I went to Brighton College y/day to see the William Kentridge exhibition. Is was OK but didn’t blow me away except for the 3D weird lense drawings which I thought were very good.
However what really interested me were two films playing near the cafeteria by some bloke called Peter Tscherkassky. He is part of a group of Austrian avant garde filmmakers/artists and his films were full-on cut-ups of found footage reinterpreted and re-photographed to create a different meaning.
He says:
“There are three factors that influence my work permanently: working with found footage, working directly on the film stock (together with the possibility of physical manipulation of the film) and, in general, the capacity of the film medium to evoke a dreamlike atmosphere”.
Basically the films are very immediate, accessible, beautiful looking black & white flickering film cut-ups sometimes using the actual stock as raw material, very fast moving and quite extreme. The sound also mirrored this method, repeating jumpy phrases and very rough as well, very emotional and gutteral. Peter Tscherkassky is doing a masterclass as part of the CineCity film programme on Sun, so I’m going to that.
Since last night I’ve been watching The Filth and the Fury, the Sex Pistols film by Julien Temple, over and over. Johnny Rotten and Steve Jones; what fucking stars they are. And what amazing music that seemed to come from nowhere, on TV shows with the likes of god awful bands like Kansas, at number 1 above the Eagles’ Hotel California, coming up with God Save the Queen for the jubilee. An incredible tale. I was in tears on the bus with the story of the demise of Sid Vicious, but the whole thing, the attitude and the music gave me so much energy and together with the Peter Tscherkassky films got me thinking about pushing my music and film more, being more emotionally direct, being more extreme and experimental, use more of the energy I’ve always got from noise and music.
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