Wonderful addition to the bottomless pit of greatness offered over at Ubu, American assemblage artist Wallace Berman‘s first and only film, Aleph. Best known, perhaps, for spearheading the SEMINA art publication, Berman labored on Aleph from ‘56-‘66. Here’s what Ubu says of the film:
Aleph is an artist’s meditation on life, death, mysticism, politics, and pop culture. In an eight-minute loop of film, Wallace Berman uses Hebrew letters to frame a hypnotic, rapid-fire montage that captures the go-go energy of the 1960s. Aleph includes stills of collages created using a Verifax machine, Eastman Kodak’s precursor to the photocopier. These collages depict a hand-held radio that seems to broadcast or receive popular and esoteric icons. Signs, symbols, and diverse mass-media images (e.g., Flash Gordon, John F. Kennedy, Mick Jagger) flow like a deck of tarot cards, infinitely shuffled in order that the viewer may construct his or her own set of personal interpretations. The transistor radio, the most ubiquitous portable form of mass communication in the 1960s, exemplifies the democratic potential of electronic culture and serves as a metaphor for Jewish mysticism. The Hebrew term kabbalah translates as “reception” for knowledge, enlightenment, and divinity. According to the artist’s son Tosh Berman, Wallace Berman treated Aleph ‘...as a creative notebook, and like a true diary, it has no beginning and no end.’
