→ from book to film to book in a fanny dance

 .

(…) as we begin to read, a temporal process commences, which in addition to the two dimensions of surface and to the dimension of space—we think of the body of the book!—brings the fourth dimension of time. One of the essential characteristics of time is that the direction in which it moves is irreversible. (Hoculli, 1996)

→ FROM

When the moving image was first invented there was a tremendous excitement about the possibilities of the new medium. It was a spectacle on par with the magic shows. Georges Méliès produced The Haunted Castle and A Trip to the Moon. Lumière Brothers produced Le Squelette joyeux and Spanish Bullfight. Watching those films it is easy to see what the joy and the fascination were all about. It was "the cinema of attractions", as Tom Gunning called it, full of "visual delights…surprises…displays of exotic, beautiful or grotesque…or other sorts of sensational thrills “ (Abel, 2005)

Those early short films - each only about 4 minutes long - certainly used and explored the moving image with imagination and dedication of Caractacus Potts. The idea of film as a non-narratative medium (or where story-telling takes a secondary role) resembles a form of an artist's book, which excites the reader with form and content, rather then the verbal story on its pages (symmetry Nr1): a short blast of unfolding enjoyment.


→ 

The adjective “well-thumbed” tends to suggest a certain monomania regarding a text (Farry, 2015)

As soon as producers realised that longer films meant bigger profits, narrative cinema was born: Cinderella (Georges Méliès) and Alice in the Wonderland (by Cecil Hepworth and Percy Stow) were among the first to be made. 
The parallel between book and film goes beyond a direct book adaptation. Like film, codex is inherently sequential by it's structure: there are pages (film frames) and pages (film frames) and pages (film frames) that require time to ingest in a linear order from 1 to X hundred. (symmetry Nr2). McFarlane, in contrast, compares book to a literary narrative, distinguishing word as the smallest unit in the sequence. He rightly points out, that we do not watch film frame by frame as we read novel word by word. The comment would still stand even if comparing film/frame structure to the book/page structure. However, the principle of linear time-based sequenciality remains.

Like oral or cinematic narrative, it (literary narrative) can only be "consumed", and therefore actualised, in time that is obviously reading time, and even if the sequentiality of its components can be undermined by a capricious, repetitive, or selective reading. (Genette, 1980)

 → BOOK TO FILM TO BOOK

Film editing process requires patience, stamina and precision of a typesetter, as I realised when editing between one hand and another. It was an illuminating experience, that had me appreciate  links between book and film production and  possible transitions that I had not yet considered.

When looking for more specific bridges between the two areas, I found that most conversions between the mediums happen in reference to their inherent sequentiality (symmetry Nr2). Flip books are the ones that came to my mind first. (Is it a film? Is it a book? Is it a toy?) Flip Books ! Un livre, un pouce, un film is probably the most remarkable project of them all. The film (which was screened at this years Pages book fair), includes an anthology of 300 activated flipbooks from Pascal FOUCHÉ’s collection (France - 2007). It traces the history from the XIXth century to today and it is subdivided into categories, such as dance, animals, artist's books, publicity, etc. Remarkably, there is "no dialog, no music, only the characteristic "flip" sound, in Stereo Dolby , wow !" 

The film certainly sounds fascinating - just like the whole business of flip-books. I will be coming back to the subject very soon.

The video below does not come from Flip Books ! Un livre, un pouce, un film - I found no quality images of the project online. This video is a credit to the amazing Flipbook Collector on YouTube - great channel!

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Flip Books ! Un livre, un pouce, un film is a professional documentation of 300 books. But there are also documentation works of individual artists: artist's who work with all kinds of books (not just flipbooks) often resort to video to record their work. Because it is time-based. Personally, I like how our George documents his works. His videos and their presentation maintain the character of his books: they are a good step above a tipod+flipbook set-up. Below is an illustration from to every action there is a reaction. Take time to look at his other book videos. Immaculate.

→ 
 
And here is the most obvious work of them all. DOT (DOT: The book as a video and DOT: The book) The video is a sequence of digitally reproduced letterpress prints, produced in the typography workshop of the University of Arts in Braunschweig, Germany. The pages were collected and bound to three (almost) identical books. The project’s subheading refers to this coexistence of print and digital video.

 

It is an interesting project which requires spotless skills of a typesetter and a video editor. I loved the experimental idea of it, however - as for the rest - it was somewhat underwhelming. I wonder what Romano Hänni could have done with the video!

→

(…) as we begin to read, a temporal process commences, which in addition to the two dimensions of surface and to the dimension of space—we think of the body of the book!—brings the fourth dimension of time. One of the essential characteristics of time is that the direction in which it moves is irreversible. (Hoculli, 1996)

 








PS. → IN A FANNY DANCE 
Visual books use even more cinematic features: such as panning, flashbacks, eye-line matching, etc. I was also going to include video poetry (I did, in fact, and I deleted), photobooks and animation (flipbook linked), and then I realised that I was digging too deep and this whole blog post was getting out of my hands. So I stopped. Leaving some great subjects and artists to tackle next time.



Sources:

Abel, Richard (2005) "Cinema of Attractions." Encyclopedia of Early Cinema . New York. p. 124.

Buchan, Suzanne (2013) Pervasive Animation. Routledge p. 63

Chilyan, Tagui (2011) The Development of Narrative Film. Hitrecord: http://www.hitrecord.org/records/402381

Genette, Gerard (1980) Narrative Discourse. New York: Cornell University Press. p. 34. 
Hochuli, Jost & Kinross, Robin. Designing books: practice and theory. Hyphen Press. London,1996. p.12 

Farry, Oliver (2015) "The crack of the spine: why do we find wear and tear in books so comforting?". New Statesman: Feb 19, 2015 http://www.newstatesman.com/culture/2015/02/crack-spine-why-do-we-find-wear-and-tear-books-so-comforting 
McFarlane, Brian (1996) Novel to Film: An Introduction to the Theory of Adaptation. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
 

[Egidija]

Vincent Walsh on Creativity

Is it OK to like Turner 2012?

What do you think when you come to see Turner Prize 2012 and find a few coachloads of WI and a couple of vicars crowding in the ground floor lobby of Tate Britain? Great! I want to be part of their tour! This is going to be exciting! (Un)fortunately they were in for Pre-Raphaelites.
My rooms remained very satisfyingly uncrowded.

Paul Noble

Paul Noble

Paul Noble is in the first room: the room feels pleasantly safe as a gallery setting (good for sales). There are huge pencil drawings of pretend worlds that could almost exist in some space and some time that is distant but vaguely related to ours. I saw his Nobvile about four or five years ago in Tate as part of an excellent drawing exhibition. The city was much more human then. The spaces have expanded into an eery stillness of abandoned city: city in a perpetual state of unfinished construction (very much like our house, then). The pictures are neither exploring the limits of drawing nor setting new boundaries for contemporary art as a whole. They are detailed and skilled and their production required meditative amounts of patience. He is probably the only one in the lot who can safely be assumed not to win.

Elizabeth Price

Elisabeth Price. I saw her show HERE in the Baltic earlier this year. (Yes I did!) I remember being captivated by the combination of words (very matter-of-fact), the music and the visual footage.  Especially that video about the things - spinning sculptural everyday objects sequenced to the music with her trademark bits of text to punctuate the imagery.  This signature of hers became immediately obvious as soon as I sat down in front of  The Woolworths Choir of 1979 at Tate Britain. The sound, the words. The aesthetics of the slideshow. Flicking through a book. Very detached and very engaging.

Luke Fowler

It is fascinating, that three out of four nominees are using time based mediums: film, film, performance. Luke Fowler is also supplementing his film with photographic diptychs. I did not watch the whole film, unfortunately - 90 minutes is long for a gallery viewing. I will need another trip and a better planned morning. The photographs, however,  were atmospheric and the combinations were worth a stare or two. 

 

Spartacus Chetwynd

Another reason to return is that I missed Spartacus Chetwynd performance. The setup looks genuinely disturbing - I have found circus and puppetry scary since I had a glimpse of a horror film set in the theater. That happened at least 30 years ago. I will get back to this later. On the whole - the set up seems to strike the right kind of notes for a winning entry: definately on the boundaries of the mainstream and I haven't got a clue.

Turner prize has received a lot of beating in the last few years. I felt guilty for liking most of the show - is that  normal?

This is not part of Turner Prize 2012. This is a Tate corridor.

Elizabeth Price @ Baltic, Newcastle

I never use songs because of their words – but I do try to use songs with an effective, generic
pop sentiment, or a certain ersatz emotion, and to connect that strange, strong attachment or feeling to another narrative. (Elizabeth Price)

The videos are great. They are probably as close as a video can get to an artist's book. A book with a sound.*

The one right at the back was about the things: User Group Disco. All it shows is a mesmorizing sequence of everyday objects spinning to the music. The objects are lit with that British Museum kind of light that makes them resemble important sculptural artefacts. You would be forgiven for thinking you are watching a documentary! The imagery is punctuated with her trademark snippets of text that drop in here and there. Like flicking trough a book. A Christie's catalogue.
Very simple. Very detached. Very engaging.

USER GROUP DISCO, 2009 (15 mins) This video is part of a series in which each episode constructs a section of a ruined museum. This work opens in the ‘Hall of Sculptures’ and is a fantasy narrative played out through objects, neglected items of kitsch and consumer goods and artefacts that swirl in the darkness like floating debris. These various utensils and ornaments drift through categories of definition and, in so doing, gradually generate other spaces and narratives. A distinctive rhythmic soundtrack completes the work.

The following text is an edited (twice!) interview between Elizabeth Price and Alessandro Vincentelli, BALTIC Curator of Exhibitions and Research.

AV: Each of the three works in the exhibition is constructed around a different spatial concept or place: the auditorium, the Hall of Sculptures (from an institution or museum), and, in the newest work, the bottom of the sea. How did you intend the viewer to experience these?

EP: I want the viewing space to exist as a parallel or mirroring space to the place constructed within the video, the fictional location proposed or established through the narrative. The title of the show, Here , refers to this. Each of the video’s narrators repeatedly calls the fictional place they are describing ‘here’. They insist upon the real presence of the fantasy location – but in doing so, I think they actually disrupt that fantasy, because they remind the viewer of the empirical ‘here and now’ of the viewing space, and of their own embodied reality. I called the show Here to co-name the two contingent but distinct ‘heres’ of the work.

AV: In your videos you don’t use people, you use objects. Are you more at home working with archives or museums, and with the meanings that objects have?

EP: I usually appropriate objects that do not belong to me personally, which I think are powerful or important. I take possession of them through art, and adapt them to tell other stories, although I usually draw upon their own existing, archived histories to do this. My work is about people and histories, but not individuals – it’s about people as collective forces or voices and how we emerge as such through material culture. This is why I use objects (in which category I would include melodies and writings).

AV: With several of your films you are creating a very particular kind of space in the work, one
that seems to be informed by film genres. Are science fiction films or horror films an influence
for you?

EP: I’m interested in the kinds of complex imaginary spaces constructed in science fiction. Each of my videos is constructed around a spatial principle, which is the ‘here’ the narrators refer to. In fact the narrative often comprises little more than establishing imaginary places and moving through them.

AV: The third section of the film Choir continues the research from the first two. With this you
have drawn on a powerful real event, a fire in a Woolworths department store in Manchester in May 1979. What was it that drew you to this?

EP: The image that links the three films is one of an expressive hand gesture. The image from the Woolworths fire of women waving from windows for help was the first image I came across of the three. I remember it from the time; I saw it in a newspaper when I was a child. When I was looking at the image of the Shangri Las doing their sombre, enigmatic dance, and wondering why I was so fascinated by it, I remembered this newspaper image. At the same time I was reading about ecclesiastical architecture – for no good reason, other than being interested in the arcane terminology – and I came across a similar image in that context. To some extent, it was a coincidence.

AV: Your use of text draws from a whole range of sources, from artistic manifestos to advertising scripts.

EP: I really enjoy finding and reading arcane texts. I like technical vocabularies and take pleasure in the formal qualities of strange or new words, how they sound or look on the page. The script for West Hinder drew from car manuals and press releases, and that for Choir (Part 1) drew on essays on ecclesiastical architecture. In each of these sources, a different kind of language has been used very precisely to name things, to build complex ideological worlds.

AV: What were the sources for the range of objects and artefacts in User Group Disco?

EP: I collected all the objects over several years, because they seemed redundant in some way: damaged, outmoded, useless or excessive. I didn’t initially collect them in order to make the video – and many objects in the ‘collection’ do not appear in the video.

AV: The motif of the spiral or the turntable recurs in User Group Disco. Why is that?

EP: The ‘pivotal’ object in the video is the turntable and this is used to animate the other objects, which rotate and swirl in the darkness. Hence the reference to ‘disco’ in the title. In The Form of the Phonograph Record’ (1934) Theodor Adorno describes the phonographic record as a strange and terrible science fiction object, in words which seem to evoke a whirlpool. This text, with its prophetic tone and paternal attitude, was the key for all the others. credits and funders.

(from the exhibition brochure)

P. S. October 22, 2012 - a follow up from Tate Britain.


* which suggests that an average codex book is a video without a sound. A customizable kind of video -  where the viewer can toggle the scenes as he pleases.

V&A doors by George Cullen

 

Rotating doors at Victoria and Albert museum (by George Cullen). One of those instants of cinematic poetry, if there is one...

Symmetry

A beautiful video from Everyone. 

Tonis Saadoja & Flo Kasearu. "21.05.09" / "14.06.09" @ ŠMC, Vilnius

Tonis Saadoja @ ŠMC, Vilnius

Tonis Saadoja @ ŠMC, Vilnius

Flo Kasearu @ ŠMC, Vilnius

Flo Kasearu @ ŠMC, Vilnius

Two young generation Estonian artists Tonis Saadoja and Flo Kasearu present their works "21.05.09" / "14.06.09".

Tonis Saadoja’s photo installation "14.06.09" refers to the date of the first mass deportation in Estonia by the Soviet troops in 1941. The photos are taken in Tallinn the same night 68 years later, each portraying an empty crossroad. Although the portrayed locations have individually no specific connection to historic deportation sites, and rather follow a mind construction ,what if it happened today, the pictures are displayed in a sequence from the late 19th century bourgeois suburb towards the modernist Soviet blocks of houses of 1980s.
Presented as a lightbox installation the work physically influences the viewers’ control over the surrounding space, serving as a memorial piece to situations where human control is replaced by force majeure.

The lightbox installation is accompanied by a video work "21.05.09" (aka ESC) by Flo Kasearu referring to an awkward real life incident with escaped hippodrome horses galloping in a desolate Tallinn some years ago on the night of the 21st of May. Being partly a reconstruction of the documentary events the video features a digital high speed graffiti displayed on the facades of Tallinn. The expressive galloping of a symbolic white horse in a desperate boy racer situation leads to a powerful trip through the city presented from a perspective of the invisible persuader.

Emilija Škarnulytė @ Vartai Gallery, Vilnius

Emilija Škarnulytė @ Vartai Gallery, Vilnius

Emilija is showing her latest project Dingusio miesto slėnis (The Valley of the Lost City) consisting of pictures and videos of the Raigardas Valley which has been painted by Mikalojus Konstantinas Čiurlionis.
Nostalgic. Intimate. Horizon blurred with mist. The prints show lines, like they have been printed on a faulty printer.
I  wonder what do non-Lithuanians make of her work? It resonates some quintessentially Lithuanian aesthetics, suggesting an idea, that my fellow countrymen would respond to it with a different emotional charge to everybody else.

 

Sir Ken Robinson on creativity