Scratch that itch
Scratch It Workshop
Make your own 'direct film' in the spirit of artist Len Lye.
"You spit or dampen the celluloid with a sponge. You stick down the sides with Scotch tape.You hold your hand at the right height and act as if you were making your signature.I worked myself into a kind of hypnotic trance and did this sort of spastic gesture."
Len Lye was strongly attracted to the handmade aspects of art, developing kinetic sculptures by 'waggling' pieces of metal and painting and scratching directly onto celluloid. This last process, which he labelled 'direct film' - was a radical innovation that secured him a significant place in film history.
In ACMI's free 'Scratch It' workshop you will have the opportunity to create a film without a camera, using Lye's techniques of painting and scratching images directly onto 16mm film stock.
Where Lye used tools ranging from a camel hair brush to a comb, dragging them through wet paint to make 'striated wavy lines', you will be sticking with textas in your early work as a 'direct filmmaker'. With about 15 seconds of film stock you will create a short sequence, to be spliced together with other participant's work and projected as a large collaborative and abstract film.
All novice scratchees will be lured into Studio 1 by the inspirational colours and sounds of Lye's films. Some Lye trademarks you may want to impress your fellow scratchees with include using a vertical line down the length of the film and making it sway, wriggle, jump, or glide. Alternatively, paint a horizontal line with a wobble to evoke the vibration of a twanged string.
To get inspired before the Scratch It workshop, watch one of Lye's most masterful works, Free Radicals (1958), at the exhibition currently showing at ACMI. Hailed by experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage as "an almost unbelievably immense masterpiece (a brief epic)," the film has recently been included in the National Film Registry of the United States Library of Congress.
Check out the digitised lesser quality version of Free Radicals here if you simply can't wait for the exhibition and then get a scritch scritch scratchin' yourself.
For more details about the Len Lye exhibition and events click here
Published Monday, 17 August 2009
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