[ index | VIDEO | 1970 ]


Tom DeWitt: The Leap

"I look at the medium through its manipulation of time and space. Man's ability to manipulate space is very limited. Actually a space change is almost inconceivable. The same with our control of time. We're contained in clock time. But the medium at least seems to control space within completely malleable time."

After his collaboration with Scott Bartlett in the making of OFFON, Tom DeWitt made his own extraordinary videographic film, The Leap, completed late in 1968. Although the two films were born at approximately the same time and place in San Francisco, they are dramatically different in almost every respect: evidence not only of two strongly individualistic personalities, but of the latitude for personal expression possible in the videotronic medium.

"I turned to cinema as a vehicle for expressing my intuition," DeWitt explained. "I find myself only at the threshold and I can see no horizons. I try to use technology flexibly to realize dream images, but I would hardly call my work more than the first crude stage of image-manipulation through modern technology. I've been trying to learn enough about image technologies so that if I ever make a dramatic statement I'll know that it's being communicated through the essence of the medium. There was a time when I had my copy of Fortran and began to learn it – I saw computer art as a potentially limitless field – but I decided to explore what I could contribute through videographic cinema."

The leap of the film's title might be interpreted in several ways, all of them appropriate: a leap of consciousness from one reality to another; a leap in image technology from cinema to video; a leap to escape the suffocating boundaries of metropolitan life (in this respect The Leap is a continuation of the theme of DeWitt's first film, Atmosfear); and finally it might be seen as a leap to escape the purely videotronic world of the film's imagery. However one chooses to view it, The Leap unquestionably accomplished DeWitt's motivaion: "I wasn't satisfied with the film until I felt that without any verbal references it would take you on an emotional trip, reacting purely to the essence of cinema and television."

Whereas OFFON is composed entirely of iconographic, geometric concrete imagery – organic figures processed through the medium until only a fundamental primary structure is left – The Leap is impressive for its mixture of pure video space with representational filmic space. Thus an ordinary man seems to interact physically with videographic apparitions, moving in and out of different space/time realities, fluctuating between the physical and the metaphysical with each stride of his leap toward freedom.

We see a man jumping across rooftops and racing up a grassy hillside. He dodges through a jungle of billboards, ominous structures, and forests of barbed wire. This is the basic vocabulary: a man running through an industrial landscape in search of nature. But through the video system this simple footage was transformed into a breathtaking constellation of exploding perspectives, shimmering masses of color, androgynous symbols, and vast realms of arcane electronic voodoo. There are endless zooms into quivering video centers, rectangles within rectangles of vanishing imagery. In mid air the man's body becomes a videotronic ghost filled with vibrating silvery shock waves. A simple motion is shattered into a thousand mirror images reverberating into infinity. Intersecting space grids completely demolish perspectival logic. Positive becomes negative, up becomes down, inside is out and outside is in.

In making The Leap, DeWitt first shot approximately one-hundred and fifty feet of high contrast, black-and-white film that was processed through a video system. "By compounding the imagery through the video mixing panel I expanded the image material into about eight-hundred feet," he said. "While the film was running through the system, I added effects by keying, wiping, and debeaming, inserting images into each other. One of the film-chain monitors had a camera on it, so whenever I switched to that camera I got a feedback. That studio had only two monitors for four film projectors and two slide projectors, so some of the calls were blind, based on what I thought was back on the film chain. I could see the final mix on monitors, plus one of the two sources coming in from film chains, plus images coming in from a videotape recorder we started to use after the first session. So at about three layers deep it got pretty complex. I was very happy because I was penetrating an area that was completely new to me; but if I were doing it over again I'd want more control. I'd want to see all the images feeding in; I'd want synchronization between the images, and I'd master roll the images before I put them in."

During fifteen hours of studio time DeWitt was assisted by an engineer who operated the videotape machines, an engineer operating the two film chains, and a man on the feedback camera. DeWitt made all aesthetic decisions at the master control panel. "One of the main things I like about video," he explains, "is the immediacy of seeing what you're doing, which is a tremendous balancing effect because you can make decisions on the spot which feed back into the work you're creating. It's much more spontaneous than working in film, where you're never really sure what the results will be until you get the film back. Plus the effects built into television which are very difficult to get in film, particularly keying and wipes."

The master tape was re-edited as a whole before a kinescope was made. The kinescope was edited through conventional film techniques, and color was added on DeWitt's home-made optical printer. This footage was edited once again, and finally an electronic sound track was made by Manny Meyer, who composed the track for OFFON. "I wanted to express an emotion," DeWitt said. "Certainly you're triggering something in the unconscious when you start playing with space/time alterations."

-- Gene Youngblood: EXPANDED CINEMA, 1970, [PDF /4.6 Mb]

[ index | 1969 ]