PIERRE HÉBERT THE TECHNOLOGY OF TEARS (2005)

Director: Pierre Hébert

Year: 2005

Time: 14 mins

Music

Fred Frith

Tenko & John Zorn

Eye of Sound: Fred Frith once lamented that the dancers for Rosalind Newman's 1987 choreography The Technology of Tears complained about the music he had written for the piece: it was thought to be too rigid and mechanical for the fluidity of movements the dancers aimed at. Nevertheless, Frith's homonymous piece survived its original setting as one of his most beautiful scores, presenting an uncanny blend of musicianship, rhythmical accent, virtuosity, timbrical vigour, and emotional spunk that distinguishes it from most of its contemporaries. It was perhaps as an act of justice that Pierre Hébert decided to revisit Technology, for which he had designed the video sections (and the LP cover) and offer an overtly choreographed reinterpretation of the piece, one in which the fluidity of movements does not seem hindered by the invasive pulse of Frith's score. This decision was all the more justified as the project was originally conceived as an intimate collaboration between the three artists, in which the three artists would make their contributions evolve along with the others' and none would be condemned to be foreground or a mere scenic servant of the remaining elements. Hébert's Technology uses animations produced much later "to fill in the black hole in the continuity that had served the scenography for the dance piece", not being, therefore, a simple transposition of the choreography into animated drawings. For some sections, Hébert had Newman repeat the main solo dance of the piece in a studio and repeatedly drew it on film (as he often does in live performances), creating a visual "explosion of the solo itself" by means of a technique that bears the obvious influence of Len Lye, quoted by Hébert as the founding father of the relationship between animation and body movement. 

THE TECHNOLOGY OF TEARS

DEREK BAILEY LIVE INCUS FESTIVAL 22.04.1985

Year: 1985

Time: 22 mins

Music: Derek Bailey

Eye of Sound: Just before Parker's solo performance posted below, Mr. Derek Bailey opened the concert with an impressive session, now with amplified guitar and pedal. If you ask me, it's always the blues. The final section, joining Parker and Bailey on stage, will be posted soon.

DEREK BAILEY 22.04.1985

EVAN PARKER LIVE INCUS FESTIVAL 22.04.1985

Year: 1985

Time: 30 mins

Music: Evan Parker

Eye of Sound: In 1985 the legendary Incus label hosted a concert featuring Derek Bailey and Evan Parker, first playing solo and then as a duo. This is the Evan Parker solo set, with tenor and soprano saxophones, at a time when he was refining his circular breathing technique. The remaining sections will be posted in the next few days.

EVAN PARKER 22.04.1985

ERKKI KURENNIEMI ELECTRONICS IN THE WORLD OF TOMORROW (1964)

Director: Erkki Kurenniemi

Year: 1964

Time: 5 mins

Music: Erkki Kurenniemi

Eye of Sound: Erkki Kurenniemi was arguably one of the first artists to propose or fantasise about a complete cultural surrender to cyber existence, and his entire career, covering such diverse fields as artificial intelligence, music, engineering, film, dance or rhetorics, testifies to this desire to escape the limits of the human body and transgress into a different dimension, bordering on techno-fetishism. In his 1964 short Electronics in the World of Tomorrow, Kurenniemi presents a slideshow of the most aseptic signs of technological  imagination: diagrams, chips, machines, cold surfaces. But footage of human warmth also comes up - mostly in black and white, as if to give humans the status of a memory. Originally silent, the film was in this version endowed with a electronic music piece by Kurenneimi himself: a cold, aggressive soundtrack that could be said to present technology as a potentially menacing affair, although this is a reading that the director would certainly refute.

ELECTRONICS IN THE WORLD OF TOMORROW

COIL COLOUR SOUND OBLIVION I: LIVE IN LONDON 24.08.83

Camera: Cerith Wyn-Evans

Year: 1983

Time: 24 mins

Music: Peter Christopherson

Eye of Sound: To celebrate the news of Peter "Sleazy" Christopherson's demise yesterday, a recording of Coil's performance at the Air Gallery in London in 1983. Entitled A Slow Fade to Total Transparency (How To Destroy Angels), it features John Gosling, John Balance and Marc Almond, while Christopherson provides the sound input on tapes. Samples from Pasolini's Salò set the tone for Almond's reading of a bitter-violent text apparently addressed to an ex-lover and for Balance's and Gosling's disturbing ritual of self-mutilation. As an esoteric ritual performance, the procedures elude the understanding of the non-initiate, and, much like in TPY's First Transmissions act, we are only allowed to know that it is located at the intersection of pain, sacrifice, control, art and magic. If the abundance of blood, smear and dejects is reminiscent of Muehl and the Aktionist posse, the slow, pseudo-ritualized gestures of the performers lend it a different, possibly more deranging effect, and certainly carry a different signification for the artists and their followers.

COLOUR SOUND OBLIVION I

PATRICK BOKANOWSKI THE WOMAN WHO POWDERS HERSELF (1972)

Director: Patrick Bokanowski

Year: 1972

Time: 16 mins

Music: Michèle Bokanowski

Eye of Sound: A woman powdering herself, while someone who seems to incarnate death patiently observes her, is probably one of the few immediately intelligible scenes in Bokanowki's 1972 debut film. She wears a mask that apparently hides the blisters covering the faces around her and, by powdering herself, she seems to entice the march of another creature who is later seen to attack a woman, perhaps the powdered woman, with the help of a raging mob. The film's narrative is cryptic enough to have elicited all sorts of exegetical discoveries: from discourses on beauty, masks and the objectification of desire to comments on the French Revolution, critics seem to have found different keys to the mystery of La Femme. In fact, the film's baffling combination of expressive action and onirical sequence should perhaps make us weary of the attempt to locate linear narration units in it. It is tempting to say that La Femme, Bokanowski's first short, contains all the elements that would the director would mature in the following decades: opaque screen compositions are loaded with painted superpositions, although the result here sometimes verges on a tribute to expressionism; the sometimes imperceptible slow gestures are familiar to admirers of L'Ange, while the run across the fields is thematically reminiscent of Déjeuner; and, above all, the deformity of objects and plans, associated with a perverse use of light and shadow contours, enhances the opacity of the images. Michèle Bokanowski, the director's wife and lifetime collaborator, offers a beautiful, if somewhat cold and deranging, electroacoustic soundtrack that punctuates, through its contrasting modes, La Femme in oblique ways: although woven into the film, the composer's score is delicately synched with the screen in telescopic ways, compounding moments rather than providing, as usual, a steady throbbing cadence.

LA FEMME QUI SE POUDRE

MUSTAFA EMEK GÜL FOE (2007)

Director: Mustafa Emek Gül

Year: 2007

Time: 9 mins

Music: Barkin Engin

Eye of Sound: Winner of the Best Experimental Film Award at the Naoussa Short Film Festival, Emek Gül's Foe is a film-essay that aims to explore issues of human displacement, challenging the construction of abnormality and the accommodation of monstrosity both within the self and the social body. According to the director, a metaphorical monster is seen to bridge gaps between the categories of normal and abnormal, a creature who also mimics traits of (normatively) pathological behaviour, namely "somatoform and dissociative disorders". This "overdramatic" creature also aims, Gül says, to act the out freudian theory of the child's psychosexual stages in several sequences: the "I am Defiant" section, for instance, purports to explore the anal retention phase, while the "I am Unique" sequence deals with the effects of the phallic phase on the construction of narcissism. While it is not clear whether such complex problematics flow through Foe's elusive narrative, even to viewers reasonably acquainted with classic psychoanalitic theory, the film's stark, sometimes brutal design, supported by cirurgical computer graphics and an impressive physical performance by Cenk Kurt, offers an intense viewing experience, heightened by a diverse and carefully composed soundtrack that weaves together hiss, grain, frequency and drone.

FOE

GEORGES SCHWIZGEBEL THE RAPTURE OF FRANK N STEIN (1982)

Director: Georges Schwizgebel

Year: 1982

Time: 9 mins

Music: Michael Horowitz & Rainer Boesch

Eye of Sound: Schwizgebel once commented that Le Ravissement of Frank N. Stein was born of the desire to work intimately with a composer. By teaming up with Michael Horowitz and Rainer Boesch, two electroacoustic and electronic composers that create music by forging unity out of fragmentary sources, Schwizgebel was perhaps offering one of the keys to this immensely rich Frank N Stein edifice - especially if we notice that the soundtrack is built on cycles of crescendos rather than contrasting disparate sound objects. External references abound, Marguerite Duras' Le Ravissement de Vol N. Stein and James Whale's 1935 The Bride of Frankenstein being the most obvious. Duras' novel is acted out, after a brief insight into the monster's inform interiority and laboratorial gestation, in the apparently motionless traversing of endless rooms that are progressively filled out with objects and persons. But this is not an external museum, and we are soon lead to believe that we are crossing the internal landscape of a fragmented being who bears the marks of discontinuity both on his body and in his name. The filling out of such halls is equated with the construction of his selfhood: from the repetition of nothingness, through spaces of complete darkness, to a stage of apparent excess, an illusory surplus of inhabitants blooms out of the original void that predicated the creature's mind - illusory because we are shown that the multiplicity of figures is a guise for the repetition of a mind-cell, one in which only the monster and his fearful bride exist. By the time we reach the final chamber, that of his unified selfhood, we are thrown into The Bride referential territory. And, paradoxically or not, it is, as Amy Lawrence pointed out, when seeing his bride that the monster acquires a self - a self, we may assume, that is immediately shattered by her hysterical rejection of her own male-counterpart. It is also at this moment that we are detached from the monster's vision, but the supplementary distance created by the final scene, in which all is shown to be film and fiction, only temporarily reassures us of our status as spectators: for by allowing us to read the monster as fiction for a few seconds but then placing our theatre seats as part of the film, Schwizgebel immediately relocates us in the fabric of fiction from which our selves had just been rescued from. 

LE RAVISSEMENT DE FRANK N STEIN

TOSHIO MATSUMOTO SWAY (1985)

Director: Toshio Matsumoto

Year: 1985

Time: 8 mins

Music: Takashi Inagaki

Eye of Sound: Perhaps as close to an ethnographic documentary as Matsumoto ever got, Sway seems to explore a persistent, if not entirely explicit, concern in the director's filmography. If Everything Visible, Atman, Ki and even Dongure, among others, were entirely or partly concerned with metaphysics, Sway offers an openly subjective look at a religious cult site in Japan, its ritual routines and the apparent willingness of followers to be taken by a vocabulary of gestures that may or not contradict the implicit néant of those doctrines. In any case, Matsumoto proposes a more generous glance at both the site, which is made to vibrate as if possessed by a radiant energy of some sort, and its practitioners, who are at most points made to carry a visual aura, as if accompanied by something other than themselves, or to become translucent when circumambulating the object of devotion. An usual collaborator of Matsumoto, Inagaki offers a soundtrack reminiscent of Verghya's early works: percussion movements and diluted bells chimes, perhaps alluding to local religious music traditions, are abruptly interjected within atmospheric quasi-drones and rhythmical snaps, providing the visuals with diverse sonic settings that oscillate between introspection and frenzy.

SWAY

ANDREW PEKLER HORROR SALVAGE (2010)

Director: Andrew Pekler

Year: 2010

Time: 6 mins

Music: Andrew Pekler

Eye of Sound: In his classic piece on screamscapes, Gregory Whitehead defined the scream as a primal outburst of the "pressures of the unspeakable" within an individual body. But the way this manifestation of the unfathomable has been represented in cinema follows a strictly codified language in which invention is replaced by convention, therefore stripping it of its potential for derangement. Andrew Pekler's Horror Salvage perhaps doesn't go as far as presenting an exhaustive "taxonomy of screams" in cinematic forms, but by editing a collection of such disruptive events out of context and sequencing them according to a rhythmical and "grammatical" design, it exposes both their syntagmatic void and part of their paradigmatic logic. Pekler thus divides his study in three short sections that reflect the internal organisation of the kino-scream: intensification and acceleration, followed by a "reflection punctuated by shocks" and concluded with deceleration and/or relief. The piece is accompanied by left-over fragments from Pekler's last album, craftily editing different electroacoustic soundscapes to great effect. While it is unlikely that Horror Salvage will prompt viewers to track down all the horror and sci-fi films from which it was made,  it will at least relieve them, as Pekler himself says, of the task of watching the 100 sub-B flicks it condenses. 

HORROR SALVAGE

LIS RHODES DRESDEN DYNAMO (1971)

Director: Lis Rhodes

Year: 1971

Time: 5 mins

Music: Lis Rhodes

Eye of Sound: A classic in the art of optical sound, Dresden Dynamo apparently resulted of an accidental discovery. When applying Letratone to a blank 16mm film soundtrack, Rhodes noticed that it produced a C note; she then composed several images with Letraset, of which she developed positive and negative copies, and later applied color filters in order to develop two-color contrasts. By allowing these compositions to encroach into the soundtrack, Rhodes creates relatively stable sound drawings that are an aural translation of the printed screen, thus expanding on earlier experiments by McLaren and Hébert, among others. The result is a mind-bending experiment in which the interaction between simple geometrical, aural and chromatic patterns generates infinite illusory events and in which colour and shape subtly pervert one another, forcing foreground and background to constantly change positions in order to conjure depth and movement.

DRESDEN DYNAMO

DAN AGNEW DOPPLER EFFECT VERSION II (1968)

Director: Dan Agnew

Year: 1968

Time: 5 mins

Music: Duane Hitchings

Eye of Sound: A sequel of his previous 1967 homonymous experiment, Doppler Effect II moves one step forward in the mission of organising seemingly random stock footage along a rhythmical axis. By using found footage of diverse origin - political announcements, animal life, porn - and intertwining it with images recorded by Agnew himself - cityscapes, abstract light essays -, the film abandons any attempt of evoking meaning of any sort and focuses on a strictly formal exercise centred on time intervals and micro-relations between small sets of images. The soundtrack, recorded by Duane Hitchings (known for his collaborations with Miles Davis and Hendrix, but also for his Flashdance OST) on a Moog synth, is an engaging exercise in abstract sonic dynamics and an essential part of the Doppler experiment in that it not only provides different aural settings for the diverse footage presented throughout the film, but also aptly sets the pace for the fast succession of synched images.

DOPPLER EFFECT II

TAKAHIKO IIMURA ONAN (1963)

Director: Takahiko Iimura

Year: 1963

Time: 8 mins

Music: Yasunao Tone

Eye of Sound: Apparently Iimura's first experiment with 16mm film, Onan was also his first work to receive wider international attention. A tale of auto-erotic imprisonment, it elegantly explores the violent relationship  between a young man and the images he brings to life through his unbridled desire. This deranging and unbalanced relationship, ultimately predicated on isolation and an inability to communicate, implies the destruction of these images and eventually results in the delivery of a strange oval form that seems to have been born from, or stand for, his seed.  Knowing not what to do with this form of himself, he hands it over to a young girl who, like Tamar, drops it to the ground. The noise layers that accompanied the young man's self-exertion, created by Yasunao Tone (member of the original Fluxus crew and co-founder of Group Ongaku but mostly known for his later works with CDs), are then suspended and he is left, alone and exhausted, in the open, abandoning us with a silent and poignant commentary on the aporias of the myths of self-sufficiency and sexual liberation.

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ONAN

GRANULAR SYNTHESIS RESET REMIXED (2003)

Directors: Granular Synthesis

Year: 2001

Time: 20 mins

Music: Granular Synthesis

Eye of Sound: Commissioned for the Venice Biennial in 2001, Reset was an audiovisual installation addressing problems in the relation between colour and sound, and was here "remixed" for home consumption. The Austrian duo (Kurt Hentschlaeger and Ulf Langheinrich) have in fact focused much of their output on definitions of synaesthetic processes through creative uses of synthetic technology. In the Biennale, Reset was composed of two semi-giant screens, each exhibiting one basic looped visual track. These "tracks" comprised a succession of synthesised audiovisual samples produced, according to Langheinrich, through the "consecutive synthesis of individual samples" rather than through "a pre-arranged sound-image relation". Reset Remixed fuses these two separate tracks in order to create an alarmingly intense audiovisual experience in which the throbbing parade of visual and sonic chromatic tonalities results in a coherent composition that does not betray the fractured nature of its materials. Each colour is associated with a given sound (or vice-versa), thought to be warmer or colder according to a idiosyncratic scale, resulting in a dazzling chain of colour pulses and aural throbs. Each frame is thus a perceptual object vibration in itself, but their succession results in an immersive, seamless whole that affords no discontinuity.

- Film kindly offered by Damayanti via email -

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RESET REMIXED

HUGO VERLINDE GÉMINGA (2003)

Director: Hugo Verlinde

Year: 2003

Time: 9 mins

Music: Hugo Verlinde

Eye of Sound: A "sequel" to Verlinde's 2001 work Aldebaran, Géminga continues to explore relations between surface and projection, light and dark, body and environment. Surrounded by a carefully crafted cascade of environmental recordings, a body is used as a surface for the projection of chromatic textures and images of unrecognisable provenience: abstract light-designs that find a temporary resting point on skin. In its visual elusiveness and absorbing function, this body is given a strange sense of frailty, as if powerless before the aural and plastic siege within which it has been placed. At the same time, its own carnality seems to be overcome, rendered both insignificant in its role as a reflection surface for subtler realities and almost shapeless in its task as a mere vessel or host for more fluid levels of being.

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GÉMINGA

SABRINA RATTÉ MIRAGES (2010)

        Director: Sabrina Ratté

Year: 2010

Time: 18 mins

Music: Le Révélateur
Eye of Sound: One of the most promising names in Canadian experimental film today, Sabrina Ratté has been exploring the mysteries of colour, contour and shape in moving images for nearly a decade. Not afraid to frame filmic experiments as such, her films usually convey a sense of discovery and risk but also of conceptual focus and matured observation of materials, often betraying an acute awareness of video-art history and sources. Mirages was born of an ongoing collaboration with Montréal-based musician Le Révélateur: having been projected at several of his live performances, it evolved and metamorphosed in a concert immersion context which is, I believe, hinted at throughout the film. Working, as in other films, with relatively simple materials and a contemplative stance, Ratté begins by exploring the flickering movement of light and its distortion as it is translated into the digital realm, using chromatic excess as a means to corrupt her sources' integrity. These somewhat inform images of natural events slowly morph into geometric grids with which moving human silhouettes are later juxtaposed before we are finally sent back to the abstract shapes that opened the film, now harmonised with these colour-looms and figurative forms. Perhaps intended as a veiled tribute to the video-art tradition of the 70s (a connection which could be said to be reinforced by Révélateur's "library"-reminiscent soundtrack), Mirages is an aptly chosen title for this work, as its optical explosions seem to be built like an inquiry into some of our perception habits and a test to their limits.

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MIRAGES

MACIEJ ĆWIEK STOMP (1984)

Director: Maciej Ćwiek

Year: 1984

Time: 7 mins

Music: Krzesimir Debski

Eye of Sound: Ćwiek's debut as a director is an intriguing showcase of collage elegance and rhythmical acuity achieved through apparently simple techniques, its meaning being perhaps as elusive as the piece is visually engaging. Initially reminiscent of Len Lye's early experiments with film scratch, Stomp quickly dives into a black and white parade of almost self-contained beautiful visual print compositions . Time and individuality seem to be the main thematic issues at work, as we are drawn to watch the gradual coming together of a fragmented and incomplete self along a very literal diachronic line. Fingerprints, foot plants, faces and loose letters (perhaps alluding to unformed names) seem to climb the stairs of the construction of selfhood, these staircases being analogous to the timeline that anxiously takes the screen throughout most of Stomp. Krzesimir Debski's musical accompaniment is an uncanny blend of faux-jazz and "library" soundworks interspersed with dramatic atonal sketches that render Stomp an even more unclassifiable piece.

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STOMP