In a darkened, hushed gallery, three screens comprise a triptych of flickering images.
Some of the short films that run on loops are ethnographic ( Indian and Ceylonese types from the Netherlands, for instance). Others are educational or industrial. One offers a tutorial on gold mining in Cripple Creek. Another, credited to the “Concrete Industry,” is surprisingly riveting. (How did we ever learn to build this world?)
Still others are brisk portraits.
All invite a kind of wonder. They were made between 1909 and 1919, not even two decades after those amazing Lumière Brothers held the first public screening of moving pictures.
All the films, says Jennifer Peterson, “represent the prehistory of documentary.”
A film professor at University of Colorado in Boulder, Peterson curated one half of the Lab at Belmar’s current exhibit “Silent Film & Bedroom Paintings” (running through Aug. 31).
Before there was Robert J. Flaherty’s “Nanook of the North” (1922), there were hundreds of films like the exhibition’s brief cinematic portrait of the life cycle of “The House Fly” (Thomas Edison, 1912)
“Lying the Eggs in Horse Manure” announces an intertitle in the bio-pic. What follows is a shot taken close enough to make for a beguiling, nearly abstract image.
Abstraction is one of the pleasures (or frustrations) of this installation, which rebuffs conventional ways of watching movies.
In her note about the show, Peterson shares a story about Andre Breton. It seems the French surrealist enjoyed ducking into a movie theater, capturing a few minutes of a flick, leaving before it “became boring or began to make too much sense,” then slipping into another movie house for yet another bout of disjointed images.
So if you are fond of beginnings, middles and ends, you may feel flustered by the installation. The loops run approximately 35 minutes. And it would require a certain — and contrarian — kind of discipline to watch each panel from start to finish. It’s just not programmed that way.
And if you’re a meaning-seeking sort who likes to glean the reason for certain juxtapositions, you, too, may feel thwarted, because “Silent Films & Bedroom Paintings” dodges interpretations.
Instead, you’ll have to take full responsibility for discovering a relationship between the movie that shows kids blowing kisses, then melting into fitful tantrums on one screen and the lovely film of a train making its way through Swiss mountains on another.
The three loops aren’t the same length, so their juxtapositions shift over time.
“It’s not all there for you on a plate,” admits Peterson, who likes the randomness of the viewing experience.
“I’m always fascinated by audience responses to film,” she says. “I’d rather not impose my thoughts about the films. I wanted to make people infer whatever they wanted. There are almost infinite questions that come to mind.”
Indeed. It’s mesmerizing and vexing to watch heavyweight champ Jack Johnson twirling white men in business suits around as they grasp him about the neck like kids on a ride. That they end this quick thrill ride with a kerchief wipe of the forehead is bitterly comical and inspires this question among others: Who exactly is doing the exertion here?
Silent films are coming into their own, particularly in film studies programs, Peterson says.
But with some fine exceptions, usually the work of film festival programmers (Chautauqua Silent Film Series got underway last Wednesday; ), these films can make for uneasy viewing for audiences.
“The pacing is so different,” says Peterson. “That’s one of the things I like about the early documentary films. They’re just slow.” They’re also very short.
In the same way the three panels in “Silent Films” rebuff easy interpretations, if you’re expecting an absolutely perfect conversation between the films unspooling in one gallery and the pretty “Bedroom Paintings” hanging in the next, you’ve got your work cut out for you.
But then, that is part of the pleasure and aim of the Lab.
“Silent Films & Bedroom Paintings”
Installation and exhibit. The Lab at Belmar, 404 S. Upham St., Lakewood. Through Aug. 31 12 p.m.-6 p.m. Tuesdays – Saturdays; 12 p.m.- 5 p.m. Sundays. Closed Mondays. $5. 303-934-1777 or .
