Still from "Inner Heat", video by Fred Hatt with Corinna Brown

If you emerge from a hot tub or shower into the cold night, you may see rivulets of steam rising from your skin.  If the environment is dark and a light source illuminates the steam from behind, you can see it clearly.  A runner on a chilly morning may also generate steam from the body, but it’s usually difficult to see in daylight.

Still from "Inner Heat", video by Fred Hatt with Corinna Brown

My longtime friend and collaborator, Corinna Hiller Brown, a butoh dancer and movement therapist, had the idea of trying to capture this effect on video, combined with trancelike butoh dance.  On a snowy winter night in 2005, in my studio in Brooklyn, we turned off the heat, opened all the windows and doors, and pulled a box fan out of off-season storage, trying to get the room as cold as possible.  Corinna repeatedly got in and out of a hot shower, so when she entered the chilly studio her skin would steam for a couple of minutes – just enough to get a quick take.  Later that same night, I filmed the snowflakes eddying under the street lamps outside.

There was no way to assemble the fragments of dance into a connected choreography, but the slow downward drift of the snow through shifting currents of air worked well as a transitional element, echoing in reverse the movement of the glowing steam curling up from the warm skin.  The first, simple edit of this material was used as a projection element with “My Love Bleeds Fire”, a choreographed piece that Corinna premiered at the Cool New York Dance Festival at White Wave.

Still from "Inner Heat", video by Fred Hatt with Corinna Brown

Seven years later, I’ve finally completed a version of the video that I feel stands alone as a piece of poetic cinema.  For the soundtrack, multi-instrumentalist Gregory Reynolds created a jangly droning sound with swelling bass notes, which I mixed with recordings I’d made of ocean surf and rain.

Still from "Inner Heat", video by Fred Hatt with Corinna Brown

For me, the film is a vision of the warmth of life in the cold world.  I described it thus:  “The body is a slow flame, a campfire in the snow, a star in the vastness of space, a pulsing heart in the ocean.”  Every living being is a kind of fire.  Metabolism is combustion.  Life force is like a flame, cohering as long as it consumes experience, adhering to the body as a candle flame clings to its wick.  The heart and mind of a sentient being give warmth and light into the world.

Still from "Inner Heat", video by Fred Hatt with Corinna Brown

The title, “Inner Heat”, refers to a traditional Tibetan meditation practice called tummo.  A combination of breathing exercises and highly focused visualizations can produce enough heat in the body to survive in the snows of the Himalayas.  This is more than just legendary tantric magic, as Harvard researchers have documented the ability of experienced tummo practitioners to produce striking changes in body heat and other supposedly autonomic bodily functions.

Still from "Inner Heat", video by Fred Hatt with Corinna Brown

I suggest viewing this video as a meditation.  Give yourself over to the waves of slow movement and feel the warmth generating within your own belly and heart, and be a source of light in the darkness.  The video is embedded below (except in the email subscription version of the blog), or click the link to see “Inner Heat” on my Vimeo page.

Still from "Driving Rain", 2008, video by Fred Hatt

Before I get into this week’s material, I’d like to urge my readers to click over to Museworthy, where my friend, model, and blogging mentor Claudia is celebrating four years of her entertaining, inspiring, and enlightening blog about artists, models, and her life as an artists’ model.  Every Museworthy blogaversary post has featured a photo of Claudia by me.  Check out this year’s shot at the link!  And here are the shots for years one, two, and three.

Still from "Driving Rain", 2008, video by Fred Hatt

I’m continuing to develop my own approach to watercolor painting, but I’ll wait to post on that again until I have a wider selection of examples to share.  Today’s post, though, does feature colors running in water, as well as optical phenomena of distortion and reflection, so you could see it as a continuation of themes.

Still from "Driving Rain", 2008, video by Fred Hatt

The stills here are from “Driving Rain”, a video made in the spring of 2008.  This is one of my experiments in minimal cinema, using the video camera to capture fleeting phenomena of light and motion.  We are used to seeing moving image media used to present narrative, to entertain, educate, persuade, or manipulate.  I’m interested in stripping all of that away, to see the moving image as simply an image of movement.  We appreciate still pictures for their aesthetic and formal qualities, for their ability to show us the world through another’s awakened eye.  I believe video can do the same, separate from its rhetorical dimensions.  (For other “minimal cinema” efforts, see here and here.)

Still from "Driving Rain", 2008, video by Fred Hatt

The video is nothing but a shot through the windshield of a vehicle during a pelting downpour, driving across the Williamsburg Bridge between Brooklyn and Manhattan, through the streets of the Lower East Side, and up the FDR Drive along the East River waterfront of Manhattan.  There is no music, there are no voices, and there are no edits until nine minutes into the total eleven-minute running time.  Sounds boring as hell, you say?  It is, unless you give in to the film’s narrative blankness and start appreciating the peculiar complexities of the images and sounds.

Still from "Driving Rain", 2008, video by Fred Hatt

There is the mechanical beating of the windshield wipers, the deluge’s waves of white noise, and the roar of the engine.  There’s the stop-and-go flow of traffic and the relentless flow of water from the sky.  The world is seen through a refractive surface of water droplets and rivulets.  Droplets are drawn downward by gravity, shoved aside by the wiper, and blown upward by the wind.

Still from "Driving Rain", 2008, video by Fred Hatt

Because you aren’t actually driving in this monsoon, you are free to enjoy the musical phases of its various rhythmic elements, to marvel at the complexity of the movements of water on glass, to appreciate the impressionist scattering of light and color that the wet windshield introduces to the world beyond it.

Still from "Driving Rain", 2008, video by Fred Hatt

The video is embedded below (unless you receive the blog by email), but I suggest following this link to see the video in full screen and HD resolution.  If your computer or connection isn’t up to that, or if you’re reading this blog on your phone, don’t bother – just enjoy the stills.  This video was conceived with the idea of projecting it in high definition on a large screen, and it works best that way.

If you appreciate the beauty of rain as I do, you might also enjoy this earlier post, featuring still pictures of rain in the city.

Mana Hashimoto in "Lullaby", 2009, video by Fred Hatt

Itsuki no komoriuta, or the Lullaby of Itsuki (a village on Kyushu Island, Japan), is one of the best-known Japanese folk melodies.  It will probably sound familiar to you even if you know nothing about traditional Japanese songs.  It’s been covered by many western musicians, including the French pop singer Claudine Longet and the Brazilian guitarist Baden Powell.  Here’s a lovely version in  a trembling, breaking voice style by Ikue Asazaki.

Dancer Mana Hashimoto, with whom I’ve previously collaborated several times, was inspired to explore this song in movement.  Mana describes Itsuki no komoriuta this way:  “Two centuries ago in Japan, it was common for poor families to sell their children, age six and up, to work for rich families as baby sitters or housekeepers. If the rich family were nice and open, the children might be allowed to go once in a while to visit their birth families, but often the children didn’t know when they would get to go home. Itsuki no lullaby is a song in the voice of a child missing her home town as she takes care of a rich family’s babies, putting them to bed.”

Norio Shimizu at lyricstranslate.com provides an excellent translation of the lyrics.  (“Bon” refers to the annual Buddhist festival to honor the spirits of the ancestors by dancing and by floating lanterns on the river.)

As soon as Bon arrives,
I will leave for my hometown.
The sooner Bon comes, the sooner I will go home.

I am no better than a beggar.
They are rich people.
With good sashes and good dresses.

Who will cry for me
When I die?
Only the locusts in the mountain behind the house.

No, it’s not locusts.
It’s my little sister.
Don’t cry, little sister, I will be worried about you.

When I am dead,
Bury me by the roadside.
The passers-by would lay flowers for me.

What flowers would they lay?
Cam-cam-camellias
The water would come falling down from above.

Mana was struck by the sad, forlorn mood of the lullaby, and by the beauty of its melody.  It appealed to her sympathies as a mother.  “I always want to find some hope,” she says, “to give those children some light.”

Mana Hashimoto in "Lullaby", 2009, video by Fred Hatt

Mana incorporated Itsuki no komoriuta into her full-length choreographed piece “Yumema/Dream Between”, which she has performed recently at Dixon Place and Green Space.  The film “Lullaby”, which I made with Mana two years ago, represents the beginnings of her engagement with the song, as she improvises movement while singing it.

This film was made in the Brooklyn loft of my friend Sullivan Walsh, a metal craftsman, who created the bed and oval mirror seen in the background.

Mana explores space by contact and by reaching out, often using tactile objects as a base for her movement.  Here, a long banquet table is her stage.  In the first part of the video she explores the melody of Itsuki no komoriuta through gesture and voice, bathed in the golden light of the setting sun.  In the second part, she restlessly tests the boundaries of her narrow stage in the deep blue twilight.

The video of “Lullaby” is embedded here.  If you receive the blog by email you will need to click to the blog site or follow this link to the Vimeo site for this video.

Mana will be performing a different piece this Saturday at a benefit for Japan earthquake relief at Tenri Cultural Institute in New York.

Hi Mizu Kaze – rebirth A fundraising event for Japan featuring gagaku and beyond

Featuring Mana Hashimoto (dance) // Sadahiro Kakitani (ryuteki) // Kaoru Watanabe (flute & taiko) with Daniel Abse (recitation) + Yoichi Fukui (sho) + Yuko Takebe (film)

Saturday, July 16, 2011, 7:30pm. $10 suggested donation. Tenri Cultural Institute, 43A West 13th St. (btwn. 5th & 6th Ave.), New York, NY, 10011, 212-645-2800, www.tenri.org

Luminous Interval, 1991, still frame from video by Fred Hatt

Making a work of art that goes beyond the sketch level is like cooking: ingredients are chosen and combined, subjected to the controlled heat of the artist’s craft and sensibility.  You might conceive a recipe and then go about gathering all the elements that will go into it, but most artists, in whatever medium, keep a kind of pantry of ideas, sketches, and fragments that they draw upon to make a dish.

My blogging process works the same way.  My pantry contains my archive of new and old work, sketches and experiments, things I’ve seen, ideas and fragments of writing.  When I feel the need to whip up a blog post, I see what’s in the pantry and try to figure out what I can make from it.  Last week’s post was a kind of stew, a bunch of unrelated morsels that were simmered together in the stock idea of spatial perception.

This week I’m going to look at this art of combining ingredients through “Luminous Interval”, a video piece I made twenty years ago, one of my earliest attempts to make something meaningful out of the random results of unguided experimentation that tend to fill my pantry.  The illustrations are still frames from the video piece, interspersed without particular reference to the adjacent text.

Luminous Interval, 1991, still frame from video by Fred Hatt

In the mid-1980’s I was living in Oklahoma and had a job producing local television commercials to run on cable systems in small city markets around Oklahoma and Texas.  I used to drive to these markets in a production van with industrial U-matic video equipment.  I wasn’t making my own films, but I often experimented with the equipment, filming the highways and motels on my way.  When the gain was turned up on these old tube cameras, for shooting in low-light levels, the results had a weird, hyper-saturated glow.  Other effects arose from filming with condensation on the lens, or from changing various settings while shooting.

Another kind of experimentation I enjoyed was video feedback.  Pointing a camera at its own monitor creates the same kind of endless tunnel effect you get by facing a mirror to another mirror, but with a slight delay, and moving the camera or changing settings produces blooming, morphing forms of colored light.

Luminous Interval, 1991, still frame from video by Fred Hatt

I moved from Oklahoma to New York and got another job that gave me access to video and film gear, working as Operations Manager at Film/Video Arts, a nonprofit media arts center offering equipment, facilities and training at subsidized rates for independent and noncommercial film and video projects.  I borrowed a spring-wound Bolex 16mm camera and shot some film while visiting a waterfall and stream somewhere in the woods in the Catskill mountains with a dancer friend.  Later, I experimented further with this footage on Film/Video Arts’ film-to-tape transfer machine, which allowed film to be run forward and backward, in slow and fast motion, and converted to negative, with tonalities and colors reversed.

Luminous Interval, 1991, still frame from video by Fred Hatt

I found myself with a stack of tapes containing the results of all this aimless playing around.  I loved the imagery, but something more coherent would have to be made from it to make it worth sharing with others.  My starting point was the contrast between the lush eden of the Catskills stream and the alienating, isolated feeling of the highways and motels.  The architecture that grows around the modern highway is functional, generic, and hard.  It aims to keep us moving along, no rooting or flourishing allowed.  In this context, the forest stream images could be seen as memories of the richness of life.

Luminous Interval, 1991, still frame from video by Fred Hatt

I had recently been reading the Bardo Thodol, or Tibetan Book of the Dead, a text that views death as a transitional state, a passage between worlds in which visions of peaceful and wrathful deities test the spiritual state of the soul on its way to finding a new womb of rebirth.  Though I was young and healthy myself, mortality was on my mind.  This was at the height of the AIDS crisis, when so many of the creative of my generation, and so many of my friends, suddenly wasted away in their prime.

The Bardo Thodol gave me a rough structure, inspiring the six numbered “chapters” seen in the video.  The edition of the Bardo Thodol that I had described the “bardo” as a “luminous interval” or transitional state between realms, so “Luminous Interval” became the final title of the piece (some earlier versions were screened under the title “Baptism”).  My idea of this structure was also influenced by the 1963 electronic music composition “Le Voyage”, by Pierre Henry.  “Le Voyage” is also based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead, and had been a favorite album of mine when I was a kid.  Some fragments of this piece are used in “Luminous Interval”.

Luminous Interval, 1991, still frame from video by Fred Hatt

To sharpen the idea of the journey of rebirth, I borrowed a National Geographic film called “The Incredible Human Machine” from the public library, appropriating some of its amazing medical footage, especially the material showing the fertilization of the ovum and development of the embryo, to layer in with my other material.

Luminous Interval, 1991, still frame from video by Fred Hatt

All the original video material I had to work with was silent.  I felt that having some sound on it would make it easier to find transitions and moments in it, so I simply dubbed entire sides of some of my favorite LPs onto the source footage tapes.  I chose atmospheric pieces that seemed to fit the moods I saw in the footage, but once the sound was laid down I did nothing to move or alter it.  In the edited video, wherever the video is cut the audio is also cut, and wherever there are two pieces of video superimposed, the two sound sources are also mixed.

When I’d finished a rough edit of all this material around the Bardo Thodol structure, it did seem a mystical, psychedelic journey, but I felt it still needed a stronger narrative element.  I found the poem “The Flight of Quetzalcoatl” in Jerome Rothenberg’s “Technicians of the Sacred”, a collection of his poetic renderings of myths, songs and rituals from traditional cultures all over the world.  “The Flight of Quetzalcoatl”, from the Nahuatl Epic, depicts the exile, mortality, and rebirth of the Mesoamerican deity of the dawn, the Feathered Serpent.  This poem seemed to fit my narrative like a glove, so I added excerpts from it as a voiceover.  Like the music excerpts, the poem is fragmented and re-ordered.

Luminous Interval, 1991, still frame from video by Fred Hatt

This is how a finished piece was made out of material that came out of pure play, without any vision of the finished product guiding the creation of the source material.  Much of my work is done this way, not only video work but also drawing and painting.  In my larger drawing works, I often begin by sketching unplanned overlapping figures, only then trying to discover some structure in the resulting chaos.  You can read a description of that drawing process here.

You’ll notice that there’s quite a bit of material in this piece that I’ve appropriated without permission.  When the film was made it was only shown in noncommercial screenings, so it wasn’t an issue, but now it’s going up on the internet.  I think the “fair use” argument, that only fragments of the music and video and text sources are used and that they’ve been made into a substantially new work that does not compete or infringe on the original sources, applies here.  Full credits are seen at the end of the film and can also be found in the info section on the video’s Vimeo page.

The video itself is embedded at the bottom of the post.  I believe subscribers who receive the blog by email won’t get the embedded video, but will need to click to the blog site or to follow this link to the Vimeo site for this video.

August from Fred Hatt on Vimeo.

Click on the video to watch in HD on Vimeo.

I spent last week visiting my brother in Western Massachusetts.  He lives in a rural area surrounded by forests and wetlands.  I was struck by the sound environment there.  Far from highways and flight paths, it was clean of the technological noises that are constant in my usual urban setting, but it was hardly quiet.  With my eyes closed I could hear the densely woven tapestry of sound surrounding me in omnidirectional space:  crickets and cicadas, birds and bees and frogs, and the constant burbling of a stream, shallow from the late summer drought.

Still from "August", 2010, video by Fred Hatt

I wanted to take a sample of this sound to bring with me to the city.  The only audio recording device I had with me was a small camcorder with a reasonably good microphone, but no tripod.  So I set the camcorder down on various flat rocks and let it run for two or three minutes each in a variety of locations.  In the bright sunlight I could hardly see what kind of images I was recording.

When I had the chance to play back my recordings, I was struck by the images I had captured, almost without thinking of it.  The view of the natural environment was intimate, up close and from ground level, a frog’s eye view.  Every scene was filled with motion, the constant fluctuation of wind, light, water, and life in all its forms.  It was a beautiful portrait of teeming Gaia in late summer, simultaneously harmonious and chaotic, serene and tempestuous.

Still from "August", 2010, video by Fred Hatt

The five minute edit presented here is a landscape picture in sound and motion.  There are no characters, no events, no ideas.  This absolutely minimal way of using video highlights its richness as a medium for capturing the texture and energy of the natural world, a little love letter to Mother Earth in the technology of our time.  Watch it in HD, and with headphones if possible.

For another of my experiments in minimalist video, depicting a different setting and season, see “November”.