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The voice
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Two years ago, Morgan Fisher reappeared
to the eyes and minds of cinephiles, after an absence
whose length we’d more likely associate with comets
or cicadas. The occasion was marked by the appearance
of the curiously titled ( ). The eponymous parentheses
double as an emoticon expressing the anticipation felt
during the 19-year gap between its appearance and the
filmmaker’s previous dispatch, the 1984 masterwork
Standard Gauge. That film, whose sense of
summation came to feel over time more like a finality,
offered glimpses of a historical juncture within the
motion picture industry overlaid with a chapter of
Fisher’s
own personal history.
Viewed as a whole, Fisher’s films are like a service entrance hidden behind the
Hollywood sign, leading into corridors that take us past the film labs, sound
stages, and utility closets of a vast movie empire. Viewed separately, they are
sly and nuanced conundrums that introduce us to the unseen servants of an elaborate
image-making process. Together, the films converse with and refer to one another
in an intertextual cacophony worthy of Borges.
Early on in our study of film history, weíre taught that Gregg Toland’s cinematography
in Citizen Kane (and, earlier, in John Ford’s The
Long Voyage Home),
with its greatly expanded depth of field, opened up revolutionary new fields
of cinematic possibility. And if Toland’s approach represents a primary coordinate
on a historical diorama, letís envision a line, represented by the zoom through
Michael Snow’s
loft in Wavelength, leading us to a second coordinate no less important, though
far less familiar to most.
Confine the field of vision to a flat focal plane; lock the camera into a fixed
position; choose an object, or maybe an image, to fill the frame. No montage,
so long as there’s a hand to reach in and rearrange things when necessary. A
recipe for tedium? Not for Fisher and a handful of his peers. P. Adams Sitney’s
anointment of their body of work as “structural cinema” was confusing,
and perhaps premature, given that it named a tendency that hadn’t fully
taken shape yet. Perhaps it’s more useful to approach things from a materialist
perspective, via the gear that transmitted their worldview. The copy stand, an
embodiment of not only fixed immobility but the studio itself, is by its very
limits the ideal vantage point for the scrutiny of a simple subject. Setting
aside the particulars of its variants (tripod or other type of mount) and the
orientation of its subjects (pinned to a wall, held in hand, lying on a table,
burning on a hotplate), this was the common anchor for films as diverse as Hollis
Frampton’s (nostalgia),
Richard Serra’s Color Aid, and several of Fisher’s own works.
After earning an art history degree at Harvard in 1964, Fisher stayed on as a
research assistant in the university’s early computer mapping efforts. Within
a few years, he moved west for graduate work at USC and UCLA, where an interest
in film took hold. Along with teaching, a series of jobs in Hollywood, yet off
its beaten path—stock-footage research for Haskell Wexler’s aborted follow-up
to Medium Cool, and editing for Roger Corman’s New World Pictures—provided
a means for the first of his own forays into film. With their laconic titles,
these early works—including The Director and His Actor Look
at Footage Showing Preparations for an Unmade Film (68), and Documentary
Footage (68)—tricked some
into thinking that they were simply solipsistic exercises (given the degree of
self-reflexivity within late Sixties and early Seventies art, perhaps this is
understandable). David James once invoked the ouroboros in discussing Fisher’s
Production Stills (70), and indeed, the mythical serpent devouring its
own tail might well have served as an emblem to emblazon on the freak flag of
late Modernist practice. But to what end did this alchemical circle close in
upon itself? For Fisher, these films were zero-degree works, indicative not of
the paralysis so prevalent then, but of a back-to-basics taking stock—“What
is this thing called cinema, anyway?”
We might begin to answer this by looking at Phi Phenomenon (68), his
most notoriously austere film. Evoking an endless afternoon study hall, the film
consists of an 11-minute static (and silent) shot of a clock. The only visible
movement is the creeping minute hand and the random effervescence of the black-and-white
film grain. Seeing and knowing collide, as movement that barely qualifies as
such is produced by a succession of nearly identical frames racing through the
projector’s gate. The wall separating art and life is made uncomfortably flimsy,
yet through their newly permeable boundaries our awareness of their difference
is heightened.
By working through late Modernism’s cult of “essential properties” Fisher
was fashioning his very own cinema of refusal: no editing (at least as it’s conventionally
understood), no camera trickery, no sound dubbing, and an adherence to what his
friend Thom Andersen (paraphrasing Lawrence Alloway) called “normal images.”
It’s
no surprise that two of his early films were included in the Museum of Modern
Art’s landmark summit of conceptual art, the 1970 exhibition “Information.” Most
important, though, was the audiovisual crossfire of his films, where the means
of production became their putative subject. During these same years, the French
critic Jean-Louis Baudry was publishing his early theoretical inquiries into
the cinematic apparatus, working toward very different ends.
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