. . . (ellipses) Part 51998

Reel #5 of (. . .) is composed of scratch-imagery edited to the music of Flocking by James Tenney. The music is allowed to play for about 2-1/2 minutes accompanied only by black leader: then there is a sudden flare of pure white which begins to flicker with negative-colored ephemeral shapes, until finally the music and a fulsome mass of scratched images are accompanying each other. At times a distinctly different quality of colored image appears and continues for awhile (non-orange negative photography of painted film as well as picture images, altogether unrecognizable, un-nameable). The audio-visual aesthetic is such that there are very few absolute synchronizations between image and sound, but rather music "echoing" visuals or cisuals cut into the rhythmic patterns of previous music, so that the two "go along" together interweaving without either dominating the other (which is the principal reason the music is allowed at beginning to establish its aesthetic in the mind of the listener before he or she is expected to follow the development of visual patterns): both audio and visual end at the same time, bringing some sense of closure to the event film.–S. B.