Author: DC (Page 555 of 1085)

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‘How do musicians communicate emotion? Performers have often answered this question in terms of what the performer should think and feel. According to the eighteenth-century keyboardist C. P. E. Bach, “a musician cannot move others unless he too is moved.” For nineteenth-century pianist Johann Nepomuk Hummel, emotion came from the performer’s “ability to grasp what the composer himself has felt, expressing it in his playing, and making it pass into the souls of the listener. This can be neither notated nor indicated.”

‘Musical performance emerged as an object of scientific study around 1900, when for the first time physiologists and psychologists were able to record the fleeting processes of performance. Of course, you might think, that’s when the phonograph was becoming available. But it wasn’t the phonograph the early scientists of musical performance turned to. These scientists wanted to analyze not sound, but touch – the magical touch of the expert pianist.

‘To analyze pianists’ touch, Parisian psychologists Alfred Binet and Jules Courtier developed an apparatus that registered the time and pressure at which the pianists pressed the keys, recording this information in the fashion of a seismograph. Binet and Courtier used their graphs to show that the best pianists had the greatest regularity in execution. Around the same time (the 1890s), pianist-turned-research Marie Jaëll developed another method for register touch: covering the keyboard with strips of paper and coating the fingers with printing ink, she recorded the placement and quality of the fingers’ touch upon the keys.

‘Then, in the 1900s, the player piano hit the market. The player piano changed everything by introducing piano performance without keyboard touch. At first, piano rolls contained only metrically exact renditions of the notes of a musical score. Such performances were considered mechanical and soulless. Soon, timing, dynamics and pedaling too were automated with the piano rolls of a new type of instrument: the reproducing piano. Unlike the player piano, which played piano rolls generated straight from the score and had no mechanism for automated dynamics, the reproducing piano played piano rolls made from actual performances, complete with the performer’s temporal and dynamic nuances. The result was a new scientific instrument for the study of musical performance.’ — Spooky & the Metronome

 

 

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Conlon Nancarrow
‘Composer Conlon Nancarrow was a dedicated socialist, which made him politically unacceptable in the United States. This was brought plainly home when he applied for a passport and was denied. Angry at such treatment, he moved to Mexico City in the early 1940s, becoming a Mexican citizen in 1956. He died there in 1997. Nancarrow composed for the player piano partly because of Mexico’s extreme musical isolation. Another more compelling reason was his long-standing frustration at the inability of musicians to deal with even moderately difficult rhythms. He goes so far as to say that “As long as I’ve been writing music I’ve been dreaming of getting rid of the performers.” With the advent of the phonograph, the player piano has been relegated to the status of an object of nostalgia. But not so for Nancarrow, who since the late 1940s composed almost exclusively for the instrument.’ — Other Minds

‘Study for Player Piano No. 21’

 

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Black Sabbath (on Synthesia)
‘Black Sabbath are cited as pioneers of heavy metal. The band helped define the genre with releases such as quadruple-platinum Paranoid, released in 1970. They were ranked by MTV as the “Greatest Metal Band” of all time, and placed second in VH1’s “100 Greatest Artists of Hard Rock” list, behind Led Zeppelin. Rolling Stone called the band “the heavy-metal kings of the ’70s”. They have sold over 15 million records in the United States and over 70 million records worldwide. Black Sabbath were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2006, and were included among Rolling Stone’s list of the 100 Greatest Artists of All Time.’ — Wiki

‘Iron Man’

 

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Bill, Brian and Stefan of Olin College of Engineering
‘Much of Olin College’s curriculum is built around hands-on engineering and design projects. This project-based teaching begins in a student’s first year and culminates in two senior “capstone” projects. In the engineering capstone, Senior Consulting Program for Engineering (SCOPE) student teams are hired by corporations, non-profit organizations, or entrepreneurial ventures for real-world engineering projects. In the Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences (“AHS”) or Entrepreneurship (“E!”) capstone, students work on a self-designed project relating to their focus. Olin College allows students to receive funding and non-degree college credit for “Passionate Pursuits,” student-defined personal projects that the college recognizes as having academic value. Until 2009, the college offered full tuition to all students.’ — Students Review

‘Chopsticks’

 

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Tom Johnson
‘Tom Johnson is an American minimalist composer, a former student of Morton Feldman. His pieces are most often based simply on mathematical and logical processes, such as tiling, which he attempts to make as clear as possible. His works include: The Four Note Opera, An Hour for Piano, Rational Melodies, the Bonhoeffer Oratorio,Organ and Silence, Riemannoper, and Galileo. Johnson received the French “Victoires de la Musique” prize for contemporary composition (the French equivalent of the “Grammies”) in 2001 for Kientzy Loops. He lived 15 years in New York, but in 1983 settled in Paris, where he lives with his wife, the artist Esther Ferrer.’ — lovely.com

‘Study for Player Piano #1’

 

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Batman
‘The Dynamic Duo are tied to a conveyor belt of a hole punching machine that creates paper music rolls for player pianos. Batman observes how the machine operates, and deduces a clever way of evading perforation by calculating the notes necessary to make the plunging punches miss and then overpowering the sound of the piano. When he and Robin capture Harry, Harry squeals that a guy named Fingers is the ring leader. Batman deduces that Fingers and Chantell are the same man, and soon unravels the rest of the evil plot.’ — TVRage

‘The Dead Ringers’

 

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Annie Gosfield
‘Annie Gosfield lives in New York City and divides her time between performing on piano and sampler with her own group and composing for many ensembles and soloists. Her work often explores the inherent beauty of non–musical sounds, and is inspired by diverse sources such as machines, destroyed pianos, warped 78 records, and detuned radios. She uses traditional notation, improvisation, and extended techniques to create a sound world that eliminates the boundaries between music and noise, while emphasizing the unique qualities of each performer. A 2012 fellow at the American Academy in Berlin, and the recipient of the 2008 Foundation for Contemporary Arts’ prestigious “Grants to Artists” award, Gosfield’s essays on composition have been published by the New York Times and featured in the book Arcana II. Active as an educator, she has taught composition at Princeton University, Mills College, and California Institute of the Arts.’ — anniegosfield.com

‘Shoot The Player Piano’

 

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Györy Ligeti
‘Gyorgy Ligeti was, along with Karlheinz Stockhausen, Iannis Xenakis and Pierre Boulez, one of a group of composers which revolutionised postwar music. Rejecting classical musical forms and creating often sparse and atonal works, they continually withstood the derision heaped upon them by generations of critics. Like Bela Bartok, Ligeti was fascinated by folk music and initially produced a number of arrangements in that idiom. Perhaps his most notable, certainly his most famous, piece was Atmospheres from 1960. This work featured, along with Ligeti’s Requiem and Lux Aeterna, on the soundtrack of Stanley Kubrick’s film 2001: A Space Odyssey.’ — BBC

‘Étude pour Piano No. 9’

 

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Trimpin
‘Trimpin, a sound sculptor, composer, inventor, is one of the most stimulating one-man forces in music today. A specialist in interfacing computers with traditional acoustic instruments, he has developed a myriad of methods for playing, trombones, cymbals, pianos, and so forth with Macintosh computers. He has collaborated frequently with Conlon Nancarrow, realizing the composer’s piano roll compositions through various media. In describing his work, Trimpin sums it up as “extending the traditional boundaries of instruments and the sounds they’re capable of producing by mechanically operating them. Although they’re computer-driven, they’re still real instruments making real sounds, but with another dimension added, that of spatial distribution.”‘ — Other Minds

‘Ratatatatatt’

 

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Mario Bros. (on Synthesia)
‘Synthesia is a video game and piano keyboard trainer for Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X, as well as Linux using Wine, which allows users to play a MIDI keyboard or use a computer keyboard in time to a MIDI file by following on-screen directions, much in the style of Keyboard Mania or Guitar Hero. It was originally named Piano Hero due to the similarity of gameplay with Guitar Hero; however, Activision (the owners of the rights to Guitar Hero) sent a cease and desist to the program’s creator, Nicholas Piegdon. Synthesia was originally an open source project, but seeing the potential commercial value of the program, Piegdon decided to stop releasing the source code (version 0.6.2), however leaving the most recent open-source release available for download. While the basic functionality is still currently free, a “Learning Pack” key can be purchased to unlock additional features, such as a sheet music display mode.’ — synthesis.eu

‘Medley’

 

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Marc-André Hamelin
‘Marc-André Hamelin began his piano studies at the age of five. He has made recordings of a wide variety of composers with the Hyperion label. He is well known for his attention to lesser-known composers especially of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century (Leo Ornstein, Nikolai Roslavets, Georgy Catoire). Hamelin has also composed several works, including a set of piano études in all of the minor keys, which was completed in September 2009. Although the majority of his compositions are for piano solo, he has also written three pieces for player-piano (including the comical Circus Galop and Solfeggietto a cinque, which is based on a theme by C.P.E. Bach), and several works for other forces, including Fanfares for three trumpets.’ — guardian.co.uk

‘Pop Music for Player Piano’

 

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Dan Deacon
‘Dan Deacon is a Baltimore, Maryland-based electronic music composer/performer. He attended the Conservatory of Music at Purchase College in Purchase, New York, where he played in many bands, including tuba for Langhorne Slim and guitar in the improvisational grindcore band Rated R. Dan Deacon’s compositional style is best classified in the future shock genre along with videohippos, Santa Dads, Blood Baby, Ecstatic Sunshine, Ponytail, and other bands in the growing Baltimore music scene. Since 2003, Deacon has released eight albums under several different labels. Deacon also has a renowned reputation for his live shows, where large scale audience participation and interaction is often a major element of the performance.’ — discogs.com

‘Become a Mountain’

 

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Xiao Xiao
‘Andante visualizes as animated characters walking along the piano keyboard that appear to play the physical keys with each step. Based on a view of music pedagogy that emphasizes expressive, full-body communication early in the learning process, Andante promotes an understanding of the music rooted in the body, taking advantage of walking as one of the most fundamental human rhythms. This video shows three example visualizations. – Scales played by different characters. – A character playing a boogie woogie bassline. – A Bach canon with each voice as a character.‘ — xx

‘Andante’

 

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Minecraft
‘Minecraft is a sandbox-building independent video game written in Java originally by Swedish creator Markus “Notch” Persson and now by his company, Mojang. Minecraft is focused on creativity and building, allowing players to build constructions out of textured cubes in a 3D world. Gameplay in its commercial release has two principal modes: Survival, which requires players to acquire resources themselves and maintain their health and hunger; and Creative, where the player has an unlimited supply of resources, the ability to fly, and no concept of health or hunger. A third gameplay mode, named Hardcore, is essentially the same as Survival, but the difficulty is locked on the hardest setting and respawning is disabled, forcing the player to delete his or her world upon death.’ — minecraft.org

‘Ode to Joy’

 

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Memory Tapes
‘If the role of a judge is inevitably sombre, then this wouldn’t be a mood misplaced in judging Memory Tapes’ new album by its cover. As a title, Player Piano gives us a sense of Victorian-cum-Edwardiana far removed from the vaguely modernist pastoralism of Dayve Hawk’s debut outing as Memory Tapes, Seek Magic. The mood of the séance, of the all-too-fleshy ghost in the machine (or vice versa), is played out in the sinister yet charming album art recalling the troubled sexuality of the medium as liminal locus of interpenetration: the vulnerable body, the orifice-issuing ectoplasm, the speaker as spurting speculum, the Succubesque presence of the fox spirit.’ — Tiny Mix Tapes

‘Wait In The Dark’

 

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Igor Stravinsky
‘The Russian-born American composer Igor Stravinsky identified himself as an “inventor of music.” The novelty, power, and elegance of his works won him worldwide admiration before he was thirty. Throughout his life he continued to surprise admirers with transformations of his style that stimulated controversy. Stravinsky died on April 6, 1971, in New York City and was buried in Venice. His approach to musical composition was one of constant renewal. Rhythm was the most striking ingredient, and his novel rhythms were most widely imitated. His instrumentation and his ways of writing for voices were also distinctive and influential. His harmonies and forms were more elusive (difficult to grasp). He recognized melody as the “most essential” element.’ — igorstravinsky.com

‘Étude pour Pianola’
—-

 

*

p.s. Hey. ** wolf, Star gazing star! No idea where that came from or why. I like the word skill better. I think some people mean skilful when they say competence. Skill, I’m into, but self-taught skill is a lot more interesting than schooled skill for the greatly most part. A novel isn’t a car that you need to learn preset, established skills to be able to manufacture or repair, and yet the novel, and fiction in general, is really often taught that way: ‘This is what a novel is, and here’s how you write one.’ Obviously, the kind of novel that results works for a whole lot of people, and more power to both them and their favorite authors, but you end up with novels that people are happy to read because they’re inherently familiar and the art part is just has to do with how lapidary and graceful and lush and surprising in only the most delightful ways their writing is. If a novel isn’t forceful or fascinating enough to an author that it jars the writing itself, I’m just not interested. What you say about the leak from creative fields into the corporate world seems really true, yeah. Big up. You need to lure a crow to your window sill. Those guys can do anything. ** David Ehrenstein, Hi. I did read that Scorcese piece on Fellini, and, yeah, it’s excellent. ** _Black_Acrylic, Hi, B. Yeah, I wish this blog was more phone friendly. When I make it, I never even think that people might look at it on their phones, I guess because my own phone is just a telephone, message sender/receiver, and camera. Too late now. How are you feeling? Things okay? ** Misanthrope, Hi. Yeah, I’m in a few groups on FB, but I only look and read. Very, very rarely I’ll add my two cents to the Guided by Voices group, but that’s it. So … your mom called, I hope. Naval Academy, right, that’s it. Sounds very nice, man. ** Dominik, Hi!!! SCAB! New, giant, unpleasant SCAB! I’ll be holding my breath or at least fantasising that I am because, you know, otherwise I’ll die and not be able to read the new SCAB. My weekend was good enough, productive. There’s suddenly a bunch of stuff happening around the film prep, so I’m mostly onto that. Aw, now that love you directed at me is a guaranteed gigantic hit in my heart, thank you. Love like the gore that would result if this and this got into a huge, extremely violent fight and tore each other into a billion pieces, G. ** John Newton, Hi. I hope the Greenfield films are useful to her. Yeah, I read that Dean Corll book. If there’s a book about serial killers published before the early 90s, there’s about a 90% chance I read it back then. Wayne Henley wrote me a letter from prison once. And he sent along an autographed photo of himself. John Waters sent him my book ‘Jerk’, and he wrote to tell me he thought it was hilarious, which I thought was pretty weird. No, my new novel is about my relationship with my friend George Miles. It’s not about any of those things you mention. Well, a little bit about sex and drugs, I guess. No, I never wrote any of those postal books. No, I never wrote a true life thing for STH. I’m actually a person who’s not so into writing about my personal life. I don’t feel any need to share that stuff publicly. I never really liked writing non-fiction at all. I just did it to challenge myself as a writer and bring in money to live on, and I swore it off about 14 or so years ago Not my metier really. Enjoy your noirs. ** Bill, Hey. Now the downstairs neighbors think our building has mice because we bring them in and keep them as pets. Oh, I think that film was in the recent suicide forest post? Or if it wasn’t, it should have been. I’ll look for ‘I Blame Society’, gracias. A film that’s hip or whatever enough to have Nick Antosca do a cameo sounds pretty intriguing. Huh. ** T, Hi, T. I’m so happy the post interested you that much and that you even watched things in it. That’s, like, the blog’s most fervent daydream come true. I didn’t actually watch that VOD thing. I checked it to make it was real, but that’s all. Could be a region thing. People often link me to things that France does not allow me to see. And I guess vice versa. Wow, it’s still only Tuesday so I think there’s still time to find a way to make my week racedog-like, and I’m going to do my utmost, thank you. I hope your week is like a battering ram laser-targetted at every potentially boring instance. ** Sypha, Hi. They don’t know what annex means? That’s some clientele you’ve got there, man. I hope your intervention gets my book into Fiction. The Romance crowd would not be happy. ** Brian O’Connell, I’ll take your morning and see you an afternoon. Yep: these days. I would start with Denis’s earlier work. I personally thought her last couple of films were rather dreadful. Yes, it was ‘Horror Noire’. It’s no great shakes in the documentary film department, but it’s informing and pretty charming, I thought. What an interesting, or, hm, maybe not, time to study American government, given its current disastrousness. Happy you’re digging ‘Eustace Chisholm’, cool. Interesting that the Logic course is a blinding snooze, but I can imagine how that would be. I wonder if one really needs to take a course about Logic to understand logic, but that’s showbiz, ha ha. Your Monday was very interesting to read about, so there’s that, I guess. I’m mostly doing a bunch of grunt/leg-work for the next film right now, and today should just add more to that, but we’ll see. I hope yours is full of shiny stuff. ** Shane Christmass, Howdy, Shane. I’m on it. The manifestos book. I like motels. Nice. Oh, right, it’s like late summer where you are, right? It’s still scarf weather here, but today just might be the day I start leaving mine behind. Sunlight galore to you, sir. ** Right. So, guess what? Player pianos aren’t just those things you put coins into in certain old pizza parlors. Did you know that? Well, now you do. See you tomorrow.

 

‘Over her more than four-decade career, New York based filmmaker, performer and writer Amy Greenfield has achieved widespread critical acclaim for her genre-bending films which cross boundaries of experimental film, video art and multimedia performance – from her feature film, Antigone/Rites Of Passion to her major new live multimedia work, Spirit In The Flesh. Exploring the dynamism of human movement and the resiliency of the spirit, Greenfield creates a new visual and kinetic language of cinema. An innovative exploration of an artist whom Cineaste called ‘the most important practitioner of experimental film-dance,’ — R.A. Haller

‘Amy Greenfield has been pushing the boundaries of dance and cinema since the early 1970s. Her work is known for its earthy rawness and proto-feminist point of view. In Greenfield’s 1974 work, Videotape for a Woman and Man, audiences may at first experience utter shock at seeing the two performers Greenfield and her male partner as being completely stark naked. This 33-minute film features the female and male performers in a series of progressive dance-like and often highly acrobatic body movements with pauses in the film that integrate vocal phrases in order to explain some of the emotions and motives that the film maker is intending to express to the audience. The nakedness of the performers ultimately expresses a sense of freedom in their complete exposure in order to communicate the essence of the raw emotions that a man and woman can experience towards one another in a relationship. In doing so, they clearly tell us that they have nothing to hide. Their emotions are real and unhindered because of their nakedness. The movements of these nude performers range from loving to violent to erotic and passionate as they tell their story through uninhibited movement.’ — Missy Briggs

‘In February YouTube censored Amy Greenfield’s films including segments from Club Midnight/Against Censorship. Greenfield was outraged at such censorship of art, placing it mistakenly in the category of “pornography”. The absence of any way to appeal directly to YouTube impelled Greenfield to contact the National Coalition Against Censorship. Supporting her work, and agreeing that the issue is very important for filmmakers, the NCAC, with the leading internet civil rights organization, Electronic Frontier Foundation, went up against the internet giant to help bring to light the issue of YouTube/Google’s censorship of nudity. With an outpouring of press and public support on the internet, You Tube, in an unprecedented and potentially ground-breaking decision, restored Greenfield’s films to their site, unrestricted, recognizing her use of nudity as art.’ — NCAC

 

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Stills

 

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Further

Amy Greenfield @ The Film-Makers’ Cooperative
Book: ‘Flesh into Light – The Films of Amy Greenfield’
Amy Greenfield @ IMDb
Amy Greenfield @ letterboxd
DVD: ‘Greenfield: Cinema of the Body’
Amy Greenfield reviews ‘The Tales of Hoffmann’
Amy Greenfield, a Critical Essay
Amy Greenfield’s “Dance for the Camera”
Amy Greenfield’s Finely Spun `Antigone’

 

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Extras

CENSORED BY YOUTUBE

Frameform | Rewind: Amy Greenfield

 

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Interview: Making Antigone/Rites of Passion

 

TONY PIPOLO: I thought it would be helpful to divide up the questions into categories. First, I’d like to know what attracted you to this project, and how you think the subject of Antigone bears upon these times. Then, perhaps we could talk about the form the film takes; since you are associated with dance and choreography, it seems relevant to consider how you managed to exploit these talents and place them at the service of this story. Lastly, how filmmaking techniques–especially the framing and editing of shots–affected and were affected by the approach you took. I’m sure they’ll be some overlapping, but let’s begin with the first one. When did the idea of doing Antigone occur to you? Were you always fascinated with Sophocles’ play?

AMY GREENFIELD: Yes. When I read it in college, of all the Greek tragedies, it was the one that most interested me. And when I got into film, I thought, when I do a long film eventually, it will be Antigone. But originally the play didn’t feel personal for me. I just thought, “I know how to do that. Something in me knows how to make that into a film.” And those were the feelings, again, when I said, I think it’s time.

The idea was a little more frightening than I thought, though. Not Antigone so much as a long feature film. But I wanted to make such a film and I felt that I could play Antigone. I had different projects going at the time. That was the time when I tried more practical things like proposing something for cable television with postmodern dance–something I didn’t want to really do, even. Those fell through, but an administrator at Ballet Theater at the time said, “If you can bring something new to Antigone, do that, don’t think of doing a ballet for television.”

Other people encouraged me, too: a wonderful professor of Classics at the University of Southern Illinois, Joan O’Brien, wrote an essay on Antigone and androgyny, which turned out to be one way into the character and a take on the text I’d never been taught, and which led to looking at the sexuality going on in it. She’d been a nun but “quit” (if that’s the right word) because of the Pope’s attitudes toward women. She loved my wild pagan female nude film dances. She felt Antigone/Rites of Passion should be that physical.

But it was when I started to do video rehearsals with Bertram Ross, taking his body and face as material for script, that the film really started. So the way into visualizing the words started with the physical. The opposite process from mainstream dramatic filmmaking.

Then it became clear that I had to find a dramatic structure for the film. I luckily ran into a weekend screenwriting workshop with Frank Daniel, then head of Columbia’s Film Department. That workshop enabled me to begin and go on and on to reconstruct the texts from my own point of view as cinema.

Now, I remember the thing that got me to drop everything else–well, almost everything else–and concentrate on this film was asking myself the question: “if I had only one year to live, what would I do?” The answer was to make this film–and it took five years to make.

TP: So, clearly, your reasons must have been very compelling.

AG: Yes, but I didn’t even think of the reasons.

TP: It strikes me from viewing the film that your reasons were far more personal, as opposed, let’s say, to primarily polemical. Over the last thirty or forty years, people who have revived and produced Antigone seem to approach it almost exclusively as a polemical piece with a special message for our times. One finds it in college anthologies, for example, along with essays by Thoreau and Gandhi on Civil Disobedience. Your film does not strike me as being driven by motives or interests of this kind.

AG: No, I was not driven by those motives at all. I don’t understand them if you’re going to do the drama, not talk about it. The play is taught in most high schools and colleges and made so boring because of such textbooks. My drive was to bring its really very passionate life to the screen, and let the ideas come through that passion. I think my motives were close to why an artist like Cocteau would translate a certain myth or tale into drama, ballet, cinema, because he felt it corresponding to something very essential in himself and transformation of self into a larger sphere. He actually did a version of Antigone which got to his feelings about Charlotte Corday.  Also, I think I was motivated by terror. At the time when I started to conceive of and make the film, I used to wake up every morning experiencing terror. I couldn’t control it. It seemed to have everything and nothing to do with my life. It was real but not attached to something specific. Making the film brought me through it. Greek Tragedy, like a horror film or thriller on a popular level, ultimately brings the audience through terror via the fullness, the seduction of art.

TP: My feeling about the choice of beginning the film with the scene between Oedipus and the two daughters is that it does, as you’ve indicated, deemphasize the straightforward political aspects of the play. Beginnings–and endings, of course–are so important. But it also clarifies the situation for an audience unfamiliar with the story of the trilogy, especially concerning the curse on the family. There is this strong psychological bond with the father and because of the curse on the family, Antigone has no choice but to pursue the path that she does. It is all clearly laid out for her, but not just in cultural and political terms. I was wondering what you thought about how this relates to the political dimension of the play and how the question–which is really a question posed by all of Greek tragedy–of determination and free will fits into this.

AG: Well, I have trouble with such all-encompassing phrases that have been around for centuries. If I’d approached the film from that point of view, it certainly never would have gotten made, and if it had somehow, no one would have wanted to look at it. I was involved with the practical agonizing day to day decisions of getting onto the screen the agonizing choices of the characters in a story that’s so great that part of its greatness is that it makes into truth what in a literal way is really unbelievable at almost every turn.

But let me think. This interview is making me become conscious of stuff that was in there. You’re right. The film starts with the voice of Antigone over a black screen saying, “The story of Antigone began before she was born.” Before she goes into the cave, she says, “My birth imprisons me.” The beginning narration ends with “Antigone chose to go with him (i.e., Oedipus), to lead him in the wilderness.” So there are two extremes for her. A path circumscribed horribly by her birth and gigantic choices no one else would make, and once they’re made, they lead her to a narrower and narrower sphere within which choice can be made.

It’s interesting–the imprisoned birth–Antigone is a character who never changes. Instead, her choices keep her more and more on the track of her own character, and change everyone around her more and more. Then, when she seems to have no choice left, “Antigone takes her death into her own hands.” Creon, so he won’t get blamed for actively executing her, puts her in a cave to starve. Instead of dying passively and slowly, she chooses fast suicide, and it is that suicide which topples Creon.

In cinematic terms, when there seems to be no choice left for her, when she’s locked in the cave, the camera becomes her in an extended point of view shot, and we see only the rock walls, as if there were no space left for her in the world. Therefore, we as audience, are her as she travels through the seemingly endless and claustrophobic and amorphous cave. Then, the camera comes to a dead end wall. We see her feet–she is climbing the wall. A choice. There’s no way out, but she’s found a way up. Then the camera goes wild and out of that frenzied camera movement we see her, like an African death mask, dead, but in a way alive still through the camera’s motion, and her voice: “Antigone takes her death in her own hands.” I actually was holding the rope up myself with one hand, though in the film it looks like she’s actually hanging. I designed the “death” shot. I was totally active. It was an active choice. Her will had to be at the strongest point in her life to do that. It’s a metaphor for taking control of one’s own death, really terrifying to me, but very much an issue in our society now. Her final act of will makes for a release of energy, an explosion of events–Haimon’s suicide, Creon’s madness, and finally Ismene’s heroism as witness. Creon, unlike Antigone, comes in at the point of most choice for himself as new ruler, and he chooses wrongly. Under a misguided kind of patriotism, he chooses to unbury the dead and execute for the necessary act of mourning. Like Antigone, he won’t give in, but her force of will is greater than his. A shot where he seems to have most power–when he pronounces Antigone’s death in a cave, is done as a mug shot–he’s a criminal right up against the wall looking into the camera. The camera humiliates and imprisons him just when it seems like he imprisons Antigone. That’s a twist in the free will vs. determinism game. And unlike a tragic hero, when he relents, it’s forced upon him. And while finally he is vulnerable and cries out, he has seen his mistake much, much too late. His change of heart in burying the dead and unburying the living and his realization of his passion and tenderness as father for his son, both come too late. He is mad, unfit to rule even himself, taken over, unable to choose what he now wants–death. Bertram Ross’ incredible reversal in the way he uses his body, from hard and straight to collapsing in on himself and soft, the seductiveness with which he plays Creon, makes the character fascinating, dimensional, very modern.

But it is only Ismene who, through Antigone’s death, becomes free of that curse. Her choice to stay alive in the play was seen as a cop-out. Ostensibly it is a choice for personal survival, but it’s also choosing to be powerless before unjust law. The film gives her a second chance by developing her character after Antigone’s death. With her choice to wrest power and complete the vow, this time she emerges with dignity and a spiritual balance and calm which give the sense that no matter what happens to her, she’s free of the family curse, though everyone she loves is dead. Her breathing is the ultimate necessity of life, and it’s life which enables choice.

TP: We’re talking about complex ideas that come through, yet there are so few words in the film. The ideas come through a brew of pictures and sounds.

AG: There is something fundamental that we haven’t yet talked about, not only about my own filmmaking, which is very physical and visual, but about cinema in general which stresses these qualities. The text on the page is uncinematic. It had to be taken apart and resynthesized as cinema. The solution was to find some action-through line, for Antigone and Oedipus, then Creon, and branching out to the other characters–taking that as the core. It became clearer and clearer that that had to be the core; you had to move forward all the time through action. I couldn’t have a chorus, not only because of money, but it would have made the film even more artificial. Instead, I used dance, motion, as an in-between area between real action, acting, and metaphor. Once I do that, of course, I’m going to show the two brothers fighting, and once I do that, they are characters who appear and who have weight, and so forth. Then it’s a matter of generosity to the characters–as well as to the actors–I say, “Wait a minute, I just can’t see Polyneices getting knocked off?” and then “Why is she [i.e., Antigone] so passionate about this act?” and so it leads to showing their passion together, when she makes the vow to bury him after Oedipus has cursed him to die, and that brings us back to the family and the curse. In the book, Antigones, by George Steiner, he keeps coming back to this inextricable bond within Sophocles’ language, and to the eros connected with that family.

TP: To put it mildly.

AG: Yes, so there’s always a movement, an impulse, an impulse behind the words. It’s wonderful to deal with that and once you get behind the text and you say, oh, look what’s there–that’s pretty wild. Antigone says of Polyneices’ body, “If I die, I’ll lie with him,” and you think, “Let’s try that desire while she’s alive.” Then, of course, the action takes the film out of the area of abstract ideas and into this primal area. If you take out all of the other material with messengers and so forth, and concentrate on these primal scenes, you discover the strong action of the drama, which is laden with significance.

TP: This does partly explain the fascination of your film, in which we are not distracted by all of the connective tissue experienced through choruses and messengers, and all we are left with are these core scenes. There is no commentary, and no thread but the one woven by the drive to get the primal across.

AG: Which is connected with death. You said that in one sense the film is about the process of mourning, and the counter movement of that is the eros which infuses the drama.

TP: Yes.

AG: It’s built into the action, the choreography. When the brothers fight in violent arm to arm combat, they die, two twins, in an embrace. And we see Antigone attempting to carry out her words, “When I die, I’ll lie with him,” when she kneels over Polyneices’ body and kisses his lips, collapses on him from the attempt to carry him, and turns this action into rolling his body, then lying under him. Then, toward the end of the film, when Haimon falls on Antigone as he dies, that’s real kinky romantic, and Creon over Haimon’s body, gathering him up–here Haimon and Creon are both barechested, so it’s flesh to flesh, both dirty and wet. The tragedy is that the contact should have been in life. I’m not saying “Eros equals death” at all!

TP: Even in these actions, though, there is the political level. Let’s get into that aspect a little. On a low budget, and with the style of the film, how did you get the feeling of the State? I think you do, but it must not have been easy.

AG: Well, the political implications are all offscreen in the Oedipus at Colonus section. Only the voices-off evoke the City and the political power struggles. But once Oedipus leaves, that’s when Antigone makes the decision, or is driven, to go back to the city because that’s where her brothers’ fated battle is going to take place, and she has made her vow to her brother. This places the drama within the city structure and, you are right, to deal with the concept of the state was very difficult. Now, I would be able to deal with scenes of masses or extras. But when I made it, luckily it was inconceivable because I didn’t have the money–I mean it gets down to being so tight that even to have one more person there … it gets so difficult. So the sense of “State” came through the location–the actual State buildings of New York in Albany, plus costume, acting, music, well-chosen words …

TP: But I think the film gains from that forced economy. At least for me it does. There is something pristine about it in the way Greek tragedy is pristine. All the excesses are kept at bay and you get down to the absolute gut feelings and confrontations.

AG: Good, that’s what I wanted.

 

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9 of Amy Greenfield’s 16 films

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Dirt (1971)
‘… has been used in women’s studies classes on rape. Its energy is the energy of protest and of rock music. A woman is dragged and dragged through dirt with increasing violence. As the violence increases, so does the beat and intensity of the harsh, eletronic sound. The audience can identify deeply with the woman’s movements and so experience the depth of this violence.–A. G. “She abandons her body entirely.”–Boston Sunday Herald. DIRT and TRANSPORT are counterparts and are ideally screened together.’ — A. G.

 

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Transport (1971)
‘TRANSPORT came out of many influences in the early 1970s: the dead of Vietnam; the poem by my poetry teacher Anne Sexton, “For God While Sleeping”; the post-modern dance experiments with trust, to give yourself totally while being lifted by another; and the airborne astronauts of moon exploration. In the film, a man, then a woman, are lifted from the ground and are carried through space. Most of the film is seen upside-down against the white sky. The man and woman never meet. Their relationship is made entirely through the film editing. They move between ground and sky, between death (dead weight), through gravity (conflict weight) toward space (floating space). Finally, they break out into space and are borne along as if flying through the white air.’ — A.G.

the entirety

 

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Dervish 2 (1972)
‘For twenty minutes we watch Greenfield, wrapped in a white sheet, simply spin. The ceaseless repetition makes us lose our sense of time and gives the dynamic movement an object-like permanence. And yet, the actual physicality of her body also seems to dissolve. Subtle superimpositions of alternate camera views create delicate image transparencies while the whippings of the sheet across the monitor screen emit luminous stroboscopic flickerings. Rhythmic ambient sounds of shuffling and breathing reinforce the hypnotic effects of optical repetition.’ –- Richerd Lorber

 

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Element (1973)
‘ELEMENT, like TIDES, raises issues of the active image of a woman’s body on film. The two films are counterparts and are ideally screened together. The woman’s body is covered, like a moving sculpture, entirely with black, wet, clay-like mud in an environment of this element. She falls into and rises out of this glistening substance, over and over, until she is seen against the sky and falls one last time, ending with her black body sliding along the mud glittering in the jewel-like sun. The whole film is a human cycle which is both birthlike and deathlike and summons up through visceral imagery a very primal area of female sensuality. “In the well-known ELEMENT, Greenfield rolls and seethes and plunges in a field of mud, her hair, her face, her naked body [are] not just slathered with mud but become a part of it ….’ –- Deborah Jowitt

the entirety

 

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Tides (1982)
‘The literary sources for TIDES came from Isadora Duncan’s “The Dance of the Future,” Maya Deren’s script for the unfilmed passages of Ritual In Transfigured Time, Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra. “TIDES is a cinema-dance dealing with the theme and image of woman and ocean. The entire film was shot with a high speed camera, creating action from two to twenty times slower than normal speed. Because of this extreme slow motion, the surge and flow of the woman’s nude body and the waves becomes intensely felt, continually moving cinematic imagery.’ — Film-makers Coop

the entirety

 

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Antigone/Rites of Passion (1990)
‘A feature film starring Bertram Ross, Janet Eilber and Amy Greenfield. Music: Glenn Branca, Diamanda Galas, Paul Lemos, Elliott Sharp and David Van Tieghem. An “emotionally charged feminist take” (The Village Voice) on the daughter of Oedipus. Amy Greenfield takes avant-garde and feminist filmmaking into a new sphere of storytelling. Dazzling, demanding, bold, triumphantly ambitious and successful …. Greenfield wisely decided to shoot her film as a silent, allowing her performers complete freedom of movement. … Greenfield and her cinematographers Hilary Harris (for the natural locations) and Judy Irola (for the architectural settings) keep the camera in perfect, expressive harmony with the performers. … Add to this spare, off-screen narration spoken by the various characters as they reveal their innermost thoughts. … Further add the film’s astonishing score, a great, richly varied hum and roar and shimmer. … Through the flawless fusion of all these elements we’re able to experience an ‘Antigone’ as if we had never seen it performed before, an ‘Antigone’ at once sensual and erotic, timeless and timely, for this film is charged with the tension of viewing Oedipus from his daughters’ point of view. … Inspired.’ –- Kevin Thomas, The Los Angeles Times

Watch the film VOD here

 

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Wildfire (2002)
‘Wildfire is digitally colorized into an intense raibow blaze, building from slow motion then layered, reversed, speeded to create a wildfire explosion of female energy. A beautiful film! A great film!’ — Bruce Baillie

Excerpt

 

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Club Midnight (2008)
‘CLUB MIDNIGHT is an evening of interconnected cutting-edge films, with cabaret stars Andrea Beeman; Bonnie Dunn; Francesca and Selene Savarie revealing themselves, body and soul, in a new nakedness, joined with spirituality and intelligence. The six films that make up CLUB MIDNIGHT, are challenging and exhilaratingly sensual, all inspired by the empowerment and expressiveness of erotic dance (to) the music of Philip Glass, Einsturzende Neubauten, and Lee Hazlewood, Dennis Hopper interpreting a poem by Poet Laureate Charles Simic (from which the film cycle takes its title), and (Amy Greenfield’s) inspired digital and analog manipulation . . . CLUB MIDNIGHT is a postmodern romp through a neo-feminist party.’ — letterboxd

Excerpt

 

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MUSEic Of The BODy (2009)
‘MUSEic Of The BODy, in many ways is not only a tribute to Charlotte Moorman and Nam June Paik both well known artists and musicians but also a pivotal experience for Greenfield. It was the first time she directed a large scale multi media stage event that would influence her own work for the next decade.

‘Her subjective camera zooms in and out at a dizzying pace on performer Suzanne Gregoire, who is completely nude in a pair of stilettos and a long string of extra large pearls. She is bound and tangled in the expansive string of pearls while she plays Nam June Paik’s interactive piano/video installation Pyramid- Interactive with her convoluted body. She pounds the piano in a desperate physical wail. The audience is given the ultimate impression of internal calamity pulled in a cerebral storm of transgressing emotions. Her image fills the mountain of screens, she hammers and tears at her pearls, her eyes make contact with the audience, her body shakes and quivers. The accompanying soundtrack facilitates and promotes this increasing transgression by mixing the rogue piano notes with the classic sounds of Beethoven’s piano sonata. Her head reaches back, the pearls tighten, she exhales, the piano fades, it is understood this dance continues on in an ethereal sphere now.’ — CTSart

Excerpt

 

 

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p.s. Hey. ** Quentin S. Crisp, Hi. Well, thank you for entrusting this place. And for coming in. And for the added information and link, which I will now pass along. Everyone, Quentin S. Crisp, one of the Neo-Decadent authors, gives us some extra information and a gateway to a very intriguing sounding work. In his words, ‘I just wanted to give a shout out (as they say) to two artists, Joe Campbell and Oscar Oldershaw, who did the styling and took the photo of me (Quentin S. Crisp) in polkadot dress and shades. This is a link to one of their collaborative pieces (film) that drew words of praise from Apichatpong Weerasethakul (“I can watch this film over and over. I don’t understand it but it is just fascinating. The camera work invites us into the ritual, we are part of the alienation.”)’. Thanks again, and respect to you. ** Ferdinand, Hi. Well, there isn’t a whole lot else to do in my realm these days other than do the workhorse number. Luckily that’s my bread and butter. Mm, ‘Frisk’ was banned in Canada for a number of years. Otherwise, I can’t think of any instances of actual censorship, although I wouldn’t be surprised. ** David Ehrenstein, Hi. I’d forgotten all about that Marvin Lee incident until you mentioned LM. So, thanks. ** Tosh Berman, Hi, Tosh. Zac and I met one of the Neo-Decadents — Justin Isis — a few years back when we accidentally bumped into him in a pizza place in … Shibuya! Me too re: the missing, big, biggest time. ** Sypha, Hi. ‘Romance’? Hm, that’s … stretching it. ‘I Wished’ is 134 pages, so it’s roughly ‘Period’ or ‘God Jr.’ sized. Short but packed. ** John Newton, Hi, welcome. My pleasure re: the post. No, I’m not interested in writing a memoir. My upcoming novel is very personal and based in my autobiography, but it’s definitely a novel, not a memoir. That’s probably as close as I’ll ever get. Thanks for asking. Take care. ** Damian Murphy, Hadrian Flyte, Hi, thank you very much for entering and for answering John Newton’s question. I was rather curious myself. I’m pretty new to N-D, but I look forward greatly to getting to know your works ASAP. ** Shane Christmass, Hey, Shane. No, I haven’t read that book you linked to, didn’t know about it, but it definitely looks like a must-get. Thanks, man. ** _Black_Acrylic, Can’t keep a trusty pair of headphones down. Pudding and custard. Now those are good ideas. Not common food stuffs over here unless I’m missing something. Your story! Excited! Everyone, Maestro of multiple mediums and definitely prose Ben ‘_Black_Acrylic’ Robinson has a new short fiction piece up at the Terror House site with the irresistible title ‘Dead Cat Bounce’. Get your eyes, etc. on it here. ** wolf, *distant, lonely, inhuman sound in the distance*! Gotcha, but competence in art of any kind is pretty gross. And that it’s treated as a legitimising requirement of ‘good’ art by so many. Re: literature, the powers that be give competence fancy sounding names like ‘lapidary’ and ‘literary’, but they’re usually just talking about competence that’s acting hoity toity. I would say it’s one of art’s big, eternal enemies, but that’s me. Oops, about Hubert. Poor thing. Tough decision, yeah. My asshole neighbors, who live directly below me on the 3rd etage, are nuts. They’re an elderly hetero couple. For a long time, the male would bang on my door two or three times a week accusing us of using a jack-hammer in the middle of the night. (In the middle of the night, I’m always asleep and Yury is sometimes up watching TV quietly). I even let him come inside and look around to see that I don’t have a jack-hammer. It’s always something bizarre with them. Love, me. ** Dominik, Hi, D! Me too about the lockdown. They just locked down four French cities, luckily not including Paris, so … uh oh. How was your weekend or I guess including Monday? It’s true that that Styles guy kinda makes the bun work. Ha ha, I’d watch that horror movie. Who wouldn’t? Love hiring planes to skywrite Peter Sotos’s ‘Tick’ in its entirety in the sky in Tahoma font above every city, town, and village in the world, G. ** Bill, Hi, Bill. The new Gisele piece is just a promising early kernel of an idea at this point, but I’ll be sure to blab about it here when it coheres. Does Nick Antosca still writes books or has TV eaten his writing? I met him once at a reading. Super nice guy. ** Steve Erickson, Hi. Okey-doke … Everyone, Two new sonic constructions by the one, the only Steve Erickson. Let me let him tell you all about them. SE: ‘In the past few days, I’ve written two songs inspired by BLADE RUNNER and its soundtrack. The second one, “Of Course We Know,” began as a remix of the first, reusing some of the same sounds and melodies, but took on a life of its own. Here is the first, “Happy Android”.’ Wow, I’ll find that Takashi Miike film somewhere. Sounds nuts. ** Misanthrope, Another FWB of the Neo-Decadents, or maybe it’s vice versa. Sounds like a fun time you had last night. Annapolis is famous for something specific, but I can’t remember what. A university or something? Good news about your mom. Hope it goes really well today. ** Brian O’Connell, Good morning! ‘Beau Travail’ is terrific, yeah, I agree. One of her very best films, I reckon. Weekend + me: Mm, my editor sent me a pdf of the interior design of ‘I Wished’, and I went through it and okayed it. I spent most of yesterday at my friend/collaborator Gisele’s place talking about the next theater piece we’re going to do and discussing how best to film our piece ‘Jerk’, which we’re doing next month. I watched a documentary about the history of Black representation in Horror movies that was just clips and talking heads but was pretty interesting. And a lot of other forgettable things that, yes, I have forgotten. How and what was your painfully early class? And its aftermath? Happy next 24! ** Okay. I’m thinking that most of you reading this don’t know the films of Amy Greenfield due to how difficult it is to see or even read about experimental films in these blanded-out and corporation commandeered days. Count on DC’s to disrupt that crap whenever possible. So, get to start to know her films. That’s the idea anyway. See you tomorrow.