FEMALE UNDERGROUND
Tuesday 27 October 1998, at 6:30pm
London Barbican Cinema

Mary Ellen Bute was one of the pioneers of experimental filmmaking and began to work in this area in 1936 with Rhythm In Light. She is said to have been the first American to make abstract films. Her early films were made in collaboration with her husband Ted Nemeth, and most are animated interpretations of classical music compositions. Many of her abstract works were bought by Radio City Music Hall and used as pre-feature entertainment. In the early 1950s Bute became the first filmmaker anywhere to use electronically generated images which were photographed off a cathode ray oscilloscope. Before she discovered the oscilloscope, each of her animated films, just 6-9 minutes long, required making 7000 photographs. Mood Contrasts (1954) is her most complex collage of animation and special effects. Two years later she made a life action short The Boy Who Saw Through (1956) and then spent the next decade working on a feature length version of Finnegan’s Wake (1964-65).

MOOD CONTRASTS
Mary Ellen Bute, USA, 1954, 16mm, colour, sound, 7 min

“For years I have tried to find a method for controlling a source of light to produce images in rhythm. I wanted to manipulate light to produce visual compositions in time continuity much as a musician manipulates sound to produce music. It was particularly while I listened to music that I felt an overwhelming urge to translate my reactions and ideas into a visual form that would have the ordered sequence of music. I worked towards simulating this continuity in my paintings. Painting was not flexible enough and too confined within its frame.” (Mary Ellen Bute writing in Films In Review, 1954)

Marie Menken was the grande dame of the New York experimental film scene. She was a painter who developed a unique style of visual poetry. Her first personal film was Visual Variations On Noguchi (1945) and she went on to build a substantial catalogue including Notebook (1962-63) and Go Go Go (1963). Hurry, Hurry (1957) combines microscopic footage of spermatozoa with a superimposition of flames. Marie died in 1970 after years of being an alcoholic, four days later her husband Willard Maas died of a broken heart.

HURRY, HURRY
Marie Menken, USA, 1957, 16mm, colour, sound, 3 min

“Hurry, Hurry she always referred to as her own favourite. It can be interpreted, on one level, as a portrait of Willard’s life – the tragedy of Willard running from one gay bar to another trying to find a progenitive life for himself; and, like the spermatozoa, gradually dying out for lack of an egg. When, in his interview with Marie, P. Adams Sitney asked why she had once referred to this film as her saddest, she said, “Mighty sad when the sperm only seeks the sperm because it cannot find an egg – and then what? It collapses in death … And see that film to see what death is really like, at the beginning – we know the fanfare, and at the end of life – what resignation.”” (Stan Brakhage on Marie Menken in his book Film At Wit’s End, 1989)

Shirley Clarke was another notable activist in the New York film community and was a key figure in the development of the independent feature film. Her work in cinema began with a series of dance poems including Dance In The Sun (1953), In Paris Parks (1954) and Moment In Love (1957). In 1960, Clarke was one of the founder members of the New America Cinema Group and in 1967 was one of the organisers of the Film-Makers’ Distribution Centre, an attempt to form a more commercial branch of the Cooperative. Throughout the 1960s she made three important feature films – The Connection (1960) The Cool World (1963) and Portrait Of Jason (1967), before concentrating first on Super-8 and later on video for her work in the 1970s. Bridges Go Round (1958) consists of shots of immobile New York bridges choreographically printed and edited in a way that makes them appear to dance. The film is presented in two forms, one with an electronic soundtrack by Louis and Bebe Barron, and one with a jazz score by Teo Macero.

BRIDGES GO ROUND
Shirley Clarke, USA, 1958, 16mm, colour, sound, 7 min

“By my standards, Miss Clarke’s picture, an eerie close-up of the metropolitan bridges, is extraordinary. A film that captures the bizarre magic of man-made spans with the movement of a lightning clap and with the same terrible beauty.” (Howard Thompson on Bridges Go Round in the New York Times)

Naomi Levine is a legendary character in the history of underground film. She appears in a number of classics including Andy Warhol’s Tarzan And Jane Regained … Sort Of (1963) and Kiss (1963-64), Jack Smith’s Normal Love (1963) and Jonas Mekas’ Walden (1964-68). Mekas has been a constant defender of her work, particularly Yes (1963) and Jeremelu (1965). Naomi continued to make films until 1972, but unfortunately her involvement with drugs heightened her mental instability and she has been in and out of Bellevue and similar institutions since the late 1960’s.

YES
Naomi Levine, USA, 1963, 16mm, b/w, sound, 24 min

“Naomi Levine has just finished her first movie. It is like no other movie you ever saw. The rich sensuousness of her poetry floods the screen. Nobody has ever photographed flowers and children as Naomi did. No man would ever be able to get her poetry, her movements, her dreams. These are Naomi’s dreams, and they reveal to us the beauty which we were not able to rip out of ourselves – Naomi’s own beauty.” (Jonas Mekas on Yes, Village Voice Movie Journal, 1963)

The incredible Christmas On Earth (1963) was made by Barbara Rubin when she was only 18 years old. The film is a surreal abstraction of the sexual activities of two couples (including Gerard Malanga and Naomi Levine). The randomness of the shooting style is continued in the unique presentation of the work in which two reels are superimposed and overlaid with coloured filters by the projectionist, and each reel may be shown upside down or back to front. For many years Rubin refused to make a print and rented out the original camera materials until the film was restored by Anthology Film Archives in the early 1970s. Rubin subsequently made two further films (shot mainly in London) before becoming deeply involved in religion.

CHRISTMAS ON EARTH
Barbara Rubin, USA, 1963, 16mm, b/w, sound-on-tape, 31 min

“A woman, a man; the black of the pubic hair; the cunt’s moon mountains and canyons. As the film goes on, image after image, the most private territories of the body are laid open for us, now an abstracted landscape; the first shock changes into silence, then is transposed into amazement. We have seldom seen such down-to-earth beauty, so real as only a terrible beauty can be: terrible beauty that man, that woman is, that Love is.” (Jonas Mekas writing about Christmas On Earth in the East Side Review)

Carolee Schneemann is an internationally renowned artist and performer who’s major film work is an Autobiographical Trilogy consisting of Fuses (1964-68) Plumb Line (1971) and Kitch’s Last Meal (1973-78). Fuses became a cause célèbre because of its frank portrayal of the sexual relationship between Schneemann and the composer James Tenney. As in her artworks, Schneemann manually worked directly on the film to create a multi-layered, deeply personal masterpiece.

FUSES
Carolee Schneemann, USA, 1964-68, 16mm, colour, silent, 22 min

“The first explicit feminist erotic film confronting traditional sexual taboos. An homage to a relationship of ten years, filmed by Schneemann while participating in the action. A film which breaks the barriers between private and public subject matter. From her background as a painter Schneemann was free to explore the physical-visual context of sexuality as well as the nature of film as material substance. Fuses is structured in rhythmic layers of collaged imagery; hand-painting to intensify colour sequences, cutting, staining, overlapping durations of A and B rolls.” (Carolee Schneemann, New York Film-Makers’ Cooperative Catalogue #7, 1989)

Joyce Wieland was a Canadian filmmaker who lived in the United States for many years and created her most important works there. Two of her earliest films, 1933 and Sailboat (both 1967) point towards the approach the Structural filmmakers adopted in the 1970s. 1933 is a formal shot of a street scene viewed through a window and Sailboat appears to be a loop of a single boat crossing the field of vision (it is not), both use the title superimposed over the image. Wieland made many other highly respected films including the satirical Rat Life And Diet In North America (1968), in which all the characters are played by animals, depicting political and economic repression in the USA and liberation in Canada. She was married to Michael Snow and they worked together on several films.

1933
Joyce Wieland, Canada-USA, 1967, 16mm, b/w, sound, 5 min

“1933. The year? The title? Was it (the film) made then? It’s a memory! (ie. a film). No, it’s many memories. It’s so sad and funny: the departed, departing people, cars, street ! It hurries. It’s gone, it’s back! It’s the only glimpse we have but we can have it again. The film (of 1933?) was made in 1967. You find out, if you didn’t already know, how naming tints pure vision.” (Michael Snow on 1933, New York Film-Makers’ Cooperative Catalogue #5, 1971)

SAILBOAT
Joyce Wieland, Canada-USA, 1967, 16mm, colour, sound, 5 min

“Sailboat has the simplicity of a child’s drawing. A toy-like image of a sailboat sails, without interruption on the water, to the sound of roaring waves, which seem to underline the image to the point of exaggeration, somewhat in the way a child might draw a picture of water and write word-sounds on it to make it as emphatic as possible.” (Robert Cowan on Joyce Wieland in Take One magazine)

Gunvor Nelson was born in Sweden and emigrated to the USA in 1953 where she concentrated on painting and married Robert Nelson in 1958. Her first film Schmeerguntz (1967) was made in collaboration with Dorothy Wiley. Nelson continues to be a prolific filmmaker and her most successful works include Take Off (1972), Moon’s Pool (1972) and Frame Line (1983). My Name Is Oona (1969) is a kaleidoscopic portrait of her daughter. On the soundtrack Oona repeats her name, and manipulated by Steve Reich it becomes a magical incantation.

MY NAME IS OONA
Gunvor Nelson, Sweden-USA, 1969, 16mm, b/w, sound, 10 min

“My Name Is Oona captures in haunting, intensely lyrical images, fragments of the coming to consciousness of a child girl. A series of extremely brief flashes of her moving through a night-lit space or woods in sensuous negative, separated by rapid fades into blackness, burst upon upon us like a fairy-tale princess, with a late sun only partially outlining her and the animal in silvery filigree against the encroaching darkness; one of the most perfect recent examples of poetic cinema.” (Amos Vogel in the Village Voice, 1969)

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