Arnulf Rainer is a completely different kind of work from The Flicker.
Kubelka's effort is recuperative of a constructivist ethos very much
akin
to that of Anton Webern, while my film--though unhappily labeled
"structuralist" by P Adams Sitney--is much more rooted in the
surrealist
tradition: it has transparency, activation of the unconscious, and
effects
a radical endorsement of individual subjectivity. The Flicker also
attempts
to delineate a harmonic formalism within the perceptual modality of
flicker, while Arnulf Rainer (named for an expressionist artist) is an
archly abstract expressionist temporal design.
The sound for The Flicker was conceived as a composition of pulse
trains
whose frequencies would fall into the perceptual region lying between
rhythm and pitch. It was performed on a custom configuration of
interconnected mechanical devices, with a sine wave oscillator driver
and
some tape echo. I thought at the time of this device as what a music
synthesizer OUGHT TO BE, as opposed to the then-recently-appearing
Buchla
and Moog gizmos, which were designed by engineers to suit what they
imagined the needs of musicians to be. Unfortunately, this
engineer-driven
technology has accelerated ever since, which is in part why The
Flicker's
soundtrack still sounds quite distinctive.
And thanks for bringing the pirates at ubu.com to my attention.
-------------Tony Conrad
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Date: Tue, 16 Dec 2003 19:38:39 +0100
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Subject: Re: [microsound] Tony Conrad's The Flicker
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Hi,
If there's a screening of Peter Kubelkas "Arnulf Rainer" you should
see
it...
It's made out of black and clear frames (it flickers...), the sound
is weather white noise or it's silent. It's made 1960 and you should
find a lot about it in the net...
for example Fred Camper wrote about it:
Arnulf Rainer (1960)
Arnulf Rainer’s images are the most ´reducedª of all — this is a
film composed entirely of frames of solid black and solid white
which Kubelka strings together in lengths as long as 24 seconds and
as short as a single frame. When he alternates between single black
and white frames, a rapid flicker effect is produced, which is as
close as Kubelka can come to the somewhat more rapid flicker of
motion-picture projection; during the long sections of darkness one
waits in nervous anticipation for the flicker to return, without
knowing precisely which form it will take. But Arnulf Rainer is not
merely a study of film rhythm and flicker. In reducing the cinema to
its essentials, Kubelka has not stripped it of meaning, but rather
made an object which has qualities so general as to suggest a
variety of possible meanings, each touching on some essential aspect
of existence.
(Fred Camper)
thanks, Bernhard
microsound <microsound@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> schrieb am 15.12.03 22:43:52:
Hi,
I just saw Tony Conrad's experimental film The Flicker, and was
interested if anyone knew how the sound was made. I wonder if this
has been discussed before?
For those who don't know, it's a film made up entirely of black
and white frames in various strobe patterns which can potentially
cause epileptic seizures (didn't happen in the screening I was at,
but several people had to leave). The sound seems like it might be
using pulse generators...it sounds analogous to the visual strobe
effect.
I found an mp3 of the sound here:
http://www.ubu.com/sound/conrad.html
I highly recommend it.
thanks,Phil Curtis
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