OXUM: GODDESS OF LOVE (2007)
Anti-Cinema by Stewart Home

This thirty minute film consists of alternating sections of colour intercut with both black and with white, and is topped and tailed with titles. The full sequence of alternating sections are shown initially with a duration of five seconds for each segment of the film, the sequence is then repeated with this duration reduced to three seconds, then one second, then five-twelfths of a second, then one-sixth of a second, then five-twelfths of a second, then one-sixth of a second. The tempo of these sequences increases dramatically in the second part of the film, since the initial slow cycle takes nearly half its running time. The soundtrack consists of repetitive trance beats.

There were a number of starting points for this film, and these lie in both the development of my own anti-cinematic works and the history of avant-garde cinema. One of my starting points for all this was Jim McBride's 1983 're-make' of Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless (A Bout de souffle - 1959). I really disliked McBride's movie but it did lead me to think through why Hollywood re-made films - which among other things was to re-work black and white movies in colour and to provide English language versions of 'world' cinema 'classics' with American stars. This led me to speculate about which film would constitute the most pointless re-make of all time, and I decided this might be Sleep (1963) - six hours of John Giorno asleep. After further thought I decided I'd also like to re-make Guy Debord's Screams In Favour of de Sade - which consists only of sections of white with speech, and black that are silent (the final 24 minutes of this feature being entirely black and silent). I have yet to re-make Sleep and it took me many years to get around to re-making Screams In Favour of de Sade. In my version of Screams (2002), Debord's French is rendered into English (with some changes) and I combine black with TV colour bars so that the film is in colour. In a later film The Eclipse and Re-Emergence of the Oedipus Complex (2004), I attempted to draw out the relationship between French avant-garde cinema of the early fifties and its commercialisation in the French new wave of the late fifties, as well as the relationship between these movements and Andy Warhol's film work.

Oxum - Goddess of Love continues these explorations but utilises as its starting point Tony Conrad's The Flicker (1966) which consisted solely of quickly alternating black and white with tonal accompaniment. The effect of The Flicker on its viewers is to produce visual hallucinations and the appearance of colour. As with Debord's Screams what is important is not what happens on-screen but what happens off-screen amongst the audience; but Conrad is using trance effects to induce visions, whereas Debord employs boredom to provoke his audience into breaking with their role as spectators and forces them to 'act for themselves'. That said, in both instances the same disparate effects might be achieved by other means (which may or may not resemble Debord and Conrad's work in terms of form, as was the case with my remake of Screams). In his early silent films, Andy Warhol splits the difference between the super-consciousness that emerges from Screams and the trance that The Flicker induces. Although Warhol's explorations in this area pre-date the appearance of The Flicker I do not think there is in any sense a historical progression at work here, since logically Warhol's movies provide a synthesis to Debord's thesis and Conrad's anti-thesis. Warhol is flirting with boredom and his emphasis is very much on flirting and seduction.

In putting together Oxum I decided not to use clean fields of colour but instead to digitally manipulate scans of slightly distressed paper. Likewise, unlike Conrad I was not forced to resort to a fast flicker throughout my film since I had introduced colour into the actual work; simultaneously I was interested in those hoary debates about colour music, and the film work of Maya Deren with its trance qualities, as well as the painterly constructions of Hélio Oiticica. I decided to use a simple drum pattern for the soundtrack, since the colour of the film itself would provide melody. Initially I’d wanted the drums to invoke Voodoo and thus Maya Deren (whose book and 'documentary' film on Voodoo were a source of both interest and inspiration for me). However when I viewed Oxum before I added the sound, I found myself taken back to 2004 when I'd attended a Candomblé (sometimes called Macumba) ritual for the Goddess Oxum in a broken down hall in a Brazilian town along the bay from Rio. I had already considered a number of titles for this film before watching it through for the first time, none of which specifically invoked either Candomblé or Oxum, but the specificity of the imagery this viewing conjured up was so striking that the title imposed itself upon me. In retrospect it seemed appropriate that the work should be given this proscriptive title because of the way this relates to Warhol's choice of the title Blow Job (1963) for one of his early films (the viewer sees only a man's head lit from above, and without the restrictive title this repeated shot might be interpreted in an almost infinite number of ways).

Oxum is intended for viewing in a number of ways, and I plan to make a gallery installation around it in the near future, as well as present it as a cinematic screening. However, Oxum is being presented initially in edited rather than full form on the internet. I have kept the titles in but removed the slower earlier sections. This "7 inch" edit makes the work appear closer to Conrad's The Flicker than is in fact the case. The Flicker meshes more easily with much contemporary post-rave popular culture than many of my other points of reference (and this is a source of both strength and weakness in Conrad's work); contemporary clubbers are familiar with flashing lights, strobe effects and the combination of such visuals with other trance elements. Whether the inhabitants of planet "get down" can be induced to move from this to the more rigorous dialectics of trance and super-consciousness found in Voodoo, Candomblé and the avant-garde (when it is willing to 'live' out its own 'death' in silence rather than the chatter of neo-critical production), remains to be seen. I became consciously aware of my desire to make Oxum on 3 June 2007 and I physically put it together using iMovie between 23 and 31 July 2007, doing the final edits on both the full version and the "7 inch mix" on 31 July 2007. Compressing Oxum for web streaming (which among other things reduces the number of frames per second) will have distorted the timing of the work in curious ways; planned accidents of this type are an integral part of my work…

Finally, when I made Oxum I had not seen “Ray Gun Virus” (1966) by Paul J. Sharits or “Archangel" (1966) by Victor Gruen (both of which I understand alternate solid colour fields), so any effect these films had on my work was simply the result of my scanty knowledge of their existence rather than the product of a viewing experience.

Edited version of "Oxum"

Notes on four Stewart Home anti-films

"Last Cannibal On Skid Row". Stewart Home short film 2008.

Stewart Home exhibition Ruins of Glamour/Glamour of Ruins

Art/Anti-Art

Film