I, An Actress

I, An Actress is a short film made as a kind of screen test for one of filmmaker George Kuchar's acting students during a filmmaking workshop. The student, Barbara Lapsley, is given a page from a ludicrously melodramatic script, set opposite a dummy draped in a coat with a curly wig to represent her husband, and then set loose to read her lines. The whole thing quickly degenerates, however, as Kuchar himself steps into the frame as the director, instructing his actress in how to read her lines and how to act, constantly urging her further and further over the top, towards more and more outrageous behaviors and line readings. Kuchar, nebbishy and overwrought as he careens into the frame after virtually every line from the actress, encourages her to caress her breasts as she acts, or to fall on the floor and kick into the air, or to throw her arms spastically around the dummy and kiss its "shoulder."

He is driving her towards a performance of sheer camp awfulness, in other words, and she's all too eager to go along with it, laughing uproariously, slurring her lines through clenched teeth with a cigarette sticking out from between her lips like a whistle, spitting out the script's hilarious melodramatics with mock venom. "When I cheat it's not for sex, it's for revenge," she sneers, then can't help but giggle. Later, as she falls down at the dummy's "knees," she's even goofier as she barely manages to snarl, "aren't you used to women on their knees, Harold, or are you only used to women on their backs?" It's glorious fun, especially whenever Kuchar's on camera, coaching the girl by acting out her part himself, showing her how to pose seductively, how to fall on the floor, how to eke out every bit of fun from this role. As an actor's workshop, its main message seems to be not to take things too seriously, not to actually worry about talent or believability. Instead, Kuchar keeps casually disrupting whatever hint of artifice there might be in this scene, never allowing the actress to get into the part; she probably doesn't ever get to deliver more than two uninterrupted lines in a row throughout the whole scene. He races around the small set, acting things out, guiding the actress, shouting instructions to the camera operator. The whole thing quickly becomes less a screen test for Lapsley, gaping and giggling at all this chaos, and more a demonstration of the sheer joy of moviemaking, the hands-on fun of the director in dictating what happens on a movie set.


To that end, the cinematography dances and bounces along with Kuchar's frenzied improvisations and instructions. At one point, he tells the camera operator to move in on Lapsley, and the camera frantically zooms in, at first seeming like it's going to center on the actress' bust until the cameraman perhaps realizes, belatedly, that Kuchar meant her face. It's one of many funny, absurd little touches that add a bit of sexual frisson to the film's crude pseudo-documentary aesthetics. Of course, part of Kuchar's coaching is to continually urge his actress into sexually compromising positions, like kneeling beneath the dummy, her head buried in its coat, so that as the camera probes in the composition makes it look like she's giving the dummy a blowjob. Later, the obvious subtext of Kuchar's continued insistence that she lie on the floor and kick up at her husband in anger is that this position will cause her skirt to ride up and her underwear to show. It's all completely ambiguous: is Kuchar exploiting a student, or is she in on the joke, contributing to a sly satire of the ways in which filmmaking is a sexual power struggle in which male directors control and dominate female performers? Certainly, the film's flippant tone, and Kuchar's habit of stepping into the female role himself, posing flamboyantly and feeling up his imaginary breasts, suggests that the latter is the case.

Either way, of course, I, An Actress is a fun, frequently hilarious short spoof, a ridiculous parody of Hollywood moviemaking that turns melodrama into farce, reveling in the nuances that can be suggested through supposedly "bad" acting.

Burial Path/The Process/The Machine of Eden

Stan Brakhage's Burial Path, as its title implies, seems to be concerned with the burying of the dead, with mortality. If it can be said to have a narrative, it's a simple story: finding a dead bird in one's garden and burying it. But Brakhage takes this simple moment, this prosaic story, and expands upon it, free-associating around the ideas and images conjured up by this dead bird. The film opens with an image of a bird, a drawing like those found in science textbooks or bird-watching guides, and then an image of the dead bird itself, lying in the dirt. Then the associations start. The film's structure is like a moment interrupted by a diagrammatic layout of the thought process of the observer. Someone sees a dead bird in a garden, and towards the end of the film the bird is laid to rest, carefully buried beneath a thin layer of soil in the garden by gentle hands. In between, the observer thinks about birds, about death, the mind wandering at will, its musings and meanderings captured by the collage of Brakhage's images.

Frequently, these images seem to be just on the verge of focusing, wavering in this hazy state where it's almost possible to tell what's being depicted, but often the focusing stops there, or regresses into blurriness, not quite revealing the subject of the image. It's as though a memory has hovered on the edge of awareness only to slip away unheeded, the mind moving on to other things. For Brakhage, seeing and thinking are intimately linked. His cinema is all about sensation, about the process of seeing and the ways in which vision is linked to memory, intellect, decision-making, spirituality and mysticism. The film's rapid flood of images is entirely subjective and ephemeral, a loose stream of associations linking the dead bird to a flurry of birds in flight against a green-tinted sky, or a bird carefully pecking at the ground on a bright, summery day. The variety of the images suggests a span of memories, pulled from disparate situations, different emotional tones, different nostalgic moments.

Pale, faded greens, grays and blues are juxtaposed against bursts of bright, fiery red — stop light red, blood red. The film's dominant tone is muted and faded, as though worn away by the distance of the past. The sporadic moments, mostly inserts that last for barely seconds at a time, where brighter colors enter the film are thus shocking and bracing. Branches of trees are blurred into fractal shapes, hinting at clear lines and patterns in the indistinct haze, suggesting that there is a meaning, a way to make sense of the chaos, if only everything were clearer, if only the images would coalesce into some readily identifiable form. Instead, the rush of images continues, sometimes suggesting narrative moments and precise memories, sometimes evoking the concrete shape of the bird that triggered this journey, sometimes simply presenting a fog in which nothing is solid or tangible. At one point, fading out of the fog of distortion, kids in red jackets sit on a low wall, laughing — and, for just a fraction of a second, almost too quickly to be perceived consciously, Brakhage cuts in a very brief glimpse of the same shot unfiltered, unprocessed, the jackets as bright as a fire engine, the colors undiluted by Brakhage's careful process of wearing and muting. It's that longed-for moment of clarity, there and then gone again in the haze of memory, lost in the rapid pace of thought.

In the last minutes of the film, the real fire hinted at earlier makes its appearance, its flames dancing much as Brakhage had made the jittery red and gold blurs of light dance earlier in the film. It is a fire that represents, perhaps, the mortality hinted at by the dead bird, a cleansing flame that seems to be licking up towards the frame, threatening to engulf and erase everything in its fiery climax.


Stan Brakhage's The Process is a flicker film using blocks of solid color flashed up on the screen, sometimes with images lurking within the saturated color, suggesting that if only it were desaturated, a concrete image would reveal itself, the form would be visible. Brakhage is separating form and color into their pure states, abstracting color from tangible referents, treating pure red, pure blue, pure green, as things in themselves, each with its own space, its own frame. These bursts of color are alternated with prosaic images of people walking, talking, driving, their actions unclear, often shrouded in shadows or portrayed in negative, in that ghostly blue-and-black netherworld that further abstracts color from reality.

This flicker creates a feeling of impermanence. Like most flicker films, The Process is meant to be felt, to be experienced, more than actually watched. The solid colored frames create rhythms that are broken up by the actual images, like the appearance of two kids in cowboy outfits drinking sodas, or a pair of candles with their flames gently flickering in the gloom, matching the shimmery pace of the alternating colors. At one point, a figure seems to be emerging from a kind of tunnel, a hallway made to seem vast and deep by the gulf of purple light surrounding it. These images have no meaning, tell no story, present only glimpses of domesticity, play, perhaps ritual. The actual images and the colors are treated equally, as elements in Brakhage's patterns and rhythms, a pure primary color and an image of a child given the same mental and visual weight by the film's structure. Both flicker by, barely glimpsed, an afterimage on the viewer's eyelids.

This ephemeral feel translates to the film as a whole, which seems like a minor experiment from Brakhage, who is as always concerned with sensation and vision. He is playing with the formal contrast between solid colors and the messy, shadowy documenting of reality.


The Machine of Eden is about lighting and about scope, about distance. The film consists largely of landscape shots and skies, with comparatively judicious use of the interior domestic scenes that so often ground Stan Brakhage's films in his daily lived reality. The bulk of the film examines a few locations over and over again: snowy mountain peaks, a stretch of green farmland, a few scraggly-looking autumn trees by the side of a highway. Brakhage's camerawork is by turns graceful and jittery, sometimes resorting to whip zooms that emphasize a detail only to leap back out to the larger image, or incrementally increase the camera's distance from a particular landmark. He films mostly still skies, pregnant with heavy rainclouds or, less often, pale blue and cloudless, though at one point the image abruptly leaps into motion, the clouds spiraling and swirling together the way the paint would flow from frame to frame in Brakhage's later hand-painted works. There's a sense of distance here, of overlooking the beauty of the natural world from an abstracted viewpoint somewhere above, as though the creator implied by the title was observing his craftsmanship, eyeing the tiny details as well as the sweeping grandeur of these mostly unpopulated landscapes.

At times, Brakhage's abstraction transforms the sky into an empty color field, devoid of reference points until, during a pan across the stretch of dark blue, the tips of some even darker hills appear towards the bottom of the frame, finally introducing a hint of context to the image. The same aesthetic defines the domestic scenes, which are focused on the arm of a chair or the suggestion of a person breathing beneath the covers in bed, the only intimation of human presence the steady rise and fall of the fabric in response to the unseen person's respiration. When full human figures appear — a woman and children walking through trees — they're shot from behind, their faces unseen. It's as though Eden, that lost garden of natural beauty, is found wherever people are not, glimpsed when humanity's back is turned. Maybe that's why so many of the images in the film are dark and dim, shot with clouds running overhead, their shadows playing across the white snow of the mountains or bathing the entire landscape in a dark curtain.

Brakhage only sporadically allows the light in, in the form of a blinding orange sun that darts across the blackness of the frame, a sun that refuses to stand still. Elsewhere, a dim landscape is momentarily illuminated as the sun breaks through the clouds, casting its pure white glow over the land, melting through the gloomy and apocalyptic aura suggested by all those stormy vistas. Brakhage also mitigates against the film's deadening, harrowing visual aesthetic with a goofy insert of a goat trotting after its master, its ears flapping in slow motion like miniature wings, as though it's about to take off in pursuit of the flocks of birds that occasionally glide across the film's deep blue skies.

A Grin Without a Cat

Chris Marker's A Grin Without a Cat is a kind of eulogy for the worldwide failures of the revolutionary, socialist spirit that ran through many youth, workers and intellectuals in the turbulent 60s. It is a response to the disappointment engendered by the ultimately ineffectual demonstrations and protests of May '68, in France and elsewhere, and to the increasing corruption of idealistic movements by dictatorial forces, by disillusionment, by acceptance of the status quo. The "grin without a cat" of the title (a substitute for the thematically analogous French play on words of the original title) refers to the empty words that never led to concrete action, to the ideal that never quite corresponded to the reality, to the rhetoric that never got a real mass of people behind it to give it meaning and strength. The missing cat behind the grin is what might have been: the masses that never materialized, the revolution that never came, or that dissipated in the wind as it became clear that the ideals were not being lived up to in reality.

It is a remarkable film, an attempt at telling history from the point of view of the losers for once. History, it is said, is always written by the victors, and never by those who tried and failed, never by those whose ideas were crushed by opposition, or whose struggles were ultimately quashed. Marker, of course, is more interested in those whose stories aren't often told by history, those who dreamed and then were forced to wake up, those who don't get to write their stories in the conventional history books. The three-hour film is divided into two equal halves, which together don't so much relate a chronological history as present the factual events followed by the commentary upon those events, the analysis of what it all means. The film's first half, entitled "Fragile Hands," presents a documentary account, assembled through video records of the late 1960s, of the student revolutions and protests, the air of socialist revolt that crystallized in France, in the US and Latin America and elsewhere, around 1967 and 1968 especially. The "fragile hands" referred to here are the hands of the students, the intellectuals; a popular slogan suggested that the students, with their ideals and their posters, were the vanguard, that they would soon hand on the torch to the workers, who were more robust, more suited to actually carrying out these ideas in practice. This film, perhaps, is a record of how and why this passing of the torch never happened.

To tell his story, Marker strings together various documentary sequences, tying together Maoist China, the Stalinist USSR, the war in Vietnam, socialist organizations on college campuses in France and the US, factory workers and their unions, guerrilla revolutionaries in Cuba and Latin America, and of course the capitalist bosses and political leaders who opposed all this upheaval and change. It is a true radical history of 1967-68, and Marker's purposeful juxtapositions emphasize both how united all these various factions and ideals were in their overall ideology and goals, and how divided they were on virtually everything else. Marker gathers together a cacophony of competing voices, many of whom don't seem entirely sure of what they want or what they're fighting for. The revolutionary certitude of Fidel Castro and Che Guevara is contrasted against the workers in French factories, who went on strike without even knowing what they were demanding, what it was all about. The seeds of discord are apparent already: fellow radicals being accused of counterrevolution, the split between the workers and the students.

Several narrators comment on this action, providing context, naming the prominent people who appear on screen, but the bulk of the narrative is conveyed entirely through the archival material that Marker has gathered together. His achievement here is one of editing, compressing and molding a wealth of material into a coherent narrative, condensing the multitude of viewpoints into cogent oppositions and arguments. Marker seems simultaneously nostalgic for this atmosphere of revolt and radicalism, and all too aware of its failings and limitations. At one point, several workers call for a coherent platform of the left, a set of concrete principles for everyone to rally around. It is clear, from Marker's arrangement of the contradictory demands, dreams and ideas of the people arrayed on the side of radicalism, that this is not forthcoming.


If the first half of this film is an attempt to document and provide a historical overview of this particular fraught moment in time, the second half, entitled "Severed Hands," is Marker's more direct commentary on the defeat of radicalism in the late 1960s. It is clear, almost immediately, that Marker's perspective on this material is going to be more intrusive, in terms of aesthetics and commentary, in this second half. The film's midpoint centers around the Soviet invasion of Prague in August 1968, just months after the student uprisings of May. A voiceover darkly hints at the invasion at the close of "Fragile Hands," and "Severed Hands" opens with a lengthy analysis of the situation. One of the most striking sequences involves Castro hedging his bets on the Soviet invasion, declaring it simultaneously illegal and necessary, perhaps afraid to come out too strongly against his Soviet benefactors. As he speaks, the dissonant synthesizer score, by Italian experimental composer Luciano Berio, nearly overwhelms Castro's words with squealing feedback and threatening bursts of noise, as the image jumps and jitters, worn with age, so that the film seems to be on the verge of tearing itself apart. The score, often present as a subliminal hum in the first half of the film, here emerges more frequently and more violently to the forefront, lending a mood of dissonance and disruption to the images that Marker has assembled.

Later, the names of killed dissidents and activists are read out above a melancholy organ drone, as images of their funerals are collaged together, and the drone eventually coalesces into a burbling, insistent dirge. Marker's perspective on this material becomes more forceful. The subdued air of nostalgia that inflected the first half of the film gives way to anger and disappointment, the feeling that something potentially magical was lost in the aftermath of the hopeful atmosphere of 1967-68. The Prague sequence demonstrates this loss most poignantly, as Marker shows images of a Congress held by the Czech Communist Party in the wake of the invasion, a meeting at which everyone participated rather than just the usual leaders, suggesting a potential new democratic ideal within socialist organizations. Of course, the Soviets subsequently suppressed this Congress, and Marker ironically remarks that these images, these silent and tinted black and white images of people passionately stating their resistance and their desire for a new role in politics, document an event that, according to the official histories, never even occurred. It's an affirmation of one unstated goal of this film, to bring to light the ideas and people forgotten by official history's gloss on the past.

"Severed Hands" is a document of disillusionment as well. One sequence portrays the initial hopefulness about Mao, of all people, as a democratic icon, a new socialist hero in opposition to the now-discredited totalitarianism of Stalin. And then that too fades, as Marker describes the reaction of radicals as some of Mao's inner circle started to disappear, to be denounced as imperialists and counterrevolutionaries, a familiar pattern repeating itself as revolution gave way to repression. This film is all about familiar patterns. In another sequence, in France, Trotskyite agitators get called "fascists" by those socialist workers who oppose them; it's easier to call opponents loaded names than to engage with their ideas. It's the victory of empty words and specialist sects, divisions based only around terminology, factionalism. And the beginning of defeat.

The voiceover describes the complete lack of mass response to the Watergate hearings, and a television montage positions the whole scandal within the context of prosaic entertainment, goofy sitcoms meant to distract from genuine world conditions — an explanation for the absence of public protest surrounding Watergate, the apathy of a public watching their political system unravel on TV, all of it with no more impact than an Archie Bunker show. What a coda to May 1968, from Marker's perspective, and what persuasive evidence that the moment of political upheaval and political engagement represented by that era was at an end. Other political events provide similar reference points: the short presidential tenure of Salvador Allende in Chile (Marker frames this sequence with the first recorded image of Allende as president, and the last); the international mourning over the Israeli hostage tragedy at the 1972 Munich Olympics juxtaposed against the complete lack of international interest in the far bloodier Tlatelolco massacre at the 1968 Mexico City Olympics. By the 70s, history was being written by the victors, not by the students or the revolutionaries or the workers.

Nevertheless, A Grin Without a Cat doesn't offer up an entirely hopeless farewell to the era of political protest. Instead, Marker seems to be encouraging a movement away from the ideal, towards the concrete. He presents an anecdote about a Japanese town where a company poisons the water supply with mercury waste, and accompanies the story with harrowing images of mentally damaged young men, drooling and heavy-lidded, deformed by this industrial abuse. The way forward, perhaps, is in such local battles, and Marker celebrates the fierce reaction to this situation, the enraged protest against the company responsible. In such localized, clearly focused fights, the amorphous revolutionary, anti-establishment fervor of May '68 finds its clearest, most potent expression. When Marker shows a Japanese mother whose children are dead, raging against a flustered business executive, it's obvious that he's juxtaposing her with the radicals and revolutionaries who had appeared elsewhere in the film. She has no ideology, no slogans or ideals, only a genuine and visceral reaction to the unfairness of the system she lives under. This is perhaps the source of the hesitant optimism in the film's coda, written by Marker in 1993, when he re-edited and restructured his original 1977 film, in which he comments on how things have changed and stayed the same in the years since he made this film.

Marker consistently looks to animals for inspiration. Of all the assembled heads of state at the Shah of Iran's grand festival at Persepolis, the voiceover says, earlier in the film, "compare their expressions with the clear eye of the cat... the cat is never on the side of power." There's a freedom, an innocence and simplicity, in the animal, that Marker clearly respects. So it's appropriate that in the film's coda, he locates a metaphor for radicalism in the use of helicopters to slaughter wolves, thinning the herd with rifles, as originally documented at the end of the 1977 version of the film. In 1993, Marker retains some hope about the future of protest and resistance: fifteen years later, he notes, some of those wolves are still alive.

Desert

Desert is a phenomenally sensual, evocative film from Stan Brakhage. It is an examination of literal and metaphysical deserts, extracting the essence of the desert and exploring both the physical place and its abstract equivalent — red-hot sun, hazy heat-blurring, hallucinatory mirages, wavery color fields that suggest the horizon line dividing sand from sky. It is a film about deserts both external and internal, in keeping with Brakhage's insistence on the continuity between sensation, mental processes and the world outside. The film opens with images that are defined as desert-like only in relation to the film's title, scratched into celluloid in Brakhage's distinctive jittery handwriting just moments before. Without that context, there would be little suggestive of the desert about these abstracted fields of brown and gray, these Rothko-like color fields, divided by horizon lines that seem to shimmer in the distance. A red-brown haze is complicated by a pattern of cracks and cobbles that evoke images of dry desert hardpan. A dried-out, bare bush appears, with its spiky branches sticking up into the sky, looking like bones, a rib cage stretched out on the desert's empty ground.

This film is all about the landscape of the desert, and more a mental landscape than a tangible one. It feels like the desert. Watching it, one can feel the heat, can feel it in Brakhage's images of a shimmery yellow sun hovering in a red, gritty sky, the red thick with clusters of film grain. The landscape below is black and silhouetted, this dark land of hills and long dry plains stretched out beneath what seems to be an eternal red sky. At one point, Brakhage captures the sunset and, by placing his finger partially in front of the camera lens, distorts and warps the sun, compressing it into a flattened oval, expanding and contracting in the haze of the twilight hour. These kinds of distortions are at the heart of the film, distortions that evoke a kind of ideal desert, romanticized and haunting, the sun always in the process of setting, the land always bathed in deep shadows, the heat creating mirages that waver unpredictably at the edges of the frame, like the shot of what seems to be children playing, a flurry of unclear movement out of focus in the background. The children seem like ghosts, fuzzy afterimages that shift unpredictably in and out of view, only half-existing at the fringes of perception.


At other moments, Brakhage's images suggest a desert found within civilization: light flares shifting within an abstract space, occasionally taking form just enough to suggest that Brakhage was filming cars moving along a highway, the sun or their headlights creating reflections and star-like bursts in the grainy clouds. Brakhage captures the loneliness, the emptiness of the desert, the feeling of one lone leafy tree — an incongruous palm tree, symbol of fertility and tropicality, made to seem desert-like in its isolation — rising up out of the bare, dark hills. This is a very existentialist movie, because the desert seems to inspire such existential thoughts; there is something about the isolation of the desert that provokes the kind of bleak romanticism that Brakhage conveys so powerfully here. His images lack the clarity of specificity, though the film was shot on a trip to Southern California. There is no suggestion that this is a road trip movie, a document of a particular place or time. It is instead general, not to say generic. It is timeless rather than of its time.

In fact, Brakhage's actual locale, the place where the movie was shot, was not the desert, was in fact a tame suburban area, as seen occasionally in the shots of parking lots and highways. Brakhage is creating a mental desert out of nothing, shaping the space around him into an ideal desert where none existed in reality. Many of the film's textured shots might be interiors, even, shot out of focus in order to make them indistinct and abstract, so that they might be merged into Brakhage's desert fantasy.


This is all leading towards the film's striking final image: the sun setting rapidly and, at the last moment, transforming into a blurred purple cross of light suspended just above the horizon, a moment of profound transcendence and beauty. It's a trick of light, the way the sun morphs and shifts over the course of its descent, culminating in this spiritually suggestive final image, but then these kinds of tricks of light are never just that for Brakhage. An illusion, a manipulation, is never just an illusion to Brakhage, who sees these evocative images as truthful representations of internal, if not external, realities. If a faked, manipulated desert landscape suggests spiritual inquiry and heightened emotional states, Brakhage's warped images will privilege that subjective perspective over the more objective depiction of actual physical landscapes.

Aleph/Chumlum

Aleph, the only film made by Beat artist Wallace Berman, is a frantic collage that represents, in a brisk 9 minutes, a kind of hyper-speed gestalt vision of the 1960s and all that that wild, tumultuous decade represented. Berman, a poet and artist, worked on Aleph as a kind of private journal, continuously altering it and adding to it, collaging together the images that fascinated him and subjecting them to a process of degradation, layering and frantic editing so that each image is merely a momentary flash before the eyes, flickering into motion and then vanishing within the deluge of visual stimuli that Berman stitches together for this film. He apparently uses newsreels, still photos, home movies, advertising cutouts, and any other visual material he can get his hands on, building upon these varied foundations a powerful document of 60s culture.

The haunting beauty of this film arises from the impression that it is constantly on the verge of falling apart, or that perhaps Berman assembled it from exhumed materials encrusted with the wear of the ages. The film crackles and pulses with the signs of film degradation: burns, brown-hued scars and scratches, black lines shimmering across the frame. To this, Berman adds his own defacements, layering on additional colors and superimposing text — flashing across the frame too fast to read, mostly composed of Hebrew writing and other glyphs anyways — on top of the rapidly moving stream of images. These images originated from a variety of sources, ranging from private, intimate footage to the public appearances of celebrities, radicals and world figures. Bob Dylan, Mick Jagger, the Pope, pulp magazines, softcore porn, home movies, Alice in Wonderland, a snatched shot of a movie theater marquee playing It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. The 60s vibrate and pulse through Berman's film, in every frame: all the chic 60s girls, lounging around in long dresses or in the nude, practicing free love; the radicals reading books with delicate wire glasses looking out-of-place on their hard faces; Dylan looking young and baby-faced the way he did on the cover of his eponymous first album; Jagger, as always, stretching those rubbery lips to sing or shout; sober, suited politicians in clusters, caught from above so their bald spots show. All of this is contained by Berman's film, appearing and then disappearing, returning in subtle rhythms.

The film has something of the aesthetic of an old photograph, decaying and rotting with age. Figures and faces seem to emerge from an encrustation of rust, and the images are frequently textured, thickly layered with paint and markings and scratches across the emulsion of the film. The sheer variety of the images, and the pace of the editing, gives the film a surging forward momentum, a vibrancy that captures the sense of freedom and enthusiasm running through this era. And yet at the same time the whole thing seems already retrospective, an artifact of the past, assembled throughout the peak of the 60s and yet already with a built-in nostalgia in its half-obscured images, a sense of looking back at a moment already lost. There is, in this film, a nostalgia for a time that had not even yet ended when this film was made, as though Berman already sensed the import of this era and the ways in which it would someday be eulogized and remembered. It is thus by turns a haunting film, a joyous one, an aggressive one, cycling through moods and impressions as quickly as its images flicker by.

This impression is enhanced by the film's lack of a proper soundtrack. It is totally silent, though when showing it privately, which was pretty much the only way Berman ever did show it, he often accompanied it with a random record. The film is more or less a very radical home movie, intended for home viewing, constantly subject to change, always being reworked or paired with whatever music was at hand. It is a film very much alive with the circumstances of its own construction, and with the spirit of the era captured so memorably in its torrent of images.


Ron Rice's Chumlum is one of those films in which the conditions of its construction are integral to the experience of watching it. It is a record of a cadre of creative people having fun on camera, playing dress-up, dancing, flirting, lazing around. The film's cast gathers together a roster of figures from the Warhol Factory and the underground arts and film scenes in New York: Beverly Grant, Francis Francine, Mario Montez (star of Warhol's infamous Mario Banana), Gerard Malanga, Joel Markman and filmmaker Jack Smith, whose film Normal Love was the inspiration for Chumlum (Rice made the short while working with Smith to assemble props for the latter's film). This ensemble cast is nothing unusual for the era, a sign of the film's emergence from this prolific and fertile period in 60s New York when seemingly everyone was working with everyone else.

Rice uses these familiar faces and personae as fodder, as a kind of foundation from which he builds his densely layered compositions. The use of multiple overlays and superimpositions means that no image, no performer, stands on its own, no image exists in isolation. Instead, multiple images are used for their textural properties: a burst of color here, a fluid movement there, a flicker of reflected light there, and somewhere in the background the dull blue flicker of a nighttime horror scene, a mummy shambling after its intended victim through the somber dark. Furthermore, Rice frequently uses semi-transparent materials within the individual images, adding to the sense of fragile, gauzy overlays. The actors wrap themselves in shawls and sheets, the thin material acting in much the same way as Rice's superimpositions, rendering multiple layers within the image, creating compositions where one is always looking through something. A woven cot, with its honeycomb of empty spaces between its threads, is overlaid with a thin fabric sheet, and then incorporated as one onion-skin layer within Rice's dense overload.


This film is dazzling and sensual, reveling in the gender-ambiguous piles of flesh and translucent fabrics. At times, the frame becomes so cluttered, so dense with multiple layers, that it's nearly impossible to separate out the constituent parts from one another. The individual images are often blurred and swirled together into collages of stray limbs and colorful patterns, chaotic and beautiful pile-ups that completely confuse things. It's disorienting and reduces the human form to one more abstract component in Rice's hodge-podge compositions, which blend textures and exotic elements, throwing together Eastern garments and decorative flourishes of various origins. This catholicism is also reflected in the clanging, bell-like music by Angus MacLise, the onetime Velvet Underground drummer who left the group before they ever recorded their first album, and whose Oriental-influenced music, with its elements of repetition and minimalism, provides just the right soundtrack to Rice's fantasia: stripped-down and destabilizing, with a sound that just barely hints at exotic lands and foreign musics in its ringing tonalities.

Chumlum is a viscerally exciting, visually stimulating short that uses the formal properties of layering and multiple exposures to create a film in which multiple narratives seem to be happening at once, in which pirates and Middle Eastern belly dancers coexist within the same space as New York bohemians and cross-dressers. Rice co-opts the imagery and props of various genres and traditions, all of it accumulating into a multi-layered pastiche that suggests all stories without actually telling any of them.

Two 1960s avant-garde shorts

Storm de Hirsch's Peyote Queen is as hallucinatory and strange as its title suggests, an experimental film in which de Hirsch is continually playing havoc with the frame, with the basic unit of film. De Hirsch was originally a poet, and surrounded by the inspiration of other 60s avant-garde filmmakers, she decided that she wanted to become a filmmaker as well. Her work is thus defiantly amateur in its origins, and her outsider's perspective on the medium is apparent in her non-conventional approach to the film strip and the frame. Like so many other avant-garde filmmakers of the era, coming to film from other media and other arts, she makes a virtue of her amateur status. She chops frantically away at the surface of the film, allowing jagged holes of white to cut through the featureless black sheets of an unexposed film strip. The film opens with white specks (actually holes punched directly into the film stock) flickering in time with the soundtrack's congo drums, like footprints appearing and disappearing in unstable sand. The ragged clusters of white splotches pulse to the beat of the drums, alternately matching the rhythms of the music and syncopating with the drumming.

Then de Hirsch introduces her rough animations into the film, a rapidly flickering collage of images that are here and then gone within the space of a single frame, a fraction of a second. These images flash across the frame, suggesting various shapes and forms without ever quite settling into any one definitive, stable state. Crude drawings of breasts mutate into blinking eyes and then back again, or the form loosens altogether so that the lines simply ebb and peak like waves. Fish and lips and flowers and boats also appear from out of the frenzied mash of images, which at other times is simply a scratchy abstract grid. The film's animation builds continuities between the female form and various other objects and geometric forms. In this way, de Hirsch abstracts the curves and shapes of anatomy into this fluid jumble of lines and designs, suggesting that the form of the body should be appreciated aesthetically just like any other artistic form.

This sensibility is carried over when, after the initial barrage of frenzied scratchings and scrapings, de Hirsch switches over to photographic imagery, a switch that's signaled by a ferocious burst of pure color, a few frames of layered rainbow hues seeming to scroll vertically down the screen. De Hirsch then divides and subdivides the frame with a kaleidoscope of colorful, constantly-in-motion images. The frame is segmented into four squares, each of them showing more or less the same thing, slightly out of sync so that the flashing lights and colors create dazzling effects as different corners of the frame shine or glisten with reflected light. This division creates tensions and frictions, balancing between stasis and motion; at times, one half of the image will be at rest while the other half frantically jiggers and swirls about. De Hirsch uses a simple handheld fragmented mirror, divided into trapezoidal segments with a circle at its center, and this filters and warps the image, at one point turning a woman's face into a circle of eyes, insectoid and clustered together. De Hirsch has a seemingly instinctive feel for such bizarre images, generated through disarmingly concrete and even prosaic means. She makes no attempt to obscure the fact that this nightmarish multi-eyed demon woman is actually just someone playing with a little knick-knack.

The film's visceral, disorienting style is matched by its soundtrack, which shifts between multiple modes to match its visual transitions. The circularly repetitive, tribalistic congo drum rhythms of the opening minutes eventually give way to a lo-fi, exuberant boogie-woogie, before returning to the drums, this time even more explicitly tribal with the addition of chanting. This ritualistic music lends a mood of near-spiritual catharsis to de Hirsch's images, which are simultaneously aggressive and introspective, representing subjective inner states with raw physicality.


Bruce Baillie is an experimental filmmaker and a founder of the San Francisco-based avant-garde distribution cooperative Canyon Cinema. The documentary Here I Am was made for Canyon's newsreel program, which documented the kinds of local issues and institutions not often covered by conventional news. Baillie's film is about the East Bay Activities Center, "a day program for emotionally disturbed children." It's a direct, low-key documentary, a simple, wordless chronicle of the school and some of its students. There is no narration, no commentary, no text, just images of these children as they play, interact and gather around their teacher for lessons that go unheard. The film's soundtrack is mostly composed of the children's laughter and cries, not synchronized with what's actually onscreen but recorded separately and then overdubbed, creating a generalized atmosphere of children in action. Baillie combines this sound with the droning, melancholy cello of Eda Borgfeldt, which occasionally drifts to the foreground or appears as a faint hint beneath the clamor of the classroom.

This is an utterly straightforward, un-ornamented documentary; its title, to some extent, is its whole point, and the images are merely an emphatic exclamation point to the message sent by those three words. It's Baillie's way of allowing these marginalized, oft-forgotten kids to say, I am here, I'm a person too, I deserve some attention too. That's what emerges, again and again, in Baillie's offhand images from the schoolyard and the classroom, where he captures these kids playing and enjoying themselves. The kids sometimes seem aware of the camera, curious about its presence, staring inquisitively into its lens, but at other times they simply go about their business, doing normal kid activities.

Baillie's cinematography is appealingly rough, lending an unassuming kind of poetry to these images of children with various unidentified mental and developmental disorders. The film opens with a series of tracking shots along foggy streets, thick with gray smoke, the sky darkened with clouds, as the cello's drone further adds to the oppressive atmosphere. From these moody, foggy opening credits, Bailie pans down from an overcast sky to a child playing on a swingset, her compact body propelling forward into the frame as the cello is replaced by the chirps of birdsong. Although the film is framed by images of fog and darkness, in between, the actual images of the children are bright and even cheery. The children sometimes seem upset or confused, and Baillie's camera captures these emotional interludes in tight closeups, but more often they seem carefree, simply running about and playing like any other kid would. It's this sense of normality that is at the heart of the documentary.

Baillie often films from unusual perspectives where something is jutting into the frame: some branches and flowers from a bush, the chain of a swingset, a metal bar, a rope, the corner of a building. Bailie often seems to be watching from an awkward position like this, close to these children but not really intimate with them, even when his closeups capture their unfathomable expressions. This gives the film an off-the-cuff quality, a casualness in its presentation that prevents it from ever seeming like a preachy "message" movie. Instead, it's simply a minor document of a place and time, of some children who need special care and special attention in order to find their place in the world.

---

This post is a contribution to For the Love of Film: The Film Preservation Blogathon, which is hosted by the great bloggers at Ferdy On Films and Self-Styled Siren. This is a fundraising blogathon for the Nation Film Preservation Foundation, who do the very important work of preserving the heritage and history of cinema by preventing older films from sliding into oblivion. Go donate to them now. Here's some information about the organization and this blogathon's purpose:

The National Film Preservation Foundation is the independent, nonprofit organization created by the U.S. Congress to help save America’s film heritage. They work directly with archives to rescue endangered films that will not survive without public support.

The NFPF will give away 4 DVD sets as thank-you gifts to blogathon donors chosen in a random drawing: Treasures III: Social Issues in American Film, 1900-1934 and Treasures IV: American Avant Garde Film, 1947-1986.

The two films I've written about above were both preserved, like so many other avant-garde films, by Anthology Film Archives in New York, and both films appear on the Treasures IV set mentioned above. This essential set would virtually not have been possible without Anthology. This organization, founded by Jonas Mekas, Stan Brakhage, Peter Kubelka, and P. Adams Sitney in 1969, is one of the most important institutions for avant-garde cinema in the United States. It is a great theater — constantly screening a rotating repertory program of classics and obscure experimental films alike — but even more importantly it is dedicated to preserving avant-garde films that would otherwise be lost and forgotten forever. And it is especially difficult to preserve the legacy of avant-garde cinema, which is invisible to most people these days. These films were made outside of any established film industry, often by solitary artists working with extremely minimal means, and the resulting roughness and imperfection of the films themselves is intrinsic to their special qualities. It is thus a special challenge to preserve these films without extinguishing their unique fire. Organizations like Anthology, and like the NFPF, are dedicated to just that purpose. Please support the invaluable work they do.

Lights

[This is part of a series of posts in which I explore the work of the Austrian DVD label Index DVD. This company has released a great deal of valuable European experimental cinema onto DVD, naturally focusing on the Austrian underground but occasionally branching out as well. Index's DVDs are distributed in the US by Erstwhile Records, so anyone intrigued by Index's catalog should take a look and support the fine work both these companies are doing for obscure and avant-garde cinema. The short film discussed below is one of four included on Index's DVD of the documentary Notes on Marie Menken; that film is reviewed here and the other shorts are reviewed here.]


Marie Menken's Lights is a film of such joy, such pure sensual beauty, that it is breathtaking and overwhelming. In just seven minutes, with a breakneck sequence of abstract, colorful images of lights floating in a black nighttime field, Menken delivers an intoxicating visual experience. It's an abstracted vision, like the work of Stan Brakhage, a celebration of light and color in which each frame is alive with furious scribbles of blurred light and tangled rainbow beams. It's as though Menken is drawing with light by shaking her camera, unleashing small hash marks of white light and amber curlicues that twist around each other. Through Menken's expressive stylization, the marks and lines of these lights become a form of handwriting, an abstract language inscribed in the twists and turns of motion-blurred neon, car brake lights and Christmas decorations. The film was assembled over the course of three years, during which Menken shot Christmas window displays and other seasonal decorations, working mostly late in the night, when she could be alone in the darkness with these vibrant beacons.


The resulting film is truly a visceral experience like no other, matched only by the best of Brakhage's light works. Menken molds and shapes light into alien structures, destabilizing the familiar into a blur of fleeting sensory impressions. The film opens with shots of multi-colored Christmas lanterns hanging in a tree. Menken's camera at first patiently pans across these lights, capturing their vibrant glow, their definite shapes: bell-like cups when viewed from the sides, becoming sun-shaped circles with white-hot centers when viewed from below. Then her camera begins to shake, to disrupt the stability of these images, transforming the concrete into the ephemeral. Little white dashes dance across the frame, moving parallel to the motion of the camera, sometimes darting sideways across the frame, sometimes falling like rain. Menken's moving camera creates designs by stretching out a single point of light into a line, as though tracing with a white pen across a black sheet of paper.

From this dazzling abstraction, Menken steps back to reveal the source of these light patterns, as she twirls her camera around to make the giant Rockefeller Center Christmas tree do a 360-degree turn through the night, and then sets off on a whirlwind tour through the city's streets. Everywhere, there is light. A church is defined by the lights at its borders, the black foundation of the building seemingly a negative space surrounded by crisp rows of circular lights. Menken captures momentary hints of religious sentiment amidst all this bombast: a cross in lights, glowing palely in utter darkness, a rapid tracking shot across a nativity scene where Mary and the wise men are bathed in a gaudy Las Vegas neon aura emanating from somewhere nearby. These are ephemeral reminders of the origins of this celebration, the reason for all this festivity and brilliance. Blink, and you'll miss it: a recurring theme in Menken's fast-paced, sensually exciting work, of which this film is quite possibly the apex.


From here, she's back out into the streets: images of cars, their brake lights glowing red, set off against blue dots the origins of which are more obscure. And then she shatters even this hint of the familiar, further blurring the speeding traffic into curving, bouncing lines, a trail of red lights tracing across one side of the frame with shaky white lines staggering across the other. As the pace picks up, Menken ventures further and further into abstraction, layering multiple exposures and reducing all the light and motion to cryptic calligraphic marks in the darkness, squiggles and check marks and amorphous suggestions of form. Tight clusters of these marks seem to dance across the frame, as though performing some arcane choreography, a Busby Berkeley number as performed by a chorus line of neutrons and electrons, a subatomic musical extravaganza taking place in a silent vacuum.

Increasingly, Menken abstracts the imagery even as she incorporates more recognizably photographic exposures. A star field in which gray scratched lines hover like graphite scrapings or stalks of spiky grass. A skeletal outline of a metal globe, gray spirals, splotches of red like blood or paint, dots of light in the dark. A long view of the city skyline from across the water, with strange UFO-like bursts of light floating in the darkness.


These images are haunting and beautiful, and Menken's approach makes Lights a kind of sensory fever dream. She makes these external phenomena — the properties of light as it is refracted and processed by her camera — internal and introspective, dream images dancing across the inside of the viewer's closed eyelids. It is a deeply subjective perspective, utilizing objective phenomena, like the way light behaves when it is photographed in certain ways, to create a complex inner landscape. And in its off-kilter beauty, it is a surprisingly moving film, discovering pathos and warmth in its brilliant abstractions. I was originally planning on writing about this film as part of yesterday's post about four other Menken shorts, but I thought it deserved its own separate tribute. Plus, as you can no doubt see, I just couldn't stop grabbing screen captures; the visual imagination and beauty of this film is simply inspiring.

Four Marie Menken shorts

[This is part of a series of posts in which I explore the work of the Austrian DVD label Index DVD. This company has released a great deal of valuable European experimental cinema onto DVD, naturally focusing on the Austrian underground but occasionally branching out as well. Index's DVDs are distributed in the US by Erstwhile Records, so anyone intrigued by Index's catalog should take a look and support the fine work both these companies are doing for obscure and avant-garde cinema. The short films below, with the exception of Go! Go! Go!, are included on Index's DVD of the documentary Notes on Marie Menken; that film is reviewed here and Menken's other short Lights is reviewed here.]


Marie Menken was an influential early pioneer in experimental film, a key figure in the development of the American avant-garde. Visual Variations on Noguchi, originally made in 1945, was her first film, a study of a set of sculptures by Isamu Noguchi. These sculptures are smooth, rounded abstract forms, and Menken impressionistically runs her camera along the curved surfaces of these sculptures, infusing movement into the static forms through her explorations. She examines the surfaces and shapes of these sculptures in patient pans across their surfaces, occasionally honing in on the detail of a textured curve, and montaging everything together with a loose, ragged aesthetic that contrasts against the fluidity of the forms. The jump-cuts and quick montage of Menken's aesthetic creates a jagged impression that works against Noguchi's amorphous blobs and graceful limb-like extensions.

Menken also added, for a 1955 re-envisioning of this film, a bold soundtrack created by Lucia Dlugoszewski. This clanging, clattering free improv is composed of pounding piano, trashy drums, scraped string feedback and occasional outbursts of talking, listing off names. The jittery, abrasive music clashes against the smoothness of the sculptures, further adding to the film's sense of opposites careening off one another. Menken made this new soundtrack version the definitive cut of her film, and with good reason. The music is one more contrasting element in a film where everything clashes against everything else: Menken is bringing together different aesthetics and sensibilities into a single space, allowing diverse artistic ideas to collide and enrich one another. Thus the simple, graceful forms of Noguchi's sculptures ricochet against Menken's rapid editing and the cacophony of the score. It is this sense of opposition, of contrast, that lends weight to Menken's precise, intimate examination of the sculptures.


Glimpse of the Garden is a simple, unassuming observational film. In this brief film, Marie Menken carefully probes the layers of a lush garden, shifting from the macro to the micro and then back again. She collages together images that nudge into the hidden details within the greenery that surrounds her. Extreme closeups of garden plants and insects alike reveal details and textures, thin hairs, protrusions, ridges and stalks that transform this hidden micro world into a whole universe. She accompanies these images with a soundtrack consisting of processed bird and insect noises: reedy trills vibrating in clustered rhythmic pulsations. The slightly off-kilter bird calls resonate with the imagery, in which natural elements are made to seem strange and alien, as Menken peers into the center of a flower or pans her camera up a stem, examining the bumps and grooves in the plant's flesh.

As always in Menken's cinema, the editing is crucial to the effect. Her sense of pacing is intuitive, as she delivers a constant barrage of colorful, sensuous imagery, shifting from streams of foliage that rush by so fast that individual images can hardly be grasped, to moments when she slows down to observe the flowers more closely. She also delivers a gorgeously dark, haunting final shot of what appears to be a watery midnight-blue sky rippling above a black filigree of tree branches. It's a mysterious, beautiful image, a fitting capper to a film that unexpectedly locates the mystery and strangeness within the ordinary. The film has the air of a home movie, a stripped-down and simple work, and this casual, amateur mood lends it a certain laidback charm that makes its more abstract imagery all the more striking.


Arabesque for Kenneth Anger is Marie Menken's tribute to her fellow avant-garde filmmaker, Kenneth Anger, whose influence obviously looms large over this expressive, evocative short. The film, shot in a Moorish palace in Spain over the course of an afternoon, is concerned, as Anger always was, with light and color, and especially with the ways in which forms could be made to interact with the tempos of music and cutting. The film is set to a lively score by composer Teiji Ito, who combines Spanish guitar and castanet motifs with Japanese-influenced reeds, resulting in a driving, vivacious score that's perfectly suited to Menken's imagery. Although the score was made later, to fit the short, the film sometimes seems to move with the tempo of the music, as when the circular ripples in a puddle dance to the beat of the snapping castanets. Even better is a wonderful section where the film takes on the stuttery rhythm of the percussion as the frame seems to jump and skip, giving the illusion of a sideways motion through a courtyard but in fact repeatedly returning to the same spot again and again. The black edges of the frame take on the function of cutaway walls, so that the viewer is faked out into believing that the camera is moving from one room to the next. It's a compelling image of being in constant motion while never quite going anywhere; the camera is essentially running in place.

With its driving rhythms and free-associative editing, the film is a fitting tribute to Anger, who Menken also nods to with repeated shots of fountains, the streams of water glistening and letting off a crystalline spray of droplets. It's an obvious visual homage to Anger's gorgeous Eaux d'artifice, in which blue-tinted images of a garden and its fountains create a sumptuous tribute to light reflecting off of water. Elsewhere, Menken intersperses a rapid time-lapse montage of gargoyle heads, and picks out random architectural features, lingering over the curves and textures of the concrete. Menken loves these details; she seems to think of "detail" in the artistic sense of the word, presenting a fragment of an arch or a roof's peak as a detail selected from a larger canvas. She explores these fragments as representative of larger forms and as textural, aesthetic forms to be admired in their own right as well.

Menken's talent lies in her mastery of editing, of pacing. Her images move and breathe, achieving a delicate balance between static observation and visceral kinetic flow. At one point, she lingers on an image of star-like lights floating in a field of black, swirling with that swoony, choreographed quality that infuses Anger's short experiments like Puce Moment. It's an abstractly beautiful shot, and a fitting tribute to Anger.


Go! Go! Go! is a time-lapse film shot in New York City, a familiar subject that Marie Menken infuses with enough energy and vitality to make it somehow feel fresh. Her camera races along through the city streets, in tracking shots that seem to have been taken from out the window of a moving car. So it's all about travel, about motion, and in terms of subtext, about how fast it all goes by, how fleeting everything in life is, how ephemeral each moment, each sensation, can be. She shows an entire graduation ceremony massively sped-up, with endless processions of black-robed students marching across the frame like lemmings, disappearing at the edge. This manic parade becomes poignant as the students stutter across the frame and seem to vanish at the edge, fading out of existence as though a life lasts only the width of a film cel; blink and you'll miss it.

Some of the film's best scenes show sped-up processes from a distance so they take on qualities of abstract design: cars and pedestrians locked into traffic patterns at a city intersection, industrial vehicles moving crates across a shipping yard, boats tracing semicircular paths on a roiling sea. Shot from above, with everything moving so fast, the cars and boats are geometric forms rather than tangible objects. As Menken continues to explore the city at hyper-speed, her frantically edited montages acquire an odd poignancy, as she accentuates the rapid pace of life. In a way, her time-lapse film mimics the form of memory, the way the past is just this indistinct blur with certain moments sticking out with utter clarity. To that end, Menken captures a beach scene where the shake and jitter of her camera eliminates individual personalities and faces, leaving only the sensual impression of youth, lust, vibrancy, play, desire: the essence of a summer day distilled in blurred images of bare limbs and bright skies and sand.

Notes On Marie Menken

[This is part of a series of posts in which I explore the work of the Austrian DVD label Index DVD. This company has released a great deal of valuable European experimental cinema onto DVD, naturally focusing on the Austrian underground but occasionally branching out as well. Index's DVDs are distributed in the US by Erstwhile Records, so anyone intrigued by Index's catalog should take a look and support the fine work both these companies are doing for obscure and avant-garde cinema. I have also reviewed some of the short films included as extras on this disc, here and here.]


Marie Menken's importance to the early American cinematic avant-garde is often forgotten today. She was an abstract painter, a filmmaker, an inspiration to Jonas Mekas and Stan Brakhage, an important figure on the fringes of Andy Warhol's large entourage, appearing in his films and documenting some of the Warhol group's activities. Martina Kudlácek's documentary Notes on Marie Menken probes this rich legacy, examining Menken's life and art through her films and the memories of those who knew her. Menken was a very diaristic filmmaker, crafting small, nearly incidental works of observation and prosaic activity, chronicling the day-to-day and the ordinary with a sensibility that discovered surprise and beauty in such conventional sights as a flower garden, a sparkle of light off a shiny object, a person's face. Kudlácek pays tribute to this sensibility by making her own film a reflection of, a response to, Menken's own methods. In sensuous black and white images, Kudlácek interviews those who knew Menken: Mekas, Kenneth Anger, to whom Menken dedicated a film, Warhol assistant and filmmaker Gerard Malanga, Warhol Factory designer Billy Name, underground actress Mary Woronov, filmmaker Peter Kubelka and painter Alfred Leslie. These people weave a complex web of anecdotes and impressions, contributing to a portrait of a woman who was crucial to the development of the American avant-garde, and whose corpus of unassuming little films endures as an unshowy, private oeuvre. Menken's films, originally not meant for public consumption, were intended as documents of her observations and impressions, chronicles of the way she perceived certain moments in time. They are deeply personal, and Kudlácek's documentary maintains that sense of peeking into a private life, seeing the art and beauty in this woman's everyday life.

Kudlácek weaves together the interviews and reminiscences with excerpts from Menken's own films, as well as interludes in which Kudlácek follows her subject in capturing ephemeral moments on camera. At one point, while interviewing Mekas, her camera peers out a window, down at the street two stories below, where a group of kids are exchanging greetings and eager chatter, making plans and saying goodbye before they split up for the evening. Kudlácek watches them for a few moments before panning back inside onto the documents and film canisters on Mekas' desk. Such moments — like similar ones where Kudlácek lingers on the spray of water from a fountain or the skeleton-like designs on the backs of some fish in a pond or the twirling kaleidoscope of lights from a carnival ride — are the documentarian's way of paying tribute to Menken, who made such small and poetic details the substance of her oeuvre.

Kudlácek gathers a great deal of stories and information about Menken, who seems to inspire an almost aching nostalgia in many of these interviewees. When Kudlácek interviews Mekas and, especially, Malanga, one can see the warmth and love that these men felt for Menken, whose art and personality meant so much to them. Throughout the course of the film, Kudlácek deals with Menken's passionate but often troubled relationship with her husband Willard Maas (the couple were the inspiration for Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?) and her interactions with the New York art scene of the time. But the real meat of the film, the real way in which Menken's essence is captured, is in the excerpts from her work. Kudlácek includes the full film Arabesque for Kenneth Anger, Menken's film made in Spain, set to a new score composed by John Zorn. Zorn contributes lyrical, low-key jazz throughout the film and here provides a lively, propulsive piece, derived from the ethnic melodies of his Masada group, to accompany Menken's fast-moving snatches of Spanish architecture and fountains. The film is contextualized by Anger himself, who accompanied Menken on the trip that produced this film and indeed was apparently standing right behind her while she made it. He describes how he was guiding her while she moved through the gardens and courtyards documented in the film, making sure she wouldn't fall. For Anger, and for many others who describe Menken's working methods here, she was dancing with her camera, fluidly moving so that the images she captured were an extension of her body, of her senses. Hers was a very physical cinema, but also a graceful one, and Anger's story, of the two of them dancing in tandem as she made this film in tribute to him, is moving and evocative of Menken's art.


Perhaps even more so than in her excellent, informative documentary on Maya Deren, Kudlácek really makes this material her own, finding her own way into Menken's life and art. Increasingly, in the second half of the film, Kudlácek seems to have discovered a peripheral story that she finds as interesting as Menken herself: Gerard Malanga, Warhol's assistant for so long, star of some of Warhol's most iconic films, a poet and photographer and filmmaker in his own right. The scenes with him, which form a substantial part of this film, are poignant and almost startlingly emotional, as the prospect of talking about Menken brings forth in Malanga a virtual torrent of nostalgic feelings and potent memories. This is especially true during a wonderful scene in which Malanga unearths a crusty old film strip that contains footage of Menken and Warhol. On his own small reel-to-reel machine, he begins playing the film, letting it pass slowly across an editing stage, excitedly picking out frames of interest that seem to trigger deep-seated emotional reactions in him. The film contains a "duel" between Menken and Warhol in which the two artists essentially danced around each other on a rooftop at sunset, the sky bright red behind them, as they filmed one another on handheld Bolex cameras. It is a fantastic scene, and the degraded quality of the filmstrip only adds to the poignancy of it all: the rot and decay of the years at times threaten to swallow the image whole, and then a few frames of Menken or Warhol with their cameras will abruptly emerge from the morass. As Malanga says, the film seems to be "resisting extinction." This is followed by some footage Menken shot, in her jumpy time-lapse style, of Warhol and Malanga walking through the city, creating some screenprints in a small apartment studio, and then returning home. It's the kind of time capsule moment that's invaluable, one great artist documenting another at work, and Kudlácek and Malanga both seem very aware of the historical import and beauty of these documents.

Kudlácek returns again and again to Malanga throughout this film, fascinated by his obviously emotional reaction to being reminded of Menken and Warhol and this whole scene that he was a part of. Menken, he says, was like a mother to him, and she thought of him as a son. His nostalgic recounting of private moments with her — going to visit her at her late-night shift at Time magazine, where they used the magazine's photocopiers and facilities to assist in their personal work — provides the film with an emotional heft that contextualizes Menken beyond her art, beyond her influence and importance, in the personal relationships she formed with those around her. It seems, for those who knew her, Menken herself loomed as large as the art she made. The pinnacle of this approach comes when Kudlácek goes with Malanga to the cemetery where Menken is buried. He goes first to visit his father, who he'd never really known but who happened to be buried in the same place, and then he goes to visit the woman who became virtually his surrogate mother. It could've been an exploitative, tear-jerking moment, but Kudlácek films it with a quiet, unassuming observational quality, so that Malanga's graveside visits with his real father and his spiritual mother are poignant rather than manipulative.

The way that Malanga's reminiscences merge his personal affection for Menken with the artistic inspiration he and so many others took from her provides the template for Kudlácek's own multifaceted tribute to the filmmaker. She excerpts liberally from Menken's rich oeuvre: the stop-motion animated paintings of Dwightiana, the lush light studies of Lights and Eye Music in Red Major (the latter introduced by Brakhage's blend of the mystical and the pseudo-scientific from one of his lectures), the diaristic observation of Andy Warhol or her portrait of Spanish monk gravediggers, the blurry rapidity of her New York fantasia Go! Go! Go!, the blend of home movies and theatricality in Midnight Maases. But Kudlácek goes beyond Menken's own images, her own films, to probe the artist's broader sensibility, and the image of Menken herself that endures in memory. Kudlácek's documentary includes the kind of moments that Menken herself would have loved to capture, like a wonderfully funny visual diversion while interviewing Billy Name, in which Kudlácek indulges in a close-up of Name's bushy beard, exploring its textures, bristly white like steel wool, as he talks about Menken and strokes the long beard's tip. Menken, one suspects, would have loved this image, simultaneously absurd and sublime, utterly prosaic and somehow also lyrically beautiful.

Three avant-garde shorts

Shirley Clarke's Bridges-Go-Round is a four-minute minimalist examination of urban structures around New York, mainly bridges as the title indicates. Clarke assembled the film using leftover footage from a commissioned documentary project, tinting the images of bridges and skyscrapers with various colored filters: red, blue yellow. These city images are thus reduced to abstract designs, geometrical abstractions much like the animated figures of Oskar Fischinger or Hans Richter. All those hard lines and rigid shapes create an impression of architectural precision, which Clarke subtly works against by blending the images together, superimposing them to create softer images, layered compositions where staggered cityscapes hover translucently above an image of a bridge's supports.

Clarke further plays with the film's form by creating two slightly different versions of the film, with the same images but different scores. Clarke commissioned two different scores, one an electronic score by Louis and Bebe Barron, the other a jazzy score by Teo Macero. Thus, with the two versions played back-to-back as Clarke often presented the film, Bridges-Go-Round is a lesson in the extent to which music can dictate the mood and tone of a film. With the bubbly, spacey electronic score, the film plays as contemplative and introspective, like a patient exploration of a sci-fi alien world. This is especially the case with the opening, in which images of bridges, blue-tinted, are superimposed over a glittery, watery backdrop, suggesting a strange sky on an alien world. With Macero's score, with its percussive rhythms and vocals used as punctuation, the film seems propulsive and lively, driven along by the pulse of the music, the near-abstract cityscapes seeming to dance and groove.

Bridges-Go-Round is an evocative small film, an examination of pure design and visual beauty, a poetic appreciation of urban architecture.


Paul Sharits' Bad Burns is a race against time and destruction, as though by staying in constant motion the filmic image can escape its inevitable degradation. Sharits exposes the film strip itself, a stream of abstracted images moving vertically within the frame. What seems at one point to have been an image of a woman's face is scrolled upwards, warped, blurred by speed into an abstract blob of color, formless and dissolved. The sprockets are visible to the right side of the frame, revealing a misaligned film strip, a mistake, a crooked scrap of film falling apart as it plays. Indeed, the film emerged from a mistake, a fortuitous accident during the construction of a three-screen gallery installation Sharits was assembling. Bad Burns is a scrap of leftovers, an accident that is unexpectedly poignant in its documentation of cinematic death.

Indeed, death implicitly haunts the background of the image here. The woman's face is ghostly and indistinct, as though she were already long gone, and the film's rapid flicker further accentuates her disappearance. Her blurry countenance stretches and condenses as the images roll by, and at times it seems like the blur is almost going to resolve itself into a recognizable face, features coming together out of the abstract color field before everything falls apart again. Indeed, the moments when the film stands still, trying to resolve a concrete image, are the most dangerous. Whenever the image freezes for a moment, rot and decay catch up to it, an acidic red burn spreading across the frame. Sharits is capturing death in motion, lingering on the moment when the decay spread across the frame like a corrosive disease, destroying the celluloid and destroying the image of the woman at the same time. Cinematic destruction and human death are thus united in a single image, the film strip standing in for the length of a person's life, with blotchy ruin waiting at the end when the race of life begins to slow down.

More than this, though, Bad Burns is simply a beautiful and affecting film, a Brakhage-like examination of light and color. Images flicker across the screen, miniscule changes washing through the color field like waves. It's gorgeous and, in its evocation of mortality and decay, surprisingly poignant.


Standish Lawder's Necrology is a film that seems to be one thing, relatively simple and straightforward, only to reveal itself as something else entirely at the point when one would normally assume the film to be over. It's a lengthy tracking shot down a seemingly endless escalator, presumably shot using a mirror mounted above the escalator. The cinematography is grainy black and white, so that as people appear at the bottom of the frame and slowly move towards the top, they disintegrate into the blackness, swallowed up in the dark. Many of the people are simply staring straight ahead at the camera or blankly off into space. Others are engaged in conversation, laughing, yawning, reading newspapers, picking their noses, adjusting their hair, fidgeting with coffee cups and other props. Lawder pairs these deadpan images with sweeping classical music, so that the overall effect is balanced somewhere between extreme mundanity and a kind of spirituality, as though this is an escalator leading between states of existence (towards Heaven? Hell?) or something similarly grand. The impression that the people on the steps are melting away into blackness at the top of the frame only enhances this sense of mystery; one watches this parade of people, of souls, and wonders what this simple image is meant to represent, what it means, where it's all leading.

And then, abruptly, the film is over, and no answers have been provided. Or at least that's what seems to happen. In fact, Lawder makes the end credits as much a part of the film as the images themselves. After the eight-minute uninterrupted shot of the escalator with its parade of people, the credits stretch for a few more minutes themselves, taking time to credit each of the actors who appears in the film (in order of appearance, of course). These people, who were each on screen for a fleeting few seconds, are given various descriptions that reveal the narratives, interior psychologies and personal histories that had been hidden within the film proper. These descriptions range from the grand (FBI agent; Criminal, interstate) to the mundane (Yawning girl; Man picking nose; Woman with canker sore in her left cheek) but they all probe the realities that stretch beyond the image, suggesting stories and possibilities for each of these people. It's both hilarious and profound, opening up the film's simple form into a grand epic of massed humanity, all of them possessing identities that are sometimes absurd, sometimes profane, sometimes suggestive of convoluted stories and sometimes pointing towards mere physical processes.

The credits essentially ask what it means for a person's identity to be defined by a glimpse or their face or a brief one-line description. Some of the credits go out of their way to identify the characters by race or ethnicity, while others are identified by occupation, still others by medical complaints they suffer from, others by the actions they've performed, the things they've done or do. All of us, at various times, might be identified by any or all of these means, and Lawder thus emphasizes how mutable identity is. All of these people, one suspects, might be identified differently at different times; they might have different names, different credits, in a film shot on a different day. By locking these people into one identity, Lawder demonstrates the power of words to define and explain, to suggest what the image cannot. Necrology thus posits that the film doesn't really end with its final image; its credits, rather than being extraneous or external to the film's world, actually define what the film is, what it means. Lawder surprises us at the end by telling who and what it is that we've just seen. His small descriptions of the characters who so briefly appeared within his frame expand the film beyond its images into a rich world of imagination.

In the Mirror of Maya Deren

Maya Deren is a legendary figure in avant-garde cinema, a true visionary who completed just six short films in her brief life, but whose reputation has endured on the strength of this small but utterly original oeuvre. Martina Kudlácek's documentary In the Mirror of Maya Deren is an attempt to grapple with this tremendous legacy, to trace Deren's eventful, complicated life, to explore the ideas and preoccupations at the heart of her cinema, to gather the testimonies of those who knew her, who were affected by her incandescent passion and energy. All of this comes across beautifully in Kudlácek's film, which is a true ode to its subject, a poetic assemblage of reminiscences, fragments of film, excerpts from Deren's finished works, and audio recordings of her voice, delivering lectures on filmmaking, voodoo, art and philosophy.

Deren's work as a filmmaker began with Meshes of the Afternoon, made in 1943 with the help of her then-husband, the experimental filmmaker Alexander Hammid. This epochal film, nearly on its own, is responsible for Deren's legacy: it is a trancelike psychodrama, steeped in the logic of dreams and nightmares, populated with doubles and mirrors and an eerie sense of danger and sensuality intertwined. Kudlácek's film touches on the making of this short, but her focus is not necessarily on the details and intricacies of the filmmaking process — this documentary gives little sense of Deren at work, only momentary glimpses of her process behind the camera. It is not a behind-the-scenes documentary, nor is it a comprehensive biography, though it veers closer to the latter. Kudlácek seems chiefly concerned with getting as close as possible to a vision of who Deren was, what her creative philosophy was like, what she thought about and imagined when she was creating her visionary works. The film follows the arc of Deren's life, tracing her biography, often filling in details with onscreen texts that describe pivotal events — childhood background, marriages, divorces, moves, publications. But these are facts, only, and the interviewees who Kudlácek includes in the film, all of whom knew Deren very well, rarely talk about the facts of her life. Instead, they discourse on her personality, on what made her special and what made her films special, on her ideas, on her mystical and spiritual qualities.

It is fitting that a poetic, evasive figure like Deren should be treated to such a poetic, evasive biography, one that establishes certain basic facts but is much more concerned with the ephemeral and the sublime. Kudlácek's own voice never enters the film; she never offers her own commentary but allows everyone else to speak, to offer their own individual commentaries on who Deren was and what she represented. The voices here range from Hammid to future IMAX filmmaker and personal friend Graeme Ferguson to fellow avant-garde filmmakers like Stan Brakhage and Jonas Mekas to Film as a Subversive Art author Amos Vogel to the performers who appeared in Deren's dance films to the Haitian friends she made on her many visits to that country, working on a film she never completed. These people offer many contrasting visions of Deren: personal reminiscences, admiration for her commitment and craft as a filmmaker, and in many cases expressions of her supposed mystical and even magical power. Brakhage tells a story about the diminutive Deren, possessed by a Haitian god during a ritual, actually throwing a refrigerator across a room, and the Haitian painter André Pierre tells about a time when Deren disappeared from a boat only to reappear floating way out in the ocean, singing.

All of this, like everything else in the film, is presented without comment, as one more indication of the legends and stories that have accumulated around this extraordinary figure. There is a certain amount of pretension in Deren, in her mysticism and her speeches about filmmaking. Sometimes in her filmmaking as well: Brakhage laments that her final film, The Very Eye of Night, was misunderstood by practically everyone, but the film itself is tiresome and inscrutable, consisting entirely of negative-image dancers superimposed upon a field of stars. As with most of Deren's work, there's an elaborate intellectual justification for everything here — something about myth and the movement of "celestial bodies" — but unlike in her earlier work the film itself is largely inaccessible without the benefit of this context. Whatever meaning Deren intended for the dreamlike Meshes and At Land, or the rigidly choreographed earlier dance films like Ritual in Transfigured Time and Meditation on Violence, the films themselves have a sensual and visceral quality that goes beyond mere conceptual games.


Thus, when Deren's voiceover is heard describing her films in lectures, speaking over images from her own films, it is undeniable that the images possess a power and beauty that cannot be captured in words, not even the words of the filmmaker herself, whose explanations for her every choice fall short of the ineffable quality that made her films truly great. Kudlácek's film is fascinating for providing a glimpse into Deren's thinking, into her creative process, but ultimately all these words can only be a glimpse, dwarfed by the mysterious power of the films themselves. In the Mirror of Maya Deren also proves valuable for its insight into Deren's collaborative process, for the way she would draw in multi-talented people to work with her. Although she worked entirely outside of the conventional Hollywood system of her time, she was also distinct from most of her contemporaries in the avant-garde, including Brakhage and Mekas, who tended to be solitary figures making personal films on their own, with just a single camera and their own two hands. At one point, Brakhage himself is shown at work on the film Water for Maya, his tribute to Deren, and it's a very different working method from Deren's expansive, collaborative ventures: Brakhage sits alone, holding a filmstrip up to the light, carefully dabbing paint onto the strip.

In contrast, Deren worked with crews; never traditional crews, in the usual sense, but free-floating ensembles where people would come and go, doing whatever needed to be done on the set. Her first film was made in collaboration with Hammid as co-director and co-star, and on subsequent films she would often include choreographers and musicians as key collaborators, their contributions as integral to the finished work as her own. It's telling that she viewed her dance films, especially, as interactions between the dancer's body and the camera, two equal partners creating a unified motion together. This is especially apparent in the way these films frequently play fluidly with a sense of space and time, cutting together shots so that a dancer may start a motion in one place and complete it somewhere altogether different, bridging space and time with the arc of a leg.

Kudlácek's film is especially good when dealing like this with the formal qualities of Deren's cinema, the way she would use her editing to transcend a limiting, realistic view of the world. That's perhaps why, as Mekas describes it, she was contemptuous of his improvisational, naturalistic method of shooting, preferring art that is planned out, that has a definitive form and meaning. Kudlácek herself subtly undermines her subject here, though. Right as Mekas is talking about the value of improvisation and random footage, and Deren's dim view of such spontaneity, Kudlácek inserts some of her own footage, of an Anthology Film Archives employee accidentally stepping into a shot and then ducking back out abruptly. It's as though the documentarian is silently making her own position known, gently underlining Mekas' point with this quirky little moment.

Perhaps it's also because of Kudlácek's sympathies for improvisation and accident that the film's best moments consist of archival footage that Deren never assembled into a finished work. Kudlácek samples generously from Deren's hours of Haitian footage, and there's a joyous energy and unpredictability to this material that belies Deren's own ethos — who knows what the Haitian film would have been like had she actually ever made it, but her footage from her trips there has a spontaneity and raw beauty unlike anything in her more lyrical established oeuvre. The same is true of a phenomenal outtake from Ritual in Transfigured Time, in which Deren herself throatily sings a folk ballad while dancers twirl about, their bodies thrusting together in openly sexual ways, smiling and laughing with the same unselfconscious openness seen on the faces of the voodoo dancers. In the Mirror of Maya Deren is a valuable, fascinating documentary, cutting to the heart of one of avant-garde cinema's most beguiling and interesting figures.