The istinction of Idioms: NOll-Industrial Film in Los Angeles

Curated by heir idioms were distinguishable, but not notably so; received model should t.hcn be supplemented with, David E. James and if fuller knowledge were extant it might be neces­ and in many case replaced by, one that would recog­ sary to recognize half a dozen dialects instead of the two nize the following: which the presence of the missions has given the appear­ ance of being standard. -the binary division between Hollywood and an -A.L. Ifilms have been generated not only macy of a tradition of similarly "avant-garde" film. by isolated artists, but also by social movements, micro-political identity groups, subcultures and so on, 1 4 • 8 : 0 0 who have found film useful or unavoidable in their own social self-production or self-articulation. 16mm 11:00 Furthermore, the films made by these groups have fre­ 16mm 14:00 quently been informed by other cultural practices (music, theater) more organically associated with 16mm 6:00 them. 16mm 11:00 16mm 34:00 -non-industrial films are often self-conscious about 35:00 both their other and their own otherness, and typical­ ly produce themselves, not as permutations of the for­ mal axioms of their antecedents, but by way of more Traced from French Surrealism and various experi­ or less explicit, more or less allegorically displaced, ments in abstraction (rather than from the commer­ envisionings of Hollywood and of their own relation­ cially successful German Expressionism or the explic­ ship to it. itly communist Soviet Constructivism), this tradition is supposed to have been brought here by emigres like Nowhere is the pertinence of these principles greater Hans Richter and Oskar Fischinger or reinvented here than in Los Angeles where, on the one hand, the by Maya Deren and Sidney Peterson, and since then industry all but totally permeates and frames con­ to have been self-producing and self-determining, sciousness and, on the other, urban decentralization unaffected by either the commercial film industry or has dispersed the various identity groups into isolated the wider social field. The formulation, "the precise sectors of the city, inhibiting theil' articulation. relation of avant-garde cinema to American commer­ Eschewing the missionary position, then, the present cial film is one of radical otherness. They operate in program attempts to sketch the alternative reading, It different realms with next to no significant influence assembles films from different historical periods in on each other'" bespeaks both the binary and the which d.ifferent groups, differently situated in respect autonomy of its parts. to industrial production, have used the medium for their own priorities and possibilities, but. all of them Thc prestige of this theory has resulted in the mislead­ entailing a reading of Hollywood! Marginals in the ing assignment of an ongoing plurality of popular industry, students, and visual artists; women and practices to alien and procrustean schemas-most gays, Blacks, Chicanos, and Asian-Americans; these egregiously, to the "high" end of the reductive "high­ and others have all imagined t.hemselves into being by low" seesaw. Sanctioning only the two languages of reimagining actual Hollywood films, the codes of Hollywood and the avant-garde, the critical missions Hollywood cinema in general, its materials and pro­ have ignored the half dozen (and more) other dialects duction methods, or the forms of social organization it of film, themselves not always comprehensible or even has sustained. audible to each other. As I have argued elsewhere, the

36 (Hmforum

Though preceded by numerous European European experimentalism, but also a Kenneth Anger's .Fi,·/,'U'ork!l (1947), but works, the U.S. experimental art film specifically feminist reworking of with a gay rather than a (proto)femini t begins as early in Los Angeles as any­ Hollywood genres, those of wartime nair agenda. It was followed by Puce Moment where," probably with Dudley Murphy's and the '40s women's fihTl." Combining (1940). also shot ill Hollywood. "a lav­ The SlYUl of the Cypress, made in 1921, the the fem1ne fatale character type of the ishly.colorl·(] evocation of th Hollywood same year as Paul Strand's 111anhatta. former with the locations, temporal now gone" (Anger's own words). In it. a Seven years later, the dialogue with the extensions, and exaggerated affect of the young pe n, apparently female but of industry was explicit and multi-leveled. latter, Meshes created a new American equivocal g nder, sorts through a num­ Combining live action and special effects, film language, even as Deren herselI cre­ ber of himmering gowns. Finding one Life and Death of 9413-A Hollywood ated a new cinema. With justice, the that fits h 1', she reclines on a couch, Extra (Robert Florey and Slavko film displaced its few predecessors to traris-fixca· in fantastic s If-projection, Vorkapich, 1928) employed an expression­ become recognized as the fonnding text justif. 'ng the designation the cl'edit' ist visual vocabulary to sketeh both the of the tradition of autobiographic~films afford her: the Star. The film is all that architectural fabric of the city and to cri­ in which women artists confront their remains of "a planned feature on the tique the human costs of its chief busi­ own objectification, as well as providing Hollyw d of UU? '20 ,'" a project that ness. The genre of narratives about the a matrix, no less for the '60s under­ Anger di pillc 'd into the lebration or lives of film folk, already well established ground than for '70s feminists. In her Hollywood Charlie Chaplin nevertheless interrogations of Hollywood genres in at l. C, Curti Harrington and Gregory secured it a commercial distribution. The the work of theoretical feminists like ~1arkopoulos, both films reflect the genre would continue to pass to and fro among various modes of production and indeed different media (it was especially important in nair novels of the late '30s like Nathaniel West's The Day of the Locust, 1939), down to the present; Jon Jost's Angel City (1977), Gregg Araki's Long Weekend (0' Despai1") (1987), and Robert Altman's The PlaYe1' (1992) are three of endless examples. As an industry calling card (and how various a hybrid genre that must be!), it served its purpose. Both Florey and Vorkapich went on to extensive industrial careers, one as a fea­ ture director, and the other as a maker of both his own experimental films (Moods of the Sea, 1942) and of experimental intcrludes in commercial features. Cameraman Gregg Toland, of course, shot the art-tilm-as-such, Citizen Kane, itself arguably the major influence olllvieshes of the Afternoon (Maya Deren, 1943). Laura Mulvey and Sally Potter which, strong homosexual underground in L.A. While Deren's husband and collaborator, at least in the latter case, eventually in the late '40s that was furni hed by Alexander Hammid was, like Vorkapieh, mutated hack into industrial production. the wartim accumulation of sailors ill a EUl'Opean experimental filmmaker the ar a and the em rging gay porn looking for work in Hollywood, Meshes' The artisinal restaging and rephrasing of industry, as well as Qy Hollywood'; OWll Dutch angles, moving p.o.v., and high­ selected elements of the Hollywood fea­ gay c()mmw1ity,~ While ubsequent usc contrast lighting suggest not only ture was picked up four years later in CtmJlmml on ptl{I,e 72 Distinction of Idioms cOlltinued was secularized in at least three forms: in From the allure of Hollywood, then, not Hollywood collaborations (e.g. Jordan even the severest aestheticism has been of the trance genre that Firewo'rks passed Belson on The Demon Seed); in light shows immune. While elsewhere Structural Film on from Meshes did not have a specifically at rock concerts (which continued on in either focused its metacinematic analytics gay inflection, the genre initiated by Puce the various stadia and nightclub visual on the material properties of the medium Moment did. The domestic drag film-fabu­ pyrotechnics that accompanied the muta­ or, when it considered specific historical lous improvisatOl'y masquerades in which tions in popular music, down to the pre­ usages, did so via texts which were cultural­ men played the personae of female sent psychedelia revival and the appropri­ ly remote (like Ken Jacobs' manipulations Hollywood stars---reached a radical maturi­ ation by the music video industry of visu­ of Canal Street or pre-Griffith footage), the ty in New York in the mid-'60s in the films al codes from the underground); and in outstanding Los Angeles practitioner of the of Jack Smith and Ron Rice, and Andy art-world installations involving film. All genre was thoroughly, though idiosyncrati­ ''''arhol's middle period (e.g. Hedy, 1965), three currents pass through and around cally, preoccupied with the industry. In a before j·eturning to Hollywood itself as gay the work of Pat O'Neill. series of films made mostly in the '70S, cinema became mainstream. Morgan Fisher enticed wallflowers hidden in A sculptor and also a member of Single remote cornel'S of studio apparatus to give After Hollywood found ways to tap the Wing Turquoise Bird, the city's premier up a rare dialectical booty. The quasi-scien­ '60s youth cultures, a process completed light show, O'Neill combined the two inter­ tific connoisseurship of films like Cu.e Rolls with Easy RidCT (Dennis Hopper, 1969), ests in his film work, where multi-layered (1974) was, however, only apparently it5elf an amalgam and appropriation of sev­ matting creates intensely sensual and com­ impersonal; as obsessive and integral as any eral underground genres, the boundary plex coloration and graphic design; the star-struck fan's, the infatuation that sus­ between avant-garde and industry became combination provided, more than the work tained it would at last openly speak its even more porous than before. Industrial of any other filmmaker, the vocabulary for name in Standard Gauge (1984), Fishcr's narratives about beats and hippies, civil the image manipulations in the most tech­ melancholy autobiographical masterwork in rights and peace workers demanded the nically sophisticated of contemporary which he does the medium in different voic­ simultaneous appropriation of the tech­ music videos: Since the autonomous beau­ es, but never loses sight of the fact that niques and motifs these groups had negoti­ ty of these effects tended to generate not they are all policed by the industry. ated in their own filmic self-production. As the economy and drive of narrative but a result, the period saw more formal and cycles of formal permutation, the works The priorities of Structural Film were simi­ thematic intersections and rcconfigurations uncommonly repay prolonged and repeated larly accommodated in a highly personal of film dialects than any other, at the same viewing, and so easily accommodate and way in Chick Strand's films of the same time that the restructuring of the studio indeed frequently imply the loop projec­ period. After her early poetic ethno-docu­ system allowed for the extremes of the two tion and material presence which installa­ mentaries, Strand's work coalesced into two production methods to be bridged in an tion supplies. main genres. The first consists of intimate unprecedented number of more or less inde­ portraits of women, conceived in what pendent feature productions. The results Such art world connections mediate became her signature trope: by pho­ were, on the one hand, the New Hollywood, O'Neill's dialogue with industrial culture, tographing her su bjects in motion, fre­ and on the other an increased popular but the latter is overtly inscribed in several quently back-lit, using a hand-held telepho­ currency for cultural experimentation of ways: in the frequency of his recourse to to lens in extreme close-up, Strand magni­ all kinds. Of the many forms this latter 35mm, the standard gauge which alone per­ fied the somatic responsiveness that Maya took, three will be addressed here: visual mits the precision of his matting; in the Deren had claimed as the great potentiality music; film in the art world; and the new traces of actual Hollywood film which edge of the body-as-apparatus, creating an Black cinema. or corner or, like the return of a repressed extraordinarily sensuous lyricism that con­ unconscious, appear beneath the most stantly dissolves into abstraction-a power­ Since the meeting-ground for the rapproche­ abstract patternings which somehow they ful feminist idiolect, however unfashionable ment was often rock music, the Southern shape; and in the trajectory of his career as its premises at the time. The second genre Californian tradition of visual music, which a whole. If the '60s appeared to suggest is made up of compilation films that surre­ had since the '30s sustained a highly specif­ that the mainstream would come to the alistically fragment and juxtapose found ic interface between the experimental and underground, in subsequent decades it footage, often foregrounding women's the industrial, developed new forms. more often seemed that the underground issues. Cartoon Le j\t1ou.sse is unique in Deriving from Oskar Fischinger (who could only survive by going mainstream. Strand's oeuvre in juxtaposing both styles, moved from experimental light shows in his Like others of his generation, O'Neill has and in fact pushes each to such an unprece­ studio in Germany in the '20s to Disney lately come to frame his projects in feature­ dented degree that the formal specificity of and animation for Fantmia in the '40s), the length for theatrical distribution, a histori­ the different found footage and the materi­ tradition of audio-visual spiritual synaes­ cal compulsion which can hardly be regret­ ality and grain of film are forced into visi­ thetics manifest in, for example, James ted as long as it produces epics like Water bility. The yoking of the several heteroge­ Whitney's Yantra (1955) and Lapis (1966) and Power. neous industrial and the avant-garde

72 dialects in such an unexpectedly paratactic Gronk, Harry Gamboa, and Patssi Valdez.' whole summari­ fUmforum montage has the impact-and the anxi­ Simultaneously wall-art and performance ly entitled Dis-inte­ ety- of a shotgun wedding. pieces, and consisting of the posting of gration, Environmental is an installation xeroxed advertisements for screenings of consisting of a video assemblage of outtakes Combining the scrutiny of Hollywood pro­ non-existent movies, these were at once and endclips from Pacific theater WWII duction methods instanced by Fisher and Dada critiques of the virtual exclusion of films projected across the gallery space the feminist reworking of Hollywood genres Chicanos from any position in cinema other onto another assemblage, one comprised of instanced by Strand is Julie Dash's than as consumers, and acts of cognitive home movie screens, stacked vertically so Illusions, a conspicuous example of the restructuring, totalized aestheticizations in as to approximate theatrical proportions, school of Black filmmaking which emerged which life as a whole was conceptualized as while on the opposite wall a domestic-size in the early '70s, especially around the cinema. In this latter, they were an intrigu­ television monitor plays an assemblage of Ethnocommunications program in UCLA's ing invocation of the native American total '50s TV commercials. Conjoining the film school. (The student film, of course, is cinema imaged by the great avant­ Yonemotos' concerns with the mass media yet another agora, where the tongues of garde/industrial film, Dennis Hopper's The saturation of the psychic environment, its many different traders are spoken.) Crafted Last MOv1£ (1971) (which is only appropriate specifically racist cast, and so its adversari­ to resemble studio films of the period, since his LAPD apologia, Co lOTS, 1988, was al position in identity micro-politics, Dash's fable of racism and sexism in such a porcine travesty of what a popular Environmental finds its own voice by wartime Hollywood produces in its best Chicano cinema might be). speaking through the voices of a history of moments (especially the scenes in the misrepresentration; but it also looks to a recording studio) concise yet multi-valent The Asian-American film-culture that also future about which nothing can be predict­ images that summarize the intersection of emerged out of the UCLA Ethnocommuni­ ed with certainty--except that it will be different mediums, different degrees of cations program and which was institution­ irreducibly polyglot. industrialization, and differcnt modes of alized as Visual Communications empha­ exploitation that comprise industrial cul­ sized working-class documentaries and his­ Notes ture, togethcr with the reticulations of torical recovery projects through the '70s. 1 P. Adams Sitney, Visiona:ry Film: The American Avant-Garde, second edition, (New York: Oxford class, race, and gender that subtend it. The After this period, video was increasingly University Press, 1979) viii. Though here I contest heroine's final determination to make films the medium of choice for vanguardist pro­ this position, Sitney's original formulation had tremendous heuristic power. that will restore Black people to the medi­ jects, reshaping the two components of the 2 If the present program were not limited to short mu~h um and to history-where previously they interventions considered here-the self-rep­ films, then a wider range of modes of' pro­ duction could be illustrated. In these notes, I have have only been illusions-is prophetic of resentation of marginal groups and their sometimes referred to apposite examples screened Dash's subsequent work and indeed the confrontation with their previous industrial at other points in Seral.ching lhe Belly oj lhe Beasl, such as Pat O'Neill's Water and Power. aspiration of her generation (vide Charles representation. The cheapness of video B The point is made in the two seminal essays on Los Burnett's career). It also expresses an eth­ made the former much more feasible, while Angeles lilm, Paul Arthur's "The Western Edge: Oil of L.A. and the Machined Image," (Millennium Film nic and perhaps class-specific attitude to the latter was transformed by the new abil­ JOl.rnal, 12, 8-28), and William Moritz, "Visual Music productive options; whereas other avant­ ity to sample old films on video to produce and Film-as-an-Art in California Before 1950" (in Arm and Paul Karlstrom, eds., The Edge oj Ameri.ca: gardes have accepted the marginal expo­ more or less modified collages that fore­ Moderni'l Art in CaliJornia BeJore 1950. Archives of sure offered by screening organizations like grounded submerged subtexts. The latter American Art/ De Young Museum, San Francisco, 1994). The present notes are deeply indebted to both Filmforum, Black filmmakers have typical­ became a key strategy in lesbian and gay essays and to other scholarship by both writers. ly sought mass distribution and, on occa­ cinema, instanced respectively by Dry Kisses 4 The former connection was made by J. Hoberman, "The Maya Mystique," The ViUage Voice 2B, no. 20 sions like the Blaxploitation era (which Only (Jane Cottis and Kaucyila Brooke, (15 May 1978) and by Paul Arthur, op. cit.; the lat­ bcgan in L.A. with Melvin Van Peebles' 1990) and Rock Hudson's Home Nlovies ter by Lauren Rabinovitz in Points oj Resistance: Women, Power and Polilics in lhe New YQ1'k Avant­ Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song) or the (Mark Rappaport, 1992). The possibilities of garde Cinema, 1943-71 (Chicago; University of combining both were displayed in the Illinois Press, 1991). P. Adams Sitney, who makes present, found it. the strongest case for Deren's reference to French remarkable Japanese-American macaronic, Surrealism, nevertheless notes the influence of Other ethnic groups have not so far been as Rea Tajiri's Histmy and llilemory. Kane's "regular shifts of perspective" (op. cit., 15). 5 Sheldon Renan, An Introducti<>n wthe American successful. If for Blacks music was the Underground Film. (New York: E.P. Dutton, 19(7), 108. vehicle of intervention, for Chicanos it has In Los Angeles, however, the Asian­ 6 See Richard Dyer, Now YOI' &e It: Sl:udies on Lesbian and Gay Film (Routledge: London, 1990), 111-17. been forms of theater and visual arts. American interrogation of industrial culture 7 See Paul Arthur, op cit. for a discussion of the relation between the heavily·machined "finish fetish" of sev­ Theater has informed successful featurcs has been most fruitful in Bruce and eral strands of Southern California culture and the like Zoot Suit (Luis Valdez, 1981) and the Norman Yonemoto's remakes of soap work of O'Neili and other independent lihnmakers. most splendid Chicano cinemas have been operas, commercials, and other genres, not 8 See "Interview: Gronk and Gamboa," Chi.mleurle No_ 1 (Fall 1976),31-:33. the formal and informal paintings on the of film, but of broadcast television. Their walls of the barrios. The varying forms of most recent project demonstrates the collu­ access allowed by the different mediums sion of both mediums in the social con­ were brilliantly registercd in the serics of struction of Japanese-Americans. Initially No-Movies made in the early '70s by one component in a gallery exhibition as a

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