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“Attention Viewers: The film you are about to see is an attempt at cinematic diffusion of visual scenes. The purpose of this experimental work is to create an absolute cinematographic language completely free of theatrical or literary language.” Author and conductor of the experiment: Geoff Graham.

That body of text was taken, in part, from the opening scene of a 1929 silent documentary film by Dziga Vertov, entitled Man with a Movie Camera. Vertov’s hand cranked film used a wide range of cinematic techniques, such as double exposure, fast motion, slow motion, freeze frames, split screens, extreme close-ups, tracking shots, footage played backwards, animations, and a self-reflexive style.

Similar in it’s presentation of life through manipulation of imagery, director Godfrey Reggio employed (much) the same visual tactics in the 1982 film Koyaanisqatsi. Reggio explains the lack of dialogue by stating “It’s not for lack of love of the language that these films have no words. It’s because, from my point of view, our language is in a state of vast humiliation. It no longer describes the world in which we live.” Neither film follows a plot and It becomes the job of the viewer to give value and interpretation to the images and music.

In the vein of films like these, legendary East Coast skate photographer Geoff Graham has resurrected this lost art of the video orgy with his first foray into motion pictures with Flying Sutra For Beginners. Where Man With a Movie Camera was silent, but accompanied in theaters with live music, and Koyaanisqatsi had a score composed by Philip Glass, Flying Sutra For Beginners has, well, Flying Sutra.

Flying Sutra is a two piece band based out of Philadelphia that features Robert Cozzolino (percussion) and multi-instrumentalist George Draguns (guitar, bass, electronics). The duo’s music can be heard on the soundtrack of skate films by Buddy Nichols and Rick Charnoski, such as Fruit of the Vine, Northwest, and BloodShed.

As a photographer, Geoff Graham captured some of the most epic shots of East Coast vert sessions in the late 80s and early 90s at places like the Ocean Bowl in Ocean City, Maryland, Trashmore and the Cedar Crest ramp for Thrasher, Poweredge and Transworld.  “I received my first camera as a gift in 1988, a used Richo SLR”, explained Graham. “If you grew up reading Skateboarder, and later Thrasher and Transworld, like I did, you always wanted to be able to take those kind of killer images. I got a job at a photo lab and just kept shooting whenever I could afford too.”

From the very beginning, Flying Sutra for Beginners introduces the viewer to an aesthetic that will continue throughout the span of it’s forty-three minute duration. Juxtaposing images and music, it’s more like a slow moving, sightseeing train ride than an out of control rollercoaster, yet there is a feeling of organized chaos, nonetheless. In the opening scene, Dan Tag sits in a laundromat patiently waiting for his wash cycle to complete. Then, flash forward to the scene where he selects the setting on the dryer. Then finally returns to his seat to exchange the dusty white laces on his duct taped pair of Vans with a pair of neon green laces. Cut. From there the film quickly turn to scenes of nature, frogs, Rodney Jones, butterflies, dogs, rain, Carlos, tadpoles, Steve Faas, owls, Gnarley Carleigh, goats, Joey Fitzpatrick, birds, Mathiew Therres, indoor spine ramps, planes, FDR, and sushi. All shuffled in full color through nineteen chapters.

There’s no apparent plan to how the film jumps from random, ornate scenes of inanimate objects to skate clips but it all seems to follow in rhythm to the music and the transition from one scene to another is rather seamless.

Flying Sutra is far from a skate video and even further from a music film, but the avant garde style of the compilation of natural environments and skateboarding in raw, urban landscapes all set to a free-noise-psychedelic soundtrack makes for a perfect ensemble.

Graham, who cites Rick and Buddy from Six Stair Productions as heavy influences, began filming Flying Sutra in February of 2009 and completed it’s first rough draft about a year later. The last edit is finished and a new run of DVDs is in the works, complete with a poetic intro from Jocko Weyland on the cover.

- Derek Rinaldi