Film Culture (February 1958)

PARKER TYLER: A PREFACE TO THE PROBLEMS OF THE EXPERIMENTAL FILM The history of the Experimental (Avantgarde or Poetic) Film is a curious one that even possesses its Hollywood phase, when professional workers with serious, as opposed to commercial, ideas decided on their own, and on very small budgets, to do imaginative work that used the camera the way a poet uses his pen: as an instrument of invention; it is significant that these professional workers were typically camera specialists, for the first step in visualizing the Experimental Film as a distinct reality is to conceive the proper role of the camera as a visual medium. In the big industrial studios, the camera—now as large as a public monument—is a sort of gargantuan fetish, a Frankenstein’s monster that can swallow and reproject vast panoramic spaces as on the new grandeur screens. So it is a fitting symbol of commerce. The Experimental camera is not at all like that, being as personal as a hunting rifle when compared to the collectiveness of a cannon on a battleship. If, in the art of painting, the brush is traditionally the indispensable instrument of work, in the art of film this instrument is the camera. The commercial industry regards the camera only as a carry-all, an ingenious baggage compartment into which an art is stuffed and then purveyed in “magic reels” to be unloaded in theaters. Actually the camera contains as many secrets of “significant form” as does a pencil, a brush, or, for that matter, the spout used by modern painters who pour their forms on canvas. A standard technical book on the film by Raymond Spottiswoode is called “A Grammar of the Film.” Can one imagine a book called “A Grammar of Poetry,” or of “Sculpture,” or even “Play-writing’? No, one speaks of an “art,” or, at the most rudimentary, a “craft,” of the established aesthetic domains, as with Percy Lubbock’s “The Craft of Fiction.” The “grammar”! This means the art is—and so it is here—in the kindergarten stage. Therefore, Jean Cocteau’s kindly, paternally valid advice to a young film-maker, who would take his art seriously, is to equip himself with a small camera, go out into the world, and improvise ... In view of all the factors enmeshed with the film craft, this ABC advice is very sound. When one scrutinizes the basic craft of communicating meanings to the film medium—as opposed to just photographing, in the journalistic or sub-documentary sense—one sees that it is a problem held in some degree in common with all the arts to be classified as visual, with poetry in so far as it deals directly with images and, of course, with painting. As a total theatrical art, where the film combines with music and spoken dialogue, the auditory and literary enter the scheme; one deals with a theatrical spectacle of a given and complex kind. The movies, at this point in their artistic history, are all too much a synthetic art of an “easy,” commercial type. To believe, however, that the film, at its mere appearance, automatically contributed an independent aesthetic dimension to the arts would be to believe that telegraphy as such contributed something independent to literature PARKER TYLER, POET AND CRITIC, IS AUTHOR OF “THE HOLLYWOOD HALLUCINATION,” “MAGIC AND MYTH OF THE MOVIES,” AND “CHAPLIN.” FOR MANY YEARS HIS PROSE AND VERSE HAVE APPEARED IN LEADING AMERICAN LITERARY MAGAZINES AND REPRESENTED IN ANTHOLOGIES SUCH AS “SPEARHEAD, >: “THE: KENYONCRITICS,” “FRE ART AT MID-CENTURY.” or photography something independent to painting. It is true that we can conceive “telegraphic” literature and “photographic” painting: literally translated Oriental ideograms are a virtual telegraphese. But literature and painting respectively absorbed the technical innovations of the ideogrammic phrase and the instantaneously reproduced optical register of the photograph. When we deal with the film as such, we can see that from the start it has partially constituted a simple pictorial documentarism, a kinetic visual journalism and a kinetic visual science. But in this regard, journalism and education have simply absorbed new techniques of expression, new channels of communication; no new dimension has sensibly been added thereby to a visual art. It remained for the aesthetic instinct animating all the arts to make the ultimate filmic contribution. The one striking thing about the Experimental Film is that its practitioners, if gifted and sincere, automatically acquire a unique aura. This aura is nothing but the independent art of the film. Let us concede without quibble that some Experimentalists are naively misled, that some are even a bit opportunistic. It is so human and “traditional” to be opportunistic! Many film-makers, with a right intuition of the art whose essence is the replacement of words with vision, go astray or remain insignificant because, though their chosen path is a true one, they have more optimism than talent, more unsatisfied vanity than sturdy ambition. But there are those who fall by the wayside in every art—even, and especially, in the most popular, the most commercial, forms of an art. There is such a thing, however, as stick-toitiveness, a first cousin to intuitiveness, and one will find that a young film-maker, once articulate as “having something to say,” usually says it again, and more com. plexly, perhaps says it better .. . The first virtue of Film Experimentalists is the state known as radical, which only means, aesthetically speaking, being near the root of the matter, being close enough to understand and maneuver the root of the matter. In the very simplest sense, after certain technical rules of mechanics are grasped, all the Film Experimentalist does is translate his feelings into images as though words did not exist. This is what he must want to do, must aim at doing, must set up as an ideal. Here the procedural question of the film script necessarily arises. There may be a shooting-script — even a shooting-script with poetic qualities such as Eisenstein wrote—but unless its words can be successfully translated into optical terms, it had better not exist at all. The misfortune that befell the commercial film was, of course, the sound that became speech, actual words. It was a misfortune, however, only because the huge potentialities of the film as a visual medium had not been adequately—one should say radically—achieved before sound came and all too quickly triumphed. The history of the film art is a history of the corruption of an infant art before it had a chance to grow up; the stage play and the novel, the very media which intellectually and emotionally helped the movies develop beyond their primitive fairy-tale and vaudeville routines, also injected them with a virus of premature growth similar to the artificial intoxication of Easter plants, which must be sold at once, before their glory perishes through the same intoxication that suddenly vitalized them. For prestige, the early movies moved the Heaven of the stage play and the Earth of all literature. Commer 5