Men & Women & Bells

"Face Smiling. Hammering a brick. CU of an ear (moving?). Face twitching. Dancing on one leg. Rolls, twitches on the floor. Boxes the wall."

"INVOCATION is Higgins' Satie movie... the purest attempt to clear art from any or all historical, esthetic, thematic, ornamental claptrap to regain the lost-eye consciousness." - Jonas Mekas

Feature-length compilation program presenting 37 out of 41 original fluxfilms produced and directed in the 1960s by Fluxus artists, including George Maciunas, Nam June Paik, Yoko Ono, Robert Watts, Paul Sharits, et al.

A satire on business. We see a distinguished business man speaking gibberish, telephone ploes being ripped down to make room for beautiful farmlands, prices tumbling. I hoped the end would justify the means. –D. H.

The scenario for what might have been quite a beautiful films is projected as a text. In between the blocks of text, two small girls romp, as if from another movie altogether. –D. H.

This film belongs to Higgins' 'hard series', meaning that the formal structure is relatively inflexible. The colors shift from the normal to their complements, producing extraordinary after-images, and this is done to a pulse by means of over 3000 splices to the films. The sound is from a tape recording of the Ray Gun Specs at the Judson Church in 1960, and in which Higgins was one of the featured Happenings artists. –D. H.

Higgins’s only feature-length film, THE FLAMING CITY, explores the dichotomy between the lifestyle of Higgins and his artist friends in SoHo, which was viewed as a threat to middle class American values, and Higgins’s well-heeled upbringing. The film employs several photographic techniques Higgins learned at the Manhattan School of Printing, including filters, hand-drawn patterns, and alteration of color. - Anthology Film Archives