Sunday, April 12, 2020

Lil Stabs

Stray notes on a few experimental short films I watched online a few weeks ago ...

Peter Gidal's Clouds (1969), at least as viewed via Vimeo, prompts us to scrutinize our sense of direction on and with the screen. Even as its repetitive 'action' of following the flight of a plane from left to right in the lower third of the screen anchors us in a sense of profilmic spatial reality, we might wonder, "how are we seeing so many plans in such close sequence?" and "when and where does Gidal move his camera back to the left, or up?"

What can we say about Little Stabs at Happiness (1959-1963)? I think it's a very moving film, but in a weird way. It all seems to go nowhere and its gestures all seem tiny, from Jack Smith's oral play to the on-off rhythms of bright light and soundtrack in the latter part of the film. People try out different postures and Ken Jacobs draws in chalk on the street with some neighborhood kids. It feels trivial in the best and freest sense, like a morning stretch or the kind of full-body dance that children do.

Su Friedrich's Scar Tissue (1979): something happened, or is happening, but what? Repeated shots of women walking in heels and men walking in three-piece suits accumulate and provide a sense of scale, at least in part through a tricky of economy (not just similar types of shots but some of the same shots themselves are very obviously repeated) as if to underline something about the bustle of this maybe-urban space. There's a police barrier visible in the center background of one of the repeated shots. The high-contrast grainy b&w is extremely pleasant.

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