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Bruce McClure - Friday, October 28, c/o Teatro San Giorgio, 9.30 P.M.
Performer of light and darkness. These would be the right words if we had to describe the live performances of this ex-architect, one of the main interpreter of Expanded Cinema and guest of the most important festivals of the world (Rotterdam, Toronto, New York, etc). Bruce McClure lives and works in New York, but has lived many years in Italy, first around Emilia and then near the borders of Switzerland. He will be the international guest of this eleventh edition, creator and main character of a suggestive and unique film performance to be staged on Friday, 28 October.
His events, studied for around a hundred people, throw the audience in the complete darkness of the theater, illuminated only by visual flickers (the pulsing image of the projector): sound beats and visual loops synesthetically drag the audience into a space dominated by the rush of the sound and the beam of intermittent lights and images. Light meets darkness: a series of 16mm projectors, modified by Bruce himself (for this performance, he will use two simultaneously) project films loops, creating cones of light which are then synchronized with sounds and noises – the optical sound of the filmstrip. A mixer and some electric pedalboards allow him to create an optical/sound universe that completely envelops the audience. His live performances are very close to expanded cinema, that is, that cinema which dominates the space beyond the screen: not the imaginative world of a diegetic vision, but the actual, palpable, never virtual universe of a theater made of light and darkness, a space shared by both the projectionist and the audience, by both the one who creates the light and the ones who experience it. Cineseizures, like Martin Arnold’s cinema, attacking the linear, undisturbed vision we’re used to: Bruce McClure’s performances create a sort of proto-cinema which both isolates and merges the minimal codes of signification (light and darkness), stripping them of any possible representative hold. Even the choice of images is not random: indeed, the title of his performance is only chosen after an inspection – in this sense, his past as an architect still lets its voice be heard. He explores the theater, he tastes it, and then, once he got his inspiration, he prepares detailed papers with title and ‘explanation’ of his performance and hands them out to the audience. So, it’s not a detached vision, but a totally enveloping one, where it is still possible to taste the charm and the sound of darkness.
“One of the beauties of the projectors I use is that they have optical sound. With this system one form of energy can be converted into another. A waveform pictured as a changing ratio of light to dark on the film surface is converted by a light beam and cathode into electrical output amplified and made audible by loudspeakers. The projector has an integrated anatomy of giving designed to satisfy both the eyes and the ears and leaves little waste. Film in my performances serves the picture lamp and the sound lamp signals to be pushed and pulled by the projectionist. What I do is to try to sound out through the darkness enjoying every minute of it before someone else turns on the lights.” (Bruce McClure interviewed by Bertram Niessen)
The use of the projector, not as the maker of imagination anymore, but as an integral part of the performance, is the tangible cause of the changing and settlement of light on darkness and darkness on light. So, to witness a performance of Bruce McClure means to feel it, not just to see it and hear it: there’s no DVD, no recording that can give us the intensity of this experience that brings us back origin of cinema, where the light pierces the darkness of the theater and the sound embraces us with its power and a/synchronicity.
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