MAKING LIGHT OF IT

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(Sally Berg)

(Bill Nichols)

(Scott MacDonald)

(Alfred Guzzetti)

(James Benning)

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(From a 1972 screening/Q&A at the Millenium Film Workshop)

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(From The Films of Stan Brakhage in the American Tradition... by Bruce Elder)

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(From A Crucible of Document by Marie Nesthus)

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(From the No. 56/57 Spring 1973 issue of Film Culture)

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MacDonald: I saw The Act of Seeing at an early screening, in Binghamton in 1972, and it was a transformative experience for me. You were not there. I was furious after the film and wanted to stand up and scream at the programmers for showing it—but within a few weeks, I was already thinking how it would be exciting and valuable to show the film to my students and to the public audience I was programming for. Am I right that The Act of Seeing has become one of the more popular of your films?
 

Brakhage: Yes. Also, of all the films I've made—and let me preface this by saying that I have always wished that I was not who I am, but the Hans Christian Andersen of film: I would easily give up everything to have been a great children's storyteller (of course, Andersen wanted to be Charles Dickens, so there we go: no one ever gets to be exactly what he wants to be)—this film was the film that our children always asked to see, and that they wanted to bring their friends in to see (I'd have to get permission of the parents, some of whom wouldn't give it). My children have always wanted to see this film, above everything else of my making, and see it over and over.

Children are always trying to figure out how bad things can get, and they love gruesome tales. And there is a fairy-tale quality to that film in a way. To all three of the Pittsburgh films.
 

MacDonald: When I was a kid and encyclopedia salesmen came by, the section of the body were imaged on clear sheets of plastic; you could "enter" the body: skin, the muscles, nerves, organs, bones. So their reaction makes sense to me.
 

Brakhage: The children also accepted the form of the film in a way that some adults haven't been able to. It's a very dark vision and gets darker and darker as it moves along.
 

MacDonald: Though near the end you seem to have a kind of epiphany and become almost a child yourself in the excitement of exploring what seem to me to be landscapes. The camera becomes a plane swooping through these strange formations.
 

Brakhage: Oh, I'm glad for that. To me one thing that saves the film is this little tiny bit of reflected sky that's caught in a little puddle of liquid in the armpit of a corpse—a little blue ephemeral thing that can stand for all of Spirit, which otherwise would be missing.

Also, I think it's funny that at the end a little man in a little bow tie is seen reciting all this horror into a tape recorder. He turns it off, and the film is over. The Act of Seeing is full of jokes like that—it's black humor to be sure, but humor. The fly crawling on a toe. Or the zipping up of the body bag soon after a knife comes down and "unzips" a whole torso. Those moments are there to lighten the load of watching.

(From a Critical Cinema 4 by Scott MacDonald)

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(Essential Cinema committee)

Earlier this week Mike Everleth over at Bad Lit, a site that should undoubtedly be near the top of your bookmark list, transposed The Essential Cinema repertory list, along with some of the history behind its conception.  To this day the list itself can serve as a very positive tool for those looking for valuable insight into some of the aims associated with key members of the movement at that time.  While the road to making the list seemed by all accounts predominantly paved with good intentions, there is no doubt that this effort rubbed some the wrong way.  In fact Scott MacDonald, a key scholar of the avant-garde, named his essential series A Critical Cinema in outright opposition to the committee’s repertory label of The Essential Cinema.  In a Critical Cinema 4 he muses:

"In The Essential Cinema there is a photograph of the Anthology Film Archives selection committee (Ken Kelman, James Broughton, Sitney, Mekas, and Kubelka), the group that had selected 'the Essential Cinema'-the 'nuclear collection of the monuments of cinematic art,' to use Sitney’s phrase-that would become the repertory of Anthology Film Archives.  Stephen Shore’s photograph of the committee, it seemed to me then, perfectly captured the dimension of Sitney that I was rebelling against.  There is something rather forbidding about the photograph, something arrogant, even hostile; and, in the 1970s, when so many of us were coming to grips with issues of gender and sexuality, and confronting whatever dimensions of patriarchy had infected us, this photograph seemed particularly reactionary…Of course, the committee’s presumption in selecting the ‘monuments of cinematic art’ seemed utterly typical of patriarchs everywhere."

Another key figure who had struggled with selection process was Stan Brakhage, who had written a mere two years earlier a fiery letter to Jonas Mekas concerning his withdrawal from the Filmmaker’s Co-op (which is an issue worthy of examination all unto itself).  In the following letter to P. Adams Sitney, Brakhage, among other things, highlights some his concerns surrounding the task proposed by the committee.

As I was randomly perusing through books that I have previously read earlier today, I landed on an introductory message by Amos Vogel that was originally written for the German re-release of his Film As a Subversive Art and was included at the end of Scott MacDonald’s Cinema 16: Documents Towards the History of the Film Society.  Considering the announcement of certain dubious awards made this morning (yeah, you know the ones), and the recent end of a certain dubious festival a few days ago (yeah, you know the one), I felt it was very much in line with some of the things running through my head lately and are worth sharing here. Of course as I hope is obvious, I don’t mean to trivialize certain aspects of the piece (particularly those directed specifically at the German readership and Vogel’s heritage) by suggesting all of the expressed sentiments have been familiar to me, but rather out of respect for the author I’m including the article it in its entirety:

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“Though my book was written in English, my native language is German.  It therefore gives me much pleasure to note that the first republication of the book occurs in the German language.

It is an additional source of pleasure for me—this time, a perverse one—that it occurs in Austria, the country which, under Hitler, almost succeeded in killing me.  Obviously a new wind is blowing in my native country, though its purity is somewhat impaired by odors wafting from the direction of Jorg Haider, the hope of the New Austrian Right.

But I, in my new country, should not complain too much about others; we have our own noxious right-wing and its power, too, is growing.

In fact, contemporary America—a late capitalist colossus, owned by large corporations while parading as a democracy and dominated by rabid commercialism and consumerism—is now attempting to dominate the world via trans-nationals, Hollywood cinema and television, the export of American cultural ‘values,’ the Disneyfication of the globe.  It’s not the dinosaurs and extra-terrestrials that the rest of the world ought to be afraid of; it is the commodification of all spheres of human existence, the seemingly unstoppable commercialization of human life and society, the growing international blight of the theme parks, the all-pervasive malling of the world.  Our fate seems to be the homogenization of culture—an universal leveling down, an anesthetizing, pernicious blandness.

The space in which this infantilization of the human race is most clearly revealed in the monstrous structures of American television; for the first time in history, the most powerful mass medium of a society is totally controlled and dominated by advertisers and the marked, totally driven by commercial imperatives, saturated by ubiquitous commercials that deliver audiences to advertisers (not programs to audiences); and an ever larger spectrum t of channels delivering primarily garbage 365 days a year.  Thus has the marvelous potential of this medium been betrayed.

And the American cinema—today the most powerful in the world—is not far behind in its successful stultification of audiences.  We are inundated by meretricious stories, a failure to explore the marvelous aesthetic potential of this medium, a pandering to the lowest common denominator, a truly horrifying concentration on the most cruel violence, a smirking perversion of sex hobbled by hoary prohibitions.  This is topped by an obscene (profit-driven) blockbuster obsession leading to more and more films in the 100 million dollar range.

For those who still have resources of personal identity—an increasingly difficult and perilous endeavor—there exists no more important obligation than to attempt to counteract these tendencies.  Otherwise, future generations may accuse us of having been “good Germans” all over again; cooperating with evil not by our deeds but by our silence.  Silence, under such circumstances, is complicity.

There were moments in our blood-drenched century, when there seemed to be hope; the equalitarian impulses behind the 1917 Russian revolution (perverted within ten years); the Kibbutz movement’s attempts in Israel to establish socialist communes (today they exploit Arab/Third World labor); the promise of the 1960s (eventuating in the current world situation).  As we approach the Millennium, these humanist impulses are now behind us.

And yet, everything in past human history teaches that these attempts to transform us into humans will inevitably continue.  In terms of cinema, this explains the very large importance of independent showcases and independent festivals; it explains the ‘exceptions’ (from the Hollywood drivel); both those that constitute the content of my book as well as, even more importantly, those that continue to be made today.  Not those fake ‘independent films’ whose makers only aspire to become the next Hollywood stars—but those true iconoclasts and independents—feature, avant-garde or documentary filmmakers—who even under today’s bleak circumstances audaciously continue to ‘transgress’ (i.e. subvert) narrative modes, themes, structures, and the visual/aural conventions of mainstream cinema.

What a pleasure, then, for a man of cinema, to help discover and support these ‘exceptions’.  Though I am 76, my search continues unabated; I attend film festivals, museum series, the special showcases, serve on juries and selection committees, write articles and reviews, inform potential distributors and exhibitors and compose supporting letters to foundations and governmental institutions for grants and subsidies.

Momentous changes have occurred since the original edition of this book, among them the disappearance of the USSR and the GDR, the dissolution of Yugoslavia, the triumph, globally, of American commercial cinema and television.  Yet I find no reason to modify or change any of the basic theses or structures put forth in the original.

For me, the most important conclusion I came to then remains as true today.  Realizing its significance, I had stealthily placed it at the very end of my book, neither highlighting nor situating it in a separate paragraph, thus making sure that the real message of the work would be appreciated fully only by those who had kept reading to the very end.  There is therefore no better way for me to conclude this forward than by once again not drawing my new readers; attention to it [See ‘The Eternal Subversion’ pp. 437-39].”

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I think Vogel’s seminal book need no real introduction from me, other than to reiterate that despite sporadically drifting a little too heavily into the sort of “side-show” aesthetic occasionally leveled at his programming style, it is an extremely enjoyable, insightful and often amusing read, and a great chance to get a peek into the mind of an individual whose determined efforts had influence far and wide.  

MacDonald’s book, along with his two other works of a like-minded nature, Art in Cinema and Canyon Cinema: The Life and Times of An Independent Film Distributor, offer readers a chance to examine first-hand the rise of seminal alternative film society movements on both coasts through letters and interviews with various key members, as well as assorted programs notes and listings.  They are invaluable resources for those looking to get a grasp (however unavoidably limited) of some of the historical developments in and around the field in the U.S., as well as serving as a considerable source of inspiration for those of us with similar, though perhaps a little less lofty, hopes and dreams.   

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