In the beginning there is the question of relevance and rapture. It's a deeply personal one. During the disturbing era of the financial collapse of 2008, a film arose as an examination of the time and it arose in spite of it. While the thunderclap signalling the largest decline of real estate values since the Great Depression was reverberating across the world, a friend of contemplation and enigmas sat somewhere in a corner of New York. His fate was to sell his apartment and to make this film. His state of mind was reflective and perplexed, thus simultaneously stressed and carefree. So suffering, he did the math and wrote down his thoughts on Hollywood. This preface (or postscript) is dedicated to the kernel of what would emerge as a wonderful, yet hardly accessible film. After a year had passed, he found himself in Los Angeles. He still hadn't erased the question mark he wrote at the end of the word "Hollywood". Then, in the month of deepest tension, when year-end bonuses were negotiated on Wall Street, he finally started to finish the BIRTH OF PRIMARY CINEMA FROM THE SPIRIT OF SOUND. From Sound? Sound and Primary Cinema? Hollywood and the Sound of Primary Cinema? Hollywood and the artwork of Supermodernism? How can this be? Does Hollywood need Primary Cinema? What's more… Utopian Science? What he seized upon is something fearsome and dangerous. It is a problem with horns, not necessarily a whole bull, but at any rate a new problem. He states that it is the problem of science itself, as science is now understood to be problematic and questionable. Thus a utopian science was created only out of personal experiences dwelling on the border of perception, and it was built on the foundation of art, because the problem of science cannot be understood on the basis of science. Perhaps, this is a film for artists with analytical tendencies and a capacity for retrospection; an artist that is full of psychological innovations, secrets and metaphysics. It is the sort of film which is good for "the best people of its time." For that reason this film should be handled with some consideration and discretion because the work dares not only to look at science through the lens of the artist, but to look at art from the perspective of life. Let me say this again: it is an impossible film. I call it poorly written, slow moving, childish, obsessed with image, sentimental, uneven in tempo, without any will for logical clarity, very self-confident and distrustful of evidence, even distrustful of the relevance of evidence, like a film for the initiated. It is "music" for those baptized into music, for those that have in common rare and shared art experiences. It is a token of recognition among the blood relatives in art. But it is also a film. Its effects continue to seek out all of us and tempt us to new pathways and dance floors. At any rate, here speaks a strange voice. People admit this with as much curiosity as aversion: the voice is the disciple of a yet "unknown God," who momentarily hides in the guise of a learned man, under the heavy and humourless dialectics of the German man. Here is a spirit with alien, even nameless needs; a memory filled with questions, experiences and secrets, where the name Supermodernism is written like a question mark. Here speaks, so people say with suspicion, a mystical and infuriated soul that stumbles with difficulty into a foreign tongue, uncertain whether it wants to communicate or hide. This "new soul" should have sung, not spoken. Ultimately, there is a problem right here. As before, Hollywood will continue to remain entirely unknown and unknowable as long as we have no answer to the question: "What is Supermodernism?" This film offers an answer. *** It is about 11 o'clock in the morning I look out the window and stare The phone almost never rings. If it does, I pick up and nobody is on the line. As the rate of information is increasing, I realize that this is especially true for My eyes drift back to the Hollywood sign. Motion pictures are based on an illusion. Motion pictures are based on an illusion Furthermore, the rate and the amount More and more events occur per minute Everything goes up: I fly back to New York. The illusion of Hollywood's cinema Only if a single image is confronted I continue to breathe At the dawn of mankind, Our Primary Cinema is therefore This is the original immersive Although in Primary Cinema In the very end, *** |
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Catalog No: | FLX13 (LN39) |
Title: | Birth of Primary Cinema from the Spirit of Sound |
Sound Artist: | Frank Rothkamm |
Visual Artist: | Frank Rothkamm |
Label: | Flux Records |
Length: | 33:13 (1993s) |
Composed: | 2008-2010 |
Location: | Los Angeles New York |
Instruments: | Csound microphone organ |
Release Date: | 05/04/2010 |
Edition Size: | 200 |
Format: | Compact Disc |
Parts: | Vinyl Style Sleeve (4/4) DVD (4/4) shrink wrap 4to booklet + 3.75 x 2 print |
Tags: | field recordings csound |