peter meets peggy

Prior to meeting Peggy, I had heard of her, seen some of her video works from the past few years, and read an article about her in an old issue of Millenium Film Journal.  From my reading, I knew that she used to shoot a lot of super8, which is the format I have  been working a lot in recently.  I hoped that I would get to see some of her earlier work and anticipated showing her some of my recent super8. I was especially interested in seeing Martina’s Playhouse, which apparently caused a bit of a scandal at the time and is one of her most well-known works.

When I arrived we chatted for a bit, about Bard, about film, about Nathaniel Dorsky, about cats, about Bushwick and Williamsburg and the changes she has seen around her “crash pad” off of the Bedford stop since she first moved there over a decade ago.  Then we got down to business:  First she showed me a quite unsettling film which involved some creepy (and soothing) Morton Feldman music and two found-footage sources; a strange 1970s telling of Adam and Eve in Eden (very reminiscent to me of some of the cheesy sets Captain Kirk and his landing party would explore in the original Star Trek series), and some very excited, very 90s virtual-reality demonstration footage by NASA.  Peggy noted to me that these virtual reality tests often feature manicured (manufactured?) landscapes (I suppose since they are virtual they coudn’t really be wild or naturally occuring), gardens, as their virtual testing grounds.

We also watched her tribute to Bruce Connor ‘Bethlehem’ which I had missed this year at Views.  This, like the first film I watched with her that evening, was a found footage film.  The catch was: it was all footage that she ‘found’ in her own collection.  The film was edited to present each of these moments from her body of work in fleeting succession, each shot barely on screen long enough to consider its source or original context.  These moments, recontextualized by one another, seemed to be the pinnacle or climactic moments of hundreds different narratives strung together, and coupled with a very sentimental score,  created for me very strange viewing experience that kept me at an uncertain but unwavering plateau – I was experiencing the emotions one reaches at a crucial moment in a film but these moments kept coming, each as ‘climatic’ and indeed as ‘anti-climatic’ as the next; as these images were all devoid of their contexts which presumably would have lent them greater emotional force.

Finally, after minor prodding, we watched her film Martina’s Playhouse that I am sure she has watched a bagillion times but I was very happy and very greatful to see this early work of hers.  A work from a time when Peggy was shooting constantly, carrying her super8 (sound+picture) camera around constantly, and only working with footage that was ‘her own.’  She was against using found footage for her work at the time…ahh the naivite of youth.  Her youthful stance kind of echoes my own and I am increasingly seeing the limitations of it.  I won’t do any discussion of this film here since it has been much written about, for instance you can get a pretty good idea of it here: http://archive.sensesofcinema.com/contents/directors/03/ahwesh.html

The viewing of Matina’s playhouse led into a interesting discussion about the relationship of film and video – specifically video as a distribution method for works shot on film and what the effect of that is.  For instance with Martina’s playhouse, Peggy mentioned that when doing the DVD stransfers she found herslf faced with a list of decisions she hadn’t really considered before:  Decisions involving how much to sweeten the audio, or involving whether or not to correct a technical mistake which couldnt easily be fixed before digital methods, which could be fixed with the click of a mouse now, but which is part of the film that has been shown many times.  Can it be too late to fix something like this?  Dishonest?  What are the philosophical flaws to say, someone like George Lucas’ approach which is to constantly re-edit and/or remaster his work?  There must be some in between that is not so objectionable.  This question, however, is not so easily answered.

Thinking of the transfer to video of a work calls to my mind Walter Benjamin’s essay The Task of the Translator.  I think this ‘transfer’ from film to video must be much more than what the word suggests; a mindless task an example of which would be displacing the contents of one box to another or something equally inane.  The transfer of a filmic work to video must attempt transcribe the details, and mood, the very essence of the piece into a new language where much of the original nuance may be lost.  In literature, a translator of poetry would be assumed to be a poet themselves.  We do not expect this of the telecine technician, but should we?  Most of my masters are on video due to economic constraints, and I am usually quite pleased with the the color timer’s work; sometimes a shot which I had exposed incorrectly would come back to me beautiful and usable.  If I was working before the days of video would I take the time to reprint that shot in the optical printer?  Would my entire aesthetic be different, more sloppy?

Kind of an uncertain ending point for this post, but who needs traditional structural elements in this blog anyways.

-Peter

PS  - sorry for the lateness, I hope some of you are still reading this – I know I am still checking for responses.

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