"To plasticize the films, Carl Brown reinvented the procedures and tools of cinema itself. By pulling (drawing), the gauging and the drying of the surface Brown begins. This chromatic material is the toner that he spreads over the film so as to leave a trace of arm movements, then works with the help of two principal procedures, the Sabattier effect, being the double development with inversion of optic values, and the plaiting, being a doubling of gelatin, caused by the difference in temperature between fixing solutions. With those techniques of pure chromatic mounting (setting) which through folds, fractures and the explosion registers the conversion work which is the development at the heart of the colour itself, Carl Brown exalts what he calls the 'depravity of toner.' ... CONDENSATION OF SENSATION as other Carl Brown films (RE:ENTRY, 1990; AIR CRIES, "EMPTY WATER," 1995) respect a form of classic narrative, the one of the voyage: its exploratory progression leads from one identifiable type image (the negative for example) to an absolutely frantic nameless chromatic; the colours stacked one upon the other, declining by themselves, have no longer names, colours, connections, nor even describable motion. Carl Brown, bringing up in his own way the Eisenstein project, describes this enterprise as 'opening up the screen.' However, it is less a question of animating a surface by imaginatively opening it from the outside then covering and recovering it so that each colour coat, itself mixed and complex, falls on the previous one without being annulled or replaced: it superposes itself so dense and opaque that the colour seems to suffocate its own light in a convulsive way. By investing the unedited links to fertilize the possible relationships between coats and undercoats, between analogue planning and all over abstract, between unstringing accumulations. Through wafering and leafing, Carl Brown commutes the film's density into depth ..." - from an essay, "Experience chromatiques le cinema contemporain" by Nicole Brenez, presented at the Louvre, Paris, France in October, 1995
Produced by Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council. Sound: C.C.M.C. CONDENSATION OF SENSATION is a materialist travelogue that documents the process of perception itself, what Brakhage has called "mind motion." A montage of sixties commercials punctuates the wanderings of its protagonist, a blank-faced boy-wonder who struggles through a garden of unearthly delights before lighting on a water's edge park. CONDENSATION is generously furnished throughout with the broken iconography of Roman Catholicism - figured literally here in its kinetic montage of itemized constituents, a congregation of the heart.
"In CONDENSATION OF SENSATION, the filmmaker has applied himself to the surface of the film, soaking its small strips in dye baths to produce a hallucinatory palette. Passed through successive generations of printing, painting, sabattier, reticulation, gluing, and toning, 'the film provides an encyclopedia for hand processing techniques.'" - Mike Hoolboom
1987, 16mm, color/so, 90m, $150
Produced by the Canada Council for the Arts. Sound: Kaiser Neitzsche.
"As a film, RE:ENTRY could hardly be more pure. A story in light and color and movement, it becomes an extended essay on change wrought through time, through chemistry, through experience. It shows memory tattered but obsessive, a recurring drift of thought and allusion. Though much of the imagery is based in nature, the audio is distinctly urban: nervous, speedy, and full of aural debris. RE:ENTRY quantifies and characterizes the materiality and physicality of cinematic experience. Conscious of both its antecedents and its present content, this is a radical work." - Peggy Gale
As I stood at the water's edge, it was night, I was eighteen, I was young. I dove into the pool for a swim and then it seemed as though I was thirty before I reached the other side. In the water, I was suddenly in a different world. The barriers were gone and the darkness was no longer an enclosed, stifling dark, but an enormous night in which darkness was not the absence of light but the presence of things unseen of a whole world of being, not known or realized before. I got out and looked at the ripples in the water extending away from me until they shaded into a horizon like etched glass. I saw it only with my eyes, without recognition. ... I was looking into this time past, with its immensity of vision straining my eyes to distinguish some form, listening for an intelligible sound, but as I stared, all that looked back was a reflection that made the surrounding darkness seem transparent like a sky. I reentered to find out why.
1990, 16mm, color/so, 90m, $150
Produced by the Ontario Arts Council. Sound: Michael Snow.
As the wheel turns the religion of the body moves to and through the physical into the psychological. We see the feared; all is moved. There is a hint of seclusion, an idea from the past reworked and still dangerous. The participants, unsure, choose for convenience a convent and yet are still revealed. Through a window there appears a tree, and then a forest. Too many options. The monastic life, safe and sure. We cluster for the cloister.
1991, 16mm, color/so, 31m, $95
Sound: John Kamevaar
BROWNSNOW presents a fascinating combination of two artistic visions, mine and Michael Snow's. I have known Michael for almost half of my life and all of my film career so this is a natural marriage of Michael's work and my filmic vision of him and his work.
"... The film is extraordinary, generous dialogue that leaves the work of the three artists involved intact yet paradoxically becomes, absolutely, a film by Carl Brown of, on, about, in reference to and using, the work (in various mediums) of Michael Snow.
"The source of all the 'musical' sound in the film is any music from solo recordings or recordings of ensembles of which I was a part from 1948 (!) to the nineties. The third artist involved with this work, John Kamevaar has beautifully manipulated 'my' music to make 'his' music become a powerful partner in image-sound situations in Carl Brown's film. ...
"Brown has also shaped sequences of commentators on my work (some are Jonas Mekas, Bruce Elder, Regina Cornwell) and their comments so that they, their images, become part of his work yet, again, they remain 'themselves,' portraited. Their statements remain theirs but what was originally meant is now part of what the film means. ...
"Thank you Carl." - Michael Snow
1994, 16mm, color/so, 134m, $250
"Wrapped in the skin of this form that is known as the body only lies the memories and the soul of that self. So too, the skin of the film is the emulsion which holds together all the photochemical secrets just under its surface. This work is a testament to my unwrapping of these two energies and blending those photochemical secrets with my energy of unconscious ... sometimes conscious memories of the events that took place upon the expulsion of one life to another. ... I created the destination and the two skins began to crack and peel like the first good sunburn of the summer. ... At last I could not deny it, the merging of myself with the film gave rise to internal events realized through much thought before/during/after the fact surfacing in ways that only my most sacred thoughts could. It is the story of a personal tragedy overcome by sharing misery with company to shed the bad blood to allow the red thread that binds us all to run the oxidized route of freedom without fear and let old skin which has been discarded be wrapped in the wind of the Mistral swept up for all the senses, fresh again. Beautiful but terrible to fight and feel another day."
Sound: John Kamevaar
The story is the closure,
the film is how pain and anxiety are
carried by the wind
There is no use to exert control,
it only causes the pain/anxiety
to linger
It must run its natural course
The Mistral can be beautiful and terrible,
if it catches onto you
your soul becomes wrapped in its temper.
It dances over the water changing its course to make your light
unpredictable, terrible but beautiful ... solo or in tandem
The story is the jazz by which these events take place
To exert any force over the film would not be the story
I am consumed by the flame
1997, 16mm, color/so, 117m, $250
Fine pain an imperceptible barrier screening vision.
Or a cute coenesthesia
Double vision staring in the dark
Blessed are the cross-eyed for they will see God twice
(juxtaposition being the inverse of repetition)
Or the monophonic dialogue of the schizophrenic subway
passenger.
Two track mind.
Schizophrenic.
Moment after moment everything is movement.
I'm sane but overwhelmed.
A minimum of memory is indispensable.
May your shadow never grow less, the patient is no longer here.
I have always refused to let my shadow casting be hurt by a
shadowless idea.
I don't think the voice think in the convulsive light.
Thus Sprake Zarathustra: "These metamorphoses of the spirit do I designate to you: how the spirit becometh a camel, the camel a lion, and the lion at last a child." - John Kamevaar
1998, 16mm, color/so, 60m, $200
Composer: John Kamevaar
"Carl Brown makes celluloid dance. Carl Brown 's new film work will burn colours so deeply into your brain, you'll be watching a light show inside your eyelids for hours. Titled Neige Noir (Black Snow in English), a name that conjures Toronto winters but actually refers to the trenches of the first world war, the piece is a visual feast more exhausting than a turkey dinner. Clocking in at about 60 minutes, it opens with a calming sequence of manipulated representations of a swimmer and the sea set to a lulling jazz tune, then crashes into a steady techno and white noise assault with pulsating images.
"Brown radically alters the celluloid itself, experimenting like a mad scientist to create gorgeous colour patterns. He sometime refilms an image up to eight times to bring its dance of distortion to a climax. Any single still from this film could bring you to a stop in an art gallery, and Brown gives us some 86,000 of them.
"After Neige Noir, the jostling holiday shopping experience will seem far less intense."-Thomas Hirschmann
2003, 16mm, 60 minutes, color, sound, dual projection, Inquire for price