Letters with Tim

Tim Blue and I were chatting on the emails today. He in Berlin, me on my Brooklyn sofa. Here's what we said.


Hallo Pablicity,

The blog is very nice. I streamed the flicks and clicked the pics. Do you know how much your work informs my own? Well, it does. I just realised this recently when having a private Rowley Festival. I think it has to do with attempting to understand the power of Image.

Recently I have had a feeling of losing some nice things, and have made attempts to get them back. Mainly music and image, because for me these were communal things in the beginning, and they have become increasingly solitary, which caused me to feel as if the Source was lost.

It was mentioned to me by a Marc that my fixation on the Natural may be the result of making experimental films. This was meant as a playful jibe at a comment I had made in admiration of a tree. I thought it was funny, but it triggered a series of thoughts that stayed with me for the next day. I thought of the term, “Formal” in describing a certain type of experimental work, which in turn led me to think of the study of the variety of Forms in nature. Geometry of leaves, petals, the slopes of rolling hills. I had read in an interview with an Iranian film maker that he believed the history of Western film can be traced to it’s origins in painting, and Eastern could likewise be traced to a lineage of poetry. On my bicycle I thought how I always have envied painters. Though I really do not know for sure what is meant by Formal, I remembered what impressed me greatly when seeing Paul’s work in progress was the reduced scale of the working copy which not filling the entire screen, and surrounded by black, the natural looked artificial, like a painting. I liked the natural presented this way, as if it gave a certain truth in art; this is not Real. I have since put many things these reduced size boxes of moving images. Mostly Ghosts.

My love to you,

Tim


Timb!


Thank you for another beautiful email. I'm glad you are finding the communal again. I agree that we are both foamy mouthed image whores straining to put ghosts in boxes, and pointing to a tree as if to say, 'See, this is possible. We can do this too'. Brakage of course knew this, Jarman too, and most enthusiasts who found themselves on an optical printer, suddenly drunk with the knowledge of how to change time's constant rate. I remember my first hand processed super 8 experiments, where I crammed rolls of film into tiny tins and then tinted them in golds and violets. The image barely hanging on, dark shifting shapes on blasted bleached out light strips. Lots of these were pictures of nature, swinging plastic flowers, plastic and non plastic palms. And water. My early obsession with it and the way it conspires with light to deceive the eyes.

The other half of the footage was of people. But the portraits I found fell short. To show someone's face meant nothing. It added little to looking at their face without a camera at all, and served only as a record of a moment. Where the nature sequences made something that had the richness of an image, the frames of peoples faces were only stills of blankness in lines. It was up to us, looking back on the reels, to decide how to respond. Emotionally? With this blankness? How could that be possible?

Except for one shot, a group of strikers shot from a distance. Here, as a group, the flattening of purpose surpassed the inadequacies of my early silent filming. But yet this flattening of purpose was immediately apparent as the sticky fly trap of abstracting the individual and the group, the Leni Riefenstahl mode, flocks of hats and flags united in purpose. Foamy mouthed Fascism.

Maybe this was why our first feature shows the back of the main character's head for the first 15 minutes. In some ways it was an attempt to work through this image blankness, to place a person in an image. Holding back on the face, not having the face ever speak, then drowning the viewer with the loveliness of the image and the horror of history.

These experiments are ongoing. These days it is the residue of memories in broken down fairgrounds I am piecing together, while the faces speak directly to us. Somewhere between the recording of the record and the polishing of nature as it is whittled away.

XXX
Pablo

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