|
|
| from Rose Lowder's notes for the frame-by-frame shooting plan for Sailboats and Poppies (courtesy Rose Lowder) |
The "motion" in motion
pictures is an illusion. Films are made up of a series of still images on a
strip, cleverly manipulated during projection to fool us into seeing motion on
the screen. "Speed of Light" is a journey through the ways in which still images uncover new ways of seeing movement.
Time-lapse photography allows film to condense a single day into just a few
minutes, as in Jonas Mekas's charming study of a port in the south of
France and Gary Beydler's dramatic landscape study Hand Held Day.
Beydler's delightful film Pasadena Freeway Stills is an ingenious
frame-within-a-frame masterpiece. This elegant, influential
experimental film remains highly regarded today.
Subversive, visually wild and often hilarious, Martin Arnold's tour de
force film Pièce Touchée
takes eighteen seconds
from a Hollywood film and stretches it out, turns it upside down and backwards,
loops tiny moments and turns the simplest movements of the actors into riots of
latent meaning. Guy Sherwin (using countdown film leader) and Stan
Brakhage (hand painting images of the cosmos) use hand printing and
superimposition to dazzle the eye and mind, while Rose Lowder's "ecological
cinema" makes dynamic use of overlapping imagery from natural spaces in
the south of France (see below).
 |
 |
| Successive frames from Rose Lowder's Sailboats and Poppies. The top image was shot every third frame; the film was rewound and the sailboat was shot every third frame; then another poppy field was shot every third frame. (courtesy Light Cone and Rose Lowder) | Cinema as ecology: successive frames from Rose Lowder's Bouquet 30, shot in the same way as Sailboats and Poppies (see left). The frames go by at 18 per second. (courtesy Light Cone and Rose Lowder) |
Program:
Numero 4 (Pip Chodorov, 1989), super-8, color, sound, 3
minutes (screened on 16mm)
At the Academy (Guy Sherwin, 1974), 16mm, black & white, sound, 5 minutes
Pièce Touchée (Martin Arnold, 1989), 16mm, color, sound, 16 minutes
Pasadena Freeway Stills (Gary Beydler, 1974), 16mm, color, silent, 6
minutes
Cassis (Jonas Mekas, 1966), 16mm, color, sound, 4 minutes
Voiliers et Coquelicots (Sailboats and Poppies) (Rose Lowder, 2001),
16mm, color, silent, 3 minutes
Hand Held Day (Gary Beydler, 1974), 16mm, color, silent, 6 minutes
Stellar (Stan Brakhage, 1993), 16mm, color, silent, 2 minutes
Bouquets 21-30 (Rose Lowder, 2001-2005), 16mm, color, silent, 14 minutes
Eyedrum:
290 Martin Luther King Jr Dr Suite 8, Atlanta, GA 30312
404.522.0655
www.eyedrum.org
go to STILL/MOVING program 2
STILL/MOVING is a
Film Love event, programmed and hosted by Andy Ditzler for Frequent Small Meals.
Film Love exists to provide access to great but rarely-screened films, and to
promote awareness of the rich history of experimental and avant-garde film. Film
Love was voted Best Film Series in Atlanta by the critics of Creative Loafing in
2006.
Film Love home page
Frequent Small Meals home