…and BEYOND HOLLYWOOD…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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SURREALISM
Friday 23 October 1998, at 8:30pm
London Barbican Cinema

The development of the personal film in America can be directly traced back to the early expressionist and surrealist films that were made in Europe in the 1920s. The works of Hans Richter, Rene Clair, Man Ray, Luis Bunuel and others inspired the first wave of American experimental film. Beginning in the late 1920s and into the next decade several individuals made independent works that bore little relation to mainstream film production. These include Paul Fejos (The Last Moment, 1927) Robert Florey (The Life and Death of 9413 – A Hollywood Extra, 1928) and Watson & Webber (The Fall of The House of Usher, 1928 and Lot In Sodom, 1933-34). Few films were produced in America or Europe during the Depression though important pioneers such as Len Lye, Norman McLaren, Mary Ellen Bute and Hy Hirsch started work in this period. It wasn’t until 16mm equipment became readily available in the early 1940’s that avant-garde film began in earnest and what is regarded as the first major work was made by Maya Deren in 1943. Meshes Of The Afternoon is a poetic dream-like film in which editing is used to displace the normal sense of time and space. It was photographed by her husband, the Czech filmmaker Alexander Hammid, but is essentially Deren’s vision. The soundtrack was added later by her third husband, Teiji Ito. The film is drenched in symbolism and set a precedent for the trance films that followed in the next decade.

MESHES OF THE AFTERNOON
Maya Deren, USA, 1943, 16mm, b/w, sound, 18 min

“The film is concerned with the interior experiences of an individual. It does not record an event which could be witnessed by other persons. rather, it reproduces the way in which the subconscious of an individual will develop, interpret and elaborate an apparently simple and casual incident into a critical emotional experience.
“The makers of this film have been primarily concerned with the use of the cinematic technique in such a way as to create a world: to put on film the feeling which a human being experiences about an incident, rather than to accurately record the incident.” (from the earliest programme notes written by Maya Deren, 1945)

Maya Deren was born Eleanora Derenkowski in Russia, in 1917. Her family fled to the USA in 1922 and settled in Syracuse, where throughout her time at university she was deeply involved in socialist politics. Subsequently, her interest in poetry and dance, together with meeting her second husband Alexander Hammid, led to the making of Meshes Of The Afternoon. Through the 40’s and 50’s Deren completed five more films – At Land (1944), A Study In Choreography For Camera (1945), Ritual In Transfigured Time (1946) Meditation On Violence (1948) and The Very Eye Of Night (1959) – which continued to develop her fascination with dance, psychology and the dreamworld. She also became a major figure in the promotion of avant-garde film and was the first filmmaker to rent a theatre and show an evening solely of experimental works. This event at the Provincetown Playhouse, New York in 1946, led to Amos Vogel founding Cinema 16 as the first regular showcase for avant-garde film. Deren also promoted experimental film through her writings and by appearing in person at presentations across the United States. Together with Amos Vogel she formed the Creative Film Foundation to promote and assist experimental filmmakers in their work. In 1947, Maya travelled to Haiti to study Haitian Voodoun ritual and wrote the book Divine Horsemen on the subject. A posthumous film of footage she shot of the rituals was completed by Teiji and Cherel Ito in 1977. After returning to New York she became the priestess of a Voodoun cult and the filmmaker Stan Brakhage recalls that the magic and rituals he saw her practise made Rosemary’s Baby seem pale and pathetic by comparison. Stories of Voodoun curses surround the death of Maya Deren after a stroke and cerebral haemorrhage in 1961. Without her pioneering work, American experimental film would not be the same.

Meshes Of The Afternoon was made in Los Angeles and it was here that three more important filmmakers emerged – Curtis Harrington (Fragment of Seeking, 1946) Kenneth Anger (Fireworks, 1947) and Gregory Markopoulos (Psyche, 1947-48). In San Francisco, James Broughton and Sidney Peterson collaborated on The Potted Psalm (1946) before pursuing their own visions in later films. Mother’s Day by James Broughton (1948) is a light hearted satire which takes a perverse backwards glance at a childhood dominated by the mother. Broughton continues to write poetry and make films and has two books of memoirs published by City Lights.

MOTHER’S DAY
James Broughton, USA, 1948, 16mm, b/w, sound, 23 min

“Mother’s Day was not made to please anyone but myself. It was done out of absolute necessity to discover what my inner haunting looked like. It is a capricious but unsparing souvenir of a San Francisco childhood, recollected in the nostalgic style of a cluttered family album. This film exposes the fetishes and enigmas and secret nonsense rituals of a large household dominated by a self-absorbed mother with a taste for exotic hats and stereotyped children.” (from notes by James Broughton as published in Film Culture #61 (1975-76))

The Lead Shoes (1949) was Sidney Peterson’s last independent work before he entered the world of commercial film making. It was made on a shoestring budget with his students at the California School of Fine Arts. The narrative is derived from the combination of two ballads – “Edward” and “The Three Ravens” – which are combined with masterful editing to make an improbable series of dream-like events. Peterson was one of the first to use anamorphic lenses to distort imagery and was a pioneer of cross-cutting on motion. Other notable avant-garde films made by Sidney Peterson include The Cage (1947), Mr Frenhofer and the Minotaur (1948) and The Petrified Dog (1948).

THE LEAD SHOES
Sidney Peterson, USA, 1949, 16mm, b/w, sound, 17 min

“It is vitally important for full appreciation of The Lead Shoes to try to beat it at its own game – to try to follow its many levels of meaning clear through – because only these experiences of mental defeat really open the viewer to the film. Try as you will – and just exactly as in the gambling casino – you cannot win – cannot wring a coherent set of meanings from the film. Sidney has masterfully stacked the deck ! The means, or themes, of The Lead Shoes are deliberately edited at cross-purposes. No simple warp and woof here, but rather one of the most masterful frays of meaning ever created – thus, one of the greatest celebrations of Mystery I’ve ever experienced.” (from a lecture on Sidney Peterson by Stan Brakhage at the Art Institute of Chicago, 1973)

Also working in the same social circle as Kenneth Anger and Curtis Harrington at the turn of the decade was the writer Anais Nin and her husband Ian Hugo, who made his first film Ai-Ye in 1950. His brilliantly coloured films are infused with many superimpositions that yield abstract visions. Bells of Atlantis (1952) is an imaginary look at life in the sunken city and was inspired by the poem “The House of Incest” by Anais Nin, who stars in the film. Technical assistance is provided by the filmmaker Len Lye and the soundtrack is by electronic music innovators Louis and Bebe Barron.

BELLS OF ATLANTIS
Ian Hugo, 1952, 16mm, colour, sound, 10 min

“Titles and narrative, far from helping a cinema audience to understand the theme, often actually limits the field of vision, feeling and comprehension” (Ian Hugo)

“This is the first cinematic poem worthy of that name. The fusion of image, text and sound is so magical that it is impossible to disassociate them in order to explain the favourable reaction of the unconscious.” (Abel Gance)

As the 1950s began, experimental film was undergoing its first real explosion of activity. Willard Maas and Marie Menken had made Geography Of The Body (1943) using dime-store magnifying glasses to make horrifying close-ups of the human anatomy. These two poets became in many ways the godparents of the New York Underground film movement. Their Brooklyn apartment became a focal point for the young filmmakers of the time, who were encouraged and often fed by the elder artists. One such young pioneer was Stan Brakhage who was newly arrived on the East Coast from Denver, by way of San Francisco, where he had made his early films. During this time in New York he stayed with Maya Deren and worked on films with Joseph Cornell. Cornell was an aging artist who assembled magical box constructions that were first exhibited at the gallery of Julien Levy, a dealer who was singly responsible for bringing Surrealist art to the USA in the 1930s. Cornell’s interest in cinema developed from his love of silent film, and he was also exposed to experimental work at weekly screenings at Levy’s gallery. He bought a 16mm projector in 1933 and started to collect footage. His first film was a celluloid collage which became an experimental classic – Rose Hobart (1939) is a re-edited and surreal version of a grade-B jungle flick called East Of Borneo (1931). Ken Jacobs later worked briefly for Cornell and studied Rose Hobart, which lead directly to his own collage film Tom, Tom The Piper’s Son (1969). Cornell made three further montage films which were left unfinished until completed by Larry Jordan in 1970. Jordan also photographed new material under the direction of Cornell, as did Stan Brakhage and Rudy Burckhardt. The films continue the themes of his boxes and often express Cornell’s feeling of loneliness and detachment. A Fable For Fountains is Rudy Burkhardt’s edit of a longer film titled A Legend For Fountains (1957), which was Cornell’s personal favourite. It stars Suzanne Miller, an off-Broadway actress Cornell was obsessed with at the time, who wanders through the rain-splashed streets of Little Italy.

A FABLE FOR FOUNTAINS
Joseph Cornell & Rudy Burckhardt, USA, 1957, 16mm, colour, sound, 7 min

“What Cornell’s movies are is an essence of the home movie. They deal with things very close to us, every day and everywhere. Small things, not the big things. Not wars, not stormy emotions, dramatic clashes or situations. His images are much simpler. Old people in the parks. A tree full of birds. A girl in a blue dress, looking around, in the street, with plenty of time on her hands. Water dripping into the fountain ring. An angel in the cemeteries, sweetest face, under a tree. A cloud passes over the wing of the angel.” (Jonas Mekas in the Village Voice Movie Journal, 1970)

As the 1950s passed by, the new wave of independent filmmakers progressed from surreal imagery to a more personal style before moving off in numerous new directions as Pop Art became the latest thing. During the 1960s Carl Linder developed a very different kind of surreal film making – rooted in Pop, and very much emblematic of the period, his movies are violent and disturbing assaults on the viewer and present things not rationally related to each other in order to provoke new meanings. Whilst celebrated at the time, his films are now marginalized and often overlooked.

WOMANCOCK
Carl Linder, USA, 1966, 16mm, b/w, sound, 16 min

“I try to debase my art, to violate it, to impregnate it. Often you will notice an image which deflates – or a gesture that castrates. The importance of image in my art is in its special nature. It represents neither a tree or any known being – for the image is personal, but personal like the fall of a garment over one’s shoulders. The image can be read but not labelled. It is almost supernatural – it is a totemic, occult and devilish thing. It overpowers with ugliness. And it defends itself like the devil against unconsciousness. Thus, when one of my films ends, it is the final removal of obstruction to this image, however sinister it may be.” (Carl Linder in the New York Film-Makers’ Cooperative Catalogue #4, 1967)

Whilst working with Joseph Cornell in the mid-1960s, Larry Jordan began to create his own phantasmagorical film assemblages. Our Lady Of The Sphere (1969), like several other of his early films, is constructed from cut-outs of Victorian engravings – a procedure that inevitably generates radical juxtapositions of scale, spatial relationships and the associative qualities of objects. The film consists of an introduction and two clear sections. In the first, a boy with a frightened or surprised expression tumbles through a variety of episodes, and in the second a well-dressed lady with a balloon for a head wanders through different scenes.

OUR LADY OF THE SPHERE
Larry Jordan, 1969, 16mm, colour, sound, 10 min

“The basic act in my work is of freeing the objects from the chains of convention and connotation. The whole thing is symbolic of the Surrealist philosophy, which, by definition, is inexplicable. The enigma is quite sacred to the Surrealists like myself who are openly arrogant about symbolism and allegorical inanities. My “characters” don’t portray anything in particular, but they still have ties with the mechanics of this world: a flying mushroom represents in no way a psychedelic connotation; it is a new born giraffe, and moves as such. because it wants to be one, not I.” (Larry Jordan from a written interview conducted by Robert Russett, 1974)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

PLEASE NOTE A CHANGE TO THE ADVERTISED PROGRAMME

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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