LOST FUTURES 002

#002 PROTOTYPE(S)

PROTOTYPE(S) 3D Films by Blake Williams

LOST FUTURES #002 x Ben Nicholson 7pm, 19th June 2018.

Genesis Cinema. Whitechapel, London.

“As a major storm strikes Texas in September 1900, a new and mysterious televisual device is built and tested…”

Red Capriccio (Blake Williams / 2014 / Canada / Anaglyph 3D / 7’) Something Horizontal (Blake Williams / 2015 / Canada / Polarized 3D / 10’) PROTOTYPE (Blake Williams / 2017 / Canada / Polarized 3D / 63’) A trio of 3D films from Toronto based critic, academic and filmmaker Blake Williams that build upon the history of the use of stereoscopic technologies in the avant-garde and beyond. A series of satisfying sensorial experiments that push the possibilities of the image in strange and alluring new directions.

Expanding inwardly and outwardly, each challenges the flatness of the screen.

FIRST 3D CINEMA EXPERIENCE “The first film-film I think might have actually been Avatar? That may not be right, but it’s the first one I can think of offhand. But I saw a few 3D rides and short films at theme parks like Disney World and Six Flags growing up. Things like T2 3-D: Battle Across Time - also James Cameron, naturally - left some sort of impression.

I don’t actually remember the movies themselves or how they looked, but rather the peripheral glimpses of my neighbours trying to grab the pop-out images.”

MOST MEMORABLE 3D FILM EXPERIENCE “Norman McLaren’s Around is Around. Probably the only movie I discovered as an adult that I watched with my jaw dropped, unable to comprehend how it could have possibly been made.”

2D FILM THAT SHOULD BE 3D “Since ‘all of the above’ isn’t an option... [Sergei Eisenstein’s] Man with a Movie Camera. Or any [Nathaniel] Dorsky. Or [Michael] Snow. Or [Jacques] Tati. Or..”.

FAVOURITE RECENT USE OF 3D IN FILM “I’m actually really excited by what the 3D (and frame rate) does to the tone of [Ang Lee’s] Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk. It’s arguably the ‘realest’ use of the format, but it makes the film feel like a nightmare.”

CONFRONTED WITH FLATNESS 3 DIMENSIONAL THOUGHTS FROM BLAKE WILLIAMS Made of bonus material from a longer piece (available online at Sight & Sound) on these and other topics, some miscellaneous musings on filmviewing and filmmaking in three dimensions from Blake Williams. Questions by Ben Nicholson.

FIRST FORAYS INTO 3D FILMMAKING “After making Coorow-Latham Road I tried to apply a similar method to a bootleg copy of Michael Snow’s Wavelength, having seen it for the first time in 2010. I tried to post-convert that film into anaglyph 3D by distorting the picture, frame-by-frame, to create illusions of depth—which I thought was more funny than anything else, since one of the things Snow is doing with Wavelength is questioning spatial illusionism in the photographed image; Snow’s camera presses into a loft space until we are confronted with complete flatness.

My attempt at this 3D conversion was a very tedious process, though, and I gave up after a couple of months of not getting very far with it. But, that experience folding a plane, creating virtual 3D forms out of 2D images, is what led to my first 3D short, Many a Swan, which takes found footage of the Grand Canyon and folds and shapes it into various 3D shapes, like with origami.”

NEW FORMS, AND A NEW LANGUAGE - ON PROTOTYPE Most films are like many others; some are unlike anything else. Blake Williams’ PROTOTYPE falls very much into the latter category - it is a singular entity, a genuine cinematic U.F.O. Beginning in the realm of recognisability, it quickly becomes something else entirely: indefinable and often inexplicable; but also radically, refreshingly new. Starting from a historical event, cycling through stereoscopic photographs depicting the devastation wrought by a storm that struck Galveston, Texas in 1900, PROTOTYPE then enters gradually into the realm of fantasy. A foundation in the real that facilitates a move towards the imaginary.

As well as a starting point, these images and this event offer something to grasp onto, something extant from which to make something new. Devastation causes a void that only memory (and fancy) can fill. (Like a dream whilst you are in it, or a spell whilst you are under it, that which is remembered is essentially true.) Beginning with abstracted representations of this damage before looking at the manufactured world that has arisen in the absence created by it, PROTOTYPE charts a micro-history of technological creation made from touchstones twice-removed from their original form. A blank slate; a fresh canvas; a new world. Objects are reshaped and moulded, new forms are made from known materials, strange shapes morph from ones that are familiar and colours blend across a pulsating gradient of amorphous red, blue and green.

Each image warps into the next, shifting and sliding across the screen’s mutating planes, in and out of depth, back and forth between familiarity and incomprehensibility, mystifying the mind and confounding the eye. Mesmeric rolling waves. Oceanic miasma that folds and collapses from a flat image into a multi-dimensional one. Radiations of light that form shapes through their dilations. Televisions that projects images from their warped rectangular stomachs.

And a host of figures, statues, vehicles and machines, all distorted from familiarity, and stretched across the dimensions. Much of it remains indescribable, and all of it is entirely sensorially overwhelming, alien images overlain with a droning soundtrack that entrances through density, stupefies with intensity.

Decoding it proves difficult, but surrendering to it is easy. Experimentations into shape, space, colour and volume. Light pulsations. Wave notations. Images thrown across every axis. Multilayered cinema. Multidimensional cinema. Depth from flatness. New forms, and a new language. PROTOTYPE uses the destruction of the known world as a point from which to create countless new unknown ones. Disaster acts as a reset button. Myriad small somethings are born from a single huge nothing; or maybe, myriad small nothings from a huge something. It is an explosion that can be contemplated, but equally one that can just be absorbed. Most films are like many others; but some—not many mind, very few indeed—are unlike anything else.

- by Matt Turner

HYPERBOLIC MOTION - ON BLAKE WILLIAMS’ SHORT FILMS Movement is a definitive element of Blake Williams’ short films. It appears as the primary subject, it provides a frame of reference, and it signifies the director’s own formal trajectory through formats and styles as he experiments with depth and dimensionality like a stereoscopic road trip.

His 2012 short Display (2012) is described in the director’s notes as a “mini-essay on motion” but it is Coorow-Latham Road (2011) that kick-starts the journey. In the film Williams used Google’s Street View algorithms to effectively paste a landscape onto a tunnel wire-frame, creating the sensation of actually driving along the eponymous road in Western Australia. It may not be a film viewed through any form of 3D glasses, but it creates a multi-dimensional effect on screen without the need for any by contorting flat images into a traversable landscape. The motion is both the key to the film, and the product of it.

The roving camera once again played an important role in Many a Swan (2012) which took origami as inspiration for a film about folding. Now working with anaglyph 3D, the film appropriates found footage and by its conclusion is folding the ‘flat’ plane of the screen into the three-dimensional object of a paper aeroplane. All the while, cameras pan over the Grand Canyon, the motion given additional oomph by the red/cyan stereoscopy. Williams’ next film Baby Bird (2013) tapped directly into that idea, exploring how motion parallax creates perspective and depth of vision. (In its simplest form this is the way something close to us moves across our retina relatively faster than something far away does).

Motion is intertwined with an aural crescendo in Red Capriccio (2014) which may initially appear to be a study in colour - red and blue, naturally - in the flashing lights of a police vehicle. Williams makes use of the moving camera as a counterpoint to the static car, then once again creates a navigable landscape via a Lost Highway-esque sojourn down a midnight road. It is perhaps with Something Horizontal (2015) that stillness is finally embraced. An impressionistic exploration of a confined space through geometry and German Expressionism, there is movement in the cut and on the screen - just less literal motion. Not so for Williams though, who continued to evolve, making Something Horizontal his first foray into polarized 3D. Whatever format he works in next, you can bank on forward motion being a key component one way or the other.

- by Ben Nicholson

ONE IMAGE AND ANOTHER - 3D IN THE 21ST CENTURY It took over a century, but 3D is finally generating some cultural goodwill. The tenacious ‘here again/dead again’ format is apparently beginning to transcend its stigma as a box office gimmick; its capacity for new formal breakthroughs now more than ever met with inklings of trust instead of contempt. Pernicious connotations of commerce, power, and excess haven't been exorcised from 3D so much as they've been fused into its very infrastructure, opening up new opportunities for radical abstractions, poetics, disruptions, and historical inquiries to subvert grand institutions and languages from within the form itself. This potentiality is not actually new, we just needed Godard to give us the go-ahead to embrace it.

The present output of 3D work reminds us yet again of the high/low polarity that exists in cinemas that hoist image and spectacle above narrative. Films fall, more or less, into one of two camps: high-dollar blockbuster spectacles, and DIY artist films. This isn't to say there is a purely black and white disparity between the two, but it's a necessary distinction to note, in that it represents yet another illustration of 3D's essentially binary nature—despite the triadic implications of the terminology. These are films that operate within the realms of left and right, red and cyan, vertical and horizontal, “out from” and “into,” one image and another. Then again, as was reiterated by Adieu au langage last year, we could, should, just as well replace any “and” in the previous sentence with an “or.” That is, depth ought to be regarded as supplementary, not fundamental, to the ontology of stereoscopic imagery, because “correct” 3D representation is always optional, but also, and more importantly, because depth sensations, intrinsically linked to our basic predatory instincts, are biological phenomena, natural illusions that trace us back to our impulses to dominate and consume, which art should always consider its duty to question and disrupt.

- by Blake Williams, taken from ‘3D in the 21st Century: Becoming 3D’, originally published by MUBI (mubi.com/notebook)

3 X 3D - A PRIMER ON STEREOSCOPIC MOVING IMAGE THE FIRST AGE Even those versed in the history of the medium might point to mid-century experiments as the birth of 3D cinema, but before his kinetoscope had even been revealed to the world Thomas Edison was working on stereoscopic moving imagery. Indeed, within a few years of their first public screenings, the Lumières’ patented the Octagonal Disk Stereo Device - Louis, in particular, was devoted to the third dimension. It wasn’t until 1935 that he managed to remake L’Arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat in 3D (meaning that the train really did arrive in the station). Pioneers of all kinds saw stereoscopy as the future, not least theorists like André Bazin and Sergei Eisenstein - indeed, despite its failure to break into the mainstream, these luminaries considered cinema incomplete without it.

THE SECOND AGE 1951’s Festival of Britain played some part in the brief 3D explosion of the 1950s. At the event were screened Norman McLaren’s Now is the Time (to Put On Your Glasses) and Around is Around, both of which still amaze today – though the latter remains particularly impressive. This led to a number of more high profile releases including Jack Arnold’s It Came from Outer Space. There was resistance and the need for two simultaneously projected (and identical) prints made it costly and laborious. There were technical advancements made in this period to combat the issue and despite a number of memorable 3D films being released – Arnold’s Creature from the Black Lagoon, Hitchcock’s Dial M for Murder – they were most widely seen on flat 2D screens.

THE THIRD AGE There were a few outlying titles during the end of the 20th century - Jaws 3-D! – but for the most part, new 3D was primarily a spectacle for theme parks with experiences like Disneyworld’s Honey, I Shrunk the Audience and Universal Studios’ T2 3-D: Battle Across Time. It has been since the turn of the century that the mode has once again begun to flourish with James Cameron spearheading its multiplex charge with Avatar. Alongside it, and perhaps at this point outstripping it, has been a steady rise in avant-garde 3D that perhaps borrows more from McLaren than Arnold and Hitchcock. The third age is in rude health with the likes of Ken Jacobs, Jean-Luc Godard, OpenEndedGroup and, of course, Blake Williams at its forefront.

- by Ben Nicholson

002 - PROTOTYPE(S) LOST FUTURES x Ben Nicholson Special Thanks to: Adam, Akash, Blake, Bobbi, Chloe, Christina, Danny, Emily, Goo-Ryong, Izzy, Kenji, Laurence, Michael, Michael, Nick, and Ollie.