Tiny Colour Movies

TINY COLOUR MOVIES Arnold Weizcs-Bryant of Baltimore USA is a private collector of film. He has a huge collection of movies from many sources and in many different media. He stipulates that the movies he collects must be short - none is more than seven or eight minutes long, and some have a duration of only a few seconds. He insists that these represent a new kind of art. One which is only now becoming possible to recognise. Photography has recently become acknowledged as a new technological art form and commercial cinema is currently undergoing this kind of reassessment. According to Arnold, another significant yet unrecognised form exists - the movie made outside commercial considerations, for the sheer pleasure of film. This category can include found film, the home movie, the repurposed movie fragment. These ideas appear to have some correspondence with the films and ideas of Stanley Brakhage. Indeed Arnold was very excited when he discovered Brakhage's work a few years ago, since he feels it confirms many of his long held views about the aesthetic beauty and cultural significance of film fragments. I was fortunate to be able to view some of the Weizcs-Bryant collection recently at a small birthday celebration screening held for his wife Edie and a few friends, at a commercial theatre in downtown Baltimore. We were all transfixed by the beauty and strangeness of the movies. They were like flickering transmissions from another world. Here you see old sunlight from other times and other lives. Juxtapositions of underwater automobiles, the highways of Los Angeles, movies made from smoke and light, discarded surveillance footage from 1964 New York hotel rooms. For me, the most magical of all were Max Forbert's assemblage movies, made from film fragments he saved when he swept the cutting room floors of Hollywood. After the viewing, I began to understand what Arnold meant when he spoke so passionately about the intrinsic beauty of the medium - how the scratches, the grain, the bleached out sections, all once regarded as imperfections, can now be appreciated as qualities - elements which only add to the mystery, the emotional and intellectual resonance, and the sensual appreciation of film. As I began to record some new music a few weeks later, I realised I was still carrying the afterimage of that Baltimore evening. The underwater automobiles and surreal Hollywood outtakes glimmered through my head while I worked in the studio. So I decided to give in to it - to see what would happen if I made a small collection of musical pieces using the memory of those Tiny Colour Movies. JOHN FOXX