Movement as Meaning
Curated and Presented by Daniel Barnett
The films of Daniel Barnett are among the most complex (and least understood) works in all of cinema. Taking Peter Kubelka’s aesthetics of shot-to-shot/frame-to-frame collision and articulation to elegant extremes, works such as 1975’s White Heart and 1987-90’s Endless embody profound expressions of visual language that remain regretfully outside the genre’s assimilated canon. With the publication of his Movement as Meaning: In Experimental Film (Editions Rodopi, Amsterdam/N.Y., Consciousness, Literature & the Arts), Barnett articulates in words the aesthetic that has long been at the heart of his filmmaking practice, discussing the relationships between narrative language, image making and the relationships of motion and sequence to thought while pondering the possibility of “thinking without words.” Following a brief introduction by Barnett on these topics, four works discussed in the book and central to his theses will be screened: Stan Brakhage’s Fire of Waters, A. Keewatin Dewdney’s The Maltese Cross Movement, Saul Levine’s The Big Stick/An Old Reel and Barnett’s own The Chinese Typewriter. (Steve Polta)
