Project Kill Nazi Redemption

Before seeing Quentin Tarantino's alternate World War II story, Inglorious Basterds, I reflected on a few Nazi killing fantasies that have impressed the world's imagination in the past couple decades. The most brilliant I believe is the computer game, Wolfenstein 3d, created by id software initially just for Windows in 1992. Wolfenstein started the 1st person shooter genre in the gaming industry that has now become a multi-billion dollar industry in itself.

As a young Jewish boy growing up in Los Angeles, I was already familiar with playing video games glorifying violence. But I distinctly remember the irreproachable morality of playing Wolfenstein. In other words, my mother did not seem to feel any guilt allowing me to play it. And we offered the game as gifts for the birthdays of many other Jewish boys during my elementary years.

In this alternate world, I took on the avatar of a Polish, perhaps even Jewish soldier, attempting to escape a labyrinthian Nazi castle, killing the bastards along my way. In fact, little did I know that I would eventually be the Rambo-like agent overthrowing the entire Nazi regime, assassinating Hitler -- the final boss. I mean what foresight in 1992, Hitler as the final boss of a shoot 'em up video game. And I killed that mother fucker over and over again.

The dream of reimagining more redemptive ends to World War II run deep in the American collective consciousness. And that ferocious fantasy is exactly what Tarantino taps in Inglorious Basterds. *(Spoiler) The concept of annihilating the most powerful Nazi heads -- including that of Hitler -- within an occupied Paris cinema is Tarrantino's brilliant representation of such a revenge fantasy. While the Nazis watch a self-congratulatory spectacle of their own feats, at least three separate groups of conspirators successfully plot their deaths and thus the end of the war.

The fantastical demise of the Nazis within the French cinema is ultimately the brilliant concept that holds the film together. The cinema -- as repository of chimeras, alternate realities, and the realizations of our most unimaginable dreams -- is the magical setting of this revenge. Perhaps the cinema is the contemporary symbol most capable of vindicating us from our traumatic histories and horrific truths, at least for those sublime moments of experiencing catharsis. And within this particular Parisian cinema, we can obliterate the masturbatory spectacles of Goebbels' Nazi film making with the dramatically explosive, Jewish fueled cinema of modern day America.

And as if burning, shooting, and blowing up all the head Nazis wasn't enough, we also get to dream revenge in the shape of carving a swastika into Hans Landa's head. The act, I know, may seem too ethically abrasive for a Jew. Although if you've ever studied Passover, then you know that atrocities from 4000 years ago still irk us. Ultimately, the swastika carving points out that the identity and moral implications of Nazism goes beyond the typical episodic nature of warring parties. Once the war is over, a Nazi should not so easily shake his or her affiliations with the machine.


So, it seems we've entered a new stage of viewing WW II. One where we rewrite the history and satisfy our inflicted guilt and anxieties, as the last horizon of people holding real memories of the events die off. The said truths shall become legend and in legend we can invent myth.

Unfortunately I could not find a copy of Wolfenstein 3d for Mac OS x as I did want to revisit some of my childhood simulations of Nazi killing catharsis. However, my good friend Adia did draw my attention to a promo "Bear Jew" game posted on Eli Roth's myspace page. I suppose I'm not so far off associating the Wolf with Inglorious.

Rapper Poets: DOOM vs. Bukowski

Two weeks ago DOOM (dropping the MF) crept out of the shadows to unleash an apocalyptic maelstrom onto heads. His latest effort, Born Like This, is still resonating in the soundwaves, listeners and critics alike scrambling to make coherent DOOM's catastrophically pleasing formula. I don't plan to give any definitive answers here, but I anticipate that the album's title offers some clues to understanding DOOM's broodingly vicious cartoonery.



It is rare that a rapper makes reference to a white American poet of longstanding acclaim in the cannon. Although it would be unfair to call the haggardly magnificent Charles Bukowski a conventional member of the West's finest lyricists. DOOM chooses the title "Born Like This" to directly reference the revealing documentary on the life and work of Los Angeles' most prolific barfly, Bukowski: Born Into This (2003). A poet born into ugliness and horror and loneliness; a rapper born like a cartoon clip and masked warrior and tragic tale.

In the documentary, director John Dullaghan splices some of Bukowski's spoken poems over archived footage of the man going about his daily affairs. The montage of Bukowski's keen lyrical despair over sparse 1960's - 70's Hollywood is gripping if not completely unsettling. The brutally honest and troubled words of "Dinosauria, We" are particularly compelling.



DOOM's "Cellz" begins with revamped vocals cut from the film's clips of "Dinosauria, We", an apocalyptic meditation on the filth bred by humankind in the end of days. The minimal quality of the Bukowski's short of breath rhythm is filled out with gong-like dissonant drums warning of explosive terrors and shots. Dramatized keys straight out of a cult detective film whirl "Dinosauria" into a hyperbolic cartoonish tale. And perhaps that's all it ever was. The end of days foretold by Bukowski sets the horizon for DOOM's coming, "Born out of that / The sun hidden there / Awaiting the next chapter".

DOOM / Cellz (10) / Born Like This

Enter DOOM, a rapper with poetic ambitions. A mask striving for authenticity. A name always changing. A lyricism fighting to be heard. And some unadulterated, mad live, ridiculously talented flow from the metal faced bard.

For more tales of human caused mass destruction like "Dinosauria, We" look for Bukowski's insidious collection, Last Night of the Earth Poems.

Hybrid Worlds - Where Animation and Live Action Meet

The employment of animation in live action film introduces a rupture of evident artifice to the screen. Film typically relies on a disseminated form of presentation, divulging the viewer as voyeur into an apparent reality through the perspectival boundaries of the camera lens and hidden editing of scenes. What is left for the viewer is an experience that makes invisible the creative process and crafted architecture of the work. By contrast, animation produces the opposite effect, displaying in its very appearance the constructed and imaginative character of the visual art.

The Surrealist Belgian painter, Rene Magritte, is perhaps the most famous for taking up the aesthetic thematic of the deceptive character of visual representations with his treachery of images (La trahison des images 1928-29)series. The paradigm example is the landmark painting, "Ceci n'est pas une pipe" (This Is Not a Pipe), which makes manifest the contradictory elements inherent in representative, visual art.



The tension engendered by juxtaposing elements of live action with animation parallels the antagonistic characteristics intrinsic to the creative capacities of the human spirit. Is there a more effective way to express the surrealism of dreams and hallucinations or the exaggerated qualities of cartoonish characters and cliched themes? How else might one exhibit a human being's ordain ability to inflict the world around us with fantastical myth or even sensible meaning? The hybrid world affirms without hesitation the artifice of art, the inherently deceptive character of visual representation that tend towards making invisible its own productive process. And the more adventurous among us might even generalize such an argument over to perception as a whole.

In the newly released music video for Kid Cudi's lonely stoner single "Day N' Nite", the director (who is it?) uses rotoscope to drape live footage over with costume-like illustration. The effect is one of herb induced hallucination partly forged by a healthy dose of city life paranoia. Broad plains of color divided into boldly outlined geometrical shapes act as transitions between each individual scene of illusion.



In another light example of this strategy, director Eric Wareheim produces a frenzied dance number for Flying Lotus' "Parisian Goldfish" off his acclaimed 2008 Los Angeles album on Warp Records. Innocent gyrating figures transform into over-sexualized cartoon porn stars on the backdrop of flashing disco lights tending towards vertigo spasms of love. Beware.




Perhaps one of the most famous instances of the hybrid world is Robert Zemeckis' direction of Who Framed Roger Rabbit in 1988. A fantastic dual world populates the film. Illustrated personages called "Toons" and their related ontological dimension coexist alongside the human world. The interplay of live action and animation displays the power dynamic between two conflicting ways of being (toon and human). And the phenomenal movement infused in tension, release, and synthesis of the toon / human dimension might encourage one to reflect on the capacity for the imagination, more specifically artistic creation, to take on its own life.



A year later in 1989, French auteur Alain Resnais critiqued the conventional distinction between low and high art in his controversial film, Je Veux Rentrer a la Maison (I Want to Go Home). Resnais exemplifies the beauty inherent in cartoon characters possessing a sublime quality equal to that found in great works of literature like Flaubert and Balzac. Cartoons are breathed into existence by the swiveling of simple lines, two-dimensional coloring, and geometry, gracing the silver screen with strangely agile figures that belie the laws of physics.

Ari Folman's critically acclaimed "Waltz with Bashir" exhibits the most radical use of animation informed by live footage. The imaginary war-torn hallucination of a soldier's search for his lost memory is abruptly made manifest in its ultra-sensitivity by a climactic clipping of live footage of the Sabra and Shatila massacre in Lebanon.

Hybrid worlds permit an unparalleled aesthetic strategy for drawing out antagonisms, conflicts, and imaginative artifice, guiding the viewer in a sensual experience without delusion of its means. Any other notable examples?

The Sound-Image: Floating Points' Radiality

Sound and light are unique physical phenomena that tend to belie our direct tactile grasp. The ear perceives a sonic source of extended spatial distance, often of unknown source, by capturing and amplifying the vibratory waves in the air. The eye is perched at the heights of an Olympian mountain. This small organ of manifold layers might see things originating from enormous distances, even stretching time in looking millions of years into the past while gazing into the stars.

How might one touch the sharp brightness of the sun's radiation? In what way might one come to hold onto a melody that dissipates like a phantom a moment after being heard? Try to put into words the substantial quality of sound or an inkling of light's tactile sensibility.


Perhaps this refusal of strict objecthood is a reason why light and sound have both been associated with supernatural sources, and divine powers, throughout history. In Ancient Greek mythology, Prometheus robs fire from the gods and gives the gift to human beings. Take the invisible voice of a strange, omnipotent God booming awfully from the burning bush. Or further back, consider the immediate creative power of some great Being producing entities with his spoken words, stating in simple grammar for instance, "Let there be light."

Such meditations on sound and light arise from my viewing of a new Floating Points music video, Radiality, constructed under the direction of Hayden Bannochie & Alex Pissourios. Working from the title of the composition, the music video attempts to weave together a central converging point, a structural radius, where sound and image in a particularly modern context magnify sensual form.

In the beginning there was darkness. Darkness glides along melodic chords, opening its eyes into the static cut scene of an electricity tower looming over skeleton trees. A filtered burgundy orange air washes over the static. Our modern age is one of a proud Prometheus that grants us the force of electric fire to harvest the energy to warm our bodies.

The radius of such industrial fire is dynamic. It twists and turns with the rhythmic dissonance of a watery slap bass and piercing bolts of light that crash onto the screen like falling rain on a win shield. Brooding chords wither along zigzagging laser lines drenched in the smoggy haze of sunset. The electricity tower pulses synthesized swirls of burning drums, eventually broken down into its infrastructure-- the collaborating lines of twisting geometry-- bending into a vertigo of angles. Building in momentum dabbling computer signals work their way harmoniously into the dithering melody, rising and falling like spasmic breaths of air.

While sound travels in waves, light betrays such easy classification. In fact, light is the only physical phenomenon that can be measured as a wave or a particle, depending on the reflective stance of the observer. Perhaps such a dual physical make-up is what allows light to manipulate the sensual effect of music, informing the feel of vibration while making its invisibility more tangible.

In Radiality, Floating Points explores the physicality of the sonic and visual phenomena. Bass heavy synth wrangles the chest mirrored by the piercing quality of abrupt splashes of light that bother the eyes. However, the radiality of sonic-light also strives to reenchant our sterilized impressions of mechanical electricity and factory sound with the enigmatic immateriality that influenced the ancients to reflect on the supernatural. Grasping the infinite in such phantom-like phantasmagoria is an impressive, if not sublime feat.

Make sure to turn the sound UP when listening and make the screen as large as possible. This video demands full perceptual attunement.




Floating Points will release an album soon, stay tuned!

A Waltz into Trauma

By mistake I saw Ari Folman's animated documentary about the 1982 Lebanon War, Waltz with Bashir, back in October. Let me clarify, I was in the dreadful city of Brussels, completely exhausted from three days of sleepless travels, and had just escaped along with my companion a meddlesome Belgian--which was not too difficult considering his morning drunkenness, broken leg, and freshly slashed face--who insisted on showing me the main shopping district.


We surreptitiously ducked into a local movie theater, choosing to watch the next available screening, Waltz with Bashir. After the fat Belgian lady working at the counter finally agreed to sell us tickets (she did not think we should see an Israeli film with French and Flemish subtitles while she stupidly identified the Hebrew language film as in Arabic), we settled into our seats and enjoyed a moment's of rest before the start.

I never fell asleep. Waltz with Bashir opens suddenly with frothing yellow-eyed hounds running through nondescript Israeli streets, knocking down everything in their path, coming to a stopping point outside a lone square window where an unshaven man blankly stares into the monsters that haunt him. The nightmare begins.

Director Ari Folman tells the story of himself, a middle-aged Israeli filmmaker who lost his memory of fighting in the 1982 Lebanon war at the age of 19. The scene of the hounds, a recurring nightmare told to the aged Folman by a fellow soldier, jump starts his psychological journey to recapture his own memory of the war. The result of this journey is the creation of Waltz itself, an imaginatively construed world outside of our earthly dimension. Art director and illustrator, David Polonsky, and director of animation, Yoni Goodman, execute richly colored, chiaroscuro illustration that recalls the aesthetic quality of graphic novels.


Folman's film becomes a reflection on the dynamic nature of his fractured memory, as he investigates the reality of the blocked experiences by seeking out, and conducting interviews, with others present alongside him during the war. We witness Folman's live interviews (two dubbed over for the sake of anonymity) that take place in illustrated bars, rural homes, or a car, splicing immediately over to the recalling of dreamy sequences of escape and hipnotic meditations on horrific war scenes. The soundtrack propels this pschyedelic discplacement of experience, ranging from rhythmic drum claps mirroring the movements of a racing heart during night terrors, ironic pop music chanting about the thrills of bombing Lebanon reflecting the soldier's experience of returning from war to a land of general normalcy, and the incessant machine gun fire--chilled by the silence of death.

How does one recount the atrocities of war? What creative form might inch towards capturing the its reality, a reality that by its very natue eludes our grasp? A reality that human nature resists, repressed into the realm of myths, denied and blocked up in the subconscious. How might one detail the journey of recollecting this lost memory, divided and traumatized by its origin? Waltz thrusts the the unreal into the real, seamlessly layering hallucination with brutal fact, the construction of memory with some truth to be remembered. There might be no more exacting medium than animation to disclose such interplay between the imaginary and the real, and the complete breakdown of these categories when taking up the horrors of war.

Throughout the narrative we see repetitive sequences of the younger Folman wading in the sea outside of the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps where Lebanese Phalangists massacred thousands of Palestinians in vengeance of the assassinated president-elect of Lebanon Bashir Gemayel. Folman struggles with his guilt, coming to acknowledge the fact that he, and otherIsraeli soldiers, permitted the Phalange militia men to enter the camps. They stood by a few hundred yards away, perhaps unable to believe the sure signs of the massacre right before them.

In the dreamy state Folman rises to the shores with his troupe. They dress in fatigues under dreary, yellowed sky lit by flares and walk sullenly into the dilapidated, blown out buildings of West Beirut. The sequence repeats on end throughout the narrative, reaching a corner turned where hijab adorned women scream in terror, yell, and then the whirling sound of silence. Again and again the audience witnesses this scene, anticipating the view of atrocity, dreading the moment, and again and again, the impending fact is cut off from us.


Folman faces the problem intrinsic to any documentary of atrocity; how does a director disclose such brutality without turning it into a spectacle? How might a filmmikar avoid transforming such horrors into phantasmagoria for our own entertainment, seated in cushioned theater chairs, our bodies circuited into a lit up screen that affords a vicious movement of suspense and drama.

In the final scenes of Waltz Folman transitions abruptly from the magestically powerful animated world into gritty, documented footage of the massacre. We see bodies stacked and beginning to rot, rubble and human parts indistinguishable, the spilled entrails of a ferocious massacre. And just for a moment we are taken to this time and place, thrown violently outside the bounds of the protected camera lens, enveloped within the horror.

Somehow Folman's animated, hipnotic dimension prepares us for this task, doing consistent labor on our sentiments, shaping our abilities to imagine the impossible, and fooling the body's defense mechanisms into accepting the most unreal of all realities. For a moment, the veils of the spectacle fall back, the protective cognitive system breaks down, just a moment enough to grasp the absolute terror.

Folman's final work is nothing short of a masterpiece, a compelling anti-war documentary that achieves the most exemplary of moral efforts: to disclose the genuine reality of horror and trauma, hoping to guide us to feel the obligation of working towards its demise.

The Spotless Mind Raps of Jay Electronica

If you take a minute to cruise the hiphoposphere, in all its virtual glory, or on the concrete streets, in your favorite dusty record store, or all up in the ink spilled magazines, then you might have heard about this new, Jay Electronica. And I'm not just posting abut him because I can't stop talking about musicians influenced by movies.


There is no doubt that Jay Electronica is breaking down barriers. Trying to define his style leads to a refreshing enigma. He came up in New Orleans but lived all over the country and lost the accent. He flows supremely over clashing Dilla beats but sounds at the top of his game on his own melodic production void of any drum breaks. He spits slick rhymes concocting mystical images of spiritual understanding and at the same time rips bubble gum rappers into atoms without effort.

If you don't believe me, before copping the mixtape which will introduce you to the music--What the F*ck is a Jay Electronica--just listen to "the Pledge." Jay loops the lulling melody that pervades Michel Gondry's widely influential film, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004), to construct an awe inspiring song. The lack of percussion sounds immediately fresh in a music game ridden with computer generated drum snares and overly produced rhythms. The imaginatively brooding melody repeats nervously in the distance infusing Jay's meditative reflections with a cutting potency. The song generates a feeling of uneasiness and fascination, a dangerous balancing act between hope and desolation.


In the longer version of the song Jay interslices the track with sample vocal cuts from other films, primarily the classic Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, directed by Mel Stuart in 1971. The sonic samples from the film draw the listener in through a nostalgiac attraction to a film that partially shaped the imagination of many American childhoods and a novel wonder produced by the strange context we're hearing it in. The vocals also act as chapter marks in a largely epic song taking on the length of about eight minutes, giving the listener a much needed moment to reflect.

If you're going to Rock the Bells then you will also be seeing Jay Electronica. Give me the word on it! A full length album is due out by the end of the year.

The Sound Image: Quasimoto's "Come on Feet"

Despite my pathologic habit of initiating a concept series and then never following up with a single successive post, the idea of the sound-image is too irresistible. So, a second post is in order, and what better candidate than Madlib's helium voiced alter-ego, Quasimoto, represented cordially by a florescent green puppet animal--slightly resembling a hideous faced possum--in the seminal underground release "Come on Feet". Madlib, born Otis Jackson Jr., dropped the single in 2000 on the original Quas album, "The Unseen", simultaneously rejuvenating and making a cemented name for Stonesthrow Records.

Saturated thoroughly with weed smoke and toad slimed mushrooms, Los Angeles' beat konducta par excellence Madlib ventures into the astrolands of the Hiphoposphere in his psychedelic exploration of the basic anatomical apparatus that keeps us moving around; our two feet.

Before we get to the acid trip puppet show video, let's break down some of the historical elements shaping the track's spacey quality. Giving "Come On Feet" a clamoring, other worldly feel, the running hypnotic melody cut from Alain Goraguer's psych-jazz soundtrack of Laloux's La Planete Sauvage shapes a dissonant, multi-textured soundscape. That's fitting considering Fantastic Planet is an animated epic story of a revolutionary battle between sensitive human and rational alien produced in 1973 but taking place in a temporal dimension far outside of our own. Madlib reaps crackling effects of stumbling footsteps and shadowy figures to construct a nocuous sound array that threatens to stir the most guarded corners of the listener's paranoia.

The vocal edits and samplings take their influence from another film of a more local, but equally mind bending, variety. Distorted clips chopped from Melvin Van Peeble's original 1971 blaxploitation film, Sweetback's Badasssss Song, surround Quas' raps dedicated to the prowess of his running legs. "Come on feet / cruise for me / ... Come on feet / Come on run." The listener is quickly gripped by the wrenching terror that overwhelms a fugitive escaping the authorities.

Surely inspired by the cinematic coherence between La Planete Sauvage's sound and image as well as Sweetback's song and visual landscape, Madlib pieces together the spacey liftedness with the terrestrial density of the urban jungle.

The unusual puppet animation employed (by some unknown art director) for the video of "Come on Feet" synthesizes the brooding sense of unfamiliarity and estrangement--consisting in both its airy and earthy forms--that permeates the sampled films. Sound and image lock together to produce deranged effects in the audience, most likely seated or standing still, interpolating monstrous feet as they loiter.



Just entertain your feet for a couple moments. Wiggle the toes. Slip your consciousness into the outer appendages. Imagine the inner motors of your mind beamed outwards from each protruding appendage. How monstrous and unsettling are they?


Question: Does anyone know the art director for the "Come on Feet" video?

Side note: "Feet" is a standard biblical euphemism for genitalia. Take, for example, Saint Jerome's description of a prostitute as "the harlot who opens her feet to everyone who passes by".

The Vortex Room Brings Back Cinema

While cruisin' the boulevard in my smelly kicks I sometimes indulge in that surging impulse to peer through the ubiquitous store windows that candy coat the streets, showcasing all their little treats categorically prepared just for tempting my wallet to shovel out its guts. Store after store pass, the same endless routine of clothing, furniture, liquor and food, the four basic elements of modern urban existence all fused together by the common driving force of entertainment.

My eyes jet elsewhere, flipping to the florescent signs, shifting higher towards the rooftop cornices and spiraling back down the iron fire escape that winds gently between box cut windows offering, behind drawn curtains, a scant glimpse into a lived world -- dirty dishes piled in the sink, a humming television, floating bodies moving in and out -- all in hopes of locking my eyes upon any object not for sale, concrete enough to stabilize my thoughts.

I sometimes imagine streets filled with a different kind of business, a more intimate and hospitable kind of market where purchases fade into the background of things and connections with people rise to the forefront. Alas, my dreams of purposeful capitalism driven by a little more soul aren't so ridiculous, because I assure you my readers, that I have glimpsed such possibilities!

A hidden speakeasy in the heart of the SOMA sector speaks directly to my cravings. A plain warehouse facade, once perhaps the exterior of a humble print shop, disguises the portal into a supergalactic experience within! Upon entry, the human being walks through a tiny corridor and emerges into a spiraling realm of film reel vertigo and brooding light fixtures cyphering on the walls.

Welcome to the Vortex Room, a classic speakeasy lined with black leather couches, a bar stocked with fine whiskeys, and a projector shooting the most obscure mm prints onto a screen just big enough to envelop your entire visual landscape.


The Vortex Room is managed by Cosmic Hex, an internet based preservation resource of discarded or neglected film gems, organized for member download at quite the reasonable price. These folks are the crate digging archivists of the film world, with a knack for seeking out acid trip psychedelic soundtracks, the most twisted horror plots, and the untimely cult films (C-Films) that we could baptize as a-classic.

The otherworldly atmosphere of the Vortex Room serves as a catalyst for the viewer to imaginatively fall into a full cinematic experience that glides into another dimension of sound and color.

The cinema used to be a focal point in communities from an era not so long ago, serving as a social hub for entertainment, news and education, or even spiritual restoration and elevation. The French would convert palaces into extravagant cinemas while Italians viewed them as more important than the Church (I point to Cinema Paradiso).

The Vortex Room harks back to just this sort of era where the cinematic experience inflicted a resounding sense of awe into people. Once again we journey on spaceships throughout the universe of human emotion and thought, landing on Earth again once the lights turn back on, feeling replenished and joyous with life.

Many might accuse me of absurd nostalgia or idiotic romanticism for a cinematic milieu of simpler days, but the Vortex Room agrees that a futuristic intimacy with film and people is still possible while staring wondrously at the glowing moving image.

Two films, or a series of shorts, stream every Thursday night around 9pm at 1082 Howard in between 7th and 6th. Entry for $5! Here's the calendar.

The Sound Image: Nick Uff's Vision of Portishead

Growing up in the 90's I never cared much for the MTV style music videos replaying like clockwork on the daily. The predictable narrative structure of a bunch of musicians singing to a camera that sporadically zipped through fifteen angles within a few seconds failed to add anything substantial to the music itself. I found it all pretty boring.

My stubborn distaste led me to some experimentations of my own with image and sound. I learned pretty quickly that smoking some herb and relaxing my back to twisted post-apocalyptic animation, while playing grinding spacey beats, could elevate the music listening experience to a subliminal state of wonder and transplant my body fully into a surreal absorption in the imagery. The audible and vision became one.

Since then I've trained myself to be able to reach that state of awe without any indulgence in drugs (although hallucinatory inspiration can't hurt). Many other experimenters in the sound image must be on the same page, because since then, I've noticed a lot of artists cultivating delicate skills to create films that explore the relationship between what is seen and what is heard.


I'd like to dedicate a new series in this crazy little blog to the videos that seamlessly intertwine music and image to produce the captivating inter-sensorial experience that as of yet lacks a codified description. Unfortunately, my linguistic baptizing skills escape me at the moment, so the preliminary concept shall be simply called the Sound Image. (suggestions anyone?)

We can start off this series with a couple relatively new films produced by Nick Uff for Portishead's groundbreaking third album after a ten year hiatus, fittingly titled Third. Mr. Uff's animation style harks back to the more traditional cartoonist method of hand drawing each frame. The jagged and looping lines of Uff's pencil sketches gives birth to his characters and landscapes while informing the scenery with a resonating sense of the artist's own emotional input.

Mr. Uff further adds to the raw texture that permeates the animation by shooting the frames entirely on 16mm. A buzzing choppiness scratches the surface, intensifying the movement of the camera's perspective that whizzes deeper and deeper into the ephemeral world that manifests itself.

The camera consistently falls into the eyes of a character, serving as the gateway into a new dimension of contour and filling that itself eventually dissipates into another world or spirals back to one previously seen but thereupon under the guise of a richer context. This collage strategy draws the viewer into an overlapping sphere of visual movement and vibration, concretely paralleling the formal structure of Portishead's music.

Mr. Uff describes his own creative process as consisting in a simple evolution of his first pencil stroke. An image comes to mind or the hand moves on the piece of paper, and the world begins to develop from the founding conception. "I don't storyboard my ideas, but let the films go where they take themselves. There's all sorts of ideas in there - things that have happened, a bit of social comment - like a stream of consciousness you could say."

In "The Rip", Beth Gibbons sings haunting stories of white horses rescuing her from the despair of lost love. The soft guitar matched by resounding keyboard melodies darkens Gibbons' introspective mood. Uff's animation brings out the horrific quality that emanates from Gibbons' voice through imagery of grotesque figures overwhelmed by the decadence of ghostly cityscapes.

Uff also plays with the ambiguous depiction of figures falling blindly to their deaths or flying joyously in the sky, ending abruptly with the song nearly suffocating on its tension. This embrace of the ambiguity by aggravating the tension seems to imply that artistic creation may sometimes lead to release and restoration, but at other times, it may intensify the feelings of suffering and loss that inspire it.



Portishead evokes a more desperate sentiment in the alarming synths of "We Carry On." The track increasingly builds towards a bass plucking tension that, once again, never gives. Uff's animation elaborates on just this tension by shifting violently between a broken love narrative, jungle-like urban landscapes that grow rampantly, and our disturbed voyeurism of shadow demons taking possession of humans.

The broken collage and focus on abundant decadence bring to mind the cutting geometrical structures and monocled prostitutes that give German Expressionist paintings a powerful sense of alienation and loss. Hope lingers slyly in the depths, but that pulsating tension constantly keeps us wondering; are we rising up or rising down?