UnionDocs

PASTRAMI RECORDINGS Pip Chodorov USA, 2009, 31 minutes, 16mm

In June 2009, Pip Chodorov and Charlemagne Palestine were invited to the Côté Court festival in Pantin, France to make a filmo-musical performance about their home town, New York City. The film was cut together from images Chodorov filmed on 16mm over a 15-year period, and projected with live music by Palestine from recordings made in New York, and with participation by Chodorov and Benn Northover. This screening will be an attempt to recreate that performance from the film and the music recorded that night.

FAUX MOUVEMENTS (WRONG MOVES) Pip Chodorov
USA, 2007, 12 minutes, 16mm

Specific neurons in the brain are responsible for perceiving motion. This film acts directly on those neurons, to create novel motion effects, not on the screen but directly in the brain. Made by bipacking 16mm loops of trains and spirals on the contact printer.

ON BEEING AND NOTHINGNESS Emilija Skarnulyte, Francesco Panozzo 2009, 3 minutes, Super8

The Lithuanian language has several words for “death,” one of which is used for bees and people, the other for all other beings. This film was shot time-lapse over a four-day period.

CHARLEMAGNE 2 : PILTZER Pip Chodorov
USA, 2002, 22 minutes, 16mm

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.

Pip Chodorov. Born April 13, 1965 in New York. Filmmaking and music composition since 1972. Studied cognitive science at the University of Rochester, NY and film semiotics at the University of Paris, France. Work in film distribution – previously Orion Classics, NYC; UGC, Paris; Light Cone, Paris; and, currently, Re:Voir Video, Paris, which he founded in 1994  and The Film Gallery, the first art gallery devoted excusively to experimental film. He is also co-founder of L’Abominable, a cooperative do-it-yourself film lab in Paris, and the moderator of the internet-based forum on experimental film, FrameWorks.