Ballet Mécanique by Fernand Léger

Ballet Mécanique is a Dadaist post-Cubist art film conceived, written, and co-directed by the artist Fernand Léger in collaboration with the filmmaker Dudley Murphy.

Notes from screening at Anthology Film Archives:

beautiful entrancing rhythms
camera work - jump cuts - pull you in and repel you simultaneously
magnetic pulls
great cubist rendering of the body - lips, eyes, framed in sections against post industrial machine movement
organic - in-organic in sync and out of sync
barrage of imagery
landscape overlays
lost in time and space
images of mind, memory floating, transposed - creating pattern
revealing pattern - commonality of gestures
double meanings
collage - simultaneity - variety (variety of Keaton, vaudeville)
beautiful collage rendering of paper Chaplin puppet at end - eccentric dance via animation cut and paste
puppetry
language of symbols, images
slapstick of camera and movement

Film still by Shona Masarin (pictured:  Cori Olinghouse)

Interview with Cat Gilbert about my “Ghost lines” project with Shona Masarin which combines elements of dance to create a “vintage” 16mm film. 

http://the22blog.com/2012/09/04/an-interview-with-cori-olinghouse/

(via the22magazine)

“Loony Tom” by James Broughton

Footage from our first work-in-progress screening of Ghost line - created by film artist, Shona Masarin and myself.

OUR WAY LIT BY THE PROJECTOR’S GLOW @ Vaudeville Park in Brooklyn, NY

A night of 16mm film shorts presented by Kenneth Zoran Curwood. Live score by Ian M. Colletti and friends.

Shown alongside these brilliant filmmakers:  

Marie Losier, Bradley Eros, Martha Colburn, Margaret Rorison, Katherine Bauer, Steve Cossman, Molly Surno, Stephanie Wuertz, Rachel Blackwell/Miguel Drake-McLaughlin, Joshua Lewis, & Sarah Halpern

Film still from Ghost line test film #2, by Shona Masarin.

A chance dot turned up on the first frame of our footage!  Reminds me of Oscar Schlemmer’s shape characters!

Test footage from the film project I am currently working on with experimental film artist, Shona Masarin.  Here, we were experimenting with tension by playing with different camera speeds in conjunction with movement and timing.  For more information about our project visit our Kickstarter project page and the film tab of this site!

Original concept

In 2011, I began to create Ghost lines, exploring the body as a conduit for transformation.  Inspired by ghost towns, silent era clown films, and Samuel Beckett’s Ghost Trio, the masked characters in Ghost lines conjure remnants from a lost world, as if rising from the dust storms of the Great Depression.  I was interested in the metaphoric idea of a ghost town as a parallel to our failing cultural economy:  a completely abandoned town or city. A town often becomes a ghost town because the economic activity that supported it has failed, or due to natural or human-caused disasters such as floods, government actions, uncontrolled lawlessness, or war.  In 2007 my father died in the high deserts of Apple Valley, California and I began to wonder about my family connection to a ghost town in Nevada called Olinghouse.  I was immediately moved by images, stories, fantasies and feelings of this imaginary space.  I found this posting from someone visiting Olinghouse “Even in 1970 there was nothing much left of the [Olinghouse] town other than the remains of fallen down buildings and what appears to be the skeleton of an old wagon.”  This past year, I’ve been creating a freestyle movement language where I conjure a series of imagined spaces, forms, and languages in a continuous line drawing.  The Ghost line was a way to remember, imagine, and invent – and transform these spaces of decay and loss.

Photo taken by my Aunt Rose Tyson in her recent trip to the Olinghouse ghost town

In August, at The Yard in Martha’s Vineyard, I developed a duet version with shadowshaper, Eva Schmidt. My interest has been to create a sustainable art practice where Ghost lines can be reconstituted in a variety of ways – through film, live art happenings, live performance, as photos, drawings, and an ongoing freestyle solo practice.  We are currently creating a shadowshaper series to appear through New York City, in a series of free and unannounced live art happenings – keep your eyes out for us if you’d like some clues on how to catch a sneek peek!

Photo by Andy Jordan, Ghost lines in Prospect Park

Ghost lines was first performed at The Yard, a contemporary artist residency, dance and performance center, as part of the Bessie Schonberg Choreographers’ and Dancers’ Residency on September 3, 2011.  

Film collaboration

Shona Masarin and I met this past fall while working on a film restoration project for Elaine Summers film of Trisha Brown’s 1971 Walking on the Wall at The Whitney.  I have been working in the archives for the Trisha Brown Dance Company since 2009 and Shona as Elaine Summers film assistant since 2011.  Cataloguing video since 2002 and not being able to touch, see or come in contact to the material inside the cassette jacket, I was amazed to experience a tactile and sensory connection to 8mm and 16mm film.  The physical and ephemeral nature of film connects to my ongoing interest in vaudeville, silent clown, and eccentric dance – forms that are fading in our contemporary art culture today. 

Shona brings a wide-range of techniques into play, including hand painting and tinting film, hand-processing, bleach experiments, frame-by-frame animation, collage and drawing, and contact printing on home-made emulsion.  Her work is often the result of in-process discovery as she intuitively explores the possibilities of the medium.  This process is related to that of the surrealists with their automatic poetry and exquisite corpses. Her exploration is largely tactile and haptic, oriented by touch.  

With Shona, we began to see the possibility to forge a new visual language, re-imagining the aesthetics from Vaudeville and early Dada and Surrealist films through experimental film techniques and tactics.  In the film, we see images moving between materialist/formal abstractions and dreamlike narrative forms. We are not interested in following a linear narrative. Instead, we are interested in using the bits and pieces of a narrative as triggers to explore memory, history, dreams, myth, and the collective unconscious.  In ghosting these languages that are seen as historical, archival, and antiquated, there is a possibility to forge a new seeing of the ephemeral.

Stay tuned as our Ghost line film unfolds!  We urge you to check out our Kickstarter page to find out more our project!  http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/139958170/ghost-line

Decasia, found footage film by Bill Morrison, 2000

“One of the most vital and richly textured art forms threatened with extinction centers around the practice of avant-garde filmmaking, particularly in 16mm format. These filmmakers treat the celluloid film emulsion as a living organism: it is an organic substance, a shimmering silver onto which they directly imprint the delicacy of their emotions. They work in relative isolation, creating their films with the hand of an artist, rather than as products for consumption by a mass audience. The style of their films most frequently challenges the conventions of linear narrative. These filmmakers recognize not only the ephemeral nature of the celluloid film stock, but also the perilous state of human existence in the modern world. They begin with their direct experiences of everyday reality and often move toward a process of abstraction in their films. They filter found objects from the world around them, and through a wide array of filmmaking techniques, including use of outdated film stock, over- and underexposure, scratching directly on the film emulsion, re-photography, and optical printing – articulate distinct, individually defined processes of creation. They evoke spiritual visions of the world in which their own livelihood is inextricably linked to the vibrancy of the film emulsion – both literally and figuratively – as a matter of life and death.” - Jon Gartenberg