When Anthology Film Archives first opened in 1970, its inaugural screening – presented during a private event on November 30 – showcased four highlights from the foundational repertory cycle that would come to be known as the Essential Cinema Repertory Collection … The four films represented a short survey of film history, spanning from the turn of the century all the way up to the (then-)present day.

Voyage Across the Impossible (1904, Georges Méliès)

The hand tinted color is supremely excellent, the handcrafted, cardboard-looking sets and props very nice, and I couldn’t care less about the slapstick steampunk nonsense plot. More or less a sequel to A Trip to the Moon, this time to the sun. Jules Verne died the following year, so could potentially have seen this. When some passengers accidentally freeze into an ice block in the protective cooler car, their guide hurriedly warms them up by starting a fire with some hay… on the sun. I like the copyright notices hidden in plain sight, on cliff walls and the sides of trains and submarines.


The Midnight Party (1940s/1968, Joseph Cornell & Lawrence Jordan)

Stock Footage: The Movie. Sometimes the shots are flopped or frozen or repeated, with flashes of intertitles in between. The whole thing feels like it was made by mistake.


The Canaries (1969, Jerome Hill)

Canary songs and chirps are visualized as color blobs, which finally form new canaries made of pure sound and light which float away from the cage, visiting lovers on the beach. I wish I’d thought of this one.


Film No. 11: Mirror Animations (1956, Harry Smith)

I just watched this last year, probably my favorite of all the Harry Smith films I’ve seen.

That Flicker Alley blu-ray set I threatened to buy at the beginning of the year, well I bought it. And besides being full of interesting avant-garde films beautifully preserved in high-def, it’s really well sequenced and presented. Gonna have to break this into a few screenings and posts since I’m taking so many screenshots.


Manhatta (1921 Sheeler & Strand)

City photography, mostly seaside and rooftop, floats by, with intertitles from a Whitman poem. Impossible to know how this looked in 1921 since by now I’ve seen hours and days of NYC photography. Buildings and ships still look like buildings and ships, so I was mostly interested in the few shots of people and traffic. Strand later photographed Redes and codirected Native Land.

Lewis Jacobs, writing in Film Quarterly in late 1947:

In technique the film was simple and direct, avoiding all the so-called “tricks” of photography and setting. In a sense it was the forerunner of the documentary school which rose in the United States in the middle 1930’s … The picture’s emphasis upon visual pattern within the real world was an innovation for the times.


Anemic Cinema (1926 Marcel Duchamp)

Alternates geometric spirals with word spirals (jokey French puns, I think). Peaceful. His buddy Man Ray helped out, and some prankster named Gustavo contributed a drone soundtrack.

In Visionary Film, Sitney calls it one of the “two fundamental works of the graphic cinema from the 1920s made without animation,” along with Ballet Mechanique.

Kristin Thompson:

Duchamp’s purpose was presumably to create an artwork with minimal means, including quasi-found objects, the disks he had made for another purpose. His idea is clearly reflected in the title, Anémic cinéma, which suggests a weakness or thinness of means. “Anémic” is also an anagram for “cinéma.”


Life and Death of 9413 (1927 Florey & Vorkapich)

Still one of my favorite shorts ever. I love that Florey & Vorkapich were already this cynical about Hollywood in the silent era – especially great is the “babababa” mouth-flapping in place of speech. Would be a good short to run before The Last Command.


Skyscraper Symphony (1929 Robert Florey)

New York buildings, photographed straight ahead and jutting out in all directions, making this an appropriate follow-up to the city documentary Manhatta and the expressionist angles of 9413. Donald Sosin contributes a very nice piano score. Florey directed a Marx Brothers movie the same year.


Mechanical Principles (1930 Ralph Steiner)

Pistons, meshing gears and other mechanics, beginning slow and simple and getting into crazier and faster gizmos. Really cool.


A Bronx Morning (1931 Jay Leyda)

More New York scenes, this one more social than the structural interests of the others. Leyda had documentary cinematography and editing pretty well figured out by age 20, worked with Steiner, later with Eisenstein and went on to write film histories.

How much does expert ladies hair bobbing cost to-day?


Lot in Sodom (1933 Watson & Webber)

Leagues beyond the previous films in visual poetry. Bodies collide in slow motion, mirrored and refracted. Eventually a plot takes shape when an angel appears to woolen-bearded Lot and tells him to get out of town before it’s destroyed by a rain of fire (there’s some other stuff I didn’t catch, not being familiar with the bible story). Like I wrote for the same directors’ Fall of the House of Usher, “I still don’t know exactly what happened, but boy was it awesome.”

Jacobs called it “the most distinguished experimental sound film of the period.”

Lot in Sodom used a technique similar to that of The Fall of the House of Usher, but far more skillfully and resourcefully. It drew upon all the means of camera, lenses, multiple exposure, distortions, dissolves, and editing to achieve a beauty of mobile images, of
dazzling light and shade, of melting rhythms, with an intensity of feeling that approached poetry. Its brilliant array of diaphanous shots and scenes … were so smoothly synthesized on the screen that the elements of each composition seemed to melt and flow into one another with extraordinary iridescence.


Poem 8 (1933 Emlen Etting)

Visual poetry with no narrative – the first time that had been done, according to Etting, who is wrong (Man Ray, Hans Richter, Ballet Mechanique). Rough on the technical side, but it works for me. Dig the first-person camera sipping a cocktail and making out with an undressing woman. I didn’t feel the new piano score by Rodney Sauer was appropriately poetic.


An Optical Poem (1938 Oskar Fischinger)

Floating shapes appear and move in sync with a Liszt song. Since it’s made with paper cutouts in stop-motion (which must have been aggravating) you can their shadows upon each other.


Thimble Theater (1938 Joseph Cornell)

Cornell and his posthumous editor Lawrence Jordan throw together a bunch of things and run circus music under them all. Too many kids in a paper flower… what looks like a Melies movie… a cartoon printed inverse and upside down… mountain goats… a man vs. kangaroo fight in slow-motion. Before Spike & Mike or Everything Is Terrible or Star Spangled to Death, Cornell was the original curator of clip shows of wonderous things.

Ballet Mecanique (1924, Léger & Murphy)

Every camera and editing trick known to man (at the time), in a rhythmic collage of pleasingly odd images. Plucky string music by Paul Mercer on this version.

The women (woman?) of Ballet Mecanique:


Combat de boxe (1927, Charles Dekeukeleire)

Someone allowed a filmmaker to shoot a sold-out boxing match, not knowing Dekeukeleire was a lunatic obsessed with film reversal and superimposition who would shoot anything but a standard angle on the action. Who did the great soundtrack, all pulsing sound effects and breathing? Dekeukeleire was a Belgian film pioneer, made two other influential avant-garde films in the late 1920’s according to wikipedia.

The boxer uses ghost mode:


Rose Hobart (1936, Joseph Cornell)

Cornell’s re-edit of East of Borneo, which appears to be a somnambulist jungle picture, highlighting the scenes of star Rose Hobart. Oh wait, he has slowed the film to silent speed, that’s why it looks so dreamy. The not-exactly-fitting-the-mood soundtrack is from a record called Holiday In Brazil.

Cornell’s first film, and his most famous. Reportedly during the premiere screening Salvador Dali attacked the film projector in a rage, claiming the film had been stolen from his dreams. I watched a whole program of Cornell shorts at Eyedrum in the pre-blog era, but hadn’t seen this one before.

Rose chats with a monkey:

B. Frye in Senses of Cinema:

Rose Hobart was only one of several mythologized actresses who populated Cornell’s hermetic world. Many of his boxes were homages to the actresses that formed his pantheon: Lauren Bacall, Hedy Lamarr, Greta Garbo and Deanna Durbin, among others. In Rose Hobart, Cornell holds Hobart in a state of semi-suspension, turning the film itself into a sort of box. She moves her hands, shifts her gaze, gestures briefly, smiles enigmatically, perhaps steps slightly to the side, and little more. The world appears as a sort of strange theatre, staged for her alone.


Betty Boop for President (1932, Dave Fleischer)

Okay, what? That is a cynical view of government for the 1930’s. Betty does caricatures of I’m not sure who, and appears to be a communist. Her opponent is Mr. Nobody, who gets booed by his crowd. After she’s elected, her victory parade fades into a giant beer mug, implying the entire film has been a drunken fantasy.


Betty Boop’s Penthouse (1933, Dave Fleischer)

Bimbo and Koko are incompetent, cat-tormenting mad scientists obsessed with their next door neighbor Betty. They accidentally create a Chemical Frankenstein who pursues her before being turned into a flower by her perfume. Insane and wonderful. Nice variation on the ol’ blackface Al Jolson gag.

Koko on fire:


Carmen (1933, Lotte Reiniger)

I don’t watch much opera, so don’t know the plot of Carmen. It seems she lures some fancy man to her sexy lair, then steals his clothes and sells them, buying herself a new outfit. But she fails to impress an even fancier man, the famous bullfighter, so she heads into the ring, dodging the first man who is now trying to murder her, and dances with the bull. Is that the general idea? Oh yeah, Wikipedia says that’s pretty much it, except the first man ends up killing her. The first of Reiniger’s silhouette films I’ve seen and it’s just wonderful.


Papageno (1935, Lotte Reiniger)

More opera… guess I never wrote up the Julie Taymor theater version of The Magic Flute we saw last year. It wasn’t a proper Taymor film like Midsummer but a live-televised version of her play. Anyway we both enjoyed. I wouldn’t have figured the carefree singing bird catcher Papageno for a spinoff film, but that’s what we’ve got here, set to the Mozart music. Papageno’s a real hero in this one, fighting off a giant snake that attacks his girlfriend Papagena by harnessing his bird-friends’ powers, like an avian Aquaman. She escapes on an ostrich, is gone for a half minute, which is too long for ‘geno, who attempts suicide, saved by a flock of parrots. Definitely best part is the ending, while the reunited lovers are singing to each other and the birds start rolling in eggs hatching baby Papageni.

Parrots!

There’s a lot of kissing and disrobing in these movies – guess you could get away with sexier stuff in silhouette animation than using actors in the 1930’s.

Making out in the trees:

About to catch an escape-ostrich outta here:

Watched bits and pieces of this anthology, but never all the way through before – which I guess is sad given how much I’d been looking forward to its release. I put on a shuffled playlist of instrumental albums, soundtracks, ambient and other strange sounds since Brakhage films tend to be silent. I know you’re supposed to watch them silent, As The Artist Intended, but you’re also supposed to watch them projected off 16mm film in an art gallery with fifty other people all shifting uncomfortably in their folding chairs, instead of at home on a comfy couch accompanied only by birds. I prefer my way.


The Wonder Ring (1955)

Brakhage nerding out on photography in a train station, then on the train itself, shooting through its warped windows. Not knowing in advance where the movie was set, I kicked off the music with Sqürl’s I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry, a song that prominently mentions trains. After the Sqürl, iTunes offered 75 Dollar Bill and a peaceful John Zorn number from The Mysteries. I first saw this movie at a Film Love screening of Joseph Cornell works – supposedly he codirected, but the onscreen credits say “by Brakhage.” Fred Camper only says Cornell commissioned this film, a record of a New York elevated train before it got decommissioned. Camper credits Brakhage with the finished work, says he’s “finding a real-world version of the superimpositions Brakhage would later create in the lab.” Elsewhere are mentions of GniR RednoW, a film Cornell made from Wonder Ring outtakes.


The Dead (1960)

Paris cemetery, in positive and negative, overlapped upon itself – the superimpositions mentioned above, making this a great follow-up to Wonder Ring. Heard a long, ambient Per Mission song, worked beautifully. The few living humans on screen are not shot in any great detail, but internet rumors claim Kenneth Anger was one. Doesn’t have much in common with the John Huston/James Joyce version.


Two: Creeley/McClure (1965)

This and the next film were part of the thirty-one Songs series. This one’s technically separate from the Songs, but was edited into the 15th in the series, the 38-minute 15 Song Traits. Portraits of poets Robert Creeley and Michael McClure. Again with some reversed footage. Final section is jittery mania. I watched twice, and the second time Guano Padano’s story-song Dago Red came up, inappropriate since it makes the audio the main focus, turning Brakhage’s film into a music video, but interesting.


23rd Psalm Branch (1967)

Watched on the plane home from a trip. Images of war, wreckage and parades, remixed, with black and brief colored frames. Something Brakhage wouldn’t have expected: myself in place of the blackness, reflecting in laptop monitor in the overlit cabin. Something else: he shoots clouds out a plane window, I look to my left and see clouds out a plane window. A couple of long songs that worked very well: The Nymphs by Zorn and Recks On by Autechre. Prefuse’s Infrared was lyrically appropriate. The film’s second half contained more black than my Dramamine-drowsy state could handle, had to restart some sections. As Film Quarterly puts it, “he has used black leader so brutally this silent film gives the impression of roaring, booming sound,” and part two specifically is “abstract and full of private symbols, difficult to absorb and to watch.” Music by Sqürl, Per Mission and Morricone. Written letters and section headers. Kubelka’s Vienna, then Brakhage’s Vienna, all dim red figures disappearing into the blackness, a few shots of fire recalling Frampton. Marilyn Brakhage called it an attempt “to reclaim person and personal vision from the onslaught of television news.”