The Red Thread

By Larry Gottheim

The Red Thread is the definitive work on Larry Gottheim, a key figure in the history of American experimental film.

Gottheim's account of the evolution of his work over the decades provide an extraordinary window onto the development of the art form in America in the late 20th century. His own account of his li

• Language: English
• Publisher: The Film-Makers
• Release date: Dec 11, 2023
• ISBN: 9782958204495

Book preview

The Red Thread

THE RED THREAD

LARRY GOTTHEIM AND HIS FILMS

LARRY GOTTHEIM

Eyewash Books

CONTENTS

Part 1: The Red Thread

The Beginning Before the Beginning

1. In the Beginning is the Ending

2. Blues, the Fons et Origo

3. Fog Line: Manifesting

4. The Time of Ceremony: Corn

5. Sliding: Doorway

6. Thought

7. Visual Music: Harmonica

8. Going Home: Barn Rushes

9. Edge: Horizons: Elective Affinities Part 1

10. Mouches Volantes: Elective Affinities Part 2

11. Four Shadows: Elective Affinities Part 3

12. The Garden is Closed: Tree of Knowledge, Elective Affinities 4

13. Natural Selection: Me and the Mind of Others

14. Transformations: Sorry/Hear Us

15. Reversing Time: Mnemosyne Mother of Muses

16. The Red Thread

17. Machete Gillette...Mama

18. Your Television Traveler

19. Chants and Dances for Hand

20. Knot/Not

The Ending After the Ending

Part 2: Critical Notes

Jonas Mekas

Scott MacDonald

Barry Gerson

John Hanhardt

Michael Sicinski

Owen Vince

Part 3: Personal Perspectives

Steve Anker

Heinz Emigholz

Scott MacDonald

Acknowledgements

Filmography

Index

Notes

CONTENTS

Part 1: The Red Thread

The Beginning Before the Beginning

1. In the Beginning is the Ending

2. Blues, the Fons et Origo

3. Fog Line: Manifesting

4. The Time of Ceremony: Corn

5. Sliding: Doorway

6. Thought

7. Visual Music: Harmonica

8. Going Home: Barn Rushes

9. Edge: Horizons: Elective Affinities Part 1

10. Mouches Volantes: Elective Affinities Part 2

11. Four Shadows: Elective Affinities Part 3

12. The Garden is Closed: Tree of Knowledge, Elective Affinities 4

13. Natural Selection: Me and the Mind of Others

14. Transformations: Sorry/Hear Us

15. Reversing Time: Mnemosyne Mother of Muses

16. The Red Thread

17. Machete Gillette...Mama

18. Your Television Traveler

19. Chants and Dances for Hand

20. Knot/Not

The Ending After the Ending

Part 2: Critical Notes

Jonas Mekas

Scott MacDonald

Barry Gerson

John Hanhardt

Michael Sicinski

Owen Vince

Part 3: Personal Perspectives

Steve Anker

Heinz Emigholz

Scott MacDonald

Acknowledgements

Filmography

Index

Notes

PART 1: THE RED THREAD

The Red Thread (1987)

THE BEGINNING BEFORE THE BEGINNING

What is most important has been left out. If you could have seen all the films, and then we could slowly go over them little by little, including the sound, without any reference at all to ideas, you would be much closer to the heart of the matter, to the experience of the matter, to what is possible here. That has necessarily all been left out.

That is what I worked on. The true nature of the films can be found there, not here.

As you will see, in writing this I very often refer to doubles. The person writing this is a kind of double, an avatar of the person who made the films, not the same person. The identity of this person is superimposed on the other. You will see something of how that person was led to the films, how he worked on them. My work on this book has been an entirely different process. I could not even begin until I could approach the films as though they were the work of someone else. I can only try to express what I find there from the other side of the window. You will likely find other, different things. Hopefully this book will open areas of common interest, suggest many surprising new directions, while leaving you free to explore your own thoughts.

I expect there will be readers who have not seen any of the films. Don’t worry. I think it is rare to find a deep analysis of artworks by the person who made them, or the artist’s double. I hope the progression of ideas during the course of the book will be stimulating on its own. Maybe you can think of the films discussed here as imaginary, standing in for the real ones. I hope the description of the films will be clear enough to let you follow the discussion.

The Red Thread (1987)

Among the meanings of The Red Thread are the connections that run from one film to the next, and the threads that run from the films to issues of biography, philosophy, psychology, film theory, social issues, ritual and ceremony.

To honor what is left out, here is a white page.

1. IN THE BEGINNING IS THE ENDING

A few basic elements organize many of my films, sometimes individually, sometimes several combine. They are continuity, circularity, repetition, and reversal. Many films circle around in one way or another. Ceremonial dances often include these movements. It’s like Ouroboros, a snake consuming its tail. It has been a symbol of many things throughout history. Strangely this may have something to do with Damballa, a Haitian Vodou Lwa said to be my protector. One of Damballa’s avatars is the snake.

I am afraid of snakes.

The Red Thread (1987)

I have tried to understand what drove me to these structures, to return to them. My early films started me on the path to forms that continue to lead me into new areas. The structures have a formal aspect that shapes the experience of the viewer. After the first films they provided editing challenges. In order to edit within these structures I discovered affinities, surprising ones, ones I never consciously thought of before they appeared through my efforts to solve the editing puzzles. They were lying there, waiting to be discovered. I couldn’t have discovered them outside of the challenge that editing within the structures led me to.

They open the films to a unique experience for each viewer at each viewing.

At first I turned away from editing, and then that became a major element. Some background information may help explain:

As a child I loved the movies playing in the three theaters near my house (one of them was called the BLISS.)

Called the Bliss.

Later, seeing the early films of Godard, Truffaut, Fellini, Antonioni were powerful experiences. I was soon to become affected by other films. On a trip to Philadelphia my wife Deborah and I saw a newspaper notice that Jonas Mekas had curated a program of experimental films. That sounded interesting. There I saw films by Robert Nelson, Bruce Baillie, Bruce Connor. Soon I was seeing other experimental films at Tambellini’s Gate Theater and Warhol films at a theater on 42nd Street and other venues. These early Warhol films would be especially influential.

While I was teaching English at Harpur College (it later became Binghamton University) I became involved with the Harpur Film Society. Somehow that awakened an urge to get into making films myself. Impulsively I decided to get a camera. I bought a used Bolex at Willoughby’s, with one lens. I left it in a locker at Grand Central Station and took a cab to Wooster Street. I had read that the Filmmaker’s Cinematheque occupied a space on Wooster Street that had been acquired by George Macunas, the Fluxus artist. The cabbie had never had any call to that part of the city and had to look it up. We drove down deserted streets past empty warehouses. For a few years there was only one bodega along the length of the street from Houston to Canal where one could get a cup of coffee.

I started exploring and learning possibilities of filming. The English Department gave me some latitude, so I was able to teach a cinema class. As amazing as it seems now, the first group of Black and Latino students in the college had to be admitted under a special program. They lived together in a dormitory, and formed a close-knit social organization called the Afro-Latin Alliance. I became friends with them and made a film with them called ALA. For many years I didn’t list this as one of my real films but now I am proud of it. I see some connection with some of my much later films.

In order to get some equipment I later agreed to make a film about the college with some students. This became Our Harpur Film.

In connection with a poetry class I invited Anne Sexton to visit and read some of her poems. I was deeply moved by her work. At that time she was depressed and compulsively taking drugs, though her poems and readings were rich and moving. I felt the urge to make a film with her, but she said she was already talking to someone else in Boston about that. I think it might have been Fred Wiseman, whose film Titicut Folies (1967) had touched me deeply. I felt sympathy for the atmosphere of drugs, emotional illness, self destruction around her, I was later to use one of her lines, Ann Ann fuis sur ton âne in program notes for première of Four Shadows at the Collective for Living Cinema.

I decided to make a narrative film, The Present. I got together a group of students and other friends and somehow found a way to begin. I didn’t have a clear plan for the whole film but developed specific scenes as we went along. The filming was silent, as I didn’t have the means to record sync sound. There was a stage play within it that had a fairy tale subject. I’m thinking now how prescient was the theme of the breakup of a marriage. That began to enter my real life much later.

I would set up a location and a situation and the actors would improvise a performance from only a brief description of what I wanted in a scene. I was busy moving around the scene with my camera. In the end I wrote a script, a first person narrative by the main character, and also added music.

The I Ching played a part in the film, reflecting the influence of John Cage and also my connection with elements of Eastern thought and ritual. Chance continues to enter into most of my films.

I don’t talk about this film much, and it is only now that I sense how, in a negative way, it influenced what I did later. I was very uncomfortable working with the actors, hoping they would embody what I was imagining without being able to explain it to them. The main problem was with the actor who read the voice-over narrative. Despite great efforts working with him, his voice and his reading of the text never had the character I longed for.

As I write this I am trying to understand why this had such a deep impact on me that I abandoned working with actors.

In some way the character was my double, seen in the negative light that I often feel is how I am perceived as well as embodying my longings. His narration would give voice to his/my ambiguous essence.

Give voice.

This term has come to mean that a film could represent the thoughts and feelings of a group rather than just of the film maker. This is uttered near the end of Machette Gillette...Mama by Victor, my negative avatar. But I think of it here in an opposite sense, articulating the complexity of what is within me. In that way it is an element that threads its way into the use of the voice in all my films starting with Mouches Volantes.

I longed to find a way that the voice would represent some aspect of myself. This led to the inclusion in later films of figures who were positive or negative avatars or doubles of myself. When there are voice-overs in later films they are often spoken by people whose native language isn’t Standard English, partly to dislocate the reading from the painful distortion of tone that I experienced in The Present and also to increase the experience of the music of speech and question something about the nature of language.

Later I was able to see how Nicholas Ray successfully brought out deeply revelatory performances. But that was not a method I felt comfortable with. When I saw Shirley Clarke’s Portrait of Jason (1967). I saw how vivid and complex Jason was (as were many of Warhol’s performers), I could see how Shirley was able to coax him and allow him to present himself in his full complexity.

I invited Shirley Clarke to come to Binghamton to show Portrait of Jason to the Film Society. She brought a suitcase of films from the Film-makers’ Coop. She stayed for a few days and was very generous with her time, even watching with sensitivity parts of my work in progress.

There was an Independent Film Competition run by Rick Manning at St. Lawrence University in northern New York. I entered The Present, and spent several days there with a group of students from my film class. Ken Jacobs had been called in to be on the jury as a replacement for Jonas Mekas, who couldn’t make it. Among those who submitted work were Ken, Hollis Frampton (whom I had known slightly when I was a student at Oberlin,) Joyce Wieland, Ernie Gehr, Morgan Fisher and others.

Instead of bringing back to Binghamton the winning films by audience popularity, I asked to take all the films that had been entered. We watched them all, on two simultaneous projectors. I arranged for Ken to visit Binghamton in connection with my film class and the Film Society. He brought a number of films with him on his marathon week visit.

As a fellow of one of the newly established residential colleges at Harpur I had access to a generous budget that could be allocated for programs. Along with the poet Milton Kessler, we arranged all-night screenings of experimental films in the dorm lounges.

The programming of the Film Society was going in a different direction than what the typical audience was used to. Besides films like Portrait of Jason, programs included Mekas’ The Brig (1964), Warhol’s Harlot (1964), films by Dreyer, and some films we had selected from the Film Competition. These annoyed large parts of the usual audience including faculty members who loved movies as highbrow entertainment. I also broke with the idea of starting each program with some light short. Instead we showed examples of works of early or avant-garde cinema that happened to be shorter than features.

The theater we used was the domain of the Theater Department. There were old projectors that hadn’t been maintained and I wanted to replace them but there were territorial disputes about funding. Nobody seemed to care.

That projection booth remained in place long after the Cinema Department had its own projection facility. During the time when Nick Ray was there, Dennis Hopper visited. Before Nick came to stay with us he had been on the set of Dennis’s The Last Movie (1971). Reportedly Dennis was anxious to get rid of him. Dennis had brought a print of a documentary about the Chicago Seven that Nick had worked on. It was a 35mm print. Nobody had used the 35-mm projectors, possibly ever. Some students volunteered to try to run the projectors. They mightily struggled with them, but it was taking a long time. I vividly recall Dennis climbing up the ladder to the booth, yelling Get it together, will ya! looking just like his character in Blue Velvet (1986).

When I was in the Ph.D. Comparative Literature program at Yale the study of literature was absorbing and exciting. I had been trying to write poetry and fiction but soon I felt I had to decide whether to pursue creative writing or literary study and literary scholarship won out.

I also continued to play the clarinet. My clarinet teacher since the age of 11 was the avant-garde composer Meyer Kupferman, who influenced me greatly. With his encouragement I went to the High School of Music and Art in NYC, and was in the All City Orchestra and other musical groups. One reason I went to Oberlin College was because of its School of Music. After doing graduate study at Yale, teaching and writing about literature seemed to be my vocation. But when I started teaching English the atmosphere was different and I became restless. The creative drive I had suppressed began to assert itself. Working with film and even teaching courses in cinema moved from being something minor beside my work as teacher and student of literature to being my full concern. Teaching only one Cinema course in the English Department began to seem stifling. I began to think about some kind of independent academic program dealing with cinema that would teach film-making as a personal art.

This was a time when the college was expanding. The administration was more innovative and radical than most of the faculty. (That was soon to change.) As soon as the idea of a program in cinema surfaced, faculty members from various departments who had offered no help with the film society’s struggles, began to want to be connected with it. They wanted an inter-departmental program that they would be part of. I wanted a separate department. Eventually the administration sympathetically fostered the creation of a regular Department of Cinema within the humanities division. This was, I think, unique in higher education at that time. It was a regular academic department like history and physics. Other academic programs like studio art and creative writing were within the Art and English Departments, rather than departments of their own. Courses in film history were sometimes found in other universities. Filmmaking programs within universities were mostly to prepare students for careers in commercial cinema and TV and were not part of the regular academic programs.

My connection and friendship with Ken continued. He recently had a bad experience teaching at St. Johns University and was at loose ends. I was able to convince the administration to hire him for the impending department as someone whose stature in the film world was far beyond that of these other faculty members who claimed they should be part of the program. He didn’t have an academic background. The willingness of the administration to hire him, and later to hire Nicholas Ray, contributed to the development and reputation of the department.

I felt the urge and the pressure to make a film that would stand beside the experimental films I had been feasting on. The filmmakers I was getting to know were around my age, some even younger. They had already made films that I admired and were accepted into the world of avant-garde cinema that Jonas Mekas was writing about in The Village Voice. Though most were self-taught as filmmakers, in my mind I felt they had mostly come from a fine arts background. Actually that was not always the case.

I felt some kind of heavy guilt that I was sneaking into film art without what I thought were the proper credentials. Literature seemed the worst field from which to enter the world of the kind of cinema art that I felt was a purely visual and sonic medium, not a literary one.

My background in music and literature and my readings in philosophy seemed irrelevant, and embarrassed me, though later I fully embraced that training and sensitivity and they came more and more into my work. I don’t have any juvenilia as a filmmaker because, as I came to realize, my previous studies and ventures provided a base for development in the new area. At that time I felt I needed to give myself a catch-up education in visual art. My experiments were informed by a saturation in the art movements that were so strong in New York at the time, in jazz, experimental music, dance, and particularly in painting and sculpture. I studied what I could in museums and galleries.

I worked out exercises to develop my skill as a filmmaker. For example there was a large pile of objects in the Binghamton Art Department studio that served as subjects for the beginning drawing students. I would go in there at night and film these objects, making up exercises that challenged me anew each session.

I experimented filming in regular 8mm, sometimes in 16mm. Film was not expensive. You could buy 8mm Kodachrome in the drug store that included processing by Kodak. 16mm film was sometimes available in camera stores.

My major project from this period involved a collection of picture frames. I picked them up at flea markets and even on the street or in various garbage disposal units. I suspended these in my wife Deborah’s pottery studio and set up simple lights. Several nights a week I would film a roll of 16mm film, experimenting filming from various angles and with various movements. Influenced by some of Brakhage’s work, I filmed through translucent objects, or put my hand over the lens with only a small space between my fingers. That was one of my favorite discoveries. Sometime later the developed rolls would arrive. Seeing these rolls, and sometimes sharing them with friends, was thrilling. Eventually I had accumulated a lot of these rolls. It was time to make what I thought would be the first real work in my chosen direction.

My work with the frames was a purely experimental attempt at creating visual phenomena through the camera. Every shot resulted from a new approach. Now my goal was to make an exciting film out of this material. It was to be called Frames, partly in tribute to the unique nature of the film roll that was made up of frames separated from each other by frame lines and sprocket holes that drove the film through the camera and later through the projector. I couldn’t wait to get into what I felt would be my major talent as a filmmaker - editing.

Night after night I tried creating various sequences of material, cutting on movement, creating parallels and oppositions, relating strips of film to others, using the images the Projectola viewer showed on the wall in front of my table. It became painfully clear that these carefully edited assemblies, when projected, had lost all the freshness that the original camera rolls provided. This precipitated a crisis. Just as I had decided to give up working with actors and narrative, I now felt I had to give up editing itself.

Sorry / Hear Us (1986)

I felt that using my conscious mind to decide what film segment to splice onto other segments did not lead to what I was seeking. I began to be drawn to subjects that could produce developed works of art just by letting the camera continuously film.

The notion of the cut still haunted me during this period. The cut was always present by its absence. Later, beginning with Horizons, the cut and splice emerged from the shadows to become a significant concern of my work.

Present by its absence. The Present.

I wanted to avoid manipulation. Manipulation has its linguistic root in manus, the hand.

I was drawn to Heidegger’s discussion of the hand in What is Called Thinking. He precedes it by a discussion of the relationship of a cabinetmaker to wood: ¹

Teaching is more difficult than learning because what teaching calls for is this: to let learn. The real teacher, in fact, lets nothing else be learned than learning. He distinguishes the hand from the organs of grasping that animals have. He relates his discussion of the hand to thinking. Every motion of the hand in every one of its works carries itself through the element of thinking…. All the work of the hand is rooted in thinking.

I was developing my filming notions at the time my teaching had turned from the academic study of literature to the creative world of filmmaking and cinema. Heidegger in these lectures was reflecting on his own teaching and made me think about mine. My ideas about editing at that time were parallel to my reflections about how best to foster the creative evolution of the work of the filmmaking students. In discussing the cabinetmaker he doesn’t think of the hand as something that forces itself on the wood. Rather when his hand touches the wood the cabinetmaker allows something within the wood to come into being, and this process is what he is calling thinking. It is not an empty passivity, but a creatively receptive one that is also active.

Heidegger’s suggestion that real thinking is the work of the hand became a central concept for me. It became the name of my Haitian son. My business with historical and art photography is called Be-hold, a split word that connects being with the hand, with holding, as well as seeing. I thought of the hand as something in opposition to the brain, the intellect. It was a different kind of thought, true thought.

There is a personal psychological dimension to this. Throughout my childhood I felt that my intellect was my main defense. Music had provided a release from it. Now I wanted to defeat it, to favor the hand over the brain, intuition and chance over conscious manipulation. This extended into my developing ideas of filmmaking.

Traditional editing usually involves a manipulation of material. It could be consciously willful or done according to a cluster of vague intellectual and visual ideas. Editing was usually guided by ideas. Eisenstein and other Russian theorists worked out theories about ideas that could be generated by the juxtaposition of shots. Editing organizes the experience of the viewer, enhancing the story or the message in a documentary.

The intellect would serve the will that is behind the project. This is obvious in most narrative and documentary films. Even in formal films when the visual aspects of the shots are foremost in the editing, there will usually be some controlling idea that would inform the decisions.

I was already attracted to the influence of John Cage, who employed several strategies to organize material outside of his control. The I Ching already played a part in The Present. Chance is connected to the notion of acceptance that plays a central role in the modes of editing I would later adopt.

If one lets the camera run continuously, without introducing ideas connected with cuts and splices, one can’t control precisely what occurs within the time span of the film. Once the concept was chosen, I had to accept what occurred within the duration of the film. I wanted to choose a procedure where what occurred would be rich without having been planned.

The early films of Lumière were an important influence. They are not only continuous shots, but, as a close analysis of films such as the arrival of the train or the workers leaving the factory reveals, the events are carefully organized within the given span of time. It isn’t clear whether he directed the timing of the events but they fall into structural divisions. Another connection with the Lumières is through Cézanne, as one of their films seems clearly to be modeled on Cézanne’s great paintings of the card players. I played with the idea of something like a still life in a film. When I looked at a Cézanne still life it would change in time like a movie.

Circularity, repetition and reversal are parts of many of the world’s rituals. They have been part of everyday human activities - music, dancing, games, sports. Children love them.

In baseball the structure provides a different experience for the players and for the spectators. The interaction of these linked experiences creates the attraction of the game. The historic, mythical, cultural background of the game is not in the consciousness of the players or the spectators. It is there nevertheless. As a filmmaker I came upon these structures in a way that was particular to the evolution of each work. It will be part of my discussion of each film. I wonder how these deep unconscious forces contributed to the gravitational pull that led me to those forms. It was there in childhood, even before that, long before I could ever read or think about them.

Those patterns of design are shadows of elements of time and eternity, inevitable death and destruction and the possibility of creative renewal. They have often manifested themselves in static graphic and sculptural forms. They appear in the architecture of devotional spaces. They are basic elements of ritual. In the temporal structure of cinema they can provide the foundation for the viewer to experience some of what lies behind the surface of the images and sounds. This will be especially true in structures that don’t involve a narrative. They can stimulate memory and anticipation. When we play music or listen to it, dance or watch a dance, these issues are present even if outside our conscious awareness. Time is always present in its deep essence, distinct from normal time. Normal time dominates our daily lives. I am attracted to the possibility of cinema transcending that normal time, bringing us into the felt presence of the essence of time for us as human beings.

This is very different from how narrative films collapse or switch times.

Cinema is an art of time. To accept an arbitrary unit of film time involves an ending. This arbitrary time unit in a film also has to do with space, or rather length. In the era of physical film, it involved the unit of a length of film stock. In the American system the common rolls of 16mm film were 100 feet or 400 feet long. The typical 16mm cameras accommodated themselves to this length. The inner chamber of the Swiss Bolex conformed to this length, as did the external magazine. So did the German Arriflex, the French Beaulieu, and other camera models. From the start one had to deal with millimeters, feet, frames, seconds. This relationship between time and space set boundaries but also opened creative possibilities.

The inner chamber.

Modern physics and cosmology show that some of the concepts of time and space that the ancients intuited are really part of the physical world. Even if their physical understanding was wrong according to current physical concepts, our ancestors somehow grasped something about the connection between human life and natural forces. The concepts of relativity and quantum theory arose at the same time as the birth of cinema around 1900. Some of the first films of Lumière and Méliès clearly demonstrate this connection between cinema and the new theories of time and space.

In the digital era electrons and digits have replaced the physical filmstrip and the shutter. Like many other experimental film artists I embrace the physical nature of film-based cinema. Time is thought of in physical terms. One second is visualized as 24 frames. Forty frames equals one foot. When one looks down at the strip that is rolling between the rewinds one can see time passing. In the digital era time is just time. It could still have a physical manifestation, as for example in a clock. But you could not touch it, cut it, and feel it with your fingers. A timeline in a computer editing program represents time in a different way than the filmstrip does.

In my later video works I no longer resist the nature of digital information, but embrace it.

In these films I didn’t think of the camera as something behind the scenes. Rather I tried to bring the film itself and the camera and the projector into the nature of the film work.

Recently, working in video, I see many advantages of the new systems. I have more control over the color. The timeline gives me more power over the organization of the time. It is easy to use the same material again and again. I don’t have to make a new print every time I want to repeat something.

When I digitize a film that I shot in 16mm, some of the artifacts of the camera and the film grain are still visible. But I need to get familiar with a new relationship to the digital material that is no longer material. Just as there are deep philosophical dimensions behind the elements of film-based cinema, so other elements of being are present in the digital world.

"Digital" from the digits, the fingers of our hand. The basis of the number 10.

Whether one films continuously or intermittently, the roll of film comes to its inevitable end. If one is going to make a film without sound, with some cameras one has the option of filming at various speeds, not only 24 frames per second, which became the standard speed for sound in the United States.

24 conformed to the fugitive American norm of 12 inches to the foot, not