Colors at War

Once thought lost, but recently found and restored by Anthology Film Archives, artist/philosopher Manuel De Landa’s Super 8 Ism Ism captures his truly inspired collage mutations of New York City subway ads during the mid-to-late 70s. Slicing and dicing the perfect faces of models into deviant ghouls, Ism Ism turns the homogenate into the ripening rot of nightmares.

The next chapter in the battle of effects versus porno.

Joan Braderman talks about and appears in front of a projected version of the soap opera Dynasty.

Using multiple layers of the same shot and animating masks on each produces a wide variety of effects that fracture and distort the shot. These were used here for NYC buildings, to create a dissonant urban symphony. The music is classical piano pieces played backwards.

A battle between special effects and porno, Will porno always win? If you think the effects are winning just squint.

A noir mostly set in a bathroom stall and stairwell. A private dick trapped in a tight spot. A narrator searching for a way out of the story.

From the 1970s urban interventions on billboards, Ism Ism (1970), to his recent digital manipulation of digital footage, Manuel DeLanda keeps testing the rough edges of perception.

The editing strategies parallel the personal relationships depicted, and a mismatched cut is literally only the other side of a mismatched couple. Rarely have sound, image and the spatio-temporal coordinates of narrative illusion been buffeted about so vigorously.

My take on New York City crowds. Some effects involve tracking individual faces and a lot of masking work, others use multiple slices of the same shot, offset a few frames, to stretch all moving figures in strange ways.

"The very first footage I shot in NYC, back in 1975. This version was put together in 1981 when I blew up the original super 8 to 16mmm. All the special effects (wipes of different types) are hand drawn with black ink directly on the super 8 original. The resulting A and B rolls were then superimposed."

Image and sound by Manuel DeLanda.