Unit 3: Art and the

Moving Image

The postwar American avant-garde

Postwar Modern Art and the
Rejection of Modernism
 The development of a new American art movement was held in
abeyance until after World War II, when the United States took
the lead in the formation of a vigorous new art known as
abstract expressionism with the impetus of such artists as Arshile
Gorky, Jackson Pollock, and Willem de Kooning.
 Action painting, as the movement was also known, made its
impact felt throughout the world in the 1950s. A number of
notable developments were led by artists associated with these
and other New York school artists. As the influence of abstract
expressionism waned in the 1960s, artists came to question the
very philosophy underlying modernism. A vast variety of new
movements and styles came to dominate the art world that, in
the aggregate, can now be seen to mark the beginnings of
artistic postmodernism and the post-midcentury shift from
modern to contemporary art.
Arshile Gorky 1904-1948
Jackson Pollock 1912 -1956
William de Kooning 1904
-1997
Harold Rosenberg first used the term “Action painting” to refer
to de Kooning’s violent slashes of color and the shifting
foreground and background typical of his abstract work.

 “Painting isn’t just the visual thing that reaches your

retina,” the artist once said, “it’s what’s behind it. I’m
not interested in ‘abstracting’ or taking things out or
reducing painting to design, form, line, and color. I
paint this way because I can keep putting more and
more things in -- drama, anger, pain, love, a figure, a
horse, my ideas about space. Through your eyes it
again becomes an emotion or an idea. It doesn’t
matter if it’s different from mine as long as it comes
from the painting which has its own integrity and
intensity.”
The Post war Avant-Garde
Film
 The postwar resurgence of avant-garde cinema began in
the US.
 Partly due to;
 Arrival of scores of refugee artists in the 1930’s and
1940’s
 Artists brought ideas from Modernism with them,
spreading its influence across the arts in America
 Increase in the availability of 16mm equipment
 Growth of film societies, film schools etc (Cinema 16,
New York Film-Makers’ Co-operative)
Personal Film
 The U.S. had some avant-garde filmmakers before World War II, but much pre-
war experimental film culture consisted of artists working in isolation. This
became known as ‘Personal Filmmaking’
 The films of this period share a concern with the personal as subject matter.
 P. Adnams Sitney’s book Visionary Film (1974, 1979) suggests filmmaking
during this period related to a Romantic tradition primarily concerned with the
representation of states of mind. Internal belief systems and metaphysics.
 ‘the preoccupations of the American avant-garde filmmakers coincide with those
of our post-romantic poets and Abstract Expressionist painters. Behind them lies
a potent tradition of Romantic poetics’.
 Essentially Sitney states what both artists and filmmakers were attempting to
achieve during this period in particular were representations
 of inner vision and mind
 ‘the great unacknowledged aspiration of the American avant-garde film has
been the cinematic reproduction of the human mind’
Influence of European Avant-
Garde
 In Rochester, New York,
James Sibley Watson and Melville Webber
directed The Fall of the House of Usher
(1928) and Lot in Sodom (1933).
 http://vids.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=vi

Within the film it is clear to see the influences of

German Expressionism in the theme and
setting and Surrealism in the fragmented
dream-like narrative.
Maya Deren
Maya Deren 1917 -1961
 Harry Smith, Mary Ellen Bute, artist Joseph Cornell, and painter (1905–1993) made early masterpieces
in the 1930s, and Christopher Young made several European-influenced experimental films.
 Maya Deren was born Eleanora Derenkowsky and was
educated and worked in New York. In 1941 she changed her name.
 Maya is the name of the mother of the historical Buddha as well as the dharmic concept of the illusory
nature of reality. In Greek myth, Maia is the mother of Hermes and a goddess of mountains and fields.
 At Land, in 1944. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y9Gve37nWBo
 A Study in Choreography for the Camera 1945.
 Ritual in Transfigured Time was 1946, which explored the fear of rejection and the freedom of expression
in abandoning ritual. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xrWNXLPFz40
 In 1946 she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for "Creative Work in the Field of Motion Pictures". In
1947 she won the Grand Prix Internationale for 16 mm experimental film at the Cannes Film Festival for
Meshes of the Afternoon.
 Deren's Meditation on Violence was made in 1948. Chao-Li Chi's performance obscures the distinction
between violence and beauty. Halfway through the film, the sequence is rewound, producing a film loop.
 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pYd7STccjN8
 In 1958, Deren collaborated with the Metropolitan Opera Ballet School and Antony Tudor to create The
Very Eye of Night.
 Deren distributed her own films and promoted them through lectures and screenings in the United States,
Canada, and Cuba.
 She lectured on film theory and Vodoun. She wrote, directed, edited, and performed in her own films.
Maya Deren
 Criticism of Hollywood
 Throughout the 1940s and 50s, Deren attacked Hollywood for its artistic, political and
economic monopoly over American cinema. She stated, “I make my pictures for what
Hollywood spends on lipstick,” and observed that Hollywood “has been a major obstacle to
the definition and development of motion pictures as a creative fine-art form.” She set
herself in opposition to the Hollywood film industry’s standards and practices.
 Haiti and Voodoo
 The Guggenheim grant enabled Deren to finance travel to Haiti several times between
1947 and 1955 to pursue her interest in voodoo. Dunham wrote her master’s thesis on
Haitian dances in 1936, which may have influenced Deren’s interest. In Haiti, Deren not
only filmed many hours of voodoo ritual, but also participated in them, and adopted the
religion. Her book Divine Horsemen: The Voodoo Gods of Haiti (New York: Vanguard
Press, 1953) is considered a definitive source on the subject.
 However, the accompanying documentary film Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti
remained incomplete in her lifetime and was edited and produced by Teiji Ito and his wife
Cherel Winett Ito (1947-1999) in 1981, twenty years after Deren's death.
 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uGBOFOgfMkQ
Meshes of the Afternoon
(1943)
 Meshes of the Afternoon (1943) by Maya Deren and
Alexander Hammid is considered to be one of the first
important American experimental films. It provided a model for
self-financed 16 mm production and distribution, one that was
soon picked up by Cinema 16 and other film societies. Just as
importantly, it established an aesthetic model of what
experimental cinema could do. Meshes had a dream-like feel
that hearkened to Jean Cocteau and the Surrealists, but
equally seemed personal, new and American.
 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YPi9i3gfSAM
Kenneth Anger (1927-)
Kenneth Anger
 Kenneth Anger was born in Santa Monica, California as Kenneth
Wilbur Anglemyer and attended the Maurice Kossloff Dancing
School with Shirley Temple and Judy Garland.
 He gained fame and notoriety from the publication of the French
version of Hollywood Babylon in Paris in 1959, a tell-all book of
the scandals of Hollywood's rich and famous. A pirated (and
incomplete) version was first published in the U.S. in 1965. The
official U.S. version was not published until 1974.
 He became fascinated with the supernatural and Aleister
Crowley, as well as becoming an adherent of Crowley's religion
of Thelema, sometime in his late teens. Many of his films reflect
occult themes.
Key works
 The first film that he directed to see
distribution was Fireworks, filmed in
Los Angeles in 1947, which gained the
attention of Jean Cocteau, who then invited
him to go to Paris.
 Always notorious, In 1949, Anger directed
The Love That Whirls which, according to the
1972 book Experimental Cinema, contained
(faked) nudity, and was thus confiscated by
the film lab.
Puce Moment 1949
 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LRm3B4T5SkU
 Puce Moment is a short 6 minute film by Kenneth Anger, author of the
Hollywood Babylon books, filmed in 1949. Puce Moment resulted from
the unfinished short film Puce Women. The film opens with a camera
watching 1920's style flapper gowns being taken off a dress rack. The
dresses are removed and danced off the rack to folk rock style music. A
long-lashed woman, , dresses in the purple puce gown and walks to her
vanity to apply perfume. She lies on a chaise lounge which then begins
to move around the room and eventually out to a patio. Borzois appear
and she prepares to take them for a walk.
 The gowns used were owned by Anger's grandmother who had been a
costume designer in the silent film era. Anger attempts to recreate silent
era style by using alternating camera speeds. The film was made in the
house of Sampson De Brier, a silent film actor, who later appeared in
Anger's Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome. moved to Mexico shortly
after the film was made. Anger reveals Marquis was a mistress to
Lázaro Cárdenas, the Former President of Mexico.
Inauguration of the Pleasure
Dome 1954
 in 1955 he made a documentary film of the ruins of Crowley's
Thelema Abbey in Cefalù, Sicily, which is now considered a lost film
.
 Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome 1954 features a Slavonic
Mass by Leos Janácek playing as historical figures, biblical
characters, and mythical creatures gather in the pleasure dome.
Aphrodite, Lilith, Isis, Kali, Astarte, Nero, Pan, and the Great Beast
and the Scarlet Woman are part of a visual feast of images
superimposed, hallucinations, and the spirit of decadence of the
"Yellow '90s." Mythological images from Aleister Crowley, cabalistic
symbols, artifice, and magic combine to render the pleasure dome
both as prison and as celebration.
 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s-ZWdzYgYoU
Lucifer Rising
 During the late 1960s Anger became a key influential figure in
popular culture. He became associated with The Rolling Stones, as
well as Bobby Beausoleil (before he gained notoriety as an
associate of the Charles Manson family). Beausoleil, a musician
who had played with Arthur Lee, was cast as Lucifer in Anger's
proposed film, Lucifer Rising. Beausoleil and Anger had a falling out
and Beausoleil left, taking most of the completed film with him
 British singer Marianne Faithfull later appeared in Anger's re-shot
version of the film.
 Anger, who is still working today influenced many narrative
filmmakers including most importantly Martin Scorcese
 You can see and read about much of his work here
http://www.subcin.com/anger.html
Stan Brakhage
Stan Brakhage 1933 - 2003
 Over the course of five decades, Brakhage created a
large and diverse body of work, exploring a variety of
formats, approaches and techniques that included
handheld camerawork, painting directly onto celluloid,
fast cutting, in-camera editing, scratching on film and
the use of multiple exposures. Interested in mythology
and inspired by music, poetry and visual phenomena,
Brakhage sought to reveal the universal in the
particular, exploring themes of birth, mortality sexuality
and innocence.
 Brakhage's films are often noted for their
expressiveness and lyricism.
Early Years
 In 1953, Brakhage moved to San Francisco to attend the
San Francisco School of the Arts, then called the California
School of the Arts. He found the atmosphere in San Francisco
more rewarding[13], associating with poets Robert Duncan and
Kenneth Rexroth, but did not complete his education, instead
moving to New York City in 1954. There he met a number of
notable artists, including Maya Deren (in whose apartment he
briefly lived[14]), Willard Maas, Jonas Mekas, Marie Menken,
Joseph Cornell, and John Cage. Brakhage would collaborate
with the latter two, making two films with Cornell ( and ) and
using Cage's music for the soundtrack of his first color film, .
Wonder Ring 1954

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0_oK7yn4e2A
 film of Manhattan's Third Avenue Elevated
Train.
Early Years
 Brakhage spent the next few years living in
near poverty. While living in Denver,
Brakhage met Mary Jane Collom, whom he
married in late 1957. Brakhage tried to make
money out of his films, but had to take a job
making industrial shorts to support his family.
 In 1959, Jane gave birth to the first of the five
children they would have together, an event
Brakhage recorded for his 1959 film
Window Water Baby Moving.
Window Water Baby Moving
(1959)
 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-drSrvTtZ1k
 A record of the Jane Brakhage’s pregnancy
and the birth of their child.
The 1960s and Beginning of
Recognition
 When Brakhage's early films had been exhibited in
the 1950s, they had often been met with derision,
but in the early 1960s Brakhage began to receive
recognition in exhibitions and film publications,
including Film Culture, which awarded several of his
films, including , The Dead in 1962. The award
statement, written by Jonas Mekas, a critic who
would later become an influential experimental
filmmaker in his own right, cited Brakhage for
bringing to cinema "an intelligence and subtlety that
is usually the province of the older arts.“
 From 1961 to 1964, Brakhage worked on a series of
5 films known as the Dog Star Man cycle.
Dog Star Man
 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mTGdGgQtZic
 A woodsman attempts to climb a mountain. He struggles with a dead
white tree, throws it down and chops at it.
 All of the techniques which Brakhage had been developing to this time
were brought into play for The Art of Vision. Rapid cutting, multiple
superimposition, out-of-focus, color filters, distorted lenses, painting on
film, cutting into the frame, the use of zoom, rapid camera movement,
the use of negative footage and the mixing of color and black and white:
 ‘He has completely rejected continuity of space or time: that is, real
spatial dimension does not exist in his films, and events do not follow
each other with relation to any time sequence. There is no "base" that
one can approach his work from. His films are dreams, without the
Freudian symbols that made earlier attempts in this direction more
immediately understandable; they are visions, but with too many
unrecognizable objects to be directly related to one's daily experience’.
Fred Camper
1960’s
 The Brakhages moved to , Colorado in 1964, though Brakhage
continued to make regular visits to New York. During one of
those visits, the 16mm film equipment he had been using was
stolen. Brakhage couldn't afford to replace it, instead opting to
buy cheaper 8mm film equipment. He soon began working in the
format, producing a 30-part cycle of 8mm films known as the
Songs from 1964 to 1969. The Songs include one of Brakhage's
most acclaimed films, 23rd Psalm Branch, a response to the
Vietnam War and its presentation in the mass media.
 Brakhage began teaching film history and aesthetics at the
School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1969, commuting from
his home in Colorado.
1970s and 1980s
 Brakhage explored further approaches to filmmaking in the 1970s. In 1971, he
completed a set of three films inspired by public institutions in the city of
Pittsburgh. These three films--Eyes, about the city police, Deus Ex, filmed in a
hospital, and The Act of Seeing with One's Own Eyes, depicting autopsy--are
collectively known as "The Pittsburgh Trilogy."
 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m1zVmIacXy4
 In 1974, Brakhage made the feature-length Text of Light, consisting entirely of
images of light refracted in a glass ashtray.
 In 1979, he experimented with Polavision, a format marketed by Polaroid,
making about five 2 1/2 minute films. The whereabouts of these films are now
unknown. He continued his visual explorations of landscape and the nature of
light and thought process, and through the late 70's and early 80's produced
filmic equivalents of what he termed "moving visual thinking" in several series of
photographic abstractions known as the Roman, Arabic, and Egyptian series.
 In 1979, Brakhage began teaching at the University of Colorado in Boulder.
 In the late 1980s, Brakhage returned to making sound films, with the four-part
cycle, and also completed the hand-painted "Dante Quartet.“
 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=az13qB_AUIo
1990’s Onwards
 Brakhage remained extremely productive through the last two
decades of his life, sometimes working in collaboration with other
filmmakers, including his University of Colorado colleague
Phil Solomon. Several more sound films were completed,
including "Passage Through: A Ritual," edited to the music of
Philip Corner, and "Christ Mass Sex Dance" and "Ellipsis No. 5,"
both with music by James Tenney. He also produced the major
meditations on childhood, adolescence, aging and mortality
collectively known as the "Vancouver Island Quartet," as well as
numerous hand-painted works.
 Brakhage was diagnosed with bladder cancer in 1996, and died
in 2003, aged 70. The last footage Brakhage shot has been
made available under the title Work In Progress. At the time of
his death, Brakhage was also working on the Chinese Series,
made by scratching directly on to film.
Summing up – Formal
Characteristics
 Other filmmakers such as Shirley Clarke, Gregory Markopoulos,
Willard Maas, Marie Menken, Curtis Harrington and Sidney Peterson
created similar ‘Personal Films’. Significantly, many of these filmmakers
were the first students from the pioneering university film programs
established in Los Angeles and New York.
 In 1946, Frank Stauffacher started the "Art in Cinema" series of
experimental films at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
 They set up "alternative film programs" at Black Mountain College and the
San Francisco Art Institute.
 Post WWII American experimental film can be defined in its influence
from European Modernism, specifically abstraction and surrealism.
Films fragmented time and space and had a dream-like feel
 Filmmakers attempted to represent personal reflections and inner vision
in a new way through experimenting with narrative and often tactile
techniques (Superimposition, Colour, Editing, scratching and painting on
film).
 Filmmakers often had an interest with the body, sexuality, Ritual,
metaphysics, mortality.