Jim Flannery

Photoheliograph, 16mm color sound, 10 minutes

"Photoheliograph is a continuation of my interest in adapting the phased-loop techniques of Steve Reich's mid-sixties tape work (previously expressed in Steve Reich for two projectors) to visual phenomena. The film is an "adaptation" of a poem by Harry Crosby; the poem's structure was used as the basis of a soundtrack, which was then transcribed and mirrored in the construction of the images.

"If I describe the poem, perhaps this will indicate what I considered "adaptable" in it: it is a 5x10 grid of the repeated word "black", in the center of which (actually, replacing what would have been the 23rd "black" and reducing the number of "black"s to 49) is the word "SUN"; thus:

            black   black    black    black   black
            black   black    black    black   black
            black   black    black    black   black
            black   black    black    black   black
            black   black     SUN     black   black
            black   black    black    black   black
            black   black    black    black   black
            black   black    black    black   black
            black   black    black    black   black
            black   black    black    black   black

"I considered this flat, instantaneous image as the equivalent of the screen, and as the front surface of a solid; and projected (like a 3D model), a temporal dimension backward from it -- that is, considering the third dimension to be time rather than depth. Each of the instances of "black" was taken to represent one looped sample, all of them extending, backward, parallel, into the depth of the film's duration. So there's a sample of my voice saying the word "black" ... and then there are a total of 49 treatments of the sample (pitch-shifted, stretched, eq'd, etc.), all set off in sync at the beginning & left to drift out of sync (since the editing process left them all slightly different lengths), in a similar manner to Reich's It's Gonna Rain.

"Once the soundtrack was recorded, a parallel set of 49 images were assembled (again, a set of 49 manipulations of one original image, a photograph of the atmosphere of Saturn); each of the images was assigned to one of the voice samples, and the images were rephotographed in the order in which the samples were triggered in the soundtrack ... thus, the sound and image tracks reflect an identical sequence of events, but at different speeds."