Bill Randall

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I want to see more of these films, videos really, that Phil Chambliss has made for years with his coworkers from the rock quarry. The easy one to find, “The Devil’s Helper,” appeared in the Oxford American’s 2007 Southern movie issue.  And it is a Southern movie: two ex-cons, jealous that they can’t get hunting licenses, go to burn someone’s deer stand.  Then Satan’s buddy shows up with a pitchfork, a filing cabinet, and a deal.

It’s hilarious and strange, and we would see more films like it if my neighbors would avail themselves of iMovie and cheap DV cameras.  Chambliss didn’t; he appears to have edited deck-to-deck at home, and did his music on a keyboard.  His movie feel handmade and warm: the only deer’s a still photo, and he reuses one shot three times in a row.

“The Devil’s Helper” feels like a tall tale with everyone in on the joke.  The actors can’t hide their smirks.  Rather than the precise compositions and craftsmanship people like me harp on, the camera just reveals personality. I could watch Chambliss’ ensemble all day.  It’s not unlike Hollywood movies: people watch for the actor, even if the movie sucks.  This one doesn’t, and I wouldn’t mind filmic locavores, hayriding to the multiplex for homegrown pone.

I normally write on images, but Aleksandar Hemon’s new novel The Lazarus Project entwines enough with photography to belong here. It follows a Bosnian writer and a war photographer through Ukraine and Moldova, one researching a book, the other acting cool and telling stories. It’s complex and hilarious. Hemon knows my language better than I do, enough to wipe Everything Is Illuminated from my memory, to my relief.
But the images, photographs, come at the beginning of every chapter. Hemon collaborated with Velibor Bozovic, who shot them on a journey with Hemon mirroring the book’s fiction. They’re poorly printed, but look great on Hemon’s website, where an interactive display shows dozens of them along with snippets of Hemon’s writing. I got lost in it for a while before reading the book.

And in the book, the snippets are usually funny, not as portentious as they seem with the photos. They remind me of my friend Fedja, who used to regale me with Montenegrin jokes of such power that we all laughed before he explained the stereotypes. In the book, all Rora’s jokes remind me of his best. Especialy the one on page 154, with its more immediate punchline.

So, would that I had more to contribute like the other three. God knows I tried, but putzing through Japan with rickety camera gear yielded neither video black or black leader. Just crows, on a seeming moonscape:

At least the light was nice later, in the train station, where I found out, from a paper in the trash, that the Tigers lost the series.

That’s it. Hours of footage I should probably do something with. Alas! At least, following Elsewhere, there’s always ample Engrish:

Actually, this was the only example I have. Ches, Eric, please don’t beat me up.

On Gary Sullivan’s Elsewhere

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

I don’t know what it is about Japan that inspires good art. Yes, it also inspires the awful, from that Sofia Coppola movie to geisha-with-cellphone photos. But even the worst works please the eye. So the good ones are that much better.

One of the goods ones is Gary Sullivan’s Elsewhere #1. He kindly sent me a copy after our brief exchange about an article I’d written for The Comics Journal. I enjoyed his comic, first as I felt flattered by sights I knew, then for its distance from those sights. Sullivan applies the lessons (whatever they are) of Flarf, the nonsensical poetry whose name he coined. Flarf unwinds our world of slogans, ads, and linguistic effluvia, and so finds a perfect subject in the riot of images that define Japan more than ancient temples and Bruno Taut.

Fig. 1. Emus in the Zone.

The comic consists of images and slogans Sullivan saw during his honeymoon trip. Most are ads. The only plot is looking, as his eye flits about, taking in drawings of the Yokai or the blurb for the manga One Piece. His traditional, clear layouts ensure it does not read like nonsense. Each panel has one caption. So the inane reads with a sure rhythm, lest all that Engrish cause an aneurysm.

Fig. 2. Moss the Interrupter

He tips the pen to some other artists, like Enomoto quite consciously, and SHIRIAGARI Kotobuki I suspect less so. (Though a serious artist, his image of men end-to-end sniffing like dogs, with a slogan translating as “Sniff the Butt’s Aroma,” might cast doubts.) And the endpapers point to Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil. More than homage and collage, there’s an artist’s hand at work. What impresses me most is how he has structured the comic so it waxes and wanes. Even though I understand nothing rationally, when it ends, it feels right– the final page sticks in my memory more than the conclusion of the last three plotted works I’ve read.

He uses a similar approach in the Elsewhere #2, with an equally triumphant conclusion. This time, a poem by his wife Nada Gordon brushes against the advertising seen walking from Brighton Beach down Coney Island Avenue. In other words, walking from Russia through South Asia in a few blocks. Four pages in the middle put me in mind of Zorn’s Lemma, while others have me searching. The covers of these attractive comics– a perfect form for these stories, like a chapbook– make me hope Sullivan gets to work in full color soon.

His in-progress fourth issue takes Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s first film as a starting point. The third collects some works, more conventional, done for Rain Taxi Review of Books. They span autobiography and personal myth, including that Writer-as-Kirbian Hero riff that never gets old. Best of all, a few of #3’s early strips hint at his international courtship-by-correspondence with Nada Gordon, a perfect introduction to the book they built from it, Swoon.

(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?