Silverlake Blvd.

"Things are always going wrong: new restorations of Los Angeles experimental films" @ the Billy Wilder Theater

Last night an evening of 11 short films from the Academy Film Archive, hosted by Marc Toscano. 

Gary Beydler’s 1974 Pasadena Freeway Stills was beautiful, funny and clever. It made a completely banal view of driving through the tunnels on the Pasadena Freeway to the turnoff to the 5 into a magic trick—a demonstration of the magic trick of still images moving. Like a lot of the films in the program, it was a mediation on the constituent elements of the movies, but was also—35 years later—a document of an earlier Los Angeles.

 

Likewise the other really compelling film, Beydler’s 1976 Venice Pier. At first I didn’t care for it. I thought, “Zoom shots are to independent cinema what explosions are to commercial cinema. Enough is enough.” But this zoom was composed of footage shot over a year, in the different seasons (there are such) and at different times of day. Gradually I became absorbed by the diverse moods of his unprepossessing subject. It became a demonstration of the different faces a place can present under different conditions. The sky and sea at dawn, morning, noon, afternoon, sunset, night. The crowds of strollers and people fishing during summer days, the emptiness of the place during winter mornings and evenings, and all the incremental changes in-between. I lived in Venice when it was closed. I remember watching huge waves engulf the structure while eating breakfast at the Crab Shell at the end of Washington, and wondering how long the city was going to let people use it. It was always seemed derelict, but the fishermen enjoyed it. Little did I know it had already been immortalized in film.

Pat O’Neill & Robert Abel’s 1963 By The Sea also contained images of Old Venice Beach—particularly of people messing around on the Muscle Beach exercise equipment, and the Santa Monica pier merry-go-round (before renovation). We saw things in normal grey-scale and also in super-contrast black and white. Burned into my memory is the silhouette of a girl spinning in a white void.

 

Roberta Friedman and Grahame Weinbren’s Murray and Max Talk about Money(1979) was a dialectical materialist-structuralist period piece consisting of audio of two men pontificating about money cut up into absurd snippets accompanying images of David Wilson’s rear end as he endlessly painted and re-painted a wall. It was intermittently compelling but a long 15 minutes.

 

Fred Worden and Chris Langdon’s 1973 Venusville also juxtaposed audio and image: mostly static images of palm trees and audio of two guys enthusiastically discussing what must have been some other movie, which achieved moments of hilarity.

 

But the mean-spirited humor prize of the evening went to Langdon’s 1973 Picasso, which in 3 minutes disposes of its subject with a malicious glee that a few years later would be known as punk. “This is the actual voice of Picasso” a title card said, referring to a snippet of a demented old codger’s pointless anecdote which looped and looped on the soundtrack.

 

The evening ended with a 5 minute psychedelic extravaganza from 1968 that O’Neill, Neon Park and Chick Strand made for Sears—of all incredible things—to promote the skirts, blouses and jackets of their Junior Bazaar, complete with pink giraffes, boogaloo-ing girls trailing multiple afterimages and animated hamburgers marching in formation. Art or artifact, it was a gas. 

Peter Grimes @ English National Opera

After a week of poking around English fishing villages we spent our last night in London immersed in the English fishing village the English National Opera created for their production of Peter Grimes.

The difference was that the villages we visited were delightful; the ENO’s was completely horrifying. The village populace was the villain of the piece, a mob ready to believe anything bad about their neighbors and eager for any excuse to be violent. The production employed a huge chorus—at times the stage was entirely filled with people (like the mob scenes in Metropolis or M), with an appropriately oppressive effect.

And because we were seeing it at the Coliseum rather than some giant modern barn, instead of a big operatic spectacle it was an intimate, dramatic event. And so we were able to appreciate the acting as well as the singing of Stuart Skelton (Grimes), Amanda Roocroft (Ellen), Gerald Finley (the Captain), and everybody else. The orchestra under Edward Gardener was incisively dramatic—the instrumental interludes became an integral part of the drama.

 What a strange opera! The music is accessible, with moments that stun—the quartet of Ellen, Auntie and her neices, the raucous Moot Hall dance—but it’s not light entertainment. The text merely toys with the idea of being a mystery, but ambles off into often opaque tableaux. The hero is a vision-haunted madman--I don’t recall encountering any Wozzecks during our ramble around Penwith peninsula. It’s the anti-Fidelio, warning us all how eager we are to be misled.

Cornwall

The Cornish flag, the flag of Saint Piran, who sailed from Ireland to Cornwall on a mill-stone. You see it everywhere.

Home base at Marazion:

St. Michael's Mount in Marazion (painted by Alfred Wallis):

Mousehole, home, like all of coast, of pirates and smugglers:

Lamorna Cove:

The Minack Theatre:

Rowena Cade, builder of the Minack Theatre (from a postcard):

Ruins of the old tin mines near Pendeen:

Lanyon Quoit, between Madron and Morvah:

St. Ives, where Saint Ia landed when she sailed to Cornwall from Ireland on a leaf. Fantastic.

St. Ives by Bryan Pearce:

Barbara Hepworth's studio in St. Ives:

St. Ives by Ben Nicholson. The Tate St. Ives had a free Ben Nicholson-centered audio tour that was so informative and fun we followed it all over town.

Dartmouth (which is not in Cornwall but Devon). The view from our room above the pub. In the right corner is the holy well of Saint Petrox. (Nobody knows what he floated to Devon on.) Dartmouth is beautiful.

Sugary Cove, near the ruins of Dartmouth Castle:

Taking the car on the ferry across the river Dart:

The Cobb at Lyme Regis:

In Persuasion, Jane Austen described Louisa Musgrave injuring herself on some tricky steps on the Cobb:

The gardens at Heligan:

The palette of Cornwall. Saffron and bone lichen; translucent turquoise and dark navy-blue water; ink and slate stone.

 

The taste of Cornwall: St. Austell Brewery.

No encounters with spoken Cornish to report, unfortunately. I was excited about it because I just read Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue, which makes the argument that what makes English what it is is the influence of Cornish and Welsh. But we did enjoy Middle-Earthy place names: Gweek, Crows-an-Wra, Treen, Tregavethan, Trenoweth, Trevoole, Trethewey, and Market Jew Street in Penzance. 

We took the long way back to London, via Stonehenge. This was the one moment of the whole trip our luck with the weather gave out. We got soaked, but it was worth it. It's so well made! How many things built in my lifetime are going to last 4000 years? 

“… the greatest glory of a building is not in its stones, nor in its gold. Its glory is its Age, and in that deep sense of voicefulness, of stern watching, of mysterious sympathy, nay, even of approval or condemnation, which we feel in walls that have long been washed by the passing waves of humanity. It is in their lasting witness against men, in their quiet contrast with the transitional character of all things ….”  (Ruskin)

And the first thing I noticed was the baa-ing of the sheep who have the run of the place.

Visiting, in Leigh-on-Sea and London:

Pickwick Cottage in Dulwich: