CHARLEMAGNE 2 : PILTZER

by Pip CHODOROV
2002 / 16mm / color-b&w / sound / 1S / 22' 00

On December 9 1998, Charlemagne asked me to bring friends to his piano concert at an opening at the Gérard Piltzer gallery in Paris, and to bring a movie camera. I shot two rolls of super-8 tri-x at 9 frames per second and recorded the sound on mini-disc. I forgot about the rolls of film left him undeveloped for a year and a half. When i found them and processed them as negative, i was surprised with the results and i blew them up onto 16 mm positive high-contrast stock. I then contact printed the positive 16 mm to negative 16 mm and optically printed frame by frame through these positive and negative master rolls onto color negative stock throughcolored filters, following a precise notation of the concert music. I chose the following principles:

-The 6945 notes played in the
concert correspond to 6923 frames
of super-8 film that were shot. No
frames are left out or printd twice.
-Speed of playing controls speed of
frame succession.
-Discordant diminished fifths are
translated into the following
methods of visual discordance for
the seven parts of the concert in a
attempt to replicate in the visual
cortex the harmonic the harmonic
overtones that arise in the temporal
lobe when listening:
-Flicker between negative and
positive,
-between opposites on color wheel
(red/green),
-between opposites in retinal cone
sensivities (red/green)
-between different flicker
frequencies (frequencies beating in ` discordance);
-clusters of b/w negative and
monochrome frames to create
overtonal retinal afterimages,
-left/right screen masking and
mirror image printing,
-crossfading between negative and
positive images.
-When more than two notes are
played, the additional colors
correspond to the complexity of
sound frequencies.

The final result is at once a diary film, a document of the concert, astructural flicker film, a hand-processing film, a graphic representation of music, and a attempt to apply cognitive principles in sensation and perception to film art.

1 PRINT IN DISTRIBUTION


distribution format 16mm
screen 1,37 - Standard (single screen)
speed 24 fps
sound optical sound
rental fee 74,00 €