GME Presents the Marriage of Experimental Film snd Music: the Films of Paul Clipson and Joost Rekveld
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In the arena of the marriage of experimental film and music that emerged from live performance, we feature the single channel, abstract films of contemporary artists Paul Clipson (LANDSCAPE DISSOLVES, 2009-2016) and Joost Rekveld (11 FILMS, 1991-2017).
Paul Clipson (1965-2018) was a San Francisco-based filmmaker whose work involves projected installation and live collaborative performances with sound artists and musicians, including Tarentel, Jefre Cantu-Ledesma and Joshua Churchill. Their methods of experimenting with sound and instrumentation, incorporating improvisation, mistakes and accidents into live performances and recordings, greatly influenced Clipson’s approach to his moving image work. Over time, shorter film pieces were carefully created by Clipson from these performances, utilizing the accidental, unexpected juxtapositions of sound and image that have been discovered live. Working In the experimental film vein, Clipson cites as his influences Stan Brakhage, Marie Menken, Bruce Baillie, and Bruce Conner.
Clipson’s cinema is one of eternal recurrence. Subjects continually repeat themselves: bridges, buildings, fences, gratings, trains, airplanes, trees, suns, leaves, grass, eyes, power lines, and especially bodies of water. Clipson creates layered superimpositions of these objects through rewinding his Super 8mm camera and re-exposing the film stock from another iteration of the subject. In this manner, Clipson transforms material reality into otherworldly thresholds of shimmering reflections and dynamic edges into vibrations of light. In this, Clipson’s primary concern is not alluding to the properties of cinema, but rather to the properties of perception itself. Clipson’s films are among the clearest articulations since Stan Brakhage of how vision is formed through process – how sight is not a passive and inert function, but can equally shape the world. According to the filmmaker, "My approach to making films is to bring to light subconscious preoccupations that begin to reveal themselves while filming in an improvised, stream of consciousness manner. Aspects of memory, dreams and recordings of the everyday are juxtaposed with densely layered, in-camera edited studies of figurative and abstract environments vast and small, all within a flowing formal and thematic experimental aesthetic that encourages unplanned-for results.”
A SCENE FROM LIGHT YEAR (2013)
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Joost Rekveld (b. 1970) is a Dutch artist and experimental filmmaker. Since 1991 he has been making abstract films and light installations. Rekveld has written that “The beginning of my filmmaking was guided by the idea that light moving in time could be composed in a similar way as sound is structured in a musical piece. But even though I studied in an environment that was saturated with electronic music, I had little idea of what composers actually did until I started taking lessons in electronic music composition by Gilius van Bergeijk. It was through these lessons that I started to see how I could compose moving images and where I developed a way to use notation not only to write compositions down, but as a tool to generate and extrapolate ideas.” Through his filmmaking process, Rekveld dissects light, allows it to trickle through tiny apertures and makes hypnotic patterns dance before the spectator’s eyes.
In his early days, Rekveld worked intensively with the medium of film, experimenting with all aspects of the process from printing, to manipulating, to developing the images himself. In 1994, he was already using a computer to make an animation film by writing his own software; a practice he returned to later on in his career. His works display an intimate and embodied understanding of our technological world. They are deeply inspired by science and technology and the systematic dialogue between man and machine. By exploring the various spatial and sensorial aspects of light projection his works intrinsically relate to the early history of optics and perspective and, in many ways, can be understood as a type of visual music. His animated films are often mechanical compositions whereby the computer acts as a controller, orchestrating the precise movement of each optical element of the film-work or installation.
Rekveld was for a long period of time head of the ArtScience interfaculty in The Hague; in significant fashion, his experiments and experimental films bridge the divide between art and science, mankind and machine. The accompanying 117-page booklet (in English and Dutch) provides extensive in-depth accounts by the filmmaker himself about the creative and thought process that went into making each of the moving image works represented in this digital publication. The booklet also includes an essay by Simona Monizza of the Eye Museum (Amsterdam) about the digital restoration of his films, and of the challenges in preserving analog work in this format.
A SCENE FROM #57 (2017)
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