Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media

The Afterlife of New American Cinema:An Archival Perspective Sabrina Negri (bio) In her book After Uniqueness: A History of Film and Video Art in Circulation, Erika Balsom investigates the effect that the digital revolution has had on the perception of authenticity of various works of moving image art: How can we perceive as unique, and therefore authentic, an object that can be endlessly reproduced?1 As she explains, the tension between optimism and skepticism as concerns the potentialities of perfect reproducibility has always been central to the work of several experimental filmmakers, as reflected in both their art and their dissemination strategies. Anxieties towards issues of originality therefore pre-date the advent of digital technology, though I would argue that it is because of the digital transition that they have become more visible and legible in ways that were unthinkable before. This is particularly true when looking at the archival life of some of these works, where the essential difference between films and their digital reproduction (or simulation, as some scholars would put it) emerges more strikingly.2 In this article, I will engage with these issues by exploring the afterlife of the New American Cinema Group's 1960s European Grand Tour from an archival perspective. In particular, I am going to compare the experimental film conservation, preservation, and exhibition approaches of two archives, namely the Rare and Distinctive Collections at the University of Colorado Boulder Libraries and the film archive at Museo Nazionale del Cinema in Turin, Italy. Both institutions house materials related to one of the most prominent members of the New American Cinema group, Stan Brakhage, but their collections and archival strategies differ enormously: while Boulder houses a sizeable Brakhage [End Page 212] collection in which film is only a small portion of the archival holdings, Turin is primarily a film archive that owns a few Brakhage films as part of a small collection of American experimental cinema, which has its roots in the New American Cinema program that took place in the city in 1967. I will argue that the two archives' different approaches to their Brakhage materials reflect their institutional history, their mission, their collections, and their relationship with Brakhage himself, while at the same time inviting different interpretations of Brakhage's work based on how it is archived, preserved, and exhibited. My goal is to approach the work of Brakhage from an archival perspective, while at the same time approaching archival issues through his work. What I want to think through is the dialectical relationship between film archival materials and the institutions that house them—that is, how the one influences the other and is influenced by it in return. The term "film" in relation to its archival life acquires a twofold meaning: on the one hand, it refers to the specific films that are conserved at these institutions, while on the other hand it evokes the nature of the object "film" in general. In fact, I believe that these two case studies can be incredibly instructive as pertains to issues of uniqueness, originality, and authenticity with respect to cinema: in these two archives, and arguably in any film archive, film's nature is revealed to be multifaceted in a way that goes far beyond its being a means for projection, thus broadening our understanding of what film (and therefore cinema) is, and showing how film archiving and preservation function as not only practices, or disciplines, but also interpretive frameworks and lenses that allow us to look at cinema from a different perspective. Even though I am not an experimental cinema scholar, I am particularly interested in this topic because the preservation and archiving of avant-garde cinema challenge traditional standards and theories in use in the field: experimental works, as Balsom demonstrates in her discussion of avant-garde cinema circulation, question widely assumed notions of originality, reproducibility, and exhibition. In this sense, experimental cinema already broadens the boundaries of the medium by creating an overlap between cinema and the fine arts not only as pertains the medium's aesthetics but also, and especially, the medium's material nature—and the aesthetics of its material nature. This is what makes the preservation of...

Sabrina Negri

Framework The Journal of Cinema and Media

The Afterlife of New American Cinema: An Archival Perspective

新美国电影的余波：档案视角

The Life History of Juli Jones, Junior by William Foster Allyson Nadia Field (bio) Imagine what new histories could emerge from a commitment to doing more with less. —Ashley D. Farmer (2018)1 By accident I reached Chicago. … What was I to do in this big Windy City? —William Foster writing as Juli Jones, Jr. (1910)2 William Foster is a frustrating figure for the film historian. One of the first African American film producers—quite possibly the first—Foster made short comedies and actualities in Chicago in the 1910s, including his celebrated one-reel farce The Railroad Porter (US, 1913). He was also a prolific author for newspapers and other publications, writing extensively about Black vaudeville and musical theater, the film industry, and opportunities for Black entrepreneurship, and serving as a highly respected authority on African American sports and entertainment in the early twentieth century. Yet Foster has eluded sustained engagement from historians and film scholars. A central reason for this is that, despite the volume of his writing, he elides details of his life, career, and creative output. And, as with many early African American filmmakers, none of Foster's films are known to survive.3 In my work, I've sought to find methodologies for writing with, rather than despite, such absences, turning them into generative sites from which to create film histories that aren't deterred by archival lacunae but find in them different forms of presence.4 If, in Michel-Rolph Trouillot's [End Page 82] terms, the archive's "silences" are functions of power, there's an imperative to accounting for what we cannot see, motivated as well by "the political and ethical demands of the present," requiring us to reorient ourselves towards the gaps and elisions of the archive.5 Yet, while Foster didn't leave extensive records of his filmmaking or details of his life and career that we know of, he did publish multiple autobiographical anecdotes and narratives. Many of these seem to be forms of satire, either of himself or of others. Foster also wrote two "memoirs": a 1910 "Life History" of his alter ego, the journalist Juli Jones, Jr., published in the Indianapolis Freeman, and a 1928 article consisting of his recollections of Black theater performers (but no discussion of his own life or work) that appeared in the inaugural (and only) issue of The Official Theatrical World of Colored Artists.6 Film historians, including me, have drawn from his journalism in discussions of his theatrical and filmmaking work, and the 1928 "memoirs" are regularly cited by scholars of Black musical theater, despite its omissions.7 However, the "Life History," a fictional memoir, has not been acknowledged or engaged with, likely because it is so clearly satiric fabulation with no evident correspondence with the actual events of Foster's life. It eschews the gravitas of the memoir form in favor of irreverent, even sarcastic, fantasy. How should we read it? What place does such a text have in works of history? Foster wrote "The Life History of Juli Jones, Junior" when he was about fifty years old and three years before he turned to filmmaking. I discuss it here not to dispel its self-mythologizing, or to provide a "true history" that refutes its stances, but to take the account seriously as an extant self-presentation of a figure whose absence looms over Black film historiography. The "Life History," as with Foster's persona and career, lends itself to speculative interpretation. The ephemeral traces of Foster's life and work are, in the aggregate, an indeterminate archive of an elusive figure. In embracing indeterminacy, José Esteban Muñoz finds value in "ephemeral evidence" rather than the "traditionally evidentiary."8 As he writes, speaking of queer lives in particular, "Ephemera includes traces of lived experience and performances of lived experience, maintaining experiential politics and urgencies long after these structures of feeling have been lived."9 In the case of Foster's fictive self-fashioning, his own performance of lived experience, publicly presented and widely circulated, constitutes autofiction—even autotheory—a fictocritical self-portrayal that itself is speculative and invites speculative engagement.10 This approach recognizes that Foster's self-satire...

Allyson Nadia Field

The Life History of Juli Jones, Junior by William Foster

《威廉·福斯特笔下的朱莉·琼斯少年的生平》

Gauging Film History:An Exquisite Corpse Ina Archer (bio), Dino Everett (bio), Marsha Gordon (bio), and Martin Louis Johnson (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Collage of 3 mm, 8 mm, 8.75 mm, 9.5 mm, 16 mm, 17.5 mm, 22 mm, 35 mm, 65 mm, and 70 mm. Arranged and photographed by Dino Everett, HMH Foundation Archivist, University of Southern California. [End Page 126] If the history of film is a history of creative expression and experimentation, it is also a history of technical innovations, standards, and practices. Of these, the width, or gauge, of film is one of the most critical, if often neglected. While film gauges were—by and large, and with important exceptions—standardized very early in an effort to make film an interoperable, international technology, producers and equipment manufacturers continued to experiment with film gauge, making films wider and narrower to achieve various exhibition-related objectives. Over time, film gauges became associated with modes of display, sites of exhibition, and specific uses of the medium. Unlike other film histories, the history of film gauges is not a story of growth from small to large, low to high, or local to global. Instead, film gauge confounds these narratives, offering us a history of dead and loose ends. What follows is a series of lilliputian lamentations, tiny tributes, half-pint histories, elfin elegies, mini manifestoes, and petit poems on the history of film gauges, starting with the widest gauge (125 mm) and ending with the smallest (3 mm). It was produced in the Surrealist spirit of an Exquisite Corpse: our team met once on Zoom to establish and discuss the rules that would guide our respective entries, which we did not share with each other until the entire piece was drafted in our separate corners. We assigned each participant a set of gauges on a 1-2-3-4 basis, rotating writers as we went from the widest to the narrowest, with each entry written to the precise word count for the gauge. For some entries (17.5 mm, 9.5 mm) this meant writing to the half-word. We agreed that we could be expansive in our entries but that we would discuss no gauge other than the one assigned. We did not see each other's contributions before our second and final meeting, when we revealed our pieces all at once through the simultaneous magic of a Google doc and a spirited recitation in the round. 125 Cinema is ephemeral, all light and shadows, darkened rooms and fixed gazes. Film is tactical, plastic, and fragile. When we hold film up to the light, our fingers are separated by its width, or gauge, allowing us to see the frame, unobstructed. While images can be made smaller or larger through lenses and throws, the gauge remains constant. Or does it? What is the history of the gauge, that standard that is not as standard as we assume? What do we make of the edge cases of something defined by its edges? Edges such as 125 mm, almost 5 inches, a gauge first patented by Herman Schlicker in 1914, designed to contain as many images as possible, some 1,664 on a roll of safety film. [End Page 127] 75 The 75 mm gauge was developed by the Lumière brothers for the 1900 Paris Exposition. The idea was to create a larger format in order to provide greater clarity when it was projected on a larger screen. The camera was built and ten negatives were shot; however, the projector was never completed. There was a typo in the Brian Coe book of Movie Photography that suggested Todd-AO prints were 75 mm, but that is false. 70 I'm among the earliest and widest to gaze at the cityscape. I'm the grandest and in my grandeur I grew from no perfs to 4, epically accommodating the coming of sound. You can positively BLOW me up to twice my negative size because I'm a Mad Mad Mad Mad format. Superlative plus high, wide, and handsome in my mid 50s—monikered Todd-AO, Ultra, Super, Panavision, and IMAX in my 70s...

Ina Archer

Dino Everett

Marsha Gordon

Martin Louis Johnson

Gauging Film History: An Exquisite Corpse

衡量电影史：一个精致的尸体

Promoting and Curating US Experimental Cinema in Europe:"The Western American Experimental Film" Tour in 1963 and the New American Cinema Miguel Fernández Labayen (bio) and John Sundholm (bio) Introduction This article is born out of the finding of the program poster of "The Western American Experimental Film" tours in Stockholm (Fig. 1). We found the poster in the archive of Moderna Museet, Stockholm's Museum of Modern Art, when researching the New American Cinema screenings in Europe. Not having ever heard of this program before, we began to trace its origins and history. Somehow, we were confronted by an object, an event, and a past, which had not been written about and had left no trace in the narratives about the presence of US experimental cinema in Europe in the 1960s. Later on, when trying to revisit the program for "'The Gatekeepers exist to be overthrown.' Amos Vogel—Reprisen und Repliken (II)," a film series devoted to Amos Vogel that ran from November 8 to 15, 2021, at Arsenal in Berlin, it turned out to be very difficult and, in some cases, impossible to get hold of the prints. It looked as if the films had also disappeared. The aim of this article is two-fold: on the one hand, we map "The Western American Experimental Film" tour of 1963 in Europe; on the other, we question why some films and filmmakers have vanished from the circulation and the reproduction of American experimental film culture. Hence, even if not being completely omitted from history (or otherwise the remains of the tour would not exist), many of the films and filmmakers within the tour have hardly left any traces in a history, that of the New American Cinema, that we think we know. As such, we approach the Western Experimental Film tour as one of the deviations of the history of the circulation of the New American Cinema in Europe, [End Page 183] Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. The poster of "The Western American Experimental Film" at Moderna Museet, Stockholm. Courtesy of Moderna Museet. [End Page 184] a deviation that opens the historiography constructed around the so-called New American Cinema Expositions of 1963–64 and 1967–68 both spatially and temporally, and brings into the fore what have become invisible objects overshadowed by the tours organized by Jonas Mekas and P. Adams Sitney. In order to address the question of why certain films seem to have disappeared from circulation and thus have also been omitted from history, we will look in particular at "The Western American Experimental Film" tour in 1963 as an example of the branding and dissemination of US experimental film culture in the making in Europe in the 1960s. Through a look at promotion, programming, curating, and reception, we will explore the creation of discourses and ways of conceptualizing a set of films. This strategy would become the basis for the New American Cinema apparatus and its aspirations to control the interpretation of the films, which culminated in the 1967–68 film exposition and the publication of P. Adams Sitney's highly influential book Visionary Film in 1974, based on Sitney's experience of travelling with and curating the second grand tour.1 In this way we will also challenge the transcendental historiography of Visionary Film by establishing different histories, written from the perspective of each specific place and its own time-space configuration. That is, contrary to a vision that creates a common denominator for a set of films—establishing an object and following it through time and space—we ground the films in the specific venues where they were/are being screened. These places have their own specific history of screenings, and they are connected by personal and professional affinities to other localities (which do not necessarily have to be situated within the same national boundaries). The organization of the tour The first chronological trace that we have found about the organization of "The Western American Experimental Film" takes us back to the spring of 1963. In March of that year, Bruce Baillie contacted the cine club at Stockholm's Moderna Museet.2 In the letter, Baillie announced that...

Miguel Fernández Labayen

John Sundholm

Promoting and Curating US Experimental Cinema in Europe: "The Western American Experimental Film" Tour in 1963 and the New American Cinema

在欧洲推广和策展美国实验电影：1963年“西部美国实验电影”巡展与新美国电影

Editorial Drake Stutesman A key theme throughout Framework 63 1&2 (Spring & Fall 2022) is interconnection—as both a method and a perception. In the two dossiers, "Exquisite Historiography: Experimental and Collaborative Film Histories" and "The New American Cinema Group in Europe: The 1960s Grand Tour and Its Afterlife," there is a sense of weaving and interconnecting, allowing for open spaces and an inventive, perhaps kaleidoscopic, perspective on the past, present, and future. This interconnection continues in the only entry that is not part of a dossier, Olivia Landry's essay, "Exil and the Cinematic Mood of Racism." With its analysis of Albanian Kosovar Visar Morina's film Exil/Exile (DE/XK, 2020), Landry brings into focus the contemporary, constant, often indefinable interconnection of immigration, exile, acceptance, and rejection. The dossier "Exquisite Historiography: Experimental and Collaborative Film Histories" makes use of the Surrealist game "exquisite corpse" as a method of creativity to make experimental and collaborative film histories. Our invitation to contributors was expansive and specific: An "exquisite historiography" offers a flexible framework for working together, inventively exploring new concepts of authorship, and cultivating bonds of community. It orients film history to chance, imagination, and the "hidden." We encourage serious and playful reflections on and responses to the disciplinary norms of film history and new forms of film history for our present moment. We invite new means of authorship, critical fabulations, video essays, reflective and theoretical essays, dialogic exchanges, collective conversations, experimental micro-histories, assemblages and annotations of primary [End Page 7] materials, and other creative and experimental responses, including work that focuses on a question (rather than answers one) for this special issue. We encourage risk-taking, understanding that we might learn as much from intelligent failure as from the most brilliant collaborative work. Our contributors (some in partnership, some in groups, some alone) Núria Araüna Baró, David Archibald, Ka Lee Wong, Kiki Loveday, Susan Potter, Isabel Seguí, Marina Cavalcanti Tedesco, Anila Gill, Allyson Nadia Field, Matilda Mroz, Ivan Cerecina, Ina Archer, Dino Everett, Marsha Gordon, and Martin Johnson rose to the occasion with wit, seriousness, and joy. Núria Araüna Baró, David Archibald, Kiki Loveday, Susan Potter, Matilda Mroz, Ivan Cerecina, and MM Serra also made films as experiments in Exquisite Historiography, and their films are available on the Framework website: https://www.frameworknow.com/audio-visual. The essays in the dossier "The New American Cinema Group in Europe: The 1960s Grand Tour and Its Afterlife," guest edited by Ronald Gregg, are the outcome of the symposium "Transatlantic Experimental Film Connections and Influences: New American Cinema and Europe in the 1960s and Afterwards," held May 26, 2022, in Turin, Italy. Turin was a progressive, creative city in the sixties (and continues to be one), and it hosted the festival that launched the 1967 germinal tour of New American Cinema films across Europe. The 2022 symposium and subsequent Framework dossier revisit the event, and some argue that this tour was instrumental in building the reputation, in the US as well as in Europe, of now iconic filmmakers like Jonas Mekas, Robert Breer, Storm de Hirsch, and Warren Sonbert, and of highlighting the considerable influence of filmmaker and arts patron Jerome Hill. The 2022 symposium was organized, with others, by Giaime Alonge, writer and associate professor of film history at the University of Turin, and Ronald Gregg, Senior Lecturer in the Discipline in film and media studies at the School of the Arts at Columbia University. Framework was honored to be one of its six sponsors. To offer more context to our readers, Framework asked The Filmmaker's Cooperative in New York to curate and make available, by links, twelve of the twenty-three films that toured in 1967. Framework also linked to Gartenberg Media Enterprises to have on view Warren Sonbert's Where Did Our Love Go? (US, 1966), also on the tour. For links to these sites and the films go to: www.frameworknow.com/audio-visual/the-new-american-cinema-group-in-europe. The contributors to this dossier are Faye Corthésy, Ronald Gregg, Giaime Alonge, Claudio Panella, Silvia Nugara, Miguel Fernández Labayen, John Sundholm, Alessandro Amaducci, and Sabrina Negri. In their work...

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The Afterlife of New American Cinema: An Archival Perspective

The Life History of Juli Jones, Junior by William Foster

Gauging Film History: An Exquisite Corpse

Promoting and Curating US Experimental Cinema in Europe: "The Western American Experimental Film" Tour in 1963 and the New American Cinema

Editorial

Hall of Mirrors

Warren Sonbert Filmography

Carriage Trade (1971, 75 min. version)

The Evolution of Carriage Trade

Sonbert’s Cinematic Development: Early Films