SHAMELESS (1974) by Victor Faccinto
WAVELENGTH (1967) by Michael Snow
Projected in 16mm film
Curated by Tara and Gordon Nelson
Cut-out puppet animation. Not recommended for gentle sensibilities.
Plagued by his redundant existence, Video Vic follows his instincts into
an outer space environment, where he is faced with the cruel realities
of his linear life. "Victor Faccinto's last cut-out
film SHAMELESS exhibits a tension within the form. As real penises
penetrate paper vaginas, and cut-out men investigate life-sized female
parts, the film implies a potential synthesis of metaphoric and real
action; the film also suggests the exhaustion of
purely cut-out imagery by manipulation of materials, only now it is the
film itself which is scratched, painted or cut." -- Ian Birnie, Art
Gallery of Ontario
WAVELENGTH was shot in one week in December, 1966, preceded by a year of
notes, thoughts, mutterings. It was edited and first print seen in May,
1967. I wanted to make a summation of my nervous system, religious
inklings, and aesthetic ideas. I was thinking
of, planning for a time monument in which the beauty and sadness of
equivalence would be celebrated, thinking of trying to make a definitive
statement of pure Film space and time, a balancing of "illusion" and
"fact," all about seeing. The space starts at
the camera's (spectator's) eye, is in the air, then is on the screen,
then is within the screen (the mind). The film is a continuous zoom
which takes 45 minutes to go from its widest field to its smallest and
final field. It was shot with a fixed camera from
one end of an 80 foot loft, shooting the other end, a row of windows
and the street .... The room (and the zoom) are interrupted by four
human events including a death. The sound on these occasions is sync
sound, music and speech, occurring simultaneously
with an electronic sound, a sine-wave .... It is a total glissando
while the film is a crescendo and a dispersed spectrum which attempts to
utilize the gifts of both prophecy and memory which only film and music
have to offer.
*Descriptions courtesy of the Filmmakers Cooperative*
