The Brooklyn Rail

Dick Higgins (1938-98) was an influential vanguard poet-artist who attended composer John Cage’s course in experimental composition at the New School starting 1958 before becoming one of the earliest Happenings artists.

Years before his Fluxus contemporary Nam June Paik showed his first videotape and before Hollis Frampton’s works created the “Structuralist” film movement, Higgins toiled at film experiments then left them aside as he had theatrical works, devoting his energies instead to the international Fluxus group as a co-founder and the Something Else Press, his 1964-1973 avant publishing venture.

Pulling these films out of hiding to play at the Film Anthology was apropos because its founder Jonas Mekas was one of the few who ever wrote about them, calling The Flaming City, “two hours of almost pure nothing,” and adding presciently, “All this will be … history some day… These are only forecasts of subconscious streams.”

Higgins’ passion for danger—he invented Danger Music—transformed dreamy “exposures” into questionable audience experiences. He murkily exposed, between the frames, himself, downtown Manhattan, and, the shifting culture he occupied and manipulated with art.

The buildings Higgins repeatedly panned up and down on weren’t yet named “Soho.” The neighborhood was called “Hell’s Hundred Acres” at the time, and we do see smoke as The Flaming City opens, but no fire. Was it as important that he cinematically captured these buildings, which are still here, as it was the street signs and related surroundings now gone? Higgins, a homesteader in the neighborhood, predated Robert Moses’s and Jane Jacobs’s well-documented interest. For Higgins the buildings and the artists in them were symbols of new class struggles approaching on a human level battling the Industrial Revolution—from handmade to machine-made periods to the gizmos of the AV era at the dawn of an information age. His film juxtaposed half-acted footage of friends and family playing out these seismic cultural shifts in Upstate and downtown locations as well as Coney Island, Central Park, and Worcester, Massachusetts.

I’d like to see the opening credits in Higgins’s familiar handwriting again. The Flaming City employed photographic techniques Higgins learned at the Manhattan School of Printing—camera filters, color changes, superimposed imagery—in front of and behind clips. Occasionally footage of Higgins smoking a cigarillo appears, smiling, laughing and pushed to the frame’s bottom. These “director” shots were interspersed with others appearing to direct in various ways, critiquing, mugging, working from imaginary scripts.

The Baroque music soundtrack—ongoing traditional-sounding classical orchestra and choral music recordings in muddy German or French with Fascist moments and occasionally lapses into Lotte Lenya-style music hall and oom pa-pa marches—provided chaotic cohesion to equally disparate visual elements, disjointed vignettes and semi-theatrical dioramas, from mid-century home movies to Edison and silent Buster Keaton era pastiches. As one of at least two simultaneous audio tracks would end, another continued underneath.

An alternative title for this film was “Legend of the Anti-dancers,” a reference to the film’s most memorable sequence: two women dancing—differently, single file, looped, with a third woman dashing left, right, back, forth repetitively gesturing, arms a-waving. Elsewhere cast members made Judson Church-ish movements, more than “real life” and less “formal” than this repetitive threesome.

Higgins pal Letty Eisenhower, next to a ladder, drew on herself nude with pastels, then thick shoe polish, covering stomach then thighs, breasts, and finally her ass, accentuating existing forms linearly before unsuccessfully attempting to adorn her back. Higgins’ grandmother playfully performs tasks with objects on a table. Close-ups, toothy smiles, disturbing eye movements. Florence Tarlow, who attended Cage’s class with Higgins, walks beside a brook.

When closing credits, dated August 1962—one month before Higgins and his wife Alison Knowles, also seen here, went to Wiesbaden, officially founding Fluxus—notified me the film was over, I felt proud to have endured two tense hours, aware of time, self-consciously viewing—palpable, non-theoretical, experiential and therefore, concrete: structural cinematic danger, a proxy for experiential changes coming in the then-advancing 1960s.

Higgins and Knowles subsequently created many works about their twin daughters. Like a Cage-Cunningham dance score with visuals and music evolving independently, Higgins’s film Scenario (1968) shows the toddlers rolling a ball, climbing rocks, navigating roads and rural structures while a fanciful Higgins poem, “Scenario,” written one year earlier, unfolds, erasing barriers between logical meaning and “anti-semantics.” Once again, I longed to re-see the titles, here calligraphically lettered on a clipboard, referring to his daughters as “The queen of …” various domains, describing physical, metaphorical and internal engagements with each other, the filmmaker and their Vermont property.

Hank And Mary Without Apologies (1969), like Scenario, employed a poem as proto-score. Higgins, composer James Tenney, an IBM computer and Fortran took 1.64 minutes to generate 625 combinations of four four-letter words: Hank shot Mary dead. Higgins used the poem to edit footage against the soundtrack: a 1960 weekend-long “Ray Gun Spex,” Happenings event organized by Claes Oldenburg and Jim Dine at the Judson Gallery. Beginning, “We are gathered together to witness… the death of the traditional American theater,” tinting, color processing and literally 3,000 splices in 16.5 minutes follow, maybe or maybe not personal expressions of Higgins on relationships. For Higgins, 1960s computers and film, like the New York Audio Visual group he founded with Al Hansen, were mechanisms for creation.

Men & Women & Bells (1970) may or may not convey an unspoken spiritual connection. Unrelenting for forty-one minutes, the mournful, haunting, mercilessly rhythmic sound of the bells of Rostov-on-Don, Russia, bang, clang and pound repetitively while Higgins faces down Americana in the form of his family’s own privileged affluence. Again, in “found” footage, his father’s, we see Dick as toddler, in a sailor suit, at a summer party, his baptism in England, at a family fishing trip, a wedding, a parade, and elsewhere, family scenes of Higgins at various ages, including the present.

The End (1962) was a found twelve minute black and white 1940s employee informational telephone company film run backwards creating now-familiar gibberish though Higgins was not first. Starting 1906, Alice Guy Blaché, creator of some of the first cinematic special effects, ran film backward and Paris Musique Concrete creator Pierre Schaeffer’s 1936 aural collages included backwards audio and speed changes. Higgins found the pacing, conservative-looking bureaucrat “star” amusing.

Finally, Invocation Of Canyons And Boulders, (1962), an unpleasant closeup of Higgins’ mouth chewing, was a silent 7 second five-foot Mobius strip loop meant to be played indefinitely, now preserved digitally by Anthology Film Archives. George Maciunas added it to a Fluxkit as the second Fluxfilm with plans to turn it into a flip book that never materialized. Mekas called the piece “for Stan Brakhage,” Higgins favorite filmmaker at the time, Higgins’s “Satie movie,” (meaning repetitive ad infinitum) and “a Tibetan prayer wheel, a hypnotic device to free your mind.” Perhaps most accurately, Mekas added, “It is a joy to find somebody who wants nothing.”

In the end, these films, perhaps unwanted, were withdrawn from view. Last seen in 1969 with a couple others at the Jewish Museum, they were plucked from Higgins’s archives and digitized, thanks to the interest of two Higgins scholars, Alice Centamore and Lauren Fulton, who introduced them.