Lumia - The Origins of Parfait Luz

Our journey with Light Shows started with experimentations during 2024 for a masters program in experimental film - this is an edited version of the dissertation that explains how Light Shows became part our creative practice, and how it evolved from Sophie and Morgan originally starting to practice them at the university- this then continued past the film this dissertation is referring to, and has now evolved into Parfait Luz.

Lumia has been performed twice - Once at IOS Designs, and once at Otago Street Diaries.
We are planning future performances with the new techniques we’ve learned since the first showings.

Lumia as a project went through several stages of development throughout the year, originally starting as a script written several years ago about a couple falling in love over the course of one night, with psychedelic inspirations. This concept has since been pushed further through an interrogation of not only the theme of love itself, but of its presentation in film, and why using techniques originating in the psychedelic era are appropriate to present this; finally culminating in an immersive live performance in which the film was cut together in real time in front of an audience, mixing both prerecorded footage and live liquid lightshow plates. Moving from a linear film, shot traditionally with elements of 60s techniques, into a live event was the result of reading and trying to gain a deeper understanding of where the techniques I was using originated from. I also questioned how these techniques could be pushed further to merge analog techniques of the time with modern technology while respecting their origin. In using modern software I also tried to find an approach that captured the ephemerality of a live liquid light show as performed by Joshua White and the many other light show artists of the 60s and 70s by looking to current practitioners of the art as well as filmmakers exploring Expanded Cinema to bring these ideas together into one piece.

Originally, my main forms of reference from the period were Wonderwall (1968), The Trip (1967), and Psych Out (1968), with my main inspiration for a modernization of these

techniques being Anna Biller’s The Love Witch (2016), due to the use of film, lens filters, as well as an Old Hollywood approach to mise-en-scene and dialogue that evokes a film made in the 50s or 60s while conveying a more current message through this lens. It was only after reading Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1968) that my research began to expand from aesthetic elements of the period, to the film developing conceptually through research about lightshows. In Wolfe’s description of the acid tests he describes the bright colors and dripping liquid, finally declaring that “surely, the final stage would be reached when the audience forgot it was an audience, and became part of the action”. These descriptions led me to finding lightshows, and in turn people who practiced the art then and are continuing it now, such as Joshua White, Steve Pavlovsky, and Mark L.Rubenstein, all who are still active members of the Psychedelic Light Show Preservation Society, which shares resources about the art form and provides a community of artists, which is where I received most of my advice, allowing the film to evolve in the way that it has. This is one of the reasons the title of the film changed from Shine On to Lumia, “The fourth element (of the Joshua Light Show) was dubbed “lumia” […] The name comes from Thomas Wilfred’s color organ experiments of the 1920s.” Lumia has come to encompass the practice of manipulating light, and this seemed more fitting. For the final film, we used two types of plates, a Blow Plate, and a Squish Plate, also employing a kaleidoscopic lens to a portion of these.

Originally, light was going to be a central theme in the film through a green light which the two characters follow, and as they are closer together the light would engulf them. The green light has since been replaced, moving from a literal light to the manipulation of it through projections, lens filters, the use of gels and mirrors, and finally a full liquid lightshow at the end. Understanding that the manipulation of light was a theme that Iwanted to explore rather than just having it as a motif is what brought these ideas into more clarity.

Lightshows lend themselves to haptic visuality well, as there is no concrete and discernable form to be found within them. As each plate is unique and the product of different chemicals interacting, they are completely up to the audience’s interpretation when projected. In D.R Weir’s experimentation studying lightshows, he found that the reactions audiences had to these images greatly differed, “Psychological effects resulting from a light show include those resulting from viewing the cinema. Some spectators found that the images reminded them of moving Rorschach patterns. A spectator at one stage complained of seeing 'blood' and this idea became so strong that she had to leave. On the other hand, other spectators have come to the show irritable and tense and have left calm and relaxed.”

When thinking of how the use of light show techniques have an effect on the viewer, Laura Marks writing, “haptic space may be considered abstract in that the line and form of the image do not set out to depict as much as to decorate, it is concrete in that it creates a unified visual field only on a surface.” Correlates with how one may see a Blow plate as it is layered on top of live action footage, it takes over the field of vision, and creates an emotion through the colours and movement being produced in real time, one feels immersed in it, as though you are touching it, while not being able to understand exactly what you’re looking at, “The video works I propose to call haptic invite a look that moves on the surface plane of the screen for some time before the viewer realizes what it is she is beholding.” Marks also mentions that the look and grain of film contributes to the haptic, this imperfection and handmade feel being something that originally drew me to 60s art is something I tried to explore throughout this process, originally using a camcorder for this flatter, grainer look, and then taking this a step further, trying to achieve something that was tactile to make rather than just look at.

In conversation with Joshua White, I brought up this dilemma I was having of trying to make this film look and feel handmade, discussing reading I’d been doing of Gregory Zinman’s book Making Images Move, and his writing about artists such as Stan Brakhage and Len Lye about their manipulation of physical film, and how I’d like to apply this feeling and care to my own work, but did not have film available to me to do this. His advice to me was, “just because you are not physically cutting together film does not mean what you’re doing isn’t working with your hands.” This changed my approach to editing and led to several experimentations in which I tried to find ways to work around the inaccessibility of film to still make things by hand. This began with printing out individual frames on paper and cutting, ripping, and colouring over them to achieve a similar process to doing this to film itself, then putting it all back into Premier Pro and cutting it all together. This achieved not only the effect that I had been looking for, but also the process that I was looking for, and I went on to use this for the final live action scene of Lumia in the church, having reality fully distort as the film moves from a narrative anchored in some reality to being fully taken over by lightshows and animation – combining the two using this technique. This could also be applied the digital animations in the film.

Montage was another concept used in earlier experimentations, and as the film began to take shape, it increasingly became integral to the research and practice. Originally, the script contained dialogue as the two characters made their way through a world that is slowly becoming more psychedelic, but as more planning went on, the dialogue kept getting cut down. It became quite apparent that the visual language was what was going to tell the story. “Suggestion is always more effective than exposition.” From early on, the emotions being conveyed were being shown with psychedelia as a form of surrealism, with the lighting and abstraction giving these emotions a visual language, so having dialogue to explain this only seemed to hinder this message rather than add to it. Joshua White’s, advice was to have the characters be “human figures in a landscape, not acting out a scene”, but capturing them “and their emotions in this atmosphere created by you” (Joshua White 2024) Originally, the script called for the characters to end up in three locations as they tried to get home, a park, a laundromat, and a church, with the idea being them wandering into these different locations as they make their way through the city. It wasn’t until late into the project that I began to think about why they were there, of course the characters had to end up somewhere, but the reason behind these locations hadn’t yet become clear. Even though I knew they would be dream-like sequences, part of this “trip” that they were going through together. While this originally was only going to signify the progression of their relationship, really leaning into the concept of montage and having each scene tell a different story did things start to make sense. “Eisenstein's experiments with film montage […] is, the innate tendency of the human mind to ‘leap to a conclusion.’” Some narrative linearity was kept by having the connecting scenes present, as well as the mise-en-scene, such as the shirts the actor is wearing in every scene being the same, but as the film progresses they are all painted slightly differently, until in the final scene where it is fully painted and covered in color.

While montage was already being used as the main device to keep the “trip” moving from scene to scene, combining the original narrative in linear structure with lightshows was something that was working aesthetically as two different pieces, but did not make much sense together. In the original trailer, there was a very distinct split between the normal, linear love story, and the final lightshow sequence, they didn’t feel like part of the same film. Part of this was then rectified by being more abstract with the mise-en-scene and costuming, making the characters feel more part of the abstract space they were inhabiting, and considering having the light shows be more of a part of the first scenes. Reading about Laurie Anderson’s work made the concept come together.

“She often became so absorbed in making her work that she was late to her performances. ‘I’d barely finish editing the film, so I mever got to the soundtrack. At the last minute, I’d grab my violin and run to the festival. I’d stand in front of my film, play the violin live and do the dialogue live’”

If the music could be performed in real time to accompany the film, could the other way around not work as well? Remembering the work of Steve Pavolvsky, who does live performances of liquid lightshows, mixing the plates together digitally, I began to explore the idea of not only mixing live lightshow plates together, but prerecorded footage as well. VJ software works very similarly to the way that DJ software works, giving the person using it the option to fade in and fade out video, manipulating it in real time. Gregory Zinman had already written about lightshows connection to cinema, “Because the light show involves the projection of images and/or the play of focused light on a screen or surface, it shares certain characteristics with cinema and is often discussed as a subgenre of expanded cinema or intermedia art.” Lightshows themselves were a performance, the chemical reactions and interplay of the liquids could not fully be controlled, make them an ephemeral art form that can not be fully replicated. Combining the element of live performance that lightshows have as a base with modern VJ technology allowed the whole film to have this quality, leading to my exploration to move this into a kind of installation or performance piece, looking to theories of expanded cinema for guidance. “Expanded cinema became the term used to describe radical experimentation with the moving image”….“many directed their attention towards the installation and experimented with what they considered the physicality of time and space” When choosing software I settled on GLMixer which allows the user to input all of the clips into a file, dragging them on and off the “stage”, with the center of the circle being 100% opacity and the opacity lowering as the clip is dragged further away from the center. This also allows for the layering of several clips together, something that I ended up using a lot in the montage, as it allowed me to create new images through the use of ones already recorded in real time, also allowing for animations on top of any footage rather than having to have this already tied to a specific clip.

What incorporating live editing did for the project was bring in a tension between linearity and non-linearity, as well as performance vs cinema. “Performance […], disrupts the rules of time. We cannot accurately determine how long a performance will last; […] Performance takes from reality and gives back, whereas cinema takes from reality, processes, and gives back. The experiment communicates everything.”

Filmmakers Darrell Jonsson and Jean Detheux have used GLMixer in combination with their own cinematic practices, both using GLMixer to edit together abstract images, such as in Jean Detheux’s Trieste Concert, in which he mixed abstract visuals live while being accompanied by a pianist, reacting to the music in the same way a light show artists or VJ would. Darrell Jonsson is an “Experimental filmmaker, projection artist using expanded cinema techniques, generative computer graphics […] Motion media designed for live dynamic, narrative performances.”2 His ongoing project Urban Space Epics combines live music and pre-recorded footage, “chant, analogue Moog synthesizer, electric Kalimba’s, xylophone, slide guitar, wind instruments and a variety of world music instruments.” Within his practice he explores form and the interaction between the live and pre-recorded, analogue and digital, combining cultures to create a project that captures the ephemerality of there interactions. Lumia, on the other hand, still has some basis in traditional forms of narrative. While montage and layering are employed, the basic structure is still there. Eno (2024) is a similar concept, a generative film in which every time an audience views the piece it will be different as AI decides what clips to cut in.

Keeping the narrative itself did present a number of challenges for the live event. First of all, while I did have many light show plates pre-recorded and already on GLMixer, there still had to be live lightshow plates. The element of live editing means that every time the film is performed it will be different. I originally had around 300 individual clips colour graded, exported, and in GLMixer ready to go, but ultimately cut this down to roughly 150 clips total, so that in the live event I would not be overwhelmed by the amount of choices, choosing the half I preferred at the time to be available for assessment. Morgan, who did the cinematography for the film was the one doing light show plates next to me, with cameras recording both and feeding in to GLMixer to be added into the film whenever we were ready. We had previously discussed what kinds of plates and colours would go best with each scene, with the idea that around half of the light show plates in the film would be live and unrepeatable, layering them with other plates we had from previous recording sessions, as it would be very difficult to mix more than two plates at a time during such a short film. When planning the event, I was lucky enough to be allowed to screen the film at ISO designs, I needed a table to put the computer and the lightshow equipment, as well as a space where people could stand and observe. The goal was not for people to sit and watch, but for them to wander around and interact with how the film was being made, having the opportunity to see how the plates were being created as well as how the film was being cut together live. If the screen and plates had not been within the audiences eyeline then I felt they would not fully experience how the film they were watching was being put together. This also meant that after the show, audience members were able to come over and try out these elements for themselves, adding to their understanding of how the event worked while also hopefully creating some interest in how lightshows are made.

The nature of the film being live did mean there were lots of different instances in which the live event could have gone wrong. If a clip was not switched on time it would loop back to the start, and unfortunately the cameras recording the live light shows froze halfway through, leading me to have to rely on pre-recorded ones during the last sequence. The music was also cut short by about a minute. All of these things were practiced over a dozen times before the actual event, but since it was live there is not much to be done other than have it fixed for the next time the film is presented live. Ultimately the most challenging aspect was finding a balance between narrative flow and allowing for experimentation in the film, while keeping communication between myself and Morgan for the live event to run smoothly. For the next event, the clips could be organised completely differently, changing the order of scenes or even having the scenes merge together completely.

This film being a mixture of live event and pre-recorded footage is what I believe brought a year’s worth of concepts together into an experience that made sense. Combining the ephemerality of a light show with the craft of experimental film in a way that will be different every time it is performed. The use of haptics in both the live action and light shows brought these two together in a more cohesive manner then earlier explorations, and pushing montage and editing to something live explored the concept of expanded cinema in a way that draws on the works of both experimental filmmakers such as Jean Detheux with artist such as Mark L. Rubenstein and Steve Pavlovsky, to create a linear story with an experimental approach based in performance art.