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Patron: Bernhard Fasenfest
Department: Other
Email:
bgf2108@columbia.edu
Odyssey: 206.107.42.20
PETER KUBELKA:
The Theory
of Metrical
Film
(From Lectures on Adebar, Schwechater,
and Arnulf Rainer)
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Peter Kubelka
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Peter Kubelka
So, I give you this and the gesture have to do with each
other. You conclude: since he wants me to see something,
apparently, he wants me to see this. Now you figured out
where I was really pointing. As you can all see when you think
back, even the apparent simplicity of what I did (I said, I give
you this) already was received differently by everybody. I
dont want to go into longer examples of this. Let me just make
statements. As you live your life, it is clear that every one of
you always lives in the way he alone can live it. I say your
personal realityyours, yours, yours ... for your reality, you say
the realitybecause its yours. You have only this one and you
cannot imagine how another one would look. If at the same
point of time two people stand at the top of Rockefeller Center
and one jumps down and the other not, each cannot imagine
why the one does not jump and the other jumps. Everybody is
confined to his reality. Theres nothing wrong about it, but that
is the case. When I want to communicate something about fife
or something about realitythe realitywhen I want to make a
film, I think I want to document something about life, about
reality, about what is going on. And I want, lets say, to make a
picture of nature. Now from your point of view this is my
reality, my special nature, as I see it. And, now again, if I say,
I give you this, what will happen? Nobody will know what I
actually wanted to give you, because everybody will look at
the tree, maybe 2/3 of you will look at the tree, and those that
look at the tree will all stay within their own reality. So when I
want to say something about nature, I must really understand
that this is my nature, and that I have to articulate that for
you, so that you clearly see what I was thinking about.
Because nature, in itself, is completely shapeless. It is open to
any kind of vision, action, interpretation. It will do something
different to anybody; its therefore useless. If I want to give you
my tree, I have to articulate my tree. Now, let us articulate my
tree for you with this Polaroid camera. [Kubelka and a student
photograph tree.] We have two trees, my tree, his tree. Whats
the difference? Is there a difference? And where is the
difference? Yes, there is a difference. I wanted the whole tree
on it. I managed one side of it, but only where it comes out of
the earth. I know that half of the tree is inside. So the trees are
like when you screw together two things. The trees screw
together the sky and the earth. But you cant see that here of
course. Every time when I see a tree, I know that its half in the
earth and thats a very important point for me. My tree feeling
is that this is a part where heaven and earth are held together
by this being. Half here, half there. Its between the two
elements. A tree has a fantastic double existence. But this
didnt come out in the photograph. That fact came out a little
bit when I talked about it. It comes to decision making. . . . You
can make two or three decisions. You can choose to stay here,
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stay there, hold the camera higher, lower. You might have
chosen to open the lens more, or close it more, and then the
tree would have become darker still and you would have had
more outline.
Now lets compare whats on this photograph with the real
tree. Everybody will agree that the green is in no case the
green of the tree. Where have these two photographs a real
value? They have a value in that they distinguish a little bit
him (the student photographer) from me. So, they say
something, not about the tree, but about him and me. So,
again, the value of one picture is almost nil. The value of two
pictures already says something about us. We took different
pictures whatever small decisions we made.
Where a medium is really mirroring nature, it is valueless.
Where it absolutely follows nature, it cannot be manipulated, it
cannot be worked upon, it cannot be used for articulation. It
cannot be used for building my reality, which I want to give
you. You have to see everything as your reality. The world
which you see, nobody else sees. So you can see my world
doesnt exist for you, if I cannot build an image of my world.
Then my world may become your world or your world may
change after seeing my world. And my world may change after
seeing your world. Again, everything is interpretation.
Everything is documentation and articulation. The real thing is
without interest and value.
This whole argument is directed against the belief in
photography and the value of reporting the real world. What I
say that you must do in cinema is not try to report or bring the
real worldto use the qualities of the cinematographic camera
to mirror the real world, but that you have to articulate as you
do when you talk or draw. The danger in filmmaking lies in that
people think that bringing nature to somebody else is useful. It
brings my world. Of course when you draw its very evident
that no two drawings are ever the same. But when you make
photographs, and you stand where I stand and you also shoot
the tree from the same angle, then the photographs are
practically alike. This factor is rather strong in photography
because this machine has a strong articulation of its own,
which is not desirable, which we have to remove.
Every artist tries to mirror the world, because what he thinks
of as the world is his own world. You see I dont say I want to
mirror my worldwhat is my world? I say I want to mirror the
world and then its my world anyway. There is no painting
which is mirroring the world. Every painting talks. And every
painting mirrors the world of the man who painted it. You see,
of course you say, I want to mirror the worldits a formula
to help you understand that you have to get a little bit of
distance to yourselves, and that you acknowledge that there
are other beings who each have their own reality and think
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Peter Kubelka
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Peter Kubelka
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Adebar
pillars here and nine pillars there, when you cut out one pillar
of one side the temple falls down. You have to have nine pillars
here and you have to have nine pillars on the other side. I
wanted to make myself an ecstatic time, to take me out of the
amorphousness of daily life.
I decided that I would have ever)' one of the chosen
elements meet every other one. I have elements one, two,
three, four, and element five. I want to bring these five into an
order which would not make one of the meetings heavier than
the other. One meets two: two meets three, three meets four,
and four meets five. Five meets one and we start again with
one. One has already met two, so one meets three; three has
met four; three meets five; five has already met one, so five
meets two; two has already met three, so two meets four. See,
I have my second strophe, or second stanza. My second
repetition contains again all the elements, each just once, and
each meeting with a different one than the first time. All these
articulations come into being by the meeting of two elements.
I established another law which says two positives never meet.
When a positive appears I want it to be succeeded by a
negative. Positive can never meet positive, negative can never
meet negative.
In cinema one establishes such rules, regulatory rules,
balancing rules, which you have in music when, for example,
the musician wants the whole length of his piece divided in 4/4
measures. With this he establishes an overall structure within
which he will then compose. All of these compositions will
have an overall character like an overall smell, a taste, which
is the four beat. This is what cinema has been lacking. Law
and order is the basis of creating. In music, you establish your
overall rhythmic structure: then you establish your character
in pitch: you say it will be C major, which means the piece
starts with C major and ends with C major. Composition is just
a multitude of such rules and laws which are put there and
which relate to each other in a way they have to relate,
following again laws which are derived from the medium. We
have the intervals also. We have no 3/4 tone, no 1/4 tone, we
have either a whole tone or a half tone in between, and then
after twelve half tones the scale repeats. Fantastic reduction!
Reduction of all the possibilities in the sound world to these
twelve intervals. The fifth is the basic interval. So people made
music having fifths and then maybe a fourth, and maybe a
second, and that was that. They ruled off everything else, and
they functioned under this law until very late when the half
tone emerged. This 1/2 tone is something very tasty and very
specifically musical. There are many systems of composition
which ruled out this harmony. If you used the half tone in some
religious societies you would be killed.
What I want to achieve for cinema is a sensual sensitivity
as refined as it is in music. Music for the eye. With this film,
I took the magazine, found out how to thread the film. (I had to
spend the whole night in darkness, of course.) I bought one
box of film, thats all I could still afford. Furthermore, see, my
order was for a color film. But, I had no money for color
anymore, so I bought a black and white film. I had sixty
meters, black and white film, which is exactly two minutes
worth of shooting time.
With every movement I made, every thought, there was
defeat. But I still wanted to win. 1 still wanted to beat them. Of
course you can imagine the aggression I had, against a whole
civilization in which I lived anyway. But I believed in my
cinema. I had a hunch that I would do it. The showdown came
when I had to film this stuff. My friend was ready to act as my
assistant. I dressed in a black suit, the only one I had. It was
like a funeral, wedding, or something. It was a ceremonial suit.
My friend came with this old car, and he brought the loaded
camera. I walked through the town with my black suit. When I
arrived there, there were twenty-four models waiting. There
was the special envoy of the publicity agency, who had to
make sure that I did film what they wanted. I had beer casks.
So I put these beer casks there, and I put the camera on them
symbolically: beer filmcamera on the beer. The publicity man
said, Well, how about now having a little beer poured. I said
Okay, lets do it. The waiter came and poured beer.
It was a hand-cranked camera, of course, and had several
speeds because it was made for scientific purposes. You could
go at two frames a second with one gear, or you would stick it
into another gear and it would go up to three hundred frames,
and make a ZZZZZZ. It also had a speedometer where you
could read how fast it was going. It was a very interesting
instrument. I started cranking, and this man came and said,
Oh, what is this camera? I said, This is a special camera
only for your film; I have to control the speed so exactly that I
have a speedometer as you can see. The speedometer was
going, so he was very pleased with this thing. Then they directed all that was to go on, and I was always cranking. I ran
out of film, of course, after two minutes, we worked the whole
day, and I was always cranking. They were bringing things out
and drinking beer. It was, in a way, somewhat to my liking.
Over the years the funny effect has, of course, grown. At the
time it wasnt so funny. It was mad: they had all the power,
and I was really dancing on a tightrope. I did it regardless of
what would happen. I became very hungry, and there were all
these trays with food. But I could not find an excuse to get
some of it, because it was decoration. Then, it occurred to me
that I could order some drinks by pretending that the models
were not in the right mood.
Anyway, the day ended and everybody went home very
content. And I had a roll of film, I developed it, and then I saw
this incredible mess. It was absolutely nothing. I said, I will
make the greatest film ever made. Now lets get back to the
formal side. Since childhood I desired visual speed. In my first
film there is a sequence of very short shots where I attempt to
speed. I cannot account for this wish. But, I was dreaming of
works of art which I could make, which would last half a
second, or a second, like lightning signals. I wanted to make a
film with the most visual speed. What I really wanted to make
at this time, and what I also asked the beer people at the
beginning to pay for, were nature studies. At the time my
Schwechater
With this film I have done something which will survive the
whole film history because it is repeatable by anyone. It is
written down in a script, it is beyond decay. It can be made
exactly after my script without any faults. Someday I will put
the script in stone, granite, then it will last 200,000 years, if it
is not destroyed. You see the normal age of black & white film
is 50 years. Now it is only 15 years, since the chemicals and
materials are much worse than they were in 1905. A color film
rots in about 10 years and then the colors fade and decay. In
the entire world there is no way to preserve a color film. But
Amulf Rainer will last forever.