FILM
- AS A -
SUBVERSIVE ART

EAT
(Andy Warhol, USA, 1963)
In this famous early Warhol film, the painter
Robert Indiana eats a mushroom for 45 minutes.
This ordinary act, due to the absence of other plot,
becomes an event; and proves that "real time"
in cinema (where we are used to condensation)
prolongs actions and is almost unbearable.    SC

THE DESTRUCTION OF
PLOT AND NARRATIVE

The dilution or rejection of conventional narrative and straight-
forward realism is the predominant tendency of contemporary art.
The  multi-faceted, fluid nature of reality as now understood can no
longer be subsumed in the certainties of linear narrative structures.

Since neither simplistic causality nor terms such as
"beginning" or "end" are any longer philosophically
tenable, it becomes increasingly difficult to tell a tale.

The narrative, as our academic critics conceive it, represents
an order, linked to an entire rationalistic and organizing
system, whose flowering corresponds to the assumption of
power by the middle class ... All the technical elements of
the narrative -- systematic use of the past tense and the
third person,  unconditional adoption of chronological
development, linear plots, regular trajectory of the
passions, impulse of each episode toward a conclusion,
etc. -- everything tended to impose the image of a stable,
coherent, continuous, unequivocal, entirely decipherable
universe. Since the intelligibility of the world was not
even questioned, to tell a story did not raise a problem.
The style of the novel could be innocent.  (1)

From Kafka to Beckett, from Joyce to Burroughs, from Proust
to Robbe-Grillet, there is an unbroken evolution towards vertical
rather than horizontal explorations -- investigations of atmosphere
and states of being rather than the unfolding of fabricated plots.
In an interview with L'Express, (2)  Ionesco referred to a play as
a structure of states of conciousness and added that there was no
longer a story, but rather "a progression by a kind of  progressive
condensation of states of mind, of a feeling, a situation, an anxiety."
 This may be another way of saying that -- through modern science and
philosophy --art once again returns to poetry and the significance of
poetic truth.  This truth does not deny the "story" -- it only robs it, as
Robbe-Grillet put it, of its character of "certainty, tranquility, innocence". (3)

This mature "uncertainty" -- so much more open to life than the dogmatic
authoritarianism of our forefathers -- now also extends to characterizations
and motivations of the story's protagonists.  The elegant characters created
by the older masters of world literature, the "full" explanations of human
behavior, the delineations of the character's past, are replaced by dimly-
perceived personages whose actions and motives remain ultimately as
unclear as they are in real life:  we are all enmeshed in knowledge of
others or self that is forever "incomplete", forever tinged with ambiguity.

A character who can present no convincing
arguments or information as to his past
experience, his present behavior or his
aspirations, nor give a comprehensive
analysis of his motivations, is as legitimate
and as worthy of attention as one who,
alarmingly, can do all these things.  (4)

The loss of virginal certainty, however, leads to a more profound --
if more painful -- understanding of man.  This mystery was glimpsed
by Dostoevski, whose torn, neurotic characters display the fullness
(ambiguity) of human nature; their actions are seldom predictable, their
motives opaque, but they frequently offer intimations of a larger truth.

Acknowledged by Dostoevski and legitimized by Freud, the admission of
the unconscious into our sensibility has forever removed expectations of
an "unravelling" of human mysteries.   Instead, we have the protagonists
of Pinter; even more hermetic and alienated than Dostoevski's. Yet we
are moved by their mystery and our certainty that we are like them.
And though the end of bourgeois individualism may indeed be at hand,
perhaps man (as Shapley and Robbe-Grillet point out from different,
yet convergent vantage points) can exchange his shaky monomania for
a larger, less anthropocentric conciousness.  Film, the most modern of
the arts, has not remained exempt from these new developments.
Nonetheless, Hollywood still hankers after 19th century style, stories
and type-cast stars; after all, Gone With The Wind,  The Sound
of Music, and Love Story still sell the largest number of tickets.

But both the independent avant-garde and the serious 35-mm
directors have been profoundly affected.  In the underground
(from Man Ray, Richter, and Epstein to Brakhage, Peterson,and
Bartlett), plot and character had always been subsidiary to the
medium's poetic potential.  Even in the commercial cinema,
the same trend is evident in Bresson, Godard, Skolimowski,
Bertolucci,  Fassbinder, and others.  Significantly, the attack on
 plot and bourgeois individualism, initiated half a century ago by
the Aesthetic Left (Breton, Eisenstein, Tzara, Bunuel) is thus joined
by contemporary Western artists  with a different emphasis.  But
the assault on narrative structures takes yet another, insidious path.

REFERENCES

(1)   Robbe-Grillet, For A New Novel, 1965
(2)  Interview with Eugene Ionesco, L'Express, Jan 28 1960
(3)  Robbe-Grillet   (4)  Harold Pinter, The Theatre of the Absurd, 1961

FILMS
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AKRAN
(Richard Myers, USA, 1970)   (F)
Myers is unquestionably a major talent of the
American avant-garde and Akran one of his most
important films. A feature-length deluge of incessant,
brilliant bursts of images (short takes and jump cuts,
single frames in series, freeze-frames slightly altered
between takes) it creates a Joyce-like, dense and sombre
mosaic of memory and sensory impressions, a texture
instead of a plot, a dream-like flow of visually-induced
associations often flashing by faster than they can be
absorbed.  Described by the director as an "anxious
allegory and chilling album of nostalgia", its pene-
tratingmonomania is unexpectedly -- subversively --
realized to be a statement about America today:
the alienation and atomization of technological con-
sumer society is reflected in the very style of the film.

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ANTICIPATION OF THE NIGHT
(Stan Brakhage, USA, 1957)   (F)
Light and shadow, sun and moon, dream and color: a
daring attempt, by one of the great experimentors of our
day, to portray events, objects, the world as they might
look to an infant as yet unable to organize his impres-
sions.  "Reality" is here broken into a flow of colors and
shapes, rushing by in complex, mysterious orchestration.    SC

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L'AVVENTURA
(Michelangelo Antonioni, Italy, 1960)   (F)
With this film -- booed at its initial Cannes presentation --
Antonioni developed the language of the new cinema and
entered film history.  The old-fashioned plot has gone; as
if to spite it, the heroine disappears early in the film, never
to be found.  To show the empty lives of empty people, there
is monotony; and long, repeated, silences, as in life. In fact,
with its extreme long-takes in almost real time, the work
today appears as a forerunner of minimal cinema. But
unlike the latter it is suffused with meaning:  the absence
of communication, the spurious utilization of eroticism to
alleviate loneliness or anxiety, the crumbling values of the
elite, the ennui and lethargy of the rich. Space, decor, com-
position, and environment become integral components of
the moral action and a very modern sense of disintegration
permeates this major work of the new cinema.    SC

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EMPIRE
(Andy Warhol, USA, 1964)   (F)
An eight hour long film, during which the camera,
from one fixed position, uninterruptedly photographs
the Empire State Building in real time; an object
existing outside us, in its own universe of non-meaning.

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DESTROY, SHE SAID
(DETRUIRE, DIT-ELLE)
(Marguerite Duras, France, 1969)   (F)
The famed French ideologue of the New Novel and author
of Hiroshima Mon Amour creates a hypnotic film about five
alienated people isolated in an unworldly hotel. Enmeshed in
ritualistic power games, they continuously exchange personalities
as each acts out his own ambigious charades.  A highly stylized,
non-logical dialogue creates enigmatic fear; long, uniterrupted
takes and absence of close-ups evoke ennui and distance. At the
end, there is a mysterious climax of revolutionary destruction.

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THE MARRIED WOMAN
(LA LATER UN FEMME MARIEE)
(Jean-Luc Godard, France, 1964)   (F)
The powerful close-ups of arched, yielding body
and the man's possessive, loving hand, posed
against white background, reflect Godard's
fusing of humanist and minimal cinema.    SC
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To analyze all the stylistic innovations of this most original
director would require separated discussions of practically all
his films.  The underlying tendency is nevertheless clear; an
increasing atomization of conventional cinematic structures in
favor of freer, collage-type improvisations. Plot and narrative  are
subsumed by Godard's preoccupation with the nature of cinema and
of reality, his investigations of contemporary problems, ideologies,
paradoxes -- the capturing of modern ambiguities and confusions of
hich he is very much a part.  The "plot" of The Married Woman -- 24
hours with a woman between husband and lover -- is therefore merely a
pretext for  vertical,in-depth explorations of values, atmospheres, tex-
tures; of  relation- ships, lies, ignorance of self, sex-as-communication.
For audiences brought up on Hollywood, the style, tempo, and content
of the film is maddening.  Consisting almost entirely of three stylized,
intensely beautiful love scenes and seven cinema-verite interviews
involving the protagonists, the work swings wildly between extremely
long takes (the interviews) proceeding at a painfully slow tempo, and
the tightly edited love scenes, composed of individual, 10- to 20-second
long tableaux -- beautifully stylized fragments of nude bodies, hand,
faces -- separated by sensuous fade or quick cuts.  The alternation
of tempo between these lyrical, yet fast sequences and the almost
Warhol-like interviews (perversely, the usual reaction shots are
missing), creates a disturbing dichotomy.  Alienation is caused in
the love scenes by fragmentation and in the interview scenes by the
use of real time.  This prevents conventional "identification" with
the protagonists, rather compelling the viewer, in Brechtian manner,
to ponder the social ramifications of the action; the domination of
people by false images, advertisements, slick consumer goods; the
alienation of women (if not of man);  the need for self-awareness and
for true values, so entirely lacking in the film's sensual, empty star.

Also apparent are Godard's preoccupation with the nature of cinematic
reality and his insistence on subverting the screen's illusion, constantly
recalling us to the artificiality ("created-ness") of what we are viewing.
There are even anti-illusionist games:  after we have viewed a series of
ads in a woman's magazine, the last of these, filling the entire screen as
did the others, is suddenly revealed as a huge outdoor billboard by the
shocking device of having the heroine unexpectedly enter the frame
"in front" of it. Only then is the true size, scale, and nature of the image
revealed to us and its "reality" as a newspaper advertisement destroyed.   SC

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DON GIOVANNI
(Carmelo Bene, Italy, 1970)   (F)
The woman's averted glance, harsh light,
enveloping blackness, create disembodiment
and dissociation -- a perfect visual metaphor
for the compulsive, cubist fragmentation
of the opera's conventional plot.
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 More sombre, controlled and abstract than Bene's earlier work,
this is a baroque, ironic and claustrophobic avant-garde
"restatement" of the opera's incest episode.  Accompanied
by Mozart's score, this compulsive, cubist fragmentation of
conventional plot in favor of a more profound exploration
also utilizes complex, subtle montage, varying from minimal
 cinema to a sustained staccato rhythm.  Bene is reconfirmed
as one of the true iconoclastic talents of contemporary cinema.

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TOM, TOM, THE PIPER'S SON
(Ken Jacobs, USA, 1969)   (F)
This structuralist dissection, enumeration, decomposition
and reconstruction of a 1905 Biograph film of the same title
provides a painstaking metaphysical exploration of the nature
of cinema.  Practically every shot and scene of the original
10-minute film is ominously "analyzed" and re-interpreted into
a feature-length work by manipulation of image, introduction
of slow motion, repetition, freeze-frames, abstracting, and
other "subversions" of the original.   Shades of Vertov!

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VAMPYR
(Pedro Portabella, Spain, 1970)   (F)
A most original work,  A hallucinatory montage of unfinished,
non-consecutive fragments of scenes photographed on the set
of a new Spanish version of Dracula, this sophisticated homage
to the vampire film genre transmutes its visual data into a new
poetic reality.  The plot of the commercial Dracula (though not
its eerie atmosphere) effectively disintergrates in this lyrical,
nostalgic evocation of its essential elements, refracted by a 20th
century sensibility.  As irrelevant extras or technicians with smoke
machines walk spectrally through scenes of intended horror and
become part of Portabella's daring new universe instead of disrup-
ting it, we are suddenly confronted with a brooding reflection
on the genre itself -- a memory piece that is also a farewell.    SC

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LA VERIFICA INCERTA
(Gian Franco Berucello, Alberto Griffi, Italy, 1965)
"A calculated assault upon the supposed logic of the structure of the
narrative film.  Clips from a dozen or more cinemascope movies, shown
still squeezed, follow each other in a perfectly logical but complete anar-
chic progression.  The filmmakers replace the conventional sequence of
shots  describing a simple action (opening a window, for example) with
an equal number of shots, all technically "correct" and all dealing with
the same  dramatic/functional situation, but which throw the event into
total confusion.  The hero changes person mid-shot;  camera movement
reverses  halfway through an action; the lighting jumps from phony
blue-filter  darkness to over-exposed multi- shadowed "daylight";  and
the  color range (which throughout the movie manages to reflect every
imperfection of mass produced color prints) cuts from all-over brown
to washed-out blue-green." David Curtis, Experimental Cinema, 1971

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KATZELMACHER
(Rainer Werner Fassbinder, West Germany, 1969)   (F)
Stylized, proscenium-type acting by non-emoting stereotypes
against chalk-white backgrounds creates a Brechtian attack
on the German petty-bourgeoisie.  The artist's tampering
with film stock itself contributing to the alienating effect.
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An early work by one of Germany's best new filmmakers,
who -- like Godard whom he quite deliberately emulates --
produces at least two features a year while directing the
famed avant-garde Munich Anti-Theatre.  Played in
proscenium-style by non-emoting stereotypes against
chalk-white backgrounds, the film depends less on its
minimal plot that on the careful creation of a Brechtian
universe to make an intricate attack on the German petty-
bourgeoisie, viewed once again as potential prototypes
of neo-fascist tendencies. The "actors" appear not as
individuals, but as social types, drowned in empty lives
and cliched "values". The stifling narrowness of the petty-
bourgeois mind has seldom been more penetratingly revealed.