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.

Les maîtres fous

Les maîtres fous is one of the French director Jean Rouch's ethnographic accounts of Nigeria under European colonial rule. The film is a bizarre and unsettling chronicle of the Hauka movement, a quasi-religious Nigerian sect in which the members enacted rituals where they are "possessed" by various archetypes of European colonialists. Rouch devotes most of his film to a document of one of these rituals, complete with a voiceover that purports to identify the various forms that the Africans are taking on: the General, the Governor, the Doctor's Wife, and other positions of military and political power within the European ruling authorities. While Rouch's narration maintains its deadpan, unruffled calm, the contortions of the ritual become increasingly ecstatic and unhinged, as the celebrants foam at the mouth, spasm and dance spastically, sacrifice a chicken and a dog, and lick up the blood from these sacrifices until their faces are smeared.

What makes the film so odd and challenging is the juxtaposition between its relaxed narration — which affects the soothing tones and distanced objective pose of many ethnographic documentaries — and the lurid, outrageous imagery of the ritual itself. Rouch's perspective is odd, too. His narration makes the claim that the ritual is intended to be a parody of the colonial occupation, that the Nigerians are channeling their disdain for their white masters into exaggerated, stylized appropriations of the Europeans' rites and and dress and manners. He might be right. But it's hard to know just how seriously to take Rouch's claims, as again and again his narration seems less like the result of informed research and more like a series of fanciful descriptions of observed behavior. His voiceover has a searching quality that makes it seem as though Rouch is trying to form a narrative based around the images he's gathered, and this impression complicates the film considerably.

Rouch is reading a great deal into the psychology of the film's subjects, and it's questionable how valid his conclusions are. Is this ritual a defense against mental illness, as Rouch claims at the end of the film? Is it a way for the colonized Nigerians to cope with the stress of their daily confrontations with industrialized Western society, or to deal with their status as indentured laborers for the whites? It's hard to tell, but Rouch's narration, with its loose interpretations of various gestures, doesn't exactly inspire confidence. At one point he puts words into the mouth of a man swinging a chicken back and forth, suggesting that the gesture is of great religious significance when, by all appearances, it's simply idle motion. Such questions about the film's faithfulness to the intent of these rituals are constantly raised, though Rouch's authoritative narration seems calculated not to encourage dissent.


There's also more than a hint of exploitation in Rouch's portrayal of Africans engaged in bloody, wild rites that not only appear as irrevocably exotic to Western eyes, but are explicitly compared to mental illness in the film's text. Rouch is portraying his African subjects as wild men, literally foaming at the mouths, the lower halves of their faces covered in white spray as they vibrate, roll around on the floor, walk with a jerking, frantic stride that truly does make it seem as though their bodies are being propelled around by some external animating spirit that jerks them around like puppets on strings. The images are, undeniably, darkly fascinating, and often horrifying as well, particularly when the celebrants ritually sacrifice a dog and then cook up a stew with its entrails, taking hungry bites out of its head and fighting to get the "best" scraps of the slaughtered animal. One man, picked out for a closeup twice in the film's half-hour, rocks back and forth, his face smeared red with blood from the feast.

Rouch continually locates such provocative images, tracing the progress of the ritual from its tentative beginnings to the point when numerous participants have been "possessed" and taken on these alternate personalities. Rouch's narration wryly notes the appropriation of English and French modes of dress and rituals, but this too is a problem. When Rouch says that the Nigerians are holding a "roundtable conference" on the subject of whether to cook the dog or eat it raw, his voice maintains its steady, even keel, but there's an obvious note of sarcasm and irony in the counterpoint between the colonialists' ceremonies and military discipline and the crudity of the Nigerians imitating their oppressors. Rouch even inserts footage of British and French soldiers on parade, and European aristocrats in their fancy cars, to further solidify the comparison.

Intended for European audiences, the film condescends to its subjects, presenting these rituals with an unmistakable tone of "hey look at these weird Africans," even while the subtext of Rouch's narration points at the exploitation of the African people by their colonial overseers. This adds up to a very conflicted film, simultaneously poking fun at colonialist pretensions and perpetrating the stereotype of the violent, superstitious African primitive. It's obvious that Rouch, who lived and worked in Nigeria for a long time and had a definite anti-colonialist bent, meant well, but Les maîtres fous, despite its compelling, raw imagery and the interesting ideas it explores, can't get over its tonal inconsistencies.

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 Conversations #20: Rock Concert Films

Jason Bellamy and I have completed another of our dialogues about films, this one focusing on the aesthetics of the rock n' roll concert film. We chose five concert films that we thought reflected the breadth of this genre: Woodstock, Gimme Shelter (the Rolling Stones), Stop Making Sense (Talking Heads), Rattle and Hum (U2) and Instrument (Fugazi). Our conversation touches on the experience and mythology of the rock concert and its cinematic representations, on aesthetics, on authenticity, on performance and acting. It's a fun conversation, so take a look at the link below and, as usual, comment. We always say that we like our exchanges to be only the start of the conversation.

Continue reading at The House Next Door

Cave of Forgotten Dreams

Werner Herzog's latest documentary, Cave of Forgotten Dreams, is about the Chauvet Caves, the site in France where the earliest examples of human painting have been discovered. It's a 3D film, of all things, Herzog's first experiment with that technology, and it's going to be screening at the beginning of November as part of the DOC NYC festival. I've reviewed the film for the House Next Door, so follow the link below for my thoughts about Herzog's approach to this material, the way he uses 3D for good and ill, and the characteristically Herzogian themes that he brings to the documentary.

Continue reading at the House Next Door

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.

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.

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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.

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.

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.

Don't Look Back

D.A. Pennebaker's seminal documentary Don't Look Back remains the startling work it was upon its release: not only a revolutionary cinema verité approach to a rock tour, but one of the most intimate glimpses possible of the perpetually elusive Bob Dylan. The film was made on Dylan's 1965 U.K. tour, a pivotal moment in his career, as he began to move away from the folk movement from which he'd emerged. He'd just released Bringing It All Back Home, which featured rock instrumentation on its second side, a source of some controversy among his rabid folkie fans — at one tour stop here, a couple of young schoolgirls nervously tell him that it doesn't sound like him, that it sounds like he's only goofing around. In fact, it was no joke. This would be Dylan's final acoustic tour, and when he returned to England in 1966 it was for the electric tour that yielded one outraged fan's accusing cry of "Judas," a legendary moment. Pennebaker couldn't have known all this was coming, but it must have been apparent that Dylan was poised on the brink of something. The film captures an artist in flux, trying on different identities, experimenting with a playful sensibility that sometimes bleeds over into perversity and willful obscurity.

What Pennebaker's restless camera captures, more than anything, is a man whose personality is always shifting; Dylan is almost always performing in some way, always trying on different guises, covering up what he's thinking with strings of non sequiturs, turning interviews back on the interviewers with probing, unanswerable questions of his own. Pennebaker's handheld camerawork is perfectly suited to examining such a slippery figure; when Dylan bobs and weaves, figuratively speaking, the camera is with him, subtly zooming in to probe the intricacies of his face, his expression, trying to reveal what might be hidden behind his ever-present dark sunglasses. What Pennebaker seems to find is a guy who contains multitudes, who's many different things at different times. In unguarded moments, he sometimes seems like a kid — Dylan was 24 at the time — hanging out with friends, goofing around, telling jokes. At one point, listening to a jazz band, Dylan and several friends don dark glasses and snap their fingers, aping beatniks, laughing as they drop "hip" phrases. The Dylan who appears in interviews is someone else altogether, confrontational and aggressive and gnomic in his pronouncements. In one of the film's most prolonged scenes, a British journalist comes into the dressing room before a show and finds himself drawn into a battle of wits with Dylan and his friends, who are constantly challenging the guy, asking him questions about himself, basically asking him to defend his very existence to them.

It's amazing, and reveals a certain antagonistic streak in Dylan, a tendency to go on the attack, to prevent anybody from understanding him or pinning down anything about him. Pennebaker, by simply observing, by letting his camera unobtrusively weave through the scene, getting a rough fly-on-the-wall perspective on the singer, arguably understands much more than almost anybody else who Dylan encounters over the course of this film. He gets Dylan's need for mystery, for myth, and recognizes it as a bit of an act. He's also perceptive enough to see a different Dylan, the charming, bashful young boy who's so polite with an older British woman who comes to pay her respects, enthusing about his songs and earnestly asking him to come stay at her country mansion. There's a moment, towards the end of a particularly ornery and provocative "interview" with a reporter from Time magazine, when Pennebaker's camera zooms in on Dylan's face, capturing the bemused, playful smile dancing across his features as he answers a few questions. It reveals his famed aggressiveness towards the press as a bit of a joke, a put-on, a game to create a certain persona — Dylan's having fun with it, enjoying the clash as a sport.


If Pennebaker's film is enlightening about Dylan the man, it remains even more worthwhile for its portrayal of Dylan the musician. In rehearsals, in ad-hoc jam sessions at house parties, on stage, in loose songwriting sessions at a piano, Dylan always seems utterly focused, utterly alive, never simply tossing something off. His energy and passion for his music is obvious. If the public Dylan was always changing, always playing games, there's something dead-serious about Dylan the musician, which made that schoolgirl crack about Bringing It All Back Home kind of sting; he shrugs it off with a joke but the annoyance shows through anyway. The film is alive with Dylan's music, with snippets of concert footage; he rarely gets to play a whole song through, but Pennebaker collages together more than enough music to capture what it was like to see Dylan live on this tour. He sings through the first three verses of "The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll" at one point, and Pennebaker films it in a closeup, because Dylan's face is very much alive when he sings, seething with the bitter irony of the lyrics. Dylan's best songs hurt, they're dangerous: the story of rich tobacco farmer William Zantzinger and poor maid Hattie Carroll is unforgettable to anyone who's heard it, because Dylan doesn't just tell the story, he brings its images to life, and he infuses it with the depth of his own outraged emotions. When he sings this song in Pennebaker's film, his face communicates everything that the lyrics do, the heartache and acute sense of injustice.

What's remarkable is that this is true even of Dylan's more elusive later songs, after he abandoned this kind of topical rant. The film closes with an equally heartfelt rendition of "Love Minus Zero/No Limits," one of Dylan's best songs from this era. Its poetic evocation of love isn't direct or representational like Dylan's earlier songs, and its images are figurative rather than visual, but it's obvious that it is no less deeply felt, that its emotions well from somewhere deep inside. The final moment of music in the film, the penultimate shot before a chatty, informal car ride, is accompanied by Pennebaker's most ostentatious camera move in the whole film. The camera, behind Dylan, floats aloft towards the high rafters of the theater, looking down at the musician within a small circle of pure white light at the edge of a dense darkness, and then the camera looks up, out at the house lights as the final notes of the harmonica fade away. It's a gorgeous moment, as mysterious and strangely poetic as anything in Dylan's songs. Pennebaker has a lyrical sense that's sometimes lost or ignored in his frenzied, off-the-cuff backstage camerawork, but that's readily apparent in his soulful closeups and the more formalist austerity with which he films Dylan's concert appearances.

Pennebaker is equally interested in Dylan's musicianship offstage, in the way any gathering with his friends might suddenly burst into song, with Dylan or Joan Baez or anyone else who happens to be around. (Though an interlude with Baez where she sings a few Dylan compositions inadvertently winds up as further proof of Dylan's artistry; despite her lilting, lovely voice, there's no escaping just how boring Baez is, how flat and lifeless her performance is, how lacking in Dylan's crucial energy and passion.) Pennebaker also evinces some curiosity about the character of Dylan's manager Albert Grossman, who with his bushy black eyebrows and big glasses and noncommittal expression is in some ways even more gnomic and inscrutable than Dylan himself: who knows what this guy is thinking? There's an enlightening scene where Pennebaker films the merciless negotiations Grossman conducts with several British promoters for a few shows, hammering away until he gets the tremendous sum he wants for Dylan. Throughout it all, Grossman shows no expression, no trace of anything; he's almost creepy, like a mob boss delivering ultimatums.

The point of the scene is obvious, of course, Pennebaker's not-exactly-revolutionary suggestion that it all comes down to commerce, that beneath all the artifice, on at least one level, Dylan's just another pop star. He's what the kids are listening to this month instead of the Beatles, as one newspaper article has it. That's part of it maybe, but Pennebaker seems to know it's only part, that there are many parts to Dylan, which is why Don't Look Back is structured as such a collage of public and private, performance and backstage, "in character" and out, rock star and folk singer and pop idol and just a guy enjoying himself and doing what he wants. All of these things are in Dylan, and all of these things are in Pennebaker's film as well.