Bill Randall

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(Three related posts this week, M-W-F)

In 1982, film essayist Chris Marker finished a gorgeous film with ample sections from his travels in Japan. A year earlier, video artist Bill Viola finished his first major video work, also in and of, but not about, Japan. Marker emphasized the black, Viola the light:

Video treats light like water– it becomes a fluid on the video tube. Water supports the fish like light supports man. Land is the death of the fish. Darkness is the death of man.

Which is just about all you need to know to appreciate Hatsu Yume (First Dream). For almost an hour, its quiet, slow shots lead from the seashore in the rural north of Japan, through valleys flooded with diffuse sunlight, across the water on a fishing boat, into neon-drenched streets.

One thing to add, though, is that it’s a journey to death, more or less, ghosts traveling to the ends of the known world.

I heard Viola say as much when I saw him speak in Tokyo in 2006. It was the opening of his show at the Mori Art Museum in preening Roppongi Hills, which I stumbled into by sheer luck. He hadn’t been back in Japan, I believe he said, since he worked there in 1980-81. That time ended with his gig as Artist-in-Residence at Sony’s Atsugi research lab, during which he filmed Hatsu-Yume on the new cameras the engineers has just built.

He recalled the engineers looking on in horror when he showed them his footage, full of light trails dripping off every lamp and lantern. He’d been enamored of this quirk in the equipment; they saw it as revealing a defect. But the old cameras have aged well: his lecture included a premiere of the just-remastered HD version of the film. The extra headroom and resolution brought out details on the source tapes previously obscured by less precise equipment. Most of all, the colors, and the light trails, looked gorgeous: deep reds, vibrant greens, bright yellows.

During the Q&A, I asked whether he missed these old cameras and their quirks. Not so much, he said, though he did mention some young artists getting worked up over the purely analog images, asking what digital filters he’d used. He also said that people no longer trusted digital’s sleek perfection, and so were moving back to the handmade. That’s something coming from an art & technology pioneer.

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Other than the videos, and especially the installations, the best introduction to his work is his essay collection, Reasons for Knocking at an Empty House. In person, he’s affable, a little geeky; in print, he’s lucid, formidable, even magisterial. While his installations must be seen in person– works like “The Crossing” and “The Stopping Mind” offer grand spectacle– a few videos can be had on DVD. Unfortunately, my screen grabs are from the nasty AVI making the Net-rounds. Whenever I get the Microcinema-distributed DVD, I’ll tidy up.

(Three related posts this week, M-W-F)

The opening of Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil:

The narrator reads us the letters she receives from Sandor Krasna. She describes his problem with the footage of the girls from Iceland– he could never find another image to cut it to. So he uses black leader: “He wrote me, ‘One day I’ll have to put it all alone at the beginning of a film with a long piece of black leader. If they don’t see happiness in the picture, at least they’ll see the black.’”

The film, not a travelogue, swings back and forth between First and Third World; memories real and not; and African, European, and Asian time. You could be forgiven for calling it a documentary on Japan. He does spend some time in that fascinating place, but as occasion and counterpoint, not for a prime subject. Instead of a list of facts, the film is a “list of things that quicken the heart.”

In a way it is the only movie, or every movie. This for how it did what movies do now, years before they did, now that they’ve been rendered into “content” for “media platforms,” now that you can put them in your pocket.

In particular it works just like memory, and builds a whole system, coherent in itself. For (just one) instance, smoke binds the film together as leitmotif, memento mori, and probably a dozen other things besides. (Another instance: cats, the fleabitten thread running through Marker’s entire filmography.)

If the film works as a capsule of mind and memory, then Marker anticipated by 20 years ideas set forth by artist Warren Neidich. In his book Blow-Up: Photography, Cinema and the Brain, he describes the “phatic image,” one engineered so that the brain takes it in faster. So too it builds stronger neural networks inside the brain. Such images include media, video, anything that attracts the eye by shedding its excess. Film sheds time, with only 24 frames per second, while video sheds detail, color, and dynamic range. Neidich, an artist with actual training in neuroscience, in a sense only describes things Marker intuited years before.

The ending (or close to it):

By now, Krasna has introduced “the Zone,” his friend’s homage to Tarkovsky.  In it one finds these video images he makes with a synthesizer, solarized or saturated or posterized. Each image comes from an earlier scene in the film, but exists apart from it.  One image became clear to Krasna only after he saw it in the Zone.  This could be like a memory burning itself into clarity years after it happened, if it happened at all, or like the nonspace in which we’re reading this sentence.

I had the pleasure of watching Persepolis with an audience the other day. Other than the energy of watching in a room full of people, a couple of things struck me:

1) The animation was delightfully old-fashioned. Yes, economics made them use computers. To my eyes, all computer-aided animation looks like either paper cutout (2D) or puppet (3D) animation, technically impressive but hardly a leap forward. In Persepolis, however, the frame-to-frame shifting of scene and character, especially in the flights of fantasy, reminded me of the kind of animation, handmade, that best represents the medium. Giannalberto Bendazzi champions such works in his encyclopedic Cartoons: One Hundred Years of Cinema Animation, works that make the world contingent between frames.  Much cooler than just building a drawn world and treating it like the real one.

2) Compared to the source book, which reads like a letter or diary, the film indulges much more in fantasy. For instance, the scene where Marjane dances from rooftop to rooftop plays as spectacle (never mind the crowd-pleasing “Eye of the Tiger” bit).  Film, I think, must have Vaudville built into its DNA, or else the chance to sing & dance in front of a crowd’s just too seductive.  These Persepolises are, of course, two different works, but I was surprised at how different.

With a deadline writing about Dousei Jidai, the other great 70s shacking-up manga, I discovered a stupid mistake in the final draft of my Red-Colored Elegy article. It’s probably at the printer’s so as to cement my shame. BUT I also found some images from the picture book version (!) of the “Red-Colored Elegy” song by Morio AGATA. The same blog, Burai Yokochou, also has this image from the single:

Meanwhile, as I’ve been in the basement again waiting out a tornado warning (dammit), I’ll leave you with this slant-rhyme of color, a work by the glassmaker Stephen Rolfe Powell, whom I had the pleasure of filming last week.

…over other people’s shoulders, flying in a cramped multiplex, one of these Airbus flights with personal viewers for the lowly coach folk. Me with no sound, no remote, just lots of choices.

Craning my neck, I can’t follow the stories. Characters becomes actors in light and rhythm, cutting patterns, composition. And in movie’s I’d never otherwise see, greats like Some Martin Lawrence Movie In Which They Cared So Little That They Cut Repeatedly in the Middle of Dolly Shots Before the Dolly Finished Moving, or a half-dozen Playstation-FX movies, like that Hulk movie. The pixels have no weight, so skim. I’ve come to prefer watching computer effects this way: scattered and smothered, like surfing the Internet with ten tabs in Firefox and those asinine Snap! previews.

Case in point: Charlotte’s Web. Not the classic, but the newer one, with barnyard animals more real than real. An animator’s toolkit is now a Pandora’s box, as in an early scene of the spider on a pig’s snout. Though in shallow focus, every snout hair is visible. It’s disgusting, like the pores and sweat of a Brobdingnagian. Better the abstract, gentle sweep of a hand-drawn line.

Or a projector: that day, turbulence bumped me around, so the LCD image went half-negative. More recently, I scuttered a trip for the cost of fuel.  Hence the older examples.  And I doubt I’ll replace them with newer ones, as airlines will soon scutter movies & their equipment to save money with sky-high fuel. Not that it will save them from bankruptcy. Or that the particular pleasures of watching Tom Cruise the Scientologist samurai, riding a raging horse in a seemingly endless loop on twenty screens all around my head, should be eulogized so much as treated with some kind of drug, perhaps one found in the Amazonian mycelium, flown in at great expense.

So I guess the next time I travel I’ll read a book.

Osaka’s greatest landmark, the snare-drumming clown Taro, has left for a warmer clime. He had a steady gig playing in front of Kuidaore, an eating institution. Or so I’m told; the one time I had a decent tempura there, the place was deserted. Of other customers. I guess the perpetual hordes of photogenic tourists posing with Taro never stopped for a bite.

Anyway, he’s retired to Beppu, famed for its “Nine Hells” of blood-red hot springs. At least he’ll have naked people all around. Meanwhile, Osaka’s left with what? Every time I go back it seems like it’s lost something, even if it’s just been a few days. Of course, when most of your precious memories are tied to advertising brands, what can you expect?

The best story in Glomp #9 also bridges the gap between the freer art and more traditional storytelling. In “The Trashing Party,” Amanda Vähämäki draws a palpable dread in nervous pencils. Her art recalls Katri Sipilainen’s, but with more particulars. Each of Vähämäki’s characters is an individual, just like their place, a factory town’s school. Garish color underscores a pervasive unease.

The story focuses on a boy worried sick about the werewolves that have been terrorizing the school. He’s not the only one: even though the wolves have been caught, the adults in charge have sweat beading on their foreheads. A school assembly– that site of schoolchildren’s ultimate dread– threatens to go south at any moment. No one save the boy seems to realize it. Everyone else is happily beating up the werewolf gang, following the principal’s orders. But the wolves are right next door. It would all be terribly dreamlike if Vähämäki didn’t reject that option outright. The story’s ending lets everything grow long after reading’s done.

Vähämäki, a Finnish artist who works with the Canicola collective in Italy and KutiKuti back home, has proven herself a talent to watch, not for the future but right now. Her story “The Bun Field” was published online by Action Yes, and another of her short comics, “Prophet,” can be downloaded free from the German publisher Electrocomics. Neither has the impact of “The Trashing Party,” but all are solid work from an artist for this decade and the next.

One of the most traditional stories in Glomp is also one of the best. Lilli Carré, an American artist based in Chicago, turns in “The Thing About Madeline,” a story that recalls the standard entries in mid-90s anthologies. But she takes it further, with fluid art in purple and orange.

The story centers on a young woman, no qualities, in a humdrum life. Daily highlight: she gets so drunk that a stranger helps her home. When the monotony’s too much, she splits, literally. One half watches her doppelganger live her life better than she ever could. After spying in the bushes for too long, the first half discovers that no one recognizes her. She has no choice but to disappear.

Were this the mid-90s, the story would stop there, probably with a lyrical, cheap non-ending. Carré takes it further selling the odd plot with a scrupulous realism. Everything in the story could happen, given the right psychology and situation. It’s done with solid cartooning that balances the plot’s fantasy conceit with its logical conclusion.

“Madeline” first appeared in a mini. It far surpasses The Tales of Woodsman Pete, her first book collection.  Next to the radical flights in the rest of Glomp, it stands out for its lack of experimentation: Carré knows what she’s doing.

The Economist this week on a Vilhelm Hammershoi exhibit: “All his best-known paintings are of household interiors that are drained of colour and tell no stories. …the mood is melancholic and enigmatic, but the paintings are oddly compelling. Quite why, no one seems sure.” Which almost sums up how I feel about Lee Jyung-Houn’s comics.

This South Korean artist seems to work outside tradition: pencils over inks, sideways pages, and a foreboding restraint. Her two pieces in Glomp, “Kitchen and Bathroom” and “Death,” play with the balance of light and dark in empty rooms. The panels-in-panels suggest passing time, recalling Richard McGuire; her domestic scenes are no less infused with meaning than his. But I don’t understand the meaning.

I’m reminded of a Guy Davenport quip: “Stan Brakhage had recited ‘The Kingfishers’ [by Charles Olson] with passion in my living room. But he had no more understanding of the poem than my cat.”

Meow. Glomp’s author bio states that Ms. Lee lives in Incheon with her cat Budgi. So maybe I’m on the right track.

Much of Glomp’s art, arresting and experimental, looks more like gallery hangings than comics. That’s nothing new, but it nicely displays certain trends in art comics. In three artists:

I. Andrea Bruno

In this untitled comic by Bruno, an Italian member of the Canicola collective, its seductive surface recalls painting. But it’s not painting. It’s just some borrowed surface tics, rather like distressing a chair from Ikea.

Bruno’s work, like many of the artists with full-page illustrations instead of comics in Glomp, truly borrows from the world of design and illustration.  That is to say, these are commodity images, easily digested.  I would contrast a painting by, say, Sigmar Polke.  While superficially similar, Polke’s actually welcomes deep seeing, like the comic by Aapo Rapi.  Its traditional cartooning, cloaked in foreboding watercolors, and does not flatter my eye so much as bleed through it.

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II. Katri Sipilainen

At the other end, this Finnish artist borrows from childhood art. She has a vibrant, often gaudy color palatte well-suited to her folktale story. I find it more painterly than Bruno; it looks like watercolor, though often feels like colored pens.  Of course, using cartoon art with adult themes has been a tired shock tactic since the undergrounds.  Here, the color and wily line contrast childhood’s world of bright forms with the swirling unease at the heart of folktales’ moral world.

Other artists make similar use of primitive drawing.  Some can’t draw.  Others, like Olivier Schrauwen, need an art style that resonates with a death-metal story.  Adolescence follows childhood.

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III. Janne Tervamaki

Finally, a purity of form and color in this story, “Three Short Circuits.”  It is one of the book’s best, a few pages of dashed expectations made more striking for the coldness in the images.  In part, it just shows the tools used, a fine pen and a computer for color.  But it is also a response to a certain kind of story, a way of emptying the narrative with the images.