A White Wait

Absolut Panushka, Jan-Apr 1997.

A White Wait

James Whitney purposely rested for a year or more between his films — what the Chinese call a “white wait” — during which he would practice another art form, like Chinese brush painting or ceramics, that yielded immediate and tactile results. This exercise paid off, for each successive film is more brilliant.

Lapis (named for the alchemical “philosopher’s stone”) consists of hand-drawn dot patterns that he shot in
1963 using a computerized animation camera (prototype of the “motion control” cameras used for special effects), which his brother John Whitney had built. This meant that James could paint a configuration of 250 dots, then set the camera to shoot it five or ten times with a tiny calibrated rotation between each exposure (and sometimes a variation in color filter), giving the final image as many as 2,500 precisely moving dots. The intriguing, intricate patterns, mostly centered circular forms, stagger the mind with their voluptuous and dynamic developments.

James’ next project was to have been four alchemical films suggesting the basic elements, Fire, Water, Air and Earth. The Fire film is named Dwija, a Sanskrit term “twice born” which refers to the bird (born as an egg, then born again as it leaves the egg) as a symbol of spiritual enlightenment. The imagery uses old illustrations (the same that Harry Smith used for Film No. 11) of the alchemical vessel undergoing a cycle of distillation, with a bird flying up and down to represent vaporization and condensation. The images were shot repeatedly in different color combinations, hand-developed and solarized, so that flame-like streams of irregular texture constantly surround them.

The Water film Wu Ming (“No name,” the opening words of the Tao) again consists entirely of hand-drawn dot patterns which James solarized and modified out-of-focus to soften them in some cases, and in others, to keep them as hard geometric shapes.

When Wu Ming was first shown in New York in 1977, Jonas Mekas called it in his review “a work that looks like it’s made by gods.”

The very beautiful Air film, Kang Jing Xiang (a pun: “empty mirror image” or “ecstasy of the lustrous refined-gold symbol”)

contains many soft flowing images with some dynamic sharp configurations, such as an intense red mandala that suddenly dissolves to white, with dazzling after-images. There are also brief glimpses of the “homunculus” and the “worm of ouroboros,” alchemical symbols of the new-born and the eternal cycle: in my ending is my beginning.

The last film of this group, the Earth film Li or Wu Wei, consisted entirely of full-screen seemingly random dot patterns. But it was left fragmentary at James’ death in 1982 and has never been finished.

Moritz, William. “History of Experimental Animation.” Website. Absolut Panushka, curated by Christine Panushka. (Jan-Apr 1997).