Robert Fulton - Starlight 1970 5 minutes color / B&W sound
Robert Fulton - Path of Cessation 1974 15 minutes color / B&W sound
Jerome Hiler - Words of Mercury 2011 25 minutes color silent 18fps
Program running time: 45 minutes
Friday December 2nd, 2016 9pm Free Admission
The Beverly Lounge 224 Foxhall Avenue Kingston, New York
I am very pleased to resume the Film Program series in Kingston NY. For this screening, I have partnered with The Beverly Lounge, a new venue in midtown Kingston, where the screening will take place in their banquet hall.
Some notes by Jerome Hiler, on his film Words of Mercury:
WORDS OF MERCURY is my loving farewell to color reversal 16mm film. The Bolex camera, which has served me so well for over fifty years, became a container for a process of distillation. I wanted to extract as much as I could from my remaining rolls of Ektachrome 7285. Film emulsion is so rich with latent colors and images, it was a simple decision to make a film of superimpositions which were all shot in the camera. Anyone who has tried this knows how difficult and sometimes cruel the process can be. In the past, I had renounced it more than a few times in defeat. It’s especially hard when shooting four or more layers. But I had my inspiration from a lifetime of musical listening to polyphonic choral music from the middle ages and renaissance - so many pieces in four to six voices. As it developed, only the passages I shot in four layers were satisfying to me, even though all four might not be perceived on the screen since some were sub-visual and some imitated other layers.
The flow of multiple images is sometimes broken with a single layer image, which might have the effect of the aria—recitative relationship of classical Italian opera. But, as a filmmaker, one is simply a practical artisan and, for me, the single-layer images serve simply as relief from the restless movement of the superimpositions.
The film takes a journey from darkness and a bare world through the seasonal spreading of seeds to a place almost choked and repugnant with color - a place that invites death. The final couplet from Shakespeare’s LOVE’S LABOR’S LOST speaking of the place of death, supplies me with my title. I seem to make the same film again and again in different ways.
Notes on Robert Fulton’s film Path of Cessation, by Stan Brakhage:
“We are not tricked into the belief that we’ve visited Tibet by proxy. Here is the wonder of your works, Bob: that you know, always, whatever part of the World you bounce light off, you are in yr. own backyard ... albeit all these strange (and familiar) creatures move thru that infinite ‘yard’ of yr. mind. How simply wonderful .... Each film a growth: all of the same spirit. What more can I say but ... Thanks!”
Film still above from Words of Mercury.