An Impersonal Autobiography in 1968 the First

Morgan Fisher: An Impersonal Autobiography In 1968 the first American to receive wide publicity for a sex-change operation published Christine Jorgensen: A Personal Autobiography. The book’s title means to suggest that outside the realm of television appearances and photo opportunities, there is a real person with a private life. Inadvertently the title also suggests that some sort of autobiography (less predictable and bathetic, perhaps) other than a personal one can exist. When I first met Morgan Fisher, I mistook him for a pop music celebrity. In all innocence, I asked him if he had ever been a member of Mott The Hoople. He said, “No, that is another Morgan Fisher. What is Mott The Hoople?” I was disappointed that he could not play the keyboard part of “All the Young Dudes,” but I soon discovered that he was quite expert at playing himself. Over the course of a career having nothing to do with the music business, he has refined a persona, an indelible but rarely examined part of the body of work signed Morgan Fisher. This persona emerges, somewhat paradoxically, from an artistic project committed to excluding traditional notions of self-expression. In a note on his film Cue Rolls (1974), Fisher outlines certain elements of a style he would make his own: mechanicalness, impersonality, disproportion, misdirection, verbosity, redundancy, obscurity, and monotony. He goes on to assert that these elements are necessary in that they are dictated by external circumstances. Personal preferences or judgments of taste have nothing to do with the matter. Such constraints give Fisher very little room for creativity, and that is precisely the point. In this way, the work can be said to generate itself. Of course, the work does not generate itself in any strict sense. There is an artist to make it, and in more or less oblique ways, that artist remains present. In the case of his early work, Fisher sought to absent himself from the work while consistently making representations of himself within it. The Director and His Actor Look at Footage Showing Preparations for an Unmade Film (2) (1968) seems to teach a lesson: that cameras take their best pictures with the least interference from humans. Paul Morrison, the actor of the title, takes a number of photographs around picturesque Cambridge, Massachusetts. The pictures rehearse a number of whimsical clichés, and as a result, it is not always clear what they are intended to describe. Fisher, the director of the title, restricts himself to taking pictures of Morrison in the act of photographing. His task is to record an activity, and his success is complete on his own limited terms. There is also a third view of the scene, that of the cinematographer who makes a record of the recording. From the first shot, this view reveals the great disparity in height between actor and director. This instance of disproportion assumes the status of a running gag. Fisher towers over Morrison in every shot, and in an awkward, comic moment, he even perches on a high stack of pallets to photograph Morrison. In The Director and His Actor… Fisher stages his first self-portrait and lets it be known that the director has a sense of humor about himself. A number of Morgan Fisher’s films from the 1970’s can be considered self-portraits in the most obvious way: he appears in his own works. Fisher presents himself performing the tasks of production or speaking about their technical aspects. He confines himself to revealing prosaic details. There is very little sense of who he is as a person, aside from what can be gathered from the tone of his voice and his outward appearance. Production Stills (1970), one of Fisher’s most complex films, is a self-portrait than is not necessarily a self-portrait at all, a work which deflects questions about who is the author of it, and by extension, casts doubt on established notions of authorship in the collaborative medium of film. The synchronous sound track consists of the sounds of the film being made. Unlike almost any other film production, all of the crew members are free to speak while a shot is being taken, and there is no script. The action consists of a still photographer taking black and white Polaroids of Fisher and the crew at work. As soon as the development of a Polaroid is complete, it is placed in front of the camera, a massive Mitchell. The Mitchell’s field of view is restricted to a mere four by six inch area of celotex, but by virtue of the stills placed there, it is possible to see a fairly extensive part of the sound stage. An intimidating array of old-fashioned equipment has been assembled for an exceedingly modest production. Fisher takes only one Polaroid, the last, so that the still photographer, Thom Andersen, may also appear in the film. Fisher does not dictate the details of the other stills, and thus does not control how he is represented. The control over the image, which is normally considered the responsibility of the director, has been surrendered to Thom Andersen. What the task of directing entails in such a situation is open to question, and Fisher has suggested that his role on the film is more properly one of producer, rather than director. Production Stills is an example of what Fisher refers to as avoiding the responsibility for inventing. Picture and Sound Rushes (1971) includes synchronous sound footage of Fisher explaining the premise of the film that is being shot. He improvises his dialogue from notes to which he refers while the camera is rolling. At predetermined thirty-second intervals, the film alternates between sync sound, wild sound over black, MOS or silent footage of Fisher speaking, and silence over black. After the segments of silence over black (called the “null case” in the film) Fisher’s reappearance comes as something of a relief. In the sync sound footage of 240x (1974) Fisher is seen making photocopies of a black pattern (the design of Maltese cross movement, a part which produces the intermittent motion of the pull-down in a film projector.) Fisher punches holes in the copies so that the images can be properly registered. He then shoots the 240 individual sheets on an Oxberry animation camera. The title refers to these sheets in two ways: “240x” may mean 240 times or (in animator’s shorthand) 240 frames. The film ends with a ten second coda, the 240 frames of animated footage that is the product of the work previously represented. Fisher’s only video, Protective Coloration (1979), breaks with the decorum established in the films. It does not show Fisher at work, and it imparts no information about film production. It has the aspect of a private amateur experiment. Shot in one long take, it consists of a frontal view of Fisher seated at a table. Behind him is a black void. He wears “scrubs,” the surgeon’s operating room uniform. He does not speak. An unseen assistant passes him brightly colored pieces of protective gear one by one, and he places each on the appropriate part of his body. Pauses allow time to consider Fisher’s discomfort. With the addition of a respirator, his breathing becomes audibly labored. He places goggles on his face, but it is obvious that by this point, he can no longer see. He has difficulty finding his own eyes. Two layers of gloves obscure his hands and forearms. As this test of physical endurance continues, the visual characteristics defining Morgan Fisher become more and more difficult to discern. The action has no climax; there is no release from the accumulated layers of latex and rubber. The video ends with its director in full gear, almost obliterated and barely looking human. Protective Coloration is Fisher’s last self-portrait in moving images, and he uses the occasion to stage his own disappearance. Standard Gauge (1984), the culmination of a whole period of filmmaking activity, is Fisher’s first film with a subject outside itself, and marks a shift from self-portraiture to autobiography. Apart from two shots of Messiah of Evil (another director’s film which, in its uncorrected anamorphosis, recalls the sight gag of The director and his actor…) Fisher’s image does not appear in Standard Gauge. The sense of Fisher’s presence in the film comes mainly from the soundtrack. Whereas in previous films Fisher’s voice may exhibit the impersonality, verbosity, redundancy and monotony that are his stated goals, in Standard Gauge his voice recites a carefully prepared text, a narration belonging more properly to the literary genre of autobiography. The narrating persona of an autobiography (the “I” of the text) is a fictional device that in its way speaks the truth. “I” may resemble the person doing the writing in many respects, but there is inevitably some disparity, even in texts written with the purest of intentions. This gap between person and persona can become wider with time, as memories fade and the stories based upon them assume different forms. The “I” of the text speaks with greater precision and is capable of greater synthesis than any person speaking spontaneously. A lifetime of experience can be distilled in a few well-chosen sentences. It is only a matter of choosing them. Standard Gauge has a subject outside itself in the sense of the film representing something extrinsic to the circumstances and materials that generated it. The film functions as a string of synecdoches, tiny parts standing in for whole movies, whole genres, even a whole industry.

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