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footage of San Francisco, Gehr made Eureka. A film of Gehr's of 1970 is entitled History and, through its simplicity, it conjures up fantasies about early film-allusion to what might have been, and what historically couldn't have been done or made then as opposed to what is possible now. History is a film of its own movement. It is an oscillating field of black-and-white emulsion in which colors appear as after-images, and illusions of objects and patterns suggest themselves to the willing and open viewer. By its title, through its means, all that it omits, and its silence, it forces one to think and to think back. 

But what is the relevance of primitive film? We know that in modern art there has been intense interest in the primitive on the part of the Cubists as well as those involved in other forms of abstraction. As Meyer Schapiro points out, modern artists were among the first to appreciate primitive work "as true art". The primitive brought new insights to form in modern work. "But," Schapiro writes, "with all the obvious resemblances, modern paintings and sculptures differ from the primitive in structure and content. What in primitive art belongs to an established world of collective beliefs and symbols arises in modern art as an individual expression, bearing the marks of a free, experimental attitude to forms." And he goes on to say that there is a sense of kinship felt between the two.12.

Of course in film one is talking about 65 to 75 years apart rather than the thousands that Schapiro is speaking of. But the issues of form, perception, and that curious and interesting point about collective beliefs and symbols in the primitive as opposed to individual expression in the modern are relevant here. Can we talk about collective beliefs for those who made early films? Perhaps we can consider them as that body of forms from popular culture of the 19th century-types of spectacle and tableaux from the magic lantern and vaudeville. And they were employed by the artists and/or small businessmen working with a few people or alone. Artists of the avant-garde working today may deal with form for altogether other reasons and from other points of view, but they may share visual-stylistic kinship with the cinema of the primitives.

The individual has a place in both films: the avant-garde artist today and the entrepreneur of the 19th century. The machine used by both is a product of the industrial revolution. Early machines were simple. The machinery, meaning the whole apparatus of the cine-ma, took over to create a complex business and industrial situation-a collective form and a mass enterprise beyond that of the individual artist and the entrepreneur. But the artist of the avant-garde, working alone, still using the basically and comparatively simple machine, stands against the large scale cine-ma, opting for forms which are disruptive and discontinuous with the mainstream and choosing the freedom of his or her own expression.

So there is a kinship in working procedures and a sympathy for the construction of early film that carries into the recent avant-garde. But one could say that about the kinships of the working procedures of the earlier avant-gardes as well. But unlike the Dada and Surrealist related work of the '20s  and the films of the '40s and '50s, the recent work expressions those interests in starting over again, in deconstructing existing forms and replacing them with simpler ones. As Mekas said about Warhol, a certain kind of simplicity forces one to look and to begin to see all over again. The less is more of recent film helps create the attraction to and an affection for early work, an affinity between the naive and the sophisticated.


The marvel of early films, particularly multiple-shot fiction works, is often the look of discontinuity, of anarchy, and of the strange and the bizarre. But were they discontinuous for their own time? Did audiences expect full causal narratives? Did they expect narratives at all? What did they see? We can't exactly and entirely answer the last  question, though we do know, of course, that they brought other assumptions and expectations than those that we bring to the theatre, and they probably saw in a radically different way based on their cultural data and conditioning. The cinema was a novelty. Possibilities were being tested in nonfiction and fiction. When one saw short movies at the end of a vaudeville routine on thought in terms of variety and spectacle, farce and humor. It is more than likely that when a plot of inchoate narrative was subsumed by humor, slapstick and spectacles of all kinds, the disruption or discontinuity was something already assimilated through the experience of other forms. A string of events, a lack of causality, a reconstruction and repetition of events from several points of view were probably digested without questioning. The anarchy, seeming destruction, bizarre plots and characters were no surprise, but were part of popular lore from other forms.

However, from afar it becomes relevant, for we can see these films as discontinuous, as radical from our point of view-from the point of view of someone interested for and to our own purposes: the disruption; the deconstruction of narrative; the mismatches, the events unrelated to causality organized paratatically; and spectacle-in and of itself, seemingly a tool to foreground narrative, with humor in its various forms of slapstick and grotesquery as type of spectacle-an exploding discontinuity. Of course what also be-comes relevant are the use of a static of stationary camera over, and more than, camera movement; the long take; the far shot and the kinds of compositions created with overall movement in the frame; use of diagonals in which we discover extraordinary compositions that substitute camera movement as well as an amazing wealth of detail. Sometimes the overall movement within the frame becomes abstract-abstracts the action and distracts from the action. 13

There is a delight in this, a practical one for the filmmaker/viewer and a theoretical one for the critic. We read the work to suit our needs and interests even while we may know that such work was not necessarily radical for its time, in its form, although the machine itself was new, and in that sense, perhaps in itself radical. There is, as Schapiro suggests, a difference in structure and content between primitive and modern art. Thus, when older work is literally and physically used by recent filmmakers, it is transformed. Ja-cobs shows us a triptych, with the original Tom, Tom the Piper's Son at beginning and end, and his new Tom, Tom, a rephotographed manipulation of the time


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[[Image]] Ernie Gehr, Reverberation, 1969.