FILMOGRAPHY

(Click on titles to view image galleries for films)

BLUES (1969)
8 ½ minutes, 16mm, 16fps

A close continuous view of a bowl of blueberries and milk. A spoon comes in and scoops up some of the berries, presumably to be eaten, until they are all gone. The milk, that is always there, manifests itself more and more as the berries are removed and finally seems to rise up and be washed over by light that struck the end of the camera roll as it was removed from the camera. A malfunction with the camera motor of a rare 8mm Bolex produces a regular pulse against the slight flicker of the shutter at silent speed. There are already indications of a mystery as some of the berries move down as though charged by the energy of the camera’s and viewer’s concentration.  This is my first real film; all the others rise out of this one.


CORN (1970)
11 Minutes, 16mm

 This is one of the films that came out of a rejection of expressive camera work, sound, language, editing. I wanted to offer a rich experience of phenomena and associations that could come from a continuous moving image the length of a roll of film. The scene is a space of ceremony, of an offering. This is the world of my house in the country, of my marriage to a potter whose bowl represents her. She is the actor. There are actions that have to do with the transformation of ears of corn into sustenance. These actions take place within a space/time theater of slow continuous changes of light and shadow. There are long spaces where the viewer is free to look at various parts of the screen and, with the steam that rises from the cooked ears, into the very grains of the film itself. The sinuous dance of steam is a counterpart to the fog of FOG LINE. The two films are joined.


FOG LINE (1970)
10 ½ minutes, 16mm

 The fog lifts on a scene. For an attentive viewer the mental fog could also lift. It doesn’t go from white to full clarity. It just shows a piece of time, a section of a process in the landscape and in the mind of the viewer. The entire image slowly changes, the sky, the ground, what’s at the edges. The main features are the three trees and the wires. The trees stand there, manifesting their being. They have a soft shape without outline. The lines of the wires are something else. They relate to drawing rather than painting, the controlling mind rather than the imagination. The implications of this contrast go right through my work. There is something ethereal, ghostly. The viewer is invited to explore the screen, looking here and there, each person following a different path. Those whose path includes entering into the very emulsion that makes up the image are rewarded by the sight of ghost horses, the first animals in my films.


DOORWAY (1970)
7 ½ minutes, 16mm, 16 fps

Finally I moved the camera, in a slow pan from one side of the wide door of my wife’s pottery studio to the other. While the camera is panning left, the visual sense is of the features of the near and far landscape moving right. The doorway itself marks a plane separating the inside from the outside, as windows will do in other films. Because of the change in temperature between the inside and outside there is a pulse that is visible along with the shutter’s pulse when the film is projected at the correct silent speed. This pulse seems like the pulse of vision that emanates out from the camera, making a moving cow stand frozen behind another. That image stands out from the other material as most charged with meaning, but it too passes by. The lines of hills and fences end edges continue the motif of the line in FOG LINE, and prefigure HORIZONS.


THOUGHT (1970)
7 ½ minutes, 16mm, 16 fps

The last of my continuous shot silent films. There is a very limited field of view, with small sliding and focus motions, but a lot to see. The previous films grew out of formal ideas, without much conscious concern with meaning, but now I was becoming aware of the implications of these works, and so I gave it this title.


BARN RUSHES (1971)
34 minutes, 16mm, 16fps

I noticed a play of moving light between the slats of an old barn I passed every day on the way to my house. This led me to film it from a car window as the car drove up the road, turned and continued up the hill. I filmed it in extreme slow motion – the fastest camera speed. The barn is seen from the side, then front,  then from the other side. The film is made of 8 passes across the barn, each the length of a 100 foot roll of film The light and the relationship to the foreground grasses, the sky, and the woods behind, change in each pass. Each roll of film is slightly exposed to light at the start or end, moving into a zone of images that have not passed through the lens, but are directly in or on the strip of film. Once I saw the originally unintended element of repetition, I seized on it as a fruitful meaningful element in this and other of my films. The barn manifests itself, as do other things and creatures in my films. It is both passive, as I am with the camera, and active, almost alive. As in BLUES the fully revealed milk seems to rise above the bowl, so here another miracle occurs as at the end the foreground grasses seem to pass behind the barn. These films are mysteries.


HARMONICA (1971)
10 ½ minutes, 16mm

This concludes the series of continuous shot films, but now with sound. The sound is produced by the car and the people inside it. The car window is both a screen and a plane that separates the inner world from the outside. Shelley, the performer, generates the primary sound when he breaks through that plane. The film is popular because of the vibrant energy of the performer, the music, and the autumn landscape, but it is also complex. As with the previous films, I myself am passive. The driver and the car and Shelley are the creative forces. He is the first of many avatars, doubles of me, that appear in many of my films and that became one thread of my later attraction to ceremonial possession.


HORIZONS (1971-73)
”Elective Affinities, Part 1”
75 minutes, 16mm

HORIZONS is the result of a year spent filming landscape horizons. Motifs such as animals, windows, fences, clotheslines, even some film friends and family are included. The structure is based on rhyme schemes. I found relationships between one shot and another that could be thought of as “rhymes.” Lines and borders play crucial roles. They call attention to the structure of the film, which echoes the structures of the landscapes. The film offers a field of relationships that extend out to the whole film, even if only a few can be retained in the mind. The nature of these affinities led to the series of films – the “Elective Affinities” – to which HORIZONS is the “Overture.”


MOUCHES VOLANTES (1976)
”Elective Affinities, Part 2”
69 minutes, 16mm

The beautiful, evocative musical tale Angelina Johnson narrates about her relationship with the blues singer Blind Willie Johnson is matched, frame-by-frame, with films of my family. Echoing the title – which translates to “Flying Gnats” and was taken from Helmholz – I attended to snow, the surf, the sand, tiny specks flying in front of the subject, leading the subject to follow them. They always escaped. They were in the eye itself. As the retina turned to catch them, they seemed to fly away. This embodied the paradox of inside and outside that was already a presence in my work and was to reemerge in other forms.

Like HORIZONS, this film creates a dance between the flow of images that pass by and the memory of other related images, nearby or distant. Rhymes and relationships led me to the notion of affinities, which in turn suggested the title, “Elective Affinities,” a reference to Goethe. The notion of affinities also applies to personal connections of myself with Angelina and Blind Willie Johnson, blindness, blackness, and other motifs.


FOUR SHADOWS (1978)
”Elective Affinities, Part 3”
64 minutes, 16mm

Four four-minute image sections and four four-minute sound sections are linked in all combinations of the sound sections with each of the image sections. This established affinities between each of the image sections to the others, and the sound sections to each other. The image sections are: surveyors measuring the land near my house as seen through an old window, a family of Siamang Gibbon apes in the Washington zoo, an industrial site, and a page turned from a book on Cézanne’s composition showing a diagram of his painting Mardi Gras, filmed against bright leaves. The sound sections are: a dramatic scene from Debussy’s opera “Pelléas et Mélisande”, a passage from William Wordworth’s autobiographical poem “The Prelude,” sounds from rowing on a lake at night, and the sounds of the apes vocalizing.

Some of these were thought about or created  before the idea of the film came about, and some were expressly added. The final material was the Cézanne images This section might present the most difficulty for the viewer, but actually allows for the deepest penetration into the heart of the film. The diagram is an analog of the film as is the zoo cage and an industrial building with it four rows of four windows.

Since each element is repeated four times, there is constant recontextualizing of the material. The viewer can “play” elements of material from other sections that have affinities with what is on the screen and sound track at a given moment. Everything is deeply reverberant with issues that are connected with my life and work but also can open associations that are unique to each viewer. The theme of “nature” that is present in my earlier work is here, too, but now made more complex.  Other issues relate to music, language, painting, the relation of humans to animals and the earth.

The Wordsworth passage is read each time by four different readers for whom English is not the native language. Each is a kind of portrait of the reader. They include Jonas Mekas, Peter Kubelka, Klaus Wyborny, Heinz Emigholz, Taka Iimura.


TREE OF KNOWLEDGE (1980)
”Elective Affinities, Part 4”
60 minutes, 16mm

The final film of “Elective Affinities.”  A central element is a documentary film about paranoid conditions. Another is a flow of images of an apple tree in my back yard filmed impulsively, without forethought, the opposite of the static camera of FOG LINE. The radical breaking with the previous passivity of the camera has deep psychological dimensions. That was the first thing that led me to bring the paranoid material into the zone of the tree footage. The elements of sound and image are closely matched to each other, frame by frame. Inserted in them at the heart of the film are images of children, Kenneth and Louise, from an instructional documentary about the seasons. Cries of cattle being auctioned and sent to the stockyards are also inserted. The children are central. They stand in for the audience of the didactic film about the seasons. They are both the ones who are learning and also part of the didactic mechanics of that film that represents and teaches received knowledge. The paranoid patients are also presented as instruments of instruction and at the same time subjects themselves who have absorbed in a distorted way knowledge they have received from religion, newspapers, common gossip. Their minds struggle with elements of the outside world that penetrate their attention--  politics, new post--WWII technologies. The doctor who presents them is also in intimate league with them in this studio space. The narrator of the seasons film is his brother. The affinities between all these figures continue the theme of doubles that appear in my films. The film points to a deeper reality than what is on the surface. The explanation of the seasons is obviously correct. But in its didactic context it serves as a cover for something deeper. This material is repeated with different permutations of the sound material and the image material, once in the original sync sound and again with the other sound track, continuing procedures from the preceding two films of the series. All this is preceded and followed by continuous black and white negative images of the tree going from clear to black and reversed at the end. Each is accompanied by an important sound element. At the very beginning and end is a small piece with new material that points forward and back into a world outside the garden, that concludes the series of “Elective Affinities” and opens to new procedures..


NATURAL SELECTION (1983)
35 minutes, 16mm

My own vision is superimposed on the free creative work of others. My friend the Swiss/Austrian artist Alfons Schilling uses his sculptural viewing devices to experience landscapes around Binghamton as though his vision was different from the normal human one, for example if his eyes were wider apart, or if he were a cyclops, or they were connected to a space not the one he inhabits. My students at the same time film him and the nature he is looking at, but we can not see what he sees. Two friends, one Japanese and one American, read their poems as the other tries to translate. Some of them improvise in a large space in a ruined building where they only think to break the windows, and climb out one. In discussions with the students  about where we are headed, the translation issues lead us to think about glossolalia, speaking in tongues. We eventually go to Montreal, where we are invited to the laboratory of André Roch Lecours, who is studying the relationship between glossolalia and the brain. Noah improvises a lecture in a made-up language that is subjected to the same computer analysis that is done in the laboratory’s research. Within this nonsense language a Swedish phrase, or something like it, is discovered:  “I love you.”

I edited the film adding my own material, some from Darwin texts, some from New Mexico petroglyphs, sounds from the Beethoven house in Bonn and some words of Schoenberg.  The figures of Alfons and Roch become avatars of my self. Noah is a mock professor. There is some connection between the alteration of normal vision and of normal speech.


SORRY/HEAR US (1984)
8 minutes, 16mm

We deconstruct a poem’s language by playing it backwards until some words emerge from the backward text. The students create images that illustrate this new text.


MNEMOSYNE MOTHER OF MUSES (1986)
18 minutes, 16mm

There is a double retrograde motion. A flow of images goes forward, linked to a sound track that is going backward. Then the directions are reversed. This relates to the complex canon forms and retrograde motions that were beloved of some Western Renaissance composers as well as Schoenberg and Webern. I was influenced by a passage in Heidegger where he calls attention to the ancient Greeks conceiving Mnemosyne,  the goddess of memory,  as the mother of the muses. Memory is both a subject of the film and an essential part of its structure. The material evokes many other emotional and philosophical ideas. Images include those from a wedding, the Red Robin Diner at night, my father after his stroke, the place in Sunnyside where I grew up, a ruined factory on the shore in Eastport Maine. Sound elements include the conductor Arturo Toscanini rehearsing a passage from Wagner, something from the sound track of the film noir THE KILLERS. There is a sense of loss and recovery-- the need to go back and its impossibility except in art.

THE RED THREAD (1987)
17 minutes, 16mm

Material from a time spent in California at the San Francisco Art Institute. My actual image appears as an ironic avatar of my real filmmaker self. It is challenged by a woman, a weaver with whom I was in a relationship. The mythic references are more than just ironic. Creatures appear. A tribute to women: Clara Schumann, Sally at the piano, Leonora, the cow-herding women of myth. The division into “acts” is a somewhat ironic echo of the formal structures of previous films. The real me, the filmmaker me, is there, for example in the piano passages and above all with the children in the schoolyard, a ceremonial dance. Leonora is connecting the making of this very film to my personal failings. The film itself shows how I transcend those failings.


MACHETE GILLETTE… MAMA (1989)
45 minutes, 16mm

Filmed during three trips to the Dominican Republic. My interest in the superimposition of identities led to a focus on ceremonies that involved possession. While filming at a batey (a sugar workers’ settlement), a friend made off with the rental car. He had an accident on a rural road. A Haitian worker on a motorcycle was killed. As part of a convoluted arrangement to spare him I said I had been the driver and so spent two days in jail. This was a major superimposition of my identity with his. A Dominican friend narrates a version of my experiences. The film is in no way a travel documentary. Many scenes reveal the cinematic ceremony outside the performed ceremonies.


YOUR TELEVISION TRAVELER (1991)
15 minutes, 16mm

The core material is of space footage with a sound track that is an intimate discussion with a Cuban woman. Another group of images taken in Cuba is superimposed on it, It includes a major religious festival. The sound track with this material is from a documentary record about a space flight in which the astronauts internalize an identity with the racist comic character of a Hispanic astronaut, Jose Jimenez, and Castro comes to power. A final body of material is from a TV series in which the narrator, the “TV Traveler,” narrates about the Florida turpentine industry. This is a counterpart to the sugar industry run by slaves and former slaves across the Caribbean. All the elements are superimposed in the final section.

This continues my interest in the superimposition of identities, including the TV Traveler as an ironic self-image. The astronaut Scott Carpenter has identified with Jose Jimenez as his double, even when he almost faced death. Many affinities are exposed between the elements, including geographic, political and historical. Political reality is another construct that hides the nature of being that tries to manifest itself from beneath the banal surface of things.


CHANTS AND DANCES FOR HAND (1991 - 2017)
39 minutes, video

There are many scenes of Voudou ceremonies, a violent uprising, and images from my personal life that include my Haitian son Hand. The sound track is always the sync sound that accompanied the images. These images are stark brief blasts of vibrant phenomena and sounds. The viewer/listener can recall some of them and do a kind of editing in the mind. The formal design of the work invites this. The opening shots are disconnected, out of context. When they return at the end they are full of implications that each person can experience in terms of their own path through the film. That freedom for the viewer/listener is just one element that connects my works.

In a Vodou ceremony turning a dancer around, or when the celebrants reverse their direction circling the central pole, prepares for the appearance of the spirit and accompanying possession. The formal design of many of my previous films is here related to the formal nature of the ceremony. The numbered sections lead to a central section dealing with an uprising. The subjects of each section are then repeated with different material in reverse order. In between each of these main sections there are “interludes” that present different material. When these interludes return in the second part of the work the shots are the same, but in reverse order. Two of these interludes deal with movies. These are essential.  This is far from a “documentary” about Vodou. The ceremony of possession extends into politics, cooking, the movies and the electronic nature of video. A meditation on death. The most important dance is what takes place in the viewer’s mind.

 
KNOT/NOT (2019)
22 minutes, video

“KNOT”—wrapping things up, tying things up. “NOT “– cross out, erasure. Material from a documentary about conductor Wilhelm Fürtwangler, material from a graffiti stencil work on a brick wall near where I live, a stencil of a girl writing something on the wall, what she wrote crossed out by another act of graffiti. These are the main elements. Also footage looking down at the water of Pearl Harbor with the ruins of battleship Arizona beneath. It had turned red with age. And some footage from Manchester the morning after the terrorists struck. All composed against a sound piece, a multiplication table repeated in four languages. Everything superimposed. It’s not just about what it’s about, but also memory, negatives that try to get negated. About music and painting. Politics, longing and regret. Superimposition is the primary device. The doubling and tripling suggest many implications.