About the Event
States of Mind: Pat O’Neil’s Water and Power & Kerry Laitala’s Orbit
Friday, December 4, 7:00 p.m.
Water and Power
By Pat O’Neil, 1989
35mm, 54 Min
Water and Power’s title comes from the Los Angeles water district. Much of the film was shot in the Owens Valley and in an old office building in downtown LA and is metaphorically about the exchange of energy between two places. It is also about water, in all of its states, and about cyclical motion: the planets, the tides, the implied rotation of the camera on its axis, and the repetitive actions of the performers. There are also quotations from older movies and their soundtracks: at times their landscapes become continuous with those of the present. Human habitation in this wilderness is tenuous and risky.
“The ‘reality’ animated by the film is LA; its topography and social ambiance, its myths of creation and embedding of a dream. It is surely the greatest of contemporary ‘city symphonies.’” - Paul Arthur, Moving Picture
Pat O’Neill has been deeply involved in Los Angeles culture since the late 1960’s. A founding father of the city’s avant-garde film scene, an influential professor at CalArts and an optical effects pioneer, he is best known for his short works from the early 1960’s onwards which are highly graphic, layered and reflexive assemblages based on a mastery of optical printing techniques.
In O’Neill’s films boundaries fade, narrative collapses and layers of imagery draw the viewer simultaneously towards and away from linear meaning. O’Neill has combined found footage with experimental montage and compositing techniques to create a graphic language that deals with how different, often disparate elements assembled together in the frame relate to one another. His innovative optical techniques anticipated our digital landscape well before its time.
Orbit
By Kerry Laitala, 2006
16mm, 9min
Candy apple light emissions create a series of photic stimulating events that tickle the retinas. Orbit takes one into the realm of the mistake… a playful pulsation of mis-registered images made when a lab accidentally split the film from 16mm to regular 8. This format was then reconstituted on the optical printer making the colors and contrast further blow out into the atmosphere. Kodachrome color fields create tremulous vibrations whose flickerings hypnotize. The hand-made soundtrack is comprised of the flutterings of optical noise reverberating to the splices of the film, intermixed with extensions of the visual plane onto the soundtrack area. Crackle! Pop! We enter through the oval window, while the Gravitron spins eternally.
Kerry Laitala is a media archeologist who investigates the past and retrieves cultural artifacts from the limbo of the forgotten. Her penchant for medical imagery and relics of decay sprang from her time working in medical and dental institutions.
Laitala is deeply invested in the process of working directly with the film medium, and has been involved in all aspects of production: shooting, developing, editing and sound design as well as optically printing much of the material to transform it into celluloid strands of uncanny resonance.
Free and open to the public. Discounted parking available in West Lot 4, credit card required, $6 flat rate.
