Towards the end of last week I was able to visit the Whitney Museum of American Art. The Whitney has been showcasing Andy Warhol’s art throughout the museum since the start of November 2018, through March 31, 2019. I have visited the Whitney in the beginning of December and haven’t visited since. They added a miniature screening theater to showcase his short experimental work. The Whitney had already used an entire floor to show most of his videos on TVs and projectors, this addition was held in the middle of other works of art besides just video.

I sat down to watch two different pieces with the same concept behind them I would say. Both pieces were about eight and a half minutes long and both of these videos were screen tests. Andy Warhol encouraged the subjects to follow strict rules, like to sit as still as possible without blinking, for the whole roll which was a little over three minutes. I only learned that Warhol wanted his subjects to do this after my viewing, this fact did make the pieces make a little more sense. The subjects that I sat and watched were Ethel Scull and Edie Sedwick. Ethel Scull was first on the screen and she was sat directly in front of the camera, set up for a close up shot, for the length of the roll film in the camera. At first she was opening her eyes wide and stayed sitting in the chair. After a minute or so when she began to blink she gave in a little bit and did not sit up as straight as she did in the beginning. She began to try again to keep her eyes open as long as she could, but the roll of film seemed to be longer than she expected.

At the end of each of these pieces you can tell the whole roll of film is used up because of the flare effect that happens when the roll is used up. This happens at the end of Ethell Scull’s and Edie Sedwick’s film. Edie Sedwick was trying her hardest to keep a straight face without blinking when it was her turn in front of the camera. Even though she might’ve lasted a little bit longer than Ethell Scull, after she blinked and smiled she wouldn’t try after that. She would continue to blink, but still try and stay still for the camera like Warhol wanted them to behave. She was different from the first woman Ethell Scull because she wasn’t trying to stay serious the whole time. Even though she blinked and was beginning to laugh in front of the camera, she still tried to stay still.

These short screen tests for both women interested me because it made me think why would Andy Warhol want to make films like these. It made me wonder if Warhol wanted to show how human these two women are and just like any of us they can’t stay still. He could also be demonstrating how difficult it is for people in general to keep still and people just want to keep moving. These two pieces were short, but had a lot to say in the short time that they had.

 

Time Piece is a 9 minute experimental film by Jim Henson released in 1965. It was directed, written, and produced by Jim Henson, who also stars. I watched the film at the Jim Henson exhibit in the Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria, Queens. The piece was shown on a small screen alongside Henson’s other experimental and mainstream work. This was one of the few pieces that was live-action, in that it didn’t involve puppetry. Most people know Jim Henson for his work on The Muppets and Sesame Street, which are positioned as cultural icons in the American media canon since the 1960s through modern times. I was pleasantly surprised to find out that Henson’s creativity has been used in a more experimental way while still remaining playful, provocative, and entertaining.
 

The man goes to work, goes on dates, and lives his relatively mundane life until he is imprisoned for shooting the Mona Lisa, and escapes wearing different disguises until he is shot down by military force.s The film’s end reveals that Henson was experiencing his life condensed in the last moments before his death. The camera moves from the lifeless body to the doctor, who is revealed to be Henson, and he winks at the camera.

The piece begins with Henson at a doctors office in a hospital gown receiving what looks like a routine check up. However, the doctor comes into a problem when he cant find his heartbeat. The film then goes through a series of seemingly unrelated short shots cut together rhythmically, with brief interludes of brightly colored construction paper animation. (The film was actually not written, but each shot was fully storyboarded, which comes across in the visually striking and graphic framing, usually created to make a graphic match).

Each shot lasts only a few seconds, creating a dizzying viewing experience. The soundtrack by Don Sebesky roots the film in a consistent pulse. This is also aided by a lack of dialogue save for Henson’s few utterances of “help”. The film, although distinct from most of Henson’s other work, still very much feels like a Jim Henson project. The acting and direction feels disorienting and bizarre but humorous and relatively accessible. The film uses some visual metaphor (like the repeated shot of painting an elephant pink to represent intoxication) that creates a layer of distance between the viewer’s experience of what is actually a pretty sad life story. It seemed to have its roots in Russian montage, and at times reminded me of DIga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera.

I went to go see the films Blue God part 1 and 2 by Carl1 at Spectacle theater in Williamsburg. What first struck me was how little information there was about the film besides the trailer on the theater’s website.

The first film starts out with two school girls hanging out on a roof and talking with each other. There is atmospheric music but the dialogue is shown through text on monochrome frames like old silent movies, making it hard to know which character is talking. The lack of audible dialogue is a feature of both films, besides a scene in the second part. The two school girls talk about being tired of everyday life, finding it mundane and repetitive. They decide to run away and scenes of them walking through streets at nighttime follow until they eventually reach a beach where the first part ends on a long shot of the sky as it transitions from day to dusk.

The Second part is more abstract as it follows the school girls as they perform a ritual to summon the “Blue God” in a series of scenes. One scene features an older woman who cryptically speaks english set in a classroom where one of the school girls cuts the head off a chicken, the camera paying attention to the dripping blood. The second part of the film depicts the two school girls as they get infatuated with the indifferent and male, Blue God. There are many shots of the schools girls moving in unison. One of the school girls eventually performs a sex act with the Blue God, prompting the other girl to run to a cliff’s edge, the camera work and editing implying suicide.

After seeing the movie I was left confused about the meaning of the second part. The first was seemingly about the naivete of adolescence as the two girls seek to escape a modern world, that is in their opinion, too predictable and suffocating. After talking to my friend who I went to see the movie with the second part came to make more sense to me as he saw the films as an allegory for sexual maturity and growing up. The two girls act as representations of one person, the one who eventually commits suicide being the other’s innocence. This is apparent with the many shots of both girls moving in unison, essentially unifying them as representations of one person. The focus on the blood and the school room setting of the second part makes one think of the moment of having one’s first period. The death of innocence follows the girl’s first sexual experience, which essentially overshadows the naive and childish want for escapism that is presented in the first part.

After coming to this conclusion I came to appreciate the film a lot more, even though there is a lot of imagery and apparent symbolism that I didn’t pick up on. I was struck by the beautiful cinematography of the films; the first part features many tight shots of building walls that match the color of their surroundings and create interesting geometrical patterns in the layout of stones and tiles. The music used in the film is very atmospheric which made the whole project feel more like an art piece than a film. There are moments that dragged and felt like the creator was making them that way in order to have the film be more ‘artsty.’ Overall I enjoyed the film, I was really interested in the concept of making puberty into a surreal an metaphysical journey. As a moment that changes a person both physically and emotionally, puberty is in a way an event that feels jarring, awkward, and transformative.

When it comes to experimental cinema, I am particularly attracted to animation. Animation can be seen as the foundation on which cinema is based, and by it’s very nature allows for a reconstruction of cinema itself. If cinema or video reflects the world, animation exists outside of reality. There are no rules in animation, save for how well you can draw (or digitally sculpt), and how much patience you have.(The exception being stop-motion, which does require a connection to the world around you.) Much early animation involved playing around with moving drawings, creatively scratching the film stock, or discovering the magic of stop motion. It can be said then, that experimental animation is often about craft.
The program I attended at the Metrograph, Griffiti: Animation by George Griffin, reflects this focus on craft. The first short in the program, Rapid Transit, was done by arranging beans and other objects on a white, lit background in stop motion to create “kinetic, percussive” imagery in time with the background music. (The short was celebrating its 50th anniversary.) the second short, Trikfilm 3, alternated between a surreal hand-drawn animation and scenes of Griffin drawing the piece on a notepad in stop-motion. The stop-motion segments feature Griffin at a table drinking coffee when he decides to start the piece—creating art out of just a notepad and boredom.

One of the more interesting pieces was Flying Fur. The piece was set to the background music from the Tom and Jerry cartoon, Puttin’ on the Dog. Knowing nothing about the source of the music, Griffin animated what he thought would be happening based on the score, only finding out where it was from later. (The piece was shown as Puttin’ on the Fur, in which both the original cartoon and Griffin’s piece were shown side by side. Similarly, Ko-Ko was an an animation using cutouts, animated in rhythm with music by Charlie Parker. The piece was intended to be part of a larger project involving Parker that was never completed.
Midway through the program, there was a documentary by Griffin and DeeDee Halleck, Meadows Green, featuring the Bread and Puppet Theater, a politically radical puppet theater. It was, not surprisingly, an outsider among the rest of the shorts. In a Q&A afterwards, DeeDee claimed that it was difficult to find distribution for the piece on American television. The short simply shows the theater’s antics at their annual Bread and Puppet Circus, occasionally broken up by Griffin’s animation. One of the first questions brought up by executives at PBS was why there wasn’t a narrator, which I found quite telling about the television industry back then: even PBS wanted to play it safe. One short piece near the end, The Bather, stood out to me. The film features a live-action shot of Griffin’s wife bathing behind the shower door, as a drawing of the woman plays in the foreground. In lieu of titles, a description of the short, including plot, genre, and themes, scrolls across the screen, eventually giving the audience some context that would not be otherwise apparent.

The best piece by far, however, was Lineage. A half-hour in length, and combining various types of stop-motion with hand-drawn animation, the piece deconstructs the nature of animation itself in, as Griffin’s Vimeo page puts it, “an anti-cartoon essay on animation’s contradictory legacy: comedy and formalism.” In one part of the short, The character Griffin creates interacts with the version of itself from the previously-drawn frame of animation, before stealing scissors and cutting itself free. This character, in stop-motion, is itself shown using a hand-cranked device to create an animation with moving lines. One section of the piece involves Griffin drawing on photocopied film stock, which moves in stop-motion as he colors it in. As this scene plays, he laments that the capture of images has gone from an art to a means of profit.
I found these pieces interesting and amusing, often in equal measure. All of them and more can be found at
https://vimeo.com/geogrif.

About three weeks ago I had a chance to visit Whitney Museum of America Art. The exhibition was dedicated to a very unique and in a way weird art of Andy Warhol. There were many different paintings, pictures, caricatures and abstract drawing on display at the museum. The whole Andy Warhol exhibition occupied three floors of the museum. The only things that I felt a genuine connection with were many different photos and color swapped pictures. Than one that I really liked was a picture of Marlon Brando in his leather jacket and a bike from the movie “The Wild One”. And to be completely honest, many film that were shown on the exhibition felt bizarre. I could not concentrate on one particular film because there were so many and all of them were strange.

However, the one that strikes my memory the most is shown on a third floor and screen shows Andy Warhol eating a burger. As I stood there watching I was thinking about the thought process behind this film and I might be wrong but there was nothing special about that piece. People around me were fascinated with this piece but I kind of was not.  After that I watched some other short film which were shown on small old TVs with a dedicated headset for someone who would want to listen. These film were also very odd in a way. One showed a lady cleaning her room, the other showed two people staring and arguing with each other. I felt as if I was watching aliens on screen who try to replicate people’s behavior and interact with each other. Maybe that was the whole point after all to create a feeling of alienation to a  viewers or it might be that I did not understand something. It is hard to tell because one of my friends was definitely interested and very invested in all the art pieces. When I asked her to explain it to me, she could clearly deliver the message though.

At the end of the day,  the thing that I took away from this is that we live in a world which is too contemporary in a way that every media that we consume now is commercialized. Everything is picked out very carefully. If it is a car then it is the most luxurious car that you can find. If it is a model then it is the most stunning model on screen. If it is a sunset on a beach then it is the most breathtaking and colorful sunset. And then seeing something as simple and weird as a man sitting in a white room eating a burger, it simply does not spark the same interest and attention to it. The only thing that it does spark is a feeling of awkwardness.

This weekend, I went to the Whitney museum in the Chelsea neighborhood and observed the exhibit Programmed: Rules, Codes, and Choreographies in Art, 1965-2018. The exhibit was a compilation of art created by all levels of programming that were at once introduced in the Whitney at one point of time. The exhibit deals with all types of experiments and productions that people worked with in art.

One of the most notable productions was a “choose your own adventure” laser that detailed the life of a women who spent a month without leaving her home because of Agoraphobia. I found it interesting, because I had no idea what was going on, but the idea was “gimmicky” or interesting enough to keep me pressing the different options and seeing how the adventure could end until I felt like I stayed at the piece too long. The piece is surrounded by a fake living room with a really comfy couch that lets you change the menus with a DVD remote, and I felt so comfortable watching everything, I felt uncomfortable sitting for too long when other people began to gather.

Another piece, which was the star attraction of the exhibit, was a giant multi-television media which was programed to use every monitor as part of the same piece. He video switched mainly between a video of David Bowie performing a dance with a woman, a blue faced computer-generated face, and a video of a naked lady walking with funky video effects. The piece gave me different feelings, as some of the things that the televisions showed worked in unison to create a piece, while other times, it felt random. I enjoyed it when the televisions flashed in union with a Bowie Song in a sort of pseudo music video only possible with the sit up of televisions. I initially did not care for the other seemingly random stuff, but after some time to effect I find myself looking fondly at the randomness and appreciative about the work someone made to program the televisions to do them, which isn’t normal for me.

The rest of the exhibit felt like the usual. Stuff that’s almost intriguing but is so far away that I didn’t really see the beauty of it. Although the aesthetics didn’t please me, I was always intrigued to learn how the artists were able to create their work, and in learning the goal of that artists and learning the steps and work they took to get there. When it comes to programming, a thing that is often unseen questioned, it was cool to see people ask their own questions and experiment with it in both the real and virtual worlds. In the end I felt like I gained more then ever thought I would.

I went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, on 86 street and 5^th Avenue, where I was able to catch a short film, which is considered one of the best arts created to date. Stasi City (1997) is universally considered one of the most impactful works of video art of the last half century, because it was one of the first films to date that could be classified as an experimental film. the four-channel video installation is a dizzying tour of the former headquarters of the East German secret police (Staatssicherheit) housed behind a nondescript row of buildings in the former East Berlin.

 

When I walked in the room and saw the movie playing on four walls all in different scenes yet syncing up at the same time really threw me. As an outsider privy to this place even existing, the circumstances that these rooms were in really emphasized torture and struggle. Throughout the film, there’s a boy floating around, and I interpreted that as a spirit that lingered in this place trapped forever because this is where he lost his life.

Another very interesting trait about this piece is that it’s a silent film. For a silent film to be this suspenceful and this attention grabbing I’m sure was a rarity when this first released in ’97. The slowness of the footage evokes surveillance, the feeling of being watched, as does the installation’s layout, which draws the visitor into a corner.

Jane and Louise Wilson, the creators of Stasi City, were able to bring to life a very dark and overlooked moment in German history which I feel also make this piece very historic. The fact that this was one of the first film pieces to publicly expose some of the horrors that were going on in these rooms really magnified the dehumanization that went on behind closed doors.

 

 

I was a Journalism Major at one point before switching to Media Studies and this piece really reminded me of a Feature Article. Not your typical “soft news” Feature, but more like a story that a reporter had been working on for a while, digging up as much information as possible to them expose corruption almost like a breaking news story or something to that effect.

 

 

I really enjoyed the silent film and it made me think a lot on more of a journalistic side in terms of the approach and making is silent to add that much more suspense. Jane and Louise Wilson had real courage to make such a sensitive film public, but by doing so, they let the world know what was happening in Germany behind closed doors almost like a reporter breaking a story on a government corruption scandal here in the United States.

The event was consisted of four shorts directed by Argentina filmmaker Eduard “Teddy” Williams including Could See Puma, I forgot!,, and Persí. As I started watching the first and second piece, I found myself constantly looking for a narrative of the film by picking up visual clues such as locations, behaviors, and dialogues between characters. That’s where I got really frustrated since I could not get any idea of what I was watching. What’s the storyline here? What’s the meanings of this image and intentions of the filmmaker? The films rather became more ambiguous and poetic. I kept wondering and realized that his films focus on the ordinal moments in our lives documented in unique ways.

I saw lots of abrupt cuts, unique angles and replacements of cameras, and less explanations. All the films focus on young males and how they interact with each other. The shared theme among the three pieces seemed to be nature, plants, and fruits such as boys hanging out in abandoned buildings, cave, and around their houses. The locations of the shoots are different for each film including Argentina, France, and Vietnam. However, the director did not use conventional texts indicating time and location or personalize characters. It actually depersonalizes the image and characters. I started to realize there are more similarities than differences among people all over the world. Third piece was very interesting and experiments with the boundaries of repetitions where sounds get extremely overwhelmed. All of the sounds are juxtaposed two sentences starting “Seems like A is B” and last throughout the entire film. Moreover, image the filmmaker chosen to go along with the sentences are footage taken from 360 degree GoPro attached to roller skaters and men dressed as women cruising a town with their car. Again, no explanations to those characters at all and the image seem to be pretty much observational.

Fortunately, after the films, we had the filmmaker himself coming up to the stage for a discussion. This is usually a time for me to problem-solve because I can have better understanding of the meanings, intentions, and methods of the filmmaking explained by the filmmaker himself/herself. I bet many of the audience had a plenty of questions to ask as we are usually used to be given sufficient information about story and characters. I would say it was the most interesting discussion ever. What I basically understood from Teddy talking about his films was that he follows his intuitive artistic creativity and always experiments with how he shoots and shows the image. I didn’t quite get the answers to my questions! I headed to my home feeling like having an unsolved mystery in my mind. I kept thinking about what I saw until the next day, and I came to a realization that, that is what experimental filmmaking is. Shooting with a camcorder on a tripod does not always have to be the way to shoot. The filmmaker’s work is significant as he always challenges the normative of filmmaking and storytelling. I was inspired to explore, find, and sophisticate with my style.

On February 20, 2019 I had the opportunity to attend a screen at the Ludlow House organized by the Filmmaker’s Coop. The screening was an accompaniment to the fall 2018 issue of Framework, a film and media journal highlighting artists pursuing new cultural and political perspectives in their art. Four experimental filmmakers, all of whom are in some way associated with the coop, had been asked by Framework to participate in their issue by creating a visual essay based off of their work. At the screening, each artist showed a portion of the work from which they drew to create their visual essay. The resulting screen was four very different artists, displaying four very different pieces of experimental film.

The first artist presented was Michelle Handleman. Michelle is a filmmaker who uses video and live performance in her work. The piece screened on this particular evening was a snippet from an installation currently on view at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art called Hustlers & Empires. Hustlers & Empires is a three-channel video installation which intertwines the lives of three “hustlers” from various time periods. The piece included dialogue and musical numbers, all written by Michelle and her cast. The format she chose to show at the screening included video from inside the gallery, so we were able to see the actual installation, as well as clips from the video itself.

The second artist was Bette Gordon, showing the first 15 minutes of her feature film Variety, originally released in 1984. Variety is the story of a young woman living in New York City who takes a job selling tickets at an X-rated movie theater in Times Square after she is unable to find any other job. Desperate for employment, this sweet, innocent, Midwest transplant soon finds herself completely enthralled by the movies inside. I am not exactly sure what about this film qualifies it as “experimental,” but it was included in this screening of experimental works.

The third artist (and my personal favorite) was Rob Roth. Rob screened footage of a performance called Soundstage which was done in 2018. The performance included a live performance on-stage partnered with pre-recorded video footage. Rob, though he had not originally planned on actually being in the piece, performed live, while a pre-recorded actor, Rebecca Hall, was projected on screens around the stage. It was extremely impressive because Rob (on-stage) was interacting with Rebecca (in the pre-recorded video) as though they were acting with one another.

The final piece was by MM Serra. This piece, titled Enduring Ornament, was a found footage film made up of about 4 discarded 16mm peep show films from the 1940s which MM acquired after the closing of an adult bookstore in Times Square. She altered the film through optical printing and alternative processing. The result is often a very obscured image with amazing texture and movement.

I enjoyed this event very much. It was interesting to see some of the various ways artists are creating experimental work. Each piece was unique from all the others, so it was cool to see them back-to-back. This event really opened my eyes to the unlimited possibilities of experimental filmmaking.

John Romano

Andy Warhol Whitney Exhibit

Andy Warhol has created several films in his time. At the Whitney Museum this weekend I got to experience several of his experimental short films. I want to talk about one in particular because It was short but deep. I believe most of Andy’s films are about challenging the idea of what is art.

“Andy Warhol eating a hamburger” is a film that was shot in the 1980s by Jørgen Leth. Warhol decided to be a part of the film for several reasons. One of the reasons was that It was shot in his style. The film is a single shot film on a single camera much like a lot of  Warhol’s films. At one point Warhol struggles to pour the ketchup but the camera keeps rolling because that is the beauty in this particular film and art form. The idea that everything is art.

I saw this short film at the Whitney Museum in one of the main floors. The film is a little over four minutes long and shows Warhol eating a hamburger for the entire film. When you watch the film for the first time you may think its funny or you may feel uncomfortable. It’s fairly silent until the end when Warhol says his name and what he just did. It’s strange that we feel uncomfortable because he is performing an everyday action of eating something. However, silence is what makes It uncomfortable. He sometimes looks at the camera and other times looks shy and almost vulnerable while eating the burger.

The main point of the film in my opinion, however, is the idea of what is art? Pop art was formed because of the idea that every day things can be art. Art does not have to be unique so eating a hamburger could be art. The normal activities of everyday life can now be turned into art. Who is to question what is and isn’t art? Some people can see art in things that others can’t.

Warhol eating a burger from Burger King also shows that Americans are created equal. Warhol is an American born citizen who I believe took pride in being American. He wanted to show that celebrities eat the same food that regular American citizens eat. The film is digging deep into the American consumer culture. I think this is shown through the film because you expect something to happen during the film but the film just ends up being about a man eating a burger. The reason people watch this film even though it’s just a man eating a hamburger is because of Andy Warhol’s presence. People expect something greater because of a celebrity appearance. If It was shot with a man on the street people would walk away. However, people place celebrities on a pedestal and look up to celebrities even when they do everyday mundane things. The way Warhol moves in the film also shows his character and personality as an artist. He knows how to move an audience in a very simple way.