Bleu Shut

One of the more accessible examples is Bleu Shut. Robert Nelson's 1970 film won a National Film Preservation Award and, like Eureka, is a meditation on cinematic time. Where Gehr's film emphasizes the materialist side of the sturctural-materialist equation, Bleu Shut is concerned primarily with the sturctural side. The film comprises discrete units divided by minute, with a clock in the corner revealing the elapsed time. In contrast to ficiton films which ask the spectator to submit to a narrative time, here the experience of real time is played with. And played with is the right term: Bleu Shut approaches its materialism with both an aleatory aesthetic and a sense of humor.

Audience: Fairly accessible as far as experimental work goes. I find the film entertaining - and some students do as well - but that reaction may vary by crowd. Do note that there is a brief but graphic clip of an old pornographic stag film.

Basics: Robert Nelson, 1970, 16mm, color, 30m

Distribution: Canyon Cinema, 16mm rental, $125 + shipping + fees

Eureka

Eureka (1974), to me, suggests the expressive potential that structural film can have. Taking an early cinema actuality film and slowing it down through frame-by-frame shooting, Ernie Gehr creates a meditation on cinematic time. From the description – and from what I know of the use that 60s and 70s avant-garde filmmakers made of early cinema – I expected more tinkering with the image, either by montage, image manipulation or projection effects. Instead the film presents the original footage with a film speed (3-4fps? Gehr says he extends each frame 6-8 times) that hovers right at the cusp of our perception of continuous motion. The spectator thereby is both able to see the individual frames and to follow the movement. At times this gives a ghostly effect. Meanwhile, the slowness of the shot – a barely interrupted dolly along a city’s trolley tracks – is matched by the overall busy-ness of what passes in front of the camera. Motion becomes a controlled, ongoing revelation of space and activity.

Classroom audience: I suspect undergraduates, beyond the most advanced, will find this challenging, given the running time for a limited number of shots. Would work very well in a class on early cinema (where I saw it, in fact), or a unit on structural film, or cinematic time.

Basics: Ernie Gehr, 1974, 16mm, b&w/si, 30m, $90

Distributor: Canyon Cinema 16mm rental, $90 + shipping + fees

Useful readings: Mary Ann Doane, Emergence of Cinematic Time
Scott MacDonald, "Ernie Gehr: Camera Obscura/Lens/Filmstrip" Film Quarterly Vol. 43, No. 4. (Summer, 1990), pp. 10-16.

Correction, Please

Correction, Please: or, How We Got into the Pictures
(Noel Burch, 1979, British Arts Council [TV])

I’ve talked about this film elsewhere, but I’m pleased to note that this half-forgotten Noel Burch film about early cinema does have a video distributor, Concord Video in the UK (they’re the distribution arm of the British Arts Council, who produced Correction, Please). Last I checked, 120 pounds sterling can get you an NTSC conversion VHS copy for your institution (75 pounds for PAL). The website, meanwhile, lists DVD copies (PAL) available. Given the exchange rate, that's not cheap for American purchasers, but it's a title worth owning.

Made in 1979, Correction, Please is really two things at once. Part of it is a pedagogical film, illustrating the changes that film underwent in the transition from early to classical cinema. My favorite part are the five recreations that mimic, loosely, discrete moments in film history:

Circa 1903
Griffith Biograph one-reeler, c. 1909
Transitional Hollywood film, with errors, c. 1915 (not pictured below)
Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler (Lang, 1925)
Mature silent classical Hollywood, late 1920s



At the same time, Burch’s film belongs to a lineage of experimental works of the 1960s and 1970s which used early and pre- cinema as inspiration for counter cinema practice. Like Thom Anderson’s Edward Muybridge, Zoopraxographer (which also deserves a write up here at Not on DVD), Correction Please reflects on cinemagoing, though where Anderson’s film is about the perceptual quality of film viewing, Correction is about the narrational dimension of spectatorship.




“How we got into the pictures” is meant figuratively and more literally.