Allan Fish Online Film Festival, Day 3: A Sidebar of Experimental Short Films

By Dean Treadway

In this. the first Allan Fish Online Film Festival, devised by the site’s co-founder Sam Juliano after the untimely death of our British co-hort Allan Fish, Sam has asked many of the site’s contributors to throw in on a film festival designed to highlight Fish’s obviously consuming love of cinema. Many of the contributors here have many superlative things to say about Allan, each of them having a long online (and sometimes face-to-face) correspondence with the man. But I feel it’s correct to, at this point, detail my own run-ins with this completely genius-level film lover.

It’s really simple: Allan hated me. He thought I was a complete amateur as a film commentator, and frankly, I think he may have been correct, at least in comparison to himself. There is no way I could compete with Allan as a film expert; he had me beat (though I never realized this was a competition). His curiosity in viewing movies was incomparable. He could casually watch movies from Turkey, Columbia, France, Nambia, New Zealand, Bulgaria, South Korea, Peru, and Vietnam with as much zeal as I could watching films from the United States and Britain. He understood that I have an Ugly American’s view of film: they’re better if they’re in English. He was right there, and it made me slightly angry that he had my number. I could never match his curiosity toward world cinema and, further, I also couldn’t come close to his succinct mastery of the English language detailing that passion. We never shared a conversation, personally or online, leading to detante with one another. He insulted me directly many times in the comments section of this website. These comments did sting, but I never held them against him. I knew he knew more about the subject than I did, so I let it all slide (though I could give an insult back to him that matched the one he lobbed to me–“pretentious gasbag” comes to mind here; and I should say, he was wrong many times).

Still, I admired him greatly. I tried to tell him this, but I don’t think he ever accepted my appreciation of his work. I guess he thought it was disingenuous (he was never one to respond favorably to sentiment, anyway). In the Wonders in the Dark yearly overviews–a project that took nearly two years to complete–I eventually got so fed up with his attempts to shape every year’s cinematic output according to what he thought was notable, I asked Sam if I could throw in some possibilities for each year, in order to make the project more complete and fair. I would add films and performances and artistic contributions to each year’s round up, and many of them were from films Allan had wholly disowned (and yet some of the elements that I added ended up winning the best of their respective year, so many of the people contributing to the site disagreed with him). Allan vehemently disliked my horning in on his well-determined territory, yet I thought this collective project of ours deserved to be completed with all possibilities considered. This did not result in a joyous collaboration. To him, I was a totally dismissible outlier with pedestrian tastes.

While loving his work, I continued to note his particular take on film history–one that had little time for movies that didn’t feel ambitious or important, much less films that seemed like craven cash-grabs–did not necessarily apply to all film lovers. Yes, Spielberg films could exist as both incredibly effusive–and insufferable–cinema AND as box-office moneymakers. I was not alone here–many of the WITD contributors (including Sam Juliano) had long-standing clashes with Allan. These battles almost lead to Sam and Allan having a bitter fall-out with one another. And yet many connected to Wonders in the Dark–some also similarly insulted–were able to disregard all of Allan’s fooferall, because we all loved how much he loved the movies. Hell, we loved them, too.

Allan Fish is a fascinating character. I’m sure (and hope) he’ll be talked about more in the future, by many who never got the chance to know him. Even with as much as I know, I’d like to learn more about his life. I consider him an astounding presence in the world of film criticism, and I’m looking forward to the coming printed compendium of his work. Yeah, we didn’t get along, but who cares? He was, on all levels, a remarkable craftsman.

And so, with this, my first entry into the first Allan Fish Online Film Festival, I thought I’d keep the clash between us haughtily alive with this 76 minute program highlighting ten classic short films, some of which Allan liked, I presume. Even so, in the WITD yearly rundown, Allan expressed that he felt shorts pretty much died after the mid-1950s after the studios had disbanded their production teams. He even posited that the Best Short Film category should have been jettisoned after 1960 or so. It was Joel Bocko and I that rallied against this (both of us feeling that the short film really came alive AFTER the studios had abandoned the form). And so, I thought, if an online film festival is to be launched, it needed to include short films. This is my attempt to highlight the work of filmmakers whose absolute genius rarely gets sung–and, let’s face it, every film fest needs some short film love in it. And so here are my choices for ten unbelievably influential entries in the realm of experimental short films–all of which are meant to wake the unwakeable Allan Fish up to these extraordinary visions. I feel, deeply, that he’d concur with my selections, even if he’d be reluctant to say as much.

CATALOG and PERMUTATIONS (John Whitney Sr., 1961/1968)

John Whitney Sr., chief among  the fathers of modern computer animation, built a one-of-a-kind filmmaking contraption in the late ’50s after messing around with parts from a World War II anti-aircraft plane’s gun director. After a bit of tweaking, the machine towered at twelve feet and could produce dazzling images, if operated correctly. According to Wikipedia, “Design templates were placed on three different layers of rotating tables and photographed by multiple-axis rotating cameras. Color was added during optical printing.” So his 1961 film Catalog is merely that: a stunning demo reel designed to test the limits of this massive device (and imagine the additional effort put into optically coloring the original black-and-white footage!!).

John Whitney Jr., now also a filmmaker (along with his two brothers), offers here a technical explanation of how his father’s machine worked:

I don’t know how many simultaneous motions can be happening at once. There must be at least five ways just to operate the shutter. The input shaft on the camera rotates at 180 rpm, which results in a photographing speed of 8 fps. That cycle time is constant, not variable, but we never shoot that fast. It takes about nine seconds to make one revolution. During this nine-second cycle the tables are spinning on their own axes while simultaneously revolving around another axis while moving horizontally across the range of the camera, which may itself be turning or zooming up and down. During this operation we can have the shutter open all the time, or just at the end for a second or two, or at the beginning, or for half of the time if we want to do slit-scanning.

Slit-scan is the special effect used by Douglas Trumbull to arrive at the famed Stargate sequence at the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Trumbull and Kubrick both were inspired greatly by the effects Whitney came up with in Catalog. In fact, as you watch the piece, you’ll be aware of yourself falling into the same sort of abstract trance the Stargate sequence produces for Kubrick. Like many of Whitney’s subsequent works (which you can locate on You Tube if you search for this film), it’s a magical, meditative movie, backed by Gyorgy Ligeti-like music–furthering the 2001 connection–and produces purely color-, musical- and geometry-based emotions (Catalog is a dry run for John Whitney Sr.’s 1968 film Permutations, which continues to explore the possibilities of this then-nascent form of cinema). Both movies are landmarks of animated and experimental cinema, but also of television (where would ’70s TV graphics be without it?), abstract art, and the merging of technology and human expression. Whitney was a artist of bold feelings and keen engineering savvy. Trivia note: Whitney also produced the spirograph-like drawings adorning Saul Bass’s credits sequence for Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo).

REMEMBER, VIEWERS: My recommendation: start both movies at the same time and watch them both on one screen (I’d open up another window so you can see them each at a larger size). The violin score on Catalog and the percussion track on Permutations work together absolutely perfectly–enough to make me think that both movies were designed to be seen simultaneously.

 

 

MULTIPLE SIDOSIS (Sid Laverents, 1970)

In 2000, the National Library of Congress, in their yearly picks of 25 American films to be preserved by their National Film Registry, included a rarely-seen, amateur 16mm movie by Sid Laverents as one of their chosen few. Completed in 1970, Multiple SIDosis splashes as a simple idea on paper, but on celluloid, it’s a whole other matter. Laverents plays himself, and as the film opens, he’s getting the Christmas gift he’s always wanted–a reel-to-reel tape recorder. He excitedly experiments with it, and halfway through, the film really gets underway (stick with it). Laverents made a living during the vaudeville era as a one-man band and here, at ages 58-62 (this 9-minute film took four years to complete), he revisits that particular talent through cinema. The movie follows Laverents as he performs Felix Arndt’s jaunty ditty “Nola” for the camera lens.

At age 100, Laverents died on May 6th, 2009. Though he never made a living as a filmmaker, he joins Abraham Zapruder as one of the few hobbyist moviemakers whose work are among the 700 American films in the National Film Registry. Multiple SIDosis is a marvel of technical ingenuity that might seem radically quaint in today’s digital age (a film like this would be easy to do now, with ProTools and Final Cut). But in the ’60s and ’70s, it took a keen sense of timing to pull off what Laverents does here. And it required an exacting artistry (especially if you know what it once took to achieve multiple exposures–Laverents had to have cut a thousand mattes to hit this apex). To quote Bruce Weber’s exacting New York Times obituary: “Using repeated exposures of the same piece of film, Mr. Laverents kept adding different shots of himself playing the different musical lines. The skill, patience and fastidiousness of the filmmaking is extraordinary. Not only did Mr. Laverents perform all the individual parts beautifully, but because he was re-exposing the same piece of film again and again to layer on the next part, if he made a mistake on the eighth run-through, say, he had to begin again.” This veritable orgy of color-laden, split-screen mania–made outstandingly funny by the slight nature of the concept itself–required a major amount of grunt-work from the impassioned Laverents (and his one-time wife, Adelaide, who gave him the tape recorder and often operated the 16mm camera), and it all pays off by making us feel wonderfully, unexpectedly giddy. Multiple SIDosis is a lovely, lovable film–a masterpiece, really.

 

MOTHLIGHT (Stan Brakhage, 1963)

Watching the works of Stan Brakhage is like looking at a field of daisies: why ask why? The best of his films are pure magic, and Mothlight among his most ethereal efforts. It was made in 1963 during a period where the filmmaker was running low on film stock. So instead of taking a hiatus, Brakhage took long strips of 16mm splicing tape and embedded between them the wings of moths and pieces of grass he’d accumulated in the yard of his New England home. This was the first Brakhage film I KNEW I had to see, and I was not disappointed; it’s a perfect intro to his more challenging works. As with all superb experimental films, no words can describe its glorious, quiet beauty.

 

BEGONE DULL CARE and NEIGHBOURS (Norman McLaren, 1949/1952)

“I was inspired to make Neighbours by a stay of almost a year in the People’s Republic of China. Although I only saw the beginnings of Mao’s revolution, my faith in human nature was reinvigorated by it. Then I came back to Quebec and the Korean War began. (…) I decided to make a really strong film about anti-militarism and against war.” –Norman McLaren

The Scottish-born McLaren had been making films for almost twenty years when he hit upon Neighbours, the groundbreaking animated war parable which he produced for the estimable National Film Board of Canada in 1952. He began his film career in the 1930s, sans camera, by painting directly on film stock (making him a precursor to the now-more famous experimental-filmmaker extraordinaire Stan Brakhage). Begone Dull Care, made with Evylyn Lampart, utilizes a snappy jazz soundtrack from the Oscar Peterson Trio and, with it, is a vibrant jolt. No words can adequately describe it.

McLaren made deeper inroads into internationally-renowned territory with Neighbours, which won him, incredibly, the Oscar in 1952 for Best Documentary Short Subject. This, to me, is an amazingly wonderful outrage that could not occur today. Neighbours is for sure an animated piece (via pixillation) and very much NOT a documentary–at least, in a traditional sense (it’s also the only non-Disney short-subject ever to get TWO nominations–it was also cited for Best One-Reel Short Subject that same year, but lost to the now-forgotten Light in the Window: The Art of Vermeer).

Along with David Cronenberg, McLaren is Canada’s most influential filmmaker; as proof, there’s a whole wing of the National Film Board of Canada named for him. McLaren served as artist and public servant for the NFBC from 1941 to 1983. He is, thus, the one filmmaker most notable for bringing the Canadian filmmaking voice into full flower. And if you’ve ever taken a look at any NFBC animated or live-action shorts (like The Cat Came Back, Special Delivery, or scads of other well-loved Canadian shorts), you begin to realize how much McLaren did to steer the entire idea of what constitutes a lively short towards new directions. Pre-McLaren, we had Disney and Warner Brothers, MGM and maybe UPA providing us with animated pieces; after the Canadians came in, the revolution was won, the genre was opened up for the world; the indies have controlled the shorts market ever since (and I think their market value is going way up these days).

After Neighbours, McLaren garnered acclaim for 1957’s A Chairy Tale (once spoofed brilliantly on SCTV‘s Canadian episode) and for Pas De Deux for which he won a BAFTA Award and the Palmes D’Or at Cannes in 1968. Also, 1984’s Narcissus made a big splash at the festivals that year. But it was Neighbours that I and probably millions of others saw all throughout the early ’80s as “filler” in between movies on HBO (HBO really showcased a lot of cool shorts in between movies in the late 70s/early 80s–things like Jim Henson’s Timepiece, Sally Cruickshank’s Quasi at the Quackadero, Larry Hankin’s Solly’s Diner, S.S. Wilson’s Recorded Live, and tons of neat early music videos). Even though I marveled at how the film won an Oscar as a documentary, I DO have to say this: this is a perfect representation of how wars begin and escalate, so as to it winning the documentary award–hell, why not? By the way, this is a surprisingly violent film; the scenes where the (SPOILER) two men, fighting over this dancing flower on this tiny plot of land, eventually kill each others wives and children were initially excised from US prints of the movie; here they’ve been restored (although via a print of lesser quality). Note: during the battle scenes, the soundtrack was enhanced by McLaren’s scratchings on the edge of the celluloid, read by the projector as static rumbles; thus, even the SOUNDTRACK becomes animation. An unparalleled film from a real visionary.

 

POWERS OF TEN (Charles and Ray Eames, 1977)

Made in 1977, Powers of Ten stringently follows the letter of numerical law, and graphically maps our outer and inner worlds based on a strict measure of time and distance. It takes us from an idyllic picnic to the outer reaches of space, and then back again to a visit with the tiniest of the world’s building blocks. It is narrated by Philip Morrison, one-time Professor Emeritus at MIT and cohort of J. Robert Oppenheimer, developer of the nuclear bomb (after surveying the damage of Hiroshima, Morrison became a staunch supporter of nuclear nonproliferation). To boot, Powers of Ten is completely a product of Charles and Ray Eames’ visionary school of design (it looks like digital filmmaking before the form existed). This film has been spoofed and paid tribute to for decades: it’s been needled by The Simpsons and aped by scads of filmmakers, including Robert Zemeckis, who had his crack FX and sound teams concoct the amazing opening zoom-out for 1997’s Contact in an extended tribute to the Eames’ film.

Powers of Ten is the sort of staggeringly basic-knowledge movie that has begged to be crafted ever since the medium of film was invented. It’s astounding that it took the quixotic, joyous Eames couple to do it, despite their obvious passion for practical designs benefiting the everyman (they’re still more well known for creating a line of now much-treasured mid-century furniture). Then again, now that I consider it, I suppose Powers of Ten was very much a part of this same shared devotion. It’s scored by Elmer Bernstein, the late musical master who provided backing for over 200 movies and TV shows, including To Kill A Mockingbird, The Man With The Golden Arm, The Age of Innocence, Thoroughly Modern Millie (for which he won his only Oscar, in 1967), Hud, Animal House, Meatballs, Trading Places, The Grifters, and Far From Heaven.

 

PRECIOUS IMAGES (Chuck Workman, 1986)

While on this shorts kick, I thought, what better film to include on an Allan Fish-commanded, movie-themed website than Precious Images. Originally created by Chuck Workman for the Directors Guild of America in 1986, this awe-inspiring montage of the greatest moments in cinema history is downright riveting, especially for film junkies who will inevitably try and name all the movies sampled here. Give it up, guys–it can’t be done. Over 8 minutes, we see flashes of over 500 movies. If you can name ’em all as they come up, you’d be in Guinness as the world’s fastest talker, among other things. Since winning his Oscar for this film, Workman has gone on to many gigs with the Academy Awards show as their resident montage-builder (that’s why his cutting style seems so familiar–we’ve all seen his work on the Oscars before). He’s also directed The Source, the fine documentary about the Beat Generation, as well as the more recent What is Cinema? and Magician: The Astonishing Life and Work of Orson Welles. Anyway, check out his dazzling display of editorial chops! I can only wonder at what Allan Fish thought of this film; I’m sure he could have enriched it further, had he had a hand in it.

 

FRANK FILM (Frank Mouris, 1973)

Frank Mouris’s Academy Award-winning animated biography Frank Film (made in close collusion with his wife Caroline) remains, nearly thirty years ofter first seeing it, one of my favorite bits of animation ever, and certainly in the running for my favorite short of all time (I saw it first on HBO in the early 1980s, when they were showing classic weird animation between features). This is one of the best damn things I’ve ever witnessed, EVER! Seriously, think of all the years Mouris had to work on this…and how his dream of success, detailed within, ultimately came true (at least up to the point the film was made). It’s too bad Mouris’ output subsequent to this 1973 film has been almost nonexistent. I’d really like to know what the man has been up to over the past few years. I love that the 1973 piece is named Frank Film, because Mouris is being so “frank” about his past. I ravish the swirling graphic imagery, of course, and the sense of breakneck movement. The two dueling soundtracks, Mouris’ deadpan narration style, the dictionary of f-words, the beautiful colors, the universality of the film’s themes–the brain overstimulation this movie sparks is radically orgasmic to me. I’m gonna watch it again!!!

 

VERY NICE VERY NICE (Arthur Lipsett, 1961)

“People who have made no attempt to educate themselves live in a kind of dissolving phantasmagoria of a world–that is, they completely forget what happened last Tuesday. A politician can promise them anything and they will not remember what he has promised.”

Canadian artist Arthur Lipsett was a collector of sound bites who became a filmmaker after friends encouraged him to put images to his sound collages. The result was Very Nice Very Nice, a stunning tour through the world of the 1960s that, when seen now, seems radically prescient. Seeing it now, with its dazzling display of newspapery images, it seems impossible that he had no acumen as a filmmaker; in fact, when Stanley Kubrick first saw Very Nice Very Nice, he immediately approached the filmmaker to construct the trailer for his new film Dr. Strangelove (Lipsett turned down the offer, and Kubrick instead got film artist Pablo Ferro to complete the assignment, which he did as an impressive Lipsett imitation). This remains among the most riveting uses of sound and images ever in film history. It makes you sick with its jumbling of photographic images, all meant to display a world out of control (I’m sure its reverence to striking images appealed to the Look Magazine photographer that Kubrick once was). Its chaos is singular in effect, setting into concrete the late 20th Century as the beginning of an apocalyptic future in which connection between humans has become almost impossible to employ. Lipsett committed suicide two weeks before his 50th birthday, after completing a decade’s worth of documentary work. But Very Nice Very Nice–nominated for the 1961 Live Action Short Film Oscar—is forever a unique, superbly affecting work, having influenced filmmakers like Alan Pakula and George Lucas, the latter of which still says Lipsett made the kinds of movies he wished he could make–“a very off the wall, abstract kind of film.”

RIP Allan Fish, a true artist of immutable passions.