Wednesday, December 15, 2004
My man, Jim Flannery dropped me an email Wed to let me know about the JPEX program at Anthology, saying it was unmissable. I skipped the last two programs, but saw the first two, the second on basis of the strength of the first.
Structuralist/Materialist film, especially in Britain had a distinctly handmade look. Loads and loads of camera jitter, scratchy negatives, rough optical printing, lots of torn sprocket-holes. Peter Gidal would have you think some crap of political considerations of the material conditions that led to the films being as ragged as they are, but really, it says more about the enthusiasm for ideas of these filmmakers, like middle school scientists in the midst of an underfunded chemistry lab. What the films lack in polish, they more than compensate for in idea-density, just check out some of those synopsies.
These Japanese experimental films were exactly the opposite. The ideas were buried in the material manipulation itself, t
Structuralist/Materialist film, especially in Britain had a distinctly handmade look. Loads and loads of camera jitter, scratchy negatives, rough optical printing, lots of torn sprocket-holes. Peter Gidal would have you think some crap of political considerations of the material conditions that led to the films being as ragged as they are, but really, it says more about the enthusiasm for ideas of these filmmakers, like middle school scientists in the midst of an underfunded chemistry lab. What the films lack in polish, they more than compensate for in idea-density, just check out some of those synopsies.
These Japanese experimental films were exactly the opposite. The ideas were buried in the material manipulation itself, t
