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Course File on Experimental Film (Part 2) (1982)

From AFI Education Newsletter (January-February 1982). Because of the length of this, I’ll be running it in two installments. — J.R.

Course File:

EXPERIMENTAL FILM:

FROM UN CHIEN ANDALOU TO CHANTAL AKERMAN (Part 2)

UNIT III: German and Soviet Experimentation in the Twenties

Part of the strategy of studying German and Soviet experimentation over roughly the same period is the striking contrast between these national film movements and their relationship to popular genres as well as their different themes and subjects. On the one hand, one finds the efforts of a Fritz Lang to experiment with the thriller format, and those of F.W. Murnau (and his scriptwriter Carl Mayer) to construct an essentially non-verbal visual language. On the other hand, one finds the relatively less script-bound experiments with montage and certain documentary principles provided by the Soviet filmmakers. An interesting topic to consider speculatively is the Soviet version of Lang’s first Dr. Mabuse film, which was re-edited by Eisenstein for Russian audiences.

Screenings:

Bronenosets Potemkin (The Battleship Potemkin) (1925, 65 min.) Directed by Sergei Eisenstein — Perhaps the most famous of all experimental films, including some 1300 shots, Eisenstein’s classic is structured in five “acts.” Along with Strike, made the previous year, this is the most accessible of  Eisenstein’s silent films, and might be contrasted with October (or significant portions thereof) in               terms of the different principles of montage at work. (A comparison of the bridge-raising sequence in the latter with the Odessa Steps sequence in Potemkin might be useful.)

Sunrise (1927, 97 min.) Directed by F.W. Murnau — This, of course, is neither a German film nor a Soviet one, but as an experimental (and expensive) Hollywood feature of the period made almost entirely with a German crew, and highly reflective of the influence of German Expressionism, it may offer even more to a course in experimental film than such German films directed by Murnau as Nosferatu,The Last Laugh or Faust. One should note in passing that the sound version of this film is very much to be preferred to the silent one; indeed, Dr. Hugo Riesenfeld’s provocative and original blend of music and sound effects deserves close study in its own right.

Spione (Spies) (1928, 86 min.) Directed by Frilz Lang — A thriller which develops and refines the themes and structures of Lang’s first Dr. Mabuse film while anticipating those of M, Spione can probably be approached most profitably through its editing — which, along with early uses of sound, is a central concern of this Unit. The fact that this was a highly commercial UFA production makes its inclusion in a course on experimental film somewhat polemical and debatable; that is to say, the teacher shouldn’t take its experimental nature for granted. But the fact that Eisenstein edited the Soviet version of Dr Mabuse der Spieler might stimulate an interesting discussion on the differences between the functions of editing in the films of both directors, and a consideration of whether the greater narrative emphasis in Lang’s case disqualifies him as an experimenter.

Enthusiasm (1931, 96 min.) Directed by Dziga Vertov — Alternately known as Symphony of the Donbas, this remarkable documentary about the efforts of the Don Basin region to fulfill certain agricultural and industrial tasks during the First Five Year Plan is ideally suited for a consideration of the experimental uses ofsound, as well as the anti-illusionism in Vertov’s work that is equally evident (albeit only in visual terms) in the silent Man with the Movie Camera, made two years earlier. One of the few early sound films that addressed sound as a subject, and not merely as a formal means of articulation, Enthusiasm is no less valuable in broaching the area comprised by the experimental documentary — an area in which Buñuel’s Land without Bread and the films of Michelangelo Antonioni, Andy Warhol, Jean-Luc Godard, Jean Rouch and Chris Marker might also be considered.

Readings:

Burch, Noël, “Fritz Lang: German Period,” in Cinema: A Critical Dictionary, Vol. 2 edited by Richard Roud, New York: The Viking Press, 1980, pp. 583-599.

Eisner, Lotte H., Murnau, Berkeley: The Uni versity of California Press, 1973.

Fischer, Lucy, ” Enthusiasm: From Kino-Eye to Radio-Eye,” Film Quarterly, Winter 1977/8, printed with.Peter Kubelka interview about restoration of film, pp. 25-36.

Marshall, Herbert, ed., The Battleship Potemkin, New York: Avon, 1978.

Michelson, Annette, “From Magician to Epistemologist,” in The Essential Cinema, edited by P. Adams Sitney, New York: Anthology Film Archives and New York University Press, 1975, pp. 96-111 .

Rosenbaum, Jonathan, review of Spione, Monthly Film Bulletin, May 1976, p. 112.

Sitney, P. Adams, “Dovzhenko’s lntellectual Montage,” in The Essential Cinema, op. cit., pp. 88-94. See also Sitney’s article on Dovzhenko in Cinema: A Critical Dictionary, op. cit., Vol. 1, pp. 279-290.

UNIT IV: North American Experimental Filmmaking, 1941 -1972

This Unit runs the gamut from the innovative Hollywood studio work of Orson Welles and Jerry Lewis to the underground experiments of Stan Brakhage, Michael Snow and Yvonne Rainer. In regional terms, the ground covered in the latter category extends from the Colorado of Brakhage to the New York of Rainer to the Canada of Snow. The relations of Snow and Rainer to popular cinema, explored in part in the readings below, are both subtle and complex; like Welles’ background in theater and radio, and Rainer’s background in dance and performance, these cultural crossovers are worth exploring in some depth.

Screenings:

Citizen Kane (1941, 119 min.) Directed by Orson Welles — This well-known first feature by Welles can of course be approached in numerous ways (the André Bazin book cited above offers merely one example), although, like The Passion of Joan of Arc in Unit II, one may wish to treat it as a culmination and synthesis of many different strains in experimental filmmaking that preceded it.

The Ladies Man (1961,106 min.) Directed by Jerry Lewis — While the teacher might well regard this film, Lewis’s second feature as a director, as an unlikely or debatable entry for a course in experimental filmmaking, classroom experience has revealed it to b an excellent vehicle for discussion of many pertinent topics (such as discontinuous narrative, formal gags and self-referential devices) — as is Lewis’s first feature The Bellboy (1960) and Frank Tashlin’s Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?, both of which can be regarded as excellent substitutes. Many of Godard’s boldest procedures of visual analysis and parody are anticipated in all three of these films, whose eclectic and highly original structures permit a surprising amount of conceptual invention and formal experimentation.

Wavelength (1967, 45 min.) Directed by Michael Snow — A film that has often been described somewhat incorrectly as a single continuous zoom shot, Wavelength in fact charts a journey across a loft through changes of light, color, texture, sound and visual field that becomes a grand metaphor for perceptual and philosophical investigation, not to mention the forward thrust of narrative itself. Four separate human events, including a death and a subsequent discovery of that death, intersect with this inexorable trajectory towards a photograph of sea waves on the opposite wall. As Snow himself describes the process, “The space starts at the camera’s (spectator’s) eye, is in the air, then is on the screen, then is within the screen (the mind).”

Scenes from Under Childhood (1974, 144 min.) Directed by Stan Brakhage — As much an instance of personal, autobiographical cinema as Blood of a Poet or 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her, in spite of its relative freedom from the forms and constraints of narrative, Brakhage’s ambitious, large-scale “drama” about himself and his family is split into four distinct sections, each running between half an hour and 45 minutes. The only entirely silent film in this Unit, it utilizes complex color variations in a manner that was inspired, according to Brakhage, by the music of Olivier Messaien.

Lives of Performers (1972, 95 min.) Directed by Yvonne Rainer — Opening with a quotation from Leo Bersani about the use of cliché as a principle of intelligibility, Rainer’s first feature is intimately related to some of her previous dance and performance work. It enlists her own performers and herself in a web of imaginary relationships with one another (though drawn from actual autobiographical material), placed in a fictive relationship to their own performances (viewed retrospectively, in stills). The result is a sort of distanced, deadpan comedy of psychological ambiguity that echoes such New Wave filmmakers as Godard and Rivette in many of its preoccupations.

Readings:

Bazin, André, Orson Welles: A Critical View, New York: Harper Colophon Books, 1978.

Cohen, Phoebe, “Scenes from Under Childhood,” Artforum, January 1973, pp. 51-55.

Coursodon, Jean-Pierre, “Jerry Lewis’s Films: No Laughing Matter?,” Film Comment, July-August 1975, pp. 9-15.

Lewis, Jerry, The Total Film-Maker, New York: Warner Paperback Library, 1973.

Michelson, Annette, “Toward Snow (Part l),” Artforum, June 1970, pp. 30-37.

Michelson, Annette, “Yvonne Rainer, Part Two: Lives of Performers,” Artforum, February 1974.

Rainer, Yvonne , Work 1961-73, Halifax/New York: The Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design and New York University Press, 1974 (includes shooting script of Lives of Performers, pp. 213-240).

UNIT V: The New Wave and Its Antecedents, Cousins and Consequences

Returning to France in this final Unit again provides the teacher with a useful focal point in an area that also includes many non-French filmmakers, e.g. the ltalian Michelangelo Antonioni, and the Belgian Chantal Akerman. But, as with France in the 20s, the creative burst of experimentation by young filmmakers which comprised the New Wave was largely prompted by the resurgence of a self-conscious awareness of cinema as an art form. (Significantly, in this Unit as in Unit II, most of the filmmakers involved have backgrounds as critics or theorists.)

Screenings:

Pickpocket (1959, 75 min.) Directed by Robert Bresson — In a plot loosely adapted from Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, a reclusive dropout gradually instructs himself in the techniques of a pickpocket and practices this profession until he is caught; only when he is in jail does he achieve a kind of salvation and the capacity to love. Bresson’s pared-away drama, as experimental for its use of sound and its elliptical framings as for its deliberate avoidance of acting and psychology, can be seen as a direct precursor of films by Godard (Vivre sa Vie).

L’Année Dernière à Marienbad (Last Year at Marienbad) (1961, 93 min.) Directed by Alain Resnais and scripted by Alain Robbe-Grillet — This controversial, rigorously constructed narative enigma can be seen, in both its mystifications and its equally deliberate demystifications, as a critique of the processes of narrative illusion and their attending seductions. Creating an ambiguous continuum of sequences set in the past, present, future and conditional tenses — stations more of the mind than of concrete time or space — this haunting fable excitingly manipulates and exposes the machinery of narrative enchantment through the same panoply of techniques.

L’Eclisse (Eclipse) (1961, 125 min.) Directed by Michelangelo Antonioni — A remarkable love story, set in contemporary Rome, between a translator and stock broker, this film is worth examining in relation to several active polarities: documentary and closely choreographed mise en scène (which are intricately interwoven in the stock exchange sequences), human and inanimate forms (particularly in the opening and closing sequences), extended takes (as in the beginning) and montage (as in the closing 7-minute sequence of 58 shots in which neither of the central characters appears).

2 ou 3 Choses que je sais d’elle (2 or 3 Things I Know About Her(1966, 95 min.) Directed by Jean-Luc Godard — This is probably the most ambitious of Godard’s early efforts in articulating the possibilities of a film essay through a complex social critique of prostitution and city planning (and the implicit relationships between the two) in the Paris region. Closer to documentary in certain respects than Godard’s other films of this period — with the fictional trajectory of a suburban housewife, played by Marina Vlady, largely used as a semiperfunctory structuring device, and Godard himself whispering a poetic offscreen commentary — it provides a most interesting contrast to Enthusiasm (in Unit III), on several levels.

Playtime (1967, 120 min.) Directed by Jacques Tati — By depicting the modern city as a complex social organism menaced by architecture, Tati’s comic masterpiece reformulates many of the same issues of 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her, yet in a completely different manner that is relatively non-verbal and physical. At the same time, it is surely no less experimental and innovative — for its gigantic city set (comparable to that in Sunrise), its extremely complex perceptual play with shifting multiple focal points (every scene is in long shot) and a mise en scène that in certain sequences becomes as densely populated as a Brueghel painting, and its highly original deployments of color and sound.

Céline et Julie Vont en Bateau (Celine and Julie Go Boating) (1974, 195 min.) Directed by Jacques Rivette — Here again (and in the following film as well), we encounter the potential difficulty of a work with an unusually long running time within a classroom setting (or outside it, for that matter). However, the special appeal that this madcap comedy can have for students — above all, its capacity to make the issues of narrative and illusionism both accessible and enjoyable, in a spirited fantasy double-plot utilizing two pairs of highly skilled actresses - seems to make its virtues outweigh its practical difficulties. As a further argument for the long experimental film, one might add that the longer-than-usual film fosters the (correct) impression that it is exceptional, hence deserving of more than conventional expectations and responses, while conventional running times tend to encourage the perpetuation of commercial filmgoing habits. And ideally, any serious course in experimental film should consider and perhaps countenance certain experiments in filmgoing and film attendance — even if this challenges or alters conventional scheduling and programming reflexes.

Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai de Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (Jeanne Dielman) (1975, 195 min.) Directed by Chantal Akerman -– This beautifully composed yet disturbing epic devoted to compulsive housework is at once a powerful political statement — deceptively simple at first look, in fact complexly conceived and experienced — and a summary of certain painterly and structural concerns in experimental filmmaking (as exemplified in the work of Warhol and Snow) confronting the forms, conventions and concerns of mainstream narrative filmmaking. Akerman’s frontal medium-shot mise en scène, the camerawork of Babette Mangolte (who also shot Liyes of Performers, in Unit IV) and the title performance of Delphine Seyrig (the heroine in Last Year at Marienbad) are all stunning achievements worthy of detailed analysis.

Readlngs:

Fischer, Lucy, “‘Beyond Freedom and Dignity’: An Analysis of Jacques Tali’s Playtime,” Sight and Sound, Autumn 1976, pp.234-239.

Guzzetti, Allred, Two or Three Things I Know About Her: Analysis of a Film by Godard, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1981 .

Houston, Penelope, review of Last Year at Marienbad, Sight and Sound, Winter 1961/2, pp.26-28. t

Nowell-Smith, Geoffrey, “Shape and Black Point” (on Antonioni), in Movies and Methods, edited by Bill Nichols, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976, pp. 354-363.

Patterson, Patricia and Manny Farber, “Kitchen without Kitsch” (on Jeanne Dielman), Film Comment, November-Decembet 1977, pp. 47-50.

Robbe-Grillet, Alain, Last Year at Marienbad, New York: Grove Press, ‘1962.

Rosenbaum, Jonathan, “Edinburgh Encounters” (on Jeanne Dielman) Sight and Sound, Winter 1975/6, pp. 18-23.

Rosenbaum, Jonathan, “Work and Play in the House of Fiction” (on Rivette) , Sight and Sound, Autumn 1974, published with interview with Rivette, pp. 190-198.

Sontag, Susan, “Spiritual Style in the Films of Robert Bresson,” in Against lnterpretation, New York: Delta, 1966, pp. 177-195.

Course File on Experimental Film (Part 1) (1982)

From AFI Education Newsletter (January-February 1982). Because of the length of this, I’ll be running it in two installments. — J.R.

EXPERIMENTAL FILM:

FROM UN CHIEN ANDALOU TO CHANTAL AKERMAN (Part 1)

UNIT l: lntroduction

One distinct advantage to teaching a course in experimental film as opposed to avant-garde film is that it automatically gives one much more leeway in terms of screenings to be selected as well as overall teaching approaches. While “avant-garde cinema” can be regarded, by and large, as a distinct body of work with its own traditions, history and critical literature, “experimental film” is a rather more subjective and ambiguous category, and one that cuts across certain forms of commercial as well as avant-garde filmmaking. (There are many more references to various commercial forms of filmmaking, including Hollywood, in David Curtis’s Experimental Cinema, than there are in P. Adams Sitney’s Visionary Film: The American Avant-Garde.)

Consequently, any teacher setting out to plan a course in experimental rather than avant-garde cinema automatically has a greater amount of material to select from, and substantially more freedom in defining the scope and limits of his or her subject. By the same token, the demands placed on one’s imagination, creative input and organizational capacities might also be significantly greater.

Any course in experimental film will, of course, have to concern itself with the avant-garde in considerable detail. But, if at all possible, it should avoid collapsing the two categories into one ill-defined, all-purpose unit. It is important to attempt to distinguish at the outset between social and aesthetic definitions of the avant-garde, without of course projecting the impression that aesthetic definitions have no social implications, or conversely, that social categories have no aesthetic meanings and consequences. One should attempt to clarify that some avant-garde work can be tradition-bound as well as (or in some cases, instead of) experimental in nature.

One essential requirement of this task, it would seem, is that the teacher deal with the experimental and avant-garde categories critically and historically, in as precise a manner ds possible, from the very beginning. This entails some study of what Un Chien Andalou meant in relation to the French cinema as a whole and within the avant-garde during the late Twenties. It also involves making a distinction between what, say, the jump-cuts of Breathless and the match cuts of Last Year at Marienbad looked like in the early Sixties — how they were and/or weren’t “experimental” at the time — and how they register today, formally, conceptually and dramatically.

The social/aesthetic distinction mentioned above is only one of the central polarities that should be considered. Partly because experimental and avant-garde work is defined in terms of its oppositions, and partly due to the indelible mark of Hegelian and Marxist dialectics on much European thought about the avant-garde, teachers will naturally be drawn to defining their terrain with the help of a good many useful polar categories or antimonies. Some of these would naturally include American versus European, abstract versus figurative, narrative versus nonnarrative, animation versus live-action, silence versus sound, and so on.

At the same time, the teacher should guard against the temptation to overvalue the “useful” if this threatens to remove too many of the teeth in any sort of oppositional cinema by making it overly safe, remote, conformist and academic. For this reason, certain antinomies used by an essay such as Peter Wollen’s “Counter Cinema: Vent d’Est” – identification versus estrangement, transparency versus foregrounding, closure versus openness and fiction versus reality, among others — are undoubtedly helpful as descriptive tools, but should probably be regarded with some skepticism when it comes to defining either terms or reception or a social praxis in terms of an American classroom situation. Precisely because this film by Jean-Luc Godard lends itself so readily to being a “textbook” illustration of counter-cinema in Wollen’s terms, its likelihood of challenging or broadening a student’s conception of aesthetic and social issues may well be reduced as a consequence — at least in relation to less systematic but more multi-faceted and vigorous works like 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her or Numéro Deux, which deal with much wider ranges of experience.

This hits upon a crucial issue which should be borne in mind throughout any planning of an experimental film course. If, on one level, the task of an experimental film is initially to confuse spectators — while the task of an experimental film teacher is initially to clear up confusion — the teacher should be careful to avoid reducing his or her work to simple, dramatic and symmetrical problem-solving. The “clearing up” of issues, if pursued too doggedly for its own sake, and without sufficient appeal to wider contexts, might run the risk of lessening the impact of the films for the sake of a teachable clarity.

It can be very rewarding, for instance, to try out all sorts of analytical and interpretive systems on Un Chien Andalou; each can deepen one’s overall sense of the film. But it might be rather dangerous to trust any single one of them too much, and privilege it as a skeleton key that unlocks all mysteries. One would be wise to hold in mind Luis Buñuel’s radical claim that Un Chien Andalou, far from being an object that sought after either beauty or poetry, was ultimately “nothing more nor less than a desperate call to murder.”

General Reading:

Bordwell, David and Kristin Thompson, Film Art: An Introduction, Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, 1979.

Burch, Noël, Theory of Film Practice, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981.

Curtis, David, Experimental Cinema, New York: Delta Books, 1971 .

Durgnat, Raymond, David Ehrenstein and Jonathan Rosenbaum, “Obscure Objects of

Desire: A Jam Session on Non-Narrative,” Film Comment, July-August 1978, pp. 60-64.

Dwoskin, Steve, Film Is: The lnternational Free Cinema, Woodstock, New York: The Overlook Press, 1975.

Eisenstein, Sergei, Film Form and The Film Sense, New York: Meridian Books, 1967.

Farber, Manny, Movies, Hillstone, New York: Hillstone, 1971 .

Gidal, Peter, ed., Sfructural Film Anthology, New York: British Film lnstitute/New York Zoetrope, 1978.

Le Grice, Malcolm, Abstract Film and Beyond, Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1977.

Mekas, Jonas, Movie Journal, New York: Collier Books, 1972.

Michelson, Annette, Camera Lucida/Camera Obscura, Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1982 (in press). [2012 note: In fact, this has never been published.]

Sitney, P. Adams, ed., The Avant-Garde Film: A Reader of Theory and Criticism, New York: New York University Press, 1978.

Sitney, P. Adams, ed., Film Culture Reader, New York: Praeger, 1970.

Sitney, P. Adams, Visionary Film: The American Avant-Garde 1943-1978 (second

edition), New York: Oxford University Press,1979.

UNIT II: France in the Twenties

One good reason for beginning a study of experimental film with France in the 20s is that few places and times in the history of any art can be considered more international in scope. Thus France in the 20s means not only such French filmmakers as René Clair, Jean Cocteau, Germaine Dulac, Fernand Léger, Jean

Renoir and Jean Vigo — many of whom went on to become international figures — but also the Spaniard Luis Buñuel and the Dane Carl Dreyer, among many others choosing to work in France. (Roger Shattuck’s The Banquet Years provides an excellent background regarding avant-garde activity in the other arts during the early part of the century,) It was only in France, too, that a figure like the Vicomte de Noailles could finance such costly revolutionary films as Cocteau’s Blood of a Poet and Buñuel’s L’Age d’Or (The Golden Age), and where Carl Dreyer could be given the extensive means and freedom to make his film about Joan of Arc.

Screenlngs:

Paris qui dort (The Crazy Ray) (1923, 60 min.) Directed by René Clair — A fantasy about Paris immobilized at precisely 3:25 in the afternoon, Clair’s first feature is a film which is almost explicitly about film, in which time can stop and start up again at the whim of an amiable mad scientist. It has many links with Dada as well as Surrealism, and might profitably be shown with the subsequent Clair short, Entr’acte (1924), based on a screenplay by Francis Picabia. Exploiting and calling attention to the properties of the medium in a number of ways — speeding time up, slowing it down, freezing it, reversing it, and exploring the Second Empire monuments of Paris (along with the International Exhibitions celebrating the progress of technology) with some of the dryness of a documentary, The Crazy Ray can be used as an excellent example of the popular experimental film, and one that can be used to illustrate the links between avant-garde traditions, comedy and science-fiction.

Ballet Mécanique (1924, 20 min.) Directed by Fernand Léger, who was assisted by Dudley Murphy and Man Ray, this short was reportedly influenced by Abel Gance’s La Roue. Léger wrote, “The idea tor the film came to me in order to be certain of the plastic possibilities of these new elements expressed in movement. The repetitions of shapes, of slow or rapid rhythms, allowed extremely rich possibilities. An object could become, all on its own, a tragic, comic or spectacular sight. It was an adventure in the land of wonders.” A useful pairing for purposes of contrast might be made with Dudley Murphy’s own 1929 American short with Duke Ellington, Black and Tan, which utilizes certain ideas and techniques also found in Entr’acte and Ballet Mécanique.

La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc (The Passion of Joan of Arc (1927, silent speed 123 min., sound speed 82 min.) Directed by Carl-Theodor Dreyer — A pivotal film in many respects, Dreyer’s last silent feature can be linked to many different facets of experimental film tradition: the idiosyncratic handling of space (treated by both Noël Burch and David Bordwell, the latter in considerable detail), the experimental adoption and application of mainstream techniques derived from Griffith (notably the close-up and crosscutting), the use of German Expressionist sets (designed by Hermann Warm), ” the rhythmic editing and typage (both influenced in part by Soviet cinema), and, indeed, Impressionistic montage and subjective camerawork from the French avant-garde during the Twenties. From this point of view the film might be regarded as both a culmination and a synthesis.

Le Sang d’un Poète (Blood of a Poet) (1930, 58 min.) Directed by Jean Cocteau — Split into four episodes, Cocteau’s first film, linked by his own commentary, is said to take place between the explosion of a chimney in the first sequence and its fall to the ground in the last. Described by Cocteau as a poem on celluloid and one that should be taken as a response to Surrealism rather than as a Surrealistic statement, it continues to be a highly influential film within the experimental tradition for its explorations into the possibilities of a highly personal and self-referential form of filmmaking.

Zéro de Conduite (Zero for Conduct) (1933, 45 min.) Directed by Jean Vigo –Banned by French censors until the mid-Forties, this exuberant, anarchist ode to rebellion at a repressive boys’ school can be profitably compared to (and contrasted with) several New Wave films, on political as well as aesthetic grounds. (The same could be said of Cocteau’s work, although here his Orphée would probably serve better than his Blood of a Poet in spelling out the ancestry of; say, Godard or even Demy.) The separate forms of stylization at work in the depiction of the children and the adults in this film might serve as one fruitful point of departure, as would a consideration of Maurice Jaubert’s score and its functions.

Readings:

Abel, Richard, “The Contribution of the French Literary Avant-Garde to Film Theory and Criticism (1907-1924),” Cinema Journal, Vol. XlV, No. 3, Spring 1975, pp. 19-40.

Bordwell, David, ” La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc,” The Films of Carl-Theodor Dreyer, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981 , pp. 66-92.

Cocteau, Jean, Cocteau on the Film, New York: Dover, 1972.

Drummond, Phillip, “Textual Space in Un Chien Andalou,” Screen, Autumn 1977, Vol. 18, No. 3, pp. 55-119.

Michelson, Annette, “Dr. Crase and Mr. Clair,” October No. 11, Winter 1979, pp. 31-53.

Renoir, Jean, My Life and My Films, New York: Atheneum, 1974.

Salles Gomes, P.E., Jean Vigo, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971.

Shattuck, Roger, The Banquet Years, New York: Harcourt Brace, 1968.

Williams, Linda, “The Prologue to Un Chien Andalou: A Surrealist Film Metaphor,”

Screen, Winter 197617, Vol. 17, No. 4, pp. 24-33.

Just Jost

From Film Comment (January-February 1982); reprinted in my book Film: The Front Line 1983. My thanks to Jon Jost himself for furnishing me with the frame grabs from Last Chants for a Slow Dance and Stagefright. — J.R.

1. “This is a movie, a way to speak. It is bound, like all systems of communication, with conventions. Some of these are arbitrarily imposed, some are imposed by economic or political pressures, some are imposed by the medium itself. Some of these conventions are necessary: They are the commonality through which we are able to speak with one another in this way. But some of these conventions are unnecessary, and not only that, they are damaging to us, they are self-destructive. Yet we are in a bad place to see this. We are in a theater.” Jon Jost, addressing the camera and spectator in Speaking Directly (1974).

2. Despite five substantial and in many ways remarkable features under his belt since 1974, and nineteen shorts since 1963, Jon Jost at 38 is still a long way from becoming even an arcane household name in this country. Not that he makes it easy on anyone. His originality, technical virtuosity, and political sophistication have all tended to work against him by showing the rest of us up-thereby banishing him from most of the restricted genre and market classifications designed to protect us from his scorn, under avant-garde and mainstream umbrellas alike. In a manner that seems exasperatingly and inescapably American, that alternately warms and chills my blood, Jon Jost embodies the dangers, limitations, and intransigent strengths of isolation more graphically than any other contemporary independent I know — with an authenticity whose challenges often leave a disturbing aftertaste.

An anarchist outsider by self-definition, whose impossibly slim budgets — $2,500 for Speaking Directly, his first feature, in 1972-73; $3,000 for Last Chants for a Slow Dance, his third, in 1977 — are offered like tart reproaches to other filmmakers; Jost has tended to amass a reputation more than a following in the U.S. (In England and, more recently, Germany, he appears to have somewhat more clout. )

His most recent and (by far) most experimental feature Stagefright was shot for German TV in a somewhat Dr. Mabuse/Strangelove spirit (”I wanted to lock actors in a black room for four days and see what would happen… and orchestrate spectators’ feelings with very little content”). When it turned up at New York’s Collective for Living Cinema just before last Halloween, only a smattering of curious people showed up for the event, and a good handful of these walked out during the first fifteen minutes. To the best of my knowledge, no New York publication deemed the film worthy of review — although an attack on the accompanying short, Godard 1980, which managed to get its title wrong, appeared in The Soho News twelve days later, by a reviewer who smugly concluded, “I wish I could get a crack at re-editing this footage.”

“Personally, I much prefer to show my films in provincial places,” Jost told me in Hoboken a couple of days later, interpreting the Stagefright walkouts as New Yorkers being trend-conscious and fad-oriented. “I’d rather do a show in Omaha, because I feel people are more receptive there. It’s the contrary of what people say.”

3. Filmography (includes only films with available prints, all available from Light Communications, P.O. Box 315, Franklin Lanes, NJ. 07417): 1964 — City (short). 1967 — Leak, Traps (shorts). 1968 — 13 Fragments & 3 Narratives from Life (short). 1969 — Susannah’s Film (short). 1970 — Fall Creek, Flower (shorts). 1971 — Primaries; A Turning Point in Lunatic China; 1, 2, 3, Four; Canyon (shorts). 1972 — A Man is More Than the Sum of His Parts/A Woman is (short). 1974 – Speaking Directly: Some American Notes (feature). 1977 — Angel City (feature), Beauty Sells Best (short), Last Chants for a Slow Dance (Dead End) (feature). 1978 — Chameleon (feature). 1980 — X2: Two Dances by Nancy Karp, Lampenfieber, Godard 1980 (shorts). 1981 — Stagefright (feature).

4. My own first encounter with Jost’s work came when I saw Speaking Directly at the Edinburgh Film Festival in 1975, which I wrote about at some length-along with Jean-Marie Straub’s Moses and Aaron, Michael Snow’s “Rameau’s Nephew” by Diderot (Thanx to Dennis Young) by Wilma Schoen, and Chantai Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai de Commerce-1080 Bruxelles (it was a meaty year) — in the Winter 1975-76 Sight and Sound. Made in Oregon and Montana, it’s a materialist exposition of all that the act of filmmaking entails; I can think of no other film like it. As a radical critique of America in the early Seventies, it is as essential a document, in a way, as the collectively made Winter Soldier (1972) — a straight record of the confessions of war crimes given by American veterans back from Vietnam — although the experiences it bears witness to are distinctly different. (Jost was imprisoned in federal custody from March 1965 through June 1967 for draft resistance.)

At the same time, I had certain doubts about Jost’s self-willed isolation as it came across in the film. Writing from the vantage point of an American who had been living abroad for six years and who had already been deeply affected by different attitudes toward collectivity which I’d been exposed to in Paris and London, I was at once attracted to and repelled by Jost’s entrenched, lonely position, which seemed imbued with a cracker-barrel spirit that reeked of Thoreau as well as Mailer. As I put it in Sight and Sound:

“I’m wary about the lure that can be exerted by this brand of all-American confessional — the note of cranky individualism which dictates that all the most well-worn discoveries have to be reasserted anew, like home-made appliances, as if no one had ever thought of them before. It’s the precise reverse of that assumed tradition of several centuries, languages, and ideologies lurking behind every gesture which I find in Straub/Huillet. An American and contemporary of Jost, I’m constantly tempted to indulge in this rhetoric — what else am I doing now? — which may give me a high tolerance for it, extended further by a familiarity with the lifestyles and idioms.”

5. The strange fruit borne by this maverick stance in Stagefright belongs to no acknowledged filmic or theatrical tradition save the magical, yet Jost clearly intends the first section of it to be a “kind of history of mankind and the development of consciousness.” No fooling; and as Jost describes it all, it’s very schematic. What follows is his edited description (with my added interjections):

“You see the woman’s body — egg-shaped, beginnings, right? Then she sort of stumbles around and finally get up on her feet, and by the end of the sequence she’s got her body under control, and she knows it and she smiles and she walks off-screen.” (A man suddenly enters the frame from another direction as she exits, playing with our sense of spatial balance and perspective.) “Then it’s basically the same thing, but dealing with facial expression. First, he’s sort of spastic, then he goes through some elementary expressions, like fear and surprise. Then he walks off, and next you see this actual mirror image where he smiles and frowns to himself. The hand comes in, the camera drops down — I wanted to suggest that expression takes some kind of self-consciousness. But the mirror itself doesn’t produce a dialogue or drama.

“In the next shot you see his face on one side and his infinitely repeated image in a mirror on the other side…. Then comes a mock mirror shot when he smiles and frowns at once, and you get the introduction of conflict. You no longer get a mimicking, but a disagreement.” (After the same actor applies paint to his face, there’s an enormous close-up of his mouth making lip and then guttural sounds, again moving towards greater muscular control.) “I like the very end, when the camera pulls back and his expression really looks like a Francis Bacon character. Then he’s got clothes on  — another level of consciousness and repression at the same time.” (Eventually he pulls out a book and reads a Serbo-Croatian myth.)

“Then you go to the alphabet that you hear in different languages and then see in animated figures-again, starting from the earliest ones and going up to the story of Cain and Abel, in Hebrew.” (Blood — or, rather, Godardian red paint — splatters over the Hebrew text, and there’s a dissolve to a close-up of a woman whose face bears an animated cartoon of changing make-up while one hears an audience working itself up into rhythmic applause. End of section.)

It seems to me that Stagefright is your first film that isn’t about America.

Yeah, it’s the first one that isn’t dealing with a specifically American background or context. It’s not dealing with the German one, either — it’s dealing with the universal one. It’s not a pretty picture, I agree…. I was just trying to deal with a more primal form of politics. Most people wouldn’t refer to it as politics, but to me it is. If the prime human story is that we murder one another, that’s definitely a political story — but I was trying to phrase it in more primal terms, that this is something having to do with some very fundamental quality of the human species. And I was trying to deal more on those levels and deal with it so that the viewer received it the way you receive primal things — more on the subconscious level.

That somehow seems more Germanic than your other movies.

Well, in a very real way my politics have changed. Hopefully, they will continue to change as I learn more things.

6. “In all my films, I’m always testing the limits of the audience. In Angel City, it was the part where he picks the jigsaw puzzle apart and gives you a very frontal lecture about what you get when you get a story. He tells you what the etymology of the word ’story’ is, that it comes from ‘history,’ that its origins mean ‘to know.’ Then he gives a lecture about how story — as we think of it, fiction-means knowing the wrong things. Like, Rexon is a phony company when we should talk about Exxon, the real one, right?

“Then he walks offscreen, and you just have this rather beautiful but barren shot of the blue of the swimming pool, with a woman’s corpse laying on the ground. And that’s the point that’s hardest for audiences, for two reasons. One is that they’re being shown a long, static shot where the lead actor [Bob Glaudini] walks offscreen, and meanwhile they’re getting a lecture about something they don’t want to hear about. They don’t want to hear about the real names, or somebody telling them that they don’t want to hear.”

(Angel City — a comic hard-boiled detective story intermixed with an elaborately detailed social, political, and economic critique of Los Angeles — cost a little under $6,000 to make. Jost’s omnipresent gallows humor, extending to such sequences as an actress, who later becomes the corpse beside the swimming pool, undergoing a screen test for a Hollywood remake of Triumph of the Will, or a TV commercial for Rexon in which the supposedly benign president walks casually along a beach, is reflected in Jost’s own frequent laughter, which some find unsettling. The hero of Last Chants for a Slow Dance, played by drama teacher Tom Blair, exhibits a more advanced case of the same manic, inner-directed cackle.)

7. Are all your films distributed by you?

Yes, and it’ll remain that way. There are distributors in America who would now like to handle my films. Unifilm wanted to take them all. But then I asked, “What are the terms?” “Oh, you provide the prints, we take sixty percent.” I said, “How many bookings can you get me a year for all four features?” “Twenty-five.” Well — I can get on the phone and do that in a week. There’s no distributor in America who’s willing to take me until maybe I’m on the cover of Time Magazine or something. [Laughs.] Then, all of a sudden, I’ll become of interest. Which I find embarrassing to some degree. I mean, there’s no reason why Last Chants for a Slow Dance shouldn’t book as well as a lot of Fassbinder. It’s certainly no less accessible.

(I agree. At once the easiest and most disturbing of Jost’s features, and to my mind the best, Last Chants conceivably gets closer to the mentality of the alienated and seemingly motiveless killer than either Mailer or Capote. Broken up into extremely long takes — some of them accompanied by original country-western songs, written and sung in part by Jost himself, which are a lot more authentic than those in Nashville — the film chronicles the aimless wandering of Tom Bates in his truck around Montana, stopping only once to see his embittered wife Darleen, living on food stamps, who informs him during an ugly fight in front of a bathroom mirror that their two accidental kids are soon to be joined by a third.

Supposedly unable to find a job, although we never actually see him looking for one, Tom is cackling away to a male hitchhiker in the opening scene about how he “can smell pussy a mile away.” When he asks, “Hey, you got pussy waiting for you?” and the younger guy responds uneasily, “I got a girl — I don’t think of her like that,” Tom starts to get pissed off, gradually working himself up into a rage: “Fella, all girls are pussies…. You ain’t one of those funnies, are ya?” Before long, he’s ranting that he’s paid for his truck with his own money, doesn’t have to give anybody a lift if he doesn’t want to, stops, and asks the hitchhiker to get out. Throughout this one-take sequence, the camera, after focusing on the moving highway, pans over to take in first Tom and then the rider as well; the following long take pans between Darleen in front of the bathroom mirror and Tom standing beside a door behind her…. After two encounters in his travels — with a hippie and a woman he picks up in a bar — he winds up killing a man he encounters on the road with car trouble, for no apparent reason apart from the pretext of taking his wallet.)

8. It seems to me that Last Chants is one of the few films that combines elements of structural filmmaking with a whole other tradition that’s more verbal and is closer to someone like Godard. And the structural and narrative aspects set up a very interesting tension between them in relation to things like duration. I’m curious, in any case, what structural films you’ve seen and how you relate to them.

I’ve hardly seen any. What little I’ve seen strikes me as technical exercises, so I end up not being too interested — or I’m interested only if there’s some technical thing I can learn from it.

Have you seen any of Michael Snow’s films?

Just two days ago in Pittsburgh, I saw a reel of The Central Region, and then I saw Wavelength for the first time.

Did they seem like technical exercises to you?

Well, I didn’t get bored with Wavelength, but I also didn’t think it was all that wonderful a film. A lot of the visual intrusions struck me as arbitrary, just sort of fucking around, mainly to maintain your interest visually– all those filters and multiple printing things. It occasionally got a very striking visual effect, but it struck me as arbitrary.

What about the narrative intrusions?

Well, they were there, but they were very skimpy, and then on another level they weren’t believable, because the acting was so amateurish. It was very crude that way. I mean, the idea was interesting, and somehow, cumulatively, you do end up watching it for forty-five minutes. But I was surprised, after reading about it, by what I considered the sort of sloppy way it was done. All those flashes and the filters going over it were a lot cruder than I’d thought might be there. About the first reel of The Central Region, I dunno. It reminded me of a shot in Speaking Directly, the 360° landscape. And I liked it — it was very sneaky as it changed your perspective. I remember having read years ago about those jumps that occur when they changed magazines. I really wish I could have put a 7,000-foot reel on the camera. I find the cuts conceptually very disruptive. And I appreciate the technical problem, although he could have dissolved them and masked them somewhat.

I’m curious about two sequences in Last Chants in which you hold a particular fixed image for a long time. One’s in a roadside diner, and the other’s in a room with a TV set and adjoining bedroom. I’m interested in how you arrived at these sequences and what sort of function they have for you. For me, they both stretch and manipulate the narrative-illusionist precepts of the film in a very interesting way. (I like what Noel Carroll wrote about the film, which applies especially to the latter sequence: “Jost’s strength in this film is his ability to portray the experience of time of the lumpenproietariat who is outside the regimented rhythm of work and sleep, who lives without directions, schedules, and goals.”)

To me, both sequences fall into a broader overall plan for the film, which was that it should start off seeming to be in some sort of realist mode. I wanted to start off with that and then slowly push the viewer off that axis. The first significant place where that happens is the cafe shot, which is a black-and-white shot with the word “cafe” in red, done as a multiple printing. I shot the black-andwhite shot, and then I slept in the place overnight and shot the red cafe neon sign that was in the background, although in the picture it reads as being in the foreground. I knew it would create confusion and be an ambiguous image. Part of the reason I did it was I found it was going to be a relatively long take, and I have to throw in a little spice in the image to make you go with it. As it turned out, the improvisation that the actors did [a scene between Tom and the hippie] was quite funny, so probably it would have held without it. But for a longer strategy in the movie, it was the first step toward throwing it off this realist mode.

Then it goes into a bar sequence, then the couple go up the stairs-which is a multiple-image thing where their image and their shadow become indistinguishable. That’s just a short shot, but it’s usually one that’s quite effective; I watch audiences, and one can just see this little ripple going through that says, “What is this?” Then they go in the bedroom, and here the strategy was on several levels. I knew it was going to be a very long shot-it’s around fourteen minutes. There’s a color TV on one side (the left) in a black-and-white image, and you can hear the track of The Johnny Carson Show, or whatever it was-so you’re listening, and it’s kind of interesting, and at the same time you’re subconsciously trying to look around the door on the other side of the set so you can see them fucking. (As it is, one can see only their feet.) Also, where the TV is situated, if you didn’t have a wall there, that’s where their heads would be. That was like a discreet metaphor for what their mentality was-this is the culture they live in. And within the same shot, there’s also this compression of time, because it starts off at night, and within the same shot, although the TV program is continuous, it’s morning.

That’s one of the things that reminded me of films like Wavelength. How did you do that?

It’s ABC-rolled. One roll is nighttime black-and-white stock, one roll is daytime black-and-white stock, and they’re dissolved together. The third roll is the color TV. All I did was put a black piece of paper over the color TV while I shot the black-and-white. Then I blacked out the room at night, turned on the TV, and just shot it.

The intriguing thing is that you get two different time scales.

Yeah, there’s the continuous take of the TV, which is fourteen minutes, and then the rest, which is twelve hours. You see them fucking, and then there’s this real slow ninety-frame dissolve, and the light slowly fills the room, and the bed’s now different; he’s sitting on it and making a telephone call, she’s in the bathroom, and you can hear water running. Then when they come out and pass in front of the TV set while it’s still on, it prints through them, and they turn into ghosts. To me that had a kind of literary meaning, because in a sense they’re not there, mentally.

But it was also part of the strategy to keep pushing further and further away from this realist mode. So by the time he leaves her house, this whole thing with the mug shots (Tom looks at and reads “Wanted” notices in a post office, although we see only the notices and hear him offscreen), and writing his postcards (again, in close-up, to Darleen), and the rabbit being killed (in excruciating closeup this time with no discernible relation to Tom), all of that has no plausible relation to narrative logic. What I was trying to do was put you inside the guy’s head rather than have you outside looking at him. So it was basically a step-by-step process away from a realist mode and getting you into a psychic mode of some sort.

I tried to make an honest picture of a small segment of American society. It was definitely an outgrowth of my two years in prison, where I met lots of people like that. And I’m interested in those characters. It has some connection to the Gary Gilmore case, which had happened the previous year.

9. (Chameleon, my least favorite Jost feature, brings back Angel City’s Bob Glaudini, this time playing a Los Angeles drug dealer who tries to convince an artist to execute forgeries for him. Like Jost’s other story films, it has a narrative only in a quasi-deceptive sense; like Stagefright, it seems freighted with a great deal of literary allegory.)

I read somewhere that the initial idea for Chameleon came from a shot which you weren’t able to do in Angel City. It had something to do with color, I think. And I remember the changing color backdrops during the screen test in Angel City.

Yes, and you see the same thing in the make-up shot in Stagefright. Actually, I think what you’re talking about is something I wound up not being able to do in Chameleon, either. I was talking about the scene in the art gallery [with Gene Youngblood], where each shot has a different color. And originally what I wanted to do was have a continuous take, where the printer would step you through the spectrum. And the reason I didn’t do it was because the continuous take wasn’t strong enough on its own, and I had to cut some flat spots out of it. Also, I probably would have had to scream bloody murder at the lab I was with, to go through a light change every forty frames. Because you could gradate it so there would be no sense of steps, it would just take you right through the spectrum. The lab I’m working with now in San Francisco could do that.

10. When Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin came to the U.S. with Tout va bien in the early Seventies, Jost arranged five west-coast screenings and drove them to each one, after picking them up in the Seattle airport. Godard saw three of Jost’s shorts in Eugene — Primaries, A Turning Point in Lunatic China, and 1, 2, 3, Four — and wound up forcing the San Francisco Film Festival to show them right before Tout va bien. Later, a local newspaper quoted him as saying of Jost, “He is not a traitor to the movies, like almost all American directors. He makes them move.” To the best of my knowledge, Godard remains the only internationally well-known filmmaker, living or dead, whom Jost respects, at least as a filmmaker. (He has supported several lesser-known filmmakers in both America and Europe.) Significantly, when Jost was initially helping to set up a film project with Nicholas Ray and Wim Wenders in 1979, which eventually became Lightning Over Water (see Jost’s article in the Spring 1981 Sight and Sound), Ray had already seen at least one of Jost’s film, Last Chants, but Jost had not recalled seeing anything by Ray.

The seventeen-minute Godard 1980, produced by Framework Magazine in England, shows Peter Wollen and Framework editor Don Ranvaud interviewing Godard, who, to their consternation, backs away from endorsing his own Dziga Vertov Group films and some of his other earlier practices: “For a while, I made movies for other directors, or people who wanted to be directors, who were my real audience…. Loneliness could be good, but isolation is not so good.”

“My experience with Godard is that he’s a lot more mellow than he used to be,” Jost told me in Hoboken. “He’s much better with audiences in answering questions — he doesn’t get sucked into stupid arguments that aren’t going to help anybody. I think he’s learned a lot. Like I know when Sauve qui peut (la vie) went to London, a lot of people were upset, because they were still sitting there theorizing in a dry academic way about things that Godard had already said goodbye to, eight or ten years ago.”

11. At the Collective, you were very critical of what Godard’s interviewers were saying. Are you critical of what Godard says also?

Well, I just feel like — I’m a filmmaker, and I can sympathize and understand a lot more what Godard’s situation and thinking is. But as it was, he wasn’t getting asked good questions, because Don and Peter had pigeonholed him. And they were too much in awe of him. He’s just a human being; if you want to ask him a question, you don’t have to apologize about it before you ask it. [Laughs.]

There’s one moment that’s quite striking, when Godard says that even though he hasn’t been to Vietnam and hasn’t been under a tank, he’s been in a Pans traffic jam. And the moment he says this, what seems to happen is that Don and Peter become, in effect, members of a bourgeois audience responding to a Godard film: they’re embarrassed, shocked, speechless.

Well, they were taken aback. And then Peter says, ‘There are some ways in which it’s the same, and there are other ways in which it isn’t.” To which Godard says, “For me it’s just the same.” And I put that in because I think it’s provocative — especially so for people who have these political brackets that they’re operating in. All he was saying was that, with the subjective experience of being under a machine, it doesn’t matter where it is — if you’ve been under it, that’s what it’s like.

I hear this interview really affected Peter’s opinion of Godard, for the worse.

Well, there’s another part of that, too. Because he and Laura [Mulvey] went out to dinner with him, and he didn’t say anything.

I hear that he did the same thing in New York with David Denby. It makes sense. As far as I can tell, Godard isn’t especially friendly or warm to critics who consider themselves stars.

What Peter and Laura wanted to do was sit down and have a big theoretical conversation, and I don’t think Godard gave a shit.

12. What are we going to do about Jost? One critic of my acquaintance who hates his work has a simple solution for dealing with his combined brilliance and asocial tendencies. She assumes that he steals his ideas from other films, then lies when he claims that he hasn’t seen those films. According to this argument, there’s a lipstick scene in Angel City that’s a direct lift from Flaming Creatures, and the black studio space of Stagefright comes straight out of Le Gai Savoir.

I think that Jost tells the truth and hasn’t seen either of the above films — which doesn’t exactly prevent his work from remaining problematical, either. (In Hoboken, where these issues seem to matter less, he admitted that the opening shot of Godard 1980, which frames Godard from behind, comes directly from the opening of Vivre sa vie.) Jost openly admits that all his films are mainly part of a learning process, that he wants to get a foothold (or even a toehold) in Hollywood, that Angel City and Last Chants, and Chameleon were all partially made to demonstrate that he could make well-acted and attractive-looking story films for practically nothing, that his ultimate goal is to make “essay films for mass audiences.”

Toward the end of Stagefright, after a lot more magic and allegory and reflections about acting, an actor gets a pie thrown in his face. The sequence slows down until it becomes a meditation on a nearly static image (pie-in-the-face) that seems to last forever. After one feels ready to scream and is ready to howl for blood — without ever looking away, for Jost is cunning enough to hold one’s interest with the visual tease of quick intrusions, like a stopwatch and a screwdriver that enter and exit the frame — Jost suddenly cuts to another shot, taken directly from a 35mm print of Hearts and Minds. It’s footage of a Vietcong suspect being shot at close range through the head and is one of the most powerful and shocking eruptions of violence I’ve ever seen in a film. Like the killed rabbit in Last Chants, it both gratifies our desires for meaning and action and shows the resultant blood on one’s hands in the process. As long as Jost goes on making more films just as truthful, I don’t expect him to win any popularity contests.