Audio transcription
For more interviews and talks, visit the Harvard Film Archive Visiting Artists Collection page.
Grammar for Listening Part I & Grammar for Listening Part II and Pilgrimage from Scattered Points introduction and Q&A with David Pendleton and Luke Fowler. Saturday December 5, 2015.
John Quackenbush 0:00
December 5 2015, the Harvard Film Archive screened Grammar for Listening Part One and Grammar for Listening Part Two. This is a recording of the introduction and the discussion that followed. Participating are HFA Programmer David Pendleton and filmmaker Luke Fowler.
David Pendleton 0:18
Good evening, ladies and gentlemen, and adventurous cinephiles. Some of you may be all of the above. My name is David Pendleton, and on behalf of the Harvard Film Archive, I want to welcome you all to the second part of a very special evening here in the basement of the Carpenter Center. At 6:30, we had a special screening of the latest film by Rebecca Baron, who is well known to those of us here at Harvard through her work as a Radcliffe fellow exhibiting in the Carpenter Center, and teaching here in Visual and Environmental Studies.
Now I have the distinct pleasure of presenting in his first public appearance here in Boston and Cambridge, a young filmmaker whose work it's important to know—for those of you who keep up with contemporary experimental film—and his name is Luke Fowler. Over the past several years, his work has begun to be exhibited in museums, galleries, cinematheques and film festivals around the world. He was the first recipient of the Derek Jarman Award. He comes to us from Glasgow, Scotland, although he's been living here for the past few months as a Radcliffe fellow.
And so I should actually thank some people for making this evening possible. He is here as one of the Radcliffe-Film Study Center fellows and so I do want to thank the Radcliffe Institute, especially Judy Vishniac there. And also the Film Study Center, meaning the unholy trinity of Cozette Evangeline, Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Ernst Karel. We're very grateful to them. They bring a number of really interesting filmmakers. In fact, my first exposure to Luke's work was a few years ago when Luke was here for a private screening thanks to those people. And so now, we're very pleased and excited to be presenting it in public screenings two evenings, tonight and tomorrow night. Let me also point out that tomorrow night, we're starting at seven o'clock, our usual time, so you need to get there a little bit earlier tomorrow.
In those past several years, Luke has amassed quite a large amount of work. In fact, the two nights that we're showing here, are, I think, a very representative sampling of the work but by no means exhaustive of it—often going back and forth between working with archival footage, and footage that he himself has shot. There's a couple of terms that we could use that are important to describe the main themes in Luke's work. Two of them, I think, are in the title to our program “Outside the Sound.” One of which is sound itself. Sound is perhaps the central preoccupation in Luke Fowler's films and the axis around a lot of his investigation of the question of the moving image or the cinematic image with his joining of sound and image. Luke also works as a musician. And particularly tonight's program is really focused on Luke's work about sound. What we're going to see is two films from the three films that make up A Grammar for Listening from 2009. These are three short films that Luke made—each in collaboration with a different sound artist, and or composer. We'll be seeing Part One and Part Two, made in conjunction with Lee Patterson and Éric La Casa, respectively. Then, in the middle, we're going to show an earlier work between the two parts of Grammar for Listening, an earlier work that represents another aspect of Luke's work, which is the use of archival footage, to document the history of various kinds of outsiders, or outsideness. And we could talk more about that. I mean, in a sense, the idea of being outside is also important in Luke's films, as you'll see in Grammar for Listening. In this case, what we'll be seeing in the second part—in Pilgrimage from Scattered Points—is a documentary history of the Scratch Orchestra, which was a performing ensemble in England formed by a group of experimental British composers led by Cornelius Cardew beginning in the late 1960s. And so the film itself brings together a lot of important parts of Luke's preoccupations, I think. Questions of collectivity and collaboration, looking at the history of outsiders or radicals, and using the archive in creative ways to tell those histories. I think that's all I need to say about the three films or that I need to say about tonight. We'll go ahead and get started. And by started, I mean, we'll start by inviting Luke up to say a few words.
Also, please turn off any devices you have on your person that might make noise or shed light. We'll go through the three films, one after the other. And afterwards, Luke will come back up here to answer your questions. And I'll be here to moderate a little bit. But for now, before we begin the films, please welcome Luke Fowler himself.
[APPLAUSE]
Luke Fowler 6:01
Thank you for attending. I'd like to say a couple of thank-yous as well before talking about the films. Thank you to the Radcliffe Institute, to David, Haden, Jeremy and to the projectionist, also to the Film Study Center and Ernst Karel who've made me feel so welcome here in the last three months.
These three films that we’re showing tonight…. Well first, we're going to look at A Grammar for Listening which as part of a three-part series, we're going to see just two of them that looks at the relationship between sound and image and also tries to address the relationship in cinema between the sound recordist or the composer, and the director and to, I suppose, try to de-hierarchize the relationship between those two individuals to create a more equal relationship. I always felt when watching films that the role of the composer or sound recordist was one that was denigrated and subservient to the director. And in this really, these are equal pairings. They are collaborations where everything was done from the conception of the film, to the making of the images, the discussion of where the locations—everything was done in partnership with my fellow artists and sound recordists and musicians, whatever you want to call them. So that creates the series, A Grammar for Listening, which were made in collaboration with Lee Patterson, Éric La Casa, and Toshiya Tsunoda. And then, we're actually going to watch them in a sort of lopsided sequence where we'll have in between the two Grammar parts, an earlier film I made about the composer Cornelius Cardew and the Scratch Orchestra from 2006. And this is the third film of my filmography.
And by way of introduction, I just want to say that I’m something of an autodidact both as a filmmaker and as a musician. I studied printmaking at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art in Dundee, so I didn't have any background in filmmaking. And I also don't have any formal training as a musician either. I was what Cornelius Cardew called a “musical innocent” and this sort of person that he wanted to enlist for his Scratch Orchestra, which was someone who didn't have any musical background or training, but had an enthusiasm for music and perhaps a training in visual art. So, when I made the film about the Scratch Orchestra, it really came out of the fact that there was a poverty of information about the Scratch Orchestra of any great length and of any great detail. And since making the film that has been corrected to some degree through John Tilbury’s memoir of Cornelius Cardew, called Cornelius Cardew, a Life Unfinished, which John was working on whilst I was making the film. So that in any rate is a great read and I implore you all to read it. And it, of course, goes into much greater detail about Cardew’s life than the film ever could.
But for me, as someone that was beginning to start working in improvised music and beginning to become interested in British avant garde music from the 60s, I read a lot of hearsay about, there's a lot of mythologizing about the Scratch Orchestra. But really, you know, the only recording that existed was “The Great Learning,” which is actually a composition by Cornelius Cardew, and a bootleg ten-inch record that was brought here by David Jackman. And so really, the journey for me was one to find out more about the Scratch Orchestra and what actually took place and the relationships and it's a sort of historical account, I suppose. And hopefully, more than that, as well. So we're not gonna have any breaks, we're just gonna go straight through, and then David and I will be in conversation afterwards. Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
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David Pendleton 11:42
Please welcome back Luke Fowler!
Thank you very much, Luke, for the films. I thought maybe I would start. Yeah, if you have– I thought you're gonna say something. Maybe I'll start with a question or two.
I was struck this time by the differences between the two parts of Grammar for Listening. The first part I find so fascinating and intriguing. But then Part Two, I just find incredibly beautiful, and–
Luke Fowler
Thank you.
David Pendleton
You're welcome. I'm wondering how much of that is due to the different collaborators, the difference between the two films are due to the difference in the collaborations between the two. And maybe you can just say a little bit about who those people are, and the difference that you found in working with the two of them?
Luke Fowler 13:00
Sure. So the first film is a collaboration with Lee Patterson, who's a sound artist based in Manchester. And the film really revolves around these sets of dialogues between us. And that's the case for all three of the films that are collaborations. And so what sort of tended to happen was a sort of like, invitation for him to come to Glasgow, and then for me to go to Manchester and film. And then when he arrived and when I arrived, we then made the plan of what we were going to do, but nothing was structured or preordained. And a lot of the sites for the filming came out of just his interests or sonic interests, and then he sort of reciprocated when I came to Manchester. He thought of a place that we would both find a worthwhile experience. And so Lee works a lot with contact microphones and mic-ing up foodstuffs, and he’s been known to make mic up sparklers. So he's interested in the internal life of objects, of sounds.
David Pendleton
When you say “he mics up foodstuffs,” you mean he attaches microphones to–
Luke Fowler
–foodstuffs and then burns them to release their energy, as we saw with the walnut burning. And he's also worked with other liquids and substances like treacle and things like that. So things that you wouldn't expect to have a sonic quality or character to them. He has access to that world. But he also makes field recordings and he's a very excellent field recordist in my opinion, and he works compositionally with field recording, and so does Éric. But Éric, I suppose, comes from more of an IRCAM electroacoustic background being French and that. [LAUGHTER] Although he's certainly not an establishment composer.
David Pendleton 15:52
Except to the extent that IRCM has a certain kind of establishment.
Luke Fowler
No, I think he just like stares outside and, you know, knocks at the door and you tell him to fuck off, come back with some credentials. We're all punks... basically.
David Pendleton 16:13
Well, this is sort of a slight detour from where I was thinking I was going, but I’m curious now thinking about this idea of music, like to what extent is there music in these films, because we're kind of at this border, particularly in the first film. I feel like, in Part Two, there's a lot more of what's recognizable as music. But there’s this really interesting…. it's almost like we're moving along this spectrum, this noise spectrum or sound spectrum, from sound to music, with musique concrète somewhere in between, in these films. I don't know if that's your understanding of what goes on or if that’s their understanding…
Luke Fowler
What’s the question?
David Pendleton
To what extent is this sound considered music? Do these people think of themselves as composers or as musicians? Or do you think of it as music?
Luke Fowler 17:02
What was John Cage's phrase? “You don't have to call it music if the term offends you.” Or something like that. Yeah, I consider it to be music. But definitely Éric’s part is much more compositional, and I think all the sounds are natural sounds that we're recording on location. But it sounds like he's done some filtering to them. And there's much more of a montage, perhaps, of layering, and that is an equivalent to the visual montage.
David Pendleton 17:45
Right? Right. Well, that was one thing I was going to say is that it seems like Part One of Grammar for Listening really is about thinking about what these sounds are or the relationship between the sound and the image. And, the second part seems to be much more about montage in a way. Because often, in Part One, at least there are overlaps. Sometimes what we see and what we hear are the same thing. Whereas in Part Two, there's much less of that. And you have moments where the creaking of the ropes juxtaposed with a shot of like a blade of grass, for instance, which almost could be this sort of Einsteinian moment of a montage where the sound and the image combine to give you a different image.
Luke Fowler 18:30
Sure. Yeah, I think we were thinking about vertical montage. And I think we were thinking about trying to make the three pieces very discreet and have a definite structural and visual organization, visual and sonic organization. So yeah, there’s sync-sound in the first one, and there's little sync-sound in the second one, and the colors are used as sort of chapter headings to delineate when and I think in each chapter, there's maybe two locations. I can't recall now whether the locations are… Yeah, there's not really a diaristic like, or indexical relationship between the montage or the... Each chapter has maybe two places or two locations, and then it's just, we're working with them. The first cut of the film was much more chaotic. There was really no sense of location. I think it was much more desperate. And Éric had a problem with that, so we changed it.
David Pendleton 19:52
Are there questions in the audience that people are dying to ask? I've got a lot more questions. But yeah, there's a mic. Here, hang on a second. We'll get a microphone to you. Jeremy will pass you the mic, just raise your hand.
Audience 1 20:08
I'm very curious about your use of the word “grammar,” which seemed singularly inapposite to me, but maybe I'm too verbal.
Luke Fowler 20:20
Well, it’s a nonlinguistic grammar.
David Pendleton 20:28
Well, “grammar” is also the name that we have for books that help us learn a language, right? I mean, that's how I always thought of it, that there's sort of a pedagogical aspect to the films in a way.
Luke Fowler 20:41
Right. And, you know, there's definitely a pedagogical aspect to the way someone like Lee uses sound recording in the environment. When we were recording together, there was often people coming up and asking him what he was doing, and then he would let them hear. And so they would hear the environment in a new way that they hadn't heard it before, and perhaps went on to become recordists. [DAVID LAUGHS] We'd like to think.
David Pendleton 21:12
To what extent are you conscious of there being a pedagogical impulse in these films? And particularly seeing them in juxtaposition to Pilgrimage from Scattered Points too, I feel like there's a way in which Cardew’s project maybe had also some sort of pedagogical impulses behind it, and that you picked up some of those impulses?
Luke Fowler 21:40
Yeah, I mean, as I said, in the initial intro, they’re the films of an autodidact. They're largely about my experience, learning how to use a camera, how to make a montage, thinking through ideas of the relationship between sound and image about how to tell a history that hasn't been told. Yeah, creating our own history as well. With that Cardew film, looking at it again, I really felt like this wasn't a history that had been told by official channels. And I felt that's why I needed to do it, because it hadn’t been told. And it was important… to me anyway… and to many other people, I think.
David Pendleton 22:30
But there's also the pedagogical impulse of trying to encourage people to think about sound differently when they watch a film?
Luke Fowler
Yeah, sure.
David Pendleton
To sort of reverse that hierarchy—to go to some things you were saying earlier on.
Luke Fowler 22:45
Absolutely, yeah.
David Pendleton 22:48
I was reading the statement that you made. You were talking about musique concrète, and this idea that a philosopher had about musique concrète, that it was a sort of reduced listening, is that the term?
Luke Fowler 23:02
Well, I think we were talking a lot about Schaeffer and Shaffer [sic?]. It's funny how they have really similar names, these two people who are like figureheads of sound studies. But, you know, completely coming at the world from two different perspectives. And we were talking about those things, as we made the film—like, about soundscape, the World Soundscape Project and about the notion of the acousmatic, of what does it mean to put an image to the sound? Does it enhance it? Does it add anything? Is this completely animatic? Is this even a worthwhile exercise?
David Pendleton 23:55
Right. I mean, well, there's a lot of cinephiles who—looking back to cinema's silent beginnings—tend to privilege the image and to see the sound as a secondary. So that is—what I assume—part of the impulse or this idea of a grammar of teaching a new sort of language or a new sort of experience is like trying to reverse that hierarchy.
Luke Fowler 24:20
Sure. And I think, the way that the camera is used is not really in a way of a traditional language. It’s trying to use the camera as an “objective correlative”—if I borrow Elliott's term for how we listen and how the microphone works as well. Because listening and the way a microphone works, and the way the ears work, are two completely different things.
David Pendleton 24:51
Right, the idea of reduced listening is that musique concrète encourages us just to hear the sound phenomenally, if you like, and not to jump to musical, cultural associations. And so a reduced viewing, I presume, would be trying to experience these images in a way purely, or experiencing them as visual phenomenon, first of all, before going on to assigning meaning, or other associations.
Luke Fowler 25:22
Sure. I mean, I definitely think that there is a social significance as well to sound. I think you can read sound in a way that is different from how... I mean, in a way, it's a continuation of what Schaeffer was talking about in terms of like, noise pollution. But perhaps in a less didactic manner. We were trying to strive towards something that was less didactic.
David Pendleton 25:55
That seems to get to the difference between the two parts really, in the way that I feel like the first one is all about sort of stripping things out. And then the second part is about montage and bringing back in the kinds of associations that can happen with that.
Are there other questions?
Luke Fowler 26:11
There must be some questions! [LAUGHS]
David Pendleton 26:13
I'll stop... There's a question here. And then, Olivier, is that a question, or are you…? Okay, we'll come to you next.
Audience 2 26:20
I was curious if you ever had pairings that just didn't work at all, in terms of, they didn't make any sense? I say it, because as I was watching this, I felt like I could almost always sort of make some sort of story to explain, like, why the image was with the sound.
Luke Fowler
If I didn’t have what?
David Pendleton 26:36
Juxtapositions, you mean, of image and sound? That made no sense.
Luke Fowler 26:40
I don't know what you mean by “sense.”
David Pendleton 26:43
Well, he said he would come up with narrative reasons sometimes for how to bridge the–
Audience 2 26:47
As I watched it, I could almost have it seem like a plausible dream I could have. But if you ever got things that just seemed like, pure noise when you put them together?
Luke Fowler 26:58
Oh! Yeah, good question. I mean, there were certainly things that, like I said, in the first edit, it was quite visually incoherent. And, therefore, for Éric, that meant that sonically, it was going to be a challenge for him to make a soundtrack according to what I had sent him from the montage. Yeah, I think it was too noisy visually.
David Pendleton 27:29
Well, both of these questions remind me of some things that are said in Pilgrimage from Scattered Points where there's this question of the relationship between the artist and the audience. And whether the artist is there to provide an experience that the audience must then make up its own mind about? The question of concessions to the audience, etc. That was one of the reasons why I wanted to put this film in the middle of the two; I'm wondering to what extent Cardew’s Scratch Orchestra, in some ways, informed your practice as a filmmaker.
Luke Fowler 28:04
I mean, all the films have informed my practice as a filmmaker and as a human being. And, you know, I'm thinking through films. That's how I survive in the world, you know.
David Pendleton 28:21
Right. But it seems like maybe the final result is not necessarily a meaning so much as perhaps an experience or a process or...
Luke Fowler 28:30
Yeah, I'm trying to have an experience and then offer something back—about what I've experienced—to an audience. I hope they're generous films in some way. They're not just obtuse.
David Pendleton 28:51
Yeah, Olivier and then the back in the middle.
Audience 3 28:56
There's been a few references to the history of electroacoustic music and acousmatic, very multichannel immersive environments. And something I found interesting with the Grammar for Listening film was the fact that they're on 16 millimeter, and there's this aspect of material decomposition, and there's kind of inherent limitations to sound on a 16 millimeter print. And if that was a consideration—either one of your considerations, or one of the considerations of the sound artists working on the films?
Luke Fowler
Right, well, for those that didn't notice, the first film has a separate sync soundtrack and that meant that this soundtrack was played on a computer and it was synced by hand by the projectionist. Thank you. He did a very good job. And the second film is printed onto the optical soundtrack and in a way, I gave both options to the filmmaker because when you print something on an optical soundtrack, then you're reduced to mono. And also, a very restricted frequency shelf. But the advantage of it is you get perfect synchronization. So that's the trade off really.
And so Lee really wanted the full frequency spectrum of the sound and of the stereo image. And Éric was very adamant about having synchronization. I mean, when I look at these films, I think about the death of the film laboratory and of film as a craft in the United Kingdom. They're incredibly badly graded. With my eyes, now, I can see that. I didn't see that at the time. (I'm looking at the screen as if there’s something there!) The technicians totally cocked up the coloring of the colored leader in between the first time it was printed. The sound is terribly noisy, because there was an action against using a type of applique. I'm probably getting too technical here, but it meant that this soundtrack was never as black as it used to be; therefore the sound is more degraded, and it's more likely to sound like a 78. You know, it's more likely to break down over time. So really, the film also speaks of this situation of film craft, and how difficult it is at the present age.
David Pendleton 31:59
Well, what about the format—just to add to follow up with that for a second—the format of Pilgrimage from Scattered Points, which we’re showing on DigiBeta? It seems to be that you shot the interviews in a variety of formats, as far as I can tell. And I'm also wondering that the variety of formats in the archival footage that you used.
Luke Fowler 32:19
Yeah, film’s a bit of a pig's ear.
David Pendleton
I'm sorry?
Luke Fowler
Film’s a bit of a pig's ear.
David Pendleton
I don't understand what you’re saying.
[LAUGHTER]
Unknown Speaker 32:26
Okay. [LAUGHS] It’s a bit of a mess. It’s all over the place. It's a hodgepodge. It's a collage.
David Pendleton 32:34
Yeah, I guess I just didn't know if you had any thoughts about the advantages or disadvantages of working with digital, with video, with film? I mean, there's some moments in Pilgrimage, it almost looks like a video art aesthetic, in some cases, with the superimpositions and things like that.
Luke Fowler 32:55
I take that as a compliment.
David Pendleton 33:01
Yeah!
Luke Fowler 33:03
[LAUGHS] Like I said, I think that was like the third film that I’d made. And, you know, I sort of hopefully feel like there is an exponential curve to the craft of filmmaking as it goes on, but it definitely feels a bit…. You know, there's certain things that are less desirable to me now. But you know, I'm not one of these people that is really precious and goes back and re-edits things and can't put it down, you know. Just be gone with it! It's the past.
David Pendleton 33:39
Right. But I really like that film.
Luke Fowler 33:43
I like Cardew, so… That's why I like the film.
David Pendleton 33:47
Gotcha.
Hang on a second, there's a question there in the middle, and then we'll come up here to the front.
Audience 4 33:55
Yes, I was very interested, by particularly the sound of the rope. It was very rich. And it makes me very much feel that indeed, there's all these very beautiful sounds that surround us and we don't have quite the grammar—to use your term—or library or ways to get to these sounds and sometimes you had a shot, and usually I couldn't get even the scale of it. I was wondering, maybe I was a rat somewhere. And you know, there were some doors that– It was blurred, but maybe it was in some high-rise and it was at the scale of human or whether it was the scale of a rat? And back to the first movie when this guy Lee has this capability to hear into the microstructure of the material which I found most interesting. I'm very curious to hear in the hidden as well. If I were a rat or a mouse, I would hear something different back in my hole. So anyhow, a [INAUDIBLE] excuse me as well.
Back to the work you did—you yourself—with a camera, you tend to have this fascination for differences which occur in your work. Nature and grass come very often or you point to the sky. In terms of the grass, you have this technique which I find very interesting, and I would like you to tell me how it relates to the sound, in terms of filters, right? The first movie, you zoom out, or you zoom back, and of course, then back on zooming mark [AUDIO CUTS OUT]
Luke Fowler 35:40
I suppose, yeah, I was thinking about sound scale, and the scale of the sound as it relates to the scale of the image. But also, that's important to say that it's quite, sort of posthumous, because when we made the film, we didn't know what each other was doing, really. I mean, when I'm talking about Éric and I—apart from the synchronized sections with Lee Patterson—we didn't really know what each other was up to. Sometimes he would let me hear. But yeah, the idea of sound scale is something I feel like I lament the loss of that, you know. Altman talks about this idea of sound scale. I can see Ernst nodding there! And, proxemics, you know, the proximity of the microphone to the camera.
I’ll tell you a story, like when Lee was recording some of the grass, he said to me, he had this like epiphany, because he heard the sound of a flute in the recording of one blade of grass, and he wasn't stoned or anything, but he stood up, and then he realized that there was a field of blades of grass [LAUGHS] and each one had a slightly different micro-pitch, and he thought, “Oh shit. I’m gonna be here all day.” Kind of that was what it was, like, you know, when you were filming it, as well: someone would take you somewhere, and they would get involved in their recording, and you didn't want to interfere with their recording. But you'd be sitting there sort of like a bored schoolboy, just awkward, you know, thinking, “Oh, god, what am I going to do here?” And then that was a good sort of disciplining, because then I realized that I could actually film something in even the most nondescript places, because you know, the acoustic of a space doesn't necessarily make it an interesting space visually, and vice versa. And that was, I suppose, part of the exercise of the problems of the film.
David Pendleton 38:23
Then the ability to juxtapose those differences, creates an interest or can create interest.
There is a question up here in the front, and then we'll go back to the middle.
Audience 5 38:37
So thanks very much. Those were three fascinating films. And so I was particularly excited to see the Cardew film. I had seen the little clip of it, I think, that's on the New York Times’ website, and it was great to see the whole thing.
Luke Fowler
I didn't get paid for that. [LAUGHS]
Audience 5
I think there was a little preview… It was in some film festival or something.
Luke Fowler
Oh, okay.
Audience 5
It was like a two-minute clip; it had burdocks in it.
Luke Fowler 39:00
Should get my agent to look into that.
Audience 5 39:01
Yeah, yeah. Sue ‘em! But I'm curious. So I've read Stockhausen serves Imperialism, his book.
Luke Fowler
That's a great book, isn’t it?
Audience 5
It's fantastic!
Luke Fowler 39:15
I mean, that was the first book that I read about the Scratch Orchestra, and it was really the only text that existed at the time.
Audience 5 39:22
Okay. Yeah, it's interesting to see the extent, sort of, almost to be a fan of early Cardew is you can't be a fan of later Cardew because later Cardew repudiates early Cardew, in a way.
Luke Fowler
Exactly.
Audience 5
And so I'm kind of curious to hear your thoughts about how convincing is his politicisation to you? And like to do sort of folk songs, revolution songs, do you think that's effective in politicizing people or motivating the masses? Does that create a better connection to people, do you think?
Luke Fowler 40:00
You see, his analysis chimes with me, but I think how he put that analysis into practice, I think, that's where it's maybe flawed, I think. Although, you know, in saying that, I think the piano music, like the Thalmann Variations is really beautiful—and especially Rzewski’s recordings of it—, so I think he was trying to work through his idea of what political music would be. And it’s interesting meeting Christian Wolff and Luigi Nono—I mean, I never met Luigi Nono, but I visited the archive in Venice—they also had these political epiphanies and realized that in different ways. And Christian was saying—because he was really good friends with Cardew and he stayed with him in the 70s. And he wrote a piece for the Scratch Orchestra and also for AMM called “Edges.” And Christian sort of also stopped making really avant garde music and started writing music, like for Harriet Tubman, you know, where he’d include folk songs. But he just said that they had a very different approach, because Cardew basically, was trying to reprogram himself and make himself into like, a working class guy, when he was actually a member of the bourgeoisie. His father's like a really high-establishment potter, Michael Cardew, and his mother was a Bluecoat curator, you know, so Christian was like, “I’m dyed-in-the-wool middle class. I’ll always be middle class, and I can't change that,” whereas Cardew kind of reinvented himself. But that's it. I don't know if that answers the question.
David Pendleton 42:32
Well, it's interesting. It's an interesting discussion, because there was a lot of that happening in the time, I think, particularly in intellectual circles and artistic circles in the late 60s, early 70s.
Luke Fowler 42:43
Sort of “dressing down.” Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
David Pendleton 42:47
Yes, there's another question, there in the middle.
Audience 6 42:53
[AUDIO MISSING]...mostly, deeply annoying, among the few, but–
Luke Fowler 42:56
That's okay, cuz you're sitting next to the guy that really liked them, [LAUGHS] so you kind of cancel each other out.
Audience 6 43:04
But one of the images that interested me greatly actually was what seemed to be a zero point in which you have the sound transformed into a visual image. And I wonder if you could talk about that a little more, and what that meant to you? I can't even remember actually what the sound effect was. So could you talk about that a little bit? I believe it was the second film, right?
David Pendleton 43:34
The first film, if we're thinking of the same moment. A Grammar for Listening with the sound rendered as a pattern of light? It's like–
Luke Fowler
Oh, yeah!
David Pendleton
–the string vibrating, and the way that we see it, it looks like these little pinwheels of light, kind of, in a way.
Luke Fowler 43:49
Yeah, that basically Lee also amplifies springs, and there's this thing called an EBow which induces vibrations and strings and other metals or other objects, but it’s traditionally used for guitar strings. And he uses it on these springs, and he noticed that when he was doing so, you actually see a kind of waveform physically. It's like the Chladni patterns, where you play certain frequencies and you put dust down or sand, and you actually see the waveform of the sound or equivalent of that, really, but with these very complex harmonic tones that were created by the spring being excited.
David Pendleton 44:59
Yeah, no that’s a striking moment...
Luke Fowler 45:02
Glad I could answer that! Phew… That was a hard one!
David Pendleton 45:04
[LAUGHS] No, but I think that you refer to it as a “zero point” because there is a way in which the first film, in particular, is all about these different ways of thinking about sound and image together. And you're right. And in some ways, that's an extreme, because it's like, the two almost become the same thing where what you see is exactly what you hear, and vice versa, as opposed to the much more associated montage of the second film.
Luke Fowler
Yeah. I think I got away with that.
David Pendleton
No, but I think it's interesting to start with that, in a way, and then to play out from there.
Luke Fowler 45:36
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
David Pendleton 45:38
I mean, there's a way in which also the fact that the sections in the first film are delineated by Roman numerals and titles as opposed to fields of color in the second film that says a lot, I think, about the difference between the two films. And the juxtaposition of the two I think is fascinating.
Are there other questions? It's been kind of a long evening, and we have tomorrow night still to go.
Luke Fowler 46:06
I hope you all come back tomorrow.
David Pendleton 46:07
Yes! We’ll be showing two of Luke's more recent films that are in many ways different—very different from what we've seen tonight—although there's definitely continuations in terms of history, retelling history, use of archival footage, but a lot of other things that come out too about subculture, identity and history and things like that. In any case, thank you all for coming. Thank you, Luke, for being here to present your work.
[APPLAUSE]
Luke Fowler 46:37
Thanks for your attention.
David Pendleton 46:38
Tomorrow night at seven!
©Harvard Film Archive
