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ROUTEMASTER - Theatre of the Motors
Super-8, written & directed by Ilppo Pohjola
Rostrum cinematography Seppo Rintasalo
Editing Heikki Salo
Year of completion 1999
Country of origin Finland
Original format Super-8 + S-35 mm
Screening format 35 mm
Aspect ratio 1:2,35
Length 460 metres
Running time 16 min 10 sec (25 fr/sec)
16 min 50 sec (24 fr/sec)
ROUTEMASTER - The Geography of Music Mixes
The film is available with 3 different soundtrack mixes & as a single
Hörspiel:
The Original San Francisco Mix
Sound design Jim McKee
Original music Wieslaw Pogorzelski
Recorded music Merzbow & NON
Sound Dolby Digital
Tokyo Noise Mix
Music & sound design Merzbow
Sound Dolby Stereo
London Dance Mix
Music Lee Digi-Dub
Sound Dolby Stereo
Helsinki Radio Mix
Sound design Pekka Lappi
Sound Dolby Surround
Production & sales Crystal Eye Ltd
Tallberginkatu 1/44, 00180 Helsinki
Tel + 358 9 694 2308
Fax + 358 9 694 7224
E-mail: pohjola@crystaleye.fi
Festival prints Finnish Film Foundation
Kanavakatu 12, 00160 Helsinki
Tel + 358 9 622 0300
Fax + 358 9 6220 3060
ROUTEMASTER - Theatre of the Motors
Category: Routemaster is a rhythmic mosaic about speed and human cadavers
that have been used in crash tests.
Topic: Routemaster is about the filmic portrayal of speed.. It is a
montage of racing car speed, a merging of the subject with the film
material, and is also about the use of human cadavers in crash tests.
Routemaster's sound track uses computer-manipulated electric-violin
sounds, a rhythmic pulse and noise loops to convey a sense of
ever-faster motion and speed. Routemaster is a film that resembles a
physical experience.
Synopsis: Routemaster is a montage of rhythmically organised repetitions
and involves an abstraction of motion that increases in frequency and
scale. The basic framework of the film is provided by intercutting
of two counterposed materials. On the one hand, it uses black-and-white,
endlessly accelerating and rhythmically varying images of the inexorable
forward motion of the racing cars. On the other hand, it uses colourful,
extreme slow-motion images of details of a chequered flag fluttering in
the wind. The escalating speed, growing abstraction and mosaic-like
repetition of images leads on to manipulated, yet realistic images of
human bodies used in crash tests. In the end, all that is left is the
black-and-white flash of speed, the gyrating pulse of the mosaic, the
details of the human bodies and the intense soundtrack. Routemaster has
some of the qualities of a live concert.
Reference: Routemaster is a film conscious of its context. It aims at a
new filmic synthesis of the history of structuralism and minimalism, and
at finding technical approaches that revitalise the tradition of
formalist expression.
ROUTEMASTER - The Geography of Music Mixes
Routemaster is available with three different soundtrack mixes and with
all of these as a single radio programme. They are used to investigate
the effects of the geographical environment on the audio interpretation
of the visual material. The versions are: The Original San Francisco
Mix, Tokyo Noise Mix, London Dance Mix and Helsinki Radio Mix.
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ROUTEMASTER
3 x 17 min; Super-8+S-35mm; 1:2,35, b/w+colour
Written and directed by Ilppo Pohjola
ROUTEMASTER - THEATRE OF THE MOTORS
Routemaster is about the filmic portrayal of speed. It is a montage of
racing car speed, a merging of the subject with the film material, and
is also about the use of human cadavers in crash tests. Routemaster's
sound track uses computer-manipulated electric-violin sounds, a rhythmic
pulse and noise loops to convey a sense of ever-faster motion and speed.
It is a film that resembles a physical experience.
Routemaster is a montage of rhythmically organised repetitions and
involves an abstraction of motion that increases in frequency and scale.
The basic framework of the film is provided by intercutting of two
counterposed materials. On the one hand, it uses black-and-white,
endlessly accelerating and rhythmically varying images of the inexorable
forward motion of the racing cars. On the other hand, it uses colourful,
extreme slow-motion images of details of a chequered flag fluttering in
the wind. The escalating speed, growing abstraction and mosaic-like
repetition of images leads on to manipulated, yet realistic images of
human bodies used in crash tests. In the end, all that is left is the
black-and-white flash of speed, the gyrating pulse of the mosaic, the
details of the human bodies and the intense soundtrack. Routemaster has
some of the qualities of a live concert.
Routemaster reflects an awareness of the history of experimental film.
It aims at a new filmic synthesis of the history of structuralism and
minimalism.
Routemaster also makes use of the plasticity and rhythmicality of pure
film -- it makes references to itself by using repeated rhythms and
arithmetic patterns. It employs the stylistic means of abstract
formalism -- it is self-reflexive and refers through its rhythmic
structures to the film-making process. Routemaster is material-based and
defamiliarising. It is like flicker films. -- Formalist form language has
not, however, been used to try to create some filmic study, but an
emotionally powerful, musical whole. The mood of Routemaster is close to
the dreamlikeness of surrealism.
Routemaster has been created using digital editing and classic film
techniques. Fifty Super-8 cassettes were shot, i.e. about three hours of
material. It was edited in digital form on an EditBox. The equipment's
non-linear features include setting the image length/relative
length/looping/ rhythm/etc. using simple numerical commands. It
reproduces everything in real time in DigiBeta resolution. This makes
possible the rapid construction and testing of a mass of pictorial
rhythms to help find the desired structure. This is a new situation in
experimental film. Previously loops have been made on an optical printer
according to a provisional scheme, developed, viewed, corrected and made
again so as to achieve the desired result. Non-linear editing means that
the working process can be reversed. Images from the work are
rhythmicised digitally and the original Super-8 footage is blown up to
35 mm film only for the required frames and rhythmic structures. Some of
the loops are produced using an optical printer. The Mosaic-like image
multiples were made using a rostrum camera, simply using back light and
work prints. Thus a single Cinemascope frame on the screen could include
up to two thousand two hundred and sixty (2260) moving Super-8 images
simultaneously. When making Routemaster an attempt was made not just to
achieve a synthesis between different means of expression, but also to
find technical solutions that would revitalise the formative tradition
in film.
ROUTEMASTER REMIX PROJECT - THE GEOGRAPHY OF MUSIC
Routemaster is available with three different soundtrack mixes and with
all of these as a single radio Hörspiele. They are used to investigate
the effects of the geographical environment on the audio interpretation
of the visual material. The versions are: The Original San Francisco
Mix, Tokyo Noise Mix, London Dance Mix and Helsinki Radio Mix.
*****************
PAINTING WITH MOVEMENT AND SOUND
Martti Lahti
The main and essential thing is: The sensory exploration of the world
through film... We therefore take as the point of departure the use of
the camera as a kino-eye, more perfect than the human eye, for the
exploration of the chaos of visual phenomena that fill space.
- Dziga Vertov
UK educated Ilppo Pohjola is among the most visually inventive
filmmakers to have emerged from Scandinavia during the last decade. From
the beginning of his career, he has shown commitment to the exploration
of the political and visual boundaries of audiovisual media (cinema,
television, and video), juxtaposing elements and influences from sources
such as the graphics arts, music video, video art, and traditions of
radical and experimental filmmaking. For example, Pohjola's Daddy and
the Muscle Academy (1991) was an experimental documentary about the art,
life, and influence of Tom of Finland, a Finnish born queer graphic
artist, whereas his P(l)ain Truth (1993) brought the conventions of
graphic art and experimental filmmaking into play with an almost
documentary investigation of transgendered identity.
His most recent film, Routemaster (1999), as well as the preceding
Asphalto
- An Aria for 13 Gas Stations and Demolition Cars
(1998), continues the exploration of the limit(ation)s of classical film
narrative by focusing on filmic movement in tandem with the speed of
racing cars. Drawing from a tradition of structuralist filmmaking and the
principles of minimalist art, Routemaster combines their common emphasis
on repetition and slight variation, using rapid and complex editing of
very similar images to disrupt the flow of linear time and strict spatial
continuity.
These techniques create a interestingly paradoxical sense of both a
slow, almost mathematical, progression to the images and the unbridled
visual chaos of extreme velocity and frenetic movement. The film's
minimalist structure is assembled from three different sets of visual
materials (shot with Super-8 and blown to 35 mm). On one hand, there are
highly stylized black-and-white shots of race cars in motion, which are
edited together following the increasingly more rapid rhythm. These
black-and-white shots are then contrasted with near-abstract detail of a
checkered flag, shot in color and slow motion. Towards the end of film,
Pohjola introduces third element, color images of human cadavers used in
automobile crash testing.
Pohjola has released Routemaster in three different film versions,
each with its own soundtrack (The Original San Francisco Mix, Tokyo
Noise Mix, and London Dance Mix). Further expanding his interests in
multimedia production, he has also made a radio program based on the same
audio material. The filmic versions' music sometimes works in tandem with
the visuals, synchronized with the pace of editing; but at other times it
is in contrapuntal relation with the images and editing. In any case, the
music with its increasingly faster rhythms, shares with the visuals an
emphasis on manic movement and hypnotic progression. These industrial
sounds, "remixed" in different variations like the visuals themselves,
equally evoke the sense of aggressiveness and technological destruction
that characterize the film as a whole.
Clearly with these visual and auditory strategies Pohjola invites
his audience to explore the specificity and materiality of images, the
relationship between sound and image, and the cinematic construction of
movement. Together these three different versions of Routemaster create
an experimental geography of music and sound. Pohjola's work contemplates
how sound space influences the way we see and experience our visual
environment. Furthermore, akin to several avant-garde filmmakers,
Pohjola is experimenting with various formal solutions in order to find
ways of creating a sense of cinema as pure movement of graphic elements.
One might think of his work in connection to that of Sharits, Rimmer,
Snow, Frampton, or Brakhage--who at times explored the film medium itself
through repeated and gradually degraded film loops, "flicker" films
entirely made up of simple, rhythmically alternating light or dark
frames, or through techniques which highlight the celluloid itself or
isolated aspects of cinematography, such as lens focal length, angle of
view, or camera movement. Here Pohjola uses repetition and slow motion to
progressively disconnect a filmic image of racing cars from their real
world referent in favor of abstract, non-referential image of movement.
From one shot to another, the frame is divided into smaller and smaller
parts, each repeating the image of racing cars. From a single, grainy
image, we move to a split screen, with two slightly different images of
cars speeding right to left, divided at center. Three-panel views of
different images also intervene, with this strongly directional,
flashing, black and white movement also contrasting with their
side-by-side configuration. Gradually Pohjola creates a mosaic image put
together from over 2000 tiny shots filling the screen simultaneously. The
movement of the image "content"--the race cars--becomes too minute to be
visible, and is instead completely reduced to a patterned graphic effect,
pulsing surges of light and shadow, arranged in vertical columns but
repeating (and recalling) the same right to left trajectory of the
speeding cars.
Also recalling earlier phases of the film's progression, this mosaic is
itself split into three columns at points, with the central panel
introducing new material (for example, the crash test cadavers) in
patterned interjections. The result is an abstract image of movement
that foregrounds the filmic material (still images) and the filmic
construction of movement. Here our aesthetic pleasure is based on the
manipulation of image, time, and movement, reaching a highly sophisticated
complexity by Routemaster's audiovisual crescendo.
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