Looking for mushrooms
Bruce Conner, USA, 1967, 13 min
Music by Terry Riley

Expecting a nuclear disaster, Conner moved down to Mexico in 1962, where he spent his time looking for mushrooms with Timothy Leary. Later, Conner added footage of similar hunts in Frisco and in 1997 he decided to set it against a 1968 Terry Riley soundtrack. The result is a strange combination of typical ’60s psychedelic editing with what might appear to be a road movie interested in exotic landscapes. A classic of American avant film.

Towers Open Fire
Antony Balch & William S. Burroughs, UK, 1963, 9 min 35 sec

William S. Burroughs – The Cut-Up Films (1963-1972); Cinematography: Antony Balch; Screenplay: William S. Burroughs; Cast: Antony Balch, William S. Burroughs, David Jacobs, Bachoo Sen, Alexander Trocchi

Opus-1
Pierre Hébert, Canada, 1964, 4 min 43 sec

‘Bande sonore : Improvisation collective avec un groupe de camarades’

Autour de la perception / Around Perception
Pierre Hébert, Canada, 1968, 16 min 27 sec

Délire ordonné, géométrie sonore, mathématiques en couleurs psychédéliques, ce court métrage d’animation est né d’une collaboration entre un ordinateur et un cinéaste. Cette présentation de fragments disjoints agit à la façon d’une sollicitation violente, d’une provocation. C’est un appel à la perception visuelle et sonore qui ne s’adresse ni à l’intelligence ni à l’affectivité du spectateur, mais cherche à déclencher sa réaction physique.

Canadian animation genius Pierre Hébert started his career with studies on pure shape-driven abstraction and the limits of human perception. Around Perception is a groundbreaking experiment on computer-based animation, consisting of 11 audiovisual events designed to baffle cognition and unrest comfortable notions of reality. Unlike most of his later films, Hébert chose not to collaborate with top-notch experimental musicians and created the soundtrack himself. In this, he followed a method also used by Norman McLaren: to scratch sound directly onto the film itself. The relation between sound and picture, however, is not as symbiotic as in McLaren’s Synchromy: although there are organic reactions between the two domains, one is not a direct translation of the other. This, of course, need not be seen as a weakness.

Indeed, with its fast-paced changes of color and geometrical patterns, and the employment of Columbia-like richly crafted electronic tones, Around Perception works as a tremendously hallucinatory exercise in trompe l’oeil (and l’oreille) techniques. Or, as stated by Hébert himself at the beginning of the film, an exercise « for the mind and against the mind ».

Missoni F/W 10-11
Missoni’s new ad campaign is a short film by KENNETH ANGER

From Vogue Italy:

“I’m fascinated by Kenneth Anger’s use of color and his ability to transform a film into a three-dimensional texture, a fabric of images in movement,” explained Angela Missoni. This is how she introduced her decision to entrust the Missoni F/W 2011 campaign to one of America’s most famous authors and directors of avant-garde cinema.

Anger — a hyperactive octogenarian who loves working in the wee hours of the night and at dawn using sophisticated instruments such as the RED digital camera that has the characteristics of a classic 35 mm camera – flew in from Los Angeles to film the campaign in Sumirago that involved all the members of the great Missoni family. They are the stars of this campaign that was conceived as a series of superimposed and overlapping portraits. Vogue.it presents a preview of this film: a vibrant and impalpable evocation of unique patterns, patchwork motifs, stitches, knits, and styles, it is a symbolic weave as ephemeral as a dream.

“The images of Juergen Teller for the S/S 2010 campaign reflected and portrayed our everyday family life,” said Angela. “Kenneth Anger’s experimental approach and his narrative style, on the other hand, transformed the new campaign into a sublimation of our world.” The style of this ad campaign that verges on art clearly reveals the taste of this Californian filmmaker, who directed the films “Fireworks” (1947), “Puce Moment” (1949) and “Scorpio Rising” (1963), wrote successful books such as “Hollywood Babylon” (1959) dedicated to the secrets, manias, perversions and scandals of early Hollywood film stars, and is a favorite of young fans. Included in the 2006 edition of the Whitney Biennial of New York, he currently works with some of the most important international galleries of contemporary art and enjoys much popularity today.

A man of few words, this fascinating former actor who still takes care of his appearance first filmed the settings for his film “Missoni”: mostly locations near bodies of water in the Sumirago countryside and part of Rosita and Ottavio’s garden. For the indoor sequences, he built a set in the Council Room of the Sumirago Town Hall, a basement room with a vaulted ceiling. The mood of the film and the poses and movements of Margherita, Jennifer, Angela, Rosita, Ottavio, Ottavio Jr. and all other family members are reminiscent of Sergei Parajanov’s “The Color of Pomegranates”, a 1968 film that inspired Anger to create his Chinese box-style storyboard.

The intertwining and blending of moods, micro-plots, and situations make his “Missoni” a dream of a film within a film, a surreal dreamy interaction of spaces, faces, gestures, clothes, and costumes with different ages and narrative tempos. “Before he left,” said Angela, “he gave my mother, with whom he became fast friends, a film award he recently received.” To the question, “What did he leave you?” she answered with her usual humor, “Twenty-five wigs!” In Anger’s film, the wigs appear in a minimum part and are worn by Margherita, the protagonist with Jennifer of a project that will enchant, document, but not illustrate fashion.

The film expresses Missoni’s sophisticated choice and desire to amplify the role of images, making them a communication means and not an end, instruments for personal forms of appropriation and interpretation.

Mariuccia Casadio