Free Radicals: A History of Experimental Film Page #3

was mostly other filmmakers

that would, you know,

go to the Charles,

and I don't really think

until Jonas had the Voice

to get at the news that there

were people making films,

people making film art,

that an audience

began to come around.

Then it was really a good audience,

mostly artists, and very serious.

Well, pretty serious.

I showed New York Eye and

Ear Control in 1964 or 65

at one of these theaters of Jonas'.

It was shown with

a film of Warhol's,

and he always had a huge entourage

so that normal audiences

were maybe ten people,

that would be about it

- the same people too -

but whenever he was there,

there was a huge crowd.

And New York Eye and Ear

Control was shown first,

and his group hated it, they

threw things at the screen

and stomped and whistled

and all that kind of sh*t,

which was really rather annoying.

But when it was over, Andy and

I think it was Gerard Malanga

ran back to the projection

booth where I was standing,

and they were very excited! They

said, what is this? This is fantastic!

Who made this? Who are you?

And all this kind of stuff.

Where most artists and filmmakers

were leaving Europe for America,

Robert Breer did the opposite. He

left America for France in 1949.

Robert Breer

experimented in animation,

making every frame different

from every other frame.

I can remember one of the first

times publicly was in Paris,

and Agnes Varda

was invited and I...

the two of us were invited

to show our avant-garde films.

Agnes Varda, and then

myself, got up on the stage

and stood around there and talked

a little bit shyly, at least I did,

and then showed our films.

And my films I remember being a very

mixed reaction with the audience,

and somebody coming up to me angry

because I was destroying

their vision with my film.

And it was an explosion

of hostility afterwards.

Instead of any supportive applause

there was this long silence

and then hostile questions,

one being a man

standing up and saying,

"Mr. Breer, I see you

don't respect Napoleon."

I'd made fun of Napoleon in

one of my other films I guess.

Anyhow in general they were offended

by how disorganized my films looked.

When I made this big step for

me and small step for mankind,

when I went to changing radically

not just the shape of frames

but doing it, changing the

shape, 24 times a second,

I just put whatever came to my

mind on the table under the camera.

So at some point it includes

the head and face of my cat

whom I grabbed and stuck under the lens

for one shot, for one or two frames.

So that's how I made the film.

That was completely

nonsensical or radical,

depending on how you look at it.

Nonsensical for most people,

because the film had been...

the big achievement of film was to record

movement smoothly as though in reality

and of course it made film the

most wonderful medium in the world,

and what I was doing was

trashing it, in a way.

But I was trashing it in the name

of something new and different,

you know, "avant-garde" which in

the painting world was important.

Do it here.

When Courbet painted his

L'Apres-dinee a Ornans,

which showed normal common people,

and he painted it in a big format,

it caused a scandal

which almost ruined him,

because the big format had

been reserved for big themes,

religious themes, etcetera.

So the only thing is, when you smoke

your first cigar, maybe you vomit

because your body receives something

he is not sure he will survive,

so that's the shock,

from any kind that is new.

So, the fact that you don't have

success does not come from cinema,

it comes from doing something which

brings people into another realm

where they have not been before

and they get scared, that's it.

Isidore Isou actively pushed

film into this new scary realm.

He too had emigrated in

1945 from Romania to Paris,

and there he created

the Letterist movement,

making poems, paintings, films,

and writing political theory.

Letterism was an attempt

to break art forms down

into their constituent

parts or letters,

building new languages

out of the rubble.

Maurice Lemaitre

joined his movement

and he too started

creating Letterist films,

aggressively pushing the art of

film into uncharted territory.

The Letterists made films

from scraps of found footage,

scrounging used strips of film

from garbage bins behind film labs.

People tell me

filmmaking is expensive,

but all you need is a dark

room with running water,

some chemicals and some free time.

Do-it-yourself is the credo

of the independent filmmaker.

The ideas come from

your tools and materials.

Many of these experimental film

artists didn't start in film,

even though there was film. They

started in graphics of some kind.

That was certainly

the case with Richter,

who was always a

draughtsman and a painter,

and it was the case

with Vanderbeek too,

who was making collages, and

then he filmed these collages

and then he filmed these collages in a

way which enabled him to move them around

so that on screen you had

what amounted to animation.

Years later, Terry Gilliam

took some of those same ideas

for those montage sequences

you saw in Monty Python.

Those come right out of Vanderbeek.

Stan was living with a group of other

people in a kind of communal situation

about two hours from New

York, north of New York.

As I remember it, the Moviedrome

was literally built in the woods,

and became like an

adjunct to his house.

Stan's idea was that all over

the world there should be places

where people could

go and see movies.

They should see movies the

way you would see the heavens,

you'd lie on your back and look up.

To me this was a

homemade planetarium.

How many films were actually

shown there I don't know.

But he was always experimenting

with different kinds of projectors

and different ways of

introducing an audience to a film.

We sat in the Moviedrome,

leaned back against the wall...

It was never completely

finished! There was always,

"watch out there's a gangplank

there... don't trip over that wire..."

He, after all, was the man

who filmed on naked dancers;

he filmed on steam...

I once went to a theater

where people danced in steam

and Vanderbeek projected

his films against them.

So that was one side of

Vanderbeek. On the other side,

he was able to go into Bell Labs

and talk his way into them giving him

money and studio space out in New Jersey,

so he may have been slightly

mad, but he wasn't a madman.

Vanderbeek was always a

wonderful contradiction to me.

On the one hand he was

outrageously experimental.

You could never imagine Stan

saying "nah that'll never work."

If you suggested something

he'd say, "well let's try it!"

He was a Dadaist,

an American Dadaist,

and he worked in many media.

On the other hand, he

was very self-disciplined.

I think this served him very well.

He was a decent businessman

on top of everything else.

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