[Frameworks] Bruce Baillie's new youtube channel 1st video!
Enjoy! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lf5DXcU0bkglist=UUwL55I7MH815wAXorJrOMbg ___ FrameWorks mailing list FrameWorks@jonasmekasfilms.com https://mailman-mail5.webfaction.com/listinfo/frameworks
[Frameworks] Bruce Baillie's new youtube channel 1st video!
Enjoy! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lf5DXcU0bkglist=UUwL55I7MH815wAXorJrOMbg ___ FrameWorks mailing list FrameWorks@jonasmekasfilms.com https://mailman-mail5.webfaction.com/listinfo/frameworks
[Frameworks] Ronald Nameth's email
Hey Pip can I please get Ronald Nameth's email? thanks, Doug (dgtols...@yahoo.com)___ FrameWorks mailing list FrameWorks@jonasmekasfilms.com https://mailman-mail5.webfaction.com/listinfo/frameworks
[Frameworks] Ronald Nameth's Exploding Plastic Inevitable
Can anyone please help me find or a make me a DVD copy of the original uncut 1966 Ronald Nameth's Exploding Plastic Inevitable ? Thanks! Doug Graves___ FrameWorks mailing list FrameWorks@jonasmekasfilms.com https://mailman-mail5.webfaction.com/listinfo/frameworks
[Frameworks] Bruce Baillie-sponsored internship
This is a call-out to all San Francisco-based independent cinematic artists, teachers, and exhibitionists/organizers: I'm a 16mm abstract movie maker and a close friend of the great Bruce Baillie. I'll be in San Francisco next week and from about Nov. 14 to sometime in december or e= arly Jan. I'll need a free place to stay. Bruce suggested that I volunteer for one of the organizations out there in exchange for a room or a couch. Anyone who could use some free assistance and could accommodate me with lodging, please call me or write me ASAP Thank you! Doug Graves 4636 Talbot Drive Boulder, CO 80303 702-580-4293 PURE CINEMA CELLULOID http://www.purecinemacelluloid.webstarts.com/ ___ FrameWorks mailing list FrameWorks@jonasmekasfilms.com https://mailman-mail5.webfaction.com/listinfo/frameworks
[Frameworks] Bruce Baillie-sponsored internship
This is a call-out to all San Francisco-based independent cinematic artists, teachers, and exhibitionists/organizers: I'm an abstract 16mm movie maker and a close friend of the great Bruce Baillie. I'll be in San Francisco next week and from about Nov. 14 to sometime in december or early Jan. I'll need a free place to stay. Bruce suggested that I volunteer for one of the organizations out there in exchange for a room or a couch. Anyone who could use some free assistance and could accommodate me with lodging, please call me or write me ASAP. Thank you! Doug Graves 702-580-4293 PURE CINEMA CELLULOID http://www.purecinemacelluloid.webstarts.com/ ___ FrameWorks mailing list FrameWorks@jonasmekasfilms.com https://mailman-mail5.webfaction.com/listinfo/frameworks
[Frameworks] help with my projector here in Boulder
I have ra equest for help to fellow celluloid people here in Boulder - i just bought a used 16mm kodak pagaent projector on ebay and it works fine except for the sound. the speaker makes loud distorted noises when i turn up the volume so i'm assuming it works so i don't know what the problem would be. any help would be greatly appreciated, such as a repair or perhaps a donation of a working sound projector that you no longer need, etc Sincerely, Doug Graves 4636 Talbot Drive Boulder, CO 80303 702-580-4293 PURE CINEMA CELLULOID http://www.purecinemacelluloid.webstarts.com/___ FrameWorks mailing list FrameWorks@jonasmekasfilms.com https://mailman-mail5.webfaction.com/listinfo/frameworks
[Frameworks] My Trip To PFA Part 7
Wed, Oct 3rd, 2012 Jordan Belson's Magical Motion Pictures I saw some other wonderful Belson movies on vhs tape that day, such as Re-Entry, Chakra, Northern Lights, Bardo, and Cycles. I immensely enjoyed all of them. I thought the beautiful moving color light effects of Northern Lights were especially interesting as they seem to mark a departure in his life. He started to foreground those kinds of visuals in his later works such Fountain Of Dreams and Epilogue and that imagery is always flowingly colorful and luminously gorgeous to behold. Sausalito Frank Stauffacher A lovely black and white piece with some nice camerawork and editing. Some striking shots of a man's eye peering through a peephole of some kind, intercut with the imagery of the small Bay Area town on the pier; the interior close ups of the man's face reminded me of similar close ups in Vertov's Man With The Movie Camera. I could definitely tell that it suffered from being on seen dvd and projected that way but it still retained a lot of gorgeous filmic qualities. From this piece and Notes On The Port of St. Francis it is clear that Mr. Stauffacher possessed a fine control of cinematic craft, with a beautiful camera eye and smooth editing rhythm. He had a subtle, excellent visual sensibility and style and I really wish he hadn't passed away so young. I'm sure we would have more of these exceptional movies to enjoy if he had lived to an old age. Image, Flesh, and Voice Ed Emshwiller A very strange black and white 35mm piece by the great abstract movie maker Ed Emshiller. For the last few years he's been one of my top cinematic passions and interests. I love his 16mm work Thanatopsis, Carol, Film With 3 Dancers, and Life Lines, and I really enjoyed his lyrical portrait George Dumpson's Place. I'm also excited to see his extraodinary-sounding Relativity and his other celluloid work such as Dance Chromatic, Transformations, and Totem. He was a very skilled and agile camera man. He could operate 16mm and 35mm movie cameras with a graceful dance-like precision and control. This talent of his was especially valuable in the days before the steadicam and he found easy employment as director of photography and camera operator on many other director's features such as dance movies, narrative independent features, and a beautifully shot docmuentary from the 70s on modern New York painters called Painters Painting. Having said this, Image, Flesh, and Voice is a purposely odd and truly experimental work. It is very dark and stark, floating camera moves in interiors, gliding past people in people in seetings such as living rooms, usually when they're together at parties, with a constant soundtrack montage of conversations, presumably between those people. They are all reflecting on different aspects of social behavior, such as learning how to visually observe people's physical mannerisms and behavior in a more concentrated non-verbal manner. It's a long piece, over an hour I think and it didn't help that I saw it projected on dvd. it seemed to especially suffer visually this way. I was bothered by what looked to me to be a technical flaw - he has a lot of match cuts on black screens when he slowly moves the camera from people to an unlit black space and cuts to another screen of black and moves the camera to reveal some other lit setting; on these cuts there are jarring frame lines on the bottom of thw image that are especially noticeable because they're purely black. Emshwiller was a technically meticulous craftsman and he never has these kinds of mistakes in his other work, so i don't if they're intentional. maybe he had an esoteric reason for including them? Robert Haller has said that it is an important and overlooked work that needs to be seen more than once to be comprehended. I'd definitely like to see it again, preferrably on 35mm on the big screen. Doug Graves 4636 Talbot Drive Boulder, CO 80303 702-580-4293___ FrameWorks mailing list FrameWorks@jonasmekasfilms.com https://mailman-mail5.webfaction.com/listinfo/frameworks
[Frameworks] Question For Gene Youngblood
I'm a big fan of your Expanded Cinema book. thank you very much for writing it. but i'm curious as to why you did not include anything about Ed Emshwiller? And i was wondering if you could please put up online your review of Relativity ? Best, Doug Graves ___ FrameWorks mailing list FrameWorks@jonasmekasfilms.com https://mailman-mail5.webfaction.com/listinfo/frameworks
[Frameworks] Anyone else like me out there?
As an isolated 16mm abstract moviemaker I'm very interested to know if there's anyone else like me around today? Specifically, is there anyone who works on photo-chemical celluloid motion picture film and makes any kind of formal aesthetic work that is either purely cinematic, abstract, or just generally lyrical and poetic, visually speaking? I'm 30 and I spent 3 years and 10,000 dollars making a really ambitious and stylized abstract 16mm movie called PALMS, it's a serious piece of work that I think is worthy of following in the tradition of what I feel are the truly great non-narrative cinematic artists such as Will Hindle, Ed Emshwiller, James Whitney, Pat O'Neill, Jordan Belson, Scott Bartlett, Bruce Baillie, Maya Deren, Slavko Vorkapich, and Dziga Vertov, among others. Are other people out there, particularly people younger than 50 and currently active, who are also passionate and excited by the work of all these great cinematic artists and are committed to working on celluloid? The last 3 years have been a struggle for me to make another movie and to get my 1st one even seen by anyone. and i also just haven't been able to find people who share my love of cinematic technique and will share it in any way, such as emailing or talking to each other about great shots and montages and optical techniques or sound design techniques in the brilliant movies by these artists. That kind of community and sharing is i feel necessary, even if only between a few people, and it's sad when we're so alone in our struggling and hard work. The only current 16mm moviemakers I know that are similar to me in any way are Timoleon Wilkins and Mark Toscano and they are unfortunately inaccessible for various reasons. I can't see their work or stay in touch with them as friends or even associates. Especially nowadays with all these faster, easier, and cheaper ways of communicating around the whole world such as the internet and cell phones, it's amazing how it seems like most people are if anything more reluctant and difficult about staying in touch and enjoying community and fellowship. I know that maybe there are some really great cinematic-celluloid artists working today out there who just make their work for themselves and don't really show it and don't desire to know other cinema enthusiasts. In a way I can understand wanting to be like that and maybe nowadays it's the only way to be. I might get like that too but right now I would welcome the interest and association of serious people whom love what I love and, as my mentor the great Bruce Baillie would say, want to be human to each other about it. Doug Graves 4636 Talbot Drive Boulder, CO 80303 702-580-4293 PURE CINEMA CELLULOID http://www.purecinemacelluloid.webstarts.com/___ FrameWorks mailing list FrameWorks@jonasmekasfilms.com https://mailman-mail5.webfaction.com/listinfo/frameworks
[Frameworks] My Trip to PFA and Canyon Cinema Part 1
After waiting 6 years to afford it, I was finally able to visit Pacific Film Archive at UC Berkeley and Canyon Cinema in the Bayview neighborhood of San Francisco. I went early in October to screen as many 16mm prints of abstract and artistic movies as I could, works I've been waiting to see for several years, and it was a joyful inspirational and exciting experience to finally watch them! 1st day : Oct 2, PFA Moon 1969 Scott Bartlett Stunning, mesmerizing, and kinetic! A hypnotic, cinematically exciting tour de force. I had been waiting 9 years to see this ever since reading about Francis Coppola and George Lucas' enthusiasm for it. Coppola caught it at at saturday midnight show at the Palace movie theater in North Beach, a sort of pre-Rocky Horror Picture Show where fun partying people dressed in wild costumes. They would screen different compilations of movies, including things like newsreels, serials, classic features, documentaries, and the occasional abstract or avant-garde 16mm movie. That night they happened to screen Moon 1969 and the normally rambunctious, talkative audience was completely silenced, hypnotized by the beautiful intense abstract visuals and sounds. Coppola was very impressed and began trying to develop a feature at american zoetrope with Scott at the helm and i really wish it had come to fruition. I was immediately hooked by the opening: over black, we hear NASA radio communications for a few minutes. There's a real tense, errie feel about it. Then a beautiful shot flying down slowly at night, wide view of a stretch of runway lights, surrounded by a sea of twinkling citylights. The camera slowly comes down and closer towards the runway - the two lines of individual points of light stretching away into the background of blackness and then they start to be mutliplied, as in double exposures I think; four lines of lights now, the 2 new ones going up and down and back and forth through the first 2. A really cool effect. The movie goes on to one great visual effect after another. Very strange colors and solarized-type effects. Great sounds with repeated reverb and echo effects that match the images of figures being multiplied far away into the background, perfectly combined together. Beautiful shots flying through the blue sunny sky, past white puffy clouds. Gorgeous shots of the ocean waves rolling and crashing. I got a feeling of how the moon affects our planet and our consciousness without ever seeing the moon itself. Great dramatic tension mounts as quick flash frames of white repeatedly strobe between the images. It hits a visual/sound climax and then a lovely wide shot zooms out from the horizon over a path of sunshine glistening off the ocean and reveals the ocean waters gently rolling into the beach. All superbly shot and edited, technically perfect. Scott was clearly gifted and very skillful with the tools and technology of movie making. Of course, like all of us abstract movie makers, he must have been working with limited resources and assistance and it's very impressive what he accomplished. He really had a fantastic sense of composition, color, movement, and sound. 1970 Scott Bartlett I had never heard of this work of his until reading about it in the catalogs of the PFA and Filmmakers's Co-op and decided to request it out of a curiosity about his life. What a treat it turned out to be! It's one of those great movies I can't believe has been sitting unknown and unheralded on a couple of archives' shelves for 40 years now. It is definitely ripe for re-discovery and renewed appreciation. It is a personal documentary of his life and cultural environment in that year but it is also a beautifully formal aesthetic experience. No videographics or post-processing visual effects, just superb technically excellent camerawork and editing combined with mostly pop songs in a very effective fashion. The star is his beautful wife Freude, a slender woman of delicate feminine features. Pretty face, long arms and legs, a small afro of curly hair - what looked to me to be black but was actually red! Scott follows her and a girlfriend as they make their way down a sidewalk in an old, dilapitated neighborhood of San Francisco. His handheld camera very sensitively employed as he moves with them. He then joins them at their table in a restaurant right next to the front window looking out on the street. He cuts back and forth to close angles moving their forks in their hands as they eat salad, swishing between their mouths and their plates, creating an oddly intimate effect, as if we're present hanging out with them as close friends. Really fun kinetic shots driving down the street fast, past other cars set to a good rock song. An absolutely lovely shot of Freude as she sits at the low base of a very large white tree in the middle of its huge trunks that branch out from there. Scott's camera positioned high above somewhere on
