HAPAX UTOPIA:
Seven independent filmmakers in search of progressive collaboration:
Yvonne Rainer, William Greaves, Spike Lee, Anthony McCall, Peter Watkins, Tadhg O’Sullivan and Nikolaus Geyrhalter.
(Hapax legomenon/hapax legomena (from the Greek), is a word or an expression that occurs only once in a document, a body of work, or even in a now-“dead” language, so that, lacking multiple contexts, one can never be sure of its meaning. Hollis Frampton’s Hapax Legomena (1971-1972) is made up of seven films, each distinct from the others and from conventional cinema in general. Together, the seven films create a deflected autobiography and a panorama of Frampton’s early exploration of cinema possibility. My title is meant to evoke Frampton’s; each of the seven films discussed here is distinct from the others in its way of referencing, imagining, or creating cinematic collaboration.)
Of course, commercial cinema has long been a collaborative medium. Production has usually involved a considerable hierarchy of contributors overseen by studio heads, producers, and directors—a carefully organized cine-army, sometimes numbering in the thousands. I was so impressed by the length of the end credits of The Call of the Wild (2020), that I counted them. Roughly 1,830 contributors are named. Documentaries usually involve far fewer contributors, but can also be considerable productions. The credit sequence for Laura Poitras’ CITIZENFOUR (2014) includes more than 300 names.
On the other hand, “avant-garde” or “experimental” films, what Annette Michelson termed “artisanal cinema,” are usually produced by one or a few contributors. For these independents, collaboration has sometimes been difficult to sustain, and not just financially. In a few instances, however, independent collaborations have produced noteworthy films that function as explicit and/or implicit cine-metaphors that model a utopian sensibility.
All but one of the following discussions involve both text and moving-image illustration–generally clips from the films discussed. Roughly speaking, the illustration becomes more elaborate as the essay evolves. You may need to adjust the sound level for the clips.
1.
Yvonne Rainer’s Privilege (1990) concludes with an extended documentation of what is presumably the cast/crew after-party for the film. This documentation begins and continues for 13 minutes, with some intercutting between party scenes and interviews with women who are dealing or have dealt with menopause—a central subject of Privilege. Also included within this documentation are the film’s final credits—and a single computer text. Texts on a computer screen are a motif throughout Privilege and this is the final instance of that motif.
Enjoy two minutes of the party sequence and the final computer text:
That the particular quote.presented on the computer, written by Rainer herself, is emphasized, not only in the midst of the cast/crew party, but during the interspersed rolling end credits, suggests that for Rainer, filmmaking—and perhaps the production of this film in particular—seemed a kind of cine-utopia, a model for cultural collaboration across gender, age, ethnic, and, to some extent, political and class lines.
Near the end of my January, 1991, interview with Rainer about Privilege [see A Critical Cinema 2 (California, 1992): 352], this exchange takes place:
MacDonald: You intercut between the textual credits and what I assume is the wrap party for the film,,,, Do you see the wrap party as a kind of momentary utopia?
Rainer: Yeah.
MacDonald: Is the process of making a film your attempt to model utopian interaction?
Rainer: Originally, the ending was going to be a dozen postmenopausal women in bright red lipstick and black leather jackets pouring out of a bar, trying to zip up their jackets [laughter]. It was going to be some climactic moment of attacking stereotypes: those raunchy spunky women. And then I kind of abandoned that and thought, “Oh, well maybe there’ll be a dance.” I thought I’d show all these women dancing to “Sounds of Soweto” or something, and then that seemed too corny. And finally, I decided, why not document what was already going to happen. I invited all the interviewees to the party.
Often during the extended party footage (shot by John Canalli and Ellen Spiro) we see Rainer engaged in quiet interchanges with individuals and in conversation with groups. Rainer’s close-up, cheeky interruptions earlier in the film (she butts her head into the image to explain what one character actually means; as “Helen Caldicott” she delivers a mordant reading of a Caldicott text; or smears lipstick all over her face…) ensure that viewers can recognize her during the party sequence, where she is consistently seen in long-shot, often in the background, but always with others—a confirmation of the collaborative nature of the film.
The last minutes of Privilege include one woman interviewee’s frustration with menopause, along with her awareness that conversation with others about menopause is becoming more comfortable. This is followed by a visual/auditory poem, presented for the camera by Novella Nelson (who plays “Yvonne Washington,” Rainer’s African-American doppelganger, in the film), about a series of hot flashes she experienced in predictably distracting/annoying moments—but ending with an instance of a hot flash that can be read as a pleasurable premonition of the possible post-hot-flash future to come.
Throughout the final fourteen minutes of Privilege, even during the sequences of rolling end credits— interrupted only by the brief interviews and Nelson’s memory of hot flashes, and the computer text—we are hearing the din of conversational interaction among those who were contributors to Privilege. The professional collaboration that produced the film has dissolved into a social collaboration that presumably will, at least to some extent, continue—perhaps implicitly modeling or imagining a possible continuation of the utopia suggested in this extended moment.
2.
If Rainer is the first filmmaker I’m aware of who has made a direct reference within her film to the utopian dimension of her filmmaking process, she was not the first to see filmmaking in this way. William Greaves’ Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One evidences a related approach. The Greaves film was shot in 1968; a first edit was completed in 1971. The version currently in distribution through Criterion was not completed until 1994, some years after Dara Meyers-Kingsley discovered the original print in a cardboard box in Greaves’ office closet, then celebrated it at a Greaves retrospective at the Brooklyn Museum (see William Greaves: Filmmaking as Mission; Columbia University Press, 2021: 315-318). The film had its first theatrical engagement at the IFC Center in New York City in 2005.
Greaves’ original conception for what became the Symbio project didn’t suggest that he was hoping to instigate a cinematic utopia—just a film quite different from the more obviously educational films he and Louise Archambault Greaves had been producing at their Williams Greaves Productions. On March 9, 1967, Greaves mailed himself “Proposal: Theatrical Short Subject,” presumably to protect his ownership of what he considered a novel idea for a film:
My film would be simultaneously cinema verité, documentary, avant-garde, dramatic.
Let me explain…. The documentary aspect of my short shows how a film crew, actors and a director go about the business of shooting a film on location, of penetrating human character, of applying the laws of esthetics to the motion picture image and sound.
The dramatic aspect of the film will be found not only in the themes of marital strife, homosexuality, and social responsibility which form the basis of the dramatic story being filmed, but also there will be drama in the struggle which takes place on the part of the actors, the director and crew to heighten the reality and dramatic intensity of their work.
Shot in New York’s Central Park, what had become a feature film ostensibly about a series of screen tests, involved developments some of which Greaves could not have foreseen—though the openness of his proposal certainly allowed for surprises. Greaves’ subsequent editing of what was shot “to explore the psychology of a group of creative people who would function as an entity in the process of making a film” [Greaves interview in A Critical Cinema 3 (California, 1998): 50] proved not only inventive, but implicitly utopian.
Originally, Greaves, who had taught acting at the Actors Studio, probably assumed that the adventure of the film would result from struggles with his actors. He may have assumed he could goad them into rebellion against his “authority,” in order to reflect on the many confrontations of authority that were occurring during the 1960s By the time of the shooting, he had decided to work with different pairs of actors playing spouses Alice and Freddie struggling with their marriage (Alice wanting children and Freddie being a closet gay).
In the end, the first edit of Symbio, Take One, focused only on Don Fellows and Patricia Ree Gilbert playing the couple. Greaves’ original plan was to produce enough footage with four sets of actors to produce four full-length “Takes,” plus one composite film. When this plan was foiled by the failure of Take One to find enough distribution to make other “Takes” financially possible, Greaves moved on. When Symbio finally achieved its New York public premiere, Greaves had added brief bits of footage of the other acting pairs, in order to clarify the complexity of his original intention.
Well into Take One, during an outdoor sequence where cast, crew, and Greaves discuss the film-in-progress, Greaves seems to abjure directorial power. Since some of those assembled are clearly frustrated with how the production has been going, he asks the group to come up with a better idea for a creative work of cinematic art:
Though the assembled cast and crew seem befuddled by Greaves’ request, the edit that Greaves completed in 1971 and revised in 1994 reveals that at some point during the shooting, the crew did meet together in secret to discuss the Symbio project, and filmed their interchange. The resulting footage was delivered to Greaves at the end of the shoot. Judging from the clothing the crew members wear, it seems likely that there was only one meeting, shot in two long takes. During the editing, Greaves divided the crew’s conversation into three sequences that function as a motif during the 75-minute feature.
If the crew’s meeting was held after the outdoor conversation with Greaves—given Jonathan Gordon’s comments, it is clear that by the time of that meeting, the production was well underway and was causing consternation—one could imagine that Greaves’ asking the crew (and actors) to come up with a “better idea” might have instigated the crew’s decision to meet. In both edits of the film, however, this outdoor meeting occurs just after the third excerpt of the crew’s private discussion. Perhaps Greaves had had some indication that a meeting had happened, or was planned.
What is obvious throughout the crew’s apparently secret discussion is the diversity of viewpoints among the crew and the ethnic diversity of the crew themselves. My count is that eleven crew members are crowded into the small room where the discussion occurs (a room too small for a full-frame look at the gathering). There are three women and around a dozen men of a range of ethnicities and a variety of accents. The men tend to interrupt the women, who nevertheless reveal a clearer understanding of Greaves’ process than the men seem to have.
The edited versions of Take One include not merely the crew and cast working on Greaves’ production and the crew’s secret meeting, but also a considerable range of visitors to Central Park who found their way into the shoot and who were subsequently included in the finished film. For example, during the opening credits, an ethnic panorama of men, women and children at rest or at play in Central Park is organized into what appears to be an allusion to the widely-known MoMA photographic show, The Family of Man (curated in 1955 by Edward Steichen). And early within the body of Take One, a group of ethnically diverse high-school-aged young people are drawn to the shooting and have an interchange with Greaves about the film-to-be—at this point, Greaves is calling the project “Over the Cliff.”
Adding to the cultural diversity of Take One are particular individuals who become momentary passers-by, witnesses, or visitors to the shoot. They include a seemingly wealthy woman on horseback who rides by, early on, and a mounted policeman who enters the shoot to be sure Greaves has permission to film in Central Park. Later, a police squad-car enters a shot-in-progress, then backs off. And at one point, as Don Fellows talks with Greaves about how to present Freddie’s implied homosexuality, a bare-chested, athletic young man is seen in the background, rowing on one of the park’s lakes.
The finale of Symbiopsychotaxiplasm; Take One focuses on Victor, a homeless man who says he sleeps in the park at night. He joins the cast/crew as they are walking, perhaps to the next shooting location, to ask, “Oh, it’s a movie! So who’s moving whom?”—an astute thumbnail of the film. Clearly Victor’s interrupting the group happened at some unplanned point during the shoot. But during the editing, Greaves made the extended interchange between Victor and the cast and crew the film’s concluding sequence, and the lead-in to the final credit sequence. Indeed, Victor’s good-bye is the film’s last word: “I don’t like to say good-bye,” he says, “I like to say ciao.” Judging from my experiences screening Symbio, Victor’s farewell is, for many who see the film, a particularly memorable and amusing take-away.
The microcosm of Greaves’ unusual openness, both during the shoot and subsequently during the editing, can be understood as a reflection on the openness of Central Park itself and the utopian implications embedded within the original concept for and design of the Park (despite, of course, ethnic issues during its construction). Central Park was meant to provide and does in fact provide an open space within the commercial/industrial grid of Manhattan, and Greaves’ choice to shoot the entire film within the Park and to treat all those who became part of the shoot as fellow contributors makes Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One, like Rainer’s Privilege, an implicit gesture toward a utopian reality, a reality that may have been even more evident if Take Two had been possible to make.
One of the four couples who were part of the shoot is mixed-race. Played by Audrey Henningham and Shannon Baker, they are visible during Symbio’s final credits and the closing promise of the next “Take.” Though Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take Two was never completed, the belated success of Take One, once it was discovered and celebrated, led Greaves back to this “Take Two” couple. Thirty-seven years after the original shoot, Baker and Henningham would become lead actors in Greaves’ Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take 2 ½ (2003, produced by Steven Soderbergh and Steve Buscemi), where they play the characters Alice and Freddie and reveal aspects of their own relationship, thirty-seven years later.
3.
Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing (1989) can seem about as far from a utopian metaphor as one could imagine. On a super-hot day in mid-summer New York City, ethnic differences and personal frustrations on a particular block in the Bed-Stuy neighborhood of Brooklyn boil over, resulting in the death of Radio Raheem, whose boombox’s incessant broadcasting of Public Enemy’s “Fight the Power” in Sal’s Famous pizza parlor so infuriates Sal that he destroys the boombox with a baseball bat. Radio Raheem attacks Sal, choking him until local cops arrive, one of whom chokes Radio Raheem to death. Mookie (Spike Lee’s character in the film), throws a garbage can through the pizza parlor’s front window, instigating looting and the subsequent destruction of Sal’s Famous.
That these events are instigated first by Sal’s refusal to include anyone but Italian-Americans on the pizza parlor’s Wall of Fame, then by Buggin’ Out’s demand that Sal add African Americans to the Wall (since most of Sal’s clientele are African-American), then by Sal’s refusal to say “please” when he demands that Radio turn the boombox down while in the restaurant, suggests how easy it is for ethnic difference to result in death and disaster, not only for Radio Raheem and for Sal’s and his sons’ livelihood, but also for the neighborhood—Sal’s Famous has been its only (and very popular) local restaurant. That the film is based on real events that occurred in the Howard Beach section of Queens in 1988, when Michael Griffith and two others, leaving the New Park Pizzeria, were beaten by a mob of racist whites and Griffith was killed by a passing car as he tried to escape, makes clear how far the United States has to go before ethnic difference ceases to instigate horrific events.
And yet, this is only the most obvious message of Do the Right Thing—despite its being for many, maybe most viewers their takeaway from the film. A second important message is made evident by the film’s consistent instances of self-reflexivity, from its opening moments. Do the Right Thing begins with a credit sequence during which we see the character of Tina (Rosie Perez) dancing to “Fight the Power” in front of what is an obvious photographic backdrop of a row of apartment houses typical of the Bed-Stuy block where much of the film was shot. During Tina’s dance, we see her in three different outfits, as she looks and gestures at the audience.
The first image within the body of the story is an extreme close-up of Samuel L. Jackson’s lips speaking to a microphone at the local radio station; the camera pulls back and pans left to reveal a longshot of the block where all of the subsequent action takes place. Implicitly self-reflective moments continue to occur throughout the film. For example, when Mookie goes to the kitchen to get ice cubes to cool Tina’s naked body, the shot of him grabbing the ice tray is filmed from inside the icebox.
An even more obvious interruption to the developing narrative occurs when Lee creates a mini-montage of four characters, each seen in close-up, spewing racist epithets at the viewer. And later in the film, when Radio Raheem shows off his new Hate-and-Love brass knuckles to Mookie (but more precisely to us), the camera is so close to Radio’s outstretched arms that they’re distorted. Of course, many experienced cineastes will recognize that Radio’s monolog is borrowed from Charles Laughton’s Night of the Hunter (1955). Here are the two sequences:
During these and other moments, we are simultaneously within the diegesis of Lee’s narrative and outside of it. Lee’s determination to have us follow the film’s narrative and to be aware of the film-as-a-film is a means to an end—to the fundamental message of Do the Right Thing. There is certainly no denying that the events seen within the narrative dramatized by Lee are possible. During the moments after Radio Raheem is murdered, the assembled crowd chants the names of individuals whose deaths have come at the hands of white mobs and police. Their chant is confirmed by Lee’s dedication at the end of the film to Eleanor Bumpers, Michael Griffith, Arthur Miller, Edmund Perry, Yvonne Smallwood, and Michael Stewart.
But there is also no denying that a group of creatives, composed of people of precisely the same range of ethnicities and ages, worked together in a Bed-Stuy neighborhood for nearly six weeks during the summer of 1988 to shoot the footage that Lee and Barry Alexander Brown (along with a group of assistants) would edit into a remarkable work of art.
St. Clair Bourne’s documentary, Making Do the Right Thing, which was recorded during the Bed-Stuy shoot, provides a variety of inside looks at Lee’s relationship with the neighborhood, and also broadens our sense of the ethnic issues dramatized within the film. For example, Lee sometimes cast characters in ways that play with ethnic assumptions. Here, Giancarlo Esposito and Danny Aiello talk about ethnicity (from St. Clair Bourne’s Making Do the Right Thing, an extra on the 2001 Criterion DVD of Do the Right Thing):
Ultimately, if the collaborative process that produced Do the Right Thing is not an answer to the problems dramatized in Lee’s film, it certainly models a way forward. Mookie chooses an act of destruction, whether to dramatize his fury at Radio’s death or to redirect impending violence by the assembled mob from Sal himself to the pizza parlor (or both), depends on one’s interpretation. Lee, on the other hand, committed himself to a long-term inter-ethnic collaboration and the creation of a remarkable film—a cine-gesture toward an urban utopia.
4.
Among the most unusual films to reflect a utopian urge is Anthony McCall’s minimalist, silent structural film from 1973, Line Describing a Cone. During the 30-minutes of the film, if one were looking at a movie screen (usually no formal screen is used), a white dot would gradually become a circle, though the dot-becoming-a-circle is merely a temporal map for the experience of the film and a metaphor for what happens between the 16mm projector and whatever surface, if any, the projection lands on. Here, the circle is early complete during a screening:
Line Describing a Cone was made when smoking, indoors or outdoors, was still relatively normal. Those who were children during earlier decades may remember watching the smoky projector beam in commercial theaters—for a child, it could seem as interesting as whatever movie was being shown. Whether this was a conscious or unconscious influence on McCall, who was born in 1946, and on Line, I can only speculate. In Line Describing a Cone, however, the cone is not above the audience as in a theater, but at audience level.
Whether Line Describing a Cone is presented in a room or out-of-doors, it functions implicity as a critique of what for more than a century was the physical basis of conventional cinema-going . Specifically, McCall critiques the implications of the architectural shaping of the conventional screening space, where the audience sits in rigid rows of seats, everyone facing forward, and the projection is beamed out above the audience from a booth not accessible to those watching the reflected imagery on the screen.
Line invites the audience not only to examine the projector that makes the film possible, but to participate directly in what is seen during the film. The cone of light that develops is made more or less visible by the audience themselves ,using cigarettes, incense sticks, whatever smoke-makers they have brought to the screening (smoke machines have been used, though this seems fundamentally beside the essential point of McCall’s film).
It is not unusual during a presentation of Line for an individual spectator/collaborator to move from a standing position near the projector to a stance midway along and inside the evolving cone, to a prone position under the expanding smoky cone some distance from the projector.
This drawing of an “audience” engaging the cone was, for a time, included with the 16mm print when it was rented.
In recent years, smoking has become illegal in nearly all indoor locations. This, plus the gradual expansion of outdoor lighting (especially on many college and university campuses) now poses a challenge for anyone wanting to present Line Describing a Cone—in addition to the ever more frustrating challenge of presenting the film as a 16mm print. And yet, my personal experience in confronting these challenges has, in many instances, made the experience of the film more mysterious, distinctive, and exciting, for me and my students.
Recently I’ve been able to project Line on the outside wall of Hamilton College’s observatory, in a space separate from the campus and with its limited outdoor lighting turned off. Over and over, I’ve watched groups of students working together in close quarters in the dark, carefully using cigarettes and incense sticks to explore the visual possibilities of the smoky cone of light, a creative collaboration that is virtually unique and, in many cases, memorable for those who participate. No one, so far as I am aware, has ever been burned during a projection of Line Describing a Cone, no matter how crowded it has sometimes been.
If for McCall, Line Describing a Cone was, first, an experiment with light and space—made more visible by environmental smoke or dust, it was also an implicit act of Marxist cine-theory. The success of a presentation of Line Describing a Cone depends on the labor of those who work with smoke to make the projection fully active. Everyone experiencing the evolving cone is, paraphrasing Marx, free to participate according to their ability and experience the film according to their needs or desires. Line Describing a Cone has become for many, simultaneously a political critique of the implications of theatrical cinema and a collaborative spiritual experience.
When all of Hamilton College’s 16mm projectors had become defunct because the rubber and plastic innards of the projectors had decayed, I was faced with the irony that while I had been assiduously careful with 16mm prints, always worried about scratching the emulsion, tearing the filmstrip, or burning a frame, the prints have tended to last longer than the projectors! But fortunately we were able to find a still-usable 16mm projector—in large measure because I could not accept not presenting the McCall film (and its siblings: Conical Solid, 1974; Cone of Variable Volume, 1974, and McCall’s other related light films),
5.
If Line Describing a Cone is a minimalist, momentary cine-gesture toward utopia, Peter Watkins’ global film, The Journey (completed in 1987), is a maximalist counterpart. The suppression of Watkins’ Oscar-winning The War Game (1966) by the BBC shattered the filmmaker’s hopes that his docudrama, when seen on primetime television, would have a serious impact on the global arms race. Indeed, the 48-minute film seems to have been suppressed precisely because of the political impact it might very well have had in the U.K.
While Watkins moved on to other projects, his frustration with having The War Game available only to those with a 16mm projector—schools, film societies—continued to rankle him until he committed himself to a global film that would be financed and shot by citizens committed to responding to the still-expanding arms race, as well as to issues of gender, ethnicity, and class—and, in particular, the ways in which the language of commercial media was functioning in relation to these issues. When the Swedish Peace and Arbitration Society signed on to assist Watkins in getting the project started (early on, it was called “The War Game 2”), he proceeded to assemble collaborators.
Like many independent filmmakers, Watkins had traveled widely to show and discuss his films, and one of the first things he did, once he’d committed to the new project, was to contact those who had screened his films and hosted his visits. He wanted to see if they’d be willing to participate in what would be a global media undertaking–explicitly to assist in producing a film and implicitly to become part of an ongoing active network of citizens in many nations who shared concerns about the issues Watkins hoped to explore in what would becomeThe Journey. During 1983-1984, often working with local crews, and, when possible, with local financing (shooting in locations where substantial funding was not possible was paid for by the more affluent locations), Watkins filmed in France, Norway, West Germany, the USSR, Japan, Mexico, as well as on the island of Tahiti, and in multiple locations in Scotland, Australia, and the U.S.
Within each location, Watkins instigated and filmed dinner-table conversations among family members (parents and children) and himself to model new familial ways of productively confronting serious issues. Photographic blow-ups of the results of the Hiroshima/Nagasaki bombings were passed around the table to instigate the conversations. In addition to the family discussions, in locations where enough money had been raised (generally through public events that related to the issues Watkins was exploring), group dramatizations of relevant events were enacted.
The group dramatizations varied. The Mohawk Valley region of central New York State was, at the time, home to a major SAC (Strategic Air Command) base that would be a primary target in a nuclear war between the USSR and eastern Europe and the USA and western Europe. A local research team located the American government plans for dealing with an attack on this target and discovered, among other things, that the plans included the evacuation of an African-American neighborhood in Utica to a largely European-American small town fifteen miles to the east (downwind of the target!). Hundreds of people in both locations came together to participate in an enactment of the government plan.
Local photographer Sylvia de Swaan made production stills of Watkins working with these collaborators:
When Watkins arrived at the National Film Board of Canada in Montreal, where editing facilities had been arranged, he began shaping the footage into what turned out to be a 14 ½-hour multi-chapter meta-film, designed for both theatrical screenings, serial television, and the weeks of a high school or college semester (an elaborate study guide was produced). Throughout the editing, Watkins remained true to a commitment to edit his conversations with families as little as possible, to let individuals have their say—his counter to the tendency of commercial television not only to ignore non-experts entirely, but to reduce the presentation of information and idea to brief, isolated, easily consumable and forgotten bits.
The extended length of The Journey and the patience required to produce it were designed to model a new kind of commitment by journalists. To complete the shooting, Watkins had circled the globe three times, first, to visit communities interested in being part of a grass-roots production; then for organizing the crew and those who would participate in front of the camera; and finally, for filming the families and group dramatizations. The project modelled Watkins’ desire for new more fully global and interactive forms of media that might lead to a safer, more collaborative, possibility more utopian world.
The Journey was featured at the Forum during the Berlin Film Festival in 1987 and though it was taken seriously there, during subsequent film festivals many of those who had heard about or saw some of Watkins’ meta-film were unwilling to engage with its formal complexity and innovation. Though there were a range of screenings early on, in some instances these were discouraging; and at the Robert Flaherty Film Seminar in 1987, a yearly gathering of cineastes and programmers devoted to documentary, the film and Watkins were generally patronized.
In time, The Journey fell out of sight. It remains available, in 16mm, at Canyon Cinema, but there is currently no DVD/Blu-ray version in general distribution. And what interconnections had developed between the diverse groups that collaborated with Watkins are generally lost to time, though a Scottish family did bond with a Soviet family and the last I knew, the two families were planning to get together in the USSR, during the “white nights of summer.”
The completion of The Journey did demonstrate how a single person could collaborate with groups of people around the world to produce a new kind of cinema. What I respect about The Journey, to paraphrase William Faulkner, is “the gallantry” of Watkins’ remarkable effort (Faulkner, speaking about Thomas Wolfe, in Faulkner in the University). I remain hopeful that this essay might help in some small way to see The Journey back into distribution.
Here’s an instance of a community dramatization by Norwegian children in The Journey (the narrating voice is Watkins):
6.
At 73 minutes, Tadhg O’Sullivan’s To the Moon (2020) is a haiku compared to The Journey, and the result of a very different form of global collaboration. It focuses not on current political challenges, but on a dimension of everyday life that has affected virtually everyone and everything on the planet throughout history: Earth’s lunar neighbor.
Though O’Sullivan wrote, directed, and edited To the Moon (Clare Stronge produced), the film was a meta-collaboration involving currently active filmmakers and archives around the world. O’Sullivan made arrangements with filmmakers who shot images of the Moon from Catalonia, Spain; Brandenburg, Germany; from Jaipur and Ladakh, India; from New Zealand, Switzerland; and the U.S. (from Alaska and two locations in California; and Oregon); from Ireland, Scotland and Wales.
O’Sullivan also collaborated with dozens of archivists across the world, who contributed what they thought were interesting and evocative lunar clips from films, and with friends who enacted moments referenced in particular readings. He recorded a monologue with Brazilian actress Grace Passô, when she was visiting Porto, Portugal (the monologue was based on a Clarice Lispector short story called “Another Couple of Drunks”). A wide range of literary sources (and voice artists to read them), were included, along with sixteen musical compositions, plus original music by Amanda Feery and Linda Buckley.
To the Moon is organized according to the eight lunar phases, beginning with Full Moon, then Waning Gibbous, Third Quarter, Waning Crescent, New Moon, Waxing Crescent, First Quarter, Waxing Gibbous, and finally returning to Full Moon. Within these phases, O’Sullivan explores a range of ways in which the Moon has been experienced, understood, and represented :
Here’s the beginning of the first Full Moon section:.
The film’s eight cine-explorations are organized into sound-image-text montages of somewhat varying lengths, each of which focuses on a different kind of thinking about the Moon. The Full Moon montage focuses, not surprisingly, on the beauty of the Moon and gradually transitions into instances where the Moon has represented romance, particularly for couples. In Waning Gibbous, the Moon is seen as an emblem of loneliness, then of lunacy. In Third Quarter, the focus is on the real and imagined power of the Moon; in Waning Crescent, on the Moon’s connection to superstition, sorcery, devil worship, werewolves, vampires, and the coming of death.
The New Moon section—the Moon now invisible from Earth—focuses on emptiness and loss, mourning, prayers for what is gone, despair. The Waxing Crescent sequence focuses on waking, beginnings (“Let me begin again!”), blossoming, revival, infancy, childhood; the First Quarter sequence, on growing, climbing, imagining, and on fantasizing the Moon as destination; Waxing Gibbous, on climbing, exploring, developing mastery, flight, political “supremacy” (Fascism/Nazism), space flight, the Moon conquered—and, in another sense, simultaneously lost. To the Moon concludes with Full Moon, there once again and for all its history and our history with it, still beautiful.
Throughout To the Moon, O’Sullivan consistently uses film clips in the traditional 4:3 aspect ratio, so that it is difficult to distinguish between clips from archived films and imagery shot specifically for To the Moon. Implicitly, the choice to avoid wide-screen imagery is simultaneous with a recognition that our understandings of the Moon and Earth, and of outer space and the future, have already begun to transform. O’Sullivan recognizes the realities of the present, but hopes that we can continue to recognize the artistic accomplishments of the past that the Moon has instigated.
On the most obvious level, To the Moon is a reminder and celebration of the Moon’s beauty, variety, and power, as witnessed and shared by humanity and all global life throughout both recorded and unrecorded history. O’Sullivan has paid homage to the Moon by combining an astonishing range of cultural memories and interconnections that become increasingly fascinating, the more one experiences the film.
Of course, utopia itself is beyond historical grasp—difficult even to imagine. But for cineastes and lovers of the arts in general, To the Moon—like the other films surveyed in this essay—can be understood as an attempt at cine-utopia. Cinema, as the past century’s art of arts, has offered, and hopefully will continue to offer, an ongoing global psychic space within which humanity can, from to time, join together in something like a utopian interconnection across space and time.
[I interviewed O’Sullivan about To the Moon via an exchange of emails in 2021; the interview is chapter 4 of my Comprehending Cinema (Oxford University Press, 2024).]
7.
Like Peter Watkins and Tadhg O’Sullivan, Austrian Documentary filmmaker, Nikolaus
Geyrhalter, has brought a global perspective to modern cinema. Since Elsewhere (2001), his
four-hour epic survey of the most remote locations on the globe as of the year 2000 (filmed, one
location each month, throughout the first year of the new millennium), Geyrhalter has
documented various global patterns relating to the accelerating domination of the Earth by
humanity.
In Homo Sapiens (2016) Geyrhalter surveys locations exploited, then left behind by human
activity and ecological disaster: industrial over-exploitation, scars of modern war, the Tohoku
earthquake and tsunami of 2011… Earth (2019) documents the largest humanly instigated earth-
moving activities, which, combined, account for more redistribution of the Earth itself than the
combination of all natural occurrences. Perhaps the most impressive—or at least for me the most
affecting—of Geyrhalter’s global films, is his 2022 epic, Matter Out of Place, which surveys the
varied attempts by humanity to deal with the immense organic and nonorganic refuse produced
every day by an exploding global population. Attempts vary from simply ignoring the “matter
out of place” to burying immense amounts of garbage and refuse “out of sight,” to processing it
in a variety of ways.
Each method of struggling to come to terms with the seemingly overwhelming build-up of
human detritus is accompanied by the difficult-to-avoid sense that, in time—perhaps a time not
so far in the future—the Earth will be little more than an immense sphere of waste, not only
unable to sustain the overpopulation that is producing the refuse, but unable to sustain humanity at all. For Geyrhalter, this is perhaps less a tragedy than we usually imagine. He himself has said,”When Michael Palm was editing Homo Sapiens, he told me, ‘Editing this film was a little bit like dying, and after editing this film, I’m not afraid of dying anymore!’ If hypothetically there would no longer be humans, the world—nature—would not miss us and would immediately cope with the new situation. We would be missing, but nobody and nothing would care. I wanted to stress that” [Geyrhalter, in MacDonald, The Sublimity of Document (Oxford, 2019): 152].
On one level, Matter Out of Place can seem to confirm the “warning” of Homo Sapiens,
that more and more of planet Earth is becoming uninhabitable by humans, but Matter also provides
an alternative possibility. Indeed, Geyrhalter’s care and effort in documenting the global reality
of the ever-expanding infusion of garbage within human culture suggests that it is worth
knowing what he shows us, important that we know it—since despite our fears, the horror the
current reality portends is only one possibility,
It is clear throughout Matter that human beings around the world collaborate on a considerable
scale to obscure the reality of the accumulating refuse, carefully burying it or hiding it. For
example, no one looking at the wide field in Solothurn, Switzerland, that is the subject of the
opening post-title section of Matter Out of Place, would imagine how much refuse is concealed beneath their feet; or that in Nepal, garbage carefully collected by individuals throughout crowded urban neighborhoods is amassed by an army of dump trucks that labor up a steep mountainside outside of the city where the garbage is filling a giant hollow that will become, perhaps to all
appearances, just another mountain.
As Matter Out of Place evolves, however, other less implicitly ominous events are recorded. In a
coastal area of Greece, a group of men and women in scuba gear dive to the floor of a bay, where
they collect detritus, most of it invisible to the eye, and bring what they collect to the surface
where it is placed in a boat that delivers the refuse to a dump on a small, isolated island. The
elaborateness of the divers’ labor, which often suggests an underwater ballet, exudes a respect
for the cleaning up of even a largely invisible dimension of the environment. And in Austria, we
see an elaborate grinding system that transforms everything from metal cans, plastic, and
thrown-out clothing to a large mattress into what looks like gravel that might be used in a variety of
ways.
Most remarkably, however, Matter Out of Place concludes with what begins as an ethereal
mystery that gradually transforms (please see it full-screen):
This documentation of the annual Burning Man ritual in the Nevada desert evokes the gradual set-up of what becomes a vibrant, musical celebration that covers the desert as far as the eye can see. The celebration concludes with most visitors leaving. Then, the small efficient cadre of dedicated celebrants who have stayed behind carefully clean the immense ritual site so that, in the end, the mantra “Leave No Trace,” has been fulfilled, leaving the desert as it was before the celebration. Geyrhalter’s spirited conclusion of the Burning Man sequence is a compelling utopian metaphor that reminds us of what committed collaboration, even in what often seems a dark and dangerous moment, could (still) make possible.
Acknowledgements and sources:
Thanks to Yvonne Rainer, William Greaves, Peter Watkins, Tadhg O’Sullivan, and Nikolaus Geyrhalter, for permission to use clips from their films.
Privilege is available at Zeitgeist and Kanopy; Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One and Do the Right Thing, on DVD or Blu-ray, through Amazon; Line Describing a Cone, at Canyon Cinema; The Journey, in 16mm from Canyon Cinema and,in certain instances, from me personally (smacdona@hamilton.edu); and To the Moon, from Grasshopper Films, and in Ireland at IFI@HOME.
Thanks to Doug Higgins and Soren Lara at Hamilton College for assistance in formatting this essay; and to students Julian Arky, Aderyn Grace, and Amanda Sedaka for making available images of a presentation of Line Describing a Cone during the fall of 2024.