Feeding honey, marmite and PVA to 35mm film

Feeding honey, marmite and PVA to 35mm film in the footsteps of NZ’s finest

“I'm intensely attracted to colour, rhythm and movement, so I guess I’ve been massively influenced by film animator Len Lye,” laughs filmmaker Eve Gordon. “I’m sure every contemporary experimental filmmaker from New Zealand has to say that!”

However Gordon and collaborator, multi-instrumentalist composer Sam Hamilton, take their experiments with film even further with their upcoming exhibition Looklessness at the NZ Film Archive mediagallery, 26 April – 13 May.

The exhibition will consist of multiple DVD projections using images originally shot on film. The artists have decided to create an immersive environment of light and sound in the Film Archives mediagallery. To ensure visitors get the full impact of the experience Gordon intends to lay glow-in-the-dark feet on the ground indicating where to stand.

With the intention of creating “a process of looking that’s more like listening with the eyes,” the pair, who have shown their work throughout Australia, in Berlin and around New Zealand to great acclaim, marry experimental sound and imagery with a range of weird and wacky film techniques.

As well as working as a trained actor, trapeze artist, film producer, singer and theatre teacher, Gordon worked as a projectionist where she was able to play with scrap 35mm film to her heart's content.

“There are so many different things you can do to film to create unique imagery. We paint, dab, spray and dribble bleach onto it. I poke holes in black film both by hand and with a sewing machine. We also have a broken projector which we use to create melted imagery. Some sections have been burnt with a soldering iron which Sam discovered was highly effective.”

As well as scratching the surface directly in true Len Lye tradition with pins and screw drivers, the pair have an unusual list of materials they stick inside the film: wax, PVA, water, honey, even marmite and Indian Ink.

The curious resulting images are “lubricated” by Hamilton’s musical scores. Hamilton, who’s work has been described as "quite striking …like a teenage robot on a tense day at the microchip hurler" (Foxy Digitalis), has collaborated with many well-known New Zealand musicians; Tall Dwarfs, Marksadgrove, Chris O’Connor and more. He has toured Australia and New Zealand and is travelling to Brazil later this year to do field recordings in the Amazon jungle.

Sam Hamilton and Eve Gordon first collaborated on the direct film, "Two Vivid Animations; 'fuck horizontal' and 'vertical or Backwards'", where they explored the ideas of sound and image co-existing with equal importance. They have expanded their experiments from pre-made film, through slide projector performance to multi 16mm and 8mm projector performances.

Hamilton says “I started off with a desire to make sound and music not subsidiary to the image as it is in most filmmaking at present. I am interested in trying to make a purely equal film.”

With Looklessness the artists aim to affect the viewer psychologically. “It’s like wearing a pair of glasses with glasses with black dots painted in the middle of the lenses. We’re asking people to question their filmic experience and explore the periphery.”

There will be a live performance Light-mantled Sooty Albatross by the artists on Saturday 28 April. People are invited to view live in action “the mutli-projector analogue delights: spliced and bubbling marmite collage, eye-bending glass light, and bleached, honeyed sprocket-holes.”

Gordon adds, “These organic materials seen through the intense light of the projector create ‘living’ fragile images of coagulating forms. I love that it creates a unique sense of film at the moment of its conception.”

“Abstract multi-screen constructions of 'rejuvenation Loops' from Auckland who have that typically NZ style towards technology, where everything is half-broken and frayed, but somehow beautifully fragile and poetic.”
- Sam Lee, 'Expanding Celluloid' OtherFilm Festival, Brisbane Time Off

ENDS

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