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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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