Chapter 10
The intersection with Video > David Perry
Perry had been apprenticed to the printing trade [1] in the 1950s and developed an interest in painting and photography that, coupled with his teenage interest in the movies (especially the newsreels and animation), led him to film-making. While working in the printing industry he became involved with the Sydney Push where he met Albie Thoms, among many others. Around 1964 he joined the ABC, and his exposure to the graphic arts (printing technologies) was translated into making film. At the ABC he worked for the Federal Engineering section at their studios in Gore Hill [Sydney] in what was known as the Telerecording Department where film was used to record the ABC s productions. This gave him access to out-of-date film and to high-grade cine equipment.
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Previously, over 1967, Thoms, Perry and Read had produced a number of hand-made films, which they called synthetic films. [2] Of these, Perry's first was Halftone (1967). The halftone screen is used in the printing industry (to which Perry had been apprenticed at the age of 16 [3]). It is a gridded pattern of small dots, squares and lines that, in printing, is laid between a negative and the printing plate so that it converts tonal images (photographs) into patterns that although in black and white ink are sufficiently small to give the visual effect of being grey-scale. |
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Perry used several half-tone screens in an optical printer, directly printing them onto strips of 16mm film, so that [as he says] "the original dot patterns were spread across the full width of the strips and thus covered the soundtrack area as well as the image area. After editing I asked the lab to run the film through the printer twice, printing the image area first, then to wind the |
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original and print material back to the start and print the sound track area with the image starting twenty-eight frames earlier to allow for the offset between picture start and audio start on a standard sixteen millimetre print. The result was a film in which the pattern you saw on the screen also created the sound you heard from the speakers." [4] |
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Fig. 2: 3 frames from Albie Thoms' Bluto (1967). [Courtesy: Albie Thoms]
He also made Moon Virility (1967) in which a brush is (probably) held against and dabbed in multiple coloured layers onto a piece of clear film as it is wound through an optical printer with an unheard optical sound track already printed on it that was found in a rubbish bin. [7]
Read made Super Block High (1967) by (from the look of it) shooting in tight close-up the raster of a TV screen that has had the syncs thrown out of whack and then brushed or scraped with something like a metal comb, although Mudie indicates that it was made with a grinding wheel [8] that attacks the frame over its vertical, horizontal and diagonal axes. The film is then painted so that the edges of the scrapes show saturated colours.
Any means of affecting the film: painting on it, scratching it, damaging it, could be exploited to make synthetic film and was so for many of the films used in the Ubu lightshows. [9] As Thoms wrote in Ubu's Hand-Made Films Manifesto, which they all signed, the camera is no longer necessary, hand-made films are abstract and anyone has the freedom to make a film by scratching, painting, drawing, biting, chewing directly onto film or by any technique imaginable... [T]hey may be projected alone, in groups, on top of each other, forward, backwards, slowly; quickly, in every possible way as environments, not to be absorbed intellectually, but by all senses. [10]
While attached to the Federal Engineering section of the ABC (at the Gore Hill studios in Sydney, c.1968), Perry had access to high-grade production equipment. This provided him with the opportunity to experiment with television (or video) as a means for making synthetic films, and it was there that he made his electronically sourced, synthetic, experimental film Mad Mesh. (1968). One of the ABC's television cameras had developed a fault with the mesh in its Image-Orthicon [11] image pick-up tube (the I-O tube). It had become loose which meant that it could be moved around with magnets. This produced crawling, moving patterns on the monitor. Perry recorded these patterns by exposing 16mm film with red, green and blue filters in a series of multiple exposures so that they gave an irregular, fluid moire pattern while moving randomly across each other. Occasionally this produced a full range of colours as the mesh patterns mapped onto each other through the RGB filters. The distortions were controlled by Tom McGrath and it was set to electronic music by Ken Parkyn. [12]
Although kinescoped from the output of a television camera displayed on a video monitor Perry did not think of Mad Mesh as a video work. For him it was a film, it was made with film techniques and recorded onto film and presented as such. [13] [Fig.3]. So Mad Mesh was a transition work, made using electronic means but recorded to film, which in 1968 was the only way to record colour footage. Perry later commented that even while working with videotape he still saw himself as a film-maker, although he knew it was impossible to get good kinescope recordings of the video works. The texture and quality disjunctions of video and film in these attempts to make films with inappropriate equipment interested him and was sometimes very lovely but he really wanted to make films. [14]
Fig. 3: Still frame from David Perry's
Mad Mesh (1968). [Courtesy: David Perry]
Perry's last film with Ubu was a short autobiographical montage called Album (1970) made from Perry's early photographs and clips from Ubu films that he shot. It opens with a close-up of the take up rollers pulling a film through the gate of a projector followed by Perry holding an older type still camera (which appears to be a Voigtlander), the titles, and then photographs and short clips of films he had made edited together in short staccato segments as he talks about his childhood interest in photography. Farmland and the bush, flowers, photographs as a child and as a teenager are intercut with moments from Ubu films he shot that show his early sexual interests (e.g., with the dancing girls sequence from The Tribulations of Mr Dupont Nomore). Many of the images are posterised colour or other optical effects, including sequences from Halftone. He talks about being an apprenticed printer, and illustrates this with a slightly longer sequence from Halftone, more clips from (generally more conventional) film he shot, followed by his interest in light. The sequence then returns to friends, now his adult friends including Albie Thoms, and Abigail (his then wife), Liffy (his daughter with Abigail), moments in their family life from which he turns to his (semi-abstract) paintings, more flowers while thunder crashes on the soundtrack and finally a run of shorter, staccato recapitulations of images and clips from earlier in the film. [15]
Perry then moved to London.
At this point, c.1969-70 (with Challenge for Change in Canada, TVX in London, and Australians like John Kirk and David Perry also living in London), video begins to encroach on the film world, and it is through the experimental film-makers, community activists and hippies that it gained a productive life of its own. However, for a long time many of the film-makers saw video as the poor cousin. For a start it was only monochrome, not colour and certainly not the luscious colour of Kodachrome or of much Super-8. Neither did it have the resolution that 16mm had, though it did have a resolution similar to that of Super-8. For much of the first decade of video it was not considered useful for anything except stuff you couldn't actually do with film, among which was activist, fast turnaround community interaction and social feedback, since it did not have to be processed before you could see what had been shot. All you had to do was rewind the tape and play it back. Also the sound was automatically in sync with the pictures, which made it very useful for interviewing or recording events in which the sound had a major role.
Video's other great difference was that it was electronic, much as audio recording had been since the 1920's. [16] The electronic effects made possible with the video-mixer were readily available to the editor. Although you could do them in film, it was a far more arduous (and expensive) process. Video, being an electronic medium, could also be synthesised and that, for a brief period, was its most valued capacity, since it could be composed as though it were electronic music.
At first editing video was downright impossible, leaving gaps and visually-noisy roll-in results at and after the cutting point. The timing of the edit was never really accurate and the out-point / in-point could be anything up to seconds away from where you wanted it. The editing problems were solved to a major extent by several innovations developed by community video production groups, such as the back-timing trick used by TVX [17], or the later Editape system [18] developed by the National Resources Centre at Paddington Video Access in Sydney. Once Sony got their U-matic system working and selling they then incorporated editing functions into it. By the mid-1980's the Sony VO-5800 series of U-matic video machines had become a reliable production device adopted in the, by then, remaining access centres such as Open Channel, educational institution video facilities and independent post-production facilities like Heuristic Video.
The single most important advance that made video viable was the Time-Base Corrector (or TBC) developed by Quantel [then known as Micro Consultants who developed the first integrated circuit video speed analogue-to-digital and digital-to-analogue converters, both of which they used in their TBC 2000] in 1973 [19] With this, video play-back could be easily mixed and otherwise combined with other video tape sources, the effects available in the video mixer, computer graphics and the video synthesiser. It also had the advantage of making editing just that bit more reliable.
Meanwhile, having survived the ignominy of the premiere of Marinetti, Thoms went overseas in November 1969 to show his film around the centres of the avant-garde in New York (only briefly) and Europe, ending up in Britain where he met Hoppy Hopkins of TVX which, Thoms comments:
“was, at that stage,... just interviewing people. It was very basic. One time I remember they'd gone round to a place called the Arts Lab in London and the police had raided it and arrested somebody for drugs or something. And they weren't there at the time, nor were any other television media. So they immediately re-created the event on half-inch tape and sold it to the BBC as a news thing. And so one of the first uses of half-inch video on broadcast television was this fake sort of thing of the police busting the Arts Lab. And that was the attitude of TVX; they were anarchists.” [20] [See John Kirk's version of the story in Chapter 1]
While in London, Thoms worked with Richard Neville who was interested in start[ing] a new newspaper called INK, a weekly alternative newspaper.[21] Thoms suggested a video version of it to Hoppy, but nothing eventuated, although Thoms noted the Canadian [CFC] project. However this contact with the local underground in London led Thoms to propose and publish [at the Isle of Wight Festival (August, 1970) [22] a stencil-duplicated newspaper called the Freek Press about four or five times a day. [23] Having done that, on his return to Australia David Elfick who was the editor of Go Set asked [him] to do [something similar] for the Wallacia Festival. [24] This resulted in a daily news sheet called Rubbish. Albie notes:
“we [in this case Thoms and Mick Glasheen] were talking about what TVX was doing and I'm pretty sure he suggested that I check out the Akai quarter-inch system. Or he'd just heard about it or something. And we decided we'd try and do something for the Wallacia Festival, which was the end of January 1971.
“I approached Akai and they were very happy to loan us a camera and a monitor and a recorder. So parallel to providing the newspaper service, we decided to have the video thing, which I d talked about having with INK, you know. This was a live thing.... We just interviewed people at the festival, got their opinions, played it back on the monitor outside our tent where we were producing the newspaper.” [25]
David Perry had moved to the UK in October of 1970 [26] and while there he began experimenting with video. He took a job as a technician in the Hornsey College of Art CCTV [27] studio. Knowing that he already had considerable experience in film-making his boss gave him some lecturing work in film and video production, although Perry did note that this aggravated the traditional class division of work amongst his technical colleagues. [28] His students were shooting their assignments with an old Arriflex 16mm camera, but Perry had heard of the new video portapak and realised that it would allow the user to make very long takes (up to 30 mins) of what they were recording and that this would allow the recording of workshops, theatrical performances and events on the streets that lasted more than the standard 3 minutes of a roll of film. So he convinced the college to buy one and along with teaching production [29] he began experimenting with it, even though editing the material shot with it was a nightmare. [30] He began to assign exercises in video to his students and became interested in video himself.
The college was already using industrial video equipment in its Film & Television Department and, in what is probably the first live video-process installation by an Australian artist (albeit working in Britain at the time), Perry
“set up a small experiment in the corridor between the Fine Art and Film & TV departments. My idea was to use a television system as an object rather than as a medium, and to see what kind of interaction (if any) would occur between the object and its observers. A camera was placed to give a static view along the corridor and of any events which might happen there. The picture was recorded to videotape for about one hour.
“When the recording was complete I placed two monitors on a table just in front of the camera and connected the output of the camera to one monitor and the output of the recorder to the other and replayed the tape. This meant that I was showing pictures of present events on one monitor and past events on the other, although both sets of events occurred in identical picture spaces.
“The effect of this was that as people walked toward the installation they could see their own picture on one monitor while on the other it might be somebody else's picture or just the empty corridor.
“Several people became intrigued by it and eventually a large group gathered and obviously found it engaging.” [31]
This simple formalist installation [Fig.4], was not dissimilar to Bruce Nauman's Live Taped Video Corridor piece (1969-70). [32] It provided Perry's students with what was, for them at least, an as yet previously un-encountered experience of the past injected into the present, in which the multiple layers of memory immanent in the video system were exploited as interactive processes. [33]
There are two characteristics of video as a formal medium that make it different from film. One is that it can be treated, usually in an installation situation, as an object in which the viewer enters some sort of interactive relationship with the image, or as a sculptural or painting-like object in which some prepared or pre-recorded, in those days on videotape, material is presented. [34] The other characteristic is that which I have already mentioned, namely the capacity to produce electronically generated or processed images with it and thereby a visual music or for various kinds of feedback. Those feedback processes that operate over long durations bring video into the personal and social realms where it supports mnemonic and analytic practices, as well as (real-time) interactive processes as explored in Perry's installation in the corridor.
Perry's use of video extended into the social realm where video could support analytic practices reflecting his life and ideology, and he made several such film/video transition works while living in London, two of which stand out as public expressions and at least one in which private small-scale family activity is recorded. This can be seen in a simple domestic tape of Liffy (David and Aby's daughter) just doing stuff in the backyard of their London home.
Of Perry's public expressions the first is My Dutch Newsreel (1972), (which he subsequently reworked in 1986). It was shot in Holland during a family visit, and reflected on in London and Sydney (thus the rework) and consists in landscape studies and the company of Clem Weight, an old friend from the Ubu days, and her new [Dutch] husband (Theo van Leeuwin) who was also a film-maker. During the trip Perry shot 16mm film of their domestic interiors and the landscape of an island in the North Sea which they visited while there. He then added it into video of him telling the story of their holiday and it thus became My Dutch Newsreel (1972). [35] See [Fig.5].
In the video David speaks of the distance and isolation of living in Australia and of Australian's desire for travel. He speaks of the function of landscape in building and sustaining the collective unconscious schema: a representation of what life's all about. [This being] the basis of all cultures. That reflection (the reflection on one's self and the role of the world context more than just the social context and perhaps not far removed from the First Australians' notion of 'country' in forming one's identity) is made manifest through the double image of the Kodachrome colour and the old monochrome video in a TV set in the scene. (The 1986 version was awarded First Prize (Video Art), in the Australian Video Festival, 1987).
This mixing of film and video seems to occur regularly in Perry's work of the 70s (and through the 80s). In 1973 he devised a project called Utopian Memory Banks Present: Fragments From the Past, which used video footage that Perry had shot with the college portapak in the streets of South Kensington and the Science Museum in London. With this material he made a tape based on the idea of looking back from some future time at what had been happening in London immediately after the Paris student revolution of 1968 and the unrest in British colleges at the same time. The video was
Fig. 4: Four frames from David Perry's
Corridor video installation piece.
Fig. 5: David Perry on the screen in My Dutch Newsreel.
“set in an indeterminate future after 'The Interminable Struggle' and 'The Greater London Fire'. A presenter with a burn-scarred face showed the footage I had shot as if it was material recently discovered in the ruins of a building in old North London.” [36] [Fig.6]
Fig. 6: The announcer at a VTR in Utopian Memory Banks Present: Fragments From the Past.
It is based on aspects of life in London as seen from an imagined future, drawn from what had been happening in a somewhat dystopian London immediately following the Paris student revolution of May 1968, the unrest in British colleges, and the anti-Vietnam War movement. Perry used material he shot at the Science Museum and around West Kensington (London) at the time, representing it as old found footage, which in its own way echoes a kind of early tourist video. The video opens to a fanfare of trumpets (which later turns out to be a pipe organ) and martial drums. A fire scarred presenter with a fey voice is shown standing at an open-reel videotape player with a small video monitor beside him. He announces that this Collective Memory Module offers
“for your absorption fragments of images and sounds of London in the year 1973. They were recorded by a contemporary process known as videotape recording in the period before the interminable struggle and the Greater London fire.” [37]
These 'documents' are represented as re-discovered footage, and include sections of film and Portapak-video footage used [as Perry notes REF?] to exploit the contrast in textures . [85] We are watching what might, in fact, be a message from the future set up as an attempt to bring back to the surviving population memories and examples of what London was once like memories from our past so that as the presenter says: We [can] avoid at all costs the danger of collective amnesia. [38]
This Collective Memory Module begins in Exhibition Road outside the Science Museum and then, in the first module looks at some of the relics displayed in the Museum, from James Watt's (though not identified as such) steam engine, other kinds of engines, to a giant model of a crystal showing its atomic structure. The presenter then reminds us that these exhibits had been used to create considerable wealth at the time when these scenes were recorded. In the second module the memory fragments step to scenes of children (including Perry's daughter, Liffey) (playing in the streets ?), old and new cars, all in a location of poverty, with people living under a freeway overpass or railway bridge in the area known as West Kensington. The presenter regularly adds to his description of these visual fragments with statements regarding the political situation underlying the general poverty of most people living in the locality (or in greater London) at the time.
In the third module Perry appears in front of a painting of his, reading a prepared statement the sound of which has been deliberately erased as though it contained politically unacceptable material. [Fig.5] A following segment shows an apparently slowed down video of a man at a piano playing, with the sounds of machine gun fire beneath it as though there might have been a civil war occurring at the time. The video closes on this last fragment as the presenter then turns off the monitor and mentions the feelings of despair and the fear of the approaching struggle, which we know were characteristic of that period, and finally declaiming Long Live Utopia , as the image fades to black.
Fig. 7: David Perry in front of a painting "found" in the rubble in Utopian Memory Banks Present: Fragments From the Past.
Perry comments in his Memoirs that the result was technically very rough, [39] but given the state of the editing systems that would have then been available this is hardly surprising. However he soldiered on.
Much of his production over the next half decade worked with these mnemonic ideas, with occasional excursions into the more formal possibilities of the medium. For example, the exquisite moment encapsulated in Interior with Views (1976) which I shall discuss below with Perry by then back in Australia.
On return to Australia
As noted above, David Perry was in London from 1970 to early 1974. He returned to Australia in March 1974 [40] to the open and friendly co-operativeness that showed the huge cultural shift that the Whitlam government had helped realise in Australia. [41] He found he could access the photographic darkrooms of the Tin Sheds at Sydney Uni and the video equipment held by the (Paddington) Video Access Centre. The Video Access Centres and their extended network were a product of the Whitlam government's support for the concept (drawn from the Canadian Challenge for Change project, see Chapter 3) of community development through making the media more accessible to the people so that they could, in their various ways and needs, communicate with each other and the bureaucracy. This access to video allowed him to make new video works and he produced GoodBye Richard Nixon (1974), a scathing comment on the Watergate affair based on a song by Johnny Earls which Perry had recorded on portapak while still in London. [42] Now back in Sydney he completed the piece with material taken from Nixon’s resignation speech.
In 1975 Perry accepted a position as artist-in-residence at Griffith University Film and Drama Centre (now Arts Workshop) in Brisbane. As the workshop was brand new, Perry was able to purchase and install his own version of what was then ideally possible in low budget production facilities. Although the system he built was not perfect for editing, lacking the frame accuracy that film editing could provide, it provided a useful facility for Perry’s style of very personal video.
Fig.8: Frame from A TV Show, with David Perry and Kay Comino "at the controls". Made with the equipment shown in this picture at the Griffith University Creative Arts Workshop, 1975. [Courtesy: David Perry]
While there, he made three documentary works: A TV Show in which he told the story of the establishment of the workshop [Fig.9], Down to Sydney and Back to Brisbane, which tells the story of visits to friends made on this journey, and Near Redland Bay, a study of the landscape near his home of that time.[43]
Fig.9: Frame from A TV Show, with David Perry looking through the window, 1975. [Courtesy: David Perry]
As a work of video art his most significant work from the Griffith University residency (1975) was Interior with Views. Representing a perfect moment in the dappled afternoon sunlight and a cup of tea it lasts the time it takes to boil the jug and make a cup of tea, and in that action sums up so much of what makes the Australian manner, encapsulating the quiet steadiness of his life as artist-in-residence in 1975. Somehow this simple work brings out the quiet pleasure of the Australian bush while being an elegant and spare reflection on just what video art can be. [Fig.14]
Fig.10: Frame from Interior with Views. Made at the Griffith University Creative Arts Workshop, 1975. [Courtesy: David Perry]
Meanwhile in 1970, for the Ubu adventurers, experimental film led to lightshows, the Sydney Film-makers Co-op [the Melbourne Film-makers Co-op was established slightly later c.1971 by Fred Harden and local film-makers such as Bert Deling and Arthur and Corinne Cantrill] and, in part, a revival of the Australian film industry. Subsequently over the early 70s, for Perry, Harden, Deling and others it led to further experiments with video, the attraction being that you could shoot long sequences of continuous material without having to change reels every few minutes and that you could see the results then and there, without having to wait for film processing. The downside was that, for low budget productions, it was black and white only, it was quite low resolution compared to 16mm film and editing it was next to impossible. The lack of colour was solved quite soon with the release of a colour capable Akai portapak (VT-150) in the early 70s, followed by the Sony U-matic (c.1974), but it took ages to solve the editing problem although makeshift solutions were developed pretty rapidly.[44] The resolution problem was solved more by judicious use than anything else and the fact that for many productions the information was far more important than beautiful pictures. So effectively video became the activist’s medium of choice, but for some it was possible to access the “broadcast standard” colour television production facilities available if one had the budget. The first to do this was Mick Glasheen whom I shall talk about in Chapter 17.
Endnotes
1 Perry, David (2004), Memoirs of a Dedicated Amateur. Self-published, Sydney: David Perry, p.4.
2 Perry, David, (2004), op cit., p.71.
3 Perry, David, (2004), op cit., p.4.
4 Perry, David, (2004), op cit., p.71. See also Mudie, 1997, op cit, pp.47-8.
5 Mudie, Peter, (1997) op cit., p.45.
6 Ibid.
7 Mudie, Peter, (1997) op cit., p.77.
8 Ibid.
9 Mudie, 1997, op cit., p.12 and note 19, p.19.
10 There is a copy of the manifesto in Mudie, Peter, (1997), op cit., p.77.
11 For details on the Image-Orthicon image pick-up tube, see . Retrieved 23/01/2017.
12 Mudie, 1997, op cit., p.97, and see picture on p.98 and the National Film Theatre Programme Notes, p.260.
13 Perry, conversation, 22/4/05
14 David Perry, notes from a conversation with the author on 22nd April, 2005.
15 Perry, David, (2004), Memoirs.... Mosman. Draft copy given to Stephen Jones (2010), p.98.
16 Wikipedia on Sound recording and reproduction. Accessed 1/2/2018.
17 See the CATS Video manual. by John [Kirk], Hoppy [Hopkins] 'n Cliff [Evans], Glebe, N.S.W. : Tomato Press, 1974. Available at The State Library of NSW and the National Library of Australia.
18 Author unknown (probably Mario Fairlie), The Editape 3670 Editing System , City Video, vol.1, no.1, Paddington Town Hall Trust for the Paddington Video Resource Centre, 445 Oxford St, Paddington. 1976.
19 The first TBC I saw was at the Paddington Video Access Centre in 1976. See Wikipedia on Quantel (See History )
20 Thoms, conversation with the author, op.cit.
21 Thoms, conversation with the author, op cit.
22 Isle of Wight Rock Festivals.
23 Thoms, conversation with the author, op cit..
24 Thoms, conversation with the author, op cit.
25 Thoms, conversation with the author, op cit.
26 Peter Mudie, Sydney Underground Movies: Ubu Films, Sydney, UNSW Press, 1997, p.262.
27 Closed Circuit Television.
28 Perry, 2004, op cit, p.112. This is the way Perry puts it, but Thoms (in an email of 3 May, 2006) points out that Hornsey College had been one of the first to go on strike during the student unrest of 1968 and was black banned by the teacher&srquo;s union, so when Perry accepted the teaching work he became, albeit unwittingly, a strike-breaker.
29 Perry, conversation, 22/4/05.
30 David Perry, Memoirs of a Dedicated Amateur, Valentine Press, Bellingen, NSW, 2014, p.121.
31 David Perry, ibid., p.119
32 Schneider, Ira and Korot, Beryl (eds) (1976) Video Art: An Anthology, New York: Harcourt, Brace and Jovanovich, pp.240-1.
33 David Perry, notes from a conversation with the author, 2005.
34 The difference between a sculptural object and an installation can become pretty thin in contemporary art, so this difference might be considered artificial by some critics.
35 My Dutch Newsreel, 1972 and reworked 1986. 16mm film and videotape; 5 minutes. Landscape studies shot in Holland and reflected on in London and Sydney. [Perry, 2004, op cit, p.125-6]
36 Perry, 2004, op cit, pp.135-6.
37 Transcribed from the video Utopian Memory Banks. (1973)
38 David Perry, Stephen Jones, David Perry, David Perry (Scanlines entry) and Utopian Memory Banks present fragments from the past Retrieved 25/01/2017.
39 Transcribed from the video Utopian Memory Banks (1973)
40 Perry, David, (2004), op cit., p.135.
42 Perry, David, (2004), op cit., p.140.
43 David Perry - Abbreviated Filmography, 1953-1998.
44 The Cats Video Training Manual of 1974 has a good description of how tape-to-tape “crash editing” was done in those days. See Kirk, John; Hopkins, John “Hoppy” and Evans, Cliff (1974) Cats Video Training Manual, Sydney: Tomato Press, pp.30-32. This is the Australian version of a manual that the authors produced for a series of training sessions they ran for community activists in London (around 1972?).