vespers2

Program of September 9th:
Tony Conrad - Film Feedback
Beverly and Tony Conrad - Straight and Narrow
Anthony McCall - Line Describing a Cone

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Tony Conrad - Film Feedback
1974, 16mm, black & white, silent, 14 minutes

"Made with a film-feedback team which I directed at Antioch College. Negative image is shot from a small rear-projection screen, the film comes out of the camera continuously (in the dark room) and is immediately processed, dried, and projected on the screen by the team. What are the qualities of film that may be made visible through feedback?"
Tony Conrad

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Beverly and Tony Conrad - Straight and Narrow
1970, 16mm, black & white, sound, 10 minutes

"Straight and Narrow is a study in subjective color and visual rhythm. Although it is printed on black and white film, the hypnotic pacing of the images will cause viewers to experience a programmed gamut of hallucinatory color effects. Straight And Narrow uses the flicker phenomenon not as an end in itself, but as an effectuator of other related phenomena. In this film the colors which are so illusory in The Flicker are visible and under the programmed control of the filmmaker. Also, by using images which alternate in a vibrating flickering schedule, a new impression of motion and texture is created."
Beverly and Tony Conrad

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Anthony McCall - Line Describing a Cone
1973, 16mm, black & white, silent, 30 minutes

"Line describing a cone is what I term a solid light film. It is dealing with the projected light-beam itself, rather than treating the light-beam as a mere carrier of coded information, which is decoded when it strikes a flat surface (the screen).
The film exists only in the present: the moment of projection. It refers to nothing beyond this real time.
The form of attention required on the part of the viewer is unprecedented. No longer is one viewing position as good as any other. For this film every viewing position presents a different aspect. The viewer therefore has a participatory role in apprehending the event: he or she can - indeed needs to move around, relative to the emerging light-form." Anthony McCall

"Anthony McCall's Line Describing a Cone is a film which demanded to be looked at, not on the screen, but in the space of the auditorium. What was at issue was the establishment of a cone of light between the projector and the screen, out of what was initially one pencil-like beam of light. I consider it the most brilliant case of an observation on the essentially sculptural quality of every cinematic situation."
P. Adams Sitney, Artforum

"Line Describing a Cone's engagement with space, and its emphasis on projection - the light beam - marks it as unique not only within the history of experimental film, but within the history of all time-based, moving image work during that period."
Chrissie Iles, Curator of Film and Video, Whitney Museum of American Art