1966-1969 5 Rare Short Films Disc 1 - 48.00 1 Human Be-In: 1967, Colour (w/ Dead footage) 7.31 m 2 Beatles Electronique: 66-69, Colour & B+W 3.00 m 3 San Francisco: 67-68, Colour 15.33 m 4 Andy Warhol's EPI: 1967, Colour 12.06 m 5 Eyetoon: 1968, Colour 8.00 m ******************************************************************** Track Info: 1 Human Be-In: Jerry Abrams, 1967 (w/ Grateful Dead footage) 16mm: colour w/ sound: 7min Music by Blue Cheer. Captures the spirit and essence of the great San Francisco Human Be-In of 67-Jan-14. Ten thousand people imbued with peace, love and euphoria. Set to hard rock such as only San Francisco blues can produce. BE-IN contains Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Timothy Leary, Michael McClure, Lenore Kandel and Buddha. 2 Beatles Electronique: Nam June Paik & Jud Yalkut, 1966-1969 Colour & B+W w/o dialogue: 3min Beatles Electronique is a mesmerizing improvisation that reveals Paik's early engagement with the manipulation of pop cultural material. Against a looped electronic soundtrack, images of the Beatles from A Hard Day's Night and performing at Shea Stadium are transformed into an eerily hypnotic study. 3 San Francisco: Anthony Stern, 1967-1968 (w/ Interstellar Overdrive) 16mm: colour: 15min (United Kingdom) Anthony Stern's San Francisco, could be described as a city film and allied with Jean Vigo's A Propos de Nice (France, 1930) and Walther Ruttman's Berlin: Symphony of a City (Germany, 1927). It could also be described as a film of visible and invisible journeys. It moves between day and night, the city centre and its outskirts, the shops and the counter-culture. The invisible journey travels between the two 1960s psychedelic capitals of the world, San Francisco and London; Stern shot the film in the city of its namesake but returned to edit it in London, firstly at the BFI Production Board's facilities at Waterloo and then at the Arts Lab at Drury Lane. The music that accompanies the film is occasionally synched to various San Franciscan musicians - march bands, street musicians, bands on stage. It was, however, recorded in London (returning us to the invisible journey) and was played by Pink Floyd. The track, Interstellar Overdrive, at first drives the film, the flickering and flashing images matching the music's propulsive beat. Later, as the music calms, our attention is led more explicitly to the images. Now the rapid cutting decreases and the film concentrates on a house and the ritualistic occult activity contained therein. (The music and the long haired occultists very much place the film in the time of its making, but the distinctive editing techniques manage to partially dislodge it from this anchor.) These changes in music and image create a focus point and then, as the music returns triumphantly to its original pattern, a grand finale. The use of 'Interstellar Overdrive', came about through an intermix of relations between Stern, The Pink Floyd's Syd Barrett, and filmmaker Peter Whitehead. All three had lived in Cambridge and all three had had painting exhibitions in the same upper room of the Lion and Lamb pub in the village of Milton. Stern later worked on several Whitehead films, including Tonite Lets All Make Love in London (1967) and, through his friendship with Barrett, succeeded in bringing the three together again in London. This lead to the use of Interstellar Overdrive in both Tonite and then in San Francisco. William Fowler 4 Andy Warhol's Exploding Plastic Inevitable: Ronald Nameth, 1967 The Velvet Underground & Nico, I'll Be Your Mirror and European Son from The Velvet Underground & Nico LP and It Was a Pleasure Then from Nico's Chelsea Girl LP, and two live songs from the Exploding Plastic Inevitable at Poor Richard's, 1363 No. Sedgwick, Chicago (66-June-23): Heroin (5.14) and Venus In Furs (3.24). That show was w/o Lou Reed who was at New York's Beth Israel Hospital for hepatitis, and w/o Nico who took off for Ibiza at the beginning of June. John Cale on lead vocals, keyboards, drums Sterling Morrison on guitar Maureen Tucker on bass Angus MacLise was on drums Running Time: 22 minutes (long version) 12 minutes (short version) ** I think this is the 12min version ** An alternate version of this film was broadcasted on French TV channel Canal on 90-Aug-26. That version is edited to 12 minutes and the soundtrack is different: Venus In Furs (3.57) and Heroin (3.19) are not the versions sung by John Cale but those from the Columbus, Ohio Valleydale Ballroom 66-Nov-4 tape. Credits titles are also different (John Cale's name appears correctly spelled even though it was mispelled as 'John Cahill' in the 22min version). It was this shortened version which was shown at the Fondation Cartier exhibition in Jouy-En-Josas on 90-June-15 and is available on the Re: Voir VHS. Andy Warhol's hellish sensorium, the Exploding Plastic Inevitable, was, while it lasted, the most unique and effective discotheque environment prior to the Fillmore/Electric Circus era, and it is safe to say that the EPI has never been equaled. Similarly, Ronald Nameth's cinematic homage to the EPI stands as a parangon of excellence in the kinetic rock-show ganre. Nameth, a colleague of John Cage in several mixed-media environments at the University of Illinois, managed to transform his film into something far more than a mere record of an event. Like Warhol's show, Nameth's EPI is an experience, not an idea. In fact, the ethos of the entire pop life-style seems to be synthesized in Nameth's dazzling kinaethetic masterpiece. Here, form and content are virtually synonymous, and there is no misunderstanding what we see. It's as though the film itself has exploded and reassembled in a jumble of shards and prisms. Gerard malanga and Ingrid Superstar dance frenetically to the music of the Velvet Underground (Heroin, European Son, and a quasi-East Indian composition), while their ghost images writhe in Warhol's Vinyl projected on a screen behind. There's a spectacular sense of frantic uncontrollable energy, communicated almost entirely by Nameth's exquisite manipulation of the medium. EPI was photographed on color and black-and-white stock during one week of performances by Warhol's troupe. Because the environment was dark, and because of the flash-cycle of the strobe lights, Nameth shot at eight frames per second and printed the footage at the regular twenty-four fps. In addition he developed a mathematical curve for repeated frames and superimpositions, so that the result is an eerie world of semi-slow motion agaisnt an aural background of incredible frenzy. Colors were superimposed over black-and-white negatives and vice-versa. An extraordinary off-color grainy effect resulted from pushing the ASA rating of his color stock; thus the images often seem to lose their cohesiveness as though wrenched apart by the sheer force of the environment. Watching the film is like dancing in a strobe room: time stops, motion retards, the body seems separate from the mind. The screen bleeds onto the wall, the seats. Flak bursts of fiery explode with slow fury. Staccato strobe guns stitch galaxies of silverfish over slow-motion, stop-motion close-ups of the dancers' dazed ecstatic faces. Nameth does with cinema what the Beatles do with music: his film is dense, compact, yet somehow fluid and light. It is extremely heavy, extremely fast, yet airy and poetic, amosaic, a tapestry, a mandala that sucks you into its whirling maelstrom. The most striking aspect of Nameth's work is the use of the freeze-frame to generate a sense of timelessness. Stop-motion is literaly the death of the image: we are instantly cut-off from the illusion of cinematic life, the immediacy of motion, and the image suddenly is relegated to the motionless past, leaving in its place a pervading aurea of melancholy. The final shots of Gerad Malanga tossing his head in slow motion and freezing in several positions create a ghostlike atmosphere, a timeless and ethereal mood that lingers and haunts long after the images fade. Using essentially graphic materials, Nameth rises above a mere graphic exercise: he makes kinetic empathy a new kind of poetry. 5 Eyetoon: Jerry Abrams, 1968 16mm: color w/ sound: 8min The sea, tranquil and violent, is the ultimate symbol for Jerry Abrams' Eyetoon and the ultimate equivalent to making love, his concern in this short and visually dazzling film. Abrams contrasts the rushing faces of New York and a highway juggernaut with the peaceful joining of bodies in a Gjon Mili-like stroboscopic sequence, always with a burbling, flashing maelstrom of emotions underlying and double-exposing with the bodies. It is visually lovely, technically first-rate and impossible to ignore. The graphic sex is economically handled. John L. Wasserman, San Francisco Chronicle "The film Eyetoon would seem to be the perfect synthesis of the metaphysical, spiritual and sexual feelings of a sensitive experimental filmmaker." ~ Reverend Earl Shagley ******************************************************************** Lineage: German/French TV-station arte / 07-July-16 / Duration 48 mins approx Just the original digital DVB-S Stream, NO re-encoding, 100 % Quality !!! Notes that came with this recording: The psychedelic short film roll, with an early and rare 1967 version of "Interstellar Overdrive" "Turn on, Tune in, Drop out!" Complete version !!! Have fun, enjoy !