January 18, 1968
ON NORMAN MAILER NEW FILM FICTION STYLES
Most of the daily and weekly film reviewers objected to the virtues of Norman Mailer’s film, Wild 90. I don’t want to discourage our reviewers, but the techniques of Wild 90 are here to stay, for a while. Wild 90 is only one of many films that you are going to see soon which use the so-called cinéma vérité techniques to “write a novel.”
No doubt, it all started with Lumière. But it was Leacock and Pennebaker who brought these techniques to the attention of our contemporaries. The only thing is that it was always considered that it’s O.K. to use the cinéma vérité techniques to shoot a documentary, a reportage, but not for anything else. And that’s how it went, for a good ten years. Until, one day, came Andy Warhol. In the history of cinema Andy Warhol—besides many other credits—will have a credit for introducing, very freely and very casually, the cinéma vérité techniques into the fiction film. Not the “neorealist” techniques or style where they did everything to imitate the life, to recreate the life; but to use the real life to make fiction of it.
In a sense, it’s nothing new. Artists, that is, film-makers, always used real-life techniques in cinema. It’s only a question of the emphasis, of the degree. And the emphasis, the degree, the angle always comes from the immediate (contemporary) needs of man. The theatre of Stanislavsky is based on the use of “real-life” experiences, too. All good acting is based on “real” experiences. But there are so many levels and aspects to this “real truth” in which we live. The emphasis, the styles keep changing.
The first masterpiece of this fictionalized reality, no doubt, was The Chelsea Girls. The Four Stars is its Odyssey. Vali and Portrait of Jason followed. Sheldon Rochlin (Vali) is editing another film, The London Scene, which he shot in London during a period of several months, and if he won’t destroy his footage in editing, his new film in which he follows several real people in real life situations will provide us with a Go (John Clellon Holmes) of London, 1967. The Edge, Troublemakers, and In the Country fall in the same category. There are, basically, two variants to the technique: 1) to take real people (usually, nonactors) and let them improvise upon given situations (Chelsea Girls, Wild 90, The Edge) and 2) to follow real people in real-life situations and edit the footage into a “novel” (Vali, Rochlin’s new film, Portrait of Jason). In the second variant, the film-maker can either stay very close to the character (Vali) with a documentary fidelity (much of Jean Rouch’s work falls in this category), or he can use the gathered footage freely and fictionalize it.
Knowing what’s in editing rooms, and knowing what’s in the wind, I can tell you that there will be many more films in this direction during this coming year. Really, the only thing that’s holding the film-maker is the technology of cinema which is so far behind the life, behind the ideas, and behind the practical needs of the artists. The sync equipment for sound shooting is still too complicated, too expensive, and too unreliable.
I know that there will be some among my readers who will say: “Oh, look what he is pushing now. I wonder what will be next….” But, you see, I am not a critic. I don’t criticize. I am a cold, objective, “piercing” eye that watches things and sees where they are and where they are going and I’m bringing all these facts to your attention. Now it’s up to you to interpret the facts of life. The only thing is that you prefer history, you prefer to look at things and enjoy them from the past, as history. All your interpretations are interpretations of history. But when the things happen, right now, you don’t find much instruction in them, you prefer to “criticize,” that is, to dismiss them, very skeptically—as if your skepticism would eliminate in us the need for these new developments, new researches, new insights. And that’s how it always was, with critics, and with people, and that’s how we remain, most of us. Except that times are changing. The children of Now are here. There will be much more consciousness of the present during the coming years. Not everything will be left to history, to “historical perspective,” as the war in Vietnam already demonstrates. We don’t want the truth of history about Vietnam: We want the truth of now.
January 25, 1968
ON RADICAL NEWSREEL
December 22 will go into the history books of cinema. Some thirty film-makers—cameramen, editors, soundmen, directors—gathered at the Film-Makers’ Cinematheque and created a radical film newsreel service. The same day a very significant coincidence occurred: On our way home, in the evening papers, we read the headline—Universal Newsreel Service Closes.
The new Newsreel service is still in organizational stages, it needs money very badly, but the first newsreels should be out sometime this week. Not even the name of the service is fixed as yet, proposals going from the Guerrilla Newsreel to the Radical Newsreel to just simply the Newsreel. But whatever the name, the time is ready and ripe for it.
What will the new Newsreel do? I will quote here some of the half-official announcements:
The Newsreel is a radical news service whose purpose is to provide an alternative to the limited and biased coverage of television news. The news that we feel is significant—any event that suggests the changes and redefinitions taking place in America today, or that underlines the necessity for such changes—has been consistently undermined and suppressed by the media: Therefore we have formed an organization to serve the needs of people who want to get hold of news that is relevant to their own activity and thought.
The Newsreel is the cooperative effort of many young film-makers who have been documenting independently whatever they considered “news.” Most of their footage has had no outlet, and some has not been seen. The Newsreel will be such an outlet and will make several types of news film: short newsreels which will appear every week or two; longer, more analytic documentaries; informational and tactical films.
The Newsreel films will reflect the viewpoints of its members, but will be aimed at those we consider our primary audiences: all people working for change, students, organizations in ghettos and other depressed areas, and anyone who is not and cannot be satisfied by the news film available through establishment channels. We intend to cover demonstrations; to interview figures like LeRoi Jones and Garrison; we want to show what is at stake in a housing eviction or in consumer abuses in Harlem; we should provide information on how to deal with the police or on the geography of Chicago.
Films made by the Newsreel are not to be seen once and forgotten. Once a print goes out, it becomes a tool to be used by others in their own work, to serve as a basis for their own definition and analysis of the society. Part of our function, therefore, is to provide information on how to project films in nontheatrical settings—on the sides of buildings, etc. We hope that whoever receives our films will show them to other local groups as well, thus creating an expanding distribution network. We shall also encourage the formation of similar newsreel groups in other parts of the country, so that there can be a continual interchange of news films, whereby people in Oakland can see what happens in New York and vice versa.
Films may be obtained from the Newsreel in the following ways: 1. Free of charge to community organizing groups that cannot afford to pay for prints; 2. On a regular subscription basis to film clubs, national organizations, theatres, etc., who will pay for the cost of prints plus handling charges; 3. By renting back prints of the Newsreel in a package; 4. By renting whatever foreign or other documentary films we have compiled.
February 1, 1968
ON CHURCHES AND THE SHADOW METAPHORS OF KEN JACOBS
The churches of New York are sooty, heavy, cold buildings. No good vibrations in these churches. Maybe in some corners, yes. When I walked into the St. Peter’s church, in Rome, it felt like a factory. But some corners, some half-hidden areas felt like a church. In my travels, I have come upon only one little church, lately, in Austria, near Vienna, on a hill, a very tiny, tiny church, which felt like a church. And if someone were to walk into this little church, in Austria, and start doing what Ken Jacobs did at the Washington Square Methodist Church last weekend, I’d throw him out with my own hands. But in the case of this particular Methodist church, Ken Jacobs’ Apparition Theatre of New York: Evoking the Mystery: Chapter 4 of the Big Blackout of ’65 piece uplifted the spirituality of the church. For the first time the sad, cold building was touched, explored, looked at with loving attention. Still resistant and frozen, it started coming to life, for thirty-five minutes. Jacobs manipulated carefully placed lights which, when switched on or moved around, revealed now a cornice, now part of the ceiling, now part of the altar, now a chair, now the organ pipes—while the sound system blew into the church the sounds of the street, noises, cars, bits of voices, and, later, the organ music (played by Michael Snow).
This was the fourth installment of Jacobs’ Big Blackout epic, and I can only repeat what I have said on other occasions, that Ken Jacobs is the subtlest manipulator of light and shadow in the entire multi-media area, and as a lyricist (with a touch of melancholy) he is hardly surpassable. (Other lyricists are Nam June Paik, Claes Oldenburg, and Ken Dewey.) Jacobs is not content just to show what you can do with light, as an effect—light itself—which is the way of most of the psychedelicists. What Ken does, and often with a real genius, is to make shadow-light metaphors. It’s a pity that Ken’s pieces aren’t recreated more often—and when they are, the audience is usually so small. But Ken Jacobs’ shadow metaphors are among the most beautiful in the whole new cinema-shadow play art, and they are impossible to describe (they are already shadows to begin with); the child metaphor, the moon metaphor, or in the case of the latest installment, the opening door metaphor; or the illuminated ceiling image when the pale light strikes fragilely the church ceiling, as the rest of the church remains in darkness—it’s a breathtaking moment of meditative beauty; the church becomes a live thing and you identify with it, as if you were this church, alone at night, listening to the city noises with the car lights caressing your ceiling.
It’s no great news that man is going through a spiritual regeneration. With the old religions (churches) crumbling in their own staleness, even the houses of God must be rejuvenated, recovered, touched again with love, one by one, piece by piece. As I sat in the Washington Square Methodist Church that night last weekend I had a feeling that the church building itself was excitedly aware of its own coming back to life—of a possibility of becoming alive. The blasting sound of trumpets and organ sounded and shook the entire church as the light hit the ceiling and the walls, again and again, almost painfully, like streams of sunlight—long rays of light and shadow pierced into the (symbolic) darkness of the church—again and again, trying to bring walls and space to life, walls abandoned by man to death. And the church stood there, in expectation, for a moment, waiting for God to breathe life into it. But the altar remained still in darkness.
Yes, artists are priests today. Reverend Kenneth Jacobs. The spirituality of the poet against the practicality of a Yogi, Maharishi Mahesh?
April 18, 1968
ALL ART IS REAL AND CONCRETE
“Experimental Film is synonymous with a mental delirium and the escape from reality,” writes French movie critic Marcel Martin in one of the three leading French movie journals, Cinema 68 (N. 124), as he reviews the Fourth International Experimental Film Competition at Knokke-Le Zoute. This kind of attitude is still very typically European.
In the United States this mentality is represented by Amos Vogel (see his Evergreen article). What amazes me is this: How, with all the schools of philosophy behind them, the French intellectuals (??) can still be so primitive about reality. Escape from reality! A regular Hollywood (or French) movie scene is reality; but Tony Conrad’s film, The Flicker, is not reality…it deals with light. Or Wavelength. Light is not reality. But reality is endless, there are so many levels and angles to reality. Hollywood film is one reality, the work of Markopoulos, or Snow, or Brakhage deals with another reality. The work of the avant-garde film-maker is not an escape from reality—it’s just the opposite: It goes deeper into reality, beyond what has been seen by the eye of the contemporary narrative cinema.
All is real and concrete.
All senses are real and concrete.
Aesthetic senses are real and concrete.
Art is real and concrete.
Art’s workings are real and concrete.
The soul is real and concrete.
The workings of art upon the soul and the workings of the soul through art are real and concrete.
And now I’ll tell you a story. My story could be called “A Story About a Man Who Went to the Frick Gallery to Look at Vermeer.”
A STORY ABOUT A MAN WHO WENT TO THE FRICK GALLERY TO LOOK AT VERMEER
Once there was a man. He lived, he worked, he ate, and he slept like everybody else. One day, I do not know how nor why, he went to the Frick Gallery and stood in front of a painting by Vermeer. As he stood there, watching the subtle play of light and color, he began to feel pleasant currents go through his whole being. Later, at home, and at work, he could still feel Vermeer’s presence. He felt a kind of electricity in the subtle and tiny ends of his senses, a current which went further, into his thoughts and through his heart. He knew that something that had been atrophying and dying in him was suddenly given new life by Vermeer. And he felt richer for it. He wasn’t a shrinking man: He was expanding. All his life he was told that art and beauty were ephemeral and unreal. Now he knew that in actuality both art and its workings were concrete and real. Vermeer had locked into his painting the energy, the subtle vibrations of light and line which can wake up and come into action as soon as there is a sign of an approaching frequency of vibration in the onlooker—and it lifts that lower vibration of the onlooker into its own field.
Knowing this, the man now frequently visited the gallery to spend time with Vermeer. It was like going to school and learning and growing—only the facts learned were not the facts of profession and craft but rather the facts of aesthetic senses. If in school, he felt, his thinking powers were strengthened and the know-how facts were instilled into his memory—so here an entire area of his being that he didn’t even know existed was strengthened and developed and now seemed to give meaning to the rest. He also understood now that the expression which he had heard so often in school and among his friends, that art is a reflection of life—now this expression had little meaning for him. Art was not a reflection of life: Art was life. Art was energy. Art was more life than he was, very often…. More soul was locked into this painting than into some of his friends. The separation was not between life or a reflection of life but between the different phenomena. A man is one thing, a tree is another thing, a stone still another, and a painting by Vermeer still another. And each of the four was a field of energy and they acted upon each other and all four were life.
As the years went by, while his visits to the Frick Gallery continued, he used to stop occasionally in the street in front of some artist selling his paintings. And he was always disappointed not to receive from them any of the feelings he got from Vermeer. A confusion of muddled tones seemed to come out of these amateur paintings—a vibration of a much heavier quality and frequency which almost by force was pulling down his own frequency, dulling his senses, jarring with them, making him almost physically sick, and he had to rush away. He knew by now that the artifacts of man can act both ways—they can lift one up or they can drag one down, all depending on where the onlooker was in his own development and where the creator of the artifact—“the artist”—was when he was creating the artifact, where he was in his own development, how pure, how clear an instrument he was himself, what kind of note could sound through him.
May 16, 1968
OBSERVATIONS ON FILM FESTIVALS
I spent this past weekend at Yale University as one of four judges at the first Yale Film Festival, organized by Yale University. (Other judges were Annette Michelson, Willard Van Dyke, and Bernard Hanson.) The first prize was given to Scott Bartlett’s film Off-On; the second prize to James Broughton’s film The Bed; the third prize to Will Hindle’s film Chinese Firedrill. John Craig got the prize for the best film under three minutes for his film Twitchy; Jerome Hill’s Anticorrida received the honorary prize for a film under three minutes. Larry Jordan’s film Gymnopedies was given jury’s special prize. Each judge chose one of his favorites for a special mention. Annette Michelson chose Palazzola’s O; Willard Van Dyke chose Loren Sears’ Tribal Home Movie No. 2; Hanson chose Will Hindle’s FFFCTM; I chose George Landow’s Bardo Follies.
No point telling you that each of the four “judges” had his own individual preferences which differed greatly from the list of the “winners.” The winners constitute a compromise among the four. For instance, none of Annette Michelson’s selections got on the list of winners. Which brings us to a very important lesson. Festival juries consist of individuals with very different interests in cinema. They come from all kinds of professions and from all kinds of walks of life. When we look through the names of the film festival juries, we find writers, actors, poets, art critics, film festival directors, and film-makers themselves. It is absurd to ask them all to agree upon the same film. The only thing that can be done is to announce the individual selections of each juror. The reasons of each juror could be given for his selections. The compromise selections of prize one, prize two, prize three, etc., do justice neither to the films nor to the jurors. I for myself do not intend in the future to participate in any other kind of jury but ones which will be based on individual selections.
The second observation from which it’s time to draw practical lessons concerns the films themselves. Usually, hundreds of films are being sent to film festivals (230 were sent to the Yale Film Festival). Festival organizers appoint a local preselection jury to reduce the number of films to a size good enough to squeeze into the festival screening time (in the case of Yale, three screening sessions, each session 2½ hours long). So that the jury of the festival sees only one-tenth of the films submitted to the festival (this goes for all festivals, from Cannes to Yale). Since the virtues of some of the most advanced works, the youngest works, can be noticed only by the most advanced and open critics, it happens very often that such films are eliminated before they reach the final jury. Looking through the list of rejects at Yale we discovered that the rejected films were as good as the ones which were accepted. So we started digging into at least some of the rejects. Annette Michelson’s top choice, for instance, Palazzola’s O, came from the rejects. At this year’s Oberhousen Film Festival (Germany), Scott Bartlett’s Off-On was rejected by the preselection jury. Only upon the insistence of some members of the jury (Willard Van Dyke was one), who by sheer accident happened to know that Bartlett’s film was submitted, the film was put back into competition and it ended up by winning the grand prize. Among the rejects of the Third International Experimental Film Competition, Belgium (1964), was Stan Brakhage’s masterwork, Dog Star Man. The conclusion is this: The final jury, the one that gives awards, has to see all of the films submitted. No doubt this creates all kinds of problems, including longer sessions of work for the jurors—but either the jury takes its work seriously or it doesn’t. The jury is responsible not only for those films which are selected for screenings to the public, but for every film submitted to the festival.
Number three observation concerns the technical aspects. No festival of cinema can be considered serious if it cannot cope with 8 mm. projections, loop projections, double (or triple) screen projections, or other similar technical aspects which by now have become part of the normal film-making vocabulary and techniques. (Yale Film Festival, for instance, did not consider 8 mm. films at all, and it failed to project Storm De Hirsch’s two-screen film, Third Eye Butterfly, even after it was accepted. At Cannes Film Festival, last year, they could not project The Chelsea Girls, because it requires two screens.) Film festivals have to bring themselves up to date and change their working procedures if they want to show what’s going on in cinema instead of what’s going on in the history of cinema.
May 23, 1968
ON THE NOVELISTS IN CINEMA
Cinema keeps attracting novelists. I have never really understood why. Writing, good prose and good poetry, is a gift of angels and a great craft. It takes years to master it. But the same novelist who knows perfectly well what goes into good writing (nobody can say that Pasolini, Robbe-Grillet, or Mailer do not know what prose is)—they go now into film-making as if it was the easiest thing to do. Do they really believe that to tell stories with a camera is easier than with words?
Robbe-Grillet’s Trans-Europe-Express is sloppily, poorly written (with the camera, that is). I picked up his book Dans le labyrinthe. I read: “Je suis seul ici, maintenant, bien à l’abri. Dehors il pleut, dehors on marche sous la pluie en courbant la tête,” etc. I am searching in my memory for a single scene in Robbe-Grillet’s film of such ease and flow and magic. The film is clumsy and undernourished. Despite the constant intercuttings, the plots within plots, and the method of “estrangement,” the film remains too plain, too simple, too one-level. There is in it none of the magic and playful simultaneity of his prose, and none of the down-to-the-matter quality. Same goes for Robbe-Grillet’s first film, L’Immortelle, with the exception of the fascinating and almost hypnotic use of the panning shot (even if he has learned it from Resnais). Obviously, it would be foolish to say that Robbe-Grillet shouldn’t make films, or that they are completely without value. As long as he doesn’t take the rhetorical “now everybody can make movies” for plain truth, it’s O.K.
Norman Mailer is more clever. Robbe-Grillet and Pasolini (with the exception, perhaps, of Accattone) fail mainly because they are working within the conventional (and commercial) narrative cinema, never daring to go beyond the nouvelle vague usages. Thus they are exposed to all the comparisons. You can’t watch Robbe-Grillet without measuring him against Resnais, Godard, or Hitchcock; but you can watch Mailer’s Wild 90 without ever comparing him with anyone else. Mailer, clever and intuitive, chose a more contemporary style—specifically, the style of cinéma vérité—which permits him to remain the center of the film, as he is the center of his writings. He performs another clever trick in the transition: While in his writing he is all reason, all mind, all intellectual, in his films he goes to the opposite, whatever that opposite is—he becomes a spitting slob. Thus he avoids any comparisons of his films to his writing—which is not the case with Robbe-Grillet or Pasolini. The films of Pasolini and Robbe-Grillet look like shadows of their own earlier books; the films of Norman Mailer have nothing to do with his books: If you want, you can consider them completely new books, written on film. The reels of Wild 90 and Beyond the Law can sit on the shelves next to his other books, with equal rights. Mailer pulls through, maybe because of his temperament, his vitality—that is, because of his qualities. You can watch Garbo even in a badly directed film: Garbo is the film. And so is Mailer.
August 1, 1968
ON ERNIE GEHR AND THE “PLOTLESS” CINEMA
I saw Ernie Gehr’s two films, Eyes* and Moments, twice. The first time they seemed like light events. Two light events. On second viewing Gehr’s films began to appear to be two light narratives. They also look like movies which could be projected in Michael Snow’s room in Wavelength.
Which is not taking away anything from Gehr’s personality or originality; it’s just that he has absorbed all the light lessons taught by Wavelength, and has gone his own way. For Eyes could surely be looked at (although there are many ways of looking at it) as a narrative. (We shouldn’t forget that Wavelength is also a “murder story.”) At least I found it that way. Two people sitting in a room. Silent. Nothing seemingly happens. They slightly change positions from time to time. Window. Room. Furnitures. Action between the frames. And the light, between them, around them, over them. The story is not told by way of usual situations, happenings, actions, emotion clashes, because the story is not the usual one. It’s happening on some mental level. The light, no doubt, is the key to it, it punctuates the events, it tells the story, it sets the tone.
Wherever I go, wherever there is a discussion of modern cinema, I keep hearing the question of plot, of story, of narrative. “But where is the plot?” they ask (or, rather, cry). And the film-maker defends himself, as I have so many times: “Yes, but this film isn’t supposed to tell a story, this film belongs in the domain of poetry; if you want plot you go to prose.” Etc., etc.
The truth is more simple and more complex, and makes the usual poetry-prose, narrative-nonnarrative explanations practically silly.
The point is that poetry has plot. The point is that Ernie Gehr’s films have plot. All of Brakhage films have plots. His little Songs, the most lyrical works created in cinema yet, have plots and have stories.
What do I mean? It’s like this:
Man, as an individual, goes through stages of growth. Today, the stress may be on the physical adventures, emotions, life outside, naturalistic events; tomorrow, the same man makes another step, and turns inward and begins to follow the events of his unconscious and he follows them through their intricate, but quite logically plotted, causal development (story) lines—as in poetry.
The larger sections of people, of population, go through similar ups and downs, ins and outs. There are centuries which are so much out, preoccupied with the matter only, that even their poetry is all nature, all gross (sentimental) emotions, moralizing, all is “reflection.” At the turn of this century, or before that, the humanity began swinging in (Joyce, Proust) to inner adventures, developments, and events. Only cinema remained in the 19th or 18th century.
If Ernie Gehr’s Eyes were a 19th-century “narrative,” these two people who are now sitting in Gehr’s room, no doubt, would be talking, exchanging some lines, performing, going through some psychological bits. No matter how disjointed, surrealistic, or cubist, still they would be going through lines and actions and expressions aimed at revealing their psychology, emotions, ideas. In a later 20th-century or early 21st-century film, which is where Gehr’s film is, the event is transposed to another level and we don’t give a damn about these people’s emotions or their characters. We are following completely something else, something that cannot be told in words but can be revealed only through certain rhythms of light—emphases, and events of light—something that is happening on a mental level which communicates directly to your thought waves (nerves) and you won’t get anything out of it if you try to react emotionally, if you look for psychological keys, or any of that bag. Yes, maybe we should use Richard Foreman’s term: Ontological cinema has arrived.
So we should stop crying that there is no plot in the new cinema. There is plot in the new cinema and there is story in the new cinema: Only that plot and that story is on another level of being, so no doubt it has different characteristics and laws and different logic (illogic?). Still, these events are as tightly knit and proceed with as much inevitability and time-place-character unity as on the other, outer level (circle) of being (of art).
August 15, 1968
THE SUPREME OBSCENITY OF THE UNITED STATES CONGRESS
August 5: Preview of Peter Bogdanovich’s first film, Targets. Boris Karloff plays himself. I’d like to see the film again. I can’t talk about any film from one viewing. It’s a very good first film. It has a number of submerged interesting levels of content. The style is direct, clear, in the best Hollywood tradition of storytelling (Hawks, Ford, Hitchcock).
August 6: Last autumn, a print of Jack Smith’s film Flaming Creatures was seized at the University of Michigan. The case is still open. Meanwhile, the enemies of Justice Fortas, manipulators of justice, got a print of Jack’s film from Detroit police, and are circulating it in Washington, D.C., among the senators, to undermine Fortas. Supposedly, Fortas was one of the judges who approved the film, when my own case went to the Supreme Court last year (and was rejected). Says Time magazine: “…the anti-Fort as faction said it planned to send copies [of Flaming Creatures] to women’s groups and civic clubs in hopes of triggering further outrage.” And all this without asking Jack Smiths permission! What an outrageous mocking of author’s rights, all in the name of justice, and on the very floor of our Senate. So who wants to talk about justice in this country any more? Corruption everywhere. I know Jack Smith is so fed up by now with misuse of his rights that he may not do anything about it. But what about the people of the law? How can they tolerate things like this? Why can’t they put the United States senators in jail for stealing and peddling prints of Jack’s film?
TEN REASONS WHY THE NEW YORK FILM FESTIVAL SHOULD BE CLOSED
Should the citizens of New York close the New York Film Festival? Why? Or why not? Is there any art in Lincoln Center? Should we close (some say: burn down) Lincoln Center? Do we have right to entertain ourselves at the Lincoln Center (art or no art) while we conduct wars in other countries?
If you are interested in discussing the above (and similar) questions and getting some answers (or providing them yourself), you should attend one of the meetings taking place all over the city these days. The idea emanated from the Newsreel group, but numerous student, youth, grownup, political, and apolitical groups are already involved in the Down With Lincoln Center movement. One meeting will be on September 3, 8 P.M. Blue Van Films, 28 West 31st Street. If you want, you can organize your own discussion groups.
There are several texts and manifestoes floating around, prepared by various groups. Here are some excerpts from the texts:
Although much more sophisticated than popular culture and addressed to a narrow constituency—the educated middle- and upper-middle class which is not fully deceived or adequately satisfied by the mass media—Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts also functions to maintain the false consciousness which bourgeois culture must induce to prevent a critical spirit, understanding, disaffiliation, and consequent revolt. Like the other cultural institutions of the society, like the mass media, its function is coping with rebellion.
The structure of Lincoln Center adequately defines its reactionary role, and its occasional exhibition of radical cinema or theatre is a part of that structure itself, not a deviation, since Lincoln Center’s presentation of radical art, by plucking it out of the social context which could give it life and meaning, effectively nullifies whatever explosive content it might have had. Like any other bourgeois institution, Lincoln Center—in its own sophisticated manner—continually functions to maintain the anti-human capitalist social system.
Lincoln cinema is a phony radical’s cinema. It has nothing to do with cinema.
Gathering from all over the world what its directors consider to be great cinema, petrifying the film into an art object, concentrating a whole year of film-making into ten dizzy days of alienated film-viewing, the Film Festival is a powerful confirmation of coterie art. The entire concept of a film festival, of a cultural event, militates against the establishment of ongoing relationships between film-makers and audiences, especially new audiences, which alone makes vital and progressive art possible.
We understand that Lincoln Center—Pentagon of cultural oppression—must now be confronted, but not on the basis of demands that Lincoln Center improve its programs, i.e., give us better elitist festivals, better bourgeois culture, more refined social control. Up against the wall, bourgeois institutions, bourgeois culture, bourgeois life.
We want a new society where art is no longer a commodity or a mystification, but where it is ecstasy, illumination, and celebration.
The audience of the festival is a coterie of cineasts (and fellow travellers who acquire the status of coterie by attending the festival) who have swallowed the elitist definition of culture whole and who seek to impose those definitions on the “art of the film.”
Lincoln Center should be totally utterly demolished, smashed, popped off, scum-cleansed by violent intrusions, cutting off dresses and titties.
These are the voices of the people. They may be wrong, they may be right, but one thing is certain: Those in power have brought this action (or reaction) upon themselves. Should one call it “punishment”? That would be moralizing, no?
CONSTRUCTION VS. DESTRUCTION, OR LEAVE THE DEAD ALONE
Where do I stand myself? I can only tell you where I stood myself till now. I am not very certain where I am now. This was my past stand: Those who have watched the growth of the New American Cinema, the underground film, should know by now that our attitude (my attitude) or spirit was to build, to create, not to destroy. The things that we considered outdated, even harmful, we left to their own inevitable and solitary death by not cooperating with them, by keeping ourselves out. We didn’t waste energy on destroying the Hollywood film industry. We directed our energies toward creating a new kind of cinema, a more personal cinema, toward the liberation of the camera; we didn’t waste energy on destroying or fighting the competitive, commercial film distribution systems—we created our own cooperative distribution center, Film-Makers’ Cooperative, based on noncompetitive human relations. We didn’t waste energy on fighting censorship laws: We created a cinema that is changing the censorship laws. We didn’t even waste energy in fighting the corrupt public information media—we created our own underground information film, the Newsreel. The same thing was with the film festivals: We stayed out of them. That is, till now. Because things are different now. The air is full of foulness and desperation. Who is creating this desperation? Do I have to answer it? I am afraid things are out of control. But that’s how they always were, I gather, when one looks from the worm’s angle….
September 5, 1968
ON TV AND THE DEMOCRATIC CONVENTION
I never watch television—I have no time for it—but I watched the Convention. One good thing I can say about television: It helps to dethrone such public pigs as the Mayor of Chicago. Thursday morning, after the “nomination,” I listened to some people who I knew had no great previous passion for breaking the “law and order,” and they all told me, in shaky voices, that after seeing the behavior of Mayor Daley on the convention floor, and what was happening in the streets of Chicago—they were ready to go into the streets and smash windows. There he was, Mayor Daley, mockingly grinning at all decency and justice, the big boss, the biggest Democrat of them all—and he could not hide anything from the all-seeing eyes of the TV cameras. His snickerings, his huddlings with the Mafia, his secret (he thought) signs to the buddies in the balcony, his childish and almost innocent pride, and his uncontrolled anger when he lost even a tiny bit of control over the Convention—nothing could be hidden.
The NBC footage of the woman trying to take three youths out of the demonstration area, her driving into the solid wall of the National Guard, their anger, their violence, their monstrous demonstration of senseless brutality—a whole team of heavily armed National Guardsmen and one helpless woman with three kids in the car—as if she were carrying three kegs of powder (and maybe that’s how they look today at the American youth, each one is a keg of powder); and how they pushed their guns into the face of the woman and shouted—and amazingly, the woman remained surprisingly calm and controlled when the entire National Guard team looked like an insane asylum in a fit of hysteria; yes, this footage, these two or three minutes of film—I do not know, really, how long it lasted, the time froze in horror, these two or three minutes of TV film are the most shattering anti-army, anti-police, anti-American, anti-Daley, anti-Humphrey document, produced by Mayor Daley himself.
Orwell predicted that in the year 1984 all citizens will be monitored by the police. I think that we should aim for the opposite. We can do it. I think that a law should be passed to enable us to watch on special TV sets any time we want all our public “servants”—presidents, mayors, police chiefs, even the individual policemen, generals. One channel for Mayor Daley, one for the chief of police, one for the President, one for the Department of Buildings, etc. We could see how they run the city, the country, we would find out what kind of people they are. They would think twice, whatever they say or do. They would know they can hide nothing. Why should a good man hide anything? We are entitled to know everything about the government and its operations. Under the all-seeing eyes of the TV cameras no pig would be able to stay in any office for very long. Paradise on earth would come closer. Now I can’t see it, it’s behind the clouds of tear gas. It is a symbolic action, I guess: Cover your faces, close your eyes, don’t look around, run blindly. That’s their conception of a citizen. Which is a hell of a nerve.
ON PROFESSIONALISM, PRESS PREVIEWS, AND NORMAN MAILER
An old note, from May 6: “Went to a preview of Mailer’s new film, Beyond the Law, at 1600 Broadway. Norman was there, neater and slicker than usual, his hair combed close to his skull, still wet, very proper, like a farmer boy going to town. ‘Oh,’ I said, ‘you look so proper.’ ‘I am the producer now,’ he blurped, in Norman’s usual way. As an actor, he was right. Something in that word ‘producer’ makes one want to look more proper, and solid, and clean. It gives security and strength.”
As soon as you leave the underground, you enter the strange world of pretended security. Be it at the 1600 Preview Theatre, or at the Lincoln Center Film Festival—you don’t want to look sloppy, you have to keep a sense of properness. You don’t shuffle your feet unnecessarily, you don’t move around much, you sit straighter than usual. If you have any such small vices or imperfections you tend to hide them, push them down.
That has to do with the personal behavior at Lincoln Center or 1600 Broadway. But the same applies to the film-making. When you make a movie and you know that it will be previewed at 1600 Broadway, you make your movie so that it will exude the same sense of safety and “strength.” Your movie should behave properly, it shouldn’t shuffle its feet, and no coughing. A “proper,” “real,” uptown movie. The camera must be steady, its movements orderly; the people in the movie must speak in certain proper voices. If not, then your movie will be designated as “personal,” as “independent,” and it will end up in the Special Events, a freak show. But what you want is to be with all grownup art, at the Philharmonic.
We put on ourselves this artificial pose when we enter 1600 Broadway, or when we enter the Philharmonic, when we enter the world of commercial art. I have watched hundreds of commercial critics’ previews at 1600 Broadway until one day I couldn’t take it. I watched them, these people, the film-makers, the producers, the reviewers, this second-water Hollywood, and they all had those expressions of forced, phony seriousness, of faked security, strength, fake power. Many times I tried to look beyond those masks, but they had been walking in those Establishment poses for so long that the masks got stuck to them, like a second nature. They have become the games they played.
It’s interesting to watch these audiences looking at a Mailer film. Or read their scribblings. They find Mailer’s second film “more professional.” Vogel put it into the festival. It’s their little dirty corner. A little dirty corner in the festival, to balance things. Mailer is a good choice, because he is backed by enough official reputation, and he writes for Harper’s and Esquire. So it’s O.K. if he spits in Philharmonic Hall and his camera is shaky. But not too shaky, please! Pennebaker ensures that. It won’t shake outside the limits of the properness, I can assure you that. Pennebaker makes films for TV.
And there is the real Mailer who has too much energy to become the game he plays. He has been around the “proper” people long enough that much heavy plaster has got stuck on him, the plaster of Establishment, and it makes his movements heavy and unnecessarily vulgar, and gross at times—and the plaster becomes too itchy, and Mailer begins to stir, to shoot into wild outbursts. Yes, insult them, make a fool of yourself, show what a slob you can really be—what a slob everybody can be—make a fool of yourself, show the 42nd Street of your soul, spit it out—spit the gangster out, spit the cop out, spit the murder out, yes, yes—do it, do it, Norman—entertain the clean, proper folks, you are the Man Who Laughs, they have thwarted your very soul, they have made you what you are, in their Procrustean beds, their society, their way of life—they made of you an exaggerated, laughing replica of themselves so that they could use you to entertain themselves—be a goddamn slob, and a goddamn idiot and fool and talk dirty and be Norman Mailer. At least you can vomit it out—through your movies. Others are less lucky; they carry it inside until it becomes what?—cancer—murder—death—puke.
September 26, 1968
ON TV MONITORS AND PUBLIC OFFICES
Three weeks ago, I wrote in the Voice that we should monitor our public servants, policemen, mayors, etc.—to reverse Orwell’s prophesy that it’s we who are going to be monitored in the near future. I wrote my proposal in a fit of anger, provoked by the Democratic Convention and Mayor Daley. People like Daley can bring the worst out in you. There was no great reason to lose my cool because of Daley or the Convention. My proposal to watch, to monitor our civil servants, was, really, immoral. Immoral because it’s based on mistrust. It’s one of those many, many protective regulations, legalities, restrictions with which man has surrounded himself already, trying to fix things from the wrong end. We want to create an ideal society but we are doing it from the wrong end. Nothing can be done when you begin with force and mistrust. The right end to start at is the opposite: no force, but trust to the end. The only action, besides love, that one can take—as far as I can figure it out—is the education of man. That is, to increase his knowledge of himself so that he wouldn’t do anything that is against himself—because to do harm to others is to do harm to yourself. This is the preacher speaking—but since everybody’s speaking revolution, why not me? I think that humanity is badly educated. Ignorance is cruel, heartless.
November 7, 1968
WHY WE SHOULD THROW BRICKS AT FILM CRITICS
I have no idea who was the first one to write that Mailer’s Beyond the Law is “a much better film than Wild 90.” I keep seeing that statement in every review, even by the people who never saw Wild 90. I’d like to punch their noses. They almost managed to create the impression that yes, this one is O.K., but the other one, oh, that one was really lousy. Which is not true. Beyond the Law may be better, but Wild 90 was good too. What an ugly habit: As soon as we find something good or beautiful we try to use it as a club to hit the other thing, that is a tiny bit less good and less beautiful. We have to enjoy ourselves through blood.
Anyway, for the sake of those who haven’t seen Wild 90, I want to state here that the movie reviewers are misleading you. Both Mailer films are interesting. They are as interesting, and often more, as the best of Hollywood or European movies around. The reviewers hated Wild 90 because it was Mailer’s first film. Reviewers always hate first films. They are full of mistrust, and they are blind like bats. Only when they see that a film-maker is persisting in what he is doing, do they decide to give him a break: They figure, O.K., the second one must be better than the first one, it stands to reason, we can’t make a big mistake. Dear reader: Whenever you see a film critic, pick up a brick and throw it at him. No great damage can be done to his head.
December 12, 1968
WILL GODARD BECOME AN UNDERGROUND FILM-MAKER?
December 2: Weekend reconfirms my belief that Godard with his every movie is coming closer and closer to the techniques and aesthetics of the New American Cinema. It’s interesting, when you see Weekend, how the greatness of an artist like Ron Rice stands out, who, in his very first film, The Flower Thief, in one big stroke managed to liberate himself from most of the restricting conventions of the cinema and the society, while it took Godard six years and ten movies to do the same, and he still hasn’t made the final plunge into freedom. Yes, he slapped his own producer in the face, publicly, in London—but privately he still plays games with the capitalist cinema, with the Daddy’s Cinema, with bad cinema.
ON DAVID BROOKS
December 3: Museum of Modern Art, as part of their monthly Tuesday Series, presented David Brooks’ new film, The Wind Is Driving Him Toward the Open Sea. The film is as poetic as its title. I find it one of the most interesting narrative films that have come out this year. What’s interesting about it, at least to me, is that David Brooks manages to fuse in it a number of different techniques which till now have been used only in nonnarrative, poetic films—techniques such as single frame, free, impressionistic camera movement, almost total plotlessness, etc. The other thing that I like about The Wind is a fascinating melancholy that surrounds it. It’s a narrative of moods, of reflection, of things lost, gone, like autumn leaves—no tragedy, really, only a mood of melancholy, of sadness—of friends, of ways of life, of cultures gone, of ages coming and going—these are just some of the notes that the film strikes. Romanticism? Perhaps.
ON CAMP AND BEING CAMPY
December 4: Barbarella—rich man’s science fiction movie. Mike Kuchar’s Sins of the Fleshapoids was done only with a tiny fraction of the money wasted by Vadim, but Kuchar’s movie had much more craft, much more imagination, and was better cinema. Just compare the “love-making” (touching the hands) scene which Vadim, knowingly or not knowingly, borrowed from Kuchar (Fleshapoids played in Paris). The difference, I think, is that although both Vadim and Kuchar worked within the Camp style, Kuchar never lost his distance, his detachment, Kuchar never lost his cool; Vadim, however, loses his detachment and becomes campy himself—which is his proper and natural level, and it’s simply bad.
ON VOICE AND IMAGE
December 5: For two minutes I watched a documentary on Michelangelo on TV. Had to turn it off, because of the stupid commentary. Not that the commentary was totally stupid—no, very often, truths were uttered, serious statements. But that voice! That hollow, stupid, that banal voice! I think that the main reason why all our documentaries fail is that the voices, the speakers are so stupid. I have come to the final conclusion that unless the reader or speaker of the lines of the commentary is as sensitive and as intelligent as the truths he is pronouncing, the commentary will sound hollow, stupid, pompous, banal, and will destroy the images. That’s what’s so good about books—God bless the books!—there they are, all the great poets, and all the bad poets, and all the wisdom, black on white, pure and plain on that white page for you to read—no hollow stupid rolling voice comes out from their pages—oh blessed be the silence, in which the angels speak….
December 26, 1968
SUMMING UP THE YEAR 1968
To sum up the avant-garde film scene, 1968, we have to begin with the last half of December, 1967, the premieres of Andy Warhol’s **** and Norman Mailer’s first film, Wild 90. From there on we go into 1968:
January: Premiere of probably the most important film of the year, Michael Snow’s Wavelength. Other first screenings of importance: Robert Nelson’s Grateful Dead, Charles H. Ford’s Poem Posters. Ken Jacobs presents Chapter Four of the Big Blackout of ’65.
February: First screenings of newsreels produced by the Newsreel group (organized late in December, 1967)—the most important new development in the American cinema. The Newsreel group, during the rest of the year, makes more than fifty films, and establishes branches in Chicago, L.A., San Francisco, Boston, becoming the most active new film movement in the country. Other premieres of February: Will Hindle’s Merci Merci, Adolfas Mekas’ Windflowers, first New York show of Robert Breer’s 66.
March: Hermann Nitsch show at the Cinematheque, first public screening of Andrew Meyer’s Flower Child, premiere of Robert Kramer’s The Edge, David Wise’s Triple Spice.
April: Premiere of Stan Brakhage’s Scenes from Under Childhood, Gregory Markopoulos’ Illiac Passion, Lloyd Williams’ Line of Apogee, New York premiere of Godard’s Les Carabiniers, Jack Smith begins to show his new film(s) under constantly changing title(s).
May: First public shows of Warren Sonbert’s Holiday and The Bad and the Beautiful, Stan Vanderbeek’s computer films, Scott Bartlett’s Off-On, Will Hindle’s Chinese Firedrill, James Broughton’s The Bed. With the critique of the Yale Film Festival (see “Observations on film festivals,” p. 317) begins the summer-long reevaluation and confrontation of film festivals. Premieres of Storm De Hirsch’s Third Eye Butterfly and The Color of Ritual the Color of Thought, George Landow’s The Film Which Rises to the Surface of Clarified Butter, first New York show of Gerard Malanga’s In Search of the Miraculous.
June: Joyce Wieland’s Cat food, Sailboat, and 1933. First public screenings of Ernie Gehr’s Wait and Moments. First “private” screenings of Carolee Schneemann’s Fuses, certainly the most beautiful film of the year.
July: First screenings of Andrew Noren’s Kodak Ghost Poems (another contestant for the most important—or beautiful—film of the year). New York police and the Building Department close the Film-Makers’ Cinematheque and inaugurate a long slump in the New York avant-garde film viewing. For the rest of the year, it becomes impossible to see independently made films on any regular basis.
August: Premiere of Peter Bogdanovich’s Targets, my opinion being that Bogdanovich is one of the more talented newcomers to the “narrative” film; first screenings of David Brooks’ The Wind Is Driving Him Toward the Open Sea.
September: Norman Mailer’s Beyond the Law, John Cassavetes’ Faces. October: Larry Kardish premieres The Slow Run, Godard’s Weekend opens in New York.
November: George Kuchar premieres Unstrap Me; final version of Bruce Baillie’s Quixote screened in New York; Ken Jacobs’ Air shaft and Hollis Frampton’s Surface Tension premiere at Hunter College.
December: Paul Sharits’ N:O:T:H:I:N:G, premieres at the Jewish Museum.
Please notice that I am sticking to the New York opening dates. I am not going into international waters, and much has been happening in the international film avant garde these last few months.
ON H. G. WEINBERG, THE TRUE LOVER OF CINEMA
Looking back through 1968, one can’t miss the amazing number of books on cinema that have come out and keep coming out. My special tribute of the year goes to Herman G. Weinberg, for his two books, Josef von Sternberg and The Lubitsch Touch (Dutton paperbacks). I have known Herman G. Weinberg for many years, and many of us who have been bitten by the cinema bug have known him for years. And all these years we have been waiting for his books to come out. Some of us lost hope. But Weinberg didn’t rush, he took his own time. And now that I am reading his books I am almost wishing that they hadn’t come out. You see, Herman Weinberg is writing with such love and with such firsthand knowledge about all those fantastic movies that I am reading his books and am dying to see all those movies. There are books on cinema, many, many, they keep coming out, like mushrooms—and they are nice, scholarly, pedantic, researcher’s, professor’s books. They are nice to have—but they are innocuous. They do nothing to you. They don’t excite you, they don’t send you immediately to the phone to call the Museum of Modern Art: When are we going to see Lubitsch’s Kiss Me Again, or Sumurun? Weinberg’s books are different. They can make a Museum-of-Modern-Art pest out of you. Weinberg’s books should be banned; he writes with so much love for the movies that you read and you go crazy thinking about where are you going to see those movies, and when. I am in the middle of The Lubitsch Touch, right now, and I can’t bear it. Either I see Sumurun tomorrow or I get rid of the book. I am even considering suing the publisher: It’s not fair to make you all excited about a film and not to provide, as a supplement to the book, the film itself. Anyway—do you see the difference between a book and a book?
