Visual Essays: Origins of Film

56 min. color, sound 1973-1984                                     only on DVD

These six essays on film/image history attempt to reconstruct the vision of cinematic creation occurring in the minds of cinema's "primitives" ; together they comprise a critical/structural investigation of silent cinema. "I thought it necessary to engage the original film texts by creating a process of `discovery' wherein the viewer could partake in the `myth of creation' without being encumbered by the full questions of ideological significance, historical placement, and authorship." (A.R.)

"Both the visual artist and the educator make their appearances throughout Origins of Film,  but it looks to be the poet who has the final say. Informing the overall shape of the project is an argument that is presented at a number of levels. Each film is structured around a distinct set of optical printing and collage techniques [and] ... embodies a `look' which becomes the film's central strategy and metaphor." (Peter Chapman, Independent Eye)

9 min. sound b/w 1979

The subject of the first essay is cinema itself: an apparatus of representation wherein fact and fiction are recreated. As such, the pro-filmic facts are necessarily drawn from two of cinema's "pioneers":   Louis and Auguste Lumière   and Abel Gance ( La Roue, ),   with additional material provided from a Warner Brothers featurette, Spills for Thrills.

The film breaks down into four distinct sections and is loosely centred around Lumière's classic one-shot film of a train pulling into a station   Arrivée d'un train à la Ciotat, L' (1895).

The exposition and form of the film is closely tied to the tradition of cine-structural poems which foreground the materials of the medium (light, dark, form as shadow-projection of the cinematic apparatus). Using alternations between positive and negative, the film chronicles the "coming to life" (of the apparatus) and the resulting action/movement and documentation of events - encompassing incidents (the near mishaps), human expectations (the arrival at the station), and human spectacle(the destruction of the trains, the station in chaos). Towards this purpose, I have used an expanding narrative, a play on the title itself, and the shifting conditions of synchronous and asynchronous sound/image (and image-to-image). (A.R.)

Awards: Ann Arbor; Kent State; Baltimore film festivals.

Individually featured in international exhibitions, retrospectives.
In the collection of the National Gallery of Canada

Illustrated pages on the Lumière Brothers

MÉLIÈS CATALOGUE

8 min. color silent 1973

This burning celluloid montage film presents the mythic iconography of the films of Georges Méliès -- a dreamlike terrain, a grab-bag of magician's surprises, a cornucopia of players that proceed from the imagination of that "magician" of cinema - announced by the opening motif, "the expanding head."

These incidents are presented/framed within the graphic form of burning frames, each image-shot erupting and being displaced by the following shot. This is an essay featuring discontinuity and surprise. Images in this piece were compiled from approximately 30 films by George Méliès, most notably   'A Trip to the Moon (1902)' -- (A.R.)

Short history - Georges Méliès

SEQUELS IN TRANSFIGURED TIME

14 min. SEPIA-color sound 1976

Sequels in Transfigured Time   returns to Georges Méliès and notably portions of A Trip to the Moon (1902) and other early Méliès films (including a hand-colored early film, and uses techniques of 'frozen stills becoming movement', still which are initially 'abstractions' through the absence of movement and denial of depth (via graphic solarization). The stills are meditations on the "becoming of motion-picture reality" through movement and seamless editing (the "invisible"cut), mechanisms in the 'creation of narrative' (which Méliès thought to be secondary to 'special effects' for the eye).

This essay is also an elegy for Georges Méliès, his "Eden lost and found," his cine-world becoming obsolete and "ghostlike." This is a 'sound film' with the 'Elegy for Méliès' occuring at the end (sound ). -- (A.R.)

Awards: Ann Arbor; Kent State; Northwest Film &Video Festival

Individually featured in international exhibitions, retrospectives.

Short history - Georges Méliès

GHOST: IMAGE

12 min. SEPIA-color sound 1976-79

Thematically proceeding from the last film, GHOST: IMAGE   encompasses that tradition of "fantastic" films that includes Dada, Cubism, Surrealism, Expressionism, Poetic Realism, Symbolism, and eventually the horror genre (and of course Fritz Lang's Metropolis ).

Its formal design, the mirror image, creates a denial of axis and screen direction,with the result that the viewer must read "through the images." At times, the mirror images are reduced to their Rorschach component, and complemented by the presence of fragmented poetry (after T.S. Eliot and automatic writing), a metonymic realm suggesting "automatic disclosures" and unconscious correspondences in the developing discourse.

The familiar myths of woman as 'madonna' / 'victim' / 'temptress', and 'redemption through knowledge and science,' 'fear of the undead," and 'fear of the irrational,' form the signposts of this historical and cultural terrain.

Contains excerpts from aproximately 20 surrealist, dada, horror, films. (A.R.)

Individually featured in international exhibitions, retrospectives.

FOR ARTAUD

10 min. color sound 1982

An essay on expressionism and the tradition of Gothic horror. It brings to mind humanity caught between notions of absolutes, evils of monstrous proportions,classicism, and questions of individuation. Artaud, though a figure indirectly associated with film history, is suggested in this essay as prime provocateur in the collision between classicism (the "Greek chorus") and romantic expressionism. Dreyer's Passion of Joan of Arc   - in which Artaud himself appears (as the monk) - serves to set the stage for this "inquisition." (A.R.)

Individually featured in international exhibitions, retrospectives.

16 min. color sound 1984

This last visual essay focuses on montage and the dialectics of Sergei Eisenstein's films, indicating their influence as cornerstones of silent cinema and as major contributions to the evolution of later cinema. Eisenstein's work in the areas of non-verbal signification and allegorical-revolutionary montage is subjected to three "framing" processes: inversion of chronological narrative, fragmentation and repetition of selected montage passages, and the interrogation of selected Oktober   sequences by the application of 'saccadic eye movement' (animated) techniques.

Contains sequences from 'Battleship Potempkin' and 'Oktober' by Eisenstein.

Spoken text from writings of Benjamin Buchloh, and Soviet Formalist sources (freely adapted).

'VISUAL ESSAYS: ORIGINS OF FILM'' available on DVD