One-shot art films

Years ago, I was in Cambridge, Mass., heading for a movie at the Brattle Street Theater, the art theater there. I can't remember what I was going to see. I went to a Kurosawa festival there, and saw a couple of Roger Corman movies one time. I also saw Todd Haynes' Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story, unavailable for years due to copyright problems. (If the Carpenters didn't sue over the use of her music, Mattel would have sued over the fact that her story was performed entirely by Barbie and Ken dolls.)

I was hanging around. I went into a bookstore. This was in the vicinity of Harvard University, so their magazine selection was sort of high brow. And I bought a copy of a magazine dealing with the subject of art film.

The one article I remember was on one-shot art films. These were unedited films that consisted of a single take.

They described some of them.

There was one where they set a camera up looking across a road. It was a sound movie, so there was some suspense as we hear a car approaching. Will it come from the left or right?

Another film showed a beer sign. It was one with an image of a mountain scene that slowly moved across. The audience couldn't tell what it was until the seam on the picture appeared.

The most interesting-sounding one was a 16mm film of a man untangling a roll of fishing line. The filmmaker had a friend who was weirdly gifted at this, so we see him untangling the line while talking about other subjects the entire time.

They mentioned Jim Jarmusch's Stranger Than Paradise, which was one shot per scene.

"Holy crap. That's all you have to do to make an art film?" I thought.

I started looking around for things I could waste a roll of film on. It would have to be Super 8. I think I had a 16mm camera at the time, but it was spring driven and you couldn't do a shot that lasted that long.

I had seen other books on art film, and they made it sound even easier. I read a book on it that characterized one art film maker as being especially prolific because he made a two-minute Super 8 film every year.

For ten bucks a year (what it cost for film and processing back then) I could be a major figure in art film!

I was wrong, of course. Or was I?

I saw Stan Brackage when he appeared at the university here many years ago. I was working as a dishwasher and came in late. He showed his old movies and also showed a few movies made by other people. Some more interesting than others.

Brackage's movies were all silent. One of the showed his wife giving birth and was used as an educational film in the U.S.S.R.

But he also showed one that he said he made in high school. He said he made it as a way of meeting a girl at school he had asked to be in it. We see some teenagers sitting around a room. A boy is examining his naval. Brackage didn't like the overly smooth panning in Hollywood movies so at one point the camera starts zig zagging up and down as it pans. It ended with them happily skipping off together.

I wasn't sure what to think. What does it say about art film that an art film-maker's very first effort, filmed while he was in high school, was considered to be of artistic merit. It's hard to imagine an artist in any other medium showing work he did in high school.

I also kind of wonder if he was telling the truth. When I was in high school, my friends and made our own kung fu movies. And one of my friends who worked on these went on to become a serious artist. It's hard to imagine a high school kid setting out to make an art film, especially in the late '40s.

Brackage's friend, Kenneth Anger, had lied for years about his first movie. Anger claimed that he was 17 when he made a gay art film about himself being attacked by sailors. His story was that his parents were out of town, so he and his friends stole a backdrop from a movie studio and somehow recruited several sailors to be in this thing.

In fact, he was a university student when he made it.

In any case, how many artists working in other media present the stuff they made in high school as important, serious work?

I always thought it was strange that stand-up comics and former sit-com stars are producing major cinematic works. What does it say about cinema as an artform?

Although I suppose another test might be the evenness of the work. There have been flukes over the years, but you don't have filmmakers producing crap, then making one great artistic work, then nothing but crap again.

There was Michael Cimino. He made The Deerhunter which was critically acclaimed until he made Heaven's Gate at which point people went back and re-examined The Deerhunter and decided it might not have been so great after all.

Heaven's Gate cost $37 million, a fortune back then in the late '70s, and it was a western which nobody went to anymore, and it wasn't very good. It was the end of United Artists which was bought by MGM. Cimimo made more movies after that, none of which stood out.