Scott Stark Also see Scott Stark's Complete Filmography Scott Stark has produced more than 50 films and videos in the last 20 years. Additionally, he has created a number of gallery and non-gallery installations using film and video, and created elaborate photographic collages using large grids of images. Born and educated in the midwest, he has always been interested in aggressively pushing his work beyond the threshold of traditional viewing expectations, challenging the audience to question its relationship to the cinematic process; yet he also tries to build into the work elements of whimsy and incongruity that allow the viewer an entryway into the work while maintaining a critical distance. Both a passionate purist and a cynical skeptic, he likes to emphasize the physicality of film while humorously cross-referencing it to the world outside the theater, attempting to lay bare the paradoxes of modern culture and the magical nature of the perceptual experience. Scott's films and videos have shown locally (San Francisco), nationally and internationally, including recent one person shows at New York's Museum of Modern Art and the Pacific Film Archive. His films have won several awards including three Black Maria awards, and he recently received a San Francisco Bay Guardian Goldie Award. He has taught art classes at the San Francisco Art Institute (where he also received his MFA), interweaving non-traditional uses of film and video with a variety of art disciplines. Stark served for seven years on the board of the San Francisco Cinematheque, during which time, among many other things, he co-founded the Cinematheque's journal of film and media art, Cinematograph. Scott has worked in a variety of motion picture media, including 8mm, super-8mm, 16mm and video. Several of his films introduced a novel technique where he ran movie film through a still camera, which, when projected, produces collage-like barrages of images and odd optically-generated soundtracks. He calls this series of films the Chromesthetic Response Series. Scott Stark makes his living as a graphic designer and desktop publisher, and occasionally gives presentations about the Internet to artists and filmmakers. He is the author of the Flicker pages. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Selected films and videos of Scott Stark in.side.out NOEMA Back in the Saddle Again Archimedes' Screw Under a Blanket of Blue I'll Walk with God Unauthorized Access Acceleration Don't Even Think Tender Duplicity Episiotomy The Chromesthetic Response Series Chromesthetic Response The Sound of His Face Satrapy Protective Coloration W Air Hotel Cartograph More Films and Videos (complete list) ------------------------------------------------------------------------ in.side.out [Image] [Image] [Image] (1999) videotape, color, sound, 10 mins. in.side.out is a very personal piece. On the surface it's about the changes taking place, over a two-year period, in an empty lot and a decrepit old building next to my house. Deeper down it's about the walls and windows between my interior and exterior selves, and how the fragile constructs of identity are etched, eroded, re-shaped and transformed by outside forces. "Setting in motion the fixity and confinement of home against the transformation and liberation of an adjacent tract, Stark rhymes gesture across time and space." -- New York Video Festival "An acutely edited structural film." Amy Taubin, Village Voice NOEMA [Image][Image][Image][Image] (1998) videotape (16mm film version also available), color, sound, 11 mins. NOEMA is philosopher Husserl's term for "the meaning of an object that is formed in the domain of consciousness." Pornographic videos are mined for the unerotic moments between moments, when the actors are engaging in an awkward change of position or when the camera pans meaningfully away from the urgent mechanisms of sex up to a cheap painting on the wall or the distant embers of a crackling fire. A piercing musical score loops endlessly throughout, and the repetitive and curious iterations of movement become furtive searches for meaning within their own blandness. "A canny, meticuluous reduction of found video porn to raw motion study... Scott Stark finds in the busy-ness of the naked, often disembodied shapes of bodies a rhythm and finally a grace." -- Edward E. Crouse, San Francisco Bay Guardian. "Scott Stark's Noema... deconstruct[s] a swatch of hard core pornography involving several couples. But instead of finding a hidden psychological subtext, he finds a psychological and erotic blankness in couplings that are never completed." -- Stephen Holden, New York Times. "Noema is neither Boogie Nights nor the nights of Scheherezade, but more a Decameron-like tournament of missing links and coitus interuptus. A dizzy daisy chain of synchronized decouplings and eager hesitations where bodies never merge. Porno unplugged. In this skeleton dance of surplus motion the transistional moments of awkward repositioning create a multiple oasis of non sequtir and practical inconvenience.The editing constructs an exaggerated mechanics out of flawed maneuvers allowing anatomies to rotisserie with equestrian grace.The impaired visual intelligence, the unmotivated and lazy drift of the camerwork thirsty for insignificance and the defaulted mise en scene of the original source material asserts its deficiency and negative allure as it is brought to the poin tof a nearly redemptive desperation. Stark's analytical insistence pits his passionate acuity against dispassionate executions while giving the found material a sporting chance towards atomized immortality and ritual replay. A splayed adagio infects the scenes with a polar melancholy." -- Mark McElhatten, New York Film Festival ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Back in the Saddle Again [Image][Image] (1997) 16mm film, black & white, sound, 10 mins. A found footage film that innocently plays with many of the elements I explore in my own work. A family's playful interaction with a 16mm sound movie camera, singing along as a group with Gene Autrey's title song in front of the camera, combines western fantasy, American kitsch, gender posturing, deterioration of the film's surface, the wonderment of the cinematic process, and the use of controlled accidents to shape the form of the film. My only intrusion on the footage was to print it first in negative, which adds a bleak, mysterious edge to it, and to print it again in positive, which seems to answer many of the questions raised in the first part. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Archimedes' Screw [Archimedes'Screw image #1] [Archimedes'Screw image #2] (1996), Hi-8 videotape, color, sound, 15 mins. The final installment of the trilogy that includes I'll Walk with God (1994) and Acceleration (1993). Cross-referencing early 20th century women's histories with iconized models of Christian indoctrination, and using a modern billboard as a point of departure, Archimedes' Screw playfully distills and reconfigures contemporary notions of spirituality and public vs. private identity. As the documentary-style structure of the video begins to unravel and the personal histories become increasingly implausible, the women portrayed become unwitting participants in an iconography of worship and idealized femininity, unfairly transformed into corporate commodities by the banality of the public sphere. Undermining its own narrative authority, Archimedes' Screw gently evokes a sense of displaced and re-placed sanctification. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Under a Blanket of Blue [Image] [Image] [Image] (1996), Super-8mm film, color, sound, 15 mins. A super-8 alchemy of song and imposing urban landscapes. Filmed in heavily over-developed areas of northern and central Spain, the dehumanizing and impersonal architectural structures that the inhabitants call "home" are edited into a bittersweet array of rigid geometric forms and bland textures. Ironically grafted onto the imagery is Glenn Miller's sweet romantic ballad, "Under a Blanket of Blue," both in original recording and in a breathless vocal a capella by the maker during the filming. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ I'll Walk with God [Image] [Image] (1994), 16mm color sound film, 8:00 Using emergency information cards surreptitiously lifted from the backs of airline seats, I'll Walk with God pictorially charts an airline flight attendant's stoic transcendence through and beyond worldly adversity. Through an elaborate system of posturing and nuance that evokes an almost ritualistic synergy, the female protagonist(s) are shuttled toward a higher spiritual plane, carried aloft on the shimmering wings of Mario Lanza's soaring tremolo. Winner: First Prize (Director's Choice), Black Maria Film Festival, 1995 "With the silence for the first half, and the horrifying images, banal and tragic, sweeping through the screen of the airplane crash cards, and then the Mario Lanza track erupting on the sound level, the film summed up the ephemerality of human existence, our collective wish to remain immortal, the impossibility of this... it's a deeply felt, deeply moving film." -- Wheeler Winston Dixon ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Unauthorized Access [Image] [Image] [Image] (1993), color sound hi-8mm videotape, 30 mins. An urban sabotage video in the highly structured and territorial world of the financial services industry. Barriers are broken, trespass is the means to transcend privilege, property and perspective. Winner: Second Prize (Jurors' Choice), Black Maria Film Festival, 1994 Honorable Mention, film+arc Film & Architecture Film Festival, Austria ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Acceleration [Image] [Image] [Image] (1993), Super-8 color sound, 10 mins. A snapshot taken in a moment of human evolution, where the souls of the living are reflected in the windows of passing trains. The camera captures the reflections of passengers in the train windows as the trains enter and leave the station, and the movement creates a stroboscopic flickering effect that magically exploits the pure sensuality of the moving image. Winner: First Prize (Director's Choice), Black Maria Film Festival, 1994 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Don't Even Think [Image] [Image] (1992), super-8 color sound film, 15 mins. Tongues flapping, lips smacking, teeth clacking, vocal chords vibrating; it sounds like speech, but it's in a language where intellect and vocabulary impede comprehension. To really hear what's being said, don't talk; don't even think. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Tender Duplicity [Image] [Image] [Image] (1992), color, sound, 35 mins. Objects of aggression are suggestively fashioned from sensuous playthings, inviting the viewer to indulge in the prurient pleasures of patriotism and self-righteous hostility. The objects combine and juxtapose to form a seductive visual catalog of the vocabulary of war, garlic-pressed through a lattice-work of light and sound on the film's emulsion. As the tension builds between the objects in front of the camera and the activity on the surface of the film, a complex musical architecture is triggered across constantly shifting foregrounds and backgrounds, activating incongruous polarities between figure and ground, sound and image, pleasure and aggression, clarity and purposeful obfuscation. The film was shot with an antique camera that records an optical soundtrack directly on the film while shooting. The footage was then systematically fogged and flashed with segments of white light, which caused both the image and sound to be erased; thus the flashes of light that appear in the film are followed one second later by a dropout of equal duration in the sound. The points between flashes (gaps), as well as the gaps themselves, become syllables of a language that is all but oblivious to the relentless posturing of the photographed images. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Episiotomy [Image] [Image] [Image] (1990), Super-8 color sound, 13 mins. This Super-8mm film was shot off of a French soft-core pornographic comic book, against a variety of urban backgrounds in both France and the USA. The sounds of those environments intrude upon the pictures, sometimes enhancing and sometimes subeverting the narrative. I was interested in telling a story, but devising a narrative structure to the film that was unrelated to the story. Thus the rhythm and cadence of the narrative runs obscured somewhere beneath the surface of the film's mechanics. By using in-camera editing, contradictory juxtapositions of image and sound, and a variety of backdrops, physical forces and arbitrary events, the two narrative threads interweave and occasionally intersect, creating moments of dramatic punctuation which are mostly accidental. Oddly enough, the story itself, though it is diminished, disrupted and often ignored by the film's narrative structure, still seems to evoke a logical continuity; and despite all the distractions and activity around the edges of the frame, one's attention is still drawn toward the "events" represented on those flimsy pieces of paper. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ The Chromesthetic Response Series The following four films were made by shooting 16mm film in a 35mm still camera. Each of the four consists of a succession of 35mm still images which flicker, collage-like, through the 16mm projector gate, and because the images spill over onto the optical soundtrack area of the film, the variations in image density actually generate their own peculiar sounds. For example, pictures of zebras (in Protective Coloration) create a succession of odd musical notes. Chromesthetic Response [Image] (1987), color, sound, 5 mins. A collage of human-created worldly surfaces -- sidewalks, streets, storefronts -- that evoke subtle and mysterious noises. "Chromesthesia" is a condition whereby one sees a color or shape and experiences a sensation of taste, smell or hearing. The Sound of His Face [Image] [Image] (1988), color, sound, 5 mins. A "filmed biography" of Kirk Douglas -- literally. Pages of a book -- the lines of text, and the tiny dots comprising the half-tone photographs -- create odd musical notes, which are edited into a pounding rhythm. This film examines the molecular fabric of Hollywood superficiality. Winner: Juror's Choice, SFAI Film Festival, 1988 Satrapy [Image] [Image] (1988), color, sound, 13 mins. Rephotographed pornographic playing cards rhythmically intrude upon a piercing 5-beat score of different-sized black parallel lines, injecting a note of "negative sound" every third beat against the 5-beat background. As the film progresses, contrapuntal variations of 3, 4, 5 and 7 beat rhythms blend and collide, creating an almost indiscernible complexity, until the lined background ruptures and the sounds and visuals become scattered and disordered. The "girlie" cards break out onto saturated color fields and eventually find their way into the real world, aggressively flickering by against backgrounds of earth, concrete and other surfaces. "Scott Stark's Satrapy charts the subversive power of the feminine... Initially the alternation between the flickering cards -- with their teasing bare flesh -- and the stripes recalls subliminal perception tests. With more rapid, wildly anarchic editing, however, the cards displace the stripes, challenging the film's coherency. Female sexuality, instead of supporting the logic of representation, threatens annihilation." -- Manohla Dargis, Village Voice. Winner: Honorable Mention, Oberhausen Film Festival, 1989 Protective Coloration (1990), color, sound, 17:30. In general the title "Protective Coloration" refers to zebras' and other animals' fur patterns, which evolved naturally as camouflage to allow them to hide from predators. The irony is that it is these same patterns which make the animals more visible to human predators, since humans are, unlike most other animals, attracted to their visual uniqueness. What evolved to hide now serves to attract, especially when the animals are transplanted from their natural habitat. This is a concept that exemplifies ways modern humanity's relationship to the natural world. The film is a succession of visual and aural "notes" generated by the patterns in the animals' hides, which are arranged and re-edited into a complex musical architecture, developing intricate rhythms not unlike the complex syncopations found in traditional African music. Elements of sand, dirt, light and shadow cross-reference the film's emulsion with evolutionary history, and provide a second level of musical structuring through which the first layer is necessarily filtered. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ W [Image] [Image] [Image] (1988), 3 super-8 films, color, sound, 25 mins. A soaring, lilting, plunging excursion through a range of human experience. Three films shown simultaneously overlap and create structures, shapes and sounds not possible in the physical world. Air (1986), 16mm, color, silent, 9:00. Shot in an airline terminal, Air studies the movements across and through the planes of the film's surface. An obsessive geometric structure is formed with camera angles and tracking shots. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Hotel Cartograph [Image] (1983), 16mm, color, sound, 11:00. A camera mounted on a movable cart, pointing down at the floor, passes over a seemingly endless succession of gaudy carpets and surfaces in a single shot through a major hotel. The movements across the 2-dimensional space, and in and out of elevators through 3-dimensional space, suggest a conceptual map of the visible environment, which is perhaps drawn by the camera itself. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Corporate Accounting (1982), 16mm, B/W, sound, 6:00. Made without a camera, using rolls of microfilm of thousands of cancelled checks "borrowed" from a major corporation, contact printed onto 16mm movie film. The sound is generated optically by the checks overlapping onto the soundtrack area of the film. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ One Person Film/Video Shows: Museum of Modern Art (New York), Austria Filmmakers Cooperative (Vienna), El Independiente (Buenos Aires, Argentina), Filmforum (Los Angeles), San Francisco Cinematheque (San Francisco), Pacific Film Archive (Berkeley, California), Chicago Filmmakers (Illinois), First Person Cinema (Boulder, Colorado), Millennium (New York), Collective for Living Cinema (New York); Eiga Arts (Saga City, Japan); S.F. Camerawork Gallery (San Francisco). Festivals, Group Shows: Oberhausen Film Festival (Berlin), Viper Film Festival (Switzerland), Stuch (Belgium), film+architecture Festival (Austria), Film Arts Festival (USA), Black Maria Film Festival (USA), Utah Film & Video Festival (USA), New American Makers (San Francisco), Exploratorium (San Francisco), Other Cinema (San Francisco), Conspiracies (New York), El Paso Museum of Art (El Paso, Texas), Media Gallery (San Francisco), Intersection Gallery (San Francisco), SFAI Film Festival (San Francisco), Eye Gallery (San Francisco), ... ------------------------------------------------------------------------ More Films and Videos (complete list) Also see Scott Stark's Complete Filmography and Flicker biography Films available through Canyon Cinema or directly from the artist. Send email to Scott at: sstark@sirius.com Scott Stark P.O. Box 460910 San Francisco, CA 94146-0910 USA fax: 415.642.0270 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ List of Film/Videomakers [Image] ------------------------------------------------------------------------