To mark his ninetieth birthday, EYE has restored Zwartjes’ very first film, originally shot on Super-8 and long thought lost. Zwartjes started his career as a violinist and visual artist. He took photographs, made music and built instruments – but only really broke through with his equally craftsmanlike films.
Prelude 10 is a double-printed film with an extreme mixture of darks shot thru with jewel-like bursts of color, and very white bursts of light and fleeting colored forms.
The ocean, the trees, the varieties of cityscape and landscape assert themselves as "pictures", but the images are essentially a wash and tangle of nervous feedback, sometimes influenced by the colors of inlet waters, sometimes the wave movements, but more ordinarily by the cellular shifts and shapes of the optic system receiving exterior imagery.
Turquoise and maroon-toned thin lines of paint are interspersed with variously toned circular "watermarks" of blotched paint giving-way to multi-colored brush strokes and finally fulsomely darkened and thickened brush-strokes which then thin to something akin to the beginning.
Interplay of mostly horizontal lines inter-woven with "watermark" forms in a wide variety of tones which gradually tend to dissolve into blues at the end.
Many white interruptive frames and absolutely straight-edged multi-colored lines amidst "clouds" of color, finally thickened into blobs with lengthy white (clear leader) spacing between them.
Much depth of multi-colored thickened shapes which appear to be superimposed upon each other, semi-transparent in their "weave" with each other which is increasingly interrupted by ragged-edged blobs and smears of color.
Interplay of toned rectangular shapes, vertical and horizontal and diagonal lines in juxtaposition with hardened darker shapes which gradually shift tone and lighten until ending on thin blues.
This section is very similar to Prelude 4 except that it is composed of extremely thin-lined colors and sharply delineated shapes which are constantly interrupted by "cloud"-like forms.
...again, is "plein-aire abstraction" as defined above (painted in New York City) – with, for example, even a correctly toned green impression of The Statue of Liberty – and, then, impressions of Toronto with its architectural particularities appearing, midst hurrying people – shapes (almost as if photographed at times).
Popular movie trailers from 1967
These some of the most viewed trailers for movies released in 1967:
Featuring Joan Adler (who also appears in Chinese Checkers), Soliloquy is one of the four early Stephen Dwoskin films that were awarded the Solvey prize at the EXPRMNTL festival in Knokke, Belgium in 1967.
A wild, freewheeling spoof on motorcycle gangs in which tough-looking cyclists, who roam the highways on invisible bikes leaving visible tire tracks, pick up a girl hitchhiker encounter another gang.
Comments
Have you watched Film II yet? What did you think about it?