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Cinéma & Cie. Film and Media Studies Journal
L'Avant-Gehr
Text.Serial.Journal
https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/cinemaetcie
9
Thematic issue / Section thématique
2009-03-01
2022-12-16
2009-03-01
2024-02-14
Cinéma & Cie
Pip Chodorov
2009/03/01
The Film Gallery, Paris
2036-461X
12
en
L'Avant-Gehr
https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/cinemaetcie/article/download/19413/17271
9
L’AVANT-GEHR
Pip Chodorov, The Film Gallery, Paris




   This will be a short introduction to artists working with the film medium in an abstract tradition,
from the 1920s to the 1960s, which may be useful as an introduction to the work of Ernie Gehr.
I’ll start with two scroll paintings (Figs. 1-2) made by Hans Richter, who was an artist in the Dada
movement, and one of the first artists to make experimental abstract films. Not the first – there is
a great deal of doubt about whether he fudged the dates of his films – but he’s a very good starting
point for me, because the films that he made were very close to the material nature of film: black,
white, the square shape of the frame, the aspects Ernie Gehr was discussing at the beginning of
the round table. Richter thought about those things very early on, in 1921.




Figs. 1-2 – Hans Richter, scroll painting.

CINÉMA & CIE, vol. IX, no. 12, Spring 2009                                                        111
PIP CHODOROV

   I understood Richter better when I read The World of Yesterday by the Viennese author Stefan
Zweig, who described the period around World War I: he said that just before WWI, poets and
musicians and painters across Europe could communicate and exchange ideas and befriend each
other, so that he was close with many foreign poets, in France, in Germany, while he was in
Austria. But when the war started, suddenly it was forbidden to communicate outside your own
country, and bad poets who were nationalists became the most important poets overnight. For
him, it was very stifling and dramatically violent. After the war, the artists tried viciously to create
a world that was radically different from the world before the war, with rampant experimentation
in the arts. Zweig felt most of it was useless and a big mistake (cubism was an exception). But I
realized when reading it that 1919, when the war was over, was also the year the first surviving
abstract films were made, films by Viking Eggeling and Walter Ruttmann.
   Richter and Eggeling worked together in the Dada movement as painters. Their idea was to
expand beyond the frame of the painting, which they felt was a barrier. So, they started painting
long rolled scrolls of compositions and variations, much like musical forms, but in graphics. They
were interested in the temporality of looking at a scroll, similar to the temporality of music, and
their scrolls were named “symphonies” or “rhythms”. The scrolls were difficult to show in a
gallery – they had to be rolled by hand, or hung around the walls of the gallery – and even more
difficult to sell; interestingly, these hardships prefigure the condition of the experimental
filmmaker even today. But their interest was to find new directions for painting, to break down the
rigid frame and to bring in the new dimensions of time, rhythm and composition. This naturally
brought them to the new technology of film. Film, they thought, would allow them to make
paintings moving in time, developing over time like music. They didn’t know anything about film
equipment, which was then very expensive, but they acquired a simple box animation camera and
figured it out. Richter approached the filmstrip with basic components of film in mind: the
rectangle of the frame, white, black and grey, negative and positive, movement in time, and the flat
surface of the screen. This is one of the first films that treat the screen not as a window looking out
into a world, but as a flat surface like a painting. Richter claims he had never seen abstract films
before making his own. He was probably surprised by the feeling of depth in his film: when a
rectangle gets smaller we experience it receding in space. All these things were to be important for
the filmmakers who followed, who treated this film as an eye-opening, revolutionary experience.
   Len Lye was from New Zealand, a painter and sculptor interested in kinetic motion. He made
one animated film in Australia and then came to London in the 1920s. In 1935 he made A Colour
Box, one of the earliest color films. The color was not photographed, however, but painted onto
the filmstrip (actually an optical sound negative: a transparent film with music along the edge).
He regarded the filmstrip in a way that most filmmakers at that time hadn’t yet, as a physical strip
to work on in lengths, not frame by frame. So, he painted across the surface in different ways
trying to represent movement; he aimed to create figures of motion, composing movement as
musicians compose music. A Colour Box is a commercial for the Post Office. Lye worked for
several years at the Post Office film department. Like many experimental filmmakers, Lye had to
find a way to make some money, and it’s interesting to note that none of these filmmakers ever
made it in the art world, unless they came from the art world to film, like Hans Richter. Films
were not bought or sold in galleries or in the art market. To this day, there is a great gap between
experimental filmmakers and the art market, and there is also a gap between the experimental
filmmakers and the film industry: it’s in a no man’s land where these artists spend their whole life
creating these very intense works of art that very rarely get seen in their original format and very
rarely bring money to the filmmaker. Nevertheless, in 1935, cinemagoers would see newsreels
and a feature film, both in black and white, but when Len Lye’s colorful, lively Post Office

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commercials came on they were like fireworks. People loved them, and these were big audiences.
This is something that doesn’t happen often to experimental filmmakers these days.




                             Fig. 3 – Allegretto (Oskar Fischinger, 1937).

   By 1937 many abstract films had been made by Len Lye, Oskar Fischinger and others. Fischinger
was from Germany, living in Berlin, making a living in special effects for feature films and
commercials, and making his abstract films in secret. He had had a big following in the late 1920s
and early 1930s for his black and white film studies, and there was still a big demand for them
outside Germany at this time. But abstract art was banned in Nazi Germany as degenerate, so his
whole personal artistic practice was suddenly outlawed. In 1935, he had secretly sneaked an abstract
film to the Venice Film Festival, where he won a prize and was invited by Paramount Studios to Los
Angeles to make a dream sequence for a feature. This became Allegretto (1st version, 1937, Fig. 3).
He spent the rest of his life in Hollywood, but the success and popularity he had in Europe was never
equaled in America. His pet project was to make a feature-length abstract animated film set to
music, which he eventually proposed to Disney, who accepted. He worked only a few months on
Fantasia (AA.VV., 1940). Disney urged all his animators to contribute ideas, and with
hippopotamuses and dancing broomsticks, the film rapidly deviated from Fischinger’s vision. He
got fewer offers and eventually stopped filmmaking altogether and finished his life as a painter.
   When WWII started, many European artists and filmmakers fled to America where they had an
influence on the burgeoning American experimental film. Some settled on the East Coast, such
as Richter who taught film in a New York university (Jonas Mekas attended some lectures); some
settled on the West Coast, such as Fischinger who befriended and was admired by Maya Deren
and James Whitney. Where Europe had provided the richest experimentation of the 1920s and
1930s, it is the American avant-garde who would change the face of art and film from the 1950s
through the 1970s.
   Few filmmakers did not leave Europe. In 1951, two artists in Paris, Isidore Isou and Maurice
Lemaître, created the Letterist cinema. They had a very new, radical approach to filmmaking.
They had started as poets, reducing language to syllables and sounds, and then turned to the other
arts – painting, film – to reduce them too to their constituent parts. Isidore Isou made Traité de

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PIP CHODOROV

bave et d’éternité (1951) while Maurice Lemaître made Le Film est déjà commencé? (1952). The
two films were conceptual, but where Richter was breaking the boundary of the film frame, the
Letterists were breaking down narration, story, character, sound and image, photography, editing,
even projecting, and finally the audience itself and the very walls of the screening room. They
were thinking about film as an event, a performance, going beyond the image or content, beyond
even projecting an image. In short, they considered film as a political and conceptual art, ten years
before the Happening. The Letterists developed a following and a movement; a later split led by
Guy Debord led to the Situationist movement.
   In 1958, Len Lye won first prize at the Knooke-le-Zoute festival with Free Radicals, a four-
minute film completely scratched on black leader with a needle. It was made almost as a
manifesto, since Lye couldn’t raise any money from sponsors for filmmaking. So, he scratched
the film with a needle, spending very little besides time, and then went on strike as a filmmaker
for the rest of his life, switching to sculpture where he could make a living. (He scratched four
films in secret over the next twenty years). Also in Knokke-le-Zoute was Recreation (1956-57,
texts by Noël Burch, 1 min.) by Robert Breer, a filmmaker who lived in Paris at the time and who
was interested in trying to make collisions between single frames. Most of the film’s images last
one frame each, 1/24th of a second (Fig. 4). Breer was interested how the eye perceives the rapid-
fire succession of disparate stills.




                                  Fig. 4 – Recreation (Robert Breer,
                                  1956-57).

   At that time, the Denise René gallery represented Breer’s abstract paintings. He was making
large compositions every week, until he found himself less interested in each composition as in the
transitions between compositions, and so decided to make animated films. At that time, film wasn’t
respected in the art world. Galleries looked down on film as “show business.” At the same time,
experimental films were relegated to midnight screenings. Still he preferred film: at art openings,
people ignored his paintings and drink wine and socialized; at film shows, the lights went out and
people paid attention; they would even clap at the end. It was a lot more rewarding to show films.

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His career as an artist suffered tremendously when he left painting for film, though he still showed
kinetic sculptures widely. Breer was directly influenced by Richter’s early films; he felt that they
had given him a lot of ideas that he wanted to explore further, including working frame by frame.
   Also in 1958, Peter Kubelka presented Adebar (1956-57), a film made as a commercial for a
bar in Vienna. Composed in black and white, as much in positive images as in negative, it follows
a metric structure: the film is edited in such a way that the shots are all 13, 26 or 52 frames long.
The film is one minute long and is based on rhythm more than content. This structural approach
was a new idea, radicalizing film editing, but again this is based on the physicality of the strip.
As for many filmmakers, a lack of funding forced him to concentrate on the small lengths of film
he could afford, and so on the component parts of the film medium.
   In 1960, Kubelka made Arnulf Rainer, consisting only of black frames and white frames, with
no filmed images at all. Black images represent opacity, or the absence of light, while white
images are transparent, the presence of light; the soundtrack alternated between silence and white
noise (all frequencies of sound). The four elements of this film are therefore the presence/absence
of light and the presence/absence of sound. Kubelka composed a structural plan, like a musical
score, before making each of his films, and he often shows them as installations hanging on the
wall as carefully aligned 35mm strips. This material approach was new to filmmakers. The
viewers too were becoming conscious of film technology and material.
   Still in 1958, another revolutionary filmmaker, Stan Brakhage, premiered Anticipation of the
Night at the same Knokke-le-Zoute festival. It is a poetic lyrical film, silent and 38-minutes long.
This screening was a first introduction to Brakhage for many and a revelation. He was making
films very much about his own life, like Window Water Baby Moving (1959), documenting the
birth of his first child. The composition of lines and forms are as strong as the events pictured
(Fig. 5). Later his work would become abstract in an attempt to represent “closed-eye” or
“untutored” vision, as he called it, fast poems of light and color.




                             Fig. 5 – Window Water Baby Moving (Stan
                             Brakhage, 1959).

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PIP CHODOROV

  Tom, Tom, the Piper’s Son (1969-71) by Ken Jacobs is a “structuralist” film, in which Jacobs
reworked a 1905 silent short by Billy Bitzer of the same title, refilming it, slowing it down,
zooming in on the frame, on the grain, stretching it out to two hours. In one section the film passes
through the projector without being registered by the shutter, we see only a blur. N:O:T:H:I:N:G
(1968) by Paul Sharits features fast flickering of monochrome colors. The same year he made
T,O,U,C,H,I,N,G, which is a more complex film: even before you go to see the film, the title gives
you the idea of discrete, separated moments, to make people conscious that the film is not running
in the projector smoothly, but stopping in front of the lens before it gets pulled down to the next
frame. In 1973, Michael Snow made a 4-¼-hour-long film called Rameau’s Nephew, about the
relationships between picture and sound, especially concerning recorded speech. Snow brought a
lot of humor into the structural concept of what film actually is. For him, the sound isn’t coming
from the film, it’s coming from the speakers, and he draws the viewer’s attention to these speakers
during the film.
  I’d like to conclude with contemporary examples. Marcelle Thirache works in Super-8 here in
Paris, a gestural filmmaking with the handheld camera. Cécile Fontaine uses found footage,
ripping layers of emulsion off one film using Scotch tape and various household chemicals and
placing them down on other strips of found film. Overeating (1984) shows a man chewing
chicken, with the film itself getting chewed in the process. In Bouquet, Rose Lowder weaves three
scenes together by skipping frames and rewinding: in one 24-frame second we see frames of
scenes A B and C repeating eight times in succession. The visual effect is a fast flicker with a
sense of superimposition in the eye. Peter Tscherkassky, living in Vienna, also works with found
footage. He exposes 35mm film, like Man Ray did, by hand, through recuperated strips of film
using a light pen in the darkroom. Jürgen Reble, works in Bonn, Germany and has become a great
master in handling chemicals, the actual chemistry of the film emulsion and developers. He
explores the ways in which these different kinds of chemicals interact with the film emulsion,
taking reality and making a different reality out of it, the molecular reality of the chemicals. And
finally, Frédérique Devaux also works with found footage, scratching and refilming in the optical
printer. These examples give an overview of the world of which the films of Ernie Gehr are a part.




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