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Fisher, like many of his contemporaries, embraced rule-based methods for his
work. The Oulipo group, an international collective on a parallel track in the
realm of experimental literature, also embraced arbitrary constraint as a means
of creative liberation. The group posed their purpose as a definition, as recounted
by member Jean Lescure: “Oulipians: rats who must build the labyrinth from
which they propose to escape.” Understanding the inherent paradoxes further
enriched the result, much as it did for Fisher. The rule to exhaust permutational
possibilities between sound and image in Picture and Sound Rushes (73)
was designed to comically undercut Fisher’s quasi-instructional efforts; a similar
premise reappears in
Projection Instructions (76), this time as both text and spoken commands
for the projectionist to follow. Fisher has described the film itself as a score,
which has elicited widely varying interpretations.
Standard Gauge (84) abandoned the absolute rigor of his previous films
in favor of something looser, though no less thoroughly considered, in spirit
reminiscent of a 19th-century scrapbook. It stands as a temporal repository of
discarded film stock (sometimes single frames) to which Fisher had a personal
connection and deep emotional attachment, belied by the measured tone of his
narration. Toward the beginning, Fisher confides, “I’ve never seen
a piece of 35 that I didnít want to pick up and look at.” The pleasures
of this tactile connection to beauty, to craft, and to history are nowhere clearer
than when a fragment of Hindenburg footage appears midway through the film. Not
only does it forge a link to Bruce Conner’s A Movie, in which
the dirigible also appears (and about which Fisher has expressed great ambivalence),
it also calls forth a fetishistic awe at the association, unstated yet undeniably
present, between the airship it depicts and the nitrate stock on which its image
was captured, ready to combust with just an errant spark. Standard Gauge is
laced throughout with a sense of loss, whether it’s the ephemerality of
film stock, a missed opportunity at B-movie stardom, or the closing of an IB
Technicolor printing plant in Hollywood, victim to economic forces that outsourced
the work to China. Toward the end Fisher says, “Here are some pieces of
film that I think are interesting to look at.” What
follows is a tender coda: miscellaneous frames pass before us in reverential
silence. That closing sentiment set out the premise for (
), a very different
type of found-footage film, drawing from dozens of features rendered more or
less anonymous by the guiding limitation: only close-up insert shots are used.
On the surface, it’s unlike anything Fisher’s ever produced. But
wait: inserts are the onscreen counterparts to the unsung subjects that Fisher
has always favored; they are, as he wrote in an accompanying statement, “far
from the traffic in faces and bodies … that are the heart of narrative
film … [T]hey have
a job to do and they do it.” Guns predominate, and clocks and watches run
a distant second. These close-ups without stars are sequenced to follow a predetermined
rule, though all we know of it is that no two inserts from the same film appear
consecutively to one another (though sometimes they’re separated by just
one shot). In certain passages, we’re teased by intermittent patterns that
suggest a cross-cutting that predates Griffith.
So here again are an arbitrary set of constraints. What’s different this
time is that they’re hidden, in order to “liberate the inserts from
their stories. The shots are raised from necessity to freedom.” Over the
course of the film, we realize that narrative (even a radically reconfigured
one) has been thwarted, so we look for other types of order. Weíre now in unfamiliar
territory, and this new freedom, in turn, serves up a whole new paradox: even
as (
) adheres to its
own course, each insert generates an imaginary follow-through to the actions
and gestures it depicts. Between these two movements, waves of association collide.
As Fisher’s films often proceed directly from the consequences of their
immediate predecessors, are these stray signals of his next step forward?
Jim Supanick is a videomaker and writer whose latest video, Seed
Sold Back to the Farmer, will premiere in spring 2006.
© 2005 by Jim Supanick
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