A few new experimental films

[inlieubeaulieu]

I thought I would post a few "new" experimental films that I have recently just transferred to HD

Solaristics: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sBn4z2OXTEI
a multi-exposure 16mm experiment I conducted a few years ago featuring R/G/B light-bulbs (to experiment with additive color effects). shot with an Arriflex 16 S/B on V3 500T. scanned from a well-worn workprint.

Spatial (excerpt): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r2WK39qXtxI
This one I just got back from the lab, it is a single roll of Tri-X Super 8 comprised of single images (with alternating black frames). Shot with a Minolta XL601

I have more coming, just need to ship it to the lab.

[grainy]

nice!

[nikonr10]

I thought I would post a few "new" experimental films that I have recently just transferred to HD

Solaristics: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sBn4z2OXTEI
a multi-exposure 16mm experiment I conducted a few years ago featuring R/G/B light-bulbs (to experiment with additive color effects). shot with an Arriflex 16 S/B on V3 500T. scanned from a well-worn workprint.

Spatial (excerpt): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r2WK39qXtxI
This one I just got back from the lab, it is a single roll of Tri-X Super 8 comprised of single images (with alternating black frames). Shot with a Minolta XL601

I have more coming, just need to ship it to the lab.

Very Nice !

[EyeSpy88]

"Solaristics" was just beautifully done! The fact that all effects were in-camera just adds to it's 'experimental' charm. I enjoyed "Spatial(excerpt), however, I would recommend attaching a warning, for those who may be prone to seizures! Inspiring stuff. I look forward to seeing more of your work in the future.
Regards,
Jeremy

[Nicholas Kovats]

"Spatial" is perfect. Thank you for sharing.

[inlieubeaulieu]

thanks for watching! I have added a 'seizure warning' to the Spatial's video description.

[JeremyC]

Spatial, with the music, very sixties. Great!

Must've been a lot of work.

[inlieubeaulieu]

Just thought that I'd share the completed version of Spatial (now with a mind-melting color ending shot on Ektachrome 100D w/RGB filters)
https://youtu.be/2cN6eFmjHNE

[Tscan]

That was really cool-

[carllooper]

Excellent work. Very much appreciated.

Spatial assaults the senses, which I find an endlessly fascinating area, but the quiet contemplation of the light bulbs, in Solaristics, I found more thoughtful. But both are great.

Keep 'em coming.

C

[nikonr10]

Just thought that I'd share the completed version of Spatial (now with a mind-melting color ending shot on Ektachrome 100D w/RGB filters)
https://youtu.be/2cN6eFmjHNE

like the colour of 100D , towards the end / on a TRIP !

[inlieubeaulieu]

thanks for the encouragement... Spatial definitely took awhile (I got pretty impatient towards the end), but I am really happy with the trippy R/G/B color results (this was, in many ways, a test for a special sequence for an upcoming film).

I really like making slower-paced films (my favorite filmmakers are Andrei Tarkovsky and Béla Tarr), and hope to make an actual 'narrative' film in the not-too-distant-future (I've been formulating an existential sci-fi film for awhile, I just need to push through and make it now).

I still have a glut of 16mm and Super 8 footage waiting to go to the lab... I just need the $$$

[carllooper]

thanks for the encouragement... Spatial definitely took awhile (I got pretty impatient towards the end), but I am really happy with the trippy R/G/B color results (this was, in many ways, a test for a special sequence for an upcoming film).

I really like making slower-paced films (my favorite filmmakers are Andrei Tarkovsky and Béla Tarr), and hope to make an actual 'narrative' film in the not-too-distant-future (I've been formulating an existential sci-fi film for awhile, I just need to push through and make it now).

I still have a glut of 16mm and Super 8 footage waiting to go to the lab... I just need the $$$

Existential Sci-Fi.

Sounds great. Do you have a synopsis? Not that you need one, or that if you did you would want to let the cat out of the bag before it's ready. But if you do have some teaser you're willing to share, I'd be all ears. I'm a fan of sci-fi - the good, the bad and the downright ugly. Especially if it's experimental narrative. It's a keen interest of mine.

In experimental film making (or artist film making as it might now be called) narrative still remains a contentious issue.

It's mainly due to various historical battles fought, where the term "narrative" was associated with conventional film production (the drivel you typically see at the local cinema). In the 70s it became an incredibly hot issue. An experimental filmmaker exposing even a hint of narrative could be crucified by the various underground powers that be. Michael Snow's 'Wavelength' was taken to task along these lines by the strident (if utterly compelling) critic: Stephen Heath *

Myself, I've been attempting to recuperate narrative or "narrative" (as we might otherwise put it) as something that should instead be reclaimed by the experimental/art filmmaker - to treat it as something that was actually stolen and abused by conventional filmmakers (rather than being some sort of fundamental signifier of such film making).

To steal it back.

C

* From the Wikipedia entry on Wavelength:
Stephen Heath in Questions of Cinema finds Wavelength "seriously wanting" in that the "implied…narrative [makes Wavelength] in some ways a retrograde step in cinematic form.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wavelength ... tural_Film

[inlieubeaulieu]

I feel a plot-synopsis won't really do justice to the film I hope to make, but here goes. The film takes place in a charred post-apocalyptic landscape with a poisoned atmosphere (I'm planning on some bleach-bypass work for these sequences), the main character scavenging for survival. His wandering leads to a hallucinatory "travel" scene with an ending in a lush, inhabited, forest. There's more to it than this, but most of it is without dialogue, or typical conflict.
some of my major influences for the project are Andrei Tarkovsky's Stalker, and Andrei Rublev (and to a lesser extent Solaris and The Sacrifice), and a number of films by Konstantin Lopushansky including Letters From a Dead Man, and Visitors to the Museum. Werner Herzog is another major influence (Aguirre, mostly). The experimental aspects are to mostly be utilized as disorienting special effects, much in the same way the aesthetics of Jordan Belson were utilized (ie stolen) as the slit-scan effects of 2001.

Yeah, the intersection of the avant-garde and narrative has been contentious to many over the years (the Dogmatic always find something to argue over), which I feel is problematic for many reasons. Many of my favorite experimental works are often a marriage of the two forms (I'm thinking of the early works of Peter Greenaway, or Luis Buñuel, or Kenneth Anger, or Jean Cocteau), and playing with the mechanics of narrative is a different sort of experimentation than pure experimentation of form. It's like the difference between the work of EE Cummings (or later Vito Acconci) experimenting with language itself, versus a work by James Joyce which experiments with the narrative (and language, too, but in a less abstract manner). I feel that now someone like David Lynch can be considered every bit as experimental as Hollis Frampton even though their experimentation exists on completely different planes. I have to admit that I am oft baffled by "pure" works of experimentation as the filmmakers sometimes rely too heavily upon the written word to (over)explain everything, as if the film justifies the essay (almost as a form of academia).

[carllooper]

I feel a plot-synopsis won't really do justice to the film I hope to make, but here goes. The film takes place in a charred post-apocalyptic landscape with a poisoned atmosphere (I'm planning on some bleach-bypass work for these sequences), the main character scavenging for survival. His wandering leads to a hallucinatory "travel" scene with an ending in a lush, inhabited, forest. There's more to it than this, but most of it is without dialogue, or typical conflict.
some of my major influences for the project are Andrei Tarkovsky's Stalker, and Andrei Rublev (and to a lesser extent Solaris and The Sacrifice), and a number of films by Konstantin Lopushansky including Letters From a Dead Man, and Visitors to the Museum. Werner Herzog is another major influence (Aguirre, mostly). The experimental aspects are to mostly be utilized as disorienting special effects, much in the same way the aesthetics of Jordan Belson were utilized (ie stolen) as the slit-scan effects of 2001.

Yeah, the intersection of the avant-garde and narrative has been contentious to many over the years (the Dogmatic always find something to argue over), which I feel is problematic for many reasons. Many of my favorite experimental works are often a marriage of the two forms (I'm thinking of the early works of Peter Greenaway, or Luis Buñuel, or Kenneth Anger, or Jean Cocteau), and playing with the mechanics of narrative is a different sort of experimentation than pure experimentation of form. It's like the difference between the work of EE Cummings (or later Vito Acconci) experimenting with language itself, versus a work by James Joyce which experiments with the narrative (and language, too, but in a less abstract manner). I feel that now someone like David Lynch can be considered every bit as experimental as Hollis Frampton even though their experimentation exists on completely different planes. I have to admit that I am oft baffled by "pure" works of experimentation as the filmmakers sometimes rely too heavily upon the written word to (over)explain everything, as if the film justifies the essay (almost as a form of academia).

Thanks for sharing Miles.

A sci-fi I've been entertaining, off and on for a while now, is set in a kind of time jumbled world. Not explicitly so but one that kind of creeps up on you. Its not so much that you can't tell the particular period (as if in some timeless world) but one in which the various signifiers (fashion, vehicles, locations, etc) instead of reinforcing each other towards some notion of a consistent milieu, interfere with each other instead. Not directly confronting each other but sort of over time, outside the immediate present. The present remains as a kind of well conceived world, but what we've seen, and what we have yet to see, don't quite support it. Unhinging it from without.

Within this world otherwise unfolds a narrative involving detectives not out of place in a 1940s film noir world, investigating a case of spontaneous combustion, the chief suspect being a photographer who was taking a photograph at the time of the combustion - capturing the exact moment in which the victim exploded. However the photographer is on the run, leaving behind the evidence in an abandoned camera.

There's a lot more going on but that's the extent of my teaser.

My inspiration are writers like Phillip K Dick, and Stanislaw Lem.

My film making influences are very wide ranging from the experimental to the German new wave to complete rubbish. Two of my lasting influences are Wim Wenders and the early Jarmusch films (and his last one), not so much in terms of a style of film making (as much as I can't take my eyes away from such) but in terms of some of the themes they've explored. But I get inspiration from everywhere really. A puddle of water near the bus stop I use had me in an inspired trance for half an hour, the other day.

C