Tonyconradtheflickerremake
made me think of Interface by Farocki, should watch it again?
The usual (?) - recurrent filter-ing through the digital - remediation / shift between technologies
Conceptual take
Appropriation
UPDATE: FEBRUARY, FRIDAY 17TH - DAVINCI PROJECT FILE IS CORRUPTED I CANNOT OPEN IT ANYMORE - I HAVE TO DO ALL THE WORK ALL OVER AGAIN
I am making it for the second time. This time I am trying to be more analytical. Break down the structure, counting every frame, how many times each part is repeated. What changes happen. I might want to write an accurate account of this. As a self-standing piece? A description, a score, a set of instructions to remake the flicker.
(tautology - descrip[tion)
also:
a series of short loops for every white/black flicker sequence of the film)
UPDATE: FEBRUARY, MONDAY 20TH - DAVINCI PROJECT FILE IS CORRUPTED I CANNOT OPEN IT ANYMORE - I HAVE TO DO ALL THE WORK ALL OVER AGAIN - THIS DID NOT HAPPEN TO TONY CONRAD FOR SURE - IS ANALOG FILM SAFER?
list of outcomes from this work
an excel file as a visual score
a text with precise information about the sequences that make the film. their composition, number of frames, timecode, as specific as possible
a series of video loop, for every sequence of the piece. ideally displayed in the order they are in the film, but on separate screens, one next to the other
the full remake version of the piece
a written reflection of the process? a breakdown of the piece? a lecture-performance?
references:
https://research.gold.ac.uk/id/eprint/23575/1/B%20Crone%20Flicker%20Time.pdf
https://www.academia.edu/9456134/The_Flicker_and_the_Image_Machine
https://open-assembly.calarts.edu/index.php/2018/12/12/beyond-the-flicker/
http://mfj-online.org/journalPages/MFJ43/Conrad.htm
https://www.tate.org.uk/intermediaart/tony_conrad.shtm
MacDonald, Scott (2005). A Critical Cinema 5: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers. University of California Press. pp. 66–72. ISBN 978-0-520-93908-0.
Joseph, Branden W. (2008) Beyond the Dream Syndicate: Tony Conrad and the Arts After Cage
Deleuze in Time-Image
This research project started from my long-time fascination for the flicker effect that I recurrently witnessed in my experimental/avantgarde/younameit film watching/meandering/researching of the past few years. A common encounter, yet always unexpected and a surprisingly touching experience.
An element that my gut found immediately appealing, intriguing, that stuck in the back of my eyeballs.
I tried to use it in some of my projects, but I soon realised I was only using it as a merely aesthetic device, a visual effect, and this did not feel enough. I felt that there was more to it, more potential to be unfolded, more depth, than just a plain visually shocking effect.
I then resolved to start making research about it, to try and understand its meaning, its implications, why and how it has been/could be used in a moving-image-making practice.
I almost immediately came across Tony Conrad's The Flicker, as one of the staple pieces in the use of flicker in experimental film.
Some info from The Flicker's wikipedia page:
The Flicker is a 1966 American experimental film by Tony Conrad. The film consists of only 5 different frames: a warning frame, two title frames, a black frame, and a white frame. It changes the rate at which it switches between black and white frames to produce stroboscopic effects.
[...]
The film starts with a warning message, which reads:
WARNING. The producer, distributor, and exhibitors waive all liability for physical or mental injury possibly caused by the motion picture "The Flicker."Since this film may induce epileptic seizures or produce mild symptoms of shock treatment in certain persons, you are cautioned to remain in the theatre only at your own risk. A physician should be in attendance.
The warning is accompanied by the ragtime tune "Raggedy Ann" played on an old gramophone. The film then goes on to a frame that says "Tony Conrad Presents," and then to a frame that says "The Flicker," at which point it starts. The screen goes white, then after a short while, the screen flickers with a single black frame. This is repeated, at varying rate, again and again until it creates a strobe effect, for which the film is titled. This continues until the film stops abruptly.
[...]
Conrad was familiar with the effects of stroboscopic light from a physiology class at Harvard University. By November 1964, Conrad had begun designing a flicker movie with "gradually lengthening alternate white & black areas on the film."
[...]
Conrad continued planning The Flicker with paper diagrams for several months. He wanted to arrange the frames to create multiple frequencies while balancing the number of black and white frames. He consulted William S. Burroughs's 1964 article "Points of Distinction Between Sedative and Consciousness-Expanding Drugs" while arranging the patterns. In June 1965, Conrad tested various flicker speeds with his friend Lew Oliver. They found that the strobe effect was most powerful between 6 and 16 Hz. Oliver suggested using slightly longer durations for black frames, so Conrad used an extra black frame when constructing cycles of odd length.
[...]
He shot the black frames by covering the camera lens. He first tried unsuccessfully to shoot the white frames by removing the lens but ultimately ended up shooting a sheet of white paper. Conrad shot the material over the course of a few days. He produced one 16 mm roll with 47 arrangements of black and white frames and made ten copies. He used an inexpensive 8 mm film splicer to reorder the frames such that each of the 47 arrangements was repeated ten times.
[...]
The soundtrack for The Flicker was made by Conrad on a synthesizer that he built solely for the film. He operated the synthesizer around 20 Hz so that the people could hear it as either a rhythm or pitch. The soundtrack uses tape delays and heavy reverb. Conrad intended for the audio to be played from a separate stereo tape because of film's poor sound fidelity.
I googled it, downloaded it, watched it on my studio computer.
I fell for it, for its absolute simplicity yet stunning complexity.
I decided to start making a frame-to-frame copy of it, from beginning to end. A remake (to use a film term), or a cover version (to use a music word - which feels quite relevant as Tony Conrad was also a musician and composer). Appropriate and copy to understand, to learn the craft, the tricks. Just as young painters and sculptors used to copy the masterpieces from the past to learn their art. That was the initial intention.
I imported the downloaded file in my editing software, zoomed in to the max, and started adding black frames on black frames, white frames on white. The project file I was working on got corrupted twice in the making, which means that I had to start from scratch three times in a row. It was actually useful, though. At first I was simply matching black frames to black frames, white to white, in an almost automatic yet playful game of copying and pasting. After the first and second crashes, I decided to progressively keep track of the overall structure of the film, isolating the single repeated sequences, counting the number of black and white frames that they are made of, counting the number of repetitions/iterations before the following one, spotting and highlighting allegedly mistakes in the film structure - extra or missing frames - and made notes of all this in a separate text file.
What started as a way to "backup" my work in case of a new file corruption - I could easily re-make it if the project crashed again - became an intentional process of debunking of the hidden structure of the film, of deconstructing/dissecting it in its simplest elements/devices - black and white frames combined in various sequences, each one repeated a varying number of times. I unmade/unpacked Conrad's work, followed backwards his lines of thought. It became a more analytical, attentive, scientific, forensic work. Less playful, more painful.
Things that I found out along the making, that I did not expect to find and that made me realize that I had started to investigate a field with wider implications:
1
In Conrad's film the black is never fully black, the white is never fully white. There's always light leaks on the borders of the frames, dirt, dust, scratches. In digital you can have full white, full black. Grain vs Grid.
The watching experience changes drastically. Also, the analog version is made to be projected, the digital one to be screened. Again, the experience is radically different.
2
The seemingly rigid/perfect/controlled structure of the film actually contains some errors. Some frames are missing, some are extra, making for unique/exceptional sets of frames in the structure of the film (or maybe is it me? the mistake is mine?). They always (?) lie in the transition between two different sequences. This makes me think that the extra/missing frames are the result of imperfections in glueing together different pieces/strips of film.
3
Digital technology is unstable. I lost my work three times in three days. Conrad's film is still around after 60 years (elaborate more on this). Error, glitch, decay ...
What began as a sort of impossible, unproductive, crazy, absurdist, self-imposed/self-inflicted challenge/quest - making a frame-by-frame copy of a boring ass film from the sixties consisting only of black and white frames - gradually tuned out to be a much deeper field to dig in, and from a simple, intuitive, impulsive mimetic/copying exercise it expanded in a wider research project.
The overall sense of this research is yet to be built and articulated - I feel - but I can definitely list some topics that have arisen from this act of appropriating / breaking down / remaking of The Flicker.
Analog/Digital interaction-relation-clash
visibility invisibility
moving image technological apparatus - vision apparatus
appropriation, image ownership
loops, repetitions
errors-glitches-noise-dirt-scratches-imperfections-artefacts
perfection/imperfection
space/time/body experiences through moving images
political implications of this - in reference to Bridget Crone's essays bringing together flicker films and philosophical and political thought (Deleuze's most importantly)
The outcomes that i envision for this research process/progress are multiple:
a full-length, HD/4K digital copy/remake/cover version of The Flicker, to be screened as a film in its own right
a visual score - a visual translation on paper of the film
a textual, detailed, instructional description/breakdown of the film, so that everyone can make it
a set of self-standing black and white flicker loops - where each loop is one of the sequences that The Flicker is made of
a piece of writing about this research/process, to be possibly presented alongside the above-listed materials in the form of an essay and/or a lecture-performance (?)
Also, most importantly, I am carrying on this research as a way for me to understand the potential of the flicker technique in order to use it in my own works in a more intentional way.
Some bibliography (in process):
....
Where I am at:
i have a first version of the copy
i have all the sequences in my timeline as self standing loops
i have a first draft of the textual score/instruction
i have highlighted the moments of errors/contradictions in the structure - extra frames, missing frames
what to do with sound?
the structure that I broke down does not seem to match the description found on wikipedia. why is that?
errors, extra frames?
how it relates to rest of my practice?