Elizabeth Block is a filmmaker, an artist, and an award-winning writer of poetry and fiction. Her writing has been published in a variety of literary journals and magazines, and on the internet. Her writing includes the novel, A Gesture through Time, a hybrid work of prose, poetry, textual flip book, and scripted story of obsessive/ambiguous love, death, and unusual cinematic history. She believes film--in its abstract, sensual, and lit-up personas--may cajole and elucidate the idea of language as a material articulation of perception, and she likes to get her hands dirty in material things. In this capacity, she feels her work as a poet and a filmmaker intertwine. She also adores dyslexifying digital media as (although arrived) dis-evolution after celluloid. She is currently touring her film work across the United States in festival, micro cinema, and museum venues. Her collaborative text/sound art (with Warren Burt) has been internationally performed and broadcast, and her photography has appeared in art spaces throughout the San Francisco Bay Area.
A 16mm poem- re-photography of 16mm projection, re-photography of digital video/video projection.
Producers: Elizabeth Block and Evri Kwong
Director/Writer: Elizabeth Block
Cinematographer: Elizabeth Block
Editor: Elizabeth Block
Composer: Warren Burt
I find William Faulkner's novel, Light in August, which I haven't read since my dreaded high school years. I re-interpret the novel into a dyslexic language poem, and I fiddle with the idea of un-translation (an un-adaptation) into film. Falling for celluloid in a digital era has left me feeling somewhat out of order. I am unhinged by an awareness that film is not entirely fossil, yet is increasingly eclipsed by its son, bit stream. I romance Bolex landscape and abstract cinematography and black and white re-photography of color film projection, traditional photochemical process, and photogram film. Yet I also re-photograph digital re-cinematography of projected 16 mm film. At first glance, a viewer may not be able to distinguish between fiber optic re-photography and pure chemical light emulsion. I deliberately edit the film to punctuate different light properties, yet blur the distinction between pure celluloid and celluloid tainted with digital video projection. Even as digital video succeeds at replacing celluloid, I am interested in dyslexifying and displacing the digital video projection from its historical development after celluloid, as its own dis-evolution of technology. Featuring a digital sound composition by Melbourne, Australia based, Warren Burt.
2003, 16mm, color/b&w/so., 9min. 30sec. Rental $20
Hand-inked and 16mm re-photography of digital video/video projection
The film—part of an unfolding series—doubles as a text-color/light poem. It also comprises an excerpt from a prose-poetry manuscript: The wind as the waves, themselves, disported, amorphous—tumbling confusion, in brute want and lust, itself aimlessly by: multiple print iterations hand-to-ink-to-leader struck by light (with the exception of a few bits of re-photographed digital video pixel projection backwards— into celluloid).
The film script in prose poetry form:
After night
night, winter and summer storms of torment, the like-arrow stillness of weather fine, their court, without, held interference. Had (listening there any been to listen one), the, from rooms upper empty, the only house chaos gigantic lighting streaked with have, could, heard, been tossing and tumbling: the wind as the waves themselves disported, amorphous, like the bulks whose leviathans are brows pierced by light no reason of; mounted and on one another top and plunged, lunged darkness in the daylight or (night for day and, month year and shapelessly together ran) in games idiot, it, until seemed if as universe—the battling—were tumbling confusion, in brute want and lust itself aimlessly by.2004, 16mm, color/si, 6 min. Rental $20