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Interlude
(Homage to Bugs Bunny) was one of my 'personal experiments' , and
originally I had not intended to release it for distribution. Initially
I had been interested in the soundtrack and its relationship to
the images, editing the 'pirated' sequence of Bugs Bunny and Yosemite
Sam by listening to the patterns made by the repeating musical phrase.
Fascinated by the work of Steve Reich (see below) I became increasingly
interested in the relationship between the repeating musical rhythms
and the looping cycle of the cartoon characters, as this relationship
began to suggest a structure. I liked the idea that the repetition,
though very noticeable, was not immediately obvious and that the
musical structure influenced the decisions about where and when
to cut the sequence. The accuracy of my editing (and my edit suite)
was tested, and in this sense I saw it initially as a kind of technical
exercise.
These
ideas notwithstanding, I had also had some preliminary plans to
make a piece of work that was 'about' the experience of watching
television. As a child (and into my teens!) I had been an avid Bugs
Bunny fan, and as I had watched the programme unfailingly every
week, I had seen this particular episode (Irate Pirate, dir. Chuck
Jones) many times.
For
me Interlude (Homage to Bugs Bunny) was important because it became
'physical', both because of the use of duration, which I had learned
from the structuralist film-makers, and rhythmical because of what
I had learned from listening to Reich. It was also nostalgic, because
it referred to my childhood television viewing, and conceptually
interesting to me because it referred to the 'flow' of programming
which by now seemed to define the medium of television so specifically.
The pun here was intentional, this tape was made before the brief
vogue for 'Scratch Video', but was in fact, shown as part of a survey
of British scratch video work in 1986, ("New British Video"
Atelilier de Pedegogie et d'animation, Strasbourg, France.)
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