cameras

• lieca was inveted to test movie stock
• walkman – story about a technician in the cassette factory
• 35 mm is the way we see the world
• negative

• film example

  • platoon
  • pd100 – wouldn’t work – depth of field is too great
  • greg tollen – citizen cane
  • ASA ISO – 400, 800, 5000… the film’s sensitivity tran

timecode

• restrictions on legal – have to specify a DOP – have to have a story credit
• timing timing timing…

discussion

• lacie mutimedia drive
• just dancing around – william forsythe documentary

Macianism – the evil god that created the world

The order of redemption and life

Succession – tiqqun – agamben law from life

Killing a man in defense of an idea is not the defense of an idea – it is killing a man.

Invisible committee

Actions at the new school – war criminal Kerry – marcusian

Different resistance strategies… Resonance – a resonating body influencing another body

John Gray carl Schmidt barrack Obama – the way things are – utopian impulse – the break of the event

The political miraculous – sovereignty bataille

Violence:

Acts of violence – a history of violence – a double act between human subjects in a repotition effect. A loop – eg.: colonlialism – franz fanah the wretched of the earth

Violenece is the absolute praxis

Killing a European is killing two birds with one stone

Sartre… Hannah Arendt – the faculty of action in the modern world -

Nonviolence is an attempt to solve around the table

Sartre – passiveness puts u on the side of the oppressed

Non violent warfare – graver

Benjamin the critique of violence – though shalt not kill – guideline of non violence – a plum line for action…

Levinas – violence as necessary but never forgiven

Jacob blumenfeld -

Sds TI the weather underground

Infinitely demanding – infinite in the sense of finding something in the situation which exceeds it’s limits. The politics of accommodation – transactional

Resurfacing of r d Lang – anti psychiatric us – millennialism – Judith butlers reading of Benjamin – anarchism – non violent violence

Reenactment – the Renaissance was a reenactment – the history if politics is a

Norman Cohen – John Gray – the pursuit of the millennium – forms of erotic radicalism – the heresy of the free spirit

Marx critique by bacunian – zizek is in love with the state

Zitgeist – designer city

Post human politics – beckett asked about happiness ” sounds nice but not for us”

Gins and harakawa – denial of death

“Revolution is a tigers leap into the past”

figgis on philosophy

• the idea of aesthetics as a deeply profound – translating a “universal truth”
• time to learn – properly – philosophy
• visual imagery – sound imagery
• relationships with others – relationships with yourself

• is it the role of the filmmaker to bring philosophy to the masses?
  • arrogance?
  • “perhaps its ok to be arrogant?”
  • “the great unwashed” – overheard in LA
    
  • contradictions…?
• lowbrow / highbrow
• ensemble production – e.g.: film – as a ‘total form’ – deleuze
• LA life – air-conditioned car to air-conditioned studio – heist of cars at studio lot

three act structure

• the three act structure – character arc
• Robert McKee

• matthew barney

• business models
  • marx brothers meets king lear, etc.
  • richard gear – claims to have fucked his wife – andy garcia – panties – would be like taking out the hankerchief from Othello
• au revoir les enphants

• peter green – fleetwood mac
  • questions – first guitar – “its really a question of when you listen to something do you listen to the words or the music first”

• figgis’ favorites
  • godard
  • dylan
  • jazz – history of jazz is the history of percussion
  • indian music – raga based on different seasons
  • troufau – the woman next door
• Komar and Melamid – Denis Dutton

• disturbed by the lack of vital elements in our culture – in combination /
• Billie Holiday – Lester Young
  • Nina Simone – My Baby Just Cares for Me

• “art is art. everything else is everything else.”

• english / european / assumptions of art / culture
  • developing a sense of ‘the responsibility of art’
  • without appealing to a concept of the ‘the great unwashed’
  • the english as good storytellers
• django rheinhardt
• playing slowly as a billie holiday

• david lynch interview
  • i think every body can do it – some people just take a long time
  • marilyn munroe would exaust her felow actors
• michale bey – fires one person a day

• culture of ‘no’ in hollywood – paranoia – hollywood is syncing
  • studios as old churches

hotel

• using techniques of mainstream cinema to inform arthouse techniques
• burt reynolds!

a showing of Timecode 11

Alain Badiou

• Wagner
• Everything that exists obeys the immediate paradigm of existence
• The real of suffering
• Musical predetermination – suffering is a result / suffering is not true but useful
• Nagative dialectics – the only kind of artistic form capable of surviving – will be the form that organizes its own dissentegration
• The totalitarian fantasy of ‘high art’ -
• Wagner can be credited with creating a “as such”
• Tanhauser
• 
  

mike figgis’ history

• music training – free jazz group + performance art troupe
• the london arts lab
• conflict between the improv music and the performance art troupe (they couldn’t be heard)
• polish avante guarde art
• The People Show (current)
  • Mexican performance artist – mexican visual tradition – day of the dead – licking sugar
  • Mark Long – son of hardcore east german communists
  • Laura

• slickness – stopping when it was done – “the painting is finished”

• “structured tape” – process, tactile contact with the material
• ghent
• learning the discipline
  • lighting sound, music/text balance,
  • as difference to the british theatre tradition
• film school interview story:
  • the relationship between performance art and film – drama
  • Lord David Putnam – if you don’t get into
  • Sir Oswald Morris -
  • made a film because he was “pissed off”
• next phase of performance work – film integrated into performance work – Mike on stage and Mike on the screen
• the live and the dead
  • fascination with people who actually are dead – relationship between the animation of the film perspective

• first work:
  • micry – performance art venue – amsterdam
    • robert wilson
    • wooster group
    • experimental japanese work

• channel 4 – back to britain
  • greenaway – The Draughtsman’s Contract (1982)
  • stromy monday
  • internal affairs – was a hit, offered $1,000,000 for the next film
  • “its not the film you’re making now – it’s the film you might make next” – metavoy

• the unofficial system of LA film world community
  • if you don’t buy a house there – you are treated with suspicion
  • ridley scott – physical visual commitment – the community aspect of
  • i would never join a club that would have me as a member
  • bergman visiting los angeles – barbarah streisand threw him a party that he didn’t show up – went back to sweden
• leaving las vegas
  • novel that given to mike by a gallerist (nice guy)
• miss julie
  • based on the play by
  • takes place in a kitchen – soft light
  • shot on two cameras – one by mike and one by DP
  • started to synchronized
• timecode
  • digital video allowed the filming of an entire feature film
  • john caley – knew charlie parker
  • transmitting the thought of the piece – folding A4 to get the quadrants
  • like a string quartet – absolute parallel syncronicity
    • expanded metaphor here – moving from one camera to the other like a theme in music
  • physical weight of cameras – large digital cameras
  • godard quote of griffiths – “all you need is a girl and a gun”
• new wave drifting off jean paul delmondo

• the fourth way – G.I. Gurdjieff  
  • in each language words come into play which enrich the emotional language (inuit words for snow)
  • the disappearance of words means the possibility of the disappearance of certain kinds of emotions
  • Miss Julie & August Strindberg (no real interest in dramatic tension – just interested in words)
    
  • Meetings with Remarkable Men
    
  • catherine mansfield
• stevie wonder
  • to relax he went to the movies – the sensuality of the movies

• cartier bresson
  • physicality of the camera – the lack of boom mics in Timecode – pistol mics -
  • getting close to the person in order to hear the person
  • robert maplethorpe’s photos are of people reacting to robert maplethorpe
  • use of the Leica in bresson… zoom requires getting closer to the person

• 3D – panasonic 3d camera
  • paintings’ reaction to photography was to break out of representation (20th century painting -
  • theater is about death -

• don mccullin – dark photographic was imagery – if they weren’t so dark you wouldn’t know

• shooting people
• Trash Humpers – Harmony Korine
• Festen
• Nazi film – Yael Hersonki

• the last life in the universe
• searching for the wrong eye’d jesus
• mystery train

• stephen fry – having critics fess up to the music and films that they actually liked

Timecode

• Discussions of timing
• Acting to music / music to acting
• Film started gently – i.e.: as in music – there is a first theme established of the
• Specific deconstruction of the first verion of Timecode

• Jacques Tati – Play Time
• Mel Bockner

• The potentiality of synchronicities and serendipities of the different cameras
• “The most important tool for a composer is the eraser” – Schoenberg

acoustic arts

• john zorn
• fantasmagoria – collage
• collages – challenges

• dj spooky – journey
  • telepological present – phonograph writing sound
  • mnemonic construction of a power space
• john oswald
  • plunderphonics
• bob ostertag – death
  • about a boy who’s father that’s dead
  • there’s just the grave and the shovel
  • there is beauty in what is really there – the boy the shovel the fly

• effects of repetition
  • trivialize, translate, amplified
• state of things – wim wenders

specific translation of a visual topic or sound into a visual language

• kagel
• 1969 – beethoven

June First Group:

• Kittler, Speck, Lovink, Manovich, Hardt, von Trotta

June Second Group

• Vitanza: Lyotard, Diane Davis: Derrida, Nancy, Zupancic, Schirmacher, filmaker

August First Year First Group:

• Lotringer (Semiotexte): Baudrillard/Foucault, Pierre Alferi, Chris Fynsk, Michael Schmidt / Heiner Goebeels, Manuel DeLanda, Peter Greenaway

August First Year Second Group:

• Hubertus_von_Amelunxent (Barthes, Benjamin), Volker Schloendorff, Larry Rickels + artist, Balzo + poet, Werner Hamacher, Michel Serres

August Second Year First Group:

• Daren Aronofsky, Max Weber, Avital Ronell, Badiou, Slavoj Zizek, Wolfgang Schirmacher,

August Second Year Second Group:

• Elia Suleiman, Martin Hielscher + writer/poet, Judith Butler, Giorgio agamben, Noodleman, Souleman

Paul Virillo – Luce Irigary:

• Friday – Saturday: April 1-2 La Rochelle France
• Monday – Tuesday: April 3-4

Contingency, Hegemony, Universality

sound visualisation

len lye

oskar fischinger

• structural approach to representing sound

• 1933 – Circles

• objective translations of sound to image (in an abstract ‘language’)

walter ruttman

• berlin symphony of the big city – here and here – protofacist
• eisenstein
• vertov
• fritz lang

• greenaway – micheal nyman
• greenaway – cage – opening sequence – four american composers

music for film

• adorno – hans eisler
  • film music project
  • princeton radio research project
  • 14 ways to describe rain
  • autonomy of music and film
  • antempts to
• the mountain war project – lopez
  • mountain performances – communicating by
  • austria and italy – first world war

film for music

• Zbigniew Rybczyński
  • Zbig Vision
  • intermedialization – amplifying musical structures
  • The Orchestra (1990)
  • Diagetic
• Oliver Hermann – The Rites of Spring
  • 3 people – personal sacrifice
  • st. aria ceremony
  • Stravinsky
• Peter Sellers – Opera
• Operation Orfeo
• Syncresis
• Semiconductor
• Trapped in the Closet

• discussion
  • Douglas Gordon
  • Christian Marclay
  • Stan Brakhage
  • Mauricio Kagel
  • Christian Marclay – Screen Play
  • Vertov – Cinematic Orchestra
• when film ‘works’ in music or music ‘works’ in film – are these moments of syncresis
• Schubert – Winterreise – Theatricized production