Avant-Garde Film
AVANT-GARDE CRITICAL STUDIES
23 Editor
Klaus Beekman Associate Editors Sophie Berrebi, Ben Rebel, Jan de Vries, Willem G. Weststeijn International Advisory Board Henri Béhar, Hubert van den Berg, Peter Bürger, Ralf Grüttemeier, Hilde Heinen, Leigh Landy
Founding Editor Fernand Drijkoningen†
Avant-Garde Film
Edited by Alexander Graf and Dietrich Scheunemann
Amsterdam - New York, NY 2007
Cover illustration: Film strip sequences from Opus 4, 1925, Walter Ruttmann Cover design: Aart Jan Bergshoeff All titles in the Avant-Garde Critical Studies series (from 1999 onwards) are available to download from the Ingenta website http://www.ingenta.com The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of “ISO 9706: 1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents Requirements for permanence”. ISBN: 978-90-420-2305-5 Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam - New York, NY 2007 Printed in The Netherlands
Contents Preface
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Abstraction, Surrealism, Futurism: The Cinema of the Historical Avant-Garde 1 R. Bruce Elder Hans Richter and Viking Eggeling: The Dream of Universal Language and the Birth of The Absolute Film A.L. Rees Frames and Windows: Visual Space in Abstract Cinema
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Alexander Graf Berlin - Moscow: On the Montage Aesthetic in the City Symphony Films of the 1920s 77 Rudolf E. Kuenzli Man Ray’s Films: From Dada to Surrealism Michael Korfmann On Mário Peixoto’s Limite
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Tami M. Williams Dancing with Light: Choreographies of Gender in the Cinema of Germaine Dulac 121 Marina Burke Mayakovsky: Film: Futurism
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Post-War American and European Experiments
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Maureen Turim The Interiority of Space: Desire and Maya Deren
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Inez Hedges Stan Brakhage’s Film Testament: The Four Faust Films
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William Wees Light-Play and the Aesthetics of Avant-Garde Film
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Yvonne Spielmann Paul Sharits: from Cinematic Movement to Non-directional Motion197 Pierre Sorlin Changes in experimental filmmaking between the 1920s and the 1960s: On Luis Buñuel
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Bart Keunen and Sascha Bru It’s a Kind of Magic: World Construction in French Surrealist and Belgian Magical Realist Fiction and Cinema 231 Nicky Hamlyn Peter Kubelka’s Arnulf Rainer
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Tania Ørum Danish Avant-Garde Filmmakers of the 1960s: Technology, Crossaesthetics and Politics 261 New Technologies and Media Convergence: The Contemporary Avant-garde Film 277 Martine Beugnet French Experimental Cinema: the Figural and the Formless – Nicolas Rey’s Terminus for you (1996) and Pip Chodorov’s Charlemagne 2: Piltzer (2002) 279 Frédérique Devaux The Stammering Frame: on recent French and Austrian Film Experiments
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Ursula Böser Inscriptions of Light and The ‘Calligraphy of Decay’: Volatile Representation in Bill Morrison’s Decasia
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Günter Berghaus From Video Art to Video Performance: The Work of Ulrike Rosenbach
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Margit Grieb New Media and Feminist Interventions: Valie Export’s Medial Anagrams
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Jonathan Walley The Paracinema of Anthony McCall and Tony Conrad
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List of Illustrations About the Authors Index
383 385 393
Preface This volume on avant-garde film has emerged as part of a wider reassessment of 20th century avant-garde art, literature and film carried out in the framework of a research project within the School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures at the University of Edinburgh from 2000 to 2006. The project’s overall objective was the development of a new comprehensive theory of the avant-garde. It is one of the surprising features of existing theories of the avant-garde that they either wholly neglect avant-garde film (Renato Poggioli, The Theory of the Avant-Garde, Harvard UP, 1968) or explicitly exclude it from the construction of the theory (Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, Minneapolis UP, 1984). As a result the prevailing definitions and distinctions of the avant-garde as a whole “do not fit” avant-garde film, as Anne Friedberg points out (Anne Friedberg, Window Shopping. Cinema and the Postmodern. University of California Press, 1994, p. 163). Furthermore, most likely as a result of this circumstance, the most referenced critical works dealing specifically with avant-garde film satisfy themselves with using this term, apparently without recognizing the importance of a clear delineation of its significance and restricted applicability. Among recent exceptions to this is Al Rees’ A History of Experimental Film and Video, BFI, 1999, which addresses the disparity identified by Friedberg, as well as issues of nomenclature, historical demarcation and the link with movements. The present volume gathers contributions by eminent scholars in the field of avant-garde studies relating to the “classical” avantgarde film of the 1920s, to new trends emerging in the 1950s and 1960s Europe and North America, and to the impact that innovative technologies have recently had on the further development of avantgarde and experimental film. Whilst avoiding any head-on tackling of established theories of the avant-garde, the following essays, and the volume’s structure, recognize and highlight the wisdom of speaking rather of “avant-gardes” in the plural, in order to avoid the overly restrictive scope of relevance that characterizes, for example, Bürger’s theory. A study specifically of film along these lines exposes the weakness of Bürger’s assertion that the neo-avant-garde – his own term – largely represented a repetition (and therefore failure) of the projects and achievements of the historical avant-garde. In film, on the other hand, it can be seen that the post-Second-World-War era has completed many of the historical avant-garde’s projects, succeeded
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where the historical movements failed, which has important ramifications for an understanding of avant-garde art and movements on the whole. Although the era of movements, manifestos and founding statements was largely over by the 1940s, that spirit of assertion – or attempted assertion – of art according to completely new parameters, which, above all else, distinguishes the avant-garde from the Modern or the experimental, continued with renewed vigor in the post-war era. The Structural Film movement, and the boom in avant-garde film production in post-war Europe and the USA generally, saw, for the first time, most artists working exclusively within the medium of film, in contrast with pre-war, largely European projects of artists to explore and elaborate their ideas first developed in other arts in film. The comparative lack of organized movements and founding manifestos, which is largely responsible for claims that “the avant-garde” is somehow “over”, testifies, conversely, to the sentiment that the goal of establishing the “seventh art” as an art, a status which the avant-garde filmmakers had striven to attain in the pre-war period, had – despite, or because of the efforts of the anti-art movements to get art out of the galleries – been reached amongst the art producing world, if not the general public. Paradoxically, of course, the avant-gardes became established – something they never claimed as a goal – only once they had conquered the galleries. This insight invites the question to what extent the avantgarde movements are necessarily embedded within the radical, antibourgeois (art)political environment that distinguished pre-war avant-garde art. Even if we agree with Bürger that the development of art techniques must come to an end in order for a self-critical art (in the form of avant-garde art) to emerge, that does not mean that the evolution of art techniques, and the conception of art as a whole, need proceed consistently in step with external factors. The avant-gardes would rebel, and surely have rebelled, against such a selfunderstanding that would see art in perpetual opposition to art, “thereby in effect creating art after all” (Hans Richter, Dada: Art and Anti-art (London, 1965). These and others are all questions the following chapters try to address, with the objective of closing the gap between theoretical approaches towards the avant-garde as defined on the basis of art and literature on the one hand, and avant-garde film on the other. As well as situating the avant-garde film in its historical context, the chapters show that contemporary experimentation in film has often continued
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the intensive inquiry into modes of vision, reception, perception, projection and communication, but under a changing set of external parameters, and hence highlight the need to reconsider the underlying theories. The technical and physical characteristics of what we refer to as ‘film’ alone have changed to such a degree that the term is no longer useful: “motion pictures” is perhaps a more helpful discriminating designation that at once captures the feature that most pertinently differentiates our medium from others, while helpfully excluding such extreme interpretations as Tony Conrad’s 1973 “film” Deep Fried 4-X Negative, which Jonathan Walley discusses, and many other such camera-less or film-less works from the avant-garde film canon. In nevertheless addressing these and similar formats that perhaps cannot be strictly defined as “film”, this volume seeks to extend the focus of its investigation to the very limits of its theme. Finally, a word of thanks to, and remembrance for, Dietrich Scheunemann, who died in the early stages of the editing of this volume. The contributors, who have all expressed their sorrow at his sudden passing, and all who worked closely with Dietrich at the University of Edinburgh, remember him warmly and thank him for the conception and initiation of this volume, which is dedicated to his memory and to his widow Lilli.
Chapter 1 Abstraction, Surrealism, Futurism: The Cinema of the Historical Avant-Garde
Hans Richter and Viking Eggeling: The Dream of Universal Language and the Birth of The Absolute Film R. Bruce Elder Abstract: In the mid 1950s, Hans Richter was living in New York City and teaching at the City College. A new independent American cinema was emerging then and many of the young people, enthusiastic to discover new models for cinematic production, looked to Richter as a predecessor and mentor. So it was that Jonas Mekas asked Richter for a contribution to the first issue of the film magazine he had founded, Film Culture, that soon became the unofficial house organ of the New American Cinema movement. Richter’s essay, ‘The Film as an Original Art Form’ (1955) was a reflection on his accomplishments during the early years of Absolute Film.
The main aesthetic problem in the movies, which were invented for reproduction (of movement) is, paradoxically, the overcoming of reproduction. In other words, the question is: to what degree is the camera (film, colour, sound, etc.) developed and used to reproduce (any object which appears before the lens) or to produce (sensations not possible in any other art medium)? ... In the words of Pudovkin: “What is a work of art before it comes in front of the camera, such as acting, staging, or the novel is not a work of art on the screen”. Even to the sincere lover of the film in its present form it must seem that the film is overwhelmingly used for keeping records of creative achievements: of plays, actors, novels, or just plain nature (Richter 1955: 15-16).
The interest in sensations that are unique to the film medium, sensations that could not be produced but through the film medium, is pure modernism. So, too, is the idea that film becomes film – film becomes an original art form – by purifying itself of any contaminating influence from adjacent media and becoming truly (purely) film. This, Hans Richter went on to claim, is what the documentary cinema accomplished. With the documentary approach, the film gets back to its fundamentals. Here, it has a solid aesthetic basis: in the free use of nature, including man, as raw material. By selection, elimination, and
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R. Bruce Elder coordination of natural elements, a film form evolves that is original and not bound by theatrical or literary tradition. That goes, of course, for the semidocumentary fictional film (Potemkin, Paisan), as for the documentary film itself. These elements might obtain a social, economic, political, or general human meaning, according to their selection and coordination. But this meaning does not exist a priori in the facts, nor is it a reproduction (as in an actor’s performance). […] It has come to grips with facts – on its own original level. (Richter 1955: 17)
Here Richter offered the semiotic proposition that documentary and semi-documentary film is art because it is productive – it makes meaning, rather than records pre-established meanings. It does this through configuring relations that do not pre-exist the film’s making. However, he went on to say that relations in a documentary film elicit a rational response, because in documentary films the relata are of a factual character. There is another type of film that can elicit a response of a different order: [The documentary film] covers the rational side of our lives, from the scientific experiment to the poetic landscape-study, but never moves away from the factual. Its scope is wide. Nevertheless, it is an original art form only as far as it keeps strictly to the use of natural raw material in rational interpretation […]. The influence of the documentary film is growing, but its contribution to a filmic art is, by nature, limited. […] Since its elements are facts, it can be original art only in the limits of this factuality. Any free use of the magic, poetic, irrational qualities to which the film medium might offer itself would have to be excluded a priori (as nonfactual). But just these qualities are essentially cinematographic, are characteristic of film and are, aesthetically, the ones that promise future development. (Richter 1955: 18)
Richter did not explain why he believed that irrational, poetic, magical qualities are essentially cinematic. But one might conjecture what led him to the conviction: dynamism exerts a spell, a sort of magical charm. This charm is the cinema’s real strength; but the documentary cinema restricts its effects by shackling its dynamism to the order of facts. The avant-garde cinema, however, unfetters dynamism and allows the cinema’s capacity to charm to achieve its full potential – to become mysterious. There is a short chapter in the history of the movies that dealt especially with this side of the film. It was made by individuals
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concerned essentially with the film medium. They were neither prejudiced by production clichés, nor by necessity of rational interpretation, nor by financial obligations. The story of these individual artists, at the beginning of the 1920’s, under the name of ‘avant-garde’, can be properly read as a history of the conscious attempt to overcome reproduction and to arrive at the free use of the means of cinematographic expression. This movement spread over Europe and was sustained for the greatest part by modern painters who, in their own field, had broken away from the conventional: Eggeling, Léger, Duchamp, Man Ray, Picabia, Ruttmann, Brugière, Len Lye, Cocteau, myself and others. These artists discovered that film as a visual medium fitted into the tradition of the art without violation of its fundamentals. It was there that it could develop freely: “The film should positively avoid any connection with the historical, educational, romantic, moral or immoral, geographical or documentary subjects. The film should become, step by step, finally exclusively cinematography, that means that it should use exclusively [what Jean Epstein called] ‘photogenic elements’”. [By photogenic elements Epstein meant, essentially, elements that cause strong sensations.] (Richter 1955: 18)
This insight led Richter to assert: “Problems in modern art lead directly into the film. Organization and orchestration of form, colour, the dynamics of motion, simultaneity, were problems with which Cézanne, the cubists, the futurists had to deal”. (Richter 1955: 18-9) He continued by relating the reasons for his own early involvement in Absolute Film to the issues being dealt with in visual arts of the time. Eggeling and I came directly out of the structural problems of abstract art, volens-nolens into the film medium. The connection to theatre and literature was, completely, severed. Cubism, Expressionism, Dadaism, abstract art, surrealism found not only their expression in films but also a new fulfilment on a new level. The tradition of modern art grew on a large front, logically, together with and into the film: the orchestration of motion in visual rhythms – the plastic expression of an object in motion under varying light conditions, “to create the rhythm of common objects in space and time, to present them in their plastic beauty, this seemed to me worthwhile” (Léger) – the distortion and dissection of a movement, an object or a form and its reconstruction in cinematic terms (just as the cubists dissected and rebuilt in pictorial terms) – the denaturalization of the object in any form to recreate it cinematographically with light – light with its transparency and airiness as a poetic, dramatic, constructive material – the use of magic qualities of the film to create the original state of the dream – the complete liberation from the conventional story and its chronology in dadaist and surrealist
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R. Bruce Elder developments in which the object is taken out of its conventional context and is put into new relationships, creating in that way a new content altogether. [As André Breton wrote about Max Ernst] “The external object has broken away from its habitual environment. Its component parts had liberated themselves from the object in such a way that they could set up entirely new relationships with other elements”. (Richter 1955: 19).
Richter expanded on Breton’s remarks on the role of the external object in Max Ernst’s art by relating it to the shaping role the external object has had in the experimental cinema. The external object was used, as in the documentary film, as raw material, but, instead of employing it for a rational theme of social, economic, or scientific nature, it has broken away from its habitual environment and was used as material to express irrational visions. Films like Ballet Mécanique, Entr’acte, Emak Bakia, Ghosts Before Breakfast, Andalusian Dog, Diagonal Symphony, Anemic Cinema, Blood of a Poet, Dreams that Money Can Buy, and many others were not repeatable in any other medium and are essentially cinematic. (Richter 1955: 18; emphases in original)
The Language of Art: Constructivism, Reason and Magic However magical this new cinema would be, it would still have a rational basis. Reason would uncover the laws that account for the wonder of art. Hans Richter was involved in the international Constructivist movement and his contribution to the theory of formbuilding emerged partly from the ideals of that movement. Constructivism strived to generalize the principals of form and sought for a supra-individualist basis for artistic construction. It attempted to discover a lawfulness in artistic making. Some of Richter’s visual art of the mid twenties, such as Farbenordnung (1923) shows the influence of Eleazar Markovich (‘El’) Lissitzky’s work, especially in its use of trapezoidal forms to suggest perspectival foreshortening using only simple geometric shapes. The influence was more than indirect: El Lissitzky had arrived in Berlin in late 1921 or early 1922, on behalf of Anatoly Lunacharsky, to engage German artists in a dialogue about artistic production in the Soviet Union. He served as a conduit for introducing constructivist ideas into Central and Western Europe – or, more exactly, he introduced his own, highly idiosyncratic idea of Constructivism to Middle and Western Europe. He quickly
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became friends with Theo van Doesburg and established contact with the De Stijl artists Vilmos Huszar and J. J. Oud. In late May 1922, Hans Richter and his friend and fellow painter/filmmaker Viking Eggeling went to Düsseldorf, for the first international Kongress der fortschrittlichen Künstler (Congress of Progressive Artists). El Lissitzky was also there, representing Veshch’/Gegenstand/Objet, while Richter and Viking Eggeling represented de Stijl and “the Constructivist groups of Romania, Switzerland, Scandinavia and Germany” (Burchartz et. al. 1922: 68-9). On the second day of the conference, differences arose among the conference participants. This clash resulted partly from conflicting notions concerning the goals of the organization. The main portion of the representatives wanted the organization to focus on practical economic concerns and not to concern itself unduly with intellectual or artistic matters, while van Doesburg, Lissitzky and Richter disagreed. This disagreement led them to establish their own Internationale Fraktion der Konstruktivisten (International Faction of Constructivists). The Fraktion’s declaration gave another reason for the schism, in addition to the Fraktion’s intellectual thrust: We define a progressive artist as one who denies and fights the predominance of subjectivity in art and does not create his work on the basis of lyrical random chance, but rather on the new principles of artistic creation by systematically organizing the media to a generally understandable expression […] the actions of the congress have shown that due to the predominance of individual opinion, international progressive solidarity cannot be developed from the elements of this congress. (Burchartz et. al. 1922: 68).
The Fraktion’s declaration also echoed Soviet Constructivists’ desire to assimilate the labor of art-making to the labor of other workers in other sectors of societies: “Art is the common and real expression of the creative energy that organizes the progress of humanity, which means that art is the tool of the common process of labour”. Emphasizing their anti-individualist convictions, van Doesburg, Lissitzky and Richter declared the time had come to form a group that “denies and attacks the predominance of the subjective in art, and builds artistic works not upon lyrical whim, but rather on the principle of the Gestaltung by organizing the means systematically into an expression intelligible to all”. (Burchartz et. al. 1922: 68). The
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manifesto was a radical, vanguard attack on the prevailing artistic ethos, for it also condemned Expressionists and ‘Impulsivists’ for their individualism. Two years later, in 1924, Richter commented on the appropriation of the term ‘Constructivism’. The word ‘Constructivism’ emerged in Russia. It describes an art which employs modern construction materials in the place of conventional materials and follows a constructive aim. At the Düsseldorf Congress of May 1920 [actually 1922] the name Constructivism was taken up by Doesburg, Lissitzky and me as the Opposition, in a broader sense. Today, what passes by this name has nothing more to do with […] elementary formation, our challenge at the Congress. The name Constructivism was in those days borrowed as a slogan which was applied both against the legitimacy of artistic expressions [present there] and as an efficient temporary communication – against a majority of individualists at the Congress. (Richter 1924: 72)
Richter correctly identified the use of modern, industrial materials as a defining feature of Constructivism. The use of those materials characterized those exemplars of the constructivist ideal, the laboratory works produced by Rodchenko and his OBMOKhU (Obshchestvo molodykh khudozhnikov; Society of Young Artists) colleagues for their Moscow exhibition that opened in Moscow on May 22, 1921. Richter also points out, correctly, that he and his colleagues used the term ‘Constructivism’ in a somewhat different sense: as a movement that concerned ‘elementary formation’, which they conceived as an antidote to impulsivism and individualism. Some eight months after the founding of the Internationale Fraktion der Konstruktivisten, in Berlin in the winter of 1922-3, El Lissitzky characterized the emergence of Constructivism in an unusual way: Two groups claimed constructivism, the Obmoku and the Unovis. The former group worked in material and space, the latter in material and a plane. Both strove to attain the same result, namely the creation of the real object and of architecture. They are opposed to each other in their concepts of the practicality and utility of created things. Some members of the Obmoku group […] went as far as a complete disavowal of art and in their urge to be inventors, devoted their energies to pure technology. Unovis distinguished between the concept of functionality, meaning the necessity for the creation of new forms, and the question of direct serviceableness. They represented the view that the new form is the
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lever which sets life in motion, if it is based on the suitability of the material and on economy. This new form gives birth to other forms which are totally functional. (Lissitzky 1922: 340)
It is not difficult to see what side El Lissitzky was on: UNOVIS (Utverditeli novovo iskusstva; Affirmers of the New Art) had been organized by Kazimir Malevich and reflected his spiritual interests in elementary constructions. Lissitzky’s gesture of taking the term ‘Proun’ (Proekt utverzhdenija novovo; Project for the Affirmation of the New) to refer to his own work of the period aligns him with the work of the UNOVIS. El Lissitzky was more strongly committed to Suprematist spiritual elementarism than to the Productivism towards which most Constructivists inclined (See Bois 1977, 1988, and 1990). Embracing such spiritual convictions in the Soviet Union was a somewhat idiosyncratic gesture; although Malevich’s abstractions influenced the new artists associated with OBMOKhU, the ‘affirmers’ associated with UNOVIS, unlike Lissitzky, did not claim Constructivism as their cause. OBMOKhU artists rejected Malevich’s spiritual concerns, the very basis for his new art, in favor of Marxist principles. But in Europe, El Lissitzky’s idiosyncratic redefinition of ‘Constructivism’ took hold and seems to have influenced Richter’s understanding of Constructivism as an elementarist art of much the same sort as De Stijl advocated – thus, Richter advertised G: Material zur elementaren Gestaltung in De Stijl as “the organ for the constructivists in Europe”. (Bann 1974: xxxiii. El Lissitzky’s redefinition was the view of Constructivism that Veshch’/Gegenstand/Objet propounded1). There were grounds for El Lissitzky’s appropriation of the term ‘Constructivism’ for his project. Lissitzky noted the similarity between the geometric forms of De Stijl artists and those of contemporary Russian artists, and the correspondence between van Doesburg’s artistic radicalism, which proposed to poeticize reality, and the Russian Constructivists’ interest in integrating art and life. Thus, at the 1922 Kongress der fortschrittlichen Künstler, Lissitzky described Russian thinking as characterized “by the attempt to turn away from the old subjective, mystical conception of the world to create an attitude of universality – clarity – reality”. He added, “That this way of thinking is truly international may be seen from the fact that during the seven-year period of complete isolation from the
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outside world, we were attacking the same problems in Russia as our friends here in the West, but without any knowledge of each other”. (Lissitzky et. al. 1922: 63) And whatever his reasons for disavowing “the old, subjective, mystical conception of the world”, he nonetheless would have noted the spiritual interest of the Neo-Plasticists’ and their affinity with the spiritual concerns of the Suprematists. His bent of character was to perceive similarities in people’s beliefs that might allow them to make common cause with him in the transformation of reality. So he developed a unique understanding of Constructivism: as an art movement concerned with elementary principles and sympathetic to spiritual concerns. Furthermore, in this effort at internationalizing the avant-garde, Lissitzky was faced with the difficult task of reconciling the rational interests of the Constructivists and the spiritual interests of the Suprematists. The Neo-Plasticists’ Hegelian leanings allowed him to discern how Reason and Spirit might be reconciled, a problematic that Richter’s interest in using reason to the ends of magic rehearsed. The drive to find the universal laws of artistic making fuelled Eggeling and Richter’s research into what they called a Universelle Sprache (a universal language) of art. Richter, in fact, took the aim of identifying the scientific principles of art as Constructivism’s defining ambition. At the Düsseldorf conference, he declared that Constructivist artists had “overcome our own individual problems and reached the fact of an objective issue in art. This objective issue unites us in a common task. This task leads us (through the scientific investigation of the elements of art) to want something other than just a better image, a better sculpture: it leads us to reality”. (Lissitzky et. al. 1922: 63) Richter’s Constructivist interests led him to an enthusiasm for things Russian. His anti-individualism echoed that of Jean Pougny, an expatriate Russian friend who lived near Nollendorfplatz, then the centre of the Russian artistic community in Berlin. In his “Aufruf zur elementaren Kunst,” Pougny demanded an art that built on the medium’s character and formal elements, not on individual whim. Richter also praised a trilingual journal El Lissitzky and Il’ia Ehrenburg had founded, Veshch’/Gegenstand/Objet, (two issues of the magazine appeared, one in March/April 1922 and the other in May 1922,) for being a publication “that confronted the problems of our
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modern art and underscored the affinity between our artistic efforts and those in Russian art”. (As cited in Finkeldey 1998: 97) The Internationale Fraktion der Konstruktivisten founded at Düsseldorf subsequently renamed itself the Konstruktivistische internationale schöpferische Arbeitsgemeinschaft (Constructivistic International Creative Workshop) and expanded its new membership to include, besides the original trio, Karel Maes and Max Burchartz. KisA associates included Werner Graeff, Raoul Hausmann, Hannah Höch, Erich Buchholz, László Moholy-Nagy and Cornelis van Eesteren. Richter played a central role: a second manifesto of the group, published in De Stijl 5, No. 8 (1922) gave Richter’s address as the group’s office address. Visitors to KisA meetings included Hans Arp, Tristan Tzara and Kurt Schwitters. Gert Caden, an observer of a second congress, convened by the KisA in conjunction with erstwhile Dadaists, observed the accord that the ideas Richter, Lissitzky, van Doesburg and Moholy-Nagy struck. What he wrote reflects Eggeling and Richter’s ideas on the Universelle Sprache – and its relation to International Constructivism and Neo-Plasticism. Not the personal ‘line’ – what anyone could interpret subjectively – is our goal, but rather the work with objective elements: circle, cone, sphere, cube, cylinder, etc. These elements cannot be objectified further. They are put into function; the painting also consists of complementary tensions in the colour-material and the oppositions of vertical, horizontal, diagonal. […] Thus a dynamic-constructive system of force is created in space, a system of innermost lawfulness and greatest tension.... That is the formal side of our efforts. More important, however, is the ideological side: that these things agitate for a clear, simple plan for life, one of inner necessity with an exact balancing of forces. Here our goal meets the goals of the social revolution. So seen, our task is not party-political, it is rather a task of cultural politics. (Undated letter from Gert Caden to Alfred Hirschbroek cited in Finkeldey 1998: 105)
So Caden, stating the ideas of Richter, Lissitzky, van Doesburg and Moholy-Nagy, echoes Piet Mondrian’s ideas of dynamic equilibrium and inner necessity. To be sure, the members of the Arbeitsgemeinschaft did not agree upon their political outlook. Van Doesburg and Mondrian clashed with Lissitzky and Moholy-Nagy over Constructivism’s political commitments – a clash that Richter tried to mediate. Still, though Piet Mondrian’s political affiliations
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might have been different from those of, say, Caden, they shared a fundamental understanding of Gestaltung. Mondrian would even have agreed with Caden that the goal of art is to balance the forces acting in human life. The coincidence makes it easy to understand how, their revolutionary proclivities notwithstanding, Marxist-Constructivist arts could be committed to spiritual amelioration. Eggeling and Richter proposed to use formal principles of “Kontrast-Analogie,” (contrast-analogy) to reconfigure artistic form, to make artistic forms consistent with the materials in which they are realized. This ambition was among the reasons Richter set to work to make abstract films: the abstract film would be the true art of cinema, the cinema that is true to its own nature, not that of literature, or theater. Richter’s views about recasting the arts took many forms. Sometimes Richter sided with Dadaists, sometimes he sided with Surrealists, and sometimes he sided with Constructivists/ Neoplasticists. Richter even attempted at times to put a distance between himself and the Dada movement with which his name is so frequently associated, and when he did, he generally embraced Constructivism. Richter praised El Lissitzky and Il’ia’s Constructivist journal, Veshch’/Gegenstand/Objet, the first editorial of which declared that the time for the “negative tactics of Dada” were now past. (Lissitzky and Ehrenburg 1922: 1-2; Bann 1974: 55-6) Richter stressed his constructivist/ neo-plasticist leanings in a 1924 article that first appeared in the journal he and Werner Graeff edited, one of the first journals of avant-garde art, G – Zeitschrift für elementare Gestaltung. Titled Die schlecht trainierte Seele, the article was illustrated with reproductions of film frames, most of them from Rhythmus 21. (Richter 1924b: 22-23) These images, presumably, were intended to indicate ways in which the poor education the article’s title alluded to might be undone. Die schlecht trainierte Seele foreshadows many of the ideas that structural filmmakers of the 1960s would propound. The article starts out by attacking the contention that feelings are without form. They say feelings are conceived in sleep and, hatching themselves out, just appear! It is simply not true. Feeling is just as precisely structured and mechanically exact a process as thinking: it is just that our awareness of this process, or rather its IDENTITY, has been lost. So modern man is excluded from a whole sphere of perception and action. (Richter 1924b: 22)
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The idea that feelings are formless served as the basis for an intuitive approach to creative making that values sincerity over structure. Richter proposed to combat this tendency by according primacy to rhythm organized by universal sensory laws: Still without a well-defined aesthetic, it does not understand that creative form (schöpferische Gestaltung) is the control of material in accordance with the way we perceive things. Not knowing how our faculties function, film does not realise that this is where its job really lies. Instead, the screenplays of today strain for theatrical effects. By film I mean visual rhythm, realised photographically; imaginative material coming from the elementary laws of sensory perception. (Richter 1924b: 22)
Richter claimed the form of Rhythmus 21 followed the shape of feelings, a notion that relates to Suzanne Langer’s idea that artistic forms have the virtual shape of emotions. The article gives expression to Richter’s neo-plasticist leanings: Richter became associated with van Doesburg’s De Stijl movement in 1921, and from 1923 to 1926 served as editor of G., which, though not exactly the movement’s house organ (there was an official publication, De Stijl), was closely aligned with the De Stijl movement. The films Richter made in this period, Rhythmus 21, Rhythmus 23 and Rhythmus 25, are all deeply influenced by neo-plasticist ideals. Richter’s aim, to follow the shape of feelings, also meant bringing the time of the film entirely into the compass of the present. This film gives memory nothing to hang on. At the mercy of ‘feeling’, reduced to going with the rhythm according to the successive rise and fall of the breath and the heartbeat, we are given a sense of what feeling and perceiving really is: a process – movement. This ‘movement’ with its own organic structure is not tied to the power of association (sunsets, funerals), nor to emotions of pity (girl matchseller, once famous – now poor – violinist, betrayed love), nor indeed to ‘content’ at all, but follows instead its own inevitable mechanical laws. (Richter 1924b: 22)
In this article, Richter laid out, in brief, the background to his work in Absolute Film and the efforts he and Viking Eggeling had undertaken to develop a universal form language. His commentary took a dialectical form. He proposed that form-building (Gestaltung) relied on several principles, for instance, relations of maximal contrast
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between elements. As examples of the attributes that might enter into relations of maximal contrast Richter cited position, proportion and light distribution. Further, he cited relations between most nearly identical elements, and likewise, relations that modulate the contrast between elements. The examples that Richter offered focused on movement; he devoted much thought to the ways that movements could be more or less similar. The article offered several attributes in respect of which different movements could be more or less similar or more or less contrasting and could resolve, to a greater or lesser extent, the tension between otherwise contrasting elements. He argued that film is visual rhythm created using photo technology, and both rhythm and technology serve as building blocks for the imagination, which creates by drawing on the medium’s material attributes and on laws governing the senses. Extending Eggeling’s ideas of contrast to montage, he proclaimed perception involves opposition. Unless a thing is differentiated (i.e., unless it has borders), it cannot be perceived. However, though separation is necessary to perceive the object as having boundaries, recognizing the affinities amongst things is required to put the perceived object into a context. The important principle of unity-in-difference applies as well in the theory of sensations as it does in aesthetics. The role that contrast between elements can have in giving shape to an artwork had been a fundamental interest of Richter’s from 1917 on. From 1912 to 1917, in his first years as a painter, Richter had painted sometimes in a more cubist manner, and sometimes in a more expressionist manner. During 1917, after moving to Zürich in late August or early September 1916 and coming under the influence of Dada, he began painting what he called ‘visionary portraits’, intensely colorful and extraordinarily vibrant, ever more abstract paintings, executed by adopting a spontaneous, free-associative method: For my own part, I remember that I developed a preference for painting my [visionary portraits] in the twilight, when the colors on my palette were almost indistinguishable. However, as every color had its own position on the palette my hand could find the color it wanted even in the dark. And it got darker and darker […] until the spots of color were going on to the canvas in a sort of auto-hypnotic trance, just as they presented themselves to my groping hand. Thus the picture took shape before the inner rather than the outer eye. (Richter 1985: 49)
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The method allowed Richter to be prodigiously productive, creating sometimes three or four visionary portraits in a day. In late 1917, Richter became disenchanted with this spontaneous method and the results it produced. He conceived the desire to create more structured abstract works, in which a single rhythmical effect would unify the pictorial elements. “The completely spontaneous, almost automatic process by which I painted my ‘visionary portraits’ no longer satisfied me”, he wrote. “I turned my attention to the structural problems of my earlier Cubist period, in order to articulate the surface of my canvases”. (Richter 1985: 61). These works that resulted were his Dada-Köpfe, portraits that became increasingly abstract, and show that, early on, Richter was concerned less with the sitter’s psychology than he was with formal relationships, with working out contrasts in which blacks and whites traded roles in defining volumes and space. These portraits concern figure-ground relationships, which Richter articulated by using contrasting black and white areas that, depending on the areas the tone covered and the relation of those areas to areas in other tones, traded roles in representing form and space. Viola Kiefner wrote of them: “What was strived for was not a choice for or against some position, but a synthesis of polarities, the harmonization of opposites, order and chance, logic and intuition, consciousness and unconsciousness, objectivity and abstraction”. (Kiefner 1989: 64). Some of Richter’s other drawings from the period, e.g., Häuser (1917) and Musik-Dada (1918), work on similar principles. These issues would remain central to Richter’s art for many years to come. Similar means of creating stark contrasts of black and white, either of which may represent a volume or a void depending on its position and area, characterize Richter’s first film Rhythmus 21. In the film’s opening sequences especially, but in some measure in the rest of the film as well, the spatial relations among the various figures are ambivalent and undergo continual transformation. It is sometimes difficult to state whether the white areas on the screen are foreground or background, and, even when you can identify them, foreground elements often transform into background elements. Incorporating negative film enhanced this ambiguity.
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Hans Richter, “Dada Head”; ink, 1918
Hans Richter, “Dada Head (Abstraction)”; ink, 1918
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Richter’s concerns with the harmonization of polarities led him to search for the foundations of visual art, for a Generalbaß der Malerei.
Eggeling’s Integrity Eggeling was born in Sweden in 1880, one of twelve children. He became a bookkeeper but moved to Paris in 1911, where he took up painting. Eggeling had little formal training and until 1911, his painting and drawing consisted largely of landscape and figure studies. However, the museums and galleries he visited, the analytical discussions he engaged in, and the work he did in Paris opened up many of the issues that would later preoccupy him. People concerned with advanced art in Paris at the time were under the sway of Cubism, and Eggeling took an interest in the Cubists’ formal experimentation. As a result, the paintings he did show an interest in the analysis and simplification of forms into geometrical figures. In 1917, he learned about the Dada movement. While not sharing their anti-artistic animus (or their politics), Eggeling found liberating the dada idea that the conventions of traditional art had grown stifling. In 1918, he moved to Germany, where Dada had taken hold. Eggeling was already working on ideas about orchestrating lines that would eventually form a part of the general theory of painting that Richter alluded to in the passage cited above, a theory he referred to as the ‘Generalbaß der Malerei.’ Eggeling had already organized the geometric possibilities of the line into themes. When he met Richter, he had also found means to orchestrate the line. Eggeling would soon anthologize these ideas in his (likely uncompleted) film, Horizontal-Vertikal Orchester (1923). These means relied on principles similar to those of counterpoint in music, creating a play of contrast and analogies. Eggeling, (drawing partly on Hans Arp’s ‘The Rules of Plastic Counterpoint,’ but mostly working on his own,) through empirical and practical study, developed his ideas systematically. Over long years, with exacting thoroughness, he drew up models of formal classification, organizing them according to similarities and contrast. Eggeling was soon to discover that, by using contrast and analogy, he could develop any formal element, not just vertical and horizontal lines, as Mondrian was doing. Still, for Eggeling, the origin of all artistic forms was the line. Eggeling drew the idea of harmonizing tonal masses from Richter’s idea of counterpointing positive and negative areas; this was
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incorporated into Eggeling’s structural system, which to that point had focused on counterpointing contrasting linear elements. When he met Richter in Zürich, early in 1918, Eggeling had already been at work on the scrolls that became the basis of his film experiments, begun as early as 1915-17. He had also already been at work systematically surveying elementary forms and attempting to formulate a set of syntactical principles that governed their relations. Richter soon recognized that a fantastic dedication was reflected in the systematic manner in which Eggeling pursued the study of contrasts. Richter wrote about their meeting forty-five years later: One day at the beginning of 1918 […] Tristan Tzara knocked at the wall which separated our rooms in a little hotel in Zürich and introduced me to Viking Eggeling. He was supposed to be involved in the same kind of esthetic research. Ten minutes later, Eggeling showed me some of his work. Our complete agreement on esthetic as well as on philosophical matters, a kind of ‘enthusiastic identity’ between us, led spontaneously to an intensive collaboration, and a friendship which lasted until his death in 1925. […] Eggeling’s dynamics of counterpoint, which he called Generalbaß der Malerei, embraced generously and without discrimination every possible relationship between forms, including that of the horizontal to the vertical. His approach, methodical to the degree of being scientific, led him to the analytical study of the behaviour of elements of form under different conditions. He tried to discover which ‘expressions a form would and could take under the various influences of ‘opposites’: little against big, light against dark, one against many, top against bottom, and so forth. (Richter 1952: 79)
After meeting and realizing that their interests overlapped, Richter invited Eggeling to return with him to Richter’s parental home. Together they worked on formal exercises and in 1920, began to experiment with film. Though the two worked closely for a time, Eggeling’s work was clearly of a different character than Richter’s. Eggeling’s drawings in the Yale University Library reveal that the abstract shapes he took an interest in evolved from natural forms: he prepared what are essentially notations for sets of natural forms, and then, as Goethe’s scientific method prescribed, put them through an evolution that proceeded according to visual laws. But, though the forms he studied are organic, they have something of the character of ideograms. Like Mondrian, Eggeling worked with an unvanquishable persistence to distil a vocabulary of elementary forms from nature. Experiencing these gestures can enhance the senses and can (as
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Goethe suggested) lead us to grow new organs of perception. The syntax that Eggeling strived to work out would be based on opposition between pairs of attracting or repelling forms. His fundamental task, then, was to identify certain elementary forms and to determine their affinity for, or antagonism towards, other elementary forms. The difference in Eggeling and Richter’s concerns would last into the era when the two artists took up filmmaking. Though both Viking Eggeling and Hans Richter attempted to resolve visual form into elementary units, Richter’s film work, like that of the NeoPlasticist painters, was concerned with the interplay of rectangular areas, which are differentially defined as lighter and darker, while Eggeling was more concerned with revealing linear developments through time. Thus, Eggeling’s Diagonal-Symphonie is essentially a work of morphological transformation (understood as Goethe understood that morphological process). Eggeling’s investigations carried him beyond traditional art media. Eggeling began, partly under the influence of Bergson, to investigate time in the visual arts. This led him to his scroll painting and his work on the film Horizontal-Vertikal Orchester. Eggeling was led to this interest in time partly because he had experienced difficulty in incorporating motion into his visual language. After he had begun collaborating with Hans Richter, he decided that a better way to create a dynamic effect was to extend his work into the dimension of time. Eggeling and Richter’s first attempts at this took the form of laying out a sequence of constructions on a long scroll of paper: the viewer was required to scan the length of the artworks, that is, to view them through time, since they could not all be seen at once. However, this approach left them dissatisfied. Scroll paintings implied movement more strongly than the diagonalization of form in traditional painting, but they did not present actual movement. They next experimented with using very thin sheets of rubber as an elastic canvas that could be stretched horizontally and vertically, to create a sort of movement. Even this left them dissatisfied and they found themselves exploring film.
The Analogy to Music At the beginning of the twentieth century, many artists sought some way to escape ‘the tyranny of the object’ and to create an art that was
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free from the constraints of the visible and tangible realm. Music provided something of model for how a work constituted of pure, nonrepresentational elements could be formed, without falling into ornamentation, arbitrariness or disorder. Contrapuntal music especially showed artists how to resolve abstract elements. Thus, in 1922, Richter, with Werner Graeff’s assistance, embarked on a project to be entitled Fuge in Rot und Grün (Fugue in Red and Green). To be sure, this was not the first visual fugue to be realized on the assumption of the analogousness of film and music. Around 1910, the Czech artist Frantisek Kupka, an erstwhile Symbolist painter who was deeply involved with Theosophical ideas generally and, in particular, with their ideas on synaesthesia and on color, became the first painter to arrive at the principle of sequential composition based on chromatic progressions. He described his goal: “By using a form in various dimensions and arranging it according to rhythmical considerations, I will achieve a ‘symphony’ which develops in space as a symphony does in time”. These ideas eventuated in Amorpha – Fugue in Two Colours (1912). Music’s temporality helps explain why visual artists regarded it as an ideal to which they might aspire. Music could achieve a continually changing quality of tone space, and painters longed to find a means for achieving analogous effects in their medium. Karin v. Maur explains: The disintegration of the unified pictorial space, the fragmentation of the object, the autocratic employment of liberated motif elements, the autonomy of colour, form, and line, and the increasing dynamism of all three – these developments, which took place between 1908 and 1914 in the guise of Cubism, Futurism, Orphism, Vorticism, or Synchronism – were basically directed towards opening visual art to the dimension of time. Never before in the numerous programs and manifestos of the avant-garde did there appear so many temporal concepts, such as rhythm, dynamics, speed, and simultaneity, or musical terms such as cadence, dissonance, polyphony, etc., proving the existence of a close link between the temporalization tendencies in art and the reception of musical phenomena. (Maur 1999: 44)
In his painting of his Bauhaus years (1921-31), Paul Klee embarked upon a program of discovering the dynamic perceptual qualities of color and form. His thoughts were formalized while teaching at the Bauhaus in the 1920s, where he wrote the Pädagogisches Skizzenbuch (Pedagogical Sketchbook), which presented a complete course in the
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dynamics of static form. Klee’s paintings represent a movement towards dynamic form in abstract painting, and he connected this dynamism to music. Klee took up the problems of painting music in the monochrome Fuge in Rot (Fugue in Red, 1921). This work presents fugal themes as different shapes moving from right to left over a dark ground, leaving trails of afterimages behind; the visual effect resembles that of the repetitions of themes in a fugue. Like Kandinsky, Klee used the analogy with music when describing his work and some of Klee’s later works developed directly out of musical structures: the form of the fugue was the subject of Ad Parnassum (1932), which used a dappled grid of shifting color within an architectonic framework to represent the pattern of repeated elements in a fugue. The American Synchromists Morgan Russell and Stanton Macdonald-Wright also pursued the analogy between sound and color. At the time of their first solo exhibition, at Munich’s N e u e r Kunstsalon, they proposed that, until then, music alone had been capable of communicating the highest spiritual sensations. Now, abstract painting’s time had come. After overcoming the obstacles that the effort to render material reality had put in its path, painters could direct their interests to the higher reality. Painting had developed to the point where it could convey the mysterious reality hidden within ordinary reality. Several artists and theorists went as far as to argue that painting was closer to this ultimate reality than music, because visual perception is more intimately linked than aural perception is to the inner reality of nature. Robert Delaunay, too, argued that painting is superior to music, though his reasons for asserting that claim were different. For him the superiority of painting turned on its capacity to apprehend several objects and events simultaneously. He unpacked the significance of this principle of simultaneity in Bergsonian terms: The idea of the vital movement of the world and its movement is simultaneity. […] The auditory perception is not sufficient for our knowledge of the world. […] Its movement is successive, it is a sort of mechanism; its law is the time of mechanical clocks which, like them, has no relation with our perception of visual movement in the Universe. (Delaunay 1912: 319)
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Delaunay used interacting complementary colors to produce a sense of optical motion. His interest in the interaction of color led him to consider the importance of light: he wrote about light as an ordering force, a force whose nature is harmony and rhythm. Different proportions in the mixture of colors led to different harmonies and different rhythms (different rates of vibration). The dynamics of the modern world had pressed the phenomenon of change towards a new importance. Morgan Russell, Stanton Macdonald-Wright, Robert Delaunay, et. al. were looking for a medium that would invest a dynamic medium, a medium that could convey the flux of energy, with the privileges of sight. This is especially clear in Delaunay’s case. Despite his advocacy of simultaneity, Delaunay used sequential development in such works as Les Fenêtres sur la ville (Windows on the Town, 1912). The work uses a scroll form to unfold color contrasts through time. Klee noted in a diary entry from July 1917, “Delaunay has attempted to shift the accent in art to the temporal, based on the example of the fugue, by choosing a format so long it cannot be taken in at a glance”. (Klee 1957: 380) Another medium had led the way: that medium was the cinema. Like many artists, Delaunay, Russell and Macdonald-Wright proposed to reformulate their medium to endow it with attributes of the film medium. The similarities among Delaunay’s scroll painting, Les Fenêtres (The Windows, 1912), Viking Eggeling’s scroll painting, Horizontal-Vertikal Orchester (Horizontal-vertical Orchestra, 191921), and Hans Richter’s scroll paintings Fuge 23 (1923/76) – and their similarity to the cinema – along with Eggeling and Richter’s decision to create cinematic works, suggest the influential role the cinema played in the development of the visual arts in the twentieth century. The makers of Absolute Film proposed to reconfigure film so as to highlight the film’s innermost dynamics – thereby they would release cinematic form from representation. Light and time, they insisted, were the cinema’s true materials – the artists engaged in the creation of the Absolute Film shared an interest in light and time with makers of light sculptures and Lichtspiele. These works were as immaterial as music. That something as immaterial as colored light came to represent an ideal medium for artists in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries must be taken as evidence of the important role that music – and the cinema – had assumed in thinking about the arts.
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This is so despite early film stocks being black-and-white. Even in Méliès’ time, films were often tinted or colored by hand (as Ballet Mécanique was). Early artists who gravitated towards the film first conceived of color projects and only later, and by dint of necessity, realized them in black-and-white.
Fernand Leger, Ballet Mechanique. 1924
As the title suggests, Richter’s Fuge in Rot und Grün was to be a color film; since no color stocks existed at the time, Richter was prepared to color each frame red or green by hand – he hoped that the unevenness of colors applied by hand would not be noticeable against the black ground. Graeff convinced Richter the project was not feasible, that every colored stroke would be visible, and the film remained in blackand-white. Even so, color was among Richter’s central concerns at this time – the importance Richter accorded color is made evident by the fact that in the same year he made the film, Richter produced Orchestration der Farbe (Orchestration of Color), an “orchestration of colour in complementary, contrasting, and analogue colours, as a Magna Carta for colours” and another work, Farbenordnung (Color Order), a work that was included in the notorious Entartete Kunst exhibition and likely destroyed thereafter. (Richter 1965b: 37) Moreover, as Oskar Fischinger’s involvement with Gasparcolor makes clear, the makers of Absolute films used color as soon and as much as they could.
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Hans Richter. Orchestration der Farbe, oil on canvas, 1951
Towards a Generalbaß der Malerei When Richter met Eggeling, Richter was already interested in the analogy between music and painting, and soon after they met, Richter explained to Eggeling that he wanted to paint completely objectively, following the principles of music, with long and short note values. This is not to say that Richter, or Eggeling for that matter, wished to create visual forms that imitated a specific musical composition, as Walther Ruttmann did and Oskar Fischinger would later do. Rather, Eggeling and Richter wanted to pattern their work after the lawfulness of musical structure. Viking Eggeling played the leading role in conceiving the core notions of their Generalbaß der Malerei and in working out its basic principles. Eggeling was a brilliant theoretician and artist whose intensity deeply affected those with whom he came into contact. Hans Arp described meeting Viking Eggeling:
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I met him again in 1917 in Zürich. He was searching for the rules of a plastic counterpoint, composing and drawing its first elements. He tormented himself almost to death. On great rolls of paper he had set down a sort of hieratic writing with the help of figures of rare proportion and beauty. These figures grew, subdivided, multiplied, moved, intertwined from one group to another, vanished and partly reappeared, organized themselves into an impressive construction with plantlike forms. He called this work [his Diagonal-Symphonie] a ‘Symphony’. (Arp 1938/1959: 25).
Viking Eggeling. Diagonal Symphony III scroll: from a copy made in the 1930s from Eggeling’s original pencil.
Richter and Eggeling together tried to work out a theory to ground visual compositions in the formal principles that music had uncovered. Richter explained why he assumed that a syntax regulating the interplay (counterpoint) of these elements could be modeled on music: In musical counterpoint, we found a principle which fitted our philosophy: every action produces a corresponding reaction. Thus, in the contrapuntal fugue, we found the appropriate system, a dynamic and polar arrangement of opposing energies, and in this model we saw an image of life itself: one thing growing, another declining, in a creative marriage of contrast and analogy. Month after month, we studied and compared our analytical drawings made on hundreds of little sheets of paper, until eventually we came to look at them as living beings which grew, declined, changed, disappeared – and then were reborn. […] It was unavoidable that, sooner or later in our experiments, these drawings, which were spread about on the floor of our studio, would begin to relate systematically to each other. We seemed to have a new problem on our hands, that of continuity, and the more we looked, the more we realized that this new problem had to be dealt with […] until,
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The scroll that Richter refers to as the Horizontal-Vertical Mass is usually referred to as Horizontal-Vertikal Orchester. Erna (Ré) Niemeyer, Eggeling’s girlfriend at the time Eggeling was to make this scroll (and later, 1927-9, Hans Richter’s wife, and then the wife of the great Surrealist poet Philippe Soupault) reveals that she worked with Eggeling on a film of the same name, and based on the scroll, in 1923. No copy of Eggeling’s film is known to exist, and it is likely that, due to some dissatisfaction with it, he did not screen it in public. Art critic Ernst Kállai comments on the film in an article, ‘Konstruktivismus’ in the Jahrbuch der jungen Kunst: The aesthetic perspective, recalling Gabo’s kinetic constructions, is revealed also in Viking Eggeling’s abstract film (sketched in 1919) which the artist calls Horizontal-Vertical Orchestra. The name indicates two fundamental traits of the work. The film is a trial of strength in which take part the polar and analogous [recalling the terms Kontrast and Analogie] relations of form, proportion, rhythm, number, intensity, position and temporal quality. [This provides what is likely a comprehensive list of the feature domains that Eggeling considered in his theory of Kontrast-Analogie.] The time factor is experienced immediately, through the spatial-optical course of the movement and indicates the connection with music. […] In their films where movement of light is presented in square forms, Eggeling’s disciple and former collaborator, Hans Richter, and also Werner Graeff, have followed the principles formulated by Eggeling concerning polarity and analogy, and the influence exerted by these two concepts on each other. (As cited in O’Konor 1966: 27-8)
Richter had offered a theory of form-building to the enterprise of applying the principles of music to filmmaking. Artworks should evoke feeling through form, he proposed: through its form, an artwork elicits and resolves tension. The sort of tensions appropriate for artworks to modulate are tensions that arise from creating and resolving contrast between features essential to that medium. Every frame is a distribution of light and dark, and filmmaking is essentially the art of modulating the distribution of light. Thus, it is appropriate for film form to modulate tension by varying the contrasts amongst dark and light areas.
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Constructing forms that modulate tension by varying the contrast among features essential to the medium brings the form into alignment with the nature of the materials in which it is realized, but it does more than that. The emotional associations that individuals have with particular representational images are unpredictable. They are loose, or, to use Richter’s word, “flabby.” The response that people have to forms rooted in the actual materials of the medium, on the other hand, do not depend on the idiosyncrasies of the individual viewers’ backgrounds and life experiences; the response is common to all and therefore predictable. Adopting views that in many respects are analogous to Eisenstein’s ideas about developing forms on the basis of Pavlovian conditioning, Richter proposes that it should be possible to work out a scientific basis for developing such forms. Once that basis had been worked out, the problems of creating artistic form would not engage with the vagaries of an individual’s make-up, but would be rooted in the common constitution of humankind. From the way the two aspects of contrasting and relating depend on each other, their mutual interaction, comes feeling. This is the way of the creative process. […] What flourishes today as ‘feeling’ is easy submission to uncontrollable emotions about the hero, chaste maiden, and smart businessman. [...] This sensibility, some kind of mad thing made up of feelings preserved from past, and unreal, centuries, dominates and distorts our vision of the world. Our perceptive faculties have become flabby, our breathing has become restricted; our sensibility – unable to develop – has become more a weakness than a strength. […] The development of such a soundly based approach […] touches at the root of basic questions about the evolution of the psyche, which originally had a certain ‘thinking power’ now lying fallow. This ‘thinking power’ enables the sensibility to exercise its powers of judgment and of action. It provides the whole man with powerful means of action indispensable to his general sense of direction. (Richter 1924b: 23)
Elsewhere, Richter explained the connection between Eggeling’s theory of Kontrast-Analogie and counterpoint. [A] principle of dynamic relations as in counterpoint, [it] comprehended every possible relation among forms without discrimination, including the horizontal-vertical relationship. […] Its almost scientific method led him [Eggeling] to analyze how elements
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The earliest theoretical foundations of Richter’s work developed out of a search for a Generalbaß der Malerei. ‘Generalbaß’ is the German word for ‘thoroughbass’, a 17th and 18th century term denoting the basso continuo part, so called because an independent bass part plays throughout the composition. Most European compositions from 1600 to 1750, including most of J.S. Bach’s compositions, make use of a continuo part. Those that used a basso continuo were so preponderant amongst all the compositions of the period that the era is often referred to as the thoroughbass era. The basso continuo part was written as a bass line with numbers under or over or beside the bass notes, to indicate what chords to play. The numbers indicate the interval above the bass note that should be played, however, the pitches can be played in any register and freely doubled, though the general principles of voice-leading must be observed. Converting the numbers into chords to create a complete musical texture musicians referred to as ‘realizing a figured bass’; realizing a figured bass and deciding how to play these chords took real interpretative skill, as it demanded the performer create an ‘accompaniment’ part from a composed bass part by playing the notated pitches and improvising harmony above them. Although the bass line itself could not be modified, the player who realized the harmonies had considerable freedom. The player was not bound by the rhythm of the bass line or to use the simplest forms of the specified harmonies – a chord may be played in root position or not. Bach was extremely adept at extemporizing, and the music he could produce by sight-reading from these general instructions sounded like rehearsed, thoroughly notated compositions. He even wrote a text explaining these skills. Extending the idea of ‘Generalbaß,’ one could describe it as a method for creatively elaborating musical works that proceeds according to well-established principles. It is in this sense that Goethe used the word. In a conversation with Riemer (May 19, 1807), Goethe
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accused painting of lacking any Generalbaß, that is any established, accepted theory for creating forms by following established principles. In proposing a Generalbaß der Malerei, Eggeling and Richter were proposing to fill the lack that Goethe had noted and to provide a ruleguided, but nonetheless creative, approach to making a painting: in making a painting or any visual artwork, the imagination would follow demonstrated principles. Richter’s Dada experiences had led him willy-nilly into considering the analogy between visual art and music. Just before he embarked on his effort to develop a Generalbaß der Malerei, Richter had been working on his Dada-Köpfe, which, as we have noted, set black elements against white elements, to represent volumes against space or space against volume according to the position and relative size of the black and white elements. In Zürich in January 1918, Richter met the Italian composer and musicologist, Ferruccio Busoni (1866-1924). Busoni had a profound interest in counterpoint. His monumental Fantasia Contrappuntistica of 1910, just a few years before Richter met him, was greatly influential. He also produced an important edition of Bach’s music. Busoni saw in the alternation of black and white a set of relations analogous to the play of voices in a contrapuntal composition. He proposed to Richter and Eggeling that they might undertake the systematic study of these relations by examining J.S. Bach’s 1725 Klavierbüchlein für Anna Magdalena Bach (Anna Magdalena Bach’s Clavier Book). This was just around the time that Richter first met Eggeling, and Richter passed Busoni’s recommendation on to Eggeling. Busoni’s recommendation struck a resonant chord in Eggeling, for he had already undertaken a systematic study of the elementary syntax of form relations, and had begun to consider the analogy between music and visual art. We don’t know exactly what connection Busoni saw between Richter’s black and white drawings and the thorough-bass practices of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. But we can conjecture. First, there are many repeating patterns in Richter’s Dada-Köpfe, and Busoni might have connected this aspect of the works to the tradition of the ground bass and of ‘divisions on a ground.’ Second, baroque music often exhibits a homophonic texture, with a melody playing against a bass line that has strong harmonic implications. This polarity between the soprano and bass lines Busoni may have seen as a formal
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parallel to the contrasts between black and white in Richter’s DadaKöpfe. Finally, with the beginning of the thoroughbass era around 1600, this soprano-bass polarity developed into a more complex form, with the inner parts of the composition improvised against the basso continuo. In the relation in Baroque music between the strong foundation of a bass and implied harmony parts and one or more supported melodic parts, Busoni might have seen a parallel to Richter’s complex, and shifting relation between foreground and background. That he saw such a parallel is all the more likely as sometimes the middle parts of a thorough-bass composition seem to come to the fore and become almost another melody line. Richter and Eggeling presented the results of their study of the syntax of form relations in their eight-page pamphlet Universelle Sprache (Universal Language, 1920), which they mailed to a number of influential people, including Albert Einstein. Among their purposes for the document was to persuade UFA to support their work in experimental film. No copies of the pamphlet are known to exist, but an outline for it can be found in Stephen C. Foster’s Hans Richter: Activism, Modernism and the Avant-garde, and a statement of what were likely some of its central ideas appears in Eggeling’s hardly known essay of 1921, Elvi fejtegetések a mozgómüvészetrö (Theoretical Presentation of the Art of Motion), and Richter’s much better known, and nearly identical, essay of the same year, Prinzipielles zur Bewegungskunst (Principles of Movement Art). The purpose of Eggeling and Richter’s study into the Generalbaß der Malerei was to present the ground principles of Gestaltung (‘forming’). It would offer a new universal language – universal both in the sense that it applied to all visual media and in the sense that it applied to all cultures, notwithstanding their different natural languages. Eggeling and Richter’s goal was to develop a system of communication based on the visual perceptions, whose mechanisms, they were convinced, were universal. “Every person would have to react to such a language for the very reason that it was based on the human ability to see and record”, Richter wrote. (Richter 1965b: 24) Some years after the pamphlet was issued, Richter outlined the thesis of the Universelle Sprache: This pamphlet elaborated our thesis that abstract form offers the possibility of a language above and beyond all national language frontiers. The basis for such a language would lie in the identical form
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perception in all human beings and would offer the promise of a universal art as it had never existed before. With careful analysis of the elements, one should be able to rebuild men’s vision into a spiritual language in which the simplest as well as the most complicated, emotions as well as thoughts, objects as well as ideas, would find a form. (Richter 1965a: 144)
Though all visual media could use this language, Eggeling and Richter believed that film took this language to a higher level. In his Elvi fejtegetések a mozgómüvészetrö Eggeling proposed that “beyond all doubt the film will soon be taken over by the artists as a new field for their activity”. (As cited in O’Konor 1966: 28) The constructivist notions that were at the heart of Eggeling and Richter’s research programme advocated a comprehensive reorganization of life that could only be initiated by reason. In an interview first published in Art International [Zürich] in 1959, Hans Richter told Friedrich Bayl, “[M]y driving desire, to control the means of expression and to pair inspiration with understanding, let me first point to a geometric scale as a point of departure. Objectivizing gestures are a universal language”. (As cited in Wolf, 1989: 16) Eggeling and Richter’s Universelle Sprache was a grammar for combining forms into pairs of opposites based on mutual attraction and repulsion. The constellation of opposing pairs would create a form of counterpoint. The theory of the Universelle Sprache proposed that polarities between opposites were the elemental relations from which forms were created: positive and negative; black and white; above and below; curved and straight; empty and filled; intersecting and not intersecting; horizontal and vertical; parallel and counterpoint; simple and complicated; dark on light and light on dark; single and multiple; internally linked and separated. It was a language whose elements, then, were not individual forms but which were significant in their relationship to one another. Eggeling and Richter’s research sought to identify especially the key features of spatial relations. The idea that there might be a grammar of spatial relations was a fundamentally Constructivist notion. László Moholy-Nagy wrote of the need to “apprehend the elements of optical expression” (Moholy-Nagy 1933; cited in Wolf 1989: 16) and of the need to develop a “standard language of optical expression”. (As cited in Wolf 1989: 16) Like Richter, he, too, believed this language – that would be universal since it would be
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internationally understandable – should be immediately standardized, that is to say, simplified, purified and democratized. Moholy, Eggeling and Richter shared a utopianism. All three wanted to establish a new system of visual communications for a new society, as all three were appalled at the conditions around them. This was a feeling shared by other artists of the time. Recall the horrifying images of suffering in the slums that Käthe Kollwitz produced around this time; Meidner’s depictions of urban existence as a veritable terror; Kirchner’s images of menacing prostitutes preying on the city; Otto Dix and Georg Grosz’ grotesque visions of black market racketeers, sex murderers, disabled veterans, and Freikorps assassins; and John Heartfield’s (Johann Herzfeld) photomontages, replete with coffins and death masks. Eggeling and Richter believed that this new universal language of visual art would help shape the new human who would arise out of the blighted world. Thus, this universal language would not only concern itself with the self-realization of the ‘Universal Man’ but would be the means for the realization of universal life. In this way, Eggeling and Richter’s advocacy reflected utopian aspirations that were in the air in this era. Many thinkers and artists of the time felt that the culture of their time had become weak, superficial, impoverished and that European civilization had entered a phase of crisis: the outrages that humans perpetrated on humans reflected that. Art had the responsibility of renewing European civilization, and to achieve this, it would have to become more spiritual – would have to become, in Eggeling’s phrase, ‘signs of communication’ between people. The old artistic forms were no longer capable of this. The most important task that artists confronted, therefore, was to create a new, universal language that all would be capable of understanding, a language not burdened with outmoded associations carried forward from a civilization in its phase of decadence and encumbered by national differences. Its idiom would be pure, simple, and abstract, for only non-figurative art could do what is essential: to revive culture by creating a new instrument with which all people could communicate. This language was not to be simply a means of communication that duplicates the languages we now have. It would be an objective language. Its grammar would give instruction on the correct ordering of forms. Its first concern would be with structure, not personal expression. Expressionist values had dominated German
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art for two decades, and, although Richter’s early drawings were influenced by such German Expressionists as Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, he, and Eggeling too, had come to see Expressionism as a dimension of the culture that should be opposed. Excessive feeling, and especially feeling that was not contained within the bounds of formal, constructive imperatives, could deform art, just as unbridled feeling, feeling that was not contained by the ideals of the Socialist utopia, could wreak havoc on society. Eggeling and Richter considered the elimination of subjective expression to be a purifying process: their vision of the Universelle Sprache was that of an immaterial spiritual language that would allow an ascetic and disciplined presentation of a subject, and would ensure that reason would ascend over personal feeling. It would produce a new terrain outside language’s communicative domain, a meta-language that would help foster a new reality. As the product of ideal order, the language of this new reality would be spiritualized. In 1919 Eggeling and Richter had begun working on scrolls – Eggeling on Horizontal-Vertical Mass and Richter on Präludium.
Hans Richter, Preludium (detail); ink scroll on paper, 1919
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In making these works, Eggeling and Richter developed a form in which the pictorial elements led the eye through the composition. In this regard, the scrolls were like films, and this similarity engendered in the painters a desire to work in film. A wealthy backer who lived in their neighborhood had offered to give them DM 10,000 – a large sum, but not enough to make the film. Neither artist knew any of the technical rudiments of filmmaking. So, the pair decided to start a campaign to persuade UFA (Universum-Film A.G.) to produce their film. They had the idea of producing, as a part of this campaign, a pamphlet, Universelle Sprache, which would set out their ideas about a language of elementary pictorial elements, and which they could likewise send out to people of influence. Their campaign was successful, for UFA provided them with a studio and a technician; in the end, however, the technician and the artists did not get along and the resulting collaboration was a disaster. To be sure, and despite what Richter has written on the topic, Eggeling’s first UFA animation tests (1920/21) were so unsatisfactory that he would not show them in public. Eggeling and Richter worked together on creating a film of the Horizontal-Vertikal Orchester for about a year before Richter abandoned the project. Eggeling attempted several more animation tests during 1922 and 1923, but they too seemed inadequate. In 1923, Erna Niemeyer, then a young Bauhaus student, undertook to animate his Diagonal-Symphonie scrolls. At this point, Eggeling abandoned the Horizontal-Vertikal Orchester entirely. Niemeyer and Eggeling, working in appalling poverty, finished the Diagonal-Symphonie in 1924 and showed it first privately to family and friends, then publicly. Eggeling was already in the hospital when the public première took place, and a few days later he died of syphilis. Early on however, an influential Berlin critic, Dr. Adolph Behne, had seen the experiments Richter and Eggeling were engaged in, and had written enthusiastically about them. His report was read by Theo van Doesburg who sent Richter a telegram informing him that he wanted to pay them a visit in Klein-Koelzig. He arrived for a threeday stay and remained three weeks. He recognized, of course, their affinity with the works of the De Stijl movement, which was already underway in the Netherlands.
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Viking Eggeling. Diagonal Symphony. 1924
In one of his more lucid statements of the idea of inner necessity, Kandinsky wrote: “Thus it is clear that the harmony of forms can only be based upon the purposeful touching of the human soul. This is the principle we have called the principle of internal necessity”. (Kandinsky 1994: 65) Or, making the same point, when discussing color harmony: “The artist is the hand that purposefully sets the soul vibrating by this or that key. Thus it is clear that the harmony of colors can only be based upon the principle of purposefully touching the human soul. This is the principle of internal necessity”. (Kandinsky 1994: 160) The principle that emerges is that a work of art should be constructed so as to move the soul towards some good; this was a principle that Eisenstein was to reformulate in materialist terms with the help of Pavlov Bechterev and Sechenov’s psychology. In the context of his discussion of internal necessity, Kandinsky, too, referred to the Goethean concept of Generalbaß. Kandinsky thought of the Generalbaß as a worked-out, reasoned and conscious mode of composing colors and forms that would ensure that
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the spectator’s soul was stirred toward the good the artist had in mind. It was just this belief that led Kandinsky to conclude Über das Geistige in der Kunst (On the Spiritual in Art) with this paragraph: In conclusion, I would remark that in my opinion we are approaching the time when a conscious, reasoned system of composition will be possible, when the painter will be proud to be able to explain his works in constructional terms (as opposed to the Impressionists who were proud of the fact that they were unable to explain anything). We see already before us an age of purposeful creation, and this spirit in painting stands in direct, organic relationship to the creation of a new spiritual realm that is already beginning, for this spirit is the soul of the epoch of the spiritual. (Kandinsky 1994: 219).
One sees that in Kandinsky’s mind, too, the opposition between reason and the spirit (magic) is not one of stark antithesis. The belief that the Universelle Sprache would permit the ascetic and disciplined presentation of the subject, wherein reason would triumph over feeling, led Eggeling to a belief in the transcendent character of art. Eggeling proposed that visual art could become the ideal form of expression, and might even supplant ordinary language in many of its uses – that it could become the embodiment of the perfection that humans heretofore had been able to conceive, but were unable to realize because of the hold the concept of representation had on earlier mentalities. All in all Eggeling was skeptical of representation, for he maintained that representations could not directly communicate a particular state of mind to an audience since viewers’ responses are contaminated by their preconceived notions. He searched for a way that would allow artists to convey a precise quality of experience, so precise that artists could think of it as impersonal, objective and universal. His practical programme for freeing the visual arts from biased perceptions led him to abstraction, for he believed that, to accomplish the goal of direct communication, visual constructions must be freed from the concepts we associate with particular objects. To this end, Eggeling began the investigation of the pure visual phenomena: line thickness, orientation, curvature, texture, etc.; he also began to explore the systematic variation of these attributes in constructions that used lines and curves and the simple derivations of them (e.g., semi-circles, triangles and quadrilaterals). By limiting his elements to forms belonging to this set, by avoiding representation, and by working only with neutrals,
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Eggeling strove to discover the means to preserve the purity of the message transmitted to the viewer. Richter maintained similar beliefs. In his essay ‘Prinzipielles zur Bewegungskunst’ Richter set out the following precepts concerning the essential attributes of art: Art is a human language that requires definite elements as an ‘alphabet’; it consists of an abstract ‘form-language’ (Form-Sprache) through which the pure relations that forms bear to each other can be investigated; it is not the identifying characteristics of the natural objects that are of interest, but the pure material of artistic forms; a composition arises dialectically, as a constructive process based on polarities that evoke tension and release; a work of art contains relations based on contrast, which are visible, and relations based on analogy, which can be experienced only spiritually; a work of art strives for a synthetic solution of rhythmic unification (rhythmische Einheitlichkeit). His Demonstration der Universalen Sprache proposed that both organic and inorganic elements in analogic relations are stipulated by metaphysical laws or truth of a higher order. The language Richter used was redolent of that of UNOVIS. Richter declared that when artists apprehend these metaphysical truths, through intuition, their artistic production falls into conformity with universal principles that apply to all arts. “Art serves as a realization of a higher unity […] the completion of individuality in a higher form of organization”, he wrote. Richter too, like Eggeling, described artworks as having a transcendental function, for an artwork detaches itself from the natural object in order to approach, through humans’ determined striving, the further side of awareness and experience. With the help of universal principles, the standardized language would speak of a higher form of organization, a harmonized and conflict-free condition, an effectively static and nonhuman condition. Art effects a synthesis of intuition and rational will, chaos and order. This synthesis allows “the truth of the chaotic to be expressed […] but it is controlled by will: the manifest law – as far as it really expresses just that, is not improvised”. (Richter 1998: 209) When artists intuit these laws or truths, a will for manifestation supervenes. This will commands a rhythmic structure and that rhythmic form serves as a higher law for the material the artist shapes. When artists form material in conformity with a rhythmic structure, the material produces apt results, and the work is therefore full of sense.
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Film played an important role in shaping these ideas. Evidence of this can be found in a key passage in which Richter proclaimed that kinetic art could be singled out as the art of the future, for kinetic art promised a new cultural reality, in which movement would be identified with progress. Through artists’ efforts, kinetic art would be re-oriented. Rather than being concerned with what is effective – that is, rather than being directed towards producing particular emotions – it would aim at bringing about transcendental experience. In the new cultural reality that kinetic art would bring about, humankind would be functionally integrated in a superindividual collective that would negate the singular being of individual persons. Richter marked the universality of the objectivizing gestures that constitute this language by expelling all intelligible verbal and visual signs and making use only of elementary geometric forms. Because the elements of this language are without intrinsic significance, no preconceptions are invoked; the syntax of the Universelle Sprache undertakes the task of combining these elements into a rhythmic composition and thereby drawing the elements into a higher domain. Rhythm would do the work of fusing the elements into a unity. The principle of polarity inherent in the rhythm sublates the contradiction between these elements, rendering them comprehensible. Richter’s idea of rhythm was expansive: “The rhythm of a work is identical with the idea of the whole. Rhythm is that which conveys ideas, that which runs through the whole: its meaning = principle, from which each individual work derives its significance. Rhythm is not a definitive, regular sequence of time and space; it is the unity which ties all the parts into a whole”. (As cited in Maur 1999: 57; Grey 1971: 136.) “Rhythm refers to the metaphysical domain of belief and truth. We experience rhythm intuitively. Rhythm is inwardness. Rhythm is the power of nature. Rhythm it is that forms and animates incommunicable ideas, and through which we are bound to the elementary forces of nature”. (As cited in Wolf 1989: 19) Because the forming process depends on unifying contrasting forms by rhythm, the will-to-form is grounded in emotions as well. “The emotional power of form leads to rhythm as the essence of emotional expression”, Richter stated, referring to the form of expression concerned with supra-individualistic, transcendent feeling.
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(Hans Richter, ‘Rhythm,’ cited in Wolf 1989: 19) In the end, though, the purity of rhythm draws artistic form into a higher, trans-individual domain. The inner sense of a linguistic form cannot be grasped literally or symbolically; we can only experience it in process. Such was Richter’s basis for arguing that rhythm belongs to a domain beyond the rational. “Rhythm expresses something different from thought”, Richter stated. (Wolf 1989: 19) Thought coheres on an intellectual/conceptual plane of communications and concepts; semiotic practices are its proper territory. Rhythm coheres on a plane that is more rudimentary.
Goethe as Precursor Not only was Goethe responsible for pointing out the need for a Generalbaß der Malerei, his Zur Farbenlehre (Theory of Colors, 1810) provided a model for working out its form. There are several parallels between Eggeling/Richter’s ideas about form generally and, in particular, between their ideas about color contrast and color harmony, and Goethe’s ideas on the same subjects. Goethe challenged Newton’s assumption that color was an intrinsic property of light. Against Newton, Goethe contended that color emerged as a condition of light’s environment. Colored light seems darker than colorless light, and Goethe would not deny his intuitive sense that an amalgam of darker luminous materials cannot make a lighter one. Goethe’s science, which the Theosophist/Anthroposophist Rudolf Steiner did so much to restore to public attention, was empirical, but empirical in an extended sense of that term. Goethe assumed that experience could reveal what brings forth the phenomenal realities that belong to the visible world of ordinary experience. Goethe outlined the conditions under which observation might produce insight, recommending “exakte sinnliche Phantasie” (exact sensorial imagination) as an active and deep participation with the phenomena. There should be no addition, no speculation, no agenda or desire to adjust observations to represent them as being other than what close scrutiny reveals them to be. Like Galileo and Newton, Goethe looked for experimental procedures that allowed him to undertake a systematic examination of natural phenomena. He did not assume, however, that only the quantifiable attributes of these phenomena were germane to constructing scientific theories. Goethe’s
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science, in keeping with the spirit of his times, was a science of generative processes. To discover the inward truth about natural processes and the forms they produce, one looked for means of exploring the generative process that produces a variety of observed forms, all of which, these philosophers assumed, are different expressions of its underlying nature. Thus, in one famous section of his scientific writings, Goethe considered the process by which one comes to understand the development of leaf forms. To understand this process, we lay out samples of the leaf’s development in a temporal sequence, from the oldest, most basal leaves to the newest, most apical leaves. Examining the sequence carefully we see the various leaves differ markedly, but mental sight enables us to link the forms of several different leaves into a smooth, continuous metamorphosis that takes us from one form to another. As our attention passes from leaf to leaf, we realize that there is no one representative leaf or ideal leaf, but a fluid spectrum of shapes. The sequence of forms is an integral process, characterized by necessity. This wholeness would be disturbed if we were to change the order in which the leaves are displayed. We begin to experience the dramatic movements of plant growth by entering into our imaginations. Goethe understood exakte sinnliche Phantasie as an active process that, as understanding develops, results in our merging ourselves with the phenomenon being studied. Through the imagination, one can intuitively and non-invasively come to an understanding of how the plant grows. This experience reveals a unique ‘gesture,’ a movement characteristic of the plant, telling us who it is as it dances its way into being. Theosophists would say this experience attunes us to the ‘deva’ of the plant. Goethe stressed that one had to start with the actual phenomenon and, opposing the dominant scientific methods of his time, he asserted that one cannot distance oneself from participation in nature if one wants to uncover its underlying truth. Goethe’s science seeks to participate in this gesture of organisms, and it is this experience that shows us the ‘inner necessity’ of the growing plant. (Likewise, to experience the morphological transformations in, say Viking Eggeling’s DiagonalSymphonie fully, we must experience the inner necessity generating the transformations). As concerns color experience, Goethe happened upon an experiment that allowed him to study color systematically. This
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experiment involved examining the spectrum produced by a prism held up to a horizontal boundary dividing a light area from a dark area. When he held the prism with the corner up, against a boundary dividing a dark area above from a light area below, Goethe could see colors from the blue range of the spectrum: from the top down, the colors were violet, indigo, and blue. If he reversed the prism so that a side was at the top, he saw something different: the dark area and the light area below were reversed, so there was a light area above and a dark area below. He also saw a complementary range of colors (from top down, the colors were yellow, orange and red). Moreover, no green occurred in either experiment. On the other hand, when he placed two black cards on a white card, one card over the top part of the white card, the other over the bottom part, and positioned them so as to form a horizontal slit of white between the black areas, and viewed this through a prism positioned with a corner at the top, then he could see colors from violet to red, with green in the middle. When he placed two white cards on a black card, leaving a strip of black between the white surfaces, he saw a reversed series of colors, with yellow at the top and blue at the bottom. Goethe looked for a pattern in these phenomena and noted that the warm colors (red, orange and yellow) appeared at dark borders on a light background and that the cold colors (blue indigo and violet) appeared at light borders on a dark background. These observations are difficult to explain using Newtonian principles, as is the failure to see green in the first pair of trials. Like Kant, Schelling and Hegel’s philosophies, Goethe’s science was one of polarities. For Goethe, the visible and invisible world, light and dark, spirit and matter, are the interacting constituents of a single reality. Goethe’s Zur Farbenlehre also posited certain polarities as fundamental to the experience of color. Of these, the polarity of black and white is most important, since black and white strips could form all the colors of the spectrum. Goethe observed that when one looked at a clear white surface or a clear blue sky through a prism, one did not see a spectrum of light. However, if a slight spot interrupted the white surface or a cloud appeared in the sky, then one saw a burst of color. From this, Goethe concluded that it is “the interchange of light and shadow” that causes colors to be seen. But how does a shadow produce colors?
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Against Newton’s idea of the spectrum, Goethe noted first that color appears only when light and dark come together. Newton maintained that the appearance of color depends on chemical pigmentation and that the absence of light alone causes color to appear. Darkness, in Newton’s theory, is simply the absence of light. According to Newton, bodies absorb light according to their pigmentation. He believed this explained why it is impossible to mix colors on a palette to produce white. Goethe asserted, to the contrary, that color is produced by the interaction of light and dark and that both the source of light and the source of darkness are real phenomena, so color is really ‘troubled light.’ Goethe considered the appearance of colors at the borders between dark and light to be simply the effect of darkening areas of light and of lightening dark areas. One of Goethe’s principal concerns in formulating his theory of color was to develop a consistent understanding of our subjective responses to color, of the feelings we experience from different colors, what he called the “sinnlich-sittliche Wirkung der Farbe” (the “sensual-moral effects of color”, whose effectivity he explained by considering color mainly as sensual qualities within the contents of consciousness). Goethe’s interest in these effects reflects his belief that mind and matter develop out of the same matrix. The mind is active in perception, Goethe maintained. It does not simply record visual sensory input, but helps shape perception. The imagination (by which Goethe means a faculty for the inner re-creation of the phenomenon, not for engendering a fantasy about it) plays a role in forming the perception. His analysis of color therefore straddled the domains of physics and psychology. Goethe believed there is a consistent relation between the processes in nature that produce color and our experience of their feeling quality. Therefore, these experiences are the basis of a reliable knowledge about the process that forms the phenomenon. Experience arises from the whole process, which goes on within us and beyond us and includes both outer circumstance and its inner resonances. (Richter reiterated this idea when he proposed the idea that grounded his belief in the universality of the Universelle Sprache, that “nature + mind are not opposites. The one completes itself in the other. The law lies above them”. (Richter 1998: 209) The consistent relationships organisms have to their environments reflect reality. Consequently, consistent emotional responses to physical processes are unlikely to be arbitrary.
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This recognition provides a reason for taking these ‘inner’ responses and qualitative experiences as indicators of the process experienced. In Über die Einteilung der Farben und ihr Verhältnis gegen einander (On the Order of Colors and Their Relationship to Each Other), Goethe attempted to establish that only yellow and blue are totally pure colors. Yellow has the effect of brightness, of being ‘next to light,’ and blue, the effect of darkness, of being ‘next to blackness.’ All other colors can be grouped between these. Blue can be intensified to purple, yellow to orange-red. Red and purple together give magenta, which epitomizes the strong side of colors, and yellow and blue together give green, which epitomizes the weak side of color. Thus, colors can be arranged into a color circle. Red is the highest augmentation of colors leading from yellow to blue, and green, which results from the mixing of yellow and blue, lies opposite it on the circle. The circle is completed by orange on the ascending side and by blue-red on the descending side. Goethe suggested there is a systematic order to the effects of colors that can be disclosed by sectioning a number of triangles out of the color circle. Among the triangles he identified are a triangle of primaries (red, yellow, and blue) and a triangle of secondaries (purple, green, and orange). Perhaps the most important triangle, however, concerns these emotional effects of color, colors can be arranged on the basis of their sensual-moral effect into a triangle whose vertices are marked by force, sanguinity or melancholy. Red is arousing and passionate, as red reflects our own fires being lit as external light darkens. Blue is uplifting, calming, peaceful and contemplative, for blue represents the lightening of darkness – lightening the mood to feelings of serenity and also gives a feeling of coldness. Yellow has a splendid and noble effect, making a warm and comfortable impression. Green is alive and vibrant. Red, Goethe also noted, results from a darkening of light, thus, the sun’s light is darkened by the increasing depth of atmosphere through which its light travels as the sun sinks in the evening, while the blue of the sky results from the effect of sunlight being scattered by the earth’s atmosphere, a scattering that lightens the darkness of space. The part of the circle that runs from yellow through orange to red Goethe referred to as the plus side, and its continuation through green and purple into blue he referred to as the minus side. There are, accordingly, three basic pairs of opponent hues: red/green, orange/blue and yellow/purple. Generally, the colors on the plus side
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of the circle induce an exciting, lively, aspiring mood, while the colors on the minus side, “create an unsettled, weak and yearning feeling.” Those familiar with Steiner’s writings on color will note that Goethe’s commentary on the sensual-moral effects of particular colors is quite at variance with those of Rudolf Steiner and the Theosophists, who considered blue (for example) as being the most spiritual color. Goethe’s interest in the ‘subjective,’ sensual-moral effect of color seems at odds with his desire to create a science of color, as we usually consider subjective associations to be individual and idiosyncratic and, therefore, unreliable as indicators of the real character of physical processes. Yet these sensual-moral effects of color were a primary concern of Goethe’s color theory, and many people believe that studying the effect of individual colors “on the sense of the eye […] and the eye’s imparting on the mind” were the primary purpose of Goethe’s study of color. Goethe’s analysis of the sensual-moral effects of color was an attempt to bring order to color’s more chaotic, aesthetic aspects. Color could be powerful, or gentle and/or radiant. If yellow, yellow-red and purple predominate, the effect will be of power. If blue or its neighbors predominate, the effect will be of something gentle. If all colors are in equilibrium, a harmonious coloration will arise which can produce radiance and pleasantness. Despite the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein’s comment, in Bemerkungen über die Farben that “[er zweifelte], daß Goethes Bemerkungen über die Charaktere der Farben für einen Maler nützlich sein können. Kaum für einen Dekorateur”, Goethe did give advice to artists about using combinations, whether characteristic combinations, harmonic combinations or complementary colors. For example, he recommended the use of complementary colors to help separate costumes from the scenery. The practical thrust of Goethe’s color theory was probably an inspiring example for Eggeling and Richter in their efforts to develop a scientific theory of visual form. Kandinsky’s theory of colors was modeled on Goethe’s momentous Zur Farbenlehre. Kandinsky’s approach was similarly methodical – he asserted that when one concentrates on color in isolation, and allows one to be affected by single colors, one is able to couch the question about color in the simplest possible terms. The two great divisions, which at once become obvious, are: 1. warmth or coldness of a colour.
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2. lightness or darkness of a colour. In this way, for every colour there are four main sounds [vier Hauptklänge]: (I) warm, and either (1) light, or (2) dark; or (II) cold, and either (1) light, or (2) dark […] In the most general terms, the warmth or coldness of a colour is due to its inclination toward yellow or toward blue. This is a distinction that occurs, so to speak, within the same plane, whereby the colour retains its basic tonality, but this tonality becomes more material or more immaterial. It is a horizontal movement, the warm colours moving in this horizontal plane in the direction of the spectator, striving toward him; the cold, away from him. […] The second great contrast is the difference between white and black, i.e., those colours that produce the other opposing pair, which together make up the four main possibilities of tone: the inclination of the colour toward light or dark. These also have the same movement toward or away from the spectator, although not in dynamic, but in static, rigid form. (Kandinsky 1994: 177-9)
In fact, Kandinsky had set out to develop a grammar for visual art that cast syntax as the arbiter of meaning, just as Eggeling and Richter did. In Kandinsky’s formal syntax, the concept of opposition plays the key role – similar to the role that the idea of Kontrast-Analogie plays in Eggeling and Richter’s Universelle Sprache. For Kandinsky, the fundamental polarity is that between the circle and the triangle; their interaction creates a mysterious pulsation. In this opposition, the triangle plays the role of an active or aggressive element, while the circle plays a role that suggests interiority and spiritual depth. Mediating between the triangle and the circle is a third elemental form, the square, which evokes feelings of peace and calm. The circle brings together opposing characteristics, e.g., the concentric and the eccentric, in a dynamic equilibrium. When this union of opposites goes to its furthest extreme and the opposites are brought together in an absolute identity, the circle becomes a point, the Indifferenzpunkt of Schelling’s philosophy of identity, where the invisible becomes visible. “In geometry, the point is an invisible entity. It must, therefore, be defined as a nonmaterial being. Thought of in material terms, the point resembles a naught. […] Thus, the geometrical point is, in our imagination, the ultimate and most singular combination of silence and speech”. (Kandinsky 1994: 538) Speech, too, he understood as form and silence as formless. In asserting that the point marks the identity of speech and silence, Kandinsky suggests that art
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emerges at the point where form passes over into, or fuses with formlessness, the point where it becomes possible for an artistic form to articulate what lies beyond form, the point where vibrations become still. The directions in which artist and Bauhaus teacher Johannes Itten took Goethe’s color theory tell us much about what the early abstract filmmakers, and avant-garde artists of the early twentieth century generally, must have found in the great writer’s scientific work. Itten developed a twelve-part color wheel that, because it was practicable and rational, won wide acceptance, both by practicing artists and by teachers. Itten hoped to find a way to harness the richness of the rainbow, with its inestimably large range of colors, and to use it to extend the restricted and more controlled palette of traditional pigments. He explored color mixtures, as well as some of the optical effects that had intrigued Goethe. Itten’s color system also served as a color-music code whose character reflected Itten’s Mazdaznan beliefs. Rather than using Newton’s spectral progression of ROYGBIV, Itten chose the painters’ standard color wheel. The primaries and the secondaries were supplemented by six intermediate hues to form a twelve-color system, one color for each of the semitone notes of the musical scale. Itten also believed that different colors have different spiritual values. This belief that colors have spiritual value was common in the late nineteenth and early twentieth-century’s art circles. A Miss Georgina Houghton, for example, claimed that spirits worked through her to choose her colors according to their meanings. The catalogue of her painting exhibition of 1871 in London laid out their meanings: Houghton started her list with the primaries red, yellow and blue, which she claimed stood for the Father, Son and Holy Ghost. From there she went on to offer other precise, if extravagant, associations. Burnt sienna, for example, represented Clearness of Judgment. Itten offered moral equations for color mixtures. The mix of red and blue that gave violet is equivalent to the combination of love and faith needed for piety.
Kandinsky, Eggeling and Richter: Color as Feeling, Rhythm as Form Eggeling and Richter’s ideas about color and form were influenced by Blavatsky, Steiner, Leadbetter and, above all, Kandinsky, especially his version of Goethe’s color theory. In fact, Richter embarked on the
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project of understanding, and developing, Goethean ideas about color before embarking on his final rhythm film, Rhythmus 25. Like Goethe, he understood color as the product of opposites interacting and proclaimed there to exist only a single pair of primary colors: red and green.
Hans Richter, study for Rhythmus 25, colored pencil, pencil on paper, 1923 The scientifically denominated elementary colours, blue, red and yellow, do not have, esthetically speaking, an absolute distance from each other. Red and yellow are nearer (warm); blue is the opposite of yellow as well as of red, whereas green and red are incomparably unequal to each other. And if you want to use technical measure, green and red are together, black. All other colours I consider more or less variations. (Richter 1971: 85)
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Rhythm in painting was often understood as a temporal form – Richter himself did not propose that view, but some of his contemporaries did. They also likened rhythm to color. The American Synchromist Morgan Russell (1886-1953) remarked: In order to solve the problem of a new painterly structure, we have considered light as tightly linked chromatic waves and devoted closer study to the harmonic combinations among the colors. These ‘color rhythms’ lend a painting a temporal dimension; they create the illusion of the painting developing over a period of time, like a piece of music. (As cited in Maur 1999: 48)
Around 1925, just a short time after Hans Richter began working on scrolls, Carl Buchheister’s (1890-1964), one of Richter’s Constructivist/Dada colleagues, produced elongated, almost scroll-like paintings whose titles identify music and visual art, for example Konstruktive Komposition mit Dreiklang Gelb-Rot-Blau, (Constructive Composition with Three Sounds Yellow-Red-Blue). A few years later, in 1929, he offered this observation: Rhythm is the essence of abstract artworks […] a good abstract image is born out of inner necessity [note the Kandinskian expression], the rhythmic structure of a good abstract image is in harmony with the rhythmic events of nature. It is a layperson’s task gradually to make itself familiar with the inner necessity of abstract images sensed through the exercise of the rhythmic feelings”. (As cited in Maur 1985/96: 148)2
Rhythm, then, experienced through exakte Phantasie, allows us to apprehend the unifying force of inner necessity, a unifying force that pervades the artwork and the cosmos alike. Kupka maintained a similar view so he created a ‘two-part composition,’ one part in red, the other in blue, whose parts converge and diverge (that is, they develop through time), as the parts of a fugue do. The effect Kupka apparently desired was to present the dance of cosmic rhythms. By the beginning of the twentieth century, the relations between painting, music and time had become a key issue among artists. Richter’s interest in rhythm is associated with similar ideas about vibration. Standish D. Lawder, following up on Richter’s remarks, offered the following comment on Rhythmus 21:
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Richter’s first film, Rhythm 21, was a kinetic composition of rectangular forms of black, grey, and white. Perhaps more than in any other avant-garde film, it uses the movie screen as a direct substitute for the painter’s canvas, as a framed rectangular surface on which a kinetic organization of purely plastic forms was composed. For, normally, the movie screen is perceived as a kind of window, more or less arbitrarily circumscribed, and behind which an illusion of space appears; in Rhythm 21, by contrast, it is a planar surface activated by the forms upon it. Thus, its forms, like those of an abstract painting, seem to have no physical extension except on the screen, nor do we sense their lateral extension beyond the limits of the screen as is usually the case in images created by camera vision. The film is a totally self-contained kinetic composition of pure plastic forms. (Lawder 1975: 49-50)
In the final two sentences of this passage, Lawder interprets the significance of Richter’s recasting the role of the screen surface in an orthodox modernist fashion (hence the allusion to De Stijl at its end). He is not wrong in this: some years after making Rhythmus 21, Richter made a similar point. The simple [square] of the movie screen could easily be divided and orchestrated by using the rectangle of the cinema-canvas as my field of pictorial vision. Parts of the screen could then be moved against each other. Thus it became possible on this cinema-canvas to relate (both by contrast and analogy) the various movements to each other. So I made my paper rectangles and squares grow and disappear, jump and slide in well-articulated time-spaces and planned rhythms. (Richter 1965: 29)
But there is more to Richter’s recasting of the role that the screen surface plays than either Richter or Lawder allows: the screen is treated as it is because Richter conceived of it as a surface that could be set into dynamic motion, that could be made to pulsate and vibrate.
Rhythmus 21 and the Generalbaß der Malerei The Generalbaß provided Richter with a schema for understanding the relations between music and painting. His first film, Rhythmus 21, involved expanding and contracting forms on a black or white background in a contrapuntal interplay. Much of the tension of the film results from the way that background forms develop into foreground figures and foreground elements turn into background,
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much as the lines in a polyphonic composition do. Richter, following Eggeling, used the term ‘Kontrast-Analogie’ to refer to this ambiguity of the spatial illusion. The use of both negative and positive footage heightens that ambiguity: in the negative footage a dark shadow form, a form that suggests that one figure is raised above the other, sometimes marks the edges of figures. As in the other Rhythmus films, in this work Richter created a distinctive abstract genre. As Richter and Lawder (1975) have noted, in these films, the cinema screen is treated like a painter’s canvas that is activated by the white, black and grey geometric shapes projected upon it. Like the other Rhythmus films, the work is an autotelic kinetic composition of pure plastic forms. Lines turn into oblong shapes, which collide with squares that grow out of darkness, and curves become circles. Individual forms wax and wane, expand and shrink. Their movements create a sense of spatial ambiguity. The film’s fundamental structural principle is the counterpointing of contrasting pairs. Wipes from black to white are answered by wipes from white to black and similar forms move in contrasting vertical or horizontal or diagonal direction, according to regulated rhythm, a rhythm that is less that of regular succession in time that the coordinated movement of parts. For Richter, artistic form reflects the fact that the universe manifests itself in harmonic configurations and rhythmically organized compositions. The fluidity of the movements and their precise co-ordination create a remarkable harmony. Although Richter embraced the fundamental tenet of the Universelle Sprache, that principles regarding contrasting elements hold in all visual media, his experience in filmmaking led him to the conclusion that additional laws – laws that did not apply in painting – also had a role in filmmaking. The difference between the two media, Richter determined, resulted from the fact that the events in a film unfold in a fixed, regulated, invariable time, while the spectators’ attention moves from point to point in a painting in a less regulated time and in an order that is not invariant from one spectator to another. Further, in film, single forms had hardly any importance: only the relation of one form to another in time matters. Time had a different character in film and it was time, Richter realized, that must govern the forms of film.
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Notes:
1
Christina Lodder emphasizes this in ‘El Lissitzky and the Export of Constructivism’ (Perloff and Reed 2003: 27-46). There is more to be said: Maria Gough does a fine job of proving that El Lissitzky considered his Proun Room (Berlin, Große Berliner Kunstausstellung, 1923), his Raum für konstruktive Kunst, (for the Jubiläums-Gartenbau-Ausstellung, Dresden, 1926), and his Kabinett der Abstrakten (1927-8, for Hanover) to unfold a reasoned argument, as Sergei Eisenstein believed montage was capable of doing. This is why he referred to these projects as Demonstrationsräume. Lissitzky’s works are essentially paracinematic works, she shows. Like Sergei Eisenstein, Lissitzky formulated means to transform the spectator from a passive consumer to an active participant, but while Eisenstein used cinematic means, Lissitzky used paracinematic means. See Gough, ‘Constructivism Disoriented: El Lissitzky’s Dresden and Hanover Demonstrationsräume’ in Perloff and Reed 2003: 77-125. 2 Quoted in Maur 1985/96: 148. Translation mine. Note: in the original publication, all words except the first appear in small letters.
Primary works consulted Eggeling, Viking. 1921 [1966]. ‘Elvi fejtegetések a mozgómüvészetrö’ in MA No. VIII (Vienna) in O’Konor, Louise: ‘The Film Experiments of Viking Eggeling’: Cinema Studies 2(2): 26-31. Delaunay, R. 1912 [1968]. ‘Light’ in Chipp, Herschel B. (ed.) Theories of Modern Art. Berkeley: University of California Press: 319. Kandinsky, W. 1994. Kandinsky: Complete Writings on Art. K.C. Lindsay and P. Vergo (eds): New York: Da Capo. Klee, P. 1957. Tagebücher von Paul Klee 1898-1918: DuMont Dokumente Band 1. Texte und Perspektiven. F. Klee (ed.). Köln: DuMont Schauberg. Lissitzky, E. 1922 [1980]. ‘The New Russian Art: A Lecture’ in LissitzkyKüppers, S: El Lissitzky: Life, Letters, Texts. (tr. H. Aldwinckle and M. Whittall). London: Thames & Hudson: 334-344. Lissitsky et.al. 1922 [1974]. ‘Statement by the Editors of Veshch’/Gegenstand/Objet’ in Bann. S. (ed.) The Tradition of Constructivism: The Documents of 20th-Century Art. New York: Viking. (The declaration was largely written by Lissitzky): 63-64. Lissitzky, E. and I. Ehrenburg. 1922. ‘Die Blockade Russlands geht ihrem Ende entgegen’ in Veshch’/Gegenstand/Objet: 1-2. Moholy-Nagy, László. 1933. ‘A festéktôl a fényig’ (From Pigment to Light). Korunk, 8(10): Kolozsvár: 231-37. Richter, Hans. 1922 [1967/1998]. ‘Köpfe und Hinterköpfe’ Zürich: Die Arche Verlag. Cited in Finkeldey, Bernd: ‘Hans Richter and the Constructivist
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International’ in Foster, S.C. (ed.) Hans Richter: Activism, Modernism, and the Avant-garde. Cambridge: MIT. —. 1924. ‘Der Konstruktivismus’ in G: Zeitschrift für elementare Gestaltung. No. 3. —. 1924b [1978]. ‘Die schlecht trainierte Seele’ in G – Zeitschrift für elementare Gestaltung. No. 1. (tr. M. Weaver) in Sitney, P.A. (ed.). The Avantgarde Film: A Reader of Theory and Criticism. New York: New York University Press. Translated pp. 22-23 as “The Badly Trained Sensibility” (though I should have preferred to see it called “The Badly Trained Soul”). My quotations in the following section of the text all come from this source. —. 1926 [1999]. ‘Rhythm’ in The Little Review. Winter 1926. Cited in Maur, K.v. The Sound of Painting: Music in Modern Art. (tr. J.W. Gabriel). New York: Prestel. —. 1952. ‘Easel–Scroll–Film’ in Magazine of Art. February 1952: 78-86. —. 1955 [1970]. ‘The Film as an Original Art Form’ First published in Film Culture 1, January. Reprinted in Sitney, P.A. (ed.): Film Culture Reader. New York: Praeger Publishers, Inc.: 15-16. —. 1965a. ‘My Experience with Movement in Painting and Film’ in Gyorgy Kepes (ed.): The Nature and Art of Motion. New York: Braziller: 142157. —. 1965b. Hans Richter, Monographie. Joray, M. (ed.). Neuchâtel: Editions du Griffon. —. 1971. Hans Richter by Hans Richter. Grey, C. (ed). New York: Hold, Rinehart and Winston. —. 1985. Dada Art and Anti-Art (tr. D. Britt). London: Thames and Hudson. —. 1998. ‘Demonstration of the “Universal Language” ’ in the Appendix of Foster, S. C. (ed.): Hans Richter: Activism, Modernism and the Avantgarde. Cambridge: MIT: 184-239.
Secondary works consulted Arp, J. 1938 [1959]. XXième Siècle, I; reprinted XXième Siècle, XXI(13). Bann, S. (ed.). 1974. The Tradition of Constructivism: The Documents of 20thCentury Art. New York: Viking. Bois, Y. 1990. ‘From -4 to 4: Axonometry, or Lissitzky’s Mathematical Paradigm’ in Debbaut, Jan et. al. Exhibition Catalog, El Lissitzky, 1890-1941: Architect, Painter, Photographer, Typographer. Eindhoven: Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum: 27-33. —. 1988. ‘El Lissitzky: Radical Reversibility’ in Art in America 76(4): 160-81. —. 1977. ‘Lissitzky, Malevich and the Question of Space’. Exhibition Catalog, Suprématisme. Paris: La Galerie: 29-48. Finkeldey, Bernd. 1998. ‘Hans Richter and the Constructivist International’ in Foster, Stephen C. (ed.) Hans Richter: Activism, Modernism and the Avant-Garde. Cambridge: MIT: 92-121. (The undated letter from Gert
Hans Richter and Viking Eggeling: The Dream of Universal Language and the Birth of The Absolute Film
Caden cited in the text is to Alfred Hirschbroek and is in the holdings of the Sächsische Landesbibliothek, Dresden: Handschriftensammlung, Nachlaß Caden, Provincial Library of Saxony, Collection of Handwritten Materials, Caden File.). Foster, Stephen C. (ed.). 1998. Hans Richter: Activism, Modernism and the Avant-garde. Cambridge: MIT. Grey, C. (ed.). 1971. Hans Richter by Hans Richter. New York: Holt, Rhinehart and Winston. Kiefner, V. 1989. ‘Analogien’ in Justin Hoffman et. al. Hans Richter: Malerei und Film: Ausstellung vom 24.2-23.4. Frankfurt am Main: Deutches Filmmuseum: 44-103. Lawder, S. D. 1975. The Cubist Cinema. New York: New York University Press. Lodder, C. 2003. ‘El Lissitzky and the Export of Constructivism’ in Perloff, N and B. Reed (eds) Situating El Lissitzky: Vitebsk, Berlin, Moscow. Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute: 27-46. Maur, K.v. (ed.) 1985 [1996]. Vom Klang der Bilder: Die Musik in der Kunst des 20. Jahrhunderts. Munich: Prestel. —. 1999. The Sound of Painting: Music in Modern Art. (tr. J.W. Gabriel). New York: Prestel. Mekas, Jonas (ed.). 1991. Swedish Avant-garde Film 1924-1990. New York: Anthology Film Archives. O’Konor, Louise. 1966. ‘The Film Experiments of Viking Eggeling’ in Cinema Studies 2(2): 26-31. Mondrian, Piet. 1993. The New Art – The New Life: The Collected Writings of Piet Mondrian. Holtzman, H. and M. S. James (eds): New York: Da Capo Press. Verkauf, Willy (ed.). 1957. Dada – Monograph of a Movement. London; Heiden: Tiranti. Wolf. E. (1989). ‘Von der universellen zur poetischen Sprache’ in Gehr, H. and M. von Hofacker (eds), Hans Richter: Malerei und Film: 16-23. * note: Eva Wolf’s statement, on p.16 of the Gehr book, that “Vom Pigment zu licht” appeared in a 1936 edition of Telehor, (edited by Kalivoda Frantisek, and published in Brno,) could not be verified. The Moholy-Nagy Foundation suggests that the article appeared as ‘A festéktôl a fényig’ (From Pigment to Light) in Korunk, issue 8(10). Kolozsvár: 231-37 in 1933. The article may have been reprinted in the 1936 edition of Telehor, but no evidence of this was found, therefore, in this bibliography, the 1933 version of the article is listed. See: http://www.moholy-nagy.org/Bibliography_3.html. Further, a reference by Wolf on p. 16, to a Moholy-Nagy article in De Stijl (Moholy-Nagy [1926-7] ‘Ein Fragment über den Elementarismus von van Doesburg’, in De Stijl, vol. XIII no. 7) may be inaccurate. The Moholy-Nagy article does not appear in the journal – nor in any issue of De Stijl – I’ve been through them.
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Frames and Windows: Visual Space in Abstract Cinema A.L. Rees Abstract: This article features the precursors of electronic imaging who worked in avant-garde film and video. It looks at numbers and screen geometry in the early abstract work of Hans Richter and Viking Eggeling, agreeing with Malcolm Le Grice that Diagonal Symphony was the first programmable film. It traces this lineage through to Len Lye's abstract color montage in the 1930s and to the systematic permutation of words and images in the structural film during the 1970s. These are linked to the new digital abstraction explored by contemporary artist filmmakers in the US and Europe. The article argues for a tradition of frame-based thinking for the screen that anticipates the computer, to assert an independent experimental approach to the shapes and structures generated by the classic film avant-gardes.
Switch on any computer and the screen fills with square or rectangular ‘windows’, which the user can move, overlay and even animate to provide and to compare information. Go back to the early experimental cinema of Hans Richter or Walther Ruttmann and you will find the same ‘form-language’ in which very similar graphic shapes are seen to advance, recede and transform on the screen1. These shapes and movements are the sole content of such films, which were made roughly between 1921 and 1925. Is this pattern of resemblance simply on the surface, with no other particular consequences, a more or less chance meeting between the ex-Dadaists of long-ago Berlin and the ex-hippies of Silicon Valley? Almost, but not quite, is a possible answer. For the graphic art of abstract animation, no surface is simply superficial, and forms do indeed speak. More historically, connections pass from the Cabaret Voltaire and Weimar Germany to New York and California in a not altogether broken line. But the line also loops back on itself, since Dada and radical Constructivism did not stop dead in the 1930s. NeoDada and Fluxus art of the 1960s play a part in the story, as does contemporary artists’ video today.
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A clear statement about the aesthetics of this history is made in David Hall’s WithouTV (1992), one of a series of minute-long video pieces commissioned from the artist by MTV. Shown repeatedly and at random by the music channel, these short works form part of Hall’s strategy of ‘intervention’, or interruption. In this example, a TV receiver is on a flat piece of grassy ground (in fact, near the now-emblematic site of Dungeness). The TV recedes and disappears, its space now framed by another TV set which replaces it. The process is repeated as a series of potentially infinite TVrecessions occur. The illusion of space is seen as both compelling and constructed. The final frame is coextensive with the real TV set in our own viewing-space, on which the work is shown. The first steps in the direction of the dynamic window-plane were taken with the experiments of Hans Richter and Walther Ruttmann in the 1920s. The very first attempts to make abstract art in the film medium took the form of designs and plans round 1912 (in the case of Picasso’s friend, the painter Henri Survage), and similar schemes (with some tentative try-outs which have not survived) by the Italian Futurists perhaps two years earlier. In almost all of these instances, which make up the lost ‘ur-cinema’ of abstraction, the effects seem to have been conceived as a series of overall surface shifts and transformations. Shapes that predominate include circles, curves, stars and spirals, often in a style close to symbolism. These ideas were in fact ahead of their time, even if – to later generations – the symbolic elements seemed to be regressive. Richter and Ruttmann, by contrast, who brought abstract cinema beyond the drawing board and who actually shot and projected abstract films, were more easily aligned with the high modernist tradition, the Bauhaus, the post-WW1 ‘age of isms’2 and hard-edge picture making. For a long time this gave them great kudos, before ‘formalism’ became a dirty word. They were already canonical in the 1920s, and became even more so when they were re-issued on the new 16mm experimental art film and underground circuit in Europe and the USA thirty or more years later. In fact, the story of their relation to high abstract modernism is even more complicated and intriguing. The early films re-issued in the 1940s by Hans Richter – then in the USA – are, in part, compilations of experiments whose origins go back to the Zürich Dada period of 1916/17. Around 1919/21 he was collaborating with the older Cubist artist Viking Eggeling on a series of scroll-drawings 3. Their aim was to reveal the development of
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forms when small changes were made to the content and shaping of the abstract image. This involved the idea of process, rather than the single statement of an over-all surface as, for example, in the influential paintings of Kandinsky. Consequently, the unfolding of the scrolls also implied an art of duration, just like film, and logically enough Richter and Eggeling focused their efforts on getting access to a movie camera. They sent out a battery of manifestos and statements and – it worked! With some limited but vital technical support, they made their first steps to the abstract film. A point to underline here is that one crucial stage in the invention of abstract cinema emerged from a Far-Eastern model of art – the scroll – and not from the bounded frame, which characterized mainstream Western art. There is also a crude analogy between the scroll unwinding in front of the viewer and the film moving from one reel to the other. A second point is that artists at the fringes of the industrial system had little chance to make a film. To make a film was, in fact, to engage with industrialization. Eggeling, a very pure artist, worked with a loaned camera, an occasional technician from the Askania Camera Company and, finally, a willing helper, Erna Niemeyer, a young Bauhaus student.4 His film was premiered shortly before his death in 1925, at a major screening of abstract film art under the auspices of UFA, the great German studios of the time5. Then, as now, industry was able to support a pure art form on the grounds that it constituted ‘research’. Malevich in Soviet Russia mounted the same argument to defend artistic experiment against the more practical demands of the State6. Like many filmmakers today, Richter was less troubled by these issues. By the mid to later 1920s he was making advertising films that mixed abstract and figurative styles, and was working on special effects for fiction films. But at the same time he was a loosely attached member of Brecht’s circle, promoting left-wing film clubs, proselytized for the artistic film and, when Hitler came to power in 1933, was actually shooting an experimental documentary in the USSR.7 The path to abstraction was by no means smooth. As a presumed compilation of the early trials, Richter’s Rhythm 23 is very much in mixed mode. Some of its linear drawing images seem to echo the Eggeling-inspired flatbed period, in which curved shapes transform but remain parallel to the picture-plane. Other non-linear squares and rectangles advance, overlap and recede, sometimes
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abruptly, in the spirit of the more accomplished but misleadingly dated – because probably later – Rhythmus 21 (the numbers refer to the year when Richter claimed the film was made).8 Werner Graeff, then a young artist and publicist for ‘the new art’, recalled many years later that Richter was still wrestling with the mysteries of aspect ratio, hand coloring and the mathematics of abstract motion in 1922 (Film As Film 1979: 80). Much of the material in the surviving films probably dates from 1923/4 rather than earlier, and we cannot be sure that they fully resemble their originals. Richter’s friend Graeff saw, with many others, that film was a kind of shock effect, an assault on the optical unconscious. Eisenstein in his “montage of attractions”, Walter Benjamin with his image of film as “dynamite at a tenth of a second”, Artaud and Buñuel in Surrealist cinema, all variously interpreted the violence of vision in the cinema. They believed this violence would be a powerful force to renew perception and interrogate the given world. For Graeff, writing in 1922, abstract film uses “elementary optical means” and techniques “to make powerful impressions of an almost physical nature (blows, ruptures, pressure etc) upon the spectator. The calculated alternation of partial and total surprises plays the major role in this process”. (Film as Film 1979: 81)
Rhythmus 21, 1921-28?, Hans Richter
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Now this was a road that Eggeling decisively did not take. A painter and musician at heart, for him film was an output medium; it was not in itself the goal. The goal was the depiction of movement and tonal shifts or contrasts across time in strict relation to the actual plane of vision – not the cinematic illusion of spatial depth crafted by Richter. Compare their titles: Diagonale Sinfonie for one, Rhythmus for the other. There is deliberately little obvious rhythm in Eggeling’s surviving work, and the film was to be played silent (a rare stipulation when there was almost always sound accompaniment to film projection). He paid more attention to rate of movement and change than to the rhythmic aspects of cinema explored by his fellowabstractionists. The question of music was, in some ways, displaced elsewhere – into the very construction of the work, its algorithmic and musically scored base.9
Diagonale Sinfonie, 1925, Viking Eggeling
The question of illusionistic depth can be similarly traced in the abstract film series Opus 1-4 (another musical offering is in the title) by Walther Ruttmann. Apart from Oskar Fischinger, Ruttmann was the most professional of these artists at this stage, as an animator working for Lang and Reiniger among others, and had corresponded with Fischinger on technical questions. Large parts of the symbolic battle between circles and squares in his four-part film series derive, in the period 1921-4, from a flat-and-frontal style, which stands for the painterly voice in early abstraction. It is only towards the later part of
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the series, and outstandingly in the magnificent Opus 4 (1925) that Ruttmann takes on the push/pull or advance-and-retreat formlanguage, which Richter had on his own account so painstakingly pioneered. For these later pieces, Ruttmann used what appear to be the major resources of the animation rostrum camera, and his visual effects are staggering in their control of space and – of course – rhythm. The screen seems to explode and pulsate as Ruttmann explores its dimensions through time, creating effects (especially of running vertical patterns) that recall today’s digital streaming. Like Richter, but even more powerfully, these films also treat the frame edge as an equal space to the now destabilized centre of the screen.
Film strip sequences from Opus 4, 1925, Walther Ruttmann
Seen on its own, as it often is, since it is the most widely circulated of the four Opus films, it makes Ruttmann look more of a hard-edge Constructivist or formalist than he probably was. The series actually began with Opus 1 on the flat plane, and flowing shapes moved over it. There was at first very little illusion of depth and dimension, and the preferred drawing style was definitely more ‘organic’ than machine-driven. It was arguably left to Richter to complete the process of combining organic and mechanistic ideas in the abstract
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film, in his own mixed-mode films of 1926-28. These combine figurative with abstract imaging, lightplay and objects, and incorporate the human presence directly. Here he took a great leap forward. The stumblings and (creative) crudities of the Rhythmus series are behind him. His grasp of visual space and logic is complete. Ruttmann completely abandoned the abstract cinema when he took over the direction of the seminal documentary Berlin: Die Sinfonie der Großstadt in 1927, literally fading abstraction out of the picture in the opening sequence of that film, as real shapes (railway tracks, telegraph poles) replace drawn ones (abstract lines and triangles). Only the title of the film recalls its distant origin in a concept of film art modeled on music. By contrast, Richter began to edit photographic and abstract images together, inventing a new form of montage which not only culminates in the avant-garde as a lyric form but also – he might have been pleased to learn – pioneers the music and promo video of our own time in such films as Inflation (1928). But the key film in this context is arguably his Film Study of 1926, which cuts together the, by now, well-honed and elegant pictorial grammar of abstract shapes with a range of camera-shot images. These include labor (a man hammering, linked to an abstract wedge of light), nature (flocks of seabirds in backward motion or inverted, linked to circles), and the eye (floating and superimposed artificial eyes, a metaphor for viewing). Negative footage similarly asserts the distinctiveness of the film medium. It is perhaps not such a big jump to see if more recent films and videos reveal whether or not the same form-language still flourishes. Richter nuanced the idea of form in film when he said that there was, strictly speaking, no form in his earliest abstractions: I mean that by taking the whole movie screen, pressing it together and opening it up, top, bottom, sides, right, left, you don’t perceive form any more, you perceive movement. [… The definition of form refers to one’s perception of the formal quality of a single object, or several single objects; but when you repeat this same form over and over again and in different positions, then the relationship between the positions becomes the thing to be perceived, not the single or individual form. One doesn’t see the form or object any more but rather the relationship. In this way, you see a kind of rhythm. (Richter, 1971: 132 and Le Grice 1976: 26)
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Repetition and rhythm, rather than pure form, are indeed hallmarks of George Barber’s Scratch Free State (1983), in which abstract blocks and squares of color float over the found-footage that comprises most of this early ‘Scratch’ video (i.e. reassembled from other films and TV material). The floating areas add an overtonal or contrasting montage to the video-mix, which mostly fills the screen; inset birds in flight (shades of the pigeons and gulls in Film Study) are imposed on underwater shots, for example. Here, the soundtrack is an overt part of the composition as a whole, but as with most of scratch video, it is also selected from existing rock music rather than specially composed – which has a slight degree of throwback to improvised live accompaniments in the so-called silent cinema. In this case the soundtrack is disco, in defiance of overly high-art conventions. On the other hand, this work stands in the lineage of artists’ video, rather than the more political side of Scratch (as David Hall recognized very early). Its title may echo Mick Hartney’s 1970’s Orange Free State, but more importantly this video also directly incorporates the typical abstract shapes of the early avant-garde as a part of the graphic overlaid mix that curtains the screen. This abstract veil interrupts the full view of the movie clips behind them, and disrupts their narrative as much as the rhythmic ‘cut-up’ effect of rapid montage. Over a decade later, the Greek-born videomaker Vinsky (Nikolas Tzaferidis) records a journey from Kent to London, where he rapid-shoots the city streets (machine-ing, 1996/7). That, at least, is one half of the visual story. Certainly the images are recognizable – they record a fragmented walk through the city – but over them, parallel to the picture plane and defying the illusionist depth of the image, there runs a second stream of shapes made up of grids, striations, shifting lines like a graph, information coded by the camera itself. The act of mapping the image is here literalized, using the formworld of the early abstract cinema but now digitally coded. The film comments not just on its own making but on its own viewing. The fracture of sight and angle, and the logic of movement, is anchored in post-Cubist abstract film. A third example is video artist Steve Littman’s color-grid ‘homage’ to Hans Richter – and Piet Mondrian – called Digital Boogie-Woogie (1997). Smoothly flowing rectangles and lines, initially in black and white, become filled with subtle color over the
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ten minutes of its duration. More than any other work discussed here, this video makes the point that is central to the argument.
Digital Boogie-Woogie, 1997, Stephen Littman
These grids and tracks, which so disconcertingly resemble the formworld of Richter and Ruttmann, are the underlying digital matrix of a wholly figurative work, Predatory Cats/Selfish Diva (1997). Delightful in a different way, this piece shows a pigeon – that bird again! – matted onto a complex series of interlocking spaces which seem to offer food and protection. The pigeon, a kind of pocket-sized Tantalus, can never get at the tempting objects around it. This short work, on the edge of symbolic meaning, is transformed into the equally rich language of abstraction by means of the technology that produced it. The notion of the matrix, a very powerful contemporary icon of the production of meaning and affect from the hard-line visual arts to the soft-bellied commercial cinema via color printing, is a related story. Ultimately it is a mathematical concept, but in Littman’s video it takes on abstract visual status through the transformation of rhythm. A different and astonishingly forward-looking use of mathematical system is seen in the Austrian filmmaker Peter
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Kubelka’s Adebar, made in 1957. Kubelka was then part of a group of artists who combined the expressive vigor of the painter Arnulf Rainer (a Kubelka abstract film is named after him) with systems-based thinking derived from the Vienna School serial composers led by Schoenberg and Webern. Adebar consists of a number of very brief shots of dancers in a club – presumably the ‘Adebar’ café, which commissioned the film as an advertisement. The shots vary from positive to negative, moving to still. The soundtrack is made up of looped, and thus repeated, pygmy tribal music, echoing the African drumming that Len Lye chose for his later and most purist abstract films, handmade animations in black and white. As described by filmmaker Peter Weibel, (Film As Film 1979: 111), “the film shows dancing couples in positive and negative, so shot, that they have the effect of shadows”.10
Adebar, 1957, Peter Kubelka
Adebar was composed in accordance with a strict system based on patterns of 13, 26 and 52 frames (which Kubelka believed gave a more classical sense of proportion than 48 frames, the more obvious module for a camera running at 24 fps). These shot-units are then ordered according to a system like a tone row in serial music. The basic row is permutated, inverted and run backwards until all the
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possible alternations are exhausted. The film is one minute and fourteen seconds long, consisting of 14 feet, 34 meters or 1664 frames. It is essential to the film that these measures can be taken and known. This film is forward-looking in a number of ways. Although it is exceptionally ‘purist’, it was nonetheless a sponsored film. There is a long-standing tradition of sponsored radical documentaries going back to the 1930s, and as we have seen in the case of Eggeling there was some backing for artists in the very first avant-gardes. Later, there were to be commercial links between the purely abstract experiments of the Whitney brothers, Charles Dockham, Mary Ellen Bute and other pioneers, down to our own time. Kubelka’s case is, however, rare. He retained total control over the film, literally so in the editing system which he adopted. By predetermining the structure of the film – a step he took even further in the wholly abstract Arnulf Rainer – he both asserted his authorship and denied its subjectivity. The film ends when all its variations have been realized. Finally, even if in a very refined way, Kubelka forged a link through the disjunction of sound and image to the experiments which herald the rise of the pop promo, but twenty to twenty five years ahead of its time. In much the same way, but with a distinctly different pulse, Len Lye’s 1936 Rainbow Dance also deftly anticipates the fusion of popular music and radical cinema in the music video genre. Elaborate as it is, using the full resources of color technology, it is still close to the cameraless films of the early abstract cinema, such as Lye’s own hand-painted Colour Box of 1935. Rainbow Dance ‘starred’ the modernist dancer Rupert Doone, and features a guitar player in color negative. Lye shot no new camera footage for its successor, Trade Tattoo in 1937. Instead he hand-colored and stenciled abstract shapes onto ‘found footage’ clips. At the time, Lye was working for the Post Office and similar organizations, and extracts from Night Mail, Industrial Britain and Song of Ceylon are prominent and easily recognizable, but transformed. Like a printmaker, Lye separates the three-color matrix of Technicolor to re-mix film clips with solarized and negative shots. Although Malcolm Le Grice’s Berlin Horse of 1970 is similarly handmade, its production conditions were at the other end of the scale. It exploits the limitations of these conditions as one of its major strengths. Lye was a genuinely hands-on filmmaker and, like Le Grice, he had come to film by way of painting.
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Trade Tattoo, 1937, Len Lye
He was more of a poet than a theorist, although he had a large if idiosyncratic aesthetic theory that promoted intuition and spontaneity. He worked cheaply and professionally – Colour Box reputedly cost £5, the price of its materials – but he also enjoyed advanced technical facilities and high production values, including 35mm Technicolor. By contrast, Berlin Horse was made on a home-made printer and its six minutes are generated from a handful of frames. A few seconds of 8mm footage of a horse running in a farmyard (in a village, not the city, called Berlin) are mixed with a fragment of 16mm found footage from Thomas Edison’s 1896 The Burning Stable. B y refilming from the screen, blowing up formats, using negative and roughly reprinting grainy black-and-white in fulsome color, Le Grice expands his minimal if powerful source material. Brian Eno supplied a looped soundtrack. Described by Phillip Drummond as “a sumptuous and lyrical film”, Berlin Horse can be shown on one, two or four screens according to choice and possibility.
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Frame still sequences from Berlin Horse, 1970, Malcolm Le Grice
Berlin Horse, 1970, Malcolm Le Grice
The films of Kubelka, Lye and Le Grice reveal the kinds of form of process, including musical and mathematical modeling, that underlie
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the development of digital imaging. They expand on the power of abstract and pictorial concepts, and distance themselves from the realist cinema. Similarly, they have musical soundtracks that are in keeping with the films themselves, often based on the same systems or processes employed by the images. By these musical analogies and similarities they implicitly oppose the fixed forms of verbal language, and reject any notion of dialogue or voice-over. Paul Sharits, then a member of the Neo-Dada Fluxus group in the US, also challenged the power of language, but in a direct and very different sense, in his Word Movie of 1966. Here, hundreds of words are rapidly animated in a series of permutations that are too fast to register, although a few stand out for most viewers (‘suck’ and ‘screw’, for example). The soundtrack alternates two texts word-byword, one scientific and one from an art manual, read in two voices – one male, one female. Visually, Sharits turns the word into image, enforcing the unusual act of literally ‘reading’ a film, and confronting the authority of speech.11 At the same time, the film predicts the typographic revolution of contemporary video graphics, although each letter in the complex and flowing grid of words has been laboriously cut and arranged in Letraset (a commercial transfer process). Today, the film looks like a running critique of automatized and instantresponse computer technologies. A coincidental successor to Sharits’ film is Cowgirl, by Graham Wood, made in 1996. This video exists in several versions, issued by the Tomato design group, of which the purest (black-andwhite) example is the best. Opening with the first line of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus (dating from 1922 and the age of early abstract and systems art) – “the world is everything that is the case” – it permutates words from the soundtrack song by Underworld, “I’m invisible”. The text is as anxious and sexualized as in Sharits, but with an additional undertone of male anxiety, punning on ‘razors’ and ‘erasers’ of ‘love’. The images are in the abstract tradition of Lye, but here resemble the Mac-based shapes and style of contemporary computer imaging. In fact, all these shapes were hand-drawn and painted to imitate digital visual graphics, in an interesting reversal of the usual state of affairs. With Wood the examples come full circle. If early abstract film both predicts and influences the most recent digital imaging, then there is also a certain amount of feedback when film and video makers try to go back to source. This move counteracts the attempts of digital
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video to provide the stylistics of cinema – digital ‘negative’, digital ‘filmscatch’ – but necessarily shorn of their function and real basis (since digital images have no negative and cannot be scratched). But while digital abstraction often dovetails with commercial TV and promos – many younger artists make music videos or live disco projections for an income – it also resists dominant media culture. Norbert Pfaffenbichler, one of a dynamic grouping of Austrian video artists, argues that computer ‘dysfunction’, including simulated faults like glitches and jumps copied from film and audio media, can generate new visual ideas (Pfaffenbichler 2004: 60)12. ‘Technosyntactic abstraction’ also translates unfiltered machine codes into sound or image percepts, to both process and construct the work. In his own Santora (1998, with sound by Christian Fennesz), a single huddled walking figure is repeated in single-frame and multi-screen effect. Cyclical motion and intermittent gesture (echoed in the clicks and tones of the digital soundtrack), as well as graphic lights and darks, recall Kubelka’s early films or Kurt Kren’s TV (1967), which cuts up and permutates brief, serial views from a dockside café. Many artists produce pure abstraction with the multi-color paintbox of computer imaging. Notes on Colour (2003) by Pfaffenbichler and Lotte Schreiber shifts 256 colors in dot patterns on four monitors, one of many works that descend from Bauhaus color experiments, color-field paintings and such artists as Ellsworth Kelly. Kelly’s panel-strip paintings, such as his Spectrum series, are echoed and transformed here, as also in Colour Bars (2004) by Simon Payne, which vividly samples and streams a TV color test pattern. The pixel dot at the heart of digital imaging is differently treated in Pixel (2003) by Dariusz Krzeczek, Stefan Németh and Rainer Mandel, where widescreen projection creates a ‘space installation’ from the algorithm used by two networked computers to generate variations from a single monochrome pixel. Randomized imaging in other recent work by digital filmmakers both asserts the selective machine logic in process but also risks a collapse into unmotivated pattern-making. Images evolve but do not develop. The visible white raster/pixel grid becomes an inert ground, a surface distinct and disconnected from the images. Frame-by-frame digital video, because it is made of static material, lacks movement in the literal sense. While some artists treat the screen as a total all-over field to resolve this problem, others employ fragments of city life mixed with abstract and audio signals. In Annja Krautgasser’s
(2002)
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passers-by and buildings turn into lines and dots, and buildings or facades reveal the structuring grid of modernity. Maia Gusbert’s airE (2001) is an abstraction of electric power lines to form intersecting graphic planes, while HC Gilje in Crossings (2002) overlays video frames in small clusters to make pedestrians at walkways perform new ‘crossings’ on the screen. Also emblematic is Michaela Grill’s trans (2003), in which shadows, silhouettes, lines and fields flit by as static images. Stefan Grissemann comments on how such thaumatropic video exploits in a positive sense the static aspect of the digital frame (Abstraction Now 2004: 236): […] the movement does not take place within the images themselves, but between them […] a work of reciprocal merging and overlapping […] its main place of action is the space between two images, and its defining order is the neither-nor of two positions imagined as one.
Just as this thematizes the ‘interval’ or gap between shots (sometimes frames) in Vertov and Eisenstein, so the frequent images of power lines, intersections and other urban motifs evoke (but in small) the heroic age of utopian cinema. They also convey a sense of contemporary alienation, as images of instability, motion and dystopian anxiety. But the contrast between modernist ideals and postmodernist realities is neither reductive nor dismissive. In part, these digital films seek grounding in the same radical montage concepts as the early pioneers (differing from the uncritical long-take gaze of much gallery video installation, for example, despite its ideological claims). And further, they open and renew the unfixed and unstable aspect of Vertov’s cinema, its deferred utopia of vision. This troubling, metaphysical undercurrent to the collectivist optimism of Man with a Movie Camera was spotted in 1929 by Siegfried Kracauer (2004: 355-359). He found Surrealism in the dreamlike ‘dawn’ sequence of disconnected empty streets and gardens, and ‘Romantic irony’ (i.e. disenchantment) in the freeze-frames of crowds and intersections, a death-like interruption of life. Such interpellation is one of Vertov’s techniques that “probe beneath the surface, dispel any sense of certainty, and brush along the underside of daily routine”. (358) These themes run through much new digital work in Austria and elsewhere, as in the UK with Karen Mirza and Brad Butler, Sue K., Emily Richardson and others who are strongly wedded to the film
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tradition. Matthew Noel-Tod literalizes the link between the radical montage age and modern dailiness in Jetzt Im Kino (2003) – literally, the title means “Now in Cinema” – weaving excerpts from Laszlo Moholy-Nagy’s Painting, Photography, Film, and Rudolf Arnheim’s Film as Art into a hybrid narrative floating across the cityscape of modern Berlin. Another recent digitally edited film by Berlin-based Toby Cornish Sarajevo Vertical (2004) has a frame-edit structure akin to the Vertov-Kubelka tradition. The film uses 66 separate shots (originally on b/w super-8 and 16mm), each of which contains a central vertical line, variously comprising architectural features, shadows on a face, cables on walls and trees in open spaces. Some of these are ‘negative’ spaces, like gaps between buildings. Close viewing reveals the word ‘Tito’ on a road bridge, and the bridge on which Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated. The shots are arranged by the growing thickness of the line, alternating from dark to light, so that from apparently ‘chaotic’ elements a continuous line ebbs and flows as it thickens and gains momentum. The editing structure is cumulative and based on a ‘row’ of permutations that gradually speeds from 3 to 2 to 1 frame cuts. After 66 shots the cycle starts again, gathering momentum so that each time the line shrinks it loses a frame at its thinnest point until each shot is a frame long. The location sound (edited by Owen Lloyd) is broken into 66 separate single frame cuts or ‘intervals’ that engulf the film at its end. In a programme note, Cornish explains that each cycle repeats the same pattern of frame durations, “with the exception of a shot of a man crossing a bridge, where I advance the 3 frame section by one frame each time he appears, so that after several cycles he crosses the bridge”. The ‘narrative’ implication connects this film and other new urban videos to a pre-digital tradition in which bridges are metaphors of history and of the frame itself (in both its cinematic senses of border and photogram). It includes Eisenstein’s October (1927), Vertov’s Enthusiasm (1931) and Eleventh Year (1928), where the camera travels over a “constructivist dinosaur” of a bridge (Yuri Tsivian), Lang’s Metropolis (1927), Richard Serra’s Railroad Turnbridge (1976) and Kurt Kren’s TV (in which a quayside view through a café window substitutes for a literal bridge). In this context, the new abstract cinema explicitly recalls the first abstract avant-garde of Richter, Ruttmann and Eggeling, who also aspired to linear patterning, and which dates from the aftermath of the world war that
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effectively began in Sarajevo. Strictly contemporary in its content and rapid-paced style, with glimpses of dailiness culled from ‘non-places’ around the emblematic bridge, Sarajevo Vertical is one of many new works that assert a live link to the abstract tradition. Beyond surface style, early abstract cinema is a forerunner of contemporary media arts by way of a shared process-oriented methodology; a mathematical and systemic origin; a concern for simultaneous rather than singular imaging, using the whole screen and dividing it into parts, segments or zones; and an implicit rejection of a perspective-based and realist account of technological vision, in contrast to the mainstream currents in film and television. (Revised from Point (Art and Design Research Journal) n11, Digital Aesthetics issue, Spring/Summer 2001.)
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Notes:
1
Also see Lev Manovich (2001: 306): “One general effect of the digital revolution is that avant-garde aesthetic strategies came to be embedded in the commands and interface metaphors of computer software. In short, the avant-garde became materialized in a computer”. This is expanded in his essay ‘The Avant-garde as Software’, 2000, <www.uoc.edu/artnodes/eng/art/manovich1002/manovich1002 .html>. For another approach, see Maureen Turim, 1999, “Artisanal Prefigurations of the Digital: Animating Realities, Collage Effects and Theories of Image Manipulation” Bild Medium Kunst. ed. Yvonne Spielmann. Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 45-58. 2 The anthology Die Kunstismen, Les Isms d l’art, The Isms of Art, 1924-1914, edited by Lissitzky and Arp, 1925, “presented Cubism, Futurism, Expressionism, Simultaneism, Dadaism, Purism, Neoplasticism, Constructivism, Absolute Film, abstract and metaphysical art, and Lissitizky’s Proun. Malevich introduced Suprematism” (Malevich 1997: 115). Lissitzky (also a friend of Vertov) first heard of Eggeling’s films from a German visitor in Moscow in 1920, and then met him in Berlin in 1922. He wrote an obituary of Eggeling in 1925. Eggeling’s study of dynamics and motion inspired his own ideas about “immaterial materialism” (see El Lissitzky, 1984 (1925), ‘A and Pangeometry’, 142-148, Russia: An Architecture for World Revolution, trans. Eric Dluhosch, Cambridge Mass., MIT. A different, illustrated translation is in Sophie Lissitzky-Kuppers, 1980, 352-358, El Lissitzky – Life Letters Text, London, Thames and Hudson. 3 Louise O’Konor argues that their collaboration and friendship ended in 1921 (1971: 69). Also see Le Grice (1977: 19 and 24) on dates of films by Richter and Eggeling. 4 For her evocative 1977 memoir (as Ré Soupault), see Film as Film: 75. 5 The other works shown were light projections by Hirschfeld-Mack, Richter’s Film ist Rhythmus, Ruttmann’s Opus 2-4, Léger and Murphy’s Le Ballet mécanique and Clair’s Entr’acte. 6 “Symptoms of the commencing decline of traditional painting – I am not referring to the terrible economic plight of the artists at the present time – are already apparent in a number of directions, the development of the suprematist Malevich may serve as an example. His last picture: a white square on a square white canvas is clearly symbolic of the film screen, symbolic of the transition from painting in terms of pigment to painting in terms of light. The white surface can serve as a reflector for the direct projection of light, and what is more, of light in motion”. Moholy-Nagy, cited by Esther Leslie, 2002, ‘Zeros, dots and dashes’, Hollywood Flatlands, Verso, London, 35. The full text, ‘Problems of the Modern Film”, written 1928-30 and published in Cahiers d’art, v. VII/n6-7, Paris (1932), is translated in Moholy-Nagy, An Anthology, 1971, ed. R. Kostelantz, Allen Lane, London, 131-138. Malevich’s writings on film are collected in The White Rectangle, 1997, ed. Oksana Bulgakowa, Potemkin Press, Berlin and San Francisco, including the 1927 notes on architecture that Malevich dedicated to Richter. 7 See Foreword to Struggle for the Film (Richter 1986: 7-21) for some links between Richter, Brecht and Benjamin. Michael Jennings (Walter Benjamin and the European
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Avant-Garde, 2004, Cambridge Companion to Walter Benjamin, ed. David S. Ferris, Cambridge University Press) says that Benjamin had little involvement with the earliest avant-gardes, although Gershom Scholem (Walter Benjamin – the story of a friendship, 1982, Faber, London: 78) mentions that Benjamin was a neighbor and friend of Hugo Ball and Emmy Hemmings in Zürich in 1919 (after Ball’s Dada period). Jennings dates Benjamin’s avant-garde contacts to the Berlin ‘G’ group led by Moholy, Lissitzky and especially Richter (“the group met most frequently at his studio”, p. 22), linking Dadaists, Constructivists, the international style and ProtoSurrealism around the journal G. Jennings says that Walter and Dora Benjamin and their friend Ernst Schoen took part in these studio discussions. In a letter to Scholem on 16 September 1924, (Correspondence, 1994, ed. G Scholem and T. Adorno, University of Chicago, Chicago and London, 248) Benjamin writes that he cannot yet send a copy of the new journal [misprinted as ‘H’ rather than ‘G’ in this edition], but that “more out of weakness than as a favor to its publisher”, Richter, he has translated “a blague by Tristan Tzara with a verve that commands respect”. The translation Die Photographie von der Kehrseite appeared in Zeitschsrift für elementare Gestaltung, June 1924. 8 David Macrae (2000: 148) quotes Standish Lawder in a vivid account of Richter’s supposed “first film”, Rhythmus 21, that brings out its crucial role in linking painting to film (and digital), even if the film as we know it is a later version by at least two years. “Perhaps more than in any other avant-garde film, it uses the movie surface as a direct substitute for the painter’s canvas, as a framed rectangular surface on which a kinetic organization of purely plastic forms was composed. For, normally, the movie screen is presented as a kind of window […] behind which an illusion of space appears; in Rhythm 21, by contrast, it is a planar surface activated by the forms upon it. Thus, its forms, like those of an abstract painting, seem to have no physical extension except on the screen, nor do we sense their lateral extension beyond the limits of the screen as is usually the case in images created by camera vision. The film is a totally self-contained kinetic composition of pure plastic forms””(Lawder 1975: 49-50). Part of Rhythmus 21, known as Film ist Rhythmus, may have been shown to and by Van Doesberg in late 1921, as a ninety-second fragment. The first certified screening was at the UFA light-play event in 1925, still with the original title (footnote 5 above). 9 For Le Grice, Diagonal Symphony “is more mathematical than musical in character and prefigures the development of computer film through its ‘programmability’. It is probably the first hint of the later widely used experimental film strategies where an arithmetic system becomes the basis of a non-narrative but temporal structure” (2001: 293). Also, “its position as a key work prefiguring the digital is not based on its surface similarity to programmable abstract film but is held in the similarity of its concept and aesthetic philosophy with the process of analysis, synthesis and the attempt to make formal principles explicit” (2001: 317). 10 Weibel – now a prolific animateur of digital culture and exhibition – notes in this early essay the influence on Kubelka of Duchamp, Vertov and Lye. 11 Word Movie can be compared to its Dada-Surrealist predecessor, Anemic Cinema (1926) by Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray. P. Adams Sitney (Visionary Film, Oxford, 1974: 399) writes that “Eight disks of different graphic spirals alternate with eight on which elaborate puns have been printed spirally, so that each sentence begins and
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ends at the center of the revolving circle. The motion of the camera records their illusory movement. Although there is no ontological difference between the image of a moving disk with concentric (and eccentric) circles and the image of a similar disk with letters rather than straight lines, the automatic optical response of the viewer shifts at each change from spirals to words, and this is the main point of the film. […] The optical illusion of depth generated by the graphic spirals corresponds to the ‘translation’ of the letters into sounds, words and meaning in the act of reading”. This is cited by Macrae (2000: 152) who argues against Peter Bürger’s account of Anemic Cinema as a “restricted” or desiccated film. By contrast, he says it “reveals an ingenious dynamic interaction operative between space and surface, sign and sense, interpretation and illusion, fact and form, process and presentation. Indeed it is an incessantly informative oscillation of perceptual levels. The stifled closure which Bürger proposes […] becomes swept away into an entirely different mode of resonance […] by the cinematic surge of persistence of vision – urgently empowering the viewer with the oxygenating active awareness of imagery, meaning and the mechanized terms of their respective generation”. Macrae’s passionate defense suggests further application to new digital imaging with its similarly ‘embodied’ and ‘participatory’ modes of vision. 12 This essay is in Abstraction Now, edited by Pfaffenbichler and Sandro Droschi, the catalogue to an exhibition at the Künstlerhaus Wien in 2003. It contains many of the details that follow, on new digital abstraction.
Works consulted Dusinberre, Deke and A.L. Rees (eds). 1979. Film As Film. London: Arts Council of Great Britain and Hayward Gallery. Kracauer, Siegfried. 1929. ‘Man With a Movie Camera’ (Frankfurter Zeitung) in Lines of Resistance: Dziga Vertov and the Twenties. Tsivian, Yuri (ed.). 2004. Pordenone: La Giornate del Cinema Muto: 355-359. Lawder, Standish. 1975. The Cubist Cinema. New York: New York University Press. Le Grice, Malcolm. 1977. Abstract Film and Beyond. London: Studio Vista. —. 2001. Experimental Cinema in the Digital Age, London: BFI. Macrae, David. 2000. ‘Painterly Concepts and Filmic Objects’, in Scheunemann, Dietrich (ed.). European Avant-Garde: New Perspectives. Avant Garde Critical Studies. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Malevich, Kazimir. 1997 (2002). The White Rectangle - Writings on Film (ed. O. Bulgakowa). Berlin and San Francisco: Potemkin Press. Manovich, Lev. 2001. The Language of New Media, Cambridge Mass. and London: MIT. O’Konor, Louise. 1971. Viking Eggeling 1880-1925, Lund: Almqvist & Wiksell. Pfaffenbichler, Norbert and Sandro Droschi (eds). 2004. Abstraction Now. Vienna: Edition Camera Austria. Pfaffenbichler, Norbert. 2004. ‘From Panel Painting to Computer Processing’ in Abstraction Now: 58-66. Richter, Hans. 1986. The Struggle for the Film (tr. Ben Brewster). London: Scolar.
Paris – Berlin – Moscow: On the Montage Aesthetic in the City Symphony Films of the 1920s Alexander Graf Abstract: Though the montage aesthetic exhibited in the city symphony films of the 1920s was hardly an innovation in the arts on a general level, it has particular significance in connection with the subject matter of the films in question: as an expression of urban modernity, it played by far the greatest role in defining film as a “modern” art form. This chapter seeks out the specifically artistic and avant-gardistic character of filmic montage, a quality denied by theorists of the avant-garde.
City symphonies are a category of cinematic production, which P. Adams Sitney is bold enough to have considered a “specifically avantgarde genre” (Sitney, ix). Bold, because in doing so he challenges the views of theorists of the avant-garde such as Renato Poggioli and Peter Bürger, who either overlook film in the construction of their arguments, or else specifically eliminate film from their considerations on account of the medium’s technical characteristics. I do not seek to pursue the “is it or isn’t it” avant-garde argument directly, since the academic community has evidently been quite comfortable for a long time now with the application of the designation “avant-garde film” without deeming it necessary to reference canonical models. But is this perhaps a result of, or indeed encouraged by, the explicit omission of film in the theories? My objective here is instead to examine shared formal characteristics that the term ‘symphony’ suggests, and that validate Sitney’s assertion that these films constitute a genre. In doing so, I will address several core issues pertaining to avant-garde theory, including issues raised by Poggioli and Bürger. By investigating the treatment of urban environments in city symphony films I shall also attempt to demonstrate how concepts of the city current in the historically specific time of the 1920s both shaped and were shaped by avantgardist thought and practice. Before I move on to these issues, I would briefly like to outline the range of works that can be included within the city
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symphony canon. Commentators are split on the origins of the genre: the earliest example can be traced back to Paul Strand and Charles Sheeler’s 1921 abstract study of New York City, Manhatta. Yet while this film applies the dawn to dusk format that was to become the standard for city symphonies, and composes a portrait of a living, populated city from a mixture of abstract architectural photography and figurative, documentary-style sequences, which exposes Sheeler’s background in Precisionist painting, and the photographer Strand’s affiliation with Stieglitz’s Pictorialist Photo-Secession group, their film does not display a significant interest in rhythmic or associative editing typical of the city symphonies that followed. René Clair’s 1923 film Paris qui dort has also appeared in city symphony filmographies. Yet while some use is made of rhythmic editing patterns and documentary-style images of the city, the film’s conventional narrative trajectory, strong plot elements and camera trickery dominate its formal characteristics, thus complicating its classification as a city symphony film. Both Sitney (ix) and Siegfried Kracauer (244) mark out Alberto Cavalcanti’s Rien que les heures as having initiated the city symphony genre in the year 1926. Loosely structured around the adventures of a pimp, a prostitute, a sailor, a newspaper vendor and a haggard old woman, the primary concern of Cavalcanti’s film is social comment through the portrayal of the wretched existence of an imagined Parisian underclass. The very much skeletal storyline is padded out with documentary-style scenes of Paris and the daily life of the city, presented in a mixture of rhythmically and associatively edited shots and more contemplative panoramas and cityscapes reminiscent of Manhatta. As is suggested by the film’s title and intertitles, concepts of both cinematic and abstract time are of interest here in the form of a palpably metrical editing rhythm at the formal level, and a deliberation on the dynamics of a global space-time continuum on the level of content. Yet the film does not succeed in establishing a significant mutual cohesion between these temporal elements, nor between them and the social criticism the film makes, and thus fails to either construct or employ any film language one could describe as genre-defining. Cavalcanti himself once described his film as a “[…] clumsy social document” (Sussex 188). Despite the fact that the film does not strictly conform to the dawn to dusk format, the documentary character of many urban sequences, coupled with the interest in abstraction through rhythmic and associative editing, are
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sufficient in my mind to justify speaking of a significant maturing of the city symphony genre with Rien que les heures, in comparison with the earlier works. The genre reached full maturity with Walther Ruttmann’s film Berlin, Symphonie einer Großstadt (1927) and Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera (1929). Both films display an almost total suppression of intertitles, narrative and plot elements, and a rejection of the documentary form in the traditional sense, in favor of asserting rhythmic and associative montage as formal devices, and a dawn to dusk structuring strategy in the search for a pure film form. It is for these reasons that I wish to concentrate my investigation on these two works, since close readings of the films I have mentioned are not my primary objective, but an exploration of the formal characteristics shared by all the city symphonies to varying degrees. Some justification would be due to the objection here that Vertov’s film, having been shot in at least three different suburban and urban locations, does not strictly adhere to the city symphony format: no particular city is specified in the film’s title (as opposed to Berlin, Paris, Manhattan, etc. in the other titles). However, like Ruttmann’s film, Vertov’s representation of the pace and rhythm of urban life expressed through editing techniques are the overriding concern when considering this specific (sub)genre, whether the raw material is drawn from one or many geographical locations. Other films I should mention, which may have been inspired by Ruttmann’s and Vertov’s films, and share elements of the city symphony aesthetic, are Joris Iven’s Regen (1929) which employs the duration of a fictional thunderstorm as its overall structuring principle; Jean Vigo’s biting and overtly political satire, À propos de Nice (1930); and Adalberto Kemeny and Rudolf Lustig’s Sao Paolo – Sinfonia do Metropole (1929), a documentary of the more traditional type, that makes use of city symphony editing patterns. The city symphony tradition has continued to this day with certain modifications. I could mention Patrick Keiller’s London (year), Godfrey Reggio’s Koyaanisqatsi (year), and Thomas Schadt’s recent remake of Ruttmann’s film on its 75th anniversary as examples. Other possible candidates from the 1920s and early thirties, but which I have unfortunately been unable to view, are Mikhail Kaufmann’s Moskva (year), Hermann Weinberg’s City Symphony, (1930) and Manoel de Oliveira’s 1931 study of Oporto, Douro, Faina Fluvial.
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The most significant impulse evident in the works I viewed, and that we can call an avant-gardist impulse, is the aim of developing and asserting a new film language, of forcing a “change in the representational system”, as Peter Bürger describes it (62). As we can draw from statements made by some of the makers of city symphonies and other avant-garde artists speaking or writing on the subject of film, relative harmony prevails amongst views of what should characterize that new language, and that it should be intrinsic to the medium. In describing a concept of the essence of cinema as the seventh art, Germaine Dulac, for example, calls for the cinematic work to “[…] reject every [a]esthetic principle which does not properly belong to it and seek out its own [a]esthetic in the contributions of the visual”. (Sitney 47) Dziga Vertov, while denying that his Kinok group connects its work or existence with what is called “art” (Michelson 47), describes kinokism as a language “proper to cinema”. (Sitney 9) And Ruttmann, speaking on cinema and art, similarly asserts that art “will only result if it is born of the possibilities and demands of its material”. (Schobert 6) Unanimity reigns, too, on the subject of what should be excluded from film art, and which was seen to characterize the aesthetic basis of an already fully developed narrative code in dominant cinema, resulting in an impoverishment of the art: any influence from theater, literature and the word. It is a paradox then, to find that, with the exception of Cavalcanti, the artists sought inspiration for their film language, a visual art, in other arts, especially music. This is where the label ‘symphony’ becomes relevant, since it denotes principles of balance and formal discipline to achieve dynamic coherence in a composition, both in music and in the graphic arts. Rhythmic montage, of the kind we see in city symphonies, involves the precise calculation of duration, which can be compared to musical composition. In Ruttmann’s Berlin this is seen most clearly in the second sequence, beginning at shot four after the opening, which features a train speeding towards Berlin in the dawn hours. In an analysis of this sequence, Jiri Kolaja and Arnold W. Foster (354) detect a precisely timed, recurring, rhythmic pattern of shots alternating subjective and objective shots of and from the train, in which the sound rhythm of a train is conveyed by exclusively visual means. Here, the construction method is interesting in the context of musical principles of form, since it brings the element of time to the fore, which is manipulated in
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order to convey an audio impression by visual means. Music, a “Zeitkunst” (Adorno 42), is an art governed by the laws of time, and the same can be said of film, a time-based medium. As such, this goes some way towards explaining why the makers of city symphonies looked to the mathematical abstraction of musical aesthetics in their efforts to establish a film language intrinsic to the medium in the city symphonies. One might furthermore conjecture that, as an intangible art form, without physical aspect, music and musical composition offer the filmmaker a model that does not reference any physical entity whatsoever, including other forms of art or specific artworks. Hence, the vocabulary and grammar of film artists in describing their work and ideas can naturally adopt abstract concepts reminiscent of descriptions of sounds, melodies and harmonies. The considerable lack of a concrete, objective vocabulary serving the description of musical dynamics and sounds generally would encourage the emphasis we find in Vertov’s writing on the much more tangible concepts of rhythm and mathematical calculation, thereby diverting emphasis away from the straightforward mimesis we find in the image, as well as from other forms of art or art works (photography, theater, literature). This would be of interest to Vertov and the avantgarde artist generally since a primary objective was to develop and theorize a language proper to the medium. Indeed, to return to Ruttmann, he most often spoke of wanting to catch the “tempo”, a term that specifically implies ideas of musical rhythm and speed, in his portrait of the urban experience of Berlin in the late twenties of the twentieth century. In the case of the train sequence we can see that tempo has to do with the sound of a train, but also with its speed. It is primarily the tempo – the forward motion of the train – that Ruttmann tries to convey in the sequence in question through creating the visual impression of the sound of a train traveling at various speeds. It would be quite a different matter to acoustically represent the sound of a slow-moving or stationary train through visual rhythmic montage, which is why, as the train slows on its approach into Berlin, rhythmic cutting patterns give way to subjective shots of the city from the train, neither conveying rhythm, nor employing any obvious rhythmic cutting patterns. The machine whose rhythm is being described is no longer in the picture. In musical terms, this would represent a shift in tempo from andante to adagio. One shot gently cross-fades into the next, the reduced tempo now no
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longer rhythmic since it reflects the early hours, before a soul has stirred in the streets of the city, which is void of all movement. Thus, just as is the case in music, the instrumentalization of cutting rhythm, as we see in rhythmic montage, functions as a device of both emotive and illustrative description. This pattern is sustained throughout the film, and is a feature of the dynamics of all true city symphonies, though none of the directors are quite as disciplined in following the scheme as Ruttmann. The second type of montage employed in city symphonies is associative montage. Although associative montage can also be rhythmic, it has much more to do with graphic properties, space and content, and hence derives from painting and photography. In city symphonies it functions on two levels: a rather rudimentary compositional level, where analogous or contrasting shapes or other visual phenomena, direction of movement or tonal qualities are brought into temporal and therefore spatial proximity with one another. One example of this function is in the train sequence I mentioned above, where images of the round wheels of the train engine are juxtaposed with images of straight objects, such as telegraph poles and wires, and the train tracks. Or, later on in the film, the legs of a moving mass of people are immediately followed by the legs of a herd of cows moving in the same direction. Repetition is also a mode in which associative montage functions, such as the sequences featuring the repeated closure or doors, windows and gates in both Ruttmann’s and Vertov’s films. These examples of formal juxtaposition are largely ornamental, though they can border on symbolism, especially when contrasted, rather than analogous phenomena are edited in sequence, or when, as in the end of Rien que les heures, a wildly spinning globe is immediately followed by the wildly spinning hands of a clock, symbolizing the idea of speed and of shortness of time in the modern world. The second type of associative montage in city symphonies functions on a much more intellectual level to generate meaning, and is especially a feature of Vertov’s The Man with the Movie Camera. Vertov’s views of the creative possibilities of film language are much more political than Ruttmann’s, or at least he describes his ideas in much more political terms. Where Ruttmann spoke of orchestrating a symphony of movement out of images of life, in line with his view that film content “can only become an artistic experience if it is conceived optically” (Schobert 6) rather than verbally, Vertov speaks
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of organizing film fragments into film objects. He stretches the editing process to include the entire progression of film production, with the aim of organizing the film pieces, “wrested from life, into a meaningful rhythmic visual order, a meaningful visual phrase”. (Michelson 88) While also stressing the value of the material from which film objects are constructed as specifically visual phenomena, intended to create meaning for the eye to apprehend and understand, thus exposing links between spatially and temporally separated phenomena hidden to the human eye on account of the fact that it cannot edit in the same way as the cinema apparatus, the emphasis is on the meaning that can be generated from the simple fact of spatial/temporal proximity through montage synthesis. The very fact of juxtaposing images of birth, death, marriage and divorce, intercut with images of the cameraman at work, for example, can be said to constitute a meaningful visual phrase through the plastic compression of time and the manipulation of space during editing. This sequence, which occurs towards the middle of The Man with the Movie Camera, asserts the camera and the editing process as an ideal combination in the service of expanding the limited horizons of biological vision, while simultaneously making a statement on the multifaceted nature of city life due to the synchronicity of the divergent events pictured. Vertov uses the theory of intervals – another musical term denoting the distance in pitch between one tone and another – as the basis of his aesthetic construction. While Sitney appears confused by Vertov’s use of this term (viii), Annette Michelson, introducing the writings of Vertov, describes it as denoting the “movement between frames and the proportion of these pieces as they relate to one another”. (xxx) Unless by ‘frames’ Michelson means shots, she too is confused as to the meaning of Vertov’s concept of intervals. He himself states that it is a question of juxtaposing visual details, (Michelson 21) meaning the movement between shots, not frames.1 Though I do not wish to dwell on the matter, Michelson makes precisely the same error here as Bürger in his assessment of the importance of montage for film. Bürger asserts the very act of filming as a montage process simply because one still image follows another on the filmstrip. While he does differentiate between this technical characteristic and associative montage (using as an example the simulated movement of the rising lion in Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin (1925), he does not differentiate between the simple consecutive sequence of frames,
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which is, in fact, a basic, technical characteristic of filmmaking, and the editing together of shots, which is potentially a basic technical procedure, since all films are cut, but can also be used creatively, as in Eisenstein’s sequence, and thus asserts that montage is “not a specifically artistic technique, but one that lies in the medium”. (Bürger 73) Tracing its origins back to the “heroic years of Cubism”, Adorno (232) in contrast describes montage in film as a “selfcorrection” of photography that is “by no means a trick to integrate photography and its derivatives (film) in art, despite their restrictive dependence on empirical reality”. Rather, he posits the constructivist principles of montage as an artistic protest against the hegemony of the organic artwork in late capitalistic society, primarily Impressionism. In the context of cinema, and bearing in mind Vertov and Ruttmann’s disdainful statements on the subject of film language, we must accept that this protest is the main driving force behind their experimentation with montage as a formal structuring principle to combat the dominance of narrative continuity in cinema, and to develop a new film language, which fully supports Bürger’s claim that one of the primary intentions of all avant-garde art is the destruction of art as an institution (55-59). The fact that conventional narrative film production, in all its aspects – from conception, to distribution and exhibition – was, already in the 1920s, a full-blown industry, should not confuse the issue: it was and still is the institution of cinema, the dominance of which much avant-garde and experimental film production seeks to challenge. In this regard I cannot agree with Al Rees who, in A History of Experimental Film and Video, draws on Anne Friedberg’s position that avant-garde theory “does not fit” film to argue that both Hollywood and the film avant-garde were seeking to establish film as a high art form, thereby distancing both of these “modern” art institutions from “modernist” rebellion. On the contrary, the historical film avant-garde had only industrial film production to rebel against (with the small but significant exception of Vertov, who railed against German Expressionist film as well as against American drama). Any suggestion that Hollywood of the 1920s could be considered a hotbed of modernism is misguided: it took much longer for film artists to be able to directly challenge the institution of film art in their work. Furthermore, the fact that a large majority of artists working with film in the 1920s avant-gardes were previously working in other media, to which most also returned, must also be taken into account. As avant-gardists these artists challenged the institution of
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art, and their work with the medium of film was generally an extension of this project in a new medium. But why did the montage aesthetic develop the way it did in films that focused on cities? Much has been written about the special affinities between cinema and urban environments, and the influence of both on human perception. Ezra Pound, for example, relates village life to narrative, whereas “in the city the visual impressions succeed each other, overlap, overcross, they are cinematic.” (Donald 74, nn) In Screening the City, Carsten Strathausen similarly describes the primary significance of film aesthetics as a means to “capture the essence of modern urban experience which presented the metropolis itself as one big intersection of ‘moving images’” (Screening the City 24). Of course, neither of these two statements could have been made with dominant, narrative cinema in mind since its treatment of urban environments tends to be profoundly different. Conventional narrative cinema generally employs urban environments as settings or backdrops in which scripted human dramas can unfold, at most functioning as narratological devices, thus locating standard narrative film squarely in Pound’s “village”. One only has to think of the psychologizing role of the urban environments in Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (year?) or Nicholas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now (year?) for confirmation of this view. That said, there is no intrinsic reason why a montage aesthetic should exclude conventional filmic narration: this is merely a tendency. After all, not just the alleyways of Venice, but also other sections of Roeg’s film feature strong montage elements, though mainly in the service of furthering or elaborating the narrative. In city symphonies these environments themselves are the material from which the films are composed, and the urban experience (and “cinema”, of course) is their sole subject matter. As Jean Paul Goergen states in his introduction to the catalog Walter Ruttmann: Eine Dokumentation, Ruttmann’s Berlin marks a turning point in the filmic representation of the city in its “transposition of observation, in the transition from the documentation of an object to the documentation of an experience”. (Screening the City 52) Perceptions of the modern urban experience in the late stages of urban growth and industrialization at the turn of the 20th century have been documented by Georg Simmel in his landmark sociological studies. He describes an increase in sensory activity as resulting from the rapid and incessantly changing external and internal impressions
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in city environments, which he terms a “rape of the senses” by the metropolis. (Simmel 117-8) New technologies, high-speed transport and communications systems, new industrial processes emerging in this period, the manifold, fragmentary nature of visual impressions that could strike one within the space of a glance and, not least, the explosion of cinema as a form of mass entertainment, profoundly altered the perception among city dwellers of urban time and space. It is this fragmentation and inflation of the visual aspect of urban existence that the montage aesthetic both used and addressed. Not that this was a particularly new artistic tendency: the Cubists had already attempted a reflection of metropolitan temporal and spatial discontinuity, and the perceived human experience of it, by varying and multiplying perspectives in their works, for example Delaunay’s studies of the Eiffel Tower, which incorporate buildings and views from different districts of Paris. The photomontage then developed temporality in still images by compressing and combining disparate fragments of time and space into single works, the restrictions of the still image eventually losing out to this new concern with temporality. (Donald 74) The particular advantage film could offer was thus that it enabled artists to work with and reorganize fragments of recorded duration as a formal principle, meaning that modern urban fragmentation could be both apprehended and constructed in film at a spatial and temporal level. In this sense none of the city symphony films are truly portraits of cities. Rather, the directors composed, or constructed, historically specific impressions of the modern metropolis from mostly documentary material. Historical specificity inevitably brings the question of content into question as a perhaps more important consideration than critics have often been prepared to accept. Yet this is an area in which criticism of avant-garde film works of the period – in particular “formalist” works – could well be expanded upon. In the case of Vigo’s and Cavalcanti’s films the socio-political content is evident, since both films are overtly satirical, while Kameny and Lustig’s SaoPaolo – Sinfonia do Metropole is anyway closer to a traditional documentary that offers much cultural and historical information in the form of intertitles. And, while the political impulse behind Vertov’s The Man with the Movie Camera is both evident and undisputed by commentators, Ruttmann’s Berlin has received much criticism from the likes of Kracauer for lacking “any specific context”. Aside from purely formal considerations, or the self-evident “delight
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in the serendipity of abstract shapes and formal juxtapositions”, as James Donald describes it, the significance of principles of montage as itself a vehicle for political and social comment becomes clear if we return to Georg Simmel’s The Mental Life of the City. Here, Simmel cites the intensification of sensory stimulation from the rapidly changing flow of visual impressions as the primary psychological basis of individuality and identity in the metropolis. City dwellers, threatened by the onslaught of visual stimuli, develop strategies to prevent themselves being uprooted by this current, resulting in an objective attitude to people and things, and a marked blindness for differences. Simmel likens this process to the finance economy, also embedded in the metropolis, which has only one scale of value to attribute to goods, thereby expunging the differences between them. The result of this ambivalence towards co-metropolitans and the city environment, Simmel argues, is a profound sense of loneliness that is never more strongly felt in the anonymity of a crowded city. The brevity of human contact, compared with life in a small town or village (Pound), tempts the city dweller to exaggerate his or her individuality to ensure that an unambiguous impression of their personality comes across in the short time available. (Simmel 116-29) As historically specific expressions of urban experience, then, city symphonies expose the fragmentary nature of urban existence through the application of a montage aesthetic (perhaps not by chance a product of left-leaning thought) in their cutting patterns (the same could be said of the aforementioned Roeg film, though to a much lesser degree since the sections in question support a chase sequence). Take Ruttmann’s Berlin as an example, which Kracauer describes as a superficial cross-section film that prefers to concentrate on the formal qualities of objects and pure patterns of movement, and as thus void of any social content. (Kracauer 184-5) In the very same text Kracauer laments that “People in Berlin assume the character of material not even polished. Used-up material is thrown away. […] The life of society is a harsh, mechanical process”. Kracauer 186) Ignoring the evident self-contradiction of these two statements, my argument rests on what I believe is Kracauer’s mistaken understanding of Berlin as a cross-section film. Kracauer speaks as of a documentary, but the cross section in Berlin, as well as all the other city symphonies, is another: a horizontally organized, symphonic, cross-section exposing a day in the life of the cities, from dawn to dusk, a perhaps arbitrarily chosen,
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time-based structuring device (though it would be a mistake to underestimate the importance of the choice of this device in mimicking symphonic completion and unity) that serves to delimit the scope of the works in the absence of a standard narrative structure. Vertov, who asserts the camera eye as the perfect witness of the world of visual phenomena, and montage as the perfect device to produce a vision of the world more complete than the human eye could ever afford, insists that everything must be shown, that the camera must do the work of Baudelaire’s flaneur, and strings his gathered fragments of life along the horizontal cross-section of a day according to the principle of intervals. In other words, it is precisely through the aesthetic of rhythmic and associative montage, which structures the city symphonies internally, that social contrasts become evident. The interval of which Vertov speaks is thus the difference between Ruttmann’s white-collar worker tucking in to his filet steak in a restaurant, and the construction worker biting into his stale sandwich. Kracauer is certainly right to say that formal devices are at the basis of these social contrasts. But what I would like to suggest is that the dawn-to-dusk format is, in each case, a container that accommodates all these contrasts, or intervals, making them plain by presenting them as a cross-section of a period of time. It is for this reason that we cannot fail to see the lack of any character development in the films: the entire scale is present! The humans we observe are at the behest of the determining tempo of the city. No one is an individual, no one stands out from the crowd. Yet Ruttmann has slipped in a contrived occurrence into his film that accentuates the social comment it makes by contrasting it with the indifferent portrayal of humans in a way that precisely corresponds with Simmel’s psychogramm of the city dweller, and which only James Donald seems to have picked up on without becoming confused by it: a small acted drama, inserted in the very center of Ruttmann’s Berlin, in which a woman commits suicide. Donald points out the presence of a direct cut at the beginning of Berlin from mannequins displaying erotic underwear in a shop window (interpreted by Kracauer as an expression of mutual indifference among the city dwellers) to the canal at precisely the spot where the woman drowns herself later on. He also points out the direct cut from the scene of the suicide to models on a catwalk: the very image of commodification and exploitation of women. What I wish to suggest is therefore that the suicide episode represents an ultimate form of assertion of identity and individuality as Simmel describes it
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in his social analysis of the city dweller, a direct result of the alienation expressed by the fact that humans are, by necessity of montage editing, hardly differentiated as individuals, and that this is the very social statement made by the application of montage editing principles. Though they are not documentaries in the traditional sense, then, what the makers of the city symphony films were interested in almost without exception, was rather a documentary attitude to filmmaking, because of the implied link with the photographic medium and, therefore a further aesthetic element of a cine-language that was pure. But too mimetic was the photographic image alone for the abstract painter Ruttmann; and too contrived for Vertov, the advocate of concealed photography. And so form became content, and vice-versa. The metropolis of the 1920s and 30s was a place where the New was in a constant state of emergence, which made its culture key to the European avant-garde’s anticipatory intentions. Yes, it had to be documented, but so too did the unstable point of view. It is within this area of tension, somewhere between photographic mimesis and pure motion energy, that city symphonies are located.
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Notes:
1
The Russian term for “shot” Kadr has evidently confused the issue, since it can also mean “frame” or “sequence”. Michelson’s translator has opted for frame. After consultation of the original texts (Stat'i, dnevniki, zamysly ; Dziga Vertov (ed Sergej Vladimirovic Drobasenko). Moscow: Izd. Iskusstvo: 1966) it is clear that Vertov could only have meant “shot” as the basic unit of his concept of montage. Where Vertov wants to specify frames he uses a diminutive of kadr, “kadrik”. This is the case whenever he specifies the number of frames (5, 10, 20) that comprise a shot. An exception to this usage is where Vertov uses the adjectival form of kadr, kadrovij. In such examples, Vertov is describing the editing procedure, with the “montage already calculated in frames” or “kadrovij” (Vertov 245). Furthermore, Russian verb construction comes to our aid in establishing the consistency of meaning of kadr in Vertov’s usage of the term: in his memoirs on the making of an early Kinoki film The Battle of Tsaritsyn (1919), Vertov uses two compound adjectival constructions, “mezhdukadrovij” and “vnutrokadrovij” – combining the prepositional derivatives mezhdu- or “between”, and vnutro- or “within”, with kadr. Vertov uses the latter when describing movement “within the shot”. Obviously, movement cannot occur within frames. Hence, kadr here can only mean “shot”. In the very next sentence Vertov again specifies kadr in describing runtime: again, time is involved, so kadr cannot possibly be translated as “frame”. The only sense in which Vertov could have intended “frame” in his use of kadr, and therefore in his description of his montage construction, is at the level on which a shot consists only of one single frame, which is an extremely rare occurrence in his films, so rare as to make this translation likely in the technical sense only. (Thanks to Al Rees for helping me argue through to this interpretation).
Primary works consulted Schobert, Walter (ed.). 1989. Der deutsche Avant-Garde Film der 20er Jahre. Munich: Goethe Institut Vertov, Dziga. 1966. Stat'i, dnevniki, zamysly ; Dziga Vertov (ed Sergej Vladimirovic Drobasenko. Moscow: Izd. Iskusstvo —. 1984. Kino Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov (ed. Annette Michelson). Berkley: University of California Press
Secondary works consulted Adorno, Theodor W. 1985. Ästhetische Theorie. Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp Bürger. Peter. 1984. Theory of the Avant-Garde. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press Donald, James. 1999. Imagining the Modern City. London: Athlone Friedberg, Anne. 1993. Window Shopping: Cinema and the Postmodern condition. Berkley, University of California Press
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Kolaja, Jiri and Arnold W. Foster. 1965. “’Berlin, the Symphony of a City’ as a Theme of Visual Rhythm” in The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism (23/3): 353-358 Kracauer, Siegfried. 1979 (2006). Theorie des Films: die Errettung der äußeren Wirklichkeit. Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp Rees, A.L. 1999. A History of Experimental Film and Video: from Canonical AvantGarde to Contemporary British Practice. London: BFI Simmel, Georg. 1995. Aufsätze und Abhandlungen 1901-1908. Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp Sitney, P. Adams (ed.). 1978. The Avant-Garde Film: A Reader of Theory and Criticism. New York: Anthology Film Archives Fitzmaurice, Tony and Mark Shiel (eds). 2003. Screening the City. London: Verso Sussex, Elizabeth: “Cavalcanti in England” in Aitkin, Ian (ed.). The Documentary Film Movement: An Anthology (Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 1998)
Man Ray’s Films: From Dada to Surrealism Rudolf E. Kuenzli Abstract: In focusing on Man Ray’s contributions to avant-garde cinema, I analyze his first three films, Retour à la raison (1923), Emak Bakia (1926), and Étoile de mer (1928), in order to establish criteria that allow us to distinguish between Dada and Surrealist films. In Man Ray’s first two films the anarchic, spontaneous, playful, illogical, and non-narrative Dada spirit dominates, although he tried to create a Surrealist film with Emak Bakia. Having not succeeded, he relied on Robert Desnos, the foremost Surrealist dreamer, to furnish him with a Surrealist script in order to create his first Surrealist film, Étoile de mer.
We have been given several Man Rays in books and exhibition catalogues: Man Ray the Duchamp-inspired visual artist, which he aspired all his life to be; Man Ray the photographer of New York Dada, Paris Dada, and Paris Surrealism; Man Ray the portrait photographer of famous artists and personalities; Man Ray the commercial fashion photographer who always tried to combine fashion photography with avant-garde art; and Man Ray the avantgarde filmmaker, an aspect of his work that has been overshadowed by critical attention to his art and photography. I would like to emphasize Man Ray’s pivotal role in avant-garde cinema. He made four films, which have received some critical attention, but he contributed and was involved in a number of other avant-garde films, from Ballet mécanique to Entr’acte and Anémic Cinéma. In analyzing Man Ray’s first three films I shall attempt to trace the development from his early Dada films to his concerted effort to create the first Surrealist film. My intention is to arrive at some criteria that allow us to distinguish between Dada and Surrealist films within the field of avant-garde cinema. Man Ray seems to have worked best within avant-garde movements that provided an open, accepting, and encouraging audience for his innovative work. He left America in 1921 because he felt that Americans did not care about artistic innovation. Although he co-founded the first museum for modern art in America and worked
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with Duchamp on film projects he later called “obscenema”(1974: 32), he could not imagine an accepting audience there. His letter to Tristan Tzara of 1921, which he signed ‘Man Ray directeur du mauvais movies’, says as much: “merde la merde la merde…dada cannot live in New York”.1 In Paris he found acceptance among the members of Paris Dada, especially Tristan Tzara, its major organizer, who lived in the same hotel as did Man Ray, and who had a major role in Man Ray’s experimental photography and his first film. When Man Ray more or less accidentally discovered photography without a camera by placing objects directly on sensitive photographic paper, and then exposed it to light, it was Tzara who enthusiastically collaborated with him and immediately organized Man Ray’s first book publication in 1922, a collection of twelve Rayographs, as he called them, entitled Champs délicieux, echoing of course André Breton and Philippe Soupault’s Les Champs magnétiques, which was published a year earlier. Tzara wrote a preface to Man Ray’s publication, ‘La Photographie à l’envers’, which Walter Benjamin translated and published in Hans Richter’s journal G in 1924. In the early twenties, Man Ray also bought a small film camera that could hold a few feet of standard film. Again, Tzara encouraged him to create a Dada film. Man Ray set up this camera and filmed some of his art work in movement, as well as other shots: a turning paper spiral, his airbrush painting Dancer/Danger, to which he gave a sense of movement by blowing smoke at it, an egg divider which he hung up and turned in front of the camera, his ‘visual’ poem consisting of only horizontal lines, which he moved back and forth, the lights of a merry-go-round at night, and of course the most beautiful object for Man Ray, the naked female torso turning in front of striped curtains. The female body thus becomes a canvas for the lines of light, not unlike his Violon d’ Ingres of a year later. Tzara, according to Man Ray, absolutely wanted to promote Dada films in order “to offset all the idiocies on the screen” (1963: 259). When Tzara organized the Dada event ‘The Bearded Heart’, he included three avant-garde films in the program: Hans Richter’s Rhythmus 21, Paul Strand and Charles Sheeler’s Manhatta, listed as Fumée de New York (1921), and, without informing or asking Man Ray, a film by Man Ray listed in the program as Le Retour de la Raison with music composed and played by George Antheil. Yet Man Ray had only one
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minute worth of film if he glued together the shots he had taken of his art, the merry-go-round, and the female torso. It was again Tzara who suggested that he use his technique of Rayographs for his film and thus lengthen it with these sequences. Man Ray followed Tzara’s advice and described the process: Acquiring a roll of a hundred feet of film, I went into my darkroom and cut up the material into short lengths, pinning them down on the worktable. On some strips I sprinkled salt and pepper, like a cook preparing a roast, on other strips I threw pins and thumbtacks at random; then I turned on the white light for a second or two, as I had done for my still Rayographs. Then I carefully lifted the film off the table, shaking off the debris, and developed it in my tanks. The next morning, when dry, I examined the work; the salt, pins and tacks were perfectly reproduced. (1963: 260)
Retour à la raison, which he hoped would ‘regale’ his Dada friends, “the only ones capable of appreciating such nonchalance” (1963: 259), indeed received enthusiastic acceptance. The anarchic arrangement of strips of Rayographs and filmed sequences expressed Tzara’s Dada spirit of spontaneity and chance, which were the Dada strategies of disrupting logic and rational order. The title of the film, Retour à la raison, is therefore highly ironic. The film begins with sequences of Rayographs in rapid motion, followed by the rotating lights of a merry-go-round at night. The only sequence in which the camera is moving is the one taken from the merry-go-round. Otherwise, objects turn in front of the camera lens: the rotating spiral lampshade, the egg divider which dances with its shadow, and the line patterns formed by the sun’s rays playing on the female torso. The realistic objects, such as the torso, seem to be caught in the motion and the lines that tend to transform them into semi-abstractions. Retour à la raison, which is not quite three minutes long, establishes an almost regular rhythm through the alternating sequences which are of similar length, and thus foreshadows the tempo and the rhythmic structure of B a l l e t mécanique, which appeared a year later. Man Ray’s short film was perceived as radical and revolutionary. At least three major developments followed for Man Ray from having made Retour à la raison. When the American filmmaker Dudley Murphy saw this film in Paris, he immediately wanted to work with Man Ray in the sense that he would use Man
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Ray’s new ideas about cinema while contributing his know-how in filmmaking and his far superior equipment and sophisticated lenses that could deform and multiply images. Man Ray was interested, but insisted on the ‘Dada approach’ (1963: 266), if they were to work together, by which he meant improvisation without a script, and illogical arrangement of sequences. They began shooting scenes of Kiki, Man Ray’s mistress whose torso he had filmed for Retour à la raison, of Murphy’s wife Katherine, of Paris streets, and of making love intercut with pistons of machines. When they ran out of money, Ezra Pound suggested that Fernand Léger would gladly finance the film, and Natalie Barney would underwrite a musical score by George Antheil (Moritz 1995: 126). It was at that point that Man Ray left what seemed to him a very complicated collaboration. He also sensed that Léger wanted to claim the film as his own, which indeed happened, when Léger had new titles made for Ballet mécanique in 1935 that omitted Dudley Murphy’s name (Moritz 1995: 133). The most condemning passage in Man Ray’s Self Portrait relates to Ballet mécanique, when he writes: “And that is how Dudley [Murphy] realized the Ballet mécanique, which had a certain success, with Léger’s name” (267). Similarly to Murphy, Henri Chomette, half-brother of the filmmaker René Clair, wanted to collaborate with Man Ray after having seen Le Retour à la raison. Man Ray agreed, and the two completed their film in 1924, which they called A quoi rêvent les jeunes films? (What Do Young Films Dream About?). The film was financed in part by the Comte de Beaumont, who distributed it under his own name. Similarly to the situation of Ballet mécanique, Man Ray refused to mention his collaboration on this film in his Self Portrait. A third development from having made Le Retour à la raison consisted in Man Ray being offered funding for his next film, Emak Bakia. Three years after Breton and his friends had forcefully broken up Tzara’s Paris Dada at the ‘Evening of the Bearded Heart’, and two years after Breton had published his Manifeste du surréalisme in 1924, Man Ray wanted to make a Surrealist film with his cinépoème Emak Bakia. He received generous financial backing from Arthur Wheeler, an American financier living in France. This film is more than five times as long as his first film, Retour à la raison. When we see the title rotating in the opening sequence of the film, we realize
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that Man Ray was able to buy far superior equipment than the one he used for his first film. Emak Bakia is Man Ray’s exploration of the camera’s potential to transform the familiar world, and thus to create surreality. The film opens with an introduction of the apparatus of transformation: Man Ray’s new film camera, and Man Ray filming. In the lens we see his eye upside down, since he filmed himself filming by aiming the camera at a mirror.
Fig. 1: Man Ray, EMAK BAKIA (1926)
After the presentation of the apparatus, Man Ray repeats the cinematic Rayograph sequences that opened his first film, an indication that he and his friends thought very highly of them. After these Rayographs we again see an eye closed and then open, superimposed on the hood of a car, suggesting perhaps that the car is a living being, that its headlights are its eyes. This scene is followed by a car accident with a pig. In order to get the violent blurs Man Ray threw his camera up in the air, which most likely was the first camera toss in film history. A woman’s legs are visible stepping out of the car, surprisingly followed by many other legs. This scene of repetition recalls the sequence of
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the old woman repeatedly climbing the stairs in Ballet mécanique. After a series of shots of the ocean and a full rotating shot that has the sky on the bottom and the ocean on top, we see one of Man Ray’s rotating sculptures, which recalls all the rotating objects in his first film. Shots of geometric objects are followed by three different women’s faces with eyes closed, then opened. Then, quite unexpectedly, the only intertitle appears: “The Reason for this Extravagance”. The viewers indeed hope to get an explanation of the rather chaotic series of sequences they have just seen. A car drives up, and a man with a suitcase steps out, as though to deliver the answer. Yet the suitcase only contains collars that magically dance in the air, foreshadowing the ballet of the hats in Hans Richter’s 1927 film Ghosts Before Breakfast. The ending of Emak Bakia again focuses on the eyes. We see Kiki looking into the camera. Suddenly she opens her real eyes -- what we saw before were eyes painted on her eyelids. Are Kiki’s double eyes a Dada joke, or do they suggest double vision -- reality and surreality? Man Ray introduced much more of a human presence in this film. He appears himself at the beginning of the film operating the camera. Several narrative fragments or narrative teasers are in this film: Mrs. Wheeler driving a car and having an accident with a pig; Jacques Rigaut arriving with a suitcase to deliver the ‘explanation.’ What could be thought of as a hodge-podge of realistic shots, sparkling Rayographs, and abstract forms, Man Ray tried to rhythmically structure by contrasting abstract sequences with what he called “objective” sequences (Kovacs: 133). Man Ray attempted to suggest reality and surreality by alternating the world of crystals and abstraction with the everyday world, and especially by repeating faces with eyes closed and then opened. Yet his friends did not consider this film Surrealist. Man Ray describes their reaction in his Self Portrait: My surrealist friends whom I had invited to the showing were not very enthusiastic, although I thought I had complied with all the principles of Surrealism: irrationality, automatism, psychological and dreamlike sequences without apparent logic, and complete disregard of conventional storytelling. (274)
For the Surrealists, this film was still too Dada, too much related to the anarchy of his first film, Retour à la raison. When Emak Bakia was shown in Paris together with Richter’s Filmstudie, also of 1926, it was Richter’s film that was considered Surrealist, and not Man Ray’s.
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Yet Man Ray made another attempt to create a Surrealist film, this time with his own money and of his own initiative. Since the Surrealists protested Germaine Dulac’s realization of Antonin Artaud’s script The Seashell and the Clergyman (1928), which was supposed to be the first Surrealist film, Man Ray must have thought that there was still time for him to create Surrealism’s first film. Not trusting his own understanding of Surrealism, he had Robert Desnos, the foremost Surrealist dreamer and visionary, write for him a rather detailed script entitled Étoile de mer - Poëme de Robert Desnos - Tel que l’a vu Man Ray, whose thirty-three numbered sequences Man Ray very closely followed.2 This marks an astonishing change in Man Ray’s filmmaking, since in his previous two films he worked spontaneously and was very much opposed to the use of a script. The discovery of Desnos’ detailed scenario also indicates that Desnos’ contribution to this film was much greater than has been thought. Desnos’ script is probably related to his frustrated love for the Belgian blond cabaret singer Yvonne George, for whom Desnos did everything, including procuring drugs, but who only tortured him by never letting him come close to her. In the same year in which he wrote the scenario for L’Étoile de mer he also finished the play La Place de l’Étoile, in which the protagonist gazes at a starfish in a jar while longing for reciprocal love. Youki, Desnos’ wife, explained in her memoirs: “Robert loved Yvonne George in an almost supraterrestrial manner. For him she wasn’t a woman but an immaterial creature, which is why he sublimated her into the star” (1999: 131). Desnos himself wrote that he owned a starfish, which for him became the embodiment of a lost love, and he tellingly added, “a love well lost” (Migennes 1928: 160). As in Artaud and Dulac’s film T h e Seashell and the Clergyman, the theme of Desnos and Man Ray’s Étoile de mer is again the male protagonist’s intent to alchemically transform the elusive, resisting woman into a spiritual abstraction, in order to possess and control her. For Inez Hedges, this alchemical process is the male Surrealist protagonist’s desire for androgyny, for “incorporating the womanly into one’s male persona” (1996: 101). P. Adams Sitney notes a metonymic relationship between thighs and teeth in the film’s early sequence of the woman adjusting her garter and the immediately following first intertitle, “Women’s teeth are objects so charming…that one ought to see them only in a dream or in the instant of love”. In his analysis of Étoile de mer, he mentions the
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male protagonist’s “titillating dread of the vagina dentate and Cybelean castration”, yet his main focus is on self-reflexive language in the intertitles as well as the images, which reveal that the optical vision of the camera is always already distorted. He relates Étoile de mer to Marcel Duchamp’s Anémic Cinéma as yet another example of “Mallarméan cinema” (1990: 17-37). My reading of Étoile de mer is indebted to these two analyses, but I shall more strongly emphasize the Surrealist protagonist’s crisis of masculinity that manifests itself in his fear and rejection/transformation of the woman. The film opens with a rather coherent section. A man and a woman (André de la Rivière, a friend of Desnos, and Kiki, Man Ray’s mistress) walk along a path. The action of the woman adjusting her garter is punctuated by the intertitle “Women’s teeth are objects so charming… that one ought to see them only in a dream or in the instant of love”, thus warning the viewer of the danger that woman poses. The two enter the house where the woman lives; they go upstairs into her room. While she completely undresses, he sits fully dressed on a chair looking away. When she has made herself comfortable on the bed, the man gets up, and the intertitle “Adieu” appears. He kisses her hand, leaves, and the intertitle “Si Belle! Cybèle!” (So beautiful! Cybele!) follows. Again, the homonym “Si Belle – Cybèle” reveals, as did the earlier intertitle about the teeth, that the woman poses a danger for the male protagonist. Cybele was a goddess of Phrygia, the mother of all gods, and as such connotes matriarchy. This section is followed by the same woman selling newspapers in the street. The male protagonist takes her arm, and they both look at a glass jar with a starfish in it. He takes the jar to his room and closely examines the living starfish. Then a sequence of movements – newspapers blown away, trains and ships moving – is juxtaposed with a flower in a flowerpot, image of feminine beauty, followed by the intertitle “If the flowers were made of glass”. When the woman walks along the path by herself, the intertitle “Beautiful, beautiful as a flower made of glass” appears, followed by the image of a dead starfish. This transformation of organic, living beings into immobile, fixed objects occurs throughout the second part of the film, and these two different worlds appear simultaneously. When the woman climbs the stairs with a long, threatening knife in her hand, the image of a dead starfish is superimposed.
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Fig. 2: Man Ray. ETOILE DE MER. (1928)
When the woman leaves the protagonist for another man, the intertitle “How beautiful she was” appears. The protagonist then looks at the starfish, and the intertitle “How beautiful she is” follows, thus signaling the transformation of the mutable, fickle woman into the immutable image of the starfish, which he holds in his hands and can thus control. This alchemical change recalls the clergyman’s severing of the lady’s head and preserving it in a bowl in The Seashell and the Clergyman. Desnos and Man Ray present the woman’s independence as a threat to the male protagonist, which they express most memorably via the shot of the woman dressed in a tunic and a Phrygian cap holding a spear. Intertitles, such as “And if you find on this earth a woman who loves sincerely” are accompanied by the image of the woman wearing a mask. Even the musical selections, which are clearly marked in the manuscript of the scenario, further underline the overall theme of love lost and turned into permanent memory. The film begins with “The pleasure of love lasts only a moment” of the popular song Plaisir d’amour, and concludes with “Love’s sorrow lasts the entire life” of the same song. The protagonist can only give permanence to his love relationship by turning the fickle woman into the permanent object of the starfish. The film presents this alchemical
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process in which everyday reality and the world of imagination interpenetrate, where flowers turn into glass as in Baudelaire’s artificial paradise, and where threatening and independent women turn into beautiful, unchanging starfish. It is this transformative process in the protagonist’s mind that the film produces. Curiously, Man Ray used a gelatin-coated lens for almost half of the shots in this film. He might have initially resorted to this technique in order to avoid censorship for his scene depicting the woman undressing. Yet his use of this lens in many other sequences ultimately creates a very painterly, dreamy, poetic effect, which might also suggest that the protagonist does not very clearly recall some scenes from the past, and others, such as the woman with the spear or the violent shattering of the glass with the woman’s face behind it, only too clearly. Unlike the collaboration between Artaud and Dulac on The Seashell and the Clergyman, Man Ray and Desnos’ work on this film was very harmonious. Desnos was very pleased with the realization of his script and stated that Man Ray granted him the most flattering image of himself and his dreams (Migennes 1928: 160). He did not even object to the seemingly playful long takes of newspapers scattered and blown by the wind, houses and trees filmed from the moving train, the screen divided into twelve sections, all of which recall sequences of Man Ray’s earlier Dada films. Étoile de mer is indeed quite different from Man Ray’s two earlier films. In his Dada films Retour à la raison and Emak Bakia, he constantly defamiliarizes the familiar through cinematic manipulations and total incoherence, and thus never lets the viewer enter the world of the film. A distance is thus created between viewer and film from the beginning, which accounts for the viewer not being very disturbed by the rather playful nature of his Dada films. Étoile de mer, on the other hand, relies on strong narrative fragments and even characters. Because viewers are given an albeit fragmented story, they are frustrated in their attempt to build coherence, which they would not be inclined to do in Retour à la raison or Emak Bakia, since the narrative elements are almost totally absent. I see the difference between Man Ray’s earlier films and Étoile de mer, or more generally, between Dada films and Surrealist films, in their different strategies of defamiliarizing social reality. Surrealist films largely rely on narratives and characters as a means to draw the viewer into the reality produced by the film, which then is ruptured. The incoherent,
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non-narrative, illogical nature of Dada films keeps the viewers’ minds and logical thinking at a distance, but these films have the potential to reach the viewer on a quite different level through their rhythms, patterns, and play.
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Notes:
1
Man Ray’s two-page letter to Tristan Tzara is reproduced in Man Ray: directeur du mauvais movies (Bouhours and de Haas 1997: 8-9). In his Self Portrait, Man Ray explains that his title, “directeur du mauvais movies”, refers to an erotic or pornographic film he made with Duchamp: “while helping [Duchamp] with his research, I had shot a sequence of myself as a barber shaving the pubic hairs of a nude model, a sequence which was also ruined in the process of developing and never saw the light”(263). The model was Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, the most fascinating New York Dada artist and poet. At least parts of this film survived, since Man Ray glued two frames of nude Elsa with shaved pubic hair on the top of his letter to Tristan Tzara, which he signed “Man Ray directeur du mauvais movies.” In using Man Ray’s term ‘obscenema’, a quite different essay on his ‘cinema’ could be written by focusing on his erotic narrative series of photographs, such as Blanc et Noir (1929), La Prière (1930), Erotique Voilée (1933), and even Mr. and Mrs. Woodman (1947), as films. 2 Inez Hedges published a facsimile of Desnos’ manuscript, as well as a transcription and translation (Kuenzli 1996: 207-19).
Primary works consulted Desnos, Youki. 1999. Les Confidences de Youki. Paris: Fayard. Ray, Man. 1963. Self Portrait. Boston: Little, Brown and Co. —. 1974. ‘Bilingual Biography, I and Marcel’ in Opus International 49: 31-33.
Secondary works consulted Bouhours, Jean-Michel, and Patrick de Haas (eds). 1997. Man Ray: directeur du mauvais movies. Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou. Hedges, Inez. 1996. ‘Constellated Visions: Robert Desnos’s and Man Ray’s L’Étoile de mer’ in Rudolf Kuenzli (ed.), Dada and Surrealist Film. Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 99-109. Kovács, Steven. 1980. From Enchantment to Rage: The Story of Surrealist Cinema. London and Toronto: Associated University Presses. Kuenzli, Rudolf (ed.). 1996. Dada and Surrealist Film. Cambridge MA: MIT Press. Migennes, Pierre. 1928. ‘Les Photographies de Man Ray in Arts et Decorations 54. Moritz, William. 1995. ‘Americans in Paris: Man Ray and Dudley Murphy’ in JanChristopher Horak (ed.), Lovers of Cinema: The First American Film Avant-Garde 1919-1945. Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press. Sitney, P. Adams. 1990. Modernist Montage: The Obscurity of Vision in Cinema and Literature. New York: Columbia University Press.
On Mário Peixoto’s Limite Michael Korfmann Abstract: Discussions about avant-garde films of the 1920s usually relate to European, Soviet or North-American productions, while South American films such as Limite (1931), written and directed by Mário Peixoto (1908-1992) and, at least in Brazil, one of the most important cult movies, are hardly ever mentioned in this context. Classic works on film history frequently do not offer more than very short, general and sometimes incorrect comments on Brazilian films of the 1920s. This article will therefore present a more accurate and detailed account of its genesis within the international avant-garde scene, its reception and importance for the Brazilian film and cultural debates throughout the last decades, as well as a critical evaluation of its aesthetic foundations. Even though Limite results partially from European artistic influences, it may still be seen as a very singular and unique attempt to explore the cinematographic potentials in search for a visual poem of great intensity and timeless significance.
The European avant-garde movements had an expansionary dynamism, their innovating effects invading artistic production even as far away as Brazil and South America in general. As biographical references, one may cite Marinetti’s visit to Brazil in 1929, Swiss writer Blaise Cendrars’ three well-documented visits to the country between 1924 and 1928, when he called for a “Brazilianization” of national culture (Eulalio 2001), or the reception of Surrealism in countries such as Argentina and Peru. (Ponge 1999) And, already in 1918/19, escaping from World War I, Marcel Duchamp spent some time in Buenos Aires, where he continued to work on his Large Glass, unsuccessfully attempted to organize a Cubist exhibition and, according to Tomkins (247), dedicated much time to improving his chess. Approaching the diverse artistic forms of the avant-garde as responses to “technological advances” (Scheunemann 2000: 42) and not as an ideological movement attempting to reintegrate art into the practice of life, it should be considered that media, in the shape of photography and film, came quickly to Brazil. The first daguerreotype was imported as early as 1840, and first local film productions and movie theaters were reported by 1898. But even though the technical
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apparatus was introduced very early, we do not encounter a wider critical discussion on the role of photography or film, their effects on perception or new artistic forms as we do in Europe and North America, where relations between photography, literature and the arts became one of the main issues during the 19th century. Already in 1839, for instance, The Spectator published an article under the Luhmannesque title ‘Self-operating processes of fine art’, in which the new demands of art in the post-photographic era were clearly in evidence: “Painters need not despair; their labours will be as much in request as ever, but in a higher field: the finer qualities of taste and invention will be called into action more powerfully” (1839: 342) intoning later statements by Picasso and Man Ray about the new, non-reproductive tasks of art after the consolidation of the new medium. With regard to the central role of cinema for aesthetic discussion I may point out Helmut H. Diederich’s work on the History of Early German Film Theory (1996), documenting the intensive and extended debates on the new mass medium and its artistic challenges. In Brazil, photography and film did not arouse such widespread debates, even though critics such as Flora Süssekind state that Brazilian literature of the 1920s “dialogues maliciously with the new techniques and perception forms. It does not mention the movies at every moment but it appropriates and redefines, through writing, what is of its interest”. (1987: 48) There are few concrete examples of intensive debate on the new medium and its challenge to the arts in general. While Cubist or Expressionist tendencies served as impulses, Brazilian artists of the 1920s searched mainly for a genuinely national, postcolonial modern art, which would combine formal innovations with a shade of Brazilian ethnic and picturesque qualities, as we can see in the paintings of Tarsila de Amaral, the most famous of the Brazilian modernist painters. The following quotation, also by Amaral, offers a basic outline of a hybrid artistic modernity between past and present, a concept that influenced many Brazilian artworks in the 1920s: We will descend into our obscure and dark Prehistory. To bring out some of that immense atavistic source. Search the totemic annals. Qatar race roots, with a psychoanalytic mind. From these reencounters with our things, in a creative climate, we can reach to a new structure of ideas. Solidary with the origins. To construct a Brazil in our own likeness, of deep linkages. [...] We will gather a generation. To make a new “Social Contract“. The youth are disenchanted, wasting time with
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cultural snobberies. It dried the soul in Cartesianism. Why Rome? We have mystery at home. The pregnant earth. Voices accompany us from the distance. (cf. 1966: 97)
It comes then as no surprise that the rare photographic excursions of modernist artists concentrated much more on ethnographical aspects than on the medium itself. Writer and musician Mario de Andrade, for instance, documented photographically his journey through several Brazilian states in 1927 and 1928/29, focusing mainly on folkloric, architectural and regional motifs. Similar tendencies are seen in most Brazilian cinema productions of that period, where the so-called regional cycles used mainly local costumes, landscapes, episodes or folkloric figures for shaping their films. So when we speak of more experimental or avant-garde movies in Brazil or such films made by Brazilian directors, one is limited essentially to three productions: Rien Que Les Heures (1926), filmed in Paris by Alberto Cavalcanti (1897–1982), who would later work for some time in England before going back to Brazil; São Paulo – Sinfonia da Metrópole (1929), directed by Rodolfo Lustig and Adalberto Kemeny, a film obviously inspired by Ruttmann’s Berlin Symphony of 1927. Even though it is described in its title as a symphony, it was filmed and edited without a soundtrack. The resulting lack of a stringent rhythmic structure, constant interruptions by intertitles praising the industrial growth of the city, as well as a quite hilarious imitation of Lang’s Metropolis at the end, results in a rather unconvincing production, as becomes clear from a contemporary review which considered it, despite “some original images, well photographed and pleasant to watch”: “As a documentary, it does not pay off. As a rhythmic film it is even worse”. (cf. Pinto 2001: 2) And, finally, we have Limite, written and directed by Mário Peixoto in 1930 and first exhibited in 1931. Limite has, over the years, attained a legendary status, and was voted several times as one of the best Brazilian movies ever made. This is the only film that one may consider a true reference for original Brazilian avant-garde films of the silent era.
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Movie poster, São Paulo- Sinfonia da Metrópole (1929)
Even though English-speaking critics have frequently translated the title as ‘boundary’, I would like to keep the term Limite or Limit since, in my view, it does have a certain programmatic quality. First, I would like to point out the iconic quality of the I (in Portuguese, Limite is pronounced as limiti) as a structural concept that characterizes the permanent visual lines throughout the film in the shape of cables, roads, trees, branches and plants, stakes and posts, roofs, walls, bars, fences, legs or even stocking-ladders. And it is not by chance that after the opening sequence – exploring a more fluid, amorphous state – the camera focuses on the wooden plank of a boat as the initial line which will then lead us down the first memory lane. These visual lines, at times running out into the open and at others forming limited spaces such as triangles or crosses, therefore serve as connections linking the different flashes into the past, as well as indicating their
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limitations, giving the whole movie a very geometrical structure, counterbalanced by moving details such as wheels, handles and of course the movements of the camera itself.
Production still from Limite
Secondly, Limite may be situated on the historical limit between silent movies and talkies, a movie with a certain ambition to summon up many of the aesthetic and technical possibilities developed in the 1910s and 1920s. From this perspective, one may, among other things, point out the repetition of shots and close-ups on details as in Man Ray, the same music score by Satie in Limite as in Ray’s Les Mystères du Château des Dés (1928), the very rhythm-oriented structure as in, for instance, Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera (1929) or Ruttmann’s Berlin Symphony (1927) – even though these are of a different quality and tempo – as well as the very spare use of intertitles, as in Murnau’s The Last Laugh (1924). The boat scenes in Limite might evoke parallels with Murnau’s Sunrise (1927), and the shouting scenes in both Limite and Sunrise also bear some similarities.
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The moving fields and plants we also find in Earth (1930) by Alexander Dovzhenko, and, of course, one should mention an enormous variation of camera movements and angles as an exploration of the medium of film itself. Limite can therefore be seen as an effort to explore the visual possibilities, the experimental techniques and the rhythmic variations of the filmic medium in the context of a sometimes melancholic and somewhat aggressive statement about the limitations and the futility of human existence. It is perhaps this feature that Peter Weiss had in mind when he mentioned a certain “Mediterranean melodramatic tendency” (1995: 75) in his review of Limite. In his film, Peixoto attempted to integrate two basic concepts: the idea of a pure, ‘absolute’ cinema – in the sense of not being tied to ‘realistic’ narrative structures and trusting the camera-eye as the protagonist – and a poetic reflection on memory and time, a theme he explored extensively later on in his 6-volume novel The Uselessness of Each One. The vultures at the beginning and the end, symbolizing perhaps the perishability of all existence and efforts of conservation, for instance memories, make this proposition quite obvious. Let me finish this introduction with two more comments on limits: Peixoto’s original plan to underline his film with a natural noise soundtrack such as wind, rustling leaves and breaking waves was abandoned due to technical difficulties, and substituted by a record-soundtrack chosen by Brutus Pedreira, who plays the pianist in Limite, and who was a musician in real life. The chosen musical themes were then played on two alternating record players during the screening, frequently operated by Peixoto and Pedreira. Due to this procedure, in later exhibitions the film was frequently shown without any musical accompaniment and only with the editing of the video have images and music been definitively integrated. Knowing Peixoto’s obsession with detail concerning his film, arranging even the plants and trees to bow in a certain angle in one sequence, one may therefore look at the relation between sound and image in Limite as an elaborate, frequently contrapuntal concept, an intentional rhythmic discrepancy where sound and image often diverge, opening a third temporal and resonant dimension between the actual scene and a potential wider space beyond the limitations imposed by the ‘framed’ vision and the sequentiality of the film itself. In this context, one may judge the underlining of the storm scene at the end with the
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music of Prokofiev as an unhappy choice, which unfortunately diminishes the earlier impact of the movie to some extent. Finally, we have to mention the technical limitations of a film made without a professional backup structure, a one-man enterprise financed by the director/writer himself. It was above all cameraman Edgar Brazil’s brilliance that enabled the director to realize the effects he envisaged. Brazil was of similar importance as a cameraman in Brazil as Karl Freund was in Germany at the time. He built the special equipment Peixoto required for his elaborate camera movements, such as a wooden crane activated by ropes enabling a vertical camera shift, or a litter carried by four porters used to follow the steps of a couple on the beach.
Shooting of Limite: 1930
Just like many young Brazilians from rich families, who formed the intellectual and artistic elite at the beginning of the 20th century, Peixoto received important artistic stimulus from Europe. In 1926/27, at the age of 19, Peixoto spent almost a year at the Hopedene School in Willingdon near Eastbourne, Sussex. It was there that he discovered a certain inclination towards acting, developed a strong appreciation for cinema, especially for Russian and German movies, and probably first experimented with his homosexuality. With regard to cinema, Peixoto particularly admired the work of directors such as Lang, Pabst, Murnau, Lubitsch, Eisenstein and
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Pudovkin. Peixoto returned to Europe in 1929 with the express intension of seeing the latest cinema productions unavailable in Brazil at that time. Fascination for the cinema, contacts with critic/writer Octávio de Farias, cameraman Brazil, director Adhemar Gonzaga, (Peixoto assisted the shooting of one of his films, Human clay, 1927), and the discussions held in the “Chaplin Club” laid the groundwork for the idea of making his own movie, in which he would figure as an actor. The Chaplin Club, made up of a loose circle of friends, was founded in 1928 and until 1930 published a magazine called The Fan, dedicated to debates on the aesthetics of silent cinema, which I will come back to later. According to Peixoto, he found his final inspiration for Limite in August 1929, on his second trip to Europe. While walking through Paris he saw a photograph by André Kertesz in the 74th edition of the French magazine VU, a magazine for which Man Ray had worked.
Photo by André Kertesz: VU magazine, 1929
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It was this picture that led to the writing of the scenario for Limite, published for the first time in 1996. The hand-written scenario was then offered to director friends Gonzaga and Mauro, but both declined. They advised Peixoto to make the film himself and to hire Edgar Brazil as cameraman, who would have the necessary experience to guarantee the realization of the project. Shooting began in mid1930, using specially imported film material with a high sensitivity for grey scales. Stills from Limite were soon distributed and, in an effort to raise public expectation, they were frequently presented as photos from a new Pudovkin movie.
Still from Limite: 1930
The first screening took place on May 17th 1931 in the C i n e m a Capitólio in Rio de Janeiro, a session organized by the Chaplin Club, which presented Limite as the first Brazilian film of pure cinema. It received favorable reviews from critics – who saw the film as an original Brazilian avant-garde production – but also rejection by part of the audience and film distributors. Limite never made it into commercial circuits and, over the years, the film was screened only sporadically.
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Still from Limite: 1930
This story of failure and resistance may have contributed to the cult status of both director and movie, but there is a series of other factors to be mentioned, which fit quite well into the inclination of Mário Peixoto to not always differentiate clearly between his artistic projects and prosaic everyday life. Soon after its first screening in Rio, Limite was shown on several occasions in Europe, in Paris as well as at the Marble Arch cinema in London, where it was said to have attracted the interest of Sergei Eisenstein, leading to an article written by him entitled A Movie from South America, supposedly published in 1931 in Tatler Magazine. This article has frequently been quoted as proof of the international recognition and reputation Limite received, as in the program of the Berlin Film Festival in 1981. In the 1940s and 1950s, Peixoto had often mentioned the Eisenstein text but never came up with the article itself. He first claimed to have translated the text from a French version of the original English article, and later on claimed that cameraman Brazil had translated it from German into Portuguese. According to Saulo Pereira de Mello, however, he finally admitted to having written it himself. The article was then republished by de Mello (2000) as an original text by Peixoto, which I will comment on later as a description of Limite by the director himself.
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A second item to mention is the description of Limite as “the unknown masterpiece”. In 1959, the nitrate film began to deteriorate and two dedicated admirers, Plinio Süssekind and Saulo Pereira de Mello, started a frame-by-frame restoration of the last existing copy. Limite only returned to festivals and screenings in 1978. Even though nobody could see the movie between 1959 and 1978 – as in the case of Georges Sadoul and his unsuccessful trip to Rio de Janeiro in 1960 – it still served as a reference for controversial discussions and statements, while others even doubted that the film really existed. In 1963 Glauber Rocha, a leading figure of the new cinema, the cinema novo, classified the unseen movie as “far from reality and history” (Rocha: 59) and the director as “unable to comprehend the contradictions of bourgeois society” (66), a “contradiction historically overcome” (67) and confirmed his judgment of Limite as a product of the intellectual decadent bourgeoisie again in 1978 after finally having seen it. But the legend around the film also increased when Peixoto withdrew to an island between 1967 and 1987, living in a mansion he said had been constructed by a 17th century Spanish pirate. The mansion was a gift from his father, and Peixoto spent most of his family fortune transforming it into a private museum decorated with antiques. Due to financial problems, he later had to sell this property and moved into a small hotel. His final years were spent in a small flat in Copacabana, where he died in 1992. Let me finish with some remarks on theoretical approaches to Limite. Over the years, it has been characterized as decadent bourgeois art, an avant-garde film, an anti-avant-garde manifesto and an organic work in the sense of a Goethean allegory. Some have called it a cinematographic poem or, if we take a look at the homepage of the Brazilian Embassy in London we find it classified as a “surrealistic film”. I think its programmatic outline can be understood quite clearly by analyzing two important documents, first the Eisenstein/Peixoto article, and secondly The Fan, the publication of the Chaplin Club where it was above all Octávio de Farias, a close friend of Peixoto, who formulated the basic reflections that would influence the conception of Limite. With regard to The Fan, first of all we find the well-known rejection of film as an adaptation of traditional literary structures, similar to Ruttmann who stated in Kunst und Kino that “Literature has nothing to do with cinema”. (cf. 1989: 7) We also find the same emphasis on film as a medium of form, space, light, and
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darkness with all of their “atmospheric qualities”. (9) Based on these reflections, Farias postulates that film should abandon its orientation towards the word and develop a belief in the image as a form of thinking, that would go beyond the imprisoning of reality within logical linear structures, and that would multiply, open and extend our perception to the infinite, overcoming the traditional ‘crystallized’ representation offered by written language. Instead of the frozen word: the image – and the camera. “I believe in the image. It authenticates the gesture. It constructs movement. It creates rhythm”. (Farias: 1929 n.n.) Movement, rhythm and montage of the visual are to substitute the decadence of linear and reproductive literary procedures. But quite surprisingly, Farias finds his theoretical praise of the self-reflecting processes of the medium, so characteristic of the avant-garde in general, to be realized in quite traditionally molded, classical narrative forms. For him, as well as for many members of the Chaplin Club, it was not Dada, Surrealism or abstract experiments, but Murnau who served as their main reference. The Last Laugh, for instance, was highly admired for the fact that it abandoned the use of intertitles and emphasized the mobile camera, thus creating a cinema of “plastic fluidity” and “filmic continuity”, to use two expressions by Paul Rotha. (cf. Scheunemann 2003: 16) It seems quite clear that Peixoto’s film, with its floating pictures and emerging solidification, points much closer to the theoretical reflections of Farias than Murnau’s Kammerspiel films, as Lotte H. Eisner has defined them. (1964: 147) Nevertheless, the fluidity and continuity mentioned by Rotha may also serve as references for Limite, not so much with regard to its structural concept, which is, contrarily to Murnau, based on visual and rhythmic variation and not continuity as the main filmic principle, but in regard to the underlying philosophical ambition: the oscillation between a fluid memory stream and concrete objects and episodes, which emerge as fixed points in the continuity of time. This proposal is quite clearly formulated in the article by Peixoto, A Movie from South America – formerly attributed to Eisenstein – which I understand as one of his few theoretical statements. Here, Peixoto first emphasizes the role of the “camera-brain” and the “instinctive rhythmic filmstructure” of Limite, and then defines the film as somewhere between a singular, outstanding work of art and a completely anonymous item, “unidentifiable in the inexpressive crowds”, whose “poetic evasion is built on a vigorous plan of adaptation to the real”. (2000: 85)
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For Peixoto, the experience offered by Limite cannot be adequately captured by language, but was meant to be felt. Therefore, the spectator should subjugate himself to the images as to “anguished chords of a synthetic and pure language of cinema”. (88) According to the director, his film is “as meticulously precise as the invisible wheels of a clock”, where long shots are surrounded and linked by shorter ones as in a “planetary system”. (88) Peixoto characterizes Limite as a ‘desperate scream’ aiming for resonance instead of comprehension. “The movie does not want to analyze. It shows. It projects itself as a tuning fork, a pitch, a resonance of time itself” (88), capturing the flow between past and present, object details and contingence as if it had always “existed in the living and in the inanimate”, or detaching itself tacitly from them. Since Limite is more of a state than an analysis, characters and narrative lines emerge, followed by a probing camera exploring angles, details, possibilities of access and fixation, only to fade out back into the unknown, a visual stream with certain densifications or illustrations within the continued flow of time. According to Peixoto, all these poetic transpositions find “despair and impossibilities”: a “luminous pain” which unfolds in rhythm and coordinates the “images of rare precision and structure”. (91) The oscillation between fluid and solid, the outstanding and the unidentifiable, between concrete object and abstraction is a basic principle not only of this film but also of his literary work. If we follow these outlines, we may see Limite as a film with a clear, elaborate and recognizable concept, maybe difficult to identify at first sight but emerging more fully at each screening one attends. This may explain Peixoto’s dislike for surrealistic movies, specifically those of Buñuel and the rejection of chance as an artistic principle, as we find in Man Ray or Dada. Limite starts off with the image of a woman embraced by a man in handcuffs, a prototype image that is varied and diversified throughout the film. The proto-image in the beginning, based on the photograph Peixoto saw in Paris in 1929, introducing the leitmotiv of imprisonment, of being trapped, gives way to a long, almost hypnotic boat scene that is to transport us into the continuum of time, a rather fluid, amorphous state where the camerabrain then moves into the past, tracing certain memory lines, episodes and associated details, objects, movements and images, visual flashes of limitation, that reflect themselves in other images and thus escape a
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fixed, limited and solid status, only to disappear or fade out without further explanation.
Proto-image: Limite
The wrecking in the storm then leads us back to the original protoimage, the initial theme, now extended and enriched by the visual and rhythmic variations we experience.
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* The author wishes to thank the CNPq for a scholarship.
Primary sources consulted Peixoto, Mário. 1984. O inútil de cada um. Rio de Janeiro: Record. —. 1996. Limite. ‘scenario’ original. Rio de Janeiro: Sette Letras. —. 2004. Seis contos e duas peças curtas. Rio de Janeiro: aeroplano editora
Secondary sources consulted Bopp, Raul. 1966. Movimentos modernistas no Brasil Rio de Janeiro: São José. Diederichs, Helmut H. 2002. Frühgeschichte deutscher Filmtheorie : Ihre Entstehung und Entwicklung bis zum Ersten Weltkrieg. Online at http://fhdo.opus.hbznrw.de/volltexte/2002/6/ (consulted 26.05.2004). Eisner, Lotte H. 1964. Murnau. Berkeley: University of California Press. Eulalio, Alexandre. 2001. A Aventura Brasileira de Blaise Cendrars. São Paulo: Edusp. Farias, Otavio. 1929. ‘Eu creio na imagem’ in: O Fan 6. Mello, Saulo Pereira de. 2000. Mário Peixoto - Escritos sobre cinema. Rio de Janeiro: aeroplano editora. Pinto, Maria Inez Machado Borges. 2000. O cinematógrapho e a ilusão espetacular da São Paulo moderna. Online at http://www.mnemocine.825com.br/cinema/historiatextos/mariaines2/ (consulted 14.06 2002). Ponge, Robert. 1999. Surrealismo e novo mundo. Porto Alegre: Editora da Universidade. Rocha, Glauber. 2000. Revisão Crítica do Cinema Brasileiro. São Paulo: Cosac & Naify. Scheunemann, Dietrich (ed.). 2000. European Avant-garde: New Perspectives. Amsterdam: Rodopi. — (ed.). 2003. Expressionist Film: New Perspectives. Rochester, NY: Camden House. Schobert, Walter. 1989. Der Avant-Garde Film der 20er Jahre. Munich: GoetheInstitut. ‘Self operating processes of fine art.’ Online at http://www.daguerre.org/resource/ texts/self_op.html (consulted 06.01.2003). Süssekind, Flora. 1987. Cinematógrafo de Letras. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras. Tomkins, Calvin. 1999. Marcel Duchamp. Eine Biographie. Munich: 1999. Weiss, Peter. 1995. Avantgarde Film. Suhrkamp: Frankfurt am Main.
Dancing with Light: Choreographies of Gender in the Cinema of Germaine Dulac Tami M. Williams Abstract: This chapter traces the cinematic conception of French feminist and pioneer filmmaker Germaine Dulac as it evolved in her films of the 1920s. Drawing upon sources from Dulac’s personal collection, it explores the artistic influences (especially from music and dance) and the social aspects of Dulac’s approach, not only through her writings and films, but also through the historical conditions of their production. Setting aside the common division between Dulac’s commercial and avant-garde films, this chapter emphasizes the coherence and continuity of her vision across her narrative and non-narrative works, in their evolution from figuration to abstraction, and in her search for a “specific” or “pure” cinema.
In the post-World War I climate of shifting social and aesthetic hierarchies, Germaine Dulac played a founding role in the creation of a new, aesthetically groundbreaking and socially engaged cinema. Despite its mythical designation, “les années folles”, France of the 1920s was marked by major social fissures. There was a tremendous gap between women’s desires to maintain their wartime experience of liberty and the official moral discourse of neo-natalism, which dictated conservative social conceptions of class, gender and sexuality. In this context, whose constraints were intensified by the pressures of a struggling film industry, Dulac pioneered new cinematic strategies and techniques, which allowed her to communicate her feminist ideals through an elaborate signifying network based on suggestion. While she was influenced by 19th century naturalist and symbolist tendencies in theater, painting, music and dance, Dulac saw in the modern instrument of cinema a medium that was more capable than its predecessors of expressing the inner life and social reality of the “New woman.” Throughout the 1920s Dulac developed a number of experimental film strategies to reconfigure and subvert formal, narrative and generic codes (caricature, parody, mise-en-abîme, technical effects, multiple endings), for the purpose of social critique
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and the expression of her discourse on gender and sexuality, and as a means of exploding or analyzing the film from within. In her search for a cinema free from the other arts, she developed her conception of a pure cinema based on three central concepts of “life,” “movement,” and “rhythm.” Central to this conception was the use of gesture, which has it origins in 19th century Pre-Raphaelite painting, and early 20th century symbolist theater. Also important was the figure of the female body in movement, developed through the trope of sport and particularly dance. Dulac used sports or dance in over half of her films. She also characteristically employed athletes and dancers in key roles (these included music hall dancer Edmonde Guy, ballerinas Lilian Constantini and Stasia Napierkowska and Isadora Duncan’s disciple Djemil Anik. She also employed several male figures, including athlete Georges Charlia, tennis player Raoul Paoli and dancer Ernest Van Duren, to name a few). For Dulac, form, movement and the rhythm of sport and dance could transmit through “sensation” and “suggestion” certain notions of emancipation. One can see a progression in her use of these activities, and the movement and rhythm that they embody, throughout her career. Dulac employed sport – as an incarnation of modernity – along with classical and modern dance, to express the social condition and sexuality of woman, before having them appear in a new and more “abstract” incarnation in her “pure” films, where only form, movement and rhythm of life subsist.
Dulac’s Use of Dance In many of her early films, such as La Cigarette (1919) and La Belle Dame Sans Merci (1921), Dulac associates women with sports such as golf and tennis, as well as with the speed of the automobile (all of these were considered acceptable activities for women, at a time when the fear of the virilization of women’s bodies was a subject of intense popular debate). Yet, she seems to go further in her use of dance to express, metaphorically and lyrically, the “interior life” of women, and to subvert gender conventions. To this end, and particularly in her films of the late 1920s, she used the rhythm of cinema and dance to tackle more socially controversial issues such as homosexuality. In her 1927 independent short l’Invitation au Voyage, dance is linked to the emancipation of the female protagonist who, one evening, during her husband’s absence, goes to a cabaret. The movement and rhythm
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of this location and its maritime decor create a strong contrast with the austere universe in which she lives. From the outset, the “bellboy,” a woman in drag, who monitors the door of the cabaret, clearly announces that the sex roles will be disturbed, or that there will be “gender trouble”. This idea is accentuated by the fact that the heroine enters the cabaret through a revolving door (one of a number of recurring circular motifs in the film, which reappear in her later abstract works such as Disque 957, 1928). The first thing that the young woman sees on entering is a dancer whose movements express from the outset the liberty of the location. In opposition to the relaxed and lightly dressed female clientele, the young woman, very rigid, hesitates before sitting down and taking off her coat. During the course of the evening she accepts an invitation to dance with a young man with an androgynous, even faintly feminine, Rudolph Valentino-like physique. This sequence constitutes a key turning point in the film. Even as the frequent displacement and circular movement of the camera contributes to creating an atmosphere of instability throughout the duration of the film, the movement and rhythm of dance, in this crucial sequence, permit a shift – or slippage – of gender roles. Although the couples on the dance floor are ostensibly heterosexual, their bodies turn in a vertiginous way, destabilizing their identity; Dulac uses montage to juxtapose the close-up of a woman closing her eyes with a fleeting or fugitive shot showing the legs of two female couples dancing, which we can read as her fantasy. Here, it is through the speed of the dancers’ bodies, which merge or flow together – an effect that Dulac accentuates through the use of the blur – that the heroine’s most illicit desires are revealed. In La Princesse Mandane (1928), a commercial film adapted from a novel by Pierre Benoît, Dulac evokes the constraints of the female condition through classical ballet. The film tells the story of a young man who, having seen the great adventure film Michel Strogoff (Victor Tourjansky, France, 1926), imagines a voyage to the country of the Tartars, where he will attempt to rescue a princess sequestrated in her palace. Dulac uses a simple ballerina to evoke the social condition of the captive Princess. In a key scene of the film, the immobile body of the ballerina, aside from a few restricted and controlled poses, is isolated in the center of an immense room surrounded by her guardians and the
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spectators gazing at her. This composition translates the visual representation of the young heroine, as well as her sequestration in a masculine image. The image of the princess – the mise-en-scène of her femininity – is the object of a male fantasy, just like the historically fragile and ephemeral body of the classic dancer or ballerina.
La Princesse Mandane (dir. Germaine Dulac, 1928), Photo D.R., coll. BiFi
In Dulac’s film this representation is accentuated and subverted, at the same time, by a homosexual subtext, which sends an unconventional and unexpected image to the male protagonist and the spectator. At the time of her liberation, the princess appears to regain control of her image. First, her liberty comes through cross-dressing, a recurring motif in Dulac’s work (i.e. Ame d’artiste, L’Invitation au Voyage). Then, at the film’s climax, the princess, once liberated by the young adventurer, rejects him. She gives him her crown as a token of her gratitude, and leaves off-screen with another woman. The off-screen look of the adventurer, followed by his expression of horror, renders this subtext explicit. Afterwards, the young hero, “victim of the cinema,” wakes up from this unexpected adventure, happy to be reunited with his wife. This second more commercial ending or framing narration no doubt allowed Dulac to satisfy a broader, more conservative public at the time.
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From Figuration to Abstraction While in her narrative films Dulac often expressed the emotional and spiritual states of her characters through the movement and symbolism of dance, it is in her self-financed “film d’essais” or experimental films (1929) that dance took on its full significance on a formal level, as well as in terms of gender. Dulac foregrounded dance as an expression of the significance of movement. In her 1927 search for a “pure cinema,” Dulac expanded upon her concept of a “visual symphony,” which minimized plot and simplified decors in favor of rhythm and sensation (an approach exemplified by her 1925 film La Folie des Vaillants). Dulac gained the conviction that the lines and forms of gesture and figuration, central to her narrative films, could move the spectator without actors or characters.1 She directed three abstract films, all inspired by music and nature, and described as dances. The role of nature essential to Dulac was also crucial to the theories of modern dance in its attachment to nature and the unity of gesture. Dancer Isadora Duncan summarized the essence of her conception in her prewar article ‘Dance and Nature’: “The great and sole principal which I feel I can rely on is the constant, absolute, universal unity of form and movement, a rhythmic unity which can be found in all manifestations of nature”. (Duncan 1927: 29; Duncan’s emphasis.) “Pure cinema”, according to Dulac, echoes this conception in its formulation of movement and rhythm as essential qualities. Moreover, cinema did not content itself with imitating nature, because it provided the “material of life itself”. Contrary to other filmmakers of the “abstract” movement like Viking Eggeling and Hans Richter, who defend a non-figurative and non-referential approach derived from painting, for Dulac, cinégraphie remained present in its most tangible forms: the visualization of movement and rhythm. In her film Thème et Variations (1929), Dulac makes dance a central theme and effectuates a series of comparisons and contrasts, or variations, between the dancer (as line and form), and the machine. According to the original project, the film was also to contain various material forms found in nature (BiFi, GD 3232). In the final film, with the exception of the prologue, which includes shots of flowers, birds, clouds and grass composed and arranged in the form of a “cinédance,” only the figure of the dancer and the machines remain. The
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silhouette of the dancer evolves through numerous oblique postures (grands and petits pliés, jumps, kicks). These developments are juxtaposed with the movements of the machines (the play of a pivot, pistons or valves, connecting rods, perforators). Moreover, the variations of the lines and interior movement within each shot are often accentuated by slanted camera angles that create interlacing linear and diagonal motifs. The use of slow motion, superimpositions, blurs and dissolves render these elements even more complex. It is through this elaborate schema that the image of the dancer leaves the domain of the photographic and attains abstraction in order, according to Dulac “to create, through the rhythm that it espouses, a suggestive aspect which goes beyond form”. (Dulac 1930)
Dancer Lilian Constantini in Theme et Variations (dir. Germaine Dulac, 1929), Photo D.R., coll. BiFi 1929
In her film Etude cinégraphique sur une Arabesque (1929), which she subtitles “ballet cinégraphique,”(BiFi, GD 232) it is the form of the arabesque which comes from music, decor and choreographic dance that furnishes these elements with the accord that they are seeking in nature, as in her film Disque 957, where the principal materials are water and light. With the exception of some motifs, which recall Disque 957, the visual structure of the film is composed essentially of variations on the arabesque: arcs of light, water spouts, spider webs, burgeoning trees, flowers and foliage, a woman’s smile, arms stretching, a leg that rhythms a rocking chair. Like the more freeflowing tendency of the arabescal decorative style that employs varied
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elements of foliage (such as flowers, stems and leaves), the lines and forms of Dulac’s Arabesque maintain a more or less figurative appearance. Yet, in keeping with the arabescal motif that Debussy’s suites inspire, the film, as a whole, tends more towards abstraction than Disque 957. To render these elements more abstract, Dulac often uses photographic techniques such as blurs, masks, dissolves, multiple exposures, and multiple lenses. However, the elements from nature that she includes, such as light, mirrors, water and wind, serve to distort or blur the various elements, or to intensify their design. We find branches of trees reflected in water, blurred streaks of light on a spinning mirrored globe, the reflection of flowers arched in a mirror (which Dulac refers to as a “dance of tulips”), water jets bouncing off trees, the wind blowing a scarf, the reflections of light from the mirrored globe on a scarf, and so on. Recognizable figures give way to more abstract forms.
Lilian Constantini in Disque 957 (dir. Germaine Dulac, 1928), photo D.R., coll. BiFi
The motif of the “arabesque,” which often adopts a literal form in the film’s mise-en-scène, is also mirrored in the overall arabescal structure of the film. Taking her cue from Debussy’s first and second arabesques, it seems that Dulac first conceived of the film as being divided into two arabescal forms. According to an early description of the project entitled “Sur deux arabesques de Debussy”, the film’s
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“first arabesque” would correspond to number two of Debussy’s suite, and the film’s “second arabesque” to number one. Dulac likened the film’s first arabesque to a dance (BiFi, GD 226). It is the lines of light and rhythm that play the lead. This technique of abstraction through light, movement and rhythm is close to the serpentine dances of Loïe Fuller, whose body eclipses behind the floating veils and electric lights. In February 1928, on the occasion of a tribute to Loïe Fuller by L’Union des Artistes, Dulac evoked this very absence of the body: “An invisible body dissolving into diaphanous and transparent tissues from which a head emerges […] a mind carried by light”. (1994: 109). In her February 1927 article “Du sentiment à la ligne” published in her journal Schémas two years before she began making her abstract films, and without reference to any particular film, Dulac described her notion of abstraction through the motif of the female dancer. She wrote: I evoke a dancer! A woman? No. A line bounding to harmonious rhythms. I evoke, on the veils, a luminous projection! Precise matter? No. Fluid rhythms. The pleasures that movement procures in the theater, why scorn them on the screen? Harmony of lines. Harmony of light. Lines and surfaces evolving at length according to the logic of their forms and stripped of all meanings that are too human to better elevate itself towards the abstraction of sentiments leaving more space for sensations and dreams: integral cinema. (1994: 87-89)
If this passage is famous, the source of its inspiration is unknown. Yet a first draft of this article indicates more specifically how the filmmaker went from figuration (in her impressionist films) to abstraction (in her experimental films). It reads: I evoke Isadora Duncan. A dancer. No. A line bounding to harmonious rhythms. I evoke Loïe Fuller. Veils. No. Fluid rhythms of light. The pleasures that movement procures that we like in certain forms in the theater, why banish them, in certain others on the screen. With Isadora a harmony of lines, with Loïe Fuller a harmony of light. Lines, surfaces stripped of all meanings that are too human to better elevate itself towards the abstraction of sentiments: integral cinema. (BiFi, GD 1381)
It was with modern dance that women, and notably Duncan and Fuller, for the first time created their own choreographies, revolutionizing dance, as Dulac would the cinema. As historian Anne Higonnet has argued in her article “Femmes, images et
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représentations,” it was in this way that women would “take control of their visual identity and take it outside of the limits within which it had been confined” (Higonnet 2002: 457). It was also with modern dance that the body of the woman liberated itself from classical ballet to adopt an unfettered lyricism. It is in this sense that certain women perceived modern dance as possessing, through the body, a transcendental capacity. For example, in her 1903 book Der Tanz der Zukunft, Isadora Duncan wrote of the new dance, “the dancer of the future must be a woman whose body and spirit have developed so harmoniously that the movement of the body will be the natural language of the soul”. (Duncan 1903: 43-44) Of this transcendental aspect, dance critic Gabriele Klein observes in her essay “La construction du féminin et du masculin dans la danse des modernes,” “It is not surprising that the reflection of the dancer of expression on the world of affect […] is celebrated as the veritable emancipation of women”, even as she notes that the ideological conventions of expressive dance remained historically restrictive in terms of gender as well. (Roussier 1998: 189) Yet in Dulac’s ideal of a “pure cinema,” the body only existed as an abstract or fleeting form. With the disappearance of the female figure, one might be tempted to ask what happened to her feminist project. Loïe Fuller seems to have been Dulac’s preferred model. She was preferred precisely because she was not content to desexualize the body, but to make it disappear, as Dulac stated in her article “D u sentiment à la ligne”, “to better elevate itself towards the abstraction of sentiments leaving more space for sensations and dreams” (31). While in her narrative films the figure of the dancer evoked the liberty of women in the face of modernity, in her “abstract” films the model inspired by modern dance, for one, offered new possibilities of gender and sexual identification. In other words, with her pure cinema, Dulac created a modern cinema that opened up new possibilities for the spectator to create herself. Dulac’s approach set her apart within the 1920s avant-garde film movement, and her work anticipated some of the most significant cinematic tendencies that followed. Her penchant for a “pure cinema” that retained its origins in the “material of life itself” would prove appropriate as the goals of the experimental film movement transformed to meet the social concerns of the period. Dulac went on to contribute to the cinéma d’actualité, which, she would argue, was,
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among cinema’s many applications and forms, the most sincere and pure.3
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Notes:
1
In her 1927 article “Les esthétiques, les entrâves, la cinégraphie intégrale,” she asked, “Can lines, which unfold and extend, following the rhythm of a sensation or abstract idea affect us […] by themselves, through their development alone?” Germaine Dulac, Écrits sur le cinéma, ed. Prosper Hillairet (Paris: Éditions Paris expérimental, 1994), 135. The latter volume is a collection of Dulac’s writing on cinema. Further references to Dulac’s Écrits indicate that an archival source is reprinted in this volume. 2 This chapter is based in large part on original documents from the Dulac Archive, which carries the name of her companion, the “Fonds Marie-Anne ColsonMalleville,” held at the Bibliothèque du Film (BiFi) in Paris. References to this archive take the form BiFi, followed by GD and the item number. All translations are mine. 3 See Germaine Dulac, “La portée educative et sociale des actualités,” Revue Internationale du Cinéma Educateur, August 1934. Dulac, Écrits, 203-207; and Tami Williams, “Germaine Dulac and the French Film Industry between the Wars: Modernizing the ‘News-Real,’” Women in Europe between the Wars: Politics, Culture and Society, ed. Angela Kershaw and Angela Kimyongür, (Aldershot, England and Burlington, Vermont: Ashgate Publications, 2007), 171-189.
Primary sources consulted Dulac, Germaine. 1931. ‘La Nouvelle évolution’ in Cinégraphie: January 1931 —. 1994 Écrits sur le cinéma, (ed. Prosper Hillairet). Paris: Éditions Paris experimental
Secondary sources consulted Duncan, Isidore. 1927. Écrits sur la danse. Paris: éditions du Grenier —. 1903. Der Tanz der Zukunft. Leipzig: Eugen Diderichs Klein, Gabriele. 1998. “La construction du féminin et du masculin dans la danse des modernes,” in Roussier, Claire (ed.). 1998. Histoires des corps, à propos de la formation du danseur, Paris: Cité de la musique Higonnet, Anne. 2002. “Femmes, images et représentations” in Histoires des femmes en Occident : Le XXe siècle. Vol. 5, Paris: Perrin
Mayakovsky: Film: Futurism Marina Burke Abstract: In the early decades of the twentieth century the term ‘Futurism’ was loosely used to describe a wide variety of aggressively ‘modern’ styles in art and literature. The roots of Futurism are a tangled web of early twentieth century political, cultural and philosophical currents that found expression in Filippo Marinetti’s bombastic “Founding and Manifesto of Futurism”, published in Le Figaro in 1909. While Futurism had an impact worldwide, it was in Russia where it had its most vigorous development, outside of Italy. This chapter will explore the film career of Vladimir Mayakovsky as the link between the early days of Futurist activity in this field and the full flowering of the Futurist aesthetic in the Soviet montage cinema of the 1920s.
Everything has become lightning fast, swift flowing as on a film strip. […] Poetry must correspond to the new elements of the psyche of the contemporary city. (Mayakovsky 1914, 1955: 453)
A charismatic figure, more famous as a poet and playwright and enthusiastic participant in the many Futurist performances and happenings of the early anarcho-revolutionary period of Russian Futurism, Vladimir Mayakovsky nevertheless appears in the annals of Soviet cinema history as a prime exponent of Futurism in the cinema. Initially however, despite the general critical perception that Russian Futurists, who, like their Italian counterpoints, embraced cinema whole-heartedly, and the affinity acknowledged by Durgnat’s association of Futurism and film’s “intrinsic modernity, motion, dynamism and demagoguery”, (Durgnat 1969: 11) both groups were slow to appreciate the Futurist possibilities of this new art. While the Italian Futurists had issued a “Technical Manifesto on Painting” in 1910, which underlined this very affinity, Everything moves, everything runs, everything changes […] A figure is never motionless before our eyes […] Because of the persistence of an image upon the retina, all objects constantly multiply themselves, succeeding each other like vibrations within the space in which they run […], (Durgnat 1969)
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it was not until 1916 that “The Manifesto of Futurist Cinema” appeared, along with a handful of films that could be called Futurist.1 Of these films, Thais, Il Mio Cadavere, Il Perfido Incanto (A. G. Bragaglia) and Vita Futurista (Arnaldo Ginna), only the latter two would appear worthy of discussion as Futurist films proper. Il Perfido Incanto – while by all accounts a violent melodrama – was distinguished by Bragaglia’s attempts to apply the principles of his first love Photodynamism to film, making the play of light and line an integral part of the action, increasing the ‘surreal’ effect of the scenography by the use of different kinds of lenses and prisms, as well as the convex and concave mirrors that were also used in Vita Futurista (Kirby 1971: 139, Tisdall and Bozzolla 2000: 145). In line with the recommendations of the Manifesto, Vita Futurista used toning to color the black-and-white film, hand-coloring, mirrors for distortion, split-screen techniques, and double exposure: there are glimpses of the later abstract cinema of Viking Eggeling and Hans Richter, or the visual playfulness of Dada and Surrealism (Le Grice 1977: 11-2). The development of Futurism in Russia, as elsewhere, was linked to the visual arts and poetry, specifically Symbolism and Cubism; the extravagance of dress and behavior that later characterized the Cubo-futurists began as early as 1910 at meetings of the group of painters known as the “Union of Youth”, soon after reinvented as the “budetlyane” – a Russification of the term ‘Futurists’ (Brown 1973: 41). The Russians had been aware of Italian Futurism since 1909, when Marinetti’s manifestos were translated and discussed in the Russian press; the Russians, however, insisted on claiming priority in the invention of Futurist ideas. Indeed, with some justification: while similarities abound between the two groups (see note 1), Russian Futurism could also claim to have its origins in the milieu that surrounded the primitivist art movement that developed from 1909 to 1911, spearheaded by the painters Mikhail Larionov and Natal’ya Goncharova. This movement involved an aesthetic of “[…] popular prints (lubki), ancient icons, city folklore, folk toys, painted furniture, fairground paintings, kitschy carpets, shop signboards, etc.” which, Tsivian further claims, when “reappropriated by avant-garde artists of the teens would eventually find its way into films of the early twenties”. (Tsivian 1996: 45) Futurism in Russia began in these circles: almost all of the Futurist poets came to their writing from
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painting, and many of the literary devices in Russian Futurist poetry can be directly related to Larionov’s paintings of this time: the use of irrelevant associations; the imitation of children’s art; the adaptation of folk-art imagery and motifs. (Gray 1986: 109) While a more direct debt to Italian Futurism is evident in the Futurist Manifesto of 1912, “A Slap in the Face of Public Taste” (a polemic on old art, specifically literature, in the spirit of Marinetti’s anarchic vitalism and rebellion against ‘passéism’): The past constricts: The Academy and Pushkin are less intelligible than hieroglyphics Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, etc. must be thrown overboard from the Ship of Modernity. (Burliuk, Mayakovsky, Kruchenykh, Khlebnikov 1912, 1975: 170)
the Russians Futurists can also claim to have trumped the Italians in the production of the first Futurist film. This was Drama v Kabare Futuristov (The Drama in the Futurist Cabaret No. 13, Vladimir Kasyanov), which appeared in November 1913. Starring Larionov and Goncharova, the actors also included Mayakovsky, and David and Nikolai Burliuk. The film itself is apparently irretrievably lost; in addition, information about it is very sparse, and (as in the case of the Italian Futurist films) such data that exists is inconclusive, unreliable or very incomplete. It has been described as a parody on the prevalent genre of the film-guignol (Leyda 1960: 71); more accurately, perhaps, it was a sort of filmic equivalent to the Futurists’ 1912 manifesto, and their wish to “scandalise the philistines” in a war against bourgeois smugness. It could be considered a sort of ‘first step’ towards that extraordinary series of public performances, “The Futurists on Tour”, undertaken from December 1913 to March 1914 by David Burliuk, Vasily Kamensky, and Mayakovsky himself, later described by Mayakovsky as his “Golgotha of auditoriums”. (Brown 1973: 45) Drama in the Futurist’s Cabaret is of immense historical interest even if all that remains of it are a few stills or frames. The plot description conveys a sense of the theatrically melodramatic, redolent of the Italian Futurist films but lacking their investigations into the specifically filmic, and closer to the spirit of Eisenstein’s first film venture Dnevnik Glumova (Glumov’s Diary, 1923) – itself based on the principles of music hall and circus Eisenstein derived from Meyerhold.2
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The premises of the cabaret: the Futurists are preparing for a festive party. They are painting each other’s faces, while the artist Goncharova is in evening décolleté. As these preparations are coming to an end, a title appears on the screen: ‘The hour 13 has struck. The Futurists are gathering for a party’. One of the secondary personages, apparently a poet, waves a sheet of paper that is marked all over with zigzags and with letters that are scattered about in disorder. This is a poem dedicated to Goncharova. While reading the poem, he keeps on turning to one side, then the other, then his backside, to the audience. Then comes the turn of a very tall woman – the danseuse, El’ster. Dressed in a white costume slit to the waist, she dances the ‘futurist tango’, now getting down on her knees letting her head drop to the floor, now straightening up and throwing out her legs. El’ster likewise dedicates her performance to Goncharova, and therefore, upon completing her dance, she gets down on her knees before the artist and kisses her foot. Later, Goncharova herself rises and, teamed with some sort of decorated character, she dances the chechetka, quite clumsily and fussily, rapidly mincing her feet. After a new declamatory item on the programme comes the turn of the main ‘sensation’, which is the proper beginning of the ‘drama’. This is the ‘Futuredance of Death’, during which one partner must kill the other. The Futurists draw lots. It falls to the futuristka Maksimovich. She climbs onto a table with a man whose eye-sockets are smeared with black paint, and they are given crooked daggers. The Futuredance consists of a man tossing the woman from arm to arm, raising the dagger threateningly and striking her, not yet with the blade, but with the shaft. The woman responds by striking the man with the handle of her knife. The man gradually flies into a rage and finally plunges the blade into the woman’s chest, killing her outright. A title appears: ‘A Futurefuneral’. The murderer and a friend take the corpse away in a car. The car stops somewhere in the woods. The corpse is thrown into the snow near a snowdrift. Suddenly the murderer has a feeling of pity for his victim, he leans towards the corpse and kisses it. Then he returns with his cohort to the cabaret, where the Futurists are calmly continuing their wine drinking as if nothing had happened. Upon learning that the murderer has kissed his victim, the Futurists become passionately agitated. They set up a trial and sentence him to be expelled from Futurism. Being incapable of withstanding such a punishment, the murderer drinks poison, leaves, and falls dead at the open doors of the cabaret. The rest of the Futurists leave the cabaret shortly thereafter. Demonstrating their contempt of death, one by one they indifferently step over the corpse of the transgressor. The last of them bends over the body of the suicide and attaches a note.
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Title: ‘Exiled from Futurism’. The final shot is anticipated by a title: ‘A victim of Futurism’. In it (the shot) once again is shown the corpse of the futuristka Maksimovich lying in the snow. (Heil 1986: 178-9)3
In the light of this, it is perhaps not surprising that Mayakovsky’s three articles on film in 1913 have as their main concern the sad state of theater. These articles are his contribution to the contemporary widespread assault on naturalist theatre by Meyerhold and other champions of a theater of poetic language and stylized movement. The cinema, at this stage in his thinking, offered a possible remedy: it could relieve the theatre of what he considered to be its burden of questing after the photographic reproduction of reality by “harmoniously (fixing) the movements of the real” (Mayakovsky 1913, Taylor and Christie 1994: 34) – a conception that is linked to Mayakovsky’s poetry in this period and his subsequent involvement in Lef and its constructivist ethos. The importance of film for Mayakovsky in this period is best illustrated in poems like A Cloud in Trousers (1915), parts of which are structured like a film scenario, with dissolves and ellipses: in the hotel scene, for instance, the girl comes in, fusses with her gloves, then remarks “Look – I’m getting married”. There is a quick shift to the telephone conversation. The scene fades to the burning building, then to the Luisitania, then to the harbor fire. (Brown 1973: 319) As for a more direct involvement in cinema, according to Mayakovsky’s own testimony, his “first scenario”, written in 1913 and titled “The Pursuit of Glory”, was not greeted with any great acclaim: One person from the production company listened to the reading of the scenario and then said despairingly “It’s rubbish”. I went home, completely put to shame. I tore up the scenario. Later I saw a film from the scenario showing in the Volga region. Evidently, the script had been listened to more attentively than I had thought’. (Mayakovsky 1937: 217-8)
With the Bolshevik revolution of 1917 – for Mayakovsky, the inauguration of “the first country in the modern history of arts” (Mayakovsky X11: 9) it appeared, at least initially, that the avantgarde’s struggles for artistic recognition during the pre-revolutionary era were at an end. The first overt attempt to claim a special place for Futurism in the revolutionary state was the Gazeta Futuristov (“Futurists’ Newspaper”), the first and only issue of which appeared
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on March 15, 1918. The brief and stormy history, however, of the journal Art of the Commune (Isskustvo Kommuny) – the weekly paper published by the Fine Arts Section (IZO) of the People’s Commissariat of Enlightenment – is revealing as to the difficulty Mayakovsky and his fellow Futurists experienced in their effort to be recognized as the true ‘proletarians’ of art. They soon found themselves out of step not only with the proletarians, whose taste in literature, if it existed at all, tended to favor the classics and to reject the sophisticated linguistic contortions of the Futurists, but with the party leadership. Lenin’s tastes ran to the traditional; Mayakovsky’s work he regarded with antipathy, and Futurists in general as “decadents, partisans of an idealistic philosophy hostile to Marxism”. (Brown 1973: 195) Lunacharsky, though sympathetic, was forced to intervene to correct the editorial line of Art of the Commune; he cautioned the Futurists against the mistake of imagining that they were in some sort of state-sponsored school of art. In a concluding section not published at the time he was sharply critical of Mayakovsky: “[…] what frightens one is his boyhood, which has continued too long. Vladimir Mayakovsky is an adolescent”. (Brown 1973: 196) These words were a foretaste of the struggles both the Mayakovsky-edited Lef and Novy Lef were to face in the 1920s, as well as perhaps reflecting a distaste for the theme of the suffering poet, which is such a feature of Mayakovsky’s pre-revolutionary poetry, an autobiographical element which also featured heavily in his film scripts. In the spring of 1918, he wrote and starred in three films. Of the three, only one has been preserved – Baryshnya i Khuligan (“The Young Lady and the Hooligan”) – perhaps because it alone gained the approval of the Commissariat of Education’s Film Committee. All that remains of the other two are synopses written by the participants and a few frames from the actual films. Nye dlya Deneg Radivshishya (“Not Born for Money”), an adaptation of the Jack London novel “Martin Eden”, began this series of films. Mayakovsky himself wrote the scenario and Nikandr Turkin directed. According to a synopsis of the film, Mayakovsky retained the broad outlines of London’s plot, while shifting the milieu from California to Moscow. The proletarian hero, Ivan Nov (played by Mayakovsky himself), becomes a futurist poet, under the influence of a rich girl whose life he has saved. This eventually brings him fame and riches, and his lifestyle and appearance change beyond recognition. When he meets the girl again,
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she declares her love for him, but he suspects her of being impressed by his wealth and success and rejects her. He suffers, feels disenchanted by all that surrounds him, contemplates suicide. In the end, he decides to break with it all, fakes suicide, puts on worker’s clothes again and, in the words of Viktor Shklovsky, goes off into the unknown: “homeless and free like Chaplin, who, in those days, did not yet make such movies”. (Halberstadt 2001: 12)
Still from Not For Money Born (Nye Dlya Deneg Radivshishya, 1918). Courtesy of the David King Collection.
It would seem that Mayakovsky took an active interest in the shooting and the design of the film. (Henderson 1974: 301) One of the scenes invented by him reproduced a gathering in the Poet’s Café, the
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Futurists’ meeting place in Moscow; the sets, made of plywood, were painted by Burliuk and filled with the café’s usual cast of Futurist poets. Burliuk and Kamensky played themselves and recited their own poems before the camera. Mayakovsky (presumably in the guise of Nov) reads “Our March”, his recently written eulogy of the revolution: Beat the squares with the tramp of rebels! Raise your heads in defiant rage! With the streams of a second deluge Speed this Earth to a different Age! The bull of days is too leaden. Years trudge in a slow cart. Our god is momentum. Our drum is the heart. (Mayakovsky: Halberstadt 12)
Here can be noted an interesting introduction of the ‘documentary effect’ so beloved of Mayakovsky, and also notable in other films from the era: the rash of post-revolution agitki (short propaganda films), and the mixed fiction/non-fiction aesthetic of many films in the transition to the fully-fledged montage cinema initiated by Eisenstein’s Strike (Stachka, 1924). As noted by Enzensberger, another Futurist touch gives symbolic expression to the Futurists’ attack on high art, in the spirit of their founding manifesto. This is the scene, also added by Mayakovsky, in which Nov speaks to a conference of grey-bearded Pushkin scholars. The rhythm of his oratory knocks over a bust of Pushkin, which eventually shatters, and the scholars chase him out of the hall. (Halberstadt 2001: 13) One is struck by the foreshadowing of the Surrealism of the early Buñuel, an impression reinforced by the stills that show Ivan Nov talking to a skeleton, which he bought in a shop and took home. (Halberstadt 2001: 13) The review for the Commissariat of Enlightenment’s film bulletin (which was not enthusiastic) describes the film as “a sort of advertisement for several of the futurists (Mayakovsky, Burliuk and others in particular). The plot is the futurists’ battle with the surrounding milieu for their ideals, but the ideas of the futurists, essentially, are not shown at all”. The review adds: “There are several successful moments in the direction and filming […]”. (Henderson 1974: 301) But we can only speculate as to what these were. They may have been similar to the composite shots and multiple exposures used to convey the thoughts and emotional states of the leading
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characters in The Young Lady and the Hooligan, where Mayakovsky worked closely with the director Slavinsky in composing each scene (he is credited as co-director). This latter film was based on a story by the Italian writer Edmondo de Amicis, translated into Russian as The Worker’s Teacher. Shot quickly within a week or two, like most films of this period, it was widely distributed and, on May Day 1919, it was included in the mass film showings in Moscow and Leningrad. The immediate impression is of its pace and its somewhat episodic nature: a description of its plot resembles a long poem transposed to film. (Burke 2003: 217-8) The film, along with Lev Kuleshov’s Engineer Prait’s Project (1917), are unique in this period in Russian film history in incorporating fast-paced editing and (limited) shot-reverseshot editing patterns, the first significant evidence of the complete rejection of the ornate, slow-paced style of pre-revolutionary filmmaking. The Young Lady and the Hooligan to some degree illustrates Mayakovsky’s 1913 formula for film: many of the scenes are shot outdoors, and the film is rich in naturalistic details of current Soviet conditions, for example the schoolroom scenes where the class is composed of all age groups. Every time the schoolteacher turns her back to write on the blackboard, minor chaos breaks out among the students (in a manner which irresistibly brings to mind Vigo’s Zero de Conduite). Many of the scenes are shot outdoors. These scenes are interspersed, however, with flights of fancy that are almost surrealist in tone – for instance, in an early scene in the film the young lady (who is a schoolteacher) imagines she is being attacked by animated letters of the alphabet. In a later scene in a tavern the hooligan (played by Mayakovsky in a disconcertingly modern, disaffected-young-man style: for Malcolm Le Grice the film is a “kind of precursor to Rebel Without a Cause, with Mayakovsky as a slightly improbable James Dean” [Le Grice 1977: 13]) has a vision of the heroine coming in and tossing flowers onto the table. In the scene where the hooligan declares his love for the teacher, he goes down on his knees and kisses the hem of her skirt, in a parody of romantic fiction films. She flees his presumptuous advances, only to be stopped by a mud puddle in her path. Stealing a turn from Sir Walter Raleigh, the hooligan rips off his jacket and spreads it over the mud before her. The penultimate scene in the film, where a fight erupts in the classroom, is distinguished by the mobility of the camera and unusual camera angles.
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The third of Mayakovsky’s scenarios, Zakovannaya Filmoi (Shackled by Film) was again directed by Nikandr Turkin, who was apparently not at all sympathetic to Mayakovsky’s ‘futurist notions’. The plot of the film plays with ideas of reality and fantasy – Osip Brik described it as a film about “movie-miracles”. (Brik 1940: 8)
Mayakovsky, Lily Brik: still from Shackled by Film (Zakovannaya Fil’moi, 1918). Courtesy of the David King Collection.
An artist (Mayakovsky) is the main character; he is bored and depressed, and paces the boulevards aimlessly. He approaches a woman and strikes up a conversation, but suddenly she becomes transparent and he can see that instead of a heart she has a hat, a necklace and some hatpins. Then he sees through his wife: instead of a heart she has frying pans. He meets a friend: instead of a heart he has a bottle and a deck of cards. He meets a gipsy: instead of a heart she has a string of coins. Nothing comforts him. He leaves home. A gentleman not unlike Mephistopheles has produced a film that has had a great success, entitled Heart of the Screen. A ballerina (played by
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Lily Brik) is that heart, but the whole world of the cinema surrounds her with all its brilliant personalities, cowboys, detectives, etc. After seeing the film, the artist stays in the auditorium and continues to applaud. The ballerina reappears on the screen, then comes down from it and joins the artist. He takes her with him, but it is cold and dark outside. She escapes from him and re-enters the theatre through the closed doors. The artist despairingly pounds on the door. The artist becomes sick. Some medicine is brought to him wrapped in an advertisement for the film – a picture of the ballerina. The ballerina comes to life and is suddenly sitting on a small table. She approaches the artist and, immediately, he is well again. At that very moment the ballerina disappears completely – from the advertisement, from the film. The artist has appropriated her and takes her away with him, but she yearns for the screen and is drawn to everything white and bright that looks like a screen. After more adventures she finds her way back to the studio and ‘melts’ into the screen, which is where she really wants to be. The film ends with a shot of the desolate artist at the window of a train on a journey to the “country of the cinema”. (Halberstadt 2001: 483)4
Still from Shackled by Film. Courtesy of the David King Collection.
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Outside of the interest of the formal device of the heroine being constantly transposed back and forth from the two-dimensional space of the screen and poster (advertising the film) into a supposedly threedimensional space of ‘real life’ (a device that recurs in Buster Keaton’s Sherlock Jr., 1926), there is an irony in the highly romantic theme of the fatal power of female beauty and the impossibility of love and happiness from the pen of an arch-futurist such as Mayakovsky. The correspondence between these three scenarios and Mayakovsky’s pre-revolutionary poetry is noticeable, as indicated previously. All three present variations on the theme of unrequited love: themes that were very much at odds with other productions of the time – Kuleshov’s work for the Moscow Film Committee, the newsreel reportage of Vertov – and very much at odds also with Mayakovsky’s professed iconoclasm and radicalism. Mayakovsky himself later described his first two films as “[…] sentimental commissioned rubbish […] Rubbish not because they were no worse than others, but because they were no better […]”. He referred to Shackled by Film with greater satisfaction: “[…] having become familiar with cinematic technique, I wrote a script on a par with our more innovatory literary work. The production by the same Neptune Company made a shameful bungle of it”. (Halberstadt 2001: 14)
Mayakovsky, Brik: still from Shackled by Film. Courtesy of the David King Collection.
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While Mayakovsky wrote a scenario for one of the many agitki made in the Civil War period (To the Front), he ceased to participate actively in film until 1922, when his declamatory poem Kino i Kino (“Cinema and Cinema”) urged Communism and Futurism to end capitalism’s domination of film: […] The cinema – purveyor of movement. The cinema – renewer of literature. The cinema – destroyer of aesthetics. The cinema – fearlessness. The cinema – a sportsman. The cinema – a sower of ideas. But the cinema is sick. Capitalism has covered its eyes with gold. Deft entrepreneurs lead it though the street by the hand. They gather money by stirring the heart with whining little subjects. We must put an end to this. Communism must rescue the cinema from its speculating guides. Futurism must steam the dead water – slowness and Morality […]. (Mayakovsky 1922, Taylor 1979: 39)
It’s difficult to know what exactly Mayakovsky is attacking here: the Soviet film industry was still struggling to establish itself, so perhaps it was the peculiar hybrids of pre-revolutionary melodramatic styles mixed with Soviet-style documentary inserts that characterized the period, or the recent influx of German Expressionist films (dismissed by Eisenstein as “mysticism, decadence, dismal fantasy”, Leyda 1951: 202). The much-lauded ‘Americanism’ was evident only in the uniformly fast cutting rate; the introduction of political themes into American genre conventions was not yet underway. Mayakovsky’s prescription for film was to find its home in Lef, the journal of the Left Front of the Arts, founded in 1923 with Mayakovsky as editor. The editorial board was an (at times uneasy) mélange of Futurists, Formalists and Constructivists; the latter had started as a conscious movement in 1920, its origins being the ‘art in production’ theories of Art of the Commune, and the Cubo-Futurist style of painting (Sherwood 1971-2: 28). Some of the original Futurist poets contributed to the journal: Khlebnikov, Kruchenykh, and Mayakovsky himself, whose poem “About That” appeared in issue No. 1. Lef published photographs, scripts and film criticism, and offered an arena
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for debate to Eisenstein and Vertov, each of whom contributed theoretical manifestos in 1923. Lef’s credo of political and documentary art was a continuation of the early Futurist cult of the machine, reinforced and broadened in a growing context of Taylorism and ‘Americanism’ in general. Mayakovsky’s own visit to America in 1925 was accompanied by a eulogy to the Brooklyn Bridge; Heart of the Screen, the rewritten version of Shackled by Film that he produced in the following year, replaces the Mephistophelian character with an American concessionaire, and has the land of film, by implication, set in the United States. (Henderson 1974: 304) His career in film in the late 1920s was as a writer of (mainly unproduced) scenarios: these scripts are characterized by their attempts to integrate ‘Americanism’ with the dictates of the ‘social command’ and ‘the fixation of fact’ being promulgated by Novy Lef, the successor to Lef. Only two of the nine scenarios he wrote in the period 1926-8 were to be made into films.5 The first of these, released as The Three, illustrates how a summer in a Pioneer camp transforms three children of very different social types: the bourgeois American becomes a Komsomol, the starving daughter of an impoverished English miner becomes healthy, and the delinquent son of an overworked Soviet mother turns into a good citizen. Elizabeth Henderson argues that Mayakovsky borrowed from “the arsenal of visual humour” (Henderson 1974: 308) – mainly Chaplin, whose Woman of Paris Mayakovsky greatly admired – in constructing scenes which are meant to be serious, even pathetic. In one of these, for instance, the English worker tries to get a bottle of milk for his daughter. On his journey across town, he meets with a series of mishaps: a company spy arrests him; he escapes, with the help of a group of strikers; in order to then help the strikers to build a barricade, he climbs up a lamppost and hides the bottle on top; a policeman chases him, but he escapes only spilling a few drops; he puts the bottle down on a ledge which turns out to be part of a truck which then drives away; when he finally reaches home, he puts the bottle down to unlock the door, whereupon a dog knocks the bottle over and drinks all the milk. The debt to American silent film comedy is evident, as well as to the bio-mechanical high jinks of Kuleshov’s Extraordinary Adventures of Mr West (1924). In the same way, the basic plot of The Elephant and the Matchstick (1926) and Comrade Kopytko or Down with Fat (1927) is a chase in the tradition of American silent film comedy. Both are satires in which fat, corrupt bureaucrats are taught a
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lesson; the heroes move through the stories from one bit of visual slapstick to the next. (309) When it became clear that neither of these scenarios would be produced, Mayakovsky converted the latter into the play The Bathhouse (1930). More in keeping with the dictates of Lef are two scenarios more directly related to an attempt at a ‘documentary effect’, How Are You? (1926) and Forget About the Hearth (1927). How Are You?, which has been described as the “one real masterpiece” among Mayakovsky’s unproduced scenarios, (Henderson 1974: 312) is an attempt at a lyrical documentary, in Henderson’s description, a kind of “emotionally organised newsreel of a poet at work”. (315) In a nod to the ‘city symphony’ documentary genre, the subtitle of the scenario is “A Day in Five Film-details”, with the structuring principle the cycle of the hero’s day from sunrise to sunset. As a number of critics have pointed out, the scenario is highly autobiographical, and many of the motifs of Mayakovsky’s early poetry reappear in it. (Brik 1940: 9, Jakobson 1956: 183) These motifs are imbued with a documentary quality and a reproduction of the urban milieu. As noted by Edward Brown, for instance, the (already cinematic) transformation of his bedroom into an ocean in “About That” takes place once again in part one of the film. The city, the street, the pounding feet of pedestrians disturb him in his sleep, and city sounds awaken him. All of this is imported directly from the poems of 1912 and 1913, including the street in perspective and tram tracks moving directly at the camera. (Brown 1973: 322-4) Parallels with Vertov are inescapable, a link that becomes overt in part three, which calls for a reversed time sequence. The film’s hero, Mayakovsky, has thrown away a crust of bread. This crust is then taken back through all the processes of production to show ‘How much work it takes just to make a piece of bread’ – a deconstruction undertaken at a more subtle level of theoretical complexity and greater length in Vertov’s Kinoglaz (1924). According to Mayakovsky, Kuleshov and two members of the literary staff of Sovkino (Shklovsky and Solsky) were delighted with the scenario and wanted to produce it, but the film organization’s administration rejected it out of hand as ‘ideologically weak’, as ‘not reflecting life’, and finally, as “utter nonsense”, (324-5) – judgments inspired perhaps by the several surrealist moments in the film, such as the poetrywriting scene which opens with the poet transforming Moscow into a chessboard on which he manipulates the other characters in the film, and a scene in which the hero sees a parade of new suits marching by
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with price tags on their heads. (Henderson 1974: 316) Forget About the Hearth, the poet’s last scenario (besides an aborted attempt to write a scenario with René Clair in 1928) was written at the request of the directorial team of Kozintsev and Trauberg. In the scenario, the various episodes are divided and commented upon by excerpts from Komsomolskaya Pravda, reporting some of the more outrageous excesses of the NEP era. According to Henderson, Kozintsev and Trauberg were expecting a hymn to technology, and were not impressed by Mayakovsky’s satirical treatment of the topic. (311) The scenario was more successfully realized as the play The Bedbug (1929), staged, like The Bathhouse, by Meyerhold. If the Russian avant-garde in the pre-war period marks an initial stage in the pursuit of the montage principle, then Mayakovsky’s film work is an important way station on Futurism’s journey into the cinema of the 1920s and, ultimately, via Constructivism into the films of Eisenstein and Vertov. It was in the latter in particular that the verve and audacity of the loud-voiced, yellow-shirted Futurist found its cinematic equivalent. As for Mayakovsky himself, his direct involvement in cinema was more aspirational than fully realized. His favoring of a documentary aesthetic, traceable from his early poetry, intersects with a love of the playful, the satirical, the romantic, which ultimately found no place in the Constructivist-inspired machine aesthetic of the 1920s. This may be part of the explanation for why Mayakovsky withdrew, in the latter part of 1928, from the editorial board of Novy Lef and, in a speech entitled ‘More Left than Lef’, publicly disassociated himself from its utilitarian theories with the reminder that “[…] we need poetry and song too, and not just the newspaper”, and that “[…] not every boy who can work a camera and take a picture of something is a Lef-ist”. (Mayakovsky 1955 X11: 507) The other most obvious point that can be made about Mayakovsky’s involvement in cinema is that, as in his other work, Mayakovsky is often Mayakovsky’s own subject. As numerous commentators have noted, these scripts with a central, romantic male role, like the film scripts of 1918, and Heart of the Cinema and How Are You?, are highly autobiographical. The central love interest is either idealized and unattainable, or is sordid and mundane: in the case of Shackled by Film, directly linked to Lily Brik. Hence André Breton’s surrealist-tinged explanation of Mayakovsky’s suicide in 1930 as stemming from the contradiction or conflict between his
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desire to be a revolutionary poet, and his desire to realize his personal ‘destiny’; in Mayakovsky’s case, to find love or to overcome the pain of unrequited love, to which no true revolutionary is immune. (Breton 1930: 20) While a towering figure in what might be termed ‘the avantgarde episode’ in the Bolshevik revolution (Barooshian 1974: 125), like Henderson, we can only speculate that had Mayakovsky “found a director with whom he could have collaborated, like he did with Meyerhold in the theater, his part in the history of the Soviet film might have been less fragmentary”. (Henderson 1974:318)
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Notes:
1
Any discussion of Futurist cinema, as of much of early cinema, is complicated by the fact that most of the works produced are no longer extant. In the Italian case, all of the four films that might be identified as Futurist have been lost – as well as Arnaldo Ginna and Bruno Corra’s experiments in abstract film made between 1910-2, arguably the first avant-garde works in cinema of any kind. 2 Meyerhold himself began his long infatuation with the cinema by scripting, directing and acting in a film version of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Grey (“Portret Doriana Greya”) in 1915. The film is now lost, but Leyda has described it as “undoubtedly the most important film made previous to the February revolution” (Leyda 1960: 82). 3 In his article, Heil gives the most comprehensive account of so far available on this film, detailing the numerous and contradictory versions of the making and ‘plot’ of the film. This plot summary is taken from Simyon S. Ginsburg’s Kinematografiya Dorevolyiutsionnoi Rossiya, Moscow, 1963. Heil suggests that the synopsis may have originated from someone who had seen the film – perhaps Ginsburg himself; incidentally no fan of Futurism. 4 The scenario of this film as recollected by Lily Brik can be found in Halberstadt: 279; also in Brown 1973: 321. 5 Henderson provides an invaluable and thorough survey of these films, 1974: 309316. They are also discussed in William Rudy’s “Mayakovsky and Film Art”, 1955 (unpublished dissertation at Harvard University).
Bibliography Barooshian, Vahan D. 1974. Russian Cubo-Futurism 1910-1930: A Study in AvantGardism. The Hague: Walter de Gruyter. Breton, André. 1930. ‘La barque de l’amour s’est brisée contre la vie courante’ in Le Surréalisme au service de la revolution, No. 1 (July 1930): 16-22. Brik, Osip, 1940. ‘Mayakovsky – tsenarist’ in Isskustvo kino (April, 1940). Brown, Edward J. 1973. Mayakovsky: A Poet in the Revolution. Princeton: N.J.: Princeton University Press. Burke, Marina. 2002. A Search for Evidence: The Evolution of Film Editing in Russian and Early Soviet Fiction and Non-Fiction Film. PhD thesis. University College, Dublin. Durgnat, Raymond. 1969. ‘Futurism & The Movies’ in Art and Artists (February 1969): 10-5. Feldman, Seth R. 1978. Dziga Vertov: A Guide to References and Resources. Boston: C.K. Hall: 1978. Eisenstein, Sergei. 1951. ‘Dickens, Griffith and the Film Today’ in Leyda, Jay (ed.) Film Form. London: Dennis Dobson: 1951. Gray, Camilla. 1962. The Russian Experiment in Art 1863-1922. London: Thames and Hudson. Halberstadt, Ilona (ed.). 2001. PIX 3. London, BFI.
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Heil, Jerry. 1986. ‘Russian Writers and the Cinema in the Early 20th Century – A Survey in Russian Literature XIX (1986): 143-174. —. 1986b. ‘Russian Futurism and the Cinema: Majakovskij’s Film Work of 1913’ in Russian Literature XIX (1986): 175-192. Henderson, Elizabeth. 1974. ‘Shackled by Film: The Cinema in the Career of Vladimir Mayakovsky’ in Russian Literature Triquarterly 7. Isskustvo Kommuny No. 4: December 1918. Jakobson, Roman. Russkii literaturnyi arkhiv. New York: 1956. Le Grice, Malcolm. 1977. Abstract Film and Beyond. London: Studio Vista. Leyda, Jay. 1960. Kino: A History of the Russian and Soviet Film. London: Allen and Unwin. Markov, Vladimir. 1968. Russian Futurism. London: MacGibbon and Kee. Mayakovsky, Vladimir. 1937. Kino. Moscow. —. 1975. Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 13 Vols., Moscow: Khudozh. Lit.: 1955- 1961. Russian Literature Triquarterly, 12 (Spring 1975). Taylor, Richard. 1979. The Politics of the Soviet Cinema, 1917-1929. Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press. Tisdall, Caroline and Angelo Bozzolla. 1977. Futurism. London: Thames and Hudson. Vertov, Dziga. 1966. Stat’i, Dnevniki, Zamysly. Moscow: Isskustvo.
Chapter 2 Post-War American and European Experiments
The Interiority of Space: Desire and Maya Deren Maureen Turim Abstract: This essay closely examines how Maya Deren renders space as a manifestation of the interiority of desire.
How can we rethink the work of Maya Deren at present? Much useful recent work on Deren focuses on her as a personal filmmaker of great consequence as a woman pioneer, connecting her films to biographical material, particularly her interests in dance, anthropology, and her reaction to psychoanalysis (her father’s expertise). I would like to add to this growing reconsideration a perspective drawn by considering dual theoretical issues, those of desire and of the interiority of space. Desire most often is conceived as a narrative trope, though one articulated in relationship to seeing, recognition of the other, and replication of an image of the self or others (painting, photography, portraiture). By the interiority of space referred to in the title of this essay I mean the manner in which external space becomes a figural expression of the interiority both of the characters figured in the film and of the viewer. Filmic montage and transformations of temporality both contribute to creating this sense of interiority. Rendering space interior iterates desire in images and through montage. This dual theoretical approach differs from historical methodologies towards Deren that have stressed influence studies and the tracing of artistic movements. Categorizing artistic movements, determining their demise, discussing their return as neo reborn initiatives: all these gestures so familiar from standard art history, museum studies, and catalog copy are problematic because categorization, no matter how much light it sheds and what its temporal historical parameters, always risks becoming a restrictive goal, defining too narrowly the direction our imaginations might go in theorizing the life of art in culture, and in the history of ideas.
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In Deren’s case these art historical views have often focused on a debate on her relationship to Surrealism and to other European influences. In that debate Surrealism is often limited to Surrealism in film, as epitomized by Luis Buñuel, and just as often countered with Deren’s expressed rejection of that term to describe her work. Secondly, influence studies focus on her significance for a US avantgarde to follow, particularly Stan Brakhage, as a shared concept, if not of vision, then at least of a certain interiority and subjectivity as a component of vision. Brakhage’s writing on Deren, which includes his speculation on Hammid’s role and his portrait of her as a mad woman, if a sort of holy mad woman, calibrates her influence as that of promoting exhibition of the avant-garde, or places that influence in terms of self-expressive quest narrative, the mythopoetics of personal expressivity. Consider how both moves encapsulate the approach to Deren suggested by the Museum of Modern Art Website: Made by Maya Deren with her husband, cinematographer Alexander Hammid, Meshes of the Afternoon established the independent AvantGarde movement in film in the United States, which is known as the New American Cinema. It directly inspired early works by Kenneth Anger, Stan Brakhage and other major experimental filmmakers. (http://www.moma.org/collection/printable_view.php?object_id=8928 3, consulted 15.09.2006).
More recent feminist displacements see Maya Deren not simply as the Mother of the Avant-Garde, but as an engendering Mother Figure for other women artists. I have a great deal in common with this feminist approach, but my methodology remains distinct. Theoretical discussion of desire in Deren will propose intertextual comparisons with other artists, particularly other women. Maya Deren’s stated desire speaks to this intertextuality of the artistic unconscious: I am content if, on those rare occasions whose truth can be stated only by poetry, you will perhaps recall an imageeven if only the aura of my films
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And what more could I possibly ask as an artist than that your most precious visions, however rare, assume, sometimes, the forms of my images1
In a previous essay entitled ‘The Ethics of Form: Structure and Gender in Maya Deren’s Challenge to the Cinema’ I present an analysis of the conflict between Deren’s commitment to form and prevailing artistic styles of spontaneity and expression. Form for Deren meant a correlation between the ludic structures of childhood games and rituals, both archaic and modern. Thus, Meshes of the A f t e r n o o n (1943) references a trial by fire, while Rituals in Transfigured Time (1946) highlights women’s social rituals such as winding yarn or walking into a party. Parapraxis interferes with the smooth order of ritual; in Meshes such everyday mishaps as a key or knife falling, or a phone left off the hook, or a phonograph needle running beyond the margin of the recorded music evoke an interiority fraught with desires that eventually will cede to violence. The temporal-spatial displacements and transformations so charmingly wrought in Deren’s works are part of a quest structure in which notably female protagonists seek to traverse spaces laden with the weight of the unconscious, of desire and of fantasy. In another recent essay, ‘Violence in the Feminist Avant-Garde’, I look at how cutting in Meshes of the Afternoon and Meditation on Violence (1948) may be construed as part of a larger investigation into interiority, desire, and violence in women’s art making, and how Meditations on Violence especially seeks to rework violent impulses as creative energy, dance rather than martial aggression. Here, I would like to build on those arguments, first by looking at the intertextual functioning of Deren’s films. By examining the profilmic and social architectural space in which Deren shot Meshes – her home at the time in the Hollywood hills – we can understand how her vision works intertextually with the meanings these spaces held in the culture. The house is of a style known as the ‘California Bungalow’ or the ‘California Craftsman.’ These houses featured simplicity of design, emphasizing good carpentry and design
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at an affordable price in the 1920s and 30s. They were one- or oneand-a-half-storey stand-alone houses with a low profile and a clustered floor plan. Deren’s home clearly was a one-and-a-half-storey model, whose stairs lead to the bedroom featured in the film on the truncated second floor. The front door opens directly into the living and dining rooms, while the kitchens and bathroom, unseen in the film, presumably are part of the downstairs cluster. Although ‘Craftsmen’ could be set down in landscape, they were as often located on a hillside, as Deren’s house is in the film. Not only architectural design, but interior decorating at one with that design is implicated in the Craftsman bungalow, heritors as they are of precepts of the arts and crafts movement. Gustav Stickley’s Craftsman Furniture showed how stand-alone pieces could conjoin the model’s emphasis on built-in cabinets. Affordable modernism at one with the landscape, emphasizing an overall harmony of design, the Craftsman can also be considered an outgrowth of the prairie house architecture for a more privileged class created by Frank Lloyd Wright at the turn of the century. Craftsman bungalows offer space whose dynamics Hollywood narrative film explored less frequently than the gothic frame house, but sometimes did explore tellingly, for example in Michael Curtiz’s Mildred Pierce (1946), in which the choice of a Spanish-style bungalow is taken from the James M. Cain story on which the film was based. Mildred bakes pies from her bungalow kitchen when her husband becomes unemployed; her voice-over tells us of her determination to get out of the kitchen. The staircase to her daughter’s bedroom becomes, for Mildred, a threshold to anxiety as she wishes to buy her elder daughter’s love. Her daughter schemes constantly to rise above her mother’s social status, emblemized by the working-class bungalow, telling her mother she is driven to “get away from this shack with its cheap furniture. And this town and its dollar days, and its women that wear uniforms and its men that wear overalls”. Mildred’s living room has the open plan of the bungalow, easily invaded by Wally, her husband’s lecherous partner, when her husband isn’t home. The connotations, then, of the working-class California bungalow as a confining compromise of larger ambitions for women emerges as a subtext in one of Hollywood’s darkest views of family life in the forties. This discussion of Mildred Pierce sets the stage for how the Craftsman bungalow will become the scene of one of the US’s most
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accomplished avant-garde films. The seemingly progressive design still garnered associations at odds with its plastic harmony. Its ideal interior space was not necessary ideally interiorized by women of the forties, and Deren delves into her own resources to express a gendered social interiority. Deren activates this space to the shape of the unconscious. Her desire to enter the house and reach the bedroom takes the shape of a troubled return; her return seems troubled from the outset with a violent undercurrent, later figured as a desire to escape. The film may be seen as a series of five variations on coming home, on entering the house, some marked as more imagined than others, but, despite the inclusion of images of the protagonist closing her eyes between the first and second of the house-entering series, the film never wakes its protagonist definitively from her ‘dream’. Spatial relationships and the activity of objects and characters throughout are interiorized, dreamlike functions of a sensibility owing much to the unconscious. Coming home meets from the outset with all sorts of interference, first on the hill footpath leading to the house, in the form of a flower dropped by another, and an undefined and mysterious figure in a black cloak who disappears beyond the bend in the wall. Retrieving the flower of the other opens the first space of metamorphosis and transformation; the flower was first extended by a manikin’s arm in the film’s first frames. It then mysteriously departs the image. The initial encounter with the cloaked stranger will return later in the film, elaborated as a dream-image. Our protagonist drops her key on steps as she is first about to enter her house: a parapraxis, as discussed above. In fact, the staircase in the house will be repeatedly figured similarly. Parapraxis becomes associated with the staircase by the objects in disarray found on its bottom rungs (phone off the hook in the first series, knife lying there in the second). Parapraxis is then further suggested by the dances, in which ascending or descending becomes complicated in a number of different ways as abstracted movement, or lack of, or repeated movement. Deren uses great economy of means to suggest a life out of order, such as a swish-pan from the knife falling off the bread to a telephone off the hook on the bottom of the staircase. Her initial climb up the stairs ends with a look downstairs, in which a subjective shot reveals the chair that will figure later. The subjective camera lays out the space, already strange, but not yet as complexly uncanny as it will become in the second iteration of her return to the house. Following
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the closing of the eyelids of the protagonist reposed on the chair, the space is revisited. This time its treatment is more elaborated, repeating and amplifying the uncanny of the first entrance. A renewed glance ahead at the cloaked figure only reveals a mirrored face when the figure turns to look back. This facial mirror doesn’t reflect what stands before it (the protagonist) and only hints at a reflection of the landscape. The mirror as face of the other becomes a surface that refracts light. In this second journey into the house, the knife on the stairs mentioned earlier leads to a jump to a curtain and an entrance to the bedroom, not from the house’s interior, but through its black gauzed window. Here, the phone receiver figures as occupying the pillow, the place where a face might be if a human were lying under the blankets. The female explorer pulls back the blanket to reveal the knife, which serves as a mirror to reflect her face. The protagonist’s backbend introduces her exit through the window. Then, this movement flows into her return to the staircase, anticipating her descent. A repetitive reaching in backbends leads her down the steps by way of touching the banisters and the ceiling. This eventually leads to her stretching down, impossibly (implausible movement suggested across a cut) to turn off the record player, now located next to the chair. This series ends on a close-up as she removes the key from her mouth, followed by a cut to an image of the key in her hand. A third journey into the house ensues. Her staircase-climbing is now portrayed as a struggle with a tilting ground, as the hooded figure appears ahead of her on the interior stairway. It turns, its mirror now reflecting some patterns of the interior décor. This third journey again ends with a close-up as she once more removes the key from her mouth, and once more a cut abruptly shows it in her hand, only to flash as a knife. Taken together these three series are built on a montage of displaced being, a multiple quest riddled with chutes and ladders, falling away from forward progress, then, paradoxically, an unexpected sliding forward. A fourth entrance into the house has our protagonist bearing a knife from the outset. She joins her multiple selves at the table, submitting to the game whose open palm suggests a ‘trial by fire’; each picks up the key, which turns over to face the opposite direction, until the final figure’s key turns into a knife. This self crosses all terrains in montage, carrying a knife to arrive as the avenger. Our protagonist annexes the world metonymically represented through the
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combination of different landscapes to the house: all space serves interiority, figuring the intensity of her anxious anger. However, when the avenger figure appears ominously before the sleeping self, she now sees a man holding the flower, climbing the staircase. She follows him up the stairs, where she sees him deposit the flower on the pillow. A montage series suggests a complex interweaving of the protagonist with this man, but ends with the woman protagonist smashing his face in a mirror, which leads to an image of the shards of the mirror scattered on a beach. In the fifth entry this man is now framed approaching and entering the doorway parallel to the way she had in her first approach, their shadows against the wall presenting their movement through metonymy rhyme. This time, upon opening the door, his subjective view shows the mermaid suicide. All five entries into the house may be seen as variations on a series, each contributing to the interiority of space as a manifestation of the conflicts of desire. When we compare the series of entrances into the house, we sense the self as multiple and fragmented: a self whose relations to the other evoke images of strangeness, unreachability, indecipherability; a shadowy, mirror figure whose presence evokes absence. Desire – to enter, to find this other, to know the self, to inhabit the home – is repeatedly presented as disturbed by elements seemingly outside the self, amiss in the very universe of the home. Yet from the confrontations with the multiplicities of self, violence emerges, erupts, crosses over to itself, at the self and at the mirrored reflection of the other, until the death of the self is imagined as that which would confront the other when he returns home. Desire is both to enter the home, and for escape from the home; the film associates all its astounding repetitions and variations with the very doubleness of such contradictory desires as they shape the spaces of interiority. A different sense of spatial interiority emerges in Rituals. Beginning with the architectonics of a hallway looking into two doorways, a figure of a young woman placed there looks in to see a woman winding wool engaged in conversation with an unseen interlocutor. Entering the doorway, her subjective view of the woolwinding is rendered in stopped motion, and then reengaged; she is the other the wool-winder seems to be addressing, and as she takes a seat on the waiting stool, she takes up the task of forming the ball of wool. Another woman appears in the doorway behind her. A shot from
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behind the wool-winder then frames all three women in relation to the wool looped over the winder’s outstretched arm in a triangulation of looking across the three women. With the entrance of the young woman in mourning clothes into a crowded cocktail party, the social ritual of greeting is treated visually as intermittently stopped motion, forced gestures, and endless repetition. Segue into the third section, the statue-maker dance, as she is spun by a male dancer into a frame of stopped action. She then watches as he spins other women in the same way, eventually attempting to run away. Pursued by him, across the sculpture garden, through cloisters, she then disappears into water below a pier. There follows a negative image as she floats down, both bride and death. Desire is figured here, particularly in the second and third sections of this film, as a search for social interaction. The dynamics of this spatial tracing of social interaction can best be understood by intertextual comparison to the work of Leonor Fini, an artist on the borders of surrealism, particularly her “L’Entracte de l’apothéose” and “The Alcove: An Interior With Three Women” (1938 – 1939). An artist whose women metamorphose into creatures and suggest the mythological, Fini never considered herself a Surrealist, although she participated in several important Surrealist exhibitions in the 1930s and shared the surrealist interest in the unconscious. Seeing two women artists spatially treat configurations allows us to appreciate, despite the vast differences that separate the art of this pair, how the configuration of three women may be seen as expressions of desire. While there is an element of competition in Deren’s statue-maker sequence of Rituals, concomitantly the women act as mirrors of each other, replacing one another in the graphic configurations across the images. Deren’s use of driftwood and natural settings in At Land (1944) invite another artistic comparison to the work of Georgia O’Keeffe, and to organic abstraction in photography, including the images of Alfred Stieglitz, Hands with Skull (1930), Georgia O’Keeffe’s hands) and Life and Death (1927). Even a photographer not ordinarily seen as part of the mythic or symbolist sensibility, nor as a surrealist, makes photos whose concern with light-rendering on the bold shapes of nature captures a mythic valence: Ansel Adams’ photos in exploring the drama of organic, everyday objects and the landscape suggest a correspondence to Deren’s At Land. Deren animates such images with the active explorations of her female protagonist. At Land can be seen as a movement towards and away
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from the social space of the formal dining table, with both ends of the journey placing the protagonist in intimate proximity with natural shapes of the landscape through which she navigates. That the chess game figures both at the end of the formal dining table and in the final sequence with the two other women on the beach at the edge of the surf connects the game structure with the quest narrative of desire; the film’s most joyous image has the three women embracing each other as they tilt backwards. Let me end this tracing of desire, interiority and intertextuality with one more comparison, this time to a contemporary filmmaker, Abigail Child. Although again very different from Deren, elements of Child’s films echo the use of spatial reconfiguration to express interiority and desire. Consider Child’s Mayhem (1987), a film that reverberates with many other films: film noir in general, Kirsanov’s Menilmontant (1924), Jack Smith’s Normal Love (1963), Ken Jacobs’ Little Stabs at Happiness (1959-63). The elements that recall Deren weave women looking, staircases, images in negative, and an underlying sexuality and violence, which of course surface in Mayhem far more directly than they do in Deren’s films. Yet seeing the work intertextually helps make us more aware of the sexuality and violence underlying Deren. The desire to be taken seriously as a film artist interconnects to all depictions of desire in the work of the avant-garde. For women filmmakers, this desire historically had extra impediments to traverse. Any interior space that confines women to domesticity must be ruptured by the desire to create, and in Deren’s case, starting with Meshes of the Afternoon, her filmmaking created the images of that rupture, even as they connect with images of other artists, before and after, as an ongoing flow of spatialized figuration of desires.
My thanks to Fina Bathrick for first introducing me to the California Bungalow in relationship to the film Mildred Pierce, which we taught together as graduate students at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
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Notes:
1
As quoted at the opening of the Mystic Fire Videotape of Deren’s films, the words accompanied on screen by her voice.
Bibliography Clark, VeVe A., Millicent Hodson and Catrina Neiman. 1984-1988. The Legend of Maya Deren: A Documentary Biography and Collected Works. New York: Anthology Film Archives/Film Culture. —. 1996. ‘Maya Deren’s Fatal Attraction: A Psychoanalytic Reading of Meshes of the Afternoon with a Psycho-biographical Afterword’ in Women’s Studies 25(2): 137-53. Jason, Philip K. 1985. ‘Oscar Baradinsky’s “Outcasts”: Henry Miller, Anais Nin, Maya Deren and the Alicat Book Shop Press’ in Anais: An International Journal (3): 109-116. Millsapps J.L. 1986. ‘Deren, Maya, Imagist’ in Literature-Film Quarterly 14(1): 2231. Mosca U. 1992. ‘Deren, Maya – American Avant-Garde Cinema Of The 40s’ in Cineforum 32(5): 28-31. Nekola, C. 1996. ‘On Not Being Maya Deren’ in Wide Angle: A Quarterly Journal of Film History, Theory, Criticism, and Practice 18(4): 29-37. Pramaggiore, Maria. 1997. ‘Performance and Persona in the US Avant-Garde: The Case of Maya Deren’ in Cinema Journal 36(2): 17-40. Rabinovitz, Lauren. 1991. Points of Resistance: Women, Power & Politics in the New York Avant-Garde Cinema, 1943-71. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Rice, Shelley (ed.). 1999. Inverted odysseys: Claude Cahun, Maya Deren, and Cindy Sherman. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press. Satin, Leslie. 1993. ‘Movement and the Body in Maya Deren’s “Meshes of the Afternoon”’ in Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory 6(2): 41-56. Sitney, P. Adams. 1979. Visionary Film: The American Avant-Garde in the 20th Century. New York: Oxford University Press. Turim, Maureen. 1986. ‘Childhood Memories and Household Events in the Feminist Avant Garde’ in Journal of Film and Video 38: 86-92. —. 1991. ‘The Displacement of Architecture in Avant-Garde Films’ in Iris 12: 25-38. —. 2001. ‘The Ethics of Form: Structure and Gender in Maya Deren’s Challenge to the Cinema’ in Nichols, Bill (ed.) Maya Deren and the American AvantGarde. Berkeley: University of California Press. —. 2005. ‘Violence of Female Desire in Avant-garde Films’ in Wexman, Virginia (ed.) Women and Experimental Filmmaking. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
Stan Brakhage’s Film Testament: The Four Faust Films Inez Hedges Abstract: In his narration accompanying his four Faust Films, 1987-89, Brakhage recapitulates some of the major themes of his writings. He also retraces the path of his own aesthetic development from psychodrama to his later understanding of film as “light moving in time”. As a summation of Brakhage’s life work, the four films can be read on several levels: the autobiographical/everyman, the aesthetic/philosophical, the perceptual/cognitive, and the performative/somatic.
When Stan Brakhage died in March 2003, he had been at the forefront of avant-garde filmmaking in the U. S. for 50 years. The New York Times obituary commented: Like the work of many artistic radicals, his is often described in terms of what it is not: working in a photographic medium most commonly defined by storytelling and the reproduction of real-world objects and events, Mr. Brakhage made films that usually had no narrative, were often not representational and at times even dispensed with photography altogether (Scott 2003).
Brakhage drew inspiration from, among others, Gertrude Stein, as he makes clear in a lecture titled “Gertrude Stein: Meditative Literature and Film,” presented at the University of Colorado in 1990 and later reprinted in Millennium Film Journal. The lecture’s central thesis is that film, following the example set by Stein in literature, should free itself from referentiality: Film must eschew any easily recognizable reference. […] It must give up all that which is static, so that even its stillnesses-of-image are ordered on an edge of potential movement. It must give-over all senses-of-repetitions precisely because Film’s illusion-of-movement is based on shot-series of flickering near-likenesses of image. […] The forms within The Film will answer only to each other (Brakhage 1991: 105-6).
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Another influence was Méliès whom he praises for being able to “exteriorize moving imagination” and also to discover an “alien world beneath the surface of our visibility” (Brakhage 1972: 20). Brakhage may even have been inspired by Méliès’s Faust films in his own choice of the subject; he praises the French filmmaker for borrowing “the trappings of all western man’s converse with demons”. Like the Surrealists, Brakhage argues that imagination is strongest in childhood. He is most interested in recovering the freshness of visual perception before the developing child learns to categorize shapes and colors into named objects and qualities. In his writings and interviews, he opposes “open eye vision,” or what we are directly conscious of, with what he calls hypnagogic vision, moving visual thinking, peripheral vision, dream vision, and memory feedback. Hypnagogic vision is what you see through your eyes closed--at first a field of grainy, shifting, multi-colored sands that gradually assume various shapes. It’s optic feedback: the nervous system projects what you have previously experienced--your visual memories--into the optic nerve endings. It’s also called closed-eye vision. Moving visual thinking, on the other hand, occurs deeper in the synapsing of the brain. It’s a streaming of shapes that are not nameable--a vast visual song of the cells expressing their internal life. Peripheral vision is what you don’t pay close attention to during the day and which surfaces at night in your dreams. And memory feedback consists of the editings of your remembrance. It’s like a highly edited movie made from the real (italics mine) (“Brakhage at Sixty”).
Brakhage’s project is a utopian one that aims to recover the lost capacity for vision that characterizes adulthood and thus to offer resistance to society’s suppression of imagination: “It seems to me that the entire society of man is bent on destroying that which is alive within it, its individuals (most contemporarily exemplified by the artist), so that presumably the society can run on and on like the machine it is at the expense of the humans composing it” (Brakhage 1976: 34). For Brakhage, the project of filmmaking is, in itself, Faustian: If you accept the full adventure of this course [filmmaking], you will surely lose your mortal soul: you will be tortured by demons (physically pained by them, mentally-anguished to the point of suicidal thought): you will be stretched to the orders of angels more
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terrible than demonic force, set tasks by them beyond all comprehension or imaginable accomplishment (Brakhage 1972: 12).
Between 1987 and 1989 Brakhage made four films that take up the Faust theme.1 In fact, they represented the culmination of a forty-year project for the filmmaker, who wrote a grant proposal for what he termed a “Faust in reverse” as early as 1955, and a scenario for an unfinished “Faustfilm” in 1957. Although the early scenario bears little resemblance to the four finished films, the grant proposal states, in outline form, some of the themes that would reappear more than forty years later. The initial situation was to represent the dreams of a young man living alone in a cold-water flat. He is loved by a woman whom he rejects, and who then leaves him; confronted by his own selfishness, he “makes a pact with his devil-self in the mirror” and hangs himself. Grown old and white in a “frozen room turned white as winter” he then struggles from death to rebirth. The theme of selfknowledge, of Faust’s love for another, of re-birth or at least assimilation into the world, and the motif of whiteness are elements that eventually made their way into the four Faust films. Perhaps even more importantly, this short text contains Brakhage’s eloquent statement about his goals as a filmmaker: I am after pure film art forms, forms in no way dependent upon imitation of existing arts nor dependent upon the camera used as the eye. I do not want films to show, as in existing documentary (the only direction film has taken to free itself from photographed drama) but to transform images so that they exist in relation to the film only as they flash onto the screen…exist in their own right, so to speak (Brakhage 1976: 36).
The four Faust films are at once a continuation of Brakhage’s lifelong quest for a synaesthetic cinema that would, in Gene Youngblood’s words, represent “the totality of consciousness, the reality continuum of the living present”, (Youngblood 1970: 88) and a radical departure from his previous films. They remain consistent with Brakhage’s other work in that many of his familiar techniques require the spectator to recognize repetition and self-referentiality in order to experience the films as coherent. Some of these techniques include the superimposition of multiple images, out-of-focus shots, washing out images by shooting directly into light sources or underexposing the shot so that the image is dark, shooting through a prism, “all-over”
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dispersal of visual information so that the viewer has difficulty establishing a hierarchy for processing it (a technique taken from Abstract Expressionists like Jackson Pollock), interruptive flash frames, pulsation, shooting through painted glass, shooting in fog and downpours (the “filters of the world”), as well as hand-held camera movement that simulates body motion.2 All of these filmmaking strategies make the films hard to describe in words (Brakhage’s intention) and render shot-by-shot analysis almost meaningless. The filmmaker objectifies the film image as image, and prevents any absorption into the narration. Brakhage’s artistry seeks to use film as a way to liberate the spectator’s learned visual conventions. The four-part structure is a recurrent one in the filmmaker’s opus: the early masterpiece Dog Star Man consisted of a dream-like “Prelude” followed by four parts, and The Dante Quartet, made up of images painted directly on film, was made in 1987 at about the same time that Brakhage started Faust Part One. Another four-part series, Tortured Dust, was made in the 1980s. In many ways, however, the Faust films constitute a radical departure. In three of the four films, Brakhage speaks his own poetry in a voice-over narration. The films are accompanied by sound and music, whereas most Brakhage films are silent. There are actors who murmur lines that the film viewer strains to overhear. Most unusual of all, Brakhage introduces characters: Margaret, Faust, and Faust’s friend (his demonic counterpart). Here we find the filmmaker at his most mythic, at least since the Dog Star Man series of the late 60s. In that film, Part One shows the father figure (Brakhage), struggling up a snow-covered mountain to cut firewood from a tree that the filmmaker links allegorically to Ygdrasil, the world tree. Part Two celebrates/shows the birth of the filmmaker’s son; Part Three mingles visceral shots with lovemaking scenes intercut with shots of nature, while the coda depicts a conflagration and catastrophe. In the Faust series, there is a progression from the introverted Faust of Part One to the poem on love and art that makes up Part Two and the fusion with the world in Part Four (Part Three constitutes an interlude, a “Walpurgisnacht” of music, dance, and the words of actors, with no narrative voice). At the same time, the Faust films, because of the techniques of interruption outlined above, succeed in being “presentational” rather than “representational” – that is, they challenge viewers to construct their own cognitive maps. Brakhage’s Faust films do not tell
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a story — they are like filmed poetry or the equivalent of abstract expressionism in painting. The filmmaker’s narrative voice amplifies, rather than explains, the images, with comments that relate more to the themes of vision and perception than to Faust’s attempt to negotiate his sense of place in the world. Rendered in lines replete with onomatopoeic associations and rhymes, the spoken words constitute another voice that accompanies the images, along with music (much of it by Rick Corrigan), and musique concrète, or rhythmically arranged music/sounds that suggest objects not depicted on the screen (a film projector, water, a muffled bell, hammering, etc.). The four parts of Brakhage’s Faust films are nevertheless distinct in their content and focus. Part One, Faustfilm: an opera is shot almost entirely in a low-key blue light. At times it is hard to make out Faust’s figure as he moves about in the semi-darkness, plays his French horn, meets Gretchen, and finds the friend for whom he yearns. Through the narrator, we learn that Faust is divorced and living alone in the house of his father, raising his young son by himself. The narrator explains that Faust needs workmen to tend the light so that he can find his way around the darkened house; and that by the same light he occasionally warms his hands. Light is a continuous theme in Faustfilm, and the narrator explains that Faust is not the master of it: “The light with its peripheral sparks had a life of its own”. When Gretchen appears she dances a shadow dance on a sheet hung above the bed, re-creating a film screen within the screen of the spectator’s viewing. Other objects—soap bubbles, a paper lantern in the shape of a sun—exist as objects to catch and refract light. Faust and Gretchen also move in front of or behind a painted scrim, or transparent screen, that patterns the light against them, and double themselves in mirror reflections. Brakhage’s explorations of light here recall Faust’s realization in Part Two of Goethe’s Faust that he cannot bear to look at the sun directly; he is compelled to turn away from the sun and see light reflected in the rainbow (“life is ours by colorful refraction”, line 4727). Like Faust at the beginning of Part One of Faust, Brakhage’s hero in Faustfilm suffers from estrangement (the narrator calls it “asidia, estrangement from God”) and is so alienated from himself that his “absolute wish”, as expressed to the friend/ Mephistopheles, is that he “could have fulfilled his every life’s task without having to live through the intervening years of tedious
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accomplishment […] become an old man, every sense of completest of destiny, whitest of hair”. The depth of Faust’s despair, before the appearance of Gretchen, is rendered rhythmically by overlaying fragments of conversation (“awful thought […] deadlines […] absolute wish […] losing ground”) while the image also breaks up continuity through images that flash by in rapid montage. Gretchen, when she appears, is described as Faust’s “dream woman” who “finally becomes flesh to his imagination”. Some of the shots with Gretchen break with the predominately blue lighting of the film, which is now interrupted by ochre and red. The vegetal forms painted on the scrim behind which the couple appears and disappears recalls Goethe’s scene of Gretchen and Faust in the garden—even though this first part of Brakhage’s Faust film remains completely indoors. Once again, there are fragments of conversation; “Your soul and mine”, says Faust; “I’m not understanding you”, says Gretchen. In the final shots, the friend/Mephistopheles suddenly appears naked between Faust and Gretchen who sit on the bed. The friend reminds Faust of his “pact,” and agrees “philosophically” with Faust’s wish for “aged redemption”. This first part concludes with the vision of the friend come between Gretchen and Faust, who blow soap bubbles at one another against a blue screen/bed sheet lit from the back. The second of Brakhage’s Faust films, Faust’s Other: an Idyll moves explicitly into the realm of art and aesthetics. Here Faust is a musician (Joel Haertling), who lives a romance with a woman painter (Emily Ripley). The narrator’s bittersweet commentary suggests that the “idyll” of the title was or is to be short-lived; in his notes on the film, Brakhage also derives the title from the Greek “idein,” to see: Just draw, scrawl or anything, straight line, square block, round ring circle will be fine. If you please to do so I-That piece of me or you well hid in the soft white lie-drum rag of skin. See things you can’t or we together cannot know. So softly now plant pencil lines on paper scraps When the little mindly maps lay neatly out,
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You and I and me we’ll shout our bitter share of joy, And find within our sleep blue-blown eye The boy—you know, the one that once we knew.
Faust plays his horn while the woman painter paints—the canvas is red, green, and ochre, while the color of the other shots remains blue, as in the first film. While images repeat and succeed one another in rapid montage, creating rhythmic intensity, the theme of vision comes to the foreground in the narrator’s recited poem: All is atremble the waves of light, the eye itself impulsed and continuously triggering its moods, the jelly of its vitreous humor, the first bend of light, the wet electrical synapse of each transmission, the sparking brain; but then comes the imagination of stillness midst the meeting of incoming light and discrete sparks of nerve feedback; the pecking order of memory which permits cognizance of only such and thus such and imposes on each incoming illumination an exactitude of shape and separates each such with a thus; distancing in the imagination it thereby creates the dance of inner and incoming light imaginary tensions; these tensions then in taut network containment of these shapes constitute warp woof of memory’s pick of shapes acceptable to the imagination.
Here Brakhage echoes another passage from Goethe, namely Mephistopheles’ ironic commentary on God’s creation in Part One of Faust, where he notes that light is only visible when it is reflected off objects: I am but part of the part that was whole at first Part of the dark which bore itself the light, That supercilious light which lately durst Dispute her ancient rank and realm to Mother Night; And yet to no avail, for strive as it may, It cleaves in bondage to corporeal clay,
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Inez Hedges It streams from bodies, bodies it lends sheen, A body can impede its thrust, And so it should not be too long, I trust, Before with bodies it departs the scene (Goethe 1832: lines 1349-59).
The filmmaker, whose art depends even more on light than the poet’s, expands the discussion of vision by bringing up the question of memory images (“warp woof of memory’s pick of shapes”) and their relation to the imagination. The second Faust film corresponds to the Gretchen story in Goethe’s Faust, and it is here that the narrator (always in Brakhage’s voice) expounds on his ideas about love: What we call loving may be no more than empathy’s ultimate and infinitely affectionate layering of rainbow-like aura ordering; it can certainly be nothing less; […] Those moves of reciprocity or whorls of self some each, each slide of skin beginning and end this one, if armed and unarmed at once one knows the limitless limit midst such ambiguities; just exactly as hug presses closure to open it bodying forth, that there be no being, feeling such buzz of another so loved— so too is aura oracular and picture at once.
The narrative voice suggests that love is a shared perception of the world in which reality appears clothed in a kind of aura that both lovers can experience simultaneously. In this the filmmaker remains true to his recurrent claim that authentic experience lies not only beyond words but even beyond convention-bound visual perception—Ripley’s painting and Brakhage’s interruptive techniques are directed toward the goal of reflecting some of that aura back into the viewer’s perceptual field. Brakhage has described his Faust 3: Candida Albacore, as the daydream of Faust’s Emily. His ambition was to allow a woman to have “something of her ritual included in the myth of Faust” (Brakhage 1992a: 57). This is the most lighthearted of the four films, although it begins with a disturbing image of a broken doll lying on the ground. Goethe’s “Walpurgisnacht” scene in Part One of Faust with its medley of witches and warlocks provides the source. The actors are dressed up in bizarre and colorful ways: a woman in a bishop’s miter, a woman in a lace dress with white leggings, a woman in a fez wearing a mask on the back of her head, a man in oriental
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garb spinning a globe. A woman dancing with two swords reappears from the second film, inviting the viewer to judge that earlier image as anticipating its fuller development in this film. Faust, still playing his French horn, now wears a gas mask. The soundtrack mixes circus music, musique concrète, taped dialogue played in reverse, chimes, drums, and brass instruments. The color white referred to in the title is treated thematically in the costumes: a spinning white umbrella, and repeated “whiteouts” of the image. This is the shortest of the four films, and reads like an interlude before the final film, Faust Part Four. As a celebration of the feminine it resembles the Surrealist film L’Etoile de mer (1928) by Man Ray and Robert Desnos. Brakhage may even be playing intertextually on this film through the twirling white umbrella and spinning globe, which bring to mind the split and multiplied screen images of twirling starfish and bottles in the earlier film, or the twirling umbrellas in the Odessa Steps sequence of Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin. Brakhage’s fourth and final Faust film moves into geologic space; like Murnau in his shots of Faust’s and Mephistopheles’ aerial flight in his 1926 film Faust, Brakhage takes his camera into the air and films roads, the ruins of the Mesa Verde Native Americans, landscapes, and cityscapes from a flying perspective. Images from the first and second films flash by as memory traces, interspersed with these views. In this way Brakhage sets up a referential universe within the Faust films, which become complete in themselves—like the imagined worlds of Méliès whom he admired. The narration brings Faust into the larger world, as Part Two of Goethe’s drama had done: This is the ore of Faust’s vision and meditation and the error of all his envisioned meaning; this is the land mass that fed his flesh, the very marrow of his unformed bones, the raw electrical connects of all he was ever to have known; these then are the symbols of human hubris that tricked him out, the engineered play at mastery over earth and all and the glistening sea, the dread darks thereof; the very air, sun’s white and molten whole, these the synaptical sparks of Faust’s brain dreaming finally of stars.
The final tone is conciliatory, as Faust fuses with the world, yet the voice is exhausted, and has many more stops. There is a sense of ending, of, perhaps, making a final statement:
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Brakhage suggests that Faust’s redemption is the total knowledge that comes about through the fusion of vision and memory. The head and shoulders of the blue, meditative Faust are repeatedly superimposed onto the other images, reversed, and then doubled.
Faust (Joel Haertling) doubles himself in Stan Brakhage, Faust Part 4 (1989). Courtesy of the Estate of Stan Brakhage
The final eight minutes go by in silence, as the soundtrack falls away, leaving only landscape. For Brakhage, however, this is not silence, but rather a return to the “musical or sound sense” of the silent films.
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Much of the filmmaker’s subsequent work has in fact dispensed with a soundtrack. The spectator of Brakhage’s four Faust films is not invited to identify with Faust or any other character; instead, they try to take the spectator through an aesthetic and cognitive experience. In the first film, we are plunged into darkness, and are asked to find our way around the visual images presented in much the same way as Faust has to grope around his dark house. The “servants” who help him find their counterpart, for us, in the projector, screen, and film that are there to “aid” us. In contrast, Faust’s Idyll and Candida Albacore, with their respective themes of painting and theater, celebrate light and texture. In the end, however, these are shown to be utopian moments (Candida Albacore is even said to be a dream), just as Goethe showed Faust’s happiness with Gretchen to be only a stage in Faust’s evolution. By the end of the tetralogy, in Faust Part Four, the spectator planes above the landscape as a liberated camera-eye. The intended fusion of the spectator with the camera’s vision of mastery mirrors Faust’s own ascension; Brakhage explains that Faust becomes one with “the hypnagogically visible cells of his receptive sight and inner cognition” and that this was “all I could give him of Heaven” (Brakhage 1992: 57). In lieu of presenting us with a Faustian narrative, Brakhage actually invites us to share in his vision of the Faustian experience. I have said that the Faust films were a life-long project for Brakhage, as indeed the Faust drama was for Goethe, who left the second part of Faust sealed on his desk, to be opened after his death. I believe that one can make the argument that the Faust films also represent Brakhage’s “testament”. Here he may have been following Cocteau, whose film Orphée he credits with showing him at a young age that “’the movies’ MIGHT/(possibly) be an Art Form” (Brakhage 2001: 208). At the end of his filmmaking career, Cocteau made The Testament of Orpheus (1959), a summation of his life’s work and philosophy. Although Brakhage continued making films for another 15 years after 1989, he seems to be following in Cocteau’s steps with his Faust films. They constitute a similar summation of the artist’s life work in that they can be experienced on four levels: the autobiographical/everyman, the aesthetic/philosophical, the perceptual/cognitive, and the performative/somatic. Above all, in setting forth Brakhage’s own narration on topics such as love, friendship, perception, and aesthetics, they are unique in his oeuvre.
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On the autobiographical level, P. Adams Sitney (2002: 414) has suggested that the four Faust films span the period of Brakhage’s breakup with Jane Collom and his falling in love with Marilyn Jull, who was to become his second wife. Certainly Part One does mention Faust’s divorce, while Part Four seems to move beyond what Sitney calls the “psycho-drama” of parts 1 and 2 (with their enclosed spaces) into a broad view that encompasses the natural world. Sitney calls this a shift in genre to the “moving vehicle lyric” that Brakhage had already perfected in his earlier films. Yet even on a personal level, these films move beyond the autobiographical to meditate on human experience (friendship, love, personal destiny) and the individual’s place in the world. In the “60th Birthday Interview” with Suranjan Ganguly published in 1994 in Film Culture Brakhage describes Part Four, which incorporates many images he filmed on a road trip with Marilyn through the West and the Midwest, as an attempt to “inherit the landscape again” and to free himself from psychodrama: “Part Four is the obliteration by single frame of the memories of the past in the swell of the earth and the desert …In Part Four there is no story really—but a going to the desert to rid myself of these “pictures” and encompass the whole spectrum of sky and earth and what lies between the two” (Ganguly 1994: 28). The whole life cycle is meant in the four Faust films—Faust is described as “young” in Part One and looking forward to the completion of his destiny. By Part Four the narrator’s voice sounds exhausted, as though coming to final conclusions about life and art. The broader vision also corresponds to the high mountains in Goethe’s drama where Faust has the vision of wresting land from the sea. The Faust films also constitute a summing up of Brakhage’s aesthetics, even as they appear to resonate with insights gleaned from the particular predecessor whom the filmmaker seems to have had in mind: namely Goethe. One need look no further than Goethe’s Faust for the mix of poetic styles and genres, the mingling of narrative and philosophy, and the interplay of dance, music, and poetry. In addition, Brakhage seems to have paid some attention to Goethe’s scientific work in the area of color theory. The filmmaker’s descriptions of hypnagogic vision and memory feedback recalls some of the German writer’s observations (Goethe 1940: 1-55) on “physiological colors” produced by the retina in reaction to strong stimuli (and encompassing such phenomena as retinal traces, afterimages, and the generation of
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an opposite, compensatory color in response to a strong color stimulus). Goethe’s pioneering work on the subjective experience of color (and his observation that we perceive color only as it bounces off objects) corresponds to Brakhage’s description, in Metaphors on Vision, of […] the eye’s flight discovery of its internal ability to produce prismatic sensations directly, without extraneous instruments […] Fixed by effortless fascination, akin to self-hypnosis, my eye is able to retain for cognizance even those utterly unbanded rainbows reflecting off the darkest of objects, so transitory as to be completely unstructionable, yet retaining some semblance in arrangement to the source of illumination (Brakhage 1976: 30-31).
Part Two of the Faust series restates some of these ideas, which were also later elaborated in such essays as ‘In Consideration of Aesthetics’ (1996). Here Brakhage accepts as the best definition of film the title of a book by William Wees, “Light Moving in Time” (Brakhage 2003: 50), and writes: Imagine(n)ativity: too much takes over from the eye as mind in what then becomes fantastical. How to separate out from in and the in from innard’s error—there was/is always an original imprint of light on eye’s outer surface. There is instanter than elaboration of bent light sparking optics within the minding eye which triggers eye cell response immediate at optic nerve ends and also from brain’s biological limits. The possibly memorable of each instant’s input is as if weighted or charged for fullest electrical retrieval, images forced to biologic shaped gnoscent to memorabilia…
What’s important to Brakhage is to retrieve the innocence of what Goethe calls “physiological vision,” an aspect of seeing we don’t pay attention to because we have become accustomed to processing our optic experience into conventional categorizations. Brakhage’s filmmaking aims to restore some of this lost vision to the spectator by means of perceptual strategies. For instance, in Metaphors of Vision (18) he describes seeing spots before his eyes when watching a child being born; Goethe also wrote about “subjective halos” and considered that they resulted from “a conflict between the light and a living surface”: “From the conflict between the exciting principle and the excited, an undulating motion arises, which may be illustrated by a comparison with circles on water”.
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Goethe (1840: 43) was also fascinated by rainbows (Faust notes with delight the rainbow’s “shimmering arc,” line 4722) and conducted many experiments in order to study them. In his second birth film, Brakhage writes about trying to communicate his subjective vision by experimenting with light in order to convey that optic experience. Finally, like much of Brakhage’s other work, the Faust films are performative in that their movement is tied to body movement, and the camera dances in order to convey a somatic experience on a human scale. One of the intertextual interfaces here is with the poet Robert Duncan in whose house Brakhage stayed in 1953 and 1954, and whose play Faust Foutu he mentions in Metaphors on Vision. In Duncan’s play, produced in a dramatic reading in San Francisco in 1954 at King Ubu’s gallery, Faust is a painter. The play contains a hymn of praise to the human body: Dear Human Body, ruthless arbiter. Even in rage I address you. In all your shifting guises, male and female seductions. Eternal fisher of men. In your ripe bosom, lustrous pear-clear breasts, abundant, or in your pectoral splendors with nipples like young grapes among the hairy leaves of the vine. Eternal museum of our desire. My burning face, my trembling hands, exalt you! In your great belly that smacks of wheat, that smells of damp summer earth, in your muscular visceral secrets. (Duncan 1958: 34)
Bruce Elder (1998: 276) has written that Brakhage’s attempt to achieve, in the mind of the spectator, an experience of the present moment (a quality Brakhage admired in the writing of Gertrude Stein) is linked to the body: “The unceasing present is also the time of internal somatic awareness”. In Part Two of the Faust films the camera “dances” with Emily, and in Part Three the camera assumes the perspective of one more performer among the dancers and musicians. Brakhage has never retreated before the body, filming the births of his children, sexual acts, and even viscera in such works as Dog Star Man (1961-64), Window Water Baby Moving (1959), and Wedlock House: an intercourse (1959). Yet there would seem to be a conflict here, between these representations of the body and Brakhage’s aesthetic claims, in which he reiterates the desire to move beyond representation: “Much of my life’s work constitutes an attempt to subvert the representation photography IS by creating a sense of constant present-tense in each film’s every instant of
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viewing” (Brakhage 2001: 210). After the Faust series, Brakhage turned away more and more from photography, writing in 1996: I no longer photograph, but rather paint upon clear strips of film—essentially freeing myself from the dilemmas of representation. I aspire to visual music, a “music” for the eyes (as my films are entirely without soundtracks these days). […] I …now work with the electric synapses of thought to achieve overall cathexis paradigms separate from but “at one” with the inner lights, The Light at source, of being human (Brakhage 2001: 211).
In the Faust series, that search for inner light is still held within the narrative of the Faustian, yielding one of the most remarkable syntheses between myth and film form to be achieved in cinema’s first 100 years. This is perhaps most evident in Part Two, where Brakhage’s voice “argues the logic of loving” over images of Emily dancing with her shadow as Faust offers her a drink: We can calm become then and en-auraed each his/herself as always fish in water with it, but now at one within the entire aurora of it be enabled to see unseizing this that, yes but also the, the globe, moebic, whole of light’s life through to the particularity of its being shimmering us as phasual essences, essential neither to of from but rather timely with it rhyming the entirety from of it […]
The circumstance that Brakhage shifted increasingly away from sound and photographic representation after the Faust series enhances the role of these films as a sort of last word or testament. Like Goethe, who has his Faust ascend into the light at the end of the drama, Brakhage too melds human aspiration with light, and love with the experience of shared aura just as, in earlier films, birth was associated with color spots and rainbows. Faust 4 ends in silence and with a sunrise, in a landscape from which traces of the human have all but disappeared. For Brakhage this absence, which presages his turn away from representation, is an expression at once of dread—the coming dark age that will descend upon humankind because of its neglect of and alienation from nature (to quote Part Four again, “the engineered play at mastery over earth and all and the glistening sea, the dread
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darks thereof”) and of hope, as he writes in his essay on Bruce Elder in 1994 (Brakhage 2003: 126-7): “I empty Film of its referential means, as best I’m able (holding language and narrative drama especially at bay), because I would receive this great new gift/Film in the light of its Light-life—that it may grow into its greatest possibilities”.
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Notes:
1
Brakhage’s four Faust films are distributed by Canyon cinema. A copy of Faust, Part Four may be viewed at the Library of Congress, Motion Picture, Broadcasting and Recorded Sound Division. 2 Some of these techniques are described/enumerated in Stan Brakhage, Metaphors on Vision, ed. P. Adams Sitney (New York: Film Culture, 1976) and reprinted in Essential Brakhage, ed. Bruce R. McPherson (New York: McPherson & Company, 2001) 16; as well as in R. Bruce Elder, The Films of Stan Brakhage in the American Tradition of Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, and Charles Olson (Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1998) 255-9.
Primary works consulted Brakhage, Stan. 1972. The Brakhage Lectures. Chicago: The GoodLion. —. 1976. Metaphors on Vision (ed. P. Adams Sitney). New York: Film Culture. —. 1991. ‘Gertrude Stein: Meditative Literature and Film’ in Millennium Film Journal 25: 105-106. —. 1992a. Faust 3: Candida Albacore. Film/Video Catalogue 7. San Francisco: Canyon Cinema. —. 1992b. Faust 4. Film/Video Catalogue 7. San Francisco: Canyon Cinema. —. ‘Brakhage at Sixty’. Online at: http://www.fredcamper.com/Film/BrakhageL.html (accessed 22.06.2005). —. 2001. Essential Brakhage (ed. Bruce R. McPherson). New York: McPherson & Company. —. 2003. Telling Time. Essays of a visionary filmmaker. Kingston, New York: McPherson & Company.
Secondary works consulted Elder, Bruce R. 1998. The Films of Stan Brakhage in the American Tradition of Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, and Charles Olson. Waterlook, Ontario: Wilfrid Laurier University Press. Duncan, Robert. 1958. Faust Foutu. San Francisco: White Rabbit Press. Ganguly, Suranjan. ‘Stan Brakhage—the 60th Birthday Interview’ in Film Culture 78 (Summer 1994). Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. 1970. Theory of Colors (tr. C.L. Eastlake). Cambridge: MIT Press. —. Faust. 2001. (tr. W. Arndt (ed. Cyrus Hamlin). New York: W.W. Norton. Scott, A.O. ‘Stan Brakhage, Avant-Garde Filmmaker, Dies at 70’ in The New York Times (March 12, 2003). Sitney, P. Adams. 2002. Visionary Film: The American avant-garde, 1943-2000. New York: Oxford University Press. Youngblood, Gene. 1970. Expanded Cinema. New York: E.P. Dutton.
Light-Play and the Aesthetics of Avant-Garde Film By William C. Wees Abstract: Light has attracted the interest of philosophers, theologians and artists for centuries, and since the 1920s has played an important role in the aesthetics of avantgarde film. Following in the tradition of ‘color organs’ and other instruments designed to ‘play’ compositions of light and color, some avant-garde filmmakers have expanded the treatment of light in film beyond modernist concerns with the specificity of the medium. At the same time, as illustrated in films by Jim Davis, Stan Brakhage and Jordan Belson, cinema offers a unique means of creative light-play that cannot be duplicated in digital media, leaving open the question of whether – or how – the philosophical-theological-aesthetic significance of light can survive in avant-garde digital art.
The essence of the reflected light play is a product of light-space-time tensions in color or chiaroscuro harmonies and (or) in various forms by kinetic means, in a continuity of motion: as an optical passage of time in a state of equilibrium. (Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Painting, Photography, Film, 1925)
Historically, the aesthetic preoccupations of avant-garde film have drawn upon some of the more rigorous – some might even say, puritanical – demands of 20th century modernism: to discover and exploit the unique, essential properties of the medium, and in the process to ‘purify’ a medium infected with ‘impurities’ from other art forms – particularly literature and theatre. For example, the Bauhaus artist Ludwig Hirschfeld-Mack wrote in the early 1920s (MoholyNagy 1969: 80): I remember the overpowering impression of the first film I saw in Munich in 1912; the content of the film was tasteless and left me totally unmoved – only the power of the alternating brilliant white to the deepest black – what a wealth of new expressional possibilities. Needless to say, these primary means of filmic representation – moving light arranged in a rhythmic pattern – was totally disregarded in this film as it is in modern films, in which time and again the literary content of the action plays the principal part.
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Germaine Dulac, writing about French avant-garde film of the midlate 1920s, (1978: 46) announced: To strip the cinema of all those elements which did not properly belong to it, to find its true essence in the understanding of movement and visual values: this was the new esthetic that appeared in the light of a new dawn. […] Within pure cinematic means, beyond literature and theatre [avant-garde filmmakers] sought emotion and feeling in movement, volumes and forms, playing with transparencies, opacities and rhythms. It was the era of pure cinema.
The contemporary American avant-garde filmmaker Nathaniel Dorsky displays the same aesthetic preoccupations in his recently published Devotional Cinema (2003: 15, 92): When I first encountered avant-garde films in the early 1960s, the works I found most interesting were those that were discovering a language unique to film, a language where film itself became the place of experience and, at the same time, was an evocation of something meaningfully human. […] Beyond everything else, film is a screen, film is a rectangle of light, film is light sculpture in time.
Of these articulations of modernist aesthetics applied to film, Hirschfeld-Mack’s “moving light arranged in a rhythmic pattern” and Dorsky’s “light sculpture in time” apply most directly to the argument of this essay. Of course, they are also similar to “light moving in time”, which I have argued to be the essence of the visual aesthetics of avant-garde film (Wees 1992: 11-13 and passim), but rather than repeat my argument here, I propose to push it a little farther by concentrating on the first of the key terms, light. I will suggest that under certain circumstances, light in avant-garde films can become a creative force with aesthetic, philosophical, religious, even mystical implications that push beyond modernist concerns with medium specificity and the semiotics of a purely filmic language. This extra-filmic quality is most apparent when light is the principal subject of the film; that is, when the film is not only made with light, but is about light.1 Of course, all films are made with light, but the attention given to light by the filmmaker and the consequent awareness of light by the audience can vary tremendously from film to film. Most of the time light is treated as ‘lighting,’ as providing appropriate light for whatever falls within the frame while the camera
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is running. This way of thinking about light dominates the film industry. A few comments by prominent Hollywood cinematographers illustrate how this thinking goes. They come from a collection of interviews published under the title Masters of Light (which, in terms of my argument, should be called Masters of Lighting). Here is Nestor Almendros (Schaefer and Salvato 1984: 7): I go to a location and see where the light falls normally and I just try to catch it as it is or reinforce it if it is insufficient; that’s on a natural set. On an artificial set, I suppose that there is a sun outside and then I see how the light would come through the windows and I reconstruct it. The source of light should always be justified.
Owen Roizman (Schaefer and Salvato 1984: 199): [I]f you’re going to shoot a long scene [on location] with matching cuts, you have to control the light. You can’t shoot with available light because it’s going to change throughout the day. […] So what you usually do is overcome the light that’s outside anyway; you make your own lighting. And once you make your own lighting, you might as well be on [a sound] stage because it’s the same thing.
Mario Tosi (Schaefer and Salvato 1984: 238): Bounce light looks so natural; it’s so soft. It gives a completely different feeling from conventional lighting. It looks like it’s not lit; it looks like you are filming a natural environment and that’s the biggest achievement.
What these remarks suggest is that proper lighting should not be noticed; it should be taken for granted, rather than appreciated as a creative contribution to the cinematic image and an aesthetic property in its own right. Lighting in commercial cinema is regarded as a means to an end; whereas, for avant-garde filmmakers, filmically representing light can become both an end in itself and, as I have suggested, a means of expanding perception beyond the inherent properties of the medium. A good place to begin an enquiry into the nature of this expanded, multi-faceted perception of light is the quotation from Moholy-Nagy (1969: 23) at the head of this essay: “The essence of the reflected light play is a product of light-space-time tensions in color or chiaroscuro harmonies and (or) in various forms by kinetic means, in
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a continuity of motion: as an optical passage of time in a state of equilibrium”. Moholy-Nagy was writing, in the first instance, not about film, but about the visual effects of his own kinetic light modulators and what he called (1969: 21) “reflected light and shadow plays” created by several other Bauhaus artists in the 1920s. These experiments with ‘light play’ (including Moholy-Nagy’s series Lichtspiele [1928-32]) are a reminder that the background for an aesthetics of light in avant-garde film includes a non-cinematic art of “creating a light-space-time continuity in the synthesis of motion” – another phrase from Moholy-Nagy (1969: 21) – to which I will return after a brief look at certain philosophical and theological considerations of light that are part of that background as well. The history of Western philosophy includes a metaphysics of light that was concisely stated by the 9th century philosophertheologian Johannes Scotus Erigena: “Omnia, quae sunt, lumina sunt”, which Ezra Pound translated in Canto 74 as, “All things that are are lights”, and Stan Brakhage re-stated as “All that is is light” when talking about his film The Text of Light (1974). Later ‘light philosophers,’ most notably Bishop Robert Grosseteste, elaborated on Erigena’s dictum, proposing that the light permeating the universe emanates from the Godhead (light in its purest, most spiritual form) and becomes visible in the everyday, material world. Within a less metaphysical and more familiar tradition of Christian art, light is commonly equated with the Deity and with such visible manifestations of divinity as the halos and rays of light representing the divine entering the earthly sphere. Even light passing through stained glass windows could acquire an aura of holiness for worshippers observing its glowing colors from within the gloom of medieval cathedrals. A more specifically aesthetic consideration of light, which also figures in the development of avant-garde light-play, goes back at least as far as Sir Isaac Newton’s comparison of the color spectrum of sunlight made visible by a prism to an octave of musical notes, and over the centuries there have been numerous efforts to put Newton’s speculations into practice by constructing instruments that could ‘play’ compositions in light and color. An early example is the ‘clavecin oculaire’ invented by the 18th century Jesuit Bernard Castel, which produced patterns of color with two disks divided into twelve colors (representing twelve semi-tones of a musical octave) attached
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to a harpsichord. In the late 19th century, Alexander Wallace Rimington used a piano-like keyboard to control light projected through twelve apertures of a light-light piano, and in the 1920s a trained musician, Alexander Lazlo, created his sonchromatoscope with “four large projectors […] and four small footlight machines, which are operated from a switchboard”. He described the result as “colored light musical compositions, in which there appear, on the one hand, the widest possible range of color variations with an unobtrusive transition from one threshold to another […] and, on the other hand, images in geometrical or expressionist planes, seen in both moving and static states” (Herzogenrath 1979: 23). The most technically advanced and sophisticated successor to the sonchromatoscope and its predecessors is the clavilux of the artistengineer Thomas Wilfred. During the 1920s and ‘30s Wilfred developed various models of the clavilux: a combination of projectors, lenses, colored filters and discs controlled by a complex keyboard of dials and sliding keys. The clavilux produced ‘lumia’ – Wilfred’s term for “a visual art that utilizes light as its medium of expression” (Stein 1971: 9). While he gave lumia performances for audiences, Wilfred also programmed self-operating versions of the clavilux – called luminars – for temporary and permanent installations (including one at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, where a small, separate theater for a luminar was constructed in 1942). Some were also designed for use in private homes. Although Wilfred did not accept earlier thinking that equated the colors of the spectrum with a musical octave, his lumia compositions had music-like structures in which the colors, shapes, intensity, tempos, and complexity of patterns of moving light were carefully orchestrated according to principals of unity, harmony and balance. Unfortunately, Wilfred refused to have lumia performances filmed. He felt that even projected at 24 fps. the lumia’s continuity of motion would be destroyed if recorded as separate, still images. He also believed that “the intensity range of a lumia was too vast for any known reproduction process” (Stein 1971: 30). Luckily, that was not the attitude of the artist who rather immodestly declared in his diary in December 1966 (Davis 1992: 89), “I think I am perhaps the foremost of those artists who utilize light as the most important medium of our time”. That artist was Jim Davis whose discovery of, and first experiments with, the effects of reflected
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and refracted light occurred in 1942. While he was recuperating from an operation, Davis had to rest every afternoon, during which time, he became aware of “wondrous patterns of reflected light” on the ceiling and walls of his bedroom, as he wrote later in his diary (1992: 96). They were patterns produced by sunlight reflected off shiny surfaces and refracted by glass ashtrays. This inspired him to experiment with sheets of acetate held up to sunlight and bent in various ways to produce his own “patterns of reflected light”. Subsequently, he made relatively simple arrangements of acetate, plastic and other translucent and reflective materials, described by Robert Haller (Davis 1992: 1) as “curved plastic sculpture, mobile-like structures that would hang in space, rotate, and reflect/refract light into shifting pools and points of color”. His reaction upon first seeing the results is revealing. He writes in his diary (1992: 96-97): All hell broke loose. Miracles of moving, changing shadows, reflections, refractions took shape. It was as if I had opened some kind of “Pandora’s Box.” At the time the results awed and frightened me. This was all so new, so mysterious and so beautiful that I felt that perhaps it was something sacred, secret, that no human should know or see.
The fascination, awe and fear inspired by these moving, changing, colored light shapes convey some sense of the theological/metaphysical significance light held for Erigena and the ‘light philosophers,’ as well as the excitement of discovering light’s potential use as a medium for works of art, which had motivated many creators of light compositions from Castel to Wilfred. Moreover, in his eyes, the abstract patterns created by his ‘mobile-like structures’ offered an “accurate recording of visual fact” and were an expression of “the basic causes in nature” (1992: 106, Davis’s emphasis). Elaborating on this view, he wrote in his journal (1992: 5): These artificially invented effects of dynamic reflections [and] refractions […] are so mysterious that indeed they do suggest the great flux and flow of energies, or impulses, in nature that precede and follow, the state of being, which is life […] This why they have such a great emotional impact upon those who see [them].
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In 1946 Davis began filming his creations of reflected/refracted light. From then until his death in 1974, he made over one hundred 16mm films, most of which never had a public screening. Some treat other subjects, but most are devoted to recording the rhythmic patterns of light falling on a wall or screen – or in the case of at least one film, Death and Transfiguration (1961), on discretely shadowed parts of a naked male body. Because they are composed of ‘purely abstract’ images, Davis’s films defy precise verbal description and, consequently, encourage a language of metaphors and analogies, and imaginative narrativization that can’t do justice to the mysterious beauty and formal complexity of the light-play Davis created within the space framed by the camera. In films like Death and Transfiguration, Light Reflections (1948), Color Dances No. 1 and No. 2 (1952), Energies (1957) and Fathomless (1964), motifs of colors, shapes, and movements in different directions and at different speeds are organized in passages of similar and contrasting, isolated and overlapping, vivid and dull, intensely bright and barely perceptible, hard-edged and softly glowing light. There is no sense of human intervention. The light-shapes seem to move, appear and disappear under their own volition – yet they also give the impression of being propelled by mysterious energies and responding to invisible forces of nature, just as Davis had perceived and presumed was the reason for their “great emotional impact.”
Jim Davis, preliminary study for Energies (1975). 35 mm slide courtesy of Anthology Film Archives
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In fact, of course, these effects resulted from extensive planning and experimentation, as well as careful editing of the raw footage, but they also required an openness to what this method of shaping light would reveal to him. In an essay addressed to Davis, but written many years after his death, Stan Brakhage put it this way (2003: 42-43): Once you [that is, Davis] “gave in,” finally to the pure play-of-light in your work, you took it so far that the un-nameable shapes of lumen you photographed leaped from the screen itself […] those magnificent trails of timeless Light–a lightning which, in your best moments, doesn’t even evolve […], but rather flows to the intrinsic formal possibilities of Film […].
That phrase – “flows to the intrinsic formal possibilities of Film” – is typical of a modernist point-of-view applied to film. But, keeping in mind the extra-cinematic background to Davis’s work, as well as Davis’s remarks about “something sacred, secret, that no human should know or see” in the colors, shapes and rhythms of light he was able to create, I would suggest that Davis’s aesthetic endeavors go beyond modernist concerns with medium specificity to embrace metaphysical, religious, and aesthetic implications of light itself. In his films light overflows “the intrinsic formal possibilities of Film”. The same is true, I would argue, of Stan Brakhage’s The Text of Light and – though perhaps to a lesser extent – a number of short films he made after The Text of Light appeared in 1974: the Roman numeral and Arabic numeral films, The Egyptian Series, and The Babylon Series. While all of these can properly be called films of light, I will limit my remarks to the longer, unquestionably major work in the Brakhage oeuvre, The Text of Light. The film is dedicated to Jim Davis who was, Brakhage said in an interview at the time the film came out (Brakhage 1975: 9), “the first man who had shown me reflected light in film”. As is well known, The Text of Light is a frame-by-frame recording of minute changes in sunlight refracted through a large glass ashtray and other objects of glass and crystal placed in and around it. Brakhage’s filming technique produced denser, more textured images than those in Davis’s films. And although Brakhage’s camera, with a macro-lens attached to a bellows, rested on the table with the ashtray, it was hand-held, which imparted to many of the images a slight
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tremor that is missing from Davis’s images. Both of these differences point to a greater emphasis on the properties of the medium in Brakhage’s film, and hence their alignment with Modernist doctrines of medium specificity.
Stan Brakhage: The Text of Light (1974). Frame enlargement by William Wees
But, as I have already noted, in talking about The Text of Light, Brakhage regularly presented the ideas of Erigena and the ‘light philosophers’ as central to his intentions for the film, suggesting that the importance of light, exceeds the importance of the medium that records it. Brakhage also found in the writings of the ‘light philosophers’ an affirmation that, in Brakhage’s words (1975: 7), “thought was illumination, [that] their thinking was electrical or light-like”. And he goes on to allude to 20th century theoretical physicists who have been able to prove “that matter is still light. Light held in a bind. So that what this ashtray permitted me to do was photograph equivalence of things seen and processes of evolution, of ephemerality of light taking shape and finally taking a very solid seeming shape”. While one might have some reservations about Brakhage’s interpretation of modern physicists’ theorization of the relationship of light and matter and his attempt to integrate it with the propositions of Erigena and the ‘light philosophers,’ it is clear that he intended The Text of Light to be an extended meditation on, and aesthetic appreciation of, light “taking
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shape” in material, ‘solid-seeming’ forms – on the threshold, as it were, between light as matter and matter as light. That light is the source and subject of the film is apparent to anyone who sees it – even without knowing its intellectual background or how it was made. My contention, then, is that The Text of Light, like Jim Davis’s films, demonstrates that the more complete the engagement with light – in both making and seeing the film – the further the aesthetics of avantgarde film moves in the direction of placing the medium at the service of light, rather than the other way around. One can draw a similar conclusion from Jordan Belson’s short film Light, released in the same year as The Text of Light. Certainly there are significant differences in the way light is presented in the two films – Brakhage talked about conducting “a friendly argument in my mind with Jordan Belson” while making the film (Brakhage 1982: 208) – but Belson’s direct filming of light sources and subsequent optical printing and editing produced a work comparable in significant ways to Brakhage’s film, and to Davis’s films of light as well. Belson presents light as, in his words (Belson n.d.: n.p.), “both a spectrum of physical phenomena and as corresponding states of consciousness. It is”, he says, “an expression of light as a physiological and psychological substance”. He works with light forms that, at times, suggest the sun, stars, sparks and other “physical phenomena” and at other times – or, sometimes, simultaneously – suggest mental constructions of light, as they might be perceived in various stages of meditation or higher consciousness. The latter dominates when light moves into circular and symmetrical designs quite different from the more irregular and free-flowing patterns of light in Brakhage’s and Davis’s films. But in every case, no matter what its form in the finished film, the light that passes through the camera’s lens, transforms the chemistry of the film’s emulsion and eventually reappears as images on a movie screen, is not only the fundamental element of light-play, but also uniquely cinematic. For that reason I want to conclude with some very tentative thoughts on the implications for light-play when avant-garde filmmakers desert film to work in digital media – as an increasing number seem to be doing. Unlike light in the films I have been discussing, digitally produced light originates in a computer, not the phenomenal world.
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Jordan Belson: Light (1974). Frame enlargement by William Wees
It may achieve as great, or greater, intensity and color saturation than the pro-filmic light with which the creation of cinematic light-play begins, and while it can be programmed to move in intricate patterns, one finds it hard to imagine anyone having the patience – and the necessary software – to simulate the complex choreography of light in Davis’s films or the intricate and subtle, frame-by-frame variations in movement, color, intensity and texture of light in The Text of Light. (It is true, however, that the patterns in some passages in Belson’s film might be generated by a computer). In cinematic and digital media, there are, in other words, fundamental differences between both the source of light – within the algorithms of a computer program or within the natural world – and the degree of complexity that light can achieve in its final form as moving image art. As Malcolm Le Grice explains in The Experimental Cinema in the Digital Age (2001: 313), “[T]he data in a computer does not resemble its source in any sense, it is sheer codification”. As a consequence, images of light in digital media have no causal connection, as it were, to a light-source outside the computer itself. Le Grice does not apply his observation to light specifically, but its implications are clear: digitally produced and cinematically produced images of light differ fundamentally, and light-play undertaken by avant-garde artists working in the two media will differ accordingly.2
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Stephen Prince, writing on “cinema in the digital era” in Film Quarterly (2004: 31), deals explicitly with the question of why images of light cannot look the same when produced by digital, rather than cinematic, means: The extreme clarity of digital video is a function of its lack of grain. Grain – bits of silver halide suspended in the emulsion of a film stock – gives the celluloid image its special luminosity and vividness. The grain pattern is never the same from frame to frame, making each frame a unique visual experience. […] It is the constantly changing grain pattern that helps make the film image so alive, and which also diminishes its degree of sharpness relative to DV [digital video].
This is true, as Prince notes, of even the increasingly fine-grained films that have evolved over the years. “In a perverse way”, Prince adds (2004: 31), “perhaps the grainlessness of digital video represents the ideal and ultimate goal of this evolution. In actuality, though, scrubbed of grain, the digital image looks unnaturally clean and shiny”. That is one way of characterizing what others might call the ‘dead light’ of the DV image. Summarizing the most significant consequences of replacing film-based cinema with DV – and echoing modernist presumptions about medium specificity – Prince argues (2004: 32) that “the quality and character of light itself, and the perceptual experience it induces in viewers, provides perhaps the most integral conception of the medium, and it is here – in the nature of the light-induced perceptual experience – that the medium is transforming most radically”. Prince’s interest is entirely in the implications of that transformation for the popular film industry, but surely it is true that a comparably radical transformation must occur when avant-garde light-play shifts from film to digital media. The special significance of light – if noticed at all – will most likely seem computational, synthetic, virtual – with no intimations of light as “a physiological and psychological substance”, let alone “something sacred, secret, that no human should see.” Conceivably, it could offer a new context for affirming “All that is is light”, but that would call for a different line of argument about light-play from the one I have presented here – not to mention a different selection of avant-garde works to illustrate it. And obviously, it would not be about avant-garde film.3
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Notes:
1
I wish to make a distinction, in other words, between films in which light is filmed directly, which is the pro-filmic source of the film’s imagery, and other kinds of avant-garde films in which the special impact of light is produced by other means, for example, by manipulating the projection of light through rapidly alternating black, clear and/or colored frames, as in Tony Conrad’s The Flicker and the “flicker films” of Paul Sharits; or by infusing the image with an intensified luminosity through special optical printing techniques, sometimes enhanced by scratching and painting on the film or chemically altering its emulsion, as in the films of Phil Solomon; or by special projection conditions, such as those as required for Anthony McCall’s Line Describing a Cone. 2 Le Grice also offers insights into the incompatibility of digital art and modernist notions of medium specificity (2002: 310-11) and even, albeit unintentionally, suggests the possibility of creating digital “color organs,” when he remarks that “data stored for one representational purpose [may be] output in a completely different form. For example, data stored as a picture may be output as a sound” (2004: 314). 3 The possibility of applying the thought of Erigena and the ‘light philosophers’ to a digital art of light was suggested by Bruce Elder during the discussion following my presentation at the “Avant-garde Cinema” conference at the University of Edinburgh in September 2004.
Primary works consulted Belson, Jordan, n.d. Notes on films distributed by Pyramid Films. Berkley CA: Pacific Film Archives. Brakhage, Stan. 2003. Telling Time: Essays of a Visionary Filmmaker. New Palz, NY: Documentext. —. 1982. Brakhage Scrapbook: Collected Works. New Palz, NY: Documentext. —. 1975. ‘Remarks Following a Screening of The Text of Light at the San Francisco Art Institute on November 18, 1974’ in Canyon Cinemanews, 75, 2: 6-11. Davis, Jim. 1992. The Flow of Energy. (ed. Robert Haller). New York: Anthology Film Archives. Moholy-Nagy, Laszlo. 1969 [1927]. Painting Photography Film. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Secondary works consulted Dorsky, Nathaniel. 2003. Devotional Cinema. Berkley, CA: Tuumba Press. Dulac, Germaine. 1978. ‘The Essence of Cinema: The Visual Idea’ in P. Adams Sitney (ed.). The Avant-Garde Film: A Reader of Theory and Criticism. New York: New York University Press. 36-42. Herzogenrath, Wulf. 1979. ‘Light-Play and Kinetic Theatre as Parallels to Absolute
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Film’ in Film as Film: Formal Experiment in Film 1910-1975. London: Hayward Gallery and Arts Council of Great Britain. Le Grice, Malcolm. 2001. Experimental Cinema in the Digital Age. London: British Film Institute. Prince, Stephen. 2004. ‘The Emergence of Filmic Artifacts: Cinema and Cinematography in the Digital Era’ in Film Quarterly, 57,3: 24-33. Schaefer, Dennis and Larry Salvato. 1984. Masters of Light: Conversations with Contemporary Cinematographers. Berkley, CA: University of California Press. Stein, Donna M. 1971. Thomas Wilfred: Lumia. Washington, DC: The Corcoran Gallery of Art. Wees, William C. 1992. Light Moving in Time: Studies in the Visual Aesthetics of Avant-Garde Film. Berkley, CA: University of California Press.
Paul Sharits: from Cinematic Movement to Nondirectional Motion Yvonne Spielmann Abstract: In the sixties and seventies the American artist Paul Sharits explored and expanded the standard projection of moving images in films by incorporating flicker effects, loops, re-photographed footage and multi-screen film installations. The focus of his work is the investigation of human perception and the reception of motion, and their manifestation in filmic processes. More precisely, what interests Sharits is the constructedness of movement in time that, under the specific conventions of the cinematic apparatus, produces the impression of linear motion in time.
Perception and Projection Sharits proposes an analytical approach to movement and visibly scrutinizes the constitutive parameters of apparent motion in experimental films. His films and multiple-screen installations are characterized by performative intervention into the flux of images: for example, the filmmaker interrupts the velocity of frames and introduces alternative rhythm through variable frame rates, or he shifts the direction of movement within one and between two or more projected film strips (forwards and backwards, left to right and right to left). Sharits is interested in demonstrating the tension between synchronity and asynchronity that is generated when he establishes and dissolves visual and auditive coherence between different film strips when they are projected adjacent to one another. The structural analysis of the temporal features of movement that Sharits stresses in his work was also a feature of cognitive approaches in perception theory at the time. These state the importance of motion for perceiving persistent properties of events and objects. One of the leading theorists in this field, which developed in the aftermath of Gestalt theory, is James E. Gibson, who accounts for the consistency of sight when we view variant events and objects in time. Gibson also underlines the necessity of abandoning the commonly held understanding that a stream of impressions would be
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required for the experience of coherent perception. Rather, as Gibson asserts, theories of invariant perception of variable impressions need to acknowledge both variable and invariable components that interact in perception. This is important for our orientation when we move, and also for the recognition of objects that move. Gibson believes that when we view changing objects and events (in time and space) consistency of perception is possible because of invariant parameters in the transformation. Otherwise we would not be capable of viewing the flow of sensations in the visual world and recognizing shapes and forms from different perspectives. It is crucial that when we regard the transformation of objects and events in a temporal flow we also know that there are invariant structures in the perception of transformation (Gibson 1950: chapter 7). In principle, both these factors in human perception apply to the mechanisms of a projected series of single frames that are vertically fixed on a film strip, but nevertheless appear as moving images on a projection surface – once they are illuminated and set in a specific speed of motion. But Sharits is not satisfied with the usual look of apparent motion and the forms of movement that occur in the standard modes of film projection. This is because standard projection veils the underlying processes that construct movement out of the interplay both of variant images (in the continuous flow of frames) and invariant motion (through an adjusted frame rate, stopped frame in the projector, and the elimination of flicker). Frequently Sharits interferes with the variant and invariant parameters of perception. His work causes confusion regarding the kind of illuminated image that runs through the film projector, as well as the apparent material characteristics that become visible in the image projected on the screen. In his films and installations, Sharits separately visualizes the two components of perceiving motion in time. On the one hand, he uses projection with variable frame rates as an instrument that allows him to manipulate coherent motion (“Synchronousoundtracks”, 1973); on the other hand he inserts frame cuts that interrupt the image, giving the effect of a flicker in the transition from one frame to the next (N:O:T:H.I:N:G, 1968). The latter process in particular demonstrates consistency of sight in the perception of transformation when, in T,O,U,C,H,I,N,G (1968), Sharits calculates interval effects on the film strip that produce the flickering overlap between apparently moving images in the projection (a pair of scissors that seems to cut through a tongue: see
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fig. 1). At the same time these different images can also be seen to be fixed on the film strip so that the cut is revealed as an illusion of motion. As this demonstration occurs within the parameters of cinematic moving images, the viewer paradoxically seems to see motion and still images at the same time. Sharits’ idea is that one can actually see individual frames and also ‘see’ the illusion of motion at different speeds. In both installations, “Synchronousoundtracks” on 2 screens and “Sound Strip/Film Strip” (1972) on 4 screens, Sharits performs variable speeds in the projections, constant speed and high speeds where the frames oscillate. This effect of viewing a passage of motion can also be generated by deliberately misadjusting image flow in the projection of footage that is re-photographed at a different frame rate (“Synchronousoundtracks”).
Fig. 1: Paul Sharits: T,O,U,C,H,I,N,G (1968)
As regards projection, Sharits singles out and individually designs each frame according to luminance and color values, but also with regard to its representational information, when the image depicts real objects. The five-minute film Peace Mandala/End War (1966) consists of blue and red monochrome color frames that are interlaced with black-and-white images of a couple making love. The two shots of the naked bodies represent two sides of the image simultaneously – front and rear view – so that the depicted scene looks like an endless loop. More importantly, Sharits works with abstraction, and in Peace Mandala/End War introduces the monochrome frames in the function of an interval that cuts in between the still frames of the couple. The flickering speed of these two interlaced types of images results in the impression/illusion of figures that move around. In later films and
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installations, for example, monochrome colored frames are ordered in sequences on the film strip in ways such that the viewers of these moving images become aware of gradual variations of light and color information in a smooth temporal process, which also involves the visibility of flicker effects. Primarily, these paradoxical processes in the work of Sharits are constructed with the aim of demonstrating the notion of change in the linear succession of the individual frames (for example, in the film T,O,U,C,H,I,N,G). At the same time, Sharits is interested in developing gentle color changes (for example in the installation “Sound Strip/Film Strip”) that express mergers between a series of different film projections in a horizontal order. What becomes evident here are the usually unseen invariant qualities in the projection of variable images. The impression of a frame that is constantly shifting is realized through a variable projection speed (vertically) and multiple projections arranged next to each other (horizontally). Thus, the materiality of film disappears behind the look of a transparent oscillation between two or more light/color channels that, at the same time, make the passage of the frames visually apparent. However, as experimentation with paradoxical effects vividly illustrates, the difference of light and color values in time can only be perceived because of the inherently invariant structure of perception. What guarantees the persistence of vision is revealed through the motion of events and objects – as Sharits self-reflexively examines when he makes extensive use of interval and flicker, thereby analyzing the properties of the individual frame. In this regard, the artist is in agreement with today’s perception theory (following Gibson) and the insight that it is the motion of objects which makes it possible for us to recognize size as invariant and the shape of objects as constant (Wilson and Keil 1999: 632). In particular Sharits demonstrates persistent properties of film images in non-synchronous motion in instances where individual frames are enlarged and aligned with slight separation. In the installations of “Synchronousoundtracks”, one is a 2-screen vertical version and another is a 3-screen Super-8 continuous loop projection (both 1973). Here, the speeds of the loops differ so that alternating synchronous and asynchronous rhythms appear in the seamless interplay of the screens when the images seem to move in vertical or horizontal directions. The resulting oscillation between the screens is another way of performing interval and flicker. Sharits describes this
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work, where the images of film strips are moving at ‘slow-fast-slow’ speeds, as follows: […] each image shows footage moving right-to-left superimposed with similar footage moving left-to-right; each frame of the original footage is different in color so that overlaps constantly create new color mixtures (at high speeds the colors tend to blur – oscillate). The opposing vectors give the impression of a back-and-forth lateral motion oscillation (Sharits, “Reference Materials”, Folder: “Synchronousoundtracks”).
Concurrently, the sounds are manipulated in frequency but also in synch to the speeds of the images. “Each speaker is in logical relation to one of the 3 screens. The sound is of sprockets passing over a projector sound head. The frequency oscillates in direct (synchronous) relation with the sprocket hole images on the screen” (Sharits, “Reference Materials”, Folder: “Synchronousoundtracks”). The paradoxical effects of sound and vision are highlighted when we clearly view motion on one screen and also from left to right and right to left between the two, three, and four screens through changes of color and light. In the installation “Sound Strip/Film Strip” the footage fades from black to pink and white and is projected in endless loops, while the soundtracks under each of the 4 screens are word loops that interact with each other and with the images like a “visual-written word (which endures and can be scanned indefinitely)” (Sharits, “Reference Materials”, Folder: “Sound Strip/Film Strip”). These film works dismantle the notion of development through variations in speed. While the work pushes the linearity of frames to its limits and, through oscillation, produces the illusion of back-andforth movement to the point where linear directionality is disrupted, the viewer is also made aware of the fact that motion in film, which gives the impression of out-of-synch imagery, is recognized as such only by its invariant features. The point is that these parameters of perception may or may not be confirmed by the mechanisms of film projection, as Sharits exemplifies when he uses projection as a variable tool. Viewed together, the possibilities of audio and visual interplay of variant and invariant components of film explain Sharits’ research interest into the persistence of vision and the illusion of movement that is specific to film.
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Performing the Shift In his single film works with interval and flicker effects in particular, Sharits is interested in the transition from projection to performance under the aspect of expanding filmic vision beyond the boundaries of the cinematic apparatus. While T,O,U,C,H,I,N,G breaks up causeeffect-relations and replaces development with redundant effects of flickering images (frames showing a man cutting his tongue interfere with monochrome color frames) and sounds (the word “de-stroy” is cut in two repeated segments) that are structurally open-ended, the corresponding film N:O:T:H:I:N:G (see fig. 2) works with the same idea of introducing differently designed frames on a film strip that, in the projection, produce effects of abstraction and not of filmic development. Sharits deliberately employs a kind of interval montage that stresses the vertical asynchronity on the film strip and tries to eliminate visual and auditive fusion as much as possible. He is interested in the frame itself and not the frame as bearer of information. One radical way to demonstrate this concept is to show the image of a pair of scissors that cut ‘material’ (like the interval cut of the film material); another is the image of the projection source, that is the image of the light bulb that literally expresses: “N:O:T:H:I:N:G”. As Sharits puts it, “the major image in the film is that of a light bulb which first retracts its light rays”. At the end of the film this image without information turns black. “This simple ‘action’ is fragmented and small segments of its stages of development are separated by about two minutes of color rhythm developments” (Sharits, “Reference Materials”, Folder: “Apparent Motion”).
Fig. 2: Paul Sharits: N:O:T:H.I:N:G (1968)
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In the conceptually related film Epileptic Seizure Comparison (1976) Sharits even more explicitly employs interval montage to merge performance and projection with the goal of destroying development. The flickering images of the film avoid any sense of action because of the material that is used. When we regard the film strips by themselves (see fig. 3 and 4) it becomes clear how Sharits calculates flickering effects frame by frame in such ways that he intentionally superimposes two film strips (frames of a medical study on epilepsy and frames with pure color) not to emphasize but to reduce action toward abstraction. While the epileptic seizure represents an activity that is captured on film, Sharits uses these ‘representational’ images in a flickering structure of film that by itself resembles the rhythm of an epileptic seizure (and might cause epileptic-like reactions in sensitive viewers) but withholds the flow of ‘action’ because of the intermingled pure color frames. The formal approach supersedes the representational characteristics inasmuch as the projection of this kind of film becomes a performance of the projection of images of light and color.
Fig. 3: Paul Sharits: Epileptic Seizure Comparison (1976)
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Fig. 4: Paul Sharits: Epileptic Seizure Comparison (1976)
In a parallel stream of work – his performative film installation “Sound Strip/Film Strip” – Sharits reduces variability of visual information as much as possible in order to diminish any sense of linear development that is specific to film projection. Differently from the flickering speeds of frames in films like N:O:T.H:I:N.G and T,O,U,C,H,I,N,G, where the passage between the frames is stressed and the viewing process confirms the interval structure, in “Sound Strip/Film Strip” the filmmaker is interested in avoiding any noticeable transgression from one frame/segment to another. He instead produces oscillatory effects when merging the passing frames not only vertically (the frames that are fixed on one single film strip) but also horizontally (the frames on 4 screens that are arranged next to one another and look like a horizontal film strip). Clearly, the idea is to cause a perceivable tension between, on the one hand, the linear order of different frames and, on the other hand, the illusion of coherent forms in motion. Sharits hereby develops a particular method to analyze the illusion of apparent motion, and demonstrates isotropic linearity on the vertical and horizontal axes. Neither effect occurs in the standard projection, only when the shutter and the registration pin are manipulated, if not removed. Sharits describes the technical and aesthetic concept of this work as a “passage of film”:
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Each ‘screen’ can be regarded as a ‘frame’, within which is the ‘illusion’ of film frames passing (‘fades’ going by – removed shutter and gripper for smooth passage, no flicker); each ‘frame’ is defined by an ‘illusionary’ scratch and a parallel real scratch. More precisely: the image on each screen was produced by re-photographing a film strip of fades from a screen (fades from black to pink to white to pink to black to pink to white to…); this strip has a continuous scratch which drifts from one side of the frame to the other; graduated (fast to slow to fast to…) speed changes of the frames and scratch are like ‘temporal fades’ – at a high speed the projected image looks like regular fades; when the film drives down, one can see that the ‘fades’ are just a series of individual frames, each one progressively being darker or more or less saturated or lighter than the proceeding frame – a fade out/in is the only ‘motion’ (‘changing’) image which can ‘look right’ whether projected by a normal projector with a shutter and gripper arm or by a projector without shutter or gripper. (Sharits, “Reference Materials”, Folder: “Sound Strip/Film Strip”).
For Sharits this interference with the rhythm of projection represents a suitable tool for the dramatization of the temporal quality of film (as a time-based medium). In the broader sense of cinema as an apparatus which regularly requires a set of fixed mechanisms, Sharits’ concept of violating the frame – insofar as he manages to blur visual impressions vertically and horizontally through fading in and fading out – finally points to a structurally different image type that is nondevelopmental. While the vertical blurring reflects the misadjusted film strip in the projection, the horizontal merger foreshadows the possibility of ‘horizontal drifting’ in video. The drifting effect specifically occurs in video when the electronic beam that creates the video signal is misadjusted so that the horizontally written lines are set adrift (the most prominent examples of this operation can be seen in the video works Matrix (1970-72) by Steina and Woody Vasulka). In the same manner of blurring Sharits deals with the audio part in the installation of multiple projections of sound film, “Sound Strip/Film Strip”. He rhythmically disconnects and fuses syllables of spoken words that constitute different sounds attached to each of the 4 screens. What happens is an interplay between partly comprehensible and partly non-comprehensible sounds and fading images, but also between the different sounds and images of the 4 screens. The degree of oscillation shifts in response to the intensity/frequency of the fades in the horizontal drift. The effect of drifting depends on the speed and
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directionality of the images/sounds that are continuously presented in loops and in different stages of cinematic movement. When viewed together, the film works with flickers and those with fades represent the complementary facets of Sharits’ disagreement with experimental – and especially structural – film approaches that, despite their shared radicalism of nonrepresentational forms, are nevertheless stuck with the parameter of development that seems to be inherent and almost unavoidable to the material apparatus of film. For Sharits, one way to reflect on this basic condition is to challenge the invariant parameter of perception through processes of fading (“Sound Strip/Film Strip”). Another possibility, which Sharits employs, lies in the visibility of the constructedness of the composite image of film. For example, in the 4-screen installation “Shutter Interface” (1975) Sharits explores the intermittency of the shutter in its twofold function to affirm and negate the flicker through blurring: “On the wall of the gallery, a band of seven overlapping rectangles of pure color flickers and pulsates. Each sequence is interspersed with black frames representing the shutter action” (Iles 2001, 144). In S:TREAM:S:S:ECTION:S:ECTION:S:S:ECTIONED (1968 -71), an early experiment with film strips, Sharits had reflected the ambivalence of synchronity and asynchronity in the vertical order of frames that are separated and connected by the interval. Here again, synchronity stands for repetition of the same process of linearity that guarantees the constant vision and invariant features of perception, whereas asynchronity is represented by the technical rupture and temporal difference between the moving frames, essentially characterizing the viewing condition for the perception of motion in film. The film self-reflexively develops an analysis on the constructedness of the illusionistic image of film: Sharits puts 3 vertical scratches onto the material of the film strip that represents water currents in a loop-like structure, where this film strip is repeated 8 times. Variation occurs because, with each segment, Sharits adds 3 more vertical scratches until he reaches the number of 24 scratches – which represents the regular frame speed of 24 frames per second. Finally, these scratches stand for variant parameters in the vertical axis that produce the flow of images in standard film projection. But at the same time the film carries out horizontal development because the scratches that add up are placed side by side within the loop structure of the entire film. The inscription on the
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material of the film is used by Sharits as a self-reflexive tool to make the ambivalence of film illusion apparent. On the one hand, the scratches separate, they literally disrupt and almost veil the perception of the linear flow of images of current through the dominant visibility of the rupture that fills the space of the frame; but on the other hand, besides their factual asynchronity, the scratches also metaphorically connect frame with frame. This impression occurs because the mathematical order of the scratches represents the underlying constant mechanism of 24 individual frames that need to be spliced together in order to create the illusion of development 24 times per second. The vertical direction of the scratches manifests continuity, whereas the horizontal order of the scratches on the material of the frame reflects discontinuity. Interestingly, Sharits introduces this setting as a reference frame for building up ambivalence between the levels of representation and those of the objects that are represented. On the first level, Sharits uses the scratches to disrupt the illusion of motion and puts an emphasis on asynchronity in the horizontal direction that is comparable to the drifting in “Sound Strip/Film Strip”. On the second level, Sharits uses images of water currents that, in their unstructured movement, escape linearity and, because of 8 sets of repetition, would rather reflect invariant parameters. But this is not true, because Sharits violently cuts into the visual surface of the images, an activity which demonstrates that he wishes to make the viewer aware of the persistence of vision. By the same token, he tries to get rid of the representational characteristics of film images by stopping their directional motion – in short, to leave behind illusionistic movement.
Film and Media In the film Apparent Motion (1975) Sharits tries to supersede illusionistic movement with a demonstration of the apparent motion of images. In experiments with different grain structures of the frame, the usually unnoticeable grain of the film image visibly appears as an effect of ‘non-directional motion’, similar to the ‘white noise’ of the televisual image, and, as the film-maker describes the work, causes for the viewer “a conflict of perceptual attention as the viewer follows the illusions of movement of the recorded images”. In order to disrupt the illusionist notion of movement in film, Sharits reworks the imagery for this film in the following way:
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The images for this project were first obtained by enlarging, with an optical printer, frames of evenly distributed grain particles from a black and white strip of underexposed 8mm Tri-X film. The resulting 16mm black and white Plus-X copy was again blown up with an optical printer to make a negative on high contrast stock. In the final stage, using an optical printer, color gels were employed to code each of the up-to-six layers of superimposed images of grain fields; this was recorded on fine grain Ektachrome Commerical color stock. What began as dark grain particles in relatively clear (light toned) emulsion, in the 8mm specimen, at the last stage, have become colored images of grain particles in a dark field (Sharits, “Reference Materials”, Folder: “Apparent Motion”).
Although there is no actual motion, as Sharits observes, the viewer will perceive the film as a form of ‘continuous-directional motions’ and will view the grain quality of the individual image when the image is blown up enough to make the grain structure apparent. Looking at the materiality of film frames blocks directional development. However, the work also demonstrates that even on the internal, ‘infrastructural’ level it is not possible to eliminate the basic filmic paramenter of illusionistic movement. Sharits himself refers to early Gestalt psychologist Max Wertheimer who, when describing the ‘phi’ phenomenon in 1912, explains how we view continuous motion between two given objects that are not moving. In analyzing his own film experiment, Sharits comes to the conclusion that we cannot differentiate between actual and apparent movement perception: “One might hypothesize that film is, in this respect, thoroughly illusional, on all levels from its most obvious recorded-image plateaus to its most primary image-forming depths” (Sharits, “Reference Materials”, Folder: “Apparent Motion”). Earlier, Sharits had noticed that television commercials would use rapid cutting that was similar to his use of flicker in film. While in both cases, television and film, the techniques of flickering that were achieved through cutting were used to make the transition between images and scenes, Sharits sees the influential role that structural films, such as Ray Gun Virus (1966), play in the development of the languages of film and also television. His starting point was to cut back and forth into fading-in and fading-out of a scene in the blackand-white film Ray Gun Virus, “so at a certain point the image was flickering when it was making the transition” (Sharits 1973: 19). Although the film’s performance does affirm the standard projector
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operations, because of the strong color and light energy the film seems to ‘look’ back at the audience in a pulsating rhythm that, in Sharits’ words, represents “new nervous system responses”. The whole film needs to be seen as a serious exercise “to induce the sense of a consciousness which destroys itself by linear striving, fixated on achieving the ‘blueness’ of inner vision […]” (Sharits, “Reference Materials”, Folder: Ray Gun Virus). Sharits, like Stan Brakhage, is concerned with the visualization of the unseen and blurs the flow of images so that the expressiveness of a film conflates the meaning of conscious and unconscious perception. The goal of the film – that the viewer’s ‘normative consciousness’ must pass out because of its radical audio and visual pureness (blank colors and sprocket sounds) – is acknowledged in Stan Brakhage’s comment on Ray Gun Virus: “I really do think you have a very fine film there of magnificent subtlety in its by-play with the texture of film and eye’s grain” (Brakhage, quoted in: Sharits, “Reference Materials”, Folder: “Ray Gun Virus”). But, unlike Brakhage, Sharits believes that even when the viewer is left with a screen onto which we can project our own patterns from inner vision, so that the viewer is embedded into his/her sense of perception, this will be impossible in the temporal organization of moving images. In a 1973 interview with Hollis Frampton, Paul Sharits states his formal approach towards film and, by the same token, finds it problematic to follow essential characteristics of structural film practices. In responding to generally held views on structural film, as represented by P. Adams Sitney’s influential catalogue of criteria, Sharits contends that his films are not stripped of referential imagery. As the filmmaker explains, when he uses blank color, the image is not nonreferential because he is not dealing with pure color but rather “it’s a sort of a projection of a picture of color”. Having said that these images are referential, Sharits then further discusses the problem that “it’s almost impossible to get rid of the narrative”. Interestingly, the interview took place when both filmmakers, Sharits and Frampton, were affiliated with the Center for Media Study at the State University of New York in Buffalo, a place where the core of structural filmmakers (represented by Sharits, Frampton, and Tony Conrad) would develop their materialist approaches next to early video artists, who, like Steina and Woody Vasulka, would also be interested in formal languages to present the medium’s characteristics, and in developing
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non-narrative structures of time-based media. In film, Sharits understands the narrative as an inherent structural component of temporal development that has nothing to do with the idea of telling a story or conceiving a plot. What the narrative means in terms of structural filmmaking arises from the connection of movement and temporal progression. “I would define it as, anything that has development in time tends to me to have a narrative sense about it, because it has a form, or at least it has the movement of narrative, if not the content”, claims Sharits and gives an example: […] the sense of moving through time in some kind of progressive manner is absent from a work like Field, you have the diagonal blurs, so you watch the film for a period of time but you don’t get the sense that you’re going somewhere, you’re just going along with real time, and maybe that’s as far away from the narrative, in the sense that I mean it, as you can get, except for maybe having a completely still frame reproduced, one frame reproduced for the extent of the film (Sharits 1973: 3 f.).
Strictly speaking, the narrative cannot be escaped as long as there is development, which is understood as a form that has beginning, middle and end. In this radical perspective, all time-based media would employ narrative in the directional sense of development. However, there are slight differences between film images that Sharits and other structural filmmakers work with and the electronic images of television and video that constitute another aesthetic language. The first type of image is not only bound to the confinement of the frame and to linear succession of frame by frame. Its visual appearance also necessarily relies upon a fixed temporal-spatial apparatus to create and maintain the impression of movement of shades. This happens through the projection of light and the difference of an interval between frames in the standardized technical setting that is specific to film; whereas the second type of image is not caused by projection, but by the reflection of signal information that is not bound to the form of a frame. The visible form of video consists of electronic signals that are generated inside the camera and are usually transmitted to a monitor that reflects the video signal from inside onto the visible surface of the screen/monitor. These processes of electromagnetically written signals in lines (from left to right and from top to bottom) are normally adjusted and arranged in a certain number of lines (‘scan lines’) that
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define the standardized format of PAL (Europe) or NTSC (Northern America). But specific to video is the fact that, from a technical point of view, these line processes are not at all limited to the boundaries of a frame, which means the video image is essentially frame-unbound. And, even more importantly, there is no development in the appearance of video and television such as in film, because the electronic signal runs and jumps from line to line and can also circulate endlessly in an open apparatus’ structure (where, for example, cameras, monitors and other tools are to be plugged together). This brief outline of different forms of linear media demonstrates that in the example of video and television, there is no fixed place for the appearance or the distribution of electronically processed images. The electronic is rather characterized by the simultaneity of the recording and transmission of signal information that characterizes the open type of image. Generally speaking, the electronic medium is a processual form of linearity (whereas film employs the image as an entity), and the simplest way of using it is to record light, scan an ‘image’ inside the camera, transmit this information to a receiver and reconstruct the ‘image’ inside the monitor (Spielmann 2005). This excursion into parallel media helps to clarify that the electronic medium of television/video does not carry out such a development that Sharits connects to narrative and assigns to film. Unlike film, the directional sense of development in the electronic medium is expressed by its processuality. It connotes abstraction through the permanent construction, deconstruction and reconstruction of information that is encoded in the electronic signal, and optionally generates linear and circular structures as well as electronic standstill. The point is that the electronic type of image does not need to appear in the adjusted form of a ‘frame’ type image (which is a convention not a condition). It can also have a misadjusted presence of flow and rather look like a distorted ‘frame’ – which stresses its abstractedness even more. Sharits holds an extreme position in this comparative view of media images, and conceptually employs some of the properties of the electronic medium. His structural interest in the projected image leads him to generate distortions of the standard film projection that bring the film image closer to the open structure of the television/video apparatus’ structure, and make the appearance of the medium more fluid. Variable film frame speeds cause instability and express
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abstraction that is comparable to signal processing. The overriding goal in Sharits’ films is to work with flickers, loops and multi-screen projections that he finds appropriate and effective for a more flexible and essentially open cinematic apparatus. These experiments push the confinements of film to limits where the directional sense of development collapses. One extreme operation can be identified in the projection of reduced visual information that, through its pulsating rhythm, blurs the boundaries of external sight and inner vision. Another extreme lies in the reduction of development through variable speeds to the point that the structuring principles of the frame-bound image become dominant as restrictions in the viewing process. At this point, Sharits shifts from knowing to seeing and visualizes the paradox of an individual frame in motion. Once we can see through the structure of projected film images and perceive the individual frame, but also know at the same time that the image in motion that we see is a necessary illusion, it will be harder for the viewer to interpret film movement in the sense of directional development. Sharits’ intervention into the temporal structure of film is twofold: it generates awareness of the still frame and, at the same time, blurs the sense of differentiation in pulsating abstractedness of light and color. Also, different types of footage, moving images and reproduced still frames, would visually collide into unstable forms that demonstrate the possibilities of non-narrativity through oscillation, but on the basis of successive development of motion in time that normally produces narratives. In a media-historical view we can now better understand Sharits’ dissatisfaction with standard projection, given the specific features that the time-based media film and video/television have in common. But also with regard to their technical differences in organizing the flow of images, it is interesting to note that the filmmaker proposes an analytical examination of structures of perception with film at a time when, on the one hand, the languages of film as narrative cinema have been fully developed and when, on the other hand, television was becoming the new cultural form: it was the leading medium that would grow to dominate cinema. In this respect, I suggest a discussion of the far-reaching effects of Sharits’ loop structures and his work with manipulated projection speed of rephotographed footage, in particular in the light of parallel media of the sixties and seventies and under the perspective of shared properties of linearity and succession. The reference level of television and video
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makes it evident for film that, in principle, it is possible for the type of linear order of visual and audio information to escape the directional sense of development. However, the specific condition is that the image is processual – as is the case in television/video, but not generically in film. When the crucial difference between visual forms of film and video lies in the fixity of the first and the non-fixity of the latter type of imagery, Sharits is interested in working with film frames as if they were processual images, frame-unbound, and had an open temporal structure. He thereby tries hard to dissolve narrative and, instead, generates a certain degree of non-development within the film’s linearity. Evidently, this interrelationship between the two media has, for the most part, not been discussed in scholarship on experimental film or on video, because the discourses have rather developed alongside each other and not across disciplines. Up until a short while ago, both ‘sides’ (representatives of experimental film on the one hand and of video art on the other) have rather expressed antagonistic views in their discussions of the interrelationships between film and video and vice versa. In the recent discussion, Jonathan Walley proposes an interesting alternative to avoid the dilemma and looks at forms of films that further develop the ‘idea of cinema’ as a concept that is removed from or even stands in ‘opposition’ to the material aspects of film. Apparently, this view on the cinematic as the overriding category finally allows the evaluation of Sharits’ radical contribution to visual media in structural terms, but not limited to the generic canon of ‘structural film’. By the early seventies, however, Sharits was embarking on a series of works that expanded beyond the traditional components of film, eventually moving into film- and video-based ‘locational’ or installation art by the mid-seventies. In these works, Sharits first altered, then rejected, the materials of the film medium, seeking to create alternative forms that could still be called cinematic. He began by committing a kind of violence against the film projector, showing several of his earlier flicker films using a projector from which he had removed the shutter-blade and registration pin. The result was that the film, in projection, was no longer experienced as a series of discrete frames bounded by the movement of the shutter blade and registration pin, but a blur of colors and shapes opposite to the uniquely filmic flicker he had worked with earlier. This initial gesture of disintegrating the physical medium, literally piece by piece, was the first step in a larger process of locating the cinematic outside of film (Walley 2003: 18 f.).
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In the context of his argument, Walley in particular describes Sharits’ work where it disrupts specific properties of film in favor of cinematic qualities that unquestionably draw the viewer’s attention to the fluidity of a type of image that looks frame-unbound like video. It can be added here that the expansion in Sharits’ film works differs from the overall view of separate media. He shows permeable media borders and explores techniques that rather destroy some of the features that are specific to film. His violent non-compliance of the limits of film demonstrate that intermingling influences between the media need to be recognized as vivid (in particular at Buffalo, where film artists were working next door to video artists and were interested in the same questions of how to get rid of the ‘narrative’.) For future analysis it will be necessary not to look so much at direct references between individual works of technologically different media, but instead to scrutinize the aesthetic forms of parallel media (that do or do not share some structural features). This analytical perspective can contribute to a better understanding of the ways in which border phenomena, for example of film, pre-shape and conceptually prepare the audience for other media forms that are no longer cinema. When we consider a dialogical situation between visual language systems of differing media, and also think about reflection and exchange in the experimental field of art, research on Paul Sharits and his performative intervention into cinema will come to a recognition of his pioneering role in future media development. Astonishingly, in the early seventies he is already thinking the open apparatus that would – starting with the emergence of video – become the new standard in the broader sense of electronic and later non-linear media.
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Primary works cited Sharits, Paul. ‘Reference Materials’ (assembled in 2004 for the exhibition project “Mindset” (work title) at ZKM, Karlsruhe. The material comes from the series “Green Box” which is held in the collection of the Burchfield Penny Art Center. The Museum for Western New York Arts, Buffalo, NY. —. 1973. ‘Paul Sharits interviewed by Hollis Frampton’ (March 1, 1973, at the State University of New York at Buffalo, transcribed by John Minkowsky, quoted with permission of Gerald O’Grady who described that and many other interviews in ‘Resources for the Oral History of the Independent American Film at Media Study/Buffalo, New York’ in Perry, Ted (ed.). 1976. Performing Arts Resources (3): New York: Drama Book Specialists and Theatre Library Association: 24-30. —. 1978. Film Culture: 65-66.
Secondary works cited Gibson, James E. 1950. The Perception of the Visual World. Boston: Houghton. Mifflin. Iles, Chrissie. 2001. Into the Light. The Projected Image in American Art 1964 – 1977. New York: Whitney Museum of American Art. Sitney, Peter Adams. 1979. ‘Structural Film’ in Sitney, P. Adams (ed.) Visionary Film. The American Avant-Garde 1943 – 1978. Oxford: Oxford University Press: 369-397. Spielmann, Yvonne. 2005. Video. Das reflexive Medium. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. English translation “Video. The Reflexive Medium” forthcoming with MIT Press, 2007. Walley, Jonathan. 2003. ‘The Material of Film and the Idea of Cinema: Contrasting Practices in Sixties and Seventies Avant-Garde Film’ in October 103: 1530. Wilson, Robert A. and Keil, Frank C. (eds). 1999. The MIT Encyclopedia of the Cognitive Sciences. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
* I would like to thank Gerald O’Grady and Steina and Woody Vasulka for their kind support with research materials and for permission to publish quotations from a Paul Sharits interview with Hollis Frampton and from Paul Sharits’ reference materials (assembled for the project “Mindset” at ZKM, Karlsruhe).
Changes in experimental filmmaking between the 1920s and the 1960s: On Luis Buñuel Pierre Sorlin Abstract: While the early films of Spanish director Luis Buñuel have proven easy to categorize within the albeit late Surrealist and avant-garde period in France of the late 1920s, not least because of Buñuel’s own proclamations of allegiance to the movement, the further experimentation with film language evident in his later films has earned him the reputation as one of the founding fathers of what would be defined – much later and in comparatively incoherent terms – as European auteur cinema. This essay seeks to determine the nature of the “experimental” in Buñuel’s postavant-gardist work.
Buñuel’s first films, Un chien andalou and L’âge d’or, shot in 1929 and 1930, came late, at a time when the heyday of French avant-garde was over. Buñuel did not talk much about his films; neither did he explain his conception of cinema. He was interested in Surrealism (when Un chien andalou was released it was advertised as “a Surrealist film”) but more than an avant-garde filmmaker, he conceived of himself as an experimental director. Experimentation is a tricky word, which can be understood in many different ways. It often refers to a research of new expressive procedures and techniques, but in the case of Buñuel it represented an attempt to make spectators watch actively and succeed in formulating their own personal reading of the film. It was thus necessary to prevent them from rushing into any pre-established interpretation. If, sporadically, the elements of a possible story seemed to surface, they were abruptly interrupted. The same actors appeared and disappeared, but every time the public saw them they seemed to be involved in a changed tale; there were captions, but they provided incoherent, contradictory information about characters and dates. Moreover, there was no formal continuity, frames succeeded each other in a seemingly random order, and constant variations bewildered the viewers, forcing them into ceaseless readjustment. Warnings likely to arouse attention were carefully arranged throughout the duration of the movie. First, there were quotations,
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more precisely pictures borrowed directly from Epstein, Buster Keaton, or Man Ray’s films, but slightly modified: the box from which stiff collars are removed in Man Ray’s Emak Bakia became a square box from which was taken a tie; the lovers who move away along the shore at the end of Keaton’s The Cameraman is quoted, but the sea is on the other side of the screen, and the characters wear casual clothes. Spectators felt they knew these images, and while they tried to remember where they had seen them, their attention was diverted. The same happened with repetitions: the reappearance of shapes or contrasts already seen (the black and white stripes in Un chien andalou) slowed down the rhythm and surprised the audience. But the most important device was the Buñuel’s use of misleading clues or deceptive shots: a woman threatens a man with a racket, but the expected blow does not take place, the scene instead shifts to the surrealist scene of dead donkeys, pianos and seminarists. Countless exegetes have tried to explain the films1. Some, emphasizing the ridiculous images of priest or bishops and the inconsequent behavior of rich people, have interpreted both works as a charge on religion and conservative or bourgeois values. Others, looking at psychoanalysis, have found in the pictures processes similar to the dream work as defined by Freud: the manifest content of images should not be taken at face value, but should be translated to disclose a latent, hidden content. Violent aggressions (the cutting of an eye) manifest people’s destructive drives, while an overt sexuality points to the strength of sexual instinct. Still other commentators have seen in Buñuel’s work an endeavor to bring to the fore the arbitrariness of filmic construction, and to make spectators consider the form rather than the content. It is also possible to consider the devices distributed in the film as pure signifiers deprived of any specified meanings, so that spectators could be unaware of them, or connect them according to their fantasy, or even try to interpret them in relation to the rest of the film. Let us take the example of Un chien andalou, in which characters often look through windows. If we are trying to find a coherent story in the picture we shall observe who is looking at whom or at what. But if we have decided that there is no plot we may remember that windows are also points of transition, and that the film constantly shifts from one place or situation to another. There are different types of transition, some arbitrary (ants appearing suddenly
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on a hand) and some are openings (the opening of a book discloses a painting by Vermeer; the opening of a box shows a tie), while others still lead from one space to another (a girl looks through the window and we see the cyclist). It is up to us to build personal circuits throughout the film according to the various forms of transitions it uses. The films are experimental inasmuch as they force their viewers either to leave or to watch carefully, instead of merely submitting to any pre-established narrative construction. With the exception of one documentary, Los hurdes, shot in 1933, Buñuel’s cinematic career was interrupted until the late 1940s, and when he resumed his work in studios his idea of filmmaking had changed. Many factors – personal, political and economic – were involved in his new view of cinema. All his subsequent films had main characters and told a continuous, coherent story. In most of them Buñuel introduced a surrealist touch, if we agree to call ‘surreal’ what looks strange in or of itself, and questions the boundaries between visible, solid things and invisible, evanescent ones (Gubern 1992). Dream was extensively used because of its ability to mix up traces of daily activities and fancied images or situations. The two dreams in Los Olvidados have become paradigmatic, and are given as examples in all film schools. In the first a boy, bullied by his mother, imagines she has become affectionate, but is disturbed by the memory of a crime he has witnessed; in the second an adolescent, shot by the police, sees his hard life and the peace awaiting him while he is dying. Dreams are convenient inasmuch as they allow the disclosure, in a few shots, of the secret wishes and fears of the characters, but they have long been a literary or cinematic device and have little, if anything to do with cinematic experimentation. Buñuel never gave up introducing dreamlike sequences in his movies. Some of his later pictures, for example Belle de jour or Le charme discret de la bourgeoisie, are entirely built on the encroachment of night fantasy over actual life. Spectators believe they are watching daily actions that turn out to be dreams that, sometimes, cross over into other dreams. Emphasis has often been put on Buñuel’s surrealism at the expenses of an important change that took place when the director returned to experimental cinema in the late 1950s. Such modification has often been overshadowed for motives that I shall explain, and such is the reason why I would like to focus on the films of the early 1960s.
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Viridiana will be the centre of my discussion. It is probably the only one of Buñuel’s films that does not feature any surrealist elements, while surrealism shows on the surface in the other experimental films of the period, Nazarin, El angel exterminador and Simón del desierto. If we give the adjective ‘classical’ the meaning proposed by David Bordwell (1985: 3), that is to say the representation of “psychologically defined individuals who struggle to solve a clear-cut problem or to attain specific goals”, Viridiana may be labeled a classical film: the main characters are well-identified, there is a logical, linear story which unfolds in contemporary Spain and refers to existing institutions or social activities. A naive nun-tobe, Viridiana, invited by her uncle, don Jaime, is deeply distressed by the latter’s suicide; she abandons the convent, uses her inheritance to rehabilitate a group of beggars in society, fails and becomes the mistress of Jorge, her uncle’s natural child. The style also seems traditional: Buñuel employed established devices, for instance when Viridiana talks with their uncle or with Jorge, their dialogues are filmed in shot/reverse shot, and when Viridiana tries to make the beggars pray while her cousin is restoring the old house, crosscutting shows, in turn, reluctantly praying mendicants and busy workers. From a purely narrative point of view Viridiana conforms to the pattern of contemporary Spanish and Mexican melodramas: there is an orphan, an illegitimate son, a suicide, an inheritance, which, in a jiffy, changes the main character. Such a scheme was easily understood by everybody and gave way to straightforward interpretation. It must be added that Franco’s Spain, which had sponsored the film, and the Vatican reacted in the most stupid way to its release. Crying out in indignation and accusing Buñuel of having discredited the religious vocation and monastic orders (in traditional melodramas a “wicked woman” will usually repent and become a nun; here, a nun becomes a “wicked woman”) they prompted spectators to run into the picture houses and induced critics to associate Viridiana with Nazarin, later with Simón del desierto, all being read as lampoons against the Catholic Church. Sure enough, Buñuel did not like priests or nuns, and was hard on them, but limiting the film to such narrow interpretation is much too restrictive. The director was extraordinarily innovative in his shooting: it is his style, rather than his anticlericalism, which makes surprising, even gripping an enjoyable but rather trite melodrama.
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Beneath the surface Buñuel displayed complex, not immediately visible networks of signs that are not directly related to the plot. I have indicated that, for Buñuel, experimentation consisted in spreading clues that the public would either bypass or pick out. What was new in his films of the 1960s was the perfect consistency of the plot. Audiences were offered at least three solutions: either to focus exclusively on the story, or to follow at the same time the story and the signals, or else to try to read the story in the light of its networks of clues. Viewers never see exactly the same film, but with experimental films the possibilities of various, unexpected readings are notably increased and exceed the filmmaker’s expectations. Signals set in very soon in Viridiana: it is enough to watch the five initial shots to note them. The credits unfold against a frozen picture showing three high columns that might be part of the entrance to a large mansion. In the middle of the credit sequence the “Hallelujah” of Handel’s “Messiah” rings out, then stops abruptly at the end of the credits. Two shots introduce the story: in her convent, Viridiana, who is about to take her vows, is told that her aunt’s husband, her only family since all her relatives are dead, would like to see her before she renounces the world. He has arranged the trip and she can leave at once. The following shot opens with a close-up on the legs of a small girl who is skipping with a rope. The camera pans towards the right superior angle, eschewing thus the girl but catching the back of a man in black walking towards the background. The fifth shot opens like the previous one with the skipping legs, followed by another pan, this time vertical, which reveals the girl and the man looking at her; he takes the rope, puts it on a tree and asks: “Rita, do you like the rope I have given you” – “Yes, because it has handles”. That is all, but it is also very much. Two shots – four and five – open in the same way, indicating that the film will not avoid repetition. Later, after the uncle’s suicide, we shall see again the same skipping legs. It would be difficult not to pick out the signal: two parts to the film, the old order and the new one. In the same way people move around by horse and cart while don Jaime is alive, but by car once Jorge has taken the property in his hands. The signs are not misleading, but they are so obvious that they are likely to hide other connections. In the fifth shot Rita and the man in black, who is Viridiana’s uncle, exchange glances. Looking plays a relevant part in the film: subjective shots are granted to all the main characters, with the
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exception of Viridiana, who does not look at anybody or anything. During the dialogues the young lady lowers her eyes or adopts an absentminded expression; when she opens a window or when she meets someone she averts her gaze as if she did not want to see what is in front of her. Her avoidance of any visual contact is so systematic that it cannot be casual: the actress was surely instructed to behave in this manner. Is this a way of evidencing Viridiana’s lack of selfconfidence? Perhaps, though Buñuel seldom offers clues about his characters’ psychologies. But the actress is also inserted into another relationship loosely related to the plot. Viridiana is always shot in full light. In night scenes a spotlight contrasts her body with the rest of the scenery. When she arrives at her uncle’s she is wearing black clothes, but on the second day, she appears in white and she wears white clothes for the rest of the picture. In a famous scene, reproduced on the film poster, she goes forward, in a wedding dress, against a nocturnal background (as she resembles her deceased aunt her uncle has asked her to put on his wife’s wedding dress for the last night they will spend together), but this is only one example of a recurring whiteness. There is another female character in the film, Ramona, Rita’s mother and don Jaime’s servant. Ramona is dressed in black. She is also an ‘eye’, with many shots of the film involving her opening with her looking at something and going to the place she was watching. Black/white, looking/being looked at, motion/stillness, domestic/heiress: is this a predictable pair, the contrast between a good-willing, naive young lady and a mature, experienced woman? To a certain extent, yes. At the end of the film both women seduce Jorge (who does not resist them), Ramona thanks to her intense and sustained stare at him, Viridiana through her evasive gaze. But this play on desire and the ways of unveiling it is only one aspect of the feminine couple. There is no clash between the women who get on very well and prove friendly to each other. Even though both court Jorge, what oppose them are mostly formal elements. At the beginning of many shots the black Ramona is on the left edge of the screen; she looks, then walks and seems to create the white Viridiana in her wake. In other cases Viridian is idle in the middle of the screen, Ramona enters, crosses the room, addresses Viridiana, who neither looks at her nor moves. There is more given than is directly expressed in words or actions. The female couple directs us towards the
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appearance and transformation of contrasting attitudes, we experiment inasmuch as we try to discover the various manners of bringing together and opposing the characters. It is the arrangement of positions and its rearrangement across time, as much as what the characters say or do, which solicits the audience’s attention. The fourth shot could be labeled a ‘deceiving shot’. It is a close-up that ends in a pan. Close-ups, in classical cinema, have two functions: either they focus on a face, usually the star’s, or they emphasize an object which will be of importance in the film. Here we have two unremarkable legs that will have no part in the story. What is more, we expect the pan to reveal the skipping girl, but are only offered the back of a black silhouette. Close-ups are exceptionally numerous in Viridiana. Some are functional, for instance, when a beggar wants to kill a fellow beggar we see first the shovel he will use, then the blows on the head. On the other hand Buñuel gathered, for the part of the beggars, an amazing collection of freaks and was obviously pleased to let the camera linger on their faces. However, some close-ups seem of little use: during Viridiana’s second night at her uncle’s the old man plays with his wife’s wedding garments. We hear Mozart’s “Requiem” and the close-up of a turning record interrupts the scene: a banal device to tell us that the music is a part of the scenery? Maybe, but other the connections are more interesting. Later, three characters will manipulate the record player: first, don Jaime, who is intent on persuading Viridiana to stay, maybe to marry him – in other words he’s trying to seduce her. Later, the beggars, taking advantage of the absence of their hosts, organize an orgy. One of them, quarantined by the others because he might be leprous, turns on the record player to amuse or seduce his fellow vagrants. Finally, Jorge, coming back home during the orgy, switches off the record, thus putting an end to the feast. The records are of religious works (Handel’s “Messiah”, Mozart’s “Requiem”) fraudulently used to charm: both uncle and beggar cheat with faked (recorded) and sacred music. Jorge stops the blasphemy – and later introduces modern music to the house. The first shot of the record player is sandwiched between other close-ups. After an abrupt passage from day to night, the camera pans over the uncle’s sitting room ending, thanks to a tracking shot, in a medium shot of don Jaime trying to slip on a female wedding shoe. Cut to a close-up showing a dark male hand taking the shoe. Then comes the record, followed by a close-up of a bodice and another
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close-up of the uncle putting the bodice on his chest: fetishism, of course, as the uncle has never got over his wife’s death – hence his absurd desire to marry Viridiana. But why is there, after the pan that unveils don Jaime’s obsessions, a close-up that tells us exactly the same thing? And why are there two shots with the bodice? A possible answer is that the scene deals at the same time with fetishism and with manipulations in the double meaning of handling and of maneuvering. Don Jaime clumsily manipulates fine garments as he will needlessly manipulate the record player, his hands failing him. Hands reappear frequently throughout the film. Some are simply working – but why is it their hands that signal that don Jaime is writing, Viridiana is picking up a mirror, and Ramona is sewing? Other hands denounce: grasping a piece of bread, the leper unveils a hidden scare; letting go the tureen, Ramona acknowledges her fancy for Jorge; knocking over a bottle, another beggar shows how old and weak he is. Hands participate also in love games: Jorge’s hand fondles Ramona’s cheek, Ramona nibbles at Jorge’s hand, and when the latter accepts Viridiana’s advances, he takes her hand. Hands are no mere human tools, they have a personality that diversifies in accordance with their particular task: don Jaime’s hands are awkward when he takes the wedding dress, but skilful when he plays the harmonium or writes. Hands are constantly changing roles and positions, so that the public can organize different networks based on their function, their place in the film, their owners. In the fetishist close-up don Jaime associates hand and foot; the following night, his hands will touch the feet of Viridiana while she is asleep. Limbs were already connected in the fourth shot of the film, with Rita’s hands and legs involved in the skipping. Feet or legs are the most common fetishist objects, but when the film lingers on Rita’s legs, in shots four and five, no sexual hint is implied: the legs are only two vertical lines crossing the screen. They are thus halfway between the pillars seen behind the credits and other, more sexualized images. Again, they cannot be assigned to any pre-established meaning. The first night Viridiana, who has retired to her bedroom, eases on her black stocking and her white leg, in close-up, remains, idle, in the middle of the frame. Night, room, bed and the length of time the scene is held endow the shot with some eroticism, but the following night the same leg, in the same position, indicates that the young lady is bending down in front of the fireplace. Legs are as frequent as hands, and also have various functions: they can be useful (for walking, for
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the activation of the harmonium pedals, for washing); ludicrous (the feet of a beggar tangled in a veil); erotic (the feet of a couple lying hidden behind a sofa); or mysterious (Viridiana’s legs in a corridor during a sleepwalking crisis). They are also punctuation marks that demarcate certain episodes: the legs of the uncle and the niece when they have their first talk; don Jaime’s legs at the outset of the first night; Jorge’s feet showing how he is taking over of the house. Limbs are mobile, fluid signals that the audience may organize according to their relation to the film. For practical purposes I have singled out hands and legs, but these appear generally at the end, or more often at the beginning of a much longer shot. Independent from place or character, Buñuel’s mobile camera freely plays with space. Describing the fourth shot we labeled it a “disappointing shot” because its end does not correspond to its beginning. And there are numerous other instances where the film disorientates its audience: two hands are peeling an apple. Is the fruit shot in close-up an important item? No: a tracking shot sets Viridiana in motion and follows her while she meets her uncle for a talk: another close-up focuses on Viridiana’s religious object – a cross and a crown of thorns – but leaving them thanks to a wide pan, the camera produces a much larger space, that of her room which the young lady is busy cleaning. Such motions do not specify or comment on the initial close-up: they contribute less to the machinery of the narrative than to experiments in cinematic expression. The talk between don Jaime and his niece, the cleaning of the room, would both be banal occurrences were it not for the camera work which appeals to the public’s attention. In itemizing the various signals laid out throughout the film, I may have given the impression of confusion: what do these signs mean, how do they relate to each other? They have no precise meaning, and it is the public that will – possibly – connect them. This is what I would like to synthesize using one last example. In the fifth shot Rita says something strange: she says she likes the skipping rope given to her by don Jaime because it has handles. The sentence is sound, but irrelevant at the outset of the film. And why is it that the old man confiscates the rope and hangs it in a tree? The details are of no consequence for the story, but when don Jaime hangs himself he does so from the some tree, with the same skipping rope. Viridiana and the police see the dead man hanging above, but the spectators are not offered the same view. Instead, the image shows us don Jaime’s
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back, unveiling thus the skipping rope’s handle. Later, one of the beggars uses the rope to hold his trousers.
Fig. 1: The rope handle which wanders throughout the film. Here at the back of the hanged uncle
After the orgy, Viridiana, on her homecoming, is assaulted by the same beggar. She resists, but all she can seize is the rope’s handle. Handle/hand: we have already noted the recurrence of hands in the film. Rita’s handle is peculiar, rather long, with a sharpened end – rather resembling in shape a cow’s teat. On her second day at her uncle’s, Viridiana visits the cowshed. The farmer invites her to milk a cow, whereupon she hesitantly touches the teat (fig. 2) in close-up, then gives up under Rita’s scornful glance – and various clues suggest that the girl is highly interested in sex. The chain of handle-teat-penis is obvious, as well as its relationship to death and sex, but how should it be understood? A joke with no intended meaning? A thought on the lethal side of love? A reading of the film stressing the repression of desire on the part of Viridiana, which leads to don Jaime’s suicide, to a rape and to an eternal triangle? Handles are used to manipulate; don Jaime wanted Viridiana to stay in his mansion and to marry him, he failed but did not he succeed by manipulating Viridiana, thanks to the handled skipping rope? After all, she stays and “marries” her uncle’s son. There must be many other solutions to a puzzle cleverly contrived by the filmmaker.
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Fig. 2: Rope handle, cow teat, phallic shapes Viridiana does not dare touch
Questioning the false evidence of images, experimental films displace them from their classical function of narrative support. From Nazarin to Simón del desierto Buñuel’s experimental works of the 1960s use a well-constructed screenplay to explore the extent of the cinema’s deceptiveness. “Explaining” these pictures is easy and disappointing. Nazarin, Viridiana and Simón tell us that an excessive religiosity, far from being charitable and helpful, is destructive, El angel exterminador shows how fragile is the veneer of culture and civilization: these are hardly original messages. Since spectators are tempted to let themselves be taken in by the story, Buñuel tries to offer them, besides the direct route through the plot, indirect lanes which can be, according to Heidegger’s expression, Holzwege – lanes that do not lead anywhere. For instance, in El angel exterminador and Simón he has recourse to repetition: in the former, several scenes, the flight of the domestics, the host’s speech, the impossible departure are shown twice; in the latter, Simón and his mother do the same things at the same time, Simón on top of his column, the mother at its base. Even the most reluctant of spectators cannot but compare the different versions and note the variations that distinguish them. Buñuel’s first films were “terrorist” inasmuch as the public had to accept them or leave. The 1960s films were less dogmatic: spectators could chose between being lured into the charm of the fable
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or to ‘unstick’ themselves from the plot, and imagine a personal itinerary thanks to the ‘signals’. The viewers could anticipate, remember, deviate and, in this respect, these works were truly “experimental”.
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Notes:
1
The bibliography on Buñuel is gigantic. A recent, comprehensive synthesis can be found in Victor Fuentes’ Los mundos de Buñuel Madrid, Editorial Akal, 2000.
Bibliograp hy: Bordwell, David. 1985. Narration in the Fiction Film. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press Gubern, Román. ‘El surrealismo en el cine de Luis Buñuel’ in Turia: Madrid, June 1992
It’s a Kind of Magic: World Construction in French Surrealist and Belgian Magical Realist Fiction and Cinema Bart Keunen and Sascha Bru Abstract: In comparing Surrealist cinema and literature with that of magical realism, one cannot escape the impression that in magical realism some of the Surrealist magic is lost. In an attempt to explain this loss, this chapter compares the ways in which the two movements interpret reality by means of images.
Magical realism and Surrealism are similar in the respect that both allow the imagination a good deal of space. Magical realism, which became very popular in the sixties (mainly in the Low Countries, Germany and Latin America) has by now gained its footing in literary historical surveys, particularly through the association of the Latin American magical realists (Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Alejo Carpentier) with the concept of Postmodernism. Belgian magical realists are well known too, and include authors such as Johan Daisne and Hubert Lampo, painters Octaaf Landuyt and Paul Delvaux, and filmmakers André Delvaux and Harry Kümel. Their work has similarities with Surrealism because, in the spirit of Breton’s first manifesto, it combines dream and reality. Johan Daisne, for instance, states: “Dream and reality form […] the two poles of the human condition, and it is through the magnetism of these poles that magic arises” (Daisne 1966: 68). However, Surrealism and magical realism relate to different semantic constructions of the image. To Delvaux (as well as his literary model, Johan Daisne), the image in many ways calls upon aestheticist principles of construction that are suppressed in Surrealism to lend the magical effect of the image a critical dimension. Whereas the Surrealists try to repress any ‘deep meaning’, any reading as a projection of subjective situations by celebrating ‘objective coincidence’, magical realism shows a rather naïve return to symbolic strategies of meaning. In this sense, magical realist art
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brings to the surface a symptom that might be called the ‘return of the repressed’. But with the return of the repressed, a considerable amount of the critical potential of Surrealist imagery is lost, as we will see further on.
The image in Surrealism: hyperreal perception. Images, descendez comme des confettis. Images, images, partout des images. Au plafond. Dans la paille des fauteuils. Dans les pailles des boissons. Dans le tableau du standard téléphonique. Dans l’air brillant. Dans les lanternes de fer qui éclairent la pièce. Neigez, images, c’est Noël (Aragon 1926: 102).
In a simple way, this passage from Aragon’s Le Paysan de Paris shows that to the Surrealist, images are there for the taking, on the condition that powers of imagination are fully engaged by the one who takes them. Here, they fall from the sky, avalanche-like, into apparently neutral places like the Café Certa, as unpredictable as the weather, as chaotic as the elements of nature, and sent by chance. In this passage, Aragon stresses his intent to enrich consensual, everyday perception with the world as it manifests itself in imagination or related states of consciousness, like the dream, ecstasy and hallucination. Human powers of imagination are complex. They permit, as Kant suggests, the possibility of thinking the present and the past together, to use both as overlays in everyday perception, as well as the capacity to bring about connections so as to be able to think of matters that elude perceptual observation. It goes without saying that Surrealism particularly took care of this last possibility, and therefore tried to simulate the dream and related dreamy states, because they give free rein to the imagination. From the simulations results a kind of magic that, as Benjamin pointed out in his Surrealism essay, sheds a new light on the way we perceive our surroundings. To clarify the procedures behind this effect somewhat, we will first sketch a minimal typology of images used in Surrealism, because not all types of images used in Surrealism are also found in magical realism, as we shall see. Of course, this is not the first study to attempt such a categorization. Instead, this study mainly hopes to point to the necessity of imbedding the Surrealist image within a broader whole of possible worlds used in literature and cinema in order to lead the
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reader’s or viewer’s perception. Indeed, only when considering the context in which the image is entered, some more, and some less studied gradual differences between Surrealism and magical realism reveal themselves.
The perceptual and the imaginary in Surrealist imagery Before discussing the imbedding of images in possible worlds, it is worth point out a marked difference between the two movements on the elementary level of the image itself. Roughly, we can state that when we investigate how perception and imagination (perceptio and imaginatio) relate to one another, Surrealism uses two kinds of images: images that are produced from a juxtaposition of two perceptual elements; and images that result from a juxtaposition of a perceptual and an imaginary element. The first kind of image is almost completely lacking in magical realism. As is commonly known, Surrealism considers the image not simply as a metaphor (that always implies an abstract relation between two elements – e.g. beauty as a mediating abstractum between a woman and a rose). Surrealism rather considers the image as a product of perception, in which fragments of reality are combined without losing the literal character of those two fragments (Bohn 2002: 144). There is never a permanent resolution of the two contrasting elements: they become caught in an “état d’attente”, and are perceived “toujours pour la première fois”. Instances of combinations of two everyday elements of perception are found, among others, in Cet obscur objet du désir (1977), Buñuel’s late film in which, as is well known, the shadow of Surrealism is still quite evident. Whereas this first type of image is almost completely lacking in magical realism, the second type, consisting of a combination of perceptual and imaginary elements, is a regular feature of magical realism. A fine illustration of this aspect in Surrealism can be found in Le Paysan de Paris, in the scene in front of the shop selling walkingcanes (Aragon 1926: 30, 31). On leaving the café Le petit Grillon, the narrator, having confessing to having taken more than a few drinks, sees a mermaid appear in the display window. This event is rendered in a meticulous description or focalization of visual and auditory objects of perception. The narrator, for instance, carefully describes the arrangement of the canes in the shop window, the different types
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of handles, the mechanical sound that resembles the deep, rumbling sound of a seashell, and the vague, marine-blue-green light oozing down from the ceiling of the display window. This same meticulousness appears when the narrator describes a female figure swaying between the described objects. He examines the miraculous apparition down to the smallest detail (clothes, sounds, movements). In other words, in the description of the mermaid, the perceptual world fluently passes into the world of the imagination. Secondly, it is even clearer that we are dealing here with a product of the power of the imagination, since the mermaid sings and looks like a Rhineland prostitute (Lisel), whom the narrator met during his military service on the river Saar. Thus, the imaginary siren not only turns out to be a memory from a fictional tradition of fairy-tale figures, but also a figure who pops up from the biographical memory stock. Quite a few similar examples can be found in Buñuel’s Cet obscur objet du désir, for instance, in the alternation of the two actresses (Carole Bouquet and Angela Molina), maintained consistently throughout the whole film, we recognize a perception filtered by imaginary patterns: at times, the relation to the love object is filtered by the archetype of the femme fatale, at other times by that of the femme naïve (further such examples from this film will be addressed later on). The ‘dream’, the world of imaginary perception, and ‘reality’, the world of perceptual reality, blend in this second type, again leading to an unsolvable ambivalence, since the boundaries between perception and imagination become vague. Here, just as with the first type of image, the reality character of both image elements is maintained. With Aragon, we get to see the elements through the eyes of the narrator; with Buñuel, through the eye of the lens – and neither narrator nor lens question the truthfulness of the imaginary element.
Four possible worlds As we stated above, images that result from a juxtaposition of imaginary elements and perceptual elements are abundant in magical realism, too. Still, this second type of image is not of the same order in the two movements. But before concentrating on the differences, we should situate this second type of image within the ‘whole’ of possible worlds. The theory of possible worlds is a discipline from present-day narratology, used to study semantic aspects of stories and, more generally, their conditions of fictionality. With the help of the
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semantics of possible worlds, we can throw light on the more general semantic status of the image in the two movements. In Surrealism and magical realism, two semantic worlds – perceptio and imaginatio – are combined in a detailed description of a fictional space introducing itself as a new reality. From the viewpoint of narratologists such as James Phelan, we are dealing here with three types of fictional worlds used in narratives. In his study on magical realism, Rawdon Wilson defines them as follows: (1) fictional worlds in which all the deictics and descriptions operate as if they were being used in the extratextual world and which, thus, constantly beg comparison to that world; (2) fictional worlds in which all indications of distance, capacity, or arrangement are generated in accordance with self-contained assumptions, gamelike rules that are experienced as axioms (Wilson 1995: 217).
The first type of possible world corresponds to that of nineteenthcentury realism (a Balzacian description of a street in Paris, for instance). For convenience’s sake, we will call this the realistic type from now on. The second one corresponds with that of the fairy-tale or fantasy genre (a world with the axiom that animals speak or in which mermaids occur). We will therefore refer to this type as the unrealistic type. If one wants to give a place to the magical realist variety of the image, one would need Wilson’s third, and much more hybrid, type of fictional world, that is: fictional worlds in which the indications of local place are sometimes those of the extra-textual world, but at other times are those of another place, very different in its assumptions, and which, if it were to exist purely, would be a closed axiomatic world of the second kind (Wilson 1995: 217).
Magical realism evokes a world that strongly resembles this third variety, and in this respect approaches what Todorov coined the “fantastic” type of possible world. However, it is not expedient to understand the Surrealist image from the viewpoint also of this semantic register – even though some texts could be interpreted in this way. Indeed, if we zoom in on the specific technical procedures and strategies that Surrealism uses in order to construe a fictional world and to lead our perception of it, a few marked differences with fantastical literature emerge.
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In order to avoid confusion with magical realism, we could distinguish the hybrid, or third possible world that magical realism uses, from a fourth type of possible world, an (also hybrid) world construction that we could call hyperreality. In contrast with most of the magical realist images, the Surrealist image combines reality and unreality within one syntagmatic whole, and wants to have the image appear as an isolated object of perception. Therefore, one cannot state that the image simply consists of an alternation of real and unreal elements. The specificity of Surrealism lies, as Michel Carrouges states, in a specific strategy of fictionalization: “Surrealism is not to be confused with the unreal; it is a lively synthesis of the real and the unreal, of the immediate and the virtual, of the banal and the fantastic” (Carrouges 1950: 24). In referring to hyperreal perception, we emphasize the fact that Surrealist images are by no means unreal images, and should therefore not be reduced to the world of the purely imaginary, not even when the image is the result of a combination of perceptual and imaginary elements. That is why we might replace the term ‘surreal’ with the concept ‘hyperreal’ – a broader concept that applies to other artistic and cultural phenomena as well.1 The prefix ‘hyper’ points to the excessive, exceptional, complex and extraordinary character of the mode of perception (the combination of non-contiguous elements considered by Bohn as the core of the Surrealist image, and that also appears in certain forms of the grotesque and in Expressionist experiments with simultaneity), while the component ‘reality’ accentuates the fact that the hyperreal modus presents the image as an (indubitable) entity of perception. On top of that, a second distinction exists between Surrealism and magical realism: the unreal elements that the hyperreal image integrates can hardly be interpreted as components of a closed axiomatic system. Wilson’s definition of the third possible world is, in other words, not applicable to the Surrealist image. It is rather a reformulation of what Todorov calls the possible world of the fantastic.
The ambivalence of reality and hyperreality: a fifth possible world? The fact that Surrealism at first sight appears to be working with the techniques of a fantastic type (and quite a few commentators opine this position: see, for instance, Collier 1985: 224) is related to the way in which Surrealist ‘novels’ imbed their hyperreal images. Surrealism
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uses realistic – documentary – techniques (the nuanced and detailed description, and the journalistic interpretation of everyday events) to lend credibility to the hyperreal, and therefore appears to aim for the juxtaposition of reality and unreality. However, the alternation of documentary and hyperreal narratives is situated on a different semantic level, that is, in the combination of the first with the fourth type of possible world. In this sense, one could speak of a fifth type of possible world. The essence of the Surrealist strategy of fictionalization lies in breaking through documentary registers by means of hyperreal constructions. This breaking through is a semantic technique not to be associated with the fantastic: no doubt is raised between the real and the unreal, as Surrealists restrict themselves to presenting a juxtaposition of the real and the hyperreal. Le Paysan de Paris accentuates the realistic world more than magical realist narratives. Indeed, the bulk of the novel’s narrative time is claimed by elaborate descriptions of what preceded the moments in which the fourth type of world is introduced (through sequences of ambivalent images). In this way, the narrator convinces the reader of the truthfulness of the events. Before his perception of the mermaid, for instance, Aragon describes how he is sitting in a pub, waiting in vain for someone, and killing time by drinking. Moreover, his confrontation with the mermaid is followed by a description of the events of the following day. On returning through the passageway, the narrator remarks that in the adjoining display window (also belonging to the walking-cane shop) a pipe with the chiseled head of a siren is split in two. The consecutive use of different types of possible worlds is of the utmost importance to understanding the technique behind the Surrealist strategies of imagination: with Aragon we might speak of continuity between the ambivalent image and the perceptual elements within it on the one hand, and the realistic world on the other. Similar examples are evident in Buñuel’s Cet obscur objet du désir, for instance the scene in which a woman sits down and starts embroidering in a display window. This alienating spectacle is extremely fascinating as the sewing comes out of a jute bag that appears a couple of times before in the film (once carried by a man, later on given to the main character as if it were his luggage). In the final scene, as if by accident, a nightgown appears to be in the bag. So, on the one hand, Buñuel presents elements from the realistic world, while on the other hand, he presents elements that refer to a
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second, this time imaginary, world: the memories of a jute bag. In the sequence, two display windows are also observed by the characters: the first within a realistic register of images, the second as an ambivalent object of perception in a fourth-type world. The second display window resembles the first, but it is in this window that the woman sits down. Through the mis-en-scène, Buñuel thus repeatedly stages hybrid images that, through montage, are reinserted in a series of perceptual images afterwards. As with Aragon, this generates ambiguity by registering a Surrealist, hyperreal image within a realistic looking world. The Surrealist world can therefore be described as a fictional world in which the real and the imaginary are joined (the fourth type of possible world), but it is crucial to acknowledge at the same time that this hybrid world is imbedded in the realistic story type (consequently leading to a fifth type of possible world).
The Image in Post-World War II Belgian Magical realism We have already indicated that in magical realism, certainly in its Belgian form, the emphasis is almost completely placed on images that mix perceptual and imaginary elements. Also, the imaginary element is to be interpreted as a ‘literal’ object of perception in magical realism. Unlike Surrealism, here, the imaginary element does not belong to a hyperreal world, but is – in accordance with Wilson’s definitions – a phenomenon from a closed and previously existing semantic system. In Belgian magical realism, for instance, there is great interest in oneiric elements that together form a coherent, albeit unfathomable, semantic whole. An example of this is to be found in Delvaux’ second film, Un train, un soir (1968, an adaptation of a work by Johan Daisne), which works with a stretched-out dream sequence in which allegorical images from the Everyman tradition are brought together. Images in which supernatural, imaginary situations are combined with everyday, perceptual elements are also found abundantly in the widely known work of Garcia Marquez. The bursts of the supernatural in his work are innumerable (as in Latin American films). Here, we have in mind characters like the Minotaurian grandmother in the story Innocent Eréndira, who is situated in a plausible, realistic world, but also has green blood running through her veins. Much more than hyperreality, magical realism attempts to generate a suggestive effect of alienation, described by Angel Flores
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in her famous New York lecture of 1954, as an illumination of reality in the direction of the supernatural: “Thought must draw so far away from human fetters that things may appear to it under a new aspect, as though they are illuminated by a constellation now appearing for the first time” (Flores 1995: 190). On first reading, this statement seems closely related to Surrealist poetics, but this only appears to be the case. The image in magical realism owes its magical effect largely to the fact that the imaginary component is already supernatural and magical by itself, and therefore completely belongs to the second, unrealistic, type of possible world. Magic in magical realism actually does not need the confrontation with the everyday world, since the magical realist image is hardly grounded in the first, realistic possible world. With Aragon, the extreme modus of perception emanating from the hyperreal imagination can be seen as a continuation of everyday reality. It joins the everyday and, at the same time, breaks out of it as it adds something to real perception and sheds a new light on the perceptual situation preceding the alienating image. Hyperreality therefore not only means the bringing together of two heterogeneous worlds into one fictional world: it also implies that the composed world interacts with the realistic world. And, even though magical realism of Latin American origin indeed works with ambiguity – with the “dualité interne imaginaire/quotidien” (Gallo 1987: 130) – the supernatural events still remain isolated and do not really join up the world of natural events. Essentially, this ‘neglect’ relates to the way in which the audience’s perception of the image is led. In the Aragon text the narrator is confronted with a hybrid world, whereas with Garcia Marquez it is not the narrator, but the reader who enters into the confrontation. Surrealism presents a confused observer, and therefore stages an interaction between the hyperreal mode of perception and the fictional character. In doing so, Aragon illustrates the fact that the process of perception is “virtually automatic” and presupposes “little or no participation on the part of the observer” (Bohn 2002: 147). The magical realist image has not so much the character, but rather the reader confused. As the magical realist text does not present the confrontation of the narrator with the ambiguous image as such, no second ambiguity arises. Magical realism, in other words, does not turn hyperreal perception into a theme, but submerges the reader in an artificial fictional world to undergo an aesthetic high.
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In sharp contrast with the Surrealist procedure, the observer of the image has to participate in the magical semantic process. He should at least partly accept the existence of an alternative, imaginary world and the laws of an alternative semantic universe. This has the extra effect of the sheer impossibility of seeing the reception of the work of art as a displacement of everyday perception. Within the boundaries of the magical realist work of art, everyday perception cannot be unbalanced, because the ambiguity between the hybrid images and the everyday is no longer in order. Delvaux’ films very clearly illustrate the difference between Surrealism and magical realism. Especially his De man die zijn haar kort liet knippen (“The man who had his hair cut short”) – a story by Johan Daisne from 1947, and faithfully adapted for the screen – is highly illuminating. At first, Delvaux’ picture presents itself as a neorealist first-person story. Gradually, the magical is introduced in the last quarter of the film. In his essay of 1987, Delvaux explicitly states that he did not want to use montage or mis-en-scène techniques to stage the magical atmosphere. He wanted to avoid the expressionist stock, tagged by him as “the other language of the imaginary” (as in Marienbad, for instance). He opted instead for a meticulous but interiorized realism, of which the magical dimension only came from minute touches […] to render the experience of Miereveld [the film’s protagonist] objectively by showing us Miereveld, while at the same time pretending to stay close to him and to look at the world with him, as we have grown used to in cinema with the technique of the leading character [...] and thus by conquering a displaced dimension of realism, to loose our footing imperceptibly, to fling us into a methodical doubt about the facts that can no longer be presented clearly (Delvaux 1987: 264, our translation).
Like in Cet obscur objet du désir the filmmaker chooses a neorealist staging of the love affair of one character. In contrast with Buñuel, however, the story is not interlarded with hybrid images. In this story, the introduction of hybridity is ever so subtle, as it only becomes clear après coup that scenes we have seen before are essentially ambivalent. In the first part of the story, a teacher, Govert Miereveld, falls in love with a student of his, and by this fierce and apparently unanswered passion ends up so confused that he quits his job to become a clerk in a court of justice. Years later, Govert is confronted with a corpse during a forensic investigation – an apparently coincidental
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confrontation with the dead body of the father of his beloved. A second coincidence, guided by an invisible hand, is a reunion with the beloved, Fran, by now a successful artiste, who has moved, of all places, into the hotel where Govert spends the night with the forensic commission. In a conversation in her hotel room it turns out that Fran believes the death of her father (of which only Govert knows the ins and outs) to be a sign that she’d better take leave from sublunary life as well, because her father had given her a gun for her to use when life had yielded up all its secrets. Govert, linking his finding of the father’s corpse and his reunion with Fran, concludes from his insight that he is the one chosen to execute her father’s will, and shoots her with the gun. From the next scene, however, it is by no means sure whether or not Govert, apparently sent to a mental institution, really killed his beloved. The TV news has Fran still on a tour around the country, and her successful career hardly seems to have found a tragic ending. In other words, the story suggests that Govert’s imagination and his belief in the magical pattern behind coincidental events has played a trick on him and that, by the all too confronting experience with death and the corpse, he had been taken in tow by hallucinations. Moreover, a second deranging element might explain his madness: in the conversation Govert learns that, during his unspoken love for his student, she had a relation with a teacher Govert was befriended with. Après coup another light is shed on earlier scenes, lending them a new semantic status. Especially the conversation with the beloved can be interpreted now as a suggestive scene that illustrates the mysterious patterns motivating Govert’s actions. Now, we can formulate a few conclusions on the use of images in Belgian magical realism. There is a staging of hybrid perception but, like in Latin American magical realism, this perception is over-coded via the story itself in a suggestive semantic frame. The belief in supernatural patterns that Govert adheres to – whether this is a matter of esoteric knowledge or paranoid schizophrenia is left unresolved – shows that this character lives in a world governed by other laws. Nor is there any question of down-toearth contextualization: as opposed to Aragon, the point here is not the possible deranging effects of the human power of imagination. This is about a character living in a second world, hardly grounded in daily reality. The magic of the ambivalent image does not arise from the ordinary (and therefore has no hyperreal status), but is staged in its
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alienating shape. It remains an alienating hybridity that only seems to aim at enchanting the audience. In short, the concern of magical realist cinema rather resembles that of the traditional fantastic story: focusing on the doubt in the audience between everyday and alien perception (see also Weisgerber 1987: 28). Magical realism therefore carries out an aestheticizing operation through a magical enchantment, and thus cultivates a distance between audience and work. Only the epistemological certainties of the characters are undermined, not the everyday perception of the audience. As a matter of fact, in his comment Delvaux acknowledges that the aesthetic distance between his fictional world and the audience is explicitly desired in his film. On the theme of impossible love he states: The theme seemed universal and susceptible to being related to the concrete experience of any man in his fantasy, so that Miereveld was no more of a stranger to us than Oedipus. But Miereveld lives this imaginary all the way down to its most intimate consequences, whereas we, reader-viewers, have the chance and power to stop, so as not to drown in tragedy (Delvaux 1987: 263, our translation).
Chance versus Necessity: The indifference of Buñuel versus the metaphysics of Delvaux In pointing out the difference with the magical realist formation of the image, the fact that Surrealists emphasize that their hybrid semantic constructions are to pop up accidentally from the everyday perceptual world is of the utmost importance. In Le Paysan, Aragon gives the floor to imagination itself in a speech that leads to an elegy on Surrealism, admiring mainly its preference for ecstatic associations. The addiction called Surrealism is the debauched and passionate use of the means of the image, better said: the uncontrolled provocation of the image for its own sake and for what, in the domain of representation, it brings about in unpredictable disturbances and metamorphoses: because every image forces you to rethink the whole Universe. And for every human being one could think of an image that annihilates the whole Universe (Aragon 1926: 83, our translation).
This Surrealist, hyperreal image wants to focus on the power of chance in everyday experience. Magical realism, on the contrary, stages a non-everyday necessity. Their imaginary images can be
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explained as necessary products of another culture (the mythical oral culture of Colombia), as the causal effect of another state of mind (Govert’s hallucinations) or as the implications of some timetranscending truth (the Jungian archetypes with which the author Hupert Lampo interlards his works, the Platonic idea of love that Daisne believed himself to recognize in Govert’s hallucinations). The ‘dream-reality’ of magical realism very often refers to a coherent and closed worldview. In contrast with the maritime fantasy popping up in Aragon, the supernatural events in the work of Marquez or the metaphysical universe of Daisne belong to a well-founded belief. The shooting sparks in the combination of dream and reality, Daisne says in his programmatic writing, is a light unveiling “a supersensibility, a truth behind the reality of life and dream” (Daisne 1966: 68). Jean Weisgerber is therefore right in saying that magical realism completely depends on the acceptance of some other conceptual system: While being very attentive to the sensible aspect of things, it [magical realism] professes a totalizing concept of the universe, and will go on underlining their ‘correspondences’. Moreover, it does its utmost to intellectually, intuitively or imaginatively understand their ontological (metaphysical, religious, mythical) ground, which underlies, informs, enriches or undermines, depending on the case, empirical reality (Weisgerber 1987: 27, our translation).
The predilection for closed ontological systems is certainly evident with the author of De Man, as already in his earliest writings, Johan Daisne expresses his inclination toward ‘Romantic’ intuition that enables us to perceive reality in a no longer “psychophysical, external” way, but sheds a light from the “parapsychological, metaphysical and even the mystical” (Daisne 1942: 354). In a way, magical realism shows signs of a return to the late nineteenth-century aestheticist view on fictionality. Govert, for instance, very strongly resembles the main character in Georges Rodenbach’s Bruges-laMorte. His compulsive neurotic behavior and his inclination toward delusory systematics completely control the development of the love theme in the film and the novel. The reader/viewer indeed effortlessly finds correspondences between Govert’s confused passions and empirical reality. The film sets, for example, mysteriously correspond to the character. Delvaux eventually opted for empty cityscapes and
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grey shades, as he felt they fitted the unsettled heart of his main character (Delvaux 1987: 265-6). This choice connects to the programmatic writings of Daisne, who enjoys referring to the Platonic Ideas to indicate that behind empirical appearance, time-transcending conceptual certainties are concealed (Daisne 1942: 358). The love relation in De Man therefore does not present a surprising perception of the female figure (as in Breton’s Nadja or in Buñuel’s films) but is far more the projection of fantasies of a magically functioning brain. Surrealism offers a completely different elaboration of the love theme. Here too, accidental meetings and inadvertent appearances of erotic hallucinations stand out, but chance is no longer contextualized. In Cet obscur objet love plays the Surrealist’s favorite role: it is the sublime appearance of the wondrous and is born out of chance. To the main female character, it is the height of adventure precisely because the power of chance is manifested in the advenire of erotic force. Moreover, in the film chance is described as a continuous process: the meeting comes with attraction, to turn into repulsion. In Cet obscur objet, the magnetic game of attraction and repulsion is actually the main thread. The structure of the film has three capital moments, formed by a triple repetition of the primal erotic meeting. This compulsive repetition shows the lack of growth in the relation: every advance is followed by separation. Organic growth indeed belongs to an idealistic metaphysical world, not to the inorganic and even inhumane Surrealist world of chance. This universe naturally puts the bourgeois main characters in an awkward position: in failing to appreciate the adventurous nature of love, as well as the materialistic character of the universe, they are confronted with a tragic (and, to the audience, tragicomic) situation. Just like in Der Blaue Engel, the beloved toys roughly with her male suitors. In fact, the Surrealist story suggests that the bourgeois lover has only himself to blame for the tragedy: he is naïve, believes (as do the terrorists in the film) in lofty ideals such as love, sincerity and loyalty, and is therefore struck all the more by the indifference of the chance-ridden universe. He cannot see through the indifferent world and thus becomes its plaything. He is, like the title of the novel on which the film script is based (Pierre Louys’ La Femme et le pantin), a puppet on a string. Add to this the unpredictable terrorist attacks, and the ontological context is completely different from that of Delvaux’ film. With Buñuel, the dominant law is that of a materialistic universe in which no évolution créatrice is present, no genesis, no myth, no man-
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made or man-conceived world construction. Events happen by chance, because not only the characters, but also the fictional world, is governed by chance. Breton talks of “objective chance”. In magical realism chance occurs within an alienating but nonetheless causally ordered world. In Surrealism it is ‘objective’. With Delvaux, chance gets its place within the causal explanatory systems of dream, madness or metaphysics. The absence of such frames of interpretation with Aragon, Breton and Buñuel is typical of the Surrealist work of art. In their world, no space, or only inferior space, is made free for links of necessity. In Introduction au discours sur le peu de réalité, Breton states: I have systematically forgotten everything that happened to me, happy, unhappy or indifferent. Only the indifferent is admirable. […] It is toward the indifferent that I have tried to train my memory, toward fables without morality, toward neutral impressions, toward incomplete statistics (Breton 1924: 271, our translation).
Morality and ideals, the quote implies, do not belong to the indifferent universe of Surrealism. Breton rather manifests himself as reminiscent of the modern artist as portrayed by Köhler: The artist in search of sense and coherence is finding it harder and harder to decipher signals of necessity in reality. Probability no longer guarantees a necessity that would make sense. Teleology, even that of lucid rationality, is nothing but a pure chimera in the face of the omnipresence of possibility. It leaves everything open to the arbitrariness of chance (Köhler 1973: 70, our translation).
From such a point of view, it need not be a surprise to find the Surrealists at ease in combining aesthetic freedom and indifference: the Surrealist image is an “événement advenu qui ne présuppose rien de plus que la ‘disponibilité’ pour le ‘hasard objectif’” (Köhler 1973: 71). Or, in the words of L’amour fou: Today I no longer wait for anything but my sole availability, nothing but this thirst for wandering to meet everything […] Independent of what happens or does not happen, it is the waiting that is magnificent (Breton 1937: 697, our translation).
The core of the difference between magical realism and Surrealism indeed lies in the formula of ‘breaking through everyday perception in
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an indifferent universe’. Surrealist narratives devote a lot of attention to staging a first, realistic world in which ‘waiting’ and ‘availability’ stand out, to unleash chance on it, or better: to have the indifferent universe caper around. The hybrid images that chance offers are therefore principally uncontrollable, and are thus of a different order than the images of magical realism, which are contextualized in a universe in which chance has a hidden and, moreover, menschliche, allzu menschliche logic. Thus, we can conclude that precisely this contextualization, the imbedding in a familiar, fictional world, explains the loss of the critical dimension to the image.
Still from De man die zijn haar kort liet knippen (André Delvaux, 1965)
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Notes:
1
“Surrealism’s secret already was that the most banal reality could become surreal, but only in certain privileged moments that are still nevertheless connected with art and the imaginary. Today it is quotidian reality in its entirety – political, social, historical and economic – that from now on incorporates the simulating dimension of hyperrealism. We live everywhere already in an ‘aesthetic’ hallucination of reality”. (Baudrillard 1983: 148)
Primary works cited Aragon, Louis. 1926 [1966]. Le Paysan de Paris. Paris: Gallimard. Breton, André. 1924 [1992]. ‘Introduction au discours sur le peu de réalité’ in Œuvres Complètes II. Paris: Gallimard: 265-280. —. 1937 [1992]. ‘L’Amour fou’ in Œuvres Complètes II, Paris: Gallimard: 673-786. —. 1924b [1985]. ‘Manifeste du surréalisme’ in Manifestes du surréalisme, Paris: Gallimard: 9-60. Daisne, Johan. 1942. De trap van steen en wolken. Brussels and Rotterdam: Manteau. —. 1966. Het Geluk/Wat is magisch-realisme. Brussels: Manteau.
Secondary works cited Baudrillard, Jean. 1983. Simulations. New York: Semiotext(e). Benjamin, Walter. 1929. ‘Der Surrealismus. Die letzte Momentaufnahme der europäischen Intelligenz’ in Angelus Novus, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp: 200-215. Collier, Peter. 1985. ‘Surrealist City Narrative: Breton and Aragon’ in Timms, Edward and David Kelley (eds) Unreal City: Urban Experience in Modern European Literature and Art. Manchester: Manchester University Press: 214-229. Bohn, Willard. 2002. The Rise of Surrealism. Cubism, Dada, and the Pursuit of the Marvellous. Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press. Carrouges, Michel. 1950. André Breton et les Données Fondamentales du Surréalisme. Paris: Gallimard. Delvaux, André. 1987. ‘Du roman à l’écran: L’homme au crâne rasé’ in Weisgerber, Jean. Le Réalisme Magique: Roman, Peinture et cinéma. Lausanne: L’age d’homme: 262-269. Flores, Angel. 1995. ‘Magical realism in Spanish American Fiction’ in Parkinson Zamora, Lois and Wendy B. Faris (eds) Magical realism: theory, history, community. N.C.: Duke University Press: 187-192.
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Gallo, Marta. 1987. ‘Panorama du réalisme magique en Amérique hispanique’ in Weisgerber, Jean (ed.) Le Réalisme Magique: Roman, Peinture et cinéma. Lausanne : L’age d’homme: 123-153. Köhler, Erich. 1973 [2000]. Le Hasard en Littérature, le Possible et la Nécessité. Paris: Klincksieck. Lampo, Hubert. 1972. De zwanen van Stonehenge. Een leesboek over magischrealisme en fantastische literatuur. Amsterdam: Meulenhof. Phelan, James. 1989. Reading People, Reading Plots: Character, Progression, and the Interpretation of Narrative. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Todorov, Tzvetan. 1970. Introduction à la littérature fantastique. Paris: Seuil. Weisgerber, Jean. 1987. ‘La Locution et le concept in Weisgeber, Jean (ed.) Le Réalisme Magique: Roman, Peinture et cinéma. Lausanne: L’Age d’homme 11-33. Wilson, Rawdon. 1995. ‘The Metamorphoses of Fictional Space: Magical realism’ in Parkinson Zamora, Lois and Wendy B. Faris (eds) Magical realism: theory, history, community. N.C.: Duke University Press: 209-233.
Peter Kubelka’s Arnulf Rainer Nicky Hamlyn Abstract: In this essay I will look at Peter Kubelka’s classic film Arnulf Rainer (6 1/2 minutes, black and white, optical sound, 35mm, 1960) in terms of the way it can be seen to operate around a number of dichotomies, between dark and light and black and white, sound and image, balance and asymmetry, film-strip and projection, onscreen and in-brain, work and context. I will also consider some of the wider issues that arise about lightness and darkness generally, and about the scope and purpose of formal analysis.
You have the possibility to give light a dimension in time. (Mekas 1978: 103)
Introduction Peter Kubelka has, famously, made a handful of mostly very short films in a long career. In 1966, when the interview took place from which the above quote was taken, he had produced, since 1952, an average of two minutes of film per year. Since then two more titles have appeared, bringing the sum duration of his oeuvre to just under an hour. Kubelka’s films are notable for their being intricately structured and for their extreme concentration and exactitude of form. Every frame of the minute-long Schwechater (1958), for example, is ordered according to complex repetitive sequences based on numerical procedures. Arnulf Rainer is the third of Kubelka’s ‘metrical’ films (his own designation) after A d e b a r (1957) and Schwechater. It is composed of equal amounts of black and white and sound and silence. The images are organized as rhythmic clusters of black and white frames, interspersed with longer sections of either black or white. The sound is similarly composed. Sound and image are juxtaposed in various ways. The film is both proto-cinematic and fully formed, simple in means yet complex in its effects (less is more in a specifically filmic way), conceptually sophisticated and powerfully
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visceral: The film was made in 35mm and is best seen in that format, in order that the full power of the picture and sound may be experienced: “Oh, it was fantastic in Los Angeles [...] They had a screen as large as a house, and they had these powerful loudspeakers. The sound was like Niagara Falls, so loud […] and the lights, so strong”. (Mekas, 1978: 106)
Essence and Appearances The opening quote evokes William C Wees’s formulation of experimental film in the title of his book “Light Moving in Time” (Wees: 1992), yet for Kubelka, cinema is emphatically not movement: “It can give the illusion of movement. Cinema is the quick projection of light impulses. These light impulses can be shaped when you put the film before the lamp – on the screen you can shape it”. (Mekas 1978: 103) This understanding of film as discontinuous and essentially static underpins Arnulf Rainer’ s rationale. As in Eisenstein’s advocacy of filmic, as opposed to filmed movement, Kubelka takes the clash of shots proposed by Eisenstein’s theories of montage to their furthest possible extreme: white shots next to black shots next to white shots or rather, in this case, white and black frames juxtaposed, since the frame is the basic unit of construction. Thus the distinction between shot and frame is dissolved, since every frame is a shot. This is also true of most of Kubelka’s other films, even those that have shots in the conventional sense, since they are almost all subject to frame-by-frame forms of organization. In this way Kubelka gets us to see the whole of Arnulf Rainer as formed from chains of elements of equal value, elements that in most films invisibly, and thus subserviently, support larger compounds – shots – the perception of which requires the disappearance of those individual frames as such. Kubelka also foregrounds the way light can be experienced as pure duration if it is contextualized in the way it is in a film like Arnulf Rainer. Here the alternation between black, white, and black and white flicker rhythms allows light to be experienced as time. In shots lasting more than a fraction of a second, white is bracketed by black, marked-off as the presence of duration, and articulated within that duration both by the flicker of the projector at 24 frames per second – projector flicker becomes considerably more noticeable when clear film is running through it – and by the marks and scratches
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that inevitably accumulate on the film and which are animated by its passage through the projector. Thus the stasis that is the true state of film is articulated by the illusory movements generated in the eye by the rapid presentation of successive empty frames. In other words, illusory movement in the service of true stasis.
Flicker Although Arnulf Rainer may at times look like a flicker film, it is not. According to P. Adams Sitney: For the structural filmmakers who use the flicker form, it is the vehicle for the attainment of subtle distinctions of cinematic stasis in the midst of extreme speed which can be presented so as to generate both psychological and apperceptive reactions in its spectators. Although Kubelka is not closing out the possibility of such reactions, he created his film as both a definition of cinema and a generator of rhythmical ecstasy. (Sitney 2002: 288)
In these crucial respects, then, Arnulf Rainer is very different to a film like Tony Conrad’s The Flicker (1966), where long sections of regularly alternating black and clear frames – flicker – are permutated step by step, primarily in order to stimulate a range of psychological reactions in the viewer. In Arnulf Rainer relatively short sections of rhythmically fluctuating flicker are interspersed with sections of plain black or white. The most basic and paradigmatic form of flicker, alternating single frames of black and clear, occurs only briefly at three or four points. Most of the rhythms are more complex than this. The film begins with a pattern of frames as follows: 1 black, 1 white, 2 black, 1 white, 3 black, 1 white, 2 black, 1 white, 1 black, 1 white, etc. Most of the patterns follow similarly fluctuating relationships which will often expand and contract in a kind of simultaneous contrary motion, for example: 3 black, 4 white, 2 black, 6 white, 1 black, 8 white.
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The experience is of a set of permutations of possible combinations of black and white frames, sound and silence, based on an imperceptible unit of measure. It does not matter that the film’s metrical order is imperceptible. What matters is that we experience the film as working through the possible combinations of its four components. These could be said to correspond to all possible kinds of shot within film. Thus we are invited to see a film as a matrix of possibilities circumscribed by its shape and (technological) limitations.
Black and White, Dark and Light.
Peter Kubelka: Arnulf Rainer (1960)
The symmetrical relationship between light and dark frames implied in the use of the terms black and white is actually asymmetrical in several respects. Firstly, the black frames hold back the light from the projector, so that even if there are pinholes in the film’s emulsion, the sense of its movement through the projector and its experience as material is diminished. At the same time, the abrupt darkening of the highly reflective screen serves to darken the auditorium as a whole. This darkness in turn facilitates the awareness of strong after-images generated by the white frames. The black frames present a purer absence, yet one in which the glowing afterimage of the screen/frame hovers over the varyingly perceptible rectangle of the frame on screen. (It is at these moments that the mind seems to meet what is on the screen halfway, since what is in the eye – the afterimage created by the white sections burning a rectangle on the retina – variously interacts with, surrenders to, obliterates what is on the screen). However, insofar as there is an absence of image, one could say that the experience of pure duration is also non-filmic, or rather, that it is only the context in which these pauses/durations are experienced that marks them as cinematic. In other words there is, at these moments, a sharp divide between the nature of the experience and its context. The white frames, actually clear frames that allow the projector beam to shine through relatively unimpeded onto the white screen, reveal every slight imperfection in the film’s surface. Every
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scratch refracts the projector light, which is already refracted by its passage through a medium, foregrounding the passage of time and the projector’s flicker. The marks on clear celluloid replace the photographic image (which has, as it were, bleached into light). They remind us only of the celluloid in the absence of the image. They are not an interruption like a scratch on a normal image, but, in the absence of an image, isolate the material decay of the filmstrip: the scratched white surface becomes a new, entropic index, in a different way to the way that scratches on black frames function as imperfect black latent images. Insofar as white frames expose the medium in its manner of operation, they reduce the medium to its technology, although eventually the accumulation of scratches will become as much an image, a record of the film’s projections, as its negation. That the bending of light can produce an effect that is as strong in its way as the blocking of light by the black frames seems to contradict a common-sense idea of light strength and behavior: how can bending light be a form of withholding such that it forms a mark that can be as dark as a black line drawn or created photographically: so that bent light and withheld light create an equally strong effect? The effect thus draws attention to the specificity of movie film as light projected through a medium whose material characteristics affect the nature of the light hitting the screen. In this sense different base media; nitrate, acetate, polyester, as well as the emulsion structure and type, will deflect and scatter the light differently (hence the film buff’s enthusiasm for Technicolor inks on an (explosive) nitrate base for its particular qualities of color and light diffusion). Video light, by contrast, emanates unimpeded from its sources. Both in its manner of organization and generation at its source, and in the way in which color is mixed in the eye, it is more akin to pointillist painting than it is to film. Like the black parts of the film, the white parts also have an environmental effect. The light reflecting off the screen illuminates strongly the auditorium and the people sitting in it, turning the film into a kind of installation (and evoking Malcolm Le Grice’s emblematically reflexive first film Castle 1 (1966), in which a light bulb, hanging by the side of the screen on which found footage is projected, is switched on and off periodically, illuminating the audience and partially obliterating the image, displacing and mixing projected light with the unmediated [though also flickering] light of the bulb).
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There are some other asymmetries between black and white, and between dark and light, which arise here. Darkness exists in nature in a way that lightness does not. Absolute dark can be experienced in controlled environments or remote parts of the world in a way that absolute light cannot. In fact there is no absolute lightness, or brightness, in the way there can be absolute darkness. Light can be as bright as the light emanating from the brightest star: unimaginably intense and destructive. Absolute darkness potentially conceals, lightness reveals, but at a certain intensity obliterates. In most films, the absence of light is portentous. The blackness holds something back, literally in a temporal sense, by coming between the moment and the image to come, but also in a spatial sense: the blackness holds back the light which is required to produce an image and in this sense that light is always potential image in a way that blackness is not. The pinholes in a black period/pause emphasize this sense of potential, of light, and hence image, held back, held in waiting. Conversely, the flecks and scratches on white illuminate the current imperfections in the medium. The apparatus is working within its capacity when the screen is dark, whereas whiteness is always limited by the specifications of the projector bulb: to see a white screen is to see that limit revealed, to glimpse an aspect of the technology in its nakedness. In another sense, though, when an image dissolves to white (there is a technical description, but no special term equivalent to ‘fade’ to describe this transition) there is the sense that the light leaves the image behind, obliterates it on its way to infinite brightness. There is, finally, an imbalance in the way we can see the film as composed of equal numbers of black and white frames. We never experience black and white flicker as being of equal intensity, because the exposure of the retina to white frames bleaches the rhodopsin pigment in the receptors in the eye, rendering the eye insensitive to immediately subsequent stimulation. The brighter the light, the longer the receptors take to recover their sensitivity. This means that when we see a black frame after a white one, we cannot experience it as fully as the white because the eye has not had time to recover from the saturation caused by the white frame. This affects the sense of rhythmic pattern discernible in the sequences that make up Arnulf Rainer.
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Sound versus Image, Sound and Silence Arnulf Rainer’s soundtrack consists of white noise and silence that share the same structural patterns as the picture: sound, silence, and rhythmic patterns of sound and silence. The white noise contains all the audible frequencies possible on a 35mm optical film soundtrack – from around 30 Hertz to around 18 kHz, slightly less than the full range of human hearing – and this corresponds to the way that white light contains all the visible colors of the spectrum.1 These sounds and silences are sometimes in sync with the picture, sometimes not. Sometimes the same pattern of frames is seen then heard, and sometimes vice versa. Sometimes one visual pattern will be followed by a contrasting audio one. For example, the visual pattern of 3 black, 4 white, 2 black, 6 white, 1 black, 8 white described above is followed by a stretch of black with a sound pattern as follows: 4 frames sound, 2 silent, 2 sound, 2 silent, etc. The film stresses the absolutely contrasting nature of the experience of picture and sound in film, particularly where visual rhythms are immediately followed by their auditory duplicates. The discrepancy between image and sound perception arises from the fact that as a photochemical process, vision is inherently slower than the mechanical apparatus in the auditory system. Thus the sound rhythms in the film are bold, insistent and fully discernible, in contrast to the visual ones, where the experience of identical patterns is inflected by the interference of after-images, the temporary partial blindness caused by the exposure to white frames, etc. When audio rhythms are followed by their visual counterpart, the audio serves as a kind of guide to the visual, whose rhythmic patterns are often hard to follow for the reasons outlined above. In their punchy clarity, the audio rhythms emphasize, by contrast, the subtle, inflected character of the visual sequences. The truth of these sequences can never be fixed. They are fundamentally unstable; profoundly subjective in that what they are is defined by the way they are experienced. In every different pattern of black and white frames, the character of the instability is different, whereas the different sound rhythms are uniformly discernible. The subjective character of the visual rhythms can be contrasted with the factuality of the filmstrip when it is examined on a bench. It is merely black and white frames: unambiguously describable, simple, reproducible. In their contrasting reality, the two establish distinct relationships to their spectators, and
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demonstrate, in a hypostatized form, the dualism of film: as material and as experience. The dichotomy between the frames as determinate when viewed on a bench and indeterminate when experienced sequentially at 24 frames per second is discussed further below. However, before moving on to that, it is worth mentioning one respect in which sound and picture function in a similar, rather than dissimilar, manner. As mentioned above, the black and white frames have an environmental effect in the auditorium in which the film is shown, darkening or lightening, filling and thus defining, the whole space. The sound also fills the space, articulating its dimensions and animating its resonant frequencies, turning the box of the auditorium into a kind of performance space and the film, perhaps uniquely, into a time-based installation. Most movies try to mimic the familiarity of the experience in everyday life of the contrast between narrowly focused vision and environmentally dispersed sound, a development facilitated by the use of Dolby Stereo, that makes explicit use of off-screen sound to create a dispersed, immersive soundscape. Arnulf Rainer collapses this distinction.
Number crunching and Phenomena. The whole film is interwoven with […] transfers of meter from sound to picture, or the opposite, in phrases that may be (according to Kubelka’s notes) 288, 192, 144, 96, 72, 48, 36, 24, 18, 16, 12, 9,8,6, 4, or 2 frames in duration. There are 16 sets of phrases, each one 576 frames long (24 seconds). Within each of the 16 sections except one, the metrical patterns accelerate their changes as the phrases move from the longest to the shortest in fixed stages. Since there are no distinct, visible boundaries between the sections or the phrases inside the sections, this structure is vaguely perceived as a seemingly endless series of irregular accelerations. (Sitney 2002: 287)
Although sequences are separated by short sections of white or black, at which point the aforementioned rectangular after-images appear, it is hard, as Sitney suggests, to discern the numerical structure of the film. This has a lot to do with the fact that the material can be divided up according to a large number of possible equal divisions. All of the above numbers down to 24 can be divided equally by 24, down to 96 can be divided by 16, down to 8 by 8 (excluding 36, 18 and 12), down to 6 by 3 (excluding 16) and down to 2 by 2. These divisions produce
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other self-referring or significant numbers. For example, 144 divided by 16 equals 9, one of the lower numbers in Kubelka’s list, and other divisions yield 24, 12 and 16, numbers that refer to filming and projection speeds, seconds and simple fractions thereof. However, as Sitney also notes, many of the film’s sections appear to be composed of units that could not easily be experienced as regular. At one such point, the film can be divided into eight-frame segments, each one of which has a different disposition of one black and seven clear frames. When these are seen as a continuous flow they appear as white punctuated by random occurrences of a single black frame (perceptible as little more than a quasi-blink, a negative interference, let alone as rhythmic punctuation). These perceptions are compounded by the fact that the sound is often out of sync with the picture, although what ‘sync’ means here is brought into question by the film. Since there is no necessary, or necessarily fixed, relationship between white and sound, say, or black and silence, there are no grounds for saying that the sound is in or out of sync at any point in the film. However, the dialectic between a stretch of white, synchronized with a burst of continuous sound, followed by a stretch of black with a rhythmic sound pattern, compounds the sense of local asymmetry in the film. The analytical urge that a film like Arnulf Rainer stimulates serves precisely to make the analyst question that urge, for it is immediately apparent that a numerical analysis yields nothing semantic: there are no hidden meanings, only effects, phenomena, and these cannot be amplified or clarified by further analysis, unless analysis were able to generate further phenomena not generated by the film itself. The urge to analyze is invited partly because the film is its own score: all other things being equal, it could be reproduced exactly by viewing it on a light box and copying it frame by frame. This encourages the idea that the structure is simply meant to be (if it could be) read-off from the work, an attitude that leads away from the work as an experience with effects, to one in which the work is reduced to its compositional structure. In watching the film, one clearly senses order, rhythms, but this does not imply that a frame-by-frame analysis of its structure will yield a deeper level of experience, even less a deeper understanding of the work: what could understanding mean here? Thus, Arnulf Rainer also raises the question of what it means to understand a film, at least
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a film like this. As in some, (but not all) serial music, the ordering procedures produce a sense of coherence when the work is experienced (rhythmical sequences interspersed with periods of plain black or white) but this emphatically does not mean that an understanding of the structure will focus that sense of coherence, even less yield the work’s meaning: what could it be said to mean (outside of itself at least)? The film thereby constitutes a rejection, in extreme form, of the wider practice of analyzing a film shot-by-shot in order to discover how and what it really means. This is the procedure whereby small parts of a film are watched repeatedly in order to understand the structure by breaking it down. Such an analysis, while useful for filmmakers wishing to understand the nuts and bolts of film grammar, the how of film’s affects, overlooks the (ideological) what of film’s effects as seen in its intended form, at 24 frames per second for two hours, concealed beneath eye-line matches, action cutting, speech crossing picture cuts, etc. Shot-by-shot analysis academicizes the reception and study of cinema. While it may lead to an understanding of how ideological effects are constructed, it does not address those effects per se. Instead of responding to the ideological effects of a film, a response that may then lead to cultural-political reaction, analysis takes place in isolation from the political culture of which it is a part, and in which it has its effects. It thus takes the place of politico-cultural response and action. By its extremity of form, its radical separation of means from effects, Arnulf Rainer resists such an analysis, for it is clear that the construction of the film, examined in isolation, cannot disclose what the film does, and that therefore such an examination is futile. Indeed, it is precisely by this evident futility that the film signals its opposition to such critical practices. It may be coincidence that Arnulf Rainer was made in the same ‘high modernist’ moment as Frank Stella’s black paintings, with which it shares certain obvious features. However, while Stella’s paintings constitute one kind of elegantly reductive (end) point in painting, Arnulf Rainer is a kind of new beginning for film.2 While Stella’s paintings are what they are, what they appear to be, and assert a cool distance from their observers, who, to this extent at least, are posited as other to the work, Arnulf Rainer develops a complex, indeterminate, interactive relationship with its spectator through the unpredictable phenomena it generates. Questions of knowledge, understanding and experience are all raised in the process. At the
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same time the film proposes a kind of return to the beginnings of filmmaking in order to propose a radically different course for the medium, far away from the cinema, even as it also references and figures cinema in its organization of frames/shots composed of patterns of sound and silence, light and dark, in time but not moving.
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Notes:
1 Just as the 35mm projected picture will be brighter and more forceful than a 16mm projection, so the frequency spectrum of 35mm white noise is considerably wider than it is for 16mm (see Kubelka’s remarks in paragraph two). 2 It’s also important to mention Kubelka’s compatriot and near contemporary Kurt Kren, who was making similarly complex and highly organized short films at the same time.
Bibliography Kubelka, Peter. 1978. ‘The Theory of Metrical Film’ in Sitney, P. Adams (ed.) The Avant-Garde Film: A Reader of Theory and Criticism. New York: Film Culture/New York University Press: 139-159. Mekas, Jonas. 1967. ‘Interview with Peter Kubelka’ in Film Culture 44 (Summer): 43-47. Gidal, Peter (ed.). 1978. Structural Film Anthology. London: BFI publishing. Sitney, P. Adams. 2002. Visionary Film (3rd edition). New York: Oxford University Press. — (ed.). 1978. The Avant-Garde Film: A Reader of Theory and Criticism. New York: Anthology Film Archives. Wees, William C. 1992. Light Moving in Time. Berkeley: California University Press.
Peter Kubelka's Metric Films and Dichtung und Wahrheit Adebar (1957). 35mm, B&W, sound, 1-1/2 min Schwechater (1958). 16mm, b&w, sound, 1 min. Arnulf Rainer (1960). 35mm, 16mm, b&w, sound, 6-1/2 min. Dichtung und Wahrheit (Poetry and Truth) (2003). 35mm, color, silent, 13 min.
Peter Kubelka's Metaphoric Films Mosaik Im Vertrauen (Mosaic in Confidence) (1954/55). 35mm, 16mm, color and b&w, sound, 16-1/2 min. Unsere Afrikareise (Our Trip to Africa) (1961-66). 16mm, color, sound, 12-1/2 min. Pause! (1977). 16mm, color, sound, 11-3/4 min.
Danish Avant-Garde Filmmakers of the 1960s: Technology, Cross-aesthetics and Politics Tania Ørum: Abstract: Danish avant-garde film has been pioneered mainly by visual artists. When small, portable, cheap cameras appeared in the 1960s a new generation of avant-garde artists started making films as part of the cross-aesthetic experiments going on in the circles around the Experimental School of Art in Copenhagen. They formed the film collective ABCinema in 1968, which experimented with new film languages while also striving to secure democratic access to the medium and trying out novel forms of film projection.
A very brief pre-history Danish film had an early golden age in the era of the silent film. There was the star of the silent screen – Asta Nielsen – whose first Danish films in 1910 and 1911 led to an international career based in Germany. The hugely popular and internationally branded couple of clowns Fy(rtårnet) & Bi(vognen), called Long and Short in English versions, made more than 30 silent films between 1921 and 1929, several of them in other European countries, and, from 1930 until 1940, sound films too. Another early filmmaker of some renown is Carl Theodor Dreyer, whose films were considered so odd that he managed to find financial support for only four films during his career: Du skal ære din hustru (“Honor Thy Wife,” 1925); Vredens dag (“Day of Wrath”, 1943); Ordet (“The Word”, 1955); Gertrud, (1964). His international renown rests on the highly experimental films produced in France (La passion de Jeanne d’Arc, 1927) and in Germany (Vampyr, 1931), which have been an inspiration to many filmmakers, among them Jean Luc Godard, Jørgen Leth and Lars von Trier. Besides these early pioneers of the Danish screen, Denmark also has a strong tradition of documentary films from Theodor Christensen onwards. Many of these classic films – some of which could well be seen as avant-garde – have been largely disregarded by critics, inappropriately stored, if at
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all, and have still not been properly conserved/restored. But at least these films are mentioned in film histories – which is more than one can say for the proper avant-garde films. The first book about Danish avant-garde film, Helge Krarup & Carl Nørrested’s Eksperimentalfilm i Danmark, appeared as late as 1986.
Avant-Garde film in Denmark In Denmark, it has mostly been painters and other visual artists who have explored and experimented in the film medium. These avantgarde films have never been regarded as ‘proper films’ by film critics, the film industry or film historians. Many of them have been lost, the Danish Film Institute has recently been pressurized to start digitalizing some of them and, eventually, what remains may become available to the public. The pioneers of Danish experimental film started out during the Second World War, in a period of relative isolation during the German occupation, when visual artists were nevertheless very active in the circles around Asger Jorn, the Danish section of the CoBrA Group, and the art and literature magazine Helhesten. These films were mostly the result of contacts between painters (like the constructivist Albert Mertz) and cinematographers. From 1947 into the early 1950s, visual artists from the Constructivist group linien (the line) and others experimented with nonfigurative film, sometimes painted directly onto the filmstrip (Søren Melson and Richard Winther), with collage film (Albert Mertz, Jørgen Roos), and with Surrealist film (Jørgen Roos, Wilhelm Freddie). By the early fifties, these film activities had faded away and experimental film did not revive in Denmark until the early 1960s – characteristically, in the avant-garde groups of visual artists who emerged at this time: 1) the Scandinavian offshoot of the International Situationist Movement centered around Asger Jorn’s brother, the writer and painter Jørgen Nash, and the painter and art critic Jens Jørgen Thorsen, who made so-called dé-collage films and arranged five festivals of international experimental film in 1964-65; 2) the German artist and gallerist Arthur Köpcke, who lived in Copenhagen, made several experimental films; and 3) the visual artists from the independent Experimental School of Art (often called the Ex-School, founded 1961), who used film as one of several experimental media –
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and who later on, in 1968, formed the nucleus of the production collective ABCinema, in collaboration with writers, architects, composers, actors, film-workers and photographers. In this chapter I shall focus on ABCinema.
ABCinema: the Technological Basis and its Artistic and Political Implications There are clearly technological reasons for this new impetus in avantgarde film activities in the late sixties: by 1968 film cameras had become sufficiently small, portable and cheap to make them available to everybody. Most of the Danish (and European) population started filming their children, family birthdays, holidays and other memorable moments in the 1960s. The availability of small, portable cameras made the elaborate division of labor within the film industry unnecessary. The avantgarde artists around the Experimental School of Art saw this as an important step towards media democracy, opening the way for a new, interactive use of film that would make it possible for everyone to make their own films and show them to one another in public meeting places or at home, not necessarily in cinemas. The cinema public would thus be liberated from their passive position as consumers submitted to the one-way communication of celebrated film auteurs or the commercial products of the capitalist film industry. “Film is easy to make” was one of the slogans of ABCinema. Projecting films outside the cinema, several at a time, thus introducing a more relaxed and less dramatic viewing situation, was an integral part of the film experiments. ABCinema members talked of “being with film” rather than looking at film, thus combining the new viewing habits introduced by television and the experience from the visual arts of using film in installations or events to create a total environment in which viewers are free to move around and choose their own perspectives. The ABCinema collective set out to demonstrate just how easy it was to make film by making their own. And they also saw it as a political obligation to secure access to filmmaking based on artistic merit, not commercial interest – to make film an art form instead of a commercial product. In February 1969 a group of ABCinema activists thus led a rather chaotic occupation of the then newly established Film
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School in Copenhagen. Their aim was to demonstrate that with all the state funding, expensive machinery and film at the disposal of the school, interesting films could be made one day and shown the next day. Because of the conflicting interests of the occupants, heavy press coverage of the inexperienced activists who did not manage to gain access to the expensive cameras kept behind locked doors, and because of the influx of other groups of youth protesters who added to the general confusion, the occupation crumbled and no films were actually made before the police cleared the premises. A wider aim of the occupation was to protest against the influence of the film industry on the Film School education, and to campaign for a more experimental approach to filmmaking at the school. People from the ABCinema collective also worked to establish an open Film Workshop, where anyone with a good idea could find the economic and technical support necessary to make their own films. Much of the public subsidy system for films, which has been operative from the 1970s through the 1990s, actually dates back to principles of public access introduced by ABCinema. By abolishing the necessity of a film crew, the small cameras also enabled the artists to use the camera ‘as a pen’ (caméra-stylo), i.e. to conduct personal experiments directly with the camera without having to pass through intermediary technical staff or professional photographers – and without submitting a written script in advance. Since many ABCinema members were visual artists, they tended to emphasize the visual nature of cinema: “film is pictures” was another slogan of the ABCinema. Abolishing the script as the basis of a film was seen as liberating the visual side of cinema from literary dominance and narrative constraint. Direct artistic control of the medium was seen as an important precondition for experimenting with the media-specific possibilities of film. It should also be kept in mind that, in the late 1960s, Denmark (and the rest of Europe) was not the visual media society of today. Avant-garde artists thought it immensely interesting to be able to take their camera along with them everywhere and take pictures of quotidian objects and ordinary life, which they had never yet seen on film – or in color. Whereas most people wanted to preserve memorable occasions and special situations on film, these artists were interested in everyday life and ordinary objects not usually deemed worthy of filming. New areas of life were thus brought within the
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reach of film, and it became possible to merge public and private spheres of life, and to fuse artistic, personal and political issues to a much greater extent than had hitherto been possible. This was demonstrated in several films shot by artists, partly in their everyday surroundings, partly during various actions. The two visual artists Bjørn Nørgaard and Lene Adler Petersen shot several short films in their apartment chronicling both the everyday life of the couple, playful scenes of cross-dressing and intimate camera explorations of each other’s bodies and faces. These private activities merge into ritual scenes of a female Christ walking along a red line on the bedroom floor or standing before the outline of a crude cross painted on the wall of the room amid the remains of the couple’s lunch. These “diary films” hover between art and (private) life, between the documentation of visual art and experimental filmmaking. The female Christ sequence, for instance, is a version of a more persistent theme in Nørgaard’s art and also appears in public actions staged by the couple and documented on film – such as the notorious Naked Female Christ, which shows Lene Adler Petersen walking naked with a cross in her hand through a startled crowd of stockbrokers at the Stock Exchange in Copenhagen.1
Bjørn Nørgaard and Lene Adler Petersen. Naked Female Christ. 1970
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Other members of ABCinema took their cameras along to demonstrations, squatters’ campaigns, meetings and concerts, thus chronicling the fusion of personal life, social gatherings and political activities characteristic of both the avant-garde circles of artists and the larger circles of youth culture in the late 1960s. One example is the photographer Niels Schwalbe’s film documenting his personal life in the summer of 1970, part of which was spent in the utopian summercamp community established by a youth organization called “The New Society” in Thy, Northern Jutland, and envisioned as the first step towards creating a new society. Schwalbe’s aim was to capture what he called “film reality”; a reality unmanipulated by dramatic or narrative patterns, by private interests or political agendas. So he kept the camera running for long stretches of time and tried to film whatever took place in front of him from the moment he woke up in his sleeping bag (and so filming from a horizontal position) until he went to sleep in the evening, and afterwards he tried to edit the filmed sequences as little as possible. The result – Film Diary from Thy and the World around it, Summer 1970 (1970) – is a slow, rhythmic film full of atmosphere, mixing many kinds of heterogeneous materials into a highly personal kind of documentary: reportage from the community, with details of life in the campsite; close-ups of flowers and plants; sunsets over the sea; discussions about political, philosophical and personal matters; sequences shot from a car, etc. Super-8 film was relatively cheap: indeed, the ABCinema group argued in their manifestos that you should cut the ordinary 16mm films into halves and thus get twice as many films out of the state funding provided. Another slogan was “film is cheap”. For those who wanted better technical quality (mostly people with a film background), film was not cheap – so they made an ethic and aesthetic point of using every bit of the filmstrip, thus turning the filmmaking process into a part of the finished film. This can be seen, for instance, in Jørgen Leth and Ole John’s film Motion Picture, in which every bit of 16mm film they could afford to buy was actually used in the finished film and nothing was cut away or discarded, including even the perforated ends of the film rolls. Artists using Super-8 film most often dispensed with cutting, too, since the technical means were expensive and not easily available. Instead, they developed the technique of ‘cutting in the camera’. In this way films could be made without professional assistance, without access to film machinery and
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with very little money: experimental films were simply shot, sent out to be developed and glued together to form longer sequences. Professional filmmakers and critics often voiced the objection that what was produced in this way was not film at all. But the ABCinema collective argued that anything filmed and developed is by definition film. The general dismissal of experimental film by the official film board, by cinemas and by the film industry, as well as by film critics, was thus no longer able to prevent avant-garde films from being made. Indeed, many in the avant-garde group of writers, composers and visual artists connected with the Experimental School of Art were quite happy to use 8mm film. They were deeply influenced by the waves of popular criticism of elitist art and cultural politics in the 1960s. The first wave of protest built up at the start of the 1960s, provoked by the establishment of the new ministry of culture (in 1961) and the concomitant new state support for artists, as well as the policy of cultural education adopted by national television and radio, which exposed larger parts of the population to modern art. The second wave of popular protest – this time with a marked political edge and aimed especially at censoring the allegedly leftist bias of the mass media – emerged towards the end of the 1960s. Although the avant-garde artists disagreed with the populist premises of these protests, both in terms of political views and in terms of their traditionalist view of art, the critique of elitist art and its cult of the artist was part of their own avant-garde platform, as was the wish to step out of the halls of high art and culture and get in touch with the everyday life of ordinary people. This is part of an avant-garde heritage stretching back to the start of the 20th century. As Richard Murphy has suggested (Murphy 1998: 34), the dividing line between modernism and the avant-garde is precisely the fact that, whereas the modernists want to raise the mundane world up to the ideal level of art, (ie. educate people to appreciate good art and turn fragmented, chaotic and banal everyday existence into art), the avant-garde wants to bring art down to the banal level of everyday life and popular culture.2 The Danish avantgarde of the 1960s was as critical of the elitist pretensions of much modernist art, as were the popular spokesmen – although for entirely different reasons.
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8mm film was seen as an unpretentious medium, close to the filming habits of ordinary people and sufficiently cheap not to need heavy state support. As an avant-garde, eager to experiment with new materials, techniques and situations, the ABCinema collective was of course interested in making films as soon as technological developments permitted them to do so. And since they wanted particularly to escape from the art institutions seen as elitist and tradition-bound (and quite often closed to such work as theirs) and to get in touch with wider circles of people, modern mass media were of particular interest to them. ABCinema: a new morphology of film As the name indicates, one of the impulses behind ABCinema was the wish to create an entirely new kind of film with a new visual alphabet or film vocabulary. The cross-aesthetic group of Ex-School artists made a series of collective films exploring the basic possibilities of the camera: the first was shot during a winter outing, where artists and their families took the camera on toboggan rides, took turns at filming in various positions, threw the camera into the air and passed it from one person to another, etc. The second collective film focuses on the exploration of the first big shopping mall in the Copenhagen area, thus combining a completely new kind of urban landscape with new ways of filming, using various experimental techniques, from reportage and performance to hoisting down the camera on a string and tracing the patterned grids of the building by focusing on the steps of the escalators, etc. The third collective film is an experiment in portraiture, which submitted the then social democrat prime minister Jens Otto Krag to a series of formal constraints of which he was not informed. One rule was that none of the film crew would talk to Krag, so he was left to wander around the garden where the filming took place, without any instructions, and accompanied by a girl who tried to chat him up. The film shows him trying to make the best of the unusual situation, while the soundtrack, mixed by the composer Henning Christiansen, repeatedly cuts up two brief statements by Krag (one of them asking for a definition of the term socialism) and mixes the resulting stammer with quotes from the Soviet Red Army’s choir singing the “Internationale”, Elvis Presley’s “Beautiful Dreamer” and comments from the film group about Krag, recorded during the filming of the prime minister.3
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Although pieced together from sequences filmed by nine different people, the Krag film is a more focused and controlled work that gives an unusual and interesting portrait of a politician. The first two collective ABCinema films are more wildly experimental and have the same kind of primitivism verging on the amateurish that has been seen as characteristic of the happenings from roughly the same period.4 It is not always clear whether this primitivism is intentional, i.e. part of a deliberately non-professional aesthetics, or merely the result of lack of money, technology and competence. Another example of the many attempts to break away from conventional film language and create a new vocabulary is the film Motion Picture (1970) made by the poet Jørgen Leth and the photographer Ole John in 1969, which, as the title indicates, is an analysis of the relation between the basic elements of film: picture, motion, light, text and sound. It is the first of several films by Leth featuring heroes from the world of sport – in this case the Danish tennis player and Zen Buddhist Torben Ulrich, who appears practicing tennis against a wall, dancing in the dark with his tennis racket, or performing funny walks and other pranks. While the camera remains stationary, the tennis player moves not only across the field covered by the camera, but quite often outside the picture frame, leaving, for instance, only a section of floor and wall divided by a white stripe in view – rather like an abstract painting and quite beautiful in coloring.
Jørgen Leth and Ole John. Motion Picture. 1970
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In one sequence Ulrich is seen sitting down at a table to drink tea in extreme slow motion, performed and filmed in real time. In another sequence the film is fed back into the camera, thus producing a slightly displaced double exposure so that Ulrich seems to be playing and dancing with his shadow. Leth is visible at the start of each sequence, clapping his hands to ensure synchronicity of picture and sound. The film shifts from color to black and white and back again, and was cut according to a formal set of rules, disregarding the content of the film rolls. Instead of Leth’s distinctive speaking voice, often used in his other films, Motion Picture employs words written on the screen – saying, for instance, “a ball a wall anything”, “a man moving”, “some pictures and some sounds”. In this way, the entire film language and its implicit conventions are made visible, while the film attempts both to deconstruct illusionistic film language and to demonstrate the tactility and unknown possibilities of the film material. Ole John and other members of ABCinema had visions of forming a ‘film band’, so that several cameras/projectors could work together like a rock band (Ole John was one of the first in Denmark to review rock music in the newspaper Politiken, where he also edited a weekly youth page pioneering open access to the weekly editorial meetings). He and the three other members (the photographer and actor Niels Schwalbe, the actor and musician Niels Skousen and the filmmaker Peter Thorsboe) would each film their version of a common subject and the four versions would then be projected together to interact like instruments – one central image would function as the lead guitar, while the two projections on each side of it would provide ‘rhythm’ and thematic variety, and a fourth projection underneath would serve as the bass. This interesting attempt to analyze both the film medium and its content in its separate components was never fully developed. Some of the individual film versions still exist and seem to complement each other as different perspectives on the same motif, allowing the public to form their own impression or choice of combinations. Other experiments by the group were attempts at combining the four cameras to create a continuous 360-degree view, for instance by filming out of the windows and rear mirror of a car in motion. Ole John also experimented with other ways of merging film and music by making visual shows as rhythmical and stimulating as rock concerts. During these shows he would
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simultaneously operate several 8mm film projectors, accompanied by records – which was quite a physical, as well as technical feat, since the projectors were highly unstable and the records had to be changed often. Sometimes he would do the shows with films only, without music, and sometimes he managed to get the audience ‘high’ enough to keep on dancing for several hours afterwards. Other members of ABCinema experimented with combinations of still and moving images. For example, the painter and sculptor Stig Brøgger made a triptych installation called “Between road and grass” consisting of a Super-8 film projected between two slides, one depicting grass and the other a section of asphalt road. The 20 minutes of film consist of shots of roads, traffic, bits of television programs (ranging from movies to that absolute icon of late sixties modernity, the television transmission of the landing on the moon) and shots of the artist’s wife and child in nature.5 This film can be seen as both an electronic painting – Brøgger himself describes it as a Rauschenberg painting – and as an experimental film in the Warhol tradition of parallel screens showing scenes of everyday life almost devoid of action. ABCinema never developed an aesthetics common to all its members. Individual members and groups of members made their own experiments, and even collective films often had to accommodate widely divergent ideas and styles, so that several of the collective films are in fact more like anthology films incorporating sequences directed and filmed by different people or a series of “events”, performed and filmed by various members of the group. This antinarrative sequence of tableaux is, however, a much-favored form, also used in films by individual artists. For the visual artists in the group the method of combining separate scenes to form a sequence was already established in experiments with serial paintings or sculptures, with the comic-strip format, and in happenings and Fluxus concerts which were seldom composed of unified elements fitting into any single dominant theme or narrative. On the contrary: the aversion to plot or narrative coherence is a general mark of the avant-garde of this period in all the arts. Unlike mainstream films and television bent on entertaining their public, the avant-garde wanted to slow down the rhythm of their films, partly for realistic reasons – to allow the filmmaker and the spectator to get a good look at things and avoid illusionist or dramatic speeding up of everyday life; partly for
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analytical and aesthetic reasons – to lay bare the structures of what is shown, and to demonstrate the sculptural qualities of unobtrusive, everyday objects and scenes.
The End of ABCinema The loose experimental group that made up ABCinema gradually disbanded during the 1970s. The pressure from the growing political radicalism of the later 1970s made aesthetic experiments harder to defend. Politics tend to demand effectivity and broad popular appeal – and very few of the experimental filmmakers could boast large circulation or political impact outside their own circles. Some of the filmmakers went on to make political films. Some used their artistic experience to promote progressive programs in radio and television. Others worked to organize access to production facilities for grassroot organizations and political groups, to secure better working conditions for film workers and fight off censorship. Some of the women, who had mostly been present in the ABCinema group as performers or family, now started making their own films combining feminist issues and experimental techniques. Examples include: Ursula Reuter Christiansen’s film Skarpretteren (“The Executioner”, 1972, 16mm, color, sound, 37 min.); and Tre piger og en gris (“Three Girls and a Pig”, 1971, 16mm, color, sound, 100 min.). ABCinema left behind some organizational structures and a legacy of experimentation, which was picked up by the recent wave of Danish filmmakers in the 1990s, who have received international attention under the common banner of ‘Dogme’, i.e. cheap films made on minimal budgets and employing non-illusionistic techniques, rather like the ABCinema films, only far more conventional (they all have ordinary, indeed often highly melodramatic, narrative plots, employ professional actors, but tend to feature hand-held camera and little artificial lighting). Lars von Trier, who was the central person in this group of young filmmakers, has acknowledged the inspiration from ABCinema and especially from Jørgen Leth,6 who has continued to make films in the spirit of ABCinema until today. Jørgen Leth’s later films almost all employ his characteristic technique of turning film into a series of tableaux, thus emphasizing the visual over the narrative, and demonstrating the constructivist rather than the illusionistic nature of film. He also continues to
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experiment with the relation between sight and sound, image and language, creating tension between what is shown on the screen and what is said, or inserting comments in subtitles. The tableaux in Leth’s films are used as phenomenological and anthropological test models: he often puts things or people in laboratory surroundings, against a clear background, without any props or support, and asks them to explain their lives, their work or other activities. In the portrait of America for instance, 66 Scenes from America (1983) he uses these tableaux as a series of postcards, some showing landscapes and scenery, others snapshots of many different kinds of people, who are asked to introduce themselves, their skills and jobs, and who thus put on their best faces. People are taken at face value or given small everyday tasks to perform, for instance the very American task of eating a hamburger, as performed by Andy Warhol in one scene. Although Leth’s films present nothing but surfaces, the spectacle of people putting on their surfaces often turns out to be highly revelatory – or even moving, as in the case of Warhol, bravely striving to eat his hamburger without anything to drink and without any cues from Jørgen Leth.
Jørgen Leth 66 Scenes from America. (1983)
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Notes:
1 The Girl in the Green Dress (Female Christ 1), 1970. S 8mm, color, silent, 11 min. Camera: Bjørn Nørgaard and Lene Adler Petersen is one of these small diary films. Naked Female Christ is a part of the anthology film Frændeløs (Without Kin) made by the ABCinema collective. 1970. 16mm, color + b/w. music by Henning Christiansen, 66 min. 2 Richard Murphy 1998. Murphy actually distinguishes between two different tendencies within the avant-garde: “the ‘idealist’ wing of the avant-garde”, who see art “as an ideal model for life” as against “the ‘historical’ avant-garde”, which cultivates what Murphy calls “a ‘cynical’ sublation of art and life bringing art down to the banal level of reality” (34). I would suggest that the first tendency should be called Modernism. 3 Dyrehavefilmen (Deer Park Film) 1969, 4 x S 8mm, color, 15 min. Music: Vivaldi. Rødovrefilmen (Rødovre Film) 1969, 4 x S 8mm, color, 15 min. Music: Django Reinhard. Kragfilmen (Krag Film) 1969, 4 x S 8mm, color + b/w, 15 min. Soundtrack: Henning Christiansen. All 3 films were transposed to 16mm in 1983. Private ABCinema Production. 4 “Happenings have had in common a physical crudeness and roughness that frequently trod an uncomfortable borderline between the genuinely primitive and the merely amateurish. This was partly intentional [...] and partly the inevitable result of extremely limited finances”. (Kirby 1965:11). 5 Between Road and Grass. 1969, S 8mm + slides, color, 20 min. This film also exists in a paper version included in the “picture novel” produced by Stig Brøgger and Mogens Møller called Midway (1969). This literary version has two columns, one repeating GRASS and the other ROAD 11 times, so that the two words form a border to the right and a border to the left side of the paper, while the middle section of the paper has a wider column of changing words, saying, for instance: “an EMPTY glass, a sharp RATTLING sound, three WHITE steps, a sudden and GRACEFUL movement...” 6 De fem benspænd (Five Obstructions, 2003) stages this acknowledged inspiration. In this film Trier challenges Jørgen Leth to remake five scenes from his early film Det perfekte menneske (The Perfect Human Being, 1967) under obstructive conditions determined by Trier. The film thus provides a playful double portrait of the two filmmakers.
Primary works cited Brøgger, Stig and Mogens Møller. 1969. MIDWAY. Dansk Tidsskrifts Tryk, Foreningen Ung Dansk Kunst: Forlaget Rhodos.
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Secondary works cited Kirby, Michael. 1965. Happenings. New York: E.P. Dutton. Krarup, Helge & Carl Nørrested. 1986. Eksperimentalfilm i Danmark. Copenhagen: Borgen. Murphy, Richard. 1998. Theorizing the Avant-Garde. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Chapter 3 New Technologies and Media Convergence: The Contemporary Avantgarde Film
French Experimental Cinema: the Figural and the Formless – Nicolas Rey’s Terminus for you (1996) and Pip Chodorov’s Charlemagne 2: Piltzer (2002) Martine Beugnet Abstract: Based on highly dissimilar filmmaking practices, Nicolas Rey and Pip Chodorov’s remarkable film works testify to one of the most fascinating shift in recent experimental filmmaking. Eschewing the conventional division of pure abstraction versus figuration, the shift is towards a cinema of the figural, where the pre-emptive rule of perspective is abandoned, so that the image and the sound allow for figure and ground to interact and ultimately merge. The chapter first sketches a brief outline of the historical background in order to put into context the analysis of the two films, then offers a close reading of these works and shows how both Terminus for you and Charlemagne 2: Piltzer draw on the traditions of abstract and figurative avant-garde film, but do so in order to explore the fluid borders between the figural and the “formless”.
One basis for the seminal reflection on figuration and abstraction Gilles Deleuze develops in Logique de la sensation is the exploration of a third path, where modern art evolves between the figurative and the purely abstract: “Il a fallu l’extraordinaire travail de la peinture abstraite pour arracher l’art moderne à la figuration. Mais n’y-a-t-il pas une autre voie, plus directe et plus sensible?” (Deleuze 1981: 19). Intended to describe the evolution of painting, his analysis seems equally relevant to the medium of moving images, in its experimental forms in particular (that area of film where its indexical, photographic basis does not restrict the medium to standard figurative-narrative models). It appears even more pertinent when it is considered in the context of the work of filmmakers like Nicolas Rey and Pip Chodorov, where the interface between painting, film and other art forms is a fundamental part of the creative process. Commenting on Francis Bacon’s paintings, Deleuze identifies two possible ways by which an art form can escape the figurative, illustrative and narrative rule, “vers la forme pure, par abstraction; ou bien vers le pur figural” (Deleuze: 12). To differentiate figural from figurative is to point to the construction of an environment where the (human) figure is present
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and, at least temporarily, identifiable, but appears out of the conventional narrative and perspectival spatio-temporal structure.1 Hence, if this second approach, which Deleuze seeks to define, is still based on the figure, it is a figure that is initially caught in a grid that isolates it from a wider, potentially narrative context, and presented in a non perspectival space, where its relation to the background is not one of depth, but one of coexistence on the same plane in a “corrélation de deux secteurs sur un même plan également proche” (Deleuze: 14). While similar considerations have fed into those recent discussions that focus on the passage from a modernist formalism to a postmodern “formlessness” (Krauss 1985; Foster 1996; Krauss and Bois 1999), French experimental filmmakers like Rey and Chodorov have been exploring these territories in their practice. In deliberately expository fashion, this paper first sketches out a brief historical background in order to put into context the tentative exploration of the two film works that follows: Rey’s Terminus for you (1996) and Chodorov’s Charlemagne 2: Piltzer (2002). To look at these two works is to consider one of the most fascinating shifts in recent experimental filmmaking. Rather than providing an evolutionary model, however, it is the palimpsest-like dimension of these artists’ practice that the historical context helps to decipher. Developing out of film’s illustrative and figurative-narrative tendency, their cinema draws on the traditions of abstract and figurative avantgarde film, but does so in order to explore the fluid borders between the figural and the ‘formless’. Hence, eschewing the conventional division of pure abstraction versus figuration, these works veer towards a cinema of the figural, where the pre-emptive rule of perspective is abandoned, so that the image and the sound allow for figure and ground to interact and ultimately merge. As we shall see, the transient nature of the film image, the presence/absence of the figure and the deformation and disappearance of the image’s figurative elements, rather than conjuring up the pull of the abstract as figuration’s transcendence (that is, abstraction leading to a ‘superior’, autonomous form of art), evokes that of the informe. Indeed, ‘formless’ is the closest translation of the term informe, coined by George Bataille to evoke that ambiguous area of representation where form and figure become fleeting, ephemeral traces, subjected to the mutations and the dissolution of the image in time (Bataille 1929: 382).
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French Cinema from Avant-Garde to Experimental Retrospectively, France in the 1910s and 20s appears like an unrivalled hotbed of experimentation for the newborn art form of the moving image. While this privileged time of creative activity saw the emergence of some of the most influential avant-garde movements of the century, the frontiers between popular and a more specifically artorientated film production remained porous and innovations seemed to permeate throughout. The period thus left a legacy of remarkable visual traces – poetic, shocking, inventive filmic explorations that demonstrated the aesthetic, expressive and analytical potential of the new medium. Hardly a century after its birth, however, as if to confirm Artaud’s prophetic announcement about “the precocious old age of the cinema” (Artaud 1933), the bulk of the French cinema appears to have precious little to offer to those for whom cinematic pleasures lie in the territories of formal experimentation. Wedged between the massive Hollywood machine of production and distribution and the irresistible rise of the new Asian cinemas, it often appears trapped in the “poids mort du scenario, atavisme de la psychologie” (Strauss 1997: 64). Nostalgia and pessimism need to be kept in check on several accounts, however. French production has always maintained an output sufficient in number – and most importantly, in diversity – to allow for the development of a film culture that permits filmmakers to continue to produce in the margins of the mainstream and for their work to find an audience. Ever since the advent of sound, as the conditions of production seemed to harness cinema tightly to commercial factors, including within the confines of the dominant, overarching model of the feature-length narrative fiction film, the history of French cinema has been punctuated by fertile periods of reflexive filmmaking, and brilliant examples of formal innovations and critical vision. Retrieved from the mass of standard productions, those few comets that are today crossing the otherwise dull sky of the feature-length film might well form, in retrospect, a corpus that redeems what currently appears as a particularly uninspiring moment of cinema history (Frodon 2004). Moreover, since the 1990s, at the opposite pole to commercial production, France boasts a lively experimental scene. In the aftermath of WWII and up to the 1970s, French experimental cinema did not so much disappear than remain unseen: it
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was, in the words of Dominique Noguez, a ghost-like corpus, a “group of zombie works unnoticed or misunderstood by the critics” (Noguez 1999: 175). Yet, if the spirit of the early avant-garde thus appeared to have emigrated to flourish mainly in the United States until the end of the 1960s, the re-emergence of film cooperatives in the Paris of the 1970s signaled the rebirth of an active French experimental film sector, fed by the work of both established and up-and-coming filmmakers, as well as installation and conceptual artists, some of whom continue to produce cutting edge, inspiring works (Yann Beauvais, Patrick Bokanowski, Maria Klonaris, Robert Lapoujade, and Katerina Thomadaki, Stéphane Marti, as well as Christian Boltanski, Alain Fleisher, Jacques Monory, Jean Le Gac, amongst others). The integration of historical and contemporary avant-garde cinema in a variety of university programs, and the success of widereaching retrospective exhibitions taking place in the Centre Pompidou in particular, have contributed further to a renewed interest in non-narrative cinema. After a less buoyant period in the 1980s, the 1990s witnessed a new impetus. Cine-clubs and associations dedicated to the screening of experimental films, led by filmmakers and by students, appeared in Paris and in the provinces, while major art exhibition centers, from the Louvre to the Centre Pompidou and the Cinémathèque Française, organized exhibitions and screening programs. In 1999, the latter started Jeune, pure et dure, a major two-year retrospective of experimental films curated by Nicole Brenez and Christian Lebrat. In 2004 the Centre Pompidou hosted the Light and Sound exhibition, offering a possibility of viewing early film works and color organ projections alongside works by contemporary artists. A network of studios has been established across France (including L’Abominable in Paris, MTK in Grenoble, Mire in Nantes), where filmmakers can borrow equipment and develop their films. Distribution and screenings are undertaken by cooperatives like the long-established Collectif Jeune Cinéma, the Paris Film Coop, or Light Cone. In parallel to the publications of independent journals like Episodic, Bref, and Explosion, the organization Re-voir, headed by Chodorov, ensures the distribution of documentaries on experimental directors, as well as of video works by past and contemporary makers. As mentioned in the introduction, this has resulted in the growth of an abundant corpus, characterized by a profusion and diversity of approaches.
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Internal diversity, however, does not preclude the existence of a strong common identity, clearly distinct from the other sectors of cinema. In the early days, avant-garde artists of all backgrounds celebrated cinema for its popular, anti-establishment status and looked to it as an innovative, versatile medium and a source of inspiration. Today, in France as elsewhere, the adjective ‘popular’, associated with ‘cinema’, has lost its subversive connotations. Popular cinema understood as mainstream cinema is primarily geared at producing the one dominant model of one-and-a-half to two-hour narrative drama, shot in the realist-representational style, albeit with a limited range of internal variations and genres. Yet if the two remain dissociated in fundamental ways, experimental techniques have continuously infiltrated more mainstream film forms. Ultimately recuperated in the service of conventional strategies, they nevertheless contribute to a salutary renewal of filmmaking practices. In effect, Dominique Noguez identifies as one of the particularities of French cinema the existence of a “frange intermédiaire d’oeuvres bâtardes” (an intermediary fringe of hybrid works) an in-between zone composed of works that combine the conventional narrative framework with more radical strategies (Noguez: 185). However, the specificity of experimental film, Noguez adds, is that it takes form as its driving principle. Having the choice of escaping narrative structures and related conventions of filmmaking altogether allows experimental filmmakers to explore the widest possible array of cinematic forms and techniques. For the moment French experimental cinema has therefore found its place by developing largely outside of both the commercial sector and the artistic establishment. This evolution may appear paradoxical considering not only the medium’s industrial origins and the links that developed between early abstract avant-garde filmmakers and the advertising sector, but also the fluidity of the borders between popular, art and avant-garde film in early French cinema. Yet, while film’s commercial sector has long distanced itself from the more radical aspects of popular culture, as well as technical and artistic innovation, in favor of the spectacular impact of special effects, and while most of the art that elaborates the forms and techniques first conceived of by the historical avant-gardes is now considered material for museums, galleries, collectors and investors, experimental cinema has remained in the margins. Indeed, it is somewhat ironic that it is in relation to film, the one art form left out
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of Peter Bürger’s famous study of the avant-garde, that artists and critics persisted in using the term (O’Pray 2003: 1). Yet Bürger not only overlooked the radical potential of montage (Scheunemann 2000: 14) and of film as the medium of time, but also, by and large, experimental film’s resistance to commodification and absorption into the commercial and art market systems.2 While it typifies this unforeseen aspect of the legacy of film’s historical avant-garde, French experimental cinema, in its diversity, further testifies to the inadequacies and contradictions – so ingeniously exposed in the introduction of A.L. Rees’ book – in applying to film theoretical categories and distinctions that are conventionally used for other arts. In A History of Experimental Film and Video, Rees stresses the problems in equating binary oppositions such as high culture or high modernism versus popular culture and, later, postmodernism, when considering the history of French experimental cinema in particular, entangled as it is with popular culture and with a mechanical mode of production, as well as with other forms of artistic expression (Rees 1996: 10). As Noguez remarks, though experimental film forms are, by definition, more demanding than standard, more familiar narrative productions, the fact that these forms develop outside the boundaries of mainstream cinema does not mean that experimental cinema “rompe avec la communication ou le récit” (Noguez: 184). Neither does it necessarily follow that experimental cinema should be described as elitist: as Chodorov ceaselessly outlines in his regular public lectures as a distributor, and as the growth in the number of clubs, associations and other distribution and production networks attests, the contemporary experimental sector actively pursues aspirations of accessibility, both at the creative level and at the dissemination and viewing stages. Such openness, which questions both the familiar notion of author-asgenius and the borders between viewing subject and artist, is less an effect of a utopian democratization process than an intrinsic aspect of French experimental cinema: while one of its essential criteria, Noguez argues, is “art ou artisanat plutôt que commerce ou industrie, dans la production comme dans la diffusion” (Noguez: 201), experimental cinema is also an art of experimentation through bricolage (i.e. a ‘makeshift’ or ‘do-it-yourself’ approach to technology). In effect, the majority of experimental filmmakers working in France favor simplicity of means or technical savoir-faire and ingenuity, bypassing contemporary tendencies towards
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technological fetishism and the need for expensive equipment. Moreover, the growth of the digital sector also contributes to rendering filmmaking proper more accessible: with the establishment of the new recording techniques, film equipment considered outdated by the commercial sectors now requires minimal investment. Hence, here lie some of the most interesting paradoxes of this area of art cinema. Reputedly ‘difficult’ in viewing terms, in material terms it represents the ‘accessible’ side of filmmaking – as Chodorov insists, in France today “everyone can make an experimental film”. At the same time, and although film initially remains, more than the other arts, tied to the photographic – or the mechanical – representation of an ‘objective’ reality in its multifaceted experimental practices, it encompasses some of the most personal, idiosyncratic forms of filmmaking. Indeed, as in the case of the two films described below, some of the main techniques of experimental filmmaking involve the manual alteration of the filmstrip itself (experimental film practices thus feed on an ambiguity that is at the core of filmmaking in general – an ambiguity that is of particular significance in a country where the concept of ‘auteur’ cinema is often applied unquestioned). In the event, even where the contemporary body of French experimental cinema is concerned, the more straightforward set of qualities and distinctions on which Dominique Noguez insists may prove most relevant. As mentioned before, in addition to the crucial (anti) principle of diversity, Noguez stresses that of bricolage. Rather than high versus low or art versus popular expression, distinctions are thus articulated in terms of heterogeneity over standardization, and of low-cost technological innovation over high-cost technical sophistication. In turn, as we will see, such fluid characteristics allow for the elaboration of hybrid forms of cinema and the exploration of the ‘other path’ evoked by Deleuze. Looking at France’s experimental cinema today, Dominique Noguez stresses the impossibility of a stable classification for a French production which is at once profuse and incredibly diverse: L’extrême variété des oeuvres réalisées, explicable par la diversité […] des milieux créateurs, distingue, par exemple le cinéma expérimental français d’un cinéma expérimental beaucoup plus unifié comme celui de la Grande-Bretagne ou des Pays-Bas, et […] rend, du coup, périlleuse toute généralisation. (Noguez: 186)
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Coextensive with its shifting forms, its diverse sources and the multifaceted notion of time it encompasses is the denial of the permanence and fixity of meaning. French experimental cinema today appears like a cinema of differance, the art of ‘becoming’ par excellence, and Noguez’s belief in the inadequacy of categorizations and static definitions is reflected in the title of his book, where the adjective experimental is crossed out in Derridean fashion. Indeed, as its current heterogeneous vitality demonstrates, French experimental cinema cannot merely be defined as the ‘other’ of commercial film, and rather than developing as a unified reaction against the overbearing presence of commercial, narrative moviemaking, it multiplies in many directions. From the audio-visual diary to the poem and the essay, to direct intervention on the film stock, the use of animation and found-footage, filmmakers are exploring those potentials initially sensed by the artists of the early avant-gardes but left largely uncharted. In its great variety, French experimental cinema thus carries the legacy of the early film avant-garde, exemplified in Germaine Dulac’s critical writing and in her filmmaking (Dulac 1978): it affirms the desire to exploit ‘purely’ cinematic expressive and analytical possibilities, immersing the viewer in a temporal and sensual experience unfettered by pre-established narrative conventions. Yet at the same time, the majority of French experimental directors tend to distance themselves from the need to develop a ‘pure’, autonomous art form, and instead use footage that documents an ‘objective’ reality as much as they create abstract images, while also freely exploring the links with other arts. Typical of a cinema developed in the margins of conventional filmmaking, Pip Chodorov and Nicolas Rey’s films exemplify the ability to explore the medium’s aesthetic possibilities precisely by combining, through the low-cost bricolage approach, avant-garde and experimental techniques developed in a multiplicity of art forms with the powerful impact of film as photographic image in motion. Their work thus elaborates on those avant-garde strategies that were initially established as a response to the advent of photography and film, and have remained fundamental components of experimental filmmaking: “Abolishing the traditional spatial illusionism of painting, overcoming its traditional static nature” (Scheunemann: 10-11). In a sense, as Rees stresses, the seeds of all cinematic innovation were planted by the first vanguard movements. Hence, in the 1910s, the Futurists already considered the wider scope of
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possibilities of expression and creation afforded by the new medium, which were further explored by the German and French avant-gardes (Rees: 27). However, Chodorov and Rey’s work is not mere variation based on pre-established formulae. As we will see, the two artists explore an area of film form where the paradigm of the modernist grid, epitomized by the montage of single photo-frames and the play on geometric, ordered compositions and highly constructed effects, combines with and ultimately gives way to the pull of the formless. Their filmmaking thus foregrounds the dynamic tension that lies at the core of current experimental art practices: to engage the techniques explored by avant-garde forebears, while putting them in the service of a specifically contemporary sensibility. “Terminus for you” and “Charlemagne 2: Piltzer” Considered together, Terminus for you and Charlemagne 2: Piltzer appear to be good illustrations of Noguez’ description of French cinema as uniquely versatile and diverse. Though both films originate in Paris, a brief description in terms of stylistic choices, as well as settings and subject matters, initially sets them poles apart: Chodorov’s color composition is based on the recording of a concert of minimalist music that took place in an art gallery. Rey’s black-andwhite urban cine-poem is created out of images of the moving walkways at Montparnasse subway station.
Still from Terminus for You, 1996 (© Nicolas Rey)
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Yet Charlemagne 2: Piltzer and Terminus for you are akin, and typical of much current French experimental cinema, in that they demonstrate a similar willingness to engage with the rich legacy of the medium’s history. Palimpsest-like, Rey’s and Chodorov’s works weave into their contemporary images the traces of former practices going back to the beginnings of cinema and the work of the first avant-garde movements. Chodorov’s film can thus be seen as the recent heir to a long tradition of expressionist use of color and synaesthetic exploration of the interface between music and film through color.3 Nicolas Rey’s black-and-white Terminus for you, on the other hand, evokes the Futurists’ and Surrealists’ celebration of street life, as well as the invention of noise-music and Cubist use of cut-up words for collage and analytical montage effects. In the high contrast and grainy quality of the photography, both films recall the now degraded images of old silent movies and the use of the ‘blownup’ effect most readily associated with Andy Warhol’s screen printing. As well as relating to different yet overlapping trends of a common history of experimentation, the films make use of comparable techniques to contrasted effect. The two works involve an intervention on the filmstrip itself – hand painting in Chodorov’s case, the application of chemicals in Rey’s – in order to play on the tension between the abstract and the figurative. More precisely, in both cases, the filmmakers start from photographic representations of an ‘objective’ reality, which the framing, the optical printing and the editing, as well as the physical manipulation of the filmstrip, turn into abstract or near-abstract images. Even more than their setting, it is this particular process, and the effect of this pull towards abstraction, that situates the films most strongly within a contemporary sensibility and helps to create the characteristically ambiguous atmosphere attuned to the artistic tendencies of their epoch: sensual and humorous, yet anxiety-ridden. The intent is still, as Deleuze put it, “d’arracher la figure au figuratif” (Deleuze: 17), but where much early experimentation featuring the human figure used the body or segments of the body as recurring patterns and abstract motifs, here the transformation takes the form of a dissolution. Both films simultaneously play on the techniques specific to non-narrative cinema and on the metamorphosis of the ‘figural’ field, so that the human figure seems constantly at risk of disappearing, and ultimately,
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giving in to the pull of the formless matter, is swallowed up by its surroundings, absorbed in darkness or dislocated into mere particles. Rey’s film uses a simple, classic trope of contemporary urban life: the moving walkway at the subway station becomes a dual symbol, an evocation of the human condition in the industrial world, as well as a metaphor for the workings of the most representative of the era’s art forms: the cinema. Like the film loop, the walkway circles endlessly, yet its visible portion, shadowing the human walk, offers an illusion of linear progression, transporting human bodies from A to B with the smooth lateral movement of a traveling shot, and the pre-determined direction and calculated time of an endlessly repeated scenario. No reconstructed mise en scène or décor are necessary: Rey sets up his camera in front of what seems like a perfect, humorous metaphor for the predicament of our post-capitalist times and of cinema’s corresponding continuity system. Urban life’s mechanical rhythms continue to provide an artificial sense of continuity, direction and purpose where fragmentation and senselessness reign. Saturated with the audio-visual signifiers of today’s culture of frantic consumption, the work functions like a form of cinematic vanitas, where the void lodged in the interstices between the film frames would slowly invade the images, colonizing the familiar visions of Parisian commuter life until they finally dissolve in a formless chaos. Shot on old film stock, Rey’s images have the grainy quality of early films, heightened by the insertion of negative images. Blackand-white areas form highly contrasted blocks, and in the style of expressionist painting, the thick outlines erase the finer features to retain only particular details: the eyes and mouth of a face, a pair of glasses, a hat; black silhouettes, dark letters or the lines of drawings on posters float upon saturated white backgrounds. In Cubist fashion, Rey organizes his film like an audiovisual collage of heterogeneous material, where any lasting sense of stable point of view or perspective collapses. The film is punctuated with close-up shots of the metallic walkway, creating abstract geometric motifs – diagonal lines, filling the screen and moving almost imperceptibly – that alternate with images of commuters being carried past the camera. Inserts of cut-up sentences and words, as well as details from advertising posters, provide caustic comments on the quality and loneliness of urban existence. Just as the editing together of images and sequences drawn from the most banal aspects of daily
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life construct ironic yet affecting metaphorical variations on universal human issues – destiny, the passing of time, mortality – the framing extracts out of this same reality the widest possible array of forms. Similarly, the optical soundtrack, more noise-music than commentary, conveys a mixture of echoes and sensations, its fragments of oldfashioned music, occasional crackling and muffled tones providing an equivalent to the grainy quality of the images. Industrial drill-like sounds mix with distant echoes of a street-organ or circus band, a ringing that recalls the start of horse races, radio advertisements and public announcements in the station. At times, the combination of soundtrack and image thus evokes the origins of cinema: a fairground atmosphere where the silhouettes of the commuters appear to take part in an endless parade of urban characters announced in the style of the ‘attraction’ show by ringing sounds, slogans and puns. With the conveyor belt providing the traveling movement, Rey’s camera merely pans right to left and left to right to follow the silhouettes of the people who cross its field of vision, often returning the gaze of the camera and interacting with it. In further disregard of conventional continuity rules, the camera is shifted from one side of the walkway to the other (a materialization of the 180 degree line) between shots. Furthermore, in montage, images are not only repeated but shown in negative, and sequences are replayed with the direction of the movement inverted. While the superimpositions of a variety of ‘types’ and ages – children, young people, couples and the lonely silhouette of an old man slowly walking away parallel to the walkway – provides a running metaphor for the transient nature of human existence, the foregrounding of the materiality of the film strip as a modifiable support outlines its vulnerability. It thus draws a parallel between the ephemeral quality of human life and that of the art form that paradoxically derives much of its power to fascinate from its apparent ability to ‘embalm’ life and replay it endlessly as an illusion of live movement. Ultimately, the film, like the silhouettes caught in the movements of time, is bound to dissolve into nothingness. Yet frozen instants and isolated sounds may linger for some time on the screen like memory images or traces of missed encounters. Indeed, most effective is Rey’s use of the freeze-frame, the soundtrack providing the humorous counterpoint to the poignancy of some of the images. Where passers-by sliding or running past the camera return its (the spectator’s) gaze, a bell, or a drilling noise almost like that of a machine gun resounds (the literal visualization of the expression
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‘fusiller du regard’ (‘if looks could kill’), and their image is suspended for a fraction of a second. George Bataille, who, in the 1920s, was already calling for an art that moved away from idealism, gave an (in)famous definition of the term ‘formless’ that could almost literally serve as a prefiguration of Terminus for you’s final sequences: “[…] affirmer que l’univers ne ressemble à rien et n’est qu’informe, revient à dire que l’univers est quelque chose comme une araignée ou un crachat” (Bataille 1985: 31). A sign, presented several times through repetitive montage, warns the traveler (and the viewer) of the approaching end of the conveyor belt. As we eventually reach it, we first fall into the void – a blank frame and silence. The following sequences form a striking series of decomposing figures as the images, attacked by chemicals, undergo a succession of mutations. First splitting into a myriad of cells recalling the effect of the pointillist technique, the silhouettes change into grotesque apparitions and start to melt into the background like figures drawn by Edvard Munch. Soon, they dissolve completely into fluid, organic shapes and black lines and stains, gracefully unraveling across the screen like abstract etchings by Henry Michaux set in motion. The details of an advertising poster – the rough outlines of made-up lips and nails – briefly flash up as a short, hysterical laughter resonates over the final frames.
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Charlemagne 2: Piltzer by Pip Chodorov (© Jeff Guess)
By revisiting so many of the territories explored by avant-garde art of the 20th century, Chodorov’s Charlemagne 2, like Rey’s Terminus for you, creates an uncanny feeling of nostalgia and déjà-vu.4 However, nostalgia, in this context, looses the negative, reactionary connotation commonly attached to the term, and becomes part of a creative process where a fluid play on historicisms through a combination of techniques and styles becomes a way of exploring cinema’s unique relation to the workings of time. Where some of Rey’s images recall aspects of Expressionist and Abstract Expressionist painting, as well as the geometric abstraction and Futurist experiments of the early film avant-gardes, Chodorov’s compositions call to mind those of Ruttmann, mais imprégnées de la fluidité d’un Fischinger. Il arrive que l’érosion de l’image rappelle ces oeuvres de transition où Hollis Frampton passe de la photographie au cinéma (Nostalgia, 1971) […]
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D’autres séquences évoquent la rythmique d’un Paul Sharits. (Bassan 2002: 26-27)
Chodorov gives a very precise, scientific account of the making of his film portrait of the composer Charlemagne Palestine. The mathematical quality of the technique, however, is underpinned by the manual, subjective process of optical printing and hand-painting. Like Rey’s, Chodorov’s work thus foregrounds the material basis of film and ultimately reveals its vulnerability to change and manipulation, creating the effects of presence/absence so consonant with contemporary human portraiture. Invited to a concert by the minimalist composer and pianist at the Paris Gallery Pulitzer, Chodorov made an audio-visual record of the event, initially capturing images and sounds simultaneously but separately on Super-8 film and on 16mm magnetic tape. The images were printed on 16mm high-contrast positive and negative stock, and the sound track transformed into a visual score. Every note was identified as X (for low notes) or O (for high notes). These marks were then grouped into frames, exposing patterns and dominants of highs and lows, each frame of the score matching one frame from the filmstrip. Chodorov printed and edited the film image by image, playing on a series of contrasts and alternations to create a visual interpretation of the score (Chodorov 2003: 6-7). Rather than a documentary of a musical event or a visual accompaniment for a concert, Chodorov thus combines both recordings to construct an audiovisual composition. The structuring element is the music. Its sounds and silences, and its variations in tone and rhythm, determine the appearance and disappearance of the image. Hence the gradual formation of the visual composition as the first chords resonate, and the progressive fading of the images to a black screen as silence settles, or the shadows and colors lingering on the screen just as the sound still echoes after the last chord of a musical movement has been struck. Palestine creates minimalist, repetitive pieces. Initially inspired by the sound of church bells, his music alternates between sequences of single, isolated chords and a swelling of intense, disharmonic ones, a ‘strumming’5 that fills and echoes across the space. The soundtrack, however, takes in the music as well as other ambient noises – the chatter at the interval and, at the end, an explosion of clapping which, in its mundane connotations, curiously clashes with the heightened effects
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of the music and images. The color composition forms a powerful combination of hallucinatory, pulsating visuals that echo the tranceinducing quality of the music score. Chodorov uses the wide array of possibilities offered by the optical printing and manipulation of photograms: he alternates positive and negative prints, contrasts monochrome and colored images of various intensities, prints images mirroring themselves across a split screen and varies the frequency of the editing rhythm. Silhouettes and mask-like faces and movements flicker across the screen, sketched out in thick outlines and blocks of color where background and foreground merge. The feeling of chaos and urgency created by the quick alternation of strident colors and jarring forms is offset by the recurrent appearance of isolated faces, like the one of the young woman as the concert ends, whose grainy image lingers for a few instants on the screen, seemingly contemplative and very still, as if under a spell. In Charlemagne 2 as in Terminus for you, attention is simultaneously drawn to the mutability and fragility of the film support, and that of a figural field always on the brink of melting away, and ultimately absorbed into the undifferentiated mass of the final images.
Conclusion Chodorov and Rey’s works are characteristic of an approach to filmmaking where the denial of conventional, narrative-illustrative figuration as an initial framework, and the extraction of the figure from a space constructed by perspective and point of view, do not lead to ‘pure’ autonomous abstraction, but rather operate as shifts from the figural to the formless. The central role of the single frame (the combination of optically printed photograms), as well as Chodorov’s grid-like transposition of a music score and Rey’s abstract geometric motifs, all point to the persistence of the modernist formal order. But here, the principle of pure abstraction is overruled by the pull of chaos and formlessness. Writing at the beginning of last century, Wilhelm Worringer argued that the tendency towards abstraction witnessed in the art of certain periods of human history is born out of a deep anxiety about the world, and a desire to ‘abstract’ objects from the surrounding confusion and temporal instability. In contrast, art forms that seek to convey a sense of spatial wholeness and stylistic unity through the imaginative representation of objects integrated in their environment
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offer the viewer an experience of Einfühlung – the possibility of harmonious identification with a coherent universe (Worringer: 1908). Almost a century later, some of the most interesting works of experimental cinema seem to bring together these two apparently opposed pulls. As figure and ground merge, and the human form dissolves into the metamorphosing body of the image, films like Chodorov’s and Rey’s thus confront the viewers with that which feeds the ambiguity of a postmodern sensibility: the uncertain shift between the seduction and anxiety of the loss of the self.
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Notes:
1
The use of the term figural suggested here is thus different from the meaning assigned to it in the writings of François Lyotard and, more recently, David Rodowick. 2 Due to its specific conditions of viewing, a film is rarely considered as an art object in itself – that is, an art object in the material, collectable, meaning of the term. An initial film print, even when works involve direct intervention onto the filmstrip (scratching, painting), needs to be projected onto a screen to be experienced. Lettriste film and other experiments in expanded cinema tend to focus on precisely that aspect of cinema: the projecting apparatus and/or the viewing event to the detriment of the recording and recorded material itself. Yet whereas mainstream cinema derives its added value from box-office and related returns, experimental cinema is almost never associated with mass distribution in theatres. At the same time, even if the conditions of viewing cannot be compared to those of a film projection proper on a large screen, avant-garde or experimental films are also increasingly distributed and seen in their video copy format. In theory, for all its marginal status, experimental cinema thus arguably comes closest to the ‘positive’ aspects of Walter Benjamin’s vision of art in the mechanical age: accessible insofar as it is endlessly reproducible, yet difficult to recuperate in solely capitalist, mass production and market terms, or as the art-asunique commodified artifact of high culture. 3 The tradition goes back to the very beginnings of abstract cinema with Léopold Survage’s and the Futurist artists, the brothers Ginna and Corra’s projects of abstract color film. 4 As Rees points out, the ‘oxymoron’ at the heart of the practice of experimental film brings together the contradictory notions of ‘radical’ and ‘tradition’ (Rees: 4). 5 The term ‘strumming’ is the one used by Palestine himself.
Works consulted Artaud, Antonin: 1933. ‘La Vieillesse précoce du cinéma’ in Les Cahiers Jaunes 4, spécial Cinéma, June 1933, reprinted 1972. ‘The Precocious Old Age of the Cinema’ (tr. Alastair Hamilton) in Collected Works. London: Caldon and Boyars: 76. Bassan, Raphael. 2002. ‘Charlemagne 2: Piltzer de Pip Chodorov’, BREF – Le Magazine du court métrage 54 (Autumn), http://www.agencecm.com/pages/bref54 (consulted 12.01.2005). Bataille, George. 1929. ‘Informe’ (ed., tr. Allan Stoekl) in Documents 2: 382. —. 1985. Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-1939. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Bürger, Peter. 1984. Theory of the Avant-garde. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Chodorov, Pip. 2003. Cinexperimentaux 4. Paris: RE:VOIR Video Editions. Deleuze, Gilles. 1981. Francis Bacon, Logique de la Sensation. Paris: Seuil.
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Dulac, Germaine. 1994. Ecrits sur le cinéma, 1919-1937 (ed. Prosper Hillairet). Paris: Paris Expérimental. —. 1978. ‘The Avant-Garde Cinema’ and ‘The Essence of cinema: The Visual Idea’ in Sitney, P. Adams (ed.) The Avant-Garde Film: A Reader of Theory and Criticism. New York: New York University Press: 36-44. Foster, Hal. 1996. The Return of the Real: Avant-Garde at the End of the Century. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Frodon, Jean-Michel. 2004. ‘États du Cinéma Français: le meilleur’ in Cahiers du Cinéma 593 (September): 10-13. Krauss, Rosalind. 1985. The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Krauss, Rosalind E. & Bois, Yve-Alain. 1997. Formless: A User’s Guide. Cambridge: Zone Books. Noguez, Dominique (1999), Éloge du cinéma experimental, Paris: Paris Expérimental. O'Pray, Michael. 2003. Avant-Garde Film: Forms, Themes and Passions. London: Wallflower Press. Rees, A.L. 1996. A History of Experimental Film and Video. London: British Film Institute. Scheunemann, Dietrich. 2000. ‘On Photography and Painting. Prolegomena to a New Theory of the Avant-Garde’ in Scheunemann, Dietrich (ed.) European Avant-Garde: New Perspectives. Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi: 10-26. Strauss, François. 1997. ‘Miam-Miam’ in Cahiers du Cinéma 510: 64-65. Worringer, Wilhem. 1908. Abstraktion und Einfühlung: ein Beitrag zur Stilpyschologie. Munich: R. Piper (reprinted as Abstraction and Empathy, (tr. Michael Bullock). New York: International University Press: 1953.
The Stammering Frame: on recent French and Austrian Film Experiments Frédérique Devaux Abstract: This chapter identifies an aesthetic of repetition at the operative heart of films by three contemporary European filmmakers, Michel Amarger, Martin Arnold and Rafael Montanez Ortiz. These figures engage the spectator in a game of perception, generating hypnotic and psycho-optic effects that at once alienate us and bring us deeper into the viewing experience.
The interest in experimental cinema is due in particular to the fact that many of its auteurs work within what one could call cinematic “niches” in their most minute and manifold variations, while at the same time occupying a position at the meeting point of the visual arts and music. This essay examines three experimental films that are all based on the structural principle of repetition: Slug ou la dernière limace (Michel Amarger, 1987); Passage à l’acte (Martin Arnold, 1993); and Dance n° 22 (Rafael Montanez Ortiz, also 1993). As will emerge, however, the first of these films, Slug ou la dernière limace contrasts sharply with the other two in that it does not feature repetition of frames in the strict sense. It is a found-footage film composed on a small cutting table constructed by the director. Amarger worked by visually counting the individual frames after having established a strict score, very similar to a musical score. Apart from this major difference, the three films under discussion have in common a concern for continuous action, which the filmmakers respectively interrupt using trompe l’œil. The three artists work with found footage taken from either documentary or fiction material. The reedited montages reveal elements that standard projection could never divulge, either – as in the first case (Slug) – through the manipulation of the frame (vertical and horizontal tilting/inversion of the image) or through repetition and extension of filmic time, such as we see in Arnold, who begins by assailing the eye
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with imperceptible bursts of action, developing narration on a higher register – a kind of “supra-narrative”. For Slug Michel Amarger selected frames in which the action is simultaneously banal and static (there is no spatial movement), contrasting interior and exterior work with masculine labor being progressively “injected” into the female work of hanging a cauldron up on a hook over the fireplace. There is a written sequence for this montage: (10 (woman) 1 (man)/ 9 (woman) 2 (man), etc.) in alternation with horizontally and vertically rearranged frames. The rhythm thus unfolds according to a metric calculation (in the literal sense, as in Eisenstein’s “metric montage”) that becomes ever more complex. This gives the impression especially that the female figure, though motionless, is moving. The viewer contributes to and participates in a game of perception in which immediate vision is distorted, and our perception deceived. The two audible sounds, (a siren which, according to the author, is intended to recall the world of work; and the jazz – a tranquil counterpoint to the highly rhythmic movement), while they are also “found”, are provisory. In other words, complete freedom is maintained for the composition of the “soundtrack” at the point of projection. These variations (the sound can be live or improvised) permit different rhythms to be combined with the images on the filmstrip.
Slug ou la dernière limace (Michel Amarger, 1987)
Martin Arnold built a special optical printer for the making of Passage à l’acte. The evocative title most likely refers to the scene in which
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the boy has just sat down again at the table and begins “playing” with his knife on the edge of the table, triggering the viewer’s imagination. Everyone more or less sees an act of masturbation, all the more so because the boy is prepubescent, and because the action begins in a moment of crisis with his parents, i.e. with the established order. His triumphant cry is audible, like that of a rooster and, indeed, we even imagine we can make out the ‘clucking’ of an orgasm. This film is structured in a narrative loop that operates on at least two levels: a) first the boy leaves the room, and at the end of the film the girl leaves. Could the patriarchal model be exploding? In the penultimate shot of the film, the girl kisses her father on the cheek which, thanks to the repetition, sounds like a gentle slap; b) The entire film is constructed from samples placed in a loop with variations within each of these repeated passages. Arnold, an Austrian, (the country of Kren, Kubelka and Export, but also where dodecaphonic music was developed at the beginning of the 20th century, and the homeland of the father of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud), runs the samples (a 33-second extract from Robert Mulligan’s 1962 film To Kill a Mockingbird) through a computerized analytical projector capable of accelerating or slowing down the projection time. The sequence featured in this work is emblematic: a family meal with a father, a mother and their two children (respecting a family setup that in French we call “le choix du roi” or “God’s choice”, the boy being a little older than the girl). This can be seen as a sort of pagan Last Supper with all the attributes of patriarchal society, and therefore in line with the family model favored in Hollywood. All the codes – social, aesthetic and continuity – are respected: the parents, guarantors of order, face us, whilst the children, the dissidents at odds with the codes, have their backs to the spectator. Shot composition is balanced between the crowded space of the principal action on the left, and that of the secondary action on the right, which is open. This is a quasi-archetypal scene, one that we have all experienced, an everyday scene of action or of ennui that allows each of us to refer back to our own experience and, of course, to a communal experience: the family meal. In this way, we participate actively in the iconoclasm and in the fall of idols (of parental authority, as well as of the cinema), this pre-pubescent crisis being one of its earliest symptoms. We participate too in the dismantling of images and of sounds as created by this “film as
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process”, to use the terminology of Steve Reich, who analyzed “music as process”. I do not refer to this musician by chance: what interests me here is the possible rapport – this brief exposé is only a small part of it – between this “experimental” work and what we called, in the sixties, “repetitive music”, as is familiar from the work of Philip Glass and Steve Reich. We could read this film, then, as follows: we have a trio, or rather a duo (two singer-musicians – the children); the conductor of the orchestra (the father, who sets the tone when he raps on the table saying “Jeremy” or “Jem”, we cannot understand clearly which); and an audience (the woman) who smiles, cries, is moved, and so participates emotionally, but remains passive from the point of view of the action. Through the effect of repetition, at the end of the film the mother applauds. She is the only one who doesn’t have her own “scene”, by which I mean her moment of close-up action or sound. She is always present in the composition that simultaneously envelopes and disregards her. She does not exist as herself, since she remains somehow “outside” the scene even if, without her, the action might have developed along very different lines (you don’t play to an empty parterre). Furthermore, as the young boy “clucks” to his “orgasm” we catch sight of a fragment of a further figure in the background, which could be the house servant. Returning to Steve Reich: he was born in 1936 and grew up against a background of reformed Judaism. He claims to have learned neither Hebrew nor the cantillations. Nevertheless, there is plenty to say about the possible influence of Jewish religion on artistic activity, and especially on that of Reich, but that is not our concern here. Briefly, the gradual processes under way are not only mechanical in nature: Steve Reich, who is interested in the diverse forms that rhythmic structures can take, uses African music as a source and model, as well as Indian ragas, with their peaks of sound, issued over and over again. He is also fascinated by the Balinese gamelan and its repetitive musical articulations. Reich manipulates speech captured on magnetic tape, making loops using two tape recorders. These loops are synchronized, with their rhythms matched. Then he gradually brings one of the two recorders to a stop, which, through the progressive time-lapse between the two recordings, creates unedited forms ranging from echoes to completely new sound figures. Reich calls this manipulation the
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“gradual process of phase differentiation”. He works on the voice first of all (according to him the voice is unclassifiable, therefore allowing him to avoid predetermined approaches), putting this process into play – most notably – in It’s Gonna Rain (1965) starting with recordings of a sermon by a black minister in San Francisco. The phase differentiation (as used in Reich’s “minimalist” music between 1965 and 1971, but which I prefer to describe as “repetitive”) progressively prolongs each note played. I don’t want to talk about the process of composition, but rather about passages of music which are literally processes. The pertinent trait of musical processes is that they determine simultaneously the ensemble of details, note after note, sound after sound, and the totality of the form. I’m interested in the processes that can be perceived there. I want to be able to hear a process as it unfolds in sound. In order that listening to it be fine and precise, a musical process should be produced in an extremely gradual way. (Interview, “France Culture” 2004
Beyond the obvious relationship between a sound fragment from It’s Gonna Rain and a sound fragment of Arnold’s film, or in Dance n° 22 (also from 1993) by Rafael Montanez Ortiz, what is interesting for us is the possible parallels between these “works as process”. We will focus in particular on three points of convergence which, quite naturally, also bring up some elements of divergence. 1. Rather than playing on simultaneity, since the cinema, by virtue of the unfolding of frames, is an art of succession, the phase differentiation in Arnold, as in Amarger, takes place between what we foresee in the logical unfolding of banal action, thanks to our powers of anticipation (in a scene that we have all experienced) and what becomes of it through the manipulation of the tape. In Arnold, the sound serves as a “calculation-guide” or metronome for the frames, since the ear is able to perceive variations, as well as phonemes, in cases where the eye is not capable, for example, of identifying the passage of one, two or three frames. 2. We should recall that the so called “repetitive” musicians wanted, amongst other things, to bring psycho-acoustic facts to the fore in a search for acoustic effects able to create a geometry of “trompe l’oreille”. The hypnotic effects obtained by repetition or by long-held notes (just as there are images that are held for a long time in these films) generate a very peculiar phenomenon of impregnation
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in our brains: the listener loses all notion of time and enters into another type of listening. These psycho-acoustic effects can be found again in the form of psycho-optic effects in the three films that we are analyzing. In the films of Arnold, Amarger and Montanez Ortiz, the viewer-auditor engages, so to speak, in another type of vision, of perception of the facts. The viewer-auditor sees a movement where there are minimal gestures, such as the hanging of a kitchen utensil on a hook, or else perceives the outline of an act of masturbation, or hears either a cock’s crow or an orgasm. In short, our senses deceive us, as if in a reversal of inhibition (that of Hollywood), to use a Freudian expression. 3. Let us look at one final supporting example in the shape of Philip Glass. In 1968, while making “One plus one pour solistes” the musicians, through tapping their fingers on an amplified table, discovered a process of unedited progression that Philip Glass described as “additive” (123 4 123 45 123 456 123 4567, and so on). Then, the artist proposed a series of additions and subtractions, rendering the process ever more complex. All these processes create, as we have said, a structural subversion that is auditory, but they equally achieve a different apprehension of rhythm: i.e. they modify perception, which mutates ad infinitum. In certain moments of Passage à l’acte (notably the scene where the father, who, in tapping on the table, plays a superb repetitive score, or in the confrontation between the brother and sister) or even in Amarger’s score, we can see an illustration of these new metric, visual and audio forms, with subtle and sensitive variations that render these works engaging and complex. In accordance with each passage, Arnold creates fine and varied rhythms and variations: sometimes one or two images more or less. Alternatively, he introduces flashes, which make the metric structure of the film richer and more complex, even without taking into account the gradual discrepancies between sound and image, or between one sample and the next, which might even be the very same sample, give or take an image.
Inscriptions of Light and The ‘Calligraphy of Decay’: Volatile Representation in Bill Morrison’s Decasia Ursula Böser Abstract: Bill Morrison’s Decasia combines found-footage on decaying pre-1950s nitrate celluloid film stock with Michael Gordon’s dissonant ‘Symphony of Decay’. In compiling highly disparate and fragmented imagery, Decasia samples an array of rationales for its construction. However, the film derives its overall coherence from the local effects that are created by the recurring play of representation and its dissolution. Decasia thus unifies its disparate elements around the inherent volatility and materiality of representation in the cinematic ready-mades it employs.
D e c a s i a is both a film and a symphony. The E u r o p ä i s c h e Musiksommer commissioned Michael Gordon, founder of the “New York Bang On A Can” collective for the presentation of new music, to produce Decasia, the symphony. The Basel Sinfonietta was to premier and record the piece, and Bill Morrison – at the time audiovisual assistant for the avant-garde Ridge Theatre in New York – was to provide the images. The common point of departure for this cooperation between composer and filmmaker was to be the theme of decay. After a process of collaboration, during which Morrison worked with approximations of the final score, D e c a s i a was performed in Basel as part of a multi-media event. Members of the Sinfonietta stood on three rows of a triangular pyramid. The film was projected on to a screen that was draped over the three sides of the structure. Seated inside the pyramid, the audience was subjected to wrap-around sound and images.1 A version of Decasia for cinematic release was re-edited in synchronicity with this live performance and premiered in 2002 at the Sundance Festival. Gordon’s symphony is a richly dissonant and orchestrated piece. Executed with unconventional instruments, such as eight brake drums made from car parts, it combines a minimalist sonic texture in the tradition of Philip Glass with apocalyptic, eardrum-shattering crescendos. As Tony Rayns notes; “rhythmic pulses battle with screeching decaying tones in this symphonic sound-track” (Rayns
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2003: 33). The visual counterpart to Gordon’s ‘Symphony of Decay’ is an assemblage of cinematic ready-mades: Decasia is entirely constructed from footage retrieved from sources such as the South Carolina University Archive of Twentieth Century Fox newsreels, the nitrate film collection of the Library of Congress in the WrightPatterson Air Force Base near Dayton and the Museum of the Moving Image in New York. The film brings together mere snippets as well as lengthy sequences of feature films, ethnographic documents, wildlife footage, old newsreels, test and medical film and other samples from the repositories of our cinematically documented past. In taking such recourse to filmic ready-mades, Morrison evokes a strand of filmmaking with a venerable lineage. Jay Leyda, writing in 1964, traces the form’s “preconscious beginnings” back to the early days of cinematography and cites instances of how footage by the Lumière brothers was re-appropriated for a new cinematic context. Such interpolation of previously shot footage helped to service the growing demand for the visual illustration of topical events. It also provided the creative spark for innovation in feature films such as Fleming and Porter’s Life of an American Fireman (1903). In the more ‘consciously’ shaping hands of Esfir Schub and her assistant Sergei Eisenstein, ‘compilation’ not least provided an artistic stimulus for the exploration of the power of montage (cf. Leyda 1964). Surveying a more contemporary body of filmmaking, William Wees compiled a substantial corpus of found-footage films and identified a discernible strand of such works in the tradition of American avant-garde filmmaking (cf. Wees 1993: 101-117). Uses of the compilation form across the decades might have varied widely, but there is a common denominator for them all: filmmakers in the found-footage tradition, entirely or in parts, forgo the use of a camera. By relinquishing control over mise-en-scène and cinematography they focus the process of artistic creation on the selection and the re-assembly of pre-existing and diverse material into a whole. Here, we therefore have a cinematic form that challenges the notions of the unity of the work of art by the very process of its creation and the materials it employs. These import varying degrees of temporal and spatial disjunctions and a heterogeneous stylistic texture into their assemblage. Yann Beauvais summarizes this concisely in stating: “Im Collage-Film verbirgt sich die Idee der Zusammenhaltslosigkeit” (Beauvais 1991: 4).2
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The task of creating a meaningful whole from fragments is approached with particular acuity in Decasia. Here each image is a fragment: blisters, bubbles, scratches, spots, blotches or the effects of solarization obscure and distort almost every single frame of the film. At times these distortions are all that remains of the image. They are not traces of artistic manipulation of the material, but features that bear testimony to its chemical dissolution: all of Morrison’s selected footage is shot on pre-1950 celluloid nitrate base, and is thus a highly volatile chemical medium. An estimated fifty percent of all nitrate stock based films have vanished, and this destruction takes a multitude of forms, from spontaneous combustion to the gradual reduction of film rolls into what archivists eloquently refer to as ‘hockey puck’. Bill Morrison’s Decasia shows this on-going disintegration in full and graphic detail. The condition of its selected source material and the film’s origins in a found-footage production mode make Decasia a film of multiple fragmentations. As James Peterson points out, found-footage filmmakers might be said to differ in the way in which they reduce or emphasize disjunctions and “provide a framework for the comprehension of the images” (Peterson 1994: 159). The analysis that follows will trace the ways in which Bill Morrison’s Decasia engages with the disjunctures of this found material and the shifting patterns of coherence which he provides for his audience. Decasia starts as it ends: with a shot of a Sufi dancer spinning around his own axis (Fig. 1).
Fig. 1: Decasia. Bill Morrison. Courtesy of Plexifilm
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The sense of closure this creates is supported by the reiteration of material from the opening portion of the film at the end. These are shots of amoeba-like structures of decay behind which the figure of a Japanese woman appears. Tropes of ending and closure accompany this imagery in the final minutes of the film: a car advances towards the horizon of a deserted landscape; the sun goes down over the desert. Alluding back to earlier sequences of rudimentary narratives these shots provide a generic notion of ending. Within individual segments of the film, shots from the same sequence of footage appear intermittently and thus seem to frame the interpolated material. One of these evolves over eleven minutes. It features miners battling against the detritus of the nitrate-based celluloid. Their struggle seems replicated by a boxer who fights the traces of dissolving celluloid (Fig. 2);
Fig. 2: Decasia. Bill Morrison. Courtesy of Plexifilm
a miner is carried out of the shaft, the scene framed by decay; another rescue follows; a procession of women walk into a river to be baptized; a scene of reconciliation between a man and a woman; images of a man praying in a burial chamber; a brief sequence in which a man attacks a woman, footage of a trapeze artist who climbs a ladder skywards in a dance-like ascent are interlaced with the recurring depiction of the rescue of the miners (Fig. 3).
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Fig. 3: Decasia. Bill Morrison. Courtesy of Plexifilm
Perspectival contrast and linear movement links this low-angle shot to what follows: a high-angle shot of an anthill and its willful destruction with a stick wielded by an off-screen agent. In the next image a cameraman is perched on the ledge of a building above the frenzied action on a busy city junction. In a final return to the mining disaster, the hectic activity amongst clusters of people reverberates as men tumble from the opening of a mineshaft and make their hurried exit. Another sequence, in which a recurring narrative is interspersed with a selection of shots, shows a procession of children moving through a half-ruined convent and past nuns who supervise their progress. This sequence recurs throughout the film. In its last occurrence the children disappear into a building. Another such framing segment consists of a man who makes his repeatedly interrupted progress through ruins towards a row of arcades. These segments seem like fragments of a more extensive narrative that we can only remotely infer. Their connection with the interpolated footage shifts constantly, or simply remains obscure. Narrative inferences are also encouraged by fleeting references to cinematic genres in Decasia: a five-second shot of a sheriff poised for a fight evokes the genre of the Western, and genre allusions abound in what follows: a woman argues her case before a judge with a melodramatic fervor that is underscored by the frantic dance of decay that distorts her face. Allusions to melodrama also
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reverberate in a shot of a mother hugging a child. In a second oblique reference to romance, a finely dressed man on horseback is seen flirting with a maid. A man and a woman in a mask dance together in comically stilted fashion. A series of shots shows three sets of seemingly clandestine observers who witness their antics and erupt into laughter. The film then continues on the dalliance between the horseman and the maid as he tries to bestow his apparently unwanted affection on the object of his desire. Intermittently thematic clusters surface: in the first few minutes of Decasia imagery of water and the sea are followed by microscopic shots of genetic material and cells, a close-up of a butterfly and swarms of birds. This succession of shots seems to amount to a thematic exploration of the origins of life. Throughout the film allusions to new beginnings and birth seem to complement notions of ending and closure. One recurring theme is the juxtaposition of manual and mechanized labor. In an extended sequence at the start of the film, the camera travels through a film laboratory, past film spools from which strips of celluloid unwind, and past industrial-size development baths through which these strips are pulled. Later we will see men circling a contraption for film processing and then immersing this into tubs for further processing. In another scene the cars of a Ferris wheel emerge out of a sea of decay, only to race and melt back into it as they traverse the space along a horizontal axis (Fig. 4).
Fig. 4: Decasia. Bill Morrison. Courtesy of Plexifilm
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Reverberating with the earlier juxtaposition of manual and mechanized actions, the next shot varies this theme with a handcranked merry-go-round. In another instance children are shown as they get onto a bus. A brief image of a Western-style wagon establishes another comparison along the above lines. A particularly prominent structural element in Decasia is graphic in nature. The starting sequence lays bare the found-footage origins of the film: here a hand juts into the visual space to select and examine a filmstrip. However, it also introduces the two pronounced directional elements that assist in structuring Decasia: the circular motions of the dancer and the film reels, and the linear motion of the advancing sections of celluloid. This common trait of extended linear movement unifies a series of shots: a caravan is shown crossing a desert, and with it the shot space, from right to left. The succeeding image varies this representation of progress along a linear axis as we see the bow of a ship ploughing straight ahead. Later on in the film, the caravan will be seen as it traverses the space in the opposite direction. The portrayal of linear progress provides a recurring theme in Decasia. Circular motion described by Ferris wheels, contraptions for spooling film or spinning wheels, amongst others, contrasts with this. A seven-minute sequence towards the end of the film prominently features more variations on movement and directionality. It starts with spotlights that illuminate aircraft as they traverse the filmic space and release parachutes. As these near the ground, downward motion makes way to a lateral sweep of the camera. This motion carries over into a traveling shot through a landscape, and is then extended by the track of the caravan shown earlier. Now, however, it advances from left to right as if returning from its journey (Fig. 5). The most salient form-engendering devices in Bill Morrison’s Decasia are the marks of the film’s physical disintegration. During the first three minutes only minor flaws mar the images. In the next shots, the palpable traces of the image’s decaying carrier medium make a striking debut and countless permutations of these provide the most conspicuous visual element of the film from this point on.
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Fig. 5: Decasia. Bill Morrison. Courtesy of Plexifilm
This consists of graphic patterns that fill the screen, of interludes between discernible images, or of mutating abstract structures that interact with the representational content. At a local level Decasia seems to explore a variety of links between shots. The marks of decay are one of these. Frequently it is the source of the film’s most palpable fragmentation that provides transition between images. Here, the interpolated blisters and bubbles of decaying film stock serve to attenuate disjunctures as shots are shown to rise to the surface of a seething mass of decay, or to be swallowed by it again. At times, whole intervals of pure decay separate the imagery. Variations on the device of the gaze provide another rationale for inter-shot connections. Here, a series of identically choreographed shots show children looking out of the bus windows and then, at some imperceptible command, they direct their unwavering gaze straight at the viewer. Shots of two men who look straight at the viewer reinforce this theme of direct visual address. Then, a woman in a bathing suit appears, seated in a tanning contraption framed by light bulbs. She averts her eyes, in marked contrast to the steady gaze directed at the viewer in the previous images. The sequence is followed by an investigation of the gaze as a continuity device in the form of an eye-line shot. Impenetrable decay precedes a montage of eye-line matches: a man seems to look in
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pained disappointment at a distant couple, while another observes this display of emotion with evident malice. The spatio-temporal contiguity of classical editing is palpably invoked in this sequence of eye-line matches. Such inference of spatial proximity is also encouraged when we see images of a crew, and two shots of men who appear to raise their arms in a farewell gesture to the men aboard the ship, in an oblique and uncertain indication of narrative continuity. There are striking moments when metaphor is used as a device to create connections between adjacent shots: an iris shot of a ship’s funnel establishes a metaphorical link to the image of a woman’s legs, and the comical effect this generates is reinforced by a repeat display of her lower torso. In another such instance of metaphor a man massages a dummy with circular movements in what appears to be a demonstration for medical purposes. The juxtaposition with the next shot, in which a man scrapes bark off a tree, provides a comically metaphoric link. The adjacent shots of an anthill and a crowded city junction, which has already been mentioned above, draw on a conventional metaphor. Efforts to harness disjointed elements through a variety of schemata at a local or a global level are readily evident in the above analysis. The film’s circular structure, the framing of seemingly disjointed material with images of a continuous action which unfolds over distinct portions of the film, the tentative allusion to narrative patterns, the pursuance of discernible themes, recurring and emphatic circular and linear structures and, not least, the continuous intrusion of chemical decay into the shot space, support a drive towards coherence in Decasia. Shifting clusters of inter-shot connections assist in the creation of a sense of structure. But there is no single pervasive rationale that informs this compilation of images other than the mark of decay, which is featured in every image and the music. The alignment between the music and the images is highlighted in the film’s very first shot: as the Sufi dancer turns, bells in the background move in the wind. The low jingling sound with which Michael Gordon’s symphony begins responds to this image and this sound and theme returns at the end of Decasia. As the film unfolds, shot changes, or changes within the shot, as well as changes in the music, are emphatically synchronized.
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Competing rhythms are associated with the two main visual elements of the film: random decay and directional movement. This is partly due to the fact that Decasia is entirely in slow motion. All of the footage has been stretch-printed. With each frame repeated at least twice, the action seems to unfold with great deliberation and is thus endowed with a significance that far exceeds its often mundane nature. Morrison’s selection of footage, with its emphasis on extensive or repetitive movement, plays to this stylistic trait: in their sloweddown portrayal, these movements occur with unerring determination and willfulness. This is all the more palpable since it contrasts with the presentation of the dominant graphic element of Decasia: the abstract formations that are generated by the decaying film stock. Across all shots runs a more or less frenzied dance of abstract surface structures. Even when subjected to retardation through the stretch printing, this incessant motion impinges on the eye with a rapid and almost stroboscopic, abrupt randomness. The visual rhythm it establishes is as pervasive as the slow pacing of the actions that are represented. Decasia is a perceptual onslaught of form coming undone and, as such, it poses a considerable challenge for its audience. Reviews of Decasia generally acknowledge this, but they nevertheless tend to view the film as readily accessible. In the words of one critic, Decasia seems to constitute “that rare thing: a movie with avant-garde and universal appeal” (Hoberman 2003: www.decasia.com/html/ villagevoice_03_25_03.html, consulted 21.04.2006). An obvious reason for this is that, notwithstanding its fragmentation and its dissonant soundtrack, Decasia proffers itself for easy readability: the cumulative effect of seventy minutes of chemical decay on film stock amounts to a powerful piece of cinematic rhetoric. Tony Rayns highlights this aspect of the film when he states: “By presenting images that are in an advanced state of decomposition Morrison is agitating in the most powerful way on behalf of the archives fighting to rescue their holdings from disintegration” (Rayns 2003: 33). Morrison’s previous works lend purchase to an interpretation along such lines. His assignment as a creator of shorts to form the backdrop for theatrical productions started him on his extensive search for footage in US film archives. In his twelve-minute short, Film of Her (1996), he dramatizes the true story of a film archivist who happens upon a collection of paper prints of nitrate films in the Library of Congress.3 Film of Her is the story of the single-handed
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rescue of this find, told through found-footage and voice-over narration. The exploration of how images perish is continued in Decasia. However, Morrison’s own account of the film situates this process of dissolution in a wider cycle of creation and destruction. He summarizes what he describes as the film’s ‘movements’ like this: 1: Creation. This film is the meditation of a Sufi dervish dancer, the feed reel. It opens with the laboratory. I think of this as a type of heaven, where gods examine our lives as they are played out on various films. One is examining this film. This film is the dream of a Japanese goddess. There are first just clouds of gas and then revealing earth, sea, life and various migrating species, including Man. Movement 2: Civilization. Man sets up civilization and creates religion. He fears Death. Time passes, and man imitates God, turning wheels as God turns the wheels of the film he is printed on. Modern Man is born in a caesarean section shot by Eisenstein. He grows up and goes to school, the frontier. He invents Cinema in his likeness. Emotions are served up for mass consumption. Artifice becomes indistinguishable from reality. He pursues Women, first playfully and then aggressively and violently. Movement 3: Conundrum. In the name of advancement and industry, he has created a nightmare world of mines and machines and cities full of scourge. His world collapses and his efforts to transcend it seem hopeless. Movement 4: Disintegration and Rebirth. But he is ultimately delivered. He disintegrates into that which is essential and indivisible and reforms into something waiting to be re-born anew. The Japanese Goddess awakes from her dream. The Sufi continues to whirl, the take-up reel. (www.decasia.com/html/highangle.html, consulted 21.04.2006)
This interpretation of the film provides us with a narrative frame, albeit a somewhat idiosyncratic one. And if it appears difficult to reconcile this account with Decasia’s tentative and fluid structure, Morrison also provides an explanation for this by appealing to a form of psychological realism: his description of the film as the “meditation of a Sufi dervish dancer” and the “dream of a Japanese Goddess” marks out stylistic idiosyncrasies as the effects of an altered state of mind. This equation of film style and human consciousness invokes a well-established interpretive approach in the treatment of the American avant-garde film. Notably, in P. Adams Sitney’s Visionary Film it is pursued as the underlying theme in the development of American avant-garde filmmaking (cf. Sitney 2000). In his essay Beyond Interpretation – The Lead Shoes, Gregory Taylor considers an instance of recalcitrance to an interpretation along such lines:
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analyzing Sidney Peterson’s film The Lead Shoes, he puts forward the view that the subsumption of the film’s highly unconventional stylistic traits into such an interpretive approach spells a “strategy of containment”. He concludes that: [...] most of the best known works of the American post-war avantgarde cinema are dually motivated: though their form is innovative, and at least partly self-justified, the interpretive community surrounding the films has been able to account for their peculiarities through the safe (and more readily articulated) appeal to psychology and, more broadly, issues of epistemology. (Taylor 1991: 85)
The present analysis of Decasia is not concerned with contesting the validity of interpretations that detect narrative structures in the film, such as Morrison himself proposes. To do so would be futile, given the object of study at hand. As Peterson contends, “Given any random collection of images there is undoubtedly a combination of metaphoric and metonymic readings that would allow inventive viewers to find some sort of narrative in them”. This is of particular relevance for a form such as the compilation narrative, which generally cues the viewer to be highly inventive or, as Peterson formulates it, “to readily infer metonymic replacements along the storyline, and search for often wildly exotic metaphors” (Peterson 1994: 168). Rather, this investigation seeks to pursue what Taylor refers to as “dual motivation”. From this vantage point more abstract patterns are seen to be at play in Decasia than those proposed above. Rather than seeing this film as being about the rise and fall of civilization, this analysis considers Decasia as a work that is structured around the interaction between the inscription of light and its dissolution into an illegible “calligraphy of decay” (Hoberman 2003: www.decasia.com/ html/villagevoice_03_25_03.html, consulted 21.04.2006). The visible trace of form and representation that unravels – which, in Morrison’s own account, provides a symbolic backdrop for the story he outlines – turns into a formidable protagonist who takes center-stage in this take on Decasia. Morrison assembles countless minute dramas from the interplay between the abstract shapes created by chemical reaction and the representational content; between a portrayal of human actions and the will of “stuff”, to paraphrase one reviewer (Boxer 2002: www.decasia.com/html/nytimes_12_03_02.html, consulted 21.04. 2006). In a chemical melt-down, faces, objects and places appear and
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decompose right in front of our eyes, and decay assumes an almost personalized dramatic function as it, for example, replaces a once extant adversary. Asked about the rationale of his footage selection Morrison explains: “I was always seeking out instances where the image was still putting up a struggle, fighting off the inexorability of its demise but not yet having succumbed” (Rayns 2003: 33). The contrasting visual rhythms observed above crystallize this drama as it is replayed in almost every image of Decasia. And it is exactly the absence of any stable rationale for the ordering of the heterogeneous imagery that fosters the perception of the battle that is enacted in the film’s surface features. Rather than encouraging a spectatorial investment in narrative anticipation or gap-filling, the ordering of imagery in Decasia thus guides our attention towards local effects. Michael Gordon’s “Symphony of Decay” expedites this process. It consists of a series of segments during which the music accumulates texture and urgency until, eventually, it gathers the force of what one critic vividly describes as “stratospheric harmonies clanging into one another, large blocks of sounds shifting and falling – like a cross-fire hurricane” (Bowles: www.sequenza.21.com /080502.html, consulted 21.04.2006). This is followed by a retreat to a more sparse orchestration and a relative, yet short-lived and uneasy calm. However, Gordon rarely seems concerned with responding to the varied affective signals in the footage. Instead, the combination of jarring dissonances and the driving and repetitive staccato rhythms appear to accompany the recurring juxtaposition of the slow motion of the action and the fast rhythm of decay, rather than the represented actions. In inflecting all imagery with its trajectory of increasing tension, foreboding and catastrophe, the music seems to take its cue from this inherent tension within the shots. The result is a film with an atmospherically highly unified feel to it. When describing its impact on the audience as “hypnotic” or “narcotic” (cf. for example, Rayns 2003: 33; Jones 2003: 21) numerous reviews of the film record the perceptual effect of the film’s concentration on local effects. The perceptual pull that Decasia exerts is supported by the origins and nature of the imagery displayed. As Joel Katz notes on the inherent connotations of archival footage, viewing it “can be an experience of ghostly, almost necrophiliac dimension – the corporeality of the images may seem nearly as tenuous as the nitrate’s grip on the film stock itself” (Katz 1991: 100). As the chemicals that
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carry the image disintegrate, the physical reality, which had once inscribed itself onto the nitrate stock, seems to undergo a second cycle of annihilation as even its chemical inscription is visibly reclaimed. Roland Barthes’ description of the aura that emanates from material traces of the past, and the sense of dread imparted by their destruction, captures the pervasive atmospheric undertow of Decasia. He describes such traces as “secularized reliquary” and characterizes them by the fact that they have: [...] lost all trace of sacred meaning, except that which is inseparable from something which once existed, no longer exists, but presents itself as a present sign of a dead thing. Conversely, the profanation of these relics is tantamount to the destruction of reality itself. (Barthes in Lane 1970: 154)
By throwing considerable weight onto the dissolution of representation in a medium once associated with unprecedented representational richness, Decasia rekindles a question that has been a perennial focus of the filmic avant-garde: cinematic specificity. Against the backdrop of a spectrum of media enriched by the possibilities of digital creation and reproduction, Decasia highlights the transience of any answer this question might engender. William Wees points out that the retrieval and recontextualization of images cannot but “invite us to recognize it as found footage, as recycled images” (Wees 1993: 11). And, by virtue of the production mode of found-footage films, not only do these turn our attention to their own origins, but they are also “media-referential” (Wees 1993: 25) and thus call attention to the mediascape of which they are a part. With its focus on the volatility of cinematic representation, Decasia might be said to refract its own historical context of representational forms. In The Analogies of the Avant-garde, Peter Tscherkassky identifies a shift in the concerns of avant-garde filmmaking and notions of cinematic specificity in the 1980s. He sees this as a response to an altered media environment that finds an expression in forms of found-footage filmmaking. Surveying the relation of the avant-garde with the cinematographic image, Tscherkassky suggests that the avant-garde’s “apparent iconoclasm is [...] a paradoxical turning towards the image itself, whose intrinsic reality is to be maintained. What is stressed is the character of the created object, of the produced in contrast to the apparent simplicity in relationship
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between the reproduction and the reproduced” (Tscherkassky 1992: 27). With the advent of digital technology, synthetic imagery and thus new paradigms of artificiality in the late 1970s, constellations have changed. Film makes way for video as the prime site for the exploration of the “Charakter des Gemachten” and thus literally the ‘madeness’ of imagery (Tscherkassky 1992: 28). In this context, found-footage filmmakers turn their attention not to the precarious analogy of image and reality, but to the very processes of analogous representation. These – rather than merely the photographic content of the quoted footage – become a point of departure for an artistic exploration that continues the avant-garde tradition of “producing an artistic essentiality within film and cinematography […] What lies in the center is no longer the produced, rather it is the analogous quality of the film image” (Tscherkassky 1992: 29). In Decasia, Morrison engages with these analogous processes as they are reversed, and as imagery comes undone and becomes unrecognizable. In discussing the nature of representation, David Bordwell notes: The Latin root of representation is both ‘to show’ and ‘to bring back’ which indicates the difficulty: representation is at once a display, a spectacle for a spectator and a recovery, the return of an absent entity. Representation is least problematic when we pass from the displayed token to absent meaning. Representation becomes troublesome when that passage is blocked. (Bordwell 1981: 6)
In Decasia, Bill Morrison creates form out of this blockage, out of the irretrievability of a meaning once planned and recorded, but now receding into abstract shapes. As the carrier medium dissolves, Decasia palpably states its failure to provide ‘a window on the world’ or to stave off the ravishes of time by “embalming” it, to quote André Bazin’s well known aspirations for the filmic medium. Volatility and distortion, rather than permanence and transparency, are the hallmarks of Decasia.
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Notes:
1
Excerpts from the American premiere of the live performance of Decasia can be viewed online on www.ridgetheater_org/decasia.html. Excerpts from the film version can be accessed on www.decasia.com/ 2 “The collage film harbours the notion of a lack in cohesion” (translation by the author). 3 Film of Her can be viewed on-line on desires.com/features/thefilmofher/her_video_ six.html
Bibliography Barthes, Roland. 1970. ‘Historical Discourse’ in Michael Lane (ed.) Structuralism. A Reader, London: Cape. Beauvais, Yann. 1991. ‘Found Footage. Vom Wandel der Bilder’ in Blimp 16 (Spring): 4-11. —. 1992. ‘Lost and Found’ in Hausheer, Cecilia and Christoph Settele (eds) Found Footage Film, Lucerne: Zyklop: 8-24. Bordwell, David. 1981. The Films of Carl-Theodore Dreyer. Berkeley: University of California Press. Boxer, Sarah. 2002. ‘Where a Film’s Gooey Bits Are The Real Showstoppers’ in The New York Times Review (3 December 2002). Hoberman, J. 2003. ‘The Art of Destruction’ in Village Voice (19-25 March 2003). Jones, Jonathan. 2003. ‘Ghost Worlds’ in The Guardian (6 September 2003). Katz, Joel. 1991. ‘From Archive to Archiveology’ in Cinematographe (4): 96-103. Leyda, Jay. 1964. Film Begets Film: Compilation Films from Propaganda to Drama. London: Allen & Unwin. Peterson, James. 1994. Dreams of Chaos, Visions of Order. Understanding the American Avant-Garde Cinema. Detroit: Wayne State University Press. Rayns, Tony. 2003. ‘Decasia’ in Sight and Sound 13(12): 33. Sitney, P. Adams. 2002. Visionary Film: the American Avant-garde 1943-2000. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Taylor, Gregory. 1991. ‘Beyond Interpretation: the Lead Shoes as an Abstract Film’ in: Millennium Film Journal 25: 78-99. Tscherkassky, Peter. 1992. ‘The Analogies of the Avant-Garde’ in Hausheer, Cecilia and Christoph Settlele (eds) Found Footage Film, Lucerne: Zyklop: 27-36. Wees, William. 1993. Recycled Images. The Art and Politics of Found Footage Films. New York: Anthology Film Archives.
Websites www.decasia.com/html/highangle.htm www.sequenza.21.com/080502.html
From Video Art to Video Performance: The Work of Ulrike Rosenbach Günter Berghaus Abstract: In the 1970s, artists began to explore the use of video in live performances that contrasted the physical action of an organic body with its electronically mediated reflection on a monitor. Feminist artists exhibited the two simultaneous discourses in order to expose and subvert the traditional roles assigned to women in the mass media. In the years 1973-1980, Ulrike Rosenbach was one of the most important representatives of feminist video art and one of the leading pioneers of the genre of video performance. She used video technology as “a psychic feedback” and showed that the sign “woman” was not a natural, given thing, but a product of society. Thus she helped to dismantle conventional modes of representation and to foster a new consciousness of the relationships between woman, art and nature.
Most of the contributions in this volume deal with cinema as a medium produced and distributed in the form of celluloid strips. In this chapter, I shall concern myself with new technologies for capturing and preserving moving images that came into use in the 1950s. In 1951, Bing Crosby Enterprises launched a magnetic video tape for broadcast use; in 1956, Ampex Corporation developed a twoinch quadruplex videotape of broadcast standard; also in 1956, CBS in New York put the first TV programme filmed on videotape on air. In the course of the 1960s, black and white video equipment became the standard medium used in the television industry, and in the 1970s, artists from a variety of backgrounds employed video as a new medium of expression and experimentation. The video camera encodes and transmits pictures electronically, directly and without time delay onto monitors. As such, the process is different from film, which fixes images chemically on an oxide-coated plastic carrier and makes them visible to the naked eye. Video sequences can be simultaneously recorded and played back; film, on the other hand, requires time-consuming and often costly laboratory processing before the images recorded can be viewed.
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In the early 1960s, video technology was only available to television companies in an expensive and cumbersome two-inch format. In the mid-1960s, with the development of half-inch helical scan equipment, video made its first inroads into the domestic market. In the late 1960s, after the release of Sony’s first portable video recorder, the ‘Portapak’ became an important new tool for artists who had previously worked with celluloid film. Many of the early video-art tapes were produced by painters and sculptors who had switched to time-based art in the wake of the Happening and Fluxus movement.1 The production of electronic images offered an alternative to canvas and easel, just as cinema had challenged previous generations of artists. Videomakers continued the process of ‘dematerialization of art’ – to use a term coined by Lucy Lippard – which had been started by the Dadaists and developed further by the Action Painters of the 1950s. In the 1970s, video art was often related to Conceptualism, as electronic images were considered ‘art ideas’ rather than physical ‘art objects’. Most of the early videotapes were self-reflexive exercises examining the nature of the new electronic medium. Avant-garde video, like modernist painting, sculpture or film, had little to do with the meaning or representation of reality, but rather focused on the material properties of the medium and the structural laws of the signifying process. But as video did not require any operating crews, it afforded a strong sense of intimacy and became particularly attractive to artists working in an “expressionist” environment, where immediacy and spur-of-the-moment creativity were highly rated. Here, video replaced the canvas as the medium on which to ‘imprint’ creative ‘gestures’. Another approach could be observed amongst artists who had been politicized by the 1968 rebellion and who placed video and television in a broader social context. They used video as a tool to deconstruct the myth of television as a “window onto the world”. They examined TV as ‘a way of life’, criticized the pervasive influence of television and the mass media, and revealed the skewed picture of reality that dominated commercial television broadcasts. Integrating art and social change became the objective of many radical video producers, who explored the possibilities for setting up counterstructures for the democratization of the television medium. In the rest of this chapter I will not be concerned, in the first instance, with video art, but with the use of video in live events, for
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which at the time the new term ‘video performance’ was coined. As the expression was widely used by artists of the period without necessarily denoting the same phenomenon, I shall begin my discussion with a clarification of how I am employing it on the following pages. In a video performance, a stage action is confronted with an electronically mediated image of the same event, and both are exhibited simultaneously to the audience. Two separate, but interconnected, discourses take place at the same time, enabled by the instant-relay property of the video camera. The monitor displays sequences of images that are an objective refraction or a distorted manipulation of the live performance. The discourse of the body is combined with the discourse of the electronic medium. The juxtaposition of the two information systems allows the audience to compare and critically assess the two simultaneous presentations of an organic body and its artificial image. A different category of video performance was developed by artists who substituted the live events with electro-magnetic tapes. These videos were not conceived as an element of a live performance, but devised to be viewed on a video monitor. The resulting images had a theatrical origin but were specifically generated for the video camera. They were processed, filtered, manipulated and designed to establish an objectifying distance between performer and spectator. The physical reality of the body was used as a basis for an electronic discourse that was specific to the video medium. Since the artist was at once performer and editor of the tape, he or she could control the primary material (i.e. his or her body) and the secondary images generated from it. Through the use of montage and editing techniques the artist arrived at a re-arrangement of the material, a re-structuring of the time nexus and a re-composition of the imagery. The videotape became an autonomous creation in which the performance was subsumed without losing its intrinsically performative quality. The first events that combined body-centered live art with an electronic mediation through the video camera took place around the year 1970. Vito Acconci and Dan Graham can be regarded as the fathers of this new genre, but it was soon taken up by women artists, and in the course of the 1970s it developed into a favorite genre of feminist Performance Art. There was a general tendency amongst women artists to be drawn towards body-centered video performances, whereas male artists were more often engaged in
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exploring the formal and material characteristics of the new electronic medium. Video performances offered an ideal outlet for feminists who sought to confer value upon women’s experiences and achievements, expose and subvert the traditional images and roles assigned to women in the mass media, and develop a new identity outside the constraints of patriarchal society. In the 1970s, many women artists concerned themselves with problems of representation. They saw in the mass consumption of gender-specific imagery a major obstacle to establishing an emancipated female identity, and sought to reclaim the body as a site of female subjectivity instead of having it serve as a canvas for the projection of male desires. It was therefore paramount to disrupt and subvert the accepted languages of representation in advanced information societies. Both Body Artists and female video artists demonstrated in their works that just as gender was not biologically determined but socially constructed, there existed no ‘natural sign’ of the body but only ideologically charged representations of it. Video turned out to be a useful tool for deconstructing the dominant discourses of femininity because the displayed images on the monitor resembled those on the television screen. The picture frame of the television was regarded as an electronic equivalent to the proscenium arch in the theatre and the wooden frame around a painting. In all three forms of representation, the female human being was objectified in principally the same manner: she occupied the same status, she was subjected to the same distortions, and she was denied her own voice. The advantage of video performances over Body Art or painting was its ability to juxtapose ‘woman as subject’ with ‘woman as object’ in the same live event. The synchronous feedback of video technology offered a unique means for making the viewing process a focus of attention. It problematized the relationship between the real woman in the performance area and the image of the woman on the video monitor, and thereby fostered a new type of spectatorship.
Ulrike Rosenbach Ulrike Rosenbach was one of the most important representatives of feminist video art and one of the leading pioneers of the genre of video performance. Her work was shown at avant-garde theater festivals, major art galleries, museums and women’s centers. She taught at the California Institute of Art, set up a School for Creative
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Feminism in Cologne, and is now a professor of New Media at the Academy of Arts in Saarbrücken, Germany. Between 1964 and 1969, Rosenbach studied sculpture at the Düsseldorf Academy of Art and became a master pupil of Joseph Beuys. Her work at that time consisted mainly of body sculptures and objects related to it. Her interests took a new direction when, in 1971, she met Gerry Schum and became his assistant at the first video gallery in Düsseldorf. In the same year, she visited a major video exhibition at the Düsseldorf Museum of Fine Art. She described the impact of the show on her: It became immediately clear to me that […] here was a system as I needed for my work: It did not require vast processing costs, it allowed me to produce a film without relying on other people’s technical support, and it did away with the time-consuming work at the cutting table. Video was a fantastic invention which allowed me to stand in front of the camera and at the same time view myself and control the image on the monitor. (Herzogenrath 1980: 99)
Rosenbach had been politically motivated by the 1968 student rebellion, the feminist movement and Beuys’ theory of Social Sculpture (i.e. sculpting the body politic and moulding society by fostering the idea of free creativity and direct democracy). Idealistically – and quite naively, one may add – Rosenbach believed that video could be an important tool in the process of creating art for all. She was convinced that with the serial production of videotapes the “Art of the Age of Electronic Reproduction” had finally arrived. What Walter Benjamin had predicted with regard to film and photography, she assumed would now become reality through video technology. Rosenbach wrote about her rather Utopian concepts at that time: It was our dream to use the TV monitor, the “altar” in the modern family home, in order to reach at least 60 % of the citizenship with our broadcasts. We wanted to achieve with our video programmes a degree of distribution, which surpassed that of the museum, gallery and book market. It would change our consciousness and lead to a revolution in perception processes. (Herzogenrath 1980: 99)
Initially, Rosenbach had presented her creations in the form of photographs, and from 1972 onwards she acted them out for the video camera. In 1973, she began a series of live video performances, using
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the instant-relay property of the video medium to ‘sculpt’ her own image as well as her body actions. Looking back at her early career in 1982, she laughed about her erstwhile assumptions of Benjamin, Barthes and Eco changing the face of television culture: TV remained a fortress in this land, a position of power and technological ideology we couldn’t conquer with our critical experiments. […] And so, video art remained on the fringe, in the underground, stuck in an alternative position, although it should have been the most important new medium of the 1970s. (Herzogenrath 1980: 100)
However, because it was not encumbered by a long tradition established by male ‘geniuses’, it represented virgin territory waiting to be explored and hence attracted a large number of women artists. Rosenbach’s first live performance in Cologne was seen by Willoughby Sharp and led to an invitation to participate in a performance festival at 112 Greene Street in New York. John Baldessari took an interest in her work and invited Rosenbach to take up the post Judy Chicago had vacated at CalArts in 1973, to teach courses that combined Feminist Art with Video Art. Rosenbach entertained amicable relations with artists such as Vito Acconci and Dan Graham, but her career developed in an entirely different direction. Zsuzsanna Budapest introduced her to Wicca and the Goddess Movement and, consequently, Rosenbach embarked on a path of self-discovery through research into matriarchal Goddess rituals. While many of her California artist friends such as Suzanne Lacy, Linda Montano and Eleanor Antin developed their West Coast Feminist Performance Art and East Coast artists such as Carolee Schneemann and Joan Jonas combined this new aesthetics with experiments in video technology, Rosenbach returned to the Rhineland and introduced to the European public a novel and challenging combination of video and performance art, complemented by an engaging political dimension. However, she soon came to realize that such a blend proved disagreeable to the German public. Even amongst colleagues, her work found little acceptance. A first attempt to set up a feminist art group at the Düsseldorf academy (1969-71) resulted in only four women coming forward to join her.2 Rosenbach had more success with her School for Creative Feminism in Cologne (1976-82), but participation levels fluctuated enormously and output was seriously hampered by a lack of theoretical awareness
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and artistic sophistication.3 If there had not been enlightened curators such as Dorine Mignot at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, gallerists such as Robert Self in London and Konrad Fischer in Düsseldorf, and enterprising Kunstvereine with an interest in contemporary, experimental art,4 she would have had to fall back onto teaching jobs to feed her small family.5 Instead, she developed an extensive œuvre of video performances and videotapes. Although her work was characterized by great precision and technical competence, she rejected any “useless technical gimmickry” (Rosenbach 1982: 114) and focused her attention on political issues and humanistic concerns. Over the past thirty years she has produced more than 80 works, which principally fall within four categories: self-contained videotapes, closed-circuit live performances, live performances with pre-recorded tapes, and videotapes resulting from live performances. In the following section I shall discuss a number of significant examples from her live performances of the years 1973-1980.
Video Concert – Improvisation (Cologne Art Fair, 1973)
Rosenbach’s first video actions took place in a studio, without an audience, and were what she called “private performances for the camera” without edits or any other technical interventions. (Rosenbach 1982: 109) Her first live video performance was Video Concert – Improvisation (Cologne Art Fair, 1973), which combined a concert of electronic music by Konrad Schnitzler with a video reflection /
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refraction of her own body. The artist held in one hand a lamp that lit parts of her body; with the other she directed the video camera mounted on a tripod. A live relay circuit conveyed to the audience dream-like images of Rosenbach’s body synchronized with the slow rhythm of Schnitzler’s music. Through an American fellow student at the Düsseldorf Academy she had made contact with Lucy Lippard and a number of feminist artists in California which, in the following years, led to several long stays in the USA. She also became acquainted with the budding video art community in New York and participated in a festival at 112 Greene St,6 which gave her a first US showcase, Isolation Is Transparent. She divided the performance space into two sections, separated by an opaque screen. On one side of the screen sat the audience and observed on several monitors her actions on the other side of the room. The exercise was intended, as the title suggests, to demonstrate the mechanisms of isolation and how they could be overcome. Her first major work, which found international acclaim and immediately became an icon of feminist video performance, was Don’t Believe I Am an Amazon (Biennale des Jeunes, Paris, 1975). Rosenbach combined live action with mediated images on monitors and shot fifteen arrows at a famous painting of the Virgin Mary by the Gothic painter Stefan Lochner. This masterpiece of the International Gothic style has always played an important role in the culture of Rosenbach’s home town Cologne, and she was not alone in admiring the beautiful image while at the same time disliking the Virgin’s passive and demure appearance. As an advocate of a new concept of femininity, Rosenbach wanted to go beyond traditional stereotypes and allow women to exist as multifaceted, composite and contradictory beings. But in her performance, she showed that by eliminating the traditional role of women the artist also annihilates part of herself, and that saying goodbye to one’s ancestors is a liberating as well as painful process. She used two cameras to superimpose on the monitor the two heads of herself and of the Madonna. When the arrows struck the reproduction of the painting, Rosenbach was struck as well and torturer and victim merged into one, creating an image of suffering by both women. In this action, Rosenbach questioned the allegories of amazon / virgin / mother, as these clichés only represented a very limited – and very limiting – aspect of femininity.
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Don’t Believe I Am An Amazon (Biennale des Jeunes, Paris, 1975)
In her view, the opposition of passive sweetness, weakness and selfsacrifice vs. predatory aggressiveness, belligerence and ferocity was an over-simplified interpretation of the female condition that needed to be overcome. Reflexions on the Birth of Venus (ICA, Los Angeles, 1976) dealt with another stereotype. In Rosenbach’s view, Botticelli’s Birth of Venus no longer conveyed the concept of a matriarchal Goddess of Fertility, but only a “clichéd image of female accommodation to the sexual demands of a patriarchal world”. (Rosenbach 1982: 13) Preceding the performance, Rosenbach projected a series of slides showing Venus in advertisements for make-up and underwear, liqueur and sex shops. As this goddess had been used and abused as a market commodity and as a representation of streamlined eroticism, she could no longer act as a model for twentieth-century women. In her performance, Rosenbach set up an apparatus of literally projecting an ancient image onto a modern woman. The shell, in which Venus rode out of the sea, was constructed from plastic material and placed on a stage. In it stood Rosenbach in a leotard, painted white on the front and black on the back. At her feet lay a carpet of fine sea salt and a small ‘pearl’ in the form of a monitor playing back images of rolling
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waves. As Rosenbach was turning around her own axis, she either reflected the image of Venus or absorbed it in her dark fabric. This was a poignant evocation of the problem women were facing with regard to dominant cultural representations of femininity: either they propagate them (and thereby disseminate their falsehood), or they deny them (and then deny themselves access to their positive aspects). What was needed, therefore, was a new, feminist system of representation. Together with four of her students from the School for Creative Feminism in Cologne, Rosenbach developed a performance that was documented on video, but did not involve any live-relay circuits. Venus Depression – Medusa Imagination (Palazzo Strozzi, Florence, 1977) explored in depth some of the themes she had dealt with in her previous performances. During a long stay in Florence, Rosenbach had studied the Venus images in the Uffizi gallery and had come to hate them for their saccharine sweetness. Another painting in the Uffizi, Caravaggio’s Head of Medusa, made a very different impression on her. In classical mythology, Medusa was a captivating beauty, whom Minerva, out of jealousy, turned into a hideous and dangerous monster. However, she retained her power of converting every object on which she fixed her eyes into stone. Perseus slew her, cut off her head and gave it to Minerva, who placed it in the centre of her shield. For Ulrike Rosenbach, Medusa became a protection figure, and the shield on which her image was painted an allegory of female power. On the wall of the performance space, inside a white circle, hung four shields with the Medusa head painted on them, and a fifth was held by Rosenbach, who cowered in a large circle filled with salt. The floor space was divided by a Pentagram, and on its intersections stood five pans with smoldering charcoal. Projected onto the walls were the four episodes depicted in Botticelli’s Nastagio degli Onesti. This painting relates to an episode from Boccaccio’s Decamerone (fifth day, eighth story), which was read out over a loudspeaker and structured the performance. Initially, Rosenbach was in the centre of the Pentagram, covering her head with the shield of Medusa. After a while, she got up, took one of the Venus images and burned it in a coal pan. One after the other, the four co-performers appeared, each taking a shield from the wall and burning further Venus images. Eventually, all performers moved towards the end points of the Pentagram, where they took up different body postures with the shields, signifying a progression from repression to liberation.
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In a statement on Venus-Medusa, Rosenbach explained that the Pentagram and the salt referred to the generative principle to be found in the ancient cults of Magna Mater. However, this all-powerful Moon and Earth Goddess could sometimes appear as a loving mother and sometimes as a vengeful destroyer of life. This polarity could still be found in much later Venus and Medusa figures. In Rosenbach’s performance, the mythological characters represented the two poles between which the five women moved. The space defined by the circle and the Pentagram acted as a frame for reconstructing a primeval unity of opposite forces: “When in the dark room the shields sparkle like the moon, the aggressive force of Medusa merges with the loving force of Venus”. (Rosenbach 1982: 35)7
Women’s Culture – Attempt To Make Contact (Vienna, Galerie Curtze, 1977)
Her next video performance focused on different aspects of women’s history under patriarchal conditions. In Women’s Culture – Attempt to Make Contact (Vienna, Bonn, Melbourne, 1977-79), she fixed 65 photographs to the skirting board of the performance space, showing women in different cultural contexts, ranging from the Agricultural Revolution to contemporary patriarchal society. Rosenbach rolled on the floor with her camera filming these images and relaying them to monitors set up in the auditorium. As she was ‘scrolling’ through ten thousand years of women’s history, the cables of the camera rolled tighter and tighter around her body until in the end, i.e. with the final images of women’s lives under patriarchy, she was fully tied up by the electric cable. Some of these images were used again in Salto Mortale (Bremen, Freiburg, Amsterdam, Lisbon, Maastricht, 1977/78), this time displaying different facets of women’s culture between the two extremes of a Palestinian freedom fighter and a Catholic Madonna.
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Salto Mortale (Pro Musica Nova, Bremen, 1977)
A new element, which was to assume a major significance in the artist’s subsequent performances, was a mirror. Rosenbach, hanging head down from a swing, filmed her own image in the mirror and made it merge with those of some 150 other women, whose photographs were pinned on the wall. In the 1970s, Rosenbach’s performances focused on the position of women in the history of humanity and how myths and works of art reflected on women’s lives in past centuries. In the 1980s, her political engagement in the Women’s Movement waned. She stopped doing live video performances and worked, from now on, with pre-recorded tapes that were integrated into her stage shows. Whereas before she used the material she herself had shot during a performance for subsequent release as video art tapes, she now employed technicians to record her performances. Subsequently, the
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footage was edited using a range of techniques and aesthetic strategies that made her work accessible to a larger audience, either by means of broadcasts or gallery exhibitions. In 1982, she closed the School for Creative Feminism, and in 1989 she became Professor for New Media in Saarbrücken. An increasingly spiritual concern informed her performances and the male-female polarity was now interpreted in the context of Eastern philosophies. She also introduced ritual elements and symbols from indigenous cultures such as Sioux and Aborigines, but more frequently she drew on European traditions of mythology and folklore and their visual representations in Western art. For example, in Meeting with Eve and Adam (Kunstverein Münster, 1982) she negotiated a path between the duality of her two halves in order to achieve a transformation and fusion of her male and female personas in a hermaphroditic unio mystica. Listening to the advice of the serpent – an ancient symbol of wisdom – and accepting the gift of the apple was for Eve an act of gaining self-knowledge and transforming herself from a natural into a cultural being. Guiding her journey was an angel and the figure of Till Eulenspiegel, here turned into a female fool. This popular Rhenish character (the annual Cologne carnival always has thousands of Eulenspiegels roaming the city) turned up again in Die Eulenspieglerin (Kunstverein Hamburg, 1984). Not having been accepted as a court jester, Eulenspiegel became a vagrant fool who defied morality and custom and shocked citizens with his anal humor. In a literal interpretation of the name, Rosenbach created images of the wisdom of the owl (Eule) and the reflecting mirror (Spiegel). In her performance, this outsider became a figure of strength and courage who ventured into the unknown without showing any fear. Obstacles on the way to self-fulfillment were only temporary irritations, and as long as the female fool learned from her lessons, she regained direction and arrived at her goal. Eulenspiegel’s path was again marked out by salt; the obstacles she had to overcome were represented by TV monitors displaying a fragmented kaleidoscope of sounds and images; a red thread (‘Ariadne’s Thread’) helped her to find her way out of the labyrinth. Other props used in the show were twigs (the tree of life) and two silver horns (the magical bull Minotaur). Rosenbach understood her performances to be autobiographical narratives, showing the historic origins of her present condition, her struggle with it and some possible ways of overcoming
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the limitations of her status as a woman. Her concept of creativity was greatly influenced by her teacher Joseph Beuys, but from the very beginning she combined the archetypal images and symbols in her work with historical formations of gender roles. Her interest in Earth Goddesses and the subliminal survival of matriarchal concepts in patriarchal societies went hand in hand with an awareness of how the idols of fertility had been turned into clichéd images of streamlined eroticism geared towards male gratification. In several of her performances she dealt with contrasting feminine roles, such as Venus, Eve, Madonna on the one hand, and Diana, Medusa and the Amazons on the other. She felt that women who were searching for a female identity had to confront these images of femininity and explore their relevance for the modern era. She understood herself to be rooted in a long tradition that had never completely died out, but was buried under, or mixed up with, existing patriarchal structures. One function of her performances was to externalize these contradictory aspects of the female psyche in a ritual-like process. This, hopefully, would allow her and her audiences to cross boundaries and eventually transform themselves into more liberated beings. Rosenbach used video technology as “a psychic feedback” (Rosenbach 1982: 43), similar to the mirror she often employed in her performances, in order to show how woman sees herself and how she is perceived by others. Her video performances revealed the representation of women in Western art to be a vehicle for patriarchal ideology and showed that the sign ‘woman’ was not a natural, given thing, but a product of society. She sought to break out of the prescribed codes and to foster new discourses that showed women as complex and contradictory beings. She articulated her own identity by exposing traditional roles and overturning stereotypes, by assembling multifaceted aspects of self that drew on both masculine and feminine traits. Her work encouraged identification processes in the spectators, but instead of offering them a single focus, she presented her actions in simultaneous discourses of a physical body and a mediated image of that body. This multi-perspective angle fostered a critical awareness and reflective consciousness in her audiences. Many of Rosenbach’s performances dealt with the relationships between women and nature, art and nature, women and technological society. Her images of organic growth belonged to an essentialist brand of feminism that understood women to be sacred custodians of the earth with a historic mission for the care of the
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environment. By the 1980s, she realized that working towards the rebirth of an earth-centered women’s culture and to affect a return to “Mother Nature” was no longer a realistic agenda for the Women’s Movement. As a result, her work diversified and increasingly engaged with metaphysical and ecological concerns, derived from Wicca, Sufi, Tantra, Eco-Feminism, and so on. Thus she placed the female condition in a broad perspective of humanistic and cosmic dimensions.
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Notes: 1
For a more detailed discussion of the complex relationships between Happenings, Body Art and Video Performance see Berghaus (2005). 2 These figures and much of the biographical information presented in this essay was gathered in two interviews conducted in Rosenbach’s home in Rösbach near Bonn, on 16 September and 6 October 2004. 3 For the work of the School see the documentation in Rosenbach (1980a). 4 Kunstvereine are non-commercial art associations comparable to the British Society for the Encouragement of Arts. There are some 231 of these in Germany, usually founded and run by art-interested citizens and attached to local museums. 5 Before graduating as a fine artist, Rosenbach had trained to become an art teacher and written a degree thesis on Dada art. 6 This video performance series of 1974 was curated by Liza Bear and Willoughby Sharp. It presented, amongst others, works by Vito Acconci, Chris Burden, Dennis Oppenheim, Richard Serra, Keith Sonnier and William Wegman. 7 See also her statement in Bronson and Gale (1979: 145).
Primary works consulted Rosenbach, Ulrike. 1976-77. Ulrike Rosenbach: Foto, Video, Aktion, Exh. cat. Aachen: Neue Galerie, Sammlung Ludwig. —.1980a. Schule für Kreativen Feminismus: Beispiel einer autonomen Kulturarbeit, Cologne: Schule für Kreativen Feminismus. —. 1980b. Ulrike Rosenbach / Valie Export. Exh. cat. Dorine Mignot (ed.). Amsterdam: Stedelijk Museum —. 1982. Ulrike Rosenbach: Videokunst, Foto, Aktion/Performance, feministische Kunst, Cologne: Rosenbach. —. 1983. Ulrike Rosenbach: Video and Performance Art. Exh. cat. Boston/MA: Institute of Contemporary Art. —. 1986. Ulrike Rosenbach, Exh. cat. Wolfgang Becker (ed.). Aachen: Neue Galerie, Sammlung Ludwig. —. 1989. Ulrike Rosenbach: Video, Performance, Installation 1972-1989. Exh. cat. Claudia Lupri (ed.). Toronto: Art Gallery of York University and Art Gallery of Ontario. —. 1990. Ulrike Rosenbach: Arbeiten der 80er Jahre. Video, Installation, Performance, Fotografie. Exh. cat. Ulrike Rosenbach and Bernd Schulz (eds). Saarbrücken: Stadtgalerie. —. 1997. Made for Arolsen: Ulrike Rosenbach Installationen, Exh. cat. Gerhard Glüher and Birgit Kümmel (eds). Bad Arolsen: Schloß Arolsen. —. 1998. Ulrike Rosenbach: Die einsame Spaziergängerin. Exh. cat. Ursula Schönewald (ed.). Göttingen: Altes Rathaus.
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—. 1999. Ulrike Rosenbach: Im Palast der neugeborenen Kinder, Exh. cat. Kornelia von Berswordt-Wallrabe (ed.). Schwerin: Staatliches Museum Schwerin. —. 1999. Ulrike Rosenbach: Last Call fuer Engel, Exh. cat. Frank Günter Zehnder (ed.). Bonn: Ausstellungshalle Alte Rotation.
Secondary works consulted Berghaus, Günter. 2005. Avant-garde Performance: Live Events and Electronic Technologies. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan. Bronson, A. A., and Peggy Gale (eds). 1979. Performance by Artists. Toronto: Art Metropole. Grüterich, Marlis. 1989. ‘Ulrike Rosenbach: Metamorphosen zwischen Natur- und Kultur-Kreisen’ in Künstler: Kritisches Lexikon der Gegenwartskunst, vol. 6. Munich: WB Verlag: 3-11. Herzogenrath, Wulf (ed.). 1982. Videokunst in Deutschland 1963-1982. Videobänder, Videoinstallationen, Video-Objekte, Videoperformances, Fotografien. Stuttgart: Hatje.
New Media and Feminist Interventions: Valie Export’s Medial Anagrams Margit Grieb Abstract: Digital technology is still in its infancy, not yet confined to a prescribed role in society, and it has therefore become an important new medium for innovative feminist artists. This essay looks at new technologies of distribution and storage, in particular the CD-ROM, and examines how these technologies can shape the ‘older’ medium of film and its accompanying institutional systems. The CD-ROM Bilder der Berührungen (Images of Touch, 1997) by the Austrian feminist avant-garde artist Valie Export constitutes an early but thought-provoking experiment with digital storage. Instead of regarding her media art from the 60s, 70s and 80s as texts firmly grounded in the analog era, Export repackages and recontextualizes her film Syntagma (1983) and other artworks and displays them in the new digital environment. In an attempt to further her specific feminist ideological goals Export creatively transcends formal ‘borders’ and, through her art, ventures into a virtual terra incognita.
What interests me is that even minimal shifts in context will bring out differences in signification for the same unit of representation. It is a kind of language system for image production in the technological media. (Valie Export in Mueller 1994: 213)
Syntagma and its Function in Bilder der Berührungen The Austrian feminist and avant-garde artist Valie Export has been producing essays, films, actions, videos, installations, photographs, performances and multimedia projects since the mid nineteen-sixties. Throughout her prolific career, spanning several decades and still very much in progress, she has been confronting the intersections of art and technology and interrogating how these relate to women and feminist concerns. In the CD-ROM Bilder der Berührungen, published in 1998 (in English, ‘images produced by touching’ or ‘images of touch’ [she never offers a translation for the title]), she reframes and repurposes her diverse aesthetic inquiries of more than thirty years, and disseminates the results on CD-ROM. In other words, and as the basic premise, Bilder1 is a type of artistic portfolio that acquaints the user
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with the most important work of Export’s career. On another level, however, it presents itself as something more – as an autonomous addition to her artistic œuvre. In Bilder der Berührungen, Export uses one of her experimental films, Syntagma (1983), as the centerpiece of the CDROM presentation. This is a fitting choice because Syntagma, with regard to its structure, style, content and production date, has much in common with the formal aspects and artistic intentions of Bilder. Because of its relatively short duration of 18 minutes, Syntagma is well suited to the formal logic of the CD-ROM as a medium. Due to its limited capacity, offering no more than 800 megabytes of storage, the CD-ROM is a less than ideal medium to accommodate the storage and dissemination of traditional films. In order for any feature-length film to be adapted to fit on a CD-ROM, it must either be highly compressed, sacrificing image clarity and/or size during play, or split up onto several discs. Although the CD-ROM, widely available since the mid-1980s, was the first mobile storage medium to allow for films to be displayed on personal computers, it was quickly eclipsed by the now dominant format, the high capacity DVD-Video, which can accommodate several hours of full-screen, full-motion video and several voice tracks on a single disc.2 A CDROM, on the other hand, can only contain about half an hour of a similar quality video. Nonetheless, serving as a link between films and computers granted the CD-ROM special status as the storage medium of choice for many multimedia artists, at least until DVD-ROM became available in 1997 (only one year before Bilder was published). As for Export’s Bilder, the CD-ROM’s storage limitations have little effect on the presentation of the film. With the exception of the relatively small display size of Syntagma and the various additional images, the CD-format appears suited to Export’s project. This is due not only to Syntagma’s short duration, but also to the lack of image clarity in the 16mm original. Thus, the film can be shown in its entirety and still allow for ancillary material to be present on the same disc. As an experimental film, Syntagma consists of several separate units of meaning, structured in a montage-like sequence. This sequence exhibits a very loose narrative structure, if any, and is therefore less resistant to interruptions occurring by clicking the mouse on other selection options while Syntagma is playing. Furthermore, Export’s experimental film is assembled as a montage,
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and intersplicing extra-filmic materials appears less distracting than it would in a film with fluid editing. On the CD-ROM, the representations of art, films and video that are paired with scenes from Syntagma often comment on the film’s thematic content, or elaborate on a visual point the film is making. Syntagma, like Bilder, re-frames fragments and elements of Export’s body of work, including her experimentation with film, video, photography, as well as aesthetic practices used in performances and installations. The film and CD-ROM both recycle Export’s previous work and replicate certain techniques, decontextualizing them from their original sites of display, such as communal spaces and city streets, and estranging them from governmental and private patronage systems, such as private collections and museums. They are now recontextualized, stored in an alien format, and displayed by different apparatus. In the case of the CD, the reappropriation goes even further than in Syntagma. Here, installations, videos and photographs of performances, experimental films, and extracts of feature-length films, as well as some of Export’s critical writings on art, have all been homogenized into a single executable file and preserved on disc in a mere 600 megabytes of storage space. Recycling existing ideas and products is a common tactic of the commercial world, where developers use and repurpose materials with name recognition in order to maximize profit while minimizing economic risk. Export adopts this practice to some degree, not due to financial considerations, but presumably to make her transition and initiation to this new medium less challenging. With this strategy, she has tapped into two of the most appealing characteristics of digital media: the accepted recycling of narratives, themes, techniques, and code, and the ability to display materials with a variety of material origins. Finally, S y n t a g m a is a mid-career work for Export. Appropriately, in Bilder it is used as a platform around which to stage work that chronologically precedes and follows it. In accordance with its title, Syntagma uses montage sequences comprised of a series of images that are related by similarity or contiguity, by a relationship that is established, specifically, through the placement in that particular series.3 In other words, although the individual film segments have meaning in and of themselves, the intended effect of these segments is only established within the film’s whole. This montage technique is also at the core of Bilder’s CD-
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ROM design and presented as a ‘digital syntagma’. Because all of the works featured already exerted an artistic effect when they were originally composed and exhibited, only a placement into a new semantic and formal context, within a different medium and in a constellation made-up of different artistic works, can stimulate new interest and create new meaning. Export wants the user to pay attention to this new context, so that Bilder der Berührungen can transgress the boundaries of the artist’s portfolio and become a work in its own right. Indeed, Export has never hesitated to recycle elements of her work, a product that she calls medial anagrams (see opening quote), and to place them within the context of a new or even similar piece. It is a practice that reflects her approach to art. By extension, then, Bilder, adopts this approach to achieve a twofold goal: it serves as a retrospective of her career, and it represents Export’s first experimentation with the CD-ROM as an artistic device. Valie Export began her career in the late nineteen sixties as part of the European neo-avant-garde art scene. Initially, she was associated with Viennese Actionism, the only female member amongst a group of male performers such as Günter Brus, Peter Weibel, and Hermann Nitsch. It is, of course, part and parcel of avantgarde practice to experiment with new technologies in an attempt to exceed the limitations of traditional media and subvert art’s status as a commodity or good. Export, however, always regarded her political agenda as necessarily influenced and determined by her feminist concern, in her own words, “to open up limited patterns of perception and representation, limited views of the natural and artificial image and space, and a limited concept of truth and reality” (Mueller 1994: 219). Export’s art straddles traditional boundaries set by media, art movements, gender, conventions, and the public sphere. In these areas she refuses to submit obediently to any prescribed limits, especially when those arise from gender-related issues.
Intersections of Feminism and Technology Export’s artworks from the last three decades differ considerably with respect to media, exhibition venue, genre, and subject matter. Nonetheless, the artist’s feminist ideology, specifically her focus on the female body used as both subject and conduit of her ideas, resonates throughout her oeuvre.
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Since the 1980s Export’s career has been guided by her interest in exploring digital media and technologies. She argues: […] there is nothing masculine about computer technology. […] The points of departure of expression, content, and representations may be gender specific but not the medium itself. If there is male dominance it also means that women have not tried hard enough to get a hold of the media and to use it for their goals. This is hard work because women have never been granted access without a struggle. (Mueller 1994: 214-5)
In an effort to apply a Brechtian Umfunktionierung to the computer, albeit using a feminist rather than Marxist approach to the procedure, Export uses the CD-ROM Bilder in a similar way to her previously implemented technological gadgets, as Monika Faber puts it, “to investigate as well as expand our senses” (1997: 213). She employs the technology, according to Faber, “contrary to those conventions that want to tie [it] into the existing system — in the sense of a ‘neutral’ scientific innovation” (213). For Export, in order to be artist and subject, rather than model and object, it is necessary to be in command of the means of re-production, to be an ‘image-maker’, not an image. Export’s desire to control how women’s images are represented in new media art echoes Donna Haraway’s belief that “cyborg writing is about the power to survive, not on the basis of original innocence, but on the basis of seizing the tools to mark the world that marked [women] as other” (1991: 175). Haraway’s cyborg is founded on the notion that “[l]ate twentieth-century machines have made thoroughly ambiguous the difference between natural and artificial, mind and body, self-developing and externally designed, and many other distinctions that used to apply to organisms and machines. Our machines are disturbingly lively, and we ourselves frighteningly inert” (1991: 152). The cyborg, a fusion of animal and machine, erases age-old oppositions such as nature and culture and therefore also affects the way we conceive of ‘natural’, hence unchangeable, states. Since the technology is here to stay, argues Haraway further, “we cannot go back ideologically or materially. It’s not just that ‘god’ is dead; so is ‘goddess’” (162). In other words, the technological developments of the late twentieth century have had a profound impact upon women as well as men, but most importantly on ideological positions such as feminism.
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Feminism after the cyborg, which has come to be known as ‘cyberfeminism’, is based on the notion that, by using contemporary technology in productive ways, it is possible for women to construct identities, sexualities, gender, and other cultural codes in less restrictive ways. New technologies make it possible for women to codefine traditions and histories as they are in the process of being made. Cyberfeminism does not depart from traditional feminism completely, but instead “takes feminism as its starting point, and turns its focus upon contemporary technologies, exploring the intersections between gender identity, the body, culture and technology” (Brayton 1997). Rather than viewing technology with suspicion because it was spawned by a patriarchal system, cyberfeminists such as Sadie Plant call for an alliance between women and technology (Brayton 1997). In the same way that Haraway claims the cyborg to be “the illegitimate offspring of militarism and patriarchal capitalism”, and concludes that cyborgs, as “illegitimate offspring, are often exceedingly unfaithful to their origins” because their fathers are of no significance (1991: 151), cyberfeminist women disregard the technological origin of most new media as inconsequential. Nonetheless, cyberfeminism does not disregard technological history altogether; neither does it erase the decades of struggle for women’s equality, especially in the field of information technology. Instead, cyberfeminism incorporates the historical development of feminism into its own and actively tries to redirect technology’s malebiased trajectory: it builds on and reshapes, rather than breaks with, tradition. Export supports this ideological position in that she endows a new apparatus, the CD-ROM, with work from preceding decades. The CD-ROM not only chronicles Export’s untiring experimentation with emerging media, from video in the seventies to digital photography in the eighties and CD-ROM in the nineties, it also represents a record of her own continuously developing feminism. In Export’s exposition via Bilder, both – technology and feminism – appear fluid and dynamic rather than restrictive and static. Although Roswitha Mueller, in her book Fragments of the Imagination, does not mention the artist’s work as being informed by cyberfeminism per se, she points out that, for Export, technology is a potentially liberating agent that can release the biologically overdetermined body of the woman in patriarchy. In order to gain the status of subject in society (rather than remain forever the object),
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women must necessarily abandon what is often viewed as biology (1994: 59). However, in Export’s artistic visions, abandoning biology does not mean disregarding the body as an important socio-political factor thoroughly implicated in gender issues. On the contrary, her work stresses the fact that the female body has always played an important role in defining women’s status quo in society. In Bilder the viewer becomes acquainted with a variety of different artworks by Export, most of which either include and thematize the female body, or its absence, as well as its representation in other media. Her emphatic casting of the body as a site where social pressures manifest themselves and questions of identity based on gender are raised, contests specific scientific and cultural discourses which aim at rendering the body superfluous and view consciousness as a unit separated from our incarnate selves. As Katherine Hayles explains in How We Became Posthuman (1999), this retro-discourse, based on age-old Cartesian beliefs that split the mind from the body, has been fueled by investigations into the nature of information (as early as the Macy Conferences on cybernetics from 1945 to 1960) and recent developments in digital technology. Increasingly, information is seen as abstract and classified as either pattern or randomness. Hayles is keen on reintroducing the body into this conceptualization in order to demonstrate that there is a dynamic relationship between seemingly disembodied information and the materiality of the systems that originate, receive, and convey it. In her study, she unequivocally opposes the idea that to be posthuman should be equated with destroying that which physically constitutes the human being: his or her body. Rather, in Hayles’ view it is important to retain and include the human body as a container of a cognitive system that interacts and provides the interface for communicating with intelligent machines. A post-human, or cyborg in Haraway’s vocabulary, is located somewhere between this body and the machines that make it function in contemporary society. To be sure, deserting the body in a society that still affirms corporeal importance through fashion, prejudice, class and gender markers, pornography, violence, and eating disorders, has important implications for feminist concerns as well. In Bilder der Berührungen Export makes a conspicuous effort to implicate the body in the featured artwork, in information retrieval, as well as in the original coding of the presentation. Everywhere in Bilder, the user is confronted with bodies and body parts of women
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being mutilated and tortured, who appear as disembodied limbs, cast themselves as part of the landscape, merge with structures, or pose side by side with their projected double.4 The body is presented as artist and subject as well as employed as medium. The centerpiece of the CD-ROM, the film Syntagma, highlights the corporeal as a thematic source even more strikingly. This short experimental film presents the image and body of woman as a heterogeneous and problematic entity, endowing it with resolute movement and potential for action in some scenes, while in others fragmenting and immobilizing the same. In the introductory sequence a disembodied voice proclaims: “The body clearly takes a position between me and the world. On the one hand this body is the center of my world, and on the other it is the object in the world of the others”. The adaptation of this quote into images, but also an interrogation of the implications of such dichotomous statements, becomes the film’s foremost intention. In the scenes that follow, the body is presented as an interface on one hand, and as an objectified fragment on the other, and at times occupies both positions. The very first sequence of the film makes this point very clear: Syntagma begins with a pair of female hands forcing open two strips of celluloid. As Kaja Silverman remarks: The feminine real seems to be asserting itself over and against the fictions of the silver screen. But as the opening becomes larger, this hypothesis is discredited. The shapely hands signify culture, not nature; they are well-manicured, and their fingernails have been painted with red nail polish. (1997: 214)
The woman’s hands signify power in their action, but at the same time project impotence in their disembodied and beautified state. However, in an act of creative resistance against their disembodiment they manage to speak (literally) to the viewer, they announce the film’s title in sign language. In the ensuing film Export continually juxtaposes the female body’s powerlessness and passivity with its potential for empowerment and action. Another sequence in Syntagma, which appears twice, features a female actor in constant motion and shows her crossing a room from different angles, at varying speeds, and at times both of these styles spliced together. Roswitha Mueller interprets these images as a feminist adaptation of Rilke’s Panther, where the woman, entrapped in the domestic sphere, represents the
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“captive panther pacing back and forth behind bars, a motion that betrays potential strength; pent-up explosive energy that reaches a pitch of accelerated frenzy” (1994: 187-8). Similarly, in another sequence, Export contrasts the cut-up pieces of a black-and-white nude photograph with the body of a colorful female who appears to be a real person. The black-and-white cut-outs remind the viewer of the documentation of a murder victim; the depicted woman lies completely immobilized and pallid against a backdrop of white, sanitized hospital-style sheets. Superimposed on this ghastly installation appears the ‘real’ body with its prominently vibrant complexion as a vigorous agent interacting with the lifeless object, asserting its dominance over it by partially covering it. On yet another level, however, both these female bodies – the photograph as well as the live model – are only representations of the ‘real’ and part of a series of photographs in the style of Export’s earlier work Ontological Leap, which are now, as part of the film, re-projected onto a screen. In the words of Silverman, “for Export, there is no bodily reality which is not informed by representation, and no corporeal representation which does not have its real effects” (1997: 215). Export’s film does not want to present the body as a simple dichotomy of either dead or alive, powerful or weak, whole or fragmented, a physical representation of the self and an object to others, but rather presents it as an entity in motion, able to represent both ends of the spectrum at the same time and intermittently. The woman’s image in Syntagma appears as a part, rather than the product, of a process. Apart from Syntagma, the focal point of the CD-ROM, Bilder also brings Valie Export’s staging of the body as an important feminist project to the foreground in its interface design. She uses an image of a hand to stand in for the body, which represents both the artist as a producer of the CD-ROM and its images, as well as the user who retrieves, through movement of the mouse, the images and texts on the CD. The hand is a fitting icon that relates the body’s potential for action more obviously than any other body part. The Interface as ‘mise-en-abyme’ The main interface, the portal to all interactive applications, plays an important and interesting role in the navigation of CD-ROM applications and is especially influential in Bilder. The CD-ROM interface in general does not simply perform the function of establishing a genre, mood, or relationship with the spectator (as is the
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case with the ‘establishing shot’ in cinema, for example). It is a recurring component, continually confronting the participant with its regulating functions, but also with its aesthetic comments on the materials presented: it is an intermediary agent between artist and user. In Bilder der Berührungen the interface performs the title of the work, both aesthetically and formally. It acts as a mise-en-abyme within the entire presentation because, as Gregory Ulmer explains, the mise-en-abyme “shows what it is telling, does what it says, displays its own making, reflects its own action” (Lunenfeld 2000: 54); it represents a “mini narrative that encapsulates or somehow reflects the larger structures within which it is held: it is a mirroring of the text by the subtext” (Lunenfeld 2000: 54). When the participant tours the interface of the CR-ROM with the mouse, his or her movements activate two intersecting lines. When the intersecting points of these lines pass over a ‘hot spot’, a user access point, in conjunction with a mouse-click, they lead to the various parts of the CD. The sections that become activated provide access to representations of Export’s work. The artist’s images have literally become Bilder der Berührungen, images produced by touching and/or contact. As was already mentioned, the hand shown on the interface represents the user’s own active body part involved in the production of meaning, as well as alluding to the artist’s involvement in producing the artwork in the first place. The user of the CD-ROM, as well as the artist, both play their part in producing this artistic experience.
Interface of Valie Export’s Bilder der Berührungen
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The CD-title and interface complement each other nicely here, because they bring out the hypermediated space of the interactive work itself. By ‘hypermediated’ I’m referring to Bolter and Grusin’s use of the term in their book Remediation, where hypermediation signifies a “style of visual representation whose goal is to remind the viewer of the medium” (2000: 272).5 Through the interface and title the participant is reminded that, although the images are representations of Export’s own art, the constellation and retrieval of these images are to some degree controlled by the user.6 Through the interface alone, and by highlighting its constructed nature, Export’s CD-ROM has achieved a critical distance in the user. Since the interface serves the function of entrance, exit and intermediary throughout the interactive experience, there is no risk of the user ever repressing the mediating element or agency, nor his or her own function as an active producer of meaning. Additionally, the prominent position of Syntagma in the interface also creates a hypermediated effect. The film uses many allusions to multiple distances, for example in the recording of an image, which is itself a projection, through mirror reflections, photographic representations and recorded images themselves. Both Syntagma and the CD-ROM thematize the act of adaptation and transpose their raw material from one medium into another. The user and viewer become keenly aware of the fact that images are purposefully created and assembled. The act of mediation and the agent/creator are foregrounded at the expense of ‘natural’ images. This foregrounding of agency also serves Export’s feminist intentions in that it achieves what Justine Cassell has termed a “feminist vision” of digital design, namely to create an electronic text that speaks “about [its own] design and construction” (1998: 302). Bilder’s interface mise-en-abyme achieves another critical function: many digital media exhibit difficulty in sustaining long and drawn-out arguments or narratives, elements that are endemic in Western literary tradition, the classic case in point being hypertext. The option of ‘clicking’, and therefore leaving or diverging from the presented argument or presentation, is always there and often even encouraged. Every page must be able to stand on its own because the creator cannot rely on any specific prior knowledge on behalf of the visitor, since point of entry and trajectory may be different for each user. In order for digital media to keep from what Peter Lunenfeld
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calls “atomizing discourse” – to collapse discourse to such an extent that it loses all meaning and significance – they must include opportunities for nano-thought. Nano-thought, Lunenfeld explains, consists of “ideas, metaphors, and images processed down to their smallest units, and then repeated throughout digital databases” (2000: 173). The mise-en-abyme as interface – when employed skillfully as it is in Export’s CD – can be a superb vehicle for nano-thought, one which is both profound and sustaining. When navigating Bilder, one is constantly reminded through the interface mise-en-abyme that these artworks, as well as the film Syntagma, originally distributed via and created by ‘older’ representational systems, can attain new life and new meaning in a digital environment because the technical, historical, as well as social context in which these works originally appeared has been transformed completely. Most importantly, the user has played an active role in creating this permutated context. Limits and Control Interactivity has become a buzzword in recent years for digital new media. In the realm of art, however, the possibility of interactivity enjoys a long-standing tradition within certain genre of art, such as installations and performances. Interactivity necessarily involves the retreat of the artist as sole producer of meaning in the artwork. To a certain extent interactivity may be viewed as a natural outgrowth of post-structuralism, where meaning can no longer be located entirely within the text, but is rather produced by the subjective response of the recipient. Export’s feminist perspective allows her to be especially supportive of dislodging the author as the center of creativity – a patriarchal construct to be sure – and she has pursued this goal since her early works by implementing interactivity and performativity visà-vis experiments with new technologies. CD-ROM presentations such as Bilder abandon to some degree the claim of artistic autonomy, once thought to be an integral part of any artwork, for their production of meaning. At the same time, however, they are ‘contained’ in their form, they are based on ROM (read-only-memory) and limited to that which is permanently encoded on the CD. Therefore, these interactive applications are somewhat controlled and controllable (by the author/programmer). This feature has positive and negative implications, depending on how one views the fact that meaning and learning is directed and mediated. Thus, it is important to interrogate the CD not only according to what
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and how material is presented, but also to deal with the limits that ‘authors’ have applied to these digital worlds, so that we do not, in the words of Lev Manovich, “mistake the structure of somebody else’s mind for our own”. It is precisely in the limitations set in the technical realization of Bilder where the CD fails to live up to its artistic potential and feminist intent (at least in terms of dislodging the ‘author as creator’ construct). This gap between theory and actualization represents a trap for many new media filmmakers and artists. The user does not have sufficient control over the content and presentation to be genuinely involved in the production of new meaning. The CD-ROM Bilder der Berührungen has too much in common with other non-interactive conventional representational apparatuses such as certain museum installations, video, photography, and film. Although much of the work Export presents on Bilder was originally conceived for these audience-passive media and spaces, a new presentation of these pieces could have embraced more of the formal capacities and opportunities that the CD-ROM format offers. Instead, in several of its main parts, the CD-ROM mimics the non-interactive video installation in a museum, which persistently runs while audiences come and go, or the cinema, where viewers sit and watch an uninterrupted presentation. If ‘Syntagma’ or ‘Playback’ is clicked, for example, the application starts running continuously, without any user input whatsoever (although it does not repeat automatically). Although Export disrupts the semantic context of the Syntagma sequences by providing an option to intersperse images and video clips from her other work, this practice does not produce much in the way of the unexpected. This is primarily due to the limited time that each image or scene is available for clicking, as well as the prearranged selection of work, which is available to be paired with each particular Syntagma scene. In other words, Export has predetermined, to some degree, every new combination of images instead of letting the user combine and contrast her work independently. Of course, the user can opt not to click, but without any disruptions, neither the film nor the artwork’s context change, and therefore the original meaning is preserved. The limited interactive opportunities are especially apparent in the presentation of the film Syntagma. There is no random scene access available, nor can the film be fast-forwarded, rewound, or otherwise played in a non-cinematic way (except halted). The images
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that comprise the film cannot be manipulated in any way, such as distorted in size or focus. Scenes cannot be cut or rearranged, and neither slow motion nor freeze-frame is possible. The only possible interaction with the film relies exclusively on the peripheral images and video clips that are pre-arranged by Export and appear at strategic moments during the film for specific periods of time. In many ways, Syntagma stays true to its original cinematic form, although it is no longer formally obligated to do so. In this regard, what remains does not exceed or subvert the conventional art portfolio in as radical a way as expected, and it cannot aspire to realize Export’s ambitious claim found on the CDinsert to the fullest degree possible. There, she proclaims: “The CDROM should not be regarded as a documentation of my works; it is an individual artistic work that stands for itself”. There are plenty of promising concepts introduced in Bilder der Berührungen, especially considering the fact that it was produced when the CD-ROM was but a nascent technology. But ultimately, the artist’s excessive control over the material presented fetters the medium’s potential for creative interaction and unpredictability.
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Notes:
1
I will henceforth alternately use the abbreviation Bilder and the complete title to refer to Bilder der Berührungen. 2 There are currently technologies in development that will allow a DVD to store ca. 50 gigabytes of information. 3 The term syntagma is derived from the Greek and refers to a collection of texts (or words) which, when assembled in a specific configuration, express a comprehensive idea. 4 One could also see a correlation between Export’s proclivity for showing mutilation and disembodied body parts in Bilder to the tendency of digital media to cut up the whole into segments, such as in pixilation, webpage design, and digital sampling. 5 The opposite of this effect would be “immediacy” or “transparency”, where the viewer is supposed to forget that what is presented is going through a mediating filter. Virtual reality only represents an extreme example. 6 The title Bilder der Berührungen also captures the ambiguousness of the word ‘touch’ in a digital world, as in images that are produced by the touch of the mouse in physical space and through the virtual touch of simulated intersecting lines on the screen.
Primary works consulted Export, Valie. 1998. Bilder der Berührungen. CD-ROM. Cologne: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König.
Secondary works consulted Bolter, Jay David and Richard Grusin. 2000. Remediation. Understanding New Media. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press. Brayton, Jennifer. ‘Cyberfeminism as New Theory’. On line at: http://www.unb.ca/ PAR-L/win/cyberfem.htm (consulted 20.01 2005). Cassell, Justine. 1998. ‘Storytelling as Nexus of Change in the Relationship between Gender and Technology: A Feminist Approach to Software Design’ in Cassell, Justine and Henry Jenkins (eds) From Barbie to Mortal Combat Gender and Computer Games. Cambridge, Mass: The MIT Press: 298-326. Faber, Monika. 1997. ‘Leap of Space. Time-Poem. Movement-Trace’ in Split:Reality Valie Export: Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien (ed.). Vienna, New York: Springer: 208-213. Haraway, Donna. 1991. Simians, Cyborgs, and Women. The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge.
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Hayles, N. Katherine. 1999. How We Became Posthuman. Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. Lunenfeld, Peter. 2000. Snap to Grid. A User’s Guide to Digital Arts, Media, and Cultures. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press. Manovich, Lev. 2002. The Language of New Media. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press. Mueller, Roswitha. 1994. Valie Export: Fragments of the Imagination. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Silverman, Kaja. 1997. ‘Speak, body’ in Split:Reality Valie Export in Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien (ed.). Vienna, New York: Springer: 214-223.
The Paracinema of Anthony McCall and Tony Conrad Jonathan Walley Abstract: In this essay, I argue that paracinema (works that identify themselves as films but do not take the form of the film medium as we know it) was a response by certain filmmakers to institutional circumstances specific to avant-garde cinema, understood here as a distinct mode of film practice. The paracinema of McCall and Conrad intervened in these circumstances, challenging the dominance of mediumspecific formalism, which was viewed as problematic by the early seventies.
The “Para” in “Paracinema” As avant-garde film studies revises received notions about the renaissance of the sixties and seventies, and tries to make sense of the largely untouched field of work produced in the 25 years since, it will need to come to terms with the following fact: some of the most interesting and perhaps most important works in the tradition of avantgarde film were not made in the film medium. Though they identify themselves, often via their titles, as “films” or “movies,” they were not made in film. Or, if they don’t jettison the medium entirely, they reconfigure the filmic apparatus so substantially as to bear little resemblance to film as we have known it for over a hundred years. Ken Jacobs, himself a major practitioner of this kind of cinematic work, named it “paracinema” (Hanlon 1974: 60). I have revived and elaborated upon this original reference (Walley 2003), offering it as a way to describe and theorize works that identify themselves as films, and specifically as part of the tradition of avantgarde cinema, despite not being embodied in the film medium. Here, I wish to nuance my original discussion of this unique type of avantgarde film practice. The OED offers these definitions of the prefix “para:” As a preposition, Greek para had the sense of “by the side of, beside,” whence “alongside of, by, past, beyond,” etc. In composition it had the same senses, with such cognate adverbial ones as “to one side,
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Seizing on these connotations of irregularity, perversion, and wrongness, Jeffrey Sconce (2004: 534-535) and Joan Hawkins (2000) have used the term paracinema to denote trash or cult film, which challenge traditional standards of taste and morality and academic assumptions about artistic quality. For them, paracinema is transgressive, disrupting the film studies academy and its canons. My use of the term points to another transgression – of the limits placed on film art by commitments to medium-specificity theory that dominated avant-garde film in the sixties and seventies, and continue to inform scholarship. There are several variants of medium-specificity theory. Generally speaking, however, it is based on the premise that the ontology of cinema is defined by the medium of film and the distinct formal capacities of that medium. One or more of these mediumspecific capacities is taken to be the essence of cinema. A certain kind of formalist analysis follows from such assumptions, focusing on those qualities that are essentially cinematic and that show off the medium to its best advantage. Such medium-specific formalism often produces a set of prescriptive guidelines for filmmakers, privileging certain aesthetic devices (e.g. editing) over others (e.g. staging). Medium-specificity can be traced to the earliest speculative writings on cinema by theorists like Germaine Dulac, Jean Epstein, Hugo Munsterberg, and Rudolph Arnheim. Advocates of mediumspecificity have used this theoretical mode to attain an equal footing for cinema in the pantheon of the arts by staking out its unique aesthetic terrain, identifying those characteristics that distinguish it from other art forms. While medium-specificity has informed critical writing outside the avant-garde, it is within the avant-garde that it has dominated production and theorizing; given this dominance, works that identify themselves as films but that do not employ the film medium are at best marginalized and at worst not even recognizable as cinematic art. I have suggested that paracinematic works are transgressive because they reject the tenets of medium-specificity theory. However, my use of the term “transgressive” does not entail the same assumptions as that of Sconce and Hawkins. I use the term in the colloquial sense, suggesting a challenge to a dominant aesthetic but
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not the disruption of mainstream values that interest those scholars. In fact, paracinema reasserts and clarifies certain key preoccupations and conventions that have defined the tradition of avant-garde cinema. In what follows, I discuss the paracinema of Anthony McCall and Tony Conrad. My initial questions are: on what grounds did McCall and Conrad assert their non-filmic work as film? And what was the relationship of their paracinema to the predominant ontological concerns of avant-garde film at the time? And why has paracinema been framed out of existing studies of avant-garde film, and how might it be incorporated into such studies? I also consider the stakes of such a critical move for the study of avant-garde film in the disciplines of film studies and art history. Solid Light Films, Camera-less Films, and Film-less Films From 1973 to 1975, Anthony McCall produced a series of “solid light” films, the most famous of which is Line Describing a Cone (1973). It has always been a minor classic of avant-garde cinema – the only paracinematic work to enter that canon – and has recently garnered new attention within the gallery art world thanks to its appearance in the Whitney exhibition “Into the Light: The Projected Image in American Art, 1964-1977.” Though Line Describing a Cone is a 16mm film projected on a standard film projector, the modes of exhibition and spectatorship it calls for are unusual. The film acts as a sort of stencil for the projector beam, molding it into a threedimensional form that shares the exhibition space with the spectators. On the film strip, what begins as a white point in a black frame slowly traces a complete circle; when drawn out into three dimensions by the throw of the projector beam, this appears as a line describing a cone, an effect that requires the total darkening of the exhibition space and the thickening of the air with smoke. The spectators, rather than being seated and oriented toward a flat screen, are standing and mobile, interacting with the growing cone of light and each other. Line Describing a Cone eliminates one of the basic material elements of film – the screen – and thereby one of the aesthetic qualities that was typically believed to be distinct to cinema: the projection of movement onto a two-dimensional, delimited frame. It also re-conceives the relationship of the spectator to the image; the activity of the spectator is cast into three dimensions, just like the flat image of the circle on the celluloid strip.
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After varying the movement of the cone in films like Conical S o l i d and Cone of Variable Volume (both 1974), McCall experimented with new solid light forms and new modes of spectatorial engagement, getting further away from standard cinematic exhibition and reception. Long Film for Four Projectors (1974) consists of four 45-minute reels of 16mm film. Each reel is loaded on a projector, and each projector placed on the floor near a corner of a large, empty exhibition space, preferably longer than it is wide. The projectors face into the room so their beams cross one another. The filmstrips are once again light stencils; on each strip a thin white line runs diagonally from the bottom of the black frame to the top, and over the course of the film moves from right to left. Each reel can be run through the projector in four different ways: from head to tail, tail to head, head to tail with a half-twist, and tail to head with a halftwist. Each reel is put through each of these four permutations twice, meaning that a complete cycle of the film takes about six hours. The projector beam form that results is a blade of light scanning a wedge of space from left to right or vice-versa. Since there are four such blades of light, each the result of a different projection permutation, they intersect each other and articulate the exhibition space in a variety of ways. Once again the spectators are mobile and interacting, but in this case their mode of attention is shaped considerably by the extreme duration of the film. Indeed, the film was created not for a traditional screening with a distinct, scheduled beginning and ending, but as an ongoing gallery installation in which spectators could come and go as they please. Hence, each spectator’s experience of the film’s temporal and spatial unfolding is different, depending on when they enter the film and how long they choose to remain.1 McCall’s final paracinematic work was Long Film for Ambient Light (1975), a film without film, camera, projector, or screen. It consisted of an empty artists’ space illuminated during the day by a row of windows covered with diffusion paper and at night by a light bulb hanging from the ceiling. During its 24-hour duration, spectators could come and go, spending as much or as little time “in the film” as they liked. Another component of Long Film for Ambient Light was textual; a time-schema covering 50 days ran along one wall, with the 24-hour duration of the film indicated by a set of brackets around the appropriate days (June 18 to 19, 1975). That 24-hour period was considered one cycle, but the 50-day time-schema suggested that it could run indefinitely, something McCall had also
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claimed about Long Film for Four Projectors. Attached to another wall was a two-page statement in which McCall explicitly identified the work as a film and set forth the formal ideas that it enacted.
Anthony McCall, Long Film for Ambient Light (1975). Installation view, 2 p.m., June 18, 1975. Photograph by the artist.
One key point is McCall’s rejection of formalist criticism’s distinction between temporal and atemporal art. All works of art, McCall argued, contained a temporal dimension; the apprehension of a sculptural object, for instance, took time, and its existence in the world – its production, circulation and display, and the spectators’ experience of it – were all subject to the passing of time. McCall concluded the statement by claiming that he was now interested in examining: […] certain other fundamentals, viz temporality, light. I am presently assuming that it is possible to do this without using the customary photochemical and electro-mechanical processes. […] I am aware of the dangers of back-tracking, that behind every “first principle” lurks another, and I do not rule out the possibility of continuing to make “films”. However, for the time being I intend to concentrate less on the physical processes of production and more on the presuppositions behind film as an art activity. (1987: 253-254)
It is worth noting that McCall did not view the time-schema and statement as adjunct clarifying material, but as components of the work itself, just like the space, light and windows.
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We now move from a conception of cinema that has been called “dematerialized” to one that we might call “materialist a d absurdum.” In Tony Conrad’s paracinema, material is foregrounded, but in ways that either paradoxically render the film impossible to view in a normal way, or that make unexpected and provocative substitutions of filmic elements like emulsion, base, screen, projection, processing, and exposure, so that the resulting works highlight these elements but are nonetheless barely recognizable as films. Conrad’s paracinematic work began in 1972 with a series called Yellow Movies. By 1975, Conrad produced several hundred realizations, which all consist of household paint brushed onto rectangular sheets of paper roughly approximating the Academy ratio of 1.33 to 1. As the sheets are exposed to light the paint yellows, making the running time of the works in the series indefinite, but in the realm of years rather than hours and minutes. In referring to the series, Conrad consistently identifies his materials in the technical vocabulary of film production, for instance: Yellow Movie 12/14 – 25/72 Emulsion: Citron tinted low lustre enamel, Speedflex Latex Colorizer, Brooklyn Paint and Varnish Co. Base: white seamless paper. 54 by 72 1/2”.
Between 1973 and 1975, Conrad produced other types of paracinematic work, including a series of films that involved finding “alternative mechanisms to working with the material [of film] other than using the camera and ways that might allow me to express some sentiment about the material” (Conrad 1974). These camera-less films differ from those of filmmakers like Brakhage (e.g. Mothlight) because the “alternative mechanisms” that Conrad devised for exposing and processing film stock often rendered his films unprojectable. One example is 4-X Attack (1973), for which Conrad hammered 50 feet of film into hundreds of tiny pieces, which he then carefully collected and returned to the film box, exposed to light for a fraction of a second, processed in a cheesecloth sack and painstakingly glued back together. Though the original was too delicate to be projected, Conrad made a contact print so that projection could reveal the abstract patterns of light and shade that resulted from the flash exposure and the trauma inflicted by the hammering. Hence, though 4-X Attack was ultimately rendered
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projectable by duping, the images that appeared in projection were the result of alternative means of image-making, exposure, and processing that bypassed the normal technologies and methods of filmmaking. This was precisely Conrad’s point. Presenting the film at the Millennium Film Workshop, he stated: I have a certain sense of disappointment about the fact that the filmmaker is expected to use a particular kind of material that he buys in a box […] and then he takes it home and puts it into an instrument manufactured by someone else, and then he’s supposed to perform specific operations on it, like cutting the material, and then putting it back together […] and then running it on a projector, manufactured by someone else, and this inextricable bind to the commercial process infuriates me to some degree… (1974)
Other camera-less films were not projectable, including Deep Fried 4X Negative (1973), which could only be viewed as a grilled and melted mass of raw film stock still wound around a core in its original film can, and 12 versions of Pickled 3M 150 (1974), comprised of small pieces of that stock in small glass pickling jars filled with vinegar. As with Yellow Movies and 4-X Attack, Conrad refers to the methods he used in making these films in the vocabulary of conventional film production; moreover, because the films do not have a duration determined by projection, Conrad believes that the films run indefinitely. The running time of Pickled 3M 150, for instance, is the length of the pickling process, which continues today after more than 30 years. The strips of film in the pickling jars have gone almost entirely clear, and the gasses emitted during the pickling process have corroded the metal lids on the jars; in order for the film to continue running, Conrad has said, they must be preserved in new jars with glass lids and tighter seals. Hence, in reconsidering his seventies films over three decades later, Conrad has extended his bypassing of film technology to the preservation and restoration process. Another alternative mechanism of film production Conrad has invented is the “pickle wind,” a process of winding a strip of film stock in on itself based on a mathematical formula that determines the number of winds that are possible based on its length and thickness. For Roast Kalvar (1974) Conrad wound a length of Kalvar print stock 3000 times, producing a twisted mass of film whose ends were stapled together to preserve the helix-like shape. After being flash exposed
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like 4-X Attack, this mass was then roasted in an oven (a variation of the actual procedure for processing Kalvar stock), which obliterated any images that might have appeared and rendered the film crisp and delicate. Needless the say, Roast Kalvar is unprojectable; it is kept in a small wooden box and wrapped in a hair net to protect it from chipping as it is passed around the audience for viewing. One more form with which Conrad has experimented is the paracinematic performance, in which the live manipulation of the filmstrip and/or projector beam by the filmmaker replaces the customary exhibition situation. In Bowed Film (1974), Conrad stood before a film screen illuminated by the beam of an empty projector. One end of a short film loop, containing the image of a violin bow, was wrapped around Conrad’s head with each side of the loop passing over one ear. Conrad held the other end of the loop in his extended hand, keeping it taut around his head. Turning to one side, so that the audience was on his left, he passed a violin bow over the film loop while looking directly ahead into the tiny space where the two sides of the loop came together in a “V” in his fingers. The vibration of the loop by the bow created, in the flickering projector light, minute images vibrating between the two sides of the loop within the “V.” Since the loop was passed over his ears, Conrad could also hear the vibrations in stereo. The viewers could not see or hear the images and sounds, and were only aware of them because Conrad explained how the performance worked. Bowed Film thereby inverted those aspects of filmmaking and viewing that were public and private: film production, typically a private activity – especially in the context of avant-garde cinema’s artisanal mode of production – was made public, while the viewing of images, normally a public affair, was rendered private, since only Conrad could see the images he produced. Obviously, these paracinematic works are difficult to see and/or reproduce. Even Line Describing a Cone, which is most similar to normal film, requires projection circumstances that can be difficult to achieve. The other works, due to their extreme durations, material status, or both, pose even greater difficulties. Jars of pickled film or empty rooms are not subject to traditional theatrical distribution and exhibition. This inaccessibility is one factor in the inability of cinema studies to adequately address these works. Another factor, though, is that such work may not even be recognizable as part of the purview of cinema studies given its refusal of the tenets of medium-specificity and its apparent formal affinities with other art forms.
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Tony Conrad performing Bowed Film (1974) at Berks Filmmakers, Reading, PA. Photograph by Linda Adlestein.
In the next section I look more closely at this dimension of McCall and Conrad’s work, considering the motivations for, and consequences of, their assertion of non-filmic work as cinema. The “Cinema” in “Paracinema”: Another Kind of Materialism An indication of the difficulties paracinema poses to film and art scholarship can be seen in attempts by several authors to reconcile such works with one variant or another of medium-specificity theory. In the exhibition catalogue for a 1976 program of avant-garde films, John Hanhardt claimed that the scrutinizing of filmic materials by structural filmmakers of the period sometimes resulted in cinematic works that did not take the typical material form of film. Hanhardt cites McCall and Conrad, vaguely implying that medium-specific film practice could somehow produce its opposite: a dematerialized cinema. Citing the authors of a catalog for an exhibition of painting from six years earlier, Hanhardt argued, “The traditional coordinates of film/screen/projection are being questioned by ‘artists who have denied the material and analytical basis of this judgment, not by ideology, but by materiality itself’” (1976: 44). Hanhardt did not explain how this paradoxical situation, in which a preoccupation with materiality led to a denial of materiality, worked in practice.
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Sheldan Renan made a different critical move in his explication of expanded cinema. For him, the real materials of film were simply light and time. Any work, even if it took forms more commonly associated with sculpture, performance, video, or something in between, could produce what Renan called “the effect of film” if it used the materials light and time (1967: 257). But Renan does not explain how one might distinguish a work of sculpture or painting that employed these same materials from a work of expanded cinema. Nor does he characterize the “effect of film,” except to imply that it has something to do with light and time. The few subsequent critics who have addressed paracinematic work have repeated the flawed rhetorical strategies of Hanhardt and Renan. Hanhardt’s idea – that this form of cinema had somehow been reached via the reflexive scrutiny of film by structural filmmakers – reappears in a 1986 interview with McCall by Scott MacDonald. Discussing Long Film for Ambient Light, MacDonald proclaims, “it’s as though filmmaking had led you out of film” (1992: 165). P. Adams Sitney argued that Line Describing a Cone was “the most brilliant case of an observation on the essentially sculptural quality of every cinematic situation” (1976: 65). Like Renan, Sitney paradoxically implies that a work could be understood as essentially cinematic even if it took the shape and traded in the aesthetic effects of another art form, and that the cinema was, in some way, essentially sculptural. Though Renan and Sitney seem to adhere to some version of cinematic essentialism, and thus to a belief in artistic specificity in general, it is not clear from their statements how the specificity of each art form can be maintained, given this kind of artistic overlapping. In a recent essay on McCall’s films, George Baker couches the same theoretical equivocation in more sophisticated language. McCall’s films, Baker argues: proclaimed that it was the essence of cinema to have no essence. Cinema could only be particularized as the movement of form into becoming, multiplicity, and difference. The basis of film form would be its undoing of a fixed basis; the “content” of its abstract transitivity, the paradoxical revelation of its inherent embodiment of becoming, a movement that thus is always, logically, a becoming other. […] Cinema would be cinema, and it would become sculpture. (2004: 2223)
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I take it that Baker is trying to resolve (by not resolving) the paradox of Line Describing a Cone’s categorical status – sculpture or film? – that Sitney put so succinctly. Baker’s interpretation leaves McCall’s films hovering between the aesthetic territory of sculpture and film, and, by extension, the worlds of the art gallery and the cinema. By Baker’s reading, cinema is the essence-less art form wherein all the other art forms cross, ultimately revealing that they, too, are without a “fixed basis”: “In a dizzying magnification of the anti-essential essence of the medium, McCall’s light films would then grasp that it would have to be the vocation of cinema, in its becoming other, to allow us to think and produce the becoming other of other forms as well” (2004: 23). Baker’s commitment to a particular theory of artistic transgression, adapted from Foucault and Giles Deleuze, reiterates the paradox opened up by Renan and Sitney. The critics just mentioned all suggest that paracinema locates a cinematic essence beyond film, be it in the realm of the sculptural, in the materials of light and time, or in some form of dematerialized cinema. But the critical formulation of a cinema beyond the limits of film begs the question of exactly what the nature of that cinema is, while the alternative concept of art works transgressively hovering between essential artistic forms is an equivocation. What is ultimately the problem here, I believe, is that the above-cited authors have not been able to recognize how paracinematic works explore cinematic ontology, even as they reject or radically reconfigure filmic materials. A different historical and conceptual account of such explorations among avant-garde filmmakers and theorists is necessary to understand the works under discussion. Paracinema does not simply replace one set of raw materials – film, camera, projector, screen – with another – light and time. Nor does it leave the concept of cinematic essentialism behind altogether, as Baker suggests. Rather, it identifies cinema not with the raw physical material of film, but the cluster of activities, institutions, and discourses that define avantgarde cinema as an artistic tradition. These are material in the sense that they constitute the concrete practices and spaces in which that thing we call avant-garde cinema is situated. They also shape the films themselves and the ways in which viewers can experience them. Thus, in contrast to Renan’s expanded cinema, paracinema does not simply reduce cinema to light and time, but includes the additional parameters of the institutional patterns within which light, time, space, projection, movement, and spectatorial activity are organized and
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investigated by filmmakers. Works like Long Film for Ambient Light, Yellow Movies, etc. are not simply about light and time; they always attempt to foreground activities and concepts that surround the film object itself. This group of institutions and the activities within them correspond to what David Bordwell, Kristen Thompson, and Janet Staiger call a “mode of film practice” in their book The Classical Hollywood Cinema (Bordwell, et. al. 1985: xiii-xiv). The term has been extended to avant-garde cinema by Murray Smith (1998: 395), and is defined by characteristic traditions and aims of production, channels of distribution, venues and conventions of exhibition, and protocols of analysis and interpretation. The concept resonates with the distinction David James makes, in his book Allegories of Cinema, between film and cinema, the former being a medium and the latter being the institutions within which that medium is used, and which are traceable within each film produced in that context (1989). Splitting film and cinema, or medium and mode of practice, reverses the terms of medium-specificity theory. The medium does not determine the art form; instead, the practices of the art form shape the different ways a medium is used and understood. Thus, mediumspecificity theory gets relativized as one discourse among many within the tradition of avant-garde cinema, a distinct mode of film practice which, among other things, has historically been concerned with the ontology of cinema and the relationship between film and the other arts. As Noel Carroll has argued in his debunking of mediumspecificity’s logic, it is not the nature of the medium with which film theorists should concern themselves, but the variety of uses to which the medium has been put in different film-historical contexts (Carroll 1996a: 13-20). With paracinema in mind, I would not only emphasize these uses but their extension to other materials that can be made legible as cinema because they are taken up within a certain mode of film practice, subject to the same patterns of production, exhibition, and reception. The codes and conventions that emerge within that mode can be elaborated, extended, and re-examined outside the limits of the specific medium around which that mode has been organized.
McCall: Questions of Exhibition and Spectatorship McCall has suggested that his growing interest in film in the early seventies was focused on cinematic codes not necessarily related to
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the raw material of the medium. While he notes that it has become less important to define art by medium, he adds: […] it doesn’t mean that mediums are neutral. I’m quite old-fashioned about this; I believe that you have to master the codes of the medium you choose. You have to at least understand how it works historically, how it works as a medium, and what it signifies. […] And I think the same goes for the medium of film […] but mind you it doesn’t always mean you have to understand the material nature of film in something like a structural film sense […] it’s not only material technique I’m talking about, but the way the genre of medium you select signifies. (Walley 2004b)
This conception of the mastery of a medium considers the forms that have emerged from the use of film within specific historical and institutional contexts. These codes, moreover, can be thought of as semi-independent of the specific artistic medium in which we have traditionally experienced them. Probably the most important cinematic codes for McCall’s solid light films are those involving cinema’s organization of spectatorial activity in time and space. We can perhaps best think of McCall’s ideas about these conventions as extending the concerns of contemporaneous British avant-garde filmmakers associated with the London Filmmakers’ Cooperative, who foregrounded the apperceptive and participatory dimensions of cinematic reception by creating formal and material structures that placed special demands on spectators’ cognition. These ranged from structural-materialist films that called upon viewers to ascertain their obscure structuring devices, to works of expanded cinema that literally illuminated the exhibition space and thereby highlighted aspects of the spectators’ relationship with the film and each other, to cinematic (sometimes film-less) events that collapsed the activities of production and exhibition into the moment of live performance. McCall had become involved with the Cooperative around 1970, and at the same time was producing sculptural, photographic, and performance works that investigated the effects of differing temporal and spatial structures on spectators’ perception and experience. Line Describing a Cone makes the temporal structures of structural-materialist film a function of the exhibition space and the audience’s movement and interaction therein. Thus, the audience’s experience of the film’s time cannot be separated from the exhibition space, since the film encourages the viewer to move through the space
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to see the projector beam from multiple perspectives. Line Describing a Cone thus literalizes the active spectator of avant-garde cinema, extending apperceptive engagement into a direct physical experience of duration, and moreover duration shaped and articulated in ways taken to be unique to cinema. To clarify this last point, it is useful to contrast the typical exhibition circumstances of Line Describing a Cone with its reconfiguration as a looped installation piece in the Whitney’s “Into the Light” exhibition, and the way the latter was conceptualized in the language of the gallery art world. “Into the Light” offered a genealogy of projected image installation art; curator Chrissie Iles’ incorporation of McCall’s film into that historical project required that both a material and discursive shift be enacted upon it. Iles (2001) reads the film in terms of the preoccupations of gallery art, particularly process art and sculpture, with filmmakers like McCall investigating the same aesthetic territory as artists in other media. By this interpretation, the “concerns” of avant-garde filmmakers become those of the art world, where film was used to extend work in sculpture and painting and the various expanded forms of post-minimal art. Additionally, the film’s three-dimensional form creates, according to Iles, “a complete reversal of conventional cinematic viewing” (2001: 45). This characterization, by which Line Describing a Cone simultaneously rejects cinematic conventions and takes up aesthetic preoccupations that are the province of the gallery, motivated Iles’ reconfiguration of the film as an installation. But, as McCall himself has noted (2002: 58; 2003: 44-45), the way the film organizes spectatorial attention and experience is qualitatively altered when it is extended into the indeterminate duration of the looped installation format and exhibited as an art object rather than a film with a distinct beginning and end within a defined chunk of exhibition time. For one, the spectator’s experience of the film’s time is much less subject to the unfolding of the work and its formation of a distinct audience group than when the film is projected in the usual cinematic exhibition format. This distinction between viewing the film in the cinematic context (from beginning to end) or as a gallery installation (in which the spectator determines the duration of his or her engagement with the work) is more than a simple matter of material configuration – is the film looped or not? – for McCall. The two contexts are part of two different institutional structures that enable and constrain the kind of temporal and spatial experience a viewer can have of a work, and hence, to a degree, the
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kind of work that artists in these contexts can create.2 McCall made the significance of these institutional contexts explicit in a recent interview, suggesting the additional contextual factor of his films’ legibility among other self-identified avant-garde filmmakers and theorists: […] their meaning does depend ultimately on their being looked at as film. During the period these works were made they were first shown in avant-garde film showplaces, where they were looked at and thought about in relation to other films – to work by Tony Conrad, Michael Snow, Malcolm LeGrice, and Paul Sharits, for instance. (le Feuvre 2002: 58)
McCall continued to investigate this crucial issue in Long Film for Four Projectors. That film, both because of its long, potentially indeterminate running time and its exhibition structure, might at first appear to be much less problematically incorporated into the art historical narrative of projected image art. It is important to recognize, however, that both these formal characteristics were devised by McCall specifically in relationship to notions of cinematic spectatorial organization that were elaborated within the context of the avantgarde film world, and set against the conditions of spectatorship both in mainstream narrative cinema and in the typical art gallery. The temporal diffusion of Long Film for Four Projectors was a strategy for dissolving the cinematic audience into individual spectators with a greater sense of autonomy, and thereby – hypothetically – a greater degree of self-consciousness. But reflecting on the film just two years after completing it, McCall claimed that this was precisely what was problematic about the mode of exhibition and spectatorship in a gallery – “it separates people in time and space” (1976: 55-56). The ramifications of this isolation, contrasted with the cinema’s formation of a more unified audience, concerned McCall. We can see Long Film for Ambient Light as McCall’s attempt to extract cinematic codes from the traditional materials of the film medium, the conventional arrangement of the apparatus, and the limitations this was thought to impose on spectators. Although McCall’s statement that was part of Long Film for Ambient Light set forth concepts common to other art forms, these were shaped significantly by assumptions about specifically cinematic codes that were formulated within avant-garde cinema. McCall’s reduction of cinema to temporality and light independent of film pried cinematic
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signification loose from a medium and perceptual habits thought to be inextricably bound to ideology (McCall 1977; 55-57), without losing sight of the conventions of the distinct artistic tradition that had been embodied in that medium. Long Film for Ambient Light exceeds Renan’s definition of expanded cinema as consisting solely of light and time; that film’s projection and modulation of light into literal time and space must be seen in the wider scope of the codes that shape cinematic exhibition and reception, particularly as these are conceived within avant-garde cinema.
Conrad: Interventions in the Formalist Impasse Unlike several of McCall’s films, Conrad’s paracinematic works cannot be distributed or exhibited in conventional ways. These material difficulties are no accident; the works represent a multilayered assault on materialist film theory and practice. Because medium-specificity has been a predominant critical mode in the study of avant-garde film, any challenges have tended to fall outside the purview of most cinema scholarship. Even setting theories of medium-specificity aside, Conrad’s paracinema is simply not available to the normal protocols of interpretation and analysis that are typically employed to make sense of avant-garde film, even the variants of structural film or expanded cinema to which Conrad’s work is related. Paracinematic works like Line Describing a Cone or Long Film for Ambient Light can be analyzed in terms of their articulation of time, their unfolding of temporal and spatial forms, their potentially cyclical structures, and so on. Conrad’s paracinema, on the whole, simply lacks the structures or imagery that can be analyzed in formal terms like these. The removal of the medium, or the subjection of the medium to alternative processes of production and exhibition, leaves formalist analysis, and particularly mediumspecific formalism, with little to do. Conrad produced paracinema to create precisely these kinds of difficulties; their illegibility in formal terms represents an act of intervention at the level of the institutions within which avant-garde films were made, viewed, and understood. While they “assert themselves as films,” to use a telling phrase of Conrad’s (2004), they simultaneously disrupt the customary patterns of film production, exhibition, and reception, thus problematizing materialist assumptions about the nature of the medium. In the same way that structural films
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and works of expanded cinema were thought to foster an apperceptive mode in which the viewer became aware of his or her own cognitive processes and temporal relationship to film exhibition, Conrad’s paracinema, because it did not fit comfortably within the routines of its mode of film practice, drew the attention of viewers to these routines and their limitations. His work throws into relief the degree to which avant-garde film practice was constricted by formalism in film production and theory.3 Conrad has referred to avant-garde film’s preoccupation with formalism as “an apotheosis of formal omphaloscopsis” (navelgazing); a close look at writing on avant-garde film by both makers and scholars reveals that Conrad was not the only one to offer such a critique. Though formalism was initially championed as a strategy of opposition to conventional illusionist cinema, by the early seventies formalism of the structural film variety was seen as problematic, even by those who ultimately supported the project of anti-illusionism on ideological grounds. This new concern about formalism took a variety of forms. Curator Rosetta Brooks referred to the exploration of the film medium as a kind of reductionism that threatened to become an end in itself rather than a means for “changing the extant norms of filmmaking and redeveloping the practice upon newly acknowledged fundamentals”. She continued: A blind insistence upon reductionism as norm is ultimately selfdefeating. A prescription at this point might be to make more explicit the speculative component of film works because to ignore this aspect, i.e. to leave it as an implicit component in the film work is to prescribe “reductionism ad absurdum”. (1972: 1)
Implicit in Brooks’ remarks is a critique of the structural aesthetic as potentially leading to a dead end wherein films merely reiterate the properties of the film medium over and over, rather than suggesting previously undiscovered possibilities for that medium. In Brooks’ “reductionism as norm” scenario, intense reflexive attention to the materials of film and the means of cinematic signification becomes just another dominant that prescribes and therefore limits film practice. Like all new styles or movements, it must eventually become exhausted. Furthermore, a reductive materialist aesthetic might detach individual films from the institutional context in which they were made and thus foreclose the possibility of any challenge to the assumptions about filmmaking and viewing encoded in that
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institution. Brooks’ statement that the exploration of the film medium could change “the extant norms of filmmaking” and lead to the “construction of new norms of action” suggests not just a reconsideration of the materials of the medium but also of the range of practices and assumptions that define the way makers, viewers, and others within a given film culture use that medium. Peter Gidal’s attack on North American structural film echoed Brooks; “structural film became merely another aesthetic mode, another formalism, in fact, with a vague set of rules and selfdefinitions yet without important function or meaning outside its mere differentiation per se from previous modes” (1976: 15). Gidal also warned against a merely “mechanistic materialism,” claiming that “the assertion of film as material” was nothing more than another mode of representation in film that by no means guaranteed anti-illusionist demystification of cinema (1976: 15). The material of film, that is, was just as subject to recuperation into conventional processes of meaning making. McCall and Andrew Tyndall argued along similar lines that North American avant-garde film’s reflexivity: has become fetishized in foregrounding only the material and creative process by which the film is made, while ignoring (and therefore mystifying) the cultural and economic context of the film’s production and exhibition. The radical filmmaker would reject self-reflexivity as an end in itself… (1979)
Following a similar logic as Brooks, Gidal, and McCall/Tyndall, Conrad argued in a recent talk at the Guggenheim that, by the early seventies: […] the film movement that P. Adams Sitney had so problematically dubbed “structural film” became a kind of fashionable doxology, within which younger filmmakers felt compelled to revisit many of the formalist issues that had been run ragged in painting and sculpture a decade earlier. (2004)
Deke Dusinberre has engaged this problem from a somewhat different perspective, framing avant-garde film’s formalism within a larger art historical shift in which the “literalness” of art works “asserts the primacy of cognition over meaningfulness” (1976a: 14). He argues further that, although avant-garde film’s literalist emphasis of apperception was “the crucial and necessary condition for insight into the nature of contemporary meaning-making […] a simple awareness
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of this condition is no longer sufficient for any further insight into these processes of cognition and comprehension” (1976a: 14). With this critique in mind, he suggested that formalism had encountered a dilemma: because the formalist project in film removed the elements of cinematic signification from their customary narrative context in order to foreground them, it threatened to render the resulting films literally meaningless. This potentially renders a film nothing more than a tautology, as in the classic critical formulation of reflexivity, “a film about film”. He thus suggests that formalist film had to find a way to be more meaningful than was possible in a strictly tautological, reflexive cinema. He claims that the way around formalist film’s impasse was an “analogical” mode, in which each film’s reflexive investigation of the medium took a form that was analogous to another meaning system, as in the phenomenological interpretation of Wavelength, by which that film is “a metaphor for the intentionality of consciousness” (1976b: 110). The analogical mode allowed meanings that were still oppositional to conventional structures of narrative meaning-making, and still accommodating of a reflexive examination of cinema, but that did not succumb to a simplistic reflexivity that could only redundantly present the materials of the film. Conrad’s characterization of the formalist project as navelgazing echoes Dusinberre’s concern that reflexive formalism for its own sake was a tautology that rendered avant-garde film meaningless. Conrad’s paracinematic solution to this problem was to shift reflexive focus from the formal to the institutional. Keeping the terms of Dusinberre’s critique, the institutional context of a specific mode of film practice and the social and political implications of these for makers and viewers provided Conrad with the alternative meaning structure that remained both reflexive and oppositional while simultaneously reorienting avant-garde film’s reflexive strategies in ways that were not merely tautological. His intention was to play out what he called “a formalist endgame,” hastening the “dematerialization of the medium” that had already occurred in the other arts, and which would turn the attention of avant-garde filmmakers from the formal purity of their medium to the external institutional structure in which they operated (2004). This required an assault on the dominant discourse of that structure – medium specific formalism. McCall identified the paradox of such an endgame – “I am aware of the dangers of backtracking, that behind every ‘first
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principle’ lurks another,” but, like Conrad, described his paradoxical film-less film in similar terms, as a shift in emphasis from “the physical processes of production” to “the presuppositions behind film as an art activity”. Dispensing with the medium was a way to engage this dimension of film practice. Conrad’s paracinema purposefully enacted this paradox in an attempt to force viewers, critics, even other filmmakers, to confront the drawbacks of formalist film practice and the tautological bind in which it kept the avant-garde film world. The reflexive scrutiny of film that has characterized avant-garde cinema from its earliest history was turned to the social, political, and economic dimensions of film practice, rather than the physical or formal characteristics of the medium. Taking the reductive logic of medium-specificity to its logical conclusion, Conrad ironically opened up a much more heterogeneous body of materials that could serve as emulsion, base, or support (as in Yellow Movies) and of processes that could be deemed exposure, processing, or projection (as in his hurling of meat, eggs, tamari sauce, and raw film stock onto a screen in the 1973 performance 7360 Sukiyaki). The chain of filmic materials, technologies and processes of production and projection exhaustively mapped out and explored by formalist filmmakers and heralded by medium-specificity theory as the essence of film becomes, in Conrad’s paracinema, one option among a range of possibilities rather than a necessity. 4-X Attack, then, was only projectable by Conrad’s choice rather than by default. That he has refused to make several of his camera-less films projectable, such as Roast Kalvar and Deep-Fried 4-X Negative, demonstrates this point. Those films suggest alternative forms of production and exhibition and, concomitantly, create new modes of experience for the viewer. Paul Arthur, one of the few film scholars to address Conrad’s paracinematic works, usefully connects them to a much broader project in avant-garde cinema that includes structural film, Andy Warhol’s early silent films, and other hand-made camera-less films like Mothlight: Considered as a totality, the importance of these films resides in their postulating a diversity of modalities that the film artifact can assume in relation to its viewer, from the object as the sole mediator of the viewing experience to the object subsumed in theatrical performance. By short-circuiting specific agencies of the production system and
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exploding the fixed boundaries of image duration, Conrad performs a kind of meta-commentary on current theoretical concerns. (1978: 13)
According to Arthur, Conrad’s paracinematic works extend avantgarde cinema’s project of exploring film/viewer relationships different from those of mainstream cinema, as in structural film’s engagement of alternative forms of viewer cognition or expanded cinema’s participatory qualities. Arthur’s “diversity of modalities that the film artifact can assume in relation to its viewer” ranges from Conrad’s unprojectable films passed around an audience who experiences them as tactile objects to Warhol’s missing Empire, characterized by Arthur as a “conceptual film” both because of its extreme length and its absence (removed from distribution as it was by Warhol and Paul Morrissey in the early seventies) (1978: 5). Furthermore, the extension of duration via these alternative forms of production, processing, and display are strategies in Conrad’s reorientation of normal notions of film duration – part of the project he initiated of “scaling a film to the duration of a human lifetime” (2004). Yellow Movies and the various cooked films are always running, according to Conrad (Mekas 1973: 74), but are simultaneously always in processing, since pickling, molding, flaking, and general decay are ongoing processes to which these films are continuously being subjected even though they are in storage.4 Display, whether via projection or some other form of exhibition (e.g. Yellow Movies’ installation format), as Arthur argued about Empire, is not a necessary dimension of Conrad’s paracinema. All of this is to say that the use of alternative materials and forms entails a variety of new modes of relationships between viewer and film, and, by extension, between filmmakers and viewers, including situations in which the mediation of cinematic experience by the institutions and discourses of a mode of film practice are made evident to the viewer in ways previously unexplored even by other avant-garde works. From this perspective, Bowed Film sits somewhere between the radically tactile, unprojectable film object and the conceptual film that exists only as a mental entity. Arthur’s claim about Brakhage’s hand-made films is equally applicable here: “the examination of the condition of film as simultaneously artifact and performance and the relations between that dynamic and the determining industrialeconomic structures are not the exclusive domain of structural and post-structural filmmaking…” (1978: 10). Though it foregrounds the
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film strip and relies on its physical properties to produce sounds and images, it simultaneously denies the viewer access to the image content produced by projection, since the tiny flickering images on the inside of the film loop and the sounds that result from the bowing were only visible and audible to Conrad. What this film has in common with Conrad’s other paracinematic works is its disruption, even refusal, of the chain of materials, processes, and forms of exhibition characteristic of normal film (even in its avant-garde manifestations) and privileged by medium-specific formalism, which is understood here as both a kind of technological determinism that shackles filmmaker and viewer to the capitalist industries that produce film technology and a rhetorical device to acquire for film the status of object, marketable within the art world.5 These limitations and their institutional ramifications are revealed by works like Conrad’s that cannot be accommodated within the structures of film as we know it, but rather suggest a radically heterogeneous range of new relations between filmmaker, materials, spaces, and viewers, and demand a new theoretical approach.
Conclusion – Cinema Studies and Paracinema’s Legibility When McCall and Conrad rejected medium-specificity, they took the risk that their work would not be recognizable as film or, for that matter, recognizable in any context. In that sense I would argue that both filmmakers acted with some courage, confronting assumptions about cinema that were not only aesthetic, but were inextricably bound with the institutional practices of avant-garde cinema and the art world (e.g. where or even whether their work would be shown in certain spaces and seen or discussed by certain groups). Thus, I take issue with David James’ argument that all so-called structural filmmakers, a group in which he includes McCall and Conrad, attempted to achieve a formal purity in their work that denied its institutional context and allowed it to attain the status of reified art object ready for consumption by the art market. “In instances like the work of Anthony McCall,” James writes, “attempts were made to substantiate the projection of light as essentially a sculpture, while elsewhere the duration of projection was reduced into the timelessness of painting by making more or less extensive selections from the film simultaneously visible” (1989: 272-273). James cites Yellow Movies as an example of this practice. Setting aside the fact that James makes
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the same equivocating claims about the cinematic specificity of McCall and Conrad’s paracinema as Hanhardt, Renan, and Sitney, he misidentifies the goals of their work because he is unable to recognize the degree to which both filmmakers concerned themselves with the very institutions of avant-garde cinema that he accuses them of ignoring. There is no doubt that such works were concerned with these institutions, including the critical discourses that address it. Bearing this in mind, I conclude with some general remarks about the stakes of our ability to recognize and contextualize paracinema. Conrad laments, “the Yellow Movies […] ultimately failed as an intervention, since they were not cogently legible at the time within either film or art” (2004). He adds that his attempts at intervention at the institutional level of avant-garde film were “occluded by the more relevant feminist interventions” of the same period (2004). Hence, his paracinema has not been incorporated into the histories and theories of avant-garde cinema and have, largely, been sequestered to endnotes, codas, and anecdotes, as though it is not really cinema but some odd, even comic, conceptual reference to film, perhaps offered as a clarification of the material nature of “real” film. Recent developments have made the case of Anthony McCall more complex. Though references to Line Describing a Cone and a few other solid light films have appeared in avant-garde film literature, for the most part those films still constitute unexplored territory for the discipline. But, since the appearance of L i n e Describing a Cone at the Whitney, McCall’s work is being absorbed into the history of artists’ film or projected-image art, a phenomenon that threatens to frame out the crucial historical context of avant-garde cinema in subsequent examinations of his work. This is not to say that art history has no claim on his or other paracinematic work. McCall’s conception of the relationship between artistic medium and artistic practice, which he elaborates in his films, is very much informed by the post-minimal milieu in which he worked before taking up film. Any cinema scholar who addresses his films should have this context in mind. I insist, however, that avant-garde cinema, understood as a mode of film practice whose structures have shaped paracinematic work, is the more proximate context and can only be excluded from accounts of films like McCall’s at the cost of significant historical and theoretical misunderstanding. Unfortunately, however, several accounts of McCall’s paracinema produced by art scholars have downplayed or ignored this context. I am thinking specifically of three
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recent, substantive essays on McCall’s films by Iles, Baker, and Genevieve Yue, each of whom situate McCall’s work more or less exclusively within the terrain of the art world. This blinds them to the fact that McCall engaged questions of the nature of cinema within the historically specific context of a mode of film practice that must be considered as at least semi-distinct from the art world’s traditions. The ignorance of this context has led both to factual errors and, more importantly, to larger, more consequential theoretical flaws: for instance, Yue’s analysis of Line Describing a Cone is based on the mistaken assumption that the film is, and always was, an installation designed for the gallery. There is no evidence in her text that she is aware that prior to the Whitney exhibition the film was only screened in the usual cinematic exhibition context and thus experienced within a chunk of exhibition time not determined by the individual spectator, but by the routines of that mode of exhibition. This skews her account of how that film might organize spectatorial attention, participation, and cognition in ways quite different from the looped installation that has become a staple of the gallery. And, while Baker criticizes my earlier account of paracinema because it characterizes cinema as an idea rather than a “social institution” (2004: 30), his own essay on McCall’s films, while very thorough in tracing out the institutional context of sculptural work in the sixties and seventies, makes no mention of the same context for avant-garde cinema. His account of the overlapping cinematic and sculptural qualities in McCall’s work is therefore quite uneven; sculpture is understood as the condition of a complex weave of historically specific institutions, events, ideas, and individuals, while cinema is reduced to purely aesthetic parameters such as the modulation of light in time, the same simplistic expanded cinema reading we see in Renan. Characterizing cinema as always a function of a specific mode of film practice is my corrective to the abstract conception of cinema that informs the above-mentioned essays, which fail to see that McCall’s work explored not only the formal characteristics of a medium but also the context of a particular artistic tradition in which that medium is used. Put another way, McCall deployed a set of materials within a broader range of assumptions and conventions that form a specific mode of film practice, a historical fact that cannot be ignored. I began this essay by suggesting that film scholarship needed to “come to terms” with paracinema – this is especially important, I think, given that paracinema is rapidly becoming a very popular form
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among contemporary self-defined “avant-garde” or “experimental” filmmakers. Paracinema is not merely an artifact of the expanded arts scene of the sixties and seventies, but a viable form for contemporary, self-identified experimental filmmakers, a form more important now than ever in the face of ongoing anxiety over the film medium’s putative obsolescence. Making paracinema legible – literally, readable – means making it write-able. Giving it a name, and setting it against the backdrop of the conceptual and institutional dimensions of a mode of film practice that shaped its history, is a gesture towards facilitating the writing of paracinema within cinema studies.
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Notes:
1 For a more detailed description of Long Film for Four Projectors, as well as the first complete account of McCall's fascinating and highly varied artistic output over the last 35 years, see Branden W. Joseph, "Sparring With the Spectacle" in Christopher Eamon ed., Anthony McCall: The Solid Light Films and Related Works (Evanston, Ill: Northwestern University Press, 2006), pp. 35-142. 2 McCall has discussed the importance of this distinction numerous times, referring to the two ways of experiencing Line Describing a Cone as “qualitatively different”. During the time McCall made his solid light films, temporal art, according to him, was marginalized at the expense of painting and sculpture by a theoretical bias for socalled “absorbed” art works, theorized most completely by Michael Fried in his 1967 essay “Art and Objecthood” (in Gregory Battcock, ed., Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology, (New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., 1968), pp. 116-147). Fried argues that true modernist art creates an atemporal experience for the viewer in which real world contingencies (including the literal time required for the perception of all art objects) are forgotten, a state Fried referred to as “presentness,” as in his famous statement, “presentness is grace”. From this perspective, of which McCall was certainly aware, the installation version of Line Describing a Cone, because it does not impose its own internal temporal structure on the comings and goings of a viewer, might be said to be more absorbed than the cinematic version. Indeed, viewers of the installation version in “Into the Light” who stayed for only a few minutes, might not have even been aware of the movement of the projector beam, responding to the work instead as a static light sculpture. 3 Conrad, in his recent talk at the Guggenheim, referenced in the bibliography, seems to be referring to the specific type of formalism wherein the physical materials of the medium are foregrounded, as in much structural film (e.g. the interpretation of Wavelength as being about the camera zoom and frame, or of Conrad’s own The Flicker as foregrounding the action of the shutter on both camera and projector that makes the illusion of motion in film possible). This is what I am calling “mediumspecific formalism” in this essay. It could be contrasted with another type of formalist film practice that does not emphasize the physical materials of the medium so much as the conventions of signification that have emerged in cinema (as in Godard’s playfulness with genre conventions in films like Breathless, Alphaville and Pierrot La Fou, or George Kuchar’s in Hold Me While I’m Naked) or the conventions of production in the American film industry (as in Andy Warhol’s stable of superstars). These conventions are not necessarily medium-specific, and may have more to do with narration, genre, or the extra-filmic dimensions of the industry than the physical properties of film. 4 Two contemporaneous discussions of Yellow Movies by two very important filmmaker-theorists demonstrate that such an interpretation of extreme duration in cinema was not just the idiosyncratic conception of one artist, but part of the landscape of avant-garde film theorization in the seventies. See Jonas Mekas, “Movie Journal,” The Village Voice, March 22, 1973, p. 74, and Malcolm Le Grice, “Vision,” Studio International, July-August 1974.
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5
See David James, Allegories of Cinema (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), pp. 269-275 for a more elaborate version of this argument. Ironically, though James’ criticisms of structural film vis-à-vis its relation to the art world is quite similar to Conrad’s, James mistakenly interprets Conrad’s Yellow Movies as attempting to acquire for cinema the status of marketable art object. See the concluding section of this essay for my response to James’s argument.
Primary works consulted Conrad, Tony. 2004. ‘Is This Penny Ante or a High Stakes Game? An Interventionist Approach to Experimental Filmmaking.’ Transcript of a talk given at the Guggenheim Museum, March 3, 2004. Not paginated. —. 1974. Untitled statement. In: Millennium Film Journal 16/17/18: 257. Hanlon, Lindley. 1974. ‘Kenneth Jacobs, Interviewed by Lindley Hanlon (Jerry Sims Present), April 9, 1974’ in Film Culture 67-69: 65-86. McCall, Anthony and Andrew Tyndall (eds). 1979. Argument, New York: Jay Street Project. —. 1976. ‘Interview: Anthony McCall, Formalist Cinema and Politics’ in Performing Arts Journal 1: 51-61. —. 2003. ‘Line Describing a Cone and Related Films’ in October 103: 42-62. —. 1978. ‘Two Statements’ in The Avant-Garde Film: A Reader of Theory and Criticism. P. Adams Sitney (ed.). New York: Anthology Film Archives: 250-254. Walley, Jonathan. 2004a. ‘An Interview with Anthony McCall’ in The Velvet Light Trap 54: 65-75. —. 2004b. ‘Interview with Anthony McCall, February 15, 2004’ Unedited version, not paginated.
Secondary works consulted Arthur, Paul. 1978. ‘Structural Film: Revisions, New Versions, and the Artifact, Part One’ In: Millennium film Journal 1/2: 5-13. Baker, George. 2004. ‘Film Beyond Its Limits,’ 4-31, Anthony McCall: Film Installations (exhibition catalogue) edited by Helen Legg, Warwick: Mead Gallery. Bordwell, David, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson. 1985. The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960. New York: Columbia University Press. Brooks, Rosetta. ‘Introduction,’ 1, A Survey of Avant-Garde in Britain (Part Three: Film and Video) (exhibition catalogue) edited by John Du Cane, London: Gallery House. Carroll, Noel. 1996a. ‘Medium-Specificity Arguments and the Self-Consciously Invented Arts: Film, Video, and Photography’ in Carroll, Noel, William
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Rothman, Dudley Andrew (eds). 1996. Theorizing the Moving Image, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 25-36. —. 1996b. ‘The Specificity of Media in the Arts, in Carroll, Noel, William Rothman, Dudley Andrew (eds). 1996. Theorizing the Moving Image, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 37-48. Dusinberre, Deke. 1976a. ‘The Ascetic Task: Peter Gidal’s Room Film 1973,’ in Gidal, Peter (ed.) Structural Film Anthology. London: BFI Press: 109-113. —. 1975. ‘On Expanding Cinema’ in Studio International 190: 220-24. —. 1976b. ‘St. George in the Forest: The English Avant-Garde’ in Afterimage 6: 419. Gidal, Peter. 1976. ‘Theory and Definition of Structural / Materialist Film’ in Structural Film Anthology. Gidal, Peter (ed.). London: BFI Press: 1-21. Hanhardt, John. 1976. ‘The Medium Viewed: The American Avant-Garde Film’ in Singer, Marilyn. A History of American Avant-Garde Cinema. New York: The American Federation of Arts: 19-47. Hawkins, Joan. 2000. Cutting Edge: Art-Horror and the Horrific Avant-Garde. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Iles, Chrissie. 2001. Into the Light: The Projected Image in American Art 1964-1977. New York: Whitney Museum of American Art/Harry Abrams. James, David E. 1989. Allegories of Cinema: American Film in the Sixties. Princeton: Princeton University Press. le Feuvre, Lisa. 2002. ‘Anthony McCall’ in Tema Celeste 94: 56-59. MacDonald, Scott. 1992. A Critical Cinema 2: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers. Berkeley: University of California Press. Mekas, Jonas. 1973. ‘Movie Journal’ (Review of Tony Conrad’s Yellow Movies) in The Village Voice. March 22: 74. Michelson, Annette and Sitney, P. Adams. 1976. ‘A Conversation on Knokke and the Independent Filmmaker’ in Artforum 13: 63-66. Rees, A.L. 1999. A History of Experimental Film and Video. London: British Film Institute. Renan, Sheldon. 1967. An Introduction to the American Underground Film. New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., Inc. Sconce, Jeffrey. 2004. ‘Trashing the Academy: Taste, Excess, and an Emerging Politics of Cinematic Style’ in Braudy, Leo and Marshall Cohen (eds), Film Theory and Criticism. 6th Edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press: 534553. Sitney, P. Adams. 1979. Visionary Film: The American Avant-Garde, 1943-1978. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Smith, Murray. 1998. ‘Modernism and the Avant-Gardes’ in Hill, John and Pamela Church Gibson. The Oxford Guide to Film Studies. Oxford: Oxford University Press: 395-412. Walley, Jonathan. 2003. ‘The Material of Film and the Idea of Cinema: Contrasting Practices in Sixties and Seventies Avant-Garde Film’ in October 103: 1530. Yue, Genevieve. 2003. ‘The Last Picture Show: Film and Video Installation in the Late ‘60s and Early ‘70s’ in Senses of Cinema 28 (September-October 2003): not paginated.
List of Illustrations
1. Hans Richter: Dada Head; ink (1918) 2. Hans Richter: Dada Head (Abstraction); ink (1918)
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3. Still from Ballet Mechanique, dir. Fernand Léger (1924) 4. Hans Richter: Orchestration der Farbe (1951)
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5. Viking Eggeling: Diagonal Symphony III scroll (from a copy made in the 1930s from Eggeling’s original pencil) 25 6. Hans Richter: Preludium (detail) (1919) 7. Still from Diagonal Symphony, dir. Viking Eggeling (1924)
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8. Hans Richter, study for Rhythmus 25 (1923)
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9. Still from Rhythmus 21, dir. Hans Richter (1921-28?) 10. Still from Diagonal Symphony, dir. Viking Eggeling (1925)
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11. Frame sequences from Opus 4, dir. Walther Ruttmann (1925) 12. Still from Digital Boogie-Woogie (dir. Stephen Littman (1997)
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13. Still from Adebar, dir. Peter Kubelka (1957)
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14. Still from Trade Tattoo, dir Len Lye (1937) 15. Frame sequences from Berlin Horse, dir. Malcolm Le Grice (1970)
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16. Still from Berlin Horse, dir. Malcolm Le Grice (1970)
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17. Still from Emak Bakia, dir. Man Ray (1926) 18. Still from Etoile de mer, dir. Man Ray (1928)
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19. Movie poster, São Paulo- Sinfonia da Metrópole (1929) 20. Production still from Limite, dir. Mario Peixoto (1930)
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21. Shooting of Limite, dir. Mario Peixoto (1930)
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22. Photo by André Kertesz: VU magazine (1929) 23—24. Stills from from Limite, dir Mario Peixoto (1930)
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25. Proto-image, Limite, dir. Mario Peixoto (1930)
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26. Still from La Princesse Mandane, dir. Germaine Dulac (1928) 27. Still from Theme et Variations, dir. Germaine Dulac (1929)
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28. Still from Disque 957, dir. Germaine Dulac (1929)
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29. Still from Not For Money Born (Nye Dlya Deneg Radivshishya), dir. Nikandr Turkin (1918) 139 30—32. Stills from Shackled by Film (Zakovannaya Fil’moi), dir. Nikandr Turkin (1918) 142—144 33. Still from Faust Part 4, dir. Stan Brakhage (1989)
174
34. Preliminary study for Energies, dir. Jim Davis (1975)
189
384 35. Still from The Text of Light, dir. Stan Brakhage (1974)
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36. Still from Light, dir. Jordan Belson (1974) 37. Stills from T,O,U,C,H,I,N,G, dir. Paul Sharits (1968)
193 199
38. Stills from N:O:T:H.I:N:G, dir. Paul Sharits (1968)
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39—40. Still sequences from Epileptic Seizure Comparison, dir. Paul Sharits (1976) 203—204 41—42. Stills from Viridiana, dir. Luis Buñuel (1961) 226—227 43. Still from De man die zijn haar kort liet knippen, dir. André Delvaux (1965) 44—45. Frame sequences from Arnulf Rainer, dir. Peter Kubelka (1960)
246
251—252
46. Still from Naked Female Christ, dir. Bjørn Nørgaard and Lene Adler Petersen (1970) 265 47. Still from Motion Picture, dir. Jørgen Leth and Ole John (1970)
269
48. Still from 66 Scenes from America, dir. Jørgen Leth (1983) 49. Still from Terminus for You, dir. Nicolas Rey (1996)
273 288
50. Still from Charlemagne 2: Piltzer, dir. Pip Chodorov (2002)
292
51. Still from Slug ou la dernière limace, dir. Michel Amarger (1987) 52—56. Stills from Decasia, dir Bill Morrison (2002)
300 307—310; 312
57. Ulrike Rosenbach: Video Concert – Improvisation (Cologne Art Fair, 1973)
327
58. Ulrike Rosenbach: Don’t Believe I Am An Amazon (Biennale des Jeunes, Paris, 1975) 329 59. Ulrike Rosenbach: Women’s Culture – Attempt To Make Contact (Vienna, Galerie Curtze, 1977) 331 60. Ulrike Rosenbach: Salto Mortale (Pro Musica Nova, Bremen, 1977)
332
61. Valie Export: Interface of Bilder der Berührungen (1997) 62. Anthony McCall: Long Film for Ambient Light (1975)
348 359
63. Tony Conrad: Bowed Film (1974)
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Contributors to this volume Günter Berghaus is a Senior Research Fellow at the University of Bristol and has been Guest Professor at the State University of Rio de Janeiro and at Brown University, Providence/RI. He has published some 15 books and a large number of articles on avant-garde performance, Renaissance and Baroque theatre, theatre anthropology, and dance history, among others Theatre and Film in Exile (1989), Fascism and Theatre (1996), Futurism and Politics (1996), Italian Futurist Theatre (1998), On Ritual (1998), International Futurism in the Arts and Literature (1999), Avant-garde Performance: Live Events and Electronic Technologies (2005), Theatre, Performance and the Historical Avant-garde (2005), F. T. Marinetti: Selected Writings (2006.) He has been principal organizer of several international conferences and held research awards from the Polish Academy of Sciences, the German Research Foundation, the Italian Ministry of Culture, the British Academy and the Brazilian Ministry of Education. His scholarly work was accompanied by and often based on a variety of creative activities. He has directed numerous plays from the classical and modern repertoire and devised many productions of an experimental nature; he produced radio broadcasts in Germany and Britain, participated in various exhibitions in Italy and had a show of his photographic works in Tokyo. Email address:
[email protected]
Martine Beugnet teaches Film Studies in the School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures, University of Edinburgh. Her research interests include European cinemas (in particular contemporary French cinema), as well as film, philosophy, and ideology. To date, she has completed three books: Sexualité, marginalité, contrôle: cinéma français contemporain (2000); Claire Denis (2004 – the first study of the work of this important filmmaker); and Proust at the Movies (2005, in collaboration with Marion Schmid).
Ursula Böser is a Professor in the Department of Languages and Intercultural Studies, School of Management and Languages, HeriotWatt University in Edinburgh. Her main area of research is alternative film mode, and she has published, amongst others, The Art of Seeing,
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the Art of Listening: The Politics of Representation in the Work of Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet (2004) Email address:
[email protected]
Sascha Bru is associated to the Literary Theory Research Group of Ghent University, Belgium. His research focuses on the relationship between the modernist avant-garde, politics and epistemology. He is the author of various essays on avant-garde and modernist writers, and co-editor of Historical Avant-Garde: Poetics and Politics (2005) and The Invention of Politics in the European Avant-Garde, 1906-1940 (2006). He is currently finishing a book on vanguard literature in states of exception. Bru is a founding member of the European Network for Avant-Garde and Modernism Studies (EAM). Email address:
[email protected]
Marina Burke teaches film studies at Queen’s University Belfast. Her research interests include Soviet and avant-garde film, film and sound, documentary film and African cinemas. Her publications include the articles “Inside Soviet Film Satire”, “Constructivism in Film” and “Vsevolod Meyerhold” (Irish Slavonic Studies 15(1994/6)); “The Life and Times of Rosie the Riveter”, “Union Maids”, “Juris Podnieks” and “Esfir Shub” (Encyclopedia of the Documentary Film, Routledge 2005); “Kubrick’s Early Non-Fiction Work” (in Essays on Stanley Kubrick, McFarland and Co. 2007); “Towards a Soviet Cinema”, (Cinema & cie, Fall 2007); “Eisenstein and Sound”, (Kinema, November 2007); and “Early Film Sound”, (Continuum Companion to Sound in Film and the Visual Media, forthcoming, Dearborn, 2008).
Frédérique Devaux is a filmmaker and teaches film in the Department of the Sciences, Arts and Technologies of Image and Sound at the University of Marseille, Aix-en-Provence. She has published widely on Letterism, art and experimental film, and has made over 50 feature films (both experimental and documentaries) since 1980. Email address:
[email protected]
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R. Bruce Elder is a filmmaker and Program Director, Graduate Program in Communication and Culture, Ryerson University in Toronto, Canada. He has had retrospectives at the Art Gallery of Canada, Anthology Film Archives, and the Cinémathèque Québécoise, and his films have been screened at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, Centre Pompidou, the National Gallery of Canada, Atlanta’s High Museum, and the San Francisco Cinematheque. He has received numerous awards for his films including the Governor General’s Award in Media Arts (2007), Canada’s highest award in the field. Bruce Elder has a keen interest in mathematics and works as a software engineer. He is an active member of a team of researchers at Ryerson University developing software tools for multimedia artists, contributing primarily as a computer programmer. He has received numerous grants to support this work. His fourth book, Harmony and Dissent: Film and Avant-garde Art Movements in the Early Twentieth Century, will be published early in 2008. Email address:
[email protected]
Alexander Graf is Senior Lecturer in Film and Video at the International Film School Wales in Newport. He has numerous publications in the field of European and avant-garde film, including The Cinema of Wim Wenders: The Celluloid Highway (2001). Email address:
[email protected]
Margit Grieb is Assistant Professor of German at the University of South Florida in Tampa. She has published articles and book chapters on the intersections of film and videogames, the films of Wim Wenders, and on television and its influence on German national cinema. Currently, she is working on a book manuscript entitled Transformation of the (Silver) Screen: Film after New Media. Dr. Grieb teaches courses in German film, literature and culture and directs the USF Film Studies Certificate Program.
Nicky Hamlyn is filmmaker and Professor of Experimental Film, University College for the Creative Arts at Maidstone, Kent. His most recent publications include the book Film Art Phenomena (2003),
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“Site Specificity in Film and Video Installation” in Experiments in Moving Image, EpiGraph/University of Westminster, and The Roman Numeral Films in Stan Brakhage: Filmmaker, ed. David James (2005). Nicky Hamlyn’s films have been shown worldwide at film festivals and in one-person shows. Recent festival screenings include London in 2005 and Rotterdam in 2007. Recent solo screenings include Cambridge Film Festival 2006, San Francisco Cinematheque and Pacific Film Archives, Berkeley, 2007. His film Penumbra won the prize for Experimental Form at the San Francisco Art Institute of Experimental Film and Video in 2004, and in the same year was awarded joint first prize at the Museum of Contemporary Cinema, Madrid. Email address:
[email protected]
Inez Hedges is a professor of French, German, and Cinema Studies at Northeastern University, where she holds the title of Stotsky Professor of Jewish Historical and Cultural Studies. She is the author of several books, including Framing Faust: Twentieth-Century Cultural Struggles, Southern Illinois University, 2006; Breaking the Frame: Film Language and the Experience of Limits (1991); and Languages of Revolt: Dada and Surrealist Literature and Film (1982). She is currently working on the production of “Children of Drancy”, a dramatic work she has created, based on letters and documents from the deportation of Jews from France.
Bart Keunen is Professor of Comparative Literature at Ghent University. His recent publications include Verhaal en Verbeelding. Chronotopen in de westerse verhaalcultuur (2007), Tijd voor een verhaal. Mens- en Wereldbeelden in de populaire verhaalcultuur (2005), Post-ex-sub-dis: Fragmentations of the City (with GUST, 2002), Literature and Society. The Function of Literary Sociology in Comparative Literature (with Bart Eeckhout, 2001), De verbeelding van de grootstad. Stads- en wereldbeelden in het proza van de moderniteit (2000) and The Urban Condition: Space, Community, and Self in the Contemporary Metropolis (with GUST, 1999).
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Michael Korfmann is Professor for German and Comparative Studies at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul in Porto Alegre (UFRGS), Brazil. Email address:
[email protected]
Ruedi E. Kuenzli teaches courses in contemporary theories, literatures and cultures of the 19th and 20th centuries, interarts, and avant-garde at the University of Iowa. He has published books on Marcel Duchamp, Dada and Surrealist Film, Andre Breton, Surrealism and Women, and New York Dada. He is the editor of Dada/Surrealism and the Director of the International Dada Archive at the University of Iowa.
Tania Ørum is Associate Professor at The Department for Cultural Studies and the Arts, University of Copenhagen. She has published extensively in a variety of fields of Modernist studies, including on Danish artists’ film and video.
A.L. Rees is Research Tutor at the School of Communication Art & Design, Royal College of Art, London, where he coordinates research activities in the field of Communications. In September 2006 he directed Moving Frame, an exhibition of new film and digital work by research staff and students at the RCA (including Karen Mirza, Brad Butler, Nicky Hamlyn, Simon Payne, Adam Kossoff, Toby Cornish, Malcom Clarke, Jo Cammack, Matthias Hillner), RCA Galleries. His major publications include A History of Experimental Film and Video, BFI, London, 1999 (in 6th reprinting) and, more recently, “Unconscious Optics of the Avant-Garde Film” in The Expanded Eye – Stalking the Unseen (Kunsthaus Zürich 2006); “Experimenting on Air” in Experimental British Television (Manchester University Press 2007); and the forthcoming “Movements in Film 1912-40” and “Movements in Film 1940-79” in Film and Video Art (Tate Publishing 2008). Al Rees is also a board member of AVPhD (a consortium of colleges that provides training and debate for UK researchers using audio-visual media) and of no.where lab, which organizes workshops, screenings and critical forums in experimental filmmaking and timebased art.
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Email address:
[email protected]
Pierre Sorlin is Professor at the University of Paris Sorbonne Nouvelle. His recent publications include Dreamtelling (2004) Email address:
[email protected]
Yvonne Spielmann holds the Chair of New Media at the University of Paisley, Scotland. She is author of the German language books “ Eine Pfütze in bezug aufs Mehr. Avantgarde” (1991), “Intermedialität. Das System Peter Greenaway” (1998) and “Video. The Reflexive Medium” forthcoming, MIT 2007. She is also co-editor of, amongst others, “What is Intermedia?”, a special issue of Convergence (winter 2002), “Hybrid Identities in Digital Media”, special issue of Convergence (winter 2005). Research grants and fellowships include the Getty Center (1989/90), The Society for the Humanities at Cornell University (2000/2001), The Rockefeller Foundation's Bellagio Study & Conference Center (2002), The Daniel Langlois Foundation (2003 and 2004), the Japan Foundation (2005), and the National University of Singapore (2007).
Maureen Turim is Professor of English and film studies at the University of Florida. She is author of Abstraction in Avant-Garde Films (1985), Flashbacks in Film: Memory and History (1989) and The Films of Oshima: Images of a Japanese Iconoclast (2004). She has published over fifty essays in anthologies and journals on a wide range of theoretical, historical and aesthetic issues in cinema and video, art, cultural studies, feminist and psychoanalytic theory, and comparative literature. Several of these essays have appeared in translation in French and German. Her current book project, entitled Desire and its Ends: The Driving Forces of Recent Cinema, Literature, and Art, will look at the different ways desire structures narratives and images in various cultural traditions, and the way our very notion of desire may be shaped by these representations.
Jonathan Walley is Assistant Professor, Cinema Department, Denison University (Granville, Ohio). His recent publications include
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“The Material of Film and the Idea of Cinema: Contrasting Practices in Sixties and Seventies Avant-garde Film”, October 103 (Spring 2003); “An Interview with Anthony McCall,” in Anthony McCall: The Solid Light Films and Related Works (ed. Christopher Eamon, 2005); and “Modes of Film Practice in the Avant-Garde,” in Moving Images (ed. Tanya Leighton forthcoming 2007). Major research interests involve avant-garde film and its aesthetic, historical, and institutional relationship to avant-garde art in general. He is currently writing a book about paracinema, focusing particularly the work of Tony Conrad, Ken Jacobs, Anthony McCall and Paul Sharits, as well as contemporary paracinematic work. Email address:
[email protected]
William C. Wees is Emeritus Professor of English, McGill University. His major publications include Light Moving in Time: Studies in the Visual Aesthetics of Avant-Garde Film (1992); and Recycled Images: The Art and Politics of Found Footage Films (1993). He is also Editor of the Canadian Journal of Film Studies/Revue canadienne d’études cinématographiques Email address:
[email protected]
Tami M. Williams is Associate Professor for Film Studies at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee. She has curated several retrospectives of the work of Germaine Dulac in Europe and the United States.
Index
8mm 66; 208; 267-268; 271; 274n 16mm 56; 66; 71; 189; 208; 260n; 266; 272; 274n; 293; 357; 358 35mm 66; 249-250; 255; 260n
ABCinema 262-274 Absolute Film 3; 5; 13; 22-23; 73n abstract art 5; 48; 56 Abstract Expressionism 168-169; 292 abstract film 12; 26; 46; 56-59; 62; 64; 68; 74-75; 125; 128; 150n; 279 abstract form 30; 98; 127; 314 abstract images 48; 61; 287; 289 abstract patterns 62; 71; 188; 316; 360 abstraction 1; 9; 15-16; 35; 56-57; 59; 63; 69-70; 75n; 78; 81; 95; 98-99; 117; 122; 125-129; 162; 199; 202-203; 211-212; 279-280; 289; 293-294; 297 Acconci, Vito 323; 326; 336n Action Painting 308 Adams, Ansel 162 adaptation 115-116; 135; 138; 238; 346; 349 Adler Petersen, Lene 265; 274n Adorno, Theodor Wiesegrund 74n; 81; 84 aesthetics 14; 56; 81; 85; 112; 145; 170; 175-177; 183-184; 186; 192; 261; 269; 271; 326 after-image 252; 255-256 agitki 140; 145 alienation 70; 89; 179; 238 Almendros, Nestor 185 Amarger, Michel 299-300; 303-304 amazons 328-329; 334 analogy 12; 17; 19; 21; 24; 25; 29; 37; 4957; 319 analytical montage 288 androgyny 99; 123 Anger, Kenneth 156 Anik, Djemil 122 animation 34; 55; 64; 286 animation rostrum camera 60
Antheil, George 94; 96 anthropology 155 Antin, Eleanor 326 arabesque 126-128 Aragon, Louis 232-234; 237-239; 241-143; 245 architecture 8; 158 Arnheim, Rudolph 71; 356 Arnold, Martin 299-301; 303-304 Arp, Hans 11; 17; 24; 73n art film 56 Artaud, Antonin 58; 99; 102; 281 associative montage/editing 78-79; 82-83; 88 asynchronity 197; 200; 202; 206-207 aura 156; 172; 179; 186; 318 auteur 285 automatism 98 avant-garde (-art) 5; 10; 20; 46; 84; 93; 116; 156; 163; 267; 271; 274n; 284; 286-287; (-cinema) 4; 93; 357; 362; 365-366; 368370; 374; 376-379; (-film) x; 49; 77; 84; 86; 129; 183-184; 186; 194; 195n; 261; 279-280; 293; 296n; 315; 318-319; 355356; 357; 370-374; (movements) x; 105; 262; 264; 266-268; 281-283; 288; (theory) ix; x; xi; 77; 84; 356; 380n; (-video) 55; 322
Bach Johann Sebastian 28-29 Bacon Francis 279 Baldessari, John 326 ballet 98; 123; 126; 129 Barber, George 62 Barney, Natalie 96 Barthes, Roland 318; 326 basso continuo 28-30 Bataille, Georges 280; 291 Baudelaire, Charles 88; 102 Bauhaus 20; 34; 46; 56-57; 69; 183; 186 Bazin, André 319 Beauvais, Yann 282; 306
394 Belson, Jordan 183; 192-193 Benjamin, Walter 58; 73n; 74n; 94; 232; 296n; 325-326 Bergson, Henri 19; 21 Beuys, Joseph 325; 334 black and white 15; 23; 29-32; 41; 43; 45; 47; 49-50; 62; 64; 66; 68; 134; 183; 195n; 199; 201; 205-206; 208; 218; 222; 249258; 270; 287-289; 290; 321; 329; 347; 357-358 Boccaccio, Giovanni 330 body 123-124; 128-129; 178; 288; 321; 323; 331; 334; 344-345; 347; 353n body art 324 Bokanowski, Patrick 282 Bolshevik revolution 137 Boltanski, Christian 282 Botticelli, Sandro 329-330 Bouquet, Carole 234 bourgeoisie 115; 135; 146; 218; 244 Bragaglia, Anton Giulio 134 Brakhage, Stan 156; 157-180; 181n; 183; 186; 190-192; 209; 360; 375 Brazil, Edgar 111-114 Brecht, Bertold 57; 73n; 343 Breton, André 6; 94; 96; 148-149; 231; 244-245 bricolage 285-287 Brik, Lily 142-144; 147-148; 150n Brik, Osip 142 Brøgger, Stig 271; 274n Brus, Günter 342 Buchheister, Carl 48 Budapest, Zsuzsanna 326 Bürger, Peter ix; x; xi; 75n; 77; 80; 83-84; 284 Buñuel, Luis 58; 117; 140; 156; 217228; 229n; 233-234; 237-238; 240; 242; 244-245 Burliuk, David 135 Burliuk, Nicolai 135; 140 Busoni, Ferruccio 29-30 Bute, Mary Ellen 65 Butler, Brad 70
Cain, James M. 158 cameraless film 357; 360-361; 374 Caravaggio, Michelangelo Merisi da 330 Carpentier, Alejo 231 Castel, Bernard 186-188 Cavalcanti, Alberto 78; 80; 86; 107 CD-ROM 339-352 celluloid 194 Cendrars, Blaise 105 chaos 37; 294 Chaplin Club 112-113; 115-116 Chicago, Judy 326 Child, Abigail 163 Chodorov, Pip 279-280; 283-285; 287-289; 292-295 Chomette, Henri 96 Christensen, Theodor 261 Christiansen, Henning 268; 274n Christiansen, Ursula Reuter 272 cinema novo 115 cinematography 4-5; 105; 115; 306; 318-319 city symphonies 77-89; 147 Clair, René 73n; 78; 96; 148 clavecin oculaire 186 clavilux 187 CoBrA 262 Cocteau, Jean 5; 175 Collage 288; 290; 202-203 collage films 262; 289; 306; 320n Collectif Jeune Cinéma 283 collective films 268; 271 Collom, Jane 176 color 14; 20 -23; 35; 39-48; 56; 58; 62-66; 69; 134; 166-173; 177179; 183; 185-190; 193; 195n; 199-203; 206; 208-209; 212213; 253; 255; 264; 269-270; 287-288; 294; 296n color-field painting 69 color theory 44; 46; 176 comedy 146 commodification 88; 284 composition (visual) 20; 25; 34; 3638; 48-50; 62; 74n; 80-82; 183; 186-188; 257; 287; 292294; 300-303; (musical) 24; 28-30; 80-81
395 conceptual film 375-376 Conceptualism 322 Conrad, Tony xi; 195n; 209; 251; 355; 357; 360-363; 369-377; 380n; 381n Constantini, Lilian 122; 126-127 Constructivism 6; 8-12; 51n; 55; 73n; 148 content 78; 82; 86-87; 89; 210; 218; 270; 312; 316; 319; 364; 376 continuity 25; 84; 116; 122; 170; 183; 186-187; 207; 217; 237; 289; 290; 301; 312; 313 contrast 12-15; 17-18; 22-23; 25-28; 30; 37-39; 45; 59; 82; 88; 98; 123; 125; 189; 208; 218; 212; 255; 256; 288-289; 293-294; 300; 309; 317; 321; 324; 347 Cornish, Toby 71 Corrigan, Rick 169 counterpoint 17-18; 25; 27; 29; 31; 50 cross-dressing 124; 265 cross-section film 87-88 Cybele 100 Cubism 5; 14-15; 17; 20; 56; 62; 73n; 84; 86; 106; 134; 288-289 Cubo-Futurism 134; 145 culture 30; 32-33; 89; 157; 227; 243; 267; 284; 290; 296n; 328; 331; 333 Curtiz, Michael 158 cutting 71; 81-84; 87-88; 95-96; 145; 157;160; 185; 198-190; 202; 208; 220; 258; 266; 268; 270; 347; 361 cyberfeminism 344 cyborg 343-345
Dada 5; 12; 14-17; 29-30; 48; 55-56; 68; 73n; 74n; 93-103; 104n; 116-117; 134; 322; 336n Daisne, Johan 231; 238; 240; 243-244 dance 64-65; 121-129; 136; 155; 157; 159; 162; 168-169; 176; 178; 307-311; 313-315 Davis, Jim 183; 187-193 de Amaral, Tarsila 106 de Amicis, Edmondo 141
de Andrade, Mario 107 Debussy, Claude 127-128 decay 253; 305-306; 308-314; 316317; 375 dé-collage films 262 defamiliarization 102 de Farias, Octavio 112; 115 Delaunay, Robert 21-22; 86 de la Rivière 100 de Mello, Saulo Pereira 114-115 Deleuze, Gilles 279-280; 285; 288; 365 Devaux, André 231; 238; 240; 242246 Delvaux, Paul 231 dematerialized cinema 360; 363; 365 depth 59; 60; 62; 75n; 280 Deren, Maya 156-163; 164n desire 121; 123; 155-157; 159; 161163; 222; 226; 324 Desnos, Robert 93; 99-102; 104n; 173 De Stijl 7; 9; 13; 34; 49 De Stijl 7; 9; 11; 13; 53n dialogue 68; 220; 222 Diana 334 “diary films” 265; 274n Diederich, Helmut H. 106 differance 286 digital 55; 60; 62-63; 68-71; 73n; 74n; 75n; 183; 192-194; 195n; 262; 285; 318-319; 339-345; 349-351; 353n digital photography 344 dispersed sound 256 dissonance 20; 317 distortion 5; 134; 211; 307; 319 distribution 84; 211; 281-284; 296n; 325; 339; 362; 366; 375 Dix, Otto 32 Dockham, Charles 65 documentary 3-6; 57; 61; 78-79; 8687; 89; 107; 140; 145-148; 167; 219; 237; 261; 266; 293; 299 Dogme95 272 Doone, Rupert 65 Dorsky, Nathaniel 184 double exposure 134; 270
396 Dovzhenko, Alexander 110 drawings 15; 17; 18; 25; 29; 33; 56; 57; 60; 289 dream 70; 99-100; 102; 128-129; 159; 167; 172; 175; 218-219; 231232; 234; 238; 243; 245; 315 dream vision 166 Dreyer, Carl Theodor 261 drifting 205; 207 Drummond, Phillip 66 Duchamp, Marcel 5; 74n; 93-94; 100; 104n; 105 Dulac, Germaine 80; 99; 102; 121129; 131n; 184; 286; 356 Duncan, Isadora 122; 125; 128-129 Duncan, Robert 178 duration 57; 79-80; 86; 250; 252; 358; 361-362; 368; 375; 376; 380n DVD-video 340 dynamism 4; 20-21; 133
Edison, Thomas 66 editing 65; 71; 78-79; 83-84; 89; 90n; 110; 141; 190; 289-290; 294; 313; 323 Eggeling, Viking 5; 7; 10-14; 17-19; 22; 24-27; 29-37; 39-40; 4446; 50; 55-57; 59; 65; 71; 73n; 125; 134 Ehrenburg, Il’ja 10; 12 Einstein, Albert 30 Eisenstein, Sergei 27; 35; 51n; 58; 70-71; 83-84; 111; 114-116; 135; 145-146; 148; 173; 250; 306; 315 Eisner, Lotte H. 116 electro-magnetic tape 323 electronic music 327 electronic painting 271 emulsion 192; 194; 195n; 208; 252253; 360; 374 Eno, Brian 66 Epstein, Jean 5; 218; 356 Erigena, Johannes Scotus 186; 188; 191; 195n Ernst, Max 6 “establishing shot” 348
Eve, 333-334 evolution créatrice 244 Eulenspiegel, Till 333 exhibition 84; 156; 282; 357-358; 362-363; 366-378 Expanded cinema 296n; 364-365; 367; 370-371; 375; 378 experimental film x; 30; 74n; 125; 128; 129; 213; 220-221; 227; 250; 261-262; 265; 167; 271272; 279-280; 282-285; 287; 296n; 299; 340-341; 379 Experimental School of Art (Copenhagen) 261-263; 267 Export, Valie 301; 339-352; 353n exposure 127; 134; 140; 254-255; 270; 360-361; 374 expression 5; 7-8; 31-33; 36-38; 125; 157; 183; 187; 225; 284; 287; 321; 343 Expressionism 5; 8; 32-33; 73n; 84; 106; 145; 236; 240; 288; 289; 292; 322 external object 6
fade 81; 117; 118; 137; 201; 205-206; 254 Faust films (Brakhage) 165-179; 181n feelings 12-13; 26-27; 32-33; 36; 38; 42-48; 184-185 female body 129; 321; 323-326; 328; 331; 334; 342; 344-347 femininity 124; 324; 328; 330; 334 feminism 325-326; 334; 335; 342-344 feminist art 322; 326; 328; 339 feminist video performance 321; 324; 328 figuration 122; 125; 128; 163; 280; 294 “film band“ 270 film language 78; 80-82; 84; 217; 261; 269; 270 “film reality” 266 Fini, Leonor 162 Fischer, Konrad 327 Fischinger, Oskar 23-24; 59; 292 Fleischer, Alain 282
397 flicker 195n; 197-208; 212-213; 250254; 362; 380n Flores, Angel 238-239 Fluxus 55; 68; 271; 322 folklore 134; 333 form 4; 5; 6; 8-9; 10-13; 15; 22; 2450; 55; 61-62; 67-68; 74n; 75n; 77-78-80; 82; 84; 86-89; 98; 102; 106; 115-116; 121122; 125-130; 157; 167; 179; 184; 190; 192; 203; 209-213; 218; 249-250; 258; 268; 270; 271; 279-287; 289-291; 295; 302-304; 306-307; 311; 314; 316; 319; 324; 339-340; 342; 351-352; 356; 359; 362-365; 367-376; 378; 379; 380n Formalism 56; 60; 86; 145; 280; 355356; 359-374; 376; 380n Form-Sprache/form-language 37; 55; 61 Foucault, Michel 365 found footage 62; 65-66; 253; 286; 299; 305-307; 311-315; 317319 frame 49; 55-60; 64-71; 74n; 83; 90n; 197-214; 249-259; 289; 290; 293-294; 299-300; 303; 357 frame rate 197-199 Frampton, Hollis 209; 293 Freddie, Wilhelm 262 freeze-frame 290 Freund, Karl 111 Friedberg, Anne ix; 84 fugue 20-22; 25; 48 Fuller, Loïe 128-129 Futurism 5; 20; 56; 73n; 133-149; 150n; 287; 288; 293; 296n
Gabo, Naum 26 Galileo, Galilei 39 Garcia Marquez, Gabriel 231; 238239; 243 Gasparcolor 23 gender 121-125; 129; 157; 159; 324; 334; 342-345
genre 65; 77-79; 135; 145; 176; 235; 283; 309; 321; 323; 324; 342; 347; 380n geometric forms/shapes 6; 9; 17; 31; 38; 45; 50; 55; 98; 187; 287; 289; 292; 294; 303 George, Yvonne 99 Gestalt theory 7; 9; 12-13; 30; 74n; 197; 208 gesture 18-19; 31; 38; 40; 69; 122; 125; 155; 322 Gibson, James E. 197-198; 200 Gidal, Peter 372 Gilje, HC 70 Ginna, Arnaldo 134; 150n Glass, Philip 302; 304; 306 Godard, Jean Luc 261; 380n Goddess Movement 326 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 18-19; 28-29; 35; 39-44; 46-47; 115; 169-179 Goncharova, Natal’ya 134-136 Gonzaga, Adhemar 112-113 Gordon, Michael 305; 306; 313; 317 Graeff, Werner 11-12; 20; 23; 26; 58 Graham, Dan 323; 326 grain 194; 209 graphic art 55; 80 grid 21; 62-63; 68-70; 280; 287; 294 Grill, Michaela 70 Grissemann, Stefan 70 Grosseteste, Robert 186 Grosz, George 32 Gusbert, Maia 70 Guy, Edmonde 122
half-inch helical scan equipment 322 Hall, David 56; 62 Hammid, Alexander 156 happenings 133; 269; 271; 274n; 322; 336n Haraway, Donna 343-345 Hartney, Mick 62 hand-coloring 58; 65; 134 Hausmann, Raoul 11 Hayles, Katherine 345 Heartfield, John 32 high modernism 56; 258; 284
398 Hirschfeld-Mack, Ludwig 73n; 183; 184 Historical avant-garde x; 284 Höch, Hannah 11 homosexuality 111; 122; 124 hybridity 71; 106; 235-236; 238-242; 246; 283; 285 hypermediation 349 hyperreality 232; 236-242; 247n hypertext 349 hypnagogic vision 166; 175-176 Huszar, Vilmos 7
Iles, Chrissie 206; 368; 378 imagination 14; 29; 39-40; 42; 45; 102; 166; 172; 231-234; 237; 239; 241-242 Impressionism 36; 84; 128 improvisation 96 individualism 8; 10 informe 280-281 installation art 69; 70; 187; 197-201; 204-206; 213; 253; 256; 263; 271; 282; 339; 341; 342; 350351; 358; 368; 375; 378; 380n instant-relay 323; 326 integral cinema 128 interactivity 258; 263; 347; 349-351 interface 73n; 345-350 internal necessity 11; 35; 40; 48 interiority 45; 155-157; 159; 161; 163 International Situationist Movement 262 intertitles 78-79; 83; 100; 101; 107; 109; 116 interval (music) 28; 83; (montage) 70; 71; 83; 88; 198-200; 202-204; 206; 210 intervention 56; 189; 197; 214; 286; 288; 296n; 327; 370 iris shot 313 irrationality 4; 6; 98 Itten, Johannes 46-47 Iven, Joris 79
Jacobs, Ken 163; 355 James, David 366; 376; 381n
John, Ole 266; 269-270 Jonas, Joan 326 Jorn, Asger 262 Jull, Marilyn 176
K., Sue 70 Kamensky, Vasily 135; 140 Kandinsky, Vassily 21; 35-36; 44-46; 57 Kasyanov, Vladimir 135 Keaton, Buster 144; 218 Kelly, Ellsworth 69 Kemeny, Adalberto 79; 107 Kertesz, André 112 Khlebnikov, Velimir 135; 145 Kiki 96; 98; 100 kinetic light modulator 186 Kinok Group 80; 90n Kirchner, Ernst Ludwig 32-33 Kirsanov, Dimitri 163 Klee, Paul 20-22 Klonaris, Maria 282 Kollwitz, Käthe 32 Kontrast-Analogie 12; 26-27; 45; 50 Kracauer, Siegfried 70; 78; 86-88 Krautgasser, Annja 69 Kren, Kurt 69; 71; 260n; 301 Kruchenykh, Alexei 135; 145 Krzeczek, Darius 69 Kubelka, Peter 64-65; 67; 69; 71; 73n; 249-259; 260n Kümel, Harry 231 Kuleshov, Lev 141; 144; 146; 147 Kupka, Frantisek 20; 48
Lacy, Suzanne 326 Lampo, Hubert 231; 243 Landuyt, Octaaf 231 Lang, Fritz 59; 71; 107; 111 language 3; 29-38; 68; 80-82; 100; 116; 137; 180; 184; 210; 214; 269; 273; 339; 346 Lapoujade, Robert 282 Larionov, Mikhail 134-135 Lazlo, Alexander 187 Lef 137-138; 145-148 Léger, Fernand 5; 73n; 96
399 Le Gac, Jean 282 Le Grice, Malcolm 55; 65-67; 73n; 74n; 134; 141; 193; 195n; 253; 380n Lenin, Vladimir Ilich 138 lens 96; 102; 134; 187; 190; 192 Leth, Jørgen 261; 266; 269-270; 272273; 274n Letraset 68 Lettrisme 296 Lichtspiele 22; 186 light 5; 14; 22; 26; 28; 39; 41-45; 48; 73n; 74n; 94; 95; 126-128; 134; 160; 162; 165; 167; 169180; 183-194; 195n; 200-203; 208-212; 249-259; 357-370; 376-378; 380n lighting 170; 184; 185; 272 light-play 61; 74n; 183-194 light sculptures 22; 184; 380n line 17-18; 20; 36; 50; 70-71; 75n; 94-95; 108; 125-128; 131n; 169-170; 289 linear motion 197; 309; 311 linearity 201; 204; 206-207; 211-213 Linien 262 Lippard, Lucy 322; 328 Lissitzky, El 6-12; 51n; 73n; 74n literature x; 5; 12; 80-81; 106; 115; 135; 138; 183-184; 231-232; 235 Littman, Steve 62-63 live performance 305; 320n; 321; 323; 326-327; 332; 367 live video performance 325; 327; 332 Lloyd, Owen 71 Lochner, Stefan 328 London, Jack 138 London Filmmakers’ Cooperative 367 loop 64; 66; 197; 199-201; 206; 212; 289; 301; 302; 368; 376; 378 Louys, Pierre 244 love 46; 68; 99-101; 167-168; 172; 175-176; 179; 226; 234; 241244 Lubitsch, Ernst 111 Lumia 187-188 Lumière brothers 306
Lunenfeld, Peter 348; 350 Lustig, Rudolf Rex 79; 86; 107 Lye, Len 5; 55; 64; 65-66
MacDonald, Scott 364 Macdonald-Wright, Stanton 21; 22 machine 69; 81; 96; 125-126; 146; 148; 166; 343; 345 Madonna 328; 331; 334 Magical realism 231-246 mainstream cinema 283-284; 296n; 375 Malevich, Kazimir 9; 57; 73n Mandel, Rainer 69 Manovich, Lev 73n; 351 Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso 105; 133; 134; 135 Marti, Stéphane 282 mass media 267-268; 321; 322; 324 materialist film 367; 370 matrix 63; 65 Mayakovsky, Vladimir 133-149; 150n McCall, Anthony 195n; 355-373; 376-378; 380n media art 72; 339; 343 medial anagrams 339; 342 medium specificity 184; 190; 191; 194; 195n; 373 Medusa 330-331; 334 Mekas, Jonas 3; 249-250; 375; 380n Meidner, Ludwig 32 Méliès, Georges 23; 166; 173 melodrama 134-135; 145; 220; 272; 309 Melson, Søren 262 memory 13; 110; 116; 117; 166; 172174; 168; 290; 350 memory feedback 166; 176 Mertz, Albert 262 metric montage 300 metrical editing 78 metrical films 249; 252; 256 metrical pattern 175 Meyerhold, Vsevolod 135; 137; 148; 149; 150n Michaux, Henry 291
400 Mignot, Dorine 327 minimalist music 287; 293; 303; 305 mimesis 81; 89 mirrors 127; 134; 161; 332-334 mise-en-abyme 347-350 Mirza, Karen 70 Modernism x; 3; 56; 84; 158; 183; 267; 274n; 284 modernity 70; 77; 106; 122; 129; 133; 271 Moholy-Nagy, Lázló 11; 31; 53n; 71; 73n; 183; 185; 186 Molina, Angela 234 Mondrian, Piet 11; 12; 17; 18; 62 monitor 69; 210; 211; 321; 323; 324; 325; 328; 329; 331; 333 Monory, Jacques 282 monochrome 21; 69; 199-200; 202; 294 montage 14; 32; 51n; 55; 58; 61; 62; 70-71; 77; 79-89; 90n; 116; 123; 134; 140; 148; 156; 160; 161; 170-171; 202-203; 238; 240; 250; 284; 286; 287; 288; 290-291; 299; 300; 306; 312; 323; 340; 341 Montanez Ortiz, Rafael 299; 303-304 Montano, Linda 326 Morrison, Bill 305-319 Morrissey, Paul 375 motion 5; 19; 22; 30; 49; 58; 61; 69; 70; 73n; 75n; 81; 89; 133; 177; 183; 186-187; 197-208; 212; 222; 251; 269; 286; 291; 300; 311; 314; 346; 347; 380n movement (motion) 3-5; 13-14; 19; 21; 26; 38; 40; 45; 49; 50; 55; 59; 61; 62; 69-70; 75n; 82; 83; 87; 90n; 94; 100; 116; 117; 122-129; 137; 159; 160-162; 165; 178; 184; 189; 193; 197198; 201; 206-208; 210; 212; 250-252; 289; 294; 300; 304; 309-315; 346-348; 357-358; 364-367; 380n MTV 56 Mueller, Roswitha 339; 342-346 Mulligan, Robert 301 multimedia art 340
multiple screen 197; 199-201; 204206; 212; 272 Munch, Edvard 291 Münsterberg. Hugo 356 Murnau, Friedrich Wilhelm 109; 111; 116; 173 Murphy, Dudley 73n; 95; 96; 267; 274n music 17; 19; 21-30; 45; 48; 49; 59; 61; 62; 64-69; 74n; 80-83; 110; 121-126; 168-169; 173; 174; 176; 179; 186; 187; 223; 258; 270; 287-290; 293-294; 299; 301-304; 305; 313; 317; 327-328 music video 65; 69
nano-thought 350 Napierkowska, Stasia 122 narrative 62; 71; 74n; 78; 79; 80; 84; 85; 102-103; 104n; 117; 121; 125; 129; 155; 156; 158; 163; 172; 175-176; 209-214; 219220; 237; 271- 272; 279-280; 283; 286; 300; 309; 316; 348349; 373 narrative cinema 85; 212; 279-283; 286; 288; 369 narratology 85; 234-235 Nash, Jørgen 262 naturalism 122; 137; 141 nature 3; 18; 38; 40; 42; 48; 61; 125127; 188; 189; 232; 254; 271; 321; 334-335 negative footage 50; 61 negative images 162; 289; 290; 292; 293; 294 Németh, Stefan 69 Neo-avant-garde x; 342 Neo-plasticism 10-13 Neo-Dada 68 New American Cinema 4; 156 new media 343; 344; 350; 351 newsreel 144; 147; 306 Newton, Isaac 39; 42-42; 46; 186 New Woman 121 Nielsen, Asta 262 Niemeyer, Erna 26; 34; 57
401 nitrate film 115; 253; 305-308; 314; 317-318 Nitsch, Hermann 342 Noel-Tod, Matthew 71 Noguez, Dominique 282-287 noise music 288 Nørgaard, Bjørn 265; 274n nostalgia 281; 293 Nov, Ivan 138; 140 Novy Lef 138; 146; 148 NTSC 211
“objective chance” 245 OBMOKhU 8; 9 Obscenema 94; 104n off-screen sound 256 O’Keeffe, Georgia 162 optical printing 192; 195n; 208; 288; 293-294; 300 Orphism 20 Oud, J. J. 7
Pabst, Georg Wilhelm 111 painting 14-15; 17; 19-22; 24; 29; 34; 36; 46; 48-50; 56-57; 68-69; 71; 73n; 74n; 78; 82; 89; 94; 106; 121; 122; 133-136; 145; 169; 172; 175; 178; 253; 258; 262; 269; 271; 279; 286; 288289; 292; 322; 324; 328; 330; 364; 368; 376; 380n painted film 19; 22; 68; 168; 179; 195n; 262; 279; 288; 293; 296n PAL 211 Palestine, Charlemagne 293; 296 paracinema 51n; 355-366; 370-379 parapraxis 157; 159 Paris Film Coop 282 patriarchy 301; 324; 329; 331; 334; 344; 350 Payne, Simon 69 Peixoto, Mario 105-117 Pedreira, Brutus 110 perception xi; 12-14; 19; 21; 30-31; 36; 42; 58; 85-86; 106; 116; 166; 169; 172; 185; 197-198;
200-201; 206-209; 212; 232245; 255; 257; 299; 300; 304; 325; 342; 367; 372; 380n performance 133; 135; 136; 202-203; 208; 268; 323-324; 327-334 339; 341; 350; 362; 364 Performance Art 323; 326 peripheral vision 166 permutation 55; 64; 68; 69; 71; 251252; 350; 358 perspective 6; 72; 86; 173; 198; 270; 279-280; 289; 294; 309; 334; 368; 372 Peterson, Sidney 316 Pfaffenbichler, Norbert 69 Photodynamism 134 photography 78; 81-82; 84; 93-94; 106; 155; 165; 178; 287; 325 photomontage 32; 86 Photo-Secession 78 physiological vision 177 Picabia, Francis 5 Picasso, Pablo 56; 106 Pictorialism 78 pixel 69 plane of vision 59 Plant, Sadie 344 poetry 133-138; 144; 147-148; 168; 176 Poggioli, Renato ix; 77 point of view 89; 190; 289; 294 polarity 26; 29; 30; 38; 41; 45; 331; 333 Pollock, Jackson 168 pop promo 65 popular cinema 283 popular music 65 popular culture 267; 284 Porter, Edwin S. 306 possible worlds 232-239 post-colonial art 106 Post-modernism 70; 231; 280; 284; 295 Post-structuralism 350; 375 Pougny, Jean 10 Pound, Ezra 85; 87; 96; 181n; 186 Precisionism 78 Pre-Raphaelites 122 pre-recorded tape 327; 332
402 printing 63; 66; 288; 314 prism 41; 134; 167; 177; 186 Productivism 9 Prokofiev, Sergei 111 projection xi; 69; 73n; 128; 195n; 197-206; 210-213; 249; 250; 253; 267; 260n; 270; 282; 296n; 299-301; 349; 357-365; 370; 374; 376 projector 169; 175; 187; 198; 201; 205; 208; 213; 250-254; 271; 301; 357-359; 361-362; 368369; 380n psychoanalysis 156; 218; 301 Pudovkin, Vsevolod Illarionovich 3; 112; 113 pure cinema 113; 122; 125; 129
Rainer, Arnulf 64 randomized imaging 69 Ray, Man 5; 74n; 93-102; 104n; 106; 109; 112; 117; 173; 218 Rayograph 94-98 realism 235; 240; 315 reality 9-10; 21; 33; 41-42; 84; 98; 102; 116; 137; 142; 167; 172; 231; 233-245; 247n; 266; 274n; 285; 287; 289-290; 317319; 322-323; 342; 347 reason 6; 10; 31; 33; 35-36 referentiality 165; 167 reflected light 183; 185-186; 188; 190 refracted light 188; 189 registration pin 204; 213 Reich, Steve 302-303 Renan, Sheldan 364; 365; 370; 377378 repetition 21; 62; 82; 97; 109; 161; 162; 165; 167; 206; 207; 218; 244; 299; 301-303 repetitive montage 290-291 repetitive music 302 reportage 144; 266; 268 representation 20; 22; 36; 80; 85; 116; 165; 168; 178-179; 183; 199; 203; 206-207; 220; 242; 281; 305; 312; 316; 318-319;
321; 322; 324; 330; 333-334; 339; 342; 343; 347; 349; 372 reproduction 3-5; 137; 187; 318-319; 325 Reuter Christiansen, Ursula 272 Rey, Nicholas 279-280; 287-295 rhythm 5; 13-15; 20; 22; 26; 28; 3739; 46-50; 59-63; 79; 80; 81; 95; 98; 103; 116; 117; 118; 122-123; 125-126; 128; 131n; 169-171; 183-184; 189-190; 197; 200; 202-203; 205; 209; 212; 249-251; 254-257; 289; 294; 300; 302; 304; 314; 317; 328 rhythmic editing 78-83; 88; 95; 98; 103; 109-110; 171 Richardson, Emily 70 Richter, Hans x; 3-34; 37-39; 44-50; 55-63; 71; 73n; 74n; 94; 98; 125; 134 Rigaut, Jacques 98 Rilke, Rainer Maria 346 Rimington, Alexander Wallace 187 ritual 157; 162; 172; 265; 326; 333334 Rocha, Glauber 115 Rodchenko, Alexander 8 Rodenbach, Georges 243 Roizman, Owen 185 romance 312 Roos, Jørgen 262 Rosenbach, Ulrike 321-335; 336n Rotha, Paul 116 Russell, Morgan 21-22; 48 Russian Futurism 133-135 Ruttmann, Walther 5; 24; 55-56; 5963; 71; 73n; 79-89; 107; 109; 115; 292
Sadoul, Georges 115 Satie, Erik 109 Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph 41; 45 Schneemann, Carolee 326 Schnitzler, Konrad 327-328 Schoenberg, Arnold 64
403 School for Creative Feminism 326; 330; 333 Schub, Esfir 306 Schreiber, Lotte 69 Schum, Jerry 325 Schwalbe, Niels 266; 270 Schwitters, Kurt 11 Scratch 62; 195n; 205-207; 250; 253254; 296n scratch video 62; 69 screen 49-50; 55; 60; 66; 69; 72; 73n; 74n; 102; 134; 143-144; 169; 184; 199-201; 204-206; 212; 252-254; 272; 294; 296n; 340; 353n screen printing 288 script 99; 146; 264 scroll painting 18-19; 22; 26; 33; 34; 48; 56-57 sculpture 22; 98; 104; 188; 272; 322; 325-326; 359; 364; 365; 367368; 372; 376; 378; 380n Self, Robert 327 sensation 3; 5; 14; 21; 125; 128; 129; 131n; 177; 198 sequentiality 20; 22; 256 serial music 64; 258 serial painting 271 Serra, Richard 71; 336n sexuality 121-122; 163; 218 Sharits, Paul 68; 195n; 197-214; 293; 369 Sharp, Willoughby 326; 336n Sheeler, Charles 78; 94 Shklovsky, Viktor 139; 147 shot-reverse-shot 141 shutter 204-206; 213; 380n sight 22; 40; 175; 197-198; 212 silence 45; 174; 255-259 silent film 146; 174; 374 Silverman, Kaja 346-347 Simmel, Georg 85-88 simultaneity 5; 20-22; 211; 236; 303 Sitney P. Adams 77; 78; 80; 83; 99; 176; 209; 251; 256-257; 315; 364; 365; 372; 377 slow motion 126; 270; 314; 317; 352 Smith, Jack 163 Smith, Murray 366
Snow, Michael 369 Social Sculpture 325 solarization 307 solid light film 357; 367; 377; 380n sonchromatoscope 187 sound 21; 45; 59; 71; 75n; 80-81; 169; 174; 185; 195n; 201-202; 205-206; 209; 234; 249-250; 252; 255-259; 270; 279-281; 291; 293-294; 300-304; 305; 313; 314; 362; 376 soundtrack 62; 64; 66; 68-69; 110; 201; 255; 290; 293; 300 Soupault, Philippe 26; 94 space 8; 15; 20; 29; 49; 55-56; 60-62; 69-71; 74n; 75n; 78; 82-83; 86; 108; 110; 115; 144; 155; 157-161; 163; 173; 176; 183; 185-186; 188; 219; 225; 235; 245; 256; 280; 294; 311; 328; 330-331; 342; 349; 353n; 357359; 365; 367; 370; 376 special effects 57; 284 spectatorship 324; 357; 366-369; 378 speed 20; 81-82; 198-201 split-screen 134; 294 sport 122 Staiger, Janet 366 Stein, Gertrude 166; 178; 181n Steiner, Rudolph 39; 44; 46 Stieglitz, Alfred 78; 162 Strand, Paul 78; 94 Strathausen, Carsten 85 stretch printing 314 Structural film x; 12; 55; 208-210; 213; 251; 363; 364; 367; 370376; 380n; 381n subjectivity 7; 65; 156; 324 Sundance Film Festival 305 Süssekind, Flora 106 Süssekind, Plinio 115 suggestion 121-122 Super-8 266; 293 Suprematism 9; 10; 73n Surrealism 5; 12; 26; 58; 70; 74n; 94117; 134; 140-141; 147-148; 156; 162; 166; 173; 217-220; 231-246; 247n; 262; 288 Survage, Henri 56
404 Symbolism 56; 82; 134 symphony 20; 25; 80-81; 88; 125; 305; 306; 313; 317 synaesthetic cinema 167; 288 synchronity 197; 202; 206-207 Synchronism 20 syntax 19; 25; 29-30; 38; 45
talkies 109 Taylorism 146 Technicolor 65-66; 253 technology x; 8; 14; 63; 148; 253254; 339; 342-345 technosyntactic abstraction 69 television 208; 210-213; 263; 271272; 321-322; 324; 326 theatre 5; 12; 80-81; 121; 122; 128; 137; 175; 183-184; 324 Theosophism 39-40; 44 Thomadaki, Katerina 282 Thompson, Kristen 366 Thorsboe, Peter 270 Thorsen, Jens Jørgen 262 time 5; 19-22; 26; 38; 48-50; 59-60; 78; 80-83; 86-88; 90n; 110; 116-117; 166; 177; 183; 184; 186; 190; 197; 198; 200; 205; 210; 212; 223; 224; 237; 243244; 249; 250; 253; 256; 259; 270; 281; 284; 286; 289-291; 293; 299; 301-302; 304; 321323; 358-360; 364-370; 376; 378; 380n Todorov, Tzvetan 235-236 Tomato design group 68 tone row 64 toning 134 Tosi, Mario 185 Trauberg, Leonid 148 trompe l’œil 299; 303 Tscherkassky, Peter 318-319 Turkin, Nikandr 138; 142 TV monitor 325; 333 two-inch format 322 Tyndall, Andrei 372 Tzara, Tristan 11; 18; 74n; 94-96; 104n
UFA 34 Ulmer, Gregory 348 uncanny 160; 292 unconscious 15; 58; 156-157; 159; 162; 209 Union of Youth 134 universal language 10; 30-32 UNOVIS 8; 9; 37 urban life 79; 289 utopia 32-33; 70; 166; 175; 266; 284; 325
van Doesburg, Theo 7; 9; 11; 13; 34 Vasulka, Steina 205; 209 Vasulka, Woody 205; 209 Venus 329-331; 334 Vertov, Dziga 70-71; 73n; 74n; 7989; 90n; 109; 144; 146-148 video 55-56; 68; 70; 194; 205; 210; 211; 213-214; 253; 296n; 319; 321-334; 336n; 340-341; 344; 351 video actino 327 video camera 321; 323; 328 video graphics 68 video installation 70; 351 video-mix 62 video monitor 323-324 video performance 321-334; 336n videotape 321-323; 325; 327 Vienna School 64 Viennese Actionism 342 Vigo, Jean 79; 86; 141 Vinsky (Nicholas Tzaferidis) 62 violence 58; 157; 161; 163; 213; 345 Virgin Mary 328 visionary portraits 14-15 visual language 214 visual poem 105 voice-over 68; 158; 168; 315 von Trier, Lars 261; 272 Vorticism 20
Warhol, Andy 273; 288; 374; 375; 389n Webern, Anton von 64
405 Weibel, Peter 64; 74n; 342 Weiss, Peter 110 Wertheimer, Max 208 Western 309; 311 Wicca 326; 335 white 15; 29; 41; 42; 45; 49; 50; 69; 73n; 167; 170; 172-173; 222; 224; 250-258; 260n; 357 white noise 255; 260n Whitney brothers 65; 368 Wilfred, Thomas 187-188 Wilson, Rawdon 235-236; 238 windows 55-56; 71; 74n; 218-219; 222; 319; 322 Winther, Richard 262 withheld light 253 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 44; 68 Wood, Graham 68 Worringer, Wilhelm 294 Wright, Frank Lloyd 158 Yue, Genevieve 378
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Narrative, Space and Gender in Russian Fiction: 1846-1903 Joe Andrew
The present volume has as its primary aim readings, from a feminist perspective, of a number of works from Russian literature published over the period in which the ‘woman question’ rose to the fore and reached its peak. All the works considered here were produced in, or hark back to, a fairly narrowly defined period of not quite 20 years (1846–1864) in which issues of gender, of male and female roles were discussed much more keenly than in perhaps any other period in Russian literature. The overall project is summed up by the three key words of this book’s title, narrative, space and gender, and, especially, the interconnections between them. That is, what do the way these stories were told tell us about gender identities in mid-nineteenth-century Russia? Which spaces were central to these fictional worlds? Which spaces suggested which gender identities? The discussions therefore focus on issues of narrative and space, and how they acted as ‘technologies of gender’.
Amsterdam/New York, NY, 2007 VII-195 pp. (Studies in Slavic Literature and Poetics 47) Paper € 40 / US$ 54 ISBN-13: 9789042021860
This volume will be of interest to all interested in nineteenth-century Russian literature, as well as students of gender, and of the semiotics of narrative space.
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The Secret Agent: Centennial Essays Edited by Allan H. Simmons and J.H. Stape
This collection of thirteen essays by writers from several countries lavishly celebrates the centenary of the publication of Conrad’s The Secret Agent. It reconsiders one of Conrad’s most important political novels from a variety of critical perspectives and presents a stimulating documentary section as well as specially commissioned maps and new contextualizing illustrations. Much new information is provided on the novel’s sources, and the work is placed in new several contexts. The volume is essential reading on this novel both for students studying it as a set text as well as for scholars of the late-Victorian and early Modernist periods.
Amsterdam/New York, NY, 2007 X-185 pp. (The Conradian 32:1) Paper € 40 / US$ 54 ISBN-13: 9789042021761
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[email protected]–www.rodopi.nl Amsterdam/New York, NY, 2007 485 pp. (Faux Titre 173) Paper € 97 / US$ 131 ISBN-13: 9789042021662
Proust et Flaubert Un secret d’écriture Édition nouvelle et augmentée Mireille Naturel
En 1908, écrire « un essai sur Ste-Beuve et Flaubert » fait partie des projets de Proust. Certes, il y aura l’article de la NRF, en 1920, « À propos du “style” de Flaubert », mais l’essai annoncé ne verra jamais le jour. Proust aurait-il oublié son auteur de prédilection, celui qu’il imitait si bien dans ses pastiches ? Il n’en est rien. Flaubert est omniprésent dans l’œuvre proustienne mais toujours parfaitement dissimulé. Le dépouillement de la Correspondance, le déchiffrement des manuscrits – la démarche suivie est, en effet, celle de la critique génétique – permettent de transformer une impression de lecture en certitude. Au moment de la conception de son roman, Proust se trouve face à une actualité éditoriale qui met Flaubert à l’honneur. Lecture, relecture vont lui permettre de puiser, dans les œuvres de son prédécesseur, des motifs, des images, des noms, de construire ses personnages féminins, sa représentation de la société et de la création littéraire. À travers l’auteur de L’Éducation sentimentale, une esthétique, faite d’imitation mais aussi de dépassement, de transgression, se construit. Flaubert aura été le double de l’écrivain, réel et fictif, sans cesse tenu à distance.
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La Russie et les Russes dans la fiction française du XIXe siècle (1812-1917) D’une image de l’autre à un univers imaginaire
Amsterdam/New York, NY, 2007 446 pp. (Internationale Forschungen zur Allgemeinen und Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft 108) Paper € 90 / US$ 122 ISBN-13: 9789042021587
Charlotte Krau A travers tout le XIXe siècle, l’empire des tsars et ses habitants ont largement inspiré la production littéraire en France. Mais si des recherches se sont intéressées aux récits de voyages, aux journaux et aux correspondances, la Russie en tant qu’objet de la fiction est généralement jugée inintéressante car très éloignée de la réalité. Reposant sur l’analyse d’un corpus de cent textes environs, ce livre se propose de révéler toute la richesse de la Russie et des Russes imaginés par la fiction française du XIXe siècle – un imaginaire effectivement peu fidèle à la réalité russe, mais fortement influencé par le contexte historique des relations franco-russes dont il retrace les hauts et les bas. Trois stades d’évolution se dégagent entre la débâcle napoléonienne de 1812 et la Révolution russe de 1917. Pendant la première moitié du XIXe siècle, l’image de l’autre, du Russe, reprise au XVIIIe siècle se fragmente en plusieurs types. Entre 1855 et 1880 environs, ces types – le tsar, le prince, le Cosaque, le moujik, la femme-martyre et la séductrice – évoluent devant un arrière-plan également stéréotypé et forment un véritable univers imaginaire qu’auteurs et lecteurs identifient comme « russe ». Entre 1880 et 1917 enfin, l’harmonie de l’univers est passagèrement mise en cause par l’intrusion des nihilistes. Cependant, au même moment, de nombreux textes de la décadence recourent aux personnages russes parfaitement excessifs, et la littérature populaire diffuse abondamment le concept de l’âme slave.
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Régis Debray et la médiologie Etudes réunies par Stéphane Spoiden
Ce volume réunit un ensemble d’études sur et autour de la médiologie de Régis Debray. Il présente l’avantage de comporter des essais explicatifs clairs et précis sur la théorie et la pratique médiologiques par des médiologues eux-mêmes (Régis Debray, Daniel Bougnoux et Louise Merzeau). L’ouvrage comprend également des analyses sur la réception de la médiologie, notamment aux Etats-Unis, ainsi qu’une série d’articles qui situent la médiologie dans le contexte plus large des disciplines dites connexes, notamment la sémiologie, l’anthropologie, les media studies et cultural studies d’inspiration anglo-américaine, la culture internet et le postmédia. Cet ensemble d’études « médio-média » fait le point aussi bien sur le personnage de Régis Debray que sur le chantier médiologique qu’il a initié. Un ouvrage utile pour toute personne qui s’interesse à la question essentielle de la transmission culturelle.
Amsterdam/New York, NY, 2007 130 pp. (Cahiers de recherche des instituts néerlandais de langue et de littérature française 47) Paper € 26 / US$ 35 ISBN-13: 9789042021600
USA/Canada: 295 North Michigan Avenue - Suite 1B, Kenilworth, NJ 07033, USA. Call Toll-free (US only): 1-800-225-3998 All other countries: Tijnmuiden 7, 1046 AK Amsterdam, The Netherlands Tel. +31-20-611 48 21 Fax +31-20-447 29 79 Please note that the exchange rate is subject to fluctuations
r o d o p i
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The Enlightened Eye
Amsterdam/New York, NY, 2007 322 pp. (Amsterdamer Beiträge zur neueren Germanistik 62)) Bound € 65 / US$ 88 ISBN-13: 9789042021242
Goethe and Visual Culture Edited by Evelyn K. Moore and Patricia Anne Simpson
Poets, painters, philosophers, and scientists alike debated new ways of thinking about visual culture in the “long eighteenth century”. The essays in The Enlightened Eye: Goethe and Visual Culture demonstrate the extent to which Goethe advanced this discourse in virtually all disciplines. The concept of visuality becomes a constitutive moment in a productive relationship between the verbal and visual arts with farreaching implications for the formation of bourgeois identity, pedagogy, and culture. From a variety of theoretical perspectives, the contributors to this volume examine the interconnections between aesthetic and scientific fields of inquiry involved in Goethe’s visual identity. By locating Goethe’s position in the examination of visual culture, established and emerging scholars analyze the degree to which visual aesthetics determined the cultural production of both the German-speaking world and the broader European context. The contributions analyze the production, presentation, and consumption of visual culture defined broadly as painting, sculpture, theater, and scientific practice. The Enlightened Eye promises to invest new energy and insight into the discussion among literary scholars, art historians, and cultural theorists about many aspects of visual culture in the Age of Goethe.
USA/Canada: 295 North Michigan Avenue - Suite 1B, Kenilworth, NJ 07033, USA. Call Toll-free (US only): 1-800-225-3998 All other countries: Tijnmuiden 7, 1046 AK Amsterdam, The Netherlands Tel. +31-20-611 48 21 Fax +31-20-447 29 79 Please note that the exchange rate is subject to fluctuations
