MARTHA COLBURN INTERVIEW BY DON RAMIREZ
Please note: this article is due to appear in a more edited down form in SUPER 8 TODAY magazine. Martha Colburn’s films “Don’t Kill the Weatherman!” and “Myth Labs” will screen on opening night at the 2008 festival. Interviewer Don Ramirez is director of the film, “TRAILER TRASH: A Film Journal”, playing as part of the “GOD BLESS AMERICA” program on Sat 13th Sept at the festival). Martha Colburn is profound, profane and prolific. A Super 8mm filmmaker of uncompromising vision, she has taken her personal cinema, created with a distinctively underground sensibility, into the highest pantheons of the international art world. Her 2007 Sundance Film Festival 'official selection' notice was kind of special, not only was this 5th acceptance into Sundance, but last year she received TWO 'official selection' notifications. She screened in a short film program and had a film/video installation as part of the New Frontiers program at Sundance. Martha Colburn is a Filmmaker, artist, musician, writer and sound composer. Her work has shown in the Whitney Biennial (2006), Centre Pompidou, Andy Warhol Museum and the Museum of Modern Art (NY). Also her band, The Dramatics, released a very limited edition number of vinyl records, with handcrafted album covers by Martha Colburn. However, Martha Colburn is best known for her animated short films. They have been described as: hyper absurdist, "garage cinema", "a horrific comically surreal kinetic joy ride where every frame counts", noisy, insane, "wildly funny, a cartoon version of the inhabitants of hell", hallucinogenic, chaotic, raw, spontaneous, wickedly entertaining, gritty and (my favorite) "cut and paste perversion". Having paid her dues on the film festival circuit, relentlessly screening and touring with her films for more than a decade, she has become a film artist in demand. Rarely having time to reflect on her filmmaking success, such as prestigious screenings in Sundance and Cannes Film Festival, I deeply appreciated the time she gave to me for Super 8 Today Magazine. Martha began experimenting with filmmaking techniques in 1994 while living in Baltimore City. A graduate of Maryland Institute College of Art, she became deeply entrenched in Baltimore's alternative avant garde art and music scenes. She is a self-taught filmmaker; she first began her filmmaking career without a movie camera. Given a pick up truckload of 16mm educational films being discarded from a West Virginia library, she reedited the refuse into found footage films of jolting juxtapositions. Her early filmmaking experiments led to the altering of film emulsion with scratching and hand painting. Decomposing and rearranging she altered both film frames and sound stripes. Her earliest films like Drivers Ed and Acrophobic Babies began the theme that became the sprocket holes that run through her entire film career. As a Filmmaker she has used collage and montage in every conceivable form. While living in her cavernous artist loft space, converted from an 1895 sewing factory, unheated and with poor plumbing, an artist living a Spartan life style, not even owning a car, she poured her limited resources into her filmmaking. In 1995 she was given her first Super 8 movie camera, an old Nizo S-8, and later getting the highly sought after Canon 1014 XLS, A professional super 8 movie camera which she still uses today. Martha quickly became addicted to the super 8 film format. She stated Super 8 was cheap, accessible, easy to learn and very easy to use. Martha began working with very basic Super 8 filmmaking techniques. Working with live footage, superimposition, hand painting and stop motion animation. Martha says, "For me, making films, its not brain science, making films the way I do is simple and it’s so primitive, I mean cave -man level tech. Just light it right and the rest is up to my imagination and will power and physical stamina!" She has continued to refine those filmmaking techniques over the years, allowing her film vision absolute freedom. She has continued to constantly develop both an impeccable craftsmanship and an art aesthetic that has never allowed for the exercising of self-censorship. She began to create short films made with handcrafted flat laminated puppets. To bring her puppets to animated life, she would use steel wire, which she would have to cut and twist into hinges one at a time, using around 500 per film. Creating a menagerie of Frankenstein-like monsters, knitting together decaying parts of dead and forgotten pop culture trash (like 600 abandoned vintage porno magazines) she created paper doll monsters of unimagined beauty and terror. Only through Martha's movie camera lens could these montage horrifically beautiful and starkly comical creatures be given eternal life on film. In her early Baltimore Super 8 films, she often placed her super 8 movie camera on a tripod and pointed it at the floor, creating a make shift and inexpensive animation stand. She relied heavily on in- camera edits but still had to hand edited and hand paint all her Super 8 films, working with a reel to reel viewer and 8 mm splice tape, to preparing her short films for post production. After a labor intensive creative process she would have her films optically blown up to 16mm master film prints by Bill Brand. In final post-production she later added sound she personally created or collaborated on. Part mad scientist and part film perfectionist, she had generated animated shorts film of an entertaining complexity. Quickly grabbing the attention of Film Festival programmers and art critics alike. With an absurdist perspective she has drawn upon themes of violence, sex, hell, politics, fetishism, pop culture, death. She wields wit and a dark sense of humor like the scalpel of a drunken surgeon. Shattering all preconceived notions of art house pretensions, her films are on a "seek and destroy" mission - proof that not every filmmaker wants to go 'Hollywood'. In the first few years of filmmaking endeavors she would compile a body of work and a screening history that would make the most seasoned auteur jealous! Working without sponsorship, subsides, grants, or patrons she began producing and screening her animated hand crafted Super 8 films at a fanatical pace. She has often claimed she made so many films during those years in the Baltimore sewing factory because the arch lamps needed for animation kept her warm! In her first few years she produced over 40 films with titles like; Spiders in Love, Evil of Dracula, What's on? And There's a Pervert in our Pool. Within five years, she was winning awards in film festivals both here and in Europe. Just a few include; 1997 Best Animated Film U.S. Super 8mm Film Festival, in 1998 winning Best Animated Film at both New York Underground Film Festival and Chicago Underground Film Festival, four of her films screened at New York's Museum of Modern Art (aka MOMA) as part of 'An American History of 8mm film' and in June of 1998 she received an all expenses paid invitation to screen her films at the Hamburg Short Film Festival in Germany, In 1999 she made her first appearance at Sundance. The negatives and hand colored films of her art are preserved at Anthology Film Archive in New York City. Legendary Underground Filmmaker who is the Founder and current Artistic Director of Anthology Film Archive, Jonas Mekas has said the following regarding Martha's films: "The uniqueness of Martha Colburn, to me, is the explosive energy and craft with which she brings up-to-date, and pushes further, the film form of found-image-collage established by Stan Vanderbeek and Dick Preston in the Sixties. She has invented her own techniques and language that permits her to fuse the grotesque images of our popular civilization as produced by our image industries, to make film songs of universal sadness of our times. Bordering on the outrageous, crackling frame energy, Martha Colburn films are naked testimonials of our times, and of her generations." Martha Colburn left Baltimore after receiving an eviction notice from the sewing factory in the year 2000. Ironically, on September 20th of 2000, The Charles Theatre in Baltimore hosted and screened a retrospective of Martha's work to a sold out audience. With the assistance of Canyon Cinema Co operative, The Charles Theatre arranged a 90-minute program of 25 films! Martha like countless artists before her in other American cities was the victim of local politics. Baltimore was once again attempting a revitalization program for impoverished high crime neighborhoods, populated by gun totting drug dealers, junkies and prostitutes. Forgotten city blocks frequented only by brave bohemian outcasts and artist, creating cheap art space. A gentrification project which cost the tax payers and accomplishing nothing but displacing the artists that give Baltimore city one of its few redeeming qualities. In a Baltimore City Paper interview from that time she said, "This city, I think it needs its artists. But this one is going. " The then refugee Martha landed an artist residency in Amsterdam where she completed the equivalent of a Masters of Art at the Royal Academy of Art in Holland. She continues to be a tireless and self-driven artist with a work ethic that rivals the Amish (of her home state). Her highlights of the past few years are many; including teaching animation in China in 2004: Her animation has appeared in the documentary The Devil and Daniel Johnson (which premiered at Sundance) and in music videos for They Might be Giants and the music video Lie, Lie Lie for the rock band Srj Tankian and has received over 1.5 million hits on YOU TUBE. Most recently completing an animated music video titled ‘Wrong Time Capsule’ for the avant garde rock band Deer hoof. She continues to produce animated films now in both 16mm and 35 mm film formats. She often receives invitations to screen her films in festivals around the world. She has become a highly sought after lecturer and exhibiting filmmaker. In 2005 she completed a 35mm film (with the aid of a grant from the Dutch Film Fund), which incorporated the use of Super 8 film, Cosmetic Emergency, completed in 2006. She lives in Long Island, USA with ties to Holland. Despite all of her filmmaking success, currently working with both 35mm and 16 mm formats, she has never abandoned Super 8 filmmaking. She views the medium as vital in helping her to have brought her visions of entertaining madness to the silver screen. Currently working out of her studio in Long Island, NY, she says she is still shooting super 8 film and is planning a new super 8 mm film that would use Kodak's new Vision Super 8 negative film, Martha replied "Yes, I am shooting super 8 mostly on cut-always but for my for next film I will be shooting it in super 8mm, It's a war film so I'll be filming some live pyrotechnics and action scenes on a puppet scale." She remains a filmmaking perfectionist and purist, rarely relying on computers, all of her films originate on film. Asked about the new digital media she says, "No. I still do it all the old school way, because my animation 'vision' has become refined and I have a clear vision of what to do, I don't really have spliced edits. So I do it all in camera. I don't splice the rolls together on film anymore. I wish I could, but basically I use the computer to put them together into some presentable format." Always the experimental musician she says she likes computers for the higher quality of digital sound, compared to the older magnetic tape. She has often collaborated with musicians and artists giving their films a unique sound texture; she feels this is best captured in the new digital soft ware. She obsessively handles all the time consuming technicalities of her animation and film production. She is the iconic image of the solitary underground film artist, working as her own producer, camera man, editor and business manager, one can’t help but feel she must never eat or sleep, alone in her studio animating for hours on end. Martha Colburn's films are a 14 year testament to the power of personal cinema, never compromising her films unique vision for greater commercial success. It is the vision and talent of the film artists, not the expense of the cameras or use of the newest equipment, that creates great film art. Martha says; "filmmaking is not an 'experience' separate from myself or my life. I mean, I wake up everyday and basically I am on a mission all day and into the night to do this. So this is what I do and it brings people together, and it brings amazing collaborations and lots of fun, and much work." The country girl from rural Pennsylvania has come far, she has earned the respect and admiration of the international film community. Her filmmaking success story, with the aid of super 8, is just simply gutsy and powerful. Martha wanted to pass along; "I live in an old mafia bar in Long Island city, NY , that was once a speakeasy and the '; democratic' head quarters of NY in the 30's. My studio is in the front office. We throw cinema events and music events occasionally".
|
Film Festival 2008
Disclaimer
