eyes upside down visionary filmmakers and the heritage of emerson apr 2008

Eyes Upside Down:
Visionary Filmmakers and
the Heritage of Emerson
P. Adams Sitney
Oxford University Press
Eyes Upside Down
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Eyes Upside Down
Visionary Filmmakers and the Heritage of Emerson
P. Adams Sitney
3
2008
3
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Sitney, P. Adams.
Eyes upside down : visionary fi lmmakers and the heritage of Emerson / P. Adams Sitney.
p. cm.
Includes index.
ISBN 978-0-19-533114-1
ISBN 978-0-19-533115-8 (pbk.)
1. Experimental fi lms—United States—History and criticism.
2. Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 1803–1882—Infl uence. I. Title.
PN1995.9.E96S49 2008
791.430973—dc22 2007031171
9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper
To Tony Pipolo and Jeffrey Stout
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Preface
I
n 1992 I began taking notes for a book on avant-garde
fi lmmakers that would focus on the heritage of Ralph Waldo
Emerson and Walt Whitman. For Marie Menken, Stan Brakhage, and Jonas
Mekas, the relationship to both seemed to me uncannily apt, while Ernie
Gehr’s affi nities appeared to be dominantly Emersonian and those of Warren
Sonbert and Andrew Noren Whitmanian. As I slowly worked on the book,
its range expanded. The fi lms of Ian Hugo and Su Friedrich began to take
on new meaning for me when I considered them in this tradition. Eventu-
ally, the more remote fi lmographies of Hollis Frampton, Abigail Child, and

Robert Beavers were drawn into the expanding circle of these considerations.
Their writings on cinema fi rst alerted me to their Emersonian aesthetics.
When I examined their fi lms in this light, I was rewarded with a clearer sense
of the ways in which they simultaneously resist and participate in the native
tradition.
I also found that many of them, like Whitman, assembled individual fi lms
into complex series, sometimes even projecting a single serial fi lm as the work
of a lifetime. So, embedded within this long study of the Emersonian heritage
in the American avant-garde cinema is a sustained consideration of the role of
the fi lm sequence. I had considered extending the range of fi lmmakers even
further. I would have liked to include chapters on Saul Levine, Nathaniel
Dorsky, and Peter Hutton, and perhaps others, but the manuscript grew un-
wieldy at seven hundred pages. By the time this book is published I hope the
gist of my refl ections on their fi lms will have appeared elsewhere.
In writing this book I have benefi ted enormously from a fellowship at the
Getty Research Institute (2004–2005), where for the fi rst time in my career I
had an entire year to devote to a book. I am deeply grateful to Thomas Crow
and Charles Salas for inviting me, and to Rani Singh for tirelessly providing
me with facilities and research materials while I was in Los Angeles. Without
her help, I would not have been able to complete the book at that time. I had
the good fortune to have Genevieve Yue as my research assistant at the Getty.
She is a distinguished young scholar of the avant-garde cinema in her own
right. When I could not catch words from the soundtracks of Beavers’s Plan
of Brussels and Palinode, my colleagues Howard Bloch and Tom Levin helped
me with the French and the German.
In the three decades since I wrote Visionary Film, there has been a spec-
tacular growth in the criticism and scholarship of the American avant-garde
cinema. My frequent citations and footnotes indicate how indebted I am to
the insights of other scholars. No one has done more for the fi eld than Scott
MacDonald. His fi ve volumes of The Critical Cinema have become essential

references for us all. MacDonald was particularly generous to me, sharing un-
published tapes from older interviews, and including questions that I had
in interviews he was conducting as I was writing this book. Fred Camper,
Martina Kudlacek, Robert Haller, David James, Paul Arthur, Tony Pipolo,
Marie Nesthus (whose work on Brakhage’s serial fi lms preceded my own),
John Pruitt, Amy Taubin, Keith Sanborn, Gerald O’Grady, and Marilyn Bra-
khage have shared their insights and learning with me.
All of the fi lmmakers discussed in this book have been extraordinarily gen-
erous to me, in making fi lms and stills available, providing me with manu-
scripts, and answering my tiresome questions. All of them are, or were, my
friends. I regret than nothing I can write will ever do justice to their fi lms,
which have irradiated my life. The deaths of Hugo, Menken, Frampton and
Sonbert before I started writing the chapters on their fi lms, and of Brakhage
while I was still at work on this book, have impoverished those sections, insofar
as I was unable answer questions about their fi lms and their reading for which
no documentation survives.
The Princeton University Committee on Research in the Humanities and
Social Sciences gave me a series of grants to pursue aspects of this work. The
Stanley Seeger fund of the Program in Hellenic Studies also helped me in my
work on Robert Beavers. Marilyn Brakhage (and the estate of Stan Brakhage),
Andrew Noren, Jonas Mekas, Jon Gartenberg, Abigail Child, Robert Haller,
viii preface
Su Friedrich, Robert Beavers (and Temenos), Fred Camper and Anthology
Film Archives provided me with stills. Arunas Kulikauskas made other stills
especially for this book. Sandi Milburn and Rick Pilaro, at Princeton Univer-
sity, helped me digitalize the stills and lay them out.
A secular miracle gave me Shannon McLachlan as my editor at Oxford
University Press. No one in the world of publishing knows the fi lms I write
about better than McLachlan. She had been a supporter of my work long
before she came to Oxford. Paul Hobson, who copyedited the book, has been

extremely helpful. My agent, Georges Borchardt, Inc. has been, as ever, en-
couraging and very helpful. My dear friend, Jeffrey Stout, meticulously read
every page of the manuscript, correcting errors, offering suggestions, and
sharing his vastly superior knowledge of Emerson with me. In acknowledge-
ment for the unremitting kindnesses he and Tony Pipolo have shown me for
many years, this book is dedicated to them.
preface ix
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Acknowledgments
I
am grateful to the following individuals, presses and estates
for permission to quote texts: Wesleyan University Press (John
Cage: Silence); University of Alabama Press (Abigail Child: This is Called
Moving); Marian Faller and the estate of Hollis Frampton (Frampton);
Marilyn Brakhage and the estate of Stan Brakhage (Brakhage); New Direc-
tions (William Carlos Williams); Barbara Stuhlmann, Lilace Hatayama, The
Charles E. Young Library of UCLA, and the Anais Nin Trust (Nin and Ian
Hugo); University of Chicago Press (Gertrude Stein: Narration); Melissa Wat-
terworth and the Thomas J. Dodd Research Center, University of Connecti-
cut (Charles Olson); Georges Borchardt, Inc. (John Ashbery: “Tapestry”);
W.W. Norton and Company (Rilke).
John Cage, pp. 73, 75, 100, and 111 in Silence: Lectures and Writings © by
John Cage and reprinted by permission of Wesleyan University Press.
“To and Dog Injured in the Street” (excerpt), from Collected Poems 1939–
1962, Volume II, copyright © 1953 by William Carlos Williams. Reprinted by
permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.
“Tapestry” from As We Know by John Ashbery. Copyright © 1979 by John
Ashbery. Reprinted by permission of Georges Borchardt, Inc., on behalf of
the author.
From sonnets to orpheus by Rainee Maria Rilke, translated by M.D.

Herter Norton. Copyright 1942 by W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., renewed
© 1970 by M.D. Herter Norton. Used by Permission of W.W. Norton &
Company, Inc.
Parts of this book have appeared in First Light, ed. Robert Haller, The
Chicago Review, Film Comment, Millennium Film Journal, and Jonas Mekas:
Conversations, Letters, Notes, Misc. Pieces, etc. (Vilnius: Lithuanian Art Mu-
seum, 2005).
Scott MacDonald, /A Critical Cinema: Interviews with Independent Film-
makers/ © 1988 by the University of California Press; /A Critical Cinema 2:
Interviews with Independent Filmmakers/ © 1992 by the University of Cali-
fornia Press; /A Critical Cinema 5: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers/
© 2006 by the University of California Press, reprinted by permission of Scott
MacDonald and the University of California Press.
xii acknowledgements
Contents
Introduction: Emersonian Poetics 3
1 Marie Menken and the Somatic Camera 21
2 Ian Hugo and Superimposition 48
3 Stan Brakhage’s Autobiography
as a Cinematic Sequence 70
4 Jonas Mekas and the Diary Film 83
5 Hollis Frampton and the Specter
of Narrative 98
6 Robert Beavers’s Winged Distance/Sightless
Measure: The Cycle of the Ephebe 123
7 Beavers’s Second Cycle: The Past
in the Present—the Present in the Past 145
8 Andrew Noren and the Open-Ended
Cinematic Sequence 170
9 Ernie Gehr and the Axis

of Primary Thought 197
10 Warren Sonbert’s Movements
in a Concerto 220
11 Brakhage and the Tales of the Tribes 243
12 Frampton’s Magellan 259
13 Abigail Child: Textual Self-Reliance 271
14 Su Friedrich: “Giving Birth to Myself” 296
15 Brakhage: Meditative Cinema 321
16 Beavers’s Third Cycle: The Theater
of Gesture 349
17 Mekas’s Retrospection 372
Conclusion: Perfect Exhilaration 392
Appendix: Chronology of Films 401
Index 409
xiv contents
Eyes Upside Down
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
Introduction: Emersonian Poetics
T
he art of the fi rst British settlers of America was literary,
originating in the severe rhetoric of New England divines.
Absolutely convinced of their election, and often ferociously excoriating the
heresy of toleration, they theologized the very idea of America as a redemption
from Europe according to God’s plan and covenant. Consequently, the great
fl owering of American literature and painting in the fi rst half of the nineteenth
century arrived with the secularization of that rhetoric and theology. The turn-
ing point in our native tradition from an art in the service of Christian theology
to an orphic theology of art may be symbolically represented by Ralph Waldo
Emerson’s resignation in 1832 from the Second Church of Boston (the pulpit of

the author of Magnalia Christi Americana, Cotton Mather). In the following two
years, Emerson gradually transferred the locus of his teaching from Unitarian
pulpits to the public lecture halls, such as that of the Society for the Diffusion
of Useful Knowledge in Boston’s Masonic Temple. His essays that both predict
and inform American artistic discourse retain “in the optative mode” (as he said
of all of our literature) the fervor and conviction of the founding divines.
American artists—poets, composers, painters, fi lmmakers—have largely per-
petuated Emerson’s transformation of the homiletic tradition in their polemical
4 eyes upside down
position papers. Sometimes they have even implicitly acknowledged their
awareness of that tradition, as when Charles Ives published his Essays before a
Sonata (1920) to accompany his “Concord Sonata.” More often they have been
unwitting Emersonians, or even Emersonians in spite of themselves. Gertrude
Stein is an example of the former, John Cage and Charles Olson of the latter.
I shall focus on them as signifi cant fi gures in the transmission of Emersonian
aesthetics to the fi lmmakers at the core of this book, although they are by no
means the only exemplars that might have been chosen. They represent a suffi -
cient variety of responses to Emerson (and his disciple Walt Whitman) to chart
the array of variations on Emerson that the fi lmmakers will demonstrate.
Museum lectures, program notes, exhibition catalogs, interviews, and, in cin-
ema, introductions to fi lm screenings (since Maya Deren pioneered that mode
in the late 1940s) have been the means through which American artists have
continued this fundamentally oral tradition. Often they have spoken of their
work with the absolutist confi dence of the seventeenth century elect, and just as
often have extirpated the heresies of those fellow artists who deviated from their
convictions. All of Gertrude Stein’s theoretical work took the form of public
speeches. The title of her most comprehensive series, Lectures in America (1935)
attests to this. Narration was presented as four lectures at the University of Chi-
cago, and she delivered “What Are Masterpeices and Why There Are So Few of
Them” at Oxford. John Cage turned the lecture format into another art form,

at times interweaving (on tape) at least four different lines of argument at once.
Maya Deren began the practice of lecturing with her fi lms as an economic neces-
sity and a proselytizing tactic. Since her death in 1961, this has become a common
practice for avant-garde fi lmmakers. Parallel to the oral style runs an epistolary
mode (corresponding to Emerson’s journals) in which public polemic takes the
guise of a correspondence between artists, as in many of the polemical writings
of Ezra Pound and Charles Olson. Among the fi lmmakers, Stan Brakhage, Hol-
lis Frampton, Jonas Mekas, and Abigail Child are exemplars of this mode.
Throughout this book, I identify American aesthetics as Emersonian.
I want to include in this sweeping claim Emerson’s disciples Thoreau and
Whitman, and even those such as Melville who set themselves in opposition
to him, insomuch as Emerson comprehensively set out the terms of the argu-
ment and defi ned the terrain on which the Americanness of our native art
would be determined.
Emerson himself knew that the mutually opposed artistic positions and the
variety of styles, in a given nation at any one time, participate in a coherent
system. Near the beginning of his essay “Art,” he described the way in which
the air an artist breathes “necessitates” an “ineffaceable seal on [his] work”:
[T]he new in art is always formed out of the old. The Genius of
the Hour sets his ineffaceable seal on the work, and gives it an
introduction: emersonian poetics 5
inexpressible charm for the imagination. As far as the spiritual char-
acter of the period overpowers the artist, and fi nds expression in his
work, so far it will retain a certain grandeur, and will represent to
future beholders the Unknown, the Inevitable, the Divine. No man
can quite exclude this element of Necessity from his labor. No man
can quite emancipate himself from his age and country, or produce a
model in which the education, the religion, the politics, usages, and
arts, of his times shall have no share. Though he were never so origi-
nal, never so willful and fantastic, he cannot wipe out of his work

every trace of the thoughts amidst which it grew. The very avoidance
betrays the usage he avoids. Above his will, and out of his sight, he is
necessitated, by the air he breathes, and the idea on which he and his
contemporaries live and toil, to share the manner of his times, without
knowing what that manner is.
1
Gertrude Stein virtually repeats Emerson’s terms when she begins the
fourth lecture of Narration: “After all anybody is as their land and air is. . . .
It is that which makes them and the arts they make and the work they do
and the way they eat and the way they drink and they way they learn and
everything.”
2
It is characteristic that an avowed anti-Emersonian poet such as Charles
Olson, who deliberately aligned himself with Melville’s rejection of the
Sage of Concord, would recast this passage in a polemical essay, ignoring its
Emersonian source because he found something similar in Carl Jung’s study
of synchronicity and the aleatoric Book of Changes. But Olson was never more
Emersonian and less Jungian than in asserting the prime point of his episto-
lary essay, that wisdom cannot be detached from poetic form:
We are ultimate when we do bend to the law. And the law is:
/ whatever is born or done this moment of time, has
the qualities of
this moment of
time/
3
The peculiarly Emersonian infl ection of this commonplace would be the
invocation of Necessity or Ananke under the guise of “law.”
The transformation of Necessity into a category of poetics is one of the
dominant Emersonian features of American aesthetic theory that I shall
1. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays and Lectures (New York: Library of America, 1983), pp. 431–32.

2. Gertrude Stein, Narration (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969), p. 46.
3. Charles Olson, “Against Wisdom as Such,” The Human Universe (New York: Grove Press, 1967), p. 70.
6 eyes upside down
emphasize in this book. Others are the primacy of the visible and the trans-
formative value of vehicular motion.
The great ode to Ananke concludes Emerson’s late essay “Fate”:
I do not wonder at a snow-fl ake, a shell, a summer landscape, or
the glory of the stars; but at the necessity of beauty under which the
universe lies; that all is and must be pictorial; that the rainbow and
the curve of the horizon and the arch of the blue vault are only results
from the organism of the eye. . . .
Let us build altars to the Beautiful Necessity, which secures that all
is made of one piece; that plaintiff and defendant, friend and enemy,
animal and planet, food and eater are of one kind . . . to the Necessity
which rudely or softly educates him to the perception that there are
no contingencies; that Law rules throughout existence; a Law which
is not intelligent but intelligence,—not personal nor impersonal,—it
distains and passes understanding; it dissolves persons; it vivifi es
nature; yet solicits the pure in heart to draw on all its omnipotence.
4
In the second half of the twentieth century, the aesthetics of the Beautiful
Necessity animated the debate on the function and value of chance in mak-
ing art. The expansiveness of the Emersonian heritage makes John Cage, who
tirelessly sought to erase the distinctions between art and life, and Stan Bra-
khage, the orphic fi lmmaker whose poesis was a religious vocation, coequal
heirs of the Beautiful Necessity, although they invoke it to opposite ends.
Cage’s systematic disruptions of continuous discourse often make it diffi cult
to isolate his version of Ananke in a succinct quotation. However, the con-
cluding paragraph of his “History of Experimental Music in America” offers
the following refl ection:

History is the story of original actions. . . . That one sees the human
race is one person (all of its members parts of the same body,
brothers—not in competition any more than hand is in competition
with eye) enables him to see that originality is necessary, for there
is no need for eye to do what hand so well does. In this way, the
past and present are to be observed and each person makes what
he alone must make, bringing for the whole of human society into
existence a historical fact, and then, on and on, in continuum and
discontinuum.
5
4. Emerson, Essays and Lectures, pp. 967–68.
5. John Cage, Silence (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1961), p. 75.
introduction: emersonian poetics 7
In an interview with Roger Reynolds at the time of the publication of
Silence, he restated this idea, again linking necessity to originality:
I’m devoted to the principle of originality—not originality in the
egoistic sense, but originality in the sense of doing something that is
necessary to do. Now, obviously the things that are necessary to do
are not the things that have been done, but the ones that have not yet
been done. This applies not only to other people’s work, but seriously
to my own work.
6
For Brakhage, Ananke animated his vocation. He was unembarrassed by
what Cage calls egoism:
OF NECESSITY I BECOME INSTRUMENT FOR THE
PASSAGE OF INNER VISION THRU ALL MY SENSIBILITIES,
INTO ITS EXTERNAL FORM. My most active part in their process
is to increase all my sensibilities (so that all fi lms arise out of some
total area or being or full life) AND, at the given moment of possible
creation to act only out of necessity. In other words, I am principally

concerned with revelation. My sensibilities are art-oriented to the
extent that revelation takes place, naturally, within the given histori-
cal context of specifi cally Western aesthetics. If my sensibilities were
otherwise oriented, revelation would take an other external form—
perhaps a purely personal one.
7
In the early short book Nature (1836), Emerson set forth a hyperbole
for the primacy of the visible in his and our world. In response to it,
Christopher Cranch famously caricatured him as an enormous eyeball on
spindly legs:
Crossing a bare common, in snow puddles, at twilight, under a
clouded sky, without having in my thoughts any occurrence of special
good fortune, I have enjoyed a perfect exhilaration. . . . There I feel
that nothing can befall me in life,—no disgrace, no calamity, (leav-
ing me my eyes,) which nature cannot repair. Standing on the bare
ground,—my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infi nite
space,—all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball;
I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate
6. Richard Kostelanetz, Conversing with Cage, 2nd Edition (New York: Routledge, 2003), p. 221.
7. Stan Brakhage, Metaphors on Vision (New York: Film Culture no. 30, 1963), pages unnumbered, fourth
letter of “Margin Alien.”
8 eyes upside down
through me; I am part and parcel of God. . . . In the tranquil landscape,
and especially in the distant line of the horizon, man beholds some-
what as beautiful as his own nature.
8
In that same book, Emerson provides a scenario for the quickening of
visual experience that is central to the argument of this book, as my title
suggests. I shall return to it again and again in the succeeding chapters:
The least change in our point of view, gives the whole world a picto-

rial air. A man who seldom rides, needs only to get into a coach and
traverse his own town, to turn the street into a puppet-show. The men,
the women,—talking, running, bartering, fi ghting,—the earnest me-
chanic, the lounger, the beggar, the boys, the dogs, are unrealized at
once, or, at least, wholly detached from all relation to the observer, and
seen as apparent, not substantial beings. What new thoughts are sug-
gested by seeing a face of country quite familiar, in the rapid movement
of the rail-road car! Nay, the most wonted objects, (make a very slight
change in the point of vision,) please us most. In a camera obscura, the
butcher’s cart, and the fi gure of one of our own family amuse us. So the
portrait of a well-known face gratifi es us. Turn the eyes upside down,
by looking at the landscape through your legs, and how agreeable is the
picture, though you have seen it any time these twenty years!
9
If this passage sounds familiar, it may be because Whitman so thoroughly
took over its catalog of the puppet show of city life and made it his own in
Leaves of Grass. However, before the invention of cinema it was not possible
to make visual art directly following most of the cues in this catalog. We shall
see the various ways in which all the fi lmmakers I discuss followed Emerson’s
suggestions without knowing the source.
For the American visual artists who inherited the exhilaration of the trans-
parent eyeball, the dissolution of the self within a divine affl atus often entails
the hypothetical silencing or disengagement of language. In particular, the
temporary suspension of the substantive, name-giving activity of the mind
assumed a redemptive status for the Abstract Expressionists. Furthermore, the
primacy of vision always contains a dialectical moment in which visibility is
effaced by whiteness. The monumental expression of that threatening void at
the core of vision also can be found in Emerson’s Nature:
The ruin or the blank that we see when we look at nature, is in our
own eye. The axis of vision is not coincident with the axis of things,

8. Emerson, Essays and Lectures, p. 10.
9. Ibid., pp. 33–34.
introduction: emersonian poetics 9
and so they appear not transparent but opake. The reason the world
lacks unity, and lies broken and in heaps, is because man is disunited
with himself.
10
The polar stasis at the end of Poe’s Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym and
the chapter “The Whiteness of the Whale” in Moby Dick are examples of this
national obsession with the “blank” (or etymologically, white) of nature that
Wallace Stevens called “an ancestral theme” in “The Auroras of Autumn”:
Here, being visible is being white,
Is being of the solid of white, the accomplishment
Of an extremist in an exercise . . .
11
One extremist, Gertrude Stein, absorbed Emerson through her teacher at
Radcliffe College, William James, who, as Richard Poirier has shown, owed
more to Emerson than he cared to acknowledge.
12
Quoting the following pas-
sage from “The Stream of Thought,” the cornerstone chapter of James’s Prin-
ciples of Psychology , Poirier points to “the emphasis on action, on transitions”
in both James and Emerson and the skeptical rejection of false substantives
and illusionary ends in the frozen meaning of words:
We ought to say a feeling of and, a feeling of if, a feeling of but, and a
feeling of by , quite as readily as we say a feeling of blue or a feeling of
cold. Yet we do not: so inveterate has our habit become of recognizing
the existence of the substantive parts alone, that language almost re-
fuses to lend itself to any other use.
13

One might even say that Stein took this as a literary program. In the lec-
ture “Poetry and Grammar” she discussed her reluctance to depend upon
nouns in her writing:
As I say a noun is a name of a thing, and therefore slowly if you feel
what is inside that thing you do not call it by the name by which it is
known. Everybody knows that by the way they do when they are in
10. Ibid., p. 47.
11. Wallace Stevens, “The Auroras of Autumn.” in The Palm at the End of the Mind: Selected Poems and a
Play, ed. Holly Stevens (New York: Knopf, 1971), p. 308.
12. Richard Poirier, The Renewal of Literature: Emersonian Refl ections (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1987).
13. Ibid., p. 16. From William James, The Principles of Psychology (New York: Dover, 1950), vol. 1,
pp. 245–46.