BtZ42

[ish mailian]

Paint on Film.
The first Expressionist films made up for a lack of lavish budgets by
using set designs with wildly non-realistic, geometrically absurd
angles, along with designs painted on walls and floors to represent
lights, shadows, and objects.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Expressionism


The Absolute Film
The most unique thing that cinema could do is present a visual
spectacle comparable to auditory music, with fluid, dynamic imagery
rhythmically paced by editing, dissolving, superimposition, segmented
screen, contrasts of positive and negative, color ambiance and other
cinematic devices. Already in the 1910s, the Italian Futurists Arnaldo
Ginna and Bruno Corra made at least nine films, painting directly on
the filmstrip not only non-objective pieces (the gradual takeover of
the all-green screen by a red star, playing with afterimage) but also
taking a divisionist painting by Segantini (a girl lying in a field of
flowers) and re-painting it on frame after frame of the film to allow
the colored dots to vibrate even more brilliantly than on the canvas.
Unfortunately these films are all lost, as is the German Hans
Stoltenberg's film painted directly on the filmstrip about the same
time. Other artists made plans for abstract films that were never
realized: Leopold Survage (Parisian-based friend of Picasso and
Modigliani) painted several hundred sequential images, Colored Rhythm,
in full color on paper, with the hope that they could be filmed, but
he was unable to find an adequate color process before World War I put
an end to his project. Likewise the Polish artist Mieczyslaw Szczuka
drew numerous sequential images on scrolls of paper, and published two
fascinating samples in 1924, just a couple of years before his death,
but was apparently not able to get them filmed.

http://www.centerforvisualmusic.org/library/WMAbsoluteFilm.htm

The surprise at the end of the film is our discovery that the tale we
assumed to be one of horror and of superhuman powers is really the
product of the imagination of a subhuman brain, a paranoid’s fantasy,
a mad man’s hatred of his doctor. The world of the film is the product
of Francis’s subjective vision, not of the director’s objective one.
Robert Wiene,Caligari’s director, has intentionally used the decor of
that film in a perpetual war against nature. The striking effect of
the film’s design (by Warm, Röhring, and Reimann) is not just the
unnatural feel of it. Walls, floors, and ceilings bear a structurally
impossible relationship to one another; buildings so constructed could
never stand. Skin, that soft and flexible material of nature, becomes
hardened and frozen with paint. Windows are painted in distorted and
impossible shapes. And most unnatural of all, the world of Caligari is
a world without sunlight. Shadows of light and dark, light beams where
sun would normally cast its shadow, have been painted on the sets. By
using paint to make shadow where the sun would normally make, the fact
that no sun exists was emphasized. The outdoor scenes feel as if they
were shot indoors and they were. Here was the perfect use of the
studio film. The intentional unnaturalness of the film is so
remarkable that it is difficult to tell if the acting is intentionally
or unintentionally stilled. It is expressionistically appropriate.

http://cinecollage.net/weimar.html
-
Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l