In the Year of Our Ford

No one has heard much about movies like Breath-Death, Cosmic Ray, and Stone Sonata, but now the Ford Foundation has begun pouring tuns of gold on the happy heads of the people who made them. The foundation has decided to encourage the art of film as practiced by lone stylists whose pictures are usually brief, almost always 16-mm., and sometimes comprehensible only to themselves.

Accordingly, Ford sought a list of 177 candidates, invited them to send sample films, then picked twelve winners. Most got $10,000. The total grant was $118,500.

Presumably, the foundation screened all the pictures they prized, but viewed collectively, the winning films are a varietal riot. Some are mad, some methodical. Some are suitable for the living room and others for a smoker at the Elks. This one is conventional. That one is wildly experimental. This honest. That phony. How one panel of judges could have agreed on the twelve grantees defeats the unfoundationed imagination.

Some of the winners: Stanley Vanderbeek, 32, is a tireless man with scissors. He cuts pictures out of magazines--all kinds of magazines--and stirs them into film clips in a kind of stiff puppet action that writes a curious chapter in the manual of animation. In Skulduggery, Harry Truman comes popping out of the mouth of a sumptuous girl; then a hammer comes out of her nose and knocks Harry back between her chops. Breath-Death shows Harpo Marx playing his harp on the edge of a smoking battlefield. Khrushchev appears, sneezes, and Hitler pops up and says Gesundheit. A Merlin-like figure suddenly gets stuck in the back of the neck with a flying table fork. A nude appears, with two small skulls where her breasts should be. Another girl lies in bed caressing a TV set on the pillow beside her. Reading downbed from the TV set is a spread-out man's shirt and a pair of trousers. Kind of anemic, this lover, but what a fat head.

In all, Vanderbeek showed Ford three of his five-to-ten-minute "Visible Fill'ms"--each no doubt having some subtle message that anyone with millions to give away would instantly grasp. In A La Mode, for example, a girl carries her breasts on a tray with miscellaneous fruits. An automobile drives up hill and down dale across a pair of giant breasts. A woman's face comes off, revealing an opera .house inside her head. A bird comes out of a pore in her back.

Vanderbeek, a New Yorker now heading upstate, is about to move his wife and two children into a house he is making out of old water tanks. "I think the film's only hope is experimental cinema," he says. "The whole commercial cinema of neoreality is fundamentally pornographic and does not contribute to one's soul. It is not sensitive. The cinema needs people of private vision. We are living in an avalanche of entertainment fallout, and how does one survive when bombarded by clumsy ideas? The film should be in the hands of poets rather than just slick, literate stylists."

Hilary T. Harris, 34, also a New Yorker, is a slick and literate stylist and then some. His Seawards the Great Ships is a 29-minute color documentary on the shipbuilders of the Clyde in Scotland. He shows, rivet by plate, how ships are built. The picture won an Oscar two years ago. Harris also does shorter, impressionistic pieces. In Highway, he zips up, down, and under Manhattan's West Side Highway by night and day, sketching the rhythm of the roadway until it fairly comes alive. "My main preoccupation in film is with rhythm, and then color," he says. As if to prove it, he will use his $10,000 to make a film on the dance.

Jordan Belson, 37, will let almost no one (but foundations) see his movies unless they come to his studio in San Francisco for private screenings. His work is a brilliant arrangement of patterns of music, light, and color, a world of flashing pinpoints, symmetrical dots and fiery globes. "There is a crucible into which all phenomena can be resolved," says Belson. "If any medium can accomplish this, I am convinced it will be the film. My work penetrates deeper. It opens the doors to a universe that isn't even considered by people working in the medium."

Bruce Conner, 30, begins his A Movie (which lasts only twelve minutes) with a shot of a young and magnificently shaped woman sitting in profile, like Whistler's Mistress, wearing only a black garter belt. Cut. Savage Indians are next, seen slaughtering defenseless pioneers. An elephant charges furiously. Racing cars crash in clouds of dust and fire. A girl lies languidly back on a bed. Dissolve to a submerged submarine shooting a torpedo. The H-bomb goes off. Motorcycles race through mud. A biplane crashes into a lake. That famous Tacoma bridge whips in the wind and collapses. The Hindenburg bursts into flame. A ship sinks. A firing squad fires. Bodies hang upside down in Rome. Bruce Conner could be interpreted as a kind of Cotton Mather XXIII. His point seems to be that if you start with a beautiful nude, death and violent destruction soon follow.

Conner is a Kansan educated at the University of Nebraska. As a sculptor, he is represented at Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art. And as a filmmaker, he is no Puritan. His Cosmic Ray, four minutes long, is a collection of quick glimpses of photographically virgin (unairbrushed) nudes interspersed with scenes of naval engagements, Mickey Mouse, rocket planes, and the flag-raising at Iwo Jima. One girl rides a broomstick, a witch without a stitch. Some seem to be twisting with the camera. One lies supine, her hands slipping off her panties.

Kent Mackenzie, 34, a Californian, got his $10,000 by submitting three pictures with a total running time of one hour and 54 minutes. Two of Mackenzie's films are good, straightforward documentaries, one on a rodeo cowboy and the other on old people doomed to lose their homes to urban redevelopment in Los Angeles. But his really arresting accomplishment is a semidocumentary, full-length feature called The Exiles, a picture about American Indians as they live in Los Angeles today. Played by amateur actors like Delos Yellow Eagle and Frankie Red Elk, The Exiles slices a depressing day out of a set of static and pointless lives, showing a lost people who imitate the language of Negroes as if in aspiration to belong to a higher-echelon minority. They lie around in their grimy pads listening to westerns on TV with lines like "reckon that'll teach them moonfaced Indians to have more respect for a white man." Or they drive to a rubbly hilltop and hold war dances with jugs of wine, the galactic lights of the city spread below.

Carmen D'Avino, 45, whose Pianissimo has been nominated for an Academy Award this year as best short subject, is a painter who learned cinematography as a photographer-historian during World War II. His films are painstaking creations in color, shot frame by frame, with meticulous painting done between shots. Pianissimo is about a player piano. The keys are all white. It starts to play. As each key hits a note it acquires a color as well, until the whole keyboard looks like a Mediterranean awning. D'Avino goes on coloring everything in sight, including the punched-out player roll itself. The colors grow and move quite magically. In Stone Sonata, he moves stones around a stream bed, coloring them as he goes along in varied patterns that suggest the work of a Hopi Indian, always shooting a frame at a time, creating an imaginative suggestion of stones alive in nature, a reason-be-damned admixture of the commonplace with the impossible. This technique works best of all in The Room. It is an abysmally shabby Greenwich Village flat, filthy and gloomy, with plaster fallen off the walls. Suddenly color begins appearing. The room paints itself in wild patterns and uninhibited blazes of Latin shades. It is a resurrection in primary hues.

James Blue, 33, turned in a surprising entry. After all the six-minute adolescent pornies, the sober documentaries, and the truly artful short work of men like D'Avino, along comes Blue from Portland, Ore., with a full-length feature called The Olive Trees of Justice. Beautifully directed by Blue, beautifully acted by unknowns, it was made in Algeria three years ago. It is entirely in French, with French subtitles when the Arabs talk. Blue learned French as a student at the Paris Institute. He made Olive Trees for the French Government. It is propaganda, or was once, but it is so well done that it is chiefly propaganda for the human race. A young French Algerian broods beside his father's deathbed about his childhood, seen in flashback, and what is left of that fine early life in Algeria now. Something is left. He decides that he must go on living there.

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