Eyes Upside Down: Visionary Filmmakers and the Heritage of Emerson

433 Pages·2008·1.08 MB·English

by  P. Adams Sitney

Eyes Upside Down:
Visionary Filmmakers and
the Heritage of Emerson
P. Adams Sitney
Oxford University Press
Eyes Upside Down
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Eyes Upside Down
Visionary Filmmakers and the Heritage of Emerson
P. Adams Sitney
3
2008
3
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Copyright © 2008 by P. Adams Sitney
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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
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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,