Stanley Kubrick and Autechre

[Guest]

Wanted to see if there are any other film lovers here, what you think about Autechre's references to Kubrick, Lynch, and Tarkovsky in interviews and elsewhere? Had an opportunity to see Kubrick's 2001 A Space Odyssey on IMAX recently and forgot about the soundtrack and how well it fits with the images. One song toward the end of the film reminded me a lot of mirrage on NTS 4, and I always think of HAL dying when listening to foldfree casual on elseq 4. Their music seems to evoke a lot of interesting spatial imagery in listeners, but fewer images of time, and I've been wondering about the comment made in an interview where one of the Autechre guys said he was influenced by the way that David Lynch 'uses time.' Anyone think about time in relation to their music, other than rhythmically? 

[ignatius]

no comment to make really except that the stargate sequence and xflood from NTS 2 are cousins in some way. 

 

[fizzkinz]

Since your post started out asking if there are film lovers: then the answer is yes

Certainly a fan of Kubrick, Lynch, tarkovsky, Bergman, Godard, Maya Deren, etc etc etc etc

 

 

But with relation to Autechre, I have also often thought about the non-linear time idea of lynch and applying to Ae

I like the idea of events in the music sending artifices both forward and backward in time

Where something that you hear near the start of the song is a response/manipulation of something that happens later in the track

[joshuatxuk]

I can only imagine they are at the very least fans of his, but his work and Space Odyssey in particular has had a huge influence on music in general, IDM, electronic and beyond and with Autechre that film and sci-fi in general surely had an influence. Can only speculate how much, everything mentioned thus far is plausible and/or fitting. They specifically (and exclusively allegedly) sampled Buck Rogers on this release 

[Guest]

star gate clip reminds me of XHK - XH HX stuff

[Roo]

It feels a bit redundant nowadays to bring up 2001 in relation to spacey electronic music, a bit like some of the rote Interstellar/Arrival mentions on these boards of late. But I get it, I'm a lifelong fanatic of sci-fi films like Alien, Blade Runner and Planet of the Apes, and you feel like those passions may have lead you down the garden path to the likes of Autechre.

 

Tarkovsky and Kubrick would be my two favourite directors, always a worthy influence. I tend to rank Kubrick like this:

1. Barry Lyndon

2. 2001

3. The Shining (international cut)

4. A Clockwork Orange

5. Eyes Wide Shut

6. Full Metal Jacket

...

7. Paths of Glory

8. The Killing

9. Dr Strangelove

10. Spartacus

11. Lolita

...

 

Kubrick clearly had a wide-ranging, excellent taste in music as well, a rigorous nerd.

 

Weir, PTA & Mike Leigh are my most preferred living directors.

[Roo]

I can't say I ever much think of AE in terms of time. It often slows to a crawl, or ceases to be relevant to me. I see their music as outside of time as we've contained, measured, invented it. Some songs like shimripl casual and all end do have that lofty epic sense and transcend the boundaries of time, and I've spoken before of irlite as a lifecycle, but a lot of their work feels containable and physically experienced

[Guest]

Barry Lyndon at top position, an interesting choice. The natural light cinematography is phenomenal in that movie. If you haven't already seen the documentary Filmworker, I recommend that. It's about Leon Vitali, who played Lord Bullington in Barry Lyndon and then became Kubrick's assistant throughout his life:

 

 

By the way, have y'all heard of the German filmmaker Walter Ruttman? I feel like his films are tailor-made to be a visual display at a live electronic music show:

 

[ignatius]

FilmWorker is a great doc. Watched it a month or so ago. really interesting and that guy deserves the recognition and a fucking paycheck for all he's done. i'm glad he's working w/the estate and the studios to get the transfers done right. pretty amazing story. he was a great actor too. 

[Enthusiast]

I only learned recently that Bryan Lyndon was played by a young David Morley (R&S/Apollo). 

[Draft78]

Well, I do not think it's a mere coincidence that, together with the two gentlemen, my obsession is S K. Evidently they are both human manifestations that, by different ways, touch strings that are close. I remember a recent post, where we wondered if there are mystical aspects (understood as transcendent), in autechre. We all agreed to find something that evoked the meaning of the "sacred", albeit in a secular key. Well, in Kubrick, probably, there is a vision of existence that goes beyond the image, suggesting a third look, external to the common sense, that winks to the "beyond human". And I do not refer exclusively to 2001 aso.

 

xflood: In this case, before Ligeti, Giacinto Scelsi comes to mind: the choirs have that apocalyptic drama of Uaxuctum. Ramification, Lux Aeterna, Lontano, open to a scenario closer to the mystery and the divine than to the lovecraftian eschatology.

Anyway, the curious thing is that Kubrick discovered Ligeti by pure chance: during the filming of 2001 aso, Christian K. (his wife) listened to a radio program where Lux Aeterna was broadcast. Stanley was not far from the radio ... the rest is history.

I have often wondered if, in a fantastic reality, in which Stalney Kubrick was still alive, and was not too old (already I'm fantasizing, why not do it all the way?), how he would have reacted occasionally listening to NTS Radio, a thursday April 2018.

 

I have to admit I'm not a big Lynch fan: I find the medium-length film "the grandmother" extremely pervasive, but I can not be surprised by the following works. Lately I have reviewed Mulloland Drive: the photograph recalls the television productions of the nineties, and the narrative expedients... well, personally i found Lynch more attentive to disorienting us with suggestions related to a certain immanent surrealism, rather than to open glimpses on unsettling scenarios on the absolute.

 

Tarkowsky ... his vision of life was profound and fascinating, but I must confess that I did not share the "verbose" aspects of his cinema: he often resorted to rhetoric, exposing long theses that could suggest answers. Kubrick, however, has only dealt with raising questions, leaving his plots suspended in a dark ambiguity designed to move my brain without finding a comfort zone.

 

Among contemporary directors, I find Yorgos Lanthimos and Michael Haneke very convincing. Kynodontas, The Killing Of The Sacred Deer, The Withe Ribbon, Amour ... without rhetoric and with an ice temperature, are films that leave us lost in an inextricable skein of readings.

 

Speaking of Barry Lyndon: this month arrives in Italy (but I think in the rest of the world - usually more evolved - has already been projected) The Favourite, still by Yorgos Lanthimos, which could appear as a direct tribute.

 

To close this film digression, I also recommend the works of Charlie Kaufman, delirious, pessimistic and rooted in the paradox as much as the writing of Kafka.

Synecdoche, New York

anomalisa (the trailer is a deception: it presents the film as a riot of clichés about existence, when in reality the it is placed at the opposite end)

[Guest]

Thanks for the thoughtful post. I agree with you a little about Lynch, definitely like his films less than Kubrick and even Herzog (Bad Lieutenant is in my top 5 films, never fails to cheer me up that film), but have you checked out season 3 of Twin Peaks. He might get a little closer to the unsettling absolute there than in Mulholland Drive. The sound design in his films is also fucking incredible. I always watched Lynch films on shitty televisions and laptops, but I saw Mulholland Drive with a good stereo system once, and it was like a whole new film, I remember there rarely being any non-diegetic silence, and sometimes this is done with such subtlety that the aim seems to be upon hitting the viewer subconsciously in a way that both complements the images and is barely registered because our sense of hearing has a greater perceptive range than our sense of sight (at least in terms of watching a movie).

 

I was curious of what you thought about Lars Von Trier's Nymphomaniac? I remember seeing the director's cut a few years ago and being blown away, and your thoughts about Lynch made me curious in how you assessed Von Trier.

[Chabraendeky]

Trier is great. Antichrist is my favourite.

 

But my favourite director is Terrence Malick. I wish he had used Autechre and not Burial in 'Knight of Cups'.

 

But Burial is fine too in the end. And Tibor Szemző too.

[Draft78]

Thanks for the thoughtful post. I agree with you a little about Lynch, definitely like his films less than Kubrick and even Herzog (Bad Lieutenant is in my top 5 films, never fails to cheer me up that film), but have you checked out season 3 of Twin Peaks. He might get a little closer to the unsettling absolute there than in Mulholland Drive. The sound design in his films is also fucking incredible. I always watched Lynch films on shitty televisions and laptops, but I saw Mulholland Drive with a good stereo system once, and it was like a whole new film, I remember there rarely being any non-diegetic silence, and sometimes this is done with such subtlety that the aim seems to be upon hitting the viewer subconsciously in a way that both complements the images and is barely registered because our sense of hearing has a greater perceptive range than our sense of sight (at least in terms of watching a movie).

 

I was curious of what you thought about Lars Von Trier's Nymphomaniac? I remember seeing the director's cut a few years ago and being blown away, and your thoughts about Lynch made me curious in how you assessed Von Trier.

 

 

Hoping not to be tedious, here are some mental masturbation on the seventh art:

 

I have yet to look at the new Twen Peaks: more than one person has praised this latest work of Lynch, even those who know me well, therefore aware of my perplexities.

Working on structures close to the dream mechanisms can lead to great visions, connected to the "other world" so much sought by Huxley, but it could also offer a pretext for self-indulgence: the limit is labile. It is true, then, that the plot of the dream speaks a strictly subjective language: at the antipodes of the "universal" gesture, Lynch's world could dialogue with the unconscious of some and be extraneous to the subconscious of others: this is a point on which there is no exegesis worth, neither in favor nor against it.

 

... After seeing the new T.P. I will not forget to write which gear has been activated in me.

 

Herzog: fortunately I am heterosexual, otherwise I would have fallen into an impossible love, destined to live an incomplete life. However, it remains the intellectual love: in the case of Herzog we have an inverse phenomenon with respect to what usually happens: if it is true that the work of an author is destined to "overcome" the author himself (it is supposed that the work collects the supreme effort of a man to leave a trace of thought, therefore the work will be the distillate of the individual), with Herzog I have the impression that his work is a weak emanation of his mental vivacity. And I say this with all due respect to his cinema, which I love unconditionally. In all his works, even in documentaries (which he does not like to call such) him adds a fragment of his personality. 

For example, he does not tell us about the story of Thimoty Treadwell who, driven by the unfathomable vocation to join the bears' life cycle will be eaten by a bear (Grizzly Man - 2005), but uses the event to tell us about his reflection on more hermetic human drives and draw a picture between the chasm that separates utopia from the history of things. Last year I went to the island of Lanzarote to shoot some sequences of a project that I have been carrying out for several years, tracing, among the Canary craters, the set of Even Dwarfs Started Small: it was a formative film for me, and moving physically on the terrain of Herzog's metaphor has been an alienating experience.

I highly recommend reading The Conquest Of The Useless (the publication of the diary he wrote in the three hellish years in which he filmed Fitzcarraldo, in the Amazon jungle). Herzog's gaze transcends the context of the film, and gives us a delirious and poetic account of existence, and with this, a definitive interpretation of all his work. Then it's a tragic and incredibly fun reading.

and I advise you to see, if you have not already done so, Land of Silence and Darkness, an investigation into the world of the deaf-blind, in which Herzog tries to understand what form can dress the conscience of an individual devoid of the two fundamental perceptions, the hearing and sight.

 

Lars Von Trier: I too consider Antichrist his masterpiece. Nymphomanic: I should see it again, in the space of four hours I have lost many connections: it is a film in which the freudian's word plays an essential role. If I can find a common point among the various works of Von Trier, it is working through symbols, putting an paradoxical situation but that, within the perimeter designed by Von Trier, there is a diabolical coherence. Normally, he loves to embody reason (the super ego) and the instinct (es) in actors, putting that living paradigms in contradictions and permutations: in Antichrist, for example, we will never know the name of man and woman: it seems in fact, he is the archetype of rational, abstract thought, totally foreign to empathy and intuition, while she is the maximum representation of instinct, therefore of nature, in its ecstatic and violent manifestations. In fact we will see performing the most irrational of actions (murder) right by him... From this perspective, perhaps, we are not witnessing the story of a man and a woman, but the promiscuous relationship between arbitrariness and instinct in each individual, raised to a symbol. The human being in a test tube. A similar thing we will find in the relationship between Joe and the old man in Nymphomaniac.

I must say, however, that Von Trier also loves provocation, beyond what he wants to tell, there is also a notable narcissistic component in manipulating the public, or at least that's what I think I see. 

ok, I forgive him. 

 

[Roo]

I don't mind Lynch, although I'll never be fanatical about his work.

 

1. Mulholland Drive

2. Lost Highway

^far and away the 2 best things he has done

3. Wild at Heart

4. Twin Peaks/FWWM/Return (all of similar quality overall)

5. Blue Velvet

6. The Elephant Man

...

7. Eraserhead (my least favourite film EVER, seen it a few times to confirm as well, just find the whole experience juvenile and pointlessly joyless)

 

Never got around to Straight Story, Inland Empire or Dune as of yet.

 

I was a Von Trier enthusiast when I was a young adult, lost interest nowadays. Dancer in the Dark, Breaking the Waves, Antichrist are his best works, but most of his films I quite liked, despite their flaws.

[hello spiral]

7. Eraserhead (my least favourite film EVER, seen it a few times to confirm as well, just find the whole experience juvenile and pointlessly joyless)

 

 

[whosebrian]

[goDel]

It's Sean Kubrickre, btw. Related to Stanley, obvsly. Rob is a bastard son of HAL9000 and Kurtis Mantronik. Seriously!

[Guest]

 

7. Eraserhead (my least favourite film EVER, seen it a few times to confirm as well, just find the whole experience juvenile and pointlessly joyless)

 

 

 

hahaha

 

Do you remember in His Girl Friday, when Friday says, 'it feels like only yesterday that I saw you Walter.' and he replies, 'Maybe it has . . . been seeing me in your dreams?'

[phudoshin]

In my top5 tracks this year was NTS Sessiion-acid mwan idle - as Kubrick as Autechre could be 

[Guest]

 

 

Nymphomanic: I should see it again, in the space of four hours I have lost many connections:

 

 

The director's cut is six hours. Six glorious hours.

[Draft78]

 

 

 

Nymphomanic: I should see it again, in the space of four hours I have lost many connections:

 

 

The director's cut is six hours. Six glorious hours.

 

 

there seems to be an open competition between Baron Von Trier and the Dukes of Rochdale to overcome the barriers of time and human endurance.

It must be said that the baron (known to be a cheater) has played cunning, filling his six hours of pussy.

[sweepstakes]

I can only imagine they are at the very least fans of his, but his work and Space Odyssey in particular has had a huge influence on music in general, IDM, electronic and beyond and with Autechre that film and sci-fi in general surely had an influence. Can only speculate how much, everything mentioned thus far is plausible and/or fitting. They specifically (and exclusively allegedly) sampled Buck Rogers on this release 

Wow, I had no idea - this is probably my favorite Gescom track as well.

 

There's a shitload of classic sci-fi I still need to see. And somehow I still haven't seen Barry Lyndon despite meaning to for probably 20 years now.

[Draft78]

In another thread Drum Up wrote about cronenberg: I continue the discussion here.

 

the origianal message: 

 

I remember interacting with you about the relation between Autechre and film before, wanted to see if I could pick your brain about some film stuff, kind of unrelated to this thread however, but nevertheless: I have been jonesing to binge a director's filmography (or as much of it as I can procure) and have settled upon David Cronenberg. Was curious of your assessment of his works. Bonus points if you can somehow respond in a way that relates to this thread's topic. 

 

I watched A Dangerous Method recently, and liked it even more than my initial viewing a few years ago. Kiera Knightley's performance stands out to me, especially since I thought of her as a fashion model more than an actress. She definitely goes beyond herself in this film, not sure if she let's go of the reins entirely (one thinks of Nicholson in The Shining) or retains some sense of control. Really inspired performance in my eyes. Cronenberg always captivated me for his prescience on cultural issues (especially related to technology and the individual's perception of his/her own body). Really looking forward to checking out The Dead Zone and Cosmopolis again, not to mention A History of Violence. I don't think I will rewatch Videodrome, however, as I have already seen it probably a dozen times. Gotta save it for a few years to try and retain some kind of freshness. 

 

well, I believe we can identify at least two significant phases in Cronenberg's work: a first one, where at the center of the investigation we find the materiality of the body, and a second, where the mind, the activity of the thinking entity, is staged in its being changeable and indeterminable.

The interesting thing seems to me to be the fact that the first phase, although oriented towards the "tangible" results, in the final analysis, the phase that stands out for abstraction. The metaphysical component lies precisely in considering physical matter as an abstract and impenetrable object, continually distorted and redesigned by the lability of the sensitive, perceptive experience. Personally I find in Videodrome the peak of this season of his cinema. It's based on constant deception: at the beginning it's seem to be a critical analysis of the relationship between image, media, manipulation and violence. Then it turns out that this is a false lead: the subject is not so much the "thing" (the violent images and their commodification) but the "how" (the signal with which the image are transmitted). In practice, from the "meaning" we move to the "signifier". But we are still following an illusory trace: the hypothetical society that has devised this new "signal", this "radiation", with the possible aim of gaining control of the masses, will in turn turn out to be a consequence of the signal itself, and not the cause (when one of the executives of the "spectacular optical" will be hit in the head, dying hi will open up offering a hallucinated display of his innards: interesting as a splatter effect, perhaps for the first time in the cinema, it will not be a mere visual excipient, but determine a hypothesis of signification on an intellectual level. So, what is the Videodrome signal? A boundless super-category that permeates the fabric of reality and our perception (which in the film, it must be said, are defined as the same thing )? Where does the waterproof metaphor of the film go?

The strength of the film I believe is also in the ability to bring phenomenological premises in a purely science-fiction narrative context, never pretentious or verbose.

 

The second phase I believe has opened with Spider (a film that for some reason, perhaps linked to a certain artificiality of acting, I didn't like too much. History of Violence, on the other hand, I really liked it. A film that starts and ends with a reunited family , only, in the end, no one can say that he really knows the other.

You gave me the desire to see A Dangerous M again ... for the fact that in general I don't like biographical films, I looked at it with some prejudice, and maybe I missed Cronenberg's point of view, beyond his homage to psychoanalysis. His point of view, that thing that will add something to the simple drawing up of facts, is surely nested in the latent of every image, but to smell it I will have to see it again.

 

Lately I've seen Map To The Stars: filmed on a limited budget, proposes a satirical and merciless vision of the Hollywood system. But I believe there is more: I had the impression that the system of primary forces and needs of the high society that is told to us is a possible x-ray for the categories of thought and ego of every individual. The vulgar, hypocritical savagery of the Hollywood circuit could be a mere pretext to make explicit, "naked" the relations of force, necessity and drive in the womb of the psyche, and of its urgent, incessant work of adaptation to this absurd, ineffable phenomenon that existence is.

I must say that Cronenberg does not stand out for a personal aesthetic: if many authors (I think Pasolini, Haneke, Antognoni ...) can be recognized at a glance, with any frame, Cronenberg's cinema has a rather anonymous photograph . Well, in the case of Map To The Stars this fact (also because of the paltry budget) is taken to the extreme: the image is bare, the grain of the image is almost like television fiction. And yet, this penalty plays in favor of what we are told: a repulsive world made up of individuals driven by self-referential categorical imperatives, which act in spaces lacking an identitary or seductive aestethic possibility. Everything is foreign, repulsive, devoid of feeling and false: both the content and the form. It is a film that is not loved because it wants to lead us to the antipodes of that: it is a film that does not want to be liked, and is a apparently a deliberate choice.

A similar thing, even though through a very different process, I found it in Jan Svankmajer's latest film - insects -: he, a master of surreal charm, deliberately disintegrated his own poetics in order to be able, in spite of ourselves, to land on our own where even nihilism is out of place, because it is too romantic.