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The revisionist West: placing the postwar American avant-garde

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The revisionist West: placing the postwar American avant-garde

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The Revisionist West:
Placing the Postwar American Avant-garde

By

Dylan Howell

A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(CINEMA & MEDIA STUDIES)

May 2023

Copyright 2023 Dylan Howell

ii
Dedication

To the Los Angeles Basin, the San Juan Mountains, and a small cabin on the Uncompahgre.

iii
Acknowledgements

First, a deep thank you to my committee chair Priya Jaikumar for all your work on this
dissertation; it’s hard to express my gratitude for your patience, clarity, and enthusiastic support.
I am also very grateful for all my committee members attention and feedback, J.D. Connor,
Michael Renov, Michael Bodie, and Bill Deverell. Thank you, J.D., for long and essential office
hour chats from my first weeks at USC; Michael Renov for the many intellectual doors that you
opened; Michael Bodie for your patience for visions and revisions; Bill Deverell for your ever
thoughtful input. Working with all of you was both a pleasure and a constant source of
motivation. My thanks also go out to USC faculty members Amy Ogata, Vanessa Schwartz,
David James, Akira Lippit, George Carstocea, Gian Maria Annovi, as well as graduate student
peers Grace Converse, Eszter Zimanyi, Maggie Woodward, Corina Copp, Patricia Ciccone, and
many other with whom I had the pleasure of sharing seminars and reading groups.

Thank you also to my Los Angeles community for keeping me afloat when the books weighed
me down. This is to recognize all of you, Chris Douglass, Kayla Tsongas, Luke Falcone, Leah
Clancy, Houston Davidson, Ora Dekornfeld, Alexis Sones, Mark Golub, Zack Buckwald, Dane
Brodke, Sasha Winkler, Howie Voigt, Ben Goldstein, Will Golladay, Annie Dennis and many
others. And to the friends abroad who would drop me a line on the loneliest writing days, Carlo
Di Blasi, Alessandro Bisiani, Francesco Bassetti, Ioanna Gerakidi, Uliana Dobrova, and Emma
Vehvilainen.

The journey wouldn’t have even begun without the Pomona friends. You all pushed me to think
harder early on, and I’m very grateful the conversation didn’t stop there. Here’s to you Jacob
Moe, Hunter Dukes, Noah Sneider, Jonah Raduns-Silverstein (also for your work as official
dissertation composer), Donald Okpalugo, Joey Glickman, Peter Chinman, Jenny Flannery, and
Will Hummel.

To my family, Mom, Dad, and Morganne, for the love and encouragement. You were the source
I could turn to. And to Grace Kennison, who always saw the vision. I love you all.

iv

Table of Contents
Dedication ....................................................................................................................................... ii
Acknowledgements ........................................................................................................................ iii
List of Figures ................................................................................................................................. v
Abstract ......................................................................................................................................... vii
Introduction ..................................................................................................................................... 1
Chapter 2: Western Trance: The Complex Pastoral in Stan Brakhage’s Early Colorado Films,
1952-1964 ..................................................................................................................................... 10
Trance Today ............................................................................................................................ 10
The Mining Films ..................................................................................................................... 17
Settler Modernism ..................................................................................................................... 31
Chapter 3: Bruce Baillie’s (Auto)Critical Road Trips: Or, Urban Exodus and Indian
Representation and in Mass for the Dakota Sioux (1964), Quixote (1965), and Termination
(1966) ............................................................................................................................................ 46
Baillie’s Quest ........................................................................................................................... 46
The Road Trip Films ................................................................................................................. 54
Termination and Its Discontents ............................................................................................... 67
Multiply and Subdue the Earth ................................................................................................. 74
Chapter 3: “Our Machines”: Alexander Hammid, US Film, and HemisFair ’68 ......................... 83
Hammid, Eames, and 60s Expanded Cinema ........................................................................... 87
US Film ..................................................................................................................................... 93
US at Hemisfair ‘68 ................................................................................................................ 107
Chapter 4: Eadweard Muybridge’s Scenes of Settlement: The Modoc War Photographs ......... 116
Setting the Scene ..................................................................................................................... 116
Images of Time? ..................................................................................................................... 118
The Modoc Sequence .............................................................................................................. 121
The Modoc War ...................................................................................................................... 124
The Stereographic Image ........................................................................................................ 130
A Modoc Warrior on the War Path ......................................................................................... 140
Conclusion .................................................................................................................................. 145
Bibliography ............................................................................................................................... 157

v

List of Figures
Fig. 1 Still from Sun Quartet, Part 2: San Juan River (2017) ...................................................... 13
Fig. 2 Still from Sun Quartet, Part 2: San Juan River (2017) ...................................................... 14
Fig. 3 Still from Interim (1952) .................................................................................................... 22
Fig. 4 Still from Interim (1952) .................................................................................................... 23
Fig. 5 Still from Unglassed Windows Cast a Terrible Reflection (1953) ..................................... 27
Fig. 6 Still from Unglassed Windows Cast a Terrible Reflection (1953) ..................................... 30
Fig. 7 Still from Dog Star Man: Part I (1962) .............................................................................. 35
Fig. 8 Screenshot from Fred Camper’s Website showing film strips of Mothlight (1963)
https://www.fredcamper.com/Film/BrakhageS.html .................................................................... 41
Fig. 9 Stills from Dog Star Man: Part I (1962) ............................................................................ 43
Fig. 10 Promotional brochure for Canyon Cinema screening, 1963 ............................................ 52
Fig. 11 Still from Mass for the Dakota Sioux (1964) ................................................................... 54
Fig. 12 Still from Mass for the Dakota Sioux (1964) ................................................................... 56
Fig. 13 Still from Mass for the Dakota Sioux (1964) ................................................................... 59
Fig. 14 Time Magazine cover, July 3, 1950 ................................................................................. 59
Fig. 16 Stills from Quixote (1965) ................................................................................................ 66
Fig. 17 Promotional brochure, 1966 TRIPS Festival, San Francisco ........................................... 67
Fig. 18 Still from Termination (1966) .......................................................................................... 70
Fig. 19 Still from Termination (1966) .......................................................................................... 72
Fig. 20 Stills from Multiply and Subdue the Earth (1969) ........................................................... 77
Fig. 21 Still from Multiply and Subdue the Earth (1969) ............................................................. 80
Fig. 22 Photograph of Richard Nixon signing HR.471 “Blue Lake Bill Taos Pueblo
American Indian Land Deed” with Quirino Romero watching .................................................... 82
vi
Fig. 23 Cover of the Department of Commerce’s official United States Pavilion
guidebook ...................................................................................................................................... 84
Fig. 24 Photograph of the Confluence theater with Still from US. Taken from the United
States Exhibition guidebook ......................................................................................................... 85
Fig. 25 Still from To the Fair! (1964) ........................................................................................... 89
Fig. 26 Stills from To the Fair! showing visitors to the General Motors Futurama exhibit ......... 91
Fig. 27 Lyndon Johnson walks through the US Pavilion to a screening of US ............................ 96
Fig. 28 Still from US (1968) ......................................................................................................... 98
Fig. 29 Still from US (1968) ....................................................................................................... 101
Fig. 30 Stills from US (1968) ...................................................................................................... 103
Fig. 31 Still from US (1968) ....................................................................................................... 105
Fig. 32 Still from US (1968) ....................................................................................................... 107
Fig. 33 Image of “Los Voladores” at the “Frito-Lay/Pepsi Cola Pavilion” from the
Plastichrome guidebook to the fair ............................................................................................. 110
Fig. 34 Gillem’s Army Camp (Three Plate Panorama by Eadweard Muybridge (1873)) ........... 122
Fig. 35 Still from Eadweard Muybridge: Zoopraxographer (Andersen, 1975) showing a
stereograph by Eadweard Muybridge from 1873 ....................................................................... 123
Fig. 36 The Lava Beds, No. 4 (Photography by Muybridge, 1873) ............................................ 132
Fig. 37 Uncle Sam Hunting for the Modoc Flea in his Lava Bed. (Wood engraving. From
Harper’s Weekly, May 10, 1873.] .............................................................................................. 135
Fig. 38 The Lava Beds, No. 6. (Photograph by Muybridge, 1873) ............................................. 137
Fig. 39 A Modoc Warrior on the War Path (Photograph by Muybridge, 1873) ........................ 141
Fig. 40 Photograph of the Anaconda Mine from the UCLA Clark Library’s Montana and
West collection (Date Unkown) .................................................................................................. 147
Fig. 41 Photograph of Clark Library from UCLA Clark Library Montana and West
collection (1981) ......................................................................................................................... 147
Fig. 42 Photograph of the “Our Machines” Installation (Dec. 2022) ......................................... 153

vii
Abstract
My dissertation analyzes critical and self-conscious visions of land, history, and people in
underground and experimental cinema from the Western United States. The dissertation closely
reads and historicizes films from the postwar American Avant-garde, a network of filmmakers
traditionally recognized for their formalist style as well as cooperative and handicraft production
methods. I pay particular attention to both popular and overlooked work by Stan Brakhage,
Bruce Baillie, Alexander Hammid, and Thom Andersen. In doing so, I demonstrate that the
avant-garde’s experiments in film form participated in the vital semantics of placement: their
films spoke about the American West in a language that attempted to match the complexity of
the location itself. For the Revisionist West, the use of montage, camera movement,
experimental projection, and of visual archival material mirrored and commented on the West’s
rapid geographic and cultural transformations in the 1950s, 60s and 70s. I illustrate this
relationship between place and form by introducing a broad tapestry of cultural texts such as
western genre films, popular magazines, 19
th
century photography, festival brochures,
documentaries, and activist literature. The dissertation pays particular attention to how the avant-
garde both drew upon and critically reimagined the western genre’s legacy visions of
indigeneity, landscape, settler masculinity, and the West’s history of settlement. I ultimately
argue that the regionally specific approach not only revises canonical accounts of the avant-
garde’s film aesthetics, but also that a “revisionist” project remains a vital tradition for
contemporary researchers and film artists working in and on the American West. The relevance
of avant-garde experiments in filmic vision of the West is explored through an archival
installation that accompanies the dissertation.
1
Introduction
From my first encounters with the avant-garde, a different vision of the West was
evident. The light bulb moment came when watching Stan Brakhage’s earliest films from 1952-
53, which he shot on location around Denver’s recently built freeway system. David James
screened those films in his last seminar at USC. It was clear that the seeds of Brakhage’s later,
more overtly experimental style were already there. More glaring to me, however, was that
Brakhage was making a film about the Colorado he lived in, refracting his vision of the western
city’s highway urbanism through poetry and theater. Some more digging led me to realize that
his later, more famous works like The Art of Vision were also shot on Denver’s outskirts. As I
develop in the first chapter of this dissertation, a theory began to percolate: perhaps Brakhage’s
hallmark modernism responded to the place that he filmed. As a researcher and filmmaker from
Colorado, I was compelled to follow the thread that these films presented. In the canonical
literature, Brakhage represented a tradition of United States filmmaking that worked outside the
studio system, usually called the avant-garde, often with the prefix postwar, coop, or Anglo
attached.
1
Could it be that other filmmakers from this movement also approached an
experimental vision of the American West, or was Brakhage alone in this project? As I would
find out, he took part in a larger network of conversations about the region’s artistic identity,
history and geography, conversations that would extend within and outside the avant-garde
filmmaking circle.
To answer the above question about a revisionist cohort working in and on the West,
early iterations of my research looked for hard lines of distinction between the avant-garde and
that main genre that claimed the denomination “West”, i.e. the western or westerner. Cowboy

1
For my writing here, I’ve stuck with the label “postwar” to highlight the cultural and historical sensibility that ran
aground in the shadow of Vietnam. More on that in the discussion of the western genre.
2
films, I thought, were naïve. Unlike the avant-garde, Anthony Mann and John Ford represented
the West as a 19
th
century colonial fiction. I wanted filmmaking—and by extension, scholarship
about that filmmaking—to speak either about the contemporary West, or what Patricia Limerick
would name “the legacy of conquest.” By this she meant the real history of the so-called frontier,
a brutal process of genocide, dislocation and resource extraction that still shapes the region’s
identity.
2
What I quickly came to realize instead was that any set of filmmakers thinking about
the West in the mid-twentieth century, or about industrial film production writ large, by
necessity wrangled with the legacy of the western.
3
Indeed it would be ahistorical to understand
the avant-garde filmmakers’ vision as somehow outside of the western genre’s narrative and
geographic sensibility. Westerns built the Hollywood studio system that the avant-garde rejected,
and still ran the show in 1950 when over a hundred western series screened on American
television sets.
45
When Brakhage considered the mining ruin in Unglassed Windows Cast a
Terrible Reflection (1953), or Bruce Baillie quoted Sitting Bull in Mass for the Dakota Sioux
(1964), those legacy signifiers of the “West”
6
unavoidably echoed the monolithic, if waning,
Hollywood genre. The avant-garde’s imagination inherited a cinematic West as much as they
inherited the region’s geographic and historical realities.
However, the avant-garde not only contended with the western’s West, they also
inherited the genre’s revisionist impulse. Recent scholarship on the western genre has

2
Patricia Limerick, The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West (New York: WW Norton &
Company, 1987).
3
It also became clear that the “West” has always lacked a concrete referent, a fact that scholars from across
disciplines had thoroughly explored. This is evident in the many contemporary names: the trans-Mississippi west,
the intermountain west, the Borderlands, unceded territory of Indigenous nations. The list goes on.
4
Brian R. Jacobson, Studios Before the System: Architecture, Technology, and the Emergence of Cinematic Space
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2015), 174.
5
Stephen Kiss, “On TV Westerns of the 1950s and ‘60s,” New York Public Library, last modified December 1,
2012, https://www.nypl.org/blog/2012/12/01/tv-westerns-1950s-and-60s.
6
“West” is capitalized throughout to denote the region American West. The “western” genre is not capitalized to
indicate reference to the film genre and the symbolized West.
3
demonstrated that westerns self-consciously reimagined the frontier throughout the 20
th
century
and into the 21
st
century. Jennifer E. Smyth has shown how the 1930s westerns experimented
with “eclectic, conflicted, multiracial, feminist” format.
7
Janet Walker details the
“historiographic metafiction” of westerns that self-consciously reject the “prettification” of
settlement.
8
Ecocriticism joined the party with its own account of how “changing views of land
use” reshaped the historical telling of events.
9
These projects are united not just by their focus on
the western genre as object of study: they also claim that westerns had always been sites of
revision, that revision was not limited to the sub-genre of “revisionist westerns.” The West, as it
had been cinematically constructed, was by necessity both frozen in time and premised on a set
of hegemonically useful fictions. As culture changed and adapted, so westerns tweaked their
representation of history and place. Still today, a “postwestern” film like Hostiles (2017) thrills
with its attempt to show the Old West anew, to revise the West.
The 60s and 70s were the highpoint of the western genre’s revisionism, and this sets the
stage for the dissertation’s story. If self-consciousness about the filmic frontier had long defined
the genre, the 60s began a tradition of open self-criticism and deconstruction as their own rituals.
The Magnificent Seven started the decade with a retelling of Seven Samurai; by 1967 the ill-fated
western TV show Legend of Custer was successfully removed from broadcast by the National
Congress of American Indians.
10
However, even if the western could not endure as a Hollywood
mainstay, its construction and revision of an American West proved remarkably sticky. The

7
Jennifer Smyth, Reconstructing American Historical Cinema: From Cimarron to Citizen Kane (Lexington:
University of Kentucky Press, 2006), 90.
8
Janet Walker, “Introduction: Westerns through History,” in Westerns: Films through History, Ed. Janet Walker
(New York: Routledge, 2013), 13
9
Robin L. Murray and Joseph K Heumann, Gunfight at the Eco-Corral: Western Cinema and the Environment
(USA: Oklahoma University Press, 2012), 16.
10
Roberta E. Pearson, “white network/red power,” in The Revolution Wasn’t Televised: Sixties Television and
Social Context, ed. Lynn Spigel & Michael Curtin (New York: Routledge, 1997).
4
West was an icon ready-made for its own deconstruction. Andy Warhol’s Lonesome Cowboys
(1968) (and more forcefully Richard Pryor and Mel Brooks in Blazing Saddles (1976))
anticipated that much subsequent “revision” would take place on the level of signifier: no longer
a “historical” genre, its form was still renowned, beautiful, and problematic. Like all good
deconstructions, the force of this work tended to derive from pairing the iconography with what
it opposed: Warhol had his handsome cowboys plie, and Brooks and Pryor made their sheriff
Black. Cowboys, cow towns, Monument Valley, they could all be pushed and pulled, reshaped
and recycled.
By contrast, the filmmakers that I consider here attempted a different type of revision that
saw and understood both the genre’s “signifieds” and the very process of filmic signification. By
the signified here I mean the “West” that the western had used as a film set, as extras, or as
historical referent: that is, both the geographical region in the 20
th
century and its histories of
settlement. To formulate this notion of revision, the dissertation looks to spatial theories of
cinema. Film, Priya Jaikumar articulates, can “break our habit of seeing through space in order to
look into the mechanics of its meaning production. Cinema, depending on how it was used, had
the capacity to offer radically new ways of perceiving how space was socially fetishized and
ossified.”
11
Rather than merely represent the West more “realistically” than the waning western
genre, the avant-garde experimented with the production of meaning and visuality that had
“ossified” its filmic representation. This meant working outside of industrial modes of
production and exhibition; it also meant drawing together seemingly disjointed forms of
representation. Landscape, indigeneity, settler masculinity, and the West’s pastoral promise all
show up in these filmmakers’ films, albeit in fragmented, montaged, and de-familiarized formats.

11
Priya Jaikumar, Where Histories Reside: India as Filmed Space (Durkham: Duke University Press, 2019).
5
Such experimental models betrayed not only the heterogeneity of the avant-garde’s filmmaking
methods—they also pointed to the rapidly transformed and transforming region itself. At the
same time, the avant-garde’s loyalty to the West as a concept betrayed another structuring
principle of their work: this was a settler and Anglo avant-garde, working through their own
attachment to settler mythology.
To name this regional cluster of films and filmmakers, I’ve used the term “The
Revisionist West.” I have chosen the name to indicate not only a critical interest in the West’s
geography, history, and artistic identity. It is also to emphasize the avant-garde’s
experimentation with filmic vision. For the Revisionist West, the use of montage, camera
movement, forms of projection and of visual archival material all speak to and about the West’s
complexities. Put in other words, the dissertation takes great pains to demonstrate that the formal
achievements of the avant-garde, for which they have long been known, participate in the vital
semantics of placement: they speak about the West, albeit in a language that attempts to match
the complexity of the place itself. I illustrate this relationship between place and form by using
available historical and archival material to closely read their films. In many cases, the material
needed to provide such context was ready to hand but neglected. What connected the
superimposed urban cityscapes and Indigenous quotations in Bruce Baillie’s Mass for the Dakota
Sioux? As my second chapter recounts, the quotations of Sitting Bull and Black Elk provide a
key for decoding his visual vocabulary: the film was a provocation aimed at a San Francisco
audience, who fantasized indigeneity as a solution to their urban malaise.
My regionally specific approach contributes to both historical and contemporary
conversations on the avant-garde milieu. The broader story of a transforming West often, I find,
operates as a silent variable in the most canonical accounts of the avant-garde. Readers will
6
notice a recurring dialogue with P. Adam Sitney’s writing, and in particular his famed 1974
study of the American “Visionary Film” tradition in Visionary Film: The American Avant-garde
1943-1978. Part of Sitney’s centrality here is that he was the first and most influential scholar to
connect the filmmakers and films that my dissertation also studies. Stan Brakhage, Bruce Baillie,
and Alexander Hammid are all protagonists of Sitney’s so-called “Visionary Film,” as was Hollis
Frampton, to whom Thom Andersen’s film responded. His book threads their work together with
a story of the avant-garde’s formal development from “a dream unfolded within shifting
perspectives” to “a metaphysics of cinematic perspective itself.”
12
Following and extending
David James’s revision of Sitney, I propose that what bound these protagonists of visionary film
together was their regional location, and their dialectical relationship to Hollywood’s
imagination of place.
13
The transformation of vision in the avant-garde from the 60s into the 70s
corresponded to broader changes in regional geography and cultural identity: the waning western
genre, political and social movements, and transformations in urban development and land use.
14

Put simply, the “Visionary” film set lived in the West, made films about the West, and openly
differentiated themselves from legacy models of filmmaking about the West. This placement
defined their experiments with vision and revision.
More recent studies of the postwar American avant-garde have demonstrated the
persistent questions of gender and race that structure the movement’s film style.
15
In thinking
about these films’ representations of gender, I by no means have written off the long history of

12
P. Adams Sitney, Visionary Film: The American Avant-Garde 1943-2000 (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2002), 15.
13
David E. James, The Most Typical Avant-Garde: History and Geography of Minor Cinemas in Los Angeles,
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005).
14
Here I also challenge James’s account that a critical vision of land use among avant-garde filmmakers would not
begin until after the end of the structural film project from The Most Typical Avant-garde.
15
Chon A. Noriega, “Warhol’s Western: Queering the Frontier Myth.” Aztlán: Journal of Chicano Studies, Vol. 41,
No. 2, Fall 2016, pp. 135-152; Jennifer Peterson, “Barbara Hammer’s Jane Brakhage: Feminism, Nature, and 1970s
Experimental Film,” Feminist Media Histories, Vol. 6, No. 2, 2020. pp. 67-94.
7
criticism that the postwar avant-garde has faced. Barbara Hammer identified in her graduate
thesis film Jane Brakhage (1974), that approaching Stan’s work (or that of his contemporaries)
means wading across a lot of masculine posturing to approach the real motivations, insights, and
entangled stories of how, why, and for whom the films were made. This posturing, however, also
seems to be the point: Sitney himself identified in his reading of Baillie that the masculine
“search for a hero” permeates the various avant-garde visions, and their relationship to the
American West. Like the cowboy hero, the masculine postwar avant-gardist tended to distance
himself from ordinary life, to look in at the urban, settled, and domestic world through a remote
or discontented view, and to look out at the land for purpose.
Drawing on these insights, I participate in the conversation about avant-garde identity
and representation in at least two ways. The first is by studying the avant-garde’s complex
relationship to its own identity, and in particular the crisis of white, masculine and settler identity
that it adopted from westerns. The first chapter considers how when Stan Brakhage performed
the archetype of a “woodsman” in The Art of Vision, he summoned and deconstructed a specific
settler mythology. The second chapter finds another archetype at play in Baillie’s filmmaking:
the urban pilgrim, looking for religious and cultural meaning among American Indians. The third
chapter traces the fatalistic vision of Alexander Hammid and W.H. Auden, whose world’s fair
film U.S. warned that white fantasies of pastoral and suburban escape were no longer viable. The
final chapter studies how Thom Andersen recontextualized Eadweard Muybridge in terms of
histories of settlement; Andersen’s study of Muybridge’s Modoc War photographs
problematized the 19
th
century hero of the 1970s structuralist film set.
The other, related contribution of my dissertation is to study the representation of
Indigenous people in avant-garde film. By the 1960s, American Indians and native culture had
8
become central points of artistic identification for filmmakers, and Indian political struggle had
begun to broadly challenge legacy representations, particularly on film.
16
Despite that fact,
Indian representation in postwar avant-garde film has only recently come under scholarly
scrutiny.
17
The dissertation’s second chapter studies Baillie’s critique of Indian representation in
his mid-60s filmmaking, and the fourth chapter looks at Andersen’s prescient scrutiny of the
Modoc representation in Muybridge’s photography.
The “Revisionist West” framework offers, I think, not only an animating and
underdiscussed dimension to the postwar avant-garde project. It also can offer filmmakers,
writers and exhibitors working in and on the U.S. West another vocabulary for thinking about
nonfiction and experimental film. I attempt to demonstrate the value of critical reflection on the
concept of “revision” as an ongoing regional project through the research in chapter four, as well
as the installation outlined in the conclusion that accompanies my dissertation’s defense.
Although the fourth chapter begins with a close reading of Thom Andersen’s film, I ultimately
use his thesis film as a jumping off point for my own investigation into Muybridge’s Modoc War
photographs. Rather than take Andersen’s revision of Muybridge’s photography as a closed case,
I instead pair his film’s insight with work from contemporary United States histories of
indigenous people (what has been termed New Indian History). Such histories yield an
overlooked picture of Muybridge’s project and its legacy for 20
th
century filmmaking: the images
represented an early, perhaps the earliest, staging of settler violence in the U.S. West for the
camera. That staging is only made apparent when the history of the Modoc War is considered—

16
E.g. Vine Deloria’s discussion of Vine Deloria, Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto (University of
Oklahoma Press, 1969), or the aforementioned television protest led by the NCAI discussed in Roberta E. Pearson,
“white network/red power,” in The Revolution Wasn’t Televised: Sixties Television and Social Context, ed. Lynn
Spigel & Michael Curtin (New York: Routledge, 1997).
17
Johanna Gosse, "Altered States: Psychedelic Experimental Cinema as Border Crossing in Bruce Conner’s
LOOKING FOR MUSHROOMS," The Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, 61.5 (2022).
9
and the images are read in terms of 19
th
century public interest in the genocidal campaign.
Through a revision of Muybridge’s photography, the chapter unearths a foundational moment in
the invention of the western’s cinematic West.
The conclusion details another way I have extended the film research: the chapter
summarizes the conceptualization, planning, and results of an installation that I developed as part
of the dissertation, titled “Our Machines.” The installation exhibited the forgotten world’s fair
film U.S., which the dissertation’s third chapter narrates in terms of its exhibition history at the
1968 fair. The installation was an experiment for me in extending the dissertation’s methodology
to encompass exhibition and the interpretation of archival material in visual format (as many of
the filmmakers I study did in their own time). I ultimately attempted to make “revision” a
multidimensional act with the installation, both by my own effort to re-score and exhibit the film
in a new space, and by asking audiences to critically engage with a forgotten film object. Beyond
what I had anticipated in the planning, the film’s exhibition underscored the film’s complicated
power as an official state film that questioned the very purpose of its exhibition. Contemporary
revision, I found, took on new life in the audiovisual format.

10
Chapter 2: Western Trance: The Complex Pastoral in Stan Brakhage’s Early Colorado
Films, 1952-1964

Trance Today
The 2022 Flaherty Seminar title “Continents of Drifting Clouds” was curated by
Indigenous, experimental filmmaker Sky Hopinka and curator and scholar Almudena Escobar
Lopez. In certain ways, the conference carried forward the Flaherty’s historical commitment to
experimental and non-fiction filmmaking forms. As in past seminars, there were a couple of
screenings each day of short documentary, avant-garde, and poetic films, followed by collective
discussion. The program took part in parallel between a “live” cohort staying at Colgate
University, and an online group who collected to watch and speak in a virtual house, modeled on
the original Flaherty estate. The programmers attempted to foster a parallel world for online
participants, with their own “spaces” and conversations.
As a participant in the online version, I was able to mingle with folks from across the
world. Most attending understood the types of commitments that the programmers were asking
for; the question of experimentalism in film form was deeply tied to an interest in “decolonial”
epistemologies, practices, and histories. Hopinka and Escobar Lopez looked both across the
current film landscape and back into 20
th
century film histories to assemble a story of where
oppositional and experimental filmmaking lives today. The programmers introduced the event on
the Flaherty website in this way:
What we’ve been told is only an extraction, a sequential story by those who wrote history
with their own tools. The colonies are being questioned and in their stead, nebulous
definitions of place, space and power have been set and proffered by filmmakers and
11
artists using their mediums to examine imagined and incidental narratives that are
unbalanced, obsolete, and dangerous in their reach beyond their geographical limits.
This 67
th
Flaherty Film Seminar invites filmmakers whose works reflect the multiple
realities and intrinsic relationships between the local and the global. In times of
responsive acts to settler colonial action and imperialism worldwide, our program offers a
shift of the discussion from ways of seeing to changing the ways we know; promoting
nuance and gesture of space over paternalistic attitudes of classification and domination,
and maybe even welcoming the passive voice.
18

The program definition was itself, of course, quite nebulous—but a guiding ethos seemed to be
the rejection of “paternalistic attitudes of classification” and the embrace of “imagined and
incidental narratives…[that] reach beyond their geographical limits.” In other words, a program
that rejected parochial ideas of identity, voice, and technique to shift “the discussion from ways
of seeing to changing the ways we know”, to find new filmic epistemologies, rather than merely
different points of view.
19

One particularly electric set of films represented this subtle position perhaps most clearly.
The films were short non-fiction pieces by the anonymous Mexican film collective Colectivo Los
Ingrávidos. In terms of its social and political commitments, the group responded to the violence
of the Mexican state, and the effects of neoliberal capitalism on rural and Indigenous people.
That commitment was manifest, for example, in THE SUN QUARTET, PART 2: SAN JUAN
RIVER (2017). The film emerges from the protests that erupted across the country in late 2014,
after the abduction and murder of 43 college students in Iguala, Guererro. The politically active

18
Escobar Lopez, Almudena and Sky Hopinka, “The 67th Flaherty Film Seminar,” The Flaherty, June 2022,
https://theflaherty.org/2022-seminar-online.
19
I suspect this implied a cautious rejection of standpoint epistemology in discussions of film aesthetics.
12
students attended Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers’ college, and their abduction and murder had been
orchestrated by a local mayor as an act of political repression. The film’s core audiovisual
material is documentation of a protest in which the students’ names are shouted one by one, and
protesters march with a massive banner.
Colectivo’s method of representing this protest was notable for its unsettled movement
and montage: the observational footage is rapidly intercut, spliced, overlayed and frayed with
trembling, colorful material. The audio is also montaged, although less frantically, allowing the
voices of the protesters to form a spine through the near-hallucinatory parade of images. The
result is film equally difficult to categorize and sit with; it insists on the simultaneity of sober
mourning, anger and collective expression with its bright, flickering expressionism. The impact
of the film on the seminar attendees was immediately apparent, and almost no other film or films
took up the same discursive weight over the course of the week. If one question rose to the
surface in those series of conversations it was this: how to understand the forceful adoption of
montage technique by this group? What did it mean, and where was it from? This was clearly not
formalism for the sake of aesthetic wonder—the filmmakers’ commitment to unsettling a
received imagination of the students’ murder was as evident as it was complicated to put in
words.
13

Fig. 1 Still from Sun Quartet, Part 2: San Juan River (2017)

A clear series of answers to the questions of both intention and influence has been offered
by the filmmakers themselves, both in Flaherty Q&A and through various writings online. The
collective’s Vimeo page frames their project as such:
Colectivo Los Ingrávidos (Tehuacán, Mexico) arises from the need to dismantle the
audiovisual grammar that the aesthetic-television-cinematic corporativism has used and
uses to effectively guarantee the diffusion of an audiovisual ideology by means of which
a continuous social and perceptive control is maintained over the majority of the
population…
20

20
Colectivo Los Ingrávidos, “Los ingrávidos,” Vimeo, accessed Oct. 17, 2022, https://vimeo.com/user15819885.
14
One of the collective’s members expanded on this framework during an audience Q&A. Their
expressive filmmaking style was motivated by the proposition that, “Hallucination is the axiom
of perception.” The interest in hallucination comes from an ancestral and Indigenous worldview,
“The ancestors engraved cosmovision into stone. We wanted to do the same in a film.” In
contradistinction to “hallucination” are the corporatized models of seeing, the “audiovisual
ideology” that their artist statement warns against. They expanded on this dialectic between
hallucination and controlled perception, claiming “What stabilizes perception are diagrams of
control. A new diagram was imposed after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the imposition of
neoliberalism [in Mexico]”.
21

Fig. 2 Still from Sun Quartet, Part 2: San Juan River (2017)

21
Colectivo Los Ingrávidos, interview by Almudena Escobar Lopez, 67th Flaherty Seminar, Jun 29th, 2022.
15
The collective collaborated with Escobar Lopez to develop this program through a
website titled “Ancestralidad y Trance”. The site is part curation effort, part manifesto, with a
“constellation of films and texts” organized around an illustration of an Aztec sun stone. What
unites the objects hosted on the site is that they “understand filmmaking as a form of ritual that
opens spaces of acute awareness and deep listening.” The notion of trance, and trance
filmmaking, is revealed to be a central thesis or piece of terminology in their work. They write,
Ancestralidad y trance proposes a spatiotemporal trance where myth, violence, ancestry,
precariousness and extinction, generate multiple speculative and multinaturialist
cinematic perspectives. By grounding the viewing process in a material ritualistic object,
we acknowledge the embodiment of mediated online viewing as a form of political
agitation, a trance that the camera awakens, and expands.
22

There is a tremendous amount to unpack about this project. It’s not clear how many short films
Colectivo has produced, but the film distributor Light Cone currently lists 154. The blend of
terminology, conceptual ambition and volume work alone merits a critical attention—let alone
the actual artistic merits of their films themselves.
For the sake of the research here, I wish to highlight one dimension of Colectivo’s work:
the return to trance. I say return because for the history of avant-garde film—indeed for the
lineage of film that Flaherty for many years celebrated and programmed—the notion of “trance”
is hardly new. The term summons the innovations of Maya Deren in the 1940s, and the broader
diffusion of technique in the “American avant-garde” through such figures as Stan Brakhage,
Bruce Baillie, Kenneth Anger, Willie Varela, Chick Strand and Gregory Markopoulos, among
others. The collective explicitly references Brakhage’s trance aesthetics—and his later film

22
Escobar Lopez, Almudena and Colectivo Los Ingrávidos, “About,” Ancestralidad y Trance, Space 538, accessed
October 17th, 2022, https://ancestralidadytrance.space/about/.
16
Dante Quartet (1987) is one of the linked objects on their website. Moreover, it is difficult to
watch the collective’s work without thinking of Brakhage’s colorful, flickering eye, particularly
when (as they do many times) images of nature and sun are rapidly intercut.
There are at least two provocations that result from Colectivo’s explicit return to “trance”
as an aesthetic category. The first, which came up in discussion at Flaherty, is what it means to
revive that lineage of film history. For filmmakers concerned with decolonial and emancipatory
aesthetics, what did it mean to evoke a filmic tradition associated with white, male auteurs
working from the interior of Empire? What did Brakhage, a consummate settler in his self-
representation, have to contribute to 21
st
century forms? As a participant at Flaherty, I listened
more than contributed on this point; the mirroring of Brakhage’s work by Colectivo was almost
inarguable, the questions of why, how, and what to say about it remained contested. Brakhage
signified differently for different participants. Age and location seemed particularly
determinative: he was openly an enemy for those whose practice and thought developed in the
20
th
century U.S.
The second, related provocation that this chapter takes up is how the reference to
Brakhage’s work in this context invites a reconsideration of his filmmaking. Here I re-read the
legacy of “trance” in Brakhage in a manner inspired by the framework proposed by Colectivo los
Ingrávidos. The collective’s understanding of trance in certain ways meshes with the term as it
was originally used by P. Adam Sitney. Following Maya Deren’s writing from the 1960s, Sitney
(and later more forcefully David James) argued for trance as a way of seeing the world prior to,
outside of, and/or in opposition to the stabilizing influence of industrialized cinema’s modes of
perception
23
. If for Colectivo television’s “corporativism” is the enemy, Deren and Brakhage

23
James, David E., “Amateurs in Industry Town: Stan Brakhage and Andy Warhol in Los Angeles,” in Stan
Brakhage: Filmmaker, ed. David E. James (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2005), 61.
17
rejected Hollywood. Despite this shared understanding, the anonymous collective is clear on
something that has historically found relatively little footing in scholarship on experimental
trance aesthetics. That is, that trance is not a solipsistic act—it rather signifies a restless
relationship to the represented world. Fragmenting, montaging and destabilizing the film’s
perspective (to paraphrase Henri Lefebvre) shatters the transparency of both space and history. A
memory of disappeared students was not allowed to rest as a buried and settled fact—the trance
film insisted on its restless “agitation” in the viewer’s own mind. For Brakhage in Colorado, the
legacy of trance film defined to his own unsettled film epistemology, a complex vision of place
at odds with its Hollywood representation.

The Mining Films
The idea that Stan Brakhage, perhaps the American avant-garde filmmaker of his period,
would make work outside of a major urban center in the American West has found its way into
canonical accounts in strange ways. He has been figured as either a sort of romantic poet
retreating into the American wilderness, or as someone de facto embedded in Chicago, New
York, San Francisco and Los Angeles through travel and influence. To compound this
misrecognition, Brakhage’s two earliest films—both shot in Colorado—are overlooked
keystones for the subsequent two decades of his work. The films I refer to are his very first
Interim (1952), and his later narrative short Unglassed Windows Cast a Terrible Reflection
(1953). The films point to an agenda for Brakhage’s relationship to Colorado, and more
specifically the front range of Colorado where most of his films were shot. Brakhage’s
relationship has previously been understood in reductive terms that diminish both his interest in
the immediate location, and the history and geography of the location itself.
18
These two early films were first overlooked by P. Adams Sitney in his 1974 book
Visionary Film. He argues there that Brakhage’s earliest films represent a rudimentary, more
theatrical version of the era’s “trance film”, while the decade later Mothlight, Dogstar Man and
the Song films are major statements in the turn toward “lyrical” style and “mythopoetic”
imagination. Sitney convincingly narrates the filmmaker’s powerful stylistic evolution in this
period, and how by Anticipation of the Night (1958), Brakhage had invented a new model of
filmmaking that would anticipate and influence an entire generation (indeed several generations).
The hallmark of this evolution was the adoption of a “first-person” vision, in which the
filmmaker’s movements of thought and body were integrated with the camera itself. Sitney
writes:
[Brakhage] proceeds with a program for bringing the camera into the twentieth century
by distorting its lens, obliterating perspective, discarding the tripod, altering camera
speeds, and changing film stocks. He calls for these home-made modifications in the
name of the eye, demanding of the filmmaker (actually of himself) a dedication to what
he actually sees, not what he has been taught to see or thinks he should see.
24

Evaluated on such criteria, Interim and Unglassed Windows certainly represent a more primitive
stage in Brakhage’s work, in which he has not yet thrown out tripods and stories—but rather still
follows Maya Deren’s earlier model of the trance film.
In his haste to celebrate the style of these later, “lyrical” films, Sitney set a precedent for
critical readings of Brakhage to neglect Interim and Unglassed Windows as mere sidebars to, or
crude anticipations of, Brakhage’s main project. Given the enormous depth of Brakhage’s
subsequent oeuvre, this is also an understandable impulse. Why linger in 1952, when there is half

24
P. Adams Sitney, Visionary Film: The American Avant-Garde 1943-2000 (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2002), 167.
19
a century and 400 films to reckon with? However, the neglect of the first films also has centrally
to do with the ontology of the image that Sitney proposes: the effect of Brakhage’s radical formal
inventions, he argues, is so “we know how he is reacting to his vision”.
25
The historical world
that the camera’s image captures is ancillary to how it is captured, and thus for Sitney as
Brakhage’s films become more abstract, rapid, and flattened in the lyrical period, the closer they
are to meaning something. He writes:
In the lyrical film, as Brakhage fashioned it, the space of the trance film, that long
receding diagonal which the filmmakers inherited from the Lumieres, transforms itself
into the flattened space of the Abstract Expressionist painting. The field of vision, depth
and vanishing point become possible, but exceptional, options…Finally, the film-maker
working in the lyrical mode affirms the actual flatness and whiteness of the screen,
rejecting for the most part its traditional use as a window into illusion.
26

There is a now obvious blind spot in Sitney’s writing that perhaps is responsible for generation
of critical disagreement over Brakhage’s films. Brakhage’s camera was a window not merely to
“illusion”, of course, but also to the real, historical world that it witnessed. This is an especially
salient fact for Brakhage, since he tended to film the unvarnished goings on of his home in Lump
Gulch, Colorado, and the lives of his wife Jane and their children. Would Jonathan Rosenbaum’s
famous critique that the American Romantic avant-garde “reduces the universe to a list of male
possessions: This is my wife, my child, my gun, my dog…” cut so deeply, if the canonical
interpretation of those films hadn’t rejected the significance of the filmmaker’s wife and dog a
priori?
27
Probably not.

25
Sitney, Visionary Film, 160.
26
Sitney, Visionary Film, 160.
27
Jonathan Rosenbaum, Film: The Front Line 1983 (Denver: Arden Press, 1983), 121.
20
A recent spate of scholarship has compounded Sitney’s misrecognition. Several scholars
have re-theorized Maya Deren’s writing and filmography to consider the exogenous influences
and theoretical ambitions of her project. Rather than a pre-cursor to experiments in formal
abstraction, Deren’s notion of trance represent both a borrowed model of expression—and an
experiment with alternative and collectivist modes of perception. At the core of this revision is
an attention to how Deren’s trance emerged from her visits to Haiti, and from observation of
religious ritual. Michael Frierson writes in his chapter on Deren “Dream and Ritual: Tarkovsky
and Deren”:
After moving to Greenwich Village, Maya worked as a freelance photographer and then
as a manager and publicist for the choreographer Katherine Dunham. Dunham was
studying Caribbean dance and culture, and had recently completed her own master’s
thesis in anthropology on the Haitian dance using 16mm film to capture dances and soe
of the ceremonies for her research.
28

Frierson, alongside other scholars interested in Deren’s work, ultimately sees the imprint of that
history in her films’ choreography. He writes, “Deren is arguing here that film is essentially a
time art, experienced like music or dance each time as a recreation, as it becomes, rather than a
series of dimensional, pictorial compositions within a frame.”
29
Scholar Patricia Feise Mahnkopp
argues for a distinctively “intersubjective” epistemology that emerges from Deren’s process in
her chapter Maya Deren’s Claim for the ‘Ritualistic’ Film or Fusing the Sacred and the Profane
for the Sake of the Real:
…Deren advocated, in an almost postmodern manner, a techno-consciousness model of
film as art, one which rests both upon the capacities of the medium and the potential of

28
Michael Frierson, Film and Video Editing Theory (New York: Routledge, 2018), 250.
29
Frierson, Film and Video Editing Theory, 257.
21
the human mind and stresses the significance of a creative treatment of reality…her aim
was not to display distortions from socio-culturally or subjectively generated) reality, but
to foster—intersubjectively—modes of perception/experiences, which might be,
epistemologically speaking, more appropriate to the holistic-manifold real she sought to
evolve.
30

Mahnkopp uses this framework (generated in part from a close reading of Deren’s writings), to
differentiate her from the surrealist tradition, and to argue for the “superconscious perception” in
Deren’s filmmaking. What scholars have largely agreed on are that ecstatic modes of bodily
movement, rejection of industrialized production, and an exploration of the camera’s capacity for
illusion are all hallmarks of Deren’s pathbreaking film style. Brakhage was directly influenced
by Deren when he visited her New York City apartment in the 1950s, and embraced her thesis
that film art must reject Hollywood convention.
31
Moreover, he frequently meditated on the
rejection of enlightenment principles of stable visual realism, and famously argued for his film’s
proximity to the “real” in a way unattainable by such inherited conventions of representation.
From his famed 1964 essay Metaphors on Vision, “Imagine an eye unruled by man-made laws of
perspective, an eye unprejudiced by compositional logic…How many colors of grass to the
crawling baby unaware of ‘Green’?”
32

In what follows, I argue that the trance aesthetics of Brakhage’s first films explored the
question that Sitney persistently overlooks: what is the relationship between avant-garde film and
the historical world that the film inevitably also represents? In each film, Brakhage repurposes

30
Patricia Feise-Mahnkopp, “Maya Deren’s Claim for the ‘Ritualistic’ Film or Fusing the Sacred and Profane for
the Sake of the Real,” in The Real of Reality: The Realist Turn in Contemporary Film Theory, ed. Reeh-Peters,
Christine, Stefan W. Schmidt and Peter Weibel (Brill, 2021), 251.
31
James, “Amateurs in Industry Town,” 64.
32
Stan Brakhage, “Metaphors on Vision,” in Essential Brakhage: Selected writings on filmmaking by Stan
Brakhage, ed. McPherson, Bruce R. (New York: McPherson, 2001), 12.
22
the “trance” as a formal and conceptual response to the filmmaker’s specific spatial context: the
urbanized West of Colorado’s front range. The 24-minute Interim begins with an extreme long
shot of a young man’s walk along the Denver freeway system. The lead, played by Brakhage’s
friend Walter Newcomb, pauses briefly at the top of an overpass bridge. The camera shifts to a
behind the shoulder view off the bridge to a nearby cow farm. Already in this first sequence,
Brakhage has set up a dialectic that seems to unconsciously motivate the laconic protagonist: the
long shot isolates the solitary pedestrian amidst the roar of freeway traffic, but the behind the
shoulder brings us into identification as he looks out and away at the pastoral scene below.

Fig. 3 Still from Interim (1952)

The protagonist’s solution foreshadows Brakhage’s own response to his urban alienation
a few years hence: to seek romantic love and spiritual isolation in the shadow of Denver’s urban
sprawl. Newcomb’s character descends the stairs off the backside of the overpass and proceeds
to walk among the massive columns underneath. He there encounters a young woman, and the
two silently stroll as the soundtrack shifts from the roar of traffic to a swelling score by the
23
young James Tenney, a close of friend of Brakhage. The tension between urban and pastoral
scenery persists throughout the film, as the young romantics are stopped by a hurtling train,
shout into the bridge’s dark underpass, and hold hands by a stream. They ultimately take refuge
from a rainstorm in some sort of ruin—a motif that would appear again, more forcefully and
troublingly in Unglassed Windows. The moment of intimacy cannot be sustained beyond the
storm, and the film concludes with the lover’s separation as the protagonist ascends stairs to the
highway above.

Fig. 4 Still from Interim (1952)

There are clear mythic overtones to the film’s story, most notably an allusion to
Orpheus’s descent into the underworld for Persephone. In a seminar from 1975, Brakhage
lectured on the profound influence that Jean Cocteau’s Orpheus trilogy had on his early
24
filmmaking sensibilities, saying that the trilogy “first gave me the knowledge that film could
possibly be an art form”, and especially an art form which gave an “answer” to Walt Disney
(Brakhage, 11:00).
33
Cocteau’s trilogy culminated in 1950 with his feature Orphée, a film that
projects the myth onto a surrealistic vision of postwar France. Like his contemporaries from the
period, Cocteau relied heavily on the city’s urban fabric for the film’s meaning. Orpheus’s saga
becomes a pretext to explore memories of occupied France amidst the nascent fast-paced
urbanism of the late 1940’s, for example setting its nighttime underworld in the ruins of a former
military academy near Versailles.
If Brakhage inherited Cocteau’s taste for the Orpheus myth, he also inherited his insight
to overlay myth on the urban landscapes of technologized modernity. The effect of doing so
differs dramatically from what Cocteau achieves, however, since Interim thinks centrally about
how to confront, or escape, the alienation of the American postwar cityscape. The film poses a
simple question by way of its myth: what are we meant to do with the space underneath the
freeway? The new Western landscape of multilane highways, overpasses and drainage ditches
had left abundant negative space without obvious social meaning. In Interim, these spaces
become the synthesis of the dialectic between urban and pastoral; they are also the underworld
that Orpheus must visit, and ultimately a heterotopia that inspires the protagonist to break with
the highway’s reality principle.
As Brakhage cultivated this move, for cinema to experiment in the gaps of Colorado’s
western urban landscape, he flirts with both sides of Leo Marx’s famous formulation of

33
Stan Brakhage, Stan Brakhage on Jean Cocteau and Kenneth Anger #26, lecture by Stan Brakhage (Colorado:
University of Colorado, 1975), recorded lecture, 11:00.
https://cudl.colorado.edu/luna/servlet/detail/UCBOULDERCB1~71~71~1086107~131838:Stan-Brakhage-on-Jean-
Cocteau-and-
K%3Fsort%3Didentifier%252Ctitle%252Cdate%252Ccreator?qvq=q:cocteau;sort:identifier%2Ctitle%2Cdate%2Cc
reator;lc:UCBOULDERCB1~71~71&mi=4&trs=12
25
American pastoralism. Marx argued that modernity’s culture of machines had led to both a
simple longing for a fantasy of harmony with nature, and a more “complex” pastoralism that
doesn’t try to escape into a fantasy of the natural world, but rather meditates on “the machine’s
sudden appearance in the landscape…”.
34
An affinity for the natural world certainly permeates
Brakhage’s films. Indeed, his later move to a cabin near Boulder could be read as a form of the
naïve pastoralism criticized by Marx—or at least, a Romantic rejection of the complex pastoral
landscape that his earlier films openly engaged. Before turning to those films, however, I instead
consider here how Interim opens the door for a different reading of Brakhage’s relationship to
urban Colorado: in this view, machines had long already transformed the garden, what was left is
to look at the gaps and fissures in the post-pastoral social space. Trance, and the evocation of
myth, is a vehicle for this visual renewal and exploration.
Unglassed Window Cast a Terrible Reflection reproduced the general structure set out by
Interim, while expanding the visual and technical vocabulary of Brakhage’s trance. The film also
finds a new roadside site for its séance: a mining ruin. The film was written, directed and shot by
Brakhage, all in the years 1952-3, and once again casting his friend Walter Newcomb. It begins
with a foreboding montage of a large mining complex—a montage that with each shot moves
closer in on the mine’s blown out windows, his inspiration for the title. The shot of the mine’s
unglassed windows is then match cut with the “glassed” windows of a car windshield. The car
shot introduces the film’s protagonists, a group of young people on a car journey up one of
Colorado’s mountain roads. The group stops to confront the massive ruin when their car breaks
down, and the site of the abandoned relic slowly draws them in. Growing up in Colorado, such a
scene was ominous and familiar: the old mine sites were fascinating, if dangerous elements of

34
Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Idea in America (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2000), 16.
26
the landscape. The match cut and opening montage suggest another theme borrowed from his
work on Interim, the loss of innocence effected or psychic boundaries at the hands of the
Colorado highway system.
Brakhage’s focus on the mine site in Unglassed Windows emerged from a brief chapter in
his early biography, after he’d dropped out of Dartmouth but before he moved to San Francisco.
Brakhage’s style would evolve in leaps and bounds after connecting with Kenneth Anger and
Robert Duncan in San Francisco; in 1953, however, the raw elements that would define his most
notable work are all on display. Those are an interest in visual and theatrical modernism, in
Colorado’s complex pastoral, and in the formal possibilities of the trance aesthetic. James
Tenney recounts this period of their collaboration:
It was around this time that we met Angelo DiBenedetto, an older and established painter
living in the mountains in the former gold-mining town of Central City. The following
summer (1953), several members of the group decided to form a theatrical troupe, giving
plays (Chekhov, Shaw, etc.) in a tent on a lot next to Angelo’s huge old stone house-
studio, and they rented a house nearby to live in for the summer…It was here, during that
summer that Stan’s next film, with the ungainly title Unglassed Windows Cast a Terrible
Reflection, was made.
35

Brakhage also recalled the importance of this summer in a late interview from 1997:
I was tremendously involved with and ran a theatre in Central City, Colorado across one
whole summer. We did Strindberg, Gertrude Stein, Chekhov. Entirely one-act plays in
that summer. I really was, for a while, assuming I was going into the theatre. So when I
did make those early pieces that had some narrative to them, like The Way to Shadow

35
James Tenney, “Brakhage Memoir,” in Stan Brakhage: Filmmaker ed. David E. James (Philadelphia: Temple
University Press, 2005), 58.
27
Garden, Reflections on Black, and so forth, these were really very inspired by Strindberg
maybe above all else.
36

If Cocteau’s romanticism shaped Brakhage’s first trance film, he followed Strindberg’s
pessimistic occultism in Unglassed Windows. He also took the iconic architecture from Central
City’s late 19
th
century gold rush as visual template, and alongside Benedetto, began to
investigate the place of abstraction in the modern(ist) West.

Fig. 5 Still from Unglassed Windows Cast a Terrible Reflection (1953)

The film’s travelers are inexplicably drawn to and inside the mining complex as they wait
on their broken down car. Much like the highway underpass, the mine building’s interior quickly
liberates the protagonists’ psychic space—and the diegetic space of the camera. The characters’
motives become unclear once inside, as they wander room to room, touching walls, throwing
rocks and following reflections of light. The disorientation intensifies as time goes on and is

36
Jerry Johnson, “Film at Wit’s End: An Interview with Stan Brakhage,” The Austin Chronicle (Austin, TX), Sept.
12, 1997, https://www.austinchronicle.com/screens/1997-09-12/518407/.
28
increasingly mirrored by Brakhage’s use of slow motion, canted angles and in one pivotal scene,
a camera that rotates horizontally to mimic the movement of a neglected dynamo. At the film’s
climax, two male characters are drawn into an argument that culminates in a murder-suicide. The
outburst of violence is never explained except implicitly as an effect of the building itself. The
abandoned mine is refigured as an animating and destabilizing force, and like the highway
overpass, a portal to a trance-world standing in plain sight.
Although the film’s murder-suicide constitutes a dramatic denouement, the moment of
aesthetic discovery for Brakhage comes earlier. Up to this point, about 18 minutes into the film,
the young people had moved playfully around the building, shouting, exploring and even reading
a book amidst the exposed beams. The film’s leading woman, however, moves increasingly up
and into the ruin, as if looking for something in particular. The camera movements become
expressionistic as she moves upwards: Brakhage foregoes his tripod for handheld, POV tracking.
The atmosphere is intensified by extreme, sometimes out of focus close ups of the walls. The
viewer is brought into the woman’s disturbed psychological space—the onset of a trance that
would come to ruinously disturb the entire group. Eventually she finds herself in a room with a
large piece of mining machinery. We know from her pantomimed horror that this is the locus of
what has unsettled her. As she stares at a giant wheel shaft, her head cocks to the left, and the cut
matches her movement with a canted and rotating shot of the wheel itself. She eventually backs
away in horror, but the damage is done, there can be no easy return to sober perspective. The
sequence begs the question: does the wheel move? Or has she just imagined it? And above all
else, why the horror?
Following Daniel Morgan’s recent writing on camera movement, I hypothesize that the
character’s horror is fundamentally epistemic. She, standing in for Brakhage, has recognized a
29
fact about wheeled machines: as cameras, they are not beholden to stable perspective. The
inanimate, the ineffable and the occult can all find their expression through a camera’s
movement and montage. Static landscape can suddenly look like something else entirely—this is
the moving image’s intervention on the longer photographic and landscape tradition. Morgan’s
2016 article Where are we?: camera movements and the problem of point of view insists on this
fact about camera movement: it is not easily compatible with theories of point of view. The neat
epistemology, in which we come to know the film’s world by identifying with its gaze, is
destabilized by all the ways a camera can and does move. What does the movement correspond
to, and how does it allow the viewer to know something about the filmic world? He ultimately
lands on the notion of epistemic fantasy: “we are not ‘at’ the viewpoint established by the
camera, nor that of a character. Instead, we can simultaneously inhabit multiple positions within
the world of film.”
37
For Brakhage, the mine’s machinic wheel evoked this possibility of
multiple, incongruous perspectives—a mode of filmmaking more suited to the incongruities of
his own life, and the place he lived.

37
Daniel Morgan, “Where Are We?: Camera Movements and the Problem of Point of View,” New Review of Film
and Television Studies 14:2 (2017): 238.
30

Fig. 6 Still from Unglassed Windows Cast a Terrible Reflection (1953)

Both Interim and Unglassed Windows ultimately explore the question of landscape’s
autonomy, an aesthetic possibility for landscape singular to the moving picture. Neither film is
content with letting the mundane scenery of a car window rest unnoticed—in both films
Brakhage explores the narrative motif of pedestrians exiting the roadway to enter neglected
places, and places uniquely symptomatic of the American West’s spatial modernity. This
intrusion on places usually consigned to roadside neglect destabilizes both narrative and visual
form; indeed, place becomes the very vehicle for an experimental cinema to emerge. To say that
the landscape here is “autonomous” revises the term popularly set out by Martin Lefebvre, for
whom cinema can uniquely reveal the way humans dwell in and belong to landscape. The key to
this autonomy, Lefebvre argues, is for cinematic narrative to invite a spectator’s contemplation
and immersion. He writes:
31
...landscape seems to require a form of contemplative autonomy, a severing of narrative
subservience, while on the other hand it seems to acquire its significance relative to our
ability to immerse ourselves in it and to see it—or interpret it—as a representation of
dwelling thanks, in no small measure, to narrative.
38

Brakhage’s films proposed a more radical autonomy than Lefebvre: the landscape not only
emerges from the background (of screen or roadway), in doing so it intervenes on the psychic
continuity of the films’ protagonists. Set in the urbanized, polluted and alienating landscapes of
the 20
th
century American West, Brakhage’s films point to the impossibility of simple
“dwelling” that Lefebvre’s project borrows from Martin Heidegger. The nostalgic settler fantasy
of dwelling in Western landscapes is the province of the western genre; as Brakhage would
continue to make films in Colorado, he would explore a vision of the West that was fragmented,
multimodal, and opposed to any unified spatial vision.

Settler Modernism
On the one hand, if Brakhage’s earliest films began to experiment with trance-like visions
of Colorado’s complicated post-pastoral landscape, the films that followed his return to the state
further destabilized the camera’s visual epistemology. These films, his early, prominent
statements in what Sitney would call his “lyric” and “mythopoetic” style, represented a heady
amalgamation of techniques. The common denominator was Brakhage’s proximity to the place
he lived in, both to the actual terrain, and to the intellectual culture that surrounded him. The
films lack any guiding thesis about that land, so much as they point to possibilities for its
representation: landscape photography united modernity’s romantic and scientific sensibilities

38
Martin Lefebvre, “On Landscape in Narrative Cinema,” Canadian Journal of Film Studies 20, no. 1 (2011): 74.
32
(as well, of course, as imperialist). Brakhage’s project instead splits and scrambles that neat
convergence. The impoverished young filmmaker’s goal seemed to be to give landscape the
autonomy to no longer be landscape. This relationship to place, I argue, gives an alternative,
overlooked account of the stylistic ingenuity that characterized Mothlight and Dog Star Man: the
film strip was a heterogenous vision of Colorado, an unreconstructed assemblage of the 1960s
West.
On the other, following the work of Jennifer Peterson and her critical engagement with
Barbara Hammer’s Jane Brakhage (1973), it is necessary to also to scrutinize Brakhage’s self-
mythologization from this period. Peterson’s 2020 article “Barbara Hammer’s Jane Brakhage:
Feminism, Nature, and 1970s Experimental Film” is a cornerstone of contemporary Brakhage
scholarship, even if its subject isn’t Stan. Peterson unpacks Hammer’s portrait of Jane, which
“[refuses] the visualization of women as primarily sexual and reproductive bodies” as Stan’s
films had done over and again.
39
Hammer does so in her road trip film by engaging dialogically
with Jane around the couple’s shared home in Lump Gulch. Peterson ultimately finds that
Hammer’s film both anticipates contemporary feminist conversations and shows the
“posthumanist” thinking in Jane which would deeply inflect Stan’s work. My research here takes
Peterson’s account as a model for thinking about Stan Brakhage: rather than foreground the
collaborations that made possible his experimental vision, in Stan’s work they are either omitted
or overtly suppressed. The transformation of Jane on film into a “sexual and reproductive body”
attached to (for example) the Dog Star Man is undoubtedly the most egregious. This chapter
considers other significant collaborations that defined the “organic” vision of the lone
woodsman. They are so many, and so thoroughly debunk his frontiersman image, that like with

39
Jennifer Peterson, “Barbara Hammer’s Jane Brakhage: Feminism, Nature, and 1970s Experimental Film,”
Feminist Media Histories 6, No. 2 (2020): 85.
33
Jane, it becomes necessary to see the self-stylized woodsman as an active repression of his
multimodal and thoroughly modern connection to the place.
By the late 1950s, Stan had taken up residence in Colorado’s mountain landscape, at first
living with Jane’s parents in a small house above Boulder, before moving in the 60s to their
famed cabin in Lump Gulch (also above Boulder, if a few miles deeper in the woods). An
unpublished 1999 interview by filmmaker Colin Still found in his University of Colorado archive
reveals the profound and complicated effect that the location had on his filmmaking in the early
60s. This period of Brakhage’s life was defined by poverty, where he struggled to pay the bills
through a series of odd jobs. His unemployment in meant ample time to spend in the
mountainous woodlands that define Boulder’s hinterland: above the city is a renowned swath of
park land, variously managed by municipal, state and federal land offices. Both Jane’s parents’
house and the cabin at Lump Gulch were nestled inside of this dense network of protected forest,
and one of Stan Brakhage’s main activities was chopping and gathering wood. That chore was
(quite obviously) a primary influence for the narrative structure of Dog Star Man. Brakhage
dictated in the late interview:
I remember I set about chopping and dragging back to the house fire wood which Jane’s
parents were burning ten years later, and this and posing naked for the [University of
Colorado] students were my jobs. And out of that suddenly rose into my mind the
possible making of an image of all human, a kind of epic image of being human.
40

He ultimately executed this image of “being human” by filming himself (and having his wife
Jane film him) struggling across snowy embankments and eventually chopping wood. The

40
Stan Brakhage, interview by Colin Still, 1999, p. 26 of “Stan Brakhage: The Light of the Dance,” transcript,
University of Colorado Stan Brakhage Archives, Box 169, Folder 2, University of Colorado Libraries, Rare and
Distinctive Collections.
34
humble project’s camera and film stock would come from another source of temporary
employment, a publicly funded film meant to booster the very place that he lived in:
As it happened then there came a commercial film shoot to do two films for the Colorado
Dept of Publicity and Advertising, kind of tourist attraction films that would involve
myths and which I could photograph very much by myself with an Arriflex and my own
camera—I had still the Bell and Howell—and an Arriflex and lights and Jane’s help. So I
was doing myths for Colorado department of Publicity and Advertising and getting
enough money and filming costs that I could begin the project of ‘Dog Star Man’.
41

The exact tourist films that Brakhage worked on are lost, but already in these few details about
the film’s genesis, a contradictory picture emerges of the simple “story” that was augmented and
embellished into its 78-minute, final version (released in five parts between 1961 and 1964). The
“mythic” woodsman of Dog Star Man was the stylized self-representation of an artist embedded
in Colorado’s 1960s, exurban periphery, and the project itself was made possible by state-funded
efforts to put its natural scenery on film. By his own telling, the trance-like focus that he would
induce for his filming had constantly to be balanced with the day-to-day work of childcare,
teaching and the other mundanities of life in Boulder’s exurbs.
42

41
Stan Brakhage, interview by Colin Still, 1999, p. 26 of “Stan Brakhage: The Light of the Dance,” transcript,
University of Colorado Stan Brakhage Archives, Box 169, Folder 2, University of Colorado Libraries, Rare and
Distinctive Collections.
42
Stan Brakhage, ”Stan Brakhage: The Myth of the Mountain Man” March 1997, Video Interview with Colin Still,
Boulder, Colorado, 8:42, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I-uocvG-JQE&t=266s

35

Fig. 7 Still from Dog Star Man: Part I (1962)

Brakhage’s representation of himself in this film as both isolated woodsman and as
universal man shaped the reception of his films thereafter. Evidence of this reception abounds,
although I will focus on a few critical data points here. As discussed in Chapter 2 of this
dissertation, in 1963 Bruce Baillie’s Canyon Cinema paired Brakhage’s films with 3:10 to Yuma
(1957). Such a pairing would follow years of correspondence between Brakhage and Canyon
Cinema, and shows an implicit transformation of the Colorado woodsman into a frontiersman
(by 1963 most of Dog Star Man had been made and was being screened at art house venues.) A
more influential strain, however, saw Brakhage’s work and his placement in the natural world as
highly analogous to the outdoor sojourns of the Romantics. P. Adam Sitney’s Visionary Film set
the stage for viewing Dog Star Man as the archetypal triumph of this neo-Romantic style:
Dog Star Man elaborates in mythic, almost systematic terms, the worldview of the lyrical
films. More than any other work of the American avant-garde film, it stations itself
36
within the rhetoric of Romanticism, describing the birth of consciousness, the cycle of
seasons, man’s struggle with nature, and sexual balance in the visual evocation of a fallen
titan bearing the cosmic name of the Dog Star Man.
43

An extensive formal analysis of the film is evidence for this claim; at its core is a celebration of
Brakhage’s montaging and superimposition of images. The figure of the artist as struggling
woodsman is elevated to its transcendent, mythic meaning through associated images:
After an interlude of unraveling landscapes with expositions of internal organs, especially
the heart, comes the most concentrated episode in the film: here we see the Dog Star Man
struggling with the tree—the central act of the film according to the film-maker’s
argument…For the rest of the film, that moment of confrontation, hinted at here, is the
central absent vortex around which the actions revolve.
44

Sitney borrows the term “vortex” from Ezra Pound, who he quotes to say “The image is not an
idea” but instead “a VORTEX, from which and through which, and into which ideas are
constantly rushing.”
45
Brakhage cutting a tree is overdetermined with poetic meaning, the
generative font of the film’s “lyrical” and mythic dream work.
This rhetorical move, which centers Brakhage as woodsman and Romantic, was
reinscribed by David James in his neo-Marxist re-reading of the filmmaker. James points out an
important shortcoming of Sitney’s work: that Sitney ignores Brakhage’s relationship to
Hollywood and its industrialized means of cinematic production. By focusing exclusively on the
visual form and its epistemological effects, James accuses Sitney of an “incomplete”
understanding of Brakhage’s relationship to Romanticism. James’s argument here is dazzling for

43
Sitney, Visionary Film, 190.
44
Sitney, Visionary Film, 195.
45
Sitney, Visionary Film, 196.
37
its thorough understanding of what the Romantic mode was, and how it was produced specific
historical and material conditions. He writes of the poet in mid-nineteenth century England:
For it is at this point that alienation in its modern form began to dominate both social and
intellectual life as simultaneously the poet was displaced from a corroborative social
environment (the local community—village, coffee-house, or court) to confront the
commodification of his work, now obliged to take its place as one item among many in a
competitive market place. This social dislocation, compounded by the difficulty of
sustaining utopian republican aspirations after failure of the revolutionary movements
throughout Europe, precipitated the artist into the scrutiny of his own consciousness and
allowed him to elevate the drama of that scrutiny into an end in itself, the proper function
of art.
46

James’s analysis of Romanticism is meant set up two arguments about Brakhage: the first, that
his cinema must be read as the work of an “individual artist” working outside of “the technology
and labor practices of Hollywood.”
47
Although Brakhage did try his hand at Hollywood
production before his move to Colorado, by the time of Dog Star Man he worked (mostly)
outside of any system of commercial filmmaking.
48

The other argument is that by working outside of an alienating, urban setting, Brakhage’s
film could develop a more “organic” mode of expression. He was unfettered not only by the
constraints of commercial production, but also by the artifice of “post-Renaissance models of

46
David James, “The Film-maker as Romantic Poet: Brakhage and Olson,” Film Quarterly 35, No. 3 (Spring,
1982): 36.
47
James, “The Film-maker as Romantic Poet,” 39.
48
His work on publicity films for the state and collaboration on small documentary projects in this period as notable
exceptions.
38
perception”. James argues that the key to this de-alienation (Marxian species-being?) was living
in the Colorado woods. He writes:
The ideal of an anti-technological, organically human cinema, alternative but not
oppositional to Hollywood, was lived by Brakhage in his retreat from the city to a
nineteenth-century log cabin in the Colorado wilderness, where with his family he could
be most free from the dominant categories of urban life, free to re-create the Romantic
problematique…That situation, prefigured 150 years before in, for example,
Wordsworth’s retreat to Grasmere with his sister and Coleridge, ensured that the
parameters of his aesthetic would remain within the general terms of Romanticism.
49

In James’s revision of Sitney, Brakhage’s self-mythologization both in the film and in his writing
had become a guiding principle for understanding his broader oeuvre. Because Brakhage lived in
the woods, was poor, and represented himself as a man in relative isolation, James reads his
films ultimately as untainted confrontations between nature and his own mind—as acts of
aesthetic emancipation from the alienating effects of technology, urbanism and the whole
radically shifting social world of the 1960s.
The questions that motivate this part of the chapter are: how does the perspective
proposed by Baillie, to read Brakhage as performing the American frontiersman or settler rather
than the Anglo poet, shift a reading of his work? And secondly, how would such an adjustment
pair with an extension of Peterson’s insight—that Brakhage’s masculinist aesthetics suppressed
the more complex and relational conditions that produced his work? The questions are intimately
connected, I propose, and make sense in the context of the complex pastoralism that defined his
early work. The settler, cowboy or frontiersman imaginary is different from the Romantic poet in

49
James, “The Film-maker as Romantic Poet,” 38.
39
a very concrete way: while both celebrate unmediated experience, the settler is wedded to
frontier ideology, the story that the western genre rehearsed. Genre scholar Jane Tompkins
writes, “For Westerns believe that reality is material, not spiritual; they are obsessed with pain
and celebrate the suppression of feeling; their taciturn heroes want to dominate the land, and
sometimes to merge with it completely—they are trying to get away from other people and
themselves.”
50
To be “organically human” and to reject “modern alienation”, as James saw in
Brakhage, for the frontiersman necessarily also means domination motivated by a fantasy of
vulnerability, and an indulgence in masculine suffering. Brakhage’s woodsman’s performative
struggle up the Colorado slope was a fundamental gesture.
The film, however, is not merely a vision of a simulated frontier. As Sitney correctly
identified, the woodsman’s meaning produced through montage with the radical otherness of
bodies, landscapes, solar flares, and its colorful abstractions. Here, I think, is where Brakhage’s
complex pastoralism continued to reign: as I will demonstrate, the film nakedly deconstructs its
own settler fantasy. Whether or not Brakhage hoped for this deconstruction is unclear.
Nonetheless, the traces not only of his partnership with Jane, but also with the various cultural
and scientific institutions that he collaborated with permeate and define the film’s montaged
“vortex”. Why (paraphrasing James) would an anti-technological and isolated woodsman have
advanced solar flare photography, or high-resolution slides of human viscera? Brakhage’s
woodsman instead followed the course of the other frontier myths from this period—that is,
profound transformation and modernization—while also holding on to its aesthetic and
conceptual purchase. In what follows, I will trace out a few visual coordinates of Brakhage’s
settler modernism.

50
Jane Tompkins, West of Everything: the Inner Life of Westerns (Oxford: Oxford University of Press, 1992), 7.
40
For its rejection of one-point perspective, industrial modes of production and an
embrasure of the natural world, Mothlight represented an even more distilled vision than Dog
Star Man (and it should be noted—he worked on both simultaneously in 1963). Shorn of any
character or storyline, the notorious 12-minute film took the natural material that surrounded
Brakhage’s family cabin as its only subject, and did not use a camera. Unable to afford real film,
Brakhage used cheaper Mylar material (ordinarily for splicing), and taped bits of moth wings,
flowers and plants. The result is a luminous and abstract vision that is most legible when
projected from 16mm, since the whirring of the projector and bright luminosity of the lamp bring
the rapid montage of plant and insect matter to cinematic life.

41
Fig. 8 Screenshot from Fred Camper’s Website showing film strips of Mothlight (1963)
https://www.fredcamper.com/Film/BrakhageS.html

The film fits James’s argument about Brakhage’s arte povera very neatly, given that
Brakhage was working under severe technical and financial limitations to make the now
canonical work. However, the absence of a filmed human subject—and the second absence of a
camera to simulate the subject’s vision—complicates his and Sitney’s reading of this “lyric”
film. In what way does projection through plant and insect matter refer to the artist’s psyche?
James ultimately doesn’t answer this question. Sitney lands on an argument about moth as
metaphor, writing, “For Brakhage, extreme self-consciousness and the seduction of natural
objects are equivalents (which can, as in the present case, cancel each other) since they both
inhibit the working process, which is his ultimate value.”
51
Brakhage himself offered another
(more convincing) metaphorical reading of the work in a 2002 interview, claiming that he saw an
analogy for his own depressive process in the moth’s fatal attraction to the lamp light (following
Tompkins we might note, another reference to his own vulnerability and pain).
The minor interpretive impasse here is generative, in that it welcomes a closer reading to
perhaps ask, where did this technique come from? Whether or not its images refer to the artist’s
consciousness, projection through organic matter was a radically novel way of making films,
both for Brakhage and cinema’s history. J. Hoberman writes, “Brakhage was neither the first
filmmaker to eschew the camera nor the first to scratch patterns into, or glue object to, the film
emulsion. He does, however, seem to have been the first to fashion a movie entirely from flora
and fauna.”
52
Despite the film’s rapid speed, the effect of this projection is a dizzying proximity
to the ephemera that Brakhage collected. The projector’s lamp illuminates the minutia of a leaf’s

51
Sitney, Visionary Film, 175.
52
J. Hoberman, “Close Up: Direct Cinema,” Artforum, September 12, 2012.
42
vascular tissue or moth wing’s ornate patterning—and the apparatus thus also becomes a type of
microscope, studying slides of biological tissue. Viewing it as such leads us one step closer to
answering the question of origin, of how this novel form mediation came to Brakhage, if not
through “mind’s eye” inspiration.
Brakhage ultimately answers this question himself when discussing the material that he
gathered for Dog Star Man. Two persistent visual motifs are intercut with and overlaid upon the
scenes of his tromping through the woods: telescopic views of solar flares erupting from the
sun’s surface, and ultra close up images of organ tissue. The images return over and again
through the film’s many chapters, and form a sort of dialectical pair around its story arc.

43

Fig. 9 Stills from Dog Star Man: Part I (1962)
In the archived interview, Brakhage recounts how these view of the microscopic and
macroscopic context of the “dog star man” were lifted from his collaboration with scientists at
the University of Colorado:
…I needed to present the innards of [the dog star man] and was doing this through
microscopy I was photographing through a short commercial film that I made with
George Gamow and I got the cellular innards of him, which mixed with the moon or the
cosmic him. I got some of the greatest sun flares that have ever been photographed,
happened to be photographed here at the University of Colorado, by Oral Roberson and
these were made available to me. Although I had to go in and prove to the scientists that I
understood full well star behavior and had taken that into account, as I had, in
relationship to the mythic uses that I’m making of it.
53

George Gamow was a leading physicist at the University, who also published a series of popular
science books. The movie that Brakhage refers to is Mr. Tompkins Inside Himself (1960), a

53
Stan Brakhage, interview by Colin Still, 1999, p. 27 of “Stan Brakhage: The Light of the Dance,” transcript,
University of Colorado Stan Brakhage Archives, Box 169, Folder 2, University of Colorado Libraries, Rare and
Distinctive Collections.
44
filmic adaptation of one of Gamow’s books that Brakhage assisted with. Their collaboration on
the film represented one stage in a much longer friendship, however, that began almost as soon
as Brakhage moved back to Colorado in the late 50s. The archival record on his relationship to
the scientists working on solar photography is scanter, but it is reasonable to assume that it
followed from his friendship with Gamow (who himself researched astrophysics extensively).
In other words, although James was correct to argue that Brakhage’s work responded to
distinctly modern forces—and that a central part of his response was to seek out a relatively
isolated, natural setting—by no means were Brakhage’s images “organic” to human vision nor
“anti-technological” in their production. They instead represent the experiments of a filmmaker
enmeshed in a scientific community, and sensitive to the tenuous imagination of the landscape he
inhabited and filmed. Dog Star Man was the autobiographical manifestation of this dialectic; the
film creates a mythological woodsman by way of his university neighbors’ scientific images, not
in opposition to them. The result is a post-frontier sensibility, a sort of settler modernism, that
like his early films rejects naïve pastoral escape to explore the possibility for mythmaking in the
shadows of Denver’s centrifugal urbanism.
I wish to close with a brief reflection on the significance of trance aesthetics for
contemporary filmmaking, the note this chapter started on. There is a recent, understandable
desire to insulate contemporary experimental film, particularly Indigenous film, from histories of
20
th
century experimental forms. As Diana Flores Ruiz recently argued, academic interest in the
contemporary legacy of the avant-garde “might ultimately recenter historical approaches to
visuality within disciplines that have and continue to benefit from Indigenous dispossession
within field-defining origin stories.”
54
In other words, why read Sky Hopinka’s films with the

54
Diana Flores Ruiz, “Desire Lines: Sky Hopinka’s Undisciplining of Vision,” Film Quarterly 75, No. 3 (Spring
2022): 15.
45
white avant-garde, when filmmakers like Brakhage uncritically partook in settler institutions and
imagination? Like with Colectivo Los Ingrávidos, there are clear formal and conceptual parallels
at play. Hopinka uses colorful and flickering associational montage, focuses on western
landscape, and overtly references trance and hypnosis as conceptual cornerstones. In my own
thinking and teaching, Ruiz’s writing on Hopinka have been important words of caution.
However, the focus on trance in this chapter is meant to suggest another way of thinking
about this problem: trance never “originated” with Deren or Brakhage. If there is any origin, it
was appropriated from colonized people in Haiti by Deren in her work with Dunham. Whether
read in that light, or in Brakhage’s mining ruin modernism, it is a thoroughly postcolonial form
that destabilizes the sober structures of perception (landscape just one example). Trance’s re-
emergence in contemporary cinema does not necessarily suggest the importance of Brakhage or
Deren as filmmakers, or the need for their history to unduly shape our reception of
contemporary, emancipatory modes of vision. Rather we can pay attention to the complicated
genealogy of this way of seeing. This chapter traces out the contours of its expression in the mid-
century American West, a region and moment defined by a revisionary settler colonial
imagination. Thinking trance today requires an attention to the historical particularities that
define our own moment, and what a radical and poetic cinema might hope to express.

46
Chapter 3: Bruce Baillie’s (Auto)Critical Road Trips: Or, Urban Exodus and Indian
Representation and in Mass for the Dakota Sioux (1964), Quixote (1965), and Termination
(1966)

Baillie’s Quest
The critical conversation around Bruce Baillie, although somewhat limited, has since the
1970s praised the aesthetic autonomy of his film style. In many ways, he is the archetypical
version of what Peter Wollen termed the “Co-op Avant-garde”: enmeshed in an American urban
filmmaking cooperative, and thoroughly concentrated on the formal properties of film. Like for
Stan Brakhage, the emphasis on style and form, and in particular the novelty of his editing
techniques (both sonic and visual), took center stage from the first considerations of his
technique. Baillie was a key, if early figure in the story that Juan Carlos Kase recently
summarized in October, noting that “In the dominant critical assessments of Anglo-American
film history, scholars have agreed that much of the avant-garde cinema of the late 1960s and
early ‘70s exhibited a collective shift toward increased formalism.”
55
The high rigor and
abstraction of structuralist aesthetics from the 1970s retroactively shaped a reading of what
anticipated that work. Baillie was read as a fellow traveler to Brakhage, and a precursor to
Michael Snow.
One of the more robust accounts of Baillie’s formal innovations was written by Lucy
Fisher for Film Quarterly in 1976. The article “Castro Street: The Sensibility of Style” argues
for how Baillie draws on and surpasses the inventions of early Russian modernist filmmakers
and artists:

55
Juan Carlos Kase, “Reassessing the Personal Registers and Anti-Illusionist Imperatives of the New Formal Films
of the 1960s and 70s,” October 163 (Winter 2017): 49.
47
Like the works of a Brancusi or Kandinsky it is fundamentally an abstract composition.
For the rhetoric of pure line and form it substitutes the orchestration of photographic
images treated as graphic elements within a complex montage design…the potency of its
address inspires us to fathom the means by which its plastic abstractions communicate a
sense of their significance.
56

She goes on to celebrate Baillie’s montage as having “penetrated the surface of worldly
appearance” to unlock the deep structures of perception. He does so by overcoming the
traditional dialectical theory of montage inherited from Eisenstein; instead of collision, Fisher
finds that Baillie by “dissolves the very notion of opposition itself” through “formal interactions
between color, movement, and sound.”
57
She is referring here to Baillie’s use of superimposition:
Castro Street masterfully superimposes images and sounds in a manner that distinguished to
filmmaker’s experimental voice. The problem that Fisher runs into—which this chapter takes
up—is why Baillie edited his images of San Francisco, California and the greater U.S. West in
this way. She limits her essay to the question of film form, which given the detour through
Eisenstein is an odd choice. His formalism, of course, did not rest with an abstract philosophical
position on art. Eisenstein’s montage spoke about history and its representation.
58
Baillie’s work,
this chapter finds, did the same.
This chapter subordinates questions of style to the rich and overlooked rhetorical project
at play in Baillie’s montage, superimposition and collage. Rather than linger on how Baillie

56
Lucy Fisher, “Castro Street: The Sensibility of Style,” Film Quarterly 29, no. 3 (Spring 1976): 14.
57
Fisher, “Castro Street,” 16.
58
Sergei Eisenstein, “Beyond the Shot [The Cinematographic Principle and the Ideogram],” in Film Theory and
Criticism: Introductory Readings, ed. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004),
14: “Yes, it is precisely what we do in cinema, juxtaposing representational shots that have, as far as possible, the
same meaning, that are neutral in terms of their meaning, in meaningful contexts and series. It is an essential method
and device in any cinematographic exposition. And, in a condensed and purified form, it is the starting-point for
‘intellectual cinema.’”
48
superimposed his images (a subject that Fisher sufficiently narrates), I instead revisit the
extensive intertextuality in a trio of films from the 1960s, Mass for the Dakota Sioux (1964),
Quixote (1965) and Termination (1966). Doing so recontextualizes his work outside of the
dominant story of 60s and 70s “avant-garde” filmmaking, to instead consider the many regional
conversations that he participated in. My argument reads Baillie’s “complex montage design”
and “potency of address” as modernist techniques directed at his historical and geographic
surroundings, and as provocations to dominant forms of cultural representation from this period.
Such a revision of Baillie, I think, is highly overdue. The dormancy of critical attention to his
project in contemporary film studies, like for many of the postwar avant-garde, is a symptom of
the reductiveness of early criticism. Returning to Baillie means looking candidly at problems of
representation in his work, at his intellectual community, and at the legacy of his filmic
revisionism. I read Baillie’s filmmaking from this period as a warning to his community: a dry
set of reflections on the excesses of the Bay Area counterculture, and of America’s wider “need
for Indians” in the 1960s.
The first part of this chapter considers how Baillie’s filmmaking and programing looked
across various films and texts dealing with urbanism, masculinity and indigeneity in the
American West. The result of this Western bricolage was the construction of a story of urban
exodus in his two films, Mass for the Dakota Sioux and Quixote, as well as an axis of critical
reflection on the representation of Indian people in 1960s film. That story of frustrated exodus
and misrepresentation would again be fleshed out in his newsreel Termination. The last part of
the chapter observes the similarities between Baillie’s early work and the film screened at the
first Earth Day in 1969. The documentary Multiply and Subdue the Earth, narrated by Ian
McHarg and produced by documentary filmmaker Austin Hoyt, discusses the looming
49
environmental ills of the United States in the late 1960s. The first 15 minutes of the film takes
the viewer through the crowded metropolis and struggling suburbs to a conversation with a
leader of the Taos Pueblo.The film frequently seems as if Baillie’s films were colorized, put
through a fun house mirror, and given documentary’s permission to speak directly of its subject.
That subject was the perceived existential threat that American urbanism posed to itself—and the
hope of some sort of solution among Indigenous people. Baillie certainly didn’t invent the
mythic structure (white escape from the city to discover some truth from Indian people), but its
repetition in the Earth Day documentary showed the trope’s cementation into a potent new
formula.
At first pass, Sitney’s Visionary Film seems to initiate the formalist appraisal of Baillie’s
filmmaking by reading him as ultimately derivative (or at least strongly shaped by) Brakhage’s
invention of the “lyrical voice.” He praised Baillie for having the “surest voice of his own”, but
groups him in with other filmmakers who borrowed both technique and filmic philosophy from
Brakhage. He writes, “The pervasiveness of the lyric voice in cinema among the works of
neophytes in the late 1960s, a decade after Brakhage’s formative works in that mode, was so
great that it seemed that that way of filmmaking was completely natural and must have existed
ab origine.”
59
The lyrical style that Baillie had inherited is evident for Sitney in two facets of his
work: first by the overtly first-person perspective, manifested in camera movement and the
informality of his subject matter, and second in the rejection of “illusionism” through a set of
visual motifs that affirm “the actual flatness and whiteness of the screen.”
60
These formal
similarities would be immediately apparent to even the most casual of observers. Both

59
P. Adams Sitney, Visionary Film: The American Avant-Garde 1943-2000 (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2002), 155.
60
Sitney, Visionary Film, 160.
50
filmmakers used a hand-held camera, overlaid images, and montaged in the free-associative
manner that for Sitney conjured the “lyric poem”. If Brakhage filmed his friends, his wife, and
his cabin, Baillie filmed his friends, his road trip, and San Francisco’s streets.
Despite the formal agreement between these “neophytes”, Sitney also identifies in Baillie
a divergent thematic focus for which he cannot fully account. Unlike Sitney’s Brakhage,
Baillie’s “heroic persona” did not exclusively “undertake an interior quest”. He writes, “In Mass
and Quixote, he subtly blends glimpses of the heroic personae with despairing reflections on
violence and ecological disaster.”
61
It is worth noting that this is the only use of the words
“ecological” or “ecology” in the entirety of Visionary Film, and Sitney seems, on the whole,
unprepared to thoroughly explore its introduction. What is this “disaster” that motivates Baillie?
The answer isn’t clear, although his intuition is that Baillie is ill-at-ease with the geography that
he films. In the case of Mass, this is both the suburban periphery of San Francisco and its
bustling metropolitan core, while in Quixote, he surveys the broader American West on a road
trip. Sitney sees Baillie’s films as a diptych quest: “The incessant forward movement of Mass to
the meandering journey, of which Quixote is the diary, of a filmmaker in search of a hero who
can be his mediator without irony.”
62
In this reading, the two films show the filmmaker’s search
for a subject position to inhabit—a mouth from which a lyric would be sung to and about the
West.
Sitney, I will show, had discovered the motivation at the heart of Baillie’s celebrated
works from the 1960s, even if he couldn’t see the broader cultural landscape to which they
responded. Moreover, the implicit difference between Brakhage and Baillie in Sitney’s writing is
actually a keystone point of similarity: both filmmakers’ “heroic” journeys worked dialectically

61
Sitney, Visionary Film, 183.
62
Sitney, Visionary Film: 183.
51
with American West’s urban spaces, a fact that Baillie’s filmmaking and curation seemed to
reflect upon. Brakhage retreated into the forests above Denver, whilst Baillie’s Canyon Cinema
flirted with the edge of San Francisco’s development (the cinema started in the backyards of the
East Bay’s verdant hillsides). Of course, the question of geography and its relationship to the
extra-urban journey that Sitney identifies in our two films is not developed by Sitney. By
Sitney’s telling, the connection seems to be merely a happenstance of geography and the
scattered interests of the filmmaker; his quotation of Indigenous figures the “nostalgic” musings
motivated by the filmmaker-poet’s “equivocal relationship to technology”. Sitney insists,
“Despite his sophistication, Baillie remains an innocent” whose films search for beauty amidst
the “despair of forgotten men.”
63

The screenings at Canyon Cinema from this same period, however, help develop a theory
of Baillie’s position on the relationship between independent cinema and the American West.
Before a pivot to exclusively art house in the later 60s, Baillie’s Canyon Cinema paired the
American and European avant-garde with the Hollywood’s latest offerings. A brochure from
1963 illustrates the range of these pairings, which starts with a selection of Brakhage’s work and
the 1957 western 3:10 to Yuma.

63
Sitney, Visionary Film, 183.
52

Fig. 10 Promotional brochure for Canyon Cinema screening, 1963

Brakhage would have emphasized (as would Sitney) that his film was being screened
alongside the height of industrial Hollywood filmmaking that he rejected, both in terms of style
and method. Although we do not know which of Brakhage’s films Baillie ultimately screened,
the contrast with Yuma’s production standards and storytelling would have had striking effect.
Given the that collective certainly thought of itself as being “for the West”
64
—as distinct from

64
Scott MacDonald, Canyon Cinema: The Life and Times of an Independent Film Distributor, (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 2008): 63; “The July 1967 issue of the Cinemanews announced that Earl Bodien had resigned as
manager of the Canyon Cinema co-op and that Edith Kramer was taking over that position… ‘Earl’ the
announcement indicates, ‘has, almost singlehandedly, built the co-op into a viable and functioning center for film
distribution and information for the West.”
53
the alternative filmmaking circles associated with Jonas Mekas and New York’s Filmmaker’s
Coop—I think it is worth speculating that Baillie intended to “westernize” Brakhage. 3:10 to
Yuma reinscribed the core mythology of the western genre at a moment of latent crisis: like the
embattled heroes in Shane (1953) or High Noon (1952), the film tells the story of the leading
man’s redemption through violence. Glenn Ford’s performance defiantly stated that the
Westerner hadn’t yet retired. By 1963, Brakhage had begun to carve out his own
remythologization of the western man. Dog Star Man was shot around his homestead in the
mountains of Colorado—and starred himself as a mountain woodsman. The pairing supports
Sitney’s observation that Baillie had sniffed out a question or problem for filmmaking in this
period: what did the hero’s journey look like in the contemporary American West? Did cinema
still offer a vision of white hetero masculinity set against Western landscape, and if so, how
would it think about an urbanized West uncomfortable with its own history of settlement?
Quixote and Mass for the Dakota Sioux start from this same point of inquiry. The two
films are structured as an eruption of urban movement after the death of an anonymous man—
taking the two films together structures a story first of escape from the urban environment to the
suburbs in Mass, but ultimately finding equal repression in suburbia’s tract housing. The
filmmaker’s journey than moves out into the broader West in Quixote, looking for rebirth on a
meandering road trip. Quixote alternates between quiet pastoral clarity and montaged urban
chaos, the innocence of herd animals and open land against the clashing noise and movement of
the city. Into this dialectic, however, a third time is also introduced (and this is what Sitney does
not account for, and which transforms his account): the specter of Wounded Knee in Mass, the
encounter with Indian people in Quixote, and the critical response to federal tribal policy in
Termination. The road journey is the reaction against a distinct urban and suburban dread—but it
54
is also a quest to find real Indians who might have answers to everything that haunted the
unsettled artist’s psyche. What Baillie actually discovered or anticipated was the newly potent
cultural currency of that journey to find Indians.

The Road Trip Films
The peculiar conceptual motivation for these films, which brought together urban and
suburban anxieties with a particular interest in native history, is announced in the very first scene
of Mass. The scene montages just three elements: a quote attributed to Lakota leader Sitting Bull
“No chance for me to live mother, you might as well mourn” superimposed on black leader, and
then on a close up of hands, as if from people standing in a crowd, clapping. The sequence then
cuts to a man struggling on the pavement before collapsing, as the camera dollies in on his hand
and head. The sequence fades to black.

Fig. 11 Still from Mass for the Dakota Sioux (1964)
55
More than anything found among his experimental contemporaries, the staging of a death
evokes the dark urbanism of the Noir cycle—Joe Gillis’s floating cadaver in Sunset Boulevard
(1950), or the tuxedoed beau’s execution in Mildred Pierce (1945), to name just two examples of
a popular trope. Although the evocation of Noir in Mass was never directly acknowledged by
Baillie, nor considered as a precedent by Sitney, the film’s emplotment in San Francisco’s
crowded motorways, its lack of a real “hero” or protagonist, and its (very slight) narrative
structuring around a mysterious death all point to the genre’s conventions. Whether consciously
chosen or not, Noir also made sense as a historical referent for Baillie’s project. Contrary to
Sitney’s reading of the legacy of Deren’s experimentalism (that it led to an inward gaze into the
artist’s psyche), Noir sublimated its urban angst into a wayward vision of the city itself. The
detective story offered a narrative and affective structure to navigate the postwar cityscape.
But Mass ultimately invokes Noir’s dark signifiers while refusing the confines of its
narrative or spatial structure. Robert Sklar wrote that the “hallmark of film noir is its sense of
people trapped—trapped in webs of paranoia and fear, unable to tell guilt from innocence, true
identity from false…”
65
Through its opening death scene, Mass head-fakes this same “sense of
being trapped” to invent a more ambivalent position. Rather than investigate the cause of death,
the film takes its viewer through a sort of kaleidoscopic city symphony, complete with Baillie’s
famous superimposition of images. Bridges are superimposed on light poles, smoke stacks cut to
tracts of housing, vendors and old women cross paths in an urban market. The focus is frequently
soft, and as Lucy Fisher argued, Baillie’s eye in the edit for line and movement are always highly
nuanced. Amidst the montaging of city scenes, a sort of protagonist emerges in the figure of a
leather clad motorcyclist, careening along a highway. For anyone familiar with San Francisco’s

65
Sheri Chienen Biesen, Blackout: World War II and the Origins of Film Noir (United States: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 2005): 11.
56
geography, his movement is clear—this is a form of movement impossible inside the city’s
winding streets. He is a figure that has left, or is leaving, the urban malaise that killed the first
man (or are they the same figure?).

Fig. 12 Still from Mass for the Dakota Sioux (1964)

Edward Dimendberg has shown how film noir was premised on the negotiation of
“centripetal” postwar urban space, with its concentration of people and buildings. He thus also
found that the end of the noir cycle coincided “with the end of the of the metropolis of classical
modernity, the centered city of immediately recognizable and recognized spaces.”
66
Once urban
spaces began to sprawl outward into the “centrifugal” suburbs, the “centripetal” pressure that
fueled Noir’s storytelling and affect began to lapse. What replaced Noir’s urgency, he argues,

66
Edward Dimendberg, Film Noir and the Spaces of Modernity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004): 225.
57
was the road movie’s romanticized spatial experience of the highway system. Dimendberg’s
story of centrifugal and centripetal spatiality illuminates some of the ambivalence in Mass, which
seems only to have been amplified by the intervening decade. The figure of the motorcycle ride
seems to free himself through movement outward or outside of the dense city (and followed by a
camera moving at equal speed), a moving image version of Danny Lyon’s famed portraits from
this period. The vision of the motorcyclist is never explained, nor internalized into the story—
like the shot instead manifests pure speed and style, the masculine rejection of the city’s fallen
world for the highway.
Although the leather clad motorcyclist seems to follow the post-Noir formula, rejecting
the “classical metropolis” to embrace the open road, Baillie’s eye instead quickly lands on San
Francisco’s suburban tract housing. At roughly eight minutes, the film quotes Lakota religious
visionary Black Elk as a title imposed over a landscape shot of rows of identical houses. The
camera tilts upward to reveal the number and uniformity of houses, while the text reads “Behold,
a good nation walking in a sacred manner in a good land”. The soundtrack shifts to the
amorphous roar of machinery, perhaps of the highway itself or of a plane overhead. In any case
the Gregorian chanting which accompanied the motorcyclist’s journey has ceased. Sitney found
in this sequence the apotheosis of Baillie’s “pessimism”:
Two images demonstrate the ironic pessimism with which Baillie views the American
landscape at the center of the film. Over the sprawl of identical prefabricated houses he
prints the words of Black Elk: “Behold, a good nation walking in a sacred manner in a
good land!” Then he pans to an American flag waving on a tall pole in the distance. By
changing the focus without cutting from the shot, he brings to view a previously unseen
barbed wire fence between the camera and the flag. ‘The Mass is traditionally a
58
celebration of Life,’ he wrote in the Film-Makers’ Cooperative catalogue, ‘thus the
contradiction between the form of the Mass and the theme of Death. The dedication is to
the religious people who were destroyed by the civilization which evolved the Mass.
67

In his sketch of the scene, Sitney infers the filmmaker’s disposition while seeming to forget the
previous “story” that he had seen in Mass: why does this tableau of suburbia follow the
anonymous death on the streets of San Francisco, the montage of urban scenes, and finally the
motorcyclist’s rapid movement? At the very least we can say that it is no comfortable landing
place to follow the city’s exit. If Mass positioned itself at the end of Noir, it looked warily at
what lay on the other side of the city’s exit. The shot arrests the film’s outward movement:
unlike the previous restless journey from and through the city, the camera here barely tilts. It is
almost a landscape scene, with a trace of hills in the distance.

67
Sitney, Visionary Film, 182.

59
Fig. 13 Still from Mass for the Dakota Sioux (1964)

Fig. 14 Time Magazine cover, July 3, 1950

The rows of houses are a synecdoche for the car-centric, post-war renaissance of urban
planning, what Time Magazine’s cover image from July 3, 1950 used to illustrate the “new way
of life” offered by “HOUSE BUILDER LEVITT”. Indeed, the face of Levitt seems almost to
have been replaced with the Black Elk quote, an early critical iteration of what David R. Coon
would term the “suburban intertext”. The suburbs were always already familiar, and definitely
meant something—usually either a warning or a promise, or in certain cases, both. Baillie’s
montage implies a critique of the suburbs, although the exact nature and language of that critique
60
is notably underdeveloped here. There is a vague sense of uniformity, repression (a chain linked
fence), and with the introduction of the Lakota religious leader’s quote, an intimation of moral
culpability. The suburbs were both not the manifestation of “a good nation walking in a sacred
manner” (Sitney’s “pessimistic irony”) and as the latest manifestation of how American land was
being developed, were implicitly to blame for “destroying” the native people who had. Baillie’s
poetic solution was to look for Indian people who could perhaps still speak to this “sacred
manner” which modern America had lost.
The poet’s hunt for Indigenous voices was a gesture borrowed from an earlier period of
interest in oral histories of native people. The citation of this period is evidenced in the meta-
textual background of the film’s title, and of both its Indigenous quotations. The textual source
of the quote attributed to Black Elk is John Neihardt’s Black Elk Speaks, originally published in
1932 and republished in 1961
68
. The text recounts Neihardt’s interview with the Oglala Lakota
holy man Heȟáka Sápa, known also as Black Elk. The quotation is excerpted from a longer
passage in which Black Elk recounts part of his “great vision” to Neihardt, a vision he had as a
nine-year old boy during a bout of fever:
“And as we went the Voice behind me said: "Behold a good nation walking in a sacred
manner in a good land!” Then I looked up and saw that there were four ascents ahead,
and these were generations I should know. Now we were on the first ascent, and all the
land was green. And as the long line climbed, all the old men and women raised their
hands, palms forward, to the far sky yonder and began to croon a song together…”
69

68
Both quotations, the first from Sitting Bull and the second from Black Elk, are artifacts borrowed from a particular
genre of Indigenous history collected during the 1930s and revived in the 1960s. The film’s first quote from Sitting
Bull comes from Stanley Vestal’s Sitting Bull: Champion of the Sioux, first published in 1932, but re-released in a
new edition by the University of Oklahoma in 1957.
69
John G. Neihardt, Black Elk Speaks (United States: University of Nebraska, 2014): 22.
61
The “good nation” in Black Elk’s vision refers to the Lakota nation, and the vision to a reunion
with Lakota ancestors. Baillie’s dislocation and appropriation of the quote reads, on the one
hand, as what Phillip Deloria termed the white American urge to “play Indian”. He argues that
doing so has (somewhat perversely) authenticated settler political claims, and that this move took
on particular momentum in the 1960s. He writes:
The notion of an oppositional political culture linked to Indianness attracted young
Americans, many of whom had been schooled on the iconic nationalism of the Boston
Tea Party. The original rebels had used Indianness to shift the location of their identities
from Britain to America. Since the early twentieth century, people had put on Indian
clothes to search for authenticity in a modern American more alienating than welcoming.
Now, countercultural rebels became Indian to move their identities away from
Americanness altogether, to leap outside national boundaries, gesture at repudiating the
nation, and offer what seemed a clear-eyed political critique…to play Indian was to
become vicariously a victim of United States imperialism.
70

Although certainly not an identical act to dressing up as an Indian (as many of his peers did in
this period), the quotation deftly “gestures at repudiating the nation” through its resurrection of
Black Elk’s voice. The specific religious meaning of the quote is erased by the scene’s
“authentic” vs. “alienating” re-articulation. Doing so, as we shall see, anticipated a longer wave
of “playing Indian” specifically as a form of environmentally-focused redress.
The quotation’s literary and historical context—including why it would have been newly
available to Baillie—provide nuance to the subgenre of “playing Indian” in Baillie’s work. What
Baillie revived wasn’t only the voice of a Lakota holy man, but rather the voice of Black Elk as

70
Philip Joseph Deloria, Playing Indian (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998): 161.
62
articulated by a white poet, eager to learn from his religious vision several decades earlier. The
quotation was initially published in 1932 by the Illinois poet John Neihardt, and then republished
in 1961 with a new introduction by the author. In the introduction to its republication, Neihardt
writes:
It was during August, 1930, that I first met Black Elk. I was then working on the Song of
Messiah, which now stands as the fifth and final narrative poem in my Cycle of the West.
This Song is concerned with what white men have called the ‘Messiah craze’—the great
Messianic dream that came to the desperate Indians in the middle 80’s of the 19
th
century
and ended with the massacre at Wounded Knee, South Dakota, on December 29, 1890.
With my son, Sigurd, I had gone to Pine Ridge Reservation for the purpose of finding
some old medicine man who had been active in the Messiah Movement and who might
somehow be induced to talk to me about the deeper spiritual significance of the
matter….What I needed for my purpose was something to be experienced through
intimate contact, rather than to be received through telling.
71

Neihardt’s introduction points to a thematic and narrative framework which Baillie would repeat:
horror at the legacy of the Wounded Knee massacre, interest in Indigenous religious voices, and
a compulsion to leave the city to seek out actual Indigenous people. If, as Sitney argues, the film
represents a search for a “mediator without irony”, that mediation was found in the revised
rehearsal of Neihardt’s pilgrimage.
The quest that started with a death on San Francisco’s crowded streets takes on a lighter
note in Baillie’s Quixote. The film becomes a road movie, and a kaleidoscopic tour of early 60s
America. If there is any tension in the film’s structure, it lies in a dialectic between urban life and

71
Neihardt, Black Elk Speaks, xxi.
63
quiet pastoral scenery. This tension is reflected as a series of smaller chapters, presumably
reflecting the filmmaker’s movement through the country’s terrain; the episodes alternate both in
the pace of editing and use of color. The common thread is Baillie’s status in each scene as a
highway flaneur: the camera quickly threads seemingly unrelated subjects, observing from a
careful distance. There is neither confrontation nor narration, but rather an embrace of the totality
of experience that a road trip through the West and Southwest entails. The first few minutes of
the film, Baillie offers a long montage of a teenage basketball game scored with John Cage-like
cacophony. The sequence, it turns out, is its own quiet allegory: the game is between the white
students from Choteau, Montana, and a team from Browning, the headquarters of the Blackfeet
Indian Reservation. Blackfeet basketball players had broken onto the national scene by the mid-
60s. Put bluntly, the basketball montage updates and transforms an old trope of contest between
whites and Indians in the Wild West.
In his journey, Baillie twice approaches a subject for comment. Both approaches are
marked by failure. If Neihardt’s journey to Black Elk was Baillie’s model for his road trip, the
film testifies to his own disappointment at the reality of the voices he finds. The film starts
abruptly with an old-timer speaking through an overgrown beard and tattered hat. He seems to
explain some piece of personal history; as the title “QUIXOTE” rolls across the screen, the man
mumbles about an experience in the “federal army”, “No two arms were alike, no two saddles
alike, no two horse alike.” The man continues speaking as his voice is drowned out by the roar
and sound of a truck on a highway. The interview hard cuts to a shaking montage of farming
equipment and hotel signs—impatient with the illegible story, the road trip blazes on.
64

Fig. 15 Still from Quixote (1965)

At 25 minutes, the film finds its Indigenous interlocutors. The scene is as careful as it is
anticlimactic: edited in the classic Hollywood shot-reverse shot vernacular, Baillie observes a
long conversation between two elderly Indian men at a café. The men seem cautiously
indifferent to the camera, and speak casually whilst rolling cigarettes. Baillie reported on this
part of his road trip to the “Cinemanews” in a letter published in April, 1965:
Getting colder...Mountain men coming out of the Rockies on horseback; spent the night
in a bar near the hotel-shot two rolls. Following an eagle in a storm on morning, shooting
a basketball game; heading straight north to the Blackfeet Reservation around
65
Browning… having found very little material to substantiate this section of the film, I ran
into something at the last moment. Two old blood gentlemen in a cafe gave permission to
shoot and record them. My recorder kept stopping, but I finally came out with something
editable…had to pay these men, of course, had only $13 to get me all the way to S.
Dakota. I gave them what I could—promised to send the rest (which I did, by
Christmas).
72

The scene wears its haste and ambivalence on its sleeve. The men do not speak in English—and
despite using sync sound, Baillie ultimately chooses not to translate their conversation. Once
again, while Baillie found interlocutors for his film’s journey, he neglects the content of their
speech. He does not look for answer or solution from the men themselves, and instead includes
the two gentlemen as fellow travelers, equally uncertain about the purpose of his filming. As we
shall see, such an approach would carry over into his work on the more polemical short newsreel,
Termination.

72
Bruce Baillie, “Letter from the Road, Filming…(April 1965), Canyon Cinemazine #7, Winter 2020/21, 8.
66

Fig. 16 Stills from Quixote (1965)

Quixote made its world premiere at the Gate Theater in Sausalito on November 26, 1965. Two
months later, and just across the San Francisco Bay, Baillie also screened his work at the 1966
Trips Festival. The festival was organized by Stewart Brand, and debuted on its first day a
“sensorium” exhibition titled “America Needs Indians.” The festival catalogue detailed the
sensorium’s offerings: “america needs Indians, sensorium 9 – slides, movies, sound tracks,
flowers, food, rock’n’roll, eagle lone whistle, indians (senecas, chippewas, hopi, sioux, blackfeet,
etc.) & anthropologists, open theatre – revelations – nudeprojections.” The exhibition emerged
from Brand’s time working as a photographer at the Warm Springs Indian Reservation, as well
as his admiration for Laura Gilpin’s photographs of Navajo (Diné) people. Baillie’s films would
screen the next day.
67

Fig. 17 Promotional brochure, 1966 TRIPS Festival, San Francisco

Termination and Its Discontents
By 1966, Baillie’s latent discontent with the hero’s journey had transformed into an
explicit documentary-style confrontation with the political reality of California’s Indians.
Beginning in 1961, Baillie had produced “newsreels” of local goings-on, to be screened with the
rest of its backyard program. As Ekin Pinar’s recent dissertation Canyon Collective Artists:
Micropolitics in West Coast Experimental Film, 1960-79 has argued, the newsreels expressed a
“micropolitical” sensibility through their attention to otherwise overlooked events—and through
their playful re-imagination of documentary’s formal conventions. Pinar details how the 1961
Newsreel The Gymnasts foregrounded Baillie’s own presence, as well as the affect and
subjective limits of his engagement with a place (the navigation of a local gymnasium). If
Baillie’s openly experimental work engaged with the social and historical world more than his
68
peers, which it often did, then also his documentary style used a self-reflexive language
reminiscent of Mass and Quixote.
His 1966 Newsreel titled Termination is a three-minute portrait of the Laytonville
Rancheria, a small reservation and community of Cahto Indians in Mendocino. The Rancheria
was facing down the possibility of “termination” by the Bureau of Indian Affairs. The film’s title
alludes to a legal battle being fought by federally recognized tribal reservations across California
in the 1960s. The Native American Rights Fund’s National Indian Law Library summarized the
situation:
The United States Congress began a more complete effort to terminate federal assistance
to California Indians in 1958 with the passage of the Rancheria Act. The Rancheria Act
and the other termination programs of the U.S. Government were thought to be reflective
of a long range legislative policy of the Congress to help Indians living on or near
reservations attain a standard of living comparable to that of other Americans and as a
way to integrate them into the mainstream of the dominant society. Part of the motivation
was the fact that the Federal Government was seeking to find a way of reducing the
expenditures they were making to provide services to Indians and to force states to
assume the responsibility with the removal of tax-free status from Indian lands.
73

“Termination” had been legislated nationally since the early 1950s; its implementation signaled a
major sea change in U.S. Indian policy, and a rollback of the progressive (if highly contested)
1934 Indian Reorganization Act. Termination’s objective of breaking up collectively owned
tribal reservation land, and “integrating” tribal members into the “mainstream”, had by the 1960s

73
“ANNOUNCEMENTS”, Native American Rights Fund, The National Indian Law Library, September 1972, Vol.
1 No. 4, 4.
69
become an object of open resistance among Indian activists and scholars. Vine Deloria Jr.
summarized the critique of termination in Custer Died for Your Sins:
The Congressional policy of termination, advanced in 1954 and pushed vigorously for
nearly a decade, was a combination of the old systematic hunt and the deprivation of
services. Yet this policy was not conceived as a policy of murder. Rather it was thought
that it would provide that elusive “answer” to the Indian problem. And when it proved to
be no answer at all, Congress continued its policy, having found a new weapon in the
ancient battle for Indian land.
74

If, as Deloria argues, termination was the “great twentieth century Indian war”, then Baillie’s
newsreel was of a highly instructive skirmish. The newsreel begins with a montage of
Laytonville’s pastoral scenery: a lush marsh, a stand of trees, and some wood cabins, with
residents on the stoop. This is the Rancheria, which Congress had set its eyes on “terminating” as
federally designated and supported tribal land.
After the opening montage, the newsreel interviews a member of the Rancheria. Baillie’s
voice asks questions of the elderly man, who is always filmed from an indirect angle. Baillie asks
two questions: first, “do you think they’re gonna abandon this ranch?” and after listening to the
man’s reply, “What about the health department, they said people were getting water out of the
river?”. The questions are reminiscent of a classic documentary mode, of the newsreel style with
direct confrontation between interviewer and interviewee. Both questions point to understanding
of termination’s implications and legal grounding: the first asks whether the residents would
accept the terms set out by the Rancheria Act, whereby a tribe could vote to self-terminate in
order to access state funding and to sell a private share of the land. The second question refers to

74
Vine Deloria, Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto (University of Oklahoma Press, 1988): 55.
70
the policy’s larger (ostensible) “goal” of modernizing the public health access of reservation
land. Taking water from the river would’ve been used as evidence against the Rancheria’s health
standards—Baillie asks the Cahto man for his own view on such allegations.

Fig. 18 Still from Termination (1966)

The newsreel’s editorial choices, however, betray a more complex relationship to the
interview subject. The elderly man’s animated responses to Baillie’s questions are (in
comparison to Baillie’s questioning) very difficult to understand. This is due to his rapid,
vernacular speech pattern. Like with the older Crow men in Montana, Baillie chose also not to
subtitle the man’s speech. The speech begins to run slightly asynchronously from the man’s
mouth at moments, and Baillie montages more scenes from the Rancheria’s domestic interiors
71
and living spaces with the low and side angle shots of his subject. Especially in a single viewing
for a San Francisco audience, the viewer would be left straining to comprehend the lengthy
responses to Baillie’s inquiries. Given the right viewing circumstances—namely a digitized
copy, where slow and careful deciphering, or especially circulation among Cahto people more
familiar with the speech cadence—it would certainly be possible to understand the elderly man’s
responses. Such a move of circulation and translation remains a goal of this research. For now,
the only existing copy of the film is in 16mm at the Canyon Cinema archive.
How can we understand Baillie’s persistent refusal to translate the voices of the older
Indian men that his films sought out? It is a parallel move in Quixote and Termination—and an
inverse of his translated Indian voices in Mass. Where Mass revives intertextual ghosts of famed
Lakota leaders to narrate his own relationship to San Francisco, he shies away from translating
the living voices of Indian men on their own land. Doing so in Termination is particularly
noticeable, since the film is structured like a newsreel, asking questions directly of the
Rancheria’s imminent legal struggle. The net effect short-circuits a flow of information from
interviewee to audience. In Quixote, rather than allow a distant audience to easily eavesdrop on
the men’s conversation, Baillie meditates on the act of eavesdropping itself. Termination
similarly leaves its inquiring audience in the lurch.
Without more archival evidence, it’s impossible at this stage to glean Baillie’s motives
for leaving the man’s speech without subtitling. Moreover, it’s necessary to acknowledge how
doing so begs for a suspicious view of the newsreel. Asking questions of an Indian subject
without sufficiently introducing his response perhaps points to a patronizing sensibility in
Baillie; that is, to an indifference to the voice of his subject. Rather than listen to the story of the
Rancheria’s representative in the film, the viewer is left to infer what his response might be from
72
Baillie’s montage. The film abruptly ends after the two questions with a freeze frame on a close
up shot of one of the Rancheria’s children, and across his face a series of titles precisely
describing the predicament faced by the tribe. The shot invokes a classic trope of liberal
documentary: a call to concern for a pressing social problem, paired with a face

Fig. 19 Still from Termination (1966)

The refusal of translation is so blatant that a second hypothesis is also necessary: perhaps
suspicion of the newsreel is the point. By 1966 the social issue newsreel harkened to an already
antiquated and contested model of documentary filmmaking. The subject matter of Termination,
as well as its direct questioning of the inhabitants of the Rancheria, invokes with particular
clarity the approach of John Grierson in his seminal vision of British slums, Housing Problems
73
(1935). That film was directed by Edgar Anstey, a member of Grierson’s British Documentary
Movement (in collaboration with the public Gas company), and was one of the first to use synch
sound to record the testimony of its subjects in their own homes. Film historian Brian Winston
has argued that the film’s technological innovation was necessarily also an innovation in the
development of the “tradition of the victim”:
Giving them a voice by obtaining location sound with the bulky studio optical recording
systems of the day was an exercise in technological audacity as great as any in the history
of cinema…But Housing Problems was much more than an early solution to a major
technical problem…What was immediately influential was Anstey’s view of his
interviewees. Instead of heroic representatives of the proletariat, he thought of them as
‘poor, suffering characters’—victims.
75

Winston goes on to argue that Anstey’s invention here would influence a generation of
documentary, “The victim would stand revealed as the central subject of the documentary,
anonymous and pathetic, and the director of victim documentaries would be as much of an
‘artist’ as any other filmmaker.”
76

Like Ansley’s film, Termination questions its subject in his home, on the verge of a
publicly planned “solution” to his housing conditions. But Baillie seems instead to invoke the
Griersonian (or in Winston’s telling, post-Griersonian) model of filmmaking with the same dark
irony with which he filmed the San Francisco suburb. Unlike Ansley, Baillie’s film briefly
meditates on the government’s actions as a form of dispossession—an act disconnected and
hostile to the people actually living on the Rancheria. Moreover, the synch sound that is the

75
Brian Winston, “Tradition of the Victim in Griersonian Documentary,” in The Documentary Film Reader:
History, Theory, Criticism, ed. Jonathan Kahana (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016): 767.
76
Winston, “Tradition of the Victim,” 768.
74
hallmark of Housing Problems insistently does not synch, nor does it translate. The viewer is left
instead to reflect on Baillie’s question (which is actually the health department’s) about where
the tribe was getting their water. A montage of scenic wetlands around the ranch, turns the
question back on itself: are you concerned about whether this old man is drinking from the
stream? Or is this another attempt by the state to “solve” the Indian problem?
The answer of course was clear—and even the final shot turns the government
prerogative on its head. The still of the child’s face represents a potential victim of state action,
as opposed to Ansley’s victim-to-be-saved. What Baillie really anticipated with the film’s ironic
invocation of the newsreel was the film’s own, enduring Indian problem, which persisted in the
60s era of revisionist thought. No longer so committed to visions of ethnic cleansing (or at least
beginning to question that commitment), documentary’s tradition of the victim became a potent
and misleading new way to cast Indian people in the modern West. While Baillie’s critical
lessons were perhaps legible to his Canyon Cinema audiences, the influence of his style would
take on a problematic dimension on the first Earth Day, in 1970.

Multiply and Subdue the Earth
By 1969, Baillie’s style and narrative concern would be turned on its head on national
television. A public TV documentary titled Multiply and Subdue the Earth, produced by young
television reporter Austin Hoyt for Sunday night live TV magazine Public Broadcasting
Laboratory, first aired on March 9
th
, 1969. Hoyt worked with the PBL as the producer for the
Boston’s public broadcast station, WGBH. PBL was a key element in the mid-60s pivot in public
broadcasting to confront the pressing issues of its day. The National Educational Television
company, owned by the Ford Foundation, created PBL to collaborate with local public stations
75
for that effort. The “laboratory” frequently borrowed from avant-garde theater and film for its
productions: a celebrated but controversial first episode featured the off-off-Broadway play, Day
of Absence by Douglas Turner Ward. The play features black actors in white face, and tells the
story of a southern town where all black residents disappear suddenly. Variety heralded the
PBL’s debut as “Something short of revolutionary, the debut of Public Broadcasting
Laboratory’s “PBL” on Sunday was nevertheless an impressive demonstrator for national public
television, bringing to the medium a new form, a sense of vigor and journalistic brashness…”
77

South Carolina and Georgia instead blacked out the program in each state.
78

Multiply was no exception to the PBL’s appropriation of avant-garde form as a form to
air contested topics in the news. The film’s narrator and guiding thinker was the Scottish
architect Ian McHarg, whose recent book Design with Nature had quickly made waves as a
statement in the burgeoning environmental movement. With sweeping erudition and a bountiful
visual evidence, the book made its case for an ultimately idealist account of environmental
damage in modernity. McHarg wrote:
If the highest values in a culture insist that man must subdue the earth and that this is his
moral duty, it is certain that he will in time acquire the powers to accomplish that
injunction. It is not that man has produced evidence for his exclusive divinity, but only
that he has developed powers that permit the fulfillment of his aggressive destructive
dreams. He now can extirpate great realms of life: he is the single agent of evolutionary
regression.
79

77
Les Brown, “No Lack of Controversy in ‘PBL’s Non-Bland Brand of Public Video,” Variety Nov. 8, 1967, 41.
78
“What the Critics Though of First PBL,” Broadcasting Nov. 13, 1969, 25.
79
Ian L. McHarg, Design with Nature (Philadelphia: Falcon Press, 1969): 26.
76
The arch-villainous historical manifestation of this dream of domination, a legacy of Christian
metaphysics, was the French landscape tradition. In the present day, however, that villain was the
American city. McHarg wrote without compunction, “The ransacking of the world’s last great
cornucopia has as its visible consequence the largest, most inhumane and ugliest cities ever made
by man. This is the greatest indictment of the American experiment.”
80
Multiply would attempt
to distill McHarg’s thesis and sprawling analysis into a feature documentary film, and one that
captured the visual imagination of American television audiences.
To do so, Hoyt opened his film with a montage equally provocative and dense. The
documentary’s opening sequence borrows black and white archival footage from the National
Institute of Health of lab rats. Dr. John Calhoun narrates over the montage—he describes his
research with overpopulated rats, recounting how “As the population increased in size, as there
were more interactions between individuals… a larger percentage of the population exhibited
deviance in behavior that was not of survival value for the group...” Calhoun goes on to name the
deviant behaviors, when “most of the females never developed the ability to care for their
young”, and “withdrawal” took hold of individuals across the colony. Under the narration, the
film begins to illustrate its case: scenes of urban life are intercut with the rats. A young woman
laughs in a park, presumably a symbol of neglect for feminine domesticity, and empty faced
crowds push onto the Manhattan street. The montage betrays the film’s conservative disposition,
despite its ostensibly progressive warnings about the ills of American development. If Baillie’s
protagonist in Mass escaped the city unnamable alienation, in Multiply alienation has been
diagnosed as pathology. Cultural rebellion is a symptom, rather than cure.

80
McHarg, Design with Nature, 77.
77

Fig. 20 Stills from Multiply and Subdue the Earth (1969)

78
The reactionary posture is only deepened as the montage spills out into the troubled
suburbs. Rather than provide respite from the jarring montage of city sound and machine chaos,
the intensity of that trope intensifies and spreads. Hoyt and McHarg find the ideal narrator for the
film’s unhappy movement in a disgruntled suburban mother. She recounts that her family left the
city for the suburbs since, “we suddenly found that we were being surrounded by murders,
robberies, rapes, shootings etc.,” but rather than find a peaceful settlement, they instead “find this
is all disappearing with another kind of raping, the raping of the hills”. The woman’s interview is
intercut with a rapid montage of trucks bulldozing, houses being erected, cement being poured.
Hoyt leans insistently on canted angles, soft focus and hard audio cuts. More voices are
montaged in to suggest a broader, even nationwide panic around this development of the
suburbs. The appropriation of modernist style—of Baillie’s disaffected urbanism—is no longer
an investigation of the urban sensorium. It instead is shorthand for the ills of urban American
life.
The film’s panicked montage reaches its climax in a third sequence that follows both the
city and the suburbs: the most distilled manifestation of the threat lies in the periphery, where the
pastoral is jeopardized (or as Leo Marx would tell it, the sequence restages a grand American
tradition of the simple Pastoral, where the machine threatens the garden). This sequence also
introduces McHarg’s thesis. As a rotating gas station sign read “American” against the black
backdrop of night, his refined Scottish Burr chimes in, “I wonder when there are 100 million
more of us by the year 2000, will our cities be sicker still, our suburbs just as sick? Our
landscape befouled? That’s likely to be so, mate. And the reason is simple: we are a man-
centered society. We never learned that we are a part of nature.” The threatened paradise in
question is Lake Tahoe. A series of landscape shots of the lake is narrated by an audio montage
79
of radio advertisements for lakeside property. The promise of escape from the suburban logjam
is always haunted by more people to come—and by the effects of their presence. The Tahoe
sequence is also where the film first introduces an argument about ecology itself. In a brief
interview, a UC Biologist holds up algae from the lake, explaining that “this is an effect of the
development on the slopes.” Cutting of trees (the great visual motif of development in this
period), increases runoff into the stream, and a result “It could be turned pea green within a
lifetime.” The film then hard cuts to a casino’s ballroom entertainment, where with Baillie-esque
irony, a couple sings Wunderbar for a crowd and a rapid montage of glowing casino signs.
Where is there to go from here? The film had condemned all facets of American urban
geography with its mix of cacophony and rapid montage, McHarg’s symptoms of a “man-
centered society” born out in visual and auditory grammar. By rendering Baillie’s stylistics (and
the modernist stylistics of the broader avant-garde) a language of the fallen society itself—and
not that of the artist’s interpretation—the film equally looks for a solution to the aesthetic
dissonance as it does for the social woes it represents. Reprieve from this dissonance finally
follows Tahoe’s ex-urban malaise: the film moves to a peaceful scene of a Taos Pueblo citizen
walking by a mountain stream. The narrator introduces its laconic subject by reference to an
Indigenous past: “the Indians of Taos Pueblo, New Mexico, have been drinking water from Taos
Pueblo Creek for over seven hundred years.” The Pueblo man walks solemnly along a stream,
presumably to drink (although he does not do so), and without titular introduction. He comments
on his relationship to nature: “I was never as happy as I am here. My life is very simple, very
easy. The mountain itself we speak to it, just like anybody would go to a church.” He has been
set up as a simple foil to the aesthetic and environmental ills of the preceding set of sequences.
80
Unlike for Baillie, there is no second thought in Multiply about the reflex to cast Indians in a
story about white alienation.

Fig. 21 Still from Multiply and Subdue the Earth (1969)

The film’s incaution, however, was also a massive tactical victory for the Pueblo citizens
it filmed, who clearly recognized their image’s own currency. In the late 1960s, the Pueblo folks
the film “found” by the Taos Blue Lake—including the Taos Pueblo governor Quirino Romero,
who McHarg interviewed—had been engaged in a sophisticated campaign to return the lake and
the surrounding land to the Pueblo’s control. The land had been taken in 1906 by the National
Forest Service for a National Park. The Pueblo’s use of the land for both food and religious rites
had been duly restricted.
81
Romero patiently made the Pueblo’s case for the lake’s return in a
roadside interview with the tweed-jacketed McHarg, “This lake is where our gods, and our saints

81
Daniel Dancis, “Righting a Wrong: The Return of Blue Lake to the Taos Pueblo,” The Text Message, Textual
Records Division of the National Archives, Nov. 10, 2020, https://text-
message.blogs.archives.gov/2020/11/10/righting-a-wrong-the-return-of-blue-lake-to-the-taos-pueblo/
81
are living...These are living symbols of worship, of saints, to us. We have no right to plague the
St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City!” To illustrate what Romero proposes, the film briefly
slips back into its tacky modernist vernacular with a chaotic sequence of people in Pueblo attire
eating hot dogs from the candles of St. Patrick’s as the sound of a baby cries. The governor
speaks through a translator, and the film quickly subsumes him in its own story: the sequence
ends with McHarg walking and lecturing the first young Pueblo man on the history of ecological
thought in the West, and how the Pueblo shared his own sentiments about man’s relation to
nature.
Following its popular television broadcast, Multiply screened in theaters nationwide as
part of the first Earth Day in 1970. Before it had made the jump to the big screen, the Blue Lake
Bill was passed by the United States Congress in late 1969, granting 48,000 acres of land around
Blue Lake back to the Pueblo. Richard Nixon signed the bill into law on December 15, 1970, as
Quirino Romero stood by his side. Nixon went on to comment,
Those of us who know something about the background of the first Americans realize
that long before any organized religion came to the United states, for 700 years the Taos
Pueblo Indians worshiped in this place. We restore this place of worship to them for all
the years to come.
82

To this day, the lake remains under Taos Pueblo control.

82
Dancis, “Righting a Wrong,” National Archives.
82

Fig. 22 Photograph of Richard Nixon signing HR.471 “Blue Lake Bill Taos Pueblo American
Indian Land Deed” with Quirino Romero watching

83
Chapter 3: “Our Machines”: Alexander Hammid, US Film, and HemisFair ’68
This chapter’s object of study is a hybrid documentary film titled US (1968), directed by
Alexander Hammid, produced by Francis Thompson, and with narration written by W.H. Auden.
The film was funded by the United States Department of Commerce and was the centerpiece of
the United States’ pavilion for the 1968 San Antonio Hemisfair world’s fair. The fair was open
from April through October of 1968, and the film screened constantly for its over 6 million
visitors. Both the fair itself and the U.S. pavilion which hosted the film had been designed to
project a Cold War vision of hemispheric cooperation, with American leadership at the helm.
Variety recounted the massive exhibition: “The US pavilion is divided into an exhibit hall and a
1,200 seat auditorium separated into three 400-seat theatres for the opening segment of the film.
The three screens become one and the partitions between three audiences removed as the show
progresses.”
83
Despite this effort and display, the film has not been screened publicly since the
fair, and a soundless version was only very recently digitized by the National Archives. This
chapter revisits the film for the first time since its original release.

83
“HemisFair, as Expo 67, Demonstrates Wide Range of Film Techniques,” Variety, June 26
th
, 1968, 65.
84

Fig. 23 Cover of the Department of Commerce’s official United States Pavilion guidebook

Unfortunately for the pavilion’s organizers, the film was not received quite as seamlessly
as past world’s fair cinema spectacles had been. Newsweek reported at the time that the United
States Pavilion’s commissioner Edward A. Clark “openly loathes the film and still threatens have
it removed from view,” and upon leaving her screening of US, the first lady remarked that it
“lacked the element of hope.”
84
The film was allowed to run for the fair’s duration, but its quiet
afterlife in the archives perhaps reflected this rancor from high places. When I began to research
US, Auden’s narration transcript provided a first clue as to what might have upset the official
filmgoers so much. In a portion titled “The Highway Sequence” Auden narrated:
Our frontier lands are fully settled;
Overcrowding is our headache now.

84
Joseph Morgenstern, “America, America,” Newsweek, May 20th, 1968, 98.
85
So we have built superhighways and automobiles
To give us freedom of movement.
We have pinned our hopes on our machines.
Yes, we have pinned our hopes on our machines.
85

Johnson wasn’t lying: hope, and specifically hope in cars, was the explicit object of the film’s
critique. As this chapter considers, the highway system was a frequent and powerful motif for
twentieth-century America’s cinematic and architectural imagination at the world’s fair; it was
both visually dazzling and a triumphant symbol of 20
th
century industry and spatial
reorganization. There was no precedent, however, for viewing that pinnacle of American
industry as a false hope, and even (as the film would go on to say) a harbinger of environmental
ruin. How did this happen?

Fig. 24 Photograph of the Confluence theater with Still from US. Taken from the United States
Exhibition guidebook

85
Auden, W.H., “United States Pavilion Hemisfair ’68 NEWS” (Press Release, U.S. Department of Commerce/U.S.
Expositions Staff, 1968).
86
The surprise and displeasure of the first lady and pavilion commissioner made sense,
given both the film’s screening location and the impeccable credentials of its production crew.
Little in Hammid and Thompson’s recent filmmaking history suggested a provocation might be
in the works—nor especially a provocation aimed at the cars, highways and the abuse of nature.
Indeed, US was conceived and directed by two veterans of the world’s fair film circuit. Their 60s
filmic output followed an artistic precedent set by Charles and Ray Eames for the 1959
American National Exhibition in Moscow, of short documentaries about public life, often
projected on multiple screens. The pair had jointly made To Be Alive! and To the Fair! for the
1964 New York World’s Fair; To Be Alive! was a highly-lauded short produced for the Johnson
& Johnson corporation, while To the Fair! surveyed the fair’s own automobile-themed
attractions. The immersive documentary style bridged each fair’s corporate and technological
optimism with the outside world. Hammid and Thompson had by the late 60s mastered a style of
buoyant, colorful and fast moving films; To Be Alive! claimed 5 million visitors, including
President Dwight Eisenhower, and a 1966 Academy Award for Short Documentary.
86

US mirrored the style and energy of those earlier films while reversing much of their
optimistic messaging. The film’s documentary material paints a standard, if marginally more
social-realist, picture of American life, complete with city montages, youth culture, and the
American countryside. However, the bulk of the film were three scripted vignettes, each of
which cautioned its viewers about jeopardized, or even illusory, promises of the American good
life. The first tells the story of a honeymoon stymied by traffic, the second an overrun beach
getaway, and the third of racism in the suburbs. Auden’s narration attempts to unify the vignettes

86
“Our Academy Award-Winning Documentary To Be Alive! Inspired Millions at the 1964 World’s Fair,” SC
Johnson Company, Accessed Oct. 24, 2022, https://www.scjohnson.com/en/interacting-with-sc-johnson/tours-and-
architecture/tours-and-films/documentary-to-be-alive-at-the-1964-worlds-fair
87
and documentary into a prophecy of America’s troubled history and poisoned future. The result
is a fierce polemic that conflicted with the very fantasies of technological progress that the fair
hoped to promote. The film’s visual storytelling carries Hammid’s fingerprint much more
clearly: he reflected on his own immigration story, and the romantic, nature-bound, anti-
suburban sensibility of his avant-garde peers. If the film represented “confluence”, it was of
voices, techniques, and screens—but not of the cultural worlds that the fair intended. Indeed, the
film’s marriage of environmental concern with Hammid’s east coast, pastoral sensibility walked
blindly into the hemispheric negotiation underway in the city and fair.
1968 in San Antonio was a milestone for the Chicano student movement. Young activists
organized massive walkouts to demand major reforms to the educational system and broader
Anglo-dominated power structure. The fair itself was the target of boycotts for its betrayal of the
communities it claimed: among the grievances were a costly admission price, lack of entrance on
San Antonio’s eastside, and bulldozer-ing of historical communities.
87
Innovating on the longer
tradition of hegemonic repair by world’s fairs, the fair attempted to assert a more politically
palatable version of “mestizaje” identity as “confluence.” The prowess of Anglo industry—
intermixed with Latin American cultural identity—was a cornerstone of that attempt at
rebranding the era and city’s identity. The anti-car, anti-technological messaging in US
complicated that project, even as the film ignored the Mexican American people and Chicano
mobilizations that surrounded it.

Hammid, Eames, and 60s Expanded Cinema

87
Fox, Making Art Panamerican, 190.
88
This chapter’s reading of US hinges on an understanding of its dramatic self-revision: the
filmmakers took their own work from the 1964 as a useful foil to confront and re-narrate. That
contrast can be seen most clearly when the film is juxtaposed with To the Fair!, the official film
of the New York World’s Fair, paid for by the New York World’s Fair Corporation. In what
follows, I will briefly lay out how that 1964 film publicized the fair’s many attractions through
an emphasis on cars, mobility and multiculturalism. With a running time of 27 minutes, and shot
entirely in Technicolor, the film was a dazzling roller coaster through the fair’s many wonders.
Although by 1964 Hammid had dramatically parted ways with the independent dream lyricism
of Meshes of the Afternoon, both films undoubtedly also contain traces of the elements Sitney
first celebrated in the 1970s. To the Fair! features a first-person narrator who excitedly tells the
spectator, “Practically everyone is coming to the fair!” The film then dives and weaves between
these visitors, alternating in viewing their experience of touring the fair, and looking through
their eyes at its various attractions.
Two young men on a libidinous quest are followed with particular attention as they hurry
through various elevators, cafes and trolley cars, looking for a pair of women they have spotted
at the entrance. Hammid almost seems to consciously invert the formula that P. Adams Sitney
famously proposed in his 1974 book Visionary Film, that “In Meshes of the Afternoon, the
heroine undertakes an interior quest. She encounters objects and sights as if they were capable of
revealing the erotic mystery of the self.”
88
For the two men at the 1964 fair, the visitor
encounters objects and sights as if they were capable of revealing the erotic mysteries of the
Other—an Other that is sometimes a new machine, a racialized exhibition member, or a woman
there also to visit. That journey, much more so than in Meshes, is characterized by disorientating

88
P. Adams Sitney, Visionary Film: The American Avant-Garde 1943-2000 (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2002), 10.
89
montages full of accelerations, cuts and camera movement meant to mirror the playful logic of
its subject. What I mean to say is that the flashy formalism and subjectivity of Meshes can still
be felt in the fair film, even as its view is entirely turned onto the fair’s spectacle.

Fig. 25 Still from To the Fair! (1964)

Hammid’s mobile gaze, simultaneously observing visitors and looking through their eyes
at the fair’s various installation, seems even to partake in the “exhibitionary complex” theorized
by Tony Bennett. Writing on the architectural logic that emerged out of Crystal Palace in 1851,
Bennett writes that “Exhibitions located their preferred audiences at the very pinnacle of the
exhibitionary order of things they constructed. They also installed them at the threshold of things
to come.”
89
In other words, the spectators of the fair were themselves taken as evidence of the
exhibition’s presentation of modernity and state power. A bit more than a century after the
Crystal Palace, the same relationship to fair participants seems to have endured: by one reading,

89
Tony Bennett, The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics (Routledge, 1989): 82.
90
the film taught fairgoers to understand themselves as evidence of the very process they looked
out upon. Of course, by 1964, the circle of “preferred audiences” had globalized; To the Fair
foregrounds the cosmopolitanism of its fair participants, declaring over a montage of travelers
arriving by car, plane and train “Practically everyone is coming to the fair” from the “four
corners of the earth…and from Five Corners, Idaho.” The film introduces “Mr. and Mrs.
Chandra” who are “from India” as its other two leads, pointing to exactly this nascent
postcolonial context.
The movement of Hammid’s camera also makes it abundantly clear that to partake in
1964’s “exhibitionary order of things” one activity ruled them all: travel by car. Cars were how
people got to the fair, as seen in a sequence of a family “from out West” gazing up from their
vehicle at the skyline of New York City. More importantly they were the central attraction inside
the fair itself. To the Fair takes the fair’s car culture as its own latent fascination, indexing the
various types of car, whilst dollying alongside or in the passenger seat of the same vehicles.
Hammid even finds a (perhaps comic) moment of mise en abyme when the travelers ride a cable
car through an exhibition with a smaller city inside in General Motor’s Futurama exhibit. The
camera lingers on the model city’s main attraction: its massive highway system, full of more
small cars. Of course, such an exhibit and ride was already the central novelty of the 1939 New
York World’s Fair—the passengers in To the Fair! are living in the world of highways that
Norman Bel Geddes and General Motors had imagined for 1960. In her comparison of the 39
and 64 fairs, Rosemarie Haag Bletter notes:
91
In 1939, the Futurama had predicted 38 million cars for America in 1960. By 1960 there
were in fact 61 million cars, almost twice as many as projected, and without any of the
accompanying ‘thoughtful planning’ promised in 1939. (Haag Bletter 1995, 116)
90

If cars were already ubiquitous by 1939, it did not dampen the enthusiasm of either General
Motors to prepare another Futurama, nor for the general public in attending. The company’s
exhibit was a massive, ten-story structure, with a sprawling “futurama” inside embellished by the
set design crew from Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.
91

Fig. 26 Stills from To the Fair! showing visitors to the General Motors Futurama exhibit

90
Rosemarie Haag Bletter, “The ‘Laissez-Fair,’ Good Taste and Money Trees: Architecture at the Fair,” in
Remembering the Future: The New York World’s Fair from 1939 to 1964, ed. Robert Rosenblum (New York:
Rizzoli, 1989): 116.
91
Haag Bletter, “Good Taste and Money Trees,” 116.
92

But even after they have departed from Futurama, the film’s protagonists are awash in a
flood of vehicles. After chasing the two young women to the New York State Pavilion’s
observation platform, the films cuts to a shot of a streaming freeway below. All four characters
later jump into replica Model T cars to continue the chase. Meanwhile, in a parallel plotline the
“Chandras” (“From India”) meet “the Wilsons” in the backseat of a Ford Mustang pulled by a
tow-line. The narration tells us that “The Wilsons have never met someone from the opposite
ends of the earth before”—and thereby directly figures the vehicle as locus of an intimate
cultural exchange. A boy scout troop tries every ride in the fair in one buoyant montage of
attractions—a fake rotating helicopter, a canoe, and finally, a model Cadillac.
The camera’s rapid acceleration and deceleration, and the participants’ constant flow
between various forms of mechanized movements, certainly seems to reflect part of Vanessa
Schwartz’s thesis in Jet Age Aesthetic that mobility was a defining aesthetic project of this
period. Her study of late 50s and 60s finds a popular culture defined by constant mobility, both
of people, media and things. She argues that fluid movement and global circulation were
defining conditions of the age; unlike Hammid, she finds jets to be the vehicular protagonist.
Schwartz writes:
The jet defined an age because it was contributing to a transformation in subjective
experience. On the one hand, its speed made the world that much smaller. On the other
hand, the jet defined an age through the creation of a jet age aesthetic. That aesthetic
addressed and managed the new subjective experience created by the circulation and
mobility of the post-war world. The jet was not simply the new emblem of a complex
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transport infrastructure, but, in addition, its aesthetic situated it as a key element in a
larger media culture that glamorized fluid motion.
92

There is no question that a sort of “jet age” emphasis on mobility permeates Hammid’s film. As
we have already recited, fair visitors arrive on jets, fairgoers circulate in “fluid motion” on
various machines, and model planes and helicopters are part of the attraction. The film is one
long celebration of fluid motion and a global class of tourists, both hallmarks of Schwartz’s jet
age.
Unlike Schwartz, Hammid unambiguously centers the car as motif and metaphor for this
state of global and local circulation. Schwartz captures Hammid’s argument well in her
description of Disneyland:
When Disneyland opened, visitors parked their cars only to be transported all day long.
Rather than a series of different lands, the park was a series of roads, tracks, and skyways
that ultimately narrated journeying and offered a history of transported technology as the
key element in a larger history of progress.
93

Her insight here is extremely helpful, and again aligns closely with the fair’s logic explored by
the film: the car is both the medium of transportation inside the fair, and the message of
technological progress. Cars are vehicles of bodily pleasure and international confluence, and the
symbols of a world to come. Without cars, Hammid tells us, there is no New York World’s Fair
in 1964.

US Film

92
Vanessa R. Schwartz, Jet Age Aesthetic: The Glamour of Media in Motion (New Haven: Yale University Press,
2020): 10.
93
Schwartz, Jet Age Aesthetic, 63.
94
US is a more complicated film that revises the basic promises of To The Fair!. Put
simply, in US challenged its viewers to consider both how cars are no longer tokens of the good
life, but rather tokens of false promise. Since the film was the centerpiece of the United States
pavilion, the film thus also questioned its own relationship to its screening venue. If not to
booster US commercial fantasies, what was the film’s purpose as an official statement? This
contrast was not lost on viewers from the film’s own time. Joseph Morgenstern wrote shortly
after the film’s debut to point out the disjunction between what Hammid and Thompson had
been (very likely) hired to make, and what the film said:
Thompson and Hammid had set the style themselves with their [previous exhibition
films]…multiple screens, myriad smiles, children’s games, waving wheat, athletes and
other graceful animals in slow motion—and all of it very strong in the joy and warmth
sectors. But the world had changed since 1964 and so had Thompson and Hammid. With
the Commerce Department’s full knowledge and assent they turned the theme of
confluence into a brave and memorable warning that the American people, having come
together into the most prosperous civilization on earth, are in deep peril of losing it to
their mindless machines and their own jolly, heedless rapacity.
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Morgenstern then goes on to outline the structure of the film’s narration, describing how “It
begins with the nation’s beginnings” in the pre-settlement North American continent, then moves
rapidly through the history of settlement to land in the “vibrant, crowded, polluted present.” To
illustrate the present, “Omnivorous Caterpillars devour the land. The beaches teem with crowds
celebrating themselves. The old, unskilled, unneeded, watch and wait. A Negro family moves
into hostile white turf of suburbia. Freeways are streaked with cars.”
95

94
Morgenstern, Newsweek, 98.
95
Morgenstern, Newsweek, 98.
95
Without question, this filmic revision touched a nerve with some audiences. A certain
Ross W. Hall from Stillwater, Oklahoma wrote to the San Antonio Light in April 1968 to voice
his concern, “It seems to concentrate on the traffic jams caused by the large number of vehicles
in the United States, and on the problems of the slum areas and some minority
groups….Nowhere in the film was there any mention of our great agricultural and industrial
productivity.”
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The film’s disavowal of car culture was myopic, Hall argued, there were still
plenty of other markers of civilizational progress. The commissioner of the pavilion,
Ambassador Edward A. Clark, was duly displeased, “They had to pass up a thousand good things
in America to find one of these bad things to show.”
97
But of all the film’s criticisms, Lady Bird
Johnson’s expressed the issue most concisely when she said, curtly, it “lacked the element of
hope.”

96
Quoted in Paula Allen, “Preservation Is Slow for Controversial Film at San Antonio’s HemisFair ’68,” San
Antonio Express, July 6th, 2019.
97
Morgenstern, Newsweek, 98.
96

Fig. 27 Lyndon Johnson walks through the US Pavilion to a screening of US

To better grapple with the film’s significance, the analysis will be broken down into two
dimensions: the film itself, and the film as Hemisfair object. In its complete form, US has yet to
be digitized—the National Archives has only thus far made available upon request a digital
version of the film print without sound. As such, I analyze here Hammid and Thompson’s visual
storytelling, as well as a print copy of the narration that accompanied the moving image. When
combined, a rich if incomplete piece of filmmaking emerges. Hammid assembled his film in a
“hybrid” documentary mode, which is to say that he combined photojournalistic visions of
American highways, natural environments, and cities with an obviously fictionalized set of
vignettes. The fictional elements of his films tell stories about the locations that he surveys and
documents, while the narration gives another, only sometimes convergent account of the film’s
broader argument. There are thus three overlapping techniques that Hammid employs:
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documentary, fiction, and Auden’s poetic-polemic. Their lack of assembly in current archival
form makes the disunity of these threads more apparent than might be the case otherwise. The
film’s complex montage functions between moving image, multiple screens, and narrated text.
For now, we can only speculate how the play of voice, score and timing would further shape
each element.
By 1968, Hammid was a filmmaker working at the height of his craft; US (even in its
current state of disassembly) is masterfully told and a visual treat. It is also strikingly ambitious,
as Hammid sought to combine not only different genres of filmmaking, but also to tell his story
across three screens. The film begins as a descent to earth, first in a shot from the point of view
of an airplane moving through clouds then descending to move among city skyscrapers. The
aerial view then looks downward at pedestrians moving below, and finally settles among the
crowded coming and going of a diverse New York city street. The sequence of multiracial and
gendered faces of the crowd is paired with another montage close to the filmmaker’s own heart:
restaurant, club and synagogue signs marking the diaspora of Polish, Jewish, German and
Austrian people in New York City. Each screen, right, left, and center, deepens the montage with
its own set of faces and signage. If the film installation asked for a vision of “confluence,” then
Hammid (formerly Hackenschmied, born two Czech parents in Austria-Hungary) found a
personal note to illustrate the theme in its first two minutes. This was a quiet retelling of his own
immigration to the United States in 1939, and assimilation into exile and immigrant
communities.
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Fig. 28 Still from US (1968)

The next two sequences extend the film’s gaze beyond the streets of New York City. The
first part considers towering visions of American infrastructure, with workers perched on steel
beams and the rotations of a giant satellite dish. The second part moves to a college campus, first
with montage of somewhat countercultural students walking about and meeting on a sunny
campus, then the orchestrated entertainment of a football game. The three screens again work in
synchrony, creating a multidimensional vision of each set up. Hammid’s documentary vignettes
partake entirely in the cheerful visual vernacular of earlier World Fair cinema: they are scenes of
progress, movement, and collective spectacle. They also contrast the east and west coasts of the
United States, with the bright sunshine and college campus atmosphere clearly reflecting the
California campuses that had dominated the American news cycle in that period. The move to a
California or California-like setting also presages the film’s interest in issues particularly
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pressing for western states: that is, car-based urbanism, and the rampant encroachment on the
West’s celebrated natural settings.
These seemingly innocent visions of American modern life are also an early point of
disjunction internal to the film. Auden’s narration introduces an ambivalent and self-critical
historical framework. Over the sequences of New York City streets, Auden narrates (the
sequence is subtitled “Immigration” on the official United States pavilion brief):
Most were poor, peasants and such
From the underlayers of the old world’s
Stratified heap. They streamed to join us,
Men and women, a million a year.
These came by choice: as they crossed the Atlantic
They looked forward with hope….

….Unlike those earlier
Luckless millions who were made to come,
Torn from their African homes by force.

No rejoicing, though, for Indians:
We wanted their land,
With war and whisky we worsted them.
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The sequences of college campus life are instead subtitled “Scenes of American achievement”,
and Auden’s only comment is “America: A land of great plenty with promises to keep.” If

98

100
Hammid’s introductory imagery engages in the “repair and renewal” project of world’s fairs writ
large, Auden’s narration introduces a specter of historical revision haunting the otherwise
forward-looking project. His narration insists on a historical memory anathema to the image of
multiculturalism and technological progress that the fair was built to champion: in the
immigration sequence alone, he contrasts those who “came by choice” from Europe both with
the violences of slavery (“those earlier luckless millions…Torn from their African homes”) and
settler colonialism (“No rejoicing, though, for Indians: We wanted their land”).
This tension between Hammid’s filmic optimism and Auden’s heavy voice collapses into
a unified avenue of critique in the three vignettes that follow. The short sequences are subtitled
in the printed narration “The highway sequence”, “The beach sequence”, and “The American
neighborhood.” The setup of each scene is a mirror image of To the Fair!: the film could have
been From the Fair!, in that it extrapolates the near-term legacies of Futurama and the car-based
fantasies of ‘64. We are almost asked to imagine what happened to the folks who visited in 1964
once they’d bought their cars and tried to engage in the good-life fantasies that Hammid’s earlier
film promised. The highway sequence tells the story of a newlywed white couple, ready to drive
off on their honeymoon in a blue convertible. The scene is at first a heady and joyful excuse for
point-of-view driving shots, with second and third screens mimicking the side window
experience of a highway drive. The joy of movement (another hallmark promise of To the Fair!)
is suddenly arrested: their car is stuck in traffic. A montage of slow-moving overpasses and large
semi-trucks accompanies the young peoples’ frustrated faces. Notably, Auden continues to
invoke a historical consciousness of the predicament through his language. He laments by using
the language of settlement and frontier, “Our frontier lands are fully settled; overcrowding is our
101
headache now,” and then notes with clear caution, “We have pinned our hopes on our machines.
Yes, we have pinned our hope on our machines.”

Fig. 29 Still from US (1968)

If there is a guiding thesis of the film, it must be Auden’s words here on hope in
“machines,” a poetic device for speaking about the film’s car problems. Across the storylines,
the “hopes” of characters that the car-machine had promised to deliver are stymied—and from
that the film extrapolates a broader pessimism. The beach sequence returns to the problem of
“overcrowding”, as another young white man looks for solace on a peaceful beach (to which he
has presumably driven). He is not alone, however, as a rowdy ensemble of beachgoers arrives
and fills the beach to capacity. Hammid uses rapid-cutting with film leader to indicate the man’s
disorientation; the scene then hard cuts to a shot of a pine tree mechanically stripped of its
branches, and a montage of a pine forest being clear cut. Auden introduces the new sequence as
such, “The marvelous machines we have made obey us, And couldn’t care less for the
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consequences…If we want it that way, they will lay waste the earth.” The association of the
beach’s overcrowding with industrial logging mirrors the rhetorical logic of Multiply and Subdue
the Earth (1969), the television documentary screened at the first Earth Day featuring Ian
McHarg. As a device, it suggests the underdeveloped introduction of ecological movements to
filmmaking; Hammid and Thompson lean on the “simple pastoral” trope of the city’s
overcrowding and pollution alongside the threat of the American garden’s despoliation.
Regardless, the film’s simple vernacular allows for the poetic association of cars with logging
“machines” that “lay waste the earth,” an ambitious critical gesture.
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Fig. 30 Stills from US (1968)

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The final vignette addresses the car industry’s hallmark American good life fantasy:
suburban escape. For this sequence, Hammid used his three-screens to ironic effect. A suburban
neighborhood is at first shown bustling in the morning, with fathers collecting newspapers and
watering lawns, women bringing in groceries, and children playing in the street. All the faces are
white, and the audience would have found themselves in the middle of an almost kitsch display
of what suburbia promised. The scene is interrupted when a Black family arrives and begins
unpacking their suitcases and boxes outside one of the local houses, presumably to move into the
neighborhood. The neighbors begin to pack their things and move inside, staring with concern at
the family. In its final, climactic moment, the family looks out right and left of the camera onto
the street, which the right and left screens show to be emptied of neighbors. Auden chimes in:
Pleasant places exist, of course, comfortable retreats
Where the air smells good, the nights are quiet, and
One can forget about all the problems of the world outside.
Image and word play off each other to biting ironic effect. Why does the family’s arrival threaten
the neighborhood? Because, Auden suggests, it was built on the principle of exclusion and
escape; the Black family jeopardizes the white desire to “forget all the problems of the world
outside”, the “problem” here being the fact of Black life. Hammid’s film named the suburbs’
racial underpinnings—and once again implicated cars in the central conflicts of the 1960s
American social landscape.
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Fig. 31 Still from US (1968)

The film concludes with a return to the documentary mode—and a serious counterpoint
to its opening buoyancy. Hammid surveys scenes of American poverty, with static portraits of
run-down houses and poor, rural people. Those scenes are intercut with parades and protest
marches around the country, an easy gesture of collision montage that would have dug at the
fair’s own pomp and ceremony. Auden ties the scenes together by inviting the audience to look
at the country from an international gaze:
The eyes of the world are upon us
And wonder what we’re worth,
For much they see dishonors
The richest country on earth.
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Due to an accident on set, a rare glimpse is available of the film’s production of this final scene:
during filming of this sequence in Whitesburg, Kentucky, the Canadian producer Hugh
O’Connor was shot and killed. The New York Times article recounted:
One of the cameramen said that Mr. O’Connor and his four-man camera crew had
obtained permission of the tenants before attempting to film five weatherbeaten [sic]
houses at nearby Jeremiah as part of his documentary film. However, Mr. Ison, a retired
sawmill operator, owned the houses that Mr. O’Connor had selected. When Mr. Ison
arrived on the scene, brandishing a pistol and ordered the crew off his property, the group
first thought it was a joke. A spokesman for the crew said that Mr. Ison had fired two
shots over their heads as they were gathering their equipment. ‘We didn’t think they were
real bullets,’ he said. A third shot struck Mr. O’Connor in the chest, killing him instantly.

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The article also reveals the film’s working title from the period, All Walks of Life in the United
States. The working title and article put a helpful final gloss on our reading of the film. The
production was an ensemble effort by a Canadian producer, a Czech émigré director, and a
British poet. When attempting to film a scene of poverty in coal country, this crew fatally
mistook a loaded gun for a prop. I wonder there could be a better metaphor for the film’s
presence in San Antonio in 1968: international, modernist, highly sophisticated, well-funded, and
unaware of the people for whom they proposed to speak. The scenes of coal miner from
Kentucky would remain in the film; a single scene of Latino people, organizations or labor
would not.

99
“Producer’s Death Shocks Filmland,” The New York Times, Sept. 24, 1967.
107

Fig. 32 Still from US (1968)

US at Hemisfair ‘68
The question of venue and audience shapes the reading of the film more than for other
films I have considered: this was neither a Canyon Cinema short destined for the backyards of
San Francisco, nor a major motion picture. Its release was relatively contained in time—the fair
only ran April through October—and in one venue. Moreover, the film was built to take part in a
longer tradition of American fairs that, “were exercises in cultural and ideological repair and
renewal that simultaneously encouraged Americans to share in highly controlled fantasies about
modernizing the present.”
100
If the film itself represented an unusual tangle of elements (of
documentary, narrative, artistic voices, social projects, multiple screens), its screening at the

100
Robert Rydell, World of Fairs: The Century-of-Progress Expositions, (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1993):
10.
108
world’s fair is an even denser knot. All of this is made particularly apparent by the contrast
between film content and screening venue: the film leans heavily on East Coast scenery, New
York city streets, and the white/Black racial binary, and lacks interest in Texan, Chicano or US
western identity. However, since the film screened in Texas, and as the centerpiece of the United
States pavilion at Hemisfair, it interacted with a particularly dazzling and contested state-funded
attempt to frame a region’s story and identity. US became an unwitting protagonist in a hot zone
of late 60s Cold War maneuvering, urban redevelopment, and social mobilization.
The San Antonio HemisFair took place in a large Mexican-American city, San Antonio,
and had been put together by a collaboration of Texan elites with the Organization of American
States (OAS). Its location in San Antonio was essential to the theme of the fair “The Confluence
of Civilizations,” a neutralized reference to Hispano-American culture that the fair would
foreground at every turn. For a United States government interested in increasing its soft power
reach (largely through the OAS), HemisFair showcased Mestizaje culture for Latin American
leaders and artists.
101
Art Historian Claire F. Fox’s chapter on the fair from her book Making Art
Panamerican is perhaps the fair’s most comprehensive scholarly study to-date. Aligning with the
book’s larger project, the chapter studies the genre of Panamericanism that the fair offered its
visitors. That genre, which rendered the more radical and politically contested idea of mestizaje
into the neutral “confluence”, reflected in large part the philosophy of OAS Cultural Director,
Rafael Squirru. Since his appointment in 1963, Squirru had published a series of articles
detailing this philosophy, which reacted to leftist and communist political movement across the
broader region. Fox writes, for example,

101
Fox, Making Art Panamerican, 183.
109
In a 1964 essay collection titled The Challenge of the New Man, Squirru claimed ‘el
hombre nuevo’ (the new man)—a key phrase of the Cuban revolution—for the cause of
liberal democracy. In contrast to the Cuban Revolution ‘new man,’ Squirru’s protagonist
is reformist, humanist, and sometimes specifically marked as a Latin American
intellectual and social leader.
102

The “new man” would also be the artist, whose freedom and service to humanity would serve as
an “antidote to communism.”
The fair’s appropriation and transformation of the concept of mestizaje was equally
coded by Squirru’s Cold War, hemispheric project. Fox writes:
Squirru’s essays project a second wave of mestizaje infused with the economic theory of
comparative advantage, in which the Latin partner offers espíritu as his seductive charm
while the United States contributes technology, investment capital, and infrastructure.
103

The fair’s elaborate synthesis of multinational capital, kitsch Latin American cultural
representation, and homage to the city’s own geography embodied his capitalist theory of
mestizaje. In routine world’s fair fashion, the fairgoer would cycle through the grand displays of
modern industry and progress—but packaged in the Latin-coded visual display. Confluence
signified not only cultural admixture, but the specific synthesis of U.S. capital with (in Squirru’s
terminology) “underdeveloped” Latin America. Fox takes us through the results of this project:
HemisFair’s intertwined objectives (developmentalist, anticommunist, and consensus-
building) and its spatial registers (urban, regional, hemispheric, and global) entered into
the symbolic, visual and spatial environment of the fairgrounds, which invited fairgoers
to traverse with great fluidity the boundaries among local-, national-, and international-

102
Fox, Making Art Panamerican, 186.
103
Fox, Making Art Panamerican, 187.
110
identified pavilions… Imagine the path of a hypothetical fair visitor: she descends to the
scenic River Walk from her modular prefabricated hotel room in the brand new Hilton
Palacio del Rio. She catches a picturesque barge that ferries tourists along a newly
constructed two-mile extension of the San Antonio River…At an outdoor plaza, she
observes the Frito Lay-PepsiCo presentation of the indigenous Mexican Acrobats Los
Voladores de Papantla…
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Without question, the fair inherited the tenets of mobility and spectacle from early fairs. Like
what Hammid illustrated in 1964, fairgoers were invited to engage in fluid movement through a
dense and hybrid cultural landscape as both spectators, consumers, and evidence of the fair’s
own thesis about the “confluence” of North and South.

Fig. 33 Image of “Los Voladores” at the “Frito-Lay/Pepsi Cola Pavilion” from the Plastichrome
guidebook to the fair

Unlike those earlier fairs, there stood an unusual center of cinematic disquiet at Hemisfair
that undermined not only the fantasy of mobility, but also the fair’s guiding premise of
“confluence.” Wedged between “Fiesta Island” and the enormous “Tower of the Americas”, the
United States pavilion played a constant rotation of Hammid and Thompson’s US Here was the

104
Fox, Making Art Panamerican, 198.
111
pavilion that spoke for the Northern pole of Squirru’s dialectic, the source of “technology,
investment capital, and infrastructure” meant to combine with Latin “espiritu”. The film inside,
as we have seen, directly confronted this mythology by thematizing the effects of the technology
and infrastructure that the United States had arrived to sell. Cars were no longer vehicles of play,
erotic conquest and cultural mixing as they had been in To the Fair!. As already quoted, Auden
instead somberly remarked over scenes of highways, “Discommodate cities, turn smiling fields/
Into junk graveyards and garbage dumps/ Let noxious effluvia fill the air, polluting our lungs.”
By Auden’s telling, the car was a source of pollution and a false idol; by Hammid’s visual
storytelling, much of what it promised was rendered empty.
How did this film, which openly contrasted with the fair’s ideological and commercial
project register on a hemispheric level? Did its refusal of the good life fantasy that OAS
attempted to program have an impact on the fair’s international visitors, or on the larger
hegemonic project? An extension of this study would endeavor to look more deeply not only at
the story of the film’s production—but also at the way its anti-car, environmentally-minded
thesis landed with the hemispheric audiences that it touched. Unfortunately, Fox’s account only
briefly considers the film and pavilion. However, she does helpfully remark:
Edith Halpert, owner of a New York’s Downtown Gallery and an early defender of
committed art against cold war censorship by the U.S. government, served as an initial
advisor to HemisFair administrators for the United States Pavilion installation, which
included photo panels about U.S. racial and ethnic diversity and progressive social
movements and a poster exhibit from MoMA. In a separate building of the United States
Pavilion, the Confluence Theater screened a documentary narrated by W.H. Auden that
identified poverty as one of the greatest problems confronting the nation. The turn toward
112
social realist aesthetics at the United States Pavilion underscores the manner in which the
Great Society programs and the Alliance for Progress both drew inspiration from liberal
social projects undertaken during the Progressive Era.
105

Although her analysis of course misses the film’s specific environmentalist and pastoral
perspective (and this makes sense, given that the film would not have been digitized when she
wrote), Fox here offers up some productive avenues for further research. Since she is an art
historian, her research looks at the fair and film’s crossover with the world of fine arts, and in this
case with the New York art scene. She reads Francis and Thompson’s pivot as reflective of a larger
shift in programming ethics that accompanied Johnson’s Great Society. The extent to which I can
verify that claim—and whether it is helpful for understanding the genesis of other filmmakers in
this dissertation, is yet to be determined.
The other elephant in the room when considering the film’s venue is its timing and
location: although the 1964 fair in New York had aligned with Civil Rights mobilizations (and
indeed sit-ins by Civil Rights activists directly targeted at the fair), Hemisfair took place during a
zenith of political unrest, both nationally and locally.

Lyndon Johnson’s arrival for the opening
of the fair was postponed by Martin Luther King’s assassination on April 4
th
, and organizers had
prepared themselves for the possibility of political unrest across the city. The NAACP had long
struggled with San Antonio’s segregation, a problem that only threatened to worsen with the
urban renewal campaigns of the 1960s.
106
Most famously, starting early in 1968 San Antonio’s
homegrown student Chicano organization Mexican American Youth Organization (MAYO)
organized student walkouts across the city. The young Chicano organizers sought to break with

105
Fox, Making Art Panamerican, 191.
106
Gene Morales, “Mi Feria Es Su Feria: How Mexican Americans Created the 1968 San Antonio Hemisfair” (PhD
Dissertation, The University of Texas at El Paso, 2020), 86.
113
older generations of Tejano leadership in their organizing, and were rapidly successful in doing
so. Political scientist Armando Navarro recounted the story of MAYO in his now classic 1995
study, Mexican American Youth Organization: Avant-Garde of the Chicano Movement in Texas:
By 1967 a climate for change permeated the Chicano community. The growth of the
Chicano Youth Movement (CYM) was given tremendous impetus by the formation of the
Mexican American Youth Organization (MAYO). MAYO became the avant-garde of
both the Chicano movement (CM) and the CYM in Texas from 1967 to 1972. No other
CYM-oriented organization in Texas came close to matching its activism, militancy, and
espousal of Chicanismo. Not since the turbulent years of Juan ‘Cheno’ Cortina (1859-
1870s) had a Chicano organization dared to confront what MAYO referred to as the
gringo power structure of Texas in such a militant fashion.
107

MAYO was formed in 1967 by five graduate and undergraduate students at Saint Mary’s
University in San Antonio. The group saw themselves as fundamentally allied with the Texas
farm worker movement but focused on organizing and attempting to transform conditions of the
“barrios” in cities like San Antonio. Such a method set them apart from other organizations
working at the time.
108

In a recent doctoral dissertation in Borderlands History at the University of Texas, El
Paso, titled “Mi Feria Es Su Feria: How Mexican Americans Created the 1968 San Antonio
Hemisfair”, historian Gene Morales has attempted to situate the fair in terms of this moment in
Borderlands political history. A central theme of his research is the deep disjunction between the

107
Armando Navarro, Mexican American Youth Organization: Avant-Garde of the Chicano Movement in Texas
(Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995), 80.
108
Navarro, Mexican American Youth Organization, 82.
114
organizers of the fair, and the residents of the city—and in particular the politically mobilized
Chicano community. He writes:
Although middle-class Mexican Americans from San Antonio were able to participate in
promoting the fair and received praise from SAF and the Texas government, support on
the home front in San Antonio reflected a deep divide between class and race….In the
eyes of Anglo elites involved with SAF, HemisFair was the physical representation of the
unity between Anglos and Mexican Americans. However, the exposition signified
something different from Chicana/o activists as the city began to gear up for the opening
of the fair.
109

It signified what the young organizers were working against, that is, the indifference of city
leadership to the experience of the urban poor. Morales writes:
HemisFair became a major focal point for Chicana/o activists to express their grievances
against San Antonio’s political establishment and inequalities felt by communities of
color. The fair was the largest urban renewal project in San Antonio and brought together
a coalition of brown, black and white leaders, but it still revealed the underlining
disparities between race and class in town.
110

The fair absorbed funds that could have gone to social programs that addressed the city’s
“insufficient housing, schools, and municipals services”; it also directly took part in a campaign
of “urban renewal” by leveling a historic, low-income neighborhood to build the fair.
The desired smoking gun for my research—and which I interviewed Gene Morales about
by phone in 2021—is whether any of the MAYO or CYM activists viewed or publicly
commented on the film. Unfortunately, as Morales both detailed in his dissertation and by

109
Morales, “Mi Feria Es Su Feria,” 127.
110
Morales, “Mi Feria Es Su Feria,” 132.
115
interview, a few factors led to the unlikelihood of that sort of evidence. First because activist
groups actively boycotted and picketed the fair, despite the city’s strong-armed attempts to forbid
street protests that would threaten HemisFair’s operation.
111
In the end activists circumvented
those efforts. “Members of labor, civil rights and former community groups protested the event.
Local newspapers like Inferno promoted these protesters and boycotted the fair. Stories of
exclusion and high prices at the gate encouraged people not to attend.”
112
Whether because of the
protests or the exclusively high entrance fee of $2, actual attendance of the HemisFair by San
Antonio and Bexar County residents was unexpectedly low and led to the fair’s financial
losses.
113
All of that being said, Morales did also offer, anecdotally, that in his interviews with
fair workers and Chicano activists, the film was a “focal point” and “formative moment,” and the
sole reason that many folks attended at all. Although it did not speak about the Chicano
movement, he found that unlike almost any other element of the fair, it spoke to them.

111
Morales, “Mi Feria Es Su Feria,” 163.
112
Morales, “Mi Feria Es Su Feria,” 163.
113
Fox, Making Art Panamerican, 190.
116
Chapter 4: Eadweard Muybridge’s Scenes of Settlement: The Modoc War Photographs

Setting the Scene
In late April of 1873, Eadweard Muybridge traveled to a remote stretch of land near the
California-Oregon border. The purpose of his trip was to photograph the U.S. Army as they
hunted the surviving members of a Modoc band. During his two weeks on the Tule Lake lava
beds, Muybridge worked with the military to produce stereographic images of the land, the
soldiers, and (as falsely dictated by his photograph’s titles) the Modocs themselves. The images
told the story of the Modoc War to a global class of spectators, eager to see America’s conquest
of the West. Like in all of his photographic work, Muybridge experimented with his camera’s
means for telling this story. To photograph Indian genocide, he invented techniques appropriate
to his medium. The solutions he landed on, this chapter argues, were an early, pivotal milestone
in the photo visual imagination of settler violence on Indian land.
For much of their history, the Modoc War photographs would have aligned with the
celebrated settler memory of a brave campaign by the U.S. Army against a treacherous and
rebellious Modoc faction. The photographs attested to this version of history by centering the
settler perspective of an empty and unfamiliar land, filled with mysterious and hostile forces.
However, in the wake of the occupations at Alcatraz and Wounded Knee, the army’s presence in
Modoc country began to look differently to white eyes. Two researchers in particular opened a
vein of revisionist thought on the photographs in the 1970s: the independent photo historian
Peter Palmquist assembled the available records on the photographs and the army’s campaign
114
,
while the filmmaker Thom Andersen closely read the images for what history they betrayed. For

114
Peter Palmquist, "Imagemakers of the Modoc Indian War: Louis Heller and Eadweard Muybridge," The Journal
of California Anthropology 4, no. 3 (1977): 206-41.
117
reasons beyond the scope of this project, interest in the photographs mostly ceased in the 70s,
despite significant new scholarship on the war and the Modoc people (that this chapter will
survey).
This paper draws on and expands on that generation of work to ask, how did these
photographs produce an imagination of history? The Comanche critic and curator Paul Chaat
Smith observes that token revisionism in western films was always a doomed endeavor, since
“the master narrative does not include settled prosperous towns of Indians. Pictures of Indian
towns challenge the idea of settlers clearing a wilderness.”
115
If a revision of Muybridge’s
photographs offer us anything today, it is a glimpse at how early photography helped build that
narrative in defiance of a conflicting social context. The Modocs had for years peacefully
integrated with settler communities surrounding Tule Lake
116
; the war broke out after the federal
government announced their deportation to a distant reservation. We do not know if Muybridge
was familiar with that longer, more complicated story. It certainly didn’t appear in the national
press that covered the conflict. What we do know is that Muybridge lent his photographic eye to
a different, settler-centric imagination of the war, in which the soldiers were vulnerable
defenders and the enemy an exotic attacking force.
Revisiting Muybridge’s Modoc War photographs connects two distinct moments of
thinking on settler colonialism and United States film history. In the 1960s and 70s, film scholars
began to follow the work of Indigenous activists to consider the western genre’s representations
of settlement. That project traced how colonial ideologies of race and imperial innocence were
renewed by cinema’s frontier, how a ritual of storytelling Indian genocide “carried the world

115
Paul Chaat Smith, “The Big Movie,” in Everything You Know About Indians Is Wrong, (Indigenous Americas.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), 51.
116
Boyd Cothran, "Between Civilization and Savagery: How Reconstruction Era Federal Indian Policy Led to the
Indian Wars,” Western Historical Quarterly 52, (Summer 2021): 178.
118
view of the first colonists from generation to generation.”
117
A study of Muybridge’s
photographs contributes to that story by considering once popular, now overlooked scenes of
settlement taken by the moving-image camera’s inventor. More recent scholarship has begun to
explore Indigenous peoples’ relationships to their own representation, both historically and in the
emergence of Fourth Cinema. Media histories have re-read settler images of Indigenous people
to understand what hidden stories they contained, or how their meaning was always contested. In
what follows, I show how although the actual Modocs remained hidden from Muybridge’s lens,
his images reacted to their defiant occupation of ancestral territory. The photographs tell a story
of invasion, resistance, and the first staging of settlement for the camera.

Images of Time?
Hollis Frampton’s 1972 essay, “Eadweard Muybridge: Fragments of a Tesseract”, initiated an
influential vein of thought about how to understand Muybridge’s early photography. Frampton’s
essay, originally published in Artforum, reacted to Muybridge’s popularity among the
Conceptual Art set in the 1960s. Frampton argued that Muybridge’s sensibility could be boiled
down to a single idea, “something that seems to anticipate, almost subliminally, the sequences of
Animal Locomotion… I refer to Muybridge’s apparent absorption in problems that have to do
with what we call time.”
118
This approach dictated that even for a photographic series explicitly
concerned with place, such as his famed portrait series of Yosemite Valley, his images of
waterfalls, rocks and the movement of clouds would be read as either metaphors for or
experiments with the representation of time on film. Waterfalls were the “tesseract” that

117
Richard Slotkin, Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600-1860,
(Oklahoma: University of Oklahoma Press, 2000), 23.
118
Hollis Frampton, "Eadweard Muybridge: Fragments of a Tesseract," in Circles of Confusion: Film, Photography,
Video: Texts, 1968-1980, (Rochester, N.Y.: Visual Studies Workshop Press, 1983), 74.
119
Frampton’s title references, since the long exposure creates a cross-temporal image of the water.
Frampton found that the waterfall’s filmic blur was not an “error” in capturing a single moment,
but rather Muybridge’s attempt to show that time is a relationship between perceiver and object.
More recent scholarship has carried Frampton’s conceptual mantle. In River of Shadows:
Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West, Rebecca Solnit looked for evidence of
Muybridge’s unique sensitivity to California’s rapid settlement in the 19
th
century. She argues
that Muybridge’s sensitivity could be found through a series of carefully articulated metaphors.
Of his Yosemite photographs, she writes “water and rock became Muybridge’s principal
subjects. The water spoke of change…a permanent instability that is often a metaphor for
time,”
119
while the rock referred to the place’s deeper geological time. This fascination with
time, she argues, meant not only that Muybridge experimented with its representation, but that he
also reflected on the “journey to modernization” which threatened the photo’s natural scene.
Dimitrios Latsis developed and extended Solnit’s (and Frampton’s) argument in his 2015 article
Landscape in Motion: Muybridge and the Origins of Chronophotography, concluding that
“Muybridge’s elaboration of pictorial formulas for the depiction of landscape provided the true
launching point for a new vision of serial photography as a scientific tool and perceptual
technology that contributed to the development of cinema.”
120
These formulae included an
electromagnetically controlled device to control exposure time, and again following Frampton,
the “spatialization of time” in his waterfalls.
Opening a new vein of thought about Muybridge’s photography means breaking with this
privileging of time to instead consider (paraphrasing Chaat Smith) “the land question.” What was

119
Rebecca Solnit, River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West, (New York: Viking,
2003), 84.
120
Dimitrios Latsis, "Landscape in Motion: Muybridge and the Origins of Chronophotography," Film History 27,
no. 3 (2015): 2.
120
the photograph’s relationship to the land it depicted? Returning once again to the preferred visual
object for Frampton, Solnit and Latsis, Muybridge’s photographs of Yosemite Valley were taken
just twenty years after the first major settler incursions into the ancestral lands of the Miwok
people. As Solnit detailed, Miwok people still lived in the valley during Muybridge’s visits and
frequently show up in his photographs. Although she claims that his naming of the tribes
constituted a small “polemic” about their plight, Solnit ultimately reads the images as a wistful
tribute to the West’s “disappearing” native people.
121
For Solnit, they, too, are just a poignant
metaphor. The presence or absence of Indians on their own land remains a sideshow in this
analytical tradition, rather than a structuring influence on the photographs themselves.
In the immediate wake of Frampton’s essay, Thom Andersen’s UCLA thesis film
Eadweard Muybridge: Zoopraxographer (Andersen, 1974) began to reckon with Muybridge as
settler. While his film was informed by Muybridge’s canonization by experimental filmmakers
and artists for his early experiments in moving and serial imagery, Andersen’s attention to the
dynamics of representation and power points to the radical political sensibility of UCLA’s film
school in 1970s. The film breaks with Frampton’s thinking on the Yosemite Valley photographs
by demonstrating the artifice of Muybridge’s scenery; both in these photographs and in his study
of the Modoc War images, Andersen considers the means by which Muybridge constructed a
visual idiom of settlement. Over a long zoom-out on a monumental photograph of Yosemite
Falls with Muybridge in silhouette, Andersen quotes a journalist from the period “Muybridge has
waited several days to get the proper conditions of atmosphere for some of his views, has cut
down trees by the score that interfered with the camera from the best point of sight.”
122

121
Solnit, River of Shadows, 91.
122
Thom Andersen, Eadweard Muybridge: Zoopraxographer (1975; Los Angeles, CA: Cinema Guild), Kanopy
Streaming, 12:30-43.
121
Andersen then goes on, dictating over the same zoom shot, “He has had himself lowered
by ropes down precipices to establish his instruments in places where the full beauty of the
object to be photographed could be transferred to the negative.”
123
Andersen’s narration
ultimately complicates the long zoom out: rather than re-inscribe the romantic confrontation
between man and sublime nature that the shot’s expanding vista suggests, he instead insists on
the scene’s artifice. The view is only possible because of the location scouting, logging and
technical maneuvers made by Muybridge. The familiar picture of Yosemite’s grandeur is de-
familiarized when read through its own minor history. This hermeneutic maneuver—using the
documentary film form to turn an archive against its own ideological container—would become
a hallmark of Andersen’s filmmaking career with Red Hollywood (Andersen, 1996) and Los
Angeles Plays Itself (Andersen, 2003).

The Modoc Sequence
However, Andersen’s confronts Muybridge’s relationship to California’s conquest more directly
in the sequence prior to that of the Yosemite photographs. As a student of Andersen’s
filmmaking, that sequence first introduced me to Muybridge’s Modoc War photographs.
Andersen is clear, if too concise, on what story Muybridge’s images showed: these were
documentation of Indian extermination and removal from their ancestral land. The montage
begins with what sounds like an Indigenous audio artifact—which Andersen problematically
does not explain nor credit—and a long pan across a three plate panorama of a military
encampment on a flat plain (see Figure 1).

123
Andersen, Eadweard Muybridge.
122

Fig. 34 Gillem’s Army Camp (Three Plate Panorama by Eadweard Muybridge (1873))

A more polemical tone haunts the otherwise placid narration; the subject also shifts from
Muybridge’s biography to the photograph’s historical context. Over the pan and subsequent
montage, which mostly depicts military encampments and scenes of posing soldiers, Andersen
narrates:
In 1873 Muybridge went to the lava beds in Tule Lake, California, to make stereographs
of the Modoc Indian war. This episodic war eventually engaged seven hundred
government troops to hunt down a band of fifty Indian warriors and their families, so that
they could be removed from their homeland, and exiled to a reservation in Oklahoma.
124

Andersen was mistaken on this final point: after the war the surviving tribal members were either
executed or removed to a reservation in Oregon, and then moved again to Oklahoma during the
1950s federal termination policy.
125
Despite this error, Andersen’s sequence points to a troubling
and understudied chapter in Muybridge’s life story. Recent scholarship on California’s Indian
genocide puts a fine point on what the photographs depicted: an invasion by the U.S. military to
erase a tribal group in California, the Modoc tribe.
126
It was the closing campaign of the state’s

124
Andersen, Eadweard Muybridge: Zoopraxographer, 11:15.
125
Benjamin Madley, An American Genocide : The United States and the California Indian Catastrophe, 1846-
1873, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016).
126
Madley, An American Genocide.
123
twenty-year genocide and also the last ditch effort by a tribe to hold on to its homeland through
armed resistance. Muybridge, it turns out, worked both with the military to photograph the battle
terrain and made stereographic images of the conflict for international consumption.
127

To conclude the sequence, Andersen further complicates his reading of Muybridge’s
photographs of this campaign of extermination. The move he makes runs parallel to his revision
of the Yosemite photograph. The image that Andersen refigures here instead is (ostensibly) of a
Modoc soldier, aiming his rifle in combat—an enlarged subtitle, taken from the original
stereograph, reads “A Modoc Brave on the War Path” (see Figure 2).

Fig. 35 Still from Eadweard Muybridge: Zoopraxographer (Andersen, 1975) showing a
stereograph by Eadweard Muybridge from 1873

Andersen reproduces the stereograph’s double image, and without any zoom, pan or edit,
he narrates, “Muybridge’s Modoc Brave was in fact one of the mercenary Tenino Indian scouts

127
Palmquist, “Imagemakers,” 210.
124
recruited from the Warm Springs Reservation. These Indians did most of the fighting for the US
Army.”
128
To an even greater extreme than with the Yosemite vista, Muybridge had interceded in
the photograph’s narrative framing. This was a staged scene of Indian resistance—but for whom
was it staged? And was it the only one of its kind? Andersen does not return to nor reference the
Modoc images again in his film. Given a spate of recent historical scholarship on California’s
Indian genocide in general, and the Modoc campaign in particular, what more can be gleaned
from Muybridge’s Modoc photographs?

The Modoc War
The Modoc War was a sui generis moment of settlement, both for California and the broader
region. It was also one that caught the attention of national and international audiences to a
theretofore unprecedented degree. Although its historical memory would ultimately be
overshadowed by the events at Wounded Knee and Sand Creek, details of the campaign were
published across the English speaking world. The memory of the war lasted beyond the 19
th

century, too: Jeremiah Curtin’s The Myth of the Modocs, published in 1912, introduces its
subject, “The majority of Americans know who the Modocs are and where they live, for on a
time their bravery and so-called treachery gave them widespread notoriety.”
129
Indeed, despite
different framings of the conflict’s significance, there is agreement among contemporary
historians that the Modoc War was a turning point in the late-19
th
century’s US-Indian wars.
Muybridge’s photographs, however, have remained relatively unexamined in otherwise
extensive accounts of the tribe’s removal and extermination. This is surprising given that the
photographs provided the visual backbone for the viewing audiences that followed the conflict,

128
Andersen, Eadweard Muybridge, 11:50.
129
Jeremiah Curtin, Myths of the Modocs, (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1912), v.
125
both as stereograph and sketched reproduction. The recent histories instead offer a historical and
conceptual context for reading Muybridge’s photographs as unique artifacts of settlement and
landmarks in the history of its reproduction on film. Contemporary historiography on the Modoc
War helps demonstrate how Muybridge produced a rudimentary photographic frontier.
The scene that Eadweard Muybridge photographed in the spring of 1873 resulted from
years of settler violence, broken treaties and escalating retaliations. His arrival from San
Francisco heralded the interest of international newspaper and magazine readers, eager to
witness the final act of a widely covered campaign of extermination. The scene that spring on
Northern California’s lava beds was this: a group of roughly 150 Modoc tribal members, led by
the then-notorious Kintpuash (known in the press as Captain Jack), were hidden amidst the
crevices of Tule Lake’s sprawling lava beds. The United States Army was in headlong pursuit of
the tribe; the orders had come directly from General William Tecumseh Sherman that “the
President now sanctions the most severe punishment of the Modocs… make the attack so strong
and persistent that their fate may be commensurate with their crime. You will be fully justified in
their extermination.”
130
The “crime” named in Sherman’s orders, which motivated this latest call
for extermination, had occurred the month prior, during negotiations with the late General R.S.
Canby and several federal peace commissioners. Frustrated by weeks of negotiations and by the
inflexibility of the U.S.’s demands for relocation to Oregon, the Modocs had attacked and killed
General Canby and a commissioner, and wounded several others. The federal government,
alongside the local and national press, now cried for Modoc blood.
The tribe had been fighting and hiding since November 1872, when US soldiers and
vigilantes had shown up at their village to send them to a reservation in Oregon. The Modocs

130
Cothran, “Between Civilization,” 185.
126
resisted, several of their members were killed, and the group ultimately fled into the lava bed
terrain nearby. What ensued were months of stalled negotiations and skirmishes as the army
closed in on the Modocs in their hiding places spread across the rocky terrain. During previous
negotiations with an Indian Agent, Kintpuash himself spoke on the tribe’s decision not to live on
a reservation in Oregon (here quoted by that same Indian agent):
I want to live in my own country. I will live on the East side of Lost River. People in
Yreka tell me this is my country, though you want to talk with the President; I and all my
people only want to be let alone. My father died here, I will die here, we do not want to
kill whites; Soldiers kill for pay; they are not men with hearts; We do not want to live on
any Reservation, we want no lines drawn around we [sic]; we do not want to see your
diagram living us a small place, that place is covered with cattle—we want our Country
from Pit River to Lower Klamath Lake—whitemen may have timber, grass, and cold
water, but the Fish, Ducks, Roots and warm Springs we want, we will keep these. This is
my talk, I am a good man and never tell a lie.
131

What is notable in Kintpuash’s statement, and what recent historians have pointed to, are the
parallel but distinct reasons for the tribe’s resistance to living on the nearby reservation. On the
one hand, the Modoc had a long ancestral, religious and economic relationship to the land that
Muybridge photographed, and where they ended up fighting. Historian Boyd Cothran illustrates
this in his 2014 book Remembering the Modoc War: Redemptive Violence and the Making of
American Innocence
Located on the shores of Moatakni E-ush, the Lava Beds were the center of the Modoc
world. Many of the Modocs’ most productive fishing sites were located along the shores

131
Solnit, River of Shadows, 109.
127
of Tule Lake, and the Modocs believed that Gmukamps had created the world there by
stacking handfuls of mud onto the lakeshore.
132

This fact of the tribe’s deep, pre-modern relationship to their ancestral territory, while true and
important, has also been used since the first reporting on the conflict to misrepresent the
Modocs’ motivations. Rebecca Solnit writes, for example, “Two different worldviews were in
collision, as well as two sets of practical wants. The religion of most Native American
communities was tied to specific places; to lose those places was to lose the connection to that
power, that spirit, that religion.”
133
She does not mention the parallel reasoning of Kintpuash and
his community: the federal effort to dislocate the Modocs ignored decades of economic and
social integration with their Northern California neighbors. Such a perspective on the origins of
the conflict occludes the more immediate history before Muybridge’s photographs were taken, in
which Modocs were not outsiders, but rather participants in California’s nascent modernity.
This participation meant that Modocs had been living peaceably among the settler
communities in the area—the other point that Kintpuash raises in his rebuttal (“People in Yreka
tell me this is my country”). The orders for the tribe’s relocation and segregation were being
imposed from afar (“though you want to talk with the President”), and did not represent the
reality of their willingness to cooperate and coexist despite settler betrayal and violence. Cothran
writes on this point in his 2021 article “Between Civilization and Savagery: How Reconstruction
Era Federal Indian Policy Led to the Indian Wars”:
Far from the stereotypical Indians of James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking tales,
these men were part of a multiethnic frontier community that little resembled the racially

132
Boyd Cothran, Remembering the Modoc War: Redemptive Violence and the Making of American Innocence,
(Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2014), 45.
133
Solnit, River of Shadows, 109.
128
segregated frontier some eastern reformers imagined existed. Many settlers and ranchers
in the region, like the gray-eyed Missippian John Fairchild, worked together side-by-side
with the Modocs. Rather than fighting the Indians, these ranchers paid rents to Jack and
other headmen in the form of cattle, horses, and other provisions for the right to run their
stock on tribal lands. For their part, many Modoc men also worked for wages driving
teams, cutting hay, and above all, wrangling cattle. Experienced ranchers respected these
Indigenous vaqueros for their skill.
134

The question of why exactly this tribe was once again betrayed and removed is the subject of
historical debate. Cothran’s article argues convincingly that the conflict resulted from the
misguided federal “Peace Policy”, which “argued for a racially segregated frontier where a
paternalistic federal government could cultivate Indians as citizens without interfering in the
progress of settlers” by placing and re-educating Indians on “isolated western reserves.”
135
The
policy, however, did not account for how tribes like the Modocs had already become
economically, socially and domestically intertwined with settler communities—and that
enforcing their isolation and removal denied the “entrenched realities of the ground throughout
much of the American West.”
136
Cothran concludes that the Modoc War was “the precipitating
event that marked the end of Grant’s so-called Peace Policy and the resumption of the Indian
wars of the 1870s and 1880s,” since the Modoc’s armed resistance inflamed a widespread
rejection of peaceable engagement with tribes among the military and viewing public.
137

Benjamin Madley’s 2016 book An American Genocide: The United States and the
California Indian Catastrophe, 1846-1873 argues for a somewhat different context for the

134
Cothran, “Between Civilization,” 178.
135
Cothran, “Between Civilization,” 171.
136
Cothran, “Between Civilization,” 171.
137
Cothran, “Between Civilization,” 172
129
Modocs’ treatment. The book “constitutes the first comprehensive, year-by-year history of the
California Indian genocide under US rule.”
138
The Modoc campaign is a bookend in Madley’s
account, since it marks the final episode of organized dislocation and extermination of
California’s Indigenous population. Madley finds that the massive population loss of California
Indians accelerated dramatically after California was annexed and that it was directly attributable
to California’s state policy. He shows how by 1850 the state government had assembled a
“killing machine” of volunteer militias deputized to eradicate the extant native populations in the
state:
between 1850 and 1861, some 3,456 militiamen enrolled in twenty-four volunteer militia
expeditions and killed more than 1,342 California Indians. However, their impact was
greater than these numbers suggest. Indirectly, ranger militias encouraged many more
killings by vigilantes. Ranger Militia operations provided a widely publicized state
endorsement of Indian killing, communicating an unofficial grant of legal impunity for
Indian killing, and eroding cultural and moral barriers to the homicide and mass murder
of Indians.
139

Ultimately Madley argues “the systematic and direct, large-scale killing of California Indians
ended in 1873” with the conclusion of the Modoc War.
140
The war was the last concerted effort
by the California “killing machine” to completely erase a tribal group; it was also the last act of
armed resistance by a California tribe in the 19
th
century.
141

138
Madley, An American Genocide, 13.
139
Madley, An American Genocide, 175.
140
Madley, An American Genocide, 345.
141
Unfortunately, Madley does not detail the cultural production of the state’s “killing machines”—and this makes
sense given that the goal of his project is to circumscribe the acts of killing themselves—however he does make
passing reference to a larger cultural machinery that in some way authorized the campaigns of violence. For
example, operating in tandem with the “ranger militias” were the “social militias,” groups authorized by the same
1850 “Volunteer” militia act, but that “served primarily as fraternal social and athletic clubs”. The oldest and most
prestigious of these clubs, he tells us, was in San Francisco, and it set the tenor for all other social clubs across the
130
The disagreement about historical framing here—whether to read the campaign as the
end of a California’s genocide, or the beginning of a more martial national Indian policy—isn’t
necessary to settle in order to read Muybridge’s images. A consideration of this recent wave of
historical revision is necessary, however, for a thick description of the photographs themselves.
The work of scholars such as Madley, Cothran, and also Robert McNally in his 2017 book The
Modoc War: A Story of Genocide at the Dawn of America’s Gilded Age, points not only to the
fact that the war constituted an invasion by the U.S. military (with help from California militias).
Their work also offers clues to the public imagination that Muybridge attempted to answer and
represent in photographic form. Rather than merely index its topography and participants, his
stereographs found new ways to engage an eager viewing and reading public. In what follows I
trace out how the war’s unique spectacle is legible in Muybridge’s compositions of Tule Lake.

The Stereographic Image
Over the course of roughly two weeks on the lava beds, Muybridge took “more than fifty
stereoscopic images that were turned into Harper’s Weekly magazine engravings, sold by
Bradley and Rulofson, and later illustrated virtually every book on the subject.”
142
To the
contemporary view, Muybridge’s photographs of the campaign seem empty and unremarkable.
Compared to the few selected by Andersen for his film, the larger oeuvre immediately begs the
question: why would Muybridge, who had just photographed Yosemite’s grand vistas, take so
many images of this plain, rocky terrain? The Tule Lake landscape lacks even small trees to
separate foreground and background (see Figure 3). Indeed, most of the photographs are

state. By 1866, there were seventy-one in that city alone. He writes, “They rarely went far from home, except to visit
other social militias for new rounds of target practice, marching, balls, dining, and drinks”.
142
Solnit, River of Shadows, 104.
131
deprived of any clear subject to guide the composition beyond a few, miniature figures
surrounded by low chaparral and rocks. Given how they look to the contemporary eye, it is little
wonder that the pictures have been largely cast aside as aesthetically secondary elements of
Muybridge’s artistic biography.
Put in other words, Muybridge’s photographs of Tule Lake and the Modoc campaign
reflect a different photographic sensibility than his Yosemite portraits, or even his famed
zoopraxiscope images: there is nothing monumental nor sublime in the lava bed’s terrain.
Moreover, the images do not experiment with the representation of time in the way that
Frampton et al have celebrated. To account for this difference from his other images, Solnit
reads the photographs as being about time in a metaphorical sense:
His Modoc pictures are not great expressive works of art; what is important in them is his
act of witness and how it connects this history to the other histories he was tied to: the
transformation of a world of presences into a world of images.
143

To my reading, and despite otherwise very meticulous and helpful historical research, her
argument is tenuous in this chapter of the book. Even at a casual glance, it seems unlikely that
his documentation of the lava bed was meant to reflect on the perception of historical time in
modernity. Moreover, if that were the goal, what would explain the aesthetic departure from his
other investigations into California’s historical world? The images, as we shall see, often indulge
in a markedly different idiom from his other photographs, or from the photographic work of his
peers.
As a final rebuttal to Solnit, the latest and most comprehensive biographer of Muybridge,
while she is correct that he witnessed “a world of presences [transformed] into a world of

143
Solnit, River of Shadows, 123.
132
images”, that ultimately is a euphemism for saying that Muybridge took photographs of an ethnic
cleansing campaign. The notion of “witnessing” implies neutrality—but the purpose of the
images was for the active imagination and enjoyment of what they depicted. They were produced
for mediated consumption of the Modoc’s removal and extermination; their circulation mirrored
and fed a global media interest in the campaign. In terms of the images’ composition, this
reframing raises a set of questions unanswered by Solnit’s research. Since these were not wistful
meditations on the flow of history, but rather images meant explicitly for the transformation of
violence into mediated spectacle, then why were such seemingly lifeless images necessary (or
even central to) the war’s storytelling? What was so interesting to this deft photographer about
the lava beds’ piles of rocks?

Fig. 36 The Lava Beds, No. 4 (Photography by Muybridge, 1873)

From the U.S. Army’s first engagement with the Modocs after their retreat into the lava
beds, the terrain itself became a protagonist in the conflict—especially from the settler’s
133
perspective. Madley recounts the first major siege of the Modoc’s position, a month after their
retreat to the lava beds:
By December 21, US Army soldiers, California volunteers, Oregon militiamen, and
Indian scouts besieged Kintpuash’s people in what is now Lava Beds National
Monument. Having brought in howitzers, 300 men assaulted Captain Jack’s Stronghold
early on the morning of January 17, 1873. Given their overwhelming numbers and
firepower, the regular soldiers and militiamen anticipated a swift victory. Yet, as Brevet
Major General Frank Wheaton reported, the rugged terrain with its “miles of rocky
fissures, caves, crevices, gorges, and ravines,” obstructed his assault, as did an “unusually
dense” fog. Modocs used the volcanic landscape and thick mist to their advantage. They
moved, largely unseen, through the lava fields’ rock formations to concealed positions
from which they demonstrated their marksmanship and halted the attack. By the time the
soldiers, volunteers, militiamen, and scouts retreated that evening, one Modoc and a
dozen attackers lay dead. Kintpuash’s people had accomplished the seemingly
impossible. Having held off an enemy far larger and better armed than themselves, they
remained defiant in their rock fortress. Chastened, the army and its auxiliaries settled into
a siege that continued for months.
144

Time and again during the months that followed—right up until their surrender in June of
1873—the Modocs worked with the lava beds to evade and fight the invading force. Cothran
quotes the field commander’s account of his defeat in January, “We fought the Indians through
the lava-beds to their stronghold which is in the centre of miles of rocky fissures, caves, crevices,
gorges, and ravines, some of them more than one hundred feet deep…In the opinion of any

144
Madley, An American Genocide, 337.
134
experienced officer of regulars or volunteers, one thousand men would be required to dislodge
them…”
145
In another famed episode from after the assassination of General Canby, the Modocs
ambushed “seventy-one soldiers and fourteen of McKay’s Warm Springs Indian scouts” by
stealthy positioning on nearby ridgelines, ultimately killing or wounding 36 with no casualties on
the Modoc side
146
.
If the lava beds’ terrain facilitated the Modocs’ asymmetric warfare, they also provided a
problematic setting for the nation’s rapt spectators imagination of the conflict. The protracted
conflict had given newspapers and magazines a story to tell—but also a need to account for the
US’s losses against the small tribe, including of a general and peace commissioner. One solution
was to highlight how the landscape aided the tribes through its topology and the Indian’s
familiarity with the place; another figured the Modocs as bloodthirsty, evil or animal-like. The
visual aids that accompanied articles about the war wrangled with how to represent the landscape
and the advantage it conferred. Several magazines showed the Modocs peering down from lofty
cliffs. Cothran quotes the theological hyperbole of another “for if the surface of the burning lake
of hell had cooled, Satan and his legions would have such a region to inhabit as the Modoc lava
beds.”
147
As Muybridge prepared his photographs in early May 1873, the periodical in which he
would print them, Harper’s Weekly, imagined the tribe to be a flea hidden among bed sheets (see
Figure 4). This powerful metaphor rendered Modocs as a bloodthirsty pest fit for extermination,
and the landscape as both a hiding place for the Modocs and an eventual resting place for US
settlers. Muybridge’s photos would fill in the gaps of this bed metaphor, detailing in three
dimensions how the tribe had evaded extermination thus far.

145
Cothran, “Between Civilization”, 180.
146
Cothran, Remembering, 60.
147
Cothran, Remembering, 53.
135

Fig. 37 Uncle Sam Hunting for the Modoc Flea in his Lava Bed. (Wood engraving. From
Harper’s Weekly, May 10, 1873.]

To do so, Muybridge’s photographs represented, in grim detail, the army’s terrain of
combat. If, as Solnit has argued, Muybridge engaged in medium-specific experimentation on the
lava beds, it was in his use of stereographic photography for this task. By 1872, stereographs
were the “medium of choice for photographic production,” being produced on an industrial scale,
distributed internationally, and taking all manner of subjects across the personal, fictional and
newsworthy.
148
Stereographs work by producing an illusion of three-dimensionality in the
viewer’s mind: two photographs, exposed roughly 2.5 inches apart, are placed side by side and
viewed through a stereoscope. The brain’s occipital lobe then blends the two, two-dimensional

148
Melody D. Davis, Women’s Views: the Narrative Stereograph in Nineteenth-Century America, (Durham, New
Hampshire: University of New Hampshire Press, 2015), 6.
136
images into one three-dimensional “view.” Art Historian Melody Davis has emphasized the
importance of this depth illusion for the view’s meaning: rather than a mere gimmick, the
stereograph’s dimensionality was interpolated the viewer in the represented space. She writes:
The popularity of the medium and the expectations of the Victorians for not only the
veracity associated with photography but also the seemingly real-life space of the
stereoscope cannot be overemphasized. Detail, clarity, exactitude, the arrested moment,
and fidelity were desired, just as they are sought today in photographic media, but equally
important for the nineteenth-century viewer was a sense of environmental space…The
flat image asks us to choose and move on, while the stereoview asks from us something
more complicated—to visually enter a space that we participate in constructing, spending
time on an artificial environment with interactive meaning.
149

Muybridge had already begun to experiment with the stereograph’s interactive potential in his
Yosemite images. His photographs of Yosemite attempted to surpass those made half a decade
earlier by Carleton Watkins through their playful experimentation with the valley’s natural
spaces. One can imagine, for example, the breathless quality that the extra-dimension added to
his Contemplation Rock image, from 1872.
That stereograph interpolated its 19
th
century viewer as a future visitor, resplendent atop
Yosemite’s grand rocky outcroppings. The lava bed stereographs, in contrast, invited the viewer
into that scene’s violent precursor (Yosemite’s Miwok inhabitants were first attacked by
California’s State Militias during the Mariposa War, 1850-51). The images invited audiences to
look upon a still hostile terrain through the eyes of the invading force. In terms of composition,
the lava bed photographs lack the “theater-like” setting that Yosemite offered, with painterly

149
Davis, Women’s Views, 6.
137
background and various natural stages to foreground a subject. Instead the photographs’ subjects,
mainly troops or tents, are crowded in among the dense pattern of rocks and outcroppings. In
many of the photographs, the troops are barely visible: Muybridge must have meant to play a
game with his viewer, asking them to search for figures amid the volcanic terrain, just as the
soldiers did. The stereographs demand a viewer strain against the stereograph’s three-
dimensionality to parse background noise from the sparse foreground, and to search the
background for what lay hidden in plain sight. In the stereograph Lava Beds No. 6, two soldiers
stand facing the camera—but only appear after careful scrutiny of the photograph’s middle
section (see Figure 5). Their staging by Muybridge presumably mimics the enemy’s tactics of
camouflage.

Fig. 38 The Lava Beds, No. 6. (Photograph by Muybridge, 1873)

Whether or not Muybridge’s experiment with the stereograph’s three-dimensionality
were successful, the objective itself was clear. With the singular focus that he dedicated to the
138
movement of people and animals with his zoopraxiscope, he attempted to bring his viewers into
fearful communion with the lava bed’s polymorphous landscape. Doing so meant projecting
oneself into both a narrative and topological space, since the rocky terrain represented a hiding
place for Indian foes. Cothran writes in his study of cartoons and sketches that the illustrations
frequently “emphasized the association of Indian violence with the landscape, suggesting that
white vulnerability was a by-product of untamed western spaces and superior Indigenous
knowledge of the terrain.”
150
Such an observation also explains these photographs’ visual
density: Muybridge’s Lava Bed series imbued the spectator with the epistemic humility, an
experience of looking on a place and not being able to know what was being seen. The
photographs of complicated terrain interpolated a viewer as a hostile, foreign, but also vulnerable
subject
151
. Vulnerability is highlighted as a thematic focus in the extreme long shot of Lava Beds
No. 6, in which the rocky hills crowd an isolated figure. Muybridge uses the wide composition to
suggest how being surrounded by such terrain must feel. We know from Fred Moten that the
imagination of being surrounded is endemic to the settler experience.
152
The solution to the
feeling of vulnerability, was, of course, the extermination of Indians.
Muybridge’s camera offers an antagonistic relationship to Indigenous land, and thereby
interpolates a viewer not as a tranquil beneficiary of settlement (merely a tourist) but rather as a
participant in the affective and visual terrain of settlement itself. This, I argue, offers a very
different perspective to the popular conversation of whether a vector of influence runs from
Muybridge’s vision to a genre or subgenre of 20
th
century filmmaking. As already discussed,

150
Cothran, Remembering, 53.
151
A parallel reading could argue Muybridge offered the white viewer a sense of the camera’s superior gaze, a new
“war machine” that usurped traditional Indigenous knowledge. While the viewer might not see all, the camera could
capture it.
152
Stefano Harney & Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study, (New York: Minor
Compositions, 2013), 17.
139
Frampton found in Muybridge a progenitor for Structural film; Dimtrios Latsis has recently
argued for his influence on the early 20
th
century travelogue; Rebecca Solnit argues for a broad
proto-modernism in his attention to the “disappearing” California West. Most of these studies
have taken his peaceful images of Yosemite as primary source material—imagining the grand
images of trees and waterfalls as tranquil visions of nature, which would inform avant-garde and
touristic visual forms. The Modoc War photographs, however, present a troubling case study: not
only do they show the genocide that made Muybridge’s photographs possible, they also are
photographs composed for the spectatorship of that genocide. And perhaps most importantly for
our study here—just as Muybridge pioneered photography in his images of waterfalls and grand
vistas—so he brought his keen intelligence to the question, how could the photographic image
meet the demand for the vicarious participation in settler violence?
Such a problem, and the means Muybridge began to experiment with solving it,
foreshadowed not the travelogue (which tended to tour already settled domestic territories), so
much as the core generic elements of the western. Muybridge’s invention in terms of landscape
that the western would inherit was that his camera could tell a story about settlement by
photographing the very land that was being (or had recently been) settled. While viewers enjoyed
seeing Yosemite’s beautiful scenery, they equally enjoyed imagining the scenes of violent
dispossession set amidst California’s natural wonders—or as Muybridge rendered them, natural
terrors. From the very first decade of filmic storytelling, studios recognized this potential for
using California’s landscapes to recount the 19
th
century frontier: studios “prospected” for
California locations near their Los Angeles sets to make the immediately-popular western film
genre.
153
On this recently conquered land, the western evolved quickly from its “eastern western”

153
Brian Jacobson, Studios Before the System: Architecture, Technology, and the Emergence of Cinematic Space,
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2015), 186.
140
predecessor into a more violent form, with the killing of Indians at its narrative core
154
. Scholars
have traced out many other facets of 19
th
century visual culture that would helped build the genre
and its immediate popular reception: audiences already clamored for the dime novel leather
stocking tales, Western landscapes, and the thrills of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West performances.
What Muybridge pioneered, however, was a photographic frontier with Indian genocide as a core
narrative trait, and a mode of landscape that reached beyond the merely picturesque. His
stereographs are too austere, however, to fully resemble what would come with the western’s
daring heroics. Audiences still had to glean a story from the images of hidden troops among
rocky outcroppings, and from the writing that accompanied his stereoscopes and their derivative
sketches. That being said, Muybridge did find an anti-hero worthy of the moving screen among
the Indian soldiers.

A Modoc Warrior on the War Path

154
Scott Simmon, The Invention of the Western Film: A Cultural History of the Genre’s First Half Century,
(Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 44.
141

Fig. 39 A Modoc Warrior on the War Path (Photograph by Muybridge, 1873)

By all accounts, the real celebrities of the Modoc War were not the lava beds, nor even
the US commanders tasked with their invasion. The most popular and notorious figures were the
Modoc fighters themselves, which readers would have known by their nicknames; Kintpuash
was “Captain Jack”, Chikchikam Lupatkue-latko was “Scarface Charley”, Shkeitko was
“Shacknasty Jim”, and the list goes on. Readers of the various newspapers would have not only
known the parties by name, they would have even read accounts of the conflict in their voices
(Modoc War was the only conflict in the Indian wars where journalists interviewed the enemy
combatants mid-conflict).
155
As discussed, the Modocs’ military success deepened the tribal
leaders’ notoriety, as newspapers speculated on who these warriors were that kept the United
States Army at bay—and then killed a US general and federal peace commissioner. In the wake

155
Robert Acquinas McNally,The Modoc War: A Story of Genocide at the Dawn of America’s Gilded Age, (Lincoln:
University of Nebraska Press, 2017), 5.
142
of that killing, newspapers across the country ran stories about the Modocs being “the Red
Judas” and “Untamable Savages” who had carried out “the most dastardly assassination yet
known in either ancient or modern history.”
156
In this telling, the U.S. Army had benevolently
attempted to negotiate peace, but the treacherous Indians had chosen violence instead. The
conclusion, said both commander and press corps, was extermination framed as sort of justice—
and an understanding of the Indians as too primitive or too treacherous to negotiate peacefully.
When Muybridge arrived at the lava beds in April, photographing Kintpuash and his
collaborators would not have been possible, since the military did not know where they were,
exactly, let alone about to allow the photographer to approach them for a photographic pose.
Undeterred and understanding the appetites of his audience, Muybridge commissioned one of the
mercenary Warm Springs Indians (paid to collaborate and scout for the US military) to pose
instead. The result is perhaps the most famous photograph of Muybridge’s Modoc series, titled
“1026—A Modoc Warrior on the War Path.” The photograph, a long shot, shows a shirtless
soldier, kneeling, aiming his rifle over a stone outcropping away from the camera (see Figure 6).
Prominent in the photograph are the soldier’s long braided hair and a large knife at his hip. His
bare, muscular arm stretches along the horizon line, and above we see a face in profile. In short,
the portrait relishes the body and pose of its subject. More than any other photograph in the
series, we see the interests that defined Muybridge’s zoopraxiscope image series: that is, how
nude bodies look in action. The photograph’s composition—and its artifice—meaningfully
distinguish it from other surviving photograph of the Modocs (or supposedly of the Modocs, in
this case).

156
Cothran, Remembering, 50.
143
A series of photographs were taken by Muybridge’s rival photographer of the war, Louis
Heller, after its conclusion; the images are close up portraits of Kintpuash and collaborators with
shorn hair, awaiting execution. By the 1870s, a new, mass market for memories of the Indian
wars opened that centered on the faces, bodies and artifacts of Indian people. The decapitated
heads of the Modocs would ultimately be sent to the Smithsonian for preservation and study,
while various personal belongings (and even the wood from the gallows) circulated in private
circles.
157
Heller’s photographs of the Modocs adhere to this interest in the indexical
memorabilia, as well as the sober documentation offered by a portrait. The portrait’s caption
reads “I certify that L. Heller has this day taken the Photographs of the above Modoc Indian,
prisoner under my charge” with the printed signature of General Jeff. C. Davis.
Muybridge’s photograph participated in the same market that converted ethnic cleansing
into a consumable object. Unlike Heller’s portraits, however, Muybridge wanted to create a
dramatic scene; knowing that he couldn’t access the combat directly, he instead found an actor
for the part and posed him appropriately, crouched behind a stone wall. The soldier’s lack of a
shirt and long hair contrasts with other images Muybridge captured of the Warm Springs Indians,
who as Anderson subtly indicates in his film, wear standard western attire. The purpose of this
difference aligns with the larger ideological moment, in which the Modocs were framed as a
“savage” horde, whose extermination was necessary. In the frontier imagination that Muybridge
helped build, they stood on the other side of an invisible line of civilization, making their
persecution inevitable and necessary. The brave’s formidable body and pose perhaps also
exonerates the viewer, by showing an enemy worthy of the state’s violence. Historian Philip J.
Deloria might add that the prominence of the warrior’s muscular body would evoke a

157
Cothran, Remembering, 11.
144
complicated affective knot. By 1873, “Indianness” was at once a marker of nostalgic past, an
ethnographic Other, and an antihero to emulate.
158
The reappearance of the unclothed body in
the rest of Muybridge’s photographs would support such a reading. Whichever way the soldier’s
nakedness is understood, we can now say that in the Indian soldier, Muybridge found a scene of
war fit for the moving image to come.
The photograph “Modoc Warrior on the War Path” points to a model of representation
decades ahead of early cinema’s first Indian subjects. While the Edison company’s short film,
Sioux Ghost Dance (1894), is frequently cited for its inauguration of Indians appearing on film
for white entertainment, the film lacks any narrative context beyond the notoriety of the dance.
Muybridge’s Modoc, in contrast, prefigures the Indian performers who would not appear in early
westerns until 1908—as actors in the drama of settler violence, performed on recently settled
land. When 1626 is paired with the stereograph in Andersen’s film, another element of
Muybridge’s invention is revealed: this is the reverse-shot to the other image. Muybridge began
to experiment with the creation of diegetic space through camera angle, reproducing the same
pose in its opposite form to, perhaps, produce an imagination of three dimensional combat arena.
In the same way that the land in the western genre, and for Muybridge’s stereograph audiences,
played a double role of real terrain and imagined setting, so too did the soldier turned actor.
Muybridge’s photo shows a nexus point in which settler colonialism in the West began to
integrate with a growing spectacle economy, representing the very process of land expropriation
in the photographic imagination.

158
Philip J. Deloria, “Literary Indians and Ethnographic Objects” in Playing Indian, (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1998).
145
Conclusion
In my qualifying exam answers and prospectus, I proposed to begin building a “lab” that
would operate at film festivals. Since many festivals have a complicated (or entirely absent)
relationship to the place where they exhibit films, the lab’s pitch was to help confront the social
and visual history of the places that they operate through film, archives, and conversation. I still
think that this is a good idea, and much needed. When I attended the Telluride Film Festival in
2021 as research for this project, there were two films that made any reference to the West,
histories of settlement etc. The first was, of course, Power of the Dog (2021), the brilliant
(post)western shot in New Zealand. The other was a behind-the-scenes documentary about a gold
rush themed opera. All of that to say, there was and still is plenty of room for some place-based
reflection for the Ute valley turned mining town, turned ski resort, turned festival. When I
pitched my idea to a colleague who works in programming and education at Telluride, she
responded in an email, “ha, Telluride is definitely not interested in connecting its
programming/institutional profile to any of that. I have tried myself to make such connections
and been rebuffed. The festival's politics are a weird beast.” Weird is one way to put it.
After a lot of thought and conversation with patient advisors, I ultimately landed on a
plan to execute a proof of concept: I would activate some of the archival material from my
research with an installation that could work in a festival, museum, or other exhibition venue.
The conceptual groundwork for the installation would derive from the dissertation research,
while the installation itself would require thinking about an audience’s relationship to the work.
As opposed to a standard documentary or essay film that uses archival material, an installation
allows for a few additional elements: flexibility of audience experience and interactivity, the use
of multiple screens, and my own presence in the exhibition space. It also allows for an
146
experimental relationship to existing architecture, potentially folding the nuances of the
exhibition venue into the installation itself. At festivals in historic towns around the West, such
as Telluride, Sundance, and Big Sky, there is tremendous possibility for work to engage with
historic buildings and other indexes of the place’s history (I have begun to fantasize about
installing work in one of the many mining sites that are a short drive from Telluride).
The first version of this installation concept proposed to use material that I digitized
during a Pre-Doctoral Fellowship with the Clark Library. The library’s building and collection
were once the private holdings of William Andrews Clark Jr., son of the notorious Montana
“Copper King” and US Senator, Clark Sr. The building itself is a beaux-arts jewel box, with
manicured campus and painted cupolas. Its grand halls are lined with a famed collection of
antiquarian books. Among the rarities are several boxes of American West memorabilia, which
Clark Jr. had collected to recognize his relationship to Montana and its history of settlement.
Most interesting to me among the collections were photographs of the mines where Clark Sr. had
made his fortune. The photographs offer a picture of the stark landscape that Butte, Montana’s
notorious Anaconda Mine had left behind. The photographs speak very simply and directly of
the environmental history that had produced the library’s building and collection. There were
only a few—and their exact origin story was opaque—but they juxtaposed powerfully with the
library’s architectural pretensions.

147

Fig. 40 Photograph of the Anaconda Mine from the UCLA Clark Library’s Montana and West
collection (Date Unkown)

Fig. 41 Photograph of Clark Library from UCLA Clark Library Montana and West collection
(1981)

My proposal ultimately was to organize a symposium or screening that used the
photographs as a visual template; the event would try to answer the question, how to understand
148
the library in terms of the environmental and historical reality that the photograph depicted? Put
in other words, how we can understand the forces that built this place? I proposed projecting the
digitized images in or on the library; I also wanted to screen Travis Wilkerson’s An Injury to One
(2003), a 16mm documentary that tells the story of the brutal labor suppression around the Butte
mine in 1917. Alongside the visual material, the installation would host talks on Los Angeles
architectural history, the history of mining in Montana, and the types of photographic and
published material found in the collection. The proposal was developed through conversation
with Manuel Shvartzberg Carrió, an architectural theorist with a specialty in Indigenous
studies from UC San Diego, and was inspired by the recent pivots to institutional identity at the
Gene Autry Museum in Los Angeles or the Museum of Us in San Diego. Unfortunately,
although the library very generously opened its collections and digitized visual material upon
request, the regulations around use of the library grounds were much more difficult. Organizing
any sort of screening or installation on the library grounds was deemed institutionally
impossible, or at least certainly not possible in the timeframe of my PhD. At this stage I still have
the digitized material, but the next steps with the Clark’s holdings aren’t entirely clear to me.
Despite this setback, working with the Clark developed my own thinking around the
installation/lab concept. One area of reflection was about the relevance of “revision” as a 21
st

century cultural project. Bill Deverell had flagged this question early to me in our work together:
he pointed out that historical research on the West has moved away from “revision,” which had
dominated the first wave of “New Western Historians.” Showing the flaws of Turner’s Thesis
was an outmoded project forty years in, since everyone knows that his “frontier” was the
incorrect and white supremacist vision of one 19
th
century historian. I noticed a parallel
sentiment percolating among Indigenous activists, scholars, and artists, particularly when
149
discussing the value of “land acknowledgments.” In their 2021 article “Beyond Land
Acknowledgment in Settler Institutions,” scholars Theresa Stewart-Ambo and K. Wayne Yang
wrote:
We may be in a moment of hegemony when land acknowledgment in the United States is
achieving commonsense status as a good practice that all institutions should observe. As
with any hegemonic moment, there are real decolonizing opportunities that this moment
affords us—especially for those of us in (but not of) the university and other such settler
institutions—even while that moment is expiring and even though that
(counter)hegemony already feels compromised. Theoretically, it is also important for
critical university studies to interrogate what land acknowledgment does, where it comes
from, where it is pointing.
159

As land acknowledgements have begun more widespread (and for film festivals like Sundance,
more complicated), Stewart-Ambo and Yang encourage careful consideration of what lies
“beyond” the revisionist gesture of acknowledging a place’s Indigenous inhabitants. The authors
ultimately call for an ethic of “accountability” to follow acknowledgment, which would question
an institution’s ongoing relationship to the occupied land and its Indigenous people. When
thinking about an installation that addressed an institution’s histories of settlement and
extraction, merely pointing to that history is no longer sufficient—the question must also be,
what next?
In an important sense, and for various reasons, I have come to realize that my dissertation
does not offer an answer to that latter question. In another way, however, the research does offer
a potential lesson for thinking about cultural practices of revision in the West today: it looks

159
Theresa Stewart-Ambo and K. Wayne Yang, “Beyond Land Acknowledgement in Settler Institutions” Social
Text 146, Vol. 39, No. 1 (March 2021).
150
anew at work that attempted to say something about its own period of rapid transformation and
political upheaval in the American West. Revisiting the avant-garde gives a rich and complicated
picture of how certain contemporary questions and modes of experimentation have percolated for
longer than we might want to admit. My first chapter shows the vital history of trance film, an
aesthetic project recently revived by Mexican and Indigenous filmmakers; the second chapter
studies how Bruce Baillie’s critical engagement with the settler impulse to “play Indian” or to
misrepresent Indian people and history; the third chapter considers an early warning about the
car-centric urban planning that still defines the region; and the last chapter uses contemporary
Indian histories to revisit a project started in a 1974 thesis film. Put in other words, there is a
dialogue in my dissertation between present questions of Indigeneity, land use, film aesthetics,
and settler imaginaries and how these films approached their subject matter.
The dissertation’s methodology, although multidisciplinary, carries a throughline
between these varied objects. The method draws New Historicism to re-examine the historical
context that shapes a cultural object. I have found that such an approach proves particularly
valuable with the postwar avant-garde, since the precise contours of the American West and
western filmmaking in the 1960s and 70s had largely been neglected in previous accounts of the
work. This insight is combined with insights from the spatial turn in film theory, which examines
how film both reinforces and subverts the social imagination of space and place. The result in the
dissertation is a continued insistence in tracing out the postwar avant-garde’s dialogue with the
changing American West. In practical terms, this has meant a broad engagement with archives
that told stories of the filmmakers’ neglected work, cultural predilections, correspondences, and
magazine clippings. The archives, I discovered, were full to the brim with overlooked films,
brochures, interviews, and newspaper clippings. By no means does this dissertation exhaust what
151
might be said about the Revisionist West but has not yet been accounted for. The method has
also demanded close readings of certain well-known films in light of this cultural and historical
context. The readings I offer of Dog Star Man, Mass for the Dakota Sioux, or Eadweard
Muybridge: Zoopraxographer linger on key details, clues hiding in plain sight. Those clues only
took on meaning once a rich historical and spatial context had been assembled.
For an installation to reflect my research, I wanted it to emerge from this archival
trawling, but also to ask the audience to engage in a similar process of reflection on an
overlooked object. Rather than spoon feed a reading of the film or insist on mere cultural
preservation with a lost object’s screening, I wanted the installation to revive material from the
avant-garde in a manner that let its contemporary relevance speak for itself. What followed from
this reflection was a plan to exhibit Alexander Hammid’s film US (1968), which my
dissertation’s third chapter considers in depth. As the chapter argues, the film’s latency in the
archive was a central part of its story. The chapter considers the question, why would a 70mm,
state-funded and exhibited film directed by Alexander Hammid and narrated by W.H. Auden
have so little subsequent historical presence? Although there isn’t a smoking gun answer at this
point, the public rejection by public officials seemed to play a role. Hammid had made a
startlingly pessimistic film, which took to task the United States’ car-based fantasies of suburban
and pastoral escape. Indeed, San Antonio’s Hemisfair ’68 where the film screened was built to
sell United States industry to Latin American audiences. Hammid’s anti-car film posed a three-
screen, 70mm problem for that project. Unearthing and screening the film today could work like
a time capsule exercise: what does this forgotten object, which was forgotten intentionally
because of its subject matter, have to say to the present?
152
The ability to exhibit the film was a stroke of luck: all three projection reels were
digitized by the National Archives in 2021. After getting my hands on these digital copies in
early 2022, my perspective on the film changed dramatically (all prior research has been based
on film stills, reviews, and a transcript of its narration). While Auden’s narration and the film’s
reviews had pointed to its subject matter, Hammid’s vision told a different story. The filmmaker
leaned into the multimodal format: the sumptuous color and space of the 70mm print create their
own visual drama; the three screens play off each other in varying ways, sometimes
synchronized, sometimes montaged; documentary footage punctuates and reshapes the scripted
vignettes; Auden’s narration further cleaved a polemic into the buoyant scenery. Of all the visual
archival material that the dissertation had sorted through and uncovered, this was the least known
and most compelling. It needed to be seen to be believed, and with all three screens as part of the
display. As with all the lesser-known material from the avant-garde that this dissertation
addresses, the goal for the film’s exhibition is to think through its complicated representation of
place(s), as well as its relationship to the place it screened. In the case of Hammid’s film, that
context is anchored by the film’s guiding project: to problematize America’s car fantasy, what
Auden obliquely referred to as “Our Machines.”
The installation’s intervention took two main forms: the audio track and the installation
space. The film’s visual ensemble was projected unedited, just as the National Archive digitized
them and handed them over to me. The actual installation and projection of the film of course
necessarily constituted a form of intervention, since the film had been designed for the large
United States pavilion in San Antonio. From the original event flyers and production details, it
was clear that the screening venue’s curvature and scale were its defining features. My goal then
for installing at USC, to glean some of the original effect, was to mimic that scale and
153
organization as best as possible. The screening space would need to have the largest mobile
screens available and organized in the curvilinear format. Fortunately, the scale of the gallery
space allowed for me to arrange three 66 x 118” screens side by side, with the two peripheral
screens at a roughly thirty-degree angle. To run the three projectors simultaneously at audience
level, the screens were set up for back projection. The effect of the combined, synchronized
projections was a 30-foot-long screen that with its arcing set up, created an immersive effect.

Fig. 42 Photograph of the “Our Machines” Installation (Dec. 2022)

The other element of the installation space was an introductory screen at the front of the
hall, with the installation’s title printed over an image of the original pavilion. Inside of the space
were ten desk-chairs provided by the gallery. Although it wasn’t my first plan to have a folding
154
desk attached to the chairs, the writing desk inspired a way to introduce the film’s original
narration (which I had in print version, but which had not yet been digitized). Thus, on each desk
I attached a small packet of pages and a pencil. The cover page of the packet read: “US played in
the United States Pavilion at the center of the 1968 Hemisfair San Antonio world’s fair. This is
the film’s first public screening since 1968. Printed here is the film’s narration written by poet
W.H. Auden. I encourage you to respond to him as you watch.” Inside of the packet was
Auden’s narration in written form, as it had been printed for distribution by the Department of
Commerce and the “US Expositions Staff.” Dim overhead lighting allowed the audience to read
the narration as they watched the film.
The film’s score and narration had not been digitized at the time of exhibition. This gap
in the digital archive opened a space for interpretation and intervention: from my own research
and the film images, there was sufficient information to reimagine its score. I reached out to
ambient musician Jo Rad Silver, who works in music preservation in contemporary Detroit.
Beyond my own admiration of his sound production, the introduction of a Detroit artist’s work
subtly pointed to the film’s focus on cars and car culture. Jo Rad’s work thought about what it
meant to remember and remobilize the motor city’s sonic legacy, the outcome of that effort was
a turn to the contemplative, ambient, and melancholic. Rather than mimic the historical objects,
his music slowed and extended its granular dimensions. Working off this principle, the score for
the film was meant to emphasize the film’s latent affect: a dread that permeates the otherwise
colorful and fast-moving ensemble. Jo Rad’s drone-like score resisted highlighting any specific
beats in the film’s vignettes to instead suggest an overarching argument. The slow notes reach a
sort of roaring climax at the end of the third vignette, when the black family is rejected from the
155
suburbs, and the film turns to its documentary observation of the urban and rural poor. This, in
my reading, was the film’s QED upon which the score subtly but firmly insisted.
I hosted five screenings of the film to different groups of people during the week of
installation. Beyond the general impression that the film’s new score and three screen set up was
impactful for most folks who attended, two or three lasting insights have stuck with me for future
iterations. The first is that I did not go far enough to preface the film’s historical and geographic
context, which my third chapter researched. The long-term plan for future
installations/exhibitions requires either a verbal introduction by me—or a new plan for how to
highlight the research material. The difficulty here is communicating the film’s exhibition
history, its archival latency, and the nature of W.H. Auden’s narration succinctly. Some mix of
accompanying visual installation with an introduction will probably work, or otherwise some
further amendments to the soundtrack. The other insight is how exhibition changed my own
perception of the material. Although I’d understood the film’s provocation, seeing the images at
scale magnified the ideological impact of Hammid’s visual storytelling: the projection deepened
the film’s aura of state authority, while the images themselves told of discontent and
immiseration. It is a deftly constructed and grave warning about the future of American urban
life and the threat of car-centric planning.
I write the final lines of this conclusion from Colorado’s San Juan Mountains, not far
from where I first became interested in this subject. The public gathered last weekend to watch
young people in cowboy hats and skis get pulled across the snow by a horse. A co-worker at
Telluride Ski Resort told me that she’d written her thesis on what the ski towns will do when the
snow stops. The West, I am reminded, revises itself. Bruce Baillie once said about his
156
filmmaking, “I want everybody really lost, and I want us all to be at home there.”
160
The avant-
garde once offered new ways of seeing to a place that was tired of its own image (or as Baillie
would have it, ways of getting lost while still being at home); what’s next, as this conclusion
proposes, is not only the revision of last century’s revisions, but an experiment in getting lost
again.

160
Sitney, Visionary Film, 184.
157
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Abstract (if available)

Abstract My dissertation analyzes critical and self-conscious visions of land, history, and people in underground and experimental cinema from the Western United States. The dissertation closely reads and historicizes films from the postwar American Avant-garde, a network of filmmakers traditionally recognized for their formalist style as well as cooperative and handicraft production methods. I pay particular attention to both popular and overlooked work by Stan Brakhage, Bruce Baillie, Alexander Hammid, and Thom Andersen. In doing so, I demonstrate that the avant-garde’s experiments in film form participated in the vital semantics of placement: their films spoke about the American West in a language that attempted to match the complexity of the location itself. For the Revisionist West, the use of montage, camera movement, experimental projection, and of visual archival material mirrored and commented on the West’s rapid geographic and cultural transformations in the 1950s, 60s and 70s. I illustrate this relationship between place and form by introducing a broad tapestry of cultural texts such as western genre films, popular magazines, 19th century photography, festival brochures, documentaries, and activist literature. The dissertation pays particular attention to how the avant- garde both drew upon and critically reimagined the western genre’s legacy visions of indigeneity, landscape, settler masculinity, and the West’s history of settlement. I ultimately argue that the regionally specific approach not only revises canonical accounts of the avant- garde’s film aesthetics, but also that a “revisionist” project remains a vital tradition for contemporary researchers and film artists working in and on the American West. The relevance of avant-garde experiments in filmic vision of the West is explored through an archival installation that accompanies the dissertation.

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Asset Metadata

Creator Howell, Dylan (author)

Core Title The revisionist West: placing the postwar American avant-garde

School School of Cinematic Arts

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Cinema and Media Studies

Degree Conferral Date 2023-05

Publication Date 02/10/2023

Defense Date 12/01/2022

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag 19th century photography,Alexander Hammid,American West,avant-garde film,Bruce Baillie,Canyon Cinema,documentary film,Eadweard Muybridge,ecocriticism,expanded cinema,film archives,film history,film studies,Flaherty seminar,independent film,indigenous studies,Modoc War,OAI-PMH Harvest,settler colonialism,spatial studies,Stan Brakhage,Thom Andersen,visionary film,western genre,western history,World's Fair

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Advisor Jaikumar, Priya (committee chair), Bodie, Michael (committee member), Connor, J.D. (committee member), Deverell, William (committee member), Renov, Michael (committee member)

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