Is Love All You Need?

1960/70s Romantics and Countercultures

The Cold War Dr. Strangelove. 1963

Our aim in the Cold War is not conquering of territory or subjugation by force. Our aim is more subtle, more pervasive, more complete... The means we shall employ to spread this truth are often called psychological. Dont be afraid of that term... "Psychological warfare" is the struggle for the minds and wills of men. Eisenhower, 1953.
(Left - Jackson Pollock at work)

In a Girls' School by Ivan Alekseevich Vladimirov, probably early 1940s

Poster by unknown artist celebrating a collective farm.

Roses for Stalin, Boris Vladimirski, 1949

Socialist Realism Official Soviet Propaganda Art

Unaccounted funds were used in a CIA campaign to "culturally" fight communism through the Congress for Cultural Freedom. Art was to represent "freedom".
(see 'Who Paid the Piper?: CIA and the Cultural Cold War', Granta, London. 1999.) (Images DeKooning, Motherwell, Frankenthaler, Rothko)

Where it seems fitting, the characters in Procter & Gamble dramas should reflect recognition and acceptance of the world situation in their thoughts and actions, although in dealing with war, our writers should minimize the horror aspects. The writers should be guided by the fact that any scene that contributes negatively to public morale is not acceptable. Men in uniform shall not be cast as heavy villains or portrayed as engaging in any criminal activity. There will be no material on any of our programs which could in any way further the concept of business as cold, ruthless, and lacking all sentiment or spiritual motivation. If a businessman is cast in the role of villain, it must be made clear that he is not typical but is as much despised by his fellow businessman as he is by other members of society. Ministers, priests and similar representatives of positive social forces should not be cast as villains or represented committing a crime or be placed in any unsympathetic antisocial role.
Memo brought to light by the Federal Communications Commission in 1965, from Bagdikian, Ben H. The Media Monopoly, 2nd Ed. Beacon Press, Boston, 1987, p156-58.

Stan Brakhage In 50 years he made a large and varied collection of films (380 +). He explored a number of techniques that included handheld camerawork, painting and scratching directly on to celluloid, fast cutting, in-camera editing and the use of multiple exposures. He was interested in mythology and symbolism. Through his films, he expressed his feelings about life, mortality, sexuality and innocence. He often stated that his work was about the act of seeing.

"Dog Star Man (1964) elaborates in mythic, almost systematic terms, the world view of the lyrical films. More than any other work of the American avant-garde film, it stations itself within the rhetoric of Romanticism, describing the birth of consciousness, the cycle of the seasons, man's struggle with nature and sexual balance in the visual evocation of a fallen titan bearing the cosmic name of the Dog Star Man." - P. Adams Sitney

Symbiopsychotaxiplasm. Take One. (1968)

The Film and Theatre worlds of the late 1960s oscillated between two opposing ideas: the auteur and the collective. Auteur theory inflated the director into an individual artist who could eclipse any actor and was greater than the studio system itself. The sixties counterculture, in civil rights and anti-war groups, idealized the collective and communal decision making.

William Greaves was born in Harlem in 1926, in a Jamaican family. He began as an actor, pushing the boundaries of the roles a black actor could play. He saw that he "...had to get on the other side of the camera because [Hollywood] was messing with the image of black people with impunity". After a stint under less racist conditions with John Grierson in Canada, he returned to the US to document African American experience. *Symbio] was heavily influenced by jazz, which, to me as a black man, is an attempt on the part of an enchained human spirit to break free from the prison bars of mechanical tempo and to liberate itself. Analogically, traditional dramatic structure was for me a conventional prison from which I sought to escape with the free style of the film"

"Surrealism," "incitement to suicide," and my favorite, "traffic in art objects leading to homosexuality," all sound like respectable weapons in the modern-art arsenal. In the case of legendary director Sergei Paradjanov (1924-1993), they were grounds for fifteen years of forced inactivity and nearly five years of imprisonment in one of Russias many pre-glasnost hard-labor camps. What was it about this jovial, bearlike man that invoked the unending wrath of Russian censors? ...there are the films, a dozen features working such "troubling" territory as celebrations of Armenian (i.e., non-Russian) culture, a Dionysian (some would say delirious) approach to his material, a strict adherence to a no-linear-plot policy, and a general air of rapturous and whimsical indulgence in color and sound... (Gary Morris, Bright Lights Film Journal). Critic Alexei Korotyukov remarked: "Paradjanov made films not about how things are, but how they would have been had he been God.

Sergei Paradjanov's "Sayat Nova, The Color of Pomegranates", (1968) a biography of the Armenian troubadour Sayat Nova (King of Song) reveals the poet's life more through his poetry than a conventional narration. The poet grows up, falls in love, enters a monastery and dies, but these incidents are depicted in the context of Parajanov's imagination and Sayat Nova's poems, depicted visually and rarely heard. Sofiko Chiaureli plays 6 roles, both male and female. Parajanov writes, directs, edits, choreographs, works on costumes, design and decor and virtually every aspect of this revolutionary work void of any dialog or camera movement.

Andy Warhol

During the 1960s, I think, people forgot what emotions were supposed to be. And I don't think they've ever remembered. Sex is more exciting on the screen and between the pages than between the sheets.

Pablo Picasso 1881-1973

What do you think an artist is? An imbecile who has only eyes if he is a painter..far, far from it: at the same time, he is also a political being, constantly aware of the heartbreaking, passionate, or delightful things that happen in the world, shaping himself completely in their image. How could it be possible to feel no interest in other people, and with a cool indifference to detach yourself from the very life which they bring to you so abundantly? No, painting is not done to decorate apartments. It is an instrument of war.
Martin, Russell. 'Picassos War, The Destruction of Guernica, and The Master Piece That Changed The World', Dutton, Penguin Putnam Inc. New York, 2002, p175.

Andy Warhol 1928 1987

Sometimes people let the same problems make them miserable for years when they should just say, So what. Thats one of my favourite things to say. So what. My mother didnt love me. So what. My husband wont ball me. So what. I dont know how I made it through all the years before I learned to do that trick. It took a long time for me to learn it, but once you do you never forget.
Warhol, Andy. 'The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (from A to B and Back Again), Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, NY 1975. p112.

By 1963, Andy Warhol had achieved notoriety with his renderings of soup cans, coke bottles etc. He bought a 16mm film camera and began a series of film experiments. His work heralded a significant change in American avant-garde cinema. Firstly, it marked a increasingly intimate association between film and contemporary visual arts, especially Minimalism.

The Minimal Strain

The films of the minimal strain rejected the heightened subjectivity of the film poem and its standard stylistic devices: erratic camera movement and cutting, allusive metaphors, improvisational forms. These films presented an increasingly prolonged and impassive and stare at the most inexpressive of bodies and objects.
(James Peterson, Dreams of Chaos, Visions of Order. 1994)

Eat

Blow Job Mario Banana

Empire

Kiss

Interpretation
Looking at the work of artists like Brakhage, the viewer is forced to find coherence. Minimal films force the viewer to look for relevance. Film scholar P. Adams Sitney designated such films as Structural, defined by their shape. The Structural film insists on its shape, and what content it has is minimal and subsidiary to the outline. According to Sitney, these films are not about human vision, but about the human mind a kind of meditation.

In 1959, Gustav Metzger reacted to the nuclear arms race and environmental destruction with his concept of Auto-Destructive Art . He defined a 'form of public art for industrial societies'. He made sculptures that fell to pieces, canvases corroded by acid, rubbish in trash bags, or car exhausts in acrylic glass containers. The Destruction in Art Symposium (DIAS), which he initiated in London in 1966, clearly showed that the theme of destruction was also important for other artists of his generation. At this legendary meeting of artists, Metzger enabled the first international appearance of the Viennese Actionists.

Viennese Actionists broke with American Expressionism. They broke the idea of the artwork as a permanent object, in favour of the sensational impact on the spectator. It was an aggressive response to the conservative post-WW2 generation in Austria, where reconstruction was difficult, because of the alliance with the Nazis and traditional bourgeois values marked by deeply rooted Catholicism. Constantly harassed by the authorities, they intended to reveal the still fascist essence of the nation. They sought to confront and destroy both bourgeois politics and the notion of art, - through catharsis. They performed gory and perverse ritual acts that challenged social institutions. They were often jailed.
(Left, Self-Mutilation, Gnter Brus)

The "father of post-war European avant-garde cinema, seen by some as the European Stan Brakhage, Kurt Kren was a bank cashier. He began making shorts in the 1950s. His first subjects were everyday objects shot frame-by-frame according to elaborate diagrams and charts. Sometimes the length of a take might be determined by the sum total of the two preceding takes i.e. the Fibonacci sequence. Kren developed this flash-editing technique. In the 1960s he began filming the Viennese Actionists.

Shots from 9/64 O Tannenbaum. The title refers to a Christmas song, with which the Nazis sought to paganize the celebration.

Ed Emshwiller (1925-1990) studied painting in the U.S. and Paris. In the 1950s, his expressionist canvases received praise at art galleries, while his hyperrealistic cover illustrations for sciencefiction magazines such as Galaxy showed surrealistic landscapes of imaginary planets and exotic creatures. He became a major figure in experimental film and eventually a highly respected video artist and dean at the School of Film/Video at the California Institute of the Arts.

Emshwiller was always looking for ways to push the boundaries of film and video. He was a pioneer of computergenerated video and combining technology with art. Many of his films, received screenings and awards at New York, Cannes and major film festivals worldwide. He had a desire to penetrate "space in a kind of flying camera, a dream of flying, a kind of sensual, sexual imagery where you were constantly going into an unknown space. Emshwiller is mad, truly mad. Only mediocre craftsmen are like everybody else. The truly great craftsmen are creatures with demons at their service. And thus the borders of art and craft disappear in the mystery of created and found reality. Jonas Mekas. Many of his films carried on the Dance Film tradition developed by Maya Deren and others.

Two screenshots from Film With Three Dancers, 1971.