Yeah, the article Jonathan posted (thanks, J.!) was nowhere near as bad as the
one Fred described. You could even defend it's rhetoric on the same grounds
Chuck brought up in terms of the CBS piece. This article follows the classic
form of a "persuasive speech to a hostile audience" I used to teach in public
speaking class. In order to get the attention of conventional mainstream folks,
and get them 'on your side', you begin by establishing common ground, which in
this case means appealing to their prejudices. Then, as they're nodding along
with you, you toss in the "But..." and spin things around, and the audience
gets dragged along with you to the point where they have to at least consider
something they would have rejected without even listening to if presented with
straightforward endorsement.
So while the first part of the article is almost wholly negative, stereotypical
and sensationalist, that yields to praise both specific and general.
> At the center of the movement, however, stands a creative cluster of
> imaginative moviemakers... possibly the finest film poet the underground has
> produced. She has a subtle feel for rhythms, a grand flair for colors and a
> gay wild way with a camera that leaves the eye spinning.... the most
> affecting movie that the new cinema has turned out...the hero is part Chaplin
> and part Myshkin ...His Art of Vision, an attempt to do for cinema what Bach
> did for music with his Art of the Fugue, is an ambitious example of what
> Brakhage calls retinal music.... Stan VanDerBeek, Gregory Markopoulos, Bruce
> Conner, Robert Breer, Ed Emshwiller and Harry Smith have all done work of a
> high order. An even newer and no less gifted generation of moviemakers—Ben
> Van Meter, Ken Jacobs, Bruce Baillie—is rising with a whir. ...with all its
> excesses, the new cinema is bound to stimulate the medium. For one thing, it
> has already produced a modest but substantial body of exciting work. For
> another, it serves as a salon des refusés for aspects of the art rejected by
> the commercial cinema... "You might say," Mekas murmurs with a sly little
> grin, "that the lunatics are taking over the asylum." Nothing necessarily
> wrong with that. Every so often an art needs to go a little crazy.
>
That's a lot more credit than I'd expect from a Luce publication in 1967,
especially if they had earlier slammed the Ford Foundation for supporting this
kind of work.
And I can only imagine how insulted Jack Smith would have felt if Time HADN'T
completely misunderstood the intent of Flaming Creatures and trashed it
accordingly...
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