Myron Ort
History
Experimental filmmaker and painter since the 60's. Master of Arts degree from San Francisco State Art/Film Dept. Taught Film in Art Dept. at Sonoma State University for the decade of the 70s.
Director
"In the 1960s I pioneered Abstract Expressionist painting directly to the film surface creating a new vocabulary of moving shape, color, and texture as well as a good measure of chance operation. In the 1970s I added multiple stages of optical printing to my hand-painted film ("Ommo"), but now have returned to a simpler and more pragmatic approach without composing added speed variations." - Ort
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Hand painted film. Extended graphic modes explored.
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Hand painted film. Extended graphic modes explored.
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Hand painted film. Extended graphic modes explored.
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From the “No Metaphor” Series. Camera-less filmmaking. Hand painted.
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Filmed in Baja California where the desert sun meets the Pacific Ocean and the Gulf. A rusting shipwreck on the rocks outside of Cabo San Lucas in 1972 provides a central and poignant metaphor for a macro-psychedelic and micro-expressionistic exploration of tropical colors and surfy forms. At the time many innovative and experimental in-camera techniques were used to create a dazzling and mysterious vocabulary of painter’s eye multi-plane cinema. Extensive abstract expressionist hand painting can also be seen in this final version. Meanwhile the shipwreck "Inari Maru" has disintegrated and disappeared back into the sea.
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Filmed in Baja California where the desert sun meets the Pacific Ocean and the Gulf. A rusting shipwreck on the rocks outside of Cabo San Lucas in 1972 provides a central and poignant metaphor for a macro-psychedelic and micro-expressionistic exploration of tropical colors and surfy forms. At the time many innovative and experimental in-camera techniques were used to create a dazzling and mysterious vocabulary of painter’s eye multi-plane cinema. Extensive abstract expressionist hand painting can also be seen in this final version. Meanwhile the shipwreck "Inari Maru" has disintegrated and disappeared back into the sea.
Director
During the ensuing years of developing the land, remodeling the house, the studios, and various outbuildings, as well as various projects and excursions with my partner and friends, I carried around the smallest and humblest of unobtrusive regular 8mm movie cameras with which I could both record interesting moments and also weave a cinematic fabric equivalent to the gestural style and compositional concerns of Abstract Expressionism, a style of painting I had studied, practiced, and related to since the late 1950s. In other words, these film interludes are Abstract Expressionist home movies.
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Filmed with the Bolex Rx8 camera which was the exact same size as a 16mm Bolex but holding 4 times the amount of film time-wise. These rolls were spontaneously edited with my in-camera style and have emerged as portraits, mostly of artist friends, including the painter and colleague Lynn Shelton at work in his San Francisco home studio. There is also a black & white “portrait” of my old Los Angeles neighborhood and a glimpse of my current locale in Sonoma County California. The painter's eye and a musician's lyricism is at the root of these cinematic explorations. - Myron Ort
Second Unit Director of Photography
Second in the series by the Maysles brothers documenting the monuments/sculptures of Christo, whose art projects are landscape-scaled, and more "pop" performance art designed to question how we relate to art in the public sphere, especially when it's as oblique, non-political (at least, that is what he would claim), and neutral as running a fence through a landscape.
Animation Coordinator
Myron Ort headed up a small team of animators for this 1977 short.
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Myron Ort headed up a small team of animators for this 1977 short.
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The artists known as Christo and Jeanne-Claude along with a hired crew of enthusiastic local assistants erected a major early work spanning both Sonoma and Marin counties in Northern California. "Running Fence", the culmination of 42 months of collaborative efforts, was 24.5 miles long and 18 feet high, with one end dropping down to the Pacific Ocean.
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Mirrored from left to right and front to back, this multilayered black and white symmetrical abstract horror film has apocalypse written all over it. It is still a lot of fun to see and is not without its humor.
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The edited A-roll original prior to reversal wet-gate printing and hand-painting.
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Originally an 8mm film with hand-painting which was blown up to 16mm and hand-painted again before multiple printings with several optical manipulations. A mandala of ever changing configurations, both angelic and demonic, to be seen as an evanescent phenomenon.
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From the Psychedelic Series 1968-1972 / Painting on Film, Optical Printer work, Multiple exposure, pioneering techniques from Psychedelic era.
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"A film produced in Regular 8mm around 1970. At the time this film was very much praised by Stan Brakhage who asked me for a print and urged me to never put a sound track with it." -MO
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From the Psychedelic Series: 1968-1972. Painting on Film, Optical Printer work, Multiple exposure, pioneering techniques from Psychedelic era.
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Transition from psychedelics to Meher Baba. Cinema as path to reality.
Flower-generation celebration of love. "Filmed in San Francisco and Berkeley California in collaboration with my girlfriend at the time, the actress Donna Germain [...] When Stan Brakhage came to the SF Bay Area around 1968 and saw my 8mm film he wanted a print and we traded by footage count and that is why eventually ended up with a whole collection of his 8mm Songs. I believe Stan was influenced by this film in regards to in-camera superimposition [...] he used the technique in his very next films at the time." -MO
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Flower-generation celebration of love. "Filmed in San Francisco and Berkeley California in collaboration with my girlfriend at the time, the actress Donna Germain [...] When Stan Brakhage came to the SF Bay Area around 1968 and saw my 8mm film he wanted a print and we traded by footage count and that is why eventually ended up with a whole collection of his 8mm Songs. I believe Stan was influenced by this film in regards to in-camera superimposition [...] he used the technique in his very next films at the time." -MO
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From the Psychedelic Series: 1968-1972. Early work with the JK Optical Printer. Some of the earliest examples of optically manipulated hand painted film.
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Even by the late 1960s, to my knowledge, there had been no “Abstract Expressionist” non-referential, extended painting applied directly to motion picture film. All previous examples of “direct animation” were more or less figurative, although some by Len Lye involved stenciling and dancing geometric shapes, all previous examples adhered mostly to some kind of a figure based continuity between individual frames.
Through the veils of multiple exposure at an "Acid Test" party in San Francisco (toward the end of "He's Here Now" ) one might catch a brief glimpse of Ken Kelsey and Neal Cassidy. During those years, when picking up processed film at Multi-Chrome labs in San Francisco, I would sometimes run into and chat with another hero, the great filmmaker Bruce Baillie, one of the original founders of Canyon Cinema.
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Through the veils of multiple exposure at an "Acid Test" party in San Francisco (toward the end of "He's Here Now" ) one might catch a brief glimpse of Ken Kelsey and Neal Cassidy. During those years, when picking up processed film at Multi-Chrome labs in San Francisco, I would sometimes run into and chat with another hero, the great filmmaker Bruce Baillie, one of the original founders of Canyon Cinema.
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15 min., sound, 1967
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13 min., sound, 1967
