The Wonder Ring/Reflections On Black/Sirius Remembered

Stan Brakhage made The Wonder Ring at the request of fellow avant-garde filmmaker Joseph Cornell, who wanted to document the Third Avenue elevated train in Manhattan before it was torn down. The resulting film is a silent testimony to the strange beauty to be found in even the most blighted urban relics and the dignity of the people who inhabit them. There's even something spiritual about Brakhage's images of trains and the people riding them. Seen through Brakhage's eyes, the girders of the train platforms become stained glass windows with bright light streaming through the geometric spaces between the steel beams. A simple train journey through the city becomes a ghostly ride through an amorphous realm where people and places seem to be perpetually in the process of fading away. Brakhage achieves evocative superimpositions through the reflections of figures and buildings in the train's windows, strange hybrid compositions where reflections and refractions bring together disparate spaces into a single composite image. Brakhage points his camera out at the city through the warped glass of a window as the train slowly rumbles along, and the resulting images of the buildings outside seem to waver and morph as though the city was underwater, the train a submarine passing through the rippling waves.

The effect is dazzling and hypnotic, an unforgettable experience that creates a work of great beauty, overflowing with nostalgia for something that's not even gone yet. There's great sadness in this film, a sense of loss that's communicated by all those ghostly figures, traveling around the city in an eerie haze, their forms blurry, superimposed over one another and over the landscape around them. Brakhage's images are cloudy but also somehow precise, a tension that manifests itself beautifully when, late in the film, his camera focuses on a train window where the dirt and scratches on the glass create striations in the glass, little furrows of yellowish grime or scratched markings. The view through this glass is obscured, and everything outside is blurred and warped by the marks, but Brakhage renders the marks themselves with crystalline clarity, as though these obstacles are the point rather than the view they are ostensibly blocking. Brakhage focuses on the minutiae in order to examine the world and all its objects with an eye towards the beauty, pathos and resonance of even the simplest and most utilitarian of structures. This train line had outlived its usefulness to the city's planners and leaders, and as a result it was being erased, but Brakhage, in looking at this soon-to-be-ghost, locates the aesthetic beauty that goes beyond mere utility.


Reflections On Black is a thoroughly uncharacteristic film from Stan Brakhage, though it is characteristic of his early psychodramas, made in the early 1950s before he moved away from even the suggestion of narrative to explore more abstract and purely visual realms. This film is especially unusual in that it is overtly informed by genre in a way that Brakhage's work almost never was. The title of Reflections On Black reflects Brakhage's interest in studying the absence of color and all its implications, but in retrospect it almost seems as though the film is reflecting on black as in noir, presenting a distilled essence of the film noir in these portraits of emotionally troubled couples in shadowy spaces. Brakhage's film, made during the era in which the film noir (though not yet named as such) dominated Hollywood B pictures, provides an avant-garde corollary to the shadowy tragedies proliferating in the mainstream. The film opens in abstraction, alternating pure black frames with images of shadowy figures moving through shadowy exterior spaces, evoking B movie cinematography and the iconography of the trenchcoat-wearing mystery man.

From there, Brakhage moves into a more concrete scenario, a wordless story of a man cheating on a woman with another woman, only to be discovered in the act by the other woman's other man. It's an archetypal scenario, barely developed, a template for Brakhage's shadowy study of this familiar plot. As in his other psychodramas, the narrative is melodramatic and emotionally basic; his real concern is finding a visual language to convey the intensity of the emotions at the core of the story. It's no wonder, in retrospect, that he quickly abandoned narrative more and more in subsequent works, since the vestigial plot is so clearly not what interests him. Instead it's all about the gestures, the quiver of lips, the flailing of hands, the slow, almost mechanical motion of two lovers descending into bed together as though falling in slow motion.

The film's soundtrack, provided by Brakhage, is a musique concrete sound collage of piano, industrial clatter and hum, children's voices, and other noises and musical fragments arranged into an abrasive accompaniment to the shadowy images. Sound was another element Brakhage would soon largely abandon in stripping the cinema down to what really interested him, and it's telling that here the soundtrack, like the plot material, seems extraneous and unnecessary, added on because it was expected rather than because it really changed anything. What really matters here is the primal way in which Brakhage riffs on this stereotypical B movie situation, climaxing with a mysterious and haunting shot in which the man's eyes are scratched out with a rapidly fluctuating blur of white lines drawn directly on the frame, as though Brakhage was suggesting the way in which his later, more fully developed cinema might explode unexpectedly out of this early ancestor.


Stan Brakhage's Sirius Remembered is a film about death, about the material facts of it and, perhaps, about the possibility of spiritual transcendence hidden within it. The film's images consist solely of footage of a dead dog lying in the woods, first surrounded by brown-hued fall decay and then in winter snow. The images are rapidly edited together into a repetitive, looping framework so that the film conveys the impression of death from many angles rather than ever lingering on a single view or a single perspective. The image of the dog's black, unseeing eye does recur repeatedly, however, alternately centered within the image so it disconcertingly seems to be staring out of the film, or placed in a corner so it slyly glances up or down at the rest of the image. Sometimes, the eye seems to be staring out of the frame from within the clutter of superimposed imagery that surrounds it and frames it. The fast pace of the editing places the emphasis on the passage of time, the blending of one season into another, the slow process by which the dog's earthly remains begin to return to the soil.

As is often the case with Brakhage, this film is all about texture, as the camera whips across the surface of the dog's hair, visually rhyming it with the tangle of twigs and leaves surrounding the body. At one point, the camera repeatedly pans upward, from the dog lying amidst the browning foliage to the pale blue sky with a few bare treetops reaching up. The movement suggests the passage of the spirit out of the earthly plane, away from the rot of the earth towards, well, something: heaven, transcendence, the spiritual plane. The effect is not as visceral (in any sense) or as provocative as Brakhage's aesthetic, inquisitive approach to death in films like The Act of Seeing With One's Own Eyes, but Sirius Remembered is still an interesting and formally compelling short that attempts to encapsulate death, to document the materiality of death while acknowledging the limits of such an earthbound perspective.

Film No. 3: Interwoven/Tarantella

Harry Smith is perhaps best known for his stewardship of the famous Anthology of American Folk Music, an enthnomusicological attempt to preserve various folk traditions of the U.S. The multi-talented Smith was also an avant-garde filmmaker, and his 1946 Film No. 3: Interwoven was a work of lively abstract animation. Set to the music of Dizzy Gillespie, the film dances and bounces with jazzy rhythms, vaguely jiving to the same beat as the Gillespie tune but more just pulsating in sympathy with the music. The animation is geometric and colorful, with multicolored geometric shapes — mostly squares and rectangles, though a few circles and triangles show up towards the end of the brief short — shifting around the screen. Often, the quadrilaterals are arranged in tight grids, the internal boundaries of which are constantly shifting so that any given quadrant could pulse in size from a tiny box to spanning across nearly a quarter of the frame. These grids seem to be bouncing to their own internal groove, like there's a rowdy party going on and the whole place is jumping to the beat.

It gives the impression of architecture in motion, the boundaries all temporary, the straight lines deceptive because nothing ever stays in place for long — whereas most grids give the impression of rigidity and formality, this grid is fluid and free. Like jazz itself, it's structure in motion, structure with room for improvisation and movement, for unpredictability, for fun. It's hard to imagine a better visual metaphor for the spirit of jazz, this tension between structure/rigidity and freedom/motion. When Smith's shapes break out of the grid, dancing across the black space, momentarily suggesting bar graphs or rows of piano keys before returning to their abstract dance, it's even more suggestive of total freedom, though that sense of structure is lost.

Perhaps that's why the film's most compelling segments are the ones with that bouncing, shifting grid of colored blocks, where the borders are always changing and the colors leap unpredictably from one container to the next, creating fluid masses of shifting colors that dance across the screen, also in sympathy to the underlying beat. These images suggest so much, from tribal patterns or Oriental rugs — obvious influences — to color swatches and artists' palettes. In its suggestive abstraction, Smith's film doesn't merely accompany the jazz of the soundtrack or try to match images to the sounds of the music; it breathes and vibrates with the spirit of jazz, with the improvisatory and emotional intensity of jazz.


Tarantella is a 1940 short film made by the avant-garde animators Mary-Ellen Bute and Ted Nemeth (with additional assistance by Norman McLaren). The film is synchronized to the music of the composer Edwin Gerschefski, whose harsh, alternately speedy and minimal piano music evokes the spirit of the tarantella. Like the Harry Smith short described above, the animation is an attempt to visualize the music, to find visual equivalents for the sound and the mood of the music that accompanies these images. However, Bute and Nemeth take a more literalist approach to this audio-visual collaboration, as opposed to Smith's freewheeling evocation of an improvisation in color. Bute and Nemeth's geometric shapes are much more closely related to the music they accompany, acting as a kind of graphic notation after the fact. In particular, a recurring figure is a squiggly line that seems to wave and vibrate in correspondence with the music, like a sound wave visualization of the piano. In another sequence, colored bars on a black screen elongate and shrink in response to changes in the music, creating little visual beats that correspond to the changing tempi of the composition.

Such synchronizations come off as mannered and pat, too basic and obvious to be really interesting. The film is much more interesting when it mirrors the modernist spikiness of Gerschefski's music in minimalist forms in which jagged, hard-edged lines and lightning patterns oscillate in and out of view against a solid red background. In these stretches, the images don't exactly track the music but instead form a visual counterpoint, a logical extension of the music's aesthetic and sensibility into the visual arts. These minimalist patterns seem like a futuristic city seen from above, a map of the future with a large central thoroughfare, stretching diagonally across the frame, with little geometric figures making their abstractly anthropomorphic way across it.

Film No. 3: Interwoven and Tarantella represent two superficially similar approaches to music/animation pairings that nevertheless have very different effects in practice. They're interesting little experiments, two visions of the potential for a form of visual music in which colors and shapes take the place of notes and tones.

By Night With Torch and Spear

The collage films of the filmmaker-artist Joseph Cornell, assembled from found footage — mangled commercial and documentary films and occasional specially shot sequences provided by Cornell's filmmaker friends — are strange masterpieces of excavation and recontextualization. Cornell's films forage through the ephemera of film's accumulated history to pick out the moments of eerie, potent magic, augmenting and intensifying that magic through judicious editing and bursts of vibrant, artificial color. By Night With Torch and Spear was itself excavated from Cornell's massive private collection of film reels, discovered only after his death in the mid-70s and preserved by Anthology Film Archives. It is a stunning, mysterious film, one of Cornell's most beautiful and poetic works. It is only eight minutes long but contains layers upon layers of suggestions and emotions.

The film is assembled entirely from snippets of industrial documentaries and educational films, seemingly from the silent era. In the first long sequence — after a first shot in which a pointer traces along a white sheet marked with black dots, as though instructing the viewer to watch closely — an industrial process runs backwards and upside-down, its images sensuously drifting in reverse. A large pot of molten metal hangs upside-down, the boiling liquid within strangely pulsing downward, as though straining to pour out of its container, but somehow defying the laws of gravity to remain in place. Showers of sparks rain down like fiery comets, coming together into a yellow-hot center that then rushes back into the factory machinery like a fireball. Rivers of molten metal run upstream, up long conveyor belts, then crawl up the sides of a container, as though the industrial plant is full of an inexplicable liquid alien intelligence, an amorphous being moving of its own volition in defiance of the laws of physics. Cornell's editing and his manipulations of these images are deceptively simple, but the effect is anything but. These grainy, distorted images, discombobulated and flipped around, become almost magical, their poetic effect very far removed from the staid documentary context in which this footage originally resided.


This is the world made strange, an ultimate surrealist statement. Ordinary industrial machinery, seen through a bright pink filter, seems to glow with otherworldly energy, and the men tending to these strangely vibrant, effervescent industrial playgrounds are like sorcerers, conjuring inexplicable phenomena. Cornell explicitly compares his manipulated industrial age images to a shot of Native Americans silhouetted against a darkening night sky. Even that image isn't as simple as it seems, since the playful sprinting and obviously celebratory mood of these headdress-wearing figures suggests that perhaps they're not even genuine Native Americans, but children playing at a role, enacting games of cowboys and Indians like in a Hollywood movie. The movies certainly inform Cornell's vision to a great extent. In his most famous film, Rose Hobart, he clipped images of the titular silent era actress out of a melodramatic epic, out of context, honing in on the core of the cinema as a magic of faces, gestures, single dramatic images rather than stories.

In By Night With Torch and Spear, the cinema burbles up from the film's subconscious in the form of found and recontextualized intertitles, often manipulated in the same ways as the images themselves, turned around backward and upside-down, often flashed onto the screen in an almost subliminal fashion, too fast to read, certainly too fast to decode the mirrored text. In any event, the titles, even when decoded (thanks to a DVD pause function Cornell didn't plan for) are banal and generic, snippets of pseudo-scientific language or context-free bits of information about a machine, an insect, a group of people. Cornell treats these fragments of ordinary texts like incantations, a mysterious language to be deciphered, curious transmissions from deep within the cinematic subconscious, flashing like lightning across the surface of the film and then vanishing just as quickly back into the depths from which they emerged.

Later in the film, Cornell inserts ethnographic images of a man playing a non-Western instrument, and then the image that gives the film its name, a shadowy nighttime sequence of some men fishing by torchlight with a long wooden spear. This shot is preceded by the only easily intelligible intertitle in the film, and the most poetic as well: "by night with torch and spear." Cornell's images bring together Western industrial society with the amorphous Other, the exotic and the foreign. In essence, he exoticizes what would be, to Western audiences, the familiar, by making the processes of commerce and industry seem as haunting, and as haunted, as the exotic images of foreign lands and foreign people.


These images also exist on a continuum with Cornell's found footage of insects, seen up-close and made even more terrifying by the application of negative-image filters that make it seem as though the film is delving into a truly alien landscape, a barren gray moonscape populated by exoskeleton-clad monsters with fuzzy feelers and click-clacking mandibles. The film represents a journey from the working class factory to the Old West or the exotic Orient, stopping in Egypt for a desert scene replete with camels, then venturing deep into the unseen underworld of insects and then beyond, to a final image in which abstract dots pulsate like subatomic particles dancing to an unheard and unfathomable music.

Cornell sees the cinema as a transmitter of poetic distortions, as a massive bank of images to be combed for magical moments, moments that can be amplified and reworked into something epic and unfamiliar. His was a totally original and remarkable cinema, and this short is perhaps one of the finest examples of his unparalleled ability to dig out the strange essence at the core of the ordinary.

Los Angeles Plays Itself

Thom Andersen's magnum opus, Los Angeles Plays Itself, is a thoughtful, methodical consideration of Los Angeles as a city of the movies — not only as the city where the movies are made, but the city that appears onscreen in those movies, the most photographed city in the world if not always the most photogenic. It's a fantastic, wide-ranging work of criticism, a film that hones in on specific moments, specific shots, from countless movies, expanding upon isolated glimpses of Los Angeles as it is, as it was, and as it only ever could be onscreen. It's an examination of the relationship between the Los Angeles of the movies and the Los Angeles of reality, and of the the many different ways in which this city has been represented in the cinema. It's a work of film criticism that delves into the implications of various types of cinematic representation, but it also deals with history, with the social context in which the movies are made and in which a city changes, with architecture, with race and class, with the nature of urban identity and the specific image that Los Angeles projects of itself.

It's always Los Angeles for Andersen, never L.A., as he lambastes the shortening of the city's name as a mark of disrespect and laziness. Notably, he takes his own film's name from a 70s gay porn flick called L.A. Plays Itself, which he characterizes as a trip from the almost-rural idylls of Los Angeles' outskirts to the urban blight of its center: as the locale gets more urban in the film, he says, the sex gets rougher. Andersen's expansion of that title is a way of restoring the city's full name, rescuing it from the curse of shorthand. Towards the beginning of his film, a montage of movie titles that start with "L.A." suggests that this diminutive nickname is one source of the movies' reduction and simplification of Los Angeles, a sign that the Los Angeles that appears in the movies only flirts with the reality of the city.

Andersen's film examines, in three parts — the city as background, as character, and as subject — the role of Los Angeles in the history of the movies. His film is a collage of scenes from numerous movies, from old Hollywood classics and noirs to more modern blockbusters and disaster movies to the avant-garde work of Warhol and Deren. He mixes in a smattering of his own footage, juxtaposing various city landmarks from the movies with their modern incarnations, along with newspaper headlines that bring the city's real history into contact with its movie counterparts, particularly when talking about the true stories that provided the inspirations for Chinatown and L.A. Confidential. Andersen couples these borrowed and recontextualized images with a lucid, sophisticated commentary (read by Encke King, in a similar flat tone to the one employed by Dean Stockwell in Andersen's earlier Eadweard Muybridge, Zoopraxographer) that pulls out the subtext from all these images of the city, fitting each movie, each image, neatly into Andersen's critical framework. Andersen is credited with "research/text/production" rather than as the director, an acknowledgment of his special role as an archive-trawler and critic. What he's doing here is assembling a critical essay where his evidence, his examples, are readily available as onscreen footnotes to the text.


One of Andersen's central ideas here is the gap between reality and screen representation. He identifies many ways in which Los Angeles on screen differs from Los Angeles as an actual city, tracing the city's cinematic history from its early days, when in its anonymity it often stood in for Chicago or New York or any number of other cities, to the much more specific visions of later years. There's Los Angeles as a site of disaster movie destruction, the home town that moviemakers seem to take special delight in tearing apart. There's Los Angeles as a city of cops, and Andersen's deconstruction of Dragnet as a fascist version of the precise, minimalist aesthetics of Ozu and Bresson is especially potent. And also very funny. Andersen has a sharp, biting sense of humor, and he mingles seemingly genuine admiration for Dragnet's robotic technical precision with contempt for its exaltation of an "ideal" cop who tramples all over the pathetic, kooky, corrupt people he encounters in the course of his job. It's similarly hilarious when Andersen uses a shot of Charles Bronson literally exploding a bad guy as the punchline to a sequence in which Andersen laments the movie convention of staging chase scenes that leap from locale to locale with little regard for physical reality: "silly geography makes silly movies," the voiceover says, and with Bronson as evidence it's hard to argue.

That's a throwaway gag, though, and Andersen's critical commentary ultimately has much more serious aims. One of his most interesting insights is the idea that Los Angeles, as presented in the movies, is a city of perpetual nostalgia for a time that never was. "At any time in its history, Los Angeles was always a better place a long time ago than in the present," the narration says, speaking especially about movies like Chinatown, Blade Runner and L.A. Confidential. It's Andersen's contention that movies about Los Angeles are often period movies, rarely movies about the present, at least not in the modern era. He takes as one telling example the rather startling absence of the Watts riots from most films; it was only long after the riots had faded a bit that movies could portray the events, Andersen says, and then only with a comforting and ironic use of banal 60s oldies tunes to place the events safely and securely in the past. There seems to be widespread discomfort in really engaging with Los Angeles' present, even in the futuristic Blade Runner, which presents a dystopian Los Angeles that is actually, perversely, rather attractive, a glossily beautiful if frightening vision of the future that Andersen contrasts against the much plainer, uglier possibilities that are likely to shape the real Los Angeles of the future.

Architecture is another of Andersen's big concerns. He teases out how the modernist architecture of the 20s and 30s — and by extension the utopian ideals often motivating the movement — have in the cinema been co-opted as a signifier of suave evil, to the point that a modernist villa in the hills overlooking Los Angeles, with the inevitable large glass panels and angled lines, is sure to provide a base for some corrupt businessman or gangster, a pornographer or a drug dealer, a cop on the take or a gang of kidnappers. In contrast, he traces the origin of the Spanish revival style's status as a signifier of bourgeois pretensions to Double Indemnity, and to screenwriter Billy Wilder's distaste for the style's fake appropriation of the past and of another culture. This is perhaps the film's most fascinating current, this emphasis on how different types of buildings, and different neighborhoods, provide cinematic shorthand for different types of people. Later, Andersen will unearth the history of the Bunker Hill neighborhood, from its status as a comfortable middle class suburb to its descent into seedy film noir environs in Kiss Me Deadly to its 70s desolation presaging its complete destruction and reconstruction as a generic urban area, with little trace remaining of its distinctive past. The only reminders of the old Bunker Hill are in the movies, in the various onscreen incarnations of the neighborhood that mirrored, over the years, the changing nature of the neighborhood. For Andersen, there's a documentary quality to even the most fictional of movies, a tendency he'll explore again in a sequence that chronicles the evolution of gas station style from the 40s to the 70s.

Andersen's central thesis — the gap between reality and Hollywood fictions — could easily result in facile conclusions about how fake the movies are. Sometimes, in his more tossed-off observations, there's a hint of this, as when Andersen complains that Robert DeNiro's book store employee girlfriend in Heat could never afford her gorgeous hillside house with a spectacular view of the city proper. But such observations, though bordering on the banal in isolation, are tied together in Andersen's later emphasis on the socioeconomic subtexts and political blind spots in Hollywood depictions of Los Angeles. A big part of it is white male privilege, which Andersen brings up by way of Woody Allen, a tourist in Los Angeles whose famous putdowns of the city from Annie Hall obviously get Andersen's back up. "I don't want to live in a city where the only cultural advantage is that you can make a right turn on a red light," Woody says, and it's easy to see why Andersen, who loves Los Angeles so intensely, is put off. (Sorry, it's still funny anyway.)


The film ends with a consideration of an alternate cinema of Los Angeles, the discovery of a kind of Californian neorealism by black filmmakers like Charles Burnett, Haile Gerima and Billy Woodberry in the 70s and 80s. Andersen's sudden turn into these movies at the end of his cinematic history of Los Angeles suggests that for all of the movies that purport to show Los Angeles from various angles and perspectives, so few of them really focus on the people of the city outside of the privileged milieus of the upper class, the police, the movie industry itself. Los Angeles might be the most photographed city in the world, Andersen suggests, but large portions of its population are very much under-photographed, a point he underscores by comparing the 70s and 80s black independent films to various Hollywood comedies and melodramas in which privileged white people shuffle around Los Angeles without ever encountering much if any sign of the city's ethnic and socioeconomic diversity. Andersen's commentary closes on a note of irony, accompanying images from Woodberry's Bless Their Little Hearts of a closed tire factory. Once people could take tours of the factory to see how tires were made, the narrator deadpans, just as now they can take tours of movie studios to see how movies are made.

The voiceover suggests a progression from a concrete product — and concrete jobs for working class, ordinary people who struggle to provide for their families — to the abstract dream factories of Hollywood, an image that has colonized the popular perception of Los Angeles, largely through the self-projection of the movies, in which the city and its people are inevitably dwarfed by the movie industry. Just as the movies have largely created and reproduced an artificial image of Los Angeles with little relation to the lives of most of its people, those same people, denied representation on movie screens, are increasingly marginalized from real life as well, their jobs taken away, their neighborhoods demolished and replaced by skyscrapers. In the end, Andersen's criticism is socially and politically oriented as much as it is rooted in cinematic or aesthetic concerns. His film, in documenting what films about Los Angeles show, is also very conscious of what they, generally speaking, do not show.

Three 1950s avant-garde shorts (Belson Shimané, Broughton, Kirsanoff)

Odds & Ends, by Jane Belson (later Jane Conger Belson Shimané), is a goofy little avant-garde pastiche, a collage of found travel footage with Belson Shimané's own abstract animations, both painted and created with paper cutouts. The imagery is a dazzling and abstract blur: people having fun on exotic beaches and boats, fragments of vacationers walking through bland hotel corridors, images of elbows and legs, disconnected body parts, mixed in with smeared paint and gyrating geometric patterns that look like paper snowflakes of the kind made in elementary school art classes. The whole thing has a rough and offhand aesthetic, as though it was stitched together from whatever was at hand, which it probably was.

The images never quite come together into a coherent whole, but the wry, deadpan narration by Henry Jacobs makes one suspect that incoherence is part of the point. Over a background of stereotypical hippie bongos, Jacobs patters on about jazz, poetry, entertainment, grant subsidies, professional careers, and other matters of art and commerce. His speech is freewheeling, strung together with the phrase "on the other hand," which he repeats every few moments to segue from one contradictory point to the next. He's talking about spontaneity versus forethought, art versus entertainment, meaning versus abstraction, and his narration seems to have nothing to do with the images of Belson Shimané — which is, again, the point. As Jacobs talks about the disconnect between jazz and poetry when the two are put together, he says that sometimes when two things are combined, they seem to have little to do with one another, and people don't know what to think as a result. He might well be talking about the film itself, as his narration meanders on, utterly independent of Belson Shimané's rough collage, two things existing simultaneously without really interacting or connecting to one another.

The result is playful and silly, and Jacobs' self-aware narration earns a few laughs at the expense of avant-garde pretensions, particularly when he imagines making a living by delivering crowd-pleasing unions of jazz and poetry, connecting with a broad public through these peripheral artforms. Odds & Ends is, true to its title, a neat little collection of wry observations and charmingly amateur images.


Four in the Afternoon, by the poet-filmmaker James Broughton, is a suite of four vignettes, each one built around one of Broughton's sing-songy, nursery rhyme-inflected poems, which appear periodically on the soundtrack. Each segment concerns the somewhat elusive search for love. In "Game Little Gladys," a girl skips rope and sees images of ten men who might someday be her husband. In "The Gardener's Son," a young man lounges around, working in a garden and spying on (or seeing visions of) women frolicking in the fields. In "Princess Printemps," a princess is comically pursued by a would-be suitor, but is never caught. In the final segment, "The Aging Balletomane," an old man sees a vision of a young girl dancing on a pedestal, though she disappears every time he reaches for her or tries to approach. The film, though made in 1951, feels in many ways like a lost artifact of the silent era, as it appropriates the rhythms of silent comedy in its bursts of sped-up motion and its exaggerated, gestural, dialogue-free performances. The only sound is provided by the sprightly orchestral music and the occasional reading of excerpts from Broughton's poems.

Each segment is brief and minimal, examining a simple idea in a fairly direct way, and the film as a whole is pretty slight and forgettable, with Broughton's fey poetry and whimsical sensibility often failing to make much of an impression. That said, there are some striking images along the way, images that reveal the poet's visual sense. In "The Gardener's Son," Broughton shoots a tiled walkway in an angled closeup that creates the illusion of depth in the distinctive patterned tiles, so that it briefly seems as though the tiles are actually a staircase. It's then disorienting when a bare foot suddenly steps into the frame, recontextualizing the image so that the tiles no longer seem to be raised or layered, but are revealed as a flat surface. It's a wonderful and playful optical illusion. "Game Little Gladys" evinces a similar concern with geometry and patterns: an early shot shows the girl descending a staircase from her apartment, and Broughton inserts a shot that shows the criss-crossing stairs arranged into a distinctive shape on the side of the building. When the girl skips rope later on, the courtyard where she's playing is filmed in such a way that it seems to consist of several oddly disconnected spaces, with Gladys appearing first in front of an ordinary brick wall, then in a concrete yard dotted with weird trapezoidal protrusions.

There's also a peppy poetry to the image of the princess and her suitor chasing one another, alternately in sped-up Keystone Kops double-time and a weightless, running-on-the-moon slow bounce. Broughton is clearly not just a poet-turned-filmmaker, interested only in words, but an artist who's truly attuned to the poetic visual possibilities of the medium. If Four in the Afternoon is ultimately a minor work, it's at least often an enjoyable one.


The Russian emigré Dimitri Kirsanoff, who had a remarkable if often overlooked career as a filmmaker in France, made The Death of a Stag as a commissioned work late in his career. The film's status as a commission is apparent during the introduction, in which a painting of a hunting party is shown along with a voiceover describing the proud French tradition of the hunt and its endurance throughout the ages. It has the flat tone of an industrial documentary or an educational film. Kirsanoff then sets out to utterly ignore this introduction, instead making a typically poetic and striking document that, rather than confirming the timelessness of this rich man's tradition, reveals the hunt as a rather pathetic artifact of another time, an absurd rite with silly costumes and bracing violence at its core.

Kirsanoff's editing is crisp and fast-paced, observing the preparations for the hunt, watching the bourgeois men and women stand around, eating and chatting, smiling and laughing, as packs of dogs congregate, ready to be unleashed for the start of the hunt. The hunt itself is over quickly; the bulk of this brief twelve-minute film is spent simply watching the hunters engaging in the social rites that seem to be the real point of this whole exercise. Kirsanoff's montage is quick but gives the impression of lingering on certain key details: a man taking a bite of an egg then casting a shy sidelong glance at the camera, the dogs licking one another, the tops of bare, leafless trees swaying in the breeze (a favorite Kirsanoff image), two laborers chopping at a tree, the necessity of their work not interrupted by the frivolous country play of the rich folks partying nearby.

The climax of the hunt itself is actually an anticlimax, an unforgettable image of the titular stag surrounded on all sides by barking dogs and the men in their foppish rifles. Kirsanoff holds the image for a long few moments, capturing the utter absurdity of this very unsportsmanlike method of hunting, and then a single rifle shot cracks and the stag falls into the water, with the dogs instantly swarming onto it. The dogs are used as a symbol for the violence barely contained by the appearance of civility. The soundtrack, with its brassy horns and jaunty hunting music, is occasionally infiltrated by the barking of the dogs, subtly blending in with the horns. Later, the hunters present the dogs with a banquet of entrails and spare hunks of meat from the killed animal, unveiling the feast with great pomp and ceremony, as though it's another of the codified rituals surrounding the supposedly great tradition of the hunt. The dogs' subsequent feeding frenzy, leaping on the pile of organs and meat and fighting one another for a chunk of the spoils, belies the civilized façade of the bourgeois hunters. This fascinating little film is another glimpse into Kirsanoff's clear-eyed perspective, his ability to use his deceptively simple but always poetically rich imagery to cut to the core of whatever he's filming.

Eadweard Muybridge, Zoopraxographer

The photographer Eadweard Muybridge can be considered an early pioneer of the development of motion pictures, even though his work preceded the official birth of the cinema. Muybridge is most famous for his sequences of still images that captured animals and humans in various stages of motion: these images, strung together as stills or projected with Muybridge's zoopraxiscope (a primitive motion picture prototype), not only represented steps towards the development of the cinema, but in the realm of science, completely changed the nature of accepted thinking about animal locomotion. Eadweard Muybridge, Zoopraxographer is a film essay by Thom Andersen that explores Muybridge's life and work, first in the form of a conventional documentary biography, and then, more provocatively, as a coherently argued work of criticism that examines the ideas and associations evoked by viewing Muybridge's pre-cinematic oeuvre at a remove of almost a hundred years.

Roughly the first half of Andersen's film is devoted to a biography of Muybridge, accompanied by images from the photographer's work. The material is informative and interesting, if not necessarily exciting, and it establishes the context of Muybridge's times and his photographic background. The narration, by the actor Dean Stockwell, is deadpan and purposefully dry, straightforwardly recounting Muybridge's early photographic and journalistic endeavors. But Andersen's perceptive, incisive perspective on this material is revealed in key ways, as when the narrator says that it was "manifest destiny" that gave Muybridge passage — on a commercial ship — to Central America, where the photographer documented the laborers on sugar plantations. The voiceover's wry reference to Muybridge reworking his name as a Spanish sobriquet has a subtle hint of mockery in it, subverting the objective tone of the words themselves.

Andersen's perspective is even more pointedly revealed in the sequence where he recounts Muybridge's marriage, his subsequent discovery that his wife was cheating on him, and then his very public murder of her lover. The narration retains its dry, serious tone, but Andersen slowly zooms in on an image of Muybridge, his eyes hooded, a bushy beard covering the lower half of his face, fixing the camera with a sinister glare. Then the story takes a really unexpected turn when Andersen reveals that Muybridge, at his murder trial, initially pleaded insanity but was in fact acquitted entirely, on the grounds of "justifiable homicide." The subtext is obvious: if the slow zoom on Muybridge's impenetrable face encouraged consideration of what kind of man this was, the trial's outcome suggests just how different this era was from our own. This will be a theme that Andersen will pick up, in a very different way, in the analytical second half of his film, but here it's already an undercurrent, pointing to the unbridgeable gap between the pre-cinematic 1800s and our own time.


Once Andersen establishes the basic details of his subject's life and the nature of his work, the filmmaker delves into analysis with a section explicitly titled "Analysis" (the previous sections, mirroring Muybridge's scientific terminology, were titled "Prospectus" and "Catalogue"). Andersen then immediately leaps into the substance of Muybridge's work, particularly the series of photographic sequences, mostly of people, that he made at the University of Pennsylvania from 1883 to 1886. Muybridge meticulously documented and quantified his work, balancing between scientific rigor and an aesthetic, emotional component that prefigures the artistic/industrial divide that would be worked out in the subsequent early cinema of Edison, Lumière, and other pioneers. What's fascinating about Muybridge's work, to Andersen, is that tension between the functional/scientific and the social/artistic/emotional. Many of Muybridge's subjects were naked men and women, and Andersen juxtaposes these images against the photographer's similar documents of people in the clothing of the era: restrictive, long, formal, conservative.

Muybridge's work is presented as a radical statement in an era in which sexuality and nudity were considered beyond the pale. What's especially provocative about his images to Andersen, however, is how ordinary the presentation of nudity is, how casual. Muybridge's images depict men and women performing athletic feats, but also ordinary chores or activities as prosaic as drinking tea or getting out of bed. Andersen is probing the tension inherent in these images, even now: the scientific setting, with its abstract grid backdrop, contrasts against the casual nudity of the subjects, so that each image attempts to capture natural activity, but does so in an utterly artificial way. This means that Muybridge's photographs, balanced as they are between scientific inquiry, artistic portraiture, documentary representation, and even social commentary, are especially rich sources for the consideration of what a photographic or cinematic image represents and what can be represented by the image.

Andersen also makes the (debatable) point that the nudity in Muybridge's work was especially subversive because it did not resort to the pictorial conventions — lyricism, romanticism, idealization — that were and are used to aesthetically represent nudity in much popular art. In fact, it's likely that Muybridge's photos were as accepted as they were precisely because of their aura of scientific importance, because the nudity could be justified, not as prurient, but as observational and clinical. Andersen is right, though, that Muybridge's images are especially fascinating as early examples of the verité impulse in image-making, whether in photography or the nascent cinema. In talking about Muybridge's pre-zoopraxiscope work, Andersen points out that Muybridge's on-location photography and naturalistic depictions of unstaged, unposed scenes were breaks from the norms of the time, when most photography was made in studios, with rigid poses and very formal conditions. Muybridge, almost from the beginning of his career, had the impulse to photograph the world as it was, to take pictures even of innocuous clouds and trees, and he carried this documentary impulse over into his scientific work. This is just one respect in which Muybridge presaged the "actualities" of the early cinema, with its depictions of trains pulling into stations and athletes performing feats.


One of Andersen's first deconstructions of Muybridge's images in his "Analysis" is to translate Muybridge's tabulations of times recorded and not recorded into a cinematic reconstruction that restores the element of time to these individual still photos. Andersen represents the times between images with black spaces, so that the images seem to flicker across the screen, pulsating, as the voiceover poetically describes the relationship between the images, which freeze a fraction of second forever, and all the unrecorded time that exists in between photographs but has not been immortalized. That the images, once animated in this fashion, still create the illusion of movement simultaneously exalts the magic of the cinema and laments the non-recorded images that linger, like unseen ghosts, in between each frame of the film.

Andersen is making the very interesting argument that, while Muybridge's system, with its multiple cameras, was an oddity that had little to do, from a technological standpoint, with the eventual invention of the cinema as we know it, from a philosophical and physiological standpoint Muybridge was laying the groundwork for the innovations of Edison and Lumière. What Muybridge's work proved was that a finite series of images, projected together and interrupted by black frames, could, through the phenomenon of the persistence of vision, create the illusion of movement. Muybridge, like all later filmmakers, was taking still images — frozen snapshots of particular moments in time — and reanimating them into the forward motion and flow of moving time. He was reintroducing time to the static image, and towards the end of this film Andersen illustrates the point by recreating one of Muybridge's most provocative and evocative images, the slow progress of two naked women gradually moving closer together until they lightly kiss. Andersen's flickering recreation returns Muybridge's influence to the cinema, using modern means to duplicate the strobing but sensuous quality of Muybridge's primitive proto-cinema. As Andersen presents it, there's something poignant about the dead-end status of Muybridge's invention; he was held back by the lack of technical advances that would come too late for his work, but he was already thinking in ways that would be developed to fruition in the more direct precursors to the modern cinema.

In Eadweard Muybridge, Zoopraxographer, Andersen has created a work of criticism in film form, not only providing a biography of Muybridge and a chronicle of his influential work, but examining the implications of that work in sociology, art, the science of perception, and sexual mores. Andersen's commentary, as drolly recited by Stockwell, is at times dryly ironic (Muybridge "was the first and only zoopraxographer") and at times seems bemused and peeved by the sexual repression of Muybridge's era — and the enduring puritanical spirit that has stretched into the present as well. Muybridge thus becomes an unlikely icon for the sexual revolution, a precursor not only of the cinema but of a sensibility of clear-eyed examination that doesn't flinch away from nakedness, that's concerned with discovering the truth of human existence in all its unglamorous ordinariness. Andersen is a sharp, perceptive critic whose consideration of Muybridge opens up into social criticism, film theory, sexuality, aesthetics and technology. He is doing the work of all the best critics: looking closely and intently at these flickering images and finding a wealth of ideas to be drawn out and connections to be made.

Profit Motive and the Whispering Wind

John Gianvito's Profit Motive and the Whispering Wind is a simple but evocative documentary, a film that chronicles the history of American rebellion, resistance and progressivism, using monuments, gravesites, plaques and other commemorative relics to chart the various social, political and economic struggles of American history. The memorials that Gianvito captures in his sumptuous images — invariably backed by bright blue skies, fluffy clouds and lush green vegetation — are mostly public, with many familiar names and events highlighted, but the way he presents these finds has the feel of gathering evidence, silently making an argument through the accumulation of details. The film progresses roughly chronologically through American history, beginning with monuments to battles against Native Americans and moving on to chronicle slave rebellions, women's rights reformers, and especially the often violent struggles of the labor movement. Gianvito makes his perspective clear early on, when he films a sign about how colonial forces "defeated" the Indians in a battle: after an abrupt cut, the word "defeated" has been crudely papered over with a cardboard cutout replacing the word with "massacred." It's an acknowledgment that, within these nominally objective markers of history, there is a distinct slant, one that Gianvito is endeavoring to replace with his own slant and his own perspective.

For most of the film, though, the filmmaker simply observes and edits together these memorials and graves into a kind of alternative history of America. There are familiar names here, names inscribed in any high school history textbook, but their graves, their grand monuments, are scattered in with the more modest memorials to other martyrs and thinkers, names not so familiar, names and events that don't get taught in American classrooms. Gianvito, building on Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States, is paying tribute to the people, both famous and forgotten, who contributed to this country's history of struggle and reform. The sheer proliferation of small civic plaques commemorating the various massacres and tragedies of the labor movement itself makes a statement: so many plaques stoically recounting 19 dead here, 38 wounded there, a list of names with ages, some of them as young as six years or even six months old, another monument that documents how each of the men was killed (bullet through the heart or head) and who they left behind when they died. All the facts and figures, the years and dates, the cold hard recitation of facts about people who lived, fought and died for something they believed in. All the graves, all the forgotten heroes who died to get an eight-hour work day, to protest unfair business practices, to earn benefits that they would never enjoy themselves, but which would be passed on to future generations. One man was, his grave tells us, killed "by capitalist interests for organizing and inspiring his fellow man," a worn inscription that Gianvito finds important enough to emphasize by, for a moment, digitally enhancing the letters on the grave so they stand out clearly enough to be read.

These still, quiet images of graves and monuments are alternated with equally languid images of the wind whispering, whistling and murmuring through trees, fields of flowers, and undulating meadows of tall grass. The film quickly falls into a slow, steady rhythm: an image of untouched natural splendor, then a gravesite, surrounded by tranquil fields, buried in grass or shaded by trees, sometimes with lichens and mold wearing away the stone, sometimes with insects creeping along the cool surface of the tombstone. These images, mostly filmed in the American Northeast on bright, nearly cloudless summer days, are gorgeous and peaceful. There is rarely any direct sign of human presence — only in one shot does Gianvito capture, almost incidentally, some tourists walking along a path, distant from the grave he's shooting. The absence of any visitors to these monuments suggests a forgotten history, even if Gianvito is freezing these sites in place at moments of stasis. Many of these graves are marked with flowers and other signs of recent visitation, so the film's stillness and lack of population feels artificial, stylized, a bit of poetic license to make a political point: how easy it is to forget, to ignore the past, to walk by the lessons of history without pausing to consider them.


Some of these monuments are clearly marked and public, others are shrouded in trees, hidden away in private corners, decaying with age and rot. Gianvito introduces an image of an empty field with a paragraph of text citing a labor martyr and his unmarked grave, hidden beneath the field with no sign or monument to announce his presence or his role in history. A monument to one of many labor massacres is mounted at the base of a lamppost in a shopping mall by a major thoroughfare, a perfect example of capitalist practicality co-opting a memorial to its enemies. The film, by juxtaposing monuments placed in prominent, public view with those that are more obscured, calls attention to the vagaries of history. Gianvito, without saying a word, is asking us to question why and how we remember, and what we remember: who gets enshrined in history books, who gets a big tourist site memorial, and who gets shuffled off into a corner, buried in an out-of-the-way cemetery with only a small marker to commemorate their lives and actions.

At one point, Gianvito films a sign whose text briefly describes a 1759 slave rebellion (failed, naturally). He holds an angled shot of the sign for long enough for its text to be read, and then cuts to a different angle, revealing the very different sign in the background: an Exxon gas station sign, with cars speeding by on a highway between the rebellion memorial and the list of gas prices. The revelation recontextualizes this monument, revealing its awkward positioning by a road where it could hardly be read by all the cars speeding by, and revealing its proximity to the signifiers of modern American prosperity and commerce. By and large, these signs of progressive history are positioned within a society that is rushing ahead, not pausing to read the epitaphs on these obscure graves, not caring to be educated about the revolts and struggles described by roadside plaques. Even when modernity isn't so intrusive within the frame, it's often in the background, as Gianvito's meticulous sound design lets in the roar of passing trucks, the hum of a lawnmower, the distant buzz of what might be the titular wind, or else the traffic on a nearby motorway.

It's only at the end of the film that this timeless, methodical examination of history's uneasy position in the present gives way to a full-on embrace of the now. After filming several high-profile capitalist brands — McDonald's, Walmart — through the film's signature waving leaves and branches, Gianvito introduces a briskly edited sequence of present-day protests against the Bush administration and the Iraq war. It's an attempt — perhaps a strained one — to link the film's history of struggle to modern resistance and protest. Gianvito's evocation of different flash points in American history — the oppression of Native Americans, the slave rebellions, the fight for women's suffrage, the violence against labor unions — suggests that oppression is a constant, and so too is the resistance against it. In this context, the ineffectual Bush-era protests clearly lack the gravity or the air of importance of the other historical touchstones of Gianvito's film, but his point with this coda remains powerful: the need to struggle, to fight for the next advance, the next small victory for the under-represented. This poetic, evocative film beautifully captures the urgency of such struggles while paying tribute to those who struggled, won, lost, lived and died, and were feted or forgotten by history.

The Terence Davies Trilogy

The Terence Davies Trilogy is the British filmmaker Davies' triptych of short films made between 1976 and 1983. Obviously based on autobiographical experiences, all three films deal with the life of a gay man named Robert Tucker growing up in a repressive culture — the film is set in the specific culture of Britain in the 60s or 70s or 80s, but its depictions can apply anywhere that desires and feelings are suppressed and denigrated. These films are universal and timeless in that way, despite their specificity and wealth of detail. The films simply but powerfully examine sexual and emotional repression, Catholic guilt, confusion, grief, and the simmering hatred and despair incubated by a life of fear and lies in the closet.

The first film of the trilogy, Children, collects the childhood flashbacks of Robert Tucker (Phillip Mawdsley as a boy, Robin Hooper as a young man). As a child, the fey, quiet Tucker suffers tremendously. He is taunted and beaten at school, called a "fruit" by his classmates, who chase him home as soon as the ending bell rings, and sometimes catch him. He is tormented by his teachers as well; they can't seem to resist mocking his habit of answering their abuse and punishments with a subservient "yes sir" or "thank you sir." And at home, Tucker must deal with a brutish but ailing father (Nick Stringer) who's cold and angry, falling apart due to illness but still possessing enough strength to beat his wife (Valerie Lilley) and intimidate his son.

The film, like all three of these shorts, is shot in a loose black-and-white style, rough and realistic, with the deeply personal feel of lived memories. The opening, in which Davies focuses on the faces of schoolboys in silent shots, immediately recalls the Free Cinema movement, an obvious influence here, as is the style and immediacy of neorealism in general. Davies has a feel for faces, for observation. He accumulates small details until he's assembled a coherent portrait of a young gay boy's life in a repressive Catholic school: the punishment for small offenses, the bureaucracy, the near-military discipline contrasted against the brutishness of the schoolchildren whenever the teachers aren't watching. Catholic guilt and repression loom large. A cross is prominently positioned in Tucker's room so that it seems to linger in the background of several shots, juxtaposed against his suffering and anger.

The sequences of Tucker as a boy are implicitly the flashbacks of the older character, who doesn't seem much changed by the intervening years. Just as the boy goes to see a doctor in one scene, waiting in his underwear while the other boys make fun of him, the young man also goes to see a doctor. The bureaucracy of the waiting room connects the boy and the man, as does the anxiety over his homosexual desires. The boy watches, in a pool shower, as a young, muscular man washes himself: the scene is lovingly filmed by Davies as a sensuous expression of gay desire, capturing the look of awe in the young Tucker's eyes as as he watches the man's hands caressing his own body beneath the streaming water. Later, Tucker faces a doctor who seems to think of his lack of interest in girls as an illness, a temporary affliction that will eventually pass, and Tucker only politely says "thank you" and "sir" the way he always had to his teachers as a boy. A childhood of abuse and constant browbeating has turned him into an introspective, isolated young man, obviously haunted by his past. The film's structure reflects this: the scenes of Tucker as a man are brief and fragmentary, overshadowed by the scenes from his boyhood. Other than an attenuated scene of him getting together with another man, there is no sign of anything of substance in Tucker's adult life other than his negative memories of his own past.

Davies' aesthetic is unshowy, but these seemingly offhand images of prosaic life can be misleading: there's a subtle stylization in his images. In one shot, Davies shoots through the back window of a hearse as Tucker's father's coffin is loaded into it, while beyond the car's window are Tucker and his mother in another window, looking on, made ghostly by the distance and the panes of glass, as a sneering smirk curls Tucker's lips. The next shot is even more chilling, as the boy begins to laugh bitterly, and then walks forward at the head of a procession of mourners, each of whom stare disarmingly at the camera as they pass by. At the end of the shot, when all the mourners have walked by, all that's left is the black emptiness of the doorway.

The use of music and sound in the film is haunting and minimal. A static shot of Tucker and his mother riding the bus is accompanied by a mournful flute solo until, abruptly, Tucker's mother begins to sob quietly, gasping and hiccuping, her face disconcertingly maintaining its stoic composure in between sobs. In another shot, Davies holds the adult Tucker in the same static profile, staring straight ahead while a collage of sounds and music on the soundtrack evoke childhood memories: children singing and saying prayers in unison, their high voices joined together in both plaintive folk ballads and rote recitations of prayers. The most affecting music is reserved for the final shot, a long pan back from Tucker at his bedroom window, interrupted by a brief interior profile shot in which the boy breaks down and cries, moaning, "oh dad," a stark contrast to his smirking reaction before the funeral. As the camera pulls back from the window, and from this intimate moment of grief, a girl's voice sings the mournful, eerie supernatural folk song "The Ballad of Barbara Allen."


Madonna and Child, the second film of the trilogy, picks up the story of Robert Tucker (played this time by Terry O'Sullivan) later in his life, when he's living at home with his aged mother (Sheila Raynor) and working at a dull office job. Towards the beginning of the film, Davies' camera pans slowly across the deck of a ferry, tracking methodically towards Tucker, who sits alone towards the back of the boat, obviously crying. As the camera edges in closer and closer, it eventually arrives at an uncomfortably intimate closeup that reveals every messy detail of Tucker's grief: his heavy-lidded, puffy eyes, the tears streaming down his cheeks, his quivering lips. It is a powerful encapsulation of utter despair, mirrored at the end of the film by the scene where Tucker, sitting along in his room at home, abruptly screams loudly. His mother walks in, asks if everything is okay, and when he plaintively answers in the affirmative, she nods and closes the door. In both cases, Tucker's despair is seemingly unmotivated, not tied to any concrete event or incident, coming out of nowhere — but the rest of the film makes it clear that these uncontrolled emotional outbursts are an only too appropriate response to the general aura of melancholy and isolation afflicting this lonely, tormented man.

Davies' slow pan across a silent office, with the occasional scratch of a pencil or raspy cough rubbing up against the choral music of the soundtrack, emphasizes the deadening effect of this work on Tucker. This is particularly true when, in a deadpan punchline, Davies ends the tracking shot with a closeup on a wrinkled coworker, who asks Tucker if he did anything over the weekend, to which he drily responds, "no." But he does do something on the weekends, as the very next shot shows him methodically going about his sour-faced preparations for going out. He pulls on his leather boots and jeans, and his shiny leather jacket, popping the collar up around his neck. Davies emphasizes the sounds of this routine: the rustling of cloth, the metallic scrape of a zipper, the crinkling of the jacket, the creaking of the stairs as Tucker then sneaks downstairs in the dark, trying not to wake his mother. This grown man is acting like a teenager trying to get out of the house, while his mother, in a nearby room, lies awake, listening disapprovingly, knowing or suspecting where her son is going. The shot of Tucker slowly tiptoeing down the stairs, a striking black silhouette in the dark, his collar sticking up in points like Dracula's cape, emphasizes the distance between his desired image of himself and the truth of the matter, which is that he's rather pathetic, unable even to get into the underground gay clubs he tries to visit. He's so obviously uncomfortable with his sexuality that he winds up not fitting in anywhere, in the straight world or in the underground gay world he hesitantly flirts with.

The point is driven home during a remarkable scene where Tucker goes to confession. Speaking to the priest, he rattles off an impressive list of very specific sins, accompanied by precise tallies of how many times he committed each sin during the weeks since his last confession. The sins are mostly matters of thought and attitude, venial slips like "disrespecting my parents" and "coveting my neighbor's possessions." It is obvious that Tucker maintains a constant censorious eye on his own mind, tracking his impure thoughts, keeping a mental tally sheet of his bad thoughts. The unspoken subtext of this confession, however, is sexuality, the one subject that Tucker can't seem to bear to address in these admissions of failings and thought crimes. As Tucker continues to recite his sins in voiceover, Davies pans away into the black empty space of the confessional, transitioning into a fantasy or memory of Tucker lasciviously giving a blowjob to another man, the camera drifting along until it is positioned behind the man's bare buttocks as Tucker squeezes them together. Paired with the language of penitence on the soundtrack, the image is doubly provocative. It is clear that Tucker feels guilty for his sexual behavior, and his obsessive tracking and confession of his other sins becomes a form of compensation: he's struggling with feelings of guilt, and can't bear to even acknowledge his desires or his sexual actions.


The third film of Davies' trilogy, Death and Transfiguration, opens with a remarkably affecting and simply presented sequence as Robert Tucker goes to his mother's funeral. The shot sequence is precise: a hazy urban skyline with a blurry sun breaking through the clouds, the front grille of a hearse, a car door opening, a closeup of hands clasped in a prayer-like posture, the wheel of the vehicle as it slowly starts moving, and finally a closeup of Tucker's face as he sits in the back of a car, heading towards the cemetery to bury his beloved and feared mother. It is a near-abstract representation of grief, capturing the sense of ceremony and ritual that accompanies death, the ritualized gestures of mourning, the rites that precede the trip to the grave. That this sequence ends with a sustained image of a coffin being cremated, the flames flaking away the wood and slowly engulfing the screen, suggests that the ritual is merely a civilized facade on the truth, a disguise for the simpler and crueler fact that this is an absolute ending.

This final film, perhaps the most devastating of the cycle, focuses on Tucker as an old man (played here by Wilfrid Brambell, while Terry O'Sullivan returns as the middle-aged Tucker). The trilogy is structured so that each segment is about looking backwards: in Children, Tucker was a young man remembering his boyhood, in Madonna and Child he was middle-aged and thinking back on being a younger man, and here he's an old man remembering the entirety of his life. There's a sense of circularity to this structure, as the old, sickly Tucker lounges in a hospital, cared for by nuns, remembering his boyhood as a student at a Catholic school where he feared the rigid nuns who ruled his life. He has been returned to the hands of the nuns after an entire life struggling against the confines of religion, wracked with guilt over his gay lifestyle, constrained by his mother, who he devotedly cared for and desperately mourned for after her death.

Now, what's left to him is memory. Davies' fluid editing erases the boundaries between past and present, cutting smoothly between the silent, ancient Tucker in his hospital bed and various sequences from earlier in his life. He remembers, especially, moments of tenderness and intimacy with his mother, and moments of religious instruction from his boyhood. As he approaches his own death, his thoughts are obviously on God, wondering what's next for him, thinking about his fraught relationship with religion. He's also still haunted by his mother, long after her death, consumed by thoughts of her. One of the film's most beautiful sequences is a memory from Tucker's boyhood, as he remembers seeing various adults, friends of his parents, singing in the streets, exuberant and perhaps a little drunk, winding into the house for a Christmas party. Slowly, another song wells up from amidst the revelers' cacophony on the soundtrack, an out-of-tune woman's voice singing, badly but with such passion and feeling, "Someone To Watch Over Me." This song, sung boldly and clearly, with no shame over the cracked notes, slowly replaces the sounds of the party on the soundtrack, as the young Tucker sees his mother on the street and embraces her, and the song continues as Davies cuts back to the hospital, where Tucker wheezes and moans in his sleep, his mouth hanging open, his face looking gaunt and skeletal.

This film ends with a harrowing and mysterious sequence in which Tucker at long last proceeds, gasping and wheezing, into the pure white light that consumes him in his final moments. That's the moment of transfiguration hinted at by the title of this final film, but it's a singularly open-ended transfiguration, leaving one to wonder if Tucker has been lifted up into God's arms, as he had always been told he would be, or if he passed into some other void. It's a perfect, if desolate, ending to the film, and the trilogy as a whole, because it captures the isolation and loneliness of this man who was never able to be himself. He dedicated his life to his mother, and to hiding and suppressing the truth of his gay identity and desires, and in the end he's left with a lonely, frightening death, facing the light with so many questions left unanswered, so many wishes left unfulfilled.

Four 1960s avant-garde shorts (Jacobs, Levine, Mekas, Jordan)

Ken Jacobs' Little Stabs at Happiness is an aimless collection of vignettes featuring various friends and associates of Jacobs lounging around, playing goofy games or simply hanging out in various urban locales. Its aimlessness, one guesses, is part of the point, as the title suggests people just trying to live their lives, maybe find a little happiness along the way. The film is divided into about six rough sections, some of which are preceded by chapter titles and some of which aren't. In the first scene, Jacobs' fellow filmmaker Jack Smith plays in a bathtub with a woman, both of them dressed up in goofy homemade costumes of foil and thrift store clothes and paint, Smith with a blue line running down his nose and a hood wrapped around his head. They play with dolls, and Smith enacts both violent and sexual acts on the dolls, stubbing out a cigarette in the eye of one doll and enacting oral sex on the blank, molded plastic crotch of another, which he nearly shoves all the way into his mouth. It's a vision of childlike "innocent" play as destructive and outrageous, not so much innocent as morally undeveloped.

In the subsequent scenes, Jacobs adopts a more realistic, observational aesthetic, observing in turn two women sitting around an empty yard, a man and a woman hanging out by a dock, a man and woman talking in an alley, and a group of kids and adults drawing on the ground with chalk. In the final scene, Jacobs returns to Smith as a portrait of "listlessness," hanging out on a rooftop as a sad clown in a puffy outfit, throwing around balloons and looking discontented and sluggish.

The most interesting aspect of the film, however, is the second section, in which Jacobs delivers a voiceover that describes the structure of the film, self-consciously talking about how this section will be three minutes long, and how he is using music and other sounds to disrupt the potential for connection or conversation between the two women onscreen in this section. Most interesting of all is his admission that the people onscreen in this film are almost all people who he doesn't get along with or see anymore. He hints at an argument and falling-out with Smith, and describes all the other people as former friends who have moved away, or disappeared, or who just don't come around much anymore except if they want something. It's sad, and places the rest of the film in context as a nostalgic memoir for lost friends and broken friendships. Maybe that's why we see people talking here but can't hear them. Without this voiceover, the film risks seeming like a pointless, disconnected series of images of people hanging out, acting out typically abstract or surreal avant-garde film scenes or simply doing not much at all. But this simple, direct voiceover recontextualizes everything, and makes the film a scrapbook of happy or memorable moments from the past, rough portraits of people the filmmaker wishes to remember as they were when they were a part of his life.


Saul Levine's Note to Patti is a touching, evocative short film made for the absent friend of the title. Made during a snowy winter, featuring the friends and family of Levine's friend Patti, who was away from home, the film is an ode to the simple pleasures of the home life, a nostalgic portrait of loved ones having fun in the snow, playing, shoveling, observing the beauty of the natural world around them. The film is briskly edited, full of washed-out images that evoke a kind of nostalgic fading: kids in pale red snowsuits frolicking amidst the snowy whiteness all around; birds flitting from branch to branch in a bare tree, framed against a dull gray sky; adults trudging through several feet of heaped-up snow, digging out and watching the children have fun. Levine's cinema is irrevocably tied to the aesthetic and content of home movies. It is a personal cinema, assembled from tiny everyday moments, full of casual image captured on the fly, with a sentimental eye for the activities of the friends and family surrounding the filmmaker. The film's washed-out images evoke the past, despite being captured in the present: it is as though the film is already preparing for its future status as nostalgia, as a reminder of youthful fun.

The snow in the film provides a kind of blank canvas on which Levine draws his images in blots of color framed against the broad white stretches. The children running through the snow form streaks of rapidly moving color as they play. One boy's red hat provides a shock of bright color every time he appears. Levine is playing with the rhythms of the colors, editing so that flashes of bright color — sometimes an object within the frame, sometimes provided by filters that turn the image bright blue or yellow — alternate with pale snowy landscapes or stretches of pregnant, cloudy sky. At one point, Levine flickers back and forth between an image of a bird in a tree and a human figure walking along in the snow, so that the bird and the person continuously morph into one another, both dark blots framed against an expanse of blank nothingness, both living beings flitting around in the snow's cold solemnity. Levine is contrasting the stillness and quiet of the snowy landscape — embodied in his characteristic lack of a soundtrack — with the liveliness and activity of the people who interact with this snow, clearing it away or making games of running through it.

In its brief seven-minute span, Note To Patti communicates much, evoking warm, slightly melancholy emotional resonances from its simple images of a snow day. Levine is tapping into what's best and most noble about the home movie: the concrete capturing of a moment in time, the built-in nostalgia for this moment that will soon be over, the rich emotions of family life. But his film is far from a simple home movie, and it's his intuitive, agile aesthetic sensibility that allows him to swirl up all these feelings and ideas from this rapidly edited flow of winter images.


Notes on the Circus is one part of Jonas Mekas' long series of diary films, his records of events both prosaic and exceptional, which were eventually edited together into his diary epic Walden. The film was shot at the Ringling Brothers circus and attempts to capture the thrills of the circus through fragmentary images and fast-paced, elliptical editing. Mekas is not after a conventional documentary record of a trip to the circus: instead of chronicling the concrete events that happen during a performance, Mekas is after the feel and the atmosphere of the circus. It's a sensory record of what the circus feels like to an observer, capturing the dizzying array of sights that overload the senses. The opening section of the film seems to focus especially on the circularity of the circus, as animals are led in speedy circles around tight rings, while acrobats twirl in the air, hoops are lit on fire and spin around, and jugglers toss round balls in circular orbits above their heads. Everything seems to be spinning in constant motion, turning circles, creating a sensation of dizzy confusion, mirroring the circus patron's uncertainty about where to look, which sight to take in next.

What makes the film so charming and enjoyable is that Mekas obviously shares in this sense of wonder. One senses that the film's perspective is that of the dazzled patron, Mekas himself, gawking happily as the circus performers go flying and leaping by, their bright costumes blurred by their speed. The film often becomes nearly abstract, a stream of unclear images and fragments of discernible figures. Every so often, the frantic pace slows down in order to focus on a single image, like a tiger riding on the back of a horse or a group of acrobats tossing each other through the air and then precariously grabbing hold again. Such moments mimic the observer's temporary fascination with a particular sight amidst the chaos, before being distracted again by the overall spectacle.

Mekas is in particular fascinated with a solitary female acrobat who swings back and forth on a trapeze bar, hanging upside down by her feet, arching her back across the bar, pulling herself up and then letting loose to hang in the air again. Mekas stays with her longer than with any other individual performer, admiring her graceful back-and-forth swings, and the way she casually lets her body dangle upside down in the air, framed against a black backdrop so that she seems to be suspended above the void, holding herself aloft by barely a toe. Mekas then superimposes her gyrations over the general chaos of the rest of the circus, allowing this graceful individual performance to be absorbed back into the larger extravaganza. All the moments of grace, of humor, of absurdity, of death-defying bravado, are allowed to coexist as they do in the circus, emphasizing the emotional experience of witnessing so many different forms of wonder and magic. The soundtrack, consisting of old-timey jugband tunes, further emphasizes the childlike, slightly old-fashioned appeal of the circus. Mekas, with his Old World sensibility and wide-eyed love for the ephemera of life, is perhaps the perfect filmmaker to craft this unrepentant ode to the circus.


Larry Jordan's Hamfat Asar is a crudely animated short that uses cutout etchings and drawings as a foundation for a goofy surrealist pastiche. Against a static backdrop of a seaside scene, with a line drawn across the center of the frame like a tightrope, Jordan assembles weird collages of fish, butterflies, anatomy diagrams, naked women, various mechanical devices and pieces of scientific equipment, and other ephemera. The images are formed from collages of old illustrations, meticulously assembled into new hybrid forms that dance across the screen, coming together and then fading away or splitting apart. Jordan was clearly inspired by the wonderfully inventive collage novels of Max Ernst, like the 1934 masterpiece Une semaine de bonté. As in Ernst, there is no clear meaning to these absurdist, surrealist juxtapositions, with the emphasis on odd conjunctions of unrelated images, married into hybrid forms that improbably come to life and interact.

However, Jordan's approximations of Ernst's inventive visual sensibility rarely go beyond the level of homage. It can be fun to see these very Ernst-like creations in motion: a microscope hobbling across the screen, propelled by its hind "leg," or a butterfly with a mushroom sprouting out of the junction point of its wings as it flits across the screen. But too often the film seems to be offering up a simple stream of weird images without really digging deeper into the substance of the images. Ernst's images, though they too defy conventional interpretation, are packed with resonances and suggestions, intimations of psychosexual probing, hints of darkness and menace, submerged satirical jabs encoded in his weird constructions. Jordan's images, in comparison, seem shallow and superficial, their resonance limited to the surface, only rarely suggesting anything deeper beyond the playful impulses of combination and juxtaposition that drive the film.

Hamfat Asar is thus most satisfying in its flashes of humor and playfulness. At one point, a fish and a lightbulb dance to the beat of the hand-drumming soundtrack, traipsing along the tightrope at the center of the frame, giving playful little kicks to accentuate the beat. Towards the end of the film, a woman is chased across the frame by a hummingbird, hiking up her skirt as she runs, the bird's long, sharp nose pointed with obvious sexual intent at her hindquarters. The image mirrors an earlier and equally playful assemblage where a woman had been pursuing a fleeing piece of machinery, wagging her finger at it as though chasing down an unruly child or a misbehaving pet. In these moments of humor, Jordan's film is witty and entertaining, but he never really attains the richness of visual language that would allow the film to tap into anything deeper than a few chuckles.

Films I Love #50: Cat's Cradle (Stan Brakhage, 1959)

Stan Brakhage's prolific and esoteric career as an avant-garde filmmaker is so packed with masterful works of art that it's difficult to pick a single film to represent him. The six-minute Cat's Cradle is only one of his great shorts, but it is perhaps the densest and most compact expression of what makes Brakhage's work so profound — and so profoundly moving. The film is an evocative montage of a single morning, comprised of repeating images shot in Brakhage's home: wallpaper, bedsheets, his cat, his wife Jane, himself, some friends, lamps, vases. Each image is onscreen for only seconds at a time, and yet each one has a potent sensual impact created by Brakhage's intuitive handling of light and color, and his feel for the frantic pace of his visual streams. The film is dominated by sensual reds and oranges, by images of golden light playing across a bed or a foot. Brakhage's camera dips in for intimate, hazy closeups of his wife or his cat, paying equal attention to the folds in Jane's clothes, the shadows etched into her face, or the wiry strands of whiskers projecting from the cat's cheeks.

The film is both visceral and meditative. Its rapid montage ensures that no single image ever lasts for very long; each precise yet casual framing is there and then gone again before it has fully registered. And yet the cumulative mood of the film is languid rather than frenetic, despite the pace of the editing. It creates a vivid and powerfully felt impression of a lazy morning, of lovers lounging around the house, enjoying one another's company, doing routine chores or doing nothing. The repetition of images enhances this impression: the same shots of Brakhage and Jane recur again and again, reinforcing the languor of this morning. This is a deeply affecting film, an ode to domesticity. It is sensual without being explicitly sexual; its pleasures, as in many of Brakhage's best films, are the pleasures of the world, the pleasures especially of vision and sensation.