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FILM IDEAS, THE '70s

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July 6, 1973

My idea yesterday: Nothing but clouds, with music, let's say. Select different formations and film their disintegration.

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Early 1974

Film a moving still life with a moving camera, and project it in a systematic and appropriate way.
Or: Project a moving object around a circular room, as if writing it.

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Early 1974
FILM-PARTICLE
The surface of the screen is a x b, but only a small part of it is uncovered at a time.

FILM-SPACE
The film describes a sculpture, that's the space.

TIME-FILM
Time-units, each with a different concentration of events.

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December, 1976

FILM-WRECKING
Modification of an exciting film by blocking, superimposition, etc. (In some sort of order.)

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November 2, 1977.

PROJECTION PLAN
I take two projectors placed facing each other, and project a positive with one, and a negative with the other onto a screen positioned in the middle. Nothing will show on the screen, because what one does not block out, the other will. As the images change, we see nothing except that something is happening.

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1979

DUPLICITY
Film a produced event, or an actual event, from two angles different enough to result in totally different information. Then project them simultaneously.

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1979

Video (or film) idea

Whatever moves is stationary. In the camera, the moving object is always stationary, and the fixed object always moves. (Frustrate the event.)

Video idea (from television)
1. Picture without sound
2. Sound without picture (alternately)

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1979

VIDEO WITHOUT VIDEO

Watch the picture from a torsion mirror!
Watch your own reflection in the screen!
Look for yourself on the screen!

Always watch a different channel!
Watch the picture turned upside down!
Watch the picture turned sideways!

Watch the official program with one eye closed!
Manipulate the official program!
Turn off the official program!

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VIDEO IDEAS, THE '80s

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REPETITION
Endless video tapes on a theme which is repetitious by nature.

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Endless audio tape with changing pictures.
The disjointed film is held together by the sound (e.g. one note).

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On the train: the clouds and the moving train stand still, while the landscape rushes by. (Distance is tied to the movement, while our immediate surroundings disappear.)

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BLURRED FILM
Some sort of blurred, moving picture. One should not be able to figure out what it is. With animation and changing colors, it can be made more discernible, but not intelligible.

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VIDEO DRAWING plan

Title: Memories
1. Select a video showing simple forms (such as heads), and begin to trace it quickly on the screen.
2. The image, of course, keeps moving, so the drawing must be discontinued and a new one started immediately.
3. The procedure is repeated as long as anything at all can be seen.

Note: What stands for “memories” here are the drawings, which are never finished, but are superimposed on one another in a half-finished form until they obscure the picture completely, i.e., there is no more new information to remember. (The persistent presence and storage of memories blocks the penetration of new information.)

Variation: Figure out how to retain the capacity to receive new information by continually erasing the memories. (What is it that happens in this case?) The methodology of forgetting.

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1981

A FILM WITHOUT END ON THE THEME OF CLOTHING (a part of the Velem project)

1. People in civilian clothing enter the picture.
2. Cavellini-text-covered table with glasses, bottles: they fill glasses, drink; they drink in their own civilian clothes, clink glasses.
3. The picture changes.
They are in Cavellini-text-covered clothes as they put their glasses down, then they start leaving by a Cavellini-text-covered path toward the main road, where they start disrobing and throwing away their clothes as they disappear.

1. People in civilian clothing enter the picture...etc.

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Project: Collective film/video.
A “sculptural” stroll and poses in Hungary. Situations devised by participants. Extensions of the life of the statue vivante.
Collective space-individual times. Collective consciousness. Communication.

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1982

STAMP FILM
The accidental as montage-technique

In response to an invitation of mine, between December, 1980 and December, 1981, about 600 artists from 35 countries submitted 731 entries for a (self)memorial stamp design. As they arrived each day, consecutive numbers were assigned to the stamp designs (photos, drawings, texts, all the size of a stamp and edged, like a stamp, in a frame of “perforation”). As the days passed, the accidental sequence of the pictures began to turn into an intelligible series, as if the successive designs were continuations of one another. The remarkable result that the 731 stamp designs added up to a coherent series gave me the idea of making a film of this accidental montage.

The filming, the enlarging of the scale, and the emphasis put on the element of consecution allows the viewer to share the excitement of the series' unpredictable formation.

The music in the film-which also came from the artists who supplied the pictures-is independent of the images shown at any particular time; the occasional consonance is coincidental.

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Letter to Ray Johnson (plan)

Send me a recording with some sound material that is typical of you, and any kind of visual material (photo, junk, etc.), for a movie I want to make of you.

In return, I'll send you a copy when it's done.

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Theme for a video clip (RELATION-FILM)

BILL DE KOONING'S BICYCLE SEAT

Divide the material into a number of sections, using different approaches, and shoot 3 to 5 minute films!
With camera movements, lens movements, editing, collating partial shots, etc.
Music selected or written for the movie, related to bicycling, different types.
(Every clip is different.)
By nation, with national music (for example; but could be something else).

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1989-90

A STILL LIFE OF TIME (Idea)

Mix five different themes.

Several simultaneous systems moving in different ways are superimposed on one another.

The individual systems may move back and forth in time, but the several systems superimposed make for a still life which moves, changes, but remains a still life: the still life of time.

(One picture is always ruined by at least one other picture.)

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videórecept

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1990

Flusser: The Philosophy of Photography (Quote)

“We distinguish four different forms of discourse. First: the receivers surround the emitter in a semi-circle, as in a theater. Second: the emitter uses a series of transmitters (relay stations), like in the armed forces. Third: the emitter passes the information to a number of interlocutors, and they relay the information in an enhanced form, as in scientific discourse. Fourth: the emitter emits the information into space, like the radio. Each of the above methods is appropriate to a certain situation: the first - to a sense of responsibility; the second - to authority; the third - to progress; the fourth - to mass-orientation.”

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1991

WORLD NEWS (sound + projected picture and text)

Sound: radio signals of the various radio stations the world over broadcasting in Hungarian, brief announcements and music.

Stations: Szülöföldünk (Novi Sad), Moscow, Radio Free Europe (Munich), Radio Canada (Montreal), Voice of America (Washington), BBC (London), Radio Tirana (Tirana)

Projected pictures (slides): current news events as seen on T.V., current political and other public figures, war scenes, demonstrations, etc.

Projected texts (slides):

REACH INTO THE VOID AND PULL YOURSELF THROUGH
FORCE APPEARS MORE AND MORE AS A SYMBOL
THE MASSES OF THE OPPRESSED LIVE IN THE CULTURE OF SILENCE
TODAY, PEACE IS STILL PRIMARILY A REPRESSED AND DOWNTRODDEN FORM OF KNOWLEDGE Etc.

Concept: Every culture evaluates events according to its own point of view.

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1991

He who does not improve deteriorates.
It's a great opportunity if your fate is a part of the fate of others, if you take part in the fate of others.

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January 16, 1991

Classification of people:
Educated: bright, stupid
Uneducated: bright, stupid

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March, 1991

Hommage à El Greco

The frame and the picture supplement each other like a written invitation for a date and the date itself.

On my dual picture, Interactive Pictures, frame and picture appear as opposites. The first of the pictures, a framed invitation, requests my presence at a post-history evening at the El Grecos in Budapest.

The second picture I've put together from parts of the seven El Greco pictures in the Museum of Fine Arts. Actually. it's not even a picture, but a mass of picture-parts, of “brain scraps”. The visual conceptualized. The essence of the meeting is not the visual experience, but the demonstration of some kind of communication.

With its decorative function, the frame works against the message of the picture, puts it in quotation marks; it trans-functions it into an ornament, and draws it into its own sphere of interpretation (frame and picture are parts of an interaction).By separating frame and picture, I restored their original meanings, and pointed out the difference.

I united the seven El Greco paintings to emphasize the meaning of the pictures.
Through the picture, I wanted to point out the characteristics of El Greco's painting:

His atmospheric space is arbitrary and senseless. His worldly and celestial figures carry the same reality value, and the characteristics of the different ages are, of course, undifferentiated.

The varying (not fixed, not true, not exact) methods of photographic exposure were ways of re-forming El Greco, this typifying, repetitious personality.

The quality of production and manufacturing specific to photography, as well as the unforeseen technical attributes of mass developing and enlarging have lent a new atmosphere to Greco's opaline, grayish, glazed colors.

Lastly, my own most arbitrary act was the use of the Hungarian tricolor. El Greco, who was neither Greek, nor Italian nor Spanish might just as well be Hungarian. In other words: Everything is ours that we can make our own without taking it away from someone else.

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