"The entire process took three hours," said Bartlett. "The advantage I had was that all the material was on loops and I could just keep adjusting knobs and arranging appliances, cameras and such, until I had what I wanted, and then just film a burst of it." This videographic imagery was again processed through an ordinary cinematic optical printing system in Bartlett's studio. "The video colors were pale, but they were for that special texture that you can't get any other way. After I had that, I separated the film into AB rolls and dyed the strips with food color. One roll was dyed one color, another roll was dyed a different color. I built a trough and filled it full of dye and rolled the film from one reel through the trough and up along banks of heaters. I sat atop a ladder and very slowly rolled the film through this assemblage at a rate of about five or six inches a minute. Took me all night. A yoga dedication."
It was well worth the dedication. OFFON begins with a close-up of a huge blue-red eyeball that pulsates with the sound of a heartbeat. The eye is both human and video: suddenly it bursts into an electromagnetic field of vibrations and becomes a slowly-expanding force field, a tight ring of bright red in a pale blue universe. The red ring blossoms into a constellation of scattering sparks and suddenly we see the image of a mirror-doubled dancer throwing out multiple layers of arms like a human flower in bloom. "The multiplication of arms was done in cinematic optical printing," Bartlett explained. "But the multiplication of the multiplications was done in video: the halos around the arms were created by video feedback."
Pink and blue sea gulls wheel languidly around the disintegrating dancer, whose image slowly melts into an infinity of geometrical echoes. This evolves into a close-up of a girl's face that seems to be streaking off, disintegrating but somehow holding together. "That's a good example of hiding one technique inside another," said Bartlett, "by doing essentially the same thing with both systems and just compounding one action. Two pieces of film of the same shot were flipped over so that the left became the right. This was printed back onto the left, except out of register so that it staggered behind, apparently trying to catch up with the right. And the shot itself initially was a very slow zoom, rocking the camera back and forth while zooming in on the girl's face, who was herself rocking back and forth. When that was fed through the monitor it was refilmed by a zoom lens which was also rocking and swaying."
OFFON moves with dynamic thrust through a succession of images that never seem separate from one another, each evolving into videographic metamorphosis, exploding, glowing, disintegrating, cracking into infinity until it all ends with a final burst of kinetic energy. Later in 1968, Bartlett made a second videographic film, this time in black-and-white, called A Trip to the Moon. It involved a live panel discussion between Bartlett and friends on the subject of the new consciousness, cosmic unity, and metamorphosis. Films and slides of the moon and rockets were keyed into the scene randomly and certain interesting effects were achieved by associating audio and video feedback techniques. However, the film was too long (approximately half an hour) and not varied enough to support its length.
In the spring of 1969 Bartlett set about remaking A Trip to the Moon, but the film that resulted, simply titled Moon, became a wholly new work with only a few seconds of original footage remaining. Moon proved to be his most satisfying work, more impressive even than OFFON, because in addition to spectacular videographics it also was constructed around a substantial conceptual content. It was completed less than two months before the first moon landing, yet is more effective in its metaphysical evocative power than many of the films of the same thematic content made since then.
Moon begins in a black void as we hear a recording of the Apollo Eight astronauts reading from Genesis. Under this is a rather spacey track from the Steve Miller album, Sailor. Suddenly the black void is recognized as a night sky as we approach a distant airport whose lights seem to float in deep space. The image is flopped; the runway lights become a starry corridor similar to the slit-scan corridor of 2001. This gives way to stop-frame, optically distorted footage of astronauts boarding their craft before takeoff. The pale colors and unearthly motions lend a kind of dreamlike déjà-vu quality to the scene as these hooded creatures lumber slowly toward the giant rocket.
We see the ocean and a dawning sky. As though from anoth er time and place, we hear reverberating voices speaking of the Universal One, cosmic unity, the I Ching. A purple face appears in the sky and is fragmented into infinity. Waves of the ocean— obeying lunar gravity— crash in slow motion, and over this we see skip-frame video-distorted scenes of the lunar module simulator spinning and maneuvering in space.
Now we're inside a television control room with several monitors reflecting the faces of men whose words seem far away. The control center appears like some window onto a video space of another dimension. A roaring wind takes us soaring through towering clouds, an ethereal atmosphere similar to the opening sequence of 8½. Aqueous fingers of de-beamed video phosphors stretch across the sky like phantom visitors from another galaxy. A spaceman whirls through the clouds, flashing and sparkling like an asteroid. The graphic tempo increases with flashes of light and a tremendous roar until the final crescendo. The last image we see is the ocean receding from a beach.
Scott Barlett: Moon. 1969. VTR/16mm. film.
Color. 8 min.". . . A purple face appears in the sky and is fragmented into infinity..."
Moon is a beautiful, eerie, haunting film, a product of the New Surrealism, all the more wonderful for the fact that we do not actually see the moon: only the manifestation of its power here on earth: the ebb and flow of the waters that cover three-quarters of our planet. The film contains some of the most spectacular manipulations of video techniques Bartlett has yet achieved, sending fiery rainbows into a cloudy sky, transforming men and rockets into shattering crystals, creating a portrait of the cosmos in continual metamorphosis.
The magic of the film [said Bartlett] is its totally undefined meaning, the purely visceral message. The message could be called a code that we're trying to learn about, a code for connections to new space and new consciousness, a code for making it to the moon metaphysically, paths for your mind to get out where you can reach anything. In some ways technique equals meaning: the stop-frame action means mechanically defined space and time and the feedback layers are like accordion time— all the times stacking up on top of one another.
Commercial filmmakers use certain images or techniques as standard recognizable givens. Like the way a dissolve for them means the passage of time. But for us dissolve means "blend." Not so much one, not so much the other, but something in between the two, getting from one to another. It's valuable to hang somewhere between two different realities as a dramatic element. Dali does that. You see a face but then you realize the face is made up of a woman's ass and a cow and a flagpole or something. Your mind goes from one understood state to another understood state and you realize that you've voyaged in that process.