Carnival of Souls (1962) is one of my favourite films, so I've seen it lots of times. Up until yesterday, however, I hadn't seen the colorized version, from which this screenshot is taken. The finished product reminds me of the makeup morticians apply to corpses.
As with all the best experimental films, it takes a while to twig what's going on with Pat O'Neil's 1967 short film 7362. As the images drift, subdivide and transform like the hot wax blobs in a lava lamp, however, you'll find that it doesn't really matter what you 'get', only what you see and feel.
I'm all for forging ahead with things, but even I have to admit that something has been lost in the press button digital age in terms of experimentation. Analogue was tricky, cumbersome and time-consuming - but it was certainly fun, and it could make even a bunch of old shapes and colours feel new.
A menhir (if you've never read Asterix) is a tall stone placed in an upright position. This one is from neolithic France, and features a schematic female figure in relief.
In June 1965, Andy Warhol went to the 41st floor of the Time Life Building in New York, set up an Auricon camera and, over two consecutive nights, filmed the Empire State Building from the window. When projected in slow motion (16 frames per second, as specified by Warhol) the six and a half hours of footage runs for eight hours and five minutes.
An exercise in watching (and feeling) the passage of time, the film is, of course, pretty boring, despite the fact that there is, actually, quite a lot going on. Lights blink, the window mists, the picture blurs, the frame wobbles, stuff like that.
The whole project embodies one of Warhol's key principles: 'when nothing happens, you have the chance to think about everything' (see my previous post for another embodiment of the maxim). It's a quote that has genuinely been one of my biggest influences in terms of both art and life, so if you ever find me staring blankly into space, I'm not inactive, I'm just thinking about everything.
