The Films of Bill Morrison: Aesthetics of the Archive 9789048529094

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t h e f i l m s o f b i l l m o r r i so n

FRAMING

FILM framing film

is a book series dedicated to

theoretical and analytical studies in restoration, collection, archival, and exhibition practices in line with the existing archive of EYE Filmmuseum. With this series, Amsterdam University Press and EYE aim to support the academic research community, as well as practitioners in archive and restoration. s e r i e s e d i to r s

Giovanna Fossati, EYE Filmmuseum & University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands Leo van Hee, EYE Filmmuseum Frank Kessler, Utrecht University, the Netherlands Patricia Pisters, University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands Dan Streible, New York University, United States Nanna Verhoeff, Utrecht University, the Netherlands e d i to r i a l b oa r d

Richard Abel, University of Michigan, United States Jane Gaines, Columbia University, United States Tom Gunning, University of Chicago, United States Vinzenz Hediger, Goethe University Frankfurt, Germany Martin Koerber, Deutsche Kinemathek, Germany Ann-Sophie Lehmann, University of Groningen, the Netherlands Charles Musser, Yale University, United States Julia Noordegraaf, University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands William Uricchio, Massachusetts Institute of ­Technology, United States Linda Williams, University of California at Berkeley, United States

BERND HERZOGENRATH (ED.)

THE FILMS OF BILL MORRISON Aesthetics of the Archive

a m s t e r da m u n i v e r s i t y p r e s s

Published Published by by EYE EYE Filmmuseum Filmmuseum // Amsterdam Amsterdam University University Press Press

Cover illustration: Courtesy of Bill Morrison Cover design and lay-out: Magenta Ontwerpers, Bussum Amsterdam University Press English-language titles are distributed in the US and Canada by the University of Chicago Press. isbn 978 90 8964 996 6 e-isbn 978 90 4852 909 4 doi 10.5117/9789089649966 nur 670

© B. Herzogenrath / Amsterdam University Press B.V., Amsterdam 2018 All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the written permission of both the copyright owner and the author of the book. Every effort has been made to obtain permission to use all copyrighted illustrations reproduced in this book. Nonetheless, whosoever believes to have rights to this material is advised to contact the publisher.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgements  9



AESTHETICS OF THE ARCHIVE: AN INTRODUCTION  

Bernd Herzogenrath

1

DRAFTS AND FRAGMENTS: REFLECTIONS AROUND BILL MORRISON AND



THE PAPER PRINT COLLECTION  



André Habib

2

Dan Streible

3 4

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31

THE FILM OF HER: THE CINE-POET LAUREATE OF ORPHAN FILMS  

GHOST TRIP: SEARCHING FOR POTENTIAL MYTHS  

51

69

Benjamin Léon DECASIA: THE MATTER|IMAGE: FILM IS ALSO A THING  

84

Bernd Herzogenrath

5

THE MESMERIST: ILLUSTRATING THE RETURN OF THE REPRESSED  

6

LIGHT IS CALLING: CELLULOID DREAMS  

Hans Morgenstern

Hanjo Berressem

109

97

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7

David Gersten

GOTHAM: ZOETROPE: BLOCK BY BLOCK  

8

Jan-Christopher Horak

123

OUTERBOROUGH: EARLY CINEMA REVISITED  

137

9

THE HIGHWATER TRILOGY: THINKING THE LIQUID – ON THE ETHICS OF



WATER AND THE MATERIAL ECOLOGIES OF DISASTER AND RUINATION  



Yasmin Afshar

10

PORCH: ARCHIVES, COLLECTIVE MEMORY, AND THE POETICS OF



HOME MOVIES  



William Cusick

167

11 THE FUTURE LASTS LONG: THE ROMANOV LOST FAMILY ARCHIVES   177 Agnès Villete 12

WHO BY WATER: VARIATIONS ON MATTER, FIGURES, MEMORY,



AND MYTHOLOGY  



Andrea Pierron

187

13

EVERY STOP ON THE F-TRAIN: BEYOND AND WITHIN THE RESTLESS



NETHERWORLD OF (MANHATTAN’S) MIND  



Benjamin Betka

199

14 SPARK OF BEING: BACHELOR MACHINE   211 Bérénice Reynaud 15 THE MINERS’ HYMNS: ACTS OF RESURRECTION   227 Simon Popple 16

TRIBUTES – PULSE: A REQUIEM FOR THE 20TH CENTURY:



DEATH | DRIVE | IMAGE  



Johannes Binotto

241

17 JUST ANCIENT LOOPS: THE LOOPS OF LIFE IN INTONATION   253 Eva Hoffmann

151

18

THE GREAT FLOOD: WATER IS TRANSPARENCE DERIVED FROM THE PRESENCE



OF EVERYTHING  



Sukhdev Sandhu

265

19 RE-AWAKENINGS: BILL MORRISON IN CONVERSATION   277 Lawrence Weschler



Index of Film Titles  289 Index of Names  291 Index of Subjects  295

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to express my sincere gratitude to Amsterdam University Press for giving us the opportunity to publish this book; to all those wonderful people that contributed to this volume – it has been a pleasure! Special thanks go to Louisa Natterer and Sebastian Scherer for all the work you’ve put into this … And my heartfelt gratitude and admiration goes to Bill Morrison for all his support and, most of all, for his wonderful art! All images reproduced courtesy of Bill Morrison and Hypnotic Pictures. I dedicate this book to Janna and Claudia, and to the memory of Frank. Part of the Introduction and part of Bernd Herzogenrath’s essay already had a previous life in Cinema: Journal of Philosophy and the Moving Image 6 (2014) … republished with kind permission.

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Aesthetics of the Archive An Introduction Bernd Herzogenrath

Dubbed by Robert Koehler as ‘[o]ne of the most adventurous American filmmakers’ (Variety 12/11/11), director Bill Morrison was born in Chicago, Illinois in 1965 and he currently lives in New York. He attended Cooper Union, where he studied painting and animation. After college, he worked with New York’s Ridge Theater, making short film backdrops for their avant-garde productions. This work has been recognized with two Bessie awards and an Obie Award. Morrison’s film and multimedia art has been screened at festivals, museums, and concert halls worldwide, including the Sundance Film Festival and the Tate Modern. The Museum of Modern Art has acquired eight of his titles for their permanent collection. The MoMa also hosted a mid-career retrospective of Morrison’s work in October-November 2014. His films are found in the collection of the Walker Art Center and the EYE Film Institute. Morrison has been commissioned to create films for numerous composers, including John Adams, Laurie Anderson, Gavin Bryars, Dave Douglas, Richard Einhorn, Bill Frisell, Michael Gordon, Henryk Gorecki, Vijay Iyer, Jóhann Jóhannsson, David Lang, Harry Partch, Steve Reich, and Julia Wolfe. Morrison has received the Alpert Award, as well as fellowships from Creative Capital, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, and the NEA. Decasia (2002), his feature-length collaboration with composer Michael Gordon, was described by The Village Voice film critic J. Hoberman as ‘the most widely praised American avant-garde film of the fin-de-siècle’ (Hoberman 2007) and by Oscar-winning filmmaker Errol Morris as maybe ‘the greatest movie ever made’ (quoted in Weschler 2002). It was also was selected to the US Library of Congress’ 2013 National Film Registry, becoming the most modern film named to the list that preserves works of great cultural, historic or aes-

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thetic significance to the nation’s cinematic heritage. Writing in The New York Times Magazine, Lawrence Weschler wrote that watching the film, ‘I found myself completely absorbed, transfixed, a pillow of air lodged in my stilled, open mouth.’ In 2013, Morrison was honored with retrospective programs in four different countries: the Walker Art Museum, United States; the Vila Do Conde Short Film Festival, Portugal; the Adelaide Film Festival, Australia; and the Aarhus Film Festival, Denmark. Morrison’s particular ‘hand-writing’ and style of filmmaking is exhibited in his very idiosyncratic way of using the filmic material, the material carrier – the celluloid strip – as a prime factor in his art, the way that this material disintegrates, decays and, thus, renders a very special and affective quality of the scenes filmed. 12 |

* 1995 was an important year for Film and Media Studies in at least two respects. The year when ‘the cinema’ celebrated its 100th Anniversary, Sony, Philips, Toshiba, and Time Warner agreed on a standard for a data carrier formerly known as Digital Video Disk – the DVD [Digital Versatile Disk] that, on the one hand, declared war on ‘the cinema as we know it’, but, on the other hand, promised salvation: the medium film, having, since its early beginnings, sworn to ‘capture’ movement and the dynamics of life, had to struggle against its transience more than any other medium. In the year of its 100th Anniversary, the cinema was not only ‘old’, an ‘old-fashioned-next-to-outdated’ medium – the films themselves, the collected and archived reliquaries of film history, were in danger of rotting, decaying, and disappearing forever. Judging from the password of film conservationists – ‘From the conservation of the medium to the preservation of the content’ (Schüller 1994) – the DVD (or, in general: digital media) in fact seemed to be the redeemer for which ‘film’ had longed. This force field of the hope of ‘making the moment stay forever’ and the dread of decay, this oscillation of materiality and immateriality, of the animation of the static and the reanimation of le temps perdu reenacts – 100 years later – the relation of film, time, life, and death that already had marked the first steps of the medium film; history repeats. 1995 was also the year in which the Journal of Material Culture was conceptualized, in order to give a public and interdisciplinary face to a field of research that had already begun to take hold in various disciplines such as anthropology, archaeology, geography, etc. During the previous thirteen years, material culture studies advanced to a new, exciting, and highly influential field of cultural studies (see e.g. Brown 2003). Material culture is based

THE FILMS OF BILL MORRISON

on the premise that the materiality of objects is an integrative part and parcel of culture, that the material dimension is as fundamentally important in the understanding of a culture as language or social relations – material culture thus adds a welcomed counterweight and addition to the domination of cultural studies by sociolinguistic constructivism. Materiality’s significance is independent of human action or intervention – it is as important to ask how things do things (and what kind of things things do), as it is how to do things with words. Objects have a life of their own, a temporality of their own, ‘objects change over time, in both their physical composition and their cultural salience’ (Eastop 2006). Since material culture studies mainly focusses on the materiality of everyday objects and their representation in the media (literature, film, arts, etc.), a further and important step would be to redirect such an analysis to the materiality of the media itself, to put the probing finger not only at the thing in representation, but the thing of representation. The medium ‘film’ seems to me most fitting to test such an interface of material culture and media studies, since film has entertained a most complex relation to time from its early beginnings onward: film promised to (re)present temporal dynamics – and the temporality of things – directly, unmediated, a paradox that gives rise to the different ‘strategies’ of what Deleuze calls the movement-image and the time-image respectively. Such a representation, however, is not only an effect of a perceptive illusion, but also of the repression of the very materiality of film itself, the film stock, an immensely fragile medium that, in the course of its projection-life, is subjected to scratches, burns, etc. – to signs of the times. I will situate this crossbreed of material culture and media studies in the larger framework of Deleuze’s Cinema books mixed with his ‘intelligent materialism’1 – a hybrid that stays in the family, so to speak, in order, as Régis Debray put it, ‘[t]o proceed as if mediology could become in relation to semiology what ecology is to the biosphere. Cannot a “mediasphere” be treated like an ecosystem, formed on the one hand by populations of signs and on the other by a network of vectors and material bases for the signs?’ (Debray 1996).2

FILM: TIME | MOVEMENT Film: Time | Movement – Projection Since its birth, the cinema has entertained a complex relation with time. First of all, film was seen as a medium representing time. Marey’s chronophotography can clearly be seen as one of the ‘midwives’ of film here. By creating ever smaller temporal equi-distances in the measuring, fragmentation, and

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representation of time, Marey wanted to lift the veil of the mystery of ‘living machines’. According to him, chronophotography proved once and for all that ‘motion was only the relation of time to space’ (Marey 1884). This puts Marey in direct opposition to Henri Bergson’s philosophy of time – Bergson explicitly understood time not in its reduction to movement in space. It thus comes as no surprise that Bergson entertained a skeptical or at least ambivalent attitude towards the cinema. In Creative Evolution (Bergson 1944) he reveals what he calls the mechanistic ‘contrivance of the cinematograph’ (332) – it ‘calculates’ movement out of ‘immobility set beside immobility, even endlessly’ (331). If, as Marey claims, movement is only ‘the relation of time to space’, then, Bergson argues in The Creative Mind (1992), ‘time is made up of distinct parts immediately adjacent to one another. No doubt we still say that they follow one another, but in that case succession is similar to that of the images on a cinematographic film’ (18) and this completely misunderstands the fundamental difference between time as becoming, as continuous production of newness in the dynamics of an endless differentiation of life, and time as a ‘mechanic’ succession of moments ‘cut out’ of that very continuum. Bergson’s durée has to be understood as a heterogeneous, qualitative duration that is completely at odds with Marey’s quantitative, numeric, and linear conception of time as temps [t] – an opposition that finds its filmic equivalent in the tension between the single image and the projected film.

Film: Time | Movement – Representation The classic narrative film represents time in film with well-known narrative strategies such as organic montage, rational cuts, continuity editing, flashbacks, hence, with the action-reaction model. Even in its connection with more complex plots (see Back to the Future or Memento), narrative film is ultimately based on the concept of an abstract and linear time – exactly what Marey had in mind. Films based on the action-reaction schema are films that, in the ­Deleuzian taxonomy, belong to the movement-image. Deleuze argues that, when the reality of World War II and its aftermath exceeded our capacity for understanding, traditional forms of cinematic ‘cause-and-effect’ strategies became irritatingly inappropriate, resulting in the ‘crisis of the action-image’ (Deleuze 1986, 197) and the breakdown of its corresponding ‘realist fundament’, the ‘sensory-motor schema’ (155). Here, continuity was basically the effect of the filmic characters’ movement through space – rational intervals ensure continuity and the actors function as differentials to translate dramatic action into movement, propelling a cohesive narrative forward.

THE FILMS OF BILL MORRISON

As a result, the rational cuts and the continuity of the sensory-motor linkage loosen and collapse – the emerging interval marks the convergence of discontinuous durations and gives way to ‘false continuity and irrational cuts’ (Deleuze 1986, xi) that uncouple continuity, allowing ‘time “in its pure state” [to rise] up to the surface of the screen’ (xi). The resulting time-image emerges as something beyond movement (see 1-24), an image not defined as a succession of spatial segments, subverting the sensory-motor schema and not treating time as a simple derivative of space. No longer a measure of objects changing their positions in space, movement becomes a dynamics of relations within time.

Film: Time | Movement – Preservation A further, no less important relation between film and time lies in film’s attempt to preserve time, in its promise to not only represent time, but to capture and freeze it in its fleeting dynamics. After the first screening of Lumière’s actualités at the Salon Indien in Paris, 28 December 1895, the daily newspapers celebrated the ‘fact’ that this new medium, with its possibility to record people ‘in life’, made death lose its sting. Death is also the central term in André Bazin’s discussion of photography and film in his influential essay ‘The Ontology of the Photographic Image’. Bazin here claims an anthropological cause for the arts in general, which he calls a ‘mummy complex’ (Bazin 2005, 9). Like the ‘practice of embalming the dead’ (9), which aimed at the ‘continued existence of the corporeal body’ (9), the image was to provide an almost magical and material ‘defense against the passage of time’ (9). Art as a means to immortalize man – Bazin is catching up with a traditional topos here. In contrast to traditional painting’s ‘obsession with likeness’ (12), however, photography rather is a ‘molding, the taking of an impression, by the manipulation of light’ (12n†), an index of a human being or an object. While photography mummifies the moment, film is marked by the surplus advantage of conserving and simultaneously dynamizing the otherwise static recorded image. The mummy of film (like the mummies in film) lives – as every film-lover knows and which Bazin knew as well!! Or, as Bazin famously put it, ‘the image of things is likewise the image of their duration, change mummified, as it were’ (15). In the only illustration to Bazin’s ‘Ontology’, we get an image of the Holy Shroud of Turin, which is defined by Bazin as a synthesis of ‘relic and photograph’ (14n*). This allows us, I argue, to deduce that Bazin in analogy sees the filmic material, the actual celluloid carrier, as the mummy’s shroud or bandage, and the balm or preserving natron as a kind of emulsion that makes possible a direct ‘fingerprint’ of the real, so that precisely photography’s or film’s

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Fig. 1: The Holy Shroud of Turin – a synthesis of ‘relic and photograph’ (Wiki Commons).

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‘automatism’, devoid of an intervening subject (this coincides with Bazin’s idea of realism), makes ‘the logical distinction between what is imaginary and what is real […] disappear’ (15). As already mentioned, film ‘embalms’ time, ‘rescuing it simply from its proper corruption’ (14), but what if the corruption and entropy proper to time also eat at the mummy’s bandages? What if these die and decay, which also means – what if these have a proper life of their own?

Film: Time | Movement – Manifestation ‘This Film is Dangerous!’3 I am not referring to the contents of movies that supposedly are corrupting our youths, films containing ‘scenes of nudity and extreme violence’ – I want to focus on the material level of film, neither on the level of narration, nor of technology and techniques, but on the fundamental level of the film’s thingness – the film strip, a.k.a. ‘celluloid’. Until approximately 1950, all movies were shot on nitrate film, on nitro-cellulose (commonly referred to as ‘celluloid’), a highly flammable material – just remember the

THE FILMS OF BILL MORRISON

scene in Giuseppe Tornatore’s Cinema Paradiso (or Tarantino’s Inglorious Basterds, with its ‘Operation Kino’), in which the cinema goes up in flames. Developed in 1899 by George Eastman, the immense advantage of nitrate film was its high quality – no other material provided such brilliance and high amount of shades of gray. But nitro-cellulose consists of cotton, camphor, and acid and is based on the same formula as the so-called ‘gun cotton’ – nitrate film carries loads of oxygen in its own pockets to fend the flames, so that it even burns under water. Fig. 2: Nitro-cellulose formula (Wiki Commons).

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In addition, once processed, this material is highly sensitive to ‘environmental factors’: it tends to decompose and deteriorate in dependence of time and environment; it returns to its components – nitro-cellulose, gelatin, and silver emulsion. This process enfolds in various states; it begins with a sepia/ amber ‘coloration’ of the film strip and the fading of filmed images; then the celluloid loses its ‘shape’, softens, and becomes gooey; next, bubbles and blisters emerge on the surface of the film, the emulsion separating from the nitro-cellulose carrier. In the end, the nitro-cellulose base completely depolymerizes and hardens into the notorious ‘hockey pucks’ and ‘donuts’ so dreaded by film archivists, until what is left is just a highly inflammable reddish powder. Bazin saw the medium of film as a bandage, as a protective skin – in French, the material film strip is referred to as pellicule (skin). Since the film – and the skin of film – is also a thing, a material object, it is itself subjected to time – and to decay – as well. When actors reach an age at which they lose attraction with the audience, they either have a ‘skin job’ or quit acting. Likewise, films, if time has left too many marks on their surface, are either restored (‘embalmed’) or taken out of distribution. The entropic process can be slowed down, but it cannot be stopped – and it is exactly these decaying film skins that Bill Morrison uses as basic material for most of his films. Christa Blümlinger, in an important and early appreciation of Morrison’s work, evokes the notion

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of the ‘Poetics of the Ruin’ (2009, 37). But Morrison’s work does not exhaust itself in that notion – far from it, which is why we rather like to evoke the idea of the ‘Aesthetics of the Archive’, which, while not shying away from the notion of the passing away of the archive, also focusses on the materiality of the filmic medium. Morrison’s work takes film’s materiality seriously and lends itself to a ‘materialist approach’ to media and film studies – representation of time and things in film are complemented by a perspective that takes into consideration the temporality of the medium itself. *

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The following essays – by film historians, curators, film scholars, and filmmakers – deal with the majority of Morrison’s expansive work in a chronological manner, centred by a Photo Essay by Agnès Villette and preluded by André Habib’s essay on Morrison’s aesthetics of the archive. ANDRÉ HABIB DRAFTS AND FRAGMENTS: REFLECTIONS AROUND BILL MORRISON AND THE PAPER PRINT COLLECTION

Between 1992 and 1996, Bill Morrison has sourced material from the Paper Print Collection at the Library of Congress, in the context of the Ridge Theater stage productions or for the production of what was to become The Film of Her. Using different materials found in Morrison’s The Film of Her folder, and drawing parallels between other ‘moments’ in the history of the avant-garde with regards to the collection (namely Ken Jacobs and Hollis Frampton’s interest in those films), André Habib illuminates the ways Morrison has engaged with these films and how, in a sense, his work points to a paradigm shift in the way we envision the relationship between the avant-garde, the Paper Print collection, and the archive. DAN STREIBLE THE FILM OF HER (1996)

Despite its brief running time, Bill Morrison’s The Film of Her is a cabinet of curiosities packed with fleeting glimpses of silent monochromatic movies, wrapped in an elliptical narrative about an unnamed library clerk’s search for unnamed footage of an unnamed woman he has desired since seeing her on screen in his boyhood. She is an avant-gardist’s MacGuffin, however, a mystery that need not be solved because the film’s true purpose is to revel in the oneiric qualities of early cinema artifacts. As such, The Film of Her offers Dan Streible an opportunity to examine how the work of Bill Morrison has intersected with the work of film-preservation professionals in the digital era.

THE FILMS OF BILL MORRISON

BENJAMIN LÉON GHOST TRIP (2000)

The concept of the ‘trip’ can have two meanings: one describes a mental transformation of being (a hallucinatory state caused by drugs), while the other covers the idea of an indefinite itinerary, which is associated with the English word road. By its structure, Benjamin Léon argues, Ghost Trip (2000) literally embarks on an unknown and sinuous quest. The movie is per se a strange object; the story follows the mysterious itinerary of a man who searches for myths in a landscape of undisclosed experiences. Starting with its formal structure, this paper explores the mythical stories that are implied in the images of Morrison’s film. On the one hand, the man’s travelling quest that leads him to the ocean presents a symbolic meaning of purity and purification according to religious and spiritual traditions. On the other hand, this quest also functions as an attempt to re-enchant space by evoking the wilderness myth in a world in which ‘hyperreality’ has replaced our conscious capacity to understand and distinguish reality from the imaginary – a world in which the sign-values of our environment seem to correlate with conventional values alienated from capitalism. The key sequence, in which the driver stops in the urban metropolis of Las Vegas, shows this mental and physical alienation of bodies detached from every real emotion. As much a primitive land and space of virginal solitude as a gloomy area for conquest, the notion of wilderness instigates a series of questions about the legitimacy of the concept of original space. The film’s loop structure – it opens with a soothing song of a man in a graveyard that is revisited in the last shots – allows us to think about the powers that evolve from this place that is loaded by spirits and other spectral visions. As Morrison has remarked about his film: ‘The Driver of a Cadillac hearse journeys from one end of the film to the other, picking up, and finally delivering, a wayward soul. Combining verité filmmaking with a highly stylized visual design, Ghost Trip weaves a hallucinatory re-imagining of the American road as a state of Limbo.’ Léon’s essay tackles the question of how Ghost Trip portrays an existential void that embraces the search for the essence of things. BERND HERZOGENRATH DECASIA (2002)

This essay focusses on the nexus of film, time, and materiality. Film is, by default, seen as a representation of time – Decasia goes a decisive step further by focussing on the temporality of or in the filmic material. Material culture is based on the premise that the materiality of objects are an integrative part and parcel of culture, that the material dimension is as fundamentally important in the understanding of a culture as language or social relations – but material culture mainly focusses on the materiality of

a e s t h e t i c s o f t h e a r c h i v e

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everyday objects and their representation in the media (literature, film, arts, etc.). Thus, a further and important step would be to redirect such an analysis to the materiality of the media itself, to put the probing finger not only at the thing in representation, but the thing of representation. The medium ‘film’ seems most fitting to test such an interface of material culture and media studies, since film has entertained a most complex relation to time from its early beginnings onward: film promised to (re)present temporal dynamics – and the temporality of things – directly, unmediated, a paradox that gives rise to the different ‘strategies’ of what Deleuze calls the movement-image and the time-image respectively. Such a representation, however, is not only an effect of a perceptive illusion, but also of the repression of the very materiality of film itself. If such an interest in the possibilities of the celluloid had already driven much of the 1960s avant-garde (Brakhage, Jacobs, etc.), Decasia not only focusses on film’s ‘thingness’, but also on its own, particular ‘temporality’. Reassembled from found footage and archive material in various states of ‘dying’, this film reveals the ‘collaboration’ of time and matter as ‘creative’ in itself and ultimately produces a category that Bernd Herzogenrath calls the matter-image and that, he argues, neither Deleuze’s movement-image, nor his time-image completely grasp: here, time and matter produce their own filmic image. HANS MORGENSTERN THE MESMERIST (2003)

Morrison’s cinema has often been associated with the passage of time and death: the grim inevitable, as it were. But what about dreams and murder? The Mesmerist (2003) stands out as an oddity in Morrison’s œuvre because it has a plot. Though it features the found art of decaying film, he takes the plot from the original source, The Bells (1926) by James Young, and uses decidedly modern techniques of film, rearranged fabula, abstract art, and the modern jazz of Bill Frisell, to create a different kind of film without changing the core of the story on which his film is based. By looking at both the original film and Morrison’s ‘revision’, Hans Morgenstern shows how Morrison has created a more profound narrative by rearranging the original film into layers and using decayed cellulose nitrate base film. By contrasting and comparing it to The Bells, this paper investigates how Morrison has reshaped the original film’s plot, while still staying true to his abstract style. Freudian and Lacanian theories of the unconscious and the real are employed to help explain Morrison’s story and stylistic choices. Also, Morgenstern describes how Morrison’s editing to the music of Bill Frisell helps to clarify and to enhance his story, which still retains enough of his hypnotic style to be a distinctively Morrisonesque picture.

THE FILMS OF BILL MORRISON

All in all, The Mesmerist maintains an integrity to the Morrison style because it still shows a concern for the unconscious. Even with its clear, plotaware form, The Mesmerist can still cast a spell. Moments hardly seen in the sometimes-mutated image invite the viewer to connect with the film on a subtle level while still encouraging interpretation via the editing and a story of conflict. The strength of Morrison’s cinema lies in the subtext provided by his choice of working with decayed film, which calls attention to the medium. His work with found art is purposefully sculpted in The Mesmerist. He relies on the natural form of aged him on nitrate film, but gives it new context. Though it is a process in decay, there is something between the sources, from the filmed image to the rot that has reshaped it, amorphous but concrete, like the unconscious. HANJO BERRESSEM LIGHT IS CALLING (2004)

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As with all films, the films of Bill Morrison rely on two main media. On the one hand, the specific film stock that carries the images, on the other, the light that makes the images possible in the first place and thus, albeit in a different manner, might also he said to ‘carry’ them. It would perhaps be too easy, however, to set up a dichotomy that sees the first medium as material and the second as immaterial, or, in a similar way, that sees the first as historical – in the way that Morrison’s films rely in a fundamental way on the historicity of the specific film stock in terms of its various deteriorations, its processes of aging and the inherent changes that result from these – and the second as ahistorical. Hanjo Berressem’s essay attempts to set up a more complex relation between the various forms of media that are at work in Morrison’s movies. Drawing on scientific, philosophical, and artistic theories of light and mediality, such as those of Fritz Heider, Gilles Deleuze, and Niklas Luhman, the first part of the essay will develop the notion of ‘media milieus’. Drawing on this notion, the second part will address the technologics, the aesthetics, and the poetics of Bill Morrison’s movie Light is Calling. The main theoretical reference of this part will be Gilbert Simondon’s theory of the suspension of the technical object into a general evolutionary landscape. The reading of Morrison’s movie will take its cue from Simondon’s highly suggestive statement that ‘[t]he relationship between thought and life is analogous to the relationship between a structured technical object and the natural environment’ (1980, 53).

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DAVID GERSTEN GOTHAM (2004)

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David Gersten offers a close reading of Morrison’s 2004 film Gotham and speculates on the idea of the modern city as a living zoetrope, one that combines film and architecture into a lived experience that may signal a shift in the nature of human nature. Film and the modern city grew up together and not just as distant cousins, but as siblings and perhaps even as conjoined twins, sharing certain organs, vessels, and connective tissues, living within each other and intertwining in countless ways. As a reflective double of the world living within the world film constitutes a living system of storytelling, memory, and light: part myth, part man, part mirror, a tripartite within a mirror to infinity we call the city. New York City exists in a continuous state of change. At every given instant, at every given moment, the city gives voice to our transformations. In Gotham, Morrison’s deep meditation on this city, these voices are made present in the sphere of life, their shadows are captured and cast into the lived space of our shared stories. In perfect duet with Michael Gordon’s stunning score, the city speaks in whispers and howls, revealing in its heights, depths, and fragile grounds our own heights, depths, and fragile grounds: the city contains us, moves through us, includes us, speaks for us: as we build the city, the city builds us. These evolutionary translations of human craft and human being are at the heart of Gotham; the metropolis imagines itself out of the human and the human bears, is born of, and borne by the city. JAN-CHRISTOPHER HORAK OUTERBOROUGH (2005)

Morrison is an archaeologist of cinema. His Outerborough references not only the earliest years of cinema history, but also perceptional mechanisms. Reworking a Biograph film from 1899, Morrison transforms the film document into a structuralist meditation on cinematic space that references American avant-garde films of the 1970s. The film is an act of Duchampian appropriation that declares itself to be art. Morrison also points to the fact that the birth of cinema coincides with the development of modern modes of transportation, both technologies radically altering human perception of space and time. Suddenly, the world becomes much smaller. In large metropolitan areas such as New York, Paris, and London, humans, architecture, and transportation are seemingly stacked over and under each other, increasing the speed of movement through space and time. Not surprisingly, both modernist art and early cinema, at least in part, embraced the resulting fragmentation of vision as a consequential modification of human perception. Yet, through early cinema and its mechanisms of perception, which emphasized

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visual pleasure and spectacle, audiences were able to confront their fears of a constantly changing environment and leave the cinema unharmed. By recuperating a lost object, Jan-Christopher Horak argues, Outerborough reminds us of those early moments of discovery. YASMIN AFSHAR THE HIGHWATER TRILOGY (2007)

Morrison’s 2006 film The Highwater Trilogy exposes the medium of film to and in its existential condition: the liquid. The exceptional states evoked by the forces of water on the image level and the material decay of the emulsified celluloid film-strip fuse the episodes in an at once disturbingly repelling and compelling way, confronting the viewer with the impotency of man to master the ephemerality of life. The film is heading ‘towards disaster’, incorporating a ruinous state on the brink of collapsing into chaos. The process of ruination that includes the fragile media-material itself, however, not only appears as a merely destructive force; by presenting the film strip as a testing ground for the creative agency of the material decay that produces visual effects of blisters and melting in dissonant patterns, Morrison’s film calls for the refurnishing potential of corrosive processes. According to Yasmin Afshar, disaster, despite its devastating and shameful consequences for the natural and social ecosystems that it affects, is not definite – (some little) life always continues – it is a chance for reorganization and renewal, introducing a Bergsonian life-force (Bergson 1944) that transforms the incontrollable ‘wet ontology’ (Steinberg and Peters 2015) in these images into a point of departure for critical remembering and rebuilding. The material ecology of ruination and disaster in The Highwater Trilogy is thus inevitably entangled with the social and urgently calls for an eco-sensitized perspective on how we may constructively interact and relate with the ruins of the past that point to our future. In Morrison’s film, the liquid therefore far exceeds a metaphorical meaning that addresses the fluidity of the moving image. As a dynamic assemblage, it invites a rethinking of conventional anthropocentric understandings of ecology as concerning merely the natural surroundings in which humans live. The natural and the social form complex networks which redefine our perspective on human and non-human agency. WILLIAM CUSICK PORCH (2007)

Porch is a poetic short film combining 8mm home-movie footage with Julia Wolfe’s haunting minimalist score in an exploration of the changing shape of the American home, set to a libretto by Deborah Artman. Porch is Morrison’s only film comprised entirely of archival home-movie footage, a subgenre of

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found-footage filmmaking with rapidly developing theory and criticism. The impact of the evolving concept of collective memory on archival practice is considered as it relates to the appropriation of home movies into new films. As William Cusick shows, in the creation of Porch, the progressive programs and collaborative approach of The Lynn and Louis Wolfson II Florida Moving Image Archives crucially allowed Morrison to identify specific themes in their expanding archive of home-movie materials. Porch exemplifies the artistic possibilities for artistic and institutional collaboration in constructing representations of collective memory using home movies as a common language. AGNÈS VILLETTE THE FUTURE LASTS LONG: THE ROMANOV LOST FAMILY ARCHIVES

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Last May, while Bill Morrison was in London for the release of his selected works by the BFI (British Film Institute), he invited Agnès Villette to come along to a few meetings he had in town. Villette then got the chance to follow him on his search for archives for future projects. For her, it was fascinating to observe Morrison work: to witness how an evanescent frame caught while viewing archives could, years later, become part of a feature film, or how a line in an article could arrest Morrison’s imagination so much that he would track the private collector to meet him in London. That line, published by the Guardian a few months before, had mentioned a forgotten archive suddenly resurfacing somewhere in Moscow. As an agent for the Russian collector was trying to sell it, extracts were available to potential clients in London. Seen from the comfort of a London office, the shaky images of the Romanov Imperial Family captured a few years before the Russian revolution, invoked the shadow of their exile and assassination and operated a strange conflagration of time, space, memory, and historical channeling. The return of forgotten and lost fractions of this historical era resonated strangely with the current Russian expansionist politics. Then, one image detached itself from the military parades and the lengthy high-society ceremonies. A group of children were jumping in a pond, splashing around, laughing, and playing. On a wooden pier, looking at them with envy, stood another child, dressed up, under the close scrutiny of his minder. Replaying the sequence, Morrison and Villette observed young prince Alexei, forbidden to play with his comrades because he was hemophiliac. Concentrated and immersed, Villette could witness how one frame totally absorbed Bill Morrison and how, in a fraction of second, he knew exactly how that lonely child from an earlier century would reenact, through the power of cinema, the same desolation and intensity, as at the moment it was shot.

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ANDREA PIERRON WHO BY WATER (2007)

Who By Water is a short seventeen-minute film produced in 2007 and accompanied by an original soundtrack composed by Michael Gordon. In this film, Morrison worked with newsreel footage shot for the Fox Movietone Newsreels Outtakes, which are now collected and conserved in the Archives of the University of Carolina Newsfilm Library. Who By Water reedits footage from the same outtake and reconstructs the arrival at land and departure of a ship in the early 20th century. In between the aperture and the conclusion of the film, the camera enters the ship in order to portray its passengers either within group shots or individually. Throughout the film, Andrea Pierron argues, the various deteriorations of the film celluloid display cracks, marks, and burned holes on the stripe and thus on the recorded figures. The decayed matter interplays with the individual figures progressively veiling, distorting, or even discarding them. Thus it implies an ongoing tension between the evolution of cinematic matter and figurative processes. The unfolding gallery of successive portraits is also based on an underlying tension between individual and collective memory processes as well as between history and mythology. In other words, as the distortions impact the figures and reveal their inner evolving cinematic matter, it turn images into historical materials in the building of collective representation and implicitly conflict and reflect upon its mythological storytelling dimensions. BENJAMIN BETKA EVERY STOP ON THE F TRAIN (2008)

Morrison’s Every Stop on the F Train is a short film with one of the greatest stars in the United States – Manhattan. Morrison’s film grants a peculiar look at, and thereby a meticulous documentation of, the realities of Manhattan or urban life en bloc. However, as Benjamin Betka observes, a more cumbersome topic is negotiated here. As an audiovisual essay, this work does not illustrate or propel a distinct philosophical treatise as it is rather a constructive phenomenological provocation. Every Stop on the F-Train deals with the position of the mind as immersed (or rather manifest) in sound, vision, time, and place, which can be researched within the unique capacities of film. Playful but also rigorous, machinic but also of humble elegance, this film reworks the linked concepts of motion pictures and locomotion. It destabilizes unquestioned notions of the viewer, content, direction, and directing, thereby harnessing the deeper potential of the medium. Object-oriented ontologies sketch a cosmos of abundant but inhuman entities. Four-folded or even hyperobjects dissolve any human-centred worlds or agendas and even mundane and beaten subway trains can argue for this

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elegantly. The scheduled F-train is more than a mere container – it is rather a medium that blends commuters and the city into a humming maze. BÉRÉNICE REYNAUD SPARK OF BEING (2010)

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As Morrison – aiming to ‘merge text and form’ – mimics the process of fabrication of the Frankenstein’s Creature by ‘stitching together’ footage of heterogeneous origins, Bérénice Reynaud’s essay aims to produce a meta-discourse on this process by ‘stitching together’ fragments of other narratives: two short stories by Jorge Luis Borges and notes on an exhibition curated about the concept of ‘bachelor machine’. As these texts pertain to the notion of ‘the monstrous’, they also displace it outside of the realm of the ‘patent’ text of the Frankenstein myth, toward issues of the circularity of the gaze, the question of who dreamt the dreamer, and the violent obsessions that mark ‘the age of mechanical reproduction’. Morrison displaces the terrain from the filmic (metaphorical illustrations of a narrative) onto the pro-filmic (the conditions in which the footage was taken and film made), shifting the question of ‘the monstrous’ from the creature to the cinematic apparatus itself. SIMON POPPLE THE MINERS’ HYMNS (2011)

The Miners’ Hymns (2010) is a collaborative evocation of the working lives and landscape of the Durham Coalfields. It was commissioned for the 30th anniversary of the 1984-1985 Miners’ Strike, the final act that marked the end of the coalfield and a traditional way of life. Through the use of archive and an evocative score, the film exposes key elements of that tradition and the role the archive plays in the telling of their story. Simon Popple explores the nature of the collaboration, the role of the archive, and the universality of its subject. JOHANNES BINOTTO TRIBUTES – PULSE (2011)

Picking up on the psychoanalytic concept of death-drive, as discussed by Freud and Lacan, Johannes Binotto examines the ways in which the film ­Tributes–Pulse: A Requiem for the 20th Century uses decomposing film material, not as a final state, but rather as a new beginning for cinema. Similar to the death-drive’s capacity to transcend the common dichotomy of life and death, Morrison’s film keeps the disintegrating images alive in their process of dying. Dying thus proves to be the very opposite of death: not some ultimate break but an active process, which can be prolonged, paused, and extended into eternity. Accordingly, the film’s haunting soundtrack by Danish com-

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poser Simon Christensen also plays with similar paradoxes. Thus, the title’s ‘pulse’ can be understood, as the irresistible, undead beat of the drive itself, which has no other goal than its own circular movement. It is the film’s pulse that connects what has before been considered opposites: past and present, form and content, depiction and depicted, birth and decay. EVA HOFFMANN JUST ANCIENT LOOPS (2012)

Just Ancient Loops is the result of the collaboration between Morrison and Michael Harrison, whereby the former contributed the imagery and the latter his music. The extraordinary Maya Beiser performed the multilayered cello composition. Morrison’s imagery combines decaying nitrate celluloid found-footage and high-definition CGI animation based on NASA data to juxtapose peoples’ question of existence with the attempts of science and religion to provide answers. The film is a ternary audiovisual symphony with great emphasis on the interplay between the music and the visuals. Together, the three parts – a largo Genesis, an allegro Chorale, and the largo final Ascension – present different views on heaven. In Just Ancient Loops, the audio and visual levels are equally important and complement each other. Here, as Eva Hoffmann argues, the music is neither only accompanying the images, like a soundtrack in a film, nor are the images just expressions of the music, as is commonly the case in music videos. Morrison’s imagery and Harrison’s composition create, through multifold bilateral reference, a phenomenon here titled as über-synchresis. This signifies the allegoric self-reflexivity and syncretic reflexivity of the visual, audio, and theoretical-narrative level. The term has been elaborated on grounds of the acronym synchresis by the film theorist Michel Chion in order to describe a permanent correlation between music and image. SUKHDEV SANDHU THE GREAT FLOOD (2013)

Taking its cue from artist Roni Horn’s claim that water induces a ‘vertigo of meaning’ that is both generative and destabilizing, this associative essay about Bill Morrison’s The Great Flood (2013) hinges on two televisual outbursts: Celine Dion, on CNN’s Larry King Live, taking to task the American military-industrial complex for its refusal to intervene forcefully in the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina; and a black gentleman, who appears in Spike Lee’s When The Levees Broke (2006), who has been displaced from his home after Katrina – ‘I’m an American. How can I be a refugee?’ Sukhdev Sandhu’s

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essay interlaces three hydropolitical disasters – The Great Flood in 1927, Hurricane Katrina in 2005, and Hurricane Sandy in 2012 – to explore the limits of quantificatory approaches to extreme environmental events and to examine shared patterns of state violence against black and working-class Americans. The collection finishes off with an interview with Bill Morrison by acclaimed writer Lawrence Weschler, who commissioned Morrison’s Re:Awakenings (2013), a short film inspired by the work of Oliver Sacks, with music selected by Philip Glass.

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1

‘Intelligent materialism’ not because it is more intelligent than other ‘material-

2

Debray further proposes – ‘We speak about Earth Day. Why not tomorrow, no

isms’, but because it grants intelligence and agency to matter itself. pleasantry intended, a day London devoted to celebrating celluloid, vellum paper, or vinyl records?’ (Debray 1996, 114). 3

See Smither 2002.

WORKS CITED Bazin, André. ‘The Ontology of the Photographic Image.’ What is Cinema? Volume 1. Ed. and trans. Hugh Gray. Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 2005. 9-16. Bergson, Henri. Creative Evolution. Trans. Arthur Mitchell. New York: The Modern Library, 1944. Bergson, Henri. The Creative Mind: An Introduction to Metaphysics. New York: Citadel Press, 1992. Blümlinger, Christa. Kino aus zweiter Hand. Zur Ästhetik materieller Aneignung im Film und in der Medienkunst. Berlin: Vorwerk, 2009. Brown, Bill. A Sense of Things: The Object Matter of American Literature. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2003. Debray, Régis. ‘Toward an Ecology of Cultures.’ Media Manifestos. London: Verso, 1996. 108-132. Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 1. The Movement-Image. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and B. Habber­jam. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986. Eastop, Dinah. ‘Conservation as Material Culture.’ Handbook of Material Culture. Eds. C. Tilley et. al. London: SAGE, 2006. 516-533.

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Hoberman, J. ‘The Poetry of Decay: Live Accompaniment for Bill Morrison’s Avant-Garde Collage.’ 16 January 2007. Village Voice. https://www.villagevoice. com/2007/01/16/the-poetry-of-decay/. Accessed: July 2015. Marey, Etienne-Jules. La méthode graphique dans les sciences expérimentales et principalement en physiologie et en médicine. Paris: Masson, 1884. Schüller, Dietrich. ‘Von der Bewahrung des Trägers zur Bewahrung des Inhalts.’ Medium 4 (1994): 28-32. Simondon, Gilbert. On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects. Ontario: University of Western Ontario, 1980. Smither, Roger, ed. This Film is Dangerous. A Celebration of Nitrate Film. Bruxelles: FIAF, 2002. Steinberg, Philip and Kimberley Peters. ‘Wet Ontologies, Fluid spaces: Giving Depth to Volume through Oceanic Thinking.’ Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 33 (2015): 247- 264. Weschler, Lawrence. ‘Sublime Decay.’ New York Times Magazine. 22 December 2002. http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/22/magazine/sublime-decay.htm. Accessed: July 2015.

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‑

CHAPTER 1

Drafts and Fragments Reflections around Bill Morrison and the Paper Print Collection André Habib

Herzogenrath, Bernd (ed.), The Films of Bill Morrison. Aesthetics of the Archive. Amsterdam University Press, 2018 DOI 10.5117/9789089649966/CH01

ABSTRACT Between 1992 and 1996, Bill Morrison has sourced material from the Paper Print Collection at the Library of Congress, in the context of the Ridge Theater stage productions or for the production of what was to become The Film of Her. Using different materials found in Morrison’s The Film of Her folder, and drawing parallels between other ‘moments’ in the history of the avant-garde with regards to the collection (namely Ken Jacobs and Hollis Frampton’s interest in those films), this essay illuminates the ways Morrison has engaged with these films and how, in a sense, his work points to a paradigm shift in the way we envision the relationship between the avant-garde, the Paper Print collection, and the archive. k e y wo r ds

Hollis Frampton, Ken Jacobs, Library of Congress, Paper Print Collection

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I met Bill in a café. He presented me a thick stack of papers, letter and legal format, old faded fax sheets, typed and handwritten notes, packed in a large yellow envelope on which is indicated in black marker: the film of her. He told me there is a lot of stuff in there that may be useful for my research. He mentioned a treatment of The Film of Her when it was called Figments. He also told me about a 100-page fictional script he had written at a time when he had no idea what the film was going to be and was thinking of turning it into a feature film. He also said that a big part of that pile had to do with film and music clearances for The Film of Her. I thanked him and took the folder with me, promising to send it back as quickly as possible. I had written an email, a couple of weeks earlier, asking him:

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By the way, did you by any chance run into any of the stuff I had mentioned when we met in NY last April? I’m looking for material – pretty much anything – that could be in your personal archives, that would have kept a trace of the research queries you were addressing to the LOC to obtain the 16mm films from the paper print collection (or any other piece of documentation that could relate to The Film of Her). I think I’m gonna be focusing my article on your early relationship to the paper prints, putting it in relation to other ‘greats’ who have dealt with this material, trying to focus on the circulation of films from that collection in your works and those of Jacobs and Frampton (to name only those). In a sense, I’m trying to look at the ways your films (and others) illuminate this specific body of films, the imaginary, or the ‘age’ of the archive they point to, etc. (Habib 17 June 2015, personal email) His wonderful answer was: I will try to bring some of that stuff along with me. I’m afraid it may resemble the paper rolls themselves when they were stored in the library for many decades – but so much the better, right? (Morrison 17 June 2015, personal email) * Bill Morrison has often discussed his discovery of the existence of the Paper Print Collection by way of a description of Tom, Tom the Piper’s Son by Ken Jacobs in which Kemp Niver’s name is mentioned1. Then a pupil of Robert Breer at Cooper Union, actively involved with the JK optical printer, trained as a painter, interested printmaking and philosophy with a deep fascination with the paradoxes of time, motion, and stillness, he became immediately fas-

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cinated by the idea of reanimation of still images printed on paper. In a 2012 interview, he says: I had begun making films in art school where I studied under Robert Breer at Cooper Union. I would shoot film, and then print photographs from the 16mm negative, processing the prints with a paintbrush rather than immersing them in chemical baths. This gave each frame an individualized look. When I re-animated all these 3”x 4” prints, I found that there were two things happening at once in each frame: the image and how it was printed. This set up a relationship I found to be very powerful and one I sought out in my use of found footage. I became interested in the Paper Print Collection from Ken Jacobs’ description of sourcing this collection for his film Tom, Tom, The Pipers’ Son. These films had already been printed on paper and reanimated years later, and therefore had undergone the same process I had used in art school to treat my own films. (Morrison 2012) In an email exchange with me in 2015, he added this: Having spent much of my art school career turning films into photographs and back into film again, this process intrigued me. I was interested in an ancient film collection that had crossed over into the ‘touchable’ world and went back again. It seemed to possess the best qualities of animation without the (apparent) presence of the human hand. This led me to read Patrick Loughney’s paper on the Paper Print Collection,2 where I learned about Howard Walls, who saved the collection from destruction in 1939. I was interested in these two characters Niver and Walls, and I flew out to LA to interview both of them in 1992. This research became The Film of Her (1996) when I realized I wanted to try to tell this story using archival films. (Morrison 14 April 2013, personal email) In the late 1980s and early 1990s, apart from a few notable example (essentially Patrick Loughney’s dissertation), the history of the Paper Print Collection and its ‘restoration’ back to celluloid was not well-known and aptly documented, nor were the films in that collection (both the 16mm and the paper rolls themselves) studied with the attention and somewhat mad scrutiny with which they have been studied in recent years (although, as many would argue, still more work needs to be done).3 Kemp Niver’s articles and catalogue, according to Charles ‘Buckey’ Grimm, an independent researcher and authority on the topic, were the only ‘written history of the Paper Print Collection’ (Grimm 1999, p. 204) until recently. Published in 1967 and revised, under a slightly dif-

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ferent title, in 1985, there is only a very brief mention of Walls’ contribution in the 1985 preface, written by Paul Spehr (Niver 1985, vii). Morrison’s fascination and detective-type quest came about, in part, when he learned about what seemed like an effacement of Walls from the history of the collection4. Tom, Tom the Piper’s Son was, by the early 1990s, a considerably important film within the history of avant-garde cinema, played regularly at Anthology Film Archives, at the Whitney Museum, and the MoMA; and was mentioned in various books and publications (and was probably, for that reason, one of the most famous paper-print films being shown at the time!). It was also possible to borrow a 16mm copy of the film at the New York Public Library, which is probably how Morrison saw it (or saw it again, after seeing it possibly at Anthology or in Breer’s class). More than Ernie Gehr’s Eureka (1974-1979), Frampton’s Public Domain (1972-1979), Bill Brand’s Demolition of a Wall (1973), and a handful of others, it was surely the most important film that could have been in circulation at the time that could trigger interest in exploring cinema’s past, in order to produce new and original works within the circuit of experimental cinema (today, Morrison’s films likely trigger such interest).5 By 1990, Morrison had begun his collaboration with Ridge Theater, providing them with visual material for their stage productions and operas,6 either in the guise of background-image loops (like for Conrad Cumming’s Photo Op, 1991) or a standard-film presentation in the middle of the production, such as for Footprints, which interrupted the stage action of Jungle Movie (much like René Clair’s film Entr’acte, which was originally presented as a prologue and in place of the ‘intermission’ of Francis Picabia’s 1924 ballet Relâche). The reasons behind Morrison’s early use of found material was aesthetic, economical, and probably philosophical. The optical reprinting of old material allowed for a specific texturing of the image, often enhanced, during the development, by bleach, paint, and various techniques that attacked the material to make it visually dynamic and dramatic (see the beginning of Footprints, with the 20th Century Fox logo). Oftentimes, this ‘found’ material was shot on Super8 off a television set running a VHS tape and then optically reprinted on the JK printer or refilmed with a 16mm Bolex camera. These different remediations – from 35mm film to VHS to super 8 back to 16mm through optical rephotographing of individual stills –, from one medium to the next, migrating from one life of images to a next, is, from the very beginning, at the heart of his film practice, and explains, in part, his fascination with the Paper Print Collection. This indeterminate status between still and moving image, between the rapid flow of film and the sequence of singular and absolutely unique, still, instantiations, is the wondrous paradox on which film sits and which so many great avant-garde films have explored, including Morrison. But there were probably financial reasons as well. Film production, or

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the simple shooting of original material on 16mm, was more expensive than simply recycling films that could be, at that time, fairly easily found in thrift shops, flea markets, and dumpsters (it was a great time for found-footage filmmaking). In the 1990s, many public institutions and libraries that held 16mm collections of educational films began converting to VHS (later to DVD) and, consequently, started getting rid of massive loads of 16mm films to archives who, for the most part, threw them into dumpsters.7 After hearing about the Paper Print Collection through Jacobs’ description and after a bit of research, Morrison quickly realized it was possible (and cheap) to order 16mm films directly from the Library of Congress by using the infamous ‘Brown Book’ (Niver 1985). The archaic process entailed going through the person in charge of the service of print duplication and ordering film titles — by phone or by fax — by providing the print negative number listed in the catalogue. A couple of weeks later, the films would arrive in the mail. Morrison recalls going through that book and ordering anything that related to the origin of species, to the beginning, to infancy, to magic tricks, and to the camera apparatus itself: a baby, a child, a monkey, anything that would allow him to structure a metaphor around the idea of a beginning, or again anything pointing, reflexively, to the idea of cinema (e.g. Meliès’ Le portrait spirite, 1903; Porter’s An Artist’s Dream, 1900; AM&B Grandpa’s Reading Glass, 1902; Edison’s 1901, The Educated Chimpanzee, etc.) was ordered, sometimes optically reprinted, sometimes not, and simply stowed away8. The Paper Print Collection obviously directly addresses the idea of a beginning. Whereas it is impossible to access — get a picture — of the beginning of painting, of literature, or of architecture, film (and photography) are the two first modern mediums that can allow to seize something like a very beginning, a very first iteration, whether it be in the guise of a sneeze, a kiss, a close-up, a train entering a tunnel, workers shoveling or leaving a factory: these images embody the medium’s very first steps, and become compelling for this very reason. Morrison’s early films, such as the jungle film Footprints;9 the mesmerizing ghost ride through cinematic apparatus, The Death Train; and the fossil-like haunting Lost Avenues; all deal precisely with this array of questions of origins. The films themselves — making the most of the poor quality of the paper prints themselves and the other material he reused, optically reprinted and manipulated, seem unearthed, pointing to an archaeological gesture of excavation of something deeply hidden in the recesses of our shared memory. Shards of faded, grainy, ruinous, moss innerved imagery, brought together through rapid editing to produce a new brand of cinema of attractions.10 A rebirth of sorts. Again. *

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Fig. 1.1: First page of a list of 125 films Hollis Frampton obtained copies from the Library of Congress Paper Print collection c. 1970-1971 (with the kind permission of Michael Zryd and Bill Brand)

A colleague11 to whom I wrote about my fascination with experimental filmmakers and their reuse of films found in the Paper Print Collection, sent me two PDF scans of typewritten documents. On the first, there is a list of 16 titles, with the header, ‘Hollis Frampton Public Domain, 1972’. On the other, sprawled over four pages, are 125 titles of films and feet of footage (fig. 1.1). I find a quote, in the complete writings of Frampton that enlightens me: We are only beginning to penetrate the phantom, the fiction of the copious and the readily available, to poke around in dusty attics, into the sort

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of mausoleums guaranteed by rapacious copyright system, for example, and to retrieve heaven knows what – probably not Shakespeare, Dante and Homer […] but at least something of the context in which those texts, if they ultimately are exhumed, will be perceived. To that end, then, I have brought along thirty minutes or so of such rubbish, which presumably contains embedded in it a Stradivarius or scarab or something priceless. This is simply a roll, upon which I won’t comment at all, from the Paper Print Collection at the Library of Congress. […] My principle of selection is so embarrassing that I don’t propose to tell you anything about it at all, but it demonstrates something of the past which, like all pasts, is self-proclaiming, repetitive, redundant, naughty, sometimes astonishing, and, in this case, on the principle that nothing much was made of if at the time, essentially impenetrable to us. It is by that mechanism that this body of material, whatever it is, then imposes upon us the responsibility of inventing it. (Frampton 2009, 181-182) This quote is taken from a dense and wonderful paper delivered by Hollis Frampton, on 17 November 1979 at the Whitney Museum. The presentation took place during a symposium curated by John Hanhardt, ‘Researches and Investigations into Film: ts Origins and the Avant-Garde’ (6-18 November 1979), scheduled between a conference by Nick Browne, ‘Film Form/Family Discourse: Conditions of Representation in Early American Cinema’ and a performance by Ken Jacobs, the impossible: Chapter One. Southwark Fair (first performed in 1975). Frampton’s talk was called ‘The Invention without a Future’ (see Frampton 2009, 171-182). Ken Jacobs Tom, Tom the Piper’s Son was shown during the symposium a few days earlier (13 November). the impossible, shown on the 17th, is in part a reworking of footage taking from the 1905 Billy Bitzer film. The screening of Jacobs’ Tom, Tom was also followed by a selection of Biograph and Edison films from the Paper Print Collection. To my knowledge, this is one of the rare occasions on which avant-garde filmmakers and early film historians came together to discuss common interests (other­ wise, the channels between the avant-garde and early cinema scholarship and archivists seem pretty obstructed and the only person capable of bringing these solitudes together today is, of course, Bill Morrison, as Streible argues in his paper). It is difficult to ascertain which films of the Paper Print Collection were found on the reel presented by Frampton that evening.12 In an interview with Bill Simon, Frampton mentions going ‘through the Paper Print Collection at the Library of Congress like LéviStrauss went through the distant cultures of South America and the

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Pacific, desperately seeking primitive film’ spending ‘a lot of time, half a summer, looking at them [paper prints] in Washington, [making] a lot of notes, as they say. […]The material is in the public domain and I bought one each of what I wanted’. (Frampton 250-251)

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He mentions seeing the films on a Steenbeck machine and buying 125 (16mm copies) of films, of which ‘probably a hundred will be used’. The films were to be included – as a block or fragmented throughout, depending on the different iterations of the project – within the unfinished Magellan Project and were, in fact, included in different works or different presentations of Frampton’s works through the 1970s and 1980s. Other films of the Paper Print Collection appear in the projected cycle: in Gloria (1979, the year of the symposium); the 1903 American Biograph and Mutoscope Film Murphy’s Wake appears (in reference to Finnegan’s Wake, the major intertext for this film); and in Cadenza #1, another AB&M Film, A Little Piece of String (1902) is shown (in reference to Duchamp’s Vierge mise à nue par ses prétendants). In the same Bill Simon interview, Frampton talks about how, when he first showed parts of Mindfall in New York, he ‘showed it with primitive footage, from that same collection. I showed a medical documentary, or a series of them that were made from 1905 to 1911.’ (Frampton 2009, 251) 13 It is impossible to know if the ‘30 minutes or so of such rubbish’ taken from the collection and presented during the Whitney Symposium was what was later included in Frampton’s filmography under the title: Public Domain. Although the official date for this film is given in 1972, it does not seem to have been printed until April 1978, nor screened before that time.14 Public Domain is an extremely simple and compelling film and is tailored to the definition of found-footage film. In a similar way to Works & Days (1969), made up a film that Frampton bought for $1 in a ‘Canal street junk shop’ to which he simply tagged his logo to the film, Public Domain simply juxtaposes 16 films of the Paper Print Collection, appearing in alphabetical order, dating from 1894 to 1904, presented in their entirety and separated by black leader. We find these titles: Alone (1904, AM&B) Baby in a Rage (1902, AM&B) Bubbles (1904, AM&B) Bull Fight No 3 (1898, Edison) Deaf Mute Girl Reciting Star Spangled Banner (1902, AM&B) Edison Kinetoscopic Record of A Sneeze (1894, Edison) Electrocuting An Elephant (1903, Edison) Elevated railroad, New York (1903, AM&B)

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Execution by Hanging (1905, AM&B) Kindergarten Ball Game (1904, AM&B) Ludlow’s Aeorodrome (1905, AM&B) M. Lavalle, Physical Culture (1905, AM&B) Ostriches Running No 1 (1898, Edison) Razing a Brick Building (1902, AM&B) Union Iron Works (1898, Edison) Weighing the Baby (1904, AM&B) Some of these titles are quite well-known to us today (Fred Ott’s Sneeze and Electrocuting an Elephant) and bear the iconic stamp, the recognizable visual texture – faded, almost translucid – so specific of the Kemp Niver-Bill Ault 16mm paper print transfers. Even by 1972, and probably still by 1979, these films, for the most part, had not really penetrated the circles of reconnaissance they have today, thanks to the development of early cinema historiography (and possibly, The Film of Her!). What was Frampton, the metahistorian, looking for? The longer list includes a great number of titles that mention the word ‘art’ or ‘artist’, or seem to have some kind of reflexive nature (The Artist’s Dilemma, An Artist’s Dream, Art Studies, The Camera Fiend, His Masterpiece, etc.); others point to this ‘softcore Edwardian Porn’ Frampton mentions in the Bill Simon interview (In my Lady’s Boudoir, Kiss me, Soubrettes in a Bachelors’s Flat, Teasing, etc.) and that he was thinking of including in the Magellan Project. The film, Public Domain, contains what Bruce Jenkins calls ‘literal pieces of cinematic juvenilia (child wading at the beach, another throwing a tantrum at home, three women merrily blowing bubble pipes, and the finale, a melodramatic weighing of a newborn attended by anxious father, doctor, and nurse)’.15 It is true that Alone, Weighing the Baby, Kindergarden Ball Game, and Baby in a Rage, are images of childhood or innocence as a metaphor for cinema’s infancy (dear to Morrison as well), but images of electrocution, executions, sneezing, ostriches running, bull fights, muscle flexing, aerial train rides, planes attempting to fly, collapsing buildings, and workers leaving a factory, complete and complexify this script, creating a purposeful sense of willful randomness, a cabinet of playful and sometimes troubling modern curiosity and are thrown at us in their enigmatic and opaque wonder (something one can also find, at times, in The Film of Her, which includes many of the more famous film titles mentioned earlier, although, upon closer scrutiny, containing much fewer films of that collection than we can think). Withholding the key to the collection’s ordering (unless one sees a list of titles, it is impossible to deduce the films alphabetical structuring), the film is given up to the creative imagination of each spectator to build up Frampton’s idea of a Metahistory of Film. After the silent, simple

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‘exhibition’ of these short films, Frampton apposes the logo of his initials,16 as a ‘mark of admiration’ and parodoxal authorial reappropriation. He is very much, through this, gesturing towards the modernist, Duchampian logic of the objet trouvé … at a time when found footage was not exactly what it has become today and, in a way, was really about finding footage and doing something simple and, by this, reinventing it. *

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Morrison and Frampton, 20 years apart, dug for ‘primitive’ footage in the Library of Congress that related to the idea of origins, but also looked for films in thrift shops and flea markets, like Cornell, digging through stacks of abandoned films in a New Jersey warehouse. Jacobs later found the material for A Perfect Film in a Canal St. dumpster. Also, starting with Tom, Tom the Piper’s Son, he has regularly used films from the Paper Print Collection17, also instilling a kind of amazement for the origins of film, replayed and redeployed through a careful rearticulation of cinema’s archaeology (stereoscopic vision, flickering effect, rewinding, etc.) As is well documented, Jacobs learned about the collection through a New York Times article (Canby 1968) and soon after rented a 16mm roll of film that had been made available for educational purposes (possibly through Thomas Brandon’s distribution company), to show to his class at St. John’s University and later to friends at his place (this is how he stumbled across Tom, Tom the Piper’s Son, in a roll with two other films that did not interest him) (Habib 2014). Comparing Frampton’s Public Domain to Morrison’s Footprints, Death Train or The Film of Her or even to the films and performances of Ken Jacobs is probably a futile exercise. The works, the styles, archival gesturing and the contexts in which they were produced differ considerably. There is a willful and playful, magical and spectacular ethos that informs Footprints, The World is Round, and The Death Train. At first glance, the fictional-documentary style, albeit with avant-garde undertones, of The Film of Her, is hard to place in the same genre with the stern, analytical, dense propositions of Frampton and Jacobs (although their films may also reveal a degree of playfulness, irony, and concealed wittiness). Highly edited, carefully optically printed and processed, densely layered, sonically and optically overcharged, and thematically organized around a series of dominant motifs (cinema of attractions, infancy, primitiveness, film reflexivity, and novelty) and visual puns (the Sneeze spliced together with water damaged film in Footprints), these films operate, it seems, on very different, but no less fascinating, terms. The hybridity and variety of material used – from paper-print films to 40’s or 50’s educational or scientific films, etc. – appear closer to the kaleidoscopic collages of a Bruce Conner or a

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Craig Baldwin, whereas Jacobs (and Gehr) usually structure their found-footage films around a singular view that they analyse and exhaust. For Frampton, the multiple films are integrated, each time, within a much larger, encyclopaedic project; they are pieces of a wider puzzle, standing for something else, in a way, like a possibility of reinventing cinema’s history. * For some time now, I believed a series of shots in the 1991 Lost Avenues offered the first occurrence of a paper-print film in the films of Morrison. Between still and moving images, mixing hypnotic whale images, optically reprinted and (probably) hand-processed material to create high contrast, sometimes negative, ochre, ghost-like imagery. Halfway into the film, we see a train go through a mountain. Later, we see workers plowing a field, set to Peruvian pan-pipe music. After asking Bill, he confirmed that this was footage he shot from a VHS tape onto super8, undercranked at 9 i/s, developed and optically step-printed (3 frames for each individual frame) onto a high contrast 16mm film stock. The migration of media, in the end, produced a similar visual experience. The source remains a mystery, but I did make one discovery, talking to him that day: the 16mm images of the whale in Lost Avenues were found on a shelf with other ‘master clips’ in the optical house where he was working at the time, in the Film Center Building. He was able to use the professional printer they had there to make his own copy. He recalled, however, that he did not clear the rights for it. At the time, and for many of the Ridge Theater performances, he dug through the shelves of video stores (Kim’s, I suppose) picking up anything that could refer to early cinema. This is probably how he discovered Roger Leenhardt’s La naissance du cinema (1946). Many images from that film reappear in The Film of Her, such as the candle at the beginning and the closing shot, the Muybridge images, the rotating photo cards, a flickering projector.18 Another important source for material at the time for his various works (around 1992) was a company called Budget Films in California.19 An invoice details the rental of these films: 1) 2) 3) 4) 5) 6) 7)

Birth of Flicker $10 Archaeology of Cinema $20 Biography of Motion Picture Camera $20 Operater Cranked & Picture Moved $15 Toy that Grew up $15 From Magik Lantern to Today $20 How motion pictures Move and talk $10

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I found a digital version of How Motion Pictures Move and Talk on the Prelinger Archives database; it is an 11-minute 1940 educational film produced by Bell & Howell. I found, with happy astonishment, images that appear in The Death Train, The World is Round, The Film of Her, with sound and voice-over, and uplifting music. It has the same effect on me as when a friend showed me two rolls of 8mm Castle Films, Thrill on Wheels and Thrill a Second, both extensively used in Conner’s A Movie. I began to think that this is the kind of stuff that should go into a proper archaeology of found-footage filmmaking, if one was to write such a thing one day. *

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In 1992, pursuing his research on the Paper Print Collection, and after having discovered the existence of Howard Walls, as well as Bill Ault (the person who actually did the work of refilming the paper print material and never really got proper credit for it), Morrison set off to Los Angeles to interview Walls and Ault in 1992, equipped with a hi-8 camera. The tapes are somewhere in Morrison’s archive, but, due to the 2012 flood, Morrison has no idea if the sound and images are still salvageable (the same goes for a U-Matic tape of a 1990 interview with Walls). Walls, who was then living in Goleta, next to Santa Barbara, had a head cold when Morrison met him and refused to have him take the lens cap off of his camera and be filmed. This was crushing to Morrison, because Walls was sitting below an enormous wall-sized clock, talking about time and memory: there was a film there, in and of itself. In the feature-length screenplay virtual embodiment for The Film of Her, we can read a recreation of this invisible film: 1. int. old walter idle’s apt – day a filmmaker is interviewing old walter idle on his role in the restoration of the Paper Film Collection. She has found a rather confused and defensive man who sits beneath an enormous clock in his living room surrounded by photographic memorabilia including film reels and assorted pieces of ancient nitrate film. With the help of some wine, he is telling his story […] (Morrison, personal archive) After the interview, Morrison continued to listen to the audio recording of Walls’ voice, over and over again, which then turned into an interior monologue that found its way into the screenplay, almost textually (‘Some people say indices. We called them indexes […]’, ‘I at least got it there where it could be socialized-ed’). The voice-over in The Film of Her is, in fact, Morrison’s own voice mimicking Walls’s southern, West Virginia, accent.

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Concerning Niver, he was then living in a nondescript apartment on Hollywood Blvd. He came to the door wearing a bathrobe and sunglasses. Both men were, by that time, very old and yet still carried reciprocal grudges against the other, calling each other names. The same went for Bill Ault, who was also still quite upset after all these years.20 By that time, it seemed no one was particularly interested in these historical figures (except Patrick Loughney, who mentions them in his dissertation). Charles ‘Buckey’ Grimm, one of the great authorities on the Paper Print Collection, also mentions the existence of a July 1990 Photoplay Productions interview (he himself had various exchanges with Walls on 25 July 1997) (see Grimm 1999, 215)21 made for Griffith: Father of Cinema (1993), directed by Kevin Brownlow and David Gill (Morrison mentioned seeing outtakes of the interview after having completed The Film of Her). Leafing through Anthony Slide’s important book, Nitrate Won’t Wait, published in 2000, I suddenly recall there was some reference in there to William Ault, Howard Walls, and Kemp Niver. Looking more closely, I notice with fas-

Fig. 1.2: First page of the script for The Film of Her (with the kind permission of Bill Morrison).

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cination that Slide interviewed Walls on 7 October 1990 and William Ault on 24 January 1991. Slide’s book came out a couple of years after The Film of Her was completed, but I am somehow fascinated by this coincidence: a year or so before Morrison, film historians began, unknowingly, their own excavation into this somewhat buried history. I also came to realize that much of this story has relied on oral history, on interviews conducted at different times, which allowed historians and filmmakers to stitch the loose ends of this fragmented history together. I also realize that my encounters and interviews with Morrison – but also with Gehr, Jacobs, and others – are a way of continuing to write this history and to shed light on the way their films have helped us illuminate it.22 * 44 |

Sfiting through the thick stack of paper, preliminary drafts, notes, undated – but probably from the early 1990s when I read: ‘Figments is a film about the rediscovery of ancient films and the subsequent struggle to restore them.’ I became fascinated by the way the project for The Film of Her is laid out, the background story, wonderfully summarized, mixing together the interview material and personal research. I also read the 100-page screenplay, a highly romanticized (and romantic) comedic-fiction version of the distilled and much subtler The Film of Her (fig. 1.2). I see descriptions, bits and pieces of texts, scenes and lines, dispersed throughout, that found their way into the final film, traces of Morrison’s interview process, his research into the history of the Paper Print Collection, and his personal encounter and ‘narrativization’ of the archive. Everything is already there, precise, although embedded, on paper, in a body that ended up becoming quite foreign to the project. Of course, Morrison keeps his initial script in which the clerk (Wally Idle) is obsessed with a childhood memory of a film, Peeping Tom – starring ‘Lily Gaze’ – that he rediscovers in the paper print vault, hence issuing a psychological (ie. erotic or sexual) motivation to his quest to reanimate these still photographs. In The Film of Her, the image of an undressed woman smiling, taken from a 1919 stag film, The Painter’s Model23, Morrison found in a Lower East Side thrift ship becomes the incarnation of this lost past that the Clerk wishes to reanimate. In Trinity (2000), another stag film – found in the same lot as the one used in The Film of Her – is used with even compelling, ambiguous, and more powerful result. Delving into the murky pile ‘clearance for the film of her’, I was stunned by the variety and complexity of clips used for the film, many of them pointing to the same theme that triggered his interest in the first place: The Beginning of Life, NASA stock image, Nivers’ promotional film, Slow Fires, Leenhardt’s Naissance du cinéma, various footage from the National Archives

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(moon time-lapse imagery, and so on), as well as pages and pages of faxes, letters, invoices, and lists. As I went through these fascinating documents, I could not help but think of the fact that this pile, in its very materiality, detail, precision, laboriousness, points to a different age of the archive and that maybe The Film of Her is a pivotal film in that regard. Closer, possibly, most probably, to the work of Gustav Deutsch (for whom rights clearance is often a big issue), it is, in the end, far removed from the almost punk attitude of the avant-garde with which we are most accustomed (with regards to image and music). In a way, The Film of Her and the body of films Bill Morrison produced before and since then, seem to correspond to a transitional age in what Sandusky calls the archival film (Sandusky 1993) from a technological, material, and institutional standpoint. From the perspective of the different media Morrison has used, the media migrations (nitrate, VHS, super8, hi8, 16mm, 35mm, 2k, HD, etc.) his work encompasses, the various negotiations with institutions (from Budget Rentals to the Library of Congress, etc.) to obtain clearances, his incredible ties the Orphan film movement (that Dan Streible so beautifully describes), the oral history he has recorded and remediated in his films, this body of work stands today as testament to the changing status of the 20th and 21st-century film archive and to a new and particularly fruitful collaboration and interaction between archivists, filmmakers, and scholars that surely did not exist before him24. * Since the 1990s, the Paper Print Collection has met scholarly attention that may have encouraged various restoration projects: in 1993, a project was set to transfer the paper prints (back) to 35mm (Bill Ault was involved) and, more recently, and ever so slowly, starting in 2004, to high definition (after unsuccessful attempts to transfer them to 4k and 2k). As part of his Dawson City film project (Dawson City: Frozen Time), Bill found himself going down to the same route he had taken in the 1990s, opening the vaults of the Library of Congress Paper Print Collection again. He now did not need to send a fax; the films arrived as digital scans (1920x1080 pillarboxed). He sent me the list of films he got from them. A story begun in 1992 thus continues and, with it, the story of how we need to think and write about film preservation and archives. * I send a first draft of this article to Bill. He wrote back promptly, as always. In his response, he wrote:

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Thinking about the train in Lost Avenues, it may have come from Prelinger when he was in the Meatpacking District in the early ’90s. It was a 16mm print I had. I may have asked him what he had from Peru, and he hooked me up with that and I made a reversal print from it. Rick would definitely remember if he ever had that shot in his collection so I can send him a link.25 And – this just in – i did locate those tapes of Walls and Niver and just uploaded the files to Dropbox yesterday. Here they are. (Morrison 30 October 2015, personal email) Like I said, the story continues, and needs again to be written anew.

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My deepest thanks goes to Dan Streible, Charles ‘Bucky’ Grimm, Bill Brand, Nicolas Dulac, Ken Jacobs, Rick Prelinger, and Michael Zryd who were of help at different stages of writing and who provided different insights into this modest text. Of course, my warmest thanks goes to Bill Morrison for providing me with the core material on which these notes are expanded from … and for the ongoing and always fascinating conversations.

NOTES 1

The text could be the one that appears in the Film-Maker’s COOP catalogue: ‘Cinematography ass’t., Jordan Meyers. Negative-matching assistance by Judy Dauterman. Original 1905 film shot and probably directed by G. W. “Billy” Bitzer, rescued by Kemp Niver via a paper print filed for copyright purposes with the Library of Congress.’ (Ken Jacobs, in Filmmaker’s COOP catalogue) .

2

He is probably talking about Patrick Loughney’s dissertation, A Descriptive ­Analysis, 1988, one of the very rare sources at the time concerning the Paper Print Collection, apart from Niver’s articles and books.

3

See, among others, Côté & Monsaingeon 2002, Gaudreault 2003, Grimm 1999.

4

The acknowledgment and proper recognition of his contribution is uncontested today and has been confirmed by the Silver Light Award for career achievement, conferred upon to Walls in 2000 by the Association of the Moving Image Archivists. Perhaps, as Dan Streible hints at in his article in this collection, Morrison had an important role, or at least was part of the conversation, that led to this recognition.

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5

On the topic of early cinema and the avant-garde, see (Testa 1992). This interesection of interest in early cinema and the avant-garde finds another embodiment around the early 1990s at a time when early cinema scholarship was reaching a full bloom.

6

To name only the first: Night Highway was originally produced for the opera The Manson Family, produced by Ridge Theater, New York, 1990; The Death Train, for The Death Train of Baron Von Frankenstein, produced by Ridge Theater, New York, 1993. Footprints was created for Ridge theater’s stage production Jungle Movie, 1992.

7

It is probably not by chance that people like Rick Prelinger or the Orphan Film Movement gained momentum and were able to find and slowly gather interest in these abandoned films, precisely around that same epoch.

8

Some of these films have appeared in Footprints, The Film of Her and The Death Train, and the eye from Grandpa’s Reading Glass became a signature image for

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Morrison’s work for a while. 9

The technique of filming in super8 and then optically reprinting the material can also be found in Footprints, where a lot of the images are filmed from VHS tapes, but also from the screens of the Museum of Natural History !

10 For an account of Bill Morrison’s early work (and his work in general), see the remarkable ‘dossier’ included in the first issue of Found Footage Magazine (2015), with articles by Matt Levine, Adrian Danks, and a long interview with the filmmaker. 11 I am very greatful to Michael Zryd for having provided me with this list of titles for Public Domain (he himself got it from Bill Brand) as well as the full 125 titles Frampton ordered from the Library of Congress (which he got from Marion Faller). 12 During an informal conversation with Tom Gunning in 2014, he assumed that Frampton probably showed Public Domain. 13 In his Eyes Upside Down, P.A. Sitney mentions the fact that the footage was, in fact, ‘eighteen minutes of epileptic seizures from the Library of Congress’s Paper Print Collection. Waith G. Chase had made nine documentary films in 1905 to study the movements of epileptics during seizures.’ (Sitney 2008, 338). 14 Two letters, dated 4 April 1978, found in the Frampton collection in the archives at MoMA, addressed to Harry [Robel], the lab manager of Filmtronics Labs, indicate that it was on this occasion that the first print of Public Domain was struck. The letters mention two parts to Public Domain. ‘Part 2’ seems to correspond to what is known today as Public Domain: ‘This is sixteen very short old-time movies strung together.’ 15 Bruce Jenkins, quoted in the Film-Maker’s COOP catalogue. 16 In his description of the found-footage film Works and Days, he writes : ‘I have attached my logo to the film, not to claim it as a ready-made, but in the spirit of

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Chinese connoisseurs who affixed their vermilion seals to paintings as a mark of admiration.’ (Film-Makers’ COOP catalogue). 17 In his early Nervous System Performances, as well as more recent films like New York Ghetto Fishmarket (2006), Disorient Express (1996), or Georgetown Loop (1996), among others, all used films found at the Library of Congress, and two last ones using paper print footage Morrison used abundantly in his The Death Train, made a couple of years earlier. The images in Disorient Express are taken from A Trip Down Mt. Tamalpais, A Miles Brothers Films, shot in 1906 (the same year as the San Francisco Earthquake, and by the same crew who shot A Trip Down Market Street, 1906, famous, among other things, for being the source material of Ernie Gehr’s Eureka (1974-1979). 18 I find a correspondence between Morrison and the Production company, Les Films Roger Leenhardt, dated 6 August 1996, authorizing the utilization of 21 seconds of the film for The Film of Her.

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19 A 1975 James Hoberman New York Magazine article on alternative moviegoing in New York, mentions Budget Films in California as a good and cheap place to rent 16mm films (Lang’s American Films, Sam Fuller’s Steel Helmet). 20 In the description I had before me, I read: ‘He hired a man named Bill Ault who at the time was delighted to be part of the project but has since then adopted a more embittered view of the photography job which occupied the better part of his adult life. “I wasted 28 years of and I don’t have anything more to say about it”, he explained.’ (Bill Morrison, personal archives). 21 This material was known to Bill Morrison since I found, in his archives, a 20 November letter by Howard Walls addressed to Photoplay Productions (London) granting him permission to release interview material containing [his] image and voice to Bill Morrison for inclusion in his documentary film about the Paper Print Collection.” (Bill Morrison, ‘The Film of Her folder’, personal archive). 22 It is interesting to recall that Walls is also responsible for what Anthony Slide calls ‘the first oral history project devoted to the motion picture industry’ (Slide 2000, 65): in 1948-1949, he interviewed early silent-film pioneers; these interviews are now housed in the Oral History Collection of the Academy of Film. 23 This is the title that appears in the documents I have before me. Dan Streible (see infra 63) reports that a copy of the same footage appears in a film called Adventures of Christina. 24 The almost total silence among early film historians with regards to the role the avant-garde has played in, as Gunning writes, free early cinema ‘from the ghetto of primitive babbling to which the progress-oriented model of film history had assigned them to’ (Gunning 1983, 355), is testament to this. 25 I immediately wrote to Rick Prelinger, who did not seem to recall handling this request. The mystery lingers.

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WORKS CITED Canby, Vincent. ‘Restored Films, Dating to 1894, Shed Light on Medium’s History.’ The New York Times, 29 February 1968. Côté, Stéphanie and Eglantine Monsaigneon. ‘Fragmentation et segmentation dans les “vues animées”: le corpus Edison.’ Arrêt sur image, fragmentation du temps. Eds. F. Albera, M. Braun, and A. Gaudreault. Lausanne: Payot, 2002. 247-270. Frampton, Hollis. On the Camera Arts and Consecutive Matters: The Writings of Hollis Frampton. Ed. Bruce Jenkins. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009. Gaudreault, André. ‘Fragmentation and Segmentation in the Lumière “Animated Views”.’ The Moving Image vol. 3, no. 1 (Spring 2003): 110-131. Grimm, Charles ‘Buckey’. ‘A Paper Print Pre-history.’ Film History 11, no. 2 (1999): 204–216. Gunning, Tom. ‘An Unseen Energy Swallows Space: The Space in Early Film and its Relation to American Avant-Garde Film’. Film Before Griffith. Ed. John L. Fell. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1983. 355-366. Habib, André. ‘Archives, modes de réemploi: pour une archéologie du found footage.’ CiNéMAS vol. 24, nos. 2-3 (Spring 2014): 97-122. Hoberman, James. ‘The Movie Freaks’ Guide to Film in New York.’ New York Magazine vol. 9, no. 1 (December 1975): 72-77. Loughney, Patrick G. ‘Descriptive Analysis of the Library of Congress Paper Print Collection and Related Copyright Materials.’ PhD diss. George Washington University, 1988. Morrison, Bill. ‘Q&A Bill Morrison.’ Desistfilm, 21 May 2012. www.desistfilm.com/ qa-bill-morrison. Accessed: 19 November 2015. Morrison, Bill. ‘The Film of Her folder’ (1990-1997). Personal Archive. Morrison, Bill. Personal Email. 14 April 2013, 17 June 2015, 30 October 2015. Niver, Kemp. Motion Pictures From the Library on Congress Paper Print Collection, 18941912. Ed. Bebe Bergsten. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1967. Niver, Kemp R. Early Motion Pictures: The Paper Print Collection in the Library of Congress. Washington: Library of Congress, 1985. Sandusky, Sharon. ‘The Archeology of Redemption: Toward Archival Film’. Millenium Film Journal 26 (1993): 3-25. Sitney, P. Adams. Eyes Upside Down. Oxford, New York : Oxford University Press, 2008. Slide, Anthony. Nitrate Won’t Wait. A History of Film Preservation in the United States. Jefferson, NC, and London: McFarland and Company, 2000. Testa, Bart. Back and Forth. Early Cinema and the Avantgarde. Toronto: Art Gallery of Ontario, 1992. The Film-Maker’s Coop. Online Film Catalogue. www.film-makerscoop.com/rentalssales. Accessed: 19 November 2015.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR André Habib is assistant professor at the University of Montreal where he completed a PhD thesis in Comparative Literature. He is the author of L’attrait de la ruine (Crisnée, Yellow Now, 2011) and La main gauche de Jean-Pierre Léaud (Montreal, Boréal, 2015), as well as the coeditor of L’avenir de la mémoire: patrimoine, restauration, réemploi cinématographiques (Lille, Presses Universitaires du Septentrion, 2013); Chris Marker et l’imprimerie du regard (Paris, l’Harmattan, 2008); and Épopée: textes, entretiens, documents (Montréal, Spirale/Nota Bene, 2013). He is the coeditor, since 2001, of the Web Journal Hors champ. His recent areas of research have included the aesthetics of ruins, the archive, experimental cinema, and cinephilia.

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CHAPTER 2

The Film of Her The Cine-Poet Laureate of Orphan Films Dan Streible

Herzogenrath, Bernd (ed.), The Films of Bill Morrison. Aesthetics of the Archive. Amsterdam University Press, 2018 DOI 10.5117/9789089649966/CH02

ABSTRACT Despite its brief running time, Bill Morrison’s The Film of Her is a cabinet of curiosities packed with fleeting glimpses of silent monochromatic movies, wrapped in an elliptical narrative about an unnamed library clerk’s search for unnamed footage showing an unnamed woman he has desired since seeing her on screen in his boyhood. She is an avant-gardist’s MacGuffin, however, a mystery that need not be solved because the film’s true purpose is to revel in the oneiric qualities of early cinema artifacts. As such, The Film of Her offers an opportunity to examine how the work of Bill Morrison has intersected with the work of film preservation professionals in the digital era. k e y wo r ds

film preservation, Library of Congress, orphan films, Paper Print Collection

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In 1999, near the end of its successful run at more than 50 international film festivals, The Film of Her, which Bill Morrison premiered at the Festival dei Popoli in Florence in 1996, played to a different type of audience. Rather than screening for festival-goers, Morrison presented his short cine-poem to an admixture of film preservationists, archivists, scholars, artists, curators, collectors, technical experts, librarians, researchers, stock footage vendors, critics, students, and self-selected enthusiasts. Morrison’s participation in the inaugural Orphan Film Symposium at the University of South Carolina (usc) had a fortuitous and beneficial impact on both the artist and his audience. His interaction with scores of archivists proved an entrée to vast new moving image resources that enhanced one of his signature techniques (the thematic harvesting of archival film excerpts) and accelerated another (the assemblage of beautifully decaying nitrate film fragments). Further, his presentation of The Film of Her at the 1999 symposium helped to spark interactions among archivists, scholars, and artists that led to what soon came to be called an orphan film movement. As that movement has grown, Morrison remains an active part of it, becoming an unofficial cine-poet laureate. More particularly, and beyond the artistic realm, Morrison’s continuing interaction with the Library of Congress moving image archivists in the 21st century has impacted preservation and curatorial practice. More than 20 years after The Film of Her, we now know more about the historical events behind Morrison’s fictive narrative and its unnamed protagonist. A close examination of his experimental representation of the rediscovery of what we now know as the Paper Print Collection at the Library of Congress allows us to appreciate the work of librarians, archivists, ‘clerks’, curators, and scholars who have worked on these same cinematic incunabula. Although The Film of Her uses a palette and tone similar to his other works, it has a stronger narrative core. The festival notes for its premiere summarized its premise most efficiently: ‘La passione di un archivista che riscopre una cineteca perduta’ (‘The passion of an archivist who discovers a lost film library’).1 The narrative arc is classical in form: a protagonist overcomes obstacles to reach his goal, while also fulfilling a desire for romantic heterosexual coupling. However, the character’s identity is ambiguous. An on-screen afterword states ‘Howard L. Walls is credited with rediscovering the Paper Print Collection in the Library of Congress in 1939’. (Subsequent research established that, contrary to Walls’ memory, the year was 1942. [Grimm 1999]) Where The Film of Her departs from the Walls story is in the curious insertion of a ‘her’. The opening voice-over tells us this will be ‘a story as remembered by the copyright clerk at the library’, one who ‘dreams of making something of himself’. But this prologue has a surprising punch line. A rapid thematic montage of film fragments concludes with a teasing slow-motion glimpse of

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an explicit stag film. A medium close-up of a young woman shows her reclining, undressed, and smiling as she looks off-screen. ‘He dreams of the film of her.’ She is, however, an avant-gardist’s MacGuffin, a mystery that need not be solved because the film’s true purpose is to revel in the oneiric qualities of early cinema artifacts. As such, The Film of Her offers an opportunity to discuss how Morrison’s work intersects with that of film archives and preservation professionals in the digital era. Others have published interviews with the filmmaker and appreciative analyses of The Film of Her. These accounts place Her in the tradition of foundfootage cinema, comment on its themes of memory and materiality, and describe its interplay with the mythos of rescuing lost films.2 As Morrison told Eric Henderson in 2013, The Film of Her ‘is a set-up for the rest of my career’. When Morrison became interested in the story of how the Paper Print Collection was rediscovered and reanimated, he set out in a documentary mode, foreseeing ‘a film about Kemp Niver’. He read about Niver’s predecessor on the project, Howard Walls, in Patrick Loughney’s dissertation, completed in 1988, while he was also working in the Library’s Motion Picture, Broadcasting, and Recorded Sound Division. Loughney’s account relied, in part, on Walls’ recollections. In 1992, Morrison videotaped interviews with the two principal restorers of the ‘paper films’: Howard Lamarr Walls (1912-2003), who, in 1942, persuaded the Librarian of Congress to safeguard the collection, and Kemp Redman Niver (1911-1996), who, for a decade, oversaw the reformatting of some 3000 works from paper to 16mm film. None of this interview footage appears in The Film of Her. However, most of the words spoken in voice-over by the unnamed clerk/curator protagonist were taken from a transcription of the Walls interview. Morrison performed the role himself, owing to Walls being in poor voice at the time of his interview. Upon his initial visit to the University of South Carolina in 1999, Morrison searched the rich catalogue of its Newsfilm Library and watched VHS copies of dozens of newsreel outtakes. He reported two revelations while viewing pieces from the university’s noted Fox Movietone News Collection. One was the haphazard beauty found in some pieces of decaying nitrate film, the search for which was abetted by the usc catalogue descriptor ‘emulsion deterioration’. More than half of the footage used in his breakthrough work Decasia (2002) came from this source. The other lagniappe was seeing never-released footage of his shadow protagonist, Howard Walls, at the Library of Congress in 1944. Newsfilm Library curators displayed it along with other clips on a video monitor outside the theater where the Orphan Film Symposium convened. Four minutes of silent outtakes from a press event revealed Walls not only examining the very paper rolls reimagined in The Film of Her but even demonstrating, with technical expert Carl Louis Gregory at the National Archives, a prototype

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optical printer to rephotograph the paper using 35mm motion-picture film. Suddenly, the esoteric event took a concrete form. ‘The clerk has made an important discovery’ the narrator of The Film of Her declares. Such can be said of Morrison sharing his wonder about the Walls newsreel outtakes. No published scholarship on the history of the Paper Print Collection mentions this footage. Scant information was available about the attempts to convert paper to celluloid prior to Niver’s 16mm project at the Academy in the 1950s and 1960s. The exception to this was work by independent researcher Buckey Grimm. Morrison was aware of Grimm’s website, where the self-made historian posted his short account of the paper print restoration in 1997. In 1999, he published a longer essay in the journal Film History. The following year, the Association of Moving Image Archivists conferred its Silver Light Award for career achievement on Howard Walls, then 88, with Grimm introducing him and screening yet another set of newsreel outtakes showing Walls in 1944. These too were silent excerpts from unedited footage, in this case from Hearst News of the Day, preserved at the ucla Film and Television Archive. The Hearst camera captured different takes of Walls displaying paper rolls at the Library of Congress and, with Gregory, the optical printer at the National Archives. In 2001, amid an air of rediscovery, the second Orphan Film Symposium featured Morrison and Grimm together narrating the neverreleased Fox footage, followed by Library of Congress preservation expert Ken Weissman’s presentation ‘Restoring Paper Print Films in 35mm’.3 As Morrison later told me, had he seen this footage of Walls in the early 1990s, he might have made a documentary instead of the experimental narrative. Between the first and second symposium, Morrison developed a working relationship with the University of South Carolina, allowing him to become further immersed in its film archive. In 2000, the school’s Media Arts program hired him to teach a production course he called Found Footage and Personal Cinema. While making their own pieces using archival material from the Newsfilm Library, students watched dozens of experimental films in weekly 16mm screenings. Week one, ‘Found Footage Films About Found Footage’, began with Bruce Conner’s A Movie (1958) and ended with The Film of Her. ‘Why make a found footage film?’ the syllabus asked; ‘Filmmaker as detective, researcher, scavenger, pack-rat and opportunist.’ Other concepts that structured the course were reediting Hollywood, home movies, ‘perfect films’, media exposés, formalism, dreamwork, memory, and alchemy. Two students in that class later made new works, using footage from the usc Fox Movietone News collection, expressly for the second Orphan Film Symposium. Morrison’s work was having an impact. In ‘Refilming the Single Piece of Film’, the class studied Tom, Tom, the Piper’s Son (1969), in which Ken Jacobs analyzes a 16mm print of a 1905 Ameri-

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can Mutoscope and Biograph film of the same title, and which Morrison says inspired him to make The Film of Her. The 1905 motion picture survived in the Paper Print Collection, meaning that Jacob’s own 16mm print was a copy of the 16mm film made during Niver’s conversion project. The meshing of these works with the Library of Congress preservation agenda was later solidified, with both Jacobs and Morrison having their work enshrined on the National Film Registry of culturally significant American films. The Librarian of Congress named the 1969 Tom, Tom to the registry in 2007 and added Morrison’s Decasia in 2013. The relationship continued uninterrupted with the third Orphan Film Symposium in 2002, at which Morrison introduced a 35mm screening of his new Decasia. Thereafter, his impact on the preservation community accelerated, with two notable publications celebrating that fact. The New York Times Magazine brought this work to a broad new audience in Lawrence Weschler’s article ‘Sublime Decay’. After quoting Errol Morris’ reaction to a VHS preview of Decasia – ‘This may be the greatest movie ever made’ – Weschler characterized Morrison’s artistic revelation as emerging from attending ‘the first annual [sic] Orphan Film Symposium in Columbia, S.C., a gathering of similarly obsessed aficionados of antiquarian film’ and spending ‘more than 100 hours’ with the usc Fox Movietone Collection, saying ‘it was here that Morrison first began thinking about film decay itself as a possible subject and, more than that, as the raw material for a future project’. (Weschler 2002) From there, Morrison visited (as few researchers had) the Library of Congress Motion Picture Conservation Center laboratories, then in Dayton, Ohio. He ‘gradually got the archivists to warm to his daffy quest’, as Weschler put it, to see the deteriorating nitrate film ‘most archivists tend to hide’. A second publication to discuss the importance of Morrison’s work was Emily Cohen’s 2004 scholarly review essay in the journal American Anthropologist, ‘The Orphanista Manifesto: Orphan Films and the Politics of Reproduction’. Cohen saw the premieres of Morrison’s The Mesmerist and Gregorio Rocha’s documentary The Lost Reels of Pancho Villa at the 2003 Margaret Mead Film and Video Festival in New York (a session co-presented by the Orphan Film Symposium). ‘Inspired by the works of filmmakers Bill Morrison and Gregorio Rocha’, Cohen argues that they exemplify a transformative turn in film preservation and history, one in which advocates for saving orphan films had become activists. These ‘orphanistas’ in both the creative and archival communities were making preservation ‘an avant-garde act’. Although there was no manifesto per se, orphanista was a term I playfully used in introducing Morrison and Rocha at the Mead festival, knowing that they and others had embraced it at the 2001 symposium. Now the neologism, taken to mean a passionate advocate for neglected cinema artifacts, appears in the literature.4

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Fig 2.1: A particular holding shelf at the Library of Congress Packard Campus for Audio-Visual Conservation, 2015. Courtesy of George Willeman.

The Mesmerist and its companion piece Light Is Calling (2003), which bookended the 2004 Orphan Film Symposium, derived directly from Morrison’s Library of Congress experience. Finding it had a well-preserved copy of the Hollywood feature The Bells (1926), the Library permitted him to work with a duplicate but decaying nitrate print that otherwise would have been destroyed. Since that time, Morrison has continued a close working relationship with the Library, particularly with George Willeman, manger of the nitrate vaults. Willeman inspects thousands of prints and negatives that come to the 124 nitrate storage units custom-built for the Library’s Packard Campus for Audio-Visual Conservation in Culpeper, Virginia. With an eye attuned to Morrison’s Decasian aesthetic, he alerts the filmmaker to footage with striking photochemical decomposition. For a decade he has kept a shelf labeled ‘Films for Bill Morrison’. Since Morrison does not manipulate these images, simply replicating them as encountered in situ, Willeman’s curatorial sensibility makes him a true collaborator. Subsequent Willeman discoveries incorporated into Morrison productions include The Life of Christ (Pathé, 1906), in which the moment of Christ’s bodily resurrection is obscured by a pulsing column of severe emulsion deterioration. This silent three minutes concluded the 2010 Orphan Film Symposium. Later Morrison incorporated it into Just Ancient Loops (2012), with music by Michael Harrison. A year later, he premiered All Vows at an Indiana Univer-

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sity symposium (‘Orphans Midwest’), another short with a Harrison score, this time anchored by an uncanny piece of newsfilm. We see hands examining one of the Dead Sea Scrolls; just when a finger touches the parchment, the blackand-white images solarize. Another Willeman selection. Not unlike Walls, Willeman the archivist has become a curator. This creative partnership has become transparent and essential, as evidenced by Morrison’s own title and caption for a 30-second video. Rasputin (for George Willeman) A 35mm nitrate film clip of Edward Connelly as Rasputin in Herbert Brenon’s The Fall of the Romanoffs (1917). The clip was discovered at The Library of Congress‘ National Audio Visual Conservation Center in Culpeper, VA, by George Willeman, Nitrate Vault Manager. Note: The clip was scanned 1:1 at 2K at Colorlab in Rockville, MD. Nothing was done to in any way affect the appearance, or rate, of the original clip. The work is another indicator of Morrison’s impact on preservation practice. The Paramount feature The Fall of the Romanoffs was considered a lost film when Willeman identified a 400-foot roll. Due to severe decomposition, he was able to salvage only 25 feet of the 35mm film. Rather than considering it a loss, Morrison took the archivist’s cue and paid to scan the fragment, which shows a medium close-up of the actor staring into the camera, as mesmeric as Grigori Rasputin was reputed to be. Rather than being discarded, the film became part of a Morrison installation, running alongside his piece Dancing Decay (2014), based on another Willeman harvest, this time from an unidentified film c. 1919-1922. (Morrison 2014a, 2014b) Not all of Morrison’s archival inspirations are from decayed nitrate or from the Library of Congress, although they most often stem from obscure archival material. He made the widescreen Outerborough (2005), for example, using a film he saw presented by the Netherlands Filmmuseum at the 2004 Orphan Film Symposium. Across Brooklyn Bridge (American Mutoscope Co. 1899) shows a train ride into Manhattan, shot on 68mm film. Outerborough is a structuralist diptych, with the original footage run forward then backward, alongside its mirrored image.5 For Release (2013), Morrison created a similar split-screen work, using only a perfectly preserved outtake from a 1930 Fox Movietone newsreel.6 Like his contemporary experimentalist Gustav Deutsch, Morrison continues to have archives and festivals seek his artistic use of ephemeral material, as with The Dockworker’s Dream (2015), which redeploys silent films from Cinemateca Portuguesa.7 In other instances, he initiates projects, such as The Great Flood (2014), supporting archives by paying for highquality copies of their unique material.

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THE FILMS IN THE FILM OF HER

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A close examination of The Film of Her reveals the intermixture of ‘found’ footage and archival copies. It compiles more than 200 shots, taken from multiple sources, in little more than ten minutes. The end credits identify seven of the many sources. For footage of the Library of Congress exterior and interiors, Morrison used a rarely seen Hollywood theatrical short, The Washington Parade: Library of Congress (Columbia Pictures 1939) and Slow Fires: On the Preservation of the Human Record (Terry Sanders 1987), a documentary about the problem of (ironically) paper materials disintegrating from acid decay. The rapid-fire sequences borrow shots from Exploring with the Time-Lapse Camera (William M. Harlow 1967) and two American Association of Railroads shorts, Thundering Rails (1948) and Big Trains Rolling (1955). Many more shots, particularly those showing early cinema apparatuses, come from Naissance du Cinema (Roger Leenhardt 1946). The shots revealing actual hands-on paper-to-film copying of the Paper Print Collection derive from a promotional short Kemp Niver produced and narrated, Reclaiming American History from Paper Rolls by the Renovare Process (1953). The works by Sanders, Harlow, and Niver are, in fact, in color, but Morrison’s printing skills and output to black-and-white gives the dynamic montage a harmonious look. Although The Film of Her may leave the impression of being a collage of excerpts from the myriad of paper prints, it contains only a handful of such works. The first, Edison Kinetoscopic Record of a Sneeze (1894), appears within a clip from a documentary. As the opening narration tells us that paper prints are ‘an extinct species. . . all that remain of a bygone era’, we see the second, Electrocuting an Elephant (1903), with its giant pachyderm expiring. Three titles are connected to the central conceit. In the trick film Le Portrait Spirite (A Spiritualist Photographer 1903), we see Georges Méliès transform a framed portrait into a live woman, literally, as Gabriel Paletz has pointed out, animating a paper (or at least canvas) print into his own film of her. In Animated Picture Studio (1903), a woman dances before a motion-picture camera, then is shocked when a picture frame displays a movie of her with the flirtatious photographer. Shots from Uncle Josh at the Moving Picture Show (1902) playfully surround the first sequence showing the nude film of her. A few seconds after introducing her smiling face, Morrison reveals its pornographic context, albeit in rapid motion. We see her posing nude for and having intercourse with a male painter, while we hear our protagonist say ‘My grandfather owned a movie theater in the town I grew up and I saw every movie he got as a boy.’ The stag footage slows as the painter pulls up his trousers. ‘Some more than others…’ the voice-over ends, as a freeze frame locks her looking into the cam-

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era. A dissolve returns to the rube Uncle Josh, who, seeing a movie of a couple in romantic embrace, tears down the screen. The only other paper print in The Film of Her is used strategically. The opening shot of a hand removing a film can from a shelf dissolves to a shot from the little known The Cavalier’s Dream (1898). In a frame dominated by dark space and indeterminate background mise-en-scène, a man dressed in white breeches is seated with his head resting on a table. A second figure, wearing a full-length white robe and pointed hood, walks toward the sleeping ‘cavalier’, placing his hands on his head. Editor Morrison then executes a match dissolve to a close-up of a lighted candle. The camera pulls back to reveal the candle rests inside a magic lantern. In less than 20 seconds, these first three shots establish the subject, motifs, and texture of the work: a library of films, a dreaming man, nineteenth-century technology, and a shadowy work from the Paper Print Collection. The Film of Her concludes with a similar sequence. Shots of shelves filled with film cans are followed by a return to different footage from The Cavalier’s Dream, the motion slowed. Now five faceless hooded figures in white dance around the sleeping cavalier, then, via an early instance of stop-motion cinematography, the ghostly figures vanish. The man sits up in his chair, wiping sleep from his eyes. Cut to the final shot: the magic lantern reappears, with its operator’s hand extinguishing the candle. This time around, however, the dreamy images are assigned a particular meaning by the voice-over: ‘The collection of restored films sits in shelving, waiting to be resurrected by a projector’s lens. And the new copyright clerk catalogs copyright entries into his log. He dreams of power and of creation. He dreams of making something of himself.’ The uncanny effect of the images from The Cavalier’s Dream is enriched by both their unfamiliarity and their substandard photographic condition. In contrast to other pieces of early cinema in The Film of Her, little is known about the movie, other than its 1898 copyright by Thomas A. Edison. Despite frequent misattribution to director Edwin S. Porter (who had not yet directed any films), it is likely that Albert E. Smith and J. Stuart Blackton shot The Cavalier’s Dream in the Manhattan rooftop studio of their new Vitagraph company ­ iver’s (Musser 1991, 511-512).8 Muddying the waters, what we see differs from N description: ‘The surrounding set represents a baronial hall. By the use of stop action photography, food and table decorations appear and disappear, as well as many different types of people, such as the devil, the specter of death, persons in ecclesiastical costumes, and some young women.’ The original Edison catalogue describes The Cavalier’s Dream differently: He sits asleep at a bare table; old witch enters, raps three times, then disappears; cavalier sees table spread for a sumptuous repast. Mephis-

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topheles appears; then the old witch, who suddenly changes to a beautiful young girl. The changes and magical appearances are startling and instantaneous. (AFI Catalog)

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Who do we perceive these mysterious figures to be when looking at this cinematic incunabulum? It is this opaque and intriguing quality of early cinema that The Film of Her evokes so well, even as it wildly intermixes paper print films with a variety of others. Understanding the material sources of these images is instructive. When Morrison was assembling his film in the mid-1990s, every image he did not shoot using actors in principal photography he created with an optical printer. He brought 16mm prints to his studio, rephotographing sequences frame by frame. One of the conspicuous qualities of The Film of Her is the varying camera and printing speeds. Some shots are copied at normal speed, others are stretch printed for slow-motion effect, while others are step printed to speed up or stutter the motion. Occasional freeze frames punctuate the whole. In this way Morrison consciously repeated a process that Kemp Niver and his staff at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in Los Angeles applied as they copied paper rolls to 16mm motion-picture film. These reanimated 16mm reference prints have been in regular use at the Library of Congress ever since. Scholars who wrote the histories of early cinema examined them on flatbed viewers in the Library’s Motion Picture Reading Room. When Morrison wanted footage from the Paper Print Collection he did what other filmmakers, librarians, researchers, educators, stock footage companies, and distributors did: pay a duplication fee for the Library to make new copies. Using its 16mm duplicating negatives, the Library struck new film prints at its photochemical processing unit. Morrison has noted what others have also observed in studying these derivative copies. The films are typically ‘dupey’, soft in focus and imperfect in contrast and other photographic variables. Even with expert lab technicians in charge, a small-gauge film-to-film copy of a copy of a copy inevitably suffers generations of loss. Using technology of the 1950s, the visual quality of the first film copies was compromised from the outset. Additionally, for The Film of Her, Morrison had to take his assembled 16mm work print into video, editing on an Avid system, before finally outputting the work as a 35mm film. The ‘lossy’ quality of the Niver-era images, however, is not a deficit in Morrison’s poetic mode. As with Jacobs rephotographing Tom, Tom the Piper’s Son, this is a meditation on the materiality of film itself. If Jacobs or Morrison had access to higher resolution copies (such as are now becoming available), their works would have taken on different characteristics. Contemporaneous with the production and circulation of The Film of Her, the Library of Congress

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undertook an ambitious project to go back to the original paper prints and shoot them in 35mm. The results, when projected on 35mm, were rather stunning to those familiar with the old 16mm editions. Images were bright and clear, their sharper focus revealing hidden details. On the aforementioned 2001 Orphan Film Symposium panel at which Morrison and Grimm discussed the newsfilm of Walls, the Library’s Ken Weissman presented samples of the new 35mm prints. To take one example, a 35mm edition of Charleston ChainGang (Edison 1902) made the 16mm version (shown at the previous symposium) look shockingly different. Where once one saw prisoners paraded across a walled-in yard, now the image was dominated by large signs on the wall with the text fully legible. Had the Library-Academy project copied The Cavalier’s Dream in 35mm, the photographic detail would have been much sharper. However, only a fifth of the paper print titles had been copied when the 35mm project was suspended in the early 2000s. Ironically, most of those have only been seen through the Fig. 2.2: Video frame from The Film of Her vs. photograph (by George Willeman) of the 1898 paper print of The Cavalier’s Dream

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Library’s online American Memory Project. For these curated websites produced in the late 1990s, movies were converted to MPEG-1 files – now the incunabula of digital video. Although the Library maintains a photochemical film laboratory for preserving film, after 2010 the Paper Print Collection moved to full-scale digital conversion. As of 2016, the Library was experimenting with scanning the original paper at 2k, creating digital masters. Meanwhile, because that frame-by-frame work is slow, it is also scanning the Niver 16mm films to make new access copies. (Weissman 2010, Mashon 2014) Thus, the story of the restoration of the paper prints continues. Far from being completed, as The Film of Her might suggest, the process remains complex and unfinished. As Howard Lamarr Walls himself documented in 1953, more than 8500 motion pictures were registered for copyright as photographs on paper. Although Niver created film copies of some 3000 of these, neither he nor his successors rephotographed the additional 3500 titles deposited only in incomplete form or fragments (Ainsworth 2015, personal email).9 Furthermore, most copyright deposits included two paper prints per title. Methodically inspecting these paper rolls, André Gaudreault’s research team found ‘striking dissimilarities among large numbers’ of supposed duplicates. Yet Niver put only one of those prints to film – and those 16mm films sometimes ‘repaired or cleaned up’ the original edits visible on paper. And what of the film of ‘her’? Unlike Morrison’s other source material, this was a truly ‘found’ film, one of several stag movies in a cache he purchased in a thrift store. Could it be identified? Has it been archived or preserved? The happy ending to The Film of Her arrives when the curator finds the paper film in the Library of Congress vaults and has it rephotographed. Of course such explicit stag films were never part of the Paper Print Collection, if only because they were not deposited for copyright. This incongruity aside, in the years since Morrison’s production, film scholars and archivists have paid attention to the genre, studying and even preserving porn. The 2010 nyu Orphan Film Symposium opened with Gustav Deutsch presenting Film ist. a Girl & a Gun (2009), an avant-garde compilation of archival footage, much of it from erotica and silent-era porn saved at European archives – and at the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction at Indiana University. He was among the first artists allowed to copy material from the Kinsey’s film collection. One of the symposium’s lab sponsors anonymously preserved a stag movie, The Janitor (c. 1930), for the Kinsey, the first time any of its 4000 items had been preserved on film. Its screening was accompanied live by pianist Ed Pastorini, who was on hand to play with the selection of silent orphan film fragments Morrison and Willeman presented from a recent Library of Congress acquisition.10 In the audience was symposium co-producer and nyu graduate student Russell Sheaffer. Intrigued by

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The Janitor, he later dove into research at the Kinsey Institute and is now an Indiana University PhD candidate writing about its films. When I asked if he recognized the stag excerpt in The Film of Her, Sheaffer verified that a copy of the previously unidentified footage is held at the Kinsey. The film of her is catalogued as Adventures of Christina, produced anonymously sometime between 1924 and 1928 – the very years Howard Walls came of age watching silent movies in his grandfather’s theater (Sheaffer 2015, personal email).11 Certainly Bill Morrison’s career has reached greater heights in the worlds of cinema, fine art, modern music, and other prestigious domains. His orphan film work is but a piece of that. Yet it has had a measureable and salutary impact on moving image archiving, beginning with his artful reimagining of the birth of film preservation itself. Exactly 20 years after The Film of Her, Morrison’s project reached a notable culmination. In 2016, the Orphan Film Symposium reached its own milestone, with NYU bringing the tenth edition to the Library of Congress itself. Following a 35mm screening of The Film of Her, Morrison premiered a new seventeen-minute documentary, a digital production with the title Niver vs. Walls (2016). He crosscuts between his 1992 interviews with the two octogenarians recollecting their contributions to the Paper Print Collection, each prideful of his own work but disparaging of the other. (Even Morrison’s recovery of the 24-year-old mini-DV tapes was an act of preservation, having narrowly escaped destruction in the 2012 Hurricane Sandy flood that took much of his personal archive.) We hear Walls speaking the very words that Morrison voiced in The Film of Her while we see beautiful new high-resolution scans of the newsreel outtakes of Walls a half century earlier. We also see new digital copies of two apt samples of early cinema that survived on paper, a Mutoscope dancing girl (Flag Dance 1896) and a phantom ride, Panoramic View of the White Pass Railroad (Edison 1899). The latter is breathtaking footage of the Alaska to Yukon route built for the Klondike Gold Rush that began in Dawson City, Canada. Six months after premiering Niver vs. Walls, Morrison used the White Pass footage again in his most significant production to date. Dawson City: Frozen Time (2016) is a rich, feature-length historical account of the boomtown that later entered the storied world of film preservation. In 1978, not gold, but silver nitrate was rediscovered there, hundreds of reels of film buried underground. Remarkably the Public Archives of Canada and the Library of Congress were able to salvage and preserve many of the silent-era 35mm prints. Like the rescue of the paper prints, the story of the Dawson City Collection is legendary in archiving circles. Surpassing the efforts of scholars, Bill Morrison has documented the materiality and captured the mythos of both foundational stories of film preservation.

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My thanks to generous informants Bill Morrison and André Habib, as well as Library of Congress staff: George Willeman, Alexis Ainsworth, Ken Weissman, Steve Leggett, Gregory Lukow, Rob Stone, Mike Mashon, and Paul Spehr. Information in this essay without a cited source is derived from my own participation in the events and longtime conversation with the parties involved.

NOTES 1

The 37th Festival Dei Popoli Festival website, 1996, www.mega.it/festival.popoli/ fepoprou.htm.

2

See discussions of the film in Böser, Delgado, Habib, Le Cain and Ronan, Paletz, and Stoddard.

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3

Audio of Bill Morrison and Buckey Grimm, ‘The Film of Howard Walls’, Orphans II: Documenting the 20th Century, University of South Carolina, 29 March 2001, www.sc.edu/orphanfilm/orphanage/symposia/audio. All newsfilm of Howard Walls was recorded 10 March 1944. The usc Fox Movietone News Collection catalogue identifies the never-released material as 50th Anniversary of Motion Pictures, mvtn 51-551 552 (B), with the original description ‘Carl Gregory; John G. Bradley, Chief of Moving Pictures Archives Division; and Howard Walls, head of Library of Congress Motion Picture Collections, discuss transferring paper prints of early movies to celluloid.’ The ucla footage is catalogued as [Preservation of Early Motion Picture Film, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. Hearst production footage] with original Hearst shot descriptions, including: ‘Howard Walls, motion picture curator for Library of Congress’, ‘Mr. Walls inspecting old copyright films made on sensitized paper’, ‘Vault showing Mr. Walls enclosing film for posterity’, ‘Optical printer making a negative of old copyright prints’, ‘Print being moved down frame at a time for copying. This method had to be used due to most of prints not having perforations’, and ‘Mr. Walls and Mr. Carl Gregory, one of Mr. Edison‘s first employees working on the optical printer’. The original Hearst description referred to Howard Wall [sic]. The release version of Fox’s 50th Anniversary of Motion Pictures (vol. 26, no. 064) includes excerpts from ten early films (1894-1911), but not all are from paper print sources. MGM’s release of Hearst News of the Day (vol. 15, no. 262) entitled the segment The Fiftieth Birthday of the Movies.

4

Michael Conklin, who had been a student in Bill Morrison’s University of South Carolina course, made a short video with me for the 2001 Orphan Film Symposium that emblazoned the term. In a clip from Movietone footage (Dedication of ‘Park Row’, 27 January 1928), we see a Leon Trotsky impersonator [!?] who addresses the camera speaking Russian. In a comic false translation, our closing

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subtitle reads ‘Orphanistas, I salute you!’ Frick, chapter 5, assesses ‘orphanista’ advocacy for the preservation of neglected films. See also Cullum 2001. 5

The 26 March 2004 symposium screening was part of a compilation reel presented by Nico de Klerk, ‘“Where to Place the Camera?” 24 Biograph Films, 18961901.’ The Netherlands Filmmusem and British Film Institute jointly restored large-format American Mutoscope and Biograph films. For Outerborough, Cineric labs in New York created a 4k scan of the BFI’s duplicating negative (Fossati 200).

6

The story is catalogued as mvtn 5-527: ‘Al’ Capone, Underworld Personality (17 March 1930), Moving Image Research Collections, University of South Carolina. The footage shows people waiting for Capone to be released from a Philadelphia prison – although he never appears (having been released the previous day). Colorlab made the digital transfer from the 35mm negative.

7

The Dockworker’s Dream was commissioned for the 2015 Curtas Vila do Conde International Film Festival. See its website, http://festival.curtas.pt/festival-en.

8

Musser indicates Niver originated the mistaken claim that Edwin Porter made The Cavalier’s Dream and other Vitagraph films of 1898-1900. Another curious bit of misinformation circulates among histories of animation, which say that Edison ‘patented a stop-motion animation sequence’ for The Cavalier’s Dream. See McMahan 2005, 119; Dobson 2009, xviii; et al. The Library of Congress created a digital access copy in 2017. See archive.org/details/CavaliersDream.

9

Walls ‘lists 8,506 works, representing approximately 6,000 titles, which were registered in the Copyright Office as photographs and identified as motion pictures.’ (1953) The Library of Congress’s working database of Paper Print fragments has 3612 entries (Ainsworth 2015, personal email).

10 The obscure films Morrison and Willeman presented 7 April 2010 came from collector John Maddox of Duck Run, Tennessee: Cromwell the Wicked (1926, a weird semi-documentary about Cromwell, Oklahoma), The Climbers (1919, by little-known Tom Terriss), and the independent productions With Buffalo Bill on the U.P. Trail (1926) and Life’s Crossroads (a 1928 jungle drama). See Kohn 2010. 11 The Kinsey Institute catalogue lists Adventures of Christina (1924-1928, 16mm, silent, b/w, 400 ft.) as item 20 in a compilation reel labeled ‘Stag film collection no. 1.’ The film likely circulated under a variety of titles. Shots of coitus in Adventures of Christina also appear in Art of Love (c. 1921-1930), although it is unknown which was produced first. Sheaffer also recognized the actress playing ‘Her’ in the Kinsey stag film A Country Stud Horse (c. 1920s?). See also ‘Sheaffer Named One of Variety’s “110 Students to Watch”’, The Media School website, http://mediaschool.indiana.edu/news/sheaffer-named-one-of-varietys-101-students-to-watch. Accessed 28 April 2015.

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WORKS CITED AFI Catalog online. American Film Institute and ProQuest, 2003-2015. Ainsworth, Alexis. Personal e-mail. 15 July 2015. Böser, Ursula. ‘Memories Are Made of This: Bill Morrison’s The Film of Her.’ Senses of Cinema 41 (November 2006): sensesofcinema.com/2006/the-films-of-billmorrison. Accessed August 17, 2017. Cohen, Emily. ‘The Orphanista Manifesto: Orphan Films and the Politics of Reproduction.’ American Anthropologist 106, no. 4 (2004): 719-31. Cullum, Paul. ‘Orphanistas! Academics and Amateurs Unite to Save the Orphan Film.’ L.A. Weekly, 26 April 2001. Delgado, Monica, Narda Liotine, and José Sarmiento Hinojosa. ‘Q&A: Bill Morrison.’ Desistfilm, 21 May 2012. www.desistfilm.com/qa-bill-morrison. Accessed: August 17, 2017.

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Dobson, Nichola. Historical Dictionary of Animation and Cartoons. Lanham, md: ­Scarecrow, 2009. Fossati, Giovanna. From Pixel to Grain: The Archival Life of Film in Transition. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2009. Frick, Caroline. Saving Cinema: The Politics of Preservation. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. Gaudreault, André. ‘The First Signs of Film Editing.’ grafics website, 2001, grafics.ca/ wp-content/uploads/2013/12/Film_Editing.pdf. Accessed August 17, 2017. Grimm, Buckey. ‘A Short History of the Paper Print Restoration at the Library of Congress.’ Buckey‘s Film History, Preservation, Conservation and Resources Page, 1997. www.members.tripod.com/~cinefan/ppart1.htm. Also in Association of Moving Image Archivists, AMIA Newsletter 36, Spring 1997. Grimm, Charles ‘Buckey’. ‘A Paper Print Pre-history.’ Film History 11, no. 2 (1999): 204–216. Habib, André. ‘Matter and Memory: A Conversation with Bill Morrison.’ Offscreen 8, no. 11 (November 2004): offscreen.com/view/morrison2. Accessed August 17, 2017. Henderson, Eric. ‘Bill Morrison Uses Film Decay to Create Life.’ CBS Local Movie Blog, 22 January 2013, minnesota.cbslocal.com/2013/01/22/movie-blog-bill-morrisonuses-film-decay-to-create-life. Accessed August 17, 2017. Kohn, Eric. ‘Bringing Silent Decay to Life: Bill Morrison at Orphans.’ Orphan Film Symposium blog, 6 March 2010, orphanfilmsymposium.blogspot.com/2010/03/ bringing-silent-decay-to-life-bill.html. Accessed August 17, 2017. Le Cain, Maximilian and Barry Ronan. ‘Trajectories of Decay: An Interview with Bill Morrison.’ Senses of Cinema 41 (November 2006): sensesofcinema.com/2006/thefilms-of-bill-morrison/bill-morrison-interview. Accessed August 17, 2017.

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Loughney, Patrick G. ‘Descriptive Analysis of the Library of Congress Paper Print ­Collection and Related Copyright Materials.’ PhD diss. George Washington University, 1988. MacDonald, Scott. ‘Interview with Bill Morrison: 6 Recent Films.’ Millennium Film Journal 64 (Fall 2016): 56-67. Mashon, Mike. ‘10th Orphan Film Symposium (April 6-9, 2016): Bill Morrison and the Paper Print Collection.’ Now See Hear blog, 10 March 2016, blogs.loc.gov/now-seehear/2016/03/10th-orphan-film-symposium-april-6-9-2016-paper-prints. Accessed August 17, 2017. Mashon, Mike. ‘Where It All Began: The Paper Print Collection.’ Now See Hear blog, 27 May 2014, blogs.loc.gov/now-see-hear/2014/05/where-it-all-began-the-paperprint-collection. Accessed August 17, 2017. McMahan, Alison. The Films of Tim Burton: Animating Live Action in Contemporary Hollywood. New York: Continuum, 2005. Morrison, Bill. ‘Rasputin (for George Willeman).’ Vimeo, 18 November 2014a, vimeo. com/112450092. Accessed August 17, 2017. Morrison, Bill. ‘Dancing Decay.’ Vimeo, 18 November 2014b, vimeo.com/112448882. Accessed August 17, 2017. Musser, Charles. Before the Nickelodeon: Edwin S. Porter and the Edison Manufacturing Company. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991. Niver, Kemp R. Early Motion Pictures: The Paper Print Collection in the Library of Congress. Washington: Library of Congress, 1985. Paletz, Gabriel M. ‘Archives and Archivists Remade: The Paper Print Collection and The Film of Her.’ The Moving Image 1, no. 1 (2001): 68-93. Sheaffer, Russell. Personal email. 24 July 2015. Stoddard, Matthew. ‘The Archive and the Common: The Film of Her as Archaeology of Communicative Capitalism.’ Paper delivered at Society for Cinema and Media Studies conference, Montréal, 27 March 2015. Streible, Dan. ‘Saving, Studying, and Screening: A History of the Orphan Film Symposium.’ Film Festival Yearbook 5: Archival Film Festivals. Ed. Alex Marlow-Mann. St. Andrews, Scotland: St. Andrews Film Studies, 2013. Walls, Howard Lamarr. ‘Motion Picture Incunabula in the Library of Congress.’ Journal of smpe 42 (March 1944): 155-159. Walls, Howard Lamarr. Motion Pictures, 1894-1912: Identified from the Records of the United States Copyright Office. Washington: gpo, 1953. Weissman, Ken. ‘The Library of Congress Unlocks The Ultimate Archive System.’ Creative COW, 2010, library.creativecow.net/weissman_ken/library_of_congress/1. Accessed August 17, 2017. Weschler, Lawrence. ‘Sublime Decay.’ New York Times Magazine. 22 December 2002. 42-47.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR Dan Streible is Associate Professor of Cinema Studies at New York University (NYU). In 2014, he became director of the NYU master’s programme in Moving Image Archiving and Preservation. He teaches courses in film history, curating moving images, archival research, and documentary, and has published historical research on early cinema, movie exhibition, nontheatrical film, and moving-image preservation. His publications include the books Fight Pictures: A History of Boxing and Early Cinema (2008); Emile de Antonio: A Reader (2000, co-edited with Douglas Kellner); and Learning with the Lights Off: Educational Film in the United States (2012, co-edited with Devin Orgeron and Marsha Gordon). In 2011, he programmed the Robert Flaherty Film Seminar. Streible is currently writing a book entitled Orphan Films: Saving, Studying, and Screening Neglected Cinema, for which he was named an Academy Film Scholar. Since 1999, he has organized the biennial Orphan Film Symposium, bringing together archivists,

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academics, preservationists, curators, and artists. Prior to 2008, the symposium was held five times at the University of South Carolina, where he taught for nine years. Since then, NYU Tisch School of the Arts and its Department of Cinema Studies have hosted the event, which has traveled to EYE Netherlands Filmmuseum, Museum of the Moving Image, Museum of Modern Art, UCLA, the Academy Theater, Indiana University, and the Library of Congress.

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CHAPTER 3

Ghost Trip Searching for Potential Myths Benjamin Léon

Herzogenrath, Bernd (ed.), The Films of Bill Morrison. Aesthetics of the Archive. Amsterdam University Press, 2018 DOI 10.5117/9789089649966/CH03

ABSTRACT The concept of the ‘trip’ can have two meanings: one describes a mental transformation of being (a hallucinatory state caused by drugs), while the other covers the idea of an indefinite itinerary, which is associated with the English word road. By its structure, Ghost Trip (2000) literally embarks on an unknown and sinuous quest. The movie is, per se, a strange object, the story follows the mysterious itinerary of a man who searches for myths in a landscape of undisclosed experiences. Starting with its formal structure, this essay explores the mythical stories that are implied in the images of Morrison’s film and tackles the question of how Ghost Trip portrays an existential void that embraces the search for the essence of things. k e y wo r ds

frame, hyperreality, myth, ritual 

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Time is dead as long as it is being clicked off by little wheels; only when the clock stops does time come to life. – William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury

THE TRIP-BALLAD FORM AND CIRCULARITY

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The theme of the trip is not specific to Ghost Trip, but also resonates in other films by Bill Morrison, such as City Walk (1999) or The East River (2003). City Walk is about an urban imaginary world that gives the impression of a stark landscape. The frame is marked by a sooty chiaroscuro, which suggests an oppressing and austere mood. The director constantly manipulates the image through intensive work on the medium: the black-and-white images begin with white vertical scratches, which give way to manipulated shots. It is difficult to know how Morrison uses this manipulation: while shooting or during the editing process (on an optical printer). In The East River, the journey is more subjective. It is as if the spectator becomes the character himself, moving in water. The movie makes an aesthetic use of colour through a work on the saturation and its indistinctive resulting tint. Consequently, the droplets on the camera’s lens give it a pictorial, pointillist vibration. In this context, Ghost Trip appears as a distinctive movie in Bill Morrison’s work. The film depicts a fictional world instead of following the practice of his found-footage experiments. The first shot opens on a cemetery where a man puts some roses on a grave. The sound of his voice moulds some repeated moans, becoming a kind of incantation (of someone returned from the dead). This peculiar preamble sets a more precise thematic orientation than would appear at first seen. After a black cut-splice that introduces the credits, the movie starts with a mysterious narrative about the wanderings of a hearse driver, driving from one place (Las Vegas) to another (New Orleans). The film’s loop structure – the driver coming back to the same graveyard as at the beginning – evokes a circle motif that is reminiscent of other movies by Morrison. We may think about the first shots of Decasia (2002) in which the constant whirling of the dervish resonates with the double decomposition of the filmic movement: slow motion, which overlays the natural decay of the celluloid. The dervish becomes a metaphoric figure, which represents the indivisibility between the circular processes of composition and decomposition. In film history, the ‘road trip’ was born out of the detachment of a fixed camera position in order to grasp new relations in space; not only from the display itself, but also from the bodies and other objects in movement. In that respect, the Western genre and especially John Ford’s films are significant. In

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Stagecoach (1939), Ford combines the plastic force of silent cinema adjusted to the film’s sound development (precision of voice).1 Temporal blocks become a poetic way of changing from one place to another; these blocks are also present in Ghost Trip. There is certainly a structural dizziness here, which covers some characteristics of the trip-ballad form. By using many laterals tracking shots and some light movements with a handheld camera (fixed shots are less frequent), Ghost Trip provokes a sensory-motor rupture into the purely optical and sound situation. The idea of the trip ballad form is developed by Gilles Deleuze (from Ozu) in The Time-Image (1985): The work borrows a trip/ballad [bal(l)ade] form, train journey, taxi ride, bus trip, a journey by bicycle or on foot […]. Camera movements take place less and less frequently: tracking shots are slow, low ‘blocs of movement’; the always low camera is usually fixed, frontal or an unchanging angle: dissolves are abandoned in favour of the simple cut. (Deleuze 2013, 13-14) In this type of constellation, the image obviously reverses the connection between action and situation, emotion and its reaction. The frame appears in an economy of disparate movements in which slight editing creates distinct temporal blocks. The movie is built around a narrative thread, but this enunciation system is too loose and allusive. The artist prefers a sense of opacity instead of an intentional presupposition. We follow the driver’s trip and his encounters, but a certain incommunicability still remains in the human connections between the driver and his passengers – the lack of exchange with the hitchhiker and the muffled dialogue with the singer in the graveyard condemns the characters to absurd and pathetic wandering. Bill Morrison prefers a long distorted vision from a misty reality to a close expressive vision. Some images confirm this approach by rejecting the glance texture of reality (in the ontological sense). The first shot’s horizontal perspective reproduces the shape and the outline of the screen, but the split is close. The image opens on an unclear space, presumably a graveyard. The camera’s position emerges from the ground and reveals a pile of debris covered by scattered foliage. A singer puts down some flowers, declaiming a monochord song: ‘He rose, He rose, He rose up from the Dead, And the Lord shall bear my spirit home.’ The frame’s horizontality opens on a space whose architecture is too imprecise to lead to a mimetic acknowledgment. The image develops into a force field in which the frame’s mass-composition announces the stream of a constant displacement that appears in the following sequences. The role of frame size and, more particularly, its horizontal aspect, reinforces a shift into an unknown space. The following are different space-time blocks that

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do not avoid the unity of an indivisible time as Bergson states in Duration and Simultaneity (1922): – –

– –

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The organizational function of New Orleans’s cemetery, which generates the film’s loop structure (A). Various landscapes reviving the great American wilderness (desert, rail lines) and its artificial corollary (Las Vegas) as an intermediate movement without specific aims (B). The prayer’s isolated sequence, which reinvokes the initial graveyard’s situation (A). The path into the sea or the return to the place as a metaphor of the circle (C).

The structure of the film could then be: ABAC, a narrative form, which undermines the classical structure based on a relationship of cause and effect. As a result, it is closer to an experimental form. If I adopt the system developed by Barbara Herrnstein Smith in her text Narrative Versions, Narrative Theories (1980), Ghost Trip then clearly reverses these assumptions. As David Bordwell claims: ‘A was a cue, and on this basis you made a formal hypothesis. Probably that the letters would run in alphabetical order. Your expectation was confirmed. What follows AB? Most people say C.’ (1993, 44) It seems difficult to establish a prompt satisfaction for the viewer in Ghost Trip. Contrary to this proposed notation, the narration is characterized by a fictional limit at which the form does not provide an understanding after the first viewing of the film. The viewer is less interested in observing a rhetoric organization and focuses more on the film’s visual beauty: overexposed celluloid, size forms, size reports, and size rhythms along the film all contribute to a constant hypnotic effect. Despite the many splice shots, the movie shows some interesting variations with a few fade-to-black frames (after the graveyard’s prologue and before the credits), cross-dissolve shots (the central desert part) or, more likely, images that appear and disappear on the image itself while the space remains unchanged (in the underground parking lot, in front of the passing train). The possibility of a destination marks a horizon of expectation. But how could we reach this destination? Which specific sensory-motor element allows this kind of flow? As Deleuze says, a time reverse to the movement explains the lack of situations in which the image action finds a reactive response: ‘a time-image which is subordinated to the movement itself’ (2013, 23). In other words, the bodies stroll as pure light, existing only in the gaps between movements. The subject’s place becomes uncertain in space, presently dislocated and localized. In Ghost Trip, some indirect time-image are purely optical and sensory-motor situations. This formal consideration does not necessar-

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ily solve the expiatory nature of movements – obviously fragmented – as the priest’s preaching sequence. He talks with the lost spirits as a realistic description of spectral power. This sequence is an expression of the film’s organization with its structure as a plastic medium. In fact, the film does not serve as an imitation of perceptible reality but makes visible the shapes of the world. This leads us to consider the place of the subject in the film as less than that of the subject-viewer in relation to the formal display. The film’s project depends on its fundamental properties: this expression may be directly returned to Rudolph Arnheim’s conception in his book Film as Art (1957). For Arnheim, as a disciple of Gestalt psychology, a piece of art is not only a simple imitation or a selected copy of reality but also a translation from the medium’s observed characteristics.2 Therefore, the artist’s creative process is never a realistic copy of objects, but a recreation based on including elements that are borrowed from reality. Cinema draws its strength from its own boundaries, which supposes differences with reality. Between the film’s opening sequence in the graveyard and the return to the same one at the end, a temporal and spatial structure is established. Furthermore, the singer’s presence on the same site gives the impression of a return to the initial time that the other shots had masked. This is especially true when the frame retains the same horizontal structure in its lines. The temporal organization differs from a chronological representation as if Ghost Trip was organized around an analepsis, a time divergence that refers to the past. The graveyard becomes an anchorage point to which we return several times. There is a physical energy to the shots in this film that manifests itself in various ways, thanks to the editing. This aesthetic aspect characterizes Bill Morrison’s work: The frame’s fluidity reminds us of Andreï Tarkovski’s film that Teresa Faucon addresses in terms of its ‘hydraulic intelligence’ editing (2013). This mechanic of fluids is characterized by some long takes, allowing time’s extension to explore the landscape. It becomes more intense in the last images, in which the driver progresses into the ocean’s immensity.

HYPERREALITY AND HUMAN RESISTANCE Ghost Trip, like an initiatory journey, opens a space behind the visible space. The unreal perception goes through black figures, future spectra, contaminated by the image’s matter (black-and-white, overexposed, chromatic washed-out aspect). This aesthetic gives a funereal appearance with a deep black-and-white contrast. The driver’s ghostly presence reinforces the figure/ground opposition in the two-dimensional image. The detachment from space reminds us of the phantomlike figure of Johnny Cash, another mythical

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man in black. There is a contrast of matters (surface roughness, the clouds’ scattering transparency in the sky) just as much as the contrasts of lines (vertical and horizontal opposition in the image). Finally, the film’s soundtrack also contributes to this mysterious spirit: Morrison applies some sound effects that superpose a vertical editing in the image’s horizontal space. Through the diegetic sound of the wild space, the film adds some echoes that incorporate an atmospheric and enveloping mood. This unreal sensation finds an interesting anchor during the driver’s stop in Las Vegas. The viewer enters a world of hyperreality as Jean Baudrillard formulates it. Taking a closer look at the driver’s arrival in Las Vegas, one realizes that, after a stunning flash, connected to the next shot, a white image lights up our perception. The effect is impressive: the image seems to burn from the Cadillac’s interior. The camera’s angle, slightly off-center and positioned three-quarters by the driver, suggests the urban vastness beyond the windshield. In a way, the car moves into the narrow edge of the frame, indicating a width that is mediated only by the glass. There is a spatial strategy in terms of a dynamics of centripetal and centrifugal forces in this film, which is reminiscent of Edward Dimendberg’s take on the cinematic representation of Los Angeles in film noir: One can recognize centripetal space in film noir in a range of contents. These include characteristic architectural forms (skyscrapers, mass transportation facilities, public landmarks, residential neighborhoods), spatial practices (crowd movements, police surveillance, strolls and routines), spaces of representation (darkness, skylines, landmarks, cityscapes), and representations of space (the urban core, the grid, maps, photographs). (Dimendberg 2004, 108) The film’s movement leaves a certain freedom to establish some shifts in the frame’s perspective: a slightly reverse angle of the sky, a low-angle shot with a strong widening effect. These effects accentuate a sense of immersion. The plans are linked together: a fixed shot, tightened on the driver’s back, where a sense of isolation appears in front of the infinite road. The sky is threatening and is subtly sped up with a time-lapse effect. A strobe cut ends up the plan and a new space-time makes its appearance: our driver is trapped in a car’s corridor, showing an urbanized area. He is absorbed – as is the viewer – by the city. It is here that Morrison takes the best pictures of his film. The city of Las Vegas does not frontally appear to the viewer, but from a mirror’s reflection through the car’s windshield. This effect creates a double exposure in the image. For the driver, the windshield is a glass surface with rounded edges as to reduce glare. However, with a front-facing camera on the driver – a travel-

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Fig. 3.1: Windshield reflection.

ling hood – Morrison reverses the urban-space perspective. Thus, the driver’s reverse-angle vision lets us discover the city’s scenery. The most obvious symbol – the famous Las Vegas stratosphere (fig. 3.1) – must be introduced gradually in the frame. The semi-spherical shape appears on the windshield. As a result, some objects are visually distorted. The continuous movement gets closer to the architectural elements. As a result, buildings and palm trees are becoming larger on the screen. We can see a scale ratio between the cockpit’s confinement and the screen’s receptacle. This disproportionate environment encloses the driver on his way. In this regard, many lines become visible: first, on the windshield’s edge. Then, these lines build a centripetal space that encloses the driver even more. As a result, this encirclement is materialized by metal structures placed above the road – a grid array – through which the light shines. This structure reminds us of Hermann’s optical illusion.3 More specifically, the shot draws an overall view that projects the elements of space in an infinite low-angle shot, endowing the driver with a ghostly presence. This successive appearance and disappearance of his face relies on the light reflection and seals an inclusive city contact in the frame. This situation places the driver in a virtual space and suggests his own progressive destruction. The surface of the movie screen is shifted into gear: from the aspect of a material device to the materiality of the world that becomes an image. The windshield now works as a new and independent screen image; its transparency absorbs the necessary light for the embodiment of the urban landscape, a specular reflection

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of an inclusive city-world. Richard Koeck’s reflections in his essay Cine-scapes (2012) bring to light the spatial and temporal logics between urban spaces and places, architecture and moving images. It is not about showing the place of architecture in cinema, but explaining that postmodern architecture is basically a cinematic phenomenon that he calls an ‘urbanity set-up’: Inauthentic spaces, such as those found in Las Vegas, Macau or Dubai, tend to have a style that reminds us of the mediated reality we recognize from watching scenes on a screen. In certain moments, when moving through the artificially-lit environments of casinos, it can feel like moving form one film set to another, again engaging with actual space in a way that seems like embodying a scene in film. (Koeck 2012, 170)

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Ghost Trip produces a spatio-temporal logic in our own urban navigational practices (as a postmodern condition). The city becomes a place of visual consumption, a device based on movement, light, and body, which can be explored in a cinematic and synaesthetic way. This issue provides a metaphor for the coercive power of Las Vegas. The place operates on the resort’s system, connected to a list of programmatic combinations. Even though it is also open to external communications. Finally, these images are organized around an oppositional model: the wilderness against the unlimited consumption of the ‘cultural logic of late capitalism’ in Fredric Jameson’s words (1991). For me, these shots mark a surreal enclave in a real world. This is the hyperreality world as described by Jean Baudrillard. He develops this concept in his essay called Simulacra and Simulation (1984), and more precisely in the chapter entitled ‘The Precession of Simulacra’: It is no longer a question of imitation, nor duplication, nor even parody. It is a question of substituting the sings of the real for the real, that is to say an operation of deterring every real process via its operational double, a programmatic, metastable, perfectly descriptive machine that offers all the signs of the real and short-circuits all its vicissitudes. (Baudrillard 1994, 2) As he says, the concept of hyperreality is close to the question of the simulacrum. Baudrillard suggests that a copy world has replaced the world we live in. He uses the term simulacrum to discuss the context of the 20th century, in particular the United States of America. In relating the self-fashioned dreamland Disneyland to corporate America, he suggests that things we believe to be false are there to hide reality. We seek some simulated stimuli – a new authenticity – and nothing more. The simulation wants to be a real experience from

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what we were told, whereas the simulacrum is its figurative representation. According to him, our societies have been resting on these simulations and have been constituted on this virtual reality so much that they have lost touch with the real world. First recognized as a representation of reality, the simulacrum was multiplied, systematized by the entertainment industry, contributing to its interference between the image and what it represents (simulates). In this context, Las Vegas is the paragon of this hyperreal place. The city gives the impression of disclosing a fantasy word. The decor is not authentic and everything is a copy: the set looks like a dream. The casino sequence represents this absurd situation, where the words (‘Eight’, ‘Seven – Take a card’) operate as pure merchant signs behind a system of symbolic values (the card, the number of coins). The unequal exchange consisting in monetizing the impossible satisfaction of desires that always multiply. The driver understands it and, after this absurd getaway, goes back on the road. | 77

ATTACHMENT TO THE EARTH: QUESTIONING THE WILDERNESS From its opening scene, Ghost Trip is positioned as a wilderness space. In other words, the camera’s point of view installs an earthly anchor. The cemetery scene composes a space in which the concrete land affirms an inalienable position. Visually, this kind of frame conveys a slight low-angle shot that we also find in the film’s more dynamic sequences: the car escapes, the sky image where the high-angle shots increase the threat of nature. The open frame and the excessive depths of the field spread beyond the supposed limits of the picture that André Bazin explores in his famous text Painting and Cinema (Bazin 2004).4 The highly allusive narrative form allows Morrison to get rid of this restriction. He prefers to confront his figures to the intermittent mechanism of the film. As opposed to the Las Vegas world that lives for itself, the film suggests another less reassuring but more adventurous way: wilderness. The film carries this tenacious myth and regularly moves in the murky waters of existence. First, the idea of nature tends to refer to the image of forests, to everything that creates landscape and is opposed to the urban world. Nature creates itself, whereas the urban world is created by man; therefore, nature is not dependent on man. Wild nature, or what Americans call ‘wilderness’, refers to the free and independent regions that are not manipulated by man. Some places such as the Grand Canyon, the Everglades, and the Yellowstone Park are examples of that wilderness today. In a second step, the term ‘nature’ embraces not only flora and flora, but also the cosmos. The meaning of wilderness seems difficult to establish, as Roderick Frazier Nash asserts: ‘Depending on the context, nature can be synonymous with wilderness or

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refer to an urban park […] It’s here not so much what’s the wilderness, but what men think about it.’ (1976, 5) Americans’ awareness for the protection of this natural space reflects a relationship comparable to the conservation of cultural patrimony and national legacy. Nash thus claims: The nation’s short history, weak traditions, and minor literary and artistic achievements seemed negligible compared to those of Europe. But in at least one respect Americans sensed that their country was different: wilderness had no counterpart in the Old World. (Nash 1976, 67)

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Wilderness and its ideal landscape have some contradictions. We must remember that the myth was originally established within an expansionist policy design. After the nineteenth century and the end of Native American resistance in the West, this Promised Land – for the settlers – was justified by the sanctity of a supposedly free land. This ‘manifest destiny’ (in Thomas Jefferson’s words) has its roots in the principle of ‘Terra Nullius’ – a space to which the first settlers had assigned legal value. This conquest, which also required the creation of national parks, as a symbol of nature protection as well as a symbol of imperialism: we move from indomitable nature to conquered nature. But is it really possible to conquer nature? William Faulkner discusses this subject in his novel Light in August (1932), strongly influenced by the issue of race, examining a southern society and, more specifically, the settlers’ spoliation of the Native American territories. The past of territorial conquest – and its slave economy – prevents the ‘whites’ from believing in a positive autochthony. Implicitly, wilderness is conceptualized as a utopian myth that excludes the idea of a paradise lost. After all, could we not see the wilderness as a form of simulacrum? As Jean Jamin says in his anthropological reading of Faulkner’s novel: There’s no virgin territory, no landscapes that no eye had swept, no soil that no eye had swept, no soil that no food had trodden, or that any geographical scope that no language would have called – no water that no mouth would have soiled. So, no original nature, no inviolate kind. Once, at the beginning, perhaps there was nothing there, but it’s a nothing that implies something. (Jamin 2011, 108, my translation) As opposed to a different interpretation to Faulkner’s vision, Morrison reveals the wilderness question as a positive space. He thereby proposes an epistemological shift. Instead of a territorial expansion, which has always gone farther west, the film establishes a journey that returns to the east. As a ghostly city, the film finds a place for a return to the wild in New Orleans. The preaching

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| 79 Fig. 3.2: Beach, still from Ghost Trip (2000). .

sequence is an example in which the prayer calls for communion between man and nature: ‘I know a man that do, yes sir, I do. I know a man, oh yes, now, can speak to the wind and the wind obeys. Yes sir!’ Here, the voodoo question crosses into the film’s overall structure. With these kinds of words, the prayer has questioned the invisible forces in order to obtain power and goodwill for this man. This religion – wrongly compared to witchcraft – may be considered as a philosophy, an art, or an incorporation of ritual practices. It can be seen as forming a language that connects spirits, elements of nature, the living and the dead, the evil powers being used for the community (Laënnac 1988). From this perspective, it is not surprising to see the graveyard sequences in the oldest part of the St. Louis Cemetery, where many voodoo personalities can be found. Close to the end, the film becomes very mysterious: the images turn into ‘tableaux vivants’ when the movement stops, thereby giving way to the image’s depth. A movement to the next shot brings to a close viewer position. Its central position in the image leaves the inexorable impression of sinking into the sand. This fact recalls Maya Deren’s gesture in At Land (1944), where she also found the sea at the end. The next shot is already by the water. The man takes one step and then moves backward (fig. 3.2). Suddenly, a white shot brings us back to countryside and a beautiful time-lapse effect appears on the frame: it creates drama amongst the scudding clouds. With this open end, Ghost Trip resists interpretation and, ‘by its fluent editing, elision of illusion’ (Sitney 2002, 36), recalls the archetype of the trance film in Paul-Adams

Ghost Trip

Sitney’s own words (on Deren’s films). Following a logical atoning, the film feeds a solid but impalpable footprint: a possible vector for a constellation of past, present, and future temporalities wherein the driver or the viewer faces a hidden world of appearances, a mythical and impenetrable world.

NOTES 1

Tag Gallagher talks about Stagecoach: ‘Stagecoach is perhaps still too selfconscious to revive completely the earthy intimacy of those early silents, while its mixture of artfulness and commerciality set it apart form the Argosy Western, too. Hence, it is problematic how personal or typical of Ford Stagecoach really is. Coming out of the exotica period, it looks back to the Men-Without-Women,

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Lost-Patrol-type situation and forward to the pretentiousness of The Long Voyage Home, yet with less preciousness than any other 1939–1941 movie. In some ways it resembles The Hurricane, yet with far more variety, speed, and vigor.’ (Gallagher 1986, 162) 2

On the perceptual and percept questioning, also see by the same author: Art and Visual Perception: A Psychology of the Creative Eye (1954). However, the issue of the percept takes a quite different sense with Deleuze, who defines it as independent from the subject and closely linked to conceptual thinking.

3

Optical illusion characterized by ‘ghostlike’ grey blobs perceived at the intersections of a white (or light-colored) grid on a black background. The brain adapts the information concerning the brightness of an area according to the neighbouring areas (we can also see this phenomenon in Victor Vasarely’s nested-squares).

4

In contrast to the centripetal painting aspect, Bazin opposes the centrifugal power of cinema. While this opposition between painting and cinema still remains ambiguous – see Clement Greenberg and the All-Over concept, for example –, Bazin develops this essential notion of ‘mask’ that identifies the movie screen as a projected image, a centrifugal image at least.

WORKS CITED Arnheim, Rudolf. Film as Art. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957. Bazin, André. What is Cinema? Trans. Hugh Gray. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2004. Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation. Trans. Sheila Faria Glaser. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994.

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Bordwell, David and Kristin Thomson. Film Art: An Introduction. New York: McGrawHill, 1993. Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 2. The Time-Image. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. NewYork: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013. Dimendberg, Edward. Film Noir and the Space of Modernity. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004. Faucon, Teresa. Théorie du montage. Énergie, forces et fluides. Paris: Armand Colin / Recherches, coll. Cursus, 2013. Gallagher, Tag. John Ford. The Man and His Films. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1986. Herrnstein Smith, Barbara. ‘Narrative Versions, Narrative Theories.’ Critical Inquiry, 7, 9 (Autumn 1980). 213-236. Jameson, Frederic. Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991. Jamin, Jean. Le nom, le sol et le sang. Trans. Benjamin Léon Paris: CNRS Éditions, 2011. Koeck, Richard. Cine-spaces: Cinematic Spaces in Architecture and Cities. New York: Routledge, 2012. Laënnec, Hurbon. Le barbare imaginaire. Paris: Cerf, 1988. Nash, Roderick Frazier. Wilderness and the American Mind. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976. Sitney, Paul-Adams. Visionary Film. The American Avant-Garde 1973-2000. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Benjamin Léon is a Ph.D in Film and Visual Studies (University of Sorbonne Nouvelle – Paris 3) and a Teaching Assistant (University Paris-Est Marne-la-Vallée). He concluded a dissertation on frame’s plasticities from Andy Warhol’s work and American expérimental cinema (1950-1970). It is a reflection between different mediums: painting, photography, and cinema with frame (device) in image space (perception) as the main topic. In regards to his research, he was a visiting scholar at the Tisch School of The Arts (NYU) in 2013. His research interests cover a range of issue in film and media studies, but more specifically on theory of visual form, medium theory, aesthetics of image, and figural analysis. He essentially works on experimental cinema (USA, England, France, Austria) and contemporary art (installation practice). He also made a large reflection about experimental documentary in relation to the space and American wilderness (James Benning’s films). He contributes to various issues (Aniki, Artforum, Cinema & Cie, La Furia Umana, Vertigo) and he is now a member of the editorial staff ‘La Furia Umana’. He has written articles about experimental cinema and more precisely on Andy Warhol, Stan Brakhage, Jonas Mekas, Paul Sharits, and Peter Hut-

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ton. He is currently involved with the new critic confederation Cinema and Moving Image Research Assembly (camira). He has participated as a specialist in a retrospective at the Pompidou Centre in Paris (National Museum of Modern Art) concerning the works of Jonas Mekas and Shirley Clarke. More recently, he was invited to the jury in the 6th International Film Festival of Murcia (Spain) in 2015.

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CHAPTER 4

Decasia The Matter | Image: Film is also a Thing Bernd Herzogenrath

Herzogenrath, Bernd (ed.), The Films of Bill Morrison. Aesthetics of the Archive. Amsterdam University Press, 2018 DOI 10.5117/9789089649966/CH04

ABSTRACT This essay focuses on the nexus of film, time, and materiality. Film is, by default, seen as a representation of time – Decasia goes a decisive step further by focussing on the temporality of or in the filmic material. Put together from found footage and archive material in various states of ‘dying’, this film reveals the ‘collaboration’ of time and matter as in itself ‘creative’ and ultimately produces a category that one might call the matter-image and that neither Deleuze’s movement-image, nor his time-image completely grasp: here, time and matter produce their own filmic image. k e y wo r ds

Gilles Deleuze, Georg Simmel, Walter Benjamin, Charles Sanders Peirce

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Bill Morrison’s Decasia (2002) can be located in the tradition of the American avant-garde or experimental film of the 1960s and 1970s. A main characteristic of this tradition is its focus on the filmic material and on the structure of film. Filmmakers such as Bruce Connor, Robert Breer, and Tony Conrad worked with the concept of flicker-film that undermined classic filmic temporality (and its concomitant continuity-effect) – 24 frames per second – and experimented with various tempi. Andy Warhol rediscovered early cinema’s stylistic device of the ‘static camera’ and made duration the explicit topic of films such as Empire, Sleep, and Eat. Ken Jacobs, George Landow, and others utilized the concept of found footage for the experimental film, while Stan Brakhage produced films completely without a camera, by what Peirce would have called ‘indexical’ procedures – putting objects directly on the filmstrip to be processed, by painting or scratching on its surface, for example. It was Brakhage’s self-expressed aim to decouple the filmic image from its hegemonic relation to memory, to deconstruct the images’ representational character and to create a ‘sense of constant present-tense’ (Brakhage 2005, 210) – not a representation of the past, but a presentation of temporalities or of durations. Common to all these experiments was the desire to make the filmic material itself – under ‘classic circumstances’ invisible due to the ideal of the transparency of the medium according to which film is ‘the material base that must be dematerialized in projection’ (Stewart 1999, 3) – visible and fruitful as a fundamental component of the filmic process. Morrison went a decisive step further – Decasia is a montage made from found-footage films in various states of decay. He left the sequences basically untreated in order to present a time-image created not by a human subject, but by time and matter itself – the matter-image. In order to get his material, Morrison dug his way through various film archives; like Walter Benjamin’s ‘rag picker’ (Lumpensammler), Morrison searched the archives of the Library of Congress, and the archive of 20th Century Fox Movietone Newsreels at the University of North Carolina –particularly, their collections of actualitées, travel reports, industrial and educational films that all dated from the first half of the century of the cinema and that were all shot on nitrate film.1 In a way, I argue, Morrison’s strategy enacts a reversal of classic cinema’s subordination of time to movement comparable to the Deleuzian taxonomy. Decasia’s cannibalization and recontextualization of prewar ‘movement-images’ according to irrational cuts and false continuities enacts an undermining of the concept of time as the relation of movement and space. Whereas, in the classic movement-image, the rational cut served as a ‘linkage of images’ (Deleuze 1986b, 213), producing ‘natural relations (series)’ (Deleuze 1986a, 204) of images, the film of the time-image ‘disenchain[s]’ (Bogue 2003, 173) the images from these series, opening up and expanding an ‘irrational interval’ by which each image, according to Rodowick:

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[..] becomes what probability physics calls a ‘bifurcation point’, where it is impossible to know or predict in advance which direction change will take. The chronological time of the movement-image fragments into an image of uncertain becoming […] the regime of the time-image replaces this deterministic universe with a probabilistic one. (Rodowick 1997, 15) This is not to suggest that Decasia is a random collection of images and sequences – quite the contrary, in an interview Morrison reveals his thorough composition of the film.2 The relation between images and sequences, however, is undetermined, unpredictable, and probabilistic. Decasia begins (and ends) with the image of a spinning Sufi dancer from Egypt – André Bazin’s country of mummies. Already at the beginning, Decasia accentuates the paradox of what could be called a ‘static dynamics’ – here, movement does not propel a plot by action-reaction, but rather stays ‘within the frame’, and within the confinements of this frame, movement ‘happens’ only locally, as if space does not exist (or matter), whereas the movement itself deconstructs its proper ‘motor function’ and allows a glimpse of what Deleuze calls ‘a little time in the pure state’ (1986b, xi), a direct time-image, independent of montage strategies. After the Sufi dancer, a sequence shot in a film laboratory and rotating film reels follows – the audience witnesses the birth of a film within film.3 The dancer’s circular movement is taken up again in this sequence and enacts the constituting paradox of the filmic medium: the ‘static dynamics’ of film – movement and stasis at the same time, the illusion of movement as the effect of static snapshots is complemented by the ‘static dynamics’ in film (the Sufi dancer), subverting or at least questioning the sensory-motor schema of the classic movement-image. Images of movement and circulation, of birth, life, and death provide a ‘red thread’ in Morrison’s film and are also adopted in the circular structure of Decasia itself, opening and concluding with the Sufi dancer. ‘Repetition’ is one of Morrison’s stylistic means – he often uses the same ‘parent movie’ (found footage) in various films. In Decasia, he uses sequences that he had already used in his earlier films, such as The Film of Her (1997) and Trinity (2002). Re-petition, however, – just like re-memberance – is not a repetition of the same … this would rather be re-dundancy. Morrison instead ‘extracts’ sequences from their ‘original’ narratives and embeds them in a new context – in the context of time itself. The ‘return’ of certain images returns as difference and thus has a certain affinity to memory, as Morrison himself points out: The frame pauses briefly before the projector’s lamp, and then moves on. Our lives are accumulations of ephemeral images and moments that our

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Fig. 4.1: Boxer and blob.

consciousness constructs into a reality. No sooner have we grasped the present, it is relegated to the past, where it only exists in the subjective history of each individual. (Morrison 2006) After the two intro-sequences, scenes and images in various states of decomposition and decay follow. Decasia does not depict the signs of the time as flaws, as material defects; rather, these effects transfer their own aesthetics onto the images. Morrison has deliberately chosen sequences in which the representation engages in direct contact with the material carrier. A boxer is seen fighting against an amorphous blob (once presumably the image of a punching ball) threatening to swallow him (Fig. 4.1). ‘Flames’ dance over the close-up face of a woman, ‘wounding’ both celluloid and image. The film’s and the woman’s skin cracks and bubbles and seethes like molten lava – the woman’s face morphs ‘out of shape’, melts. The subject and title of the film seems to have transferred or inscribed itself into its material. The resulting tensions create a texture ‘so porous it recalls a “pointilliste” texture in the manner of Seurat’ (Deleuze 1986a, 85)4 and produce cracks that echo old oil paintings, but also of some of Brakhage’s works. Decasia owns a tactile texture, an almost sculptural depth missing from most contemporary film – this is not the utopia of the digital image, as sharply

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defined as possible, but the idea of an almost three-dimensional geology of surface. Morrison’s approach starts with the materiality of the filmic medium and its own proper metamorphosis, rather than its capability to represent time and things – the temporality and thingness of the material itself is the center of his work, not the forms and shapes it represents, but the shape and form it becomes. The struggle between image and material ruins the narration of the ‘original film’, but produces a new ‘narrative’ that Decasia does not illustrate, but that emerges out of the ruinous image itself. The return of film’s (repressed) materiality makes itself seen as the destruction of the image that it had produced in the first place – yet, as Joachim Paech has poignantly stated, ‘“the death of images” […] is itself an image again, otherwise it would not be representable’ (Paech 1999, 123, my translation). In Morrison’s matter-image, film is revealed as image-producing materiality, not as an illusion of reality, as in classic film. Since, for the audience of Decasia, the (re)entry of the material in the medial form appears as the very destruction of that form, the result is a paradoxical mise-en-scène of the simultaneity of appearance and disappearance, of destruction and construction. The filmic material is not (only) a transparent transmitter of images and meaning, but rather instrumental in its construction – the subject of ‘time’ in Decasia is presented on the filmic material directly, by the material’s ‘treatment’ by time itself.

RUINOUS FILM | FILMIC RUIN Morrison’s films constitute and partake in what might be called a ‘poetics of the ruin’5, a poetics of the historicity of film, not in the sense of traditional historiography of film, but with regards to the historicity – even ‘mortality’ – of its thingness. However, Decasia does not really fit into the tradition of ‘images of ruins’ of (post) 09-11 cinema – Decasia rather presents ‘ruinous images’, is a ‘ruinous film|filmic ruin’ that does not represent the decay of some other object, but enacts the decomposition of its own material. These ruinous images deconstruct the linear time of classic film – they seem to emerge from the fringes of ‘readability’, located between pure indexicality and meaning, between a ‘reanimated present of the past’ and time as a complex mystery. Film’s mythical power to ‘capture time’ merges with the tragedy that the medium film itself – as materiality – is also subjected to the vicissitudes of time – here, the aesthetics of the archive6 is married to the poetics of the ruin, indexicality connects with entropy. Here, film leaps over the threshold separating the ‘likeness-factor’ of representation from direct ‘embodiment’ – C.S. Peirce has theorized this in semi-

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otic terms as the difference between icon and index and has pointed out that, in photography, for example, the iconic relation of likeness is only a secondary and forced effect of its indexicality: Photographs, especially instantaneous photographs, are very instructive, because we know that they are in certain respects exactly like the objects they represent. But this resemblance is due to the photographs having been produced under such circumstances that they were physically forced to correspond point by point to nature. (1998, 5-6, emphasis added)

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In Decasia’s ‘ruinous images’, the indexicality is not only the one underlying the iconicity of the represented figures and objects, but first and foremost an index that is a chemical reaction of the compounds of nitro-cellulose with the environment. Decasia’s represented figures and forms do not deteriorate because of a diegetically motivated decomposition (as in the Horror Film – see e.g. the early films of David Cronenberg or Philip Brophy’s Body Melt [1993]), but because of the decay of its carrier materiality. This logic of matter’s ‘reclaiming of power’ against its forced (in)formation by man is the central topic of Georg Simmel’s essay ‘The Ruin’ (1907). The ‘[a]rtistic formation’ enacted by the creative subject (Simmel refers to architecture in particular) here appears as an ‘act of violence committed by the spirit to which the stone has unwillingly submitted’ (Simmel 1959, 260) – there’s a similar ‘physical force’ at work like the one underlying the iconic aspect of the index. In a ruin, however, ‘decay destroys the unity of form’ (260), spirit engages in a dialectical struggle with nature and with the ‘laws governing the material’ (‘Eigengesetzlichkeit des Materials’) (259) – and this material aims to stop the subject’s and the spirit’s game. From ‘the standpoint of […] purpose’ (260), from the perspective of the ‘unity of form’, this natural decay appears as ‘a meaningless incident’ (260) – however, the result of this is not the simple ‘formlessness of mere matter’ (261). The fascination of the ruin – and of a ruinous film such as Decasia – is precisely the fact that the destruction of an object (or of an image) makes a new object or image emerge, a ‘new form which, from the standpoint of nature, is entirely meaningful, comprehensible, differentiated’ (261-262). This ‘new form’ is the result of antagonistic forces, of the interplay of entropy and evolution, of past and present, intention and chance. The ruin – like Morrison’s Decasia – simultaneously struggles and plays with its own destruction; in this very oscillation a ‘new form’ emerges. Thus, in Decasia, scenes in which the amorphous mass threatens to swallow the ‘diegetic life’ are on par with scenes in which the image precisely seems to emerge out of that blob (Fig 4.2). All things considered, the ruin lacks nothing – above all, it does not lack any ‘preceding totality’. In its continuous folding of past into present and vice

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Fig. 4.2: Amorphous mass and diegetic life.

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versa, with the ruin (as with Decasia, with its similar folding of outside (materiality) into inside (image) and vice versa) one cannot simply designate ‘decay’ as the negative, destructive force: like with the Moebius Strip, the outside is simultaneously part of the inside, decay and composition become indiscernible, being destructive and creative at the same time. If, in the abstract temps of Marey (and of Classic Physics and of Classic Film), as Bergson maintains, there can be no creation, and if this statement remains true for the ‘narrative level’ of film, on the level of the materiality of the medium, newness emerges.

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When Simmel describes the patina on metal, wood, ivory and marble, it almost seems as if he were talking about the images in Decasia and the ‘mysterious harmony’ that ‘the product becomes more beautiful by chemical and physical means; that what has been willed becomes, without intention of force, something obviously new, often more beautiful’ (1959, 262), resulting in a ‘special something’ that ‘no new fabric can imitate’ (264). 7 This singularity comes close to what Walter Benjamin has famously designated as aura, the work of art’s ‘presence in time and space, its unique existence’ (1986b, 220), which has declined in the age of mechanical reproduction.8 ‘Aura’ comes close to being the historicity of materiality. According to Benjamin, aura’s ‘analogue in the case of a utilitarian object is the experience that precipitates on this object’ (2002, 55)9 – the aura of a work of art is a direct effect of its ‘contact’ with time and space. Morrison points out the importance of this ‘direct contact’ as well: […] older archival footage […] [has] this quality of having been touched […] by time, by a non-human intervention that is organic […] there are many things happening between the first time they were registered on the 35 mm negative and transferred to a paper intermediary, to being stored, rained on, or being nibbled by rats; the hairs in the specs, the grain and what would have to happen for that to be brought out and to be re-photographed some 60 years later. So each picture has its own dimension of time, its own history. Whether or not you are conscious of this while watching, you are still watching these tiny histories go by […] (quoted in Habib 2004b) With Morrison ‘staging’ the film as a singular, material object, and with the continuous oscillation of materiality, filmed objects, and time, Decasia succeeds, I argue, in the ‘re-auratization’ of film precisely in the age of mechani-

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cal reproduction. When Bazin claims that photography (and, implicitly, film) ‘affects us like a phenomenon in nature, like a flower or a snowflake whose vegetable or earthly origins are an inseparable part of their beauty’ (Bazin 2005, 13), we can specify with Decasia, that film can affect us as a ‘natural’ phenomenon, because, in an important aspect, it is a natural phenomenon. Decasia follows a conception of ‘cinematic time’ different from that which Bergson saw as the biggest drawback of the cinema – its fundamental linearity and abstractness. Decasia’s time is neither the duration of the projected film, nor the one of the film’s narrative, neither narration time, nor narrated time, but the time of its material. Decasia contradicts Bergson’s claim that cinema can only endlessly repeat ‘the same’ – Decasia, rather, is the cinematic proof for Bergson’s observation that ‘[w]herever anything lives, there is, open somewhere, a register in which time is being inscribed […] duration, acting and irreversible’ (1944, 20).10 We are presented with a film that merges the ‘nonsubjective’ perception of the camera-eye with the ‘non-human perception’ of matter itself – in its focus on the ‘perceptiveness of matter’, Decasia shows that film is not only a signifying machine, and/or an image-and-sound machine, but, because of its chemical composition, it is also something like ‘a chlorophyll- or a photosynthesis-machine’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1992). The amorphous shapes of and in Decasia result from the oscillation of the formation or representation of objects, and the natural and organic processes of the object or matter ‘film’ itself – representation and materiality, image and thing are being folded into each other. In a commentary on Decasia, Morrison puts this in terms reminiscent of the terminology of ‘Embodied Mind Philosophy’: ‘The images can be thought of as desires or memories: actions that take place in the mind. The filmstock can be thought of as their body, that which enables these events to be seen. Like our own bodies this celluloid is a fragile and ephemeral medium that can deteriorate in countless ways’ (Morrison 2006, 98). In a similar manner, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson argue in Philosophy in the Flesh that ‘[w]hat is important is not just that we have bodies and that thought is somehow embodied. What is important is that the very peculiar nature of our bodies shapes our very possibilities for conceptualization and categorization’ (Lakoff and Johnson 1999, 19); this, I argue, is what Decasia shows with regard to the filmic body, the materiality of the medium ‘film’. Decasia is on every level a more complex ‘history of film’, with concepts of ‘history’ and ‘memory’ that go far beyond the film archivists’ idea of the ‘preservation of contents’. Morrison comments – […] I’ve shown Decasia in archival symposiums, and archivists rushed up to me afterwards and were saying: ‘But you must document what all these are.’ But […] that would defeat the purpose. And it would make it seem

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a plea for preservation which I’m not actually doing. Certainly none of this work would exist without preservation. I am greatly indebted to them but I’m not saying it is necessarily tragic that time erodes these things because, hey, that’s what happens […] the magic of cinema is also its fleeting nature, not only its objectual nature. (quoted in Habib 2004b) As Deleuze, in his reading of Bergson, states – ‘the past which is preserved takes on all the virtues of beginning and beginning again. It is what holds in its depth or its sides the surge of the new reality, the bursting forth of life’ (1986b, 92). Decasia takes into consideration that, as Bergson wrote, ‘memory […] is just the intersection of mind and matter’ (1991, 13). It is this folding of perception into memory and vice versa that defines Deleuze’s ‘crystal of time’ (see 1986b, 68-97) – and in Morrison’s Decasia, I argue, the ‘crystallization of time’ allows for a very materialist reading. 92 |

NOTES 1

Decasia is a collaboration with the American Composer Michael Gordon (one of the founders of the Bang On a Can collective) in association with The Ridge Theater, New York. I will not go into the intricacies of that very peculiar image and sound cooperation, since that would be an essay of its own. Decasia was not conceptualized as a film (like what you get on a DVD), but as a multimedia event, premiered 2001 in Basel, Switzerland, with the Basel Sinfonietta Orchestra, slide projections, a very special stage architecture, etc. Gordon’s symphony ventures into the fringes of sound and works with repetitions, superimpositions, etc. – a sonic equivalent to Morrison’s visual strategies.

2

See Barnaby Welch’s interview with Morrison for High Angle Magazine (2002) on http://www.decasia.com/html/highangle.html, last accessed 14 April 2008.

3

Note the parallel to Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera.

4

Deleuze talks about this texture in the section on ‘gaseous perception’ (1986a, 80-86). While Deleuze here comments on, for example, George Landow’s and Ken Jacobs’ use of decaying found footage, quite similar to Morrison’s, and the idea of ‘an image defined by molecular parameters’ (85) and the impression that here ‘the film itself seems to die’ (86), Deleuze, I argue, is more concerned with perception and the projected image itself rather than its material ‘coming into being’. See also Totaro 2004.

5

See e.g. Blümlinger (2009), the essays by André Habib (2004a, 2004b), or the essay by Cadava (2001).

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6

See e.g. Cohen (2004), and – of course – Derrida (1997).

7

Nitro-cellulose, just like the ‘old fabrics’ that Simmel describes, is subjected to ‘dryness and moisture, heat and cold, outer wear and inner disintegration’ (1959, 264).

8

However – ‘[f]or the last time the aura emanates from the early photographs’ (1986a, 224). Benjamin explains this ‘persistence’ of aura a.o. with the long exposure times of early photography. In the reduction of exposure time – which more than faintly reminds of Bergson’s duration – from various hours to only seconds, Benjamin sees an important factor of the decay of aura. Correspondingly, long exposure time emerges as a sign of the ‘technical conditionality of the auratic appearance’ (1979, 248, my translation of ‘technisches Bedingtsein der auratischen Erscheinung’), that ‘strange weave of space and time’ (1979, 250).

9

My translation of ‘so entspricht die Aura [...] eben der Erfahrung, die sich an einem Gegenstand des Gebrauchs als Übung absetzt.’ The English translation – ‘[aura’s] analogue in the case of a utilitarian object is the experience which has left traces of the practiced hand’ (1968b, 188), I argue, reduces the object’s experience to something done to it by a human hand, whereas Benjamin leaves that open. Also, the German expression ‘sich absetzen’ also alludes to the chemical process of precipitation, which comes quite handy in my context.

10 When Simmel speaks of ‘the present form of the past’ (1959, 266) – a concept in which ‘the ruin’ and ‘the archive’ seem to merge, this simultaneity or coexistence of temporalities is of particular relevance to Bergson, who defines memory as ‘the prolongation of the past into the present’ (1944, 20).

WORKS CITED Bazin, André. ‘The Ontology of the Photographic Image.’ What is Cinema? Volume 1. Ed. and trans. Hugh Gray. Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 2005. 9-16. Benjamin, Walter. ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.’ Illuminations. Essays and Reflections. Trans. H. Zohn and ed. Hannah Arendt. New York: Schocken Books, 1968a. 217-252. Benjamin, Walter. ‘On Some Motifs in Baudelaire.’ Illuminations. Essays and Reflections. Trans. by H. Zohn and ed. Hannah Arendt. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1968b.157-202. Benjamin, Walter. ‘A Small History of Photography.’ One-Way Street and Other Writings. Trans. Edmund Jephcott and Kingsley Shorter. London and New York: Verso, 1979. 240-57. Benjamin, Walter. ‘Über einige Motive bei Baudelaire.’. Medienästhetische Schriften. Frankfurt a/M: Suhrkamp, 2002. 32-66.

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Bergson, Henri. Creative Evolution. Trans. Arthur Mitchell. New York: The Modern Library, 1944. Bergson, Henri. Matter and Memory. Trans. N. M. Paul and W. S. Palmer. New York: Zone Books, 1991. Blümlinger, Christa. Kino aus zweiter Hand. Zur Ästhetik materieller Aneignung im Film und in der Medienkunst. Berlin: Vorwerk, 2009. Bogue, Ronald. Deleuze on Cinema. New York: Routledge 2003. Brakhage, Stan. ‘Inspirations’. Essential Brakhage. Selected Writings on Filmmaking by Stan Brakhage. Ed. Bruce R. McPherson. New York: McPherson & Company, 2005. 208-11. Cadava, Eduardo. ‘“Lapsus Imaginis”: The Image in Ruins’. October 96 (Spring 2001). 35-60. Cohen, Emily. ‘The Orphanista Manifesto: Orphan Films and the Politics of Reproduction.’ American Anthropologist 106/4 (2004): 719–731.

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Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 1. The Movement-Image. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and B. Habberjam. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986a. Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 2. The Time-Image. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and R. Galeta. London: Athlone 2000 Press, 1986b. Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus. Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992. Derrida, Jacques. Archive Fever. A Freudian Impression. London and Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997. Habib, André. ‘Thinking in Ruins. Around the Films of Bill Morrison.’ Horschamp: n. pag. 2004a. http://www.horschamp.qc.ca/new_offscreen/cinematic_ruins.html. Accessed: 30 November 2004. Habib, André. ‘Cinema from the Ruins of the Archives. Matter and Memory: A Conversation with Bill Morrison.’ Horschamp: n. pag. 2004b. http://www. horschamp.qc.ca/new_offscreen/interview_morrison.html. Accessed: 30 November 2004. Habib, André. ‘Ruin, Archive, and the Time of Cinema: Peter Delpeut’s Lyrical Nitrate.’ SubStance 110:35/2 (2006): 120-39. Lakoff, George and Mark Johnson. Philosophy in the Flesh. The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought. New York: Basic Books, 1999. Morrison, Bill. ‘Retrospective.’ In the 51st Cork Film Festival 8-15. Festival Catalogue, October 2006, 98. Paech, Joachim. ‘Figurationen ikonischer n...Tropie. Vom Erscheinen des Verschwindens im Film.’ Konfigurationen. Zwischen Kunst und Medien. Eds. Sigrid Schade, Georg Tholen, and Heiko Idensen. München: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1999. 122-35.

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Peirce, C.S. ‘What is a Sign?’ The Essential Peirce. Selected Philosophical Writings. Volume 2 (1893 – 1913). Ed. The Peirce Edition Project. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1998. 4-10. Rodowick, D.N. Gilles Deleuze‘s Time Machine. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1997. Simmel, Georg. ‘The Ruin.’ Georg Simmel, 1858 – 1918. A Collection of Essays, with Translations and a Bibliography. Ed. Kurt H. Wolff. Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 1959. 259-66. Stewart, Garrett. Between Film and Screen: Modernism’s Photo Synthesis. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. Totaro, Donald. ‘The Old Made New. The Cinematic Poetry of Bill Morrison.’ Horschamp: n. pag. http://www.horschamp.qc.ca/new_offscreen/morrison_ rebirthism.html. Accessed: 30 November 2004. Welch, Barnaby. ‘Interview with Bill Morrison.’ High Angle Magazine: n. pag. 2002.

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Accessed: 14 April 2008.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Bernd Herzogenrath is professor of American literature and culture at Goethe University of Frankfurt am Main, Germany. He is the author of An American Body|Politic: A Deleuzian Approach and editor of The Farthest Place: The Music of John Luther Adams and Time and History in Deleuze and Serres. At the moment, he is planning a project, cinapses: thinking|film, that brings together scholars from film studies, philosophy, and the neurosciences (members include António Damasio and Alva Noë). Currently, he is editing the collection film and|as philosophy for the University of Minnesota Press. He is also (together with Patricia Pisters) the main editor of the media-philosophical book series thinking|media with Bloomsbury.

Decasia

CHAPTER 5

The Mesmerist Illustrating the Return of the Repressed Hans Morgenstern

Herzogenrath, Bernd (ed.), The Films of Bill Morrison. Aesthetics of the Archive. Amsterdam University Press, 2018 DOI 10.5117/9789089649966/CH05

ABSTRACT Morrison’s cinema has often been associated with the passage of time and death: the grim inevitable, as it were. But what about dreams and murder? The Mesmerist (2003) stands out as an oddity in Morrison’s œuvre because it has a plot. Though it features the found art of decaying film, he takes the plot from the original source, The Bells (1926) by James Young, and uses decidedly modern techniques of film, rearranged fabula, abstract art, the modern jazz of Bill Frisell, to create a different kind of film without changing the core of the story on which his film is based. However, The Mesmerist maintains an integrity to the Morrison style because it still shows a concern for the unconscious. k e y wo r ds

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Because of the specificity of Bill Morrison’s medium – decayed early-20th-century nitrate film and its abstract, kaleidoscopic expressiveness – a sense of the vital ephemeral quality of the images caught in a state of decay often becomes associated with the passage of time and/or as a metaphor for life and death. After all, his most famous work is his feature-length masterpiece Decasia: The State of Decay (2002). His œuvre working with this material seems to thrive as abstract testament to its form and rarely can his films be judged on a clear narrative level. But then there is 2003’s The Mesmerist, a short film Morrison created directly after Decasia. With The Mesmerist, the filmmaker found a new context for decayed nitrate film. The film’s startling bubbling quality reflects a different side of man. Instead of his mortality, it represents his corruption. The film also features Morrison’s straightest narrative yet. The filmmaker said it himself in a 2006 interview with Senses of Cinema: ‘What’s remarkable about “The Mesmerist”, and really sets it apart from anything else I’ve done, is that, not only have I borrowed the images, I’ve also borrowed the plot points. But I’ve reshaped the plot.’ The direct source materials for The Mesmerist are various reels of the 1926 silent feature by the American director James Young, The Bells. These reels include both a well-preserved print as well as several damaged reels of the same movie. All of it was provided to Morrison by the U.S. Library of Congress (Senses of Cinema). By comparing The Mesmerist and The Bells, I hope to show that Morrison has created a deeper experience in the original narrative. I will use classic Freudian theories of the unconscious further defined by Lacan and his concept of ‘the real’. I will also closely examine Morrison’s film techniques, from editing to music as well as his use of decayed film, to show how, even in abstract form, his cinema can tell a clear story heavily informed by psychology.

THE BELLS: THE SOURCE Though The Mesmerist can stand on its own as a coherent drama, in order to appreciate where Morrison has ‘reshaped the plot’, one must examine the source material. Normally, this would not be necessary in Morrison’s films, as he recontextualizes the images based on the appearance of the decayed nitrate film, which he aestheticizes on a level beyond their original narrative context. Because The Mesmerist follows a plot based on previous material, however, it helps to know the plot of the original film. Young adapted the 1871 English stage play of the same name by Leopold Lewis. Both Morrison’s adaptation and Young’s film acknowledge the original 1867 French play by Émile Erckmann and Alexandre Chatrian, Le Juif Polonais (The Polish Jew), which Lewis

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translated to The Bells in England. The Bells takes place in a mountain village in France (Alsatia, now the Alsace region). It stars Lionel Barrymore as the innkeeper Mathias, who is terribly in debt and has political ambitions to become the town’s burgomaster; before he can run for office, however, he must pay his creditor. When a travelling merchant (E. Alyn Warren) with a belt full of gold stays the night at Mathias’ inn, Mathias murders him for his coins. Although Mathias thinks his problems are solved, he finds himself struggling with his conscience. The Bells also features Boris Karloff in a significant supporting role: the mesmerist who has arrived for a show at the fair and believes he can hypnotize Mathias into telling nothing but the truth. Morrison has distilled Young’s film to its core concerns between the innkeeper, the Jew, and the visionary mesmerist. He cuts out backstory, including the political ambitions of Mathias and his debt problems. The Bells also features a subplot involving Mathias’ daughter, Annette, and her suitor, Christian, who happens to be the town’s gendarme, (i.e. the village sheriff).1 In The Bells, Mathias pushes Christian to ask for his daughter’s hand as a twisted kind of insurance against the murder, just in case he is tried for the killing, but justice is more than a legal matter. Though Mathias gets away with the murder, he is haunted by his victim, and several scenes depict Mathias’ internal conflict. Disembodied sleigh bells appear and he clutches his ears, for they are the titular bells that were in the Jew’s hands when Mathias killed him with an ax. Though he never goes to trial for the murder, Mathias falls asleep at a table exhausted by guilt, at the end of the film, while nearly the entire town celebrates Annette and Christian’s wedding in another room. As he drifts off to sleep he has ‘the accusing dream of conscience’, in which the mesmerist appears in a court of law to put Mathias in a trance. The mesmerist asks the accused, ‘On the night of the great storm last Christmas, tell us what you did with the Polish Jew’s body?’ This is when Young cuts away from the court and back to the snowy outdoors. Mathias is seen dragging the body to a large flaming kiln before closing the door. When he wakes from his trance, Mathias is in tears and the judge tells him, ‘You are a cunning man – you thought to destroy all proofs by burning the body in your lime kiln.’ The judge orders Mathias to hang and then Mathias awakes, reaching for his throat. Mathias then prays to a statue of the Virgin Mary in the room and the ghost of the Polish Jew appears between him and the statue. Mathias tells the spirit, ‘I have repented my sin has been forgiven.’ Then the ghost tells him, ‘Then – “Peace be with you.”’ After the ghost fades away, Mathias collapses in his chair before the title card of ‘The End’ appears. According to Lewis’s script, Mathias has a heart attack and dies, but this is not clear in Young’s cinematic version of The Bells. In the script by Lewis,

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Fig. 5.1: Lionel Barrymore in The Mesmerist.

Mathias’ wife, daughter, and a slew of other characters rush into the room, and his wife confirms Mathias’ heart has stopped beating. In Young’s version, however, Mathias just lies back in his chair, seemingly exhausted, and closes his eyes. Maybe he stops breathing, but, by then, the image has faded. It is possible he has drifted into a peaceful sleep. This is what Morrison posited in his interview with Senses of Cinema. ‘It is a particularly odd film’, said Morrison about The Bells, ‘in that the protagonist [Mathias Barrymore] commits coldblooded murder and it basically solves all his problems. I wanted to re-invent the film so he doesn’t get off the hook, as it were.’

PLOTTING AND STORYTELLING WITH ABSTRACTION Nowhere in The Mesmerist are we told that Barrymore’s character is named Mathias. However, the fact that Morrison inserts a title card in the opening credits that reads ‘A revision of Chadwick Pictures’ “The Bells” (1926)’, points

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to the idea that this is the same story with the same characters. Morrison actually begins his film with the final shot of The Bells, fade-out included, except he recontextualizes it as an entry into a dream. After the fade, Morrison cuts to a wide shot of the fair. The film is slightly slowed down; this is the moment in which Morrison begins to use a deteriorated version of the print. People dressed as giant papier-mâché heads dancing in the crowd are made more grotesque by the warping bubbles of the film emulsion coming off the print. We first see Mathias among the audience watching the Mesmerist’s act, who has cast a spell on a rotund man, making the audience, including Mathias, laugh. A money collector then appears in the foreground. The film is slowed down to allow the decomposed celluloid to mutate this man’s features as he turns his gaze to the camera. He looks a bit like Marty Feldman with his wide grin and bulbous eye that looks directly into the camera. With this momentary stare the dreamer/observer is told to pay attention. The mesmerist then steps into the crowd and directs his attention to Mathias: ‘Let me put you in a mesmeric sleep – I can make you tell any incident in your life’, he tells Mathias. From here, Morrison cuts to the trial scene of The Bells using one of the clean prints, which is a significant choice. Here, we have entered another level of narrative, signaled not just by the fact that the crowd at the fair is gone and the Mesmerist and Barrymore’s character are surrounded by blackness, except for the face of the judge in the background, watching intently, but also in the clarity of the image. The Mesmerist now asks the sleeper something only he knows: ‘On the night of the great storm last Christmas, tell us what you did with the Polish Jew’s body?’ Now, we enter the memory of the character, and the story has entered a fourth level: a recollection in the dream within the dream. The image is still clear, as the Polish Jew enters the inn in a puff of snow, declaring ‘Peace be with you!’ Here, The Mesmerist follows a stricter fabula of the events of The Bells. Mathias invites his guest to a drink and he gets to hold the money belt filled with gold coins before helping the Polish Jew put it back on. Behind the Polish Jew’s back, Barrymore projects a conflicted look of opportunity and scheming before he sees his victim out the door, and the Jew once again states: ‘Peace be with you.’ There’s a fade out. When the movie fades back in, it reveals a cloaked figured stumbling through a snowstorm. Where The Bells showed the killing, but hid the disposal of the body, Morrison puts both scenes next to each other. After he disposes of the body in the kiln, Mathias puts his hands over his face, which Morrison then matches to a similar shot of Barrymore covering his face in court before he drops his hands to reveal his tearful face. The mesmerist waves his hand over Mathias’ face and, in another brilliant match cut, we are placed back in the fair, the accused incredulously looking at the Mesmerist. The flawed print is back, and Mathias slowly turns and walks away, returning to the first level of the dream here. As he walks away,

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a fortune-teller (Laura Lavarnie) stops him and takes him by the arm to coax him into her tent. Once inside, the blotches from the evaporating image grow so intense that the film seems to decay into abstraction. It is not clear, but something has happened, and Morrison uses a jump cut to take us back to the killer at the table, where he falls into his chair and is confronted by the ghostly vision of the Polish Jew. Once again, the image is clean; however, it is not perfect. The killer addresses the specter, who happens to appear before a statue of the Virgin Mary: ‘I have repented my sin has been forgiven.’ The ghost then responds, ‘Then – “Peace be with you.”’ The effect of the film is no longer the pristine image of the encounter that led to the victim‘s murder. The flaws in the film appear sparse and serpentine, not unlike the slinky music that accompanies it. The ghost disappears, and, via a rhythmically timed jump cut, the spare decay on the film melds with the wilder blotches that first appeared in the fortune-teller’s tent. We see gestures behind the haze of the startling imagery, before Mathias exits to see the Mesmerist standing outside. They exchange glances and the killer walks off screen. Again, we have the wide shot of the fair before Morrison splices the film to return to where we started. ­Barrymore’s character awakes from his dream; it is the same clean image that opened the short. He seems rattled and checks his neck. Though maybe his murder was not discovered, a twistedness inside will always linger, for we have been given an in-depth tour of the corruption that lies within this man.

THE RETURN OF THE REPRESSED IN THE MESMERIST Morrison’s decision to start his version of the story where The Bells ends far from makes his film a sequel. Though The Bells features a dream sequence, the plot of The Mesmerist stands as something very different and modern. As ‘a revision’, The Mesmerist presents a complex examination of the effect of murder on Mathias’ mind. The narrative is psychological and vividly shows the viewer the return of the repressed cued by Morrison’s editing and the image’s condition as opposed to literal explication. The decayed reels contrasted with the clean reels allow for Morrison to juxtapose ravaged images alongside immaculate images that lend deeper meaning to the picture beyond narrative. The chemical makeup of the nitrate thus becomes part of the story. The contrasts of the conditions of the image provide markers to suggest different levels of consciousness: the conscious, the subconscious, and the unconscious. The images become more than visual atmosphere but add context to the plot. As opposed to The Bells, much of The Mesmerist is a dream … and more. The middle part of the film reveals a stark truth that informs the dream: the murder of the Polish Jew. Appropriately, it is the only section of the dream,

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bookended with a confrontation by the Mesmerist, in which Morrison uses the preserved version of the film. That part is the unconscious of Mathias, which may also speak to the Mesmerist’s power to see through the man. The decayed scenes, meanwhile, present both the corrupted and obscured version of Mathias as well as the repressed abstraction of his guilt. The sleeping and waking Mathias, meanwhile, is presented via the clean print in order to contextualize the dream in a reality that is more difficult to see through. While the subconscious of the dream seems to haunt the murderer, the unconscious informs his fear of being revealed. There is no clear resolution for this murder, just an implication that, no matter what, a man who kills another man is a man defined by a past he can never wholly erase. Since we do not know what lies in the unconscious by definition, we do not know that the killer confesses all these details that we see, nor are we sure he is clearly aware of them. This is when the powers of the mesmerist play an important role. He is a channel to the repressed memory, what Lacan refers to as ‘the real’. ‘The “real” emerges linked to the symbolic and the imaginary: it stands for what is neither symbolic nor imaginary, and remains foreclosed from the analytical experience, which is an experience of speech’ (Lacan 1998, 280). Morrison imitates this

Fig. 5.2: Lionel Barrymore in The Mesmerist.

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sort of experience with his jump cut to the scene of the murder and away from his signature visual style of decayed cinema. That is where the trauma lies, what the viewer is to perceive as the ‘truth’. There is no such thing as a definitive reading, much less a definitive telling – in other words, a definitive truth –, for, based on Lacan’s theories, no two narratives are the same. It does not matter whether the killer confesses, what matters is that the mystery is somehow made manifest, and there is no hiding from the Mesmerist’s power. There is something more unsettling about the murder in Morrison’s take. Whereas The Bells presents the murder as part of the film’s action, and Mathias always seems on edge [He’s nervous, hence ‘on edge’] of being found out, The Mesmerist presents the murder as a repressed memory. There is no conscious torture in Morrison’s version of Mathias. He only weaves in the ‘narrative’ representing the unconscious; everything else is his unease about the presence of the Mesmerist and the fear of his power. The fortune-teller’s scenes are the most obscured by the melted image: in some frames the images are completely dominated by the blobs, so as to make the film complete abstraction. The fortune-teller and the killer have ceased to exist. All we can observe is expressive obscurity informed by glimpses of Mathias gesturing at the fortune-teller. He looks angry and the stretching and morphing of the image enhances that. Morrison has taken away any clear future for Mathias, except that he will be haunted by the Polish Jew. Despite his confession to having repented, the Jew appears before the Virgin Mary statue. The ghost represents the burden that will never let him be and forever inform his essence and being, even deep in his unconscious.

MUSIC AND EDITING AND STORYTELLING The film is also made modern by Morrison’s repurposing of perspective through nonlinear editing. Instead of moving forward in time, the film moves through levels of consciousness. He takes the constraints of the objective camera and turns it into an inward journey, following the protagonist to a (possible) revelation and then back out again. Absolutely essential to the story and his emphasis on certain images is how Morrison recontextualizes images in the way he edits to the music of American guitarist Bill Frisell. Morrison’s experience in rearranging scenes to fit the music is taken to another level by rearranging the original story to recreate character and look deeper into conscience. As noted earlier, there is a fade out when Barrymore’s character helps the Polish Jew out of the inn. Then the film takes on a blue tint after the movie fades back in to show a cloaked figured stumbling through a snowstorm. The change in tint is also accompanied by a change to a second instrumental

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Again. Frisell’s music partially dictates the rhythm of the film in editing. This film marks his second collaboration with Frisell (his first was for The Film of Her and later the two worked on the acclaimed feature The Great Flood). Morrison’s choice of musical collaborators features some of the greatest American instrumentalists of the 20th century. Morrison seems to favour minimalism, as his collaborators have included Philip Glass, John Adams, Steve Reich, and, most prominently, Michael Gordon. In contrast to his other musical collaborators, Frisell’s music is much more active and dynamic. Both pieces used in The Mesmerist come from Frisell’s 2001 collaborative album with drummer Elvin Jones and bassist Dave Holland and both start as meandering improvisations before cohering into an easy-to-comprehend melody. Morrison syncs the images perfectly to the music, adhering to mood and dynamic. Even though the music was recorded several years earlier, it feels as though it were made for the film Morrison has created, due to his editing. Tell Your Ma, Tell Your Pa morphs from an obtuse, bluesy, scattershot jam of drums, guitar, and bass that accompanies the opening shot of Mathias falling asleep, into a sprightly groove that is still downbeat enough to feel a bit creepy when the film fades in to reveal the fair. Like the film’s opener, Again begins with obtuse improvisation and syncs brilliantly to the changing images. It is obtuse and incoherent – the perfect representation of the id and the unconscious. It is only after the ax falls and the blood splatters on the snow that the song coheres, following delicate tapping of a hi-hat. When the murderer reveals the fire, Frisell plucks out a languorous lament on his guitar as Holland throbs a spare bass counterpoint. Another highlight is how the film arrives at its transcendental climax with the buoyancy of the music, which features parts played backwards, during the film’s most abstract sections, which feature the fortune-teller.

CONCLUSION: A FILM THAT CASTS A SPELL The Mesmerist is focused on the burden of guilt. Mathias is forever a man changed by his act of killing. He cannot hide this and his corruption is given physical form in the distorting images that picture him obscuring the truth. Only the truth and the pain of the truth are vividly rendered in the plot of Morrison’s version. Going further, if you look at the film as reflective of humanity, the film offers a metaphor for humanity’s role in the Holocaust. Guilt now takes another form, on a meta level. While The Bells was produced before the discovery of the German concentration camps, a Jew placed in an oven in the more modern The Mesmerist means something else in our post-World War II era. Metaphors aside, The Mesmerist succeeds as a Morrison film because of his sensitivity to the unconscious. Even with its clear, plot-aware form, The

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Mesmerist still casts a spell. His personal production company is called Hypnotic Pictures for a reason. Moments hardly seen in the sometimes mutated image invite the viewer to connect with the film on a subtle level while still encouraging interpretation. The strength of Morrison’s cinema lies in the subtext provided by the medium in the plainest of forms. We look at his film as both found, incidental art while also recalling the purposeful manipulation of celluloid film by Stan Brakhage. The natural rot of the aged nitrate film he discovers brings new context to the images. Though it is a process in decay, there is something between the sources, from the filmed image to the rot that has reshaped it, amorphous but concrete, like the unconscious.

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Morrison later repurposed this story in Light is Calling, a more abstract film he completed after The Mesmerist from the same damaged reels of The Bells provided by the Library of Congress.

WORKS CITED Lacan, Jacques. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XI. Trans. Alan Sheridan and Ed. Jacques-Alain Miller. New York: W.W. Norton & Co. 1998. Le Cain, Maximilian and Barry Ronan. ‘Trajectories of Decay: An Interview with Bill Morrison.’ Senses of Cinema. Issue 41 (Nov. 2006): n. pag. http://sensesofcinema. com/2006/the-films-of-bill-morrison/bill-morrison-interview/. Accessed:11 July 2015. Lewis, Leopold. The Bells. Gaslight. Mount Royal College. Accessed: 18 July 2015. The Bells. Dir. Young, James. Perf. Lionel Barrymore and Boris Karloff. 1926. Alpha Home Entertainment, 2008. DVD. ‘The Mesmerist’. Dir. Morrison, Bill. 2003. Online video. Vimeo, 12 Aug. 2014. Accessed: 21 July 2015.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Hans Morgenstern holds a Master’s degree in Literature and a certificate in Film Studies from Florida International University (FIU). Hans wrote his Master’s thesis analysing Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey against the classical Hollywood cin-

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ema form, examining how the film broke the principals of classical Hollywood form in order to transcend traditional narrative and make its sublime statement. Before completing his Master’s degree, Hans taught a class on Hollywood cinema and American Culture at Barry University for several semesters. He has also taught film courses at FIU, including a study-abroad course to the Karlovy Vary Film Festival. For several years, Hans worked in the programming departments of the Miami International Film Festival and the Miami Jewish Film Festival. In 2005, Hans helped curate the short-films programs at the Miami International Film Festival, alongside the festival’s director. Hans joined the Florida Film Critics Circle in 2011. His film criticism is mostly featured on his website Independent Ethos (indieethos.com). He has also contributed reviews and articles to The Miami New Times, The Miami Herald, Film Comment, Reverseshot.com and Hollywood.com. He has provided commentary on film on WLRN FM (NPR) South Florida. In Miami, you can sometimes find Hans introducing films at special screenings at the University of Miami as well as several film festivals and independent art houses. He has hosted Q&As with filmmakers, film critics, and authors at the National YoungArts Foundation, the Miami Beach Cinematheque, and the Miami Book Fair. He is also a board member of ‘10 Under 40’ a public television series engaging Miami filmmakers and artists highlighting Miami’s unique cultural landscape.

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CHAPTER 6

Light is Calling Celluloid Dreams Hanjo Berressem

Herzogenrath, Bernd (ed.), The Films of Bill Morrison. Aesthetics of the Archive. Amsterdam University Press, 2018 DOI 10.5117/9789089649966/CH06

ABSTRACT Like all films, the films of Bill Morrison rely on two main media. On the one hand, the specific film stock that carries the images, on the other, the light that makes the images possible in the first place and thus, albeit in a different manner, might also be said to ‘carry’ the images. This essay attempts to set up a more complex relation between these various forms of media. Drawing on scientific, philosophical, and artistic theories of light and mediality, such as those of Fritz Heider, Gilles Deleuze, and ­Niklas Luhman, this essay not only develops the notion of ‘media milieus’, but address the technologics, the aesthetics, and the poetics of Morrison’s movie. k e y wo r ds

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The relationship between thought and life is analogous to the relationship between a structured technical object and the natural environment. – Gilbert Simondon

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Upon first watching Bill Morrison’s movie Light is Calling, one might get the impression that it is simply another case of ruin porn, which is the name recently given to the artistic celebration of dilapidation, material distress and decay, created from within a highly aestheticized, neo-gothic sensibility that operates in registers of spectacular necrophilia often felt to show a deeply fetishistic relation to monuments and moments of obsolescence. One might wonder whether calling the recent delight in ruins pornographic is a result of an excess of political correctness or whether its optical gloss concerns more the nostalgic erotics of obsolescence than its pornographic display. Perhaps it is the softcore dreamspace of material culture studies. Whatever the judgement on this debate, the question is whether Light Is Calling is just another tableau of abandonment and disrepair. Should one read it as a celluloid disaster that showcases and celebrates the derelict poetry of an old, materially deteriorated, and optically degraded celluloid movie reel? Does its aesthetic effect exhaust itself in the documentary delight in the beauty of an optical ruin? Is its mesmerizing visual appeal simply the result of the inherent poetry of processes of celluloid decay?

CELLULOID DREAMS Movies are sometimes called celluloid dreams in the sense that they project, by way of the silver screen, a culture’s collective beliefs, hopes, and aspirations into that culture’s communal imaginary. In the expression ‘celluloid dreams’, however, one can also read ‘dreams’ as a verb rather than a noun. The celluloid – the material carrier medium of the movie – dreams in the sense that while it sleeps, something surfaces that might be called its ‘optical unconscious’. Although there are many good reasons to be careful with such a claim – the most obvious being that it would take a lot of conceptual preparation to argue convincingly that an inanimate object might be said to have an unconscious –, there is at least one way in which the statement is, quite literally, true. If dreams are distortions of daylight reality – optical anamorphoses in which the

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logic of desire and of the pleasure principle has taken over from that of daylight rationality and the reality principle – Light is Calling is not only optically, but also conceptually oneiric. The scene Morrison brings back to light comes from the 1926 movie The Bells. As good copies of the movie still exist, it is easy to identify the original scene. Christian is the newly-appointed gendarme of a small East-European village. En route to that village, he meets Annette, who is sitting, very picturesquely, in the load of hay that a farmer carries to the village on his wagon. When she, more or less by accident and in a coquettish melange of shyness and flirtation, slides off the wagon without the farmer noticing, Christian, gallantly and already more than a little bit infatuated, helps her up and takes her to the village on his horse. In terms of desire, the difference between the original scene and Light is Calling is that, in the original, the optical medium itself does not, either formally or materially, take up the scene’s latent eroticism, while, in Morrison’s film, the optical medium that carries the latently erotic scene has itself become, in both formal and material terms, erotic. The libidinal anamorphoses that desire introduces into daylight reality have bled into the form and the materiality of the scene by way of the materiality of the medium. The figures are moving, in dreamlike, sensuous, and languid, slow motion – Morrison has slowed down the original scene from its original runtime of two minutes to seven minutes – through a libidinously charged optical milieu that directly affects their luminous bodies and their movements. What has caused this optical unconscious to emerge is not so much – as in Walter Benjamin, who coined the term – the technical apparatus of the camera that makes visible layers of our cultural lives that had been optically unconscious to us before. Rather, it is the long, troubled sleep of a copy of The Bells in the archive from which Morrison has awoken it. The optical unconscious this sleep has made visible is not, as in Benjamin, that of cultural realities and routines, but rather that of material objects themselves; in particular, of the objects that record these very realities and routines. The logic of Morrison’s optical unconscious, then, sets an optical unconscious that stresses material and medial registers against an optical unconscious that stresses cultural registers. This shift is taken up by the fact that, while the original scene is a predictable part of a classic feature film – the stock scene that shows, in a given light the realities and routines of the first meeting of the movie’s subsequent lovers and the flirtatious mood that pervades their initial meeting –, in Morrison’s version, this scene is transformed into an optical event in which the light has itself become libidinous. In its luminous milieu, the pleasure principle has infected the original scene on the level of what might be called the medium’s material desire.

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Fig. 6.1: Still from The Bells.

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Fig. 6.2: Still from Light is Calling.

MATERIAL CULTURE STUDIES: THE LIFE OF CELLULOID If Morrison’s scene seems to be literally drenched in light, this is not, of course, because there is more light in the scene than there is in the original. It is, however, a different light, and the presence and the play of that light, as the ultimate medium of paintings, photographs, and movies, are much more foregrounded. While the light in the original scene has no ‘eigenvalue’ – it is fully subservient to the figures and their actions that it makes visible – in Morrison’s treatment, it has taken on a life and a singular quality of its own. Light is indeed calling.

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How, and from where, however, is the light calling? Like all films, Morrison’s film relies on two modes of optical, cinematographic media: the film stock on which the images are stored – a medium that can serve as a metonymy of the overall cinematographic apparatus – and light, from the ambient light that makes the images possible in the first place to the light that, at the end of the cinematographic process, is needed to project the movie onto the screen. Although both of these media might be said to carry or embody the filmic images, they do so in different ways. In conceptual slow motion: the given light – whether that light is natural in case the film is shot on location, articifial in case it is shot in a studio, or a mixture of both – is first processed by the camera and its adherent optical machines. Captured by the lens of the camera, the optical pattern provided by the given light is transposed, through the exposure of light-sensitive chemicals to the play of that light, onto the celluloid, which consists of various light-sensitive and protective layers and that functions as a carrier medium that archives the optical patterns that are being filmed for their later replay. Before that replay, however, the technically captured images need to be developed; a process that submits the storage medium to a series of further chemical reactions. Finally, another technical device, the movie projector, adds an artificial light – a light that simulates the given light in relation to the optical patterns preserved on the celluloid – in order to optically recreate the filmed moment. It would be tempting to slowly sift through the problematics I am concerned with in the different layers of the celluloid film stock, and thus to create an equally layered conceptual space. What such a procedure would show is that, given the complexity of the cinematographic procedure, one should resist the initial impulse to set up a dichotomy between material technical device and immaterial light. At all stages of the cinematographic procedure, light is both material and immaterial. Both actual and virtual. In fact, light becomes light only when it is optically captured either by natural organs of capture such as an eye, or by technological organs of capture such as a camera. In fact, there is no ontological difference between the bio-corporeal and techno-corporeal embodiment of light, because the human body is itself a technical carrier medium of light. As Heinz von Foerster notes in his trademark laconics, ‘sight comes before light’ (2008, 28, my translation). Outside of its optical capture, light is merely, like heat, an attribute of what science calls electromagnetic radiation. While this radiation might be said to be ahistorical, light – as radiation that is embodied and articulated by way of its optical capture – is invariably part of actual history, of material duration and material memory, as well as part of virtual history, virtual duration, and virtual memory. In other words, to consider the given light as ephemeral and ahistorical and technically captured light as historical, and to maintain that light in itself

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or as such has no memory and thus no history – in which case it would be electromagnetic radiation – is only possible if one subtracts the media that perceive or capture light, all of which are historical. In material terms, the light of the movie projector is historical in terms of what kind of light sources are being used, as well as in terms of the time and the circumstances of projection. As I noted above, for instance, movies were projected onto ‘silver screens’ while today’s screens are white. Morrison’s films are another example in that they rely in a fundamental way on the historicity of the celluloid in relation to its various modes of deteriorations, its processes of aging, and the inherent changes that result from these processes. As light is articulated by and thus partakes in the historicity of the optical media of capture, both natural and technically captured light have their inherent historicities. In fact, although these two are different modes of light, they are, ‘as light’, similarly historical. In terms of cinematography, the technical media of capture range from celluloid to acetate and further to digital prints. Even though digital prints seem less historical and material than the former, they also have a specific historicity. There is not only analog, but also digital deterioration and, thus, not only celluloid, but also digital debris. Obsolescence does not stop at the digital divide. Invariably, therefore, the light of a specific scene is part of the historicities of its technical carrier media. Light, however, is not only historical because it is stored in material media, it is also historical in terms of immaterial media such as memory, which stores, but also retrospectively alters the light of a specific scene according to changes in libidinal investment, analogous to the way in which, in Light is Calling, the material memory of the celluloid stores, but also alters the light of a specific scene according to changes in its material. Although its material, actual historicity is different from its immaterial, virtual historicity, light is, in both aspects, historical. Rather than to consider light as immaterial and ahistorical, which is to succumb to idealism, or to consider it as material and historical, which is to succumb to materialism, one should treat these two aspects as complementary; a notion that is itself born from the theory of light that rests on the famous, complex complementarity of the photon as both particle and wave. In fact, light is both material and immaterial, as well as historical and, as an aspect of radiation, ahistorical. Following Gilles Deleuze, there is ‘the given’ and there is ‘the given as given’ (Difference and Repetition, 222. There is electromagnetic radiation and there is light: conceptually distinct, ontologically one. The optical unconscious, therefore, comes into being in the space between the material and the immaterial. In this context, the story about human memory teaches us that we do not usually think of human memories as material,

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while the story about celluloid teaches us that we do not usually think of celluloid as having immaterial memories. Even if we accept these complementarities, it is easier to imagine memories as being invariably embodied than to imagine nonhuman and seemingly non-living bodies as having memories. Perhaps Light is Calling can help to read the second story. Not only in Light is Calling, Morrison’s optical operations work within the complex conceptual relation between the various forms of carrier media. Although both the physiological side of an embodied optics and the optics of the body of celluloid and what happens to this body during the intermediate stage between exposure and projection are scientifically well-rehearsed, neither have a very exposed role in film studies. If they are mentioned at all, however, the optical reception of a film is usually more in the focus of analysis than its physics and chemistry, which tends to be restricted to the field of experimental film. Let me focus, in what follows, on two questions that are crucial to Light is Calling: What does the body of celluloid physically consist of and what happens, physically and chemically, to this body during the intermediate stage between exposure and projection? The invention of celluloid in 1855 – or, more precisely, of Parkesine by Alexander Parkes, as it was only in 1872 that Isaiah Hyatt introduced the name celluloid for the new material – is generally considered to mark the beginning of the century of plastics. Although celluloid was widely used to manufacture objects such as dice, combs, pens, glasses, buttons, or guitar picks, it found its true calling in photography and the movie industries, which used celluloid film until the 1950s, after which it was replaced with acetate film base, which was less flammable and easier – and thus cheaper – to produce. Although the celluloid film base was still too stiff to be used in Edison’s early motion-picture experiments, by 1889, more flexible celluloids had been developed that allowed the production of photographic images on an inherently plastic material, as opposed to a glass or metal plate. This plasticity made celluloid crucial for the development of motion pictures. What underlies Morrison’s poetics is that, like all materials, celluloid deteriorates, and thus becomes, at some point, what we perhaps too easily consider as obsolete. In the case of celluloid, the main reasons for this deterioration are thermal, chemical, and physical. Once it is exposed to the environment, chemical processes begin to make it brittle and stiff. Like a living body, in fact, the celluloid body deteriorates in ways that are heavily dependent on the milieu in which it ‘lives’ and with which it interacts.

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THE BODY OF LIGHT

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Given these backgrounds, how should a film like Light is Calling be approached – both conceptually and aesthetically? As I noted, one might initially come to think that Morrison’s work consists of found footage that documents, pornographically, the beauty of celluloid ruins. On second sight, however, the given, found footage is the medium with which Morrison works, in the same way that found letters are the medium for the writer, found pigment for the painter, or found landscape for the land-artist. In Light is Calling, Morrison’s manipulations of the found footage concern not only the choice of the sequence and its time-axis manipulation but also the original’s montage. Morrison not only changes the sequence of the images, but he also removes two intertitles that, in the original version, provide the narrative context, and, in a way that is curious for the contemporary spectator, provide the names of the actors, during the movie rather than at the beginning and the end. Even more importantly, however, he optically alters the images themselves. In fact, the film’s complex production process consists of several steps through which the problematics of this paper might also be sifted. First, in order to allow for the new montage, each frame is optically printed four times. These four ‘identical’ frames are then set after each other (stretch printing) at half-exposure. This edit, in which there is actually less light than in the original, creates the movie’s slow-motion effect, although that effect has nothing to do with the film’s running speed, but rather with the lengthening of the role of negative film to which the new edit was then transferred. In a second step, an identical, similarly stretched print is optically layered over the first – again at half-exposure –, so that each condensed frame is again as light as the original frame. The second layer, however, is displaced by three frames, so that ‘each frame of the fully exposed sequence would appear as the composite of two frames, either double exposed with an identical frame, or with an adjacent frame’ (Morrison 2015, personal email). As Morrison notes, this procedure is responsible for ‘the film’s unique pulsing blend’ (Morrison 2015, personal email). This new negative is then digitized in order to ‘edit to Michael Gordon’s score’ (Morrison 2015, personal email). After this edit, ‘the processed negative of the double exposed film was conformed, and then a new 35mm answer print was made, and eventually several release prints’ (Morrison 2015, personal email). Hardly a simple case of ruin porn. Rather, all of these manipulations concern the complex artistic adequation of the human unconscious with the celluloid’s unconscious and vice versa. In this context, Morrison’s manipulations of the optical material might easily be folded onto the two oneiric mechanisms

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of condensation (Verdichtung), which is analogous to Morrison’s metaphoric layering of frames onto each other, and displacement (Verschiebung), which is analogous to the metonymic relation between two temporally consecutive frames ‘in one frame’. To return to my initial conceit: If the light that is embodied in the celluloid literally dreams, what about the light in Light is Calling? In what mode is light in the celluloid? Of course, there is no light in the celluloid in the sense that the film reel would glow in the dark. The celluloid merely stores the chemical traces of the photons that have hit the light-sensitive emulsion that is coated on the celluloid. This emulsion consists of insoluble and light-sensitive silver halide crystals that are dispersed in gelatin, which functions as a substrate and thus as yet another carrier medium on or in the celluloid-carrier medium. (Many films have been lost because the reels were mined for that silver). The gelatin coating allows the subsequent chemical processing agents such as developer, fixer, and toners, to enter the colloid without dislodging the ­crystals. During the time of exposure, the light-exposed crystals are chemically reduced to black metallic silver particles, whose pattern reconstructs the ratio in which photons have hit the emulsion during the initial exposure. The amount of light, therefore, does not lie so much in the celluloid as it lies in, for instance, the length of time the image is exposed or developed, or the light sensitivity of the specific film stock. In other words, the light that hits the emulsion is absorbed by and stored in chemical patterns that copy the initial pattern of the play of given light to which the silver halide crystals in the gelatin were exposed, and thus creates an analogous copy of that economy of darkness and light, transforming a natural, optical chiaroscuro into a chemical chiaroscuro by way of the reversal of the latent images into the ‘original images’ during the process of development. Finally, the developed chemical circumstances are resurrected into luminous circumstances when the role of celluloid is run through the projector, which functions as a renewed source of illumination. It is this optical economy of celluloid, as a chemically faithful, ‘adequate’ image of the economy of light that defined the optically captured scene, which is changed by the processes of material deterioration. One should never forget the inevitable changes performed in and by the techno-chemical process, however. In Light is Calling, a colored scene is first altered into black and white and then into sepia, which we have learned to read as a marker of historicity and of optical patination. Both chemically and physically, the medium, which had more or less cancelled itself out in the original scene – a fact that Marshall McLuhan considered as critical for its informative value – becomes increasingly visible. The filmed figures seem to exist and act in or even behind the layers of deterioration.

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As the ratio of deterioration is fully contingent in relation to the meaning carried by the images, it functions, over time, as an increasingly dense layer of optical noise. The loss of meaning produced by the noise of chemical deterioration, however, is set off by the affective and aesthetic gain inherent in what might be called the slow and persistent patination of light; a patination that is, as the material marker of historicity, the inevitable effect of an object’s presence in the material world. Dust settles on a canvas, lacquer loses its shine and transparency, chips of pigment flake off a painted surface, surfaces become brittle through the chemicals that make up acid rain. Colors fade. Cells deteriorate. Skin, like celluloid, becomes brittle. Although patination begins immediately after an object is introduced into and becomes part of the material world, it becomes visible only after a longer period of time, which is why it can be read as a marker of increased affect, but, simultaneously, of aging and decay. 118 |

THE TIME OF LIGHT Not only in this light, the parameters of time and temporality are seminal to Light is Calling. In fact, there are at least four modes or superimposed sheets of time operative in the film. The first is the actual time of the original scene performed by the actors; the second is the ‘reel time’ of the original movie, which records the speed of the original performances according to a cinematographic temporality that varies, historically, between sixteen and twenty-four images-per-second. This speed, which has entered film studies as the speed necessary for the persistence of vision, is directly related to the physiological temporality of human sight. This original architecture of temporalities is what Morrison’s deceleration of the scene is set against. Morrison’s slowing down of the images, which evokes some of Douglas Gordon‘s projects in the shift from ‘fast meaning to slow affect’, is dependent on the relation between the original scene’s speed and the temporality and the rhythm of the play of material deterioration, which functions, for Morrison, both as a temporally and spatially given constraint. The rhythm has to do with the fact that an instance of deterioration that has bled through the film reel will come back with each revolution of that reel (with increasing speed the nearer one gets to the center of the role). As the speed of the overall and the specific rhythm of deterioration is directly coupled to the speed of the original images because both take place on and are strictly coupled to the same celluloid surface, it provides the overriding temporal measure of Morrison’s retardation of the original images. The third mode of temporality has to do with how time is distributed

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across the corporeal and technical media. As I noted, Morrison’s operations, such as his slowing down of the original scene, allow for the adequation of the temporality of the celluloid’s material unconscious with the temporality of the spectators’ unconscious. If the scene were to be played according to the original’s reel time, the flicker of deteriorations would be too fast to carry the scene adequately in terms of the temporalities of human affect in relation to different parameters such as violence or erotics. In the case of Light is Calling, its dreamy, fluid legato would become a hectic staccato. In other words, it would produce a different affect. The rhythm of light in Morrison’s film is not only appropriate to the scene’s inherent affect, however, it is also – and this is the fourth temporal mode – historical in that it is reminiscent of the flicker-effect in the light one can often see in very old movies that run on eighteen images-per-second or that are, even earlier, cranked by hand. Although its overall speed can be altered, the contingent, inherent rhythm of the patterns of deterioration still provides the given rhythmic pattern of Morrison’s film, as well as that of the soundtrack, which acoustically orchestrates, as an inherent part of Morrison’s movie, the optical landscape, and is in sync with this speed.

THE CHEMISTRY OF DESIRE Why The Bells? Maybe because the true topics of the movie are dreams and projections, both of which it treats, optically, by way of special effects. Mathias (Lionel Barrymore), who owns an inn and a mill, is a ‘good man’, who allows his customers to buy on credit, although this generosity also has to do with his desire to be elected mayor. He himself, however, owes money to a neighbor, who is very strict about payments. One evening, a Jewish merchant comes to the inn. Mathias, who sits down with him to share, in his usually generous manner, a bottle of wine, sees that the merchant carries a moneybelt that is filled with gold. When, late at night, the merchant leaves the inn on his sleigh, Mathias follows him, kills him, takes his money and burns his body in a kiln that he owns. With the stolen money, he pays off his neighbor, and provides the dowry for Annette to marry Christian. Ever since his crime, however, Mathias is optically haunted by ghostly images of the merchant and acoustically haunted by the sound of sleigh bells. These optical and acoustic intrusions are optically realized by double exposures, from the ghostly transparent image of a noose, the equally transparent presence of the murdered merchant, to the image of the bells, whose inaudible sounds are implied by their movement and by the fact that Mathias covers his ears with his hands. Already the original movie, then, superimposes two levels of reality: mental

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projections are quite literally projected into real-life events, which are optically and acoustically contaminated by these double exposures, which seem to be less superimpositions than technological visitations. The end of the movie cuts back and forth between the marriage festivities and one of Mathias’ troubled dreams. Although Mathias, as the newly elected mayor, has been able to fend off investigations into the crime, he dreams of a courtroom scene in which a mesmerist (Boris Karloff), who had visited the village a short time before with the brother of the merchant in order to find the murderer of his brother, reveals Mathias as that murderer. At the end of the dream, when the merchant appears to Mathias for a final time, the image superimposes the ghostly face of the merchant onto a statue of the Virgin Mary. At the end of his dream – literally in his dream – Mathias dies, presumably of a heart attack. The structural frame of the movie is a somewhat predictable psychoanalytic allegory of the agency of the superego; the psychic agency that, by way of a mental special effect, creates the guilt that it then projects from the inside of a person to the outside, from which it returns to that person. In other words, both optically and acoustically, Mathias, and the movie with him, hallucinates. What Mathias had called, during the investigation, the devilish forces of the Mesmerist, are, in actual fact, images of the guilt that haunts him and that he is unable to repress. Mathias suffers and perhaps dies from, not a heart attack but a severe case of bad conscience. Perhaps it is because Mathias’ superego literally makes him want to die of shame that the dream can be read, according to Freud’s belief that all dreams are wish-fulfillments, as a wish-fulfillment.

TOWARDS A LUMINOUS UNCONSCIOUS The plot and the structure of the original movie, then, show a number of parallels to what is going on in Light is Calling. If the ghost of the murdered merchant enters the celluloid dream in the form of Mathias’ hallucinations, and if the dream of detection is shown as an optically and acoustically ghostly reality, these distortions are adopted, in Morrison’s version, on the formal level by the movie’s material deteriorations, which contaminate The Bells in a way that is similar to the optical contaminations within The Bells. The difference is that The Bells shows the protagonist’s mental unconscious, while Light is Calling shows the medium’s optical unconscious. If Mathias’ unconscious is securely fastened to Freudian conceptions, the optical unconscious operates on the level of the movie’s medium; it operates on and by light. As such, Light is Calling is an optical analysis that reveals the inherent but hidden luminous unconscious of The Bells. By presenting the decomposition of the medium of

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light in the contingent choreography of distress and luminous intensity, Light is Calling shows a literally luminous unconscious. While The Bells shows an individual unconscious by way of montaged images captured by a static camera, Light is Calling shows the movie’s luminous unconscious that is captured in the fluidity of optical decay. In this luminosity, objects are given immediately in and by an inherently libidinous light.

THE AGE OF LIGHT In his book Foucault, Deleuze traces how, for Michel Foucault, statements and images emerge from the media of sound and light. ‘[J]ust as statements are curves before they are phrases and propositions, so scenes are lines of light before they become contours and colors’ (2006, 67), Deleuze notes. ‘[T]he statement-curve integrates into language the intensity of the affects [...] But visibilities must then also integrate these in a completely different way, into light’ (Deleuze, 2006, 66). Before they become meaningful, sound and light form ‘diagram[s] of forces’ that are ‘realized’ in ‘description-scenes and statement-curves’ (Deleuze, 2006, 67), respectively. Before words and contours, ‘there is a “there is” of light, a being of light or a light-being’ (Deleuze, 2006, 50). A field where ‘light forms figures itself, figures formed by light’ (Deleuze, 2006, 50). There is, perhaps, no better description of the luminous and sonorous events of Light is Calling. If Deleuze and Foucault chart how meaning emerges from the photonic multiplicity that is light, Light is Calling charts how meaning returns to light and, with it, to the anonymous luminosities of affects. As Gilbert Simondon notes in On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects, ‘The relationship between thought and life is analogous to the relationship between a structured technical object and the natural environment’ (1980, 53). With this background, it might also be analogous to that between celluloid and the luminous world.

WORKS CITED Deleuze, Gilles. Foucault. London: Continuum, 2006. —. Difference and Repetition. London: Continuum, 1994. Foerster, von Heinz. Der Anfang von Himmel und Erde hat keinen Namen. Eine Selbsterschaffung in sieben Tagen. Eds. Albert Müller and Karl H. Müller, Berlin: KadmosVerlag, 2008.

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Morrison, Bill. Light is Calling. 2004. Online video. Youtube. Youtube, 06 January 2010. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cf9ah8IUVgw. Morrison, Bill. Personal email. 2 June 2015. Simondon, Gilbert. On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects. Ontario: University of Western Ontario, 1980. Young, James. The Bells. 1926. Online video. Youtube. Youtube, 15 February 2013. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LCjVCYsJPlE.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Hanjo Berressem teaches American Literature and Culture at the University of Cologne. He has published books on Thomas Pynchon (Pynchon’s Poetics: Interfacing Theory and Text, University of Illinois Press, 1992) and on Witold Gombrowicz (Lines

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of Desire: Reading Gombrowicz’s Fiction with Lacan, Northwestern University Press, 1998). He has co-edited Grenzüberschreibungen: Feminismus und Cultural Studies (with D. Buchwald and H. Volkening, Aisthesis, 2001); Chaos-Control / Complexity:’ Chaos Theory and the Human Sciences (with D. Buchwald, Special Issue: American Studies, 1. 2000); site-specific: from aachen to zwölfkinder – pynchon|germany (with L. Haferkamp Special Issue: Pynchon Notes, 2008); Deleuzian Events: Writing | History (with L. Haferkamp LIT, 2009); and Between Science and Fiction: The Hollow Earth as Concept and Conceit (with Michael Bucher & Uwe Schwagmeier, Lit, n-1 | work – science – medium, 2012). He has written over 100 articles in the fields of French theory, contemporary American fiction, media studies, the interfaces of art and science, as well as ‘nature writing’ and ecology. He has just completed two ‘complementary’ books, one about the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze (Luminous Philosophy), the other about the work of Félix Guattari (Schizo-Ecology), as well as a book on the mathematical notion of ‘eigenvalue.’

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CHAPTER 7

Gotham Zoetrope: Block by Block David Gersten

Herzogenrath, Bernd (ed.), The Films of Bill Morrison. Aesthetics of the Archive. Amsterdam University Press, 2018 DOI 10.5117/9789089649966/CH07

ABSTRACT David Gersten offers a close reading of Morrison’s 2004 film Gotham and speculates on the idea of the modern city as a living zoetrope, one that combines film and architecture into a lived experience that may signal a shift in the nature of human nature. New York City exists in a continuous state of change. At every given instant, at every given moment, the city gives voice to our transformations. In Gotham, Morrison’s deep meditation on this city, these voices are made present in the sphere of life, their shadows are captured and cast into the lived space of our shared stories: the metropolis imagines itself out of the human, and the human bears, is born of, and is borne by the city.  k e y wo r ds

Walter Benjamin, Louis Lumière, Elisha Otis, ghosts

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There are 80 years between the construction of the Eiffel Tower (1889) and the construction of the World Trade Center Towers (1969) – one lifetime. This period is immediately preceded by the emergence of photography (Louis Daguerre, 1839) and its evolution into film (Louis Lumière, 1895). Today, we are 46 years from the construction of the World Trade Towers, and they have been gone for fifteen years, ghosts, halfway through a half-life(time). William Burroughs, in his short book, The Four Horseman of the Apocalypse, tells a wonderful story about frogs. He describes how frogs started out living in the water with gills rather than lungs; they could not survive outside water, but some rare frogs had gills that, for short moments, could serve as lungs. In times of drought, these frogs could make short runs out onto land to search for other sources of water. Through natural selection, these frogs survived and, after many trips onto land, their gills transformed. They grew into lungs and the frogs ultimately moved onto land. So the frog, searching for water, found land. Recently, I read a few stories about two gigantic black holes that scientists believe are about to collide in deep space. These black holes are so enormous that the explosion resulting from their collision was described as releasing an unfathomable force, one that will blow entire galaxies away, like leaves being blown off a tree during a hurricane. The two black holes are only one ‘light week’ apart from each other, making scientists believe that their collision is imminent. Some say that this collision will occur in the next 100000 years, others speculate as soon as 15000 years (Hackett 2015). Thankfully, these black holes are 3.5 billion light years away from us, offering some sense of relief. I could not help but wonder if being 3.5 billion light years away means that this terrifying explosion has already happened a long time ago. If we could dramatically increase our ability to see into deep space, would we discover that the explosion will happen in the next 50 years? Or even next week? Maybe our Milky Way is one of the leaves thrown in the hurricane and ‘we’, our solar system, was born in the explosion we are hoping to witness in the near future. Each of these stories are expressions of transformation and the relational nature of temporal experience. Cosmic time, geologic time, evolutionary time, and historic time are all moving through our lifetime. Our present-tense sensation of time is an assembled coherence of multiple durations constructed not only within us, or the exterior world, but, in fact, between the world and our experience of it. Much of this deep physiological and cognitive process is structured by our evolution as a species, but our evolutionary time frame, our development as a species, is not the only temporal participant in the constant construction of our experience in the world. Experience is inseparable from the capacity of memory and the personal imagination to situate us in space and time. Our memory, thoughts, knowledge, desires, fears, and hopes all

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constitute ‘an environment’ situated within and arising from the many durations of our existence. In our ‘light week’ blink of an evolutionary eye, the invention of photography and film have created an empiric shift of such magnitude that the force of these constructs may create a hurricane of transformation propelling us forward. In the most elemental sense, film materially captures light in a particular moment, allowing it to be reconstituted in another moment. Film is an emergent folding of time, in which the light of today contains the light of yesterday and tomorrow. Each light occurred, will occur, and is occurring, in eddies of a continuous present. Very few have better understood the materiality of light or more beautifully captured the ineffable connective tissues between film and life itself than Bill Morrison. His stunning body of work stands as a shining expression of the nature of human nature, our timeless will to find our stories and to locate ourselves within our geographies. Heard in their own proper beat and measure, the films of Bill Morrison empathetically call us close, offering a deeply human sonnet, telling of our strengths and fragilities, hopes and despairs, embodying with great nuance the enigmas of life, time, and transformation. Film and the modern city grew up together and not just as distant cousins, but as siblings and perhaps even as conjoined twins, sharing certain organs, vessels, and connective tissues, living within each other, intertwined in countless ways. As a reflective double of the world living within the world, film constitutes a living system of storytelling, memory, and light: part myth, part man, part mirror, a tripartite within a mirror to infinity we call THE CITY. New York City exists in a continuous state of change. At every given instant, at every given moment, the city gives voice to our transformations. In Gotham, Bill Morrison’s deep meditation on this city, these voices are made present in the sphere of life, their shadows are captured and cast into the lived space of our shared stories. In perfect duet with Michael Gordon’s stunning score, the city speaks in whispers and howls, revealing in its heights, depths, and fragile grounds our own heights, depths, and fragile grounds: the city contains us, moves through us, includes us, speaks to us: as we build the city, the city builds us. One day, when my daughter Sarv was not quite three years old, she took two pieces of bread and placed them next to each other, side by side, on the table and said: ‘Look Daddy. It’s a Bread Book.’ As she placed her hands on the bread and pulled her fingers across the surface, moving her eyes to look at it closely, she said: ‘And if you read it carefully, it teaches you how to make bread.’ Bill Morrison’s Gotham captures New York City, frame by frame, block by block: if we read it carefully, it teaches us how we have lived, live, and will live

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in this city. Having spent decades in New York City and many days and nights in Gotham, I would like to take a risk and ask you to join me in looking closely at Gotham, where change is timeless.

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Act I: The Meadow (Minute 0:00-10:13) Scene I: Dawn (Minute 0:00-2:45) Sheep, lots of them, move together slowly, grazing in an archaic meadow, smoke rising through the trees in the distance. Oh, was that a car? Is that a light post among the trees? Are those buildings? Where are we? Is that a human? Aah, that is definitely a car, a few cars moving across now, and a light post standing vertically among the trees, a kind of measure to the cars and sheep passing though the meadow. The sun rises and a human figure returns, carrying one of the sheep. As they move toward an empty bench, the entire mysterious (archaic and not) meadow disappears. Where are we? As it turns out, this mysterious meadow is Sheep’s Meadow, located in Central Park, in New York City. Like the city itself, this meadow is a construction, a clearing surrounded by a forest of rising buildings: the outside has been brought in, it is an outside constructed inside a city. This ‘inside-out’ meadow was constructed starting in 1857, at about the midpoint between the emergence of photography and film. For millennia, stories in the form of myths provided a means of navigating and comprehending the world and our place within it. Some of the earliest myths were shared through a form of embodied reenactment – a reenactment with no audience. All of the participants were within the myth as you became the myth: you as a snake, you as a dragon, you as a sheep, you as a shepherd, and you as the sun. I as the wind. Together, we reenact the myth, creating a shared space of mutual telling. All of the participants were simultaneously tellers and listeners within the space of the story. This shared space was immersed within the essential telling of nature itself. It existed as a kind of ship made of water. I sometimes think of the participants in this early form of reenactment as being; With in / Within the myth and the world. Scene II: State Changes (Minute 2:46-4:10) Across the river, we have moved from within the meadow to viewing it at a distance. Steam is rising, the river is changing states, drifting across the citadel city behind. A boat slowly enters, floating toward the city, its vertical mast with no sail, then a smoke stack, a buoyant locomotive puffing into the sky, new-old floating industry. That was no mast with no sail, that was a flagpole with no flag, announcing an unnamed state. Then the

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commingling, the smoke of the stack and the rising steam drawing out and mixing into a new state of being. Many suns are caught, held up by a parasol of evaporation: the clouds. The sun’s heat establishes a filter for its light, a blanket absorbing from below, backlit from above. Add to this the rain, droplets falling, returning to the total, each reflecting its own sun, each forming a brief circle upon reentry, an ungovernable storm of geometry, and then a rainbow. When silver bromide is exposed to light, it is jarred. Particles of silver are broken free. They float off the plate, inversely reducing the reflectivity in the points of greatest light: a negative. A crystal evaporation occurs: a single moment’s light establishes a filter for its time, an intermediary sheet of time existing in both present and past. This crystal extract is a singular omniscient: a photograph. The still photograph is in constant motion: a net, a sail. Around 2500 years ago, the birth of Greek theatre introduced a separation within this shared space, a separation between the reenactors and an audience, between the tellers and the listeners. An interesting thing happened as a consequence of this new form of participation. Through vision, the landscape beyond the play was pulled into the reenactment; the hills and meadows behind the stage commingled with the story and were understood as part of the myth. This commingled understanding was then carried within the par-

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Fig. 7.1: The turn from horizontal to vertical; leaping the steeple (Minute 7:15).

ticipants as they reentered the landscape, constructing a kind of literate geography, aligning the landscape of their lives with the landscape of their stories. Scene III: The Announcement (Minute 4:11-8:17) ‘Stopped at a church and jostled through the crowd, Love followed just behind me, panting at my feet, As the steeple tore the stomach from a lonely little cloud’ Nick Cave 2001, ‘Darker with the Day’

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Three buglers, a steeple, and the tallest tower we have ever seen appear on the screen. Bugles up! The announcement begins. What are they announcing? Smokestacks appear – not one, but two – and these are on land, not floating in the river; water towers appear, holding water in, the flowing river contained, held up, vertical. Now, the buglers are within an arch, then a rotation, a second horizon – it is difficult to know where we are. BANG – OH MY, a man on a wire hanging from above, it is a vertical geography, we are rising! Hanging into the world. Now in, looking out, that must be what they are announcing! We are crossing over, entering a new world, a new within, the inhabitation of the vertical, and then a window, hovering before us, partially blocks our view. Soon, scenery was introduced to the Greek theatre; surfaces were built, painted, and placed at the back of the stage to reenact the landscape itself. I imagine that the creators of the plays recognized the vertical flattening out of the view beyond and they began to construct mimetic fragments of this landscape, to allow for further articulation and control of the story; they could make it rain when it was sunny. This scenery constructed a second world that hovered within the distance, partially blocking and commingling with the view of the world beyond. The early separation of actor and audience is a critical moment in the development of western civilization. Building a world that partially blocks the world and can be rearticulated as a mode of exchange with the world is linked to the origins of western art, architecture, science, and technology. Scene IV: Waking Up (on the other side) (Minute 8:18-8:59) Waking up, wiping the sleep from our eyes, we look out to a new world, from within a new world. The man outside cleaning the window seems to recognize certain nuances in how the water evaporates. In short, when the water is picked up after the rinse coat, it leaves behind a film that creates great variation in line and surface based on the movement of the rag and amount of water spread out; this can be cultivated into a shorthand notation, depicting very old hieroglyphs of the great meadow, and the

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sheep as we watch them go into the air behind us. As we gradually wake up, we see a lifeboat being lowered down past the window. This is a sign that there must still be a ground below, a horizontal, even if it is all water! There is a remarkable novel by Mark Halprin called Winter’s Tale (1983). In it, the main character Peter Lake lives in New York City twice: in 1900 and in 2000. How he does this is an astounding work of literature hinted at in the beginning of the book: the piece opens with a large passenger ship entering New York City’s harbour (in 1900), heading toward Ellis Island. Peter Lake is a small baby and, just as the ship enters New York City waters, it is struck and starts to sink. There is panic everywhere and Peter’s parents run to the captain’s quarters, where there is a large model of the ship in a glass vitrine on a stand. I believe the model was about twelve feet long and was called ‘City of Justice’. They break the glass and take out the model ship. They take the top off and place baby Peter into the ship and carefully lower him down and set him adrift in the harbour. As the ship goes under, only Peter in the model ship, is left floating. The inhabitation of the double creating buoyancy within the real waters of life.

Fig. 7.2: Farewell to the meadow (Min 9:00).

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Scene V: Farewell to the Meadow (Minute 9:00-10:13) ‘Every epoch is a sphinx which plunges into the abyss as soon as its riddle is solved.’ Heinrich Heine (1987)

This is one of the most stunning scenes I have ever witnessed. Waking within a new horizon, we return to bid farewell to the meadow and kiss the sheep goodbye. The emotive precision and ineffable beauty of this moment is impossible to forget. Perfectly placed, it is the hinge of the film, expressing a hinge in human history. It captures the emotive reciprocities between our geographies and our lives and evokes a longing for the silent transferences of mutual telling, immersed within the essential telling of nature itself. 130 |

Experiences do not stop at the border of our senses. The porosity of being offers no such shelter, our literate geographies contain all of the enigmas, traps, and paradoxes of language, but – and this is a big but – space speaks in silence. How can these geographies be literate, when space speaks in silence? How do we speak of space, when space speaks silence? How do we author silence? Could it be that space contains a silence that speaks to a silence deep within us and that, in this communication, we find shelter and sanctuary, find ourselves at home in the world? Act II The City (Minute 10:14-17:24) Scene I State Changes II: Ice Floats (Minute 10:14-10:34) ‘Man should take his place among the lens’ Heraclitus

Act II ‘The City’ opens with an echo of the first boat we saw moving slowly (Act I scene II ‘state changes’). This ship is moving fast, the river is now filled with sheets of ice. This state change is not toward evaporation but toward ice, toward frozen time. Ice floats, it is water held up by water, that fact contains a remarkable enigma. Water is one of the very few substances on earth that expands when it freezes. This expansion has been the essential factor in the creation of the earth’s geography, as freezing and melting moves the earth upward and down, great upheavals, splits, cracks, and pushes, forming highs and lows along the Earth’s surface. The floating sheets of ice in this scene prefigure the state-changes to come, the new vertical geography of the city. Multiple plates reconstitute many durations, delays, and extensions of time. Montage restores a new stillness within a new structure: the film double. The camera establishes

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a filter: a blanket absorbing light from the world, projecting duration to the screen. Add to this the singular sheets, plates, each reflecting its own moment of extraction, a storm, pushing and pulling duration, and then the story. Particles of memory are broken free. They float off, inversely reducing external time. The world is inverted: a negative. Scene II The New Way (Minute 10:34-11:23) By 1904, the vertical rise of the towers created a density of population that – moving horizontally – required underground expansion. This is a first in human history. The proximity and thickness of frenetic movements on the ground between the towers created a viscosity of movement that made it more efficient to construct passage within the viscosity of earth itself. With the ‘New Way’, we crossed a certain kind of border. A few years ago, my dear friend, Remo Guidieri, the anthropologist, did a series of talks called ‘Subterranean’. He was speaking about the cave drawings of 35 to 40 thousand years ago. At some point he asked the simple and difficult question, WHY? ‘Why did they go down into the caves, to draw?’ He said, ‘It is not enough to say: they were running from the animals.’ Remo started talking about the darkened spaces in the caves and the darkened spaces of consciousness, and about an equalization of pressures between the two spaces. He said that, perhaps in this equalization, drawing popped up, crossed over, from the interior spaces of the mind to the interior spaces of the caves. These marks are marks, but are also something else, something excess, something more. A drawing can be OF something but it always IS something. At some point, he stopped and said: ‘You know, often the story is that we transitioned from “Homo Faber” to “Homo Sapiens” and then we started to draw. There is another possibility. Perhaps, we found drawing down in the caves and that is what caused us to become Homo Sapiens. Perhaps the transition itself was set in motion through drawing.’ Scene III Reproduction: Charles Darwin and Walter Benjamin (Minute 11:24-12:33) An eclipse, playing, dancing with snow, with water, with flags, fires, rising, collapses, bobbing hats, weaving streets, bubbling towers, scaffoldings, port holes, rising and falling at the same time, eyes and new horizons, density density: more more more. By 1839 – the year Louis Daguerre presented the first Daguerreotype –, the population of New York City was around 312000, the largest city in the United States by three times (Allen 1995, 910-914). In this same year, the population

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of the planet was estimated to have reached around 1,000,000,000 people. In the 60 years between photography and film, New York’s population swelled, multiplying by ten times to over 3 million people (Allen 1995, 910-914); today, the planet holds 7.3 billion people (United States Census Bureau, 19 November 2015). In the 176 years since photography emerged, the population of the planet has grown by more than seven times. Through all the state changes and ‘new ways’ of moving, of thinking, experiencing, and being, the city, film, and humanity have all grown up together. This is not a simple matter of cause and effect, but perhaps it expresses our deep will to reproduce (and by reproduce I mean both biological reproduction and reproduction: drawings, images, language, representation, including mechanical reproduction – photography, film, digital reproduction: a thousand selves doubled and discharged). Here, we can place Charles Darwin and Walter Benjamin in juxtaposition, On the Origin of Species and ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ moving through each other. The city, humanity, and film spiraling between generations, expressing the same will, to recreate and to reproduce, to double ourselves into the world in unstoppable geometric progression. Scene IV Zoetrope City: Elisha Otis and Auguste and Louis Lumière (Minute 12:34-16:25) By minute 12:34, the constructed forest of the city rises into a gigantic mountain range. Through a network of ropes, pulleys, and scaffolds, these mountains are scaled and built at the same time. Climbing, swinging, repelling the vertical windowed cliffs, and there perched atop a scaffold, a film camera capturing this new geography, like Muybridge in the Grand Canyon. These shots are breathtaking. Central to this new geography is the elevator; in 1859, the year construction began on Central Park, the Cooper Union opened its doors. At that time, Cooper’s eight-storey Foundation Building was the tallest building in New York City. It contained an elevator shaft that had waited four years until Elisha Otis invented the ‘safety elevator’, which removed the vertical barrier of walking above eight stories and the city exploded upwards, creating an entirely new geography of human habitation. Beginning at minute 14:20 is a shot that weaves together Elisha Otis and the Lumière brothers and speaks to every element of the story of Gotham. A film camera is placed in an outdoor elevator at the top of a tower, looking inward toward the tower, its frame perfectly aligned with a window frame. The camera captures itself in the picture-plane mirror of the window. As the elevator begins a rapid descent, the motion of the elevator and the motion of

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the film frames align, capturing the blinking, still images contained in each window. Window by window, frame by frame, the long rapid descent reveals just how far we have risen. The vertical movement ultimately turns, becoming the horizontal movement on train tracks, entering a bridge, crossing over the river and delivering us into night. This shot exists between architecture and film, between the window frames and the film frames, between the inventions of the elevator, the train, and the film camera that, together, deliver us into a new darkness and a new light. This scene invokes the astonishing perception of the entire city as a zoetrope, block by block, blinking stillness into motion. The levitating zoetrope geography of the city constructs a dynamic between life and the still life that evokes the origins of animation: anima, zoë, life. Scene V Farewell to Night: Thomas Edison in the Caves (Minute 16:26-17:24) Following the astonishing sequence of a New Zoetrope City constructed between film and the elevator, we find ourselves plunged into night, but a new night: Edison’s night, which contains the speed of light. We begin to ask: What is the speed of a shadow? What does the light in this night project? Does it contain hints of our becoming, our transformations, hints of what the buglers may have been announcing? To approach this riddle of our forward shadows, we first have to go back, back to the meadow. We see sheep in a meadow and we ask, ‘Where are we?’ Remo Guidieri asked why we went down into the caves to draw and he spoke of an equalization of pressure in the caves, leading to the emergence of drawing, setting into motion an evolutionary transformation. Here, in this ‘inside-out’ constructed meadow, what we see are not sheep, we see a film of sheep. They are in a meadow, but we are not. We are in a film, through countless state changes over a millennium, we have gathered together in the city, within this density, we have found an infinite mirror of ‘new ways’, rising up, digging in, and bridging over, within these new views, new horizons film has emerged. We have gone down into the darkened spaces of film and, within these spaces, an equalization of pressures has emerged, a new night that may be setting in motion our next becoming. Perhaps entering this new zoetrope city has set in motion our next evolution. Perhaps this is what the bugles announce as the shepherd bids farewell to the meadow. These evolutionary translations of cosmic and primordial form into human craft, human being are at the heart of Bill Morrison’s Gotham: the metropolis imagines itself out of the human, and the human bears, is born of, and borne by the city.

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Act III Ghosts (Minute 17:25- 25:00) A ghost by definition inhabits two worlds. It must be and remain from the beyond while becoming present within the sphere of life. Like an eclipse, the presence of one sphere takes the form of a shadow within another sphere. The promise of this double condition of an eclipse lies in the capacity to make the ineffable present, to manifest the shadow of one world into another world.

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It has given me great joy to write on my dear friend Bill Morrison’s Gotham, where the past and future are made present, where change is timeless. I can almost remember the next time we will return to our cave (McSorley’s Old Ale House, established 1854, before Sheep’s Meadow, The Cooper Union, and the Eiffel Tower) to sit together, amongst the ghosts of this, our great city, and search for water, remember the towers, and wait for those two black holes to collide. * This text is dedicated to the memory of Barbara Shaum, one of the great citizens of New York City, who cut leather sheets for 60 years, giving us a place to walk.

WORKS CITED Allen, Jane. ‘Population’. The Encyclopedia of New York City. Ed. Kenneth T. Jackson. New York: New-York Historical Society; New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 1995. 910-914. Burroughs, William. The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. 1st German ed. Bonn, West Germany: Expanded Media Editions, 1984. Hacket, Jennifer. ‘Flickering Quasar May Hold Black Holes on a Collision Course.’ Scientific American, 22 September 2015. https://www.scientificamerican.com/ article/flickering-quasar-may-hold-black-holes-on-a-collision-course/. Accessed: 20 November 2015. Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. ‘Darker With the Day.’ No more shall we part. Mute Song, Bug Music Ltd, 2001. CD. Guidieri, Remo. ‘Subterranean.’ Part of a series of lectures given at the Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture at Cooper Union in 2007. Halperin, Mark. Winter’s Tale. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1983.

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Heine, Heinrich. The Prose Writings of Heinrich Heine. Ed. Havelock Ellis. London: Walter Scott, 1887. ‘U.S. and World Population Clock.’ United States Census Bureau. https://www.census. gov/popclock/. Accessed: 19 November 2015.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR David Gersten is an architect, artist, writer, and internationally recognized educator based in New York City. He has been a Professor in The Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture of The Cooper Union, since 1991, where he has served as the Associate Dean under Dean John Hejduk and the Acting Dean of the School of Architecture. Gersten is the founding director of Arts Letters and Numbers, a nonprofit arts and education organization dedicated to creating new structures and spaces for creative exchange across a wide range of disciplines including: architecture, visual arts, theatre arts, film, music, humanities, sciences, and social sciences. He has lectured and has been a visiting professor at numerous universities and cultural institutions throughout the world. Gersten’s works include: drawings, stories, essays, buildings, films, performances, and constructions. His works have appeared in numerous international exhibitions and performance spaces and are held in the collection of the Canadian Center for Architecture, the New York City Public Library’s print collection, and many private collections. He has published extensively in national and international publications on diverse areas of research, including the spaces and structures of education; emergent disciplinary geographies; the financial markets and collective judgment; nuclear weapons and debt; global resource distribution; ethics and technology; the poetic / material imagination; social justice and the linkages between embodied experience, memory, perception, language, and space. Gersten is a graduate of The Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture of The Cooper Union. He has also pursued studies in phenomenology at the New School for Social Research as well as Islamic Studies at the Jewish Theological Seminary.

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CHAPTER 8

Outerborough Early Cinema Revisited Jan-Christopher Horak

Herzogenrath, Bernd (ed.), The Films of Bill Morrison. Aesthetics of the Archive. Amsterdam University Press, 2018 DOI 10.5117/9789089649966/CH08

ABSTRACT Morrison is an archaeologist of cinema. His Outerborough references not only the earliest years of cinema history but also perceptional mechanisms. Reworking a Biograph film from 1899, Morrison transforms the film document into a structuralist meditation on cinematic space that references American avant-garde films of the 1970s. Morrison also points to the fact that the birth of cinema coincides with the development of modern modes of transportation, both technologies radically altering human perception of space and time. Suddenly, the world becomes much smaller. Yet, through early cinema and its mechanisms of perception, which emphasized visual pleasure and spectacle, audiences were able to confront their fears of a constantly changing environment and leave the cinema unharmed. k e y wo r ds

American Mutoscope and Biograph Company, avant-garde, early cinema, stereo vision

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The invention of cinema coincides with the development of mass transportation and urbanization. In major cities like New York, Paris, and London, the acceleration of time manifests itself in a compacting of space in which humans, buildings, and transportation systems tumble over one another. The resulting fragmentation of vision catalyzes a change in perception, which is not only articulated through Modernist art, but also in moments of early cinema. Urbanization and the speed of modern transportation, however, also generate anxiety in individuals, afraid of losing control of their environment. Both the apparatus of cinema and mass transport expand the experience of space and time, allowing the world to appear much smaller, but also lead to a drastic increase in perceptual data processed by individuals. Through early cinema, which focusses on visual attractions and spectacle, audiences could safely confront their anxieties about the dangers of modern life and then exit the cinema renewed. In Outerborough (2005), an eight-and-a-half minute reworking of New York to Brooklyn Across Brooklyn Bridge, an 1899 film produced by the American Mutoscope and Biograph Company, Bill Morrison meditates on the interrelationship between early cinema and avant-garde cinema, defining their commonality in the perception of movement through space and, simultaneously, the construction of cinematic space. Originally conceived of as silent, Morrison asked Todd Reynolds to compose a modern musical score for a live performance, benefitting the Filmmaker’s Coop in New York in September 2005, leading to the creation of a sound version, as well as the original silent version (Morrison 2015, personal email).1 Morrison converted a film document of a subway journey across Brooklyn Bridge into a non-narrative structuralist meditation on cinematic space and time that references American avant-garde films of the 1970s, as well as early cinema’s penchant for reproducing views from trains and other forms of modern transportation. Furthermore, the film is an act of Duchampian appropriation, taking a found object and transforming it into art. In doing so, Morrison theorizes that, far from being polar opposites as understood by traditional film histories, early cinema and avant-garde cinema should be seen on a continuum (albeit broken) of cinemas primarily interested in visual perception. The addition of Reynolds’ music, interestingly, not only undergirds the formal analysis of space and perception, but also comments on the psychosociology of the original audience, expressing its anxieties about the speed of modern transportation and modernity. In this essay, then, I would like to unpack the relationship between early cinema and avant-garde film, culminating in an analysis of Bill Morrison’s Outerborough as a cinematic meditation on that same relationship. I will begin with an analysis of the original American Biograph film, then discuss

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the ways in which early cinema presages many of the formal strategies of the avant-garde and its concerns with modernity. Then, I will undertake a formal analysis of Morrison’s Outerborough, which constructs its own film-historical narrative of urban space, speed, and human perception; its kinetic power and theoretical depth make it good art. Bill Morrison used a print from the British Film Institute Collection (BFI), Across Brooklyn Bridge,2 which was possibly shot by Billy Bitzer on a subway train from New York to Brooklyn via the Brooklyn Bridge in the first week of March 1899, although the cameraman is uncredited and there is no record of who worked that day. Preserved on 35mm from a 68mm negative by the BFI, Morrison saw the film at the Orphan Film Symposium in 2004, where he screened two of his own films.3 Morrison, who has made a career of making found-footage films, has stated that this is the oldest film he ever worked with (Morrison 2013). The Biograph Brooklyn Bridge film was, at the time of its release, not only extremely successful, but also considered ‘the longest motion picture ever taken’ (Niver and Bergston 1971, 39). A review in the St. Louis Dispatch in September 1899, when the film played at the local Hopkins Theatre listed the film at a length of 780 ft or 5400 frames, which was projected at 32 fps for a running time of just under three minutes. Virtually all the New York newspapers commented favorably on the film when it premiered, many noting that the film’s speed and length was confounding. One paper wrote: ‘The girders go whizzing by with extreme rapidity […] After spinning through the archway at almost dizzying speed. The car suddenly rushed out into the open space on the Brooklyn side.’ The Philadelphia Inquirer noted: ‘This picture bewildered the spectators last week, for people who have crossed the bridge one hundred times have never realized the immensity of the structure.’ (Niver and Bergston 1971, 42) Indeed, the reviews indicate to what degree both the technology of the camera and that of modern transportation (here manifested in the bridge’s steel structure and the electric trolley car) were celebrated, but also seen as somewhat intimidating. Most revealingly, both reviewers compared the new cinematic vision to the perceptual experience of the real bridge. Ironically, Biograph’s film was a copycat version of a Thomas Edison film, except that it was shot on a train from Brooklyn to New York. Panoramic View of Brooklyn Bridge (Edison No. 649, February 1899) was completed in January by J. Stuart Blackton and Albert E. Smith and was apparently simultaneously distributed by Edison and Vitagraph. That film places its camera on the front of a train that traverses the entire distance from the Brooklyn railroad yard to its endpoint at City Hall Station in Manhattan. The opposite journey, but exact same point of view as the Biograph film.4 The extant copy of the Biograph New York to Brooklyn Across the Brooklyn

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Bridge begins literally out of darkness as the train moves towards the terminal’s exit and into the light, travelling down an incline and a curve to approach the bridge. The camera is mounted on the front of the trolley car in such a way that its point of view is exactly parallel to the tracks, capturing other trolleys, cars, pedestrians, billboard advertising, and industrial landscapes on either side. Once the camera enters the bridge’s iron-truss structure, the viewer experiences a form of tunnel vision as the bridge’s iron girders vastly exaggerate the speed of the train. The surviving print still shows signs of wear, including discolorations in the emulsion, white spots where the emulsion has flaked off, splice lines, jump cuts, badly timed frames, and surface scratches, but the quality of the Biograph print is far superior in contrast and density to the surviving Edison print, which may be why Morrison chose to use the Biograph.5 Some imperfections were ameliorated through the preservation process, but it is Morrison’s method to keep the patina on the historical footage he integrates into his art projects, so no other digital cleanup was attempted. Bill Morrison transformed a document of early cinema into a modern new work that theorizes its own preexistence. Over the last 35 years, early cinema has been subject to an intense critical reevaluation. Defined as the period between its invention in 1895 and its industrial rationalization in the late 1910s, early cinema had previously been marked as primitive, no more than an incomplete and technically unsophisticated precursor to classical narrative forms. All that began to change after the FIAF-Brighton conference in June 1978, which reevaluated the period 1900 to 1906, when cinema transitioned from essentially one-shot films to films with multiple shots and scenes (see Horak 1985). Several representatives of the ‘new film historicism’, including Tom Gunning, Charles Musser, André Gaudreault, and others publically presented their research theses. In order to decipher early cinema’s semantic and syntactic construction and understand its historical roots, they had to relinquish classical film theory’s central premise that the medium achieved its inherent aesthetic purpose as an art form when it developed realistic narrative forms through mise-enscène and montage. Gunning et al. understood that early cinema’s reference frame was not teleologically tied to classical Hollywood narrative (Allen and Gomery 1985, 67-70), but rather to forms of viewing that had been forgotten by 20th century mass culture, namely the laterna magica, the camera obscura, and panoramas, as well as other sundry optical toys, such as the praxinoscope. Their play with various types of vision was a first indication of the common bonds between ‘pre-cinema’, early cinema, and the avantgarde. Indeed, the almost anarchic joy in experimentation exhibited by early cinema was not directed towards establishing classical narrative forms. Rather, the many technical, formal, and social changes experienced by early

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cinema led to numerous detours, one way streets and dead ends, culminating in today’s variety of styles and genres, including Hollywood classical narrative and avant-garde film. As soon as early cinema is no longer perceived as primitive folk culture, but rather as an experimental medium exploring theoretical concerns of nineteenth-century projection mechanisms, its nearness to avant-garde cinema of the 1920s and onwards becomes apparent. Tom Gunning remarks on the congruence in his 1979 essay, ‘An Unseen Energy Swallows Space’, refining his ideas in his seminal work, ‘The Cinema of Attractions’.6 Gunning notes that the relationship between early cinema and the American avant-garde of the 1950s and 1960s is pseudomorphological; in other words, surface level similarities indicate a continuum, when none existed. Gunning admits: ‘My conscience as a film historian finds it necessary to stress that we are dealing here not with a continuous tradition but with a relation traced over an abyss.’ (Fell 1983, 355) However, in discussing the avant-garde’s use of formal devices of early cinema or in avant-garde filmmakers such as Michael Snow, Ken Jacobs, and Ernie Gehr quoting of early films, Gunning ultimately builds a theoretical bridge over that abyss. In 1992, Bart Testa published his monograph Back and Forth: Early Cinema and the Avant-garde about the formal and structural relationship between early cinema and the film avant-garde of the late 20th century. Testa demonstrates that filmmakers such as Ken Jacobs, Hollis Frampton, and Ernie Gehr searched for aesthetic precedents for structuralist and postmodern cinema and found them in early cinema (1992).7 Films, like Tom, Tom the Piper’s Son (1969) and Eureka (1974), which took early cinema footage and reframed, manipulated, and explored it in order to develop a new aesthetic, simultaneously began constructing a new view of film history, which deviated from what Testa called the ‘unthought theory of art’. In terms of conditions of reception, we can also theorize a closeness between early cinema and the avant-garde. First, early cinema demanded an active viewer, since the elliptical nature of the presentation forced the audience to bring non-filmic knowledge to the moment of reception, in order to decode the image. Such a conscious mode of reception places early cinema much closer to the avant-garde than to classical Hollywood narrative, whose diegesis is self-contained for a passive viewer. The reviews of Across Brooklyn Bridge clearly indicate the active participation of viewers, who obviously compared the film image to their own experience of the pre-filmic object and noted its visual quality as an image and viewing experience. The open-endedness of early cinema’s construction, beginning with the production and exhibition, as well as its reception, certainly drew the Surrealists to early cinema in the 1920s, as well as later film avant-gardists. Indeed, we should probably view the

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relationship between early cinema and the later film avant-garde as an ‘intertextual relationship’ (Stoneman 1981, 46). One of early cinema’s central fascinations is with movement and speed, a fascination it shares with 1970s structuralist cinema. The film apparatus, as early cinema practitioners immediately realized, radically transformed human perception of space and time. This process of accelerated visual perception had begun in the nineteenth century with the invention of the railroad and continued with the development of the automobile. New modes of transportation allowed for the traversing of heretofore unimaginable distances, travelers speeding through space, but remaining static in their carriages. They viewed the passing landscape without being a part of it, movement and stasis, as in cinema. Lynn Kirby analyses the relationship between the cinema and the railroad as follows: 142 |

What mattered most in early train films was the shock effect in and of itself, the thrill of instability, which addressed a new subject cut loose from its moorings in traditional culture and thus potentially open to anything. Many early films exploited the train image for its shock potential, often at the expense of narrative coherence. (Kirby 1997, 8) Moving images taken from trains and other vehicles in motion abounded in early cinema, culminating in the popular Hale’s Tours, which sought to reproduce the experience of riding in a train. Hale’s Tours were introduced at the World Fair in St. Louis in 1904 (Fielding 1983, 121) and remained popular after their commercial introduction in 1905, but the fad was over by 1906 (Fielding 1983, 129). Hale’s Tours films, like From Omaha to Council Bluffs (1906) or From Leadville to Aspen (1906) shared with the avant-garde their documentation of movement through geographic space with no other purpose than to capture the movement itself. Audiences viewed the passing landscape serendipitously, coming and going freely, focussing on the details within the image, each according to its own interests. In this way, early films photographed by mounting a camera on a train allowed the audience to work through anxieties they may have had concerning modern transportation and accelerated travel. However, the documentation of speed and its technology is but one concern of early cinema, the perception of space in cinema being another, as demonstrated by an early film, taken from a moving train: Interior New York Subway (Biograph 1905). The film documents a stretch of the New York subway along the 14th Street crosstown local. This film can be read at a variety of levels. At the indexical level, the film documents a five-minute ride of a subway with the camera mounted on the front of one train while photographing another train immediately ahead of it. However, at the level of image perception, the forward

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movement of the train itself becomes the most prominent feature. Ironically, motion here has the opposite effect of speed, because the distance between camera and lead train never alters. It is an image of movement without movement. As Gunning notes, contemporary reception of such train films was by no means naïve, reviewers rather commented on the camera technology and the conscious construction of images (1994, 197). However, Interior New York Subway demands that viewers not only constantly reorient themselves in cinematic space, but also makes its own technology of reproduction visible when a train parallel to the lead train comes into view – its lights shining on the first train, so it can be filmed in the tunnel. I have gone far afield overall and specifically in my discussion of Interior New York Subway in hopes of preparing the groundwork for my reading of Bill Morrison’s Outerborough. In the spirit of Testa’s pedagogical cinema, I propose to structure my reading as a series of theses and countertheses, based on a formalist analysis of what is visible within the image, but augmented by historical knowledge of the medium itself. By developing and overturning arguments as the work unfolds, I, as the viewer, actively participate in a process of historical learning, a methodology that seems productive for the reading of many avant-garde films.8 I theorize that the artist, Bill Morrison, constructs, in collaboration with his composer, Todd Reynolds, an argument concerning the historical evolution of film perception, the present reviewing the past, the ancient contrasting the modern. Bill Morrison’s Outerborough depicts not just one view of the Brooklyn Bridge as seen in 1899, but two, side by side. Projected in the dark, the two images present a stereo view, referencing a whole genre of nineteenth-century photography and its technology. The concept of stereo photography had been around since 1833, but it was Queen Victoria who popularized the medium, when she enthusiastically acquired a Brewster Stereoscope (invented in 1849) at the Crystal Palace exhibition of the London World’s Fair in 1851. Between 1850 and 1930, photographers produced literally millions of stereo photographs, which today are exhibited in museums without a viewer: two seemingly identical images in side-by-side frames. The two frames on screen, however, also point to the fact that a technological apparatus (viewer) is necessary to make the 3-D image visible to human perception. However, we quickly realize that this is not a stereo film, despite the initial similarity of the two images, as they seemingly appear out of the darkness of the subway station, because the two cameras move in opposite directions. And yet, Outerborough continues to reference stereo photography, especially in the truss footage inside the bridge because, in those moments, the image on both sides is formally identical (as in stereo photographs), except for the movement.

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Fig. 8.1: Faux stereographic view abstracted.

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We can next hypothesize that the right image has been produced by filming the view from the trains back end. This theory seems to hold up in the first viewing of the original document, since the distance from the bridge to the respective stations on both sides is virtually identical, so the girded bridge footage starts and ends almost at the same time on both the left and right screen, as does the entry/departure that begins and ends the original film. Such a thesis may, in fact, stand for several viewings, because we initially engage in reading the left image or the right, focussing on decoding the indexical content. Thus, as the train pulls out of the Manhattan station, we notice the pedestrians and transportation workers at the side of the track, looking at the train, the train platform with waiting commuters, street lamps, the trolley that is moving along the bridge at a slower pace, the trucks carrying freight on the bridge’s roadway, and, once more on the Brooklyn side, more pedestrians, and billboards for Quaker Oats and Alcock’s Plasters. Before the train enters the Brooklyn station, we see a stationmaster peering from his wooden booth, while other rail workers watch it enter into the darkness of the station. Indeed, if we freeze the frame at various points on both sides of the bridge, we can see that the film’s production is intensely observed by rail workers and pedestrians. By the second or third take of the film, the viewer probably notices that the billboards on the right frame are backwards, so we can hypothesize and confirm that the original film has merely been flipped and is running backwards at the same time as it runs forward on the left frame. Perceptually, then, it seems as if the left frame runs from Manhattan to Brooklyn, as does the Biograph original, while the right runs from Brooklyn to New York, the latter replicating the Edison film. Is Morrison consciously referencing both historical films? Possibly yes, since he viewed both (Morrison 2015, personal email). If the historical recipient experienced disorientation when the film was projected supposedly at 32 fps, Morrison’s first take clocks in at 1:35 minutes

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or 57 fps, almost twice the original projection speed. Reynolds dissonant, atonal music in the first take consists of violins, cellos, and percussion, with the percussion creating a steady beat, while the strings slide downwards, underscoring both the sense of movement and technology at work. The images themselves are relatively high contrast, so that the Brooklyn Bridge’s towers appear almost ghostly, before materializing in the background, literally out of the emulsion. In each succeeding repetition, the journey traversing the bridge takes less time: T1 (1:35”), T2 (44”), T3 (22”), T4 (11”), T5 (6”), T6 (6”), T7 (3”), etc. Morrison accomplishes the acceleration through a mixture of increasing the frame-per-second rate, as well as removing frames. When the repetition slips below two seconds, the bridge truss sequence in particular, loses all sense of forward movement, and, as a result, all sense of a 3-D space, flattening the image. The nearly identical images on both sides feature a vanishing point at the exact center of a frame, consisting of tracks and trestle. That briefly stable image replicates once again that of a stereoscopic viewer and, in fact, resembles the viewing mechanism itself. Moreover, the rapidity of images begins to establish a visual rhythm of light and dark forms, almost pulsating, which matches the rhythm of the percussion. More importantly, as the sequence accelerates, the film loses its iconic signification, details lose their contours, and, in image, transitions to one of pure abstract form. In doing so, the film fulfills a pedagogical function as well as an aesthetic one by making the audience conscious of its own position as a viewing subject, as do most avant-garde films. Through the organization of temporal and spatial coordinates, the film achieves a distancing effect, similar to the obsessive repetitions in Ken Jacobs’s Tom, Tom, the Piper’s Son or Bill Brand’s Demolition of a Wall (1974), the latter a reworking of August Lumière’s Démolition d’un mur (1896). Meanwhile, Reynolds’s aggressive cellos in counterpoint to the now frantic percussion underscores the anxiety that contemporary viewers may have felt, once their ability to read signs indexically had been eliminated, the descending violins expressing almost a sense of desperation. These fast-motion images continue until at least halfway through Outerborough, during which individual images seem to pop out from the mass, a commuter on the platform, a sign, a truss, or the bridge tower moving forward and backward in a split second. At the same time, Morrison begins to optically print images over images, so that the train is running forward and backwards on both frames at the same time. He also varies the lengths of the takes, so that images are overlaid at contrasting speeds, creating very intense and dense multiple exposures, which ironically begin to appear more concrete as the repetitions begin to lengthen again and we again get a sense of forward and backward movement. At this point, it is no longer possible to distinguish a beginning or an endpoint, the images moving too rapidly and overlapping

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Fig. 8.2: Multiplicity of views within the frame.

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at too many points. Here, the sense of movement through modern transportation is heightened to an abstract and purely kinetic experience, simultaneously exciting and distancing the audience. Especially the shots in the bridge truss feature abstract patterns from the multiple exposures of the trains flying through the frame, images not uncommon in early cinemae.g. William Paul had under-cranked his camera as early as 1899, in order to create fast motion effects for On a Runaway Motor Car Through Piccadilly Circus9. Similarly, Henri Chomette’s avant-garde film, Jeux des reflets et de la vitesse (1925), shot film footage from a Paris Metro train, which, through fast motion and multiple exposures, creates a visual orgy of speed and motion. In the film’s last three minutes, the film begins to slow down again to its original speed, while the multiple exposures continue, establishing a different rhythm pattern, as Morrison layers more and more images over one another, but focussing only on the truss section of the bridge. Again, we get a stereo view, but abstract, like a moving mandala, producing an almost dreamlike subjectivity, as the music continues to beat out a hypnotic rhythm, and the mind begins to wander. Soon, the music begins to slow down into a deliberate rhythmic pattern, while the strings return to the long, slow sliding scales of the opening, relieving the former anxiety with a steady down beat. In the final 30 seconds, we can again read the images indexically from the Manhattan and Brooklyn sides of the subway line, as the image freezes on its first shot of the proscenium arch, framing the bridge tower, while the right image places a ghost of the tower in the same spot, framed by the truss, then fades to black, the dreamlike subjectivity evolving to quiet contemplation. Reading Bill Morrison’s Outerborough is thus an active process for viewers, animating them to set up a series of hypotheses about what they are seeing. By repeatedly reworking a popular film from over 100 years ago that documented nothing more than a train ride on a bridge, Morrison comments both on the

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cinema’s ability to alter the perception of space and time, but also on how contemporary audiences experienced depictions of modern transportation, recreating moments of anxiety before leaving the cinema renewed.

NOTES 1

Reynolds, a longtime collaborator of Bill Morrison’s, is heard on the Light is Calling soundtrack, and toured the U.K. with Bill in Michael Gordon’s band. Outerborough now exists in a 35mm silent cinemascope film and a digital sound version with Reynolds’s track.

2

The original Biograph Bulletins simply list the title as the Biograph Brooklyn Bridge film, since most films at that time did not have title cards yet. It is listed in IMDb as Across Brooklyn Bridge, which includes, as alternate titles: New York to Brooklyn Across Brooklyn Bridge, New York to Brooklyn, Taken from Car Running Across Bridge, and New York to Brooklyn Over Brooklyn Bridge (IMDb, 20 June 2015). See also Niver and Bergsten 1971, 39-42.

3

‘On Location: Place and Region in Forgotten Films’, the 4th Orphan Film Symposium was held at the University of South Carolina, 24-27 March 2004. Nico de Klerk (Nederlands Filmmuseum, now EYE Institute) screened 24 Biograph films from the period 1896-1901 in a program called ‘Where to Place the Camera?’

4

It was also released under the titles, Brooklyn to New York via the Brooklyn Bridge and From Brooklyn to New York over the Bridge, proving to be so popular that Edison remade his own film in September 1899 as New Brooklyn to New York via Brooklyn Bridge No. 2 (Edison No. 719), the only surviving version. Charles Musser speculates whether the original negative was damaged or the subject was so popular that the negative wore out, or simply produced by Edison staff in order to avoid paying their licensee, Blackton and Smith royalties. See Charles Musser 1997, 482-3, 524.

5

Edison print available on YouTube, 25 February 2009. Accessed: 30 June 2015.

6

Compare Gunning 1983; see also Gunning 1990.

7

‘It is within the moment of structural film that Frampton’s conception of a metahistory of film takes the form of an inevitable embarkation toward origins, steering back into the mysterious waters of the so-called primitive.’ (Testa 1992, 9).

8

In my Jonas Mekas article, I present a different entry into avant-garde cinema, arguing for a more subjective and emotional response (through the process of reverie and identification). ‘Regarding Mekas’ Horak 2010.

9

(Chanan 1980, 286).

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WORKS CITED Allen, Robert C. and Douglas Gomery. Film History: Theory and Practice. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1985. Chanan, Michael. The Dream that Kicks: The Pre-History and Early Years of Cinema in Britain. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980. Fell, John Lewis, ed. Film Before Griffith. Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1983. Fielding, Raymund. ‘Hale’s Tours: Ultrarealism in the Pre-1910 Motion Picture.’ Film Before Griffith. Ed. John L. Fell. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1983. 116-130. Gunning, Tom. ‘An Unseen Energy Swallows Space: The Space in Early Film and its Relation to American Avant-Garde Film.’ Film Before Griffith. Ed. John L. Fell. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1983. 355-366.

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Gunning, Tom. ‘The Cinema of Attractions: Early Film, its Spectator and the AvantGarde.’ Early Cinema. Space, Frame, Narrative. Ed. Thomas Elsaesser. London: British Film Institute, 1990. 56-62. Gunning, Tom. ‘The Whole Town’s Gawking: Early Cinema and the Visual Experience of Modernity’. Yale Journal of Criticism, Vol. 7, No. 2 (Fall 1994): 189-201. Horak, Jan-Christopher. ‘The Magic Lantern Moves: Early Cinema Reappraised.’ Film Reader, No. 6 (1985): 93-102. Horak, Jan-Christopher. ‘Avant-Garde Film and Audience Subjectivity.’ Millennium Film Journal, No. 53 (Fall/Winter 2010 / 2011): 52-66. IMDb. ‘Across Brooklyn Bridge (1899): Release Info.’ http://www.imdb.com/title/ tt0242250/. Accessed: 20 June 2015. Kirby, Lynn. Parallel Tracks: The Railroad and Silent Cinema. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1997. Morrison, Bill. Interview by Christian Lund, Art Gallery of South Australia. Youtube. Youtube, October 2013. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OFR5KASR3Kw. Accessed: 13 June 2015. Morrison, Bill. Personal Email. 29 June 2015. Musser, Charles. Edison Motion Pictures, 1890-1900: An Annotated Filmography. ­Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1997. Niver, Kemp and Bebe Bergsten. Biograph Bulletins. 1895-1908. Los Angeles: Locare Research Group, 1971. Stoneman, Rod. ‘Perspective Correction. Early Film to the Avant-Garde.’ Afterimage Nr. 8/9, Spring 1981. 50-63. Testa, Bart. Back and Forth. Early Cinema and the Avantgarde. Toronto: Art Gallery of Ontario, 1992.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR Jan-Christopher Horak is Director of UCLA Film & Television Archive and Professor for Critical Studies. He received his PhD from the Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität in Münster, Germany. His book publications include: Film and Photo in the 1920s (1979); The Dream Merchants: Making and Selling Films in Hollywood‘s Golden Age (1989); Lovers of Cinema. The First American Film Avant-Garde 1919-1945 (1995); and Saul Bass. Anato­ my of Film Design (2014). Named an Academy Scholar in 2006, he is also the recipient of the Katherine Singer Kovacs Essay Award (2007).

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CHAPTER 9

The Highwater Trilogy Thinking the Liquid – On the Ethics of Water and the Material Ecologies of Disaster and Ruination Yasmin Afshar

Herzogenrath, Bernd (ed.), The Films of Bill Morrison. Aesthetics of the Archive. Amsterdam University Press, 2018 DOI 10.5117/9789089649966/CH09

ABSTRACT Morrison’s 2006 film The Highwater Trilogy exposes the medium of film to and in its existential condition: the liquid. The exceptional states evoked by the forces of water on the image level, and the material decay of the emulsified celluloid filmstrip fuse the episodes in an at once disturbingly repelling and compelling way. In Morrison’s film, the liquid far exceeds a metaphorical meaning that addresses the fluidity of the moving image. As a dynamic assemblage, it invites a rethinking of conventional anthropocentric understandings of ecology as concerning merely the natural surroundings in which humans live. The natural and the social yet form complex networks, which not least redefines our perspective on human and nonhuman agency. k e y wo r ds

ecology, experimental film, film philosophy, wet ontology

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The Highwater Trilogy (2006) consists of monochrome found footage of three different liquid environments recorded in the 1920s. While the episodes relay the theme of man’s encounter with water – an uncontrollable force that, apart from its beauty, always bears the potential of posing a threat to humans and their dwellings, thus causing ecological disaster – this liquid theme also permeates the structural component of analogue filmmaking as the development of celluloid images demands a submergence in photochemical emulsion. After decades of storage in film archives, the film footage has started to chemically decompose, not only making the fragile materiality of the medium perceptible, but also stressing a conception of cinema as material process (Ivakhiv 2013, 33). In a media-philosophical sense, then, the film is an active component in reflecting on the philosophical implications of the physical and biological relations that are involved in its creation and production (Ivakhiv 2013, 33) and in philosophizing (Sinnerbrink 2014) on its status as an inherently wet medium. While the increasing ‘emergency state’ of the dying images throughout the film – as it literally ‘runs out of time’ in (digitized) time – poses a temporal paradox to the notion of cinema as time-based medium that captures and preserves the moment, the ephemerality of the footage and the corrosive process of materiality also appears as a ‘creative agent’ (Bennett 2010, 65). This double forming in which the medium reflects on its own temporal and transitory conditions allows for the documentary footage of waterscapes, including that of the 1927 Mississippi River flood, to open up an entirely new cine-philosophic perspective not only on the relation between man and water, and thus ideas of subjectivity and selfhood, but further on the film as leading a ‘life on its own’ which, due to its corrosive materiality, presents a visual memory of decay. The Highwater Trilogy demonstrates that liquid is not merely a metaphor for the fluidity of the moving image, rather, it also constitutes a dynamic material ecology of both ruination and rebuilding, of decomposition and rearrangement under, literally, ‘critical conditions’. In other words, the way Morrison’s film exposes its materiality and physicality, and the ways that liquidity is tied to the human existential condition as it is generally to life on our blue planet, demands a contest of persisting normative and anthropocentric concepts of environment and ecology, and their underlying strict divisions between the natural and the social, nature and culture (Bryant 2013). This ‘ethics of water’ might be a philosophical approach to thinking watery, a hydrophilosophy of the cinema of the Anthropocene.

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THINKING THE LIQUID In The Highwater Trilogy, the filmstrip’s chemical state mirrors the ‘chaotic but rhythmic turbulence of the material world’ (Steinberg and Peters 2015, 248), which is supported by David Lang’s soundtrack that rises in intensity concurrent with the level of material decay of the images. As the actual space of the filmstrip becomes the test site for experimentation with a ‘wet ontology’ (Steinberg and Peters 2015, 248) – a concept that comprehends the chaotic formations of matter –, thinking the liquid means to rethink both the material properties of water, as well as the manifold relationships that connect humans and human technologies to the ocean. The material formation of water by its generic multiplicity contests the idea of unified, Cartesian space that builds the foundation of popularized understandings of media as stable containers. A media-philosophical approach in turn foregrounds media’s intrinsic functional and operational principles as generative of thought. Media make philosophical concepts or propositions thinkable in medium intrinsic ways as their technologies and materialities can be regarded as ‘active agent[s] in the ontological or epistemological sense’ (Parikka 2015, 1). Film, then, is neither seen as ‘philosophy’s raw material, nor a source of its ornamentation’ (Mulhall quoted in Sinnerbrink 2014, 208) but as ‘[…] philosophical exercise[s], philosophy in action – film as philosophizing’ (Mulhall quoted in Sinnerbrink 2014, 208). To think the liquid far exceeds a representational level – rather, it describes Morrison’s film’s, and more generally cinema’s, situatedness, both in the reality of its (possibly) fragmented physical state as well as in its being a visual testimony of historical reality. Metaphorically, the flood, one of the trilogy’s major themes, suggests both the element of erasing existing orders, ways of living and forming reality, as well as offering the opportunity to establish new ones. For philosopher Hannah Arendt, the activity of thinking per se builds ‘the only reliable safety net’ (Berkowitz 2010, 5) in the human condition against the forces that threaten to pull us apart and deprive us of judgment. In a Kantian sense, facing the impotence against this existential burden may then lead to the realization of one’s unalterable state as a moral being. This cognitive movement is what, for Kant, marks the aesthetic category of the sublime, as not just aesthetically appealing from a distance and fearful in effect, but dynamic in its consequences (Kant 143ff.). High-water situations are episodes of liminality, framing liquidity as a violent force of dissolution, yet also as a chance for rethinking how relationships are shaped (Bryant 2013, 304), of which the latter is the (ethical) aim of ecological thought. As the following paper explains, the filmic treat on the physicality and aesthetics of the ocean in The Highwater Trilogy thus not just integrates chaos and crisis as vital aspects of any building process. In a

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post-human sense, Morrison’s film becomes a means of thinking about the way the liquid impacts traditional notions of human subjectivity and its predominance in shaping our perception of the world we live in. Humans appear as only one of many components next to other non-human agents within the ecological system we call ‘world’.

‘BEFORE I ENTER’: PASSAGE, POROSITY, DYNAMIC SPACE The first episode of the film consists of a slow succession of long shots of ocean waves pushing rhythmically against the banks, juxtaposed with a similarly rhythmic vocal from the soundtrack. The song – which is also entitled ‘Before I Enter’ and accompanies the entire film section – sketches the decelerated process of a speaker entering the home: 154 | Before I enter my house I touch the doorframe Before I enter my house I bow.1 In antiquity, the beginning of the house is defined by the sub-medium of the threshold as a holy sphere of limit (Seitter 2015, 23). This inbetweenness, rooted in a classical Aristotelian vision of the medium as metaxy (Seitter 2015, 20), opens up the possibility for drawing nondualistic relationships between inside and outside, nature and culture, water and land. The subject is involved in vital and haptic contact, fulfilling a set of (bodily) practices while approaching what is declared as ‘my house’. Throughout this episode, the camera changes its position in relation to the water, marking a defining practice; a defining practice is to approach a matter from various angles to filter and distract distinct features. The disequilibrating ups and downs (‘I step up high and then bow low’) are mirrored in the reverberations of the ocean waves on the image level (Fig. 9.1, above). Here, it is the subject that gains contours despite, or rather through the dissolving and decentring effects of what Steinberg and Peters call a ‘wet ontology’ (Steinberg and Peters 2015, 248), a model of being that affirms the chaotic qualities of the ocean: water presents an ever-changing, unfixed, and unstable condition, always on the brink of forming new shapes in unexpected ways, which inscribes a sublime effect of attraction and threat (Presto 2011, 576) into the images. Water points are never fixed, neither vertically, nor horizontally, but are continuously involved in processes of folding and submerging. These features qualify the ocean as a space of immanence and volume (Steinberg and Peters 2015, 255). The ocean is

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both, disruptive in that its ‘liquidity […] complicates control’ (Steinberg and Peters 2015, 253) and creative, allowing for continuous reformation as ‘[…] the chaotic movement and reformation of matter, […] is seen most clearly in the churnings of the ocean’ (Steinberg and Peters 2015, 255). Since all cellular life – including the human body – is dependent on water (Chen, McLeod, and Neimanis 2013), the encounter between man and water that ‘Before I Enter’ displays evokes the question of how this oceanic multiplicity (Serres 1995, 6) impacts conceptions of human and nonhuman agency. In short, how does the film let us rethink how we live and experience the world? ‘Before I Enter’ experiments with a stable ideal of a home and challenges a container-like design that refers to an Aristotelian physics of the house (Seitter 2015, 21). Lowering itself (‘Before I enter […] I crawl through a tunnel’), the subject submerges itself only to reemerge repeatedly with every line of the vocals, performing new actions. Contrary to this wavelike, unstable, yet also vital passage of constant renewal, the space of the home is conventionally seen as establishing a sense of order and belonging, of a fixed point in spatiotemporal orientation by which identity is shaped and remembered. Proposing a nondualistic vision of inside and outside this episode yet encourages the question of ‘how to build a new house’ (Arsic 2006, 130). The home envisioned here employs a type of spatial thinking: neither constituting a prisonlike setting, nor an entirely unstable house, but, instead, an elastic and porous fold that embodies a ‘space of pure relation. […] [A] space of verbs or motions in indeterminate form; the space of walking, waiting, leaving, making (love)’ (Arsic 2006, 134) – in short, of relational and interactive practices within a dynamic space. Before I enter my house I step up high and then bow low I pat my pockets for my keys I leave my shoes at the door I push aside the skin of the door I adjust my eyes to the dark I put the keys in a bowl I kiss my fingers and pat the scroll I have no key I have no door I step up While the previous section suggests that the subject enters the house, the last three lines indicate the contrary through the absence of a key. As media theorist Walter Seitter puts it, the key forms an a priori – it is an element of

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intelligent knowledge for decisions and selections – it knows its place (Seitter 2015, 23). The absence of a key – thus the impossibility to enter – puts the subject into the threshold condition of being neither inside, nor outside and demands an ongoing referential process of actively engaging with the environment. In this way, the subject’s wavelike activities are not a preparation for an ‘interior’ life – subjective experience is the where and how its life unfolds. The next stanza of the lyrics continues this notion of an experimental project of housing or making space inhabitable:

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Before I enter my house I climb a ladder I get down on my knees and crawl I crouch down I punch in a code on a keypad I fix my face I lift the flap of wool I lift the flap of sheep skin I slide a screen to the side I step around a wall I push aside the bamboo and palm I wipe my feet I take off my shoes I check the fire As Deleuze and Guattari understand subjectification processes as constituted by both de- and re-territorializing processes, in this dynamics of de- and re-territorialization (Deleuze and Guattari 2005, 327) that follows an oceanic logic, the subject inhabits a condition of permanently practising, in which reorganization and rebuilding become constitutive features: ‘To the extent that this process affects the builder, building becomes the process of experimentation with one’s own self. To build is thus to think in a new way […]’ (Arsic 2006, 134). The liquid, rather than an environment of instability and insecurity, forms a dynamic space of reorganization that retains an element of vulnerability (‘I have no door’ – reading this line not as an expression of the lack of access to somewhere, but as the subject itself missing the quality of ‘having a door’ and thus a fixed limitation between the in- and outside world). This porosity becomes readable in terms of ecology as ‘the study of relations and interactions’ (Bryant 2013, 294). Other than a cultural studies conceptualization of environment as what surrounds us as human beings, according to such an ecological thought, we are always already ‘“in” and “of” nature’ (Bennett 2010, 111ff.). The enumerated actions are ecological in so far as we

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as human beings become alive only through conscious interaction with our environment: Before I enter my house I check under the mat for the only key I sign my name I show my eye I show my fingerprint I show my hand I crawl through a tunnel I take a deep breath I breathe a sigh of relief I climb down a hole I light a candle I brace myself I turn on the lights.

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The reality of life displayed in the practices the lyrics retrace correlates visually with the score of humans observing and approaching the seaboard and acoustically, as the repetitive structure of the lines follows a wavelike repetition. The lyrics end on ‘I turn on the lights’, the subject having entered the house, which also coincides with the end of this first section and the screen turning black. In contrast to the next two sections, in this first part there is no sign of decay of the material film strip. Instead it seems like an almost theatrical ‘prelude’ that sets the stage for the subsequent parts in which the effects of material decay more and more start to dominate the viewing experience. The turning on the lights might suggest the entrance into a next phase in which man is no longer necessarily present, instead making way for an objective, non-human centered vision of the environment. While the thinking that evolves during this part already introduces an ‘oceanic multiplicity’ in that it relates subjectivity with the never-ending churnings and movements of the ocean, this concept is further observed in the next section of the film, in which the vocals have ceased. Instead of centring on the images’ juxtaposition with the subjective experience invoked by the lyrics of the first part, it intertwines the interplay of the camera’s movement on the ocean and the material film strip’s decomposition.

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Fig. 9.1: Ocean waves in ‘Before I Enter’. Below: Iceberg on the open sea in ‘How to Pray’. Courtesy of Bill Morrison – Hypnotic Pictures.

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‘HOW TO PRAY’: SEASICK CAMERA, RUINOUS FILM ‘How to Pray’ consists of footage reminiscent of early polar-expedition documentaries and pulls from dogmatic terminology (referring to the title), while also producing the effect of being on water, which indicates an exceptional circumstance that disrupts our conventional ways of approaching the topic of liquid and solid. While the phenomenological effect of being on the open sea and testing out the spatial dimensions of the rough waterscape is visually mediated by the camera’s placement on a boat, this nautical experience is

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musically evident in a swelling and lowering of different layers of pitch and tone. The ocean’s waves involve the camera in tumultuous, vivacious, up-anddown and tilting movements, which immediately places the viewer into the condition of oceanic multiplicity. It is this stark presence of the camera’s fixed position that builds a contrast with the water forbidding a fixed horizontal line of orientation, and thwarting any stable visual hold on the icebergs in view (Figure 9.1). The ‘sea-sick camera’ allows for the confrontation of an anthropocentric and land-dominated conception of the ocean as (measurable) space of navigation with that of a non-horizontal spatial formation shaped by manifold processes, an assemblage in which ‘[…] materiality persists and is reformed amidst constant processes of “arranging”’ (Steinberg and Peters 2015, 256) marked by constant reformation, immanence, rhythmic turbulence, and the unpredictability of dynamic forces (Steinberg and Peters 2015, 248ff.). In a Deleuzoguattarian sense – rather than a striated space in which positions can be geometrically pinned down – the ocean constitutes a smooth space, a term that, unlike the conventional understanding of the word suggests, refers to a space defined by its amorphous, nonformal and heterogeneous nature, a point between two lines that resists appropriation (Deleuze and Guattari 2005, 526). The religious discourse implied in the section’s title by invoking the gesture of the prayer is here not understood as embodying a narcissistic human desire to stabilize and reinstall a sense of equilibrium (Bryant 2013, 290f.). Instead ‘praying’ here seems to suggest the very submergence in that uncontrollable wet ontology signified by the rhythmic movements of the ocean. The constant seasickness of this episode subverts any land-dominated thinking that would perpetuate the conventional dualism between liquids and solids as simply the contrast between the fluid parts and the land regions of Earth or, in general, of the condition of matter. Rather than being limited to water, liquid formations of matter describe a far-reaching, geophysical reality that builds a constant of life on Earth as, for instance, in geological phenomena such as terrestrial formations by tectonics (Parikka 2015). A dissolution of the liquid-solid dichotomy is also evoked in this episode by the iceberg itself as a frozen assemblage of water, which indicates a persistent theme relevant to times of global climate change in which – due to the melting of polar caps and dwindling fresh water resources – it becomes the aggregate state of most urgent ecological interest. Such visual symbols highlight the political implications of a wet ontology. Embedded within the environmental discourse of Morrison’s work is the fact that these early 20th-century images are cinematic witnesses of a historical period marked by the rise of industrial capitalism and the resulting rapid transformation of natural environments by capitalist modes of consumption and production. The rise of the moving image industry, too, is indebted to these developments, and particularly the genre of the documentary film

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incorporates the gesture of exploration and visual consumption of nature by the camera’s gaze in such a prominent way. The camera’s predominance in recording the seascape is then met in the second half of ‘How to Pray’ with the decomposition process that begins to show in forms of blisters leading to a visual effect of melting that further corresponds to the dissolving liquidsolid dualism. By these effects that evolve without any camera the analogue filmstrip itself is displayed as a sensitive ecosystem, visualizing what Georg Simmel describes as ‘natural forces [that] begin to become master over the work of man’ (Simmel quoted in Gafijczuk 2013, 163). While the film stresses the fragility of the natural world – and, more specifically, arctic environments under the pressure of human civilizations –, the wet ontology of the ocean and its inherent complexity is also evident in the ruinous state of the film itself. As Bernd Herzogenrath points out in reference to Morrison’s Decasia, however, the ‘ruinous film|filmic ruin […] does not represent the decay of some other object, but enacts the decomposition of its own material’ (Herzogenrath 2015, 126). The process of ruination constitutes ‘spaces of active exchange between presence and disappearance’ (Gafijczuk 2013, 149) and, as such, builds ‘models for the transitive character of history itself’ (Gafijczuk 2013, 149). Gradually disappearing in substance, the images of the past emerge as even more confidential witnesses of a destructive present. Instead of ‘embalm[ing] time, rescuing it simply from its proper corruption’ (Bazin 2005, 14), the filmic ruin makes possible a ‘virtual witnessing of the past’ (Gafijczuk 2013, 149), which gives rise to the point that society’s obligation to remember is not done with preserving the past through representation, but with developing more ecosensitive perceptions of today’s environment. ‘How to Pray’ thereby not only challenges the notion of media as archival units that preserve in order to resist the sublime terror of a ruinous logic of fragmentation (Gafijczuk 2013, 155), it also introduces the materiality of the filmstrip as creative agency in forming alternative non-anthropocentric understandings and perceptions of our environment. The temporality of the ruin ‘allows the past to emerge in the moment of our encounter with the “afterlife” of various events’ (Gafijczuk 2013, 155) and serves as an ethical sensitization for ecological disaster from which humans are not excluded, but of which they are inevitably a part.

‘WHAT WE BUILD’: RUINATION, DISASTER, SURVIVAL In the last part of the trilogy, the filmstrip’s material decomposition is at an advanced stage: the piercing movements of dark blisters on film are mirrored in the musical accompaniment that is similarly increased in urgency, intensity, and speed, evoking the feeling of heading towards disaster (Figure 9.2, above).

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The footage of the 1927 Mississippi River delta flood – to date, the biggest flood in the history of the United States (to which the current flooding of the Houston region after hurricane ‘Harvey’ hit the U.S. state of Texas during the end of the month of August this year shows a shocking resemblance in scale) – and the images of people navigating the ruinous state of exception of natural disaster are met by the similarly ‘devastated’ chemical state of the film. The term ‘highwater’ here comes to its full expression since it describes a liminal and critical state that is on the brink of tilting over and collapsing into chaos. In There is No Such Thing as a Natural Disaster: Race, Class, and Hurricane Katrina, Chester Hartman calls for a critical review of the term ‘natural’ in natural disaster in an effort to underline the often implicitly anthropocentric perspective taken when addressing ecological disasters, which disguises the multiple different causes and effects these disasters have on a sociopolitical level (Hartman 2006). Morrison’s film points to a historical context of socioeconomic and environmental crisis that affected people’s lives unevenly in accordance to race and class divides and ‘force[s] us to rethink unquestioned understandings of the relationship between land, water, society, and place (as well as the categories of “disaster” and “exceptionality”’ (Steinberg and Peters 2015, 259). The ‘impermanence of men and empires’ (Davies 2014, 46), visible in architectural structures, social orders, or Morrison’s filmic ruins, presents a material ecology that casts the natural and the social not as opposed, but as intertwined categories that form complex assemblages: it is not just that humans infect nature, but nonhumans such as media, technologies, bacteria, natural phenomena, and other agents have the same effect on culture (Bennett 2010, 115). In ‘What We Build’, the celluloid filmstrip itself constitutes a skin surface forming a porous test site for these material ecologies. For the body, the skin means the surface of encounter between subject and environment. The unsettling experience of this episode results from the contact and reaction between chemical, physical, material, and meteorological processes with organic and nonorganic matter. The liquid effects of the film skin’s dissolution, the chaotic disappearances and reappearances of irritations on the emulsified layer yet again points to themes of both erasure and emergence. The literal and figurative emergency state builds a testing ground for the limits of film, in which the media material displays itself as active agent in an epistemological process of experimenting with the medium, of making visible the agent of disappearance – time –, and therefore outlining cinema’s ethical capacity of confronting and involving us with the ephemeral world in which we live. The trilogy ends with the images almost entirely spotted with dark blisters (Figure 9.2, below). This agitated state of crisis of the image, however, retains a creative potential: ‘What We Build’ frames the material ecology of ruination and disaster as ‘epicenters of renewed collective claims […] that animate both despair and new

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Fig 9.2. Above: Stairs in ‘What We Build’. Below: From ‘What We Build’. Courtesy of Bill Morrison – Hypnotic Pictures.

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possibilities’ (Stoler 2013, 14) – after all the documentary film stock has been rescued from dissolving completely. Rather than functioning as irretrievably destructive, implementing a nostalgic or melancholic gaze, the corrosive process of ruination includes an active and future-oriented move (Stoler 2013, 9). While the mere contemplation of sublime disasters does not necessarily result in action (Cresap 1990, 122), ‘What We Build’ thus stresses the necessity to become engaged in ‘building a new house’ and to rethink the future of present (ecological) crises. The material decay of the cellulose filmstrip builds a space full of speculation that takes place in forms of contractions and actions (Arsic 2006, 139). Ruination therefore functions as speculative agent in not only critically reflecting our thinking about ourselves as part of and as shaping the environment we inhabit, but also about the responsibility of how we rebuild the present from the ruins of the past.

WHAT FOLLOWS FROM DISASTER? A CINE-PHILOSOPHY OF THE ETHICS OF THE AFTERMATH ‘Whereas a gun can only shoot one bullet at a time at one individual, cinema can shoot 24 frames a second at ignorance, so as to bring knowledge to the individual and society.’ ­— Mohsen Makhmalbaf, 2016

In Hannah Arendt’s philosophy, the aspect of memory constitutes an ethical question as the banality of evil derives from a refusal to think about and remember past events (Arendt 2014, 296). What do images of (past) disasters mean to us today in our media-saturated world? How does cinema alter the way that we look at the world around us and how we understand ourselves as humans? As Morrison’s film shows, it is not just by inhabiting and reconstructing the ruins of disaster, but also in the ways that humans remember these disasters that we become ethically engaged. The Highwater Trilogy spins Kant’s Enlightenment argument of the genesis of moral consciousness from the encounter with the sublime further: it enables us to think about our own fast-paced times, not through a neoliberalist lens for which rebuilding figures as a permutation of short-term, excessive, and moribund capitalist optimization. Instead, the images call for heightened sensitivity for the material ecologies that underlie them – thinking the liquid opens up the possibility of envisioning an indeterminate future that is not freed from the past, but that, in the sense of Jean-François Lyotard, employs a ‘critical form of memory, anamnesis, as a way in which thought can preserve the facticity of history as

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a means though which the felicity of the future can be posed (again, anew) as a question’ (Slade 2007, 3, my emphasis). The survivor of a disaster constantly wonders how to live after what happened. The shock value of unforeseeable events, however, is not a symptom. It is a vital sign, or, to speak with Bergson, it is the condition of élan vital (Bergson 2009).

NOTE 1

The following lyrics are quoted from David Lang’s ‘Before I Enter’ from the album Shelter, Cantaloupe Music (2013).

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WORKS CITED Arendt, Hannah. ‘Über das Böse.‘ Was ist das Böse? Philosophische Texte von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart. Ed. Christian Schäfer. Stuttgart: Reclam, 2014. 285-299. Arsic, Branka. ‘Thinking Leaving.’ Deleuze and Space. Ed. Ian Buchanan and Gregg Lambert. Edinburgh: UP Edinburgh, 2006. 126-143. Bazin, André. What is Cinema? Volume 1. Ed. and trans. Hugh Gray. Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 2005. Bennett, Jane. Vibrant Matter. A Political Ecology of Things. Durham and London: UP Duke, 2010. Bergson, Henri. Creative Evolution. Boston: Indy Publishing, 2009. Berkowitz, Roger. ‘Introduction: Thinking in Dark Times.’ Thinking in Dark Times: Hannah Arendt on Ethics and Politics. Ed. Roger Berkowitz, Jeffrey Katz, and ­Thomas Keenan. New York: Fordham University Press, 2010. 3-14. Bryant, Levi R. ‘Black.’ Prismatic Ecology. Ecotheory beyond Green. Ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen. Minneapolis/London: UP Minnesota, 2013. Chen, Cecilia, Janine MacLeod, and Astrida Neimanis, eds. Thinking with Water. Montreal, Kingston: UP McGill-Queen, 2013. Cresap, Steven. ‘Sublime Politics: On the Uses of an Aesthetics of Terror.’ Clio, 19, 2 (1990). 111-125. Davies, Christie. ‘Ruin Lust.’ New Criterion, 32, 9 (May 2014). 45-47. Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. Capitalism and Schizophrenia: A Thousand Plateaus. London/Minneapolis: UP Minnesota, 2005. Gafijczuk, Dariusz. ‘Dwelling within: The Inhabited Ruins of History.’ History and Theory 52 (May 2013). 149-170. Hartman, Chester. There is No Such Thing as a Natural Disaster: Race, Class, and Hurricane Katrina. New York: Routledge, 2006.

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Herzogenrath, Bernd. ‘Matter that Images: Bill Morrison’s Decasia.’ Media|Matter. The Materiality of Media, Matter as Medium. Ed. Bernd Herzogenrath. New York: Bloomsbury, 2015. 111-137. Ivakhiv, Adrian J. Ecologies of the Moving Image: Cinema, Affect, Nature. Waterloo, Ont.: Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2013. Kant, Immanuel. The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant. Critique of the Power of Judgement. Ed. Paul Guyer and trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews. Edinburgh: UP Cambridge, 2000. Lang, David, Michael Gordon, and Julia Wolfe. ‘Before I Enter.’ Shelter. Cantaloupe Music, 2013. CD. Makhmalbaf, Mohsen. ‘A Moment of Innocence and Rebellion – In Conversation with Mohsen Makhmalbaf.’ www.fourbythreemagazine.com. Accessed: 31 December 2016. Morrison, Bill. The Highwater Trilogy. Hypnotic Pictures 2006, 31 min, B/W, 35mm.. Parikka, Jussi. A Geology of Media. Minneapolis, London: UP Minnesota, 2015. Presto, Jenifer. ‘The Aesthetics of Disaster: Blok, Messina, and the Decadent Sublime.’ Slavic Review, 70, 3 (Fall 2011). 569-590. Rust, Stephen and Salma Monani. ‘Introduction – Cuts to Dissolves. Defining and Situating Ecocinema Studies.’ Ecocinema Theory and Practice. Ed. Stephen Rust. New York, NY: Routledge, 2013. 1-13. Seitter, Walter. ‘[Meta]physics of Media.’ Media|Matter. The Materiality of Media, Matter as Medium. Ed. Bernd Herzogenrath. New York (et.al.): Bloomsbury, 2015. 19-27. Serres, Michel. Genesis. Trans. Geneviève James and James Nielson. Ann Arbor: UP Michigan Press, 1995. Slade, Andrew. Lyotard, Beckett, Duras, and the Postmodern Sublime. New York (et al.): Peter Lang, 2007. Sinnerbrink, Robert. ‘Film-Philosophy’. The Routledge Encyclopedia of Film Theory. Ed. Edward Branigan. London: Routledge, 2014. 207-213. Steinberg, Philip and Kimberley Peters. ‘Wet Ontologies, Fluid Spaces: Giving Depth to Volume through Oceanic Thinking.’ Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 33 (2015). 247- 264. Stoler, Ann. Imperial Debris: On Ruins and Ruination. Durham, N.C: Duke UP, 2013.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Yasmin Afshar is a PhD candidate and assistant professor at the American Studies department of the Goethe University Frankfurt. She received her MA degree in German Literary Studies and American Studies in summer 2014. Her MA thesis fused approaches from urban and literary studies with a Deleuzian space-philosophy in

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a reading of Paul Auster’s novel Moon Palace and Teju Cole’s Open City. Her dissertation project (‘The Ethics of Water: Thinking (the) Liquid with Contemporary American Experimental Cinema’ – working title), which she started in fall 2014, is a film-philosophical approach to the material processes of cinema that sheds light on the discourses of ruination and disaster, the relationship between nature and culture, media and their materiality, as well as water and land, doing so from an eco-critical perspective. Afshar’s research on direct and found-footage film, especially from U.S. American filmmakers such as Stan Brakhage, Len Lye, Ken Jacobs, Jennifer West, and Bill Morrison, has a special focus on the creative agency of the autocatalytic decompositional processes of analogue film. She is interested in how by these films’ persisting notions of ecology and environment are challenged, and how the complex material and social assemblages between humans, media, and other nonhuman agents shape today’s pulsating media environment.

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CHAPTER 10

Porch Archives, Collective Memory, and the ­Poetics of Home Movies William Cusick

Herzogenrath, Bernd (ed.), The Films of Bill Morrison. Aesthetics of the Archive. Amsterdam University Press, 2018 DOI 10.5117/9789089649966/CH10

ABSTRACT Porch is a poetic short film combining 8mm home movie footage with Julia Wolfe’s haunting minimalist score in an exploration of the changing shape of the American home. Porch is Morrison’s only film comprised entirely of archival home-movie footage, a subgenre of found-footage filmmaking with rapidly developing theory and criticism. The impact of the evolving concept of collective memory on archival practice is considered as it relates to the appropriation of home movies into new films. Porch exemplifies the artistic possibilities for artistic and institutional collaboration in constructing representations of collective memory using home movies as a common language. k e y wo r ds

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Summer evenings and lemonade A time when the whole town knew each other and said ‘hello’ First came screens against the bugs Then came glass against the chill Then came walls against the winter The street became so loud with cars and trucks Passersby diminished Inside there is air-conditioning and TV – Porch, libretto by Deborah Artman

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Bill Morrison’s short film Porch originated as a component of the visual accompaniment to the staged oratorio Shelter, the third in a trilogy of collaborative works by composers Michael Gordon, David Lang, and Julia Wolfe. The libretto for Shelter was written by Deborah Artman and the movement entitled Porch was composed by Julia Wolfe. Co-commissioned by The Next Wave Festival of the Brooklyn Academy of Music, musikFabrik, and Kunstiftung NRW, the production was first performed under the direction of Ridge Theater’s Bob McGrath and conductor Brad Lubman. The initial conception of the piece centered around the idea of human shelter, both literal and metaphorical. The collaborators set out to explore the various meanings and connotations of the word, from basic protection from the elements to the building of an American home (Bang on a Can). Following a process of development, during which Morrison created a series of films in his signature found-footage style to integrate with Laurie Olinder’s projection design, Shelter premiered in Cologne, Germany on 20 March 2005 (Ensemble musikFabrik). Variations of the production continue to be presented around the world, most recently in Los Angeles on 31 May 2015 (Los Angeles Philharmonic Association). The standalone short film version of Porch was edited by Morrison to the original recording performed by Ensemble Signal, released by Cantaloupe Music on 26 March 2013, and is featured in the Icarus Films release Bill Morrison: Collected Works (1996-2013). Wolfe’s musical composition is a complex and darkly beautiful tapestry of overlapping female voices intoning Artman’s libretto. Three soprano singers alternate between consonance and dissonance over the steady, hypnotic rhythms of an electric guitar, percussion, and string accompaniment. The brief rests in the music serve to build and simultaneously relieve the tension, driving the music forward with a feeling of rapt disentanglement, the resolution ever elusive. Over the course of eight minutes and thirty seconds, the

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music builds and twists and crashes, combining with Morrison’s film to create an experience of an oblique nostalgia, not quite saccharine or sentimental, more dreamlike than real. The juxtaposition of banal, slice-of-life moments culled from an archive of mid-20th Century home movies with the sophisticated and repetitive patterns of early-21st Century minimalist composition creates a poetic meditation on human existence, collective memory, and the passage of time. Porch is unique in Morrison’s filmography for being his only archivesourced film entirely comprised of private home-movie footage. Morrison’s films are primarily constructed from archival footage from newsreels, feature films, and amateur film productions of the past. Morrison’s filmmaking process involves research and discovery of materials and subsequent synthesis of these preexisting image sequences into a newly structured organization of his design (Böser 2013, 306-307). He works in collaboration with composers, lyricists, and archivists to develop and to create these densely layered films, often intended for presentation during live performances. Morrison’s process of creating Porch was guided by the imagery in Artman’s libretto and facilitated by an invitation from the Lynn and Louis Wolfson II Florida Moving Image Archives to access their expanding collection of home movies. Media scholar Patricia Zimmerman describes home movies as ‘unresolved, open texts’ that ‘operate as a series of transversals, translations, and transcriptions between history and memory, between text and context, between the public and the private’ (2007, 17). The moving images selected by Morrison for Porch specifically operate in the liminal space between public and private spheres, extending the investigation of shelter by raising questions about the nature of presence and trespassing in archives of collective memory. The visual investigation of the quasi-public, quasi-private outdoor space connecting neighbors is constructed out of fragments selected from home movies filmed in Florida, archived by the Florida Moving Image Archives, and culled from materials identified by archivists as relating to the concepts of porches, backyards, and family homes (Davidson 2007, 97). The isolated and fragmentary nature of home movies lends itself to recontextualization within broad conceptual frameworks and the formulation of poetic collective-memory cinema. Contemporary archival theory and scholarship actively engage the shifting concepts of social and collective memory. Recent discourse considers whether archives can be regarded to serve a crucial function in the preservation of what might be considered public or collective memory (Jacobsen, Punzalan, and Hedstrom 2013, 218). A key aspect of this discourse is the evolving definition of ‘collective memory’, a concept initially established by French sociologist Maurice Halbwachs in 1941 as social or institutional recall that parallels the functions and processes of individual cognitive mental reconstructions of the

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past (1992, 182). Halbwachs’ initial theories echo throughout years of archival science, as the varying definitions of ‘collective memory’ continue to evolve. In his consideration of collective memory and its impact on public programming by archival institutions, archival theorist Richard J. Cox broadly defines it as ‘the perceptions and uses of the past by the public–including both government and citizen’, which serves to describe the concept without necessarily elucidating a functional process (1993, 122). Given the massive growth of data and backlogs in archival arrangement and description, public programming could be argued as counterproductive to the essential tasks of archivists, but this engagement is essential to fulfill the promise of constructing functional collective memory. Building upon rapid growth in progressive archival scholarship, archivist Brien Brothman advanced a definition of memory as ‘a process of knowledge construction in anticipation of performance’ which ‘involves diminishing “the pastness of the past” and shaping existing informational material to present purposes’, reaffirming the essence of collective memory as a constant and active process of engagement (2001, 80). The concept of anticipated performance supports Brothman’s distinction between what he terms ‘history’s archivist’ and ‘memory’s archivist’, the latter being more deeply engaged in the process of recall (Brothman 2001, 62). Yet, for some contemporary media theorists, the term ‘collective memory’ is altogether inaccurate and they argue for the adoption of the term ‘media memory’ to denote the inherent mediation of any archival record that shapes collective memory (Neiger, Meyers, and Zandberg 2001, 2). Semiotics is at the center of the collaboration between filmmakers and moving-picture archivists working with time-based media. The subjective translation of embedded visual representations from the moving images into searchable database terminology is what allows this collaboration to occur successfully. In the case of orphaned home movies, the work of descriptive cataloguing becomes essential to the survival and potential future performance of the archived material. This is where Brothman’s conception of ‘memory’s archivist’ as a lateral thinker becomes essential in ‘promoting integrated knowledge, social identity, and the formation of group consciousness’ by moving beyond temporal sorting into spatialized ‘cycles and continuums’ of preserving and organizing memory (2001, 79-80). Archivists must engage with home-movie materials in both analytical and poetic terms to provide sufficient frameworks for access and discovery. This translation process happens multiple times for the archives, first at initial media ingestion and then again when a search is initiated that requires any degree of lateral, nonlinear categorization outside of strict chronological descriptors. As with nearly all of his films, Morrison’s Porch presents multiple lay-

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ers of parallel meaning in both form and content. Morrison’s found-footage films can be considered as cinematic palimpsests in which new meaning is engraved on top of preexistent meaning through his reorganization of the archival moving images. To the casual viewer, Porch could easily be mistaken as a readymade reel of home-movie found footage set to Wolfe’s music, owing to the deft and seamless editing approach employed by Morrison in the construction of the montage. A closer look at the film reveals its intricate structure that mimics the linear passage of time while defying temporality through imperceptible leaps forwards, backwards and sideways through the chronology and geography of the recordings. Further still, the sequencing mimics the physical passing of the home-movie camera between various operators as if to imply that everyone in the film is somehow part of a collective, extended family. Morrison’s editing exploits the jump cuts and light leaks that happen incamera, already present in his source footage, and he allows for shots to linger beyond what might be considered obvious edit points in the material. This automatic assemblage style of the edit combines with the point-and-shoot aesthetic of the shaky cinematography to create a genuine sense of an entirely in-camera experience. If, as communication theorist Roger Odin concludes, ‘to make a home movie is to create an album of moving photographs’, then Morrison maintains the integrity of the source material and perhaps the intentions of each camera operator, by allowing the film to move in a seemingly chronological yet non-narrative sequence (2014, 18). Porch unfolds as though the recording occurred across an infinite slice of 24 hours, creating a readymade non-narrative film out of slice-of-life moments. The first shot of the film lingers on a toddler standing between a house and a rocking chair, the tightly framed picture reveals little else. The girl holds onto the arm of the small rocking chair, balancing herself. She has short, cropped light-brown hair, light skin, and she wears a white dress, a picture of childhood. At first, she gazes off-screen before a jump cut in the footage switches the direction of her face and she looks directly into the camera. After a moment of what seems to be tentative consideration, she looks away, and then again back into the camera. The banality of everyday life on the threshold of a house begins to unfold before our eyes. In the music, the words ‘summer evenings’ are intoned by the trio of female voices and, even though it is daytime in the footage, a sense of anticipation for the impending nighttime begins to build. In the second shot (Fig. 10.1), it is still daytime and three children sit atop the steps of a porch, a doorway to the house open behind them. The youngest of the three children, an infant boy, sits on the lap of a slightly older but still very young girl. Again, their eyes meet the camera lens and then look away.

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Fig. 10.1: Porch.

172 | The two younger children are clad in white outfits, the oldest girl wears pink, and the two little girls wear white gloves. The girl with dark brown hair taps her foot impatiently on the wooden steps. The sense of anticipation grows; perhaps the children await something extraordinary or perhaps they are just impatiently bored, but – lacking additional context – their expressions are inscrutable. A jump cut in the footage again punctuates the visual rhythm and composition and, after a few moments of holding the gaze of the oldest child, all of the children look away from the camera. Standing at the edges of houses and looking into the eyes of strangers’ children would be considered the edge of trespassing in our present society, were it done by anyone outside of the family unit. And yet, here we are at the start of the film, the audience, allowed access to this intimate space of childhood and the semi-private space of the front porch, on the threshold of shelter, literal and figurative. This sense of nontransgressive voyeurism is best elaborated by Jaimie Baron in her brilliant conception and analysis of what she terms the ‘archive effect’, defined as ‘the viewer’s experience of a document’s movement from a perceived intended private context of reception with a private or limited audience to an actual public context of reception – an appropriation film – with an unlimited audience’ (2013, 89). On the conceptual experience of archival voyeurism, she writes: Building on the spatial notion of the home, ‘trespassing’ offers us an appropriate metaphor for the act of entering and appropriating a private space uninvited – or at least a private space into which we possibly should not have been invited. Of course, when an innocent recording of a birth-

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day party or a happy family snapshot is reused in a new film, watching it does not necessarily incur a feeling of ethical transgression. As viewers of an appropriation film that includes such images, we may be trespassing in someone else’s ‘home,’ but the recording of such images is part of a social ritual we know and recognize (Baron 2013, 95). And so, on the strength of this sense of recognition of social ritual, Porch casually moves among the physically embodied, digitally mediated, collective memories of familiar strangers, detached from diegetic sound, called forward by the voices in Wolfe’s music. The word ‘summer’ repeats in harmony, stepping up, then down as a steady and moving guitar melody metes out a rhythm. The footage cuts to a little girl in a pink dress and a little boy on the steps of a porch, perhaps two of the children from the previous shot have aged, or perhaps a parallel duo is presented. The girl runs up the steps. The boy sits and the footage jump cuts to a moment later, the boy wanders aimlessly towards and away from the camera. He looks into the lens, stands, sits, stands again, over and over. A woman approaches, her face unceremoniously, presumably unintentionally, cropped out of the frame by the cameraperson. The trio of the woman and two children walks away from the house. Light leaks, film slipping sprockets and the wandering attention of the camera movement combine to create a sense of authentic nostalgia, of a time lost to time accessible to the present only in fleeting glimpses. We see yet another porch, this one attached to a dark brown house with white window frames. The porch steps are faced with stones and bracketed by a low stone wall. Perhaps a neighbor’s house or grandparents’ house, though just as likely someplace completely unrelated to the last house. It feels like moving through a series of family photos without a narrator to explain away the dreamlike aura of each person in the pictures. A little boy in red shorts, red shoes, and a white shirt stares directly into the camera, smiling, and then he picks his nose as he stands on a porch. More children emerge from the house and join the boy on the steps as he stares into the camera, into the obscure future of a home movie. Porch is populated with adults and children of all ages. No main character takes focus, only themes of family and collectivity crystallize over the dissonant tones of the music. A photo album of moving pictures of children, parents, grandparents, all seemingly somehow related and each individually aware of the presence of the camera, of the record it creates. As the film moves forward, time slips from day to night and behavior grows increasingly looser with laughter and smiles, cigars and alcohol, then dance. The crescendo of this summer evening is a slow-motion shot of a woman in red, white, and blue, dancing alone, spinning around her own axis. For

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Fig. 10.2: Porch.

nearly 30 seconds, the image of the lone, spinning dancer fills the screen in Porch, simultaneously invoking the symbolism of the spinning of the Earth and the waving of an American flag. The image is reminiscent of the lone Sufi dancer in the opening and closing shots of Morrison’s masterpiece Decasia (2002). Whereas in Decasia the lone dancer begins and concludes the long journey through layers of decay, in Porch, the lone dancer is discovered only in the middle of the film. Considered in parallel, this image of the dancer in Porch becomes a new top layer, a surface, implying many more layers spiraling below the skin of this celluloid memory. Without warning, the summer evening is over. It is another day, women mingle on porches, old and young, together and separate. There is a small parade of family members in formal dresses and button-up shirts getting into a pose on the porch together. Each of them is older now by years, not one day. Everyone is still for a moment as a photo is taken by a man in a black suit and then, naturally, they retreat inside for air-conditioning and TV. The oldest among them is helped back up the stairs, but, before they all disappear indoors for good, there is time for more dancing on the porch. Close-ups and medium shots collected by a shaky, searching camera collide; there are shots of hands and faces and feet in motion and then a man abruptly waves goodbye. Porch maintains a delicate balance of public and private, of dissonance and harmony. The brief, non-narrative structure of the film frames poetic glimpses into the lives of several American families living and thriving in Florida in the

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1950s and 1960s. These families were fortunate enough to afford recording their days and nights on 8mm film and then generous enough to have those memories archived for public and private access nearly 50 years later. The fragmented and unresolved visual texts of home movies form the basis for a new poetic language of social identity. Morrison writes Porch in the language of home movies and crafts a timeless meditation of collective memory. In the 1960s, avant-garde filmmaker Jonas Mekas predicted ‘that some of the most beautiful movie poetry will be revealed, someday, in the 8mm home-movie footage’ and here, through the collaborative efforts of archivists, composers, and filmmakers, this poetry emerges (1972, 131).

WORKS CITED | 175 Baron, Jaimie. ‘Archival Voyeurism, Home Mode Appropriations and the Public Spectacle of Private Life.’ Archive Effect: Found Footage and the Audiovisual Experience of History. London, New York: Routledge, 2013. 81-108. Böser, Ursula. ‘Inscriptions of Light and The “Calligraphy of Decay”: Volatile Representations in Bill Morrison’s Decasia.’ Avant Garde Critical Studies 23 (2007): 305320. Brothman, Brien. ‘The Past that Archives Keep: Memory, History, and the Preservation of Archival Records.’ Archivaria 51 (2001): 48-80. Cox, Richard J. ‘The Concept of Public Memory and its Impact on Archival Public Programming.’ Archivaria 36 (1993): 122-135. Davidson, Steven. ‘The Florida Moving Image Archive.’ Mining the Home Movie: Excavations in Histories and Memories. Eds. Karen L. Ishizuka and Patricia R. Zimmerman. Berkley: University of California Press, 2007. 92-97. Halbwachs, Maurice. ‘The Social Frameworks of Memory.’ On Collective Memory. 1941. Translated and edited by Lewis A. Coser. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992. 167-192. http://bangonacan.org/store/music/shelter. Accessed: 26 March 2013. http://typo3.musikfabrik.eu/fileadmin/user_upload/programmhefte/ musikFabrik-im-WDR-07.pdf. Accessed: 18 March 2005. https://www.laphil.com/philpedia/music/shelter-video-wolfelangegordon. Accessed: 31 May 2015. Jacobsen, Trond, Ricardo L. Punzalan, and Margaret L. Hedstrom. ‘Invoking “Collective Memory”: Mapping the Emergence of a Concept in Archival Science.’ Archival Science International Journal on Recorded Information 13 (2013): 217-251. Mekas, Jonas. Movie Journal: The Rise of the New American Cinema, 1959-1971. London: Macmillan Company, 1972.

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musikFabrik im WDR 07 Shelter. Ensemble musikFabrik. http://www.musikfabrik.eu/ de/klang-bild/musikfabrik-im-wdr. Neiger, Motti, Oren Meyers, and Eyal Zandberg. ‘Editors Introduction.’ On Media Memory: Collective Memory in a New Media Age. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. 1-26. Odin, Roger. ‘The Home Movie and Space of Communication.’ Amateur Filmmaking: The Home Movie, the Archive, the Web. Eds. Laura Rascaroli, Gwenda Young, and Barry Monahan. London, New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014. 15-25. Shelter – Gordon/Lang/Wolfe. Bang on a Can, http://bangonacan.org/store/music/ shelter. Shelter – LA Phil. Los Angeles Philharmonic Association. https://www.laphil.com/. Zimmerman, Patricia R. ‘The Home Movie Movement: Excavations, Artifacts, Minings.’ Mining the Home Movie: Excavations in Histories and Memories. Eds. Karen L. Ishizuka and Patricia R. Zimmerman. Berkley: University of California

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Press, 2007. 1-28.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR William Cusick is a writer, director, and designer based in New York City. Cusick is on faculty at The New School in New York City, where he lectures on filmmaking, creative technology, and theatrical design. Cusick’s second independent feature film, Pop Meets the Void, premiered in June 2015 at The Lower East Side Film Festival in NYC and was awarded Best Feature Film of the festival. Cusick’s first feature is the award-winning Welcome to Nowhere (Bullet Hole Road). The neo-surrealist road movie premiered at the 2012 LES Film Festival, received the 2013 Founders’ Choice Award at the Queens World Film Festival in NYC, and was featured at the 2013 Queens Museum of Art International Biennial. The film premiered online in 2013 on Kentucker Audley’s website NoBudge.com. Cusick has directed short films and music videos for MacArthur Award-winning choreographer Susan Marshall, PulitzerPrize-winning composer David Lang, and Guggenheim Fellow playwright Young Jean Lee. Cusick’s video projection designs for theatre, dance, and music have been featured in productions around the world and on Broadway in Sharr White’s The Other Place at Manhattan Theater Club in 2013. Cusick received the 2007 Henry Hewes Design Award for Projection Design for Tom Stoppard’s The Coast of Utopia on Broadway at Lincoln Center Theater. As a contributing editor for Chance Magazine, a serialized art book about performance and design, Cusick has interviewed filmmakers and projection designers working in contemporary performance.

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CHAPTER 11

The Future Lasts Long The Romanov Lost Family Archives Agnès Villete

Herzogenrath, Bernd (ed.), The Films of Bill Morrison. Aesthetics of the Archive. Amsterdam University Press, 2018 DOI 10.5117/9789089649966/CH11

ABSTRACT Agnès Villette was invited by Bill Morrison to follow him on his search for archives for future projects. For her, it was fascinating to observe Morrison work: to witness how an evanescent frame caught while viewing archives could, years later, become part of a whole feature film, or how a line in an article could arrest Morrison’s imagination so much that he would track the private collector to meet him in London. Concentrated and immersed, Villette could witness how one frame totally absorbed Bill Morrison and how, in a fraction of second, he knew exactly how that lonely child from an earlier century would reenact, through the power of cinema, the same desolation and intensity, as at the moment it was shot. k e y wo r ds

photo essay, Russian Romanov, London, Moscow archive

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T h e F u t u r e L a s t s Lo n g

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T h e F u t u r e L a s t s Lo n g

T h e F u t u r e L a s t s Lo n g

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Agnès Villette is a French journalist and photographer based in London. She has been a permanent contributor to Citizen K magazine for the past sixteen years and also works as a freelance journalist for various French and British magazines. Her features cover various aspects of popular culture, art, literature, and architecture. She also teaches French literature in London at the French Lycée. She came across Bill Morrison‘s work, in 2002, during the Edinburgh Film Festival, where Decasia was screened. At the time, she did an interview for the Belgian avant-garde magazine Bilbok. She is currently developing several projects connected to dark ecology. Part of a research laboratory team as an artist in residence at the Caen School of Art, she is investigating the story of the Orne river, as the dams are removed within a program of rewilding European rivers. Originally from Normandy, she travels more often to the place where she spent her childhood, as she photographs and researches a project

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around the decommissioned military island forts around Cherbourg in connection with the imaginary representation of nuclear contamination, due to the proximity of two important nuclear plants. Opening up the field of her research, she has just completed a documentary film and is planning a new one on the recently self-proclaimed micro-nation of Liberland, on the Croatian and Serbian border.

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CHAPTER 12

Who by Water Variations on Matter, Figures, Memory, and Mythology Andrea Pierron

Herzogenrath, Bernd (ed.), The Films of Bill Morrison. Aesthetics of the Archive. Amsterdam University Press, 2018 DOI 10.5117/9789089649966/CH12

ABSTRACT Who By Water reedits footages and reconstructs the arrival at land and departure of a ship in the early 20th century. In between the opening and closing of the film, the camera enters the ship in order to portray its passengers, either within group shots or individually. Throughout the film, the various deteriorations of the film celluloid display cracks, marks, and burned holes on the strip and thus on the recorded figures. The decayed matter interplays with the individual figures progressively veiling, distorting, or even discarding them. Thus, it implies an ongoing tension between the evolution of cinematic matter and figurative processes. k e y wo r ds

historical found footage, optical process, American visual history, experimental editing

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The media have substituted themselves for the older world. Even if we wish to recover that older world we can do it only by an intensive study of the ways in which the media have swallowed it. – Marshall McLuhan

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Bill Morrison produced the seventeen-minute short shot in DV Who By Water in 2007. He used stills from the Fox Movietone Newsreels Outtakes courtesy of the Archives of the University of Carolina Newsfilm Library. No further information about the film is to be found in the credits, including the title, the date, and the name of the original filmmaker. In this manner, the found footage remains partly unknown. Even without further contextual precisions, the stills assembled are coherent in sharing the same filmic origins. As described by the filmmaker himself in an interview given in 2012, all the footage he has worked with in his most recent films have been digitally recorded: ‘But the last films have all been assembled digitally, so in a way that subject matter, and the close physical relationship with film stock, probably isn’t as pronounced now as it was in the earlier work’ (Morrison, quoted in Danielsen). Despite the fact that the celluloid matter is swallowed by the digital print, Who By Water still displays characteristic traces of material decay, only digitally printed. The found footage depicts the arrival in the early 20th century of a ship at land and a series of portraits of its passengers. It displays a gallery of faces who look straight at the camera in turns, smiling or soundlessly talking. The film quietly unrolls without any comment, but rather accompanied by the musical arrangement composed by Michael Gordon. The film thus raises some specific questions. To what extent is the tension between cinematic matter and memory developed through principles of found-footage editing ( repetition, reapparition, and material alterations)? To what extent does this tension express an inherent power of attractions or disruptions and what impacts would be impressed on both images and faces as to build an aesthetic of altered memory? How does the film portray a tension between the recollection of individual subjects and an underlying collective memory? How can the film be linked to specific processes of mythological conceptions within the building of American memory? To what extent does the mythological dimension is contradicted by historical aspects or formal and material alterations? Indeed, this essay develops a fragmentary editing process in slow motion that seeks to uncover the inner properties of figuration in showing documents of individual yet anonymous portraits. It turns towards an enquiry on the processes of appearance and disappearance, the disfiguration that threats the portraits. The film also seems to reflect historical – that is to say collective

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memory – and mythological dimensions within the recollections of various individual portraits. Bill Morrison produces Who By Water in digitizing the original frames from the Fox Movietone Newsreels Outtakes. The filmmaker himself states that the digital process diminishes the physical impression of material and formal decay. On the other hand Matt Levine has noticed another aspect, which he introduces along the new technique that he describes in his article ‘A Poetic Archeology of Cinema: the Films of Bill Morrison’: Morrison’s early interest in film’s simultaneous existence as a recorded image and a material entity would later form the crux of his foundfootage work, as it is the deterioration of the material itself that enables such hauntingly surreal imagery. […] In a way then, Morrison practices an ideal fusion between analogue and digital technologies, relying upon celluloid as a formal base yet editing (and often projecting) using digital technology. (Levine 2013) In this way, the digitization also represents a fusion. That is to say, it both materially homogenizes and conserves the various scratches left by time that are enclosed in the decayed celluloid matter. The convenience of the digitized process allows bringing a certain homogenization to the material disruption: if it visually maintains the decayed forms evolving at the surface of the frame, at the same time, it diminishes their material depths. In this way, the digitization of the cinematic footage collected in Who By Water creates, at first, a material gap between the original celluloid and the mastered digital version. In Who By Water, the wreckage of time and deterioration can still be seen as a veil covering all images. The images composing the last part of the gallery portraits have been dramatically discarded. In those images, the veil becomes thicker, darker, and shows evidences of damaged, burned holes in the celluloid. If the digitization dismisses the sensitivity of the damaged materials, it nevertheless records its formal imprints left on the images and specifically on the faces. As the filmmaker Ken Jacobs once said: ‘A lot of footage is perfect left alone.’ (Jacobs, quoted in Wees 1993, 6) For him, the deterioration of the frame is materially, formally, and thus significantly rich, complex, and deep enough to be considered on its own as an immanently beautiful, formally, significantly, and inherently whole. In Who By Water, Bill Morrison does not act directly upon the celluloid matter. He prefers to record the cracks digitally and thus allows the desiccation to evolve throughout the film. More importantly, reediting the footage represents the main focus. If the cinematic matter is indeed still a problem it does not qualify anymore as the main aspect. Instead,

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Fig. 12.1: Veil of time and deterioration covering the image.

Fig. 12.2: Wrecked image with burn holes.

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it has become interdependent of the treatments of the figures in gradual and formal alterations. The decay is scrutinized and emphasized throughout the film by the means of editing. The editing assembles frames that derive from the same newsreel, thus portraying each ship passenger in the same manner. The film depicts the arrival and departure of the ship. It opens on images of people waiting on the docks, then shows the ship entering the port, the portraits of its passengers starting with collective pictures of the ship crew, then focussing on individuals and a few small groups, and finally closes on a aerial view of the ship at sea. As it develops in slow motion, each individual figure looks directly into the camera; with each figure’s turn, the image is captioned and the figure is

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framed using the same focal and close-up. In this way, all the images participate of an identical aesthetical apparatus. The editing introduces a specific tension between the homogeneity of the origins as well as the aesthetic apparatus shared by all the photographs and the heterogeneity uncovered by Bill Morrison’s editing. The film reedits the various fragments in order to awaken and confront aesthetic and meaningful differences or resonances that place the film upon a reflexive breach. The fragmentary process introduces the subtle differences within the overall homogeneity. Indeed, the breach uncovered by the variations of fragments lays emphasis on an ongoing crisis throughout the film. When displayed in succession, the fragments are particularly highlighted one by one at the very moment that they vanish. In this way, it is through the fugacity of disaggregation and decline that the subject is the most accurately sized. In the same way, the film successively varies on film figures in an underlying tension between apparition and dissolution. Every fragment is seized between apparition and disappearance, between recognition and difference. It displays its specificities in slow motion, slight differences before being carried away by the cycling alternation and alteration. The overall and increasing flux of disaggregation – evolving from white smog to scratches to deep black burned holes – carries, veils, and interacts with all images. It distillates intrinsic and subtle relations of difference throughout alternating images. The evolution of deterioration marks on the surface of the film matter as well as its impacts on recorded images or faces increases the sense of loss in perceiving the fragmented pictures. Thus it multiplies the intensity of inner contrasts. For the film theoretician Teresa Faucon, in her essay entitled Editing Theory, Energy, Forces, and Fluid: Isn’t every figure, through the editing process, gifted with the energy of transformation, melted into this living matter? Let’s remember that the figure is a form, thus a fugitive aspect of the matter. Its origin is the modelling (the Latin word figura derives from fingere, to model something). Ephemeral and permeable is the form. So much that its loss frees a force and restarts the figurative process. (Faucon 2013, 15) 1 In this way, the figures that progressively rot in Who By Water become prone to such interplays between the decayed matter and the figurative process. As they become more and more materially damaged, they transform themselves and expose their living processes in a stretch towards disfiguration. André Habib, in his article ‘Around the Films of Bill Morrison’, has denoted the different paradigmatic changes of Bill Morrison’s editing processes and the moment he begins to work with slow motion specifically:

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With The Film of Her (1996), his path seemed to have taken a new turn. This slightly fictionalized documentary on the paper print collection of the Library of Congress in Washington, triggered a reflection on the loss/reappearance of films and a change in his next films: slow down his editing, dilate durations, and proceed by blocks of time (Trinity, made in 2000, is a major turning point in that regard). It is in early 2000 that he became directly interested in corroded film and began exploring the visual possibilities of decayed material. Morrison’s wish is to bring viewers into a state of reflection on human mortality, and for which the decayed film serves as a memento (we will rot like the films). (Habib 2004a)

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In this manner, as explained by André Habib, slow motion becomes a crucial tool within Bill Morrison’s editing approach. It enables dilating the duration and thus increasing the depiction of the evolving processes within the image. This way, slow motion allows laying eyes more precisely and intensely upon the dissolutions of matter and their interplays with figures as much as the game of appearance and disappearance through the editing. The filmmaker develops his precise conceptions on cinematic reappearances in an interview with André Habib in 2012 for Offscreen: But you are also aware that you’re looking at separate pictures. The essential element of these things is a painting. A painting that can’t be stopped, and that’s important too, that as soon as you see it, it becomes part of the past. And that you are watching history and that you are unable to grab it, and hold on to it and look at it. This is really what separates cinema from the other arts. And indeed maybe it’s the most basic analogy to our lives: at no point can we actually freeze a moment and hold on to it and say: ‘This is it. This is the moment right here.’ The moment we have said it, it is gone and its part of history. So our whole experience is a memory of that. Art is able to verbalise that this thing is happening now. It’s an act of history. (Habib 2004b) This extract particularly echoes with the ballet of figures described by Who By Water and opens up the fragmentary process of editing to a characteristic historical conception. The film dynamic, supported by slow motion, looks more closely at the very moment of appearance and disappearance, that is to say on the vanishing quality of film fragments or figures. It gives enough time to notice the very moment, but not so much as to experience the sense of loss. Throughout the overall cinematic succession of appearance and disappearance, the film enrols in an abyssal dynamic that alternates inner resemblances and differences, transfigures and reveals their extinguishing characteristics

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through fugacity and, to some extent, disfigurations. Furthermore, Bill Morrison considers that the specificity of the film apparatus, that is to say the disclosure of time within the figure, intrinsically opens up the figurative process to a historical representation. As described by Matt Levine, Bill Morrison’s work on the concepts of time and cinematic decadence represents as much a historical as much as a metaphysical concern: In his work, the passage of time appears in different guises: as both a historical process that traces the evolution of humanity throughout history and as an autonomous, existential force to which all matter, living and otherwise, must fall prey. Whether treating the march of time as fodder for a narrative of human history or as an irreversible process of flux and decay, Morrison’s films utilize traces of found footage littered throughout our cinematic past, ambitiously attempting to grapple with the ambiguous concept of ‘time’ itself […] This mythological aspect is bolstered by the fact that these historical images take on a perverse beauty that can only be wrought by the decay of celluloid. (Levine, 2013) The historical process enclosed by the found footage can also take on a mythological aspect, which is brought out more vividly by the intrinsic decay. The rotten matter and forms, with the doom of time weighing upon them, display more intensely their original and mythological aspects, their inner ability to retrace origins or to be part of the tale. If Levine links this mythological dimension to the celluloid-matter disaggregation, the collection of figures in Who By Water supports the mythological aspects, for the focus on individual figures invokes the collective history or memory. Following Erwin Panofsky, who considers, in his conference ‘Style and Meaning in Motion Pictures’, the cinematic apparatus as prominently characterized by ‘the accumulative dimension, the collection of archetypes, the typology of stereotypes and thus the figurative level of the filmic image’, the gallery of individuals collected in Who By Water concentrates the figurative process specific to the film apparatus (Panofsky 1997, 95). An individual portrait represents at once the substrate of an overall cumulative figurative process, while its archetypal figurative dimension encloses a collective representation. Furthermore, the collection of found footage, depending on the same origins, links all the portrayed individuals to a common and shared history. One can also consider that the cinematic image is constructed on mnemonic substrates. According to Jean-Christophe Royoux: And so, under the sign of the still image, a whole conception of the relationship to cinema becomes apparent. The ‘regular deposit of mnemonic traces’ of which it consists is, as Godard says, not just the only way to

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become conscious of an unbroken history of the twentieth century, but it is also, from this very fact, the only way, for each of us taken one by one, to recognize that he or she has a history. The psychic mechanism of the freeze-frame is merely an attempt to describe the relationship between cinema and memory, in other words the cinematographic articulation of the link between individual and collective memory, underlying all culture. (Royoux 2008, 347)

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The theoretician notices the analogy that can be made between the memory process (within mnemonic traces) and the cinematic image specifically through the stillness of the freeze frame. In Who By Water, slow motion could be associated with the freeze frame and the marks of alterations pictured could signify the substrates concentrated by the cinematic image as well. Since the figurative process in Who By Water is based on different portraits and fragments, it can be linked to the articulation of individual and collective memory. This way, each portrait shows a singular face but recalls collective memory and, thus, becomes historical. Furthermore, the traces of celluloid decay evolving at the surface of the images and interplay with the figuration add a historical dimension to the form. The decay, as related to intrinsic timely degradations, is intertwined with the figures and thus to the individuals as well as the underlying collective history. Royoux also cites Jean-Luc Godard, who denotes the cinema’s ability to represent an unbroken version of history, which is alternatively characteristic of the myth. Indeed, the mythic form must offer a flawless tale of which elements cannot be disputed. Its perennial aspect, however, makes it unhistorical, that is to say timeless. In a way, one can foresee a tension between the historical and mythological processes within the cinematic image. According to André Glucksmann in an article devoted to the mythological dimension of western films within the American culture: ‘Every mythology pretends to enlighten the present from the glorious origin it has imagined for it; when the present is too rationalized, the origin can no longer be providential, the myth becomes chronicle and the genealogy only keeps its status of oracle’ (Glucksmann 1993, 71). 2 The material alterations in questioning the becoming of images also put into question the outdated dimension of the myth. That is to say, the various material alterations in insisting on the living process also lay emphasis on the historical being and thus contradict mythic timelessness. Through disfigurations, the myth is attacked as a decayed story whose relevance has become history. The deterioration as an evolving, living matter also represents the historical process and thus counteracts the mythological dimension. The interactions between mythological and historical processes block and discard

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the providential tale. In other words, it confronts its limits. The introduction of decay or history within the myth at once recalls and rationalizes the collective memory that has produced the found footage and exhibits the myth as a limited version. The myth can no longer exist as unequivocal and stable form. It is no longer limitless in its consistency and becomes a relic or an outdated discourse. In another way, Susann Sontag singles out, in her essay ‘America, Seen Through Photographs, Darkly’, the notions underlying the portrait of individuals in classic photographs: ‘In the normal rhetoric of the photographic portrait, facing the camera signifies solemnity, frankness, the disclosure of the subject’s essence’ (Sonntag 1990, 38). An analogy between photography and cinema can be eased by the use of slow motion, which comes closer to the freeze frame and thus to the photographic quality of the film frames than the average cinematic speed. In the same way as described by Sontag, all the individuals portrayed in Who By Water face the camera, which implies as much a solemn pause as the supposed aperture to one’s essence. At first, the solemnity could be linked to the original mythological discourse because it assembles a solemn story designed to retrace the human ‘glorious’ origins. In this way, the original aesthetic apparatus compounds elements of mythological storytelling. The disclosure of the essence in turns seems challenged in being perceived through the looking glass of numerous recollections and distortions. If the disaggregation of figures introduces darkness and somehow a part of mystery within the portraits, it keeps the essence at bay and relies on a mythological aspect, for the myth seeks to enlighten the present by mystifying the past. Thus, the historical aspect is a bit shadowed and not entirely rationalized. Then, it reintroduces a mythological dimension. The film enrols in a tension between the decayed, historicized mythology, on the one hand, and, on the other, remains of the glorious tale perceived through the surviving mysteries of the images. Who By Water constitutes then a specific instance of Bill Morrison’s work on found footage. It intertwines the two newly introduced components such as digital reprint and dilatation of time through slow motion with the reuse of historical footages. Who By Water turns into an inquiry on the underlying collective memory of the individual portraits as well as the use of the cinematographic apparatus in this regard. The film editing varies on fragmentary and figurative processes in order to disclose specificities, enhance similarities, and distillate subtle differences or creates interplays and depths between images. It then turns towards a process of disfiguration, in reaching formal distortions reflected on the portraits, that seeks to disrupt the perception and uncover some uncanny aspects as slow motion allows time to express underlying tensions, as the cracks on the celluloid veil portraits from time to time

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and lay emphasis on the alteration. On the other hand, the film confronts inner elements of mythological representation, such as solemn portraits or shadows running through the footage, with the historical process enhanced by the decayed matter and forms. The underlying conception of mythology in the collective memory process, as an undisrupted tale of the origins, is historicized and contradicted by the traces of time. Who By Water depicts the surviving aspects of mythological storytelling, which are no longer relevant aside from the perspective of the history of representation, recalling a passage from Benjamin’s ‘Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century’: ‘They are residues of a dream world. The utilization of dream-elements in waking is the textbook example of dialectical thought. Hence dialectical thought is the organ of historical awakening (Benjamin 2002, 13).’

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NOTES 1 ‘Toute figure, par l’opération du montage, n’est-elle pas douée d’une énergie de transformation, ne se confond-elle pas avec cette matière vivante? Rappelons que la figure est une forme, donc un aspect momentanée de la matière. Son origine est le modelage (le latin figura vient de fingere, modeler). Ephémère et perméable est la forme. Si bien que sa perte entraine la libération d’une force et relance le procès figuratif’ (Faucon 2013, 15). 2

‘Toute mythologie prétend éclairer un présent à partir de l’origine illustre qu’elle lui imagine; lorsque le présent est trop rationnalisé, l’origine ne peut plus être providentielle, le mythe devient chronique et seule la généalogie garde valeur d’oracle’ (Glucksmann 1993, 71).

WORKS CITED Benjamin, Walter, The Arcade Projects. Trans. Howard Eiland, Kevin McLaughlin, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002. Danielsen, Shane. ‘Why New York is Celebrating Experimental Filmmaker Bill Morrison.’ IndieWire. IndieWire, 31 January 2012. http://www.indiewire.com/2012/01/ why-new-york-is-celebrating-experimental-filmmaker-bill-morrison-give-thisman-a-gallery-49336/. Accessed: 18 May 2017. Faucon, Teresa. Théorie du Montage. Energie, Forces et Fluides. Paris: Armand Colin, 2013. Glucksmann, André. ‘Les Aventures de la Tragédie.’ Western: Approaches, Mythologies, Auteurs-Actuers, Filmographie. Ed. Raymond Bellour. Paris: Gallimard, 1993.

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Habib, André. ‘Around the Films of Bill Morrison.’ Offscreen 18.1(2004a). http:// offscreen.com/view/morrison. Accessed: 18 May 2017. Habib, André. ‘Matter and Memory: A Conversation with Bill Morrison.’ Offscreen 8.11 (2004b). http://offscreen.com/view/morrison2. Accessed: 18 May 2017. Levine, Matt. ‘A Poetic Archaeology of Cinema: The Films of Bill Morrison.’ Walkerart. Walkerart, 18 January 2013. https://walkerart.org/magazine/bill-morrisondecasia-film. Accessed: 18 May 2017. Panofsky, Erwin. ‘Style and Meaning in Motion Pictures.’ Three Essays on Style. 1937. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1997. Royoux, Jean-Christophe. ‘The Time of Re-departure: After Cinema, the Cinema of the Subject.’ Art and Moving Image. A Critical Reader. Ed. Tanya Leighton. London: Tate Publishing, 2008. Sontag, Susan. ‘America, Seen through Photographs, Darkly.’ On Photography. 1977. New York: Anchor Book, 1990. Wees, William. Recycled Images: The Art and Politics of Found Footage Films. New York: Anthology Film Archive, 1993.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Andrea Pierron is a PhD student in the Art and Media Studies Department at the Sorbonne-Nouvelle University of Paris. She is currently writing a PhD thesis under the direction of professor Nicole Brenez, devoted to Experimental Cinema and entitled ‘Towards a Plastic History of The Experimental Film Paratext: A Study on Journals Designed By Plasticians And Filmmakers’. She has previously worked on cinematic materiology issues, focussing on the depiction of the film apparatus, processes, and techniques as examined and developed by different experimental filmmakers through either structural films (Peter Gidal) or films using early cinema materials (Ernie Gehr, Werner Nekes, Thom Andersen, Gustav Deutsch, and Kerry Laitala).

W h o by Wat e r

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CHAPTER 13

Every Stop on the F-Train Beyond and within the Restless Netherworld of (Manhattan’s) Mind Benjamin Betka

Herzogenrath, Bernd (ed.), The Films of Bill Morrison. Aesthetics of the Archive. Amsterdam University Press, 2018 DOI 10.5117/9789089649966/CH13

ABSTRACT Morrison’s Every Stop on the F Train is a short film with one of the greatest stars in the United States – Manhattan. As an audiovisual essay, this work does not illustrate or propel a distinct philosophical treatise as it is rather a constructive phenomenological provocation. Every Stop on the F-Train deals with the position of the mind as immersed (or rather manifested) in sound, vision, time, and place, which can be researched here with the unique capacities of film. Playful but also rigorous, machinic but also of humble elegance, this film reworks the linked concepts of motion pictures and locomotion. It destabilizes unquestioned notions of the viewer, content, direction, and directing, thereby harnessing the deeper potential of the medium. k e y wo r ds

space, perspective, tunnel, mass transit

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I read, no, I rather screen the short film Every Stop on the F-Train here in a slightly personal manner. My point of departure is an actual ride on the actual F-train in Manhattan in the spring of 2013. I was in New York for the second time – curious, hungry, a bit lost but nevertheless rubbernecking with glee and awe. I came for a graduate conference at CUNY, and, also being a scholar of what is known as American Studies in Germany, I was, in fact, many things: tourist, investigator, customer, and (aged) fanboy. Every accumulation of people, materials, signs, and rhythms challenges the outsider’s mind. The subway is the most urban and, I would argue, the most enigmatic and startling machines of the modern city. While only really big cities have a subway system, its use is not associated with something very prestigious, but it is irritatingly normal, like faucets and electricity. Like those resources, the subway is something that becomes relevant when it is out of order or somewhat suspended. Its effective exploitation depends on a certain amount of assess-ability (but also accessibility) and its individual user’s literacy of maps and abstract charts. For me, it depended on Josef, my generous city guide, who could identify approaching redirected trains by the people who were waiting for it. Not only does Morrison’s film (like Josef) unfold how eerie and mysterious a seemingly mundane or even boring conveyance actually is, Every Stop on the F-Train also reflects on film as a medium or (self-paced?) tool for such an unfolding of the expanse of an object – and of the definitions by which it normally goes. It deals with the magnitude and the expanse of the role of the passenger itself and thus elevates it out of the unspectacular hustle and bustle. While not a philosophical essay, F-train engages in a philosophical dialogue about the depth of the world and its contents. A few words on the peculiarity and, yes, the congeniality of this work are in order. These few minutes of moving images taken through the window of the arriving, departing, accelerating, and decelerating New York subway train may seem stern and serious. Some viewers, probably those expecting a more movie-like entertainment with actors and plots, could even be baffled and call the film obtuse or stuporous. If you wait for a punch line or a resolution other than the train’s arrival at its final stop, you could be disappointed. The film, however, is actually a playful work that explores notions such as latencies and arrivals – not as mere negative assessments frequently associated with a waste of time and effort, but as provocations on the assumed regularities of human perception and cognition. The F-train is able to transport its viewers into the midst of many things: into the heart of American culture and into the hub of philosophical (both civilian and scholarly) enquiry. But, above all, it takes us towards the tender acknowledgment that any idea of such a midst, a heart, and a central hub is a cozy fiction and a fragile tool, which does not fulfill the width of Manhattan, of the mind, and of trains in general. One could call it a

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decentering meditation and a mediation of passage as an abstract yet ubiquitous aspect of (urban) life. Morrison did not deliver a work that is transgressive for the sake of snubbing certain viewers or listeners. Its score, the sound for the train’s track, consists of very special choral music by Michael Gordon. A choir sings the names of the stops of the train. One might expect robotic announcements in a subway informing passengers about the next stop but the most human of all instruments, voices, are bundled in a unique diachronic melody in the movie.1 Their synchronicity, their sum, matches the essence of what makes the F-train the F-train and differentiates it from any train with another alphabetical denomination: the stops make the train. The sequence matters, but not what is sequenced. The cars, their speed, the engineer, and the passengers may change but the stops remain. The choir sings an identity. Its song aestheticizes seemingly mundane but actually crucial information. It clads an aspect of everyday urban life at the heart of the Empire State into an unexpected and crafty harmony. A mere list becomes a euphony. The film is literally about Every Stop on the F-Train – not every stop of the F-train. The point of view never leaves the car, the camera remains inside. We never see the train in its entirety; we are locked into the perspective of the one who gazes out of the window. Our view is fixed – the camera does not wander about the car’s interior. We are forced to take in every stop and nothing but the stops. We do not get a mere selection of stops that could be grouped along the lines of, say, architecture or clientele or weather conditions or degree of tidiness or decay. We do not gain an outsider’s (and supposedly objective) look at

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Fig. 13.1: Every Stop on the F-Train.

things in motion but are faced with the facts. This F-train is a refreshingly unauthorial and simultaneously authentic, original take on the many levels of New York’s urban netherworlds and non-places, those under the streets and within its inhabitants.

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In 2013, as I rode the F-train alone with the itinerary in my clenched and damp hand, I thought about the regulations and etiquette regarding the use of my cell phone’s camera (and about the limits of Google maps, just in case). By no means did I have the calm to just read a book or listen to some music like the Manhattanites around me. Does this train qualify as a touristy memory? Will people around me roll their eyes as I take pictures? Will they call security? Will they just ignore me? The F-train is very concrete and distinct – just like the Statue of Liberty, but which New York original will foreigners remember most after their return? The train’s coaches and cars have provoked the formation of a new kind of public sphere. In carriages, people were confronted with the behinds of horses for long periods of time or, when seated in cabins, with a small number of fellow travelers. The ability to initiate a conversation and to uphold it with manners and courtesy were important – on the train, however, people would neither learn nor remember each other’s names. A new kind of behaviour has become the standard: to each his or her own blank face. Live and let time pass. Other means of entertainment, such as lean texts like newspapers or dime novels, have taken the traveler’s attention. On the one hand, much more diverse members of society met in the bigger spaces of the coaches, but on the other hand, the opportunity for sustainable original conversation was diminished. When we think of the subway, this is the case even more so. Designed to let people in and out as fast and possible, subways offer handholds for those who will not even sit down. Paradoxically, trains – but even more so, subways – can be crammed much more effectively with people than carriages. The few (often not very comfortable) seats do not invite anyone. Traveling the city underground means to spend some time in limbo, between stops, between the comfort of home and the incentive of a non-home up along the tracks. An eerie kind of a non-place, but also a non-time emerges. In his study on the railway and its cultural and historical relevance, Wolfgang Schivelbusch reminds us of the 19th-century notion of an ‘annihilation of space and time’, at which trains supposedly succeed (2014, 33). I would argue otherwise and claim that Morrison’s film highlights exactly this limbo – a site where space and time are neither destroyed nor just discretely compressed. In the subway, the stops

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matter. It matters where and when I can get in or out, which is a follow-up question to the (sometimes quite emotive) question: where do I want to be? The journey is rather endured, a certain amount of time in this metal box is rather accepted in order to get to some other place. We pay for our ticket, but we also pay with the time we have at our disposal. My role as a tourist was, of course, quite different then: for me, being in this stunning city was enough to make me appreciate every moment. I was so amazed by my immediate surroundings that I kept asking myself whether some quick pictures might be appropriate (probably to be posted on Facebook with some snazzy comment so I could boast about my trip). However, Every Stop on the F-Train can be acknowledged within a much more fundamental, deeper, artistic, and philosophical dialogue that inter­ mingles trains and film shortly after their almost coincidental invention well over a century ago. The film negotiates crucial themes of cultural anthropology and the history of ideas: wheels and reels are inherently connected as both focus on the complex relationship between velocity and the perception of time, space, and motion. Locomotion was a vast cultural, economical, and historical innovation and bears a tremendous cinematographic scope. The concept of the subway, however, both tightens and alters this relationship in a rather sombre way. It is a train that predominantly manoeuvres in the dark, an entity that is controlled by extensively invisible forces. The most bold and simple connection of the concept of film and the concept of the train might come when we try to find the differences between windows and screens. Is one not quite a bit like the other? In the train, the landscape rushes into one direction and the passengers gain a new perspective on a new slice of the world at every instant. Even the most ordinary landscape becomes something vivid and ever-changing. The horizon becomes a wave of matter that disappears behind the right or the left (but never top or bottom) frame of the window. What we see through the windows is not-here, it is a realm we colloquially call outside (which puts us into a here that is somewhat inside): as we move within our train car through the world, we are separated from it (the world) and can neither influence our traveling speed nor make the window’s gaze (its alignment) linger on something. The intersected locations become a part of the past and are easily forgotten as they disappear. The film screen could be considered a train window that does not have to respect most of these rules – while the viewer is also distant from what gets framed on the screen and cannot force the camera’s view, the director and editor of the film can. In his book The Power of Movies: How Screen and Mind Interact, Colin McGinn invests a lot of effort in an analysis of frames of all kinds as he asks what we do when we look into things (2005, 19). Unfortunately, he only considers windows in build-

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ings and not in trains. However, he writes that ‘[b]eing windowlike, the [film] screen pulls the eye in, sending it in search of objects of interest’ (McGinn 2005. 23).2 This can also be taken into account when thinking about trains. What do we look at while we look out the window? We take (in) what is offered. We might twist our necks when something extraordinary appears on one side and our train passes it. Our interest, if not fixed at some object of entertainment we brought with us for the ride, stretches out into the world. Hold on. The beautiful analogy, parallel, and equalization of window and screen is peculiar in the subway as this kind of train does not necessarily have some landscape to offer. There is blunt and plain matter in front of the window – there is no depth, there is no possibility to witness changes in proximity and direction. There is darkness, only to be illuminated very briefly by the passing subway’s very own twitching lights. No celestial bodies are present. The directions of up and down are only produced by the movement of the train. An alteration of gravity would hardly be detected. I sit on the F-train as it passes underground through the nothingness3 and I think to myself: ‘We could all go to hell, straight down, like in a vertical shaft. The devil just has to switch the current center of gravity to the side.’4 Of course, Hollywood has found successful ways to include such a spatial-epistemological-existential turbidity in big productions. Examples can be found from the thrillers of Hitchcock to Lynch. It is probably most prominent (spectacularized maybe) in the baroque imageries of Christopher Nolan’s Inception. Here, it is also gravity that influences the matryoshka-dolled quests of its merry band of crooks. The title of Morrison’s film can be read as such a connective lifeline. It does not, however, focus on an inception, on the preciousness of starting points, but rather on reception – on the necessity of straight lines and lists for things to be actually what we call them. We can keep it together and oppose any ontological doubt and exasperation by the mantra-like repetition of the correct order of the line’s many stops (and more will be remarked on questions of sound and chanting below). The underground platforms are reassuring beacons of reason as they enlighten the windows of the underground trains with hope in a particular rhythm. Saying that interest stretches out into the world is thus troublesome with regards to the subway, whose windows can and do become black reflective glass walls frequently. So does our interest really stretch? This notion must be qualified a bit further, because we are dealing with the subway here. As previously stated, we do not necessarily know where we are when traveling underground. We reach an etymological impasse, which can be quite telling nevertheless. Inter esse, the being in-between, can be translated back and forth and bring remarkably clear foundations on human sense-making.

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| 205 Fig. 13.2: Every Stop on the F-Train.

PHILOSOPHIES AND OBJECT(IVE)S I was at CUNY to present a little paper deriving hybrid concepts from (very specific) film theory and (very general) philosophy. An essay collection on postmodern questions of experience and knowledge accompanied me in my mind and in my backpack. The width of the notion of perspective startled me, especially in these days. It was another thing I was interested in, a thing with which I spent quite some time (in ruminative contemplation) – and time is of central importance here. The notion of interest has a crucial connection with the notion of meanwhile, which Ian Bogost explores in his Alien Phenomenology. He is a protagonist of what has come to be known as object-oriented ontologies (OOO), a more recent field in philosophy, which opposes correlationism – a tendency of scholars to relate the human being into the sole centre of ideas, worlds, contexts, and processes. Instead, this faction of thinkers favors an ever-becoming but largely non-caring (and uninterested) universe, which should best be tackled by speculation and less by explanation. Bogost continues concepts introduced by Husserl, Latour, and many others and finds these quite lofty lines to introduce his pointedly alien phenomenology: ‘It’s a phenomenology, to be sure. But it is a phenomenology that explodes like shrapnel, leaving behind the human as solitary consciousness like the Voyager space craft leaves behind the heliosphere on its way beyond the boundaries of the solar system’ (2012,

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32). It is through the concept of the meanwhile and the eeriness of the subway, worked out accurately in Morrison’s film, that this path of thought can be acknowledged. The subway and all the epistemological turmoil it brings, as pointed out above, is, of course, an object made by man for man. But questions of its supposed artificialness do not matter as I claim that we do not actually know what a subway does and is. Film can (figuratively) show us this ignorance. We can only speculate and expect that everything works out. This expectation, this trust even, is not glamorous: many people have it as they use the trains on a daily basis. Actually, there is a lot going on in the meanwhile. Actually, all kinds of trains make all kinds of stops in the train grid of New York, but, as passengers, we only see one stop at a time. By isolating the F-train and dedicating a film to it, Morrison sheds light on the massive whole that is the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which, then again, is enmeshed into the whole that is the city of New York and the Empire State. We are stuck in the diachronic line of our experience, we travel via blunt dichotomies such as here-there and then-now. We necessarily centralize our perception of the world. The film and its makers underline the weight of time by letting us question the frame, the slice, and the outlook (?) that we use (literally) regarding the world. As viewers, we depend, as said above, on the angle the filmmaker sets the camera. In the F-train, there seems to be a very strict regime: the train is one big camera dolly that moves the lens exactly sideways past the platforms, walls, and other surroundings of the line. Cameras are framers but not copying machines that patiently replicate a given reality. Their screen is a very peculiar kind of window – in the F-train, both are fused into one argument against the idea that anything moves only straightforward. Again, very basic categories (which we tend to label as objective truths) are debunked as brittle: of course, the train moves ahead! But, in the film, we only see a lateral change of perspective. What differentiates progression from retrogression? Or, to put it more bluntly, do those subway travelers actually get somewhere or do they just evade the city, skipping sideways like boxers in the ring? The subway train can be acknowledged as a mysterious object, although it is habitually mundane. Where does it end in time, where does it end in space? The F-train makes us question the simplicities we assume by confronting us with a very simple perspective – the horizon on the side. We think of the train as any other object, of having three dimensions: its length, width, and depth. But we, the people, can never walk around it. We could say that any train is two-dimensional rather than three-dimensional, actually, and maybe dismiss it as not worthy of our attention. But is it not striking how little we know about the speeding metal box we deliberately enter so that our bodies and belongings can be yanked on underneath streets, rivers, and buildings? Graham

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­ arman embraces incomprehensibility when he sketches quadruple objects H in his eponymous 2011 book, maintaining that ‘[c]onscious awareness makes up only a tiny portion of our lives. For the most part, objects withdraw into a shadowy subterranean realm that supports or conscious activity while seldom erupting into view’ (2011, 37). We will never grasp the whole of any object’s reality (Harman 2011, 39). Notwithstanding Harman’s figurative language, one can claim that the subway train is, like any object, ‘a dark crystal veiled in a private vacuum: irreducible to its own pieces, and equally irreducible to its outward relations with other things’ (Harman 2011, 47). We are in the dark. Films such as F-train can lay bare our ignorance by gathering and storing light. Our interest is a reductive influence that needs to be questioned from time to time. Twice, the F-train, like any train, stops for good: one of these points is called terminus, the end of any means of transportation. As the train and the film approaches its end, light begins to shine. We are back under open sky. Finally, Coney Island, of all places, is reached – a place for amusement, cotton candy, for pastimes, and temporary liberation. It is a place where you do not go every day. Staying on the F-train until its final stop would thus mean that this subway ride was indeed special and not habitual, a certain treat, maybe to celebrate a specific day or to meet someone special. A line can only have two ends. The rails do not allow truly free travel, but Coney Island serves as a happy ending. As a truly last stop, any train crash is also a crash of schedules, of assumptions regarding the world. Crashing subways are an even deeper surprise that is even more shattering and metal-bending than other crashes because of the darkness and the absence of open space (and safe distance). There is no means of escape for the flying debris. There are no witnesses, no surrounding (human) eyes in the tunnels. It is too dark for CCTV. In his classic 1980s novel White Noise, Don Delillo explores the visibility and ultimately paranoia-inspiring traits of modern civilian life. Just because something cannot be seen does not mean that it is not there, it does not mean that uncanny powers are at work underneath the surface. The subway, a place for a final fatal peek-a-boo. Hello, here are tons of grinding steel coming your way right now. You see the lights coming at you and it is too late to lament your fate and too late to curse the very fact that it is too late. The notion of meanwhile evaporates as everything is suddenly now and over in an instant. I survived the train, the MTA, NYC, and 2013. Today, I am glad regarding and viewing films such as Morrison’s because it helps me and others to tackle and to continue bulky words such as perspective, motion, and objects with cunning, patience, and grace. Even while in transit.5

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NOTES 1

The handclap of the human palm is of course also a very special instrument that provokes quite a lot of philosophical debate. However, the human voice carries words, intonations, and rhythm and is thus more (but by no means indefinite) means of expression.

2

Consider the impossibility of footnotes in film. In texts the reader|consumer|recipient can let his eyes get closer to the page, read at his own pace, and come to the conclusion that footnotes should be ignored altogether as the frequently state something very obvious or subsidiary and are altogether quite boring like yet another trip downtown in a grayish battered subway car.

3

Actually nothingness is an inappropriate word. If it existed, the word everythingness would be more appropriate since there is stuff, earth, dirt, and stones (our planet) all around the subway’s tracks. This density must be understood as

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incompatible to our minds which are eager to find significances and to differentiate. There is not vision within the earth and sound does is not carried well (if at all). 4

I think so because my expertise in raucous sensationalist cinema travels with me underground as I am the vessel|incubator for it.

5

It might sound too touristy or patient but one could say that of course every arrival enables another departure. The process of traveling might have become less obvious sometimes but it actually only stops when the brain itself, this odd objectifying object, stops receiving nourishment from the lump of flesh below, the baggage we will probably always carry or get carried by heavier mobile entities. And eventually I get to JFK and am suddenly amazed by film’s capacity to grasp the concept of the plane.

WORKS CITED Bogost, Ian. Alien Phenomenology or What It’s Like to Be a Thing. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012. Delillo, Don. White Noise. New York: Penguin, 1985. Harman, Graham. The Quadruple Object. Washington: Zero Books, 2011. McGinn, Colin. The Power of Movies: How Screen and Mind Interact. New York: Vintage, 2005. Schivelbusch, Wolfgang. The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the Nineteenth Century. 1977. Oakland: University of California Press, 2014.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR Benjamin Betka works on the relationship between films, brains, and existential desperation. After a first contact with communication and information science, he studied English, philosophy, and pedagogics in Lower Saxony and Texas. His main field of research is the intersection between screen media, entropic ontologies, and concepts of suffering in a (post?)Deleuzean context.

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CHAPTER 14

Spark of Being Bachelor Machine Bérénice Reynaud

Herzogenrath, Bernd (ed.), The Films of Bill Morrison. Aesthetics of the Archive. Amsterdam University Press, 2018 DOI 10.5117/9789089649966/CH14

ABSTRACT As Morrison mimics the process of fabrication of the Frankenstein’s Creature by ‘stitching together’ footage of heterogeneous origins, this essay aims to produce a meta-discourse on this process by ‘stitching together’ fragments of two short stories by Jorge Luis Borges and notes on an exhibition curated about the concept of ‘bachelor machine’. These texts displace ‘the monstrous’ toward issues of the circularity of the gaze, the question of who dreamt the dreamer, and the violent obsessions that mark ‘the age of mechanical reproduction’. Morrison displaces the terrain from the filmic (metaphorical illustrations of a narrative) onto the pro-filmic (the conditions in which the footage was taken and film made), shifting the question of ‘the monstrous’ from the Creature to the cinematic apparatus itself. k e y wo r ds

bachelor machines, mise en abyme, off-screen space, orphan films

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We are all the products of these images Morrison With relief, with humiliation, with terror, he realized that he, too, was but appearance, that another man was dreaming him. Borges 1998a, 100

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The phrase ‘spark of being’ comes from the Chapter 5 of Mary Shelley’s novel, as Victor Frankenstein recounts his story to Captain Robert Walton, whose ship is trapped in the frozen Arctic sea. James Whale’s 1931 Boris Karloff vehicle, however, is the version that comes immediately to mind. Renamed Henry, Frankenstein experiments with dead body parts and electricity, and mayhem comes not only from the grotesque shape of his creation, but from human trespass: his assistant Fritz had secured the brain of a criminal. The method used in the novel is more mysterious and no misstep takes place: ‘I collected the instruments of life around me, that I might infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing that lay at my feet’ (Shelley 2008, 26). Unlike Whale, Morrison bookends his film with polar sequences, a faithful reflection of the novel’s structure.1 The original narrative is referenced by intertitles separating the different ‘chapters’ (as in silent cinema). Yet, ‘there’s no visible murder, no mayhem […] just some Army footage [in which] they are dragging a corpse off’ (Morrison, 2010). The Creature, mentioned four times in the titles, seems nowhere to be seen … or is he? Is he the lone sled driver glimpsed at a distance in the midst of a relentless ice field framed by two icebergs? Is he the caped figure standing in the last shot’s non-descript landscape? Does the fear he inspires multiply him in the eyes of the onlookers? Is he hiding within the bodies of these men (one walking with a cane, one smoking, one in a suit) who stand under some mediaeval arch, looking for something off-screen, poised for an impossible encounter? Or is he haunting a sequence in the last chapter (‘The Creature’s Pursuit’), in which a dozen ordinary looking men, reiterating similar gestures, yet in different settings (mountain roads, forests, country landscapes, fields of pure snow), ride dog-driven sleds? Spark of Being displaces the ‘fiendish’ aspect of the story from the visible to the invisible, from the objects of the cinematic gaze to the cinematic apparatus. Cinema begets monsters because it is a monster itself. It ‘snatches’ fragments from the real world, suspending them between life and death, between presence and absence, in a process André Bazin describes as la momie du

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changement (‘change mummified’) (2004, 15). Escaping the realm of human imagination, mummies, ghouls, ghosts, doppelgängers, vampires, minotaurs, deviant robots, cyborgs, the Jewish Golem, as well as Frankenstein’s creature, become not only cinematic beings, but metaphors for what cinema does best: creating an illusion and then taking it away from us.

[I was] using the Frankenstein story as a skeleton, hanging this music and these images off it […] At some point the creator, the filmmaker, has lost control and now the material is running ­rampant. Morrison 2010

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2 Thinking about an adaptation of Frankenstein for about a decade, Morrison collected boxes of analogue footage and transferred them to HD. ‘A couple of shots ended in Decasia’, [and] ‘maybe the same icebergs show up in How to Pray, Sparks of Being and [the performance] The Sinking of the Titanic (2007)’ (Morrison 2010). A dialectic is woven between intentionality and accident, authorship and (to paraphrase physics) ‘the strength of the material’ – with particular acuity since none of the footage had been shot with the story of Frankenstein in mind (in sharp contradistinction with two of Morrison’s most recent projects, Miners Hymn and The Great Flood). Decayed/distressed or not, the original footage – educational films, Army training films, newsreels – was subjected to a form of embezzlement. The most obvious instance is Frank Hurley’s 35mm shots of Ernest Shackleton’s ship Endurance stuck in the Antarctic ice, standing in for Walton’s aborted Arctic adventures. Beyond this transgressive mode of equivalence (South Pole = North Pole), embezzling the expressive qualities of Hurley’s footage allows Morrison to operate a Freudian displacement from the content of representation to the off-screen conditions that made the representation possible. Spark of Being makes two discrete allusions to the cinematic apparatus. First, the opening shot revolves around an antique, bulky 35mm camera, eventually focussing on the lens, inside which a title is superimposed: ‘Hypnotic Pictures (Morrison’s organization) and Greenleaf Music (Dave Douglas’s record label) present’. This triggers the memory of the opening shot of Le Mépris (Contempt, 1963) – the lens of a 35mm camera over which we heard a voice (long mistaken for Jean-Luc Godard’s) read the credits. Whether or not it

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was the master’s voice, these were the master’s words, up to a slightly altered citation, falsely attributed to Bazin: ‘cinema substitutes for our gaze a world that matches our desires’.2 There is no such robust assertion of authorship at the beginning of Spark of Being – just the mention of a collaboration between two arts organizations. The next two titles, ‘a Bill Morrison film’ and ‘original compositions Dave Douglas’, are superimposed over shots of a turning wheel and microscopic enlargements of bacteria before the enigmatic view of a crowd of several hundreds – maybe even thousands – of men, dressed in the same way (dark suits, fedoras, a few bowlers) massed by the façade of an imposing (official?) building and gaping, with undisguised hostility, at a spectacle off-screen. As we are poised to see ‘a film about Frankenstein’, it is easy to imagine that ‘the Creature’ is the object of their dread. What we see in the next shot, instead, are spots of light moving over a black background. The title follows, printed over an image of the sea against a mountain landscape, with Douglas’s eminently recognizable jazz score. In the same shot, Mary Shelley is credited as ‘the inspiration’. The next image – an ice floe – serves as a backdrop for the names of the musicians and the last credit: ‘directed and edited by Bill Morrison’. The following sequence contains some of Hurley’s footage, so the bulky machine was an index of the conditions in which it was taken. Early cinematographers lugged around these heavy cameras, tons of equipment and stock, as far as the South Pole, and brought back extraordinary images – ships stuck in ice, sailors falling ill – with heroism and determination bordering on madness.3 Cinema, produced in such outlandish conditions, demanding such sacrifices, was a ‘monstrous’ endeavour. Hurley’s footage is all the more apt at evoking the ‘pro-filmic’ as it appears as fragments – and, as discussed later, as repeated fragments – instead of being subsumed into the texture of a documentary.4 As noted by Mulvey, once a fragment is excerpted, ‘the time of the camera, its embalmed time, comes to the surface. […] It brings with it an imaginary of the filming into the mind’s eye, the off-screen space of the crew and the apparatus’ (2006, 173). When the ‘making’ of a film is not about the ‘time of the camera’, but the time of collecting and editing archival fragments, the ‘pro-filmic’, we become aware of the work involved in assembling the footage. Aiming to ‘merge text and form’ (Morrison 2010), Spark of Being is a reflexive film.

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He dreamed the heart warm, active, secret – about the size of a closed fist, a garnet-colored thing inside the dimness of a human body that was still faceless and sexless; he dreamed it, with ­painstaking love, for fourteen brilliant nights. Borges 1998a, 98

3 Frankenstein or The Modern Prometheus sprung from the mind of a bright nineteen-year-old woman – the daughter of political philosopher William Goodwin and influential British feminist Mary Wollstonecraft; the lover (later the wife) of the Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley; and a friend of Lord Byron, who, as they were vacationing together by Lake Geneva, proposed his companions of leisure that they should each write a ghost story … A fecund line of analysis draws parallels between Mary Shelley’s life and her creation. Frankenstein narrates ‘what happens when a man tries to have a baby without a woman’ (Mellor 1990, 41). In 1815, Mary’s first baby had died in infancy, while Percy did not seem to care. The character of Victor Frankenstein – who recoils in horror when he first encounters his ‘son’ – and details of his history seem inspired by Percy Shelley’s biography: as a student, he had experimented with chemistry and he had a sister called Elizabeth (the name of Victor’s adopted sister, sweetheart, and then bride). Spark of Being, however, does not explore gender-fuelled tensions, but displaces the issues of dominance and agency, the gaze, its object, and the desire aimed at the object onto a mise en abyme of the cinematic apparatus. It is not easy to make a man, it is not easy to make a film. In both cases, we have a composite creature ‘stitched’ from disparate parts, some recognizable, some not, and the familiar is made uncanny. In chapters 11-16 of the novel, when the Creature meets Victor again, he narrates what has happened to him after being violently rejected. For months, he had hidden in a ‘hovel’ near a cottage inhabited by a family in exile: the father, son, daughter, and, later, the son’s Arabian lover. The family is warm, loving, and literate. The Creature learns to read and becomes familiar with the the human mores he discovers while watching them in secret. Morrison regroups this episode in chapters five to eight. While often located in an idyllic, Alpine setting, these images are banal, but, as the titles inform us, since they represent what the Creature sees, they are infused with a poignant sense of longing – increased by the nostalgic tone of the music. In ‘The Creature Watches’, a man follows his young son down the slope of a mountain; a woman in traditional peasant costume feeds geese; a man hacks wood, another

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Fig. 14.1: The gaze of the camera: 1970s processed soft-porn, suggesting the innocent voyeurism of early erotic cinema.

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woman turns a wheel, a little girl carries a bucket. Another little girl, who carries a book in her mouth, stares at us, therefore breaking the fourth wall, and detaches herself from the texture in which she was incorporated. The shot now conjures the loveliest and the most frightening moment of Whale’s film – the tragically aborted friendship between the Monster and young Maria. What the Creature learns from these stolen glimpses is the impossibility to ever be inserted into a familial or biological continuum. He will never be ‘a son’, never become a father. His fate is to repulse his maker and to kill little girls. Beyond debonair domestic bliss, what the Creature desires is ‘romantic love’, which Morrison translates into a luminous, strangely moving moment. A pair of attractive models – the girl with long flowing hair – run naked through nature before intertwining their bodies in slow motion on the ground. Before inserting it into the film, Morrison digitally distressed the sequence of a 1970s soft-porn movie by blending it with a high-resolution digital scan of abstract deteriorated nitrate (Morrison 2010) – suggesting the innocence of early erotic cinema, the lost paradise of an unattainable ‘normality’. In the novel, observing the cottage family is what prompts the Creature to ask Frankenstein to give him a female companion. Unable to face the ethical dilemma of the task, Victor destroys his work before completion. Furious, the Creature taunts him: ‘I will see you on your wedding night.’ Morrison’s narrative ellipse (‘The Doctor’s Wedding’ follows ‘Observations of Romantic Love’) makes sense. The strangeness of this chapter rests mostly on the musical composition, wilfully at odds with the featured Tyrolean pageantry (brass bands, fräuleins in folk costumes, people feasting, couples dancing), foregrounding the disquieting absence of a diegetic soundtrack: people talk and sing, but we do not hear their voices; they dance, but we do not hear their footsteps; they play different instruments than the ones that we hear. The tone is discrete, a mixture of acoustic and electronic sounds, then it slows down and becomes elegiac, even mournful. At this point, Morrison loops, a small section of the dance nine times, with close-ups of skirts twirling and a man who appears to be yodelling, again and again, in the background – as the repetitive gestures of an automaton5 or the evasive flickers of a Kinetoscope peep show.6 Then, the sequence becomes completely silent.

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If I returned before nightfall, I did so because of the terrible dread inspired in me by the faces of the people – colourless faces, as flat as the palm of one’s hand. […] The crude supplications of the masses were signs that I had been recognized. The people prayed, fled, fell prostrate before me. Borges 1998b, 220

4

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The film’s tenth chapter, ‘The Creature in Society’, comprises a single shot, which reprises the enigmatic image of a crowd of men gaping off-screen; now it is held longer (one minute against ten seconds), so we have time to absorb more details: an illegible placard stands out from the midst of the crowd; a little girl moves among the men; a man wearing a worker’s cap appears; the men are not talking, but keep staring in our direction. This does not create a Kuleshov effect, since this image is followed by another title, ‘The Creature Confronts His Creator’, but it seems patent that they are organizing a sort of public protest (political, unionist) and that the object of their hostility is the newsreel crew, commissioned by the powers-that-be or the industrialists they are protesting against In their silent, determined resistance, their defiant way of returning the gaze of the camera, these men look ominous. By reusing the same image in a different context, Morrison flips its meaning. It is not only the

Fig. 14.2: The gaze to the camera: where is the monster here?

Creature that appears frightening to the common man, it is humanity that is frightening to the Creature (as in Borges’ story about another monster, Asterion the Minotaur). Towards the end of the film, this shift in perspective is deepened, as images of the Antarctic expedition are recycled, revealing what the Creature might have seen or what might have been done to him. Throughout the novel, Victor is the true ‘undead’. He faints, is in a coma or burning with fever, reaches Walton’s boat in a ‘wretched condition’, and eventually dies onboard. The whole fantastic tale could have been the delirium of a dying man, as in Raúl Ruiz’s Mistérios de Lisboa (Mysteries of Lisbon 2010). The repeated shot in which sailors are trying to revive a man on the deck, first shown in Chapter 1, then in the penultimate chapter, ‘The Doctor Flees’, opens a vertiginous equivalence between Victor and his Creature – like the ending of Borges’ ‘The Circular Ruins’. It could show the care provided by Walton’s crew to Victor, as well as the process of ‘infusing a spark of being into a lifeless thing’. This grounds the hypothesis that the Monster only existed in Victor’s mind: semi-conscious, his limbs manipulated, his body revived several times during the narrative, he may have hallucinated himself as an inert mass of flesh being brought to life by mysterious means. Yet, if Victor dreamt his Creature, who, in turn, dreamt of Victor, and backed his tale with a no-less-fantastical story of a mythical being he is the only one to have seen and who disappears with the intent of self-immolating? The answer: Captain Walton, a failed writer with a ‘love for the marvellous’ (Shelley 2008, 6). Stuck in ice, faced with the failure of his expedition and with a possible mutiny, he writes letters to his sister Margaret, turning her into a vicarious accomplice of extraordinary happenstances, rendering his own travails more exciting – not unlike so many ‘travellers accounts’ that had blossomed before the invention of photography.7 Morrison’s illustrations of these ‘pre-age of mechanical reproduction’ fantasies8 through images taken after the invention of cinema foregrounds the epistemological structure made possible by such invention. The Creature emanated from Victor’s desire, while Victor himself may have simply emanated from Walton’s desire. In this Russian doll/mirror structure, something went wrong. As Walter Benjamin noted in his often-reproduced 1935 essay, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, cinema took it as its privilege/responsibility to produce images and sound to illustrate this crisis.

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Marcel Duchamp coined the phrase ‘bachelor machine’ to designate the lower part of his piece The Large Glass (The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even). […] Michel Carrouges […] redefined this theme as […] ‘the Gordian knot of the interference between mechanization, terror, eroticism and religion or anti-religion.’ Carrouges 1954, 24-25 ‘Bachelor machines simultaneously assert the power of eroticism and its negation, death and immortality, torture and wonderland, thunderbolt and resurrection. […] They are “bachelor” for they necessarily include a sexual component repressed by mechanics themselves. […] Energy, whose origin is organic, is folded upon itself by mechanics that transforms it into an i­ ndefinite repetition, a sort of obsessive immortality that mimics the ­forbidden reproduction – begetting.’

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Caillet and Bâ 1989, 44-45

5 In the second chapter, ‘The Traveller’s Story’, Victor’s conception and childhood are suggested through a second discrete allusion to cinema – and its infancy. The trembling flame of a candle is enclosed into a magic lantern, a hand closes the gate; the light is projected through the lens. This is followed by a tiny, pulsating white shape at the centre of a dark screen that comes closer and closer to us, revealing itself as the ultrasound of a foetus in the womb. The third shot is the overexposed head of a little boy who looks like an alien creature – strange, sensitive, melancholy, and lost. Using glass plates and a number of other objects, either flat or tri-dimensional, magic lanterns were used (and still are) to create fantastic spectacles of ghosts, spirits, or purely abstract forms floating in the air.9 The 1976 Paris exhibition inspired by Carrouges’ research on ‘bachelor machines’ included a filmic adaptation of Adolfo Bioy Casares’ The Invention of Morel.10 In order to keep the woman he desires captive in his private island, a man invents a machine that reproduces the images of the people its shoots – to eternity. The same scene is played again and again, until a fugitive stranded on the island chances upon it, falls in love with the woman as well, and, in order to be with her, walks in front the machine – having understood that it will kill him (cf. Casares 2004). As it destroys the souls of the people whose images it reproduces, Morel’s invention is a monstrous variation on both the magic lantern and the camera. It is a perfect bachelor machine, merging the desire to (pro) create with the desire to kill, the specular drive with the urge to possess and

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control, rearticulating the fears of those who are indeed convinced that ‘taking’ their images also means stealing their souls. It also points out a purely technological tragedy: to enter the realm of the illusion/replication created by the machine, both Morel and the fugitive have to become images themselves. This brings us back to the defiance of the crowd of men in fedoras facing the camera. Our condition as subjects caught in the age of mechanical reproduction is that, at any moment, our image can be used to articulate somebody else’s discourse, or the discourse of an institution that oppresses or ignores us, as is powerfully expressed by Godard in Ici et ailleurs (Here and Elsewhere, 1976). The ‘bachelor machine’ of cinema begets composite, artificial beings that have no biological parents and borrow their limbs, facial expressions, and emotions from actual people – in parallel with the monstrous creations discussed by Carrouges: the Golem11 and Frankenstein’s Creature. At the core of cinema lurks the desire to compete with the Creator, who ‘made man into his image’. It is intent on producing images with which we can identify and that may function as a flattering mirror, but it risks manufacturing alienated reproductions, caricatures – Marilyn Monroe killing herself because she could not stand ‘that woman’ staring at her from the screen. Victor wanted to make a man that would resemble him; he ended up with the misshapen projection of his worst nightmares. Without fathers or mothers, these monsters are ‘orphans’. And what are the leftovers fabricated by the bachelor machine of cinema? Orphan films. Used officially by the Library of Congress after 1933, the term denotes films whose copyright holders cannot be identified and that are ‘outside commercial preservation programs, newsreels, silent films, avant-garde works, documentaries and others’ (Usai 1999). They constitute the basic material out of which Morrison has crafted his oeuvre.

In the cosmogonies of the Gnostics, the demiurges knead up a red Adam who cannot manage to stand; as rude and inept and elementary as that Adam of dust was the Adam of dream wrought from the sorcerer’s nights. – Borges 1998a, 98-99

6 Collecting, transferring, splicing together bits of ‘orphan’ footage and hanging them onto the ‘skeleton’ of a preexisting monster story, Morrison plunges into the intimate waters of his own ‘desire for cinema’. It involves the project

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of creating something new out of preexisting material, but also the will to control this material. For Mulvey, with digital technology ‘the desire for possession […] can now be fulfilled […] in the repetition of movements, gestures, looks, actions. […] The human figure becomes an extension of the machine, conjuring the pre-cinematic ghosts of automata. The fragmentation of the narrative […] the privileging of certain sequences, all return the question of sadism to Freud’s concept of repetition compulsion’ (2006, 170).

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Commenting on Raymond Bellour’s work with film fragments, she adds: ‘Film subjected to repetition and return […] suffers from the violence caused by extracting a fragment from the whole. […] But […] this process “unlocks” the film fragment and opens it up to new kinds of relations and revelations’ (Mulvey 2006, 179). Paralleling Victor Frankenstein’s ‘compositing’ a man out of various material, Morrison clearly exerts some violence on the archival footage he uses – looping a Tyrolean dance, distressing a well-preserved 1970s flick, repeating the same sequences in different contexts – , while breathing a new life into these orphan fragments. Meanwhile, he finds himself facing the unexpected ‘behaviour’ of the material he has assembled: the gaze of the little girl running with a book in her mouth, the defiant stare of the men in fedoras, the overwhelming snowscapes in which the Endurance is stuck, the disturbing beauty of the abstract colour shapes of degraded films. The delight we have watching Spark of Being comes from the tension it creates between sadism and surrender, from its ability to take us through the looking glass from ‘illusion’ to ‘being’ and back again, from its elegant change of perspective between a man afraid of his creation and a lonely monster afraid of people. Like Flaubert, Victor Frankenstein could have said ‘I am my Creature’. He actually became it, since popular culture calls the monster by his name. They were inverted mirrors of each other, both afraid of the darkness in their souls – but then … somebody else was dreaming them, writing them, filming them, and, finally, recomposing them with fragments torn from our collective bachelor machine.

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NOTES 1

While taking liberties with the novel, Kenneth Branagh’s Mary Shelley’s Franken-

2

This is a slight misquote from Michel Mourlet ‘Sur un art ignoré’, published in

stein (1994) keeps the Arctic sequences. Cahiers du cinéma No 98, August 1959 and republished in Mourlet, Sur un art ignoré, 34. 3

Frank Hurley was reportedly called ‘Mad’ Frank.

4

Hurley’s 1919 documentary on the Shackleton expedition was restored by the BFI in 1998.

5

Like Olympia in E.T.A. Hoffmann’s ‘The Sandman’ (1817), which inspired Sigmund Freud’s text ‘The Uncanny’ (1919).

6

Kinetoscope parlours allowed patrons to view short silent films, projected in loop, through a peephole. See http://www.earlycinema.com/technology/kinetoscope.

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html Accessed: 2 July 2015. 7

The ‘truchement’ or ‘drogman’ was a middleman offering his services as a guide and translator to Europeans traveling through the Middle East. He would invent the existence of monsters in areas he did not want to cross and captive princesses dying to be introduced to the foreigner for a fee. Hence, the origin of many Orientalist myths. Hassoun, ‘Le truchement’, 21-26.

8

Nicéphore Niépce invented photography in 1816. First published in 1818, Frankenstein had been composed a couple of years prior. The narrative takes place during the eighteenth century.

9

About magic lanterns, see, in particular http://www.luikerwaal.com/indexx_ uk.htm, Accessed 2 July 2015.

10 Emidio Greco’s L’invenzione di Morel (Italy, 1974). 11 In Jewish tradition/folklore, the Golem was created from inanimate matter, misshapen and unable to speak. Legend has it that, in the sixteenth century, a golem created to defend Prague against pogroms went on a murderous rampage.

WORKS CITED Bazin, André. ‘Ontology of the Photographic Image.’ What is Cinema. Trans. Hugh Gray. Berkley: University of California Press, 2004. 9-16. Bioy Casares, Adolfo, The Invention of Morel. Trans. Ruth L.C. Simms. New York: New York Review Books Classic, 2004. Borges, Jorge Luis. ‘The Circular Ruins.’ Collected Fictions. Trans. Andrew Hurley. New York: Penguin Books, 1998a. 96-100.

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Borges, Jorge Luis. ‘The House of Asterion.’ Collected Fictions. Trans. Andrew Hurley. New York: Penguin Books, 1998b. 220-22. Caillet, Elisabeth, and Catherine Bâ. ‘L’Art Comme Jubilation Critique.’ Aster 9 (1989): 43-67. Carrouges, Michel. Les Machines Célibataires. Paris: Arcanes, 1954. Hassoun, Jacques. ‘Le Truchement.’ L’Exil de la Langue. Paris: Pont Hors Ligne, 1993. 21-34. Mellor, Anne K. Mary Shelley: Her Life, Her Fiction, Her Monsters. London: Routledge, 1990. Morrison, Bill. ‘Conversation with Philip Bither.’ Billmorrisonfilm.com.: Walker Art Center: Bill Morrison in Conversation with Curator Philip Bither, Oct 2010. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A7ZY6I9H6-o. Accessed: 10 July 2015. Mourlet, Michel. Sur un Art Ignoré: La Mise en Scène Comme Langage. Paris: Ramsay, 2008.

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Mulvey, Laura. ‘The Possessive Spectator.’ Death 24x a Second – Stillness and the Moving Image. London: Reaktion Books, 2006. 161-180. Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein or the Modern Prometheus. Project Gutenberg, 17 June 2008. http://www.gutenberg.org/files/84/84-h/84-h.htm. Accessed: 12 May 2014. Usai, Paolo Cherchi. ‘What is an Orphan Film? Definition, Rationale and Controversy.’ sc.edu, 23 September 1999. https://www.sc.edu/filmsymposium/archive/ orphans2001/usai.html. Accessed: 24 July 2015.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Bérénice Reynaud is the author of Nouvelles Chines, nouveaux cinémas (Paris, 1999), and Hou Hsiao-hsien’s ‘A City of Sadness’ (London, 2002). Her essays have been published in Sight & Sound, French Films: Texts and Contexts, Chinese Films in Focus (U.K.); Resolutions: Essays on Contemporary Video Practices, The Routledge Encyclopedia of Contemporary Chinese Culture, The New Urban Generation, DV-MADE CHINA: Digital Subjects and Social Transformations after Independent Film, Film Comment, Afterall (USA); CinemaScope (Canada); Senses of Cinema (Australia), Cahiers du cinéma, Le Monde diplomatique, Libération, Vingt ans de théories féministes sur le cinéma (France); Meteor, Springerin, Kolik (Austria), Nosferatu (Spain); Storia del Cinema Mondiale (Italy); and The New Chinese Documentary Movement (Hong Kong), among others. She has curated a number of film and video series for Artists Space, The Collective for Living Cinema, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Museum of the Moving Image (New York); the UCLA Film and Television Archives and the China Onscreen Biennial (Los Angeles); The Cinémathèque française, The Festival d’Automne, and the Galerie nationale du Jeu de Paume (Paris); and the Kerala International Film Festival (India).

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She is a correspondent for the San Sebastian International Film Festival (Spain) and the Viennale (Austria), and has worked with the Créteil International Women’s Film Festival (Paris, France) from 1985 to 2002. Since 2003, she has worked as co-curator of the series ‘Film at REDCAT’ in the Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater in Los ­Angeles. She teaches film history, theory, and criticism at the California Institute of the Arts.

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CHAPTER 15

The Miners’ Hymns Acts of Resurrection Simon Popple

Herzogenrath, Bernd (ed.), The Films of Bill Morrison. Aesthetics of the Archive. Amsterdam University Press, 2018 DOI 10.5117/9789089649966/CH15

ABSTRACT The Miners’ Hymns (2010) is a collaborative evocation of the working lives and landscape of the Durham Coalfields. It was commissioned for the 30th anniversary of the 1984-1985 Miners’ Strike, the final act that marked the end of the coalfield and a traditional way of life. Through the use of archive and an evocative score, the film exposes key elements of that tradition and the role the archive plays in the telling of their story. Simon Popple explores the nature of the collaboration, the role of the archive, and the universality of its subject. k e y wo r ds

archive, community, history, memory

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Lord of the oceans and the sky above, Whose wondrous grace has blessed us from our birth, Look with compassion, and with love On all who toil beneath the earth. They spend their lives in dark, with danger fraught, Remote from nature’s beauties, far below, Winning the coal, oft dearly bought To drive the wheel, the hearth make glow. Now we remember miners who have died Trapped in the darkness of the earth’s cold womb; Brave men to free them, vainly tried, Still their work-place remained their tomb.

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– Gresford, The Miners’ Hymn. Robert Saint. c.1934

INTRODUCTION: THEMES AND CONTEXTS ‘You find nothing in the Archive but stories caught half way through: the middle of things; discontinuities’ (Steedman 2002, 45). The film archive is a tomb, another place where the dead sleep. It is of the past. Memories are frozen in a discontinued flow, embalmed as, ‘a defence against the passage of time’ (Bazin 1960, 4). They are visited intermittently, at moments of anniversary and respectfully resurrected for public display. They are sacred, inviolable, and closely guarded. At least they used to be. We have now learned their real value and have recognized that they belong in the here and now. They speak as much about the future as of an imagined past. They transcend the enforced reverence of the museum, the gallery, and historical documentary, and demand to be animated in exciting and challenging ways. They sidestep the temporal and teleological orthodoxy of the historical document. They are -- and should be -- sites of contestation and creative experimentation wherein history can be reclaimed and evidential traces resurrected, performed, and creatively re-imagined. Both filmic and photographic images invite re-contemplation and a deep reflection that is both historically rooted and simultaneously present (Kuhn 2002). They are part of an increasingly liquid culture in which meaning is ‘unfixed and unfixable’ (Zylinska 2011, 141). They can and must be afforded the (dis)respect they deserve. The Miners’ Hymns (2010) is one such reimagining – a collaborative celebration of the lives and experiences of people and landscapes central to a

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particularly contested history, full of often bitter memory and marginalized industrial existence. The effacement of such raw memory and tradition is something to be resisted and not to be eulogized romantically. It is decidedly not of the past, but, as Barthes suggests, essential in the creation of an emotional encounter with an anterior future (1981). These struggles matter and are played out on a universal scale and are no less prescient than when the source material was originally made. Morrison has taken up the cudgel and succeeded in transcending the natural inclination of the filmmaker dealing with the re-articulation of these ‘historical’ sources. He avoids the lionization of the Stakhanovite worker and the clichéd nostalgia of recent brit-flick attempts to represent the dignity and struggle of mining communities whose terminal decline was hastened by Margaret Thatcher’s brutal deindustrialization policy (Milne 2014). This struggle for survival reached its denouement in the 1984-1985 Miners’ Strike, the culmination of over a decade of increasing tensions between the state and an increasingly militant industry clearly cognizant of the threat to its very existence. At the point of the strike, the national industry employed some 187000 miners and still supported confident and culturally rich communities renowned for their traditions of choral and brass-band music (Russel 1997). Yet, by the time of this film, only 4000 U.K. jobs remained and communities were decimated, landscapes remade, and the physical traces of centuries of industrial activity erased. The mining community at the heart of this film were no exception. Historically, the Durham coalfields had been one of the largest and had seen a huge explosion in exploitation in the late nineteenth century, reaching a peak in the immediate years surrounding the First World War, when nearly 170000 miners worked the coalfield. By 1994, the last pit on the coalfield had closed and the remaking of the industrial terrain was nearly complete (Turner 2015).

COMMISSION Triggered by the 25th anniversary of the 1984-1985 Miners’ Strike, the film was commissioned by David Metcalfe, Director of Forma Arts, for the 2010 Durham Brass Festival. Metcalfe wanted to commemorate the strike in a very regional, hyper-local context, with a focus on the community centred in the city of Durham and its surrounding coalfields. As he said, ‘We didn’t set out to make something with universal appeal, in fact it was a very specific history we were exploring’ (Wonfor 2014 ). Morrison might have seemed an odd choice for such a specific project, but, as Morrison noted, he felt that both he and Ice-

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landic composer Jóhann Jóhannsson were chosen for their ‘outsiderness’ and ‘detachment’ from the emotional cauldron of the subject (Morrison 2014). As outsiders, they were inured against the immediate rhetoric of the strike whilst empathetic to the broader political and cultural themes that had marked previous projects. As Morrison noted: I had an idea there were coalmines in England, and I was aware of the big strike in ’84. But beyond that I certainly didn’t know about the Gala, the banners or the miners’ bands, any of this (Bradshaw 2014).

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The strike had already produced an outpouring of creative responses and reflective visitations: this declining industry was already memorialized by a series of projects, including the establishment of the National Mining Museum for England in 1988 and was also part of a broader set of contested heritage narratives related to mining culture (Bailey and Popple 2013). The decline of the mining industry had become a focus for a range of artistic

Fig.15.1: Still from The Miners’ Hymns by Bill Morrison and Jóhann Jóhannsson, ‘40 Years On’ – National Coal Board, 1978 (BFI). Courtesy of Forma Arts.

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commemorations, which incorporated filmic and musical elements, most notably the campaigning films produced by the Test Department Collective that emerged out of the strike and later commissions, such as Opera North’s Songs at the Year’s End (2010) with poet Ian McMillan and composer Hugh Nankivell (Popple and Macdonald 2012). Test Department deployed agitprop techniques and used contemporary footage as a backdrop for its powerful performances and had made a definitive intervention with a collaborative tour involving the South Wales Striking Miners Choir in 1984. The tour featured integrated performances from the choir, band, and brass bands against a backdrop of archival footage and recent news coverage (cf. Test Department 2015). The resultant album Shoulder to Shoulder (1984) and films emerging from the tour have also been revisited in the DS30 (2014) film and performance that took place in Dunstan Staithes, a former industrial site associated with coal production and commissioned for the Newcastle 2014 AV festival. The Miners’ Hymns sits well within these traditions and was similarly intended to inhabit important spaces associated with this lost industry. The material that formed this statement was drawn from a significant series of archival sources and was an experience through which Morrison drew a direct parallel with the lives he sought to represent as he commented that, ‘there is a great affinity between coal mining and mining for film’ (Morrison 2014).

MINING THE ARCHIVE Mining and its associated cultures have long been registered in British traditions of filmmaking and have deposited a rich archival seam. One of the first extant films, The Day in the life of a Coal Miner, dates from 1910 and presages a century-long focus on the industry and its associated communities. The core of the collection, the National Coal Board’s (NCB) documentary magazine Mining Review spanned 1947 – the year the industry was nationalized – to the outbreak of the strike in 1984 (Enticknap 2012). This focus ensured that Morrison had plenty of source material to draw on from an increasingly valued set of collections held by the British Film Institute (BFI) (Russell 2012). As Mining Review was the official NCB mouthpiece, it was, as he said, like, ‘getting the footage from the boss’ (Morrison 2014). The BFI also afforded him the opportunity to draw on a unique collection of Edwardian social documentary films produced by the Mitchell and Kenyon Company in Northern Britain before 1913 (Toulmin, Popple, and Russell 2004). The project coincided with and benefitted from a major BFI initiative, led by its nonfiction curator Patrick Russell, to curate its industrial film holdings under the title This Working Life,

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with its first focus King Coal in 2009. Other important archives owned by the Amber Film and Photographic Collective, The Northern Region Film and Television Archive, The Yorkshire Film Archive, and BBC North East were used to provide more regionally specific material and a broader focus on landscape and social practices. Talking about his approach to the archive, Morrison was clear about his decision to focus on the regional films within this emergent national collection and build a series of complementary elements for Jóhannsson’s score. He saw the archive as a place of work and one where he wanted to respect the purity of these source materials. He approached it without any preconceptions of what he wanted to incorporate in his film, seeing the experience as a form of excavation, saying that, ‘I approach it the same way as any documentary filmmaker going out in the field- open to what I find’ (Morrison 2014 ). His use of the archive is certainly respectful but not wholly reverential and respects Sekula’s call to read the archive ‘from a position of solidarity with those displaced, deformed, silenced or made invisible by the machineries of profit and progress’ (2003, 451). The manipulation of stock, the stripping of sound, use of slow motion and decolourization is certainly not the act of a purist. It is subtly provocative and melds past and present. It helps create a vibrant act of memorialization and a slightly disrespectful resurrection. It is, though, tempered by an abiding respect for its subjects that comes from Morrison’s empathy for their struggle. As he reflected, ‘I often deal with footage that is distressed or deteriorated- in this case I did not feel like that was appropriate’ (Morrison 2014). Its subjects are silent but not silenced and some of the original soundtrack was re-incorporated and sampled in the score. The source materials were orchestrated into selections designed to evidence a ‘great continuity’ of approach and sustain its theme throughout the near century that the footage represents. Morrison was looking for similar shots that ran across decades, both in terms of camera setup, shot, and subject. The selection of materials was often predicated on being able to make such seamless historical transitions, Morrison noting that, ‘In editing it we were really looking for how similar these shots were over time…the same setup every decade on’ (ibid.). One key example is a sequence showing children running up a slagheap during the Second World War and seeming to run down the other side in the 1970s.

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STRUCTURE AND APPROACH: ACTS OF RESURRECTION Morrison and Jóhannsson had not previously collaborated but quickly familiarized themselves with each other’s work. They determined to build the project around the archival traces of the local community and to draw on its enduring musical culture. The film was initially intended as something that would evolve through a series of interactions between Morrison and Jóhannsson, with the first cut preceding the score. The tight deadline, however, dictated that the score be completed before the sequences were assembled and Morrison had to cut the archival footage to the score. This was a different way of working for Morrison and predetermined the structure of the film and its sections. Jóhannsson had seen rushes of the archival material and there had been time for discussions of themes so there was a degree of collaborative flexibility and Morrison remarked the music was consequently easy to cut to and allowed it to be, ‘married to the score’ (2014). Morrison has worked on a long series of collaborations with musicians and was a natural choice to link these deeply historical archival sources with such a specialist music commission. He understands the power of music as a form of expressive language and the eschewing of a conventional voiced narration. The removal of diegetic sound allows it to speak for itself. The music draws on references to brass-band culture, featuring brass players in the live ensemble, but is not a pastiche or a reworking of traditional music. It does locate tradition through its title, which came from Jóhannsson, by its reference to Gresford, the Miners’ Hymn written by miner Robert Saint. It commemorates the 1934 disaster at Gresford Colliery in Wales during which 266 men and boys were killed in an underground explosion. Only eleven bodies were ever recovered. Gresford became synonymous with the struggle for nationalization and the implementation of safety measures and was quickly adopted by colliery bands as key part of their repertoire. It is at the heart of mining culture and is sung at the cathedral service at the end of every Durham Gala. As he later said about the score, […] it’s a homage filtered through my own sensibilities. I try to take all these influences and create something that hopefully has resonances to this world and culture, but I didn’t want to be too much of a tourist and appropriate things. (Bradshaw 2014) The Miners’ Hymns, 52 minutes in length, is divided into five distinct sections that match the movements within the musical score and delineate different narrative phases. Its transitions are marked by brief fades to black and intervals of silence. The sequences draw the viewer through a series of transitions

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from the contemporary landscape, through the changing processes of work, leisure, strike and moves inexorably towards the celebratory gala. It demonstrates the continuities of life and struggle across the shifting historical phases of the mining life and uncovers layer upon layer of continuity and tradition now largely absent.

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The film opens with a sweeping shot that draws the viewer from rough seashore, over crumbling cliffs, to a series of locations that mark the sites of former mines and mining communities. The physical erosion of the shoreline mirrors the decline of a centuries-long way of life. A brief series of captions, the only captions in the film, provides information of what these places once were -- the only legends that mark former pits in a sanitized and remade landscape where they have become ski-slopes, shopping centres, and football grounds. These opening aerial shots are the only contemporary elements in the film. They establish the landscape that is remade through the archive, prefiguring an ongoing series of celluloid palimpsests. The sequence ends with a shot of a shimmering field of grass that dissolves into an archival shot of a sea of faces at a gala many decades ago. The world becomes black-and-white in this instant; the frame rate reduces slowly and deliberately. We ‘enter the archival footage through the land’, land that is a ‘wound that had healed’ and becomes an ‘open wound in the black and white footage’ (Morrison 2014). These faces are flanked by rows of banners in a slow pan that allows each face to be contemplated in turn – these are real people, not the ‘masses’ of agitprop tradition, and they exude confidence and pride in the occasion. The symbols of their beliefs and culture lie around them: political slogans on banners and colliery bands ready to play. Dressed in their finest clothes, families together, the archive draws us down the century, clothing the only discernible variable as the scene becomes more recent. Then the faces become more serious and the party becomes a wake. It closes with a poignant close-up on a child’s toy revolver. Fade.

Act 2 We are now in the darkness of early morning. We see miners – men and boys – leaving for work, traversing deserted streets towards the pithead’s belching smoke. Miners collect tokens and trim their lamps in readiness for the inevitable descent below ground; the music is slow and contemplative, the elements

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proceed at funereal pace. Men are framed within a series of metal coffins, the lift cage and the underground train, as they prepare for the final journey to the coalface where they crawl, bent double between the pit props and direct the horses that will haul the coal they are there to hew. The archive then begins to reveal the increasing mechanization of processes from men with picks and horses to vicious metal-toothed saws and sleek conveyers that mechanize and inexorably increase production. The machines slice through rock like a plough through a rich and yielding black soil. A slow, dreamlike quality pervades these underground sequences and creates stark contrast between dark and light, man and machine. A final shot reminds us of the miner’s presence as a half-naked man pushes a coal truck up a steep incline. Fade.

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We are back on the seashore where men and horses work in harness to gather sea coal washed up on the beach. This is another source of coal for beachcombers and overground miners. Coal is collected in nets and sorted as children help to wrestle the coal from an unforgiving sea. Their labour is equally harsh and starkly contrasted with the mechanization of the cranes and trucks seen on the horizon. Children play on the spoil heaps these machines have formed, joyous and abandoned. The focus then shifts to miners’ houses, gleaming sheets hang in a dark and filthy environment as preparations are made for the gala. Preparations continue as police mount barriers and traders board up plate-glass windows against the crush of the crowd. Trains arrive and revellers are disgorged, ready to celebrate. Fade.

Act 4 But this is no celebration; this is a strike and a battleground. Ranks of police traverse a pithead landscape marked by slogans daubed on walls reading ‘Scabs Beware’ as strike-breakers are brought in to do the strikers work, protected in armoured buses as miners protest at their betrayal. These sequences are decolourized to match the archival motif and, for the only time, Morrison draws on non-regional material as the scene shifts to South Yorkshire. Footage from the infamous and bloody battle of Orgreave in June 1984 is used to show the barbaric and mediaeval nature of the violence thrown up by the strike as miners throw stones, police baton miners, and mounted police charge unarmed men. There is no dignity in this labour. Morrison justifies this

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break by acknowledging that he, ‘had to deal with the 1984 strike’, as it was, ‘the prism through which everyone was going to view it’ (2014). This BBC footage is deeply controversial as its sequencing and emphasis has been a subject of ongoing contestation (Milne 2014). It is in this melee of disturbing images that we see where the filmmaker’s sympathies lie, the footage the, ‘most political material in the film - it tips my hand’ (Morrison 2014 ). Fade.

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We briefly return to the world of colour as the aerial sequence is rejoined and more sites of commemoration are visited. Back to the archive, we see miners leaving work, urgent, smiling as a clarion call is sounded in the score, calling them to muster for the gala, their banners and bands to the fore. Proud people progress, their banners proclaiming their heroes, histories, and beliefs. Children join the throng – dancing ahead of the procession, across the decades to Durham and the Cathedral, where the service will be held and the banners blessed. The crowds wind through the mediaeval streets as they are drawn to the Cathedral square. The banners are brought into the church and process towards the high altar. Fade/Credits.

Fig. 15.2: The Miners’ Hymns (2010) by Bill Morrison and Jóhann Jóhannsson performed at Easington Social Welfare Centre, East Durham, United Kingdom, 2014. Image Credit: Colin Davison, Courtesy of Forma Arts.

PERFORMANCE AND AFTERLIFE The Miners’ Hymns premiered in March 2010 with two performances in Durham’s magnificent cathedral, the spiritual home of the local mining community and the focus of the annual miners’ gala. The subsequent tour of local and regional miners’ clubs and broader international exposure struck resonant chords, and what could have been an insular and partial project, became a universal statement about the dignity of community and the nature of industrial life. It was commercially released in 2011 and was toured again in 2014 to commemorate the 30th anniversary of the strike. The premiere was a potent and emotional event and Morrison clearly felt that emotion, reflecting that it, ‘was very moving for me to see how these images connected with people’ and that there was a strong, ‘self-reflexive feeling at the premiere’ (2014). The accompanying tour website records the deeply emotional responses to the film from members of the audience and are characterized by the powerful relationship between the archival footage and the potency of the score. The lack of commentary and original dialogue is seen as adding to the emotional impact of the work. The potency of the Cathedral and the Gala are integral to understanding the film and its quasi-religious allusions. The space itself, though, is not used as a religious site, but as a social space at the heart of the community and a location of tradition and history. The same is true of other spaces in which the film was initially shown, within the habitus of the miners’ hall and local social spaces. As Morrison noted, ‘every room is different, every crowd is different’ (2014). Thus, each new performance draws on the space and audience to create a differently orientated and nuanced experience. Variations in tone, orchestration, and ambience mean that every live experience is a different kind of resurrection, a different type of memorialization. The fluidity this affords means that the film has a rare transcendence and can translate into new and perhaps unexpected contexts. Different forms of habitus intersect and interact and a set of contextual materials was produced by Forma to provide specific references for different audiences and provide a basis for recording the memories unleashed by the film.1 Its commercial release on DVD by the BFI reflects the importance of the live experience of the film by including highlights from the live premiere performance in Durham Cathedral. In trying to explain its broader appeal, Morrison reflected that it was perhaps its narrow, regional focus, which enabled international audiences to recognize their own relational contexts and to forge a deep empathy for the universal nature of the experiences it depicts. He felt that, ‘the more detail you reveal in a way, the more universal it becomes’ (Morrison 2014). Any initial fear on his part that the film would not be understood beyond its immediate

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locale was groundless and it garnered broad international plaudits; the New York Times reviewer describing it as, ‘an elegant, elegiac found-footage work’ (Dragis 2012).

CONCLUSION These are a string of beautiful images fit together to a beautiful score that has a truth – Morrison 2014

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The Miners’ Hymns exists as a site of resurrection and contemplation; it is, in Morrison’s own words, ‘a long form poem’ to the ‘rich heritage’ of the Durham coalfield (Morrison 2014). It respects the communities and traditions it features, the landscapes they inhabited, and the culture they defined. It is evidence of the reinvigorated potency of the archival sources that predominate in this text. As such, it is not, as so many films dealing with this contested history, a nostalgia piece, but a living and fluid testimony and an emotional and performative document. It is a secular requiem mass that respects tradition and mourns a lost way of life. It represents a distinctive approach to the use of the archive and shows how artists can make interventions that both respect and challenge the sanctity of their sources and question orthodox uses of these materials. It operates as a potent exemplar of how the archive can be mined to ‘bring amnesia and forgetting out into the open’ (Lorenz 2004). Seen by some as form of heresy, the reinterpretation of these sources and their incorporation in an ongoing historical journey are its lasting legacy.

NOTE 1

Available at http://theminershymns.com

WORKS CITED Bailey, Michael and Simon Popple. ‘The 1984/85 Miners’ Strike: Re-claiming Cultural Heritage.’ Heritage, Labour and the Working Classes. Eds. L. Smith, P. Shackel, and G. Campbell. London: Routledge Press:2011. P.19-33. Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida. New York: Hill and Wang, 1981.

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Bazin, André. ‘The Ontology of the Photogenic Image.’ Film Quaterly 13.4 (1960): 4-9. Bradshaw, Nick. ‘Muck and Brass: Bill Morrison and Jóhann Jóhannson on The Miners’ Hymns.’ Sight and Sound. http://www.bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/sight-soundmagazine/interviews/muck-brass-bill-morrison-j-hann-j-hannsson-minershymns. Accessed: 5 March 2014. Dargis, Manohla. ‘An Industry Beneath the Surface: Bill Morrison Documents the Reign of Old King Coal.’ New York Times 8 March 2012. Enticknap, Leo. ‘British Cinema and the Nationalisation of Coal 1946-7.’ Digging the Seam: Popular Cultures of the 1984/5 Miners’ Strike. Eds. Simon Popple and Ian Macdonald. Durham: Cambridge Scholar Press, 2012. 22-34. Khun, Annette. Family Secrets: Acts of Memory and Imagination. London: Verso, 2002. Lorenz, Helene Shulman. Amnesia/Counter Memory. Pacifica Graduate Institute, Santa Barbara.http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.624.5387&rep =rep1&type=pdf. Accessed: 10 October 2016. Milne, Seamus. The Enemy Within: Thatcher’s Secret War Against the Miners. London: Verso, 2014. Morrison, Bill. ‘The Miners’ Hymns – Discussion with Bill Morrison and Simon Popple.’ Soundcloud. https://soundcloud.com/formaartsmedia/the-minershymns-discussion. Accessed: 05 March 2014. Popple, Simon, and Macdonald, Ian, (Eds.) Digging the Seam: Popular Cultures of the 1984/5 Miners’ Strike. Durham: Cambridge Scholar Press, 2012. Russel, Dave. Popular Music in England 1840-1914: A Social History. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997. Russel, Patrick. ‘Power in whose Hands? Industrial relations and the Films of Nationalised Coal Mining.’ Digging the Seam: Popular Cultures of the 1984/5 Miners’ Strike. Eds. Simon Popple and Ian Macdonald. Durham: Cambridge Scholar Press, 2012. 35-48. Sekula, Allan. ‘Reading an Archive: Photography between Labour and Capital.’ 1986. The Photography Reader. Ed. Liz Wells. London: Routledge, 2003. 443–52. Steedman, Carolyn. Dust: The Archive and Cultural History. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2002. Test Department. Total State Machine. London: PC Press, 2015. Toulmin, Vanessa, Simon Popple, and Patrick Russel. The Lost World of Mitchell and Kenyon: Edwardian Britain on Film. London: BFI, 2004. Turner, Brian. Here Today, Gone Tomorrow: An Industrial and Social History of the South West Durham Coalfield. Bishop Auckland: Eli Press 2015. Wonfor, Sam. ‘Miners’ Hymns Come Home Thanks to Forma Founder David Mercalfe.’ The Journal 31 January 2014. Zylinska, Joanna. ‘On Bad Archives, Unruly Snappers and Liquid Photographs,’ Photographies, 3:2 2011. 139-153.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR Simon Popple is Deputy Head of the School of Media and Communication at the University of Leeds and Senior Lecturer in Photography and Digital Culture. His research is concerned with the relationships between communities, institutions, and concepts of democratic exchange, open space, archives, and the digital sphere. He has become increasingly focused on the coproduction of digital tools that allow communities to develop independent access to cultural and historical resources as a means of storytelling, campaigning, and social advocacy. He has acted as principal investigator on several projects exploring these themes and has worked with a range of community and arts organizations and national institutions including the BBC and the Science Museum Group. Recent research includes two projects on the role of the BBC Archive of the 1984-1985 National Miners’ Strike (The Open Archive Project and the Strike Stories Fusion Project) and the Connected

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Communities Pararchive Project. He has written widely on cinema and on the miners’ strike, most recently editing the book Digging the Seam: Popular Cultures of the 1984/5 Miners’ Strike. Cambridge Scholars Press: Durham 2012.

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CHAPTER 16

Tributes – Pulse: A Requiem for the 20th Century Death | Drive | Image Johannes Binotto

Herzogenrath, Bernd (ed.), The Films of Bill Morrison. Aesthetics of the Archive. Amsterdam University Press, 2018 DOI 10.5117/9789089649966/CH16

ABSTRACT Picking up on the concept of death-drive, as discussed by Freud and Lacan, this essay examines the ways in which the film Tributes–Pulse: A Requiem for the 20th Century uses decomposing film material, not as a final state, but rather as a new beginning for cinema. Similar to the death-drive’s capacity to transcend the common dichotomy of life and death, Morrison’s film keeps the disintegrating images alive in their process of dying. Dying proves to be the very opposite of death: not some ultimate break but an active process, which can be prolonged, paused, and extended into eternity. The title’s ‘pulse’ can be understood, as the irresistible, undead beat of the drive itself, which has no other goal than its own circular movement. k e y wo r ds

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The image does not, at first glance, resemble the corpse, but the cadaver’s strangeness is perhaps also that of the image. – Maurice Blanchot (1982, 256)

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What we see, we cannot tell. These bubbling, crumbling, dying images leave us speechless, breathless, and devastated. Is this how it all ends, or how it starts? Or is it both? The images with which Bill Morrison opens his film Tributes–Pulse: A Re­­ quiem for the 20th Century are in such an extreme state of decay that it is impossible to tell what they once featured. The decomposing nitrate film stock shows nothing more than pure visual noise – a degree zero of cinema – or even less than that. Thus, the unprepared viewer may wonder if this constantly changing, flickering chaos of dots and lines, covering almost the entire frame, is really cinematographic after all, or if it is only graphic. Indeed, the opening shots look more like pencil drawings or minute etchings, depicting some mysterious fungi, like the one covering those last rocks visited by the time traveller in H.G.Wells’ The Time Machine on his journey to end of the world. Pre-filmic in its appearance, anything could be hidden in this incomprehensible, primordial mess. And there are things hiding: since it is from this very chaos of flickering black and white that Morrison allows all the other scenes of his film emerge, eventually also his own original material, with which the film concludes. The filmmaker thus presents the complete deterioration of old film material not as a final state, but rather as the site for a new beginning. Picking up André Habib’s perceptive comment, that Morrison’s films ‚are agonizing, precisely because they oscillate between life and death, on the threshold between survival and disappearance‘ (Habib 2004), one could go even further and argue, that it is this oscillation between the opposites, which we experience not only as the agony of film, but also its reanimation . Dying film gives birth to new images continuously – this, I would argue, is the paradoxical motto of large parts of Morrison’s oeuvre in general and of this film in particular. In fact, it is a paradox already inscribed in the film’s full title, with its subtitle’s ‘requiem’ standing in striking contrast to the main title’s ‘pulse’. How does the mass for the dead and the beat of life, which here are combined in one and the same heading, go together? However, the title’s apparent contradiction is not a contradiction after all, as the film proves. Rather, it is precisely the conjunction of mutually exclusive opposites that the film’s images, as well as its soundtrack, the insistent music by Danish composer Simon Christensen, enacts: a forceful celebration of decay as the ultimate moment of pulsating vitality. To put if differently, this requiem goes full drive and drive is what this requiem is about.

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In French, the Freudian term Trieb (drive) is translated as ‘pulsion’. For once, the translation is even more precise than the original, since it implies the repetitive nature of this force, that governs the unconscious. Impossible to be fulfilled, the drive is forced to go in circles instead, pulsing endlessly, and with no other goal than its own continuation. Accordingly, Jacques Lacan highlighted this circularity as the fundamental aspect of the drive, arguing that the drive follows a ‚topology of the border‘ and is concerned with circling around the object, ‚chasing‘ it, but not actually attaining it (2001, 188). Thus, in his seminar on The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, which is, in large parts, devoted to the concept of the drive, Lacan proposes the following formula: ‘la pulsion fait la tour’. Lacan adds that ‘Tour is to be understood here with the ambiguity it possesses in French, both turn, the limit around which one turns, and trick’ (1981, 168). While racing at the limit, at the border of satisfaction but never yielding it, the trick of the drive is its own constant repetition – the pulsing of pulsion. This pulsing circularity of the drive is encountered, in its most obvious form, in those infamous repetition compulsions, which, according to Freud, are so typical for the most radical and most disputed drive of them all: the death-drive. Surprised by the observation that traumatized patients, instead of turning away from the horrific past, would rather restage and repeat those very events that scarred them, Freud could not help but make the assumption of a negative drive, located ‚beyond the pleasure principle‘, a drive that – contrary to the analyst’s former convictions – is aimed, not at pleasure, but disaster (Freud 1961a). This striving for self-destruction, however, does not come to an end, but is held captive in the circular motion of repetition compulsion. Death-drive thus becomes a contradiction in itself: the endlessly repeated quest for an absolute end. It is this paradoxical conjunction of finitude and endlessness, that one also finds in Freud’s own formulations, for example, when he argues, that the ‘task of the death-drive is‚ to lead organic life back into the inanimate state’ (Freud 1961b, 40, my emphasis). The drive’s aim at death is thus considered by Freud a return ‘back’ to the beginning, to the inanimate state of things, out of which everything was first born. No wonder the drive never finds a solution, since every movement towards the end is ultimately also a movement backwards. Looped between ultimate and initial death, the drive cannot ever come to rest, but is doomed to be sustained forever. Neither here nor there – like in the famous ‘fort-da’ game that Freud recounts in ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’ – it cannot but continue. Thus death-drive becomes, in Slavoj Žižek words, ‘Freud’s name [...] for an uncanny excess of life, for an undead urge which persists beyond the (biological) cycle of life and death’ (2006, 62). It is within these undead loops of the drive that the images and the sounds

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of Tributes–Pulse also make their tour. In one of the most haunting instances of the film, we see a newborn child, wrapped in blankets, with its toothless mouth opened for a cry that we cannot hear. The very photographic material, though, with which this infant was filmed, is itself in utter distress. Bubbling and boiling, the borders of the image start to disappear. Destruction is closing in, until it looks as if the baby too is consumed in this process of decomposition. The baby, representing the beginning of existence, and life’s complete eradication melt together. As the film material returns ‘back into its inanimate stage’ (Freud 1961b, 40), so too does the child. While the nitrate film stock seems to burst into flames, so too the infant’s tiny body is devoured. ‘Father, can’t you see that I am burning?’ (Freud 1953, 509) – the horrific question, posed in one of those dreams presented in Freud’s Traumdeutung (but remaining suspiciously uninterpreted) finds here its visual reply, or rather: replay. We have to watch how the film burns and the child with it. Like the child, which opens its mouth wide, so too there are fissures and holes opening up in the film material, mouthing a death scream that we cannot hear, but are forced to see.

Fig. 16.1: Screenshot from Tributes–Pulse: A Requiem for the 20th Century (digital frame enlargement).

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The sight may remind us of those last sentences in Edgar Allan Poe’s gruesome short story ‘The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar’, about a man who is hypnotized at the moment of his death and thus held suspended in state of limbo. When he is finally released by his mesmerist, the body of Mr. Valdemar deteriorates instantly: ‘amid ejaculations of “dead! dead!” absolutely bursting from the tongue and not from the lips of the sufferer, his whole frame at once – within the space of a single minute, or even less, shrunk – crumbled – absolutely rotted away beneath my hands. Upon the bed, before that whole company, there lay a nearly liquid mass of loathsome – of detestable putridity’ (Poe 1984, 842). While the ‘frame’ in Poe’s text refers to the body of the story’s protagonist, Mr. Valdemar, the very same words could also serve as an apt description of these other frames: the film frames Morrison inspects. Like Mr. Valdemar’s body, so too the body of old nitrate film shrinks and rots away beneath our eyes, turning into a liquid mass. Yet, there lies a paradox in Poe’s description of Valdemar’s disintegration. Far from releasing his character, Poe is, in fact, with his words, conserving the deadly transformation. Very much like the mesmerist in his story, so too the author prolongs the process of decay endlessly, in order to be read again and again. Similarly, Bill Morrison’s films preserve the process of decomposition for repeated viewing. Those disintegrating pieces of film he presents us, are not restored to their former integrity. The distinction is crucial: Morrison does not restore old nitrate film, but archives its damage. The deteriorated film frames are kept alive in their state of dying. Curiously enough, the process of dying thus proves to be the very opposite of death. In his lecture Recessional – Or, the Time of the Hammer, the author and theorist Tom McCarthy ponders the mysterious activity the word ‘dying’ exhibits (cf. McCarthy 2016). Instead of denoting an ultimate break, the verb indicates a process, which can be prolonged, paused, and extended into eternity. This is, for example, what happens with the corpse of Addie Bundren in William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying. Addie continues to die, even after her family has put her in a coffin. The corpse continues to be active and even narrates parts of the story. Like the river, which, at one point of the novel takes the coffin with it, so too the process of dying itself is unstoppable and impossible to resist. Eventually, everyone is caught in this vicious temporal circle of dying, which is the same circle that Freud and Lacan call death-drive. It is this temporal loop, Addie’s son Darl muses, when looking at the black river: ‘It is as though the space between us were time: an irrevocable quality. It is as though time, no longer running straight before us in a diminishing line, now runs parallel

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between us like a looping string, the distance being the doubling accretion of the thread and not the interval between’ (Faulkner 1985, 96). It is this same river of eternal dying to which the figures in the scenes in Tributes–Pulse run, through the open door of a wooden shack. It is not just water they dive into, however, but also the acid of liquified nitrate film, in which they dissolve. Nonetheless, in their disappearance, these people, who, in reality, have passed away a long time ago, are still there. We still see them, still bathing and swimming in this deadly compound of film chemicals. They are not dead, but dying, before our eyes. Forever. As Garrett Stewart has pointed out, this conflation of death and life is the ambiguous task of the cinematic medium per se. Picking up on the wellknown tradition of linking photography with death he argues: ‘We realize that if photography is a corpse, film is, by contrast, a finality always on the cusp of revival, or otherwise a vividness always in passing. […] To repeat: Photography is death in replica, cinema a dying away in progress’ (1999, 152). Nowhere can this be seen more radically and more beautifully than in these glowing, burning, passing away, and reappearing views in Tributes–Pulse. At one instance in the film, we see footage of a buffalo herd roaming the prairie. The animals move in the frame from right to left, a direction that is usually considered as a backward motion by film viewers. In the centre of the frame, the film material, due to its deterioration, falls apart. Thus, it looks as if these buffalos, heading backwards, eventually fall into a deep chasm, opening up in the middle of the landscape. But then they reappear at the left side of the frame, moving on, as if nothing happened. It is an enigmatic, contradictory sight, bringing together so many of the thoughts mentioned above. The buffalo herd we see, well-known symbol of the frontier, is heading backwards, returning, not only to their home ground, but also to their ‘inanimate state’, as Freud would put it. This image of loss also reminds us of the very real mass slaughter of the buffalos, which took place in the second half of the nineteenth century. It was this wasteful extermination of the buffalo herds that also led to the demise of the American Indians, as can be seen in the words of Plenty Coups, chief of the Crow Nation: ‘When the buffalo went away the hearts of my people fell to the ground, and they could not lift them up again. After this nothing happened’. As the philosopher Jonathan Lear has argued in his extensive reading of Plenty Coup’s statement, this curious claim of the chief, that ‘after this nothing happened’ must be read in the most radical sense possible: what died with the buffalo was not only a concrete community of people, but a whole way of life. Even though many of the American Indians may have survived the extinction of the great buffalo herds, the world in which they grew up and in which their actions and rituals were embedded, was destroyed.

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‘With the destruction of this way of life came the destruction of the end or goal – the telos – of that life. […] But with the destruction of the telos, there was no conception of the good life to provide a larger context for the significance of one’s acts. […] People continued to act practically, but they lost the rich framework in which such acts made sense’ (Lear 2006, 55-57). The loss Lear is after, is more fundamental than a concrete, physical destruction. It is the destruction of a complete system of thought; it is such a moment of complete eradication that we also witness in these images of Tributes–Pulse, in which the buffalos do not simply die, but are completely erased from the image, etched off, unmade by the chemicals destroying the film footage. But still, after this, something happens: the disappearing buffalos suddenly reappear at the other side of the frame. The continuing destruction that we witness in these decaying images is, at the same time, also a constant revival. The frontier and its way of life, so irretrievably lost, is found again in these images, captured and reemerging with every single frame anew. This requiem for the American West is also a manifesto for its still strong pulse.

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It is this paradoxical logic of rejuvenation through death that also informs Simon Christensen’s composition for the film. Not only that Christensen Fig. 16.2: Screenshot from Tributes–Pulse: A Requiem for the 20th Century (digital frame enlargement).

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draws inspiration from dead composers such as Charles Ives and the Mexican composer Conlon Nancarrow, thus reviving them, but these precursors were already themselves exploring those zones beyond life and death, each in his own way. In his famous piano studies, Conlon Nancarrow wrote pieces, which could only be played by an automatic player piano, thus making him one of the first composers to use auto-playing musical instruments. Both rhythmically and tonically so complex, that only a machine could play them, Nancarrow’s compositions represent both an end and a new beginning of music: while the human musician has to capitulate in front of these compositions, this failure gives way for the mechanical musician, which is no longer inhibited by the limitations of his predecessor. Played by an automaton, which knows neither exhaustion nor death, but will continue even after every human being has died, Nancarrow’s music could be seen as a form of acoustical death-drive. Even more radically, the American composer Charles Ives dreamt of a kind of music that would even transcend the limitations of sound: ‘What has sound to do with music! […] Why can’t music go out the same way it comes in to a man, without having to crawl over a fence of sounds, thoraxes, catguts, wire, wood and brass… The Instrument!’ (Paul 2013, 89-90). Ives’ fantasy of a soundless music, unhindered by the materiality of player or instrument, corresponds with Freud’s remark about the death-drive being mute (1961b, 46). Christensen picks up on these concepts, but only to give them yet another twist: according to his own remarks, Christensen prefers the complex musical patterns that Nancarrow gave over the automatic player piano, to be played by humans (Oteri 2011, 5), while the mute music, Ives dreamt of, is here transposed into pervasive, piercing sound, to which we cannot shut our ears. Thus, as much as Christensen may pay homage to these influences, he also, by the same token, constantly betrays, contradicts, and reverts these influences. Captivated and haunted by these sounds, we wonder about their origin, both in concrete and metaphorical sense: from which tradition do they stem? Are they produced by instruments or machines? Or are they even produced by something, which is neither of the two? With their irresistible, unwavering beat, these sounds may even remind us of those mysterious pulsing signals from outer space. Picked up in 1967 by radio-telescopes, they were first mistaken as signals from an extraterrestrial life form. Astronomers eventually found out that the source of these mysterious sounds were highly magnetized, rotating neutron stars, emitting beams of electromagnetic radiation towards the earth. These so-called pulsars, however, sometimes beaming with the energy of ten million suns are, in fact, only remnants, left over from a supernova explosion (NASA.gov). Thus, what is heard as the pulsar’s never-ending beat is, in fact, nothing but the death cry of a dying star. The pulsar is burning out, but it does so with an energy greater than anything we could imagine and it will continue

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to do so, even after humankind has vanished. The exploding star, rotating in the heavens, is nothing but the ultimate example for destruction as vitality. Pulse - pulsion - pulsar: dying goes on, in eternal rhythms. It is not by accident that the nitrate footage that Morrison shows last also captures particles in the sky. We see disintegrating footage of aeroplanes, circling overhead and a parachuter falling from the heavens, tossed around, both by the whirling winds and the unstable film material. We sense that the film will end with that, but we are mistaken. The film closes with the disappearing parachuter only to take us for yet another round: the screen goes black and then – for the first time – to full color. We see destruction again, not with dilapidated film material, but with dilapidated ships. In front of our eyes are rusty, degraded, vandalized remains of tankers and boats, half sunk, lying in some harbor. It is a chilling sight, as if taken from an apocalyptic dream, and its effect is only heightened by the fact that we know that this apocalypse is real. It is Morrison’s own material that we see, shot by himself from a helicopter, flying over the docks in Staten Island, New York. By adding his own film to the collage of old footage, it is as if he wants to stress, once and for all, the actuality of all the destruction we have witnessed through the entire film. The process of dying has still not ended, but continues, into our own time. This coda repeats, but also reveals the film’s method: not just that the ruins of the ships echo the ruination of film material that we have witnessed before, but that this echo also makes clear how much Tributes–Pulse plays with blending form and content. Be it the crumbling footage of the baby or of the bison herd, it always looks as if the destruction of the medium also entails the destruction of that which the medium shows. Constantly, we confuse the depiction and the depicted, enunciation and the enunciated. In these final images, however, the confusion turns out to be the truth. The ships in the harbour really are in ruins. The decay was not just an optical mirage, but a physical fact. Dying does not remain on the level of the optical, but materializes, both on the body of film as well as on the body of things. It is a long flight over these ragged, soaking, dying steel vessels, laying in the water, like Addie Bundren’s coffin. The flight goes on for so long that we lose orientation. We forget where we are and what time it is, until one of those cadavers look familiar to us. Have we not seen the same boat before? We realize that Morrison’s flight has come full circle. Repetition compulsion once more takes its toll. Dying goes on, in loops. Once we understood that, the films lets us go, fades to black. Once again, it falls back into its inanimate state of darkness. The film ends, but it does so only after we realized, that it will continue forever.

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WORKS CITED Blanchot, Maurice. ‘The Two Versions of the Imaginary.’ The Space of Literature. Trans. Ann Smock. Lincoln: University of Nebraska, 1982. 254-262. Faulkner, William. ‘As I Lay Dying.’ 1930. Novels 1930-1935: As I Lay Dying, Sanctuary, Light in August, Pylon. New York: Library of America, 1985. 1-178. Freud, Sigmund. ‘The Interpretation of Dreams.’ 1900. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works. Ed. James Strachey. Vol. IV. London: Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1953. Freud, Sigmund. ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle.’ 1920. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works. Ed. James Strachey. Vol. XVII: 1920-1923. London: Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1961a. 7-64. Freud, Sigmund. ‘The Ego and the Id.’ 1923. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works. Ed. James Strachey. Vol. XIX: 1923-1925. London: Hogarth

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Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1961b. 13-68. Habib, André. ‘Around the Films of Bill Morrison. Thinking in the Ruins.’ Offscreen 18.1 (2004): Accessed: 23 June 2015. Lacan, Jacques. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. The Seminar, Book XI. Ed. Jacques-Alain Miller. New York/London: Norton, 1981. Lacan, Jacques. ‘Les Quatre Concepts Fondamentaux de la Psychoanalyse. Compte Rendu du Séminaire 1964.’ Autres Ecrits. Paris: Seuil, 2001. 187-189. Lear, Jonathan. Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation. Cambridge/ London: Harvard University Press, 2006. McCarthy, Tom. Recessional – Or, the Time of the Hammer. Zurich/Berlin: Diaphanes, 2016. ‘NASA’s NuSTAR Telescope Discovers Shockingly Bright Dead Star.’ NASA.gov. October 8, 2014. Accessed: 12 July 2015. Oteri, Frank J. ‘Liner Notes.’ Tributes – Pulse. Dacapo Records, 2011. BluRay. Paul, David C. Charles Ives in the Mirror: American Histories of an Iconic Composer. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2013. Poe, Edgar Allan. ‘The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar.’ Poetry and Tales. Ed. Patrick F. Quinn. New York: Library of America, 1984. 833-842. Stewart, Garrett. Between Film and Screen. Modernism’s Photo Synthesis. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1999. Žižek, Slavoj. The Parallax View. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR Johannes Binotto is a lecturer for media studies and film theory at the Universities of Zurich and Basel and at the Lucerne School of Art and Design. Apart from that, he teaches film & psychoanalysis at the Zurich Lacan-Seminar and at the Psychiatric Hospital Burghölzli. His research is specifically devoted to the intersections of psychoanalytical theory, philosophy of technology, film, and literature with a particular interest in cinematic and literary techniques as ‘affective effects’. He has published extensively and on such diverse topics such as the gaze, abject bodies, male hysteria, medias of paranoia, and on spaces of anxiety in film, literature, and popular culture. Johannes Binotto’s dissertation on the Freudian uncanny and its spatial representation in art, literature, and cinema was awarded in 2011 with the annual prize of the Faculty of Arts at Zurich University and has been published in 2013 by Diaphanes under the title TAT/ORT: Das Unheimliche und sein Raum in der Kultur. Johannes Binotto is currently working on an habilitation project on ‘Disfigurations: Towards a Poetics of Cinematic Devices’ in which he examines traditional cinematic devices such as rear projection, matte painting or split screen for their subversive potential. Personal homepage: http://www.schnittstellen.me/

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CHAPTER 17

Just Ancient Loops The Loops of Life in Intonation Eva Hoffmann

Herzogenrath, Bernd (ed.), The Films of Bill Morrison. Aesthetics of the Archive. Amsterdam University Press, 2018 DOI 10.5117/9789089649966/CH17

ABSTRACT Just Ancient Loops is a ternary audiovisual symphony with great emphasis on the interplay between the music and the visuals. Together, the three parts – a largo Genesis, an allegro Chorale, and the largo final Ascension – present different views on heaven. Music is neither only accompanying the images, like a soundtrack in a film, nor are the images just expressions of the music, as is commonly the case in music videos. Morrison’s imagery and Harrison’s composition create, through multifold bilateral reference, a phenomenon one might call übersynchresis, a term elaborated on grounds of the acronym synchresis by film theorist Michel Chion in order to describe a permanent correlation between music and image. k e y wo r ds

symphony, synchresis, über-synchresis, audiovisual correlation

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Bill Morrison’s audiovisual film Just Ancient Loops consists of three parts that are typical for a symphony: a largo Genesis, an allegro Chorale, and the largo final Ascension. The imagery, mainly decaying pre-1950s nitrate celluloid film footage, is supplemented with high-definition CGI animation based on NASA data. The found-footage material was sourced from two archives: the Moving Image Research Collections at the University of South Carolina and the Audiovisual Preservation at the Library of Congress. The images are taken from feature films, documentaries, and ephemeral films – advertisements as well as industrial, educational, and amateur films – and are all in various states of decay, as shown by their blisters and scratches. Michael Harrison, one of the most innovative composers in recent years, created the music that accompanies the visuals. In the piece, entitled Time Loops, he refined ancient tuning systems to develop Just Intonation, a tuning system wherein the distances between notes are based upon whole number ratios. Morrison reflects on Harrison’s musical creation through the CGI animation. These animations are based on the research of Walter Murch, who found a connection between the overtone formula and the orbits of the planets. This interplay constitutes the quintessential musical and visual correlation of the film. The multilayered cello composition was played by the exceptionally gifted cellist Maya Beiser. Beiser performed the piece live at the premiere at Bang On A Can Festival 2012 and hence turned the screening into a performance. The fact that the music was played live during the screening clearly emphasizes the music and hence influences the audiovisual reception. This accentuation of the music shows the importance of the music in the film and its special correlation to the imagery. These images were deliberately chosen to match the music and vice versa, in their form as well as in their content. The audio and the visual levels are equally important and complement each other. Here, the music is neither only accompanying the images like a soundtrack in a film, nor are the images just expressions of the music as is commonly the case in music videos. Morrison’s imagery and Harrison’s composition create, through multifold bilateral reference, a phenomenon here called über-synchresis. This term has been elaborated on grounds of the neologism synchresis by the film theorist Michel Chion. The other central motive, aside from the phenomenon of the über-synchresis, is the depiction of different views of heaven. Through his selection of film snippets, Morrison raises the great question of the purpose of life and displays the attempts made by both science and religion to provide answers.

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GENESIS Just Ancient Loops opens with an image of a church. This architectural entity, which predominantly represents a form of spirituality, is depicted from the first moment. The church as a symbol of spirituality is one possible interpretation of existence, one way to view the heavens, and a central motive in Just Ancient Loops. It is depicted multifariously throughout the entire short film. The following image is a fort; as Goethe postulated, architecture is frozen music. Thus, by presenting a second image of architecture, the correspondence between two further central motifs is initiated, the bilateral reference between music and architecture. The next image presents a telescope, which is used to show the scientific perspective of the sky or of the heaven. Juxtaposing religion and science emphasizes their commonalities and differences. Both turn towards the sky/ heaven; both search for explanations for our existence and are the only ones that pretend to be able to give answers. Similar to how the first accord of a symphony contains the tonic, the first few pictures of Just Ancient Loops already indicates the central motifs and foci in the short film, which are religion, ­science, architecture, and music. The emphasis on science is enhanced by the images that follow. Now we not only see the telescope, but also the building opposite of it – the Pantheon of Rome – as well as a man with a camera, obviously filming the telescope. The image’s complexity and multifaceted nature sets the Pantheon to a specifically emphasized pivotal position in the film, which is especially evident in

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Fig. 17.1: The Pantheon in Just Ancient Loops.

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the Chorale. The Pantheon represents the pictorial mimesis of a heliocentric episteme induced by Aristarchus and implicates the connection between the architecture of the dome, the music of the spheres, and the orbits of the planets written in stone. Displaying a cameraman enables the viewer to directly codify the footage. The act of revealing the property of a film deconstructs the inviolability and sanctity of the filmic illusion of fiction. To visualize the constructiveness of imagery means to point out a self-reference of artificiality; to be media-referential, hence to emphasize the ‘Charakter des Gemachten’ (Tscherkassky 1992, 28). The logical conclusion, in this case, is to classify the images at view as fragments of documentaries rather than as fictional narratives. The documentarian interpretation is reconfirmed by the image of a toddler looking straight into the camera. In this moment, the viewers comprehends their own position as spectators of bygone events and become aware of their current position as observers, which inevitably deconstructs the illusion of an inviolably voyeuristic position. The toddler staring at the camera raises the question: who is watching whom? At this moment, the film footage appears as an analogy of a time-portal, a window to the past, which deceptively suggests a possible uninterrupted communication with a young life that had faded away a long time ago. Up to this moment, the viewers have been bystanders watching the people displayed watch the sky. Now, the viewers are integrated into the group and, just like them, face the sky in order to witness the extravaganza. Partly flickering and jerking imagery shows the moon, as it shifts in front of the sun, fully obscuring the light and then slowly re-revealing the sun. The clouds drifting by convey the image of constant movement and dynamism in the film. A variety of footage, which is edited rhythmically, shows the total eclipse. The attention of the viewer is drawn to the synergy of imagery and music, due to its reduction of the mise en image, a light geometrical form in front of a dark background, in addition to the rhythmic montage and the flicker provoked by the differently exposed celluloid. How we perceive images is influenced by their accompanied sound or music. This effect is at last evident at this point in the piece, when the audiovisual synergy has reached its highest intensity so far. The form and tempo of the film are suddenly reduced. Prior imagery delivered information unambiguously and therefore drew the attention to its display rather then its audiovisual relationship and bilateral influence. Due to its higher degree of objectivity, images dominate the audiovisual perception. Music, in contrast, is generally of a more ephemeral nature and

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hence its contract of cognition is rather subjective. The more explicit the information of an image, the more objective the interpretation and consequently the more dominant its role compared to music. In other words, the more abstract the content of an image, the more subjective the interpretation and therefore the more attentive the perception of music or sound. Hence, to the viewerd, the musical level of the film is most evident while they watch closeups of the moon that are reduced to geometric forms. The bilateral reference influences the perception of image and sound. Here, the structure of causality is generated by the arrangement of the imagery akin to visual music and causes an interdependent dialectic relationship. The montage is comparable to the ‘musical edit’ (Lund and Lund 2010, 198) commonly used in the process of creating visual music. The difference is, however, that, in visual music, in contrast to the films by Bill Morrison, the music or sound generates an image with the same intensity and vice versa. Yet, just like in visual music, a synchronicity is created by arranging the visual and audio footage rhythmically; in other words, the visual and auditory pieces are arranged and edited in such a way that they create a polyvalent appearance. The musical montage and the reduction of the image to geometrical shapes are reminiscent of Oskar and Hans Fischinger’s experimental films from the 1920s, such as Komposition in Blau/Lichtkonzert Nr. 1. The flickering and vibrating of the image; in other words, the testimony of the decaying footage are arbitrary; however, in combination with the arco and pizzicato rhythmization, its aesthetic appears to be an audiovisual correlation. The image interferences and the analogue photo grain with its noise appear to move or dance to the music rhythmically, clocked to the cadence. A similar phenomenon is the manipulative-receptive and psychologically influenced construct of perception that was labeled as synchresis by the French film expert Michel Chion (1994, 63ff.). Synchresis is a portmanteau created by merging the two words synchronism and synthesis: ‘The spontaneous and irresistible mental fusion, completely free of any logic, that happens between a sound and a visual when these occur at exactly the same time’ (Chion 1994, xviii). The form of synchresis as described by Chion, the modest synchresis (1994, 49), is not quite applicable to the content of Just Ancient Loops. Instead, a variation of the term, musical synchresis, seems to be more appropriate. Due to the viewers’ disposition of a synchretic perception, the visuals obey the laws of gestalt psychologie and are transformed to an audiovisual unity adjusted to the rhythm and tonality of the music. In that regard, Just Ancient Loops is one of the

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certain experimental videos and films [that] demonstrate that synchresis can even work out of thin air – that is, with images and sounds that strictly speaking have nothing to do with each other, forming monstrous yet inevitable and irresistible agglomerations in our perception. The syllable fa is heard over a shot of a dog, the sound of a blow with the sight of a triangle. Synchresis is Pavlovian. (Chion 1994, 48)

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An advanced form of musical synchresis on the visual level can be seen in the avant-garde films of Oskar Fischinger. In Komposition in Blau, the synchretic demeanor is not only linear but also polyvalent, which is evident in its arrangements of abstract element within the frame composition and colours that are in direct correlation to the music. The described phenomenon was recently reconfigured and elaborated in the music video Star Guitar by the French director Michel Gondry. The video for the song by The Chemical Brothers displays the subjective point of view of a passenger on a train watching the landscape fly by outside the window. The elements of the digital landscape only appear with the corresponding elements of the music; in other words, they emerge in the landscape only for the period of time when the attributed elements of the music are audible. The synchronic nexus of audio and visuals are so consequently existent that it constitutes not only points of synchronization but also creates a polyvalent synchronic continuum. The fact that the different elements of the audio are constantly presented with a visual correspondence creates the synchretic effect. The polyvalent synchresis in regard to colour, form, and arrangement within the frames as in Star Guitar or Kompoisiton in Blau, is nonexistent in Just Ancient Loops. However, on a hypertextual and hyper-dialectic narrative level, Just Ancient Loops constitutes a special form of synchresis: the übersynchresis. This über-synchresis correlates less with audiovisual points of synchronization but signifies the allegoric self-reflexivity and syncretic reflexiveness on the visual, audio, and theoretical-narrative level.

CHORALE The über-synchresis is most noticeable in Chorale, the second and middle part of the film. This sequence of five minutes contrasts with the other parts in its choice of media, since Bill Morrison uses precisely elaborated high-definition CGI material based on NASA data instead of his commonly used nitrate found footage. Scheuman and Graf’s appraisal concerning the usage of found-footage

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material is also applicable to the utilization of certain CGI material and animation. As Böser declares: ‘Uses of the compilation form across the decades might have varied widely, but there is a common denominator for them all: filmmakers in the found-footage tradition, entirely or in parts, forgo the use of a camera’ (2007, 306). The same can be applied to CGI media, which bypass the camera as well, but, in comparison to found footage with predetermined cadrage, the framing has to be created artificially. Aliorsum in using CGI animation in Chorale, the spectrum of an alternative cinematographic narrative structure is extra­ polated. The medial sequence opens with the view of the universe. Here, in contrast to the found-footage parts in which movements have a vertical and horizontal tendency, a central-perspective image composition dominates. The movement starts from an eyepoint and vanishes into infinite space, as it is characteristic for the orthogonal axonometry and the appropriate type of graphical movement in a space of abyss such as the universe. This type of movement is diagrammed by the planets, which start their movement from an eyepoint,

Fig. 17.2: The distances of the moons of Jupiter result in the dominant 7Th chord. Just Ancient Loops.

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hence the subjective point of view of the viewer, continues towards space and is swallowed by the blackness of infinity. The first planet to appear is Jupiter and, from the same perspective and with the same movements, the moons of Jupiter: Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Calisto emerge. Their movement is faster and ends in the invisible infinity, while Jupiter continues to be apparent and dominates the image. Blue animated circles surround Jupiter and label the velocity, distance, and movement of its moons. Their tracks merge into a stave and transform to lines of staff. The position of Io equates Ab and Europa E in the bass clef, Ganymede C and Calisto Bb both in the treble clef: together they constitute the dominant seventh chord. The animation is a direct reference to the findings by Walter Murch and the theoretical visualization of music. Walter Murch is a renowned multiple Academy Award winner. Known mainly for his work as a sound designer and film editor, he has had an immense influence on Hollywood. His interests, however, go far beyond the world of Hollywood and include architecture, astronomy, music theory, and mathematics. Thanks to his wide-ranging interests and open-mindedness for cross-disciplinary theory, Murch was able to find a connection between the architecture of the Pantheon in Rome, Nicolaus Copernicus and the origins of heliocentrism in western astronomy, the BodeTitus-Law, and the formula of the overtone series. Murch discovered that Copernicus described, in his disclosure Revolution, concurrently the structure of the Pantheon and his theory of the solar system and discovered through superimposing Copernicus’ diagram of the planetary orbits and an image of the Pantheon dome, ‘[…] that the ratios of the circles in his drawing and the ratios of the circles of the Pantheon line up almost exactly’ (Manaugh 2007). The engagement with the music of the spheres and the Bode-Titus-Law, a relatively simple form of algebra proving a predictive and descriptive proof for the factual existence of patterns to the planetary orbits, led Murch to discover a direct and numerical correspondence between the structure of Western music and the orbits of the planets. Furthermore, he detected that the simplified Bode formula equates the formula from the overtone series. As Murch explains: ‘They’re primarily variations on what we call the 7th chord: C, E, G, B-flat. Bode’s predicted ratio between Earth and Mars, for instance, is the same as the 5:8 musical ratio between E and C. And if you divide the distances, in kilometers, of the four Galilean moons by a common denominator you get the notes Ab, E, C, Bb. And so on’ (Manaugh 2007).

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This theoretical analysis regarding the interrelation between music and the planets is not only expressed on the visual level but also through the means of music composed by Walter Harrison. The multilayered cello composition in Time Loops, the music of Just Ancient Loops, is consistently held in a pentatonic modality of the dominant seventh chord. This is exactly the same modality as in the overtone formula, which, again, is identical with the calculation of the Titius-Bode-Law. Thus, the arco flageollets of Maya Beiser, which render audible the natural overtones of a vibrating string, find their visual correspondence in the portrayal of the orbits of Neptune’s moons pictured as CGIs in Just Ancient Loops. This theoretical, musical, and visual trilateral reference corresponds to the theory of über-synchresis as mentioned above. The audiovisual reflexivity in music and image of architecture is another phenomenon on the level of über-synchresis. The peculiarity of the melody in Chorale is its ornamental style, which musicalizes the architecture of the Pantheon.

ASCENSION The third part of the film, which, like the first part, is kept in a major tonality, is dominated in a pentatonic manner by the FB quint. Now, after having directed the view from the earth to the sky and heaven prior, the attention is turned towards the Earth. The flickering image of the fire, lightening, sky, and clouds, in combination with the portato arco sound of the cello creates a synchretic effect. The absolutely arbitrary image interferences that set the image in jerking and glinting convulsions seem rhythmically adjusted accordingly. The telescope, from the opening of the film, is replaced by a microscope and renders visible micro cells, which spark association to the evolution of life on Earth. Again, the scientific references to the genesis of humanity are juxtaposed by a religious approach: images of a naked man who is wandering in a Garden of Eden type of nature constitute the transition from the focus on nature to the portrayal of humanity. People cultivating nature and doing amusing activities in an urban environment are presented and musically accompanied by flageolets. The fact that imagery of civilization shows up during the celluloid’s highest degree of decay and damage seems to be a critical commentary, a hint at the permanent destruction of nature by humans. Morrison does not try to create an artificial illusion of a cinematographic reality. On the contrary, he deliberately displays the materiality, emphasizes celluloid as texture, and thereby makes conscious that we are watching a film,

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a product, a material object artificially produced by men in a constantly inexorable physical process of deterioration echoed by the severely damaged film stock. In the first part of the film, the traces of decay are infrequent and subtle: the celluloid softly wafts, the scratches and blisters appear sporadically. In contrast, by the third and last part of the film, the demise cumulates: every blister and every scratch draws attention to the surface and hence is the testimony of its own volatility. Displaying the fragility of the material conveys that film is an ephemeral phenomenon. Its celluloid is the carrier of an image and is haunted by instability and is susceptible to a continual process of entropy (Blümlinger 2009, 288). Using material in decay can be read as the statement that the endeavour of men to preserve life through its representation is a determined illusion. This attempt, formulated by André Bazin in his discourse as the mummy-complex (1975, 21) declares the desire of people to preserve life as the foundation of art. To imagine reality as done in art ranging from painting to photography and cinematography is based on the urge to overcome the past. The rotting film stock, however, emphasizes the assumption that the urge to vanquish mortality is unfulfillable, no matter how much it is desired. The decaying images of a former present appear like a mirror of bygone times, with its associated memories fading, just as the celluloid crumbles to dust. Morrison’s mouldering film stock is the proof that film and photography can attempt to embalm time, as postulated by Bazin, but it merely remains an attempt. Eventually, one has to realize that time will prevail over cinema. The subsequent images display the animation of a clock from 1919, which seizes the idea of visualization of music in an über-synchretic style. The acoustic noise of the sound is depicted as sending out rays. Since sounds are sine waves and sine waves are mappings of circular motion, music is movement and the most adequate way to visualize music and the rhythm of life is in the form of loops. These loops are omnipresent and consistently detectable motifs on all levels. Loops, as implied by the title, are the central motif and can be found in all possible forms of appearances: the cosmos moves in loops, life on Earth emerges in loops, in rays expanding rings on water, the animation of sound, the machines and engines constructed by men operate in loops, even film tape is conserved in loops. Pursuant to a consequent bilateral reference, in the final moments of the film, the music, with its minimalistic and Indian raga ostinato, is spirally accentuating like a loop to ultimately climax with a dominant seventh chord expressed on the visual and acoustic level simultaneously. On the visual level, remnants of the French film The Life and Passion of Christ from 1907 display these final moments of musical climax. In a stage-

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like setting of props, we witness the resurrection of Christ and his ascension. Adequate for this heavenly rise, the musical sound is so enthralling that it uplifts the listeners acoustically towards the sky/heaven and ultimately leaves them levitating in infinity. Religion is representatively to be understood as one possible view of the heavens. Along with the scientific attempt to deliver an imaginable explanation for existence of life, as depicted by the people viewing the sky in the beginning of the piece, religion offers an alternative explanation for existence to humans. In addition to these two views of heaven, the CGI images of satellites provide a view that extends the capability of what the human eye can perceive and hence appears like an omnipotent extension of human power. The finale reference to a Christian interpretation of supernaturalism links the final image to the first one and hence über-synchretically revives the motif of the loop, but this time in its formal structure: the presentation of the film as a loop.

WORKS CITED Bazin, André. ‘Ontologie des fotografischen Bildes,’ Was ist Kino? Köln: M. DuMont Schauberg Verlag, 1975. Böser, Ursula. ‘Inscriptions of Light and the “Calligraphy of Decay”: Volatile Representation in Bill Morrison’s Decasia,’ Avant-garde Film. Eds. Alexander Graf and Dietrich Scheunemann. Amsterdam/New York: Rodopi, 2007. 305-320. Blümlinger, Christa. Kino aus zweiter Hand. Zur Ästhetik materieller Aneignung im Film und in der Medienkunst. Berlin: Vorwerk, 2009. Chion, Michel. Audio-vision: Sound on Screen. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994. Lund, Holger, and Cornella Lund. ‘Get the Cut.’ Rewind Play Fastforward. Eds. Henry Keazor and Thorsten Wübbena. Bielefeld: transcript, 2010. Manaugh, Geoff. ‘The Heleocentric Pathenon: An Interview with Walter Murch,’ BLDGBLOG 6 April 2007. http://www.bldgblog.com/2007/04/the-heliocentricpantheon-an-interview-with-walter-murch/. Accessed: 7 July 2015. Tscherkassky, Peter. ‘The Analogies of the Avant-Garde.’ Found Footage Film. Eds. Cecilia Hausheer and Christoph Settlele. Lucerne: Zyklop, 1992. 27-36.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR Eva Hoffmann is an experimental audiovisual artist, filmmaker, and PhD candidate. She studied Fine Arts and English at Goethe Universität Frankfurt am Main and is currently enrolled in a postgraduate program at Academy of Media Arts Cologne. She has participated in multiple art shows in Germany, Canada, and the United States. In her artwork as well as in her academic research, Eva Hoffmann focusses on the relationship between music and image. Here, she aims at new forms of synchresis in film, music videos, and experimental video art. In her thesis, entitled Image and Music. Music and Image. Exploring the Synchretic Relationship Between Auditive and Visual, she initiates a concomitant database of topic-related research and videos.

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CHAPTER 18

The Great Flood Water is Transparence Derived from the Presence of Everything Sukhdev Sandhu

Herzogenrath, Bernd (ed.), The Films of Bill Morrison. Aesthetics of the Archive. Amsterdam University Press, 2018 DOI 10.5117/9789089649966/CH18

ABSTRACT This associative essay about The Great Flood (2013) hinges on two televisual outbursts: Celine Dion, on CNN’s Larry King Live, taking to task the American military-industrial complex for its refusal to intervene forcefully in the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina; a black gentleman, who appears in Spike Lee’s When The Levees Broke (2006), and who has been displaced from his home after Katrina – ‘I’m an American. How can I be a refugee?’ This essay interlaces three hydropolitical disasters – The Great Flood in 1927, Hurricane Katrina in 2005, and Hurricane Sandy in 2012 – to explore the limits of quantificatory approaches to extreme environmental events and to examine shared patterns of state violence against black and working-class Americans. k e y wo r ds

The Great Flood, Hurricane Katrina, Hurricane Sandy, Celine Dion

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Watching the water, I am stricken with vertigo of meaning. Water is the final conjugation: an infinity of form, relation, and content. (I never know where I’m standing when I’m standing by the water). – Roni Horn 2011

I am watching The Great Flood. Its angry water, terrible panoramas, its sweep and majesty, its dark sublime: I am impaled and transfixed. But I am also taken back to terrors past, riverine disasters that, for a long time, were the stuff of dusty history books, but whose memory this film rekindles and reanimates. There was a long Great Flood in 1927. It has a backstory and tributary narratives.

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‘During the nineteenth century’, Pete Daniel writes in Deep’n As It Come ‘the line of levees lengthened along the banks of the Mississippi, but no matter how high the levees grew in times of great floods the river would find a way through. People who lived along it came to measure time not simply in years, but in flood years - 1858, 1862, 1867, 1882, 1884, 1890, 1897, 1903, 1912, 1913, 1922’ (1977, 5). Watching a film, especially in this current era, feels strangely partial and fragmented. To watch a film on or through a smartphone or laptop is to know that any thoughts, speculations, and questions it generates can be rapidly shared or even answered. Open another window, tap out a query in a search engine, flick through rivers of images, drift through data, assemble – in almost-ambient fashion – your own augmented version of that film. All at a pace so much quicker than in those not-so-distant days when you might have been tempted to trek out to a public library to dig for more information. This proximity to the past – a sort-of past, a semi-exhumed past, a compressed and vulgarly pixelated past, a seemingly infinite past – affects (for good or for bad) my relationship to film. I never know where I am sitting when I am sitting by moving images. Watching The Great Flood, I think about that time Celine Dion came on Larry King Live, a nightly talk show on CNN that ran from 1985 to 2010, the longest-running programme of its sort in the channel’s history. The whole show, like almost every current-affairs show in late August and early September 2005, was devoted to Hurricane Katrina, which had ravaged the Gulf Coast from central Florida to Texas. Over 230 people were killed in Mississippi and all 82 counties in the state were declared disaster areas. In New Orleans, after many levees broke, over 1450 people were killed; they were disproportionately black and working class and images of their corpses, rotting in the city streets, were broadcast day after awful day.

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Larry King had been showing a lot of those images and when he brought on Celine Dion, Queen Melisma, global empress of overwrought and ululatory emotion. She was about to go on stage at Las Vegas where she was in the middle of a three-year residency and King wanted to thank her for pledging $1 million to American Red Cross. It is easy to imagine what would happen next: statements of sadness, calls for viewers to make contributions, saccharine sentiments, and celebrity sanctification. Actually, nothing like that happened. Celine looked like she was about to cry – either that or fly into a rage. She certainly did not want to talk about money. I’m waking up in the morning. I’m having a coffee. I barely can swallow it. I come here at Caesars Palace every night to perform. I barely can sing. But for respect to the people who come I am still singing. When I come home at night, my son is waiting for me. I watch television. Yes, we gave $1 million, but what we expect, what I want to look – like the rest of the world… I open the television: there’s people still there waiting to be rescued and for me it’s not acceptable. I know there’s reasons for it. I’m sorry to say – I’m being rude – but I don’t want to hear those reasons. King looked a little nonplussed, but she continued: You know, some people are stealing and they’re making a big deal out of it. Oh, they’re stealing twenty pairs of jeans or they’re stealing television sets. Who cares? They’re not going to go too far with it. Maybe those people are so poor, some of the people who do that they’re so poor they’ve never touched anything in their lives. Let them touch those things for once. The main thing right now: it’s not the people who are stealing. It’s the people who are left there and they’re watching helicopters flying over their heads and they’re praying. How come it’s so easy to send planes in another country to kill everyone in a second, to destroy lives? […] You know, when I was hearing a couple of days ago that these things are not reachable, it’s too full of water […] Maybe I’m too much like my – I’m not thinking with my head. I’m talking with my heart. Nobody can open any roofs? The helicopters fly in. Take two people at a time! Take a kayak! Go into those walls. There’s kids being raped at night. They hear gunshots, big guns, what’s that? Those people are praying. They’re walking. They’re like this, ‘Hello, do you see us?’ ‘We’re still alive but we’re dying.’ It’s terrible.

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It feels, even when watched years later on YouTube in a fuzzy, non-HD version, like an explosive moment. Everyone would have expected Dion to have produced some bromides about the greatness of America or the need to pull together; instead, her passion, her refusal to engage in victim-shaming, and her ability to link the terrors in Katrina to the War on Terror in the Middle East made Kanye West’s accusation, during a Katrina fundraiser on the NBC network, that ‘George Bush doesn’t care about black people’ seem rather tame. Of course, Larry King quickly translated this critique into a parable about the glories of wealth creation and capitalist individuality: ‘You’re going to help a lot of people live and survive. You should take great pride in that, one, that you’ve attained the ability to be able to do that, to be able to give $1 million. You should take pride in that.’1

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What am I watching when I watch The Great Flood? The event it rekindles and reanimates was initially known as the Mississippi River Flood. ‘Mississippi’ is the Ojibway word for ‘Big River’. It is also sometimes called ‘The Big Muddy’. But no one could have foreseen (or could they? Those numbers again: 1858, 1862, 1867, 1882, 1884, 1890, 1897, 1903, 1912, 1913, 1922) the immense devastation - the Biblical ruination – wrought there between the summer of 1926 and June 1927. 16.5 million acres across seven states were submerged. More than 14 per cent of Arkansas lay beneath water. Nashville’s Cumberland River stood over seventeen metres high. Hun-

Fig. 18.1: Hurricane Sandy caused flooding on Avenue C in New York’s East Village, night of 29 October 2012. (Photographer unknown. Digitized print bought by Bill Morrison from street seller.)

dreds of men and women died, and over 600000 were dislocated – many forever. Small wonder it became known as The Great Flood. Statistics, data sets, quantification: these are what historians try to amass and to use as narrative bedrocks. But quantification can also numb and obscure. America clings to its genius for amnesia, sees it as a precondition of modernity, and these days, even after Hurricane Katrina and Hurricane Sandy, The Great Flood is almost completely forgotten. You would have to be a nonagenarian to have any firsthand recollections and, even in the South, its status as a hand-me-down memory or folk epic – more nightmare than fairy-tale – has long been eroding. Perhaps it is the blues that best keeps The Great Flood alive. It was the subject of countless 78rpm records: Blind Lemon Jefferson’s ‘Rising High Water Blues’ (1927), Lonnie Johnson’s ‘Flood Water Blues’ (1927), Memphis Minnie and Kansas Joe’s ‘When The Levee Breaks’ (1929), Charley Patton’s ‘High Water Everywhere’ (1929). In these and other contemporary songs, there is, as Ralph Ellison claimed there was in all the blues, ‘an impulse to keep the painful details and episodes of brutal experience alive in one’s aching consciousness, to finger its jagged grain, and to transcend it, not by consolation of philosophy, but by squeezing from it a near-tragic, near-comic lyricism’ (quoted in Mizelle 2014, 12). It is possible to argue that, through Led Zeppelin’s 1971 cover version of ‘When The Levee Breaks’, – and the subsequent sampling of John Bonham’s thunderous drum track by the likes of the Beastie Boys (‘Rhymin’ & Stealin’, 1986), Dr. Dre (‘Lyrical Gangbang’, 1992), and Massive Attack (‘Man Next Door, 1998) – the Flood has cast a spell over much of today’s popular culture. This is probably wishful thinking (It certainly wasn’t the lyrics of those old blues records that were being sampled or recontextualized). Would Bill Morrison even have been interested in developing a feature about the Flood if it were better known? The New York-based filmmaker is one of the world’s foremost aestheticians of decay and disappearance. Decasia (2002) was a ghostly valentine to old nitrate films: at exactly the moment when digital media was being (falsely) championed for its stability, Morrison created rapturous, arhythmic visual poetry out of the fragility of film and all its streaks, flares, bubbles, and decompositional effects. In The Miners’ Hymns (2010), he raked through the archives to find footage, much of it pocked and distressed, of North England coal miners. It was hard not see the disfigured images as a symbol of the ways in which so many livelihoods and communities had been disfigured – first by Thatcherite neoliberalism, then by a Blairite neoliberalism that appeared ashamed of the role trade unions played in the development of the British Left. The Great Flood exists because natural disasters are visual feasts, catnip for adventurous filmmakers. Cameramen from across and beyond America

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travelled to the South to document the unfolding drama. Morrison includes footage of levees being dynamited with the goal of submerging small towns in order to save New Orleans. He shows Herbert Hoover, who became U.S. President in 1929, posing for photographers and trying to create a narrative that, according to Richard M. Mizelle Jr., was that of ‘a person capable of leading the nation through the greatest peacetime disaster […] The messages conveyed in these films had more than a hint of paternalistic racism that mirrored Red Cross publications, popular images and paintings’ (2014, 96). There is darkness here, but it is of an eerily handsome kind: plaintive landscapes full of trees rendered mobile, main streets where all that is visible are the roofs of cold storage warehouses, empty bank buildings. As with photographs of abandoned Detroit or Cold War architecture in the Soviet Union, there coexists here both rapture and melancholy, beauty and bathos. Statistics, data sets, quantification: on the evening of 27 October 2012, Hurricane Sandy hit New York. Its storm-force winds extended more than 1000 miles from one end to another, making it three times the size of Hurricane Katrina. For the first time since 1888, the New York Stock Exchange was closed for two consecutive days. Seawater filled seven tunnels beneath the East River; 17 per cent of the city’s total land mass was flooded; 43 people were killed; nearly 2 million people were without power; 6500 men and women were evacuated from hospitals and nursing homes; over a million children were unable to attend school for over a week; over $19 million damage was caused. Bill Morrison was in New York when Hurricane Sandy struck. He was in his home in the East Village, not very far from the East River. There had been reports of severe weather for a few days. But the previous year, forecasters had predicted that Hurricane Irene would assail the city: businesses shut up shops, the subway system was closed, everyone – bar the homeless, pissed, or reckless – stayed indoors. In the end, nothing happened: people breathed a sigh of relief, wondered if they had been too timid, grumbled that they would not believe climate Cassandras in the future. ‘We watched the Con-Ed tower explode’, Morrison recalls. ‘Right after that, the lights went out. It was peaceful in a certain way. Later, of course, there was twelve feet of cold water in my basement’ (Morrison 2015).2 At the time, even though he had staged live performances of The Great Flood with jazz guitarist Bill Frisell as far back as spring 2011, he had yet to finish editing on the final version of the film. ‘It was incredible to see how the neighborhood in this day and age was so quickly reduced to what I was seeing in footage of 1927: sandbags and no electricity – with the difference being that everything is based on electricity now. Everyone’s trying to figure out how to charge our cellphones’ (Morrison 2015). Morrison is attuned to strange alchemies of art and life, creation and

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destruction. Over a decade before, he edited Decasia (2002) when the Twin Towers fell. Now, for days and weeks and months, he lived through the grimy aftermath of Sandy. ‘I’ll say this: Sandy was definitely a way to get to know your neighborhood. The guy next door had a generator. Another guy had a pump. I would get a gallon-milk jug and get on my bike to cycle to near 42nd Street to get gas for the generator. It felt very Mad Max: everything below 34th Street was in darkness and if you didn’t have a light on your bike it was like riding into the void. You ended up in a pothole or riding into a person’ (Morrison 2015). In The Great Flood, the threat to peoples’ lives and to a social order – as well as to much of this archival footage – is made potent by the use of footage that is itself in a state of animated decay. The border of the frame judders and flickers balletically. Blackness threatens the image. The decomposition conveys its own vulnerable beauty. In post-Sandy Manhattan, Morrison also confronted decomposition and disappearance: ‘I lost a lot of stuff – film and photographs and artwork and all this stuff that I’d stored. Saltwater wrecks everything it touches. It’s so crippling. It took a long time to patch up the walls and then paint them’ (Morrison 2015). What am I not watching when I watch The Great Flood? Contemporary films about floods or climate change tend to be emergency bulletins, strategically alarmist, calls to arms. Spike Lee’s When The ­Levees Broke (2006), Davis Guggenheim’s An Inconvenient Truth (2006), and Jon Shenk’s The Island President (2011), for example, are all muscular, buoyed by their sense of righteousness, more or less pedagogic. In Lee’s film, a black guy who was displaced from his home after Hurricane Katrina cries out: ‘I’m an American. How can I be a refugee?’ It is a sincere cry, an angry cry, and yet it is also parochial and historically ignorant. There should be a pause, a space for reflection – but the story gushes forward. Environmental catastrophes have the capacity to make refugees of us all. Scientists, mostly ignored by contemporary politicians – particularly those from America – have long warned that climate change will provoke mass migration on a previously unimaginable scale across the world. Those exoduses will produce upheaval and chaos. They will bring into relief vulnerability to which the weaker peoples of this earth are exposed on a daily basis. The violence, the apartheid, the wretched disparity in access to and enjoyment of natural resources: the ‘event’ of the flood does not so much turn the world upside down as show that the world was already upside down.

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Fig. 18.2: Dancing on the streets of Chicago, early 1960s (Still from The Great Flood sourced from Mike Shea’s 1964 film And This Is Free).

‘“They called us refugees,” Cora Lee Campbell recalled, with obvious distaste for the word’, writes Pete Daniel in Deep’n As It Come (1977, 84). ‘That’s what they called, and I guess that’s what we were.’ When asked how she fared in the Deeson, Mississippi relief camp, she replied, ‘I tell you, some places, some time, hit was hard. I’m just going to tell the truth. Sometimes hit was hard’ (Daniel 1977, 84). Campbell might well agree with Richard M. Mizelle Jr. when he speculates, Perhaps what the vitriolic discourse behind the word ‘refugee’ kept hidden from view was the experiential truth for black people during the 1927 flood and Katrina, that they were treated not only as second-class citizens, but at times as if they were strangers, and indeed ‘refugees’, in their own land (2014, 158). In Mississippi, the National Guard was activated to patrol Red Cross camp perimeters and control the movement of African Americans. If a black person worked as a sharecropper before the flood, he or she had to provide the name

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of that landowner before entering a relief camp and receiving food. Black people who did not work for a white person still had to be vouched for by a white person. Every black family, single man, woman, and child, had to be vouched for by a local white person to receive food and shelter, without exception. Every black family, single man, woman, and child, had to be vouched for by a local white person to receive food and shelter, without exception. Movement surveillance was largely achieved through a tag system reminiscent of the slave codes used during slavery and the black codes during the post-Reconstruction era. […] Those who didn’t have a tag or whose tag was missing could be jailed or forced to work on a levee detail (Campbell 2014, 37-38). From a certain perspective – that of Hollywood, perhaps – America had never been as fast, roaring, and inviting as it was in 1927. Peter Daniel captures this affluence and arrogance, this myopic hubris, this unwitting provincialism: ‘Aviators were continually setting flight records; several had already attempted the Atlantic, and before the flood crest reached the Gulf Lindbergh reached Paris. It was the year Al Jolson spoke in The Jazz Singer, De Hane Seagrave became the first person to drive across the earth at over 200 miles per hour. Babe Ruth hit sixty home runs that year’ (1977, 8). With the exception of one buzzy sequence in which another 1920s is mapped out via the pages of a Sears Roebuck Catalog – fashionable, metro-modern, consumerist – The Great Flood adopts a more rueful, ruminative approach. Some of the film’s most startling footage shows how brutal normal life was for millions of black Americans: watched over by a horse-bound overseer, the sun beating down on their stooped backs, their hands scarred and arthritic. Later they are shown doing a lot of the grunt work involved in trying to stop the rising waters from engulfing various towns. Many reside in temporary camps. When it comes to evacuation they are only allowed to leave after white people and livestock. When I watch The Great Flood, I am always a little confused. I know I am meant to be looking at a disaster, at sorrowful images of drowned lands and depleted peoples, but, even though the scenes depicting black workers picking cotton do not linger on their sweating backs and bloodied, arthritic hands, I know that these fields are factories and that their lives are expendable. I know the world that is on the brink of being lost is a pit, a futureless void, a graveyard of ambition and autonomy. ‘Nowhere but in the Mississippi Delta,’ wrote the sociologist Rupert Vance in 1935, ‘are antebellum conditions so

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nearly preserved’ (Mizelle 2014, 3). By 1927, the flood had already taken place: it was the theft and transportation of black bodies to America; it was the brutal instrumentalization of their bodies to prop up a plantocratic society; it was a perverted vision of democracy that denied representation to those men and women whose labor underwrote national expansion. Even the camps in this film – these white-triangled places of refuge – resemble Ku Klux Klan headwear. In the end, and rather unexpectedly, The Great Flood is an X-ray that reveals not only that the patient is sick but that his illness is curable. For hundreds and thousands of black Americans, the flood was a grand liberation, the trigger for them to throw off the shackles of cotton-picking servitude and to head north to cities such as Chicago. There, they could use bodies in different ways, move and dance in rhythms old and new, use and abuse time any which way they liked. This is no blues, no plaintive grief song – this is a jubilee, a deep carnival. There would be time for blues, for other grief songs in due course. * p os tsc r i p t

1:

‘Americans haven’t taken water seriously since the era when we had to tote our own drinking water and protect our own families from floods. And we haven’t said “Never again” for a very, very long time. In the wake of America’s 1927 Mississippi flood; the ’28 hurricane that killed 2,500 people south of Lake Okeechobee; and after Katrina, Congress admonished the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to get to work building protective barriers. But the rest of us quit paying attention’ (Barnett 2011, 52). ‘new orleans: There is disappointment but little surprise here at a federal judge’s grudgingly absolving the Army Corps of Engineers of liability in the flooding of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. […] The judge, Stanwood R. Duval Jr. of the Federal District Court here, a son of South Louisiana, heartily seconded that notion on Wednesday, suggesting that the corps was guilty of “gross incompetence.” But Judge Duval said he was powerless to rule favorably on the lawsuit because the Flood Control Act of 1928 granted legal immunity to the government in the event of failure of flood control projects like levees’ (Nossiter 2008). p os tsc r i p t

2:

‘42 per cent of Americans live in areas protected by levees’ (Barnett 2011, 50).

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NOTES 1

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q_8Y0JhSSGo. It should be noted, in case it seems I that posit Celine Dion as an uncomplicated hydropolitical heroine, that she is one of the largest water users in two states – Florida and Nevada. In 2010, she spent $20 million on a backyard water park at her Florida home – two swimming pools, two water slides, and a lazy river, which use 500000 gallons of water a month (Barnett 2011, 14).

2

This and all further quotes from Morrison taken from personal interview, Manhattan, 5 August 2015.

WORKS CITED Barnett, Cynthia. Blue Revolution: Unmaking America’s Water Crisis. Boston: Beacon Press, 2011. Daniel, Peter. Deep’n as It Come: The 1927 Mississippi Flood. New York: Oxford University Press, 1977. Horn, Roni. Another Water: The River Thames, For Example. Göttingen: Steidl, 2000. Mizelle, Richard M. Backwater Blues: The Mississippi Flood of 1927 in the African American Imagination. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014. Morrison, Bill. Personal Interview. 5 August 2015. Nossiter, Adam. ‘In Court Ruling on Floods, More Pain for New Orleans.’ The New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/01/us/01corps.html. Accessed: 1 February 2008.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Sukhdev Sandhu directs the Colloquium for Unpopular Culture at New York University and the Texte und Töne publishing imprint. He writes for Bidoun, The Guardian, The Wire, Sight and Sound, and many other publications.

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CHAPTER 19

Re-Awakenings Bill Morrison in Conversation Lawrence Weschler

Herzogenrath, Bernd (ed.), The Films of Bill Morrison. Aesthetics of the Archive. Amsterdam University Press, 2018 DOI 10.5117/9789089649966/CH19

ABSTRACT An interview between Lawrence Weschler, who commissioned Re:Awakenings (2013), with Bill Morrison. k e y wo r ds

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Lawrence Weschler: In considering the genesis of Reawakenings, the documentary we did with Oliver Sack’s material, maybe I should start. As you know, I had known Oliver Sacks at that point, in 2013, for something like 35 years and indeed, at one point, in the early 1980s, had been getting set to do a biography of him. In the event, we had agreed, he and I, that I wouldn’t do that (he had issues around his sexuality, which, at the time, he did not feel comfortable having talked about, though, just recently, that has changed and he is talking about them in his own newly released autobiography), but we stayed friends. And, in 2013, I was working with the eminent dancer Bill T. Jones, who wanted to start a humanities festival in his NY Live Arts dance space and have me curate it, an annual festival to be themed around body issues widely understood (mind-body, body-soul, body-politic, and the like); and we agreed that a great way to start would be to devote the entire five-day 20-event festival to the work and worlds of Oliver Sacks. (The next year we did the work and worlds of James Baldwin and the year after that, Laurie Anderson.) But, in any case, the first one was to be Oliver Sacks. And I knew, knowing Oliver, that he had a box somewhere in a closet in his Greenwich Village apartment, containing something like fifteen reels of super-8 footage that he himself had taken at the time of the great awakening of his patients, those remarkable months back in 1969, just before and just after, when he’d brought a group of deeply frozen patients rearing back to life. These were patients who had been entirely entranced, as if living statues, for at that point coming on for 20 or 30 years. And suddenly, because of the administration of the so-called wonder-drug L-Dopa, he was able to bring them back to vivid life, though they then encountered all sorts of complex tribulations. And he had filmed it all! My own free association, thinking about all of this (and having previously written about both your Decasia and your Release, and having stayed in friendly contact with you ever since then), was that these were, in some sense, the human equivalent of the kinds of film stock that you often deal with: achingly degraded, time-worn, time-collapsed, as it were smeared human beings (as opposed to film stock). And that you therefore would be the obvious person to talk to about this. So I contacted you and said, ‘Do you want to play?’ And you said… Bill Morrison: ‘Well, yes!’ Of course! Any time there is a bunch of super-8 film crammed into a cardboard box, I get excited. The fact that these were Oliver Sacks’ home movies from 1969 – I think it occurred to both of us that the patients in question had been archived, if you will, in their own bodies, for decades, in deep and dark storage, shuttered in and unexposed to the light in a certain way, up until their release in 1969. The same with that boxful of reels

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in the intervening years: we were sort of going to be releasing these films from their cardboard box. Now, of course the Awakenings story had already gone through many different manifestations: it had become a best-selling book, a major Hollywood movie, a Harold Pinter play, a modern dance. But what was really intriguing here was that we were going to get to engage with the original source material. Now, unlike what is generally the case with the material I usually work with, these films were actually not in that bad condition. The colors hadn’t faded that much, certainly the emulsion was still intact. It was a decidedly amateurish production, there was one single light unit, often visible; there was a cord that the patients often had to negotiate, almost like an obstacle course to get past the lighting. I think, at times, Oliver was operating the camera. Sometimes, he had set it up and had an assistant do so. We’d see a veritable parade of different fashions of the time worn by his various nurses and assistants. LW: Which was great, because this was 1969 fashion. The heyday of peacelove, flower-power… BM: Oh, man it was just – there was this one gal in particular who just came with a different dress every day and it was like – wow. LW: We might pause for a second just to describe who these patients were and how they’d gotten there. BM: Of course, it was a wide swatch of people. I think that, when the hospital began, it had been expressly established for them. Isn’t that correct? LW: Indeed, it was launched as ‘a home for the incurable’ in the late 1920s. As you know, just after World War I, there was that terrible influenza outbreak, which killed more people around the world than the war itself had. In, like, an eighteen-month period: just horrifying. Of the people who survived that, a certain percentage suddenly – five or six years later, and then onward from there – suddenly from one day to the next… slowed down, and presently came… to a… complete… …stop. It was a completely shocking state of affairs, this epidemic of ‘sleeping sickness’ as it was soon being called. It was happening all over the world and affecting young people, in their teens and 20s to a particularly severe degree. People who were just starting out with their lives. It was eventually identified as a post-encephalitic syndrome (the influenza had encephalitic characteristics, and this was a post-encephalitic situation). Some of the victims came out of it, many of them died, and most of those who survived were

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initially kept at home – but, at a certain point, that became untenable for most of their families. And they started being warehoused in various places around the world. And the one in the Bronx was called a ‘home for the incurable’. The disease itself seemed to vanish as suddenly and unaccountably as it has first appeared, and it was quickly forgotten. It had been so traumatic that people didn’t even want to remember it anymore. As time went by, they started warehousing other sorts of people in the same hospital – variously demented, palsied, catatonic cases. The place became a Jewish home and it became known as Beth Abraham, in the Bronx, right near the Bronx Botanical Gardens. And the original population was lost amidst the wider group. And so things persisted until around 1967, when a young English doctor named Oliver Sacks arrived… BM: On a motorcycle! 280 | LW: Yup, he was still in his motorcycle days. And now that his autobiography has come out, you will know how, among other things, during his immediately preceding California residencies, he had been a dedicated bodybuilder, a champion weight lifter, a fierce motorcyclist, and had also given himself over to phenomenal drug binges. But, anyway, he arrives and he starts attending there at Beth Abraham. And I’ve always felt that, in some sense, the really amazing part of that story is that Oliver had the imagination – in some sense, almost the moral grandeur, the audacity – to recognize that some of those people were not like the other ones, and to imagine that some of those frozen statues were, in fact, in some strange way, fully alive in their frozenness. BM: And you attributed that to his drug experiences, right? LW: Yeah, in that, ‘Yeah, I know how that is. I too have spent twelve hours without moving’. BM: And what these people need is some speed! LW: Well, he was open to the possibility that something like that might work. It was about a year later that L-Dopa came online. The movie that would later be made – with Robin Williams playing Sacks and Robert DeNiro playing his foremost patient – got some things wrong in a fairly profound way. Because Oliver wasn’t the one forcing L-Dopa on his patients. Oliver had doubts about L-Dopa from the start, notwithstanding its miracle reputation. Oliver had taken so many drugs and was so aware of all the side effects that he no longer

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believed in Messianic claims. But suddenly L-Dopa had appeared on the scene as ‘the miracle cure for Parkinsonism’, and there were no reports yet of any problems whatsoever. Oliver had misgivings, but the patients themselves – or their families, or whoever (sometimes the patients would come out of their trances for a few hours and would have some awareness of the world) – and they began demanding to be given L-Dopa. So, anyways, with some misgivings, L-Dopa was given to them, and the flowering – the Awakening – was just astonishing. There was a brief period of incredible efflorescence, almost. I mean the sheer joy of it – BM: That was in the summer of 1969, right? LW: All through the summer of 1969. And the point is that he had filmed them both before and after. And so now, decades later, you open the box and – well, describe things: what was this box? BM: Well, it couldn’t have been more quotidian. It’s a box that I imagine many of us have in our closets – depending on what era you are from, but I myself certainly have a cardboard box full of super-8. LW: Were they big reels or little reels? BM: I guess they were 3-inch reels, each one would contain maybe about 50 feet. In some cases, they’d been compiled onto 400-foot reels, but they were, for the most part, single, standard – the sort of preloaded cartridge you would have brought to your drug store for developing, and it would have come back in an envelope. My first thought was ‘We gotta get this into some sort of HD digital format’. In other words, whatever condition these had been in before, they’d never been into what we’d consider our state of high resolution, given the way things were in 2013 (which probably is inferior to what we would do in 2015). I mean, the super-8 is emulsion, you know? And we’ll forever be chasing that. But there happened to be a lab that still does super-8 work and isn’t scared when you bring in a box full of this stuff. They could make big, high-resolution files for us. So, after some time, we got that squared away, and I started looking through this material. And I think the thing that really struck me – and this was the thing I think Oliver brought to this beyond his experiences with drugs or anything else – just his incredible empathy: how he was treating these people as people. As colleagues, as patients, but not as – LW: Not as vegetables.

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BM: Not as vegetables! And this before the L-Dopa. Later on, it seemed to me that they could have been responding to that sheer empathy as much as to anything pharmacological. Because he was incredibly interested in them, these people who, for years, had just been… archived… and what he was doing was therapy as much as clinical testing. He was asking them to stand up and clap and write their name – he was giving them an identity again. Which was very touching. And also just the context of who he was. There are these shots that he obviously set someone else to film of his arriving at the hospital on his motorcycle. But again, there were no production values; these were strictly clinical studies.

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LW: The earlier shots, which you ended up putting at the beginning, were just heartbreaking, just crushingly – the patients are like collapsed stars almost, just completely crunched. I imagine that one of the things that kept happening for you as you were reviewing the material was that the same patients kept showing up at different points, in different conditions. BM: Yeah, and that was a big part of organizing this project: matching faces, and then eventually names, as those became clear. And indeed, sometimes it was hard to recognize an early patient from the one who had been treated. Now, of course, the other thing we had brought to the project besides our edit was Philip Glass’ music. LW: Talk about that. BM: Well, I’d worked around Philip’s world for years; he’s sort of been a deity in the world where I’ve worked for almost decades, now. And physically we’ve been his virtual next-door neighbors this entire time. LW: The composers that you’ve worked with are mainly the generation right after him, basically. BM: Right after. People like Michael Gordon, David Lang, Steve Reich’s colleagues. And, over the years, I’d become friends with Phil, too. I’ve asked him to perform at benefits and things like that. And he’s just one of the most generous guys I know. Incredibly magnanimous and engaged – and has time. I mean, I know he doesn’t have time. But he makes time. And I’ve heard that across the board, from other people who’ve worked with him. How that’s really striking for someone who has that many demands on him.

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LW: And you guys had been saying for some time that you wanted to do something together someday, right? BM: Yeah, that’s true. At one point, I had said something like that and he said, ‘Yeah, and I still haven’t worked with Sonny Rollins yet, either’. [Laughter from both] So I knew I had to get in there. But, at any rate, we brought him some of the early scans and it struck him immediately that there was this eternal, internal breath going on that the patients could always hear. Therefore, he felt, the soundtrack should be a solo woodwind. LW: The ticktock of breathing. BM: Yeah, exactly! This thing that they would always have been aware of. We had hoped that Philip could write something new – but it occurred to him that he already had these beautiful melodies for saxophone solo that he’d composed maybe a decade earlier for a JoAnne Akalaitis production, which had been recorded by Andrew Sterman but hadn’t really been used in a film before. I think that he felt that they’d never reached a wider audience and so he was happy to offer them to us. Maybe at first as scratch tracks, but then ultimately as the finished score, because really they couldn’t be improved upon. So we’re incredibly grateful to him. Before you touched briefly on this idea of how people should never forget. The hope, in turn, that maybe if we remind people, if we make this manifest now, that people may become aware once again of the forgotten power of viruses and so forth. And that turns out to be a recurring theme of my work. How no one should ever have forgotten the 1927 flood, but, by 1937, everyone had forgotten it. Likewise, everyone should be aware of encephalitis lethargica and we still have never found a cure for it. LW: Beyond that, in your own case, you grew up with AIDS all around you – as did I –in the art world you came up in (you’re a few years behind me) there’s always been this sense of ‘This has to be memorialized, this has to be remembered’. Because, I have a feeling at some point there will be a cure for AIDS – there already is a treatment and the sheer horror of that moment is fading away and people who are younger don’t remember it. BM: People certainly don’t remember how commonplace it was just to have friends dropping.

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LW: I sometimes wonder the extent to which your own work grows out of that spectre – I mean, in Decasia, for example, the mine disasters and the like, or the flood in The Great Flood, and so much else – how they all have in them the feel of somebody who had grown up around the AIDS epidemic, which, in turn, becomes one of the themes that keeps percolating underneath those films. BM: Likewise, and I’ve said this before, in Decasia, there’s a picture there of Wall Street in complete chaos, which, when I chose it for the film, served as a kind of distressed celebration of the aviators, a kind of march down the skyscraper canyon, but, by the time we’d stretch-printed it, it was 12 September 2001, and it had come to mean something completely different. LW: And of course, 9-11’s in the background there, too. 284 | BM: That was in the background. But it meant so much to me at that time. Whereas now, fourteen years later, that’s faded into the background. That’s not a reference point that people would necessarily… LW: Curiously, one of the allegorical references that I myself drew off of Awakenings years ago – I wrote a piece in 1990, which is included in my book Everything That Rises, saying (this was at the time when Communism all over Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union had fallen, and totalitarianism was likewise collapsing in South Africa and Chile and all those other places, we were seeing this great awakening of countries that had been frozen, there was all this euphoria going on). And I wrote a piece at that time saying that the most important book one could read right now to get a proper bead on what was going on in Eastern Europe was Oliver Sacks’ Awakenings. Indeed, one of the things that you’ll see in my book is that when Vaclav Havel is standing in that photo on the balcony, he’s wearing a black peacoat with the word ‘AWAKENINGS’ on the back, and it is indeed the peacoat from the Awakenings film shoot, which had taken place just a bit earlier. A friend of Havel’s had been the cinematographer on the film and he had given him that peacoat. BM: Wow. LW: And what I was suggesting at that time was, ‘Be careful. It’s not a simple matter, these sorts of awakenings. There are likely to be all sorts of complications up ahead. Sure, now there’s euphoria, but things are going to get very complicated’. And, in fact, Czechoslovakia broke up into two countries just a few years later, you’ve had all kinds of complications in all those countries,

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with eventually Yugoslavia catastrophically so, the neoliberal shock treatment had all sorts of perverse effects, especially in Russia. The Awakenings story is just so powerfully allegorical. The book itself was so rhapsodic, going back over material that at the time, in his daily clinical notes, Oliver had recorded in one register as it were, and now he was reviewing it in a different register, the clinical tale – almost a different musical register. And then, to have your film, with Philip Glass on top of it, offers still another register. BM: Isn’t it also the case that when Awakenings, the book, first came out, it was met by disbelief? LW: It was not only disbelief. When he wrote the book, it was roundly condemned by the medical establishment, because Oliver was saying, ‘Wait a second, it’s not as simple as that’, and he was attacked for ‘puncturing the mood of therapeutic optimism’. People were saying, ‘What are you doing saying that there’s all these problems?’ Now it’s taken for granted that there are these problems with L-Dopa. I mean, L-Dopa has good things going for it, but it doesn’t solve everything. But he was roundly condemned at the time, and it was very, very traumatic for him, the reception he got. But, then again, here you have the video evidence of it, at some level. BM: At the time, he’d also invited that British television team to come in. LW: He invited a British team, Duncan Dallas and his team from Yorkshire Television. And, in effect, the first film that was made of those events was that very straightforward but beautifully rendered hour-long documentary. BM: But this was eighteen months after the book’s publication. LW: Right. And, indeed, they used some of the footage that you had access to, too. But I see yours as an almost poetical distillation. Being only fifteen minutes long, it’s incredibly concentrated, and yet, when you watch it, you feel like you’ve watched an epic. A fifteen-minute epic. BM: Duncan Dallas had had access to the patients afterwards, and so, of course, we were able to use some of his footage to end our film. LW: Do talk a little about the process of arranging your film, coming up with the fifteen minutes, and that kind of thing.

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BM: Well, it was unlike any other project I’d ever tackled, of course. And there was also this sense of not wanting to romanticize or trivialize the situation of those people. These were real people, who have families, and you’re showing them in sometimes very distressed situations. There were some victorious moments, but these are compromised people. So it became… LW: You wanted to be worthy of it.

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BM: I certainly did. But I also wanted to marshal and organize the material, without necessarily stamping it ‘This is a Bill Morrison film’. Because this is actually an Oliver Sacks film. So I first had to get to know the patients, and there were many, many more than we ended up including since we only ended up taking the ones where we could clearly follow the whole arc: those who had been bedridden, and then going through the first days of exercise in the spring of 1969, and really blossoming in the summer and showing some ebullience, on through crisis, and even onto the far side in the rec-room in 1971 with those remedial exercises. So, once we were able to sort of identify who those players were, we were also able to venture a few side excursions: for example, the gentleman who walks out of the hospital and then down the street and then becomes kind of consumed by the crowd, which was such a beautiful metaphor for – for – for – LW: He enters urban life! BM: He enters urban life and just looks like any other elderly person from the Bronx. Which was a perfect stand-alone piece all by itself. So, unlike a film where the footage was sort of going to tell me how to shape the film, in this instance, we sort of knew the story we wanted to tell from the outset. So it was more like, ‘Well, we’ll need a prelude’. And there, incredibly, we had this public-domain footage from the 1920s of the encephalitis lethargica outbreak. And then these early shots of Oliver arriving at the hospital, and then those bedridden pre-Dopa patients. And it was all spelled out, literally, on a chalkboard for us: who had taken by what, when. LW: And speaking of chalkboard, you even had the people introducing themselves by writing their names on the chalkboard. BM: Right, these names that had heretofore been private. I mean, in the book, they had all been given pseudonyms, and now we were revealing their actual names for the first time, which was powerfully moving.

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LW: One of the most interesting, by the way, being Leonard L. as he is known in the book, whose fate constitutes one of the main stories in the book – BM: The DeNiro character. LW: Yeah, Ed Weintraub, that kind of pear-shaped funny looking drooling guy in the plaid shirt at the outset who turns out to be an amazing person when he comes to. BM: And you knew him? LW: I knew his mother. He had died by the time I was visiting Beth Abraham in the early 1980s. But I met his mother, and oy, was she a character. How was it for you as you finished making the film? Because it’s interesting. It occurs to me how, when you’re watching it, the catharsis almost comes at you sideways. It’s a devastating film, and yet, there’s always the exhilaration of capturing devastation cleanly, and seeing it cleanly captured. BM: I think it’s a very strong film, but that owes to the immediacy of the source. I think what you’re seeing is human empathy in action. And it hadn’t been filmed for that purpose: Oliver wasn’t grandstanding. It was done for the truest scientific purposes. So it’s interesting to see it recontextualized – reawakened, as it were – this way, as a narrative, as something with emotional content. Because, of course, that wasn’t the way it was filmed at all. And I think you get that from looking at it, how you’re looking at reels of film from a cardboard box that have been pulled out, but could just as easily have been forgotten. That reminds me of one more thing. I was working on this in the fall of 2012. And I had many, many films in many, many cardboard boxes besides these ones in my home studio. And on 29 October, my basement and first floor in our East Village apartment were submerged when the Long Island Sound came rushing in. LW: That was Hurricane Sandy! BM: We lost a lot of old prints of Decasia, for example, and many other things. LW: Talk about The Great Flood! BM: But, luckily, that particular cardboard box was above sea level, as it were, and it was spared.

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LW: Oh, God. What did Oliver think of the film? BM: Well, he wrote me a very touching letter, said he was very moved by it, which was very gratifying. As I say, I wanted to feel worthy of the footage and his response helped me feel that way.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Lawrence Weschler (Cowell College, UC Santa Cruz, 1974) was a staff writer at The New Yorker for over twenty years (1981-2002), where his work shuttled between political tragedies and cultural comedies. He recently graduated to Director Emeritus of the New York Institute for the Humanities at NYU, where he was Director from 2001-

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2013. He is also the Artistic Director Emeritus, still actively engaged, with the Chicago Humanities Festival, and sometimes a curator for the New York Live Ideas Festival. His books of political reportage include The Passion of Poland (1984); A Miracle, A Universe: Settling Accounts with Torturers (1990); and Calamities of Exile: Three Nonfiction Novellas (1998). His ‘Passions and Wonders’ series currently comprises Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees: A Life of Contemporary Artist Robert Irwin (1982); Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder (1995); A Wanderer in the Perfect City: Selected Passion Pieces (1998); Boggs: A Comedy of Values (1999); Vermeer in Bosnia (2004); and Everything that Rises: A Book of Convergences (2006). Recent books include a considerably expanded edition of Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees, a companion volume; True to Life: Twenty Five Years of Conversation with David Hockney; and his latest collection Uncanny Valley: Adventures in the Narrative. He currently writes for Vanity Fair and The New York Times Magazine and is completing a book on Oliver Sacks, due out in 2017. His work is regularly updated on his website: http://www.lawrenceweschler.com/.

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INDEX OF FILM TITLES A Movie 42, 54 Adventures of Christina 48n23, 63, 65n11 La Naissance du cinema 41 Le Juif Polonais (The Polish Jew) 98-99, 101-102, 104 Lost Avenues 35, 41, 46 Magellan Project 38-39 Paper Print Collection 18, 31-38, 40, 42-45, 46n2, 47n13, 48n21, 51-55, 58-60, 62-63, 192 Public Domain 34, 36, 38-40, 47n11, 47n12, 47n14 Ridge Theater 11, 18, 31, 34, 41, 47n6, 92n1, 168 The Bells 20, 56, 97-102, 104-105, 106n1, 111-112, 119-121 The Cavalier’s Dream 59, 61, 65n8 The Death Train 35, 40, 42, 47n6, 47n8, 48n17 The Film of Her 18, 31-33, 39-45, 47n8, 48n18, 48n21, 51-55, 58-63, 85, 105, 192 The Mesmerist 20-21, 55-56, 97-105, 106n1, 120, 245 Tom, Tom, the Piper’s Son 32-34, 37, 40, 54-55, 60, 141, 145

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INDEX OF NAMES a

Chatrian, Alexandre 98

Arendt, Hannah 153, 163

Chion, Michel 27, 253-254, 257-258

Arnheim, Rudolph 73

Christensen, Simon 27, 242, 247-248

Artman, Deborah 23, 168-169

Copernicus, Nicolaus 260

Ault, Bill 39, 42-45, 48n20 d b

Deleuze, Gilles 13-15, 20-21, 71-72, 80n2, 83-86, 91-92, 92n4, 95, 109,

Bazin, André 15-17, 77, 80n4, 85, 91,

114, 121-122, 156, 159, 165, 209

160, 212, 214, 228, 262 Baron, Jaimie 172-173

Deutsch, Gustav 45, 57, 62, 197

Barrymore, Lionel 97, 99-104, 119 Blanchot, Maurice 242

e

Beiser, Maya 27, 254, 261

Erckmann, Émile 98

Benjamin, Walter 83-84, 90, 93n8, 93n9, 111, 123, 131-132, 196, 219 Bergson, Henri 14, 23, 72, 90-92, 93n8, 93n10, 164

f

Faulkner, William 70, 78, 245-246 Fischinger, Oskar and Hans 257-258

Bioy Casares, Adolfo 220

Ford, John 70-71, 80n1

Bogost, Ian 205

Frampton, Hollis 18, 31-32, 34, 36-41,

Borges, Jorge Luis 26, 211-212, 215, 218-219, 221

47n11, 47n12, 47n13, 141, 147n7 Freud, Sigmund 20, 26, 98, 120, 213,

Breer, Robert 32-34, 84

222, 223n5, 241, 243-246, 248,

Brothman, Brien 170

251 Frisell, Bill 11, 20, 97, 104-105, 270

c

Cash, Johnny 73 Carrouges, Michel 220-221

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g

m

Gondry, Michel 258

McGrath, Bob 168

Gordon, Douglas 118

McLuhan, Marshall 117, 188

Gordon, Michael 11, 22, 25, 92n1,

Murch, Walter 254, 260

105, 116, 125, 147n1, 168, 188,

Mulvey, Laura 214, 222

201, 282 Grimm, Buckey 33, 43, 46, 46n3, 52,

n

54, 61, 64n3

Nancarrow, Conlon 248

Guattari, Félix 91, 122, 156, 159

Nash, Roderick Frazier 77-78 Niver, Kemp 32-35, 39, 43-44, 46,

h

46n1, 46n2, 53-55, 58-60, 62-63,

Harrison, Michael 27, 56-57, 253-254

64n3, 65n8, 139, 147n2

Hyatt, Isaiah 115 o

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i

Olinder, Laurie 168

Ives, Charles 248

Otis, Elisha 123, 132

j

p

Jacobs, Ken 18, 20, 31-33, 35, 37,

Parkes, Alexander 115

40-41, 44, 46, 46n1, 54-55, 60, 84,

Peirce, Charles Sanders 83-84, 87

92n4, 141, 145, 166, 189

Poe, Edgar Allan 245

Jameson, Frederic 76

Prelinger, Rick 42, 46, 47n7, 48n25

k

Kant, Immanuel 153, 163

s

Karloff, Boris 97, 99, 120, 212

Serres, Michel 95, 155

Koeck, Richard 76

Shelley, Mary 212, 214-215, 219, 223n1

l

Simmel, Georg 83, 88, 90, 93n7, 93n10, 160

Lacan, Jacques 20, 26, 98, 103-104, 122, 241, 243, 245, 251 Lang, David 11, 153, 164n1, 168, 176, 282 Lear, Jonathan 246-247

Simondon, Gilbert 21, 110, 121 Sitney, Paul-Adams 47n13, 79-80 Stewart, Garrett 84, 246 Streible, Dan 18, 37, 45-46, 46n4, 48n23, 51, 68

Leenhardt, Roger 41, 44, 48n18, 58 Lewis, Leopold 98-99 Loughney, Peter 33, 43, 46n2, 53

v

Lubman, Brad 168

Von Foerster, Heinz 113

Lumière, Louis 15, 123-124, 132 Lyotard, Jean-François 163

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w

Walls, Howard 33-34, 42-44, 46, 46n4, 48n21, 48n22, 52-54, 57, 61-63, 64n3, 65n9 Warren, E. Alyn 99 Willeman, George 56-57, 61-62, 64, 65n10 Wolfe, Julia 11, 23, 167-168, 171, 173 y

Young, James 98-100

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index of names

INDEX OF SUBJECTS | 295

a

d

American visual history 187

death drive 26, 241, 243, 245, 248

Audiovisual correlation 253, 257

documentary 38, 40, 47n13, 48n21,

Archival Footage 62, 90, 169, 222, 231,

53-55, 58, 63, 65n10, 68, 81, 110,

233-234, 237, 271

152, 158-159, 163, 186, 192, 214,

Archival Theory 169

221, 223n4, 224, 228, 231-232,

Archive Effect 172

254, 256, 278, 285

archivists 17, 37, 45, 46n4, 52, 54-55, 57, 62, 68, 91, 169-170, 175

drive 26-27, 220, 241-243, 245, 248 dying 20, 26, 83, 152, 219, 223n7, 241242, 245-246, 248-249, 267

b

bachelor machines 26, 211, 220-222

e

Bang on a Can 92n1, 168, 254

eclipse 131, 134, 256

Brooklyn Academy of Music 168

ecology 13, 23, 122, 151-154, 156, 159-

c

ensemble music 233

Cantaloupe Music 164n1, 168

Ensemble Signal 168

celluloid 12, 15-17, 20, 23, 25, 27,

ethics 135, 151-153, 160-161, 163, 166,

161, 163, 166, 186

173, 217

28n2, 33, 54, 64n3, 70, 72, 86, 91, 101, 106, 109-110, 112-121, 151-

experimental editing 187

152, 161, 174, 187-189, 193-195,

experimental film 36, 54, 84, 115, 151, 197, 257

234, 254, 256, 261-262 CGI 27, 254, 258-259, 261, 263 Collective Memory 24-25, 167, 169170, 175, 188, 194-196 consumption 76, 159-160 cosmos 25, 77, 262

f

film philosophy 151, 166 film preservation 18, 45, 51-52, 55, 63

Florida Moving Image Archives 24, 169

liquid/liquidity 23, 151-156, 158-161, 163, 166, 228, 245

found footage 20, 24, 27, 33, 35, 38, 40-42, 47n10, 47n16, 54, 58, 70,

loops 19, 27, 34, 70, 72, 217, 222,

83-85, 92n4, 116, 139, 152, 166,

223n6, 243, 245-246, 249, 253-255,

167-168, 171, 187-188, 193, 195,

257-259, 261-263

238, 254, 258-259 frame 24, 33, 41, 58-62, 64n3, 69-75,

luminosity 109, 111, 117, 121, 217 luminous unconscious 120-121

77, 79, 81, 84-85, 104, 116-117, 120, 124-125, 132-133, 139-141,

m

143-146, 153, 161, 163, 171, 173-

material culture 12-13, 19-20, 110, 112

174, 177, 189-191, 194-195, 203,

materiality 12-13, 18-20, 45, 53, 60, 63,

206, 212, 234-235, 242, 244-247,

75, 83, 87-88, 90-91, 111, 125, 152,

258-259, 271

159-160, 166, 248, 261 medium/media 12-13, 15, 17-18, 20-21,

296 |

g

23, 25-26, 34-35, 41, 45, 53-54, 57,

Gestalt 73, 257

65n11, 70, 73, 81, 84-85, 87, 90-91,

ghosts 19, 35, 41, 59, 69, 73, 75, 78,

95, 98, 106, 109-117, 119-122, 140-

80n3, 99, 102, 104, 119-120, 123-

141, 143, 151-155, 160-161, 163,

124, 134, 145-146, 213, 215, 220,

166, 169-170, 174, 188, 197, 199-

222, 269

201, 209, 240, 246, 249, 251, 256, 258-259, 264, 269

h

mise en abyme 211, 215

Historical found footage 187

monster 212, 217-219, 221-222, 223n7

home movies 23-24, 54, 167, 169-171,

motion 14, 25, 32, 41-42, 48n22, 52-55, 58-60, 62, 64n3, 65n8, 65n9, 70,

173, 175, 278

111, 113, 115-116, 127, 131-133,

hyperreality 19, 69, 73-75, 76-77

139, 142-143, 145-146, 155, 173i

174, 188, 190-195, 199, 203, 207, 217, 232, 243, 246, 262

Icarus Films 168

moving image archiving 24, 46n4, 52, l

54, 63, 68, 169, 171, 254

Library of Congress 11, 18, 31-32, 35-37, 40, 45, 46n1, 47n11, 47n13,

music video 27, 176, 253-254, 258, 264 myth 19, 22, 26, 53, 63, 69, 73, 77-78, 80, 87, 125-127, 194-195, 196n2,

48n17, 51-58, 60, 62-64, 64n3,

219, 223n7

65n8, 65n9, 68, 84, 98, 106n1, 192, 221, 254

mythology 25, 187-289, 193-196, 196n2

light 15, 21-22, 44, 72, 75-76, 80n3, 109-121, 124-127, 131, 133, 140,

n

143, 145, 157, 171, 173, 204, 206-

newsreels 25, 53-54, 57, 63, 84, 169,

207, 214, 220, 235, 256, 270-271, 278-279

THE FILMS OF BILL MORRISON

188-190, 213, 218, 221 nitro-cellulose 16-17, 88, 93n7

nitrate film 16-17, 18, 21, 27, 42-43,

Shelter 164n1, 167-168

45, 52-53, 55-57, 63, 84, 98, 102,

silent film 48n22, 57, 221, 223n6

106, 217, 242, 244-246, 249, 254,

space 14-15, 19, 22, 24, 59, 70-78, 81,

258, 269

84-85, 90, 93n8, 110, 113-114, 123-127, 130-131, 133, 135, 137-

o

139, 141-143, 145, 147, 153-156,

object-oriented ontology 25, 205

159-160, 163, 165, 169, 172, 199,

obsolescence 110, 114

202-203, 205-207, 211, 214, 224,

off-screen space 53, 171, 211-214, 218

231, 237, 240, 245, 248, 251, 259260, 271, 278

opera 34, 47n6, 167, 231 optical process 187

symphony 27, 92n1, 253-255

optical unconscious 110-111, 114, 120

synchresis 27, 253-254, 257-258, 261, 264

Oratorio 168 orphan film 45, 47n7, 51-57, 61-63,

| 297

64n3, 64n4, 68, 139, 147n3, 170,

t

211, 221-222

temporality 13, 18-20, 83-84, 87, 118-

Orphan Film Symposium 52-57, 61-63, 64n4, 68, 139, 147n3

119, 160, 171 time 12-20, 22, 24-25, 32, 38, 40-45, 51, 58, 70-74, 79, 83-87, 90-92,

p

93n8, 95, 97-98, 104, 114, 116-120,

Pantheon of Rome 255-256, 260-261

124-127, 130-131, 134, 137-140,

Paper Print Collection 18, 31-38, 40,

142, 144-145, 147, 152, 160-161,

42-45, 46n2, 47n13, 48n21, 51-55,

163, 168-171, 173-175, 189-190,

58-60, 62-63, 192

192-196, 199-200, 202-203, 205,

Parkesine 115

206-207, 214, 218, 228, 232, 242,

passage 15, 20, 97-98, 131, 154-155,

245, 249, 254, 256, 258, 261-263, 266, 274, 278, 282

169, 171, 193, 196, 201, 228 Porch 23-24, 167-175

train 25-26, 35, 39-42, 46, 47n6, 47n8,

psychoanalysis 26, 120, 243, 251

48n17, 57-58, 71-72, 133, 138-140,

pulse 26-27, 56, 116, 145, 166, 220,

142-146, 199-207, 235, 258

241-244, 246-249 u r

undead 27, 219, 241, 243

Ridge Theater 11, 18, 31, 34, 41, 47n6,

underground 63, 72, 131, 202, 204,

92n1, 168 ritual 69, 79, 173, 246 road trip 70 ruin-porn 110, 116

208n4, 233, 235 University of South Carolina 52-55, 64n3, 64n4, 65n6, 68, 147n3, 254 über-synchresis 27, 253-254, 258, 261-263

s

semiotics 170

index of subjects

w

wilderness 19, 72, 76-78, 81 wet ontology 23, 151, 153-154, 159160

298 |

THE FILMS OF BILL MORRISON

FRAMING

FILM ALREADY PUBLISHED Giovanna Fossati From Grain to Pixel. The Archival Life of Film in Transition, 2011 isbn 978 90 8964 139 7 Eef Masson Watch and Learn. Rhetorical Devices in Classroom Films after 1940, 2012 isbn 978 90 8964 312 4 Julia Noordegraaf, Cosetta G. Saba, Barbara Le Maître, Vinzenz Hediger (eds.) Preserving and Exhibiting Media Art. Challenges and Perspectives, 2013 isbn 978 90 8964 291 2 Martha Blassnigg (ed.), Gustav Deutsch, Hanna Schimek (ass. eds.) Light Image Imagination, 2013 isbn 978 90 8964 384 1 Chris Wahl Multiple Language Versions made in BABELsberg. Ufa’s International Strategy 1929-1939, 2015 isbn 978 90 8964 633 0 Tom Gunning, Joshua Yumible, Giovanna Fossati, Jonathon Rosen Fantasia of Color in Early Cinema, 2015 isbn 978 90 8964 657 6 Peter Verstraten Humour and Irony in Dutch Post-War Fiction Film, 2016 isbn 978 90 8964 943 0 Giovanna Fossati, Annie van den Oever (eds.) Exposing the Film Apparatus. The Film Archive as a Research Laboratory, 2016 isbn 978 94 6298 316 8 (paperback) / isbn 978 90 8964 718 4 (hardcover)

Thomas Waugh The Consience of Cinema. The Works of Joris Ivens 1912-1989, 2016 isbn 978 90 8964 753 5 Patricia Pisters Filming for the Future. The Work of Louis van Gasteren, 2016 isbn 978 94 6298 238 3 (paperback) / isbn 978 94 6298 031 0 (hardcover) Annete Förster Women in the Silent Cinema. Histories of Fame and Fate, 2017 isbn 978 90 8964 719 1 Begt Lameris Film Museum Practice and Film Historiography. The Case of the Netherlands Filmmuseum (1946-2000), 2017 isbn 978 90 8964 826 6 Wendy Burke Images of Occupation in Dutch Film. Memory, Myth, and the Cultural Legacy of War, 2017 isbn 978 90 8964 854 9 Bernd Herzogenrath The Films of Bill Morrison. Aesthetics of the Archive, 2018 isbn 978 90 8964 996 6