A History of The American Avant-Garde Cinema
A History of The American Avant-Garde Cinema
A History of The American Avant-Garde Cinema
of the
American
Avant~Grarde
Cinema
A History
of the
American
Avant-Garde
Cinema
This film exhibition and catalogue are supported by a grant from the
National Endowment for the Arts.
Wilder Green
Director
Trustees
Trustees Honorary Trustees
Charles C. Cunningham
Mrs. Eugene A. Davidson
Arthur Q. Davis
Mrs. Kenneth N. Dayton
David C. Driskell
Arthur D. Emil
Martin L. Friedman
Allen Grover
Mrs. Wellington S. Henderson
David Kruidenier
Thomas W. Leavitt
Sherman E. Lee
Irvin L. Levy
William S. Lieberman
Kynaston McShine
A. Hyatt Mayor
William D. Paul, Jr.
William S. Picher
Emily Rauh Pulitzer
Perry T. Rathbone
Mrs. Judith Rothschild
Mrs. Albrecht Saalfield
David M. Solinger
Morton I. Sosland
Mrs. Otto L. Spaeth
Robert A. M. Stern
John W. Straus
Joshua C. Taylor
Evan H. Turner
Willard Van Dyke
Ian McKibbin White
Mrs. Katherine C. White
Mrs. C. Bagley Wright
Leonard C. Yaseen
Contents
Catalog List
Filmographies
Bibliographies
9
Introduction
For each age, for each place, for each time, there has always been an avant
garde. Hector Berlioz, a musician much maligned in his own time, relates
that when Beethoven’s C # Minor String Quartet was premiered, “After a
short while, people grew restless and began whispering Eventually, . . .
most of them got up and left, protesting aloud that it was meaningless,
absurd, unbearable— the work of a madman.” James Whistler’s Nocturne
in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket, today seen as a major work, was
lambasted by John Ruskin who accused Whistler of “flinging a pot
critic
of paint in The public agreed And Gertrude Stein’
the face of the public.” .
“A rose is a rose is a rose,” one line from her many writings which strove
to re-examine language, was the subject of many a cartoon, the punchline
of many a joke. These and other artists were avant-garde; their work was
misunderstood, mocked, even banned or destroyed; but eventually, they
became familiar, acceptable, sometimes even traditional, or reactionary.
As Amos Vogel said in his introductory remarks at the 1975 American
Film Festival Film as Art presentation:
All of this figures for the art form of cinema. As Vogel continued,
“It is structured in terms of frame-area, composition, color or contrast be-
tween black and white, light, shadow; shapes, masses, volumes; and, most
importantly, time: movement, rhythm, editing.” A startling invention,
cinema quickly became a convention. John G. Hanhardt, the guest
curator of this film exhibition, points out in his opening essay, “The
Medium Viewed,” that film’s status as a mass entertainment medium
carries with it certain expectations of style, technique and genre which
have changed minimally popular cinema’s eighty-year history. But
in
cinema is no more “fixed” than any art— a point the avant-garde film-
makers seized on in Europe (and sporadically in America) in the 1 920’s,
and the 1930’s, and in America from the 1940’s to the present. The avant
garde film explores the modernist concerns of time, space and movement
with which other modern arts are involved. As Hanhardt shows, these con
cerns, as well as the overthrow of realism and linearity, have informed the
avant-garde film; a primary concern with the very material of and proper-
ties particular to film has led to the discovery of new techniques, new
Lighting . can go now from the '‘properly” exposed and lit image to
. .
These filmmakers reflect the periodsin which they live and work—
their films do not so much represent a movement, but rather they exhibit
trends, drifts. The 1940’s, influenced by the art movements of Surrealism
and Dadaism, by Freudian analysis, by a sense of post-war absurdity, saw
psychodramas and Surrealist films. In 1943, Maya Deren ( Meshes of the
Afternoon A Study in Chroreography for Camera) started to work and
,
talk on films. She stressed the poetic, dream-like qualities of film and the
abilityof editing to displace a normal sense of time and space. Deren, as
Lucy Fischer shows in her essay on program influenced many independent
1 ,
filmmakers through her concerns and her major preoccupation with the
conflict between and exteriority. It was Deren's idea of hiring
interiority
the Provincetown Playhouse, New York, to show her films which inspired
Amos Vogel to establish Cinema 16, a showcase for experimental films.
Among the filmmakers who, along with Deren, were instrumental in
creating, encouraging and sustaining avant-garde film in the 1940’s were
Willard Maas ( Geography of the Body), Marie Menken (Notebook), James
Broughton (Mother’s Day), Sidney Peterson ( The Lead Shoes), Ian Hugo
(Bells of Atlantis), Kenneth Anger (Fireworks, Scorpio Rising), and Harry
Smith (Early Abstractions). Maas, Peterson, Hugo and Broughton were in-
volved with works set to or based on poems, ballads or poetic prose. Maas
went on to create psychodramas dealing with sexual conflict, such as The
Mechanics of Love and Narcissus. Hugo, a “supreme colorist,” as Stuart
Liebman notes in his essay on program 2 and a master of superimposition,
described himself as “using images as if they were notes in a symphonic
composition.” Peterson’s sophisticated and witty films, rooted in
Surrealism, as were those of his one-time collaborator James Broughton,
mixed, in P. Adams Sitney’s words, “formal commitment with psycho-
logical distancing.” Peterson was also a teacher of filmmaking at the San
Francisco Art Institute, one of the earliest film schools established in the
country. Broughton, poet and playwright, has continued to use the
poetic voice into the 1970’s; his recent works view human events in terms
of rituals and cycles, all infused with a bright sense of humor.
Other filmmakers did not base their work on poetry or prose. Marie
Menken, wife of Willard Maas, photographed Geography of the Body but ,
Harry Smith, unlike the other filmmakers of the 1940’s, was not in-
volved with poetry or psychodrama or the filming of simple, everyday
things. He is an animator and his earliest works involve formal composi-
tion and illusory depth through color and shape and an interest in the
textural surface of the film material. Heaven
His later works-particularly
and Earth Magic Feature (No. 12)- use cutouts to create striking and
arcane images based on Smith’s studies in alchemy and psychology.
The 1950’s, as Liebman discusses, saw a period of transition between
the initiatives of the 1940’s and the coming maturity of the avant-garde
film in the 1960’s. “The period’s best films,” says Liebman, “moved away
from dramatic narrative towards freer thematic organization.” In the
1950’s, television took over; apathy seemed a way of life. But during that
time, the Beats, the Abstract Expressionists and rock-and-roll infused all
13
of Waters Riddle of Lumen).
,
A dancer, Clarke has described all her
works as “dances”; Bridges-Go-Round uses superimposition and a
in fact,
continuously moving camera to choreograph New York City’s bridges.
Clarke’s later works include two unusual narratives— The Connection and
The Cool World- and the brilliant and controversial cinema-verite work.
Portrait of Jason. Bruce Conner, assemblage sculptor, uses found footage
and the collage approach in his filmmaking, laying emphasis on juxtaposi-
tion, film movement and rhythm. In many ways, Conner’s early work
anticipated the Pop Art movement. Stan Vanderbeek’s work is allied to
Conner’s in his use of collage, but Vanderbeek uses animation as well as
found footage and has gone on to create environmental works, like the
Movie-Drome, which, as Sheldon Renan says, are “collages of media.”
Vanderbeek’s involvement with the technology of visual language, with
the film as a method of communication has led him toward what Gene
Youngblood, in his book Expanded Cinema, calls “synaesthetic cinema,”
and his early works looked forward to the “mixed media” events of the
1 960’s.
Breer, Jacobs and Brakhage represent three different and important
styles of filmmaking. A painter and sculptor, Breer saw film as an exten-
sion of ideas he was pursuing in painting. He has animated lines, shapes,
human and animal and objects and has used collage and rotoscope
figures,
techniques. Of all his work, he says, “I’m interested in the domain be-
tween motion and still pictures.” P. Adams Sitney, in his book, Visionary
Film, describes Breer’s work as “graphic cinema” and says, “There is
always a distance between him and the subjects of his films; he is an ex-
treme formalist.” He is also a wit and his films reflect his sense of humor.
The early works of Ken Jacobs (Little Stabs at Happiness, Blonde
Cobra) have been called Baudelairean by Jonas Mekas. They portray,
writes Mekas, “A world of flowers of evil, of illuminations, of torn and
tortured flesh; a poetry which is at once beautiful and terrible, good and
evil, delicate and dirty.” These works, like those of filmmakers Jack
Smith and Ron Rice, are very much a part of the underground films of
the 1960’s, even though they were started in the late 1950’s. Jacobs’
later works are structural, and deal with the material and properties of
film. His masterwork, Tom, Tom, the Piper’s Son, is, as Lois Mendelson
and Bill Simon say in their essay on the film in New Forms in Film, “with
Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera, one of the two great works of reflex-
ive cinema whose primary subject is an aesthetic definition of the nature
of the medium.”
“Historically,” writes Sheldon Renan, “Stan Brakhage is the major
transitional figure in the turning away of experimental film from
literature and Surrealist psychodrama, and in its subsequent move toward
the more purely personal and visual.” Prolific and articulate, Brakhage has
been an inspiration to many independent filmmakers. His lyrical films,
based on incidents, people, fears, desires, and symbols from his own life,
transform actual life and make us re-see images, colors and, particularly,
light. Largely silent, Brakhage ’s films involve the totality of seeing.
Brakhage ’s seminal book Metaphors on Vision suggests that for him, as
Seeing includes what the open eyes view, including the essential
movements and dilations involved in that primary mode of seeing, as
well as the shifts of focus, what the mind’s eye sees in visual memory
and in dreams (he calls them “brain movies”) and the perpetual play
of shapes and colors on the closed eyelid and occasionally on the eye
surface (“closed-eye vision”). The imagination, as he seems to define
it, includes the simultaneous functioning of all these modes.
Particles, Etc. ), Bruce Baillie (Castro Street, Mass for the Dakota Sioux),
Michael Snow Wavelength ), Standish D. Lawder (Runaway), Jonas Mekas
(
says in his essay on Gehr in New Forms in Film, around “the ambiguity of
what one is seeing.” Gehr has written that he tries to break down “the
essential contradictions of still and shot.” Gerson’s films, as Simon points
out, “are concerned with the ambiguity of the space of the shot.” Gerson
speaks of the levels of reality revealed through film— illusions within illu-
sions.
An other type of structural film, in Bill Simon’s words, “isolates an
idea, a theory, a concept, usually concerning a particular aspect or problem
in the cinematic experience, and creates a structure that demonstrates or
elucidates it.” The films of George Landow and Hollis Frampton are con-
ceptual structural films. Landow uses celluloid itself, the film leader, the
abstraction of found images, printed text, etc. in his films. Sitney says of
his work, they:
... are all based on simple situations: the variations on announcing and
looking (Fleming Faloon), the extrinsic visual interest ina film frame
ment in ideas. If Brakhage’s great gift is what he does with light and
Snow’s what he does with space, Frampton’s is what he does with
conceptual structures.
Sharits’ statement forms the basis for a definition of structural film and
helps us to understand the works represented here.
But, although films are their own reality, existing independently in
time and space, they are, as Deren said, made by filmmakers. As Amos
Vogel says, “All of these films are invitations to you to see the world with
new eyes, to open your mind to new possibilities, to give your unconscious
free rein.” The first step in appreciating any art is to maintain an open
mind. The second involves exposure. It was with this second step in mind
that The American Federation of Arts created this exhibition of A History
of the American Avant-Garde Cinema. The important word is “A” for
there are many histories of avant-garde film, of any art. This particular
history selected by John Hanhardt is intended to introduce audiences un-
familiar with avant-garde film to some of the major cinematic achievements
of three decades and to allow those familiar with these films to view them
once again and gain further insights into and from them.
Just as it is full the intricacies of harmony,
impossible to grasp in
rhythm, orchestration of of music from one hearing, or to under-
a piece
stand the complexities of color, perspective, composition of a painting
from one viewing, it is impossible to savor all that an avant-garde film has
to offer from one screening. But, even one viewing can suggest the vision
of these works and can point the viewer to new ways of examining his/her
own perceptions, dreams and understanding of art. And, hopefully, one
screening will encourage interest in further viewings. Each film has its
own stylistic and structural qualities which lend it its own unique textures,
resonances and shades of meaning. Each viewing of a film reveals more
about these qualities.
The essays in this publication define and refer to the structural and
stylistic qualities, as well as to the content, major concerns and back-
ground of the films and their makers. They do not purport to be the
“final word” on the films— they, like all criticism, are interpretative; but
they, along with John Hanhardt’s opening essay on the development and
critical response to the avant-garde film, are designed to familiarize the
reader/viewer with both the films themselves and with the new criticism
necessary for thoughtful discussion of the new cinema.
But, although avant-garde film requires a new criticism and a new way
of looking at film, it shares with all art certain essentials of form, structure
and tempo. We must seek to recognize these in avant-garde, and all film,
but with the knowledge that there no one form, no one tempo that is
is
good, right or proper. An open mind, exposure and familiarity with the
language of the avant-garde allow us to feel considered appreciation for the
avant-garde film, and to say, as Sheldon Renan has:
Some underground films are good. Some are bad. A few are great.
But whatever they are, underground films are the film artist’s un-
mitigated vision.
Marilyn Singer
Editor
The Medium Viewed!
The American
Avant-Garde Film
The individual is continuously, and largely unconsciously, casting his
environment in the mold of his past experiences through a dynamic
interaction between its components and his self-conception. He must
perforce classify and interpret himself as well as other things; since no
two things (including himself) are ever identical from one moment to
the next, he is constantly grouping together sensory and ideological
data that are different. Perceptual organization is not a photographic
process. It is fundamentally an innovative act; it is an interactive, ad-
justive relationship between the perceiver and the thing perceived. The
two together make up a dynamic creative whole.
H. G. Barnett. Innovation: The Basis of Cultural Change.
And here, somewhere, we have an eye (I’ll speak for myself) capable
of an imagining (the only reality). And there (right there) we have the
camera eye (the limitation of the original liar). And here, some-
. . .
proof that The Promised Land exists, that man can feel/think his way
to vital form.
Ken Jacobs. New York Film-Makers’ Cooperative Catalogue.
Film That Invents Itself: The Avant-Garde Film
The term “avant-garde” links the films to which it refers with advanced
art and ideas in other media and disciplines, and, by definition, with a view
of film which is neither traditional nor orthodox. Because most people
share a traditional notion of what constitutes a film, films are generally ex-
pected to conform to certain conventions. These include strategies of
editing and camera movement which confirm a narrative tradition through
specific codes of representation. The story and point of view created
within this tradition are consistent with the logical development and
psychological orientation of its model, the nineteenth century novel, and
with the traditions of linear form and illusionistic space. The manner in
which these conventions are affirmed or modified affects the viewer’s per-
ception of film and motivates the critic’s response.
The best-known type of film is the feature-length, commercial, enter-
tainment film. Its premise is that film is mass entertainment requiring cer-
tain levels of production and marketing to sustain it as such. These films
have standardized running times to permit an optimal number of theatrical
showings per day, and utilize supporting conventions of storytelling. In
addition, the significant technological developments of sound, color and
wide-screen, have been viewed as essential embellishments to a product of
an industry constantly seeking to increase its audiences. Motion picture
production is thus organized along the lines of a large industry (factory=
studio) with highly specialized production crews fashioning the whole
film, and sophisticated organizations distributing and marketing it. Film
appreciation in general (and in particular its historiography and criticism)
has supported this type of film by according it the preeminence it enjoys
today while attempting, in the process, to balance its basis in mass enter-
tainment with its justification as art.
There are certain films (once called, interestingly, “art” films) which
appear to depart from the conventional model, but which are nevertheless
both a reaction to and a confirmation of the established codes of film-
making. For example, the cinema of the French “New Wave,” particularly
the films of Jean-Luc Godard, addresses itself to conventions of acting in
the American cinema and establishes its own “stars” who become
associated with a director’s films. There is also a use of color and action
which refers to the established iconographies of genres such as the western,
romance, and gangster film. At the same time, such films as Godard’s
Contempt (made in 1963 and featuring Brigitte Bardot, Fritz Lang, Jack
Palance and Michel Piccoli) employ formal devices of camera movement
and editing and reveal narrative strategies which, in their self-referential
aspect (referring to the myths and iconography of movie making and cul-
ture) break away from the dominant film codes. Alain Resnais’ Last Year
at Marienbad (produced in 1961 with original scenario and dialogue by
Alain Robbe-Grillet) bears a more specific relationship to the ideas and
forms of the French “New Novel” as represented by such authors as
Robbe-Grillet, Michel Butor and Marguerite Duras, ideas which, as part of
the intellectual life of Paris, influenced such directors as Resnais and Robert
Bresson. The New Novel’s manipulation of time and memory finds a
correlate in the temporal disjunctions of Last Year at Marienbad. While
such films as these consciously refer to conventions of production and
present instances of radically shifting film time, they do not engage the
material of film and the illusion of space (except for such a casual aside
as in Godard’s Les Carabiniers when Michel-Ange tries to peer over the edge
of a bathtub in a filmed bathing scene) with the same specific regard as
does the avant-garde film.
The avant-garde film of Europe of the 1920’s, and in America with in-
creasing activity since the early 1940’s, aspires to a radical otherness from
the conventions of filmmaking and the assumptions and conditions which
inform the dominant view and experience of film. Thus these independent
films are made primarily in 16mm (and sometimes in 8mm), not the 35mm
of commercial filmmaking, and they involve the filmmaker directly through
a tactile, “hands on” approach or an assertive point of view that is the ex-
pression of an artist engaged in such vanguard aesthetic movements as
surrealism, cubism, abstract expressionism or minimalism. This cinema
subverts cinematic convention by exploring the medium and its properties
and materials, and in the process creates its own history separate from that
of the classical narrative cinema. It is filmmaking that creates itself out of
its own experience.
Thefact that a critical discourse exists in painting and sculpture that
embraces modernism in general and such recent specific movements as
minimal art, process art and conceptual art, while no such discourse
exists, except marginally, for film, indicates the special manner in which
consideration of the avant-garde is held back by the attention given
traditional standards of film production and appreciation. In addition to
the use of 16mm and more direct involvement with film’s materials, there
are running times which vary from less than a minute to more than six
hours, and formats which range from conventional audience-screen rela-
tionships to installations which challenge such conventional relationships.
Even the earlier terms identifying these films— underground and experi-
mental— imply a tentative, subversive, clandestine activity.
and its audiences, a dialogue which takes place through the form and
content of the films and with critics monitoring the condition of the
films and historians offering ideological support for both roles. The
enormity of the avant-garde’s challenge, and its attendant complexity, is
to address the economic, production, distribution, exhibition, critical dis-
course and historiography which have virtually dominated film production
and appreciation. The avant-garde seeks nothing less than to challenge the
dominant coordinates of film appreciation— the linear story film and its
subject matter as codified by styles and genres in the traditional cinema,
and standards of professionalism and production values which are held to
be the cinema’s norm. This is not to deny the very real achievement of
the traditional cinema and its discourse, but to explore the tenacity of the
ideology and mythology which support the dominant thinking on film to
the exclusion of the avant-garde by defining it from the outset as a sub-
genre of little interest.
The basis of film is the process of photography, an invention of mid-
nineteenth century science and industry. The urge to invent the photo-
graph and motion picture was sustained by the desire for the “solution” to
the presumed “problem” of creativity— the reproduction of the perceived
world. As Marcelin Pleynet points out in Debat: Economique, Ideologique,
Form el:
in the assembly line. The assembly line offered the perfect linear correlate
for a linear world view of mass production and mass markets. That view
sought justification and preservation in the photograph and the cinema, and
itfound both. The Daguerretype became a new mechanical mirror to be
held up to all and to be seen for its power to reproduce self and environ-
The fact that the avant-garde film has not been seriously considered in
the predominant thinking on film rests in part on the traditional histories
devoted to film. As with all written history, the historical explanation of
the development of film is guided by metahistorical considerations.
Historians have wrestled with the ambition of making the writing of
history a science. But whereas scientists can agree on a scientific problem
and scientific explanation, no such understanding has ever existed in
historiography. As Hayden White has written in his book Metahistory:
Unlike literary fictions, such as the novel, historical works are made
up of events that exist outside of the consciousness of the writer.
The events reported in a novel can be invented in a way they cannot
be (or are not supposed to be) in a history. This makes it difficult to
distinguish between the chronicle of events and the story being told in
a literary fiction. . . . Unlike the novelist the historian confronts the
veritable chaos of events already constituted, out of which he must
choose the elements of the story he would tell. He makes his story by
including some events and excluding others, by stressing some and sub-
ordinating others. This process of exclusion, stress, and subordination
is carried out in the interest of constructing a story of a particular
3
kind. That is to say he “emplots” his story .
Hayden White here presents the dilemma of the film historian and the
assumptions contained in the definitions of film which have informed so
much of its written history. Because the traditional cinema is structured
or emploted, along linear narrative lines, it is interpreted and placed within
literary contexts. In addition, since it is a large entertainment industry, it
assumes in some histories an exclusively social and cultural role based on
its economics. These factors have resulted in the organization of film
”5
the shattering of content taboos, political, religious, and sexual . . .
photography and therefore shares with this medium a marked affinity for
the visible world around us. Films come into their own when they record
6
and reveal physical reality .” This model of film sees its ultimate achieve-
ment in the narrative code of neo-realism and the documentary ideal of
Robert Flaherty and cinema-verite.
Similar thinking informed the writing of art historian Erwin Panofsky
on The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, a highly stylized work emanating from
Berlin and heavily influenced by German Expressionism. Panofsky attacked
the film for its artificiality and “pre-stylizing of reality” and saw the fruit-
ful potential of film “in the problem of manipulating and shooting un-
7
stylized reality in such a way that the result has style .”
Stanley Cavell, Professor of Philosophy and Aesthetics at Harvard
University and author of Must We Mean What We Say?, attempts in his
recent book The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film, to
develop a theoretical interpretation of film which, however carefully
worked out, presupposes the relationship of film to reality via photography:
The material basis of the media of movies (as paint on a flat delimited
support is the material basis of the media of painting) is, in the terms
which have so far made their appearance, a succession of automatic
world projections. “Succession” includes the various degrees of motion
in moving pictures: the motion depicted; the current of successive
frames in depicting it; the juxtapositions of cutting. “Automatic” em-
phasizes the mechanical fact of photography, in particular the absence
of the human hand in forming these objects and the absence of its
creatures in their screening. “World” covers the ontological facts of
photography and its subjects. “Projection” points to the phenome-
nological facts of the viewing, and to the continuity of the camera’s
motion as it ingests the world 8 .
The “absence of the human hand” which Cavell feels characterizes the
art and ontology of film ignores the avant-garde’s exploration of the ma-
terials, processes and properties of the film medium. Avant-garde film
25
“A photograph is of the world,” according to Cavell, and the fact
“that the projected world does not exist (now) is its only distance from
9
reality.” He adds that the function of photography is to “maintain the
presentness of the world by accepting our absence from it.” He sees this,
by extension, as the basis of the film experience. We have here a “kind of
explanation” implicit in many of the narratives of film history, the
organization of that history around photography and to
its relation to
society as a mass entertainment art untouched by the “elitism” of the
theatre and other arts. The chaos of the outside world which the his-
torian organizes and interprets is precisely what the film historian per-
ceives of film as doing— as distancing the outside world on the screen
through narrative forms and traditions preserving and ordering it. Thus,
traditional film historians and theoreticians and filmmakers support and
inform each other’s work in a common view of film.
In recent years, the French and Anglo-American structuralists have
made significant contributions to the methodology of film analysis, but
10
primarily with reference to the narrative film. They have attempted to
establish causal relationships between society/culture and the content of
movies as mediated by the motion picture industry. Theirs is a view of
film as mass entertainment having an investment in the status quo. But
as Annette Michelson has argued in her essay Art and the Structuralist
Perspective
u structuralism’s basis in structural linguistics and Levi-
,
The films under discussion appear “irrational” when language and image
sequencing are evaluated and grounded in traditional semantic/informa-
tion/communication capacities and within the parameters of syntactical
rules.
The writing of film’s history generally presents a development from
the experiments with successive motion to the theatrical tableaus and
gestures of the first story films to a gradually evolving standardization
(grammar) of editing, camera movement, compositions, lighting and
shots. The cinema evolved through the work of D. W. Griffith, Thomas
Ince, Erich von Stroheim, F. W. Murnau, and Orson Welles, a complex
of styles and strategies used to explicate what the historian and critic see
as a series of world views, or narrative organizations, in which subject/con-
tent and photography serve as the basis. The successive phases in the his-
tory of the world’s cinema are taken as a loosening of the techniques of
filmmaking and story-telling from the restraints of theatrical models to
seeking allegiance to the predominant traditional literature and, to a
much larger extent, and primarily in Europe, to the modernist novel and
criticism. Film is not permitted, in this view, to transcend the narrative
model of traditional literary forms but must instead carry on the tradition
of the popular novel. Those achievements of the world’s cinema which
are revolutionary in their conscious appraisal and reformulation of the
materials of film, such as the Soviet cinema in the 1920’s and particularly
the films of Dziga Vertov, and the American avant-garde are traditionally
viewed as anti-humanistic and “unproductive” in their approach. The
assumption is that there is a norm which does not question the procedures
of filmmaking and which is congruent with a cultural and ideological
order, and, further, that this norm must be preserved.
The radical approaches in recent years to performance, dance, paint-
ing, sculpture and film reveal an eclectic attitude toward the arts in which
forms and expectations are broken down and reconstituted. This situation
has been considered in the writing and teaching of Annette Michelson,
whose efforts, based on phenomenological models and modernist concerns,
constitute an important revision in thinking about film. In her writing, the
perceptual coordinates of the creating and viewing experience are related to
abstract expressionism, minimal and post-minimal painting and sculpture,
the art and ideas of Marcel Duchamp, the music and writing of John Cage
and Pierre Boulez, the theater of Richard Foreman, the performance/dance
of Yvonne Rainer, the philosophical writings of Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice
Merleau-Ponty, Edmund Husserl, and Jean Piaget, among others. Her
work has included a restitution of the revolutionary Soviet cinema, in
particular the work of Dziga Vertov, and an approach to traditional film
aesthetics and criticism informed by modernism and the American avant-
garde film.
An example of Michelson ’s approach to traditional film aesthetics
and criticism is her perceptive reading of the French theoretician Andre
Bazin, one of the most influential writers on film. As co-editor of Cahiers
du Cinema, he had a seminal influence on the thinking of the directors of
27
by Louis Jacques
Paris Boulevard
Mande Daguerre
28
the French “New Wave” (Godard, Resnais, Francois Truffaut, Claude
Chabrol, et. al.). Bazin’s ontology of film posited a “seamless” image, a
cinema which could enclose in its frame a world view of order confirmed
by the realism implicit in photography. Thus Bazin became a champion of
Erich von Stroheim's detailed and ambitious aspirations of re-creation and
of veracity-through-art of the Italian neo-realists:
For someone like myself, working as an art critic during the late 50’s
and early 60's, Bazin's taste and theory tended to sever film from the
modernist tradition; his allegiance to the notion of film as only and
irretrievably a “mass medium” effected a breach between one’s ex-
periences and expectations of the work of advanced painters and
musicians on the one hand, and of the filmmakers on the other. He
had, in his filmic ontology, precluded the interest and the develop-
ment of processes of abstraction, of reflectiveness and the critical
examination, by and through the art itself, of the terms of its
14
illusionism. All this was unacceptable.
It is the implications of the Daguerre photograph and of the early films dis-
cussed by Burch and Dana which have been largely ignored in mainstream
film criticism and history but which have informed the work and thinking
of avant-garde filmmakers.
The precursors and models of the American avant-garde film are the avant-
garde films produced in Europe during the 1920’s and 1930’s and the
cinema of the Soviet Union produced in the late 1920’s. Made by artists
who, for the most part, had reputations in other media, the films were
independent productions created outside the ascending mainstream of
commercial film production and distribution. The European avant-garde
demonstrated how the tenets and strategies of modernist art could be re-
articulated in the medium of film. As Standish Lawder has written in The
Cubist Cinema:
33
34
and in his theoretical writings, which elaborated his ideas about editing
(montage), composition, and a range of other basic issues. Standish
Lawder discusses an interesting and remarkable passage from Eisenstein’s
film Old and New, which indicates the possible influence of the European
avant-garde on the Soviet director:
most abstract he ever made, and quite likely he was stimulated to ex-
periment along these lines by the European avant-garde films that
21
Ehrenburg had shown him in 1926.
imagery was used only in service of the narrative, not as an end in itself.
Dziga Vertov’s The Man with the Movie Camera is on one level a day
in the life of a Sovietcameraman. The film shows him at work, experi-
menting with his equipment and creating a dialectic between his experience
and the medium of film. The viewer witnesses the procedures of filming,
processing, editing and projecting the film. The very complexity of the
work in terms of editing, idea and ideology plots an ontology of film
through its self-referential strategies. Vertov’s film is especially important
in discussion of the avant-garde film since it came out of Soviet Russia at a
time when the interaction among media composed a
artists working in all
euphoria of exploration. Constructivism in painting and sculpture and
formalism in literary theory bracket an aesthetic and a context in which
the artists worked. Constructivism’s abstraction, employment of mate-
rials, and activization of space, and formalism’s examination of literary
texts in formal and structural terms, influenced the Soviet cinema. Thus
Vertov’s film was created in a context of change, in which process and
method were part of the social and aesthetic/artistic enterprise. The
radical Soviet cinema is similar to the avant-garde film of Europe in the
1920’s and of America in the 1940’s and later insofar as it operated within
contexts of modernism and radical ambitions.
In a seminal appreciation of The Man with the Movie Camera, Annette
Michelson writes:
This passage makes quite clear the author’s inability to establish access to
the formal innovation of the films under consideration or to separate them
from the narrative traditions, to say nothing of the fact that art critics and
historians might dispute the obsolescence of a movement like dadaism,
which has profoundly influenced recent art. On the other hand, Annette
Michelson’s “rediscovery” of Vertov and the placement of his achievement
within a modernist context, and her efforts to bring the European and
American avant-garde into an aesthetic discussion in the pages of an art
journal {Artforum) have been among the most significant developments
in recent thinking on film.
The history of the American avant-garde film begins in the early
1940’s. Hans Richter and many compatriots in the other arts left Europe
during the second world war and came to the United States, where they
played an important role in this country’s cultural life. Their influence
was most visible in screenings of their and other avant-garde films given at
film societies such as Cinema 16 in New York and Art in Cinema in San
Francisco. These screenings were attended by the new generation of film-
makers. In addition, writings on and by these filmmakers appeared along-
side the criticism and manifestoes of the emerging avant-garde in Film
Culture magazine, which became, in the late 1950’s, the house organ of
the independent, New American cinema. The emergence of the avant-garde
in film in this country is in part a function of the larger shift of the center
of artistic activity from Europe to the United States during and after World
War II.
37
was the San Francisco Art Institute and the efforts of Sidney Peterson,
who produced, with his students, a series of Films, including The Lead
Shoes (1949), which is being presented in the second program.)
New York and San Francisco have been the traditional centers for
independent filmmaking, with a number of Filmmakers organizing them-
selves in both cities around Film societies and cooperatives. New York’s
cultural ties to Europe and its central position in post-war American art
and intellectual life made it a natural place for the film artist to settle.
The presence of critics and museums led to growing support for the
medium through historical appreciation and exhibition, and sustained an
avant-garde in Film that was linked to contemporary achievements in
painting, sculpture, performance and criticism. In San Francisco, the in-
fluence of Eastern ideas and philosophy and the less urban situation of the
Pacific coast resulted in a more freewheeling film with its imagery and
editing rooted in eastern iconography and western surrealism.
It was not until 1974 that a history of the avant-garde Film was
Just as the chief works of French film theory must be seen in the
lightof Cubism and Surrealist thought, and Soviet theory in the
context of formalism and constructivism, the preoccupations of the
American avant-garde Filmmakers coincide with those of our Post-
Romantic poets and Abstract Expressionist painters. Behind them
lies a potent tradition of Romantic poetics. Wherever possible, both
The historical patterns which Sitney saw emerge are presented as confir-
mation of a visionary strain in the avant-garde film.
In the Film Culture Reader Sitney posits a distinction between the
“graphic” and “subjective” film. The graphic film evolved more “calmly”
than the subjective:
After the initial exploration of the flat surface and the hard-edge
forms, the graphic was vitalized by the development of the hand-
painted film and quite recently has entered the area of imagery
generated by computers and electrically modified (through television
tape). The appearance of the flicker film (black and white or pure
color alternations) bridges the division between animated and directly
photographed film by its critical reduction of both to a common
27
atomism.
The subjective film dates from the 1940’s, when the filmmaker often
played a central role in heavily symbolic visual contexts. These early films
were like dreams, or dream-like states, reflecting the cultural influence of
Freud. Sitney sees a shift away from the Freudian base to a Jungian one,
from the psychodrama to the mythopoeic epic. The single somnambulistic
“Trance” figure yielded to multiple characters with mythic personae.
Fry's statement sheds some interesting light on the avant-garde film and on
Sitney’s interpretation of its history, particularly the privateness of the
filmmakers’ experience, and the intensity of the films which they project
onto the world while same time absorbing that world through their
at the
art. Romantic
Sitney’s application to this experience of literary and
“Visionary” qualities, led to a subtle reading of the Lyric and Mythopoeic
forms and ambitions, but found greater difficulty in dealing with the
“structural” film, which he characterizes as “a cinema of structure in
which the shape of the whole film is predetermined and simplified, that is,
29
that shape which is the primal impression of the film .” He writes:
40
their actual existence to the film instrument. Instead, it must create
a total experience so much out of the very nature of the instrument
31
as to be inseparable from its means .
The avant-garde film has been presented here as addressing itself to the
history and materials of film, and to the process of its own perception. In
recent years, the avant-garde has enjoyed increased recognition of its ac-
complishments, with filmmakers presenting new works in gallery and
museum contexts as well as in traditional theatrical situations. The work
of Paul Sharks, Tony Conrad and Anthony McCall indicates some direc-
tions in which the avant-garde is now moving.
Sharks’ “locational” pieces utilize a number of projected images
aligned in a gallery space to create tensions between them. Continuous
projections, they break down the traditional coordinates of an auditorium
with the screen on stage and the film experience having a defined begin-
ning, middle, and end.
exists in my own
work. In one way, all we know is now The . . .
Synchronousoundtracks by Paul
Sharits
I was seeing Jack again and I told him, “Jack, you’ve got to see this
The absorption of film by the artist into the modernist and romantic
nature of the aesthetic object/experience creates a hermenutics with tech-
nology (film). The wresting of film from the public sphere into a highly
personal one forces cognitive tensions on the viewer accustomed to the
“insular” walls of the confirming experience of traditional film. The
resistance to the avant-garde film by the cultural institution, be it a cur-
rent aesthetic or program, affirms a profound allegiance that film has to
an affirmative world view.
We rehearse for roles all our lives, and for various patterns of be-
havior. We rehearse our national, our local, and our personal styles.
These things we rehearse so that we may participate in a predictable
world of social and environmental interaction. But we also must
rehearse the power to perceive the failure, the necessary failure, of all
1.
Film theory, criticism, and history must meet the challenge to expose
the problems of that “false world” with terms posited by the medium it-
self. Literary, linguistic and mechanistic models are not, exclusive of each
other, capable of meeting the challenge. The examination of what film
2.
is, formally and structurally, is the first what film
step toward ascertaining
is as a biological/social experience for the viewer. What vital interests and
3. instincts are at stake in viewing the avant-garde,and all forms, of film?
4.
Very and significant problems can emerge from such a question. It
real is
John G. Hanhardt
Guest Curator
Footnotes
The asterisked titles denote those films included in this exhibition. The
Chronology makes clear that the history of the independent film is com-
prised of the efforts of many filmmakers and this listing is by no means
complete. With every year, more and more films were produced; some
were screened at Cinema 16 or at the open screenings at the Film-Makers’
Cinematheque, and while many were lost or forgotten, certain films and
filmmakers were considered in the criticism and discussion of the day.
This listing includes many of the films and filmmakers that were important
at various stages in the avant-garde film’s history. Included in the
Chronology are the films of European filmmakers such as Peter Kubelka
who have been influenced by, and been important to, the American avant-
garde movement. Also included are films such as Primary by Ricky
Leacock, a documentary (cinema-verite) film not often associated with the
avant-garde. It is listed because it was recognized as an important develop-
ment in filmmaking and given the Third Independent Film Award (1961)
by Film Culture magazine, the leading critical journal of the avant-garde
film.
The dates of the Chronology refer to the time of a film’s completion,
thus a film finished and released in 1970 may have been worked on since
1965. Also one should recognize that many dates are difficult to pin
down. Filmmakers change their minds or cannot remember, and accurate
records" are not kept. This indicates the importance of research being done
today into the origins and history of the avant-garde film. Certainly the
Anthology Film Archives, New York, under its director Jonas Mekas, has
been outstanding in the areas of film preservation and the collection of
primary and secondary material on films and filmmakers. Their research
center, along with that of The Museum of Modern Art’s Department of
Film, have been and will continue to be important resources for new per-
spectives on the history of the avant-garde film.
Included in the Chronology are certain events, such as the founding of
the Film-Makers’ Cooperative, which were important to the development
and particular direction which the avant-garde film took. They are events
which at the time were considered of great importance and have remained
today focal points in discussion of the avant-garde’s history. Not included
here are the premiere screenings of particular films in New York and other
parts of the country because of the problems in pinpointing them with any
degree of accuracy. However, it should be remembered that these premiere
screening events, the actual showing of the films, were important occasions.
In any case, it is hoped that a Chronology of dates for the films will indicate
the scope, diversity, and creativity of the avant-garde film. (J.G.H.)
) ) ) ) ) )
1943 1949
The Nest (Anger) Puce Moment (Anger)
*Meshes Of The Afternoon (Deren and On The Edge (Harrington)
Hanimid The Dead Ones (Markopoulos)
Color Sequence (Grant) *The Lead Shoes (Peterson)
* Geography Of The Body (Maas) Festival and International Experimental
Film Exercise No. I (Whitney) Film Competition, Belgium,
established.
1944
Escape Episode I (Anger)
1950
At Land (Deren)
Rabbit’s Moon (Anger)
Rena Scence (Harrington)
Advenmres Of Jimmy Broughton (
Film Exercises No. 2 and 3 (Whitney)
Ai-Ye (Hugo)
1945 Cinema 16 Film Library established.
DrasticDemise (Anger)
*A Study In Choreography For Camera (Deren) 1951
Visual VariationsOn Noguchi (Menken) Mambo ( Belson)
Film Exercises No. 4 And 5 (Whitney Four The A fternoon Broughton
In (
Improvisations #1 (Belson)
Unglassed Windows Cast A Terrible
*Mother’s Day (Broughton)
Reflection (Brakhage)
Meditation On Violence (Deren)
Form Phases II And III (Breer)
Image In The Snow (Maas)
The Pleasure Garden ( Broughton
Merry-Go-Round (Maas and Moore)
Polka-Graph (Bute)
The Quiet One (Meyers, Loeb)
Dance In The Sun (Clarke)
Du Sang De La Volupte Et De La Mort:
The Little Fugitive (Engel)
Psyche; Lysis; Charmides (Marko-
Rhythm (Lye)
poulos)
The End (MacLaine)
Ah, Nature (Peterson and Hirsh)
Mr. Frenhofer And The Minotaur (Peter-
son)
The Petrified Dog (Peterson
Sausalito (Stauffacher)
) t ) )
1954 1957
Inauguration Of The Pleasure Dome Daybreak And Whiteye (Brakhage)
(Anger) Loving (Brakhage)
Disistfiim (Brakhage) Jamestown Baloos (Breer)
The Extraordinary’ Child (Brakhage) *Recreation I (Breer)
The Way To Shadow Garden (Brakhage) Recreation II (Breer)
Form Phases IV ( Breer) A Moment In Love (Clarke)
Image By Images I ( Breer) *A Movie (Conner)
Un Miracle (Breer) Angel (Cornell)
Abstronics ( Bute) Nymphlight (Cornell)
Color Rhapsody (Bute) Pastorale DEte (Hindle)
Mood Contrast Bute) ( Saturday Afternoon Blood Sacrifice:
In Paris Parks (Clarke) TV Plug: Little Cobra Dance (Jacobs)
Pattern For A Sunday Afternoon Visions Of A City (Jordan)
(D'Avino) Wa terl igh (Jordan
Treadle and Bobbin (Gallentine) Adebar (Kubelka)
Jazz Of Lights (Hugo) Glimpse Of The Garden (Menken)
8x8 (Richter)
*Early Abstractions (Films #l-#5, #7
1955
& #10) (Smith, H.)
Thelma Abbey (Anger) N. Y N. Y. (Thompson)
In Between (Brakhage)
Astral Man (Vanderbeek)
Reflections On Black (Brakhage)
” Mankinda (Vanderbeek)
“ Tower House (Brakhage) became
What, Who How (Vanderbeek)
Centuries Of June (Cornell)
*The Wonder Ring Brakhage) (
1958
Image By Images II And III Breer) (
Flight (Belson)
Bullfight (Clarke) *Anticipation Of The Night (Brakhage
Aviary (Cornell
A Man And His Dog Out For Air (Breer)
Gnir Rednow (Cornell) Par Avion (Breer)
Evolution (Davis)
Shadows (Cassavetes)
Lovers And Lollipops (Engel) “Loops ” (Clarke )
Brussels
Man In Pain (Jordan)
The Big O D'Avino)
(
52
Lifelines by Ed Emshwiller
53
) ) . )
Re-Entry (Belson)
Dog Star Man: Part III ( Brakhage) 1965
Dog Star Man: Part IV (Brakhage) Kustom Kar Kommandos (Anger)
Songs 1-8 (Brakhage) Quixote (Baillie)
First Flight (Breer) Yellow Horse (Baillie)
Nightspring Davstar (Brooks) Phenomena (Belson)
Lurk (Burckhardt) Nothing Happened This Morning
Divinations (De Hirsch) (Bienstock)
Newsreel: Jonas In The Brig ( De Hirsch) The Art Of Vision (Brakhage)
Babo 73 (Downey) Black Vision (Brakhage)
Alone (Dwoskin) *Fire Of Waters ( Brakhage)
Scrambles (Emshwiller) Pasht (Brakhage)
The Neon Rose (Gerson) Songs 9-22 (Brakhage)
Night Crawlers (Goldman) 15 Songs Traits (Brakhage)
Three Films (Blue White, Blood’s Tone,
Vein) (Brakhage)
55
>vV /
56
Two: Creely/Mc Clure (Brakhage) More Milk Yvette (Warhol)
Ten Second Film (Conner) My Hustler (Warhol)
Vivian (Conner) Outer And Inner Space (Warhol)
Aviary (Cornell) Paul Swan (Warhol)
Centuries Of June (Cornell) Poor Little Rich Girl (Warhol)
A Finish Fable (D’Avino) Prison (Warhol)
Peyote Queen (De Hirsch) Restaurant (Warhol)
Chinese Checkers (Dwoskin) Screen Test #1 (Warhol)
George Dumpson ’s Place (Emshwiller) Screen Test #2 (Warhol)
Grandma ’s House ( Fleischner) Space (Warhol)
Echos Of Silence (Goldman) Suicide (Warhol)
Pestilent City (Goldman) The Thirteen Most Beautiful Boys
Lisa And Joey In Connecticut: “You ’ve (Warhol)
Come Back!’’ “ You ’re Still Here!” Vinyl (Warhol)
(Jacobs) Diffraction Film (Yalkut)
Naomi Is A Dream Of Loveliness (Jacobs)
The Sky Socialist (Jacobs) 1966
Hamfat Asar (Jordan) All My Life (Baillie)
Petite Suite (Jordan) *Castro Street (Baillie)
Corruption Of The Damned (Kuchar, G.) Port Chicago Vigil (Baillie)
57
The Chelsea Girls by Andy Warhol
'
' fc Ok '
_k
44*4
1
_k 1
* 4 ‘A
(De Hirsch)
**** (Warhol)
Shaman (De Hirsch) Bike Boy (Warhol)
Atmosfear (Dewitt) I, A Man (Warhol)
61
62
' )
Later That Same Night (Hindle) The Shores Of Phos: A Fable (Brakhage)
Swamp (Holt, Smithson) The Wold-Shadow (Brakhage)
Aphrodisiac (Hugo) Moment (Brand)
July 1971 -In San Francisco, Living At Rate Of Change (Brand)
Beach Street, Working At Canyon Zip-Tone-Cat-Tune (Brand)
Cinema, Swimming In The Valley Gulls And Buoys (Breer)
Of The Moon (Hutton) Dreamwood (Broughton)
Paul Revere (Jonas, Serra) Dvn Amo (Dwoskin)
Leah (Jost) Filet Of Soul (Faccinto)
What's Wrong With This Picture? Aparatus Sum (Frampton)
(Landow) Hapax Legomena V: (Ordinary Matters)
Color Film (Lawder) (Frampton)
Erection (Lennon, Ono) Hapax Legomena II: (Poetic Justice)
Imagine (Lennon, Ono) (Frampton)
Story Of A Dot (Levine, N.) Hapax Legomena VI: (Remote Control)
No More Leadershit (Macdonold) (Frampton)
Neo-Classic (Morris) Hapax Legomena VII: (Special Effects)
Easy Out (O’Neill) (Frampton)
Color Aid (Serra) Tiger Balm (Frampton)
Inferential Current (Sharks) Yellow Springs (Frampton)
La Region Centrale (The Central Region) Group VII: Portrait Of Diana/Portrait Of
(Snow) Andrew Noren (Gerson)
Carriage Trade (Sonbert) Movie No. 1 (Gidal)
A Practical Guide To Archery And Other Upside Down Failure (Gidal)
Conjectures (Spence) Pear I (Herbert)
6 Loop Paintings (Spinello) Pear II (Herbert)
Matrix (Whitney) Plum (Herbert)
Electronic Fables (Yalkut) Aphrodisiac II (Hugo)
Metamedia (Yalkut) Levitation (Hugo)
Four Lectures (The Idea of Morphology The Sacred Art Of Tibet (Jordon)
The Idea of Abstraction, The Myth What’s Wrong With This Picture (Part II)
of the Absolute Film, The Myth of (Landow)
the Film-Maker) delivered by P. Construction Job (Lawder)
Adams Sitney at The Museum of Raindance (Lawder)
Modern Art (Depatment of Film). Aspects Of A Hill, Pt. I: The Periphery
First “Special Film Issue ," Artforum (Levine, N.)
magazine. (Edited by Annette Front And Back (Lugg, Cohen)
Michelson.) The Liberal War (Macdonold)
Reminiscences Of A Journey To
1972 Lithuania (Mekas)
For Example (Arakawa) Scenes From Life: Golden Brain Mantra
1970 (Bartlett) (Noren)
Chakra (Belson) Easy Out (O’Neill)
Eye Myth (Brakhage) Last Of The Persimmons (O’Neill)
Gift (Brakhage) Lives Of Performers ( Rainer)
The Presence (Brakhage) Neuron (Russett)
The Process (Brakhage) Plumb Line (Schneemann)
*The Riddle Of Lumen (Brakhage) Irvington To New York (Schneider)
Sexual Meditation: Faun ’s Room Yale Orbitas (Schneider)
(Brakhage) Still Life (Schneider)
Sexual Meditation: Hotel (Brakhage) Apotheosis (Schwartz)
Sexual Meditation: Office Suite Googolplex (Schwartz)
(Brakhage)
Sexual Meditation: Open Field
(Brakhage)
(The Retentive . . . ) (Shulman)
Table Top Dolly (Snow)
Videospace (Vanderbeek)
Who Ho Ray No. 1 (Vanderbeek)
Pierre Vallieres (Wieland)
Cinema Metaphysique Nos. 1-4 (Yalkut)
Kenyon Film (Yalkut)
Planes (Yalkut)
Waiting For Commercials (Yalkut)
Programs
Meshes of the Afternoon (Maya Deren and Alexander Hammid
1
1943-1948
Geography of the Body (Willard Maas)
Early Abstractions (# l-#5, #7, #10) (Harry Smith)
Fireworks (Kenneth Anger)
A Study in Choreography for Camera (Maya Deren)
Mother’s Day (James Broughton)
2
1949-1958
The Lead Shoes (Sidney Peterson)
Bellsof Atlantis (Ian Hugo)
The Wonder Ring (Stan Brakhage)
Bridges-Go-Round (Shirley Clarke)
A Movie (Bruce Conner)
Recreation (Robert Breer)
Anticipation of the Night (Stan Brakhage)
8
1959-1963
Science Friction (Stan Vanderbeek)
Prelude, Dog Star Man
Notebook (Marie Menken)
(Stan Brakhage)
A
1963-1966
Scorpio Rising (Kenneth Anger)
Fire of Waters (Stan Brakhage)
Window (Ken Jacobs)
The Flicker (Tony Conrad)
5
Samadhi (Jordan Belson)
Film in Which There Appear Sprocket Holes, Edge Lettering,
Dirt Particles, Etc. (George Landow)
1966-1967
Castro Street (Bruce Baillie)
Notes on the Circus (Jonas Mekas)
Lapis (James Whitney)
Wavelength (Michael Snow)
6
1967-1970
T,0,U,C,H,I,N,G (Paul Sharits)
Runaway (Standish D. Lawder)
69 Robert Breer)
(
7
1970-1972
Serene Velocity (Ernie Gehr)
The Riddle of Lumen (Stan Brakhage)
Endurance / Remembrance /Metamorphosis (Barry Gerson)
Nostalgia (Hollis Frampton)
Meshes of the Afternoon by Maya
Deren and Alexander Hammid
68
1
Meshes of the Afternoon (Maya Deren and Alexander Hammid)
Geography of the Body (Willard Maas)
Early Abstractions (# I-#5, #7, #10) (Harry Smith)
Fireworks (Kenneth Anger)
A Study in Choreography for Camera (Maya Deren)
Mother's Day (James Broughton)
Each film was built as a chamber and became a corridor, like a chain
reaction. You know those puzzle games where if you draw a con-
tinuous line from one point to another, consecutively numbered, you
end up with a picture? Well ... I finally drew those points and got a
picture.
Maya Deren
1
(Letter to James Card)
In writing these lines in 1954, Maya Deren was articulating her desire to
take a retrospective glance over the films she had authored since the time
of Meshes of the Afternoon, the work which in 1943 had signalled the
birth of the American avant-garde. Though formulated in regard to her
own cinematic oeuvre, Deren’s thoughts seem applicable to the critical-
70
Meshes of the Afternoon by Maya
Deren and Alexander Hammid
tinuity. In the first shot we see her in the room preparing to move and in
the next shot we see her emerging in an outside landscape. This is followed
by five close-ups of feet walking: the first by the sea, the second on earth,
the third on grass, the fourth on pavement, and the fifth on carpet.
The sequence ends with the character arriving in the room once more.
Although Deren explains this section as symbolically recapitulating the in-
dividual’s progression from life to death, it seems significant that the move-
ment as depicted incorporates the fluid transition between exterior and in-
terior locales. For here as elsewhere in the film, the opposition of inside
and outside space seems to stand as metaphoric for the poles of interior
and exterior worlds.
But perhaps the most fundamental instance of the dialectic of in-
feriority and exteriority in the work of Deren occurs on the level of the
filmmaking process itself. For Deren, that procedure involves two distinct
phases:
The very first sequence of the film concerns the incident, but the girl
falls asleep and the dream consists of the manipulation of the elements
of the incident. (Italics mine .)6
71
A Study in Choreography for
Camera by Maya Deren
72
just as Deren the dreamer elaborates the incidents of waking life, so Deren
the filmmaker fashions the photographic material of external reality into
poetic expressions of interiority.
It is this sense of the ascendancy of the imagination that pervades
Deren ’s third film, A Study in Choreography for Camera (1945) in which
7
the movement of a dancer creates “a geography that never was.”
Once more this creative geography involves a dialectic of interior
versus exterior spaces. In a section which Deren entitles “extension out-
doors, close-up indoors” we see synthetically connected shots of dancer
Talley Beatty raising his leg in the woods and lowering it into the space of
a room. This volatility of space continues even within the interior domain.
For by means of match-cutting long-shots and close-ups of Beatty in move-
ment, Deren moves him imperceptibly from one apartment to another, and
then Finally into the space of The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Ultimately the film ends with a reversal of its initial directionality as
Beatty leaps from interior space back out into the woods. In A Study in
Choreography for Camera it is as though the five-step walk sequence of
Meshes had been expanded into the entire dynamic of a film.
Although one finds hints and traces of psychological reference in A
Study (for example, in the multiplicity of selves created in the opening
panning shots which connect four images of Beatty, or in the multi-headed
Egyptian statue by which he dances in the hall of the museum) the psychic
element is far less emphatic than in Meshes. For A Study seems primarily
involved with proclaiming the strength of the imagination and its power to
defy the spatio-temporal coordinates of the external world. This assertion
is metaphor of dance and the potency
articulated specifically through the
of film to explode the of theatrical space. Thus the fluid
rigid constraints
transitions of Beatty’s dance movements seem to stand as analogues for
the movements of consciousness, by which (as Deren tells us) “a person is
8
first one place and then another without traveling between.”
76
a
tinually varies the angle of framing and the position of the subject within
the screen rectangle.
As with Meshes the narrative progression of Fireworks is complex
and involves the mirrored labyrinth of a dream within a dream. It begins
with a statuesque pose of a sailor holding a bloodied Anger in his arms
and thereafter cuts to the image of Anger the sleeper awakening from
that dream and stumbling into another. The existence of the first dream
is posited by the appearance of photographs depicting the opening shot—
For when the dreamer awakens from the second dream, he is no longer
alone, and the broken plaster cast which we have seen in earlier sequences
is miraculously reconstituted whole at the end. As Anger tells us, the
13
dreamer “returns to bed less empty than before.’’
While Deren and Anger are concerned with the interiority of the
dream and Maas with the realm of erotic mystery, James Broughton
14
allows us to enter the “country of emotional memory.” Mother’s Day
is a nostalgic comedy which takes a rather perverse backward glance over a
next as old, one moment is outfitted in the style of the 1940’s and the
at
next in Victorian garb. Broughton's aim is to create a sense of simul-
taneity -the simultaneity of the psyche which commutes fluidly between
the spheres of past, present and future.
Broughton, too, utilizes editing to achieve this internal temporality.
But editing is combined with techniques involving the manipulation of
mise-en-scene which he inherited from his background in the theatre.
The classic sequence employing editing and costume/prop changes is that
of Mother at the window surveying her suitors. With each cut back to
her, she is dressed in a different fashion; and with each return to the
suitors, a Melies-like magical transformation is accomplished.
Broughton enlists a purely theatrical strategy (that of using adults to
play children’s roles) in order to render the dual sense of an adult
remembering the past and of the child who Broughton
lives in the adult.
also uses stop-motion to achieve manipulations of foreground and back-
ground that approximate the relative dominance of certain images within
the mind. Thus in one shot we have a suitor in the foreground and an aged
mother in the rear, while in the succeeding shot their positions are reversed.
Mother’s Day is also a poignant vision of the life cycle itself as ar-
ticulated through the metaphor of the mirror. As one of his editing
tropes, Broughton intercuts shots of Mother gazing at herself in a hand
mirror with images of Mother at an older age within the mirror frame.
Cocteau, of course, lurks somewhere through the looking glass and one is
a
80
deep structures reveal significant textual parallels, for the formal
mechanics of Smith’s films seem to translate into the realm of pristine
abstraction, the dynamics which operate representationally in the works
of the other filmmakers.
We have seen how the notion of metamorphosis is crucial to the works
of Deren, Broughton and Anger. In Meshes, we saw keys turn into knives
and in A Study for Choreography the exterior space flow into that of in-
,
81
Early Abstractions (#10) by
Harry Smith
. .
huge hand. What seems significant about the room however is not its ec-
centric formal attributes but rather the way in which it would seem to
reconstitute in abstract form the kind of magical space in which the
mysteries of Meshes of the Afternoon, Mother’s Day or Fireworks might
well have taken place.
It is fitting that we should
close with the image of a room, for it was
through the metaphor of chamber becoming a corridor that Deren had
a
articulated the relationships she sensed between her films. However,
having now traversed the deeper corridor formed by the collective works
of Deren, Maas, Anger, Broughton and Smith, a pattern has emerged.
And it is one that seems best formulated in the words of Max Ernst de-
scribing the work of the Surrealist generation. He wrote:
registering what they see and experience there and intervening where,
20
their revolutionary instincts advise them to do so .
— Lucy Fischer
Footnotes
1 . Maya Deren. “Writings of Maya Deren and 11. P. Adams Sitney. Visionary Film, New
Ron Rice,” Film Culture No. 39, Winter York: Oxford University Press, 1974, p.
1965, pp. 31-32. 101 .
5. Ibid., p. 11.
18. Harry Smith. Catalogue entry in Film-
Makers' Cooperative Catalogue, no. 5, New
6. Ibid., p. 1
York: Film-Makers’ Cooperative, 1971,
p. 296.
7. Ibid., p. 30
19. Deren. op. cit., p. 42.
8. Ibid., p. 3.
The American independent film of the 1950’s stood on the threshold be-
tween the isolated initiatives of the 1940’s and the explosion of film-
makers and styles which marked the movement’s maturity in the 1960’s.
For many of the filmmakers of the “first wave,” it was a period of with-
drawal and frustrating retreat. Maya Deren ceased making films for a
decade after Meditation on Violence (1948) to proselytize for the move-
ment and to pursue her Haitian ethnographic studies. The Lead Shoes
( 1949) was Sidney Peterson's last independent effort before he entered
I i
86
The Lead Shoes by Sidney
Peterson
The effect of these creative strategies was the reduction of the illusion
of three dimensional space offered by both the construction and the
traditional use of the movie camera’s optical system. Implicit in the
cinematic practice of the period, therefore, is a critique of narrative form
87
Bells of Atlantis by Ian Hugo
88
makers of the decade. The use of retarded, accelerated, and reverse mo-
tion varies and accents the movement within the shots and also highlights
their rhythmic form at the expense of their narrative informativeness.
The most astonishing aspect of the film is its soundtrack. Song titles
(“Old Gray Mare”), verses from the ballads, repeated falsetto shouts
(“Edward?!”), all sung and spoken at assorted dynamic registers, are sus-
pended over a clanging, untuned patchwork of parodied polkas and New
Orleans jazz idioms. The dense sonic texture facilitates an associative inter-
play with the images. It represents an exceptional example of audio-visual
asynchronism based on a Joycean play of word associations used in films
The great ambition of Ian Hugo’s films has been to embody “the
language of multiple dimensions of our inner world.” More than that of
any other filmmaker, his cinema dreams and reveries in composi-
figures
tions whose techniques attempt metamorphic flow and in-
to reflect the
explicable shifts of our subconscious. Most of the formal options available
to cinema, particularly superimposition, special printing techniques, and
above all, the dissolve, are enlisted to portray this radical subjectivity.
Bells of Atlantis was Hugo’s second film and it is related to the trance
film genre discussed above. Based on Anais Nin’s prose poem “The House
of Incest,” the film explicitly postulates a lyrical self in the narrator’s
voice (spoken by Nin herself). Her episodic text recites a narrative of the
agonizing birth of consciousness from the indistinct fluid realms of
Atlantis, the film’s metaphor for the subconscious. Louis and Bebe
Barron’s evocative score, whose meandering tones bent by an electronic
synthesizer sound as if they too emerged from under the sea, restates in a
different mode the film’s primary image: water.
The visual track of Bells of Atlantis presents the alien but strangely
familiar visionary realm “beyond the reach of human eyes and ears.” The
camera sways gently in contrasting directions over each of the three layers
of superimposed images that are usually present. Hugo uses inner-cutting,
slowly changing one layer of imagery (usually by dissolves, fades, and
plastic cutting on black), while the other layers remain constant. The ebb
and flow effects thus produced convey the rhythms and even the visual
textures of water. The movements of.the narrator (performed by Anais
Nin) can be glimpsed through the “aquatic” space.
Hugo concentrates on shooting highly contrasted reflections off water
whose colors are further intensified by various printing techniques which
exploit masking and combined negative and positive imagery. (Hugo was
assisted by Len Lye, pioneer avant-garde filmmaker whose experiments
with painting and stenciling directly on film in Color Box (1935) and
Kaleidoscope (1936) anticipated many formal initiatives of the 1950’s).
One of the great colorists of the independent cinema, Hugo uses color
symbolically. Blues and greens, occasionally accented by more intense
contrasting orange-red hues, represent the erotic subconscious which is
night-filled Atlantis. As the narrative progresses, reds and pinks symbolizing
flesh, daylight and terror come to dominate the color scheme. The washes
of subtly related colors flow across the screen in rhythmic waves through-
The Wonder Ring by Stan
Brakhage
90
out the film, evoking those “colors running into each other without
frontiers,” announced in the monologue, as the space where one finds “no
currents of thoughts, only the caress and flow of desire.” This realm, ar-
ticulated by the veils of color and flow of hypnagogic imagery (evanescent
I
images preceding sleep), becomes the matrix for the presentation of the
inner self, a lyrical theme adapted and greatly modified by Stan
Brakhage.
Because of the extraordinary quality and variety of his prolific oeuvre,
Stan Brakhage has come to be the exemplary figure of the American inde-
pendent cinema. His films, made over a quarter century, encompass most
of the major modes that have been developed and contain much of what
has been and will be of enduring value in the history of American film
art.
His early films were shaped by the formal and thematic preoccupations
of the trance film genre. The Wonder Ring, made on a commission from
Joseph Cornell, began his long apprenticeship to the modalities of visionary
experience which would become his principal theme. The film’s visual
complexity emerges from an intensive examination of the soon-to-be-
destroyed platforms and train cars of New York City’s Third Avenue
elevated subway. The multi-colored virtual spaces of glass reflections, the
saccadic movement of light through the train, the web of girder silhouettes,
and the rippling distortions of window panes that Brakhage records and
edits into a rhythmic form that recapitulates the jerking movement of a
subway ride, reveal the wealth of visual stimulation available to an attentive
eye. More than that, Brakhage finds in the train’s movements through the
urban landscape a “natural” repertory of cinematic strategies— superimposi-
tion, distortion through special lenses, etc.— which are the tools of his
art,and eventually form the essential vocabulary of his “lyric” style.
In a letter to P. Adams Sitney in 1963 (published as part of Metaphors
on Vision, Brakhage ’s meditation on film and language), Brakhage wrote:
Perhaps more than any other of Brakhage ’s films, The Wonder Ring
situates itself in the history of the twentieth century visual arts. Numerous
“pictures” in the styles of Expressionism, Cubism, and Abstract Expression-
ism, the main stages of the moderns’ critique of Renaissance pictorial space,
virtually constitute a museum without walls within the film. These fleeting
allusions are incorporated “naturally” within the shallow space of action
characteristic of Brakhage ’s “lyric” style. Their inclusion also introduces
an important problem later explored analytically and didactically by Ken
Jacobs in Tom, Tom, the Piper's Son (1969): the relation of filmic
The Wonder Ring by Stan spatiality to the catalogue of pictorial spaces proposed by the Western
Brakhage tradition in painting.
Bridges, especially those of New York City, have been central icons
of modern American poetry and painting. Joseph Stella’s “Brooklyn
Bridge” canvases and Hart Crane’s The Bridge come immediately to mind.
A stanza from Crane’s prefatory To Brooklyn Bridge might, in fact, serve
as an invocation to the dancing bridges in Shirley Clarke’s Bridge-Go-
Round.
91
And Thee, across the harbor, silver paced
As though the sun took step of thee, yet left
Some motion ever unspent in thy stride,—
3
Implicitly thy freedom staying thee!
That Clarke’s bridges should seem to dance is not surprising: she was
trained as a dancer before she began to make films. Her earliest works such
as Dance in the Sun (1953), Bullfight ( 1955), and A Moment in Love
(1957, choreographed with Anna Sokolow) belong to a lyrical dance film
form pioneered by Maya Deren’s A Study in Choreography for Camera
(1945). This genre’s synthesizing of diverse spaces by cutting on the
dancer’s leap and matching shots along his implied trajectory is carried
over to the immobile subjects of Bridges-Go-Round.
The film’s formal strategies make the massive structures seem to float
in a flowing, gravity-less space. “Sandwiching” and “inner-cutting,” tech-
the sandwiched shot, not at the beginning or end of it, but within the
shot itself. This is a form of overlapping that produces the sensation
of perpetual motion and flow which I have always sought to attain in
my films. . . .
Though she did not originate these techniques, Clarke exploits them
elegantly in a film which almost consistently avoids the disjunctive breaks
of the simple cut.
Clarke’s use of camera angles, highly contrasted images and compound
camera-zoom movements dematerialize the bridge forms and help to in-
duce the sense of weightlessness. The generally low angles and high back-
lighting transforms the three dimensional shapes into two dimensional
abstract patterns. She often holds these visual shapes constant while
changing the image’s tint, or makes sandwiched shapes meld into a new
graphic form. Most original, however, is her use of the zoom lens which
creates the illusion of motion through a change in lens ratios. Fixing on
a point of the bridge, she zooms in or out while continuing to move around
or through its structure. The bridge appears to rise from its foundation
and leap across the water separating it from the totemic sky-line of New
York City distantly sighted at the film’s beginning and approached at its
conclusion.
A Movie’s, masks the scope of its ambition. Conner’s
unassuming title
Films were very liberating. ... I wanted to see some things I’d never
seen before. . . For me, film was another medium that permitted
.
mixing of all this extraneous stuff, ideas and words and configurative
elements that I couldn’t justify putting in paintings anymore.
Brakhage himself. (The two are joined in the hanged man at the film’s
conclusion.) The long central section figures his contemplation of suicide.
His memories, hopes, speculations and desperate fascination for the light
are fused by Brakhage’s plastic cutting on dark or unfocused images, and
his useof continuous camera movements across the shot changes. Each
motif of his meditation is articulated as a rhythmic-textural unit of
related image clusters (the pacing man, the child on the grass, the amuse-
ment park, the temple structure, the sleeping children) which, from its first
95
Anticipation of the Nigh
Stan Brakhage
96
brief appearance, gradually assumes dominance as the previous motif
recedes to become a punctuating interlude.
The conventional uses of film techniques are deliberately violated as
Brakhage translates aural and tactile sensations into modes of visual ex-
all
perience. The rapid camera movements behind which can be sensed the
filmmaker’s violent gestures swing freely through space, transforming ob-
jects into streaksof light on an ambiguously deep ground and unifying dis-
continuous spaces.
By contrast, the earlier work, The Wonder Ring's smooth slow move-
ments follow the horizontal and vertical directions of the traditional pan
and tilt and respect the spatial donnees. The speed and complexity of
Anticipation's editing undermines the coherent spatial and temporal order
of conventional narrative exposition. Inverted images, accelerated mo-
tion, varying degrees of exposure and focus, the inclusion of film leader
and end flares are all employed to weld disparate objects and spaces into
a chain of metaphoric transformations which forms Anticipation's poetic
argument. Condensing time and space into a perpetual present, 5 the
film’s formal structure ultimately embodies Brakhage 's great project: the
representation of the movements of consciousness itself.
Stuart Liebman
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
Footnotes
... I just look at the pictures in the articles, it doesn’t matter what
they say about me; I just read the textures of the words. I see every-
thing that way, the surface of things, a kind of mental Braille. I just
pass my hands over the surface of things.
—Andy Warhol, from an interview
In 1964, two rather distinct and often contradictory modes of filmic struc-
ture were evident in the foreground of New American filmmaking. Neither
approach was organized or consistently applied— in the manner of a
School— and neither derived from a single impulse or set of sources. A
number of artists worked with only marginal participation in or totally
divorced from the prerogatives of either approach. And by the mid-sixties,
one style had achieved its apogee— serving primarily as a negative model for
subsequent filmmaking— while the other was in a state of growth and trans-
formation, evolving as the dominant mode of the late sixties.
In articulating the genesis of the former, the mature style, P. Adams
Sitney has stated:
What took place between 1950 and 1960 was the growth of a form
which could contain many simultaneous characters, episodes, and
fantastic changes of space: a comparative cinema, with symphonic
organization of parts into a grand mythopoeic whole. I’ve called this
elsewhere the exchange from a cinema of conjunction to a cinema of
1
metaphor.
100
folds itself into the shape of a rocket and rises out of the frame. As
Eisenhower and Kruschev observe through telescopes, a cigar, a teapot, a
fountain-pen, an ice-cream sundae, and other objects are projected into
orbit. At one point, a rocket crashes through the house of an unsuspecting
consumer and impales him.
A brief newsphoto survey of architectural monuments— East and
West— is followed by the ignition and assumption of the Empire State
Building, Eiffel Tower, Kremlin, and Washington Monument, among other
buildings. The world is revealed as a place of potential rockets and poten-
tial targets. The heads of the two Cold War leaders emerge through the
Cold War conflicts (Don Siegal’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers is a good
example). Vanderbeek’s film seems to implicate— in a playful manner— the
technologized vision of science fiction as contributing to the cult of missile
hardware. The soundtrack of machine noise and electronic tones, the inter-
mittent cutting to patterns of revolving concentric circles (reminiscent of
Duchamp’s Anemic Cinema), and the stuttering movement of the
animated cutouts, suggests Science Friction as a kind of self-destructing
machine whose collage images pull apart and vacate the frame. Each suc-
cessive composition is subject to a reverse gravitational force that destroys
its stability.
Although several distinct sections are evident, the global form retains
an ambiguity— in point-of-view and narrative evolution— not suggested by
Baillie’s account. The dedication— “For the Dakota Sioux”— indicates a
thematic element that, of necessity, is articulated indirectly. As Baillie
writes: “The dedication is to the religious people who were destroyed by
Science Friction by Stan Vander-
beek
m
4
the civilization which evolved the Mass .” The title itself can be read on
at leasttwo other levels: as a reference to the density and weight of both
the image and sound tracks, and as a description of the nameless, ghostlike
faces that populate the film’s urban landscape. That the human figures
command an expressive physical presence within a context of dimly and
brightly exposed images, layers of superimposition, and shots in negative,
confirms the filmmaker’s extraordinary sensitivity to his unposed subjects.
After an epigraph by Sitting Bull (“No chance for me to live
mother/You might as well mourn”), the first image is a close-up of clap-
ping hands— a framing device that recurs following the central section. On
a dark sidewalk we see a man crawling just beyond a square of light. He
appears to be drunk or seriously ill.
After this introduction is a section— much of it superimposed— of city
shapes and movements. Smokestacks, telephone lines, a busy street
corner, an automobile harboring a face in the window, drift through the
frame articulated by slow panning shots and dissolves. The filmmaker is
glimpsed for a moment through a luminous haze that surrounds much of
the footage. In this section, Baillie sets up a cross-directionality of screen
movements— with specific images seeming to advance or recede through
layers of texture— that conveys both a sense of weariness and ritual motion
and has a precise parallel in the soundtrack. Street noises intermingle with
the Gregorian chant, one element then the other assuming audial
dominance. As the voices of the chant rise and fall in pitch, the patterns
of imagery shift in direction or velocity through matched editing.
In the second section of the film, a long travelling shot precedes a
clear image of the cyclist, possibly the protagonist and mediator of the
urban vision. A long pan across rooftops is connected to a shot of rows of
suburban houses. squeezed together on an incline. A title appears: “Behold,
a good nation walking in a sacred manner in a good land.” The resemblance
of the peaked roofs to Indian tepees underscores the bitter irony of a dis-
placed people.
This signals the start of the central and most intense portion of the
by increasingly ironic and politicized juxtapositions. A
film, elaborated
frieze is enjambed with the face of a church gargoyle. A
of the Virgin
montage of television images— Boris Karloff, commercials, a marching
band— develops a theme of spectatorship and mass destruction. In one
sequence, a shot of a street derelict cuts to a woman’s face in an advertise-
ment: “Doctor, been having these terrible muscle spasms in my arm.”
I’ve
The next shot is of a field cannon spasming as it discharges its shell. The
implication that media— and the culture in general— trivializes pain and
death thereby fostering an acceptability of human and ecological disaster
is extended through a series of violent match-cuts.
At the end of this section, three men and a boy are seen against a
window clapping enthusiastically. This highly problematic shot simul-
taneously offers a climax to the preceding sequence and acts as an un-
comfortable distancing device to the film’s structure. The opening shot of
the crawling man and the closing sequence described in the notes are ob-
viously acted and extremely artificial in nature. The clapping audience
calls attention to and makes suspect these heavily dramatic scenes and
also the editing tour-de-force just witnessed.
In the midst of the rapid montage— and later at the close of the film—
an image of waves breaking onto a beach tries to insert itself through the
welter of urban violence. But this invocation of the “natural,” the peace-
ful, is finally unattainable. The ocean is filled with battleships or, in the
103
Little Stabs at Happiness by Ken
Jacobs
the cigarette from the eye. Christmas ornaments are dangled in front of
the camera lens obscuring the field, and this is followed by several shots of
extreme close-up of Smith
a light bulb, a clay-like form, then a soft-focus
gnawing at the crotch of a doll. The background music is a rendition of
“Bubble Your Troubles Away.” A shot near the end of the section displays
a crowded, heavily textured and gaudily colored composition-recalling,
perhaps, Joseph von Sternberg— involving the two actors and various
objects.
The alternation of distracted, unfinished-looking compositions with
mapped, quasi-aesthetic views is a strategy reiterated in several
carefully
interludes. Its exposure and assault on conventional notions of pictorial
“beauty” are paralleled by seemingly arbitrary intercuts (the shot of the
pigeon in the fourth section) and the replacement of stable camera setups
104
Notebook by Marie Menken
scene and they proceed to exit. In the film as a whole, what is perceived
spontaneous clowning emerges as a carefully executed system
initially as
Jiiv?
“Lights” and “Moonplay” also share a sense ot shape as defined by the
graphic flow of successive images.
Each section of the film is introduced by a title appearing on a back-
ground of clear leader. The transparency of these shots performs the
function of voiding the material of the concluding section and easing tran-
sitions between color shape. There is a progression from black and white
in the opening sections to gradually saturated color in the middle parts,
and a similar movement from static camerawork
“Raindrops” to frenzied
in
knew.” 6 Brakhage goes on to state that her use of the hand-held camera
and orientation to the film-strip (rather than the screen) provided him
with important insights into the possibilities of filmic structure.
Prelude is the first section of the five -part Dog Star Man, begun in
1960 and completed at the end of 1964. It is a film of monumental
scope and achievement and its prelude— the most independently struc-
tured of the five parts—can be fully comprehended, only in relation to its
subsequent development.
105
In an account oi Dog Star Man's structure and narrative evolution,
Brakhage provides this brief synopsis:
The man climbs the mountain out of winter and night into the dawn,
up through spring and early morning to midsummer and high noon,
to where he chops down the tree There’s a Fall— and a fall back
. . .
7
to somewhere, midwinter .
For example, in the linkage of capillary action within the body and a solar
eruption, a secondary association with the rhythm of the filmstrip arises.
The “universe” invoked in Prelude is anchored by the twin presence of the
dreamer and shaper of filmic artifice.
Some of the methods by which Brakhage articulates comparison of
diverse material are verbal association, color, texture, shape, camera move-
ment, internal motion, placement in the frame. Metaphors are often gen-
erated by manifold elements; a woman’s breast and the moon may be con-
nected by verbal association, tonality and placement as well as shape.
Images may be yoked in superimposition or compared across a cluster of
shots. And elements once joined are later compared separately with
apposite elements (women’s bodies are conjoined with the sun, a flame,
the moon, a tree trunk in different sections).
Also, sets of opposing elements which are dominant in one portion of
the film become recessive in another: the fire/water opposition at the be-
ginning gives way to sun/moon juxtapositions which in turn develop into
male/female comparisons. It is also the case that the moon is more
Prelude, Dog Star Man by Stan
evident in the first half and the sun more evident in the second. There are
Brakhage elements-such as the wooded landscape— that are excavated gradually to
assume a central position and other elements which make relatively few
appearances (the beating heart). Non-photographic elements— painting and
106
Prelude, Dog Star Man by Stan
Brakhage
prominence of blue and red one section and an accenting of yellow and
in
orange in another. A pattern of evolution from round or amorphous forms
to a prevalence of vertical or linear figures presages the central narrative
Dog Star Man’s struggle with the tree.
episode in the film: the
An asynchronous doubling of action on both layers of superimposi-
tion, the use of rapid zooms into and out of the man’s almost sexual em-
bracing of the tree, and a heightened employment of negative images and
reverse motion sequence apart from the rest of the work. In this
set this
confrontation, the tree is associated with female genitals, seasonal indica-
tions fuse, solar and lunar references are merged. The Dog Star Man and
a woman are seen kissing, then images of a baby breast-feeding and being
held aloft by the protagonist are conjoined with scratches, solar explo-
sions, and capillary flow.
The intensity of montage subsides into shots of a dark landscape with
clouds passing in fast motion. After several more clusters— reiterating the
moon and woman— separated by two dark pauses, the film ends on a land-
scape. This is the landscape into which the man will be thrust upon
awakening. The flare-out end of Prelude suggests this awakening, but
at the
it will fall to the following four sections to develop and apotheosise this
central theme.
-Paul S. Arthur
Footnotes
1. P. Adams Sitney. “The Idea of Morphology,” 5. P. Adams Sitney. Visionary Film, New
Film Culture, No. 53-54-55, Spring 1972, York: Oxford University Press, 1974.
p. 18.
3. Canyon Cinema Cooperative Catalogue, 3, 8. Sitney. Visionary Film, op. cit., p. 218.
Sausalito, 1972, p. 19.
9. Fred Camper. "'The Art of Vision, A Film
4. Film-Makers’ Cooperative Catalogue, No. by Stan Brakhage,” Film Culture No. 46,
4, New York, 1967, p. 13. Autumn 1967, p. 40.
107
4
Scorpio Rising (Kenneth Anger)
Fire of Waters (Stan Brakhage)
Window (Ken Jacobs)
The Flicker (Tony Conrad)
Kenneth Anger’s Scorpio Rising (1963) and Tony Conrad’s The Flicker
(1966) define a spectrum of film form and sense along with the work of
other filmmakers of the sixties such as Fire of Waters 1965) by Stan
(
Brakhage and Window ( 1964) by Ken Jacobs can be situated. On the one
hand, evident in the latest film in this program, is Conrad’s interest in the
most basic, abstract units of film construction: light and shadow con-
densed into solid frame units, mathematically distributed along the film
strip’s space-time continuum and projected to produce an hypnotic,
lyrical, gesturing camera. Anger in Scorpio Rising also exploits the unify-
ing and graceful properties of camera movement, sharp colors, forms, and
lighted surfaces, uses irony in the form of sound-image and editorial juxta-
positions to create a ritual documentary of an era’s cult and its magic.
Of the four films, Scorpio Rising is the most elaborate and seductive,
with its intriguing mixture of sensuous surfaces caressed by a smooth
moving camera and rock songs with pleasingly familiar, now nostalgic,
tunes and lyrics. The combination is more perverse and explosive than
one at first suspects. The thirteen songs, played for the most part in their
entirety, provide the primary subdivisions of the film and tend to under-
mine or comment on the visual material. “Fools rush in, where wise men
fear to tread” accompanies the first bike polishing and fitting rile. “My
boyfriends’ back and he’s cornin’ after you-oo” greets a biker as he care-
fully prepares a ritual toilette and introduces the latent and blatant, largely
homosexual, eroticism which dominates the film. “She wore blue velvet”
comically contrasts with the zipping up of blue jeans, mimicked by a
vertical camera tilt, while red flashes and “Heat Wave” reproduce on aural
and visual levels a “high,” as the biker snorts cocaine. “I will follow him,
whereever he may go” equates the cyclists’ allegiance with Christ’s dis-
ciples and Hitler’s troops, a comparison underlined by match cuts joining
similar lines of movement and actions in the Hollywood Christ film
footage and a Hell’s Angels’ initiation “party.” The songs, often mixed
with loud bike noises, and camera movements carry over the enormous
number of cuts which join a large inventory of diverse materials: shiny
fenders, studded belts and jackets, James Dean memorabilia, comic strips,
muscle-bound bodies, flashes of color and lights, scorpion insignias, video-
109
Scorpio Rising by Kenneth Anger
Window by Ken Jacobs
textured movie footage, Nazi emblems and checkers, and stock shots of
Hitler and army ranks.
More so than any of the other films, Scorpio Rising follows a proces-
sion of events which do not constitute a linear narrative as such, but do
suggest a ritualistic progression from arising and dressing in preparation for
a “party” cyclist (the initiation and convocation) and bike race (the
apocalypse and sacrifice) which ends in an actual “wipe -out” death for one
and a metaphorical death for all. Individual bikers are seen in full figure
in deep spaces as they perform their polishing and dressing rites. These
deep, narrative spaces and actions are then, however, systematically under-
cut with materials in flatter spaces which are tangentially or metaphorically
related to those activities. The hand-held camera which circulates around
the party sequence is the furthest removed element from the formal control
which unifies and stylizes much of the other action footage. The inter-
cutting, for example, of a mustard-plastered crotch and wagging penises
with shots of an indignant Jesus Christ sets up still another synthetic
framework to reorient and comment on this quasi-documentary footage.
Beneath the often comic action and ironic commentary of these
moments is a sense of violence accentuated by abrupt contrasts of light and
shadow, flat and deep spaces, and noise and song. The erotic and sado-
masochistic anointment of mustard, the tough leathers, the screeching of
cycles, the tyrannic leader’s defamation of an altar and his gun waving, and
the final montage evocation of a biker’s death double the irony of “Hit the
road, Jack, and don’t you come back no more, no more, no more ...”
And, the film occasionally parodies and marvelously invokes the concerns
of all of Anger’s film work: demons, the occult, sexual rites, Magick, myths,
VWYV) More quiet and abstract is Window, Jacobs’ study of the lines, frames,
shadows, and recesses of a window space animated by a constantly moving
camera. Jacobs describes his method:
111
Window by Ken Jacobs
112
movement continuing over the cut. Nearer the end, superimpositions
juxtapose in the space of one shot two spaces and times which overlap and
define the distance between them. The film presents a few moments of
visual beauty in the shifting network of a multitude of frames. Transform-
ing the inert into the moving, Jacobs’ camera travels from form to form
with delicacy and grace.
Although Brakhage, in earlier films, pioneered the art of gesturing
camera and lyrical combinations of refracted planes and light, in Fire of
Waters he reduces more rigorously than Jacobs the area and units of his
visual concerns and derives from shadow, light and mysterious spaces a
remarkably subtle evocation of forms and their dissolution in cinematic
time. Far removed from the epic dimensions of Dog Star Man, Brakhage
presages the intimacy of the Songs in Fire of Waters’s quiet, vanishing
windows and lights. And, in addition, the film explores and exploits
momentarily the mysteries of film illusionism: frame, grain, light, dark,
sprocket holes, sound, silence, and motion.
On first viewing, one perhaps assumes that Brakhage has captured
the momentary flashes of light and long periods of darkness with which
lightning reveals the silhouette of a house and then engulfs it. Yet the
strangely minimal sound track, the presence of “defects” in the film
stock and frame alignment, and above all the nearly comical moving
around of people in a real, deep landscape suggest that still another level
of magic is at work. To quote the seer of Blue Moses, the lightning is
like “An eclipse— manufactured, but not yet patented ... for your
2
pleasure.”
Paul Arthur, in his analysis of four Brakhage films in Artforum,
suggests that the film is a product of systematic single frame exposure
3
and underexposure, as close examination of the film strip confirms.
The lightning flashes seem to be the result of severely overexposing one
frame and underexposing the others, all during daylight hours. The
flickering on the house at full exposure further suggests that changes are
synthetically created. The propelling of a figure down the sidewalk is even
clearer evidence of single-frame construction. Passages of pure flickering
light on film stock are another synthetic occurrence.
Until this daylight section at the end, the film seems to be a piercing
of a dark ground by lit-up shapes and silhouettes at unexpected intervals:
a circular light source on the far left of the frame, two window frames or
one window frame, or a cloud-covered moon. The carving out of that
black field in turn suggests a deeper, “real” space slightly behind.
Horizon lines and house frames horizontally divide the field into light top,
dark bottom, forms which quickly recede into that field again. These shots
appear to be a series of continuous, static takes of horizons or houses
which lightning illuminates from behind.
Still another surface seems to hover in front of this plane of houses
and the space behind it, defined by the very grainy, gray field, slashes of
white on black leader, water spots or emulsion defects appearing over the
dark field or lightning images, and areas of light in the shape of sprocket
holes on the upper and lower edges of some frames. At one point, in a
bright section, what seems like a liquid bleeding in of white from the
edges into areas of grainy emulsion defines a very slightly more sculptural
surface.
The most enigmatic part of Brakhage’s “last sound film” until 1975
is the highly fragmented track consisting of three intervals of “sound,”
113
114
and of the crackles and clicks produced by the blank portions of the track
passing over the sound drum in the projector. Again, close examination of
the film strip shows zig-zags in the soundtrack area through only a few
feet of the film; the rest is clear celluloid. The first section of the track
accompanies the titles and sounds like the clatter of hooves or guns firing
in a Western on a TV at a distance from the sound recorder. This seems to
me and even funny comment on synchronous sound
to be Brakhage’s ironic
and narrative modes which are rejected in this film and nearly all others.
The sound in this first section stops abruptly. Several minutes later we
are reminded that this is a sound film by the rather pitiful scratching out of
three descending notes repeated three times on a cello on what sounds like
a very worn out record surface with louder, more defined cracklings than
just the blank parts of the soundtrack provide. Accompanying the dark,
imageless screen, the strains of music seems to parody the emotional ac-
cents which music has traditionally provided for narrative films. The final
squeaky, shrill noise, possibly the persistent yelp of a dog seems again to
be a comic accompaniment for the fast-motion, pixillated movement of
cars and pedestrians forward along the street by the house which is now
fully and therefore potentially “narratively” visible. The sound track then
also confirms reports that Brakhage is up to magical appearances and dis-
appearances, an abstracted inheritance from Melies.
It is unfortunate that audiences of a film like Conrad's The Flicker
cannot be given a print of a few feet of the film to hand around and
examine after its projection for there really are two very different ex-
periences of the film: the first, a bewildering play of flickering light and
shadow, with appearing and disappearing, always imagined forms and even
colors, which radically flood and darken the screening room; the second is
the revelation that all these effects and illusions are produced simply by
the metrical alternation of black and clear frames of celluloid in seemingly
endless permutations and combinations which can be counted and even
reproduced on another celluloid strip, if one had the enormous patience
which the film’s construction must have required.
The projected experience of the film begins with what seems a
sarcastic suggestion on a title card that the film can induce nausea,
migraine headaches, and epileptic seizures, and therefore requires a
physician in attendance. Actually, such optical stimulation can cause
serious physical responses quite different from the aesthetic, as literature
on stroboscopic effects distributed by societies for the treatment of
epilepsy warns. The accompanying sound tape (separate from the film
and to be synchronized during projection) begins with old grammaphone
music and calls into question the seriousness of this long-held message
which it accompanies. A one-frame, graphically compact card reads
“Conrad presents” and dissolves to another black and white graphic com-
position of the film title. Finally “1966 Conrad,” scratched into the
emulsion, gives way to the flickering light from which the title is derived.
The film itself is so fluid in appearance that it is difficult to subdivide
it. At the beginning, there seems to be a faster and faster pulse which is
vaguely perceived as the throbbing of a white field. With no subject matter
to enforce one’s attention, one’s eye tends to wander around the frame
and room to gather in the full and wild impact of the film. Depending on
the projection conditions, dust around the frame edge and particles and
scratches in the field, often moving by quickly, can be noticed. Also, the
frame line at the top or bottom appears to vibrate up and down a bit,
giving another sense of rhythm or periodicity to one’s viewing.
The light vibrations of the flicker bring optical illusions into play,
which vary with different viewers and viewing situations. Patterns of light,
colors, and even shadows of seemingly hidden forms appear as the film
continues. At times there seems to be a swirling movement hovering
around the center of the frame; at other times yellow and/or green and
purple seem to vibrate in and tint the field. The surface of the screen seems
radiant and brilliant as the light strikes forward into the space before the
screen and assaults the viewer.
Later on, the light and dark interchange seems to thrust in and out in
an even deeper space and seems to speed up again toward the end. Mean-
while, the taped sound of white noise also varies in volume and quality,
fading in and out, speeding up and slowing down, sometimes in coordina-
tion with the flicker, sometimes more independently. It is a clicking
machine noise, reminiscent of the non-existent sections of the sound
track of Fire of Waters. Strained to the limits of the persistence of vision
which makes the actual units of the film illegible, the eye comes to a rest
at last; the stare is cut off and dissolved into conversation and questions.
What is the film, anyway? According to Conrad, a musician as well as
a filmmaker:
Examination of the strip does not make a triadic principle any clearer.
Approximately the first half of the film is constructed on a certain ratio of
clear leader frames to one black frame which separates each grouping of
clear leader frames. In other words, the light frames dominate any series.
For example, a group of twenty-three clear frames and one black frame is
repeated twenty-five times at the beginning, a series exactly one second or
24 fps in duration. Then a gradual decrease in the number of clear
frames per black frame from 1 1 clear frames per black to 5 clear frames
1
per one black is executed. From then on, the patterns are for the most
part more complicated and require very careful counting. Sometimes
there will be an alternating pattern (5 clear, black, 4 clear, 1 black,
1
terns of black and clear frames becomes very complex, for example,
2 black, 1 clear, 2 black, 2 clear, etc. There are tricky deviations from
the main patterns, even within a series, which force the frame counter
never to assume that a series is entirely regular. At the end, the pattern
of the beginning is reversed with 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 11, and then 23 clear frames
interspersed with one black frame. The startling transformations of the
film during projection belie the systematic means by which it was created.
Many of the filmmakers of the avant-garde of the sixties have ex-
plored what P. Adams Sitney has termed the “structural film.” Its
methods seem more closely related to serial music’s mathematical pat-
terning of musical tones, although the analogy applies only partially.
What is amazing is how diluted the mathematics of such structures be-
come in how the clear frame or empty screen seems to
the final viewing,
dominate, with dark shadows pulsing behind and apparitions forming
above and beyond the simple alternating of black and white.
1.
2.
3.
4.
Footnotes
Mekas
119
American films); and Mekas’ own particular attempt to intensify and make
immediate.
Various techniques help achieve these ends. One kind of cut used
repeatedly involves no change of subject matter or camera angle, just a
transition to a slightly later time. A series of these brief ellipses makes the
action seem speeded-up, but more importantly, forces the eye to continual-
ly jump with the editing to re-see the subject. This has an analogue in a
kind of camera movement used: jittery, rapidly vibrating movements
separated by brief pauses in which the subject is seen more clearly. Other
kinds of cuts involve shifting to a different camera or lens framing of the
same subject matter, cutting to a completely different part of the same
subject, and cutting to completely different subjects. As well, Mekas cuts
between out-of-focus and in-focus shots, often of the same subject.
Finally, brief superimpositions are used at unexpected moments, adding an
extra layer of object, color, and movement, and creating another kind of
cut: between single image and superimposition.
It should be noted that these techniques combine quite remarkably
in the whole film, so that, for instance, the viewer does not sense an
enormous difference between certain jittery camera movements and certain
cuts, and senses instead that each technique is analogous to the others.
These techniques combine to deny the subject any continuity outside
the film and force it to be seen as something which occurs, and occurs
differently, in each image, each frame. Further, Mekas as film-maker seems
ever present, and thus making the subject “his,” through the techniques
described. But the particular attitude that Mekas takes toward his subject,
and the particular kind of immediacy he achieves, needs further discussion.
It must first be said that even more than most films Notes on the
stand its statement. Consider first the circus itself. A “normal” trip to
the circus occasions a continuous viewing of its acts; that is the usual pur-
pose of going. The spotlighting of specific acts encourages this. This
lighting is accepted by Mekas in his film, so that in most images the back-
ground is all or mostly black and the bright colors of the performers are
121
ASTRO st
800
ro Street by Bruce Baillie
only in the context of the whole that each shot can be understood. In
these, each image’s place in the film depends on what has preceeded and
on what will follow; the images have a past and a future in a way that
those of Notes on the Circus do not. Notes does, of course, create optical
afterimages, but in so doing, it is still really locating its effects in
momentary perception; the film develops with a remarkable linearity rather
than working towards an architectural whole.
P. Adams Sitney’s description of Castro Street suggests it is less ob-
viously personalized than Notes on the Circus:
On one hand, this can be seen in the film’s absence of any direct
reference to the physiology of seeing, and way it avoids the implied
in the
assertion of Notes on the Circus that the film is an individual’s reaction to
events seen. At the same time, it is a highly constructed and manipulated
film of a single street. But the effects of this manipulation are not as im-
mediately personal as they are in Notes on the Circus. To understand this,
123
Samadhi by Jordan Belson
124
issuperimposed; whole sections are composed based on sets of such tran-
they appear to be continually expanding on, or out of, themselves.
sitions;
Nominally a portrait of a street, the film does not build to a view of the
“whole street,” but really does the opposite, destroying not only
geographical fixity but the permanence of everything seen. In many
images, darkness fills much of the frame, seeming to lie behind the shift-
ing fragments of visible objects. This is a visual materialization of the
film’s deepest idea: if all is artificial and impermanent, then behind lies
It’s home . . . But I want everybody really lost, and I want us all to
be at home there ... I have to say finally what I am interested,
like Socrates: peace . . . rest . . . nothing . . }
the degree to which the filmmaker, viewer and screen are united. A film
like Notes on the Circus partially separates the camera’s recording function,
the filmmaker’s manipulations through movement, focus and editing, and
the viewer’s perceptual reactions to them; questions can then be asked
about the relationship between content, artist, and viewer; such relation-
ships are forms of the subject/object split that the experience of Samadhi
seeks to close. Belson’s images are to be seen whole, and do not invite
questions about how they were created; for him, they are not images at
all, but forms of consciousness.
The film begins with shifting light and color over indistinct repeated
patterns. Circular shapes are seen in continuous transformation; circles
here act as planetary or celestial references, and as representatives of a
unity of inner consciousness; P. Adams Sitney has pointed out the rela-
tion here to Emerson’s notion of circles as extending from the eye
throughout nature, and found metaphorically in various aspects of
human life and civilization 3 This connection is apt; not only do the
.
125
Lapis by James Whitney
126
Wavelength by Michael Snow
127
.
the viewer finds it reductive he can try concentrating on the images alone.
If he can do so he will find elaborate shifting patterns created with com-
puter animation; shapes made of hundreds of parts are organized through
the use of geometry and repetitions of detail. The film pauses briefly on
some of its more complex images, involving geometrical arrangements of
myriad tiny dots. Pauses are appropriate, for these patterns are complex
enough for the eye to want to move around in them; this eye-motion,
plus the sense that the changes are always about to resume, make it a
film without any truly static moment.
P. Adams Sitney has compared Brakhage’s humanized camera with
Michael Snow’s camera and found in Snow a “disembodied viewpoint”
which he also sees in Belson’s films; he identifies Snow as differing from
4
Belson concern with cinematic illusionism.
in his In Lapis and Samadhi,
the fact that the mediating action of the filmmaker is not directly visible —
as it is in Mekas or Brakhage— gives the images a more absolute status: they
are\ the viewer is in them. Wavelength raises more questions than these
two films; consciousness of film and the film-making process is strongly
suggested, but ultimately its zoom has an absolute quality.
Wavelength most simply described as a 45 minute film consisting of
is
changes the amount of depth in the frame as well. Further, the zoom
creates various expectations, which themselves are constantly shifting: it
is only after some minutes that we begin to see the zoom and suspect
that it will constitute the whole film; we then wonder where it leads;
it is only much later that we first surmise and then know it will end on
the photo. Annette Michelson has stated that
The film is in fact much less easily unified than Samadhi or Lapis, for
it contains within the zoom a series of comparisons and disjunctions.
Snow breaks up the zoom by changing the color of the image, by cutting
to negative, by altering the film stock used; other cuts change the time of
day through the windows. The “purity” of the single movement
visible
across an empty space is disrupted by people at several instances: a radio
is played, someone appears to die; these narrative elements call for a dif-
ferent mode of apprehension than that involved in the seeing of the slow
zoom. Finally, there is a paradox involved in the progress of the zoom
itself. Snow identifies a space “natural to film” as “maybe conical, but
6
flattened;” he is of course describing the space suggested by the
progression of his zoom; this also is another way the zoom relates to film
128
space. When it concludes on the sea photograph, one might expect to have
an affirmation of the flatness and photographic nature of film itself; in-
7
stead, the image seems to open out into “limitless space.” These con-
trasts involve a questioning process. Partly they refer the nature of film:
the shifts in film color and stock, for instance, contrast different emulsion
and filter characteristics with the still-present continuity of the zoom;
perceiving the zoom and the narrative elements together causes the viewer
to question and compare the nature of each, seem so different;
since they
certain narrative events heighten the contrast by occurring offscreen after
the zoom has passed their location in the loft. The film is unified by the
fact that all these questions are related and form a system of similar kinds
of questions, and by the fact that all are encompassed within the single
zoom.
Wavelength sometimes troubles viewers relatively new to its kind of
cinema by the apparent sparseness of “events” within its length. But one
thing Snow is doing is creating a new sense of film time, one which is
defined and determined by the slow movement of the zoom. To
appreciate this, however one finally evaluates the film, is to suspend any
other expectations one may have about film time, whether derived from
the attention-getting density of narrative events in a Hollywood film, the
visual density of Brakhage, the rapid cutting of Mekas or the subsuming of
linear time into a continuous flow in Castro Street or Samadhi. It is im-
portant to understand that any film can define its own sense of time.
These considerations might well be applied to George Landow’s Film
in Which There Appear Sprocket Holes, Edge Lettering, Dirt Particles,
Etc., which may at first glance seem even “slower” than Wavelength,
although it is in fact only four minutes long. Landow’s image material is
a frame which contains within it two whole and two parts of film frames
of a woman’s face, together with the items listed in the title: edge letters
go by, dirt particles appear and reappear. In the fragmented frames on
the right, but not in the whole frames on the left, the woman blinks
regularly. The edge letters and dust patterns seem to recur regularly; in
fact, the film’s material is a strip only a little more than a second long,
which is continually repeated, occasionally shortened by a few frames.
This is one of a number of films that have been called “minimal,” both
as a description of the minimum of subject-matter and with reference to
“minimal art.” In fact, if you really watch the film, you will become
aware of a great variety of experiences within it: of the regular fascination
of the blinking, which, as Landow says, also “forces all the attention of
8
spectator to the edge of the screen;” of the rapid patterns of edge letters;
and finallyof the complex repeating patterns of dust particles. Many, on
first viewing, find this film too long. But for me, on a purely optical level,
this film hardly runs long enough for all that is contained within it to be
seen.
If Mekas’ and Baillie’s films can be called non-objective documentaries
can be seen as a documentary of film itself. Not only is its image material
taken from some Kodak test footage, but Landow re-printed it in a way
which made film’s usually invisible frame-lines, sprocket holes and edge
letters part of his image. In documenting film itself, however, Landow
has made a very different kind of film than one which documents a sub-
ject external to film. Further, the entire approach that the film embodies,
and hence the mode of perception it asks its viewers to bring to it, sharply
differentiates it from all the other films on this program.
129
Film in Which There Appear
Sprocket Holes Edge Letter-
,
130
This film is, in fact, a polar opposite to those of Mekas, Baillie, or
Brakhage, whose films’ internal structures use image, editing, color and
movement to express their makers’ selves to the viewer. Rather than
making a film which explicitly materializes his personalized reactions to a
subject, Landow made
a film which is about the viewer’s process of
has
9
perceiving it Film in Which ... is, first of all, an object to be looked at,
.
but its statement emerges out of the processes of one’s looking at it rather
than being embodied in its internal structure.
Each of the film’s important aspects can in fact be shown to lead to
this. Its “unusual” use of film time immediately surprises the viewer,
causing him to question his mode of watching it. Its unusual subject mat-
ter similarly startles the eye; like Wavelength it contains complex con- ,
trasts, though not actual opposites. Looking at the whole woman’s face
on the left is quite different from looking at the fragment on the right;
watching her blink is different from watching her unblinking face; watch-
ing the sprocket holes is much more static than watching the single-frame
edge letters; watching the dust is different as well. The dust, for instance,
is multiple, and each particle lasts only a frame; to watch it, the eye must
continually shift. The face, by contrast, is far more static. The edge letters
change a frame at a time, but, unlike the dust, are always seen in the same
part of the screen. Looking at each of these elements involves a totally dif-
ferent type of attention. The extreme shifts that the viewer goes through
as he looks at different parts of the film cause him to notice his own
watching-processes, which is what the film is in fact reflecting on.
Linally, the very fact that the image, and certainly the dust, are
“found” objects, suggest each as something to be looked at, rather than
as an element making a personalized statement. Landow’s alterations-for
instance, getting the sprocket holes to appear in the middle— simply
heighten the internal paradoxes which refer back to the viewer.
The film’s length seems to me to be the absolute minimum required
10
to exhaust its material The brief strip is repeated several hundred
.
Fred Camper
Footnotes
6. Film Culture No. 46, Autumn 1967, p. 3.
1. P. Adams Sitney. Visionary Film, New
York: Oxford University Press, 1974, p. 7. Michelson. op. cit., p. 32.
210 .
5. Annette Michelson. “Toward Snow,” Art- 10. There is also a longer two-screen version of
forum, Vol. 9, no. 10, June 1971, p. 31. this film; see filmography.
131
) )
6T,0,U,C.HJ,N,G (Paul
Runaway (Standish D. Lawder)
Sharits)
69 Robert Breer)
(
The object itself has not become less important. It has merely be-
come less self-important.
Robert Morris (“Notes on Sculpture”, 1966)
aesthetic terms are not in but dependent upon this autonomous object and
exist as unfixed variables that find their specific definition in the particular
space and light and physical viewpoint of the spectator . .
-” 1
The thrust of
such a situation is against the sacrosanct nature of the object, its com-
133
tion of prescribed methods of production and distribution and their con-
nections with the commercial market was undertaken-was indeed re-
quired— at an early point in the movement’s history.
From 1967-1970, there were attempts to expand the context of Film
viewing through the employment of multiple screens or incorporation of
live performance elements with film projection (Paul Sharits, among
others, has worked in both areas), but most filmmakers accepted the
mechanically determined requisites of the single flat screen and projected
image. Within these requisites, filmmakers explored a number of issues
parallel to those in painting and sculpture in this period. And although the
six filmson this program present a multiplicity of styles and elicit myriad
responses, one can isolate certain general shared concerns, the most im-
portant being the formulation of new structural modalities that redefine
perceptual and cognitive relations between film image and viewer ( Our
Lady of the Sphere participates in this process only minimally).
One characteristic element is the attention to materiality, either of the
film strip and screen itself or latent in the manipulation of “found”
images. All six films make use of images not constructed by or not
originally photographed by the filmmaker (69 and T,0,U,C,H,I,N,G, use
these materials only peripherally). The displacement of images from their
original contexts and their repetition (Runaway), recombination (Bleu
Shut), or external alteration (Diploteratology), serves to expose the omni-
vorously synthetic aspect of photographed images as it de-emphasizes that
quality of “immediate seeing” canonized by Brakhage and others (cf. P.
Adams Sitney’s Visionary Film) during the fifties and early sixties. These
are films at several removes (at least) from the convincing reproduction of
actuality and, more important, equally distant from any subjective reifica-
tion of a world seen either by the eye or the subconscious mind. That is,
“interiority” for these films consists of an awareness of projection as a
frame-to-frame event, of the support (screen) as capable of sustaining or
dispelling an illusion of depth, and speed of image assimilation as the agent
of perceived motion.
Structurally, what we find in these films is the substitution of repeti-
tive, additive, or other non-progressive schema for causal, associative or
other evolutionary filmic structures (Our Lady of the Sphere is the excep-
tion here). This results in the devaluation of image to image “reading” or
interpretation as a model for viewing and engenders, instead, a heightened
receptivity to the temporal and physical elements of the cinema environ-
ment. In T,0,U,C,H,IJV,G, the rapid alternation of blank frames of color
generates the illusion of rectangles of light leaping off the screen and ac-
tivating the space between eye and flat support. In 69, the animated
forms that seem to revolve into and emerge from the off-screen space im-
mediately adjacent to the borders of the frame develop a rich counterpoint
between affirming the flatness of the support and staticity of the single
frame and suspending these elements in a strong illusion of fluid move-
ment into and out of the screen space. Diploteratology at times creates
the sensation that the screen itself is melting or burning. Bleu Shut, in its
direct address and implicit solicitation of its audience in a game of mul-
between spectator and image.
tiple choice, suggests a direct dialogue
The responses described above share a common source in the frustra-
tion of identifying the film image as the mediation of a psychological
eye, be it an eye recording an internal or external vision. With the retrac-
tion— or better, the displacement— of the ordering sensibility to accom-
modate the viewer’s physical, perceptual, or cognitive idiosyncracies, these
Runaway by Standish Lawder
Diploteratology or Bardo Folly by
George Landow
films evoke a paradoxical sense of subjectivity-paradoxical because of the
degree to which they insist on their status as objects and refer us to the
mechanical structural components of cinema.
Standish Lawder’s Runaway contains perhaps the most simplified
structure of the group. It is derived from four seconds of a commercial
cartoon entitled The Fox Hunt in which a pack of dogs run across a
field, prick up their ears, then race back in the opposite direction, stop
and repeat the process. This single phrase of movement has been looped
continuously into a Moebius strip and rephotographed. After an initial
zoom into what looks like a video screen, the dogs continue to race back
and forth until the filmstrip appears to tear and we see the jagged-edged
strip careening wildly through the frame. The sound accompanying the
loop is, at first, a few bars of looped organ music rhythmically inter-
rupted by canned laughter (and at one point by sustained clapping). The
visual track is subjected to constant, minute variations of light exposure
(producing at times a flicker effect) and the imposition of (apparently
artificial) horizontal scan bars reminiscent of video malfunctioning.
These bars create a rhythm that interplays with the rhythm of exposure
changes and the dogs’ movement.
Towards the end, the sound of thunder followed by raindrops, is
heard, suggesting an ironic metaphor as the darkened image is followed
by a “storm” of horizontal bands. Once the basic repetitive phrase is set—
and this occurs almost immediately— the viewer’s attention is increasing-
ly directed to the abstract qualities of movement (the utter banality of the
cartoon reinforces this process). The image is one of entrapment-the
dogs cannot escape the confines of the frame— but even this referential cue
gives way to a perception of flat masses of dark and light oscillating in
minimal patterns. The illusion of the torn strip breaks this pattern and
explicitly recalls themechanism of projection.
The process of abstraction of a “found” image occurs again in
Landow’s Diploteratology with a slightly different focus. The loop struc-
ture— roughly analogous in form to a serial painting by Andy Warhol— is
the starting point for a didactic meditation on the nature of the film frame
and light-sensitive emulsion. The film’s title, Diploteratology -the study
of severe malformations in growing organisms— posits the filmstrip as an
organism composed of “cells,” and refers to the filmmaker’s procedure of
rephotographing single frames of the original image as the plastic base ex-
pands and melts. A loop of a woman waving from a Cypress Gardens’
tourist attraction is repeated for some minutes. This image splits into
three, then two, small round cells similar to the telescopic iris. Her wave is
137
Bleu Shut by Robert Nelson
'
138
this process resembles the way a star dies: the steady contraction of an
interior mass and expulsion of matter into space. 2 The idea of a film
frame as a cosmological entity, a comparison of the microcosmic with the
macrocosmic, rehearses a level of filmic perception all but unseen in the
normative viewing experience. The revelation— and animation— of a world
of shape and texture within, rather than between, frames radically recon-
structs the temporal scale of projection and confers on the image an aura
of finite existence.
In his films since Diploteratologv, Landow has continued to inves-
tigate the parameters of “commercial” images insofar as they encourage
the perception of “false information” and regiment the learning expe-
rience. The ironic testing situation of Institutional Quality (1969) in
which the spectator is instructed to place pencil marks on a booklet
(actually the screen), induces a type of impossible audience response (we
can make no concrete input to the flow of images) similar to that in Bleu
Shut. Robert Nelson’s film is structured like a television quiz game with
commercial interruptions every other minute. A woman’s off-screen voice
informs us that the film will last 30 minutes and provides a partial
itinerary of excitements: “At 5 minutes, 35 seconds comes the Johnny
Mars Band. At 1 1 15, weiners. At 21 :05, pornography. At 23:30, a
:
duet.” We are told to keep track of the elapsed time via a small clock in
the upper right-hand corner of the screen.
The quiz sections consist of one-minute long, magazine-type stills (in
lurid color ) of gaudy boats with six possible names printed over them.
Two off-screen voices proceed to guess which name fits the boat in ques-
tion. There are eleven such interludes, and as Bob and Bill (the filmmaker
and William Wiley) bumble from one wrong guess to another, the viewer
naturally begins to test his acumen against that of the players while simul-
taneously ticking off the film’s duration and anticipating the various in-
139
T,0,U.C,H,I,N,G by Paul Sharits
140
are of a perceptual nature, involving color, the production of retinal after-
images, and the intrusion of the image into the space of the theater. Like
his previous films, T,0 ,U\C\H,/ ,7V ,G has a distinctly symmetrical organiza-
tion with six equal parts divided by
median section, each part occurring
a
between the projected letters The images consist or ordered
of the title.
141
Larry
by
Sphere
the
of
Jordan
Lady
Our
pended and the boundaries of the frame are affirmed.
Flat geometrical drawings and cartoon-like forms are introduced and
juxtaposed with the more regular forms. Color emerges, first as a blue
toned sequence then as replacement for either an outlined form or its sur-
rounding background (leaving, say, the hexagonal column outlined in
white). Single frame changes in color (blue, red, green, yellow, orange)
again break up the fluid movement into discernible increments and their
flashing sometimes creates slight after-images of the geometrical forms.
In an interview with Jonas Mekas and P. Adams Sitney conducted in
and it’s not Purgatorio” 5 — in HamfatAsar (a film employing the same ma-
terials) and this idea could pertain to Our Lady of the Sphere as well.
Jordan constructs a consistent spatio-temporal context in which back-
grounds, objects, and human figures float in and out, interact with each
other, undergo transformations, and disappear. Sitney has commented on
the fragility and evanescent quality of Jordan’s images. They contain, as
well, vague threads of narrative continuity and half-understood associative
connections. While in no way put together by a psychoanalytic formula,
the flow of images suggest explorations of a subconscious state subject to
interpretative analysis. Our Lady of the Sphere is divided into two fairly
evident sections. Following an introduction in which a variety of recurrent
figures are introduced (and the filmmaker in the form of an engraving of a
dandified gentleman reveals his guiding hand), the first section concerns
the adventures of a young boy— with arms raised and a frightened or sur-
prised expression— who tumbles (suspended) through a succession of
scenes. As he does so, he seems to imagine or experience a series of
events grounded in the themes of suspension and flight (human and
cosmological). Acrobats turn into flashing stars; tour balloons, trapeze
artists, jugglers, horseback riders enter from the sides of the frame, recede
Many other encounters and transformations take place along the way.
If this description suggests a clear narrative evolution, it is only partially
misleading. Despite the fact that most of the image condensations remain
hermetic and opaque, Jordan maintains conventions such as matching
screen direction and velocity as he develops motifs and thematic patterns.
The spherical forms—clocks, compasses, balloons, planets— relate to the
themes of suspension (both temporal and spatial ) and submersion.
Recurrent image-fragments such as a flower, a suitcase, the figure of
Atlas, suggest at different times transiency and the task of the search.
These elements are reinforced by rapid changes in color tinting (the
dominant colors are red, yellow, light blue, and jade green) and by the
soundtrack— which juxtaposes harp music, and electronic buzz, animal
sounds, running water, etc. There are superimpositions and several
varieties of camera movement which, in combination, produce a strong
feeling of layered, amorphously mobile depth. In one sense, the
strategies employed here would seem to conform with the illusion-
producing/illusion-denying aesthetic of other films on this program.
Jordan’s vision, however, is more directed at the metaphysical than the
1.
concrete. It is true that Our Lady of the Sphere grants an awareness of
the single frame as the unit of filmic structure and that the disjunction be-
tween static backgrounds and animated figures calls attention to the flat-
2. ness of the screen surface; it is to the transcendence of these limitations
that the film is addressed.
3.
Paul S. Arthur
Footnotes
Robert Morris. “Notes on Sculpture,” 4. Jonas Mekas and P. Adams Sitney. “An
Minimal Art, Gregory Battock, editor, Interview with Robert Breer,” Film Cul-
New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., 1968, ture, No. 56-57, Spring 1973, pp. 46-47.
p. 234.
5. P. Adams Sitney. “Larry Jordan Inter-
David G. Imber. “Temporal Referencing view,” Film Culture No. 52, Spring 1971,
and Synthesis on Bardo Follies," New p. 82.
York: Bard College, 1975. (unpublished
essay)
145
)
148
projection arises from the activation of an optical principle known as
persistence of vision. When images are projected at a certain rate of
speed, this principle operates so that the retina retains the image for an
instant after the light source has disappeared. It allows one to experience
the projection of a succession of discrete images of consecutive movements
as acontinuous action.
In Serene Velocity, the rapidity of the alternation of shots and the
sense of increasing distance between represented spaces creates images of
superimposition. The viewer is presented with a situation which disturbs
the normally subliminal apprehension of continuity by separating the
components of the viewing process. The disjunction between the structure
of the film as discrete units and the appearance of superimposition makes
the viewer conscious of the distorting vision which causes the transforma-
tion.
The use of persistence of vision becomes the foundation for creating
an analogy between the process of viewing film and that of consciousness.
Just as the film object is filtered through a distorting mechanism, so all
Gehr defines his task in terms of creating a film object which explores
its own process of construction. The film structure functions as both an
analogue and an instant of consciousness. One confronts certain notions
of subjectivity through the exposition of the manner in which persistence
of vision creates an illusion of depth and movement.
Gehr’s choice of the zoom intensifies the analogy. The zoom lens ac-
centuates the mediating nature of the photographic process. This lens and
the humaneye both impose their own vision upon perceived objects in a
literaland figurative act of projection. The constant tension between the
authority of the film object and the controlling, manipulating stance of
the camera/viewer creates an experience which is paradigmatic of a
particular conception of man’s being in the world. This conception has
perhaps been most precisely stated by Robbe-Grillet:
Even if many
objects are presented and are described with great care,
there always and especially, the eye which sees them, the thought
is
149
The Riddle of Lumen by Stan
Brakhage
150
Without trying to establish exactly what Brakhage means by a “riddle
of lumen,” or to determine how a linguistic model can be transformed into
a visual one, it is possible to examine certain concerns around which the
film revolves in terms of the model Brakhage proposes. A riddle presents
an enigma which acts as a kind of “rite of passage.” One who answers the
riddle, who passes the test attains a new, elevated status.
The test situation seems operant in the film on the two levels of per-
ception and cognition. Perception of images is made difficult by frequent
absence or change of focus, reduction of the context of an object through
closeness of the camera, darkness, and by rapid editing and camera move-
ments. The progression of images is non-linear. Connections between
images or image clusters must be made by the viewer. For example, dif-
ferent images relating to childhood recur at different moments in the
quires stripping the conventional and the learned from the act of percep-
tion. The relinquishing of the conventional for the uncommon mode of
perception is required to understand Brakhage’s riddle as well as a lin-
guistic one. Ironically, the visual task is one which requires the rejection
of an association with language since the acquisition of language is the
primary means used by children to learn conventional methods of percep-
tion and conception.
Within The Riddle of Lumen there are several images of childhood
which are structured to assert the viewer’s distance from the event. A
space containing a child's wagon is traversed by a dog running in slow
motion; blurred forms of blue represent children playing, a childhood
figure is glimpsed behind trees. Each time a filmic strategy is used to deny
access to a world of past innocence.
The first shot which introduces the subject of childhood is that of a
reading primer. Two pages which contain drawings of a house and a bird
are depicted with absolute clarity. The abstraction of the drawings results
from an extreme schematization and reduction of subject matter. The
visual distinction between this shot and those described above is startling.
The early image of the primer establishes the relationship between the ac-
quisition of language and the loss of complexity and freedom of vision.
The later shots of childhood are interwoven with others to create a web of
images of various degrees of abstraction. The childhood images are them-
selves an integral part of the web.
The preeminance of abstraction and the return to images of childhood
are joined in one process. The reaffirmation of the multiplicity of vision
creates an approximation of childhood vision. Since it is impossible to
complete a return to the vision of childhood, an approximation, rather
than a duplication of that vision is established. Therefore the images of
childhood are transformed by certain filmic techniques and can never be
recorded directly.
The last shot of the film re-establishes the sense of the object, but it
has been transformed. An object gradually comes into focus in the center
154
Each of the three sections of the film creates an ambiguous sense of
space. In Endurance, the camera is positioned in the room to frustrate
immediate recognition that swaying on the left. The strange
a curtain is
angle invites a misreading that the camera is not directed downward to the
reflection on the floor but upward in order to glance out of a window.
The ambiguities would not be experienced if the rest of the space were
not engulfed in darkness. The blackness obscures the boundaries between
wall and floor, thereby obfuscating the spatial context.
A similar ambiguity occurs in Remembrance where it is difficult to
discern whether certain forms exist outside the window or are reflections
of objects in the room. There is an essential difference, however, between
the two segments of the film. In Endurance, with a certain amount of
visual adjustment, the eye can discriminate between reflection and object,
whereas in Remembrance this clarity is not possible until the camera
moves. The carnera tilts and pans to accentuate the disparity between
foreground, the reflections on glass, and background, the exterior view.
With Metamorphosis, a qualitative change occurs, and the ambiguity is
never resolved. Neither the eye nor the movements of the camera are able
to unmesh the layers of surface which the internal focus mechanism makes
visible. The constant manipulation of the space also makes it difficult to
ascertain its scale and the constitution of its parts.
Each four minute segment of the film incorporates a unique set of
strategies to create its special character. Endurance establishes a balance
of forces by spatially separating the reflection from the curtain, balancing
them by repeating the undulating rhythm in counterpoint. The camera is
synthesized within the contrapuntal structure since its movement mimics
that of the curtain.
In Remembrance, camera movement does not mimic object movement.
Nothing in the field is mobile. Instead, the camera asserts its function as
framer. As the camera rotates laterally and advances and retreats from the
framed window, the objects change in relation to one another. As the
camera moves, one senses a special effort to maintain the window’s frame
within the shot. The act of imitation does not occur on the level of move-
ment, but on that of frame: the frame of the window mimics the frame of
the image. This inclination is accentuated as the camera maneuvers to
isolate the reflection of an antique lamp superimposed on a tree, enclosing
the image on three sides by the window frame.
The primary structural strategy in Metamorphosis is not mimicked by
an element of the visible field. The focusing apparatus is totally hidden
within the body of the camera, but it enforces its way of seeing with such
force that the objects recorded are radically diminished in terms of their
reference to the phenomenal world. Whereas the first two sections of the
film establish a certain ambiguity between object and reflection, the last
one dematerializes the object so that the terms of that dichotomy are
themselves abandoned. Established in its place is a new vision where the
objects represented are subordinated to and reflect the “eye” of the
camera.
Finally, one may ask, what do the titles of these parts indicate? At
the very least, they direct the viewer to experience or interpret the sec-
tions as instances or analogical forms of endurance, remembrance, and
metamorphosis. A suggested method or model of investigation is never
indicated. I will briefly suggest a possible direction.
The repetition of undulating movements and the balance of the parts
in Endurance impress one with the sense of continuity and stability.
155
Nostalgia by Hollis Frampton
156
States of reflection and objecthood, interiority and exteriority, are held in
perpetual equilibrium by the mediating agent which establishes and re-
157
disjunction requires the spectator to look within, not beyond, the
boundary of the film to analyze the interrelationships, ambiguities, and
contradictions which are a direct result of this non-coincidental structure.
Although certain elements direct one's attention to time periods beyond
the limits of the film, that pull is frustrated by the circuitous structure
which so strongly emphasizes its own nature as self-contained and self-
propelled.
It is interesting that each track, if isolated, is totally comprehensible
the film.
The rift between a direct experience and one mediated by language
can never be closed since the former requires an escape from the shackles
of language as well as its cohort, linear time. Nostalgia refers to the two
poles of the duality. They cause mutual reverberations, but remain poised
in a stance of irreconcilable separateness. Jorge Luis Borges, likewise con-
cerned with the human experience of time, wrote of the eternal division
between the ecstatic and historic times. After an ecstatic experience, he
158
explained the frustration of trying to recapture the moment through the
mediation of language:
—Ellen Feldman
Footnotes
159
5
Catalog List
The organization of this exhibition has followed a chronological line. It
CATALOG LIST
(All films are 16mm, sound, 24 fps and on loan Bells Of Atlantis
from the artist unless otherwise noted.) Ian Hugo
3
1952, 9.5 minutes, color
Assisted by Len Lye; Narrated and acted by Anals Nin;
1 1943-1948 Electronic music by Louis and Bebe Barron;
Meshes Of The Afternoon Lent by Film Images.
Maya Deren and Alexander Hammid
1943, 18 minutes, black & white The Wonder Ring
24 fps
silent, Stan Brakhage
Camera, Alexander Hammid; 1955, 4 minutes, color
Lent by Grove Press, Inc. silent, 24 fps
Geography Of The Body Theme suggested by Joseph Cornell.
Runaway
4 1963-1966
Standish D. Lawder
Scorpio Rising 1969, 5.5 minutes, black & white
Kenneth Anger
69
1963, 29 minutes, color
Robert Breer
Music by Little Peggy March, The Angels, Bobby
1968, 4.5 minutes, color
Vinton, Elvis Presley, Ray Charles, The Crystals, The
Ran- Dells, Kris Jensen, Claudine Clark, Gene Diploteratology Or Bardo Folly
McDaniels, The Surfaris; Filmed in Brooklyn and George Landow
Manhattan; Cast: Bruce Bryon (Scorpio), Johnny 1967, 20 minutes, color
Sapienza (Taurus), Frank Carifi (Leo), John Palone silent, 24 fps
(Pinstripe), Ernie Alio (Joker), Barry Rubin (Fall Formerly known as Bardo Follies.
Guy), Steve Crandell (Blondie), Bill Dorfmann (Back),
Johnny Dodds (Kid). Our Lady Of The Sphere
Larry Jordan
1969, 10 minutes, color
FireOf Waters
Stan Brakhage Bleu Shut
1965, 6.5 minutes, black & white 1970, Nelson
Robert
1970, 33 minutes, color
Window Soundtrack by R. Nelson, Diane Nelson, Wm. T. Wiley.
Ken Jacobs
1964, 12 minutes, color
7 1970-1972
silent, 1 6 fps
Originally filmed in 8mm. Serene Velocity
Ernie Gehr
The Flicker
23 minutes, color
Tony Conrad
silent, 16 fps
1966, 30 minutes, black & white
Sound on separate magnetic tape. The Riddle Of Lumen
Stan Brakhage
5 1966-1967 1972, 14 minutes, color
silent, 24 fps
Samadhi
Jordan Be Ison Endurance /Remembrance /Metamorphosis
1967, color, 6 minutes Barry Gerson
Lent by Pyramid Films Corporation. 1970, 12 minutes, color
16 fps
silent,
Film In Which There Appear Sprocket Holes, Edge
Lettering, Dirt Particles, Etc. Nostalgia
George Landow Hollis Frampton
1965-66, 4 minutes, color 1971, 36 minutes, black & white
silent, 24 fps (Hapax Legomena I.)
Castro Street
Bruce Baillie
1966, 10 minutes, color and black & white
Filmographies
Kenneth Anger Termination (1966, 6 min.)
Port Chicago Vigil ( 1966, 9 min.)
Who Has Been Rocking My Dream Boat? (1941,
Show Leader ( 1966, 1 min.)
1 1 min.)
Valentin De Las Sierras (1967, 10 min.)
Tinsel Tree (1941, 6 min.)
Quick Billy ( 1970, 60 min.)
Prisoner Of Mars
1942, 20 min.) (
The Love That Whirls (1949, unfinished.) Bop Scotch (1953, 3 min.)
The Lune Des Lapins (Rabbit's Moon) ( 1950, Flight (1958, 10 min.)
1 5 min.) Raga (1959, 7 min.)
Maldoror (1951-52, unfinished.) Seance (1959, 4 min.)
Le Jeune Homme Et La Mort ( 1953, 25 min.) Allures (1961, 9 min.)
Eaux D’Artifice (1953, 13 min.) Re-Entry (1964, 6 min.)
Inauguration Of The Pleasure Dome 1954, ( Phenomena 1965, 6 min.) (
162
) ) ) 1 , ,
“Tower House” (1955, 10 min., film photo- Songs 6 and 7 (1964, 6 min., 8mm)
graphed for Joseph Cornell under the work- Song 8 (1964, 5 min., 8mm)
ing title “Bolts of Melody,” then “Portrait Songs 9 and 10 (1965, 9 min., 8mm)
of Julie,” finally becoming Cornell’s Song 1 (1965, 5 min., 8mm)
“Centuries of June.”) Song 12 1965, 5 min., 8mm)
(
Films By Stan Brakhage: An Avant-Garde Home Song 27 (Part II) Rivers (1969, 36 min.,
Movie 1961 5 min.)
( , 8 mm)
Blue Moses (1962, min.) 1 1 Song 28 (1969, 4 min., 8ntm)
Silent Sound Sense Stars Subotnick And Sender Song 29 (1969, 4 min., 8mm)
( 1962, 2 min., lost.) American 30’s Song ( 1969, 30 min., 8mm)
Oh Life A Woe Story -The A Test News (1963, Window Suite Of Children Songs 969, 24 ’s ( 1
Dog Star Man (1961-1964) Scenes From Under Childhood: Section No.
Prelude: Dog Star Man 96 25 min. ( 1
1 , 2 (1969, 40 min.)
Dog Star Man: Part I (1962, 35 min.) Scenes From Under Childhood: Section No.
Dog Star Man: Part II 1962, 7 min.) ( 3 (1969, 2714 min.)
Dog Star Matt: Part III 1964, min.) ( 1 1 Scenes From Under Childhood: Section No.
Dog Star Man: Part IV 1964, 5 min.) ( 4 1970, 46 min.)
(
The Horseman, The Woman, And The Moth Deus Ex (\91\ 3314 min.)
( 1968, 19 min.) The Act Of Seeing With One ’s Own Eyes (1971,
Lovemaking (1968, 36 min.) 32 min.)
Songs 1964-1969)
( Fox Fire Child Watch (1971, 3 min.)
Song 1 (1964, 4 min., 8mm) Angels’ (\91\ 2 min.)
Songs 2 and 3 ( 1964, 7 min., 8mm) Door ( 1971, 134 min.)
Song 4 (1964, 5 min., 8mm) Western History (1971 , 814 min.)
Song 5 ( 1964, 6 min., 8mm) The Trip To Door (1971, 1214 min.)
Sexual Meditation: Room With View (1971,
3 min.)
163
The Peaceable Kingdom (1971,7% min.) Robert Breer
Eye Myth (1972, 190 frames, begun in 1968 as Form Phases I (1952, 2 min.)
sketch for The Horseman, The Woman, And
Form Phases II and III ( 953, 714 min.) 1
Brussels “Loops” 1958, twelve ( 2)4 min. loop 7360 Sukiyaki (1974)
films.) Pickled 3M-1 50 (1974, 12 realizations.)
Bridges-Go-Round (1958-9, 8 min.) First Film Feedback 1974, 18 min.) (
Barry Gerson
Ken Jacobs
Orchard Street (1956, 15 min., abandoned.)
The Neon Rose (1960-64, 41 min.)
Saturday Afternoon Blood Sacrifice: TV Plug:
Automatic Free Form (1968, 20 min.)
Little Cobra Dance (1957, 9 min.)
Evolving (1969 17 min.)
Star Spangled To Death (1957, approx. 180
,
min., unfinished.)
1 6 min.)
Little Stabs At Happiness (1959-63, 18 min.)
Group Water/ Contemplating (1969 16 min.)
II: ,
23 Vi min.)
Baud’larian Capers 1963-64, 20 min., revised
Group IV: Breaded Light/ Dissolving/ Bey ond
(
in 1975.)
(1970, 12)4 min.)
Window 1964, 12 min., originally 8mm.)
Endurance / Remembrance j Meta-
(
Group V:
The Winter Footage (1964, 20 min., 8mm.)
morphosis (1970, 12 min.)
We Stole Away ( 1964, 30 min., 8mm.)
Movements ( 1971,4 min.)
Lisa And Joey In Connecticut : “You 've Come
Group VI: Converging Lines/Assimilation ! ”
Back “You ’re Still Here!’’ ( 965, 2 min., 1 1
( 1971 18 min.)
,
originally 8 mm.)
Group VII: Portrait of Diana/ Portrait of
The Sky Socialist (1965, approx. 1 20 min.,
Andrew Noren (1970-72)
8mm, unfinished.)
Shadow Space (1973, 6 min.)
Naomi Is A Dream Of Loveliness (1965, 4 min.)
Inversion (1973, 12 min.)
Airshaft (1967, 4 min.)
Luminous Zone (1973, 28 min.)
Soft Rain ( 1968, 1 2 min.)
Translucent Appearances (1975, 22 min.)
Tom, Tom, The Piper’s Son (1969, 1 15 min.,
Celluloid Illuminations ( 1975, 32 min.)
revised in 1971 .)
1 66
) , ?
A Man Home Is
’s His Castle Films: The Living Is Dying (1970, 30 min.)
European Theater Of Operations/Urban Sacred Art Of Tibet (1970, 28 min.)
Peasants (1975, approx. 150 min.) Once Upon A Time (1972, 12 min.)
The Impossible: Chapter One, Southwark Fair Orb (1972, 4V2 min.)
3 (1975, approx. 90 min., 3-D performance Plainsong (1972-73, 11 min.)
for two analytical projectors.) Fire weed (1973, 3 min.)
The Apparition (1973)
Larry Jordan
George Landow
One Romantic Venture Of Edward (1952-64,
7 min.) Fleming Faloon (1963-64, 7 min.)
The Child's Hand 1953-54, 7 min.)
( Studies And Sketches (1963-65, 17 min.)
Morningame ( 1953-54, 9 min.) Film In Which There Appear Sprocket Holes,
Man Is In Pain (1954, 4 min.) Edge Lettering, Dirt Particles, Etc. (1965-66,
Trumpet (1954-56, 4 min.) 4 min.)
Undertow ( 1954-56, 7 min.) Film In Which There Appear (Sprocket Holes,
(1954-56, 6 min.) Edge Lettering, Dirt Particles, Etc. (1966,
Visions Of A
City ( 1956, 15 min.) 10 min. wide screen.)
Watertight 1957, 9 min.)
( Diploteratology or Bardo Folly 1967, 20 min.)
(
Triptych In Four Parts (1958, 12 min.) The Film That Rises To The Surface Of
The Studio: A Fable ( 1959-60, unfinished.) Clarified Butter (1968, 9Vi min.)
Finds Of The Fortnight (1959-60, dismantled.) Institutional Quality (1969, 5 min.)
The Soccer Game ( 1959-60, 6 min.) Remedial Reading Comprehension ( 1970,
Minerva Looks Out Into The Zodiac (1959-60, 5 min.)
6 min.) What’s Wrong With This Picture? ( 1971 , 7 min.)
Hymn In Praise Of The Sun ( 1 960, 9 min.) What'sWrong With This Picture (1972, 3 min.)
The Soccer Game: The Forty And One Nights, Thank You Jesus For The Eternal Present: 1
ox Jess's Didactic Nickelodeon, also called ( 1973, 516 min.)
Heavy Water ( 1960-61 6 min.) , Thank You Jesus For The Eternal Present: 2
PortraitOf Sharon 1960, 9 min.)
( (1974, 10 min.)
The Herb Moon (1960, 5 min.) Wide Angle Saxon ( 1975, 22 min.)
The Seasons’ Changes: To Contemplate (1960, “No Sir, Orison” (\91 5 3 min.)
7 min.)
Four Vertical Portraits (1960-61, unfinished.) Standish D. Lawder
The Movie Critic (1961, 4 min., unfinished.)
Sunday In Southbury (1968, 7 min.)
The Monkey (1961 4 min., unfinished.)
,
Maas: Filmwise #5-#6 (1967) and Film Half Open And Lumpy (1967, 2 min.)
Comment (Fall 1971). The Great Blondino (with Wm. Wiley, 1967,
41 min.)
Jonas Mekas Blondino Preview (1967, 214 min.)
War Is Hell (1968, 28 min.)
Guns Of The Trees (1961, 75 min.)
Bleu Shut (1970, 33 min.)
Film Magazine Of The Arts (1963, 20 min.)
King David (with Mike Henderson, 1970, 16
The Brig (\964, 68 min.)
min.)
Award Presentation To Andy Warhol (1964, 12
min.)
No More (1971, 70 min.)
Worldly Woman (1973, 614 min.)
Report From Millbrook (1966, 12 min.)
Rest In Pieces (1974, 814 min.)
Hare Krishna (1966, 4 min.)
Deepwesturn (1974, 4 min.)
Notes On The Circus (1966, 12 min.)
Cassis (1966, 4 min.)
Sidney Peterson
Diaries, Notes And Sketches (1968, 180 min.)
Time & Fortune Vietnam Newsreel (1969, The Potted Psalm (with James Broughton, 1946,
4 min.) 2414 min.)
Reminiscences Of A Journey To Lithuania The Cage ( 1947, 3 min.)
1
1014 min.)
A Woman’s Place (Belle Starr, 1956)
Sound Film (1970,
Side Seat Paintings Slides
The Twelve Days Of Christmas (1956)
20 min.)
Rome Burns (Nero fiddling, 1956)
La Region Centrale (The Central Region) (1970-
The Greeks Take Troy (1956)
71 190 min.)
Lady Godiva (1956) ,
films of Harry Smith. Each statement Panels For The Walls Of The World (1967,
made by Smith on the subject contradicts 8 min.)
the other; as do the attempts of film his- Poem Field No. 5: Free Fall (1967,7 min.)
169
Spherical Space No. 1 (1967, 5 min.)
The History Of Motion In Motion (1967,
10 min')
T. V.Interview (1967, 13 min.)
Newsreel Of Dreams No. 1 (1968, 8 min.)
Poem Field No. 7 (1967, 4)6 min.)
Vanderbeekiana (1968, 29 min.)
Oh (1968, 10 min.)
Super-Imposition (1968, 17 min.)
Will (1968, 4 3A min.)
Newsreel Of Dreams No. 2 (1969, 8 min.)
Found Film No. 1 (1968-70, 6-1/3 min.)
Film Form No. 1 (1970, 10 min.)
Film Form No. 2 (1970, 10 min.)
Transforms (1970, 3 min.)
Symmetricks (1972, 7 min.)
Videospace (1972, 7 min.)
Who Ho Ray No. 7 (1972, 8 min.)
You Do, I Do, We Do (1972, 14 min.)
Computer Generation (1973, 29 min.)
James Whitney
170
,
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Illustration credits:
Anthology Film Archives, Francene Keery: pp. 34, 53, 56, 58, 62, 68, 76,
88, 122, 127, 156
Francene Keery: pp. 71 , 72, 74, 78, 80, 81 , 82, 86, 90, 94, 95, 96, 102,
103, 104, 105, 106, 107, 1 10, 1 1 1, 1 12, 1 13, 1 14, 1 18, 120, 130, 135,
136, L 38 140, 150, 152, 153
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