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)

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THE BEATS
Saturday 24 October 1998, at 3:30pm
London Barbican Cinema

The Beat Movement, which was most evident through the 1950’s, is primarily known for its literature and the works of Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs. However, diverse artists in the fields of performance, painting, sculpture, music and film also shared the Beat sensibility. Kerouac and Ginsberg were both directly involved in the production of Pull My Daisy (1957) and Burroughs engaged in most of the artistic disciplines in his lifetime and collaborated on films with Anthony Balch and Brion Gysin (notably Towers Open Fire, 1963 and The Cut-Ups, 1967).

Wallace Berman was in many ways an archetypal Beat artist, who worked for years in relative obscurity on assemblage, collage and painting. Between 1955 and 1964 he published Semina, a hand-printed, makeshift poetry journal. In 1957, during his only exhibition at a commercial gallery, the artist was arrested and the show was closed down by the LAPD over a painting by Cameron, the star of Kenneth Anger’s Inauguration of The Pleasure Dome (1954-66), which was incorporated into one of Berman’s sculptures. By 1964 he was using an early copy machine called the Verifax to make substantial and important collages. Berman was also a leading pioneer of mail art. For a decade from 1956, he worked on his only film which was for a while called Semina but is now known as Untitled. The film was never shown to a large or paying audience – Wallace Berman was interested primarily in presenting his work on a one-to-one basis. It is essentially a collection of images that were collected around Berman’s studio, shot on black and white 8mm film and later hand-tinted in red ink. Wallace had an undeniable, though widely unrecognised, influence on popular culture and as a result was selected by Peter Blake to appear on the cover of The Beatles’ Sgt Pepper album and was cast by Dennis Hopper in a scene of Easy Rider. He died in 1976, leaving an important body of work that should now be reassessed.

UNTITLED
Wallace Berman, USA, 1956-66, 16mm, colour, silent, 7 min

“Untitled has its own essence of narrative that may or may not be there. Like the dance – it is more of a meditation than a factual report. Wallace was an informant in his artwork, not of the concrete flesh, but in its ‘unknown’ undertone that reads the music in (on) the air – frozen by a hand, holding the sound image in a transistor radio. The images indicate a twisting of the radio dial; turning singular visions off and on. There are those who detach film from other artworks – that is a conventional mistake – essentially when it concerns this work. All the dominant themes in my father’s work – death, life, mysticism, politics, pop culture – are in this film. To exclude the cinematic version of his artwork would be an act of folly. The film’s brilliance is that it captures the period so clearly with Wallace’s exhilarating mood of rapid changes within his art, in that transition from the mid-1950s to the 1960s – in addition to my father’s intimate life during that time. Besides, the film is extraordinary as a work of art.” (from Wallace And His Film by Tosh Berman in the book Support The Revolution, 1992)

What is regarded by many people as the most accurate cinematic depiction of the Beat movement was developed from a play by Jack Kerouac entitled The Beat Generation Or The New Amaraean Church. The third act was chosen by Kerouac, Robert Frank and Alfred Leslie to form the basis of the film Pull My Daisy in 1957. Alfred Leslie was an Abstract Expressionist painter and Robert Frank a photographer who was to become well known a year later on publication of his book The Americans. What appears to be a casual and instantaneous encounter was actually a carefully rehearsed and controlled work. The film was mostly shot in Leslie’s studio loft and stars Allen Ginsberg, Peter Orlovsky, Gregory Corso and Larry Rivers. The soundtrack is a loose narration improvised by Kerouac with musical accompaniment by David Amram. It was premiered in 1959 alongside John Cassavetes’ similarly ground-breaking feature Shadows (1959), a screening that was a landmark in the New American Cinema. Pull My Daisy was financed by Walter Gutman, a Wall Street banker who developed an interest in experimental movies and went on to create a series of extraordinary films usually depicting his interest in nubile young circus girls.

PULL MY DAISY
Robert Frank & Alfred Leslie, USA, 1957, 35mm, b/w, sound, 27 min

“A spoof on the Beat Generation, a nonsense comedy, it blends most perfectly the elements of improvisation and conscious planning, both in camera work and directing. The plotless episode has never been more eloquent than it is in this film. The feeling of “being there” was achieved in this fiction film to the highest degree. Its authenticity is so effective, its style so perfect, that the film has fooled even some very intelligent critics: They speak about it as if it where a slice-of-life film, a piece cut out of the raw stream of life, a documentary. Instead of criticising the film, they criticise the Beat Generation. The film’s amazing sense of style and form escapes through their fingers like fluid – it is almost invisible, transparent. No other film ever said so much, and in such a pure and condensed manner, about the man of the Beat Generation.” (Jonas Mekas’ Notes On The New American Cinema in Film Culture #24, 1962)

Christopher Maclaine was a poet and bohemian who worked with a dedication to madness, and was regarded by many as the Artaud of San Francisco. As a filmmaker he documented the Beat movement as it happened. He completed only four films, including an epic called The End (1953) – a dark apocalyptic chronicle of obsession, despair, murder and suicide. Beat, by contrast, is a witty and graceful portrait of the time. Maclaine’s continued use of amphetamines led to rapid physical and mental deterioration and after a suicide attempt in 1963 he spent most of the remainder of his life in a vegetable state until he died in 1975.

BEAT
Christopher Maclaine, USA, 1958, 16mm, colour, sound, 6 min

“As one looks at his film Beat one sees more of the humour in his camera movements. People are made to walk fast and look jerky in his films, and this is intentional humour; he was not content to shoot at eight frames per second – he skips frames so that people skip ridiculously in a way that rhythmically captures their intrinsic self-centredness. No more perfect metaphor for street life in North Beach at that time could be found than the woman in Beat who behaves as though she were free and lovely (with an umbrella – she is Gene Kelly singing in the rain). But she is like a turtle trapped in a cage, going around the four corners of an intersection. One can look at this as humorous or as unbearably horrible. If you can regard it as both delightful and horrifying, you are close to the balance that makes Maclaine an artist. To me, Beat evokes that era to a T – beautifully, precisely, wittily and terrifyingly.” (description by Stan Brakhage in his book Film At Wit’s End, 1989)

Bruce Conner is widely regarded as one of the masters of experimental cinema, and he is unique in that he rarely shoots his own material, preferring to montage found or stock footage. He was a leading assemblage artist and this, his first film, was originally conceived as a loop forming part of a sculpture. In constructing A Movie, Conner developed a new style of film-making in which material from different sources was edited together so that a continuity is suggested where it cannot plausibly exist.

A MOVIE
Bruce Conner, USA, 1958, 16mm, b/w, sound, 12 min

“Using only found footage, Conner has created one of the most extraordinary films ever made. One begins by laughing at the juxtaposition of Cowboys and Indians, elephants and tanks, but soon the metaphor of association becomes serious, as we realise we are witnessing the apocalypse.” (Freude on A Movie, Canyon Cinema Catalogue #7, 1992)

To L.A. With Lust features an early appearance by one of the underground’s true stars – Taylor Mead, who collaborated on two films with the director Vernon Zimmerman. A year earlier the pair had made Lemon Hearts (1960) in the decaying Victorian mansions of San Francisco, and it was here that Mead first displayed his onscreen comic persona (which is not dissimilar to real life). Whilst technically crude and primitive, it is a film of liberation which prefigured the work of Ron Rice, Ken Jacobs and Jack Smith. Their second movie To L.A. With Lust is a funky and wonderful satire on Hollywood.

TO L.A. WITH LUST
Vernon Zimmerman, USA, 1961, 16mm, b/w & colour, sound, 27 min

“Wild and dirty, but so easy to understand, comparatively speaking, that it may be considered a fair introduction to cinematic youth on-the-march. It has distinct traces of humour, no thanks to Zen, and offers several moments of pleasure. The female star, Ingrid Lothigius, is a blonde who photographs well and deadpans her life and hard times like a pro.” (Archie Winston reviews To L.A. With Lust in the New York Post, early 1960s)

In 1961 Bruce Conner substantially speeded up the method of quick cutting that he had presented in A Movie three years before. In Cosmic Ray a stripper is rapidly juxtaposed with images such as cannons, fireworks and phallic symbols until a final climactic release is achieved. The frenzied rate of images attracted the attention of advertising executives and is thought to have influenced the development of fast cutting in commercial television. Conner continued to develop his montage technique and his last two completed works (in 1979 and 1981), which accompany tracks by Devo and David Byrne, may be regarded as innovative music videos.

COSMIC RAY
Bruce Conner, USA, 1961, 16mm, b/w, sound, 4 min

“Cosmic Ray used to get rented by advertising agencies … So in a way, I might be guilty of some of that tendency in ads to get as much information as possible into a short period of time. I’m aware of the way that people are manipulated by television advertising, so much so that I can’t stand to watch the stuff. It’s not just the manipulation in the commercials, it’s the manipulation in the programming itself that gets to me. Most of it is nasty and aggressive, and I take it as a personal assault. I couldn’t kill my TV set just by kicking it; I had to use a hammer. That’s dangerous. Electricity is stored inside TV sets, so even when they’re unplugged, there’s enough power to electrocute you.” (Bruce Conner in conversation with Scott MacDonald in 1981, from the book A Critical Cinema, 1988)

Richard Preston is best known for his cut-and-paste animation of magazine illustrations that satire the social and political aspects of American life. Sometime in 1961 Preston printed a number of black and white photographic tableaus for Jack Smith and these were filmed and interspersed with images of nude pin-ups from girlie magazines to form Paperdolls.

PAPERDOLLS
Richard Preston, USA, 1962, 16mm, colour, sound, 5 min

“I have been in the pillory for years, but now, with the aid of film I have managed to wriggle one arm free. With this good arm I can catch and hurl back some of the garbage that has been thrown at me. And by garbage I mean the lies, the distortions, the hypocrisies that are the manipulators’ weapons.” (Richard Preston in the Film-Makers Lecture Bureau Catalogue #1, 1969)

Robert Nelson has made films in a variety of styles but each are underpinned by an enthusiastic, deeply felt sense of humour. After studying at San Francisco Art Institute, Nelson became immersed in the beatnik culture around him. His early films are anarchic comedies and Oh! Dem Watermelons (1965) is a riotous underground masterpiece. It was originally conceived to form part of the San Francisco Mime Troupe’s Minstrel Show – a shocking confrontation of the racism inherent in American culture. After a frustratingly long opening shot the film careers through a rapid anthology of events covering just about every possible abuse of a watermelon. Later works by Nelson display a more subtle use of humour and his classic Bleu Shut (1970) is a participatory film in which the audience is tested in an absurd kind of TV quiz show.

OH! DEM WATERMELONS
Robert Nelson, USA, 1965, 16mm, colour, sound, 12 min

“The film cost $280 to make, including the cost of a dozen watermelons. We all had a good time running around the Mission District and Portrero Hill busting up watermelons, showing-off and having fun. A few weeks later when we had the film roughly edited, I ran it silent for Ron and Saul and a few people at the Mime Troupe. There was deadly silence and it looked awful. Everyone was embarrassed for me and didn’t know what to say. I faked it by saying it was good and not to worry. A few days later Steve Reich composed the soundtrack and got all the people to sing their parts the right way. The track has helped the film a lot. The film has won a lot of prizes all over the world … and I bought a lot of equipment with the prize money I got for it.” (Robert Nelson On Robert Nelson in Film Culture #48-49, 1970)

Whilst from a later era and not strictly Beat, Warren Sonbert’s romantic diary films chronicle the lives of young, swinging bohemians in New York in the late sixties. His first film Amphetamine (1966) centres around two homosexuals who share a predilection for shooting speed, but it is not a shocking expose – like his other works it is a beautiful and sensitive piece of cinema. Together with Where Did Our Love Go and Hall Of Mirrors (both also from 1966) it forms a potent trilogy depicting the lives of the filmmaker and his friends. In the 1970s, Sonbert began to restructure his earlier footage into silent films such as his magnum opus Carriage Trade (1968-72). He died in 1995 and his entire catalogue has recently been restored by The Estate Project and will receive a major retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum in 1999.

AMPHETAMINE
Warren Sonbert, USA, 1966, 16mm, b/w, sound, 10 min

“And the films themselves were sexy. I don’t mean to say that the actors took their clothes off, they didn’t, but what was sexy was the extremely fluid way the movies were put together. The soundtrack of soul songs had something to do with it, but even more so the long hand-held tracking shots that followed in “real time” someone walking down corridor after corridor, or the merry-go-round shot that metaphorically described an attitude toward the cosmos as much as did Godard’s swirling coffee cup. The shots took over us like a wet dream. It was as if Hitchcock’s 360-degree turn around the lovers, Stewart and Novak, in Vertigo, that saturation of love and impossible yearning and doubt and fulfilment, had started to infiltrate all of Sonbert’s images. It was a lover’s cinema. The film-maker was in love with the world, or was amused and saddened by it, so obviously that he had only to point his camera anywhere, it seemed, and it would fill up with feeling.” (Philip Lopate on The Films Of Warren Sonbert in Film Culture #70-71, 1983)

PLEASE NOTE A CHANGE TO THE ADVERTISED PROGRAMME

The Warren Sonbert film Amphetamine has not yet arrived from California. It has been replaced in this afternoon’s programme by How Can We Tell The Dancer From The Dance ? by Jerry Joffen (1970, 10 min).

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FLAMING CREATURES
Saturday 24 October 1998, at 8:45pm
London Barbican Cinema

For many people the words “Underground Film” invoke ideas of sexual depravity and cinematic obscenities, but Flaming Creatures (1962-63) and similar films do not use nudity to titillate, rather to express a kind of innocent freedom that became necessary to pursue new ways of uninhibited personal expression. Jack Smith’s most celebrated flick and the court proceedings which followed its release went some way to liberate cinema, breaking down moral barriers which made it possible to present previously taboo subject matter on film.

Jack Smith was born in Ohio in 1932 and moved to New York in the early 1950s where he developed an interest in experimental theatre, and from then up until his death in 1989 he was incredibly prolific as an actor, writer, filmmaker and photographer. His unique and highly opinionated persona informed an inimitable vision that he conveyed through all his works. In the late 1950s he was developing a distinctive style of still photography at his Hyperbole Studio in the East Village – bizarre tableaus of bodies, costumes and informal props which could depict entire worlds in a single frame. One extended photo session led to the publication of The Beautiful Book (1962) by the poet Piero Heliczer’s Dead Language Press. Jack’s first experiences in film were as an actor in movies by Ken Jacobs and Bob Fleischner (Star Spangled To Death, Blonde Cobra and Little Stabs At Happiness all date from 1957-60). Throughout the next decade Smith would appear in many classic underground films including Chumlum (Ron Rice, 1965), Camp and Hedy (both by Andy Warhol, 1965), Brothel (Bill Vehr) and The Illiac Passion (Gregory Markopoulos, 1967). His first completed film was Scotch Tape (1959), so named after the piece of tape which was unwittingly wedged in the camera gate, was made quite casually at one of the locations of Ken Jacobs’ epic Star Spangled To Death. Three years later on the roof of the Windsor Theatre Jack meticulously fashioned his masterpiece Flaming Creatures out of a mythology of Hollywood, 1001 Arabian nights and the spirit of Maria Montez. The outdated black and white stock he used enhances the timeless and otherworldly aura of the scenarios. A review of the first screening of the then unfinished film hints at the tour de force that was about to be unleashed upon the public.

“Jack Smith just finished a great movie, Flaming Creatures, which is so beautiful that I feel ashamed even to sit through the current Hollywood and European movies. I saw it privately, and there is little hope that Smith’s movie will ever reach the movie theatre screens. But I tell you, it is a most luxurious outpouring of imagination, of imagery, of poetry, of movie artistry – comparable only to the work of the greatest, like Von Sternberg.” (Jonas Mekas in the Village Voice Movie Journal, 1963)

Jonas Mekas was an unfailing patron of Jack Smith and Flaming Creatures, and was directly involved in the now legendary screening at the Knokke-le-Zoute Experimental Film Festival in Belgium and the court cases which followed seizure of the film back in New York in 1964. His efforts went unappreciated by Smith, who later made Mekas (“Uncle Fishhook”) the villain in many of his writings and theatre productions. Almost immediately after completing Flaming Creatures, Jack started shooting Normal Love (1963), a sumptuous colour film populated by a large all-star cast of underground celebrities (Smith regarded the subjects of his films the “Superstars of Cinemaroc”, an early precursor of the Andy Warhol Factory). This and subsequent movies such as the incredible No President (1967-70) were never assembled into definitive versions and were constantly re-edited for individual screenings or partially used in his extraordinary theatre presentations of the 1970s.

FLAMING CREATURES
Jack Smith, USA, 1962-63, 16mm, colour, sound, 45 min

“At once primitive and sophisticated, hilarious and poignant, spontaneous and studied, frenzied and languid, crude and delicate, avant and nostalgic, gritty and fanciful, fresh and faded, innocent and jaded, high and low, raw and cooked, underground and camp, black and white and white on white, composed and decomposed, richly perverse and gloriously impoverished, Flaming Creatures was something new under the sun. Had Smith produced nothing other than this amazing artifice, he would still rank among the great visionaries of American film.” (from J. Hoberman’s essay in the book Jack Smith: Flaming Creature, His Amazing Life and Times, 1997)

In the latter half of the 1960s Jose Rodriguez-Soltero created a series of profoundly beautiful films including El Pecado Original (1964), Lupe (1966) and Dialogue With Che (1968). His most notorious is Jerovi, an exploration of the Narcissus myth in which a young male performs unashamed self-love in a lush garden setting.

JEROVI
Jose Rodriguez-Soltero, Puerto Rico-USA, 1965, 16mm, colour, silent, 12 min

“Cinema is a search. Everytime I pick up a camera or see a film I sense a rhythm, a force which impels me to act, to move, to make – no reasons can be given to exhaust the meanings of those forces … My work has been a slow exercise in this search and in sending that rhythm … I haven’t made a film I’m satisfied with completely. I am preparing to live, to reach those personal truths which give me faith. Each of my films is a development, although at times erratic, of my being.” (Jose Rodriguez-Soltero, Film-Makers Lecture Bureau Catalogue #1, 1969)

Bill Vehr made grandiose and exotic costume epics reminiscent of the style of Jack Smith. Avocada is a silent film designed to be accompanied by ethnic Peruvian music. It stars Carole Morell in an electrifying study of high-art writhing, beautifully photographed in glorious Technicolor. His second film Brothel (1966) was similarly transcendent and featured Jack Smith, Mario Montez and Piero Heliczer. In 1968, while returning from a screening in Montreal, both prints of Brothel and a new work-in-progress were seized by Customs officials. As he had no money to go to trial the film was never recovered and has not be seen since.

AVOCADA
Bill Vehr, USA, 1966, 16mm, colour, sound, 37 min

“Bill Vehr is making a magnificent entrance into cinema … His movie Avocada took the Cinematheque’s audience with its beauty – flamboyant, delicate and erotic, and a little bit like Jack Smith, perverted that is to say, and some people will not like it, despite its beauty, because Bill Vehr’s world has been inherited from the famous Marquis, born of the fruits of decadence.” (Jonas Mekas in the Village Voice Movie Journal, 1965)

The Canadian actor Bob Cowan is best known for his starring roles in films by Mike and George Kuchar. He first appeared in Born Of The Wind (1961) and went on to perform in many classics such as Lust For Ecstasy (1963) Sins Of The Fleshapoids (1965) and Color Me Shameless (1967). Cowan was also a prolific filmmaker himself and George Kuchar remembers that “the films he has made are a celebration of the physical loveliness that energised his lust for a richer palette of perception and interpretation via various mediums which give a voice and vision to constipated-carnality”. Soul Freeze is a tough film which explores the temptations and guilty fantasies of a Catholic priest. Cowan has now returned to his native Toronto and continues to make 8mm video films.

SOUL FREEZE
Bob Cowan, Canada-USA, 1967, 16mm, colour, sound, 25 min

“Gathering an inevitable sense of the relentless, Soul Freeze pulses from far flung stasis, the rigidities of outer space, to the multi-peopled cacophony of a demented flesh desert. With feverish momentum, it hovers on waves that break at the edge of reality. The viewer must hope that somewhere he is securely anchored, for as the film unrolls, the universe is fragmented with a clarity merciless in detail. From Soul Freeze there is no escape, only an endless embrace of hell.” (D.J. Ben Levi on Soul Freeze, New York Film-Makers’ Cooperative Catalogue #5, 1971)

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AROUND THE FACTORY
Sunday 25 October 1998, at 8:45pm
London Barbican Cinema

Andy Warhol’s interest in experimental film developed in the early 1960s when he began to attend screenings organised by Jonas Mekas. There he saw works by Jack Smith and Ron Rice that deeply influenced his approach to cinema. From 1963-68 at the Warhol Factory the entire history of cinema was recreated and rewritten by a considerable cast of Superstars and assistants. It’s a popular misconception that The Factory was simply a drop-in centre for drop-outs and dope fiends, but this view does not take in to account the enormous number of creative people that worked with and around Andy Warhol in the sixties – an incredibly artistic crowd which at various times included The Velvet Underground, Piero Heliczer, Angus MacLise, Ronald Tavel, Billy Name and many others.

Marie Menken and Willard Maas were two of the people responsible for Warhol’s move towards cinema. It was through Marie, Willard and the poet Charles Henri Ford that Andy was introduced to Gerard Malanga, who was to become his assistant during the intensely productive mid-1960s period. Marie also starred in Warhol’s films The Life Of Juanita Castro (1965) and The Chelsea Girls (1966). In 1965 she made a stop motion portrait of Warhol at work in the Factory and her husband Willard Maas documented the silver clouds exhibition at the Leo Castelli Gallery one year later.

ANDY WARHOL
Marie Menken, USA, 1965, 16mm, colour, silent, 22 min

“Willard and Marie were the last of the great bohemians. They wrote and filmed and drank (their friends called them “scholarly drunks”) and were involved with all the modern poets. Marie was one of the first to do a film with stop-time. She filmed lots of movies, some with Willard, and she even did one on a day in my life”. (Andy Warhol on Willard Maas and Marie Menken in Popism – The Warhol Sixties, 1980)

ANDY WARHOL’S SILVER FLOTATIONS
Willard Maas, USA, 1966, 16mm, colour, silent, 5 min

“The buoyant clouds were a striking sight as they grazed aimlessly about the room, clustering in mid-air just below the ceiling. Susceptible to air currents, changes in temperature, and static electricity, they endlessly rearranged themselves. Although their movements were mainly dictated by air currents or passersby, they often appeared to express behavioural traits of their own. It was a novel experience to be confronted by floating forms that were soft and resilient and seemed to be both utterly passive and totally free.” (Description of the silver clouds show by David Bourdon in his book on Warhol, 1989)

The early silent films like Kiss (1963-64) and Empire (1964) gained the respect of the film community and in 1965 Andy Warhol announced his “retirement” from painting in order concentrate on movies. By this time he had progressed to incorporate either improvised soundtracks or scripted scenarios by Ronald Tavel and his output was incredibly prolific. Some films such as the Edie Sedgwick portrait Outer And Inner Space (1965) and the legendary The Chelsea Girls were conceived as dual screen projections, but most of the double reel features from this period were sometimes presented in this manner, usually at performances of the Exploding Plastic Inevitable. Hedy (variously known as The Most Beautiful Woman In The World, The Shoplifter or The Fourteen Year Old Girl) features a large cast including Mario Montez, Jack Smith, Mary Woronov and Ingrid Superstar and has an original score by John Cale and Lou Reed. After the success of The Chelsea Girls, Warhol moved towards a more traditional narrative style and following initial commercial experiments like I, A Man and Nude Restaurant in 1967 he handed over to Paul Morrissey who directed Factory Films until production gradually wound down during the 1970s.

HEDY
Andy Warhol, USA, 1966, 16mm, b/w, sound, 33 min (double screen)

“Andy was definitely behind the camera in Hedy, and it’s what I think makes it one of the outstanding films that we did together. Because finally the master took over, and we could see his eye behind the camera. This was the second moving camera film … and I hated it when I first saw it because it came very close to destroying my script, the way he moved the camera, but I loved it for what he did. Because I’d never seen that sort of thing before: As the action would move toward its most dramatic, move toward its point, the camera eye would become bored with the action, with the story, with the problem of the star, kleptomania and so forth, and would begin to explore the ceiling.” (Ronald Tavel talking to Stephen Koch in the book Stargazer: Andy Warhol’s World And His Films, 1973)

Andrew Meyer made a handful of outstanding poetic films including Shades And Drumbeats (1964) An Early Clue To The New Direction (1966) and a full length feature called The Sky Pirate (1969) before going on to direct several movies for Roger Corman in the 1970s. Match Girl depicts the fantasy experiences of an aspiring young actress in a loose interpretation of the fairytale Poor Little Match Girl. It offers vital insights into the Factory and boasts two original Screen Tests shot by Warhol for inclusion in the film.

MATCH GIRL
Andrew Meyer, USA, 1966, 16mm, colour, sound, 26 min

“Andy Warhol, Gerard Malanga, the Rolling Stones, Marilyn Monroe are contrasted with the haunting poetry of Hans Christian Anderson in this jet age fairy tale of a lonely young model (Vivian Kurz) in the pop milieu of New York. The colours are exquisite, the mood is melancholy detached, the imagery evocative and lush … there’s a metaphysical gloom that pervades the film, but Meyer manages to transform it into a flawless portrait of the ‘cool’ aesthetic.” (Gene Youngblood on Match Girl in the Los Angeles Free Press, late-1960s)

Super-Artist is a long lost documentary on Warhol that was compiled by Bruce Torbet, a cameraman who usually worked on commercials and was not part of the underground scene. Most of the footage was shot in the Factory in 1965 after Torbet’s partner Juan Drago suggested they should ”just walk in and see what happens”. It is a delightful film edited in a playful Pop style which brilliantly captures the excitement and fun of the Silver Factory period. Torbet went on to work on several low budget feature films including Greaser’s Palace (Robert Downey, 1972) and Basket Case (Frank Henenlotter, 1981).

SUPER-ARTIST ANDY WARHOL
Bruce Torbet, USA, 1967, 16mm on video, colour, sound, 21 min

“A fascinating look into the artist, his image, his point of view, his environment. With Henry Geldzahler, Edie Sedgwick and a large supporting cast. Segments of: commercials matched against Warhol making a movie, children romping in the Castelli Gallery amid Andy’s floating plastic pillows, corroded, colour-dyed scenes of Andy at work, The Velvet Underground and a thousand film clips chopped up into an eye-popping-picture-sound-chef’s salad.” (Bruce Torbet, New York Film-Makers’ Cooperative Catalogue #5, 1971)

Having performed in legendary films by Ron Rice, Gregory Markopoulos and Andy Warhol, Taylor Mead is well known as one of the underground’s greatest stars. He is also respected for his unique diary films which are highly praised as among the earliest in the single frame style. He made his home movies with a cheap pawn shop camera and used single, double, sometimes even triple frame bursts to conserve film stock which was already becoming expensive in the late-1960s. NYC to San Diego includes footage from the shoot of Warhol’s unreleased San Diego Surf (1968) and features Viva, Joe Dallesandro, Eric Emerson and Paul Morrissey.

HOME MOVIES: NYC TO SAN DIEGO
Taylor Mead, USA, 1968, 16mm, colour, sound-on-tape, 19 min

“The film flickers through a millennium of culture as it would appear to a tourist. It is an intense film, yet there is an incredible wealth of information surprisingly accessible. Aside from the exciting experience itself, the breakneck history lesson is a reminder that the mind can move in lightning steps: The plodding way information is typically presented is an insult to mental capability.” (Bartlett Naylor on Taylor Mead’s Home Movies, 1982)

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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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WAYS OF SEEING
Thursday 5 November 1998, at 7:00pm
London Lux Centre

Robert Breer is another painter who found the canvas so restricting that he moved into cinema. All of his films seek to explore “the domain between motion and still pictures”. His first film was Form Phases I (1952), which was clearly influenced by Hans Richter and Viking Eggeling. In 1954 he made an innovative loop titled Image By Images I, in which each frame was independent of the next and there was no perceptual continuous motion. He further developed this new collage technique in the films leading up to Recreation I (1956-57) in which rapid, disparate, single-frame sequences are occasionally interrupted by slightly longer shots in an attempt to subvert the persistence of vision. Throughout the 1960s Breer refined his animation style in films such as Inner And Outer Space (1960) and Fist Fight (1964), before adapting his work process to include drawing on filing cards which he could flip through to view the movement. He also began to make and exhibit Mutoscopes of his card animations, and in the late 1960s built “floats”, small kinetic sculptures that moved along the ground at a very slow pace. Breer later started to combine live footage with his animations. He continues make short films that are always infused with gentle wit, some of the best examples are 1969 (1968), Gulls And Buoys (1972), Fuji (1973) and LMNO (1978).

RECREATION I
Robert Breer, USA, 1956-57, 16mm, colour, sound, 2 min

“I decided since I don’t know about continuity, I don’t have to think about it, and I’ll just put it out of my mind. I’ll do it in a very methodical way, which was by fracturing, shattering the image so there wasn’t a flaw in it. So the collage thing was kind if deliberate—like the first ones, Recreation and the loops I made before that—were done really in a kind of deliberate feeling of wonderment: “What the hell will this look like?” and “I don’t want to know, I can attach no value to it. I don’t know whether this is cinema or not, it doesn’t matter”.” (Robert Breer interviewed by Jonas Mekas and P. Adams Sitney in 1971, printed in Film Culture #56-57, 1973)

It is not possible to do justice to the work of Stan Brakhage in a single paragraph, or by showing one film in a season such as this. Brakhage continues to be incredibly prolific, making it hard to summarise his work. He began filmmaking with Interim (1953), a brief romantic narrative, and then made a series of trance films (including Reflections On Black and The Way To Shadow Garden, both 1955) inspired in part by his friendship with Maya Deren. Anticipation Of The Night (1958) marked a new turning point signifying his fascination with light and fragmentation of the normal visual world. Prelude (1961) is the opening section of Dog Star Man (1961-64), a major opus on the creation of the universe that is widely regarded as his greatest achievement. On its release it made a monumental impact upon the work of experimental filmmakers. Dog Star Man was then incorporated in The Art Of Vision (1961-65), a four-and-a-half hour long silent epic. In 1963 he made Mothlight by pasting moth wings and plant material between strips of mylar tape. After his 16mm camera was stolen he worked on the series Songs 1-29 (1964-1986), while continuing to make other films and series throughout the next decades. Brakhage is a great believer in the purity of cinematic vision and almost all of his films since 1955 have been silent. His recent works have all been abstract, made by painting directly onto 35mm or 70mm film.

PRELUDE: DOG STAR MAN
Stan Brakhage, USA, 1961, 16mm, colour, silent, 25 min

“In Prelude, the new Brakhage reaches his highest peak so far and gives to modern cinema one of its authentic and incontestable masterpieces. A film that is a poem, a metaphysical thought, a visual symphony, I don’t know what – it is beyond description in words. It is all cinema.” (Jonas Mekas, Village Voice Movie Journal, 1961)

“I thought of Dog Star Man as seasonally structured; but also while it encompasses a year and the history of man in terms of image material (e.g. trees become architecture for a whole history of religious monuments or violence becomes the development of war), I thought it should be contained within a single day. I wanted Prelude to be a created dream for the work that follows rather than Surrealism which takes its inspiration from dream; I stayed close to the practical use of dream material. One thing I knew for sure (from my own dreaming) was that what one dreams just before waking structures the whole day. Since Prelude was based on dream vision as I remembered it, it had to include ‘closed-eye vision’.” (Stan Brakhage quoted in P. Adams Sitney’s book Visionary Film, 1974)

David Brooks was the first director of the New York Film-Makers’ Cooperative when it was formed in 1962. He made a series of short diary films before his untimely death in 1969. His work displays a freedom inherent in the use of a hand-held camera together with a natural sense of timing. In 1968, Brooks completed his longest film, The Wind Is Driving Him Toward The Open Sea, a melancholy unstructured narrative of reflection and seeking.

NIGHTSPRING DAYSTAR
David Brooks, USA, 1964, 16mm, colour, sound, 18 min

“Nightspring Daystar, made when Brooks was only nineteen, is his most inspired. The film centers on the everyday: Brooks’ room, views out of windows, various travels, a woman, concerts at the Village Gate and Apollo Theatre, the night lights of the city. More than any other film I can think of, it operates on the level of pure feeling, evoking in the viewer various moods and memories.” (from J.J. Murphy’s essay The Films Of David Brooks, Film Culture #70-71, 1983)

Jerome Hill was the heir to the James J. Hill railroad fortune. While at Yale, he co-directed a feature film of Tom Jones (1927), and after leaving college he spent the following years travelling, painting and studying in Europe. In 1932 he bought one of the first Eastman Kodak 16mm cameras and began to pursue filmmaking, shooting some personal footage but mostly making documentaries. His film on Albert Schweitzer (1950-57) won an Academy Award and soon after he met Jonas Mekas and became aware of the independent film movement. Hill made a dream film, The Sand Castle, in 1961, combining live footage and hand painted sequences. After the feature Open The Door And See All The People (1964) (an absurd fantasy starring Taylor Mead and others), he made his first short film Death In The Forenoon or Who’s Afraid Of Ernest Hemingway (1933-65) which brought together material that was shot thirty years apart. It is both dark and humorous and was originally titled Anti-Corrida. More short films followed and his last completed work was the autobiographical Film Portrait (1970) which utilised the home movies of his childhood alongside new footage. Jerome Hill died in November 1972. Throughout his lifetime he used his inheritance to support many independent filmmakers and he was the original sponsor of Anthology Film Archives.

DEATH IN THE FORENOON OR WHO’S AFRAID OF ERNEST HEMINGWAY
Jerome Hill, USA, 1933-65, 16mm, colour, sound, 2 min

“I must tell you that Peter Kubelka (who is staying with us this month) (and who is, to my way of thinking, the greatest ‘perfectionist’ of the film medium, and thus finds it very difficult to ‘like’ anything but his work, a few of mine, and one or two other films in the whole world) DID like your film and was much interested in this unique effect you’ve created … what I call the ‘back-space’. I think the children were actually tempted to look behind the screen—I mean that there is such a play between the shapes you’ve painted and those photographed that the former do very much seem in a different ‘plane’ and definitely as if emerging from behind.” (Stan Brakhage in a letter to Jerome Hill, reprinted in New York Filmmakers’ Cooperative Catalogue #5, 1971)

Ed Emshwiller is widely regarded as one of the finest technicians of avant-garde film. In the 1940s he was one of the world’s leading science-fiction illustrators. After studying painting in Paris, Emshwiller made his first film Dance Chromatic (1959), animating abstract paintings over film of a girl dancing. Other personal films followed and he also spent time as a cinematographer for feature directors. Between 1960-62 he made the amazing Thanatopsis, a live action single frame animation. Relativity (1966) is a metaphorical film about man’s place in the universe. Using an astounding range of cinematic techniques, Emshwiller achieved complete control of time, gravity and scale. It was his most successful film and thereafter he went on to make pioneering works of video art.

RELATIVITY
Ed Emshwiller, USA, 1966, 16mm, colour, sound, 38 min

“The artists’ search for the meaning of his own existence is never-ending and many forms. Ed Emshwiller’s remarkable epic Relativity continues this explanation with extraordinary frankness and rare technical skill. The sequence which symbolically portrays a woman at the moment of sexual climax is one of the most beautiful in the literature of film.” (Willard Van Dyke)

Jerry Joffen is a legendary figure of the Lower East Side, whose impulsive films are often dismissed as home movies. He developed a technique of unplanned multiple exposure similar to that of Piero Heliczer, another character who is often overlooked and undervalued. While sharing a loft with Ron Rice in 1961, Joffen began to make films such as Ineluctable Disaster In The Adventure Of The Stairway Of Infinite Rungs Infinitely Leading Nowhere (1962-63) with the downtown crowd. Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures was premiered at his loft in 1963. As was often the case with Smith, Joffen rarely made definitive edits of his films and preferred to cut them specifically for each screening. In the early 1970s, Joffen became ill and underwent neurosurgery. He returned to the lifestyle of his Rabbinical family and made two religious films. Further surgery led to extensive paralysis and he was bedridden for many years until his death in 1983.

HOW CAN WE TELL THE DANCER FROM THE DANCE ?
Jerry Joffen, USA, 1970, 16mm, colour, sound, 10 min

“Jerry Joffen has so much personality and artistry that even those parts of his films which fail become somehow integrated and work perfectly in the total structure. It has always been in the past that Jerry Joffen’s failures were more interesting than some other artists’ successes. He is a master of destruction. I mean it in a good sense, in the sense of spiritualizing the reality, dissolving time and space.” (Jonas Mekas in the Village Voice Movie Journal, 1965)

Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Bill Brand made a number of analytic films that investigated theories of perception and the transference of information. For Moment (1972) he developed a systemic editing procedure to fragment a continuous single shot of a garage from behind a slatted, rotating advertising hoarding. He went on to make the trilogy Acts Of Light (1972-74), “a study of pure colour based on the notion that film is essentially change and not motion”.

MOMENT
Bill Brand, USA, 1972, 16mm, b/w, sound, 23 min

“In a two-and-a-half minute sequence, a simple series of gas station events is seen intermittently through the opening display. This sequence is then divided and rearranged seven times in reverse order. Each time the divisions are greater in number (smaller in size) until finally the film appears to move smoothly backwards, divided by a single frame. The inspiration for the film as well as the title is derived from information theory. There, a ‘moment’ is defined as the shortest duration at which no distinction can be made between units of information. This work is a demonstration and exploration of the line between human information and machine information. It dynamically reveals the film’s basic unit, the frame.” (Bill Brand, New York Film-Makers’ Cooperative Catalogue #7, 1989)

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KEN JACOBS & BOB FLEISCHNER
Thursday 5 November 1998, at 9:00pm
London Lux Centre

Ken Jacobs’ films developed out of despair and desperation, and were an attempt to make an urban guerrilla cinema in reaction to his disappointment with the “wall to wall colour stupidity” of early avant-garde art cinema. After growing up in Brooklyn, he spent some time working as a coastguard off the coast of Alaska and on returning to New York, he began to make Orchard Street (1956), a documentary about the Lower East Side. He then embarked on a series of films with Jack Smith as his leading actor, commencing with Saturday Afternoon Blood Sacrifice: TV Plug: Little Cobra Dance (1957) before embarking upon a three hour epic titled Star Spangled To Death (1957-60). This film, which is concerned with the aesthetic of failure and collapse of order, incorporates new material with found footage. It occupied Jacobs for the next three years. After cutting it down to a ninety minute version for a benefit screening in 1964, he is still promising to restore it to its full length. During this period, using the pseudonym K.M. Rosenthal to “protect my obscurity”, he completed the wonderful Little Stabs At Happiness (1958-60), a series of whimsical 100’ rolls presented as they came out of the camera. During the summer of 1961, Jacobs and Smith spent time in Provincetown performing The Human Wreckage Review, which anticipated many of the artists’ happenings of later that decade and was closed down by the police. The Death of P’Town (1961) was made at this time.

In 1960, Bob Fleischner gave Ken some unedited and abandoned footage of Jack Smith and Jerry Sims picking their way through a desolate apartment space. From this material Jacobs assembled Blonde Cobra (1959-63), adding taped monologues by Smith and several long passages of black leader. It is an incredible film which constantly defeats its own continuity through its method of construction.

BLONDE COBRA
Ken Jacobs & Bob Fleischner, USA, 1959-63, 16mm, b/w, sound, 33 min

“Jack says I made the film too heavy. It was his and Bob’s intention to make a light monster-movie comedy. Two comedies actually, two separate stories that were being shot simultaneously until they had a falling out over who should pay for the raw stock destroyed in a fire that started when Jack’s cat knocked over a candle; Jack claimed it was an act of God. In the winter of ‘59 blue Bob showed me the footage. Having no idea of the original story plans I was able to view the material not as the exquisite fragments of a failure, of two failures, but as the makings of a new entity. Bob gave over the footage to me and with it the freedom to develop it as I saw fit.” (Ken Jacobs, New York Film-Makers’ Cooperative Catalogue #5, 1971)

“Blonde Cobra, undoubtedly, is the masterpiece of the Baudelairean cinema, and it is a work hardly surpassable in perversity, in richness, in beauty, in sadness, in tragedy. I think it is one of the great works of personal cinema, so personal that it is ridiculous to speak of ‘author’s’ cinema. I know that the larger public will misinterpret and misunderstand these films. As there are poets appreciated only by other poets, so there is now a cinema for the few, too terrible and too ‘decadent’ for an ‘average’ man in any organised culture. But then, if everybody would dig Beaudelaire, or de Sade, or Burroughs, my God, where would humanity be?” (Jonas Mekas on The Baudelairean Cinema, Village Voice Movie Journal, 1963)

Ken Jacobs didn’t dig the Baudelairean tag and made the fantasy home movie Baud’lairian Capers (1963-64) in response. It forms part of a loose trilogy with The Winter Footage (1963-64) and The Sky Socialist (1964-65).

BAUD’LAIRIAN CAPERS
Ken Jacobs, USA, 1963-64, 16mm, b/w, silent, 20 min

“Jonas Mekas jumped the gun, celebrating the arrival of a ‘Baudelairean Cinema’ with Bob Fleischner and myself subsumed within the category, that is, obscured beneath the dark cloak of Jack Smith. Bob had filmed Blonde Cobra, I had composed it (and more), but from Jack’s ‘stuff’, respectful of his fantasy. I’ve had to wonder if Jonas’ unwillingness to help bankroll my earlier and more ambitious Star Spangled To Death might’ve been because it was so involved with historical (Jews!) and political matter so thumpingly non-Baudelairean that it would’ve confused his simplistic take, and selling point, for ‘Underground Cinema’. That Bob, a pleasant amiable Bronx boy might be so construed, as Baudelairean, was nuts. Prompting me, in going from a portrait of Jack to one of Bob, to ironically attach that title, with the telling contra-subtitle, A Musical With Nazis And Jews. And at that time in the USA, ‘Jews’ was as uncomfortable a public utterance as I suspect in Britain today. You’ve got a homeboy in the film by the way – your poet Harry Fainlight (in the one scene accompanied by sound). It was Harry’s shockingly tasteless idea to film ‘the revenge of Anne Frankenstein’. Appalling, but the idea stayed with me, modified by me, entering this film and largely amplified in my next, the feature-length The Sky Socialist.” (statement by Ken Jacobs, 1998)

Bob Fleischner worked on many of Ken Jacobs’ early films and had shot the original Blonde Cobra footage. In 1965 he made Grandma’s House, a labour of love featuring Jerry Sims. In the film, Sims returns to haunt his grandmother’s house in Coney Island where he discovers his dream girl, played by Barbara Kahn, and is faced with the possibility of giving up his life of doom. Throughout the 1970s and early 1980s, Fleischner made a number of brief portrait poems including Max’s Shirt (1975), Paradise (1978) and Sally’s Window (1982).

GRANDMA’S HOUSE
Bob Fleischner, USA, 1965, 16mm, b/w, sound, 25 min

“Very high. Bob understood his star’s tortured moodiness, schlepped the boardwalk with him and bought him lunches, cheered him up with imitations of Lugosi while solidly, stolidly, cine-drop by drop recording the elements of this most tender but utter horror story. Grandma’s House is so true, believed, unaffected and straight forward in its image-locked-into-image narrative delivery it’s embarrassing. Like Chaplin in Monsieur Verdoux, Fleischner employs the simplest and most direct means to convey his emotions, to tell the story. He’s out to impress us, not with how facile he can be, but with a sad hard fact that’s beset him and which we must now face and live with forever.” (Ken Jacobs on Grandma’s House, New York Film-Makers’ Cooperative Catalogue #5, 1971)

After completing the feature-length narrative The Sky Socialist (1964-65), which in its cinematography investigates depth and the perception of space, Jacobs began to develop a keen interest in the manipulation of light. For projection of the 8mm film Naomi Is A Vision Of Loveliness (1965), he used a variable projector and distorting lenses. The next year, he began to present live shadow plays starting with The Big Blackout of ‘65: Chapter One “Thirties Man” (1965), which negated the need for camera or projector. The shadow plays continued to develop in two and three dimensions through the next two decades and included the wonderfully named Ken Jacobs At The Console Performing “Stick To Your Carpentry And You Won’t Get Nailed” (1979). In 1964, he utilised a more formal approach to cinema and made Window, in which he proposed the room as a camera and the window as the aperture. Similar ideas were later investigated in Airshaft (1967), a fixed camera looking through a fire escape, and Soft Rain (1968), a window view that is partially obscured by a paper rectangle which confuses the spatial structure of the frame.

SOFT RAIN
Ken Jacobs, USA, 1968, colour, silent, 12 min

“A large black rectangle following up and filling to space above the stage-area is seen as both an unlikely abyss extending in deep space behind the stage, or more properly as a two dimensional plane suspended far forward of the entire snow/rain scene. Though it clearly, if slightly, overlaps the two receding loft building walls, the mind, while knowing better, insists on presuming it to be overlapped by them. (At one point the black plane even trembles). So this mental tugging takes place throughout. The contradiction of 2D reality versus 3D implication is amusingly and mysteriously explicit.” (Ken Jacobs, New York Film-Makers’ Cooperative Catalogue #5, 1971)

Jacobs then made the definitive collage film Tom, Tom The Piper’s Son (1969) by reediting and rephotographing a ten minute short made in Hollywood in 1905. He transposed the timing, scale and sequence of the original by refilming close-ups from a screen, using filters, making loops and retarding the narrative, to make his own film nearly two hours in length. That same year he made Globe (1969), his first truly 3D film which is viewed through special Eye Opener filters.

GLOBE
Ken Jacobs, USA, 1971, 16mm, colour, sound, 22 min

“Previously titled Excerpt From The Russian Revolution. Normal projection. Flat image (of snowbound suburban housing tract) blossoms into 3D only when viewer places Eye Opener (copyright 1987) before right eye. (Keeping both eyes open, of course. As with all stereo experiences, centre seats are best. Space will deepen as one views further from the screen.) The found sound is X-ratable (not for children or Nancy Reagan) but is important to the film’s perfect balance (Globe is symmetrical) of divine and profane.” (Ken Jacobs, New York Film-Makers’ Cooperative Catalogue #7, 1989)

Throughout the 1970s and 1980s Ken devoted much of his time to teaching and to the development of his Nervous System projection unit. Two wonderful films he made during this period are The Doctor’s Dream (1978), a found television drama which was sequentially reedited, and Perfect Film (1986), the rushes of television news footage of vox pop interviews on the occasion of Malcolm X’s assassination, which was found in a dustbin and presented unaltered.

The Nervous System is a way of deriving 3D images from standard 2D film and was begun in 1975 with The Impossible: Chapter One “Southwark Fair”. Using two single-frame analytic projectors containing identical footage (usually found or archive material), Jacobs performs cinematic magic by controlling frame by frame advances and by flickering between the two machines to manipulate the viewer’s perceptions, appearing to present both forward and backward motion at the same time. It truly defies visual (and mental) comprehension. There are now twenty Nervous System pieces, including Two Wrenching Departures (1989), a tribute to Jack Smith and Bob Fleischner. The latest is called Ontic Antics Starring Laurel And Hardy (1998) and was recently premiered at the New York Film Festival.

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GREGORY MARKOPOULOS
Friday 6 November 1998, at 9:00pm
London Lux Centre

The work of Gregory Markopoulos occupies a unique position in the history of film. He is widely regarded as one of the masters of the cinematic art, yet since he departed the United States in 1967 his films have been almost impossible to see. As a result of his need for total control over the presentation of his vision, he increasingly withdrew himself and his films from the film community he had been so actively involved in.

Markopoulos was born in Toledo, Ohio, in 1928. He was the son of Greek parents and was encouraged to speak their native language up until he entered an English speaking school. In 1940 he was given an 8mm camera and made one of his first films A Christmas Carol (1940). That film survives but others from 1940-45 were destroyed by the filmmaker. After studying film at the University of Southern California and assisting Curtis Harrington on Fragment Of Seeking (1946), he made the film Psyche (1947). With Lysis and Charmides (both 1948), it formed a trilogy titled Du sang de la volupte et de la mort (1947-48), an early cinematic representation of homosexual love. In the following years he made a number of films, including Swain and Flowers Of Asphalt (both 1951), in which he refined his technique. In 1954 he destroyed all of his journals and travelled to Greece to start anew. He developed a scenario for the film Serenity (1955-60) and spent several years travelling between Greece and the USA to raise funding. The film was shot in 1958 using predominantly untrained Greek actors. In 1960 he edited the film and composed a soundtrack using simultaneous English, Greek, German and Russian narration. It was premiered as an unfinished work print in October 1961, but after three screenings Markopoulos was forced to return the film to the production company in order to get his director’s fee. He never saw his film again, despite employing an attorney try to get it back in 1963. The same year he published Quest for Serenity (Journal of a Film-maker) detailing the film’s eight year long history. Meanwhile, since 1961, Markopoulos had been working on Twice A Man (1963) based on the myth of Hippolytus. The film begins with a two minute long blank screen accompanied by the sound of rain, and then proceeds to demonstrate the filmmaker’s mastery of composition, editing and use of the single frame. The soundtrack is also innovative, as Markopoulos fragments words and phases by manipulating the audio tape. It remains a major work of the mythopoeic cinema. In 1964, he began work on his next epic, inspired by Prometheus Bound, the film which would eventually become The Illiac Passion (1967). During the period in which he was editing and securing funding for that film, he made three films edited entirely in-camera. Galaxie (1966) is a series of thirty one minute portraits of the artistic and intellectual community of Manhattan. Some portraits were exposed up to ten times and all fades, dissolves and single frames were achieved at the time of shooting. Ming Green (1966) is an immaculately constructed portrait of his apartment that was shot in a single afternoon. Through A Lens Brightly: Mark Turbyfill (1967) is a biographical portrait of the dancer and poet.

MING GREEN
Gregory Markopoulos, USA, 1966, 16mm, colour, sound, 7 min

“The reason the film is called Ming Green is because it’s about a very beautiful apartment, a very simple apartment, that I had in New York for about six or seven years. The apartment was painted ming green, which is a sort of Chinese-y colour. Stan Brakhage gave me the idea. He said mine was the only apartment in New York City that he could stand to come and visit, because it was very, very quiet. The important thing about this film is that all the editing was done in the camera itself. As you already probably know, I have a system in which I edit using single frames and it gets very, very complicated, as in Twice A Man or Himself As Herself. In Ming Green all these single frames, all these superimpositions were done in the camera itself.” (from a lecture given by Gregory Markopoulos at Kent State University, 1968)

After making Himself as Herself and Eros, O Basileus (both 1967) in New York, Markopoulos moved to Europe, ostensibly to raise money to finally print The Illiac Passion. While in Greece he made the architectural portrait Bliss (1967), and in Italy he shot Gammelion (1967-68), for which five minutes of footage filmed in the 365 rooms of the Castello Roccasinibalda was extended to almost an hour using over a thousand fades. In the autumn of 1967, Markopoulos was living in Brussels where he persuaded a consortium of businessmen to fund the completion of The Illiac Passion. The film had been shot in 1964 and starred Richard Beauvais alongside a cast of well-known underground personalities, including Andy Warhol, Gerard Malanga, Taylor Mead, Beverly Grant and Jack Smith. It was originally edited in the first half of 1965, and was then intended as a three hour long, triple projection film in which 35, 16 and 8mm frames would be superimposed on each other to demonstrate different layers of consciousness. During the printing process, Markopoulos commuted between Brussels and the lab in Boulder, Colorado. After a thirty minute section had been completed, he realised that the film would never be ready in time for the film festival at Knokke-le-Zoute, so he reconceived and reedited the film into the 92 minute version that exists today.

THE ILLIAC PASSION
Gregory Markopoulos, USA, 1967, 16mm, colour, sound, 92 min

“It would, perhaps, be well at this point to inform the film spectator and reader interested in my work, that The Illiac Passion has become on two levels (without going into exact detail) the spoken and visual Odyssean journey of the filmmaker. From the moment that the figure of Mr. Beauvais appeared that evening while I was working at Marlboro Books in Greenwich Village, New York, and one of the employees whispered “that’s the Prometheus you have been searching for”, to the final casting of Mr. Jack Smith as Orpheus towards the final days of the film production, this film has taxed every nerve, fibre and muscle of my Being. That this should have been so is only fitting, for was not Prometheus himself daily visited by that uncompromising eagle sent by Zeus! An eagle whose arrival one never sees in the film, but only hears its piercing cry. A cry oddly American; a cry containing the elements of the wronged, of the misunderstood.” (Gregory Markopoulos in his essay The Adamantine Bridge (for Paul Kilb), Film Culture #53-54-55, 1972)

After the success of The Illiac Passion, Markopoulos continued to work in Europe for the next two years up until Sorrows (1969). Through the 1970s, though he continued to shoot films (including Genius, 1970, a version of Faust featuring David Hockney), they were rarely printed. Markopoulos was already developing plans for the Temenos, a dedicated theatre and archive that was to be constructed in his father’s home town of Lyssaraia in Greece. He severed his remaining ties with the film community in 1974, by disassociating himself from Anthology Film Archives and asking P. Adams Sitney to remove the chapter on his films from subsequent editions of the book Visionary Film. In the summer of 1980, Gregory Markopoulos and Robert Beavers held their first, free, open-air screenings on a hillside above Lyssaraia. The screenings were accompanied by publications and this tradition continued annually until 1986. In the 1980s, Markopoulos also worked on Enaiaos (1948-91), a series of twenty-two silent film cycles containing material from his forty years as a filmmaker. The series was fully edited, but not printed, before his death in 1992. It consists of over eighty hours of film and will cost an estimated $770,000 to complete. Robert Beavers is continuing to pursue the construction of the Temenos, and intends to build an archive for Markopoulos’ journals, letters, script, articles and reviews which the filmmaker had linen-bound in handmade cases and are currently stored in a Swiss vault, together with a film theatre for presentation of the complete Enaiaos. In 1999, Temenos Inc. will resume the summer screening programme at a temporary site in Lyssaraia.

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FLICKER FILMS
Saturday 7 November 1998, at 9:00pm
London Lux Centre

In the early 1960s, experimental filmmakers began to break cinema down into it smallest possible unit – the frame. Some went even further, removing any traces of image to present purely blank frames, whether in black and white or in colour. The Austrian filmmaker Peter Kubelka was the first to make an imageless film in 1960, believing that cinema speaks between the frames. In America, unaware of this achievement, Victor Grauer, Tony Conrad and Paul Sharits began to investigate the flicker phenomena. These four artists gathered for a symposium on “The Imageless Film” at the State University Of New York in Buffalo in the mid 1970s, and their films are reunited for this event.

Though Peter Kubelka began his cinematic career in Austria with Mosaik im Vertrauen (1954-55), he did not find a context for his art until he arrived in America in 1965. In this first film a series of images are grouped together using a set of highly developed rules. By Adebar (1957) and Schwechater (1958), he was severely reducing the amount of information in each frame. Adebar was originally commissioned as an advertisement for the Cafe Adebar in Vienna. Kubelka filmed dancers against a white wall to achieve a flat image with extreme contrast. He selected only a handful shots and carefully composed a structure using positive / negative juxtaposition and freeze frames. This film is one and a half minutes long, Schwechater is thirty seconds shorter and though similarly structured, it is generated from a more complex set of rules that are used to order only four images. It was commissioned by a beer company, who rejected it for commercial use. Kubelka recommends that viewers see each film at least twice before attempting to understand them. In Arnulf Rainer (1960) Kubelka completely removed the image by making a montage of black or white leader, accompanied by a soundtrack of white noise and silence. He considers it the absolute film, which both defines and brackets the art. The Viennese painter Arnulf Rainer commissioned a portrait, but Kubelka became interested in presenting film its purest form and again used a complex metric structure. For Unsere Afrikareise (1961-66) he travelled to Africa and recorded ten hours of sound and a few hours of visuals which he then studied, notated and memorised before editing the material into a twelve minute movie, abandoning single frame montage but concentrating on perfect image and sound relationships. Flawlessly assembled, it is regarded by many as his masterpiece. He made one further film, Pause! (1977), in which Arnulf Rainer himself finally made it onto the screen. Peter Kubelka was a founder member, and remains a director, of the Oesterreichisches Filmmuseum in Vienna.

ARNULF RAINER
Peter Kubelka, Austria, 1960, 16mm, b/w, sound, 6 min

“He has even created a film whose images can no more be ‘turned off’ by the closing of eyes than can the soundtrack thereof it (for it is composed entirely of white frames rhythming thru black inter-spaces and of such an intensity as to create its pattern straight thru closed eyelids) so that the whole ‘mix’ of the audio-visual experience is clearly ‘in the head’, so to speak: and if one looks at it openly, one can see ones own eye cells as if projected onto the screen and can watch one’s optic physiology activated by the soundtrack in what is, surely, the most basic Dance of Life of all (for the sounds of the film do resemble and, thus, prompt the inner ear’s hearing of its own pulse output at intake of sound).” (Stan Brakhage, New York Film-Makers’ Cooperative Catalogue #5, 1971)

Victor Grauer is a thereotician and composer who was one the first to present the flicker on film in the mid 1960s. These two early films have been rarely shown since that time. The original camera materials were recently discovered in his loft, and the filmmaker has struck new prints that will be premiered tonight.

ANGEL EYES
Victor Grauer, USA, 1965, colour, sound, 10 min

“Angel Eyes was probably the first color flicker film ever. It was made in 1965 and first presented at a screening organized by John Brockman at St. Marks Church, NYC. There was a lot of interest in this film (my first) at the screening, but I realized that this approach had the potential to be much more powerful and decided to make another with stronger ‘strobing’ effects (don’t forget, the strobe light was still pretty much unknown at that time). The new film, Archangel was made in 1966 and shown at the Filmmaker’s Cinematheque and, a bit later the same year, at the New York Film Festival (on the same program as Conrad’s The Flicker). Archangel attracted some interest and was shown in various other theaters in NYC. Early in ‘67, I left New York City to study music composition at SUNY Buffalo and was not able to continue my ‘research’ on imageless film until many years later.” (Victor Grauer, 1998)

Perhaps because of its eponymous title, The Flicker (1965) is probably the best known of all imageless films. It was made by Tony Conrad, a musician who became aware of the effects of stroboscopic light in a class at Harvard. After graduating he travelled to New York to study and play with the composer La Monte Young and found himself in the midst of the bohemian subculture. Through Young and his wife Marian Zazeela, Conrad was introduced to Jack Smith, for whom he assembled the soundtracks to Scotch Tape (1961) and Flaming Creatures (1962-63), and Angus MacLise, whom he recorded to accompany Ron Rice’s Chumlum (1964). With Jack Smith, Mario Montez, and others, Conrad also experimented with filmless films using the flicker of an altered 16mm projector as illumination (they were too poor to afford the stock, or the camera). In 1965, he used his mathematic training and the music theory on harmonic relationships he had developed with Young to evolve ideas for The Flicker. He borrowed a camera and shot a basic four thousand frames of raw material, which was then processed and compiled according to a carefully planned exposure timing sheet using approximately six hundred splices. The rate of flicker changes throughout the film to present a variety of harmonic chords which induce different sensations in the viewer.

THE FLICKER
Tony Conrad, USA, 1965, 16mm, b/w, sound-on-tape, 30 min

“I don’t think of The Flicker as a movie as we know it today. It is a piece of film that is experienced by a group of people in various ways – depending on how they choose to approach it. There is a variety of effects I am investigating, effects that act on your eyes so as to produce the actual imagery directly within the observer rather than in a normal way of having the eye interpret the light patterns on the screen. The film is actually divided into about fifty sections each of which consists of a repeating pattern made up of one rhythm of black and white frames. Nevertheless, most people see colors, and that is not unusual at all.” (Tony Conrad interviewed by Jonas Mekas, Village Voice Movie Journal, 1966)

In an extremely productive period between 1966 and 1968, Paul Sharits produced a series of outstanding films which, while devoid of mystical or cosmic imagery, seek to induce a change of consciousness by using relentlessly altering sequences of colour. His first, Ray Gun Virus (1966) was made while studying visual design at Indiana University and predates the introduction of sporadic images to his films, thus consisting only of ‘empty’ coloured frames. Sharits further disorientates the viewer by incorporating an amplified sound track of the film’s sprocket sounds.

RAY GUN VIRUS
Paul Sharits, USA, 1966, 16mm, colour, sound, 14 min

“Although affirming projector, projection beam, screen, emulsion, film frame structure etc. this is not an ‘abstract film’ / projector as pistol / time-colored pills / yes=no / mental suicide and, then, rebirth as self-projection / dedicated to Regina Cornwell” (Paul Sharits, Film Culture #65-66, 1978)

A year after Angel Eyes, Victor Grauer made Archangel (1966), a more powerful strobe film, which he described as “pure light energy, released by the splitting of the film atom”. Two further films, Seraph (“not for cowards”) and Certain Stars; Distant Star; Acid, were completed that year before he left New York City to study music composition at SUNY, Buffalo and was not able to pursue his interest in this area for some time. In the 1970s Grauer continued to investigate this phenomenon and made a number of computer generated flicker videos, and has more recently made what he regards as the definitive flicker work as a program for the Amiga computer.

ARCHANGEL
Victor Grauer, USA, 1966, 16mm, colour, sound, 10 min

“Whereas painting finds its true meaning in the articulation of space, the true meaning, the essence of film lies in the articulation of time. For this no image is necessary, only the alternation of light and non-light. It is presented in its simplest and strongest form when the contrast between light and non-light is at its maximum, i.e., when frames of the clearest possible film are placed in contrast with frames of the most opaque possible film, in a setting of total darkness”. (from A Theory Of Pure Film by Victor Grauer, Field Of Vision #1, 1976)

In 1966 Tony Conrad started work on The Eye Of Count Flickerstein, in which the flicker effect is seen as an intense sequence of images in the eye of the Count. Conrad does not regard the film as a successful achievement and it is no longer in distribution, so it is rarely seen today.

THE EYE OF COUNT FLICKERSTEIN
Tony Conrad, USA, 1966-75, 16mm, b/w, silent, 7 min

“Conrad’s second film, The Eye Of Count Flickerstein, begins with a brief Dracula parody in which the camera moves up to the eye of Count; then, until the end of the film, we see a boiling swarm of images very similar to, if not made from, the static on a television screen when the station is not transmitting. Aesthetically, Count Flickerstein lacks the ambition of The Flicker, but it is not without visual interest.” (from Structural Film by P. Adams Sitney, Film Culture #47, 1969)

In the same year, following the initial study of Ray Gun Virus, Paul Sharits made Word Movie / Fluxfilm 29 and Piece Mandala / End War (both 1966), in which at first words, then photographs were incorporated into the coloured flickers. His next major development was N:O:T:H:I:N:G (1968), a long flicker film which includes images of a chair falling backwards and a light bulb being drained of its energy. T:O:U:C:H:I:N:G (1968) came soon after and features the poet David Franks threatening to cut off his tongue with scissors and having his face scratched by a woman’s fingernails, while on the soundtrack his voice repeats the word “destroy”, which is looped into an unsettling mantra. In S:TREAM:S:S:ECTION:S:ECTION:S:S:ECTIONED (1968-71), moving images (a stream) and superimposition are introduced before the picture is systematically obliterated by scratches. During this period, Sharits developed his first double screen work, Razor Blades (1965-68), composed so as to bombard the viewer with forty-eight different images each second. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Sharits continued to be extremely prolific making complex and challenging films including Inferential Current (1971) Axiomatic Granularity (1972-73) and Episodic Generation (1977-78). In his lifetime, he was one of the few filmmakers who was successfully active in the art world. Between 1966 and 1973 he was a contributor to the Fluxus group. He also made Frozen Film Frames (complete filmstrips mounted between sheets of plexiglass) and developed several Locational Pieces (continuous installations for two to four simultaneous projectors, many of which were subsequently scaled down into single or double screen films). One of the most demanding of the Locational Pieces was Epileptic Seizure Comparison (1976), a double screen film comparing two male epileptics entering convulsive states, presented with quadraphonic sound in an enclosed, trapezoid space with metallic, reflective walls.

N:O:T:H:I:N:G
Paul Sharits, USA, 1968, 16mm, colour, sound, 36 min

“Based, in part, on the Tibetan Mandala of the Five Dhyani Buddhas / a journey toward the centre of pure consciousness (Dharma-Dhatu Wisdom) / space and motion generated rather than illustrated / time-color energy create virtual shape / in negative time, growth is inverse decay / dedicated to Stan Brakhage”. (Paul Sharits, Film Culture #65-66, 1978)

“The film will strip away anything (all present definitions of ‘something’) standing in the way of the film being its own reality, anything which would prevent the viewer from entering totally new levels of awareness. The theme of the work, if it can be called a theme, is to deal with the nonunderstandable, the impossible, in a tightly and precisely structured way. The film will not ‘mean’ something – it will ‘mean’, in a very concrete way, nothing.” (from a grant application by Paul Sharits, reprinted in Film Culture #47, 1969)

Tony Conrad was married to Beverly Grant, one of the underground movie stars, and in 1970 they began to make make films together. Straight And Narrow (1970) is a further development of the flicker principle, but introduces more visual information in the form of horizontal or vertical black lines on a white background. The film is immaculately constructed and is accompanied by a pulsating soundtrack by John Cale and Terry Riley. The Conrads also worked together on the feature film Coming Attractions (1970), a tantalising fusion of flicker and other optical effects with a narrative fantasy that stars Francis Francine. In their final collaboration they made the four screen abstract film Four Square (1971). Throughout the 1970s Tony Conrad totally deconstructed the normal concept of cinema. In 1972 he exhibited the Yellow Movie series of canvases painted with a yellow pigment that changed colour over time. He then developed a number of film performances such as Deep Fried 4-X Negative (1973) 7360 Sukiyaki (1973) and Roast Kalvar (1975) which involved the cooking of raw film stock. Bowed Film (1974) consisted of an amplified film loop running between the floor and his head. He also realised several versions of Film Feedback (1974), in which the exposed film comes constantly out of the camera and is immediately processed, dried and projected back onto the screen it is being filmed from. After spending several years concentrating on teaching and working with community television projects, Conrad has recently returned to music composition and performance.

STRAIGHT AND NARROW
Tony & Beverly Conrad, USA, 1970, 16mm, b/w, sound, 10 min

“Straight And Narrow is a study in subjective color and visual rhythm. Although it is printed on black and white film, the hypnotic pacing of the images will cause viewers to experience a programmed gamut of hallucinatory color effects. Straight And Narrow uses the flicker phenomenon … not as an end in itself, but as an effectuator of other related phenomena. In this film, the colors which are so illusory in The Flicker are visible under the programmed control of the filmmaker. Also, by using images which alternate in a vibrating flickering schedule, a new impression of motion and texture is created. The film is a tour-de-force in richness and variety of texture that can be achieved through very simple composition of minimal means (horizontal and vertical stripes) when they are controlled from frame to frame.” (Tony & Beverly Conrad, New York Film-Makers’ Cooperative Catalogue #6, 1975)

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