Bennett Glace

Documentaries that take cameras inside slaughterhouses are typically cinematic hairshirts. With direct address and deadening montage, their directors pursue purely polemical ends. Franju employs more surreal techniques and avoids both didacticism and pure shock value. He nevertheless manages to startle, repulse, implicate, and raise frightening questions about what the viewer will tolerate, what an acclimatization to mechanized slaughter might mean for our future. Plenty of footage from stockyards and killing floors has turned my stomach in PETA-approved docs, but seeing Franju’s masterpiece three times in school is the best answer I have for why I’m going on a decade of vegetarianism. 

Long before De Niro strutted to The Stones or Dorothy Vallens sang “Blue Velvet,” Anger scored luxuriant pans and rapid-fire cuts to hits from the likes of Bobby Vinton, Ray Charles, and Elvis. Anger’s most enduring incantation, Scorpio Rising, retains its ability to thrill and provoke thanks to daring, deliciously blasphemous juxtapositions and a surprisingly game cast of real-life bikers. As the titular character makes his way out into the night, primping and eroticized motorcycle maintenance give way to increasingly disorienting montage. By the end, the revels have left us exhausted and overstimulated. We can hardly brace for the crash, which arrives on a note of bitter irony and brutal inevitability. 

Maybe the most scrutinized footage of the 20th century provides Bruce Conner fodder for the most haunting, thrilling, and incisive of his collage films. Just four years removed from the assassination of John F. Kennedy (and decades away from “Back, and to the left”), Conner examines the psychic residue of a national tragedy turned media spectacle. Presenting the events of November 22, 1963, in reverse order, he plays on the collective desire to turn back time, relive the past, and hopefully see it play out differently. Conner suggests, however, that obsessive study has only cheapened the memories, commoditizing Kennedy and creating a Frankenstein’s monster of recycled images. He charts the process by which grief curdled into gawking.

For a brief and fruitful period, the State University of New York at Binghamton housed a murderer’s row of experimental filmmakers. Cinema Department co-founder Gottheim’s silent, single-shot film endures as one of the era’s most essential contributions to the avant-garde annals. For me, no film better represents the experience of awakening to the power of non-narrative cinema. We watched it on the first day of Intro to the History and Theory of Film, and I’ll admit to feeling baffled. I’m not sure I kept my eyes open, let alone spotted the just-perceptible horses that cross through the murky, green frame. Repeat viewings retrained my eyes, lifting the fog to reveal Gottheim’s artistry and the limitless potential of landscape filmmaking.   

Another masterful dispatch from the early days of SUNY-Binghamton’s Cinema Department, Gehr’s film turns a drab, municipal hallway into a stomach-dropping nightmare space with only the most elemental of tools. Its paradoxical title suits a short whose effect is at once harrowing and hypnotic, creating in its viewers an uneasy sense of lurching forward and backward while remaining stationary, of being penetrated while remaining untouched. Serene Velocity’s ceaseless movement and uncanny imagery may unsettle, but beneath its disquiet lies a spark of wonder, the promise of a new day, and a reminder that cinema can illuminate the hidden possibilities of perception. 

I’ve always associated Frampton more with academic and formal rigor than emotional resonance. It’s fitting, then, that his reflection on his early days as a New York photographer should reject the usual meaning of its title. To Frampton, nostalgia has nothing to do with sentimental longing for the past. He focuses on 13 quiet, seemingly insignificant memories and subverts the walk down memory lane with a playfully disjointed structure. Michael Snow’s dry voiceover guides us, but it’s the strangely arresting sight of photographs we “remember” blackening to disintegration on a hot plate that transforms Frampton’s recollections into a ritual. He commands our close attention and active participation, revealing that he’s perhaps a far more inviting and engaging filmmaker than I had given him credit for. 

Not many filmmakers demand or reward patience and devotion quite like Nathaniel Dorsky. Because he does not digitize his work, screenings of his silent 16mm films are rare events, and seeing Hours for Jerome projected was more than worth the years of wait and miles of travel. Dorsky indulges a more traditional form of nostalgia than Frampton, lovingly capturing the passing seasons, warm domestic moments, and the ineffable beauty of everyday life, yet he too shows no interest in guiding the viewer on a straightforward journey through the past. His signature polyvalent montage elevates simple observation into an intricate game of recollections and associations, showcasing the full potential of his medium and the remarkable scope of his talents. 

Sonbert’s return to sound filmmaking was another long-sought Grail. Nearly a decade passed between my first classroom viewing of the film and my second chance to see it projected. I was right to revere it. The first half overwhelms with familiar pop needle drops and a dazzling array of imagery from around the world. It’s joyous, propulsive, and impossible not to fall in love with. Like Dorsky, Sonbert encourages us to tease out the subtle connections between sequences, but it’s easy to just get lost in reverie. Then a wordless piece from Gluck slows the pace, turning exuberance to solemn contemplation and reflection. Few films so effectively or so movingly communicate the full sweep of experience, and perhaps none do so in just over 20 minutes.

Bridging the gap between the structural and diaristic modes, Friedrich’s Sink or Swim is among cinema’s most potent articulations of what Cleanth Brooks called the language of the poet. Moving backward through the alphabet and forward through her recollections, the narrator, to paraphrase Brooks, “makes up her language as she goes.” While it mirrors the construction of Frampton’s Zorn’s Lemma (1970) and makes an intriguing companion to (nostalgia), I’ve always preferred Friedrich’s film to both for its unflinching emotion and subtle shift from childish impressionability to hard-won wisdom. The structural gambit on display never puts the viewer at a distance. Instead, it draws us slowly into the film’s turbulent currents.

Brakhage returned to old techniques as he reckoned with eternity. On the eve of cancer surgery, he plunged his camera into the waters of Boulder Creek to create his first photographic work in years, a film he believed would be his last. Though hand-painted frames appear briefly, Brakhage primarily transitions between hypnotic glimpses of the creek’s luminous undersurface–bubbles bending, folding, shimmering–and the chaotic churn of its surface. Pulling the viewer between serenity and turbulence, stillness and motion, the greatest filmmaker of them all takes us on one of his most visually arresting and spiritually affecting adventures of perception. He’d go on to make many more films before he passed in 2003, but the final moments of Commingled Containers remain the apotheosis of his long career.