Cut-ups: Jacobs, Chytilova and the politics of slapstick modernism

Textual Practice ISSN: 0950-236X (Print) 1470-1308 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rtpr20 Cut-ups: Jacobs, Chytilova and the politics of slapstick modernism Bill Solomon To cite this article: Bill Solomon (2017): Cut-ups: Jacobs, Chytilova and the politics of slapstick modernism, Textual Practice, DOI: 10.1080/0950236X.2017.1308433 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/0950236X.2017.1308433 Published online: 31 Mar 2017. Submit your article to this journal Article views: 23 View related articles View Crossmark data Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rtpr20 TEXTUAL PRACTICE, 2017 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0950236X.2017.1308433 Cut-ups: Jacobs, Chytilova and the politics of slapstick modernism Bill Solomon Department of English, University at Buffalo, Buffalo, NY, USA ABSTRACT This essay formulates the concept of a slapstick modernism in order to designate a cultural mutation that occurred in the US and elsewhere in the world from the 1950s through the 1970s. It was during this period that Beat Generation artists committed to formal innovation (in literature and film) looked back to the heritage of silent screen comedy for aesthetic inspiration. After briefly describing the parameters of a slapstick modernism, the essay applies the category in question to two radicalised cinematic ventures: Ken Jacobs’ sevenhour epic of dissent, Star Spangled to Death and Vera Chytilova’s Daises, the latter a product of the Czech New Wave. From the perspective of cultural history, the essay contests the notion of a postmodern break in favour of an understanding of the genealogical continuities extending across the twentieth century. ARTICLE HISTORY Received 22 July 2015; Accepted 20 October 2016 KEYWORDS American literature; underground film; Czech New Wave; collage/montage; humour I just make up these little skits, that’s all. […] I just make a little slapstick. (William Burroughs) In a brief article titled ‘A Note on Comedy in Experimental Film’, first published in 1963 in Film Culture, Sidney Peterson made a compelling case for considering the formally inventive work of a new generation of independent filmmakers (none of whom he refers to by name) as amusingly disruptive acts of social criticism. Asserting somewhat counterintuitively that such artworks ‘are often very funny indeed’, he goes on to praise them on the grounds that their satiric thrust has taken aim at ‘targets worthy of destruction’, at ‘the vices of the age’.1 The explosive blasts of such non-sentimental ‘dynamiteurs’ take advantage of the fact that ‘in our democratic culture’ ‘mockery … tends to be the poor man’s weapon’ (399). Significantly, an early allusion to Wyndham Lewis’s ‘Inferior Religions’ situates the cinematic phenomena in question in CONTACT Bill Solomon [email protected] © 2017 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group 2 B. SOLOMON a genealogy that extends back in time to early-twentieth-century literary modernism. The opening paragraph remarks that few possess the talent to ‘lead us to laughter’, the audible manifestation of which ‘a celebrated “soldier of humor” once defined as “the sneeze of the intellect”’ (398). Shortly thereafter Peterson identifies a historically adjacent set of cultural materials the excessively violent aspects of which also anticipate current filmmaking tactics: slapstick motion pictures. Hence the fact that the best introductions to the extravagances of the experimental cinema are not the works of Ford, Eisenstein, or de Mille. They are those silent comedies, first French and then American, in which people used to experience until their ribs ached, the ferocity and heartlessness of the farcical view of things. (400) Ultimately, what was at stake in Peterson’s quasi-manifesto was recognising that a mutation in cultural practice had begun in the US in the 1950s, one that would continue to take shape throughout the following decade. This is a historical event that a periodising reliance on the entrenched category of postmodernism has the effect of obscuring rather than illuminating, and it is with this in mind that I would like to characterise it as the emergence of a slapstick modernism. Whereas for Fredric Jameson, in his canonical account of the largescale transformations taking place after the Second World War, the effacement of the frontier between elite and mass culture, the collapse of the ‘high’ into the ‘low’, marked a dramatic decline in artistic energy, my concern is with a genuinely productive fusion that occurred in these years.2 The theorist’s detection of signs of exhaustion, his conviction that a vibrantly modernist commitment to a shock aesthetic had given way to the postmodernists’ symptomatically frivolous indulgence in schlock, seems to me to be a result of his having overlooked what a previous commentator had envisioned (albeit primarily on the basis of tendencies in fiction) as ‘the second coming of modernism’ in this country.3 That a reinvigorating return on the part of artistically ambitious writers to the heritage of popular film lunacy was in process in the 50s and beyond is most evident in the output of the Beats. Perhaps Jack Kerouac put it best when he declared that: It goes back to those crazy days before World War II when […] our fathers wore straw hats like W.C. Fields. It goes back to the completely senseless babble of the Three Stooges, the ravings of the Marx Brothers […] to Laurel and Hardy in the Foreign Legion […] this had begun to disappear around the end of World War II […] when suddenly it began to emerge again.4 But equally telling was Allen Ginsberg’s assertion in the liner notes to a recording of Howl that his main goal in composing the poem had been to generate a ‘tragic custard-pie comedy of wild phrasing, meaningless images for the beauty of abstract poetry of mind running along making awkward combinations like Charlie Chaplin’s walk’.5 Indeed, many of the other Beat TEXTUAL PRACTICE 3 writers expressed an affinity for the performance styles of the stars of the virtually obsolete cinematic genre. Examples include Gregory Corso’s ‘Clown’; Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s ‘Constantly Risking Absurdity’; as well as Bob Kaufman’s ‘Sullen Bakeries of Total Recall’; not to mention the lengthy tribute to the Three Stooges in Kerouac’s Visions of Cody; and, most significantly, William Burroughs’ Naked Lunch, portions of which read like scripts for a grotesque version of a Marx Brothers or W.C. Fields movie. Moreover, the so-called black humorists of the 1960s – Joseph Heller, Thomas Pynchon, Philip Roth and Kurt Vonnegut, among numerous others – all paid homage in some way in their respective literary enterprises to the slapstick tradition of comic madness.6 The debt owed in this era to the timeworn cinematic genre is just as apparent in the sphere of American underground film. One of the first cases in point was Peterson’s own Lead Shoes, a film from the late 40s that (with the help of an anamorphic lens) contains a surrealistically distorted impression of a man in a diving suit flailing about in the city streets, as if Buster Keaton in The Navigator had finally made it to dry land. James Broughton (a sometime collaborator of Peterson’s) and Ron Rice also registered the impact on them of silent screen comedy in employing actors (Kermit Sheets and Taylor Mead, respectively) whose on-screen antics recalled alternately Charlie Chaplin and Harry Langdon. (I am thinking here of Broughton’s Loony Tom: The Happy Lover and Rice’s The Flower Thief as well as The Queen of Sheba Meets the Atom Man; the former’s performance in Mother’s Day also brings Chaplin to mind.) Correlatively, Bruce Conner has acknowledged that he drew inspiration for the montage method he utilised in his meta-textual classic, A Movie, from the ‘Help is On the Way’ sequence in Duck Soup.7 For my purposes, the leftwing filmmaker Saul Levine’s Big Stick/An Old Reel is particularly revealing, for it is simultaneously a semi-scientific investigation of the conditions of possibility of filmic imagery and an act of political protest. Editing together the remnants of a couple of Chaplin short films and televised scenes of antiwar demonstrators involving the police, Levine integrates a comic sensibility into a partially abstract work of art that nevertheless manages to denounce the State as a force of oppression. Lastly, Stan Vanderbeek dedicated his 1963 ‘collage-animation’ film Breathdeath to ‘Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton’; as his Science Friction had four years earlier, the later work of ‘comedy-satire’ ‘cuts up photos and newsreel film and reassembles them’ as a means of protesting the Cold War threat of nuclear disaster.8 Below I will attend first to one of the major accomplishments of an equally radicalised underground filmmaker, Ken Jacobs, whose penchant for aesthetic experimentation on occasion coexisted with a fondness for slapstick silliness. His analytical fascination with screen comedy manifests itself in Keaton’s Cops (1991) and Ontic Antics Starring Laurel and Hardy: Bye, Molly (2005) – in 4 B. SOLOMON both of which antiquated film stock featuring the performers is subjected to intense formalist scrutiny (and in the latter instance digital modification). Yet it is in Star Spangled to Death, a collage film he laboured on through the latter half of the 50s, that dissident rage and humorous impulses combine to govern his politically volatile engagement with the materiality of the medium. The second portion of this essay turns to Vera Chytilova’s Daisies (1966), a hilarious product of the Czech New Wave that was deemed subversive and swiftly banned by State authorities. Together the two films demonstrate the socially progressive promise of cinematic mixtures of slapstick buffoonery and modernist ingenuity. Ken Jacobs’ Star Spangled to Death You are to infiltrate, sabotage and cut communications – Once machine lines are cut the enemy is helpless. (William Burroughs, ‘Vaudeville Voices’) Snip, snip, s-n-ip. (Clancy Sigal, Going Away) A late sequence in Clancy Sigal’s neglected 1961 novel Going Away furnishes an excellent means of access to the subversive potential of critical interventions predicated on the manipulation of pre-existing cultural materials. Subtitled a report/a memoir, the book is a kind of politicised response to On the Road. Sharing with its more commercially successful predecessor a concern to bring novelistic prose into closer proximity with autobiographical discourse, Going Away interrogates in a sustained, and historically wellinformed fashion the postwar collapse of the Old Left, suggesting that the repression of dissident viewpoints and diminished radicalism within the labour movement helped ensure that the lifestyle of the beat hipster would be a predominantly apolitical one. Set in 1956, the first-person narrative details the frustrations and anxieties of its protagonist – who is on the threshold of a nervous breakdown throughout the novel – as he quits his job as a Hollywood agent and drives across the country, from the West to the East Coast. The pressing historical event, which has played a large role in triggering his mental crisis, is the revolutionary uprising in Hungary and subsequent decision on the part of the Soviet Union to suppress it – though the recent memory of the House Un-American Activities Committee’s (HUAC) investigation of Communist influence in the motion picture industry remains painful as well. Primarily a despairingly mournful assessment of the profound defeat in the Cold War era of the socially progressive forces previously involved in the collective battle for industrial unionism in the US, the novel contains a singularly optimistic recollection of the protagonist’s participation in a miraculous act of cultural sabotage. While employed as a lowly cleaner of 16 mm prints of old Hollywood pictures, the narrator experiences a sort of epiphany when a new way to combat TEXTUAL PRACTICE 5 the distressing tendencies of his country is revealed to him. Working in the basement for a company involved in the syndication of movies for television broadcast, the narrator stumbles ‘on this idea, this plan, this grand design to rescue civilization from itself’.9 One day he figures out how to take advantage of the subterranean position in which he has found himself. While he and the other members of his motley crew ‘were monotonously working away’, he is suddenly stricken with a blinding, magnificent sense of reality … it struck me that this material which was running through my ethyl-soaked hands at the rate of three feet per second was motion picture film. On the film were prospects, vistas and perspectives which, when projected by a machine into a cathode ray tube and electronically distributed to American homes, created a series of mounting images which formed one leg of that monster table, ‘the mass media’. What better way to devote one’s spare (and more than spare, working) hours than to lead the way in sabotage? So this one afternoon, I suddenly stopped my re-wind and picked up the piece of film. I sabotaged it. The method was simplicity itself. Part of our job was to check the film for breaks or chips in the sprocket holes. If we came across a break we stopped the re-winds, snipped half a frame from either side of the defect, cemented the film together and rolled on. … I gazed almost affectionately at the slightly torn sprocket hole in the piece of film I was holding. I then cut through the film with my razor blade, took up two feet of film, cut through again, cemented the ends, dropped the two feet of amputated film into a trash bin at my side and rolled on. … A moment later, I repeated the procedure, removing from the film another twenty-four inches of action and sound. The picture was called Farewell Dear Murderer. All told I took out seven or eight stretches of film story. I knew that many television stations never took the trouble to screen the films they bought, and the ecstasy of my vision of the reaction of the Late-Late Viewers as they bumped and jolted through a more than normally incomprehensible story almost brought tears of joy to my eyes. To you, out there, this may sound vicious, or hostile, childish even. Such is the fate that awaits all the great seminal actions of a revolutionary character. (481) He continues: I ripped whole sections of film out of the spools all that day. … I had acquired the knack of ‘reading’ film by just holding it up to the light and using the individual frames like letters of the alphabet. I did this now. Gradually, from day to day, I refined the method from indiscriminate sabotage to calculated torture. I would ‘read’ the film until I came to the climactic scene of a sequence – the cowboy dashing to the rescue of the lady, the revelation by the master detective of the criminal, the seduction which the plot had been leading up to – and then, simply remove it. … From that day onward my job took on meaning. (482)10 The narrator’s approach parallels (though it is not identical to) the avantgarde tactics – the cut-up and fold-in methods – Burroughs had begun to mobilise in the early 60s in putting together the Nova trilogy. (Burroughs has stated that he recognised ‘The Waste Land’ and John Dos Passos’ USA trilogy as pursuing in the 20s and 30s the same goal as the one at which his 6 B. SOLOMON postwar experimentation was aimed.11) More significant, the two writers share the conviction that critically dismantling dominant narrative structures amounts to a politically significant gesture of cultural resistance. Of course, Burroughs does not take recourse to the reassuring distinction between fiction and social reality; everyday life as he views it is as much a symbolic construct (produced by the ‘reality studio’) as any conventional novel or generic film.12 Going Away’s (thematic) endorsement of semi-sadistic acts of textual elimination, of aggressive editing as an enjoyable mode of interfering with the process of consumption, finds its (formal) complement in the montage/ collage techniques several underground filmmakers were also starting to deploy in the late 1950s. The use of found footage, for instance, in Conner’s A Movie is an exemplary case in point. Modelled on ‘coming attractions’ trailers, the highly reflexive film is composed of precisely the kind of materials the protagonist in Sigal’s novel would have removed from the features and tossed in the wastebasket (Jenkins: 185). As the obverse of cutting out, pasting in or together also serves as an inventive means of engaging in radical political protest. Equally if not more pertinent is Ken Jacobs’ powerful anti-epic, Star Spangled To Death, a film he initially worked on between 1956 and 1960, the scathingly satiric thrust of which has led one critic to describe it as ‘a mammoth-sized razor blade sharp enough to set plenty of throats ableeding’.13 Almost seven hours long, Star Spangled to Death is an emotionally intense denunciation of class and racial injustice in postwar America, the film frequently expressing, either implicitly via ironic juxtapositions or explicitly in written text, remorse at the fact that the New Deal-era gains for the less privileged members of society have been eradicated. The militarised regime now in control of society seems no longer concerned with the plight of the common man, exhibiting none of the tolerance or compassion for suffering persons to which Roosevelt at least paid lip service in his speeches throughout the Great Depression. The film’s star, Jerry Sims, thus epitomises the sorrowful situation of many of the nation’s have-nots. One of the filmmaker’s primary goals is to generate empathy for the down-and-out object of his cinematic attentions. Listing himself in the credits as Oscar Friendly, Ringmaster and Janitor, Jacobs’s project is in part to compel others to care about the unfortunate victims of capitalist modernity. Bullied by a world insensitive to his quirks, his freaky behaviour, Jerry is a real albeit addled scholar who has sufficient intelligence to grasp his degraded condition. Impoverished, repellent and unemployable, Jerry is a social pariah who realises how unfair his situation is. The exceptionally lengthy re-presentations of lost or discarded film materials, the excerpts often running thirty minutes or more, are incorporated into the main text in order to make the spectators feel the awfulness of Jerry’s predicament. The first interpolation is an ethnographical film featuring TEXTUAL PRACTICE 7 the naturalists Martin and Osa Johnson returning from an expedition into Africa. As the husband and wife team prepare to leave the jungle, the voice-over proudly congratulates them on their missionary accomplishments, praising them for having brought good hygiene and greater sanitation to the tribe with whom they have stayed. Jacobs occasionally interrupts the depiction of the safari as it heads ‘back to civilization’, showing Jerry and his pals engaged in actions similar to those of the ‘primitive’ peoples, carrying items resting on their head, for example, as the Africans do while transporting the big game hunter and his spouse’s belongings and equipment during the trek. If the live-action footage, shot outside a Manhattan brownstone, comically mocks the documentary, the latter conversely supplies a metaphor for the urban disenfranchised: they are the ones who must shoulder the material burdens of society. The same tactic of converting literal imagery into a figural signifier obtains in the next insertion, an episode on ‘Mother Love’, from a CBS television broadcast of a programme called ‘Conquest’. In the show, the reporter (Charles Collingwood) visits a laboratory involved in scientific experimentation on rhesus monkeys. Scientists have deprived several of the animals of any maternal presence so as to measure the impact of this lack on the creatures. The assorted tests are both cruel and absurdly ridiculous, and the head psychologist appears on camera as an automaton-like dunce. Yet the primary aim here is not simply to make fun of the scientific community, for here again the clip functions tropologically, figuring Jerry’s fate in the urban metropolis. As he and assorted other peculiar looking persons create impromptu street theatre scenes, the camera angles occasionally mimic those employed in the television broadcast, while the men are often shown clutching toys as the lonely and frightened monkeys do. Those living on the margins of urban modernity are just as scared and disoriented by their treatment as the insecure animal objects of cognition in the programme. Men and monkeys exist in cages and remain in the present at the mercy of those who would examine their behaviour in logically rational, unfeeling ways. That the distinctive members of both species are living beings, each one of whom deserves kindness and respect, is a basic truth that appears to have escaped those involved in the accumulation of knowledge about emotional states. The conscienceless villains of Star Spangled to Death are without question Nixon (whose ‘Checkers’ speech is reproduced almost in its entirety) and Nelson Rockefeller, who was elected governor of NY during the making of the film. An extended sequence of clips from a television broadcast (subtitled ‘The Man and his Record’ and paid for by the ‘Citizens Committee’) celebrating the latter’s accomplishments serves as a means for Jacobs to argue against systematically perpetuated social inequalities. When one individual is lucky enough to be born into a wealthy family so that he can rise to power, 8 B. SOLOMON someone else without these initial advantages must follow an antithetical trajectory, ending up a devastated, puny outsider due to a lack of financial support and beneficial contacts. The existence of a winner like Rockefeller presupposes the experience of a loser like Jerry, and this is why Jacobs characterises the two men as conjoined twins. They are inseparable in the sense that those who make it to the top of society are inevitably shadowed by persons on the bottom. Star Spangled to Death’s other main attraction, performing alongside Jerry Sims, is the half-human weirdo, Jack Smith, with his marvelously multiple set of hysterical personalities.14 At first the influential performance artist appears merely as the featured player of an ensemble cast of social misfits and castoffs, whose street theatre shenanigans inject considerable comic energy into the otherwise radicalised proceedings. The carnivalised scenes in which grotesquely costumed characters flail about randomly resemble nothing so much as the early Keystone films where the display of chaotic, non-stop movement for its own sake had previously served as the primary object of visual fascination. (The downtrodden clowns in Star Spangled even resemble some of the minor actors in Sennett’s studio – their exaggerated moustaches and silly top hats reminiscent of Chester Conklin or Ford Sterling.) In the later work, too, multidirectional pantomime sets bodies wildly in motion; they collide with one another, ricochet off at peculiar angles, all the while fooling around with an array of strange props that clutter the outdoor set. The extravagant gestures of the strangely outfitted, frequently masked creatures tend to prevent the distracted viewers’ attentions from settling on any single object or personage, our eyes kept busy by the excess of information or data on the screen in front of us. The mobile camera, which veers off as unpredictably as its subject matter, panning erratically, zooming in and out and then recording the action from high and low angles, adds to the impression of rapid movement (which Sennett tended to generate via quick montage cuts). Oblivious to their larger surroundings, the adult performers devote themselves to acts of uninhibited play, behaving in essence like children, and it is therefore fitting that they are on occasion joined by actual kids who pursue their own spontaneously devised games in a self-absorbed manner. However, Jack takes all this to a dizzying extreme, leaving the neighbourhood enclave in order to bring his loony show to the city as a whole. At times, we observe him flamboyantly prancing across town, his unique garb including assorted boas, veils, makeshift headgear, as well as plastic drop cloths and linen sheets that trail behind him like a king’s robe or a superhero’s cape. And indeed in one scene he is credited with having freed the slaves, as he leads a group of black kids down the street like a deranged pied piper. Jack’s improvisational attempts to insert his eccentric comic sensibility into everyday life in urban modernity are customarily watched by a crowd of TEXTUAL PRACTICE 9 mildly bemused, slightly perplexed bystanders. Though they do not seem to know what to make of his gesticulations, they do not seem upset either. This is appropriate because he clearly wants to entertain his audience, his unusual yet humorous antics designed to loosen the hold of dignified normalcy on public behaviour. Indeed, one ‘has to hand this to’ Jack: he ‘created a form that offers a counterweight to … reality. If in that reality … the world [is subject] to an often unbearable discipline, … [he] in turn dismantles this self-imposed order quite forcefully’.15 A cut-up in the other sense of the word, a practical joker, Jack unreservedly dedicates himself to counteracting Jerry’s gloomy pessimism, exhibiting the exuberant hopefulness people need to carry on in the world. Appropriately named ‘The Spirit of Living Not Life’, Smith ebulliently embraces the opportunity to present himself as he chooses, thus embodying an active alternative to Sims as a portrait of abject misery. Tellingly, when Jack first enters the film, the soundtrack is playing ‘Happy Days are Here Again’ – clearly his theme song. After watching a three-hour rough cut of Star Spangled to Death, Jonas Mekas wrote in Film Culture that Smith does there ‘as good a job as the early Chaplin’, adding ‘I know [this] is a big statement, but you’ll see someday its true’ (quoted in Sitney: 2002: 329). The wording is significant, for Mekas does not mean to say that Smith is simply an excellent mimic of the legendary star’s style. On the contrary, the point is that Smith invented ‘his own special brand of monkey shines’,16 his extravagant physical silliness and expressive grimacing amounting to a genuinely original contribution to the all but defunct cinematic genre (leaving Jerry Lewis aside). If Smith’s penchant for becoming-child and becoming-woman recalls Harry Langdon and many others, Smith commits himself to these nutty transformations with an intensity that exceeds that of his predecessors in this area. Combining the ordinariness and oddness of Harold Lloyd, as well as the mix of grace and clumsiness of Keaton (whose severe good looks Smith also shares when not wearing gaudy make up), Smith even manages to invoke bit players like Al St. John when he dons a pair of too small overalls in order to impersonate a hayseed or country hick (I am thinking here of the post-nuclear holocaust scenes in Star Spangled, where Jack encloses a few youthful survivors back in the large drum they have evidently used as a bomb shelter. Smith’s whoops and yelps on the audio track (almost never synchronised with the visuals) may reference the squeals of dismay and barking of Curly of the Three Stooges; yet the nasal monologues Smith voices occupy a terrain of verbal humour into which the member of the comic trio never ventured. Jack’s dementedly self-pitying rant against his insatiably hungry cat Nosferatu is an exceptionally hilarious case in point – and one that stands in sharp contrast to Nixon’s hypocritical variant of such confessional discourse mentioned above. Lastly, and most significantly, Smith’s artificial get-ups are as idiosyncratic as the Tramp’s trademark outfit but utterly unique. Converting 10 B. SOLOMON lampshades as well as paper bags into makeshift headgear, draping his body in layers of unmatched fabrics, wearing on occasion ill-fitting pantaloons, not to mention the assortment of exotic costumes he often dons, Jack’s fashion sense encapsulates on the level of apparel the formal, montage/collage tactic of the film itself. His thrift store aesthetic, which results in his being dressed in an assortment of fortuitously discovered items, all of which are precariously brought into contact on his 6 foot 2 frame, corresponds precisely to the method Jacobs utilised to compose Star Spangled to Death. For the motion picture too gathers together a heterogeneous array of tattered materials, many of them the worse for wear, yet prized nonetheless, their value recognised despite the fact that they have been cast aside, abandoned by those concerned to keep up with new trends. Jacobs’ plunge into the archives of cinema thus finds its reflexive corporeal corollary in Jack’s mode of dress, both techniques of assemblage predicated on the idea that second-hand purchases and dumpster diving are the means through which the hidden riches of the cultural past may be unearthed and subsequently redeemed. In ‘A Mischievous Little-Boy Revolution: The Whirled’ Branden Joseph takes issue with the conviction that Jacobs’ early work in film amounts to a ‘naïve expression of the supposedly liberatory forces of improvisatory spontaneity’.17 Instead, Joseph argues – ultimately drawing heavily on Theodor Adorno for theoretical support – Jacobs’ project was to assume the suffering endemic to a post-Holocaust society, thus signalling a mature acceptance on the part of the serious artist of his responsibilities in a disaster-stricken world. His body of work in this respect stands as ‘resolutely modernist’ (57), his negative rigour repudiating ‘the formal semblance of reconciliation’, his struggle to make his way dialectically through two incompatible aesthetic options: art for art’s sake versus social and political commitment. Torn between a desire to achieve pure beauty via abstract perfection of a painterly sort and a need to denounce discursively the evils of a fallen world, Jacobs speaks ‘the truth of a profoundly unresolved society’ to the degree that he refuses any ‘false resolution’ (58). My claim is simply that Jack Smith’s participation in Star Spangled to Death enables this particular film to overcome the contradictions Joseph locates as structuring the bulk of Jacobs’ work in the first phase of his career. The motion picture is indisputably a powerful articulation of the filmmaker’s compassion for the plight of the underprivileged, expressing with great energy his hostility toward those whose actions perpetuate the oppression of minority communities. Mobilising formal experimentation in order to produce feelings of intense anger, Star Spangled also strives to provoke its prospective audience to acknowledge the horrors of capitalism, to jolt the spectator into a thoughtfully aware state of the awful state of existence of disenfranchised persons. Yet the film is also a joyful demonstration of the virtues of maintaining a spirit of comic rebelliousness, Smith’s prankish capering renovating the tradition of silent comedy for satiric use in Cold TEXTUAL PRACTICE 11 War America. Perhaps influenced by the star of his film, the filmmaker embraces decidedly non-adult ways of attending to objects, his ironic combination of discarded visual phenomena deriving from his recognition that it is in ‘waste products … that the world of things turns directly and solely’ to him.18 In bringing together ‘materials of widely differing kinds in a new, intuitive relationship’ (Benjamin: 448), the filmmaker approximates the state of a child at play. ‘I think we identified with children a lot. We wanted consciously to maintain the ability to play, to fabricate, to make fun of, you know, to mock.’19 And approaching such a state allows him to appreciate the pleasure of indulging in acts of profane vandalism. ‘Resistance. Occupation. Jack and I would deface posters in the subway, which I called counter-desecration. We had discovered things you could do with the posters, erasing and adding things. We had a lot of fun’ (MacDonald: 370). This same insight into the fun of messing around undoubtedly informed the making of Star Spangled, establishing it as one of the small number of radical artworks that manages to appeal to ‘the most revolutionary emotion of the masses: their laughter’.20 Even though the cinematic project was not completed at the time, remaining for the most part invisible throughout the latter half of the century, upon its return it has regained its status as a testament to the political potential lurking in technologically mediated acts of countercultural play. Such acts are what I propose to conceptualise as instances of a slapstick modernism. Daisies: slapstick modernism and communism In 1966, five young filmmakers, most of whom had met one another while attending the National Film School in Prague (NAMU), decided to join forces and make an omnibus of short films, each based on a short story from Pearls of the Deep, a collection of Bohumil Hrabal’s work which had recently appeared in print. Of these films, the one directed by Jiri Menzel, Mr. Baltazar’s Death, most clearly announces the debt it owes (as does a good deal of Hrabal’s fiction) to American slapstick. Organised around the eccentric behaviour of several spectators at a local motorcycle race and featuring assorted violent crashes, the deadpan comedy recalls the setting and style of numerous early Keystones – among others Kid Auto Races at Venice (1914), the public debut of ‘The Little Tramp’. In contrast, Vera Chytilova’s contribution to the collective venture, a solemn version of the writer’s The Restaurant the World, does not evoke the cinematic genre in question. However, Daisies, the film she created later that same year would reveal the director’s substantial investment in silent screen comedy. Resulting from the collaboration of Chytilova (director and screenwriter), her husband Jaroslav Kucera (the cinematographer, and Ester Krumbachova (the costume designer), Daisies is a strikingly innovative, reflexive artistic undertaking that draws a considerable amount of its ostensibly subversive 12 B. SOLOMON energy from the tradition of slapstick film. Its debt to the latter is intermittently signalled in scenes that suddenly shift into rapid motion--as is the case in less daring films such as Louis Malle’s Zazie Dans le Metro (1960), Karel Resiz’s Morgan: A Suitable Case for Treatment (1966), as well as Woody Allen’s Sleeper (1973). In addition to the allusive function of its occasional use of accelerated movement, Daisies also constructs its dual protagonists, both for the most part named Marie (and played by two nonactors) in the image of several of the more or less legendary figures of the cinematic genre. Below I will discuss their relation to Chaplin and ‘Fatty’ Arbuckle, but for the moment it is sufficient to note that like Langdon, as well as Laurel and Hardy, Jitka Cerhova and Ivana Karbanova, in consistently acting like mischievously aggressive, temperamental bad girls perennially in search of ways to entertain themselves in an otherwise boring existence, invoke the procedure of becoming-child that constituted a key component in many silent comedians’ general repertoire of performance techniques. Moreover, Daisies invokes one of the equally crucial motifs in slapstick film: the notion that the entities that appear on screen are to be taken as marionettes or dolls rather than as representations of living human beings. The doll or puppet motif is introduced almost immediately. In the first shot after the credits, we see the two bikini-clad girls awkwardly propped up against a wooden wall. Indeed, as several critics have noted, the girls look like marionettes whose wires or strings have gone slack. As they slowly move their arms and head we hear creaking sounds, as if their joints are analogous to the badly lubricated hinges of an old door. When they speak they express their dissatisfaction with the current state of affairs, the awfulness of which has been suggested in the opening montage juxtaposition of grainy footage of aerial bombings and the slowly rotating components (a flywheel driven by a crank) of some kind of mechanism. Frustrated inhabitants of a world focused on military violence and industrialised labour, the girls feel, as they put it, that they are mere ‘dolls’, things the actions of which are determined by environmental forces beyond their control. Yet rather than adhere to the severely restricted norms they perceive as governing their everyday lives, the two decide to rebel not by positing themselves as beautiful souls but by resigning themselves to the ‘spoiled’ nature of their surroundings. Henceforth they will be spoiled too, behaving as irresponsible kids with absolutely no respect for the adult reality they must endure. Rejecting all established codes of conduct, the girls dedicate themselves to regressive enjoyment; from this point forward, whether in public or private, they will selfishly seek only to gratify their impulses without giving any thought to others or to the larger consequences of their misdeeds. Before examining these episodes, however, it is worth pursuing the implications of the opening scene or prologue a bit further. In the most sustained assessment of the significance of the doll motif in Daisies, Bliss Cua Lim TEXTUAL PRACTICE 13 acknowledges that it both functions as a ‘satirical device with which to caricature a femininity so vacant and self-indulgent they are practically living dummies’ (an interpretation Chytilova herself has authorised in interviews) and as a means to protest against the necessarily docile condition of women in oppressively patriarchal situations (much as it does in Sylvia Plath’s ‘The Applicant’). Yet Cua also argues convincingly in favour of a reading of Daisies as an effort to retool the trope so that it serves ‘as a celebration of female recalcitrance’.21 The latter interpretive perspective can be deepened if we take into consideration, as Anca Parvulescu does, the fact that the two young women in the initial shot are framed so that they appear ‘to be caught in a box structure similar to that of the camera itself’.22 (And the flywheel seen in the preceding montage does resemble a projector.) From this vantage point, the doll metaphor resonates reflexively; it is as if the characters themselves have declared that they are toys with which the filmmaker (and crew) are free to play. Extending the trope metonymically – the doll/toys as parts figuring the apparatus as a whole – it is entirely reasonable to comprehend the rebellious girls’ series of misadventures as repeated allegories of the defiant use of cinema as a mode of rejecting bureaucratically dictated demands to film in an exclusively sober and responsible manner. An early sequence set at a local nightclub helps illustrate this absolutely essential point. As the girls cautiously step through a red curtain into the club a spotlight shines on them and a drum roll begins. They hesitate, then, gathering their courage, begin to strut boldly, whereupon one is yanked off-camera by a waiter and the other is brushed aside by a couple of pseudo-Jazz Age dancers who proceed to do a letter perfect version of the Charleston. However, after being seated in their box, which, as Peter Hames puts it ‘resembles the stage of a Punch and Judy show’, the girls, like disrespectful or inconsiderate kids, begin to compete with the official performers for attention.23 As the camera switches back and forth between the two spectacles, as if trying to decide which one is more entertaining, the girls bounce up and down in a silly fashion as they get themselves drunk. Ultimately, to the great dismay of the flapper (who has trouble finishing her part of the act), the two untrained girls prove victorious, as evidenced by the fact that the obviously unsynchronised soundtrack of a crowd wildly cheering accompanies shots of their spontaneous and clumsy fooling around (which doubles their performance in the film as a whole). The unruly antics of the two intoxicated brats are a reworking of the equally ill-mannered and disruptive shenanigans of Chaplin and Arbuckle in the early Keystone comedy The Rounders (1914). And, as in the American studio’s rare teaming of its two biggest stars, the disorderly comic duo in the Czech film get kicked out of the dining area once they start harassing the other patrons, flopping on top of them, grabbing food off their plates, etc. (Moreover, near the end of both films, the characters run the risk of drowning.) 14 B. SOLOMON Significantly, before they are booted out of the cabaret, one of the girls amazes those watching her by blowing bubbles through a straw that then magically appear enlarged on screen as an iridescent flow of foam spilling out of the glass. The effect on the actual spectator is just as strong as it is on the audience in the film; both are stunned by the startling burst of colour the impromptu interplay of water and light causes. This analogy – between the girls’ inventive use of everyday items to create an image of beauty and the cinematographer’s experimental deployment of his equipment to produce visually impressive aesthetic images – establishes the numerous other instances of cinematic wizardry (often involving colour) exhibited in Daisies as the perceptually pleasing result of ultimately meaningless improvisation. As Kucera explains it: I wanted to use colour concepts to disparage a lot of things; I had no intention whatever of arousing an aesthetic impression of beauty. But somewhere, early in the game, it turned out that the structure of things with respect to each other created aesthetics whose results I didn’t expect at all. (quoted in Hames: 187) Instances of such unplanned discoveries include the transformation of an otherwise dull monochrome shot of the girls at dinner with an elderly suitor (who clearly hopes to sleep with one of them) into a vivid attraction through the use of a series of brightly coloured filters. Shortly thereafter the landscape seen from a fast moving train is converted into a dazzlingly prismatic blur of ultimately abstract lines – not to mention the intermittent inclusion throughout the motion picture of exceedingly rapid (and difficult to describe) sets of flashing images. However gratuitous such effects may appear in light of standardised narrative procedures, they greatly intensify the sensory effect and emotional affect of the film, thus making the experience of watching it an unusually exhilarating event. The most consistently remarked upon case in which the non-normative behaviour of the characters corresponds to or allegorises the unorthodox procedures of the filmmakers is the extraordinary scene set in the two girls’ apartment where they engage in mock combat with scissors. We have previously observed the girls taking great pleasure in cutting up all sorts of things. After irresponsibly setting their room on fire (in the process of cooking a bunch of sausages) they proceed to slice assorted food items by converting their scissors into eating utensils. There have also been several allusions to the tearing and sewing back together of articles of clothing; and one of the girls’ favourite pastimes is to snip advertisements, presumably in order to put together the collage assemblages that decorate their home. Now, however, they take their cutting activities further, using their scissors as weapons. After one wrecks the other’s nightgown, the latter retaliates, attacking her roommate’s body. Surprisingly, the severed limb appears in the lower right corner of the screen, far from the body it was once attached to. As the TEXTUAL PRACTICE 15 mutual assault continues, we witness a decapitated torso roaming around, followed by the detached heads of the two antagonists. Next, the screen itself beaks into multiple and mismatched squares, and when many of these start to turn at an angle it creates for the viewer the effect of gazing into a kaleidoscope. The depiction of an aggressive fight with sharp objects thus emerges as a reflexive figure not merely for the avant-garde compositional tactics deployed in the present scene but for the approach to editing operative in the film as a whole. The scene exemplifies in other words the way that ‘[t]he form of the film was … derived from the conceptual basis of the film’ (Chytilova quoted in Lim: 39).24 For as most of its commentators have pointed out, Daisies makes extensive use of jump cuts, false cuts on action and other anti-continuity strategies, generating the impression that the jagged film has been pieced together with fragments that do not fit perfectly together (Hames: 192).25 The scene concludes with a blown-up photograph that appears to bring the magnified grain of the image into critical focus, seemingly in order to register the generally overlooked materiality of the medium. If this is the case, it is done less in the epistemologically rigorous or seriously scientific spirit of a good deal of structuralist film in the 70s than in the name of a somewhat haphazard demonstration of the degree to which making movies may function as an entertaining means of indulging in modes of comically violent optical play. For their last adventure, the two reprobates sneak into a prohibited area, eventually finding their way via a dumbwaiter into the depths of a gloomy building where a lavish meal has been laid out, presumably in preparation for a State banquet of some sort. This arrival brings the film full circle in the sense that their initial game, which they grew weary of, was to trick older men into buying them expensive dinners, under the false pretense that one of them would sleep with him. Now, scared yet giggling with excitement as they again do something they know is wrong – the girls, having previously proved themselves to be liars and thieves – proceed to add breaking and entering as well as vandalism to the list of their past misdeeds. Exuberantly digging with their hands into the assorted dishes, the trespassers gorge on the forbidden food they have stumbled across while wantonly smashing bottles, plates and glasses before concluding their illicit feast with a cream cake fight. Though completely stuffed, the girls have sufficient energy to hold a fashion show on the wrecked table and then to treat the chandelier as a swing. This scene, too, yields to an allegorical or self-reflexive interpretation, albeit retroactively. Immediately after a sudden cut drops the ecstatic girls from the heights of the chandelier to the distressing depths of a body of water, an invisible typewriter pounds out on the screen a kind of official verdict or judgment on the behaviour of the juvenile delinquents. The price they must pay for their infantile transgressions is death (for they do not appear to know how to 16 B. SOLOMON swim): this, the typewriter declares, is ‘the only way for them to end up’. As they cry out for help, which doubles as an apologetic plea for mercy, the typewriter, suggesting that it is too late to make amends, explains that even if they were given a second chance, ‘it would look like this’. The scene then switches back to the dining area. Determined to repair the damage they have done, the girls, now oddly bound up in outfits made of newspaper tied tightly with twine, rush around the room trying to clean up while we hear them whispering that ‘if we’re good and hard working we will be happy and everything will be wonderful’. Though they dust and sweep and even attempt to fix a few broken plates and reconstitute a dish or two, their efforts to clean up the absolute mess they have made are in vain, for the minute they lie down on the table to rest the chandelier crashes down onto one of them, as if carrying out the aforementioned punishment. A series of explosions amidst a reprise of the opening images of military combat confirms that the girls have been killed in action, so to speak. The proleptic point the film is indirectly and ironically articulating is that the filmmakers themselves have failed to learn their lesson in time. It is as if Chytilova and her associates realised, and inscribed in the film, the fate that they (correctly) anticipated awaited them when the authorities in the nationalised film industry got hold of Daisies and saw what had been going on behind their backs. Indeed the crew did get in big trouble, the director even having her filmmaking privileges suspended. Although the screenplay had originally been approved, when those in charge saw the degree to which the finished product willfully deviated from acceptable cinematic projects, they were obviously not pleased: Denounced by state deputies in Czechoslovakia for ‘having nothing in common with our Republic, socialism, and the ideals of communism’, Daisies was initially banned and only eventually allowed public screening, and Chytilova herself was barred from filmmaking from 1969 to 1975. (Lim: 37)26 Still, the film has survived and remains a significant accomplishment in the history of slapstick modernism, forcefully demonstrating that at certain moments in time (and in specific countries) the customarily prohibited desire to indulge in technologically mediated modes of collective play may on occasion manage to slip through the cracks in the surface of more politically approved or responsibly mature modes of cultural production. When Jameson revisits the issue of modernism in Singular Modernity, he classifies the postwar work of Nabokov and Beckett as exemplary incarnations of a late or neo-modernism. It is at this historical moment, he argues, that aesthetic autonomy arises ‘as an ideal and a prescription, a supreme value as well as a regulatory principle’; and the direct consequence of this self-conscious privileging of a latter day art for art’s sake is that the ideology of modernism finally dovetails perfectly with its practice.27 The utopian aspirations of the earlier generation of modernists are henceforth TEXTUAL PRACTICE 17 laid to rest, innovative artists no longer willing or able to envision themselves as participating in socially purposeful projects. My claim is that such an evaluation of cultural practice in the 50s is at best partial, and at worst is a judgment that turns a blind eye to the promising acts of cultural synthesis that writers like those mentioned above helped initiate, a synthesis that would become remarkably productive in the years to come. Indeed, it is just as feasible to consider Nabokov and Beckett as pivotal figures who helped fabricate what Adorno, in an oft-quoted letter to Benjamin, once referred to as the non-existent ‘middle term between Schoenberg and the American film’, by which he clearly meant those of Chaplin and his ilk.28 Nabokov and Beckett’s shared investment in the tradition of slapstick film is of course well documented. What is worth underscoring here in conclusion is the degree to which their respective efforts to blend the experimental and the popular put their many successors in the field in position to discover a wide variety of literary and cinematic solutions to the enduring problem of creating a progressive politics of culture. The concept of a slapstick modernism is one way to designate the aesthetic substances those pursuing such solutions mixed together. Notes 1. Sidney Peterson, ‘A Note on Comedy in Experimental Film’, in P. Adams Sitney (ed.), Film Culture Reader (New York: Praeger, 1970), p. 399. 2. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism: Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991), p. 2. 3. Morris Dickstein, Gates of Eden: American Culture in the Sixties (New York: Basic Books, 1977), p. 92. See along similar lines, David James, ‘Mapping Modernist Continuities’, in The Legacies of Modernism: Historicizing Postwar and Contemporary Fiction (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), pp. 1– 20. 4. Jack Kerouac, ‘The Origin of the Beat Generation’, in Good Blonde & Others (San Francisco, CA: Grey Fox Press, 1993), p. 58. 5. Allen Ginsberg, Deliberate Prose: Selected Essays, 1952–1995 (New York: Perennial, 2000), pp. 229–32. 6. One of the crowning achievements of this trend was undoubtedly the Cuban novelist (and film critic) G. Cabrera Infante’s Three Sad Tigers. Published in Spanish in 1965, and translated into English in 1971, the novel sought to do for Havana what Joyce’s Ulysses did for Dublin, but in a way that expressed ‘the philosophy of life’ as set forth by the Marx Brothers. Seven Voices: Seven Latin American Writers Talk to Rita Guilbert. Trans. Frances Partridge (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1973), 411. 7. See Bruce Jenkins, ‘Explosion in a Film Factory: The Cinema of Bruce Conner’, in 2000 BC The Bruce Conner Story Part II (Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 2000), p. 188. 8. Stan Vanderbeek, ‘Program Notes’, Visibles. RE-Voir Video (2000), pp. 4–5. 9. Clancy Sigal, Going Away (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1962), p. 480. 18 B. SOLOMON 10. The narrator is so pleased with his accomplishment that he arranges to organise a union in the shop, though the outcome of this admirable undertaking is that the workers get laid off. 11. Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews: Third Series (New York: Viking Press, 1967), p. 153. Although Burroughs names the Camera Eye device he was surely thinking of the Newsreel sections of U.S.A. 12. ‘[R]eality is a film, identity a script, and the body is behaviouristically programmed through visual and auditory stimuli. Revolt is achieved by turning the machine against itself through newspaper cut-ups, film cut-ups, photomontage.’ Peter Wollen, ‘Guerilla Conditions: The Cinema of William Burroughs’, Paris Hollywood: Writings on Film (New York: Verso, 2002), p. 28. 13. Tony Pipolo, ‘Ken Jacobs’ Two Wrenching Departures’, in Michele Pierson, David E. James, and Paul Arthur (eds.), Optic Antics: The Cinema of Ken Jacobs (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 117–8. 14. Smith would later star alongside Taylor Mead in Ron Rice’s remarkable third film, The Queen of Sheba Meets the Atom Man (1963). 15. Sigfried Kracauer quoted in Miriam Bratu Hansen, ‘America, Paris, the Alps: Kracauer (and Benjamin) on Cinema and Modernity’, in Leo Charney and Vanessa R. Schwartz (eds.), Cinema and Modern Life Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), p. 373. 16. Henry Miller, ‘The Golden Age’, The Cosmological Eye (New York: New Directions, 1939), p. 4. 17. Branden W. Joseph, ‘A Mischievous Little-Boy Revolution: The Whirled’, Optic Antics, p. 45. 18. Walter Benjamin, ‘Construction Site’, in One-Way Street Selected Writings Volume 1 (Boston, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), p. 449. 19. Scott MacDonald, ‘Ken and Flo Jacobs’, in A Critical Cinema 3 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), p. 368. 20. Walter Benjamin, ‘Chaplin in Retrospect’, in Selected Writings Volume 2 (Boston, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 224. 21. Bliss Cua Lim, ‘Dolls in Fragments: Daisies as Feminist Allegory’, Camera Obscura, 16, no. 2 (2002), p. 47, pp. 38–9. 22. Anca Parvulescu, ‘“So We Will Go Bad”: Cheekiness, Laughter, Film’, Camera Obscura, 21, no. 2 (2006), p. 62, 146. Michael Koresky, in his essay for the Criterion Collection’s ‘Pearls of the Czech New Wave’, notes that the film resembles ‘a New Wave Marx Brothers comedy’, but dismisses this critical perspective as a superficial one, privileging instead a somber ‘existential’ reading of the film. 23. Peter Hames, The Czechoslovak New Wave. 2nd Ed. (London: Wallflower Press, 2005), p. 193. 24. Chytilova specifies that for her the film conveys the idea of destruction at the level of form and content. 25. See also Dylan Rainforth, ‘This Film’s Going Bad: Collaborative Cutting in Daisies.’ http://sensesofcinema.com/2007/cteq/daisies/. 26. The film itself indirectly comments on the future possibility of its being banned in an earlier scene when the girls are troubled by the fact that a gardener and then a group of men cycling to their jobs fail to see them. As the protagonists worry that that their investment in fun has rendered them invisible, the filmmakers speculatively address the idea that their film will not be shown TEXTUAL PRACTICE 19 because it is so out of synch with prevailing attitudes toward the dignity of agricultural and industrial labor. 27. Fredric Jameson, A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present (New York: Verso, 2002), p. 208. 28. Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin, The Complete Correspondence 1928– 1940 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 130. Disclosure statement No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.