Pip Chodorov

CHARLEMAGNE 2 : PILTZER

On December 9, 1998, Charlemagne asked me to bring friends to his piano concert at an opening at the Gérard Piltzer gallery in Paris, and to bring a movie camera. I shot two rolls of super-8 tri-x at 9 frames per second and recorded the sound on mini-disc. I forgot about the rolls of film and left them undeveloped for a year and a half. When I found them and processed them as negative, I was surprised with the results and I blew them up onto 16mm positive high-contrast stock. I then contact printed the positive 16mm to negative 16mm and optically printed frame by frame through these positive and negative master rolls onto color negative stock through colored filters, following a precise notation of the concert music. I chose the following principles:

• The 6945 notes played in the concert correspond to 6923 frames of super-8 film that were shot. No frames are left out or printed twice.
• Speed of playing controls speed of frame succession.
• Discordant diminished fifths are translated into the following methods of visual discordance for the seven parts of the concert in an attempt to replicate in the visual cortex the harmonic overtones that arise in the temporal lobe when listening:
  Flicker between negative and positive,
  between opposites on color wheel (blue/yellow),
  between opposites in retinal cone sensitivities (red/green),
  between different flicker frequencies (frequencies beating in discordance);
  clusters of b/w negative and monochrome frames to create overtonal retinal afterimages,
  left/right screen masking and mirror image printing,
  crossfading between negative and positive images.
• When more than two notes are played, the additional colors correspond to the complexity of sound frequencies.

The final result is at once a diary film, a document of the concert, a structural flicker film, a hand-processed film, a graphic representation of music, and an attempt to apply cognitive principles in sensation and perception to film art.

2002, 16mm color/so., 22mi, $65

Faux Movements

Produced by: Les Productions Aléatoires and CNC.
Assistants: Nicolas Rey, Marie-Odile Sambourg.
Music: Gerard Pape.

Cinema is about the illusion of movement. The filmstrip is made up of individual pictures in succession. The phi phenomenon explains how the brain creates bridges from frame to frame, filling in the gaps, creating the illusion of smooth movement during the black intervals between frames. The perception of movement is processed in areas 17 and 18 of the visual cortex. Neurons in V1 and V2 are responsible for identifying objects in motion, their speed and direction, and global motion across the visual field. This information is processed and passed down to V5/MT where all stimuli are integrated, specific neurons determining specific perceptions, such as upward motion or forward motion. These perceptions can be tricked - cells adapt to motion stumuli and in the absence of that stimuli, produce the opposite perception. Staring into the center of the turning spiral causes forward motion detectors to adapt to that stimulus; the still picture of the train then appears to swell out. This film follows research started in "Charlemagne 2: Piltzer" which concentrated on the perception of color and the creation of phantom colors not present on the film strip through flickering. In "Faux Mouvements", forward and backward motions occur together, movement in different directions are combined. We perceive motion in images that are in fact still. We can also see references to the spiral of the film reel, and the negative and positive of the film process.

2007, 16mm color/sound, 12 min. Rental $35