Monument Film: the experience

A few years ago I was traveling with my family in Italy. I had a great time, but on my way back to Los Angeles I'd decided to stop off in New York City to visit some friends and hang out before I had to go back to Grad school.

While I was there I received an email from someone inquiring about my Arnulf Rainer tattoo. Her name was Martina Kudláček, the director of the great documentary "In the Mirror of Maya Deren". I was a little starstruck when I first got the email because I'd projected the film many years ago while working at the Anthology Film Archives in New York City. It was a brilliant portrait of one of the worlds greatest filmmakers.So, when she wanted to interview me for the Peter Kubelka tattoo I had I was very honored.

So, we met at the Anthology Film Archives and she interviewed me in the projection booth of the Maya Deren theatre where I'd projected for many years. It was a strange experience because I kind of felt like I'd carried myself well during the interview, but when it was over I completely crashed out from jet lag.

Fast forward about 4 years and I received a message on a social media site from a friend of mine that they'd just seen me in a movie at the Rotterdam Film Festival. For a moment I thought, "I didn't know Mike [Kuchar] was submitting his films to Rotterdam." Then I went to look up the program I saw a film titled "Fragments of Kubelka".

I quickly emailed Martina and asked her about the documentary. Of course, I was eager to see it, but I thought it was stuck for a little while. She later told me that it was a crazy rush to finish the edit and get the HDcam tape over to Rotterdam. But at that time she replied to my email saying that the film was basically finished and it was making the festival rounds.

Jump again another few months and I get an email from Martina stating that the film had been accepted to the New York Film Festival in the Views of the Avant-Garde section and that she wanted to make sure I was able to come so she would pay for my flight out.

I was floored. Without a thought I emailed her back and picked out a flight and held my patience. While I waited rather impatiently I looked at the other screenings that were coming up during the festival. I saw that Jodie Mack had a new film and so did Peggy Awash and Peter Kubelka had two big screenings later the same day that the "Fragments..." was screening. It was described as a film experience where the original "Arnulf Rainer" would be screened and a new accompanying film "Antiphon" would also be screened. First each would be screened individually, then side-by-side in a double projection and finally as a double projection over lapping each other.

I was really excited for that and I counted down the days til I could see this.

Finally when the screening came my hair was standing on end. It was a near full house in the classic Walter Reade auditorium at Lincoln Center. Naturally I was in the first row because I wanted to make sure the film experience completely filled my view of sight.

yes, that's Kubelka's iPad

Kubelka was there and lectured as he did breaking down reality and existence in to moments. He explained how we come to experience these moments of actions that remind us of ourselves - without mentioning escapist cinema he was describing his films as the exact opposite. He clapped his hands and said "NOW!" and again and again. "This is what reminds us of our existence" [paraphrased]. He was making an obvious reference to his "Arnulf Rainer" with it's moments of black and white. It jolts us and makes us self aware. Aware of our surroundings, aware of our pulse, aware of our thoughts.

I would push this one step further and it makes us aware of how we see. There is a strange phenomenon with flicker films that occurs somewhere in the processing of our vision. I have seen this with some of Kubelka's films, Paul Sharits' films, Tony Conrad's films, Jodie Mack's films and others. I have even experimented with it myself.

Our brain some how has a hard time with such a drastic change. Our brain creates a mixture of the previous image and the next image. With a change such as full color like many Sharits' films and "Arnulf Rainer" one color dominates while the other dissipates in ripples. With one change this is change is not apparent at all. However, with multiple changes one right after the other in quick succession the phenomenon is very obvious.

This is a strange phenomenon because the dissipated image appears to be in space in front of the screen. The fleeting image is like an ink blot - it's very different every time and it's just abstract randomness. Sometimes it takes the shape of swirls, lines, simple shapes, but in the end it is like looking at clouds and you see what you want to see. It appears and disappears almost instantaneously like the smoke bomb of a magic trick. It's like a hallucination or trick-of-the-eye. With "Arnulf Rainer" and with "The Flicker" you can see color even though both films are completely black and white.

However, this phenomenon is enhanced dramatically with the double projection super imposed "Arnulf Rainer" "Antiphon". "Antiphon" a complete counter to "Arnulf Rainer". It is the same number of frames, but where "Arnulf Rainer" is black "Antiphon" is white. Where "Arnulf Rainer" has noise "Antiphon" is silent and the reverse.

So, with the double projection super imposed you would anticipate the entire experience is white image and noise, which is true and yet still the phenomenon occurs.

It is an unexplainable experience because the phenomenon does not occur while running no film in a projector. It still flickers with the shutter. Even if you slow down the frame rate in an attempt to leave more time of black or white. This phenomenon only occurs with a film running through a projector. And just as Kubleka explains it makes you self aware every moment. The film is only 6 minutes, but it feels exceedingly longer.

I was so moved in the viewing that I had to go to the second screening and sit in the front and again experience the phenomenon again. The second instance was dramatically more special because Kubelka pulled out a reel of "Antiphon" and had everyone pass it around to look at. We all held the film in our hands at the same time (because I was in front I got the title, naturally). Then we watched the double projection while holding the film we were watching in full 35mm in our palms. Then in all it's sad symbolism Kubelka had us dissect the film into pieces and take home our little piece of history.

It was an experience I will never forget and I can only hope to one day affect someone in the same way that Kubelka has affected me.

Obviously, I spent the rest of the night handing out pieces of the title to all my friends.  So my piece has since been cut down, but that was all the people in the world who really would have loved to have a piece anyway.

A friend visits

See full photo album

Finally we were able to get David Berry to come on down. He spent the day looking through the footage and he was able to make some important distinctions for us.  Including a specific piece of 16mm film that we could not account for.  Everything else in the "Knotte Grosse" reels were 35mm, but there were three rolls of 16mm film.  They were pieced together and significantly longer then anything else.

Remember, "Knotte Grosse" as a fragment film was only a series of loops.  What does that mean exactly?  Well, almost all the reels are all black (or clear) with a small bit of animation on them.  The animation lasts for 16 frames or maybe 32 frames with 24 frames in a second that goes by very quickly.  These few frames of animation are followed then by quite a few frames of black.  The idea for the final film was that the 16 frame segment would be looped and looped, but since he had not gotten to the final piece yet he didn't need to actually make the loop.

So, these rolls of 16mm film were strange because they were continuous.  It was 1000's, or really 10's of 1000's, of frames of animation with very little blackness.  But it turned out from David that these were cut segments of "Heavy Light".  Now, I'm certain that Mark would have figured this out if he could have put it in a projector, but since there was this confusion of what is negative and what is positive with the "Knotte Grosse" materials he made sure to be very careful with it.

After a few hours of going through rolls and rolls of film we all finally settled on a few rolls adding up to about 1000 ft of film.  Now was the complicated bit.  How do we get the film scanned with no funds to speak of?

Well, Mark knew that David Wilson, who'd helped in getting "Life in the Atom" scanned, had a standing offer to help get much of "Knotte Grosse" scanned as well.  This proved to be a difficult process.  If Mark is a busy guy then David is a constant blur whizzing around our world never sleeping.  Eventually, though we went through another friend of Larry's to help us contact Rhythm & Hues to scan the film, Richard Hollander.

You see, the Hollywood movie industry is still very much full of people who work in film, there's a lot of digital, but still, a lot of film.  And Rhythm & Hues being a Visual FX studio that gets hired by production studios that means they need to be able to work on both film and digital productions.  So, they have a very high quality film scanner (a few, I believe).  But since film is not used by everyone they are not using their film scanner all the time.  So, in between a couple productions I was able to bring a nice large reel of "Knotte Grosse" rolls to R&H.  They ended up giving us a nice 2K 16bit scan of the film.

This was really great for me because it meant I had quite a bit of latitude to color correct.  The only thing I would have liked would be to have a color card or some skin tone (like I did for "Life in the Atom").  Yet, still it ended up looking really really good.

On the DVD we ended up keeping the film as one movie.  We made no loops.  This I think was a bit of a mistake, but by this point we had really pushed the schedule so far that I was really letting Larry and Pam make the decisions without much discussion.  And really I didn't have too many points of disagreement with either of them.  I really respect their decisions, but I feel that it's important if I disagree with something that I should speak up - politely, of course.  But I hope that one day the loops can be shown as loops.  Just as the "Light Show Loops" were included.

KG vids

I knew if I ran the rewind at the right speed the frame lines would sync with the frame rate of my camera phone...I only wish I'd had 3 hands to do that.  Still, kinda interesting.

Film fragments

Just about a year ago now I first laid my hands upon the 35mm elements known as "Knotte Grosse".

I don't know too much about the origins of this one, that's a question for Pamela (and really everything about Beckett that I'm writing is more based on rumors then actual fact - Pam is the real source for these things).  What I do know is that this film was a splinter off of his optical printing work that he perfected in "Heavy Light".  This was significantly more complex and hypnotic, but according to Beth Block this was the bane of his life while he was working on it.

He received a grant for it and therefore was obligated to finish it, but he also seemed to put it down and pick it up again at any moment.  He also often labeled rolls of film "Knotte Grosse" when they were in fact a gig he had for an advertisement or other project.

By the time I got to them, or really Mark Toscano at the Academy Film Archives since it's his jurisdiction, they were a few hundred rolls of film fragments that at first were unable to make too much sense out of.  Some sections were negative, some positive, but he specifically used a reversal stock while treating it as a negative (I think for economic reasons).  So, it was difficult for Mark to assess very quickly.  And, well, to say that Mark is a busy guy is an outright understatement.

During this entire process I found myself getting impatient with him because he would take weeks to respond to an email or phone call.  When in actuality he is constantly busy working on countless projects and he really has no exact obligation to the iotaCenter to help us work on anything.  So, I hope he forgives me for the times I may have been impatient with him during this process.

In any case, some how, some way, some where it came up that we should have a special process for working with "Knotte Grosse".  We knew we needed to include something of them in the DVD.  And some one, I think it was Mark, suggested that we should talk with Adam's old and close friend David Berry.  David had already been strongly involved in the process of the DVD with significant and generous donations to the iotaCenter specifically for the Adam Beckett project.  Not only did we want to make him feel like he was move involved in the process of the DVD, but we also wanted to get his opinion on these film fragments.  And it seemed only natural to have these fragments edited together in some sort of cohesive finalize piece.


As I've repeatedly stated these really are fragments and anyone who's seen the DVD can tell you that there are basically just sections of loops.  They start simple and get more complex and more complex.  Adam seemed to be working on getting a good library of loops that he would then jumble together in a final film.  He got up to the stage of making a library, but never made the film.  So, we asked David to make that film.


We didn't quite get directly to that a first.  I recall bringing this up with Larry and David, but later it turned out that David didn't have the time and Larry thought it would be manipulating the film too much.  However, initially we wanted to get David's opinion on what sections we should use.  We literally had 100's of rolls to choose from and I knew we'd have to cut it down if we wanted to make our deadline and get any help from Rhythm & Hues in scanning the film.

I figured we should just take an essential 1000' of film (about 10 minutes) of the best of the best that we could find.  Keeping in mind most of this was leader and long black sections between the loops this ended up only making it to about 3 minutes of footage and by no means could we cut any of that original material - it was archival film for god's sake.


So, we asked David to come down from the Bay Area and give us his assessment of what we should use.  I knew he would not have the time to spend all day at the archives looking at the film, but he would spend a good few hours doing so.  I also knew that Mark had not gone through all the film fragments and he would not have time to.  So, I decided to spend a day at the Academy looking through all the rolls of film and making note of reel numbers, estimated lengths, any notes or text like dates and whether or not a roll was interesting or possibly good for David to look at.

That way once David came down we were all set with just a few rolls and he wouldn't be slaving away at looking through bland or unnecessary rolls.

During that process I took some pictures and some video with my camera phone.  It's not great quality, but I hope you enjoy.  Next I'll tell you about David's visit and the following process.  On that day I brought my Digital SLR camera and took much better photographs.

The Life of "Life in the Atom"

For 30 years this film was lost.

In 1979, in the ashes of Adam Beckett's house stood Beth Block, Chris Casedy and a few other friends and family members.  Hit with the tragedy they walked like zombies through what was left of his house picking up drawings, reels of film and any bits of artwork they could find.

Most of this ended up in a storage space that is still owned and operated by the family.  A significant amount also went to CalArts; in particular the artwork that he created while at CalArts, naturally.  Still a small amount was held onto by other friends.  This was mostly because at first the two other sources were not allocated immediately and his friends all knew that this artwork was extremely important even if the world had not completely realized his genius quite yet.  One reel of film was given to Beth Block, fellow filmmaker and close friend.  That reel was his incomplete film "Life in the Atom" - this was the show reel, the most complete edit that he compiled to that point.

A few years passed and people started to ask Beth about that film.  By that point the family had finally started acquiring his artwork and putting it into the storage space.  Beth's recollection at that point was that she'd taken the film, but passed it off quickly to Adam's sister or another friend.  This question kept coming up over the next few decades, Beth would occasionally search her house and return to restate that she'd given the reel to someone else.

In about 2009, after some years people had forgotten about the film - lost to history, as so many other brilliant pieces of cinema have left us.  Two moves and significant sifting of all of Beth's life and property later; one day as she was looking for another piece of her old films in her home office- "It's not here.  It's not here either.  Hmm... There's some stuff on this tall shelf."  She pulls up a stool and reaches to a dark corner that she can't even see; feels around and settles on a box. "What's this?" she thinks to herself.  She slowly pulls it out and brings it down to eye level.  She opens the box as puzzled as can be.  She reads the side of the film inside...and a shock comes across her face.

She immediately calls Adam Hyman, director of the Los Angeles Filmforum.  THE person in Los Angeles to ask who to talk to about how to get this film in the right hands.  Adam immediately refers her to Mark Toscano, archivist of the Academy Film Archives who focuses on experimental and avant-garde film.  He is able to transfer it to the iotaCenter archives because, conveniently, their archives and all their films are on deposit at the Academy Film Archives (voluntarily, completely free of charge as an in-kind donation to the iotaCenter).

Also coincidentally, Larry Cuba, Stephanie Sapienza, Pamela Turner and Mark Toscano just finished restoring the six original films of Adam Beckett (and his one reel of early experiments).  They were just a few months away from a huge celebratory event of Adam Beckett's films and of the newly restored prints.  So, not only was Mark able to deposit the film in the iotaCenter's archive (since by that time all the film materials were donated to the iotaCenter from the Beckett family - almost single-handedly because of Pamela), but he also knew that he needed to work quickly and pull some strings all around town to get the film scanned so it would be ready for the event.

He went immediately to David Wilson, director of the Museum of Jurassic Technology in Culver City and a close friend of Adam's.  David had many friends at Rhythm & Hues, one of the largest Visual FX studios in the world, and he asked them to scan the film - free of charge, out of the goodness of their hearts.  And that's just want they did.

The film was presented and just barely made it in time for the screening.  It was a huge success and many of his old friends were able to see the film again after three decades.

A little over a year later I came into the picture.  It took me some time to understand not only the history of all the films, but also what exactly should be done with the DVD.  I quickly realized that this was an extremely important project and not only were people donating to the iotaCenter to have it done, not only was Larry the director of the organization with his aspiration, not only was Pamela the director of the project with her dreams, but there was also Mark, Beth, Chris Casedy, David Wilson, the Beckett family.

So, after talking with many different people there came about a couple different ideas.  One of which was to ask Carl Stone, Adam's old collaborator to do a new soundtrack for the DVD.  I'm not sure who it was that came up with the idea.  I think it may have been Mark, but I also recall talking to Larry about this.  I think between me talking to the two of them the idea just came about.

Of course, this comes into the dilemma of should we be manipulating the artwork of a deceased filmmaker?  If we did then what are we saying?  The filmmaker is no longer able to have a say and we might be going against their wishes.  I certainly understand this argument and I think it has a valid point, but often I think it's important try and reach a new audience so that brilliant old works of art don't die.  This argument is quite wide ranging and has even been argued for transferring film to video.  Since this is a DVD of films at what point do we say "This is ok to manipulate without the filmmaker's consent, but this point is not okay."
And frankly, in this case, you can simply hit mute and see the film as it was/is.

So, I digress.  We eventually contacted Mr. Stone who pretty much jumped at the idea.  And even though we could not pay him and he was extremely busy he made a beautiful, dreamy and lucid soundtrack and matches the film in a very eerie way.  I still can't get enough of watch the film with that soundtrack.  The film is very similar to "Flesh Flows", but significantly more sophisticated.

I do feel the need to add that Beth Block was not keen on the idea that we added a new soundtrack, but she also didn't feel the need to throw her weight around to make sure it was halted.

Also, as one more side note to the really in depth fan who is interested.  There is one segment of the film (in the second picture above) where there are little abstract bits of things that circle around in space.  At one point just before that part the background cuts from white to black.  During our correspondences Carl mentioned that he believed that Adam meant to dissolve (aka fade) the background from white to black.  It was at this point that Larry decided that we shouldn't intervene on the film to that level.  After all it was and is an incomplete film.

Mark also told me that he recalls David Wilson talking about another section of the show reel where the two characters at the end go on some kind of carpet ride.  That would have been interesting to see.  Remember there's also a small section from "Life in the Atom" that we only had animated on paper.  This was shot by Pamela and we were able to include it.

A long story, it is, but still a fun one to tell.  Next will be the "Knotte Grosse" story.