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Notes on Glass House by Zoe Beloff (Excerpt from a lecture at The Piet Zwart Institute, Rotterdam, January 2015)

I am an artist and filmmaker. My work is based on historical research. I am interested in the past as ‘potential’, in bringing to life what might have been and what might yet be, creating proposals for the future.

Glass House is based on notes and drawings for a film that the Sergei Eisenstein attempted to make while under contract to Paramount Studios in 1930. It is part of an installation A World Redrawn, based on films that were proposed or sketched out but derailed before a single frame could be shot. Its companion film is A Model Family in a Model Home based on notes for a film by Bertolt Brecht. Eisenstein and Brecht came to Hollywood under very different circumstances. Eisenstein had recently completed Battleship Potemkin. The Hollywood bosses saw a great action picture and gave him a studio contract. In contrast Brecht arrived in 1941 a penniless refugee from Nazi Germany. Desperate to earn a living, he turned to screenwriting. Here in Los Angeles both of them attempted the impossible, to challenge the formulas of film industry, to create works against the grain of the dominant narrative. I am interested in the unresolved question that their film scenarios engender, how to create a work that is both popular and radical, that both entertains and invites you to think.

Philosopher and political thinker Susan Buck-Morss, in her book Dreamworld and Catastrophe, gives us some pointers on how to proceed in this age of Neoliberalism. She believes we must not give up on dream that these left artists fought for, that new strategies of expression can help us understand how the world works, and thus suggest the possibility of change. She writes, “To submit to melancholy at this point would be to confer on the past a wholeness that never existed, confusing the loss of the dream with the loss of the dream’s realization... We need to bring the ruins up close and search through the rubble in order to rescue the utopian hopes that modernity engendered, because we cannot afford to let them disappear.”

To undertake this work, I believe one must be more than a historian, one must be an interpreter of dreams. It is not enough to archive evidence from the past one must reanimate it. To speculate on film, one must use the medium of film. My films Glass House and A Model Family in a Model Home don’t fit into any known genre, they are neither documentaries on failed films nor period pastiches. Instead they are speculative films in which the original authors become one voice in a dialog across time.

Le Corbusier, S.M. Eisenstein and A. Burov (1928)

Eisenstein first had the idea for Glass House in 1926 when visiting Fritz Lang under the glass dome on the set of Metropolis. He was fascinated by the new modernist glass architecture. He discussed his ideas with Le Corbusier. He began to make notes, “A look at America through walls. Treatment to parody the material of real America—America seen through Hollywood clichés. Reality to be an element of parody, as if Hollywood clichés were factual elements. Take the most ordinary actions and change the point of view. Take the most traditional types and psychological collisions and change the point of view. Do it as farce, as grotesque, as nightmarish tragedy.”

Unlike Bruno Taut and architects of the Glass Chain who imagined that the transparency of glass would free us from the old hierarchies, Eisenstein pictured the horror of a world of total surveillance that would come into being not only in Stalin’s Soviet Union but in the Cold War and now in our global surveillance partnerships between government agencies and major corporations.

S.M. Eisenstein – sketch for Glass House (1928)

In 1930, with a six-month contract at Paramount Studios and more or less carte blanche to develop whatever project he wanted, Eisenstein worked on Glass House. The film would begin as pure abstract cinema, a world made of glass in which objects float as in outer space. Eisenstein imagined a great glass skyscraper in which not only the walls but the floors and ceilings would be made of glass, a world of complete visibility. In the first act, the inhabitants of house are unaware of one another, they do not see their neighbors because they do not look; the rich man is blind to his impoverished neighbor. Three characters emerge; the architect, the poet and the robot who personifies the new man. When the poet opens people’s eyes it leads to violence, hatred and catastrophe. The poet hangs himself and the robot destroys the house.

The studio tried to find a screenwriter to flesh out the script but none of them grasped what Eisenstein was driving at. Their approach was whimsical while he imagined something hard-boiled. But I think the problem was more fundamental than the plot. Eisenstein didn’t care about conventional story structure. In fact at one point he simply scribbled down, ‘plots, plots, plots’. As far as he was concerned, any plot would do, the more the better. Instead he was interested in constructing an essay as artwork that would find a form to bring together dialectically the rational and the irrational, the conceptual and the sensuous in an architectural critique of modern life.

This is where in lies the importance of his drawings. Beyond simply storyboard sketches, they are the excess, the dream work that could never find a place in the cultural sphere which he inhabited in either East or West. Drawing was a form that, as he himself was aware, allowed his unconscious free reign. Indeed Glass House is nothing if not a wild violent sex comedy. He imagined a war breaking out between the tailor faction and the nudist association. Let’s not forget Glass House cabaret to which he devoted an exceptional number of sketches.

S.M. Eisenstein – sketch for Glass House Revue

These creatures may well have been inspired by his forays into the gay nightclubs of Berlin, where Eisenstein spent time en route to the US. It is important to remember that both Marx and Freud were important to him. He said himself that, “Had it not been for Leonardo da Vinci, Marx, Lenin, Freud and the movies, I would have in all probability have been another Oscar Wilde. An aesthete and a homosexual.” But he never completely sublimated his desires.

The methodology behind the construction of my contemporary Glass House is guided his theoretical concerns. Eisenstein’s two great proposals from the period, his statement on sound and his address to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences on screen aspect ratio, both of which fell on deaf ears. In 1928 he wrote that sound should not be used as it is today for cheap emotional effect, but should be constructed contrapuntally—to create new meanings in relation to the image. The proper place of the voice was not dialog but monolog, that of inner language, stream of consciousness. He spoke out against the proposals for wide screen film in Hollywood. In his lecture he declared, “It is my desire to intone the hymn of the male, the strong, the virile, the vertical composition”. Thus my Glass House has a vertical format 9:16 and a contrapuntal soundtrack.

S.M. Eisenstein and Walt Disney outside the Disney Studios (1930)

I also wanted to foreground importance of the dialog between drawing and filmmaking, through the medium of animation that is latent but never actually realized in his films. Arriving in Hollywood, Eisenstein very much wanted to meet Walt Disney. He was fascinated by Disney’s animation as a kind of primal form of expression, the ability of shapes to change and morph before our eyes suggesting the possibility of a world redrawn.

Glass House afforded Eisenstein new points of view. Through the medium of glass architecture a new kind of montage would opens up, montage within the frame, multiple stories can now be seen in the same shot. This turns Glass House into a house of cinemas.

I was inspired by the great film essayist of dream Raul Ruiz who wrote in Poetics of Cinema that within every film lies other as yet unknown films travelling like contraband hidden inside them, and that if these fragments can be reassembled, other films will begin to emerge. This is Eisenstein’s method of montage, from the perspective of the other side, the unconscious. The opening of my film, Eisenstein’s journey to America, is inspired by the Soviet animated film, Pochta (Post). Once in Hollywood, Disney’s influence animates Eisenstein’s mental universe. The Robot destroyer of Glass House is Mickey’s Mechanical Man. Characters from other movies break out of their original context, speaking to each other in a ways that were never possible in their lifetime.

Of course Eisenstein was planning very expensive studio film. Indeed this might have been what finally killed it. In his memoirs Budd Schulberg recalled the Studio manager saying to his father “My God. B.P. it would cost us a million dollars to build a glass city and we couldn’t use it as a standing set and write off the cost against other pictures, like our ocean liner, our castle, or our New York Street”. In contrast I was only able to raise a modest $15,000. This being the case, the best approach was focus Eisenstein’s early work in theater where his budget was limited and his cast small. I studied his first film, the five minute, Gumov’s Diary which he incorporated into his play The Wise Man 1923. Thus my film illuminates another Eisenstein, parallel to the one embalmed in Battleship Potemkin, traversing a trajectory from Constructivist theater to animation.

S.M. Eisenstein – A scene from The Wise Man (1923)

Glass House is of course about the architecture of surveillance. Eisenstein wanted to show us surveillance predicated on the visible, the eye. It was a system created by the character of the Architect. Ultimately I show that it is not the Architect but his adversary the character of the Robot that is the harbinger of our future. It is the prototype of the vast network of wireless technologies and data mining machines that track our movements. Today we are no longer recorded through the surveillance of the eye but through data, through GPS coordinates, our image is composed of the websites we visit, the cell phone towers that we pass, the purchases we make.

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CONTEXT: Jenny Brady, Bone

Sarah Kane, Blasted

“Sitting through Blasted is a little like having your face rammed into an overflowing ash tray, just for starters, and then having your whole head held down in a bucket of offal.” —Extract from review of Blasted by Paul Taylor in The Independent, 1995

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CONTEXT: An van Dienderen, Lili

Background story of China Girls: “China Girls, Leading Ladies, Actual Women,” Peter Monaghan, Moving Image Archive News, February 21, 2014.

“From the days before color film until the early 1990s hundreds of anonymous women graced more motion-picture film reels than perhaps any film star. And yet movie-goers never saw them; they, and their purpose, were known only to film-lab workers and projectionists.

And that was: to be inserted into the leaders of film reels (the short lengths of film before and after the images of the motion picture) for the technical purposes of lab technicians and projectionists. Lab techs used the images as standards that helped them ensure consistent colors, tones, and shadings of colors throughout a film – from one frame, shot, scene, and reel to others.

That was necessary because, for example, shots that were used to construct a sequence may have been filmed under varied light conditions or on various types or qualities of film stock. The women who posed for China Girl shots were assisting in the completion of painstaking, workaday tasks. Each of the color-control images became part of one original, master print that a lab worker made from camera negative. The print was then copied – as many times as necessary to meet demand for that film, worldwide – and on each reel that woman’s image went out to potentially thousands of theaters: The woman made her way from anonymous isolation in a particular film lab out into the film world, still in anonymity — because, of course, film-lab workers did not place the image on film-reel leaders for general exhibition.”

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Some thoughts on Mike Kuchar via review of a recent Berlin screening at NYU Local. Rat Nest screened as part of Girls at Play. 

Mike Kuchar is a glowing example of how filmmakers do not necessarily need to adapt to the technology of today in order to remain successful and productive. Kuchar proudly asserted that he does not own a computer, and instead edits his films using a machine called MacroSystem. As the screenings proceeded, some films would be in the incorrect format, causing Kuchar to apologize sheepishly and scurry up to tell the projectionist to correct the error. He returned quickly after realizing the projector was automatic and there was no projectionist—we would just have to see bodies that were a little wider than usual.

Oh, and did we see bodies. The series of shorts, prefaced by a short documentary on the brothers by Rosa von Praunheim, indicate a clear departure from the sci-fi-inspired parody of his earlier films with George. However, they are certainly still silly and campy. Now, his subjects mainly consist of young, hunky California surfer boys with personalities reminiscent of Ethan Kraft from Lizzie McGuire waxing poetically about their own existence. Shot with a camcorder and featuring Powerpoint-esque scene transitions and an occasional splash of Comic Sans, these delightfully odd and mostly-male character studies focus more on the physical form than any narrative arc. Visual highlights included a guy insisting he’ll be a better person while philosophically holding a coffee cup, a nude man painted messily with black streaks roaming around a living room like a feral animal interspersed with trippy fractal patterns, and a ten-minute sequence of a sculpted guy with long blonde hair and clothes much too small for him conducting janitorial work (and no, that’s not a euphemism—or is it?).

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Photos from the BFI Education screening of Experimenta shorts, with work by Jenna Collins, Peter Todd and Paul Bush shown. The Education department also held a workshop Experimental Filmmaking, or How to Make Still Objects Move (Without Touching Them) with filmmaker James Holcombe. 

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Peter Tscherkassky talks with Daniel Kasman for Cinema Scope on his film The Exquisite Corpus. Full interview here. 

Cinema Scope: How did you determine the films to include in The Exquisite Corpus? They span from the ’60s to the ’80s. Did you research the genre?

Peter Tscherkassky: They were supplied by friends. One gave me some pornographic material, and from another I got the nudist film that I ended up using for the opening sequence and footage you see throughout the film with the searching for the sleeping girl. And I had a print from Tony Richardson’s Tom Jones (1963), where the lady is eating the oysters. I never go to archives. Basically, I’m a lazy person. People ask me, “Would you like to have…?” Friends sometimes send me links when an interesting 35mm print shows up on eBay. Prints have gotten quite expensive. It used it be like when I got The Entity for $50, the transportation from the United States to Austria was more expensive than the print itself. Nowadays, you have to expect to pay something like 200 euros for a single good print. The days when you just bought it because it was so cheap are over. People send me things from time to time, mainly film prints that are about to be destroyed for whatever reason. Slip it out the back door to Vienna!

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Two interviews with Aura Satz on her work Chromatic Aberration, commissioned for The Gallery at Tyneside Cinema, Newcastle-upon-Tyne. The first above with Northern Stars and the second on the George Eastman Museum (formerly George Eastman House) blog, with excerpt below. 

Ryan Conrath: How did you become interested in color?

Aura Satz: My interest in color followed on from a body of works I made about sound and sound technologies. I have always been fascinated by the inherent vibratory and unsettling qualities of sound that make it unwieldy to write or encode. There is a sense of approximation or loss of authenticity, an inevitable interference of noise and distortion. Looking closely at color made me realize how inherently unstable it is. Colors will inexorably fade, dissolve, and degrade, which makes it impossible to fully systematize or standardize. Color is highly unreliable and subjective on the level of perception; it is difficult to translate effectively into language or describe with any precision. Color has often been accused of being distracting, disruptive, garish, child-like or feminine. In working with forms of notation, transcription and reproduction, I am drawn to those points at which sound or color reveal an intrinsic resistance to codification.

I am also very much committed to revisiting the undervalued (and mostly underpaid) contribution of women to the history of labor and technology. It was through this research that I came across the women who hand-colored and hand-stenciled early color films at the turn of the century. This in turn led me to explore the history of Natalie Kalmus. She was the color consultant for Technicolor (and wife of Technicolor inventor Herbert Kalmus), and worked on most of the classic films we associate with hyper-saturated Technicolor. She also wrote about composing color scores for narrative films, much like a piece of music. Sadly, none of her scores survive, but this concept of a “color score” really appealed to me. Intriguingly, the Bell & Howell color-correction machine used punched paper tape to encode the color sequence, much like the perforated paper familiar from pianolas or the punched cards of early computers. I have made works featuring both of these and found the idea of color data stored in punched tape highly resonant with a musical score, and tangentially connected to earlier inventions such as Rimington or Wilfred’s Color Organs.

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CONTEXT: Jenna Collins, Someone Who Isn’t Me

“I was an editor before concentrating on my own stuff and I am massively into the work of Thelma Schoonmaker and her work with Scorsese. When I began concentrating on my own stuff, which is not in anyway aiming at Hollywood narrative Cinema (although I do have plenty of explosions and dead bodies), I felt that I had to play down the editing, it seemed underhand to manipulate, tease, threaten, persuade and all those other things editing can do. The work of Elizabeth Price, particularly User Group Disco, completely proved what a mistake that was. In it the editing becomes a thing in itself, a form of communication that seems to come from conversational as well as musical impulses. It is also concerned particularly with digital video rather than film where the surface/ground of the image, what it is made of is more unstable or ambiguous, at the very least it doesn't pre-exist the image in the way that a roll of film does, it is created in the render. 

I really enjoyed the introduction of The Sharpest Point, animation at the end of cinema', where Steve Reinke thinks through some of these things (like his work also), and there is actually quite a lot of animation going on in Someone Who Isn't me; the sun, the text, and the image of the ocean which is taken from Google Earth, an image which starts of lens based from the satellite but by the time you get to travelling over the surface of the ocean, or sitting underneath it you are dealing with an algorithm that is being produced by your presence.

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CONTEXT: Larry Achiampong (and David Blandy), Finding Fanon

“Black Skin, White Masks (Peau noire, masques blancs, 1952) by Frantz Fanon is a sociological study of the psychology of the racism and dehumanization inherent in situations of colonial domination. I came across Fanon's work during my BA nearly 15 years ago and I felt like a world that I could only faintly see had been opened to me. Fanon's ideas helped me to strengthen and articulate my own position, not just in terms of my artistic practice, but also a young Black male of Ghanaian heritage.”

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CONTEXT: An van Dienderen, Lili

Owen Land, Film in Which There Appear Edge Lettering, Sprocket Holes, Dirt Particles Etc.,1965

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CONTEXT: David Blandy (and Larry Achiampong), Finding Fanon

“The montage sequence from the conspiracy thriller starring Warren Beatty The Parallax View (1974) by Alan J. Pakula. Nice commentary on the sequence here.

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CONTEXT: Phil Coy, As Far as I Know (Devotion Gradient)

“In terms of process I thought also of Trisha Brown's Set & Reset - Version 1 (1983, in the classic video by James Byrne where the camera was within the dance) because with these new screen gestures—that a child seems to learn almost completely intuitively—I wanted to focus on them as the driving choreography for the film and its movement. I am also a fan of Robert Bresson and his process and As far as I know borrows both from his closed focus on hand gestures and his use of actors as ‘models,’ rather than the traditional central narrative characters of cinema. Both were key points of reference. 

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CONTEXT: Phil Coy, As Far as I Know (Devotion Gradient)

“Something else has happened in the last ten years with the introduction of touchscreens and cameras on smartphones: the image’s surface is no longer sacred. Instead it invites you to tap it, touch it, rub up against and make gestures with it. Gestures in cinema and its relationship to language have been theorized by Rachel Moore’s writing on Béla Balázs in Savage Theory (the chapter ‘Close Contact’) but these new intimate gestures with the surface of the screen in public space are a new territory, perhaps largely untheorised, and I wanted to work with that.”

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CONTEXT: Jenny Brady, Bone

Katerina Kolozova "Solidarity in Suffering with the Non-Human”

“Building Judith Butler’s politics of grief and Donna Haraway’s post-humanist discourse of universality, I will argue that “identification with suffering itself” could constitute a form of political solidarity which is established independently from and at an instance beyond or anterior to language. If we identify with the “suffering itself” we are identifying with the purely “evental,” i.e., with the sheer experience (of subjection to pain) which is a pre-linguistic category. The “suffering itself” is but a taking-place of pain and/or of trauma. Put in Laruellian parlance, it is the “lived” par-excellence. Thus pain is the real in the Laruellian as well as in the Lacanian sense of the word. The figures of Christ in Donna Haraway and Oedipus in Sophocles’ tragedies will be discussed as non-humanist models of political universalism.”

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A group of poems by Joanna Margaret Paul which was given to Rachel Shearer as inspiration for her film, which incidentally lends itself to the Experimenta programme title 'I am an open window'.

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CONTEXT: Yu Araki, Angelo Lives

Press release and installation shot of Angelo Lives at The Container, Tokyo. 

“More than all, Angelo Lives demonstrates the artist’s fixation with the way he sees his environment and the connections he forges in his head, the way an artist works (highlighted in the studio scene, watching an artist at work). His associations take us through a tangled web that links religion with voyage and discovery—the plotting of old men in Spanish bar of holy wars, lost ghosts, forgotten religions, cultural histories—in an enigmatic collection of visuals, thoughts, and sounds.”

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CONTEXT: Kaveh Nabatian, Nan Lakou Kanaval

“I probably wouldn’t have brought my Bolex to Haiti if I hadn’t seen Leah Gordon’s portraits of Kanaval. Besides the aesthetic value of her photography, there is a complicity with her subjects that prevents the images from sinking to easy exoticism.”