Bruce Posner Day

 

‘If there is a thread running through the work and life of Bruce Posner, it is a desire not to forget the past and to explore the mysteries of life through film.’ — Michael McCord

‘In Bruce Posner’s films structuralist and romantic/ecstatic (think Brahkage or Tscherkassky) form merge together, a repurposing of found-footage second only to Lipsett (though this even has his humour; more humour is needed in avant-garde films). The lateral and literal cutting up of images so that each section is a cut, so that one image is at the same time multiple cuts, is astounding. When this happens, you get literal cross-cutting. Then he leads us into a secret room, as if Posner is saying well we’ve come this far – he unlocks the door and the form of film explodes into our face.’ — MTB

‘Posner’s films are quite exquisite, visually dense works, painstakingly composed primarily through animation and optical printing. His frames of reference range from highly personal, almost diary-like material to images he has appropriated from popular culture (advertising, cartoons, news) in a process he began to pursue long before its current vogue …and watching one of his films can recall the complex layering of some of the more accomplished etchers of this century.’ — Bill Judson

‘I can not imagine that Bruce Posner would need any further introduction than his own many great works have achieved in the film world, i.e. that anyone involved seriously with film would have him in somewhat of a heroic posture in their mind. Museums, archives, and audiences worldwide have benefited immeasurably from Posner’s sustained 27 years-long [c. 2002] effort to locate, preserve, and present the hidden and undiscovered film. I don’t know of anyone who has done more to reveal to us the overlooked and the underrated cinema which once seen by and through his and other people’s auspices certainly comes to take its preeminent place in film history.’ — Stan Brakhage

‘The passion, dedication and the incredible value of what you have done. And please remain as complex and nervous as you are! Normal people are boring, and they do boring things! But we are poets, and we are not normal! DO NOT RETIRE EVER! (I don’t think you will or can…).’ — Jonas Mekas

‘(Posner’s films are) being watched from a shadow in a place that isn’t your own.’ — Ethan Donnachie

 

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Stills

 

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Further

Bruce Posner @ The Movie Data Base
Filmmakers Showcase
The Grand Experiment
Bruce Posner @ Facebook
Unseen Cinema: An Interview with Bruce Posner
Bruce Posner @ Letterboxd
Don’t Look Back: Bruce Posner interview
A Day in New York: Futurist Vision and Francis Thompson’s N.Y., N.Y.
Silent Avant-Garde with Bruce Posner
On Film: getting strange in the golden age
Cinema’s Secret Garden — The Amateur as Auteur

 

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Extras

My First Project

2-Screen The Clock” test run of 2 Kodak Pageant projectors with 16mm film running forwards and backwards.

Filmmakers Showcase 1984-1986 Programs

Saul Levine introduces Bruce Posner at Mass Art Film Society

 

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Unseen Cinema: Early American Avant Garde Film 1893 –1941
from Senses of Cinema

 

Unseen Cinema: Early American Avant Garde Film 1893 –1941 is a four-part program (originally consisting of 20) curated by the film archivist, curator and filmmaker Bruce Posner. Its four program strands – Picturing a Metropolis; The Devil’s Plaything; Light Rhythms; and Lovers of Cinema – endeavours to delineate the unknown accomplishments of early filmmakers (including creative artists, Hollywood directors and amateur filmmakers) operating in America and abroad during the formative epoch of American cinema. According to Posner, many of the films sin the program were not – contrary to received wisdom – directly influenced by the various European art movements of the historic avant-garde as such. Instead we encounter the films made by a variety of different kind of artists, writers, filmmakers, poets, choreographers, playwrights, etc., who explored the innovative creative and formal properties of the film medium.

All of these filmmakers were cinephiles, first and foremost, or as critic/cineaste, Herman G. Weinberg, says, “lovers of cinema.” Weinberg’s apt term captures the passion these film enthusiasts and innovators had for their films and their avant-garde, experimental themes and techniques. However, as Posner argues, by the 1930s and the advancement of political themes during that decade many of them were starting to become isolated as their artistic concerns were deemed not as relevant as they were in the previous decade. However, though numerous of them worked in relative isolation, still their films had a large impact on the subsequent avant-garde films of the following three decades or so.

It is only in the 1990s that certain scholars, curators and critics have become critically interested in the possibilities of a viable avant-garde film culture existing before Maya Deren and her peers in the 1940s and 1950s. (Reflective of this was the forum accompanying “Unseen Cinema”, which was chaired by Jane Mills, and whose panellists Barrett Hodsdon, Helen Grace, and Janet Merewether, along with Bruce Posner, raised numerous interesting ideas and debates concerning questions of definition, film history and theory, exhibition, critical reception and methodology.)

Bill Mousoulis : What was the impetus for the whole “Unseen Cinema” project?

Bruce Posner: Around January 1999, I was with my wife in the kitchen on a Friday night, and I put a piece of chicken in my mouth and went – uh-oh. I’d swallowed a chicken bone. Twenty-two days and three operations later I got out of the hospital, and I think that was the motivating factor behind doing the series. I realised that time was limited. I had had a life-time fascination with the history of cinema, especially the history of experimental cinema, and being in the United States, I was focused on the American cinema, and I knew that no-one had really ever dealt with this. There were some books out there – David Curtis’s Experimental Cinema, Stephen Dwoskin’s Film Is, Malcolm Le Grice Abstract Film and Beyond – and being involved with the movement in one way or another since 1974, as a watcher, maker or player, I knew that all the material was there, but hadn’t been dealt with in a professional way. So – I just went at it. The institutionalised side of the US ignored this for the most part. In the mid-’70s there was a book put out by the Whitney Museum called A History of the American Avant-garde, covering 1942 to 1974 roughly. Which means that even this book left all the pre-’42 people out. I worked at Harvard Film Archive for a number of years, and just before I left I organised a weekend conference called Articulated Light: The Emergence of Abstract Film in America. I tried to get every film that was an abstract film, and there were quite a few, and I thought that if there were this many abstract films, imagine the number of everything else! Also, Jan-Christopher Horak put out a book in 1995 called Lovers of Cinema and I started talking to him about the whole project also. And one other thing is that from the ’70s, I used to buy films for the Miami – Dade Public Library, which in effect became an archive for no-one would borrow the films, and after awhile I got involved in doing the lab work for many of these films, to strike new prints.

John Conomos: Can you outline the curatorial objectives informing the project?

BP: I’ve actually been taking a lot of heat for the curatorial aspects of this program, especially in Germany. In a way, making a series that doesn’t have clear boundaries can lead to everyone being offended!

JC: People like to think in categories.

JC: There’s a variety of filmmakers represented in “Unseen Cinema”. How committed were these filmmakers to the idea of film as an art form and did they, in certain contexts, proselytize like Maya Deren did later in the 1950s? Did they use specialist journals, as did Deren and her peers, to address cinema as art?

Paul Winkler: This is a very good question. The question is not whether they were committed, but – did they know what they were doing? As Barrett Hodsdon said in the forum earlier, they had a new toy, and it was a matter of seeing what the new toy could do. So the question is: what were their thinking processes? What was their motivation? Did they have any intellectual knowledge about what they were doing? These are the important questions. From my perspective as an artist, I think they had this new toy, but they only scratched the surface. I think Burckhardt started to invent a few things, but he stopped short and simply went back to filming people on the streets, very conventional documentary footage.

BP: But Burckhardt had such a long career. That’s his style, and it evolved. He continued to make films into the ’90s.

PW: Do you think these people were really aware of what they were doing, however? Up to a point they must have been, but how much?

BP: I have not been able to clearly figure this out, and one of the reasons is that I think that trying to apply concepts that we are familiar with today to back then is very hard. We also look back and try to interpret what happened, and that’s difficult. I get the feeling that back then it was very hard for these filmmakers to actually screen their films. They didn’t have the proper viewing machines, moviolas, etc. – they had to literally project their film in order to see it. And if they couldn’t screen their films easily, then they probably couldn’t reflect enough on what they were doing. But from the ’20s, a number of journals sprung up. These journals contained dialogues about aesthetics, bringing modernism to America. America had no “culture” in a way, it took its cues from Europe. A clear-cut dialogue started developing, and magazines solely devoted to cinema started appearing. Lewis Jacobs in Philadelphia, with Seymour Stern and David Platt – they formed a thing called Experimental Cinema, which started discussing Eisenstein, lefty films, and the avant-garde films. There was a Swiss magazine called Close-Up, which contributed an extended dialogue, with American people writing for it. There was Harry Alan Potamkin, a critic with communist leanings – he wrote about experimental cinema for Close-Up. Another thing happening in the US from about ’26 was a magazine called Movie Makers, and it was a journal for the ACL – the Amateur Cinema League, which encompassed everyone from home movie makers to avant-garde filmmakers. There were also some professional organisations getting involved. Someone like Dr. Watson – he had theoretical articles printed in the magazines, but he also delivered lectures at the American Society of Cinematographers. And a dialogue was created, with other critics.

JC: What role did the idea of “cinema maudit” play in the selection of the films in the series? Do you see these films as “damned” films, forgotten films, abused films?

BP: Well, we live in an age where nobody cares about all this stuff. In terms of mass culture that is – people talk about art and culture, but they don’t really care. I’ll tell you a story. When Jonas Mekas was doing the “Essential Cinema” collection, for the Anthology Film Archives, in the early ’70s, a lot of the films were still around, were retrievable. But there was a general feeling at the time that they were all “amateur” films, not full creations of their own. And then there’s the whole Maya Deren mythos. Her career is very important, but how can one person define a whole century of experimental film? This is what has happened – her ideas affected several generations of people, what they consider to be experimental film. A number of other lines could have been taken instead.

 

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11 of Bruce Posner’s 25 films

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Trappist Preserves (1977)
‘The film acts as a nifty epithet for what everyone knows about our meager place in the Universe that is succinctly stated in the closing scenes of “The Incredible Shrinking Man” (1957). I ad-libbed upon the lofty but simultaneously righteous soliloquy using a difficult to produce, single-frame horizontal optical pan that follows the character’s movements away from the “dry flaking crumbs of nourishment,” out through the window screen, into the garden, and up among the stars and infinity.’ — BP

the entirety

 

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Sappho and Jerry, Pts. 1-2-3 (1977 – 78)
‘The three parts developed over a year period of intense study during the mid-1970s. It sort of began and ended with my dependency on “high-tech” equipment to make films and led me through the equally intensive parameters of what motion picture film could reproduce on a visceral, detail oriented level. I learned filmmaking on a 35mm Oxberry beam-splitter, multi-head, aerial-image bi-pac optical printer. A dinosaur by today’s standards and all hand operated prior to the advent of computer-assists, this machine was precise and exact to the frame.’ — BP

the entirety

 

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Hamaca: The Quickie Version (1969, 1975, 1981)
‘The ongoing project “Hamaca” grew out of the home movies shot by my father in the 1930s and then later by me, and eventually led in 1975 to one of the first optical printer films produced at The Florida Optical House, Miami. It combines Reg 8mm, 16mm and 35mm with most derived from the 8mm home movies and porno films and from my own 16mm experiments with broadcast news film outtakes. The sources and content are obvious with the overall experience somewhat unresolved for a film that has been reworked in differing versions for a variety of projection scenarios.’ — BP

the entirety

 

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LEPUS / KEATS / CHUCHUCHACHA! (1977 – 1981)
‘Speed has been of the essence of my lifetime. So a cinema of fleeting images mostly in the abstract and etched upon photochemical film stock breaks down cinema to its basics: the frame, the scratch, the splice. All direct actions on portraits of persons in absentia: the first, a rabbit-like elegy for Stan Brakhage; the second, a mysterious remembrance of the poet John Keats; and the third, a sidelong jitter-glance-dance of the visual artist Judy Akers.’ — BP

the entirety

 

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Deaf Women Listening to Stockhausen, Pt.1 (1979 – 1981)
‘After my “Sappho and Jerry, Pts. 1, 2, 3” (1977-78), the Florida Optical House closed leaving me to figure out how to make multi-screen cinema via limited means. I had been spoiled with the access to high-end motion picture technology and spent a number of years reconceptualizing how to obtain maximum visionary acuity by other techniques. As can be seen, a lot of paths opened up – from in-camera superimpositions, overlapped multiple projections, 3-color separations, and really simple optical printing techniques combined with raw stock that had been accidently exposed to light leaving a yellow-orange glowing light flare along the edge of the roll of film! In-between these tricks of the trade, a visceral abstraction unfolds along a series of dynamic pyrotechnics, all borne out in silence in homage to the deaf women listening to Stockhausen.’ — BP

the entirety

 

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PILLDEBAHL (1978, 1982)
‘Out of my reveries, much crude optically printed footage was shot on the rock-steady 16mm Maurer printer at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (with most of the source footage hand-processed black and white negative), and the remaining b/w fragments hand-colored with colorful but deadly aniline dyes, then still easily available! The coup de grace was the stellar Dennis Oppenheim dancing dummy puppet in a felt suit shot in performance at the Institute of Contemporary Art Chicago, where the Max Neuhaus sound installation hidden in the museum’s stairwell was the primary inspiration for this incredible vision that ends with the fabulous graphic demise of the banker in D.W. Griffith’s “A Corner In Wheat” (1909). In between all of the above are the 3-color separation rolls shot of a butchered pig at a farm in Unity, New Hampshire. And Sappho, the dog, hanging out in our Chicago apartment window.’ — BP

the entirety

 

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ORGASAMATIC (1983)
‘The content, tho self explanatory visually, has the following origins, with the story behind the film being quite strange and sad; it relates back to Mary Abbott’s young nephews and nieces who all three tragically died in a late night house fire at their home in st. albans vt in 1982; and the b/w images of the weird boy’s face that flash by were printed right next to the chimney that caught fire and killed them, that is several months beforehand. the weird boy is avram goldstein, a friend from college (c. 1974-76), whose father photographed a posed pix of avy, each year of his life through adulthood. and the grinning kid seen here is about 5 years old, the same age as one of the nephews who died in the fire. yuck. the image of girl in the oval is from a mid-1930s mental health film entitled “The Feebleminded” and grouped all categories of mental and physical handicapped persons into groups of people who should be sterilized so they could not reproduce and pollute society (this was in the US not Germany), among which the little girl was an epileptic that the filmmakers were subjecting to stroboscopic flashes to induce a seizures, for which she just made a silly smile. mary abbott is the nightingale with the candelabra that waifs into and out of the frame.’ — BP

the entirety

 

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Miami Confidential Parts 1-2-3 (1987)
1. Publix 8.10.1987 w/ Eric Gottlieb, Charles Recher 21 mins. 2. Cathy’s Leff’s New Apartment 8.14.1987 w/ Margot Ammidown, Cathy Leff, Juan Lezcano and César Trasobares, 42 mins. 3. Lemon Squares 8.18.1987 w/ Karla Gottlieb 32 mins.

the entirety

 

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MONA LISA SMILES (AGAIN AND AGAIN) (1975 – 1983 – 1994 – 2015)
‘From my first scraps of professional film animation to the latest wonders of digital editing, this raucous bit of 3-screen mayhem encompasses most of my filmmaking career and adult life, left in pieces in the projection booth. Featuring Maggie Cheung, Charles Recher, Avram Goldstein, and Clara Estelle again and again. Everyone is smiling in this mini-epic that is corralled into concentric circles furthered by the homemade audio collage of looped rock riffs that via composer-musician Carlos Dominguez levitate the physical space of the movie theater way beyond anything you normally might hear.’ — BP

the entirety

 

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AO804.1 (1976 – 2017)
‘The inspiration was seeing the incredible Super 8mm 8-screen diary cinema projection by German-American photographer Will McBride, who several years prior visited the University of Miami’s Wilson Hicks Communications Conference. Leica donated him the Leica Super 8mm movie cameras and projectors, and he filmed the happenings going on at his hippie-artists-commune in Italy. Music track for my film created by a variety of persons; last performed, edited and re-mixed by Joel Haertling of Architect’s Office, Boulder from several live performances with the 4-screen projections in the 1990s. Haertling worked with Brakhage on sound films.’ — BP

the entirety

 

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THE BLUE DANUBE (2017)
‘from original camera rolls shot in Trinidad c.1987-1993.’ — BP

the entirety

 

 

*

p.s. RIP Kenneth Anger. ** scunnard, Hi, J. Me too, duh. I saw your email, and I’ll get to it pronto and get back to you, thank you! ** Dominik, Hi!!! Sad, true, but they do make for haunting sights. Oh, hm, aren’t there currency exchange places geared to tourists, or are their exchange rates inflated probably? Did you get it sorted? I think love will have to do a google search to read the pigeons minds, which means I have to do it. If the answer is interesting, I’ll pass it along. Did love usher you in and out of the dentist’s in one piece? Today Zac and I find out what the cost of the post-production on our film will cost, at least in a general way, so I need love to work his magic when it comes to finances yet again, G. ** Minet, I plan to. And I’ll start with ‘Sound and Fury’ first. Oh, I see it’s distributed by Altered Innocence, who distributed ‘Permanent Green Light’ in the States. Maybe they’ll send me a file or DVD or something. I feel reticent for some reason to reveal my teen idol friend’s identity here. Yes, over a coffee or something, you got it. Come to Paris. It’s great here. I’ll show you around if you need to be shown around. I want to go to Rio. I’ve never been to Brazil even though one of my brothers lived there for a while. Argentina is closest I’ve gotten. Enjoy the museum. Bigly. How was it? ** A, Seems pretty likely. ‘Cats’, wow. Does ‘Threepenny Opera’ count as a musical? I really like that. Mm, I liked ‘Sweeney Todd’. When I was a kid I really liked ‘The Music Man’. Can’t think of any others. Yeah, RIP Anger. He wrote me a letter when my novel ‘Closer’ was just published saying he wanted to make a movie based on it, and I, of course, wrote back and said, ‘Yes, please!’ But he never did. I never met him. ** Misanthrope, I would guess that since KIX is one of those bands that milked their brief turn in the spotlight as dry as possible, they probably played with everyone at one point. Probably even with Wayne Newton. Merriweather Post Pavilion is a nice name, but it just sounds like a random name unless Merriweather Post is a company or something. ** _Black_Acrylic, My neighborhood, Place Madeleine, is like a ghost town of dead stores. It was supposed to become the new happening, trendy place in Paris until the Covid lockdown, and ever since then all the businesses are leaving in droves. Even the huge IKEA is closing. It’s kind of nice. ** Jack Skelley, Hi, rotting Keith Moon corpse or interred ashes or whatever. I’m way down to talk process. It’ll be like pulling teeth to get Amy to do it, but maybe we can manage. Iggy is a horror now. Like a Haunted House animatronic that’s been repaired one too many times. Not only does his skin look like dried lava, but he has some kind of problem with his hips, so he slumps around the stage like it’s ‘Young Frankenstein’ or something. Uh, the Iggy photo on LC was by Gerard Malanga. He sent it to me, and I asked if I could use it for an LC cover, and he said yes. That’s the whole story. Well, at least you don’t look like a puddle of mud as far as I can tell. Yours, Pete ‘stop doing Who concerts, for Christ’s sake’ Townsend. ** Jamie, Hi, Jamie. Hm, I pretty sure all the post images were there, not to besmirch your electronics. James Benning apparently looks at this blog at least occasionally since he commented here once, and I was half-expecting him to pop in yesterday and say, ‘No, it fucking doesn’t.’ I’m actually reading a Mary Gaitskill story right now for my biweekly Zoom reading group thing. I think she’s good. She’s a sharp writer. She’s said very negative things about my work, but I’m trying not to let that factor in. Ah, happy you made it through the self-doubt moment. I was sure you would. Wednesday was no big whoop as far as I can remember. Isn’t Tom Cruise hugely popular in every country in the world? They had a wax Travolta and Cage and all the usual big male stars, so it just seemed curious. I put together a modest Syncro-Vox Day yesterday, so thank you again, brainiac love, Dennis. ** Ian, I know, sad, right? It’s interesting. It makes sense and it doesn’t make sense. Yes, Zac and I edit our films. We bring in a pro in to help finesse the tough technical stuff sometimes, and we need help with the sound mix and color correction, but we do everything ourselves, yeah. ** Steve Erickson, I think, maybe I’m wrong, that Staples went out of business, which is why they had to dump the arena? Yes, I’ve been to some of the ‘high end’ haunted houses in LA. They’re almost always charming and impressive on the interior design front, but they’re generally a little too ‘bad theater’ to be amazing. Everyone, a double header of Mr. Erickson reviews for you today: Here’s him on the film ‘You Hurt My Feelings’, and here’s him on the film ‘Joyland’. **  Telly, Hi. Not Telly as in Savalas, right? Cool, I’ll search Tapas and Webtoon then. I’ve never used AI myself, and I don’t really feel much interest in doing so artistically, at least so far, but I have nothing against it. It doesn’t scare me or anything. It just seems like an interesting new option. And I am quite curious about the AI chatbot thing, so let me know, sure. And thank you re: the email. Oh, wait, I can see a zine by you right now, cool, as can everybody. I’ll go scour it as soon as I finish the p.s. Everyone, Telly makes zines, and you can go see/read/explore one of them right now, which I recommend you do, by using this link. Great, thank you! ** Cody Goodnight, Hi. I’m good. I’m glad you’re feeling much better. You definitely seem to be making the best of New Orleans. Is Anne Rice’s family mausoleum deliberately Gothy/scary? The only Ming-liang Tsai film I’ve seen is ‘The Hole’. I thought that was pretty interesting. Keep heavily enjoying NO if you’re still there. You are, right? ** rafe, Hi, Rafe! I’m good, thanks. ’embarrassed that they’re meant to look proud’: Very nice, yeah, it’s true. I do like the sound of that video you made, I must say. Hm, … it seems I’ll need to think more about video/food suggestions. Nothing is springing to mind. Paul McCarthy? Let me think. I think you’re right it might make a good blog post. I wrote that idea down to hunt about and see. Thanks. No, the blog isn’t an obsessive thing for me. I can see why people would think it must be. No, I just like doing it for some peculiar reason. I don’t remember all the posts. Well, vaguely. But I have to go back and check when I get a post idea to make sure I haven’t already done it sometimes. My hosting site has a dashboard thing that makes it fairly easy to go back and look in the archive. Except for when I write a script for one of our films, I generally think everything I start to write is going to be novel because that’s how my head is bent, and it almost always ends up being a novel or a short fiction piece. I mean, I make those animated gif fictions, and even there I start out thinking when I’m organising them that I’m writing a novel, and weirdly that’s what I end up doing. What’s your process? Happy next 24. ** T, Hi, T! No, I don’t know Showa Spot Megur, but, wow, it looks amazing, thanks! You sent me an email? Shit, I’ll go look for it. I was really spaced out about email for a while because I was so far behind because of the film thing, and I’m sure I missed things. I’ll hunt it today. Yes, hanging out! We must! Cool! I suspect that image is going to make my today blossom. Great, see you ultra-soon, I hope. ** Darbz🙄, Hi. Oh, well, don’t stay away unless you feel like you need to. It’s a pleasure. Wow, that girl is like a really huge ‘no’ on the roommate front. I didn’t know that about spiders, and it’s very interesting, thanks. Oh, if you get bored find out what pigeons think when they’re sitting still and just moving their heads around for minutes. The ‘why they do that’ question is nagging at me. Ah, my grandma never said anything about coating her animals with a chemical. Or maybe she told my parents and they just didn’t give a shit. ‘4:48 Psychosis’, yes, I know it. It’s great, but, yeah, make sure you’re in the right state to read. It’s what it is. Well, again, don’t be a stranger unless you must, but in the meantime Good luck much love to you in invisible flawless Russian. ** Okay. I suspect most of you don’t know the work of the excellent experimental filmmaker and experimental film expert/historian Bruce Posner, but, guess what, now you do. Magic. See you tomorrow.