News You Can Bruise for 2013 December 2

Uh, anyway, Wives is a fun cinema verité piece where three ladies blow off married life for a while and goof off. Columbia professor Jane Gaines introduced the movie by describing the main characters' activities as a "rampage", and I think that's a little strong, but maybe by 1975 Norway standards it was a real barn-burner. The film is sort of a more commercial Celine and Julie go Boating. The humor is less reliant on in-jokes, the men are offscreen instead of totally absent, and it's ninety minutes long instead of three hours. It was pretty fun, but Celine and Julie is still the gold standard.

I guess I'm just stirring up trouble now, so I'll go back to Next of Kin. The centerpiece of the film for me was a long sequence in the house of the late paterfamilias, in which the family argues over who inherits what, then takes everything down off the walls, puts stickers on everything, and carries all the furniture out to their cars. That must have been incredibly difficult to film, and as someone who has lived through that event (minus the arguing) I gotta say Anja Breien nailed it.

Breien attended the screening and after the movie I asked her to talk about that bit. She said she likes "people carrying things" and the "surrealistic piles" you see in Heironymus Bosch paintings. It symbolizes the alienating effect of materialism, you see. She mentioned that it was really difficult to find all those props; it had to be real expensive silver, paintings by big-name artists, etc. Sounds like they didn't insure it, either. The perfect time-travel heist!

I must admit I'm warming to Marilyn Monroe. I also admit that's a weird thing for a heterosexual man to say, but keep in mind that for most of my life I experienced Marilyn Monroe entirely through the medium of cardboard cutouts used as decor for fake 50s diners. Then I saw her in Love Happy, where she's terrible, and Some Like it Hot, where she's not that great. But as I mentioned a year ago, she's awesome in All About Eve, and she's great in this movie as someone determined to get hers out of a sexist society.

Uh, the worst thing I can say about this movie is the plot bogs it down. I don't really care about the machinations or the milquetoast dudes or the tiara; I just want to see Russell and Monroe hit on some more dumb jocks and maybe commit a little light insurance fraud. Plus, we have a French courtroom conducting an inquiry in English, which may be the most unrealistic thing I've ever seen in a movie.

Finally, I'd just like to point out that this movie ends with the two female characters getting married to their milquetoast dudes, but then it zooms in and cuts the dudes out of frame, so it's just Russell and Monroe standing next to each other in their wedding dresses. I can only imagine what this film would have looked like with the Subtext Glasses they handed out during its original theatrical run.

The other problem is that the movie doesn't tell its actual, interesting story--it obliquely tells the space around the story. Which, okay, it's a Japanese film and I'm not opposed to this technique in general, and I liked the way the actual story was told through foreshadowing and implication, but it also means we never see the main character directly struggle with the central problem of the film: the fact that he's designing beautiful things that will kill people. It skips past that part to focus on a cheesy fictionalized love story. I did not consider that a good trade.

The worst offender was Woody Vasulka's Explanation (1974), a twelve-minute film in which a mesh is deformed and rotated before your eyes, over and over again. The mesh is the visual representation of a waveform which is also played aurally, and which always manifests as an obnoxious droning noise. Twelve minutes, folks. Explanation beats out Trent's Last Case to become the worst movie I've ever seen at the museum.

In the Q&A afterwards someone spoke up for the audience and demanded an explanation for Explanation. The answer actually made sense! Films like Explanation weren't meant to be screened in a theater. They were meant to be looped on a television in an art gallery. The essential affordance of an art gallery being that you can leave when you get tired of it, rather than sitting it out because there's an hour of hopefully better stuff afterwards.

It also would have helped if we'd seen the copyright date at the beginning of Explanation instead of the end, because most of the time I was thinking "This mesh deformation stuff would be groundbreaking for the early 70s, but if this turns out to be from 1986 I'm going to hack Woody Vasulka's Twitter account and make him follow Unicode Ebooks."

The other big sonic annoyance was that most of the films up to about 1972 had soundtracks featuring gratuitous sitar/gamelan/Japanese flute music that often didn't even match the animation. With no other point of reference, the new genre of computer graphics was comparable only to the wonders of LSD, so... toss in some hippy Eastern music! This interview about the film series puts it more diplomatically:

Science and Film: Can you discuss the early films’ fascination with Asian music and imagery?

Gregory Zinman: The influence of Asian music and imagery in early computer films can be traced to a couple of intertwining concerns. Following the horrors of the second world war, many people, including artists, were searching for different belief systems and ways of thinking about humanity’s place in the universe. This resulted, in part, in a flowering of interest in Eastern religions and philosophies, which in turn resulted in a number of cinematic works that simultaneously referenced other worlds and altered consciousnesses.

In a bit of cross-cultural revenge, we also saw a Japanese film (1969's Computer Movie No. 2), in which the soundtrack was Wendy Carlos's version of the third Brandenburg from Switched-On Bach, constantly interrupted by modem handshaking sounds. Make it stop!

Enough negativity. Let's cover the highlights, with links to full video or clips or at least semi-official pages about the films where possible.

First, the abstract stuff. I loved Mary Ellen Bute's very early, good-natured Abstronic (1952) and Mood Contrasts (1953). Especially the narrator at the beginning of Abstronic who explains the concept of computer art and then says "Enjoy yourself!" Here's a page with a couple clips of Mood Contrasts and I also discovered another great Bute film called Dada. Probably the cheeriest thing ever to be called Dada.

The Whitney family--John Sr., John Jr., and James, but sadly not my uncle Jon Whitney--were well represented and seem to have set the standard with films like Side Phase Drift (1965) and Lapis (1966) and Permutations (1968) and Arabesque (1975). The standard being "pointilism because otherwise the computer can't handle the math" and "slap some Asian music on the soundtrack."

But the champion of the abstract section IMO was Larry Cuba's work. 1978's 3/78 (Objects and Transformations) has a clear Whitney influence (moving dots + Japanese flute soundtrack), but by 1985 computer power had advanced to the point where he was able to create what ranks alongside Composition in Blue (1935) as one of my favorite abstract films of all time, the gloriously isometric Calculated Movements (here's a 30-second excerpt).

Cuba made Calculated Movements with a system called GRASS, which I believe he also used to create the animated Death Star infographic in Star Wars (1977). He was present for the screening, and in the Q&A I asked him if he still had the Calculated Movements source code and if there was a framework for running GRASS on modern computers. He dodged the first question and said no to the second--someone was working on something for Windows but the project died. He did mention that he considered Processing to be the successor to GRASS.

Between abstract and representative film sits the surreal, neon candy-colored demo reel for the computer graphics studio of Robert Abel and Associates. Their work was apparently described as "a psychedelic trip gone straight," and if I'm misremembering that quote, I'll use those exact words to describe it right now. We saw the 1974 reel and I can't find that exact one online, but here are a few later ones: 1981 and 1982

I especially enjoyed RAA's bonkers 1974 ad for 7-Up, which really lightened the mood after a half-hour of the Whitneys, I tell you what. Here's a YouTube playlist of their stuff. Here's a sequel to the 7-Up commercial with a McDonalds tie-in. Outstanding. This studio seems to have driven a big chunk of the late-70s early-80s aesthetic.

And now, my perrenial favorite, representative film. Yay!

• La Faim (1974) used computer animation and morphing to create a traditional-style (albeit avant-garde) animated short. I'm surprised the disturbing, grotesque faces on display in this film aren't used in more memes. (See sample meme to the right.)
• Vol Libre (1980): This one really wowed 'em at SIGGRAPH with its fractal geometry. Bonus sci-fi connection: director Loren Carpenter says, "I used an antialiased version of this software to create the fractal planet in the Genesis Sequence of Star Trek 2, the Wrath of Khan."
• Voyager 2 Flyby (1981): We saw the second Saturn flyby, but YouTube also has the first Saturn flyby, as well as the 1986 sequel about Uranus and 1989's chiling "Neptune and Triton".

  Jim Blin, creator of the Saturn flyby film, said, "Our storyboard was the NASA flight plan." (He wasn't there; the guy introducing the films told us that he said this.) The Voyager flyby film was apparently the first time computer graphics were shown on the nightly news as part of the news, rather than just in interstitals and 7-up commercials from Robert Abel and Associates.

• Human Vectors (1982): This isn't a great work of art, but it was filmed off of a Vectrex, so it looks like nothing else in the show. It was apparently rescued by the New Museum's recent XFR STN project. I laughed at the C debugging joke.
• Big Electric Cat (1982): An 80s rock video. Not that great but I'm including it here because it's so weird. One of the directors was present and he introduced the video by saying: "It was the 80s." It sure was.
• Adventures in Success (1983): Now this is more like it! A funny music video for a good rock song. It's catchy and toe-tapping and satirical and also very 80s. Highly recommended.
• No No Nooky TV (1987): The journal of a love affair between a woman and her Amiga 1000. Funny and dirty and filled with the 16-color joy that flows from late-1980s computer paint programs. A triumph! Vimeo says the video is only 2:40, but the entire film is there.

I would be really interested to hear about the relationship between the demoscene and the computer film scene. I'm pretty sure there was no connection whatsoever, for a variety of reasons, but I would like to hear some people who came in to computer art through the "art" side talk about the stuff that came out from the "computer" side. I'm talking about the tension between Human Vectors (which is technically very skilled but nothing special artistically) and No No Nooky TV (which is clearly the work of a professional filmmaker but was made using only the programs that come loaded on the Amiga).

I didn't bring this up in Q&A because I figured no one would know what I was talking about, and if they did it would derail the whole Q&A. Perhaps I should have had more faith in computer animators. I guess I'll have to wait for the Jason Scott documentary.

I also think the museum did a good job of showcasing excellent work by women in a medium dominated (?) by male artists. The earliest films shown were Mary Ellen Bute's, and my two favorite films of the show were made by women: Lynn Goldsmith (who co-directed and sang Adventures in Success) and Barbara Hammer (No No Nooky TV). There was also a whole discussion with Lillian Schwartz which I didn't attend.

If this has whetted your appetite for old-fashioned computer animation, there's plenty more where that came from (the past).

Well, how about this. My favorite thing about Thomas Pynchon is that each of his characters is surrounded by a protective bubble of literary genre, which colors the way the narrative is reported and even shapes the plot. This is most obvious with the Chums of Chance in Against the Day, who start off having a carefree Tom Swift adventure that, as they grow up, gradually becomes a WWI military novel. The Big Lebowski does the same thing for film.

I admit it took the publication of Inherent Vice, Thomas Pynchon's own version of The Big Lebowski, for me to realize this, but there it is. Walter is in an action movie. Maude Lebowski is in an arty Eurofilm where people trade wisecracks and laugh about nothing. The Stranger is in a Western. Bunny Lebowski is in an acausal porno. Jeffrey Lebowski is in a biopic of himself, with classical music and a narrator sonoriously recounting his accomplishments. The Dude doesn't want to be in a movie at all, but his decision to get revenge for the death of his partner rug puts him into a bubble of film noir. And Donny is like a child who wanders into the middle of a movie and wants to know what's going on.

And I don't know what else to say. The Big Lebowski is my favorite movie. It's very nearly the perfect fiasco comedy, and since that's the best kind of movie, it's very nearly the perfect movie. But how many times can you watch the perfect movie? How can I laugh at a really funny joke knowing that my laughter rings hollow because I knew the joke's exact timing?

Here it stands, like Shakespeare's Hamlet or Larry Cuba's Star Wars, the source of cliches that will last a thousand years. Can I set down The Big Lebowski and walk away without betraying my love for it? Nay, and yet I must! For this is not 'Nam. This is Film Roundup. There are rules.