...ere erera baleibu izik subua aruaren... (José Antonio Sistiaga, 1970) (Patreon)

I was moved to finally watch this acknowledged experimental masterwork because its maker, the Basque artist José Antonio Sistiaga, passed away last month at the age of 91. Given the nature of ...ere erera..., I had been putting off watching it in the hopes that an actual screening might eventually come my way. This is a 70-minute, silent, hand-painted film, and on top of the fact that light through celluloid is its raison d'être, it is not exactly easy to focus on a film this abstract when viewing it at home.

But there is a new 4K version that has just been released to disc, from which the copy I watched was taken. I will say on a technical note that even in a high-quality digital transfer, there were sections of ...ere erera... that degenerated into boxy spots of color, since Sistiaga was producing rapid-fire motion that exceeded the transfer's ability to scan. While viewing this file on my computer was less than ideal, I'd like to think I at least got a sense of what Sistiaga was aiming for.

...Ere erera... is what we now call a "direct film," meaning that its maker has applied paint to the filmstrip and has employed no camera or post-production effects. In interviews, Sistiaga indicated that he was inspired by his discovery of Norman McLaren's films, and I think this is a useful bit of information for trying to unpack the temporal and gestural experience of ...ere erera... Since Stan Brakhage is probably the best-known exponent of painting-on-film, it's almost impossible not to think about his work when watching Sistiaga's film. But almost immediately, an attentive viewer sees that ...ere erera... is completely unlike Brakhage in nearly every respect.

A big part of it is rhythm. Brakhage's painted films tend to move at a rather leisurely pace, with broad painterly forms "breathing" on the screen, expanding and contracting in a palpable film space. It's also the case that Brakhage liberally employed optical effects, such as step-printing and masking areas of the image in post-production. So often his abstract images would smear, swirl, or otherwise induce a movement that the paintbrush (or ink pen) alone could not achieve. Influenced as he was by Abstract Expressionism, Brakhage saw the flatness of the screen as an arena for various kinds of visual push and pull.

In McLaren, Sistiaga found an artist who was equal parts abstract painter and animator. As one watches ...ere erera.., one can see certain shapes and particle fields emerging and dissipating. As in McLaren's films, stripes of color or groups of dots coalesce into moving forms or "characters," and they dart across the screen in a way that suggests solidity, even if only for a moment. What Sistiaga adds to this fanciful approach is a commitment to absolute flatness. Spots, bubbles, and drips will flit around the frame, and sometimes even a concrete form (like the sphere above) will arrive. But ...ere erera... insists on the screen as a surface, not a volumetric space.

So if Brakhage's painted films sometimes echo the works of Jackson Pollock or Clyfford Still, Sistiaga's images are much more akin to the paintings of Sam Francis, with their speckled fields of chromatic spillage. (Here are a couple of Francis' canvases.)

But of course, Francis's paintings are static, and can be apprehended almost immediately. As one spends an hour and change with Sistiaga's film, you really get the sense that its closest artistic analogue is minimalist music, although of the busier, more prismatic variety: Steve Reich, Giacinto Scelsi, Terry Riley, composers who fixate on an idea, turn it inside out, and then move onto another distinct but related idea. There are segments of ...ere erera... that rotate, that bubble and pop, and some that simply swirl across the surface like UHF TV "snow." You can "see things" in Sistiaga's forms, and he was apparently fine with that. But the marks on the film itself have their own solidity and unexpected development.

There is also an interest in negative space in ...ere erera... that is almost entirely absent from Brakhage. One perceives ink lines as well as an oil-based tackiness that results in disparities where the paint doesn't adhere evenly. Sistiaga achieves web-like skeins of color that, intentionally or not, reassert the filmic quality of the work. We see the screen. We see the light of the projector, sometimes without any tincture.

There's no question that ...ere erera... is a demanding film. On first viewing, I feel I have a much better sense of its micro-structures than any grand design. That could well be appropriate, and it seems that lots of viewers love the radical openness of Sistiaga's film, the freedom to engage with it on any terms, however personal or idiosyncratic. Still, I feel that ...ere erera.. exists as a single film, and not a group of shorter films, for a reason, and at present that reason escapes me. I'd need to watch it again.

However, one need not be aware of the McLaren connection to sense the playfulness and generosity of Sistiaga's film. It progresses as if the artist had a conviction about change and instability for their own sake, an enthusiasm bordering on showmanship. "Does this interest you? No? How about this?" Brakhage, as glorious as his painting films may be, often projects the seriousness of the Romantic visionary, resulting in films that are absorbing but someone dolorous. Sistiaga, part of the Gaur collective of anti-Franco Basque artists, created a film that projects an ethical commitment to anarchy, implying that the liberation of the spectator's imagination is the very foundation of anti-fascist thinking.

Final note on the title. ...ere erera baleibu izik subua aruaren... is a group of nonsense syllables that nevertheless conform to the phonetic structure of the Basque language. Like Hugo Ball's gibberish poems in "French," Sistiaga's title phrase is composed of "words" that do not exist in the Basque tongue, but might have, given somewhat different circumstances. Like the babbling of an infant, ...ere erera... assumes that a certain kind of freedom ends where syntax begins. So in this respect, Sistiaga has much in common with Brakhage's desire for the "untutored eye," the baby in the grass who has never heard of "green."