Film Culture (February 1958)

a Poet. But beyond even that, the cinematic faculty as such is capable, as many more or less primitive experiments have shown, of producing the textures and the “significant” or irregular forms of modern painting itself; su far as they go, Norman McLaren’s color abstractions set to music are ideal illustrations of what I mean, while Sidney Peterson’s Lead Shoes has the best anamorphic photography I know. Thus, by being “radical,” capable of sympathy with the newest styles of visual art, the movies possess, in the work of the Experimentalists, the one youthful factor that is not a symptom of arrested development, but rather one of much promise of fulfillment as an adult art. Among real dangers to the Experimentalists’ fire of youthful enthusiasm must be listed the temptation for facile emulation of the forms and textures of modern painting, as though the film were mainly Abstract Art operating in the domain of movement. Here the very mid-century crisis of the visual arts comes into focus. What is the aesthetic future of the human image and of that surface representation of nature which the photograph seems so eminently adapted to register? The link between the film and a “distortional” style such as Expressionism is plain enough and demonstrably evident: camera angle, exaggerated close-up, melted film, makeup, and décor are elements already used many times to the end of “Expressionistic” film. But if Expressionism is currently on the rise in painters’ studios, it is so chiefly as the sheltered ally of all-powerful Abstractionism. At the same time, the very retrenchment of Abstractionism within Expressionistic, or what may be termed emotive, forms is most suggestive. Art must ever return, so long as humanity remains human, to the emotional gesture, to the human image itself though it be reduced to hieroglyphics: to that “man” we see made of crossbars and circles in animated cartoons. It seems not only the duty but the destiny of the Experimental or Avantgarde Film to use both surface nature and the literal human image as a vehicle of visual creation that eventually will reconstitute the lost supremacy of the hero of the nineteenth century. This will not mean a revival of the nineteenth century as such, but a mere reallocation of that cultural rhythm which has always taken place and which will take place so long as human civilization survives: a reappraisal of all tradition, including the modern, and a new criticism of the abstract style. Here is the value of the Experimentalist strategy: to be near the root of visual style itself; to sense in the infinite possibility of distortion a purely expressive means; to regard, in brief, the image-distortion of a Caligari and the visual-angle displacement of a Joan of Arc (Dreyer) as a mere “grammar” of those formal inventions discussed in the books of great practicing craftsmen such as Eisenstein and Pudovkin. Acquaintance with poetry and ritual has been encouraged in Experimentalism by such pioneering films as Blood of a Poet, Andalusian Dog, L’Age d’Or and the American Lot in Sodom. Many valuable lessons have thus been learned even in the partial successes of young Film Experimentalists. Alliance with the art of dance has been as important as with that of painting, for in dance, poetry and ritual contribute most of the styleatmosphere . . . the formal, symbolic gesture, the image charged with complex relations so as to be a kind of liying metaphor; such are the nude, basic implements in poetic film as well as in dance. The novel, despite James 8 Joyce and the Surrealist movement, is still too realistic, having fallen back badly into stale nineteenth-century habits. This is part of the reason, doubtless, for the triumphant mediocrity of Hollywood and its international colleagues. “Fabulous” patterns of human behavior, of course, continue to inhere in the novel, and some contemporary young novelists have become aware of this even apart from the special influence of Kafka’s novels. Disguised fables such as The Bicycle Thief by De SicaZavattini and La Strada and Cabiria by Fellini have appeared in healthy distinction to the self-conscious “‘fabulizing” of Cocteau, which (as in The Eagle with Two Heads) slipped into a decadent romanticism unjustified by preciousness of taste. Very young Experimentalists, just arrived on the film scene, are aware of the fact that in the simplest forms of human behavior, such as the deathless theme of adolescent sex and its pristine discoveries, lie hidden some of the most indispensably meaningful patterns of legend, ritual, and myth. Films by Experimentalists Sidney Peterson, Willard Maas, Stan Brakhage, Maya Deren, Curtis Harrington, and Kenneth Anger, though a significant style is attained in only a minority of their films, illustrate the profound situation of human emotion in the Initiation Rite, which is a lost tradition of fable except in poetry and dance which themselves may tend to disguise its presence. Actually, the chief problem of Film Experimentalism is to find in ordinary behavior, where pure instinct is given the widest range and achieves the deepest sense of freedom, those prime sources of ritual and myth where humanity refreshes and revitalizes itself as in a mystic bath. The very fact that the Experimental Film uses, to begin with, the literal optical register, renders its most fertile opportunity to create extraordinary visions. To see the simple, the everyday, to see men and women as they are in mirrors, but illumined with inspiration, becoming rhythmic, behaving as if they were in dreamland rather than in the conscious, walking world ... and to create the most startling transformations in things, and in time, as though such processes were “the order of the day” . this “magic” is the kindergarten-stuff of Film Experimentalism. For all this to comprise more than a talented exercise, a stimulating blackboard lesson, film workers have to try very hard and must possess, to begin with, an innate gift for inventing with images and controlling the space in which images move of themselves and are moved by the camera; beyond this, in order to get something on film that is distinguished and memorable, filmmakers must have something of their own to say: a personal message as well as poetic inspiration. Naturally, a good deal depends on the amplitude of the mere mechanical means, the availability of technical equipment, which in monetary terms is extremely expensive and, even with the most discreet and canny usage, tends by its nature to be wasteful. This aspect of the problem is, to some extent, the responsibility of the Powers That Be and the well-wishing public of the Experimental Film. In all discouraging fact, there are far too few provisions in the charters of institutions of public benefaction covering film work, and when these do exist, they cover uncreative rather than creative work in the filmic medium. The bright solution of the Film Experimentalist’s problems, therefore, depends mostly on his own immediate skill and energy in demonstrating. with the limited means at his disposal, the inherent virtues of filmic creation.