1. Dana Polan, in The Political Languages of Film and the Avant Garde (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1985), criticized Visionary Film for its indifference to the historical forces shaping the American avant-garde cinema. David James’s excellent Allegories of Cinema: American Film in the Sixties (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988) addresses that issue. Patricia Mellencamp’s Indiscretions: Avant-Garde Film, Video, and Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990) articulated the most extensive of several feminist criticisms of my book; Lauren Rabinovitz’s Points of Resistance: Women, Power & Politics in the New York Avant-Garde Cinema 1943–RITUAL AND NATURE 71 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991) offers a corrective history, centering on the contribution of women film-makers; unfortunately Menken is not discussed. The best treatment of her work is in Stan Brakhage’s Film at Wit’s End: Eight Avant-Garde Filmmakers (Kingston: Documentext, 1989; hereafter FWE).
1. Salvador Dali, The Secret Life of Salvador Dali (London: Vision, 1968), trans. Haakon Chevalier, p. 212.
2. Luis Buñuel, “Notes on the Making of Un Chien Andalou,” Art in Cinema, ed. Frank Stauffacher (San Francisco Museum of Art, 1947), pp. 29–30.
3. See Stuart Liebman’s “Un Chien andalou: The Talking Cure,” in Dada and Surrealist Films, ed. Rudolf E. Kuenzli (New York: Willis Locker & Owens, 1987), for a discussion of language in the film.
4. See Jan-Christopher Horak, ed., Lovers of the Cinema: The First American Film Avant-Garde, 1919–1945 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996). Horak and several of his contributors criticize Visionary Film for its neglect of the American precursors of Deren and Hammid. The same perspective informs Unseen Cinema: Early American Avant-Garde Filmmaking 1893–1941, ed. Bruce Posner (New York: Anthology Film Archives, 2001).
5. Maya Deren, Notes, Essays, Letters, in Film Culture, 39 (Winter 1965), p. 1.
6. VeVe A. Clark, Millicent Hodson, and Catrina Neiman, The Legend of Maya Deren: A Documentary Biography and Collected Works, Volume One, Part One: Signatures (1917–42) (New York: Anthology Film Archives/Film Culture, 1984) and Part Two: Chambers (1942–47) (New York: Anthology Film Archives/Film Culture, 1988), extensively document Hammid’s role. Their work is the most thorough ever published on an American avant-garde film-maker; it has facilitated a large and growing literature on Deren. See Thomas Valasek, “Alexander Hammid: A Survey of his Film-Making,” Film Culture, 67–68–69 (1979); Stan Brakhage, FWE.
7. Luis Buñuel, L’Age d’Or and Un Chien Andalou, trans. Marianne Alexandre (London: Villiers, 1968), p. 90.
8. I discuss L’etoile de mer more extensively in Modernist Montage: The Obscurity of Vision in Cinema and Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990; hereafter MM), pp. 26–34.
1. Parker Tyler, The Three Faces of the Film (New York: Yoseloff, 1960), picture caption opp. p. 96.
2. Ibid., picture caption opp. p. 96.
3. Deren, Notes, p. 30.
4. Maya Deren, “Chamber Films,” Filmwise, 2 (1961), pp. 37–38.
5. P. Adams Sitney, “Imagism in Four Avant-Garde Films,” Film Culture, 31 (Winter 1963–1964)
6. Deren, Notes, p. 18.
7. Deren, “Chamber Films,” pp. 38–39.
8. Deren, Notes, p. 31.
9. Ibid., p. 13.
10. Ibid., p.17.
11. Maya Deren, The Divine Horsemen: Voodoo Gods of Haiti (New York: Chelsea House, 1970), pp. 5–6.
12. Deren, Notes, p. 27.
13. Maya Deren, “Cinematography: The Creative Use of Reality,” Daedalus (Winter 1960), pp. 154–55.
14. Maya Deren, “Cinema as an Art Form,” Introduction to the Art of the Movies, ed. Lewis Jacobs (New York: Noonday, 1960), p. 258.
15. Deren, “Cinematography,” p. 167.
16. Deren, “Cinema as an Art Form,” p. 262.
17. Deren, Notes, p. 65.
18. Ibid., p. 63.
19. Ibid., p. 74.
20. Ibid., p. 30.
21. Ibid., p. 70.
22. Ibid., p. 70.
23. Ibid., p. 70.
1. A chapter on Peterson was suppressed from Broughton’s memoirs, Coming Unbuttoned (San Francisco: City Lights, 1993). The manuscript is in the collection of Broughton papers at the library of Kent State University. Peterson wrote The Dark of the Screen (New York: Anthology Film Archives, 1980) in response to Broughton’s first book of film poetics, Seeing the Light (San Francisco: City Lights, 1977). City Lights published the second, Making Light of It, in 1992. Film Culture 61 (1975) is devoted to Broughton; see Stan Brakhage’s FWE for chapters on both film-makers.
2. Sidney Peterson, “The Potted Psalm,” in Art in Cinema, pp. 61–62.
3. René Clair, “Picabia, Satie, et la Première Entr’Acte,” L’Avant-Scene, 86 (Nov. 1968), trans. Kate Manheim, p. 5.
4. Ibid., p. 11.
5. Unpublished notes deposited at Anthology Film Archives, New York.
6. In 1981 Peterson completed Man in a Bubble, which he shot with students in a film-making course he gave at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, summer 1979.
7. See Dore Ashton, A Fable of Modern Art (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1980), for a discussion of the influence of Balzac’s story on Cezanne, Picasso, and Rilke. I discuss this film in more detail in MM, pp.11–16.
8. Interview with the author, recorded in July and August 1970.
9. Sidney Peterson, “Cine-Dance,” Dance Perspectives, 30 (Summer 1967), p. 16.
10. Ibid., p. 16.
11. Ibid., p. 16.
12. Ibid., p. 19.
13. Parker Tyler, “The Lead Shoes,” Cinema 16 program notes (New York, April 21, 1954).
14. Gregory Taylor’s “Beyond Interpretation: The Lead Shoes as Abstract Film,” Millennium Film Journal, 25 (Summer 1991), pp. 78–99, offers an interesting reading of the film.
15. James Broughton, “What Magic in Lanterns?,” unpublished manuscript at Anthology Film Archives.
16. Sidney Peterson, “A Note on Comedy in the Experimental Film,” Film Culture, 29 (Summer 1963), p. 28.
17. The Greek terms sparagmos and omophagia refer to stages in obscure Orphic rites as attested in Plutarch and early Church fathers and discussed in E. R. Dodds’s The Greeks and the Irrational. The terms literally mean the “ripping apart” and the “eating of flesh.” This rite surfaces in literary history with The Bacchae of Euripides, in which Dionysiac rites of animal sparagmos culminate in the cannibalistic death of Pentheus. In this book I have used the term sparagmos to underline the ritual origins of the numerous scenes of dismemberment in the American avant-garde cinema. I have also used it for both explicit thematic manifestations of the rite and for those cinematic tropes which more obliquely allude to it.
18. Broughton, notes at Anthology Film Archives.
19. Maya Deren, Parker Tyler, Dylan Thomas, Arthur Miller, and Willard Maas, “Poetry and the Film: A Symposium,” Film Culture, 29 (Summer 1963), p. 29.
20. Ibid., pp. 56–57.
21. Ibid., p. 59.
22. See R. Bruce Elder’s A Body of Vision: Representations of the Body in Recent Film and Poetry (Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1997; hereafter BOV), pp. 70–87, for a discussion of the body in The Bed and The Golden Positions.
23. Broughton, notes at Anthology Film Archives.
1. Tony Rayns, “Lucifer: A Kenneth Anger Compendium,” Cinema, 4 (London, Oct. 1969). The recent extended studies of Anger are Robert A. Haller, Kenneth Anger (Minneapolis: Film in the Cities, 1980); Pierre Hecker, Les Films “Magicks” de Kenneth Anger (Paris: Paris Experimental, 1999); and William C. Wees, Light Moving in Time: Studies in the Visual Aesthetics of Avant-garde Films (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992, hereafter LMT). Bill Landis, Anger: The Unauthorized Biography of Kenneth Anger (New York: Harper Collins, 1995), is unreliable.
2. Lewis Jacobs, “Avant-Garde Production in America,” Experiment in the Film, ed. Roger Manville (London: Grey Walls, 1948), p. 136.
3. Kenneth Anger, “Filmography,” Film Culture, 31 (Winter 1963–1964), p. 8.
4. Ibid., p. 8.
5. Kenneth Anger, Magick Lantern Cycle (New York: Film-Makers Cinematheque, 1966), p. 4.
6. Rayns, “Lucifer,” p. 29.
7. Anger, Magick Lantern Cycle, p.3.
8. Kenneth Anger, “Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome,” Cinema 16 Film Notes (April 4, 1956).
9. Bruce Martin and Joe Medjuck, “Kenneth Anger,” Take One, 1, no. 6 (1967), p. 13.
10. Kenneth Anger, “Aleister Crowley and Merlin Magick,” Friends (September 18, 1970), p. 16.
11. See Noel Carroll, Interpreting the Moving Image (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 214–24, for the use of condensation in the symbolism of the film.
12. Anger, Magick Lantern Cycle, pp. 3–4.
13. Juan Antonio Suarez, Bike Boys, Drag Queens & Superstars: Avant-garde, Mass Culture, and Gay Identities in the 1960s Underground Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), pp. 141–80, emphasizes the influence of mass culture on Scorpio Rising.
14. Rayns, “Lucifer,” p. 30.
15. Anger, Magick Lantern Cycle, p. 11.
16. René Wellek, Discriminations (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970), p.113.
17. Kenneth Anger, “Invocation of My Demon Brother,” Film Culture, 48–49 (Spring 1970), p. 1.
18. Rayns, “Lucifer,” p. 24.
1. Gregory Markopoulos, “Psyche’s Search for the Herb of Invunerability.” Filmwise, 3–4 (1963), p. 7.
2. Unpublished notes, originally intended for Cinema 16 Film Notes, now in Anthology Film Archives.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. Donald Weinstein, “Swain; Flowers and Flight,” Filmwise, 3–4 (1963), p. 28.
6. Charles Boultenhouse, “Serenity,” Filmwise, 3–4 (1963), p. 41.
7. Gregory Markopoulos, “From Fanshawe to Swain,” Film Culture, 41 (Summer 1966), p. 19. Many of Markopoulos’s articles have been collected in Chaos Phaos, 4 vols. (Florence: Temenos, 1970).
8. Gregory Markopoulos, “Excerpts from a Tentative Script for Twice a Man,” Film Culture, 29 (Summer 1963), p. 14.
9. Gregory Markopoulos, “The Driving Rhythm,” Film Culture, 40 (Spring 1966), p. 33.
10. Gregory Markopoulos, “Towards a New Narrative Film Form,” Film Culture, 31 (Winter 1963–1964), p. 11.
11. Ibid., pp. 11–12.
12. Gregory Markopoulos, “The Film-maker as the Physician of the Future,” Film Culture, 44 (Spring 1967), p. 61.
13. Ibid., p. 61.
14. Robert Lamberton, “Himself as Herself,” Link (Spring 1967), p. 17.
15. Film-Makers Cooperative Catalogue, 4 (New York, 1967), p. 98.
16. “Special Events Program,” Radio Free Europe, May 10, 1966, transcription in Anthology Film Archives.
17. Gregory Markopoulos, “The Event Inside the Camera,” in Retrospective Gregory Markopoulos, catalogue of Undependent Film Center (Munich, 1970), pages unnumbered.
18. Unpublished notes, Anthology Film Archives.
19. Film-Makers’ Cinematheque program notes, April 18–30, 1968.
20. Letter to Stan Brakhage, July 20, 1963.
21. Harold Bloom, “The Internalization of the Quest-Romance,” Romanticism and Consciousness, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Norton, 1970), p. 6.
22. Gregory Markopoulos, “Projection of Thoughts,” Film Culture, 32 (Spring 1964), p. 3.
23. Gregory Markopoulos, “Institutions, Customs, Landscapes,” Film Digest, 23–24 (1967). Reprinted in Chaos Phaos, vol. 3, pp. 83–84.
24. An important work on Markopoulos is John G. Hanhardt and Matthew Yokobosky, Gregory J. Markopoulos: Mythic Themes. Portraiture, and Films of Place (New York: Whitney Museum of Art, 1996); Millennium Film Journal, 32–33 [Robert Beavers, Gregory J. Markopoulos] (Fall 1998).
1. Bloom, “The Internalization of the Quest-Romance,” p. 7.
2. The literature by and on Brakhage is extensive; in addition to FWE, he has published Metaphors on Vision, ed. P. Adams Sitney, in Film Culture, 30 (Autumn 1963, reprinted 1976); Brakhage Scrapbook: Collected Writings 1964–1980, ed. Robert A. Haller (New Paltz: Documentext, 1982); Essential Brakhage: Selected Writings on Filmmaking, ed. Bruce MacPherson (New Paltz: Documentext, 2001); and Film Biographies (Berkeley: Turtle Island, 1977). R. Bruce Elder’s magisterial The Films of Stan Brakhage in the American Tradition of Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, and Charles Olson (Waterloo: Wilfrid Lauriers University Press, 1998) interprets Brakhage’s films in terms of their literary ancestors. See also James, Allegories of Cinema, pp. 28–57; Annette Michelson, “Camera Lucida/Camera Obscura,” Artforum, 11, no. 5 (January 1973); Marie Nesthus, Stan Brakhage (Minneapolis: Film in the Cities, 1979); Wees’s LMT discusses several Brakhage films in terms of the film-maker’s theories of vision.
3. The thirty Songs themselves have several subdivisions: 15 Song Traits, 23rd Psalm Branch, and Song XXVII: “My Mountain” and Rivers contain parts which might be considered as individual works. In fact, Brakhage does list the 16mm film Two: Creely/McClure, which is incorporated in 8mm in 15 Song Traits, as a separate item in his filmography.
4. Stan Brakhage, “On Anticipation of the Night, “Filmwise (1961), pp. 19–20.
5. Gertrude Stein, “Miss Furr and Miss Skeene,” Selected Writings of Gertrude Stein (New York: Random House, 1962), p. 564.
6. Brakhage, Metaphors on Vision, p. 25. I have numbered the otherwise unnumbered page for convenient reference.
7. Ibid., p. 23.
8. Ibid., p. 59.
9. Ibid., p. 26.
10. There is a lucid discussion of the editing of Window Water Baby Moving in James Peterson’s Dreams of Chaos, Visions of Order: Understanding the American Avant-Garde Cinema (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1994), PP.53–57.
11. Brakhage, Metaphors on Vision, p. 19.
12. Ibid., pp. 9–10.
13. Ibid., p. 14.
14. Ibid., p. 80.
15. Ibid., p. 77.
16. An unpublished interview with the author in the spring of 1965. A transcript is in the library of the Anthology Film Archives.
17. For an extended discussion of Blue Moses see MM, pp. 196–203.
18. Work on Baillie includes Lucy Fisher, “Castro Street: The Sensibility of Style,” Film Quarterly, 29, no. 3 (Spring 1976); Alan Williams, “The Structure of Lyric: Baillie’s To Parsifal,” Film Quarterly, 29, no. 3 (Spring 1976); “Ernest Callenbach, Bruce Baillie (Minneapolis: Film in the Cities, 1979); Film Culture, 67–68–69 (1979); Scott MacDonald, A Critical Cinema: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers 2 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992); and Tim-oleon Wilkins, ed., Bruce Baillie—Life, Work (San Francisco: SF Cinematheque, 1995).
19. Canyon Cinema Cooperative Catalogue, 3 (Sausalito, 1972), p. 19.
20. Richard Whitehall, “An Interview with Bruce Baillie,” Film Culture, 47 (Spring 1969), p. 19.
21. Richard Corliss, “Bruce Baillie: An Interview,” Film Comment, 7, no. I (Spring 1971), p. 31.
22. See MM, pp. 207–9.
23. Film-Makers Cooperative Catalogue, 5 (New York, 1971), pp. 23–24.
1. Dan Clark, Brakhage (Film-Makers’ Cinematheque Monograph Series, 2; New York, 1966), and Fred Camper, “The Art of Vision: A Film By Stan Brakhage,” Film Culture, 46 (Autumn 1967).
2. Northrop Frye, “The Keys to the Gates,” in Romanticism and Consciousness, p. 237.
3. See Marjorie Keller, The Untutored Eye: Childhood in the Films of Cocteau, Cornell, and Brakhage (Rutherford: Associated University Presses, 1986).
4. Brakhage, Metaphors on Vision, p. 25.
5. Interview with the author, Spring 1965.
6. Ezra Pound, Gaudier-Brzeska: A Memoir (New York: New Directions, 1960), p. 92.
7. Ibid., p. 94.
8. Ibid., p. 20.
9. After he gave up film-making Sidney Peterson gave the anamorphic lens he had used so often to Brakhage.
10. Pound, Gaudier-Brzeska, p. 81.
11. Interview with the author, spring 1965.
12. See Clement Greenberg, Art and Culture (Boston: Beacon, 1965), esp. the article “’American-Type’ Painting,” pp. 208–29.
13. The link between Abstract Expressionism and Brakhage was first examined by Charles Boultenhouse in “Pioneer of the Abstract Expressionist Film,” Filmwise, 1 (1961), and it was elaborated and made to encompass the aesthetics of the American avant-garde cinema as a whole by Annette Michelson in “Film and the Radical Aspiration,” Film Culture, 42 (Fall 1966).
14. Jackson Pollock, “My Painting,” Possibilities, 1 (Winter 1947–1948), and in Readings in American Art, p. 152.
15. “Art in New York,” Radio Program, WNYC, Oct. 15, 1943.
16. “A Statement,” Tiger’s Eye, vol. 1, no. 6 (Dec. 15, 1948), and Readings in American Art, pp. 159–60.
17. Metaphors on Vision, pp. 72–73.
18. Interview with the author, Spring 1965.
19. The notes on Songs I-XXII are drawn from The Film-Makers Cooperative Catalogue, 4 (1967), pp. 25–27. The notes on the subsequent Songs are drawn from the catalogue Brakhage Films, issue undated (Jane Brakhage, Rollinsville, Colo.).
20. Interview with the author, Spring 1965.
21. Guy Davenport, “Two Essays on Brakhage and His Songs,” Film Culture, 40 (Spring 1966), p. 12.
22. Ibid., p. 11.
23. Brakhage is quoting the cry of Adrian Leverkuhn, the protagonist of Thomas Mann’s Doktor Faustus, when his beloved nephew dies.
24. None of the close viewers of this film have felt the dreadful overtones which I have experienced, watching the conclusion more than a hundred times. In Film Culture, 46 (Autumn 1967), three opinions are gathered on the 23rd Psalm Branch: Jerome Hill finds the “Coda” ecstatic, “a peaceful close” (p. 15). For Robert Lamberton, it recalls Anticipation of the Night: “The grace and joy of the movement of the children is beautifully and terribly a part of the thing, a part of despair and the beginning of hope” (p. 15). Finally Fred Camper believes Brakhage has reconciled the violence of the whole film in this image: “And then, we are confronted with an image that at once suggests harmony and violence, or the harmony of violence; an image that also suggests the cyclical nature of human history” (p. 18).
25. Paul de Man, “Intentional Structure of the Romantic Image,” in Romanticism and Consciousness, p. 75.
26. In the Songs Brakhage has been exceptionally inventive in improvising effects and techniques for 8mm where specialized equipment does not exist. In Song VII he masked the images in numerous ways by placing his fingers in different positions over the lens. The anamorphosis of Song VIII was created by a glass ashtray held and revolved before the lens. As I have already said, the split-second montage of the 23rd Psalm Branch was made possible by the inclusion of two black frames between every change of shot. I suspect the mist effect here was made by the film-maker breathing on the lens before each shot.
27. Brakhage, Metaphors on Vision, pp. 47–48.
28. Program notes of the Whitney Museum of American Art, “New American Film-Makers Series,” March 25–31 1971.
29. It is a coincidence that Quick Billy resembles the first part of Scenes from Under Childhood more than any other Brakhage film. They were both made at the same time. From Baillie’s notebooks on deposit at Anthology Film Archives it is clear that he came to certain crucial decisions, such as including a section of photographs from his youth, before he could have seen how Brakhage did the same.
30. Stan Brakhage, letter to Baillie, Jan. 15, 1969.
31. Whitehall, “Interview with Bruce Baillie,” p. 20.
1. See MM, pp. 22–26.
2. See Len Lye, Figures of Motion: Len Lye/Selected Writings, ed. Wystan Curnow and Roger Horrocks (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1984).
3. Unpublished annotated filmography, Anthology Film Archives.
4. Film-Makers’ Cooperative Catalogue, 3 (1965), pp. 57–58. Nos. 8 and 9 seem to have disappeared. No. 13 has been prefixed to a film shot through a kaleidoscope of the film-maker’s construction, and called, at times, The Tin Woodsman’s Dream (1967); the Harry Smith Archives lists it as No. 16. They assign No. 15 (1965–1966) to a film of Seminole quilt designs. Four more films are assigned No. 17 (1979), an extended version of No. 11; No. 18 (1970–1980): Mahagonny, a film for four screens; No. 19, made of excerpts from No. 13, undated; and No. 20: Fragments of a Faith Forgotten (1981), combining Nos. 13, 16, and 19. The dates on the notes are unreliable, especially concerning the earliest films. William Morrison argued at the Harry Smith Symposium of the Getty Research Center, April 20, 2001, that Smith began to make films after meeting Oscar Fischinger and seeing his work in 1948.
5. P. Adams Sitney, “Harry Smith Interview,” Film Culture, 37 (Summer 1965), p. 5. American Magus Harry Smith: A Modern Alchemist, ed. Paola Ig-liori (New York: Inandout, 1966), provides further information about Harry Smith’s life and work. Interviews with Smith have been collected in Think of the Self Speaking: Harry Smith—Selected Interviews, ed. Rani Singh, introduction by Allen Ginsburg (Seattle: Elbow/Cityful, 1999).
6. Jonas Mekas, “Movie Journal,” Village Voice (June 3, 1971).
7. John and James Whitney, “Film Notes,” in Art in Cinema, pp. 61–62.
8. Sitney, “Harry Smith Interview,” p. 9.
9. Ibid., pp. 10–11.
10. Sigmund Freud analyzed Schreber’s book, “Psychoanalytical Notes upon an Autobiographical Case of Paranoia” in Three Case Histories, trans. Philip Rieff (New York: Collier, 1966). Annette Michelson presented a psychoanalytical reading of No. 12 in “The Mummy’s Return: A Kleinian Film Scenario” in Meaning in the Visual Arts: A Centennial Commemoration of Erwin Panofsky (1892–1992) ed. Irving Lavin (Princeton: Institute for Advanced Study, (82–1992) pp. 335–50. See also Carroll, Interpreting the Moving Image, pp.(1982–1992).
11. Sitney, “Harry Smith Interview,” p. 10.
12. Ibid., p. 10.
13. Ibid., p. 12.
14. Scott MacDonald, A Critical Cinema: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers 3 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), has an updated interview. See also Wees, LMT, pp. 130–36.
15. Gene Youngblood, Expanded Cinema (New York: Dutton, 1970), p. 168.
16. Ibid., p. 174.
17. Ibid., p. 174.
18. Ibid., p. 173.
19. Rammurti Mishra. Fundamentals of Yoga (New York: Lancer, 1959), p. 195; Lama Anagarika Govinda, Foundations of Tibetan Mysticism (New York: Weiser, 1970), p. 184.
1. Greenberg, Art and Culture, pp. 72–73.
2. Guy Coté, “Interview with Robert Breer.” Film Culture, 27 (Winter 1962–1963), p. 17.
3. Noel Burch, “Films of Robert Breer,” Film Quarterly, 11, no. 3 (Spring 1959).
4. Cote, “Interview,” p. 18.
5. Fernand Léger, “A New Realism—The Object,” Introduction to the Art of the Movies, p. 97.
6. Unpublished interview, Anthology Film Archives.
7. Jonas Mekas and P. Adams Sitney, “Interview with Robert Breer,” Film Culture, 56–57 (Spring 1973), p. 44.
8. Robert Breer, “Letter,” Film Culture, 56–57 (Spring 1973), p. 70.
9. Mekas and Sitney, “Interview,” p. 40; Charles Levine, “An Interview with Robert Breer,” Film Culture, 56–57 (Spring 1973), pp. 58–59.
10. Robert Breer, “What Happened?” Film Culture, 26 (Fall 1962), p. 58.
11. Recent Breer studies include Lois Mendelson, Robert Breer: A Study of His Work in the Context of the Modernist Tradition (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1981); MacDonald, A Critical Cinema 2; Jennifer Burford, Robert Breer, in French and English, trans. Pip Chodorov (Paris: Paris Experimental, Re:Voir Editions, 1999).
12. Recent Kubelka studies: Christian Lebrat, ed. Peter Kubelka (Paris: Paris Experimental, 1990); Gabriele Jutz and Peter Tscherkassky, eds., Peter Kubelka (Vienna: PVS, 1995).
13. Jonas Mekas, “An Interview with Peter Kubelka,” Film Culture, 44 (Spring 1967), p. 45.
14. On January 30, 1977, at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Kubelka premiered Pause!, a twelve-minute film composed entirely of images and sounds of Arnulf Rainer performing his body art.
15. An edited transcript of some of Kubelka’s lectures at New York University appears as “The Theory of Metrical Film,” in P. Adams Sitney, The Avant-Garde Film: A Reader of Theory and Criticism (New York: New York University Press, Anthology Film Archives, 1978), pp. 139–59.
16. Peter Kubelka, “Working for the Next 1000 Years,” Cinema, 9 (1971), pp. 29–30.
17. Mekas, “An Interview with Peter Kubelka,” p. 43.
1. See Brakhage, FWE, on MacLaine and Conner; Peterson, Dreams of Chaos, Visions of Order, on Conner, Jordan, and Nelson; Scott MacDonald, A Critical Cinema: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), interviews with Conner and Nelson; J. J. Murphy, “Christopher MacLaine—Approaching The End,” Film Culture, 70–71 (1983); Carel Rowe, The Baudelairean Cinema: A Trend within the American Avant-Garde (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1982), and James, Allegories of Cinema on Rice; 2000 BC: The Bruce Connor Story, Part II (Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 1999), esp. Bruce Jenkins, “Explosion in a Film Factory: The Cinema of Bruce Conner,” pp. 185–223; Elder, BOV, pp. 24–35; Anthony Reveaux, Bruce Conner (Minneapolis: Film in the Cities, 1981); J. Hoberman, To Tightrope Walkers Everywhere: The Collaborative Films of Robert Nelson and William T. Wiley (Minneapolis: Film in the Cities, 1979); P. Adams Sitney, Larry Jordan (Minneapolis: Film in the Cities, 1980).
2. Paul de Man, “The Rhetoric of Temporality,” Interpretation, ed. Charles Singleton (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1969), p. 202.
3. Film-Makers Cooperative Catalogue, 5 (1971), pp. 270–71.
4. Ron Rice, “The Flower Thief,” Cinema 16 film notes (April 25, 1962).
5. Fourth International Experimental Film Competition, catalogue (Cinematheque Royale de Belgique, Brussels, 1967), p. 80.
6. P. Adams Sitney, “Larry Jordan Interview,” Film Culture, 52 (Spring 1971), p. 80.
7. Canyon Cinema Cooperative Catalogue, 2 (1969), p. 55.
1. See Lindley Hanlon, Ken Jacobs (Minneapolis: Film in the Cities, 1979); “Ken Jacobs, Interviewed by Lindley Hanlon,” Film Culture, 67–68–69 (1979); David Ehrenstein, Film: The Front Line—1984 (Denver: Arden, 1984); MacDon-ald, A Critical Cinema 3; Brakhage, FWE; David Schwartz, ed., Films That Tell Time: A Ken Jacobs Retrospective (New York: American Museum of the Moving Image, 1989).
2. Film-Makers Cooperative Catalogue, 5, pp. 165–66.
3. Unpublished interview, Anthology Film Archives.
4. Ibid.
5. Film-Makers Cooperative Catalogue, 5, p. 166.
6. Ibid., p. 167.
7. Jonas Mekas, “Movie Journal,” Village Voice (May 2, 1963).
8. David James, ed., To Free the Cinema: Jonas Mekas and the New York Underground (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), combines excellent critical essays on the films with personal memoirs, useful apparatus; MacDonald, A Critical Cinema 2; Judy Briggs, Jonas Mekas (Minneapolis: Film in the Cities, 1980).
9. Jonas Mekas, “Notes on the New American Cinema,” Film Culture, 24 (Spring 1962), p. 15.
10. Jonas Mekas, “Movie Journal,” Village Voice (Oct. 23, 1963).
11. Mekas, “Notes,” p. 15.
12. See Harold Bloom, The Visionary Company (New York: Doubleday, 1961).
13. Deborah Solomon identified the gravesite as that of Cornell’s friend, Joyce Hunter, for whom he had a stone erected. See her Utopia Parkway: The Life and Work of Joseph Cornell (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1997).
14. I treat Cornell’s Rose Hobart and Cornell’s other films more extensively in “The Cinematic Gaze of Joseph Cornell,” in Kynaston McShine, ed., Joseph Cornell (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1980); see Keller, The Untutored Eye; Jodie Hauptman, Joseph Cornell: Stargazing in the Cinema (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999); Annette Michelson, “Rose Hobart and Monsieur Phot: Early Films from Utopia Parkway,” Artforum, 11, no. 10 (June 1973).
15. Unpublished interview, Anthology Film Archives. See Jack Smith, Wait for Me at the Bottom of the Pool: The Writings of Jack Smith, ed. J. Hoberman and Edward Leffingwell (New York: High Risk, 1997).
16. Jack Smith, “Belated Appreciation of V.S.,” Film Culture, 31 (Winter 1963–1964), p. 4. In Wait for Me at the Bottom of the Pool, p. 41, Hoberman and Leffingwell silently emend “explanations plots” to “explanation plots.”
17. Jack Smith, “The Perfect Filmic Appositeness of Maria Montez,” Film Culture, 27 (Winter 1962–1963), p. 31.
18. Ibid., p. 32.
19. Smith, “Belated Appreciation,” pp. 4–5.
20. Ken Kelman, “Smith Myth,” Film Culture, 29 (Summer 1963), p. 5. J. Hoberman’s superb essay “The Big Heat: The Making and Unmaking of Flaming Creatures,” in Flaming Creature Jack Smith: His Amazing Life and Times, ed. Edward Leffingwell, Carole Kismaric, and Marvin Heiferman (New York: Institute of Contemporary Art/P.S. 1 Museum, 1997), gives the production history and reception of the film. See also Artforum, 36, no. 2 (October 1997): “Jack by Popular Demand: Jack Smith in Retrospect”; Suarez, Bike Boys, Drag Queens & Superstars; J. Hoberman, On Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures (and Other Secret-Flix of Cinemaroc) (New York: Granary/Hips Road, 2001).
21. Jonas Mekas, “Notes on Some New Movies and Happiness,” Film Culture, 37 (Summer 1965), pp. 18–19.
22. Program notes of the Museum of Modern Art Department of Film (June 23, 1970).
23. Pip Chodorov and Christian Lebrat, eds., Le livre de Walden (Paris: Light Cone Video, 1997), and Chodorov and Elodie Imbeau with Christian Lebrat, eds., The Lost, Lost, Lost Book (Paris: Light Cone Video, 2000), offer detailed commentary and essays on two films from the Diaries, Notes, and Sketches series.
24. Film-Makers’ Cooperative Catalogue, 5, p. 167. Bart Testa’s Back and Forth: Early Cinema and the Avant-Garde (Toronto: Art Gallery of Ontario, 1992) discusses the importance and influence of Tom, Tom, the Piper’s Son. William C. Wees’s Recycled Images: The Art and Politics of Found Footage Film (New York: Anthology Film Archives, 1993) offers a history of found footage in avant-garde cinema. Exploding Special Issue: Ken Jacobs Tom, Tom the Piper’s Son (Paris: Light Cone Video, 2001), in French and English, contains Jacobs’s essay “Beating My Tom Tom” and ten essays on the film by French critics and scholars.
1. Since my initial formulation of the concept of structural film in an article in Film Culture, 47 (Summer 1969), it has been controversial. In Film Culture Reader, ed. P. Adams Sitney (New York: Praeger, 1970; reprinted New York: Cooper Square, 2000), I published George Maciunas’s attack on it. Peter Gidal’s Structural Film Anthology (London: BFI, 1976) is the most expansive of several British reformulations. The critical literature in America is extensive. See Paul Arthur, “Structural Film: Revisions, New Versions, and the Artifact,” Millennium Film Journal, 2 (Spring-Summer 1978); Paul Arthur, “Structural Film: Revisions, New Versions, and the Artifact: Part Two,” Millennium Film Journal, 4–5 (Summer-Fall 1979); Bruce Jenkins, “The Case against ‘Structural Film,’ “Journal of the University Film Association, 33, no. 2 (Spring 1981).
2. Stephen Koch, Stargazer (New York: Praeger, 1973), pp. 22–23. Koch’s book, revised and updated (New York: Marion Boyars, 1991), remains a preeminent study in the extensive literature on Warhol’s cinema. Michael O’Pray, ed., Andy Warhol: Film Factory (London: BFI, 1989); James, Allegories of Cinema; Suarez, Bike Boys, Drag Queens & Superstars.
3. Koch, Stargazer, p. 23.
4. Ibid., pp. 54–55.
5. Film Culture, 46 (Autumn 1967), p. 1. Reprinted in Michael Snow, The Collected Writings of Michael Snow [the Michael Snow Project] (Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1994). The four volumes of the Michael Snow Project dominate the considerable recent literature on his films: in The Michael Snow Project: Visual Art 1951–1993 (Toronto: Art Gallery of Ontario, 1994); Philip Monk’s “Around Wavelenth: The Sculpture, Film and Photo-Work of Michael Snow 1967–1968,” pp. 290–385, extensively documents the making and reception of the film; Jim Shedden, ed., Presence and Absence: The Films of Michael Snow 1956–1991[The Michael Snow Project] (Toronto: Art Gallery of Ontario, 1994), examines all of his films until the early 1990s; Regina Corn-well’s Snow Seen—The Films and Photographs of Michael Snow (Toronto: Peter Martin, 1980) was the first volume devoted to his films. R. Bruce Elder’s Image and Identity: Reflections on Canadian Film and Culture (Waterloo: Wilfird Lau-rier University Press, 1989) treats Wavelength and The Central Region in great detail. Scott MacDonald, Avant-Garde Film: Motion Studies (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992), analyzes Wavelength.
6. Annette Michelson, “Toward Snow,” Artforum, 9, no. 10 (June 1971),
7. Jonas Mekas and P. Adams Sitney, “Conversation with Michael Snow,” Film Culture, 46 (Autumn 1967), p. 3.
8. Michael Snow, “Letter,” Film Culture, 46 (Autumn 1967), p. 5.
9. Film-Makers’ Cooperative Catalogue, 5 (1971), p. 301.
10. Michael Snow, “On La Region Centrale,” Film Culture, 52 (Spring 1971), p. 61.
11. Ibid., pp. 62–63.
12. Film Culture, 65–66 (1978), devoted to Sharits, includes his writings, an essay by Annette Michelson, Rosalind Krauss’s catalogue for the Albright-Knox Art Gallery exhibition of 1976, and an interview with Linda Cathcart; see also Stuart Liebman, Paul Sharits (Minneapolis: Film in the Cities, 1981).
13. Paul Sharits, “Notes on Films,” Film Culture, 47 (Summer 1969), p. 15.
14. See P. Adams Sitney, George Landow (Minneapolis: Film in the Cities, 1981). Hollis Frampton’s Circles of Confusion: Film, Photography, Video Texts 1968–1980 (Rochester: Visual Studies Workshop, 1983) is the most important text in the poetics of films published since Brakhage’s Metaphors on Vision. The French volume, L’ecliptique du savoir: film, photographie, video, ed. Annette Mi-chelson and Jean-Michel Bouhours, trans. Jean-Francoise Cornu (Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou, 1999), contains additional texts. Annette Michelson, ed., October, 32 (Spring 1985) [Hollis Frampton Issue], is a valuable resource. See Bruce Jenkins and Susan Krane, Hollis Frampton: Recollections, Recreations (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1984); MacDonald, A Critical Cinema (1988); Mac-Donald, Avant-Garde Film: Motion Studies, analyzes Zorns Lemma.
15. Hollis Frampton, unpublished notes, Anthology Film Archives.
1. Katrina Martin has translated and commented in detail on the puns of Anémic Cinéma in “Marcel Duchamp’s Anémic Cinéma,” Studio International, 189, no. 973 (Jan.-Feb. 1975), pp. 53–60.
2. For an extended analysis of Landow’s Wide Angle Saxon and On the Marriage Broker Joke as Cited by Sigmund Freud in His Wit and Its Relation to the Unconscious or Can the Avant-Garde Artist Be Wholed (1980), see MM, pp. 211–25.
3. George Landow, “Notes on Film,” Canyon Cinema News, 2 (1977), pp. 8–9.
4. Hollis Frampton, “(nostalgia): voice-over narration for film of that name, dated 1/8/71,” Film Culture, 53–55 (Spring 1972), p. 11.
5. Hollis Frampton, “A Pentagram for Conjuring the Narrative,” Form and Structure in Recent Film, ed. Dennis Wheeler (Vancouver Art Gallery, 1972).
6. Simon Field, “Zorns Lemma and Hapax Legomena: Interview with Hollis Frampton,” Afterimage, 4 (Autumn 1972), pp. 54, 59 (abridged).
7. Frampton, “A Pentagram for Conjuring the Narrative.” In Structural Film Anthology (“Letter from Hollis Frampton to Peter Gidal on Zorns Lemma,” p. 75), he ironically acknowledges his relationship to Duchamp: “The rumour (anyway) that my mother’s name was Rose Selavy is substantially correct, and I think she has something to teach us all about the intimacy of ties between language and perception.”
8. Frampton’s theoretical exposition of this distinction can be found in “The Withering Away of the State of Art,” Artforum, 13, no. 4 (Dec. 1974), pp. 50–54.
9. Yvonne Rainer, Work 1961–73 (Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, New York University Press, Halifax, New York), p. 213.
10. Film-Makers’ Cooperative Catalogue, 6, pp. 31–32.
11. “Twelfth Independent Film Award,” Film Culture, 61 (1975), p. 1.
12. Recent Gehr studies include P. Adams Sitney, Gehr (Minneapolis: Film in the Cities, 1980); Richard Foreman, “On Ernie Gehr’s Film Still,” Film Culture, 63–64 (1976); Regina Cornwell, “Work of Ernie Gehr from 1968 to 1972,” Film Culture, 63–64 (1976); MacDonald, Avant-garde Film: Motion Studies, which analyzes Serene Velocity; Testa, Back and Forth: Early Cinema and the Avant-Garde, which discusses the importance of Eureka; Steve Anker, ed., Films of Ernie Gehr: A Collection of Original Writings, Photographic Pieces and Stills (San Francisco: SF Cinematheque, 1983); David Schwartz, ed., Serene Intensity: The Films of Ernie Gehr (New York: American Museum of the Moving Image, 1999); Gilberto Perez, “Ghosts of the City: The Films of Ernie Gehr,” Yale Review, 87, no. 4 (October 1999).
13. Ernie Gehr, “Program Notes by Ernie Gehr for a Film Showing at the Museum of Modern Art, New York City, February 2, 1971 at 5:30 P.M.,” Film Culture, 53–55 (Spring 1972), pp. 36–37.
14. Ken Kelman, “Portrait of the Young Man as Artist,” Film Culture, 6768–69 (1979), pp. 196, 198–99. Several texts by Beavers and about Beavers by Gregory Markopoulos were published in limited editions by Temenos in Florence and Rome; some of these are gathered together with an interview and critical articles in Tony Pipolo and Graham Weinbren, eds., Millennium Film Journal, 32/33 [Robert Beavers, Gregory J. Markopoulos] (Fall 1998). See also Tom Chomont, “A Note on Count of Days, a Film by Robert Beavers,” Film Culture, 48–49 (Winter-Spring 1970); Gregory Markopoulos, “The Language of Diamonds, Film Culture, 52 (Winter 1971–1972), and “Love’s Task,” Film Culture, 53–54–55 (Spring 1972); Beavers’s “Notes filmed for From the Notebooks of… appears in the same issue.
1. The most persistent and comprehensive historian of this period of American avant-garde film-making has been Paul Arthur. See his articles “Bodies, Language, and the Impeachment of Vision: American Avant-Garde Film at Fifty,” Persistence of Vision, 11 (1995), pp. 5–32; “The Western Edge: Oil of L.A. and the Machined Image,” Millennium Film Journal, 12 (1982–1983), pp. 8–28; “The Last of the Last Machine: Avant-Garde Film since 1966,” Millennium Film Journal, 16/17/18 (Fall/Winter 1986–1987), pp. 68–94; “Desire for Allegory: The Whitney Biennials,” Motion Picture, 2, no. 1 (Fall 1987), pp. 1, 5–15; “The Appearance of History in Recent Avant-Garde Film,” Framework, 2, no. 3 (1989), pp. 39–45; “The Avant-garde in ’97,” Film Comment, 34, no. 1 (Jan.-Feb. 1998), pp. 8, 11; “The Avant-garde in ’98,” Film Comment, 35, no. 1 (Jan.-Feb. 1999), pp. 38–39.
Fred Camper’s “The End of Avant-Garde Film,” Millennium Film Journal 16/17/18 (Fall/Winter 1986–1987), pp. 69–94, describes the crisis as Camper then perceived it. His film reviews for the Chicago Reader in the late 1990s reverse that assessment, sounding a celebratory note. Tom Gunning’s essay “Towards a Minor Cinema: Foneroff, Herwitz, Ahwesh, Lapore, Klahr and Solomon,” in Motion Picture, 3, nos. 1–2 (Winter 1989–1990), pp. 2–6, anticipates in different terms and categories, and excepting Klahr in the work of different artists, what I call in this chapter the turn away from Menippea. David E. James’s “Hollywood Extras: One Tradition of ‘Avant-Garde’ Film in Los Angeles,” October, 90 (Fall 1999), pp. 3–22, posits a local tradition of avant-garde production in Los Angeles.
2. See Wees, Recycled Images. The production of important found footage films has increased geometrically since the publication of Wees’s book.
3. Frampton, Circles of Confusion, p. 63
4. Teresa De Lauretis, Alice Doesn’t (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982), pp. 78, 80.
5. Annette Michelson recognized the importance of this emerging genre, devoting October, 17 (Summer 1981), to it as “The New Talkies” issue.
6. Scott MacDonald first pointed out the relationship of Benning’s film to Dos Passos’s novels. MacDonald, A Critical Cinema 2, p. 221. The major films of the mid-seventies use interlocking, fragmentary narratives reminiscent of Dos Passos. The later films, of the nineties especially, dispense with the web of narratives but substitute another Dos Passos strategy: capsule biographies and newspaper items.
7. Surajan Ganguly, “Stan Brakhage—The 60th Birthday Interview,” Film Culture, 78 (Summer 1994), p. 28.
8. Douglas Preston, “Cannibals of the Canyon,” New Yorker (Nov. 30, 1998). Preston’s article and Turner’s book (with Jacqueline Turner), Man Corn: Cannibalism and Violence In the Prehistoric American Southwest (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1998), appeared after both films were made. However, Turner’s thesis was known among anthropologists for more than twenty years.
9. Film-makers’ Cooperative Catalogue, 7, New York, 1989, p. 171.
10. B. Ruby Rich reads the Stonehenge shots less ambiguously: “mute mysterious witness to pre-history, interpreted sardonically as standing for ‘flight, romantic agony, futility of effort, history as impenetrable.’… The circle of stones is an analogue for the psychoanalytic session, that circling and probing of essential mysteries removed from time, space, and social context.” Thus the film as a whole argues “[t]he human psyche must somehow relate to the social body politic. Psychoanalysis must be made to acknowledge history. Berlin becomes, for Rainer, their meeting ground.” Yvonne Rainer, The Films of Yvonne Rainer: An Introduction (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), p. 19.
11. Madeleine Leskin, “So This Is Called Moving?” (interview with Abigail Child), Skop, Berlin, February 1989. I am quoting from a manuscript edited by Child.
12. Apparently Frampton was quoting from memory. He wrote: “How many colors are there in a field of grass to the crawling baby who never heard of green.” Brakhage returned the compliment in kind at least twice: in “Poetry and Film” [Brakhage Scrapbook, p. 220] he unwittingly makes a little story of seduction and abandonment out of it: “As Hollis has it with the birds they say “good morning,” “I found a worm,” “fuck me,” “get out,” “good night.” In “Gertrude Stein: Meditative Literature and Film,” the same misremembered sequence may have been cosmetically corrected for delivery before the faculty of the University of Colorado: “There are only about five stories, epitomized by filmmaker Hollis Frampton thinking of the five bird-songs: (1) Good Morning. (2) I found a worm. (3) Love me. (4) Get out. (5) Good Night.” In “A Pentagram for Conjuring the Narrative,” Frampton had claimed to understand the language of birds:
One fine morning, I awoke to discover that, during the night, I had learned to understand the language of birds. I have listened to them ever since. They say: ‘Look at me!’ or: ’Get out of here!’ or: ’Let’s fuck!’ or: ’Help!’ or: ’I found a worm!’ and that’s all they say. And that, when you boil it down, is about all we say. (Which of those things am I saying now?)
13. Frampton, Circles of Confusion, p. 83.
14. Film-Makers’ Cooperative Catalogue, 7, p. 469.
15. Schneemann and Tenney were the lovers of Brakhage’s Loving (1956) and appeared with Brakhage and his wife Jane in Cat’s Cradle (1959).
16. Because laboratories confused prints and printing materials, Mekas took the serial title, Diaries, Notes, and Sketches off the installments of his diary after Walden. However, he considers all of his works in both film and video, excepting Guns of the Trees and The Brig, as parts of that composite film.
17. MacDonald, A Critical Cinema 2, p. 187.
18. The most explicit threnody is one of Mekas’s videotapes, Scenes from Allen’s Last Three Days on Earth as a Spirit (1998), in which he filmed in Allen Ginsberg’s loft from the laying out of Ginsberg’s body to his memorial service.
19. Macdonald, A Critical Cinema 3, p. 249
20. Jonas Mekas, “The Diary Film,” in Sitney, The Avant-Garde Film, p.192.
21. Elder, BOV, pp. 329–332.
22. Ibid., p. 333.
23. Mekas, “The Diary Film,” p. 191.
24. Warren Sonbert, “Friendly Witness,” Motion Picture, 3, nos. 1/2 (Winter 1989–1990), p. 7.
25. Warren Sonbert, “Film Syntax,” Hills, 6/7 (Spring 1980), pp. 122, 130.
26. Ibid., p. 122.
27. Scott MacDonald, A Critical Cinema 3, pp. 246, 244, 247.
28. Ibid., p. 252 (ellipses mine).
29. P. Adams Sitney, “Saugus Series,” Millennium Film Journal, 16/17/18 (Fall/Winter 1986–1987), p. 160.
30. Canyon Cinema Film/Video Catalogue 2000 (San Francisco, 2000), p. 186.
31. J. Hoberman, “Attack of the Mutants: Tracking the Resurgence of Experimental Film,” The Voice (March 8–14, 2000).
32. Albert Kilchesty, ed., Big As Life: An American History of 8mm Films (New York: Museum of Modern Art; San Francisco: SF Cinematheque, 1998).