Avant-garde Filmmaker Research Articles

Environmental Eros: the films of Barbara Hammer as “Creative Geographies”1

In her 1978 essay “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power,” Audre Lorde avers, “The erotic has often been misnamed by men and used against women. It has been made into the confused, the trivial, the psychotic, the plasticized sensation. For this reason, we have often turned away from the exploration and consideration of the erotic as a source of power and information” (1984, p. 54). Part of our maligning of the erotic, according to Lorde, is our separation of the spiritual from the erotic, a holdover of enlightenment thinking that insists on parsing apart that which is thought from that which is felt and sensed. This paper examines 1970s lesbian-feminist esthetics, specifically the works of American avant-garde filmmaker Barbara Hammer (1939–2019), to delineate an environmental eros, in which more-than-human nature is a source of erotic inspiration and interspecies connection. Just as Lorde theorizes the erotic as a “reminder of [one’s] capacity for feeling and joy” (1984, p. 56), environmental eros understands the erotic as expansively sensual and sensory instead of solely sexual. My close readings of Hammer’s films Dyketactics (1974), Women I Love (1976), and Multiple Orgasm (1976) challenge critiques of these materials as escapist relics of an essentializing past. Instead, I use feminist and film phenomenological theory to argue that the natural environment was an actor in radical re-imaginings of subjecthood and relationality that constitute an eco-erotic ethics with clear implications for contemporary environmental politics and ecological feminisms.

Magic in Art, Poetry, and Biography

Abstract The article analyzes four works of poetry and illustration produced by the artist, poet, and occultist Marjorie Cameron (1922–1995) in the 1950s and 1960s. Widow of rocket scientist and occultist John “Jack” Whiteside Parsons (1914–1952), an early follower of Aleister Crowley’s (1875–1947) religion Thelema, Cameron was also a friend and collaborator of Beat artist Wallace Berman (1926–1976) and avant-garde filmmaker Kenneth Anger (1927–2023). In the 1950s and 1960s, Cameron delved deeply into Crowley’s magical writings alongside those of comparative mythologist Joseph Campbell (1904–1987). The article especially highlights how Cameron creatively adapted and re-worked the ideas of both thinkers in her artistic interpretations of her Holy Guardian Angel. A core argument of the article is that art, poetry, and esotericism were intertwined pursuits for Cameron, and that extra-textual sources (e.g., letters and biographical details) contemporary with the analyzed creative works are helpful in untangling their meaning.

The ‘Translated’ Cityscape: A Study of Select Satyajit Ray Films

The present paper attempts to examine the ‘translated’ nature of the cityscapes in Satyajit Ray’s films. With a select reading of films like ‘Mahanagar’ (lit. The Big City, 1963) and ‘Pratidwandi’ (The Adversary also called Siddhartha and the City, 1970), I argue for the ways in which the city becomes a space of contestation, debate, negotiation and translation between clashing ideologies of the old and the new, the rural and the urban, the ancient and the modern. Ray’s films have been studied from several perspectives, in terms of thematic, stylistic and ideological development. However, it seems to me that the city and its ‘translational’ aspect have not received enough attention. The present paper proposes to understand the role the city plays in Ray’s cinema. As an avant garde film maker, Ray’s cinema is replete with moments of conflicting ideologies, transitions and crossovers. It seems to me that the city provides the base for several such negotiations and intersections in Ray. Using certain recent developments in Translation Studies, I propose to read episodes in select Ray films as indicative of a larger ideological and cultural shift necessitated and made possible by/in the new space of the city. As a translating and translated space, the city’s agency enables other changes and transformations which would not have been possible in the absence of this primary actor – the city. The present paper is an attempt to look at several such moments of intersections and translations that Ray’s films make available to us. 1 An earlier version of this article was presented at the17th International MELOW Conference on ‘Space, Place and Language in Literatures of the World’, Dharamshala, 9-11th, March, 2018. I am grateful to the questions and discussion from the audience and conference participants which helped me rethink some ideas presented here.

Changing Times

Changing Times

A Trip Down Market Street: A Century of ‘Eureka’ Moments

This article explores the production, repurposing, and reception of the Miles Brothers’ A Trip Down Market Street through five iterations: the original Market Street print, filmed four days before the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, avant-garde filmmaker Ernie Gehr’s 1974 Eureka, Darryl Palmer’s 1995 experimental essay about Eureka, film historian David Kiehn’s 2006 restored print, and Denis Shiryaev’s 2020 Youtube 4k version of A Trip Down Market Street. This study argues that the context of a print’s re-use and exhibition not only changes its meaning and evokes different responses, but also that the circulation of this text through the ‘popcycle’ – the ensemble of discourses that sustain institutions and construct identity – facilitates the process of cultural invention at key moments in history.

THE “WHITE DARKNESS”

Rather than considering the modernist aesthetic of primitivism as singular, this article contends that there are multiple and diverse primitivist projects. Each of these speaks to its historical context, and this article considers that of the Ukrainian-born, American avant-garde film-maker Maya Deren’s primitivist investments in Haiti through her published writing, diary entries and her film footage produced between 1948 and 1953. Deren’s work must be understood in relation to US imperialism and the occupation of Haiti (1915–34). It is also informed by her complex modernist aesthetics, Trotskyist politics and proximity to the New Negro movement through her association with choreographer and anthropologist Katherine Dunham. Despite a clearly articulated modernist vision for her film in Haiti, when confronted with the material reality of Haiti itself Deren abandoned her film in favour of a written “personal ethnography.” This article considers Deren’s refusal of film and the fracturing of her aesthetic gaze, framed as a refusal to manipulate reality, in the context of colonial ethnographic film. Finally, it considers the legacy of – and resistance to – Western imperialism and voyeurism informing Haitian artistic works today, as well as the policies of the Geto Byenal (Ghetto Biennale), held in Port-au-Prince from 2009 onwards.

Other Galaxies: The Temenos Beyond the Screen

Other Galaxies:The Temenos Beyond the Screen Rebekah Rutkoff (bio) Healing takes place in the impasse / the sickness passes1 —Eleni Stecopoulos In mid-March of this year, I met Eleni Stecopoulos, a San Francisco-based poet, for breakfast in Tribeca. We had met briefly, years ago, and discovered a shared interest in the crossroads of ancient Greek medicine and poetry. Our March meeting was again short—Eleni told me about her new book-in-progress, "Dreaming in the Fault Zone: A Poetics of Healing," and we anticipated speaking more in late June. We both planned to attend the Temenos, an event in the Peloponnese dedicated to the presentation of Gregory Markopoulos's site-specific film Eniaios (c. 1947–1991).2 The Temenos, like Eleni's book, is grounded in the poetics of healing: Markopoulos devoted much of his life to probing the curative possibilities of cinema. I recall placing a bottle of hand sanitizer between Eleni and me on the cafe table, but the pandemic was still about a week away from functioning as the determining fact and force of everything, a life-organizing principle. By late April, Robert Beavers—a filmmaker, Markopoulos's long-time partner, and the Temenos organizer—informed attendees that the event was cancelled. "When I glance at the names of our guests and think of the variety and vitality that you represent as a group, it is with much regret. On the other hand, the current uncertainty makes the organization of the screenings for an international public nearly impossible. The priority is for us to be well and plan for next year," he wrote. [End Page 158] Filmmaker-Physician Every four years since 2004, spectators have gathered in a field in the Peloponnese to watch newly restored portions of Eniaios—the silent 80-hour film Markopoulos had fully edited but not yet printed when he died in 1992. Eniaios—ancient Greek for "unity" and "uniqueness"—is his magnum opus, designed exclusively for this remote location near his ancestral village, Lyssaraia. Composed of re-edited footage from most of his previous films and material from dozens of new films (works he'd edited in the 1970s but never printed), Eniaios is meant to supersede them all as an integrated epic work. Markopoulos spent the last decade of his life editing the nonnarrative film, using shots of Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Markopoulos editing Eniaios c. 1989/1990. Photo by Robert Beavers. Courtesy Temenos Archive. [End Page 159] minuscule duration—many just one or a few frames in length, each separated from the next by lengths of black and clear leader. His method confounds conventions of filmic legibility and motion; Eniaios speaks in a dialect of rhythmic pulsation that is itself in dialogue with the shifting forms of a vast Arcadian sky. The unit of the single frame was the unplumbed essence of film for Markopoulos: "Who can dare to imagine what a single frame might contain? What future process could activate a single frame?"3 Born in Toledo, Ohio, to Greek parents in 1928, Markopoulos began to make ambitious narrative films in the late 1940s—psychosexual quests and romantic meditations sprung from ancient and poetic texts. He briefly studied film production at the University of Southern California (attending von Sternberg's lectures and watching Lang and Hitchcock on Hollywood sets), returned to Toledo, and traveled to Europe—all the while making films—before settling in New York in 1960 with an international reputation as an avant-garde filmmaker. He was a founding member of Jonas Mekas's New American Cinema Group and subsequent Film-Makers' Cooperative, a vivid voice via frequent essays in Film Culture and Film Comment, and a mentor to young filmmakers. But Markopoulos grew critical of the role of institutions and non-artists ("Art World Families," "the PhD set") in impinging on the truest interests of filmmakers and their films. He had met Beavers (b. 1949) in New York in 1965; in 1967, they left for Europe and spent the next decades there—until Markopoulos's death—as an itinerant, institution-shunning society-of-two. Markopoulos gradually removed his films from distribution, intent on controlling the conditions under...

Art and Engagement in Early Postwar Japan by Justin Jesty

Reviewed by: Art and Engagement in Early Postwar Japan by Justin Jesty Nick Kapur (bio) Art and Engagement in Early Postwar Japan. By Justin Jesty. Cornell University Press, Ithaca NY, 2018. xii, 326 pages. $49.95. Justin Jesty's Art and Engagement in Early Postwar Japan is a brilliant puzzle box of a book—at times vexing, but mostly delightful. Jesty's stated aim is to use avant-garde visual art in 1950s Japan to rediscover the highly contested nature of Japan's emerging political and social contracts in the "early postwar" period from 1945 to 1960. A second aim is to propound a new model for how art and politics interact, a model that "moves beyond the idea that the artwork or artist unilaterally authors political significance, to trace how creations and expressive acts may (or may not) actually engage the terms of shared meaning and value" (p. 256). Although he touches on many other artists along the way, Jesty builds the majority of his analysis around three case studies. First, he examines three socialist realist visual artists—Katsuragawa Hiroshi, Ikeda Tatsuo, and Nakamura Hiroshi—who worked within a new subgenre of "reportage" in the early 1950s; next, he discusses the ideology of the schoolteacher-led Sōzō Biiku Kyōkai (Society for Creative Aesthetic Education) as context for evaluating three films by avant-garde filmmaker Hani Susumu; finally, he considers the rise and fall of the Kyūshū-ha, a radically egalitarian regional art collective focused around the southern city of Fukuoka. In the works of these artists, Jesty argues, art was rendered political, and politics was made artful. On the delightful side, Jesty is a lyrical writer whose vibrant, seemingly effortless prose is a true joy to read. He fully invests his inexhaustible reserves of writerly panache in each and every analytical point. His observations are by turns serious, thoughtful, whimsical, and irreverent. By never allowing himself to be bored, the author keeps the reader interested and engaged as well. In particular, Jesty excels at persuasively excavating the mindsets of underappreciated artists working with limited resources at [End Page 230] a time when Japan's future role in the postwar world still seemed entirely uncertain and even the act of creating an artwork seemed invested with incredible power and even danger. It is at this register of recovering a certain early postwar frisson, even paranoia, that Jesty most brilliantly succeeds in undermining and destabilizing any remaining notion of 1950s Japan as a staid prelude to a supposedly inevitable political and social consolidation in the 1960s. In addition, the book is lavishly illustrated with numerous black-and-white images as well as 16 glorious, full-page, full-color plates of several of the most visually arresting artworks among those Jesty considers. The book is not without some slight vexations, however. First of all, it could have been organized more efficiently. In particular, many terms, events, and important figures are mentioned in passing dozens or even hundreds of pages before they are explained or introduced in enough detail to be legible to a nonspecialist. For instance, Jesty bafflingly notes that "one prominent theorist exemplified avant-garde vision with reference to William Tell" (p. 49), without naming the "theorist" in question or providing any citation, only to finally elaborate this point 44 pages later (p. 93). Similarly, he tantalizingly mentions the "ill-conceived armed struggle campaign" of the Japan Communist Party (JCP) (p. 57) and "the JCP's misadventures in the early 1950s" (p. 61) but does not provide a full explanation of what any of this refers to until page 82. Likewise, he repeatedly employs the terms "naturalist realism" and "avant-garde realism" as if these are widely understood terms beginning on page 72, only to reveal that they are his own coinages and explain what they mean on page 89 and after. The result is a kind of treasure hunt to find which unexplicated terms might be explained in fulsome detail at some unknown later point in the book. A similar issue arises with Jesty's artistic protagonists. Artists such as Katsuragawa Hiroshi and Ikeda Tatsuo are mentioned numerous times before we are officially "introduced" to them with...

Haptic Transgression. The Horror of Materiality in Kurt Kren’s Films

AbstractThe article investigates two seemingly conflicting critical approaches of haptic and transgressive cinema, which emerged along with the corporeal turn in film studies, in the late 1990s and early 2000s. While haptics operates with undistinguishable figures and demands extreme closeness and an active caressing gaze, transgression is usually seen from a distance and subverts the social, political and ethical order. The paper attempts an examination of the Austrian avant-garde filmmaker Kurt Kren’s Actionist films and enlightens how these two opposing strategies can be present together. Giving a detailed analysis of the films, the article describes an expanded definition of Linda Williams’s body genres, in order to create a new category of horror: the horror of materiality.

Editor's Introduction

It sounds like a setup, but it is adult film history: three women filmmakers meet in an adult novelty store in Coconut Grove, Florida. The year is 1994. One is Peggy Ahwesh, the New York–based avant-garde filmmaker. In works like Martina's Playhouse (1989), The Scary Movie (1993), and The Deadman (1989), her feminist, sexually provocative, Bataillean, punk-inflected cinema embraces bricolage, found footage, performance, and portraiture, often of women in states of abandon, refusal, and jouissance . With her is M. M. Serra, experimental filmmaker, curator, teacher, director of the Film-Makers' Cooperative, and advocate of and pedagogue on the cinematic possibilities of female sexuality. They are there to see the third: sexploitation auteur Doris Wishman, then a historical novelty for a coterie of cult video collectors. Wishman had been profiled in the RE/Search book Incredibly Strange Films (1986) and was one of few women working in the largely male-helmed cottage industry of New York–based sexploitation production in the 1960s.1 Beginning with a copious string of nudist-camp romance films in the early 1960s, Wishman steadily proceeded to make sex melodramas with the quotients of nudity that sexploitation's box-office formula required, yet infused them with her own preoccupations and sensibilities, delighting in the promise of a unique title, premise, or gimmick. Her films often featured women trapped in scenarios of maddeningly patriarchal design, taken to dysphoric, absurdist extremes. Swirling, spiraling camerawork; a copious array of women sporting black lace undergarments; cutaways to shoes, stockings, and marginal decorative objects; and loose post-synching produced films with great dynamism and a touch of delirium. Wishman's works were testimony to the ways women's bodies and spirits were shaped by the demands of a rigid patriarchal order, internalized as ineluctable law. Over the course of the next four decades Wishman produced thirty sex films, varying across genres …

The Minority Machine: Alterity and Excess in the Films of Sai Yōichi

The Minority Machine:Alterity and Excess in the Films of Sai Yōichi Nathaniel Heneghan (bio) The majority of Zainichi Korean filmmaker Sai Yōichi's (b. 1949) cinematic works depict the struggle of individuals who live at the social or geographic margins of Japanese society, with two of his better-known films—All Under the Moon (Tsuki wa dotchi ni dete iru, 1993) and Blood and Bones (Chi to hone, 2004)—being adaptations of Zainichi writer Yang Sŏkil's (b. 1936) novels that foreground members of the Zainichi community.1 I will use this piece, however, to examine two of Sai's more overlooked films, Mosquito on the Tenth Floor (Jikkai no mosukīto, 1983) and Soo (Su, 2007), neither of which features overt depictions of Zainichi characters, but that I read as visually and thematically resonant with experiences of being Korean in Japan.2 This essay engages in an experimental reading of these two films, analyzing Mosquito on the Tenth Floor as a commentary on Zainichi "disrecognition" and Soo as a covert exploration of the doubleness and excess that marks Zainichi alterity through a play on the cinematic strategies of "difference and repetition" as articulated in the writings of Gilles Deleuze. Deleuze posits difference and repetition as dynamic theoretical strategies that [End Page 365] exceed the traditional order of representation and are only subordinated to this same order through repression.3 In this analysis, I link alterity and excess—two tropes that have come to describe the Zainichi condition of being both marginalized and unwanted (or "excessive") by the standards of Japanese mainstream society—with Deleuze's concepts of difference and repetition. Much as strategies of difference and repetition are erased or repressed for the preservation of the symbolic order, as described by Deleuze, notions of Koreanness have been subordinated for the maintenance of Japanese national identity rooted in the myth of homogeneity (Nihonjinron). I thus argue that Sai's films employ similar transgressive strategies for the interrogation of minority identity formation as that of avant-garde filmmaker Ōshima Nagisa (1932–2013), under whom Sai worked, while also exceeding this discursive approach by locating the potential for a transnational identity in an originary hybridity that transcends political designations. The term "excess" is also deployed here to connote Kristin Thompson's theory of cinematic excess, which is used to characterize elements of a film that reside outside the coherent unifying forces of narrative.4 The two films discussed here exhibit elements of excess in this sense as well, often in the form of gratuitous violence and incoherent or nonfunctional thematics, which have the effect of challenging conventional modes of cinematic representation. In addition, I read both Soo and Mosquito on the Tenth Floor as expressions of Zainichi "disrecognition," which John Lie characterizes as the lack of a "complex of attributes—love, right, and esteem—that endow people with a sense of acceptance and acknowledgment"5 and whose internalization is "implicit [End Page 366] in the phenomenon of passing."6 While passing is traditionally understood as "the fact of being accepted, or representing oneself successfully as, a member of a different group" and most commonly refers to "the means by which nonwhite people represent themselves as white,"7 several recent studies have reevaluated passing for its subversive potential, as a process that contests the binarism of the dominant racial discourse by underscoring the "instability and fluidity" of race and thereby revealing the constructedness of racial identity.8 As I observe in my reading of Sai's films, if recuperated in this way, passing functions as an "'actual' mode of political or ideological critique" that attempts to subvert hegemonic racial discourses.9 However, while for nonwhite Americans passing typically constitutes a conscious decision, Lie argues that passing was the default option for Zainichi Koreans, particularly the second generation and beyond, by virtue of the lack of visual distinctions that would mark them as "other."10 Thus, while the sociology of passing can indeed be regarded as somewhat generic regardless of identity, the Zainichi case even further problematizes binary notions of passing by complicating the "politics of visibility" (much as recent discourses of biracial passing seek to do) and foregrounding cultural...

Revisiting Tom Tom: Performative Anamnesis and Autonomous Vision in Ken Jacobs’ Appropriations of Tom Tom the Piper’s Son

In 1969 the American avant-garde filmmaker Ken Jacobs gained wide recognition with a two-hour long interpretation of a 1905 silent short film. Ever since, the artist has kept on revisiting the same material, each time with a different technological approach. Originally hailed as a prime example of structural filmmaking, Jacobs’ more recent variations on the theme of Tom Tom the Piper’s Son beg for a broader understanding of his methods and the meanings implied. To gain a deeper insight in this on-going mise-en-abyme (and an obsession dominating a large part of his career), this essay expands comments by the artist himself with concepts taken from animation, media-archaeology and Warburg’s Mnemosyne atlas. Rereading a filmic text with minute attention, remediating it from an analogue to an electronic format, and reanimating the original action by adding a variety of intervals: all Jacobs’ strategies are aimed at demonstrating the afterlife of Tom Tom in a contemporary cultural context.

Mountains Analogous? The Academic Urban Legend of Alejandro Jodorowsky’s Cult Film Adaptation of René Daumal’s Esoteric Novel

The Chilean-French avant-garde filmmaker and self-styled spiritual teacher Alejandro Jodorowsky’s film, The Holy Mountain (1973), is often referred to as a ‘surrealistic’ exploration of Western Esotericism, and was a pivotal cinematic moment for what Christopher Partridge (2004, 2005) has termed ‘occulture’. It is often claimed in secondary literature and informally online that the film is based on the unfinished novel Mount Analogue (1952) by René Daumal, French writer and follower of the esotericist G.I. Gurdjieff. The Holy Mountain is thus a clear candidate for testing theories about the cultural production of ‘Gurdjieffian’ film adaptations. A closer reading, however, shows that the two texts share few ideological or even structural elements. In the wake of the film’s reception and Jodorowsky’s growing cultural importance, this article maps the congruence of the film to the novel by focusing on the role played by the eponymous mountain as the only invariant symbol in both. Some of the biographical contours of the two artists’ relationship to Gurdjieffian and wider occultural esoteric discourses will also be traced to reveal the pre-critical and largely self referential narrative of the film adaptation in the secondary literature as a species of academic urban legend-making.

V-v-Vertov R-r-Re-Made

Abstract The seminal work of pioneering avant-garde filmmaker Dziga Vertov, The Man with the Movie Camera (Chevolek s kino-apparatom, 1929) has given rise to a number of discussions about the documentary film genre and new digital media. By way of comparison with American artist Perry Bard’s online movie project entitled Man With a Movie Camera: The Global Remake (2007), this article investigates the historical perspective of this visionary depiction of reality and its impact on the heralded participatory culture of contemporary digital media, which can be traced back to Russian Constructivism. Through critical analysis of the relation between Vertov’s manifest declarations about the film medium and his resulting cinematic vision, Bard’s project and the work of her chief theoretical inspiration Lev Manovich are examined in the perspective of ‘remake culture,’ participatory authorship and the development a documentary film language. In addition to this, possible trajectories from Vertov and his contemporary Constructivists to recent theories of ‘new materialism’ and the notion of Man/Machine-co-operation is discussed in length.

Imagining Reality as a Set of Chinese Boxes: An Interview with Matsumoto Toshio

In this interview the Japanese avant-garde filmmaker and scholar, Toshio Matsumoto, discusses his creative practice, as well as his ideas about the complexities of representing reality, memory, and time. He has numerous short experimental works to his credit, and four feature-length narrative films including Bara no soretsu (Funeral Parade of Roses, 1969), Shura (Demons, 1971), Juroku-sai no senso (The War of the Sixteen-Year-Olds, 1973), and Dogura magura (Dogra Magra, 1988). He has contributed significantly to the critical study of film in Japan as well, writing among things Eizo no hakken (Discovery of the Image, 1963/2005), Hyogen no sekai (World of Expression, 1967), and Genshi no bigaku (Aesthetics of Illusion, 1976). Despite these many accomplishments, Matsumoto has gone largely unrecognized in US scholarship. The conception and representation of reality, memory, and time are significant tropes in Matsumoto's films. Bara no soretsu, for instance, set in the gay district of Tokyo, freely shifts between various points in time, mixes narrative fiction and documentary, and allows for the intermingling of the actors' own personal memories and the memories of the characters that they are playing. Each actor effectively plays a character that is modeled after his or her own life. The film is loosely adapted from Alain Resnais's 1959 film Hiroshima mon amour and appropriates many of the elements in it, including, most significantly, haunting flashbacks from a repressed traumatic memory. It is also a recasting of the Oedipus narrative, which to one degree or another is also about memory. In all of Matsumoto's feature films, a character suffers from some form of delusion and/or trauma that materializes in a surging pulse—the spectral return of the repressed—and this manifests not only as plot elements but also in cinematic form (e.g., flashbacks, non-linear narrative structures, overlapping editing). Although certainly not the first to reconceptualize narrative temporality, Bara no soretsu confounded film critics at the time; many assumed that Matsumoto didn't even know how to tell a story or how to edit a film. Audiences today, however, are quick to accept the playful interventions in narrative form. This interview introduces this filmmaker/scholar who, in many respects, was far ahead of his time, to the English-speaking world.

Beyond the Rented World: An Introduction

In conversation with Austrian avant-garde filmmaker Peter Kubelka in 1973, American underground artist Jack Smith shifts focus of censorious reactions to his film Flaming Creatures (1962-63) from its possible obscenity to its anticapitalism.1 Reflecting back, after almost ten years, on what is certainly most notorious legal battle in American avant-garde film history, Smith posits that authorities at time could not accept film's attitudes towards commercialism. Flaming Creatures, he maintains, depicts poor people without any sort of agreement with commercialism that any authorities would want to see. Asked by Kubelka about film's depiction of poor people, Smith offers following lengthy, considered, and fascinating response:It's not a story in which son is going off to college or whatever ... or in which, uh . . . there are no automobiles in it. No automobile worship. Or anything that depends on-or family try to raise their children comfortably. Things like that. No refrigerators. No refrigerator worship . . . values depicted in film are not especially a set of people achieving financial status in some way or other-which is basically what commercial film would depict. For instance, a story about a widow clinging to a home or of these plots really have at their basis property in one way or another, clinging to property, attaining property. I don't think that you can think of a commercial film that didn't have at its basis the-uh-subject of landlordism.2Smith thus offers a political reading of narrative and visual aspects of his seminal underground film, which is rarely described in such terms.3 Moreover, he adds depth and substance to what is obviously more complex than a mere hatred of capitalism.4 The subject of very likely became part of Smith's aesthetic agenda as a result of his difficulties paying rent for his various Manhattan lofts and apartments. But financial, emotional, and psychological burden of regular rent payments can hardly be reduced to an individual problem. For Smith, landlordism is ultimate evil, the one problem, he explains to a seemingly unconvinced Kubelka, that's crushing life everywhere in world.Smith is certainly most famous for that cinematic burst of aesthetic innovation and sexual and gender transgression known as Flaming Creatures. Critic and Smith specialist J. Hoberman maintains, Had Jack Smith produced nothing other than this amazing artifice, he would still rank among great visionaries of American film.5 Fortunately, and despite his chaotic lifestyle, from mid-1950s until his death in 1989 from complications of AIDS, Smith made a great deal of additional work, including films, photos, performances, collages, drawings, costumes, audio recordings, and written texts. Over slightly more than three decades, Smith worked with and influenced some of most significant figures in postwar American avant-garde in film, music, theater, and performance-for example, Tony Conrad, Beverly Grant, Ken Jacobs, Charles Ludlam, Angus MacLise, Judith Malina, Mario Montez, Ronald Tavel, Carmelita Tropicana, Andy Warhol, Robert Wilson, LaMonte Young, Marian Zazeela, and John Zorn.Initially, Smith's work was not inspired by an anticapitalist critique. As he explains to Kubelka, Flaming Creatures emerged simply from a desire to film all funniest stuff he could think oF' and to represent different ideas of glamor.6 It was in early 1970s that Smith became increasingly focused on difficulties of negotiating a world dominated by capital and motivated by profit. A year ago, he tells Kubelka in early 1973,I made a very strong conscious effort to make a play that dealt with subject of landlordism. I tried to rewrite Hamlet story so that it was a family of landlords instead of royalty. This was called Hamlet in Rented World. I got play ready. It was mostly produced. …

Ken Jacobs, Alchemist

KEN JACOBS, ALCHEMIST Optic Antics: The Cinema of Ken Jacobs edited by Michele Pierson, David E. James, and Paul Arthur. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Pp. 312; 48 photographs. $99.00 cloth, $39.95 paper, 26.99 E-book.Ken Jacobs may be the most important cinema magician since George Melies. Though he remains most famous for his groundbreaking 1969 found-footage film Tom, Tom, the Piper's Son, and for the vital leadership role he played in the formally experimental and sexually permissive Underground cinema that flourished in New York City in the early 1960s, Jacobs has been a consistent innovator for six decades. Stretching and dilating the capacity of the projected image to enable new ways of seeing, Jacobs is one of the most important American artists-working in any medium-of the postwar period. The fact that his work is not more widely known to the public testifies not only to the continued marginalization of nonindustrial cinema practices, but to Jacobs's own uncompromising and relentlessly anticommercial vision.Optic Antics is the first complete volume to be dedicated to an exploration of Jacobs's career. This eagerly awaited, richly illustrated monograph promises to expand our understanding of this indispensable artist and make his work more accessible for future generations of media students. Optic Antics is a revelation from front to back. Starting with the magnificent cover image-a photographic mise-enabyme of Ken Jacobs and his wife, and lifelong collaborator Flo, taken by fellow avant-garde filmmaker Michael Snow-the book promises to reflect Jacobs from a variety of angles. The volume benefits from the editorship of three leading scholars in the field of avant-garde cinema studies: David James, Michele Pierson, and the late Paul Arthur. They have done an excellent job of bringing together film scholars, filmmakers, visual artists, playwrights, fellow instructors, friends, and former students to meditate on the different aspects of Jacobs's long career.Jacobs's contributions to film culture have included vital roles as artist, teacher, and organizer. An early champion of experimental cinema, Jacobs debuted many now classic experimental films, including the work of George and Mike Kuchar, at his loft. In 1963, he was arrested, along with Florence Karpf and Jonas Mekas, for showing Jack Smith's Flaming Creatures (1963); the trial that ensued has become the stuff of Underground legend. Founder of the still extant Millennium Film Workshop, Jacobs helped to create a utopian, nonhierarchical space of independent, low-budget filmmaking in stark contrast to the profit-driven excesses of corporate cinema. As a professor at Binghamton University from 1969 to 2002, Jacobs's unconventional pedagogy had a profound influence on generations of students, many of whom went on to become internationally renowned filmmakers, critics, scholars, and curators. Well balanced in its focus, Optic Antics pays homage to all of these incarnations, giving a more realistic sense of the integration of these roles in the life of the artist.The essays are remarkably diverse in tone. Ranging from rigorous interpretations of Jacobs's work to personal remembrances by friends, fellow filmmakers, and colleagues, the book fuses criticism with intimacy, making for a wonderfully readable volume. The book benefits from its contemporary perspective; with the exception of a fragment of Paul Arthur's posthumously published piece, none of the essays have been printed before. Many of the artificial distinctions that marked the original reception of Jacobs's work have collapsed, allowing for a fuller recognition of his contributions. As an artist who routinely explodes the boundaries between high and low, the present and the past, performance and cinema, Jacobs's work demands to be thought outside of the box or, in his case, the frame. Mapping the artist's intertexts from Busby Berkeley to Henri Bergson, Optic Antics contextualizes Jacobs's simultaneous orientation as a constructivist, materialist, postmodern historiographer, cine-mystic, and alchemist of the moving image. …

Defining Warhol: An Interview with J. J. Murphy, Avant-Garde Filmmaker and Author

Abstract

All that's frozen melts into air: Arctic cinemas at the end of the world

Abstract Drawing on the concepts of the sublime and the spectacle, this article examines the ways in which global cinemas have often mobilized the trope of the Arctic as the end of the world. Drawing on a radically disparate set of films, including examples from Swedish and Danish art cinema; Cold War documentaries made or supported by the Danish and American governments for both general release and television; 1950s 'True Life Adventures' nature documentaries made by the Disney studio; Creation, a work by American avant-garde film-maker Stan Brakhage; and To the Arctic, a recent IMAX 3D film. We argue that most of these works eradicate the material, cultural and geographical specificity of the Arctic for political and ideological reasons.

Absolute Advertising: Walter Ruttmann and the Weimar Advertising Film

Examining Walter Ruttmann’s early animated advertisements in relation both to his Opus films and to contemporary advertising psychology, this article argues that advertising, far from representing a marginal phenomenon or a compromise of artistic integrity, was central to Ruttmann’s professional identity as an avant-garde filmmaker. In so doing, I also seek to reframe our understanding of abstract animation in the 1920s as a form profoundly compatible with capitalist modernity and its regulation of perception. Through their combination of abstraction and figuration, Ruttmann’s advertisements sought to incorporate contemporary theories of advertising pleasure and activate spectatorial competencies specific to the newly commodified spheres of post–World War I Germany.