DC's

* (restored)
—-

 

‘Blob is a funny word, an ugly thing. It’s alive and nobody knows why. Maybe it came from outer space or it came from a science experiment gone bad or from pollution or from the sea or out of a really sick body. It never stops moving, moving all around with no place to go. When will it die. It can’t die by any means known to man at this moment.

‘What’s your gut reaction? “Gut reaction” is an American term for your first response to things before you examine the facts intellectually. When you see the blob your gut reaction is: you want it to be gone, you want it to die.

‘The blob’s movements are alien yet oddly familiar. Pulling and stretching. Like peristaltic movement. Like the way things move through your body by contractions which result in locomotion. You understand this is linked to your bowels and intestines because even though this motion is involuntary, it is conscious on some level. It is essentially a wave, the universal form of energy transmission divided into peeks and troughs like a bad ocean. Unending waves, wave after wave, wash away your shape. Now formless. You are the blob.

‘Now, you want to help the blob.

‘With its transparent skin, the blob exposes its muscles, organs, blood flow. The banal workings of the organism are revealed in fragile detail. How embarrassing. To encounter the blob is to see the simple, low ambitions that sustain life with no greater purpose. The blob can only and merely exist, it is useless. Whatever happens inside the blob should be hidden, should remain private.

‘The blob can be funny like any mutation, a dead end creature in the chain of evolution. And in the food chain, it has no niche, no other life form feeds on the blob. It’s a disturbing creature because it is unique A Monster that could kill you like a cancer, a devolution of cells. Here is the nightmare scenario: a terratoma analogous to you, an evil negative offspring replaces you the host. A formless double, the blob kills you when it takes up residence within.

‘When you gaze at the blob, your eye no longer has a focal point because the blob has no focal point. You see right into it. You may keep loosing your sight in a myopic blur. In this way the blob can escape even though it moves very slowly and with no apparent direction.

‘In the movie, “The Blob,” the ruby colored nemeses could be a sign of the counter culture, the erotic, psychedelic, loud, political, chaos impending into the serene, the anxious cold war America of the 1950’s.

‘The blob is scary because we do not understand it nor do we easily recognize it. Always changing shape, it’s more like a spill than a sphere. It’s like part of a fat person that escaped and came to life. It’s like Jell-O or slime or mold.’ — Tony Oursler

 

______
Further

Tony Oursler Official Website
Tony Oursler @ Metro Pictures
Tony Oursler @ Lehmann Maupin
Tony Oursler @ Electronic Arts Intermix
‘The Uncanny World of Tony Oursler’
Carlo McCormick ‘The Pathology of Projections & Cynical Spiritualism’
Tony Oursler ‘Sixth Wall’
Philip K. Dick & Tony Oursler ‘Psychomimetiscape’
TO interview by Alan Licht @ Bomb
Tony Oursler’s ‘The Presence Project’
Re: Tony Oursler’s ‘Mud Opera’
Re: Tony Oursler’s ‘The Influence Machine’
Tony Oursler books @ Amazon

 

______
Bowie/Oursler

David Bowie/Tony Oursler Where Are We Now? (Official Music Video)

‘My first actual contact with David was like a shock of energy, fully charged with the magic of media, music, and glamour. It was as if he had somehow bilocated between our world and one of myth and didn’t fully exist in the same space as ordinary earthlings. Of course, this was all in my mind, and my reaction said much about the delusions of popular culture. Somehow this giant I’d been listening to and watching with such admiration since forever was in my studio in person. It was hard to reconcile fantasy with flesh. Later, I would notice that this was a common effect of David’s presence, sometimes with hilarious results. I remember seeing a Jasper Johns exhibition at MoMA with David, his wife Iman, and the artist Linda Post. David sauntered through the show, busily discussing the art and holding forth like we were in a bubble, while the focus of everyone around us shifted from the art to him. Finally, as we were leaving the museum, a group of women surrounded David and began touching him, as if in a spontaneous frenzy of admiration.

‘That was in the late ’90s, in the early stages of a friendship that lasted more than twenty years. At that time I was living in a hovel of a studio at 175 Ludlow Street, on the Lower East Side. During David’s first visit, it took me at least an hour to calm down. As it turns out, behind the star power, he was almost a regular guy. Except that he was David Bowie, after all, who appeared to have different-colored eyes and who had that voice. I still remember fragments of our first conversations: We both agreed from experience that drugs are bad. While he was chain-smoking and sipping coffee, his thoughts ricocheted, much like his career, from music and film to books, art history, and comics, and back again. He was humble about his accomplishments (saying of his work, “One can pluck a few peppercorns from the shit”), and his humor was unforgettable, as was his deep laugh, often accompanied by a conspiratorial sideways grin. Friends asked me why he came to my studio, and at first I honestly didn’t know. It took me a while to understand that he loved art, from discussing how it was made to seeing how artists lived and worked. And it turned out that David wanted to interject some of my work into his lexicon. Much of what we did together became very public—videos can be found on the Internet—but some has never been seen.’ — Tony Oursler, Artforum

 

___
Etc.

Excerpt from ‘Perfect Partner’ by T.O., Kim Gordon, & Phil Morrison (2006)

Early T.O. film ‘The Loner’ (1980)

Tony Oursler on the art of video projection

 

_______
Interview
from designboom

 

In video art, what is ‘projection’ for you?

Tony Oursler: Physics tell us we see light, not objects. For me projection is ‘inner thoughts projected outward onto the world’ and the viewer is a collaborator of the artist. The exposes the gender of reaction to the artwork, finishing it.

Please describe an evolution in your work, from your first projects to the present day.

TO: My projects are more focused now than they were in the past. I’m comfortable with a lot of different mediums that I wasn’t so comfortable with early on. I’m sort of claiming back certain things. I started twenty years ago with photography, drawing and painting and now I’m trying to round them back into my work. It’s been an interesting elliptical process. I think an artist’s life is kind of like a snowball, picking up stuff as you go. everything’s on the outside of the snowball and sometimes you have to burrow in to get the old stuff.

Reality’s something we’re not getting from reality; it’s something people are looking for to entertain them. There’s been this reversal where the powers that be have funneled reality into the entertainment sphere and entertainment has been funneled into the sphere of policymaking.

TO: I’d always looked toward pop culture to decipher things as a mirror of the world, and now I don’t at all, because I know who the creators are, and I can see through what they’re trying to do, so it doesn’t work on me at all. I wish it did. In a weird way, I miss it. There was a time when I used to look at pop culture and take it apart piece by piece to figure out how the magic American engine worked. I was very paranoid and full of conspiracy theories. But now I just look at it as a bunch of morons who are barely getting by, just pushing the buttons on this machine that’s rolling forward. The people have the power of production in their hands, yet the good stuff is yet to be made. The most boring things I just don’t get: people who are fascinated by Paris Hilton, phenomena like that, someone who does nothing and becomes a celebrity, or even worse the city destroyer Trump.

What books do you have on your bedside table?

TO: That’s a good question. I’m a bibliomaniac, so I collect books. At any given moment I might have one book about spiritualism, another like a thriller and one about the military. There is one about the alternative new-age military culture that happened after vietnam when they introduced psychic activities to warfare, trying to kill people through thought.

Describe your style, like a good friend of yours would describe it.

TO: My friend once said I was like the Picasso of video and that was a very flattering, stylistic comment. My other friends probably call me sloppy… and insane.

The Christian Right is afraid that religion is going to be replaced by technology—that a computer can deal in absolutes better than a spiritual leader can. If you think about it, the Moral Majority got firmly embedded in the Republican Party around 1980, which is when computers started becoming more popular. I don’t think it’s a coincidence. Organized religion in this country has been very worried since then that religion’s really going to go out the window.

TO: I like the feeling of reaching progress through technology; I wish it could be true. I hope so for my son. When I wrote my timeline on virtual media around 2000, I realized that as a video artist there was no art history written for me. All this stuff that plugged in or moved or had anything to do with light was very finicky; curators, if a bulb broke or something, just put the piece in a box in the basement. It was much easier for them to put paintings and photographs on the walls, so those of us in video were left with no history of virtual image production. It goes all the way back to the first mention of the camera obscura in a Chinese poem around the year 1000. The image was upside down and associated with the dark side of human nature from the start. Anytime there’s a new kind of technology there’s this association with evil or death, so I think your theory is correct. It’s true of every human invention: rock ’n’ roll, it’s the devil’s music; photography, there was spirit photography; the radio, it was Constantine Raudive who did that tuning into the dead radio; and television, there are lots of examples, but the people who believed they could communicate with the spirit world through technology were really rebels. They took the tools and put them to personal radical use rather than be sublimated by them.

What are you afraid of regarding the future?

TO: I guess death, taxes and fascism. Actually I don’t know.

 

____
Show

___________________
Part. 1: works at a (relative) standstill

 

________________
Part 2: works in motion

Guilty (1995)

Slip (2003)

Cigarettes (2009)

Star (2003)

Pain (2008)

Switch (2010)

Vampiric Battle (2009)

Judy (1994)

various works (2008)

Cave-in (2010)

Untitled Work with Money (2008)

Frog (2005)

E*Nel (2016)

Caricature (2002)
—-

 

*

p.s. Hey. ** Laura, Hi. Plot is like too much skeleton unless the film just wants to be a fun ride. That’s what chopped means? Good to know. Yeah, I guess if someone was chopped (up) they’d be rather ugly at least in a conventional sense. When guys are well built people will say they’re cut, and maybe that confused me. The translation thing isn’t that interesting. Maybe if we had managed it would have been. He’d translate then I’d fix it and then he’d fix it and I’d fix it again. No struggles or anything. We understood each other because even though he was Dutch he spoke perfect English. There’s now a remote possibility that the visa mess can salvaged, but I won’t know until next week. Robert Pollard/GbV is my favorite living artist and I hear a giant amount that would take far too long to even begin to list. But I don’t hear Placebo. GbV and Sebadoh were lo-fi colleagues, so that’s a connection. I’m going to close my eyes at some point today and try to feel your zen. Thanks. I’m too antsy to transmit zen, and you don’t want my antsyness, trust me. xo. ** lotuseatermachine, Hi! Oh, that’s okay. Coming and going here at one’s own idiosyncratic pace is highly doable for me. You’re in the new SCAB! Great, excited to see/read it. Thanks for reading ‘Closer’, and I think that sounds like a good haul on the selling stuff front. Carsten did a good job of pointing out how to do a mss. submission formally. You basically just want it to look like a simplified version of the potential book. There’s not really a required form at this point, I don’t think. Readable and clean looking. I’m happy to address detailed concerns if you have them. ** Dominik, Hi!! Yes, it’s pray or rather ‘pray’. I don’t think our fascist monster can legally cancel the mid-terms, but I’m about 90% sure he’ll try. The great majority of film venue people are too lazy or chickenshit to just say no and just ghost you instead. It’s ugly. I think the Viennese festival is very soon. It’s a ‘horror’ festival, so he probably didn’t think we qualified even if he did like the film. My guess. There is a chance the visa thing will get fixed, but I won’t know for a while. So I get to keep living with the stress for a bit, oh boy. I didn’t realise that people could have boring dreams. But why wouldn’t they, I guess. Love wondering why five people sent him happy birthday emails yesterday, G. ** _Black_Acrylic, People sure are talking or at least posting about that Manosphere doc. I guess I should investigate the fuss. What did you think? ** Carsten, Kier was nothing compared to Faye Dunaway. I’ve seen her throw outrageous diva meltdowns and hissy fits in public that were absolutely jaw-dropping. I don’t know anyone connected with Raoul Peck, no. I can check, but I don’t think he’s in my sphere of friends and contacts. There’s usually a way to track people down if you’re driven enough. ** Thom, You’ve gotten some golden stores there, yeah, but then that’s my experience to some degree and certainly fantasy about Portland. Hope you like ‘Dear Dead Person’. He’s great, I just wish he didn’t take decades to put a book together. Nice: old British folk tune. I used to be really into 70s progressive UK folk or whatever one would call it: Incredible String Band, Pentangle, Bert Jansch, Fotheringay, Sandy Denny, etc. Were you happy with the recording? ‘Bee Thousand’! Thirty minutes of God himself. xo. ** myneighbourjohnturturro, Whoa, hi man! What a pleasure to see you. What up? Yes, yes, about Zwartjes. I only know that Grandieux is working on something. He did a talk here recently, but I was out of town, so I might’ve been able to know more. Interesting about the script. With Littell, wow. I had coffee with his producer once and she said that one of the reasons it’s so hard for him to get his financed is because he refuses to write a script first. So that’s a switch. Huh. I’ll see if I can find out anything. Thanks! I hope you’re extremely more than good. ** fish, Thank you. Oh, hm, nothing immediately springs to mind re: interesting internet set or directed fiction. But there must be. I’ll have to think. Yeah, I spend tons of time on the internet, in no small part looking for things to make blog posts with. Otherwise, pretty normal: social media, news, listen to music, watch films or weird videos, go down rabbit/black holes re: something or some artist I’m into at the time. You? Are you thinking of writing about the internet? ** Steve, Thanks. Like I said above, there may now be a solution to the problem after all, but I won’t know for a while yet. Ugh. French bureaucracy is legendary for a reason. Do dolphins enjoy said drugs, or perhaps the question is how we can we sure if they do or don’t? ** Adem Berbic, I’m strong on Burroughs ‘Naked Lunch’ -> ‘Wild Boys’, but that’s it. I mean, honestly, if you’ve read one great Burroughs, you don’t necessarily need to read another one because, essentially, they’re all the same book except maybe for ‘Wild Boys’ which has a little clearer narrative. ** HaRpEr //, When I was a teen and just post-teen and going to see experimental films a lot I tried to make it a point not to be high when I watched them because I wanted to see what they could actually do to my brain and senses on their own, and because I was kind of studying them. Glad you liked ‘Godlike’. I think that’s Richard best prose work. I’m going to copy and paste what you wrote and send it to Richard if you don’t mind because he would be very happy with your read. ** Minet, Hey there! Lovely to see you! Oh, shit, your Paris dates are during the time that I won’t be in Paris. I’ll be in the US from April 2-9 showing Zac’s and my film. So … urgh. I’ll be here otherwise. That really sucks. My agent is Ira Silverberg. He was my original agent, and I just recently went back to him. If you or someone needs his contact, email me or hit me up on Insta and I can pass it along. Thanks! I hope we can sort out the Paris neat-miss. Love back. ** Uday, Wow, I think I wish I was that me in your dream, although that Pied Piper adaptation sounds a little dodgy. Or, actually, maybe not. Wow. Happy for the most part is pretty best one can expect, I think? ** Okay. Today I decided to restore an old exhibition in my galerie featuring the wacky but moody but poetic art of Tony Oursler. Fun galore possibly. See you tomorrow.

 

‘Frans Zwartjes is arguably Holland’s pre-eminent experimental filmmaker. His highly stylised, poetically claustrophobic films achieve a unique level of sensual intimacy in their renditions of sexual and domestic tension, and voyeurism. Most famous for a prolific series of short films created in the 1960s and ’70s including Spectator (1970) and Living (1971), Zwartjes conjured up oppressively private worlds defined by the compulsions of his heavily made-up, fastidiously dressed (or undressed) performers. These wordless works draw on performance art but are equally distinguished by their oneiric visuals, disconcerting editing rhythms and hypnotically minimal sound design. Their expressively grainy visual textures emerge from uncomfortable close-ups and distorted angles, a transcendentally voyeuristic camera that prowls and clings to the figures it films. Yet this vision seems more engaged with the external projection of inner turmoil than the objectification of bodies and, as such, is imbued with its own unnerving compassion.

‘Although his films are widely available in digital formats, this celebration of Zwartjes’s art is a rare opportunity to see them in their original 16mm format. These films are essentially handmade, homemade objects. He devised and mastered a filmmaking technique every bit as personal as the scenes he filmed. He frequently cast the same performers including his wife Trix, Moniek Toebosch, and even himself. He did the camerawork himself, and his complex, astonishingly assured visual rhythms are the result of cutting in-camera, essentially turning the camera on and off during shooting instead of editing afterwards. He even went as far as to process the films himself to obtain the look he was seeking. Only 16mm projection can do this vision full justice.

‘Zwartjes’s background as a musician is one of his many talents (he is also a painter, sculptor, teacher and violin maker) that is perhaps not mentioned enough. The striking sound design of his films, hypnotically accentuating the prevalent mood of mounting psychosis, is one of their most accomplished features.’ — Maximilian Le Cain

 

____
Stills

 

_____
Further

FRANS ZWARTJES – THE GREAT CINEMA MAGICIAN
Frans Zwartjes @ IMDb
PORTRAIT OF FRANS ZWARTJES
FZ @ MUBI
Frans Zwartjes ‘Masterpiece / Spectator’ (LP)
In Memoriam: Frans Zwartjes
FZ @ letterboxd
FZ @ Cinema of the World
Susan Sontag zag het al: Frans Zwartjes (1927 – 2017) was ‘belangrijkste experimentele filmmaker van zijn tijd’

____
Extras

FRANS ZWARTJES, FILMMAKER

HM2015 Frans Zwartjes

PORTRAIT OF FRANS ZWARTJES

 

_____
Interview
by Mike Hoolboom

 

Q: The person making ordinary films in the Netherlands works within a context: you can see a certain filmmaker as an inspiring model or you can dismiss him to try to do it your own way. Did you have a context like that?

FZ: What made a huge impression on me was the New American Cinema. The municipal theatre in Eindhoven presented a new American film program in the early 1960s. For the first time I was able to see films by Bruce Connor, by Markopolous, by that fatso… Peter Kubelka and by Andy Warhol. I thought: Jeesus Christ, what’s going on! In The Shopper by Warhol, the camera is first pointed at the ceiling and then sinks downwards, but you can feel that it was not done by hand. The bolt at the top of the tripod wasn’t screwed tight. The camera sinks down by itself, splendidly. While the camera keeps on shooting, you can meanwhile hear someone talking. The protagonist just keeps on going. The crazy thing is that I started to be irritated by the film after a little while and I went out to get a drink. I must have gone back and forth ten times and each time that I opened the door to have another look, I thought, damn it all, it’s awfully good! Those screenings had a big influence on me.

Q: You developed your films by yourself in your home laboratory.

FZ: Yeah although… actually it was a cupboard. When I got my first little film back from the laboratory, I thought it looked like garbage. I went back to the lab, that was the NLF back then and said: “I want to develop my own material.” The man opened a drawer and handed me a sheet. I looked at it: R36, Agfa. It had instructions for reversal development. He immediately took hold of one more sheet, one which the address was written of Brocades in Amsterdam. You could buy chemicals there.

He also told me which was the cheapest material: Agfa’s 5-61. That was what they made their prints on. An incredibly straight curve and very, very slow: six ASA. You had to make your shots in the sun in order to be able to see something later on. It came in rolls of three hundred meters. In my darkroom, I cut them up into rolls of 30 meters that would fit in my camera. You get really strange things: perforations on the wrong side, or losing hold of the roll and everything falling apart. Then you’re up shit creek. But I always managed. After a while, I became very skilled at developing. I could develop 300 meters a day. Film on Saturday, watch on Sunday. I had students who asked me how I developed that black-and-white. I explained everything, but they still gave up. Because even if you’ve got instructions you’re not there yet. What’s important is how the material is exposed and how warm it is and how long you leave it in the developer. It’s something you’ve got to twig to. You only learn by doing it, really.

Q: Who did you show your own work to?

FZ: I didn’t know anyone!

Q: Did you not have any contacts with other Dutch filmmakers?

FZ: Of the “regular” filmmakers, only Pim de la Parra came to me and said, “You’ve got to apply for some government money. You shouldn’t be paying for those films yourself, are you out of your mind? I’ll help you.” That didn’t really happen, but still… And Johan van der Keuken. They aced normally. All the rest thought my films were strange, very unprofessional tomfoolery. But they couldn’t escape the fact that Living (1971) was something to reckon with. I heard that later from Bert Haanstra. When I was working at the violin maker, Marree’s studio, he came around. He had been given equipment by The Hague. Given! Lenses and a body and some other things: 35mm equipment. He asked if we would make a case for them. That’s how I came into contact with him. And when later on I started to make a film with a friend about the war wounded in Guinea-Bissau, I looked upper Bert. He immediately said, “Wonderful! A documentary, there’s something we understand at least.” He told me they had wanted to give me the National Prize for Living, but they went and gave it to Ed van der Elsken because he needed money. Ed sold me the Cook lens around that time, the wide-angle that I used so much. Money problems, I guess. It was a 5.7, high quality. I wanted the widest possible angle without it being a fisheye.

Q: There is a great deal of eroticism and there are many distorted power relationships in your films. Do you learn anything about yourself by watching your own films?

FZ: According to Trix, I’ve have never been as clear about myself as I am in my films. But I didn’t not see that at all when I was making them. I didn’t interpret those films. Others did, but what they said was often beside the point. I can still remember a screening – Trix and Monique Toeboesch were sitting on a bench in the film – and you know what someone said to me? “Say, I didn’t know that you wife was a lesbian. How terrible for you!” An adult man said that, a family doctor. I explained: “We’re just making a film, you know.” He acted a bit angry, “Look, you can see it too… Take a look!” I said, “I don’t see anything. I certainly don’t see that.”

I can remember Pentimento (1978) being screened in Rotterdam. The theatre was full of feminists saying I should be done away with. “It should be against the law that ever receive another cent!” And wherever that film was shown, they stormed the projection room in groups of ten, grabbed the projector and pitched it into the street, film and all. That happened a couple of times.

Q: Did that upset you?

FZ: No, something I like a lot less is when, for instance, I expect a really strong effect from a scene an right at that moment I see people leaving the movie theatre… If you don’t see anything at all, and you stand up… that’s… Well, that’s not really irritating but it leave me feeling awfully helpless. It’s just like when someone says, “Well, you know you that Bach’s compositions are just repeating fractions.”

Q: What is your own favourite film?

FZ: In my opinion Spare Bedroom (1970) and Living (1971) have a peculiar indefinable atmosphere. That quirky fidgeting and then the whimpering of the music… When I last saw the film I thought: how did I ever come up with that? I would never be able to do it again now.

 

_________________
15 of Frans Zwartjes’ 45 films

_________________
Sorbet III (1968)
‘A man in drag reaches for some sorbet and then eats it.’ — letterboxd

the entirety

 

_________
Birds (1968)
‘Hypnotic, repetitive film featuring Trix, Zwartjes’ regular partner in crime – and in life. The second ‘turtle dove’ is a piece of a toy between her fingers. Even before Structuralist film had really found its mojo, Zwartjes made this ironic deconstruction of the watch-the-birdie principle.’ — IFFR

the entirety

 

__________
A Fan (1968)
‘A man in drag sits on a couch holding a fan. The wallpaper behind him is floral patterned. Although the man does little more than looking around and waving his fan, Zwartjes created enormous tension.’ — letterboxd

the entirety

 

______________
Visual Training (1969)
‘Oppressive black-and-white study of a man in pale makeup surrendering as apathetically as a zombie from a German Expressionist film to primitive, childlike playing with food. Possibly inspired by Viennese Actionism and the mythopoetic American underground, Zwartjes more than once ventured into orgiastic territory.’ — iffr

the entirety

 

_______________
Spare Bedroom (1969)
‘Two sombre personages who are engaged in a claustrophobic game of attraction and repulsion.’ — MUBI

the entirety

 

______________
Anamnesis (1969)
‘Film in three parts in which a man and a woman, Zwartjes’ regular actors Trix and Lodewijk de Boer, circle around each other, both in the house and outside beside the water, repelling and attracting each other.’ — LUX

the entirety

 

______________
Spectator (1970)
‘This 1970 film from the experimental filmmaker tackled the concept of the image as an object of the ultimate expression of desire.’ — Nowness

the entirety

 

______________
Behind Your Walls (1970)
‘As he does more often, Zwartjes creates an intoxicating, surreal microcosm – this time through a bizarre pantomime featuring extras in heavy make-up. A great example of how the experimental filmmaker was able to unorthodoxly forge colour and black-and-white, silence and an eclectic audio mix into a lyrical poem.’ — iffr

Watch the film here

 

___________
Living (1971)
‘Frans Zwartjes and his wife explore their new home, and the sexual tension they’ve brought with them to it.’ — letterboxd

the entirety

 

____________
Audition (1973)
‘Because many of Zwartjes’ films are actually silent films, without any dialogue or direct sound, the music always plays the key role. Zwartjes made that music himself, often with his brother Rudolf and Lodewijk de Boer. Audition is a fine example of a film with a good musical soundtrack. The film is a visual improvisation between the camera and the actors, with virtually no storyline – a man watches and listens to a woman singing, while another woman looks on, mainly in exciting black and white images.’ — Eye

the entirety

 

____________
Bedsitters (1974)
‘Bedsitters takes place on the landing and the stairs of Zwartjes’ still-new, empty house in The Hague. The filmmaker evokes a mysterious and complex space by using a ‘floating’ camera to film some creeping and mysterious characters. Even when Zwartjes himself appears in the frame, the camera continues to float. The fluid movements and a substantial wide-angle lens turn the house into a building that defies logic.’ — Eye

Watch the film here

 

_____________
Pentimento (1979)
‘This film is dominated by an icy blue. In a monumental building a group of scientists submit women to obscure and inhuman experiments, in which sexuality and cruelty constantly merge into one another. When the film was released, this horrifying game of power and powerlessness was condemned severely by a militant group of feminists. The criticism was undeserved. After all, ‘Pentimento’ is an art-historical term for a hidden image underneath the actual image giving an indication of how the latter evolved to its current state. The film does not endorse the lopsided power relations in our world but actually challenges them.’ — The Uncomfort Zone

Watch the film here

 

___________
In Extremo (1981)
‘The central element in this film is formed by the preparation for and execution of a performance. The performance, a parachute jump, is carried out by an artist (Perrenet) and his girlfriend during the opening of an exhibition. As spectators to the performance, which takes place in the artist’s studio, an art dealer and several friends have been invited. The art dealer enters first, followed by Armand, who looks at some paintings made by Zwartjes; they spout the usual ‘gallery nonsense’. The art dealer appears most interested in the girlfriend. ‘My latest creation’ is how Amand introduces her. The guests who arrive thereafter are introduced in short, independent sections.’ — Letterboxd

Watch the film here

 

________
Medea (1982)
‘Frans Zwartjes’ adaptation of Euripides’ tragedy, originally produced for stage by the actresses Josée Ruiter and Çanci Geraerdts. Two theatre actresses recite the classical Greek tragedy backstage while applying makeup, smoking, wrapping each other in cellophane, etc. Medea is very stripped down in its presentation. Darkness permeates the entire movie, with only a minimal amount of blue light shining on the performers.’ — Letterboxd

Watch the film here

 

 

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p.s. Hey. ** Adem Berbic, Well, hello. The Close-Up thing seems a little iffy at the moment, so we’ll see. If it happens, we’ll ask for more than one screening, I think. After-parties are my idea of hell, but thank you anyway, haha. I would think anyone you know who isn’t a fatalist or sadist would choose the productive angle. Zac and I go to Berlin to show ‘RT’ in late-mid May, but we should be here otherwise. I think I’m going to see James soon, so I’ll ask him what’s the what on your event. I’m not very big on pre-‘Naked Lunch’ Burroughs. I haven’t seen the ‘Queer’ movie, but someone whose opinion I trust said it’s like a 90 minute homoerotic perfume commercial. ** Dominik, Hi!!! Yes, that’s precisely my/our fear about the upcoming US midterm election. I never heard back from the Viennese programmer, so I assume that’s a no, very unfortunately. Thanks to love, but it looks like the visa problem is fatal and I will have to reapply. Expensive stressful headache, but that’s how the cookie crumbled. Love giving a very un-warm Paris ‘welcome’ to the return of the cold and rain, G. ** Charalampos, I still like Iceage, but I don’t love them like I did during their first three albums period. I still love Elias’s voice, and I’m relieved that he’s past the phase where he was trying to sing Nick Cave. I have too many ‘Bee Thousand’ favorite songs to list them. Almost all of them. Hi from this place. ** _Black_Acrylic, I just read something about ‘The Great Hip Hop Hoax’ not two days ago. I don’t have Netflix, but I’ll look elsewhere and maybe get lucky. ** Carsten, Well, Kier sort paraded and flounced around whenever I saw him. And I saw him throw any number of hissy fits when he thought people weren’t treating him like a living legend. Well, at least your friends are freed, whew. Wow, that’s some poem. It’s very ‘you’ but the tone feels new and exciting. Thanks, pal. ** Thom, If I were a bookstore, short, fragmented novels would be what my bookstore was known for. Right, about the boxsets. I don’t currently have a turntable or even a CD player so I don’t have to battle with my pragmatic side over whether to spring for them. I would say thank goodness, but it’s also sad. I hope your jams are being very, very soupy. You satisfied? ** HaRpEr //, Oh, cool, yeah, Sharits is wonderful. I hope you get to see his films projected sometime. It makes the obvious big difference. You know Tony Conrad’s legendary film ‘The Flicker’ I’m guessing? In the documentary, to me at least, Coppola came off pretty well, but I admire obsessive self-styled visionaries and what it takes. LeBeouf, on the other hand, comes off completely insufferable. And his recent homophobic bullshit just dots that i. ** Malcolm Cooper, Hi, Malcom. Good to meet you. We could be related as I know virtually nothing about the extent of my extended family. Nice that Richard Siken was your mentor. He’s great, not that I’ve met him. His new book is terrific. Sure, I’ll talk with you about that. I’ll send you a quick hello email so you have my address. I feel confident somehow that you’re one of those fairly rare writers who used your MFA to your work’s advantage rather than as drill sergeant. And thank you. Happy to have helped dissuade you from being the new Michael Chabon, although you might have gotten rich. And probably talk with you soon. ** ⋆˚꩜｡darbbzz⋆˚꩜｡, Hi. I did try your mix, and, yes, it didn’t work. I’ll just daydream about it. Little Caesars sounds very promising. Yay! I make coffee by boiling water and pouring it through a filter/cone full of grounds that is sitting on top of my cup. And I’ve been doing it that way for years, except when I’m in LA and use a coffee maker machine, so I assume nothing’s changed. ** Laura, Chopped? What does that mean? No, you’re obviously attractive, and it seemed superfluous to say so. I co-translated a book of German short stories by this obscure Austrian writer Franz Boni in the early 80s with a co-translator who only spoke German as a second language, and, boy, was that a headache and failure. ** kenley, I know nature has a good reason why mosquitos need to exist, but I still wish they’d go extinct, those tiny monsters. Wonton is better. And I have a fetish for grocery store cakes. Yum/yuck. So congratulations to you all! ** Right. Today the blog chooses to direct your attention to arguably the premiere Dutch experimental filmmaker, and the rest is up to you obviously. See you tomorrow.