Tonyconradtheflickerremake
REMAKE OF TONY CONRAD'S THE FLICKER - ABSOLUTE FLICKER, DIGITAL VERSION, EXACT COPY BUT WITH PURE BLACK/WHITE FRAMES. DIGITAL FORMATTED INTRO TEXT CREDITS. NO GRAIN, NO DIRT, NO SCRATCHES - The Flicker is a 1966 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.
DOWNLOAD FROM YOUTUBE
REMAKE A OCCHIO - STEP BY STEP FRAME BY FRAME
SOUND?
Conrad spent several months designing the film before shooting it in a matter of days. He produced and distributed The Flicker with the help of Jonas Mekas. The film is now recognized as a key work of structural filmmaking.
https://ubu.com/film/conrad_flicker.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Flicker
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.
(veeeery interesting description - use it somehow?)
I wanted to understand flicker effect/device in experimental film. Why not to make a cover/copy/exact reproduction of The Flicker? Just like young painters/sculptors used to copy masterpieces from the past.
ctrl c ctrl v
copy and paste
frame by frame, no cheating
the same process, in digital
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/
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 embark on 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 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 started to pay more attention at the overall structure of the film, .... 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 took over, spotting and highlighting allegedly mistakes in the film structure - extra or missing frames - and kept track of all this in a separate text file, so that I could easily re-make the work if the project crashed again. It took me almost a week of work, but I finished it.
It then 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 - but then became much more, and I consider this as a research in progress.
The overall sense of this research is yet to be built - I feel - but I can definitely list some topics that have arisen from this act of appropriating and remaking and breaking down 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
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)
....
Envisaged outcomes of this research:
a full-length, HD/4K digital copy/remake/cover version of The Flicker
a visual score of the film
a textual, detailed, instructional description/breakdown of the film, so that everyone can make it
a set of self-standing flicker loops (10X) - where each loop is one of the sequences that The Flicker is made of
a piece of writing about this research, to be possibly presented alongside the above-listed materials in the form of a lecture-performance (?)
Also, most importantly, a base to understand the potential of the flicker technique to use in my own works in a more intentional way.
I started to gather some bibliography:
....
State of the art:
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?