By popular demand

Well, by demand of one, but one does not deny Cristobal Colon d’Estultes. He demanded to know:

Why are u not reviewing the Wavelengths, man? Are they some sort of second class citizen to you, man? Unfair. Either way. Show some love. And mercy, dude.
Give a rating. Show you care.

Honestly, I have to confess I have not graded or written about the Wavelengths 6 program because I thought I had nothing to say. Whether one calls that a failure of nerve, or modesty of the befuddled will depend on how charitably one wants to construe my actions.

I picked the Wavelengths 6 program because I had loved the previous Peter Tscherkassky I had seen and a new film from him was the centerpiece, along with some silent films. So I thought “potentially worth a gamble” and, appearances of my extremely confident online persona aside, my utter indifference to Stan Brakhage and more-or-less all subsequent avant-garde films is a minor internal embarrassment. Oh sure, one can only relate his honest reaction. I can argue that it’s mostly Emperor’s New Clothes navel-gazing, and I don’t disbelieve anything I’ve ever said. But it’s one of the cases where I’d like to be proven wrong (or more precisely, prove myself wrong). My discomfort with my reaction — “I can’t believe sane people find this crap watchable” — is not unrelated to the fact I have become good friends with several folks who find this crap more than watchable and are pretty demonstrably sane.

To be hard on myself, I pussed out. The reason, I told myself, I didn’t issue any grades was that I saw very little in the program that interested me (a kinda true statement in itself) and so much of it was so clearly “not for me” (ditto) that assigning a grade seemed kinda pointless. But Krzysztof is correct — I have to at least register my honest reaction, even if it makes me look like a Philistine, even if only in my own eyes. Anything other than that would be patronizing.

My reaction to the Wavelength 6 program broke down very precisely — I disliked all the contemporary works and found at least watchable all the silent-era footage and actually kinda liked the two completed from-that-era works.

For example, my problem with the two Ken Jacobs films — THE DAY WAS A SCORCHER and JONAS MEKAS IN KODACHROME DAYS — is that all I saw was a technical stunt. Both films are based on a few still photographs upon which Jacobs performs some photographic processes that simulate movement, change perspective or fragment the image. And my reaction was a massive Bravo Foxtrot Delta. Yes and Wang Chung and the Cars did the same or similar in the videos for “Leave It” and “Everybody Have Fun Tonight” and “You Might Think.” There were no doubt other parts of the 80s MTV rotation that didn’t come to mind that night. When those videos were made, some people in that audience probably weren’t born yet (and get off my lawn!!!). What is the interest here? Why is this stuff being put before me as a Work of Serious Art? All the Jacobs photo works did for me was lay bare some photographic tricks without drama, without context (sans the program notes, that is), and without music you could dance to. I found the Mekas film particularly aggravating because its edits tried to create the effect of a man in an umbrella dancing through a rain shower, which mostly just invited comparison with Gene Kelly’s titular number in SINGIN IN THE RAIN. And made me long for Kelly (or even an actual dancer), to actually be moving with grace and style and athleticism through the kind of real space that makes such a number difficult and this a real achievement and worthy of admiration. (The only time I’ve seen SINGIN IN THE RAIN in a theater, the audience burst into applause at the end of that number.) MEKAS’s only point, in other words, was its own aesthetic pointlessness. And by expecting us to be interested in an acontextual technical process, both films show the emptiness of the process.

As for the Tscherkassky, what I valued about his INSTRUCTIONS FOR A LIGHT AND SOUND MACHINE was his tight sensual ferocity, his roller-coaster ride aesthetic of barreling through an old-movie’s footage, radically altered almost (almost!) to the point of unintelligibility. Here in COMING ATTRACTIONS, he makes an anthology film of disconnected and far more relaxedly paced short films (Waz even praised it on exactly those “looseness” grounds). I also had the same reaction as I did to the Jacobi — I’m seeing some technical tricks for their own sake, and the filmmaker is relying on my reaction to the technique, if to more apparent point, I will acknowledge (though that ain’t saying much). Still, if there was anything to ATTRACTIONS other than “advertising banal,” it escaped me.

In fairness, I did like the two works in the program that were indisputably of the silent era, and very early therein — both prior to 1910. (I don’t think an honest reaction is possible to two reels of miscellaneous unknown footage fragments united only by the accident that someone in the Dutch film archive couldn’t bear to discard them. It’s not a work of art. Sorry.) One was CONCORSO DI BELLEZZA FRA BAMBINO DI TORINO, which consists of footage of Turin toddlers being filmed as, or as adjunct to or metaphorically in the film (can’t tell from film), an infant beauty contest. Both because it’s 1909 and because the kids look to be 2 years old or thereabouts, nobody really knows what they’re doing, how to react “properly” on film or while filming, so CONCORSO really is verite not “found footage.” The film, which is anonymous but exists in its intended form, is nothing more than a look at children’s behavior, unmediated (on both sides of the camera — why this film couldn’t be made except when it was). It’s a proto-Wiseman. The very thing that turned Waz off — that these children are probably all dead — was exactly why I thought this footage was so precious. Onscreen then (for one reason) and onscreen now (for another) were probably the only times in these lives these persons were equal. The other work I liked in the program was a 1905 film called LE ROI DE DOLLARS, which is not a Georges Melies film, but very much could be. It is nothing more than a disembodied hand before a black curtain doing some magic tricks with coins that build over the several minutes of the film. With occasional appearances by a mouth, dispensing coins like a machine, sometimes gold-tinted, 20 years before GREED. To some extent both century-old-plus films are just as one-dimensional as the other stuff on the same program. But what made them far more watchable to me than the current films in the same program and even enjoyable was an element that cannot be faked — innocence. And the joy and wonder of discovering a new medium. They both even represent the two polarities cinema already was developing — documentary representation and manipulative fantasy; or if you prefer, the Lumieres and Melies. They are “real.” In contrast, what excuse do Jonas Mekas and Ken Jacobs and Peter Tserchassky have for being satisfied with merely showing off a technique?

Happy, Krzysztof?