American Ethnographic Film and Personal Documentary. Scott MacDonald
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Screening Room remains interesting on a number of levels—some of these, I assume, not originally anticipated. As educational entertainments, the best episodes tend to be those during which complete short films were shown—especially when these films are reasonably well served by presentation on television—and when the filmmaker guests were comfortable speaking about their work. The inaugural episode, with John Whitney Sr., is an excellent introduction to his work. The first Derek Lamb program (June 1973) is an informative introduction to animation in general and to Lamb’s engaging teaching style. The James Broughton and Robert Breer shows (April 1977 and November 1976, respectively) remain enjoyable, in large measure because Broughton and Breer were articulate and comfortable speaking about their films. The Jean Rouch Screening Room (July 1980) provides a rare and valuable moment with a major force in the development of provocational filmmaking and of ethnographic documentary. And the first Stan Brakhage Screening Room (June 1973; Brakhage returned in June 1980) is an excellent record of Brakhage’s legendary passion and clarity about his work; indeed, his reaction to the broadcast of Window Water Baby Moving (1959) remains poignant: immediately after the film is aired, Brakhage comments, “My god, isn’t that wonderful that that can finally be shown on television. I’m so happy about that.”
To Gardner’s credit, Screening Room aired a good many films—Window Water Baby Moving and Jean Rouch’s Les Maîtres Fous (Mad Masters, 1954)—that, even today, are often considered outrageous and would be unlikely to find their way to television audiences. This was possible in large measure because Screening Room was aired at midnight, though in 1970s Boston, this did not mean no one was watching: the Screening Room audience was estimated at a quarter of a million people, many of them students at the Boston area’s many colleges and universities. Indeed, Brakhage’s excitement at having Window Water Baby Moving aired is poignant not only because Brakhage had waited fourteen years to see the film reach a television audience, but because his implicit assumption that the film could now reach a wider public via broadcast has not been confirmed; these days, Window Water Baby Moving is still seen almost exclusively in educational institutions; and even its release on the By Brakhage DVD hardly guarantees a large public audience.
Demanding in a very different sense, the excerpts from Michael Snow’s “Rameau’s Nephew” by Diderot (Thanx to Dennis Young) by Wilma Schoen (1974) that were the focus of a March 1977 Screening Room would confound most any viewer not familiar with Snow’s earlier work; and one passage from that film, of a nude man and a nude woman, each standing and peeing into a bucket, was the only moment from a Screening Room episode that was censored: a black rectangle was superimposed over the offending body parts, though, despite this, the shot remains effective and amusing because of the sound of the urine hitting the buckets: the focus of “Rameau’s Nephew,” after all, is sound’s relationship to image in cinema! Gardner remembers “getting called around two o’clock in the morning from the head of the station: ‘Jesus, Gardner, are you trying to get our license taken away! A movie with somebody peeing in a bucket!’ I said, ‘It’s a work of art!’ He thought that was a big joke.”39
From our perspective in the 2010s, we can forget that during the 1960s and 1970s, filmmakers often needed to develop their own technology for making the films they were interested in producing. Few independents had access to sound studios or to high-grade equipment. The result was that individuals jerry-rigged a variety of systems, some of which proved quite effective. During the early years of Screening Room, Gardner often asked filmmaker guests to bring their filmmaking equipment to Boston and to demonstrate its uses. Standish Lawder demonstrated his homemade optical printer in the January 1973 episode; in the March 1973 episode, Hillary Harris showed how he created a variety of effects with a 36-inch, 1000mm lens (a camera was mounted onto the lens) and how his time-lapse shooting was done; and in June 1973 Ricky Leacock, with the assistance of Jon Rosenfeld and Al Meklenberg, demonstrated the Super-8mm, sync-sound, cable-less rig he had designed for student film courses and hoped to market widely, including in underdeveloped areas of the world. Robert Fulton’s first visit to Screening Room in April 1973 was largely dedicated to his film Reality’s Invisible, an homage to the Carpenter Center, but Fulton also demonstrated the unusual approach to camera movement, partly balletic and partly athletic, that characterizes much of his work. Gardner’s interest in the do-it-yourself aspects of independent filmmaking in the early 1970s, as film was working its way into academe, have become a useful historical resource, in some cases, perhaps, the only motion picture documentation of this dimension of some filmmakers’ activities.
Some Screening Room episodes are interesting not because they are effective or entertaining television programs, but because, forty years later, they provide an index of the kinds of challenges that so many of us faced during the 1970s as we were first coming to terms with radically new approaches to cinema; and because they provide a glance at the ways in which independent filmmakers understood and related to media exposure during a complex and volatile decade. While Gardner plays the knowledgeable, worldly host, it is obvious as he engages Michael Snow and Yvonne Rainer (March 1977) that he has no clear idea of what they mean to accomplish in their work; his questions and comments are quietly desperate attempts to relate their films to filmmaking approaches with which he is familiar. The same is true of his second Brakhage show in 1980, where Brakhage’s increasingly abstract approach seems to stymie Gardner. Even in the case of the Hollis Frampton Screening Room (January 1977), an excellent record of Frampton as theorist and raconteur, it is evident that Gardner remains wedded to the idea of cinema as the production of well-crafted meaningful or beautiful artifacts and/or of autobiographical expressions of the artist. The idea that cinema itself can be a theoretical enterprise in which film artists explore their fascinations with little regard for the immediate reactions of audiences, seems foreign to Gardner. At the same time, his persistence in inviting filmmakers whose work was a challenge both to him and to his audiences reveals a commitment to a broad sense of film history, a commitment honored by Anthology Film Archives in 2008 with one of that year’s Film Preservation Honors awards.
During the 1970s a good many independent filmmakers, and particularly avant-garde filmmakers, were suspicious of both the commercial media and academe; and some filmmakers were resistant to speaking about their work. This sometimes produced Screening Room episodes that can only have frustrated the host. Despite Gardner’s obvious admiration of the Polish animator Jan Lenica, Lenica was a difficult, largely unresponsive guest. Even Robert Fulton, a Gardner favorite and lifelong close friend, seems awkward during his 1973 visit to Screening Room. And the Bruce Baillie episode (April 1973) begins without Baillie, who is late for the show—a bit defiantly, one assumes: when Baillie does arrive, he barely utters a word (Gerald O’Grady, who Gardner had asked to participate in the episode, works at speaking for Baillie, but comes across as stuffy and pretentious). Adding insult to injury, at the end of the show Baillie critiques Screening Room itself and his co-hosts: “Without this kind of classroom obligation to surround the thing itself [by “thing itself” Baillie means filmmaking], maybe we in this country can lead to some good broadcasting. I am thinking about TV a lot.” Despite Baillie’s critique, however, Screening Room was, all in all, a worthy experiment in television: Gardner’s willingness to include an unusually broad range of cinematic accomplishment; his willingness to pay filmmakers for their appearances on the show; and his courage in airing films that few others would have brought to public audiences make it a distinctive contribution to the history of independent cinema.40
That the first major film Gardner completed after the nearly ten-year run of Screening Room was Forest of Bliss (1986) seems no accident. Like most filmmakers of his generation, Gardner had entered filmmaking without professional training and without anything like a coherent immersion in film history. Nevertheless, by the end of the 1960s he found himself in a position of some responsibility with regard to the production and exhibition of film as director of Harvard’s Film Study Center and of film operations at the Carpenter Center. Screening Room was, on one hand, an outgrowth of his professional life at Harvard, and, on the other, a form of self-education. If he couldn’t always make sense of what some of the filmmakers he hosted were doing, he clearly learned from their commitment to their own ways of doing things and to the films they wanted to make, regardless of what others might think about these films and regardless of how these new cinematic forms might conflict with traditional