text of light and all brakhage "films" suck mad shit. fucking boring masturbatory stupidity. the same amount of "art" can be enjoyed by watching water run down a drain in your bathroom sink.

Chuck Norris must have been watching this crap growing up and said too himself, "The one-on-seven fight scene is the template for the rest of the movies and TV shows in my future career." It was like combining Breaker Breaker with Paint Your Wagon.. Equally bad as both, yet somehow combined!

Jesus Christ! It's the perfect western!!!! First symbols hates Chumlum, now you're dissing Shane. The world's gone fucking mad!

You must spread some Reputation around before giving it to demonrail666 again.

How is it that you enjoy so much pulp American westerns?? They suck! and I GREW UP playing cowboy with six-shooters but the ones you like are boring as fuck. But if you want to call me out, we can have a stand-off, be back here at noon ;)

I can see why you say that but I've never understood why people who can listen to the most extreme music have such a problem with more overtly-experimental areas of film. Couldn't pretty much everything you say about Brakhage, etc, be just as easily levelled at a lot of the more experimental types of music that get so much support here?

True, but I think most people go into a film with certain structural expectations, which experimental films tend not to fulfill. With music, people tend to be more fluid, especially considering that film attacks more of the senses simultaneously. Music you just hear, experimental film can quite literally leave you disoriented and confused.

stop saying that. I HAVEN'T SEEN CHUMLUM!

disc 1 didn't contain it. i only got disc 1. not disc 2. of your faves, it only had aleph. ALEPH. which didn't register. and maybe was great, but after 2 hours of dancing shapes it just didn't register. bad context.


i've never seen text of light but i imagine the music would be good. as for brakhage, the only movie i actually like by him, in the end, is his first one-- the kids running around like they're high on sugar. i forget the title, but it's a fun one. i mean some of the others have great fucking images but i can't sit there for 2 hours looking at them-- they put me to sleep.

i think that what some avantgarders tend to forget is that their wonderful images happen in the dimension of TIME. and they neglect it--using time as an element, i mean.

It's an American thing, I'm convinced. Those old classic Westerns seem to be far more respected in Europe than they do in their own country. I know more Americans who prefer Spaghetti Westerns than I do those who like Ford, etc. I just don't get it.

Haha, fair enough. Aleph could fall into the 'dancing shapes' category I suppose. But 'edgier', more 'punk' maybe.

And Chumlum ... be amazed ...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XTh28C1ngn4
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=voYmY9DXQG0

I feel you on that, maybe its because in Europe these appear as romantic whereas in America they come across more so as campy? I bet its also reversed, I bet Americans LOVE all the European flicks y'all think of shit.

It's an odd one, I agree. Film makes far greater demands I suppose. You can't really do anything else but watch it till it ends. Painting has no demands on your time and music at least allows you to do other things while you're listening to it.

Interestingly this is EXACTLY why my favorite gigs to perform have always been at art shows and exhibitions. It allows for a unique environment, where the audience isn't nailed to either art piece, they can meander somewhere in between listening to live music and viewing great visual art. It complements both media

There's a definite 'otherness' thing going on there. Like you say, a lot of Americans have a hard on for Godard, Bergman, etc. European cinema has no equivalent of a John Wayne or a Howard Hawks just as I suppose the US has no real equivalent of a Marcello Mastroianni or a Fellini.

thanks! but no thanks… i'll wait for disc 2! seems like the more interesting stuff is there anyway.


funny you mention him, just watched "my darling clementine" this past weekend and we thought it was pretty great-- it has a lot of funny moments for a gunslinging melodrama. sucka was pretty great at setting up his shots too, and the actors were great. yeah, some brown people stereotypes that can't be helped with the times, but we're old enough that we can laugh at them. actually, did you know that john ford was made an honorary navajo? funny and true. it was also funny to see tombstone, az, right around the corner from monument valley-- but you'd only know that if you know the area. anyway, some day you'll see for yourself, ha ha ha.

Probably my favourite film of all time. It's historical inaccuracies are as irrelevant as they'd be in a piece of Greek myth and, as you say, the racism is just a mark of its age. It's the hugeness of its message that I love: the attempt to make a kind of American origin story out of hackneyed figures from history. Like the scene where Doc Holliday completes the 'undiscovered country' line from Hamlet. Of course that never actually happened but Ford invented it and in-so-doing managed to create an entire 'idea' of America, as a nation. Big stuff.

sound/music does not need to tell a cohesive story. It works on a "lower'" level of the brain, where impulse is generated by experience. I enjoy free jazz like a motherfucker, noise improv, etc. I fucking creamed HEARING Lee and the fellas perform as Text of Light. I just hate Brakhage's "films." they are pointless, or at the most, have one single "point" to them, and then it is endlessly repeated over and over again. abstract film is not enjoyable to me. It is essentially a form of "look what neat new thing I can make my camera/lens/film do!" which is interesting for a second.

I was thinking along those lines when I read $5&*4 saying that he found some of those films boring and after looking at what's on offer on the DVD. I think that with a lot of experimental movies, particularly with stuff that came out in the 50s, 60s and to an extent the 70s, one of the things that can be misguiding is the fact that there are many works normally referred to as examples of movie-making, when today probably we'd rather call them video art or something similar to that. I can't think of someone like Harry Smith as a movie director on the same level as Kenneth Anger or John Waters, to name two people who came out from underground films, because to me Smith has a more ''painterly'' attitude to creating moving images, whereas people like Anger and Waters have a proper ''cinematic'' approach to films, regardless of their initial primitivism. It's no coincidence that a visual artist like Warhol had to usher in the expertise of someone like Paul Morrissey to give his experiments with film something resembling a more traditional approach, even though his early work was influenced by the classic black and white Hollywood age by his own admission. To me he was incapable of distancing himself from his visual artist approach to images when using a video camera, and that's why he sort of gave up and let someone else do most of the work.

I agree, humans are pattern seeking animals, and we are also story tellers, so when confronted with film people tend to expect some kind of narrative. With music, these expectations are different, the basic structures and patterns of music (tempo, cadence, timbre, tone) are still present in even the most chaotic experimental music pieces, collages, and soundscapes. The ear intuitively "hears" these underlying structures and is therefore more or less satisfied. Same thing with a painting, it is confined by the parameters of the frame and canvas, so people can begin to more readily identify the patterns. With experimental film? Anything goes, and the expectations towards narrative are harder to spot. People who enjoy more experimental film I think are those who are more easily imaginative and fill in the intellectual gaps without having to be queued..

it could also be that people who "enjoy" experimental film are just trying to seem cooler than those who do not... ;)

images to humans imply narrative, even abstract imagery. HUmans, as you state, cannot help this. However, everyone the world over loves Gangam Style.

Warhol obviously liked a certain idea of Hollywood but seemed to have no interest at all in storytelling. Although I'd say that, even more than his interest in visual qualities, his main inspiration always seemed to be with personalities - the Superstars being the one constant linking his early single camera stuff and Morrissey's more narrative films. Even with his supposedly more banal subject matter (Eat, Sleep, Empire,) he never just chose his stars at random. They were always people or things (the Empire State building) that he felt had a certain star quality. (It's not just a random person sleeping or eating, it's John Giorno or Robert Indiana.) That's why I think there's a core contradiction in Warhol's own idea that anyone could be famous for 15 minutes. He was very particular about who did and who didn't qualify as a 'star'. His was a different criteria to Hollywood's but arguably even more selective. I can only think of a handful of bona fide Hollywood stars who would've cut it at The Factory alongside the likes of Viva or Ondine.

Come on, anything that's considered outside the mainstream or 'difficult' attracts its fair share of pseuds. What are you meant to do? Pretend not to like something, to avoid association with the posers? You'd probably have to distance yourself from 90% of your record collection if that were true.

Just finished watching this - a pretty impressive effort from Mr Rice. Very dreamlike/trippy, with a touch of erotica too. The soundtrack is vaguely reminiscent to the one employed in Maya Deren's "Meshes Of The Afternoon". Wonder how it would come across on a big screen?

Any record which makes me feel like pretending to like it gets SOLD! I got rid of all Animal Collective, Earth, Lightning Bolt. BORING!

Melly^The soundtrack was by Angus Maclise.

I've never seen it in a cinema but would love to.

Thanks, demon - think this is the separate soundtrack here: http://youtu.be/AU4GL7LCvOk

Interesting to note that this would have preceded MacLise's somewhat brief stint in the Velvet Underground. Didn't yer man end up moving to Kathmandu or somewhere like that?

Yeah, don't know much about him other than that he was meant to be pretty full on as a person, even compared with others in that scene. Isn't Lou Reed rumoured to have kicked him out the Velvets cos of it?

He left the band when they got their first paid series of gigs because he didn't like having to turn up at a certain time and finish to play when they were told to.

his wife has a blog but she didn't update it in a while.
http://www.phantomlyoracula.com/

Haha. It's a wonder how he worked with people like Jack Smith and Ron Rice and anything got done at all. How that scene got it together enough to produce what it did is its own miracle. Imagine having to rely on Jack Smith for anything.

Quoted for troof.

Do you think I should subject myself to Jack Smith's "Flaming Creatures" once more? The one time I saw it (at the late Lux Cinema in Hoxton), I ended up wanting to beat myself over the head with a copy of the Gutenberg Bible. Mind you, we are talking about the same person who dozed off thorugh large chunks of Kenneth Anger's "Lucifer Rising" at the same venue (I think it was the atrocious dubbed soundtrack on the preceding "Rabbit Moon" that finished me off)

BTW, did you know that Stefan used to refer to yer man as Kenneth Angerbore?

Well I love Flaming Creatures but can understand why some people wouldn't. I doubt that it'll exactly grow on you if you're not already a fan. Although if you liked Chumlum, that's pretty much FC in colour, so maybe.

Didn't know Stefan called him that but it doesn't surprise me. He seemed to pit himself against underground film pretty early on. He's definitely more grindhouse than loft-space in that respect. Nothing wrong with that. I've just never seen it as an either/or situation the way he seems to.

Well, blow me down with a feather - it's also on YouTube - http://youtu.be/YrAlBrWpDSw

Have stuck it onto my "to watch" pile on there - will let you know what I make of it 2nd time round.

I'd agree with you on the either/or thing - there's room for both the grindhouse and the arthouse (if you see what I mean) - in fact you could say at times they complement each other (Kuchar Brothers, Curt McDowell, early John Waters, Paul Morrisey's early "Warhol" movies etc).

Stefan managed to make himself pretty unpopular amongst exploitation followers in his Shock Xpress days by putting the boot into various sacred cows - he loathed Troma films (except for "Combat Shock"); thought Jesus Franco was a talentless, blundering hack; took the piss out of Joe D'Amato's output; got enraged by a Ray Dennis Steckler interview (his editorial interjections were hilarious); was bored by Joerg Buttgereit's output; hated 80's horror scream queens (he once said on a letters page that people should get into Klaus Kinski instead of them); and let Alan Jones run amok on various reviews. He did end up running 2 massive pieces on biker movies and drug films though, which I've never seen bettered elsewhere. And he was the only person at the time in the UK who cited Bill Landis and Steve Puchalski as taking exploitation in the States seriously (it's how I discovered Slimetime, Sleazoidd Express and Shock Cinema).

Anyway, I seem to have digressed somewhat, ha ha. My next job is to hunt down some more Brakhage films - I'll have a rummage around on UbuWeb and see what they have.

MELLY - there's a good brakhage collection on dvd. his stuff is not what you wanna watch in a shitty compression. you really gotta be able to see the feathers he glued to the film and all that shit. which is FUCKING GORGEOUS. but ultimately terribly boring. for the reason rob said: it looks great, but only for a second. me i give them 5 minutes max. i get the point after 5 minutes. don't make me sit 2 hours watching at flickering chunks of film. i WILL fall asleep.

PORKY - you're right the old avantgarde from those times is more like video art from today but my question is why it still goes on today if we get the point and nothing is being advanced by it. i mean unless someone makes something truly gorgeous, it's kind of pointless to continue scratching films and painting on it by hand and shit of that sort because it gets old fast. i mean, there are people who are doing fantastic film art today, there's a woman from san francisco, can't remember her name right now, she scratches and paints and overexposes and collages but it's pure fucking magic what she makes-- avant garde by definition must be the vanguard not a repetition of the old and she moves things forward. i'll give you the name when i can remember/find it.

ROB - yes. which is why i said they ignore the TIME dimension. a gorgeous image for a brief time is great. 2 hours sitting there looking at wax melt is not a beautiful experience. i've spent something like 45 minutes looking at 4 or 5 pieces by dutch masters in a museum but it's the fucking dutch masters-- vermeer, de hooch, etc. unless people are making vermeers on the screen, they shouldn't demand such loooong fucking attention. TIME MATTERS IN FILM.

DEMONIO - poor jack smith! i feel bad for the guy. he said he was not a victim, that he was dying for his ideals, and i actually believe him. anyway, i can't stand warhol films either. there was one about a junky…. oy, i can't even fucking remember. i'll poke my eyes with a fork if i have to watch again.

gimme the kuchars instead.

It can be in the right state of mind ;)


Me too! I've practically haunted the Getty.

that's what i meant much earlier, etc. but cheeto got it right-- in the "right state of mind" you just need to look at water dripping. you don't need to spend 3 years pasting feathers to a strip of film. okay maybe you do. for that very reason. therefore should not be called avant-garde but "shit to trip to film". i'll give them that if they call it by the right name.


that shit can induce a trip without drugs. that's what potent art can do. that's what one must demand of art though-- that it be an alternative, not a supplement, to drugs.

but supplements/accessories are okay too. as long as they are correctly designated. "peyote mixtape". okay. i prefer beef jerky to doritos.

Agreed completely, though I must admit, after much consumption over, shit, am I old enough for it to be decades now? ....anyway whenever art or music has that particular effect on me sans substances, I still usually think it possibly just could be me ;)

WOLF OF WALL STREET-- Didn't really like it, but found myself re-watching some good scenes. One prolonged scene in particular is classic. Weird, but I predict Jonah Hill will win an Oscar some time in the next few years.

no, fool, that is wrong. artists have the right to make whatever they want. good art, bad art, it's their business and not yours. what really bugs me is just that it would still be called avant-garde or experimental when it's been a tried and true formula for decades. decades! that's what really bugs me. it's only avant-garde when it breaks new boundaries. okay, so now it's video art or film art or abstract film or whatever. okay. names are important.

i kinda already said that, didn't i? in a way, yes, but after last night's drinking my head is clearer, and i feel less categorical in my stupid judgments.

alright. and now to recent movies.

For what, being the only true successor of Chris Farley as "heavy set guy who smiles too much and so we can't really take him too seriously?" I like the guy, a lot actually, but not exactly Oscar caliber here..

&85^0£ was a good dolphin.