Christmas arrived several days early as I came home to find "Unseen Cinema" on my doorstep. Seven discs, nineteen hours, so it'll take some time to get through. Watched Disc 1 last evening, "The Mechanized Eye" which included several pieces both beautiful and amazing for various reasons. "In Youth, Beside the Lonely Sea" (unknown creators, 1924-25) made very effective use of multiple screens. Jerome Hill's "La Cartomancienne (The Fortune Teller)" from 1932 (still shown here) contained some fantastic imagery. The Steiner film that inspired me to get this set (it's on Disc 3) largely involved black and white abstraction of wave action, something that seems to have been on the mind of several people around the time. Henwar Rodakiewicz' "Portrait of a Young Man" spends considerable time in that area filming the sort of thing I'm sure many of us have contemplated: dappled sunlight on water, complex droplet patterns...much of it, anachronistically, reminds me of cellular automata activity programs. The purely visual takes you pretty far but when it's enhanced with additional "meaning", so much the better and that's accomplished in my early favorite from this particular set, Walker Evans' "Travel Notes", filmed aboardship on his way to Tahiti (as well as on the island). A marvelous job at melding the abstract (especially the sail ropes) with the utilitarian (those ropes are there for a purpose, after all).Much more to come....
5 comments:
“...much of it, anachronistically, reminds me of cellular automata activity programs.”
Anachronistic? But if cellular automata is analogous to processes that produce certain patterns in nature (e.g. seashells patterns), then it may be that Von Neumann and other architects of CA were responding to related material as the film makers were. Is that anachronistic? Hmm…. (Just got me thinking about that word.)
BTW, it sounds like a fascinating collection of films.
S, tig
Hi, er, tig.
"anachronistic" only in the sense of looking like something from another time. I could be wrong, but although the idea of cellular automata may have been around for a while (since the 50s? I know Conway did work in the 60s), the image of them, at least for those of us who didn't have access to early computers, wasn't really around for popular consumption until the late 80s, iirc.
In any case, some of the images in the Rodakiewicz piece (a lengthy one, btw, about 54 minutes) bear a striking resemblance to the things I used to crank out with various software (CA Lab, among others).
I was just wondering if the film makers were inspired/influenced by non-formalized (either non-artificial, or pre-cybernetic) instances of CA-like processes (e.g. sea shell patterns).
S, tig
dunno for sure but I kinda doubt it. I think it was more about the abstractability (!) of images when transferred to a repeatable, black and white medium, where the patterns are somewhat more formalized, more easily studied than in real-time, in color.
There are certain shots, like the leeching away of water in sand, that reminded me a lot of some accretion (or whatever you call the reverse--decretion?) patterns I've seen in CA programs.
These aren't anything, really, you may not have seen dozens of times yourself but there's an extra frisson of excitement you can feel from work done in the 20s and 30s when it was, in a sense, being "seen" for the first time.
Now I’m more curious than ever what these images look like…!
S, tig
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