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Stan Brakhage, 37, a husky hypochondriac who lives with his wife and five children in a log cabin in Colorado, has radically rewritten movie grammar. By fragmenting his films into frames, Brakhage has established the frame in cinema as equivalent to the note in music; whereupon he proceeds to make films with frames the way a composer makes music with notes. His Art of Vision, an attempt to do for cinema what Bach did for music with his Art of the Fugue, is an ambitious example of what Brakhage calls retinal music. One problem: to watch the violently flickering flick for 4½ hours, a spectator would require steel eyeballs.
Salvation in a Sugar Cube. The front ranks of the avant-garde are rapidly expanding. Stan VanDerBeek, Gregory vlarkopoulos, Bruce Conner, Robert Breer, Ed Emshwiller and Harry Smith have all done work of a high order. An even newer and no less gifted generation of moviemakers—Ben Van Meter, Ken Jacobs, Bruce Baillie—is rising with a whir. Romantic, rebellious and vaguely worried, the new boys come on like strangers in a world they never scripted. Some of them celebrate the horrors of modern life. They exhibit America as an air-conditioned cemetery for the walking dead, the war in Viet Nam as pure hell, and L.BJ. as a rather silly devil with his tail in hot water.
Some of them, attempting to find salvation in a sugar cube, make something called "psychedelic cinema." Their intention is to reproduce on the screen what they see while they are in the acid bag. Even farther out is something called "expanded cinema" or "mixed-media environments," a sort of avant-garde circus in which movies, theater, recorded music, kinetic sculpture and light paintings are fused into a single engulfing experience.
Like all other experimental art, the no-longer-underground cinema is sometimes silly or pointlessly shocking. And sooner or later, the experimenters will have to address themselves to what remains the movies' main function—intelligible storytelling. But with all its excesses, the new cinema is bound to stimulate the medium. For one thing, it has already produced a modest but substantial body of exciting work. For another, it serves as a salon des refusés for aspects of the art rejected by the commercial cinema. Even though many Hollywood directors write off the experimenters as no-talent amateurs, some of their notions are already being absorbed into the visual vocabulary of the media. The men who make television commercials, for instance, regularly rent big batches of avant-garde films and ransack them for ideas.
Can the practitioners of the new cinema seriously expect to keep the underground overground? Jonas Mekas is certain that the answer is yes. He has organized a Film-Makers Cooperative to rent experimental films; he has 600 films in his catalogue and a growing list of theaters all across the U.S. lined up to exhibit them. "You might say," Mekas murmurs with a sly little grin, "that the lunatics are taking over the asylum." Nothing necessarily wrong with that. Every so often an art needs to go a little crazy.