Radical Thought

A radical remix of the recent Transformers film, via synthetic collapse and critical revenge on its old & new fascist tropes > celebrating SPEED. NOISE. + DANGER. The fervent declarations & violent poetry of the Futurists are superimposed on the mythic morphology of the Autobot blockbuster’s machine mayhem. Images of death & destruction reign in a delirium of transformations as, to quote Marinetti: “We Decompose the Universe!”

The film is a collection of one-minute short films created by 60 filmmakers from around the world on the theme of the death of cinema.

“A site-specific cinema performance employing the myriad parameters of the technical apparatuses of analog film projection and light, using Anthology’s Maya Deren Theater projection booth & projectors and operated by our skilled projectionists. The work will include all of the variations of lenses, aperture plates, bulbs, lamps, gates, screen masking, shutter speeds, frame rates, change-over, focusing & framing, etc., in a composition for illuminated flicker and filmless geometries of light, for all types of projectors: 8mm, Super-8mm, 16mm, 35mm, and slide, from an instructional score for the performers. It is a work of contracted cinema, or cinéma concret, focused on the cinematographic machine and filmic light: an exercise in analog fetish, pushed towards the revelation of the invisible mechanisms, foregrounding & celebrating that which is usually hidden from sight.” –Bradley Eros

“In the context of an ‘Imageless Films’ series, it’s significant that ‘mercury’ is radio as cinema, ~ a looped excerpt from Orson Welles’s Mercury Theatre radio play of DRACULA, a performance of sound creating sight, but especially, the utterances and hallucinated descriptions of Mina (from Bram Stoker’s novel) in a trance, picturing what she visualizes in a hypnotized state: the narcoleptic sibilances of a somnambulistic cinema, manifesting what is not present to others ~ & the experience ends (for the live audience) with a shock of mirrored reflection ~ something real in the room!” – Bradley Eros

COLOUR THEORY uses a multitude of white projector light [all possible variations: 35mm, 16mm, R8 & S8mm, 35mm slide] with a spectrum [RYB/OGV] of hand-manipulated coloured gels, moving apart & over-lapping in layers, to create a blended mixture of myriad shades, performed live from the booth as a sequence of variations from a colour-coded score.

Hand-developed meditations on being and movement, as inspired by Gysin's Dreammachine, Sufi mysticism, and early cinema. A knowledge of the fragility of existence mirrors the tenuousness of the material. The film itself becomes the site to experience impermanence, and to revel in the unfixed image.