Werner Schroeter, The Rose King (1985)

Recently via the Tompkins County Public Library, I watched a DVD of the Wim Wenders film Pina (Criterion Collection). 

I've seen only 5-6 Pina Bausch productions in my life, all at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. The first one was Viktor, done in NYC in 1988. Prior to that I knew of Pina Bausch via her performance in Fellini's And The Ship Sails On, and in the Werner Shroeter documentary Dress Rehearsal, which as far as I can tell is unavailable commercially. Dress Rehearsal was done at a performance festival in Nancy, France, and it includes footage of Kazuo Ohno and Pat Oleszko, who just prior to the time of the film, I had seen in appearances at the Ann Arbor Film Festival. Several of us at the RC had Oleszko's poster of herself in a striptease costume as room decor. One of my RC colleagues knew of Oleszko via a Detroit artists group of whom I can no longer find any trace: the Motor City Free Arts Group (aka MC-FAG). 

Mostefa Djadjam is also in Dress Rehearsal. It's been a while but I recall him only as sitting at a table with Schroeter and others in the film. Perhaps garbled & distorted in my memory, I remember Schroeter addressing Djadjam with an affectionate, "Je t'aime . . . je t'aime . . ." Djadjam was the lead in the Shroeter film The Rose King (1985) which by circumstance - I worked at Film Forum at the time, where it had it's premiere in New York City - is the Schroeter film I know best, as a result. 

The cold slickness of the Wenders film of Pina Bausch would perhaps not has horrified me as much if I hadn't had my strong memories of the Shroeter title (or if I hadn't seen any actual Bausch productions which were much earthier and morbid than as seen in the Wenders doc). Shroeter's films touch on the complexities of longing, the films are beautiful in their economy, their affect: I find myself longing for such longing. 

Robert Bresson, stills - A Condemned Man Escapes, Mouchette, The Devil Probably

The first time I saw Robert Bresson's The Devil Probably was circa 1983, in a private screening at the Bleecker Street Cinema, where I worked. The Bleecker at that time was leased from Sid Geffen for a year by John Pierson, & John was considering a theatrical run of the film which had been at the NY Film Festival in 1977, which did not occur. I cannot remember if it was meant to "piggyback" as it were on the release of L'Argent, although that seems like it would have been part of the programming logic.

I will try not to put words in the mouths of John Pierson, or others present, but I recall that the utter dourness of the film, its constant focus on imminent ecological disaster in the world, coupled with the relative age of the film, six years or so after its making - the young people at that time appeared from an earlier decade, a hippie culture in total eclipse in a New York City hell-bent on gentrification and what was then called Reaganomics.

The one comment I recall is John Pierson saying to me in his glib, alpha-male way, "you want to see this don't you? you're a Bresson-person aren't you?" I hadn't thought about it until then but since then I have taken it as a truism. If I were forced to say something like this. (Mercifully I have not.)

The Bleecker was a strange but ultimately amazing place to work. John Pierson's year-long lease was a bit of stability in an otherwise mercurial if not absurdist organization. The Bleecker qualified as a "bad-first-job-for-your-media-of-choice" for young people, in this case those interested in film, the same way that the Strand Bookstore did for one-time English Majors. I was at the Bleecker 2 years, & in the first year, working for Sid Geffen there were something like 25 managers in the place. Days before John Pierson took over the Bleecker, I had been told by the then-manager, "Sid doesn't want you to think you're fired, but we're going to have to cut your hours to Zero." So it went. I was very young then and fairly pragmatic. In its favor I would say that except for a few (such as the manager who told me I wasn't being fired) there was a total lack of Fordist principles on site: One didn't have to pretend one was one's job. Given that the owner was a bit of nut, he was irrational, cruel, senseless, the place nevertheless functioned & functioned well (of course ultimately that benefited the owner) as a collective anarchy of sorts. The world of movie-going itself has changed so much. It was how you saw movies then & also how you saw others. I recall seeing Linda Montano and Tehching Hsieh going to movies there, during the year they were tied together, & locals such as Kathy Acker, Sylvere Lotringer. One of my co-workers was friends with the musician Evan Lurie, another frequent visitor. Not to mention some spectacularly difficult characters - it was a space you could enter & use both the bathrooms & a payphone without buying a ticket so the theater had multiple roles to play, physically. New York City had taken long-term mental patients out of hospitals a few years before, many of whom ended up on the nearby streets, and the then easy access of Washington Square & its public restrooms. But that sort of porousness of spaces no longer exists in New York City.

fun fact: the band the Bush Tetras worked at the Bleecker just before my time there. Supposedly their song "Too Many Creeps" refers to working there.

All that seems like such a long ago world now, whereas the portent of the newscasts in The Devil Probably, the dead forests, the polluted water & air, are now with us constantly, we live day-to-day now in the caprices of ecological disaster.

Robert Bresson, Lancelot du Lac (1974)

Bruce Conner stills - Mongoloid, 5:10 to Dreamland, Valse Triste

from "The Flower Thief", Directed by Ron Rice, with Taylor Mead (Film Culture no. 24, Spring 1962)

Jack Smith, The Moldy Hell of Men and Women (Film Culture no. 35, Winter 1964-65)

Werner Shroeter, Willow Springs, 1972

film stills

The film still, considered photographically, has been under the wire as a primary document, a thing without interest in itself, its meaning generated only in consideration of its subject.

In terms of production in Hollywood it was an integral part of the industry. Stills would be used for publicity & continuity. Classic Hollywood stills were produced throughout productions, with the hyperreal optics of a large format camera. Key scenes would be re-staged for the camera. In such a visual theater the exact perimeters of a drama were made evident, formed into a visual icon.

There have been some great collections of film stills. My 2 favorites have been the Marvin Heiferman/Diane Keaton collaboration Still Life, & the John Divola project, Continuity. Subsequently there have been great collections of silent film stills in lavish editions from Twelvetrees Press & Steidl. One could relate these collections as well to books such as Kenneth Anger's Hollywood Babylon I & II, although the Anger books are much more iconoclastic in their devotions to the shadows of the silver screen.

The film still is a curious document. For narrative films it is a document of a fiction. In classic Hollywood tradition it is the delineation of the drama is at its most concentrated. How a narrative would transmute to an image, at its apogee.

The Heiferman/Keaton Still Life was published in the heyday of black-&-white artistic photography, when the images included were at their most suspect in terms of integrity: artificial, staged, commercial, unreal - yet resonant with ideologies, in fact very clear about values & positions, & likewise, strange, in their all too quick obsolescence as a consumable object. The paradoxes of a photograph in a media based society, with its limited shelf-life & yet its ubiquity, presented themselves in glorious technicolor. From Jane Russell to Lassie.

Along with the classic industrialized Hollywood still, there has been its avant-garde shadow, in innumerable images of various louche productions. Disparate productions that come to mind are the Jack Smith book The Beautiful Book, & the various images by the cinematographer Babette Mangolte, which include work by Richard Foreman & Chantal Ackerman, among others. The Metropolitan Museum has collected photos taken of various performances in the 1960s, such as by Claes Oldenburg & Red Grooms - another example of "primary documents" entering the field of fine art as a collectible. Among filmmakers, I would cite the film stills of Ulrike Ottinger, which, more than most, replicate the high production standards of a classic Hollywood studio, & which also surpass any studio in creating images that could exist independently of any project.

Such a lop-sided juncture of fiction & document has always inspired me. I don't collect stills, the way I do stereocards or cartes-de-visite, but among my treasures are:

Dennis Hopper in Nightide

a collaged image from Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome

Harry Baer in Ludwig: Requiem for a Virgin King

Candy Darling in The Death of Maria Malibran

Ulrike Ottinger - Image Archive

At the Walker Art Center this week I bought a copy of Image Archive: Photographs 1970-2005 by the filmmaker Ulrike Ottinger. The photographs were taken over a 35 year span & include stills & studies for both Ottinger's experimental narrative films as well has ethnographic work done in Mongolia & China.

Seeing it brought back memories of when I worked at Anthology Film Archives, when in its small gallery there was a show of black-&-white images by Ottinger from her films: immaculate, well-printed, finished objects, which could be independent of the films themselves. The production of film stills is something which has for the most part diminished w/ the decline of the studio system in Hollywood, when stills were integral to publicity as well as continuity purposes. & certainly for experimental work it is often not a priority or something done w/ a great deal of work. I recall the show at Anthology as being a setting for a Halloween party. Also that it would have been circa 1989 - 20 years ago now!

There are almost 600 images in the book, mostly in color, mostly from the documentary work in Asia, but there are generous archives of images from the earlier experimental narratives, such as the spectacular Tabea Blumenschein in Madame X - An Absolute Ruler, & Ticket of No Return, & Magdalena Montezuma in Freak Orlando. & my one-time boss at the Bleecker St. Cinema, Jackie Raynal, as 1/2 of a Siamese twin in Freak Orlando. Among many others.(a nude study of Rosa von Prauheim, Delphine Seyrig as Lady Windemere in Johanna D'Arc of Mongolia, etc.).

Ottinger's images veer from the carefully studied film still images to photographs of a much more casual, "collecting" mode. Nevertheless there is a great deal of economy in Ottinger's diversity. The photographs often function as sketches for the larger work of the films. While not intended as a primary work by Ottinger, the photographs can be looked at as great footnotes to her cinematic oeuvre. & given Ottinger's careful practices, these are a truly fascinating addendum to the films.

Years ago my friend K. spoke about the absence of "women's adventure stories." I have always thought of Ottinger's films as being just that: whether a pirate queen, or a society lady drunk on a fabulous bender (Tabea Blumenschein walking on mirrors & destroying them as she walks into the future), or the meetings of all on the Trans-Siberian express on the steppes of Mongolia, Ottinger has created a hypothetical universe of expanding possibilities.

I am less familiar with the later documentary work, but in tandem w/ the narratives I am struck by the absence of tedium or banality in Ottinger's observations. Everything is about diversity & hybrid forms. The minutae of daily life can become an object of deep focus, as well as manifestations of the truly strange & unusual.

Slap Your Gondola production stills