Re: [Frameworks] CBS goes Underground
Time. 4/3/1964, Vol. 83 Issue 14, p98. 3p. No one has heard much about movies like Breath-Death, Cosmic Ray, and Stone Sonata, but now the Ford Foundation has begun pouring tuns of gold on the happy heads of the people who made them. The foundation has decided to encourage the art of film as practiced by lone stylists whose pictures are usually brief, almost always 16-mm., and sometimes comprehensible only to themselves. Accordingly, Ford sought a list of 177 candidates, invited them to send sample films, then picked twelve winners. Most got $10,000. The total grant was $118,500. Presumably, the foundation screened all the pictures they prized, but viewed collectively, the winning films are a varietal riot. Some are mad, some methodical. Some are suitable for the living room and others for a smoker at the Elks. This one is conventional. That one is wildly experimental. This honest. That phony. How one panel of judges could have agreed on the twelve grantees defeats the unfoundationed imagination. Some of the winners: Stanley Vanderbeek, 32, is a tireless man with scissors. He cuts pictures out of magazines?all kinds of magazines?and stirs them into film clips in a kind of stiff puppet action that writes a curious chapter in the manual of animation. In Skulduggery, Harry Truman comes popping out of the mouth of a sumptuous girl; then a hammer comes out of her nose and knocks Harry back between her chops. Breath-Death shows Harpo Marx playing his harp on the edge of a smoking battlefield. Khrushchev appears, sneezes, and Hitler pops up and says Gesundheit. A Merlin-like figure suddenly gets stuck in the back of the neck with a flying table fork. A nude appears, with two small skulls where her breasts should be. Another girl lies in bed caressing a TV set on the pillow beside her. Reading downbed from the TV set is a spread-out man's shirt and a pair of trousers. Kind of anemic, this lover, but what a fat head. In all, Vanderbeek showed Ford three of his five-to-ten-minute Visible Fill'ms?each no doubt having some subtle message that anyone with millions to give away would instantly grasp. In A La Mode, for example, a girl carries her breasts on a tray with miscellaneous fruits. An automobile drives up hill and down dale across a pair of giant breasts. A woman's face comes off, revealing an opera .house inside her head. A bird comes out of a pore in her back. Vanderbeek, a New Yorker now heading upstate, is about to move his wife and two children into a house he is making out of old water tanks. I think the film's only hope is experimental cinema, he says. The whole commercial cinema of neoreality is fundamentally pornographic and does not contribute to one's soul. It is not sensitive. The cinema needs people of private vision. We are living in an avalanche of entertainment fallout, and how does one survive when bombarded by clumsy ideas? The film should be in the hands of poets rather than just slick, literate stylists. Hilary T. Harris, 34, also a New Yorker, is a slick and literate stylist and then some. His Seawards the Great Ships is a 29-minute color documentary on the shipbuilders of the Clyde in Scotland. He shows, rivet by plate, how ships are built. The picture won an Oscar two years ago. Harris also does shorter, impressionistic pieces. In Highway, he zips up, down, and under Manhattan's West Side Highway by night and day, sketching the rhythm of the roadway until it fairly comes alive. My main preoccupation in film is with rhythm, and then color, he says. As if to prove it, he will use his $10,000 to make a film on the dance. Jordan Belson, 37, will let almost no one (but foundations) see his movies unless they come to his studio in San Francisco for private screenings. His work is a brilliant arrangement of patterns of music, light, and color, a world of flashing pinpoints, symmetrical dots and fiery globes. There is a crucible into which all phenomena can be resolved, says Belson. If any medium can accomplish this, I am convinced it will be the film. My work penetrates deeper. It opens the doors to a universe that isn't even considered by people working in the medium. Bruce Conner, 30, begins his A Movie (which lasts only twelve minutes) with a shot of a young and magnificently shaped woman sitting in profile, like Whistler's Mistress, wearing only a black garter belt. Cut. Savage Indians are next, seen slaughtering defenseless pioneers. An elephant charges furiously. Racing cars crash in clouds of dust and fire. A girl lies languidly back on a bed. Dissolve to a submerged submarine shooting a torpedo. The H-bomb goes off. Motorcycles race through mud. A biplane crashes into a lake. That famous Tacoma bridge whips in the wind and collapses. The Hindenburg bursts into flame. A ship sinks. A firing squad fires. Bodies hang upside down in Rome. Bruce Conner could be interpreted as a kind of Cotton Mather XXIII. His point seems to be that if you start with a beautiful nude, death and
Re: [Frameworks] CBS goes Underground
Was it filmed in a lawyer's office? Willard van Dyke badly lets the side down by suggesting that 'there is the possibility that new techniques are being explored and that other filmmakers can benefit by these techniques'. The the whole film is redeemed by the glimpse of Brakhage's pipe! Nicky. -Original Message- From: Jeff Kreines j...@kinetta.com To: Frameworks Discussion List frameworks@jonasmekasfilms.com Sent: Sat, 31 May 2014 0:08 Subject: [Frameworks] CBS goes Underground Thanks to Saul Levine for finding this. Wow! Brakhage, Mekas, Warhol, Sedgwick, and the Velvets (without sound), and more -- along with a little bloviating from Willard Van Dyke. The Making of an Underground Film from CBS Evening News with Walter CronkiteThe Making of an Underground Film from CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite, broadcasted on 31st December 1965. Featuring Jonas Mekas, Piero Heliczer with V... Jeff Kreines Kinetta j...@kinetta.com kinetta.com kinettaarchival.com ___ FrameWorks mailing list FrameWorks@jonasmekasfilms.com https://mailman-mail5.webfaction.com/listinfo/frameworks ___ FrameWorks mailing list FrameWorks@jonasmekasfilms.com https://mailman-mail5.webfaction.com/listinfo/frameworks
Re: [Frameworks] CBS goes Underground
Thanks for posting this. A DVD of this was recently issued by Boo-Hooray as part of their Piero Heliczer-themed Dead Language Press bibliography. What's interesting for Velvets fans is that this appears to show Angus MacLise and Maureen Tucker playing with the Velvets at the same time. Does anyone know the person shown playing bass at 1:18 in this video? I don't recognize him. Andy Ditzler www.filmlove.org www.johnq.org Graduate Institute of the Liberal Arts, Emory University On Fri, May 30, 2014 at 7:08 PM, Jeff Kreines j...@kinetta.com wrote: Thanks to Saul Levine for finding this. Wow! Brakhage, Mekas, Warhol, Sedgwick, and the Velvets (without sound), and more -- along with a little bloviating from Willard Van Dyke. The Making of an Underground Film from CBS Evening News with Walter CronkiteThe Making of an Underground Film from CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite, broadcasted on 31st December 1965. Featuring Jonas Mekas, Piero Heliczer with V... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DS7knWefSiQ Jeff Kreines Kinetta j...@kinetta.com kinetta.com kinettaarchival.com ___ FrameWorks mailing list FrameWorks@jonasmekasfilms.com https://mailman-mail5.webfaction.com/listinfo/frameworks -- ___ FrameWorks mailing list FrameWorks@jonasmekasfilms.com https://mailman-mail5.webfaction.com/listinfo/frameworks
Re: [Frameworks] CBS goes Underground
On May 31, 2014, at 4:12 AM, nicky.ham...@talktalk.netmailto:nicky.ham...@talktalk.net wrote: Was it filmed in a lawyer's office? Willard van Dyke badly lets the side down by suggesting that 'there is the possibility that new techniques are being explored and that other filmmakers can benefit by these techniques'. The the whole film is redeemed by the glimpse of Brakhage's pipe! Nicky. I read it a little differently: I think Van Dyke is speaking as the most credentialed person in the edisode and (being a MoMA curator) was totally familiar with the need to present a plausible PR face for fundraising and so forth. He gave the correct alibi for the mainstream (which is what the broadcast was going out to: the prestige nightly national news show). I think it’s remarkable that it got this much airtime, and that they showed the Brakhage film. I’ve heard broadcast engineers argue that they “couldn’t show” experimental films on TV at the time (and decades after) because it broke the technical capacity/FCC rules of the time (read as conventions) not because of content but because of form (e.g. single frame edits, etc.). I think the whole tone of earnest explanation by the figures here (except the typical Warhol bit—well known in the media by that time) is particularly interesting. Given the opportunity to explain, they do. They are humble and straight forward. Quite the contrast to the frequent lair assumption that they were in-your-face rebels trying to shock the establishment. Chuck Kleinhans ___ FrameWorks mailing list FrameWorks@jonasmekasfilms.com https://mailman-mail5.webfaction.com/listinfo/frameworks
Re: [Frameworks] CBS goes Underground
I agree with Chuck's comments. Given how bad mainstream media can be, this report is really quite good, considering that it was meant for an evening-news mass audience. Of course nothing profound is said, and Warhol could easily seem like a fool to those who don't take seriously John Cage's I have nothing to say, and I'm saying it, but as an intro it doesn't stumble too badly, and lets people know that something or other is happening. They showed the Brakhage likely knowing it would seem weird, but I give them credit for the showing, and for respecting the film's silence, and for not taking a condescending this is weird attitude. Plus, I always did find Heliczer's Dirt to be confusing. Something from the same decade that will appeal to anyon elooking for evidence of mainstream media's horribleness is the Time Magazine feature on underground film, in I believe 1964, after the Ford Foundation gave a number of $10,000 grants (maybe around $60,000 in today's dollars) to some of the major figures. Time, to its eternal disgrace, got a lot of attention by sensationalizing the film descriptions, making the work seem like sleazy porn, hence dissuading the Ford Foundation from continuing. Fred Camper Chicago On 5/30/2014 6:08 PM, Jeff Kreines wrote: Thanks to Saul Levine for finding this. Wow! Brakhage, Mekas, Warhol, Sedgwick, and the Velvets (without sound), and more -- along with a little bloviating from Willard Van Dyke. The Making of an Underground Film from CBS Evening News with Walter CronkiteThe Making of an Underground Film from CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite, broadcasted on 31st December 1965. Featuring Jonas Mekas, Piero Heliczer with V... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DS7knWefSiQ Jeff Kreines Kinetta j...@kinetta.com mailto:j...@kinetta.com kinetta.com kinettaarchival.com ___ FrameWorks mailing list FrameWorks@jonasmekasfilms.com https://mailman-mail5.webfaction.com/listinfo/frameworks ___ FrameWorks mailing list FrameWorks@jonasmekasfilms.com https://mailman-mail5.webfaction.com/listinfo/frameworks
Re: [Frameworks] CBS goes Underground
After reading Fred's post I ran (well, typed) straight to the online database Academic Search Complete to read the Time article. Here it is, for anyone interested. It is indeed bad (my favorite description is of Brakhage as a husky hypochondriac), but it's about what you'd expect from a magazine that ran an article called The Bosom Rediscovered in the same issue... The Art of Light and Lunacy: The New Underground Films (Time Magazine, Feb. 1967) Sunset. A blue Buddha dissolves into a large grey Teddy bear that weeps tears the size of a quarter. A little girl stabs a pig. A little boy urinates. Sixty white gloves run run run across a table. Bits of broken plaster abruptly assemble themselves into a bust of Dante. An egg cracks and marbles tumble out. A python oozes lazily around a large transparent bowl in which a child is huddled. Beside a giant telescope stands an old man, his ears blazing like light bulbs. On a narrow cot, a nude woman sits giggling and jiggling while an enormous, sinister horseshoe crab . . . Most people would call it a nightmare. Lloyd Williams, the 26-year-old New Yorker who created this sequence of images, calls it a work of art. The startling thing is that a great many Americans now agree with him. After five years of lurid reports about an underground cinema, U.S. moviegoers have caught the show. For the first time, a large audience has tuned in on experimental film and is beginning to believe what a far-out few have been saying for years: the movies are entering an era of innovation that attempts to change the language of film and reeducate the human eye. Image Movement. The Marat of the revolution is Moviemaker (The Brig) and Movie Critic (Village Voice) Jonas Mekas, 44, a shy man with long greasy hair who looks like a slightly soiled Elijah. In print and in person, Mekas passionately proclaims the death of the film as an industry and the birth of the film as an art. The new cinema is passion, he says, the passion of the free creative act. The old cinema, as Mekas sees it, was esthetically no more than an extension of the theater. The new cinema, though it will also tell stories, will be essentially a cinema of image and movement composed by film poets. The new cinema is an art of light, says Mekas grandly, and it is bursting on the world like a new dawn. At first blush, it seemed a dirty-fingered dawn. Two months ago, Mekas and some film-making friends leased an art house in midtown Manhattan to present The Chelsea Girls (Time, Dec. 30), a 3½-hour experimental peekture by Pop Painter Andy Warhol. Exclusively, explicitly and exhaustively, the film depicts homosexuality, Lesbianism, and drug-taking, and a majority of the critics (most of them over 40) found it dirty, dull and on-and-onanistic. But moviegoers (most of them under 30 and simply prurient) stood in long lines to buy the scene. All over the U.S., distributors suddenly sat up and begged for prints. In the next six months, The Chelsea Girls will be shown in at least 100 theaters—in addition to numerous college film societies. It figures to gross at least $1,000,000. With that one blow the barricades fell, and the avant-garde came storming through. Robert Downey's Chafed Elbows, the shaggy-surreal saga of a Village idiot who hopes to get rich quick by persuading female midgets to use contact lenses as contraceptives, opened in a Lower East Side cin bin that was soon crammed by the cab trade from uptown. And Shirley Clarke's Jason, a harrowing 120-minute interview with a black male prostitute, was offered a midtown opening as a hard-eyed cautionary tale and a surefire succes de scandale. Creating with Clorox. To most moviegoers, these films will look like nothing they have ever seen before, even though avant-garde cinema has been around for a long time—at least since the early '20s, when Luis Bunuel and Man Ray began making surrealistic movies in Paris. But a substantial movement became possible only in the late '50s, when motion-picture technology took an exciting new turn. Film increased in sensitivity; cameras, lights, recording equipment diminished in size, weight and cost. Suddenly, almost anybody could make movies, and make them almost anywhere for almost nothing. Hundreds of young men and women began to make them. Most of the new moviemakers agree that what matters is not the story a film tells but the images it throws on the screen. To vary and to vitalize their images, they do just about everything but what George Eastman had in mind. They tilt the camera, turn it upside down, jiggle it, wave it around, run it in slow motion, run it in fast motion, run it backwards, run it out of focus, intercut images so fast that the mind cannot register what the eye perceives. They paint the film, scratch it with knives, bleach it with Clorox, bake it in an oven, grow mold all over it. They overexpose it, underexpose it, triple-expose it, superimpose three
Re: [Frameworks] CBS goes Underground
On May 31, 2014, at 9:35 AM, Andy Ditzler a...@andyditzler.com wrote: A DVD of this was recently issued by Boo-Hooray as part of their Piero Heliczer-themed Dead Language Press bibliography. Was there no music in the Velvets sequence because of music rights, or did the report air that way? Jeff Kreines Kinetta j...@kinetta.com kinetta.com kinettaarchival.com ___ FrameWorks mailing list FrameWorks@jonasmekasfilms.com https://mailman-mail5.webfaction.com/listinfo/frameworks
Re: [Frameworks] CBS goes Underground
Jonathan, thanks a lot for posting this, but the article I remember was earlier, and even worse. It described the films of filmmakers who had just gotten a Ford Foundation grant in outrageous, and outraged, terms. I couldn't find it on Time's own site, though I didn't try that hard. Maybe I dreamt it all up! I remember in particular early Bruce Conner films described as if they were almost porn. Fred Camper Chicago On 5/31/2014 3:20 PM, Jonathan Walley wrote: After reading Fred's post I ran (well, typed) straight to the online database Academic Search Complete to read the Time article. Here it is, for anyone interested. It is indeed bad (my favorite description is of Brakhage as a husky hypochondriac), but it's about what you'd expect from a magazine that ran an article called The Bosom Rediscovered in the same issue... The Art of Light and Lunacy: The New Underground Films (Time Magazine, Feb. 1967) Sunset. A blue Buddha dissolves into a large grey Teddy bear that weeps tears the size of a quarter. A little girl stabs a pig. A little boy urinates. Sixty white gloves run run run across a table. Bits of broken plaster abruptly assemble themselves into a bust of Dante. An egg cracks and marbles tumble out. A python oozes lazily around a large transparent bowl in which a child is huddled. Beside a giant telescope stands an old man, his ears blazing like light bulbs. On a narrow cot, a nude woman sits giggling and jiggling while an enormous, sinister horseshoe crab . . . Most people would call it a nightmare. Lloyd Williams, the 26-year-old New Yorker who created this sequence of images, calls it a work of art. The startling thing is that a great many Americans now agree with him. After five years of lurid reports about an underground cinema, U.S. moviegoers have caught the show. For the first *time*, a large audience has tuned in on experimental film and is beginning to believe what a far-out few have been saying for years: the movies are entering an era of innovation that attempts to change the language of film and reeducate the human eye. Image Movement. The Marat of the revolution is Moviemaker (The Brig) and Movie Critic (Village Voice) Jonas Mekas, 44, a shy man with long greasy hair who looks like a slightly soiled Elijah. In print and in person, Mekas passionately proclaims the death of the film as an industry and the birth of the film as an art. The new cinema is passion, he says, the passion of the free creative act. The old cinema, as Mekas sees it, was esthetically no more than an extension of the theater. The new cinema, though it will also tell stories, will be essentially a cinema of image and movement composed by film poets. The new cinema is an art of light, says Mekas grandly, and it is bursting on the world like a new dawn. At first blush, it seemed a dirty-fingered dawn. Two months ago, Mekas and some film-making friends leased an art house in midtown Manhattan to present The Chelsea Girls (*Time*, Dec. 30), a 3½-hour experimental peekture by Pop Painter Andy Warhol. Exclusively, explicitly and exhaustively, the film depicts homosexuality, Lesbianism, and drug-taking, and a majority of the critics (most of them over 40) found it dirty, dull and on-and-onanistic. But moviegoers (most of them under 30 and simply prurient) stood in long lines to buy the scene. All over the U.S., distributors suddenly sat up and begged for prints. In the next six months, The Chelsea Girls will be shown in at least 100 theaters—in addition to numerous college film societies. It figures to gross at least $1,000,000. With that one blow the barricades fell, and the avant-garde came storming through. Robert Downey's Chafed Elbows, the shaggy-surreal saga of a Village idiot who hopes to get rich quick by persuading female midgets to use contact lenses as contraceptives, opened in a Lower East Side cin bin that was soon crammed by the cab trade from uptown. And Shirley Clarke's Jason, a harrowing 120-minute interview with a black male prostitute, was offered a midtown opening as a hard-eyed cautionary tale and a surefire succes de scandale. Creating with Clorox. To most moviegoers, these films will look like nothing they have ever seen before, even though avant-garde cinema has been around for a long *time*—at least since the early '20s, when Luis Bunuel and Man Ray began making surrealistic movies in Paris. But a substantial movement became possible only in the late '50s, when motion-picture technology took an exciting new turn. Film increased in sensitivity; cameras, lights, recording equipment diminished in size, weight and cost. Suddenly, almost anybody could make movies, and make them almost anywhere for almost nothing. Hundreds of young men and women began to make them. Most of the new moviemakers agree that what matters is not the story a film tells but the images it throws on the screen. To vary and to vitalize their
Re: [Frameworks] CBS goes Underground
Yeah, the article Jonathan posted (thanks, J.!) was nowhere near as bad as the one Fred described. You could even defend it's rhetoric on the same grounds Chuck brought up in terms of the CBS piece. This article follows the classic form of a persuasive speech to a hostile audience I used to teach in public speaking class. In order to get the attention of conventional mainstream folks, and get them 'on your side', you begin by establishing common ground, which in this case means appealing to their prejudices. Then, as they're nodding along with you, you toss in the But... and spin things around, and the audience gets dragged along with you to the point where they have to at least consider something they would have rejected without even listening to if presented with straightforward endorsement. So while the first part of the article is almost wholly negative, stereotypical and sensationalist, that yields to praise both specific and general. At the center of the movement, however, stands a creative cluster of imaginative moviemakers... possibly the finest film poet the underground has produced. She has a subtle feel for rhythms, a grand flair for colors and a gay wild way with a camera that leaves the eye spinning the most affecting movie that the new cinema has turned out...the hero is part Chaplin and part Myshkin ...His Art of Vision, an attempt to do for cinema what Bach did for music with his Art of the Fugue, is an ambitious example of what Brakhage calls retinal music Stan VanDerBeek, Gregory Markopoulos, Bruce Conner, Robert Breer, Ed Emshwiller and Harry Smith have all done work of a high order. An even newer and no less gifted generation of moviemakers—Ben Van Meter, Ken Jacobs, Bruce Baillie—is rising with a whir. ...with all its excesses, the new cinema is bound to stimulate the medium. For one thing, it has already produced a modest but substantial body of exciting work. For another, it serves as a salon des refusés for aspects of the art rejected by the commercial cinema... You might say, Mekas murmurs with a sly little grin, that the lunatics are taking over the asylum. Nothing necessarily wrong with that. Every so often an art needs to go a little crazy. That's a lot more credit than I'd expect from a Luce publication in 1967, especially if they had earlier slammed the Ford Foundation for supporting this kind of work. And I can only imagine how insulted Jack Smith would have felt if Time HADN'T completely misunderstood the intent of Flaming Creatures and trashed it accordingly...___ FrameWorks mailing list FrameWorks@jonasmekasfilms.com https://mailman-mail5.webfaction.com/listinfo/frameworks
Re: [Frameworks] CBS goes Underground
You weren't dreaming Fred, I found the article. I can't read it or copy it here though because I don't have the required subscription to Time. Maybe someone else on the list can help share? My curiosity has been activated. http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,939493,00.html Cinema: In the Year of Our Ford Friday, Apr. 03, 1964 No one has heard much about movies like Breath-Death, Cosmic Ray, and Stone Sonata, but now the Ford Foundation has begun pouring tuns of gold on the happy heads of the people who made them. The foundation has decided to encourage the art of film as practiced by lone stylists whose pictures are usually brief, almost always 16-mm., and sometimes comprehensible only to themselves. Accordingly, Ford sought a list of 177 candidates, invited them to send sample films, then picked twelve winners. Most got $10,000. The total grant was $118,500. Presumably, the foundation screened... [To continue reading: Log-In] ___ FrameWorks mailing list FrameWorks@jonasmekasfilms.com https://mailman-mail5.webfaction.com/listinfo/frameworks
Re: [Frameworks] CBS goes Underground
Just a note: While we might feel dismay or anger at the backward attitudes expressed back in the day, we should also remember that for some people the mere fact of denouncing experimental films for having sex, homosex, or whatever was a notice that such things existed and that you might want to try to track them down, see them, move to NYC, or whatever. I can remember some Life magazine articles on Allan Ginsburg portraying him as an amiable eccentric that made we want to find out more, or on Robert Downey (senior, father of the now celebrity actor), and his whacky underground films (which had a certain crossover market). Chuck Kleinhans ___ FrameWorks mailing list FrameWorks@jonasmekasfilms.com https://mailman-mail5.webfaction.com/listinfo/frameworks
Re: [Frameworks] CBS goes Underground
Completely agree! Sent from my iPhone On May 31, 2014, at 7:28 PM, Chuck Kleinhans chuck...@northwestern.edu wrote: Just a note: While we might feel dismay or anger at the backward attitudes expressed back in the day, we should also remember that for some people the mere fact of denouncing experimental films for having sex, homosex, or whatever was a notice that such things existed and that you might want to try to track them down, see them, move to NYC, or whatever. I can remember some Life magazine articles on Allan Ginsburg portraying him as an amiable eccentric that made we want to find out more, or on Robert Downey (senior, father of the now celebrity actor), and his whacky underground films (which had a certain crossover market). Chuck Kleinhans ___ FrameWorks mailing list FrameWorks@jonasmekasfilms.com https://mailman-mail5.webfaction.com/listinfo/frameworks ___ FrameWorks mailing list FrameWorks@jonasmekasfilms.com https://mailman-mail5.webfaction.com/listinfo/frameworks
