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Creating with Clorox. To most moviegoers, these films will look like nothing they have ever seen before, even though avant-garde cinema has been around for a long time—at least since the early '20s, when Luis Bunuel and Man Ray began making surrealistic movies in Paris. But a substantial movement became possible only in the late '50s, when motion-picture technology took an exciting new turn. Film increased in sensitivity; cameras, lights, recording equipment diminished in size, weight and cost. Suddenly, almost anybody could make movies, and make them almost anywhere for almost nothing. Hundreds of young men and women began to make them.
Most of the new moviemakers agree that what matters is not the story a film tells but the images it throws on the screen. To vary and to vitalize their images, they do just about everything but what George Eastman had in mind. They tilt the camera, turn it upside down, jiggle it, wave it around, run it in slow motion, run it in fast motion, run it backwards, run it out of focus, intercut images so fast that the mind cannot register what the eye perceives.
They paint the film, scratch it with knives, bleach it with Clorox, bake it in an oven, grow mold all over it. They overexpose it, underexpose it, triple-expose it, superimpose three film tracks on a fourth, mix black and white, sepia and full color in the same shot. They split the screen into a dozen segments. They use a dozen projectors and a dozen sound tracks simultaneously.
Such kooky methods have produced some kooky movies. Los Angeles' Tom Anderson made a six-minute film in which the camera does nothing but stare at a melting sundae. New York's Stan VanDerBeek made a five-minute animation (Blacks and Whites, Days and Nights) that does nothing but illustrate dirty limericks. New York's Tony Conrad made a 30-minute movie that presents to the eye nothing but bright blank frames interspersed with solid-black frames that more and more frequently recur and recur until the spectator is confronted by an incessant and infuriating flicker that can drive him out of the theater with a splitting headache.
Through a Proctoscope. Other films offer other reasons for discreet retreat —and for police censorship, although in most parts of the U.S. the censors are in retreat too. The nude human figure, male or female, is a favorite subject of study for the new moviemakers. They look at it frequently, and sometimes with good artistic reason—as in Relativity, where Film Maker Ed Emshwiller implies the primordial relation of man to woman by superimposing a tiny photograph of his hero on the belly of a huge nude. Too often, though, they simply look at it and drool. Jack Smith's four-year-old Flaming Creatures, an incredibly tedious parody of a sexploitation picture, demonstrates how easy it is to fall asleep in the steamy midst of an hour-long transvestite orgy. Barbara Rubin's Christmas on Earth, in which an even steamier orgy is photographed, pretends to consider sex as a cosmic metaphor and looks as if it had been shot through a proctoscope.