"Last Cannibal On Skid Row" explores the ways in which digital technology and web streaming impact upon formalist film-making. I was particularly interested in what streaming would do to 'collaged' film work in which every frame is unique (with disparate images being shot rapid fire into the viewer's retina - what these days might be hyped as cinematic bukkake). Stan Brakhage is one of my more obvious reference points, but rather than his work which I'd inevitably seen, I was rather more intrigued by shorts such as Robert Breerís "Image by Images I" (1954), although I'd only read about this and have little idea what it is actually like to watch.
In his early films Breer placed a new image on each frame, often using his own paintings as source material. I wanted to make a contemporary work so I decided to employ digital photography. Using a Ricoh Caplio R6 camera I took 120 photographs in London (England) and 120 photographs in Aberdeen (Scotland). I picked these cities partly because they have the highest and second highest house prices in the UK, and partly because of the strong contrasts between them; they also have long associations with both my life and my film work - London obviously since it is where I was born, and Aberdeen more subliminally because among other things this is the location at which my barely seen 1984 super 8 collaboration with Pete Horobin "Pram 84" concludes. I didn't use a professional stills camera for "Last Cannibal On Skid Row", and I took most of the photographs while I was on the move and without sufficient time to make much conscious judgement about their composition; indeed a good number of them were blurred (an effect I ended up striving to achieve).
I'd noticed that the compression process for web streaming on my Mac reduced the number of frames per second to 12, half the standard 24 per second used in traditional films. This led me to intercut the images I'd taken of London and Aberdeen since by organising the stills in this way I thought the streaming process might result in one of these two cities disappearing from my film, making the streamed and the non-streamed versions radically different in terms of content (if, and it was a big if because I didn't actually know how the software operated, streaming was achieved by removing every other frame).
The technology didn't work the way I imagined; iMovie imported the stills with a default setting of 5 seconds, but when I cut each image to a single frame for some reason they displayed as being two frames long in the clip panel, and this despite the fact they couldn't be split or cut any further. Once I'd dragged the pictures into the time line in the order I required they ran for 16 seconds, whereas if they'd been a single frame long I'd have expected 240 of them to run for 10 seconds; and if they'd been 2 frames long which is what they displayed as despite the fact they wouldn't cut further, then this sequence should have run for 20 seconds.
iMovie clearly wasn't designed to do the kind of work I wanted it to perform, which was why it was my chosen tool, the software collaborated with me in the construction of the film precisely because I had little idea of how it would actually respond to what I was asking it to do. I'd planned to make a 10 second animation of single frames and run this for a minute by repeating this sequence 6 times; but since I unexpectedly ended up with 16 seconds I repeated the sequence 4 times, then topped and tailed it with titles so that the film ran for roughly 112 seconds. I added sound and was very happy with the full quality version of "Last Cannibal On Skid Row" - but as I've stated my intention was that the web streamed adaptation should be quite different to the movie seen by cinema and gallery audiences when I got around to screening it in these settings. That said, when I compressed my short I was surprised by the results. I could see immediately that iMovie hadn't edited out whole frames; instead as the film starts the images are relatively clear and then they simply become more pixellated and blurred. I loved this effect and was very pleased that my collaborator (the iMovie software) had not operated in the way I'd anticipated and as a consequence we produced something that demonstrates the superiority of 'chance' to 'artistic' 'vision'.
Tags: "Stewart Home" "Robert Breer" flicker strobe 'avant-garde" acid bukkake psychedelic cannibal
