The Last Laugh: Strange Humors of Cinema

Wrenching Departures: Mortality and Absurdity in Avant-Garde Film

93 David Sterritt Wrenching Departures Mortality and Absurdity in Avant-Garde Film The greatest filmmakers explode not only the forms but also the moods of conventional cinema, injecting our neural circuits with affective tumult and intellectual uproar. In this essay I focus on the cinema of the absurd, an aesthetic modality built on oscillation between breakthrough and breakdown, geared to what Gilles Deleuze calls “the violence of sensation . . . inseparable from its direct action on the nervous system” (34–35). My primary specimens are Bruce Conner’s A Movie (1958), a work of mournful hilarity; Michael Snow’s Wavelength (1967), a drop-dead tragicomedy; and Ken Jacobs’s Two Wrenching Departures (1990), a derisive laugh in the face of death. Each takes mortality as its subject, offering a subversive vision of life entering its final fadeout. Conner: Obscurity, Illumination Bruce Conner began A Movie soon after he set up shop as a young artist in San Francisco in 1957. His work at this time included conceptual art, performance pieces, painting, printmaking, drawing, collage , sculpture, and assemblage. When he decided to make a movie, he envisioned a loop of recurring footage back-projected in a room-sized installation piece. But money posed an insuperable problem. “I was a movie usher, my wife had a job as a secretary,” he told me years later. “As soon as I got into the film project, I realized this was a rich man’s art form.” 94 David Sterritt Making a virtue of necessity, Conner realized that while a camera was beyond his means, he could afford silent 16mm condensations of feature films sold by a local store. So he took inspiration from a nonsensical montage in one of his favorite pictures, the Marx Brothers comedy Duck Soup (1933), and began editing store-bought footage into a surrealistic chase sequence that became a key scene in A Movie (David Sterritt, “Bruce Conner: Crafting Visions from Film Pieces,” Christian Science Monitor, 24 October 1984, online at www. csmonitor.com/1984/1024/102408.html). Conner made many subsequent films, most of them composed of found-footage sequences carrying the same visual energy and sociopolitical drive that make his initial production a work of such galvanic power. Like his work in other media, his films center on “the struggle between dazzling illumination and tenebrous obscurity . . . locked into a state of eternal suspension,” in curator Peter Boswell’s words (27). The practice of montage, whereby strips of film are cut and spliced to form rhythmic sequences, is closely related to the practice of collage , whereby pieces of material are juxtaposed upon a surface; what the latter does in space, the former does in time. Conner’s taste in collage-montage aesthetics was partly formed by the zigzag collisions of comic, melodramatic, and action-adventure footage in the comingattractions trailers he saw while growing up in the 1940s. “I started fabricating a movie in my mind,” he said later, “[that] would have scenes from King Kong and Marlene Dietrich movies, all sorts of things, combined with soundtracks. It was just a fantasy” (MacDonald 254). Until it wasn’t. Conner and Duck Soup both entered the world in 1933. Directed by Leo McCarey at Paramount Pictures, the film places Groucho, Harpo, Chico, and Zeppo Marx in the fictional realm of Freedonia, which is beset by problems emanating from Sylvania, a hostile country nearby. Groucho’s character, Rufus T. Firefly, becomes the leader of Freedonia thanks to Margaret Dumont’s character, Mrs. Teasdale, a wealthy matron who keeps the nation out of bankruptcy with the fortune she inherited from the late Mr. Teasdale, whose replacement (in the bank as well as the marriage bed) acquisitive Rufus would like to become. Conner saw the film at age sixteen and long remembered the scene that most captured his imagination: “There’s a war going on, and the Marx brothers are surrounded in a farm house. Groucho Mortality and Absurdity in Avant-Garde Film 95 says, ‘We need help,’ and all of a sudden you see soldiers and airplanes and dolphins and giraffes and everything else running to help them” (MacDonald 253). Extending, expanding, and complicating this concept, Conner crafted A Movie from pieces of a Hopalong Cassidy western, a 1953 newsreel compilation, a German propaganda film, a samizdat girliemovie clip, and a novelty item called Thrills and Spills. He also used a good deal of film marked with countdown numbers and codes from...