TEACHING AND LEARNING CINEMA

Long Film for Ambient Light related dream, 23 march 2007, 5.30am:
This bizarre dream popped up about 5 days after we did our experiment with Long Film. Talk about mental residue. Remember, all characters are fictional and their resemblance to any person living or dead etc…xx Lucas

We’re in New York and Anthony McCall is putting on a new show, including Long Film for Ambient Light. I’m in the gallery as LFFAL is being set up, it’s completely different from our understanding of the work. This version involves a long piece of perspex set into the wall high up towards the ceiling. On the perspex are printed representations of empty film frames. Behind the perspex film panel an area of wall has been removed, and light filters in from here. I ask Anthony where the light comes from – “the outside of the museum via the air conditioning duct,” she says. Yes, Anthony is a woman. A youngish one, too (although at the start of the dream she was a man, still quite young, and with a full head of hair, far more resembling McCall’s photos from the early 70s, than what I imagine he looks like now, balder and more statesmanlike in appearance.)
Continue reading “Long Film Dream”

16 march 2007

noon (written at 1.30pm)

I pressed go on the timer. Set it to 23 hours 59 minutes. But we still were setting up, so didn’t really take the moment to just be here. Kat was still vacuuming. The space felt clean and neat, there was a “coming into clarity” about the whole thing. But we weren’t quite there yet. I was aware of being slightly stressed with regards to this. Would have been better if we were ready in advance, but I was also quite amused that the film starts whether you are ready or not. In some sense, the film is kind of indifferent to my responses. It doesn’t care if I “attend” to it or not. On the other hand, the film needs me – without me, it is nothing. Maybe.
Continue reading “Lucas: notes from Long Film for Ambient Light”

14:40 Ground of my body, quite high tension, I am noticing the ‘base’ settings hence the description ‘ground of my body’. Column thoughts [feedback sheet had columns, used by no one except me and Walty unwillingly]. Strange how use of someone else’s specificity is having the effect of making us be present in this here and how (McCall’s specificity of this work in 1975). Continue reading “Curham: Long Film for Ambient Light 2nd commentary”

12 pm Fri Mar 16 to 12 pm Sat Mar 17E-mail to Cynthia today with some thoughts on the Long Film:

The Long Film was a very intense experience – my head did very strange things. It was unrelentingly social which I found very, very difficult. The intensity of such focus on a single space over such a time span was intense in the
extreme. Interesting that the 24 hours McCall framed was darkness book ended by light.

My best discovery was a very clear mental image of the sun in the sky acting like a bellows creating these fluctuations in the room [so in the end for me, this is a landscape film, how curious!]

I found the light bulb almost intolerable, it came to invade the room, a ‘tense object’ as one visitor described it even in daylight. At night, it felt like an attack. There was a sense at about 1am of being in solitary confinement without the benefit of being alone. I sat outside the room for many hours there – still in the building but just outside, trying to keep myself calm and as present as possible.
Continue reading “Louise’s Commentary on Long Film for Ambient Light”