BEAT EXPERIMENTS

New American Cinema

A new (and maybe broken) Universe

The universe was once conceived as a vast preserve, landscaped for heroes, plotted to provide them with appropriate adventures. The rules were known and respected, the adversaries honourable, the oracles articulate. Today the rules are ambiguous, the adversary is concealed in aliases, the oracles broadcast a babble of contradictions. One struggles to preserve, in the midst of such relentless metamorphosis, a constancy of personal identity.

She made her second film, At Land on the beach at Amagansett, Long Island in 1944. Various notables appear, including eroticist Anais Nin and composer John Cage.

War and Peace...

In America, after 1945, artists and intellectuals craved for an end to the regimented, psychologically repressed society of the war years. The spontaneous expressions of the Beat Poets and the release of unconscious forces by the Abstract Expressionist painters were parallel manifestations of this desire.
Bombhead, Bruce Conner

Activities At The Margins...

William Burroughs, son of the founder of Burroughs Business Machines, (now part of Unisys), travelled extensively after graduating from Harvard and began his writing career began in the early 1950s with encouragement from poet and friend Allen Ginsberg. He gained the reputation of elder of the beat movement in New York. He subsequently lived in Paris, London, Tangier, and New York.

1949 No. 1 by Clyfford Still, San Francisco Artist

New American Cinema

The official cinema all over the world is running out of breath. It is morally corrupt, aesthetically obsolete, thematically superficial, temperamentally boring. Even the seemingly worthwhile films, those that lay claim to high moral and aesthetic standards and have been accepted as such by critics and the public alike, reveal the decay of the Product Film. The very slickness of their execution has become a perversion covering the falsity of their themes, their lack of sensibility, their lack of style.
New American Cinema Group September 30, 1962

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. ... Common beliefs, common knowledge, common anger and impatience binds us togetherand 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 are for art, but not at the expense of life. We dont want false, polished, slick filmswe prefer them rough, unpolished, but alive; we dont want rosy filmswe want them the colour of blood.

Personal Expression
We believe that cinema is indivisibly a personal expression. We therefore reject the interference of producers, distributors and investors until our work is ready to be projected on the screen.

Stan Brakhage
Imagine an eye un-ruled by man-made laws of perspective, an eye unprejudiced by compositional logic, and eye which does not respond to the name of everything but which must know each object encountered in life through an adventure of perception. How many colours are there in a field of grass to the crawling baby unaware of Green? How many rainbows can light create for the untutored eye? How aware of variations in heat waves can that eye be? Imagine a world alive with incomprehensible objects and shimmering with an endless variety of movement and innumerable gradations of color. Imagine a world before the beginning was the word.

Documentaries?
Through constant experimentation, (he made over 300 films), Brakhage drove avant-garde film further and further from the commercial product. Starting out with psychodrama and trance films, like Maya Deren, he moved further and further toward film without any recognisable narrative, which he claimed to scholar P. Adams Sitney, were documentaries of various forms of human perception.

Cats Cradle
Brakhage says the film is sexual witchcraft involving two couples and a cat. The film is shot inside a house, with constantly flickering light from the outside. There are many techniques , such as pacing, abstraction, distortion, use of colour, and repetition. It's hard to focus. The film seems to be from the cat's perspective. There is a hint that the cat is in control. The warm colours give off heat, tension and sensuality.

Cats Cradle, 1959

Gregory Markopoulos
Markopoulos was a GreekAmerican film-maker and one of the signees of the New American Film statement. He began making films when he was 19. His Twice A Man , on one level, concerned the debate between a man and his mother about his male lover. Much of his work was concerned with celebration of his sexuality.

Twice a man, 1963

According to Hugh McCarney at Western Connecticut State University, Markopoulos proposed a new narrative film form through the fusion of the classic montage technique with a more abstract system. This system involved the use of short film phrases that evoke thought images. Markopoulos wanted to go beyond the montage ideas of Eisenstein, Resnais and Godard. He also wanted to delve right into the spectator's subconscious, completely eliminating the middleman of drama.

Ostensibly about a man, his mother and his lover, the film is re-imagining of the Greek myth of Hippolytus, who was killed after rejecting the advances of his stepmother. The film radicalises narrative construction with a mosaic of thought images that shift tenses and compress time.

Kenneth Anger
Another supporter of New American Cinema, he was born in California and grew up in Hollywod. He went to Paris in 1949 to work with Jean Cocteau. He is a disciple of Alastair Crowley. Scorpio Rising refers to birth of Luciferian Age of Aquarius. Anger says his 'lifework' is Magick and his 'magical weapon' the cinematograph. He is a high level practitioner of occult magic who regards the projection of his films as ceremonies capable of invoking spiritual forces.

Magickal Bikers
Angers films are cinematic manifestations of his occult practices. As such, they are highly symbolical, either featuring characters directly portraying gods, forces and demons or else finding an appropriate embodiment for them in the iconography of contemporary pop culture. In attempting to induce an altered state of consciousness in his viewers, Anger dispenses with traditional narrative devices, although his films definitely tell stories. According to Anger, Scorpio is the zodiac sign which rules both the sex organs and machinery.

Anger worked with a gang of ItalianAmerican Coney Island bikers. Scorpio the lead, was a motorcycle messenger in Manhattan

Ritual and Destruction

Using powerful esoteric images and, especially in his later works, extremely complex editing strategies that frequently feature superimposition and the inclusion of subliminal images running just a few frames, Anger bypasses our rationality and appeals directly to our subconscious mind. The structure common to his major works is that of a ritual invoking or evoking spiritual forces, normally moving from a slow build up, resplendent with fetishistic detail, to a frenzied finale with the forces called forth running wild.
Maximilian Le Cain, Senses of Cinema.

The preparations involve the bikers fixing and polishing their motorbikes, donning the ceremonial garb of leather, bedecking themselves with rings and chains...

Scorpio Rising
...it became, like, a landmark case of redeeming social merit. That was the phrase that was used to justify that it wasn't pornography. And, indeed, there's nothing pornographic about it. Somebody had to break the ice and have that kind of case at that time to establish the freedom, because, before then, the police could seize anything they wanted to. The film conveys Anger's (and Crowleys) perception of an effete Christianity perishing in the face of the new phallic virility that the bikers embody.

Elder of the beats

Brion Gysin, met Burroughs while he was living with in Paris in the late 50s. While laying out newspapers to protect a table, Gysin accidentally sliced through them. He observed that where a strip of text had been cut away, the print on the next page linked up and could be read across, combining different stories from other pages. Gysin showed the discovery to Burroughs. They called it cutups.

Burroughs said, "I felt I had been working towards the same goal any narrative passage or any passage of poetic images is subject to any number of variations, all of which may be interesting and valid in their own right cut-ups establish new connections between images".

Disorientation
Although the technique had been used in writing before, notably by the Dada movement, Burroughs, working with Gysin and British filmmaker Anthony Balch made experimental cut-up films. The Cut-Ups was made in 1963 and shown in a cinema on Oxford Street in London in 1966

The manager of the cinema said that during the performances an unusual number of strange articles such as bags, pants, shoes, and coats were left behind, probably out of complete disorientation.

Derangement
Gysin says the film is almost "sickeningly painful" to watch. It is a way of "deranging the senses" in the Rimbaud sense. Burroughs and Balch can be seen as modernists developing beyond Eliot, Pound and Joyce, revealing the actual structure of writing and cinema, while also creating new juxtapositions and fresh and hidden meanings. This predates "structural film", sometimes related with Minimalism.

Arthur Rimbaud, Symbolist poet at the end of the nineteenth century wrote of attaining poetical transcendence and visionary power through a "long, intimidating, immense and rational derangement of all the senses.

The limit of the Poetic?

Various readings and interpretations of New American Cinema usually refer to a poetic strain of filmmaking, concerned with the presentation of subjective views and internal states of mind. In many cases, filmmakers worked individually on their films, usually with complete control over the process. According to scholar James Peterson, there was a turn from the poetic, towards the purely visual in avantgarde cinema. He saw the film work of Andy Warhol at the forefront of this change. He argues that this new kind of Minimal film did not reward the viewer with insights after repeated viewing. Filmmakers came increasingly from the visual arts.