Reframing Experimental Cinema by Jon Gartenberg (1985) The Black Maria Film and Video Festival celebrates the creative spirit of experimental/avant-garde/independent filmmaking. In taking its name from the Black Maria, Edison's revolving film studio built around the turn of the century, this festival also pays homage to the first motion picture pioneers.[1] The genesis of avant-garde filmmaking has been traced back to the work of modern artists of the 1920's who were drawn to the kinetic and plastic possibilities of the film medium.[2] Yet little attention has been directed to viewing independent filmmaking in the context of early cinema (ca. 1895-1908). I would like to explore in this essay the relationship between these two cinemas.[3] By contrasting early cinema practices to those of the avant-garde, some of the significant concerns of experimental filmmakers can be more fully appreciated. Conversely, early cinema benefits from the comparison. We can rescue it from the stigma of "primitive." Rather, early films should be appreciated as a cinema in which diverse and not unsophisticated visual strategies were employed to tell stories. Although experimental/avant-garde/independent cinema resists a simple definition, it is most frequently described in terms of offering alternative approaches to commercial filmmaking. It has been historically less strongly allied "to concentrations of economic and social power"[4] represented by the studio system of film production. Whereas commercial/mainstream/hollywood cinema largely adopts the illusion of reality in its filmmaking practices, experimental films confront this illusionism through manipulation of the conventional forms of storytelling. With the rise of Hollywood cinema around 1915, a factory-like system of film production emerged. Filmmaking style became more uniform.[5] The classical mode of storytelling predominated, in which edits were hidden and a smooth flow to the narrative asserted. In contrast, experimental filmmakers have always questioned this seamless narration in the commercial cinema. Beginning in the 1920's, avant-garde artists radically altered the conventional means of linking shots to tell a story. For example, extended perspectives across successive shots transform machinery in Ballet Mécanique (1924) into a Cubist experience. The Surrealists' desire to alter our experiences of everyday reality into a "dream aesthetic"[6] can be seen in the disrupting spatial juxtapositions and the ruptured linear continuity across shots in Un Chien Andalou (1929). Independent filmmakers have consistently resisted control by the commercial cinema over the means of production and exploitation of their films. Consequently, they have been able to sustain to the present day an enormous diversity of visual strategies to examine such problems as (dis)continuity, the illusion of depth, and the visual representation of subjective consciousness.
In early cinema, the means of visual representation were also variegated. In the first decade of motion pictures, filmmaking practices were not systematized. Motion pictures were not a dominant form of entertainment until the rise of the Nickelodeon around 1905, and production/distribution/exhibition practices were constantly shifting. The structuring of images in early cinema was frequently influenced by other sources of entertainment such as newspaper cartoons, magic lantern slides and the theater. Different filmmaking styles competed for domination, at times simultaneously.[7] For example, in The Life Of An American Fireman (1903), the rescue of the family is shown as a repeated action over two shots, first from the inside of the burning house and then from the outside of the house. In Foul Play (1906), two simultaneous actions are shown in the same shot from the privileged position of the spectator looking in on a split set, while in the same film simultaneous action is also divided into successive shots edited together. We can find in these early cinema practices the roots of approaches addressed by experimental filmmakers in later years. Continuity Early one-shot Lumière films traditionally have been seen as "primitive" and open-ended. However, recent analysis suggests that these films are carefully structured as self-contained, enclosed narratives.[8] For example, framing and action are carefully orchestrated to describe various processes from beginning to end, including destroying a wall (Démolition D'Un Mur, 1896), preparing a cannon for firing (Artillerie De Montagne: Mise En Batterie Et Feu, ca. 1896), and breaking apart coke (Carmaux: Défournage Du Coke, 1896-7). Like the Lumière films, avant-garde artists have also structured narratives around processes. Stan Brakhage's Window Water Baby Moving (1959) graphically depicts his wife giving birth, and Francis Thompson's N.Y., N.Y. (1957) portrays a day in the life of this metropolis, from morning until night. These multi-shot films radically transform realistic representation of these activities into intensely subjective experiences through use of such techniques as distorting lenses and rhythmic editing patterns. Films such as Andy Warhol's Couch (1964) and Michael Snow's Wavelength (1967) more nearly approximate the single takes of the Lumière motion pictures. In these films, a sense of closure is deliberately frustrated. In Wavelength, the primary action concerns the progress of a camera lens slowly zooming across an empty loft. Four vignettes with live characters intrude upon the frame, as if to divert our attention into these unresolved dramas. In Warhol's Couch, the combination of static camera, long takes, and seemingly random lovemaking of the protagonists as though the camera could be turned on or off at any time, imparts this narrative with an open-endedness. Seen from the perspective of the early Lumière films, these experimental films can be more fully comprehended for the specific ways they challenge or refigure traditional modes of visually expressing continuity and closure.
Depth When camera movement began to be used with regularity in early cinema around 1903, it intensified the kinetic power of the medium, expanded the field of vision, and exploited space. The use of camera movement in early film also enhanced the illusion of depth in the image. In order to bring the action in the field of vision to a closer view, alternative methods to editing were developed. Among these was a dolly in to a close view. Another technique combined a camera pan together with movement of the protagonists diagonally across the frame from the background to the foreground of the image in order to frame the characters in close-up at the end of the shot. The illusion of depth was most forcefully accentuated by mounting the camera on the front of a vehicle moving toward the background.[9] Ernie Gehr's Eureka (1974) calls into question this illusion of depth. From a film originally shot around 1903, he rephotographed and optically reprinted each frame eight times. The field of vision is taken from a camera mounted on a trolley traveling down Market Street in San Francisco.[10] Gehr's transformations attempt to reproduce in us the feeling of what it was like for early filmgoers to experience the movement of film down that street at the turn of the century. Gehr's filming/reprinting technique imparts a prolonged sense of duration to the voyage in depth (not unlike the effect of Wavelength, and creates an experience of staggered movement. This alternation between halting progress and frozen action creates a febrile tension between stillness and energy, and between depth and flatness, like the concerns in other Gehr films such as Serene Velocity (1970) and Mirage (1981). This interplay between flat space and depth is also evident in trick films such as Méliès' Le Melomane (1903).[11] In this early film, a telephone pole is transformed into a music clef -- three-dimensional space is converted into a twodimensional canvas. Yet whereas the intention of Méliès was to amuse, Gehr's film fundamentally questions the illusion of both movement and depth in cinema. Magic In early cinema, the discovery of stop motion enabled filmmakers to create the impression that people and objects can appear and disappear, multiply many times over, and undergo sudden transubstantiation. Like their early cinema counterparts, many avant-garde filmakers have been drawn to the "magical" qualities of cinema. But whereas Méliès and his contemporaries tried to hide the tricks which created these sudden changes, avant-garde filmmakers have been dedicated to manifesting the means of creating these effects. In this way, they contest the impression of an objective reality that commercial cinema perpetuates, and remind us of the artifice of the filmmaking process. In the avant-garde vein, Stan Brakhage has championed this seemingly unlimited potential of cinema to mediate photographed images through subjective consciousness. He has observed that.
By deliberately spitting on the lens or wrecking its focal intentions, one can achieve the early stages of impressionism. One can make... image movement by speeding up the motor, or one can break up movement, in a way that approaches a more direct inspiration of contemporary human eye perceptibility of movement, by slowing the motion while recording the image. One may hand hold the camera and inherit worlds of space. One may over- or under-expose the film. One may use the filters of the world, fog, downpours, unbalanced lights, neons with neurotic color temperatures, glass which was never designed for a camera, or even glass which was but which can be used against specifications, or one may photograph an hour after the film labs will guarantee nothing, or one may go into the night with a specific daylight film or vice versa. One may become the supreme trickster, with hatfuls of all the rabbits listed above breeding madly. One may, out of incredible courage, become Méliès....[12] Experimental works are suffused with images produced through a myriad of such techniques. To name just a few of them, these include distorting lenses (N.Y., N.Y., 1957), matting and superimpositions (Castro Street, 1966), and direct film processes (Mothlight, 1963, and Kaleidoscope, 1935). Forerunners of many of these avant-garde techniques can be found decades earlier in early cinema practices. For example, the silhouetted characters in The Four Seasons (1901) prefigure the work of Lotte Reiniger. The high speed photography studies of Marey and others beautifully capture birds in flight at many times slower than their normal rate of movement. This method imparts to these images an abstract effect not dissimilar to the strategy of avant-gardists to manifest through slow-motion the "hidden reality" of an object. Using sensitive film stocks, early filmmakers were able to expand the shooting time beyond the crepuscule hour, and to capture the illumination from electric lights at night. This produced the effect of images filled with outlines of the shapes of buildings, not unlike the play with form which inspired the avant-garde artists of the 1920's and expressed in films such as Ballet Mécanique. In College Chums (1907), How Jones Lost His Roll (1905), and Do You Know This Family? (1905), anagrams flutter back and forth across the screen,[13] presaging the text and image concerns of George Landow and other experimental filmmakers. Conclusion Both early cinema and avant-garde filmmaking can be seen as divergent from the practices of commercial cinema. Like early cinema filmmakers, avant-garde artists found different ways to approach such problems as continuity, depth, and the perception of the objective world. The purpose of this essay has been to integrate early cinema more fully into the discourse about avant-garde filmmaking. Seen from this perspective, avant-garde filmmakers did not so much invent new techinques as question and refigure the assumptions of the commercial narrative cinema. In conclusion, we may be reminded that.
Early cinema offers a number of roads not taken, ambiguities not absorbed into the commercial narrative cinema. But for the avant-garde these need not be seen as history's dead-end streets. They can be inspirations for new understandings of tradition and for new films.[14] -------------------------------------------------------- Footnotes 1. The historical & theoretical issues surrounding video are outside the purview of this article. Otis does not diminish the importance of video works to the festival. 2. See Lucy Fischer, "American Experimental Cinema: Breaking Away", in Circulating Film Library Catalog (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1984), pp. 143-155, and Larry Kardish, "International Avant-Garde Film: Scattered Pieces" in Ibid., pp. 157-165. 3. Several qualifcations are in order. We are not asserting that early cinema directly influenced the development of experimental filmmaking style. Nor are we stating that the intentions of early filmmakers were identical to the goals of experimental film artists. 4. Philip Drummond, "Notions of Avant-Garde Cinema, " in Films as Film (London: Arts Council of Great Britain, 1979), p. 9. 5. See David Bordwell, Janet Staiger and Kristin Thompson's forthcoming book, "The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960," on the development and institutionalization of the classic American filmmaking style. 6. Larry Kardish, "International Avant-Garde Film: Scattered Pieces," pp. 159-160. 7. See Cinema 1900/1906: An Analytical Study (Brussels: FIAF), 2 vols., 1982; Films before Griffith, John Fell, ed. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1983); Iris special issue on "Archives, Document, Fiction/Film before 1907," vol. 2, no. 1; Jon Gartenberg, "Vitagraph before Griffith: Forging Ahead in the Nickelodeon Era", in forthcoming issue of Studies in Visual Communication, vol. 10, no. 4, 1984. 8. Marshall Deutelbaum, "Structural Patterning in the Lumière Films," in Films Before Griffith, pp. 299-310. 9. See Jon Gartenberg, "Camera Movement in Edison and Biograph Films, 1900-1906", in Cinema Journal, Vol. XIX, no. 2, spring 1980, pp. 1-16. 10. See Morel Glick, "'EUREKA' by Ernie Gehr", in Film Culture, no. 70-71, 1983, pp. 113-118. 11. See Tom Gunning, "An Unseen Energy Swallows Space: The Space in Early Film and Its Relation to American Avant-Garde Film", in Films Before Griffith, pp. 357-359. 12. Stan Brakhage, "From Metaphors on Vision, " in P. Adams Sitney, ed., The Avant-Garde Film (New York: New York University Press, 1978), p. 123.
13. See Eileen Bowser, "Preparation for Brighton - The American Contribution, " in Cinema 1900/1906, vol. 1, p. 12. 14. Tom Gunning, "An Unseen Energy Swallows Space," p. 359.