Jonathan, thanks a lot for posting this, but the article I remember was
earlier, and even worse. It described the films of filmmakers who had
just gotten a Ford Foundation grant in outrageous, and outraged, terms.
I couldn't find it on Time's own site, though I didn't try that hard.
Maybe I dreamt it all up! I remember in particular early Bruce Conner
films described as if they were almost porn.
Fred Camper
Chicago
On 5/31/2014 3:20 PM, Jonathan Walley wrote:
After reading Fred's post I ran (well, typed) straight to the online
database Academic Search Complete to read the Time article. Here it
is, for anyone interested. It is indeed bad (my favorite description
is of Brakhage as a "husky hypochondriac"), but it's about what you'd
expect from a magazine that ran an article called "The Bosom
Rediscovered" in the same issue...
"The Art of Light and Lunacy: The New Underground Films" (Time
Magazine, Feb. 1967)
Sunset. A blue Buddha dissolves into a large grey Teddy bear that
weeps tears the size of a quarter. A little girl stabs a pig. A little
boy urinates. Sixty white gloves run run run across a table. Bits of
broken plaster abruptly assemble themselves into a bust of Dante. An
egg cracks and marbles tumble out. A python oozes lazily around a
large transparent bowl in which a child is huddled. Beside a giant
telescope stands an old man, his ears blazing like light bulbs. On a
narrow cot, a nude woman sits giggling and jiggling while an enormous,
sinister horseshoe crab . . .
Most people would call it a nightmare. Lloyd Williams, the 26-year-old
New Yorker who created this sequence of images, calls it a work of
art. The startling thing is that a great many Americans now agree with
him. After five years of lurid reports about an "underground cinema,"
U.S. moviegoers have caught the show. For the first *time*, a large
audience has tuned in on experimental film and is beginning to believe
what a far-out few have been saying for years: the movies are entering
an era of innovation that attempts to change the language of film and
reeducate the human eye.
Image & Movement. The Marat of the revolution is Moviemaker (The Brig)
and Movie Critic (Village Voice) Jonas Mekas, 44, a shy man with long
greasy hair who looks like a slightly soiled Elijah. In print and in
person, Mekas passionately proclaims the death of the film as an
industry and the birth of the film as an art. "The new cinema is
passion," he says, "the passion of the free creative act." The old
cinema, as Mekas sees it, was esthetically no more than an extension
of the theater. The new cinema, though it will also tell stories, will
be essentially a cinema of image and movement composed by film poets.
"The new cinema is an art of light," says Mekas grandly, "and it is
bursting on the world like a new dawn."
At first blush, it seemed a dirty-fingered dawn. Two months ago, Mekas
and some film-making friends leased an art house in midtown Manhattan
to present The Chelsea Girls (*Time*, Dec. 30), a 3½-hour experimental
peekture by Pop Painter Andy Warhol. Exclusively, explicitly and
exhaustively, the film depicts homosexuality, Lesbianism, and
drug-taking, and a majority of the critics (most of them over 40)
found it dirty, dull and on-and-onanistic. But moviegoers (most of
them under 30 and simply prurient) stood in long lines to buy the
scene. All over the U.S., distributors suddenly sat up and begged for
prints. In the next six months, The Chelsea Girls will be shown in at
least 100 theaters—in addition to numerous college film societies. It
figures to gross at least $1,000,000.
With that one blow the barricades fell, and the avant-garde came
storming through. Robert Downey's Chafed Elbows, the shaggy-surreal
saga of a Village idiot who hopes to get rich quick by persuading
female midgets to use contact lenses as contraceptives, opened in a
Lower East Side cin bin that was soon crammed by the cab trade from
uptown. And Shirley Clarke's Jason, a harrowing 120-minute interview
with a black male prostitute, was offered a midtown opening as a
hard-eyed cautionary tale and a surefire succes de scandale.
Creating with Clorox. To most moviegoers, these films will look like
nothing they have ever seen before, even though avant-garde cinema has
been around for a long *time*—at least since the early '20s, when Luis
Bunuel and Man Ray began making surrealistic movies in Paris. But a
substantial movement became possible only in the late '50s, when
motion-picture technology took an exciting new turn. Film increased in
sensitivity; cameras, lights, recording equipment diminished in size,
weight and cost. Suddenly, almost anybody could make movies, and make
them almost anywhere for almost nothing. Hundreds of young men and
women began to make them.
Most of the new moviemakers agree that what matters is not the story a
film tells but the images it throws on the screen. To vary and to
vitalize their images, they do just about everything but what George
Eastman had in mind. They tilt the camera, turn it upside down, jiggle
it, wave it around, run it in slow motion, run it in fast motion, run
it backwards, run it out of focus, intercut images so fast that the
mind cannot register what the eye perceives.
They paint the film, scratch it with knives, bleach it with Clorox,
bake it in an oven, grow mold all over it. They overexpose it,
underexpose it, triple-expose it, superimpose three film tracks on a
fourth, mix black and white, sepia and full color in the same shot.
They split the screen into a dozen segments. They use a dozen
projectors and a dozen sound tracks simultaneously.
Such kooky methods have produced some kooky movies. Los Angeles' Tom
Anderson made a six-minute film in which the camera does nothing but
stare at a melting sundae. New York's Stan VanDerBeek made a
five-minute animation (Blacks and Whites, Days and Nights) that does
nothing but illustrate dirty limericks. New York's Tony Conrad made a
30-minute movie that presents to the eye nothing but bright blank
frames interspersed with solid-black frames that more and more
frequently recur and recur until the spectator is confronted by an
incessant and infuriating flicker that can drive him out of the
theater with a splitting headache.
Through a Proctoscope. Other films offer other reasons for discreet
retreat —and for police censorship, although in most parts of the U.S.
the censors are in retreat too. The nude human figure, male or female,
is a favorite subject of study for the new moviemakers. They look at
it frequently, and sometimes with good artistic reason—as in
Relativity, where Film Maker Ed Emshwiller implies the primordial
relation of man to woman by superimposing a tiny photograph of his
hero on the belly of a huge nude. Too often, though, they simply look
at it and drool. Jack Smith's four-year-old Flaming Creatures, an
incredibly tedious parody of a sexploitation picture, demonstrates how
easy it is to fall asleep in the steamy midst of an hour-long
transvestite orgy. Barbara Rubin's Christmas on Earth, in which an
even steamier orgy is photographed, pretends to consider sex as a
cosmic metaphor and looks as if it had been shot through a proctoscope.
Most of the new film makers are as far out as their films. Many of
them are poets and painters who belong to the New Bohemia and can be
found on Manhattan's Lower East Side or in San Francisco's North
Beach. They are apt to wear hair to the shoulders and beards to the
ears; some smoke grass and turn on frequently with LSD. A few can
count on a small, steady income from film rentals. But most under
ground moviemakers, though their movies as a rule cost less than $500,
feel lucky if they break even.
Inevitably, the kooks and the kinks have given the new cinema a bad
press. At the center of the movement, however, stands a creative
cluster of imaginative moviemakers. Among them:
Robert Nelson, 36, a 6-ft. 3-in. San Franciscan, is a black-and-blue
humorist who made one of the comic classics of the experimental
cinema. Oh, Dem Watermelons is a daffy documentary about all the
horrible things that can happen to watermelons. They get kicked like
footballs, gutted like chickens, smashed on sidewalks, slashed with
ice skates, riddled by bullets, split open and rubbed over the bodies
of beautiful women. The monstrous irrelevance of it all is
fracturingly funny—until suddenly the spectator realizes that the
watermelon is meant to symbolize the Negro.
Marie Menken, 57, wife of Willard Maas, an avant-garde bard who made
some well-known experimental movies in the '40s, is possibly the
finest film poet the underground has produced. She has a subtle feel
for rhythms, a grand flair for colors and a gay wild way with a camera
that leaves the eye spinning. In Lights, a 5½-minute study of
Manhattan after dark, she slashes at her subject with a camera as an
action painter slashes at his canvas, and the great stone city breaks
up into a wriggling calligraphy of flash and filigree.
Kenneth Anger, 34, is the wild man of the movement and one of its most
creative craftsmen. A fanatical occultist, he practices the blood
rites of devil worship and has splashed the walls of his San Francisco
pad with a Nazi banner and words written in blood. Anger's notorious
Scorpio Rising is a jaggedly cubistic piece of black cinema that
examines the big strong she-men who gun along with the cycle cult. The
movie concludes with a satanic black-jacketed bacchanal that looks
like the last stages of an amphetamine nightmare.
Ron Rice, a hard-living New Yorker who died in 1964 at the age of 29
while shooting a film in Mexico, made the most affecting movie that
the new cinema has turned out to date: The Flower Thief. Certainly a
vagrant, possibly an imbecile, the film's hero wanders the streets of
San Francisco by day, a grown man pulling a little wagon that carries
his Teddy bear. At night he goes back to the abandoned factory where a
gang of derelicts chases him through the cellars with a terrible
silent intensity. As interpreted with a marvelous simplicity by Taylor
Mead, a Beat poet, the hero is part Chaplin and part Myshkin —a holy
idiot, unaccommodated man.
Stan Brakhage, 37, a husky hypochondriac who lives with his wife and
five children in a log cabin in Colorado, has radically rewritten
movie grammar. By fragmenting his films into frames, Brakhage has
established the frame in cinema as equivalent to the note in music;
whereupon he proceeds to make films with frames the way a composer
makes music with notes. His Art of Vision, an attempt to do for cinema
what Bach did for music with his Art of the Fugue, is an ambitious
example of what Brakhage calls retinal music. One problem: to watch
the violently flickering flick for 4½ hours, a spectator would require
steel eyeballs.
Salvation in a Sugar Cube. The front ranks of the avant-garde are
rapidly expanding. Stan VanDerBeek, Gregory vlarkopoulos, Bruce
Conner, Robert Breer, Ed Emshwiller and Harry Smith have all done work
of a high order. An even newer and no less gifted generation of
moviemakers—Ben Van Meter, Ken Jacobs, Bruce Baillie—is rising with a
whir. Romantic, rebellious and vaguely worried, the new boys come on
like strangers in a world they never scripted. Some of them celebrate
the horrors of modern life. They exhibit America as an air-conditioned
cemetery for the walking dead, the war in Viet Nam as pure hell, and
L.BJ. as a rather silly devil with his tail in hot water.
Some of them, attempting to find salvation in a sugar cube, make
something called "psychedelic cinema." Their intention is to reproduce
on the screen what they see while they are in the acid bag. Even
farther out is something called "expanded cinema" or "mixed-media
environments," a sort of avant-garde circus in which movies, theater,
recorded music, kinetic sculpture and light paintings are fused into a
single engulfing experience.
Like all other experimental art, the no-longer-underground cinema is
sometimes silly or pointlessly shocking. And sooner or later, the
experimenters will have to address themselves to what remains the
movies' main function—intelligible storytelling. But with all its
excesses, the new cinema is bound to stimulate the medium. For one
thing, it has already produced a modest but substantial body of
exciting work. For another, it serves as a salon des refusés for
aspects of the art rejected by the commercial cinema. Even though many
Hollywood directors write off the experimenters as no-talent amateurs,
some of their notions are already being absorbed into the visual
vocabulary of the media. The men who make television commercials, for
instance, regularly rent big batches of avant-garde films and ransack
them for ideas.
Can the practitioners of the new cinema seriously expect to keep the
underground overground? Jonas Mekas is certain that the answer is yes.
He has organized a Film-Makers Cooperative to rent experimental films;
he has 600 films in his catalogue and a growing list of theaters all
across the U.S. lined up to exhibit them. "You might say," Mekas
murmurs with a sly little grin, "that the lunatics are taking over the
asylum." Nothing necessarily wrong with that. Every so often an art
needs to go a little crazy.
Dr. Jonathan Walley
Associate Professor
Department of Cinema
Denison University
[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>
On May 31, 2014, at 3:37 PM, Fred Camper wrote:
I agree with Chuck's comments. Given how bad mainstream media can be,
this "report" is really quite good, considering that it was meant for
an evening-news mass audience. Of course nothing profound is said,
and Warhol could easily seem like a fool to those who don't take
seriously John Cage's "I have nothing to say, and I'm saying it," but
as an intro it doesn't stumble too badly, and lets people know that
something or other is happening. They showed the Brakhage likely
knowing it would seem weird, but I give them credit for the showing,
and for respecting the film's silence, and for not taking a
condescending "this is weird" attitude. Plus, I always did find
Heliczer's "Dirt" to be "confusing."
Something from the same decade that will appeal to anyon elooking for
evidence of mainstream media's horribleness is the Time Magazine
feature on "underground" film, in I believe 1964, after the Ford
Foundation gave a number of $10,000 grants (maybe around $60,000 in
today's dollars) to some of the major figures. Time, to its eternal
disgrace, got a lot of attention by sensationalizing the film
descriptions, making the work seem like sleazy porn, hence dissuading
the Ford Foundation from continuing.
Fred Camper
Chicago
On 5/30/2014 6:08 PM, Jeff Kreines wrote:
Thanks to Saul Levine for finding this.
Wow! Brakhage, Mekas, Warhol, Sedgwick, and the Velvets (without
sound), and more -- along with a little bloviating from Willard Van
Dyke.
The Making of an Underground Film from CBS Evening News with Walter
CronkiteThe Making of an Underground Film from CBS Evening News with
Walter Cronkite, broadcasted on 31st December 1965. Featuring Jonas
Mekas, Piero Heliczer with V...
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DS7knWefSiQ>
Jeff Kreines
Kinetta
[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>
kinetta.com <http://kinetta.com>
kinettaarchival.com <http://kinettaarchival.com>
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