Film/Event review: Frame by Frame

On April 24th I attended Frame by Frame, the Academy Film Archive’s presentation of recently restored avant-garde short films. Former UC Berkeley student Mark Toscano, who worked on restoring the 8 films shown, introduced the night. He didn’t go in to much detail about the films, or the processes of film restoration, but rather, he talked about the company he works for. The Academy Film Archive is a division of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Science, the organization responsible for the Oscars. Toscano mentioned that as the Oscars was the sole means of procuring money for the Academy, so the film restoration division was only possible because of the award show. All of the films shown were relatively short, running from 5 minutes to 18 minutes. Two of the pieces I found particularly interesting were Film Exercise #5 by John and James Whitney, and Documentary Footage by LA avant-garde filmmaker Morgan Fisher.

Film Exercise #5 was a 5-minute film consisting only of different colored shapes morphing, growing, shrinking, and eventually disappearing to give way to the next morphing colors. This was all done to music, very beautifully. It reminded me a great deal of one of the vignettes in the Disney film fantasia, in which animated, colored strings vibrated and changed shape in a choreographed manner along with an accompanying piece of classical music.

Fisher’s 1970 film Documentary Footage was a single 11-minute shot in which a young woman sat naked on a stool and recorded a series of interview-type questions. Every question was asking the interviewee to describe a specific body part. She sat and read each question from a clipboard in a very serious manner, pausing for several seconds in between each. After she read all of the questions, she stopped the recorder, rewound it, and pressed play. She then stood up next to the stool facing the camera. As the recording of her questions began playing, she would answer each of them. The long pauses she gave between questions in her recording provided her with time to give detailed answers. It was very interesting to see the polar opposite emotional states of her as the interviewer, and her as the interviewee. As the interviewee she was extremely animated, and naturalistic as she shyly answered each question as if it were the first time she had heard it.