Event

Sixties Synaesthetics

(Various directors, USA, 1961-70, 16mm, 70 min)

The 1960s brought an explosion in experimental cinema, at once influenced by its forebears and liberated from them by the revolutionary lysergic ethos of the time. In this final program of the Visual Music series, we present a selection of highly original works by artists who shattered the boundaries between visual and sonic through the creative use of optical printing, animation, electronics, and editing. Films include a newly-restored print of Jud Yalkut's Turn, Turn, Turn (1966); Scott Bartlett and Tom DeWitt's landmark OffOn (1968); Robert Breer's Blazes (1961); Storm DeHirsch's Peyote Queen (1965); and Barry Spinello's Six Loop-Paintings (1970). We culminate with the purest and most intense of '60s visual music experiments: The Flicker (1965) by avant garde composer Tony Conrad, who conceived the film in explicitly musical terms and used alternating pure black and white light to create hypnotic impressions of paradoxically vivid colors.

Program co-curated by Spencer Sundell and Peter Lucas, presented in association with The Sprocket Society.