Reassessing the Personal Registers and Anti-Illusionist Imperatives of the New Formal Film of the 1960S and ’70S

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Reassessing the Personal Registers and Anti-Illusionist Imperatives of the New Formal Film of the 1960s and ’70s

JUAN CARLOS KASE

for David E. James

I think it would be most dangerous to regard “this new art” in a purely structural way. In my case, at least, the work is not, for example, a proof of an experiment with “structure” but “just occurs,” springs directly from my life patterns which unpre- dictably force me into . . . oh well . . . —Paul Sharits, letter to P. Adams Sitney1

In the dominant critical assessments of Anglo-American film history, scholars have agreed that much of the avant-garde cinema of the late 1960s and early ’70s exhibited a collective shift toward increased formalism. From P. Adams Sitney’s initial canonization of “Structural Film” in 19692 to Malcolm Le Grice’s “New Formal Tendency” (1972)3 and Annette Michelson’s “new cinematic discourse” of “epistemological concern” (1972)4 to Peter Gidal’s “Structuralist/Materialist Film” (1975)5—as well as in recent reconceptualizations and reaffirmations of this schol- arship by Paul Arthur (1978, 1979, and 2004), David James (1989), and A. L. Rees

1. Collection of Anthology Film Archives. Letter is dated “1969??.” Roughly fifteen years later, Sharits reiterated his frustration with the critical interpretations of his work in a more public context, albeit in slightly different terms: “There was a problem in the ’60s and even in the ’70s of intimidating artists into avoiding emotional motivations for their work, the dominant criticism then pursued everything in terms of impersonal, formal, structural analysis.” Jean- Claude Lebensztejen, “Interview with Paul Sharits” (June 1983), in Paul Sharits, ed. Jan Beauvais (Dijon: Les Presses du Réel, 2008), p. 50. 2. P. Adams Sitney, “Structural Film” [first version], Film Culture 47 (Summer 1969), pp. 1–10. 3. Malcolm Le Grice, “Thoughts on Recent ‘Underground’ Film” (1972), in Experimental Cinema in the Digital Age (London: BFI, 2001), p. 14. Le Grice also used the descriptive phrases “new formal work” in numerous sections of Abstract Film and Beyond (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1977), pp. 86 and 105. 4. Annette Michelson, “Introduction,” in Form and Structure in Recent Film (Vancouver: Vancouver Art Gallery, 1972), n.p. 5. Peter Gidal, “Theory and Definition of Structural/Materialist Film,” Studio International 190, no. 978 (November/December 1975), pp. 189–96.

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(1999)6—scholars have remained in agreement: The canonical formalist works of the Anglo-American avant-garde film of the late 1960s and early ’70s differ markedly from the expressive, diaristic, and personal output that dominated earlier practices of poetic, oneiric, and lyrical cinemas.7 Various intellectual turf wars notwithstanding, it is relatively uncontroversial to accept the basic claim that there was a marked increase in formalism and systematici- ty in experimental filmmaking in the period at hand. As Jonathan Walley has recently written, “What remains is a general agreement among scholars that avant-garde filmmakers of this period followed the trend within modernist art toward medium-specif- ic purification: the reduction of the art object to the essential physical or material components of its medium.”8 Filmmakers such as Paul Sharits, Hollis Frampton, Malcolm Le Grice, Michael Snow, Peter Gidal, Peter Kubelka, Tony Conrad, George Landow, Anthony McCall, and Kurt Kren were producing Minimalist, Conceptualist, and materialist films that interrogated the photochemical essence of cinema and its constitutive network of technologies while pulling away from the subjectivist tradition associated with Maya Deren, Stan Brakhage, and Kenneth Anger.9 The variant and roughly contemporaneous critical designations of formalist filmmaking from the late 1960s and ’70s share some heuristic value, despite the dissimilar, often oppositional evaluative rhetorics that they have employed.10 When read together, the critical writ-

6. See Paul Arthur, “Structural Film: Revisions, New Versions, and the Artifact,” Millennium Film Journal 2 (Spring/Summer 1978), pp. 5–13; “Structural Film: Revisions, New Versions, and the Artifact, Part 2,” Millennium Film Journal no. 4/5 (Summer/Fall 1979), pp. 122–34; and A Line of Sight: American Avant-Garde Film Since 1965 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), pp. 80–83. See also David E. James, “Pure Cinema,” in Allegories of Cinema: American Film in the Sixties (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), pp. 237–75; and A. L. Rees, A History of Experimental Film and Video (London: BFI, 1999), pp. 72–83. 7. Of all the scholars cited above, only Sitney attempted to draw a continuous through-line of sensibility between the earlier, expressive traditions and this new “cinema of structure.” As a result, he incorporates such unlikely, Romantic filmmakers as Stan Brakhage and Bruce Baillie alongside arch- Conceptualists like Tony Conrad and George Landow. These idiosyncrasies of his “Structural Film” for- mulation, in addition to many others, have triggered numerous critiques from a range of artists, critics, and scholars. The most thorough, though perhaps least well known, is Bruce Jenkins’s “A Case Against ‘Structural Film,’” Journal of the University Film Association 33, no. 2 (Spring 1981), pp. 9–14. See also George Macuinas, “On ‘Structural Film’ (by P. Adams Sitney),” in Film Culture Reader, ed. P. Adams Sitney (New York: Cooper Square Press, 2000), p. 349. 8. Jonathan Walley also connects this critical history to broader surveys of avant-garde film by John Hanhardt and Sheldon Renan in his essay “The Material of Film and the Idea of Cinema,” October 103 (Winter 2003), p. 17. 9. Though I only address the Anglo-American avant-garde in this essay, it would be just as appropriate to include works by other European filmmakers such as Austrians Birgit and Wilhelm Hein, Kurt Kren, and Peter Kubelka. I have made this arbitrary geographic division for the practical purpose of narrowing the focus and managing the length of the essay. 10. Though the basic historical observation that there was a marked increase in formalist film practice in the late 1960s is shared by both P. Adams Sitney and Peter Gidal, the respective political inflections of their claims were quite different. Nevertheless, their canonical essays form the two most adamant and influential interpretative models for this formalist tendency, which makes the following consideration even more significant: Despite fervent disagreement about the political, aesthetic, and philosophical functions of these films, both Sitney and Gidal included works by Sharits and Frampton in their taxonomies. (Since Sitney’s essay concerned only North American artists, there was no expectation that Le Grice would appear therein; he is, of course, included in Gidal’s categorization.)

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ings on this international trend—whether produced by filmmakers, critics, or acade- mics; whether published in 1969, 1974, or 2002; whether addressing American, Canadian, or British artists—bear the common goal of clearly and forcefully defining this new formalist cinema in negative terms, in relation to what it is not: It is neither illusionistic nor expressive.11 Despite their differing political and theoretical emphases, critics and scholars have identified shared elements of this formalist turn, including scrutiny of the material elements of the film apparatus (flicker, film grain, projection, etc.) and the use of predetermined a priori organizational structures (algorithmic, arbitrary, organizational mechanisms) that culminate in “a concept about the nature of film,”12 “reduction to the essential materials”13 of the medium, “rationalized, anti- poetic exercises,”14 a “turn toward pure formalism,”15 or the evaluation of the “concrete dimension[s] of cinema.”16 Yet, despite the consensus, there is something missing in the critical assessments of this formalist period in the history of avant-garde filmmaking. Though the evaluative narratives of experimental-film history have grown slightly more diverse and layered over time, an interpretative reductionism continues to linger many years later. The existing historical taxonomies and critical categorizations of this work often minimize the personal richness, conceptual ambiguity, and ideological non- alignment of these films, attempting instead to synthesize a wide array of works into one shared formal concept, as if they marched in tandem to mount a late- modernist assault on filmic illusionism and eradicate it once and for all. Within the perspective of the dominant historical narratives of experimental film, New Formal Film manifested an essentialist, post-Greenbergian reification of form that was evacuated of personal, political, spiritual, and social reference. In the words of Regina Cornwell, this was “film devoid for the most part of traditional content and whose content is largely its form.”17 However, such an understanding of these films undermines the ambivalence, hybridity, and (to borrow Paul Sharits’s term) “dual-

11. Annette Michelson articulated the anti-illusionist implications of this work as a “detailed critique of illusionism . . . traversed by the auto-critical impulse.” Michelson, “Paul Sharits and the Critique of Illusionism: An Introduction” (1974), Film Culture 65/66 (1978), p. 86. For a critique of this position on different grounds than those I present here, see James Peterson’s critique of the “Anti-Illusion Schema” in Dreams of Chaos, Visions of Order: Understanding the American Avant-Garde Cinema (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1994), pp. 85–94. 12. Rosalind Krauss, “Paul Sharits,” in Beauvais, Paul Sharits, p. 50. 13. Regina Cornwell, “Some Formalist Tendencies in the Current American Avant-Garde Film,” Studio International 184, no. 948 (October 1972), p. 111. 14. Paul Arthur, “The Onus of Representation: Harry Smith, Mahagonny,” in Harry Smith: The Avant-Garde in the American Vernacular, ed. Rani Singh and Andrew Perchuk (Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2010), p. 133. 15. James, Allegories of Cinema, p. 263. 16. Malcolm Le Grice, “Around 1966,” in Abstract Film and Beyond (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1977), p. 118. 17. Regina Cornwell, “Some Formalist Tendencies in the Current American Avant-Garde Film,” p. 111.

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ism” of much experimental cinema from this period.18 In fact, many of the most celebrated “Structural,” “Structural/Materialist,” “New Formal,” and “Formalist” films of this era include a vigorous strain of reference that has been largely ignored and that amounts, in a sense, to a repressed subtext of this matrix of related artistic movements. Behind the hyper-formalist array of systems, grids, language games, and experiments with reflexivity that underpin this chapter of avant-garde filmmaking looms a network of affect that, by virtue of its forceful reduction and attenuation, demonstrates a need for the active revision of established interpretations of the historical Anglo-American avant-garde. In this essay, I argue that a number of historical avant-garde films—work that scholars and critics have addressed almost exclusively in terms of its formal qualities (such as anti-illusionist reflexivity, medium specificity, and extended dura- tion)—are also inscribed with personal detail, autobiography, and affect. I suggest here that Paul Sharits’s Piece Mandala/End War (1966), Hollis Frampton’s (nostalgia) (1971), and Malcolm Le Grice’s Little Dog for Roger (1967), all major, canonical works of New Formal film, function quite powerfully as affective tracings of political protest, sexual longing, diaristic memoir, and personal reminiscence. Ultimately, I hope to suggest a partial revision to dominant narratives of avant- garde film history, which is in keeping with the work of other contemporary scholars who have successfully diversified, refined, and modified the historical record, in order to accommodate the “the radical heterogeneity” not only of formalist film but of avant-garde cinema more widely.19

Piece Mandala/End War: Paul Sharits, Sex, and Symbolic Protest A number of Sharits’s major early works, including Piece Mandala/End War (1966), N:O:T:H:I:N:G (1968), and T,O,U,C,H,I,N,G, (1968), share a common visual method: Each film presents a rapid barrage of empty frames of pure color that

18. Many scholars have interpreted this film work in relation to Clement Greenberg and Michael Fried. See, for example, Stuart Liebman, Paul Sharits (St. Paul, MN: Film in the Cities, 1981), p. 7. See also Regina Cornwell, “Paul Sharits: Illusion and Object,” Artforum 10, no. 1 (September 1971), p. 57. Cornwell specifically connects Sharits to Fried’s notion of “deductive structure.” 19. This phrase “the radical heterogeneity” of formalist film comes from Bruce Jenkins’s critique of Sitney’s “Structural Film” article. Jenkins, “A Case Against ‘Structural Film,’” pp. 9–14. For recent revisionist investigations of neglected figures, geographic locales, disciplinary dis- courses, critical methods, and cultural niches of the historical avant-garde, see the following: Joan Hawkins, Cutting Edge: Art-Horror and the Horrific Avant-Garde (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000); David E. James, The Most Typical Avant-Garde: History and Geography of Minor Cinemas in Los Angeles (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005); Robin Blaetz, ed., Women’s Experimental Cinema: Critical Frameworks (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007); Branden Joseph, Beyond the Dream Syndicate: Tony Conrad and the Arts after Cage (New York: Zone Books, 2008); Juan Carlos Kase, “Encounters with the Real: Historicizing Stan Brakhage’s The Act of Seeing with One’s Own Eyes,” The Moving Image: The Journal of the Association of Moving Image Archivists 12, no. 1 (Spring 2012), pp. 1–17; Andrew Uroskie, Between the Black Box and the White Cube: Expanded Cinema and Postwar Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014); Ara Osterweil, Flesh Cinema: The Corporeal Turn in American Avant-Garde Film (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2014); and Gloria Sutton, The Experience Machine: Stan VanDerBeek’s Movie-Drome and Expanded Cinema (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015).

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is rhythmically interrupted by brief flashes of representational still images of graphic and often disturbing content. In this trilogy of films, photographic bursts of sex and violence abruptly punctuate sinuous sequences of shifting, monochro- matic color frames. With this artistic strategy Sharits draws attention to the material and affective limits of his medium, be they situated within the infinitesimal temporal boundaries of the single still frame of film (the rapid succession of which constitutes the conventional illusion of movement in projection) or the representational opposition between a field of pure blue and a detailed close-up of an eye surgery. There is a meaningful but largely unacknowledged connection to be established between the formal severity and referential directness of these films.20 As a result of their minimization of representational content, their fore- grounding of mechanical aspects of the motion-picture apparatus, and their single-frame eschewal of simulated temporal continuity, Sharits’s films have, for the most part, until recently been treated almost exclusively as anti-illusionist screeds without representational substance.21 Even the most sympathetic contemporaneous critics of his films ignored their content, with Annette Michelson going so far as to describe his work as “devoid of even the most elusive and casual relationship to subject matter.”22 However, this early trilogy of flicker films displays explicit imagery that candidly evokes uncomfortable associations between eroticism, suicide, political turmoil, bodily trauma, sexual politics, and interpersonal violence, and which repeatedly undermines any impression of detached, modernist abstraction. Even when the films’ images are barely legible, they command the viewer’s attention with their symbolic force, grisly iconicity, and undeniable shock value. Piece Mandala begins with rapidly flickering frames that display the film’s printed (and intentionally misspelled) title in alternation with colored frames.23 At the end of the film’s stroboscopic opening title sequence, Sharits presents a trib-

20. Ara Osterweil poses a strong alternative reading to the dominant critical interpretations in which she foregrounds the sexual and somatic content of Sharits’s films. Osterweil, Flesh Cinema, pp. 214– 54. Her insightful reinterpretation of Sharits’s work is a fruitful revision of the dominant readings and is largely congruent with the claims I make throughout this essay. Art historian Branden W. Joseph has also criticized the dominant and reductive interpretation that positioned Sharits’s work in exclusively formalist terms. Joseph calls attention to the personal references in Sharits’s films as well as the explicitly stated affective goals of the filmmaker’s early “substructural” explorations of “expressive social and political content . . . that critics of structural film con- sistently condemned, repressed, or ignored” (p. 219). “A Crystal Web Image of Horror: Paul Sharits’s Early Structural and Substructural Cinema,” in Paul Sharits, ed. Susanne Pfeffer (London: Koenig, 2015), pp. 204–21. 21. See, for example, Rosalind E. Krauss, “Paul Sharits,” in Beauvais, Paul Sharits, pp. 47–55; and Annette Michelson, “Screen/Surface: The Politics of Illusionism,” Artforum 9, no. 1 (September 1972), pp. 58–62. Sharits respectfully disputes Krauss’s evaluation of his work as purely abstract and nonrepresentational: “Actually it’s an interplay between purely abstract imagery, if such a thing exists, and highly representational imagery. I like to slide between those barriers.” Gary Garrels, “Interview with Paul Sharits and Gary Garrels, October 1982,” in Beauvais, Paul Sharits, p. 142. 22. Quoted by Sharits in a letter to George Stevens, Jr., January 17, 1971, collection of Anthology Film Archives. 23. One imagines that Sharits misspelled the film’s title at some point and embraced the unin- tentional error as a kind of chance-based gag, a gesture in keeping with the playful, absurdist spirit of the Fluxus group, with whom he sometimes associated.

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ute: “Dedicated to Frances Niekerk.” (Niekerk was Sharits’s wife at the time and appears in the film as his onscreen sexual partner.) Piece Mandala is composed pri- marily of empty colored frames and a highly fragmented series of sexual imagery that appears within an array of unwaveringly centripetal compositions. Over the first two minutes, single frames of Sharits’s and Niekerk’s intertwined naked bodies flip back and forth across the vertical axis of the film’s compositional plane. As the film progresses, the content of the single images changes slightly, showing tiny, incremental shifts in the positions of the performers with each advancing frame. As this series begins to unfold, Sharits’s head appears between the legs of Niekerk, presumably engaged in the act of cunnilingus. Sharits has radically transformed this brief snippet of sexually explicit motion- picture cinematography by dividing it, in a frame-by-frame fashion, into its con- stituent images. He then reconstitutes the sex act in an intermittent parade of interrupted gestures that no longer communicate any impression of motion. This editing strategy, of course, undermines the illusion of temporal continuity that is typical of most moving-image cinematography. However, Sharits’s dissection of this series of moving images does not completely eliminate their representational function as illusionistic photography. Indeed, the contrary may very well be true: By breaking a continuous flow of moving images into its composite frames, Sharits has converted this sex act into a series of analytic intermittencies, which, like Eadweard Muybridge’s famous experiments in the serial photography of human and animal movement, make the viewer more aware of his or her physical specificity. About halfway through the film, the visual content of Piece Mandala changes as Sharits presents a symbolic vignette about suicide that continues the film’s established intervallic editing pattern. In this nonsexual interlude, Sharits appears onscreen now clothed, facing the camera directly, with a gun pointed at the side of his head. Over the progression of this image series, a dotted line leaves his gun and animates the flight path of a bullet heading towards the side of his temple. Then, crucially, this sequence of still images plays out in reverse. After this interlude, the second half of the film replays the same sexual imagery from its first half, but in reverse, such that at the film’s end, Sharits’s head is where it started, between his wife’s legs, establishing an overarching structure of visual symmetry to the work (which echoes the visual symmetry of the film’s centripetal compositional palette). In his meticulous geometric modification of each frame’s visual content—in which he flips the bodies across the frame vertically and the two-tone background across the frame horizontally—Sharits mimics the allover compositional symmetry of the mandala. Here he suggests, by association, that this pulsatile visual proces- sion of sexuality and suicide may share something in form and function with the graphic and geometric art objects of Hindu meditation. Sharits describes the film’s symmetrical visual structure as “one love-making gesture which is seen simultaneously from both sides of its space and both ends of its time.”24 Throughout his 1960s work, Sharits displays a stripped-down, scorched-earth formalism that is, when compared to virtually every other kind of cinema, extreme

24. Paul Sharits, “Notes on Films, 1966 –68,” Film Culture 47 (Summer 1969), p. 14.

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in its restriction of reference. With Piece Mandala/End War, however, Sharits combined nonrepresentational fields of chromatic color with highly confrontational and iconic photographic imagery. This hybrid approach triggers fresh and unusual registers of cultural and affective resonance that communicate a significant, if complex, relationship between the film’s material construction, formal methods, and personal references. One can gather a sense of Sharits’s political referents from the film’s title.25 These impressions are further amplified through reflection upon a curious written exchange that Sharits had with the lab in Texas that was processing Piece Mandala. The lab had withheld prints of the film out of concern that it contained porno- graphic content that might be deemed illegal. Sharits wrote to the lab in 1967: “First I want to say that Piece Mandala is a work of art and not pornography; it is a political statement and has strong socially redeeming values . . . being an aesthetic,

25. Sharits initially produced the film with the intention of including it in a traveling collection of work presented by the New York Filmmakers’ Cooperative titled “For Life, Against the War.” He did not finish it in time for it to be included with that program of political films.

Paul Sharits. Piece Mandala/End War. 1966.

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moral, social and political document.”26 In its use of representational imagery, this early work of Sharits clearly enunciates some of the artist’s most significant thematic interests, personal obsessions, and emotional associations, including sex, suicide, and trauma, as well as a spirit of violent protest typical of its age. When considered in relation to the notion that the film is “an aesthetic, moral, social, and political document,” Piece Mandala becomes much more layered than the formalist and anti-illusionist analysis of Sharits’s work generally suggests. Contemporary scholar Ara Osterweil concurs: “Much of Sharits’ work is difficult to reconcile with the critical tendency to regard structural film as the epitome of cool modernism.”27 As its title implies, the film functions as a peace mandala intended to illus- trate, at least partially, the pleasurable, somatic alternatives to armed combat. The film explicitly enacts the hippie mantra “Make love not war” by demonstrating, in Sharits’s words “the visibility of sexual dynamics as an alternative to war.”28 Simultaneously, in opposition to its pacifist ideological message, the images oscil- late rapidly within an aggressive, assaultive, machine-gun pulse of montage that suggests, perhaps, that the violence of the film’s form has a clear metaphorical tie to the violence of war. The connections that Piece Mandala makes between combat, sexuality, and suicide delineate a nexus of associations that are apt for a work of art produced in the shadow of the Vietnam War. Sharits described the film in similar terms, as “a very beautiful, lyrical work with a strong . . . social sense,”29 a symbolic demonstration of “the viability of sexual dynamics as an alternative to destructive violence,” and lastly, a work related “to the psychophysical experience of the creative act of cunnilingus.”30 The associative symbolic chain of this work, however far it is abstracted from the literalism of social advocacy and political documentary, nevertheless addresses concrete social issues through its sublimated emphasis upon the corporeal limits of sexual pleasure and physical violence. When considered in conjunction with the film’s title, these overdetermined images, along with their dense affective associations (as well as the violently montagist environment in which they appear), clearly evoke ideological protest and social reference and, in so doing, suggest that an intensive reinterpretation of Sharits’s cinema is in order: To claim that Sharits’s films are exclusively concerned with anti-illusionism and the material conditions of the film apparatus is to neglect their graphic content, their conceptual obstinance, and their inescapably anxiogenic function.31 These flash frames of sex and suicide

26. Letter from Sharits to Color Processing Station, Dallas, Texas, February 27, 1967, collection of Anthology Film Archives, New York City. 27. Osterweil, Flesh Cinema, p. 215. 28. Sharits, “Notes on Films, 1966–68,” p. 13. 29. Sharits letter to Color Processing Station, February 27, 1967, collection of Anthology Film Archives. 30. Sharits, “Notes on Films, 1966–68,” p. 13. 31. David James argues that the “structural film,” because of its formal severity and its seeming lack of cultural awareness, constructed a complex, possibly repressed relationship to the spaces of polit-

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function as brief explosions of reference that demonstrate how a Minimalist attenuation of content is by no means identical with its eradication. However severe they may seem, Sharits’s films do not constitute a zero-sum game of tautological formalism or teleological modernism. Much of his most inter- esting work in fact challenged any simplistic notion of “pure film”32 (to use James’s term) by instead proposing a hybrid, schizoid cinema that illustrated the extreme polarities and binaries of the medium, what he described as the medium’s innate “dualism.”33 Sharits did not present illusionism as hollow, meaningless, or politically retrograde; instead, he toyed with its dual nature, as material and image. He experimented with cinema as a totality, as a field of machines, media, and culture in which seeming opposites interact in dynamic and intense ways. In his selective, sparing use of distressing and shocking photographic imagery, the filmmaker produced work that was meaningfully referential, thematic, and even political, despite its Minimalist sheen. In his most successful investigations into the philosophical, conceptual, and ontological tensions of cinema, Sharits managed to achieve the rare feat of transposing the themes of his films into the realm of form. This accom- plishment of thematic transposition and rhetorical displacement defines this deeply personal film, a work that, for Sharits, had “been of the deepest signifi- cance in the reconstruction of our marriage.”34 None of the personal, somatic complexity of Sharits’s early films was lost on fellow filmmaker Hollis Frampton, who in conversation with Sharits said, “In Piece Mandala/End War, there certainly are referential images, and these continue and are, furthermore, for most people, I think, images that are emotionally reactive to a very great degree.”35 Like Sharits, Frampton explored novel and enigmatic strategies for selectively embedding the author’s identity deep within diverse, often unpredictable, and sometimes arbitrary registers of hyper-formalist art. In his efforts to pioneer his own particular relationship between the film artist and his filmography, Frampton reconstituted the practice of experimental film— through methods both personal and theoretical—in his own image.

ical and social reference in the age of Vietnam. In such work, “the social and the cinematic were inter- nalized as questions of film” and, by implication, form. James, Allegories of Cinema, pp. 275–76. However, it might also be added that in Sharits’s cinema this transferral of political and social reference is neither entirely formal nor symbolic, but often more direct. In a number of Sharits’s films, explicit social and political references contribute significantly to their visual iconography. 32. James, Allegories of Cinema, p. 237. 33. Sharits used this term frequently to describe the various conceptual, perceptual, and material polarities that underpin cinema. One example appears in a letter, written to Roberta Smith but unsent, and shared with Mekas: “At present, it is understandable that not many people are deeply engaged by cinema’s subtle dualisms, perhaps because the medium still seems so accessible.” Letter dated September 8, 1974, Collection of Anthology Film Archives. 34. Sharits, “Notes on Films, 1966–68,” p. 14. 35. Hollis Frampton, “Interview with Paul Sharits” (March 1, 1973), in Buffalo Heads: Media Study, Media Practice, Media Pioneers, 1973–1990, ed. Woody Vasulka and Peter Weibel (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008), p. 280.

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(nostalgia), Frampton’s Displaced Autobiography Hollis Frampton’s (nostalgia) is a playful filmic experiment in intermediality, autobiography, and the selective transposition of personal history into an arbitrary systematic context. In it, Frampton staged an encounter between older and newer media by remediating paper prints of his own photographs into the visual content of a moving-image work. Like Piece Mandala, (nostalgia) toys with the material paradox of a moving-image medium constituted of unmoving images. In its transhistorical reach, conceptual associations, and self-consciously ironic rhetoric, (nostalgia), like virtually all of Frampton’s work, evokes plentiful meta- critical and metahistorical implications. In a very real sense, all of Frampton’s films are about the nature of cinema. Frampton’s erudite writings and interviews have encouraged and bolstered this totalizing analytical tendency of his high-modernist metahistory of the medium, in which, through discrete film experiments, he reimagined the historical achievements and ontological potentials of film, “the last machine,”36 within the impossibly long view of “the infinite cinema.”37 Regarding his place in history, Frampton believed that the New Formal Film of the late 1960s and ’70s had radically reconfigured the terms of experimental cinema in toto. He writes, “The most striking break that the cinema of structure makes with previous genera is in its repudiation of psychology in favor of epistemology.”38 Most critical inter- preters have accepted this division between affect and analysis as definitive and essential to an understanding of Frampton’s cinema. Federico Windhausen reiter- ates Frampton’s claim: “Rejecting the clichés of feeling and conventions of form associated with the psychology model, Frampton’s filmmaker-epistemologist seeks to expand the tradition of cinema on deliberative (formal, material) and axiomatic (conceptual) levels.”39 However, contrary to the claims of Frampton and some of his critics, the psychological model of art and the epistemological one are not mutually exclusive: A film can investigate the most arcane formal aspects of the cinematic apparatus (and its relationship to the world) while still deliberately trig- gering affective associations. Frampton (and his work) functioned in this dualist mode, as Michelson observed in a brief scholarly eulogy, “as mediator in the difficult and delicate negotiation of a marriage of Poesis and Mathesis.”40 However ambitious Frampton’s filmo-theoretical project may have been in its “deliberative” and “axiomatic” efforts, it did not wholeheartedly dismiss the autobiographical, the expressive, or the poetic registers of experimental art. Despite suggestions to the contrary, Frampton’s hard-core formalist enterprise was also undergirded, at

36. Ibid., p. 136. 37. Hollis Frampton, “For a Metahistory of Film: Commonplace Notes and Hypotheses,” in On the Camera Arts and Consecutive Matters: The Writings of Hollis Frampton, ed. Bruce Jenkins (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009), p. 134. 38. Quoted in Federico Windhausen, “Words into Film: Toward a Genealogical Understanding of Hollis Frampton’s Theory and Practice,” October 109 (Summer 2004), p. 92. Frampton’s emphasis. 39. Ibid. 40. Annette Michelson, “Poesis/Mathesis,” October 32 (Spring 1985), p. 6.

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least partially—like the modernist masterworks that inspired him—by an array of more immediate, concrete, and personal factors. Throughout Frampton’s work, significant, if minor, personal trends manifest themselves, including occasional dalliances with reminiscence, homage, and autobiography. An array of his films collectively instantiate more intimate concerns than a pure formalism would allow: Consider, for example, the diaristic catalogue of his social circle in Manual of Arms (1966), the gendered psychodrama of Critical Mass (1971), the admiring portrait of friend Paul Sharits in Yellow Springs (1972), the unflinching and gruesome meditation on death in Magellan: At the Gates of Death Part 1 & 2 (1976), and the loving paean to his departed grandmother in Gloria (1979). Like these films, (nostalgia) addresses the metahistorical and philosophical ruminations that underpin all of his cinema while also exposing other, more personal concerns, fixations, and influences. Behind its knotty matrix of references, conceptual gags, and ironic twists, (nostalgia) is also an evocative self-portrait of the artist as a young man, presented as a fragmentary narrative in which Frampton has embedded layers of diaristic detail along with evocations of affect, humor, and loss. Over the course of (nostalgia)’s thirty-six minutes, Frampton presents a series of thirteen static black-and-white vignettes in which one photographic print after another rests briefly on the burner of an electric stove before it begins to smoke, catch fire, and eventually disintegrate into feathery wisps of burnt paper ash. Using thirteen 100-foot rolls of 16mm film (each of which lasts roughly three minutes), he documented the immolation of an equal number of photographs, almost all of which hail from his formative years as a young artist in New York City. Each image is accompanied by a voice-over narrator who describes a photograph and its origins. However, in no case does the soundtrack’s narration actually correspond to the photograph that we are seeing. In its continual misalignment, the voice-over is always describing the next image that is to appear. The result is the impression of a major error in image-sound synchronicity, an extreme displacement, which happens to be, simply, a purposeful glitch in the structural fabric of the work. For all its formal peculiarities and rhetorical obstructions, Frampton’s film could also be understood as a kind of self-curated autobiographical art exhibit, a retrospective slideshow of his formative years as a photographer, now transformed into thirteen microdramas and remediated into the audiovisual context of a 16mm black-and-white motion-picture work. The past-tense delivery of the narrator’s script positions the film entirely as a gesture of reflection, of historical hindsight. Throughout the film, Frampton’s narrator describes each photographic print in the context of bygone interpersonal experiences and fading friendships that once defined and informed its production. Many of the images are portraits of (or col- laborations with) postwar North American visual artists and friends, including Carl Andre, James Rosenquist, Frank Stella, Larry Poons, and Michael Snow. Frampton’s own artistic evolution is a key theme here. He addresses it directly, though he does so with a playful, self-deprecating sense of effacement toward the youthful naiveté that he displayed as a fledgling artist in search of effective

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artistic methods. In describing his self-portrait, the narrator confesses the following: “As you see, I was thoroughly pleased with myself at the time, presumably for having survived to such ripeness and wisdom, since it was my twenty-third birth- day.” Relatedly, he tells embarrassing stories of using his art to approach women, including a “monumentally fair, and succulent, and indifferent neighbor,” who “went about nearly naked” and whom he would approach by “invent[ing] excuses to visit upstairs, in order to stare at her.” Other photos serve as indexes of lost affections and perhaps more innocent times: “James Rosenquist and I live far apart now, and we seldom meet. But I cannot recall one moment spent in his company that I didn’t completely enjoy.” In addition to situating these images in the context of his personal history, Frampton also demonstrates an attentiveness to formal and ontological questions of compositional aesthetics, photographic contingency, and photochemical process: “I admire this photograph for its internal geometry, the expression of its subject, its virtually perfect mapping of tonal values on the gray scale. It pleases me as much as anything I did.” As is typical of Frampton’s work, a playful recognition of form, ontology, and process runs parallel to the autobiographical directive of (nostalgia). In a film about old photographs, titled (nostalgia) and accompanied by a retrospective, diaristic, first-person voice-over, Frampton’s personal history and recollection of affect are central, even though he limited his acknowledgment of these considerations carefully over the course of the work. In his “Notes on (nostalgia),” Frampton wrote, “The narrative art of most young men is autobiographical,” so for (nostalgia), “it seemed reasonable to accept biography as a convention.” His choice of material was intentionally awkward in the way that a young artist’s formative work often is; he continues, “I found the photographs I chose . . . fairly embarrassing. So I decided, humanely, to destroy them . . . by burning. My biographical film would be a document of this compassionate act!” The work then becomes a kind of confessional study of the photographs themselves and their place within the burgeoning artist’s aspirations. “In the end, when I saw the film myself, I felt that I had made an effigy, at least, of this opaque young man’s life, even if I had not wholly entrained its sadness.”41 Elsewhere, Frampton describes the film as concerning the “lumps I took during those years as a still photographer in New York. . . . There are no triumphs described in the film. . . . It was quite dreadful. . . . My predicament was that of a committed illusionist in an environment that was officially dedicated to the eradication of illusion.”42 Ultimately, Frampton played it both ways: His film work would challenge the conventions of photographic illusionism while also embracing them. Like Sharits, Le Grice, and other formalist filmmakers of the period, Frampton engaged the subjective register of art-making while partially destabiliz-

41. Hollis Frampton, “Notes on (nostalgia),” in On the Camera Arts and Consecutive Matters, ed. Bruce Jenkins (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015), p. 224. 42. Scott MacDonald, A Critical Cinema: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), p. 60.

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ing it, with the intent of undermining any impression of pure sentimentality or straightforward autobiography. All of these filmmakers were deeply skeptical of, in Sitney’s terms, “the subjectivist quest” to establish a “correspondence between the film-maker’s vision and his films.”43 As a result, Frampton and others devised original methods for destabilizing the conventional assumptions of authorial equivalency that dominated avant-garde cinema, by embracing obfuscatory techniques including formal misalignment, ironic shifts in tone, dalliances with narrative instability, and extrapolation to meta-commentary. In (nostalgia), Frampton’s displacement of sound and image ruptures an initial sense of transparency and triggers the film’s central effects of irony and distanciation. But the misalignment of sound and image is not the film’s only tactic for offsetting affect.44 As Frampton says, “What was most important of all was to sustain a certain kind of distance from that material,” so he riddled the film with unexpected distanciating effects that repeatedly undermine the viewer’s expectations of autobiography.45 Frampton knew that the playful questioning of autobiographical authorship was a key component of the gamesmanship of modernist art practice. Like Marcel Duchamp, James Joyce, Jorge Luis Borges, John Cage, and the other artists that Frampton often invoked, he engaged in the use of arbitrary framing structures, structural inconsistencies, rhetorical obstacles, and other aesthetic devices for blocking and undermining the expressionist one-to-one equivalency between the artist’s subjectivity and the inscription of his or her identity in the artwork (as opposed to the more immediately diaristic and direct work of Stan Brakhage, for example). This effect of purposeful distanciation and conceptual breakdown is central to (nostalgia) and the historical work in which it is engaged. In this regard, a much-discussed aspect of the film and a key factor in Frampton’s authorial displacement is his choice to use Michael Snow as his surrogate by having him read the first-person voice-over narration. For Frampton, having Snow (his friend and fellow filmmaker-artist) read his autobiographical script softened and distorted the confessional edges of the work. Frampton was particularly drawn to Snow’s “flat Ontario Scottish delivery”46 because of its quirky, nondramatic timbre. This meticulous and playful tempering of the film’s personal register was an explicit goal of the work: Frampton writes, “If there was to be any sort of personal revelation, that had to be balanced by an

43. P. Adams Sitney, Visionary Film: The American Avant-Garde, 1943–2000 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 379. Sitney argues here (as I do) that (nostalgia) proves Frampton’s location within a paradox in which he dismissed the psychological version of autobiographical equivalency between an artist and his work while also embracing it, such that he “is having his cake and eating it too” (p. 379). 44. Frampton also describes one image that is never seen, shows one image that is never described, and includes one found photograph. 45. MacDonald, A Critical Cinema, p. 62. 46. Ibid.

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obscuring of the same person that proceeded at the same rate.”47 Still, however distorted, obscured, or muted the film’s autobiographical voice may sound, it is nevertheless one imbued with authentic personal involvement and undeniable affective interest. As Rachel Moore has recently written, (nostalgia), a film “struc- tured by fire . . . replicates both the urgency and the decay that makes getting a grip on the passage of time so fraught.”48 Therein lies (nostalgia)’s melancholy sense of loss, of time past, of youth spent, of the insufficiency of images to stop time, a set of associations that likely triggered the unexpected “sadness” that caught Frampton by surprise when he viewed the film after its completion. Frampton (and Le Grice) maintain a robust and explicitly stated skepticism about film’s (and photography’s) capacity to convey subjectivity and selfhood in any direct, unproblematic way. However, this does not suggest that their films should be defined as exclusively or purely anti-illusionist works. They are hybrid experiments embedded with powerful, if severely tempered, indexes of somatic contingency, human affect, and personal history. (nostalgia), like Little Dog for Roger, functions as a two-tiered investigation into the representational challenges of autobiography on the one hand and the formal limits of illusionist representation on the other.

Little Dog for Roger: Le Grice’s Home Movie and the Ideological Critique of Illusionism Both a theorist and a filmmaker, Malcolm Le Grice has frequently articulated the goals of his formalist film practice in explicitly ideological terms. For Le Grice, his principal purpose is to demystify the illusionist conventions that undergird commercial cinema by radically heightening the viewer’s awareness of the medium’s constitutive materials. Of all the filmmakers that I discuss in this essay, he is the most doctrinaire and prescriptive in terms of the political objectives of his particular brand of New Formal filmmaking: “What Hollywood desperately tried to hide—the material basis of the medium—in order to retain an illusion that the spectator was inside the scene of the narrative, I . . . tried to stress. This attention to the material simultaneously disrupted illusion and established a new basis on which artistic experiment in the medium could be built.”49 However, there is room even here, in the most austere formalist and materialist filmmaking practice, to find significant traces of personal reference and affect. In Little Dog for Roger, Le Grice converted strips of timeworn, small-gauge home-movie film into an abstract collage of found footage. Using an artisanal approach to image transfer, Le Grice remediated an amateur film of a family at

47. Ibid. 48. Rachel Moore, Hollis Frampton (nostalgia) (London: Afterall Press, 2006), p. 4. 49. Malcolm Le Grice, “Art in the Land of Hydra-Media” (1998), in Experimental Cinema in the Digital Age (London: BFI, 2001), p. 301.

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Malcolm Le Grice. Little Dog for Roger. 1967.

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play by recontextualizing it as pieces of serial still images encased in celluloid and surrounded by the physical attributes of photo-chemical film (including sprocket holes, frame lines, and film grain). Like the transformation that Sharits performed on his moving-image footage in Piece Mandala, Le Grice drastically reframed existing filmstrips into series of still images that occasionally slip from concrete materiality into “illusionist” motion. However, Le Grice’s method of reproduction was unusual: Rather than using standard postproduction laboratory technologies for his highly plastic transformation of appropriated imagery, he chose a much more eccentric, amateur technology, including a crude makeshift contact printer (made from a “converted, old projector”) that continually amplifies the film’s mechanical processes, material idiosyncrasies, and physical flaws.50 To make Little Dog for Roger, Le Grice transferred pieces of 9.5mm film to 16mm film by placing them directly above raw film stock and exposing them to light, while holding them in place (or moving them) with his hands, a film claw, and/or pieces of glass. In the finished work, we see the resulting transposition of strips of film, placed in an array of positions over a flat illuminated plane, which coalesce into blurs of movement, slurred articulation, and jittery registration. Through this willfully primitive process, Le Grice makes his audience aware of the film’s dual materiality as both still and moving images, depending on the projection technology or mode of photographic access. The homespun nature of Le Grice’s setup allowed him to intensify the imperfections of the materials more eas- ily, because his technological platform repeatedly exhibits its limitations (e.g., rather than having a smooth mechanical motor to advance the film, at times it is obvious that he is advancing the film through the printer by hand). Over the course of Little Dog for Roger, we observe different iterations of heavily manipulated, semi-legible, and roughly transferred imagery that is also over- loaded with scratches, chemical blotches, and other signs of physical deterioration. The film’s numerous layers of contact printing, chemical processing, and physical corrosion set up a field of play with figuration and abstraction in which we can occasionally discern aspects of the original photographic content, including a sequence of a body in motion, or a still frame of a dog frozen in midair, while still seeing the sprockets in the middle of the filmstrip (perhaps the most extreme material eccentricity of 9.5mm film), layers of heavy scratches, or spots of chemical breakdown. In the transfer/printing process, Le Grice frequently modified the speed of the profilmic movement, sometimes reprinting single frames many times, creating crude freeze-frames and stop-motion effects as well as extensive repeti- tion, looping, and upside-down printing. In terms of the content of his original home-movie materials, only fleeting fragments are visually legible: Le Grice often obliterates the illusionistic imagery of this amateur film in a haze of reprinted sprockets and frame lines in which indis-

50. “This film was printed by me on a converted, old projector, printing 9.5mm direct onto 16mm. It caused so many difficulties in the printer/projector that the resultant film referred very strongly to the various aspects of celluloid, sprockets, scratches, and projection.” Le Grice, “Real Time/Space” (1972), in Experimental Cinema in the Digital Age, p. 158.

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tinguishable landscape details slide by hastily, almost imperceptibly. In other moments, through the flurry of printing, reprinting, and layering of the film materials, we clearly see an image of a woman petting a dog, even as the original film jitters awkwardly upward and downward (like an old TV set with an unstable vertical-hold setting). The Pathé brand logo is recognizable at times between the original frames of the 9.5mm film. Bits of black leader fill the screen, then the original home movie enters again, but in negative, and upside down. At times familiar images reappear, having been reprinted twice, first from 9.5mm to 16mm, and again to 16mm. Layers of film overlap and slide sideways across the film plane, resulting in a ghostly effect of synthetic depth achieved through multiple expo- sure. Eventually, referential content rises to the surface of the work: We see a woman chase a dog across an English landscape that is punctuated by an old stone bridge. The canine does tricks, jumps for treats, and grabs onto the leash as she swings it around lightheartedly. This motion repeats numerous times, as does the footage of the small spotted dog running across a damp bog (through the extensive use of loop printing). Near the end of the film, we see the young boy clearly for the first time. He runs after the dog, and his image pauses in mid-motion while the film freezes intermittently in the gate of Le Grice’s makeshift contact printer. We see the boy happily running, then stopped in midair with his hands towards the sky, as if immobile in time, motionless and secure in an innocent moment of childhood bliss. The soundtrack includes fragments of popular wartime songs, which together form a patchy, abstract sound collage that is historically congruent with the visual material at hand, while also providing a sympathetic sonic approximation of the disconnected, incomplete visual array of the work. In his appropriation and modification of found footage, Le Grice’s work suggests a new detail for this discussion of New Formal Film because of its undeniable historicity, its function as historical index. In this regard, he alternately demystifies and re-mystifies the illusionism of the image, using a method of interpolation and visual analysis that shares some similarities with the visual strategies of fragmentation and destruction used by Sharits and Frampton described above. The material base of Le Grice’s found-footage imagery is 9.5mm film, an obscure, outmoded, and virtually inaccessible (and largely unprojectable) format of small-gauge celluloid. Like its visual content, the film’s material basis is a relic that carries with it the inescapably nostalgic associations of obsolescent domestic technologies. In conjunction with this innate material nostalgia, Little Dog for Roger also parades for its viewers an evocative and sentimental mode of film portraiture, a homemade amateur family movie of a young boy playing with his dog on a lovely sunny day in the country. Despite the material interventions and radical modifications that Le Grice has employed to obfuscate visual access to his original home-movie footage, an index of the filmmaker’s childhood remains powerfully inscribed in the text. The “Roger” of the film is the young Le Grice himself. How could any viewer, including the filmmaker, reduce such evocative images to pure materiality? This film, to bor-

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row Vivian Sobchack’s phrase, gives us “the charge of the real,” transmitting a heavily modified visual reiteration of a childhood idyll.51 Contrary to Le Grice’s statements on the film, one critic described it as “almost lyrical.”52 Almost without fail, Le Grice has framed Little Dog for Roger, one of his most influential and well-known films, as a critical act of materialist filmmaking in which he used only “vaguely nostalgic” material.53 Recently, Noam Elcott has challenged Le Grice’s explanations of the work, recognizing an underlying paradox in his artisanal experiment in found-footage formalism. Elcott argues that “in Le Grice’s many program notes and artist’s statements on the film, he invariably marginal- ized the content. . . . And yet an unavoidable nostalgia permeates the work at every level.” Elcott also observes an inherent nostalgia in its material basis and “technological contingency.” He sees the film, in fact, as a kind of recording of a performance, “a self-reflexive and lyrical documentation of that transfer” of one amateur film gauge onto another.54 In a footnote to his essay, Elcott includes a fascinating exchange with Le Grice in which the filmmaker confesses that the film in fact communicates a nostalgic feeling that he had not intended or of which he had not been aware: “Well—I thought it was about film as a medium and material— scratches, sprocket holes, dirt, slippage in the projector, blank screen, gaps in the sound-track—I forgot that one of the boys was me, the other was my brother, the young woman was my mother—now dead—and behind the camera was my father—now dead— . . . the dog was mine.”55 Le Grice’s displacement of himself onto another fictive character, here named “Roger,” functions, like Frampton’s sublimation of selfhood onto the speaking voice of Snow, as a strategy for personal distanciation and distortion of authorial identity. Yet in both cases—and in Sharits’s use of montage and color sat- uration to transform the likeness of his own body in Piece Mandala—these strategies only partially disguise the photographic content and historical indexes lay-

51. For Sobchack, the ontological uniformity of fiction film’s diegetic spaces is sometimes rup- tured by moments of documentary directness, as in the famous rabbit-hunting scene in Rules of the Game (1939). I suggest that a parallel effect takes place in numerous examples of formalist cinema, in which a clean system of modernist intellection is disrupted by moments of historical indexicality and autobiography. See Vivian Sobchack, “The Charge of the Real: Embodied Knowledge and Cinematic Consciousness,” in Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), pp. 258–85. 52. David Curtis, Experimental Cinema: A Fifty-Year Evolution (New York: Dell, 1971), p. 185. 53.“Little Dog for Roger is made from some fragments of 9.5 home movie that my father shot of my mother, myself, and a dog we had. This vaguely nostalgic material has provided an opportunity for me to play with medium of celluloid and various kinds of printing and processing devices. The qualities of film the sprockets the individual frames the deterioration of records like memories, all play an important part in the meaning of this film.” http://www.luxonline.org.uk/artists/ malcolm_le_grice/little_dog_for_roger.html. 54. Noam Elcott, “Darkened Rooms: A Genealogy of Avant-Garde Filmstrips from Man Ray to the London Film-Makers’ Co-Op and Back Again,” Grey Room 30 (Winter 2008), p. 16. It might be suggested that a similar kind of transfer-performance is at work in (nostalgia). 55. Ibid., footnote no. 47, p. 34.

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ered throughout the work. As such, the charges of history, contingency, and somatic presence ultimately provoke an almost Bazinian awareness of the filmstrip’s capacity to contain affective traces of the past, “no matter how fuzzy, distorted, or discolored.”56 Lastly, Le Grice’s film could be understood in metaphorical terms, as a study of the fallibility, fragmentation, and alteration of visual recollection and affective memory, all of which are heightened by the material traces of the vanishing, obsolescent, amateur technology that brought it into being. Though highly modified and radically distorted, Le Grice’s reconstruction of his childhood diary nevertheless displays snippets of autobiography, flashing glimmers of the innocent past of a young boy not yet troubled by the philosophical and political challenges of visual representation.

Either/Or Thinking: Cinematic Paradoxes of Material and Its Illusions Most analyses of the systematic, formalist turn of avant-garde film in the late 1960s and ’70s have presented the filmmakers as antagonists in a fight against illusionism, a naive, retrograde, bourgeois deception in which we viewers imagine that the flickering patterns of grain are in fact not mediated representations of the world but the world itself. Though these films worked with and challenged many different versions and formulations of photographic realism, illusionism, or transparency, they did not necessarily commit to any position or polemic in this debate. In some cases, such as Little Dog for Roger, while the filmmaker may have articulated a particular political program (being the most doctrinaire anti-illusionist of the group of artists discussed in this essay), the text may in fact encourage, to a reasonable degree, variant readings. Fellow London Co-op filmmaker Stephen Dwoskin wrote of Little Dog for Roger that, “whether Malcolm likes it or not,” it is “a film romance.”57 Collectively, these filmmakers did not demonstrate that illusionism is hollow, meaningless, or politically retrograde.58 Rather, they toyed with it as a totality, a field of media in which seeming opposites—material and illusion; index and plasticity; author and artifice—interact in dynamic interface and heteroge- neous hybridization. These films by Sharits, Frampton, and Le Grice, however severe they may seem in their formalism, do not collectively enact a full-bore assault on representation or a purist distillation of filmic ontology. They engage in something signif-

56. André Bazin, “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” in What Is Cinema? Vol. 1, ed. Hugh Gray (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), p. 14. 57. Stephen Dwoskin, Film Is: The International Free Cinema (Woodstock: Overlook Press, 1975), p. 179. 58. For a critique of the history of political imperatives within the ideological critique of illusionism, see Jonathan Walley, “Experimental Cinema’s Elusive Illusion,” Moving Image Review & Art Journal 2, no. 2 (2013), pp. 239–50.

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icantly more ambivalent. Peter Wollen suggested in 1981 that the foundational critical assessments of this formalist turn in avant-garde film history ignored some of its most important ambiguities, arguing that there is at least one alternative interpretative possibility (specifically regarding the North American work): “New American Cinema was not necessarily concerned either with ‘metaphors of mind’ (Sitney) or with ‘film as film’ (Le Grice) except as one aspect of its development—a development, moreover, which was not simply towards an end-point along a line of progressive ontological purification.”59 For Wollen, the reflexive element of these films does not define them so much as it describes one aspect of their shared inflection. In 1973, in conversation with Frampton, Sharits antici- pated Wollen’s critique when he stated that he was “not taking a hardline conceptualist epistemological approach” but was simply interested in “a more formal form.”60 We can even reconsider Le Grice in this context of revisionist histo- riography as demonstrating flashes of expressive Romanticism, after noting that his materialist tendencies still allow for a significant seepage of affect, historical reference, and autobiography. From within the interpretation that I have presented here, this trio of the New Formal Film galvanizes Wollen’s revisionist historical taxonomy of the postwar avant-garde in suggestive ways. First of all, it should be noted that over the course of their multifaceted work in the period at hand, all three of these artists worked in diverse mixtures of media, including hybridizations of film, performance, photography, sound art, and conceptual art.61 In fact, it might be suggested that these filmmakers share a greater conceptual proximity to the heteroge- neous, performative, and hybrid forms of art in the 1960s than dominant interpretations have allowed. Thus, these experiments in the New Formal Film could also be understood, at least partially, as extensions not of the modernist strategies of purification associated with Clement Greenberg and Michael Fried but of those of intermedial expansion and the “theatricalization” of art in the 1960s, the celebrated subject of Susan Sontag’s “One Culture and the New Sensibility” (1965) essay

59. Peter Wollen, “The Avant-Gardes: Europe and America,” Framework 14 (Spring 1981), p. 10 (author’s emphasis). 60. Hollis Frampton, “Interview with Paul Sharits” (March 1, 1973), in Vasulka and Weibel, Buffalo Heads (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008), p. 280. 61. Sharits was associated with Fluxus and produced a number of drawings and Conceptual works in the spirit of the movement. In addition, he exhibited many of his films as loops within installa- tions and as sculptures of “frozen film frames.” Le Grice is a painter, computer artist, and art theorist as well as a filmmaker. In addition, many of Le Grice’s film projects also incorporated elements of expanded cinema, slide projection, live performance, and improvisation, including Horror Film 1 (1971), Threshold (1972), After Leonardo (1973), and Principles of Cinematography (1973). His Love Story 3 (1972) was a collaborative film-performance work in which Sharits performed alongside Le Grice’s film elements. Frampton was a photographer, Xerox artist, theorist, sometime performer, and even a Conceptual humorist of sorts. His performance work A Lecture (1968) was a live, multimedia event in which Michael Snow read aloud a script that Frampton had composed.

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and the target of Fried’s famous scorn in “Art and Objecthood” (1967).62 Wollen attributes the influence of John Cage, Fluxus, and other related artists and movements to tendencies of New Formal Film that “combined a strong element of semiotic reduction (absurd or minimal signifieds, ‘literalness’) with a strong element of semiotic expansion (mixed media, movement out of art museums into public space, lack of any painterly purism).”63 Similarly, Fluxus artist George Macuinas, in his critique of Sitney’s foundational essay, posed related objections to the essen- tializing and teleological aspects of the young critic’s “Structural Film” category in contradistinction to “minimalist” and “conceptual” developments in experimental music, visual arts, and cinema.64 In Piece Mandala/End War, (nostalgia), and Little Dog for Roger (and potentially many other films associated with the formalist turn of the 1960s and ’70s), layered behind carefully constructed effects of distanciation, conceptualism, and abstraction are the explicit manifestations of personalities, biographies, and emotional histories, many of which have evaded critical historicization. Ultimately, a latent paradox looms within some of the most rigorous, seemingly detached works of the historical avant-garde in which a reflective subjectivity has left a virtual atlas of per- sonality and affect hidden behind an illusion of structure. As a group, these films, like many formalist, Minimalist, and systematic works from this period of film history, collectively remind us that displacement, sublimation, and distortion of the author’s voice were core strategies of high-modernist practice common to an array of twentieth-century media forms and art movements.

62. Susan Sontag, “One Culture and the New Sensibility” (1965), in Against Interpretation and Other Essays (New York: Picador, 1966), pp. 293–304; and Michael Fried, “Art and Objecthood” (1967), in Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), pp. 148–72. 63. Wollen, “The Avant-Gardes: Europe and America,” p. 9. 64. Macuinas, “On ‘Structural Film’ (by P. Adams Sitney),” p. 349.

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