102 Anthology Film Selection Committee: Ken Kelman, James

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Anthology Film Selection Committee: Ken Kelman, James Broughton, P. Adams Sitney, Jonas Mekas, Peter Kubelka, 1970. Photo: Stephen Shore. Courtesy of Anthology Film Archives.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey.2005.1.19.102 by guest on 02 October 2021 The Search for the Invisible Cinema

SKY SITNEY

The starting point of this paper is a photograph in a family album: an image of my father, P. Adams Sitney, seated to the left of Jonas Mekas and Peter Kubelka in a highly unusual looking theater that appeared to have peripheral blinders between the seats, evidently eliminating the possibility of interaction and distraction from the sides. While my curiosity about the theater, which its designer Peter Kubelka called the Invisible Cinema, was temporarily satisfied by various familial anecdotes heard throughout the years, it wasn’t until I became a graduate student in cinema studies that I grew interested in learning more than surface details about it. I was surprised to discover that only a few reviewers and theoreticians had written on the subject, and disappointed to learn that such documents as program notes, financial records, and blueprints no longer existed. The theater operated for four years, from 1970 through 1974, at Anthology Film Archives, which was first located at Joseph Papp’s Public Theater on Lafayette Street in New York City. In the expression of its designer, Kubelka, the theater’s “revolutionary and controversial design was based upon the notion that like the other machines that a film depends on—cameras, developers, printers, editing machines, and projectors— the room in which one sees a film should also be a machine designed for film viewing.” That it should “make the screen [the viewer’s] whole world, by eliminating all aural and visual impressions extraneous to film.”1 The Invisible Cinema was constructed by Giorgio Cavaglieri and funded by the great art patron, Jerome Hill. Only a couple of years after the construction of the theater, Jerome Hill died of cancer at the age of sixty-seven. With two years left on the contract to Joseph Papp and without Jerome Hill’s support, the founding members of Anthology found themselves unable to pay the rent. In 1974, only four years after the construction of the theater, Anthology Film Archives lost its lease and moved to 80 Wooster Street. No attempt was made to reconstruct the Invisible Cinema, and Joseph Papp quickly converted it into a more conventional design. What follows is an oral history of the Invisible Cinema based on interviews that I

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey.2005.1.19.102 by guest on 02 October 2021 conducted with the founding members of Anthology Film Archives: P. Adams Sitney, Jonas Mekas, Stan Brakhage, and Ken Kelman.2 I did not have access to either James Broughton, who was peripheral, or Peter Kubelka, who was essential, and depended on other sources for Kubelka’s voice.

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Jonas Mekas Jerome Hill was like a Renaissance kind of man; he was a composer, a painter, an architect, and a ﬁlmmaker. But in the ﬁrst place he loved modern art; he loved cinema. In 1968, Jerome’s close army friend, Burt Martinson, was the chairman of Joe Papp’s Public Theater. After they got the landmark Astor Library on Lafayette Street, they began transforming it into theater spaces. Martinson asked his army friend Jerome if he wanted to use some of the space in the building. So Jerome called and asked me if I wanted to do something with it. I said, “Yes, why not.” It happened that Peter Kubelka was in town at that time, so we all got together: Jerome, Peter, and myself, and we sort of worked out in principle the idea that later became Anthology Film Archives.

Letter to P. Adams and Julie Sitney from Jonas Mekas April 25, 1968 Dear P. Adams and Julie, . . . Greetings from rainy New York . . . Jerome came up with an idea to put an [avant- garde film academy] in the Joe Papp building . . . While Peter was still in town, we all went to the building and we decided that it is the place where Peter’s old dream of the EGG theater could come to reality. So, that’s what it will be. The work is going already, and the theater should be ready by the first of January 1969 . . . Peter gave all the instructions of his dream to the architects, and left for Vienna. Jerome is super- vising the construction. The idea is to make this theater (120 seats) into the first avant-garde film repertory theater. There will be a board of say five or six film “authorities” (say, Kelman, Brakhage, Kubelka, Sitney, and myself) who will decide which films should be admitted to such a repertory theater. Once we decide on films, the prints will be acquired and kept in the library, for repertory screenings. There will be one director, one coordinating director who will do the programming, prepare notes, and guide the promotion—in close cooperation with the five program directors. Our first idea was to invite Peter to be the coordinating director. But we gave up the idea. It would be too difficult for Peter himself, knowing how choosy he

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey.2005.1.19.102 by guest on 02 October 2021 is. And then, he has to make his ﬁlms; he shouldn’t be tied down. Third reason: Stan said that if Peter would run such a place, he wouldn’t have anything to do with it. Otherwise Stan is completely behind the idea. So we sat and sat thinking about this matter and decided that you are the best man to run such an institution . . . Now this will affect your travels. You’ll have to make up your mind. You’d have to come back a few months before the opening of the theater so that you’d have time to prepare the whole thing . . . So, I’m enclosing $100—which is to go out and drink plenty of Irish beer and take your time and make up your mind and send a telegram to Jerome Hill . . . End of page, end of letter. Beginning. Love to both, Jonas.

Peter Kubelka The concept of Invisible Cinema has nothing to do with the special aims of Anthology Film Archives. I conceived the cinema in 1958 in Austria, after I made my Schwechater ﬁlm, and I attempted several times to have it built, but never succeeded. After several years I had almost forgotten the project when happy circumstances brought Jonas Mekas, Jerome Hill, and me together. Jonas said that we would have a chance to build a projection room for Anthology Film Archives. I remembered my old project and said I know exactly how to build such a projection room. After only four years the cinema was taken apart due to economic circumstances and that was a very severe blow. But it was built and the idea is there.3

P. Adams Sitney Kubelka couldn’t stand Giorgio Cavaglieri, the theater’s architect. It was one of my many difficult jobs to go between the two. Cavaglieri had decorative ideas; he was interested in putting up marble here and there. He wanted the theater to look nice, and Kubelka wanted everything to be devoted to the efficiency of his vision. Cavaglieri built the seats but was having a great deal of difficulty figuring a way to build the hoods. Actually, first they were to be entire booths, and that would have taken up a great deal of space. One of the big problems was how to get the maximum number of seats into the moderate space. If it had been done strictly according to Kubelka’s plan, we probably would have been left with about thirty seats. That is, the seat in front of you was to be at about the level of your knees, the booths being completely around you. All of this takes up space and we had a very limited piece of space to work with. So, I was trying to keep it at one hundred seats, and we ended up with ninety-something. Raimund Abraham, Kubelka’s architectural adviser, suggested bringing in this carpenter from Rhode Island—a woodworking guy—

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey.2005.1.19.102 by guest on 02 October 2021 who built the hoods. So, Cavaglieri had completed his job with a set of seats in a row and then the hoods came afterward.

Peter Kubelka I gave this concept of cinema the name “Invisible Cinema” to underline the fact that an ideal cinema should not be at all felt, should not lead its own life; it should prac- tically not be there. The cinema as built for Anthology Film Archives was compara- tively small in size, seating less than one hundred people. Ceiling, walls, seats were all covered with black velvet; the floor was covered with black carpeting. Doors and everything else were painted black. In the whole room, only the screen itself was not completely black. Consequently, the screen and the film projected on the screen were the only visual points of reference. In a cinema, one shouldn’t be aware of the architectural space, so that the film can completely dictate the sensation of space. Due to the blackness of the room, there is no back reflection whatsoever on the screen.

Ken Kelman My own feelings about the Invisible Cinema were that it worked in a certain way. It tended, I think, to discourage talking. Not necessarily rattling papers, or heavy breathing and coughing. In fact, the theater, I felt and still believe, made it worse. It was a very hard theater, the shells were over you and noises bounced around a little, but this is a minor point, I mean it’s negligible. I think it discouraged people from talking to the person next to them, and in those terms of counteracting certain disturbances the theater largely succeeded. Where it was a little annoying for me was that the black hood overhead had a shine. That was a little distracting, because right in front of me was this shine that didn’t exactly reflect the movement of the screen. Anything more or less at eye level, you’re going to see, and so the Invisible Cinema was not invisible. But certain things in it were, like the people; they were invisible, and hopefully inaudible as well.

Peter Kubelka [In the darkness of the theater] a color film has much stronger saturated colors; it radiates like a church window, and the blacks in a black-and-white film are really black, and the white does not have any tinting from the reflection of colored walls, as so often occurs in so-called normal cinemas. The cinema had, of course, no curtains in front of the screen, as, unlike most film spaces, it was not conceived as an imitation of theater. In order to completely eliminate everything but the screen from the visual field,

The Invisible Cinema, 1971. Courtesy of Anthology Film Archives.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey.2005.1.19.102 by guest on 02 October 2021 special seats were designed which shielded sight to both sides and made it impossible to see one’s neighbors. The rows were elevated so that the row in front of the beholder did not interfere with the sight lines of the screen. A wooden structure rose above the heads of the people in the row in front and bent forward so as to hide the head. The shell-like structure of the seat completely shielded the upper body from neighbors and people in back and front, and it also had an acoustic purpose. . . . Similar to hearing devices used in the Second World War they were simulations of big ears which concentrated the sound coming in directly from the screen and subdued sounds coming from other directions in the room, thereby creating a maximum of silence within which the sound from the ﬁlm would be undiluted.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey.2005.1.19.102 by guest on 02 October 2021 P. Adams Sitney There were things about the theater that were interesting. For instance, it was designed to have a full-time theater manager sitting in the theater during every single projection with an automatic focus control and an automatic sound control independent of the booth, plus a telephone to the booth, so that there should be no excuse for the ﬁlm ever going out of focus or for the sound not being right. Many, many ﬁlmmakers endured miserable screening conditions and because of that, the idea of someplace where there would be focus at that time seemed very important.

Stan Brakhage There was always a joke that the seats got very erotic in the Invisible Cinema. I suppose that one could have sex on the ﬂoor or ceiling of these little boxes, or play with someone’s feet and hold their hand, and so on, without anyone knowing. But gen- erally, people really had a sense of drifting in a black space, a black box, and black ahead of you, nothing visible except the screen. So there you were in this velvet box watching these jewels of ﬁlms.

P. Adams Sitney There were big cast iron columns in the room—the room was quite small—so we had to make certain that the throw of the screen didn’t interfere with the columns. Kubelka insisted that these columns were just confectionary. I spoke with Jerome, and he said, “Well, if you damage them, they’ll have to be taken down.” So, I went in at about six o’clock in the morning with a giant sledgehammer and decided that I was going to break the confectionary columns. I gave one an incredible bang and the building shook like a giant bell . . . my arms were in agony. The sledgehammer went bouncing out of my hands . . . the columns were staying.

Barbara Rose In many respects, Anthology represents a new maturity of American film conscious- ness. Dedicated to the premise that film now deserves that kind of self-awareness which distinguishes the modernist arts, Anthology shows some two hundred or so films from a permanent collection in a five-to-six week repertory cycle, permitting the serious student to re-examine a given work many times. But Anthology is more than a film museum; it is also a unique cinema with a unique viewing facility that have caused as much controversy as the highly selective group of works assembled . . . I find the viewing situation at Anthology the best I have ever experienced, but that is

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P. Adams Sitney The raking of the seats was rather steep, but we had to have enough room under the ceiling for the projection booth above the last seat. So we compromised here and there. For instance, if a person stood up in the last row, they would block the booth and their shadow would appear on the screen. One of the things we immediately realized was that human torsos are not at all on a single scale. Some people had very long legs while others needed six or seven pillows to see the screen.

Ken Kelman The seats never struck me as being too small. I suppose my friend Pinkwater would have been the great test for that, though we never thought to bring him in when he was four hundred pounds. But Kubelka himself was a fair test, and if he thought the seats were okay, I don’t think they could have been all that narrow. I have long legs, I had no problem with my knees getting skinned; it may have been a little close, but not all that much.

P. Adams Sitney There were a couple of problems that Kubelka never admitted. One very serious problem had to do with the nature of air conditioning. When one sat in the enclosed seats, one generated a great deal of heat. If you stood up the room felt like a refrigerator, but as long as you were sitting in that small box it was very hot. It was an extremely soporiﬁc problem, one became very drowsy.

Ken Kelman The dozing off phenomenon, I believe, if I’m not mistaken, can be attributed to a psychological rather than a physiological effect. I think that people in the isolation of this little booth—a kind-of womb-like thing—sort of had a tendency to drowse off a little more than they would have normally. Of course, a claustrophobe would also have certain problems. I can’t begin to address the psychological quirks of people involved in sitting in that kind of situation. It may have reminded some people of a baby carriage with a little black hood coming over you. Some people may have had an infantile regression at the time and started sucking their thumb and going to sleep for all I know. But I don’t know if there was any science, I don’t think anyone ever

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Stanley Eichelbaum The Invisible Cinema is a fascinating and eerie chamber, like no other movie house we’ve seen. I asked Mekas how it was possible for anyone to find his way into an all black theater. He replied dryly that no latecomers are admitted. The house lights are extinguished immediately before the program starts. He further disclosed that the museum’s ground rules called for no subtitled version of any films. “Everything is shown in its original state,” he said, “nor do we allow 16 mm prints of works made in 35 mm. It took us two years to find the prints we have, the whole idea is to respect the filmmaker as an artist and show the film as it was intended to be shown. Subtitles destroy the rhythm and form of a film. We’ve had complaints, but we’re not concerned with the audience. We’re interested in film.”5

Tony Hiss A few days later we went to a press review and luncheon party for Anthology Film Archives . . . Mr. Kubelka himself has designed the theater, we were told, and he also cooked the lunch and made the wine served with the lunch. We found this impres- sive—especially after we tasted the lunch, which was a hearty collation of cold roast veal, cold roast pork, a strange and delicious casserole, an Austrian cake called Guglhupf (google-hupf), and an unusual and delicious cheese . . . We decided to talk to Mr. Kubelka. He has short blonde-and-gray hair and bright-blue eyes. “The theater was designed to ensure absolute privacy to everyone,” he told us. “In most theaters, you hate the other people because their noise interrupts your concentration. Here you like the others. You hear them, but everything is subdued.” We told him we were even more interested in his food and he looked gratified. “The meat is very simple,” he said. “The pork is cooked in its own fat and with caraway seeds. The veal is roasted with butter, no spices, so the ﬂavor of the meat will be retained. The wine is simplicity itself . . .”6

P. Adams Sitney Opening night was an enormous party, by invitation. We had a big bar in the lobby, and everybody was given a ticket when they entered because not everybody could go into the cinema at the same time. So for instance, we would call out for yellow tickets, and only those people could go into the theater for the half-hour demon- stration. It was a wonderful bash. A lot of ﬁlm people, a lot of public celebrities. It ended hilariously with a ﬁght. We had a rule that you couldn’t go into the cinema

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey.2005.1.19.102 by guest on 02 October 2021 after a ﬁlm started. A guy named Cohen—a big, burly, bearded guy, who was also a drunk—tried to force his way into the theater and Kubelka told him not to. He pushed Kubelka, but Kubelka was a New York State Judo champion at the time, so he held his own quite efﬁciently. Cohen got so mad that he went up to a waiter—an elderly man carrying drinks around, and Cohen smashed the tray of drinks out of his hand and pushed him around—the waiter might of gotten cut on the glass. At which point Kubelka, and several other people in the theater, picked this enormous guy up, took him out the door, and literally threw him into the street.

Peter Kubelka When you were seated, only your eyes were shaded from your neighbor, approxi- mately from the shoulders on, but you could touch your neighbors, and since there was not a complete partition, you always felt there was someone on your side. You knew that there were many people in the room, you could feel their presence, and you would also hear them a bit, but in a very subdued way, so they would not disturb your contact with the ﬁlm. A sympathetic community was created, a community in which people liked each other. In the average cinema where the heads of other people are in the screen, where I hear them crunching their popcorn, where the latecomers force themselves through the rows and where I have to hear their talk which takes me out of the cinematic reality which I have come to participate in, I start to dislike the others. Architecture has to provide a structure in which one is in a community that is not disturbing to others.

Stan Brakhage For some films, the Invisible Cinema was really wonderful. For hand-painted Méliès, for example, it was the greatest, or for any kind of color animation: Larry Jordan’s or Harry Smith’s. I liked it very much with my hand-painted films such as The Wold Shadow. For other films, I didn’t think the theater was so good. I didn’t care for it with films of my making such as Scenes from Under Childhood. I can’t say exactly why, but that it is a more stalling movie that does not fit this enclosed sense. There was a nervousness about it. The minute they tell me I can’t pee, for example, I suddenly have the sensation that I have to. If you get up and leave, you can’t get back in. So, there you are, parted between the vision you are seeing and bodily functions. Quite a strain I thought, in that sense. I don’t want to make it sound like I’m running it down, it was the most unique theater ever architected and certainly Peter deserves enormous credit for it.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey.2005.1.19.102 by guest on 02 October 2021 Ken Kelman I had in fact, one of the most unfortunate in a way experiences I’ve ever had in the Invisible Cinema. Jonas showed Ernie Gehr’s film, Still, to be voted on. After he screened it there was utter silence. We felt as if we had been watching an empty screen. I didn’t understand why Jonas had even shown the film to us at all. Now I am not blaming that on the theater, but it happened in the Invisible Cinema. A year or two later, it must have been the last time we ever met, or near, at the Chelsea Hotel, in the worst kind of screening conditions—it was the afternoon, in a hotel room, the light was coming through the windows, the blinds weren’t very good—Jonas screens Still again. At the end of the screening I said, in effect, this is one of the greatest films ever made. The point, of course, is that we had first seen the film in the ideal circumstances and it was nothing, and the second time we saw the ﬁlm, in the worst possible conditions, it was one of the greatest ﬁlms ever made.

P. Adams Sitney The Invisible Cinema was dismantled in 1974, shortly after Jerome Hill died of cancer, because we couldn’t afford to stay at the Public Theater without Jerome’s support. When we moved to 80 Wooster Street, Kubelka wondered why there wasn’t a question of the Invisible Cinema’s reconstruction. Quite simply, Jonas had nixed it; there was no money to rebuild it. For me it was sad to end the Invisible Cinema, for Jonas it wasn’t at all. Jonas was very much in favor of the move to Wooster Street, because it was an important step toward necessary independence.

Ken Kelman When we moved, rebuilding seemed like no issue at all. It was like there was no question. My own feeling is that the Invisible Cinema was primarily a manifesto and once the statement had been made, and it had been put down in the history books, it didn’t have to be made again.

Peter Kubelka The principle has not changed for me. Of course there were several compromises involved in the solution, which I hope will not be there in the next realization. Compromises such as exit lights to the side in front, which we could not eliminate because of building codes . . . It is a pity that the new location of Anthology did not seem to allow a new realization of the Invisible Cinema. But as I said, I am very con- ﬁdent that the principle has been proven correct and there will be not one but many

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Stan Brakhage Whatever the difﬁculties of the Invisible Cinema, it was a success because it created the idea of such a thing. Because of the extraordinary sacriﬁces of people like Jonas Mekas, it has an existence, a continuum—it doesn’t go away.

Jonas Mekas The Invisible Cinema was controversial, but it was also very exciting. It was an attempt to try something different in cinema and in theater design. We hired a publicity agent and there were a number of articles as soon as we opened, more or less announcements and descriptions, but there was no critical response as such for the theater . . . Our movies, what we were showing, were not for everyone; it was often experimental in nature so our audience was different. But those that liked it kept coming back because of the situation. Jerome was a visionary so he went for the design of the Invisible Cinema, nobody else would. If I were to offer it now, people would think I was crazy. It was the best situation for seeing ﬁlm. It was an idea that lasted three years. Dreams are very difﬁcult to repeat, and that was a dream.

Notes 1. Anthology Committee, “Anthology Film Archives,” Filmmakers Newsletter, February 1971. Spelling and punctuation have been standardized throughout all citations. 2. Interviews were conducted in 1998. 3. Peter Kubelka, “Invisible Cinema,” Design Quarterly 93 (1974): 32–36, 35. Subsequent Kubelka quotes from pages 32–35. 4. Barbara Rose and Edward Sittel, “Where to Learn How to Look at Movies: New York’s New Anthology Film Archives,” Vogue, November 1971, 70. 5. Stanley Eichelbaum, “Cinema in its Purist Form,” San Francisco Sunday Examiner, 17 January 1971. 6. Tony Hiss, “Talk of the Town,” New Yorker, 5 December 1970.

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