WHEN KEN JACOBS1 edited Blonde Cobra in 1963 out of footage his friend Bob Fleischner had abandoned and tapes Jack Smith had made, he had not seen, nor even heard of, Christopher MacLaine’s The End, made exactly ten years earlier. Yet the two films are remarkably similar. They are both exaggerated expressions of suicidal despair whose formal structure metaphorically reflects their themes of self-destruction and disintegration. Although MacLaine combines the stories of several lonely people in his film and Jacobs presents only one—that of Jack Smith, himself a film-maker—two structural similarities outweigh this difference. Long passages of spoken narration while the screen is black appear periodically, and black-and-white is regularly interwoven with color imagery. In both films these devices are used aggressively to rupture continuity and challenge the consciousness of the viewer. Even the distinction between the multiple perspective of The End and the single character of Blonde Cobra begins to break down. In the latter film Jack Smith assumes different roles (the lonely little boy, Madame Nescience, Sister Dexterity) and tells their stories, while in the earlier film the stories merge in the final montage.
Although the relationship between these two films is not genetic, they bracket an era of the American avant-garde contemporary with the Beat sensibility. They also bracket the country. Just as The End depends upon the cityscape of San Francisco, Blonde Cobra, even though it is shot almost entirely indoors, makes the presence of New York felt. Early in the film, as Smith nibbles on a clump of tile and cement in a sordid room, we hear a radio broadcast: “Twelve noon by the century-old chimes in historic City Hall. This is New York, the city of opportunity, where eight million people live in peace and harmony and enjoy the benefits of democracy.” Near the end, Smith quotes himself: “‘Why shave? … when I can’t even think of a reason for living?’ Jack Smith. 1958. Sixth Street.”
Jacobs insists upon the idea of a film as a dying organism throughout his works. Blonde Cobra breaks down before it can get started. After the first few tentative images, we hear Ginger Rogers sing one line, “Let’s call the whole thing off,” followed by a mess of scribbles on leader and a halting of the soundtrack. After two blasts of live radios in the theater and a change to color imagery and back to black-and-white, the character on screen says, “We will now start all over again.” We see him writing out the film’s titles.
The two false starts and the shock of the radios are the first challenges to the concentration of the viewer. The presence of the radios is incorporated within the film when the announcement, “Twelve noon,” booms out on the soundtrack and again later when a single live radio plays, synchronized with a scene of Smith in baby clothes playing peek-a-boo and apparently listening to a radio. When the actor on screen smashes his radio’s tubes with a hammer, the sound in the audience stops abruptly. It is only at this late point that the audience receives a sign that the interaction of picture and live radio is not arbitrary.
Even more unsettling is the duration of the black passages. At the beginning of the first story—the lonely little boy who waits all day for his mother to bring him candy (“She would give him some, but not much, just a little because she would save most of it for herself”)—there are flashes of Smith miming the tale, promising the viewer a visualization which never materializes. That same promise is renewed when, after several long minutes, that story ends and we see Smith in drag as Madame Nescience. But he is on the screen less than a minute before blackness descends again, and the whole of her dream is told without illustration. By this time Jacobs has engendered a strong frustration of visual expectations. Another even briefer image appears, only to be followed by a repetitive, contradictory song (“God is not dead, he is just marvelously sick …God is dead …”) through another long blackness. After these three central voids, Jacobs no longer uses this tactic, but the viewer who sees the film for the first time watches to the end under the threat of them. In fact, Jacobs momentarily teases us with the possibility of more. The screen briefly blackens and Smith quotes, “‘Life swarms with innocent monsters.’ Charles Baudelaire.” But this time the image returns immediately.
The narratives themselves are networks of ironies. The film-maker uses repetition to intensify the duration of the black passages. After a long description of the lonely little boy’s day, Smith makes us fear an endless prolongation of the story by saying, “Next day, same thing all over again. Mother …Mother …Mother.” But rather than retell the empty events he introduces a new trope by changing from the third to the first person and closes the ironic distance between his story and himself:
Then, and there was a little boy that lived upstairs …and one day the little boy found the other little boy that lived upstairs, the family who lived upstairs, in the upstairs floor, and the little boy who was less than seven, the lonely little boy, the lonely little boy was less than seven, I know that because we didn’t leave Columbus until I was seven, I know it, I was under seven and I took a match and I lit it and I pulled out the other little boy’s penis and I burnt his penis with a match!
At the moment of transition to the first person, the narrative tone changes to a rapid, hysterical confession which mounts in intensity until the last word, which ends both the story and the blackness.
A comparable shift of narrative levels occurs in the subsequent story. First he establishes the character of Madame Nescience, then he describes her sadistic dream in which she becomes a Mother Superior. He repeatedly confuses the roles while relating the dream. At one point, while imitating the voice of Sister Dexterity, he addresses the Mother Superior as if she were the dreamer: “Madame Nescience—I mean, Mother Superior!” and excuses his lapse by saying “you see this is a dream.” But after that he continues to call the nun by the dreamer’s name without correcting himself.
The space through which the characters move is cluttered and cramped. The camera hovers close to them, often shifting slightly to follow their movements. Even when they dance to the Astaire and Rogers’ duet, “Let’s call the whole thing off,” the camera cannot get a shot of their whole bodies. It must pan down to their feet. Generally the footage looks like what it is, fragments of two abandoned films, with little concern for composition within the frame or spatial elaboration. Yet within the ironic structure Jacobs made for this material, its fragmentation and lack of composition become positive qualities.
In the fifth catalogue of the Film-Makers Cooperative, Jacobs describes the genesis and the theme of the film:
Jack [Smith] says I made the film too heavy. It was his and Bob’s [Fleischner] intention to create light monster-movie comedy. Two comedies, actually two separate stories that were being shot simultaneously until they had a falling out over who should pay for the raw stock destroyed by a fire when Jack’s cat knocked over a candle. Jack claimed it was an act of God. In the winter of ’59 blue Bob showed me the footage. Having no idea of the original story plans I was able to view the material not as exquisite fragments of a failure, of two failures, but as the makings of a new entirety. Bob gave over the footage to me and with it the freedom to develop it as I saw fit.
Silly, self-pitying, guilt-strictured and yet triumphing—on one level—over the situation with style, because he’s unapologetically gifted, has a genius for courage, knows that a state of indignity can serve to show his character in sharpest relief. He carries on, states his presence for what it is. Does all he can to draw out our condemnation, testing our love of limits, enticing us into an absurd moral posture the better to dismiss us with a regal “screw off.”2
What is the precise nature of the triumph of which Jacobs speaks? Surely it is not the qualified optimistic moment of the apocalyptic and picaresque films discussed in the previous chapter: the moment of forgetting doom just before the end of The End, the final mystery of A Movie, the scattered ecstasies of The Flower Thief, Blondino’s resurrection, or the exorcism that concludes The Old House, Passing. There is a moment in Blonde Cobra when Jerry Sims collapses in a dance and Smith continues the number by himself that hints at release. In the scene immediately following, the penultimate of the film, there is the structural possibility of such a vision, but it is deliberately made ironic. Smith in baby clothes plays peek-a-boo with the camera to the accompaniment of a live radio in the audience. The potential energy for making this scene a triumph—a willful deepening of Smith’s infantilism—begins when he smashes the radio on screen, at which point the radio in the audience stops, as already noted. Baby music from a child’s record comes on. He seems to have defied the radio’s interruption of his fantasy. But then he undermines this moment by smoking a cigarette and burning holes with its tip in the piece of gauze between the camera and himself. This act, which had occurred before in the film, characterizes the scene as another sordid episode in this mock quest for sexual identity.
Jacobs hated the trance film when he began to make cinema. At the time, he has said, it seemed “precious” and “narcissistic” to him. Although he eschewed its form and conventions, he borrowed its central theme in Blonde Cobra. The individual scenes and stories provide an ironic series of sexual options. Transvestism also pervades the film; most of the time he is on the screen, Smith wears drag. The one sustained episode in color has a masochistic climax: Sims, imitating a thirties gangster, enters the room where Smith and another man are puffing smoke at each other and burning a necktie with their cigarettes. Sims stabs one man to death and then attacks Smith with his knife. He cringes and grimaces in fear. Then he mumbles, “Sex is a pain in the ass,” and the camera pans up Smith’s body to show the knife inserted in his buttocks.
The last station of this sexual odyssey is the very infantilism which had inflected the manner in which all the other sexual options were portrayed. But within Blonde Cobra this is not a resolution of the sexual problematic. In the final scene, Smith chants in desperation, “A mother’s wisdom had dragged me down to this! a crummy loft! a life of futility! hunger! despair!” He puts a toy gun to his head. The image of a graveyard, first seen when the radio announcer described New York in the first part of the film, appears. Then Smith collapses to the floor revealing Sims behind him holding a card reading FIN. As the film runs out, we hear Smith crying “What went wrong? What went wrong? What went wrong?” referring both to the failed suicide and the end of the film.
The triumph to which Jacobs alludes is not within the film. It is the triumph of the ironical mode which brackets dreams within stories, confuses a character with the actor portraying it, and reveals a sexual despair while mocking sexual despairs. The folding over of guises and revelations deprives the film of a fixed point of reference, the solid presence of content, and makes it into a film object, which fitfully starts and after almost expiring several times, dies with an unanswered question, “What went wrong?”
The style and the form of Blonde Cobra were developed over a number of years. Throughout the late 1950s Jacobs had been shooting and editing a vastly ambitious film, Star Spangled to Death, which runs approximately three hours. In conceiving and making the film Jacobs developed his aesthetic of failure. In an unpublished interview, Jacobs described his ambitions for this film and its structure:
I had a terrific bent toward a barren dynamic perfection. I was leaning in every possible way toward a work like Mondrian would make. At the same time, these perfect structures, I knew, were not right. I felt that their destruction revealed more of a truth than their standing perfection. [For Star Spangled to Death I was] days ahead of time setting up very involved sets and situations for Jack and Jerry to wander into, situations which they could break up.
I would just move toward some ordered situation and then introduce Jack or Jerry to break up its pattern or to create some new possibilities of patterns that my mind would not have come up with. I felt the chaos of those two individuals and my penchant for a pattern clarified each other; the patterns became clearer because of the chaos, in the midst of the chaos; these two bodies of chaos became clearer because of the pattern.
I was very interested in combustion. There was even a long destruction sequence in which thing after thing was broken … Just watching things break, and in their breaking reveal their structure, had the most vibrant moment of life, all the clarity of their being made, like explicitly for their moment of destruction. I was interested in revealing things in their breaking and I wanted Star Spangled to Death to be a film that was constantly breaking.3
In talking about his film Jacobs is careful to distinguish between the “collapse of order” he wanted to achieve and “pure disorder.” The relationship between order and its collapse recalls Stan Brakhage’s use of chance operations within a controlled editing situation. Jacobs seems to have translated this interplay to the shooting stage by allowing the unpredictable character of his two chief actors to transform the structure of his fixed and very intricate compositions. Both formulations of this aesthetic have their roots in Abstract Expressionism. Jacobs’s comes directly from it without the mediation of contemporary American poetics; he studied painting with Hans Hofmann at the Art Students League and in Provincetown in the late 1950s before devoting his energies completely to cinema. In the same interview, he compares the sudden shifts of meaning he wanted to have in Star Spangled to Death to Abstract Expressionist painting:
All your preconceptions of Jack or Jerry could be just turned around any moment. You’d have to rethink who they were again. I was interested in painting that could constantly make you reconceive the entire work. You’d think it was this kind of painting, or this kind of spatial development; and then you hit a point in the painting when you realize that this thing was not behind that.4
In a much later structural film, Soft Rain (1968), Jacobs would bring this painterly adventure of perception to cinema. In his notes for the fifth Film-Makers’ Cooperative catalogue he is the film’s best analyst:
Three identical prints of a single 100 ft. fixed-camera take are shown from beginning to end-roll light-flare, with a few feet of blackness preceding/bridging/following the rolls. View from above is of a partially snow-covered low flat rooftop receding between the brick walls of two much taller downtown N.Y. loft buildings. A slightly tilted rectangular shape left of the center of the composition is the section of rain-wet Reade Street visible to us over the low rooftop. Distant trucks, cars persons carrying packages, umbrellas sluggishly pass across this little stagelike area. A fine rain-mist is confused, visually, with the color emulsion grain.
A large black rectangle following up and filling to space above the stage-area is seen as both an unlikely abyss extending in deep space behind the stage or more properly, as a two dimensional plane suspended far forward of the entire snow/rain scene. Though it clearly if slightly overlaps the two receding loft building walls the mind, while knowing better, insists on presuming it to be overlapped by them. (At one point the black plane even trembles.) So this mental tugging takes place throughout. The contradiction of 2D reality versus 3D implication is amusingly and mysteriously explicit.5
In this superbly detailed description of the phenomenological reading of his own film, Jacobs omits saying that the black rectangle registers as a shade between the camera and the view described as soon as it trembles. In turn this gives rise to the unresolved possibility that we may be looking through a window. He continues:
Filmed at 24 f.p.s. but projected at 16 the street activity is perceptibly slowed down. It’s become a somewhat heavy laboring. The loop repetition (the series hopefully will intrigue you to further run-throughs) automatically imparts a steadily growing rhythmic sense of the street-activities. Anticipation for familiar movement-complexes builds, and as all smaller complexities join up in our knowledge of the whole the purely accidental counterpassings of people and vehicles becomes satisfyingly cogent, seems rhythmically structured and of a piece. Becomes choreography.6
There he ends. Although the loops are identical, the image leaves us unsure of that until we can identify and match one of the movements. Once the looping is confirmed, we wonder how many times we will see it. Unnoted by the film-maker is the interesting relationship between the purely linear graphic grid of the composition (the wall of one building forming a perfect diagonal to the center of the screen, the black rectangle coming exactly halfway down from the top) and the eccentric juxtaposition of these elements as volumes. Jacobs’s formal description of Soft Rain is evidence of the “bent for barren dynamic perfection” he spoke of in relation to Star Spangled to Death.
The making of Star Spangled to Death took most of Jacobs’s artistic energies between 1957 and 1963. It is a work of such scope and ambition that despite its negativity and its aesthetic of failure it participates in the myth of the absolute film. He once described a screening of a Ron Rice film at the Film-Makers’ Cinemateque at which a reel of film fell from a table near the projector and rolled across the balcony floor, through a partition in the rail, and down to the seats below without harming anyone. He would have liked to have such an ending for the projection of Star Spangled to Death. He is aware too that his long inability to complete the film was bound up with its aesthetic.
In addition to Blonde Cobra, Jacobs completed Little Stabs at Happiness (1959–1963) as a by-product of, or “a true breather” from, his long film. Except for the addition of titles which identify the four sections of the film and the use of 78-rpm records and a short monologue on the soundtrack, the film is exactly as it came out of the camera, with no editing. Both Smith and Sims appear in it. The first episode shows Smith and a woman sitting in a dry bathtub playing with dolls. At one point he tries to eat the crotch of a doll between puffs on a cigarette. The camera moves casually, often resting on a bare lightbulb or another static element in the room.
Each part of the film (they are all in color) is a separate moment without narrative causality. Each is immediately present. But as if he were unable to bear the unqualified presence of his images, in the second section Jacobs himself intrudes on the soundtrack, apologizing for his monologue by saying that he wanted some sound other than music to relax the audience’s restlessness at this point. He then launches, in the most casual manner, a full-scale attack on the presence of his film. First he undermines the temporal integrity of the visual episode; then he attempts to involve us in the lives of the people we see on the screen. He tells us what time it is, 12:28, the moment of his recording the soundtrack. He brings the clock nearer to the microphone so we can listen to it tick. He plays a few notes on an organ before telling us he wants to use it in a future film. He even inserts a lacuna in the soundtrack itself: “I’ve just played that back,” he says, “and I like it. It’s vague.” Meanwhile, on the screen two women have been sitting on chairs on a roof. The camera pans slowly from the shoes of one to those of another. A series of leisurely, careful compositions shows them rocking before a brick wall. After the lacuna, Jacobs tells us that he no longer sees anyone in the film. He begins by describing how the two women have disappeared from his life and goes on to describe his broken relationships with Jerry Sims and Jack Smith. The nostalgia of this monologue transforms our perception of the songs in the later sections. As dated pieces, they now carry a sense of pastness which spreads over to the images as well. But unlike Blonde Cobra and Star Spangled to Death, the immediacy of the visual is much stronger than the verbal undermining.
In the next section, “It Began to Drizzle,” Jacobs presents fixed-frame compositions of Jerry Sims and a woman sitting outside in a light rain. A table and chairs have been set up on cobblestones. The shots shift in a geometrical elaboration of the space between the two unspeaking actors. Often one occupies the extreme foreground while the other sits in the distance. At the end of this sequence, there is a brief silent scene of Jacobs himself drawing chalk figures on a sidewalk among Chinese children.
Jack Smith, as “the Spirit of Listlessness” dressed in a clown suit, plays and lounges on a roof. He sucks at colored balloons, flashes light into the camera with a mirror, and almost seems about to take flight to the song, “Happy Bird.”
Smith himself made his own first film, Scotch Tape (1962), during the shooting of Star Spangled to Death. That day Jacobs had assembled his cast in a destroyed building or a section of a junkyard. Rusted cables in great tangles and broken slabs of concrete were all about. Smith borrowed the camera and filmed a dance of people exuberantly hopping around and under the cables. The area of wreckage was so extensive that he could film his dancers either from a few feet away or from hundreds of feet above them. Only by the size of the human figure is the scale of the shot perceptible. Occasionally panning but usually with a fixed frame, he mixed shots of nearness with extreme distances. In the longest shots he framed his group of actors in a corner of the cluttered image; then he positioned them under a covering slab of concrete so that in the brief duration of the shot the viewer must seek out the dancers in the visual field. In the closer shots he makes use of a green artificial flower under which they dance or which some of them hold in their teeth while jumping about. Once, the flower rests statically in focus while the blurred bodies vibrate in the background.
Scotch Tape is only three minutes long, in color, and appears to have been constructed in the camera without much subsequent editing, if any. It takes its title from a triangular wedge of dirty Scotch tape along the right side of the image. Since Jacobs seldom had enough money to develop his rushes from Star Spangled to Death, he had shot several rolls of film before he realized that the tape had gotten caught in the camera. Rather than let this accident ruin his film, Smith capitalized upon it in his title. Fortunately its fixed position offers a formal counterbalance to the play of scales upon which the shot changes are based.
Jonas Mekas hailed Blonde Cobra, Little Stabs at Happiness, and Scotch Tape as opening a vital new direction in the American cinema. On May 2, 1963, he wrote in his column “Movie Journal,” in the Village Voice:
Lately, several movies have appeared from the underground which, I think, are making a very important turn in the independent cinema. As Shadows and Pull My Daisy marked the end of the avant-garde experimental cinema tradition of the 40’s and 50’s (the symbolist-surrealist cinema of intellectual meanings), now there are works appearing which are marking a turn in the so-called New American Cinema—a turn from the New York realist school (the cinema of “surface” meanings and social engagement) toward a cinema of disengagement and new freedom.
The movies I have in mind are Ron Rice’s The Queen of Sheba Meets the Atom Man; Jack Smith’s The Flaming Creatures [sic]; Ken Jacobs’ Little Stabs at Happiness; Bob Fleischner’s [sic] Blonde Cobra—four works that make up the real revolution in cinema today. These movies are illuminating and opening up sensibilities and experiences never before recorded in the American arts; a content which Baudelaire, the Marquis de Sade, and Rimbaud gave to world literature a century ago and which Burroughs gave to American literature three years ago. It is a world of flowers of evil, of illuminations, of torn and tortured flesh; a poetry which is at once beautiful and terrible, good and evil, delicate and dirty.
Blonde Cobra, undoubtedly, is the masterpiece of the Baudelairean cinema, and it is a work hardly surpassable in perversity, in richness, in beauty, in sadness, in tragedy. I think it is one of the great works of personal cinema, so personal that it is ridiculous to talk about “author’s” cinema. I know that the larger public will misinterpret and misunderstand these films.7
No artist within the American avant-garde film has equaled the influence of Jonas Mekas as a polemicist.8 That influence was at its height in 1963 when he proclaimed the birth of the “Baudelairean cinema.” He couched his evaluation in terms of a historical perspective quite different from that of this book. I would like to interrupt my discussion of Jacobs and Smith at this point to analyze and trace the history of Mekas’s position.
In January 1955, Mekas published the first issue of his magazine, Film Culture. He had arrived in New York six years before as a displaced person along with his brother Adolfas. They both immediately began to learn the techniques of film-making, and Jonas continued to write poetry in his native Lithuanian. In that first issue they included an article by Hans Richter, their teacher at the Film Institute of City College of New York. “The Film as an Original Art Form” affirmed an essentially avant-garde stance. Nevertheless, the editorial position of the magazine represented in that first issue by Edouard de Laurot’s “Toward a Theory of Dynamic Realism” was severely critical of the American avant-garde cinema. In the third issue, Mekas published “The Experimental Film in America,” an attack in the guise of a survey with subsections entitled “The Adolescent Character of the American Film Poem,” “The Conspiracy of Homosexuality,” “The Lack of Creative Inspiration: Technical Crudity and Thematic Narrowness.” He concluded, “The image of the contemporary American film poem and cineplastics, as briefly presented here, is decidedly unencouraging …. To improve the quality of the American film poem, experiments should be directed not so much towards new techniques but toward deeper themes, toward a more penetrating treatment of the nature and drama of the man of our epoch.” Significantly, he calls for more attention to these film-makers as a way encouraging their improvement. Stan Brakhage has described an emergency meeting of the film-makers called by Maya Deren and Willard Maas at the time of the publication of this article to discuss the possibility of a lawsuit. Nothing came of it. Two and a half years later (November 1957), Mekas turned over half the magazine to “The ‘Experimental’ Scene,” in which film-makers themselves contributed articles. There were no more attacks.
With its nineteenth issue in 1959, Film Culture established the Independent Film Award to mark “the entrance of a new generation of filmmakers in America.” In the editorial for that issue, Mekas proclaimed the death of Hollywood. While describing the avant-garde cinema of the 1950s as a “degeneration,” he gave those film-makers credit for having “kept the spirit of free cinema alive in America.” The first flowering of that spirit was, according to him, the recipient of the first Independent Film Award—John Cassavetes’s Shadows. In the next three issues, spread over two years, awards were given to Robert Frank and Alfred Leslie’s Pull My Daisy and Richard Leacock’s Primary. And, as the editorials became longer, more credit was given to avant-garde film-makers. Furthermore, since 1958 a feature article on a major avant-gardist by Parker Tyler had been part of every issue.
In the editorials between 1959 and 1961, one can see the tremendous impression nouvelle vague in France had on Mekas’s thinking. It seemed to him that there had been a fundamental revolution in film-making, which he optimistically saw spreading to England and Poland as well as America. At the same time he was discovering an indigenous realist cinema in the work of Jerome Hill, Lionel Rogosin, and Morris Engel. With feature films in production by Shirley Clarke, Robert Frank, and numerous lesserknown independent directors who have not subsequently developed, it looked to Mekas as if the economics of American film-making had shifted from lavish Hollywood productions to more modest 35mm and even 16mm films. He interpreted this as the end of the “experimental” film of the 1940s and 1950s and the beginning of a more socially committed, more publicly oriented, independent cinema. Once he began thinking of the early avant-garde cinema as the forerunner of the movement of which he was the champion, he gradually began to see more in the films he had previously rejected.
In retrospect this is not at all surprising. Mekas’s sensibilities are those of a Romantic. In three of his films he portrays himself reading books; in Guns of the Trees, it is Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound that opens and closes the film; throughout Rabbitshit Haikus (1962–1963), which he made while on the set of his brother’s Hallelujah the Hills, he is reading Blake; in Diaries, Notes, and Sketches, subtitled Walden, it is Thoreau. The Romantic phenomenology was difficult to perceive in the avant-garde cinema of the 1940s and 1950s, but easier when the mythopoeic cinema in the early 1960s manifested itself. Jonas Mekas was there to recognize it and celebrate it. In 1958, he had been named the film critic of the Village Voice. By the early 1960s the paper had grown from local to national circulation with particular influence in the arts. Thus by the time he became the champion of the New American Cinema, Mekas was one of the most powerful film critics in America. The first clear sign of a shift in his attitude toward the older avant-gardists was his choice of Maya Deren as his substitute critic at the Village Voice in the summer of 1960 when he took time off to concentrate on the shooting of Guns of the Trees.
Had he confined his activities to writing and making films, Jonas Mekas might not have been quite as powerful as he was to become in the early 1960s. On September 28, 1960, he called the first meeting of the New American Cinema Group, twenty-three independent film-makers of whom only one, Gregory Markopoulos, aside from Mekas himself, falls within the scope of this book. Of the several points outlined in their manifesto, one was to have revolutionary significance but not as envisioned by that group. The sixth point of the manifesto called for the foundation of “our own cooperative distribution center.”
For a year Emile de Antonio tried to distribute a handful of 35mm short and feature films theatrically before a true film-makers’ cooperative could be founded. During this unsuccessful effort, Mekas accepted the position of organizer of a series of special screenings, most of them on weekend midnights, at the Charles Theater on New York’s Lower East Side. There he initiated a number of one-man shows for avant-garde filmmakers whose work had never been completely shown in New York. He followed this up with an article on the film-makers in the Voice. He also began the tradition of open-house screenings to which film-makers brought unknown works, rushes, and works-in-progress. It was at such an openhouse that he discovered Ken Jacobs, who was screening parts of Little Stabs at Happiness.
In the fall of 1961 Maya Deren died. Stan Brakhage happened to be in New York at the time, holding a series of screenings of his recent films at the Provincetown Playhouse. Since Reflections on Black (1955), Cinema 16, the only distributor of avant-garde films in the 1950s, had refused to handle his work or even to show it in their yearly programs devoted to the “experimental” film. When Mekas saw the ensemble of work Brakhage had produced between 1958 and 1961, he was sensitive to its quality. He awarded Brakhage the fourth Independent Film Award (Film Culture 24) for The Dead and Prelude: Dog Star Man. Since then the award has gone exclusively to avant-gardists: Jack Smith, Andy Warhol, Harry Smith, Gregory Markopoulos, Michael Snow, Kenneth Anger, Robert Breer, and James Broughton.
In 1962 Mekas himself took over the film distribution project. By this time the initial experiment at the Charles Theater had grown into a series of screenings, at first weekly and later daily, in various rented theaters around Manhattan. By 1962 the group of film-makers who had anticipated a radical change in the production and distribution of feature films in America had given up that idea. Yet Mekas realized that an outlet was needed for the films of Brakhage, Markopoulos, Menken, Jacobs, Smith, etc. He appointed the young film-maker David Brooks as manager of the cooperative. Its first catalogue contained only Guns of the Trees, Pull My Daisy, and the films of Gregory Markopoulos out of the list originally proposed by the group. Cassavetes’s Shadows, Clarke’s The Connection, and even Adolfas Mekas’ Hallelujah the Hills were being distributed commercially.
It would be several years before the rental fees of the Film-Makers’ Cooperative and the income from the Film-Makers’ Showcase, later called the Film-Makers’ Cinematheque, would produce income of even a thousand dollars a year for the film-makers. Yet they provided a center where film-makers could see each other’s work; and Film Culture and the Village Voice brought news of this activity around the country. On the model of the Film-Makers’ Showcase, Bruce Baillie founded Canyon Cinema outside San Francisco in 1962 and soon after that moved it to Berkeley. By 1963 there was a Canyon Cinema Cooperative.
In “Notes on the New American Cinema” (Film Culture 24 1962), Mekas attempted a comprehensive synthesis of the realist and visionary tendencies within the independent cinema. He speaks of Morris Engel, Lionel Rogosin, John Cassavetes, Shirley Clarke, Sidney Meyers, Rickey Leacock, as well as Stan Brakhage, Robert Breer, Ron Rice, Marie Menken, Stan Vanderbeek, and several others, but in the polemical sections of the essay, “Part Two: A Few Statements on the New American Artist as a Man” and “Part Three: Summing Up, Connecting the Style with Man,” he employs the language of Romantic and Abstract Expressionist aesthetics (the essay opens with quotations from De Kooning and Shelley):
The new artist, by directing his ear inward, is beginning to catch bits of man’s true vision. By simply being new (which means, by listening deeper than their other contemporaries), Brakhage and Breer contribute to the liberation of man’s spirit from the dead matter of culture: they open new vistas for life. In this sense, an old art is immoral—it keeps man’s spirit in bondage to Culture. The very destructiveness of the modern artist, his anarchy, as in Happenings, or, even, action painting, is, therefore, a confirmation of life and freedom.9
In the notes on “Improvisation,” “The Shaky Camera,” and “Acting,” he makes it clear that he is less interested in the realistic world view of Engel, Clarke, Rogosin, and Leacock than in the way they substitute a kind of spontaneous performance for classical acting.
Mekas’s involvement with a theory of acting extends back almost as far as his involvement with Romantic poetry. Before they left Lithuania, he and Adolfas had set up a regional theater. Later in a German camp for displaced persons they studied with Ippolitas Tvirbotas, a teacher of the Stanislavsky method. But it was the transformation of acting into performance, or the breakdown of the difference between the performer and his role, that seems to have particularly interested him in the later 1950s and early 1960s. The first four Independent Film Awards, for instance, show a progressive preference for the reality of performance. In Shadows, actors play in a spontaneous and improvising manner; in Pull My Daisy, nonactors—poets and a painter—play themselves, in Primary the performers are Senators Kennedy and Humphrey, playing for the presidency as filmed with Leacock’s passionate detachment. Finally, in the Brakhage films, the film-maker makes himself, his family, indeed his life, the subject of his film; it is passionate self-involvement.
Although this sensitivity to a philosophy of performance is only part—and not a dominant part—of his aesthetic, it accounts for some positions and tendencies in his criticism. If we reconsider his text on the “Baudelairean cinema” in this light, the principle underlying its historical schema reveals itself. Time soon proved him wrong in announcing the death of “the symbolist-surrealist cinema of intellectual meanings.” Within a year Twice a Man, Scorpio Rising, Heaven and Earth Magic, and much of Dog Star Man would be publicly screened for the first time; Ken Jacobs was about to begin shooting his most explicitly symbolical and mythopoeic film, The Sky Socialist. The fundamental change of the early 1960s within the avant-garde film, as I have shown in several places, was the emergence of the mythopoeic film, a direct descendant of the trance film, which had undergone a gradual but fragmented evolution in the 1950s.
In the “Baudelairean cinema” article, it seems to me that Mekas mistook a flurry of contemporary activity for the avant-garde tradition. He also seems to have equated the somnambulistic performances within the trance films with their total meaning while astutely sensing that the magnification of symbolism and the image of the possessed quester were intimately intertwined. What he did not foresee was a new form which could be even more symbolically and intellectually complex without the somnambulist.
To Mekas’s credit one must add that in the early 1960s a dimension of social criticism entered at least some of the avant-garde films. The previous chapter touches upon some manifestations in California. Mekas’s own film, Guns of the Trees, which is formally closer to The End than to the films of Cassavetes, Clarke, Rogosin, or Engel, was a social protest. Scorpio Rising can be viewed in this way. The films from this period by Stan Vanderbeek and Richard Preston, and of course Jacobs’s Star Spangled to Death and Blonde Cobra, attack aspects of American society.
Jacobs, in his own highly personal view of the history of the avantgarde film, used the term “underground film,” which became a journalistic commonplace after 1962. Stan Vanderbeek seems to have invented the term in 1961 (Film Quarterly, XIV, 4) to describe the period from the late 1950s until the mid-1960s, including his own films. Interestingly, Jacobs claims that period ended when avant-garde films became “fashionable.” He partially blames Mekas for contributing to its end by “promoting a star system.” It is true that an issue of Film Culture (Summer 1964) had a center section of photographs of “Stars of the New American Cinema,” and, perhaps more to the point, Mekas dismissed the scope of Star Spangled to Death with a discussion of Smith’s performance:
I recently saw a rough cut of Jacobs’ new film, Star Spangled to Death, a three-hour movie he has been shooting for the past seven years, and I was surprised to find in it the beginning of Scotch Tape and Blonde Cobra and the beautiful earliest work of Jack Smith where he does as good a job as the early Chaplin—which I know is a big statement, but you’ll see someday it’s true.10
This again is the manifestation of a sensitivity to performance and an excitement over new possibilities in acting. But neither the transition Mekas proposes from Symbolist-Surrealist to disengaged and free or that of Jacobs from “narcissistic” to Underground to “fashionable” transcends Mekas’s or Jacobs’s sense of himself at the center of things. When he made the “Baudelairean cinema” statement, Mekas obviously saw himself on the side of the free, looking backwards; Jacobs uses the underground platform to look in both directions.
Jonas Mekas’s theoretical interest in performance had a more profound effect upon his criticism and his film-making when it intersected with his poetics. The concept of the self is the locus of that intersection. The title of Stanislavsky’s book, as Mekas once pointed out to a group of young film-makers, is The Actor Works upon Himself. In “Notes on the New American Cinema,” he says, “Improvisation is the highest form of condensation; it points to the very essence of a thought, an emotion, a movement.” What had been a method of preparing actors to perform roles in plays becomes, in Mekas’s transformation, the central process of the imagination:
Improvisation is, I repeat, the highest form of concentration, of awareness, of intuitive knowledge, when the imagination begins to dismiss the prearranged, the contrived mental structures, and goes directly to the depths of the matter. This is the true meaning of improvisation, and it is not a method at all; it is, rather, a state of being necessary for any inspired creation. It is an ability that every true artist develops by a constant and lifelong inner vigilance, by the cultivation—yes!—of his senses.11
Jonas Mekas, following the initial efforts of Maya Deren, devoted much of his time and resources to sustaining a “visionary company”12 of film-makers through his criticism and his organization of the Film-Makers’ Cooperative, the Film-Makers’ Cinematheque, the Friends of the New Cinema (which gave small grants to approximately twelve film-makers each year between 1964 and 1971), and Anthology Film Archives. Although his work is the most spectacular example of commitment to the vision of a community of film-makers, it is supported and reflected in similar but less sustained efforts by many of the film-makers I have been considering: Maya Deren as the first propagandist for the American avant-garde film and the founder of the Creative Film Foundation, Frank Stauffacher as founder of Art in Cinema, Bruce Baillie as founder of the Canyon Cinema Cooperative, Peter Kubelka as designer of Anthology Film Archives’ Invisible Theater, and Stan Brakhage as a lecturer and enthusiast, sometimes in the guise of a Savonarola, attempting to bridge the generations and geographical isolation of film-makers. To this list should be added Ken Jacobs as the first director of the Millennium Film Workshop between 1966 and 1968 which made equipment and instruction freely available to aspiring film-makers in New York.
But to return to the films of Ken Jacobs and Jack Smith, it is necessary to consider first a film-maker who exerted a considerable influence on both of them, as well as on Stan Brakhage, Larry Jordan, and Jonas Mekas. He is Joseph Cornell. I have already discussed Brakhage’s encounter with Cornell at the turning point of his style. After years of correspondence, Larry Jordan spent several weeks during the summer of 1968 at Cornell’s home in Queens, New York, assisting him in his well-known work as a collagist and box-maker. He also photographed, under Cornell’s direction, a very evocative film of a trip to a graveyard.13 Cornell gave him three related collage movies which he had been working on for several years with instructions on how to complete them. In 1970, under the sponsorship of Anthology Film Archives, where Cornell’s films were made available to the public for the first time, Jordan completed all three—Cotillion, The Midnight Party, and The Children’s Party.
Cornell’s first collage film, Rose Hobart (later tentatively renamed Tristes Tropiques), was made in the late 1930s and first shown at Julien Levy’s art gallery in New York. It represents the intersection of his involvement with collage and his love of the cinema; for Cornell had been for many years a collector of films and motion-picture stills. Rose Hobart is a re-editing of Columbia’s jungle drama, East of Borneo, starring Rose Hobart. It is a breathtaking example of the potential for surrealistic imagery within a conventional Hollywood film once it is liberated from its narrative causality. In reducing the feature film to approximately fifteen minutes and replacing the soundtrack with music, he concentrates on the moods and reactions of the heroine. Since he often does not show to whom she is talking or to what she is reacting, her fears and anxieties seem to be in response to the very mystery which the collagist’s editing has made of the film. Two men—an Asian in a turban and an American—and two women appear fleetingly throughout the film without revealing their roles.
Among his tactics to intensify fragmentation are cutting to a scene just before it fades out, combining in rapid succession a series of similar encounters, intercutting two scenes from different times as if they were simultaneous, and showing the closing or opening of a door without the person entering or leaving. Because of this fragmentation, certain images take on surrealistic dimensions, such as the natives driving crocodiles into the river with poles or a curtain pulled to reveal a belching volcano.
By the radical employment of hysteron-proteron which alters the logical order, the film-maker gives the impression of repetition and ruptures linear time and attendant causality. Several times he cuts from the dying or dead man with a turban to shots of him fully alive. At the end of the film, the man dies metaphorically; as Rose Hobart stands before his bed or his bier, the sun quickly passes through a full eclipse, and then, by a skillful joining of shots, seems to fall from the sky like a pebble into the pool we had seen before and disappear under a surface of slow-motion ripples. She lowers her head, as if reacting to his death in the final shot.14
Ken Jacobs, who worked very briefly for Cornell while he was making Star Spangled to Death, borrowed Rose Hobart to study and to show to Jack Smith. He described his reaction to the film:
I was seeing Jack again and I told him, “Jack, you’ve got to see this movie.” We looked at it again and again, and we were both knocked out. Jack tried to act at first like a little bit removed, like I was overstating it, and then he broke down and said, “No, it’s very good.” We looked at it in every possible way: on the ceiling, in mirrors, bouncing it all over the room, in corners, in focus, out of focus, with a blue filter that Cornell had given me, without it, backwards. It was just like an eruption of energy and it was another reinforcement of this idea I had for making this shit film [Star Spangled to Death] that would be broken apart and then again there would be an order.15
Although Jacobs describes his reaction to Rose Hobart in terms of the film he was making then, its influence extended to his 1969 film, Tom, Tom, the Piper’s Son. There he transformed an old American film into a modernist work, not by re-editing and showing it through a filter but by rephotographing it at different speeds, accenting the grain, and indeed performing a series of operations on it similar to the variations with which he had projected Cornell’s film.
In his later films—both those photographed by Rudy Burkhardt, Stan Brakhage, and Larry Jordan and the collage films which Jordan completed—Joseph Cornell describes the marginal area where the conscious and the unconscious meet. These are films which affirm a sustained present moment in which a quality of reminiscence is implicated. Frequently, they share the themes of his boxes and collages and make allusion in their titles or their imagery to Romantic and Symbolist poetry, which had been a continual source of inspiration to him. Thematically, there are figures within each of the films who are proposed as tentative mediators, through whose consciousness these camera movements might be experienced.
In A Legend for Fountains there are three levels of mediation (a woman, children, birds). The first section, called “Fragments,” establishes a series of motifs upon which the second section, without a title, elaborates. A young lady slowly descends a dark staircase, passes through a hallway and out into the street. Looking down the same hallway, we immediately see her returning with the same slow pace. As if to record the time lost in that elliptical jump-cut, the camera shows “fragments” of her walk: she stares through the windows of a sandwich shop and a toy store; she hurries around a corner and rests against a wall covered with graffiti; her breath condenses in the cold air. The camera dwells on children she sees playing in the street; it slowly explores the graffiti and finally follows the flight of birds among the buildings above her.
The second and somewhat longer section repeats and extends the imagery of the first, beginning with the moments before she left the building. An opening title, “… your solitude, shy in hotels …,” quotes a source of inspiration for the film, Garcia Lorca’s “Tu Infancia en Menton,” from which the title also comes. The young lady sits by a window stroking a black cat. The camera observes her silhouette from inside, and her face can be seen under the reflections on the glass from without. When she leaves the building, the image fixes upon the reflections on the window of the moving door, as in the opening of Brakhage’s Anticipation of the Night. Outside, the attention shifts between her, the birds on top of the buildings, the graffiti on the walls, and the children playing amid trashcans.
Whenever he was asked about the relationship between his films and his boxes and collages, Cornell denied that there was any. The films, he sometimes said, “never got off the ground.” Nevertheless, they share a number of recurrent themes with the boxes: the child, the aviary, the hotel, and of course the window. The bits of letters and newspapers pasted to the back wall of some of his boxes function similarly to the graffiti-covered surfaces of A Legend for Fountains.
The serial structure, involving a return to and a reorganization of elements in two or more related works, which unites many of his boxes and collages, extends to his films. The double structure of A Legend for Fountains is one example. The most mystifying transformation by variation that he achieved in film was in making Gnir Rednow. He reversed left to right and printed backwards the film he had commissioned from Stan Brakhage, Wonder Ring, and in so doing, he introduced a differential which made the film characteristically his own. In the three collage films that Larry Jordan completed, the serial structure is very apparent. All three involve the re-editing of a film about a children’s party that the film-maker found. He creates three related contexts of the child’s consciousness by combining the dancing, feasting, and games of the party with circus acts, telescopes, constellations of stars, Zeus throwing thunderbolts in a primitive film, and windows.
What Jack Smith gained from seeing Cornell’s first collage film remains a matter of speculation. Although his first long film, Flaming Creatures (1963), does not contain collage material, it involves the transformation and “liberation” of Hollywood stereotypes in an ironical recreation of the pseudo-Arabian world of Maria Montez films. His unfinished Normal Love (1963–) also draws upon the mythology of the conventional movies for its pantheon of monsters. In No President (1969), which was shown once and then dismantled, he incorporated a found documentary on the life of Wendell Willkie into a film of his own.
The window as a veil in Joseph Cornell’s A Legend for Fountains.
In 1963 and 1964 Smith published two articles in Film Culture which outline the way he views the cinema. The first was on Maria Montez and the second on Josef von Sternberg. Both of them assert that the essence of cinema is the visual in opposition to the narrative, which retards comprehension.
People never know why they do what they do. But they have to have explanations for themselves and others.
So Von Sternberg’s movies had to have plots even tho they already had them inherent in the images. What he did was make movies naturally—he lived in a visual world. The explanations plots he made up out of some logic having nothing to do with the visuals of his films.16
He argues for an appreciation of Maria Montez films as pure cinema, once the narrative line is ignored:
These were light films—if we really believed that films are visual it would be possible to believe these rather pure cinema—weak technique, true, but rich imagery ….
The primitive allure of movies is a thing of light and shadows. A bad film is one which doesn’t flicker and shift and move through lights and shadows, contrasts, textures by way of light. If I have these I don’t mind phoniness (or the sincerity of clever actors), simple minded plots (or novelistic “good” plots), nonsense or seriousness (I don’t feel nonsense in movies as a threat to my mind since I don’t go to movies for ideas that arise from sensibleness of ideas). Images evoke feelings and ideas that are suggested by feeling.17
Visual truth, for Smith, reveals more than acting intends:
But in my movies I know that I prefer non actor stars to “convincing” actor stars—only a personality that exposes itself—if through moldiness (human slips can convince me—in movies) and I was very convinced by Maria Montez in her particular ease of her great beauty and integrity.18
Applying the same perspective to von Sternberg, he discovers not only a plastic play of light and shadow but a revelation of sexual presence:
His expression was of the erotic realm—the neurotic gothic deviated sex-colored world and it was a turning inside out of himself and magnificent. You had to use your eyes to know this tho because the sound track babbled inanities—it alleged Dietrich was an honest jewel thief, noble floosie, fallen woman, etc. to cover up the visuals. In the visuals she was none of those. She was V.S. himself. A flaming neurotic—nothing more or less—no need to know she was rich, poor, innocent, guilty, etc. Your eye if you could use it told you more interesting things (facts?) than those. Dietrich was his visual projection—a brilliant transvestite in a world of delirious unreal adventures. Thrilled by his/her own movement—by superb taste in light, costumery, textures, movement, subject and camera, subject camera/revealing faces—in fact all revelation but visual revelation.19
Nowhere has Jack Smith spoken as well about himself as in this passage allegedly about von Sternberg’s Dietrich. Flaming Creatures deliberately manifests what he finds implicated in Maria Montez’s and von Sternberg’s films, and without the interference of a plot. When he brings to the fore what has been latent in those films—visual texture, androgynous sexual presence, exotic locations (the Araby of Montez’s films or the Spain, China, and Morocco of von Sternberg’s)—and at the same time completely discards what held these films together (elaborate narratives), he utterly transforms his sources and uncovers a mythic center from which they had been closed off. Ken Kelman, in the first article on Flaming Creatures in Film Culture, found that it “echoes with ancient ritual chant, with Milton and with Dante …for the very scope and scale of sin becomes demonic in a Miltonian sense, and Flaming Creatures might be subtitled Pandemonium Regained, a paean not for the Paradise Lost, but for the Hell Satan gained.”20
Although Jack Smith dispenses with plot, he retains the structure of the scene in his film. There are ten scenes which blend into one another with deliberately obscured boundaries. Their sequence, for the most part, seems determined by rhythm and dramatic effect rather than by narrative. The move toward and away from a central core of three episodes in which the flaming creatures die in an orgy and, after an interlude, are reborn gives a centripetal form to the cyclic myth. The style of photography changes with the scenes, orchestrating them as if they were movements of a musical work.
Smith first encountered the use of outdated raw film to produce washed-out or high-contrast textures in Jacobs’s Star Spangled to Death, but it was seeing Rice’s The Flower Thief that convinced him of its possibilities. In Flaming Creatures he far exceeds either of these films in the employment of murky, burned-out, or high-contrast textures to create different depths and ranges of space. In the first scene, as figures pass back and forth in front of a poster on which the credits of the film have been ornately written, the gray, washed-out picture quality gives the impression that he was filming in a cloud. The narrowing of the tonal range obscures the sense of depth, which Smith capitalizes on by cluttering the panning frame with actors and with details of limbs, breasts, a penis, and puckered lips so that not only depth disappears but the vertical and horizontal coordinates as well.
By way of contrast, the subsequent scene takes place in the clearly defined space before a painted backdrop of a large white bush in a white flowerpot. He placed before it a transvestite in a white dress sniffing white flowers and a woman in a black nightgown. They flirt; she wiggles to the Spanish music playing throughout the scene; the transvestite waves a gloved hand; they meet, kiss, and pose together. The camera remains stationary, occasionally cutting to a closer shot, isolating just one of them. But before their relationship develops, the scene temporarily shifts to a group of creatures putting on lipstick in panning, mostly aerial views. The sound becomes the voice of an advertisement for “a new heart-shaped lipstick that stays on and on.” When the film-maker’s voice interrupts the advertiser to ask, “Is there a lipstick that doesn’t come off when you suck cock?” he calmly answers, “Yes, indelible lipstick.” Smith seems unconvinced. He asks, “But how does a man get lipstick off his cock?” to which the advertiser tartly replies, “A man is not supposed to have lipstick on his cock.” Then he continues his unctuous pitch for the lipstick. The advertising voice is so authentic that there is a shock when he first answers the question. Before that, it might have been recorded directly from radio or television.
While the speech continues, the camera wanders over a tangle of nude and half-nude bodies so intertwined that they seem a single androgynous figure of many heads (all applying lipstick, including bearded men), breasts, and penises. But after two brief transitional tableaux—a group of creatures falling down in slow motion and a group composition with the sole of a dirty foot projecting out at the camera—the attention returns to the couple before the flowerpot backdrop. They chase each other back and forth offscreen to the left and right. The camera rests on the empty scene as one or the other rushes across the screen. There is no logic to the direction or sequence of their chase; the woman might move from right to left, her pursuer in the opposite direction; once they even cross paths. But eventually the transvestite captures and throws the woman in black to the floor.
Then the camera begins to vibrate, blur, and participate as the new scene, the orgy, commences. The creatures immediately converge upon their victim, strip her, smell her armpits, poke her genitals, and crawl over her. This rape sets in motion a general orgy which the camera, now wildly shaking, glimpses without making specific. Initially faint screams grow so loud that they drown out the music at the very moment when the orgy either sets off or coincides with an earthquake. The whole set goes into spasms; a lantern sways frantically; plaster falls from the ceiling on the writhing creatures, who seem to have intensified their frenzy in the knowledge that this might be their final bacchanal.
Their death evokes the myth of the seasons. Leaves fall upon their scattered bodies. Towards the end of the orgy the raped woman had staggered to her feet, but she collapsed and was dragged off by a second transvestite, past the dead and dying creatures. But when the now slowmoving camera returns to her, she and her abductor are also dead. The earthquake as a cosmic orgasm turned the sparagmos of the victim into the sparagmos of the bacchantes.
Amid passages of silence and bits of very low violin music, Smith dwells upon the empty scene. A bit of gauze blows before the familiar backdrop; the lantern lies broken on the floor; for a long time the image settles on a fly and his shadow on the white cloth of the backdrop. With a sudden burst of dated honky-tonk music, the lid of a coffin begins to move. But Smith cuts away to the void, and silence ensues, as if this shot had been premature. The proleptic image and its sound makes the empty shots that follow it all the more barren.
The myth of the vampire is invoked when Smith finally returns to the coffin scene. A transvestite Marilyn Monroe rises from it in a white burial gown, holding lilies. To the honky-tonk song, she stretches and surveys the dead bodies and debris; then she chooses a corpse to attack. Aroused in this act, she lifts her dress and begins to play with her penis. It is not her being a vampire but her sexuality that signals the rebirth of the creatures. The lantern hangs again from the ceiling. Beneath it, the creatures dance—first the Monroe figure and her victim, then others as they revive and join in.
The concluding three scenes of the film are a sequence of ecstatic dances. In the first, all the creatures in white costumes dance together. The burned-out photography presents a dazzling effect of white on white and a depth of figure behind figure twirling and swaying in the crowded arena before the backdrop. Then a Spanish dancer in black drag with a rose in her teeth does a mad solo whirl to bullfight music. Finally, as if not to be upstaged, the Monroe figure appears puffing on a cigarette, filmed through the lantern. With the sound of the dated rock and roll record, “Be-bopalula,” she performs the final dancing rites intercut with a tableau of an odalisque, one breast exposed, surrounded by Arabs, one of whom points to her nipple.
The final third of Flaming Creatures is a continuous surge toward the ecstatic. The camera alternates between static and slowly panning shots of the dancing crowd and disorienting aerial views. The visual poles of black and white which the pursuing transvestite and the woman in the nightgown represented in the first half of the film are transposed to the white Monroe figure and the dark Spanish dancer in the second half.
To see Flaming Creatures is to understand some of Jack Smith’s dissatisfaction with the way Ken Jacobs portrayed him or allowed him to reveal himself in Blonde Cobra. “Jack says I made the film too heavy,” Jacobs says in his note for the fifth Film-Makers’ Cooperative catalogue. The infantilism, cruelty, transvestism, and irony that contribute to the tragedy of delusions in Blonde Cobra reappear as factors in a myth of recovered innocence in Flaming Creatures, where the triumph may be ironic, but it is not at all problematic.
A triumph, in the sense of a triumphal march, is the subject of the film Jack Smith began to film immediately after finishing Flaming Creatures. In fact, he called it The Great Pasty Triumph before changing the title to Normal Love. In the rough cut that he exhibited in 1964, it was a paratactic parade of episodes describing a pantheon of monsters from horror films: the Mummy, the Werewolf, the Mongolian Child, the Spider, as well as the Mermaid, Cobra Woman, and assorted creatures more or less derived from the stock mythology of Hollywood. The projection of the rushes of these scenes throughout 1963 at midnight after the programs of the Film-Makers’ Cinematheque or at Ron Rice’s loft was the occasion for important meetings of film-makers, actors, and critics. Each episode was a self-contained, sensuous exploration of a simple event structured by scene, photographed on outdated color stock that produced ravishing expanses of pastel greens, pinks and blues.
Of all the major film-makers of the mythopoeic stage of the American avant-garde film, Jack Smith was perhaps the most gifted with imaginative powers. Each sequence of Normal Love as it was serially unveiled demonstrated the sureness with which Smith could transform his creatureactors and the landscape in which he placed them into elements of a mythic vision of redeemed innocence and heightened sensuality. In slow, steady shots one could see the green Mummy wading after a nude woman in a pond a of waterlilies; the Mermaid taking a milk bath or having a mudthrowing fight with the Werewolf; a pier covered with the bodies of dead or sleeping transvestites in pink gowns projecting into the azure sea; the emerald Cobra Woman exploring a dark cave; a watermelon feast; a giant pink birthday cake with half a dozen creatures dancing on it, including a very pregnant woman.
Other film-makers, impressed by Smith’s imaginative faculties, have thought of making use of his imagery. Ron Rice often accompanied Smith as he was shooting Normal Love. They tended to return to his loft with most of the cast, still in their costumes, after the day’s filming. At first Rice made some casual film studies of the actors swinging on the hammocks in his loft. Later he expanded them into the production of Chumlum (1964).
The texture and structure of Rice’s film is altogether different from Smith’s. Throughout Chumlum there are usually at least two layers of moving imagery in superimposition. The compounding of figures, costumes, swinging movements, and the simultaneous fusion of side and aerial views flatten the space, thicken the pastel tones in deep and muddled colors, obscure the individual roles, and fragment the actions. Chumlum seems a continuously even, unaccented web of visual textures. The smoothness of the visual mesh is supported by the drone-like music of Angus MacLise on the chumlum, from which the title comes.
The fragmentation of events and the tactics suppressing internal modulations give Rice’s film a sense of temporal suspension. The inclusion of punch-holes that usually are to be found at the beginning and end of a hundred foot strip of raw film and the apparent minimum of editing (the enjambment of different layers of superimposition suggests this) indicate that Chumlum is made up of approximately ten rolls of film composed in the camera. Unlike Harry Smith with Late Superimpositions, which was shot the same way, Rice did not accent the difference between the whole rolls in assembling them.
At the end of the film he shifts from indoor scenes, all shot in his studio, to an outdoor section. But he underplays this change by using a reel superimposing both indoors and outdoors at the very beginning. Within the center of the film, he seems to have subverted the natural order of the reels (that of the shooting) so that actions would appear inconclusive and repetitive. Toward the middle, he shows Jack Smith in an Arabian costume with a fake mustache, smoking hashish. The film becomes his reverie in which time is stretched or folded over itself.
In the outdoor conclusion, which intensifies the play of color and repetition, he shows the actors, still in their costumes, walking to a log house in the woods, their gowns and feet tangled in briars. He filmed this moment twice in superimposition, slightly out of synchronization, as a resolving metaphor for the “folded” temporality of the whole film. If there is a development or progress in the film, it is from indoors to outdoors, from swinging, crawling, and dancing in the harem to dancing in the sky over Coney Island (through superimposition)—an image which recalls the end of The Flower Thief where Taylor Mead dissolves into the sea.
Chumlum and Late Superimpositions belong with Little Stabs at Happiness, some of Larry Jordan’s films, Brakhage’s Song V, and Markopoulos’s Galaxie and Ming Green as manifestations of the growing confidence in the early 1960s in the process of composing a film within the camera. This direct method found its spokesman and one of its leading practitioners in Jonas Mekas as he came to devote more and more of his energies to his film diary.
Unlike the literary diary, the film diary does not follow a day-by-day chronology. Structurally, it corresponds more to a notebook, but in its drive towards a schematic or fragmented expression of the totality of the film-maker’s life, it is more like a diary, perhaps one in which the entry dates have been lost and the pages scrambled. Mekas and younger diarists such as Andrew Noren and Warren Sonbert devote their creative energy to shooting, constructing, and revising their filmed lives.
Mekas’s Diaries, Notes and Sketches (1964–1969) and Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania (1971) are exercises in Romantic autobiography. Mekas constantly weaves together celebrations of the present moment, immediately and unironically present on the screen, with elegiac and ironic allusions to a presence that is forever absent to the camera lens: the vision of nature and of his childhood. Like all of the films brought together in this chapter, Mekas’s two diaries are versions of the myth of lost innocence and the failed quest for its recovery. The credo of his commitment to the Romantic dialectic is an article from 1964, “Notes on Some New Movies and Happiness,” in which he combines observations on the films of Ken Jacobs, Ron Rice, Joseph Cornell, and others with thoughts on happiness and sadness from his childhood memories. He writes:
It is neither a coincidence nor anything strange that exactly the same men who have tasted a fool’s happiness, give us also the deepest intuitions of the tragic sense of life.
Imitation of the true emotion. Sentimentality. No oneness. No true peace. (Who knows what true peace is?) Nostalgia of things of nature. Or are we going into neo-Romanticism? And what does it mean? Or am I going into neo-Romanticism? And this essay is nothing but pieces of my own new film? Perhaps.21
That new film was Diaries, Notes and Sketches. Mekas presented an extended synopsis on a giant sheet of paper to all the viewers at its premiere, prefaced by these remarks:
This film being what it is, i.e., a series of personal notes on events, people (friends) and Nature (Seasons)—the Author won’t mind (he is almost encouraging it) if the Viewer will choose to watch only certain parts of the work (film), according to the time available to him, according to his preferences, or any other good reason ….
A note in the beginning says, that this is the First Draft of the Diaries. Why should the Author permit then, one may ask, the unpolished or half-polished edition to come out? His answer is, he thought that despite the roughness of sound and some parts of the images, there is still enough in them—he felt—to make them of some interest to some of his friends and a few strangers. In order to go to the next stage of polishing, he felt, he had to look at the footage as it is, many many more times, and gain more perspective to it—that’s why this edition.
For a screening of this film at the Museum of Modern Art, Mekas wrote:
Since 1950 I have been keeping a film diary. I have been walking around with my Bolex and reacting to the immediate reality: situations, friends, New York, seasons of the year. On some days I shot ten frames, on others ten seconds, still on others ten minutes. Or I shoot nothing. When one writes diaries, it’s a retrospective process: you sit down, you look back at your day, and you write it all down. To keep a film (camera) diary, is to react (with your camera) immediately, now, this instant: either you get it now or you don’t get it at all. To go back and shoot it later, it would mean restaging, be it events or feelings. To get it now, as it happens, demands the total mastery of one’s tools (in this case, Bolex): it has to register my state of feeling (and the memories) as I react. Which also means that I had to do all the structuring (editing) right there, during the shooting, in the camera.22
In this text, which unites the return of “improvisation” with film construction, the film-maker is forgetting or underestimating the importance of editing and even more of sound of his own film. It is true that within an episode he sticks to the material as the scene was shot without restructuring except for inserting titles. When he says, a little later, that the materials were “strung together in chronological order,” he is taking liberties; there were no violent disruptions of chronology, but some events were reshuffled. Of this I can be certain because my family and I appear in it achronologically. The very use of Walden as a structural element attests the editing architecture of the film.
The pixilated imagery, blazing by in fast motion, provides the central and most often repeated metaphor for the temporality of the present moment. The nostalgia for a deeper and more authentic nature is invoked in the passages of speech and the titles. “I Thought of Home” at the beginning and end of the film and “Laukas, A Field, as Wide as Childhood” in the first reel. The distance between the present moment and the nostalgia is repeatedly mediated by the text of Walden, for in Diaries, Notes and Sketches the language of the text, the titles, and the film-maker’s voice is the sole vehicle of reconciling the exiled past—the author’s childhood in Lithuania—with the film camera’s dependence on the here and now of its visual substance.23
In his next film, Reminiscences, he uses the occasion of his first return to Lithuania in twenty-seven years to construct a dialectical meditation on the meaning of exile, return, and art. The film is in three parts. In the first, he put together all the footage he had made (since he first bought a camera in 1950) of his early life in New York, concentrating on the gatherings of Lithuanian exiles, who “looked to me like strange, dying animals, in a place they didn’t belong to, in a place they didn’t recognize,” as the filmmaker says in his commentary within the film. In the center of the film is the movement of return by way of “one hundred glimpses” of Lithuania, the film-maker’s mother, his family. The elegiac tone of the opening part, accented by the space of twenty years between the photography and the editing, and the commentary by the author, disappears in the middle ode, which accepts the inability to return in space (to Lithuania) as well as in time (to childhood).
He resolves the contradictory movements of the first and second parts by celebrating the present with renewed vigor on the return trip via Vienna. There he shows us the lives of artists and thinkers (Hermann Nitsch and his castle, Peter Kubelka and the cellar where he makes wine, Wittgenstein’s house, and the Americans Ken Jacobs and Annette Michelson, both visiting at the same time) whom he calls “Saints” in the identifying titles. By ending the film journal of his early years in New York and his long awaited return to Lithuania with portraits of his artist friends, one “pursuing his vision, without giving an inch, and heroically,” another “who had the courage to remain a child in the purity of his seeing and his ecstasies,” he defines his own triumph as an artist. In the last minutes he tells us, “I begin to believe again in the indestructibility of the human spirit.”
“A child in the purity of his seeing” is not the most accurate expression Mekas could have found for Ken Jacobs’s visionary stance. Ken Jacobs too has a dialectical relationship with the myth of recovered innocence. His most direct attempt at the mythopoeic film, The Sky Socialist, which was shot between 1965, and 1967 and revised in 1986, grew out of his urge to address a monumental work to the Brooklyn Bridge, which he could observe from his loft window and roof in lower Manhattan. Like Hart Crane, whom he had not seriously read, he posited from his contemplation of the sheer magnificence of the bridge and the aspiration of the Roeblings, its builders, an eccentric form which weaves through history and invokes a sense of the divine in a world bereft (as far as Jacobs sees it) of divinity. In Crane’s words,
(a) The protagonist sees the sun fall like a pebble into the pool in Cornell’s Rose Hobart.
(b) Peter Kubelka in pixilated sequence from Jonas Mekas’s Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania.
O Sleepless as the river under thee,
Vaulting the sea, the prairies’ dreaming sod,
Unto us lowliest sometime sweep, descend
And of the curveship lend a myth to God.
The inversion of a classical invocation, in which the bridge is asked to “lend a myth to God,” is precisely the theme of Jacobs’s film. “Roebling is the Sky Socialist,” Jacobs has said, “and so am I as the maker of the film.”
After a proem of zooming and sweeping pans of the bridge, the action settles (originally for three hours, in the 1986 version for ninety minutes) with occasional revisits to the bridge and the river, which the film-maker calls “choral interludes”—on the roof, where two people “stand in for” (rather than act the roles of) the dead Anne Frank and Isadore Lhevinne, the author of two obscure American novels, Ariadne (1928) and Napoleons All (1932), influenced by Symbolist prose. Despite the continual discouragement of Maurice, a fictive incarnation of the principle of despair, Isadore and Anne fall in love and marry.
The pace of The Sky Socialist is very leisurely; its movements are choreographed in a clearly defined deep space. In Jacobs’s subsequent film, Tom, Tom, the Piper’s Son, that space contracts to the grainy screen of rephotography and its time becomes an involuted version of the structural film.
Tom, Tom begins and nearly ends with an old film of the same title made in 1905, quoted entirely both times. For approximately ninety minutes (the original lasts about ten minutes), Jacobs gives us his variations on the images and movements of that film. His Tom, Tom, as opposed to the original, has a grainy, pointillist texture (an inevitable result of filming off a screen or a homemade optical printer, which the structural cinema has capitalized on) and a compressed sense of space. In transposing, he changed the time of the original with slow motion, the scale with closeups of background detail, the sequential order with repetitions and backward movements, and above all the kinesis by radically retarding the narrative of the original. Here the principle of elongation finds its clearest demonstration, which the structural cinema affirms in strong contrast to the beloved condensation of such film-makers as Anger, Brakhage, Belson, Markopoulos, Kubelka, and Breer.
Jacobs’s film is didactic in a specifically modernist tradition. He has recovered the graphic genius of the original film’s source for at least the first and last of its eight tableaux—Hogarth’s Southwark Fair; for it is the imagery and backgrounds of this etching that the anonymous film-maker transposed to film. We see a sensual tightrope walker whirling a hoop in slow motion, a hunchback rolling over and over, a crowd falling one by one out of a barn and almost floating into a haystack. There are intimations of Picasso’s harlequins as well.
Ken Jacobs’s Tom, Tom, the Piper’s Son: flatness and grainy texture achieved through rephotography.
Because of the directness of the mechanism he employs, Tom, Tom must be grouped with the structural films I shall discuss in the next chapter, despite Jacobs’s tendency to rupture the forms of all of his films. In the three versions of the film I have seen, there is a marked difference of architecture. They each violate symmetry by appending a series of slowmotion details after the second presentation of the original film. The second version, however, introduces color inserts of a shadow play (another mixed form which Jacobs practices, especially in three-dimensional stereoscope) which violently interrupt the continuity of the black-and-white film. Visually they are relaxing (so the film-maker describes their function), but structurally they are extremely disorienting. More in keeping with the texture of the film, but nevertheless digressive, is a passage in the second and third versions in which the film-maker literally lifts away the screen off which the original is being “copied,” and we are confronted with the flicker of the bare projector bulb behind the screen.
In the third version an even more aggressive passage shows an image jumping in the projector gate to the point of indecipherability by vertical distortion. Audiences seeing this for the first time do not know if the projectionist has misthreaded or if what they are seeing is part of the film itself. He has thus incorporated within the film an aggressive factor similar to the use of the two radios in Blonde Cobra. As the jumping continues (and it continues for a very long time, seeming as if it were about to rectify itself only to jump again) it becomes evident that the strategy is deliberate.
To the film-maker himself, Tom, Tom, the Piper’s Son—a filmed nursery rhyme—is an exercise in “folded” temporality, and an attempt to recover an innocence in the childhood of the medium itself:
Ghosts! Cine-recordings of the vivacious doings of persons long dead. The preservation of their memory ceases at the edges of the frame (a 1905 hand happened to stick into the frame … it’s preserved, recorded in a spray of emulsion grains). One face passes “behind” another on the two-dimensional screen.
The staging and cutting is pre-Griffith. Seven infinitely complex cinetapestries comprise the original film, and the style is not primitive, not uncinematic but the cleanest, inspired indication of a path of cinematic development whose value has only recently been rediscovered. My camera closes in, only to better ascertain the infinite richness (playing with fate, taking advantage of the loop-character of all movies, recalling with variations some visual complexes again and again for particular savoring), searching out incongruities in the story-telling (a person, confused, suddenly looks out of an actor’s face), delighting in the whole bizarre human phenomena of story-telling itself and this within the fantasy of reading any bygone time out of the visual crudities of film: dream within a dream!
And then I wanted to show the actual present of film, just begin to indicate its energy. A train of images passes like enough and different enough to imply to the mind that its eyes are seeing an arm lift, or a door close; I wanted to “bring to the surface” that multi-rhythmic collision-contesting of dark and light two-dimensional force-areas struggling edge to edge for identity of shape …to get into the amoebic grain pattern itself—a chemical dispersion pattern unique to each frame, each cold still … stirred to life by a successive 16–24 f.p.s. patterning on our retinas, the teeming energies elicited (the grains! the grains!) then collaborating, unknowingly and ironically, to form the always poignant-because-always-past illusion.24
