Bradley Eros
“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
“Without giving away too much, I’ll just say that the ‘soundtrack’ is inside the mind of the viewer, as they experience the ‘film’. An experiment & a provocation.” –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.
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.
“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
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.
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!”
