Notes
Introduction Epigraph: John Elder, Reading the Mountains of Home (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998), 163–64. Chapter 1. The Garden in the Machine Epigraph: Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden (London: Oxford University Press, 1964), 251. 1. While I am not entirely comfortable with the term “avant-garde film,” I use it here because it has somewhat broader currency than other terms used to refer to this general cinematic terrain: “experimental film” is a term many filmmakers dislike (they do not see their films as “experiments,” but as finished works); “independent film” has been used to refer to many kinds of film that share only an independence from big Hollywood budgets; “underground film” and “the New American Cinema” seem closely connected with the particular social-historical context of the 1960s. In my own writing and teaching, I prefer the pragmatic “critical cinema,” as a way of emphasizing the pedagogical value of the films discussed here for critiquing mainstream commercial cinema and television (and as a way of polemicizing the importance of these films as accomplished works of art). 2. As is discussed later, Richard B. Altick’s The Shows of London (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1978) is a most valuable introductory overview of many forms of precinematic motion picture entertainment, including still and moving panoramas, Daguerre’s Diorama, and Loutherbourg’s Eidophusikon. Notes 387 Gerald C. Carr discusses the phenomenon of the “Great Picture” in connection with Frederic Church’s work, in Frederic Edwin Church: The Icebergs (Dallas: Dallas Museum of Fine Arts, 1980), chap. 1. Stephen Oettermann’s The Panorama: History of a Mass Medium, translated by Deborah Lucas Schneider (New York: Zone, 1997), is a remarkable overview of the international phenomenon of the panorama. 3. For a review of some of the many “single-shot films” that were made during this period, see Scott MacDonald, “Putting All Your Eggs in One Basket: A Survey of Single-Shot Film,” Afterimage (U.S.A.) 16, no. 8 (March 1989): 10–16. During the early years of cinema, some filmmakers marketed “nature films”—single-shot films of waterfalls, single and multiple shots of trains traveling through famous landscapes. For a listing of such films—none of which were seen by the filmmakers I’m discussing in chapter 1—see Iris Cahn, “The Changing Landscape of Modernity: Early Film and America’s ‘Great Picture’ Tradition,” Wide Angle 18, no. 3 (July 1996): 85–100. 4. This is Gottheim’s own metaphor. I have heard him compare the clearing of the fog in the landscape to achieving intellectual clarity, during in-person presentations of his films. (It has become a convention in avant-garde filmmaking for filmmakers to appear with their films, to introduce screenings and answer questions afterward.) 5. Of course, Muybridge was not the only important motion-study photographer whose work often focused on animals. The Frenchman Etienne-Jules Marey provided major contributions to photographic motion study. See Marta Braun’s definitive history of Marey’s work (which includes a detailed comparison of the contributions of Muybridge and Marey): Marta Braun, Picturing Time: The Work of Etienne-Jules Marey (1980–1904) (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). 6. If one can accept the horses as an implicit reference to Muybridge’s study of horses, the flight of the bird may provide an even subtler, if accidental, reference to Marey’s (and to a lesser degree, Muybridge’s) motion photography of flying birds. 7. For a time in the late 1960s and early 1970s, it seemed de rigueur for some film artists to forswear credits, as if their identities were implicit in their imagery; some of these filmmakers have continued to abjure credits, presumably in defiance of the tradition of the commercial cinema. 8. The particular look of Fog Line—and Gottheim’s other early films—has changed over the years, not simply because all film, and especially color film, decays, but because certain printing stocks that were available in 1970 are no longer manufactured. The early Fog Line prints were a gorgeous pea green; the green in recent prints is a bit grayish—and less memorable as a film color, though the film remains lovely. 9. See Angela Miller, The Empire of the Eye: Landscape Representation and American Cultural Politics, 1825–1875 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), 42. 388 N O T E S T O P A G E S 6 – 1 1 [3.149.239.110] Project MUSE (2024-04-19 02:54 GMT...
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