HANDMADE CINEMA. A GUIDE TO THE PEOPLE, PRACTICES, AND THEMES OF ARTISANAL MOVING IMAGE PRODUCTION bringt in einem Raster von 8 X 10 Feldern Protagonistinnen und Nebenfiguren des Experimentalfilms und seiner Vorgeschichten zusammen und ordnet ihnen 6 »Themes« – Synästhesie, Rausch, Zufall etc. – und 15 »Practices« zu – Osilloskop, Light Show, biologische Prozesse, chemische Prozesse, Direct Filmmaking etc.

Von Louis Bertrand Castel (1688-1757, Synaesthesia + Science + Colour Organ) über Alexander Scriabin (Synaesthesia + Mysticism + Colour Organ) landet man z.B. bei Thomas Wilfred, von Jennifer Reeves rückwärts über Brakhage bei Isidore Isou.

Die Website ist ein sehr schönes Nebenprodukt von Zinmans Dissertation »Handmade: The Moving Image in the Artisanal Mode«, die er im November 2011 an der New York University abgeschlossen hat. Das Durchklicken durch die verschiedenen Einflussketten macht viel Spaß, selbst wenn die Auswahl für meinen Geschmack etwas viel USA und etwas wenig (nur mal als Beispiel) Österreich enthält – gut, ausgerechnet der Screenshot zeigt die Konfiguration Bärbel Neubauer – Chance – Direct Filmmaking – Digital. Lässt sich aber ja sicher erweitern.

[aus dem ersten Kapitel von Stefan Ripplingers gerade erschienenem Buch Bildzweifel, Band 5 der Reihe Kleiner Stimmungsatlas in Einzelbänden, Hamburg: textem 2011]

If you’ve grabbed The End from a popular or well-known classic, please search the pool first before adding. It’s probably already here. Duplicates will be removed in most cases.

The End.«

* Zurzeit 1707 End titles versammelt diese flickr-Gruppe. Slideshow viewing recommended.

Der Filmemacher Dave Griffiths hat diese Überblendzeichen, auch Cigarette Burns genannt, verschiedentlich zu Found-Footage-Montagen zusammengesetzt. Schönes Beispiel: OZYMANDIAS

Zurzeit im Arsenal, im Dezember etwas ausführlicher im Österreichischen Filmmuseum: Robert Mitchum.

[Abbildung: THUNDER ROAD (USA 1958, Regie: Arthur Ripley), die 38. Minute, im Arsenal nochmal am 15. November zu sehen. Mit Gruß an Matthias Wittmann]

Klaus Volkmer hat Williams’ Tweets, in denen er von dem Projekt berichtet und aus dem Gespräch zitiert, zusammengesetzt. Das liest sich dann so:

12. September

Ok, y’all, the revelation from my Benning interview: between RUHR
and 20 CIGS, he made a shot-for-shot remake of Cassavetes’ FACES.
Each shot true to dialogue & length of orig., but cropped on actors’
faces. Take a moment to process that, because I haven’t finished yet.

22. September

More of Benning on his Faces ‘reconstruction’:
»I like it. I reconstructed the whole film using one face … well if in
the third shot people go home then there’ll be just three faces. I only
used the face close-ups, but then I extend them to the length of the
scene, so if the scene is a half hour you see – and I measured the
amount of screen time each person had, so one of those people was on
half the time of the half hour, so you see Gena Rowlands for 15 minutes
and then the other two characters, if they were evenly – they’d each get
1/4. So I remapped their faces time wise in every scene. Yeah [it's the
same script], but it’s silent except for two places where there’s music
where there’s a night club scene. There first one has jazz music and the
other one has disco music because the first one was a jazz club and the
other one… It’s actually quite interesting; if you know the film well
you see the whole film as faces rather than dialogue. So finally the
film matches its title.«

Dank an Klaus Volkmer.

»In 1971 I began work as the editor of a low-budget feature that was known under a number of titles. The original title was Blood Virgin. A later title was The Second Coming. The film was finally, albeit briefly, released in 1975 under the title Messiah of Evil. Later on it was re-released, again briefly, under still another title, which I’m not certain of. Not only was I the principal editor of Messiah of Evil, but I also had a bit part as an assistant in an art gallery. I was in two scenes. This is the last frame from one of the takes of the shot in which I make my first appearance.

It’s blurred and over-exposed because the camera had almost stopped. The film was shot in Techniscope, an anamorphic process invented by Technicolor. In the print the image is compressed along the horizontal, and during projection a special lens spreads it back out to normal. The woman in the background is the owner of the gallery. She was supposed to be deaf, dumb, and blind. In this scene I was opposite the female lead, but because of an idiosyncrasy in her delivery it wasn’t the big moment for me that it might have been. After I gave a line, she would pause inordinately before giving hers, so it wasn’t practical to do the scene as a two-shot. Instead the director gave us each a close-up, and the pauses were eliminated in the editing. So, as I recall, I never appeared in the same shot with her.

In my second scene I was supposed to be in an alley behind the gallery, where I was burning paintings by the heroine’s father in order to destroy the evidence that he had been there. This piece is just a few frames run off between takes, but it’s similar to my close-up for the scene, in which I am supposed to be gazing at the paintings as they are consumed by fire. The other person in the frame is the director. This scene turned out to be unnecessary, so it didn’t make it into the final cut.«

[Morgan Fisher: STANDARD GAUGE, USA 1984, zitiert nach Screen Writings. Scripts and Texts by Independent Filmmakers, ed. by Scott MacDonald, Berkeley: California UP 1995, S. 184-185.]

Donnerstag 22. September 2011 um 00.00 Uhr auf arte: MESSIAH OF EVIL, USA 1971, Regie: Willard Huyck; offenbar hat Morgan Fisher keinen Credit als Cutter bekommen. Wiederholung am Samstag 24. September um 02.00 Uhr. [TV-Hinweis via]

[Ein Link zu Vanderbeeks Filmen bei UBU.COM, ansonsten viele sehr schöne PDFs mit Scans von Dokumenten: Malerei, Zeichnungen, Konstruktionsskizzen, Texte etc.]