American Ethnographic Film and Personal Documentary. Scott MacDonald

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СКАЧАТЬ this did not mean no one was watching: the Screening Room audience was estimated at a quarter of a million people, many of them students at the Boston area’s many colleges and universities. Indeed, Brakhage’s excitement at having Window Water Baby Moving aired is poignant not only because Brakhage had waited fourteen years to see the film reach a television audience, but because his implicit assumption that the film could now reach a wider public via broadcast has not been confirmed; these days, Window Water Baby Moving is still seen almost exclusively in educational institutions; and even its release on the By Brakhage DVD hardly guarantees a large public audience.

      Demanding in a very different sense, the excerpts from Michael Snow’s “Rameau’s Nephew” by Diderot (Thanx to Dennis Young) by Wilma Schoen (1974) that were the focus of a March 1977 Screening Room would confound most any viewer not familiar with Snow’s earlier work; and one passage from that film, of a nude man and a nude woman, each standing and peeing into a bucket, was the only moment from a Screening Room episode that was censored: a black rectangle was superimposed over the offending body parts, though, despite this, the shot remains effective and amusing because of the sound of the urine hitting the buckets: the focus of “Rameau’s Nephew,” after all, is sound’s relationship to image in cinema! Gardner remembers “getting called around two o’clock in the morning from the head of the station: ‘Jesus, Gardner, are you trying to get our license taken away! A movie with somebody peeing in a bucket!’ I said, ‘It’s a work of art!’ He thought that was a big joke.”³⁹

      From our perspective in the 2010s, we can forget that during the 1960s and 1970s, filmmakers often needed to develop their own technology for making the films they were interested in producing. Few independents had access to sound studios or to high-grade equipment. The result was that individuals jerry-rigged a variety of systems, some of which proved quite effective. During the early years of Screening Room, Gardner often asked filmmaker guests to bring their filmmaking equipment to Boston and to demonstrate its uses. Standish Lawder demonstrated his homemade optical printer in the January 1973 episode; in the March 1973 episode, Hillary Harris showed how he created a variety of effects with a 36-inch, 1000mm lens (a camera was mounted onto the lens) and how his time-lapse shooting was done; and in June 1973 Ricky Leacock, with the assistance of Jon Rosenfeld and Al Meklenberg, demonstrated the Super-8mm, sync-sound, cable-less rig he had designed for student film courses and hoped to market widely, including in underdeveloped areas of the world. Robert Fulton’s first visit to Screening Room in April 1973 was largely dedicated to his film Reality’s Invisible, an homage to the Carpenter Center, but Fulton also demonstrated the unusual approach to camera movement, partly balletic and partly athletic, that characterizes much of his work. Gardner’s interest in the do-it-yourself aspects of independent filmmaking in the early 1970s, as film was working its way into academe, have become a useful historical resource, in some cases, perhaps, the only motion picture documentation of this dimension of some filmmakers’ activities.

      Some Screening Room episodes are interesting not because they are effective or entertaining television programs, but because, forty years later, they provide an index of the kinds of challenges that so many of us faced during the 1970s as we were first coming to terms with radically new approaches to cinema; and because they provide a glance at the ways in which independent filmmakers understood and related to media exposure during a complex and volatile decade. While Gardner plays the knowledgeable, worldly host, it is obvious as he engages Michael Snow and Yvonne Rainer (March 1977) that he has no clear idea of what they mean to accomplish in their work; his questions and comments are quietly desperate attempts to relate their films to filmmaking approaches with which he is familiar. The same is true of his second Brakhage show in 1980, where Brakhage’s increasingly abstract approach seems to stymie Gardner. Even in the case of the Hollis Frampton Screening Room (January 1977), an excellent record of Frampton as theorist and raconteur, it is evident that Gardner remains wedded to the idea of cinema as the production of well-crafted meaningful or beautiful artifacts and/or of autobiographical expressions of the artist. The idea that cinema itself can be a theoretical enterprise in which film artists explore their fascinations with little regard for the immediate reactions of audiences, seems foreign to Gardner. At the same time, his persistence in inviting filmmakers whose work was a challenge both to him and to his audiences reveals a commitment to a broad sense of film history, a commitment honored by Anthology Film Archives in 2008 with one of that year’s Film Preservation Honors awards.

      During the 1970s a good many independent filmmakers, and particularly avant-garde filmmakers, were suspicious of both the commercial media and academe; and some filmmakers were resistant to speaking about their work. This sometimes produced Screening Room episodes that can only have frustrated the host. Despite Gardner’s obvious admiration of the Polish animator Jan Lenica, Lenica was a difficult, largely unresponsive guest. Even Robert Fulton, a Gardner favorite and lifelong close friend, seems awkward during his 1973 visit to Screening Room. And the Bruce Baillie episode (April 1973) begins without Baillie, who is late for the show—a bit defiantly, one assumes: when Baillie does arrive, he barely utters a word (Gerald O’Grady, who Gardner had asked to participate in the episode, works at speaking for Baillie, but comes across as stuffy and pretentious). Adding insult to injury, at the end of the show Baillie critiques Screening Room itself and his co-hosts: “Without this kind of classroom obligation to surround the thing itself [by “thing itself” Baillie means filmmaking], maybe we in this country can lead to some good broadcasting. I am thinking about TV a lot.” Despite Baillie’s critique, however, Screening Room was, all in all, a worthy experiment in television: Gardner’s willingness to include an unusually broad range of cinematic accomplishment; his willingness to pay filmmakers for their appearances on the show; and his courage in airing films that few others would have brought to public audiences make it a distinctive contribution to the history of independent cinema.⁴⁰

      That the first major film Gardner completed after the nearly ten-year run of Screening Room was Forest of Bliss (1986) seems no accident. Like most filmmakers of his generation, Gardner had entered filmmaking without professional training and without anything like a coherent immersion in film history. Nevertheless, by the end of the 1960s he found himself in a position of some responsibility with regard to the production and exhibition of film as director of Harvard’s Film Study Center and of film operations at the Carpenter Center. Screening Room was, on one hand, an outgrowth of his professional life at Harvard, and, on the other, a form of self-education. If he couldn’t always make sense of what some of the filmmakers he hosted were doing, he clearly learned from their commitment to their own ways of doing things and to the films they wanted to make, regardless of what others might think about these films and regardless of how these new cinematic forms might conflict with traditional expectations. Early on, Gardner’s own films were weakened by his sense that to be a film artist he needed to imitate what a poet might do or what an accomplished film artist might have done, and the result was a tendency toward affectation. Gardner seems to have approached Forest of Bliss with a new kind of confidence and from within a more complete awareness of film history. The film would become a landmark contribution to an important genre—a genre claimed by both documentary and avant-garde film.

      CITY SYMPHONY: FOREST OF BLISS

      The City Symphony—the cinematic depiction of a composite day in the life of a major city—has become one of the most recognizable and prolific forms of independent cinema. After a series of premonitions, including many Lumière films about Lyon and Paris and much documentation of Manhattan during the 1890s as well as, two decades later, Charles Sheeler’s and Paul Strand’s Manhatta (1921), the form emerged with a triad of European features: Alberto Cavalcanti’s Rien que les heures (Nothing but Time, 1926); Walther Ruttmann’s Berlin: Sinfonie einer Grosstadt (Berlin: Symphony of a Big City, 1927), the film that gave the form its name; and Dziga Vertov’s The Man with a Movie Camera (Cheloveks kinoapparatom, 1929). Each of these films focuses on the life of a modern city—respectively, Paris, Berlin, and the post–Revolutionary Russian “city,” a composite of Moscow, Kiev, and Odessa—as it unfolds from before dawn until night (or the following dawn); and in each instance, the city chosen is understood as the quintessential city of a particular СКАЧАТЬ