Flicker Film
Tusslemuscle © Steve Cossman
An all-analog program around the histories and traditions of the ‘flicker film’, from its origins in the 1960s up until today, highlighting some lesser shown key works.
While the occurrence of flicker on the screen had always been thought of as an unwanted distraction, the flicker genre explores this phenomenon, indigenous to the light-time medium of cinema, considering the absolutely fundamental elements of film and the mechanisms of its operations. Taking its cue from the shutter and the intermittent movement of camera and projector acting upon the strip of separate frames, the flicker film in its fashion emphasizes the nature of the separate frames, the rapid movement of the frames, and through analogy and by way of hyperbole, the flicker effect of the shutter. (Regina Cornwell)
“Cinema is not movement. This is the first thing. Cinema is not movement. Cinema is a projection of stills – which means images which do not move – in a very quick rhythm. And you can give the illusion of movement, of course, but this is a special case, and the film was invented originally for this special case… Where is, then, the articulation of cinema? Eisenstein, for example, said it’s the collision of two shots. But it’s very strange that nobody ever said that it’s not between shots but between frames.” (Peter Kubelka)
Program: Asel Bakchakova (Atelier OFFoff)
In collaboration with EYE Film Museum Amsterdam in the context of their exhibition and program series Underground: American Avant-Garde Film in the 1960s (October 2024 — 5 January 2025)
Victor Grauer
Archangel
This film presents a series of flickering frames of primary colors to groaning tape manipulations.
“Pure light energy, released by the splitting of the film atom.” (Victor Grauer)
“Angel Eyes, which I made in 1965, was probably the first color flicker film ever! However, I realized that this approach had the potential to be much more powerful and decided to make another with stronger strobing effects (don’t forget, the strobe light was still pretty much unknown at that time). The new film, Archangel was made in 1966 and shown at the Filmmaker’s Cinematheque and, a bit later the same year, at the New York Film Festival (on the same program as Tony Conrad’s The Flicker).” (Victor Grauer)
“Though I have worked extensively in various media, from music to poetry to film to performance to multimedia and installation art, there is a single thread that runs through most of my creative work: I am fascinated by the potential of light and sound to produce sheer magic.” (Victor Grauer)
Paul Sharits
Shutter Interface
We present the two-screen version of Shutter Interface, with two overlapping film loops that cycle through various colour permutations, creating a percussive composition.
“The central idea was to create a metaphor of the basic intermittency mechanism of cinema: the shutter. If one slows down a projector, one observes a ‘flicker’; this flickering reveals the rotating shutter activity of the system. Instead of slowing down a projector, one can metaphorically suggest the frame-by-frame structure of film (which is what necessitates a shutter blade mechanism) by differentiating each frame of the film by radical shifts in value or hue; this metaphor was a guiding principle in my work in the 1960’s, in my so-called ‘color flicker films’. I discovered, two years ago, that I could heighten this metaphor by partially overlapping two screens of related but different ‘flicker footage’.” (Paul Sharits)
“For Shutter Interface, I wanted a sound rhythm and a visual rhythm that would have something to do with high-amplitude alpha (brain) waves. I think that’s why it’s such a pleasant film. I did some biofeedback to listen to the sound of my alpha rhythm and I tried to approximate it in the piece. I wanted that sound to fit with the flicker and it does exactly. Every series of frames of colour, which are each from two to eight frames long, is separated by one black frame and the sound is in direct correspondence to those black frames. The black frames are like little punctuation points.” (Paul Sharits)
“People have not developed a way of reacting to seeing a film in the same way that they would react to, say, a Rothko after all these years of abstract painting.” (Paul Sharits)
John Cavanaugh
Blink (Fluxfilm no. 5)
“Flicker: White and black alternating frames.” (George Maciunas)
The Fluxfilm anthology is an example of a collective work produced by Fluxus, much like their musical recording or publications. The artist and founding member of Fluxus, George Maciunas, began gathering this series of 37 films as early as 1966. With a few exceptions, the artists who took part were not known as filmmakers.
At the age of 18, John Cavanaugh made fluxfilm #5, Blink, declaring that “cinema is yoga of getting organized the patterns of direct energy.” According to Jonas Mekas, Cavanaugh’s filmmaking approach seemed one of the most promosing of the New York avant-garde at the end of the 1960’s, but nothing is left of it today. Cavanaugh withdrew all his films from Anthology Film Archives at a time in his life when, due to extreme LSD experiences, he sank into a period of insanity during which he was institutionalized for several years.
Fluxfilm #5 results from a minimal process known as flicker and built on the basic elements of cinema: single frames, light and darkness. Alternating black and white frames produce a strobe effect throughout the film. With this simple, binary process, John Cavanaugh reveals the essence of cinema: its frame rate, the frequency at which the film illusion is created. Fluxfilm #5 can be compared to Tony Conrad’s film, The Flicker, made the same year. In Tony Conrad’s more demonstrative film, the intermittence creates an illusion of continuity as a psychophysiological perceptual experiment. Cavanaugh’s film on the other hand omits all didactic intentions. This film can also be compared to Yoko Ono’s Eye Blink (fluxfilms #9 and #15), with the difference that the latter’s statement is literally accomplished yet slowed down, while the subject of Cavanaugh’s film is none other than the rhythmic blinking of ‘mechanical’ eyelids. On the one hand is Eye Blink, the cause, and on the other hand the visual result, Blink, produced by the repetition of this simple experience. Where Ono’s film plays on stretching the observation of time, Cavanaugh’s analyzes real time, slicing it up with a mechanical shutter. (Maeva Aubert, Re:Voir booklet)
Jeff Weber
Untitled (Neural Network, nn_oxb_1)
The 1,440-frame-long film has been made with a score generated by an artificial neural network and coded in Python. The film explores the idea of an externalization of the cognitive instance that occurs through the advent of artificial intelligence, and the recursive principles it relies on: through the flicker, the work resonates and interferes with the very system that initially has constituted the model for the structure applied on it: the human body and its nervous system.
Jeff Weber currently holds a research fellowship (2024−2026) at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp, Belgium.
Jeff Weber
Sequences I-IV
SEQUENCES (I), 2021, 11 sec, 35mm, silent
SEQUENCES (II), 2021, 11 sec, 35mm, silent
SEQUENCES (III), 2021, 11 sec, 35mm, silent
SEQUENCES (IV), 2021, 11 sec, 35mm, silent
These short films are built upon the number of grey tones determined by the dynamic range of the film print stock used, and converted into numeric values between 1 and 6. These then constitute an initial sequence of 24 frames, that is subsequently altered and iterated through by a specific algorithm and a pre-determined method – a kind of weaving together of numeric values.
Steve Cossman
TUSSLEMUSCLE
Steve Cossman is founder and director of Mono No Aware lab in New York. HisTusslemuscle plays on the term tussie-mussie, known as the language of flowers and their symbolism. The film was made by splicing together 7,000 frames from children’s view-masters – plastic wheels with 14 small images – which Cossman assembled with transparent tape, one by one, onto 16mm film. The soundtrack composed by San Francisco-based artist Jacob Long (under the name Earthen Sea) provides a violent counterpoint to the spring-themed images. The montage is based on basic musical movements that mark the rhythm with alternating percussion and repetition (right, left, right). right, right / left, right, left, left) and the inevitable pauses that suppress the sensation of crescendo. With the idea ofsustaining a musical note, Cossman repeats the same frame, sometimes up to a hundred times, before returning to the normal cadence of the rhythm. Despite the speed of the montage, the texture of the glue, the tape, and the fragility of the frame are revealed as part of the nature portrayed. (Mónica Savirón)
“In 2001, I discovered that the view-master reel cells are in fact 16 mm wide with single perforations. I came across a few reels that had been water damaged and the white cardstock holding them in place had peeled back exposing the frames. I always thought it would be interesting to create a film entirely of these little images, so when I had the time and means I began collecting flower themed reels. I gathered reels for the greater part of three years to amass enough frames to create the 5 minute piece and spent 2 years assembling. After the frames were extracted from each reel, I would identify the similarly imaged cells and place them into envelopes. On the front of each envelope I typed a few notes about the image and made a tiny 2.5” X 3” copy of the image as to identify what was inside. These envelopes were pinned to the wall as a means of organization and a way to storyboard the piece.” (Steve Cossman)
Shutter Interface © The Film-Makers' Cooperative, New York
Sequences III © Jeff Weber
Shutter Interface © The Film-Makers' Cooperative, New York
Untitled (Neural Network, nn_oxb_1) © Jeff Weber