This September, Spectacle is proud to present a retrospective of the luminary American experimental filmmaker Scott Bartlett in collaboration with The Film-Makers’ Cooperative.

Scott Barlett (1943 - 1990) was a traveling man with a fancy for strobing lights and fast motion. His films are pure psychedelia. Patching together philosophical ramblings on mystic traditions, hit songs from the ‘60s and ‘70s, and wobbly light patterns, Bartlett creates pithy works of genius. To this day, he remains best known for 1968’s OFFON, a gleaming vision of the cosmos that tested the limits of early video technology and set Bartlett down a path of stalwart experimentation within the cinematic tradition.

PROGRAM ONE: To the Moon and Beyond

MAKING OFFON. 1981. 10 min.
METANOMEN.1966. 8 min.
SERPENT. 1971. 14 min.
MOON 1969. 1969. 10 min.
OFFON. 1968. 9 min.

Scott Bartlett was haunted by outer space throughout his life. In a lecture at the Carnegie Museum of Art, he said he wanted to express “the meaning of the universe” by depicting visions of the cosmos that surpassed the limits of human consciousness. His crowning achievement, OFFON, might represent the zenith of these ambitions, but Bartlett’s intense curiosity with space is shared across many of his short films.

Made in 1981 while Bartlett was teaching in Los Angeles, MAKING OFFON dives back into his origins as a filmmaker and sets the scene for his artistic mission. His first film, METANOMEN, still sees him stuck on Earth. Collaging images of skyscrapers into a rollicking city tour, the film foretells Bartlett’s consuming interest with worlds beyond our own. SERPENT — a magic mushroom-inspired retelling of the Eden myth — finds Bartlett playing with recycled imagery in an attempt to link various historical narratives into a short parable about humanity’s destructive tendencies. MOON 1969 and OFFON take Bartlett elsewhere and are best described by film critic Gene Youngblood as “the cosmos in continual transformation” and explorations of the “fundamental realities below the surface of normal perception” respectively.

All of these films will be shown on 16mm, courtesy of The Film-Maker's Co-Op.