Hello and welcome to this month’s Art & Trash newsletter! Thanks so much for your continued subscription to this substack. Support the series through Patreon today, and consider spreading the word about the series, and any episodes of Art & Trash that you enjoy!
August kicks off with Wizards: Labour, Magic and The Wizard of Speed and Time. It’s the most personal episode of Art & Trash yet, in which I use the animator Mike Jittlov’s cult classic feature The Wizard of Speed and Time as a launching point for talking about the creative imagination, my involvement at the Liaison of Independent Filmmakers of Toronto, and my collaborator and friend Karl Reinsalu.
A willed enchantment between the apparatus and the subject becomes a matter of personal conviction in the work of American animator Mike Jittlov, a talented outsider to the Hollywood dream factory. His story is told in a rebellious meta-fable autobiographical feature film, The Wizard of Speed and Time, in which Jittlov dramatizes the experiences of an independent filmmaker who enters into a one-sided, devilish contract with a broadcaster. For Jittlov, labour and recreation are continuous, the work of the artist and the pleasure and pastimes of the artist are inextricably bound together. Mike Jittlov sees the world as open to wonder: his illusionism can set it in motion.
In this video essay, I address The Wizard of Speed and Time in relation to the legacy of pixilation animation, and discuss Jittlov's greater themes of labour and illusion.
What follows is a digest of public content that was released in June and July!
Standish Lawder (1936-2014) was an essential contributor to the American structural film movement, with his mordant comedies such as Necrology and Runaway. In this audio commentary, Stephen Broomer situates Lawder's Roadfilm along the trajectory of Cubist artists with whom he identified (as author of The Cubist Cinema, Lawder was a major advocate for the reconcilation of Cubist multiplanar vision and the movies), and deal, in brief, with its playful treatment of axis, with its vertically and horizontally flipped images superimposed to create grand symmetries.
The Sun Quartet confronts the climate of corruption and violence that dominates contemporary Mexican leadership and militarism. Across its four parts, the series exemplifies the poetic operations of the collective, who reconcile elements ranging from sound collage, superimposed cinematography, poetic texts both read and cast on screen, and documentation of protests. These elements assemble as a counter to official claims to truth regarding traumas as recent as the 2014 disappearance of 43 students from the Ayotzinapa rural normal school that happened in Iguala, Mexico, and as distant as the 1968 Tlatelolco massacre, a formative event in contemporary Mexican revolutionary consciousness. The Sun Quartet also summons resonances of older, unspeakable traumas, more distant still, rifts that recede deep into the past of Mexico, its genocides and massacres, the predation done in its name, its significance as a theatre to colonial ambitions. The Sun Quartet mixes phenomenological fascination with the terrifying climate of contemporary Mexican governance and the historical foundations of that terror.
In this video essay, I discuss the metaphysical suggestions of Colectivo los ingrávidos' aesthetic approach to contemporary Mexico, an inferno of government abuse and multi-generational civilian terror.
Owen Land, born George Landow, was one of the primary figures of the structural filmmaking movement. In his work one could find an uncommon comic sensibility that was broad in scope, a tour of language and spirituality and the apparatus itself. In A Film of Their 1973 Spring Tour, he pursues a singular form of alternating streams of image and sound, a form that is maximalist in extremity, in its desire to condense two strings of unrelated image and sound into the length of one. Land trusts the sieve of our perception to sort these strings out.
In this audio commentary, I address the circumstances that led Land to make this film, the relation between this experiment and the perceptual restoration effect, and its relation to other 'flicker' films.
Mindwarp was produced by Fangoria Magazine in a turbulent era, when horror culture was still a controversial corner of mass culture, a scapegoat for censors and for the law to explain aberrant, violent behaviours. The film uses the setting of a post-apocalyptic world to speculate on the nature of dreams and taboo fantasies, and ultimately, to forgive the taboo imagination as a necessary fact of a healthy, creative society, a bandage for the traumas of reality. In this video essay, I situate Mindwarp in relation to post-apocalyptic cinema and John Calhoun's conception of the behavioural sink, as well as the climate of censorship that surrounds the dark corners of mass culture.
Takashi Ito is one of Japan’s most significant experimental filmmakers; his distinctive style betrays almost clinical fascinations with technology, time, and space. For Ito, the camera is a spatial tool above all, a device for capturing, mapping out and disrupting ordinary, commonplace environments, environments that, through his reconstruction of them, become deeply unfamiliar.
In this audio commentary, I discuss Thunder in relation to the metaphor of its title, Ito's techniques of time-lapse and long-exposure photography, and the atmosphere of dread advanced in his maturing work of the mid-1980s.
The films and videos of Christine Lucy Latimer defy their containers: they reveal the fragile systems underlying media; they press the boundaries of image-making machines; they embrace the faults and frailties of vision. Almost all of Latimer’s work is silent, but nothing is truly silent: Latimer draws out images that recall the hums, tweets, and mechanical moans of the technology with which she made them. Latimer’s work began long after most of the formats she pursues had become obsolescent. Refusing the universal nostalgia of the antique camera and the antique image, her works are undeniably present-facing and playfully disobedient, ethereal, abstract. Supremely self-conscious and yet mystical, they are seances that draw out the ghosts in the machine.
In this video essay, I chart Latimer’s aesthetic development from 2002 to the present, from films and videos that bear an overt eroticism (the scrambled kickboxing of Mosaic, the glow of a stripping woman filtered through a toy camera in Ghostmeat) to explorations of the patina of resilient media (the damaged digital photos of House Pieces, the foldable hologram imprints of Tender).
Coming this month - our next episode will be Neverlands, on David Brooks, the American underground filmmaker of the 1960s who died young and left behind a couple of remarkable films. We will also be posting the following audio commentaries!
I’ve been producing a tremendous amount of content this year - something new every week! For access to all of it as it comes, consider joining our Patreon with a free account, and spread the word about any episodes of Art & Trash that you enjoy. All support for this project is welcomed and greatly appreciated!
This newsletter has shifted to a bi-monthly format. My next one will be issued at the end of September as an August/September re-cap. For weekly updates, sign up for our Patreon. Thank you!
Happiness is a warm Uzi