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The films of Holly Fisher seem to reveal some magical qualities about cinema too often relegated to the shadows: an optical toy that creates motion out of stillness, space out of flatness, time out of flicker, cinema is built on its paradoxical condition as an illusion. In addition to her sensibilities about memory and perception, Holly seems especially in tune with this nature of film as a medium. Resonances between her images and their realities stoke our awareness as we watch them. We become aware of our position as spectators of shadows on the screen, wake us up to our own realities, where most films attempt to drag us into the dream life of a fictional world.

Glass Shadows shows us windows, the sunlight streaming in, shadows of the filmmaker herself on the wall framed in window light. The nature of glass and the nature of shadows are thus displayed. Most films transform the screen into a window onto a make-believe world: we see cops and robbers, lovers and fighters, epic dramas or poetic moments. This film transforms the screen into a window too, but it is a window of windows. Windowness is all around us. We are made aware of the screen’s opacity even as it displays transparency. Furthermore, we realize that film itself is a transparency, and the image we see is only the shadows it casts on the screen. We see lens flares and discover they are like windows in the darkness of the emulsion. Where light once hit the filmstrip, windows of light now appear in the silver darkness. The windows in the film are a series of squares, like a succession of frames, a picture of the filmstrip itself. Soon we realize that the sun piercing the darkness is in fact the projector bulb beaming onto the screen. Rather than coming from behind the screen, it is coming from behind our head. Then when we see the shadow of the filmmaker, we notice the symmetry of her camera, shooting this image, and the projector now throwing it back at us. But now we are the dark heads, the shadows in the dark, watching the window of the screen. Time is flattened between the shooting and the projecting, and at that moment, the screen is flattened as many windows are superimposed on top of each other creating a collage of squares, itself a metaphor for the montage of filmstrips. As the sunlight, flares, reflections and shadows multiply and recombine, we find ourselves in a cinematic labyrinth of lights, reflections and shadows. A particular telling image shows a shadow of the filmmaker’s head with windows projected inside of it: thus the image is neither immobilized on the filmstrip nor does it rest on the screen; it is also reflected into our eyes and enters our visual cortex as a mental image, a cascading superimposition of windows, yet another window behind the window of our eyes.

From the Ladies follows in Holly’s filmography, and shows us another reflection on the cinematic condition: in this case, reflection. Where we had windows looking out, we now have mirrors reflecting in. For insofar as cinema is a question of shadowplay on the screen, it is necessarily a reflection of those shadows that we see. The camera is named after a room, the camera obscura, and here we are inside a room, with a camera. Inside the camera are mirrors to allow the light to reach the filmmaker’s eye as well as the filmstrip, and inside this room there are mirrors as well, allowing us to see the filmmaker as well as the camera. Mirrors inside mirrors create an optical tunnel, an infinite space, as the observer and the observed are mirrored and made symmetrical, sometimes from the front and sometimes from behind. We the viewers are inside this optical box of the screening room, and as the camera turns, the room turns, reflecting on itself. As the camera rolls, so does the projector, and as the room onscreen turns, so does its reflection in our eyes. The optics of the eye work much like a camera: the right side of the visual field hits the left side of our retina and is sent to our left brain, and vice versa. Also, the visual field literally hits us upside-down inside the eye. Thus as the image on the screen turns one way, we perceive its opposite rotation. The screen and our eyes face each other much as do two mirrors, creating an infinite hallway of perceptions, some facing forward and some facing back. Where there is a ladies’ room, there is a symmetrical and opposite men’s room probably right next door. But where does this infinite tunnel begin? If we zero in on the source of the reflected image, we are drawn to the lens of the camera, behind it a mirror, and behind that the eye of the filmmaker staring back at us: the inward looking gaze from the lady’s eye to ours.

Made ten years later, s o f t s h o e shows us cinema as we rarely see it: as a collage of frames in motion. It shows the framelines too, the thin black line separating one image from the next. By zooming out on the optical printer, Holly is able to show the film as a strip. More than a shadow and more than a reflection, the physical reality of film is a strip. By making us aware of this nature, she is revealing an essential trick in the illusion of film: on the screen, nothing is moving. Film is individual pictures separated by black. Not only are we never aware of the black; it is also hidden when we look at the filmstrip. Only the frameline gives it away. In fact, 24 times a second, as the film is transported in the pro – jector gate from one image to the next, a shutter closes preventing light from hitting the screen; when it opens, the next frame is presented, a different still image. This flicker allows us to perceive motion, through a perceptual anomaly called the phi phenomenon. Most commonly, we perceive it when we see little lights blinking around a theatre marquee and we see it as lights in motion. The black is invisible to the eye during projection as it is when we see the strip with its framelines: a magic absence, a secret pact between film and projector. However it is thanks to this black that we do perceive motion. The spectator participates in the viewing experience by creating the illusion of motion in the brain during those split seconds of black flicker. Just as the days are sepa – rated by nights, and we dream in the night, so do we invent the fiction of motion during the black between film frames. And this explains the title of s o f t s h o e, its letters separated by spaces. We see letters but we perceive a word; so it is in cinema. The pictures dance by one frame af – ter the other, yet we perceive smooth movement. This illusion is belied by the collage on the screen. We see clearly the strips, the framelines, the succession of one image to the next. The rainfall of images on our retina is like a percussive tap dance, yet seems so soft.

These ideas may not have been foremost in the filmmaker’s mind when making these works, yet the results are embedded in the emul – sion of her films. Her later work would continue to explore in ever deep – er ways these issues of multiple perspective, the fugue of time and space and perception that is the cinema.

“Pulp western’ writer, Ryerson Johnson: feminist poet, Nancy Nielsen; workers at a herring smokehouse in Downeast Maine; postcards of famous European paintings; clips from ‘My Darling Clementine’; and the filmmaker are the main players in Holly Fisher’s new film ‘Bullets for Breakfast.’

Each of the characters shares a common space, Lubec, Maine.

As with her earlier films, ‘Bullets for Breakfast’ was produced on an optical printer. Filmed originally on S.8 film, Fisher deconstructs her original material and uses each character first as a main player, then as context for the next. As each subject is introduced, framed, reintroduced, reframed, and decontextualized, a complex shaping of each is achieved. The subtle and not-so-subtle juxtapositions and recombining of subjects begins the process of seeing the hidden depths of subjectivity.

There is enormous pathos and caring for each of the subjects in Fisher’s film which further problematizes our understanding of her project. As a promoter of a phallocentric vision of the west, Ryerson Johnson is clearly a villain. On the other hand, his presence on the screen is a vision of genuine compassion and thoughtfulness. There are no answers in Fisher’s film, nor are they intended to be. Instead, we are offered the opportunity to see and see again the landscape and its inhabitants as a multiplicity of human constructs.

‘Bullets’ is full of wit and humor and is beautiful to look at, but it is a demanding film. Even its form is a blatant hybrid of documentary and experimental style. Objectivity is clearly in the eye of the beholder.

BULLETS FOR BREAKFAST

BY HOLLY FISHER (16mm, color, 77 mins., © 1992)

One of the interesting developments in independent cinema during the past decade or so, at least in North America, has been the synthesis of filmmaking approaches and traditions that, in earlier decades, developed in isolation from one another. Holly Fisher’s Bullets for Breakfast is a distinguished instance. It is, simultaneously, an “experimental” film in which Fisher demonstrates, as she has so often in earlier films, her mastery of the optical printer; and a documentary of a small town­—Lubec, Maine–and the people Fisher has grown to know during her visits there, including western “pulp” novelist Ryerson Johnson, poet Nancy Neilson, and several women and men who skin fish at the local smokehouse. Bullets is, at once, a work in the “structural” tradition of Ken Jacob’s Tom, Tom, the Piper’s Son, Michael Snow’s Wavelength, and Larry Gottheim’s Mouches Volantes; and a feminist response to the (“masculine,” “phallic”) rigidity of the structural tradition. In its reframing of images from Ford’s My Darling Clementine and in its use of visual and auditory layering within which viewers continually detect subtle, complex, ambiguous connections and dissonances, Bullets for Breakfast could have been inspired by Luce Irigeray’s The Sex That is Not One.

Serially organized, but so that the audience is never sure which particular visual and audio motifs will be juxtaposed next, Bullets for Breakfast combines a sense of the familiar, the everyday, and of the mystery and evanescence of experience. It is both theoretically sophisticated and sensually engaging. It pays homage to pervasive visual and narrative myths of Western culture, even as it “skins” them in preparation for our cinematic consumption and digestion. In her attempt to synthesize traditional cinematic disparities, Fisher defines herself as a film progressive, a democrat in her choice of subject and formal options–without letting us forget that her long apprenticeships generating images on the optical printer, working as a free-lance editor (on such documentaries as Christine Choy’s Who Killed Vincent Chin?), and completing experimental films has allowed her to develop a deft and assured cinematic touch.

Scott MacDonald © ’92 – Author of A Critical Cinema 2. University of California Press, 1992.

Often, we act as if the evolution of cinema left certain pleasures behind — outgrew certain “primitive” pleasures — as narrative melodrama established itself as the primary focus of popular film going. For most filmgoers, the movies are a storytelling medium, and those forms of film that do not conform to this expectation are considered “marginal” and inessential to mainstream film history. Indeed, the more fully filmmakers working in arenas other than the commercial mainstream — and especially in what has been variously called avant-garde film, independent film, experimental film, underground film… — cut themselves loose from storytelling, the less central to our awareness they can seem. In my view, this framing of independent cinema is problematic because it ignores both the complex nature of our pleasure in cinema and the historical realities of that complex pleasure.

While it may be true that cinema achieved its status as a primary popular entertainment at the moment when the development of film language allowed cinema to merge with narrative and dramatic prose fiction, the pleasures that seem to have instigated the cinema are quite distinct from those of melodramatic storytelling. The technological/ aesthetic evolution that produced the “philosophic toys” of the Nineteenth Century; Eadweard Muybridge’s photographic motion studies and Zoopraxiscope; Etienne-Jules Maray’s photographic gun; and ultimately, the Lumière Cinématographe and the first motion pictures (in the modern sense of the term) seems to have been fueled primarily by an interest in studying motion, and a fascination with those visual technologies that allowed movement to be analyzed and resynthesized for popular pleasure and enlightenment. When people purchased new phenakistascope discs for the parlor, attended Muybridge lectures, and later, screenings of Lumière and Edison motion pictures, they seem to have been primarily interested in being able to study and enjoy how things move.

While the popular cinema seems to have rendered this fundamental cinematic pleasure “primitive,” a means to the end of melodramatic narrative, the pleasure in motion study has remained a vital element of much of our filmgoing experience and a major focus of both documentary and avant-garde filmmaking. This is particularly obvious in documentary filmmaking. Much of our interest in Nanook of the North (1921) — for all the film’s storytelling elements — is in how Nanook and family do things, that is, the motions they make in accomplishing particular tasks; the power of Robert Gardner’s Forest of Bliss (1985) has to do with the opportunity it offers us to see the “motion” of Benares, India, as those who live and visit there go about their business. But motion study is equally important in the history of avant-garde filmmaking. Indeed, to some degree one can see the history of avant-garde cinema as a continuing articulation of that early interest in the study of movement and the fascination with the technologies that make this study possible.

While I believe my argument here could easily encompass much of the history of avant-garde film, I want to focus on the period from the mid-1960s to the early 1970s, when a new generation of avant-garde filmmakers was reacting to mainstream cinema and the aesthetic and social politics it tended (and tends) to encode. For that generation, the origins of cinema seemed to offer an escape from the assumptions of the commercial media, and provided valuable inspiration for new forms of film practice.[1] Avant-garde filmmakers interested in defying the commercial and academic mainstream and, in a sense, starting film history over, found particular value in what had become the two most distinctive, but closely related, early approaches to motion study: those epitomized by Muybridge’s serial studies of human and animal locomotion, and by the Lumière Brother’s early Cinématograph shows, and especially the Lumières’ assumption that individual subjects should be recorded in single, continuous shots, like the subjects of still photographs.

There are, of course, a good many films that can be described as rigorously “Muybridgian” or “Lumièresque,” films that reflect their makers’ conscious or unconscious decisions to record the motion of the phenomenal world quite directly, quite literally, and to use graphic and temporal structuring (“grids” of one kind or another) so that this motion can be studied. Such films include — to name just a few — Marie Menken’s Go Go Go (1964), Michael Snow’s Wavelength (1967) and See You Later/Au Revoir (1990), Yoko Ono’s No. 4 (Bottoms) (1966) and Film No. 5 (Smile) (1968), Hollis Frampton’s Zorns Lemma (1971), Larry Gottheim’s Horizons (1973), Robert Huot’s Rolls: 1971 (1972), Ken Jacob’s “Nervous System” performances (ongoing, since the 1970s), John Porter’s “Condensed Rituals” (1970s, 1980s), Godfrey Reggio’s Koyaanisqatsi (1983) and Powaqquatsi (1987), Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi’s From the Pole to the Equator (1987), Rose Lowder’s Impromptu (1989), and Leighton Pierce’s Red Shovel (1992), to name a very few of dozens of possible instances. The motion recorded and studied in these films is seen against a graphic grid or, more often, within a temporal grid, whether time is divided into shots of equal (or roughly equal) length, as in No. 4 (Bottoms) , Zorns Lemma and Rolls: 1971 , or is “analyzed” by means of individual frames selected out of the flux of reality at regular intervals and resynthesized into “time-lapse” imagery, as in Go Go Go , Porter’s “Condensed Rituals”, and Reggio’s Koyaanisqatsi …, or is slowed-down by the camera’s ability to record more than 24 frames per second of the action, allowing us to study it in slow motion, as in Ono’s Film No. 5 (Smile), Powaqquatsi , and See You Later/Au Revoir . In other instances, filmmakers have extended the Lumière single-shot approach (1 shot = 1 film), creating extended looks at particular actions, and defining them as complete films (for example, Larry Gottheim’s single-shot films — Blues (1969), Fog Line (1971), and Corn (1971) — Huot’s Snow (1972), J.J. Murphy’s Highway Landscape (1972) and Sky Blue Water Light Sign (1972)…

In other, closely-related bodies of work similar methods are used to study the particular interface of the phenomenal world and the recording apparatus of camera/celluloid. This is the case in Murphy and Ed Small’s In Progress (1972), where a movie camera records an Iowa landscape in all lights and seasons, revealing the impact of these changing external conditions on the nature of the film’s depiction of the scene; and in Murphy’s Print Generation (1974), and Ernie Gehr’s Morning (1968) and Eureka (1979). Other films study artifacts of mainstream film history itself: in Piècé Touchée and Passage à l’acte , for example, Martin Arnold explores tiny, “typical” passages from The Human Jungle (1954) and To Kill a Mockingbird (1963) respectively, using a home-made optical printer to de- and re-construct the various levels of motion in these passages; in From the Pole to the Equator , Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucci analyze and explore early footage collected by Italian cinematographer Luca Comerio.

But of course, “motion study” need not be taken in a literal sense. While some filmmakers have focused their and our attention on visible reality or on the interface of the phenomenal world and the apparatus used to record it, many others have focused on the motion of consciousness — on the part of characters and/or on the part of viewers. And in many cases, these filmmakers — like those who approach the idea of motion more literally — have appropriated elements of motion study developed in the earliest cinema and pre-cinema. Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen’s Riddles of the Sphinx (1977) explores the development of a woman’s sense of independence, and her growing awareness of the patriarchal context within which this independence must function — her psychic movement, if we think in Muybridgian terms — by constructing an overall “grid structure” within which a series of extended, 360° panning shots of everyday activities are the central motif. Further, this central character’s evolution, which we can measure against/within this spatio-temporal grid, is framed by three opening sequences and three closing sequences that provide a set of allusions to more literal forms of motion study developed by avant-garde filmmakers: camera explorations of some home-movie footage of the Pyramids and the Sphinx (reminiscent of Ken Jacob’s extended motion study of an early commercial narrative film, in Tom, Tom, the Piper’s Son (1969), an extended single-shot of hands solving a labyrinth puzzle, and so on.

Even avant-garde films that defy the politics implicit in Muybridge’s and the Lumières’ choices of subjects and methods often use methods that relate to the early motions studies.[2] In Yvonne Rainer’s Journeys from Berlin/1971 (1980), for example, various motifs, including a set of printed and spoken stories of incidents of political violence; several journeys by car, train, plane; an extended discussion between a psychotherapist and a patient; and an auditory discussion between a man and a woman are “analyzed” into separate segments — “analyzed,” in the Muybridgian sense, of breaking an action into separate segments — and interwoven into a serial structure (roughly, a grid). As viewers watch and listen, they resynthesize the various segments of these social and historical motions, and are able to measure them against each other and against current events. In Trinh T. Minh-ha’s Naked Spaces — Living Is Round (1985), Trinh’s visits to one West African culture after another, her consistent use of (halting) vertical and horizontal pans and a serially-organized soundtrack provide patterns (again, implicit “grids”) within which the viewer can compare/contrast many different African dwelling spaces and see that African cultures are at best as various and distinctive as European cultures.

Except in rare instances, the commercial industry has tended to underplay motion study, especially in the more literal sense of the term. Of course, in a general sense, even narrative is about “motion”: narrative melodrama creates symbolic renditions of the motions of individuals in relation to their emotions, to each other, to society, and to history. And the “better” the film, the more fully it “moves” and “moves us.” But even in the more literal sense, “motion study” is important (if often suppressed in terms of viewer-consciousness) in commercial cinema. We have always gone to conventional films to study the motions of the faces and bodies of movie stars. Indeed, the combination of the camera’s restricting gaze, the particularly dramatic enlargement of the image in 35mm (and larger gauge) projection, and the theatre’s darkness allow commercial moviegoing to function in a manner perhaps more fully analogous to examining macroscopic or microscopic worlds with telescope or microscope than is possible in smaller gauges.

Even though the commercial film audience’s fascination with looking at how things move is usually ignored, however, the importance of this fascination is often obvious and in some instances may have at least as much to do with a film’s popularity as those dimensions of the film that are routinely discussed in the media and honored with Academy Awards. For example, at the heart of J.F.K. (1991) — and regardless of what one decides about the overall historical accuracy of Oliver Stone’s rendition of the Kennedy assassination, or about the film’s depiction of gays, or about the quality of the acting (the dimensions of the film most noted in media coverage) — is a painstaking motion-study of the Zapruder footage, a remarkable historical cine-artifact many of us have looked forward to really seeing, for decades.

The impact of a genre film can also be understood as a function of motion study – – though in a less literal sense than J.F.K. ‘s motion study of the Zapruder footage. The particular generic expectations viewers bring to each successive Western or horror film, or epic, function as a set of regularities, predictables (a set of patterns, an implicit “grid”) against which one can study the motion of the genre’s evolution and of one’s own evolution in relation to the genre.

Ultimately, the recognition that motion study lies at the heart of cinematic pleasure allows for a more inclusive sense of film history. To see film history primarily, even fundamentally, as the history of feature-length, commercial melodrama — and all other filmmaking practices and histories as “marginal” — endangers not only our understanding of the way in which cinema has in fact been articulated, it threatens film history itself. Should the current North American economic recession continue or expand, we are sure to see further cutbacks in film funding by Federal and State organizations and further exodus from independent moviehouses. The result will be a focus on cinematic “essentials,” and a tendency to eliminate the “marginal” forms and practices.

But if we can accept the fact that exploration of motion by “independents” ( and Industry filmmakers) has always been, and remains, a fundamental element of the film experience, and that one crucial strain of film history is the on-going discourse of the many forms of overt and implicit motion study a century of cinema has made possible, a healthy articulation of film history has a decent chance of surviving and illuminating whatever the Motion of Things brings us in the coming years.

Notes

[back] This inspiration was often credited by the filmmakers themselves. Jonas Mekas’s dedication of Walden (1968) “to Lumière” was clearly an attempt to relate his chronicle of the life around him to the seeming simplicity and directness of the early Lumière films. To the first viewers of Mekas’s diaries, his Brakhageinspired gestural camera movement and erratic single-framing might have seemed the diametric opposite of the Lumière Brothers’ simple, single-shot films, made with a stable, mounted camera. But to Mekas the connection was more significant than the differences: the Lumières’ decision to turn the camera on the life around them, including some of the more personal, everyday, dimensions of this life — the baby being fed, workers leaving the factory, a train arriving at a station — reflected an interest evident in Mekas’s diaries in using the apparatus of camera/projector to do something other than provide new forms of melodramatic narrative.

Such connections inspired “Researches and Investigations into Film: Its Origins and the Avant Garde,” a conference at the Whitney Museum of American Art, November 14th-18th, 1979. The conference coordinated by John Hanhardt, included presentations by scholars (Thom Andersen, Nick Browne, Noel Burch, Regina Carnwell, Tom Gunning, Maureen Turim) and filmmakers (Hollis Frampton, Ken Jacobs) and screenings of early film and then-recent avant-garde films that engage early cinema either literally: Ken Jacobs’ Tom, Tom, the Piper’s Son (1969), Gehr’s Eureka (1974), Thom Andersen’s Eadweard Muybridge, Zoopraxographer (1975); or conceptually: Morgan Fisher’s 240X (1974), Frampton’s Fragments from Magellan (1974, works-in-progress for the Magellan Cycle, completed later).

A more recent instance of a similar curatorial insight was Back and Forth: Early Cinema and the Avant-Garde , a show designed by Bart Testa, and presented at the Art Gallery of Ontario, April 24 to May 17, 1992; and documented by a catalogue of the same name, written by Testa and published by the Art Gallery of Ontario.

[back] While Muybridge’s model for studying the motion of things was of crucial importance for the early development of motion pictures, and has remained a useful model for more recent filmmakers, his technology for recording and displaying animal and human motion was, of course, never philosophically/politically neutral. Muybridge’s methods and their results encode a variety of cultural and class issues, and they reflect conventional gender assumptions.

Linda Williams has demonstrated that Muybridge’s photographs of women are different from his photographs of men in significant ways. Indeed, Williams sees Muybridge’s motion studies and the development of hardcore pornography — films that reveal/instigate sexual motions of the body — as fundamentally parts of the same development. See Hard Core: Power, Pleasure and the “Frenzy of the Visible” (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), pp. 39, 41 .

To some degree the gender gap in Muybridge’s motion studies remains evident in avant-garde films. In many instances, including the films by Rainer and Trinh I’ve mentioned — and there are many other instances: Su Friedrich’s The Ties That Bind (1984), for instance, and Holly Fisher’s Bullets for Breakfast (1992) — women filmmakers have used serial organizations, while refusing to be rigidly bound by them (the way Gehr, Frampton, and Murphy are “bound” by the structures of Serene Velocity , 1970; Zorns Lemma , 1970; and Print Generation , 1974, respectively): that is, they have implicitly invoked Muybridge’s system in order to work against it.

BULLETS FOR BREAKFAST

By Holly Fisher

16mm, color, 77 minutes

Juxtapositions: bullets and bulletins, the words and images, objects and voices, hit the screen, repeatedly, in orders that challenge the spectator to decipher. Fisher’s is a film in which American enterprise is closing down, witnessed in the last close-up images of fish being cleaned by strong women’s hands at a soon-to-be-idle manufacturer of smoked herring in Maine. This loss, seen as elegant, imaginary “outtakes” of an “American Agenda” segment (human interest, feature reporting) of US network television, tells its story across the sounds and images of other stories. The documentary is unmade in the weave of a visual exploration of stories, mythic correlates of this reality; yet in another sense, none of the stories of myths is any more central or any less metaphoric than the other. Each narrative conditions the others, interwoven so as to lace each entity with intertextual resonance. What startles is not the form, per se, but Fisher’s magnificent handling of subtle ironies, rather than caricatured oppositions, even when addressing such seeming polarities as male genre writing and feminist poetry, or daily economic realities and cultural fantasies.

In rearranging John Ford’s My Darling Clementine, the barroom exit of the dance-hall girls can fill a screen in the wake of a hero on horseback; this reediting explains the displace feminine title of the classic western, as Fisher’s film retells its visual and verbal icons, highlighting its celebration of a newly gentle hero whose bows and dancing, who’s “Bye Ma’am” and strains of “ten thousand cattle straying” must first confront the threat, “And I’m gonna kill you too” of consummate macho ruthlessness. This visual montage echoes the weave of two writers’ voices; she, a feminist poet, whose lines are the direct address eloquence of a female view, and ironic acknowledgement, impatient with waiting, being positioned, and contained, while he is the subtly self-conscious writer for hire, the pulp novelist who sold himself to the production of westerns transcending his own skepticism of an arid boring desert by painting it full of popular tropes. Of course the questions of writing, self, audience and nation figure here, but ever so much between the lines and in the interstices of the edits, while another voice tries over the course of the passage of other phrases to describe the narrative of one image. In decidability; do we know what an image says, or what a story means: All of art history is called into question. And biography. Maybe the weave of images and stories by a master weaver, editor, filmmaker, will let us each speculate, while she speaks through an artful cultural collage in which fine and popular art enrich one another. Holly Fisher’s film is stunning.

Maureen Turim

Associate Professor of English and Film, University of Florida

… And in some cases this festival is way ahead of the national scene. A major discovery of the event is experimental director Holly Fisher from Boston. Her “Bullets For Breakfast” showed at the prestigious Berlin Film Festival, but she is largely unknown in this country. That’s likely to change.

Her movie is a remarkable piece of work that will almost certainly revise the standards by which abstract film is judged…

BULLETS FOR BREAKFAST: Holly Fisher’s hypnotic experimental film entangles the myths of cowboy heroes with the way history has treated women. It plays almost like cultural memory burned onto film. Fisher fills the screen with complicated manipulated visions of existing films, still works of art and photography. The soundtrack records snatches of conversations with the likes of feminist poet Nancy Nielson and Western pulp writer Ryerson Johnson (“Everything we wrote about the West was a lie”).

While it pads its length somewhat, this is a startling piece of work that will be long remembered. It has the kind of power experimental films frequently dream about and seldom achieve. Fisher will introduce screenings of her movie and answer questions afterward 1992, 77 min.

Holly Fisher’s BULLETS FOR BREAKFAST weaves disparate elements together in an often spellbinding abstract film.

It is, essentially, a meditation that considers two opposing cultural phenomena. On one hand, you have male figures being inserted into a faux history of the male figures being inserted into a faux history of the macho Western. On the other you have actual women being excised from their rightful place in our historical record.

The ideas and their interrelationship are hardly new. In fact, they’ve almost been talked to death. However, the active word above is meditation, and that makes all the difference.

BULLETS FOR BREAKFAST doesn’t traffic in polemics and defiantly remains less interested in scoring points that it is in marveling at our state of affairs. The movie’s style, a surrealistic reverie of pictures kissed with irony, unreels in dream time.

The experimental design of the movie works splendidly. …the director makes canny decisions throughout her movie…

She culls her imagery from art books of classical works and modern media footage from television and the movies (“My Darling Clementine” in Particular). The pictures are manipulated and recombined through various print processes. Employing superimposition stacked like transparent tiles and blessed with a dazzling eye for color, Fisher delivers a movie that can be downright ravishing.

BULLETS FOR BREAKFAST possesses an admirable balance between progression and reassertion of critical pictures.

Wisely, Fisher avoids the pitfall of paralyzing an audience’s sensibility by adding a soundtrack that carries a slender, but effective, narrative quality. Fisher constructs the soundtrack like an aural montage. An interview with pulp Western writer Ryerson Johnson occupies one thread, poet Nancy Nielson another, the conversation of women in a smoked-herring plant is the third dominant element.

BULLETS FOR BREAKFAST cuts gracefully back and forth among these narratives, Johnson talks about writing for pulp magazines, Nielson reads poetry, the factory workers chatter about professional wrestling and television shows.

…the interaction of picture and sound offers a vibrant, almost musical, interplay. Nielson and Johnson hold center stage. One’s a poet, the other a writer for hire, and as the film advances we discover something surprising. They have more in common than one might expect. The artist has an interest in relating to the average person, while the hack writer ponder the wider concerns of responsible fiction. … Fisher, a former documentary director, comes up with one of the most arresting experimental films in several years.

Bullets for Breakfast

Not a film for those who like strong narratives with clear characters, this full-length experimental feature (77 minutes) makes real intellectual demands on its audience. The audience is amply rewarded with a fascinating display of the power of technology to produce art and make us think. The entire film was produced on an optical printer, as were all of director Holly Fisher’s previous, shorter films, clearly an outgrowth of Fisher’s work as an editor (on, for instance, the Oscar-nominated documentary Who Killed Vincent Chin?). Through this technical device, Fisher provocatively juxtaposes–literally, through double exposure–postcard images of women taken from the entire history of Western art with some eight-millimeter footage of John Ford’s classic My Darling Clementine she found in a closet. A network television documentary about women workers losing their jobs in a Maine smokehouse is also neatly deconstructed in the process, but with no overt intervention by the filmmaker. Even the soundtrack becomes a field of clashing perspectives, as the voice of a male pulp-western writer contrasts with that of feminist’ poet Nancy Nielsen. But Fisher’s quiet, subtle feminism convinces through suggestion rather than finger-pointing; an added delight is that her double-exposed images, reminiscent of early Rauschenberg, are quite beautiful. (PB) (Music Box, 7:00)

September 18, 1992 | NANCY KAPITANOFF | SPECIAL TO THE TIMES; Nancy Kapitanoff writes regularly for The Times

In Holly Fisher’s film, “Bullets for Breakfast,” Ryerson Johnson, a 91-year-old writer who wrote more

than 200 cowboy stories for pulp-Western magazines, reads from his unpublished autobiography, “We Don’t Want It Good, We Want It Wednesday.”

His editors didn’t want humor, social comment or women in Western stories either. All of that would drag down the exalted tale of good guys standing up to bad guys and finally doing away with them in a shoot-’em-up at high noon.

Recently though, the Western plot has thickened. Kevin Costner turned his camera on peaceful Indian culture in “Dances With Wolves.” Clint Eastwood’s current film, “Unforgiven,” written by David Webb Peoples, weaves in all of the elements that pulp magazine editors felt would bore an audience, and an ambiguity that they would have found insufferable.

There is humor in “Unforgiven’s” retired gunslinger who has trouble mounting his horse. Killing has its consequences, even for the good guys, if one can determine who’s really good and who’s bad. And although the women of the film are not its subject, they are not standard romantic objects either.

“I don’t think it’s any more real as a Western than any other. It’s a Western filtered through a post- feminist movement sensibility,” said Holly Fisher, 50, from her home in New York City. “It shows what I think is happening in my film, which is that history is relative to who is writing it and when.”

“Bullets for Breakfast,” a 16-millimeter color experimental film, cracks wide open typical linear story lines about the West and women’s place in the world in an assemblage of images, text, voices and sounds.

“To lay in the sound effects of bullets was amazing, to just feel the power of those tiny pieces on the soundtrack,” Fisher said. “Bang! You realize, ah, so that’s how you get power. I’m hoping, in the language and structure I’m trying to evolve, to find another way to make a powerful statement–not through loud noises and dramatic plot structure and cliffhangers.”

Moments from John Ford’s classic 1946 Western, “My Darling Clementine” starring Henry Fonda, are repeatedly interwoven with art postcards depicting Renaissance paintings of women, Fisher’s film footage of women working in a herring smokehouse and landscapes of Maine. Sequences of Johnson reading from his autobiography appear among those images, juxtaposed by feminist Nancy Nielsen reading her poetry. Throughout the film comes the suggestion, “There is no history, but biography . . . “

“Bullets for Breakfast” will screen Saturday with “My Darling Clementine” at the Gene Autry Western

Heritage Museum. Fisher will be in attendance for this double bill, which was arranged with the museum by Filmforum, an organization dedicated to the presentation of independent and experimental films.

Jon Stout, Filmforum’s executive director, sees “My Darling Clementine” as the perfect complement to Fisher’s film, and came up with the idea to show them together. “The two films deal with the Western frontier. We’re reaching out to a broader audience beyond the experimental film buff,” he said.

Stout first saw “Bullets for Breakfast” at the Ann Arbor Film Festival in March, where it won the award for “Best Experimental Film.” It was the last film of the day.

“When I saw it, I absolutely fell in love with the piece. It sustained this engagement after six hours of watching films,” he said. “It’s stunning on a visual basis. The optically printed images and the rhythms she evokes with them are seductive.”

“I’m trying to set things up so there’s this afterglow and resonance, a reading between the lines. That’s really where the film takes place, between the screen and your mind or heart,” Fisher said. “If you work from a preconception, the work has to measure up to that as best it can. The way I work, I never quite know where it’s going, but I like it that way. To me, it’s the only way to get somewhere you’ve never been.”

“Bullets for Breakfast” developed from Fisher’s fascination with her mother-in-law’s art postcard collection. “They are so beautiful, like little miniatures, and they’re not the real thing,” she said. “I knew by single framing these cards in location I could explore questions of representation and perspective in a nonverbal way.

“Each card contains in the way the picture’s painted a whole ideology in a sense. I realized nine-tenths of them were Virgin Marys. I think these pictures are part of any woman’s cultural history. They are part of our collective history just the same way the cowboy films are.”

Poet Nielsen had lined the interior of her outhouse in Maine with art postcards. As a result she was brought into the film, followed by Johnson.

“It was interesting to me how very different these two writers were–what they write about, how they write, how they think, the two different generations,” Fisher said. Her footage of Nielsen, Johnson, the women workers at the fish house and the film’s landscapes were all shot in Maine, where she has a home.

Kalama Sutta: Seeing is Believing, by Josef Silverstein, Professor Emeritus Rutgers University

This is a film about Burma from many perspectives and includes many films both lying atop one another and intersecting with each other. Burma and the unchanging land; the many different peoples, both interacting and intersecting, all different and the same. The cultures of the peasants, the village, the military and the new city life. Binding it together are the faces and voices, each telling a different part of the story, all seemingly unconnected but in fact each adding a different part.

This is the story of a national tragedy–of the peoples who never really learned to live together who share the land and parts of the national culture that can smile even as they suffer brutality, cruelty and military rule and are not free to work out their way.

To me this film is a kaleidoscope–constantly changing and each fragment revealing a tiny bit of the story which only becomes whole as the pieces move around their own axes and blend for a moment to become the whole. To me, it says the war and suffering are only a small part of a long and unfinished story of people who will survive and retain their unique identities despite the foreign cultures which bombard their senses but do not change. Fisher’s camera and sound have caught all of it for just a moment and stopped it for eternity so others can see and share the experience. As I viewed it again, I saw so much that was new; I am sure that when I view it again, I will see and learn more.