PDF: DISCONTINUOUS FILMS - Film Studies Association of Canada

Frame enlargements from The Maltese Cross Movement (Keewatin Dewdney).

CINÉ-DOCUMENTS
KEEWATIN A. DEWDNEY
DISCONTI N UOUS FI LMS
Résumé: Ce document inédit de 1967 reflète non seulement l’esprit novateur de
l’avant-garde des années soixantes, mais fait aussi la promotion d’une nouvelle
esthétique cinématographique basée sur la mécanique du projecteur.
Editor’s Note: This document, which exists only in mimeographed form (and is produced
here in its original form—including typographical and spelling errors), was written
in 1967, while Keewatin Dewdney was a graduate student in mathematics at the
University of Michigan. In the late sixties and early seventies Dewdney also made several
short experimental films, three of which are still in distribution. 1 In 1968 he
returned to Canada to take a position in the Computer Science Department at the
University of Western Ontario, where he is now an Emeritus Professor.
“Discontinuous Films” not only reflects the spirit of exploration and innovation
that characterized North American experimental/avant-garde/underground film of
the 1960s, but also identifies a particular development in avant-garde filmmaking
that was just beginning to be recognized. While clearly inspired by Tony Conrad’s The
Flicker (USA, 1966), Dewdney’s essay/manifesto offers insights and arguments that
go beyond the significance of “flicker effects.” It offers, in effect, a new aesthetics of
cinema based on the mechanical operation of the movie projector.
Although sporadic experiments in discontinuous film appear in a few early
experimental films, an identifiable “school” or “movement” of discontinuous films
only emerged in the 1960s. In addition to The Flicker and Dewdney’s own masterwork,
Maltese Cross Movement (USA, 1967), notable examples include Peter
Kubelka’s Schwechater (Austria, 1958) and Arnulf Rainer (Austria, 1960), Robert
Breer’s Blazes (USA, 1961) and Fist Fight (USA, 1964), Pierre Hébert’s Op Hop–Hop
Op (Canada, NFB, 1966) and Autour de la perception (Canada, NFB, 1968), Keith
Rodan’s Cinetude 2 (Canada, 1969), Beverly and Tony Conrad’s Straight and
Narrow (USA, 1970), and a series of stunning flicker films by Paul Sharits: Ray Gun
Virus (USA,1966), Piece Mandala/End War (USA, 1966), N:O:T:H:I:N:G (USA,1968),
and T,O,U,C,H,I,N,G (USA,1968). 2
CANADIAN JOURNAL OF FILM STUDIES • REVUE CANADIENNE D’ÉTUDES CINÉMATOGRAPHIQUES
VOLUME 10 NO. 1 • SPRING • PRINTEMPS 2001 • pp 96-105

98 Volume 10 No. 1
DISCONTINUOUS FILMS
1. The Flicker
Tony Conrad’s The Flicker is a raw, archetypal
statement about the nature of film, a
statement which few understood. The Flicker
revealed at one stroke that the projector, not
the camera, is the film-maker’s true medium.
This is not to say film-makers are unaware of
the projector and screen, the movie-house environment
(they must learn to visualize a screen
in the viewfinder of their camera). But this
does say that the very use of the camera as a
film-making tool has imposed the assumption of
continuity on film, an assumption entirely foreign
to the projector. Yet continuity has hypnotized
both Hollywood and the experimental
almost equally.
For some reason, we are now released from
continuity. Warhol fulfills a very important
satiric function in pushing the continuous scene
to its outer limits. This is why his films possess
a drollity beyond their subject matter.
It’s like saying “Here’s continuity, Jack!”
Camera Vs. Projector
During the 18 th and 19 th centuries, a great
deal of energy was expanded in a search for
“moving pictures”. Some of these were: phantasmagorias,
peepshows, dioramas, magic lantern
shows, phenakisticopes, viviscopes, chronophotographs,
kinetoscopes, etc. The great majority
of these devices sought a direct translation of
some image or series of images into a moving
picture. The emphasis was clearly on the theatrical
environment, the release of light. With
Marey’s Rifle-Camera (1882) we have the true

precursor of the modern movie camera and the
beginning of a great split in the capture of
light (camera) and its release (projector). With
photography it had become possible to make
instant pictures and only a few more instants
would be required to make a continuous run of
pictures. It was in building the projector that
the late 19 th and early 20 th Century built better
than it knew. For, ideally suited as it is to
the projection of whatever the motion picture
camera photographs, the projector is a MACHINE
CAPABLE OF PROJECTING TWENTY FOUR TRANSPARENCIES
IN SEQUENCE EVERY SECOND.
The motion picture camera is quite limited
in function. Generally speaking, it gathers
light onto a sequence of frames in rapid order;
it manufactures only continuous scenes; it will
display whatever is put into it and is completely
unlimited in the environment of the
frame.
We are now in the process of being released
from the assumption of continuity and the cinematic
schools this assumption has imposed.
Delightful as it has been, continuity has given
us little more than a visual re-hash of the literary
experience (poems included). Anyone
objecting violently to this statement surely has
a big stake in continuous cinema. The same person
will feel enormously threatened by discontinuous
film. At the Fourth Ann Arbor Film
Festival last year, many in the auditorium
groaned during The Flicker, not bored but
frightened.
An Experiment
The sort of Insight provided by William M.
Ivins and Marshall McLuhan is particularly valu-
CJFS • RCEC 99

able when applied to the projector’s environment.
For example, Ivins, by isolating a sense
in Art and Geometry is able to make the most
obvious statements about touch and yet draw the
most amazing conclusions from them. (Greek temples
look the way they do because they are
appreciated by the ‘hand’ and not the ‘eye’.)
In a room is a projector and screen. People
who have never seen a projector (or camera)
before are brought into the room, given cans of
clear and dark leader, editing tools, paint,
bleach, whatever one may think of. They are told
only that in a years time we want to see some
interesting films.
After projecting the various kinds of leader,
our people become bored. To be less bored they
would begin to make marks on the leader. Yes,
much better. They would not be very likely to
animate because animation grows out of a consciousness
of the camera. This means a rapid
appearance on the screen of designs flashing by
at subliminal speeds. If our people were all
intelligent, creative, etc., one would see at
the end of the year a more exciting collection
of films than at Cannes, New York, Ann Arbor or
anywhere. If they ultimately invented a camera,
continuous run would be regarded as a ‘gimic’ on
theirs, just as single frame is on ours.
Hopefully, this conceptual experiment has
placed the reader outside his familiar film
environment long enough to realize the tyrrany
of the motion picture camera.
The logical result of using a camera in filming
is the use of the splicer. Splices used to
bother a good many people, that is, not the
appearance of splice-bars on the screen but the
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sudden cut from one continuous scene to the
next. It bothered people because here, for one
fraction of a second, the true power of the projector
was revealed. The cuts were bandaged with
dissolves. Considering how much more expensive a
dissolve is, it really is amazing that filmmakers
(including Hollywood) ever used them, the
conventions that came to be associated with dissolvers
(time passing, place changing) have
nothing to do with their true function. Splices
do not bother people like Conrad who spend most
of a year doing them for The Flicker or Brakhage
who admits “one whale of an aesthetic involvement
in The Splice”. 3 This shows a healthy attitude
toward the motion picture camera, described
by Brakhage as a light-gathering instrument.
Conrad could really have done without it entirely
(like our people in the room). For if continuity
is a corollary to the camera, an aesthetic
use of splices is far removed from the continuous
scene mentality.
The Flicker is the Film
Many film-makers have begun to show a healthy
interest in discontinuity, even though sometimes
more than degree (namely insight) separates a
film like Vanderbeek’s Breathdeath from The
Flicker. Breathdeath, in no detectable rhythm,
lays down an exciting barrage of visuals. Some
of the scenes probably get down to 6 frames or
so, though prolongued use of shorter scenes is
certainly lacking. Bienstock, last year, with
Nothing Happened This Morning used a series of
very rapid zooms from many angles at once on a
single action, giving one a sense of simultaneity
and seeing the action (in this case, a young
man punching out an alarm clack) from all directions
at once. This year with Brummer’s he is
clearly on the trail of the discontinuous cine-
CJFS • RCEC 101

ma. In a restaurant a couple converse while the
camera on a trip of its own, explores them and
the restaurant interior with very fast, sharp
scenes, none of them subliminal but all contributing
to a sense of hurried excitement about
the restaurant. Bang bang bang. The NFB’s Norman
McLaren and Arthur Lipsett, though from quite
different traditions, show an awareness of discontinuous
film. McLaren in Blankety Blank, a
somewhat older production than these others,
uses a very short subliminal sequence and hues
from frame to frame, giving one a floating sense
of ‘lost’ beauty. Arthur Lipsett’s Free Fall and
Very Nice Very Nice are clean, documentary versions
of Breathdeath from the point of view of
scene length and content.
A changing sense of the function of the camera
can be attributed to Fat Feet by Red Grooms
and others, in which, against a pasteboard
facade of city, people act out stock roles as
drunks, firemen, prostitutes, etc., all of them
wearing enormous cardboard shoes. The technique
is stop-motion and the jerky, uneven movements
of the actors give the picture a nervous, hysterical
quality. One hopes that a great talent
like Larry Jordan will begin to explore discontinuity
because he is naturally equipped, as an
animator, to do it. 4
To postulate the existence of a kind of film
which as yet publicly exists in one example
alone would seem foolish were it not for the
very clearly detectable trend toward shorter and
shorter scenes, more and more discontinuous. For
convenience we will call this kind of film, a
Flicker Film, recalling that during the 20’s
films did flicker, and that in one sense at
least, the flicker is more important than the
film.
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Description and Techniques
The discontinuous or flicker film will
replace Conrad’s blacks and whites with dark and
light images. Subliminal runs (lengths of film
in which the image changes entirely from frame
to frame (will come into their own as an
aesthetic device. A kind of visual (or even
audiovisual) grammar will be built up within
each film. Hypermontage. Sound will take on an
entirely new dimension – no longer a slave to
the continuous scene, it will cease to act as a
radio or phonograph and mesh with the visual
component of the film in a way never before
imagined.
As an example of this kind of film, Gerard
Malanga was recently filmed both reading poetry
and dancing. 5 The sounds (reading and music)
were recorded on 1/4” tape and transferred to 16
m.m. sound stock. Both the reading and dancing
scenes lasted 2 1/2 minutes (one hundred feet of
film each) and the original film was painted
with black acetate ink on the base side in the
follownng manner. First, 24 frames reading, then
24 frames black, 23 frames reading, 23 frames
black, down to a frame of each. Alternate frames
were blackened for nearly a full minute after
this, after which the blackened frames occurred
in twos, then in threes, various distances
apart. The other film (dancing) was painted in
complementary fashion so that when the two films
were A and B rolled onto one print, one simply
had an alternation from one scene to the other,
an alternation whose speed was governed by how
close together blackened frames were put in the
original. The 16 m.m. sound track was cut so
that sounds would confirm to action right down
to the frame. The result was a highly interesting
study of simultaneity. The effect one might
CJFS • RCEC 103

think, would be of double exposure, but it does
not work this way at all. A powerful technique.
Since disparate images being flashed 24 per
second on a screen are almost entirely lost on
the viewer in his normal conscious state, it
would certainly help if they had been seen
before. This means starting such a film with one
or more key images which by the increasing complexity
of their context as the film progresses,
heighten the value of the image. Somewhere after
this, (one should pay close attention to the
build up of pace in The Flicker) we begin subliminal
runs which to someone just walking into
the theatre may be meaningless but which to the
clued-in audience are working a special magic
all their own. Sound, working with image, does
not merely “fill-in” the ear, but links it to
the eye to an almost sensuous extent.
Persistence of Vision.
104 Volume 10 No. 1
Keewatin Dewdney
(1967)

NOTES
Many thanks to Keewatin Dewdney for permitting this document to be published here, and
for providing some background information. Thanks, too, to Scott MacKenzie who suggested
that Dewdney’s essay be published as a “ciné-document.”
1. The Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Centre distributes Dewdney’s films, Sissors (USA,
1966), The Maltese Cross Movement (USA, 1967), and Wildwood Flower (Canada,
1971).
2. For a more extensive discussion of Maltese Cross Movement and some other examples
of discontinuous film see, William C. Wees, “The Apparatus and the Avant-Garde,” in
Film and the Future, special supplement to Cinema Canada 97 (June 1983): 41-46.
3. Stan Brakhage, “Letter from Brakhage: On Splicing,” Film Culture 35 (Winter 1964-65):
36; reprinted in Stan Brakhage, The Moving Picture Giving and Taking Book (West
Newbury, MA: Frontier Press, 1971), 23-40, and Stan Brakhage, Brakhage Scrapbook:
Collected Writings (New Palz, NY: Documentext,1982), 62-68.
4. By the time “Discontinuous Films” was written, the American experimental filmmaker,
Larry Jordan, had made several cut-out/collage animation films including, Duo
Concertantes (1964), Gymnopedies (1965), and Hamfat Asar (1965). More were to follow,
but that they satisfy Dewdney’s criteria for discontinuous films is debatable.
5. Dewdney is referring to his own film, Malanga (1967), no longer in circulation.
FILMOGRAPHY
Blinkety Blank (Canada, NFB, 1955, Norman McLaren)
Breathdeath (USA, 1964, San Vanderbeek)
Brummer’s (USA, 1967, David Bienstock)
Fat Feet (USA, 1966, Red Grooms)
The Flicker (USA, 1966, Tony Conrad)
Free Fall (Canada, NFB, 1964, Arthur Lipsett)
Nothing Happened This Morning (USA, 1965, David Bienstock)
Very Nice, Very Nice (Canada, NFB, 1961, Arthur Lipsett)
CJFS • RCEC 105

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