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Maya Deren

Agnes Varda
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Old News: April 1, 2019

by rick
written by rick

1. Local news

Local to me, anyway.

Free Angela and All Political Prisoners2. Women’s History Month 
March may be over, and with it “Women’s History Month”. But it’s always a good time to focus on contributions and perspectives from those excluded from the dude-canon. (How’s your #52FilmsByWomen going, by the way?)

In 1928, she wrote of the rapidly declining fortunes of female directors in Hollywood (of whom she was only one of many), saying, ‘Women entering the field now find it practically closed. Frequently a male writer is given a directorial chance on the supposition that he ought to know better than anyone else how his story should be presented on the screen. But you do not hear of a woman writer being so favored.’ Moreover, she wrote, ‘Men bosses are also less tolerant of failure or mediocrity in a woman director than in a man.’ The sexist culture on sets and in offices also posed a problem. ‘Men also like men’s talk in a business which may or may not always be attuned to the ears of women,’ she wrote.

The more things change …

3. Archives

  • Archives are an instrument of cultural memory, but as that term implies, the specifics of their use are fraught with political implications. Patrick Gathara argues that they, rather than museums, can assist in a process of colonial reckoning, but only if the objects on which colonialism is inscribed are returned to those who were oppressed, making them “curators of their own history.” Meanwhile, Chelcie Juliet Rowell and Taryn Cooksey argue for an ethic of care in confronting, and preserving, ugly histories, so that efforts to retain and make available hateful cultural products do not make us accomplices in their present-day promulgation.
  • Digitizing historical footage in Connecticut: “Thanks to that grant for about $24,000 from the Institute of Museum and Library Services, the society was able to loan approximately 75 films to a company called George Blood LP, which specializes in digitizing audiovisual media. CHS has about 50 more films in its collection but will have to apply for another grant to complete the digitizing project. The grant, received in September 2017, also allowed them to digitize thousands of photos and negatives as well as maps, architectural drawings, lithographs and posters.”
  • The odyssey of Scarecrow Video: “As for Scarecrow, it survived bankruptcy, the threat of closing and the death of its charismatic founder. In 2014, it became a nonprofit. And now, after 30 years, with more than 132,000 titles — many on VHS, laser disc and DVD — it is as much a cultural warehouse as anything else.”

Shackleton discovery4. Exhibition, Streaming, Unearthing

  • The Guardian has a look at the dynamic between cinema exhibition, video clubs, cell phones, and the use of public space across Africa: “Meanwhile not all the old cinema buildings house shops. ‘Every 15 kilometres in Ghana, they used to have a cinema,’ said Cooke. ‘They’ve all closed down. They’ve turned them into churches.’
  • A fascinating account of more celluloid documents beneath our feet: “For the past 100 years, a box of never-before-seen negatives has been preserved in a block of ice in Antarctica. Recently, Conservators of the New Zealand Antarctic Heritage Trust came across the 22 exposed, but unprocessed, cellulose nitrate negatives during an attempt to restore an old exploration hut.”
  • Terry Collins argues that “the death of the physical medium has been greatly exaggerated”: “So, I’m grateful to home video for this kind of preservation, and I know I’m not alone. Yes, some folks might be dumping their DVD collections, but an equal number are getting some amazing deals in the online classified ads or at stores who specialize in used media. These same collectors are also purchasing new movies on Blu-ray – the prices of which have fallen substantially on thousands of catalog titles and can be found in Dollar General chain stories discounted for as little as $2.99 each.”
  • Which sounds great. Unfortunately, Samsung, the market titan in Blu-ray players, also announced it’s abandoning their production.
  • In the streaming realm, Ovid.TV is live: Wang Bing, Chris Marker, Mila Turajlić, and Jean Rouch among the offerings. Criterion’s streaming service officially launches on the 8th, after a steady, predictably stellar roll-out of weekly movies-of-the-week like Mikey and Nicky, Wanda, and To Sleep With Anger.
  • Video Psychosis digs into low-budget horror, cult esoterica, and other miscellaneous vaults of disrepute. Episode 3 — “Killer turkey men, bad acid trips, Egyptian sacrifices, human flamethrowers & MORE” — here.

Agnes Varda on beach5. RIP

When I thought to include an in memorium section in this inaugural round-up, I didn’t anticipate how emotional it would be. I expect, as we mark anniversaries of cinema’s first century and a quarter, we’ll have to get used to this.

  • It seems impossible — intolerable — that Agnès Varda is gone. Despite living 90 years, and with diary films frequently fixated on death and impermanence, she always seemed too curious to rest. There are many tributes, and many more to come. This Bright Wall/Dark Room interview is essential (“I am in time. I’m old. I’ve been crossing time for years. I love the idea that even with a bad memory I can pick something which is years ago or someone I met years ago and I am here, and I enjoy it.”). So is this one in The Guardian (“’The grandmother of the New Wave!’ I found it funny, because I was 30 years old!”) I took a break from reading the obits and then came across this deliciously confrontational 1977 discussion, and missed her all over again (“If women must independently find their images, what of feminist-friendly men? ‘If men want to join, leave the door open. They can listen,’ Varda says.”) Elsewhere, she told an interviewer: “Finding fun where sometimes it’s just a bore; finding fun when it’s a burden. You can always make something look different.” When I think of Agnès Varda, I think of possibility, and light, and lightness, and the world seems heavier without her.
  • We also lost another irrepressible auteur in Larry Cohen. Subject of the recent Shudder doc King Cohen, he’s often summarily inserted under the heading “cult director” — true enough, but it doesn’t come close to encapsulating his long, weird career and singular visions. Film School Rejects has a “Larry Cohen starter kit”. Will Harris’ oral history of Q: The Winged Serpent for The Dissolve remains a hilariously insightful tribute.
  • Enigmatic, fiercely beloved pop chameleon Scott Walker died at 76.  Many of his incarnations are intertwined with cinema, from the films he scored (Carax’s Pola X, notably, and Vox Lux just last year among them) to the ones he programmed as part of the Meltdown Festival.
  • Hollywood Reporter: “John Carl Buechler, whose Hollywood horror makeup and special effects made movies like Hatchet, Deep Freeze and the Michael Moriarty-starrer Troll into classic frightfests, has died. He was 66.”
  • Pioneering performance artist, avant-garde filmmaker, and general creative force Carolee Schneeman passed on at 79. Maggie Nelson’s piece in The New Yorker, on Schneeman’s “re-enchantment,” is astute and affecting: “Carolee’s long-standing devotion to pleasure and atrocity, ecstasy and rage, protest and preservation has provided and will continue to provide a lavish example of what it might mean to meditate on these two crucial questions in the course of a life.”

 

 

 

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CommentaryFilm

The Incomplete Dream of Maya Deren and Duchamp

by rick
written by rick

The works of Maya Deren are hugely influential touchstones for experimental cinema, frequently cited and studied. Her luminous debut Meshes of the Afternoon, covered here as part of the Counter-Programming The Great Movies series, is a widely recognized classic of the form, a dreamlike visual interrogation that, in Deren’s words, “externalizes an inner world to the point where it is confounded with the external world.”

meshes

Yet Meshes was also “a point of departure” (Deren again). A curious fact about the filmmaker: she left behind far more “unfinished” works than those we would call “complete”. (Though this simply underscores the question of what we mean by “complete,” exactly.)

It was only recently that I discovered, via Dangerous Minds, that one of those unfinished works was a collaboration with the great Surrealist and urinal-exhibitor Marcel Duchamp. The jaggedly edited Witch’s Cradle, a roughly 12-minute short assembled after Maya Deren’s untimely death and intended for exhibition at Peggy Guggenheim’s short-lived The Art of This Century gallery in Manhattan, blends images of the occult and the mundane in ways that provide unique insight into Deren’s process and obsessions. It’s allusory cinema as feminist doom metal video, and full of surprises. (I’m not kidding about the metal. As a silent, you are free to score it as you see fit; I recommend eyehategod’s “In The Name of Suffering”.)

witch's cradle3

Like Meshes, Witch’s Cradle doesn’t so much tell a story as evoke sets of colliding sensitivities. Its central figure is a woman tracing a network of string, arranged like a cat’s cradle on disembodied hands but also issuing from shoelaces and elsewhere. Exposed hearts pulse. She discovers, to her apparent horror, a pentagram emblazoned on her forehead. The string itself is revealed to emanate from a mysterious male character played by Duchamp.

witch's cradle4

Drawing on a background in choreography, Witch’s Cradle is a spectacle of movement, a truly open-ended text interrupted routinely by intra-frame leader and scratched image, which only heightens its uncanny otherworldliness and resolute lack of completion. Writing to James Card of the George Eastman House in a different context, Deren once noted:

This principle — that the dynamic of movement in film is stronger than anything else — than any changes of matter… that movement, or energy is more important, or powerful, than space or matter — that, in fact, it creates matter — seemed to me to be marvelous, like an illumination, that I wanted to just stop and celebrate that wonder, just by itself…

In Witch’s Cradle, a shawl on the floor raises itself to cloak the body extending to pick it up. A commentator observes:

Gravity and space don’t work like we expect them to and the most simple of actions suddenly has a new dimension which we can start learning about in the film.

As in dreams, Maya Deren places us at the cinematic mercy of logic we recognize but must parse in the moment, without any firm ground to stand on. It is shifting before our eyes, and the meaning seems to lie in the shift.

Drawing on themes from Lacan, Foucault, Derrida, and others, critics like Sarah Keller have emphasized theories of absence and incompletion as central to Deren’s work, and it’s not difficult to see why. Even 15 years after Meshes of the Afternoon, Maya Deren was attempting to revisit and reconceptualize it, perhaps the way we revisit earlier nightmares and rerout them for present purposes, whether we mean to or not. Our inner texts, like all texts, keep changing, interweaving.

witch's cradle1

Still, it’s startling to come across something like Witch’s Cradle, which suggests a pivotal meeting between two brilliant, elusive minds and yet seems largely forgotten … perhaps precisely because it’s understood to be an “unfinished work.”

It doesn’t look that way from this vantage point. Maya Deren’s late-period fascination with the culture of vodoun is of a piece with the staggered occult of Witch’s Cradle, combining Surrealism with dance and a notion of the beyond, a kind of secret language of the image that she was after throughout her too-short career.

To this point, Maria Popova, again, draws from Deren’s letter to the George Eastman House:

[L]ooking back, it is clear that the direction was away from a concern with the way things feel and towards a concern with the way things are; away from personal psychology towards nerveless metaphysics. I mean metaphysics in the large sense… not as mysticism but beyond the physical in the way that a principle is an abstraction, beyond any particulars in which it is manifest.

The “incomplete” Witch’s Cradle is a Duchamp-like window into this precise idea. Its flickers and rough edges — and, yes, total occult creepiness — are exactly what make it interesting and vital to anyone concerned with Deren’s work.

Watch for yourself.

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CommentaryFilmGreat Movies: The Counter Programming

Fireworks: Look Back On Kenneth Anger

by rick
written by rick

[schema type=”movie” url=”http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0039383/” name=”Fireworks” description=”A surrealist dream of a dream involving homoerotic fantasy, sailors, and masochism.” director=”Kenneth Anger” producer=”Kenneth Anger” actor_1=”Kenneth Anger” ]Like his hero Jean Cocteau, Kenneth Anger is a mercurial and scandalous figure in 20th century art. An Aleister Crowley-influenced occultist, associate of counter-culture figures ranging from Mick Jagger to Charles Manson acolyte and convicted murderer Bobby Beausoleil, and author of the notorious Hollywood Babylon, a profoundly dubious book of gossip which The New York Times famously proclaimed to be “without one single redeeming merit,” Anger’s notoriety often threatens to overshadow his artistic output as an avant-garde filmmaker. But Fireworks – his first film, made before he turned 20, and a seminal (pun intended) work of experimental gay cinema – stands as testimony to a startlingly unique vision.

As legend has it, Anger (born Kenneth Anglemyer) filmed Fireworks in his parents’ Hollywood home while they were away for the weekend. Like Cocteau’s Blood of a Poet and Maya Deren’s Meshes of the Afternoon, both earlier entries in this series, Anger’s short takes the form of a “trance-film,” a series of images that don’t merely blur the division between the fictive and the real but destabilize the notions themselves. (Anger himself called Fireworks “a dream of a dream.”)

Should we summarize the “plot” of a dream?

Fireworks opens on a skewed vision of the Pieta, with a sailor clutching a prone man in his arms, before seguing onto a sleeping figure (Anger himself), seeming to awaken, seemingly with an erection. He removes the bedsheet to reveal what seems to be a carved African idol of some sort where the phallus would seem to be. He gets dressed, languorously, the camera lingering on his torso and, briefly, his crotch.

fireworks2

A door on the other side of the room reads “GENTS”, with a wire sculpture dangling in front of it that unmistakably recalls Cocteau, and he enters. On the other side, he encounters a sailor, bare-chested and flexing. We cut back to the original room, where the sailor lights our protagonist’s cigarette with a flaming pile of sticks. (The first, but not the last, bit of linguistic camp Anger has up his sleeve.) Still smoking, Anger re-enters the GENTS room, where he is brutally – and, by all evidence, willingly – assaulted by what has now become a group of sailors, all fists and chains and metal rods.

fireworks3

The camera flashes over his face again and again as fingers plunge into his nostrils, releasing a torrent of blood and fluid. A bottle of milk is smashed over him, and glass from the bottle is used to eviscerate his chest, revealing a mechanical heart. The milk itself than pours over his body, viscous and white, washing away the blood. He is again physically intact after the violations.

fireworks5

He once again enters the “GENTS” room, which now leads, as one would’ve initially expected, to a row of urinals, before which we briefly glimpse our protagonist, prone, now wearing the sailor’s cap.

fireworks4

We jump-cut back to the bedroom, where the original bare-chested sailor approaches. The sailor opens his pants to reveal an explosion of the titular fireworks emanating from his crotch, and we close on a jumpy image of the two in bed, with physical scratches to the film creating a halo of light around the dream-sailor’s head and eyes, and what seems to be a Christmas tree on fire.

fireworks6

Much has been written about “what it all means” – from analysis as the pre-Stonewall fantasies of queer youth to deep Lacanian readings about phallic displacement and “masochism as an act of subversion” – and I certainly won’t pretend to know. The overriding sense is one of loose connection – of desire, violence, submission, transgression, explosion as processed metaphorically and viscerally in turn. As in Blood of a Poet, the body is centralized and made profoundly unstable and vulnerable, and as in Meshes of the Afternoon, there is never certain, solid ground on which to stand, as allusions multiply and contradict.

Iconic figures of masculinity take on different, fraught resonances (and may come replete with low jokes: seaman, semen). Even milk, that “wholesome” staple of the All-American diet, is deployed with tongue firmly in cheek. As a teenager, Anger exploded in Fireworks as a fully-formed provocateur, even if it’s never quite clear what he’s “saying.” If we’re to take him at his word, it’s this: “This flick is all I have to say about being 17, the United States Navy, American Christmas, and the Fourth of July.”

That’s probably true, as far as it goes. But the fact that it’s up for debate for 70 years later, and still manages to scandalize probably means he did his job.

Part of an ongoing effort to watch a set of films from non-White, non-U.S., non-male, and/or non-straight filmmakers and depart a little from the Western canon. The intro and full list can be found here.

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CommentaryFilmGreat Movies: The Counter Programming

Cinema and dream-logic in Meshes of the Afternoon

by rick
written by rick

[schema type=”movie” url=”http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0036154/” name=”Meshes of the Afternoon” description=”Maya Deren’s experimental masterpiece opened up the fields of anti-narrative and dream.” director=”Maya Deren and Alexander Hammid” producer=”Maya Deren and Alexander Hammid” actor_1=”Maya Deren” ]

Part of an ongoing effort to watch a set of films from non-White, non-U.S., non-male, and/or non-straight filmmakers and depart a little from the Western canon. The intro and full list can be found here.

Maya Deren’s hugely influential 1943 short Meshes of the Afternoon played a key role in kicking off the New American Cinema Group, and has lost none of its power to entrance in the 70-plus years since. Whether taken as feminist allegory, surrealist intervention, cinematic mindfuck, puzzle movie, or Lynchian horror story, it’s impossible to look away. By literalizing the unconscious on film, Deren opened up new possibilities for representation and anti-narrative.

Deren is a fascinating figure in mid-century art, theory, and critique – and one who arguably has never received her due, despite a cinematic lineage that includes such luminaries as Stan Brakhage and Jack Smith. In a short piece, dated 1960 and titled “Some Metaphors For The Creative Process”, she wrote, “The problem of the artist, then, is to rob the vaults only of those riches that are relevant to his need.” In Meshes of the Afternoon, we find her and husband-collaborator Alexander Hammid at the peak of their banditry of the subconscious.

Meshes of the Afternoon 2

Meshes of the Afternoon seems to tell a story – or perhaps our viewership simply imposes one on the sequence of images, because we expect one to be there. Silent and circular, Deren is much more interested in resonances and magical, Symbolist association than narrative in any traditional filmic sense.

Meshes of the Afternoon 3

Our protagonist (played by Deren) falls asleep on a couch, shortly after glimpsing a figure on the street. We enter something of a dream-like state. Specific images occur and reoccur – a key, a knife, a piece of bread. A record player spins, though no sound is emitted. A flower becomes a motif. Certain figures play prominent roles, notably a Grim Reaper-like character with a mirror for a face, reflecting nothing.

Meshes of the Afternoon 4

Deren’s unnamed woman tries desperately to race after the cloaked Death-Mirror-Person, but finds herself in slow-motion, always lagging behind as it turns a cobblestone corner. Suddenly, we cut back to the sleeping Deren, who observes these goings-on from her window. The scenes are repeated from the point-of-view of her double, who seems encased behind the glass of her bedroom window, trapped. Later, there is a tripling, and three Deren’s sit at the kitchen table – surrounding … a key, a knife, a loaf of bread.

Meshes of the Afternoon 5Meshes of the Afternoon 6

Male figures emerge, and it is an open question whether they represent lovers or murderers. When one moves in close to her, we actively wonder if it’s for a kiss or a kill. Deren remains impassive throughout, but her gaze occasionally wanders back to the camera, a look that seems to represent a challenge to the audience. She doesn’t exactly break the fourth wall, but the emphasis on artifice is clear. It’s like the moment in a dream when you realize you are asleep, but powerless to affect any changes in the story your brain, or heart, or something else has in mind.

Meshes of the Afternoon 7

It’s an aggressively elusive 14 minutes. Like the Surrealists, an association Deren herself rejected but which seems hard to avoid while viewing the film today, Meshes of the Afternoon comes across as fixated on the unknowable, resonant but always out of reach. The initial experience that begins the film is fractured and mediated through all kinds of anxieties and dim connections as our protagonist dozes. She might die, or she might just dream of dying, or dream of a dream. The entire film is an astute exploration of things that can’t be said or explained, but only shown. Like many an experimental filmmaker to follow, Deren swears by the integrity of the image itself … and then seeks to undermine it. There is no ground to stand on in this realm. As in Cocteau’s Orphic Trilogy, we float through instead, prisoners to the camera lens.

Meshes of the Afternoon 8

You could go on forever about the meanings buried in this particular text. It invites and eludes analysis. Watching it for the first time recently, I was enraptured by the movements, repetitions, and score, which punctuates scenes rhythmically. Does Deren’s character’s encasement in glass seek to comment on patriarchy? Or on the various gazes that constitute viewership (and, so, patriarchy)? Is theorist Wendy Haslem right that, “As European émigrés, Deren and Hammid invest their film with an acute sense of restlessness and alienation … reflect[ing] this uncanny estrangement in the doubling, tripling and quadrupling of its central character … and in its cyclic narrative, a structure that seems condemned to repetition”? Are we dealing with Nietzsche’s notion of eternal return? Why is the hooded Death figure constructed as a kind of mirror? What would the key unlock?

Meshes of the Afternoon 9

But, like waking from a dream, it all blurs together into a mood, a sense of the uncanny, and no answers are provided. Unlike a dream, Meshes of the Afternoon is 14 minutes you can play back if you so choose, and wonder at it all over again.

Next up: Kôzaburô Yoshimura’s The Ball At The Anjo House (1947)

[schema type=”movie” url=”http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0036154/” name=”Meshes of the Afternoon” description=”A woman returning home falls asleep and has vivid dreams that may or may not be happening in reality. Through repetitive images and complete mismatching of the objective view of time and space, her dark inner desires play out on-screen.” director=” Maya Deren” ]

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