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FILM COMMENT
November/December 2002
A STITCH IN TIME: NYFF AVANT-GARDE
by Nicole Armour
above: The Decay of Fiction
Harry Smith's legacy suggests a peculiar paradox. He collected and preserved ephemera-paper airplanes, Ukrainian painted eggs, string art-yet destroyed many of his own films. Even those that remain seem fragile, near dissolution. Since cinema is used to record, document, and preserve experience, it's ironic that Smith's own film work seems as perishable as a string figure. Perhaps this reflected his view that it is uniquely human to want to make something by hand, however trivial. Smith's Film Number 15: Untitled Seminole Patchwork Film was just one of the works that embodied this notion in the sixth edition of Views From the Avant-Garde, a two-day, eight-program event that consistently generated an ideal intimacy between artist and audience.
Static and spare, Smith's ten-minute film is a catalogue of details of quilts shot in close-up. The montage of geometric patterns and colors reveals a discrepancy between the regular, repeated shapes and the irregularities produced by hand-stitching. Periodically, Smith cuts to the quilts' undersides to reveal the jumble of thread behind their precise designs. Though the quilts' patterns appear simple, the mottled clusters on their reverse sides suggest an unfamiliar language-one which, to the initiated, represents years of tradition and rigorous craftsmanship. Smith gives us a precious opportunity to view these quilts in a new light, and in doing this, he foregrounds the extent to which their language is as complex and highly personal as the one he speaks through film.
Also inspired by film's capacity to record and preserve, German filmmaker Heinz Emigholz traveled around Switzerland and the Midwest to complete Maillart's Bridges and Sullivan's Banks. Both are biographical portraits of 20th-century architects (Robert Maillart and Louis Sullivan) as represented by the bridges and banks they designed, which are presented as they exist today, in order of their creation. Emigholz's stationary shots capture the manner in which these artists expressed themselves personally within the parameters of engineering. Grouping structures that would otherwise require weeks of travel to view, he condenses the partial biographies of his respective subjects into these compact films, which run to 24 and 38 minutes. In so doing, he's created the cinematic equivalent of an idea Sullivan expressed in his lectures, when he spoke of our potential capacity to intuit life through the man-made forms around us.
In keeping with Harry Smith's affection for ephemera, Emigholz's The Basis of Make-Up (II) adopts a different approach to biography. Again working from sync-sound footage shot with a fixed camera in multiple locations, the filmmaker meticulously records the contents of 69 notebooks compiled over 16 years - one part of the director's own creative output. We're shown every page in every book, in shots that last a few seconds at the most. The handwritten texts are impossible to read, but we glimpse hundreds of images clipped from magazines and newspapers, representing years of pop cultural detritus pasted onto virtually every page. Like the monuments in his architecture films, this collection of writing and collage effectively turns The Basis of Make-Up (II) into a profile of a man in dialogue with his own culture. Emigholz has taken Sullivan's message to heart, ensuring that his own ideas will endure because they've been given material form, catalogued on paper and definitively recorded on film.
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