The human eye, the human form, the human face: these are the three central images of this avant-garde collage and kaleidoscope of shifting and fractured images, changing colors, and pulsing rhythms. Near the end, a tree appears briefly, and birds fly - first white, then red and blue. Celtic knots morph from one to another. The images become Rorschach tests although the mood, driven by the rapid changing images and the soundtrack, remains frantic.
USA
Cinema Psychedelica, Berkeley
USA
Yale Film Festival
USA
A unique consideration of the scopophilic nature of cinema, in this film Barlett utilizes a split-screen mirror effect to create interesting and hallucinatory images. The film shows the viewer's eye looking back at them, and the symmetry of the framing on-screen forms a duality with the symmetry shared between the viewer's eye and the eye in the film. The eye in the film becomes like the camera lens, and the inherent voyeurism of cinema is revealed as the image becomes a dancing woman. The audience, and the camera, are presented with the hypnotic and pleasing dancing of the woman, their shared scopophilic urges being satisfied.
The film suddenly takes revenge as the woman enters the foreground and the frame becomes…
Holy Jesus! I couldn't think of any cinematic precedents! Bartlett made one of the most relevant contributions to the world of cinema ever: to merge film with the technology to produce it: "To marry the technologies", he said, so that the viewer wouldn't perceive them as separate. However, the purpose is dual. Just like we differentiate what is natural from what is artificial, Bartlett directly opens with the not-new stunt of reversing the role of the observer as observed, to invite to self-contemplation while contemplating artworks as exteriorizations of the artists' souls. So, technology and live-action are not mutually exclusive in the art of filmmaking just like we, as sentient individuals, are not independent from fictionalized representations of either concrete…
plays like a dialectic of flashing opposites, bouncing their mirrored contradictions before inevitably collapsing inward, forming an uneasy molecule of potential energy, vibrating with anticipated tension before snapping with a sonic metamorphosis, blooming into the bomb we prescribe from the arbitrary space between this and a very similar that. ad infinitum.
Me when the
Available on YouTube, but those of you with photosensitive epilepsy had better not get anywhere near this.
An exciting example of unhinged cinema on acid. Eight minutes of total formal instability. Space, time, light, and shape being torn to technicolor ribbons. Mega-cursed. Highly recommended.
Seeing these extreme experimental films leads me to ponder how a lot of this stuff is essentially sensation porn devoid of any message. I think a little of that every now and then is okay; one seeks this sort of thing for the takeaways in formalism more than anything else. I do suspect nudges towards the complacency of partaking in pure sensationalism, but I enjoy a good head trip the same as any other pure entertainment.…
Feels like being in a microwave.
"I'm fascinated by technological leaps, and the way technology influences art and the way art, in turn, leads science and technology and (in fact) even whole societies and cultures."
~ Scott Barret narrating Making of OffOn (1980)
An early alchemy of video wizardry, Scott Barret's OffOn uses a range of then-burgeoning technology to form an optical occasion of portentous proportions. It's a work far ahead of its time, not only in adapting television techniques such as image feedback and image modulation to create an eventfully epileptic ecstasy of experimental film, but also in capturing an overload of chaos and information itself (two defining traits of any major shifts in civilization) in visual form. Not mathematically deliberated in its structure in…
Pre-computer effects using photo-chemical/mechanical processes and some early video box effects. A mix of two separate aesthetic "looks" with lots of attention to matte work in symmetrical layers. Not much holding it together thematically except the common assumption of the time that the viewers were all heavily dosed on Owsley LSD. The print I saw was dated 4 years earlier, 1968--a good year for experiments of all types.
ᑭᔕɎᑕᕼɆᗪɆᒪłᑕ Ɇ᙭ᑭɆᖇłɆᑎᑕɆ₴!
ɆᑭłᒪɆᑭ₮łᑕ ᔕɆłᘔᑌᖇɆ₴!
ᖇØᖇᔕᑕᕼᗩᑕᕼ'ᔕ ᖴØᑎᗪᑎɆᔕᔕ!
łᑎᗪᑌᑕɆᗪ ᗯł₮ᕼ ᗰᗩᑎłᑭᑌᒪᗩ₮łØᑎ!
INSTANT LIKE!!!
OffOn is an experimental short showed several images of the human eye, the human figure, and the face in morphing from one another as the film rapidly changed colors and form.
This film was interesting mainly in the stylistic fluidity. It felt almost as a stream of consciousness as images quickly morphed into other forms. I loved the use of color and animation used within the film, it really was unique and beautiful.
Apparently the director Scott Bartlett was supposed to make a movie for American Zoetrope (the Lucas/Spielberg/Coppola company that financed Apocalypse Now along with several others) in the 80s, but it fell through, which is unfortunate, because this film is among the most beautiful experimental shorts I have seen and I would love to have seen a full length film from him.
Watch this short here (I finally learned how to add links)
Anyone else getting Neon Genesis Evangelion/Serial Experiments Lain opening titles? Also, the first part has the same BPM as Born This Way.
Woah dude... that's crazy man
