[Frameworks] Letter to other Filmmaker Artists

[Fred Camper]

Anna,

Of course film is not dead, and of course you don't have to switch to  
video, and of course it's a fine thing to work with something one loves.

I don't think the analogy of film with a person one loves works too  
well. Even if one loves film, there are many different ways of using  
it, depending on one's project(s); it is even less a fixed thing than  
another person is.

My point, too, is that simply because a filmmaker loves handling film  
doesn't mean the results of that love are worth showing. This is a  
tricky issue, because I'm not saying that you should work to please  
viewers, or to "communicate" (I word I think is wrong for any real  
art), or anything like that. But what I'd like to read more of is what  
the particular aesthetic qualities of projected celluloid are, for  
viewers, that cannot be replicated on video and that someone feels are  
essential to her art. If you love handling film, that may encourage  
you to spend time making films, but it doesn't necessarily imply  
anything about the result. Isn't the point of making a film to project  
it, even if only for an audience of one, even if no one understands it  
yet? Aren't we working toward a projected result?

The avant-garde film tradition was always, at its best, about  
something very vital and very large: artists struggling to come to  
terms with their particular visions, with the place of humans in the  
world, with the place of nature, with the meaning of it all. Or, to  
quote myself, many of the founders of Aerican avant-garde film made  
films as a way of deciding whether, and on what terms, they could go  
on living. The films of Markopoulos, Anger, Deren, Maclaine,  
Brakhagge, Baillie and Rainer all have that quality for me, lone souls  
struggling to grapple with self and world. These artists sought, if  
not answers, then at least, possible pathways. As a viewer, I still  
prefer films that seem vital, seem like they *had* to have been made.  
Whether or not the artist does or does not love handling film doesn't  
seem to me to be the main issue, if we are working toward results in  
the world, rather than pursuing private hobbies. Steve Polta points  
out that "Dog Star Man" was from a different time, but one doesn't  
have to make heroic narratives to make films that engage the great  
questions, and that offer the potential to liberate ourselves, and our  
viewers.

While some of its specifics are unique to gnosticism, I have long  
loved the 2,000 year old Valentinian "formula," ""What liberates is  
the knowledge of who we were, what we became; where we were, whereinto  
we have been thrown; whereto we speed, wherefrom we are redeemed; what  
birth is, and what rebirth." The investigation of such questions, even  
with the knowledge that no final answers are possible, should, in my  
view, be the task of the artist -- not simply making things one likes  
to see, though, perhaps, that too.

Lest I be misunderstood, I am not here speaking negatively of any  
specific filmmaker on this list.

Having seen the way Brakhage took to, and used, Polaroid's short lived  
instant movie system, I don't think he is someone who would simply  
"adapt," but rather, by "work with it," I would guess that he meant  
something like, "See whether I can find things to do with this new  
medium that are worthy of my own visions, and of the standards of  
aesthetic beauty and meaning I have set for myself."

Fred Camper
Chicago