MINING THE PAST

Looking through my files, I see more than a dozen videotapes hidden away in the dark recess of a book shelf. Off the top of my head, I didn't recall making as many. But there they are, most of them dating from 1971 and 1972. They document the works and views of a handful of writers and artists, among them William S. Burroughs and filmmaker Antony Balch in London; Allen Ginsberg in San Francisco; action-sound poet Bernard Heidsieck and critic/journalist Rafael Sorin in Paris; Fluxus artist Alison Knowles in Vermont; even one of my own video pieces.

To be looking back like this must be a sign of age or dementia, or both. Anyway, here's what I found:

Burroughs/Balch Experiment + HermanWILLIAM S. BURROUGHS
Four videos.

Burroughs/Balch Experiment
Recorded live at WSB's London flat (8 Duke St., St. James, London) on Dec. 21, 1971. Approx. 10 minutes.

Burroughs's face is transformed via Balch's film projection of other faces on his. The result is seen and heard with a live soundtrack in the video recording by Herman as an illustration of propaganda techniques. Antony Balch was an experimental filmmaker ("Towers Open Fire," etc.) who often collaborated with Burroughs.

WSB talked about this video with Robert Palmer in "Rolling Stone Interviews William Burroughs." It was published in Rolling Stone (108: 34-39) on May 11, 1972. This is what he said:

"Jan Herman was here with his little video camera outfit and we did quite a precise experiment, which was: Antony brought up the Bill and Tony film, I sat there, and he projected it onto my face, which was re-photographed on the video camera, but that faded in and out so that it would be that face, then fade back to the now face, so that you got a real time section. We wanted to project it onto the television screen from the camera, but we couldn't because the cycles were different; Antony and Jan Herman were fooling around and they managed to suck up the television. But even seeing it on a little view screen, it was something quite extraordinary."

I don't recall screwing up Uncle Bill's TV, but maybe we did. Palmer's interview is reprinted in Burroughs Live: The Collected Interviews of William S. Burroughs 1960-1997.

Burroughs/Sommerville/Mottram /Herman Discussion
Recorded live at WSB's London flat (8 Duke St., St. James, London) on Dec. 18, 1971.
Three tapes: 1) approx. 15 minutes; 2) approx. 20 minutes; 3) approx. 20 minutes.

Combination of discussions and interviews among Burroughs, Ian Sommerville (WSB's longtime companion and, with Brion Gysin, creator of "the dream machine"); Eric Mottram (British literary scholar, critic, poet, and professor of English and American Literature at King's College London); and Herman. Live recording includes slices of TV and images of Sommerville's own apartment. The conversations range widely about Burroughs's theories and includes some discussion of "subliminal" propaganda.

ALLEN GINSBERG
Two videos.

"Holy Thursday" and "Infant Joy"
Recorded live at Pacific High Studio (60 Bradey St., San Francisco) on Aug. 21, 1971.
Two tapes: 1) approx. 20 minutes; 2) approx. 20 minutes.

Work sessions for Fantasy recording of Blake songs put to music by Allen Ginsberg with the help of fellow artists who recorded with him. I don't think Fantasy ever released these.

Voice: Allen Ginsberg
Madolin: Alan Senauke
Guitar: John Sholle
Bass: Charlie Russell
Viola: Peter Hornbeck

JAN HERMAN
One video.

"Notre Dame de Video"
Recorded live at Herman's Paris flat (16 rue Cels, Paris 14e) in March, 1972. Approx. 20 minutes.

I made this video piece for the group show "Trois Soirs Parmi" at 19 Quai Bourbon, Paris 4e, on March 17, 1972. The show included live performances by Jochen Gerz, Françoise Janicot, and others.

BERNARD HEIDSIECK
One video.

Heidsieck performing his sound/action poetry.

Recorded live at Heidsieck's Paris flat (19 Quai Bourbon, Paris 4e) in March, 1972. Approx. 20 minutes.

ALISON KNOWLES
One video.

Knowles performing "The Identical Lunch"
Recorded live at Goddard College (Vermont) in March, 1973. Approx. 20 minutes.

GROUPE DZIGA VERTOV
One video.

Groupe Dziga Vertov Notebooks
Recorded live at Herman's Paris flat (16 rue Cels, Paris 14e) on Nov. 30, 1971. Approx. 20 minutes.

A documentation of notebooks that were written in collaboration with Jean-Luc Goddard, preparatory to making several films in 1968. Rafael Sorin, a member of GDV and a literary critic/journalist, provided the notebooks for documentation. He narrates the video. Background music is by James Moody and Co.

POP SAMPLER
One video.

Recorded live at the Wallraf Richartz Museum in Cologne on Sept. 19, 1971. Approx. 20 minutes.

From the collection of Ludwig Sammlung, works by various artists such as Lichtenstein, Warhol, Vostell, Rauschenberg, Wesselman, Indiana, Spoerri, Tinguely, others. Narrated by Herman.

DANIEL SPOERRI
One video

Spoerri performing "Eat Art" (with Richard Lindner).
Recorded on Oct. 3, 1971, from a program entitled "Changes" on German Southwest Radio (3rd Programme). Approx. 15 minutes.

Postscript: All of these tapes are now on file here at the Charles Deering McCormick Library of Special Collections, Northwestern University Library, in Evanston, Illinois.

March 31, 2006 10:15 AM |

Categories:

Me Elsewhere

'WILD SIDE' STILL ROCKS 

Nelson Algren was one of the great American authors of the 20th century, it is no exaggeration to say, and among the most neglected. Consider his underrated classic, "A Walk on the Wild Side." The title -- popularized and co-opted as an idiomatic phrase by Hollywood and Madison Avenue (institutions Algren loathed) -- is familiar to most anyone who speaks English or knows Lou Reed's lyrics. But the novel itself? Hardly.

BUSTER KEATON REVISITED 
Buster Keaton: Tempest in a Flat Hat is not a biography. "This book is merely a fan's notes," Edward McPherson writes in the introduction, although his publisher ignores the disclaimer and calls it a biography on the cover. In fact, the book is a bit of both, a difficult combination to bring off unless you're David Thomson, who set the standard with Rosebud, his penetrating rumination on the life and career of Orson Welles, which was nothing if not a distillation of every obsessive thought he ever had about the myth and the man and all his movies.
LAUREN BACALL, STILL SALTY AT 80 
When Lauren Bacall writes that her singing voice ranges "somewhere between B minus sharp and outer space," she's being candid and funny. It's not every stage star with two Tony Awards for best actress in a musical whose vocal talent offers so little promise. (OK, Harvey Fierstein excepted.) Still less would one admit it.
THE STARS ACCORDING TO BOGDANOVICH 
Peter Bogdanovich's superb collection of movie-star profiles and interviews -- a sequel to Who the Devil Made It, his interviews of top film directors -- begins with an affectionate tale about Orson Welles that reminds us just how intimate the author's connection to Hollywood's greatest has been. But contrary to what we've come to expect from dime-a-dozen celebrities and celebrity interviews not worth two cents, the tale avoids bromidic egotism and journalistic platitudes.
SAMMY'S WHITE DREAMS 
Four decades ago Lenny Bruce sentenced Sammy Davis Jr. to "30 years in Biloxi," stripping him of "his Jewish star" and "his religious statue of Elizabeth Taylor." Now we have two new biographies of Davis that spring him from ridicule, if not from doubts about his legacy, and restore a measure of dignity to a black entertainer whose huge fame and success never overcame his devout wish -- indeed his lifelong effort -- to be white.
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