The Sixth Annual Views from the Avant-Garde: Undesirables
This program is curated by Mark McElhatten and Gavin Smith.
The 40th New York Film Festival is sponsored by Grand Marnier.
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Excerpts from a Work in Progress (Undesirables)
(Owen Land, U.S., 2002; 11 - 1/2m)
Undesirables is a fictional account of the demise of the American avant-garde experimental film movement and some of its more notorious practitioners, in the 1970's. In answer to the question of why that movement underwent a drastic decline in the late 1970's, after the promising successes of previous years, Undesirables offers an absurdist hypothesis, but a hypothesis whose component parts are derived from reality. In this hypothetical story, the experimental film movement is neutralized by a deliberate conspiracy instigated by so-called "ascended masters," and accomplished through their control of a powerful, wealthy, esoteric religious organization, known as the Illuminated Brotherhood.
In some cases, dabbling in various spiritual practices has increased the filmmakers' vulnerability.
When an experimental film-maker dies before completing his major work, the money is raised by a foundation to have the film completed. The foundation forms a committee to finish the film from scattered notes and script fragments. From the beginning there is disagreement about the film-maker's intentions. Even his choice of the film's title was unclear. Some claim it was Foibles of Feckless Film-makers; others claim it was Undesirables. Undesirables wins out.
Since the characters in the unfinished film are based on actual people--film-makers and critics in the avant-garde film worid--the foundation director invites some of these people to a screening of the in-progress film.
He's interested in their reactions, especially what they think about their own portrayals in the film. Coincidentally, the first scene which is shown involves
the same situation: another director of a foundation is screening scenes from an unfinished film to another group of film-makers and critics after whom the
film's author (now deceased) has modelled his characters. The projector is tumed on, and the incomplete film begins, interrupted by the occasional objections and suggested revisions of both the "real" and "fictional" spectators.
The opening scene of the deceased film-maker's film takes place at the headquarters of the Illuminated Brotherhood. The ascended masters have commanded them to destroy the nascent experimental film movement in New York City. Specifically targeted are the ultra-formalist film-makers whose films reject illusionism and acknowledge the materials of the film medium. The Brotherhood has a large percentage of its money invested in the stocks of Hollywood movie studios. The ascended masters fear the profits of the studios could be
diminished if the experimentalists educate the public to question the assumptions on which commercial films are based.
A strategy is decided upon: infiltrate,divide,and conquer. Dee a freelance operative, is hired to pose as a performance artist and infiltrates the closely-knit group of film-makers and the writers who enthusiastically promote their work. Her purpose is to stop the film-makers from making films, and to stop the critics from writing about them--by any means necessary.
The principal characters are gathered in the lobby of the Universe Theatre, where open screenings for film-makers are held. The theatre manager introduces Carl
Shitars, recently arrived from Kansas City, to Stanton Verbeek, the maker of the film Heavens Tibet Sees. Also at the theatre are film-makers Carmine Aviano and
Mary Ellen Regenbogen, and critics Sarkis Sarkisian and Peabody Slutsky. Carl meets the critic Marcia Rudnick, and they soon become lovers. Marcia writes a
column under the pen-name Alice Vergaengliche, which she has taken from the last line of Goethes Faust ("Alles vergaengliche ist nur ein Gleichnis"/ All that is transitory is but a symbol).
Dee rents a loft in the same building where Marcia Rudnick lives, and they become friends and confidantes. The annual College Art Association conference is scheduled to take place in New York, and the Brotherhood arranges to have both Carl Shitars and Virginia Sundquist, a film scholar from Minnesota, invited. Given Carl's non-stop womanizing and Virginia's libidinous reputation, the results are predictable. Dee engineers a break-up between Carl and Marcia. Carl,
under the influence of Virginia Sundquist, becomes a theoretician and university professor, leaves New York, and stops making films.
Bhob and Marie Brannigan are a married couple who collaborate on their highly influential avant-garde films. Bhob, however gets most of the publicity. He travels and makes personal appearances in New York, while Marie stays home on the west coast raising their children. Dee knows that if their partnership is destroyed their films will suffer. She begins an affair with Bhob, after appearing in one of his films. Marie divorces Bhob. Dee convinces Marcia Rudnick that Bhob is a male chauvinist, who exploited Dee and treated her like a sex object. Marcia loses her resped for Bhob.
Stanton Verbeek becomes Marcia's lover. Meanwhile, Dee is busy creating dissension and rivalries between the film critics. These feuds soon become the subject of their columns, diverting attention from the films they usually write about. Stanton finds a mentor in Emrisch Raser, an artist who has become famous
by accidentally erasing someone else's drawing (he signs his work E. Raser). Emrisch suggests that Stanton emulate the formal devices of Goethes Faust, Part
2. Then Emrisch explains his theory of the origin of Modernism. A famous modern painting becomes a three-dimensional space, inviting entry. Despite Marcia's
disapproval, Stanton attends a ceremony of Neo-Pagans, where he is drugged and hallucinates his metamorphosis into a pig. Soon he begins to have strange visions in the hypnogogic and hypnopompic states, as well as out-of-body- experiences. He attempt to control his nightmares through 'lucid dreaming."
Dee invites Stanton to a rehersal of her poetry reading ,a pretext for seducing him.The Brotherhood needs her to get copies of the keys to Stanton's loft. Not long
after that, Marcia finds out that Stanton is in the hospital in critical condition. By the time she arrives, he is dead, his death caused by a virus formerly found only in pigs. Marcia writes a powerful obituary in her column.
Dee convinces Marcia that most films made by men are "phallocentric." Soon thereafter, one of Marcia's columns contains a bitter attack on male avant-garde
film-makers, and she loses her credibility in avant-garde circles. She deserts the cause of the avant-garde film, and becomes a mainstream film critic.
After ruining the career of Feminist film-maker, Mary Ellen Regenbogen, Dee travels to San Francisco, and ultimately brings about the death of "Squat"Cortland, a film-maker who practices Zen Buddhism (his films are silent, because the Buddha never said a word, despite the volumes of sayings attributed to him..).
Several years after the death of Stanton Verbeek, the process of transforming dead film-makers into legendary film-makers has already begun. Experimental films, no longer seen by the movie-going public, are relegated to academia, the subject of endless re-analysis by graduate students. One such student explains her theory about the films of Stanton Verbeek to Carl Shitars, who is now an overworked university professor Her description of a film version of Goethe's Faust Part 2,which, according to her highly fanciful theory, Verbeek was planning to make at the time of his death, evokes images in Carl's memory. "It would have been," she postulates, "his Gesamtkunstwerk--Buddhist, and Hindu, and
Christian. The Virgin Mary, the black Madonna, Kali, Helen of Troy-all personifying The Eternal Feminine." Carl remembers his own early films, and realizes that he has traded the security of an academic life for the chance to make the kind of masterwork which his student is describing.
Those familiar with the history of experimental film will recognize the film-makers whose real-life stories have been altered and combined in this film. In some cases, the actual events were changed because they were too
sensationalistic and fantastic to be believed. Stylistically, many of the above scenes are references, allusions, homages, borrowings, appropriations, and directquotes from experimental films of The 1960's and 70's. Even sections of dialogue have been used verbatim. Thus, the form of the film mirrors the methods of the film-makers who are its protagonists.
Undesirables: An Outline
Owen Land, 1999