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Helsinki’s finest shrine to cinema,
the legendary and recently refurbished Orion cinema, provides
an appropriate setting for our three special screenings that probe
the shared history of music and experimental cinema.
Vintage Avanto 1
In this series, King Celluloid - i.e. film itself - has the starring
role. Peter Kubelka’s Adebar, Schwechater
and Arnulf Reiner were originally commercial films that
his clients (a Viennese bar, a brewery and painter Reiner) refused
to approve. These dense masterpieces are a combination of Anton
Webern influenced serial thinking and sheer optic terror. Malcolm
Le Grice used the latest technology in his commissioned film
Threshold. The hypnotic loops of customs officials conducting
a nocturnal raid were produced with the help of the then streamlined
Fortran computer of The Atomic Energy Institute - in secret, outside
official computing hours.
Film titles like Rohfilm (“Raw Film”), Film
In Which There Appear Sprocket Holes, Edge Lettering and Dirt
Particles, etc are pretty self-explanatory. The so-called
“pure film” is, paradoxically enough, very often the
dirtiest of all. The Hein couple have demanded that all
new film prints of Rohfilm be made from previously screened
prints, preferably as scratched as possible, and not, under any
circumstances, from the original negative. The programme is concluded
by a real gem. Tony Conrad’s The Flicker, made
up of only black and white frames and Conrad’s own brilliant
electronic soundtrack, crystallizes the themes of Vintage Avanto
1. At its most beautiful, cinema is the delicately flickering
play of light and shadow.
Peter Kubelka: Adebar (Austria, 1957,
1 min)
Peter Kubelka: Schwechater (Austria, 1957-58, 1 min)
Peter Kubelka: Arnulf Reiner (Austria, 1960, 7 min)
Owen Land (a.k.a. George Landow): Film In Which There Appear
Sprocket Holes, Edge Lettering, Dirt Particles, etc
(USA, 1965-66, 5 min)
Birgit & Wilhelm Hein: Rohfilm (Germany, 1968, 20 min,
m: Christian Michelis)
Malcolm Le Grice: Threshold (Great Britain, 1971, 10 min)
Tony Conrad: The Flicker (USA, 1966, 30 min, m: Tony Conrad)
Vintage Avanto 2
This screening fulfils the criteria of even the most demanding
animation devotee. John Stehura’s Cibernetik 5.3
is the 2001: A Space Odyssey of avant-garde film. Its early
vision of higher intelligence somewhere “out there”
is startling in its colourful splendour, and it may have been
a direct influence on the
visual imagery of the metaphysical journey through time in Kubrick’s
classic. Yantra looks like computer animation but is, in
fact, the result of almost ten years of meticulous drawing and
painting. James Whitney has described his work as “a
sincere attempt at visualizing yoga experiences”. Lis
Rhodes has used nothing but Letraset transfer lettering and
a film printer to produce her Dresden Dynamo - and its
optical soundtrack. Robert Breer, who started out as a
painter, contributes the flicker impression 69 and the
“autobiographical” Fist Fight that consists of
over 13,000 photographs and drawings. Ray Gun Virus and
Synchromy are milestones of formalist cinema that force
the viewer to reasses concepts like “viewing experience”
and “tolerance”. Tony and Beverley Conrad’s
Straight & Narrow can be seen as a continuation of
The Flicker. In the hypnagogic visions of line animation,
time and place lose their significance once and for all.
James Whitney: Yantra (USA, 1957, 10
min)
Robert Breer: Fist Fight (USA, 1964, 9 min, m: Karlheinz
Stockhausen)
John Stehura: Cibernetik 5.3 (USA, 1961-65, 8 min, m: Tod
Dockstader)
Paul Sharits: Ray Gun Virus (USA, 1966, 14 min)
Robert Breer: 69 (USA, 1968, 5 min)
John Gruenberger: In Florescence (Great Britain, 1972,
6 min, m: Gil Melle)
Lis Rhodes: Dresden Dynamo (Great Britain, 1974, 5 min)
Norman McLaren: Synchromy (Great Britain/Canada, 1979,
8 min)
Tony & Beverley Conrad: Straight And Narrow (USA, 1971,
10 min, m: John Cale, Terry Riley)
Vintage Avanto 3
This screening features a Finnish rarity - an excellent structuralist
film produced by students at the Helsinki University of Art and
Design. “We set out to apply musical structure to cinematic
expression,” the collective of Pirjo Honkasalo, Timo Linnasalo
& co stated in 1967. Hyppy represents the humourous
side of Eino Ruutsalo and its energetic Donner/Kurenniemi
soundtrack is pure proto-Pan sonic. Bridges-Go-Round and
Mongoloid are great avant-garde classics and interesting
for their soundtracks alone. Louis and Bebe Barron were
way ahead of their time with their atonal electronic buzz, and
Mongoloid shows the eternally topical Devo at their most
comical. The final film of the three Orion screenings is the decadent,
“Egypt influenced” Flaming Creatures that really
does justice to the epithet 'legendary'. Regarded as indecent
and morally degenerate, it is still banned in many American states.
There has probably been more column inches written about the deranged
shenanigans of Jack Smith’s congregation than any
other underground film.
Shirley Clarke: Bridges-Go-Round (USA,
1958, 4 min, m: Louis & Bebe Barron)
Eino Ruutsalo: Hyppy (Finland, 1965, 5 min, m: Erkki Kurenniemi,
Otto Donner)
Timo Aarniala, Pirjo Honkasalo, Anki Lindqvist, Timo Linnasalo,
Inger Nylund, Erkki Seiro: The Whole Truth And Nothing But
The Truth (Finland, 1968, 3 min)
Bruce Conner: Mongoloid (USA, 1977, 4 min, m: Devo)
Jack Smith: Flaming Creatures (USA, 1962-63, 60 min, m:
Tony Conrad)
MT
Vintage Avanto 1 Screenings - Orion Cinema
Tuesday 6.11.2001 - 19:00
Friday 9.11.2001 - 21:00
Vintage Avanto
2 Screenings - Orion Cinema
Wednesday 7.11.2001 - 19:00
Saturday 9.11.2001 - 21:00
Vintage Avanto
3 Screenings - Orion Cinema
Thursday 8.11.2001 - 21:00
Sunday 11.11.2001 - 21:00
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