Review: One Night Only
Print Generation | J.J. Murphy | USA | 1974 | 50 min
Wavelength | Michael Snow | Canada, USA | 1967 | 45 min
UW Cinematheque, 4070 Vilas Hall, Thursday, February 12, 7:00pm»
Join UW-Madison Professor J.J. Murphy for a screening of his recently restored structural film classic, Print Generation, which with the passage of time has become in equal parts an intellectually and emotionally rewarding cinematic experience.
While campus film culture has been rich with a wide variety of films, Madison still lacks regularly scheduled programming of recent experimental film and video. Things might change with the return of Starlight Cinema from the Wisconsin Union Directorate Film Committee (its first offering was a screening of films by Peter Tscherkassky and Pat O’Neill back in December). And the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater research has invited ephemeral film archivist Rick Prelinger to present his recent project, No More Road Trips? at the Chazen Museum on Saturday, February 21 at 7;00pm (look for a preview here, soon). In the meantime, we do have occasional showcases for important films in avant-garde film history, including this Thursday’s UW-Cinematheque screening of J.J. Murphy’s Print Generation (1974) and Michael Snow’s seminal Wavelength (1967).
While these films are certainly not new—Print Generation is now 40-years old—they still offer new experiences for those who are not familiar with the avant-garde tradition and canon. And even for those who are familiar with both films, revisiting them can still inspire new experiences and insights because both films are deceptively simple in their design and execution. In the case of Print Generation, what’s “new” is that it has been restored by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, with work led by Mark Toscano (who visited Madison with the last great avant-garde program at the UW Cinematheque in January 2014).
J.J. Murphy, who has taught in the Communication Arts department at the UW-Madison for many years (and was my dissertation advisor, among many mentoring roles he has played in my life), will be present for the screening. He might tell the story about someone yelling in the middle of a Print Generation screening, “I hate you, J.J. Murphy!,”* or perhaps it will happen again on Thursday night. But I’m confident you’ll find him to be one of the most personable and friendly avant-gardists you’ll ever meet (I’ll bet he’ll wear the same hat, pictured above). Rather than provoking hostility or anxiety, viewing Print Generation can be an intellectually and emotionally rewarding cinematic experience.
*In a Facebook comment, my friend Jane Greene remembers the story of the mid-screening exclamation as “J.J. Murphy, you’re killing me!” She’s probably right, but I’ll try to confirm on Thursday night.
An Insistence on Shape
Snow’s Wavelength and Murphy’s Print Generation are examples of what avant-garde critic and historian P. Adams Sitney defined as “structural film.” Although Sitney fine-tuned his definition over the years in part due to controversy over his original 1969 Film Culture essay, “Structural Film,” perhaps the most succinct definition for our purposes appears in his book, Visionary Film:
The structural film insists on its shape, and what content it has is minimal and subsidiary to the outline. Four characteristics of the structural film are its fixed camera position (fixed from the viewer’s perspective), the flicker effect, loop printing and re-photography off the screen.
Part of the controversy over Sitney’s explanation of structural film came from his list of its precedents, which included Andy Warhol’s fixed camera films (Kiss, Eat, Sleep, Empire, etc.). But Sitney ignored similar work coming out of the performance art tradition that attempted to minimize the importance of the art object, such as work by the Fluxus group led by George Maciunas. Fluxus emphasized an aesthetic of art-as-activity which pointed the way to post-modernism, but Sitney held on to the modernist tendency to emphasize the material properties of an art form. And since he argued that the structural film was a significant stage in the teleology of North American experimental film, he more or less dismissed Warhol’s work after The Chelsea Girls (1966) and everything in the art-as-activity tradition. What was important about Warhol for Sitney was that filmmakers like Michael Snow took principles of minimal form that Warhol exploited haphazardly and utilized them far more rigorously to explore film as a distinct medium.
Structural films often foreground the properties of cinematography or the experience of cinema by eschewing narrative in favor of systematically exploring permutations of those properties. Tony Conrad’s The Flicker (1965) is composed of black and white frames alternating (flickering) to produce a perceptual experience that warrants the warning to epileptics in its opening title card. Hollis Frampton’s Zorns Lemma (1970) replaces an alphabetically arranged series of street signs with random images, but the viewer remembers by association the alphabetical positions and order long after the letters disappear. And, of course, Michael Snow’s Wavelength (1967) explores both a New York loft and the properties of the zoom lens by slowly zooming in from a fixed camera position towards a series of windows over the course of 45 minutes. In each case, the shape or structure of the film is not difficult to figure out, in fact it is almost immediately apparent, unlike the very complex montage structures commonly found in previous experimental films (those by Stan Brakhage, for example).
Manifesting in different forms, aesthetics, and ideologies, the structural film dominated experimental filmmaking in the early 1970s; some filmmakers, theorists and critics took its concepts forward while others reacted against it. In England, a more overtly political, Marxist and Brechtian manifestation of the idea took hold as the “structural-materialist” film championed by filmmakers and theorists like Peter Gidal (see his “Theory and Definition of Structural/Materialist Film”) and Malcom Le Grice (see his “Real Time/Space”). Other filmmakers were not crazy about the idea that content was “subsidiary to the outline” in a time of social and political change. Yvonne Rainer (Film About A Woman Who…, 1972) utilized techniques from the structural palette but foregrounded feminist and political content.
All of this was in the air in academic film studies and experimental filmmaking as J.J. Murphy completed his M.A. in film studies at the University of Iowa and produced his first films, Highway Landscape and Sky Blue Water Light Sign (both 1972). Highway Landscape meets Sitney’s “fixed camera” criterion: it is a meticulously composed seven minute static shot of roadkill. In spirit, Sky Blue Water Light Sign meets the criterion of “re-photography off the screen,” but I’d rather not say how because as Scott MacDonald describes it, the film “is best seen in total innocence. My guess is that if one knows what he or she is looking at before seeing this little film, half of its excitement and a good deal of its meaning disappear.” As with many films in this tradition, minimalism does not mean there’s nothing going on. There’s almost too much going on to appreciate on first viewing because we might not be used to engaging with films that encourage us to consider basic cinematic properties such as sound and off-screen space.
What attracted J.J. to the structural film tradition in his early films? That sounds like a good question for the post-screening Q & A. But if you can’t make it to ask him, J.J. has been interviewed several times about this period, including in Scott McDonald’s book, A Critical Cinema (1988):
In 1971 there was a certain outrageousness in Highway Landscape. In Visionary Film Sitney talks about Warhol influencing structural film. I think he’s absolutely right, but at the same time what Warhol was doing was very different from what I was doing. Highway Landscape is a very carefully composed film that’s trying to work almost solely through composition and sound. There was certainly a sense of being outrageous, and a lot of people—the other people in the class [at Iowa]—thought it was ridiculous. The film affronted them on many levels; perhaps they’d spent $500 making complicated narrative films, and mine was so simple that they felt it made fun of them. I had the idea and just wanted to make the film; I never thought about the audience . . . I had definite formal concerns. I wasn’t about to make a sloppy film. I spent hours composing Highway Landscape.
When J.J. moved on to make Print Generation in 1974, those $500 narrative films made by his colleagues would seem cheap in comparison. Print Generation is essentially a “lab film,” made through the process of contact printing, and he was a bit horrified when the final cost was around $2000. But many critics and festivals immediately recognized it as important work. “Print Generation is a masterfully accomplished film,” wrote Mike Reynolds in the underground newspaper the Berkeley Barb, “With it, Murphy sums up concerns that have marked independent filmmaking since the late Sixties: intrinsic film structure and personal diary.”
A Cognitive Game: To Recognize and Remember
At first glance the content of Print Generation indeed seems subsidiary to its shape. The physical property of the cinema explored in this case is the film emulsion, or the side of the film strip that holds the photochemicals that create the image. The building blocks of Print Generation are 60 one-second shots that are duplicated through contact printing 50 times, with the image deteriorating with each generation. The one-minute sequence is projected 50 times, resulting in the film’s 50-minute running time. But the film begins with the later-generation duplications, which means we only see reddish dots floating on a black background. Only after watching the sequence repeat several times do we slowly start to realize that something is in fact repeating. And only then do we begin to see what we believe to be images, much like the way we see recognizable shapes and figures when we gaze at clouds. Eventually we see the less degraded images, which turn out to be relatively mundane candid shots of people and landscapes, less interesting than most Vine feeds. Halfway through the film, the process reverses itself, and the images begin to degrade back into the red emulsion dots that we saw at the beginning of the film.
As with many films in this tradition, this description might make it seem like there’s nothing going on for 50 minutes, but actually it is hard to keep track of everything happening on the screen and in your head while experiencing the film. The viewing experience develops into three distinct cognitive games that are fully engaging if you decide to play along.
The first game, obviously, is image recognition. You begin to guess what the images are, and you’ll be surprised how often you’re right or wrong as the images become more clear. The second game is pattern recognition. You memorize where the images appear in the sequence to help identify them. Some images, like the close up of filmmaker Norman Bloom, become “anchors” in the sequence, and other images shot in the same local become clusters that help you memorize the entire sequence. The final game is image retention. When you have the sequence memorized, you’ll be amazed how deep into the deterioration of the image you’ll still be able to recognize it. This last process is not just an intellectual exercise. There’s a sense of melancholy as you lose your grip on these images that didn’t mean anything to you only minutes ago.
Now that the film is 40-years old, the images themselves, despite their intended banality, carry more weight and significance. In the MacDonald interview, conducted in 1980, just six years after Print Generation, J.J. describes the process of selecting the images:
I wanted very casual and banal imagery so there would be a tension between it and the film’s mathematical structure. I felt then, and I still feel, that it’s a crucial aesthetic choice to use ordinary imagery—as opposed to carefully composed, dazzling shots—because it’s the process of the film that’s interesting, not the images. I wanted that to be clear. The simplicity of those personal images allows you to realize that what you’re seeing isn’t the result of the images but the process.
By the time I was introduced to Print Generation in the 1990s, J.J. was certainly willing to field questions about and discuss the images themselves, because it is so clear that he has personal relationships to many of the people we see. I would anticipate even more questions along these lines in the post-screening discussion on Thursday, not only because some of the images are kids who are obviously entering middle age now, but the images include friends and colleagues from another part of J.J.’s life long before Madison (he has lived here since 1980). In a sense there’s a way you can look at the film as a documentary, or as Mike Reynolds put it, a personal diary. This only adds to the melancholy of the deterioration of the images.
Perhaps my skepticism about Sitney’s claim that content can be subsidiary to the outline has more to do power of images in the first place. We want them to have significance, not just be part of a process, because even the most banal shots of friends and loved ones have significance with the passage of time.
The second half of Print Generation now reminds me of the work of Bill Morrisson, who in films like Decasia assembles beautifully deteriorating archival footage and explores the tension between the content of the images and the abstraction of the emulsion decay. It should also be interesting to ask if J.J.’s thoughts about his relationship to Warhol has evolved or changed now that he has seen a wider range of Warhol films than when he was interviewed in 1980. Even the most banal Warhol screen test carries some emotional weight as more Factory legends pass away. (J.J.’s most recent book, The Black Hole of the Camera, explores many now available Warhol films in great detail.)
I’ll conclude with one last note about the screening on Thursday: a double bill of two longer structural films can be tough sledding for the uninitiated. But if you don’t fight the images and just let them happen and come to you, your time investment will be well rewarded.
While many Cinematheque and Wisconsin Film Festival viewers might be used to minimalist material, like last year’s experimental documentary Manakamana, some viewers might find these films even more challenging. Wavelength is first, and if you haven’t seen it you should see it projected because it will never, ever be officially (or legally) available on video. I’ve probably seen Wavelength 15 times. (Some of you might have seen Wavelength when Michael Snow visited the Wisconsin Film Festival in 2003, and trust me it is worth it to see it again.) Print Generation I’ve only seen a handful of times, and the last time was over a decade ago. I consulted a video research copy to prepare this post, which does not compare to the experience of a projected screening. While I hope that more recent experimental work makes its way to Madison, Thursday’s screening is a welcome contribution to Madison’s film culture.