Film Culture (November 1957)

A LETTER FROM THE EAST COAST The unmistakable signature of East Coast experimental film-makers is their emphasis upon new techniques. Their films, divergent in subject matter and style, apply the lessons of modern art and indicate new methods of cinematic expression, presenting an attitude and sensibility to cinematic techniques which expand the boundaries of photography, color, and sound. This is well illustrated by the work of the members of the Independent Filmmakers Association, films such as Reflections in Black and White and The Way to Shadow Garden (Stan Brak‘hage) ; The Drum (Richard Brummer and De Forest) ; Jazz Dance (Roger Tilton) ; Bullfight and A Moment in Love (Shirley Clarke) ; Kaleidoscope (Hillary Harris) ; The Very Eye of Night (Maya Deren); Bells of Atlantis and Ai-Ye (Ian Hugo); The Raven and Ode on a Grecian Urn (Lewis Jacobs); Between Two Worlds (Sam Kaner and Vladimir Telberg) ; Mechanics of Love and Variations on Noguchi (Willard Maas and Ben Moore) ; Oedipus and Appointment with Darkness (Robert Vickrey); Summer Sequence (Joe Slevin) ; and others. Technique, and all it denotes, serves as a source of ideas and inspiration throughout all these pictures. Technique motivates the selections and structures, distortions, and rhythms imposed upon the various subjects and points of view. Through technique, apprehension of content is enriched and personalized. The virtue of this preoccupation with technique is that the shape and quality of film change and with these, analogous changes take place in substance, point of view and meaning. The discipline these film-makers are learning is that technique is not the secondary artificial thing that commercial film-makers claim — not an external manipulation or a mechanical appendage — but an integral and primary force, part and parcel of the film medium with intellectual and moral Ep aration which can deepen the film. More and more of these cei film-makers have begun to see that naturalism — the photographic reproduction of an object or event as a method of creative film expression — imposes an eclectic structure which prevents the cinematic sensibility from exploring the extensions of any particular subject matter and thus seriously inhibits the creative process. What they demand from themselves is a fidelity to technique as an integral means which can help them discover and evaluate their subject matter from the point of view of their medium, and through building its separate devices, parts and relations into formal structures, they may extend matter, meaning, and audience response. In this way, technique leads towards a distinctive cinematic style and can become the unmistakable signature of a creative film. LEWIS JACOBS {ILLUSTRATIONS—Page 7: 1. The participants of a symposium on “Poetry and the Film’ held by Cinema 16 on Oct. 28, 1953. From left to right: Maya Deren, Amos Vogel, Parker Tyler, Willard Maas, Arthur Miller, Dylan Thomas. 2. The Mechanics of Love, Willard. Maas and Ben Moore. 3. Object Lesson, Christopher Young. Page 8: 1. Geography of the Body, Willard Maas. 2. The Mechanics of Love, Willard Maas and Ben Moore. 3. Ode on a Grecian Urn, Lewis Jacobs. 4. Dangerous Houses, Curtis Harrington. 5. Desistfilm, Stan Brakhage. 6. Mother’s Day, James Broughton. Photographs loaned by Cinema 16, New York, A LETTER FROM THE WEST COAST A peculiar current of creativity is sweeping through San Francisco and Los Angeles and the results are exciting! And there is an awareness in each city of what is happening in the other. Artists, poets, and film-makers are both writing and visiting one another. From this torrential flux of communication should come a deluge of new film ideas! The Art in Cinema Festival next year or in two years, when the first concrete results of this creativity are shown, is an exciting prospect. Already, the new creative surge is being valuably channeled. In Los Angeles, Wallace Berman has begun a series of poetry readings by the rising poets of that city. The first evening was attended by Curtis Harrington, Cameron Parsons, Samson De Brier, and many others both interested and active in art and poetry. Berman is also starting work on his first experimental film, And some of the early names in the experimental film movement are back at work. Curtis Harrington is completing his'first film in four years: it deals with the paintings and personage of Cameron Parsons and is called The Wormwood Star. John Whitney, working together with Charles Eames, has just completed Toy Trains, and IBM has sponsored them in the making of an animated film for the 1958 Brussels Festival. Stan Brakhage, who is emerging as the most plies and perhaps the most controversial experimental film maker of the decade, has recently produced three new films: Daybreak, White Eye, and Loving. He is presently in Denver, working on a feature-length experimental film in color. Brakhage writes, ““My work has taken a new, much more difficult, direction. The three best examples of this direction are The Wonder Ring, Nightcats, and Loving. ...I no longer make a film ‘about’ something. -The statement of the film is now the result of the film’s becoming.” Ten years ago in San Diego, a newspaper woman named Ettilie Wallace invented an interesting color box which she called “Kaleidolight.” With the help of some friends, she created a film out of the abstract patterns formed by the color box. She showed the results to Robert Greensfelder, then head of Kinesis, in San Francisco. He introduced her to poet-artist-composer Christo -pher MacLaine, who offered to make a sound track for the film. The end result was Moods in Motion, a film released two years ago. Then, Ettilie was commissioned by the film unit of the Los Angeles chapter of the American Association for the United Nations to do another film using her “Kaleidolight” technique. This film was completed in 1956 and is called Come In, Jupiter. At » present, Ettilie is in Los Angeles, planning further film . work. MacLaine, who in 1953 made The End, an experi mental film, is still in San Francisco and is now working on the sound track for his newly completed film The Man Who Invented Gold; assisting him on the score is George Abend. Elwood Decker is an excellent example of a dormant film-maker being re-activated by the current wave of creative effort. Decker, a Los Angeles artist and art instructor, made a wonderful film, Color Fragments, in 1949. As its title implies, the film was actually a part of a _ larger film idea which was never realized, and Color _ Fragments remains as a beautiful silent suggestion of what could have been. But just recently, as the result of the showing of the film by the Creative Film Society in Los Angeles and the general enthusiasm of the So 9