FILM/ART:
The Viennale’s Incendiary Frames

By Andréa Picard

Gather hundreds of neophyte and veteran film festival-goers and caution the epileptics to close their eyes. Flickering will ensue, as it should with every film screening, but the throbbing light preceding the Viennale’s gala presentation was far from the expected, often imperceptible flicker. Incendiary Cinema is the one-minute film Ken Jacobs made for the Viennale as the festival’s annually commissioned trailer. He hoped the audience would scream, but this was unlikely given the Viennese’s sang-froid and their predilection for experimental cinema. While any possible short-lived discomfort might have been couched in concerted concentration, the overall effect was one of awe. An incendiary minute meant to reawaken the senses, to draw awareness to cinema’s limit cum limitless opportunity: the frame.

A work of vibration resulting from earlier experimentations by the ever-productive Jacobs that was temporarily put on hold—though this pulsing did find its way into Star Spangled to Death (“God manifests Himself in our humble sphere”)—Incendiary Cinema is an exploration of frame interval exchanges. And the pulsating is extreme! “Frame-intensive” is how Jacobs puts it; an animation not just moving, but shuddering and effecting sensory perception. Sensory overload, I’d argue, as the intensity of movement raised my body’s temperature. Had an epileptic fit occurred, who could have moved quickly enough to help? Yet within this frantic flicker film, there is a pause for life: images of children in a playground with colours drawn from reality, if a bit muted from video. Thus an intervention of form, light, movement, and finally recognized subject matter, like Malevich opening onto or collapsing into Manet. It’s the briefest of films, but the impact is jarring, especially within the context of a film festival, serving as aide-mémoire for the language unique to cinema and the power it has to exult through abstraction and via representation.

The mini-film—or perhaps best to call it the pre-film film, seeing as it is a trailer—begins with a slim white line dividing the black screen. The pulsing line grows thicker until the screen is halved into two rectangles flashing maniacally in black and white. A sudden cut relaxes the viewer as temporary calm is restored by an image: we see a note appended to a fence, its grid of chain-link revealing children in a square, their mothers keeping watch from a bench. Then the onslaught of boldly Suprematist geometrical shapes alternating their rapid-fire flicker with that of the framed, yet framing backdrop completes the film. Despite the assault, the formal play and unexpected imagery alert us to the dynamics of cinema.

Watching the trailer, I found myself thinking of Rudolf Arnheim’s classic text, Film as Art (whose title I cannot extricate from the lackluster heading for this column!). Fifty years after its re-edition (written in 1933, the work was originally and simply called Film; four essays were added in 1957 when it appeared as Film as Art), this perennially assigned cinema textbook is made relevant again in light of film’s changing vocabulary, or “virtues,” as the theorist would say. The book will reappear in March 2006 in a 50th anniversary reprinting by The University of California Press. Will the preface tell us if video flickers?

Arnheim’s inquiry was born in the silent era, the “artfulness” stemming from a host of limitations, some of which would disappear with the advent of the talkies. The final essays in the book speculate on the new possibilities for film art brought about through the invention of sound. In his foreword, Arnheim explains the genesis of his treatise: “It was the precarious encounter of reality and art that teased me into action. I undertook to show in detail how the very properties that make photography and film fall short of perfect reproduction act as the necessary molds of an artistic medium.” Though it was screened on 35mm (the Viennale transferred the film from a PAL video), Incendiary Cinema was made digitally, Jacobs says, “the blessed computer saving me any number of trips back and forth to the film lab.” Thinking back on it, the circles and lines were not precisely composed, having had that difficult-to-articulate undulating video effect. (Similar shapes occupy Lynn Marie Kirby’s video works, shapes created on a film-to-video transfer machine called the Copernicus.) Needless to say, in a mere 60 seconds the Viennale trailer lent itself to prescient issues about film, video, and the structure and impact of artistic language, the changes as much as the remainders.

Jacobs’s sudorific minute sits in good company. Past trailer-makers include Agnès Varda (Trailer , 2004—yes, it includes her hands and feet and her voice!), Ernie Gehr (Carte de Visite , 2003—the mysterious cloud formations Rosalind Krauss located in Agnes Martin’s grids), Stan Brakhage (SB , 2002—trailer as optically printed poetics), Matthias Müller (Breeze, 2000), Peter Tscherkassky (Get Ready, 1999) and Martin Arnold (Trailer 1997) at the top of their German and Austrian game, and a moving Super 8 film by Jonas Mekas titled Mozart & Wien (2001), which revisits footage of Mekas’ mother 27 years earlier. Though shot and manipulated in various formats, the films all exist in 35mm copies held by the Viennale. They can be viewed on the festival’s website, www.viennale.at, under the archive designation.

While Jacobs’ trailer was a heart-pounding and enthusiastically received addition to this impressive catalogue, Mekas’s Mozart continues to be fondly remembered by both festival staff and patrons, having left an indelible mark. A diaristic Super 8 assemblage of city lights, signage, and personal history at once mysterious and profoundly moving, one can easily detect how his trailer would penetrate the festival psyche on a level that conspires to a shared passion for cinema, but one faithfully tied to the present and history of its setting (with the Blue Danube as the soundtrack!).

Though he was not in Vienna , Mekas left his imprint all over this year’s Viennale. Sold out quite a bit in advance, his A Letter from Greenpoint (2004) is a video chronicle of Mekas’ recent move to Brooklyn from the Broome Street SoHo loft which he inhabited for 30-odd years. The change, profuse with memory and mirrored images from the past, as well as unrealized prophecy, inevitably draws from origins. The film thus begins with an unsteady digital image of a young, fetching man belting out a Lithuanian folksong. Another follows in its entirety, sung by someone else. The singers’ identities are never made clear; the film switches to the empty loft, vacant except for a ringing telephone—his existence has not yet ceased in this space. With the video camera as an extension of his eye, Mekas surveys the grand emptiness, his life packed up in boxes, and prepares himself for another chapter. The film is tender and joyously sad. With time’s passing and transitions afoot, the past encroaches upon the present like a bittersweet story that will continue to live. With Mekas, the anxieties are tempered through love, friendship, revelry, and the redemptive nature of art (which probably explains why he speaks to the camera at two o’clock in the morning when his racing brain prevents sleep). The video quality itself is poor (ironic that Mekas considers this his first real video work following 15 years of playing with his Sony camera); there are no Bolex blues or crispness to the images. But the intimacy, the “brief glimpses of beauty” result from the camera’s insistent running, its indiscriminate recording of minor moments that make up the essence of the artist’s existence. He allows it to cut deep as real poets do, the frame, in a sense, disappearing entirely.

Along with retrospectives devoted to Pedro Costa, Jane Birkin, Ruan Lingyu and representations of Buenos Aires curated by Cinema Scope contributor Quintín, the Viennale presented Andy Warhol: Filmmaker. Brainchild of Hans Hurch, director of the festival, curated by Mekas and co-presented by the Österreichisches Filmmuseum, the series consisted of over 30 films, the largest European selection of Warhol’s work in over three decades. Though Mekas’ original conception was to only present the Screen Tests (1963-65) as a single channel projection, the program ballooned to encompass a sidebar of zealous lectures entitled “Why Warhol Matters”, an art exhibition of Gerard Malanga’s photographs, Malanga’s own film work, and a poetry reading by the New York icon. With Jacobs’ trailer, Mekas’ new film and curatorial stamp, and Malanga’s fervent participation in the festival’s appreciable activities, the “New York Underground” was well represented, its radical ideas (no more past then they are present) ministering its abiding credence to the artform celebrated by the festival’s predominantly local, well-heeled crowd. With Mekas’ words on Warhol in the program guide supplement and Malanga’s introduction and discussion following the screening of Camp (1965) (conducted by Alexander Horwarth, director of the Österreichisches Filmmuseum and former Viennale head, not to mention co-author of a new book on Peter Tscherkassky), the series was intimately proposed. The Camp discussion, for example, resulted in a rare and memorable moment in which the intersection of reality and art resounded strongly, a merging of melancholic but equally triumphant nostalgia and pride.

Not having seen the film for over 40 years, Malanga’s reflections were tender and remarkably generous. Sitting next to me during the screening, Malanga giggled his way through the film and whispered anecdotes, his giddiness uncontainable to the church-like cinematheque setting. On stage, his remembrances were more controlled and cosseted, but the barely-there distance between him and the film, between fiction and reality, scored an ineffable truth, which, willingly or not, paid touching homage to Warhol’s genius, shared as it was among many talented “superstars.” Malanga was almost shockingly lucid and youthful as he remembered his friends from The Factory, friends who were performing with and sometimes for him in the vaudevillian silver loft but are no longer alive today. “Can you believe just how beautiful Jack was?” he said to me at one point about Jack Smith, likening him to “a Hollywood star from the 50s with that chiseled face.” He was right.

There’s no question that Malanga’s eye for beauty had surely informed his collaboration with Warhol on the Screen Tests, those disarmingly honest, three-minute documents of friends and collaborators in the scene. (Even when feigned, a troubling honesty emerges.) Watching a young Susan Sontag, her portrait squirming but placid, stoic and somehow sad, it’s difficult to match up her face to the image of the author of “Notes on Camp,” the infamous essay which spurred on the parodistic play at The Factory (“This is not camp, we are serious,” rallied Tally Brown). Sontag looks so inexperienced, so uncomfortable, as if fighting her embarrassment as a way to get through it. On the same reel, Edie Sedgwick’s seemingly glossy-eyed aphasia hints at another consciousness altogether. Then there’s Mekas, of course.

The presence/absence and penumbra of beloved friends (despite the antics—and ontics, to borrow from Jacobs—can we doubt the sincerity of feeling?) was awash at Malanga’s photography exhibition at the venerable Galerie Chahim. Some of the photos were stills from the Screen Tests, like those of Marie Menken (who bought Malanga his tux for Camp), Piero Heliczer, Ondine, Nico, and Allen Ginsberg, while others were portraits of the artist in his/her setting, like “John Cage conducting a moment of silence” (1964), “Warren Sonbert finishing up his teaching semester in film studies at Bard College, Rhinecliff train station” (1978), and the first ever public showing of “Kenneth Anger in an off-guard moment between moments. Riverside Park , NYC” (1975). Malanga was not just there as a documenter, but as an artist. These meticulously composed photographs, sharp to detail, show how intimately enmeshed he was with the lives of his subjects. The photo that seized hold of me and refused to let go was the Screen Test still of fashion model Benedetta Barzini (1966), her face cut in chiaroscuro, her Italian features accentuated through shadow. Her look is fierce, all sex, incendiary. Malanga pulled a double image of her face with sprocket holes to the right, the glow of light seeping forth. The connection is beyond art, beyond reality. He was, in short, “in search of the miraculous.” And Mekas knew it.

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By Andréa Picard

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