In Memoriam #13, Annals of Photography #2, Manhattan #40

Helen Levitt

(1913-2009)

Age of Print #11, Food #13, The Animal Kingdom #13

Twenty-First Annual Capital Bicycle Club Banquet dinner menu. (February 3, 1900)

Apocalypse #17, War #12

Robert Mitchum discusses Vietnam. (1966)

Art #19

To write something which was of enduring beauty, this was the ambition of every writer: as it was the ambition of the joiner and architect and the constructor of any kind. It was not the beauty but the endurance, for endurance was beautiful. It was also all that we could do. It was a consolation, even a high and positive joy, to make something true: some table, which, sat on, when it was meant only to be eaten off, would not splinter or shatter. It was not for the constructor that the beauty was made, but for the thing itself. He would triumph to know that some contribution had been made: some sort of consoling contribution quite timeless and without relation to his own profit. Sometimes we knew, half tipsy or listening to music, that at the heart of some world there lay a chord to which vibrating gave reality. With its reality there was music and truth and the permanence of good workmanship. To give birth to this, with whatever male travail, was not only all that man could do: it was also all that eclipsed humanity of either sex could do: it was the human contribution to the universe. Absolutely bludgeoned by jazz and mechanical achievement, the artist yearned to discover permanence, some life of happy permanence which he by fixing could create to the satisfaction of after-people who also looked.

T.H. White, The Goshawk (1951)

Alan Lomax's South #1, Music #13

Top: Handwritten on back: "Angola, Louisiana"; "N66-1"; "N67-1."

Bottom: Handwritten on back: "Prison compund No 1. Angola, La. Leadbelly in foreground."

(Photographed c. 1934)

Age of Print #10

Advertisement for the book Many a Monster in the New York Times (March 25, 1948)

Entrails of Finance #2, Manhattan #39, Architecture #37

The present-day money pit rises from an actual pit in the ground: work on 70 Pine Street, the future headquarters (from 1976 onward) of American International Group, a.k.a. AIG.
(Pictured 1930 and 1931)

Order of the Universe #21

The heavens are wrath—the thunders rattling peal
Rolls like a vast volcano in the sky
Yet nothing starts the apathy I feel
Nor chills with fear eternal destiny

My soul is apathy—a ruin vast
Time cannot clear the ruined mass away
My life is hell—the hopeless die is cast
& manhoods prime is premature decay

Roll on ye wrath of thunders—peal on peal
Till worlds are ruins & myself alone
Melt heart & soul cased in obdurate steel
Till I can feel that nature is my throne

I live in love sun of undying light
& fathom my own heart for ways of good
In its pure atmosphere day without night
Smiles on the plains the forest & the flood

Smile on ye elements of earth & sky
Or frown in thunders as ye frown on me
Bid earth & its delusions pass away
But leave the mind as its creator free


John Clare, excerpts from “Written in a Thunderstorm July 15 1841”

Order of the Universe #20, Apocalypse #16

One of the most pathetic aspects of human history is that every civilization expresses itself most pretentiously, compounds its partial and universal values most convincingly, and claims immortality for its finite existence at the very moment when the decay that leads to death has already begun.

Reinhold Niebuhr, Beyond Tragedy: Essays on the Christian Interpretation of History (1938)

Scenes from a Life #23, Aviation #13

Buddy Holly's body lies in front of the wreckage of the Beechcraft Bonanza B35 aircraft that also carried Ritchie Valens and the Big Bopper. (February 3, 1959)

Entrails of Finance #1,Manhattan #38, Architecture #36

Future zombie tower: preliminary sketches for Citicorp Center. Hugh Stubbins, architect. (1970)

My God, I Shot the Wrong Architect #2

Edward Durell Stone bestride his grilles. (1958)

America #50, Founders' Promissory Notes #1

Mixed-race petit jury impaneled to try Jefferson Davis, the first mixed-race petit jury in the United States. (1867)

Anniverseries #14, Dead Presidents #45

Abraham Lincoln, born February 12, 1809

Cast of Lincoln's face, hands, and Lincoln's suit and hat.

History #13

Concerning the Age which has just passed, our fathers and our grandfathers have poured forth and accumulated so vast a quantity of information that the industry of a Ranke would be submerged by it, and the perspicacity of a Gibbon would quail before it. It is not by the direct method of a scrupulous narration that the explorer of the past can hope to depict that singular epoch. If he is wise, he will adopt a subtler strategy. He will attack his subject in unexpected places; he will fall upon the flank, or the rear; he will shoot a sudden, revealing searchlight into obscure recesses, hither-to undivined. He will row out over that great ocean of material, and lower down into it, here and there, a little bucket, which will bring up to the light of day some characteristic specimen, from those far depths, to be examined with a careful curiosity.

Lytton Strachey, preface, Eminent Victorians (1918)

Atomic Age #1

A Nevada sheriff standing against the light from an atomic blast forty miles away.
George Silk, photographer (1955)

Scenes from a Life #22

Orson Welles and Cole Porter confer. (1946)

Apocalypse #15, America #49, Books on Books #5

But it is a great book, a very great book, the greatest book of the sea ever written. It moves awe in the soul.

The terrible fatality.

Fatality.

Doom.

Doom! Doom! Doom! Something seems to whisper it in the very dark trees of America. Doom!

Doom of what?

Doom of our white day. We are doomed, doomed. And the doom is in America. The doom of our white day.

Ah, well, if my day is doomed, and I am doomed with my day, it is something greater than I which dooms me, so I accept my doom as a sign of the greatness which is more than I am.

Melville knew. He knew his race was doomed. His white soul, doomed. His great white epoch doomed. Himself, doomed. The idealist, doomed: The spirit, doomed.

 The reversion. 'Not so much bound to any haven ahead, as rushing from all havens astern.'

That great horror of ours! It is our civilization rushing from all havens astern.

The last ghastly hunt. The White Whale.

What then is Moby Dick? He is the deepest blood-being of the white race; he is our deepest blood-nature.

And he is hunted, hunted, hunted by the maniacal fanaticism of our white mental consciousness. We want to hunt him down. To subject him to our will. And in this maniacal conscious hunt of ourselves we get dark races and pale to help us, red, yellow, and black, east and west, Quaker and fireworshipper, we get them all to help us in this ghastly maniacal hunt which is our doom and our suicide.

The last phallic being of the white man. Hunted into the death of upper consciousness and the ideal will. Our blood- self subjected to our will. Our blood-consciousness sapped by a parasitic mental or ideal consciousness.

Hot blooded sea-born Moby Dick. Hunted maniacs of the idea.

Oh God, oh God, what next, when the Pequod has sunk?

She sank in the war, and we are all flotsam.

Now what next?

Who knows ? Quien sabe? Quien sabe, senor?

Neither Spanish nor Saxon America has any answer.

The Pequod went down. And the Pequod was the ship of the white American soul. She sank, taking with her negro and  Indian and Polynesian, Asiatic and Quaker and good, business- like Yankees and Ishmael: she sank all the lot of them.

Boom! as Vachel Lindsay would say.

To use the words of Jesus, IT IS FINISHED.

Consummatum est! But Moby Dick was first published in 1851. If the Great White Whale sank the ship of the Great White Soul in 1851, what's been happening ever since?

Post-mortem effects, presumably.

Because, in the first centuries, Jesus was Cetus, the Whale. And the Christians were the little fishes. Jesus, the Redeemer, was Cetus, Leviathan. And all the Christians all his little fishes.


D.H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature (1923)

Annals of Photography #1

George R. Lawrence stands astride the lens of his 8 x 4½ ft glass-plate camera, which will be used to photograph Chicago & Alton Railway's Alton Limited. (1900)

Scenes from a Life #21, America #48

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Dead Presidents #43

Theodore Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln hold hands.
"Led By Lincoln's Principles" New York Mail and Express (August 3, 1904)

Walker Evans Wayside #3

Walker Evans, view from train, shot for Fortune magazine (1950)

History #12, Dead Presidents #43

Fellow-citizens, we cannot escape history. We of this Congress and this administration, will be remembered in spite of ourselves. No personal significance, or insignificance, can spare one or another of us. The fiery trial through which we pass, will light us down, in honor or dishonor, to the latest generation.

Abraham Lincoln, Annual Message to Congress (December 1, 1862)

Alcohol #10, Age of Print #9

Dust jacket to later edition of The Savoy Cocktail Book, by Harry Craddock. The full title of the original was The Savoy Cocktail Book: Being in the main a complete compendium of the Cocktails, Rickeys, Daisies, Slings, Shrubs, Smashes, Fizzes, Juleps, Cobblers, Fixes, and other Drinks, known and greatly appreciated in the year of grace 1930, with sundry notes of amusement and interest concerning them, together with subtle Observations upon Wines and their special occasions.

America #47

Small islands not capable of protecting themselves, are the proper objects for kingdoms to take under their care; but there is something very absurd, in supposing a continent to be perpetually governed by an island. In no instance hath nature made the satellite larger than its primary planet, and as England and America, with respect to each other, reverses the common order of nature, it is evident they belong to different systems. England to Europe: America to itself.

Thomas Paine, Common Sense (1776)

Anniverseries #13

Ships burn in Pearl Harbor (December 7, 1941)

Scenes from a Life #20

Kennedy administration Secretary of Agriculture Orville L. Freeman and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara play squash. (July 1962)

Opening Lines #6

Je forme une entreprise qui n'eut jamais d'exemple, et dont l'exécution n'aura point d'imitateur. Je veux montrer à mes semblables un homme dans toute la vérité de la nature; et cet homme, ce sera moi.

Moi seul. Je sens mon coeur, et je connais les hommes. Je ne suis fait comme aucun de ceux que j'ai vus; j'ose croire n'être fait comme aucun de ceux qui existent. Si je ne vaux pas mieux, au moins je suis autre. Si la nature a bien ou mal fait de briser le moule dans lequel elle m'a jeté, c'est ce dont on ne peut juger qu'après m'avoir lu.

Que la trompette du jugement dernier sonne quand elle voudra, je viendrai, ce livre à la main, me présenter devant le souverain juge. Je dirai hautement: Voilà ce que j'ai fait, ce que j'ai pensé, ce que je fus. J'ai dit le bien et le mal avec la même franchise. Je n'ai rien tu de mauvais, rien ajouté de bon; et s'il m'est arrivé d'employer quelque ornement indifférent, ce n'a jamais été que pour remplir un vide occasionné par mon défaut de mémoire. J'ai pu supposer vrai ce que je savais avoir pu l'être, jamais ce que je savais être faux. Je me suis montré tel que je fus: méprisable et vil quand je l'ai été; bon, généreux, sublime, quand je l'ai été: j'ai dévoilé mon intérieur tel que tu l'as vu toi-même. Être éternel, rassemble autour de moi l'innombrable foule de mes semblables; qu'ils écoutent mes confessions, qu'ils gémissent de mes indignités, qu'ils rougissent de mes misères. Que chacun d'eux découvre à son tour son coeur au pied de ton trône avec la même sincérité, et puis qu'un seul te dise, s'il l'ose: je fus meilleur que cet homme-là.


I HAVE begun on a work which is without precedent, whose accomplishment will have no imitator. I propose to set before my fellow-mortals a man in all the truth of nature; and this man shall be myself.

I have studied mankind and know my heart; I am not made like any one I have been acquainted with, perhaps like no one in existence; if not better, I at least claim originality, and whether Nature has acted rightly or wrongly in destroying the mold in which she cast me, can only be decided after I have been read.

I will present myself, whenever the last trumpet shall sound, before the Sovereign Judge with this book in my hand, and loudly proclaim, "Thus have I acted; these were my thoughts; such was I. With equal freedom and veracity have I related what was laudable or wicked, I have concealed no crimes, added no virtues; and if I have sometimes introduced superfluous ornament, it was merely to occupy a void occasioned by defect of memory: I may have supposed that certain, which I only knew to be probable, but have never asserted as truth, a conscious falsehood. Such as I was, I have declared myself; sometimes vile and despicable, at others, virtuous, generous, and sublime; even as Thou hast read my inmost soul: Power Eternal! assemble round Thy throne an innumerable throng of my fellow-mortals, let them listen to my confessions, let them blush at my depravity, let them tremble at my sufferings; let each in his turn expose with equal sincerity the failings, the wanderings of his
heart, and if he dare, aver, I was better than that man."

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Les Confessions, Book I (1782)
English translation, W. Conyngham Mallory

Aviation #12

LZ 129 Hindenburg burns over Lakehurst Naval Air Station, Manchester, New Jersey (May 6, 1937)

My God, I Shot the Wrong Architect #1

Wallace K. Harrison mows his lawn (1947)

Walker Evans Wayside #2

Walker Evans, view from train, shot for Fortune magazine (1950)

Anniverseries #12, Dead Presidents #42

President John F. Kennedy and Jacqueline Kennedy arrive at Love Field, Dallas, Texas (November 22, 1963)

Walker Evans Wayside #1

Walker Evans, view from train, shot for Fortune magazine (1950)

Auden #20, Art #18

Our apparatniks will continue making
the usual squalid mess called History:
all we can pray for is that artists,
chefs and saints may still appear to blithe it.

Concluding stanza to "Moon Landing" (1968)

Architecture #35

In the end, pure white light was to survive only as the weapon of the Secret Police interrogator, the brain-washer and the terrorist. But before that relegation to the underworld of Western culture, it had almost a two-decade career in the visible and progressive overworld, as architects of the International Style—with the noblest aspirations, and clear consciences which the clarity of the light was supposed to symbolise, no doubt—subjected doctors, art-collectors, publishers, teachers and the other law-abiding bourgeois who were the clients, to Gestapo-style luminous environments, with light streaming from bare, or occasionally opalescent, bulbs and tubes and glaring back from white walls. Even when allowance is made for the fact that many of the interiors they designed were for the specialised purposes of exhibitions, and may have needed unusual intensities of lighting, the published record of the work done by the Bauhaus and like-thinkers down to 1934, combined with the memories of survivors, leaves an impression of a luminous environment close to the threshold of pain, probably mad e tolerable only by the notorious willingness of intellectuals to suffer in the cause of art.

Reyner Banham, The Architecture of the Well-Tempered Environment (1969)

Order of the Universe #19

We (the indivisible divinity that works in us) have dreamed the world. We have dreamed it resistant, mysterious, visible, ubiquitous in space and firm in time, but we have allowed slight, and eternal, bits of the irrational to form part of its architecture so as to know that it is false.

Jorge Luis Borges, "Avatars of the Tortoise" ["Avatares de la tortuga"], Discussion [Discusión] (1932)

Books on Books #4, Order of the Universe #18

The directions in which the tragedy of this planet has trained our human feelings to play, and the combinations into which the poetry of this planet has thrown our human passions of love and hatred, of admiration and contempt, exercise a power for bad or good over human life that cannot be contemplated, when stretching through many generations, without a sentiment allied to awe. And of this let every one be assured—that he owes to the impassioned books which he has read many a thousand more of emotions than he can consciously trace back to them. Dim by their origination, these emotions yet arise in him, and mould him through life, like forgotten incidents of his childhood.

Thomas de Quincey, "The Literature of Knowledge and the Literature of Power" (1848)

Anniverseries #11, War #11

American soldiers cheering news of the Armistice (November 11, 1918)

Word of the Day #27

Fontanel

America #46

And these are the things we must be concerned about—we must be concerned about because we love America and we are out to free not only the Negro. This is not our struggle today to free 17,000,000 Negroes. It’s bigger than that. We are seeking to free the soul of America. Segregation debilitates the white man as well as the Negro. We are to free all men, all races, and all groups. This is our responsibility and this is our challenge and we look to this great new state in our Union as an example and as the inspiration. As we move on in this realm, let us move on with the faith that this problem can be solved and that it will be solved, believing firmly that all reality hinges on moral foundations and we are struggling for what is right and we are destined to win.

Martin Luther King, Jr., Address to the House of Representatives of the First Legislature, State of Hawaii (September 23, 1959)

America #45

America is, therefore the land of the future, where, in the ages that lie before us, the burden of the World’s history shall reveal itself.

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Philosophy of History, introduction (1832)

Order of the Universe #17, Cinema #40

The first image he told me about was of three children on a road in Iceland, in 1965. He said that for him it was the image of happiness and also that he had tried several times to link it to other images, but it never worked. He wrote me: one day I'll have to put it all alone at the beginning of a film with a long piece of black leader; if they don't see happiness in the picture, at least they'll see the black.

Sans Soleil d: Chris Marker (1982)

Architecture #34, America #44

Frank Lloyd Wright was, very probably, the last of the true Americans. This is not intended to suggest that he was of Red Indian origin (which he wasn’t) or that his ancestors came over on the Mayflower (which they didn’t). It is intended to mean that Wright was the last great representative of all the things this country once stood for in the world when “America” was still a radical concept, rather than a settled continent: a symbol of absolute, untrammeled freedom for every individual, of as little government as possible, the end of classes and castes, of unlimited and equal physical opportunities for the adventurous, of the absence of all prejudice—excepting prejudices in favor of anything new and bold; of the absence of form and of formality, and finally, a symbol of a society of many individuals living as individuals in individual settlements—not a society of masses living in giant cities.

Peter Blake, The Master Builders: Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe, Frank Lloyd Wright (1970)

Word of the Day #26

Cavaedium

Scopitone #33, Love #21

Nancy Sinatra sings "Bang Bang" (1967)

Architecture #33

Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoie used as a barn.
G.E. Kidder Smith, photographer (c. 1959)

Seasons #4, Order of the Universe #16

Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf’s a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.

Robert Frost, "Nothing Gold Can Stay" (1923)

Opening Lines #5, America #43, Order of the Universe #15

Once, from eastern ocean to western ocean, the land stretched away without names. Nameless headlands split the surf; nameless lakes reflected nameless mountains; and nameless rivers flowed through nameless valleys into nameless bays.

George R. Stewart, Names on the Land: A Historical Account of Place-Naming in the United States (1945)

Apocalypse #14, Architecture #32

It is one of the many grotesque ironies of our acceptance of technological totalitarianism that its most eager advocates among architects and all other categories of designer do not realize that they are committing themselves to voluntary castration. The artificial obsolescence syndrome has much deeper implication than the petty larceny of depreciation without service. It implies hatred of designed environment, an inability to love the things that make an identification of man and world possible. The inevitable and totally logical climax of this alienation by obsolescence is the spending of billions of national capital on a moon landing. Man's future in a space suit on a planet where neither organisms nor shapes nor continuity in time can be maintained will mark the final victory of the technocrat over man.

Sibyl Moholy–Nagy, "The Invisibility of Design" (Autumn 1962)

Manhattan #37

New York in the Future, Ideal Scheme, R.M. Bennett and G. Hicks (1940)

The Iron Horse #5, War #10

Farmville, Virginia, vicinity. High bridge of the South Side Railroad across the Appomattox. Two plates from left and right half of stereograph pair. Photographer, Timothy H. O'Sullivan (April 1865)

Anniverseries #10, Manhattan #36, Architecture 31

The World Trade Center towers under construction
Minoru Yamasaki and Associates (1966-1973, photographed October 20, 1970)

Order of the Universe #14

The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers,
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not.—Great God! I'd rather be
A pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn.


William Wordsworth

The Automobile #17, Panorama #8

The handwritten caption reads: “Largest group in the world, Buick Employe's”

The painted banner on the factory reads “BUICK MOTOR CO. LARGEST AUTOMOBILE MANUFACTURERS IN THE WORLD. ANNUAL CAPACITY 40,000 CARS.

(1913)

America #42

Given an old culture in ruins, and a new culture in vacuo, this externalizing of interest, this ruthless exploitation of the physical environment was, it would seem, inevitable. Protestantism, science, invention, political democracy, all of these institutions denied the old value; all of them, by denial or by precept or by actual absorption, further the new activities. Thus in America the new order of Europe came quickly into being. If the nineteenth century found us more raw and rude, it was not because we had settled in a new territory; it was rather because our minds were not buoyed up by all those memorials of a great past that floated over the surface of Europe—a movement carried on by people incapable of sharing or continuing a past. It was to America that the outcast European turned, without a Moses to guide them, to wander in the wilderness; and here they have remained in exile, not without an occasional glimpse, perhaps, of the promised land.

Lewis Mumford, “The Origin of the American Mind” in The Golden Day: A Study in American Experience and Culture (1926)

Anniverseries #9, America #41, Dead Presidents #41

Martin Luther King, Jr. delivers the "I Have a Dream" speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, Washington, D.C. (August 28, 1963)

Auden #19, Πολιτικά #2

De Tocqueville stands out as one of the noblest examples of an attitude which may be called the Counter-Revolution. This must not be confused with Reaction, which refuses to recognize the just element in the Revolution and wishes to regard it as a simple rebellion. The Counter-Revolutionary has no wish to return to the condition which preceded the outbreak of revolution; he wishes rather to save the revolution from failure through the inevitable over-emphasis and over simplification of the revolutionary party.

The central issue of the world revolution at present in progress is the right of every human body to the food, light, housing, medical attention, and so forth necessary for health. Its symbols are the naked anonymous baby and the tomb of the Unknown Soldier. The body knows nothing of freedom, only of necessities, and these are the same for all bodies. Hence the tendency of the revolutionary party in concentrating on this one goal to deny all liberty and all minority rights. In so far as we are bodies, we are or ought to be revolutionaries; in so far, however, as we are also souls and minds, we are ought to be counter- revolutionaries, and in our struggle, the books of De Tocqueville belong, together with Thucydides, the Seventh Epistle of Plato, and the plays of Shakespeare, in the small group of the indispensable.


Review of The Recollections of Alexis de Tocqueville, in The Nation (April 8, 1950)

In Memoriam #12, Cinema #39

Manny Farber

(1917-2008)

Visual Arts 188 exam from taught by Farber at the University of California, San Diego [early 1970s]


OBJECTIVE QUESTIONS

1. How many characters does Herr R. bludgeon when he runs amok?

2. Who are the characters Herr R. bludgeons when he runs amok?

3. Rank the following films in terms of the amount of objects likely to be found in a scene from their movies: a. Resnais' MURIEL or any of his film; b. Jancso's RED PSALM; c. Duras' DESTROY, SHE SAID.

4. How much (much, some, little, or none) camera movement is in the following films? a. DESTROY, SHE SAID; b. Godard & Gorin's LETTER TO JANE; c. Fassbinder's WHY DOES HERR R., d. Snow's LA REGION CENTRALE; e. RED PSALM; f. MURIEL; g. Gehr's SERENE VELOCITY.

5. In what film does a camera run amok in a college classroom?

6. Every director in this course uses a long, continuous take in one form or another. One definition of the long take: a single piece of unedited film, which may or may not constitute an entire sequence. Identify the director who uses the long take to:

a. Suggest impersonal, all-over-the-body sexuality;

b. Create a ritual effect of religious mortification in a grassy land or hellscape;

c. Build a comic-strip essay about consumerism and housewife prostitutes in a combination nursery-brothel;

d. Build a picture of the stupefying daily rituals experienced by a family's breadwinner

7. A truly radical formalist makes a deep cut into film practice with at least one inventive maneuver, a way of assembling the elements of film that deeply affects his or her contemporaries. Identify the director.

a. He's adamantly against applied soundtracks. He did one film against the murmur of traffic, which supplies the tonal variations given to other films by a musical score. His is a purist's argument: if you can add a juke box in the background, why not add ten other layers of sound?

b. Still light years more emancipated than the erotic revelations of LAST TANGO IN PARIS. But that's not all he dared to do. By dispensing with tension and development, and using real time, he created an alternative to traditional movie language.

c. He's changed the image from fronted to engulfing. Compared to his movie, where the spectator is in a planetarium situation, engulfed by the dynamics of a very controlled camera, the spectator in other films is in a theatrical situation, removed at some distance from an event that is played toward him, billboard-fashion.

d. The director is exploring how far you can take a movie into becalmed quiescent territory. By emphasizing sensuous tactility (with tempered movements, mannered voices), this anti-aggression director questions the amounts of noise, zap, excitement that a movie needs.

8. A five-part question on the role of women: assign the correct director's name to the following treatments of women in these films:

a. They're usually romantic, anxiety-ridden, and fluttery; for instance, the glimpses of a darting woman in short intense moments, as though seen through a prism. They have an incandescent, luminous, feverish quality. The director emphasizes the plasticity of bodily and facial movements and is very sharp on the woman’s precise position within a situation that smacks of soap opera.

b. He stereotypes his peasants. Their arms often crossed demurely over their breasts, his women move within a divorced and simplistic treatment that sexually humiliates them. They’re always pretty and virginal, moving lyrically and silently through the cruel landscape.

c. Woman is the brainier, testier, wittier, and more active gender. She expresses herself in an incessant nasal drawl, taunting any males in the vicinity.

d. She is always stoical, right-minded, even the buxom-blonde in a lemonade stall in the railroad station – always a pure luminous person. There is never any sense of great contact, emotion, or conflict in her low-key, cooled-off effect. The stoicism comes partly from the sense of a figure pushed to the back of the shot by an angular feeling in the composition.

e. The Woman often seems sentimental, woebegone: a neutralized inexpressive face is supposed to keep your attention dispersed over the image of her environment. The dumb expression, the lacrymosity inherent in the tepid handling of a dish, a dress, or a word suggests a woman trivialized by her director.


9. Identify the movies which provide posterity with the following great lines:


a. “This is the face that says it knows a lot about something.”

b. “How many breakfasts in the Cafe Kroner?”

c. “I have nothing to say and my students sleep in class.”

d. “We’ll be leaving the neighborhood soon. My husband’s getting a promotion.”

e. “He’s going to come toward me, he’s going to take me by the shoulders, he’s going to kiss me…he’ll kiss me…and I’ll be lost!”

f. “You were made to the measure of my body.”

g. “No one’s ever crossed our family before.”


10. Draw the room in WAVELENGTH, the way it looks from the camera’s original setting; include (and label for clarity) all the important objects.



ESSAY QUESTIONS

1. There are there premises of this Radical Film course: (1) each movie is an example of a sustained austere form, (2) each director has discovered an image that evokes philosophical thought about the categories of being, and (3) each director has pushed at least one stylistic concern that has influenced or changed the working style of his contemporaries. How does Warhol, the most masked and cunningly defensive director in covering his tracks, answer all the requisites of this course? Fifty words more or less, and cover each premise.


2. Fassbinder and Warhol both use groups of people, long takes, and blatant color; yet in one the tensions within a group are emphasized, while the other exploits the freedom and anarchy within a group. What in their films shows this difference?


3. Michael Snow and Ernie Gehr are often called structuralists and minimalists because the restrict themselves to a barren empty space and build their films out of the raw material of this space. One way or another they try for a fresh perception. Show how by discussing in depth at least one film of each director. Keep in mind that this is a question about the development or manipulation of a perception.


4. This is a question about the philosophic meaning behind the movies in this course. WAVELENGTH (Mike Snow’s movie about a forty-five minute zoom from one end of a room to another) is a confrontation of real fact and movie fact, facing a spectator with an actual chair and the illusion of one, a real girl making a phone call and the “ghost” or filmic image of a girl transparently making a phone call. The verbal jousting in Warhol’s MY HUSTLER, the totally random life enclosed within the single frame of a small bathroom, makes you think of the difference between the most mundane, ordinary reality and the aesthetic reality of an abstracted single-frame movie. Using one or two or three sentences for each director, what is the metaphysical meaning behind Resnais’ MURIEL, any of the Straub films shown here, and Godard’s TWO OR THREE THINGS. (If you don’t know the answer to any part of this question, substitute another director studied in this course.)

[originally published in the May-Jun 1975 issue of Film Comment]

WCW #7

Words are the burden of poems, poems are made of words

William Carlos Williams, typescript for Paterson 6

Diptych #10, Dead Presidents #40, Scenes from a Life #19

Top: President John F. Kennedy and Air Force Union of Staff General Curtis LeMay point at a fireworks display staged for the president. (May 4, 1962)

Bottom: Original caption: Swapping his Air Force uniform for a bright sport shirt, General Curtis LeMay, Head of the U. S. Strategic Air Command, sharpens his shooting eye with some target practice at the Marine Base at Quantico, Virginia. LeMay sandwiched in the shooting session during the three-day conference on Defense Matters, at the base. (June 17, 1957)

Archaeology of the Poster #7

Harry Kellar unleashes Pandora's Box (c. 1894)

In Memoriam #11, Cinema #38

Cyd Charisse

(1922-2008)



Sequence from Party Girl d: Nicholas Ray (1958)

Scenes from a Life #18, Age of Print #8, The Automobile #16

The Los Angeles Times reports the death of Ernie Kovacs (January 13, 1962)

Architecture #30, Food #12

To me, and to all the cultivated people, ornament does not increase the pleasures of life. If I want to eat a piece of gingerbread I will choose one that is completely plain and not a piece which represents a baby in arms of a horserider, a piece which is covered over and over again with decoration. The man of the fifteenth century would not understand me. But modern people will. The supporter of ornament believes that the urge for simplicity is equivalent to self-denial. No, dear professor from the College of Applied Arts, I am not denying myself! To me, it tastes better this way. The dishes of the past centuries which used decoration make the peacocks, pheasants and lobsters appear more appetizing produce the opposite effect on me. I look on such a culinary display with horror when I think of having to eat these stuffed animal corpses. I eat roast beef.

Adolf Loos, “Ornament and Crime” (1908)

Age of Print #7, Architecture #29

Frontispiece, Pioneers of the Modern Movement (Faber & Faber, 1936)

Art #17, Order of the Universe #13

No critic of experience will return to a discussion of the terms “romanticism” and “classicism” with anything but extreme reluctance; no subject has provoked so much but extreme resistance; no subject has provoked so much weary logomachy since the Scholastics argued themselves out on the question of nominalism. I only take up the discussion again (eating my own words in the process) because I think that Surrealism has settled it. So long as romanticism and classicism were considered as alternative attitudes, rival camps, professions of faith, an interminable struggle was in prospect, with the critics as profiteers. But what in effect Surrealism claims to do is resolve the conflict—not, as I formerly hoped, by establishing a synthesis which I was prepared to call “reason” or “humanism”—but by liquidating classicism, by showing its complete irrelevance, its anaesthetic effect, its contradiction of the creative impulse. Classicism, let it be stated without further preface, represents for us now, and has always represented, the forces of oppression. Classicism is the intellectual counterpart of political tyranny. It was so in the ancient world and in the medieval empires; it was renewed to express the dictatorships of the Renaissance and has ever since been the official creed of capitalism. Wherever the blood of martyrs stains the ground, there you will find a doric column or perhaps a statue of Minerva.

Herbert Read, introduction, Surrealism (1936)

America #40, Annals of Advertising #7, Foreign Lands #26, Food #11

Advertisement for the "Uncle Sam" Range, Manufactured by Abendroth Bros., New York City (1876)

The menu in the world's hand reads:

BILL OF FARE
For the Uncle Sam Range.

ENGLAND
Roast Beef
Plum Pudding

GERMANY
Sausages
[illegible]
Sour Cream

FRANCE
Saddle de Horse
Curried Frogs
Snails
Donkey a la Mode

IRELAND
Potatoes
Fried
Boiled
Stewed
Roasted
Baked
Mashed
Raw

CHINA
Birds Nests
Boiled Grasshoppers
Rats Fricassed with Watermelon Seeds

RUSSIA
Tallow
Candles
Seals Blubber
Train Oil
White Bear

Word of the Day #25

Stuccatori

The Sporting Life #4, Architecture #28

Baseball lineup for game between architectural offices of McKim, Mead & White and R.H. Robertson (c. 1895)
Charles McKim, left field; Stanford White, shortstop

Art #16, Dead Presidents #39, America #39

The artist, however faithful to his personal vision of reality, becomes the last champion of the individual mind and sensibility against an intrusive society and an officious state. The great artist is thus a solitary figure. He has, as Frost said, a lover's quarrel with the world. In pursuing his perceptions of reality, he must often sail against the currents of his time. This is not a popular role. If Robert Frost was much honored in his lifetime, it was because a good many preferred to ignore his darker truths. Yet in retrospect, we see how the artist's fidelity has strengthened the fibre of our national life.

If sometimes our great artists have been the most critical of our society, it is because their sensitivity and their concern for justice, which must motivate any true artist, makes him aware that our Nation falls short of its highest potential. I see little of more importance to the future of our country and our civilization than full recognition of the place of the artist.

If art is to nourish the roots of our culture, society must set the artist free to follow his vision wherever it takes him. We must never forget that art is not a form of propaganda; it is a form of truth. And as Mr. MacLeish once remarked of poets, there is nothing worse for our trade than to be in style. In free society art is not a weapon and it does not belong to the spheres of polemic and ideology. Artists are not engineers of the soul. It may be different elsewhere. But democratic society—in it, the highest duty of the writer, the composer, the artist is to remain true to himself and to let the chips fall where they may. In serving his vision of the truth, the artist best serves his nation. And the nation which disdains the mission of art invites the fate of Robert Frost's hired man, the fate of having "nothing to look backward to with pride, and nothing to look forward to with hope."

John F. Kennedy, Remarks at Amherst College in memory of Robert Frost (October 26, 1963)

Time #16, The Sea #7

Thy shores are empires, changed in all save thee—
Assyria, Greece, Rome, Carthage, what are they?
Thy waters wash’d them power while they were free,
And many a tyrant since; their shores obey
The stranger, slave, or savage; their decay
Has dried up realms to deserts:—not so thou;—
Unchangeable save to thy wild waves' play—
Time writes no wrinkle on thine azure brow
Such as creation's dawn beheld, thou rollest now.

Thou glorious mirror, where the Almighty's form
Glasses itself in tempests; in all time,—
Calm or convulsed—in breeze, or gale, or storm,
Icing the pole, or in the torrid clime,
Dark-heaving—boundless, endless, and sublime,
The image of eternity, the throne
Of the Invisible; even from out thy slime
The monsters of the deep are made; each zone
Obeys thee; thou goest forth, dread, fathomless, alone.


Lord Byron, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, Canto IV, Stanzas 182-183

Order of the Universe #12

Illustration, John Henry Wright, "The Origin of Plato's Cave"
Harvard Studies in Classical Philology, Vol. 17 (1906)

Memory #7, Books on Books #3, Time #15, Shakespeare #7

Thy glasse will shew thee how thy beauties were,
Thy dyall how thy pretious mynuits waste,
The vacant leaues thy mindes imprint will beare,
And of this booke, this learning maist thou taste.
The wrinckles which thy glasse will truly show,
Of mouthed graues will giue thee memorie,
Thou by thy dyals shady stealth maist know,
Times theeuish progresse to eternitie.
Looke what thy memorie cannot containe,
Commit to these waste blacks, and thou shalt finde
Those children nurst, deliuerd from thy braine,
To take a new acquaintance of thy minde.
These offices, so oft as thou wilt looke,
Shall profit thee, and much inrich thy booke.

William Shakespeare, Sonnet LXXVII

Auden #18

Idle curiosity is an ineradicable vice of the human mind. All of us like to discover the secrets of our neighbors, particularly the ugly ones. This has always been so, and, probably, always will be. What is relatively new, however—it is scarcely to be found before the latter half of the eighteenth century—is a blurring of the borderline between the desire for truth and idle curiosity, until, today, it has been so throughly erased that we can indulge in the latter without the slightest pangs of conscience. A great deal of what passes today for scholarly research is an activity no different from that of reading somebody's private correspondence when he is out of the room, and it doesn't really make it morally any better if he is out of the room because he is in the grave.

Introduction to Signet Classic edition of Shakespeare's Sonnets (1964)

Cinema #37, War #9, Scopitone #32, America #38

"Remember My Forgotten Man" Gold Diggers of 1933 (d. Mervyn LeRoy/Busby Berkeley)

Age of Print #6, Annals of Pseudoscience #1

American Phrenological Journal (Published New York City, 1838-1869)