"What Went Wrong?":
The American Avant-Garde
Cinema of the 1960s

WALTER METZ

Authorship in the Study of the 1960s
American Avant-Garde Cinema

Kenneth Anger, the avant-garde artist, marks the sign of his authorship at the beginning of each of his films with the brief phrase, "a film by Anger." His meaningful pun serves this chapter's argument and permits us to consider the academic traditions for studying the 1960s avant-garde as well as suggesting necessary correctives to this tradition. For "a film by Anger" indicates that an authorial subject named Anger is the motive force behind the film, but, more significantly, it also indicates a subjective state, that of emotional anger, from which the film's content and stylistic practices emanate.

For example, consider his film SCORPIO RISING (1964), one of the most familiar of the American avant-garde films of the 1960s.¹ It is constructed out of thirteen narrative segments, each presenting imagery that is, to varying degrees, juxtaposed against mainstream American popular songs, such as "Blue Velvet" and "Wipeout." On the one hand, Anger deliberately positions his own authorial presence within the film by tilting the camera down the back of a biker's jacket to reveal "Kenneth Anger" printed in sequins. On the other hand, the film's major project is to make ironic the fetishization of the biker culture that it is purportedly celebrating. For example, in the imagery that accompanies the film's second musical number, "Wind Up Doll," a little kid in a biker outfit winds up a toy motorcycle. At this precise moment, the song informs us about the behavior of its passive female protagonist: "Wind me up and I'll come straight to you." The film's radical juxtaposition of image and sound thus produces an angry critique of a patriarchal order in which a violent masculinity is celebrated in subaltern biker as well as in mainstream, popular culture.²

Representative John Dent (D-Penn.) chaired congressional
investigations into Hollywood's "runaway" production.

As evidenced by Anger's approach in SCORPIO RISING, American avant-garde cinema of the 1960s is defined by its aggressive style. While these non-classical stylistic practices of the avant-garde cinema are well known, a brief explication of their use will prove worthwhile to set up many of the analyses of films that follow. To begin, consider the fourminute- long FILM IN WHICH THERE APPEARS EDGE LETTERING, SPROCKET HOLES, DIRT PARTICLES, ETC. (1966, George Landow) as a case study. The film consists of an image of a woman dressed in a red shirt reproduced in three film stills running up the left and right sides of the picture. In between appear the sprocket holes of the filmstrip, with label lettering interspersed between the sprocket holes. This image of the woman in the red shirt does not change noticeably throughout the four minutes of the film, although as the viewer watches, it appears it must be changing. This is part of the playfulness inherent in nearly all avant-garde films. Because the viewer is so used to reading visual patterns in a movie, when confronted with a pattern-less film- or, more precisely, with a film in which the only representation is one pattern that does not change-a natural response is to begin to psychologically project change into the reading of the stable image.

In fact, the constantly changing lettering is the only movement in the film, but it proceeds so quickly that it is impossible to begin seeking patterns in this portion of the image and the dirt particles that were caught on the filmstrip as it was being filmed. However, we cannot tell those filmed dirt particles from the ones that are appearing because of the particular projection of Landow's film as the viewer watches it. At their core, almost all of the avant-garde films of the 1960s use these playful, aggressive aesthetic strategies to force their viewers to think about what it is we mean by cinema itself. Of course, this playful avant-garde did not emerge out of a cultural vacuum, but instead originated in response to specific developments in film history. One of the most important influences on avant-garde American cinema of the 1960s was similar experimentation in Europe that was becoming more noticeable in the United States. The economic effects of the 1948 Paramount consent decree that ended ownership of movie theaters by the major Hollywood studios resulted by the end of the 1950s in increasing importation of European films, particularly the films of the French New Wave. Their influence can clearly be seen in HALLELUJAH THE HILLS (1963, Adolfas Mekas), the pre-eminent example of what Jonas Mekas labeled the "New American Cinema." The film, which concerns two soldiers, Jack and Leo, who are in love with the same woman, Vera, resonates with strategies common to the French New Wave of the late 1950s and early 1960s. For example, there is a direct reference to Jean-Luc Godard's BREATHLESS (1959); as Jack and Leo run down the street, having gotten drunk in response to their troubles with Vera, a superimposed title reads, "Breathless." The structure of the film itself-two men after the same woman-echoes Francois Truffault's JULES ET JIM (1962).³ Finally, the film has an aggressive narrative structure where the temporal relationships between the images we are seeing and the story the film is relating are muddled beyond coherence, which constitutes an analytical description that is as much apropos of the puzzling French feature LAST YEAR AT MARIENBAD (1960, Alain Resnais) as it is of HALLELUJAH THE HILLS.

Discussion of these three films opens up a traditional approach to avant-garde cinema of the 1960s. Their aggressive aesthetic textual practices allow direct attribution to authorial intention. By focusing on representational strategies relating to intertextual and identity politics, rather than merely on the artistic geniuses (i.e., the individualistic filmmaker as "Romantic artist") and the historical traditions behind them, a deeper understanding of the avant-garde cinema in the 1960s is revealed. This process, in turn, opens new insights into the canonical experimental films of that decade while at the same time drawing our attention to films previously ignored or marginalized. Janet Staiger's essay, "Finding Community in the Early 1960s: Underground Cinema and Sexual Politics" (1999), suggests that we approach the 1960s American avant-garde cinema not from the standpoint of production, but instead from that of reception. Staiger emphasizes that both the making of, and the watching of, avant-garde movies in the 1960s served a community- building social function: "It is this same potential of finding others like oneself not only for identity but for community building that I believe the space of the underground cinema of the early 1960s provided".⁴ Hence, the notion that the director of the avantgarde film of the 1960s is the principal point through which to understand experimental movies gives way to an array of social and cultural frameworks for seeing canonical films anew, as well as for appreciating lesser known avant-garde films.

While film cultures of other nations had engaged the notion in earlier periods and in different ways, it was with the avant-garde of the 1960s that the idea of film's "radical potential" was first advanced in the United States. This expression emphasized the potential for using the cinema apparatus in noncommercial, yet highly visible ways "as a means of political representation of persons, attitudes, and events traditionally excluded from commercial channels (of expression and communication)."⁵ In a widely cited article published in Film Quarterly in 1968, Ernest Callenhach neatly summarized this view of the avant-garde by clarifying the connection of the "amateurism" of so many of the aesthetic practices of experimental filmmakers to the idea of its inherent value as social criticism and its importance as a form of resistance to "political domination."⁶ Geography is the simplest way to initially comprehend the community-forming functions of the 1960s American avant-garde cinema. There were two flourishing avantgarde film communities, one in New York City, and the other in the San Francisco Bay area. The New York community is usually associated with the organizational work of Jonas Mekas, who was instrumental in merging disparate filmmakers into a cohesive film culture complete with a film journal, aptly titled Film Culture. With the foundation of the Film-Makers' Cooperative in the late 1950s, a reasonably democratic institution through which filmmakers could distribute their films was established.⁷

Andy Warhol with workers at the Factory in 1967.

The notion of the New York City avant-garde community was further popularized and commodified by Andy Warhol, whose "Factory" became an industrial structure unto itself in American cinema of the 1960s.⁸ Warhol began experimenting with cinema by doing minimalist films featuring one or no characters, such as SLEEP (1963) and EMPIRE (1964), which consist, respectively, of uninterrupted views of a sleeping male and the Empire State Building. By mid-decade the was incorporating larger numbers of his self-created celebrities-Paul America, Joe Dallesandro, Gerard Malanga, Ondine, Edie Sedgwick, Ingrid Superstar, and Viva-into his films such as VINYL (1965) and THE LIFE OF JUANITA CASTRO (1965). The culmination of this technique of filming a large cast using one camera position and a limited number of shots occurred with THE CHELSEA GIRLS (1966), a film that lasts 195 minutes and contains some eight plot lines. By the end of the decade, Warhol was attempting to parody Hollywood studio filmmaking and its genres, as in the gay-themed "western," LONESOME COWBOYS (1967). Throughout the mid to late 1960s, Warhol's films relied on their communitarian parody of the star system to achieve their assault on Hollywood, by focusing on such clearly dubious "stars" such as Viva and Joe Dallesandro.⁹

New York City and San Francisco had arisen in the late 1950s as the twin meccas of the "Beat Generation." The central literary figures of this movement, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and William S. Burroughs, traveled widely and each one, at different times, expatriated himself from the United States. The social locus and the identity of Beats, however, remained solidly in these two cities-centered around the City Lights Bookshop and the coffee houses of North Beach in San Francisco (with Berkeley as a distant precinct) and in the Greenwich Village clubs and coffeehouses of New York City (with a tiny Beat outpost surviving near Columbia University, where the three great Beat writers had first met)."¹⁰ Many of the earliest avant-garde films of the 1960s were made as conscious extensions of the Beat movement in attempts to express on celluloid its perspectives. In both New York City and San Francisco the Beat scene coexisted and intermingled easily with the gay and lesbian communities, the jazz and alternative theatre culture, the nascent rumblings of political activism, and with the emerging avant-garde cinema movement.

For this alternative subculture in New York City, taken as a whole, 1964 was a pivotal year. In preparation for the onslaught of tourists expected in the city for the opening of the World's Fair, authorities moved to polish Gotham's image by closing down clubs, coffeehouses, and porn theaters frequented by gays and lesbians, Beats, pot-heads, and other "subterraneans." Among these raids, one resulted in the arrest of Jonas Mekas of the Film-Makers' Cooperative for showing Jack Smith's FLAMING CREATURES (1963). His arrest and the seizure of this film, according to historian Paul Arthur, "placed avantgarde film on the cultural map, stimulating support from quarters previously oblivious or even hostile to the movement."¹¹

Later in that same year, the appearance of the "Free Speech Movement" at the University of California, Berkeley, hearkened the impending integration of several alternative movements in the Bay Area. By the time that the "Summer of Love" brought together an international array of nonconformists in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco in 1967, it was clear that various alternative perspectives, from gay liberation to avant-garde cinema, were perceived to be merging into a singular "counterculture" at the same time that the Beat scene was giving way to the Hippie Movement.¹²

By the mid 1960s, a similar community of avant-garde filmmakers began coalescing in the San Francisco Bay area around Bruce Baillie, whose film poems complexly celebrated the American landscape, but offered a different vision of the roles and responsibilities of an avant-garde cinema than what was being defined in New York. For example, CASTRO STREET (1966) simultaneously represents the gritty industrial machinery that allows a city to function while abstracting it into a poetic visual celebration. For the purposes of community-building, however, the mechanisms of organization in San Francisco were quite similar to those in New York City. On August 14, 1966, under the stewardship of its founder Bruce Baille, Canyon Cinema became an institutional venture that allowed for the screening and rental of films, giving people the opportunity to see the work of this group of West Coast avant-garde filmmakers.¹³

THE GREAT EXCEPTION: STAN BRAKHAGE

The great exception to this notion of 'a geographic locus of community in the avant-garde cinema of the 1960s is Stan Brakhage, who began working in New York City, but fled to Colorado to make intensely individual works. Interrogating the boundaries between the various modes of cinematic experience, Brakhage's films use the aggressive stylistic practices of the avant-garde to represent the material of the home movie, including the filmmaker's own household and family members. In CAT'S CRADLE (1959), for example, shots of the naked bodies of a man and a woman are edited in such a way that very little narrative sense can be immediately gleaned from them. As the film wears on, however, it becomes clear that the viewer is witnessing some form of domestic conflict and the intimacy that follows (or perhaps precedes) it.

Brakhage's work in the 1960s continued this interrogation of the relationship between the film image and its spectator. "Implicit in all of Brakhage's work as a filmmaker," the scholar Wheeler Winston Dixon argued, "is an empirical connection with the spectator-subject as the paradigmatic force within the film being screened, rather than the consumerist recognition of perceptual relativity which serves as the foundation of dominant consumerist moving image constructs."¹⁴ To encourage such a complex spectatorial response to his images, Brakhage developed an aesthetic means of layering his images via the superimposition of one shot on top of the other. He used this technique in THE DEAD (1960s) to simultaneously present moribund shots of granite tombs and headstones at a cemetery and vibrant shots of people walking and talking. With DOG STAR MAN (1964) Brakhage put the superimposition technique to its most startling effect. In relating what Dixon describes as "his epic creation of the universe,"¹⁵ Brakhage layers as many as four images at a time on top of one another.

While usually considered an apolitical filmmaker more interested in the mechanisms of cinema than in using cinema to make didactic political interventions, even Brakhage by the late 1960s was employing his unique cinematic techniques in the service of social critique. His LOVEMAKING (1968), while referring back to previous explorations of human relationships and sexuality like WEDLOCK HOUSE: AN INTERCOURSE (1959), also grappled with the social politics of sexuality. Brakhage described the film as "an American Kama Sutra and loves answer to filmic pornography."¹⁶ However, the most precise example of Brakhage's political turn is his two-part collage film, 23RD PSALM BRANCH (1967), which juxtaposes its Biblical title against superimposed images of the horrific Vietnam War. Brakhage's film follows in the tradition of Bruce Conner, the collage filmmaker famous for his 1958 masterpiece, A MOVIE.

Stan Brakhage at work with a standard issue camera for the avant-garde.

Brakhage's retreat to Colorado makes him an unlikely candidate to be emblematic of the communitarian nature of American avant-garde cinema in the 1960s. He is, in fact, the only experimental filmmaker from that era who continued to exert a visible public influence on the concept of the avant-garde film through the remainder of the twentieth century. Throughout the 1970s, for example, Brakhage flew hack and forth between Colorado and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he gave courses in avantgarde cinema history. These well-attended lectures-in halls packed with as many as 500 students-consisted mainly of Brakhage detailing his personal reminiscences of the important pratitioners of American avant-grade cinema, including filmmakers whose influence he enthusiastically acknowledged, such as Maya Deren and Marie Menken. Brakhage's lectures were subsequently published in his book, Film at Wits End (1989.

Ironically, during a long period in which the widespread avant-garde experimentation of the 1960s in film had been relegated to academia, Brakhage, arguably the most peripheral member of the New York and Bay area avant-garde film communities of that decade, became one of the avant-garde's most powerful chroniclers. He also maintained his viability as a creative and influential filmmaker. Whereas the minimalist films of Andy Warhol and the structural films of Michael Snow by the twentieth century's end were seen as anachronistic oddities, employing aesthetic strategies that were tried and failed, Brakhage settled into the one place left for avant-garde film makers. He continued to teach and make avant-garde films at the University of Colorado at Boulder through the end of the century.

Michael Snow, structuralist filmmaker.

Intertextuality and the 1960s Avant-Garde

While it is easy to fall into the fetishization of the genius auteurs of the 1960s American avant-garde-such as Mekas, Baillie, and Brakhage-it is most important to understand the extent to which the avant-garde cinema engaged the larger political debates of 1960s culture, beginning with the two most obvious of issues, sexuality and race. Well established in the analysis of 1960s avant-garde cinema are the many intertextual references between those works and mainstream feature films. The dialectical connections have been richly explored by David James in his seminal study, Allegories of Cinema (1989).¹⁷ However, it must be appreciated more emphatically that the importance of the 1960s avant-garde cinema lies in the extent to which it contributed directly to the cultural matrix of American life. Stan Brakhage's BLUE MOSES, for example, is not just the "Romantic author" exploring in synchronized sound production technique, but becomes far more meaningful in the broadest cultural sense because of its reworking of Plato's "Allegory of the Cave" from The Republic.

Rather than chronicle the 1960s achievements of a few major filmmakers, this chapter seeks an intertextual understanding. What light do various works cast on each other, on the various avant-garde communities, and on 1960s society as a whole? This intertextual method will be used to study films that exhibit aesthetic practices resolutely associated with the avant-garde: BLUE MOSES (1962, Stan Brakhage), as a meta-textual mediation on the nature of representation, and PULL MY DAISY (1959, Robert Frank and Alfred Leslie), and HALLELUJAH THE HILLS (1963, Adolfas Mekas) as a cinematic attempt at Beat poetry. The intertextual method will also reveal the linkages between the experimental and the Hollywood genre film: HOLD ME WHILE I'M NAKED (1966, George Kuchar) and LONESOME COWBOYS (1967, Andy Warhol) will be investigated as a parody of a classic melodrama. These films may represent the work of prominent American avant-garde auteurs, but their rich references to culture and to other texts yield insights that a strict auteurist approach would leave obscured.

BLUE MOSES BLUE MOSES begins with its credits obscurely and mysteriously written onto rocks in a wooded area. Suddenly, there is a cut to a cave with a shack in front of it. This is the central intertextual image in the film, as it summons to mind the most famous cave in the Western intellectual and artistic tradition, that described by Plato in Book VII of The Republic. BLUE MOSES will become, as framed by this image, a meditation on the nature of cinematic representation. The allegory of the cave has profound implications for the study of representation in cinema. In Plato's allegory, a number of helpless prisoners are chained inside a cave. A fire burning behind them is used by their captors to illuminate shadows on the wall in front of the prisoners. One day, one of the prisoners escapes and discovers, much to his amazement, that the two-dimensional shadows he has been looking at for so long are in fact merely projections of a real, threedimensional world. He returns to his fellow prisoners to inform them of the news, to which they respond with angry violence. Essentially, the desire of these prisoners to believe in the two-dimensional world over the real goes a long way to explaining our intense engagement with the two-dimensional representations offered by the cinema, a phenomenon that is intricately explored in BLUE MOSES.

At the beginning of BLUE MOSES, a man dressed as a carnival barker is presented in front of a cave in a series of jump cuts . As if advertising a sideshow, he screams out, "ladies and gentlemen...." Then, back at the woods where the credits were introduced, this narrator begins telling us about some tracks on the ground that he finds perplexing. In a voice that conspicuously imitates Orson Welles, the narrator informs us that, "I'm here to find out about the tracks." At this point, the film appears to begin again. In a wooded area the viewer again sees a rock with the title of the film painted on it. Next, the narrator re-appears in a manner suggesting Moses from the Bible. He makes a grandiose, melodramatic gesture with his staff, excitedly presenting us with "an eclipse, manufactured but not yet patented, for your pleasure." In an aesthetic gesture that illustrates the avant-garde cinema's play with the basic materials of cinema, an inserted section of black leader (not a typical Hollywood special effect) simulates the eclipse about which Moses speaks.

Suddenly, and for no apparent reason, Moses begins speaking in a badly performed, stereotypical Southern accent. He invites us to "Let's play house." However, at this moment, he steps out of character and asks us, "Do you see what I meant by all that? It was ridiculous." He continues by telling us that the film is really about us, the viewers, and not about all that nonsense that has already occurred. In the film's payoff to the reference to the allegory of the cave, the narrator tells the viewer that there is a filmmaker behind everything. At this moment, he requests that we "Don't turn around. It's useless." Thus, the film's narrator, himself representing a profoundly important Biblical character, tells us not to repeat the liberating gesture of the escaped prisoner from Plato's story. However, the film's self-conscious reference almost impels us to turn around to see the projector that is itself converting a strip of celluloid into a two-dimensional projection of a twice-removed natural world that was filmed long ago.

The film then collapses the distinctions between the filmmaker and the narrator by drawing attention to the conventions of the medium of cinema itself. The film we are watching is suddenly projected onto the narrator's bare back, so that he becomes not only a fictional presence in the film, but also part of the mechanism of the delivery of cinema itself. The film concludes with an emphasis on this metadiegetic reflection over and above any narrative sense-making function. The narrator returns to the wooded area and makes reference to "the woman... his wife, so to speak." He returns to the mysterious tracks, which turn out to have been a narrative red herring all along. Contributing no more narrative understanding, he turns away in disgust, grumbling, "those damn tracks." We cut back to the carnival barker at the cave, who takes a bow to end the film.

BLUE MOSES thus achieves an investigation into the mechanism of cinema through a complex pairing of the Bible and Plato's Republic, not for narrative, but instead for metacinematic purposes. This illuminates, of course, one of the commonly studied features of experimental cinema: the ability of the form to reflect upon the basic components of the medium itself. However, the intertextual method reveals this self-reflexivity as having roots in the history of ideas, dating all the way back to the birth of Western culture itself.

PULL MY DAISY and HALLELUJAH THE HILLS Intertextual references illuminate another truism of the 1960s American avant-garde cinema-its birth in the literary traditious of Beat poetry-in PULL MY DAISY (1959). Starring Allen Ginsberg and featuring the voice-over narration of Jack Kerouac, it is an avant-garde adaptation of Kerouac's book The Beat Generation. The film tells the story of a family living on the Lower East Side of Manhattan.¹⁸

Focusing on masculinity through the character Milo, PULL MY DAISY ends with an affirmation of the Beats belief that a feminized, domestic culture is stifling. Milo's wife yells at him, "All these Beatniks in the house," then begins to cry. Simultaneously, Beat characters holler up the staircase to Milo, who puts on his coat and leaves his wife. The film cuts to an image of an empty rocking chair, concretizing the stifling, traditional nature of the domesticity that Milo just barely escaped. Milo assures his Beat friends, "She'll get over it." Engaging in a Beat mantra, Milo ends the film, "Let's go. Go. Go. Go."

The film uses its engagement with Beat poetry to advance a very traditional male rejection of the stifling nature of feminine, domestic culture. The critique of traditional marriage in PULL MY DAISY is from the point of view of the male victim, but is couched in a critique of organized religion that is seen to he the motor force behind the ensnaring of the male within this conventional institution. Certainly, this is not the only way the American avant-garde cinema of the 1960s represented the domestic space of patriarchal marriage-witness the feminist films of Marie Menken and Joyce Wieland.¹⁹ In this instance, however, through the intertext of Beat poetry, the domestic is seen as stifling a fundamental masculinity that is essential to creativity and which is held to be capable of finding its true expression only in the company of other men.

PULL MY DAISY, made on the eve of the 1960s, was followed by a more thoroughly misogynist production, HALLELUJAH THE HILLS (1963), which employs an overt plot structure emphasizing traditional femininity's threat to male independence. Making explicit reference to the silent melodramas of D.W. Griffith, including an homage to the ice flow scene of WAY DOWN EAST (1920), the film shows how traditional patriarchal culture forestalls the exploration of an Emersonian appreciation of liberating nature. Images of Jack and Leo frolicking in a snow-bound wilderness are intercut with scenes of them competing for the love of Vera in her suburban house. After many years of conventional rituals, Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners and the like, Jack and Leo are finally freed when Vera marries another man. Liberated from such rituals, Jack and Leo run out of their log cabin and scream "hallelujah" while prancing through the snow, nearly naked. As a reward, Jack and Leo encounter a forest full of women. In an orgy of libidinal release, they chase the women around the forest. Failing to catch any of them, they return to their jeep and drive away, shouting good-bye to the snowy woods, and to female companionship altogether. As perhaps a final reminder of what they have escaped, the film concludes with there driving past two escaped convicts, one of whom is played by Beat artist Taylor Mead, whose literal prison shackles resonate with the figurative gendered ones just shed by the two male protagonists.

HOLD ME WHILE I'M NAKED The American avant-garde cinema of the 1960s also engaged complexly with the representational traditions of mainstream Hollywood. The avant-garde film that most clearly assaults traditional Hollywood genres, HOLD ME WHILE I'M NAKED (1966, George Kuchar), deconstructs the melodrama. It begins with an image shot through a chain-link fence of a well-dressed woman running through a dilapidated city lot. A man's voice-over tells her to keep running, that this is a great part to be playing. Excessively suspenseful music accompanies the image of her running. The film cuts to a man in a parka filming the scene through a cheap 8mm camera. He signals O.K. and shakes gleefully as the scene comes to an end. Thus, HOLD ME WHILE I'M NAKED begins by self-reflexively interrogating the making of a film, but the film being made is not another avant-garde film; instead it is a low-budget exploitation film. The low-budget sensibility of the avant-garde cinema is applied to the making of an exploitation film, both of which offer conspicuously different production standards than the Hollywood norms.

The credit sequence of HOLD ME WHILE I'M NAKED parodies Hollywood high-gloss filmmaking. The sequence is filmed with flares, giving the image an excessively glossy sheen as if to emphasize the star quality that Hollywood would give the film if it were not a low-budget avant-garde production. In this ridiculous and shlocky parody, however, cardboard cutout letters float across the screen spelling the actors' names. In another imitation of Hollywood glamour, a title indicates, "Miss Kerness' clothes by Hope Morris," a gesture that does little to impress the viewer, given that Hope Morris has just been revealed to us as one of the actresses in the film.

After a pause in the soundtrack, piano music returns as the director films a scene in which an actor and an actress expand from lengthy kissing into sex, as the director inexplicably films the scene through a stained-glass window. The director has the actors repeat the scene, this time with the actress taking off her top because, according to the director, "the mysticism of the stained-glass window and the profanity of the brassiere do not go well together." In this way, the film interrogates the lure of the cinema, as the actors will suffer whatever humiliations are necessary just to be in a movie, even a painfully bad one and nothing like the Hollywood product that seduces people to want to be in pictures in the first place.

The director tells the actors the scene was terrific. His outline of the scenes they will shoot tomorrow again emphasizes the exploitative nature of the film, as one of the scenes will involve a fallout shelter where the female character suffers radiation damage to her thigh. When the director leaves, the couple continue their lovemaking, indicating a further level of irony: the two actors are not seduced by the lure of Hollywood after all, but instead are simply aroused.

Later, an actress in the film leaves the production, telling the director, "I'm sick and tired of being naked in almost every scene." The director, Phillip, responds by interacting with a blow-up plastic doll of a woman. Then, Phillip phones the actress, begging her to finish the film. After she refuses, Phillip calls one of his friends, who has just met a woman with dark glasses and smoking a cigarette-a direct imitation of the classic Hollywood femme fatale. While talking with Phillip on the phone, the actor begins making out with the femme fatale and they move on to the shower. Phillip tries to call them again, desperate to get them to act in his movie. Phillip takes a shower himself, and the film intercuts the lovers in the shower and Phillip in his shower alone. Phillip bangs his head into the shower wall repeatedly, at first indicating his frustration over his woes in making this film. However, there is a sudden knock at the bathroom door, as Phillip's mother tells him to get out of the shower because he leas been in there for over an hour. Thus, the film indicates that all of the preceding scenes have merely been Phillips fantasy of being a film director.

The film ends with an explosion of hitter irony. Excessively melodramatic music plays on the soundtrack as we see Phillip sitting at the kitchen table in his robe. His mother places before him a plate of disgusting black goo that is supposed to pass for food. Phillip looks directly into the camera and says with an exceptionally funny, droll irony, "There's a lot of things in life worth livin' for, isn't there? In this way, HOLD ME WHILE I'M NAKED questions the allure of Hollywood cinema-telling glamorous stories about beautiful people, and then violently juxtaposing that illusion with the reality of an awkward kid who has no more chance of being a Hollywood director than he does of having sex with a beautiful woman. As avant-garde art, the film constructs a violent juxtaposition between the grim realities of everyday suburban life and the image of filmmaking as a glamorous profession.

LONESOME COWBOYS Hollywood genre conventions are also parodied and reworked in LONESOME COWBOYS (1967, Andy Warhol), a revisionist western. The film begins with an extended sex scene between neophyte cowboy Little Joe (played by Joe Dallesandro) and Ramona (played by Viva), the proprietress of the local bordello. Whereas the Hollywood western typically represents a world of repressed sexuality-as in HIGH NOON (1952, Fred Zinneniann), where Gary Cooper's love for Grace Kelly is constructed through glance-object cuts that convey a desire not spoken in the dialogue- LONESOME COWBOYS emphasizes sexuality as the motor force of the genre. This is carried even further, as the Warhol film camps the repressed homoerotic desire among men in the Hollywood western, as when the competition between John Wayne and Montgomery Clift for the same woman in RED RIVER (1948, Howard Hawks) is expressed as physical violence toward one another. LONESOME COWBOYS translates this directly to homosexual desire and fulfillment, as Little Joe becomes the desired object for not only Rammona, but also for a gang of gay cowboys.

The ways in which these five avant-garde films forged their respective critiques of Western cultural traditions (BLUE MOSES), contemporary cultural practices (PULL MY DAISY and HALLELUJAH THE HILLS), and Hollywood cinema (HOLD ME WHILE I'M NAKED and LONESOME COWBOYS), constitute one abiding passion of the social and cultural community of experimental filmmaking in the 1960s. Each of these films represents a frontal attack upon notions of tradition, concepts of civilization, and ideas of religious faith, as well as glamour and entertainment. These assaults on propriety and conventionality were at the core of the cultural unrest that was evident among the highly self-conscious groups of artists and students 'who fashioned themselves as resisting the banalities of mainstream American culture in the late 1950s and on into the mid 1960s. Such films, and the essentially benign forms of cultural resistance that they nurtured, were the precursor of the counterculture of the late 1960s that spread across the United States. It was, however, in that segment of the avant-garde cinema that directly engaged the American social landscape through its representation of nontraditional sexuality-in defiance of puritanical traditions and conventional repression-that a more explosive form of film experimentation emerged.

Identity Politics and the 1960s American
Avant-Garde Cinema

It was during the 1960s that gay and lesbian sexuality in the United States first asserted an aggressive claim for recognition of these "de-dances" as alternative lifestyle choices. Although far from being spread widely in American culture, the grounds for this assertion amounted to the basic claims of equal treatment in society and the recognition that such lifestyle choices were being advanced as a claim of civil rights. Homosexuals and lesbians first came out of the closet in the United States during the 1960s, and they did so in the two urban centers, New York City and San Francisco, where gay lifestyles were most evident and most confrontational toward mainstream American culture. New York City and San Francisco also happened to be where the avant-garde cinema of the 1960s was centered. The actual shift to a gay political activism may date from the "Stonewall Incident" in 1969, when New York City police conducted a brutal raid at a popular gay bar, but the visibility of 'a growing gay counterculture and a new gay consciousness were both evident in New York City and San Francisco much earlier in the decade.²⁰

Two avant-garde films of the 1960s, FLAMING CREATURES (1963)²¹ and BLONDE COBRA (1963), deserve special consideration for their aggressive representation of sexuality. FLAMING CREATURES is organized into seven major sections, beginning with an orgy behind which is presented the film's credits. This sequence is followed by a scene in which a drag queen puts on lipstick. Suddenly, two traumatic events are presented-a rape and an earthquake. The film continues with a scene featuring a drag queen vampire, a celebratory dance, and concludes with an orgiastic performance of the pop song "Be Bop a Loo."

FLAMING CREATURES The film features the self-reflexive gestures that one would expect of an avant-garde film, yet these gestures are deliberately tied to the representation of scandalous sexual practices. The first shot of the film features a sultry woman playing with her hair. Then, another woman steps in front of her and begins mugging for the camera. The camera tracks past these women to reveal the film's title, not presented on a title card, but instead written on the wall behind the women. One of the women walks in front of and obscures the films title, thus calling attention to the film's modernist strategy of constantly reminding us of the tenuous relationship between the diegetic and metatextual levels of the film's narration. On the soundtrack, a man whispers "Ali Baba comes today," evidently punning between the nature of the music being heard and the orgy that is being seen.

The camera begins to reveal more of this orgy in progress. Close-ups of men taking off their pants lead to hands fondling a flaccid penis. It is at this moment that the film begins to engage its radical representational practices: The viewer is now clearly in a representational space completely unavailable to the mainstream Hollywood cinema. As if to comment on this shocking discovery, the soundtrack at this moment features Miklos Rozsa-style rousing march music commonly heard in Hollywood action files of the classical period. FLAMING CREATURES is constructed as an epic in the tradition of the Hollywood films of the period, but in such a way that emphasizes the differences between what it shows as compared to what Hollywood can merely allude; consider, for example, the sexual explicitness of FLAMING CREATURES as compared to the subtle allusions to gay sexuality in the "oysters and snails" scene from SPARTAGUS (1960, Stanley Kubrick).

Even more nontraditional sexuality appears in the film when a drag queen is shown sniffing flowers. A woman in a black dress (who is about to be violently raped) vamps in front of the camera. On the soundtrack, a romantic, Spanish-style tune can be heard. FLAMING CREATURES takes great pains to show the normality of the events: the woman in the black dress and the drag queen hug and talk, innocently. The drag queen begins putting on lipstick as the film enters its second section, during which the very conventions of classical cinema will be assaulted. On the soundtrack, we hear a radio announcer extolling the benefits of a new brand of indelible lipstick. This is accompanied by a stereotypical romantic melody emphasizing an expected heterosexual romance narrative. Instead, one of the ribald partygoers contradicts the expectations produced by the soundtrack when he is heard to say, "Is there a lipstick that doesn't come off when you suck cocks? But how does a man get lipstick off his cock?" Suddenly, and very comically, the radio announcer replies, "A man is not supposed to have lipstick on his cock." Thus, as is expected of an experimental film of the 1960s, FLAMING CREATURES breaks down distinctions between diegetic experiential orders, in this case the world of radio advertising and a scandalous orgy. This aesthetic gesture presents sexual practices that the mainstream culture presumably would want to vilify by showing them on screen precisely as a radio announcer's voice on the soundtrack intones that all oral sex-not just between men-is condemned. However, the film refuses to endorse the announcer's Puritanism, and this section of the film ends with a man deliberately putting lipstick on a penis which he happens to discover resting on his shoulder.

As if to remind us of the source of the radio announcer's Puritanism, the third section of FLAMING CREATURES begins with an image of a Victorian woman standing immobile amidst the orgy. Suddenly, however, our expectations are again shattered. In the film's most frightening moments, the drag queen turns violent, grabbing the woman in the black dress. Other men join him and the rape scene begins. Rough hands pull her breasts out of the dress and we hear her screaming. Just as her genitals are revealed, a mysterious cut to a shaking black lamp follows.

Gradually, the viewer becomes aware that the fourth section of the film-the earthquake- has commenced. As if to construct a moral retribution against this act of rape, but not necessarily the orgy which preceded it, we are given an overhead shot of the rape continuing as debris from the crumbling ceiling begins falling on the rapists. The screams of the rape victim now become indistinguishable from those of the earthquake victims. The participants of the orgy are now again seen to be writhing, but whether that gesture is from pleasure or agony is not clear. A blonde woman in pearls intervenes, taking the woman in the black dress into another room. They begin kissing, and it seems as if lesbian sexuality becomes the curative for the vicious act of male violence that the woman in the black dress has just experienced.

This transition initiates the fifth section of the film, in which a blonde vampire suddenly arises out of a coffin. Comically, this generic image associated with the horror film is juxtaposed on the soundtrack with a country-western singer crooning "Honky Tonk Angels." The vampire proceeds to suck the blood out of the necks of the earthquake victims, expressing another image of retribution for the acts of violence previously witnessed. The vampire begins dancing with the drag queen, as the sixth section of the film-a kind of celebratory dance of death-commences. Again, these unfamiliar images of nontraditional sexuality are juxtaposed with old-fashioned dance music on the soundtrack, emphasizing the film's entire strategy of anachronism. Quick-paced tango music suddenly replaces the old-fashioned music as a man in drag with a flower in his mouth enters the frame. A cut to an overhead shot emphasizes the frantic dancing of all in the room. At this moment, it becomes clear that the earthquake has produced not just rubble and destruction, but a palpable sense of death as well. To concretize this sensibility, a drag queen in a white dress with blonde hair-who can only be a reference to Marilyn Monroe-dances, amidst the rubble, with a dowdy-looking woman wearing horn-rimmed glasses. Postwar Hollywood's quintessential sex goddess, Monroe died in 1962, the year before the completion of FLAMING CREATURES, and thus is used by the film as another image that conflates gender, sexuality, and death. This "dance of death" section of the film continues with a shot of a black-haired woman. A mysterious hand begins fondling her breast. However, she lies completely inert, quite literally dead to the sexual advance. Negative image shots of the dancing bring the section to a conclusion, emphasizing the macabre, death-laden aspects of the ending moments of FLAMING CREATURES.

The film concludes, ironically, with a performance of "Be Bop A Loo" on the soundtrack as the camera cranes downward past the revelers and reveals a title card stating, "The End." However, the orgy continues, and the film presents us with more close-ups of hands fondling breasts. The last image of the film, in fact, is of a male hand jiggling a woman's bare breast. The film thus concludes by indicating its deepening contradiction between ribald representations of sexual pleasure, which are coupled with the contradictory progression toward death and morbidity. The film indicts male violence against women in its Cecil B. DeMille-like earthquake scene, yet its stance on the political nature of the behavior of these "flaming creatures" is otherwise ambiguous. The film revels in its representations of sexual behavior that mainstream culture would deem scandalous. It is, however, by no means a facile representation, as FLAMING CREATURES very clearly portrays the idea that such sexual acts-in a Puritanical culture at any rate-occur under the specter of violence, death, and destruction.

FLAMING CREATURES thus represents, on the one hand, a typical avant-garde film: it uses radical gestures of representation to shock and motivate its spectators into a heightened state of awareness about the conventions of cinema. The juxtapositions between image and soundtrack, the breaking down of the diegetic and meta-diegetic worlds, the intertextual use of glamorous yet ill-fated pop stars like Marilyn Monroe all establish the film's experimental lineage. On the other hand, however, FLAMING CREATURES applies these avant-garde strategies to deliberate engagements with sexuality as an identity political issue. Male violence against women, most explicit in the rape scene but also present through the image of Monroe, is interrogated. Same sex relationships, both between men and between women, are represented by the film with resolute precision. Moreover, the stakes of these representational practices are constantly emphasized, as the film uses the epic destruction of the space of the orgy to illustrate how tenuous these experiences are in a homophobic and sexist culture.

BLONDE COBRA BLONDE COBRA, the other significant 1960s American avant-garde film about sexuality, further develops ambiguities between a free expression of sexuality and a pervasive cultural climate of constraint and violence. The film begins with two offscreen narrators engaging in a conversation about American popular music. A man with a deep voice queries, "What are your favorite Gershwin songs?" and another man with a squeaky high-pitched voice replies, "I Got Rhythm" and "Wonderful." While this conversation engages a common motif in gay culture, the love of deeply ambiguous American pop tunes, the image track is resolutely imponderable, consisting in this moment of a still photograph of Jack Smith eating what appears to be a piece of fruitcake. While playfully indicating that Smith is some kind of a "fruit," the soundtrack replies existentially to this image, initiating the film's musical refrain from "Let's Call the Whole Thing Off." The film becomes more and more aggressive in using stretches of white film leader to indicate what cannot be represented through imagery.

Then, the film presents color footage of men, including a shot of one smoking a pipe, and another of Jack Smith wearing a suit and tie. As Smith suddenly slides into a bathtub, the high-pitched narrator begins singing, off-key, "we are drowning in a sea of nascience." BLONDE COBRA thus lays out its primary aesthetic strategy: as a foundfootage filmmaker, Ken Jacobs includes parody voice-off narration that comments on these found images. In this case, an already campy image of traditionally masculine subjects (because we know one of the men is Jack Smith) is further rendered ironic by the absurd vocal commentary.

Keeping with the "imperfect cinema" aesthetic practices of most underground film of the 1960s, hand-drawn title cards introduce the viewer to BLOND COBRA.²² Jack Smith holds a card that indicates we are watching "a philm by Bobby Fleischner," while the narrator sings a parody of "boop hoop e doo," a la Betty Boop. After another sequence of inexplicably inserted white film leader, we are presented with images of a graveyard, as the soundtrack informs us, "This is New York. The city of opportunity... enjoy the benefits of democracy." Like FLAMING CREATURES, the film thus presents us with an ironic juxtaposition, between platitudes of the American Dream on the soundtrack and representations of death and decay in the image.

BLONDE COBRA connects its fixation on death and decay to the impossibility of a stable gay sexuality in what was still an intensely homophobic culture. A somber gospel hymn on the soundtrack is directly paired with an image in which Smith campily kisses his own mirror reflection. The linkage to morbidity is again enforced, as the high-pitched voice narrates, "ravish... ravish... ravish... I'm ravishing the corpse." In a bizarre imitation of Sid Caesar, he continues by singing, "necrophiliac longing... necrophiliac fulfillment," finally finishing in a grandiose melodic flourish, "Leprosy is eating a hole in me."

The film then explicitly denies the connection between image and sound by removing the image altogether. While watching black leader, which lasts for four minutes, the narrator tells us a story to the accompaniment of stereotypically melodramatic orchestral music. "There once was a little boy," the narrator begins archetypically, "who lived in an enormous house." The story begins to lay out the narrator's childhood as a site of Oedipal trauma. He wails "Mother" repeatedly on the soundtrack. He then proceeds to tell a story of burning his neighborhood friend's penis with a match. Thus, again, the conflation between alternative sexuality and homophobic culture is linked through the register of violence, and in this case, genital mutilation.

As the image returns, we see Jack Smith lying in bed, naked. The narrator responds, "Oh God. Oh Creator, I mean." The joke at the expense of formal religion opens up the next major section of the film, which concerns Madame Nascience, the Mother Superior of a convent. Jack Smith plays Madame Nascience in gaudy drag and red lipstick. The image track consisting solely of black leader again returns, as the narrator tells us the story of Madame Nascience's lesbian encounter with Sister Dexterity. Reflecting on the moral erasure of lesbianism in homophobic culture, Madame Nascience insists that Sister Dexterity's story of abuse (she purportedly receives go lashes with the rosary with her habit dropped down) is a lie. When Sister Dexterity decides to lie on the altar and give herself to God as atonement, the narrator comments on the sacrilegious nature of the story, "what a turgid dream, indeed."

The sacrilegious nature of the story begins to take its toll on the narrator, as he lapses into a hysterical insanity and relates the tale. As he is describing Madame Nascience paddling the other nuns with a silver cross, the narrator begins to laugh hysterically as the paddling is heard on the soundtrack. This initiates a new section of the film in which the narrator's insane narrative turns toward the notion of God's existence. He sings, "God is dead and man is abandoned." When he changes his mind, arguing-"God is not dead. He is just marvelously sick"-he resumes; his insane laughter at the absurdity of life.

This in turn initiates yet another section of the film in which the history of Hollywood cinema is explored. Footage of Jack Smith resumes; this time he is wearing a papal hat and holding a Barbie doll's plastic leg. To this image the narrator comments, "Maria Montez was admirable. For one thing, she refused to wear brassieres." By invoking a Hollywood star-Montez was famous for her exotic south seas melodramas, including COBRA WOMAN (1944), from which Jacobs' film's title must derive-BLONDE COBRA indicates the myth of beauty on which the mainstream American cinema is built, and which the project of Jacobs' film is to parody. Montez is a perfect figure through which to engage the parody of Hollywood. Born in the Dominican Republic, and thus useful for a racist Hollywood to construct as exotic, she parlayed her good looks into a modeling and then a film career. Her first big success was in the title role of THE INVISIBLE WOMAN (1941). Her follow-up role, as Scheherazade in ARABIAN NIGHTS (1942), would forever typecast her as the exotic woman, such that she would become associated with the star discourse, "Aladdin and His Wonderful Vamp." The late career of Montez, her decline and death, made her an apt appropriation for the camp strategy of BLONDE COBRA. As Montez's fame began to fade in the late 1940s, she entered a period of depression as she gained weight rapidly. Her second husband, the international art film star Jean-Pierre Aumont, took Montez to Europe to try to stage a comeback. In a desperate attempt to lose weight, Montez began a dangerous hot bath regimen, and during one of these baths she died of a massive coronary.²³

In attempting to make sense of this decay of beauty toward death, the narrator of BLONDE COBRA pursues a series of quotations. First the narrator quotes the film's star: "Why shave when I can't even think of a reason for living. Jack Smith. 1958." The film thus places the existential futility confronted within its diegesis in a specific historical context. The next quotation-"Life is a sad business. Greta Garbo"-returns the film to its campy subtext, through its reference to another beautiful female star ground up by the Hollywood machine. The narrator responds to this example with desperate camp, singing "You say neither, I say neither. Let's call the whole thing off," as Jack Smith dances joyfully in front of the camera. The insertion of white film leader ends the song mid-verse. The film concludes this section with another quotation, "Life swarms with innocent monsters. Charles Baudelaire," which resonates with the Romantic mythology of the avant-garde cinema itself, but which is being used not so much to justify the greatness of the artist as to express the general despair of the human condition.

BLONDE COBRA enters its final section with Smith shown in drag smoking cigarettes with a man in a gangster outfit. Suddenly, a second man wearing a fedora hat pulls out a knife and stabs the man in the gangster suit in the chest. Again imitating Sid Caesar, Smith recoils in parodic horror. A cut to a panning shot which moves up Smith's body reveals the knife mysteriously emanating out of his buttocks, to which the narrator humorously responds, "Sex is a pain in the ass." Thus, the film returns to the central motif of the American avant-garde film of the 1960s concerning sexuality, namely the connection between sexuality and morbidity that is caused by a Puritanical and homophobic culture.

As the film ends, the narrator returns to his Oedipal analysis, arguing that "A mother's wisdom has dragged me down to this: hunger, futility, despair." As Jack Smith holds the title card reading, "The End," the narrator desperately screams out, "What went wrong! What went wrong!" Thus, the film concludes with an existential despair that germinates from the inability of its subjects to find a satisfying sexual and interpersonal expression in the midst of a repressive culture.

THE COOL WORLD While the representation of sexuality is the focal point of identity politics in the American avant-garde cinema of the 1960s, other issues of identity in contrast to the mainstream of American society are present as well. Films on racial issues are the most problematic, given the dearth of African American filmmakers in the 1960s avant-garde, yet many core films of the avant-garde grapple with issues of race. The first in this tradition is SHADOWS (1959, John Cassavetes), a ground-breaking experimental film about the politics of passing, analyzed in the relationship between a light-skinned African American woman and her Italian-American jazz musician boyfriend.

The independent films of the 1960s that most directly followed in the tradition of SHADOWS include THE COOL WORLD (1963, Shirley Clarke) and ONE POTATO, TWO POTATO (1964, Larry Peerce). ONE POTATO, TWO POTATO is a realist study of an interracial marriage. THE COOL WORLD engages in an aggressive, stylized presentation of the life of Duke, an African American boy who lives in Harlem, gets mixed up in crime, and is killed by the police.

The cases of THE COOL WORLD and ONE POTATO, TWO POTATO indicate that during the 1960s, an unprecedented breakdown between the various modes of cinema-in this case, mainstream narrative and avant-garde cinema-was underway. That is to say, the distinctions between a mainstream film, an independent film, and an avant-garde film began to collapse in a film-going environment where extremely experimental films like HALLELUJAH THE HILLS and THE COOL WORLD received theatrical releases. For this reason, rigid distinctions between avant-garde, experimental, underground, and independent films cannot be sustained historically.

Films like SHADOWS and THE COOL WORLD need to be discussed simultaneously with more unambiguously avant-garde films like THE QUEEN OF SHEBA MEETS THE ATOM MAN. SHADOWS has much in common with the films under scrutiny in this chapter, even though it was directed by John Cassavetes, who would subsequently direct more conventional independent features like FACES (1968), HUSBANDS (1970), and A WOMAN UNDER THE INFLUENCE (1974). Shot in 16mm and improvised, SHADOWS was forged out of a communitarian approach to filmmaking, in stark contrast to Hollywood production methods.

THE COOL WORLD was directed by Shirley Clarke, whom the scholar Lauren Rabinovitz labels one of the three most important women avant-garde filmmakers working in New York City. Shot in 16mm and aggressively mixing filmmaking styles by employing cinema verite documentary techniques to present a fictional plot, THE COOL WORLD represents life in Harlem in impressively direct and confrontational political terms. The film actually begins with a boldly aggressive narrative gesture. The viewer is placed without warning in the midst of a Black Muslim's speech (shot in close-up) about how "the white devil" is ruining the African American community. We are forced to wonder what function this has in the overall narrative pattern of the film. It becomes clear that the film is interested in sociologically positioning the teen-aged protagonist Duke in relation to African American culture in Harlem and a larger white supremacist culture in general.

The film often makes these connections quite subversively. For example, a white teacher takes his black students from Harlem on a field trip to Wall Street. He drones on about the American Dream while standing in front of a statue of George Washington. The black students joke and smoke cigarettes, caring neither about the teacher nor his American Dream. THE COOL WORLD treats this lack of communication ironically by focusing on the statue of George Washington, who for the white teacher is an icon of freedom, but to black folks certainly must represent the legacy of eighteenth-century slavery. The moments final contradiction occurs as the teacher hands each black student a pamphlet that reads "Own a Share in America." The slogan is an advertisement for Wall Street, but given the circumstances it is a bitter irony since "shares" of black folks like these kids were once owned by whites.

The film plays off this irony at its end, as Duke is gunned down by the white police. The last images of the film reveal a police car, sirens blaring, rushing to some other disturbance. On the film's soundtrack, a radio news report delivers the final irony as commentary about a communist stronghold in Vietnam is juxtaposed against a story on urban gang warfare. Thus, THE COOL WORLD asserts that its local plot about a gang member needs to be understood in the larger context of global politics, and that America is both a racist social regime and an imperialist power.

THE QUEEN OF SHEBA MEETS THE ATOM MAN While THE COOL WORLD is one of a handful of highly unusual independent features in the tradition of SHADOWS, more thoroughly experimental films of the 1960s also grappled with issues of race. Most interesting in this tradition is THE QUEEN OF SHEBA MEETS THE ATOM MAN (1963), which concerns the tempestuous love affair between the Atom Man, a frail white man (played by Taylor Mead), and the Queen of Sheba, an enormous black woman (played by Winifred Bryan). The film begins with shots emphasizing the refuse-filled life in which the Atom Man lives without the Queen of Sheba. A poetic image of a crane picking up garbage is juxtaposed against a classical, symphonic soundtrack, and then the film cuts to the Atom Man's apartment, which is full of junk.

In a comedic gesture towards the drug culture, the Atom Man is revealed as a drug addict, storing his stash in a trash can labeled "heroin." He even feeds heroin to a rubber mouse he keeps beneath a sink. After burying his head in a can of heroin, he collapses to the floor. These images of drug-induced depravity are linked to our first encounter with the Queen of Sheba, beginning, as she is most often seen throughout the film, lying naked in bed. She awakens, immediately downs a glass of vodka, and then rings for her manservant to bring her more vodka. The images of the Queen of Sheba certainly link to the racist imagination, in which black folks are more connected to nature, and more earthy, although the film frames these images through such an excess that they could, even at this point, be read as parody of that very racist imagination.

A scene from the independent, experimental film, THE QUEEN OF
SHEBA MEETS THE ATOM MAN (1963).

The Atom Man arrives at the Queen of Sheba's apartment. He takes a mallet out of a violin case and begins gently tapping her nude body. He takes out an outrageously long hypodermic needle and injects her, and she screams in pain. The film comically cuts to a giant plaster foot squashing the Atom Man's face into the floor, perhaps an image of the Queen of Sheba's violent reaction to his pseudo-medical torture of her body. The two characters begin to play together with a string of pearls and a big metal hoop until the Queen accidentally fall backwards on top of him, squashing the frail Atom Man.

Images of the grotesque, naked body of the Queen of Sheba are delicately juxtaposed with the most poetic moments of the film in which the Queen walks around New York City, dressed very conventionally in overcoat and purse.²⁴ A somber jazz score accompanies her stroll . She rides a subway train, and then takes a ferry ride across the river. Glance-object cuts reveal the Queen looking at beautifully poetic shots of huge chunks of ice floating in the river, accompanied by a somber prelude for piano by Frederic Chopin on the soundtrack .

Meanwhile, the Atom Man is also wandering around the city. He enters a museum, where he touches a sculpture of a large black woman, drawing the film's own representation of the black female body into a larger context, including the realm of legitimate art's representation of that body for the consumption of "sophisticated" art patrons. The Atom Man's touching the sculpture emphasizes the false distinction between these types of patron, sexualizing the response to the sculpture. This linkage to issues of nontraditional and "inappropriate" display of sexuality is furthered in the film's subsequent moments, when the Atom Man enters the men's room and "accidentally" opens the toilet stall door on a man sitting on the pot. We then cut immediately to the Atom Man sitting in his apartment reading the book, Diary of a Nymph, and cracking up in front of and mugging for the camera. It is this playful, self-conscious representation of sexuality as a human act of pleasure that most distinguishes THE QUEEN OF SHEBA MEETS THE ATOM MAN, whether it is in the representation of Taylor Mead's bisexuality, or in its emphasis on a most intriguing interracial romance.

The combination of bisexuality and interracial romance is most forthrightly represented in the film's next major sequence, in which the Atom Man arrives at the Queen's apartment, only to find her in bed with another white man. The scene begins with the man and the Queen in bed. Behind them, clearly emphasized in the raise-en-scene, is a photo of Marion Brando dressed as Fletcher Christian from MUTINY ON THE BOUNTY (from the cover of an edition of Life magazine) pasted to her wall. At first, the Atom Man does not notice the Queen having sex with another man. The comic nature of this delay of discovery is enhanced when he responds to this betrayal with ridiculous, melodramatic gestures. He then playfully collapses onto the bed with them, deciding to join in rather than respond jealously. Inexplicably, in the next shot, the lover is seen lying on the floor, inert. The Atom Man and the Queen then engage in a post-coital bout of consumption, consisting of vodka and peanut butter. The film engages in a riotously funny parody of advertising culture: the Atom Man produces a product placement ad for the peanut butter, writing "Skippy Peanut Butter" in shaving cream on a mirror. Then, the two fall asleep.

In the next shot, Brando is re-constructed as an object of gay desire. The Atom Man reads the Life magazine article about Brando, stopping to lick and eat each page that features a photograph of Brando. After this consumption of the star image, the Atom Man reads another book, Men, by Taylor Mead, thus collapsing the distinction between star and character in the midst of representing a fan's erotic attachment with the star.

The film's radical collapse of such comic moments with deeply political moments is its most interesting narrative feature. For example, the Atom Man enters a liquor store and begins shoplifting. A policeman catches him and, in a scene that directly references a similar one in A NIGHT AT THE OPERA (1935) in which Harpo Marx is caught stealing, the Atom Man begins to give everything he has stolen to the cop. However, in the midst of this sight gag, the Atom Man unexpectedly steals the cop's gun and shoots him in the face. Footage from Anthony Perkins in THE TRIAL (1962, Orson Welles) running through narrow, brightly lit corridors, is inserted as the Atom Man desperately flees from the police. The scene ends with a Kafkaesque image, as the chase comes to a halt in front of a giant clock face. Hence, a slapstick comedy is transformed into a desperate political agenda; the Atom Man goes from instantaneously riffing on Harpo Marx to becoming a violent outlaw. Nonetheless, he is no romanticized outlaw in the tradition of Hollywood's BONNIE AND CLYDE (1967), but instead is a true existential renegade because of his nontraditional sexuality, as the intertextual linkage to the reputedly gay actor Anthony Perkins attests.

The film uses this radical intertextuality throughout to explore issues of sexuality. In the clearest example of this technique, the film parodies William Shakespeare's Hamlet.²⁵ This sequence begins as the Atom Man enters an art house cinema where Laurence Olivier's film adaptation of HAMLET (1948) is playing. The Atom Man sits and watches the ending sword fight between Hamlet and Laertes. Suddenly, the film cuts to a shot in the Queen of Sheba's apartment. A man holds a hand-drawn sign that reads, "Hamlet," an imperfect cinematic gesture in stark contrast to the elegant one-sheet for Olivier's film that the Atom Man looked at on his way into the revival house. The Queen of Sheba begins re-enacting the plot from Hamlet, pouring poison into a man's ear as if she were Claudius and the man were Hamlet's father. The Atom Man enters the scene anachronistically, skipping gleefully and waving a roll of toilet paper. Thus, his presence assaults the propriety of the canonical text, as there is no toilet paper in Olivier's version of the play, for this would ruin the aura around the work of art by reminding us that people must defecate even in Shakespeare. However, the Atom Man quickly gets into the swing of things, skewering a man hiding behind a curtain, as if he were Hamlet and his victim were Polonius. In an overhead shot, we see the Atom Man and the Queen of Sheba standing over the two dead bodies. The Atom Man quickly jumps on top of the Queen, and the two have sex amidst the dead bodies.

The adaptation of Hamlet within THE QUEEN OF SHEBA MEETS THE ATOM MAN is confusingly avant-garde. The moment is clearly about camp parody, especially in its exploration of the seeming incongruity of the toilet paper. However, the scene also grapples with issues of sexuality that are at play in Hamlet, although in different terms. Claudius murders Hamlet's father, in part for a sexual purpose-he wants Gertrude for himself-while Hamlet kills Polonius, albeit mistakenly, due to his jealousy over his mother's sexual union with Claudius. The terms of sexuality are thrown into utter chaos, however, in the avant-garde film's adaptation of this plot material. For, effectively, Hamlet (the Atom Man) and Claudius (the Queen of Sheba) end up having sex with one another. Thus, an incongruity in the adaptation is used to emphasize the film's unique Oedipal sexual union between the frail Atom Man and the excessively maternal Queen of Sheba, most prominently figured through her enormous breasts that repeatedly serve as the sites for male suckling.

Although not prominent in the Hamlet section of the film (except in terms of the undeniability of the Queen of Sheba's huge, naked black body), race figures throughout the film's penultimate section. Jack Smith, that perennial stand-by of the 1960s avantgarde scene, comes over to the Queen's apartment for an orgy. During the festivities, the Atom Man dons an African mask while dancing. In the meantime, Jack Smith drags the Queen of Sheba over to a couch by her bare legs and places a clock mask over her vagina. The Atom Man licks her genitals, sticking his tongue out of the eye-hole of the African mask. Thus, in addition to the nontraditional sexuality being represented during this sequence, the viewer is also confronted with the significance of race-related signifiers, as in the African mask that alters the Atom Man's persona while he engages in oral sex with the Queen of Sheba.

The film ends with an overtly politicized sequence emphasizing the public significance of the interracial relationship between the Atom Man and the Queen of Sheba. While they engage in playful sexual activity (the Atom Man jiggles the Queen's bare breast), some activists enter the apartment. They wear placards that state, "Peace must come from the people," "General strike for peace now," and "We must love one another and die." Taking the Atom Man, they leave the apartment and go to a bar that features a prominent sign, "No Dancing." As soon as the Atom Man begins dancing, a bouncer comes over and throws him out onto the street. The Queen of Sheba and the Atom Man return to the bar together. The Queen uses her immense heft to begin beating the bouncer. Suddenly, the bouncer changes his opinion, and he and the Queen begin dancing, with the "No Dancing" sign prominently in the background. Others in the bar join in dancing. Thus, the film ends with an act of communitarian transformation; the prohibition against dancing is overcome by the overthrow of authority in a defiant act of collective strength. Clearly, this is a central motif of the film as a whole: cultural taboos such as bisexuality and interracial romance can only be torn down by resistant acts, such as the representational practices of the film itself.

Go Go Go The relationship between the Atom Man and the Queen of Sheba indicates one aspect of how completely issues of gender were explored in the American avant-garde cinema of the 1960s. This should not come as a surprise, given the appearance of the women's liberation movement during this period, which began crystallizing first in the rise of counterculture communities that began appearing not long after the publication of Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique in 1963. However, with the exception of Maya Deren, who herself is often characterized through a patriarchal lens as a kind of maternal figure for a younger generation of more accomplished avant-garde filmmakers, criticism has tended not to analyze in detail issues of gender in the 1960s American avant-garde cinema. One of the more interesting of the avant-garde films that promoted a feminist agenda in the decade was Go Go Go (1964, Marie Menken).

Menken's title itself clearly establishes her film as responding to one of the seminal American avant-garde films, PULL MY DAISY (1959). That film ends with Milo chanting, "Let's go. Go go go," as he escapes his domestic chains represented by his wife. The entire idea of Menken's Go Go Go frontally assaults the masculinist nature of the Beat imagery in PULL MY DAISY by subtly transforming the subject matter of the avantgarde film itself. Built out of home movie imagery, Go Go Go calls attention to the engendered nature of this mode of cinematic experience, thus hollowing out the patriarchal assumptions of both the home movie and the avant-garde film."²⁶ Go Go Go begins with its most obvious reminder that a differently gendered authorial voice is addressing its audience: The credits are written in bright red lipstick over a glass plate. The film then cuts to rapid tracking shots of New York City, recalling the city symphony films of Dziga Vertov and Walther Ruttmann from the 1920s. However, the film quickly moves away from this canonical avant-garde tradition, focusing instead on the home movie mode of experience. Go Go Go cuts to a graduation ceremony, rendered in fast motion. The home movie aesthetic, coupled with the fast motion, renders this ceremony ridiculous, stripped of its pomp and circumstance. The orderly rows of students receiving their diplomas, while controlled by officious men who are keeping them in line, is constructed to depict each of them as sheep rather than bright, individual minds.

These images of a male order are contrasted with shots of a men's bodybuilding competition and a girl's debutante ball. However, both of these sequences are also rendered in aggressive stylistic terms. The bodybuilding competition is shot from an extreme distance, while the debutante ball is filmed from behind some shrubbery. Thus, the film's mode of address emphasizes its own marginality, not its privileged status. In the case of the bodybuilding imagery, the film represents an alternative desire for the male body while at the same time ideologically critiquing such a desire via the absurd distance through which it is represented. Similarly, the images of the debutante ball construct an ambiguous relationship that exists in stark contrast to both the graduation ceremony and the bodybuilding competition. This debutante ball is a traditionally feminine space to which the filmmaker does not appear to have full access.

Such simultaneous playfulness with both traditional gender roles and their deconstruction constitutes the remainder of the film. Menken's pairing of seemingly incongruous images continues with more home movie footage, this time of a wedding, cut together with a man laboring at his typewriter, looking out his window at the cityscape and apparently searching for inspiration. In this way, the film interrogates the nature of traditional gender roles. The wedding indicates the appropriate behavior for a woman, while another stereotype, crucial for seeing the importance of the female authorship of Go Go Go, indicates the male struggle to create artistically.

In the penultimate pairing of images, we see a girl in a bikini kissing her boyfriend at the beach at Coney Island, and then nuns walking on the streets of Manhattan, reminding us of two traditional, although contradictory, roles for women. The film ends, however, with yet another pairing that assaults the earlier image of the man at the typewriter: a poetic image of the sunset over New York's harbor is disrupted by a shot of a woman behind a glass screen on which "The End" is written in red lipstick. Her ambiguous gesture serves to interrogate this myth of male artistry by ending Go Go Go with an image of a woman character who does not create, but at least begins to gesture for more to come. That more to come, of course, is presented by the film's meta-diegetic circumstances: Marie Menken is the female response to that struggling male artist within the diegetic space of the film.

The Structural Avant-Garde Film

A much more complicated analytical site of a woman filmmaker working in the American avant-garde cinema of the 1960s is the case of Joyce Wieland. As the scholar Lauren Rabinovitz poignantly describes, Wieland has nearly always been overshadowed by her more famous structural filmmaker husband, Michael Snow.²⁷ It is with an emphasis on the films of Joyce Wieland, however, that gender as a political identity issue can be revealed even within the sub-genre of the structural film in the 1960s American avant-garde cinema. This is important, because by definition, structural films (or "pure cinema," as some practitioners and critics prefer to call it) are intended not to be contaminated by issues of any ideology, including gender. WAVELENGTH (1967, Michael Snow) or 1933 (1967, Joyce Wieland) are purportedly exercises in the functioning of cinema unhampered by distractions of narrative or character development. WAVELENGTH, for example, is a forty-five minute continuous zoom that begins in a long shot and ends in an extreme close-up of a photograph of a wave on the opposite wall of the room.²⁸

Michael Snow's status as the most famous structural avant-garde filmmaker of the 1960s is uncontested. For example, the critic Wheeler Winston Dixon concludes his discussion of Snow with unbridled praise: "Working in cinema, sculpture, photography and video, Snow continues to create a torrent of original and captivating work which, for many, defines the essence of the experimental cinema of the 1960s."²⁹ The structural films for which Snow is famous include WAVELENGTH, a film built out of one zoom shot, and BACK AND FORTH (1969), a film consisting of increasingly rapid horizontal pans. Thus, these films become interrogations of the very building blocks of film language, each focusing on one aesthetic practice and emphasizing its operation in exquisite detail. Interestingly, Snow himself does not envision his structural filmmaking as a direct assault on classical Hollywood conventions. Discussing the narrative event in WAVELENGTH when a man (played by the experimental filmmaker Hollis Frampton) falls over and dies, Snow comments: "I absolutely never intended the film as a critique of 'Hollywood-style narratives.' There are thousands of 'narratives' in the film, some of them verbally indescribable. I simply included a 'peopling' of the space with implications of further continuity as one of the types of 'narrative' in the film."³⁰ Such tensions in the structural film, between the rigor of the aesthetic practice and the uncontrollable implications of narrative, lie at the core of Snow's work. In discussing the background images of WAVELENGTH, which consist of cars and people passing by outside the apartment window, Snow states: "WAVELENGTH is both carefully thought out, formally shaped and conscious and fortuitous and unconscious which is precisely part of its content."³¹

The apartment in WAVELENGTH (1967, Michael Snow).

Similarly, Joyce Wieland's 1933 consists of ten images connected by white leader, constructing both a rigorous repetition and yet a haunting system of potentially meaningful differences. Each of the ten images is outwardly the same: a stable camera position at a high angle looks through an iron railing, down at a street scene. People walk on the street, passing the unmoving camera at various speeds. In some of the shots, "1933' in white letters is superimposed over the image, while in other shots this detail is missing. Thus, like most structural films, the strategy involves forcing the viewer to attempt to find meaning in patterns that may be developing in the images themselves, or in the internal rhythms that appear to be structuring the films. In fact, it is not until the fourth or fifth time the shot recurs that it becomes clear we are watching the same image again and again, rather than very similar images filmed at different times of day on the street. The film thus uses this repetition to construct an image of street life as creepy, alienated, lonely, and frightening.

Rubber-gloved hand in Joyce Wieland's structuralist film, WATER SARK.

At first glance, the structural strategy of 1933 seems perfectly in keeping with the other films in the tradition. There is a feminine specificity in the work of Wieland, however, that is not found in the work of Michael Snow. For like Menken's views in Go Go Go, 1933 presents a specific kind of passive alienation from the world going on around the camera. This passivity stands in stark contrast to the way in which WAVELENGTH addresses its viewer. In the Michael Snow film, women are directly represented. His film begins in a long shot of a loft apartment in the middle of a big city. Women enter the apartment and direct moving men to place a bookcase on a wall screen left. Shortly afterward, these two women return. One of them shuts the window, while the other turns on a radio. Each is involved in her own actions; these two never talk to one another. Thus, these women are in fact alienated, but specifically from one another. This idea is further reinforced by the fact that the women leave the apartment one at a time, during which the camera is slowly zooming forward, in its inevitable progress toward the close-up of the photograph on the opposite wall.

Midway through the film, in its most notorious event, a man enters the apartment and stumbles, falling onto the floor, beneath the bottom of the film frame. The camera does not respond to this mysterious action, refusing to stop the progress of the zoom and look down to investigate why the man has fallen. The image itself responds, by flashing violently, and so does the soundtrack, which resumes an increasingly higher pitched whining hum. Thus, unlike 1933, in which there is never any choice but to inhabit the alienated, lonely, and frightening place behind the iron grillwork looking out over the street, WAVELENGTH makes a deliberate, intellectualized decision to deny the viewer the pleasure of narrative resolution, which in itself is a worthwhile distinction in terms of the relationship between narrative desire and the nature of gendered representations in these films.

A subsequent film by Wieland, CATFOOD (1968), even further emphasizes the importance of gender in the construction of her structural cinema. It consists of various closeups of a cat consuming a dead fish. Unlike the importance of the murder or accidental death represented in WAVELENGTH, CATFOOD presents a perfectly innocent domestic situation rendered grotesque by the filmmaker's intervention into the material.

Early manifestations of Wieland's ideological reconstruction of the structural film resonate in the experiments at Andy Warhol's "Factory." In particular, a Warhol film like BLOW JOB (1963) indicates that the roots of structural cinema do not lie in pure cinema at all, but, instead, in a deep interest in the ideological nature of representation. BLOW JOB consists of a thirty-five-minute medium close-up shot of a blonde-haired man's face. He periodically leans his head back and shows an expression of elation. He frequently glances upward, wipes his forehead with his hand, and purses his lips together, all indicating to us that he is experiencing extreme pleasure. At the end of the film, he lights and smokes a cigarette in a state of extreme satisfaction.

However, nothing in the image indicates that he is receiving this pleasure from an act of oral sex. This interpretation is activated entirely through the information conveyed to the viewer via the film's title. BLOW JOB is a structural experiment in spectatorship, interrogating how linguistic phenomena (titles, in this case) relate to representational material within the diegesis. Thus, even from its earliest manifestations, the structural film was deeply imbued with ideological material. Besides playing with the structural nature of film representation, BLOW JOB relates to issues of gender as well as sexuality: it is not indicated whether the person performing fellatio is male or female, since we do not see the person performing the act.

Much as Warhol's film interrogates taboos against sexuality, Menken's female authorial voice in Go Go Go is used to counteract the misogyny of the Beat film, PULL MY DAISY, and Wieland's film reconstructs the structural film from a different gender perspective. WATER SARK (1965), another film by Wieland, begins with an intriguing credit sequence that relies on aggressive superimpositions and concludes with a cut to a reflection of a lamp's illumination in a pool of water. The film's production company, "Corrective Films," is apropos of its project of gender critique and we next see Wieland operating the camera in a mirrored reflection. The images of the domestic situation that motivated the structural analysis in CATFOOD are also present here, this time in the form of a dining table on which sits a glass of water, some fruit, and a blue teapot.

WATER SARK begins to sensualize these domestic images. The fruit is represented in distorted fashion through reflections in the mirror and the water glass. The images are already vaguely sensual, although nothing yet establishes that they are unambiguously sexual. However, these images are next intercut with a blurry and distorted picture that takes some time for the viewer to realize that the content has shifted from the domesticity of the fruit to female breasts and the sensuality of the female body. The film uses the image of water to express the fluidity of female sexuality in the literal shot of Wieland shaking the glass of water in front of her breasts.

Further clarifying its strategy of distorted images, the film reveals that these images have been shot through a prism, which for the first time the viewer sees clearly. A red filter, moreover, is used to further abstract images during this section of the film. Next, Wieland dons a plastic glove on her hand, which she uses to play with a plastic tugboat in the water. The plastic glove makes a more explicit reference to the domestic: such a glove might be used most appropriately to clean house. Wieland dips the glove into the water, examining the boat and the water itself. This is an image that conveys the denial of a tactile sensation and becomes an extended metaphor for women's domestic experience within a patriarchal society.

After the film lingers, under the abstraction caused by the prism and the red filter, on Wieland's naked body, a sudden transition occurs to a blue filtered image, in which Wieland is seen in a blue striped dress as she walks around her apartment. Entering this new phase, the film indicates that we have just witnessed the climax, perhaps literally, as Wieland's sensual experience with her own body has now come to an end. In this final phase of the film, Wieland wields a magnifying glass, using it to again shake and distort the image. This is WATER SARK's most provocative representation, for in direct conflict with the conventions of traditional cinema, in which the male role is that of investigator, here Wieland herself fulfills that role. As in CATFOOD, the magnifying glass is brought to bear on an image of the household cat, the feline serving metaphorically as the female. Wieland again turns the camera on herself, blinking grotesquely with the magnifying glass placed directly in front of her eye. The film thus playfully represents the female investigator not attempting to make sense of the outside world, but of her own body. More playful grotesquery ensues, as the film presents, in stop motion, Wieland examining her teeth with the magnifying glass and the film camera.

WATER SARK concludes with Wieland taking in her hand a toy tugboat that appeared during the middle of the film. She now plays with it in the water with an ungloved hand. A concluding title card reading "Corrective Films New York" reinforces the meaning of this image. The plastic glove associated with domestic constraint has been discarded, allowing the full experience of female sexuality. It is finally this "corrective" that the film has taken great pains to represent.

Conclusion: American History and
Avant-Garde Cinema

There is no better example of an avant-garde film that explores its historical context than REPORT (1967, Bruce Conner), which uses the aggressive aesthetic and intertextual strategies of the avant-garde, as outlined above, in order to grapple with the trauma produced by the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. The film begins with television coverage of Kennedy traveling to Dallas and an announcer relating facts about the president's visit. The film begins to interrogate the nature of representation with the particular crisis of the Kennedy assassination as its backdrop. On the film's soundtrack, the announcer tells us that something has happened, but the film shows us no corresponding images. Instead, the motorcade is shown before the assault on the president's life. Ironic editing is employed, as a strip of film with the word "Finish" is presented. Thus, the very means of cinema meant to be hidden (such as film leader) are used to represent the most graphic event of the 1960s. The film denies what makes cinema special-the ability to render moving images in motion. Instead, the film gives us what is most moving emotionally solely on the soundtrack, suggesting that images cannot possibly capture this sort of trauma. Flickering white leader is all that is presented for three minutes, as the announcer describes the limousine rushing the president to the hospital.

Later, REPORT pursues its radical historiographical project by expanding outward from its core cinematic investigation into the Kennedy assassination. Chaotically mixing temporal locations, the presidential jet arrives in Dallas. The soundtrack tells us that "the doors (of the jet) fly open." In the accompanying image, however, the viewer sees a television commercial in which doors of a refrigerator fly open. Thus, the loss of President Kennedy is presented within a larger narrative of national tragedy in which advertising imagery contaminates the culture. REPORT then pursues its use of juxtapositional irony further, equating the devastating trauma of President Kennedy's death with the atomic bomb. As the viewer is presented with a stock footage image of the atomic mushroom cloud, a reporter tells us of the weather during Kennedy's visit to Dallas: "The weather couldn't be better. We have a brilliant sun at this moment." The film constructs this metaphor of reaping what one sows through imagery of the classical Hollywood horror film, FRANKENSTEIN (1931, James Whale). Dr. Frankenstein is seen firing up his generators, intercut with shots of Kennedy in his casket, which implies that the death of President Kennedy is to be comprehended as a monstrous consequence of the cold war and the atomic age. The film ends bitterly, directing its critique of an America that produced the assassination of President Kennedy against the nation's large corporations. Found footage of a woman operating an IBM electric stock trading device ends the film, as she pushes the button labeled, "Sell." Thus, an America that produced the assassination of its hero has been sold out-by the atomic age and by corporations. Hence, REPORT produces a complex historiographic analysis of America in the 1960s that far transcends its status as the experimental "found footage work" of an individualistic avant-garde artist, Bruce Conner, who might otherwise be considered as interested solely in a formalistic manipulation of film in order to heighten the viewer's awareness of cinema as a system of representation and expression.

A final note of importance concerns the ways in which 1960s American avant-garde cinema uses images of outer space. Both canonical and understudied avant-garde films of the 1960s are haunted by abstract imagery directly tied to the fascination with space in American culture throughout the 1960s. The fact that this fascination was the direct result of the space race is a little-appreciated facet in studying the avant-garde. From this point of view, DOG STAR MAN (Stan Brakhage, 1964) emerges as one of many cultural manifestations of the cold war-driven space race. To study the avant-garde of the 1960s from such a position is to directly challenge our understanding not only of the avant-garde, but of its relationship to 1960s culture writ large.

American avant-garde cinema in the early 1960s was marked by the extremely precarious financing for the films, most often drawn from personal funds. The origins of that cinema, moreover, were strongly alternative and remained focused in the Beat scene and counterculture communities of San Francisco and New York City. The decade's leading sustainer and promoter of this avant-garde, Jonas Mekas, has documented the various "showcases" he ran during the 1960s for experimental films of all sorts. The New Bowery Theater on St. Mark's Place in New York City, for example, was closed by police after the seizure of FLAMING CREATURES in 1964. Although many cinemas, especially in Greenwich Village, hosted such screenings from time to time during the 1960s, avant-garde films never truly found a sustainable home in the established exhibition venues of movie theaters-either in New York City or elsewhere.³² Beyond screenings in clubs or coffeehouses, exhibition of avant-garde cinema became far more common in the museum and gallery world and eventually made inroads to college and university campuses, which significantly increased its cultural presence nationwide. The founding of the National Endowment for the Arts in 1966, and the subsequent establishment of arts councils in many states over the next several years, meant increased funding for avant-garde cinema production and exhibition from the public treasury, although most of this money quickly became earmarked for museums, rather than for individual artists and filmmakers. By that time experimental film-already attracting generous grants attention from the Ford Foundation and other private organizationswas well along the path of becoming institutionalized.³³ The American avant-garde cinema was at its most provocative and challenging in the early years of the decade, when its daring and radical alternative visions of human logic, sex, drugs, and cinema stood out so explosively against the background of a still quiescent mainstream culture.

To return to the chapter's opening, these films demonstrate that the avant-garde cinema of the 1960s emerged from a position of anger. Many different avant-garde films of the period emerge as being fueled "by anger," not just a film by (Kenneth) Anger, but by a multitude of others as well. From Duke's anger at racial oppression in THE COOL WORLD to that angry response to President Kennedy's assassination as explored in REPORT, we can see in the 1960s avant-garde a bilious frustration with the status quo in all forms. Such anger is given both social expression, as in Go Go Go's gendered reworking of the home movie, and textual expression, as in the cage-like aesthetic space of THE BRIG (1964, Jonas Mekas). To return to BLONDE COBRA's apocalyptic ending phrase, "What went wrong?," the answer lies in the breakdown of the American social order during the 1960s. The avant-garde's response was angry and refused to remain silent, choosing instead to engage aesthetically, thematically, and ideologically with a sense of wrong-ness that was not yet self-evident to mainstream Americans. The origins of these sentiments were most emphatically expressed in the experimental thinking and art of the avant-garde that rejected not only America's rigid cultural conventions and its misguided public posturing, but which also challenged the fundamental cultural assumptions of America at their core. In their attack upon the very logic of an entertainment cinema, and in their uncompromising creation of liberated visions of alternative realities, the avant-garde films of the 1960s constituted a challenge not only to the conventions of American culture but to its deeper purposes as well.

Notes

1. In fact, Juan A. Suarez, Bike Boys, Drag Queens, and Superstars: Avant-Garde, Mass Culture, and Gay Identities in the 1960s Underground Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), pp.141 ff., argues that SCORPIO RISING is "the most representative film of the 1960s American underground cinema."

2. Anger's authorial pun is especially significant when read against the backdrop of the major academic works of criticism of the 1960s American avant-garde cinema. The birth of this tradition can he directly traced to P. Adams Sitney's 1974 book, Visionary Film: The American Avant-Garde (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974). Drawing upon the work of the literary critic Harold Bloom, Sitney uses Romanticism as his framework for understanding the American experimental cinema of the sixties. For example, in the midst of his analysis of SCORPIO RISING, Sitney argues: "After his own ritual costuming to the sound of 'Hit the Road, Jack,' ending in his putting on rings quite like the opening of Inauguration [of the Pleasure Dome], Scorpio takes a sniff of cocaine. Here we have an exultant image of Romantic liberation when the most interiorized of the songs in the film, 'Heat Wave,' is combined with an image on the television of birds escaping from a cage, and then, amid two frame flashes of bright red, a gaudy, purple picture of Dracula. We see in one or two seconds of cinema the re-creation of a high Romantic, or Byronic myth of the paradox of liberation (p.119)."

Sitney assumes that American avant-garde filmmakers, through their belief in the ideologies of individualism and liberation, exist in an artistic line that can be traced back to such libertine poets as Byron. Subsequently, it is this unyielding belief in the Romantic artist that has been the lynchpin for every serious consideration of the American avant-garde cinema of the sixties. Given this premise, it is in no way surprising that Sitney's hook is organized around individual filmmakers' idiosyncratic contributions to the experimental cinema. For example, his chapter "The Magus" is devoted to the films of Kenneth Anger, whereas "Major Mythopoeia" focuses on the sixties work of Stan Brakhage (pp.93 ff.; pp.211 ff.).

Historical writing and criticism of the sixties avant-garde cinema have maintained the Romantic organizational structures of Sitney's work, even while purportedly questioning those assumptions. Three otherwise exceptionally valuable books participate in this procedure: David James's Allegories of Cinema, Lauren Rabinovitz's Points of Resistance, and Juan Suarez's Bike Boys, Drag Queens, and Superstars. While each of these books provide post-structuralist critiques of humanism, individualism, and Romanticism, each one also contradictorily adopts essentially the same organizational structure as Sitney's approach.

3. It is not at all certain that Mekas would have seen such a recently released European film by the time filming began on HALLELUJAH THE HILLS. However, the argument asserted here merely relies on an historical and social confluence between the narrative structures of the two films, not on any claims grounded in authorial intention.

4. Janet Staiger, "Finding Community in the Early 1960s: Underground Cinema and Sexual Politics," in Hilary Radner and Moya Luckett, eds., Swinging Single: Representing Sexuality in the 1960s (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), p.39.

5. Paul Arthur, "Routines of Emancipation: Alternative Cinema in the Ideology and Politics of the Sixties," in David E. James, ed., To Free the Cinema (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), p.19.

6. See Ernest Callenbach, "Looking Backward," Film Quarterly 22, no.1 (1968). Also, Annette Michelson, "Film and the Radical Aspiration," in Film Culture Reader (New York: Praeger, 1970), pp.404-421.

7. See Arthur, "Routines of Emancipation," p.28.

8. Warhol's "factory" was in fact modeled on the concept of the artist's studio, imported from the traditional art world. Nonetheless, Warhol was invoking the discourse of mass production as an assault against the Hollywood studio system's Taylorist mode of filmmaking.

9. For more on the work of Andy Warhol, see Stephen Koch, Stargazer: The Life, World and Films of Andy Warhol, rev. ed. (New York: Marion Boyars, 1991).

10. For a good discussion of the Beats and their geographic moorings, see Dennis McNally, Jack Kerouac, the Beats, and America (New York: Random House, 1979).

11. See Arthur, "Routines of Emancipation," pp.28, 29.

12. Arthur Marwick, The Sixties: Cultural Revolution in Britain, France, Italy, and The United States, c.1958-c.1974 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998).

13. Mark J. Huisman, "Canyon Cinema: A History Worth Remembering," Independent (July 1998): 36-41.

14. Wheeler Winston Dixon, The Exploding Eye: A Re-Visionary History of 1960s American Experimental Cinema (Albany: SUNY Press, 1997), p.29.

15. Ibid.

16. Quoted in ibid.

17. James states, "[This book] argues the need to jettison the essentialist binary notions between the aesthetic and the political avant-gardes and between those avant-gardes and mass culture that film history has inherited from art history and from the ideology of modernism in general" (Allegories of Cinema: American Film in the Sixties [Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1989], p.4).

18. For more on the Beats, see David Sterritt, Mad To Be Saved: The Beats, the '50s, and Film (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1998), and The Rolling Stone Book of the Beats: The Beat Generation and American Culture (New York: Hyperion, 1999).

19. The Marie Menken films that I have studied closely are DRIPS IN STRIPS (1961) and Go Go Go (1964); for Joyce Wieland, WATER SARK (1965), 1933 (1967), and CATFOOD (1968).

20. For a detailed, personal account of how the sixties served as the cultural soil for the Stonewall revolution, see Martin Duberman, Stonewall (New York: Dutton, 1993). For a more academic take on the differences between the East Coast and West Coast gay communities in the sixties, see John D'Emilio's chapters in Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities: The Making of a Homosexual Minority in the United States, 1940-1970 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983). Chapter 9 explores the New York City-based community whereas chapter to examines the San Francisco Bav area community.

21. FLAMING CREATURES is probably the most notorious of the 1960s American avant-garde films. The prime organizer of the New York city avant-garde scene, Jonas Mekas, was arrested for exhibiting it, and Susan Sontag devoted an entire essay to the film in her renowned collection of cultural criticism, Against Interpretation (New York: Laurel Publishing, 1966).

22. I take the term "imperfect cinema" from Nelson Pereira dos Santos, the South American filmmaker. In his explication of Italian Neo-Realism's influence on Brazil's "Cinema Nuovo," dos Santos argues: "Neo-realism taught us, in sum, that it was possible to make films in the streets; that we did not need studios; that we could film using average people rather than known actors; that the technique could be imperfect, as long as the film was truly linked to the national culture and expressed that culture." Quoted by John King in Magical Reels: A History of Cinema in Latin America (London: Verso, 1990), p.107. I believe this concept, referring to all cinemas that resist high gloss Hollywood studio style, similarly applies to the American avant-garde cinema of the sixties as represented by a film like BLOND COBRA.

23. The two major biographies of Maria Montez were published in her native country of the Dominican Republic: Pablo Clase, Maria Montez: mujer y estrella (Santo Domingo de Guzman: Editorial del Nordeste, 1985) and Margarita Vicens de Morales, Maria Montea, su vida (Santo Domingo: Editoia Corripio, 1982). No biographies of Maria Montez are available in English, although a short biography of her appears in Thomas G. Aylesworth and John S. Bowman, The World Almanac of Who's Who of Film (New York: Pharos, 1987). Montez's star image spoke to some gay male spectators in the sixties because, tragically, she abused her body to meet absurd patriarchal and heterosexist standards of beauty and success. Richard Dyer studies a similar phenomenon using the case of Judy Garland in his book, Heavenly Bodies: Film Stars and Society (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1986), p.141. These images are directly linked to the international history of the avant-garde cinema, most particularly to the "city symphony" films, such as BERLIN: SYMPHONY OF A GREAT CITY (1927) and MAN WITH A MOVIE CAMERA (1929).

24. Shakespeare is a frequent intertextual referent in American avant-garde cinema of the sixties. For example, LONESOME COWBOYS (1967, Andy Warhol) uses the nurse from ROMEO AND JULIET in its intertextual reworking of the Hollywood Western.

25. In this sense-the avant-garde movie as a critical variant of the home movie-the work of Stan Brakhage is heavily influenced by Marie Menken.

26. Both Michael Snow and Joyce Wieland are Canadians. However, they both did their work in the avant-garde cinema of the 1960s while living in New York City, and that work is considered correctly to he a part of American cinema. The Museum of Modern Art's Circulating Film Catalog, for example, lists Snow's films of the late-1960s with the United States as the national designation.

27. For more on Michael Snow and structural cinema, see Scott Macdonald's chapter on WAVELENGTH in Avant-Garde Film/Motion Studies (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993); Teresa DeLauretis's analysis of Michael Snow in Alice Doesn't: Feminism/Seiniotics/ Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982); William Wees, "Balancing Eye and Mind: Michael Snow," in Light Moving in Time: Studies in the Visual Aesthetics of Avant-Garde Film (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992); and James Peterson's "Rounding Up the Usual Suspects: The Minimal Strain and Interpretive Schemata," in Dreams of Chaos, Visions of Order: Understanding the American Avant-garde Cinema (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1994). P. Adams Sitney coined the term "structural cinema" in his seminal 1969 essay "Structural Film," Film Culture 47 (Summer 1969): 1.

28. Dixon, Exploding Eye, p.158.

29. Michael Snow, unpublished Letter to Paul Monaco and Charles Harpole, April 6, 1999, p.2.

30. Ibid.

31. Jonas Mekas, "Showcases I Ran in the Sixties," in James, ed., To Free the Cinema, pp.323. 324.

32. See the excellent discussion and criticism provided in Lauren Rahinowitz, "Wearing the Critic's Hat: History, Critical Discourses, and the American Avant-Garde Cinema," in James, ed., To Free the Cinema, pp.268-283.