“I make movies, sometimes using a computer. Not always, of course: that would be maddening.”
‒James Otis
Of course weirdo art film languishes on the periphery of conventional film, but why has one James Otis, clearly brilliant yet oddly invisible, languished on the periphery of weirdo art film? Some fault lies in the stars, some in Otis himself, the confessed worst promoter of his own work. Contradictions emerge almost immediately with Otis, a polymath educated in math, sculpture, computer science, film studies and artistic practices he calls “gesturing” and “finger twiddling.” He’s a lucid dreamer of the mundane, a timeless anachronism, and a skeptic of certainty. Otis displayed remarkable perceptual abilities at an early age. Concerned about the seven-year-old’s description of binocular vision, his parents took him to a doctor who prescribed a series of eye exercises—exercises that only heightened his acuity. At the age of 19, too aware of his reliance on vision, he blindfolded himself for 9 days.
In the late 1970s, he was a “student” of Stan Brakhage at the University of Colorado Boulder—though that’s somewhat misleading, as Otis took a single course Brakhage taught on Charlie Chaplin. He later became Brakhage’s teaching assistant, befriended the monolithic avant-garde figure along the way, managed the department’s equipment room, and taught filmmaking classes. While making films, he contributed to Criss-Cross Art Communications, the journal of the Boulder avant-garde art cooperative that included talents such as Fred Worden (who received his Spectacle due late last year). And if maintaining a lifelong friendship and correspondence with Brakhage wasn’t enough to certify Otis as an “experimental filmmakers’ experimental filmmaker,” he soon became close with Ken Jacobs—once even hitchhiking from Colorado to Jacobs’ loft in New York just to visit.
Otis’ early, revolutionary computer films, such as FROM THE FAMILY OF EGGS and GRIDROSE, stand in tension with his general indifference toward the machines—though perhaps “indifference” isn’t quite right; what they can be persuaded to do, what he can produce with them. He’s an artist at heart, plain and not simple—as Ken Jacobs wrote, he’s “a central terminus of radical departures.” It’s been a little over two decades since his last solo show, which was around the time he retired from film work. Now, after nearly a quarter century, Otis is primed and ready to unleash his artistic energies upon New York’s micro-cinema-going public.
For one weekend in mid-June, Spectacle is pleased and proud to offer James Otis some long-overdue recognition—and is also exceedingly honored to host and introduce a new generation to this elusive and truly singular Colorado-based film artist, presenting the first major screening of his visionary work in over two decades.
Playing back-to-back on the evenings of June 13th and 15th, two programs will encompass twenty of Otis’s films across the spectrum of his mythical and mathematical forays into computer animation, found footage, landscape, hyper-stereoscopic, and handmade filmmaking—all on 16mm prints from Canyon Cinema and Otis himself.
Otis will be present at each screening to speak and entertain—if not answer—questions during both mid- and post-show Q&As.
Co-programmed with Paul Attard. Special thanks to James Otis, Mark Toscano, Zachary Epcar and Ashley Rose Tacheira (Canyon Cinema).
Series title and requisite knowledge of James Otis indebted to “Rocky Mountain Formalism: Avant-Garde Film in Colorado” by Dale Jamieson (Millenium Film Journal #12, 1982).
STROBE WARNING. Some of the films in this program contain intense flicker effects that may be unsafe for those sensitive to light.
PROGRAM A: “GOLLY, I’M GLAD I’M NOT YOUR GIRLFRIEND”
FRIDAY, JUNE 13 – 7:30PM w/Q&A (this event is $10)
SUNDAY, JUNE 15 – 7:30PM w/Q&A (this event is $10)
“Wonderous good letter from you, approaching (but thanks-be not AT) wit’s end; and yet I’d take it to stand, toto, for all that sadness which still has the capacity to move me re: so-social — i.yeeeeeeeeeeeee that YOU should be so ill-known (even AFTER you’ve shown yr films) that they don’t simply strew yr path with rose-and-hozannahs, start gesturing to eachother in finger shapes approximating yr visual shapes, sit solemn and attentive at yr feet (or at least at yr fret) and/or praise the socks off ya . . . “I thank God I’m not in love with you”, INDEED! — that’d make a good tomb-stone carving for the likes of you and me to hurl back at the whole fucking world.” ‒letter from Stan Brakhage to James Otis, 1983
Spanning from 1979 to the cusp of the new millennium—though not in strict chronological order—this program comprises nine films that run the gamut of most things Otis films are about: pseudo-hyper-stereoscopic experiments, handmade abstract “cone” work, and CGI the likes of which you haven’t seen before and are very likely to never see anywhere else. The program’s title, taken from a “friend of a friend upon viewing TRIPTYCH,” demonstrates both Otis’ wild wit and quiet humility. (And by the way, he’s been happily married for the last 35 years.) The program also features a world premiere (THE LAST BITE) and kicking things off is a film that Stan Brakhage declared “one of the ten most perfect films in the history of cinema” (JACOBS’ LADDER).
JACOBS’ LADDER
1981. United States.
4 min. 16mm.
Silent.
“There is also an elegance in the mathematic functions which this work depends on. Four sets of functions control the depth, angles, growth factors and overall direction of movement. Using these functions, Otis can control the parameters which determine the angles of the branching, the length of the brances and the size of the image. In reality this process is much more complex than I can describe, but the basic notion is understandable to a lay person.” ‒Don Yannacito
EASTER BLUES
1996. United States.
4 min. 16mm.
Silent.
“A delicate window study. “Outside, spring had come to Minnesota, while in here?””‒James Otis
NO ART OF MEMORY
1979. United States.
3 min. 16mm.
“NO ART OF MEMORY (1979) is a 2.5-minute color sound film. It is undrilled, and textured mattes were used to mask different parts of the cone during its exposures to light. The forms are more geometrical and less organic than those of A PRINT OF DRILLED LETTER COLOR CONE. The sound track is a product of the construction of the cone. What you hear is what you see.” ‒Dale Jamieson
TRIPTYCH
1980. United States.
United States. 22 min. 16mm.
Composed of “Foregone Conclusion,” “Edit Synch,” and “Concluding Cone.” “Golly, I’m glad I’m not your girlfriend.” ‒Friend of a friend of Otis’ upon viewing TRIPTYCH.
*Q&A BREAK
ENGLEWOOD COTTONWOOD
1997. United States.
4 min. 16mm.
Silent.
“Pseudo-hyper-stereoscopic view of one tree over three years. Shimmering life in flexible time, an antenna alert to whose vibrations?”‒James Otis
ASH AND APPLE
1994. United States.
2 min. 16mm.
Silent.
“Alternating between two cameras three feet apart, shooting black on each to match the image on the other, created in-camera A and B rolls for pseudo-hyper-stereoscopic view of two trees. Natural lighting cooperated.” ‒James Otis
UPPER BLUE LAKE
1996. United States.
12 min. 16mm.
Silent.
“UPPER BLUE LAKE, although not the most successfully pseudo-stereoscopic of several such wide-eyed studies, so enthralled me with its various qualities of light and atmosphere, I persevered, for five years jogging whenever I could, 12,000 feet high in the Colorado Rockies.” ‒James Otis
“[…] a record of a mountain lake, mostly in time-lapse, moves between summer and winter, juxtaposing water and clouds filmed at different speeds; its jerky rhythms and unpredictable structure heighten the dynamic power of nature’s changes.” ‒Fred Camper
*Q&A BREAK
(the daily compromise of) MY ENMESHMENT
1999. United States.
7 min. 16mm.
“In this poignant comedy about the pickle of incarnation, the soul, thwarted in its yearning for union with God, recognizing completeness closer to home, is reconciled to corporeal existence.” ‒James Otis
THE LAST BITE
1994. United States.
United States. 2 min. 16mm.
World premiere!
Total Running Time: 60 min. + intro/ Q&A and reel change breaks.
PROGRAM B: THE PERSONALITIES OF NUMBERS
FRIDAY, JUNE 13 – 10PM w/Q&A (this event is $10)
SUNDAY, JUNE 15 – 5PM w/Q&A (this event is $10)
The hits just keep coming in this equally revelatory lineup, featuring the wide-ranging brilliance of James Otis’ film work that also includes several of his ocular investigations into the world of found footage. But the fun doesn’t stop there: this program boasts a multimedia performance in which Otis will be live-narrating the home movie extravaganza FAMILY DINNERS. But no matter if the footage was shot by Otis himself, or even if he’s speaking over it, these films are united by his poetic sensibilities and rigorous methodology—as well as broad universal truths, such as the challenges of finding a job (ON YOUR OWN) or the the pleasures and problematics of group identity (WE AND I).
ON YOUR OWN
1981. United States.
United States. 2 min. 16mm.
“Into my hands fell a 20-minute exhortation to find the right job after high school. Struck by its fierce redundancy, I undertook a distillation, editing the optical track, aiming for conversational cadence, choosing image only when silent.”‒James Otis
VERVIELFÄLTIGUNG
1996. United States.
11 min. 16mm.
“William Sheldon’s crackpot body typing, based on the superficially convincing fiction of universal endo-, ecto- and mesomorphic components of the human form, gave each person three numbers from 1 to 7, one for each of these three components, interpretable as coordinates of a point in a cubic parameter space. The result of decades of obsessive recording, his Atlas of Men contained standardized pictures of 1200 individuals, obvious animation fodder. Attending to fundamental cinematic concepts of cut, shot and motion, I employed a computer to reduce Sheldon’s three dimensions to the one of time. Further programs turned the coordinates of bodily form into notes, giving endomorphy, ectomorphy and mesomorphy each their own voice. Thus each point in Sheldon’s parameter space implies a type of human and, by my contrivance, a frame of film and a musical chord.” ‒James Otis
WE AND I
2001. United States.
8 min. 16mm.
Silent.
“This film I found and found I could not change without degrading, too stunning was the as yet unknown hobbyist’s joy in mixing potent, posed and oddly distant pictures from his private life with the symbols of small town identity politics.
Civic leaders of Boulder, Colorado organized the Pay Dirt Pow Wow in 1934 to bring miners and farmers together and lift their spirits with a community festival. Soon renamed Pow Wow Days, it was last celebrated in 1978.” ‒James Otis
*Q&A BREAK
FAMILY DINNERS
1997. United States.
7 min. 16mm.
Silent with live narration.
*Q&A BREAK
GRIDROSE
1981. United States.
2 min. 16mm.
Silent.
“With all the grace and flair of an elegant proof.” ‒Carol Mickett
TOROIDAL FOREST
1981. United States.
4 min. 16mm.
Silent.
“One tree per frame, each from a different place on the surface of a doughnut-shaped parametric space, cooperate to rotate continuously, slowingly from the one- to the two-dimensional. After a pause accelerating counter rotations attain an approximation of a form of infinite dimension.” ‒James Otis
HEXES
1982. United States.
3 min. 16mm.
Silent.
“Let’s pretend that the friction between mono- and dicotyledonous forms (between, say, “lilies tulips the hyacinth” and “fruit blossoms the briar rose the passion flower” or, as here, English ivy) generates green.” ‒James Otis
*Q&A BREAK
DEPOSIT OF FAITH
1984. United States.
11 min. 16mm.
Silent.
“Otis’s computer animations glow as none other with intelligence of form, astonishing life-likeness of movement and the deep impress of personality.” ‒Stan Brakhage
FROM THE FAMILY OF EGGS
1984. United States.
8 min. 16mm.
Silent.
“Eggs, mountains, thistles and ultimately a glorious burning bush, pulsing to a contrapuntal samba, harboring a bit of the surrounding void, the human heart.” ‒James Otis
CALYPSO’S CLOAK
1986. United States.
3 min. 16mm.
“The filmmaker courts the muse of computer art. At the gods’ demand Calypso grants Odysseus freedom, but gives a cloak designed to drown. The melodic constriction of Schubert’s “Das Wandern” paces an emerging imposition of grid upon randomness.” ‒James Otis
COMMON KNOWLEDGE
2002. United States.
2 min. 16mm.
“An investigation of original sin and marketing, based on a South African apple juice commercial. The sound track is an obsessively synchronized mad marimba version of the old mission hymn, “From Greenland’s Icy Mountains.”” ‒James Otis
Total Running Time: 55 min. + intro/ Q&A and reel change breaks.