Writings By
Writings About
Secure The Shadow by Mark McElhatten
Angel
Beach
By Scott Stark
16mm, 25 minutes, color, silent, 18 f.p.s. - 2001
3D glasses never
quite fit on my face, but Scott Stark’s newest film, "Angel Beach"
needs no such apparatus for the viewer to experience the luxurious illusion
of three-dimensional imagery. Wielding a 16mm Bolex, Stark has literally stretched
a single moment in time into two moments by re-photographing successive frames
of 3D slides. This painstaking process took over a year to perfect, and Stark
succeeded in reassembling these images into a world that seethes with a sultry
life of its own, yielding a quivering image that calls attention to our perceptual
limitations by expanding the boundaries of the film plane and spatial realism.
Actually, this pulsating effect creates a fissure between two and three dimensions
allowing the viewer to slip inside this perceptible slice of time. Coppertone
and even the darkest of sunglasses cannot dispel the imprints of buxom, bathing
beauties that writhe and flicker their ways across the sandscape, and the imagined
soundtrack of waves, surf and seagulls punctuated by the occasional peal of
laughter paves the way for a rapturous reverie.
Angel Beach is an immortal place where youthful skin is exposed for the first time to the rays of the sun, and the gaze and desire of others. One feels the reminiscence of sand between the toes, and other crevices of the body recalling the sensual physicality of childhood when one returns home with half the beach in the bathing suit and hair. Angel Beach also revives a pubescent memory from my past of wearing a bright red bathing suit at the beach that became almost see through when wet, (and the subsequent remembrance of self-consciousness incited by the voyeurism of others). At Angel Beach, however, there is a feeling of empowerment as these sea nymphs are simultaneously active, but frozen in mid-action captured by the lens of the camera. Stark found these images circa 1969-71 at a flea market and they are artifacts of anonymous subjects and moments frozen in time. Like the remains of Pompeii, where sections of the city were unearthed with the bodies of people found in mid action without the gruesome horror of the moment of death, one still feels that these artifacts somehow reveal a sense of human frailty amidst their unabashed sensuality and ecstatic revelry. These surprising paradoxes present themselves as one thinks of the adage, "in the midst of life, we are in death".
A "Starkian" juxtaposition can most classically be defined by a gesture that has been culled; coaxed from the original material, mediated through the filmmaker to re-inscribe or create new meanings from the composition, movement, rhythm of the material. The in-between expanse of film frames come alive where hidden potentialities are released to the consciousness of a receptive viewer. Impossible relationships between sultry physiques collide and intersect in this world where space is mutable, and whimsy and folly are transcribed into the most intricate entanglements. As a slice of life unrestrained, frames become animated in a flux of nimble delight through the impossible intersections of spaces and flesh, which intertwine elliptically.
Figures are situated in many states of action and repose; their forms seem at times graceful, predatory, solitary, awkward, and whimsical sometimes bordering on the ridiculous. As people are placed together in a frame their eyes become enmeshed as different facial features, eyes, cheeks, skin tones become exchangeable and their similarities outweigh differences.In one image we see a woman confronting the photographer, hands outstretched, fingers spread in an attempt to obfuscate, and prohibit her visage from being stolen. She directly engages with and displays her irritation against the cameraperson leaving the viewer with the contemplation of scenarios of what might have happened next in this world of suspended instants of time. Her angry reaction revoked the privilege of subsequent viewings, shattering the illusion of the original photographer’s omnipotence.
In 1970, while the anonymous photographer of "Angel Beach" was scouring California beaches in search of material, the Mitchell Brother’s released their landmark porn film "Behind the Green Door", which featured a seemingly endless come shot, the gesture of ecstacy extending ad infinitum, similar to a scientific analysis of motion by Harold Edgarton. However in Stark’s film we are witness to a staccato tango between both parties engaged in equal participation. In Angel Beach, through the intervention of Stark’s re-photography, the woman is active instead of reclining in languid complicity, and any projectile fluids are in the imagination of the viewer. A more literal association would be a wild reverie of cheap beer and sex, which is more in keeping with the Schlitz can being shaken by the movements of the man’s suntanned hand and sensuous gestures of the woman who appears to be rubbing her smoldering body. Stark choreographs these forms to quaking perfection.
In Angel Beach
the audience becomes privy to secret longings of the image makers, as the presence
of the outsider is supremely felt; one who would perhaps want to join, but can
only observe. Thus the nymphets; initiates of the frolics in the sun are free
to roam, while the observer is left in static longing behind the invisible wall
of his camera. In one instance one sees a shadow that could be of the original
camera person in the lower left corner of the frame, but one can never be certain.
This shadowy presence is overlaid onto some of the human forms, and leaves one
with the impression of a lurker whose identity will never be divulged to the
audience, and we can never know the relationship or lack thereof with his oftentimes
unsuspecting subjects. Angel Beach lends itself to myriad musings of these sometimes-enigmatic
fragments. Several fades segment the film into discreet sections that allow
the viewer to take a pause to reflect on this world within a world that shivers
its snaky path toward the viewer’s retina as well as letting them rest
from the visual sweltering onslaught.
About midway through the film the viewer is presented with a white bathing suit
clad woman who is walking away from the camera. The image follows an in-camera
fade as the form descends a staircase. The camera renders this human form very
differently; she is seen ghostly white, overexposed and in high contrast to
all other images in the film due to the camera’s flash. The seaweed-like
trees on the left side of the frame offer a very different texture from the
hot sand and wet skin. She is like an angel herself leading this beach of souls
into the dark forest, a metaphor perhaps for the unknown realms that lie beyond
the earthly domain. So radically different from the other imagery, this pivotal
index of transcendence marks a departure embedded in a carousal of bodily forms.
Near the end of the film the unfinished phrase "A city is to man as a…" can be seen, cryptically written on a sea wall. This urban trace locates the beach on the outskirts of the city, situating this mythological seascape on the edge of a concrete jungle, an escape from the anxieties of city life, but also into a landscape of ambiguity. Some would be disturbed by the voyeurism present in Angel Beach, and Stark makes no attempt to sublimate this aspect. His foregrounding of this element in the film reveals our own inescapable complicity in looking wide-eyed, unblinking. It would be a vast reduction to say that the fragmentation of the women’s body is the only thing happening here. Through the intervention of the camera, the expansive terrain of "Angel Beach" is opened up, its forms dancing on the edge of the film’s precipice, to incite a prismatic contemplation of the human condition.
By Kerry Laitala, San
Francisco
November
2001
Secure
the Shadow...'Ere the Substance Fade
By Kerry Laitala
16mm, color, sound, 8 minutes -1997
"Secure
the Shadow, Ere The Substance Fade/Let Nature imitate what Nature has Made."
This early advertising motto for photography has the ring of a Victorian poem
and the shiver of an epitaph. Photography's initial triumph was to arrest the
fugitive and to fix a moment in time like an insect in amber. Following the
development of Fox-Talbot's transient pictures, it was clear that photography
could be more than just The Pencil of Nature – it was also a scalpel and
a spade. With a view towards permanence and the everlasting, cameras began indexing
the usual, the anomalous, and the pathological. Images ranged from the trachea
of the silkworm to the nimbus of the moon, life spied on unaware and the dead
composed in idealized sleep. Kerry Laitala's film derives its title and in part
its spirit from that motto and that history of imagemaking, but she creates
a work that is unique to her own idiolect and concerns, and is distinctly cinema,
recalling its genus as the quintessential Frankensteinian patchwork creature.
Secure the Shadow is steeped in melancholia, involuntary schadenfreude and a
sense of spoil that is both anachronistic and transcendental. A collection of
stereoptic medical photographs, a menagerie of unseasonable decay, surfaces
throughout the film, arriving in negative haloes of blue haze only to de-etherealize
into restored pictures of positive deformity. Flesh and spirit are pitted against
the industriousness of corrosion with wearying vigilance, as owls transform
from sentinel guardians into mocking gargoyles in the twinkling of an eye. The
plangent correspondences between emulsion and mortal flesh, editing and surgical
suturing and taxidermy, collecting and cataloguing as craft, science and mania,
are established directly or in innuendo. The recurrent images of the Crazy quilt
(specifically the commerative and mourning quilts that function therapeutically,
much like post-mortem photography) is emblematic of the above concerns. As a
visual equivalent, the Crazy quilt is often associated with the symphonic collages
and derangements of popular songs composed by Charles Ives, whose numinous cacophony
is a phantom presence here, breathing life into the film even though it is Ives'
less anxious serenities and metaphysical questions that provides shading to
Secure the Shadow's turbulent complexion. Laitala's unsettling imagery and design
manages to invoke Ives' music of the spheres, the silver swan of Orlando Gibbons,
the workaday utensils of life and death, the gnawing deathwatch
beetle's deviant arabesque, the spider's web and the awkward makings
of The Human Dress."
Mark McElhatten, curator of The New York International Film Festival, Views from the Avant-Garde
