Ars Gratia Artis

From Juxtapox magazine: "Check out this trippy five-minute video, Khoda, by Reza Dolatabadi. Dolatabad is a graduate film student who made this film from 6,000 individual paintings shown at a rate of 20 per second. It took over two years to complete and is pretty mind-blowing."


Khoda from Reza Dolatabadi on Vimeo.

As much as I think the artist's style is a little too comic book-y for me, the sheer magnitude of effort, focus, determination, and patience that this project demands is inspiring. It reminds me in some ways of underground avant-garde film visionary ("vision-ree"), dreamweaver, and facepainter? Stan Brakhage.

Since the inception of his filmaking in the late 1950's Brakhage has pioneered scores of experimental techniques that are ubiquitious in all genres of cinematography today. Particularly germane here was his penchant for sedulously hand painting directly on individual celluloid frames, treating each of them as if they were mini-canvases, works of art in of themselves. He would then project these micro-cathedrals of color and time at 24 fps using 16mm projector.

The result:



To aid in his assiduously prescient transfiguration of traditional cinema, he employed other techniques such as fast cutting, in-camera editing, scratching film, double-exposure, reverse film looping, etc. Most of his pieces are silent, in color, and range from a few seconds (Eye Gaze) to feature length (Text of Light). The means themselves were Brakhage's ends (as is true for all 'ars gratia artis'): just as much as he aimed to create a finite, condensed visual stimulus, each creatively nascent and exploratory process seemed to be just as vital to him and the success of his work.

See also: Maya Deren, Kenneth Anger