Flesh Into Light: The Films of Amy Greenfield

By Robert A. Haller

Over her more than four-decade career, New York-based filmmaker, performer, and writer Amy Greenfield has achieved widespread critical acclaim for her genre-bending films which cross the boundaries of experimental film, video art, and multimedia performance—from her feature film, Antigone/Rites Of Passion, to her major new live multimedia work, Spirit in the Flesh. Exploring the dynamism of movement and the resilience of the human spirit, Greenfield creates a new visual and kinetic language of cinema.

An innovative exploration of an artist whom Cineaste called “the most important practitioner of experimental film-dance,” Flesh Into Light covers Greenfield’s entire career and draws attention to the more than thirty films, holographic sculptures, and video installations of this important American artist.

 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Intellect Books Ltd
• Release date: Jan 1, 2012
• ISBN: 9781841506838

Robert A. Haller

Robert A. Haller is director of collections and special projects at the Anthology Film Archives in New York City and the author of Intersecting Images: The Cinema of Ed Emshwiller and Crossroads: Avant-Garde Film in Pittsburgh in the 1970s.

Book preview

Flesh Into Light

Flesh Into Light

The Films of Amy Greenfield

Robert A. Haller

intellect Bristol, UK / Chicago, USA

First published in the UK in 2012 by Intellect, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK

First published in the USA in 2012 by

Intellect, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th Street, Chicago, IL 60637, USA

Copyright © 2012 Intellect Ltd

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Cover designer: Holly Rose

Copy-editor: Macmillan

Typesetting: Mac Style, Beverley, E. Yorkshire

ISBN 978-1-84150-488-9

EISBN 978-1-84150-683-8

Printed and bound by Latimer Trend.

Contents

Flesh Into Light: The Films of Amy Greenfield

Robert A. Haller

Preface

Chapter 1: Beginnings

Chapter 2: Planning and Discovery

Chapter 3: Holograms and late 1970s

Chapter 4: 1980s and Antigone

Chapter 5: 1990s: Performance and the Cycles of Light

Chapter 6: 2000s: The Body Songs

Chapter 7: 8 Perspectives

Appendix 1: Filmography of Amy Greenfield through 2009

Appendix 2: Fragments: Mysterious Beginnings and Fragments: Mat/Glass and One O One

Appendix 3: Raw-Edged Women and MUSEic of the Body

Appendix 4: Six notions and a question about my work in video

Appendix 5: The Clock Tower

Appendix 6: Bibliography

Appendix 7: Greenfield on Greenfield

Flesh Into Light

The Films of Amy Greenfield

By Robert A. Haller

A useful measure of the accomplishment of the film-maker Amy Greenfield is the reception of a group of her films that appeared on the Internet in 2010. The films were censored – erased – while Greenfield had a New York gallery show in January and February, and then restored after multiple protests. In her films Element (1973), Tides (1983), and Music of the Body (2009), she and her other dancers were nude, in continuous motion, existing with and against standard time: interacting with the sea, with a muddy shore, and with video images of themselves. All 3 films were posted on Vimeo and YouTube. The latter took the 3 films off within hours, citing the nudity as a violation of community standards.

Greenfield received a notice that not only had she run afoul of YouTube’s community standards but she was told that uploading another violating video would result in her account being banned (Los Angeles Times, 26 February). Greenfield turned to the National Coalition Against Censorship, which took her side, and cited her previous screenings at the National Gallery of Art, international festivals, and at the Museum of Modern Art. The coalition then enlisted the support of the Electronic Frontier Foundation whose attorney declared that while we understand YouTube’s desire to keep pornography off its servers, it must also understand that not all nude art is pornographic.

YouTube then reversed its decision and reinstated the Greenfield films, which were also available on another Internet site, Boing Boing. Scores of viewers responded to the initial removal of the films – and their return. Here are some on the spontaneous responses to her Tides:

That was gorgeous. I really don’t care about the standards debate now. I want to watch the upside down backwards part around 7:00 again. Wow. (referring to the upside down, slow-motion ocean sequence)

Yes yes and all that about YouTube, but that video is special. For the first few minutes I was enjoying the nudity as much as the ocean. Then, after setting a really strong frame of reference, it used camera orientation and rewind, creating that blissful drift in me that I knew the subject was revelling in. Great vid. Awesome editing.

That’s really lovely – am I very much mistaken, or are some parts of the video actually reversed? … It’s oddly disorienting/cool.

Many initial viewers linked the films to their friends, building a cascade response that led to thousands of hits each week on Boing Boing and on YouTube:

It’s a poem, it’s a haiku in film … I was led here by a posting at Boing Boing announcing YouTube’s decision to block Amy’s work. Whether one sees beauty or ugliness is a personal choice, the choice of YouTube and those it wishes to appease by its policies seems clear. I, however, see beauty, can only see beauty, and only wish to see beauty in Amy’s work. I’m exceedingly glad her work is available here to enjoy.

Look at how our body moves in the temporal spaces. Wow!

What is striking about these comments is the recognition that Greenfield’s images are shaped by editing, that some of the images flow through different time frames, that her use of nudity is only one of many factors that induced viewers to connect to their friends.

After 4 months of the controversy of removing and then restoring Greenfield’s films the number of viewers of just Tides grew to over twenty-seven thousand. The other titles amassed twenty thousand more viewers.

The enduring resonance of Greenfield’s films, whether they were made in 1973 (Element) or more recently (Wildfire and Music of the Body) are a barometer of the impact of her films, and of the response of the wider public to sophisticated, nonnarrative motion pictures.

Greenfield believes in the potency of the image of the body in motion, that it speaks to viewers now just as much as when she began to make films in 1970. That she is not making dance films but films about the human experience (note that her one feature film is based on Sophocles). That the body is a mirror of the mind.

Preface

When Amy Greenfield completed and released the first film that she directed in 1970 she was working in a still-young medium – cinema dance. Thomas Edison’s film company had made the first pure dance film in 1894, Annabelle Serpentine Dance – indeed, it was one of the first films. But Annabelle was in a category that was passed over and unexplored in the first decades of film-making.

In contrast, the narrative film as we know it today emerged by 1910 – largely from Edwin S. Porter and D. W. Griffith. Cinema dance, which would be rooted in Griffith’s language of film (editing and camera mobility) and gestural, nonnarrative human movement, emerged much later.

Amy Greenfield is one of the handful of film-makers and dancers who opened the realms of film and dance to each other in 1940–80. The more than forty films she has made since 1970 are united first by an intense belief in the eloquence of the human body – often nude; second, by an energy that is always cinematic; and third, by an inquiry into the nature of the human condition.

The physical and abstract/nonnarrative dynamism of live dance was usually lost in movies. Only at mid-century did film-makers successfully unite these qualities of dance with cinema. Maya Deren (1917–61) was one of these – her films were mostly made in the 1940s. The Briton Michael Powell (1905–90) and the American Hilary Harris (1930–99) were 2 more – Powell made The Red Shoes in 1948 and The Tales of Hoffmann in 1951, and Hilary Harris made Nine Variations on a Dance Theme in 1966. In the late 1960s Greenfield sought the latter. From the 1970s she often worked with Harris as her cinematographer. In 1983 she finally met Powell on a film set; in 1989 Powell viewed her just-completed feature Antigone: Rites of Passion.

Greenfield’s special achievement is how she found her own way across the bland, unfeeling chasm that separated most film and dance. Like Powell, Deren, and Harris, Greenfield’s films evoke passionate states of mind through the use of the close-up camera, by camera movement, and by film editing.

In her films Greenfield considers central questions about the human condition. Who are we in relation to the world, to ourselves, and to each other? These questions are implicit in each film. Her protagonists are often naked – vulnerable but also liberated – in confronting the ultimate challenges of being in our world.

From the beginning of her film-making Greenfield worked from the basic movements of daily life, avoiding traditional postures, steps, costumes. She focuses on the innate dignity of the human body. The themes of identity and meaning emerge in our common movements. Walking, falling, embracing, rolling, running, lifting, crawling are what she and her performers do in her films. In this her work echoes the choices of Isadora Duncan, and some 1960s choreographers like Yvonne Rainer. But there is a crucial difference between her mode and that of the postmodern choreographers: it is through camera position and editing that she brings out the archetypal significance of movement and communicates ecstatic states to evoke cathartic responses. Her choreography is first cinema, then dance.

Another quality of her cinema is easy to overlook, because it is something that is not usually there – speech. Most of her films are scored with music, and some use printed words, but fewer use spoken ones. They are reserved to make explicit what is already implicit in the movements of the body.

Based upon shared common experience, her films stimulate subjective interpretation. The spectator will inquire his/her own way through Greenfield’s cinema.

I encountered Amy Greenfield’s work for the first time in 1976 when I saw her recently completed 1974 videotape, Dervish. It was gripping for its cinematic conception and for its mysterious center. Dervish was a videotape made with the first-generation equipment then available to artists and the public: black and white, moderate image resolution by today’s standards, limited sound quality. Most tapes made in the first decade of video art recorded largely immobile subjects: conceptual issues were what the tapes were about. These artists’ videotapes were detached and rational rather than emotional in impact. Duration, the passing of time, was a frequent subject.

Greenfield’s Dervish was hardly detached – it was very emotional. The 2 alternating cameras, separated by 180 degrees, regarded her as she walked into a spot-lit central space, picked up a sheet, and spun, naked and without any apparent interruption, for nearly 15 minutes, before collapsing onto the floor in a state of disoriented exhaustion. The tape was about several things: physical endurance, the theme of the interior and exterior body (suggested, even, by one image inside another), the relation of sound to image, and the sheer mystery of why Greenfield was doing this centripetal movement.

While one could imagine this work performed on the live stage, it would not have the dissolving alternation of perspective as our point of view switches from one camera to the other. We would not have the thunderous sound of the sheet as it snaps and ripples behind her. But most of all we would not see Greenfield as this divided, semi-translucent figure, a moth of our imagination who circles not a flame, but is the flame herself, consumed in a heroic gesture.

In this, as in other Greenfield videotapes and films, the body is the central image, metaphoric but also that of a very specific woman. She is open, active, and driven by forces inside and outside herself. She not only lives in a contested terrain but she challenges it. We see through her body to her inner states of mind. As in all of Greenfield’s films and videotapes, there is an illumination of the mental dimension by the physical.

The body in Greenfield’s cinema is a mirror of the mind. Greenfield says she seeks to transform the image of the body in motion … to make visible, connect us to primal revelations of bodily experience (ref. Appendix Five). That bodily experience includes eroticism as a constant, though not dominating, factor. More important are the existential concerns that appear in her cinema – freedom, autonomy, death.

Those concerns are a thread that runs through all of her films and videotapes, but so too is the ultimate condition of mystery at the end of the thread. Mystery is an inextricable element of her motion pictures. The actions we see in a Greenfield film are not complicated, and the way we apprehend them is straightforward. But in this clarity there is also an unanswered question: Why do they spin, resist nature, challenge themselves?

Greenfield and her dancer protagonists are driven figures, alone but reaching out beyond the physical. In so many of her films the protagonists are consciously aware, searching. Greenfield felt this condition long before taking up a motion picture camera. In high school, when she read Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward Angel, she underlined the strangeness and loneliness of our little adventure upon the earth (p. 22). Exile, as experienced in Element and in Antigone, for example, is implicit in much of her work.

She is one of the pioneers of cinema dance. She has worked solely in film or video, and has done so for more than 4 decades – leading the spectator into a nearby, untouched world.

Chapter 1

Beginnings

In 1970 Amy Greenfield began to make motion pictures that were based on the unexplored potential of filmed images of the body in movement. She was convinced that dance on film as film had only rarely been made. As a dancer-choreographer in the 1960s, she had been recorded – filmed – in several projects, but knew that those films had none of the penetrating energy and ideas of her favorite film-makers – Ingmar Bergman, Federico Fellini, Jean Cocteau, Michael Powell, Stan Brakhage, Jonas Mekas, Gregory Markopoulos, and Kenneth Anger.

In 1995 (in an article for Film Comment) Greenfield recalled the lasting impact of seeing Michael Powell’s two films that are set in worlds inhabited by dancers:

The only time my mother took me to the movies as a small child was to see a double bill, The Red Shoes and The Tales of Hoffmann. Afterward I wanted to see The Red Shoes over and over, and so I also saw The Tales of Hoffmann repeatedly. All that stayed with me of the latter film was a feeling of chaos, darkness, mystery, in an unreal world I wished was real.

In six pages she analyzes The Tales of Hoffman at length. As she discusses the actress Pamela Brown’s performance, Greenfield speaks of both her own (Greenfield’s) and Powell’s vision – revealing the aesthetic posture they share.

In his memoirs Powell described the discovery that the male character Nicklaus – played by Pamela Brown – is actually a woman, and that her final appearance, with breasts bared and body painted gold, would be an apotheosis. Greenfield writes that this transformative moment was

the revelation of Brown’s body as art, a sensual yet otherworldly revelation of the power of art to transcend loss and death.

This declaration of the potential of the body as art (this sequence was precious to Powell but finally was not included in the finished film) can be applied to nearly every film made by Greenfield. Bodies – made into art through the selective medium of film – speak across time and to people across space and cultures. By