tricolor

According to one of the established techniques employed for avant-garde film, analogue stock, rather than simply being exposed in a camera, is worked on directly, touched and attacked. In tricolor the film strip is worked over in this fashion: first, tinted frame by frame with a special paint for use on glass, and second, the material is scratched, carved and artistically slit. Spots flit past and spread throughout the image like mold on a wall. Minimal impurities and signs of wear and tear appear huge when projected, and green and yellow streaks of color flash by at the breathless pace peculiar to cinema (this is however always concealed in commercial film). A white arrow, scratched into monochrome yellow like the works of Len Lye or Norman McLaren, points off screen, and white lines dance on a black background. The manipulated sound of a film projector is combined with “uncanny” noises from the worlds of nature and technology. Sound is dominant in this work: There is roaring, knocking, clattering and hissing, and even the whistling of the wind could have come from a horror movie’s soundtrack. And though black, yellow and green occupy the foreground at first, tricolor contains more colors than just these three. As the film becomes darker, shades of red, then purple and blue enter the picture. The bubbles and streaks resemble details in images seen through a microscope. The film transforms ceaselessly and many mutations of the material appear, then it takes on an almost psychedelic quality. Near the end the picture starts flickering, and finer structures are added. Finally, an abstract white rain bombards the black frames — quickly producing tears in the image that resemble bullet holes.

(Stefan Grissemann)


tricolor by Martina Heyduk did not have quite as lovely a sound-image conjunction — the sounds, though abstract, tended to illustrate the abstract images a little too closely. But the melting smoke shapes onscreen, and the cacophonous soundscape — like the birth pangs of a haunted dredge — were both lovely in their own right.

(David Cairns)