Part 1: At the Lip of the Pacific
Many years ago, I took a life art class where I learned that gift-giving was a creative gesture; one less connected with the object presented or the impression it would make on the recipient. The ‘value', if any, was in the act itself. The giving was, what Marcel Duchamp called; a breath inscribed nowhere. I was recently given back something I already had: my life. I'd never considered it a gift, having owned it from my very first breath. But when the wind was knocked from me only to return as the whispered plea, “Call an ambulance”, I knew my life was a gift.
My desire to make a water film called, ‘Flow’ was inspired by James Broughton’s light-rippled cine-poem, ‘The Water Circle’. I was further encouraged by the formal possibilities of shooting unslit double 8mm film with an old Bolex P1. An image of two vertical rolling walls of ocean waves welled up from within. I figured this image could be easily realized by filming with the camera at a right angle to the sea, then flipping the reel with the exposed side and repeating the shot on the unexposed side. My shooting stage was a small inlet below the Sutro Baths ruins.
I purchased a booklet of tide charts to get a grip on the ocean’s pulse and brought a milk crate on which to sit and lean forward on my knees for support. The angle at which I filmed was crucial. The inlet had a short, steep descent where I could sit low enough to shoot across the sea surface while cutting off the horizon and beach. Leaning to my left, I laid my cheek just above the water, close enough to fill the camera frame with pillars of breaking waves. I wanted drama and the El Nino weather phenomenon provided it. I wore knee length galoshes and rainpants because every ten waves or so, the surf would lunge for my lens. I never left without a thorough soaking from the waist down. Bicycling home to the rhythmic squish of salt water in my galoshes, I felt the sea was lending me its song.
I returned to the same sandy dojo week after week for months to practice the same sequence and taste the brine on my breath. I was haunted by gulls which flocked like Victorian ghosts on the ruins and hypnotized by the diving sun as it broke the frothy sea into prismatic splendor. My body transformed itself into a powerful balloon inflated with liquid ecstasy, nimbly navigating rock and wave, anchored to nothing but the horizon.
Back home I would hungrily hand-process the footage in my bathtub, but was inevitably disappointed by a slice of sand or sliver of sky which disturbed the watery window I’d sought to frame. This occurred roll after roll because I could not relax into that precarious palm of the Pacific. One eye peered through the camera, while the other stood watch for the riptide. It was impossible to focus and compose the camera or myself. I was simultaneously inside and outside the frame, trying to project an image I had refined in my mind’s eye instead of dancing to the raw tune of the tide. Such insistence of vision prevented me from feeling the tide’s tender tap. How could I go with the flow instead of trying to direct it?
I began to experiment with more indeterminant means of recording the ocean’s majestic breath. I hammered long strings of black leader into one of the Sutro Bath’s retaining walls hoping the pounding surf would impress its fury on the film’s surface overnight. However, each time I returned, there was nothing left but a jagged row of concrete nails. I drove wooden spikes wrapped with dark leader between rocks and deep into the beach sand, but those too were stolen by the sea. A 75-pound steel beam gift-wrapped with black film before tossing it towards exploding waves became yet another unintentional offering lapped up by the hungry surf.
I collected jar-fulls of seaweed in which I mulched the double 8 wave imagery and black leader. The stench of rotting algae filled my bedroom for weeks. I'd open the mulching bin in anticipation of organically etched leader only to find clear plastic covered with little white maggots swimming in puddles of dissolved emulsion. So I kept redeveloping, if not reconstructing, my aesthetic. I produced a variety of film loops using a tear-shaped hole punch to make black water drops which I glued to clear leader. The glue retained my thumb print and a wet texture. Japanese woodblock prints inspired me to create tiny rain tableaus in each frame by bleaching and scratching in and about a drop-shaped mask. Although the effect was remarkably fluid, the single drop within each frame felt too stylized compared to the ocean’s untempered might.
Like the unslit double 8 images which, projected as 16mm divided the ocean into four disparate bodies of water within the frame, I was partitioning my possibilities. Should I rephotograph a projection of my loops over the wave footage before processing or apply the same scratch, bleach, and collage techniques directly to the wave imagery post-processing? This torrent of ideas was always half-articulated between head and hand. I was inside and outside the frame again, just as I was at the ocean's lap. Was I to work with the image as it now lay within the film’s emulsion or apply my designs to it’s surface? Refinish or rephotograph? Impose or decompose? Embrace or manipulate?
I was working under the additional pressure of an impending screening. Four months become one week overnight. Several days before the show, I arrived at the inlet hunkered down with my Bolex, two rolls of double 8, and my little panorama 35mm flash camera. I also brought a set of strategic diagrams which very neatly illustrated how I would shoot each roll; which sections I would leave blank and for how many feet, and which images would intersect with others when I flipped the double 8 roll to expose the other half. I left nothing to chance.
I shot one double 8 roll in the afternoon and saved one for sunset. The sun that died that night was redder than my own blood and dropped even faster. I had no sooner shot half of the double 8 roll, scrambled back to dry land and flipped and reloaded the Bolex, when the sun slipped past the horizon like just another sprocket hole. My heart dropped too. So I stowed my Bolex and set out to shoot flash photographs of the surf. The colors were sweet like jeweled candy, and I thought they’d look delicious through the foamy veils that were bursting over a lone rock. I got real close to the breakers and wildly fired my flash at the spray like some weapon I could slap the sea and the sky with for being so uncooperative. Peaking through the viewfinder, I saw that the panorama lens was framing the beach and rocks to either side as well as the entire sky, which had suddenly turned into a fluorescent box of spilled watercolors.
So I frantically reclaimed the Bolex to record the beautiful mess down the second half of my double 8 stock, raised the camera to my eye...and the colors simply went out. I dashed back to my knapsack and fished out my flash camera yet again. It was now so dark that nothing could be photographed save the waves. I splashed into the surf and thrust my camera towards an incoming wave, only to short-circuit the flash. I sloshed back to the beach, packed up all my equipment, faced the sea, and screamed, “HA!” I cupped my hands to my mouth, reared back and rhythmically roared, “HA!-HA!-HA!” Half-flapping winged accordion and half-crow I cawed, “HAA!!-HAA!!-HAA!!-HAA!!” I began dancing an insane jig, kicking and punching the air, chanting, “HAAA!!!--HAAA!!!--HAAA!!!--HAAA!!!--HAAA!!!”
Upon waking at home the following morning, I immediately began rephotographing and hand-processing my loops using five cartridges of Super 8. I desperately solarized everything, believing this technique would instantly make the footage sudsy, frothy, and torrential. But I over-flashed the film, blasting the color right out of the emulsion. After five straight hours of dunking film in photochemistry, my hands became as pitted and cracked as an old sidewalk. My hands which wound the Bolex crank. My hands which peeled seaweed from mollusk-covered rocks. My hands which glued, etched, and bleached hundreds of tiny tear drops between thousands of sprocket holes. My hands which had gracefully danced the tai-chi of presstape editing now clutched the phone three hours before showtime as I cried into the curator’s answering machine, “My film will not flow, my film will not flow, my film will not flow...”
Part 2: Interstitial Sound Effects & Music
Part 3: The Sea on My Back
It's seven months later
I am sitting on a blue milkcrate under a blue sky before the ocean's blue lip
I am looking through my Bolex, I am watching for waves
I am looking through my Bolex, I am watching for waves
I am looking through my Bolex, I am watching for waves
watching for waves
I am very wet
I am moving from the sand to the Sutro ruins where the bath tumbles to the sea
The white water and I charge toward one another
I am very wet
I am abandoning this turbulent tub for higher rock
I am standing ten feet above the ocean
Dozens of mini tsunami's are slam dancing with rock and rolling into violent foam
Great curtains of confettied spray are streaming upwards past my camera
I am very wet
I toss my still camera to a tourist
"Would you mind taking a picture of me when a really big one comes?"
My back is to the sea
I am focused on the tumbling froth below, mesmerized by the motion of
suds, rock and sun
suds, rock and sun
suds, rock and sun
rock and sun
I am somnambulent before the sea
I face what I see, my back is to the sea
I face what I see, my back is to the sea
I face what I see, my back is to the sea
my back is to the sea
The sea on my back
I am falling fast and there is no time to see my life flash before my eyes
before I hit the rocks below
Is the change of tide always a wave
goodbye?
My camera has washed out to sea
My images have drowned
But I’ve found my flow
The flow of tears in the ambulance
The flow of x-rays through bone
The flow of blood to bruise
Of screams to dreams
The flow of light through lens
The flow of light to film
The flow of film through camera
The flow of film to my heart
the flow of my heart through film
The flow of film to my heart
the flow of my heart through film
The flow of film to my heart
the flow of my heart through film
Through my heart
through my heart
through my heart...