6th of December, 2019
This piece was first left as a review on the website RateYourMusic. I was reviewing Epilogue, a film by Jordan Belson.
I bought a DVD of some of Jordan Belson's work recently because I happened to be buying a Takashi Ito collection, and it cost me no extra to pick up one other DVD from the same website. I liked the cover a lot. Some of Belson's films, Light and Samadhi especially, are similar to some films I made a few years back. On my camera phone lens I would smother stuff like hand-soap and washing up liquid (the best results were from wallpaper paste) and then point the camera directly at sources of light, and the effect of the translucent mask would be to refract the light into subtle soft rainbows against the brilliant white of an open bulb. I have no idea how Belson made these films, there's no information with the DVD, but there's a similar sort of delicacy to the way the colours come out that suggest some sort of physical process like refraction is as much the director of the films as Belson himself.
I really like Samadhi and Light, and only quite like this. It goes wrong in a pretty interesting way. Firstly the film was commissioned by the Centre for Visual Music which means there's this pretty cheesy aspect of this film that makes it feel like an artsy music video. Ignoring that (I can always just watch the film muted, and indeed about half way through I did) there is one other problem which is that it has this queasy atmosphere about it that reminds me of BBC VHS idents
I remember some of these from my VHS tapes I would watch as a kid, mostly the later ones since I was born in 1996. The weird 3D world map projection seems pretty tasteless now, it looks like an early 90s artefact of world music mania with its uncanny plastic representation of a united Earth accompanied by vaguely tribal drumming and glittering synths.
The ident that inspires such melacholy in me is the one at 4:46, which was from about 2002 probably. As a six year old watching Postman Pat (I think, of course my memory is hazy) this one stuck with me. Looking back on it now it's pretty rubbish looking, but for some reason in my memory it was almost this brilliant swirling pattern accompanied by some really rather lovely music, but then muddied by nasty looking digital rendering and the buzzing of the cathode ray tube TV. My parents living room at that time was pretty hippy-ish, full of earthy tones and rugs pinned to the walls and vaguely aboriginal looking abstract art objects which largely suffer from the same world music tackiness I described above. The TV was out of place: a big grey box that groaned and hissed when you turned it on crackled when you put your skin near it. Epilogue feels a bit like watching something really beautiful in that wrong, plastic, digital context.
A lot of it is messy, independently quite beautiful images layered in a pretty heedless way. There are also lots of frames that skew and tilt these images as if to suggest that they are dancing on some sort of surface, like a sky or a flowing river. The suggestion there might sound magnificent but it looks a bit more like if you encased the Earth in a giant shell of LCD screens and then played Stan Brakhage on them, replacing the sky. Actually that still sound pretty magnificent, doesn't it? I think the sheer novelty of that mental image, how imposing it feels, makes this film worth watching anyway. Just to see how the ambitions of an abstract film veteran born in the 1920s might be corrupted by a wonky, awkward transition into the 21st century.