Alchemy of the Word

An exploration of the consummate American coming-of-age ritual as it is observed in middle America.

A diary film, recording the summer weeks I spent with Robin Hill at her cousin’s house in Vermont where she’d been hired as a baby-sitter.

Influenced by Andy Warhol’s “Screen Tests” I set about recording some of the artists who populated my world in Kansas City during the 70s.

Horseflesh is an artifact of a year spent living on a horse farm in Vermont listening to Charles Mingus and John Coltrane. A meditation on country living, and our weird, anthropomorphic relationship to horses.

Arriflesh is a diary film recording a period I spent, very much at loose ends, dividing my time between Vermont and New York City. During those months I was also filming Horseflesh, so they are companion films. Various friends filled my universe in that confused, interim period: Cindy Revel, Margery Cohen, Tony Heath, and a bearded neighbor who was perpetually collecting scrap wood and who eventually made me a very complete astrological chart. In imitation of Jack Kerouac's Ray Smith in The Dharma Bums, I would walk up into the snowy hills every afternoon to meditate alone among the trees, with the same results as Kerouac…nada and a sense of the stony muteness of nature. This whole period was colored by memories of a teenage cousin who’d shot himself in a house just a few miles away, two years before. Like my bearded neighbor I was collecting scraps in the hope that they would someday come together into a cohesive whole.

The Earth is warmed by the Sun, then cooled by the Moon. A Horse is rounding the corner.

A cat climbs a screen, men squat on the pavement to gamble behind a 7-11, solarized film warbles in and out. A personal, quiet diary film, portraying an early apartment, an early cat, an early relationship in Kansas City. Uses self-conscious Eisenstein cutting to convey the indolent, charged air-before-a-storm atmosphere that pervaded that era.

In Just Sprouts, my goal was to make a film completely divorced from the camera and from such concerns as composition, lighting, camera placement and exposure. To do this, I sprouted alfalfa seeds at stepped intervals on a large piece of glass, made a contact print, then cut the resulting negative into strips and taped the strips onto clear 16mm film stock, always aware of Stan Brakhage’s 1963 film, Mothlight, in which Brakhage glued moth wings directly on film. A second inspiration was Man Ray’s Rayogram film, Le Retour à la Raison, in which pins, salt and pepper and thumbtacks cavorted wildly on the screen and caused a riot when first shown in 1923. In another section I cut negatives of magazine advertisements into strips and taped them onto film stock, thus hugely magnifying the Ben-Day dots with which the ads were printed. - PvZ

Based on the idea of Indonesian shadow puppet plays, which combine popular songs and Hindu mythology with political satire and broad comedy, None Saved satirically plays off of the events and mass emotions surrounding Jimmy Carter’s drive for the presidency in 1976. In the film, a Javanese-style monster rises up through several incarnations until it reaches a kind of shadow-cultural Nirvana. I often made paper shadow puppets based on images of white people I found on Chinese and Japanese toy packaging, thus reversing a trend in American animation to stereotype Asian features. None Saved was strongly influenced by Harry Smith’s Heaven and Earth Magic, which presented similar tactics of disassociation and, according to the artist, a trek to heaven and back.

I have little recollection of filming this except for reacting with a kind of instinctive horror to the subjugation of these large animals, and to some extent the people, to tawdry entertainment. It was a small, shabby, improvised outdoor circus somewhere in Long Island under harsh lights at night. Even back then, it was rare to find such a display without camp or self-recognition of any kind.

Dedicated to the One Eye Love is a Chaplinesque meditation on silent film, and a rather apocalyptic view of Chicago in the early 1970s. A homeless man roams the streets of an empty downtown. The sky keeps flashing as though bombs were dropping, or perhaps the BIG one. He meets a woman in an abandoned building. They dance and part company.

This is a record of a summer I spent in Columbia Maryland using film magic to make a bat kite come alive and filming Lucy and Robin at a fairly typical moment, dancing to Bob Dylan’s “Apple Suckling Tree.”

Alaska is the visual artifact of a two-week trip, in 1976, to Homer, Alaska, where my sister was marrying the son of a homesteader. Many of the issues that drove Concern for the City are present in this film, which preceded and inspired it. As compared to New York City, the setting for Concern, Alaska is a place where nature still overwhelms and has to be respected, where man and his works remain just a tiny dot on the rugged landscape. This is changing, of course, and the Alaska mindset is to try to control, vanquish and feed from the natural environment. Yet it is a far more even contest in the north.

A film school assignment supposed to demonstrate a circular and repeatable action.

A diary film, the record of an interim period, winter with two cats at the bungalow at 4111 Oak Street in Kansas City, Missouri. Practicing slight-of-hand magic, a congruence of film magic, the back yard where I used to study the ethnography of cats and park the car on Sunday, listening to gospel music on the AM radio.

A particular favorite of mine, this film takes Rimbaud’s words one step further into the arena of “inane refrains and artless rhythms.” I used a Bolex with an extreme macro lens to flip and roam through the pages of Chinatown pamphlets, Victorian erotic novels, and American pulp fiction, zooming in on lines and phrases and grasping at the truth that the pages can talk and that the words have their own independent lives. The Stravinsky soundtrack sets the pace for this restless proto-literary journey. I also used a shadow puppet for the first time, a year before None Saved. - P. V. Z.