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 . He said, “No, that is another Morgan Fisher. What is ?” I was disappointed that he could not play the keyboard part of “,” 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. Standard Gauge has another, equally important subject: a locus of subjectivity as embodied in the persona of Morgan Fisher, filmmaker and narrator.

Standard Gauge begins with a scrolling title giving an account of the way that a width of film, 35mm, was established as an industry standard that has endured over one hundred years. After a title card, nothing appears on the screen but a white void, the most austere possible establishing shot, if such a conventional term can even be applied. Fisher’s voice begins its narration from no place in particular, and he speaks in the first person: “The first time I ever handled 35mm motion picture film was in the summer of 1964.” He confesses his irresistible attraction to 35mm film and defines the term “short end” before any recognizable object appears on screen. When something appears, it is revealed to be a length of a motion picture print (specifically, the leader of a reel of La Chinoise) enormously magnified and backlit. The end of the second paragraph of the narration answers the question of the picture track. The question of the sound track – Who is Morgan Fisher? – remains.

The Morgan Fisher of the narration is clearly an educated person and a great fan of the movies. He has worked in the film industry, and yet he is not entirely a part of it. He knows who Bruce Conner is, but the technicians with whom he deals do not; he also knows that Helge is not the name of a German philosopher. He has arrived on the scene of production rather late. The great factory that is the Hollywood studio system continues to churn out motion pictures, but it does not function as it once did. In a series of more or less demeaning jobs, Fisher serves an apprenticeship for a position that may no longer exist. He expresses his affection for the work of Edgar G. Ulmer, a Poverty Row director who made the best of the limited resources at his disposal. Ulmer exemplifies the director as craftsman, one who has a sense of pride in his own work regardless of its social status, and who has convictions about the power of motion pictures to tell stories without condescension or cynicism. Fisher implies that these convictions have become more the exception than the rule, and evidence of them can be found most often in unexpected places. He ends the narration by mentioning a great film that does not enjoy a respectable reputation, The Honeymoon Killers.

Standard Gauge acknowledges that it owes its very existence to the film industry, and that independent filmmakers work at the sufferance of this industry which supplies them with materials, but which does not concern itself with whether they continue to produce films. Executives in Rochester or Tokyo or Leverkusen regularly decide to discontinue emulsions or film stocks, and everyone must accept their decisions. All individuals, irrespective of their status or ambitions, must cope with such indignities justified solely by economics. Considered in this context, Standard Gauge is an answer to two important questions: first, how to express chagrin at the ruthlessness of change in the film industry, and grief at the passing of cherished institutions and technologies, without indulging in a resigned nostalgia; and second, how to have some sort of productive relationship with the film industry, to be a filmmaker who is also a fan, but who has a critical attitude, even though no individual act, however decisive, has any effect on the relations of production that make all films possible.

Standard Gauge’s main compositional strategy rehearses an opposition between image as site of the impersonal or industrial and writing as site of individual expression. Images have a long history of being made and reproduced by machines; they can also be read by machines; and in the age of robotics, machines can now act upon what they “see.” This is not the case (thus far, at least) with writing beyond the level of the purely instrumental. Any text written by a machine reads simply as a description, a list of instructions, or a recombination of the elements already programmed into the machine. Images can exist and proliferate without consciousness, but writing in any complex sense cannot. There is always a trace of subjectivity, the grain of the voice, and this aspect of writing troubles the project of mechanization. The ideal of a mechanical literary text has yet to be achieved, though there has been a well-known attempt that later assumed a special importance for Fisher: the work of Raymond Roussel, whose impersonal compositional strategies were admired by the Surrealists, and in a sense made the literary modernism of the nouveau roman possible.

After a hiatus of nineteen years, Morgan Fisher returned to filmmaking with ( ) (2003), a departure from all his previous work. Fisher abandoned autobiography, self-portraiture, voice-over narration, even the use of the camera, in order to pursue the ideal of a practice that is purely mechanical. Consisting entirely of insert shots from narrative motion pictures, ( ) is constructed according to a pattern which appears random, yet adheres to a rule. Fisher devised this rule, but does not reveal it, either in the film or in his writings about it.

In narrative films, inserts are generally close-ups of anything but a human face. They contain information that cannot be transmitted in dialogue or in any of the other conventional figures of film editing, (e. g., master shots or two shots). Inserts have a fairly marginal presence in narrative films; they do their work best when they are hardly noticed, but the codes of narrative are present within them. Shots of money, weapons, hands, cards, dice, calendars(to mention only a few examples) serve as a sort of narrative shorthand. If, as in the aphorism of Godard, all that is necessary for a certain kind of movie is a girl and a gun, then inserts provide the gun. In ( ), inserts are isolated from their original contexts and become a series of details without any characters to see them, without any story to give them specific meaning. Fisher performs a kind of liberation for the lowly inserts, and brings to our attention their simple beauty.

The autonomy Fisher grants to individual shots in ( ) and the rule he uses to construct his film have an historical precedent in Raymond Roussel’s treatment of words in his writing. Roussel considered words not as a means of expression, but as concrete entities that yielded narration when he applied what he called his procedure. For Fisher, shots generate films; for Roussel, words generated texts.

Roussel’s rule for composing texts was not obvious from the finished works, but he revealed some of his secrets in the posthumous How I Wrote Certain of My Books. He cited an example from his novel Impressions of Africa, the plot of which was generated by two near-homophones that have two distinct meanings:

les lettres du blanc sur les bandes du vieux billiard

[the white letters on the cushions of the old billiard table]

les lettres du blanc sur les bandes du vieux pilliard

[the white man’s letters on the hordes of the old plunderer]

For Roussel, the problem or puzzle of the text was how to establish a logical connection between the first phrase and the second. In filling the gap between them, Roussel wrote other phrases, which in turn suggested more homophones. Using Roussel’s procedure, simple words and phrases could yield very strange results; for instance, règle de l’art (rule of art) may have become règle de lard (lard ruler) in Impressions of Africa, and chapelet (string of beads), chat pelé (depilated cat) in his later novel Locus Solus. Previously written texts became a fund of potential double meanings that provided the basis for subsequent texts. By obeying a difficult but arbitrary rule, Roussel wrote an invented world while avoiding conventional problems of inspiration. He did not have to empty his mind to produce automatic writing. He found the potential for it in language itself. Roussel’s texts were also virtually bereft of autobiographical detail. They expressed nothing. Roussel removed himself as a persona from the scene of writing, and thereby achieved an unprecedented kind of objectivity. The locus of meaning, if such texts can be said to have one, cannot be in the author, but must be in the words themselves.

Roussel wrote in a way that could be described as mechanical, and Fisher seeks an analogous way of making films. Narrative films in the most literal sense are made by machines, yet they work to make spectators forget the machines and be carried away to a fictional world of thought and expression. With ( ), Morgan Fisher has produced a film not only made by machines, but also mechanical in its construction. It is composed of fragments of narrative films, but it is decisively non-narrative; each fragment is loaded with meaning, but in combination the fragments do not lead spectators to any single meaning that can be agreed upon. The inserts of ( ) remain concrete, autonomous and mysterious. By obeying a difficult but arbitrary rule, Fisher has invented a world, neither fictional nor documentary, without recourse to montage, and without a conventional locus of meaning. ( ) approaches the ideal of a film void. It expresses nothing.

My essay on Morgan Fisher’s films began as a text for his 2002 retrospective at the Neuer Aachener Kunstverein in Germany. Unfortunately, due to budget problems, the exhibition catalogue was not published. I then reworked the essay as a preface for a collection of Fisher’s writings, another book that has not come out. Excerpts of the text were used as program notes for Standard Gauge: The Films of Morgan Fisher at Tate Modern in 2005. This is the first appearance of the complete revised version of the essay. at 2.6.10 Pos About Me William E. Jones Internet searches turn up many spurious references, due to my common name. I attest that I am not a dancer; I am not Canadian; I don’t write fiction; I have never run for Governor of California; I am not a chastity belt designer; I don’t believe in UFOs; I don’t teach at Cambridge University; I was never Secretary of the Navy; I did not serve in the Confederate Army; I have no connection to Johnny Appleseed; I am not a member of the New Zealand Master Monumental Masons Association; I cannot speak Welsh; I was never mayor of Bootle; and I’ve never threatened anyone with a sword. View my complete profile ted by William E. Jones