The game is on...

Children's Games received a RACC project grant for 2011!

A few excerpts from the proposal:

The goal of Children’s Games is to produce a rich musical experience that is simultaneously dramatic and allegorical. After several years of collaborating with choreographers and dance companies, I am passionate about exploring a challenging, idiosyncratic and hybridized use of the theater to create a work somewhere between music concert, cinema and performance art. My primary impulse for this work is a deep concern for the ways in which corporate, big-budget fantasy images are increasingly colonizing and replacing undirected, self-motivated, small-scale play in both children and adults. Children’s Games will dramatize this struggle in an allegory of the movie-theater audience as willingly infantilized, hypnotized and receptive to dominant ideologies. Using cinematic images against themselves, I will deconstruct their effects, allowing viewers associative and imaginative freedom.

The piece will be comprised of four distinct layers: 1) a large HD video projection with stereo sound, 2) a ten-person mixed-voice choir, 3) several synchronized video monitors, and 4) a live electronic band. Each of these four zones will contain a series of "games" - scores or procedural devices that result in rhythmic and narrative behavior. Distributed throughout the performance space, individual games will overlap and interact. Organized by rhythm and intensity rather than narrative and character, Children´s Games will expand and contract, drifting from solo voice to full choir, from a single video to a dense interplay of cinema, sound effects and evocative electronic songs. Merging media and expanding the definition of music, this performance will celebrate the associative, fragmentary and irrational aspects of imaginative play.

Children´s Games will be an adventurous work filled with haunting images, vivid compositions and strange sounds. Drawing on research into film theory, cognitive science, the loss of play in children, catharsis and special effects, I will examine the power of narratives to shape our view of the world, and argue for the independence and freedom to play.

Perfectly Imperfect

After watching Dario Argento's Suspiria (1977) for the third time, I have a few thoughts about why it remains so interesting... How is it that Argento never again matched the audio-visual shock of this film? While obviously sensationalist, stiffly acted and generally absurd, every scene in this movie displays an idiosyncratic approach to editing, sound and set design. Like many viewers, I am amazed by the film's confident, over-the-top beauty and grotesquery. Intensely artificial, Suspiria produces a Brechtian distance that I find thoroughly enjoyable. Cinematic effects are emphasized at the cost of coherence. While some of these eccentricities may be the result of low budgets or technical limitations, I find it more interesting to treat them as intentional - stylistically or conceptually purposeful.

Suspiria is sometimes attacked as being overly stylized, or stylized at the cost of content. However, it’s exactly this excess that I like - the way the film so obviously reveals itself as a machine for producing effects. The first thing we notice is the use of overly theatrical lighting - intense reds, blues and greens sculpt space and create chromatic drama. This is apparently a tradition among Italian giallo directors, as demonstrated in a much earlier film, Bava’s Blood and Black Lace (1964).

Argento amplifies the color to an even greater degree, emphasizing its garish and cartoon-like possibilities. We first encounter ballet student Suzy Banyon in the generic modernist space of an airport where the pools of primary color seem out of place. We immediately know that something is very wrong...

The same excess could be noted in the editing style of this first sequence. As Suzy leaves the airport, Argento abruptly cuts to a close-up of the automatic door’s pneumatics. The edit feels similar to the three-shot “salvo” in the “Dead Dan” sequence of Hitchcock’s The Birds (1963).

While Hitchcock reserves this technique for the climactic moment of his film, in Suspiria it is unmotivated, and the significance is unclear. Suzy’s world is presented as one in which ordinary objects and encounters are overloaded with unexplained dread. The effect peels away from meaning and the edit becomes a stylistic device.

Sam Raimi plays a similar game with the viewer in Drag Me to Hell (2009), for example in a scene where a white handkerchief “attacks” the windshield of a car, animated by a sharp edit and a blast of "stinger" music.

By quickly deflating itself, the moment reveals how shock is unrelated to content and is instead simply a collection of techniques, designed to manipulate audience response. Raimi invites us to observe our own reactions and to laugh at the silliness of how easily we can be controlled. Argento, on the other hand, maintains a serious, even maudlin tone throughout. The same jump-cut technique is again used as Suzy rides in a taxi through the rainy night. Streams of blue water rush noisily into a sewer grate and we are left wondering – what is the significance of this shot? Should we pay special attention? Will the theme of water be developed later? Does the shot explain something about Suzy’s mental state? In the end, it seems only to emphasize a universal dread - a sense that the banal world has become filled with antagonistic ill-will.

Such antagonism is pervasive and can also be found in Suzy’s interactions with other characters. While she seems to be a sincere and well-meaning young woman, the residents of this unidentified German town are snide, ironic, rude, demanding and aggressive. Their attitude seems so entirely unprovoked that we have to wonder where it comes from. Are we witnessing the subjective view of a paranoid schizophrenic?

This transformation of the “normal” world reminds me of a description of physical exhaustion on Radiolab. As a long-distance biker pushes past his bodily limits, his mind revolts and hallucinations emerge, creating a final burst of desperate adrenaline. It also reminds me of the spooky forest sequence in Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), in which the limbs of trees transform into monstrous claws, clutching at Snow White’s dress as she flees. This animation, a direct inspiration for Argento, itself
was based on classic horror films such as Dr Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931).

The soundtrack by Goblin is another strong component of the film, and one much noticed by fans. There are a number of things that make the soundtrack unusual, beyond the groovy psychedelic music itself. First, we notice how prominent the music is, and how quickly it takes over. The soundtrack often subsumes the image and these sequences begin to feel like a music video. Apparently, the music was often played loudly on the set to put the actors in the appropriate mood (a technique David Lynch also employs). In the first sequence of the film, Argento cuts between tracking shots of Suzy in the airport, and shots from her perspective. With matched sound edits, the music is associated to Suzy’s point of view - but why? It continues through her rainy taxi journey, and returns again and again throughout the course of the movie. These manipulations of intensity are impressive and, like many of the other elements, incoherent. Where do these layers of creepy voices and demonic growls reside? They create an ambiguous space – more than soundtrack, but not quite diagetic. Overall, this excess has a tendency to flatten the film. Rather than building toward moments of violence, the entire atmosphere is suffused and equalized.

I’m also intrigued by the ambiguous role of the “band” Goblin. Too moody to really succeed outside the context of Argento’s films, and yet too forceful to operate as simply supportive emotional soundtracking, Goblin are stuck between the world of fiction and the real world.

There are other pleasurable discomforts in the sound design of Suspiria. Many of the sound effects are over-loud or over-close. The voice dubbing displays the infamous Italian tendency towards looseness, and many of the vocal affectations (accents, etc.) are ambiguous and exaggerated. The editing of dialogue reveals strange shifts in acoustics, moving inconsistently between various amounts and types of reverberation in a single scene. The acting itself feels both stilted and hyperbolic. I often have the impression that actors are reading their lines from scripts.

An additional distance is created in the lack of appropriateness in the script itself. Apparently, the lines were originally written for ten-year old actresses. When it was decided that the film was too violent for such young actresses, the script was not revised to reflect adult attitudes. Thus we have actresses who don't "fit" their lines, adult women who act like children, and a feeling that the dialogue splits away from the "reality" of a scene. This distance between the voices and their on-screen bodies again creates a beautiful artificiality.

Finally, one must comment on the outrageous geometry of the sets, with their art-nouveau curves and sinuous lines. In combination with the dramatic, richly-colored lighting, these over-embellished floral patterns and contrasting ornamentations produce a refracted, gothic, interior world. The consistency and zeal with which Argento decorates this film is excessive. Scopophilic pleasures are encouraged and in many ways become their own separate (even dominant) plotline. It’s worth noting that characters in Argento’s films are often killed by pieces of art. Is there a thesis here about the dangers of beauty?

Reality / Parody

"It doesn't matter how real or true the facts are; the issue is how something that somebody says is transformed into something that will change the world. (...) That happens a lot in oral communication. I can say something - it doesn't matter if it's true or not - but your reaction and the emotion it generates within you are real. (...) The actual facts are not important but the consequences of what is said are real and tangible. I feel this way about the world in general. (...) Reality is not something that exists but something that we have constructed, and since we have made it, we can also remake it differently."
- Lucrecia Martel, in conversation with Haden Guest, Bomb Magazine, Winter 2009

"It is clear that the world is purely parodic, that each thing seen is the parody of another, or is the same thing in a deceptive form."
- George Bataille

Allegory

"Allegory resists fantasies of strictly teleological history in favor of fleeting instants where "meaning" is forged between past and present, in "the depths that separate visual being from meaning"."
- Adam Lowenstein, Shocking Representation: Historical Trauma, National Cinema, and the Modern Horror Film, quote from Benjamin, The Origin of German Drama

I'm becoming more interested in allegory as a means of structuring narrative, and this has been leading me into new research. I like how, in allegory, everything can be something other than what it is, or what it seems. Horror films lend themselves to this kind of reading, as symbols, stand-ins, replacements for the "unrepresentable". I am choosing to create a (mis)understanding that all horror films are 'actually' about the act of watching movies. I want to to read horror films (specifically those films that involve children) as allegories of spectatorship. I like this exaggerated sense of metaphor, the intersection of repression and fear, the formative trauma of childhood, the imbalances of power. But also the sense of play, the knowledge that "it's only a movie".
If I have a tagline for Children's Games (the way movies do), it will be "Narrative is a game we play with our bodies."

I am stuck in between the idea of making cinema and the idea of making music about cinema. As my music becomes more like a soundtrack (arranged rhythmically), I want to make videos that are more like music (arranged as a soundtrack). In any case, the conceptualizations for these videos are becoming more elaborate, to the point where I'll probably have to ask for help from a professional. As I imagine them now, I will need a soundstage, actors, lights. For example, I would like to shoot all of the 'scenes' against a rear projection screen. This will allow me to have two layers of camera work, and a disassociation between setting and action. I recently watched the original Godzilla and loved the obviously fake (yet still spectacular) array of special fx, including rear projection. What if the rear projection includes its own close-ups, edits, pans, etc., and is brought into active conflict with the shots? I am interested in pushing the artificiality of the video to the point where it can be read as something other than narrative - music. I am in awe of the moments where actual narrative films do this - scenes from Guy Maddin (especially Arcangel) or Lucrecia Martel come to mind.

What's been happening?

It's been almost four months since my last post (how did that happen?) so I thought I would spend some time describing what I've been doing.

Work on Children’s Games is moving slowly, mostly on hold in anticipation of - fingers crossed – funding, but thinking about the piece has continued. Recently, research has included Nietzsche on the Dionysian and studies of feral children... I am now convinced that the work will need to go in two directions, perhaps simultaneously. First, I'm imagining a series of installation “clusters”, using video projection, television monitors and speakers. This mode can allow a non-linear, looping sensibility, with random intersections between elements. It has the advantage of being transportable and of having the possibility to exist within the gallery realm. These clusters would be a way of testing material, following tangents or developing ideas that may eventually find their way into the second stage - that of the performance. I'm now realizing that the project will require much more elaborate video shoots that I previously planned. I have a dozen scenes sketched out or scripted, and I’m now starting to think about strategies for gathering material, technical and creative resources. I am most excited about working with rear projection screens and actors.

Secondly, I’ve been making music for a new band, a project that involves Taryn Tomasello and Gabi Villasenor on vocals. Formed over the summer as Crippled Athlete, we've played one show as a noise duo, and another show as a trio, with all new material that I might describe (tentatively) as "psychedelic noise dubstep". This music has furthered a fascination with vocal sounds and percussive textures that I began in Flock & Tumble and continued on Knives. It's been fun and a bit strange to work in a format that resembles the structure of a traditional band, something I haven't done since Alial Straa in the mid-90s. The music I've been making is quite a bit more condensed and forceful than past work, with electronic and acoustic drums, distorted layers, and other effects. I hope that the band will eventually exist in the "real world" as well as participating in Children’s Games. Here's a rough mix of a new track that will eventually include vocals.

breeze by Seth Nehil

I’ve also been continuing work on the cut paper pieces (see above), and working towards proper documentation of my last three years of visual work. I was recently nominated for the PortlandNW Contemporary Arts Awards (along with about 300 others), which has provided the needed pressure to rebuild my website, a long overdue task. On the new site, I'll represent my drawings in a more vigorous way, and elaborate on how my sound work has shifted toward performance in the last four years. Look for that soon!

Speaking of online activity, I've been writing for Intransitive magazine. Several interviews are underway, including conversations with Oregon Painting Society, Sean Griffin, and Micah Silver, among others. These articles will appear over the next few months.

Irrational Degradation

My increasing attraction to gothic, hyperbolic and parodic rhetoric has me reading an excellent biography of George Bataille by Stuart Kendall. I've read the pornographic novels Story of the Eye and Blue of Noon, but Bataille's theoretical works have remained somewhat impenetrable. This brief summary of his ideas has me underlining every other sentence. I'm drawn to these elaborate, knotted and knotty words: lacerations, corrosive, monstrous, sacrificial...
Some juicy tidbits:
"It is clear that the world is purely parodic, that each thing seen is the parody of another, or is the same thing in a deceptive form." "A derivative work merely copies a respected original; a parody degrades that original with mocking mimicry, assaults its absent and abandoned authority. Parody is the literary equivalent of transgression, upholding as it undermines." "Materialism is above all the obstinate negation of all idealism, which amounts to saying, finally, of the basis of all philosophy." "Base matter 'refuses to allow itself to be reduced to the great ontological machines resulting from these [ideal human] aspirations'." "'I submit myself entirely to what must be called matter, since that exists outside of myself and the idea.' Base materialism is a corrosive sense of matter, one in which form ruins."
I've always been interested in extremes, seeking out those areas that push against, struggle with, reject, distort and interrogate the status quo - perhaps as a balance or foil to my lack of actual activity in such areas, my generally placid exterior. (Though I'm increasingly worried that bitterness and aggression leak through my social anxiety...) At any rate, it remains a theoretical interest in extremities, except perhaps in art practice.
Using extremes in work is a difficult proposal, however. How does a piece simultaneously invite and assault? The accusation of difficult work is that it excludes and is exclusive. Two impulses battle within my desire - that of appealing among a wider audience, which rubs against my own tastes in repetition, intensity, ugliness and confusion. Hopefully this friction can be productive. It creates a quivery feeling in my gut, a feeling of pushing against invisible (and therefore all the more resistant) walls. The difficulty of adapting the preverbal (or even precognitive) impulses into a clear, strong voice. A cloud that rests just beyond the reach of fingertips.
My favorite work remains uncompromising, theatrical, obsessive, elliptical... and obscure. Robert Ashley, Jerry Hunt, Costin Miereanu, Catherine Sullivan. I've been thinking more and more how my favorite artistic experience is one of unresolved confusion. A kind of sustained, elevated inability to make sense of things, suspended within formal precision and aesthetic integrity. The longer a work can resist my mind's struggle to find or impose coherence, the more I'm interested in returning, thinking and exploring.
Plunging into the dark shit which animates and balances the dynamic of existence.

Furl!

New full-length CD out now from Sonoris. With a beautiful 3-panel sleeve featuring the photography of Harrison Higgs. From the press release:
Furl is the sequel to Seth Nehil’s critically acclaimed 2009 release Flock & Tumble, also on Sonoris. Continuing his exploration of physically charged, acousmatic sound, these compositions whip, crash, swoop, glide and burble. Clusters of bell-like tones pierce hazy, corroded atmospheres. Animalistic yelps, distant pings, percussive bursts and glassy swells all merge in this unique sound-world. These five pieces are both rigorously-assembled and gracefully sparse. Furl will be a welcome addition to the expanding catalogue in Nehil’s futuristic organic paradox.

Write to me directly at s_nehil(at)yahoo(dot)com to order.