Morgan Fisher: Film on Film

Abstract

We sometimes forget that film history is not simply a subject or a series of cultural facts to be written about. Film history is itself an ongoing discourse, within which, generally speaking, the history of independent/avant-garde film has functioned as a set of propositions about mainstream commercial cinema. Nowhere is this critical function of independent/avant-garde film more apparent than in the work of Morgan Fisher. Fisher began making films during a particularly energetic historical moment. As a result of yeoman exhibition and distribution work by Amos Vogel at Cinema 16 and by Jonas Mekas and the New American Cinema group (and of course many others), the late sixties witnessed a considerable growth in awareness of that generation of filmmakers who had begun making films during and soon after World War II (for example, Deren, Anger, Peterson, Belson, the Whitney Brothers, and Brakhage) and an explosion of new cinematic forms-diary film, structural film, trash narrative, and others. These new forms were inspired in part by earlier filmmakers, and in part by current developments in painting, sculpture, and music. In general, the resulting films were dedicated to the demonstration and articulation of alternatives to mainstream mass-commercial filmmaking. Fisher's films do not neatly fit into any of the usual avant-garde categories-although at first glance they can look like particularly understated examples of structural film. Instead of simply avoiding commercial approaches, as many avant-garde filmmakers were doing, Fisher used avant-garde procedures as a way of engaging mainstream film. By combining elements of the conventional cinema (learned from his considerable experience working in the industry as a technician, as well as from his experiences as a movie-goer) and elements of independent/ avant-garde cinema, Fisher has produced a series of terse cinematic polemics that subtly and inventively discourse both film historical areas, confronting our expectations and our ways of thinking about cinema. Fisher is primarily a conceptual filmmaker: the simple straightforward elegance of his films is not an end in itself; it is (as I hope to demonstrate through a descriptive analysis of the films) a means of generating new forms of film thought. In 1968, Fisher completed four films that revealed tendencies all his subsequent films would explore. Even the title of the first of these, The Director and His Actor Look at Footage Showing Preparations for an Unmade Film (2), suggests Fisher's tendency to deal with industry filmmaking and independent filmmaking as interlocking practices. (As the (2) suggests, an earlier version