SURREALISM
Friday 23 October 1998, at 8:30pm
London Barbican Cinema

The development of the personal film in America can be directly traced back to the early expressionist and surrealist films that were made in Europe in the 1920s. The works of Hans Richter, Rene Clair, Man Ray, Luis Bunuel and others inspired the first wave of American experimental film. Beginning in the late 1920s and into the next decade several individuals made independent works that bore little relation to mainstream film production. These include Paul Fejos (The Last Moment, 1927) Robert Florey (The Life and Death of 9413 – A Hollywood Extra, 1928) and Watson & Webber (The Fall of The House of Usher, 1928 and Lot In Sodom, 1933-34). Few films were produced in America or Europe during the Depression though important pioneers such as Len Lye, Norman McLaren, Mary Ellen Bute and Hy Hirsch started work in this period. It wasn’t until 16mm equipment became readily available in the early 1940’s that avant-garde film began in earnest and what is regarded as the first major work was made by Maya Deren in 1943. Meshes Of The Afternoon is a poetic dream-like film in which editing is used to displace the normal sense of time and space. It was photographed by her husband, the Czech filmmaker Alexander Hammid, but is essentially Deren’s vision. The soundtrack was added later by her third husband, Teiji Ito. The film is drenched in symbolism and set a precedent for the trance films that followed in the next decade.

MESHES OF THE AFTERNOON
Maya Deren, USA, 1943, 16mm, b/w, sound, 18 min

“The film is concerned with the interior experiences of an individual. It does not record an event which could be witnessed by other persons. rather, it reproduces the way in which the subconscious of an individual will develop, interpret and elaborate an apparently simple and casual incident into a critical emotional experience.
“The makers of this film have been primarily concerned with the use of the cinematic technique in such a way as to create a world: to put on film the feeling which a human being experiences about an incident, rather than to accurately record the incident.” (from the earliest programme notes written by Maya Deren, 1945)

Maya Deren was born Eleanora Derenkowski in Russia, in 1917. Her family fled to the USA in 1922 and settled in Syracuse, where throughout her time at university she was deeply involved in socialist politics. Subsequently, her interest in poetry and dance, together with meeting her second husband Alexander Hammid, led to the making of Meshes Of The Afternoon. Through the 40’s and 50’s Deren completed five more films – At Land (1944), A Study In Choreography For Camera (1945), Ritual In Transfigured Time (1946) Meditation On Violence (1948) and The Very Eye Of Night (1959) – which continued to develop her fascination with dance, psychology and the dreamworld. She also became a major figure in the promotion of avant-garde film and was the first filmmaker to rent a theatre and show an evening solely of experimental works. This event at the Provincetown Playhouse, New York in 1946, led to Amos Vogel founding Cinema 16 as the first regular showcase for avant-garde film. Deren also promoted experimental film through her writings and by appearing in person at presentations across the United States. Together with Amos Vogel she formed the Creative Film Foundation to promote and assist experimental filmmakers in their work. In 1947, Maya travelled to Haiti to study Haitian Voodoun ritual and wrote the book Divine Horsemen on the subject. A posthumous film of footage she shot of the rituals was completed by Teiji and Cherel Ito in 1977. After returning to New York she became the priestess of a Voodoun cult and the filmmaker Stan Brakhage recalls that the magic and rituals he saw her practise made Rosemary’s Baby seem pale and pathetic by comparison. Stories of Voodoun curses surround the death of Maya Deren after a stroke and cerebral haemorrhage in 1961. Without her pioneering work, American experimental film would not be the same.

Meshes Of The Afternoon was made in Los Angeles and it was here that three more important filmmakers emerged – Curtis Harrington (Fragment of Seeking, 1946) Kenneth Anger (Fireworks, 1947) and Gregory Markopoulos (Psyche, 1947-48). In San Francisco, James Broughton and Sidney Peterson collaborated on The Potted Psalm (1946) before pursuing their own visions in later films. Mother’s Day by James Broughton (1948) is a light hearted satire which takes a perverse backwards glance at a childhood dominated by the mother. Broughton continues to write poetry and make films and has two books of memoirs published by City Lights.

MOTHER’S DAY
James Broughton, USA, 1948, 16mm, b/w, sound, 23 min

“Mother’s Day was not made to please anyone but myself. It was done out of absolute necessity to discover what my inner haunting looked like. It is a capricious but unsparing souvenir of a San Francisco childhood, recollected in the nostalgic style of a cluttered family album. This film exposes the fetishes and enigmas and secret nonsense rituals of a large household dominated by a self-absorbed mother with a taste for exotic hats and stereotyped children.” (from notes by James Broughton as published in Film Culture #61 (1975-76))

The Lead Shoes (1949) was Sidney Peterson’s last independent work before he entered the world of commercial film making. It was made on a shoestring budget with his students at the California School of Fine Arts. The narrative is derived from the combination of two ballads – “Edward” and “The Three Ravens” – which are combined with masterful editing to make an improbable series of dream-like events. Peterson was one of the first to use anamorphic lenses to distort imagery and was a pioneer of cross-cutting on motion. Other notable avant-garde films made by Sidney Peterson include The Cage (1947), Mr Frenhofer and the Minotaur (1948) and The Petrified Dog (1948).

THE LEAD SHOES
Sidney Peterson, USA, 1949, 16mm, b/w, sound, 17 min

“It is vitally important for full appreciation of The Lead Shoes to try to beat it at its own game – to try to follow its many levels of meaning clear through – because only these experiences of mental defeat really open the viewer to the film. Try as you will – and just exactly as in the gambling casino – you cannot win – cannot wring a coherent set of meanings from the film. Sidney has masterfully stacked the deck ! The means, or themes, of The Lead Shoes are deliberately edited at cross-purposes. No simple warp and woof here, but rather one of the most masterful frays of meaning ever created – thus, one of the greatest celebrations of Mystery I’ve ever experienced.” (from a lecture on Sidney Peterson by Stan Brakhage at the Art Institute of Chicago, 1973)

Also working in the same social circle as Kenneth Anger and Curtis Harrington at the turn of the decade was the writer Anais Nin and her husband Ian Hugo, who made his first film Ai-Ye in 1950. His brilliantly coloured films are infused with many superimpositions that yield abstract visions. Bells of Atlantis (1952) is an imaginary look at life in the sunken city and was inspired by the poem “The House of Incest” by Anais Nin, who stars in the film. Technical assistance is provided by the filmmaker Len Lye and the soundtrack is by electronic music innovators Louis and Bebe Barron.

BELLS OF ATLANTIS
Ian Hugo, 1952, 16mm, colour, sound, 10 min

“Titles and narrative, far from helping a cinema audience to understand the theme, often actually limits the field of vision, feeling and comprehension” (Ian Hugo)

“This is the first cinematic poem worthy of that name. The fusion of image, text and sound is so magical that it is impossible to disassociate them in order to explain the favourable reaction of the unconscious.” (Abel Gance)

As the 1950s began, experimental film was undergoing its first real explosion of activity. Willard Maas and Marie Menken had made Geography Of The Body (1943) using dime-store magnifying glasses to make horrifying close-ups of the human anatomy. These two poets became in many ways the godparents of the New York Underground film movement. Their Brooklyn apartment became a focal point for the young filmmakers of the time, who were encouraged and often fed by the elder artists. One such young pioneer was Stan Brakhage who was newly arrived on the East Coast from Denver, by way of San Francisco, where he had made his early films. During this time in New York he stayed with Maya Deren and worked on films with Joseph Cornell. Cornell was an aging artist who assembled magical box constructions that were first exhibited at the gallery of Julien Levy, a dealer who was singly responsible for bringing Surrealist art to the USA in the 1930s. Cornell’s interest in cinema developed from his love of silent film, and he was also exposed to experimental work at weekly screenings at Levy’s gallery. He bought a 16mm projector in 1933 and started to collect footage. His first film was a celluloid collage which became an experimental classic – Rose Hobart (1939) is a re-edited and surreal version of a grade-B jungle flick called East Of Borneo (1931). Ken Jacobs later worked briefly for Cornell and studied Rose Hobart, which lead directly to his own collage film Tom, Tom The Piper’s Son (1969). Cornell made three further montage films which were left unfinished until completed by Larry Jordan in 1970. Jordan also photographed new material under the direction of Cornell, as did Stan Brakhage and Rudy Burckhardt. The films continue the themes of his boxes and often express Cornell’s feeling of loneliness and detachment. A Fable For Fountains is Rudy Burkhardt’s edit of a longer film titled A Legend For Fountains (1957), which was Cornell’s personal favourite. It stars Suzanne Miller, an off-Broadway actress Cornell was obsessed with at the time, who wanders through the rain-splashed streets of Little Italy.

A FABLE FOR FOUNTAINS
Joseph Cornell & Rudy Burckhardt, USA, 1957, 16mm, colour, sound, 7 min

“What Cornell’s movies are is an essence of the home movie. They deal with things very close to us, every day and everywhere. Small things, not the big things. Not wars, not stormy emotions, dramatic clashes or situations. His images are much simpler. Old people in the parks. A tree full of birds. A girl in a blue dress, looking around, in the street, with plenty of time on her hands. Water dripping into the fountain ring. An angel in the cemeteries, sweetest face, under a tree. A cloud passes over the wing of the angel.” (Jonas Mekas in the Village Voice Movie Journal, 1970)

As the 1950s passed by, the new wave of independent filmmakers progressed from surreal imagery to a more personal style before moving off in numerous new directions as Pop Art became the latest thing. During the 1960s Carl Linder developed a very different kind of surreal film making – rooted in Pop, and very much emblematic of the period, his movies are violent and disturbing assaults on the viewer and present things not rationally related to each other in order to provoke new meanings. Whilst celebrated at the time, his films are now marginalized and often overlooked.

WOMANCOCK
Carl Linder, USA, 1966, 16mm, b/w, sound, 16 min

“I try to debase my art, to violate it, to impregnate it. Often you will notice an image which deflates – or a gesture that castrates. The importance of image in my art is in its special nature. It represents neither a tree or any known being – for the image is personal, but personal like the fall of a garment over one’s shoulders. The image can be read but not labelled. It is almost supernatural – it is a totemic, occult and devilish thing. It overpowers with ugliness. And it defends itself like the devil against unconsciousness. Thus, when one of my films ends, it is the final removal of obstruction to this image, however sinister it may be.” (Carl Linder in the New York Film-Makers’ Cooperative Catalogue #4, 1967)

Whilst working with Joseph Cornell in the mid-1960s, Larry Jordan began to create his own phantasmagorical film assemblages. Our Lady Of The Sphere (1969), like several other of his early films, is constructed from cut-outs of Victorian engravings – a procedure that inevitably generates radical juxtapositions of scale, spatial relationships and the associative qualities of objects. The film consists of an introduction and two clear sections. In the first, a boy with a frightened or surprised expression tumbles through a variety of episodes, and in the second a well-dressed lady with a balloon for a head wanders through different scenes.

OUR LADY OF THE SPHERE
Larry Jordan, 1969, 16mm, colour, sound, 10 min

“The basic act in my work is of freeing the objects from the chains of convention and connotation. The whole thing is symbolic of the Surrealist philosophy, which, by definition, is inexplicable. The enigma is quite sacred to the Surrealists like myself who are openly arrogant about symbolism and allegorical inanities. My “characters” don’t portray anything in particular, but they still have ties with the mechanics of this world: a flying mushroom represents in no way a psychedelic connotation; it is a new born giraffe, and moves as such. because it wants to be one, not I.” (Larry Jordan from a written interview conducted by Robert Russett, 1974)

Back to top