Charlemagne 2 : Piltzer
Pip Chodorov
2002 - 22 min - Super 8 mm - Couleur et Noir & Blanc - France

Charlemagne Palestine is a contemporary avant-garde composer. His concerts consist of harmonic dissonance and resonation on the Bosendorfer piano. The film was originally the document of his piano concert at the Piltzer gallery, shot black and white on super-8, the sound recorded on minidisk. I shot and developed the film, analysed the music frame by frame on a Steenbeck, created a shooting script for the step printing, and created the finished colour 16mm film on the optical printer. The process took about two weeks. The main idea is to represent music visually, to do in the occipital visual cortex, what Charlemagne was doing with his music in the temporal lobes, using discordant harmonics and rhythms, beating and flicker and phase effects to create, one could say, an orgasm of the optic nerve.