Chomont, a dropout, had enrolled for a course in social documentary at Boston University, but decided to quit midway. He started working in a cinema as a ticket taker and was also programming, what was then called Underground.

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Hollywood films attempt to address almost everyone, to capture the mood of an entire nation, to mythify a complex culture; the critical cinema often presumes to offer a critique of this immense commercial enterprise. However, for Chomont, filmmaking is above all an unpretentious act, an attempt by a humble individual to see himself clearly. For Chomont, art has always been an ambiguous and polymorphous form of expression that resonates, coruscates and transforms.  While his early impressionistic film portraits of friends and lovers evoke the erotic lyricism and trance-like rhythms of early Kenneth Anger and Gregory Markopoulos, his later videos, raw and hard-edged, use similar montage techniques to mine darker territories of ritual and sadomasochism. These meditative and formally innovative films are at once intimate and intense, otherworldly memory poems of a daring and examined life. His films, often portraits of friends, are a lyrical evocation of the ordinary world, but at the same time they bear witness to an unabashedly spiritual and sexual parallel universe. His incomparable technique of offsetting color positive with high contrast black and white negative creates a subtly beautiful and richly evocative, otherworldly aura.

Chomont, a dropout, had enrolled for a course in social documentary at Boston University, but decided to quit midway. He started working in a cinema as a ticket taker and was also programming, what was then called Underground or New American Cinema, showing Gregory Markopoulos Twice a Man, Bill Vehr’s Avocada and Brothel.  Chomont had used techniques, unprecedented in world cinema, like mirror printing and the combination of positive and negative footage and of color and black and white, to image paranoia, self-involvement; isolation and loneliness. As intricate and inventive as they are, Chomont’s films always have a homemade, handcrafted feel. For Chomont, making films has become a medium for enabling the material and the spiritual worlds, discover each other.

His first major success came in with, “Phases Of The Moon : The Parapsychology of Everyday Life” (1968), in which the protagonist looks through the peephole in his front door and this image is mirror printed so that even the protagonist’s attempt to look out, reveals his self-involvement and his troubled, schizoid mind. What puzzles many viewers, while watching “Phases Of The Moon” is, whether the protagonist is waiting for somebody or closing himself off from somebody. The film does not provide any answers and leaves it on the individual viewer to interpret it subjectively. The man looking through the peephole and seeing himself is a metaphor for Chomont, filming his subject through the camera. The same man when looking out the window, is like the spectator looking into the frame. You don’t see out, you always see him again and the room is like a reflection, which is reflective of Chomont himself. Then came Ophelia and The Cat Lady (1969). Chomont initially thought Ophelia and The Cat Lady, as one film in two parts, but then decided to show them together. Ophelia is the most extreme of his early films. The screen’s practically all white, the colors are very slight and give a daguerreotype look. You see a lot of grain, a very dark image and looking at the picture one feels the posedness of the subject in the water. In The Cat Lady, he combined a shotthat he took of Carla Liss and some found footage from a sci-fi film. Chomont uses the sound of the sprocket holes in the film, which gives a one-second pulse ; the regular pattern of the edge numbers and letters probably causes a pulse. In number of his films, including the The Cat Lady, there’s a surprise at the very end, where the film seems to break from what’s gone before. Jonas Mekas once wrote, that, ‘Chomont’s longer films tend to break down and fall apart’.

His next film, Oblivion (1969), had been shot on two separate evenings with his lover – two friends sitting, smoking and talking. In Oblivion, a lover lies naked on a bed, deeply asleep, while the filmmaker gazes at his naked body and filmically fantasizes about it, i.e., the image of fountain of lights (suggesting ejaculation) is juxtaposed with the sleeping lover. According to Chomont, whenever his lover will get aroused and wanted to have sex, he would first start removing his shoes. In the film as well, his lover’s hand untying his shoe is blended with a pan of his body on the bed. Approximately thirty images comprise Oblivion and they obsessively repeat themselves. Although the images appear to be solarized, the film was actually contact-printed, combining high contrast black and white negative with a color positive of the same image. The high contrast accounts for the tendency of shots to flood. Images in the film, swell and contrast, often disappearing into pure color. Oblivion employs extremely rapid cutting - Some of the images last as briefly as two frames. The fact that we see so few frames, that a shot is representationally ambiguous, or shown upside down and sideways, often causes the viewer to project his/her own fantasies. Many who watched Oblivion felt that it was a extremely dense and defies literary analysis.  Chomont had a tendency to use synecdoche in many of his films – a detail of something that’s happening, takes on multiple dimensions. It’s interesting because, what tends to be diaristic for Chomont, with that condensation, has a different effect on the viewer. After Ophelia and The Cat Lady (1969) and Re:Incarnation (1973), Chomont rarely uses sound in any of his films.

In “A Persian Rug” (1969), Chomont uses complex, spiritually suggestive design of a Persian carpet as a metaphor for the film, which weaves bits of imagery of a hotel room or an apartment, of the surrounding’s environment, and of a lover. The viewer sees only a foot or a leg, into a filmic ‘Magic Carpet’ that communicates a romantic, mysterious and erotic attachment. Formal elements are used to dramatize aspects of the particular psychic state being imaged. The film frame functions as a rug-like rectangle into or onto which the lover steps.

Chomont presents eroticism in a deflected way, and the viewer understands the eroticism by reading metaphors or by uncovering another level of the film. In Love Objects (1971), which reveals the erotic interaction among a group of friends and provides a remarkably open statement about the synthetic nature of such distinctions as ‘homosexual’ and ‘heterosexual’. As we watch the lovers together, first two men, then a man and a woman, and as he films, Chomont is in so close that he is part of the lovemaking. At times, in fact his proximity to the bodies keeps us from being sure whether we are seeing a man or a woman, clearly intimacy is the issue and the particulars of one’s gender are irrelevant. This idea is emphasized by Chomont’s layering of positive and negative, color and black and white- the layers of imagery seem as intricately interlocked as the lovers. According to Chomont, initially he wanted the people to pass the camera around during sexual contact, to film him setting up the equipment – to break all the barriers and eliminate the voyeuristic aspect of filming sex, but most of the people felt uncomfortable taking the camera around, and he ended up doing only one sequence that way. The same year he also made Aria(1971), which is dedicated to Robert Beavers and Gregory Markopoulos. Chomont images an ecstatic state of mind achieved in a alpine setting. The film begins with color positive and black and white negative combined, and then later it’s color positive and black and white positive separately, and then it ends with two flares, one of which is color positive and black and white negative combined, though due to the flare you have little effects from that.

Chomont has traveled widely and has lived for substantial periods in Germany and in Holland. Even when he began to explore new processes and new formal issues during the early to mid-1970s, the resulting films did not become academic exercises but remained close to the particulars of his life. Chomont had made Lijn II (1972), Abda (1974), and Rebirth (1974), during his stay in Holland. He was then exploring the optical printer and it’s development process: he printed the films by hand, using buckets and a homemade darkroom. Lijn (1972) is a tiny portrait of a friend made on the contact printer from the scraps of a film that was lost. Next film, Rebirth (1974), reworks the same brief passage of a man in a bath over and over into a image of continuous rebirth.

In an interview to Prof. Scott MacDonald, Chomont provides a rare insight into the making of ‘For Abda’ (1974). “I took an image that was not one I made. First, I printed the original color material and got a black and white negative image. Then I took the negative and from that printed a black and white positive image. I took the positive and cut the sprocket holes off one side and pulled it through the printer so that the frame lines would begin to enter in and so the pictures would move through at a slower speed. That made the film longer – it came out about one and a half times as long as the original strip. Again, the printed version was negative and when that was developed and dried, I made a positive copy of it. Each time I took the negative and hung it aside once I had struck a positive from it; I cut the sprocket holes off each positive and pulled it through in the same way, allowing any irregularities from the film catching or from the motion of my hand to stay. As it got longer, I had to pull down and then come up and grab it again, so that pauses became more pronounced. At times I would just let it stop. Certain images would interest me, and I would decide to let them stay in the gate for awhile; and also I developed it more and more in ways that would cause the emulsion to wash loose or peel off or just tear and fold over. The printing always went from negative to positive, so I had scratches and emulsion breaks and sprocket holes showing in both negative and positive. Finally, I spliced it together sequentially. Then I took that and had a high contrast black and white positive made from it. It represented to me the fragmenting of the ego, the process by which we discover in ourselves so many aspects that we can identify with diverse other individuals. During that time I wrote to someone, “My heart has been shattered into a million pieces, and I doubt if it will ever be put together again.” But that meant also that all the other identities around me were pieces of my heart. The process – it could be summed up in a phrase like ego death – combines something that seems to be the worst thing that could happen and the resolution of the whole problem of the ego.
I’m never sure how people will feel after seeing the film. I have intentions and an opinion. What it communicates is another issue. I don’t think the filmmaker has to have intent in the sense that he intends to manipulate the audience in a specific way as most commercial directors want to do”.

In “.” (1974), viewers are trained to search out images of centering, some of which are immediately obvious, like circular shapes at the center of the frame; others become apparent as soon as one is aware of the pattern the more obviously circular images create. Chomont’s consistent use of mirror printing is probably a function of this concern with centering; mirror printing automatically creates symmetrical imagery in which the center of the frame becomes particularly dynamic. Space Time Studies (1977), his longest film to date – 20 minutes, and highly formal, yet personal, the film is divided into four sections. Chomont provides an inventive exploration of reverse, we cannot tell the characters, friends he was staying with in Amsterdam, who were filmed in reverse or so that when the imagery was developed, their actions would be seen reverse. The film is a portrait of Chomont’s relationship with his two friends and of the environment in which they lived. Space Time Studies begins with a quote from A. Roeland Hoist. During the first section, a man gets up from a chair and walks into a building six times. The six trips are framed with an image in which we see through a kind of tube. The film is mostly shot with a wide-angle lens. It is very difficult to identify, whether the motion that’s being seen is slowed down each time the man walks indoors, or whether the person is acting out a slower speed. In Parts II, III, and IV, some shots are upside down. In addition to explaining forms of filmic motion, Chomont seem to be exploring the nature of his own presence in the various sections of the film. In the first section, we see the lens move and the tip of his finger; in the second the camera is obviously hand-held and one person looks at Chomont; in the third Chomont actually enter the image at one point; and the fourth includes various kinds of presence. The original material was in color, Chomont made it into a black and white negative, then used the negative in a number of ways. For the final strip, Chomont used all the filters overlapped. The colors were in effect red, blue, and green and a number of other colors are produced by combinations of these.

In Chomont’s films, the medium of film is a means for bridging the gap between the mundane and the mystical. The strip of celluloid, the image on the screen, becomes a location where the spiritual and the material meet. Minor Revisions (1979), explores this relationship. This relationship is dramatized by the image of an onion being peeled. On a mundane level, the peeling of the onion is a simple act, a diary reflection of the ongoing process of daily cooking, yet it is also sexually suggestive; the relationship of Chomont and his lover involves their getting together to ‘peel off’ their everyday skins – clothes, uniforms. Chomont’s decision to concentrate on the onion and reveal it in double, then triple, exposure endows the onion with a deeper meaning: it becomes a metaphor for the film itself and for the peeling away of the surface levels of personality to concentrate on the spiritual level.
Having already worked for thirty years making movies, Chomont started making videos in 1990, and has made more than two dozen. There is a strong kinship between his film and video practice, which is diary oriented, deals in synecdoche , fragments and looping, and features a similar bursting white light which often surrounds, shrouds or swallows the picture.

For the past twenty years or so Chomont had Parkinson’s disease, and he is also HIV positive. His struggle with both the diseases had been part of a documentary – “Fluctuations” that Chomont had done with Samay Jain, a Movement Disorders Fellow and student filmmaker. It is a documentary that explores how he copes withthe Parkinson disease, motor fluctuations and dancing.

Whether it is commercial or independent cinema, there have been filmmakers/artists who have tried to explore themselves and the world as they know, through their cinema and at times, done that very successfully. Tom Chomont is one of them.

PIC Source :  http://www.berksfilmmakers.org/images/chomon1.jpg

Tags: Experimental Cinema, Tom Chomont

Posted By Satyam | Tuesday, June 29th, 2010 | Filed under Auteur