http://www.microscopegallery.com/?page_id=4744
THE SKY SONG
Video by James Fotopoulus
MONDAY FEBRUARY 6, 7PM
Admission $6 – Artist in Person
On the final night of the current exhibition Dreamful Slumbers: drawings and videos, James Fotopoulos will present his 2007 video “The Sky Song”, a Western-style feature about revenge. In this work, Fotopoulos incorporates special effects, costumes, charcoal and primitive computer drawings with actors’ performances. The “Sky Song” lays the foundation for further incorporation of hand drawn images in his later films.
“The Sky Song, like other Fotopoulos films and videos, is something I won’t soon forget. In short, it makes Inland Empire look like Apollo 13…notable largely for image-manipulated actors performing wooden script readings of a disturbed Western punctuated by psychosexual bloodlettings, primitive 3-D computer graphics of naked bodies and childlike drawings, and a series of flashed icons ranging from barnyard animals to an array of fruit. The word ‘nightmare’ could describe The Sky Song, but not easily: it’s an indescribable experience…” — Indiewire
The Sky Song
2007, Video, color, sound stereo, 127 min
In the old West, a man’s family is slain by his doppelganger: Mr. Lamb. The man’s quest for revenge takes him on a journey to reconcile the horrors of his past – illness, murder, lost love and war. The story’s action is told through stilted theatrical black box performances, crude CGI special effects, Halloween costumes and primitive drawings of animals, plants, sex, baseball, and sea life.
February 6th, 2012
The Nest
(Written for the screening at the Microscope Gallery 1/23/12)
I first attempted to make The Nest (2003) along with my second script Esophagus (2004) in the late 90s while in post-production on my second feature Migrating Forms (1999). Both efforts fell apart and the two pre-productions mutated into what would become my film Back Against the Wall (2000).
The film stemmed from an idea that if one member of a marriage suffered through a traumatic experience (in this case the wife) – could the partner sublimate the energy of the event or would the psychic forces be so powerful to destroy the union. Along with this was an idea of human beings projecting a rationalized illusive reality and lurking behind it, the true reality, existing as powerful swirling chaos. The ability to function in everyday life is by creating an external phantom-order to one’s inner state. But what if the internal symbols shatter through that order? And not just unconscious manifestations, but literally – as if collective symbols (or creatures) penetrate through a holographic wall-of-order. As tension in one’s life mounts – these objects or beings swirling in a parallel dimension of uncontained freedom break through into the world’s consensual reality.
Around 2000 a friend was helping me with the optical printing on Back Against the Wall and mentioned that he possessed some ruined Kodak film stock. His freezer had broken down that summer and melted ice all over the unexposed film. It was the phased out 500-ASA stocks, which had been replaced by the Vision stocks. A chip test had been done and it determined the gamma was messed up, so he was going to dispose of the ruined 45 minutes. I told him I would take it and from this damaged outdated unexposed negative, I began to structure the visuals of The Nest = I isolated the narrative’s inner-world on this film and then spun the rest of structure outward from there, using fresh new film stocks.
I took about six months building the props and piecing the film’s pre-production together (which was my usual time-frame in this period). Simultaneously I was putting together my feature Families (2002), which was a much different type of film (large cast, black-and-white, many locations), but I doubled up and bled together the resources between both films and in late October of 2001 shot Families (2002). Then using the same crew and equipment in early December, The Nest was shot in six days.
After completion of post-production on Families, I went to work throughout 2002 on The Nest’s optical effects and sound.
By this time I had been working extensively in video and for me the gulf between the two productions methods, video vs. film, where becoming vaster.
So with The Nest I wanted to make a total “film-work” to counter the video process.
A “complete film” in a way, drawing upon all the physical methods that were the opposite of what I was doing with video. I think of the idea as “end-to-end” and by that I mean literally: cutting film end-to-end, sound tape end-to-end and leaving it at that – and in-between those ends, is where the energy would take place = in the film-space, the production-space = all textures had to be consciously created during production or using methods such as in-camera effects (I had been doing this naturally on my prior film works, but now wanted to do it very deliberately and with total awareness). No timing, no sound mixing – but yet still achieving and controlling all the effects and filmic manipulation I wanted. And in a sense, an element of the video psychology crept it = the layering – which I never did as much with on film, but had been doing quite heavily in video. But this time by double exposing the film in-camera (as well as other film techniques), thus thrusting the video layering up against the blocky heavy film grammar and production.
(I initially was going to shoot Christabel [2001] on film, but the extent to which I wanted to superimpose the image would have destroyed the 16mm negative in the optical printing process – so I shifted the majority of the piece to video)
To fuse and equate the psychology of the film grammar with that of the subject, I wanted the film to fall apart by the third reel. Lending to this idea of a “complete film” the reels were the exact size of my Steenbeck-platter and were structured to collapse systematically and slowly over the first two. By the third reel, I didn’t even want it to be graceful = just badly fall apart
The drawings and paintings in the film were by the animator Jim Tranior. I had drawn out images for him to re-draw and paint. He asked me why I didn’t just draw them myself – I explained that at this time I didn’t want something so basic and personal as a drawing of my own to appear in the film’s world. I needed someone else’s drawing within the space of the film – as if it broke into the atmosphere I was creating (I felt I was “drawing” with the film pieces, the grammar – therefore I couldn’t have a literal physical drawing of my own appear within that). I felt an affinity with Jim’s work, so I thought it was both different enough from my own imagery, but with enough of a thread of similarity to make his style’s appearance feel natural within the film’s whole.
(From my essay on Sound):
The Nest (2003) was the culmination of a many things …
In terms of sound – I wanted to not go through a mix at all. I imagined like early sound films doing everything on stage = when an orchestra would play the music live during the filming of the scenes. I set out to create complete “machine work” of image and sound. I just wanted to cut the magnetic tape end to end – which is what I did. Everything as much as possible was to be done in camera or in the recording – and just having the lab run off the final print un-timed (all exposures final in camera), magnetic tape no mix with splices transferred to the optical. I handed Zack a list of sounds to collect (ie. laughing man, mice in paper bags, etc.) We would create atmospheres on the four-track and then dump them to magnetic tape. It was the total divorce of sound and image operating as different collapsing universes – a series of images that fell apart and a soundtrack that fell apart with it. There is no true synch in the film – because at the time I was thinking that that there was no true synch in real life … so why have it in a film? This film also could be the most vivid realization of the Welles interest – for example in a film like Mr. Arkadin (1955) where the sound is a flat perspectiveless derelict world – related to the image, but slightly separated – with it own technical logic. The Nest builds on this.
James Fotopoulos
February 3rd, 2012
Victor Stenger
February 2nd, 2012
February 1st, 2012
Pictured Stephanie Vella
Collaboration with Laura Parnes
www.lauraparnes.com
January 31st, 2012
Originally posted on Cine Soiree 1/15/12
http://cinesoiree.blogspot.com/2012/01/snow-and-fotopoulos.html
Snow and Fotopoulos
Many events all concurrent with one another: Occupy Cinema at Anthology, and the openings for Michael Snow at Jack Shainman Gallery, and James Fotopoulos at Microscope Gallery. Attended both the Snow and Fotopoulos shows — but it can sometimes be difficult being too many places all at once.
Tempting to draw comparisons between the two exhibits of artwork by filmmakers, but what was truly striking by way of comparison: issue of space — that is to say, the available square footage of gallery space — and its influence upon the grandly minimal arrangement at the Chelsea exhibit, with its cavernous white expanses, or the intimate and abundantly covered walls — seeking to maximize the miniscule — in Bushwick’s aptly named Microscope Gallery. Is larger space the ideal? The hanging of the Fotopoulos show invited the perusing of the drawings through a meandering of the eye from one work to the next: up, down, this work to the side, and that work above or below, making sequences and comparisons through a zigzagging from one drawing to another. A larger space might not have been as conducive this type of hanging: Perhaps an eye-level ribbon of drawings — providing a more linear experience — would have been more appropriate to a large space?
Intimate spaces seem to have been increasing within the past few years: Microscope, Spectacle Theater, and even the storefront-located Union Docs, all functioning within small-sized spaces of one sort or another (compared to the full-sized theater seating 100 or more). The little Maya Deren Theater (which seats 72) on the ground floor of Anthology seems cavernous compared to these more recent venues. Of course Bradley Eros’s E.P.I.C. = E(xtreme) P(rivate) I(ntimate) C(inema), in which several screenings took place for an audience of exactly one, may be the ultimate example of this small-sized venue (or perhaps the Edison Kinetoscope, which by its nature can have no more than one viewer at a time?).
***
And so begins the new year and a new year of Cine Soirees as the blog is now one year old.
Cheers!
January 30th, 2012
http://hyperallergic.com/45290/james-fotopulous-microscope-gallery/
Films Born Out of Drawings
by Katarína Hybenová on January 19, 2012
The entrance to Microscope Gallery on St. Charles Place. (all photos by the author for Hyperallergic)
After much media ado about the birth as performance art by Marni Kotak, you have to wonder if the wild media-saturated waters around Microscope Gallery calmed down. This Bushwick gallery has gotten back into its routine and it seems like the co-owners, Elle Burchill and Andrea Monti, are truly enjoying the change of pace.
After the Monday night screening of a film by Soviet-Armenian filmmaker Sergei Paradjanov, Elle Burchill told me that their Event Series has been doing really well. Being very prolific, Microscope hosts art film screenings and performances almost every Monday night. Monday events usually complement the current exhibition or are related to it in some way. Burchill says that recently they even had to send home some unlucky people when they couldn’t jam in anymore into the 23-f00t-long space for a recent event. There were already 45 people inside. It is notable (and commendable) that Microscope Gallery actually pays the performers and the filmmakers who are often present at the screenings. It is amazing to watch a white box gallery space turn into a black box screening room at night, and, if you’re lucky, you can watch films by artists who exhibit on the walls of the gallery.
Drawings by James Fotopoulos.
This complementary approach that marries drawing and video is very familiar to Chicago-based artist James Fotopoulos, whose drawings are currently being featured at the St. Charles Place gallery. Two hundred of the artist’s drawings cover the walls and they were all created while he was working on two of his recent films, Thick Comb, Chimera and Alice in Wonderland. As part of his process, Fotopoulos sketches every element of his films until he perfects them and they could stand on their own as works of art. They encapsulate his ideas and feel singular yet connected to one another. “ … So if a film collapsed, the concept existed,” Fotopulous explains.
Through his “film drawings,” Fotopoulos explores the tension between process and completion. “Is a sketch more alive as an idea than the completed work?“ he seems to ask.
Some of the “Red” drawings by Fotopulous.
The color that dominates most of the drawings at Microscope is red, so the works are simply referred to as Reds, while a parallel series, Blues, hangs on an adjacent wall. The artist works mainly in charcoal. His subject matter includes personal objects, parts of the body, personal symbols from his youth, memories and dreams. The drawings feel cinematic, maybe even hypnotic. His reds feel inviting, and despite many drawings being personal, I didn’t feel “excluded” or pushed away as a viewer, to the contrary, I felt very welcomed into his graphic world.
One of the walls of drawings.
While the drawings of Fotopoulos are warm and welcoming, his films are abstract and non-narrative. On January 23, Microscope will feature a night of the film and video by James Fotopoulos and Laura Parnes Sublimated Violence & Visual Excess, as part of their regular Monday events. It will surely offer another window into the artist’s world alive with color, images and untold stories.
A view of some of the artist’s “Blue” series.
Dreamful Slumbers, Works by James Fotopoulos is on view in Microscope Gallery (4 St. Charles Place, Bushwick, Brooklyn) through February 6.
January 27th, 2012
Ilya Prigogine
January 26th, 2012
Fly fishing
January 25th, 2012
Pictured Jim Fletcher and James Fotopoulos
Collaboration with Laura Parnes
www.lauraparnes.com
January 24th, 2012
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