version of “The Cinema Files: Images of Women in American Collage Film” in Some Assembly Required: Collage Culture in Post-War America. Tom Piché and Mark Durant, Eds. Syracuse: Everson Museum of Art, 2002.
The term “collage film” has largely been used to refer to works that employ “found” film and televisual footage as their primary source material, are structured by montage, and are generally identified by their citational character. As William Wees has argued in his book, Recycled Images (which exclusively examines “found footage” films), “collage” (which he compares to compilation and appropriation) includes films that “call attention to themselves as images, as products of the image-producing industries of film and television, and therefore as pieces of the vast and intricate mosaic of information, entertainment, and persuasion that constitute the media-saturated environment of modern – or many would say, postmodern – life” (32). But, in this essay, I want to focus on a very particular kind of collage film that has been largely overlooked in discussions of “collage” cinema as “found footage” film: the animated collage. While found-footage filmmaking is principally a demonstration of the genius of montage editing, there has been little directed analysis of more object-oriented films: animated collages or what P. Adams Sitney might have referred to as “the graphic film” (Sitney, 228). The films and filmmakers I will discuss do certainly engage montage practices, but they also place disparate images within the same frame using two-dimensional cut outs and three-dimensional objects often manipulated through stop-action animation and sometimes by gluing things directly onto the film base. It is important, I believe, to make such a distinction in collage practices (between “found footage” films and animated collage) because the handwork of the animated collage film compels a unique consideration of nostalgia and materialism, suggesting pre-industrial craft and labor while activating history and memory through a media archive. And, while the “found footage” film is limited to appropriations of motion picture objects (filmic and televisual) which are bound by the rather recent history of the medium, the animated collage borrows from diverse cultural artifacts that often predate the cinema and lend these films a challenging heterogeneity as the clipping and mounting of such incompatible materials more radically violates the idea of “property” in every sense.
While a thorough survey of the animated collage would necessarily include filmmakers like Stan Vanderbeek, Larry Jordan, and Harry Smith (among others) I have chosen to limit my discussion to just a couple of artists (among many) currently producing examples of such challenging works. Lewis Klahr and Martha Colburn are filmmakers who certainly pay homage to a long and varied tradition by engaging the cultural practice of collage, but they also reveal the commitments of the contemporary film artist and the place of “old-school” filmic technologies in a digital age. The animated collage extends the impulse of cinema before 1906 described by Tom Gunning as less of an interest in film’s ability to tell stories and more of a curiosity with cinema’s spectacle. The exhibitionist attention to demonstrating the magical possibilities of cinema, or what Gunning calls the “cinema of attractions,” dominates films before 1906 and does not disappear but “rather goes underground” (230). Klahr and Colburn are two contemporary artists making animated collage films who certainly emerge from this “underground” concern with sustaining early cinema’s principal motive of “pure exhibitionism” (Gunning 232). I want to describe their work not only with respect to this alternative history of the “cinema of attractions,” but also in relation to Susan Stewart’s discussion of longing and the “objectification of desire” in the cultural forms of the miniature and the gigantic.
Both Klahr's and Colburn’s animated collage films display characteristics connected to the miniature which, as Stewart notes, substitutes social fictions with nostalgic, interiorized scenarios of the personal and presenting a “diminutive, and thereby manipulatable, version of experience” (68-69). Significantly, the use of the miniature in film has produced some of the most magical effects in film history (prior to the now dominant use of CGR technologies) and, in fact, the film medium is itself a miniature, especially the low-budget super-8mm and 16mm formats preferred by Klahr and Colburn. The infinity of details in the super-8 and 16mm film frame is not limited to the filmed image as it makes visible hidden life of dust, grain, and scratches accumulated on the film surface. When projected, the tiny images are magnified, made into a gigantic exaggeration and, as Stewart observes, “whereas the miniature represents closure, interiority, the domestic, and the overly cultural, the gigantic represents infinity, exteriority, the public, and the overly natural” (70). Klahr’s and Colburn’s micro-collages become “grotesque” spectacles when projected and challenge dominant norms of “cinematic decorum” by engaging strategies – albeit to varying effects – related to the carnivalesque.
In both Klahr’s and Colburn’s films, the artist’s hand functions to not only call attention to the human labor and craft of the works, but also to establish scale by means of correspondence with the familiar dimensions of the hand: to highlight the palm size proportions of the animated objects in their collage compositions. In Colburn’s films, the artist’s hand repeatedly enters the frame as she paints credits or slides titles across the frame. In a number of Klahr’s films, like Lulu (3min.), his hand is used as an irising mechanism – opening and closing his fist over the camera lens. This handwork in both Klahr’s and Colburn’s films accentuates the miniature scale of the objects the filmmakers manipulate and thereby, according to Susan Stewart, continually references the exterior, physical world, while at the same time enclosing it in interiorized, exaggerated detail, personal reverie, and nostalgia (Stewart, 48). In Klahr’s work, this interiorized personal and nostalgic function of the miniature is most apparent in his “tribute” films. For example, his recent triad of films collectively titled Apertures of Ghosting (2001, 12.5min.), features a found assortment of three apparently amateur female model’s photographic proofs and the films are a sort of tribute to their respective memories. The photos bare the scribbled markings of the photographer’s or perhaps the model’s own hand which work in the film as traces of the picture’s original use value – to market the models – a use now totally aestheticized in Klahr’s invented context. The films are marked by a sometimes sentimental dream for the restoration of the individual pasts of the models, named in the titles of two of the films, covering over the present fact that Klahr knows nothing about the women’s actual pasts. Klahr combines the photographs with found objects to animate this false memory as he juxtaposes the posed stills with miniaturized souvenirs like a swizzle sticks, a domino, a thumb print, a button, or a bottle cap so as to, in a way, transcend the loss of history and to invent a personal intimacy with the subjects of the photographs. As Stewart observes, “the double function of the souvenir is to authenticate a past or otherwise remote experience and at the same time to discredit the present” (139). By animating these tiny souvenirs in juxtaposition with the photographic images, the film enacts the nostalgic longing to contract the world in order to expand the personal. The miniature, in these films, functions to create a new context for the “found” characters and to fill this hand-made, hermetic world with infinite, exaggerated detail.
The miniature functions similarly in Klahr’s earlier work which originates almost exclusively on super-8mm film. In this micro-gauge format, Klahr cites the materiality of film itself, calling attention to its object-ness and the distant, diminutive, framed nature of the images it preserves on its surface. In his super-8mm direct-film experiment, Her Fragrant Emulsion (1987, 10 min.), Klahr follows a tradition revolutionized by Stan Brakhage’s film, Mothlight (1963, 4 min) in which Brakhage glues organic bits of moth wings, flowers, seeds, etc., between two layers of Mylar editing tape to produce, as P. Adam Sitney observes, “what is probably the first film collage” (Sitney, “Imagism,” 199). Brakhage himself has written about the difficulties he had with “Mothlight,” particularly the delicate hand-manipulations required to work with fragile objects on such a small canvas, highlighting the microscopic science of filmmaking. The work resembles the “micrographia” (miniature writing) that Stewart discusses in which “the early artisanal concern with the display of skill emphasizes the place of the miniature book as object, and more specifically as an object of person, a talisman or amulet” (41). Just as the miniature book represented a miniaturized “body,” Her Fragrant Emulsion, like Apertures of Ghosting, pays tribute to women whose job was that of being microscopically scrutinized, decorated, exhibited, exchanged, and opened up. And like Brakhage’s presentation of pulverized bits of organic material in Mothlight, Klahr’s film tribute to B-movie actress, Mimsie Farmer (of Hot Rods to Hell and Riot on Sunset Strip fame – both 1967) is composed of mutilated, excised bits of celluloid from the sexploitation feature, Road to Salina which Klahr has glued and taped onto clear film leader, force-fed through a projector and re-photographed. As the film is projected, Farmer repeatedly appears in the sliced strips of film, springing nude from a beach. And as with the pre-1906 plotless variety genres like the trick films or the peep show, Klahr’s film is not moved by an interest in the original Road to Salina narrative, but rather, “the story simply provides a frame upon which to string a demonstration of the magical possibilities of cinema” (Gunning, 231). When projected and made gigantic, the micrographia of Klahr’s manipulations reveals the hair-thin incisions and subtle gestures of a not-too-subtle narrative original.
The films of Martha Colburn appear driven by such exhibitionist and transgressive impulses as she draws quite directly from the subversive aesthetic of the carnivalesque. Colburn’s work has a delightful consistency of iconography that includes pinup girls, porn stars, and pop icons in all variety of perverse crossbreed with squirrels, baboons, and spiders. The carnival references are obvious here as Colburn’s cast of human/animal hybrids bare obvious correspondence to sideshow freak celebrities who exhibit rare animal/human traits (dog-faced boy, et al). In Evil of Dracula (1997, 2:36 min), for example, smiling advertising faces from the ‘60s through the ‘80s all feature vampire teeth and typical monster-make-up coal-darkened rings around the eyes. Animated cartoon bats fly over the pixilated, zooming, rapid fire cut-out images of children and fashion models, all with pointy incisors, over which are superimposed hypnotizing spinning spirals and raining layers of blood. The whole film is hand-colored to give it an additional layer of movement and cracks in the paint on the emulsion predict the spider-webby themes that return in another one of her shorts, Spiders in Love: An Arachnogasmic Musical (1999, 2:36 min.), where more than beastie’s teeth are combined with human forms. In this one, spiders possess women’s mouths and eyes and large breasts or, sometimes, all eight of the arachnid’s legs are replaced by the gartered, high-heeled gams of a woman. These spider/women appear masked or corseted in bondage-like lingerie and their heads are variously substituted by a cartoon skull that fellates disembodied penises and inhales red pills.
In A Toetally Solefull Feature Pedsintation (1998, 6:00 min) more human/animal curiosities dominate the super-8 film that pays homage to feet-licking, cannibalism, and bestiality. The images appear to originate from diverse popular media sources like National Geographic, Playboy, and Newsweek. In the film, a crazy chimera of cut-out animal/people parts licks two human feet; a cow licks the manicured disembodied toes of a woman; a baboon licks the feet of provocatively posed model; a spider licks the fishnet-hosed toes of another; a hardcore orgy of scantily-clad women suck on horses’ hooves; and the webbed Muppet feet of Kermit the Frog are tongued by yet another ecstatic woman whose image has likely been excised from a porno mag. With vaudeville-like variety, the film includes obliquely narrative animated interludes as well. For example, there is a hand-drawn animation of a mad dentist who flosses the toes of a cutout pinup girl posed with her legs thrown over her smiling head. There is also a separately titled cartoon introduced by the double entendres and alliterations of either a carnival barker’s pitch or the back of a pornographic video box: “Sink your ankor into this ‘off the hook’ hot exposé . . . Fetishistic fish thirsty for saucy sailors unable to control their desires.” Another hand-drawn vignette features the galley humor of the one liner joke: a farmer, whose feet are being pecked by chickens, cracks (in a thought bubble over his head) “the harder the peck . . . the harder the pecker.” The film proceeds through this loosely strung together assortment of spectacular excesses, again highlighting its relation to the spectacle of early-cinema era fairground attractions and the world-on-its head strategies of the carnivalesque (toe-sucking has a particularly burlesque value for the carnivalesque’s revaluing of the lower bodily stratum).
Lewis Klahr also displays this interest in the carnivalesque as cannibalistic, drug-taking, hermaphroditic, hybrids dominate a number of his films. In Downs are Feminine (1994, 9m), for example, animated figures clipped from ‘70s pornographic magazines act out their couplings on suburban, mid-century modern interiors littered with a dynamic collage of vials, needles and a moving wallpaper of red pills. While the leprous-looking cut-out figures are animated and anxiously performing their ritualized exertions, their expressions remain still and continue in listless mechanical series. The red pills along with penises of varying proportions and with minimal attachment to bodies, penetrate and disappear in a sequence of implied inseminations of the mouths, anuses, and vaginas of hermaphroditically grafted figures. Klahr’s characters are deformed and dismembered by the straight edges and literal removal of the bodies from their ‘natural’ contexts, leaving missing parts where a figure might have been obscured in the original photograph. Similarly, in “Pony Glass” (1998, 14.5m), characters are removed from their background and bare the severed straight edges that originally defined the border of the story cell. In this case, the characters are lifted largely from the a Super Man comic book and feature Jimmy Olsen as a the new main character who cross-dresses, flies around on a hot dog, displays his erect penis, and has sex with both the female object of desire and the obligatory evil villain. Again, this is a world-on-its head as the polite, still world of the super hero comic is decidedly turned inside out and given life through the creative perversities of Klahr’s animated collage.
The archive of print pornography, advertising, and popular news media that both Klahr and Colburn share and their related construction of hybrid grotesques and all variety of penetrating and penetrated orifices and protuberances certainly evidences some shared aesthetic strategies and influences which I have associated with the miniature, the gigantic, and the carnivalesque. The ultimate effect, however, of their respective animated collages diverges rather radically. Klahr’s is a sentimental nostalgia and reverie in a particular version of femininity that he proves to be lost or impossibly distant. Even the hermaphroditic hybrids of Downs are Feminine and the cross-dressing Jimmy Olsen of Posy Glass reference a femininity that is defined by impersonation and a form of miming that stands in opposition to male productivity and authority. In contrast, Colburn’s non-speciocentric, energetic, and unsentimental perversions play subversively with women’s place within the cycle of exchange, making her sexualized labor visible and interchange with the performance of any animal. Nevertheless, such a socio-cultural reading of the works does not fully clarify the more interesting subversions that the films effect. I will conclude by suggesting that both Klahr’s and Colburn’s carnivalesque strategies do indeed subvert the dominant standards for “cinematic decorum” which has increasingly become the standard of digital production. The “lo-fi” manipulations and frame-by-frame animations challenge the hegemony of computerized effects as the layered handwork of the films cannot be precisely recreated digitally. The animated collages provide a glimpse into the sustained and enduring status of film in this “digital age”
Gunning, Tom, “The Cinema of Attraction: Early Film, Its Spectator, and the Avant-Garde.” Film and Theory: An Anthology. Robert Stam and Toby Miller, Eds. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers Ltd, 2000.
Rabinovitz, Lauren. For the Love of Pleasure: Women, Movies, and Culture in Turn-of-the-Century Chicago. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1998.
Russel, Catherine. Experimental Ethnography: The Work of Film in the Age of Video. Durham: Duke University Press, 1999.
Sitney, P. Adams. “Imagism in Four Avant-Garde Films.” Film Culture Reader. P. Adams Sitney, Ed. Praeger Publishers: New York, 1970.
-----. Visionary Film: The American Avant-Garde (Second Edition). New York: Oxford University Press, 1979.
Stam, Robert. Subversive Pleasures: Bakhtin, Cultural Criticism, and Film. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989.
Stewart, Susan. On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection. Durham: Duke University Press, 1993.
Ulmer, Gregory L. “The Object of Post-Criticism.” The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture. Hal Foster, Ed. Port Townsend, WA: Bay Press, 1983.
Wees, William C. Recycled Images: The Art and Politics of Found Footage Films. New York City: Anthology Film Archives, 1993.
Stan Brakhage, Mothlight (1963, 4 min) Canyon Cinema.
Martha Colburn, Evil of Dracula (1997, 2:36 min.) Women Make Movies.
Martha Colburn, A Toetally Solefull Feeture Pedsintation (1998, 6:00 min.) Women Make Movies.
Martha Colburn, Spider’s In Love: An Arachnogasmic Musical (1999, 2:36 min.) Women Make Movies.
Lewis Klahr, The Aperture of Ghosting (2001, 12.5min.) Filmmakers’ Cooperative.
Lewis Klahr, Downs are Feminine, (1994,9min.) Filmmakers’ Cooperative.
Lewis Klahr, Lulu
Lewis Klahr, Pony Glass (1998, 14.5m) Filmmakers’ Cooperative.
Found footage films of this type include the work of Joseph Cornell, Bruce Connor, Abigail Child, Leslie Thornton and Craig Baldwin, among many others.
In a letter to Robert Kelly dated August 22, 1963, Brakhage writes “I have been working almost entirely on Mothlight these days and finding it THE most difficult film to finish, at least per length (about 100’) . . .” (Stan Brackage, “Respond Dance.” Film Culture Reader. P. Adams Sitney, Ed. Preager: New York, 1970. 245). Her Fragrant Emulsionhas been described as a combination of Joseph Cornell’s found footage film homage to the film actress, Rose Hobart (Rose Hobart, 1936) with Brakhage’s Mothlight by Mark McElhatten in notes for TheHalogen Canticles (films by Joseph Cornell, Lewis Klahr and Peter Tscherkassky shown with the features that served as the original source material -programmed by Mark McElhatten – for Anthology Film Archives June 13th through June 16th, 2002. http://www.anthologyfilmarchives.org/index2.html
Georges Bataille notes that “the big toe is the most human part of the human body” since it is what differentiates us from apes, allowing humans to stand erect with head to the heavens (20). Bataille refers specifically to the bestial perversion of toe sucking that Colburn celebrates: “As for the big toe, classic foot fetishism leading to the licking of toes categorically indicates that it is a phenomenon of base deduction, which accounts for the burlesque value that is always more or less attached to the pleasures condemned by pure and superficial men.” (23) Georges Bataille, Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-1939 (Theory and History of Literature, Vol 14). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985.
The carnivalesque as a political strategy for overturning oppressive hegemonic norms has been demonstrated to be problematic as it ultimately reinforces those norms by performing its inversion. In fact, such performances may be institutionally authorized as a sort of escape valve that allows the marginalized and oppressed to let off steam while simultaneously demonstrating the stability of the dominant. Numerous critics have shown how Bakhtin’s own unabashed celebration of the physical and his wholly positive interpretation of Rabelais obscured the anti-Semitism, sexism, racism, and homophobia of the carnival revels and the dangers of “libertine fantasies of mobility”. But, as Stam has argued, the political limitations of carnivals are not necessarily those of carnivalesque strategies in art. See Stam, 96.