listen with your eyes, watch with your ears

The (Sponsor Elided) 39th Auckland International Film Festival has begun, and so this is my life now. I planned to see 54 films, in that I pre-purchased tickets to that many, but with game day decisions I am already up to 56, three days into the festival. Where the madness stops? It won’t be clear til the end. (And possibly not even then, if I repeat last year’s mad decision to append a visit to Wellington, whose film fest is staggered a week after Auckland’s.)

Every year, there’s usually one or two events that combine music in film in some interesting way, and this year is highlighted by the appearance of Metamkine. They consist of two guys each with a couple film projectors, a bunch of mostly abstract homemade film loops, various reflective and refractive devices, and flashlights improvising live in conjunction with one guy making musique concrete with tape loops, a keyboard, a CD player, a mixing board, some effects, and various other gizmos.

Let me step back a moment. (If you’re like most people and don’t give a shit about abstract film, feel free to bail at this point, but do pay attention to the Editors song on this week’s podcast, which is rocking my world currently. Bye!)

The relationship between image and sound is a torturous one, and one many abstract films fail at. (As well as most narrative cinema, where music is oft-used to prop up unconvincing drama, and music video, where the image is either gratuitous or supplants the text of the song.) Some of the best avant-garde filmmakers, like Stan Brakhage and Peter Hutton, deal with it by avoiding sound all together. Unfortunately, this can lead to their films (Brakhage’s in particular) being pirated as visual wallpaper for music performance, rather than being presented in their intended context.

Playing live with film accompaniment is also usually a recipe for disaster, because typically the film is of a static duration and fixed narrative or shape, and either a score is being played which must fastidiously match the visual cues, or else is ignored entirely (like the time I saw Cat Power play the “soundtrack” to PASSION OF JOAN OF ARC and stop playing 15 minutes before the end of the movie).

Metamkine evade all of these obstacles several ways. The first is their approach to performance, which while being entirely reliant on film imagery – no digital video to be found anywhere – is completely live, completely improvisational, and completely flexible. The image, therefore, is just as free to respond to the sound as the sound is to the image. What we have, therefore – as the boys pointed out in their sadly underattended pre-performance workshop – is something more resembling a jazz group collaborating.

This leads to the related point that, for Metamkine, neither the image nor the sound takes precedence over the other. Sound sometimes responds to image, image sometimes responds to sound, both evolve and mutate in turn in a free shape. This may sound not very special, but there is really very little cinema where the audio and video are equally important. (David Lynch springs to mind as a notable exception.)

Finally, Metamkine are fully self-reliant. Unlike many who experiment with film loops, not only do they shoot their own film, but they have created their own film labs for developing the film that they shoot, acquired equipment for step printing and optical effects, and generally can make whatever the heck they want. This process becomes part of the performance as a result – tape loops include sounds of projectors, shadows of the performers are visible on the screen, light is sometimes used to create shadows of the projectors to interact with other images of the screen. Unlike most avant-garde cinema, where the process is mysterious and hidden, here the process is fully transparent, but no less magical as a result.

I’m fading a bit, got 5 films to catch tomorrow, so what I really want to say is this: Metamkine are pretty awesome, and if they ever play anywhere near you, make a point to see it. There are no DVDs to be had – as one of them said in the workshop, “we watch 15 minutes of a recording and we fall asleep”. The immediacy of the creation is the point, and engaging as it’s happening, instead of waiting for it to be packaged for the comfort of viewing and listening in your home. Mostly, these days, you get the chance to do that with everything. Metamkine is a glorious exception.