Lecture Illustrates Avant-Garde Film

“The least change in our point of view, gives the whole world a pictorial air,” wrote Emerson almost 200 years ago in the essay “Nature.” Fast-forward two centuries and the edgiest avant-garde cinema is just an application of the same principle—at least according to P. Adams Sitney, considered by many to be America’s foremost scholar of avant-garde cinema. Sitney was at the Harvard Film Archive (HFA) last Monday to deliver an illustrated lecture about the philosophy behind American avant-garde film.

If anyone knows experimental film, it’s Sitney. At 16, he founded “Filmwise,” a journal of avant-garde cinema. In 1970 he helped found Anthology Film Archives, a New York-based center for the study, preservation, and presentation of independent films, with an emphasis on the American avant-garde movement. And if you’ve taken a class on experimental film theory, chances are you’ve read his book “Visionary Film,” a classic foundational study of avant-garde cinema first published in 1974.

The title of the lecture, “Eyes Upside Down,” is derived from Emerson’s essay “Nature.” Sitney asserts that by changing the way one looks at things, one can rediscover beauty. “I wanted to emphasize the romantic heritage and underpinnings of the American avant-garde,” he said.

Sitney illustrated his lecture with short films. He used vivid biographical details and historical connections to help the audience better understand the world of experimental film. One film in particular featured an overhead view of a street with three dashed white lines filling the screen. When a car drives onscreen, it becomes clear that the camera has been filming upside down. Entitled “Shift,” the nine-minute film by Ernie Gehr switches between an upright and inverted point-of-view. The film continues on in this way with bicycles, garbage trucks, and, at one point, a van of piano movers.

“An almost perfect example of Emerson’s principle that a few mechanical changes can make a person think,” Sitney said afterward. “What we see here is a portrait of street life by someone who perceives it with great intensity.”

A film Sitney showed by Stan Brakhage also uses upside-down shots along with shifting exposures and motion, while another by Hollis Frampton begins with a solid screen that shifts colors. Neither of these works would have been half as interesting without the anecdotal context Sitney provided. “It’s very difficult to separate direct engagement with the physical world from autobiography,” he said in regard to interpreting the stream-of-consciousness quality of these films.

Sitney explained that Brakhage drew some of his inspiration from poetry, while Frampton seems to have been motivated by a fierce sense of competition with his envelope-pushing contemporaries. Shortly after Brakhage did film about an autopsy, Frampton went to the same hospital and demanded to film a decapitated head for a short of his own.

All this explanation shed some light on the seemingly meaningless whims of some of the filmmakers. However, Sitney did acknowledge the arcane nature of many experimental films. “These came out of a deeply personal and idiosyncratic language,” he said. Sitney ties it in part to the American psyche. “There is a longstanding American—should I say Emersonian—tradition of eccentric self-reliance.”

—Staff writer Rebecca A. Schuetz can be reached at schuetz@fas.harvard.edu.