Film Movement

[malachi_lui]

Amazing news about The Hole, even if I’m in the minority who thinks it’s one of Tsai’s lesser films (I think The Wayward Cloud does much of the same stuff but far better). I didn’t even realise that it’d never had a proper New York theatrical run, and that old print that was kicking around last year (pretty sure it’s from Fox Lorber) is pretty beat.

Big World will surely release The Hole on disc through their Vinegar Syndrome partnership, as they did with Rebels of the Neon God.

[Kauno]

A complicating factor with Tsai's films is that Tsai hates home video and says if it were up to him his movies wouldn't be available for non-theatrical viewing.

I respect his opinion, but for some people home viewing is the only practical option. Due to health reasons, sitting through a film that lasts two hours without a piss break simply isn't possible. Being able to pause a movie at home makes it accessible in a way that a theatrical screening isn't. I also don't miss the 10–15 minutes of commercials before the film starts. Or are movies reserved only for youngsters and for those who don't suffer from prostate problems?

[MichaelB]

I suspect some filmmakers would gladly remove the option to pause a film! David Lynch infamously insisted on no chapter stops when he had contractual control over the presentation of home video releases.

Peter Kubelka is one of the most extreme cases, in that he has never sanctioned the transfer of any of his films to another medium, has made it clear that he never will, and that there's apparently a clause in his will that will prevent anyone from legally doing it after his death. He says that he's fully aware that this means that he'll lose out on potential revenue, but as far as he was concerned his work was conceived as films to be projected in a darkened room by a flickering projector beam, and that's that.

[denti alligator]

I understand Kubelka's position. His film's really are about the materiality of celluloid. The flicker effect, which is slightly noticeable in projections at less than 24fps, could presumably be approximated by encoding a file with black frames. The exact ration would have to be determined. Has anyone ever done this?

[tenia]

I don't think so, though maybe on some experimental movies whose video releases don't get as much visibility ?
I know about restorations made from original negatives but still replicating markers for roll changes (in Eastern Europe, notably, though I haven't seen this for some time), but flicker ?

[beamish14]

Amazing news about The Hole, even if I’m in the minority who thinks it’s one of Tsai’s lesser films (I think The Wayward Cloud does much of the same stuff but far better). I didn’t even realise that it’d never had a proper New York theatrical run, and that old print that was kicking around last year (pretty sure it’s from Fox Lorber) is pretty beat.

Big World will surely release The Hole on disc through their Vinegar Syndrome partnership, as they did with Rebels of the Neon God.

I really hope this new print screens in Los Angeles. UCLA’s archival print of it sold out very quickly during a retrospective of his work

[ryannichols7]

Also, this was a few months ago but I overlooked it at the time:

Could they do Tsai's What Time Is It There? while they're at it? It's essentially a sequel to The River.

Tsai's films really need some love. So disappointing that The Hole couldn't even get a Blu-ray release when it was restored a couple of years ago.

A complicating factor with Tsai's films is that Tsai hates home video and says if it were up to him his movies wouldn't be available for non-theatrical viewing. Since most of his films are co-produced by others who don't share that opinion, it isn't up to him, but I believe the rights to some have reverted to or been acquired by Tsai's company. I'm guessing The River isn't one of them, since Film Movement doesn't strike me as the type to acquire a film exclusively for theatrical distribution.

In the case of The Hole, the U.S. distributor (Big World) had a new print struck last year that's opening at Lincoln Center on July 10th. No idea if they intend to do a Blu down the line, though they currently distribute an old SD master on DVD and VOD.

genuinely fascinating that he has this opinion considering he participated in the Second Run and Grasshopper releases for Goodbye Dragon Inn and Days

[swo17]

He even created the cover art for Second Run

[Matt]

He’s probably one of those creators who thinks “if it’s going to happen with or without my involvement, I’d rather be involved.” Like when record labels reissue an album or a greatest hits package, the artist might want to be involved so that it at least meets their minimum standards.

[zedz]

I understand Kubelka's position. His film's really are about the materiality of celluloid. The flicker effect, which is slightly noticeable in projections at less than 24fps, could presumably be approximated by encoding a file with black frames. The exact ration would have to be determined. Has anyone ever done this?

As I understand it, Kubelka's objections go beyond just flicker and also have to do with such fundamental aspects of the media as the source of light (film = the human eye perceiving light projected onto a screen / video = light projected at the eye). Also, the flicker he is concerned about isn't just perceptible flicker (e.g. black frames or slower projection speeds), but the darkness between every single frame (every film is 50% darkness), which in his opinion creates a very different physiological impact than the continuity of video.

In Monument Film, he created a movie that could not exist in digital form (it would just be a black screen, with the two visual components cancelling one another out perfectly.) At his age, that's likely to be his last word on the subject!

I don't see it as a big deal, really. There are plenty of artists who utilise the intrinsic and unique characteristics of video to create works that are just as indigenous to their medium. An oil painting doesn't have to work as a watercolour or photographic reproduction.

I'd argue that having a DVD of Arnulf Rainer would be as meaningless as having one of Line Describing a Cone or Light Music.

[denti alligator]

But that IS the flicker effect, isn’t it? Shutter blackout. And it’s not really 50%, but closer to 40% as I understand it. Still, why not calculate it exactly and encode a disc for some film accordingly? With 60+hz refresh rates, it would totally be possible. With Kubelka‘s work, that would check one box. Using a home projector instead of a TV would check the second box.

P.S. It would be fun to create one's own digital version of Arnulf Rainer by calculating the number of black and white frames and shutter blackout as precisely as possible!

[MichaelB]

Talking of which, are there any recordings of Karlheinz Stockhausen's Gruppen that make full spatial sense? Obviously plain stereo isn't going to cut it given that the physical positioning of the three distinct groups of instrumentalists is an integral part of the work.

[zedz]

But that IS the flicker effect, isn’t it? Shutter blackout. And it’s not really 50%, but closer to 40% as I understand it. Still, why not calculate it exactly and encode a disc for some film accordingly? With 60+hz refresh rates, it would totally be possible. With Kubelka‘s work, that would check one box. Using a home projector instead of a TV would check the second box.

P.S. It would be fun to create one's own digital version of Arnulf Rainer by calculating the number of black and white frames and shutter blackout as precisely as possible!

I added an extra bit to my original post that kind of addresses this. What would be the point? I think trying to recreate the Mono Lisa out of Lego would be more artistically rewarding.

[denti alligator]

I think it raises all kinds of interesting questions about the ontology of film. Assuming you’re using a projector and not a TV, the experience of a digital Arnulf Rainer would be far closer to the experience of a celluloid film print projection than a Lego Mona Lisa to the original. Phenomenologically, the experience of the visuals should be almost identical. (I forget if the audio is the sound of the exposed frames or an added feature.) A better analogy might be the digital recording of a piece of music versus its live performance. Is there a difference? Absolutely. In each case, though, you will have heard the music.

[ryannichols7]

He even created the cover art for Second Run

that's right. would be game for him to do more.

He’s probably one of those creators who thinks “if it’s going to happen with or without my involvement, I’d rather be involved.” Like when record labels reissue an album or a greatest hits package, the artist might want to be involved so that it at least meets their minimum standards.

and I can respect this take at least, there's at least a few bands I like who were pretty anti greatest hits but got involved once they got word the label was producing one. as long as he's not actively withholding releases of his films (which doesn't seem to be the case so far), I can live with it

[zedz]

I think it raises all kinds of interesting questions about the ontology of film. Assuming you’re using a projector and not a TV, the experience of a digital Arnulf Rainer would be far closer to the experience of a celluloid film print projection than a Lego Mona Lisa to the original. Phenomenologically, the experience of the visuals should be almost identical. (I forget if the audio is the sound of the exposed frames or an added feature.) A better analogy might be the digital recording of a piece of music versus its live performance. Is there a difference? Absolutely. In each case, though, you will have heard the music.

I think it depends entirely on the film / music, and obviously in most cases the distinction is academic. I had no idea that I’d never actually heard Ligeti’s Atmospheres properly until I attended a performance. But once I had, I couldn’t honestly say that any recording truly represented the piece. Similarly, I don’t believe a recording of a Tony Conrad drone performance could give any real sense of what’s really going on sonically in the room.

[MichaelB]

I’ve been lucky enough to hear the vast majority of Ligeti’s output performed live (much of it courtesy of a big London retrospective in the mid-1990s), and I completely agree: recordings are smudged photocopies. Better than nothing, of course, but they don’t hold a candle to the live versions.

[denti alligator]

Yeah, the Tony Conrad example is a good one.

[Mr Sausage]

I think what we're talking about is the work/text distinction. Like, the text is the piece of art in itself, but the work is whatever specific copy (or recording or reproduction) you happen to've experienced. So if your CD has a scratch on it and jumps a moment, that's your specific text that someone else with the same CD hasn't technically heard. But you've both equally heard the work.

[denti alligator]

That distinction seems less relevant in the realm of visual art, where there usually is an original. There is no original Ligeti's Atmospheres or Schubert's first piano trio or whatever. There's only a score that needs to be performed. Of course, as Benjamin hammered home, with visual art the original also disappears with the advent of photography. Which brings us back to medium specificity. If every photograph or film is always already a reproduction, because there is no original, what difference does it make what medium is the foundation of that reproduction--so long as the visual experience is the same? Kubelka seems almost to want to introduce the aura to cinema by insisting on the ritual of celluloid projection.

[ballmouse]

For photography nerds, this may be analogous to those devotees of slide film who insist on projecting it (yes, the old fashioned way with the slide carousel and a projector). The same frame on a light table, projected, scanned, and printed will not feel exactly the same. I've heard some of that is the bulb, but I'm no expert. And while you can correct the image digitally, there is some sense that the feeling is different. This is just a single still image. I can imagine there is something unique about projected film. The difference between Kubelka and these photographers may just be that a typical photographer is excited someone wants to see their images and will disregard the medium to share it with as many people as possible.

[MichaelB]

Kubelka seems almost to want to introduce the aura to cinema by insisting on the ritual of celluloid projection.

He's always been cheerfully open about that!

(I interviewed him once, and cutting the end result down to the word-count pittance that I'd been allocated was physically painful.)

[Mr Sausage]

That distinction seems less relevant in the realm of visual art, where there usually is an original. There is no original Ligeti's Atmospheres or Schubert's first piano trio or whatever. There's only a score that needs to be performed. Of course, as Benjamin hammered home, with visual art the original also disappears with the advent of photography. Which brings us back to medium specificity. If every photograph or film is always already a reproduction, because there is no original, what difference does it make what medium is the foundation of that reproduction--so long as the visual experience is the same? Kubelka seems almost to want to introduce the aura to cinema by insisting on the ritual of celluloid projection.

Well the text is not the 'original'. The text is an abstract type; its existence is independant of any particular realization, be that a particular painting, manuscript, photograph, or piece of celluloid. It's a kind of possibility. The work is also an abstract type, but it's just the text as produced/realized.

Works are bound in space and time in a way texts are not (ontologically speaking). But a text does have empirical conditions to which it belongs, like a language with a specific history and geography, or a set of styles and concepts historically/culturally located, or instruments historically and culturally located, etc. The text of a film requires the invention of film, basically. So a text has constraints. A work inherits these constraints, as well as other general properties like abstractness, historical and geographical context, while importing its own spatial and temporal constraints.

Which is all an overly complex way of saying that even Kubelka's 'original' or celluloid version is just an instantiation, or realized version, of the abstract text. And it too is subject to temporal and and spatial constraints, including the fact that no two projectors are exactly alike, and that celluloid changes over time through use.

Kubelka seems just to be trying to further constrain the work by limiting the number of realizations of it and by limiting the way these realizations can be experienced. I don't know a lot about his ideas, but it seems to me that, rather than approaching an abstract purity ala a text, what he's doing is using scarcity to raise the value/prominence of a work or works. I know Benjamin attributed to originals and such an 'aura', whatever that is, but the idea of multiplicity isn't a problem once you start thinking of works as realizations rather than copies of a more valuable original.

Some works are more preferable than others. A book missing pages or a CD that skips is less preferable than works without those features. So maybe Kubelka's constraints make for more aesthetically pleasing works, or works more aligned with his particular aesthetics, than otherwise. But that's a matter of taste rather than ontology.

[denti alligator]

I understand but was confused by your terminology, which I falsely assumed was a non-theoretical one (a work is conceived and then realized as text). The theoretical distinction I’m familiar with is from Barthes, but what you describe doesn’t entirely correspond to his conception, either, insofar as it can be pinned down (what with the slippage between object and methodology). Though it’s been a while since I read the essay in question.

I’m not so sure Kubelka wants to constrain the number of realizations. He believes the phenomenological experience of his films is not the same if they are not projected from a celluloid print. I’m trying to push back a little against that. On the one hand all films (not just his) appear differently when projected from a real print. On the other hand, digital technology has made incredible strides in minimizing these differences. No one who has seen a DCP of a restoration of a 35mm film in the theaters would claim the experience was dramatically different from a screening of a restored 35mm print. The main difference would be shutter blackout, and that, I was suggesting above, could actually be added to a DCP. Truthfully, even without it, I question whether the experience of Kubelka‘s films would be much different. I could be wrong. I just spent a weekend at a nitrate film festival and it sure felt like I was seeing films like I had never seen them before. Still, I suspect that I would not be able to tell the difference between a DCP and a 35mm print. It reminds me a little of the analog vs digital debates in the audio community. (And I’m a vinyl lover!)

[Red Screamer]

I’m fairly tech ignorant, have never lived in a major hub for celluloid, & am too young to remember when films were all distributed that way — and I still find it hard to imagine how cinephiles (including multiple friends of mine) could ever confuse DCP and 35mm when projected. I don’t personally have a default preference between them, and always roll my eyes when fetishists say you haven’t “really seen” a more or less traditional film until you’ve seen it on a print. In Boston and New York, for example, I’ve seen several faded, low-contrast, and degraded prints of films with recent digital restorations that surely would have looked better on DCP. On the other hand, I’ll never forget having my breath taken away by a brand new print of Black Tuesday or an old one of Docks of New York or the 16mm of any hand-painted Brakhage I’ve caught over the years. But the presentations are two different things.

The difference gets far more extreme for a huge swath of the body of (mostly 16mm) experimental cinema. On that point, it’s time to give credence to the celluloid purists. I also doubt digital could entirely recreate what Kubelka was going for. To quote myself from the 1960 thread:

Arnulf Rainer (which will make my list) cries out to be seen on film in a theater, even moreso than The Flicker does. It did nothing for me when I saw it at home despite Kubelka's talent for brain-scratching irregular rhythms still coming through. But on 16mm it blew me away, the black frames throwing the audience into complete darkness and the white frames so bright that it felt like I was staring into the sun.

It really is something of a physiological experiment being performed on you. And we have to remember that Kubelka is intentionally using the medium and tools (of projected theatrical film) incorrectly: a projector emits an incredibly bright light that ends up tempered to a pleasing level when It’s filtered through an image on celluloid. But Kubelka’s clear leader provides no such protective intermediary.

DCPs are also not able to recreate fully blacks and shadows since they’re emitting light in a different way. Blacks tend to get represented as a slightly pale gray imitation. I remember some restoration experts saying this has been changing/somewhat fixed recently but I haven’t noticed those results yet myself.