Manufacturing Humans Through Light
by Pip Chodorov
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Stan Vanderbeek, "What, Who, How"

paintings. The experimentation went on and it can even be said that "The GreatTrain Robbery" (1903), the first narrative film structured by cuts, editing, and a story line, was an experiment too, being the first of its kind.

In order to function in the art world, the newborn filmmakers of the 1920’s had to come up with fresh appropriate answers to the questions of who they are, what they do, how to exhibit what they do and how to survive doing it. Artists who experiment with newly emerging forms at any point of time have to go through the same dilemmas of adjustment and grounding. The paradoxical exclusion of emerging film forms from other art forms, and the blend this experiment makes of them, marginalizes experimental film and everyone involved in it from the pre-established pathways of production and distribution, both in the film world and the art world. Creative breakthroughs demand innovative ideas in order to reach an audience. Once again, at the postproduction stage, experimental film poses a paradox; a paradox of funding a non-commercial venture, of distribution outside traditional networks and venues, of establishing importance outside the acknowledged categories of what is important in art. Most often the filmmakers themselves have to be responsible for what happens to their work once it is finished, because no one else will take on that responsibility. A small group of people, to which I proudly belong, assumes that responsibility as an honor, and works towards recognition and availability of the works by the major film artists of the 20th century, such as Stan Brakhage, Jonas Mekas, Michael Snow and Ken Jacobs, out of sheer love, craziness and dedication.

Though I am not a history scholar, I will still allow myself to resort to history in order to explain what happened and what is still happening in this field. As I already mentioned, since the 1920s artists became involved in film as they fooled around with new tools and new ideas. For example Hans Richter, known as a painter, found himself making scroll paintings. Change and variations, like those in music, appeared as one unrolled his long paintings. As Richter described it, he and his Swedish colleague Viking Eggeling, came to film by necessity, through the desire to work with compositions moving in time. He saw a film camera in a shop window, thought “this must be the tool for me,” learned how to use it and made a film. Forty years later, Richter was surprised to find a young woman dedicated to showing and distributing his films, and he said to Cecile Starr: “You like these old things? Take them! Do what you can, do what you want. Nobody cares to see them.” Up until that point, he remained best known in the art world as a painter, his films being too marginal. A great pioneer in the 1940’s was Maya Deren. Coming from a background in poetry and dance, she decided to make a film with no prior knowledge of cinematography while living in Hollywood with her new husband, a filmmaker from Czechoslovakia. “I can make an entire film for the price a Hollywood production spends on lipstick,” she said, and made many films using her radically independent approach. While in the 1920s avant-garde film was mainly a European phenomenon, in the early 1940’s the war forced many artists to emigrate to the United States. Right around the time when Maya Deren and Sasha Hammid made their film Meshes of the Afternoon in 1943, artists of major importance such as Duchamp, Richter and Fischinger brought over to America seeds of the American avant-garde film.

In the late 1950s, about 15 years after Maya Deren started her work, there was a new wave of radical filmmaking activity in New York. These makers, among them Stan Vanderbeek, Shirley Clarke, Gregory Markopoulos, and the Mekas brothers, formed themselves into the New American Cinema Group and their new way of making films challenged the traditional Hollywood ideas of narration and continuity, at a time when no independent filmmaking seemed possible or visible in America, whereas European new wave filmmaking abounded. Their basic tenets included a belief that cinema is a personal expression, the rejection of censorship, the search for new forms. Those beliefs brought about a need for new forms of financing, production and distribution to make films quickly and affordably and get them seen. The turbulent new energy of the group is most evident in the last paragraph of their manifesto: “In joining together we want to make it clear that there is one basic difference between our group and organizations such as United Artists. We are not joining together to make money. We are joining together to make films. We are joining together to build a New American Cinema, and we are going to do it together with the rest of America, together with the rest of our generation. Common beliefs, common knowledge, common anger and impatience bind us together, and it also binds us together with the new cinema movements of the rest of the world. Our colleagues in France, Italy, Russia, Poland or England can depend on our determination. As they, we have had enough of the big lie in life and the arts. As they, we are not only for the new cinema, we are also for the new man. As they, we are for art, but not at the expense of life. We don’t want false, polished, slick films. We prefer them rough, unpolished but alive. We don’t want rosy films, we want them the color of blood.” On September 30th 1960, this manifesto was signed by a dozen filmmakers of narrative, feature-length, short and animated films.

Though these works and these words sound deadly serious, throughout different periods the main idea behind experimentation has been playfulness, and I was no exception. In fact, that is how I came to film, through playing with it. I was born in New York in 1965. My mother was a painter and my father a television writer. My father made television documentaries about artists which, at the time, were the only cultural affairs programs on American TV. My father’s father wrote Broadway plays and Hollywood scripts before being blacklisted by McCarthy. Since my grandfather did narrative film and my father documentary, I found myself with experimental film. When I was 6 or 7, living in the country and always escaping the allergies of the outside environment, there was the magic motion machine – the film projector - and the camera my parents had. So I just started making films. Nothing special, just scratching on black leader or shooting outside frame by frame. My parents gave me film stock and it was, really, very playful. In the evenings, my dad would project films; sometimes he would have someone like Stan Vanderbeek or John Whitney on his show and we would see their films in the living room. That is how I grew up thinking that all film is film and that there is little distinction between the different types, narrative, documentary and experimental.

Jonas Mekas, "This Side of Paradise"

I came to Paris in 1988 with an education in linguistics and cognitive science and my long filmmaking habit. Only in Paris was I finally able to combine the two and study film as a language and a grammar with people like Christian Metz. I found the underground film scene of the time extremely active and immediately became involved in a film cooperative called Light Cone. In its ideology, Light Cone was a direct descendant of the New American Cinema Group. There are about half a dozen film coops like Light Cone in the world that still exist today. They unite the independent filmmakers under common beliefs and shared support in facility access, production, financing and, especially, distribution. I had already worked in commercial film distribution so I embraced the coop model and threw myself headlong into avant-garde film distribution at that point.

Even before experimental film, when Hans Richter was making his painted scrolls, he had already encountered a future distribution problem. One of the original difficulties with experimental film distribution lies in the difference between static and kinetic art objects. While a painting is physically frozen in time and shape, it becomes an entity that can be easily exposed, sold, bought and looked at. A film, on the other hand, is a happening in time closer to performance art in its immediacy and disembodiment. Even Richter’s scrolls, having already surpassed the boundaries of an easel painting, simultaneously became something that could not be hung on a wall or easily sold. Cecile Starr took it upon herself to promote Richter’s films since the 1960s, and she still shows

them, distributes them on video, teaches and gives lectures about them. For her, it became a personal battle to have this work known and recognized; one of the strongest driving forces in marginal film distribution has always been personal conviction.

In the visual art world, the economy and politics of distributing a work derives directly from the form of the work itself. There is a long-established market infrastructure for paintings and sculptures, with predetermined pathways of buying, selling, exhibiting, collecting and increasing value that is not available for film. An old friend of my parents, the late Julian Levy, founded his art gallery by buying one Brancusi sculpture for a hundred dollars that he borrowed from his parents. Years later, Brancusi became well known, his gallery became famous and he became a very rich man. Unfortunately, the same formula does not work for a Brakhage film: the very performative and ephemeral aspect of a film spectacle itself comes into play.

On the other hand, there exists, of course, a very well established network for commercial film distribution, ruled by companies who buy and sell rights to territories for existing films. Even if a personal narrative film is made on a shoestring budget, the rights to it can be sold and its visibility will be determined by the established economy of commercial box-office driven film distribution. The business is geared towards ticket sales, which goes back from the theaters to the distributors, the producers, and eventually the filmmakers. This system automatically excludes experimental films because contemporary art does not fill movie theaters and produce box office results. Therefore nobody will buy the rights to them and thus support the filmmaker and his distribution complications and costs. There lies the paradox: these art films are excluded from both art and film distribution markets and venues.

However, the films survive and sometimes even come to light, even if it is only the light of a projector. Once again, Maya Deren must be mentioned as an important pioneer. Not only did she manage to make her films inexpensively; she also devised her own system of promotion and distribution based in her home. She organized college tour circuits and grassroots methods to promote her films with no budget and no official channels for promotion. The New American Cinema Group followed Maya Deren’s example. Making money was not an object of their cinematographic experience and this forced them to be industrious when it came to finding financing. Other groups were more radical still: the Zanzibar group in France even manifested against promotion and distribution, thus their works were forgotten completely. The grassroots network of self-promoting filmmakers lay on the shoulders of marginal, off-beat, but extremely dedicated people driven by their love for the art. And this continues to this day. The distribution infrastructure now includes an 80 year old Lithuanian in New York, a guitarist in England who likes experimental film more than being in a rock band, me living in my 25 square meter garret and receiving unemployment from the French government, and a few other crazies.

In France in the late 1970s there was another uprising of young, enthusiastic film artists. A dozen cooperatives were active and promoted different styles, such as structural filmmaking, lyrical filmmaking, super-8 and body art. A lot of attention was paid to this film work at the time; festivals attracted huge audiences and even some profit. Unfortunately, the groups involved could not unite under a common flag, but struggled over their irreconcilable differences. When the CNC, the French National Film Center, finally responded to everyone’s financing requests with a demand of a uniform statement of purpose and proposal the money should be allocated for, there was no single answer. Some groups demanded collective grants such as funded labs and equipment, but others objected as this would be necessarily centralized in Paris. Others preferred to organize a committee that would distribute money based on individual projects and needs, but the others objected that this was far too republican and would only mimic the existing, biased system. As a result, nothing was decided, the funding was not granted at all, and infighting ensued. By 1982, the groups had dissipated, popularity of the art form waned and the level of involvement and activity in film dropped significantly. With few exceptions, only a handful of dedicated individuals continued to make films. At this time, the Light Cone cooperative started and started organizing weekly midnight screenings.

I became involved with Light Cone in 1989 because they liked my super-8 films and offered to distribute them. At the annual meeting of the coop, we, the members, were reminded of the cooperative nature of our organization, and that help was needed. Films needed to be checked when returning from screenings, royalties needed to be calculated, rentals invoiced, and other handy tasks. I had worked in distribution before. I worked for Orion Classics in New York, distributing foreign narrative feature films in America, and for UGC in France doing the same thing the other way around. When the opportunity arose to work at Light Cone, I strongly believed, as I do still, that a great effort should be made for this avant-garde work to be popularized and supported. With that in mind, I quit UGC and worked at Light Cone for 7 years.

At a certain point, convenience demanded that video tapes be made available of the films distributed by the coop. They were useful to festival programmers to save wear and tear on the film prints. I asked Cherel Ito, Maya Deren’s third husband’s third wife who had inherited the director’s works, if we could get video copies of Deren’s films for the coop. She misunderstood our request in a way that posed an important change of perspective; she suggested that we distribute the works on video. Many film makers avoided transferring their works to video, as did I, but it seemed to me an important and inevitable way to bring these films to people outside Paris and other cultural centers and to provide research tools for film students. We pioneered the experiment with the films of Maya Deren, along with releases of Hans Richter (with the help of Cecile Starr), and of a contemporary French filmmaker Patrick Bokanowski. Being at Light Cone, I and some other people started a new company called Light Cone Video, in the same way that Orion Pictures was affiliated with Orion Home Video.

At this time, Light Cone was getting busier and busier, screenings were becoming popular throughout Europe, and the video distribution itself became a full time job. Some people had begun confusing video with film in the mid-1990’s; it became important to distinguish between the two groups, as well as to promote the videotapes as a supplement to the film projection experience, and not a replacement. I left Light Cone, changed the name of my company to Re:Voir which is French for “to see again” because I believe these films should be seen on the big screen first and on video afterwards for further study. I spelled the name with a colon to signify “about, a propos”, the re: found at the beginning of business letters and e-mails. The name of the company also reminds us of the fact that these are films about seeing.

As to how the business is practically operated, all the pre-production is done in a hands on way in my small apartment in Paris. I meet the filmmakers and we decide upon what is going to be published. Then slides are taken of the films, I design the covers and booklets and engage in promotional activity. The high-end telecine transfers are done in the best labs available, the same ones Disney chooses, because when it comes to the importance of the image, concessions cannot be made. The business started very small and modest but it has grown fast. At first I had to go from store to store offering the videos; now we receive orders daily by fax and e-mail. Commercial and educational venues as well as private customers order tapes regularly from our web site.

I categorically refuse to show the videos we release on a big screen; for me they are the reproductions of the originals and not the substitutes for them. On a monitor, the difference becomes self-evident. The relationship is equivalent to that between a painting and a postcard of the painting, which are never confused for one another; a painting is meant to be seen in its original form and in a specific place, whereas a postcard or a book is a lesser-quality duplication, to be taken home for study, reference or personal enjoyment. Opinions on the approach to this problem differ in this age of mechanical and digital reproduction. Peter Kubelka, who has been traveling around the world for almost fifty years with his seven minimal films, is draconian about the difference between the two formats, and will only allow his work to be seen on film. When I attempted to

Maya Deren, "Meshes of the Afternoon"

justify the possibility of his films being easily available to the public, he said that the technology of cinema is his ship and if this ship goes down, he will go down with it. He was almost proudly looking forward to it. On the other hand, Jonas Mekas, participating in the discussion, told a story of an old black and white book of reproductions of paintings that he cherished as a child in his elementary school in Lithuania. He claimed those reproductions in no way diminished the greatness of the original works; seeing the real paintings years later in faraway galleries only intensified their beauty and impressiveness.

The video medium, however, is used only as a distribution tool and not as a production medium by Re:Voir. All the works distributed by the company were originally done on film. We do not even engage in video art promotion because there are plenty of other people involved in it. The contemporary areas of expertise are very narrow and, unlike in the 1920s, today poets and painters do not even know each other.

Another complication standing in the way of experimental film distribution is the problem of DVD. All requests for Re:Voir films on DVD are turned down; the reason is poor quality. This answer astounds many people who find DVD to be a crisper, cleaner and more durable medium, but there is a valid explanation. Film has 24 frames per second, VHS has 25 while DVD only has 2 or 4. This means that instead of providing every frame, the computer or DVD player interpolates the information on the disk. The frames are encoded in Groups of Pictures (called GOPs). For a GOP of 6 for example, 5 out of the 6 images are calculated and vectorized according to a special algorithm called MPEG, designed for natural and predictable motion. Still backgrounds are encoded like slides. About 30% of the information is missing, as compared to VHS. In experimental film, where nonstandard imagery is the most important aspect, that kind of compression defeats the whole purpose of the endeavor. VHS format is bad enough, but DVD is unacceptable. Hopefully, a better technology will become available soon.

The DVD resistance today stands in the way of commercial adaptability. Most large commercial venues discard VHS as archaic and prefer to only deal with DVD. Newspapers now review only DVD releases. On my insistence, only one central location in Paris agreed to maintain a VHS section devoted to experimental and short films. The choice of avoiding DVD technology suddenly started depriving experimental films the distribution options they had in the previous five years.

After the conflict of the late 1970s, the interest towards experimental film in Paris started picking up in the mid-1990s. To a large extent this was due to the academia. University professors and students started studying historical breakthrough works that were looked down upon before. In the late 1980s, when critics like Bertrand Tavernier referred to Mekas and Brakhage as troglodytes, no serious study was ever engaged. Later, however, students started doing their own research and in turn enlightened their professors. One such professor, Jacques Aumont, had a student who did her thesis on Carl Brown, a Canadian filmmaker. He became interested in the subject matter and showed the films to his students. Once the students and the professors got excited about the films they had just discovered for themselves, more screenings started happening and the demand for film rentals and video sales grew significantly.

Publishing is another valuable resource in dissemination of experimental film. Now, not only is Re:Voir printing booklets and brochures with the tapes, but one Paris book publisher, Paris Experimental, is devoted exclusively to the avant-garde film, bringing out new texts and translating classic books like Sitney’s Visionary Film into French. Whenever something comes out in print and a publication event happens, there is always a huge turnout.

I am happy to say that contemporary film activity in Paris is incredibly rich. Many old and new film groups are screening, renting, producing and writing about film. They are extremely serious about their work, but the incentive for it is still on the level of pure love and dedication. Due to these efforts, one can see something interesting here every night. A network of independent cooperative labs has also arisen across France. Paris has always been a film place; where you have garage bands in London, you have super-8 filmmakers in Paris. I almost feel that now is the time to return to New York where more work needs to be done.

Although experimental film is gaining its deserved ground, it still retains the paradox of undefinability. Filmmakers are wont to explain their work in terms of films that have come before (unlike in Hollywood where a young film director may eagerly describe his totally new project as a mixture, say, between Star Wars and Bambi). Even the term “experimental” rarely applies. Often it is Hollywood who is doing the experimenting, in terms of test projections and strategies to determine what changes should be made to elicit higher box office. On the other hand, the “experimental” filmmakers cannot help but do exactly what they have in mind, allowing no concessions. You wouldn’t call a painter an “experimental” painter, no matter how experimental he is. “Avant-garde” is another old-fashioned and misused denomination. As Peter Kubelka once said, “when all the others, the museum curators and the mainstream art and film world people are chasing each other like lemmings over the cliff, the avant-garde stands in the back.“

Pip Chodorov founded RE:VOIR in 1994, a video project which makes available a collection of videotapes of experimental films, a rich, diverse and fragile body of work, both classic and contemporary.