TECHNES Encyclopedia Database

Film in Which There Appear Edge Lettering, Sprocket Holes, Dirt Particles, Etc. (Owen Land (George Landow), 1966, 16 mm, colour, silent, 6 min.), by André Habib

In the abundant filmography of the experimental filmmaker and ironist Owen Land (George Landow) one finds Film in Which There Appear Edge Lettering, Sprocket Holes, Dirt Particles, Etc. (1966). This film, like several others by Land, has several iterations. It was initially presented more as a performance, as part of which the filmmaker showed a continuous 16 mm loop of 24 images (the equivalent of one second) showing one of the famous but always invisible Kodak “China Girls” winking (for the loop to play in the projector, the one second of “China Girl” images had to be reprinted on an optical or contact printer seven or eight times). The loop was meant to play for 11 minutes, then be followed by an advertisement, and then play again for 11 minutes, but according to a variety of sources the ruckus raised by the audience quickly brought the screening to a halt. The term “China Girl” is used to describe a few photograms at the beginning of a reel’s leader showing a woman’s face (it is always a white woman) framed by squares of colours and black and white tones in order to check the colour timing of prints coming out of the laboratory. The version of Film in Which There Appear… available today in distribution consists of a one-second loop repeated for 6 minutes showing the “China Girl” sequence, this time, however, re-photographed using an optical printer, split and decentred (to the left and the right) in such a way that the film’s perforations, as well as the edge codes written on the edge of the film stock, now occupy the central space of the image.

Owen Land’s film was made at a time when “structural cinema” was in full flight (alongside the work of Micheal Snow, Ken Jacobs, Hollis Frampton and Joyce Wieland). This movement broke away from the psycho-dramatic and lyrical-subjective tendencies which had guided American avant-garde cinema overall before then. Like the films which came out of the structural-materialist school in London in the 1960s and 70s ( Malcolm Le Grice, Peter Gidal, Annabel Nicolson and Guy Sherwin ), Land’s film sought to foreground the hidden and invisible aspects of the film apparatus and to valorize the material dimension of the filmic object, beyond the subject depicted and even more so beyond filmic narrative. In a somewhat carnival-like manner, Land chose as the subject of his film (something indicated by the superlative enumeration of the title) a series of elements which are perfect examples of what viewers should not see: perforations, edge codes, dust. The image loop shown by Land is striated with fine scratches and marked by the appearance of ever-larger bits of dust on the image – like the performance of Nam June Paik’s Zen for Film (1962-64). The loop’s infernal repetition for the duration of the film enables viewers to open up their way of seeing and to discover, in the mere unspooling of a loop of 24 photograms of scratched film stock, specked with dust, following the beat of the wink of a girl with a Mona Lisa smile, a bit of cinema in its pure state, meaning a cinema which does not skimp on its material and technical conditions of possibility.

Her Fragrant Emulsion (Lewis Klahr, 16 mm, colour, sound, 1987, 10 min.), by André Habib^[9]

To make Her Fragrant Emulsion (1987), Lewis Klahr re-filmed in Super 8 from his television set segments of a VHS copy of a hippie erotic film by George Lautner, Road to Salina (1970). He then cut up and slashed the film stock to obtain fine strips of images which he attached with scotch tape onto a piece of transparent Super 8 film (a technique similar to that used by Stan Brakhage for his film Mothlight, made in 1963). At times the image fragments about one another and at other times overlap on the clear surface of the image, creating a miniature mosaic of bursts of colour, body parts, close-ups of faces, etc.^[10] This film strip was, with difficulty, then pulled across the shutter of a projector and re-filmed, once again, in Super 8. Klahr carried out the film’s editing on this new strip of images before transferring it to 16 mm, accompanied by an elaborate soundtrack made up of audio fragments taken from the film and from a sound composition made out of brief syncopated samples, the audio equivalent of the visual cut-up filing before our eyes.

This detailed description of these operations and multiple visual remediations – from the moment of domestic fascination on videotape to the various layers of sedimentation of the film stock – was necessary to explain the tactile dimension and fragility of the process due to the Lilliputian scale of the work carried out. Here the tearing, compared to its Lettrist counterpart, consists less in an iconoclastic act of poetic destruction and reinvention than it does in an attempt, through meticulous manual and artisanal labour, of representing the filmmaker’s fascination for the body of this actress which becomes one with the fragile and fleeting body of the film stock itself.