This Common Clay

Stan Brakhage was perhaps the most original and celebrated figure in the history of American avant-garde cinema. He was also a tormented man who traced his internal conflicts and primal rage to a troubled, unhappy childhood. This chapter considers how the circumstances of his early life formed the artist’s personality, and argues that Brakhage found a way to weave even the most neurotic aspects of his character into the fabric and fugal design of his films. The latter part of the chapter focuses on Tortured Dust, the last film he made about his first family, the objects of his art and his rage, concentrating primarily on his tense relationship with his two sons. Edited while he was also dictating an “autobiography” to his first wife Jane, the film reflects the mournful fallout of the loss of his first family.

Eros Interrupted

The two films discussed in this chapter on Robert Beavers speak to two kinds of loss. The Ground is an elegiac work made in the wake of the death of Gregory Markopoulos, friend and partner of Beavers from the early 1980s until Markopoulos’ death. Sotiros is compoed of three earlier films, later combined into one film in two sections. The first section is a visual description of the Beavers/Markopoulos relationship, while the second focuses on the impact on that relationship of injuries suffered by Beavers as a result of an accident. The author argues that the melancholic tenor of these circumstances is given special weight through the filmmaker’s use of synecdoche, contrasting the head, lens, and tripod of the camera with various parts of his damaged body. In both sections of the film the significant role of Apollo as the god of light and healing is stressed.

Father Time

This chapter focuses on Maya Deren, once judged to be the mother of American avant-garde cinema. Three of her films—Meshes of the Afternoon, At Land, and Ritual in Transfigured Time—are studied in light of the autobiographical circumstances that motivated them. Deren’s father died shortly before she became a filmmaker; the chapter argues that the films reflect her conflicted relationship with him and her struggles to overcome them. At Land, in particular, reveals her efforts to come to terms, in the form of a quest, with her dead father. The chapter closely examines the framing, composition, and disjunctive editing of her films, and suggests, from a psychoanalytic perspective, how these formal aspects of Deren’s work can be understood to mirror her internal conflicts.

A Dance with Death

Gregory Markopoulos was one of the key figures of American avant-garde cinema from the 1940s through the 1980s. This chapter focuses on The Mysteries, perhaps his most enigmatic film, made during what might be termed a mid-life crisis when mortality loomed and he was consumed with unanswered questions about art, life, and time. Through an intense examination of the film’s shots, often analyzed frame by frame, the author shows that a fictive scheme rules the film, and describes how its homosexual protagonist and his obsession with death inhibits his pursuit of a romantic relationship. The author argues, finally, that the film can be read convincingly as autobiographical.

Introduction

This book is the product of viewing, teaching, and writing about filmmakers whose works have absorbed and fascinated me for decades. Like many people, I have been an avid fan of narrative cinema for most of my life, but the figures I focus on here do not belong to that tradition. For a time, no single term seemed adequate to capture the idiosyncratic approaches of these artists. Parker Tyler, one of their earliest proponents, believed they constituted an “underground cinema,”...

The Tempering Frame

Ernie Gehr has worked in both film and digital media. This chapter examines several key works representative of both media. In contrast to critical approaches that see Gehr’s work as purely cognitive or structural exercises, the author argues that it has a deeply personal dimension, the sources of which can be traced to his childhood, and even earlier, to his parents’ experiences during the Second World War. Gehr’s incorrigible sense of play and fascination with magic are explored as essential to his love affair with motion picture media. His use of the frame in both media is particularly stressed as having a strong psychic function, not unlike that of the holding environment provided in psychoanalytic therapy.