Mapping Arnulf Rainer

About a year went by. I was happy with my tattoo, I was no longer working for Anthology on a regular basis, although I would visit occasionally and I was actually at a turning point in my career. I'd spent about 5 years making experimental film, but I wanted to become more successful both on a personal front artistically and vocationally. I was fairly frustrated as a projectionist. I wanted to find a more fulfilling career in the arts of filmmaking. I was accepted into the University of Southern California's Division of Animation and Digital Arts (DADA).

However, this created a ticking clock for me. I still had the footage that Bradley shot of my tattooing of Arnulf Rainer, but I had not done anything with it. I obviously (or maybe not so obviously) had an idea to "Arnulf Rainer" the footage, so to speak. I had seen the film "A flick film in which there appear Liz and Franky, is composed under the score of ARNULF RAINER by P. Kubelka on NTSC" (Ichiro Sueoka, 2000, video, 5 minutes). I can't say that I was thinking about that film at the time when I decided to make my rendition, but I also can't help to think that when I did see it that it unconsciously gave me a tool that I would some day pull out of my bag of tricks.

In any case, I knew I was going to use the original film "Arnulf Rainer" by Peter Kubelka as the blue print for my latest piece and I had to get this done before I left New York for Los Angeles. It was June or July at the time and I was leaving in late August. Therefore, I knew I had to start as soon as possible.

From previously working for and occasionally still covering shifts for projectionists at the Anthology Film Archives I knew John Mhiripiri the Executive Director and Andrew Lampert the Head Archivist for Anthology rather well and they allowed me to conduct my research. I'd heard from a few different people that there was a "code" or "score" of Arnulf Rainer somewhere, but no one knew exactly where. I spent an entire day sifting through the "Kubelka papers" in the library of Anthology to no avail. I found a "map" of "Unsere Afrikareise" (aka Our Trip to Africa) that was conducted by Paul Sharits and one of his interns, but that certainly did not help in pursuit of my goal.

Eventually, I realized that I had no choice, but to go though the film myself and map out the entire film from head to tail. I again, asked permission of Andrew and John who each gave their consent and I carved out a week in which I would spend most of my days using a synchronizer and count every single frame of "Arnulf Rainer".

It ended up only taking me two days - about 6 hours each day. The first day I went through the entire picture and the second day I went back and went through the entire sound track. It was really quite intensive and I did it all in a back room that I never even knew existed until my first day starting. It was very quite, therapeutic and relaxing, but at the same time after each day spent counting frames, making meticulous notes and being as delicate as I possibly could with the film I felt like I was walking out of a giant wind tunnel where I was forced to stare intensely at a small point at the other end of the tunnel all day long.

It wasn't necessarily very draining or exhausting, but it was like leaving a void or being slap-happy mixed with really bad jet-lag. I was a little delirious, energized and off balance. It was not very much like projecting a movie in a dark room, working under and animation down-shooter or from a computer for hours although all of which (usually) require spending hours and hours in a darkened room with one intense source of light as the general focus and little physical movement outside of basic motor skills.

But, I DID IT! I'd successfully mapped the entire film. My one regret is that I was not able to go back through the film to check my findings, but I also knew at that time and I remember now that that would have been impossible. It was just too intense for me to go through once again.

From there I edited together the content of video footage that Bradley Eros shot of my tattooing process. I had to create a key for the film, though. "Arnulf Rainer" is a film of black and white frames and silence and white noise. I had to convert that if I wanted to use actual footage with this. So, for this piece I made black = normal video frames, white = negative video frames, silence = normal audio and white noise = out of phase audio. I also specifically edited the exact instances when the tattoo needle is touching my skin and it turned out to be exactly the amount of footage I needed. I also had to convert things on a frame to frame basis. Meaning, "Arnulf Rainer" 35mm motion picture film to be played at 24 frames per second, but the footage I had was not film. It was video which plays back at 29.97 frames per second. So, the dilemma was - do I treat each frame regardless of the frame rate? I.e. one frame of black film = one frame of normal video, four frames of white = four frames of negative video. Or do I calculate out how each frame translates in a minutes and seconds basis? This way four frames of film is about 5 frames of video, but by the end both film and video would be the same length ( about 8 minutes).

I easily made the decision to go frame to frame mostly because that was the basic philosophy of both the original "Arnulf Rainer" film and my interpretation, but I cannot pretend that there wasn't another lazy factor involved. So, in the end my video piece is actually shorter then the original Peter Kubelka film by about a minute or more.

Remember that this is a flicker film, which contains a strobing effect.

BE AWARE - IF YOU SUFFER FROM EPILEPSY OR SIMILAR AILMENTS THIS VIDEO MAY INDUCE SEIZURES.