Eyes Upside Down: Visionary Filmmakers and the Heritage of Emerson PDF
Preview Eyes Upside Down: Visionary Filmmakers and the Heritage of Emerson
Eyes Upside Down: Visionary Filmmakers and the Heritage of Emerson P. Adams Sitney Oxford University Press Eyes Upside Down This page intentionally left blank Eyes Upside Down Visionary Filmmakers and the Heritage of Emerson P. Adams Sitney 3 2008 3 Oxford University Press, Inc., publishes works that further Oxford University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education. Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offi ces in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Copyright © 2008 by P. Adams Sitney Published by Oxford University Press, Inc. 198 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016 www.oup.com Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Oxford University Press. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Sitney, P. Adams. Eyes upside down : visionary fi lmmakers and the heritage of Emerson / P. Adams Sitney. p. cm. Includes index. ISBN 978-0-19-533114-1 ISBN 978-0-19-533115-8 (pbk.) 1. Experimental fi lms—United States—History and criticism. 2. Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 1803–1882—Infl uence. I. Title. PN1995.9.E96S49 2008 791.430973—dc22 2007031171 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper To Tony Pipolo and Jeffrey Stout This page intentionally left blank Preface I n 1992 I began taking notes for a book on avant-garde fi lmmakers that would focus on the heritage of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman. For Marie Menken, Stan Brakhage, and Jonas Mekas, the relationship to both seemed to me uncannily apt, while Ernie Gehr’s affi nities appeared to be dominantly Emersonian and those of Warren Sonbert and Andrew Noren Whitmanian. As I slowly worked on the book, its range expanded. The fi lms of Ian Hugo and Su Friedrich began to take on new meaning for me when I considered them in this tradition. Eventu- ally, the more remote fi lmographies of Hollis Frampton, Abigail Child, and Robert Beavers were drawn into the expanding circle of these considerations. Their writings on cinema fi rst alerted me to their Emersonian aesthetics. When I examined their fi lms in this light, I was rewarded with a clearer sense of the ways in which they simultaneously resist and participate in the native tradition. I also found that many of them, like Whitman, assembled individual fi lms into complex series, sometimes even projecting a single serial fi lm as the work of a lifetime. So, embedded within this long study of the Emersonian heritage in the American avant-garde cinema is a sustained consideration of the role of viii preface the fi lm sequence. I had considered extending the range of fi lmmakers even further. I would have liked to include chapters on Saul Levine, Nathaniel Dorsky, and Peter Hutton, and perhaps others, but the manuscript grew un- wieldy at seven hundred pages. By the time this book is published I hope the gist of my refl ections on their fi lms will have appeared elsewhere. In writing this book I have benefi ted enormously from a fellowship at the Getty Research Institute (2004–2005), where for the fi rst time in my career I had an entire year to devote to a book. I am deeply grateful to Thomas Crow and Charles Salas for inviting me, and to Rani Singh for tirelessly providing me with facilities and research materials while I was in Los Angeles. Without her help, I would not have been able to complete the book at that time. I had the good fortune to have Genevieve Yue as my research assistant at the Getty. She is a distinguished young scholar of the avant-garde cinema in her own right. When I could not catch words from the soundtracks of Beavers’s Plan of Brussels and Palinode, my colleagues Howard Bloch and Tom Levin helped me with the French and the German. In the three decades since I wrote Visionary Film, there has been a spec- tacular growth in the criticism and scholarship of the American avant-garde cinema. My frequent citations and footnotes indicate how indebted I am to the insights of other scholars. No one has done more for the fi eld than Scott MacDonald. His fi ve volumes of The Critical Cinema have become essential references for us all. MacDonald was particularly generous to me, sharing un- published tapes from older interviews, and including questions that I had in interviews he was conducting as I was writing this book. Fred Camper, Martina Kudlacek, Robert Haller, David James, Paul Arthur, Tony Pipolo, Marie Nesthus (whose work on Brakhage’s serial fi lms preceded my own), John Pruitt, Amy Taubin, Keith Sanborn, Gerald O’Grady, and Marilyn Bra- khage have shared their insights and learning with me. All of the fi lmmakers discussed in this book have been extraordinarily gen- erous to me, in making fi lms and stills available, providing me with manu- scripts, and answering my tiresome questions. All of them are, or were, my friends. I regret than nothing I can write will ever do justice to their fi lms, which have irradiated my life. The deaths of Hugo, Menken, Frampton and Sonbert before I started writing the chapters on their fi lms, and of Brakhage while I was still at work on this book, have impoverished those sections, insofar as I was unable answer questions about their fi lms and their reading for which no documentation survives. The Princeton University Committee on Research in the Humanities and Social Sciences gave me a series of grants to pursue aspects of this work. The Stanley Seeger fund of the Program in Hellenic Studies also helped me in my work on Robert Beavers. Marilyn Brakhage (and the estate of Stan Brakhage), Andrew Noren, Jonas Mekas, Jon Gartenberg, Abigail Child, Robert Haller,
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