cut ups

there is a great website that i found earlier this year, you can download some great films from it of various counter culture icons like william burroughs, maya deren, jean genet... in the past i've downloaded genet's film un chant d'amour which he made in the 50's, also maya deren's meshes of the afternoon a surealist film from the 40's i think...

the grey lodge this week furnished me with a few different things, a film about shane ballard, an enormous 22 year old who stood for sheriff of some southern county on a pro-pornography platform, maya deren's living horsemen of haiti, some noam chomsky stuff and william burrough's the cut-up's that he made with brion gysin and anthony balch in the late 60's...

i've been interested in burroughs and his cutup technique of writing for many years now, (i taught it as an aspect of composition to a class earlier this year), he used it as part of his writing from the late 60's all the way until he died...

he got the idea from brion gysin, the painter, and the first thing they did with it was to make films... really nice therefore to have seen the later literature that came out of the cutup's and now get to experience the earlier, cinematic experiments...

this film the cut-up's is almost 20 minutes long and seems to be made up of four different films cut together at half second intervals to form the whole... i sat through it yesterday and it was pretty intense... in 1969 it ran for afew weeks in a regular cinema in london and people regularly walked out of it, often leaving their belongings in the cinema...

so it got me thinking about an approach to my videoing of the sky that i did october-november, so far i've taken one of the 4 locations from which i video'd and selected a minute from each day that i did it... 15 days in all...

as a preliminary test i took the first half second from each day and threw them together, being 7.5 seconds long... i really like it, particularly the sound, chopping between each clip...

i need to find a way of moving each clip a little so they line up nicely, easier said than done, i've spent the last hour & a half working it out, my brain is starting to melt, but once i've done it putting together the next, longer version should be fairly straight forward...

then whether to just leave the sound as it is or to compose a piece for it, maybe letting the sound that is there dicate the music that comes out...?

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