Szél (‘Wind’)
Marcell Iványi, Hungary, 1996, 6 min 40
Cannes Film Festival 1996 Best Short Film
In every photo there exists a point, a detail that attracts the eye. A particular detail, strange, and prominent. This detail takes on an emotional tone, it determines the spectator’s state of being in relation to the photo. This heightened emotion directs the spectators gaze in to the photo as well as outside the photo. …The film is based on Lucien Hervé’s photograph, « The Three Women ».
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 ».
