LIGHT OF SOUND OF LIGHT
The Flicker Tony Conrad (USA, 1966, 30mins, 16mm)
Tony Conrad (1940-2016), American avant-garde video artist, filmmaker, composer, musician, teacher, and writer.
“…my own experience with flicker was a transporting experience in the way that movies affect the imagination at their best by sweeping one away from reality into a completely different psychic environment.” TC
One of the most startling cinematic debuts on record, The Flicker is more a hallucination than a film, an out of body experience and riotous celebration of audio-visual harmonic frequencies.
In 1966 he made his first film The Flicker which consists of alternating black and white film frames, the film is composed; as much a sonic experience as a visual one. He approached the film by considering the relationship between the subjective psychological conditions of the flicker, and its relation to narrative and storytelling.
Light Music Lis Rhodes (UK, 1975, 25mins, 2x16mm)
This 2-projector piece will be screened in the Veiviseren space
Artist and filmmaker Lis Rhodes has been making radical and experimental work that challenges hegemonic narratives and the power structures of language since the 1970s. She uses film, sound, drawing, performance, photography, writing and political analysis.
This film began as a composition in drawings. In the filming of these drawings — it developed into an orchestration of noise — whereby the intervals between the lines register as differentiated “notes”. The drawings were then filmed. The movement of the camera lens — towards or away from the drawings — is heard; as the intervals between lines narrow or widen, so the pitch of sound rises or falls. The image produces sound — that is, the playing of lines is literally “light” music.
Greg Pope. 