The extraordinary potential of a cut—that alchemical moment when one image replaces another—has long been recognized by avant-garde filmmakers, from Sergei Eisenstein in the 1920s to Peter Kubelka in the 1960s. In effect combining two different entities into a syncretic whole, a cut can restructure or reinvent reality—Kubelka hoped to replace the everyday with an imagined “paradise.” But in the last few decades young avant-gardists have not only made our image-saturated culture a primary subject but employed a different approach, editing less, or less intrusively, whether the footage is found or their own. Brian Frye—who will present a one-person show of ten recent films on June 29 and a show of films he’s curated (including two of his own) on June 30, both at Chicago Filmmakers—says he tries to edit his movies to “look like they came out of the camera as you see them.”
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Frye sometimes reworks his films after they’ve been shown, and he’s given away the only copies of a number of his shorter reels—but he also says he thinks of those more as “ideas” than completed works, though some have titles. Indeed, he aims to blur the line between completed film and unfinished experiment—many of his best pieces look like fragments or rushes. His work is relentlessly self-questioning, offering a subtle, ever shifting mix of open-endedness and structure. The Letter is composed of “visually interesting” shots, he says, from the outtakes he found for an unidentified documentary. And his film looks like outtakes, with pans around a cemetery and an unexplained bald man. Later a shot of worms moving against a mesh screen introduces a different kind of imagery and motion—and as in most of Frye’s best work, there’s something creepy about the image and how little it explains. Watching Frye’s films, the viewer often feels trapped in a box with only a few peepholes, each of which distorts the world in a different way.
One of the strongest films on Frye’s program is the 15-minute TV Assassin. It’s not easy to “get,” however—I didn’t like it on a first viewing. A grainy, strangely flickering image apparently shot off TV shifts back and forth quickly between two or three similar patterns of fuzzy lines, then changes; the repetition suggests some stability beneath the haze. Evoking Frye’s characteristic mix of engagement and alienation, the images’ near hypnotic jitters are compelling, yet no two are exactly alike. The film also plays with our tendency to find faces in abstract patterns: frequently an actual face emerges. On the sound track, a voice offers what seems to be a language lesson: “E for easy, Q for queen.” Other cues indicate some kind of coded message.
Like TV Assassin, this film baffled me at first. The information Frye offered later about the year of the wedding (1946) and his family was of some help, but what really pulled the work together for me was the final section. The figures are slightly blurred, as if smeared vertically, in a manner that’s less calculated and “aesthetic” than Richter’s in his Baader-Meinhof series but suggests some of its strangely distanced beauty. All three sections address human connection: a failed romance, a wedding in the Shoah’s shadow, and finally a happy gathering of people whose substance is obscured. Frye’s melancholy may be attributable to the difficulty of discovering meaning, but his perceptual minilabyrinths are marked by modest moments of sublimity. These rewards, however, are cryptic: the worms in The Letter, a mournful image of raindrops on a bush at the end of Across the Rappahannock.
Most of the films on the program have an aesthetic very different from that of the entertainment film or the high-art avant-garde film, both of which seek to draw the viewer into a substitute world. Instead these works offer the everyday and suggest that we look but not presume to understand.
Centuries of Childhood, or Middletown Elegies (Zenith Year Zero): Selections From the Robert Beck Memorial Cinema
