Expanded Cinema in Los Angeles: The Single Wing Turquoise Bird

Abstract

During the last years of the 1960s and the first of the 1970s-the twilight of the psychedelic era-the premier light show in Los Angeles was the Single Wing Turquoise Bird.1 Long before this period, the city had seen several projects involving the projection of abstract light, "color organs" and similar apparatuses, versions of which date back at least to the 1720s when Louis-Bertrand Castel proposed that color transparencies could be linked to the keys of a harpsichord. In the early 1920s, Stanton MacDonald-Wright, a painter and self-styled "Color Motion Picturist," began to research abstract color projection and eventually made several kinetic light projectors, one of which was used in several theatrical productions in Santa Monica in 1927. Probably the most sophisticated of such light machines was Thomas Wilfred's Clavilux, built in the early 1920s; it consisted of a cabinet in which revolving discs and mirrors could be "played" so as to rear-project light onto a two-foot square screen. Wilfred wrote compositions for it that he called lumia and performed them publicly. seeing a performance when he was recovering from a syphilitic eye-infection, Los Angeles avant-garde filmmaker Dudley Murphy found it "one of the most ecstatic experiences of [his] life," and when artist Sara Kathryn Arledge saw Wilfred perform in Pasadena in 1928, she was inspired to become involved in time-based visual art and eventually to make important avant-garde films.2 Oskar Fischinger, who shared Wilfred's mystical bent, worked in a similar vein. In 1950 he built his "lumigraph," an upright wooden frame, about five feet high containing light sources that project inwards onto an open area three to four feet square holding an elastic white screen just behind the light sources. In a darkened room, the screen is invisible, but any area of it lightly pushed forward by the player catches the light, so that the player may spontaneously shape light in space. Inspired by both the technological and the socio-cultural possibilities of its own time, the Single Wing Turquoise Bird expanded and elaborated such intersections between avant-garde film and visual music. First formed in the spring of 1968 to accompany rock concerts at the Shrine Auditorium and Exposition Hall in Los Angeles, the light show several times reconfigured its membership and its performance modes, freeing itself from supplementarity to the rock concerts. Developing many different technologies and sources of both imagery and abstract light, it evolved into an autonomous multi-media unit that innovated the collectively improvised, real-time composition of projected light. The group was able to maintain itself for over five years, but eventually several of its members became involved with cinematic projects of a more traditional kind and, though they still did occasional performances for several years after, the Single Wing effectively dissolved into a theatrical film exhibition company in 1973. In fall 1967, John Van Hamersveld, an artist who had trained at Chouinard Art Institute and who had designed the iconic poster for Bruce Brown's surfing epic, The Endless Summer (1966) and, very recently, the cover for the Beatles' Magical Mystery Tour album (1967), received a grant to organize a happening. With a business and a journalism student from the University of Southern California (USC), he formed Pinnacle Productions, and on 10 and 15 November they staged the "Electric Wonder," a rock concert at the Shrine, featuring the Grateful Dead, Buffalo Springfield, and Blue Cheer, accompanied by various lighting effects. The event was so successful that they decided to sponsor more concerts, and for them they hired a local light show, the Thomas Edison Lighting Company, who projected on several screens at different points in the Shrine's cavernous interior, a space large enough to accommodate some five thousand spectators. Dissatisfied with the light show, Pinnacle invited several young filmmakers, most of whom were either enrolled in or had recently graduated from University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA), to form a new one. …