Flesh Cinema: The Corporeal Avant-Garde 1959-1979 by ‘Ara Cybele Osterweil B.A. (New York University) 1997 M.A. (New York University) 1999 A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Rhetoric and a Designated Emphasis in Film Studies in the GRADUATE DIVISION of the UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY Committee in charge: Professor Linda Williams, Chair Professor Carol Clover Professor Kaja Silverman Professor Charles Altieri Fall 2005UMI Number: 3211468 Copyright 2005 by Osterweil, Ara Cybele All rights reserved. INFORMATION TO USERS The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. Broken or indistinct print, colored or poor quality illustrations and photographs, print bleed-through, substandard margins, and improper alignment can adversely affect reproduction. In the unlikely event that the author did not send a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if unauthorized copyright material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion UMI UMI Microform 3211468 Copyright 2006 by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights reserved. This microform edition is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code. ProQuest Information and Learning Company 300 North Zeeb Road P.O. Box 1346 ‘Ann Arbor, Mi 48106-1346Flesh Cinema: The Corporeal Avant-Garde, 1959-1979 Copyright 2005 by ‘Ara Cybele OsterweilAbstract Flesh Cinema: The Corporeal Avant-Garde 1959-1979 by Ara Cybele Osterweil Doctor of Philosophy in Rhetoric and a Designated Emphasis in Film Studies University of California, Berkeley Professor Linda Williams, Chair By the early nineteen sixties, avant-garde cinema was the most sexually explicit, provocative, and groundbreaking form of American visual culture. Flesh Cinema: The Corporeal Avant-Garde 1959-1979 attempts to account for the complex and often contradictory representations of the body in American experimental film of this period by using formal analysis, historically informed discourses of pornography and censorship, and well as psychoanalytic theories of sexuality, gender, and subjectivity. By articulating and analyzing a distinct corpus of films devoted to exploring the myriad material, sexual, and mutable qualities of the flesh, Flesh Cinema argues that avant-garde films in the sixties and seventies radically reconfigured the relationship between on-screen bodies and the film spectators who labored to see them revealed. For the first time in the history of experimental film, filmmakers overwhelmingly depicted the body as a defiantly material object that refused to be harnessed to conventional ideologies of gender or subjectivity. Instead of using the body to explore psychic reality as experimental filmmakers of the 20s, 30s, 40s, and 50s had, avant-garde filmmakers of the sixties allowed the body to remain just a body in their cinema. Rather than deploying the body as the earthlymedium through which more transcendental notions of identity and subjectivity were made manifest, these experimental filmmakers portrayed the body as flesh itself, capable of disclosing corporeal rather than spiritual or psychological truths One of the primary goals of Flesh Cinema: The Corporeal Avant-Garde 1959- 1979 is to redress the exclusion of the concept of the corporeal in avant-garde film criticism, which has tended to polarize the mind from the body when confronting films that undermine such rigid dichotomies. Many critics tend to treat the avant-garde’s exploration of the body either as a brief fad in the early sixties or as the special province of filmmakers based on their gender or sexual preference. However, far from being a passing or peripheral concern of alternative cinema, the body was a defining, lasting, and central concern of avant-garde cinema for nearly two decades, as well as the primary trope in the post-war avant-garde’s experiments with film form and film language.This is dedicated to both of my beloved grandmothers, Beatrice Saltz (1912-2005), and Bertha Weisman (1920-2004), who gave me the confidence to live fully, passionately, and deliberately. It is also dedicated to an extraordinary teacher and friend, Michael Rogin (1937-2001), who reminded me that the world is overflowing with wonder and surprise.Contents Acknowledgments Introduction: In Search of the Body 1. Corporeal Fragments and Perverse Sexuality 2. Chapter Two: Experimental Intercourse: Documenting the Sex Act 3. Chapter Three: Giving Head: Prurient Portrait Films 4, Chapter Four: For the Love of a Corpse: Decomposing Compositions Conclusion Bibliography v 166 225 293 299Acknowledgments No work of this magnitude can be accomplished in isolation, without the help of dedicated mentors, friends, and loved ones. First and foremost, I would like to thank Professor Linda Williams for her tireless, energetic support and encouragement throughout this project. In addition to being a role model as a scholar, Linda has provided me with an incredible example of how to live as a complete human being. I would also like to express my immense gratitude to Professors Carol Clover and Kaja Silverman, who each bring wisdom and elegance to everything they touch. If either wisdom or elegance appears in the following volume, it is surely a result of their influence. Professor Anne Nesbet was a perceptive and extremely diligent reader whose early comments provided me with the confidence to continue my research. [am grateful for the generosity and kindness she has shared with me. In my most despairing moments I had full confidence that I could depend on my dear companions for emotional suppor! as well as intellectual motivation. Fellow travelers Elena Gorfinkel, Simon Stow, Omri Moses, and Justin Glanville offered me with the all too rare gift of true friendship while simultaneously providing much-needed doses of comic relief. Although he passed away before the completion of this study, [ am extraordinarily indebted to Michael Rogin who, in addition to being a truly unique thinker, was perhaps the kindest and most insightful individual I have ever had the privilege of knowing. My memories of Mike being Mike are a constant source of inspiration to me. Finally, I would like to thank my beautiful family, whose devotion to me has been unwavering. My parents, Allan and Enid Osterweil, whose experiences I shamelessly exploit in the following introduction, have given me iitthe courage to be defiant, and have shown me, by example, the importance of finding your own way. Words cannot describe my gratitude for their love. I would also like to thank my sister, Elana Osterweil, whose brutal honesty and raw emotion serve as constant reminders of what is real. Finally, I would like to thank my darling David, who will never know the profound influence he has had on the completion of this project. ivFlesh Cinema: The Corporeal Avant-Garde 1959 - 1979 Introduction: In Search of the Body ‘Give me a body then’: this is the formula of philosophical reversal. The body is no longer the obstacle that separates thought from itself, that zvhich it has to overcome to reach thinking. It is on the contrary that which it plunges into or must plunge into, in order to reach the unthought, that is life. Not that the body thinks, but, obstinate and stubborn, it {forces us to think, and forces us to think what is concealed from thought, life... The categories of life are precisely the attitudes of the body, its postures. Gilles Deleuze, The Time Image. The body which had been a neutral or invisible termi of vision now was the thickness from which knowledge of vision derived. Jonathan Crary, “Modernizing Vision.” By the early nineteen sixties, avant-garde cinema was the most sexually explicit, provocative, and groundbreaking form of American visual culture. While nearly all of the Hollywood films and most of the foreign films that we customarily associate with the radical transformation of censorship laws seem incredibly tame by today’s standards, the avant-garde’s vast lexicon of nude bodies, sex, and transvestism continues to shock, anger, confuse, and turn on contemporary audiences. Unlike once risqué sexploitation films, which are rather myopically regarded as kitsch artifacts from a seemingly more innocent time’, the fluid, polymorphous play of gender in avant-garde films still seems ahead of its as well as our own time. For the first time in the history of experimental film, filmmakers overwhelmingly depicted the body as a defiantly material object that refused to be harnessed to conventional ideologies of gender or subjectivity. While this post-war “shift of emphasis from a more abstract sense of the individual to an organic sense of the body” (Russell 173) was also reflected in mainstream, foreign and documentary films, it was most emphatic in experimental cinema, whose investigations of the corporeal focussed on the “material strata ofdigestion, excretion, procreation and death” (Banes 191). Instead of idealizing, desexualizing, sanitizing and otherwise “de-corporealizing” the body, as previous artistic traditions had done, avant-garde cinema depicted the everyday or, to borrow avant-garde historian Sally Banes’ phrase, the “effervescent” body in all of its filth and glory. One of the primary goals of Flesht Cinema: The Corporeal Avant-Garde 1959- 1979 is to redress the exclusion of the concept of the corporeal in avant-garde film criticism, which has tended to polarize the mind from the body when confronting films that undermine such rigid dichotomies. While the academy has finally begun to recognize the carnal allure of cinema in this period, critics tend to treat the avant-garde’s exploration of the body either as a brief fad that emerged between the brackets of lyrical and structural cinema, or as the special province of filmmakers based on their gender or sexual preference’. However, far from being a passing or peripheral concern of alternative cinema, the body was a defining, lasting, and central concern of avant-garde cinema for nearly two decades, as well as the primary trope in the post-war avant-garde’s experiments with film form and film language. This study attempts to account for the complex and often contradictory representations of the body in American experimental film of this period by using formal analysis, historically informed discourses of pornography and censorship, and well as psychoanalytic theories of sexuality, gender, and subjectivity. By articulating and analyzing a distinct corpus of films devoted to exploring the myriad material, sexual, and mutable qualities of the flesh, this dissertation argues that “Flesh Cinema” radically reconfigured the relationship vibetween on-screen bodies and the film spectators who labored to see them revealed. Coming to “Terms” When | first undertook the study of American avant-garde cinema, I was a doctoral student at the University of California, Berkeley, pining for New York City, where had grown up and where my family still lived. I felt a profound sense of alienation from home that was mediated only slightly by conversations with my beloved professor, the late Michael Rogin, who had been raised in Queens and had once expressed envy for having not grown up in the more “authentic” borough of Brooklyn. As a symptom of my nostalgia, I became fascinated with all things quintessentially New York. I started to reevaluate objects and places that once seemed too hackneyed to enjoy: the films of Woody Allen, the music of Simon and Garfunkel, the bustle of Times Square, the cafes on. Bleecker Street, the cheap amusements of Coney Island. When I visited my parents, they thought I sounded like a tourist. As I grew more reflective, however, | began to realize that there were distinct differences between these legendary versions of New York, and my own experience. Not only did the New York that I was longing for no longer exist, but, in all honesty, I had never experienced it. If such a thing is possible, I was feeling nostalgic for something that I had never known--my parents’ New York. In my own personal narrative of who I was and where I came from, I mythologized my parents’ coming of age during the nineteen sixties, an era that seemed infinitely more exciting than the one that I had grown up. I devoured my father's recollections of the parachute jump at the 1964 Worlds Fair, and my mother’s memory of seeing Jimi Hendrix at the Fillmore East (the very buildingin which I had taken a circus class while trying to avoid the physical education requirement as an undergraduate at NYU) with a long forgotten boyfriend. I was particularly interested in the kinds of cultural events my father participated in as a young man, since like myself, he was an avid cinephile and a painter. 1 wondered what he thought when he saw Andy Warhol's soup cans for the first time, whether he went to any experimental film screenings at Cinema 16, and if he attended any Happenings at Judson Church. After learning that my father had once shared a ride to Philadelphia with a certain Baby Jane Holzer proclaimed “Girl of the Year” in 1964 by Tom Wolfe~and that my mother had grown up across the street from Patty (Pat) Ast, who appeared in Paul Morrissey’s 1972 film Heat, I wondered whether my parents had inadvertently rubbed elbows with any other Underground celebrities. Since my father had “come out of the closet” in my early teens but never shared with me the details of his sexuality before he married my mother, I have always been particularly curious about his past, and about how he identified in his early twenties. Although } have never had the courage to directly ask him whether he had sexual experiences with men or women, on the occasions that T have inquired whether he was “gay” before he married my mother, my father’s answers always seemed somewhat evasive. Ii wasn’t that he was not willing to discuss his sexuality; on the contrary, if there was any timidity at all in these conversations, it was my own. Nevertheless, there was some kind of communication block or generation gap that prevented me from understanding what my father’s sexuality was and had been, at least in the terms that I offered. He seemed uncomfortable with using the word “gay,” not out of shame, but because it seemed an inappropriate way to describe the erotic experiences he had viiias a young man. When he tried to explain that people were not “gay” in the early and middle sixties, [had trouble understanding what he meant. Although I had read Foucault’s History of Sexuality and thought that I had absorbed the meaning of his work, I suppose that I still had trouble grasping the ways in which sexuality is constructed through discourse when it was presented to me as family history. It was only when I started watching avant-garde films produced in New York during the early sixties that I began to understand the alternative construction of sexuality during that period. Before I had even heard of filmmakers like Barbara Rubin and Carolee Schneemann, or had known that Yoko Ono was an avant-garde filmmaker in addition to being John Lennon’s wife, I consumed everything I could get my hands on by Kenneth Anger, Jack ‘Smith and Andy Warhol. Although I knew that all of these filmmakers were homosexual—or in any case, ot straight-when watching Smith’s extravagant parodies of gender in Flaming Creatures, the vaguely fascistic rituals in Anger’s Scorpio Rising, or Warhol's meditative, unbroken gaze at non-sexual parts of the body, again the word “gay” seemed not only historically inappropriate, but “erotically” inappropriate as well. In films by these directors, bodies were ambiguous, uncooperative, and at times, difficult to discern. Although many of the bodies that appeared in these films were male, it was frequently impossible to ascertain their gender because of framing, editing, focus, lighting, and costuming. If male bodies were being fetishized in these films, why were they disguised in drag? If these films were informed by a homosexual gaze in a similar way that Hollywood films are informed by a heterosexual male gaze, why was the only cock visible in Flaming Creatures hanging limply on the side of ixthe frame, upstaged by the voice of a drag queen extolling the various uses of lipstick? Watching Underground films was a way not only of alleviating my homesickness, but also of forging an imaginary connection to my own family history. As I became more interested in films by these “queer auteurs,” I began to insert them in what I imagined as my father’s past. Instead of Campbell's soup cans, I wondered if he had seen films ike Haircut or Blow Job, and whether these films influenced or informed his own emergent desires. Although I do not know whether my father actually saw these titles since he remembers only that he watched some avant-garde films where “nothing happened,” I imagine that in the space where nothing happened, something may indeed have happened. This is obviously not to say that my father “became” homosexual as a result of any singular experience, let alone a film screening. However, by watching Underground films, I suspect that my father, like many other members of his generation, may have had his first encounters with the public presentation of alternative sexual desires, and the onscreen representation of full frontal nudity. Ina perverse way, watching these films was a way of getting to know him better, regardless of their potentially fictional place in his life. For a narcissist, grand historical events are frequently interpreted through the prism of their own narrow experiences. Perhaps these were the delusions suffered from when I realized that the transformation of my father’s sexuality seemed to correspond quite neatly to the transformation of avant-garde cinema. Over Memorial Day weekend in 1968, my father met my mother. They were married in 1970 by a reformed rabbi on the rain-soaked rooftop of his apartment building on the Upper East Side, My mother wore white pancake makeup, whiteeye shadow, white lipstick, an old white dress with new white buttons, and flats because my father was shorter than her and in his new patriarchal role, couldn't stand her towering above him. They had a monogamous heterosexual relationship that lasted for over twenty years. When my father “came out” (oh Foucault!), they remained married, and continue to share a house, although both of them have had Other Significant Others ever since. By 1968, it seemed that avant-garde cinema had also taken a new path, away from the sexual experimentation that characterized it in the early and mid- sixties. While the commercial exhibition of Andy Warhol’s Chelsea Girls in 1966, the director’s movement towards narrative in the late sixties and his retirement from filmmaking in 1968 certainly did not announce the end of the corporeal avant-garde, it did seem to signify the growing irrelevance of non-narrative experimental films devoted to the exploration of the body. Furthermore, while Stonewall was a watershed event in the emerging gay rights movement, the more codified new identities that this movement made possible problematized, and I think, partially eliminated, the fluidity of sexual relations that had preceded it. I decided to write my dissertation on Queer Auteurism and Underground Cinema in New York, concentrating primarily on the films of Andy Warhol, Kenneth Anger, Jack Smith and Paul Morrissey, who had taken over film production at the Factory after Warhol was shot in 1968. My original hypothesis posited nine, distinct years of simultaneous artistic innovation and corporeal transgression, bracketed on one end by the closure of Cinema 16 in 1963 and on the other by the exhibition of Deep) Throat in 1972. As I continued my research, however, I began to notice that other corporeally explicit films by heterosexual female directors like Carolee xiSchneemann, Yoko Ono, and Barbara Rubin existed on a thematic as well as stylistic continuum with works by Warhol, Smith and Anger. Their works also undermined the demarcations of gender, depicted explicit sexual imagery, and defamiliarized the material body through experimental techniques. Through their formal dissection of the human figure, as well as their insistently corporeal mode of address, films by all of these directors attempted to access the material “truth” of being by compelling on-screen bodies to produce visible evidence of their pleasure, pain, and disintegration. Rather than deploying the body as the earthly medium through which more transcendental notions of identity and subjectivity were made manifest, these experimental filmmakers portrayed the body as flesh itself, capable of disclosing corporeal rather than spiritual or psychological truths. Was it possible that the marginalized positions of these women filmmakers vis-i-vis the predominantly male experimental film community of the time paralleled the marginalization of these queer auteurs vis-i-vis heteronormative society? If so, I wondered why anyone had not analyzed these works in tandem with each other. Whereas there was once a scarcity of scholarship on the avant-garde, by the turn of the millennium, new books devoted to the subject were coming off the academic presses fast and furiously. The publication of David E. James’ brilliant, exhaustive study Allegories of Cinema: American Film in the Sixties in 1989 opened the floodgates for a host of new, more specific explorations of avant-garde cinema, including Lauren Rabinovitz’s Points of Resistance: Women, Power & Politics in the New York Avant- Garde Cinema, 1943-1971 (1991), Juan Sudrez’s Bike Boys, Drag Queens, and Superstars: Avant-Garde, Mass Culture, and Gay Identities in the 1960's Underground xiiCinema (1996), the anthology Pop Out: Queer Warhol (1996), and Matthew Tinkcom’s Working Like a Homosexual: Camp, Capital, Cinema (2002). While these books were welcomed, much-needed additions to critical classics from the late sixties and seventies such as Sheldon Renan’s An Introduction to the American Underground Film (1967), Parker Tyler's Underground Film (1969), P. Adams Sitney’s Visionary Film (1974), and Amos Vogel's Film as a Subversive Art (1974), they tended to segregate avant-garde filmmakers into distinct camps, based either upon gender or sexual preference. Rather than examining the similarities between films produced by divergent directors, this new generation of critics seemed to project the contemporary lessons of identity politics backwards upon an era of corporeal films that not only did not reflect these insights, but did not have access to them historically. In their desire to gain direct “access” to bodies, avant-garde practitioners frequently disavowed the cultural inscription of bodies in favor of affirming the messy corporeality of being. By emphasizing the flesh in the return to what sexual historian Thomas Laqueur has called the “too familiar’ terrain of the material body* (12), avant-garde filmmakers from this period de-emphasized the role of gender as a determining factor in the construction of subjectivity. Rather than representing bodies as transparent signifiers of fixed notions of masculinity or femininity, avant-garde cinema approached flesh itself as the dense, opaque, and endlessly variable substance of being. Instead of focussing my research on the work of a handful of queer auteurs, I expanded it to include all of the sixties. avant-garde films devoted to the exploration of the flesh, regardless of whether they were produced in New York, and regardless of the sex or sexual preference of the filmmaker. itiThe other revelation that occurred during the genesis of my project, which significantly transformed its scope, was my discovery that so-called “structural” avant-garde films were not the incorporeal, cerebral explorations of consciousness that they had the reputation for being. Part of the difficulty of studying avant-garde cinema is their general unavailability, which leads students like myself to rely heavily on descriptions of these films in a handful of critical accounts, Although there are some videos and DVD sources that distribute legal and illegal versions of experimental works, these editions cannot, for the most part, be rented in local venues. Consequently, most scholars are compelled to visit film archives such as The Filmmakers Coop, Anthology Film Archives, and Canyon Cinema, and pay the steep fees required to screen film prints, an option that isn’t always financially feasible’. (It is for this reason that the descriptions of the films in the following study are longer and more detailed than is customary.) I don’t remember exactly what I was expecting when I first saw Paul Sharits’ Piece Mandala/ End War (1966), but I remember being fairly shocked that this “classic” of structural cinema showed two bodies in various positions of fucking interrupted by disruptive, fast-paced color flicker effects. From Sitney’s brief description of it his landmark study Visionary Film, I imagined the kind of alienating, conceptually rigorous film that | associated with structural cinema after suffering through films—which I now adore-like Arnulf Rainer (Peter Kubelka, 1960), Wavelength (Michael Snow, 1967), and Serene Velocity (Ernie Gehr, 1970). Forgetting to mention the appearance of the two nude bodies, Sitney writes, “Pure colors when rapidly flashed one after the other tend to blend, pale, and veer toward whiteness” (387). Although the color flicker effects, designed to produce physiological reactions in the spectator’s perceptual apparatus, make xivthe film both difficult and potentially painful to watch, Sitney’s elision of the “obvious” was startling. From our contemporary, postmodern, post-sexual revolution perspective, in which President Clinton’s penis constitutes a suitable subject for public discussion; it is now clear to me that Sitney had “discursive trouble” articulating the sex in Sharits’ film. As Michel Foucault has argued in the History of Sexuality, there is no sexuality except as constructed in discourse. In addition to being part of this recent “discursive explosion” of sexuality in the nineteen sixties, Sitney’s omission was an instance of “discursive production” which, as Foucault reminds us, “also administers silence” through the codification of “a whole rhetoric of allusion and metaphor” (Foucault 17, 12). It was also a perfect example of the way in which the “propagation of knowledge” about sexuality tends to cause “mistaken beliefs or systematic misconceptions to circulate” (Foucault 12). What seems “obvious,” natural or conspicuous about sexuality to contemporary viewers, accustomed to viewing hard-core pornography on video, television, and the internet, was far from “obvious” for historical spectators (and critics) who had different ways of thinking and speaking about sex. Rather than pointing towards the failure of Sitney asa critic, this moment of obfuscation suggests difficulties inherent in the discourses available to interpret works that challenged existing assumptions about sexuality, high art, and obscenity. At the time of the original publication of Visionary Film, Sitney’s comparison of avant-garde cinema with Romantic poetry and Modernist aesthetics was an important step to legitimizing the artistic significance of otherwise marginalized films. Had he focussed on the centrality of corporeal imagery in avant-garde cinema, Sitney may have threatened the legitimacy of an xvart form that he, along with only a handful of other activists including Amos Vogel, Jonas Mekas, Jerome Hill, Parker Tyler and Annette Michelson, was attempting to elevate. ‘The blatant, explicit representation of the sexual act in Sharits’ structural flicker film called into question my impression, gleaned from reputable critical sources, that the advent of structural cinema ail but terminated the exploration of the body in American experimental cinema, In Visionary Film, Sitney argued that the structural cinema of sixties and seventies foregrounded the shape of the film, which was “predetermined and simplified” at the expense of content, which is “minimal and subsidiary to the outline” (369-70). According to Sitney, structural cinema involved four basic characteristics, including fixed camera position, the flicker effect, loop printing and rephotography off the screen, which were combined or modified in the work of different filmmakers (370). For Sitney, meditative structural films by artists such as Sharits constituted a radical departure from both “lyrical” cinema, which foregrounded the “idea of a man looking” and the “intense experience of seeing,” and the bawdy Underground (142). Sitney was not the only avant-garde film historian to insist that structural film was a “cinema of the mind” rather than the body (Sitney 370). In her article “Where is Your Rupture?’ Mass Culture and the Gesamtkunstwerk,” Annette Michelson, who started the first Cinema Studies department at NYU with Sitney, narrates the transformation of a cinema devoted to the body’s untidy subjectivity toa cinema “tending toward incorporeality” (Michelson 95). Contrary to these traditional accounts, the body did not cease being a central concern of avant-garde filmmakers. Even as the avant-garde’s cinematic investigations expanded to include discourses on the nature of time, space, and xvicognition, the body remained the central point of reference through which all of these concepts were accessed and reflected upon. In spite of the stylistic differences between so-called “lyrical,” “Underground,” “Baudelairean,” and “structural” filmmakers, experimental film artists of all of these persuasions not only depicted bodies moved to intense states of excitation, but also deliberately attempted to provoke the bodies of spectators to “an almost involuntary mimicry of the emotion or sensation of the body on screen’ (Williams “Film Bodies” 143). Meriting inclusion in the catalogue of “body genres” offered by film scholars Carol Clover and Linda Williams, avant-garde cinema of this period physically “assault” their audiences with images and sounds. No less than horror’s presentation of violence and terror, melodrama’s portrayal of weeping, and pornography’s depiction of orgasm, Flesh Cinema’s portrayal of corporeality compelled audiences to become physically aware of their own bodies through the depiction of carnality, sexuality, boredom, pain, and dismemberment. Whether one feels aroused when watching the rapidly edited scenes of fornication in Christmas on Earth (Barbara Rubin, 1963), bored, fidgety or sleepy when watching Warhol’s extreme exercises in cinematic duration, or perceptually besieged as a result of being subjected to Paul Sharits’ aggressive use of flicker, the corporeal avant-garde put flesh on the spectator’s bones in order to physiologically impact it. Thad originally assumed that the rise of feature-length hard-core films in the early seventies had stamped out the remaining traces of the corporeal avant- garde. Since historical spectators were at least partially drawn to experimental films in order to satisfy their prurient desires in a culture where access to images of nudity and sex was restricted, the legal exhibition of hard-core porn seemed xviilike an apt epilogue to an era of unprecedented explicitness. Contrary to my first myopic impressions, however, Flesh Cinema did not come to a screeching halt at the debut of porno-chic, but continued until at Jeast the late seventies, when the new accessibility of video lured many of its remaining and new practitioners to abandon the 16 mm format. With its insistent heterosexuality, comic mystification of female pleasure, and reliance on pyrotechnical effects to visualize the ecstasy of the corporeal phenomenon of orgasm, Deep Throat could neither extinguish nor completely satisfy the diverse corporeal desires to which avant-garde cinema responded. Before moving on to the issue of periodization, however, it is important to understand the types of cinematic traditions that preceded and informed the development of Flesh Cinema. Motion Studies, Surrealism, and Experimental ‘Trance Films As art critic Hal Foster has argued, avant-garde art from the nineteen sixties to the end of the twentieth century witnessed a “return of the real” marked by an “emphatic turn to the bodily and the social, to the abject and the site-specific” (Foster 1996 124). Turning away from total abstraction as well as the almost unilateral rejection of realism and illusionism by previous twentieth- century avant-garde traditions, experimental artists of the sixties and seventies documented the actual, lived body with a vengeance. In an era when the representation of both sex and violence reached an unprecedented level of explicitness (Russell 25), the moving body became “the evidentiary basis of important witnessings to [the] truth” of both pain and pleasure (Foster 1996 166). In response to this growing desire to witness the body's real response to affect, avant-garde cinema from this period selectively returned to the early “motion study” experiments of the cinema's progenitors’. xviii‘As avant-garde historian Scott MacDonald has argued,’ experimental filmmakers revisited en masse the basic vocabulary of serial organization “as a means of revealing how things move” by focussing their cameras upon simple movements and gestures of the human body" (MacDonald 10). This embrace of the real involved, as theorist Rosalind Krauss has observed, an elevation of indexical images that ran counter to the degradation of the “sign” in other postwar arenas of cultural expression like deconstruction and abstract expressionism’ In this radically re-embodied experimental cinema, the involuntary gesture or physiological response achieved a new prominence as the privileged signifier of corporeal authenticity. Like the fingerprint whose ontological status is distinguished by a direct relationship to its referent, the involuntary spasm, produced by extreme sevual ecstasy or corporeal distress, emerged as the ultimate index of veracity in avant-garde motion studies. While many historians of the postwar avant-garde, including Tyler and Sitney, have made much of its substantial debt to Surrealism, there exists a fundamental difference between the representation of the body in Flesh Cinema and its depiction in Surrealist films of the nineteen twenties and thirties. Whereas the Surrealists were interested in eploring unconscious, often taboo desires by visualizing the body in dreamlike configurations, experimental filmmakers of the sixties and seventies were committed to recovering the concreteness of physical experience by exploring real rather than surreal corporeal images. Prior to the nineteen sixties, avant-garde filmmakers had continually referenced the body in their experiments with film form and language. In the 1920s and early 30s, Dada and Surrealist films employed the mutability of the xixbody as a “tactic of provocation” to disturb bourgeois notions of acceptability (Rees 41). From films like Return to Reason (Man Ray, 1923), Entr’acte (René Clair, 1924), Un Chien Andalou (Luis Bufiuel and Salvador Dali, 1929), and Blood of a Poet (ean Cocteau, 1932), emerged a lexicon of grotesque corporeal juxtapositions, superimpositions, and dissolves. However, rather than investigating the multiple possibilities of the banal material body, the Surrealists transformed the body into a site of the fantastic, the excessive, and the extreme. In these films, bodies and body parts were presented in shocking configurations that remained impossible in everyday waking life. Hoisted from the chaotic landscape of dreams, Surrealist cinema presented images of a woman's buttocks dissolving into breasts, ants boring through a human hand, sea urchins transforming into tufts of hair, dismembered body parts assuming a life of their own, and flower stamens metamorphosing into the opening legs of a dancer. By utilizing film techniques well suited to metaphoric comparison, such as dissolves, matches-on- action, montage, and superimposition, the Surrealists breached the distinction between human bodies and the bodies of plants, animals, and inanimate objects. Flesh Cinema also significantly departed from the corporeal experiments of Surrealism by objectifying female and male bodies. Un Chien Andalou’s most insolent image of a woman's eye being sliced horizontally by a razor directly satisfied Antonin Artaud’s urgent demand for pure images whose impact was violent, a shock designed for the eyes, a shock founded on the very substance of the gaze. It also, as film historian Robert Sklar has argued, marked the “culmination to a decade of European filmmaking” with “a provocation against the spectator, perhaps against a cinema turning from silence to sound, but inescapably also against women” (149). For in spite of the Surrealists’ eschewal XXof reality in their depictions of unconscious desire, their dissection, mockery and objectification of the almost exclusively female body was firmly entrenched in the patriarchal culture from which it emerged. Throughout the 1940s and 50s, experimental films predominantly employed the body as a conduit of psychic energy in the search for spiritual or self-revelation. Although trance films often featured “sexually tormented” protagonists in their explorations of “the erotic mystery of the self,” the sexualized, thoroughly corporeal body was not often represented without recourse to metaphoric symbols (James 2002 282, 278). Instead of portraying the bluntness of corporeal reality, trance films figured the “traumatized subjectivity” of its characters through distortions of the visual field” Games 2002 282). Like the “dream films” of the twenties, the “trance films” of the nineteen forties and fifties were concerned with magic and ritual, mythology and the unconscious." The very titles of American avant-garde films from this era reveal the period’s overall concern with myth, magic, and ritual: Ritual im Transfigured Time (Maya Deren, 1946), Mr. Frenhofer and the Minotaur (Sidney Peterson, 1949), Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome (Kenneth Anger, 1954, revised 1966), The Way to Shadow Garden (Stan Brakhage, 1955), and Narcissus (Willard Maas, 1956). Replete with symbolism and Surrealist-like distortion, these films explored madness and the imagination through archetypal figures and psycho-dramatic conventions. Heavily influenced by Luis Bufuel, Salvador Dali, and Jean Cocteau Gitney 47), avant-garde filmmakers of the forties and fifties utilized the body as a metaphor in their search for the principles of psychic rather than material reality. Even the provocative film Fireworks (Kenneth Anger, 1947), which is concerned with the emerging homoerotic desires of a young man, deploys xxiSurrealist dream conventions in order to express the sadomasochistic fantasies of its slumbering protagonist. Although the film does include a plethora of chaotic bodily imagery, Anger expresses the violence of orgasm in metaphorical rather than corporeal terms. In one scene, a bottle of cream smashes on the floor while a group of sailors attack the anguished sleeper; poured from above, the cream flows over his mouth suggesting ejaculate. In another scene, the sleeper unzips his protruding fly to reveal a sparkling candle phallus rather than the erect penis his “bulge” obviously connotes. In both of these examples, there is a significant swerving away from corporeal “evidence” in favor of metaphoric evocation. It was precisely this kind of substitution—of the poetic for the material— ich characterized American avant-garde film in the generations prior to the sixties. ‘The Demand for a New Experimental Cinema Tt comes as no surprise that by the late fifties, experimental filmmakers were growing weary of the mythological concerns of their predecessors in their search for an aesthetic more driven by the reality of material existence. Even before the “sexual revolution” infiltrated mass media in the late sixties, bringing a “new candor” about “nudity in film and on the stage” (Allyn 5), there was a growing demand for a new, more realistic experimental cinema. As early as the mid-fifties, avant-garde filmmaker, organizer and critic Jonas Mekas complained of the overwrought character of the dominant tendency of experimental film. In his essay, “The Experimental Film in America,” published in Film Culture in the spring of 1955, Mekas writes: In these films, touch with reality seems to be very feeble. Instead of a human being, we find a poetic version of a zombie: After all our efforts to make it alive, we find ourselves stuck with a corpse (22). xxiiBy 1959, Mekas had amplified his criticism. In his essay “A Call for a New Generation of Film-makers,” also published in Film Culture, Mekas protested how short experimental works had lost their unique degree of innovation and had become “sterile” as a result of having “been frozen into a genre” (Mekas 1959 73-74). The need to approach the body as body had become the clamor of a generation of avant-garde filmmakers. Perhaps the most tenacious demand for a corporeal cinema can be found in Robert Kelly’s article, “The Image of the Body,” which was published in Film Culture in the winter of 1963-1964. In this timely diatribe, Kelly argued that although the technology of cinema was uniquely capable of registering and representing bodies in motion, the filmmaker had “scorned the materials his tools afford him” in his ambition to make high art (393). Instead of treating the body as a valid object of fascination, the typical experimental filmmaker preferred to “go awhoring after a soul that, by his hazy hypothesis, must set such bodies in motion” (Kelly 393). According to Kelly, rather than treating the body as a dense material object, filmmakers relentlessly feared and avoided the body by relying on the fallacious soul-body dichotomy and psychological conventions of storytelling. Extolling the virtues of early cinema, which “was alive with bodies in motion,” Kelly demanded from his contemporaries a “re-Vision, a new clarity and purpose in dealing with the body” (395). In what could be a response to a film like Fireworks, which is culpable of precisely the kind of sleight-of-hand substitutions that Kelly denounces, the author writes: “Physical sex, the supreme bodily act, is hidden under verbal suggestion, evasively projected in negative, encouraged to escape from focus” (395). xxiiKelly was not the only critic to observe the ossified character of the trance film or experimental psychodrama, which had transformed the human body into a symbolic prop. In his eulogy to Maya Deren, who had died in 1961, the early film theorist Rudolf Arnheim bemoaned the untimely loss of what he referred to as one of cinema’s “most delicate magicians” (85). Focussing upon a particularly iconic image of Deren from her own film Meshes of the Afternoon (1943) in which she is photographed gazing through a window, Arnheim celebrates the dematerialization of the human face through the transformation of reality via cinematography: While photographs earn gratitude by preserving corporeal appearance, we admire the new technique even more for its being able to dematerialize the familiar face of the girl into a precise shape of transparent whiteness (85). In this essay, Arnheim points towards the overwhelming sense of “de- corporealization” in Deren’s films. As Arnheim suggests, matter is subordinated to magic in Deren’s oewore. Here, the human body appears weightless and specular, gesture is largely symbolic, and movement is ritualized. Arnheim concludes his essay with a telling observation of the anachronistic character of Deren’s poetic sensibility. He writes, "We, in the New York of the twentieth century, no longer profit from that sort of consensus. Our common standards are reduced to the practical” (Arnheim 86). Historical Parameters of Flesh Cinema Like all historical transformations, the emergence of Flesh Cinema is overdetermined. Taking advantage of the changing standards of decency and the new (relative) permissiveness of Hollywood, the concurrent demise of the studio system, the shifting parameters of sexual attitudes promised by the emergent xxivsexual revolution, and the mobile aesthetic codes proffered by art movements like Pop and Fluxus, the character of experimental film changed from a symbolic into a corporeal cinema. Rather than using the body to explore psychic reality as. experimental filmmakers of the 20s, 30s, 40s, and 50s had, avant-garde filmmakers of the sixties allowed the body to remain just a body in their cinema. Instead of offering brief though illicit glimpses of nudity, entire films were devoted to exploring nude bodies. Abandoning the narrative and symbolic concerns of the generations that preceded them, filmmakers of the sixties featured the body in predominantly non-narrative works without feeling compelled to situate their explorations of the corporeal in fantastic, dream-like realms, Finally, by directly soliciting spectators with the promise of sexual pleasure--note the straightforwardness of Warhol's titles Blow Job (1964) and Blue Movie (1968)--avant-garde cinema of the sixties explicitly acknowledged, and delighted in, its long history as an alternative venue for prurient imagery. While avant-garde cinema was never as popular as Hollywood movies, by 1963, experimental film had become an integral part of counterculture expression that drew upon, and put into dialogue, popular or mainstream media, high art, stag films and sexploitation. Thanks to Amos Vogel, who showed innovative experimental films at the membership film society Cinema 16 from 1947 until it closed in 1963, avant-garde cinema developed a paying audience by the thousands. Jonas Mekas, the founder the of Filmmakers Cooperative and Anthology Film Archives, brought avant-garde cinema into the public eye by publishing a weekly column in the Village Voice that alternately praised and lambasted the latest experimental works. Finally, famous Pop painter Andy Warhol transformed avant-garde films where virtually “nothing happened” into xxvthe definition of “cutting edge” the moment he bestowed his notorious Midas touch on a 16mm Bolex camera in 1963. Although Underground Cinema is customarily yoked to the sexual revolution, its explicitness regarding nudity, homosexual sex, group sex, and transvestism actually predates the transformation of society’s perception of these behaviors. As sexual revolution chronicler David Allyn has argued, in the early sixties, the “sexual revolution”—a term actually coined in Germany in the 1920s. by Austrian psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich"—referred primarily to the “suspected impact of the newly invented birth control pill on the behavior of white, middle-class, female college students” (4). In 1963, the sexual revolution certainly did not describe the sexual mores of the marginalized, non-heterosexual subcultures that were already being explored in Underground classics like Flaming Creatures, Scorpio Rising, and Christmas on Earth. Even by the late sixties, the countercultural definition of the sexual revolution—the freedom to have sex where and when one wished” (Allyn 5) had still not expanded to include “with whom one wished” and thus implicitly excluded homosexual and transsexual experiences. In addition to the death of Maya Deren in 1960, and the symbolic death of the type of “decorporealized” cinema that she represented, other factors contributed to the re-materialization” of the onscreen body in experimental film culture of the late fifties and early sixties. The period between 1960 and 1963 marked an important era of philosophical and organizational transformation for the experimental film community. Although the stated goals of the New American Cinema Group, which Mekas founded in 1960 with Lewis Allen, Shirley Clarke, Emile de Antonio, Edward Bland and approximately two dozen XxXviother independent filmmakers, did not articulate the creation of a “Flesh Cinema,” its “First Statement” called specifically for the re-materialization of cinema. Expressing his exasperation with the “Big Lie in life and in the arts,” and allying his cause with the burgeoning cinema movements in Europe, Mekas wrote, in 1961: As they [the new filmmakers of France, Italy, Russia, Poland and England], we are not only for the New Cinema; we also for the New Man. As they, we are for art, but not at the expense of life. We don't want false, polished, slick films—we prefer them rough, unpolished, but alive; we don’t want rosy films—we want them the color of blood (82-83). In this demand for a more honest cinematic approach to life, Mekas seized upon the very facet that would animate Flesh Cinema: the concern with the palpable exigencies of corporeal existence and the simultaneous rejection of the symbolic structures that interpret and ultimately distort them. Exhibition of avant-garde films also underwent significant changes during this period. From 1947 to 1963, the primary site of the exhibition and distribution of avant-garde cinema in the United States was Cinema 16 in New York. Founded by Amos and Marcia Vogel, Cinema 16 “educated a generation of cinéastes and provided the initial public presentation of the emerging American independent film” (ames 1992 6). Organized as a film society to avoid censorship and financial discrimination against individual experimental works, Cinema 16 eventually expanded its function as an exhibition site for mixed programs to include a separate distribution arm for the avant-garde. The closure of Cinema 16 in 1963 announced the end of an era of avant- garde film culture and the dominant philosophy of exclusivity that had animated it for over fifteen years. While it would be erroneous to disclaim the revolutionary impact Cinema 16 had on the production, exhibition, and xxviidistribution of American avant-garde cinema, it is important to note the ways in which Vogel's film society also reproduced many of the cultural biases of its time. Like the programs, which paired experimental works with carefully chosen scientific, documentary, instructional and foreign films, the Catalogue of Experimental Film that Vogel published was exclusive, reflecting Vogel's philosophy of principled selection rather than indiscriminate promotion (James 1992 7). From Vogel's point of view, avant-garde films existed on a continuum with other forms of significant expression and were screened in order to educate and enlighten viewers of the best examples of cinematic culture. By 1963, the atmosphere surrounding avant-garde film was changing. The Filmmakers Cooperative, which opened in New York on January 18, 1962, presented a significant alternative to Vogel's approach. As a collective run by filmmakers, without the intervention of an esteemed tastemaker, the Coop was non-exclusive and non-discriminatory, accepting all films submitted to it. Partially motivated by Vogel's refusal to show Stan Brakhage’s Anticipation of the Night, the Coop was dedicated to eliminating aesthetic judgments of quality in its collection process (James 1992 8). Critical reception of avant-garde film was also changing. Mekas had begun the journal Film Culture in 1955 as a literary forum in which to celebrate the accomplishments of European art cinema. Although the journal had extended its appreciation toward American cinema, Film Culture had originally been hostile to the American avant-garde, as can be glimpsed in Mekas’s notorious attack on the work of young experimental filmmakers in an essay entitled “The Experimental Film in America.” In this famous “pre-conversion” piece, Mekas lambasted the adolescent character, technical crudity and lack of xxviiicreativity in experimental films of the time, describing the new tendency as a putative homosexual conspiracy. Mekas’s eventual change of tone informs a decisive moment in the history of avant-garde cinema. His “conversion” and subsequent advocacy of experimental film are partially responsible for the unprecedented social visibility of Underground film in this period, as well as the eruption of the Underground’s “bizarre sexual extravaganzas” onto public consciousness (James 1992 10). Mekas’s celebration of the “Baudelairean cinema” of Jack Smith, Ken Jacobs and Ron Rice was instrumental in two ways: By linking “dirty pictures” with Underground film in the public imagination, Mekas articulated avant-garde cinema as a site of sexual excess and transgression. Simultaneously, Mekas sanctified the new sexually explicit cinema by associating it with a culturally esteemed tradition of poetry. The combination of Mekas's critical advocacy and the establishment of a more permissive venue of exhibition and distribution authorized American avant-garde filmmakers of this period to transform experimental cinema. Although Vogel was one of the most visionary, vociferous advocates for a “subversive cinema” that flaunted the taboos against explicit images of real sex, nudity, birth and death”, his insistence on the educational value of experimental cinema may have had unintended and unacknowledged consequences. Vogel's aesthetics tended to favor the erotic rather than the pornographic. Vogel blamed the pornographic impulse of then-contemporary cinema on the “sexually repressed society” from which it emerged and looked forward to the day when “the arousal of erotic feelings in the cinema” would take the place of “aggression and violence” (220). In this future cinematic utopia, Vogel hoped that films on these forbidden subjects would combine “un-censored realism with tenderness, xxixhumour, mishaps, and the inevitable non-erotic components of every real act of human love” (Vogel 220). Released from the burdens of recognizable social value implied by Vogel's selection process, filmmakers began to confront the materiality of the body in unprecedented, frequently dystopic ways. The replacement of Vogel's personal, highly subjective selection process with the Coop’s policy of open acceptance may have encouraged filmmakers to address pornographic, rather than erotic, dimensions of the body. Notes on Methodology Although this study does not delve into the theoretical complexities of phenomenology, much of the following analysis hinges upon French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s notions of flesh and embodied perception. For Merleau-Ponty (1908-1961), flesh was the fundamental “il y a,” or “there is” of existence; it defined both the body and the world. Consciousness was necessarily embodied because it derives its nature from the body which was, for Merleau-Ponty, the primary bearer of intentionality as well as the subject of perception. Although Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy of embodiment evolved from his relatively early articulation of it in Phenomenology of Perception (1945), throughout his career, flesh remained the “primary something” of being, the substance without which consciousness did not exist. By the time Merleau- Ponty wrote his last work, The Visible and the Invisible (published posthumously in 1968), flesh had become an Ur-element that transcended any previous definition of it in Western philosophy: The flesh is not matter, in the sense of corpuscles of being. Flesh... is not mind, is not substance. To designate it, we should need the old term ‘element, in the sense it was used to speak of water, air, earth, and fire, that is, in the sense of a general thing, midway between the spatio- temporal individual and the idea, a sort of incarnate principle that brings XXX,a style of being wherever there is a fragment of being (Merleau-Ponty 139). Since Merleau-Ponty considered body and world to be composed of the same “element,” there could be no world without its apprehension through and in the flesh. For the philosopher, the body was that which makes objects possible, Merleau-Ponty thus conceived of a relationship between subject and object” in which the “flesh of the world” was constantly encroaching upon the “flesh of the body” and vice versa in a perpetual state of transgression and overlap (1968 248). Accordingly, flesh was the groundwork of inter-subjectivity, or more accurately, intercorporeity. Similarly, the “visible” was not only “pregnant with the invisible” (1968 216), but nearly interchangeable with it “Carnal and organic,” meaning is only “invisible in the sense of being in-visible” (Hamrick). By no means new to either the practice of vision, or the practice of art, the urge to see the world corporeally found new direction in the work of avant-garde filmmakers. For avant-garde filmmakers of this period, flesh was the vehicle of being-in-the-world, as well as the dense but ultimately ambiguous medium through which perception (cinematic and otherwise) inevitably occurred. Like the perceiving subject in philosopher Merleau-Ponty’s account of being, the historical spectator of Flesh Cinema was made “conscious of the world through the medium of [the] body” (Merleau-Ponty 95). By reinserting the viewer's body as an integral term in the “equation” of spectatorship, the corporeal avant- garde translated the embodiment of consciousness to the relationship between screen and observer. No less an object than the “part objects” depicted on screen, the spectator was not addressed as a detached cogito, but as an embodied Xxxparticipant in a thoroughly corporeal mise-en-scéne. Embodiment, however, was never a neutral strategy of representation or mode of address. On the contrary, by addressing the lived body of the spectator while probing the corporeality of the on-screen body, avant-garde filmmakers reformulated the relationship between screen and spectator as one of dialectical intercorporeity. Rejecting the ideological implications of a cinematic apparatus that attempted to transcend the body in its creation of a timeless, seamless aesthetic, Flesh Cinema created active, embodied participants fully and physically cognizant of the ways in which the “flesh” of the cinema acted upon them. Corporeal avant-garde films expected film spectators to use or work their bodies in order to obtain visual, aural, and sexual pleasure. In doing so, Flesh Cinema strove to make spectators aware of the conditions not only of the film’s production but also of the corporeal dimension of viewing. Although the main concerns of this study are corporeal rather than psychoanalytic, by periodically introducing psychoanalytic discourses about gender and sexuality, I aim to situate my analysis in the larger context of an ongoing, multi-disciplinary, discursive exploration of the body. One of the inevitable interlocutors in this corporeal excavation is Sigmund Freud, whose work has remained a consistently provocative point of departure for conversations about gender and sexuality. Nevertheless, the relevance of psychoanalysis for the discussion of the corporeal avant-garde is not strictly theoretical, but historical as well. The original publication of Herbert Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry istto Freud in 1955 not only revived interest in the father of psychoanalysis, but suggested the political significance of Freud’s theories of individual and societal repression’. Norman O. Brown's first xxxiilmajor treatise on Freud, Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History, published four years later, encouraged readers to abandon the path of sublimation and embark on a journey towards psychosexual liberation. By the time Eros and Civilization was reprinted in 196, introduced by a new, overtly “Political Preface,” Marcuse’s anti-repressive injunction, to “make the human body an instrument of pleasure rather than labor” through the advancement of “polymorphous sexuality,” had found its audience’ (Marcuse xv). As counterculture historian Theodore Roszak noted in 1968, “The emergence of Herbert Marcuse... as [one of the] major social theorists among the disaffiliated young of Western Europe and America must be taken as one of the defining features of the counter culture” (84). Throughout this study, I have also taken the liberty of discussing certain non-cinematic works in order to address the formally complex, often multimedia solutions that avant-garde filmmakers created in response to the challenge of representing the “thickness” of corporeality in a two-dimensional medium. Many experimental filmmakers from this period were accomplished artists in many media, including painting, silk-screening, sculpture, poetry, performance art, and installation; only a select few of the artists discussed in this study, such as Stan Brakhage, worked primarily in the medium of film. Taking advantage of the syncretic nature of the so-called “seventh art,” many experimental filmmakers of the time incorporated techniques associated with other media in their cinema, including painting directly on the celluloid, and the use of multiple screens and live soundtracks. It would be inappropriate to re-sketch the boundary between elite art and mass culture here, since experimental films Xxxroutinely transgressed the barriers between high and low in both their modes of representation and their methods of exhibition’®, Chapter Overview Flesh Cinema: The Corporeal Avant-Garde 1959-1979 is divided into four chapters, each of which examines a central motif in the avant-garde’s exploration of the material body: corporeal fragmentation; hard-core sexuality; portraiture and facial embodiment; and pain, physical destruction and death. While some films investigate several aspects of the body simultaneously (for example, Paul Sharits’ T,O,U,C,H,LN,G is a facial portrait film which exhibits hard-core images of genital penetration as well as violent and clinical images of the body in the process of destruction), I have categorized such multiform works on the basis of their dominant imagery for the sake of clarity and efficiency. Although there is a certain deference to both chronology and autvurisin within each chapter, since 1 have organized this study thematically, my analysis of certain filmmakers and their work is dispersed throughout this volume rather than contained within a single chapter. Warhol, for example, made non-genital part object motion studies, sexually explicit cinematic documents, facial portrait films, and proto- cinematic silkscreens that investigated the representation of death and the dying body in the media. As a result, there are discussions of Warhol's work, and other extremely prolific filmmakers such as Sharits and Brakhage, contained in several chapters. Chapter One, Corporeal Fragments and Perverse Sexuality, analyzes the ubiquitous imagery of the disarticulated body in avant-garde cinema of the sixties and seventies, Through their construction of minimalist films devoted to the exploration of mouths, shoulders, asses, torsos, abdomens, eyes, penises, and xxxivvulvas, directors like Stan Brakhage, James Broughton, Albert Fine, Robert Huot, Joe Jones, Yoko Ono, jeff Perkins, Anne Severson, Paul Sharits and Andy Warhol privileged the representation of bodily fragments over images of whole bodies. They also afforded intimate, sustained glances at sections of nude bodies in a culture that prohibited images on-screen. Furthermore, in the close-up shots of isolated and sometimes unrecognizable bodily fragments, spectators were free to watch the titillating effects of involuntary motion on flesh without calling into question their sexual preference or risking the stigmatization associated with same-sex gazing since the gender of the on-screen bodies was often ambiguous. By inviting spectators to find erotic pleasure in what psychoanalyst Melanie Klein would call “part objects,” these avant-garde motion studies implicitly challenged several key notions of Freudian psychoanalysis, including his distinction between normal and perverse sexuality, as well as his conflation of anatomy and subjectivity. Framed by the debate between Klein, Marcuse and Freud over the role of corporeal fragments in the development of the subject, Chapter One investigates the ways in which these part object motion studies challenged heteronormative conceptions of desire while enabling spectators to experience alternative pleasures of the flesh. Chapter Two, Experimental Intercourse: Documenting the Sex Act, analyzes avant-garde films that refine the language of cinema in order to find adequate ways of depicting unsimulated sexual acts and the ecstasy of the orgasmic body. In films by Stan Brakhage, Barbara Rubin, Carolee Schneemann, Paul Sharits, James Broughton, Anita Thacher and Andy Warhol, intimate and revealing close-ups of nude bodies and body parts are offered as evidence of a sexual “frenzy of the visible” actually occurring in the pornographic pro-filmic XXXV,event. Made in the liminal period of experimentation between the demise of the stag film and the advent of hard-core pornographic features in the early seventies, these films both reference and call into question the sexual revolution from which they emerge and undoubtedly helped to define. However, by treating sex as a complex aesthetic, political, and social encounter that demanded new cinematic vocabularies, avant-garde filmmakers not only suggested the profound limitations of this so-called revolution, but also radically transformed cinematic standards of obscenity in the process. By treating the face as if it were endowed with as much erotic significance as the genitals, avant-garde portrait films from the nineteen sixties prioritized the corporeal manifestations of the subject over the suggestion of emotional interiority. Giving Head: Prurient Portrait Films examines this strong tendency towards “facial embodiment” in avant-garde cinema in this era. By focussing on filmic documents that showcase the human face in unrelenting close-up, Chapter Three argues that experimental filmmakers employed the fully embodied visage as a central trope in their struggle to redefine the notions of ‘being’ and ‘personality’ along corporeal rather than psychological axes. In doing so, these films capitalized upon the latent “pornographic” potential of portraiture while simultaneously skirting the hazards of filmic censorship. ‘The final chapter, For the Love of a Corpse: Decomposing Compositions, analyzes the culmination of the avant-garde’s quest for greater cinematic veracity in the representation of the material body. Made in era where discourses of death virtually defined the zeitgeist, avant-garde films from the sixties and seventies documented images of real death, violent destruction and organic decay with unprecedented explicitness and intimacy. While certain films in this analysis xxxvidirectly commented upon and illustrated the violent primal scenes of American society during this time, other films only obliquely referenced the trauma of the body politic in their meditations on death and dying. By putting these films into dialogue with each other as well as with the historical events that propelled death into the foreground of American screen culture, Chapter Four accounts for ways in which the ruin of the physical body both generated and justified the renewed realism of Flesh Cinema. Undertaken as part of a personal quest to understand my own family history, Flesh Cinema: The Corporeal Avant-Garde 1959-1979 investigates the innovative articulation of the body in post-war experimental cinema. In addition to illuminating the alternative types of pleasures afforded by this movement, Flesh Cinema attempts to “come to terms” with the theoretical and historical conversations that made the on-screen “discursive explosion” of bodies possible during this period. However, rather than merely interpreting the corporeal avant-garde vis-i-vis the overlapping contexts from which it emerged, this study is my own personal record of my enchantment, and in some cases, infatuation with a body of films that consistently stun, shock, frustrate, titillate, and move me. Even the title of Eric Shaefer’s groundbreaking study of exploitation cinema capitalizes on this perception by mobilizing adjectives that humorously call attention to the gap between what exploitation films promise and what contemporary film viewers experience when watching them. (Bold! Daring! Shocking! True! A History of Exploitation Films 1919-1959, Durham: Duke University Press, 1999). In this study, Shaefer relates an anecdote regarding the popularity of Reefer Madness in the 1970s. According to Shaefer, the film “proved popular with ‘potheads’ and their straight counterparts alike due to its outlandish depictions of the effects of marijuana on its users” (2). In this scenario of belated spectatorship, the film’s “original antidope message was drowned out XXXviiby the laugher of audiences who grooved on the overripe performances, the trite dialogue, and the strained sermons” (2). Enjoyed by fans of bad movies or camp, sexploitation films are prized for both their “cinematic ineptitude” and their “parochial take on sexuality and drug use, combined with their bombastic promises about shocking truths and fearless frankness,” which “can seem like a tonic when compared with jaded marketing and merchandising efforts that pass as films today” (Shaefer 3). ?In her essay “Where is Your Rupture?: Mass Culture and the Gesamtkunstwerk,”” Annette Michelson argues that experimental cinema had abrogated its fascination with the body by the late sixties. According to Michelson, structural cinema was an attempt to make visible the processes of cognition that replaced the cinematic investigation of the body with the exploration of the mind. Similarly, dance historian Sally Banes’ concentration on a single year in her study of the body perhaps unintentionally gives the impression that the avant-garde’s interest in the material body was a phenomenon that could be localized to a specific time and place. See her book Greenwich Village 1963: Avant-Garde Performance and the Effervescent Body for a thorough exegesis of the developments during this year. ‘In Making Sex, his history of the construction of sexuality, Laqueur has eloquently described the difficulty of perceiving the stubborn simplicity of the flesh. As individuals and as a culture, we “remain poised between the body as that extraordinarily fragile, feeling, and transient mass of flesh with which we are all familiar—too familiar—and the body that is so hopelessly bound to its cultural meanings as to elude unmediated access” (Laqueur, 12). As Laqueur suggests, bodies are so thoroughly discursively constituted that it has become increasingly difficult to evacuate them of their cultural content in order to see them. * Unfortunately, this dilemma renders inaccurate or incomplete accounts of particular films treacherous to students of the avant-garde, since these mistakes tend to be reproduced ad infinitum without being corrected. The false albeit popular notion that Warhol's Sleep shows six consecutive hours of a man sleeping results from the fact that more people have read misleading accounts of this film than have actually seen it. * See Maria St. John’s “How to Do Things with the Starr Report: Pornography, Performance, and the President's Penis” in Porn: Studies, ed. Linda Williams. Durham: Duke University Press, 2004. © From its inception, the cinema apparatus was always already implicated in what Michel Foucault would call “la volonté de savoir,” or the will to knowledge of the body and its extraordinary capacity for movement, pleasure, and the inscription of power. Although Eadweard Muybridge and Etienne Jules Marey’s interest in the nuances of human and animal figures engaged in motion made an important contribution to the scientific knowledge of the body, the fascination inspired by their images were never entirely epistemological. Early motion pictures betrayed a fascination with the human body, which both exceeded and undermined the proliferation of scientific discourses surrounding their reception. For example, the first important film theorist, Hugo Miinsterberg, insists upon the purely scientific function of Muybridge and Marey’s pre-cinematic motion experiments. He writes, “The leading aim was still decidedly a scientific understanding of the XXXViiimotions, and the combination of pictures into a unified impression of movement was not the purpose. Least of all was mere amusement intended” (5). French film theorist André Bazin contradicts this in his essay “The Myth of Total Cinema,” when he observes, “the cinema owes virtually nothing to the scientific spirit” (17).) As Linda Williams has so insightfully argued, the privileging of nude and semi-nude human bodies as the objects of visual inspection produced “unprecedented cinematic pleasure of the illusion of bodily motion,” a delight that was never “purely scientific” (39). The first “moving” pictures were essentially the first “dirty” moving pictures, inaugurating a marriage between the cinematic apparatus and the pornographic impulse that has lasted over a century, and has revealed no recent signs of discord or estrangement. “Inhis book Avant-Garde Film] Motion Studies, Scott MacDonald extends his notion of the “motion study” beyond Muybridge’s early experiments concerning human and animal locomotion to include an analysis of films in which movement itself (whether mechanical, corporeal, yeographical/ spatial, or metaphorical) plays a structuring role. * Hollis Frampton’ short, black-and-white film Lemon (1969) parodies this desire, by focussing on a single, supple lemon for the duration of the film, as if it could reveal, through analogy, the hidden secrets of non-vegetal flesh. In the first half of this black and white film, dedicated to painter/ filmmaker Robert Huot (whose own films Turning Torso Drawdown and Nuie Descending the Stairs (1970) are themselves classic motion studies of nude human beings performing simple actions) the eponymous lemon comes into view slowly as dark shadows are peeled away by the ever-increasing brightness of the screen. As the chiaroscuro striptease unfolds, the incandescent fruit, puckered at its navel, resembles different parts of the human anatomy—at first, the profile of a button-nosed face, then the silhouette of a breast with pert nipple, finally a luscious buttock. The texture of the rind, smooth in the dim light, becomes more pronounced as the lemon is illuminated; porous and dimpled, the rind suggests pockmarked skin, the thickness of tactile experience. As the light begins to fade, enveloping the object in deep shadow, the lemon seems glamorous again, aloof. Ina similar manner, Karen Johnson's Orange (1969), which was a prizewinner at the 1970 International Erotic Film Festival, transformed the “peeling, sectioning, licking, and eating of a navel orange” into a “sensuous, sexual experience” (Vogel 229). In Frampton’s later photographic series, Sixteen Studies from VEGETABLE LOCOMOTION (1975), he and his collaborator Marion Faller take this principle even further, by presenting pieces of produce, such as an apple, “advancing” against a Muybridgean grid. Subjected to the principles of the motion study, apples and lemons become corporealized and flesh-like; their resemblance to other smooth, rounded bodies or body parts are suggested in these minimalist homages to early motion studies. ° See the essay “Notes on the Index: Seventies Art in America” in The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1984; 196: 219. © P, Adams Sitney has characterized the “trance film” as the dominant genre in American avant-garde film of the late forties and early fifties. Citing both Robert Wiene’s German Expressionist film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and Jean Cocteau’s Le Sang d’un Poete as aesthetic models for this development, Sitney writes: “The xxix,trance film as it emerged in America has fairly strict boundaries. It deals with visionary experience. Its protagonists are somnambulists, priests, initiates of rituals, and the possessed, whose stylized movements the camera, with its slow and fast motions, can re-create so aptly. The protagonist wanders through a potent environment toward a climatic scene of self-realization... The landscapes, both natural and architectural, through which he passes are usually chosen with naive aesthetic considerations, and they often intensify the texture of the film to the point of emphasizing a specific line of symbolism. It is part of the nature of the trance that the protagonist remains isolated from what he confronts; no interaction of characters is possible in these films” (Sitney 21). " Wilhelm Reich (1897-1957) was an Austrian medical doctor, psychiatrist and psycholanalyst who had been a student of Freud’s in Vienna. In the 1930s, Reich claimed to have discovered a physical, mass-free energy called “orgone” that ‘was present in the atmosphere and all of living matter. Derived from his attempts to measure the physiological states of male orgasm electrically, orgone was a kind of orgastic potency that Reich believed could be used to cure cancer as well as other diseases. Although Reich developed instruments called “orgone accumulators” (commonly known as “Orgone Boxes”) to detect and harness this energy, his findings were not accepted by the scientific community. In 1930, Reich published a study of society called The Sexual Revolution, in which he advocated for free contraceptives and abortion on demand. Always one to practice what he preached, Reich set up free clinics in working class neighborhoods. After the publication of The Mass Psychology of Fascism in 1933, in which he argued that fascism was a symptom of sexual repression, Reich became extremely unpopular with the Nazis, who banned his book. After fleeing to the United States in 1939, Reich continued to write and to practice orgone sex therapy. He spent two years in prison after ignoring the FDA’s injunction against orgone therapy, which they considered deleterious. By the late forties, several counterculture celebrities had become fascinated with Reich's findings, including Beat poet Allen Ginsberg; by the sixties, William Steig, Norman Mailer and William Burroughs all admitted to having undergone orgone therapy. In 1956, during the height of McCarthyism, the FOA commenced burning Reich's books. Stunned by the nightmare vision of Nazi oppression transported to the supposed land of the free, Reich died a year later of heart failure. By the sixties, Reich was something of a countercultural hero, as evidenced by Yugoslavian director Dusan Makavejev’s extraordinary film WR: Mysteries of on Organism (1968-71), which celebrated the founder of the Orgone Box in surrealist collage. It can be argued that the telephone booth-type “Orgasmatrons” in Woody Allen’s film Sleeper (1973) also comically reference Reich’s theories. © First published in 1974, Vogel’s groundbreaking book Film as a Subversive Art devoted Part Three to celebrating American, foreign, documentary, soft-core, hard-core and avant-garde films that explored these “Forbidden Subjects of the Cinema.” In addition to the candid descriptions he offered, Vogel also supplied an enormous amount of pictures, many of which were obscene documents in their own right. ™ By the time he wrote The Visible and the Invisible, Merleau-Ponty had abandoned the distinction between the lived body and the objective body, or the subject and the object (200). xl* According to Marcuse, Freud’s analysis of the development of the repressive mental apparatus proceeded on both an ontogenetic level (the growth of the repressed individual from infancy onwards) and a phylogenetic level (the growth of society from the primal horde to the fully constituted civilized state) (Marcuse 20). ® For a more complete account of Marcuse’s unbelievable popularity during the 1960s, see Chapter 16, “(Id)eology: Herbert Marcuse, Norman O. Brown, and Fritz Perls” in David Allyn’s Make Love, Not War. The Sexual Revolution: An Unfettered History, pp. 196-205. ** Experimental films of this period were often shown in non-traditional venues such as art galleries, multimedia happenings, porn theaters, private homes, parties, and membership film societies. xiiChapter One: Corporeal Fragments and Perverse Sexualit “Indecent or undue exposure of the human body shall not be presented.” -The Code of Self-Regulation (Revised Edition, 1977) “'Prurience’—the perennial itch of mankind—is the béte noir of all censors.” -Amos Vogel, Film as a Subversive Art, 212. Nowhere is the urge to disarticulate the body more evident than in ‘American avant-garde cinema of the nineteen sixties and seventies. Seizing the cinema's ability to divide the body into discrete parts through conventions such as editing and close-ups, experimental filmmakers from this period focussed their cameras on corporeal fragments that had only rarely been recorded in the history of cinema. Like the “primitive” tradition of the late-nineteenth and early twentieth century motion study, experimental cinema attempted to anatomize the corporeal apparatus in order to produce visual evidence of the body's voluntary and involuntary movements. However, by focussing on parts of the body rather than images of the complete corpus, experimental filmmakers such as Stan Brakhage, James Broughton, Albert Fine, Robert Huot, Joe Jones, Yoko Ono, Jeff Perkins, Anne Severson, Paul Sharits and Andy Warhol divorced themselves from the purportedly scientific aims of their predecesso: . By disassembling the body into distinct fragments, these filmmakers unwittingly plumbed the ancient meanings of the word “flesh,” whose etymological roots were lodged in the notion of tearing, of dividing the meat of the (not necessarily human) body, and, fittingly, of producing new tissue’. In doing so, these directors challenged their audiences to re-think the fictive unity of identity as well as the singularity of sexual desire by defamiliarizing the body from the assumption of totality. Profoundly different from images of the body in‘mainstream film as well as the perception of the body in everyday life, the close- up images of flesh in avant-garde motion studies resembled nothing so much as a kind of “new tissue.” A Perverse Cinema of Part Objects Of course, the avant-garde’s focus on non-genital “part objects” also enabled experimental filmmakers to elide censorship while still satisfying the prurient gazes of their audience members. In a cinematic culture where nudity was still officially prohibited by the Production Code’, and sanctioned only when proved to have redeeming social value’, the avant-garde’s nearly exclusive focus on nude body parts offered a radical alternative for viewers accustomed to seeking prurient imagery surreptitiously, or in illegal venues’. Ata time when the “pretense that an erotic image had to be art or exercise instruction was yet a painful memory” (Waugh “Cockteaser” 62), the production of films whose raison-d’étre was the prurient display of the nude body was a genuinely incendiary provocation. Avant-garde filmmakers of the period flaunted the prohibitions against nudity by presenting parts of the body not usually considered titillating in a stimulating manner. They also ridiculed the courts’ efforts to adjust obscenity standards to the changing mores of sixties culture by showing off the body in ways that even a liberal censor would have trouble justifying as socially redeeming. By de-contextualizing diverse “pounds of flesh” through extreme close- ups, disorienting camera angles, rapid montage, irregular framing or unusual lighting, these “part object motion studies” offered fragments of flesh for perusal without clarifying the gender of the individuals to which these body parts belonged. By deliberately obfuscating anatomical distinction, these films‘encouraged spectators to examine on-screen bodies in order to experience types of erotic and aesthetic pleasures that could not easily be accommodated by biologically determined, exclusively heteronormative conceptions of gender and desire. In this realm of expanded possibility, male spectators could ponder images of on-screen male bodies without exposing themselves to the social stigmas routinely conferred upon men “caught looking” at other men®. Women were given the rare opportunity to examine parts of the female anatomy that had been obscured and mystified in the misogynist culture in which they lived’. Spectators of both genders and all sexual persuasions could take pleasure in the abstract beauty of the material body when watching films that exclusively featured oft-neglected parts of it. Liberated from notions of anatomical determinism and essentialist notions of identity, body parts signified the mutability of the flesh rather than the intransigence of gender or sexual preference. In contradistinction to earlier avant-garde traditions, experimental cinema from the sixties and seventies emphasized the partitive potential of the body was above and beyond other poetic, psychological and social uses of it. By examining films that almost exclusively display corporeal fragments, this chapter expands upon Annette Michelson’s observation that American artistic production of the nineteen fifties and sixties was dominated by an aesthetic of fragmentation and the representation of the body-in-pieces. According to Michelson, the breast-like abstractions in Eva Hesse’s minimalist paintings, the impressions of “targets” in the plaster casts of Jasper Johns, and the rapid montage of corporeal fragments in Stan Brakhage’s films all articulate subjectivity as a violent process of dismemberment. However, rather than treating the disarticulated bodyexclusively as evidence of the sadistic urge to rend and destroy, as Michelson suggests’, this chapter theorizes the alternative types of corporeal pleasures and modes of identification that these “part object” films make available to spectators. Much of my analysis of part object films is inspired by the extremely corporeal account of infantile subjectivity offered by the Austrian child psychoanalyst and founder of object-relations theory Melanie Klein (1882-1960). Klein’s insistence upon the utter centrality of the part object in psychic life resulted from her analysis of pre-linguistic patients who could not participate in the “talking cure.”® From her observation of “the savagery of oral, anal, and Cedipal impulses which her little patients expressed in their sessions of play,” Klein developed a radically different account of “preoedipal” sensuality than Freud (Likierman, 9). The theory of object-relations that emerged was propped upon the infant's physical, libidinal, emotional and psychical attachment to part objects—most notably, the breast--rather than whole, clearly gendered bodies. Klein's account of sexuality, which de-privileged both gender and the supposedly defining crisis of the Oedipal complex, challenged Freud’s account of sexuality and sexual difference’. As Klein observed, it was the mother’s breast, rather than Mother herself, which constituted the first and most significant object choice in the infant's world. Long before the child comprehends the maternal figure as a complete object—let alone as a subject in her own right—he forms a relation to the part of her that provides nourishment; hence, the term “part object.” Like Klein, sixties guru and psychoanalytic theorist Herbert Marcuse also challenged the domination of the Oedipal complex, and the consequentrepression of the individual, by celebrating certain aspects of infantile sexuality. One of the primary psychoanalytic notions that Marcuse combated was Freud’s “repressive organization of sexuality,” in which the “partial sex instincts” are subjected to the “primacy of genitalia” in the abandonment of the polymorphous perversity of infancy (Marcuse 40, 49). Although this motif emerged repeatedly in Freud's writings, it is perhaps most clearly summarized in his definition of perversion in Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality: Sexual activities which either (a) extend, in an anatomical sense, beyond the regions of the body that are designed for sexual union, or (b) linger over the intermediate relations to the sexual object which should normally be traversed rapidly on the path towards the final sexual aim (16). Significantly, along both the spatial and temporal axes of Freud’s demarcation, perversion is conceived of as excess, as any type of extension or dilation of sex acts that supplants the genitals as its primary focus. In “perverse” sexuality, ‘meaning is not only bestowed retroactively with the release of seminal fluids that accompanies heterosexual penetration, but i inextricably bound up with “the intermediate relations to the sexual object” (Freud 15). Since Freud’s conception of the normal sexual aim includes non-genital sexual activities (like kissing) only insofar as they directly precede and advance the cause of heterosexual genital union, sexuality defined by rapt or excessive attention to non-reproductive parts of the body is inevitably deemed perverse. In his early discussion of fetishism in Three Essays, Freud defines fetishism as those cases in which “the normal sexual object is replaced by another which bears some relation to it, but is entirely unsuited to serve the normal sexual aim” (19). Since Freud's conception of the normal sexual aim is limited to genital contact, rapt or excessive attention to those parts of the body that surpass hisformulation is inevitably deemed perverse. Freud writes, “the situation only becomes pathological when the longing for the fetish passes beyond the point of being merely a necessary condition attached to the sexual object and actually takes the place of the normal aim” (20). Freud never takes into account the possibility that excessive focus on non-genital parts of the body may develop from historical circumstances, in which access to the genitals is precluded by law, censorship or social taboos. For Freud, perversion is defined as any type of extension or dilation of sexuality that supplants the genitals as its primary focus. Thus, whereas Melanie Klein argued that an individual's investment in part objects was both a dominant and utterly normal aspect of subjectivity, Freud confiscated the part object from the subject, rendering the psychic investment in corporeal fragments a symptom of perversion. In Marcuse’s Marxist critique, this organization of the sex instinct which “taboos as perversions practically all its manifestations” that did not serve the procreative function” was an outgrowth of a society attempting to transform the body into an “instrument of alienated labor’ (49, 46). In an “acquisitive and antagonistic society in the process of constant expansion,” ordinary societal repression, designed to ward off the collapse of civilization into violent chaos, had transformed into “surplus-repression” in which all non-reproductive, non- productive functions of the body were considered excessive and potentially dangerous (Marcuse 45, 44). The result was an extreme “desexualization of the organism required by its social utilization as an instrument of labor” (Marcuse 39). Furthermore, Marcuse regarded this restriction of sexuality not merely as a quantitative change, but as a qualitative one as well. He explains,‘The unification of the partial instincts and their subjugation under the procreative function alter the very nature of sexuality: from an autonomous “principle” governing the entire organism it is turned into a specialized temporary function, into a means for an end (Marcuse 41, italics mine). In order to defy the increasing colonization of the individual by the repressive forces of society, Marcuse called for an urgent re-discovery of infantile sexuality, and the “all but unlimited erotogenic zones of the body” (23). To embrace “perversion” was to “express rebellion” not only against the “subjugation of sexuality” but “against the institutions which guarantee this order” (Marcuse 49). Thus, in The Age of Marcuse", the performance of alternative types of sexual behavior, especially those favoring non-genital stimulation—was seen not merely as a personal experiment, but as a veritable political uprising, in which sexual soldiers were encouraged to return fo the repressed with a vengeance. Within this social and political climate, the avant-garde’s “reactivation of all erotogenic zones” (Marcuse 201) was as a deliberate act of subversion, not only against Production Code censorship of non-narrative, non-conventional forms of cinema, but against a repressive society that actively marginalized non- heterosexual, non-reproductive variants of sex. Unlike experimental films explicitly concerned with documenting the sexual act (discussed in the following chapter), the films analyzed in this chapter deliberately eschew the fulfillment of what Freud would label normal sexual aims in their privileging of the part object or corporeal fragment. Frequently divorced from both narrative coherence and gender stability, the close ups of genitals and other body parts in avant-garde part object films often only ambiguously indicate the intensification of sexual pleasure, and are just as frequently deployed to suggest the radicaldeconstruction of sex and subject alike. Likewise, non-genital body parts, traditionally considered subordinate to the consummation of heterosexual intercourse, are often endowed with a degree of erotic significance normally reserved for the reproductive organs. In these films, the sexual pleasures of the body are multiplied and dispersed, emancipating the corporeal apparatus from standard anatomical hierarchies. Avant-Garde Motion Studies In many ways, Willard Maas’ 1943 film Geography of the Body is the significant precursor to later avant-garde studies of the corporeal fragment. Made in collaboration with his wife, filmmaker Marie Mencken and the poet George Barker, who filmed details of each other's bodies with inexpensive magnifying glasses taped to a 16mm camera, Geography depicts the human body as a series of abstract landscapes (Sitney 84). Comprised of individual close-ups of skin, eyes, ears, legs, breasts, nipples, hair, hands, nostrils, membranes, mouths and tongues, as well as medium shots of torsos and seemingly headless bodies, Geography is the first significant “part object film.” In Geography of the Body, however, the body is first and foremost a metaphor for landscape, and functions only secondarily as human flesh. Although images of human flesh comprise the entire film, body parts are not allowed to merely represent themselves. Here, the body is rendered sublime only insofar as it conjures something else”. The side view of a female breast resembles a gently sloping hill; other corporeal images invoke valleys, gorges, canyons, deserts, prairies, plateaus and peaks. Due to the absence of any conventional establishing shots, as well as the random alternation between camera distances, the use of magnification, and the elliptical editing pattern, it is frequently difficult toidentify many of the corporeal fragments in the film. While some images are immediately associated with parts of the male or female anatomy, more often it remains unclear whether the camera is charting male or female terrain. Unlike many examples of Flesh Cinema from the sixties and seventies, Geography of the Body includes a soundtrack that serves as a guide for the images. In this strange voiceover, Barker recites a surrealistic poem that makes copious allusions to faraway places and exotic locales. Filled with tales of virgins, savages and aboriginals, as well as references to distant islands like Hawaii and the Bahamas, Barker's commentary analogizes the notion of travel with the visual exploration of the human body’s unfamiliar terrain. While the images suggest a topographical map of flesh, Barker's voiceover evokes a mystic cartographer, returning from a distant journey with mysterious tales of his discoveries. While avant-garde motion studies from the sixties and seventies bear significant kinship with Eadweard Muybridge and Etienne-Jules Marey’s chronophotography of human locomotion", they also enact crucial points of departure from these earlier models. Whereas Muybridge over-emphasized the primacy of sexual difference in the representation of male and female bodies", avant-garde films dedicated to representing discrete human gestures and movements frequently went out of their way to avoid facile identifications of the gender of their subjects. By fostering certain types of corporeal misrecognitions in their minimal mise-en-scéne, many of the films discussed in this chapter radically estranged the relationship between anatomy and gender. In these films, the dismemberment of the body into distinct corporeal fragments neither recollects nor disavows the anxiety posed by the threat of castration, asexpressed in the Freudian account. Not only do these films challenge the relationship between anatomy and subjectivity, but through their choreography of ambiguously gendered body parts, they suggest the ways in which corporeal knowledge can be problematized rather than abetted by the sight of actual bodies. As Scott MacDonald has argued, post-war American avant-garde film endlessly returned to the origins of so-called “primitive cinema,”--most emphatically the work of Muybridge and the Lumiére brothers~through their innovative re-organization of the “hierarchical arrangements of material, space, and time” (MacDonald 8-9, 10). In his recreation of the early conditions of moving-image production, Andy Warhol actually attempted to recapitulate the history of the moving image in the twentieth century in his career as Pop artist- cum-experimental filmmaker. More than any other filmmaker of the period, Warhol's abiding fascination with the primitive conditions of motion picture production forged a formal dialogue between the old and the new. Repetition, Dissolution and Stasis in the Part Object Films of Andy Warhol Like Muybridge’s early studies of human and animal locomotion, which were not initially projected but rather published as a series of still photographs, Warhol's serialized silkscreens of celebrities and disasters suggest movement through the repetition of “frames” that bear slight differences from one another as the result of inevitable imperfections of the inking process. Likewise, Warhol's first experiments with a moving camera—a 16mm Bolex purchased by the artist in 1963—recall the pre-narrative phase of early cinema. Shot mostly in black- and-white, Warhol's earliest films are single-shot, silent studies of activities being performed at the Factory. Transforming the limitations of early cinema 10production into minimalist virtues, Warhol reinvented experimental cinema with his relentlessly stationary camera, and his abstention from editing techniques. It was only when he began to move towards the development of narrative and character in the mid-sixties, that Warhol gradually began to introduce techniques associated with the commercial cinema, including sound, color, editing, camera movement, the deployment of an alternative star system and the hierarchical division of labor. Although Warhol had shot his first film Tarzan and Jane Regained... ort Of (1963) in color, it was only in 1966 that he began regularly using color as a way to court the quasi-mainstream audiences he was seeking. Still, Warhol continued to use editing techniques and camera movement sparsely at first, then ironically, and, eventually, incoherently. Although Warhol had already partially transformed the minimalist style of his early films, it wasn’t until September of 1965, when he filmed My Hustler on Fire Island, that the filmmaker introduced both a pan and a zoom in order to visually interrogate the emerging dynamic between characters inhabiting different locations", By the time Warhol made Eating Too Fast in 1966, he had discovered the ways in which extremely selective camera movement could comically reverse the initial assumptions of the audience. In this “sequel” to Blow Job, the single downward pan in the film reveals that the bored subject art critic Gregory Battcock has actually been receiving a blow job the entire time he has been mindlessly chatting on the telephone. As Warhol's filmmaking progressed, he began to lose interest in the calculated effects of formal film language, simultaneously flirting with and withdrawing from the conventions of mainstream cinema. In many of his later films, Warhol's camera senselessly spins and swerves away from the presumed unarrative action of his actors, focussing instead (or not focussing, as is often the case) on ceilings, floors, and other inanimate “participants” in the mise-en-scene. Continually ahead of his time, despite (or perhaps because of) his inspired returns to the outdated or already-past, Warhol did not completely abandon moving image technology when he retired from the cinema after his near-fatal shooting in 1968. Always the innovator, Warhol's unrealized idea to have a television sitcom, appropriately called “Nothing Happens,” not only anticipated the current obsession with the mundane in the innumerable reality television shows congesting the air waves, but simultaneously revisited the concept of early actualité films by the Lumigre brothers. More than any of other filmmaker, Warhol was interested in the tension between motion and stasis, as well as the challenge of cinematically representing live, moving bodies that were attempting to remain as still as possible for the duration of the camera’s focus upon them. In his biography of the artist, cultural critic Wayne Koestenbaum has suggested that it was Warhol's childhood bouts of St. Vitus’ Dance, a disease of uncontrollable shaking, that drew the artist towards the “unmoving,” “beautifully quiescent” body (Koestenbaum 9). Already in possession of the ability to make still images, Warhol's turn to filmmaking offered the possibility of staging the tension produced by the stillness of the apparatus and the photographed body laboring to approximate that stillness. Watching Warhol's films of nearly still bodies, we learn the patience to look, to endure, to see. Fixed by the unmoving camera, apparently changeless subjects become more articulate the longer we watch. The sparsest movements become endowed with great significance, producing a heightened awareness of the subtlety of the human figure. Whereas Maas revealed the human body only 12to insist upon its similitude to non-corporeal objects or vistas, Warhol was interested in the body as body, as thick, intransigent flesh struggling to reveal itself, between the discipline of the apparatus and the potential distraction of the audience. Of course, merely seeing a still body does not satisfy the human desire to witness corporeal animation. “Once we have seen a body, or imagined one, or ." art historian James Elkins writes, found a body metaphor to rest content wit “then another desire becomes visible: we also want bodies to move, to be alive” (132). Since “photographs clip out instants in time, and since we see in overlapping moments and usually base our sense of a person on a fluid sequence of moments and motions,” the contemplation of moving images offers a radically different experience for the viewer (Elkins 28). For as closely as Warhol's films seem to approximate still photographic portraits, watching his Screem Tests~as opposed to seeing stills of them reproduced in a book--is an extremely unnerving, nearly rapturous experience. In the same way that sounds derive their meaning only in relation to intervals of silence, the barely legible movements of the subjects of Warhol's Screen Tests are made meaningful by the imposed stillness of Warhol's three-minute format. Although these short segments depict an infinitesimal amount of corporeal movement compared to the standards of commercial cinema, this scarcity of gesture imbues even the slightest movement with profound expressivity. Warhol's Screen Tests engage the notion of motion itself through their exegesis of duration and stillness. In Three Essays, Freud suggests that rather than being a coherent or unified drive, the sexual instinct is always threatened by dissolution. He writes, “perhaps the sexual instinct may itself be no simple thing, but put together from Bcomponents which have come apart again in the perversions” (28). By inviting the viewer to focus on singular, non-sexual parts of the human body, Warhol's early films dissolve the sexual instinct back into its component parts. Although Warhol did include shots of the male genitals in some of his films, such as Haircut (1964), as well as acts of genital penetration in Couch (1964) and Blue Movie (1968), his early motion studies deliberately eschew fulfillment of what Freud would call the normal sexual aim. On the contrary, films like Sleep and Taylor Mead’s Ass “supplant” images of the genitals with images of non-genital corporeal fragments by imbedding the viewer's desire to see the genitals in works that consistently refuse to deliver the goods. Characterized by a corporeal mode of address, in which the camera forges an intimate relation to nude flesh, Warhol's films confront viewers with their desire for genital visibility. By fixing his camera upon parts of the body that lay within seductive proximity to the male genitals or the female breast, Warhol implants the urge to see the sexual organs only to frustrate this desire by abstaining from any type of camera movement. A list of Warhol's early films reads like a catalogue of perversions; each film is devoted to an activity that has been severed from its relations to the other component parts of the sexual instinct. Warhol's famous early film Eal, which stars the artist Robert Indiana and is discussed in Chapter Three, depicts the subject in the process of eating a mushroom which seems to magically renew itself throughout the course of the film. (To achieve this effect, Warhol assembled the reels out of order.) In addition to films like Eat and Kiss (also discussed in Chapter Three), however, Warhol made a number of motion films that 14concentrated primarily on non-facial parts of the body, such as Shoulder and Taylor Mead’s Ass, both of which were made in 1964. Whereas each of the aforementioned films concentrated exclusively on a single part of the body, Warhol's six hour epic Sleep (1963) catalogued various segments of the quiescent body. In this film, corporeal fragments of the poet John Giorno’s body are viewed as he sleeps. Contrary to popular mythology, the film does not actually show six continuous six hours of a man sleeping, filmed with an immobile camera. Rather, Sleep consists of five and a half-hours of spliced- together multiple copies of four minute camera rolls taken from the original eight hour shoot. Each shot is filmed from a different angle as to emphasize different nude parts of Giorno’s body: his rising abdomen, an abstract shape that resembles the cheek of a buttock, Giorno’s torso, shoulders and head, and several close-ups of the poet’s head as he sleeps. As critic Stephen Koch has pointed out in Stargazer, his study of Warhol's life, art, and films, There were numerous shooting sessions; over a period of several weeks, the avant-garde poet John Giorno (who did the sleeping) returning repeatedly to slip off his clothes and resume his easeful task on the couch After Empire (1964), Sleep is Warhol's most sublime exercise in duration. Yet, unlike Warhol's eight-hour vigil of the Empire State Building from evening until early morning, the duration of Sleep is “faked” through loop printing, projection at silent speed, reassemblage and the use of freeze frame. Since each of these shots is slightly less than three minutes long or 100 feet of celluloid, to achieve the film’s estimable running time, Warhol looped these reels together. If one has the patience to endure the entire film, it becomes clear relatively quickly that we are watching repeated imagery of the human body, although it is more 15obvious in some shots than in others. In shots where Giorno moves, for example, the looping systematically repeats the precise corporeal adjustment of Giorno’s body. In other, more abstract shots of flesh, where the poet's rhythmic breathing constitutes the only movement in the frame, the looping is less conspicuous. It also becomes apparent that Warhol's notoriously stationary camera does in fact move in this film, although not in collaboration with our desires. Rather than avoiding repetition in the goal of putting forward a “notion of human existence as a linear progression through numerous unique events,” Warhol's looping foregrounds the ways in which desire pivots upon repetition (Manovich 317). However, confronted with images that repeat the same short sequences rather than reveal more long-term transformations in the sleeper’s demeanor, viewers of Sleep often feel cheated or abused. For the viewer who experiences the duration of the film as an exercise in corporeal discipline, the Joop implies an eternal return to the same, a sense of being “stuck” in time. Since sitting still in an auditorium for six hours calls attention to the discomforting effect of time's passage on the body, there is an expectation that the viewer's extraordinary patience should be justified with his or her exposure to a unique experience. If the spectator is not actually going to witness the minute changes of the body that unfold over six hours of sleep, what is the incentive to keep watching? ‘As new media theorist Lev Manovich has argued, cinema “banished the loop to the low-art realms” of pornography peep shows, animation, and instructional films when films began to be recognized as an art form (315). Since the cinema had emerged from Joop-based technologies like Edison’s Kinetoscope, the loop was a potential reminder of the mass media’s squalid roots 16as cheaply produced entertainment for immigrants and other members of the working class (Sklar 1975 4-5). The use of looping in Sleep foregrounds the technological limitations of the film’s production, giving the impression that the filmmaker did not (or could not) invest sufficient time, money, or equipment into actually providing a record of six hours of a man sleeping. The frequent use of looping in structural cinema signified both its “cheapness” and its kinship with lowbrow forms of the moving image. Unlike pornography and animation, however, which promise an intense degree of pleasure in spite of their financially unavoidable use of repeated imagery, looped structural films deliberately provoke the audience by subjected spectators to undistinguished, recurrent images. Conspicuously advertising its own low production values, Sleep flaunts the filmmaker’s frugality while asking the audience to invest an enormous amount of time (the film is more than three times the length of the standard feature film) and corporeal labor into the spectatorial experience. Indeed, part of the sense of abuse that informs avant-garde spectatorship emerges from the viewer's perception of this disparity: that it takes more work to watch one of Warhol's film, for example, than it did to make them. With the exception of his loquacious, exhibitionistic Superstars, Warhol liked to film “celebrities” doing what they did no! do best. Although credits are usually not listed in his films, Warhol very rarely shot anonymous actors in the hundreds of films he made between 1963 and 1968." Instead, he filmed recognizable figures from the world of letters, performance, and art stripped of the visible insignia of their professions and personalities, In Warhol's extensive cewwre, dancers sit around or stand motionlessly (Shoulder, Haircut), writers become mute through the imposed silence of the format, (Screen Test of Susan 7Sontag), painters are not filmed in front of their own work but against crisp white walls (Screen Test of James Rosenquist), actors remain expressionless (Screen Test of Dennis Hopper), singers cut hair (Nico in The Chelsea Girls), the sexy are made to look awkward (gorgeous naked people look ludicrous in the cafeteria-like setting of Warhol's Nude Restaurant), the “unsexy” are given erotic props they don’t know how to handle (Henry Geldhazer), and dandies are expected to become cowboys with the mere addition of a horse or two (Horse, Lonesome Cowboys).” Sleep, which deprives the poet not only of his words but also of his individuality in shots that objectifv or abstract features of his body, belongs resolutely to this tradition. In the half-dozen images presented, Giorno is separated from his mind; he exists as pure body, as movement without motive. As Koch has written, the shots in Sleep “convey the sense of the Person divested of anything but the essentials of life itself. In sleep...the personality veers toward the impersonality of a universally shared experience” (40). For most of Warhol's films, a description of the performer's “activity” fails to describe the nuances of movement captured on screen. Sleep is no more “about” a man sleeping than the Mona Lisa is “about” a woman sitting, although one would be hard-pressed to describe the film without recourse to such banalities. The first shot exhibits the nude torso of a man, whose abdomen rises and falls with the pressure of breathing. A mass of hair trickles down the somnolent nude’s chest, becoming a rivulet of pubic hair leading the eye diagonally off the frame. The composition of this shot positions Giorno’s penis directly out of the frame at the lower right-hand corner. Although Koch has described this image of Giorno’s rising abdomen as a kind of “fleshly abstraction” (40), the sight of the naked male stomach is much more titillating 18than Koch admits. As queer historian Thomas Waugh has observed, before Warhol's death in 1987, there was an overwhelming tendency to disavow the “primacy of sexual representation in the Warhol oeuvre” (52). Despite Warhol's frequently pornographic subject matter, “critics of the modernist, postmodernist, or heterosexist persuasion” routinely failed to acknowledge the centrality of sex in Warhol's cinema, often omitting crucial details such as the nudity of the male sleeper in Sleep (Waugh 52). ‘As in Warhol's film Blow Job, the penis functions in Sleep as a structuring absence, infiltrating our gaze with the desperate desire to see more, to peck beyond the edges of the frame. In addition to the involuntary motion of the breathing abdomen, more rapid and unpredictable movements are captured during other shots of Giorno’s slumber. Entranced by the restless realm of dreams, Giorno unexpectedly shifts his head on the pillow as he sleeps or adjusts his pelvis. Despite Giorno’s repositioning, however, his penis remains off- screen. Although it soon becomes obvious that this image is looped (after every four minutes, we begin watching the same shot from the beginning), for at least the first few times we watch it, the question lingers: Will we see it? Rather than provoking the kind of detached intellection that a film like Geography of the Body inspires through its insistent use of metaphor, Sleep invokes the urge to observe what is deliberately left unseen. When I watched the film, I found myself readjusting my body in my seat, as if seeking a better position could somehow improve my point of view. Here, however, the camera is relentlessly stationary; no amount of repositioning can outmaneuver Warhol's strategic framing. A “cockteaser,” Warhol solicits the erotic interest of the spectator only to deny the sight of the genital jewels. 19Of the five shots in the film, two are close-ups of Giorno’s face. In both of these, his head rests at a slight angle on the pillow. Composed peacefully, Giorno’s motionless visage suggests the deeper sleep of death. In the second shot, our subject once again displays the signs of vitality. Giorno’s head rests on his extended arm; at one point he re-adjusts himself, thrusting his armpit into the camera, in a shot that recalls Alain Delon’s sexy, and quite infamous, bed-bound pose in Rocco and His Brothers (Luchino Visconti, 1960). Sighing, Giorno opens his mouth; the position of the camera changes slightly as if to invite us to penetrate these two “orifices.” (The likeness between the open mouth and the outstretched armpit is not as far-fetched as it seems: Remember that Picasso painted armpits in the same way that he painted female genitals during his Cubist period: triangular configurations that likened both body parts to inverted crevices.) By avoiding an image of the subject's penis, and concentrating instead on the more unprotected “openings” of Giorno’s anatomy, Warhol insists upon the penetrability and passivity of the male subject. Warhol's use of repetition re-ignites desire as it extinguishes it. The seemingly endless return to the same four minutes of footage compels us to gaze voyeuristically at the sleeping nude body. Unlike many of Warhol's other portrait films, in which the subject confronts our gaze by breaking the prohibition against direct address and staring; into the camera, here the threat that the object of our scrutiny will “catch us” looking is diffused. Giorno’s apparent unconsciousness, suggested by his sleep-sealed eyes and involuntary gestures, invites the viewer to extend the customary peek at a nude stranger. And yet in this unique opportunity for unacknowledged erotic perusal of another's body, the ultimate object of our curiosity is kept just centimeters off- 20screen. In Sleep, Warhol insists that his viewers share the perversion of the camera/ author, which lingers too long (interminably, it seems) in the space of non-genital terrain, Each loop promises regeneration (the hope that this time we'll see it!) but offers only a repetition of the same frustrated come-on. Completely vulnerable and indifferent to the spectator’s gaze, Giorno's body is implicitly feminized through its assumption of a completely passive position, in spite of all of the signs establishing the anatomical masculinity including its covering of chest hair, its angular jaw, and supple musculature. Like a lover who has waited patiently for the instant of his paramour’s slumber, Warhol’s camera fixes upon the body of the poet, amorously, patiently, and obsessively. Breathlessly awaiting the next involuntary spasm or shudder that will reconfigure the body’s pose and reveal the secrets of the subject’s hidden self, Warhol continues to record, daring to move his camera only when it seems certain that the sleeper is completely enfolded in dream. If, as Roland Barthes has argued, the pleasure of the text is contingent upon the continuous deferral of both narrative and sexual climax, then Warhol's looping lays bare the mechanism of endless deferral, without difference Barthes 1973 10-13). For unlike the blissful deferrals of a novel, which are at least semantically and qualitatively different from each other though they may perform the identical function of prolonging pleasure, Warhol's Sleep presents the same images over and over again. Picture a striptease in which the same stripper performs the same incomplete act of dishabille over and over again, never going further than pasties and a thong, and you will have an idea of how it feels to watch the film. 21In Sleepr, as well as in many of the filmmaker's other early motion studies, Warhol was interested less in the body’s voluntary movement than in the involuntary movements produced by attempting to maintain the perfect posture of stillness. In Shoulder (1964), Warhol focuses his stationary camera on the left side of dancer Lucinda Childs’ torso, shoulder and the top third of her arm for the entire four minutes of the film. Wearing a horizontally striped tank top, Childs enacts the bare minimum of action. Over the course of the film, one notices the subtle tensing and release of Child’s shoulder as it flexes slightly; the only other movement noticeable is the nearly imperceptible rhythm of the subject's breathing. Childs, who had studied with Judith Dunn, James Waring, and other established choreographers, was an important member of the experimental dance community that developed around the fudson Theater in the early sixties (Banes 70-71). As in the many Happenings staged around the same period, the Judson Dance Theater group attempted to strip away the inauthentic veneer of classical dance performance by incorporating quotidian gestures and actions. Infusing art with the practice of everyday life, avant-garde dancers like Childs moved away from the polished theatricality and elitism of dance. In experimental dance works like Childs’ own Carnation, in which the dancer/ choreographer is assaulted by household objects such as linens, sponges, hair curlers and garbage bags, these works challenged notions of domesticity as well as gender stereotypes (Banes 223). By portraying a renowned dancer in a pose of nearly unmitigated stillness, as well as virtual anonymity (neither her face nor other identifying features of her body are included in the frame), Warhol pushed the notion of 22quotidian performance to its limit. Rather than showcasing the types of extreme bodily movement of which Childs was exceptionally capable, Warhol eschewed the trademark of the dancer's expressive mobility in his portrait. By showing a body distinguished for its flexibility in the most banal pose, Warhol transformed stillness into the ultimate feat of human contortion. As Elkins has observed, perfect stillness is an impossibility in life; while “there are a thousand positions of tension and action... there is no position of rest, no pose that represents perfect relaxation” (134). Since the body is motion, Elkins argues that representations that arrest the moving body essentially distort it, by drawing attention to unnaturalness of its frozen form (135 In dance, the position “at ease” arranges the legs apart and the arms curved into an oval behind the back, with the fingers pointing to one another, bearing absolutely no resemblance to any position the body would ordinarily find itself in a state of quiescence. Like any pose, ballet’s “at ease” is a conspicuously formalized distortion of the human body. At first glance, Warhol's more quotidian version of “at ease” seems less distorted, more natural. Nevertheless, the longer one watches, the more the filmmaker’s approximation of restfulness seems laborious, even sadistic. As any spectator of avant-garde film knows, watching even four minutes of a film in which “nothing happens” can feel like an eternity. Furthermore, since Warhol intended his films to be projected at 16 frames per second, or silent speed, rather than the more standardized 24 frames per second, in order to achieve a kind of slow motion, time itself is prolonged and expanded when watching his films. As Stephen Koch has observed, Warhol's technique of slow motion “faintly dislocates the 23