The Far Out Films

In a little theatre just north of Greenwich Village, a group calling itself the Gryphons recently put on a series of showings of member-made avant-garde movies. One, Geography of the Body, explored the human form in such extreme close-ups as to make skin textures look like craters on the moon, a nipple like an extinct volcano. In another, Wedlock, a (presumably) married couple made love – only the whole thing was shown on negative film. In still another, after some scenes of his very pregnant wife in a bathtub, the young film maker went on to show in detail, intercut with shots of the bath water, the birth of his own child.

The audiences that assembled for these performances received the pictures, and others on the same program, with mixed emotions. Predominantly, it was a Village crowd, with black sweaters, ponytail hairdos, blue denims and thonged sandals very much in evidence. They had come on the promise of an evening of offbeat film art, and many seemed to like what they saw. Others, attracted for the same reason, booed and hissed and whistled their indignation. They found the films pretentious, amateurish, an arrogant assumption of the cloak of art to conceal both technical and intellectual poverty. "Man, they were the filmic equivalent of Ike's speeches," one irate attendee reported.

The Gryphons – Willard Maas, his wife Marie Menken, Stan Brakhage and Ben Moore – are typical of a new kind of film maker on America's movie scene today. They call themselves the experimenters, the film poets. In sharp and conscious reaction to the conventions of Hollywood (or commercial film studios anywhere in the world, for that matter), they make pictures that are plotless, obscure in meaning, often shocking in content. In both their attitudes and their choice of themes, they strikingly resemble – and a few actually are – the writers and poets of the Beat Generation. They are non-conformist, "far out." And they like it that way.

Unlike their literary confrères, however, their actual impact on our society has been relatively slight. Their films are more often talked about than seen, for not even the artiest art theatre would dream of booking one. Managers know that either the cops would be down within the hour, or the lobby would be crowded with customers asking for their money back – or both. Just about the only place to catch an art movie is at one of the 450 film societies currently dotted about the country. But unless you live in one of the larger metropolitan centers, where the groups can afford to advertise for new members, your chance of even finding a society is fairly slim. You have to be "in" to get in. Occasionally an art museum or a university will organize a showing for its members. And occasionally, as with the Gryphon screenings, the film makers themselves will put the show on. However the screening comes about, though, you have to move quickly. There are no such things as continuous performances or six-week engagements in this field.

And what do they look like, these far out films? What causes the excitement in some hearts, the consternation in others? Most of them, quite simply, are concerned with self-revelation, with the externalization of the torments, anguish, angers and frustrations of their makers. Like the literary beatniks, they make little effort to comment on the social scene. They may resent its conventions, but they would sooner flout them than fight them. Sex, on the other hand, is of primary importance. Fornication, barred from the commercial screen, is either shown or graphically suggested in many of these films. Perversion is featured in many more – to such an extent that Jonas Mekas, the editor of the magazine Film Culture, was moved to inveigh against what he termed "the conspiracy of homosexuality" in the experimental field. It is, he wrote, "one of the most persistent and shocking characteristics of American film poetry today."

Perhaps the most flagrant film of this stripe ever produced is Kenneth Anger's Fireworks, a fifteen-minute study of homosexuality and sado-masochism. In it, as Anger states in his spoken introduction, "Inflammable desires, dampened by day under the cold water of consciousness, are ignited at night by the libertarian matches of sleep." More plainly, it is the dream-wish of a pervert, filled with his ambivalent fear of and desire for the male. From the first shot of a monster erection under the sheets to its final, horrifying sequence in which a gang of sailors mercilessly beats and tortures the hero (with a strong suggestion of castration as well), the images have a compulsive, nightmare quality. A brawny sailor exhibits his muscles at a bar, then attacks the boy. Another sailor lashes him with chains. Still others break his nostrils, slash him with broken glass, pour a trickle of suspiciously symbolic cream over his bloodied face. At the climax, a single sailor, tall against a black background, stands for a moment fiddling with his fly. It falls open, and what seems to be a huge phallus appears. The sailor holds a lighted match to its tip, and, as the thing shoots off sparks and flame, we see it is only a Roman candle. The final shot reveals that "it was all a dream" – but the specific nature of the dream is underscored by a view of the sailor lying prone, inert on the hero's cot.

It would be inaccurate, albeit tempting, to dismiss Fireworks as a pornographic film, an indecency thrown together for a fairies' smoker. Pornographic movies, no matter how well they are done, gratify a single urge – simple voyeurism. They show explicitly and in detail whatever refinement of copulation their creator has predetermined. Anger's film – and, for that matter, the films of most of the experimentalists – has none of this. There is an extensive use of symbol (an African fertility god, a ring deep in the young man's entrails); but far more is suggested than actually shown (the Roman candle, for example, with its suggestion of an ejaculation, or the implied castration with the camera concentrated entirely upon the hero's agonized face). More basic, however, is Anger's intention: He does not want merely to show homosexuality;, he wants his audience to feel the emotions of a homosexual, to share in his dread and exultation. And in this he has notably succeeded. General audiences are both fascinated and repelled by the work. Several mental hospitals, including the famed Menninger clinic, book it regularly as one of a series of psychological tests on their patients. The late Alfred Kinsey added a print of it to his choice collection of erotica. And, unsurprisingly, Tennessee Williams has called it "The most exciting use of cinema I have seen."

Fireworks illustrates in an extreme form both the interests and the approach of many of today's experimental film makers. They handle (continued on page 46)Far Out Films(continued from page 44) the "forbidden" subjects, the themes that are at once too special and too shocking for the mass-appeal, multi-million-dollar movie. And they handle them in a manner that suggests a unique blending of Sigmund Freud, Krafft-Ebing and Allen Ginsberg. In them, one will find Ginsberg's desolate alleys and crumbling tenement flats, his marijuana dreams, and outraged howls against thick-skinned conventionality. But the imagery, the choice of symbols – knives, ladders, telephones, gushing water – is definitely Freudian, while a distinct aura of the psychopathology of sex surrounds much of the action itself.

The Mechanics of Love, by Willard Maas and Ben Moore, for example, is virtually a handbook of Freudian sex symbology. A nude girl is seen in bed; a young man strips off his trousers, then his shirt, and advances upon her. As they nuzzle, the progress of their love-making is vividly illustrated by a veritable hail of phallic and vaginal symbols: pens, pencils, scissors, a cactus plant, a telephone pole; an upturned hat, a letter box, a pot of boiling water. Coition itself is suggested by quick shots of coal being shoveled into a furnace, a knife cutting into a loaf of bread, and the stitching action of a sewing machine. The final shot shows the slow drip of a leaking faucet. It is just possible that Maas and Moore were consciously kidding when they made this film. In any case, the hipper audiences roar at the unequivocally specific nature of their symbols. For others, the laughter is just a bit nervous. Perhaps they are aware that Krafft-Ebing cites a number of cases wherein people have preferred to consider the sexual act amusing because they were incapable of performing it themselves.

All too clearly, many of the experimentalists look upon their camera as a substitute for the psychiatrist's couch. Through vivid – and often disturbing – images, they work out their fears and obsessions. Mother's Day, a surrealist film by the San Francisco poet James Broughton, is an elaborate valentine against Mother. Mother, "who loved everything beautiful," keeps her children infantile (adults are seen playing childhood games – but tinged with a wholly adult sadism and sexuality), emasculates her husband (she pulls off his beard in great handfuls), and assumes the dominant position in the household (the final shot shows her posed imperiously with bowler hat and riding crop). Broughton's commingled admiration and resentment of this glamorous, terrifying creature underlines his every image. In Curtis Harrington's On the Edge, a length of wool extends like a vast umbilical cord from a young man wandering through a wasteland to a woman who sits impassively knitting with outsized needles. Self-destruction recurs as the obsessional theme in the films of Robert Vickrey, self-mutilation in the films of Stan Brakhage. In two of Brakhage's pictures, the eyes of the protagonist are scratched out – metaphorically in Way to Shadow Garden, where the hero gouges out his own eyes and the remainder of the film is seen in negative; quite literally in Reflections on Black, where Brakhage has scraped away the film's emulsion whenever the eyes of the blind hero are shown.

Brakhage, at once the most prolific, talented and daring of the experimentalists working today, seldom fails to incorporate into his pictures moments of sheer, provocative nastiness. In his Desistfilm, a young man is totally absorbed in picking lint out of his navel. A teenager smooches hungrily with a young girl, and their writhings are watched through the window by a gang of adolescents who lick their lips in naked prurience. Flesh of Morning, in which a young man (played by Brakhage himself) finds himself surrounded by poignant souvenirs of the girl he loves, climaxes in a very specific masturbation. Even in Window, Water, Baby, the film that Brakhage composed on the birth of his child, he cannot refrain from repeated shots of his hand caressing his wife's distended belly.

But if the new avant-garde is obsessive about sex, that is by no means its sole obsession. Terror courses through these films, a terror compounded of deep, personal insecurities and the rejection of all social norms. The Cage, by Sidney Peterson, is wholly symptomatic. The hero, his head trapped in a bird cage, chases through the streets of San Francisco after an elusive eyeball. But as he runs forward, all the people and vehicles race backwards. The young man, in his single-minded pursuit, is moving against the world. Robert Vickrey's Texture of Decay is quite literally a study in fear: a teenager, fleeing from a gang, rushes into a sumptuous, abandoned ruin where every scarred plank, scabrous wall and shattered mirror bears its own menace. Finally brought face to face with his own image, the boy commits suicide. In Vickrey's Appointment with Darkness, the terror is that of a young woman who fears pregnancy and the pains of childbirth; she too chooses suicide. In many of the films, the terror is of a more tangible nature – the terror that comes from either witnessing or receiving a savage beating. And invariably terror leads to abject flight, with the hero running from he knows not what to he knows not where. Again, Kerouac, Ginsberg and the other beat laureates are called to mind. They too are on the road fleeing and searching, but always in vain. Unless death be an end in itself.

It is an attitude of mind calculated to produce nothingness, zero. Everything is challenged, and dismissed; everything is suspect, nothing acceptable. Bourgeois morality is loathesome to the "beats," but neither are they satisfied with the scabby existence that comes with its rejection. All of this is almost painfully apparent in the recent Pull My Daisy, the first admittedly "beatnik" film to be produced in this country. The work of photographer Robert Frank and action painter Alfred Leslie, this half-hour plunge into the new lower depths is based on an unpublished play by Jack Kerouac – and accompanied by a spontaneous, unrehearsed narration delivered by Kerouac himself. As friends of the author – Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, painter Larry Rivers – drift in and out of a Village tenement flat, pausing to drink beer, blow trumpet, puff marijuana, or jibe at an incredibly young and callow bishop who has improbably turned up in their midst, Kerouac's raspy voice either comments on their actions ("Doing things and saying good-bye, saying good-bye and doing things are almost the same. It's time to go now") or supplies lines for them ("Let's go and play by fires in the Bowery"). There is a sense of improvisation not only in his words, but in the action and even the plot of the one extended scene that makes up the entire film. The mood of the piece is "what the hell" – and it is quite impossible to decide whether Kerouac is pulling his daisy or your leg. But just under the absurd surface of its comings and goings, just under the seeming irrelevancies of Kerouac's running commentary, lurks the uneasy suspicion that Pull My Daisy is providing us with our first hard look at a sickness of our times.

Not all of today's experimental film makers, however, are concerned with pathology and despair. Some, like Maya Deren and Shirley Clarke, have experimented in the creation of a new kind of dance film, using the distortion potential of the camera and the editing process to produce effects impossible in the theatre. In one of her early films, Miss Deren has a dancer begin a leap in a sculpture court of the Museum of Modern Art, continue it across an open field, and end it on the mantel in a living room. Mrs. Clarke, in her Moment in Love, emphasizes a passionate climax with a long, lovely series of double and triple exposures in slow motion that echo and extend the moment of fulfillment. Her Bullfight film intercuts a solo by Anna Sokolow with documentary footage shot at an actual corrida.

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Other experimentalists have used their cameras to create vivid, though weird, impressions of the world around us. Francis Thompson's N.Y., N.Y., a top prize-winner at Venice last summer, condenses a day in New York into seventeen unforgettable minutes by using multi-image prisms and distorting lenses that do not destroy reality so much as give it back to us in new and delightful guises. In one of his prism shots, a man brushing his teeth in the morning is multiplied a hundredfold, producing a whole screenful of rhythmic brushings. In Highway, Hillary Harris cuts tricked-up shots of New York traffic to boogie-woogie and blues rhythms for novelty of another kind; while out in California Jordan Belson has set swift-moving, kaleidoscopic glimpses of mosaics, gardens, sidewalks and tapestries to a sound track of searing jazz.

Still another section of the avantgarde rejects reality altogether. These are the "art-for-art's-sakers" of this generation, concerned entirely with the exploration of various ways to produce abstract, animated designs (often in counterpoint to a musical score, either classical or jazz). For them, technique is everything. In their number are several recognized, serious artists who have been attracted to the medium by their love for form and color, and intrigued by the possibility of mobilizing these through the camera's bag of tricks. Carmen D'Avino, for example, builds exuberant patterns by adding dabs of paint to his semi-abstract designs, photographing each new dab with a stop-motion camera. When the film is run off, they seem to sprout and climb like a luxurious growth of multi-colored ivy gone mad in the hot sun. James Davis, who originally made his reputation as an artist in plastics, creates striking patterns of shifting color by photographing the reflections and refractions of light as it bounces off the variegated surfaces of his plastic forms.

Perhaps the best known and most inventive of the experimenters in this particular field, however, is Canada's Norman McLaren, a shy, humorous Scot who frequently paints or scratches his abstract designs directly onto clear 35mm film. Sometimes he even draws his own sound track as well, using brush or pen to produce different qualities of sound. Several of his little pictures – notably Begone Dull Care, with a lively accompaniment by the Oscar Peterson Trio, and the amusingly earnest Neighbors – have achieved a distinction all but unique among the art films: they have been exhibited by some of the more advanced art theatres in this country.

When created by men of taste and artistic sensitivity, such films can be truly stimulating, even exhilarating. They charm the eye with new color and spatial relationships. When music is added, two of the senses are gratified simultaneously, and the effect is more than twice as pleasing. In less delicate hands, however, these abstract films can quickly degenerate into rather tedious doodling that may amuse the artists, but has no business being inflicted on a paying customer. In a very special way, these too reveal the intense narcissism of today's innovators. Dedicated they may be to their art, but underlying all is their conviction that because they have chosen to play around with a camera, everyone must want to see the results. They admit quite readily that communication is not their purpose – but they want their lack of communication to be admired.

It has become fashionable among certain film historians to regard these so-called – and often self-styled – experimentalists as simply an extension or a repetition of the movement that sprang up in Europe during the Twenties. They point to similarities in techniques, content and approach. Some have even suggested that "après-garde" might be a far more suitable appellation. Actually, despite these superficial resemblances, there is a very real difference between the two movements. During the Twenties, recognized artists such as Dali, Marcel Duchamp, Fernand Léger, Man Ray and Moholy-Nagy briefly embraced the film medium as another area in which to explore their concepts of Dadaism, Surrealism and the other artistic -isms of the day. They made a film or two, then promptly moved back to their brushes, still cameras or chisels. Today's experimentalists are unabashedly claiming that film is an art form in its own right, and the form that gives them the utmost freedom for self-expression.

The catalyst of this postwar avant-garde was Maya Deren, a gifted young woman with flaring red hair, the face of a Botticelli virgin and a will of iron. Married then to Alexander Hammid, an expert documentary cameraman and director, she made with him three short film poems on 16mm, Meshes in the Afternoon, At Land and Choreography for Camera. Early in 1946 Miss Deren organized a showing of her pictures at New York's historic Provincetown Playhouse (seating capacity, 200), billing them intriguingly as Three Abandoned Films. When she arrived for the first screening, there was such a crowd milling about in the street that, as she later put it, "I felt sure the theatre must be on fire." This first triumphant showing developed into a series, and the series led to screenings and lectures at universities and museums around the country. Everywhere she went, in everything she wrote, she proselytized for the new form, for 16mm film as a medium of personal expression.

And because 16mm equipment is relatively inexpensive, because it can be handled by an individual without the necessity of studio-sized, union-scaled crews of cameramen, assistant cameramen, electricians, gaffers, prop men, hairdressers, and all the other crafts and skills required for standard 35mm production, a movement quickly sprang up in her wake. On the West Coast, in Los Angeles and San Francisco, informal groups came together to make, show and discuss experimental films. In New York early in 1947, and as a direct consequence of the Deren programs, Cinema 16 was formed. The nation's largest and most successful film society, it now numbers well over five thousand members and shows on a regular basis the pick of art pictures from all over the world. Because of this showcase, more young people became film makers. Similar, if smaller, organizations began to spring up elsewhere, particularly in those colleges and universities sponsoring film societies or film appreciation courses. By 1958, when the Brussels World's Fair held an International Experimental Film Festival competition, with cash prizes totaling $15,000 to spur the entries, the United States not only submitted the most films (over a hundred), but had the highest number of entries accepted from any single country (fifty) – and walked off with six of the eleven prizes.

The Brussels Experimental Film Festival did more than demonstrate the superiority of America's postwar movement, however. It emphasized that what has been happening in the United States is no purely local phenomenon. Entries came from France, England, Germany, Italy, Sweden, Argentina, Israel, Japan, Austria and, from behind the Iron Curtain, Czechoslovakia, Poland and Yugoslavia – more than four hundred films in all. (Russia, it was rumored, submitted ten documentaries as experimenals, all of which were rejected.) Even more surprising, a Polish film, Dom, took the top honors, while the Bronze Medal (third prize) went to another Polish experiment, Two Men and a Wardrobe. Commenting boldly on the social scene, they revealed an independence of spirit and vision as fresh as it was unexpected by western observers.

No less surprising, to the American contingent especially, was the extent to which production of this kind has obtained state support throughout Europe. The Polish films were completely financed by the government. In England, France, Germany and Italy, financing (continued on page 58)Far Out Films(continued from page 50) often comes from special taxes levied on commercial films, or from rebates from movie houses showing art shorts. In the United States, on the other hand, scraping together the money to make a picture is strictly a private affair. Apart from the Creative Film Foundation, an organization started by Maya Deren a few years ago to channel funds to deserving film makers, there is literally nowhere to turn.

As a result, America's would-be film makers either have to be reasonably well-heeled themselves or be prepared for a rather rough time of it. Some, in the tradition of the garret artists of another era, live literally hand to mouth, devoting every extra dollar to the purchase of precious raw stock and equipment. Their studios are the basement of an East Side tenement, or five flights up in a Village cold-water flat. They support themselves by writing, teaching or taking on commercial art assignments, or simply by doing whatever handyman work comes their way. Sympathetic friends supplement with invitations to dinner, a spare bedroom or loans that they never expect to see paid back.

Others, more blessed with worldly goods, can afford to approach film with something of the attitude of a Sunday painter. For them it is a part-time activity, an avocation. Valentine Sherry, whose Coney Island, U.S.A. has won prizes at Venice and Edinburgh, is a diamond merchant who mastered cinematography and editing to convey his own vivid, highly personal impression of New York's shopworn Lido. Francis Thompson, a successful documentary director and cameraman, spent almost ten years composing his kaleidoscopic N.Y., N.Y. Ian Hugo is the pseudonym of a New York banker; his Bells of Atlantis, set to the cool, silvery poetry of his wife, Anais Nin, captures in shifting, multi-layered images the lure and mystery of that fabled city beneath the sea. Shirley Clarke, another Venice prize-winner, is the wife of a prosperous New York businessman (and sister of Elaine Dundy, author of The Dud Avocado and wife of drama critic Kenneth Tynan).

But for all of them, rich and poor alike, the problem remains the same. Although the cost of a 16mm experimental film may vary from a few hundred to a few thousand dollars (in contrast to the hundreds of thousands or even millions that it takes to produce a 35mm commercial feature), it is still a considerable drain when it all comes out of one private pocket. Amortization, the earning back of merely the negative costs on an experimental film, is inevitably a matter of years – if it comes about at all. And showing a profit is out of the question. Not surprisingly, therefore, many of the people most active in the establishment of the new avant-garde in the years just after the war are now conspicuously absent from the lists. Curtis Harrington, with possibly the finest camera eye of them all, has become an assistant to Jerry Wald at 20th Century-Fox. James Broughton, whose surrealist Potted Psalm and Mother's Day rivaled Maya Deren's pictures in the storms of controversy they aroused, now devotes himself to writing plays and poetry in San Francisco. Francis Lee, an abstract designer, draws television commercials. Sidney Peterson, Kenneth Anger, Ian Hugo, Gregory Markopoulos – all of these and more – have gone for years without producing any new works.

But if the hard facts of finance eventually dampen the enthusiasm of individual film makers, nevertheless the ranks of the avant-garde continue to grow. For some, there is the hope of recognition, the possibility that genius will be rewarded with a big fat contract either in Hollywood or with one of the television networks. For others, the sole concern is the opportunity that the medium affords to make a personal, independent, sincerely felt artistic statement on film, or to explore with their own sensibilities a form that is still fresh and new. And there are still others, it must be admitted, who are complete charlatans. They have discovered a field where shock, sensationalism, perversion and downright bad taste can masquerade successfully in the guise of art because audiences have not yet learned to differentiate the good from the bad, the real from the phony.

Charlatans have also invaded the field because they have discovered that an avant-garde label can be helpful in their love-life, whatever form it may take. Their work becomes a means to an end, and that end is not necessarily celluloidal. Perhaps they have seen a number of experimental movies at film society showings, movies in which undressing or being undressed play an important part. It all looks so simple! Before long they have convinced themselves that they too can be art film makers. After all, what do you need beyond a 16mm camera, a few lights, an available apartment and a willing girl (or boy)? It's such a good approach, too. An invitation to star in an avant-garde movie is so much more impressive than an offer to enjoy etchings.

Fortunately, few of the films made under such inspiration ever reach the screen. Few of them, in fact, ever get beyond the crucial scene that was their original raison d'être. For making a movie – any kind of movie – is hard work; and when coupled with the chronic lack of funds that seems to beset most young experimental film makers, it can become doubly frustrating. Discipline is required – discipline, and a sense of dedication.

Because there is rarely enough money to cover anything more than the cost of film stock – and not always enough for that – the actors in avant-garde films are frequently personal friends of the director, or friends of friends. Often they are actors or dancers who are temporarily "at liberty." (What true actor could resist the opportunity to appear in a movie, even though it be for free?) If the film maker is relatively solvent, he may provide for them a light collation of sandwiches, coffee and beer; more often, however, the performers must fend for themselves. And because money is scarce, these productions are generally made with fantastic economy. In Hollywood, the studios think nothing of shooting ten, twenty, even fifty times the footage they need to make a picture. Most avant-gardists consider it an extravagance to shoot more than three-to-one, and often squeak by on two-to-one or less.

The experimental film maker with any experience at all soon comes to rely upon improvisation and the "happy accident" to guide the development of his pictures. Indeed, the very nature of these films makes a detailed shooting script out of the question. Too much depends on the inspiration of the moment, or on the physical resources at hand. Often a prop, a setting, or an unforeseen disaster will dictate the handling of an entire sequence. In one of Maya Deren's films, At Land, a nightmarish episode involves Miss Deren crawling the length of a sumptuous banquet table under the very noses of the startled guests. To stage it, she persuaded a friend of hers, a long-time resident at one of New York's fashionably faded hotels, to coax the management into letting her shoot in one of their large, private dining rooms. The manager agreed, the date was set, and at the appointed hour Miss Deren moved in with camera, lights and two dozen "guests." She outlined the action, rehearsed her cast, then set up for the first shot. And blew all the fuses. The hotel's antique wiring just could not take the load necessary to light the scene properly. Undaunted, Miss Deren dispatched her cast in all directions to buy up all the fuses they could find. With a stop watch she timed how long it took for a fuse to burn through. Then, rearranging the sequence in her head, she went on to shoot the scene – in thirty-second snatches. Incredibly enough, through adroit intercutting the scene plays as smoothly as if it had been planned that way from the start.

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The very feat of assembling twenty-four nonprofessional and wholly unpaid actors in one place and at one time requires logistic skill of no mean order. Often the mere fact that the cast is on hand means that the shooting must go on, no matter what. One cold gray morning another experimentalist turned up in Central Park with five shivering actors. He had hardly mounted his camera on its tripod, however, when the police arrived and demanded to see his license. Amateurs, of course, can photograph their sweethearts and babies in the park to their heart's content, but professionals must have a license. In vain did the youthful film maker protest that he was an amateur. The cops pointed out that he was using a tripod and, so far as they were concerned, the tripod was the mark of the pro. And so, rather than run the risk of losing his cast while he went down to City Hall for the necessary papers, he put the tripod back in his car and shot the entire sequence holding the camera in his hand.

This question of professionalism, of status, is one that touches most art film makers to the quick. If the test of professionalism is whether or not you make your living by what you are doing, then clearly no avant-gardist could claim to be a professional film maker. Despite the spread of the film society movement both here and abroad in the past few years, it is not yet of sufficient size to support any artist in the style to which he would like to become accustomed. Indeed, most of them count themselves lucky if they can earn back their production costs. On the other hand, they very definitely are not amateurs. Not only do they at least attempt to sell their pictures, but many of them have a degree of technical proficiency that fully qualifies them for – and sometimes earns them – lucrative assignments in the commercial studios.

To others, such a "sell-out" would be unthinkable. They regard themselves as professionals, but as professional artists. And for them, the only true and valid use of the film medium is for self-expression, to project their own dreams, nightmares and visions. Oddly enough, it is this utter absorption with self, which characterizes the greater part of today's far out movement, that robs their art of its ultimate stature. But where honesty and a poetic imagination remain, augmented by technical skill with camera and the editing shears, authentic works of art can still emerge – and are emerging. On the other hand, the same obsessive images, the same impulse to shock and horrify, the same delight in camera effect and editorial trickery can result in sheer trash when the instincts and disciplines of art are lacking. For these, as Alexander King once observed of literary poseurs, "Their future is dark but certain."

It is precisely here that the film society movement in the United States is performing its most vital function. Certainly, it is important that an artist have an audience to which he can exhibit his works. Far more important, however, is the quality of that audience. Only through repeated exposure to a great many of these avant-garde works – good, bad and indifferent – can the public begin to discern for itself which ones spring from a true artistic impulse and which from a simple desire to shock, which arise from a deep urge for self-expression and which from an ignoble itch for self-exhibition. This recognition, this critical discernment, is essential. For it would be the height of folly, in this day of increasing conformity, to spurn an ardently individualist artistic movement out of distrust for some of the people who comprise it.

Experimental films are available in 16mm for home and club showings. For further information, write to Playboy Reader Service, 232 E. Ohio Street, Chicago 11, Illinois.