Avant-garde Nature Films

There's a section in Hannah Arendt's The Human Condition in which she discusses physical pain. The most horrible of all feelings (note my own vagueness in description), says Arendt, pain is so personal, so subjective, that we can't translate it into other terms, can't even put it into a more objective sphere of words, whose meaning can only be understood in the context of a shared cultural experience; words are public, and pain, whether we want it to be or not, is private--it can't be described in anything but figurative terms and consequently it can't be related, explained, analyzed, understood, or even, Arendt indicates, remembered particularly well.

Meanwhile, there's a famous quote that goes either "Writing about love is like dancing about architecture," or "Writing about music is like dancing about architecture"--appropriately enough, nobody's quite sure what the correct words are for the quote, or who exactly said it. The point about love and music is the same as Arednt's point about pain: it can't be represented by words, by gestures, or by memories. Whereas stories in novels and movies can evoke feelings if properly represented, love and music (excusing the lyrical aspects) are more like direct injections of the stuff, which explains why so many music reviews are largely devoted to discussion of the lyrics, the band members, the album's production and so forth, instead of to the music itself. Unfortunately, there is no regular section of the newspaper in which reviewers review the latest in loves, though they would be difficult not only to describe, but to compare--as Tolstoy writes in Anna Karenina, there are as many types of love as there are hearts. It would take an infinite Borgesian library to catalogue them all, and even then it's unlikely that any of the books could do its subject much justice.

When people who know nothing about experimental film think of experimental film, I suspect they tend to think of something intellectual, pretentious, difficult to follow, and possibly in black and white. I think of the opposite--something purely aesthetic with no pretentions to even so much as a story. Hitchcock, with his constant disposing of "plausibles," makes a good case for the greatest experimental filmmaker of all time (especially in The Birds) with his "pure cinema," but I'd prefer to just leave him at greatest filmmaker of all time; David Brooks and Jonas Mekas are far purer, in both outlook and aesthetics, claiming cinema not as a mix of theater, dance, art, books, and music (although Mekas incorporates all these elements), but as its own form, akin to pain, love, or music. Both take flickering fragments of their real lives--not so much events as places and times long gone and going by--and leave it at that, Best-Of compilations of their lives, moments of retreat and reprieve assembled into a scrapbook for future reference. It is cinema as cinema--images that move--not intended for the descriptions or analyses that follow, and seemingly nothing else.

Carolyn and Me Parts I-III (David Brooks, 1968)

Carolyn was David Brooks' wife before he died in a car accident at age 24; as the title implies, the film deals in love more than pain or music--the 100 minute film is, in fact, completely silent. Unlike his earlier short movies (clips of which flash by near the start of Carolyn and Me) which featured pop songs and other ditties dissolving in and out like an unwieldy radio, Carolyn dispenses with a soundtrack that might give an overarching continuity to the images, or might offer commentary to pictures that can't, again, be accurately commented on in the least. Cinema is often referred to a religious activity, at least when performed in a theater, but Carolyn may be the only film to prove this preposterous theory right; in a dark and completely silent theater, as though in prayer, one is increasingly aware of audience and of the images it is watching, and in my own case, my mind created its own soundtrack, dolling out thoughts I would have preferred to have ignored--making the movie a more intimate experience than I probably would have liked.

Brooks shot in 16mm, a format that, if used properly, seems able to amplify all the colors it can find into lush streaks of light without the loss of precision in delineating the details of image that occurs with the even more lush 8mm. Like no other film I've seen (except, as usual, Vertigo), Brooks' films glow; they can, as a result, be taken as ethereal, nostalgic, or simply glowing, but that's a matter of subjectivity. The results are something like the photorealist paintings of Robert Bechtle, albeit ones that move--Brooks shaky camera wanders around beaches and forests and monestaries and suburbs watching water and shadows and monks and children at play. The editing is rhythmic--at one point Brooks jump cuts into the sea--but mostly feels like an attempt to hold down the images, which fly around the countryside in a midsummers' idyll for a couple seconds before moving onto something new. Brooks' images seem rather quiet themselves--it's often sundown, there is often his happy wife Carolyn smiling at the camera, there's often water and sky in view, and there is none of the urgency of a particular direction to follow. The audience at the Anthology screening I attended may have felt similarly--by the end of the film only my friend and I were left, I was shocked that 100 minutes had passed by so quickly, and he was in tears. Like no other movie, Carolyn and Me is purely a matter of taste, and nearly as impossible to forget as it is to remember.

Diaries, Notes, Sketches (Walden) (Jonas Mekas, 1969)

Simply the most wonderful three hours of film in existence, Walden, Mekas' distillation of his filmic "Diaries, notes, sketches" from 1966-1968, is another late '60s film that watches humans at play, often in nature, despite the cultural fireworks of the era. Unlike Carolyn, however, Walden acknowledges those fireworks, flashing them as part of the 60s' political, cultural, and artistic explosions. Some of the people in the film include: The Velvet Underground at their first public performance, John Lennon in bed with Yoko Ono staging what has to be the most peaceful peace rally of the era, Timothy Leary at his farm in Millbrook, Stan Brakhage snowed in at his country house having pancakes with his kids, the great critic Amy Taubin, P. Adams Sitney, David Brooks, Andy Warhol, Nico, Carl Theodor Dreyer, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Smith, so forth, and so on.

Really, they're just excuses for Mekas to go new places, film new sights and sounds. As Mekas states with rather winning revolutionary naivite, "Cinema is lights. Motion." and for all the famous figures his movie represents, Walden is primarily a light show; Painting With Lights' Jack Cardiff was a genius, but it's Mekas who doesn't seem to capture light so much as project it, flicking and splattering red and green and blue lights across the screen like brushstrokes until they come together and form some sort of recognizable image. Mekas edits with his trademark flutter of stills and stop-and-go splicings, the images flashing on in bursts and dying out almost immediately as the camera jitters around its subjects, with an almost tactile sense of rhythm, speeding up, slowing down, moving in, moving out, like a conductor just barely able to control his orchestra (despite all the curious comparisons to Godard, Happy Together always reminds me of a Mekas music video). The exuberant editing, in fact, is in-camera, every bit as primitive and gosh-awed expressionistic as Murnau's (in fact, there are numerous parallels between Mekas and Terrence Malick, another Murnau descendent): in reel two, for example, amidst a flurry of colors as Mekas visits the animals and trapeze artists of the circus, Mekas leaves one ballerina on swing swinging back and forth in the foreground of the screen while he cuts together various other circus acts and rear-projects them in rapid succession behind her. This in 1966 or so; the whole circus sequence is matched by what sounds like an old vaudevillian crooning a few ditties from the Depression. In Mekas' movies all sorts of past lives, personal and public, real and simulated, tumble over each other, time not so much linear as it is patched together (there is also some top-notch 60s era punk-and-groove amidst the soundtrack).

Just as Scorsese and Lynch make movies that are considered "dreamlike" in their twisted realities and elusiveness, with their bright colors and constant dissolves, despite the fact that nobody has ever experienced any dream remotely like such movies, Mekas' movies are the cinematic Form of Memory, years sweeping by and leaving only glimpses of their very best fragments. Mekas' similarly brilliant Lost Lost Lost (a later movie that incorporates earlier footage) is haunted by these passing glimpses, a movie made of equal parts pain, suffering, and alienation, with occasional bursts of joy, as Mekas looks toward the Lithuanian homeland of his past and watches it gradually move farther and farther away. Walden is its counterpart, the naive 60s to Lost's shell-shocked 70s, a view of the paradise that will later be lost, lost, lost, a child's celebration of a new world, with more color, more nature, and only occasional bursts of nostalgia. When Mekas plays a jig on his accordian and gleefully chants along in his crackly Lithuanian accent, "I make home movies – therefore I live. I live – therefore I make home movies," it is perhaps the happiest moment in cinema.

Mekas' New York, it becomes rapidly clear, is an imagined and rather timeless one even if the footage is real and timely. Mekas is a foreigner, after all, which means real isolation in an imaginary city--with its emphasis on snow ball fights on Bleeker Street, and fallen leaves in Central Park, Mekas' conjures up a New York of fading innocence in line with Salinger's and Wes Anderson's. Walden feels prematurely nostalgic for an America that has only existed subjectively, but that's only one way the movie's a duplicitous form of memory--people dancing in the snow, dancing to ealry punk, doing acid, eating pancakes, getting married, playing the accordian, flying around in helicopters--Walden is above all, as Arendt might appreciate, a shortlist of the happy moments we inevitably forget.

This post is part of the avant-garde blog-a-thon. Home page at Girish's place.