Program 2
(Total running time: 71:00 min)
In the early 20th century, with its unprecedented mass production and division of labor, mechanization became an inevitable fact of modern life. Along with it, new art forms were sought to reflect on the reality of a world increasingly marked by accelerated progress and mobility, and adhering to scientific reason, social hygiene, and the development of new technologies to master nature and the human body. These new technologies, mainly in the fields of electronics and mechanics, optical media and communication, architecture and design, greatly inspired early avant-garde cinema as well as the making of industrial films. But the relationship between avant-garde filmmakers, sound artists, engineers, and industrial commissioners reached much deeper than to share a common vision of a better and technically enhanced future: while renowned artists and filmmakers (like Hans Richter, Len Lye or Norman McLaren) were invited to produce advertisements and corporate films, companies and state agencies showed real interest in cinematic experimentation and abstract expression as a means to promote their products as modern, innovative, future-oriented. Especially the first computer films would not have been possible without the financial support and scientific research of university departments or companies such as IBM or Bell. In 1957, Siemens, for instance, established an in-house Studio for Electronic Music in which electronically generated sounds were modulated for use in films as well as in concrete music.
Against this backdrop of the technical and economical advancements, social struggles, and political follies of the Cold War era, Particles in Space combines industrial films, early computer art and abstract cinema, mainly from the United States and West Germany, which stand out for their pioneering quality of electronic sound and image animation. The two short film programs intend to shed light on the reciprocal processes between industrial invention and artistic experimentation, presenting a variety of historical classics alongside works that are rarely shown nowadays.
Particles in Space follows up on an extensive study conducted in 2007 by Florian Wüst in the field of corporate and non-fictional film, as part of The Vision Behind: Technical and Social Innovations in Corporate Films from 1950; a project of the Siemens Arts Program, Munich, initiated by Anja Casser and Beate Hentschel, it comprised a book publication and a film series that has toured through cinemas and filmmuseums in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland.
Kindly supported by Siemens AG and Goethe-Institut Tel Aviv
Florian Wüst
Artist and independent film curator
Mary Ellen Bute
New Sensations in Sound, 1959 (USA), 16mm, 3:00 min
Courtesy of arsenal experimental, Berlin
Mary Ellen Bute, a pioneer American film animator significant as one of the first female experimental filmmakers, specialized in visual music, a kinetic art form referring to systems that convert music or sound directly into visual presentations, such as film or computer graphics. Enlisting the help of cinematographer and film producer Ted Nemeth (later to become her husband), Bute made fourteen short abstract films between 1934 and 1959. Many of these were shown in regular movie theaters, such as Radio City Music Hall in New York, usually preceding a prestigious feature film. Several of her films were grouped as part of her Seeing Sound series. In the 1950s, Bute commissioned a technician from Bell Telephone Laboratories (later Bell Labs) to design a cathode-ray oscilloscope that enabled her to work electronically, drawing on screen with a beam of light and generating patterns automatically. She made two commercial shorts, one of them a 1959 commercial for RCA, New Sensations in Sound, which presents a clever, sharply edited collage of effects from her previous films.
John & James Whitney
Film Exercise No. 4, 1944 (USA), 16mm, 5:00 min
Courtesy of Cinédoc-Paris Films Coop, Paris
"In the early 1940s, while still in his teens, James Whitney began collaborating on abstract films with his older brother John. Their series Film Exercises, produced between 1943 and 1944, is a remarkable achievement—visually based on modernist composition theory with carefully varied permutations of forms manipulated with cut-out masks so that the image photographed is pure and direct light-shaped. The eerie, sensuous neon glow of these forms is paralleled by pioneer electronic music scores composed by the brothers using an elaborate pendulum device they invented to write out sounds directly onto the film's soundtrack area, with precisely controlled calibrations. At that time, before the perfection of recording tape, these sounds—with exotic "pure" tone qualities, mathematically even chromatic glissandos and reverberating pulsations—were truly revolutionary and shocking." (William Moritz)
Haro Senft
Kahl, 1961 (West Germany), 16mm on video, 13:00 min, English version
Courtesy of Stiftung Deutsches Technikmuseum, Historisches Archiv, Berlin
Commissioned by AEG (General Electricity Company), Kahl is a documentary report on the planning and building of the first West German nuclear power plant in Kahl, located on the Main River. Newsreel clips are used to show the connection between international politics, the three year construction period, and the technical functions of the plant as well as the civilian use of nuclear energy. The creation of electricity from the new world of the atom is described as a collective achievement of engineers, physicists, and mechanics. Senft's film displays remarkable mastery in the use of filmic techniques, accompanied by a musical soundtrack by Hans Posegga, and represents yet another example of the productive relationship between corporate commissioning and film experimentation in the early 1960s, when filmmakers such as Herbert Vesely, Ferdinand Khittl, Alexander Kluge, and Edgar Reitz produced industrial films prior to the breakthrough of New German Cinema. Kahl was nominated for an Oscar in 1961, and was awarded at several industrial film festivals in the same year.
Stan Vanderbeek
Science Friction, 1959 (USA), 16mm, 10:00 min
Courtesy of Light Cone, Paris
From early collage animation created in the spirit of the Surreal and Dadaist work of Max Ernst, but with a wild, rough informality more akin to the expressionism of the Beat Generation, to utopian experiments in expanded cinema, building a dome theater with dozens of projectors, or creating computer-animated films and holographic experiments with Bell Labs, Vanderbeek was a visionary well ahead of his time. His early film Science Friction is a non-verbal social satire on modern progress, ominous and comic in its combination of found footage and graphic cut-outs. The film aims at mass society, conformism, and the competitive mania of the Cold War era. Political leaders and scientists launch rockets and bombs large enough to blast the Eiffel Tower or the Empire State Building into outer space. At the end, a mysterious gloved hand picks up the spinning earth and makes it into an omelet.
Edgar Reitz
Kommunikation (Communication), 1961 (West Germany), 35mm on video, 10:00 min
Courtesy of Edgar Reitz Filmproduktion, Munich
Edgar Reitz's short film Kommunikation— – Technik der Verständigung (Communication— – Technology of Contact) traces the evolution of human mobility and communication from speech and writing to optical media and electric signals transmitted by telephone, radio, and broadcast television. The overtly experimental and well-timed montage of documentary images builds a dynamic unity with the film's abstract soundtrack, composed by Josef Anton Riedl. Kommunikation premiered at the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen in 1962, the same year that Reitz and a group of 25 young filmmakers announced the legendary Oberhausen Manifesto: a call to create the new German feature film, free from commercial interests and the conventions of the established film industry.
Stan Vanderbeek
Poemfield No. 5: Free Fall, 1968 (USA), 16mm, 7:00 min
Courtesy of Light Cone, Paris
His desire for the new and utopian led Stan Vanderbeek to work with computer graphics pioneer Ken Knowlton in cooperation at Bell Labs where dozens of bitmap-based movies and holographic experiments were created by the end of the 1960s. With the aid of Knowlton, Vanderbeek realized a series of eight computer-generated animations entitled Poemfield. All of these films explore multilayered variations of abstract geometric forms and words. The mixture of sequences in Poemfield No. 5: Free Fall expands on images of paratroopers in free fall, subsequently producing a series of colorful, fast moving electronic animations.
Mauricio Kagel
Antithese, 1965 (West Germany), 16mm, 19:00 min
Courtesy of Goethe-Institut, Munich
Argentine composer Mauricio Kagel, who also made films and taught for two decades at the Cologne University of Music, is best known for his interest in developing the theatrical side of musical performance. Kagel's composition Antithese— – Play for One Actor with Electronic and Public Sounds was conceived in 1962, and partly produced at the Siemens Studio for Electronic Music in Munich. While the sound is played from audio tape, the solitary actor (Alfred Feussner) performs—on stage as well as in the film—a number of preset actions. He writes key words on a blackboard before turning his attention to some rotting technical equipment in a dark, cramped studio. He rummages around, mostly on hands and knees, tangling himself up in piles of recording tape. Eventually, he destroys the equipment, tilts up the shelves, and transforms himself into a negative image in front of a rear projection showing a forest, a skyscraper or an ocean with steamers.
Marc Adrian
Random, 1963 (Austria), 16mm, 4:00 min
Courtesy of P.A.P. Kunstagentur, Munich
"Random was made partly in Vienna, partly in Berlin; as far as I know, it is the first film ever to be automatically constructed by a computer system linked to it. It was done with minimum personal intervention on the part of both myself and others. I wanted to make a film that, as a result, could in no way be anticipated. Friends of mine at the Technical University in Berlin constructed a random generator based on the fluctuations of tension within the electric circuit of the alternating current net of the city of Berlin. This served as a rigorous unit to produce a defective screen pattern that was applied directly on 35mm film. The same system controlled three sinus generators for the soundtrack. In my opinion, this film is as extensively random generated as it can be; therefore I called it Random." (Marc Adrian)