Women’s Experimental Cinema (Robin Blaetz, Amnesis Time: The Films of Marjorie Keller, pp.221-227)
https://library.oapen.org/bitstream/id/ ... 004320.pdf
In
The Untutored Eye: Childhood in the Films of Cocteau, Cornell, and Brakhage, the published version of her doctoral dissertation, Keller examines the work of three filmmakers known for their representation of children and for their romantic sense of childhood as a privileged, visionary period of life. Jean Cocteau’s films were formally and conceptually intriguing to Keller for their faith in the power of photography and editing to confer plausibility on the most supernatural of events and to make these alternative realities believable, even to an uninitiated audience. By using similar textures of light, movement, and sound to unite the realistic and the purely imagined, and by avoiding the soft focus or slow motion often used to mark the improbable, Cocteau created, according to Keller, a ‘‘complex layering of simultaneous realities.’’ Cocteau was not a surrealist, Keller points out, and he rejected Freudian thought because of its concern with analyzing and explaining the often mysterious and tenuous worlds created in art. For Cocteau, as for Keller, the aesthetic achievement of art was the very point of the endeavor, not the content to be explained via symbolic or psychoanalytic readings.
In Cocteau’s films, as in those of Joseph Cornell and Stan Brakhage, a child protagonist is particularly able to seduce the viewer into entering
and believing in alternative worlds. Children are portrayed as fully and ecstatically aware of the universe in all its fullness, and childhood itself is understood as a mode of perception gradually destroyed with age and experience. Cocteau’s androgynous young heroes seek to escape the
debilitating effects of institutionalized education and the onslaught of adulthood. His primary motif is the child as voyeur, someone who visually
and psychologically absorbs the sensory world while remaining unseen. His films are based on what Keller called a ‘‘hierarchy of seeing,’’ in which
the filmmaker reformulates his childhood relation to his parents by allowing his adult self the privilege of the child’s all-encompassing vision,
including its illusion of omnipotence.
In several ways, Keller’s first two notebook films in the
‘‘Parts’’ series explore this ‘‘hierarchy of seeing’’ as well. In both, the placement of the camera identifies the filmmaker as a voyeuristic presence that organizes the world at the moment of seeing it.
Foreign Parts is most notable in this regard. The film consists of a rapid alteration, with some repetition, of scenes of children playing on a lawn that slopes down to a beach, of a woman walking on the lawn and a man cutting the grass, and images from nature (flowers, water, birds, cows) as well as from a more mechanical world (lawn mower, sliding glass doors, cars in a distance across a concrete driveway). Of particular note are a large, elaborate birdhouse on a pole in the yard and the cutting on movement that equates the birds darting back and forth with the running children. Keller described the film in the Film-Makers’ Cooperative catalogue as ‘‘portraying the poetics of family life in an unfamiliar context.’’ It charts how we make sense of the new through what we already know, and likewise, how what we know is changed by a new environment. The film’s central images consist of the filmmaker’s voyeuristic framings of familiar figures in a different space. In one instance, the person behind the camera seems to be crouching indoors as she looks out through the lens at an older man riding a lawn mower; the door slides shut in the middle of the shot, so that the glass distorts the world and calls attention to the importance of seeing and how conscious looking changes what is seen. Near the end of the film, from the same crouched position, the filmmaker looks through the space created by the arm, back, and seat of an aluminum lawn chair to see a woman walking along the beachfront lawn where children previously had been playing. The camera pans right to remove the woman from the space, then back again to include her in its intentional framing. The filmmaker, having placed herself at a child’s height, creates an image of a
threatening parental world in which she alone controls what is seen and thus assumes power over the adults.
Like Cocteau, Cornell was interested in portraying simultaneous realities. However, while Cocteau embedded his alternative universes in conventional cinematic narratives, placing them on the same phenomenological plane as everyday reality, Cornell was bolder. In both his films and
the three-dimensional collage boxes for which he is famous, Cornell worked with the objects that entranced him, including found footage; his
particular vocabulary consisted of stellar imagery, birds, printed words, scientific paraphernalia, and children, all grouped in such a way as to
show them in a new light. His method as a filmmaker was characterized by what Keller called ‘‘visual equation’’—the rearrangement of apparently ephemeral, disconnected images according to a rhythmic or graphic logic. Each image is connected to the previous and subsequent ones in a
‘‘complex of simultaneities,’’ in which meaning is subtly shifted in a nonsequential, nonnarrative way. Throughout her career, Keller remained
interested in the child psychologist Jean Piaget’s notion of a natural order in which things and events in the world are understood by children
without being explicitly stated. The practice common to Cornell and Keller of using bits and pieces of the present world to suggest a natural
order and to evoke that which is absent, taboo, or unsayable calls to mind once more the importance of amnesis as a model of artistic creation.
Like Cocteau, Cornell used children in his films to signal to his viewers that he was operating from the child’s untainted and all-encompassing
mode of perception, in which reality is shaped in conformance to a private vision. Like Brakhage, his films are based on the logic of children’s
prerational game playing; they feature repetition, nonrealistic space, and an absence of narrative flow, as well as a childlike attachment to certain
images that carry magical significance. Cornell’s films resemble his boxes more than they resemble other people’s films; their meaning depends on
one’s holding all the images and iconography in mind and integrating them into the distinctly Cornellian system. The viewer, rather than
remembering specific images and connections, retains evanescent visual ideas in which children, birds, stars, and all the other forms become
disembodied and recreated in a mysterious and charming new world.
Keller too used fragmentary images and motifs in a cyclical, nonnarrative structure, although her goal was not to disembody childhood and
children, but rather to embody them. Keller’s films do not reduce the complexity of adult life by returning to childhood’s magic. They present
the layers of simultaneities in order to speak about the transition from childhood to adulthood and all that is lost. A case in point is the brief
single-roll film
Ancient Parts, which more than any of Keller’s films resembles a Joseph Cornell box.
Ancient Parts consists of minimal action in a tiny room that includes a small boy, a mirror, a bed, and a mother in a nightgown. These iconic elements are united by the golden, grainy quality of the film and the tilting, ever-shifting camera work. Most important is the fact that most of the film was shot into the mirror, so that visually it resembles a box within a box. As the boy gazes upon and touches parts of his body, with the filmmaker and the mother as audience, he almost enacts the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan’s mirror phase of development, in which the child conceives an idealized sense of the body’s functional wholeness, or ego ideal. The toddler attempts to climb into the imagined mirror space, an action that is echoed by the filmmaker’s recording of the reflected scene as she and her camera assume the same gaze as the boy. Like the three filmmakers she analyzed in her book, Keller literalizes the process whereby a filmmaker shows the world through the child’s superior perception. But she also reveals her adult consciousness of what the child is experiencing. Twice in the film the boy turns away from the mirror and climbs onto his mother’s lap, sequences that are filmed without the mirror’s mediation. As the camera moves to a close-up, the boy’s face is seen to be scraped and scratched, as if to indicate that the task of separating from the mother is not without pain. Unlike her predecessors, Keller is interested in infusing an image with a certain amount of humor and an indication of her adult awareness.
Keller’s focus on the difficulty of crossing from childhood innocence to adult experience suggests a stronger resemblance to Brakhage than to
Cocteau or Cornell, although the final film in the
‘‘Parts’’ series also manifests the ways in which she learned from, and then moved beyond, her teacher.
Private Parts, as the title indicates, is about the filmmaker’s private life, and it features her family and friends in uncharacteristic long takes that make their identities clear. Keller took to heart Brakhage’s admonition to work within the sphere of daily life, as well as his
Emersonian belief that the deeper one looks inside oneself, the more universal one’s observations become. The setting of this film—on another lawn, in front of yet another house on the water—also reflects the indirect influence of one of Brakhage’s mentors, the poet Charles Olson, who advised artists
to fix themselves in a particular place in relation to the world and examine that place in terms of a larger history, from the geological and archeological to the anthropological and the mythological. Whereas Brakhage placed himself in the Rocky Mountains near Boulder, Colorado, Keller worked at the shore of the Atlantic Ocean in Rhode Island. In
Foreign Parts, as in many of her films, shots of the water (with or without boats), the horizon, and the rocky or sandy shoreline are powerful representations of places where the particular textures of daily life meet the flow of time. People foraging for clams among the rocks show the same intuitiveness and deliberation as the filmmaker using her handheld camera to record the textures and forms of their bodies. This mundane search for dinner is alternated rapidly with shots of the ocean, allowing the filmmaker to connect the daily world with the larger one encompassing all of human relations as well as the connections between human beings and nature.
Like many experimental filmmakers, Keller was indebted to Brakhage’s well-known text ‘‘Metaphors on Vision,’’ in which he asks the reader to
imagine the world as it would appear to a child who has not learned language. According to Keller, Brakhage thought of a child as both ‘‘a
being and a metaphor’’ and he urged filmmakers
to see the most common of life’s events as if for the first time, in close up and with attention. In truly seeing the world as it was before it disappeared behind linguistic markers, the filmmaker makes available for his camera the raw material of creation. Keller believed that Brakhage had a more honest relation to childhood than that of either Cocteau or Cornell, who used this stage of life mostly as a rhetorical guise to approach forbidden truths. Brakhage’s films, on the other hand, chart a deeply felt search for personal mysteries that are painful and finally insolvable. Keller learned from Brakhage how to rigorously structure the material gained from the search as recorded in sketchlike bits of film, then how to use repetition and the serial presentation and visual rhyming of key imagery (water, gardens, horizons, birds, vacant spaces, fragments of bodies) to give the viewer multiple points of view. As Keller wrote, ‘‘one sees the child and alternately sees how a child might.’’
Where Keller differs from Brakhage is in her intentionality. She wrote of her mentor that he was part of a Romantic tradition that allowed
him to think of his films as ‘‘given’’ to him to make, just as his children were given to him by his wives. In line with this prophetic tradition, his
films were revelations that he shared with his audience. Keller also approached the world nonintrusively, recording it with an eye tuned to
whatever was present. But she structured her films to illustrate what lies under the surface and also to provide a commentary on those observations. The title of
Private Parts, for example, refers clearly to the people and places that it shows. But it also alludes to the dominant event of the film, the three firings of a phallic-formed rocket by a boy and his father. The rocket, which disappears into the sky or the ocean, celebrates some elemental bond between father and son, and the launching also unites the people scattered across the lawn, who are all excited by it. Eventually they gather around a table, and a young girl who has been peripheral to but interested in the main event walks back and forth from the house to the guests, transporting food. Throughout the film, this girl had been shown along with other women holding small children, thus suggesting, as a parallel to the male rocket sequence, the gendered division of labor and pleasure. Intercut with these scenes are fragments of an episode in which the father hands a manuscript to another man, who is shown reading it. This image is captured from over the reader’s right shoulder in a fairly tight shot, which flashes into red at the end of the film reel. One feels here that Keller is commenting on the very process of constructing meaning—of turning the particulars of life into art—with the manuscript a metaphor for the work of the film and the red beneath the film’s emulsion a metaphor for complexity beneath appearances.
Private Parts may give the appearance of a home movie, revealed to its maker in the shooting, but like all of Keller’s work it is a carefully constructed film that must be read and interpreted.
