Bill Stamets Collection > SERIES I: Films by Bill Stamets > Subseries I: Completed Works

A Lecture on the Eyeball in Culture

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The Loud Family.

Margaret Mead said of that experiment, it is I believe as new and as significant as the invention of drama or the novel, a new way in which people can learn to look at life by seeing the real life of others interpreted by the camera.

Hence this.

Thanks.

Last summer he was honored with a star in the Boulevard sidewalk, not just for his long career as Tonto, but because Jay Silverheels founded the Indian Actors Workshop to help those from all tribes to learn the craft he practiced.

Silverheels always worried that without movies, white men in big cities would soon forget those who were there before them.

He was 62.

Terry Drake Water, CBS News, Hollywood.

Al Dale, ABC News, Managua.

The Loud Family.

My God, they're considering, could it be that I've been deceived by my teachers and professors who have taught me evolution all of my life, then I turn around and deceive my own students, are teaching the same, and I ask you to consider today's students, could it be? Could it just possibly be? Could it be? ¿157 .6? ¿157 .8? And as the young eagles do their thing, we want to recognize some of the people who are part of the committee.

Manayama, Muakil, was one of the originators of this parade.

Loretta Kersley, who has handled all the public relations.

Claudia Belal, another member of our committee.

And others.

I mean, a lot of adults lose that ability, but all children even rub their eyes to create an intense vacation of fireworks or explosions, you know, and that's the first, what I call the first level of seeing your self -thinking.

And then you see what people would call abstract, which is why most adults forget it, you know, it won't help you get a job or anything to see abstractly, like they say.

But what we are aware of is that amidst those abstractions, we can commission some memories or we're prompted by things that happen to remember grandmother or whatever.

But what interests me more and seems very much neglected is the abstractions in themselves, which carry the true mood that a person is having.

And then it becomes more the mood, because those shapes that children rub their eyes to create explosions.

Do all the little numbers and letters on the backs of envelopes mean? The first of its kind ever performed on a creature like this.

And if things go right, her vision should be completely restored.

Maria is kept alive and fortunately sound asleep by a combination of water and anesthetic flowing through her gills.

The surgeon...

Taking off diseased tissue on the cornea.

The eel has a double cornea and the outer cornea has got so much scar tissue on it that it's kind of eroded away and new tissue is unable to fill in the area where the...

...that have a diseased cornea...

...back here in the coral reef exhibit and they say she'll be as nasty as ever.

Why surgery to save an eel's vision? We've got them all out.

When he was in St.

Louis, you know, he behaved himself real well and it was just the attitude.

He was a likeable enough fellow, but he just was uncontrollable.

Now do you want to tell us why you kept the blacks out of here? Well, it's our headquarters and if you want the news, you play it our way.

If you don't, fine.

Do you have any proof of any of this, what you're saying, that he was affiliated at all with your organization? Well, the proof is in the pudding, you know, he was in it.

This our stuff? Well, hey, our stuff.

Don't allow blacks.

Come on, we back us a barf bag.

This is for you.

Okay, you want to be arrested for trespassing? Keep pushing in, okay? I got two coppers right here.

I'm just going to wait a while.

I should have arranged to quit right there.

You have no concept how important your prayers are.

Not just on the grounds of health now.

Go into those museums and loathe the blacks.

Arts intrinsically, to me at least, and I could go on about the whole history of them as such, are an encouragement to individuality, to individual inspiration.

Now, it is true that states can take and use them as cultural artifacts, can frame them, can set them up in public squares in such an offensive way that, be the art weak, it can indeed be used for its absolutely opposite purpose.

That is to become a monster to a ground which the people should rally.

The state is always trying to make the painting a flag.

And the poem, a hymn, certainly not a heard.

But then on the other hand, I claim that the responsibility for the creation of the concept of the nude is national, not the work of the artist.

It is true, it is the weakness in men's perception of women which have permitted that usage of those works that have now constitute the aesthetic of the nude.

But it is the state that's primarily involved in that, and all you have to do is go and look.

For instance, I give you a perfect example.

Those rotting fish that Soutine painted.

And then when he finished painting, it was ripped off his easel and clutched to his chest in terror that anyone would look at them so that there's paint on his chest, which in his chest becomes part of the aesthetic, so to speak, which academics have not dealt with.

And then he would take his shirt buttons over to his Gran Modigliani to tenderly show him to see if this was worthy of not only the paintings but his own survival.

And go look at them in museums surrounded, Soutine's particularly surrounded with the most ornate and garish solid gold frames of some shit.

I know what that tactic is.

Right.

It's a reload.

As Sergey Eisenstein was used, my beloved Sergey Eisenstein was used to beat all my films and me over the head with when I was young.

So my films are now so being used to beat other young people over the head with.

And I am being blamed for it.

I should what? Die? And give them a better chance to do that.

Now that's the game.

You know, but actually I've devoted my whole life to light and to feeling it.

I mean that's my joy, my obsession, that's my folly, that's my life.

And so I don't feel superior any more than a lineman would that he knows not to stand in a bucket of water while dealing with electricity.

I know certain things and I know them because I'm an artist.

First of all, through feeling.

I moved along the line of feeling.

And then I think and think and think about it and then I have to set all that thinking aside.

Sometimes kick it completely out and feel some more.

And I feel this is a very bad light.

Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh,

Identifier
F.2005-08-0316
Date Of Production
1988
Abstract
Content Notice: This material contains depictions of hate speech at 6:11 - 7:29.

"A Lecture on the Eyeball (color, sound, c. 30 min., 1988) plays with various artworld postures. As the title hints, sound is played against vision, often undercutting it. A shot of midwestern landscape seen through a moving train window resembles a well known Brakhage piece (the regular 8mm Song 13) and mocks it by adding, against Brakhage's one time fanatical devotion to silent film, musical passages from that most middlebrow postmodernist, Phillip Glass. Many shots from tv, including Gone with the Wind and Reagan, reappropriate that always already audible medium for film. Orphaned outtake images from other Stamets' works appear, such as a drill team at a parade and a media standoff at Chicago Nazi headquarters. We see Stan Brakhage on a tv monitor and hear him discourse on memories and hypnagogic abstractions. A blackboard displays repeated writing: "I will make no more structuralist films."

Commemorating the local pro football team's success, we see a ceremony putting huge Bears helmets on the famous Art Institute sculptured lions. Sometimes the images are very beautiful in conventional terms, sometimes they are just too much, too long, too bizarre. The film always borders on having a significance for the maker, but not for others, as with shots of a courtyard while a phone rings. Is this a continuation of visual Beauty undercut by aural Reality, or does it have some other significance that we do not know?" – Chuck Kleinhans, "Documentary on the Margins: Bill Stamets' Super 8mm Ethnography," Cinematograph no. 4: “Non-fiction Cinema?” long version (v. 2.0c); 28 Sept 1990.
Description
A finished experimental film described by filmmaker Bill Stamets as "a diary of vision." Footage includes the following: Televised footage presents CBS News correspondent Terry Drinkwater’s coverage of actor Jay Silverheels’ death and legacy; pedestrian traffic visits various exhibits at Shedd Aquarium; a college professor conducts an outdoor class; a close-up pans across four nude torsos of individuals standing side-to-side while each holds a camera; tracking footage shot from an Amtrak passenger car scans the passing landscapes; a scene from Bill Stamets and Janice Finney’s Our Bamboo Gingerbread House depicts a group of children as they engage in a quasi-therapeutic performance; children march in a Christmas-themed parade; televised footage presents Stan Brakhage as he talks about seeing abstraction; televised footage presents ABC-7 reporter Frank Mathie’s coverage of cataract eye surgery performed on Maria the Moray eel at Chicago’s Shedd Aquarium on September 13, 1978; the press fills the entrance to Rockwell Hall, Nazi Party of America headquarters; a televised broadcast of Gone with the Wind plays the opening credits; televised footage shows Ronald Reagan as he delivers a speech; the repeatedly written line, “I will make no more structuralist film,” spans the length of a chalkboard; children get splashed by Lake Michigan while they sit on the ledge of Chicago’s Concrete Beach; workers install one of two Chicago Bears helmets designed by sculptor Dan Galemb for the Art Institute’s bronze lions in December 1985; pedestrians frequent a farmer’s market setup in Manhattan’s Foley Square; a single frame step-and-shoot sequence captures fan attendance for a Colorado Buffaloes game at Folsom Field; University of Colorado photography professor Alex Sweetman drives around Boulder; tracking footage shot from an Amtrak passenger car scans passing landscapes while audio from a Stan Brakhage lecture and music by Ludwig van Beethoven and Philip Glass play in the background; Stamets films his cutting room table; Stamets shoots out of his apartment window while a girl across an alley leaps around her back porch and Bruce Springsteen’s “Born to Run” plays in the background; a Super-8 projector operates from Stamets’ window ledge while a radio interview with an anthropologist plays in the background; Stamets shoots out of his apartment window while Ludwig van Beethoven plays in the background and a telephone begins to ring.
 
Format
Super 8
Extent
300 feet
Color
color and B&W
Sound
Mag Stripe
Reel/Tape Number
1/1
Has Been Digitized?
Yes
Language Of Materials
English
Element
Reversal Positives
Genre
Experimental
Form
Short
Subject
Art
Independent filmmakers
Transportation
Art Institute of Chicago
Experimental
Independent films
Lake Michigan
Neo-Nazism
Nudism
Racism
Teachers
Television
Universities and colleges
Preservation Sponsor

Related Collections
Subseries I: Completed Works

Related Places
North America ➜ United States ➜ Illinois ➜ Chicago ➜ Near South Side
North America ➜ United States ➜ Illinois ➜ Chicago ➜ Uptown
North America ➜ United States ➜ Illinois ➜ Chicago ➜ Loop
North America ➜ United States ➜ Illinois ➜ Chicago ➜ Near North Side
North America ➜ United States ➜ Illinois ➜ Chicago ➜ Lawn
North America ➜ United States ➜ New York ➜ New York
North America ➜ United States ➜ Colorado ➜ Boulder

Main Credits
Stamets, Bill (is filmmaker)

Participants And Performers
Brooks, Albert (is participant)
Peller, Clara (is participant)
Hoffman, Joh (is participant)
Sweetman, Alex (is participant)
Lane, Mildred (is participant)
Shaw, Elizabeth (is participant)

 
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