The "Spirit Stream Storm" experience is akin to being on the receiving end of a sandblaster. Life flashes before your eyes in a mad and chaotic image assault on the retina -- blinking is the only defense. Bruce Posner's avant-garde was an eye-opener for the audience Friday night at Loew Auditorium.
The 90 minute barrage displayed 15 short films of hand-crafted 35mm art. By painting, etching, and pasting on celluloid strips, Posner, Stan Brakhage and other renegade artists create their films frame by frame and hurl their final products at the viewer in one enormous blast of light, color, and movement.
At times, the audience absorbed 24 frames of artwork per second. This is impressionism taken to the limit. Before the presentation, Posner wished the audience good luck in trying to "cope with the images,"-- and he was being very serious.
Jose Antonio Sistiaga's "Impressions from the Upper Atmosphere" takes an image resembling a Zooropa album cover and violently evolves the shapes and colors to produce a hypnotic effect. The fast-forward explosions and juxtapositions were at times both soothing and desensitizing.
Yet the work quickly turned on the dazed viewer with a strenuous storm of nightmarish destruction. The intensity made it necessary to sit-up and find your bearings.
But not all of the films are high-voltage streams of light. Sergei Paradjanov's "Confession" was a touching depiction of a girl's funeral. Paradjanov explained during his surreal sequence that illness left his creation unfinished. "Confession" provided a helpful breather as the pace picked up again with Brakhage's "The Dante Quartet," four silent visions of heaven, hell and purgatory racing across the screen like a subway car. In fact, Kurt Kren's "Falter" took place in a subway, flashing multiple ghosts of people and objects atop one another.
By the time Posner's finale took the screen, the eye was overdosed on the psychedelic images. Concentrating on Posner's 19 minute autobiography was very difficult, which highlighted the presentation's only drawback--its length.
Nevertheless, "Spirit Stream Storm" was definitely a worthwhile experience. The show provides a rare sensation of sticking your head out the window at light speed. It was an amazing blur of confusion, contradiction, and reality whose meaning is wholly subliminal.
