No one has heard much about movies like Breath-Death, Cosmic Ray, and Stone Sonata, but now the Ford Foundation has begun pouring tuns of gold on the happy heads of the people who made them. The foundation has decided to encourage the art of film as practiced by lone stylists whose pictures are usually brief, almost always 16-mm., and sometimes comprehensible only to themselves.
Accordingly, Ford sought a list of 177 candidates, invited them to send sample films, then picked twelve winners. Most got $10,000. The total grant was $118,500.
Presumably, the foundation screened all the pictures they prized, but viewed collectively, the winning films are a varietal riot. Some are mad, some methodical. Some are suitable for the living room and others for a smoker at the Elks. This one is conventional. That one is wildly experimental. This honest. That phony. How one panel of judges could have agreed on the twelve grantees defeats the unfoundationed imagination.
Some of the winners: Stanley Vanderbeek, 32, is a tireless man with scissors. He cuts pictures out of magazines—all kinds of magazines—and stirs them into film clips in a kind of stiff puppet action that writes a curious chapter in the manual of animation. In Skulduggery, Harry Truman comes popping out of the mouth of a sumptuous girl; then a hammer comes out of her nose and knocks Harry back between her chops. Breath-Death shows Harpo Marx playing his harp on the edge of a smoking battlefield. Khrushchev appears, sneezes, and Hitler pops up and says Gesundheit. A Merlin-like figure suddenly gets stuck in the back of the neck with a flying table fork. A nude appears, with two small skulls where her breasts should be. Another girl lies in bed caressing a TV set on the pillow beside her. Reading downbed from the TV set is a spread-out man's shirt and a pair of trousers. Kind of anemic, this lover, but what a fat head.
In all, Vanderbeek showed Ford three of his five-to-ten-minute "Visible Fill'ms"—each no doubt having some subtle message that anyone with millions to give away would instantly grasp. In A La Mode, for example, a girl carries her breasts on a tray with miscellaneous fruits. An automobile drives up hill and down dale across a pair of giant breasts. A woman's face comes off, revealing an opera .house inside her head. A bird comes out of a pore in her back.
Vanderbeek, a New Yorker now heading upstate, is about to move his wife and two children into a house he is making out of old water tanks. "I think the film's only hope is experimental cinema," he says. "The whole commercial cinema of neoreality is fundamentally pornographic and does not contribute to one's soul. It is not sensitive. The cinema needs people of private vision. We are living in an avalanche of entertainment fallout, and how does one survive when bombarded by clumsy ideas? The film should be in the hands of poets rather than just slick, literate stylists."