Ron Rice

Date: 8 November 1998 | Season: Underground America

RON RICE
Sunday 8 November 1998, at 7:00pm
London Lux Centre

After emerging as one of the major talents of the Underground, Ron Rice died in Acapulco in 1964. The four films he shot before his death show a unique vision. Jonas Mekas coined the term “Baudelairean Cinema” to describe the works of Ron Rice, Ken Jacobs, Bob Fleischner and Jack Smith. In The Queen Of Sheba Meets The Atom Man Rice further developed the style of his celebrated debut The Flower Thief. Both films star Taylor Mead as a wistful character who wanders through various picaresque episodes. He is joined in this humorous and uninhibited frolic by the huge (and frequently naked) Winifred Bryant and the legendary Jack Smith.

Ron Rice, The Queen of Sheba Meets the Atom Man, 1963, 109 min

PROGRAMME NOTES

RON RICE
Sunday 8 November 1998, at 7:00pm
London Lux Centre

Though he completed only four films in his lifetime, Ron Rice displayed a unique sensibility and attitude to cinema. His first film was The Flower Thief (1960), a feature length movie made in San Francisco. It starred Taylor Mead as a wistful character wandering through a series of improvised and playful sketches with a beatific grace. This innocent but anarchic fantasy, was lovingly filmed by Rice, who succeeded in liberating the camera from its previous restraints. Jonas Mekas hailed the film a classic of “The Baudelairean Cinema”, a term he developed to describe work of that period by Ron Rice, Jack Smith and Ken Jacobs. Loosely planning to make a film called The Dancing Master, Rice went ‘on the road’ and filmed a trip to visit an island that one of the actors in The Flower Thief had allegedly bought from the Mexican government. By the time that his party arrived, the original settlers had left due to a lack of fresh water, but some footage was shot there before Rice returned to his home in New York. Senseless (1962) is a poetic stream of images from the journey, either acted or just documented. With his next film The Queen Of Sheba Meets The Atom Man (1963), Rice again used Taylor Mead to make a kind of New York version of The Flower Thief, which Mead regards as his greatest performance. The structure is similar, but this time Taylor is joined by the self-styled Queen of Sheba, a colossal negress called Winifred Bryan who spends much of the film in a state of undress. There are also notable cameo appearances by Judith Malina, Julian Beck, Ed Sanders and Jack Smith. It was mainly improvised and a lot of footage was shot, but the film was never edited into a definitive form by Rice himself. He did assemble a rough cut for a benefit screening in 1963, but the next day he took off with the money and headed back to Mexico to make his home there. He returned briefly to New York and made Chumlum (1964). In contrast to his other films it is composed of dense layers of superimposition and appears as a bizarre dream. It was shot in the evenings after the cast of Jack Smith’s Normal Love (1963) had returned to the city after filming on location out of town. The cast consists of Smith’s superstars, with the addition of Gerard Malanga, and the soundtrack is performed by Angus MacLise on the cembalum. Rice returned to Mexico and lived a life of poverty, shooting a dozen rolls of film that were posthumously collected as The Mexican Footage (1964). He retained his unique vision and remained enthusiastic about future projects but died of bronchial pneumonia in Acapulco, December 1964, at the age of twenty nine. After his death, Howard Everngam assembled Queen Of Sheba to his best knowledge of the filmmakers intentions. This version was distributed until 1979, when Taylor Mead used his memories and notes of the shooting to prepare the definitive version of the film.

THE QUEEN OF SHEBA MEETS THE ATOM MAN
Ron Rice, USA, 1963, 16mm, b/w, sound, 109 min

“Broadly farcical with an Aristophanaic buoyancy, Sheba unwinds in interior scenes in which Taylor Mead and the more or less undressed Winifred Bryan are grotesquely displayed in cacophonous tableaux of total disarray, enmeshed in furniture, props, and costumes, with a stuffed bear and the junk strewn across their bodies in chaotically unstructured compositions. The point of departure for these comic scenes is the unusual physical characteristics of Mead and Bryan and their incongruous relationship: the puny, rubbery, and totally uncoordinated Atom Man is simultaneously drawn to and intimidated by the massive bulk and voracious appetites of the African Queen. In her strolls through the city parks and especially in a sequence in which she takes a ferry ride in dense fog, Bryan establishes for herself a strong and plangent dignity; but in the interiors she is an almost amorphous mass of flowing flesh which fills or engulfs whatever it encounters, capable not really of shifting but only of being redistributed in more and more grotesque shapes.” (David E. James, from his book Allegories Of Cinema: American Film In The Sixties, 1989)

“This is a wildman rough cut like no Hollywood director would dare show the public for fear of having his ideas stolen. We defy anyone to cop our style. This is only 70 minutes of a protracted 3 hour epic by the director of The Flower Thief. This is your opportunity to help challenge the Hollywood stranglehold on morals, expression, and art and what have you. Dig us.” (Ron Rice, mimeographed note for the benefit screening of The Queen Of Sheba Meets The Atom Man, 1963)

The Structuralists

Date: 8 November 1998 | Season: Underground America

THE STRUCTURALISTS
Sunday 8 November 1998, at 9:00pm
London Lux Centre

Structural Film became the dominant style of the avant-garde through the 1970s and these early works define the beginning of the movement. Using an apparently theoretical, conceptual and cold form, film-makers like George Landow and Michael Snow still managed to display humour in their work. Wavelength consists of one slow zoom across a New York loft space but plenty happens there to keep the viewer’s attention. George Landow continues to examine different ways of treating film and the late Hollis Frampton uniquely investigated cinematic processes. In Runaway, a few seconds of an old cartoon is manipulated into a tour-de-force of looping technique. Barry Gerson’s films are extremely formal works and Serene Velocity closes the season with a celebration of light and depth.

George Landow, Fleming Faloon, 1963-64, 7 min
George Landow, Film In Which There Appear Sprocket Holes, Edge Lettering, Dirt Particles Etc., 1965-66, 4 min
Michael Snow, Wavelength, 1967, 45 min
Hollis Frampton, Artificial Light, 1969, 25 min
Standish Lawder, Runaway, 1969, 6 min
Barry Gerson, Endurance/Remembrance/Metamorphosis, 1970, 12 min
Ernie Gehr, Serene Velocity, 1970, 23 min

PROGRAMME NOTES

THE STRUCTURALISTS
Sunday 8 November 1998, at 9:00pm
London Lux Centre

The history and development of the Structural movement was defined and discussed at length in P. Adams Sitney’s essay Structural Film (Film Culture #47, 1969), which was subsequently expanded for his book Visionary Film (1974). The historical details proposed in this paper drew defiant responses from Peter Kubelka (claiming that he was the originator and master of the Structural tendency) and George Maciunas (who offered a Flux diagram proposing that the form was an extension of ideas from other artistic disciplines, particularly citing Fluxus as a major influence). Sitney cites the new form as “a radical shift of aesthetic tactics” from the majority of films by the likes of Markopoulos, Brakhage, Anger and Kubelka in which visual (and aural) information is rapidly projected at the viewer. It is accurate to say that Structural Film is similar to conceptual or minimal art, in that the films are usually realisations of a predefined plan. It may also be seen as the antithesis of the developments of many experimental films up to that time. With Structural Film, time (and duration) is introduced as a major factor. In addition, the use of the fixed camera position (and tripod) was in contrast with the freedom of the camera, which had been liberated and hand-held by the ‘underground’ filmmakers. The most obvious recent precursors of the Structural trend were the early works of Andy Warhol (not only the static and prolonged film like Sleep (1963) and Empire (1964) but also his later use of the zoom and rapid fixed panning) and the films of Peter Kubelka (in which a complex schemata was constructed and then followed). The innovative work of Robert Breer, Bruce Conner and Ken Jacobs may also claim some influence on the initial developments of the new movement.

In the Film-Makers Lecture Bureau Catalogue #1 (1969) George Landow stated “My films are not intended as entertainment or easy viewing. They do not attempt to engage the spectator on an emotional level. A showing for the wrong type of audience could be commercially disastrous, though not necessarily without benefit.” His first 16mm film was Fleming Faloon (1963-64), a precursor to the Structural movement in which layers of images are built up and occasionally presented side by side as unsplit 8mm frames. Landow subsequently made an 8mm film Fleming Faloon Screening (1963-64) which showed people in a room watching the movie. In the 1980s he withdrew Fleming Faloon from distribution and personally prefers not to show it now.

FLEMING FALOON
George Landow, USA, 1963-64, 16mm, colour, sound, 7 min

“In the history of painting, in Flanders, the Flemings were among the artists to develop portraiture to a very high degree. It was very illusionistic painting. The film also deals with illusion. The attempt was to bring people back to the realization that they are still looking at a flat surface with the illusion of depth. And that leads to the realization that the illusion of depth is in itself a ‘reality’. In other words, ideally the person who saw Fleming Faloon could now assign reality to anything at will – he was in control. And this control was the result of realizing that everything – or, if you prefer, nothing – is real. It is this ideal situation that forms the basis of the film.” (George Landow interviewed by P. Adams Sitney, Film Culture #47, 1969)

George Landow’s next film was developed out of a loop called This Film Will Be Interrupted After Ten Minutes by a Commercial, which actually was interrupted after ten minutes by a Dutch Masters TV commercial for cigars featuring Rembrandt’s painting Town Council. With Film In Which There Appear Sprocket Holes, Edge Lettering, Dirt Particles Etc. (1965-66), Landow used the same basic visual material and was one of the first artists to use a loop, together with other important innovations, as one of the primary elements of a complete film. His found fragment of a standard ‘China Girl’ Kodak test strip was split down the middle and optically printed with the sprocket holes down the centre. The loop degenerates and collects dust as it progresses. Theoretically, the film is still developing as it gets dirtier each time it is projected. Bardo Follies (1967) also concerns the degeneration of a repeating loop. It was later cut down from forty-five to seven minutes and retitled Diploteratology. In The Film That Rises To The Surface Of Clarified Butter (1968), Landow uses a cycle of loops to depict animations that have a life of their own. Institutional Quality (1969) (later redeveloped as New Improved Institutional Quality: In The Environment Of Liquids And Nasals A Parasitic Vowel Sometimes Develops, 1976) and What’s Wrong With This Picture? (1972) invite the participation, and test the logic, of the audience. Hollis Frampton also pursued this concept, as did Robert Nelson in his classic Bleu Shut (1970). Another film, Remedial Reading Comprehension (1970) exposes and confuses the distance between the film and the viewer. Landow has continued to make challenging work including No Sir, Orison (1975) and On The Marriage Broker Joke As Cited By Sigmund Freud In Wit And Its Relation To The Unconscious, Or Can The Avant-Garde Artist Be Wholed? (1980). In the 1980s, he changed his name to Owen Land and now distributes his work under that name. He is currently completing a 35mm feature-length film called Undesirables.

FILM IN WHICH THERE APPEAR SPROCKET HOLES, EDGE LETTERING, DIRT PARTICLES ETC.
George Landow, USA, 1965-66, 16mm, colour, silent, 4 min

“The original image is used by the Kodak company to test color reproduction. It went through many different operations of cutting, re-joining and printing until it got the way it is now with sprocket holes printed in the middle. When it was printed into the final version I told the lab to leave the dirt on because the dirt was quite interesting. Somehow it seemed part of the image. The film is experienced as a composition of images, letters and other elements which is more or less constant. Although it is never exactly the same from frame to frame, the changes are so subtle compared to the changes that normally take place within a film that people tend to see no change (aside from the blinking eye). In other words, it is on a completely different level of expectation. Ideally it would fit into a situation where the spectator is ambulatory.” (George Landow interviewed by P. Adams Sitney, Film Culture #47, 1969)

Michael Snow is a prolific filmmaker whose work investigates time and spacial relationships. Wavelength (1967) was his fourth film and remains his most popular. The description of Wavelength as a continuous slow zoom across an empty loft space does not indicate the complexity of the film, which includes use of superimposition, negative images, filters, transition between day and night and scripted events. It is also interesting to note that the film was not shot in sequence and Snow actually began shooting with the middle section. After exposing the zoom in Wavelength, he investigated the fixed pan in (Back And Forth) (1968-69). This film takes place in a classroom and again contains acted scenarios. The panning becomes quite violent and the film becomes a study of velocity. His next major work, La Region Centrale (1970-71), involved building an automatic camera that could rotate 360 degrees in all directions, which was positioned on a completely barren plateau in Northern Canada where it made a three hour long film of its environment. An even longer film, “Rameau’s Nephew” By Diderot (Thanx to Dennis Young) By Wilma Schoen (1974) starts out as a conventional narrative but then the soundtrack begins to slip out of sync and over the course of four and a half hours, Snow systematically deconstructs the idea of a sound cinema and leaves it to the viewer to try and make sense of the confused information. His other films include New York Eye And Ear Control (1964), Presents (1980) and So Is This (1982). Michael Snow is also a respected artist, sculptor and musician.

WAVELENGTH
Michael Snow, Canada-USA, 1967, 16mm, colour, sound, 45 min

“Wavelength was shot in one week Dec ‘66 preceded by a year of notes, thoughts, mutterings. It was edited and first print seen in May ‘67. I wanted to make a summation of my nervous system, religious inklings, and aesthetic ideas. I was thinking of, planning for a time monument in which the beauty and sadness of equivalence would be celebrated, thinking of trying to make a definitive statement of pure Film space and time, a balancing of ‘illusion’ and ‘fact’, all about seeing. The space starts at the camera’s (spectator’s) eye, is in the air, then is on the screen, then is within the screen (the mind).” (Statement by Michael Snow, 1967)

Hollis Frampton is known for introducing a new mode of syntax and grammar into the cinema. Much of his work is constructed so that the viewer may attempt to deduce the systems that produced them, and many people find his films too theoretical. From a background in art and photography, Frampton began to work in film with a series of portraits brought together as Manual Of Arms (1966). Surface Tension (1968) and Lemon (for Robert Huot) (1969) are his most successful early works. Artificial Light (1969) repeats a simple loop twenty times and each time it is visually treated in a different manner. His next film, Zorns Lemma (1970), is a masterpiece which uses the twenty-four letter Roman alphabet as the basis for a new filmic system of language. He then made the seven part Hapax Legomena (1971-72), which includes nostalgia (1973), one of his most enjoyable and accessible films. Around this time, Frampton conceived of Magellan (1972-1980) as “a 36 hour film, organized and meant to be viewed calendrically over the course of 371 days.” Many sections of this epic cycle were completed but it was left unfinished when he died in 1984. He left behind hundreds of films, together with a huge amount of photographs and writings.

ARTIFICIAL LIGHT
Hollis Frampton, USA, 1969, 16mm, colour, silent, 25 min

“Artificial Light repeats variations on a single filmic utterance twenty times. The same phrase is a series of portrait shots of a group of young New York artists talking, drinking wine, laughing, smoking, informally. The individual portrait shots follow each other with almost academic smoothness in lap-dissolves ending in two shots of the entire group followed by a dolly shot into a picture of the moon. There is a chasm between the phrase and its formal inflections. That chasm is intellectual as well as formal. Frampton loves an outrageous hypothesis; his films, all of them, take the shape of logical formulae. Usually the logic he invokes is that of a paradox.” (from the essay Structural Film by P. Adams Sitney, 1969, reprinted in The Film Culture Reader, 1970)

In the late 1960s Standish Lawder made Corridor (1968-70), which perfectly marries the hypnotic organ music of Terry Riley with a succession of differently treated movements down the corridor of the title. Using positive/negative images, varied exposures and superimposition he exposed the grain of the film and the depth of the shots. Necrology (1969-70) was a twelve minute continuous view of tired commuters on an escalator that Hollis Frampton described as “without doubt, the sickest joke I’ve ever seen on film.” With Runaway (1969), Lawder took four seconds of a commercial animation called The Fox Hunt and made a continuous loop that was then rephotographed and sequentially abstracted so that the cartoon dogs could not escape the frame. Lawder made other films, including Intolerance (Abridged) (date unknown) for which he optically double printed every twenty-sixth frame of the D.W. Griffith epic, thus retaining the essence of the narrative but reducing the running time from over two hours to ten minutes.

RUNAWAY
Standish Lawder, USA, 1969, 16mm, colour, sound, 6 min

“Lawder achieves the perfection of all his techniques in a small film called Runaway, in which he uses a few seconds of cartoon dogs chasing a fox. By stop motion, reverse printing, video scanning, and other techniques, by manipulating a few seconds of an old cartoon, he creates a totally new and different visual reality that is no longer a silly, funny cartoon. He elevates the cartoon imagery to the visual strength of an old Chinese charcoal drawing.” (Jonas Mekas, Village Voice Movie Journal, 1970)

Before developing his own entirely new film form, Barry Gerson spent four years working on the expanded narrative film The Neon Rose (1960-64). After a couple more fruitless years developing other more commercial films he changed direction to pursue his own vision with Automatic Free Form Film (1968), completely abandoning sound to investigate perspective, light and the shapes of objects. In 1969 he began a series of Groups in which two to four short films are combined. Group V (1970) consists of three short films of equal length, and each is a single shot of a minimal space. All of Gerson’s films are meticulously crafted and precisely composed. His highly developed technique forces the viewer to comprehend what is being seen and how the image was created.

GROUP V: ENDURANCE / REMEMBERANCE / METAMORPHOSIS
Barry Gerson, USA, 1970, 16mm, colour, silent, 12 min

“I feel a strong sense of communication between my being and the objects and elements which I film. These objects and elements are alive – I feel their energy – whether they are created by man or nature they live by virtue of their chemical and energy relationships which are further determined by their shapes. It is a monumental task to place one object next to another – to place one image next to another. My films, as objects, have a life of their own once they leave my hands and it becomes an increasingly strange experience, as time passes, to see these films and know that they contain a part of me which I have willingly given up. So I am dying a little bit with the creation of each film, I am dying a joyously slow death filled with the wonder of what I see.” (A statement by Barry Gerson, Film Culture #63-64, 1977)

After making several 8mm films which he describes as being in the style of early Brakhage, Ernie Gehr switched to a 16mm camera that was usually kept on a tripod. He developed a system using f-stops in an attempt to articulate on film a similar idea to Karlheinz Stockhausen’s electronic music. Wait (1968) was his first film with this new aesthetic and others followed in the next two years. Serene Velocity (1970) is entirely composed of a sequence of stills which each last for four frames. Gehr filmed an empty academic corridor using the mid-point of the zoom as his starting point. He filmed four frames at 50mm, four at 55mm and then alternated between the two depths for sixty feet of film before increasing to 50mm and 60mm, 45mm and 60mm and so on. Over the course of the film this gives the impression of movement in both directions and opens out the corridor while keeping a flat image. Gehr continues to make groundbreaking films which often meditate on the world from odd perspectives. Later films include Shift (1973-74), Table (1976), Untitled, Part One, 1981 (1981) and Side / Walk / Shuttle (1991).

SERENE VELOCITY
Ernie Gehr, USA, 1970, 16mm, colour, silent, 23 min

“Serene Velocity is so emphatic of means it almost spills over into being a satire on single-minded concern with pictoral plasticity. It’s so perfect it inspires hilarity (not audience participation “I got it. You got it ?” giggles, but high, very high up in the brain): it’s divine! and the divine is too much. Only its whopping aesthetic transcendence saves it from being merely the definitive movie illustration of the great, contradictory 2 / 3D reciprocal reinforcement. It is surely the most intellectually and emotionally accessible, to general film audiences, of the the new purist works; if you’re in visual range you’re hit, no need to tolerate culture here.” (Ken Jacobs on Serene Velocity, New York Film-Makers’ Cooperative Catalogue #5, 1971)

Sonic Celluloid

Date: 21 March 1999 | Season: Seasons | Tags: Tony Conrad

SONIC CELLULOID
Sunday 21 March 1999, at 10:30pm
London ICA Theatre

An evening of music & film from the lofts of New York presented by Mark Webber & Robert Worby as part of the Sonic Arts Network’s Cut & Splice Festival 1999.

A programme of electroacoustic music will be accompanied by screenings of:
Ira Cohen, The Invasion Of Thunderbolt Pagoda, 1968, 31 min
Tony Conrad & Beverly Grant Conrad, Coming Attractions, 1970, 77 min

PROGRAMME NOTES

THE INVASION OF THUNDERBOLT PAGODA
Ira Cohen, USA, 1968, 16mm on VHS, colour, sound, 31 min
Directed and Produced by Ira Cohen. Photographed By Bill Devore. Tony Conrad, Sheldon & Diane Rochlin. Edited By Ira Cohen & Marty Topp. Costumes & Make-up Under the Supervision of Robert Lavigne. Music By Angus & Hetty Maclise, Loren Standlee, Ziska, Raja Samyana, Tony Conrad, Jackson MacLow, Henry Flynt. Starring The Universal Mutant Repertory Company With Rosalind, Robert Lavigne, Hakim Khan, Pedro Arbol De Pera, Fan Fan Sheba, Hetty Maclise, Angus Maclise, Beverly Grant, Tony Conrad, Robert Richkin, Erin Matson, Martha Muse, Kip Coburn, Loren Standlee, Ziska, Kirkwood, Bill Reynolds, David Gurin, Nina, Fritz Mooney, Donna Alnutt, Micah. Made with the help of Josh Reynolds and the International Audio Visual Institute.

“From The Secret Museum, a film of Ritual Magic conceived in three parts: The Opium Dream, Shaman & Heavenly Blue Mylar Pavilions. A Spiritual Voyage through the unconscious by way of alchemical dream exorcism & celestial rebirth.” (Ira Cohen)

The poet and shaman Ira Cohen was the originator of mylar photography and the only artist to use this technique to build up a substantial body of work. With The Invasion Of Thunderbolt Pagada, Cohen sought to further investigate the mystical properties of mylar as used on moving images. This psychedelic ritual was originally planned to feature underground legend Jack Smith, who resigned from the project over a minor misunderstanding about a cat. Cohen still regards the film as unfinished since he rushed to complete it in time to premiere at New York University alongside Paradise Now (the film of the Living Theatre’s controversial production) and Jud Yalkut’s Aquarian Rushes. Ira Cohen is one of the few survivors of the beat generation, a prolific poet who has recently completed Kings With Straw Mats, a documentary video of the 1986 Kumbh Mela festival of mystics in Hardwar, India. The soundtrack of Invasion consists of recordings of two collective improvisations led by poet and hand drummer Angus MacLise, who is best remembered today for his involvement with the Velvet Underground. MacLise accompanied many multimedia performances, composed the soundtrack to Ron Rice’s Chumlum, and was the drummer for La Monte Young’s Theatre if Eternal Music. In the 1970s he lived mostly in India and Nepal, where he died in 1979. Angus’ widow Hetty MacLise , who appears in the film and on the soundtrack, will introduce the film this evening.

(Ira Cohen’s new film Kings With Straw Mats will receive its British premiere at the October Gallery in London at 7:30pm on Tuesday 23rd March 1999.)

COMING ATTRACTIONS
Tony Conrad & Beverly Grant Conrad, 1970, 16mm, colour, sound, 77 min
Directed by Beverly Grant Conrad. Produced in Tantacolor by Tony Conrad. Starring Francis Francine as Mae, and featuring Joan Adler, Stanley Alboum, Tally Brown, Vincent Karas, Krash Kavanaugh, Frank Lilly, Baby Bettie Moses, Lewis and Rosanne Oliver, Sam Ridge, Ritty, Claude Purvis, Marie Antoinette Rogers, Arnold Rockwood, Amirom Rosson, Lohr Wilson, plus many others. Music by John Cale, Jim Boyd, Angel De Maria, Charlemagne Palestine, Terry Riley, La Monte Young. Lighting by Noah Lemy. Costumes By Betsey Johnson & The Cast. Titles By Peter Conrad. Based on a Story by Andrew Lamy. With special thanks to the Rockerfeller Foundation.

“Coming Attractions was undertaken with the unifying objective of exploring virgin areas of filmic entertainment. We hoped to capture a whole new range of expressive possibilities through bringing together aspects of film that are usually treated independently. Coming Attractions, as a semi-narrative film, fuses abstract technological developments in film with the use of film as a story-telling medium” (Tony & Beverly Conrad)

Up until his recent recognition as a musician, Tony Conrad was for many years regarded primarily as an avant-garde filmmaker. His 30 minute film The Flicker (1966) is thought of as the most effective and successful imageless film and consists solely of interchanging frequencies of black and white frames, which present different harmonic chords to the viewer and induce visual hallucinations. His introduction to the flicker effect was through improvised “filmless films” he developed with Jack Smith and Mario Montez – they were too poor to afford movie stock and acted live in the flicker of the projector beam. Tony Conrad’s introduction to the New York downtown scene was through his friendship with La Monte Young, in whose Theatre of Eternal Music Conrad played alongside Young, Marian Zazeela, Angus MacLise and John Cale. Beverly Conrad (née Beverly Grant) was a superstar of the underground movie scene, having appeared in films by Jack Smith, Andy Warhol and Gregory Markopoulos and stage productions at La Mama and the Theatre of the Ridiculous.

In 1968, Tony and Beverly Conrad decided to apply the flicker effect to a narrative story which was clearly influenced by the style of Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures. Francis Francine, a matronly transvestite, stars in the role of Mae, who is haunted by the memories of her life and loves. The story is told through languid set pieces, the soundtrack and visuals treated by a variety of effects and devices. The musical elements were culled from Tony Conrad’s archival recordings of friends and acquaintances and features composer La Monte Young singing a cowboy song, John Cale’s Coming Round Again and pieces by Terry Riley, Charlemagne Palestine and others. The film was completed in 1970 thanks to a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation. Tony and Beverly Conrad also collaborated on Straight and Narrow (1970) which astoundingly applies flicker to horizontal and vertical lines, with music by Cale and Riley.

(The Flicker by Tony Conrad will be shown at the National Film Theatre on Wednesday 31st March 1999 as part of the “Addendum” programme of avant-garde films chosen by Mark Webber.)

ELECTROACOUSTIC MUSIC, THE AMERICAN WAY

In the early 1950s composers began working with tape recorders – a major new invention that had been developing since the end of the Second World War. These were wild times that gave us rock ‘n’ roll, abstract expressionism and the jet engine. There was a great speeding- up of just about everything. As John Cage said, “What was so fascinating about tape was the possibility that a second, which we had always thought was a relatively short space of time, became 15 inches. It became something quite long that could be cut up.’’ Sound could be recorded and time became a precisely measurable piece of space. Just as film makers had done years earlier, composers could now cut, splice and reverse time. They could speed it up and slow it down. And when they did these things they uncovered amazing sound worlds, previously unheard. This was composing with all sounds, not just notes.

John Cage lays claim to being the first American composer of musique concrète – the technique of making music with recorded and manipulated sounds. His Imaginary Landscape No.5 (for any 42 recordings), was composed in 1951 and Williams Mix was composed in 1952. (The title refers to Paul Williams, a wealthy architect who funded the project.) This piece originally used 8 unsynchronised mono tapes of sounds divided into 6 categories: A) City Sounds; B) Country Sounds; C) Electronic Sounds; D) Manually Produced Sounds (including music); E) Wind Produced Sounds (including songs); F) “Small.’’ Sounds requiring amplification. The recordings were either used in their original state or varied in some way. The 6 categories and possibilities of variation or non-variation were subjected to chance operations using the l-Ching and a score was produced. The score was a template, a life-size drawing of the actual tape, and it worked like a dressmaker’s pattern showing all the cuts and splices that needed to be made to generate the piece. The construction was incredibly laborious and took Cage, and his friends Morton Feldman, Christian Wolf and Earle Brown, many months to complete. It was made in the studios of Louis and Bebe Barron who later became famous for their score of the seminal sci-fi film Forbidden Planet.

Perhaps the most well-known piece of tape music of all time is Revolution 9, from the Beatles’ White Album, composed by John Lennon and Yoko Ono. Many critics have mentioned the influence of Karlheinz Stockhausen or John Cage when referring to this piece but the greater influence is likely to be Richard Maxfield. In the early 1960s in Yoko Ono’s loft, in New York, the avant-garde gathered to witness many things, including the possibilities of the tape recorder. Here Richard Maxfield performed his tape works, some of which were made by the use of microphones and some with purely electronically generated sounds. Cough Music is made with the sounds of coughing taken from recordings of symphony concerts (Maxfield made a living for a while as an editor of classical records), Sine Music, Trinity Piece and Pastoral Symphony all use pure electronics. These electronic sounds were made with very simple circuits often built by Maxfield himself; he was the original lo-fi composer. His approach was typical of the pioneering American experimentalist, rejecting the techniques of the European avant-garde, which at that time were dominated by Karlheinz Stockhausen in the studios of the West German Radio in Cologne. One of Maxfield’s methods involved the recording of simple electronic waveforms onto tape and then building complex rhythms and gestures by cutting the material into short fragments which were then edited back together randomly; the very antithesis of the strict serial structures employed by Stockhausen.

Terry Riley’s piece The Gift was made for the play of the same title by Ken Dewey a director of experimental theatre and Happenings. It involves the manipulation of a recording of Riley’s arrangement of the Miles Davies piece So What, featuring Chet Baker playing trumpet. The piece was recorded in its entirety and then separate recordings were made of the trumpet, trombone and bass. All of this material was subjected to tape loop processes developed by Riley and an engineer at the ORTF studios in Paris where the piece was made. The modal nature of the recorded music allowed the construction of extended echo techniques without dissonant clashes. This is a classic ‘process’ piece where the structure unfolds audibly in a very straightforward way. The result is a kind of re-make of the work whereby melody and rhythm are slowly changed into colour and texture, and the listener is taken from the familiar into the unfamiliar. Interestingly this piece pre-dates the postmodern notion of appropriation and the now commonplace world of sampling and plunderphonics. (Robert Worby)

The American Century Film Programme

Date: 26 September 1999 | Season: American Century

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THE AMERICAN CENTURY: ART & CULTURE 1900-2000
The Cool World: Film & Video in America 1950-2000
October – December 1999
New York Whitney Museum of American Art

The Cool World surveys the development of avant-garde film and video in America, from the Beats of the 1950s to the recent innovations of the 1990s. The exhibition includes experiments in abstraction and the emergence of a new, “personal” cinema in the 1950s, the explosion of underground film and multimedia experiments in the 1960s, the rigorous Structural films of the early 1970s, and the new approaches to filmmaking in the 1980s and 1990s. The program also traces the emergence of video as a new art form in the 1960s, its use as a conceptual and performance tool during the 1970s, and its exploration of landscape, spirituality, and language during the 1980s. The Cool World concludes in the 1990s, with experiments by artists in projection, digital technology, and new media.

Curated by Chrissie Iles, curator of film and video, Whitney Museum of American Art. Film Program for the 1950s, 1960s, and early 1970s co-curated with Mark Webber; 1970s, 1980s and 1990s programs co-curated with Mark McElhatten, Brian Frye, and Bradley Eros.

The series is divided into two parts. Part I (26 September – 5 December 1999) presents work from the 1950s and 1960s. Part II (7 December 1999 – 13 February 2000) surveys the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. Each month is devoted to a specific decade.

All films are 16mm. Those marked (v) are shown on videotape. Asterisked films are shown in both the repeating weekly programs and the Thursday/weekend themed programs.

The film and video program is screened in the Kaufman Astoria Film and Video Gallery on the 2nd floor. Screenings are free with museum admission ticket. All day film ticket: $6 (admits to Film and Video program only).

THE COOL WORLD: 1950s
26 September – 24 October 1999

Avant-garde film in America had begun in the 1930s, blossomed in the 1940s, and continued to flourish in the 1950s. Many of the new experimental films were premiered at Cinema 16, which formed the focal point for avant-garde film presentation and distribution in New York throughout the 1950s. On the West Coast, abstract, Surrealist, and expressionist filmmaking continued to develop, showcased by the Art in Cinema Society in San Francisco, and, from the mid-1950s, the rebellious films of the Beats emerged. Together, this diverse body of films created a new film language that radically transformed cinematic space, structure, and subject matter.

Themed programs of 1950s films are screened on Thursday evenings and on weekends. Two general programs of 1950s classics are repeated on alternate days, Tuesday through Friday.

1950s THEMED PROGRAMS

Sunday 26 September 1999

IMPENDING DOOM
During the 1950s, America experienced a period of uncertainty brought about by the aftermath of World War II and the perceived threat of Communism. Avant-garde filmmakers, many expressing a Beat sensibility, satirized the Cold War, rejected the political establishment, and addressed the unsettled, existential mood created by the fear of nuclear weapons and an anxiety about the future.

12 pm
Doomed
Christopher Maclaine, The End, 1953, b/w & color, sound, 35 min *
Stan Brakhage, Reflections on Black, 1955, b/w, sound, 12 min *
Robert Breer, Jamestown Baloos, 1957, color, sound, 6 min
Stan Brakhage, The Dead, 1960, color, silent, 11 min

1:00 pm
Cold War Dreams
Bruce Conner, A Movie, 1958, b/w, sound, 12 min *
Stan Vanderbeek, Science Friction, 1959, color, sound, 10 min *
Gregory Corso & Jay Socin, Happy Death, c.1960, b/w, sound, 33 min
Stan Vanderbeek, Snapshots of the City, 1961, b/w, sound, 5 min
Ray Wisniewski, Doomshow, c.1965, b/w, sound, 10 min
Edward English, The Family Fallout Shelter, 1962, b/w, sound, 14 min

3:15 pm
Star Spangled To Death
A film performance presented by Ken Jacobs.

“Bestrewn with found film cadavers, the film proceeds as if on holiday, in manic fits and starts….Studied composition vies with hand-held rambunctiousness, an Action Filming akin to Action Painting….Its proto-Beat sensibility…is at odds with the lemming drift of the 1950s, when chauvinist anti-Communism threatened us all with the final star-spangling to death.” (Ken Jacobs)

Ken Jacobs, Star Spangled To Death, 1958-60, b/w & color, sound & silent, c.180 min

Thursday 30 September 1999

6pm
Early Independents: 1
The crossover between Beat and black bohemianism in the 1950s produced a number of important films, including Shirley Clarke’s raw portrayal of life in the Harlem ghetto, represented by a black teenager’s descent into crime.

Shirley Clarke, The Cool World, 1963, b/w, sound, 125 min

Saturday 2 October 1999

THE BEATS: 1
The essence of Beat lay in the literary radicalism of its writers and poets, including Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs, and Allen Ginsberg. Their existentialism, cultural displacement, and rebellious rejection of conventional values were affirmed in cinematic terms by filmmakers on both coasts. This weekend program presents a concise survey of Beat cinema, including film collaborations by Anthony Balch and William Burroughs, and rare films by Larry Jordan, Piero Heliczer, and Dion Vigne.

12 pm
Stan Brakhage, Desistfilm, 1954, b/w, sound, 7 min
Larry Jordan, Trumpit, 1955-56, b/w, sound, 7 min
Larry Jordan, The One Romantic Venture of Edward, 1956, b/w & color, 8 min
Larry Jordan, Triptych in Four Parts, 1958, color, sound, 12 min
Piero Heliczer, The Autumn Feast, 1960, color, sound on tape, 14 min
Ken Jacobs & Bob Fleischner, Blonde Cobra, 1959-63, b/w & color, sound, 30 min *
Ken Jacobs, Little Stabs at Happiness, 1959-63, color, sound, 15 min

2 pm
Wallace Berman, Aleph, 1956-66, color, silent, 7 min
Robert Pike, The Tragi-Comedy of Marriage, 1957, b/w, sound, 8 min
Frank Paine, Motion Picture, 1956, color, sound, 4 min
Alfred Leslie, The Last Clean Shirt, 1964, b/w, sound, 39 min
Dion Vigne, North Beach, 1958, color, sound, 10 min
Dion Vigne, Miscellaneous Fragments: North Beach, c.1955, b/w, silent, 10 min

4 pm
Robert Frank and Alfred Leslie, Pull My Daisy, 1959, b/w, sound, 28 min *
Anthony Balch, Towers Open Fire, 1963, b/w, sound, 10 min (v) *
Anthony Balch, William Buys a Parrot, c.1963, color, silent, 2 min (v)
Anthony Balch, The Cut-Ups, 1961-67, b/w, sound, 22 min (v)
ruth weiss, The Brink, 1961, b/w, sound, 40 min (v) *

Sunday 3 October 1999

THE BEATS: 2

12 pm
The Connection
A tough exploration of the drug world in the 1950s, seen through the eyes of a group of junkies waiting for their fix. A film of The Living Theater’s adaptation of Jack Gelber’s revolutionary Off-Broadway play.

Shirley Clarke, The Connection, 1961, b/w, sound, 103 min *

2 pm
The Films of Christopher Maclaine
The complete works of this neglected Beat filmmaker and poet, whose existentialist films used radical in-camera montage techniques to alter perception. In The End, gaps in dialogue and imagery become metaphors for the world annihilation that Maclaine felt was imminent.

Christopher Maclaine, The End, 1953, b/w & color, sound, 35 min *
Christopher Maclaine, The Man Who Invented Gold, 1957, b/w & color, sound, 14 min
Christopher Maclaine, Beat, 1958, color, sound, 6 min
Christopher Maclaine, Scotch Hop, 1959, color, sound, 6 min

3:30 pm
The Irrepressible Taylor Mead
Introduced by Taylor Mead

Taylor Mead, the first “star” of the underground, will appear in person to present two of his earliest and most celebrated performances, which showcase his comic style.

Vernon Zimmerman, Lemon Hearts, 1960, b/w, sound, 26 min
Ron Rice, The Flower Thief, 1960, b/w, sound, 75 min

Thursday 7 October 1999

6 pm
Early Independents: 2
Peter Emanuel Goldman’s haunting film shows the aimless wandering of three young people in Greenwich Village. Their search for meaning is hindered by the oppression of the city.

Peter Emanuel Goldman, Echoes of Silence, 1965, b/w, sound, 75 min

Saturday 9 October 1999

ABSTRACTION AND THE LYRICAL FILM
Abstract cinema formed a central strand of early American avant-garde filmmaking during the 1940s and 1950s, particularly on the West Coast. Its non-objective colors, surfaces, and shapes create complex compositions of light in motion that often echo the structure of music. In the work of Jordan Belson and James Whitney, cosmic principles found expression through the delicate vibrancy of light and abstract forms.

12 pm
Abstractions
Mary Ellen Bute, Mood Contrasts, 1953, color, sound, 7 min *
Mary Ellen Bute, Abstronics, 1952, color, sound, 7 min
Stan Vanderbeek, Mankinda, 1957, b/w, sound, 10 min
Jordan Belson, Mandala, 1953, color, sound, 3 min
Harry Smith, No. 7 (Color Study), 1952, color, sound, 6 min *
Len Lye, Color Cry, 1952, color, sound, 3 min *
Len Lye, Free Radicals, 1957, b/w, sound, 5 min
Jim Davis, Becoming, 1955, color, silent, 9 min
Jane Conger, Odds and Ends, 1959, color, sound, 5 min
James Whitney, Yantra, 1950-55, color, sound, 7 min *

1:30 pm
Hy Hirsh
A rare screening of the abstract montage films of San Francisco filmmaker Hy Hirsh, who mostly worked in isolation in Europe during the 1950s. Hirsh mastered the techniques of optical printing, solarizing, multiple exposure, and split screens, and he was also one of the first filmmakers to incorporate electronic imagery into film.

Hy Hirsh, Eneri, 1953, color, sound, 6 min
Hy Hirsh, Gyromorphosis, 1955, color, sound, 7 min
Hy Hirsh, Autumn Spectrum, 1957, color, sound, 7 min
Hy Hirsh, Scratch Pad, 1960, color, sound, 8 min
Hy Hirsh, Come Closer, 1953, color, sound, 5 min
Hy Hirsh, La Couleur de la Forme, 1960, color, sound, 5 min *

3 pm
Graphic Cinema and the Lyrical Film
A survey of the poetic use of light in Kenneth Anger’s Eaux d’Artifice, Robert Breer’s explorations of kinaesthetic space, Peter Kubelka’s experiments with the still frame, and the dancing light of Marie Menken’s Notebook. Also included is Ian Hugo’s Jazz of Lights, without which, as Stan Brakhage remarked, “there would have been no Anticipation of the Night”.

Kenneth Anger, Eaux d’Artifice, 1953, color, sound, 13 min
Marie Menken, Notebook, 1962-63, b/w & color, silent, 10 min
Marie Menken, Hurry! Hurry!, 1957, color, sound, 3 min *
Peter Kubelka, Adebar, 1956-57, b/w, sound, 2 x 2 min
Peter Kubelka, Schwechater, 1957-58, color, sound, 2 x 1 min
Peter Kubelka, Arnulf Rainer, 1958-60, b/w, sound, 6 min
Robert Breer, Recreation, 1956, color, sound, 2 min *
Robert Breer, A Man and His Dog Out for Air, 1957, b/w, sound, 2 min
Robert Breer, Inner and Outer Space, 1960, color, sound, 4 min
Ian Hugo, Bells of Atlantis, 1952, color, sound, 9 min *
Ian Hugo, Jazz of Lights, 1954, color, sound, 16 min

4:45 pm
Stan Brakhage
Introduced by Stan Brakhage

During the 1950s, Stan Brakhage emerged as a major figure in American avant-garde cinema, creating a new, highly personal form of filmmaking. His fragmented images, delicate light, and transformation of film space into multilayered perspectives all coalesce in his key film from this period, Anticipation of the Night. Mothlight is the first of many films in which Brakhage collages, paints, and scratches directly onto the film strip, creating sequences of planes in motion that he terms “visual music”. His films are almost all silent, asserting the primacy of the image and the process of looking.

Stan Brakhage, Sirius Remembered, 1959, color, silent, 12 min
Stan Brakhage, Anticipation of the Night, 1958, color, silent, 40 min
Stan Brakhage, Mothlight, 1963, color, silent, 4 min *

Sunday 10 October 1999

THE BEATS: 1
See Saturday 2 October 1999

Thursday 14 October 1999

6pm
Early Independents: 3
Introduced by Robert Drew

This documentary about the 1960 primary elections and the functioning of the American political system received Film Culture’s Independent Film Award in 1961. The inclusion of a political documentary within the context of the New American Cinema demonstrated the increasing number of crossovers among different artistic practices.

Robert Drew, Richard Leacock, Al Maysles & D.A. Pennebaker, Primary, 1960, b/w, sound, 60 min

Saturday 16 October 1999

12 pm
Dancing and the Streets
The rhythmic movement of dance made it a natural subject for experimental film. Fusing music, light, and the fluid choreography of the body, the films in this program form poetic compositions which, in Maya Deren’s In the Very Eye of Night, become a metaphor for the unconscious mind and the universe, through which the dancers move “like celestial satellites”.

James Broughton, Four in the Afternoon, 1951, b/w, sound, 15 min
Shirley Clarke, Dance in the Sun, 1953, color, sound, 6 min
Shirley Clarke, A Moment in Love, 1957, color, sound, 8 min
Ed Emshwiller, Dance Chromatic, 1959, color, sound, 7 min
Maya Deren, In the Very Eye of Night, 1959, b/w, sound, 15 min *

2 pm
In the Cities
The architecture of New York, transformed through the filmmaker’s lens. This program includes rare screenings of Sidney Peterson’s Architectural Millinery and Shirley Clarke’s Skyscraper, which documents the construction of 666 Fifth Avenue.

Francis Thompson, NY, NY, 1957, color, sound, 15 min
Sidney Peterson, Architectural Millinery, 1954, b/w, sound, 7 min
Frank Stauffacher, Notes on the Port of St. Francis, 1951, b/w, sound, 20 min
Shirley Clarke, Bridges Go Round, 1958, color, sound, 7 min *
Shirley Clarke & Willard Van Dyke, Skyscraper, 1959, b/w & color, sound, 20 min

4 pm
In the Streets
Since the beginning of the century, artists and filmmakers have depicted the streets of New York, creating portraits of urban life from the city’s visual cacophony. The films in this program present poetic studies of New York locations, including the Brooklyn Bridge, Mulberry Street, Little Italy, and the elevated subway.

Helen Levitt, Janice Loeb, and James Agee, In the Street, 1943-52, b/w, sound on tape, 16 min *
Rudy Burckhardt, Under Brooklyn Bridge, 1953, b/w, sound, 15 min
Ken Jacobs, Orchard Street, 1956, color, silent, 15 min
Joseph Cornell & Rudy Burckhardt, Aviary, 1955, b/w, silent, 5 min
Joseph Cornell & Rudy Burckhardt, A Fable for Fountains, c.1954-57, b/w, sound, 6 min
Joseph Cornell & Rudy Burckhardt, Nymphlight, 1957, color, silent, 8 min
Joseph Cornell & Rudy Burckhardt, What Mozart Saw on Mulberry Street, 1956, b/w, silent, 6 min *
Larry Jordan, Visions of a City, 1957 (edited 1978), b/w, sound, 6 min *
D.A. Pennebaker, Daybreak Express, 1953, color, sound, 5 min

Sunday 17 October 1999

ABSTRACTION AND THE LYRICAL FILM
See Saturday 9 October 1999

Thursday 21 October 1999

6 pm
Early Independents: 4
As the Beat movement reached its height, Robert Frank and Alfred Leslie’s Pull My Daisy and John Cassavetes’ Shadows became the touchstones of the era, capturing the mood of an alienated generation poised to explode in the wide-reaching revolution of the sixties.

Robert Frank and Alfred Leslie, Pull My Daisy, 1959, b/w, sound, 28 min *
John Cassavetes, Shadows, 1957-59, b/w, sound, 87 min

Saturday 23 October 1999

THE BEATS: 2
See Sunday, 23 October 1999

Sunday 24 October 1999

CINEMA 16
Introduced by Amos Vogel, director of Cinema 16

A special event honoring the pivotal role of Cinema 16 – to this day the largest film society in the country – in the early days of avant-garde film in America. Founded in 1947 by Amos Vogel, with Marcia Vogel and, later, assisted by Jack Goelman, Cinema 16 drew the largest audiences for noncommercial and experimental cinema in American film history. Its programs had a profound impact on a new generation of young American filmmakers. Together with special courses and lectures given at the New School and New York University and its joint sponsorship, with Maya Deren, of the annual creative Film Awards, Cinema 16 laid the foundation for the flourishing of avant-garde cinema in America. Amos Vogel’s programming brought together disparate films from different genres in an attempt to provoke and educate audiences. This presentation includes many highlights from Cinema 16’s historic series, including several classic avant-garde films that premiered at Cinema 16, especially chosen by Vogel and assembled with Scott MacDonald.

12 pm
Maya Deren and Alexander Hammid, Meshes of the Afternoon, 1943, b/w, sound, 14 min
Frank Stauffacher, Sausalito, 1948, b/w. sound, 10 min
Willard Maas, Geography of the Body, 1943, b/w, sound, 7 min
Carmen D’Avino, The Big O, 1958, b/w, sound, 3 min
Carmen D’Avino, A Finnish Fable, 1965, color, sound, 6 min
Carmen D’Avino, The Room, 1959, colour, sound, 5 min

1:15 pm
Luis Bunuel, Land Without Bread, 1933, b/w, sound, 27 min
Oskar Fischinger, Motion Painting #1, 1947, color, sound, 11 min
Roman Polanski, Two Men and a Wardrobe, 1957, 15 min

2:30 pm
Kenneth Anger, Fireworks, 1947, b/w, sound, 15 min
Weegee, Weegee’s New York, 1950-54, color, sound, 20 min (v)
Norman McLaren, Fiddle-de-Dee, 1947, color, sound, 4 min
Margaret Mead, Trance and Dance in Bali, 1952, b/w, sound, 22 min (v)
Robert Breer, Inner and Outer Space, 1960, color, sound, 4 min
Lindsay Anderson, O Dreamland, 1953, b/w, sound, 12 min
Stan Vanderbeek, Science Friction, 1959, color, sound, 10 min *

4:30 pm
James Broughton, Mother’s Day, 1948, b/w, sound, 22 min
Shirley Clarke, In Paris Parks, 1954, color, sound, 12 min
James Davis, Light Reflections, 1948, color, sound, 14 min
Sidney Peterson, The Lead Shoes, 1949, b/w, sound, 17 min
Michelangelo Antonioni, Nettezza Urbana: “N.U.”, 1948, b/w, sound, 9 min
Douglas Crockwell, Glen Falls Sequence, 1946, color, silent, 8 min

With special thanks to Amos Vogel, Marcia Vogel, and Scott MacDonald.

1950s: WEEKLY PROGRAMS

26 September – 24 October 1999

Two programs, alternating daily. Asterisked films are also screened in the theme programs on Thursday evenings and on weekends.

Tuesdays at 11:30 am, Thursdays at 1:30 pm

Robert Frank & Alfred Leslie, Pull My Daisy, 1959, b/w, sound, 28 min (v) *
Len Lye, Color Cry, 1952, color, sound, 3 min *
Stan Brakhage, Reflections on Black, 1955, b/w, sound, 12 min *

Tuesdays only

1 pm
Shirley Clarke, The Connection, 1961, b/w, sound, 103 min *

Tuesdays and Thursdays

3 pm
Bruce Conner, A Movie, 1958, b/w, sound, 12 min *
James Whitney, Yantra, 1950-55, color, sound, 7 min *
Roger Tilton, Jazz Dance, 1954, b/w, sound, 20 min
Shirley Clarke, Bridges Go Round, 1958, color, sound, 7 min *
Ian Hugo, Bells of Atlantis, 1952, color, sound, 9 min *
Anthony Balch, Towers Open Fire, 1963, b/w, sound, 10 min (v) *
Marie Menken, Hurry! Hurry!, 1957, color, sound, 3 min *

4:30 pm
Helen Levitt, Janice Loeb & James Agee, In the Street, 1943-52, b/w, sound on tape, 16 min *
Ken Jacobs & Bob Fleischner, Blonde Cobra, 1959-63, b/w & color, sound, 30 min *
Maya Deren, In the Very Eye of Night, 1959, b/w, sound, 15 min *

Wednesdays and Fridays

11:30 am
ruth weiss, The Brink, 1961, b/w, sound, 40 min (v) *
Robert Breer, Recreation, 1956, color, sound, 2 min *
Joseph Cornell & Rudy Burckhardt, What Mozart Saw on Mulberry Street, 1956, b/w, silent, 6 min *
Hy Hirsh, La Couleur de la Forme, 1960, color, sound, 5 min *

1 pm
Anthony Balch, Ghosts at No. 9, 1963-67 (assembled by Genesis P. Orridge, 1982), color, sound, 45 min (v)
Mary Ellen Bute, Mood Contrasts, 1953, color, sound, 7 min *
Edward Bland, The Cry of Jazz, 1958, b/w, sound, 35 min
Stan Vanderbeek, Science Friction, 1959, color, sound, 10 min *

3 pm
Christopher Maclaine, The End, 1953, b/w & color, sound, 35 min *
Larry Jordan, Visions of a City, 1957 (edited 1978), b/w, sound, 6 min *
Harry Smith, No. 7 (Color Study), 1952, color, sound, 6 min *
George Binkey (a.k.a. Adolfas Mekas), Anti-Film #2, 1951, b/w, sound, 18 min

4:30 pm
Kenneth Anger, Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome: Sacred Mushroom Edition, 1954-66, color, sound, 38 min *
Peter Whitehead, Wholly Communion, 1966, b/w, sound, 33 min

THE COOL WORLD: 1960s
29 October 29 – 5 December 1999

The radical environment of the sixties produced a rich mixture of alternative art practices, including an explosion of American avant-garde and underground film. Unprecedented crossovers among different artistic media led to new forms of art, including performance, Happenings, and new dance. It was during this period that many of the acknowledged classics of underground film were made. Filmmakers and artists also experimented with the newly arrived technology of video. The rebellious counterculture produced a body of films exploring psychedelia as well as radical films that independently documented political activism and protests against the Vietnam War. As in the 1950s, filmmakers allied themselves closely with music as a means of developing self-expression and independence.

Special programs exploring these different genres are scheduled on Thursday evenings and on weekends. In addition, four daily programs of important 1960s films and videotapes are repeated Tuesdays through Fridays.

1960s THEMED PROGRAMS

Thursday 28 October 1999

4:30 pm
Extended Visions: 1
Jonas Mekas’ film diary Lost, Lost, Lost, spanning 1949 to 1963, records both the evolution of the avant-garde film movement in New York and Mekas’ own adaptation to life as a displaced person from Lithuania. Its melancholic tone is offset by the excitement and energy of a new life, which included cultural figures such as Allen Ginsberg, Robert Frank, and LeRoi Jones, intercut with footage of the Film-Makers’ Cooperative, the Women for Peace protest, and other historic events.

Jonas Mekas, Lost, Lost, Lost, 1949-63 (edited 1976), b/w & color, sound, 178 min

Friday 29 October 1999

7 pm
Jonas Mekas and the Avant-Garde Film in New York
Introduced by Jonas Mekas

An evening honoring Jonas Mekas, co-founder of the New York Film-Makers’ Cooperative, director of Anthology Film Archives, publisher of the influential magazine Film Culture, writer of the Village Voice ‘Movie Journal’ columns, and self-appointed “minister of defense and propaganda of the New Cinema.” On the fiftieth anniversary of his arrival in New York on October 29, 1949, Mekas will comment on his role in the development of the American avant-garde film.

Followed by a screening of Gideon Bachmann, Jonas, 1967, b/w, sound, 30 min (v)

Saturday 30 October 1999

THE PSYCHEDELIC FILM
During the 1960s, a young generation searching for spiritual and perceptual awakening experimented with mind-altering drugs. Encouraged by visionary guru Timothy Leary and his mantra “Turn on, tune in, drop out,” young people took LSD as a means of expanding consciousness. The visionary quality of film made it an important medium for expressing the psychedelic sensibility. These programs present rarely screened experiments in hallucinogenic cinema.

12 pm
Jordan Belson
Jordan Belson, Caravan, 1952, color, sound, 4 min
Jordan Belson, Mandala, 1953, color, sound, 3 min
Jordan Belson, Allures, 1961, color, sound, 9 min *
Jordan Belson, Re-Entry, 1964, color, sound, 6 min
Jordan Belson, Phenomena, 1965, color, sound, 6 min
Jordan Belson, Samadhi, 1967, color, sound, 6 min

1 pm
Strange Trips
Introduced by Jud Yalkut

Jud Yalkut, Turn Turn Turn, 1965-66, color, sound, 10 min *
Jud Yalkut, US Down by the Riverside, 1966, color, sound, 3 min
Ben Van Meter, S.F. Trips Festival, An Opening, 1966, color, sound, 9 min *
Ben Van Meter, Acid Mantra, 1966-68, b/w & color, sound, 47 min
Bob Cowan, Rockflow, 1968, b/w & color, sound, 9 min

2:45 pm
Expanding Consciousness
Jonas Mekas, Report from Millbrook, 1966, color, sound, 12 min
Victor Grauer, Archangel, 1966, color, sound, 10 min
Victor Grauer, Certain Stars; Distant Stars; Acid, 1966, color, sound, 11 min
James Whitney, Lapis, 1963-66, color, sound, 10 min *
Will Hindle, Chinese Firedrill, 1968, color, sound, 23 min
John Hawkins, LSD Wall, 1964-65, color, sound, 7 min
Keewatin Dewdney, The Maltese Cross Movement, 1967, color, sound, 7 min
Scott Bartlett, Offon, 1968, color, sound, 9 min
Eric Siegel, Tomorrow Never Knows, 1968, videotape, color, sound, 3 min

4:30 pm
Altered States
Introduced by Ira Cohen

Ben Van Meter, Olds-mo-bile, 1965, b/w, sound, 14 min
John Gruenberger, Onset: Variation 1, 1971, color, sound, 4 min
John Schofill, Filmpiece for Sunshine, 1966-68, color, sound, 24 min
Ira Cohen, Invasion of Thunderbolt Pagoda, 1968, color, sound, 20 min (v)
Stan Vanderbeek, Film Form No. 1, 1970, color, sound, 10 min

Ken Kesey’s film of the Merry Pranksters’ bus trip across America will premiere on Saturday 27 November 1999, at 4 pm.

7pm
Andy Warhol and The Exploding Plastic Inevitable
Introduced by Gerard Malanga

Andy Warhol’s Uptight series and The Exploding Plastic Inevitable (EPI) events that followed presented an innovative fusion of music and film. This evening of films related to the EPI features Ronald Nameth’s hallucinatory film of the event. Warhol’s recently restored film The Velvet Underground was conceived to be projected over the rock group as it played. The program includes other documents of, and by, the disparate factions that congregated around Andy Warhol’s Factory, among them rarely seen films by the poet Piero Heliczer, and Ron Rice’s Chumlum, featuring a cembalum solo by the Velvet Underground’s original drummer, Angus MacLise.

Ronald Nameth, Warhol’s EPI, 1966, b/w & color, sound, 22 min
Piero Heliczer, The Soap Opera, c.1964, b/w, silent, 13 min
Piero Heliczer, Joan of Arc, c.1967, color, sound on tape, 12 min
Ron Rice, Chumlum, 1964, color, sound, 26 min
Beverly & Tony Conrad, Straight and Narrow, 1970, b/w, sound, 10 min
Keewatin Dewdney, Malanga, 1967, b/w, sound, 3 min
Warren Sonbert, Where Did Our Love Go?, 1966, color, sound on tape, 15 min
Barbara Rubin, Christmas on Earth, 1963, b/w, sound on tape, 29 min (dual screen)
Andy Warhol, The Velvet Underground, 1966, b/w, sound, 35 min (dual screen)

Sunday 31 October 1999

SOUND AND VISION: MUSIC AND FILM
Music was an important element of sixties avant-garde cinema and many filmmakers collaborated directly with composers or conceived works around particular soundtracks.
The musicians represented in these films are cited in parentheses in the listings.

11:30 am
Pop Culture
The close relationship between experimental filmmakers and popular music led to several dynamic works, including Mick Jagger’s Moog score for Invocation of My Demon Brother. Jagger appears in Peter Ungerleider’s film of the Rolling Stones’ 1969 Hyde Park concert. Gunvor Nelson’s kaleidoscopic portrait of her daughter, Oona, contains a mesmerizing tape composition by Steve Reich.

John Rubin, The Who, 1967-69, color, sound, 3 min (The Who)
Peter Ungerleider, Under My Thumb, 1969, color, sound, 30 min (The Rolling Stones)
Kenneth Anger, Invocation of My Demon Brother, 1969, color, sound, 11 min (Mick Jagger)
Anthony Stern, San Francisco, 1968, color, sound, 15 min (The Pink Floyd)
Gunvor Nelson, My Name is Oona, 1969, b/w, sound, 10 min (Steve Reich)
Robert Shaye, Image, 1964, color, sound, 10 1/2 min (Walter Carlos)
Bruce Conner, Permian Strata, 1969, b/w, sound, 4 min (Bob Dylan)

1:30 pm
Jazz in Silhouette
Four impressionistic films with jazz scores. Harry Smith’s Number 11 (Mirror Animations) is precisely constructed to mirror Thelonious Monk’s composition Mysterioso. The Forbidden Playground and Magic Sun were both inspired by the space music of Sun Ra and were projected during the Arkestra’s legendary appearances at Carnegie Hall in 1968.

Harry Smith, Number 11 (Mirror Animations), 1956-62 (revised 1976), color, sound, 11 min (Thelonious Monk) *
Phill Niblock, Magic Sun, 1966, b/w, sound, 17 min (Sun Ra)
Maxine Haleff, The Forbidden Playground, c.1966, b/w, sound, 11 min (Sun Ra)
Bruce Baillie, All My Life, 1966, color, sound, 3 min (Ella Fitzgerald) *

2:30 pm
ESP-disk Films
Introduced by Jud Yalkut

ESP-disk was a pioneering record label that issued avant-garde rock and jazz records. Assembled here for the first time are the three films ESP-disk commissioned to promote its artists, together with Michael Snow’s film New York Eye and Ear Control (A Walking Woman Work), featuring a soundtrack by Albert Ayler that became the first ESP jazz release.

Edward English, The Fugs, 1963, color, sound, 12 1/2 min (The Fugs)
Jud Yalkut, The Godz, 1966, color, sound, 12 min (The Godz)
Edward English, Spaceways, 1968, color, sound, 18 min (Sun Ra)
Michael Snow, New York Eye and Ear Control (A Walking Woman Work), 1964, b/w, sound, 34 min (Albert Ayler)

4 pm
The Music of Terry Riley
The hypnotic and transcendental organ music of Terry Riley was chosen by several filmmakers as a soundtrack. Riley collaborated with sculptor Arlo Acton to make Music with Balls, a mantric early videotape mixed by John Coney.

Terry Riley & Arlo Acton, Music with Balls, 1968, videotape, color, sound, 24 min
David McLaughlin, Getting Together, 1968, b/w, sound, 8 min
Standish Lawder, Corridor, 1968-70, b/w, sound, 22 min
John Whitney, Matrix III, 1972, color, sound, 11min
Bruce Conner, Crossroads, 1976, b/w, sound, 36 min

Thursday 4 November 1999

3 pm
Extended Visions: 2
The Art of Vision is an expanded version of Stan Brakhage’s mythopoeic epic Dog Star Man, which expresses the cycle of the seasons and humanity’s struggle with nature. It contains the complete earlier film and is an analytical study of the footage within it.

Stan Brakhage, The Art of Vision, 1961-65, color, silent, 270 min

Saturday 6 November 1999

FILMMAKERS OF THE WEST COAST: 1

12 pm
Bruce Baillie
A key figure in the West Coast film community, Bruce Baillie created complex, multilayered films that construct a poetic social commentary influenced by Eastern philosophy. His first major statement, To Parsifal, a film poem to the summer, is structured around the German legend. In Quixote, filmed on a cross-country trip in 1963-64, the filmmaker critically observes the social environment of America, from its Native American communities to Wall Street and Vietnam.

Bruce Baillie, Show Leader, 1966, b/w, sound, 1 min
Bruce Baillie, Mr. Hayashi, 1961, b/w, sound, 3 min
Bruce Baillie, A Hurrah for Soldiers, 1962-63, color, sound, 4 min
Bruce Baillie, To Parsifal, 1963, b/w, sound, 16 min
Bruce Baillie, Quixote, 1964-65, b/w & color, sound, 45 min
Bruce Baillie, Tung, 1966, b/w & color, silent, 5 min
Bruce Baillie, Castro Street, 1966, b/w & color, sound, 10 min

2 pm
George Kuchar
Introduced by George Kuchar

George Kuchar, a celebrated figure of underground cinema, will make a return to New York to present his lesser-known films of the 1960s. Kuchar’s distinct, personal view of life through technicolor spectacles continues to entertain audiences after four decades of prolific production. After making early 8mm epics with his brother Mike, Kuchar burst onto the scene with Hold Me While I’m Naked, a parody of the frustration and loneliness which characterized his particular style of steamy, homespun melodrama. This selection features films made in New York before Kuchar’s relocation to California in 1971.

George Kuchar, Leisure, 1966, b/w, sound, 9 min
George Kuchar, Mosholu Holiday, 1966, b/w, sound, 9 min
George Kuchar, Color Me Shameless, 1967, b/w, sound, 30 min
George Kuchar, The Lady from Sands Point, 1967, b/w, sound, 9 min
George Kuchar, The Mammal Palace, 1969, b/w, sound, 31 min

4 pm
Owen Land (formerly known as George Landow)

The earliest films of Owen Land (formerly known as George Landow) foreshadowed the Structural movement which was to dominate the cinematic avant-garde in the 1970s. Film in Which There Appear Sprocket Holes, Edge Lettering, Dirt Particles, Etc.is a film in which the print’s natural degradation, through collected dirt and scratches, becomes part of the work itself. Institutional Quality of 1969 (subsequently withdrawn and revised in 1976) marked a new phase of Land’s filmmaking, characterized by a dry sense of humor and a continual undermining of conventional cinematic perception.

Owen Land, Fleming Faloon, 1963-64, color, sound & silent, 7 min
Owen Land, Film in Which There Appear Sprocket Holes, Edge Lettering, Dirt Particles, Etc., 1965-66, color, silent, 4 min *
Owen Land, Diploteratology, 1967, color, silent, 7 min
Owen Land, The Film That Rises to the Surface of Clarified Butter, 1968, b/w, sound, 9 min
Owen Land, Remedial Reading Comprehension, 1970, color, sound, 5 min
Owen Land, What’s Wrong with This Picture?, 1972, b/w & color, sound, 12 min
Owen Land, Wide Angle Saxon, 1975, color, sound, 22 min
Owen Land, “No Sir, Orison”, 1975, color, sound, 3 min
Owen Land, New Improved Institutional Quality: In The Environment Of Liquids And Nasals A Parasitic Vowel Sometimes Develops, 1976, color, sound, 17.5 min

7 pm
Friday, Apple Blossoms: An Intermedia Evening for Dick Higgins

Performances, readings, and music by Dick Higgins, performed by Larry Miller, Alison Knowles, Geoff Hendricks, Eric Andersen, Jessie Higgins, and others. Dedicated to Dick Higgins, a founding member of Fluxus, who died in December 1998.

See also Fluxday, Thursday 11 November 1999, a day of Fluxus films and documents which includes a program of Dick Higgins’ films.

Sunday 7 November 1999

FILMMAKERS OF THE WEST COAST: 2

12 pm
Spring Equinox 1966: The Magick Lantern Cycle of Kenneth Anger

Kenneth Anger is a highly influential figure in American avant-garde cinema, and Scorpio Rising has become one of underground film’s best-known classics. This program presents five of Anger’s key films from 1947 to the end of the 1960s that were shown together as Spring Equinox 1966: The Magick Lantern Cycle. The Cycle, which originally began with a slide sequence, fuses mysticism, alchemy, and desire with ritual, Hollywood imagery, light, and “magick.”

Kenneth Anger, Kustom Kar Kommandos, 1965, color, sound, 3 min
Kenneth Anger, Fireworks, 1947, b/w, sound, 15 min
Kenneth Anger, Eaux d’Artifice, 1953, color, sound, 13 min
Kenneth Anger, Scorpio Rising, 1963, color, sound, 29 min *
Kenneth Anger, Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome: Sacred Mushroom Edition, 1954-66, color, sound, 38 min *

2 pm
Bruce Conner
Bruce Conner’s career as a leading West Coast assemblage artist deeply influenced his filmmaking. A Movie constructs an improbable continuity through an ironic juxtaposition of newsreel footage, scrap film leader, and commercial and military films. The frenzied editing of images in Cosmic Ray influenced the development of fast cutting in commercial television. This program brings together most of Conner’s extant films of the 1950s and 1960s, including his moving document about the removal of Jay DeFeo’s sculpture/painting The White Rose from her studio.

Bruce Conner, A Movie, 1958, b/w, sound, 12 min *
Bruce Conner, Cosmic Ray, 1961, b/w, sound, 4 min *
Bruce Conner, Looking for Mushrooms, 1961-67 (revised 1995), color, sound, 14 min
Bruce Conner, Report, 1963-67, b/w, sound, 13 min
Bruce Conner, Breakaway, 1966, b/w, sound, 5 min
Bruce Conner, Vivian, 1964, b/w, sound, 3 min
Bruce Conner, The White Rose, 1967, b/w, sound, 7 min
Bruce Conner, Marilyn Times Five, 1968-73, b/w, sound, 13 min
Bruce Conner, Permian Strata, 1969, b/w, sound, 4 min

4 pm
Robert Nelson
Robert Nelson’s collection of his rarely seen works from the 1960s. Nelson’s films are underpinned by a deeply felt sense of humor and the absurd. After becoming immersed in the Beat culture of San Francisco, he produced a series of anarchic comedies, including the underground classic Oh Dem Watermelons in 1965. The program will include the only existing prints of such works as Oiley Peloso, as well as films made in cooperation with Steve Reich, the San Francisco Mime Troupe, and the Grateful Dead. These reels were assembled in 1999, at which time many of the films were re-edited.

Robert Nelson, Plastic Haircut, 1963 (revised 1999), b/w, sound, 10 min
Robert Nelson, Oh Dem Watermelons, 1965, color, sound, 10 min *
Robert Nelson, T.P. I, 1965 (revised 1999), b/w, sound, 4 min
Robert Nelson, Oiley Peloso, 1965 (revised 1999), b/w, sound, 2 min
Robert Nelson, 60 Lazy Dogs, 1967, b/w, sound, 2 min
Robert Nelson, T.P. II, 1965 (revised 1999), b/w, sound, 5 min
Robert Nelson, 1/2 Bright, 1/2 Open, 1/2 Withered, 1/2 Lumpy, 1967 (revised 1999), color, sound, 3 min
Robert Nelson, Hot Leatherette, 1967, b/w, sound, 5 min
Robert Nelson, The Awful Backlash, 1967 (revised 1999), b/w, sound on tape, 14 min
Robert Nelson, Gourley in 67, 1967, color, sound, 3 min
Robert Nelson, Soup or Spread, 1967 (revised 1999), color, sound, 5 min
Robert Nelson, The Off-Handed Jape, 1967, color, sound, 8 min
Robert Nelson, Grateful Dead, 1967, color, sound, 8 min

Thursday 11 November 1999

FLUXDAY
Fluxus grew out of the breakdown between artistic disciplines that began during the early 1960s. Rejecting conventional definitions of high art, Fluxus created an irreverent, intermedia practice incorporating performance, music, scores, objects, and films. Centered around the forceful personality of its founder, George Maciunas, Fluxus activity was intimate, ephemeral, democratic, and poetic.This program features some of the key Fluxus films and documents, including an interview with George Maciunas.

1:15 pm
Fluxdocuments
Peter Moore, Stockhausen’s Originale, 1964-94, b/w, sound, 33 min
Shigeko Kubota, George Maciunas with Two Eyes, 1972, George Maciunas with One Eye, 1976, 1994, videotape, b/w, sound, 7 min
Larry Miller, Flux Wedding, 1978, videotape, b/w, silent, 8 min (excerpt from Some Fluxus, 1999)
Larry Miller, Interview with George Maciunas, 1978, videotape, b/w, sound, 18 min (excerpt from Some Fluxus, 1999)
Jonas Mekas, Zefiro Torna or Scenes from the Life of George Maciunas, 1952-78 (edited 1992), color, sound, 34 min

3:15 pm
Dick Higgins
Dick Higgins was a founding member and major force of Fluxus. He studied composition with John Cage, participated in many early Happenings, and is credited with developing the concept of “intermedia” in 1965.

Dick Higgins, The End, 1962, b/w, sound, 12 min
Dick Higgins, Mysteries, 1969, b/w, sound, 8 min
Dick Higgins, Hank and Mary without Apologies, 1962-70, color, sound, 18 min

4 pm
Yoko Ono
Yoko Ono’s films, scores, objects, and performances of the 1960s were an important contribution to early Fluxus. Her notorious film No. 4 (also known as Bottoms) is definitively Fluxus in its deadpan, irreverent structure.

Yoko Ono, No. 4 (Bottoms), 1966, b/w, sound, 80 min

5:30 pm
Fluxfilms
A collection of over thirty Fluxus films, ranging in length from 10 seconds to 10 minutes, edited by George Maciunas.

Fluxus, Fluxfilm Anthology, 1966-70, b/w & color, sound & silent, 120 min

#1 Nam June Paik, Zen For Film; #2 Dick Higgins, Invocation For Canyons And Boulders (For Stan Brakhage); #3 George Maciunas, End After 9; #4 Chieko Shomi, Disappearing Music For Face; #5 John Cavanaugh, Blink; #6 James Riddle, 9 Minutes; #7 George Maciunas, 10 Feet; #8 George Maciunas, 1000 Frames; #9 Yoko Ono, Eye Blink; #10 George Brecht, Entrance To Exit; #11 Robert Watts, Trace No.22; #12 Robert Watts, Trace No.23; #13 Robert Watts, Trace No.24; #14 Yoko Ono, One; #15 Yoko Ono, Eye Blink; #16 Yoko Ono, No.4; #17 Pieter Vanderbeck, Five O’Clock In The Morning; #18 Joe Jones, Smoking; #19 Erik Andersen, Opus 74, Version 2; #20 George Maciunas, Artype, #22 Jeff Perkins, Shout; #23 Wolf Vostell, Sun In Your Head (Television Decollage); #24 Albert Fine, Readymade; #25 George Landow, The Evil Faerie; #26 Paul Sharits, Sears Catalog 1-3; #27 Paul Sharits, Dots 1 & 2; #28 Paul Sharits, Wrist Trick; (unnumbered) Paul Sharits, Unrolling Event; #29 Paul Sharits, Word Movie; #30 Albert Fine, Dance; #31 John Cale, Police Car; #36 Peter Kennedy, Flux Film #36; #37 Peter Kennedy & Mike Parr, Flux Film #37; #38 Ben, Je Ne Vois Rien, Je N’Entends Rien, Je Ne Dis Rien; #39 Ben, La Traversé Du Port De Nice À La Nage; #40 Ben, Faire Un Effort; #41 Ben, Regardez-Moi, Cela Suffit

Saturday 13 November 1999

12 pm
The Dilexi Series
In 1969, The Dilexi Foundation commissioned artists to create a pioneering group of videotapes. The videotapes were made specifically to be broadcast on television by KQED, San Francisco. This selection of four of the twelve tapes demonstrates the creative potential of the unique collaboration that developed in the late sixties between artists and network television.

Julian Beck and The Living Theater, Rite of Guerrilla Theater, 1969, videotape, b/w, sound, 25 min
Philip Makanna, The Empire of Things, 1969, videotape, b/w & color, sound, 21 min
Anna Halprin, Right On, 1969, videotape, b/w, sound, 30 min
Terry Riley & Arlo Acton, Music with Balls, 1968, videotape, color, sound, 24 min

See also The Medium Is the Medium, 1969, which combines the works of six artists commissioned by television station WGBH Boston, screened on Sunday 28 November 1999, and Wednesdays, at 5:30 pm.

2 pm
Robert Nelson
See Sunday 7 November 1999

4 pm
Gregory Markopoulos
The films of Gregory Markopoulos are some of the most revered works in the avant-garde film canon, although they rarely have been seen since being withdrawn from exhibition in the late 1960s. The Illiac Passion, based on Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound, took three years to complete, and is an acknowledged masterpiece. Ming Green, one of Markopoulos’ “films of place”, was shot in a single day and edited entirely in camera.

Gregory Markopoulos, Ming Green, 1966, color, sound, 7 min
Gregory Markopoulos, The Illiac Passion, 1967, color, sound, 92 min

Sunday 14 November 199

12 pm
Gregory Markopoulos
See Saturday 13 November 1999

2 pm
Rare Films by Jack Smith
Introduced by Jerry Tartaglia, filmmaker and restorer of Jack Smith’s work for the Plaster Foundation.

Jack Smith was a prolific actor, writer, filmmaker, photographer, and a legendary figure of the New York underground. To complement his best-known film Flaming Creatures, screened in the weekly cycles, this program presents a group of rarely seen works. Many of these films were never assembled into definitive versions, and were constantly re-edited for individual screenings or used in Smith’s theater presentations of the 1970s and 1980s. No President, a bewildering construction starring Irving Rosenthal, is arguably one of Smith’s greatest achievements.

Jack Smith, Scotch Tape, 1959-62, color, sound, 2 min
Jack Smith, Overstimulated, 1959-60, b/w, silent, 6 min
Jack Smith, Reefers of Technicolor Island, 1967, color, sound on tape, 15 min
Jack Smith, No President, 1967-70, b/w, sound on tape, 50 min
Jack Smith, Song for Rent, 1968-69, color, sound on tape, 5 min

4 pm
Spring Equinox 1966: The Magick Lantern Cycle of Kenneth Anger
See Sunday 7 November 1999

Thursday 18 November 1999

5:30 pm
Extended Visions: 3
Richard Myers’ first feature-length film overpowers the viewer with its technical virtuosity. Using an abundance of visual techniques, Akran constructs a rich mosaic that presents a subversive view of America in the late 1960s.

Richard Myers, Akran, 1969, b/w, sound, 118 min

Saturday 20 November 1999

12 pm
Seeing Double: The Dual Screen Film
The practice of projecting two 16mm film reels side by side was used extensively by Andy Warhol in the mid-1960s. Several of his films were presented in either single or dual screen. The films of Storm de Hirsch and Paul Sharits use the double screen to magnify their visual abstractions and to bombard the viewer with color and sound.

Andy Warhol, Lupe, 1965, color, sound, 36 min (dual screen)
Storm de Hirsch, Third Eye Butterfly, 1968, color, sound, 10 min (dual screen)
Ira J. Newman, French Lick, 1968-69, b/w & color, sound, 6 min (dual screen)
Paul Sharits, Razor Blades, 1965-68, b/w & color, sound, 25 min (dual screen)

2 pm
Andy Warhol’s The Chelsea Girls
Introduced by Callie Angell, adjunct curator, Andy Warhol Film Project, Whitney Museum of American Art, and Ronald Tavel, screenplay author and co-founder of the Theater of The Ridiculous.

The Chelsea Girls is a collection of scenes presented as events occurring simultaneously in different rooms of the Chelsea Hotel, New York. Individual sections feature Warhol superstars Gerard Malanga, Mary Woronov, and Nico, and original music by the Velvet Underground. Following its initial screenings in New York, The Chelsea Girls went on to become the most commercially successful underground film of all time.

Andy Warhol, The Chelsea Girls, 1966, b/w & color, sound, 210 min (dual screen)

6:30 pm
Andy Warhol’s The Chelsea Girls
Repeat screening

Sunday 21 November 1999

PERFORMANCE AND HAPPENINGS
Introduced by Chrissie Iles, curator, film and video, Whitney Museum of American Art

Performance events and Happenings proliferated in the 1960s, as artists explored a process-based form of art-making which challenged the autonomy of the art object and traditional theatrical forms. These programs present rare films of Happenings and performances that took place in and around New York in the early 1960s, extending the boundaries of art to include danger, risk, duration, process, and a liberation of the body.

11.30 am
What’s Happening
Raymond Saroff, Storedays: I & II, Ray Gun Theater, 1962, b/w, silent, 15 min (documenting Happenings by Claes Oldenburg)
Bud Wirtschafer, What’s Happening, 1963, color, sound, 14 min
Allan Kaprow, Household, 1964, b/w, silent, 22 min
Robert Whitman, American Moon, 1961 (edited by Sue Wrbican, 1999), color, sound, 12 min

1 pm
Experiments in Art and Technology, 9 Evenings: Theater & Engineering
Introduced by Barbro Schultz Lundestam

The world premiere of two recently restored and edited archival films documenting the historic performances that took place on nine evenings in 1966 at the 69th Regiment Armory, New York, by Robert Whitman, David Tudor, John Cage, Öyvind Fahlström, Robert Rauschenberg, Yvonne Rainer, Alex Hay, Steve Paxton, Robert Morris, and Deborah Hay. Organized by Experiments in Art and Technology.

Barbro Schultz Lundestam, Robert Rauschenberg: Open Score, 1996, b/w & color, sound, 34 min (v)
Barbro Schultz Lundestam, Öyvind Fahlström: Kisses Sweeter Than Wine, 1996, b/w & color, sound, 71 min (v)

3 pm
Carolee Schneemann
Introduced by Carolee Schneeman

Filmmakers’ documents of Carolee Schneemann’s groundbreaking 1960s performances.

Elaine Summers, Water Light/Water Needle, 1966, b/w, silent, 15 min
Alphons Schilling, Snows, 1966, b/w, silent, 24 min
Gideon Bachmann, Body Collage, 1967, b/w, silent, 6 min

4 pm
Dance into Performance
The 1960s saw an unprecedented crossover among disciplines, in particular those of art and “new dance”. From the late 1950s through the 1960s, the Judson Dance Theater in New York became a center for experimental art and dance, showing work by Yvonne Rainer, Steve Paxton, Trisha Brown, Simone Forti, Carolee Schneemann, and Robert Morris. Aside from the performers at Judson, other artists incorporated dance movements into their work. Bruce Nauman’s early performances were influenced by the work of Anna Halprin, while some of Joan Jonas’ early performances involved groups of people performing everyday movements in the open air within a choreographed structure.

Yvonne Rainer, Trio A, 1978, b/w, sound, 10 min
Bruce Nauman, Dance or Exercise on the Perimeter of a Square, 1967-68, b/w, sound, 11 min
Anna Halprin, Right On, 1969, videotape, b/w, sound, 30 min
Joan Jonas, Wind, 1968, b/w, silent, 6 min
Robert Morris, Wisconsin, 1970, b/w, silent, 15 min

Saturday 27 November 1999

12 pm
Rare Films by Jack Smith
See Sunday 14 November 1999

2 pm
Bruce Baillie
See Saturday 6 November 1999

4 pm
Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters
The theatrical premiere of Ken Kesey’s film – finally edited after thirty years – of the Merry Pranksters’ legendary bus trips across America in the 1960s, as immortalized in Tom Wolfe’s book The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. A bridge between the Beats and the hippies, the Pranksters were vanguard figures of the psychedelic movement, whose destination was always “furthur”.

Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters, Intrepid Traveler and His Merry Band of Pranksters Search for a Cool Place, 1964 (edited 1999), color, sound, 60 min (v)
Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters, Acid Test, 1964-65 (edited 1990), color, sound, 55 min (v)

Sunday 28 November 1999

THE ELECTRONIC FILM AND THE BIRTH OF VIDEO ART
Video art was born out of two strands of sixties American counterculture: the utopian desire for an expanded perception through new technology, and a rebellion against the institutional authority of mainstream television. At the inception of video in the mid-1960s, filmmakers and artists experimented with psychedelically inflected electronic image-processing techniques using audio and video synthesizers. A number of filmmakers incorporated the new electronic imagery of video into their filmmaking, creating “electronic” films.

11:30 am
The Electronic Film: 1
Jud Yalkut & Nam June Paik, Cinema Metaphysique Nos. 1-4, 1966-67 (edited 1972), b/w, sound, 13 min
Jud Yalkut & Nam June Paik, Cinema Metaphysique No. 5, 1967, color, silent, 2 min
Jud Yalkut & Nam June Paik, Electronic Fables, 1971, color, sound, 9 min
Philip Makanna, The Empire of Things, 1969, videotape, b/w & color, sound, 21 min
John Whitney, Permutations, 1968, color, sound, 8 min
Doris Chase, Circles 1 (Subotnik), 1971, color, sound, 7 min
Standish Lawder, Runaway, 1969, b/w, sound, 5 1/2 min

1.00 pm
The Electronic Film: 2
Introduced by Stephen Beck

John Stehura, Cibernetik 5.3, 1961-65, color, sound, 8 min
Scott Bartlett, Serpent, 1971, color, sound, 14 min
Ed Emshwiller, Scape-Mates, 1972, color, sound, 28 min
Stan Vanderbeek, Videospace, 1972, color, sound, 7 min
Tom DeWitt, The Leap, 1968, color, sound, 7 min
Stephen Beck and Jordan Belson, Cycles, 1974, color, sound, 10 min

2:30 pm
Processing the Image
Jud Yalkut & Nam June Paik, Beatles Electroniques, 1966-69, b/w, sound, 3 min
Eric Siegel, Einstein, 1968, videotape, color, sound, 6 min
Eric Siegel, Symphony of the Planets, 1968, videotape, color, sound, 11 min
Eric Siegel, Tomorrow Never Knows, 1968, videotape, color, sound, 3 min
Steina and Woody Vasulka, Calligrams, videotape, b/w, silent, 12 min
Steina, Violin Power, 1970-78, videotape, b/w, sound, 10 min *
WGBH Boston, The Medium Is the Medium, 1969, videotape, color, sound, 28 min *
Nam June Paik, Global Groove, 1973, videotape, color, sound, 29 min

4:30 pm
The New Radicals
In 1969, the Raindance video collective was formed by Frank Gillette, Paul Ryan, Ira Schneider, and Michael Shamberg. Raindance’s “media primers”, which include footage of Abbie Hoffman and the Altamont concert, propose an engagement with both counterculture and mainstream television in order to create alternative communication systems. Also in 1969, Ira Schneider made a historic recording of the first exhibition of video art in the United States, at the Howard Wise Gallery, New York.

Ira Schneider, TV as a Creative Medium, 1969 (edited 1984), videotape, b/w, sound, 12 min *
Paul Ryan, Proto Media Primer, 1970, videotape, b/w, sound, 16 min *
Ira Schneider, Media Primer, 1970, videotape, b/w, sound, 23 min
Michael Shamberg, Media Primer, 1971, videotape, b/w, sound, 17 min

Thursday 2 December 1999

5:30 pm
Extended Visions: 4
Ken Jacobs’ seminal film Tom, Tom, The Piper’s Son ushered in a new era of filmmaking. Taking found footage of a black-and-white film from 1905, Jacobs dissected it, refilming it backwards and forwards, elevating details, and opening up the structure of the film to an extreme degree, thus rewriting the rules of cinema. The historical precedent for Jacobs’ making of Tom, Tom, The Piper’s Son is Rose Hobart, a film montage assembled by the artist Joseph Cornell, who re-edited footage from the 1931 Hollywood film East of Borneo.

Joseph Cornell, Rose Hobart, c.1936, color, sound on tape, 19 min
Ken Jacobs, Tom, Tom, The Piper’s Son, 1969-71, b/w & color, silent, 115 min

Saturday 4 December 1999

YOU SAY YOU WANT A REVOLUTION: 1
A weekend of programs documenting how the political and social turbulence of the sixties motivated the younger generation to become deeply engaged with civil rights, black power, personal liberation, and political action. Centered around university campuses and large-scale protest marches against the Vietnam War, their radical strategies of protest, resistance, and rebellion were recorded by avant-garde filmmakers. These filmmakers demonstrated a remarkable solidarity with a new, collectivized political filmmaking centered around the New York and San Francisco Newsreels (later known as Third World Newsreel), whose anonymously produced films challenged the hierarchy of television news reportage and “professional” documentary filmmaking.

11:30 am
Power to the People
Third World Newsreel, America, 1969, b/w, sound, 30 min *
Leonard Henny, Peace Pickets Arrested for Disturbing the Peace, 1967, color, sound, 7 min
Rudi Stern & John Riley, The Flag Show: Judson Church, 1968, videotape, b/w, sound, 15 min (excerpt)
Third World Newsreel, Up Against the Wall Ms. America, 1968, b/w, sound, 8 min

1 pm
One PM
Introduced by D.A. Pennebaker

In 1969, D.A. Pennebaker assembled footage from Jean-Luc Godard’s abandoned film One AM (or One American Movie), which dealt with resistance and revolution in the USA. The resulting film, featuring Jefferson Airplane, LeRoi Jones, Eldridge Cleaver and Rip Torn, together with Pennebaker’s own coverage of Godard at work, depicts the social and political climate of America at the end of the 1960s.

Jean-Luc Godard & D.A. Pennebaker, One PM, 1969, color, sound, 95 min

3 pm
All You Need Is Love
In the summer of 1967 in San Francisco, the first Be-In drew thousands of young people searching for a new way of life. Disillusioned with authority, and building on the earlier underground actions of the Beats, this new generation created a utopian counterculture, using hallucinogenic drugs, meditation, yoga, music, free love, and erotic liberation to open up alternative ways of living and loving.

Bob Giorgio, Love Happens, 1966, color, sound, 12 min
Bob Giorgio, America’s Wonderful, 1967, color, sound, 7 min
Jerry Abrams, Be-In, 1967, color, sound, 7 min
Les Blank, God Respects Us When We Work But He Loves Us When We Dance, 1968, color, sound, 20 min
Carolee Schneemann, Fuses, 1964-68, color, silent, 22 min

4:30 pm
World Gone Wrong
During the sixties, the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X, the violence which increasingly accompanied protest demonstrations, the Manson murders, and the deaths at Altamont undermined the spirit of social, political, and personal transformation and demonstrated the harsh realities behind the Flower Power generation’s attempts to create a new society.

Bruce Conner, Report, 1963-67, b/w, sound, 13 min
Ken Jacobs, Perfect Film, 1986, b/w, sound, 23 min
Will Hindle, Saint Flournoy Lobos-Logos and the Eastern Europe Fetus Taxing Japan Brides in West Coast Places Sucking Alabama Air, 1970, color, sound, 12 min *
Richard Myers, Allison, 1970, b/w, sound, 7 min

Sunday 5 December 1999

YOU SAY YOU WANT A REVOLUTION: 2

11:30 am
Vietnam – Against the War
Carolee Schneemann, Viet Flakes, 1965, b/w, sound, 11 min
Paul Sharits, Piece Mandala/End War, 1966, b/w & color, silent, 5 min *
Peter Gessner, Time of the Locust, 1966, b/w, sound, 12 min
Albert Alotta, Peacemeal, 1967, color, sound, 8 min
Rudi Stern & John Riley, The Flag Show: Judson Church, 1968, videotape, b/w, sound, 12 min (excerpt)
Storm de Hirsch, Trap Dance, 1968, b/w, sound, 2 min
David Ringo, March on the Pentagon, 1968, b/w, sound, 21 min *

1 pm
Get On Up
Film, television, theater, and music played an important role in addressing issues in the black community during the 1960s. Eugene and Carole Marner’s feisty portrait of two teenage black girls living on New York’s Lower East Side predicts the ground-breaking work of Charles Hobson, whose Inside Bedford Stuyvesant series was the first locally produced black television documentary in America. Dutchman, adapting LeRoi Jones’ masterpiece representing the 1960s Black Theater Movement, captures the tension that erupts in America when race and class collide.

Eugene & Carole Marner, Phyllis & Terry, 1964-65, b/w, sound, 36 min *
Third World Newsreel, I Have a Dream, 1963, b/w, sound, 15 min
Anthony Harvey, Dutchman, 1966, b/w, sound, 55 min
Charles Hobson, Inside Bedford Stuyvesant, 1968, videotape, b/w, sound, 56 min

4 pm
Black Power
The revolutionary program of the Black Panthers proposed a militant solution to the social and political problems of the black community. Radical white filmmakers produced work in cooperation with the Black Panthers, as well as other films that independently documented this revolutionary period in black history.

Third World Newsreel, Black Panther, 1968, b/w, sound, 15 min
Leonard Henny, Black Power – We’re Goin’ Survive America!, 1969, color, sound, 15 min *
David Loeb Weiss, No Vietnamese Ever Called Me Nigger, 1968, b/w, sound, 68 min

1960s WEEKLY PROGRAMS

26 October – 5 December 1999

Four different daily programs of 1960s films and videotapes will be shown Tuesdays through Fridays. Asterisked films are also screened in the theme programs on Thursday evenings and on weekends.

Tuesdays

11:30 am
Stan Brakhage, Songs 1-7, 1964-1980, color, silent, 25 min
Joyce Wieland, 1933, 1967, color, sound, 4 min
Mike Kuchar, Tales of the Bronx, 1969, b/w, sound, 16 min
Paul Ryan, Proto Media Primer, 1970, videotape, b/w, sound, 16 min *

1 pm
John Cage, Aspects of a New Consciousness, Dialogue III, 1969, color, sound, 30 min (v)
In this important early television interview, Cage discusses the philosophical principles of his work and his radical musical forms.
Merce Cunningham, Variations V, 1966, b/w, sound, 50 min (v)
Ben Van Meter, S.F. Trips Festival, An Opening, 1966, color, sound, 9 min *

3 pm
Robert Nelson, Oh Dem Watermelons, 1965, color, sound, 11 min *
Jack Smith, Flaming Creatures, 1963, b/w, sound, 45 min

4:30 pm
Gideon Bachmann, Underground New York, 1967, b/w, sound, 50 min (v)
A portrait of the New York underground film scene in the 1960s, with rare footage of Shirley Clarke, George Kuchar, Andy Warhol, Jonas Mekas, and many others.
Storm de Hirsch, Peyote Queen, 1965, color, sound, 9 min
In this “journey through the underworld of sensory derangement, of interior vision”, abstractions drawn directly onto the film stock appear at rapid speed to the rhythm of African drumming.
Andrew Meyer, Match Girl, 1966, color, sound, 26 min

Wednesdays

11:30 am
David Ringo, March on the Pentagon, 1968, b/w, sound, 21 min *
Ed Emshwiller, Thanatopsis, 1962, b/w, sound, 5 min
Kenneth Anger, Scorpio Rising, 1963, color, sound, 29 min
Ernie Gehr, Morning, 1968, color, silent, 4 1/2 min

1 pm
D.A. Pennebaker, Don’t Look Back, 1967, b/w, sound, 96 min
Pennebaker’s documentary of Bob Dylan’s first British tour.

3 pm
James Whitney, Lapis, 1963-66, color, sound, 10 min *
Warren Sonbert, The Bad and the Beautiful, 1967, color, sound, 30 min
Chick Strand, Waterfall, 1967, color, sound, 3 min
Will Hindle, Saint Flournoy Lobos-Logos and the Eastern Europe Fetus Taxing Japan Brides in West Coast Places Sucking Alabama Air, 1970, color, sound, 12 min *
Standish Lawder, Runaway, 1969, b/w, sound, 5 min *

4:30 pm
WGBH Boston, The Medium Is the Medium, 1969, videotape, color, sound, 28 min *
Six original works created for television, by Allan Kaprow, Otto Piene, Nam June Paik, James Seawright, Thomas Tadlock, and Aldo Tambellini, all of whom explored the new medium of video, incorporating image- processing, dance, performance, and intermedia.
Gideon Bachmann, Jonas, 1967, b/w, sound, 30 min (v) *
Bruce Conner, Cosmic Ray, 1961, b/w, sound, 4 min *
Jordon Belson, Allures, 1961, color, sound, 9 min *
Bruce Baillie, All My Life, 1966, color, sound, 3 min *
Jud Yalkut, Turn Turn Turn, 1965-66, color, sound, 10 min *
“A torrent of hurtling colors and lights, forms blinking, whirling and surging. Image follows image in rapid-fire succession, distorting awareness of time and space.”

Thursdays (except 11 November 1999)

1:30 pm
Andy Warhol, My Hustler, 1965, b/w, sound, 67 min
An important film demonstrating the transition from Warhol’s early minimal style to a more traditional narrative form.

3 pm (October 28, November 18, December 2 only)
Ira Schneider, TV as a Creative Medium, 1969 (edited 1984), videotape, b/w, sound, 12 min *
Third World Newsreel, Black Panther, 1968, b/w, sound, 15 min *
Harry Smith, Number 11 (Mirror Animations), 1956-62 (revised 1976), color, sound, 11 min *
Charles Henri Ford, Poem Posters, 1960s, color, sound, 24 min
A documentary poem of the exhibition opening of Charles Henri Ford, with appearances by Edie Sedgwick and many other figures from the sixties scene.
Paul Sharits, Piece Mandala/End War, 1966, b/w & color, silent, 5 min *
Michael Snow, Wavelength, 1966-67, color, sound, 45 min (not October 28)
This classic early Structural film is composed of a single slow zoom shot of a loft space, whose sparse purity is disrupted by changes in the image color, film stock, and the appearance of people and a radio, creating a new perception of film time.
Yoko Ono, Freedom, 1970, color, sound, 1 min

Fridays

11:30 am
Stan Brakhage, Mothlight, 1963, color, silent, 4 min *
Steina, Violin Power, 1970-78, videotape, b/w, sound, 10 min *
The video camera becomes analogous to a musical instrument and the violin an image-generating tool, as the black-and-white image and a Beatles soundtrack are broken down into abstract visual and aural layers.
Tony Conrad, The Flicker, 1966, b/w, sound, 30 min
In this radical minimal work, the flicker of alternating black and clear frames creates rhythms of light and darkness that suggest aural patterns, applying the harmonic principles of serial music to film.
Third World Newsreel, America, 1969, b/w, sound, 30 min *

1 pm
Norman Mailer, Maidstone, 1969, color, sound, 110 min (v)
Set in the civil unrest of 1968, this story of the murder of a commercial film director and presidential candidate uses avant-garde techniques to break down the division between fictive artifice and historical reality.

3 pm
Takahiko Iimura, Ai (Love), 1962, b/w, sound, 12 min
“A poetic and sensuous exploration of the body.”
Jerome Hill, Death in the Forenoon or Who’s Afraid of Ernest Hemingway?, 1965, color, sound, 2 min
Ken Jacobs, Window, 1964, color, silent, 12 min
George Kuchar, Hold Me While I’m Naked, 1966, color, sound, 15 min
Leonard Henny, Black Power – We’re Goin’ Survive America!, 1969, color, sound, 15 min *
Owen Land, Film in Which There Appear Sprocket Holes, Edge Lettering, Dirt Particles, Etc., 1965-66, color, silent, 4 min *

4:30 pm
Robert Breer, 69, 1968, color, sound, 4 1/2 min
Bruce Baillie, Mass (for the Dakota Sioux), 1963-64, b/w, sound, 20 min
Tom Chomont, Orphelia/The Cat Lady, 1969, color, silent/sound, 3 min
A film poem which conveys, through intense emotion and a delicate sense of beauty, the fragility of human existence.
Jerry Abrams, Be-In, 1967, color, sound, 7 min *
The first Be-In in San Francisco, with Allen Ginsberg, Timothy Leary, and Buddha. Peace, love, and euphoria.
Larry Jordan, Duo Concertantes, 1964, b/w, sound, 9 min
Eugene & Carole Marner, Phyllis & Terry, 1964-65, b/w, sound, 36 min *

THE AMERICAN CENTURY: ART & CULTURE 1900-2000
The Cool World: Film & Video in America 1950-2000

Acknowledgments
We would like to thank M.M. Serra of the New American Cinema Group / Film-Makers’ Cooperative, New York, for her extensive help and support during the research for this program. We are particularly grateful to Jonas Mekas for his help and advice, and to Robert Haller and all at Anthology Film Archives, New York. We would especially like to thank Amos Vogel for his counsel and curatorial expertise, and Scott MacDonald for his curatorial work on the Cinema 16 program. We are grateful to Professor William Moritz and to Larry Cuba of the Iota Center for lending many rare prints. We would also like to thank Gerald O’Grady, David Sherman, Dominic Angerame, Robert Beavers, James Grauerholz of the William S. Burroughs Estate, and Genesis P. Orridge. For the video programs, we would like to thank Barbara Wise and the staff at Electronic Arts Intermix, New York: Lori Zippay, Galen Joseph Hunter, Seth Price, and Kate Travers. Stephen Vitiello’s help and advice has been invaluable throughout. We are also indebted to Jean Ma for her work on the project, and to all the filmmakers and artists who have helped us in our research and have generously agreed to make their films and videotapes available for this series.

Dream House
Throughout the exhibition, the following off-site sound and light environment can also be visited:
La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela
Dream House: Seven Years of Sound and Light
275 Church Street 3rd Floor, New York, 10013
Open Thursdays and Saturdays 2 pm-midnight
Tel: (212) 925-8270

In Dreams: Surrealism and Trance

Date: 2 October 1999 | Season: Dublin Fringe Festival 1999

IN DREAMS: SURREALISM AND TRANCE FILMS
Saturday 2 October 1999, at 1:10pm
Dublin Irish Film Centre

René Clair, Entr’acte, France, 1924, 23 min
Entr’acte, one of the first avant-garde films, was originally made as an interlude to a ballet by Erik Satie. Using a variety of innovative camera tricks, René Clair developed new techniques to illustrate the Dada script by artist Francis Picabia. Free of logic, the film depicts an absurd chase after a runaway hearse.

Maya Deren, Meshes of the Afternoon, USA, 1943,18 min
The making of Maya Deren’s first film was a key point in the advancement of the personal film. It is one of the earliest ‘trance’ films, a style which developed from the earlier European Surrealist films of the 1920s and 30s. Deren creates a subconscious world and portrays a dreamer disturbed by a series of irrational incidents.

Kenneth Anger, Fireworks, USA, 1947, 14 min
Anger made this homosexual psychodrama at the age of 17, using old navy film stock, one weekend while his parents were away from home. It follows a wandering adolescent “drawn through the needle’s eye” of a nightmare dream.

Sidney Peterson, The Lead Shoes, USA, 1949, 15 min
Amid images distorted by anamorphic lenses, mother tries to rescue her son, who is dead in a diving suit. On the fragmented soundtrack a loose jazz group improvises and mixes up two traditional ballads. Sidney Peterson was at the vanguard of the American avant-garde film wave.

Stan Brakhage, Reflections on Black, USA, 1955, 12 min
Stan Brakhage is regarded by many as the master of experimental cinema. In Reflections on Black, the visions of a blind man depict an erotic and aesthetic quest, which transcends the distinction between fantasy and reality. This angst-ridden drama of relationships in a New York tenement building is an early example of Brakhage’s rejection of sound, which he believes interferes with the purity and clarity of vision.

Freeing the Image: Animation and Abstraction

Date: 2 October 1999 | Season: Dublin Fringe Festival 1999

FREEING THE IMAGE: ANIMATION AND ABSTRACTION
Saturday 2 October 1999, at 3pm
Dublin Irish Film Centre

Rhythmus 21, Hans Richter, 1921, 3 min
In his first film, the artist Hans Richter reduced the image to the rectangle, the most basic form, which he uses to subvert the cinematic illusion of depth.

Alexandre Alexeieff & Claire Parker, Night on the Bare Mountain, France, 1934, 6 min
In the 1930s, Alexeieff and Parker developed the pin screen to produce highly original and outstanding animations. 50,000 movable pins were raised and lowered by hand to create light and shade, then photographed in single frame stop motion.

Oskar Fischinger, Komposition in Blau, Germany, 1935, 4 min
Using paper cut-outs and three dimensional objects, Fischinger created one of his most complex films. These inanimate objects march and dance in tight synchronisation to the music of Nicolai.

Norman McLaren, Boogie-Doodle, Canada, 1940, 4 min
A piano boogie by Albert Ammons in interpreted by the prolific Scottish animator Norman McLaren, who made films for both the British GPO Film Unit and the National Film Board of Canada.

Shirley Clarke, Bridges Go Round, USA, 1958, 8 min
Shots of immobile New York bridges are choreographically edited and printed in a way such that they appear to dance. The footage is repeated twice, once with a score by jazz arranger Teo Macero and again with a composition by electronic music pioneers Louis and Bebe Barron (best known for their soundtrack to The Forbidden Planet).

Ian Hugo, Bells of Atlantis, USA, 1952, 10 min
An impressionist cine-poem providing visual accompaniment to “The House of Incest”, which is read by its author Anaïs Nin. The magical fusion of image, text and sound vividly depicts the sunken city of the subconscious. Produced with technical assistance from Len Lye and an electronic soundtrack by the Barrons.

Hy Hirsh, Come Closer, USA, 1952, 5 min
The mysterious Hy Hirsh made a handful of freewheeling abstract compositions throughout the 1950s. Films such as Come Closer were the first to combine electronic imagery from oscilloscopes with photographed or animated footage.

Len Lye, A Colour Box, UK, 1935, 4 min
Master animator Len Lye made several innovative short films for John Grierson’s GPO Film Unit before moving to the US, slowly withdrawing from film to concentrate on making large-scale kinetic sculptures. A Colour Box is contains vibrant imagery painted directly onto the film and accompanies a lively number by Don Barretto and his Cuban Orchestra.

Peter Kubelka, Schwechater, Austria, 1958, 2 min
Originally commissioned as a beer commercial, Schwechater shows young people drinking in a café. The four brief shots which make up the film are metrically edited in a harsh, repetitive manner according to a stylised set of rules to provide a short but intense visual experience.

Harry Smith, No. 7 (Color Study), USA, 1951, 4 min
Legendary alchemist and anthropologist Harry Smith made a series of wonderful animated works. Early Abstractions: No. 7 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.) Smith’s films work best with jazz and bebop soundtracks, but this print is accompanied by a Beatles song.

James Whitney, Lapis, USA, 1963-66, 9 min
James Whitney, one of the pioneers of computer animation, presents a constantly evolving mandala image as a highly psychedelic meditation tool.

Larry Jordan, Duo Concertantes, USA, 1964, 9 min
Larry Jordan became known for constructing exquisite animations from surreal Victorian engravings. This procedure generates radical juxtapositions of scale, spatial relationships and the associative qualities of objects. Rococo imagery mixes with space age symbols as a mystical lady with an orbital head moves through the carnival of life.

Paul Sharits, Piece Mandala / End War, USA, 1966, 3 min
Paul Sharits produced a series of outstanding ‘flicker’ films in which rapid changes of colour result in perceptual hallucinations. Piece Mandala / End War is a concise and remarkable example of his stroboscopic style.

Robert Breer, 69, USA, 1968, 5 min
Robert Breer, whose films present continually evolving ideas in a witty, gentle style, is one of the most original and respected animators of the experimental movement. 69 is a kinetic investigation of geometric forms, building visual tension by rapidly alternating images.

Scott Bartlett, Offon, USA, 1968, 9 min
Scott Bartlett was one of the first filmmakers to utilise the newly developed video technology in his work. Offon evolved in an audio-visual jam session and is a virtuoso display of image and sound processing.

Tony & Beverly Conrad, Straight and Narrow, USA, 1970, 10 min
After making The Flicker which consists solely of alternating black and white frames, the composer Tony Conrad collaborated with his wife Beverly on Straight and Narrow. Accompanied by psychotic music from John Cale and Terry Riley, rapidly changing horizontal and vertical lines produce visual hallucinations of colour and complex patterns.

Thundercrack!

Date: 2 October 1999 | Season: Dublin Fringe Festival 1999

THUNDERCRACK!
Saturday 2 October 1999, at 6:30pm
Dublin Irish Film Centre

Curt McDowell, Thundercrack!, USA, 1975, 158 min

Starring George Kuchar, Marion Eaton and Melinda McDowell

It reads like any classic horror story – a group of teenagers break down in the woods and are forced to spend the stormy night in an eerie, dark house – but from the outset it is clear that this is no ordinary movie, and by the time the sexually active gorilla appears, the audience is clearly in uncharted, perhaps unwanted, territory. This legendary cult film combines George Kuchar’s incredible sense of melodrama with sequences of hard-core sexual fantasy to make the underground’s only pornographic horror blockbuster. Legend tells that Kuchar wrote the script while high on LSD during a thunderstorm in Nebraska, but with true Kucharian pathos it was actually written during a stay at the YMCA in Oklahoma. The film’s director, Curt McDowell, was George Kuchar’s first student at the San Francisco Art Institute, where he still teaches to this day. Having already become a legendary figure in the New York underground film movement, known for classics like Hold Me While I’m Naked and Eclipse of the Sun Virgin, Kuchar moved out to California in 1971 and accepted the teaching post offered to him by filmmaker Larry Jordan. In 1973, McDowell starred in Kuchar’s epic The Devil’s Cleavage, and to return the favour to his favourite student, George wrote, did the lighting and make-up and played a leading role in Thundercrack!. The film was produced by two other students, John and Charles Thomas, partial heirs to the Burger King fortune.

Marion Eaton plays Gert Hammond, sole occupant of the decrepit “Prairie Blossom” mansion house, whose only friend is the bottle since her husband Charlie was devoured by locusts. His remains are kept pickled in the basement, while their sexually deviant son, recently returned from Borneo and suffering from elephantitis of the scrotum, is kept locked in a secret room. On this particular dark and stormy night Gert plays hostess to two sets of strangers – a group of youngsters seek shelter and wind up confronting their own peculiar sexual demons, and later George Kuchar enters as “Bing”, a carnival gorilla keeper who has survived a suicidal attempt to crash his truck. Kuchar’s overwrought melodramatic dialogue which drives the film makes it quite unlike any other movie in the old dark house genre.

While it gained several good reviews on its release, even in staid publications like Britain’s Sight And Sound, Thundercrack! is perhaps just too far out to gain the box office success achieved by similarly trashy features by John Waters, or even Ed Wood. It was a success on the American midnight movie circuit of the late 1970s, but since then has only rarely been seen in cinemas. Only four prints, each of varying lengths, survive and the one presented tonight is the complete 158 minute version. Pushing 3 hours, many people regard the film as an ordeal or endurance test, but sit back and relax (it’s one minute shorter than Eyes Wide Shut!) and enjoy a true, unadulterated Cult Movie. McDowell, Kuchar and leading lady Marion Eaton were reunited for the long and troubled production Sparkle’s Tavern, a less explicit but equally vulgar and deranged film, which took eight years to complete between 1976 and 1984.

Please Note: Thundercrack! is suitable only for mature adult audiences and contains scenes that some people may find offensive.

Going Underground: The New Avant-Garde

Date: 3 October 1999 | Season: Dublin Fringe Festival 1999

GOING UNDERGROUND: THE NEW AVANT-GARDE
Sunday 3 October 1999, at 1:10 pm
Dublin Irish Film Centre

Bruce Conner, A Movie, USA, 1958, 12 min
Assemblage artist Bruce Conner conceived his first film as a loop forming part of a sculpture. A Movie edits together material from various sources to suggest a continuity where one cannot plausibly exist. Widely regarded as one of the masters of experimental cinema, and a direct influence on TV commercials and pop videos, Conner rarely shoots his own material, preferring to montage found or stock footage.

Robert Nelson, Oh Dem Watermelons, USA, 1965, 12 min
A classic underground romp starring the San Francisco Mime Troop and a dozen watermelons. The fruit is put through every possible use and treatment for comic effect and social comment. Minimalist composer Steve Reich arranged the soundtrack.

Ken Jacobs, Little Stabs at Happiness, USA, 1959-63, 15 min
Little Stabs at Happiness consists of several unedited camera poems which depict a wistful nostalgia for times passed. Two sections feature the legendary filmmaker and performer Jack Smith. Ken Jacobs went on to be an important influence on the Structural movement and since the 1970s has developed amazing 3D projection performances known as the Nervous System.

Joyce Wieland, 1933, Canada, 1967, 5 min
Canadian filmmaker Joyce Wieland was one of the pioneers of the Structural film movement. 1933 is a formal fixed view from a window above a street. Harsh and playful, the film has such a timeless quality it looks as though it could have been made over a hundred years ago.

Michael Snow, Standard Time, Canada, 1967, 8 min
Made as a study for <—>, a film that uses an unrelenting ‘back and forth’ pan to further investigate space in the style of his continuous zoom in Wavelength. For Standard Time the camera roams freely around a small room before settling on an unexpected subject.

Jonas Mekas, Award Presentation to Andy Warhol, USA, 1964, 12 min
Mekas, the irrepressible force behind the promotion and preservation of experimental film, is also known for his rapid-fire diary films. Award Presentation to Andy Warhol documents Mekas giving Warhol (and Factory superstars Gerard Malanga, Baby Jane Holzer and Ivy Nicholson) the Film Culture Sixth Independent Film Award. In contrast to his regular shooting style, Mekas, assisted here by Gregory Markopoulos, uses one long take to replicate Warhol’s own techniques.

George Kuchar, Hold Me While I’m Naked, USA, 1966, 15 min
The Kuchar Brothers’ films are no-budget homages to Hollywood, which depict their own mundane lives as glamorous Technicolor dramas. Hold Me While I’m Naked is a hilarious parody of the frustration and loneliness of a Bronx filmmaker who thinks everyone is having a more exciting, sexier time than he.

Anthony Balch, Towers Open Fire, UK, 1963, 10 min
Towers Open Fire is the most accomplished collaboration between Balch and author William Burroughs. Loosely based on the novel “The Nova Express”, it uses film to illustrate the cut-up writing process.

Owen Land (formerly known as George Landow), New Improved Institutional Quality, USA, 1976, 10 min
Land’s films often use humour and formal technique to question the relationship between the filmmaker, the film and the audience. New Improved Institutional Quality is an absurd IQ test which mocks the illusions of cinema by disregarding senses of scale and rational conception.

Bruce Baillie, All My Life, USA, 1966, 3 min
A single pan across a white picket fence on a clear summer’s day is accompanied by the Billie Holliday song. All My Life is a perfect film which condenses a complete statement in a single shot.

Flaming Creatures / Couch

Date: 3 October 1999 | Season: Dublin Fringe Festival 1999

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FLAMING CREATURES / COUCH
Sunday 3 October 1999, at 3:00pm
Dublin Irish Film Centre

Jack Smith, Flaming Creatures, USA, 1962-63, 45 min

Starring Mario Montez, Francis Francine and Sheila Bick.

For many people the words “Underground Film” invoke ideas of sexual depravity and cinematic obscenities, but Flaming Creatures and similar films do not use nudity to titillate, rather to express an innocent freedom, showing new ways of uninhibited personal expression. Jack Smith’s most celebrated flick, and the court proceedings which followed its release, went some way to liberate cinema, breaking down the moral barriers and censorship so that previously taboo subjects could be presented on film.

Flaming Creatures‘ unique style is due to Smith’s Baghdadian visions and his worship of B-movie actress Maria Montez (reincarnated here by transvestite star Mario Montez). After an unreasonably long credit sequence, we hear the invocation “Ali Baba Comes Today!” and receive our first glimpse at the nonchalant limp penises and fondled breasts the film became inadvertently notorious for. There is a mocking advert for heart shaped indelible lipstick, and an earthquake orgy sequence in which the partially robed Superstars of Cinemaroc pose in a series of outlandish tableaux. Dance segments are punctuated by placid, abstract cutaways of materials and painted backdrops. The soundtrack is a meticulously constructed mix of opera, exotica and seemingly banal popular music such as the Everly Brothers’ “Be-Bop-A-Lu-La”. The film achieves its timeless and otherworldly washed-out look due to being shot on outdated black and white film stock and remains a unique masterpiece.

Andy Warhol, Couch, USA, 1964, 51 min

Starring Gerard Malanga, Piero Heliczer, Naomi Levine, Gregory Corso, Allen Ginsberg, John Palmer, Baby Jane Holzer, Ivy Nicholson, Ondine, Peter Orlovski, Jack Kerouac, Taylor Mead, Billy Name and others.

Using Warhol’s early cinematic style of a fixed camera and long take, Couch is an episodic film depicting a succession of visitors engaged in various types of social and sexual intercourse on the Factory sofa. It is truly voyeuristic, with the camera passively staring at the activities. Each individual three minute roll of film comprises of a single shot filmed at 24 frames per second and projected at 16 or 18 fps, effectively slowing down real time. In presenting homosexuality as just one act in a series of normal sexual practises, Warhol makes a subtle attempt at breaking down erotic taboos.

Warhol’s film career evolved in four distinct phases. This first period of silent sequences using minimal composition and a fixed camera view lasted only eighteen months but produced some of his most notorious works such as Sleep, Eat and Empire. Couch came towards the end of this phase, which culminated in the purchase of an Auricon sync sound camera. Using his rapidly growing stable of Factory Superstars to portray scenarios by Theatre of The Absurd veteran Ronald Tavel, Warhol embarked on a series of star vehicles like Vinyl, Hedy and The Life of Juanita Castro featuring Mario Montez, Edie Sedgwick, Gerard Malanga and others. A third phase began with My Hustler and the arrival of Paul Morrissey at the Factory. The films now began to tend towards exploitation and started to become more traditional in narrative form. After the box office success of the innovative double screen epic The Chelsea Girls, the financial potential of filmmaking became apparent. A new wave of superstars including Viva, Ingrid Superstar and Louis Walden took lead roles in Bike Boy, Nude Restaurant and Lonesome Cowboys. Following the assassination attempt on Warhol by Valerie Solanis in 1968, Paul Morrissey took over the Factory Films operation and achieved critical and commercial success with the Flesh, Trash and Heat trilogy starring Joe Dallesandro. Warhol’s filmmaking activities wound down in the mid-1970s after he co-produced Dracula and Frankenstein.

Please Note: These films are suitable only for mature adult audiences and contains scenes that some people may find offensive.

American Underground Primer

Date: 15 October 1999 | Season: Leeds Film Festival 1999

AMERICAN UNDERGROUND PRIMER
Leeds International Film Festival
15 & 16 October 1999

The “American Underground Primer” is intended as a short introduction to the beauty and wonder of American experimental films. The wide-ranging “underground” classification covers many diverse styles including abstract, non-objective, structural, flicker, beat, poetic, personal, animated, diary and low budget films.

Avant-garde film production entered a golden age in 1943 with Maya Deren’s pioneering trance film Meshes Of The Afternoon, and this period of intense production ran through to the mid-1970s when structuralism became the predominant form. During this time numerous advances were made in the theories and techniques of personal filmmaking. These works have proved highly influential to feature film directors from Martin Scorsese through to Harmony Korine, and their inventiveness has informed the methods used in advertisements and pop videos.

With the explosion of “underground” film in the 1960s, the ability to make movies was extended to everyone and during this free thinking period many classics of the genre were made. It should be noted that though these little movies were produced with small or non-existent budgets they are still wildly innovative, entertaining and are eminently watchable by everyone, and should not be restricted to film buffs, students or weirdos.

The American Underground Primer programmes are curated by Mark Webber.

Mark Webber

Ron Rice

The Structuralists

Sonic Celluloid

The American Century Film Programme

In Dreams: Surrealism and Trance

Freeing the Image: Animation and Abstraction

Thundercrack!

Going Underground: The New Avant-Garde

Flaming Creatures / Couch

American Underground Primer

Further Information

Links

Major Projects

All Seasons & Themes