(Stan Brakhage, letter)

Characteristics of these stories were that they didn’t tell stories at all. If they did tell a story, it was in an extremely unconventional manner. But, as Dr. Sterritt pointed out just because they’re called avant garde doesn’t mean they’re ahead of films made by mainstream filmmakers like Steven Spielberg.

We looked at the relationship between avant garde films and feature films and likened it to the relationship between poems and novels. Poems like avant garde films are very short and their form can vary greatly. They also don’t always tell a story.

Today we screened several short films including Un Chien andalou (Buñuel, 1929), Fireworks (Anger, 1947), and several films by Stan Brakhage (non-video films). Buñuel’s film was very surreal (it was co-written with surrealist artist Dali). The filmmakers later went back to edit the film so that no clear narrative or meaning could be drawn from the images. Like Brakhage they paid particular attention to dreams (Brakhage was also concerned with pre-dream vision and closed eye vision).

Throughout each screening we looked at P. Adams Sitney’s examination of avant garde films and his descriptions of film categories. He described films as either being trance films (psychodrama), lyrical films (evoking a child-like vision of the world and showing the adventure in seeing), found footage films (put together from previously unrelated footage and edited to create new meaning), and structural film (where the structure of a film is changed to change the meaning of the film).

Each film was very unique especially the example of structural film. We looked at copied frames of To Kill A Mockingbird (1962), that while hard to follow showed how altering the structure of a scene can alter our perceptions of relationships and characters. It’s too bad the class had to last for only 6 weeks. I’m sure we would have had a much greater chance to look at all the topics covered in much greater detail. It’s all been very cool.

Phantom Channel is a new internet label, established earlier this year. The first release is a compilation called, inspiredly, Phantom Channel Compilation Part 1. It gathers together nine instrumental, electronic acts of a broadly ambient-ish stripe, and presents them as an hour long continuous mix. It's a testament to the rude health of the leftfield / underground music scene at the moment that the result is of startlingly high quality.

I say ambient-ish – by that I mean that this is largely beat-less music, not that it is quiet, easily-ignored background listening. Some of this is quite in-your-face with drone and distortion playing as prominent roles as spacey synth washes and lonely piano tones. Engine7 kick things off with a glitch and click piece that builds into a hypnotic, train-like rhythm overlaid with snatches of vocals, metallic noise, field recordings and sonorous drone. It's an extremely impressive start. Parhelion's contribution is more sombre, with gentle guitar figures enveloped in swathes of reverb. It starts like Future Sound of London, but morphs into something more like Mogwai by its conclusion. “Electric Storm” isn't especially stormy when compared to the preceding track, more a build-and-decay drone piece. “Sedation” doesn't sound like a sedative, either, with its geiger-counter crackle and saw-like metallic scraping anything but somnatic.

Weird Fields' “QED” takes an age to get going, but gradually it morphs from seemingly random bleeping into something dark and muscular. I'm betting Lethosomn have some Resonant albums in their collection. The reverb-heavy “Engulfed in Red Clouds” has deep echoes of both Staffrænn Håkon and Port-Royal. Along with the Engine7 track, Brakhage's “Early Morning Frost” is my favourite. A throbbing sub-bass pulse overlaid with electro-static crackle and what sounds like a shopping trolley with a wonky wheel. It's menacing and dark as hell, even before the scary samples of a running and coughing figure kick in. It feels like the soundtrack to some disturbing event, but one which you can't quite make out. “Brand New Polaroid” is a long, gently unfolding drone which leads into Svefn's “Lightness”, a celestial two chord piece that ascends into clouds of distortion and feedback. It's a fittingly cosmic conclusion to an extremely impressive collection.

Phantom Channel Compilation Part 1 is available to download for absolutely nothing from the label's website. The tracks are all high quality 256Kbps MP3s which should satisfy all but the most nit-picky audiophile. I recommend it wholeheartedly. Come on, what have you got to lose? It's free, dammit!

Tracks
1 ENGINE7 – A Few Remaining Moments 6:18
2 PARHELION – Forgotten Outpost 7:04
3 EL HEATH – Electric Storm 3:40
4 ADAM TRAINER – Sedation 3:29
5 WEIRD FIELDS – QED 7:49
6 LETHOSOMN – Engulfed in Red Clouds 9:36
7 BRAKHAGE – Early Morning Frost 4:00
8 MOSCA – Brand New Polaroid 13:35
9 SVEFN – Lightness 3:14

Websites
www.phantomchannel.co.uk

Este viernes 8 de febrero, en la sala circo de pulgas, dentro del ciclo (sub)poético ZCTZ, José Luis Maire, videoartista,  dirige la sesión Resonancia de una caída: "Un paseo amistoso, en el que se proyectarán, de soslayo, breves imágenes en resonancia -si es que aún así se puede decir- junto con el cine de Conner, Brakhage, Godard, Ivens y Gardner"
La sesión será presentada por Félix Duque. 

Viernes 8 febrero/20:30
Circo de Pulgas/ Jesús y María 21/Lavapiés

You're going to watch Lech Majewski.

Because listen, I understand, we all like stories, and we maybe were all a little put out by Peter Greenaway's grand high pronouncements on the film's sensual surface and the need to divorce the moving image from literature to create a pure movement of abstraction, the form's determination and continual redetermination by its technology, &c., &c., &c. This before making movies about wives doing the cook to eat their husbands.

And it's not as if Stan Brakhage didn't take care of all that noise with a little more honesty to begin with.

And whoo, boy, is that abstract. Miltonians, we're telling you: we can feel our skin rejecting our eyes, our noses rejecting our brains on that stuff. Even his name does it for us, those shades of breakage and bric-a-brac and bricolage. Stan! Stan! Is that you, you old moneymaker?

But you're going to watch Lech Majewski.

Our own Whitsell Auditorium's been doing a retrospective of him and it's almost over, and it's one of those things where the image rips the story out of your own heart, OK? That post-Tarkovsky business where the still frame floods the back of the movie's brain with water. Like if Jim Jarmusch grew up in a place so miserable and improvised that style was a thing of desperation, not disaffection.

DOES IT EXPLOIT THE FILM'S SENSUAL SURFACE? you ask? Get over it. Movies don't depict sex: they are sex, and this is good sex, with foreign movement and slow dawning surprises and a life it hurts you to know.

You got your Garden of Earthly Delights tonight, Wednesday, November 28, 7pm at the Whitsell (pictures above and up top), and his maybe-masterpiece Angelus Friday, November 30, 8:45pm at the Whitsell (picture down below), and then you're out of luck. You're stuck with DVD, which is like watching a porn instead of having sex, on purpose.

Which is lazy and self-obsessed, in my opinion.

Anyway, in the first movie you're dying obsessed with 16th-century, multitasking bawd, in the second, you're sacrificing a virgin to end WWII and save life as we don't know it. You would do either, given the choice. You will do either.  

You will watch Lech Majewski even though he made Basquiat. Really.

OK, bye.