Rhythmic Hypnosis
Films by Daïchi Saïto, Karen Holmes, Amy Halpern, Peter Lipskis, Chris Welsby, Ellie Epp, Mike Stoltz, Sophie Michael, Gary Beydler, and Pat O’Neill.
This one hour program is comprised of experimental works which utilize unconventional editing techniques, offering unique glimpses of time condensed to manipulate movement within layered planes of reality, creating pulsating spatial patterns and hallucinatory visual intensities.
PROGRAM
PASADENA FREEWAY STILLS
Gary Beydler | 1974 | USA | silent | 6 minutes
Constructed as a thrilling arc of realization, the film is a beautiful articulation of our emotional entanglement with moving images, while simultaneously creating a form in which the illusion of cinema is brought into incredible relief as the film we're watching gradually catches up to the film Beydler is holding up to the camera with his hands, one frame at a time.
SAVING THE PROOF
Karen Holmes | 1979 | USA | sound | 11 minutes
Saving The Proof is a complex transformation of an ordinary action: a woman walking. The rhythm of her gait and the pulsating, repetitive sounds counterpoint with alternating images of her transversing city streets, passing windows and fences, descending stairs. As the images repeat and vary with mathematical precision, one becomes more interested in the process itself than in her destination.
COLOUR SEPARATION
Chris Welsby | 1974 | UK | silent | 3 minutes
This film is based on the colour separation process. High contrast film stock was run three times through a stationary camera; once for each of the light primaries. In the composite image, anything moving is represented in primary or secondary colour whilst anything still, having been filmed through all three filters, is represented in "correct" colour.
ALL THAT RISES
Daïchi Saïto | 2007 | Canada | sound | 7 minutes
Juxtaposition of seeing and sounding, sky and stone and all that's in between. A short walk in an alleyway, to hear vision sounding images, blessed with light and darkness.
— Intermission —
UNTITLED (OBJECTS 3)
Sophie Michael | 2008 | UK | silent | 3 minutes
Michael builds images on three combined visual planes, superimposing objects over each other so their forms and colours interact. Michael#s film has a spontaneous in the moment feel to the layering of images, as we see her desk strewn with possible alternative shapes, objects and colours - each tense with the potential of visual combination.
CRYSTALS
Peter Lipskis | 1985 | Canada | sound | 4 minutes
A cinematic tribute to William Bentley, a Vermont dairy farmer who pioneered the “art” of snowflake photography for forty-six winters (1885-1931), proving that no two of his 5381 specimens were identical. This film contains about 1500 examples (fewer than the average snowball), showing the incredible variation of design in nature, while producing the effect of an “organic” hexagonal mandala in a state of continual metamorphosis.
PALM DOWN
Amy Halpern | 2012 | USA | silent | 6 minutes
Two palindromes. One resurrection. No happy ending.
WITH PLUSES AND MINUSES
Mike Stoltz | 2013 | USA | sound | 5 minutes
Stoltz shakes and dislocates audio and image with volume and pitch variations, editing the 16mm film in camera, varying the focus and the shot length of every frame, shifting background and foreground, turning and spinning the camera hand-held positions, and allowing sequences of black that punctuate the image's algorithms.
CURRENT
Ellie Epp | 1986 | Canada | silent | 2 minutes
The conceptual and minimalist aesthetic seen in this film refers to the more complex metaphysical and alchemical transformations which occur when silver is exposed to tungsten light.
7362
Pat O’Neill | 1967 | USA | sound | 10 minutes
A bilaterally symmetrical (west to east) fusion of human, biomorphic and mechanical shapes in motion. Has to do with the spontaneous generation of electrical energy. A fairly rare (ten years ago) demonstration of the Sabattier effect in motion. Numbered after the film stock of the same name.
Total Duration : 57 minutes + Intermission
Artist Bios
Gary Beydler (1944 - 2010) was a visual artist who worked in painting, sculpture, photography and filmmaking. He created 6 conceptually innovative experimental films over a two year period before leaving the art world in the late 1970's. Having fallen into obscurity, his work was restored by the Academy Film Archive a few years before his death and his films are now exhibited around the globe.
A beloved member of San Francisco State University's Cinema Department from 1974 to 2012, Karen Holmes has helped to nurture a passionate enthusiasm for experimental filmmaking for multiple generations of students. Her own films have been exhibited internationally.
Chris Welsby was born in England in 1948 and was an early member of the London Filmmaker's Co-operative. From 1989 onwards he has taught at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver. His work is characterised by a rigorous and experimental exploration of the relationship between natural systems inherent in the landscape, such as weather patterns and tidal flow, and the systematic methods and apparatus of filmmaking used to represent them.
Originally from Japan, Daïchi Saïto is a filmmaker based in Montreal, where he co-founded the artist film collective Double Negative. His work explores the relation between the corporeal phenomena of vision and the material nature of the medium, fusing a formal investigation of frame and juxtaposition with sensual and poetic expressions.
Sophie Michael is a London, UK-based installation artist & filmmaker who creates 16mm films that examine ideas around nostalgia and innocence. Her moving image work draws on early experimental filmmaking and mid-twentieth century design to question our relationship to the past through the lens of the present.
Originating from Germany, Peter Lipskis (1954 - 2024) became an active member of the Vancouver experimental film scene in the early 1970's and created two dozen films and video projects over subsequent decades. "His films display a fusion of synaesthetic and structural styles with conceptual modellings that are highly original. The pluralism of his interests is unified by a penchant for a kind of universal consciousness and an archetypal language." — Al Razutis
Amy Halpern (1953 - 2022) was cherished not only for her memorable and beautiful films, but also for her inexhaustible engagement and enthusiasm as a devoted presence in the Los Angeles film and arts community. She had a profound curiosity about nearly everything and everyone she encountered, and her extensive body of film work reflects this passion for the sights, sounds, textures, and complex connections to be found and explored in the world around.
Mike Stoltz is a Los Angeles-based moving image artist whose practice is dictated by process, working directly with the tools of cinema (images, sound, and time) to reexamine the familiar, the communal, and the medium itself. Visual effects are created by hand through in-camera techniques, rephotography, and directly manipulating video signals. Physicality continues in the process of editing the pieces, cutting directly on 16mm film and composing the soundtracks from tape music and live sound generated with collaborators.
Ellie Epp grew up on a Mennonite farm in Northern Alberta. The first in her family to attend university, Epp studied the humanities at Queen's University before moving to London, UK to study filmmaking. While immersed in the experimental film community of the 1970's, she embarked on her own practice which would eventually take her to Vancouver, where she still resides. Though she has only made a handful of works for film and video, her artistry is recognized and exhibited throughout Canada and around the world.
Pat O'Neill has been deeply involved in Los Angeles culture since the late 1960's. A founding father of the city's avant-garde film scene, an influential professor at CalArts and an optical effects pioneer, he is best known for his short works from the early 1960's onwards which are highly graphic, layered and reflexive assemblages based on a mastery of optical printing techniques. He has also exhibited sculptural work and multimedia installations.
This presentation is supported in part by the London Arts Council through the City of London’s Community Arts Investment Program.