Screening
For the fourth program in our summer series "Sonic Visions: Experiments in Cinema and Music," join us at the Film-Makers' Cooperative on Friday, August 23rd, at 7pm, for an hour-long slate of subversive and rarely-screened films and videos from our collection about, or featuring, jazz!
*$10 SUGGESTED DONATION
**This program was originally announced as AUGUST 9th. It is now happening on AUGUST 23rd.
Program:
- Jazz Dance, Doris Chase, 1975, video, color, sound, 4 minutes
- Bridges-Go-Round, Shirley Clarke, 1959, 16mm, color, sound, 8 minutes
- Bessie Smith, Charles Levine, 1969, 16mm, B&W, sound, 14 minutes
- New York Eye and Ear Control, Michael Snow, 1964, 16mm, B&W, sound, 34 minutes
Total Run Time: 60 minutes.
Notes by Matt McKinzie:
While not an exhaustive selection of jazz or jazz-related works in our collection, the four titles in this program offer an engaging and variegated glimpse at the ways in which experimental filmmakers have invoked and explored the genre — and its delightfully amorphous, improvisational, even political potentialities — to plumb the visual and emotional possibilities of the moving image.
Doris Chase’s Jazz Dance (1975) is an early video work that was made using an outline generator. The time sequence is controlled with a slow-motion disc to render an abstract vision of dancer Gay DeLanghe interpreting Chase’s choreography. Set to an infectious score by the Uptown Lowdown Jazz Band, Jazz Dance is at once a playful avant-garde curio and an innovative convergence of music, dance, and nascent video technology. Likewise, Shirley Clarke’s Bridges-Go-Round (1959) proves a playful (and at times sinister) exploration of the genre, with Clarke’s violet, turquoise, and orange-tinged 16mm cinematography coalescing to create a dreamlike (or nightmarish) tableau of New York City’s bridges and skyscrapers. Both versions of her film are shown here: the first underscored by a surreal, free jazz-inspired electronic score by Bebe and Louis Barron, and the second accompanied by a seductive jazz number by Tao Macero.
Charles Levine’s rarely-screened found footage short Bessie Smith (1968) combines scenes of the titular blues and jazz legend in Dudley Murphy’s St. Louis Blues (1929) — an early “talkie” with an all-Black cast and the only known film in which Smith starred — with footage of 1960s Civil Rights marches and the police presence and white supremacist counter-protestors that infiltrated them. Levine’s film is soundtracked by a mélange of iconic jazz and blues numbers performed by Smith, along with an elegiac radio broadcast about Smith’s life, legacy, and tragic death from a car accident at the age of 43, read by Joseph Marzano. (Marzano notes that Smith succumbed to her injuries due to the fact that the first hospital she was brought to denied her care because she was Black). Bessie Smith emerges as not only an indelible tribute to Smith and her music, but a politically-trenchant filmic collage in which Levine reconstitutes art and artists of the past (in this case, Smith’s music and her role in Murphy’s film) to comment on the intersecting sociopolitical issues of racism, sexism, and institutional violence that are just as pertinent today as they were in the 1920s and 1960s.
The final film in the program, Michael Snow’s New York Eye and Ear Control (1964), is a fascinating 34-minute abstraction made in collaboration with Joyce Wieland and Paul Haines that combines live 16mm footage with a cutout of a woman’s silhouette and a free jazz score by Albert Ayler, Don Cherry, John Tchicai, Roswell Rudd, Gary Peacock, and Sonny Murray. The project originated with a commission Snow received from the Toronto-based organization Ten Centuries Concerts to make a film using jazz music. Having recently seen Ayler perform in concert, Snow decided to employ the musician and his quartet to spontaneously record a half-hour worth of jazz, which he then used as a springboard for his film. Snow noted:
"I was always surprised at how everybody was still bookending, as in all of previous jazz where you play a tune, play your variations, then play the tune again. I kept feeling that I didn’t want that, and particularly what I had in mind for the film, I definitely didn't want it. I wanted it as pure free improvisation as I could get."
The soundtrack for the film was recorded in Haines’ apartment (a poet who was Snow’s neighbor) in July 1964, and released a year later as an album titled New York Eye and Ear Control on the ESP-Disk label. Founded in 1963 by Bernard Stollmann, ESP-Disk would become one of the foremost purveyors of free jazz, as well as 1960s underground rock acts like the Fugs and the Godz (which are represented in the FMC’s collection with Edward English’s Fugs: Sights and Sounds of the Lower East Side and Jud Yalkut’s The Godz [both 1966]. English’s film played in an earlier program in our Sonic Visions series, “The Decade Rock Exploded,” and Yalkut’s film will screen in the next program in this series, “Jud Yalkut’s Aural Adventures”).
On the use of a woman’s silhouette in the film, and how its amalgamation with free jazz contributed to the film’s title, Snow remarked:
"In my films I’ve tried to give the sound a more pure and equal position in relation to the picture… I was hoping for an uninterrupted stream of energy against which I was going to place the almost completely static shots of the two-dimensional Walking Woman figure, either negative or positive. The picture was edited with no reference to what sound episode might accompany it. It is an attempt to make a simultaneity of ‘eye’ with ‘ear.’ And the music was created to be a movie soundtrack, not to just be ‘music.’"
While many audience members reacted negatively to Snow’s film when it first screened in Toronto, Andy Warhol and Gerard Malanga were dazzled upon the film’s New York premiere, and it has since become one of Snow’s best-known works.
Sources:
- Jason Weiss. Always in Trouble: An Oral History of ESP-Disk, the Most Outrageous Record Label in America. Wesleyan University Press, 2012, pp. 142–143.