Short and Sweet

Cantankerous friends of mine, bummed out by the "issues of the day," have invented their own. They've been to El Paso and know west Texas like the back of this month's Playmate, and they swear that they've seen the sand dune Neil Armstrong stepped out onto that historic day in July 1969. "Backdrops and mock-ups," they say. "No way anybody could ever get to the moon. It was all staged out there in Texas."

I knew as well as they did what good PR people could do with TV--I had seen TV lend piety to Richard Nixon and purity to Marilyn Chambers (the 99 and 44/100 pure Ivory Snow Girl who wound up Behind the Green Door). I have a feeling that the whole thing derived from that fateful eighth grade day of reckoning when my friends found out that all their favorite Westerns, the ones they had patterned their lives after, had been made--far from west Texas where they belonged--but in Spain.

I always trusted the networks on the moonshots because before I even had a TV I lived next door to a NASA employee, whose meek children appeased the neighborhood aggressors by handing out 8 by 10 color glossies with circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one explaining what each one was, of moon, earth, Armstrong, Apollo, and SPACE (hushed voices, and well we might, we are so small).

Those pictures had an aura akin to what I'd expect from the Hope diamond. No way they could have been taken in Texas. They were so crystalline, with a clarity to be had only in the absence of atmosphere, clouds, haze, light refracted and distracted. Literal remoteness was their essence. On TV we saw the human acts, so very simple--Armstrong saying nothing more than "just a little step for me, but you folks got a long way to go" and his pleasure in flowing slow motion. The human aspect was pretty much a not very well-scripted Wild Kingdom: "See the little gray animals. See how they run and jump." As Armstrong ambled, I almost forgot about the rows and rows of Mission Controllers. But in the glistening photographs, there was no face, only mirrors, on the front of the helmet. And the lunar module was imposing, monolithic, stark in the sharpness of the pictures, technology brought home, hard.

Cynicism about lunar-module-modernity has lapped the American shoreline since before Henry Adams, a century ago, bemoaned the coming of "dynamo" (materialism and industrialization) and the passing of the "Virgin" (the spiritual and aristic heritage of Western Europe). The weeping and wailing still continue as the Druids resurge. But if, as John Fowles would have it, cynicism is nothing more than a failure to cope, Adams' analysis fails. The very artists whom Adams would have expected to keep the icon hanging straight, are coping--by varnishing the Dynamo with super-realism. Warhol handles mass-production by redistributing the colors of soup cans. Rauschenberg sublimates industrial waste by pasting it together, taking it up off the floor onto the walls. Steve Gildea, a photo-realist painter, places a grid on photographs, another grid on the surfaces to be painted, and then copies square by square.

So square by square, on the walls of not-exactly-a-gallery in Central Square, are three NASA glossies; and the mirror in the helmet almost grins.

Probably because the gallery copes, too. It's called Off The Wall and the people who run it claim only to show short films in a coffeehouse setting and occoasional pictures on the walls. But they're modest.

Film is only a little less remote than painting. It entrances because it moves. Structure spectators that we are, cushioned and slouching in adjustable seats, row upon regimented row, the directors have to creep on shoeless feet. Camouflaged by pathos, bathos, and gales of laughter, their goal is our back-bone. Else they impale themselves, as Bergman often does, on our pointy little heads.

But Off The Wall makes film mellow twice over. We sit at tables, taste tea and Baby Watson cheesecake, and talk sibilantly. The films are shorts and perhaps have a tendency to subside into vignette. But it is certainly much easier to accept a short than a feature-length film at face value, to kern a message, to retain one final sentiment. Because of this, a well-arranged succession of short takes has as much or more potential than a full-length film for establishing a coherent flowing image. And Off The Wall has put together ten shorts that flow into an undiluted visual delight.

The four animated shorts on the program are in the "minimal animation" style--vastly different from the controlled lushness of Disney fairy tales. A group of American animators who didn't have the money or eager apprentices of the Disney studios retained the same background in most of the frames of a sequence and concentrated on the movements, shapes, and colors of the central figures.

Eggs (1971) by two former members of this group, concerns the partnership between a gossamer-clad nymph called Life and skeleton in black named Death. In one sequence, Death, reclining on the Brooklyn Bridge, extracts a cigar from his voluminous cape and looks around for a light. He flicks a convenient jet into the path of another airplane and casually lights the stogie from the crash. Eventually, the great green scaly three-mouthed mumbling monster God shows up for the final summing-up, sends Life and Death off to run another planet, and pronounces, "You're on your own."

The film Diary (1974) is the result of a visit to the United States by of the Zagreb school of animation. In less than fifteen seconds, blobs expand into cocktail parties and a pudgy businessman is isolated; he sprouts into the air, his legs become the World Trade Towers with New York at his feet, his cigar turns into innumerable smokestacks, and neon signs spring from his vest: WORK! PROSPERITY! BIG BUSINESS!

Off The Wall also features the 1975 Oscar winner for best animation, Closed Mondays, filmed from clay figures. A drunk whose face twitches, yawns, and stretches--more movement in his eye sockets alone than in most Saturday morning cartoons--sidles into a one-woman art exhibit. He leans, peers, rocks back, shakes his head: almost every interaction with the objects is exhilirating. Street Musique, (1973), a Canadian film, is an exercise in almost pure animation and the best example of "minimal animation." The shapes expand, evolve, regress, and stay every bit as lovely as anything Miro did with line and color.

Of the non-animated films, Down in the Deep is amazing as a curiosity: made in 190 in color, each frame was hand-painted. Otherwise it is boring, a sentimental undersea adventure with stilted mermaids. Dreams of Wild Horses (1960), on the other hand, tears at the viewer with the same urgent power with which two stallions in the film dance and kick and bite. It gives us nine minutes of wild horses in the south of France rippling in slow motion through marshes, waves, and spray. In the end, horses leap over walls of fire, sucking their bellies up into themselves, trying to escape back to the wild. It is the conjunction of freedom and terror and the scorch remains.

But then there is Frogs (1972). The filmers interviewed froggers, French-fried-frog-leg chefs, frog-formaldehyders, and frog-jewelry freaks. There are lots of neat warty shots, all culminating in the Calaveras County California frog-jumping contest. Owners and managers and trainers and just plain rowdies stomp up and down on the platform trying to scare their amphibians into leaping. The film ends with the soaring elongation of frogs flying for the edge of the platform. Realism gets its ya-ya's out when one bounces off the camera.

The shorts flow so lyrically that even the opening one, a surrealist nightmare with boulders dropping from water faucets and beds disintegrating into feathers and splinters and sawdust, seems whimsical in retrospect. Another disconcerting take, of endless peasant faces and worn bodies soaking in Yugoslavian mud baths, ends with its own soft fade: the camera moves away as the people move away, and mist from the warm mud interposes. A film by a Boston filmmaker (they try to have one in every group of shorts) based on Anne Sexton's poem "Old," has the same quality: two schoolgirls scamper down a staircase in a sepia print, and a minute later the scene repeats but the girls disappear before they reach the bottom.

The whole coffeehouse/gallery/theater has that sepia feel; occasionally the subway rumbles and chugs underneath; Red Zinger tea is the easiest smell in the place; and over in the corner a spot of white paint denotes a sweat-drop in the photo-realist painting of Richard Nixon meeting the press. Off The Wall is an atmosphere, slightly hazy and warm; light is refracted but does not bounce. It only ripples, like the images on the screen.