From: David Tetzlaff (email suppressed)
Date: Fri Dec 04 2009 - 09:30:00 PST
Mark:
Could you post the bunch of titles you already have in ind to the
list. Curious minds want to know.
The one film I've shown in class my students have regularly considered
sensory overload is Breer's 'Recreation'.
As I recall, "Arise: the Subgenius video" goes into overload.
Then there's that whole genre that uses fast cuts and vivid visuals to
attempt to induce a sort of hallucinogenic high - I'm not thinking of
the 60's but of something Craig Baldwin was programming at Other
Cinema in the mid-to-late 90s. I can't remember what it was called or
who the artists were though.
George Lucas's favorite experimental film, Lipsett's 21-87 is a bit
overloaded, also maybe Conner's Cosmic Ray (in an entertaining way).
Not to belabor the obvious, but parts of Dog Star Man. And of course
Anticipation of the Night is attempting to embody the sensory overload
of hypnogogic vision...
Not being familiar with all the films others have mentioned, I'm
wondering if there's a route to 'sensory overload' that does not
involve rapid edits. Can we experience sensory overload in real life,
in a fixed place? And if so is the flat screen of the cinema unable to
reproduce this? (Is the natural sublime a case of sensory overload,
but too auratic to duplicate?) Or is 'sensory overload' in all cases a
product of some industrial intervention (I'm thinking of
Schivelbusch's The Railway Journey, and if you haven't read it, I
highly recommend it to anyone interested in film: try to find the
original Urizen Press version which is wonderfully illustrated as
opposed to the UC press reprint).
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