Snippets from the Infinite Cinema

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“Art is the enemy of the present; it always wants to change it by introducing other tenses. It alters the percieved world by introducing new rhythms, forgotten, ignored, invisible, impossible”
R. Murray Schafer

I finally finished my article on Arthur Lipsett (available here, in Dutch), which will be published in Gonzo Circus in January. It’s mostly an attempt to contextualise his work, referencing people like Siegried Kracauer, Warren S. McCulloch, George Ivanovich Gurdjieff and Henri Cartier-Bresson, who all seem to have had a profound impact on Lipsett’s view on the world and the potential of cinema. It also mentions the influence his own films had, in particular on George Lucas and Walter Murch, whose ideas on sound-image relationships and the power of interruption, multidimensionality and dislocation (see for example the dystopian science fiction parableTHX 1138) were surely to some extent aroused while watching Very Nice, Very Nice and 21-87.

Here are some of Lipsett’s films (highly compressed video, available on Ubuweb)

    21-87 (1964, 16mm, b&w, sound, 10’)

A wry comment on a machine-dominated society, filled with dystopian symbolism. This film conveys Lipsett’s concern for an increasingly de-humanized civilization, foreshadowing his embryonic agoraphobia and subsequent withdrawal from public life. The title would be cited more than once in George Lucas’s work, serving, for example, as Princess Leia’s cell number in Star Wars.


    A Trip Down Memory Lane (1965, 16mm, b&w, sound, 12’)

A surrealist time capsule combining fifty years of newsreel footage, this film constitutes a brief, but explosive, tour of post-war technocracy. Lipsett’s first pure collage film, composed exclusively from stock image and sound from the National Film Board archives.


    Fluxes (1968, 16mm, b&w, sound, 24’)

Lipsett completed this film during a period of declining institutional support and increased psychological stress, which would result in more pessimistic, diffuse work. A “phantasmagoria of nothing”, based on a series of creative frictions between military motif, religious rhetoric, newsreel footage and obscure science fiction film dialogues.


    The Arthur Lipsett Project: A Dot on the Histomap (a documentary by Eric Gaucher, 2007)

“If you would look at these masks, they might remind you of someone you know. At first glance they might seem all different but if you thought about it for a while you could see that they are all really doing the same thing. What they are telling you, what they are telling me, is a kind of reminder that man is a human being with many kinds of different emotions, and travels, and skeems… whirling and twirling. They could be seen as if they were still snapshots of an actor going through a whole range of human experiences, and each frozen still would be like a mask, quite different from the others and yet it was the same man performing all those emotions. It makes you realize what a great multiplicity a man is, a strange creature inhabiting the earth, a dot on the histomap of evolution“
Arthur Lipsett


A few years ago the Global A released some of the soundtracks of Lipsett’s films on vinyl. Get them while you can (limited edition). In the meantime, you can listen to the MP3‘s.

Very Nice, Very Nice (The soundtrack of his first film, which Stanley Kublick called “one of the most imaginative and brilliant uses of the movie screen and soundtrack I have ever seen””. This was actually initially developped as a sound montage, entitled “Strangely Elated”)
[audio:http://arthurlipsett.com/VERYNICEVERYNICE.mp3]

21-87
[audio:http://arthurlipsett.com/21-87.mp3]

A Trip Down Memory Lane
[audio:http://arthurlipsett.com/ATRIPDOWNMEMORYLANE.mp3]

Freefall (This soundtrack was supposed to be composed in collaboration with John Cage. However, after an exchange of letters, Cage withdrew his participation. He wrote: Lipsett deed voor de soundtrack van deze film trouwens een beroep op componist John Cage, die zich na een korte briefwisseling echter terugtrok uit onvrede met Lipsett’s controledrang. Cage schreef: “For the past ten to fifteen years I have been concerned with not controlling a continuity of sounds, and certainly not controlling the togetherness of sound and images, sounds and stories, or sounds and movements of dancers, I am insistent upon letting things go together… Your letter makes me fear that you do not take this attitude.”)
[audio:http://arthurlipsett.com/FREEFALL.mp3]

Whose Is This Song?

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I just went to some presentations in the context of the Collaborative Online Video project, organised by the Brussels based collective Constant (more about that later, perhaps). During the discussions afterwords, Seda Gürses mentioned an interesting documentary, Whose Is This Song? (2003) by Bulgarian filmmaker Adela Peeva, as a starting point to think about issues of ownership and accountability in a collaborative context.

The film documents a journey through the Balkans to unearth the origins of a melody the filmmaker heard during a dinner party. At the dinner table, where she, herself Bulgarian, was with a Greek, a Serb, a Turk and a Macedonian, it became apparent that they all knew the words and could sing along – in their own language. The question arose: whose song is it? They couldn’t agree on its origin, so Peeva set out to make a documentary about her journey across the Balkans to discover where the song really came from. In the documentary, the song itself “transforms” as it moves through the Balkans (from Bulgaria to Turkey, Greece, Albania, Macedonia, Bosnia, Serbia, and back to Bulgaria), from love song to military march to religious hymn to revolutionary anthem. It’s about a beautiful gypsy woman who stole the hearts of the town’s men; it is sung by the marching armies of Islam as they spread their religion into the region; it’s in celebration of a local festival day. Each group claims the song as its own, insisting that only they could have composed such a beautiful piece. Through the twists and turns of the filmmaker’s quest, the Balkan peninsula reveals its diversity and the wealth and power of its traditions.

The film also speaks about the complex and sensitive political situation in the balkan region. At the end of the film there’s a scene in which Peeva plays the Bosnian version of the song for a pub filled with Serbians. At first they are silent, but then the place explodes with anger. They accuse her of being a troublemaker, attempt to smash her camera and threaten physical violence. The idea of her playing them the enemy’s “theft” of their beloved song, which was doubly insulting to them because the Bosnian version was a jihad song, and they were all Orthodox Christians. The song dredged up lingering hatreds from a decade of war in neighboring Bosnia. At a St. George’s Day festival in Bulgary, Peeva tells a group of teenagers that some people say their beloved song originated with the Turks—this immediately after they brag that they’d like to slit the throats of any Turks they see. Unsurprisingly, people get pissed off. Word gets out that she’s a “Turk-lover”, and the people turn on her, despite their shared nationality. One man threatens to hang her from a nearby oak tree. Again, she inadvertently dredged up long-held animosity, this time going back to the fall of the Ottoman Empire. The film isn’t really about who the song originated with, though; it’s about how the song as cultural commodity is used in the service of nationalism. In the finale, as the Bulgarians attempt to put out a fire started by fireworks (a fire that likely saved Peeve’s hide), the filmmaker despairs of there ever being peace in the Balkans.

Here’s a trailer for the film:

The melody obviously made its way out of the balkans too. Listen for example to Boney m’s ‘rasputin’:

I was told there are versions in jiddish as well.

The entire film is on YouTube (badly compressed)
Part 1:

Part 2:

Part 3:

Part 4:

Part 5:

Part 6:

Part 7:

Chopped & Screwed

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I’m about 10 years late, I know, but I finally discovered (via Claire Chanel and Burncopy.com) the amazing “Screwed & Chopped” genre, which emerged in the Houston hip-hop scene in the 1990s. It’s based on slowing down the tempo and applying techniques such as skipping beats, record scratching, stop-time, and effecting portions of the music to make a “chopped-up” version of the original. It may not come as a surprise that the consumption of large amounts of weed and especially “lean” or “purple drank” – a mixture of cough syrup containing codeine and promethazine, soft drinks and Jolly Rancher candy, very popular in the hip-hop community of the southern United States – has something to do with the development of that particular style. Slowing down songs and beats was supposed to recreate its effect. The style was invented by one Robert Earl Davis Jr., a.k.a. DJ Screw. “One day he picked up a Mantronix album — that’s the first thing I heard [slowed down],” remembers Big Bub, who runs Screwed Up Records & Tapes. “He played it at a slow pitch and really liked the way it sounded. He kept messing with it, messing with it, and about a year later, he made a [whole] tape all slowed down.” Devin the Dude (cool name!!) says: “He slowed it down so the bang would be a little harder and deeper. When the music was like that, you could just creep and ride around all night.” Originally, this process involved mixing two copies of the same record, slowed down either on the turntables using pitch shift or, later, through use of an after-mixer device. Phasing, flanging and echo effects were originally the result of the two records being played at millisecond intervals. The result is a heavy, drowsy groove that, over the last 15 years, has exerted a major influence on Southern hip-hop culture, and beyond. Guys like Lil Wayne even release special Chopped & Screwed versions of their records. Check out the documentary ‘Screwed in Houston’.

I really like the ghostly, alienated qualities of some of these ‘Chopped & Screwed’ remixes (in the same way I like some of the stuff of William Basinski, The Caretaker or Saule – you should check out what this guy from Brussels does with James Last records). Here are some examples I dug up on YouTube. I’m sure there’s better stuff out there (tips anyone?).

This is Karthik Pandian’s ‘Slow Jamz’ (2006), in which he applies the logic of “screwed” music to video, manipulating the speed and duration of footage of Michael Jordan. Described by Pandian as an elegy to pop-cultural phenomena of the past and obsolete media formats, the video is made up of several clips from the 1987 NBA Slam Dunk Contest, digitized from VHS tape by an anonymous Internet user and downloaded by the artist. The footage was then slowed down and the original soundtrack replaced with a version of Kanye West’s song ‘Slow Jamz’, “screwed” by Pandian.Also interesting: Claire Chanel’s interpretation of Screwed & Chopped, R&B tunes stretched to the edge of aural legibility.

[audio:http://clairechanel.com/tripleslow/aaliyah-i_care_4_u_(triple_slow_screw).mp3]
based on Aaliya, ‘I care 4 u’

[audio:http://clairechanel.com/tripleslow/ciara-promise_(triple_slow_screw).mp3]
based on Ciara, ‘promise’

And, finally, this is Claire Chanel Music remix of the video for ‘Stay Fly’ by Three 6 Mafia, “distilled to obsessive repetition”.

Variations on a Theme

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If you liked Oliver Laric’s ‘50 50‘ videos I posted some time ago, you’ll probably dig this one as well. In the installation ‘a couple thousand short films about Glenn Gould’ (2007), Cory Arcangel rescores Johann Sebastian Bach’s famous 1741 composition the ‘Goldberg Variations’, based on nearly 2000 clips of amateur musicians’ performances taken from video sharing web sites such as YouTube. Each note of the score jumps between individual clips of different musicians, with each screen carrying a separate melody line. The final effect is an almost hallucinatory montage – a flood of images which we are engulfed into. Arcangel allows anonymous guitarists, keyboard players, tuba players and other enthusiasts from around the world to unintentionally collaborate in recreating Bach’s masterpiece.

From an article in Frieze (on Paul Morley’s essay in the book ‘Cory Arcangel: a couple thousand short films about Glenn Gould‘:
“Does user-generated content make possible a new form of artistry, prefigured in both Gould’s approach to the recording studio and in Wendy Carlos’s synthesizer renditions of Bach? Or are Gould and Carlos being positioned as anticipating the dissolution of the individual artist in an anonymous digital network?

(…)

As Kirby indicates, far from leading to new forms, user-generated content has tended towards retrenchment and consolidation – for example, YouTube (for the most part) recycles old material, or else provides a space in which millions of aspirant stars ape idols whose status – established by the old systems of distribution and valuation – remains secure. Instead of being cowed by the relentless demands for viewer participation, both cultural producers and the much-derided ‘gatekeepers’ need to find new ways of asserting the primacy of production over consumption. They need to find ways of stepping outside seamless circuits in which ‘everyone’ is implicated but no-one gets what they want. In another catalogue essay for a couple thousand short films…, curator Steven Bode argues that Arcangel’s installation is ‘less an advert for networked participatory culture than an index of people’s increasing atomisation.’ If postmodern culture presents a kind of networked solipsism, perhaps what Gould can now teach us most is the value of disappearance from the screens that eagerly seek our image. Gould, who famously retired early from concert playing, showed that sometimes it is necessary to withdraw in order to find better ways to connect.”

NYT spoof

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In an elaborate hoax, pranksters distributed thousands of free copies of a spoof edition of The New York Times on Wednesday morning at busy subway stations around the city of NY. The paper, an exact replica of the NYT, includes International, National, New York, and Business sections, as well as editorials, corrections, and a number of advertisements, including a recall notice for all cars that run on gasoline. There is also a timeline describing the gains brought about by eight months of progressive support and pressure, culminating in President Obama’s “Yes we REALLY can” speech. (The paper is post-dated July 4, 2009.) The hoax was accompanied by a Web site that mimics the look of The Times’s real Web site. A page of the spoof site contained links to dozens of progressive organizations, which were also listed in the print edition. Later on that day, the Yes Men issued a statement claiming credit for the prank.

According to the NYT’s City Room blog, there is a history of spoofs and parodies of The Times. Probably the best-known is one unveiled two months into the 1978 newspaper strike. A whole cast of characters took part in that parody, including the journalist Carl Bernstein, the author Christopher Cerf, the humorist Tony Hendra and the Paris Review editor George Plimpton. And for April Fool’s Day in 1999, the British business executive Richard Branson printed 100,000 copies of a parody titled “I Can’t Believe It’s Not The New York Times.” Also that year, a 27-year-old Princeton alumnus named Matthew Polly, operating a “guerrilla press” known as Hard Eight Publishing, published a 32-page spoof of the newspaper.

see video

inserted 2008-11-26T10:51:37+00:00

From Electronic Frontier Foundation:

Could the lawyers be far behind? Not surprisingly, the corporate targets of the parody were not pleased. Now, in what is becoming an all-too-familiar trend, one of those corporations has attempted to shut down the site by putting pressure on what is often the weakest link in the online speech chain: the domain name registrar. Stymied by the First Amendment and other legal impediments, those who don’t appreciate critical commentary and other “objectionable” online content have found intermediaries — providers of indispensable technical services like domain name registration and web hosting — much easier to intimidate.

This time, the complaining (and overreaching) party was the South African diamond conglomerate De Beers, the target of a critical fake ad on the web version of the New York Times spoof announcing that diamond purchases “will enable us to donate a prosthetic for an African whose hand was lost in diamond conflicts.” Miffed by the criticism, De Beers responded not by confronting the authors (whose parody is protected by the First Amendment) but instead by threatening their Swiss-based domain name registrar, Joker.com. De Beers has demanded that Joker.com disable the spoof website’s domain name or face liability for trademark infringement.

This certainly isn’t the first time that a sore target of criticism has threatened an internet intermediary in order to take down content it didn’t like. The motivation is simple: all too often, the intermediary will prove to be unwilling to stand up for the rights of its customers. For example:

* In September, 2008, the state of Kentucky initiated an ex parte proceeding aimed at seizing 141 domain names pointing to overseas websites permitting online gambling, arguing that the domain names were illegal “gambling devices” under Kentucky law. Without giving the domain name owners an adequate opportunity to defend themselves, the trial court ordered the registrars with control over the targeted domain names to transfer them to the state, a decision the court affirmed in October. Upon receipt of the court’s order, some of the registrars (such as GoDaddy) who were likely outside of the court’s jurisdiction nonetheless locked the domain names and purportedly transferred control to the Kentucky court. (EFF filed an amicus brief arguing that the orders were unconstitutional; the matter is pending appeal.)
* In January, 2008, Swiss bank Julius Baer filed suit against (among others) Dynadot, the domain name registrar with which the domain name wikileaks.org was registered. The Wikileaks website to which the domain name pointed — a self-styled “uncensorable Wikipedia for untraceable mass document leaking and analysis” — hosted (and still hosts) documents which anonymous third-party posters argue document financial wrongdoing. Instead of challenging the operators of the Wikileaks site directly, Julius Baer targeted Dynadot which quickly agreed to lock and permanently disable its customer’s domain name. (In response to briefs such as the one filed by EFF pointing out the illegality of the court’s order approving of the ill-advised agreement, the district court ultimately dissolved the permanent injunction, leading Julius Baer to dismiss its case.)
* In December, 2006, on behalf of its affiliate radio station KSFO-AM, media giant ABC sent a cease and desist letter to 1 & 1 Internet, the then-host of the blog www.spockosbrain.com, a site that criticized what its author argued was offensive and violent rhetoric broadcast by KSFO. Despite the fact that it had no risk of liability, 1 & 1 Internet promptly shut down Spocko’s site in response to receiving the threatening letter. (EFF subsequently represented Spocko, successfully moving him to Computer Tyme, a web hosting company that promised to stand up to future threats.)

Intermediaries frequently argue (incorrectly) that they have no choice but to shut down domain names or sites when they receive a legal complaint. But they do have a choice, at least in the United States. As EFF has explained to De Beers, U.S. law provides ample protection for intermediaries, in large part to ensure that online speech and commerce continues to thrive. For example, in 1996, Congress passed Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act which immunizes internet intermediaries from most kinds of liability associated with the content that their customers place on their own sites. Similarly, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (passed in 1998) provides a safe harbor from copyright infringement liability for intermediaries who follow straightforward procedures in response to valid takedown notices. With these strong legal protections, intermediaries can and should refuse to respond to pressure from companies like De Beers.

Will the poignant work of the New York Times parodists stay up for the world to see? Will other critical online speakers be silenced by improper threats against their virtual soapboxes? The answer may ultimately depend more on the ability of targets to intimidate domain name registrars than on the legality of the underlying speech itself.