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Light Moving in Time: Studies in the Visual Aesthetics of Avant-Garde Film

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Light Moving in Time: Studies in the Visual Aesthetics of Avant-Garde Film Preferred Citation: Wees, William C. Light Moving in Time: Studies in the Visual Aesthetics of Avant-Garde Film. Berkeley: University of California Press, c1992 1992. http://ark.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/ft438nb2fr/ Light Moving in Time Studies in the Visual Aesthetics of Avant-Garde Film William C. Wees UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS Berkeley · Los Angeles · Oxford © 1992 The Regents of the University of California To my mother, Florence Myers Wees, and to the memory of my father, James Frank Sherman Wees. Preferred Citation: Wees, William C. Light Moving in Time: Studies in the Visual Aesthetics of Avant-Garde Film. Berkeley: University of California Press, c1992 1992. http://ark.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/ft438nb2fr/ Preface As other writers have shown, the mainstream of film theory and criticism offers several modes of analysis suited to the study of avant-garde film. In the Introduction, I mention a few examples that seem most noteworthy. On the whole, however, these critical approaches seem ill-equipped to examine the specifically visual aspects of avant-garde film. Perhaps this is due in part to innate differences between critics' discursive thought and film artists' "visual thinking," but surely it is also due to theoretical presuppositions accompanying what Martin Jay has called "the anti-visual discourse of 20th century French thought," which has profoundly influenced film theory since the 1960s.[1] My goal is not to critique that discourse but to open (in some cases, reopen) lines of inquiry suitable to a pro-visual discourse, in which avant-garde filmmakers are already engaged and to which film theorists and critics should be able to make significant contributions of their own.[2] I will return to this issue in the Introduction, and each succeeding chapter will elaborate one or more of its implications. By emphasizing the visual aesthetics of avant-garde film, I have avoided the tangle of historical and theoretical issues involved in defining the term avant-garde and applying it to film and other media. For my present purpose, experimenting with the medium and opposing the dominant film industry suffice to make a filmmaker avant-garde—though I readily acknowledge that there are more rigorous ways of defining the term, just as there are other terms (for example, experimental, underground, visionary, ― x ― personal, poetic, pure, free, independent, alternative) that have been applied to the films I call avant-garde.[3] More to the point, the filmmakers discussed here were selected not because they can be labeled avant-garde, but because they took advantage of the avant-garde spirit of experimentation and opposition to explore the visual dimensions of film. They are, one might say, visual artists by choice and avant-garde only by necessity. They are also artists with well-established reputations within North American avant-garde film. In fact, I have limited my detailed discussion to the work of a few major figures (for reasons explained in the Introduction); consequently, I have left out many fine filmmakers—including some from whom I have learned a great deal about looking at and thinking about avant- garde films. I expect to write about other avant-garde filmmakers in the future, and I will be delighted if other writers draw upon the arguments set forth in this book to discuss filmmakers I have not included. May a provisual discourse on avant-garde film flourish! Another matter requiring comment is the use of frame enlargements (most of which I made myself) to illustrate passages of films. Although every effort has been made to reproduce the complete frame, it was impossible to avoid slight variations in size and shape introduced in the process of going from film frames to photographs to reproductions on the printed page. Moreover, not only were most of the original images in color rather than gradations of gray, but they were never intended to be seen as photographs in the first place. At best, frame enlargements are faint shadows or slight, fossilized imprints of the film's living, luminous presence on the screen. They may jog the visual memory of readers who have seen the films projected, but for readers who have not seen the films, they can do little more than hint at what the films really look like. Finally, although many of the films discussed here have soundtracks, the aural experience they provide is not examined in detail. Certainly this is an injustice, not only to the films in question but also to the avant-garde film movement in general, which has produced many examples of complex and evocative uses of sound and sound-image relationships. To do justice to the aural aesthetics of avant-garde film, though, I would have to adopt a different critical approach, one applicable to a different channel of transmission, a different mode of perception, and (on the whole) a different selection of films for close inspection. That prospect remains open and I hope inviting to other investigators. For me, however, vision and the visual aesthetics of avant-garde film demand prior consideration. ― xi ― Acknowledgments For going out of their way to assist my research, I want to thank Louise Baudet, Jordan Belson, Herman Berlandt, Stan Brakhage, Corinne Cantrill, Elfriede Fischinger, William Moritz, Michael Snow, John Whitney, Sr., and Mark Whitney. Ernest Callenbach at the University of California Press showed an early interest in this project and encouraged me to stick with it during the long time between its inception and completion, and I must thank Marilyn Bacon Wilderson for her excellent copyediting as well as the press's anonymous readers, whose comments helped me to shorten and sharpen my presentation throughout. My wife, Sylvia Marshall Wees, also read parts of the manuscript and provided extremely helpful criticism. Further help has come from the following institutions and organizations: The American Federation of the Arts, Anthology Film Archives, Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Centre, Canyon Cinema, La Cinémathèque Québécoise, Le Cooperative des cinéastes indépendants (Film Film), Media Studies Incorporated, The National Gallery of Canada, Pacific Film Archive, and The San Francisco Poetry-Film Workshop. Through McGill University I have had resources for renting and analyzing films, as well as opportunities to offer courses on avant-garde film and profit from the questions and comments of my students. The staff of McGill's Instructional Communication Centre have been unfailingly helpful. The university also assisted my work on this book by granting me a sabbatical leave and by providing research funds through the Faculty of Graduate Studies and Research. ― xii ― I am indebted to the following organizations for providing frame enlargements: La Cinémathèque Québécoise (James Whitney's Dwija and Wu Ming ) and The National Gallery of Canada (Michael Snow's « [Back and Forth ] and La Région Centrale ). Scientific American granted permission to use an illustration adapted from "Eye and Camera," by George Wald (August 1950). Earlier versions of parts of this book have appeared in print as follows: "The Cinematic Image as a Visualization of Sight," Wide Angle 4, no. 3 (1981): 28–37; "Prophecy, Memory, and the Zoom: Michael Snow's Wavelength Re-viewed," Cinétracts 14–15 (1981): 78–83; "Before 'Lucifer': Preternatural Light in the Films of Kenneth Anger," Cinétracts 17 (1982): 25–31; "Visual Perception, Medium Specificity, and the Metaphor of the Camera Eye," Millennium Film Journal 19 (1987–88): 12–21. Stan Brakhage kindly gave permission to quote from an unpublished letter to the author. ― 1 ― Introduction The artist has carried the tradition of vision and visualization down through the ages. In the present time a very few have continued the process of visual perception in its deepest sense and transformed their inspiration into cinematic expression. —Stan Brakhage, Metaphors on Vision From the beginning, avant-garde filmmakers have insisted on the visual nature of the film medium. "The image must be everything," said Fernand Léger.[1] Man Ray described Emak Bakia (1926) as, "purely optical, made to appeal to the eyes only."[2] The scenario for The Seashell and the Clergyman (1928), said Antonin Artaud, was "based on purely visual situations whose action springs from stimuli addressed to the eye only."[3] For Hans Richter, film was "visual rhythm, released photographically."[4] Dziga Vertov said his goal was to produce "a finished étude of absolute vision."[5] Germaine Dulac campaigned tirelessly for, in her words, "an art of vision . an art of the eye."[6] Comparable pronouncements appear throughout the history of avant- garde film, but I have singled out one by Stan Brakhage for the epigraph to this introduction because it not only reiterates the avant-garde's commitment to "an art of vision" but locates the source of that art in "visual perception in its deepest sense."[7] I propose to take this assertion literally and examine its implications for avant-garde film in general and the work of Brakhage and a few of his contemporaries in particular (without implying that the filmmakers I have chosen to discuss are necessarily the "very few" to whom Brakhage alludes). On the one hand, then, there is the avant-garde's traditional emphasis on vision, on film as "an art of the eye." On the other hand, there is the study of visual perception, the science of the eye. My goal is to bring both approaches to seeing—the cinematic and the perceptual—into a single discourse on vision and the visual art of avant-garde film. Among early attempts to relate visual perception to film aesthetics, probably the best known is Rudolf Arnheim's Film as Art . Arnheim ― 2 ― invokes the perceptual theories of Gestalt psychology but does not apply them in great detail and does not give any special attention to avant-garde film.[8] Similarly, Slavko Vorkapich drew upon Gestalt psychology in a series of lectures, "The Visual Nature of the Film Medium," given at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1965 and extensively summarized in Film Culture .[9] Only the first few lectures dealt specifically with perceptual issues, however, and, again, avant-garde film is barely mentioned.
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