Looking Back and Away: Jaime Barrios’s Film Club (1968) Jessica Gordon-Burroughs (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1 and 2. Photocopy from Rodger Larson Personal Archive, photograph of Jesus Cruz and Jaime Barrios, Photo. Hella Hammid. Courtesy of Rodger Larson. The scene in Figures 1 and 2 was captured by photographer Hella Hammid1 on location during the filming of A Park Called Forsyth, a twelve-minute student film shot in the summer of 1967, in the context of productions made by the students at the Young Film-makers Foundation (YFF).2 In the foreground, the photo captures [End Page 281] seventeen-year-old student filmmaker Jesús Cruz (Figure 1) and Chilean film teacher and filmmaker Jaime Barrios (Figure 2), a Bolex camera on a tripod between them. Cruz’s short film, like many amateur student films of the period, is replete with blood and gore. The film portrays a gang conflict in which one gang leader strangles another with a bicycle chain in an “empty Forsyth Park, a park made of stone, concrete and a few scraggly trees” surrounded by an “aura of loneliness and abandonment.”3 The photo betrays little of this narrative machinery of violent reprisals and urban social dissolution and instead outlines a taut, concentrated visual and tactile connection between student, teacher, and the apparatus of visual representation. Barrios arrived in New York City only a few years earlier in 1963 to attend the School of Visual Arts and at the time of this photograph was active in an experimental scene, which overlapped with the New York Underground and tightly intertwined with his media activism at the YFF.4 The YFF, founded by art educator Rodger Larson alongside Barrios and New York philanthropist Lynne Hofer, was a community outreach project for New York City youths dedicated to training them in the art of 16mm filmmaking. Larson was also inspired by the underground scene, albeit as a viewer and occasional collaborator, even as he evolved into an important figure in U.S. community film education.5 Hammid’s photo, for its part, was employed for promotional use by the YFF and subsequently as the first image featured in Larson’s A Guide for Film Teachers to Filmmaking by Teenagers (1968).6 Later emulated throughout the country as part of the nationwide War on Poverty, the guide was a manual on 16mm student film production, intended as a blueprint of the New York City film workshops. If we understand the gaze—or, more broadly, the nature of visuality—as a confluence of subjective, spatial, and historical contingencies, the still images of Cruz and Barrios represent a significant point of convergence in regard to the visual politics of the YFF. The camera’s focus and object of representation—the Bolex camera—is visually placed at a crossroads and, centered, divides the frame in two. The symmetry of the two photographic subjects—Cruz and Barrios, in profile and facing each other—is interrupted by the lens, which is directed toward Cruz. On the left, Cruz, dressed in a starched white button-down shirt and with neatly cut hair, extends his arm parallel to the frame to the tripod, while Barrios, in an unironed denim shirt and with long wavy hair, steadies the tripod from below so as to set it at the height of Cruz’s gaze. Barrios’s hands are cut from the frame, while Cruz eyes the angle of the camera. The camera is manifestly fixed on [End Page 282] the park in which the two filmmakers find themselves, yet Cruz is seemingly looking into a dark, opaque lens as the camera points toward him. In Figures 1 and 2, the film’s director is the Bolex’s subject of representation in a twist of the film’s declared directorial logic, foregrounding a counterintuitive cinematic production of self. As such, the photo, in its entirety, constructs a tight yet enigmatic visual relation between the two filmmakers. Though each of the photographic subjects seems concentrated on some element of the camera, both Cruz and Barrios could also be interpreted as looking at one another in a confrontation between symmetrical yet asymmetrical figures, intersubjectively...
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Oct 14, 2020
Katherine Anderson + 1
Open Access
