COLOR! PATTERN! RHYTHM!

(frame enlargement from the hand painted Film #3, Interwoven, Harry Smith 1947-1949,
and inspirational Seminole Patchwork designs above that)


oh yes, it's all about color, pattern, and visual rhythm in hand painted film this week.
We watched Harry Smith's Early Abstractions (above), which you can peer at here in a very compressed version w/ Teiji Ito soundtrack = NOT Meet the Beatles. More Harry Smith links are here (grammy award) and here (his archives at the Getty). We also watched Stan Brakhage's stained glass-inspired Chartres Series (1994) and Richard Reeves Linear Dreams (1997), among other handpainted films.

This week's reading is VISUAL MUSIC , an essay by Jeremy Strick from the amazing catalog to a 2005 travelling exhibition called Visual Music: Synaesthesia in Music and Art since 1900.
And if you like that you might like to check out The Center for Visual Music in L.A where abstraction reigns king.

But back to the present--here are a few of our own hand-painted experiments !

Red Dot, Black Dot, by Christopher:

Mike's brand new bag:

Tara's acrylic determination:


Casa Bonita by Katie

Scratch My Emulsion

top: detail from Marco Breuer’s Untitled (C-498), 2004, made with scratched chromogenic paper, courtesy Von Lintel Gallery , NY
bottom: detail, frames from Stan Brakhage hand scratched titles

This week we watched everybody's first attempts at hand scratched films --this was our first assignment in direct animation! It's a fun though laborious method of making your own titles and credits, like the venerable filmmaker Stan Brakhage (1933-2003) famous for his hand-scratched titles.

Directly working on the film and photographic material has been around as long as the materials themselves, but there's been renewed interest in direct techniques in the art world recently.
In 2008, The Drawing Center in New York -- which only shows drawings--had an amazing exhibit called DRAWING ON FILM that featured artists works from the 30's till the 00's. And check out the photographer Marco Breur whose most recent body of work finds him scratching directly onto exposed photographic paper, as above. Aperture published an awesome book of this work called 'Early Recordings '--we have it here in the Norlin Library .

Ok so here is John's scratch film--looks like he's all set with his end titles and all he has to do now is make the rest of his film!

Before there was cinema...

Today was the first project on pre-cinematic devices:

(See Jeri and Ryan's tricky little thaumatropes below)

    We WATCHED some 16mm film prints :

'Free Radicals'(1958/79) by Len Lye, 'Gently Down the Stream' (1986) by Su Friedrich & 'Abrasions'(1991) by Joel Schlemowitz  for inspiration and research towards our next project in hand scratched and etched film--experiments to be posted very soon.

+CHECK out this very interesting article by Polly Ullrich,

originally printed in the New ARt Examiner out of Chicago, called

THE WORKMANSHIP OF RISK: the re-emergence of handcraft in the post-modern age.
Looking forward to your comments!

New Semester! New Decade!!

Greetings from Boulder Colorado, The United States of America, and a special welcome to the new generation of Recycled Images students! We all just met today for the first time and watched a couple of films dealing with afterimages.  I really love this short magical ghost-film NADJA by Brian Frye.


Zoe Beloff has a great site devoted to pre-cinematic optical devices  'Philosophical Toy World"

And for future reference, here is the  RECIPES FOR DISASTER film cookbooklet , edited and organized by the late filmmaker Helen Hill-- .

Stay tuned for some unique cinema from our new Recyclers!