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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THE KUCHAR BROTHERS
Monday 26 October 1998, at 6:30pm
London Barbican Cinema

Growing up in the Bronx in the 1950s and sharing a love of Hollywood melodrama compelled Mike and George Kuchar to start making their own 8mm costume epics. Early productions often took place on the roof of their apartment building with the two teenage brothers dressed in their parent’s clothes. George remembers: “At the age of 12, I made a transvestite movie on the roof and was brutally beaten by my mother for having disgraced her and also for soiling her nightgown. She didn’t realise how hard it is for a 12-year-old director to get real girls in his movies”. Their earliest surviving film is The Wet Destruction of The Atlantic Empire (1954) and subsequent movies share equally wonderful titles such as A Tub Named Desire (1956), The Naked And The Nude (1957) and I Was A Teenage Rumpot (1960).

PUSSY ON A HOT TIN ROOF
Mike & George Kuchar, USA, 1961, 8mm on video, colour, sound, 9 min

“Some people are disturbed by the rash of violence that tints our films with an acne of horror. All I can say is that violence and sin are brother and sister from the same cradle of hell. I have been scotched by this hell-fire and instead of screaming, I’m going to extinguish the flames by vomiting out the putrid liquids of bitterness that boil in my cauldron of a tummy. The New American Cinema has helped us by opening up new windows that we can jump out of, thereby plummeting into the depths of a new freedom. But if we are to protect ourselves from splashing into the pavement of indecency, we must have something to say. And I have this to say: Strip me naked you immoral world of vice and pleasure and I’ll show you the lily-white flesh of truth !” (from George Kuchar Speaks On Films And Truth in Film Culture #33, 1964)

Working in isolation for many years, and unaware of the developments in personal film-making, they only showed their films at the New York 8mm Motion Picture Club alongside travelogues and home movies by society fuddy-duddies until George’s comic-drama A Woman Distressed (1962) caused an uproar with its portrayal of the effects of Thalidomide. Bob Cowan, star of many Kuchar epics, encouraged them to take their movies along to a screening at Ken Jacobs’ loft and it was here that they became involved in the underground film scene. The brothers continued to collaborate on films into the mid-1960s before developing their own distinctive styles and concentrating on individual projects – Mike prefers colour and spectacle while George likes steamy drama.

LUST FOR ECSTACY
George Kuchar, USA, 1963, 8mm on video, colour, sound, 35 min

“In my new film Lust For Ecstasy, Donna Kerness overflows with passion and flesh in this, her most mature performance since A Tub Named Desire. Bob Cowan plays a part he is best suited for: a twisted and demented fiend wracked between the border of normalcy and moral decay. Also in the film is Cynthia Mailman, and her portrayal of a girl with deep religious yearnings will make you long for the early years when we were pure and good and everything that we did was honest. I started filming Ecstasy during Indian Summer and from then until now I have undergone emotional upheavals. So has the script. The actors didn’t know what was going on. I wrote many of the pungent scenes on the D train, and then when I arrived on the set I ripped them up and let my emotional whims make chop meat out of the performances and story. It’s more fun that way, and then the story advances without any control until you’ve created a Frankenstein that destroys any subconscious barriers you’ve erected to protect yourself and your dimestore integrity. Yes, Lust For Ecstasy is my subconscious, my own naked lusts that sweep across the screen in 8mm and colour with full fidelity sound.” (George Kuchar to Jonas Mekas in the Village Voice Movie Journal, 1964)

The introduction of the Kuchar’s to the whole downtown world of independent filmmakers directly led to production of Lovers Of Eternity (1963), George’s last 8mm production which featured new acquaintances Jack Smith and Dov Lederberg (a filmmaker notorious for his habit of cooking 8mm film). The film, which was originally called The Unclean, was an overblown burlesque of bohemian squalor and artistic torment on the Lower East Side. With Corruption Of The Damned in 1965 George progressed to 16mm and the next year he made Hold Me While I’m Naked, his most famous film which is highly regarded as a classic of the New American Cinema. It’s a parody of the frustration and loneliness of a Bronx movie maker who feels like everyone is having a more exciting, sexier time than he. The leading lady objected to the amount of nude scenes and left the set halfway through shooting, forcing George to adapt the script, which added to the tragedy. George never thought of the film as a comedy (after all it was his life up on the screen) and was initially shocked and hurt by the laughter of the audience.

HOLD ME WHILE I’M NAKED
George Kuchar, USA, 1966, 16mm, colour, sound, 16 min

“A dazzling ruby in Kuchar’s jewlry box of cinema gems and gossamer garbage. Financed with unemployment checks and populated by the semi-nude, Hold Me While I’m Naked goes beyond the erotic into a world that exists behind the film-maker’s shower curtain. Lead may shield delicate tissues from radiation, but a polystyrene shower curtain is no protection from the painful penetration of a Bolex H16. Filmed in the glamour bathrooms of the East Coast, where all the good stuff is happening, this film relentlessly exploits the problems, and bodies of today’s creative youth. Captured in surrealistic opulence on Ektachrome Commercial 7255, is this movie of a movie that couldn’t be filmed and the person who couldn’t film it because his star material failed to feed the Hydrogen furnace with an overabundance of molecular exposure ?” (programme notes by George Kuchar)

Mike Kuchar’s solo career began with The Pervert (1963) and Born Of The Wind (1964). In 1965 he made his classic Sins Of The Fleshapoids, a comic book love story for robots set one million years in the future. This intensely colourful film was a great success on the underground circuit. He continued to make gaudy dramas such as The Secret Of Wendell Samson (1966) starring the artist Red Grooms in a tale of sexual torment, and The Craven Sluck (1967) which features George and a cast of Kuchar regulars including Bob Cowan, Donna Kerness, Floraine Connors and Bocko The Dog. Mike is less prolific than George and his own film production slowed down during the 1970s. He teaches and occasionally works as a camera man on commercial independent feature films.

THE CRAVEN SLUCK
Mike Kuchar, USA, 1967, 16mm, colour, sound, 23 min

“Mike Kuchar plunges into new depths with this pungent story of a woman’s struggle for identity, recognition, sympathy and a good lay. The film features the titan talent from Jersey City, Floraine Connors, in a frightful comeback from obscurity. Supported by a competent cast of Munchkins, The Craven Sluck lays bare the flabby bladders of the domestic Fleshpots, Rumpots, Sexpots and just plain Pots.” (Mike Kuchar, New York Film-Makers’ Cooperative Catalogue #5, 1971)

George continued to chronicle the tragic underbelly of life in the Bronx, and the large belly of Edith Fisher features in Eclipse Of The Sun Virgin (1967). (George remembers “She was a force of nature that no rubber garment could harness and no man could tame. A she-devil of salivating shame wrapped in the folds of flesh so flamboyant it leaves you breathless !”). This film more than any other of this period can be seen as a direct influence on the films John Waters made in the early 1970s.

ECLIPSE OF THE SUN VIRGIN
George Kuchar, USA, 1967, 16mm, colour, sound, 12 min

“I dedicate this film to the behemoths of yesteryear that perished in Siberia along with the horned pachyderms of the pre-glacial epoch. This chilling montage of crimson repression must be seen by the victims of perversity, regardless of sex or age. Painstakingly filmed and edited, it will be painful to watch too.” (George Kuchar, Canyon Cinema Catalogue #7, 1992)

Having established himself as one of the leading directors of the independent movie scene, George Kuchar continued to make an incredible number of inventive films including Pagan Rhapsody (1970), A Reason To Live (1976) and Forever And Always (1978) and he wrote and acted in the infamous Thundercrack (Curt McDowell, 1974). In the 1980s he began to use video and has made over 100 tapes. Since 1971 George has taught film at the San Francisco Art Institute.

PAGAN RHAPSODY
George Kuchar, USA, 1970, 16mm, colour, sound, 23 min

“Donna Kerness was pregnant during her scenes but her stomach was kept pretty much in shadow and it’s not noticeable. My stomach was the same as always except it contained more mocha cake than usual since that type of cake was usually around when I filmed in Brooklyn Heights. Being that the picture was made in the winter, there are no outdoor scenes because it’s too cold and when the characters have to suddenly flee a tense situation, it’s too time consuming to have them put on a coat and gloves. Originally not scheduled as a tragedy, things swiftly changed as the months made me more and more sour as I plummet down that incinerator shaft I call my life.” (George Kuchar, New York Film-Makers Catalogue #6, 1975)

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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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MAGICK & SHAMANISM
Wednesday 28 October 1998, at 8:45pm
London Barbican Cinema

Though they made very different kinds of films, Kenneth Anger and Harry Smith were both concerned with the use of Magick and alchemy and ways that these mystical forces could be represented in cinema.

Kenneth Anger is a legendary figure of the avant-garde. From his first widely released film Fireworks (1947) through to his last completed film Lucifer Rising (1980) he has built up a formidable collection of work that is usually presented as a total whole in the Magick Lantern Cycle. Anger grew up in the 1930s immersed in the myths of Hollywood. His grandmother was a wardrobe mistress and arranged for the 5-year-old Kenneth to play the Changeling Prince in Max Reinhardt’s production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1935). Two years later, Anger claims to have made his first film Ferdinand The Bull (1937). Six more films were completed during his childhood though only two – Escape Episode (1944-46) and Drastic Demise (1945) – are known to have been exhibited publicly. Fireworks was made when he was only 17 and it was to become a landmark in the development of the personal film. (Anger: “A dissatisfied dreamer awakes, goes out into the night seeking a light and is drawn through the needle’s eye”). In 1949 he began Puce Women which was intended as a feature depicting the lives of faded Hollywood starlets. It became the first of a series of uncompleted films, and only a fragment has been exhibited as Puce Moment (1949-70). The next year Anger moved to Paris and started to shoot La Lune Des Lapins (1950/72), a ritual in which he first investigated the idea of cinema as an instrument of Magick, but he soon ran out of money. Robert Haller noted in 1980 that had Anger had the finances to complete the film Pierrot would have got lost in the woods, discovered a metro station and found an infinite series of images of the moon (“Eclipse” shoe polish posters) stretching into the darkness. In the early 1970s Anger rediscovered and edited the surviving footage, but the definitive version usually presented today as Rabbit’s Moon is 7 minutes long, has music by Andy Arthur, and was released in 1979. The longer 1972 version with a pop music soundtrack has only recently been returned into limited distribution.

LA LUNE DES LAPINS
Kenneth Anger, USA-France, 1950/72, 16mm, b/w, sound, 15 min

“Pierrot is the poet reaching for the unattainable. The moon is his mama and woman and illusion ill met by moonlight. Harlequin is the cruel jester, the trickster with his slapstick. Other people’s tragedies make us laugh. The huckster of invisible wares and the magic lantern. My art. Columbine is full of grace and teasing malice and prettily mocks the poet and his moon. The rabbit is my soul. Thus before the concluding shot of Pierrot’s fall from the sky, the entire film preceding is a flashback – dying’s memory of the adolescent’s life experience – what I know of life up to that time. And cutting the film is what I have learned since.” (Kenneth Anger in a letter to Stan Brakhage, reprinted in Film Culture #67-68-69, 1979)

Harry Smith is another legendary character who has built up a substantial mythology. He was born in 1923 and has variously claimed to have been the son of an alchemist, the offspring of Aleister Crowley or a descendent of Princess Anastasia. It seems sure that his paternal grandfather was in fact a prominent Mason. By the age of 15 Harry was already developing an interest in anthropology and spent time on reservations recording the songs and rituals of Native Americans. Throughout his lifetime he built an immense collection of field recordings of many varieties. In 1952 he used his extensive knowledge of folk music to compile the multi-volume Anthology of American Folk Music, which was released by the Folkways label. Harry received a Lifetime Achievement award at the Grammy’s in 1991 in recognition of his work in this area. He always considered himself primarily an anthropologist, then a painter and that his films were minor accessories to his paintings, referring to them as “cinematic excretia”. Unfortunately most of his paintings were destroyed, though thankfully the films survive. His earliest known film probably dates from 1946 and was hand-painted on 35mm. The Early Abstractions (1946-57) are highly hallucinatory animations that have appeared at various times with soundtracks of jazz, the Fugs, the Beatles and Teiji Ito. Early Abstractions (No. 7) (1951) consists of optically printed Pythagorean shapes made under the influence of cocaine and ups. (Harry Smith had a lifelong voracious appetite for all kinds of stimulants.)

EARLY ABSTRACTIONS (NO. 7)
Harry Smith, USA, 1951, 16mm, colour, sound, 7 min

“One of the masterpieces of non-objective cinema, the soft luminescence of the re-photographed images reminds us continually that we are watching a movie of a movie, like reflections in parallel mirrors, opening the aggressively flat screen into a conceptual infinity.” (from William Moritz’ essay The Non-Objective Film: The Second Generation, in the book Film As Film, 1979)

Marie Menken went to Alhambra with Kenneth Anger, and he became her first homosexual friend who was not a lover of her husband Willard Maas. Arabesque For Kenneth Anger (1961) is a fine example of her unique portrait style. One year earlier, Stan Brakhage had also made a film featuring Anger – The Dead (1960) was shot at the Pere Lachaise cemetery in Paris.

ARABESQUE FOR KENNETH ANGER
Marie Menken, USA, 1961, 16mm, colour, sound, 5 min

“She saw a quality in Kenneth Anger that was intrinsically Moorish, and she felt there must be some strain running through him that went back to the makers of this Alhambra. So it seemed to her, an affinity of feelings between Kenneth and these ancient grounds. She had an extraordinary grace, and with this grace and this camera in hand, as a tourist, first just taking pictures of the Alhambra, like any tourist might, she opens herself up to the deep feelings of love as friendship.” (Stan Brakhage speaks on Marie Menken at the Innis Film Society, 1992, reprinted in Film Culture #78, 1994)

Harry Smith’s eight and ninth films were collages that are no longer extant. Mirror Animations (No. 11) is a refined version of No. 10 cut to Thelonius Monk’s track Mysterioso. Both are hermetic representations of mystic symbols from different mythologies unexpectedly combined with inexorable logic.

MIRROR ANIMATIONS (NO. 11)
Harry Smith, USA, 1962-76, 16mm, colour, sound, 11 min

“If, (as many suppose), the unseen world is the real world and the world of our senses but the transient symbols of the eternal unseen, and limiting ourselves to the aesthetic experience’s well-known predilection for the eyes and ears, we could logically propose that any one projection of a film is variant from any other. This is particularly true of Mirror Animations. Although studies for this film were made in the early 1960s, the nonexistence of suitable printing equipment until recently, my inability to locate the original camera footage until 1979, and particularly the lack of an audience ready to evaluate L. Wittgenstein’s Ethics And Aesthetics Are One And The Same, in the light of H.C. Agrippa’s earlier “there is no form of madness more dangerous than that arrived at by rational means’ have all contributed to delaying until now the availability of a print in the full mirror-reverse form originally envisioned. I hope you like it.” (Harry Smith, Film-Makers’ Cooperative Catalogue #7, 1989)

No. 12 (also known as The Magic Feature or Heaven And Earth Magic) is Harry Smith’s most ambitious and difficult animation. It exists today in a black-and-white hour long version, though during his lifetime Smith presented it with a special projector, colour filters and masking slides that transformed the shape of the screen. The film is an American Book of the Dead which Smith claimed to take place in a fold in the brain called the fissure of Silvius. The Magic Mushroom People of Oz (No. 13) was intended as a three hour film of animation and live photography funded by a wealthy heir named Harry Phipps. Thousands of dollars were spent employing a team of animators but only a fragment of footage survives as part of The Tin-Woodsman’s Dream (No. 16) which was photographed through a specially constructed teleidoscope. Late Superimpositions (No. 14) was shot as a study for Mahoganny (No. 18), an uncompleted four screen film that was Harry’s final cinematic project. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s Harry Smith spent time pursuing many interests and it is only now that true stories are appearing to show the depth of his knowledge. He has been described as the world’s leading authority on string figures, having mastered hundreds of forms from around the world; he had immense collections of Seminole textiles, Ukrainian decorative eggs, antiquarian books on the occult, and the largest known paper airplane collection in the world; and was an expert in ancient languages and dialects. He spent his last years as Shaman In Residence at the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado at the invitation of Allen Ginsberg, and died at the Chelsea Hotel, New York in 1991.

LATE SUPERIMPOSITIONS (NO. 14)
Harry Smith, USA, 1964, 16mm, colour, sound, 31 min

“Superimposed photographs of Mr. Fleischman’s butchers shop in New York, and the Kiowa around Andarko, Oklahoma – with Cognate Material. The strip is dark at the beginning and end, light in the middle, and is structured 122333221. I honor it the most of my films, otherwise not a very popular one before 1972. If the exciter lamp blows, play Bert Brecht’s Mahoganny. For those who are interested in such things: No. 1 to 5 were made under pot; No. 6 with schmeck (it made the sun shine) and ups; No. 7 with cocaine and ups; No. 8 to 12 with almost anything, but mainly depravation, and 13 with green pills from Max Jacobson, pink pills from Tim Leary, and vodka; No. 14 with vodka and Italian Swiss white port.” (Harry Smith, New York Film-Makers’ Cooperative Catalogue #3, 1965)

After failing to complete La Lune Des Lapins, Kenneth Anger was also forced to abandon productions of Cocteau’s Le Jeune Homme et La Mort and Lautreamont’s Les Chants de Maldoror before travelling to Italy to make Eaux d’Artifice, a romantic portrait of a figure moving through the gardens and fountains of the Villa D’Este in Tivoli. The film was shot in black-and-white and printed through a blue filter and Anger hand tinted the lady’s fan for each print, occasionally changing the colour. Back in California, he made Inauguration Of The Pleasure Dome (1954), the legend of Bacchus told through a Magick ceremony that clearly shows Anger’s dedication to Aleister Crowley. The film has been presented in various forms with music either by Harry Partch, Janacek or the Electric Light Orchestra. Today it is usually shown in the Sacred Mushroom Edition (Lord Shiva’s Dream) from 1966. Anger returned to Paris to write the original Hollywood Babylon book and lived there until 1961 when he moved back to the USA. It was while staying with Marie Menken and Willard Maas in New York, 1962, that he made the acquaintance of a Brooklyn biker gang and a hustler called Bruce Byron, and set out to make Scorpio Rising (1963), probably the best known underground movie of all. This elaborately constructed mock-heroic view of urban youth culture set to a rock ‘n’ roll soundtrack is Anger’s most successful film. He subsequently began a companion piece focusing on hot rod customisers, but Kustom Kar Kommandos (1965) only exists as a 4 minute fragment. Anger then began to concentrate on his magnum opus Lucifer Rising in 1966. After the first Lucifer, a five-year-old boy, killed himself trying to fly off a roof, he was replaced by Bobby Beausoleil, who was a member of the Manson Family and later convicted of the La Cienega murders. In September 1967 the original Lucifer Rising footage was due to be shown at the Equinox Of The Gods, a benefit ritual to raise money for the film, but the film cans were stolen (allegedly by Beausoleil who is said to have buried them in Death Valley). Distraught, Anger announced his retirement from filmmaking in a full page obituary in the Village Voice newspaper and then appeared at the Film-Makers’ Cooperative where burned he his entire filmic output from before Fireworks. Two years later he combined what was left of the original Lucifer Rising with other imagery, including footage of himself performing the Equinox Of The Gods ritual shot by filmmaker Ben Van Meter. Adding a Moog synthesiser soundtrack by Mick Jagger (a new candidate for the starring role as Lucifer), Kenneth Anger made his most intense film – Invocation Of My Demon Brother (1969).

INVOCATION OF MY DEMON BROTHER
Kenneth Anger, USA, 1969, 16mm, colour, sound, 11 min

“The shadowing forth of Our Lord Lucifer, as the Powers of Darkness gather at a midnight mass. The dance of the Magus widdershins around the Swirling Spiral Force, the solar swastika, until the Bringer of Light – Lucifer – breaks through. “The true Magick of Horus requires the passionate union of opposites” (Aleister Crowley)”. (Synopsis by Kenneth Anger, 1969)

But Lucifer Rising did not go away. In 1970, Anger moved to London to court the interest of the Rolling Stones camp. A legendary photo session for a magazine feature took place in his basement flat in Hampstead – Chris Jagger, Marianne Faithfull, Donald Cammell, Dennis Hopper and Alexandro Jodorowsky were all present. After completing eight minutes of film Anger was awarded a grant from the BFI and flew his cast to Germany and Egypt for location shoots. Jimmy Page was enlisted to compose a soundtrack but the first version of the film was shown silent (in 1973) at an eventful in-person appearance with Stan Brakhage in Boulder, Colorado. For the next few years the incomplete film was presented with soundtracks either by the Alternative Enlightenment System or Jimmy Page, and sometimes Pink Floyd’s Atom Heart Mother album. The 1975 publication of the American Hollywood Babylon book brought Anger more widespread notoriety and royalties vital to the completion of his ongoing epic. A year later, after falling out with Jimmy Page, it was announced that the original Lucifer, Bobby Beausoleil, would compose and record the definitive Lucifer Rising soundtrack from behind bars at Tracy Prison. The fully realised version of Lucifer Rising was Anger’s last completed film and it finally appeared in 1980. A second volume of the Hollywood Babylon book was published in 1984, and between 1987 and 1989 he worked on Mouse Heaven, a fantastical collage starring Mickey Mouse. Every so often stories emerge of Anger’s own feature length version of Hollywood Babylon, and there have recently been rumours that he is working on a film of Aleister Crowley’s Gnostic Mass.

LUCIFER RISING
Kenneth Anger, USA, 1970-80, 16mm, colour, sound, 31 min

“Like Scorpio Rising, Lucifer Rising is about several things. I’m an artist working in Light, and that’s my whole interest, really. Lucifer is the Light God, not the devil, that’s a Christian Slander. The devil is always other people’s gods. Lucifer has appeared in other of my films; I haven’t labelled him as such but there s usually a figure or a moment in those films which is my “Lucifer” moment … I’m showing actual ceremonies in the film; what is performed in front of the camera won’t be a re-enactment and the purpose will be to make Lucifer rise. It’s the birthday party for the Aquarian Age … Everything I’ve been saying so far has been leading up to this happening in the world today. His message is that the Key of Joy is Disobedience.” (Kenneth Anger talks about the first version of Lucifer Rising in Friends #14, 1970)

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VISUAL ALCHEMY
Sunday 1 November 1998, at 7:00pm
London Lux Centre

Many of the early experimental films were composed of abstract shapes, usually put together in such a way as to visually interpret a piece of music. As with the poetic film, the abstract school had its roots in the European cinema of the 1920s. The films of Oskar Fischinger, Hans Richter, Viking Eggeling and Man Ray were highly influential, as were those by Len Lye (from New Zealand) and Norman McLaren (a Scot), who each made an incredible series of films in the 1930s under the direction of John Grierson at the GPO Film Unit. But it was in America, after pioneering work of the 1940s by Mary Ellen Bute, Douglas Crockwell and the Whitney brothers, that the development of the abstract film really got underway, particularly in California where the Whitneys, Jordan Belson, Hy Hirsh, Harry Smith, and Ian Hugo all worked through the 1950s.

John and James Whitney first worked together on Variations (1941-43) photographing abstract forms that were animated on cards. For their Film Exercises (1943-44) they developed a machine that could produce electronic music directly onto film in perfect sync with the images. When they began to work independently, John made films without animation using an illuminated oil bath before beginning to use computer effects in Catalog (1961). As computer and video technology progressed his films such as Binary Bit Patterns (1969), Permutations (1967) and Matrix 1,2,3 (1971-73) became more and more complex. James Whitney continued to work manually and after destroying his first Film (1945-50) he spent many years making the incredible Yantra (1950-58) by hand-drawing dots onto cards and optically printing them layer upon layer. Yantra means ‘machine’ in Sanskrit and the film can be seen to be an instrument for meditation. It was originally conceived as a silent film and became married to its soundtrack by Dutch composer Henk Badings after projection at one of the Vortex Concerts.

YANTRA
James Whitney, USA, 1950-58, 16mm, colour, sound, 10 min

“The repeated accelerating flickers between black and white or solid colour frames photo-kinetically induce an ‘alpha’ meditative state. Into the climax of these generative alternations of spectral opposites, the dots enter and enact movements which are carefully ‘choreographed’ in the sense of purely visual ‘music’. The screen is scrupulously sustained as a flat expository surface, and a reflexive consciousness of the film material process is maintained by the use of flickers, transparent / white backgrounds, scratches, and solarized, step-printed episodes, in which the hand-wrought, irregular textures also recall James’ expertise as a raku potter and the alchemical processes of transmuting elements, in this case the coloured chemicals of the film emulsion by the ‘solar’ fire.” (from William Moritz’ essay The Non-Objective Film: The Second Generation, in the book Film As Film, 1979)

There is frustratingly little reliable information about the life and work of Hy Hirsh. He was born in Chicago in 1911 and began to make films in California, collaborating with Roger Barlow, LeRoy Robbins and Harry Hay on Even As You And I (1937), a satire on Surrealism containing a scene in which a baby is laid on a plate, sliced up and served for dinner. Ten years later he worked with Sidney Peterson on The Cage, Clinic Of Stumble and Horror Dream (all 1947). It is thought that he spent most of the 1950s living in Europe, developing complex abstract films which usually featured oscilloscopes and optical printing. Some of the oscilloscope footage was used in the Vortex Concerts of 1957-59. Hirsh died of a heart attack while driving through the Place De La Concorde in Paris in 1960. All his personal effects were seized by the police as evidence for an investigation into his long term involvement in marijuana and hashish trafficking. (He stored the dope in film cans). When the films were returned to his family and subsequently passed on to Bob Pike and the Creative Film Society, many were lost, unlabelled or in an extremely poor condition that made it impossible to assemble and present his work the way it was intended. It appears that he often preferred to project the films himself, re-editing them or synchronising different soundtracks for each specific occasion. Hirsh also experimented with double screen projection and polaroid stereoscopic 3D. La Couleur De La Forme (1952) is one of his most complex films and demonstrates his mastery of editing and printing techniques.

LA COULEUR DE LA FORME
Hy Hirsh, USA, 1952, 16mm, colour, sound, 5 min

“With La Couleur De La Forme, Hirsh more than ever justifies a critic’s description as ‘the Matisse of the cinema’. Partly collage, partly a study of movement, Hirsh’s technique does on film what kinetic art does in sculpture. Mixing positives and negatives, solarization, double exposure etc., to produce a mental freewheeling of images, a brilliant kaleidoscopic dreamworld.” (London Film-Makers’ Co-Op Catalogue, 1977)

Jordan Belson is one of the masters of abstract cinema, but his values are so high that it is almost impossible to see his work on the screen. Since the 1970s he has withdrawn his films from distribution due to his unhappiness with projection facilities and frustration over the changes in colour that have faded his films over time. He began his career as a painter in Beat-era San Francisco and was a close associate of Harry Smith. His first two films, Transmutation (1947) and Improvisations No. 1 (1948), were made directly from painted scrolls, and have since been destroyed. In the early 1950s he made a series of stop-motion animations including Mambo (1951) Bop Scotch (1953) and the unfinished LSD (1954). After a few more years concentrating on painting, Belson teamed up with Henry Jacobs and became Visual Director of the legendary Vortex Concerts at the Morrison Planetarium (1957-59), projecting abstract and cosmic imagery to accompany electronic music. Belson’s first masterpiece Allures (1961) developed out of this experience to become a “mathematically precise film on the theme of cosmogenesis”. Re-Entry (1964) followed and is a combination of space travel and the journey of the soul from death to rebirth. Belson continued to work on a phenomenal series of metaphysical films including Samadhi (1967), an incredible exposition of cosmic consciousness.

ALLURES
Jordan Belson, USA, 1961, 16mm, colour, sound, 9 min

“I think of Allures as a combination of molecular structures and astronomical events mixed with subconscious and subjective phenomena – all happening simultaneously. The beginning is almost purely sensual, the end perhaps totally nonmaterial. It seems to move from matter to spirit in some way. Oskar Fischinger had been experimenting with spatial dimensions, but Allures seemed to be outer space rather than earth space. After working with some very sophisticated equipment at Vortex, I learned the effectiveness of something as simple as fading in and out very slowly.” (Jordan Belson talks to Gene Youngblood for the article The Cosmic Cinema of Jordan Belson in Film Culture #48-49, 1970)

RE-ENTRY
Jordan Belson, USA, 1964, 16mm, colour, sound, 6 min

“In Re-Entry he successfully synthesises the Yogic and the cosmological elements in his art for the first time by forcefully abstracting and playing down both of them. The great advance of this film over all of his earlier work consists in the organisation of its images into an intentional structure. From an opening of symmetrically ordered dots, moving along the plane of the flat screen and along illusionary lines of depth, the film moves, as if impelled by a directional force, through a fluid series of gaseous colours with a single metaphoric allusion to solar prominences.” (P. Adams Sitney in his book Visionary Film, 1974)

Stan Vanderbeek is widely regarded as the first to use the term “Underground Film” to describe his films and others like them. His early films were collages in which disparate images are brought together at high speeds. Photographs from magazines, illustrations and images of the 20th century are combined and animated usually as a satire on American life. What Who How (1955) Astral Man (1958) and Science Friction (1959) are prime examples of this first phase. He began to collect vast amounts of movie material and would then “slice a film off like a sausage”. In the late 1950s he developed a machine for combining live footage and collage animation, which led to films such as Achoo Mr. Keroochev (1959), Skullduggery (1960) and eventually Breathdeath (1964), an anti-war film dedicated to Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin was his most ambitious film so far. He first investigated expanded cinema with Three-Screen-Scene (1958) and after spending 1965 working on a number of loops, he returned to concentrate on multi-screen projection and built the Moviedrome as a dedicated theatre for his multiple “movie murals”. In the late 1960s he was one of the first filmmakers to use computer animation and the newly developing video technology.

BREATHDEATH
Stan Vanderbeek, USA, 1964, 16mm, b/w, sound, 10 min

“A film experiment that deals with the photo reality and the surrealism of life. It is a collage-animation that cuts up photos and newsreel film and reassembles them, producing an image that is a mixture of unexplainable fact (Why is Harpo Marx playing harp in the middle of a battlefield ?) with the inexplicable act (Why is there a battlefield ?). It is a black comedy, a fantasy that mocks death … a parabolic parable.” (Stan Vanderbeek, New York Film-Makers’ Cooperative Catalogue #5, 1971)

Jud Yalkut started to make 8mm films in 1961, but it wasn’t until he became involved with Gerd Stern and the USCO multi-media group that he developed the kinetic style he was to become recognised for. Through the mid to late 1960s USCO collaborated on a pioneering series of sound and light presentations of which Yalkut’s films were an integral part. Diffraction Film (1965) was his first to be shot on 16mm, it was premiered during the Hubbub and We Are All One multi-media touring shows. After moving away from USCO, Yalkut made two seminal happening films – Kusama’s Self-Obliteration (1967) and Aquarian Rushes (1970). Between 1966 and 1972 he worked with the artist Nam June Paik on a number of ground-breaking films and videotapes. He has lectured on film since 1968 and continues to work with video as curator at the Digital Gallery in Dayton, Ohio.

DIFFRACTION FILM
Jud Yalkut, USA, 1965, 16mm, colour, silent, 10 min

“The hot eye of diffraction, multiplicity of variables moving out toward clarity and back: ‘the life force impulse’, a spurt-valve momentum, full of love’s natural forms. Consider what street light, subway lights, signs look like as seen through teleidoscopes sculpted from diamonds. ‘The progression of a trip’; shaken out of whatever you were before; how are you going to get back, I mean, you won’t be in that place again ever … wish for and achieve satori, what the ? So you come back to the physical, and you’re a step further out … up …” (Carol Burge writing about Diffraction Film in Ikon Magazine, late 1960s)

After Yantra, James Whitney started work on Lapis (1963-66) which was again executed by hand, though a computer was used to align the drawings for accurate animation. The film is an amazing cosmic mandala set to an Indian raga. It is startlingly beautiful and the complex patterns on the screen make it hard for us to conceive of the great care that went into its construction. After Lapis, James Whitney rested from filmmaking for some years before beginning work on a trilogy consisting of Dwi-Ja (1976), Wu Ming (1970-77) and Hsiang Sheng (1977).

LAPIS
James Whitney, USA, 1963-66, 16mm, colour, sound, 9 min

“There was a long period of development in which I tried to make exterior imagery more closely related to the inner. I reduced the structural mode to the dot-pattern, which gives a quality which in India is called the Akasha, or ether, a subtle element before creation like the Breath of Brahma, the substance that permeates the universe before it begins to break down into the more finite world. That idea as expressed through the dot-pattern was very appealing to me.” (James Whitney speaking to Gene Youngblood in the book Expanded Cinema, 1970)

Pat O’Neill was a sculptor with a background in the fine arts. He began to pursue film as a sculptural device in By The Sea (1963). His films display a manipulation and colour of images that is mainly achieved during the printing process. 7362 (1965-67) combines footage of an oil pump and a dancing girl, and was the most successful of his early films. His complicated printing techniques were further developed in Runs Good (1971), Saugus Series (1974) and Sidewinder’s Delta (1976). Between 1978 and 1995 O’Neill worked on an epic titled Trouble in the Image.

7362
Pat O’Neill, USA, 1965-67, 16mm, colour, sound, 10 min

“7362 was named after the high-speed emulsion on which it was filmed, emphasising the purely cinematic nature of the piece. O’Neill photographed oil pumps with their rhythmic sexual motions. He photographed geometrical graphic designs on rotating drums or vertical panels, simultaneously moving the camera and moving in and out. The basic vocabulary was transformed at the editing table and in the contact printer, using techniques of high-contrast bas-relief, positive/negative bi-pack printing and image ‘flopping’. a Rorschach-like effect in which the same image is superimposed over itself in reverse polarities, producing a mirror-doubled quality.” (Gene Youngblood in his book Expanded Cinema, 1970)

One of the first artists to combine film with video technology was Scott Bartlett. In his first film, Metanomen (1966), he took black and white cinema technology as far as he felt was possible. The next year he was given access to a TV studio where he made OffOn (1967) and Moon 1969 (1969), two pioneering film and video mixes that won many awards. Throughout the 1970s Bartlett continued to develop his visual style with films including Lovemaking (1970) Serpent (1970) and 1970 (1972). He also made two documentaries as educational aids – Making Serpent (1980) and Making OffOn (1981), in which he reproduced the creation of OffOn with his students at UCLA.

OFFON
Scott Bartlett, USA, 1968, 16mm, colour, sound, 9 min

“In the summer of 1967, Mike MacNamee, Glen McKay and Scott Bartlett met for America’s first electrovideographic jam. Bartlett’s film loops and McKay’s light show liquids were mixed through a video effects bank and the results were filmed by MacNamee directly off the studio monitor with a rented kinetoscope camera. Bartlett edited a portion of this material and then built a soundtrack with the help of Tom DeWitt, who had also supplied many of the original film loops, and Manny Meyer, electronic sound composer. The finished film was called OffOn.” (Canyon Cinema Film / Video Catalogue #7, 1992)

The poet and filmmaker Storm De Hirsch was one of the true pioneers of the New American Cinema. After an initial short abstract film (Journey Around a Zero, 1963) she travelled to Italy to make the feature Goodbye in the Mirror (1964) which depicted “the adventures and illusions of three girls living abroad”. On returning to the USA she became immersed in more personal filmmaking and completed a celebrated mystical trilogy of films known as The Color of Ritual, The Color of Thought (1964-67) which includes Divinations (1964), Peyote Queen (1965) and Shaman, A Tapestry For Sorcerers (1967). In 1968 she made the dual-screen projection film Third Eye Butterfly. In The Tattooed Man (1969), De Hirsch combined abstract and live footage into an amazing and deep masterpiece.

THE TATTOOED MAN
Storm De Hirsch, USA, 1969, 16mm, colour, sound, 35 min

“A major work in terms of style, structure, graphic invention, image manipulation and symbolic ritual. Short, abbreviated dream-like moments, fused together by the tension and dynamics of motion-picture time … Dreamers of the dream, killers of the dream, and movie myth are perhaps what happen when we see movies. Symbolic invention and the theatricalization of dreams and making them literal is, to me, the whole function and purpose of movie-making”. (Stan Vanderbeek speaking on The Tattooed Man at the St. Lawrence University Film Festival)

Tom Chomont has made an astounding number of highly poetic and intensely personal films. Many of his early films, for example Morpheus in Hell (1967), Phases of the Moon (1968) and Love Objects (1971), are self-examining psycho-sexual investigations and usually feature creative techniques such as combining positive/negative footage, mirror printing and superimposition. Oblivion (1969) is an astounding and erotic film which occasionally blossoms into 3D when viewed through filter glasses. In the 1970s Chomont pursued a more formal approach but his films remain highly personal, using celluloid to bridge the gap between the mundane and the mystical.

OBLIVION
Tom Chomont, USA, 1969, 16mm, colour, silent, 5 min

“Oblivion was a diary to a large extent—a diary and a portrait and a confession. I think I shot it on two separate evenings, but it had elements of many of our visits: we would sit and talk; he would smoke; at some point one or both of us would feel aroused—usually he would start to take off his shoes when he wanted to have sex. I felt that this material was highly personal, and I was conscious from the beginning that there had to be some kind of formal side to it. I wanted to give the whole film the feeling of being between sleeping and dreaming, and waking.” (excerpts from Tom Chomont’s discussions with Scott MacDonald in 1980, from the book A Critical Cinema, 1988)

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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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BRUCE BAILLIE & CHICK STRAND
Saturday 7 November 1998, at 7:00pm
London Lux Centre

Bruce Baillie was a key figure in the development of the film community on the West Coast of the USA. In 1960, as he was beginning to make films of his own, he started the Canyon Cinema screenings in the backyard of his house in Canyon, California. These informal gatherings were the first time the West Coast had a regular forum for experimental film since the Art in Cinema series at the San Francisco Museum of Art some ten years before. After Baillie moved to Berkeley in 1962, Chick Strand became involved in the running of the collective, they started to film newsreels of the events around their neighbourhood, and another member of the group, Ernest Callenbach, started the Canyon Cinemanews periodical. In the mid 1960s Canyon Cinema was formed into a distribution group similar to that of the Film-Makers’ Cooperative. Baillie left the organisation soon after, but it continues today as a major source for renting experimental films.

Baillie’s films take a uniquely American outsider’s view of the world around him. After early narratives like On Sundays (1960-61) and newsreels such as Mr Hayashi (1961), his first major personal statement was To Parsifal (1963), a poem to the summer based on the legend of Parsifal and inspired by the music of Wagner. His next film, Mass (For The Dakota Sioux) (1964), is an incredible requiem that was conceived on the occasion of President Kennedy’s murder, and was partly the result of a journey back to his original home in South Dakota. It is a densely layered tribute to the American Indian and a harsh critique of modern society, and remains it one of the classics of the experimental genre.

MASS (FOR THE DAKOTA SIOUX)
Bruce Baillie, USA, 1964, 16mm, b/w, sound, 24 min

“Pictures of a civilization which subscribes to the traditional life-celebrating mass yet leaves a man to die alone on a street corner. There have been many documentary films presenting the horrors of city life, but Baillie’s Mass goes far beyond documentation, providing us with a deeply felt and deeply moving film that is truly cinematic in concept and in execution.” (Willard Van Dyke)

“The film has a very strong critical thesis: it’s against contemporary society, buildings, pollution – all the rest of it – and it’s for the at least implied joy of nature and selfhood and being human !” (Bruce Baillie interviewed by Scott MacDonald, 1989, from the book A Critical Cinema 2, 1992)

Baillie’s next film was a deeper journey into the heart of America, and in some ways it can be seen as an extension of Mass. It was filmed on a cross country trip in 1963-64 and covers themes raised by Baillie’s interpretation of the Don Quixote books. As social analysis it investigates much of the American experience, from the Indians to Wall Street to Vietnam. It was originally planned as a double screen projection, until the final edit of 1967 produced a single screen film that often uses masterful superimpositions to portray an extremely personal journey.

QUIXOTE
Bruce Baillie, USA, 1964-67, 16mm, colour, sound, 45 min

“Baillie’s trip is wedged between two generations of youthful nomads; the Beats (contemporaneous with Hollywood’s heydey of Western expansion) on one side, the hippy transhumances (and Easy Rider) on the other. That Quixote could be claimed, at different times, by each is a sign of its hinged position to two vastly different projects. Unlike either generation, Baillie could not be comfortable with the ethos of noncommitment or, for that matter, transcendence. Like both he would be in but not of, and vice versa, except that in Quixote, these states are emblematic of the conquistador, an altogether diaristic myth.” (from the essay Quixote And Its Contexts by Paul Arthur, Film Culture #67-68-69, 1979)

After mastering superimposition in the editing of Quixote, Baillie further advanced his technique in Castro Street (1966). The film is an abstracted portrait of a street in Richmond, executed as an incredibly rich montage of images which the filmmaker sees as the coming of consciousness.

CASTRO STREET
Bruce Baillie, USA, 1966, 16mm, colour, sound, 10 min

“Inspired by a lesson from Eric Satie; a film in the form of a street – Castro Street, running by the Standard Oil Refinery in Richmond, California … switch engines on one side and refinery tanks, stacks and buildings on the other – the street and film, ending at a red lumber company. All visual and sound elements from the street, progressing from the beginning to the end of the end of the street. One side is black and white (secondary), and one side is color – like male and female elements. The emergence of a long switch engine shot (black and white solo) is to the filmmaker the essence of consciousness.” (Bruce Baillie, New York Film-Makers’ Cooperative Catalogue #5, 1971)

All My Life (1966) is a simple but effective film made in a single three minute pan over a picket fence in Mendocino. It succeeds in condensing a complete statement in a single shot. The same year he made Still Life (1966) using a similar approach. His next film was Valentin de las Sierras (1968), a beautifully composed ethnographic portrait of a Mexican community. Baillie then made the epic Quick Billy (1967-70), a four reel film of his psychic journey and physical recovery during a period of transformation, a personal Tibetan Book Of The Dead. In the mid 1970s Baillie shot, but has not yet completely edited, Roslyn Romance (is it really true ?) (1973-78), which follows his quest for spiritual enlightenment in a small village in Washington state.

ALL MY LIFE
Bruce Baillie, USA, 1966, 16mm, colour, sound, 3 min

“There were three days: the peak day was the first day I noticed the light. I had this outdated Ansco film I wanted to use. But I didn’t want to make a film. By that time, I knew the toll making a film can take. But the second day the light was still marvelous. A friend was with me, and we started to drive back to San Francisco, and suddenly I said “No, I cannot turn my back on this !” We stopped, and I got the tripod, fixed it real solid. Then I practiced and had her call off the minutes: we had about three minutes to get up into the sky in one roll, one continuous shot. All My Life came out well. It was inspired by the light, and by the early Teddy Wilson / Ella Fitzgerald recording.” (Bruce Baillie interviewed by Scott MacDonald, 1989, from the book A Critical Cinema 2, 1992)

Alongside Bruce Baillie, Chick Strand was one of the forces behind the formation of the Canyon Cinema collective. Her early works share Baillie’s sense of spirituality, but concentrate more on the printing process than in the precise construction of the filmed frame. Strand also incorporates found footage into her work. After her short Haiku films of 1966-67 she went on to make a series of ethnological documentaries including Cosas de Mi Vida (1965-76) and Soft Fiction (1979), as well as collage films like Cartoon le Mousse and Loose Ends (both 1979).

KULU SE MAMA
Chick Strand, USA, 1966, 16mm, colour, sound, 3 min

“These short films, simple and sensuous as Haiku poems, are early works of this pioneer West Coast filmmaker who was the co-founder with Bruce Baillie of Canyon Cinema in San Francisco and later, after her marriage with cartoon artist Neon Park, moved to Los Angeles to help form the Film-Makers’ Cooperative there. Although trained as an anthropologist and ethnographer her interest in cinema is primarily in the abstract and kinetic visual phenomena that are inherent in film, such as positive / negative juxtapositions, chirality, flickers, etc…” (William Moritz on Chick Strand, London Film Makers’ Co-Op Catalogue, 1977)

WATERFALL
Chick Strand, USA, 1967, 16mm, colour, sound, 3 min

“A film poem using found film and stock footage altered by printing, home development and solarization. It is a film using visual relationships to invoke a feeling of flow and movement.” (Chick Strand, Canyon Cinema Film / Video Catalogue #7, 1992)

ANSELMO
Chick Strand, USA, 1966, 16mm, colour, sound, 4 min

“An experimental documentary in the sense that it is a symbolic reenactment of a real event. I asked a Mexican friend what he would like most in the world. His answer was “A double E flat tuba”. I thought it would be easy to find one at Goodwill. This wasn’t so, but a sympathetic man in a music store found a cheap but beautiful brass wrap-around tuba. I bought it, smuggled it into Mexico and gave it to my friend in the desert. The film is a poetic interpretation of this event in celebration of wishes and tubas.” (Chick Strand, Canyon Cinema Film / Video Catalogue #7, 1992)

ANGEL SWEET BLUE WINGS
Chick Strand, USA, 1966, 16mm, colour, sound, 4 min

“Having seen A Movie and the possibilities therein, I knew it was possible to work with old film and not be intimidated at all about it – lifting things and rearranging them, doing collage. It’s just sort of a miracle to find some junk nobody wants. All that stuff I got would have been thrown away, except for the few pieces I heisted from a couple of prints. I was so entranced by the image itself and how I could mess with it, stick it in another context in a sort of semi-outrageous way. Nothing is sacred. You just rip it out of one context, or leave a couple of the little sub-contextual things in it, and mix the whole thing up with something else entirely, and make up a context.” (Chick Strand speaking to William C. Wees, 1991, from his book Recycled Images, 1993)

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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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