Roger Mayer

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Roger Mayer was born in Germany. He graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design before earning a MFA in painting from Syracuse University in 1963. While at Syracuse he also performed in a noise ensemble for non-musicians directed by Calvin Hampton. Immediately following his graduation Mayer was drafted into the US Army for two years during the Viet Nam era. He returned to the US in 1966 dividing his time between New York and Providence. Mayer resumed his activities as a painter and moved to Michigan where he joined the faculty at Eastern Michigan University in 1967. In a transformative moment almost all of his work prior to that time was destroyed in a studio fire in February1973.

In the spring of 1977 he began teaching at Brown University in Providence where he taught his first course in sound for visual artists with the composer, Gerald Shapiro. This reshaped his interests in radiophonic works: time-based and without material substance.

In the early 1990’s his filmic copier work: ‘The Untimely Piano Lesson’ was shown at the HdK in Berlin and at the Soviet House of Artists in Moscow. Over the last decade Mayer’s works have found their way to venues around the world. His work in sound has led him back to film and video in addition to experimental radio: (‘Summer Night’, ‘I Think I’ve Heard Enough’). Films include ‘The Marble Staircase’ and ‘Reading at Dusk’ with a feature project ‘Switched’ remaining unfinished. A new work ‘Still Time’ with David Udris is underway.

Mayer lives with his wife and cat outside of Providence, RI where he tends several peach trees and gardens, sometimes.

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The thread that stitches together a fractured world of images is sound. It is there in its own absence as well. In silence.

Sound’s ability to transform has been more substantive than the acknowledged power of the image. The audio track interrogates the visual. It both underscores and alters it’s meaning. It plays the role of the unconscious to the image’s consciousness.

Sound from music to noise is the mostly unacknowledged content of film. In this respect it seduces our consciousness.

Tarkovsky’s thinking resonates within this film, namely that music has never been necessary, and only occurs as an essential element in realizing the whole. It might be quite possible that a film could become lightless and gain through its soundtrack.
A dark cinema.

Sounds seem to exist internally in the body/mind, unlike visual objects that reside more comfortably before the eye and hence outside us.

What is it that makes it all so fleeting? Even in repetition it cannot be the same?

Wit (Terrence Malick) in Thin Red Line: "Look out through my eyes. Look out at the things you made. All things shining."

Eric Dolphy on the Last Date: "Music…when it’s over; it is gone in the air, and you can never ever capture it again."

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Stills from THE MARBLE STAIRCASE

THE MARBLE STAIRCASE, 1999-2000

Synopsis:
A film by Roger Mayer with Duncan Smith, David Udris and Aminia Brueggemann, “ The Marble Staircase ” is an experimental narrative film 32 minutes in length based on a passage in the 19 th c. epic novel: Late Summer by Adalbert Stifter. It is shot in 16mm film and video in both black-and-white and color. The film is loosely structured on the form of a villanelle. It is by no means an exact version of this poetic form, which by its constant repetitions of text lines loses but recuperates lost language for those, at least, who persist with this elegiac task. It is a film that has a densely layered soundtrack, which, as a gradually unraveling tapestry, eventually reveals its component threads.

Within this unraveling themes emerge - loss and preservation. The task of mourning for that which is lost, is in some respects recuperated in a statue found in a marble staircase. The film is an expression of the separation from beauty, which defines us all from birth as well as specific moments of tragedy, and which then dedicates us to a lifelong labor of mourning; to a lifelong labor of forgetting, and even a refusal to remember. There are two languages here, English and German, which spiral in and out of each other always utilizing to the same Stifter text. Sounds of a moving automobile, of railway cars, of birds and hurrying footsteps, of opening windows and closing doors, of crying, laughing, breathing are found in the soundtrack. And musical fragments beginning faintly move to a final elegiac moment in which the image with voice and music become a whole and single text. Yet the medium itself remains unstable by constantly shifting - first film then video, English but then German, the voice of a reading man but also the voices of two women reading those same texts. Color intrudes on black and white. The spoken word is underscored by a printed text, but not as literal subtitles. There is a constant shifting among the layers, constant appearing and receding until finally the viewer’s gaze rests in a singular space and the listening ear perceives a music of memory. Both eye and ear recognize the presence of loss and recuperation.

“The Marble Staircase” is a film that aspires to be a symbolic elegy about the tragedy that was caused by and befell Germany in the first half of the 20 th century.

Stills from THE MARBLE STAIRCASE

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