"OFF ON by Scott Bartlett (1968) is what I highlight as a big inspiration, or as it was stated:
"films that greatly influenced my film career and my appreciation for the film industry".
OFFON by by Scott Bartlett -- 9 min. color sound 1968
"A classic early example of creating a INTERMEDIA & HYBRID finished work using film, using video, using loops and rojection materials from light shows as inspiration was OFFON by Scott Bartlett with assistance from Tom Dewitt, Manny Meyer, and Michael McNamee in 1967."
Watch OffOn on YouTube at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hEr9Z7Q4ZxY
Description of Bartlett from Martin Rumsby, "The Virtual Avant-Garde" 2014
"Scott Bartlett (1943-1990), made experimental and erotic films as well as film loops for West Coast light shows. His film Off On (1967), made up from his film loops, was the first 'electrovideographic jam.'
Bartlett's romantic, West Coast cool sensibility clashed with the then prevailing New York 'structuralist' school -- OffOn demolished the artificial boundaries between film and video, and set off a wave of similar works that fused video, then an emerging medium, with the filmic image..."
" Bartlett's other films which included, Moon 1969 (1969), Serpent (1971), Medina (1972), Metanomen (1966), Lovemaking (1970) were much admired by Francis Ford Coppola and George Lucas"
-- Wheeler Winston Dixon, 'Off On: The Film that Changed the Language of Cinema'. (cinespot.com/2013/11/offon-film-changed-language-cinema/) - March 30, 2014
Roll history as recited by Al Razutis:
"I'll never forget being at a small underground film screening, done in a San Francisco loft in 1968, when a guy with curly hair (Bartlett) came in 'straight from the lab' with his 'new film' and they put it on the projector -- the film was "OFFON" by Scott Bartlett and it blew me and the audience away...
"That's right. Straight from the lab to the screen, 1967 underground 'cinema' was a wild place to be and wild things to see.
"There was none of the 'church of experimental cinema' attitude, proceedings, with podiums, tiresome Q & A after screening, then getting drunk. That came later, when films were re-named "experimental" and government grants (in Canada) paid the way to the party and then 'Gov. Gen. Awards' when the well connected couldn't walk anymore and the group portrait looked like a mortuary posing its stiffs."
LINKS and FURTHER COMMENTS:
Al Razutis: "My page on synaesthetic and expanded cinema, to include my own films and 'Videographics':
http://www.alchemists.com/visual_alchemy/intermedia-syn.html#hybrids
"The 1970 book 'Expanded Cinema' by Gene Youngblood chronicled some of the exciting works of the 60's and 70's in a lasting way. Also from my page
http://www.alchemists.com/visual_alchemy/intermedia-syn.html#youngblood
"Just to restate the obvious: the 'underground film scene' inspired many to make their own films. That is to say it wasn't just for 'consumers' but also for 'film producers', that's how living culture (not dead on arrival shit from Hollywood) worked for our generation. Yeah, living. Yeah, living still, not dead recollections collecting dust -- take a look at media art and you'll know what I mean.
THE WIKI ON THE FILM
"OffOn is an experimental film created by Scott Bartlett made and released in 1968. It is most notable for being one of the first examples in which film and video technologies were combined. The nine-minute film combines a number of video loops which have been altered through re-photography or video colorization, and utilizes an electronic sound track to create its unique effect.
"In 2004, the film was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant". (Wikipedia)
On the relationship of Scott Bartlett's OFF ON with Pat O'Neill's 7362 film, both made in 1967-8:
"They are alike, and a comparison is warranted. I carried OffOn's answer print to an avant garde film show at UC Berkeley in 1967, not knowing '7362' was receiving its Bay Area premier showing. It was one of those rare moments of independent creativity that start new confluences in intellectual pursuits. Of course, I knew well enough what 7362 was, because it is how we were able to produce not only OffOn but the light shows that were edited into the OffOn. Did P O'N produce light shows?"
- Tom DeWitt, contributor to OFFON film, 2004.
"Making of OffOn" by Cynthia Anne Haagens is at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yASi81-qxRI
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Cynthia Anne Haagens remembers:
Scott invited me to help complete “Making Off On” after the UCLA class was past; I chose to present the material generated in his class as a film-within-a-film, or perhaps I should say, as a “video-film” within a film, since Scott had transferred the yield of his class’s shoot from video to film.
Additional visual material in 'Making Off On', which Scott created before teaching the UCLA class, are his film loops, intially created for projection in psychedelic light shows at rock concert events during the psychedelic counterculture’s brief but spectacular apex.
My collaboration with Scott on 'Making Off On' began in Summer 1981, when my filmmaking mentor August Cinquegrana and I met with Scott on the beach near his home in Playa del Rey, Scott had an 800-foot reel of video transferred to 16mm film in his hand, along with a smaller 200-foot roll in a manila envelope. ( ... ) Around the same time, Scott was Special Visual Effects Director for the movie 'Altered States', and he was often transferring video to film, film to video, and video back to film again.
It was my idea to make the film into a documentary artist biopic, especially since, according to Scott, MOMA New York had given him a modest amount of completion funding and expected a copy of the film for their permanent collection. I thus thought it would be apt interview and record Scott talking about his filmmaking and aesthetics; the idea for the high school year book sequence was an outgrowth of his discussion of the contrast between the 1950s and 60s.
I later found out that MOMA New York had provided either next to nothing, or even no funds at all.
I continue to be very proud of my role in realizing this historical artist documentary about Scott Bartlett’s experimental filmmaking practice."
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More history as recited by Al Razutis:
"A note for the record, and those selling cultural 'prescription'.
The evolution of film - video hybrids, synaesthetic film in Canada didn't come easy:
"Everyone was contributing to this 'expanded media arts culture' of west coast cinema, none of this was dependent on academic prescriptions on what constituted 'theoretically informed works' until the following decades. Those academic prescriptions effectively killed what it was trying to 'inform' which was a sense of creative abandon nor formulaic adherence to any prescription or set of rules.
"Similarly, the critical disparagement of synaesthetic works in Canada ('as decorative and less developed art' - R. Baert) contributed to the hardship and 'excommunication' of these works from the main stream 'video art' as touted in Canada at least."
"As in the case of Bruce Conner being 'rediscovered for America' by the Walker Center (retrospective) cited earlier in Amy Taubin article, similar things happened with Canadian synaesthetic video art where Walker's Bruce Jenkins wrote a piece on 'Film to video - Video to film in his essay for "Magnetic North" exhibition, which rescued hybrid film-video works (for example, Razutis' "Bridge at Electrical Storm") from the decorative 'waste bins' that other critics had placed them in (for example Rene Baert's curating statement for "Vintage Video" which is also posted elsewhere on this FB page)." (AR)
THE SOURCE 2019 FB POST
Al Razutis - Visual Alchemy
May 9, 2019
"To recover history beneath the din of today's omnipresent spectacle of images (which borrows from everyone/everytime/everywhere, no matter where we start) is anthropology and archaeology of culture, and these days (outside of academia) it's a lonely task.
"My interests are to connect the dots... between light show projections, underground film, early video art, and what became called 'experimental cinema' and 'expanded cinema' (Youngblood 1970).
"I posit these interests on two web pages of mine:
http://www.alchemists.com/visual_alchemy/1965.html
http://www.alchemists.com/visual_alchemy/intermedia-syn.html
"Here is a film, OFF ON by Scott Bartlett (and Tom Dewitt, Manny Meyer, and Michael McNamee), made in 1968 from light-show film loops, video feedback and keying/mixing experiments, experimental film printing. It is called (by some) 'the first film to use video as an art form', a 'seminal film', 'arguably the first film to use video as an art form' and is compared to Pat O'Neill's '7362' (which is an optical printing film, with the title derived from hi-contrast B&W printing stock) made the same year (1968)."
See the film 'Off On' on YouTube at:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hEr9Z7Q4ZxY
See the film '7362' on YouTube at:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WusH--ZU_to
"Both 9 minute films use mirror image, color separation, even strobing techniques and depart from the photo realistic with highly abstracted renderings via film printing and mixing techniques.
"I saw both the Bartlett and O'Neill films in SF underground cinemas, and screened both films in my own underground screenings (California and Vancouver, late 1960's). I was totally BLOWN AWAY by what I saw there and then. Not in 'film class', but out in our counter-culture cinematheques called 'underground' then.
"As soon as work like this was noticed by producers of TV shows (Twilight Zone, Outer Limits) or feature films looking for 'visual effects' the film techniques were either co-opted by them or filmmakers themselves were lured to work as special effects technicians for commercial media.
"This film is indeed a 'missing link' in the evolution of 'video art', 'synaesthetic cinema' and what I have termed (in reference to my own works and influences) as 'hybrid film'."
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LIST OF RAZUTIS FILM-VIDEO & SYNAESTHETIC HYBRIDS
Al Razutis - Visual Alchemy: "A list of some of my works ('hybrids') which tell the story of where I took this in the early 1970's:
http://www.alchemists.com/visual_alchemy/filmvideo_archives.html#videographics
"
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WHAT HAPPENED TO SCOTT BARTLETT?
"Scott Bartlett failed to make a career of 'doing special effects for feature films' both at American Zoetrope (for Ken Russell's 'Altered States' before Russell was fired), and elsewhere. He ended up thirteen years later (in 1980) teaching film at UCLA, and later Cynthia Haagens made a film of his work 'Making Off On' with Bartlett narrating and appearing in it.
'Making Off On' by Cynthia Anne Haagens is at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yASi81-qxRI
Scott Bartlett died in 1990. His few works live on in the memory of those who care to tell the story.
"The connection between 'psychedelic films' (including light show projections in the 1960's), 'underground films' (the context in which they were shown), music and analog synthesis (inspiring both the music and imagery, and inspiring their combinations), and 'experimental film' (which they are called now) is clear and undeniable.".
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