Film as film or cinema
John McEwen
'Film as Film, formal experiment in film 1910-1975' (Hayward Gallery till 17 June) is, as its subtitle forewarns, different from what is generally called 'Cinema'. That also explains why it is taking place at the Hayward, with no support programme at the National Film Theatre across the road. No one could ask a non-specialist audience, people who are not interested in the mechanics of film making, to derive sufficient pleasure to pay money to look at this sort of thing for very long. And money is what cinema and, through lack of it, film are all about. Most of the films at the Hayward have been made on home-movie budgets and look it. Form is all, stories are eschewed. The nearest thing to narrative is sequence. Those few makers represented who have gone on to box-office success — Eisenstein, Cocteau, Bunuel, Warhol — are confined to one seminal work each, as if excommunicated for their subsequent achievement, an achievement in large part due to the so-called, much despised 'literary' content of their art.
But is this not equally true, with the exception of Warhol, of their earliest works? In fact is not the very proof of it demonstrated by their subsequent appeal to a non-specialist audience? And accordingly, is not it a case of tarting up the programme to include them as formalists at all? Which brings us to the fundamental question posed by the very existence of this exhibition: is there a distinction between cinema and film? Or is it just another case of promoting promotion? There are beneficiaries in plenty. As the blurb says (the exhibition catalogue is late, an all too common occurrence with Arts Council exhibitions), 'Film has gained increasing autonomy as an artistic practice, partly through the establishment of film departments in art schools and universities and in increased state funding for independent cinema.' The prose says it all.
The verdict, however, must be one of suspended judgment. On the basis of a single visit the answer would be no, but then film, like video, performances and other fringe activities, does not lend itself to a vernissage format, and the static part of this show, a potted history of technical developments many of them just as applicable to Hollywood as formalism, is no exception. But there are also the films: some installed as loops in the exhibition, the majority screened at various times between 1 p.m. and 6 p.m. daily in a temporary theatre, the programme of 38 instalments being completed at least three times by 17 June. Apart from the work of the directors already mentioned — 'Un Chien Andalou', 'Le Sang d'un Poete', 'Strike', 'Kiss' — there are famous experimentations by Man RaY, Leger, Duchamp and others to provide historical bottom to what is, basically, a contemporary survey. It is strange passing from the multiple whirr of projectors, the contrasts and ani" mation of 'Film as Film', into the silent and, on the day I went, totally unattended world of 'New Painting: New York' (Hayward till 17 June). A gap appeared in the Hayward schedule and Catherine Lampert of the Arts Council was whisked to New York to round up a small show of paintings representative of what is going on there at this, as CBS might have it, particular point in time. F-all is happening as it turns out, but there is no harm in showing it. These artists are definitely some of the most in of the moment. There are seven in all: six nie° and, judging by her work, a token woman.
The best handler of paint is, as his reputation might have led one to suppose, the septuagenarian Philip Guston, but his introduction of comic-pic hobnail boots, detached legs and heads sinking out to se° or cast in the pit, add nothing to what 15 already there. Nevertheless the recantation of such a famous abstractionist is inevitablY seen as a mark of significance rather than decline.
The best of the rest, all painters in earlY middle-age, is Jake Berthot, if only because he seems to take himself the most seriouslY.
Certainly his biggest painting, 'Walken's Ridge', a panoramic abstraction with romantic, 19th-century landscape under tones is more atmospheric than anything else in the show, but then it would be difficult not to be in such exhausted com pany. The seriousness, however, does have its disadvantages too. Only a man of teutonic dedication could have failed t° realise that, even before '2001', the holy plinth as a visual symbol was the biggest cliché in the book, yet `Walken's Ridge' itself has one floating ambiguously right at its centre. You have to watch a man too who calls a picture 'Untitled (to A. G.)', mean ing Alberto Giacommetti — the one old master to another touch, usually the hall mark of phoney artists. Berthot is not a phoney, but he does his damnedest. In polar opposition to Berthot and his old master ways is the playful (at least so one hopes) kitsch of Joseph Zucker. Apparently Zuckers sell like hot cakes, which is not surpris ing because they look like hot cakes: funky-folkloric scenes seemingly made from icing-sugar but actually concocted bY sticking bits of acrylic-stained cottonwool on canvas.
A significant figure on the,road to the Present stagnation of so much post-New York school painting was Morris Louis, a good sample of whose works is at Waddington (till 26 May). Louis's stained paintings took three forms: the veils, which are his best; the unfurleds, stagey; and the stripes, IntPosed upon him by the critic Clement Greenberg and not his thing at all. The technique makes for hit or miss effects, and none of these are direct hits, but all the Styles are represented and two of the veils indicate something of his florid decadence. He is really a fin-de-siècle artist, appropriately enough. As for our own John Edwards (Rowan till 31 May) he has toughened up Ins mid-Atlantic abstract paintings to such an extent that in one of them, 'Red Veil', the gorey mess rather than the 'veil' is such that he might reasonably be suspected of murder. He could usefully reflect on how much better he painted half-a-dozen years ago.
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