PIERRE HÉBERT
AROUND PERCEPTION (1968)

Director: Pierre Hébert
Year: 1968
Time: 16 mins
Music: Pierre Hébert
Eye of Sound: Canadian animation genius Pierre Hébert started his career with studies on pure shape-driven abstraction and the limits of human perception. Around Perception is a groundbreaking experiment on computer-based animation, consisting of 11 audiovisual events designed to baffle cognition and unrest comfortable notions of reality. Unlike most of his later films, Hébert chose not to collaborate with top-notch experimental musicians and created the soundtrack himself. In this, he followed a method also used by Norman McLaren: to scratch sound directly onto the film itself. The relation between sound and picture, however, is not as symbiotic as in McLaren's Synchromy: although there are organic reactions between the two domains, one is not a direct translation of the other. This, of course, need not be seen as a weakness. Indeed, with its fast-paced changes of color and geometrical patterns, and the employment of Columbia-like richly crafted electronic tones, Around Perception works as a tremendously hallucinatory exercise in trompe l'oeil (and l'oreille) techniques. Or, as stated by Hébert himself at the beginning of the film, an exercise "for the mind and against the mind".
http://rapidshare.com/files/381369523/around_perception_-_pierre_hebert.avi

7 comments:

  1. [...] Variations on a Cellophane Wrapper is one of many exemplary experimental works made in Canada since the 1960s. [...]

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  2. is there anymore films as mind melting as this particular flick? This movie really blew me away & I am VERY curious to find similar viewing material!

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  3. It's difficult to say, as I don't know what exactly blew you away in this one. Maybe if you browse other posts you'll find something that may interest you.

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  4. it was the 1st 30 seconds...the very intense light show there was amazing...hallucinatory even!

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  5. Well, try the other Hébert film available here; also try Lis Rhodes' Dreden Dynamo, Granular Synthesis' Reset, Ikeda's Formula.
    Just to name a few that have been recently posted here.
    Enjoy!

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  6. grabbing now! thanks a million for the films! Do you have a good quality copy of "The Flicker"?...just curious...

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  7. No, sadly the copy of Flicker that I have is not that good. A friend has promised to locate a good copy for me, though, so maybe it will surface here sooner or later

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