Introduction by Anthony H Wilson

1. Video
   La Monte Young * Marian Zazaeela, “The Fountain” an excerpt from “87 V 10 c. 06:50:00 PM – 87 V 11 01:14:47 AM NYC”
   The Well-Tuned Piano in a setting of The Magenta Lights
2. Live Performance
   The Gavin Bryars Ensemble
   “Jesus Blood Never Failed Me Yet”
   “Epilogue from Wonderlawn”
3. Tape
   Spring Heel Jack
   “Two Small Pieces for La Monte Young”
   accompanied by
4. Film
   Paul Catling
   “First Small Piece for La Monte Young”

Interval

5. Live Performance
   Nick Cave
   solo piano songs accompanied by Warren Ellis on violin
6. Video
   La Monte Young and the Forever Bad Blues Band, excerpt from “96 VI 8 c. 8-11 PM NYC”
   Young’s Dorian Blues in G (Bb = 60Hz)
   Live at The Knitting Factory in a setting of Ornamental Lightyears Tracery
7. Live Performance
   Spiritualized
   songs from the album
   “Ladies and Gentlemen we are Floating in Space”

Interval

8. Tape
   Yoko Ono
   “Happy Birthday La Monte”
9. Live Performance
   Steve Martland
   “Crossing the Border”
   performed by the English Chamber Orchestra conducted by Charles Hazlewood
10. Tape
    Terry Riley
    “Eastern Man”
    recorded live by Terry Riley with Khayal
11. Live Performance
    Pulp
    songs from the album “This is Hardcore”

THE PURPOSE OF THIS CONCERT IS NOT ENTERTAINMENT
Friday 31 October 1997
London Barbican Centre

La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela

La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela have spent every night of their lives together since the day they officially got together: June 22, 1962. And except for a brief period in the early eighties, when they had a second living space a few blocks away, they have lived in the same downtown loft on Church Street in New York City since 1963, regularly sharing it, since the early seventies, with their former teacher, north Indian classical singer Pandit Pran Nath, who passed away earlier this year. In his typically colourful way, Young recently described their life together as “two turtles, living in a dream house.”

If it sounds as if things move slowly in their lives, the same is doubly true in their art. Even when playing microtonal blues, Young can take hours to get to the next chord change. And Zazeela’s light shows, normally in a magenta hue, appear not to move at all, except for the shadows, which are never the same. When I told the composer Ben Johnston I planned to interview La Monte and Marian, he said, “You’d do well to remember that they function as close to a single entity as any two people you’re ever likely to meet.” Certainly, in conversation, they do talk at the same time, always completing each other’s sentences. But the most compelling thing about their relationship, to my mind, is how slowly things move in their presence. This is true even in sleep, where they are on a twenty-seven-hour cycle that, depending on the day, can have them awake or asleep at any hour of the day or night.

Born a Mormon, in a log cabin, in a town of 149 people in Idaho, La Monte Young remembers the vast sense of time and distance he felt as a child. He also remembers the wind blowing through the logs of the cabin, the sound of insects, and the slow-moving clouds, all of which would later have an effect on his music. When he was three, his aunt, who sang at rodeos, taught him to play guitar. When he was seven, his father, a sheepherder, taught him saxophone, beating him when he played wrong notes. Young says he didn’t hear any classical music until sometime in high school, after his family had moved permanently to Los Angeles. As he recalls, his “first big taste of modern music” was the Bartok Concerto for Orchestra, heard on a class trip to the Los Angeles Philharmonic.

In high school, Young practiced a series of long-tone exercises on saxophone that he eventually came to regard as the beginning of his interest in sound vibrations “on a higher level.” He identifies the summer of 1957, when he was in his early twenties, as a turning point, saying he spent the entire summer on a bed in his grandmother’s house in L.A., meditating and listening to sounds. Young describes this time as the only point in his life where he ever questioned his direction in music. Later, he said his work with long tones was what led him to work with tunings, since a sustained tone allows the harmonics to be heard, which quickly leads to the area of just intonation.

In 1953, Young began classes at L.A. City College, beating out Eric Dolphy for a chair in the dance band. During the mid-fifties, jazz and experimental music coexisted in his mind, but by the time of his arrival at Berkeley in 1958 to begin a graduate degree, he had devoted himself to composition. At Berkeley, Young studied with Seymour Shifrin, in a class that included both Pauline Oliveros and Terry Riley. His most important work from this period is his Trio for Strings, an hour-long, serial piece from 1958 that is built entirely of long tones and silences. It is probably this work, more than any other, that solidifies Young’s reputation as the “Godfather of Minimalism.”

In 1959, Young attended the summer course in new music at Darmstadt, Germany. He went to study with Stockhausen, but came away highly influenced by the music and philosophy of John Cage and the piano recitals given by David Tudor. The next year, showing the influences of both Cage and Japanese haiku, Young wrote his radically different Compositions 1960, a group of poetry-like prose instructions, one of which directs the performer to “Draw a straight line and follow it.” Also in 1960, Young moved to New York to study electronic music with Richard Maxfield, and by the end of the year, had organized what may have been the first loft concert series in New York at Yoko Ono’s loft on Chambers Street.

Marian Zazeela grew up in a completely different world. Born in New York, she majored in art at the High School of Music and Art, before going to Bennington College in Vermont to major in painting, studying with Paul Feeley, Eugene Goossens, and Tony Smith, among others. Her first New York exhibition, a two-artist show at the 92nd Street YM-YWHA in 1960, was awarded to her by the art department of the college. Her large canvases of this period, with names like Blue Train and Woodcut 1960, are composed of freely drawn calligraphic strokes suspended in static, contrasting colour fields, and show the influence of two trips to Tangiers. Zazeela now says she thinks of these works as seeds, leading directly to her two major lightworks: Ornamental Lightyears Tracery, an ongoing series of short-term performances throughout the seventies, and The Magenta Lights, the environment designed specifically for performances of Young’s The Well-Tuned Piano.

In New York after college, Zazeela first moved among a circle of writers, once designing a stage set for Amiri Baraka (who was then known as LeRoi Jones). During the early sixties, she was also a super-model for Jack Smith, appearing not only as the primary subject for his legendary book of nude photographs, The Beautiful Book, but also in the featured still cameo of his banned movie, Flaming Creatures (along with Young, who, because of her, had a minor role). She would have been the main character of the movie – the part was written for her – but she had recently met Young and found his world suddenly consuming all of hers.

At first, Zazeela’s work with Young consisted of performing drone parts as a member of his group, The Theatre of Eternal Music, which at one time included John Cale, Tony Conrad, and Angus MacLise. Terry Riley, Billy Name, Jon Hassel and Jon Gibson have also participated in this group at various times. But in 1964, Zazeela also began creating a visual presentation as well, first with light boxes glowing with calligraphic patterns, later, with photographs of these patterns projected onto the performers. By 1965, her calligraphic light projections were incorporating, as she says, the elements of time into the work. And by 1968, these lightworks had become environments, creating what she called “three-dimensional coloured shadows.” Since the 1960’s Zazeela and Young have moved slowly away from the idea of concert-hall performances, creating instead, these environments in which Young’s five- and six-hour pieces gradually unfold, bathed in lights Zazeela once described as the “soft reflected light of dusk, suspended in time.”

Although Young and Zazeela have worked together on a number of projects, their two most significant, continuing collaborations are The Well-Tuned Piano and Dream House. The Well-Tuned Piano, currently approaching seven hours in length, is a work for justly tuned piano, begun by Young in 1964, in which events unfold at a glacial pace, with chords and intervals of the microtonal scale appearing slowly, in a prescribed order, over a span of hours. It is also a piece in which new material is developed each time it is played, which is why it gets longer with each performance. Beginning with the 1974 premiere in Rome, Zazeela’s lightwork The Magenta Lights has always been the environment in which Young performs The Well-Tuned Piano. He says he will never perform it any other way.

Dream House, on the other hand, is a much longer sound and light environment designed to exist over a period of weeks, months, or even years. Originally begun as a harmonically complex set of drones in their loft in the early sixties, Dream House evolved, first, into a series of short-term performances / installations in which Young’s Map of 49’s Dream The Two Systems of Eleven Sets of Galactic Intervals Ornamental Lightyears Tracery was performed, then, into a permanent installation on Harrison Street in New York, supported by the Dia Art Foundation. Unfortunately, after running for six years, economic problems within the foundation forced its closing in 1985. There is currently a seven year long Dream House installed on the floor above Young and Zazeela’s Church Street loft.

In 1990, Zazeela’s exhibition of lightworks at the Donguy Gallery in Paris was purchased by the French cultural ministry for permanent installation in France. That same year, Young formed the Forever Bad Blues Band, consisting of microtonal keyboard, guitar, and bass guitar, plus drums. Two years later, the band toured Europe, performing a two-hour version of Young’s Dorian Blues in just intonation, in a light and shadow environment created by Zazeela.

Written by William Duckworth. Reprinted by kind permission.

The original version of this article first appeared as the introduction to an interview with La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela in the book “Talking Music” by William Duckworth, published by Schirmer Books.

Inventing America
“Inventing America” is a year long celebration of American culture to be hosted by the Barbican Centre throughout 1998. The month of October will be dedicated to new music and minimalism. It will feature the first ever UK performance of La Monte Young’s Theatre Of Eternal Music. Other events will include the music of John Cage, Philip Glass, John Adams, Newband playing the original Harry Partch instruments, and a special concert featuring Pulp and Terry Riley. Call 0171 382 7101 to receive further information as events are confirmed.

La Monte Young  Marian Zazeela Benefit Concert
When I first heard that Marian was ill and I had the idea of a fundraising concert, I had no idea that we would put together such a fantastic event. I gratefully acknowledge the amount of work that has gone into making this evening possible, and I hope that this event will raise awareness of the scope and brilliance of the work of La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela. Thank you to everyone involved. (Mark Webber)

This concert would not have been possible without the generous contributions of the following people :

Pulp, J Spaceman, Nick Cave and Warren Ellis, Gavin Bryars Ensemble, Monaco String Quartet, Steve Martland, Spring Heel Jack, Terry Riley, Yoko Ono, Paul Catling, Charles Hazlewood, Anthony H Wilson, Alex Poots and the Barbican Centre.

Additional PA and lighting has been provided by Juice Sound and Light.

We would also like to thank…

Robert, Charlotte, Ruth, David and all at the Barbican who helped with this event, especially Technical Services and all at the Box Office. Geoff, Jeanette, Pru, Patsy, Glen and Kelly at Rough Trade Management. John and Melissa at Savage & Best. Scott, Nicky and Vicky at Appearing. Jeff Craft at Fair Warning/ICM. Eddie Grossman at Martin Greene Ravden. Ed Baxter and all at the London Musicians Collective. Simon Long at The Simkins Partnership. Robert Warby, Georgina Langdale. Sally Groves at Schott.

Thanks also to the ECO, Jane Quinn, Tara-Jane Zagacki, Rayner Jesson, Jutta & Carsten Brandt, Mike Scoble, Roger Middlecoate, Simon Dawson, David Toop, Tony Robinson, Rob Charles, Kevin Brown, Don Owen, Ray Moonshake, Tim Lewis, Mike Kearsey, Anthony Genn, Martin Green, Macari’s Musical Instruments and Colorsound Pedals, Freud Communications, Absolut, Pepsi-Cola, Holsten Pils, Xfm, Top Guard, Pablo and 333 Old Street.

Programme compiled by Mark Webber, designed by Blue Source and printed thanks to a contribution from Island Records.

Poster photograph of La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela at the performance of Poem for Chairs, Tables, Benches etc. at Concert I-Punkt Skateland, Hamburg. © Jutta Brandt, 1996.

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…and BEYOND HOLLYWOOD…

The Barbican Screen presents 6 feature films informed by the Underground aesthetic

Friday 23 October 1998, at 8:45pm
David Lynch, Eraserhead, 1977, 85 min

Saturday 24 October 1998, at 6:30pm
John Cassavettes, Shadows, 1959, 87 min

Sunday 25 October 1998, at 6:45pm
John Palmer & David Weisman, Ciao Manhattan, 1973, 84 min

Monday 26 October 1998, at 8:45pm
John Waters, Pink Flamingos, 1973, 108 min

Tuesday 27 October 1998, at 8:45pm
Shirley Clarke, The Cool World, 1963, 105 min

Wednesday 28 October 1998, at 6:45pm
Martin Scorsese, Mean Streets, 1973, 112 min

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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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JONAS MEKAS
Sunday 25 October 1998, at 3:00pm
London Barbican Cinema

Jonas Mekas was born in Lithuania in 1922 and travelled to New York with his brother Adolfas in 1949, having spent the previous four years in displaced persons camps in Western Europe. Soon after their arrival in the USA they bought a 16mm camera and began to document the lives of Lithuanian immigrants in Brooklyn. The next year Jonas started to attend the Cinema 16 screenings and became involved in the experimental film community. In 1955 the two brothers founded Film Culture magazine, which was at first devoted to Hollywood and the traditional narrative form. There is a notorious article from the third issue in which Jonas attacks the avant-garde, but within a few years he had become the most defiant advocate and fearless promoter of experimental film. In 1958 he started to write the Movie Journal column for the Village Voice and was one of the instigators of the New American Cinema Group, an organisation committed to cinema as a personal expression. 1962 saw the formation of the Film-Makers’ Cooperative, a nondiscriminatory distribution centre for independent film and two years later Mekas began the Film-Makers’ Cinematheque, which was devoted to presenting experimental work. Anthology Film Archives was established in 1970 as a non-profit institution dedicated to the promotion and preservation of cinematic art.

The Mekas brothers worked together on their first film Guns Of The Trees (1960-61), a conventional independent feature film about two couples (one black, one white) living in the shadow of the atom bomb. Then Jonas abandoned the narrative form and after documenting a performance by the Living Theatre in The Brig (1964), he began to assemble film diaries which were made by continually stopping and starting the camera in reaction to the events around him. Walden (Diaries, Notes and Sketches) (1964-69) was the first section of the diaries to be combined into a definitive volume, though Lost Lost Lost (1949-75) includes footage shot at an earlier time. Walden is a who’s who of the avant-garde community of the 1960s and has appearances by many filmmakers, musicians and artists, together with beautiful pastoral footage of the parks and nature of New York City. He Stands In The Desert Counting The Seconds Of His Life is a further diary covering the years 1969 to 1985. His latest film is Birth Of A Nation (1955-1997), which consists of 160 portraits of independent filmmakers and film activists – “the invisible but essential nation of cinema”. Jonas Mekas is still the artistic director of Anthology Film Archives and continues to be one of the driving forces behind New York’s alternative film culture.

WALDEN (DIARIES, NOTES AND SKETCHES)
Jonas Mekas, USA, 1964-69, 16mm, colour, sound, 180 min

“Since 1950 I have been keeping a film diary. I have been walking around with my Bolex and reacting to the immediate reality: situations, friends, New York, seasons of the year. On some days I shot 10 frames, on others 10 seconds, still on others 10 minutes. Or I shot nothing. When one writes diaries, it’s a retrospective process: you sit down, you look back at your day, and you write it all down. To keep a film (camera) diary, is to react (with your camera) immediately, now, this instant: either you get it now, or you don’t get it at all. All the footage you’ll see in the Diaries is exactly as it came out from the camera: there was no way of achieving it in the editing room without destroying its form and content. Walden contains material from the years 1964-69, strung together in chronological order. For the soundtrack I used some of the sounds that I collected during the same period: voices, subways, much street noise, bits of Chopin (I am a romantic) and other significant and insignificant sounds.” (Jonas Mekas on Walden in the New York Film-Makers’ Cooperative Catalogue #5, 1971)

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