Take One (Sep-Oct 1972)

Ce “PSS A eee eee. Oe Gee ae ee Se ee ee eee eel re ae i et Ea eee Se cei a Rete wc ee | ee eee er rn AUR > ace sere ei tions within the image area are constantly setting one off balance. The image is a corridor, with a set of double doors at one end. The camera is in a fixed position, placed squarely at the end of the hall facing these doors. The sequence of shots consists of two images placed closely together, following one another at a rapid pace. The first slowly recedes from the doors; the second approaches them. The shots alternate one with the other so that the viewer is pulled away and pushed forward almost at the same time. After a period the accumulation of these images makes what seems to be the logical perspective of the hallway, invert upon itself — so that instead of it being a long hallway receding into the distance, it also becomes a pyramidal shape thrusting forward. The lines of the corridor (floor, walls, ceiling) create expanding and contracting squares within squares. Three-dimensionality in either direction, forward or backward, is all but destroyed only to reappear again unexpectedily. As the distant doors draw nearer, both they and the hallway engulf in blackness the other gradually receding doors. A heartbeat blinking on and off. The long shot of the reflection of the ceiling lights bouncing off the floor becomes repeatedly pierced by a black line which is actually the dividing line between the doors. The variations and complexities which occur within the basic concept seem endless. Even the floor which normally appears in natural perspective does not remain that way — in fact one sees an upright pyramid shooting out from the screen and then passing back into it, a characteristic strangeness of many of the transformations. One can only follow the progress of the doors by keeping the two bottom shiny brackets in view as they expand and contract. The receding doors become postage stamp size. The advancing doors fill the screen by half. This pushing back and forth flattens the image and gives rise to a complete geometric design. It is rare that a film, which on the surface seems to be only a technical tour-de-force, can lift one to such emotional heights as it develops from surprise to surprise. Serene Velocity is not another dry and deadly structural film, it is an organic living experience. | spent a very curious but interesting day recently, appearing in a new film by Mike Snow. The title of it will be Rameau’s Nephew by Diderot (Thanks to Dennis Young) by Wilma Schoen. The film is prefaced by the title For English Speaking Audiences and is Snow's first “talkie”. He has been working on it for about one and a half years and expects the final length to be about four hours. According to Mike, it should be finished in another couple of months. Three quarters of the film will have been shot in Canada, and the rest in New York. Itis a scripted film and the dialogue Columns is written by Snow himself. It’s full of people, colours and sound. Most definitely sound. Bob Cowan A Filmmaker’s Column Since | wrote my last column I’ve had a chance to consider it more fully. | suggested that a fruitful way to understand motion picture perception was to make the eye-brain an integral part of the optical system. There is nothing original about this idea. Scientists in television and film technology have been deeply involved in this concept, but aestheticians, or critics of filmmaking rarely attempt it. There’s no reason why they should, since it makes very little sense to discuss a theatrical melodrama in visual or kinesthetic terms. However, experimental or underground films require just these considerations. | suggested that the basic analogy of eye and camera should be abandoned, with its correspondence between lens of the eye and lens of the camera, film with retina, and so on. Instead | proposed that we substitute the following: the eye is a theatre, the world is a film, the eye’s lens is a projector lens, and the retina is a screen. My analogy was meant to make clear that an aesthetic theory of film should take into account the psychology of a dynamic eye and mind in relation to the technology of the cinema’— rather than to explain brain function and the eye. Let’s put the concept to use: | will now turn my attention to one of the most puzzling comparisons | have attempted to verbalize. | think that most people who are reading this are visually sophisticated enough to tell the difference between a television program originating on tape, and one on film. As a matter of fact, very young children can tell the difference. But nobody has been able to put that difference in words, or at least not to my satisfaction. It’s not that | believe every experience needs to be, or can be, expressed verbally, but rather that | am intrigued by what it is that makes this comparison so difficult. When some movie exhibited theatrically a few months before makes its “premiere” on TV, it is broadcast from a good 35mm print, and it has a substantially different look from the daytime tv soap opera shot on tape. Although it is possible to talk about quality differences which include lighting set-ups, editing and other production techniques, | think the heart of the matter lies in the back Lenny Lipton is the author of Independent Filmmaking. He was the film columnist for The Berkeley Barb during its first four years of publication. He has made 18 films, and wrote “Puff, the Magic Dragon”. ground noise of the respective media, and the eye. You may be familiar with the minute scintillating lights perceived in a darkened room, or when your eyes are closed, or under the influence of a few hundred micrograms of acid. What you are seeing at such times is the random residual firing of retinal cells. Neural pulses usually arrive at the brain as a result of an image projected upon the retina. Sometimes these are spurious signals, or background noise originating in the information gathering system. Every information system has _ background noise, and when the noise is too great the signal gets swamped. Engineers use the general term “noise” even when they are not discussing sound recording or transmission. Huxley, in The Doors of Perception, talks about the trippy effects of mescaline, and how one perceives a diamond-like pattern in the heavens when high (“Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds”). Background noise, background noise — you may find God in background noise. In Tibetan mandala art, we have some of the best examples of the appreciation of the grainy perception of the eye-brain. Much of the power of these works depends upon the exploitation of this textural effect. Film is made up of a succession of frames, each one of which is built of grains of silver or, for colour film, dye which has replaced silver. Each frame has a different granular pattern, even if the overall image is the same as that in the preceeding frame. This gives rise to a changing pattern of granularity like the background noise of the residual firing of retinal cells in the eye-brain system. In short, the background noise of motion picture systems is very much like that of the eye-brain. The comparable background noise of television is a fixed raster of about 500 lines. A television image when displayed on a colour tube always retains the shadow mask or striped pattern of the phosphors coated on the picture tube’s face. Unlike the film image composed of randomly swirling grains, it is an image projected on a fixed pattern — quite unlike the noise of the human visual system. | think the essential difference between the two systems lies in the nature of their background noise. Film is similar to the eye-brain, and television in its present form is quite different. When film is transmitted over a television system, its granularity is combined with the tv raster, and is still perceptible, so its image quality is markedly different from a pure television image. Television systems of the future will undoubtedly rely upon a digitally processed signal originating from a matrix type transducer within the camera, like that in the new Fairchild miniature solid state camera. Such images will be displayed 37