Film Culture (Spring 1964)

PROJECTION OF THOUGHTS Gregory Markopoulos In preparing this article I abandon the commercial film critics, the critics who make their living writing for the general public. I abandon the Hollywood producers, who seek fantastic financial returns from their films. I abandon the so-called independent films and their contrivers who imitate Hollywood from afar; those independent films that contain formulas which are inferior to the Hollywood formulas for making money. I abandon the foundations which hate the medium of motion pictures, and I particularly applaud the decision of the Ford Foundation in their recent rejection of the film-makers; for in so doing they have unconsciously bestowed upon the film-makers a greater courage and determination to create their films than any $10,000 grant would ever have attained for them. Too, I abandon and condemn the public institutions, schools and colleges who in the face of being plagued by the double mirage of (a) the Little Theatre Movement, (b) a total disinterest in the medium of motion pictures as an art, (c) instructors who are would-be film-makers and not teachers of the motion picture medium, in wasting their students’ time, monies, and energies with false film programs. And thus, my beam of inspiration coupled to Light, Color, and the Sound of the Human Voice, is directed to a) film students, (b) the New Spectators of the New Cinema. Both these students and the New Spectators are at last focusing their attention upon what George Landow, film-maker, recently called, Awareness. For them the films of the New American Cinema become their immediate workshop; their advance seminar in motion picture appreciation and instruction. The ignorance that prevails among the American motion picture spectator drugged by the Hollywood product can be challenged through learning. But the spirit of the motion picture spectator must first have a need for such learning. It is a matter for the spirit of man. To quote Ibsen, “What is all important is the revolution of the spirit of man ..., and it is this with which I am concerned. The film-makers who have banded together under the auspices of the Film-Makers’ Cooperative have each and every one of them that divine fire and confidence which the ancient Greeks called thrasos. That is to say insolence. But insolence of a divine nature. For them cells, air bubbles, atoms, rays, film frames are the flame of their continued existence. Like the ancient priests of Egypt who sang hymns to their gods by uttering the seven vowels in succession, the sound of which, says Demetrius of Alexandria, produced on their hearers as strong a musical impression as the flute and lyre, just so, the filmmakers today are experimenting to a degree where their images, symbols, sounds are as if unknown. To the film spectator they seem strange. For instance, the slightest darkness of the screen for any length of time causes the film spectator to automatically turn and look up toward the projection booth to see what the difficulty may be. The film spectator arrives at the motion picture house with the attitude that he is going to see something difficult; something that he must try very hard to understand. Within this attitude the film spectator becomes lost. He makes no attempt whatsoever to understand the symbols he considers strange. So it is told by word of mouth, and through the written word of the unqualified critics of motion pictures, that the film-makers use obscure symbols, unusual sounds, incomprehensible images. Still these same individuals can read a literary passage from Gide’s “The Pastoral Symphony,” quote: “Imagine white as something absolutely pure, something in which color no longer exists, but only light; and black, on the contrary, something so full of color that it has become dark.” and say that they understand it. The word seen on the page and read is understood, but the image as word, or similarly seen on the screen is not understood. Here, something is wrong; and it is not the film-maker who is at fault regardless how poor his film may be. The trouble lies in the vision of the film spectator who through his limited sense and interpretation of his psychology of reality cannot see, still less understand what the film-maker is presenting or sending toward the beaded screen. The spectator does not see as well as he imagines. If in the other arts the symbols appear to be clear, their lucidity lies in the imagination of the observers. The symbols may not be clear; and, in truth they may not even be interpreted as their creators intended. That any symbol may appear to contain the truth of reality is chiefly due to the FILM CULTURE 3