Flesh Into Light: The Films of Amy Greenfield

162 Pages·2012·4.07 MB·English

by  Robert A. Haller

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tHe Films oF Amy GReenField
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since 1970 Amy greenfield has developed a new language, for film s
and electronic media, of the body in motion. this language evokes h
primal inner experience and a woman’s representation of the body:
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poetic, often nude, and timeless. this book explores the innovative n
work of a pioneer and major artist in a little-understood American art. t
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LIght
Robert haller is a Director of Anthology Film Archives in new York.
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he was the Director of Pittsburgh Film-Makers in the 1970s, Curator I
g
of Film at the staten Island Museum, and the Director of the Film-
h
Makers’ Cooperative. he has written/edited catalogs and books on
Kenneth Anger, stan Brakhage, Jim Davis, ed emshwiller, omer t
Kavur, and Fritz Lang. In 2006 he was awarded the Bish Film Prize by
Bruce Baillie.
tHe Films oF Amy GReenField
Amy Greenfield shows us how camera movement and human motion can
be ecstatically joined together. – Whitney Museum of American Art
[Greenfield’s films] give us the camera as a surrogate hand as well as a
surrogate eye. They provoke questions regarding relationships between
physical and psychological distances; they suggest a tension between all-
seeing and selective observation. Greenfield takes the commonplace and
makes it seem surreal.– Artweek
Dazzling. We’re able to experience [her] Antigone as if we had never seen
it performed in any other form before, an Antigone at once sensual and
erotic, timeless and timely.-- Los Angeles Times
ISBN 978-1-84150-488-9
Light of the Body is especially remarkable in that it manages to remain a 0 0
film of the beauty of illuminated nudity—no sexual manipulation. Bravo! –
stan Brakhage
9 781841 504889
A surreal masterpiece. The beauty rises to a level of intoxication, thus
making Wildfire direct in its reconciliation of poetry and motion. –
Williamsburg International Film Festival intellect | www.intellectbooks.com
Flesh Into Light

Flesh Into Light
The Films of Amy Greenfield
Robert A. Haller
intellect Bristol, UK / Chicago, USA
First published in the UK in 2012 by
Intellect, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK
First published in the USA in 2012 by
Intellect, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th Street,
Chicago, IL 60637, USA
Copyright © 2012 Intellect Ltd
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 written permission.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British
Library.
Cover designer: Holly Rose
Copy-editor: Macmillan
Typesetting: Mac Style, Beverley, E. Yorkshire
ISBN 978-1-84150-488-9/EISBN 978-1-84150-683-8
Printed and bound by Latimer Trend.
Contents
Flesh Into Light: The Films of Amy Greenfield 7
Robert A. Haller
Preface 9
Chapter 1: Beginnings 13
Chapter 2: Planning and Discovery 25
Chapter 3: Holograms and late 1970s 37
Chapter 4: 1980s and Antigone 45
Chapter 5: 1990s: Performance and the Cycles of Light 61
Chapter 6: 2000s: The Body Songs 73
Chapter 7: 8 Perspectives 91
Appendix 1: Filmography of Amy Greenfield through 2009 99
Appendix 2: F ragments: Mysterious Beginnings and Fragments: Mat/Glass and
One O One 105
Appendix 3: Raw-Edged Women and MUSEic of the Body 107
Appendix 4: Six notions and a question about my work in video 109
Appendix 5: The Clock Tower 111
Appendix 6: Bibliography 113
Appendix 7: Greenfield on Greenfield 117

Flesh Into Light
The Films of Amy Greenfield
By Robert A. Haller
Au seful measure of the accomplishment of the film-maker Amy Greenfield is the
reception of a group of her films that appeared on the Internet in 2010. The films
were censored – erased – while Greenfield had a New York gallery show in January
and February, and then restored after multiple protests. In her films Element (1973), Tides
(1983), and Music of the Body (2009), she and her other dancers were nude, in continuous
motion, existing with and against “standard” time: interacting with the sea, with a muddy
shore, and with video images of themselves. All 3 films were posted on Vimeo and YouTube.
The latter took the 3 films off within hours, citing the nudity as a violation of community
standards.
Greenfield received a notice that not only had she run afoul of YouTube’s community
standards but “she was told that uploading another violating video would result in her
account being banned” (Los Angeles Times, 26 February). Greenfield turned to the National
Coalition Against Censorship, which took her side, and cited her previous screenings at
the National Gallery of Art, international festivals, and at the Museum of Modern Art. The
coalition then enlisted the support of the Electronic Frontier Foundation whose attorney
declared that “while we understand YouTube’s desire to keep pornography off its servers, it
must also understand that not all nude art is pornographic.”
YouTube then reversed its decision and reinstated the Greenfield films, which were also
available on another Internet site, Boing Boing. Scores of viewers responded to the initial
removal of the films – and their return. Here are some on the spontaneous responses to her
Tides:
“ That was gorgeous. I really don’t care about the standards debate now. I want to watch
the upside down backwards part around 7:00 again. Wow.” (referring to the upside down,
slow-motion ocean sequence)
Flesh into Light
“ Yes yes and all that about YouTube, but that video is special. For the first few minutes I
was enjoying the nudity as much as the ocean. Then, after setting a really strong frame of
reference, it used camera orientation and rewind, creating that blissful drift in me that I
knew the subject was revelling in. Great vid. Awesome editing.”
“ That’s really lovely – am I very much mistaken, or are some parts of the video actually
reversed? … It’s oddly disorienting/cool.”
Many initial viewers linked the films to their friends, building a cascade response that led to
thousands of hits each week on Boing Boing and on YouTube:
“ It’s a poem, it’s a haiku in film … I was led here by a posting at Boing Boing announcing
YouTube’s decision to block Amy’s work. Whether one sees beauty or ugliness is a
personal choice, the choice of YouTube and those it wishes to appease by its policies
seems clear. I, however, see beauty, can only see beauty, and only wish to see beauty in
Amy’s work. I’m exceedingly glad her work is available here to enjoy.”
“Look at how our body moves in the temporal spaces. Wow!”
What is striking about these comments is the recognition that Greenfield’s images are shaped
by editing, that some of the images flow through different time frames, that her use of nudity
is only one of many factors that induced viewers to connect to their friends.
After 4 months of the controversy of removing and then restoring Greenfield’s films
the number of viewers of just Tides grew to over twenty-seven thousand. The other titles
amassed twenty thousand more viewers.
The enduring resonance of Greenfield’s films, whether they were made in 1973 (Element)
or more recently (Wildfire and Music of the Body) are a barometer of the impact of her films,
and of the response of the wider public to sophisticated, nonnarrative motion pictures.
Greenfield believes in the potency of the image of the body in motion, that it speaks to
viewers now just as much as when she began to make films in 1970. That she is not making
“dance films” but films about the human experience (note that her one feature film is based
on Sophocles). That the body is a mirror of the mind.
8
Preface
When Amy Greenfield completed and released the first film that she directed in
1970 she was working in a still-young medium – cinema dance. Thomas Edison’s
film company had made the first pure dance film in 1894, Annabelle Serpentine
Dance – indeed, it was one of the first films. But Annabelle was in a category that was passed
over and unexplored in the first decades of film-making.
In contrast, the narrative film as we know it today emerged by 1910 – largely from Edwin
S. Porter and D. W. Griffith. Cinema dance, which would be rooted in Griffith’s language of
film (editing and camera mobility) and gestural, nonnarrative human movement, emerged
much later.
Amy Greenfield is one of the handful of film-makers and dancers who opened the realms
of film and dance to each other in 1940–80. The more than forty films she has made since
1970 are united first by an intense belief in the eloquence of the human body – often nude;
second, by an energy that is always cinematic; and third, by an inquiry into the nature of the
human condition.
The physical and abstract/nonnarrative dynamism of live dance was usually lost in
movies. Only at mid-century did film-makers successfully unite these qualities of dance
with cinema. Maya Deren (1917–61) was one of these – her films were mostly made in the
1940s. The Briton Michael Powell (1905–90) and the American Hilary Harris (1930–99)
were 2 more – Powell made The Red Shoes in 1948 and The Tales of Hoffmann in 1951, and
Hilary Harris made Nine Variations on a Dance Theme in 1966. In the late 1960s Greenfield
sought the latter. From the 1970s she often worked with Harris as her cinematographer. In
1983 she finally met Powell on a film set; in 1989 Powell viewed her just-completed feature
Antigone: Rites of Passion.
Greenfield’s special achievement is how she found her own way across the bland, unfeeling
chasm that separated most film and dance. Like Powell, Deren, and Harris, Greenfield’s
films evoke passionate states of mind through the use of the close-up camera, by camera
movement, and by film editing.
In her films Greenfield considers central questions about the human condition. Who are
we in relation to the world, to ourselves, and to each other? These questions are implicit in