This short introduction to the films of Keewatin Dewdney first appeared on the Lumière website, in conjunction with a screening in Spain of Dewdney's work, in November 2016. Below I've also included Kee's essay "Discontinuous Films," which was previously published in spring 2001 in the Canadian Journal of Film Studies, but which was written in 1967 at the height of his filmmaking activities. The version appearing here is preceded by a new introduction.
KEEWATIN DEWDNEY: INTERLOCKING PARTS
by Stephen Broomer
Between 1966 and 1971, Keewatin Dewdney completed six films of diverse theme and form, cohering around metric and flicker construction, contributions to the burgeoning underground film scene. This activity began in 1966, when Dewdney took George Manupelli’s cinematography course at the University of Michigan, where he was a student of mathematics, which he approached with a background that included the humanities, cybernetics, poetry and collage. He was one of the sons of Selwyn Dewdney, an influential artist and art-teacher of London, Ontario, and had spent his teens pursuing art and creative writing. The role of mathematics in his life, not merely as a field of study but as an undergirding process across his activities, in art, in literature, in environmentalism, was dominant in his filmmaking from its outset. In the broadest sense, mathematics is the study of quantity, structure, space and change, the pursuit of patterns and conjectures, a field that informs and integrates logics, and one finds many of these concepts in Dewdney’s films. Dewdney’s six completed films include three in tonight’s program, The Maltese Cross Movement, Scissors, and Wildwood Flower; and three others — Malanga, a portrait of Warhol muse Gerald Malanga; Four Girls, a hand-painted colour film; and Patricia, a portrait of his wife. Dewdney’s films gained considerable traction in the era partly by his association with two community-builders, Jonas Mekas and Manupelli. Manupelli was not only a teacher and mentor of Dewdney’s, but also, as the director of the Ann Arbor Film Festival, was Dewdney’s local connection to the forming underground.
The Maltese Cross Movement is a work in two parts: it is a book and a film. The book is a densely codified work of collage and poetry, or collage-poetry, as the poems themselves are codified into symbols, logograms, hieroglyphics. In a letter to Clara Meyer, office manager of the CFMDC, Dewdney described the genesis of The Maltese Cross Movement: “three years ago I began to take hallucinogenic drugs and within a year’s time was so disoriented I conceived the idea of doing a book and film simultaneously. The MCM is the result. The film is so perfectly private and takes up so many themes from my personal/intellectual life (these appear as ‘stills’ in the book) that it is almost public. I believe in the theory of brief visual presentations as the basis for a whole new direction within film. We see a trend this way in TV commercials already. These presentations were not as brief as I would have wished in the MCM because I am quite lazy. I made the whole film (at the synchronizer) while listening to the Cream’s first album. All this strikes me as relevant.”
Dewdney’s playful modesty betrays the diligent, demanding construction of the film — that it was made on a synchronizer clarifies its metric character, its images carefully measured out and reassembled by frames. The film’s soundtrack is made up of fragments, of voices reading poetry, of prolonged vocalizing, and of the Beach Boys’ “Gettin’ Hungry”.
Scissors is an animation in which small and large scissors are anthropomorphized into child and adult roles respectively, and are placed into a violent natural cycle, of birth, sex, and death. The film joins the narrative character of a wildlife documentary to the flat perspective and comic action of the animated film. Once the protagonist has courted and mated, it is devoured by a large centipede-like creature. Wildwood Flower is a film of likewise simple construction, a slow motion shot of a naked woman on a galloping horse, riding toward the camera, framed in an oval ‘cameo’ window, as an elaborate animation of vines forms around the cameo, to the sound of the Carter Family singing the title song.
One of the distinct markers of Dewdney’s films is the discontinuity from film to film; the films cohere, in part, to themes of evolution, predation, and memory. The strongest formal link among them is that of the interlocking mechanism, a motif that resonates with the structural ambitions in his work, denoted by his own description of his films as “animation and flicker.” Dewdney’s films, in particular The Maltese Cross Movement, use “rapid-fire imagery,” their constitution marked by fragmented or truncated words and phrases. In The Maltese Cross Movement, the role of interlocking parts is laid plain by the suggestion of the images’ structured and codified sequence, with such an interlocking diagram, of moon and cross, indicative of a rotating shutter, serving as a motif throughout, paired with the sound of gears entwining. In Scissors, the design of the anthropomorphized scissors, from parting handles up to snipping blades, are made to mime sex and reproduction. Wildwood Flower takes on the simple mechanism of the cameo, a photo laid into an engraving, here the photo in motion, the engraving evolving by animation.
A number of projects were announced by Dewdney, but were never delivered to his distributors. These include I, Robot and Lundun. He also developed a number of films for his own pedagogical use with his mathematics students. In a letter to Jim Murphy, director of the CFMDC, Dewdney described the slow process of making his films. Speaking on Patricia, he wrote, “the shots have been ‘aging’ in a tub. I have rationalized the long delay to the various people who ask me about these films by declaring that this aging process is essential to my concept of film-making: only when the emulsion has taken on the soft golden glow of the French hillsides in early autumn will I condescend to remove it from the tub and begin gently to pass it through the synchronizer and film-press.”
While Dewdney stepped away from his filmmaking in order to focus his energies on his mathematics research and teaching, the work that he accomplished in the 1960s has remained a subject of fascination and admiration for the underground film community. While the films bear surface pleasures — the fractured soundtracks, the comic gestures, the high quality of photography — they are also works of profound complexity and codification, of elusive, hard-won meaning.
- S.B.
INTRODUCTION
Experimental film in the 1960s was accompanied by a literature of statements, propositions and manifestos, writings that would start from an elementary fact of cinema and enlarge it into an encompassing aesthetic. The camera, the projector, the shutter, the individual frame, the splice, the persistence of vision: long the subconscious bedrock of conventional cinema, this architecture could be stripped of its tendency towards invisibility, and each element rebuilt in the service of other ways of seeing. Stan Brakhage begins from vision. Kubelka from the frame and the interval. Conrad from the projector and flicker. Perception; canvas; instrument. Such claims could be deliberately absolute, because they were arguments for a future cinema. A technical observation becomes a principle of composition, and a principle of composition might suggest an entirely new direction.
Canadian filmmaker and mathematician Keewatin Dewdney wrote "Discontinuous Films" in 1967. Tony Conrad’s The Flicker gives Dewdney a point of departure for thinking through the distinction between the continuous photographed scene and the discontinuous operation of projection. He extends flicker outward from alternating light and darkness to any cinema constructed through increasingly brief presentations, where the splice, the interval and finally the individual frame assume an organizing role. His examples become increasingly various, encompassing animation, collage and rapid montage, films connected less by appearance than by the shortening of the image and the pressure placed upon continuity.
Robert Breer, whose films had for years been organized around abrupt changes of image, had described making successive frames as unlike one another as possible and finding that “a new continuity emerges in the form of a very dense and compact texture.” In Breer’s formulation, the rapid displacement of one image by another destroys one familiar continuity while establishing relations of rhythm, resemblance, persistence and movement across the succession. An image can vanish almost immediately yet still remains active in what follows it; another can enter before the first has entirely departed from vision. The continuity resides across these changes, assembled through the succession of unlike things.
For Dewdney, as the duration of an image becomes shorter, the individual frame does not necessarily become more distinct. It can become harder to isolate. Alternating images begin to mingle through persistence; black frames interrupt an image while also determining its rhythm; separate events can approach simultaneity as the interval between them shrinks. Toward the end of "Discontinuous Films," Dewdney considers precisely this threshold, where an image is presented too briefly for conscious recognition while continuing to register in perception. The mechanics remain discontinuous, but what appears on the screen is increasingly difficult to describe by those terms alone.
Owen Land’s A Film of Their 1973 Spring Tour Commissioned by Christian World Liberation Front of Berkeley, California, made several years later, carries this problem into representational image and synchronous sound. Land alternates pairs of scenes in units of three frames, one stream continually replacing the other while each remains perceptually available across the interruption. The two passages have different subjects and occur in different spaces, yet the alternation encourages the eye and ear to maintain them simultaneously. Foreground and background begin to switch. A person from one shot may seem to inhabit the space of another. One voice disappears and returns quickly enough that its phrase can be sustained across the intervening sound. The film condenses these two strings of image and sound into the time normally given to one, with the spectator sorting, joining and occasionally confusing them. The interruption supplies the condition for the coexistence of distinct experiences, each utilizing the same typically linear-logical senses (vision and hearing).
Working at the scale of the frame exposes the dependencies between component parts of the motion picture. A frame that passes too quickly to be apprehended as an independent image can change the colour, position or force of the frames around it. Repetition can carry an image across its disappearance. Metric interruptions can establish a rhythm strong enough to bind events that share no representational connection. At sufficient speed, separate images begin to occupy the same perceptual field.
"Discontinuous Films" was written while the language for these practices was still being formed. Dewdney gathers films that would later be separated by histories of animation, structural film, collage and flicker, seeing among them a common movement toward briefer, denser units and more abrupt changes. His proposition belongs to the manifesto culture of the period in its willingness to take this tendency as far as it might go. The films that followed continued to divide cinema into smaller units, while those divisions produced unexpected relations among the parts: alternating frames mingle in persistence, an image survives its own interruption, two sequences occupy a single duration. The discontinuous strip of film could yield continuities that were unavailable to the continuous photographed scene.
DISCONTINUOUS FILMS
by Keewatin Dewdney
The Flicker
Tony Conrad's The Flicker is a raw, archetypal statement about the nature of film, a statement which few understood. The Flicker revealed at one stroke that the projector, not the camera, is the film-maker's true medium. This is not to say film-makers are unaware of the projector and screen, the movie-house environment (they must learn to visualize a screen in the viewfinder of their camera). But this does say that the very use of the camera as a film-making tool has imposed the assumption of continuity on film, an assumption entirely foreign to the projector. Yet continuity has hypnotized both Hollywood and the experimental almost equally.
For some reason, we are now released from continuity. Warhol fulfills a very important satiric function in pushing the continuous scene to its outer limits. This is why his films possess a drollity beyond their subject matter. It's like saying "Here's continuity, Jack!"
Camera vs. Projector
During the 18th and 19th centuries, a great deal of energy was expanded in a search for "moving pictures". Some of these were: phantasmagorias, peepshows, dioramas, magic lantern shows, phenakisticopes, viviscopes, chronophotographs, kinetoscopes, etc. The great majority of these devices sought a direct translation of some image or series of images into a moving picture. The emphasis was clearly on the theatrical environment, the release of light. With Marey's Rifle-Camera (1882) we have the true precursor of the modern movie camera and the beginning of a great split in the capture of light (camera) and its release (projector). With photography it had become possible to make instant pictures and only a few more instants would be required to make a continuous run of pictures. It was in building the projector that the late 19th and early 20th Century built better than it knew. For, ideally suited as it is to the projection of whatever the motion picture camera photographs, the projector is a MACHINE CAPABLE OF PROJECTING TWENTY FOUR TRANSPARENCIES IN SEQUENCE EVERY SECOND.
The motion picture camera is quite limited in function. Generally speaking, it gathers light onto a sequence of frames in rapid order; it manufactures only continuous scenes; it will display whatever is put into it and is completely unlimited in the environment of the frame.
We are now in the process of being released from the assumption of continuity and the cinematic schools this assumption has imposed. Delightful as it has been, continuity has given us little more than a visual re-hash of the literary experience (poems included). Anyone objecting violently to this statement surely has a big stake in continuous cinema. The same person will feel enormously threatened by discontinuous film. At the Fourth Ann Arbor Film Festival last year, many in the auditorium groaned during The Flicker, not bored but frightened.
An Experiment
The sort of Insight provided by William M. Ivins and Marshall McLuhan is particularly valuable when applied to the projector's environment. For example, Ivins, by isolating a sense in Art and Geometry is able to make the most obvious statements about touch and yet draw the most amazing conclusions from them. (Greek temples look the way they do because they are appreciated by the 'hand' and not the 'eye'.)
In a room is a projector and screen. People who have never seen a projector (or camera) before are brought into the room, given cans of clear and dark leader, editing tools, paint, bleach, whatever one may think of. They are told only that in a years time we want to see some interesting films.
After projecting the various kinds of leader, our people become bored. To be less bored they would begin to make marks on the leader. Yes, much better. They would not be very likely to animate because animation grows out of a consciousness of the camera. This means a rapid appearance on the screen of designs flashing by at subliminal speeds. If our people were all intelligent, creative, etc., one would see at the end of the year a more exciting collection of films than at Cannes, New York, Ann Arbor or anywhere. If they ultimately invented a camera, continuous run would be regarded as a 'gimic' on theirs, just as single frame is on ours.
Hopefully, this conceptual experiment has placed the reader outside his familiar film environment long enough to realize the tyrrany of the motion picture camera.
The logical result of using a camera in filming is the use of the splicer. Splices used to bother a good many people, that is, not the appearance of splice-bars on the screen but the sudden cut from one continuous scene to the next. It bothered people because here, for one fraction of a second, the true power of the projector was revealed. The cuts were bandaged with dissolves. Considering how much more expensive a dissolve is, it really is amazing that filmmakers (including Hollywood) ever used them, the conventions that came to be associated with dissolvers (time passing, place changing) have nothing to do with their true function. Splices do not bother people like Conrad who spend most of a year doing them for The Flicker or Brakhage who admits "one whale of an aesthetic involvement in The Splice". This shows a healthy attitude toward the motion picture camera, described by Brakhage as a light-gathering instrument. Conrad could really have done without it entirely (like our people in the room). For if continuity is a corollary to the camera, an aesthetic use of splices is far removed from the continuous scene mentality.
The Flicker is the Film
Many film-makers have begun to show a healthy interest in discontinuity, even though sometimes more than degree (namely insight) separates a film like Vanderbeek's Breathdeath from The Flicker. Breathdeath, in no detectable rhythm, lays down an exciting barrage of visuals. Some Of the scenes probably get down to 6 frames or so, though prolongued use of shorter scenes is certainly lacking. Bienstock, last year, with Nothing Happened This Morning used a series of very rapid zooms from many angles at once on a single action, giving one a sense of simultaneity and seeing the action (in this case, a young man punching out an alarm clack) from all directions at once. This year with Brummer's he is clearly on the trail of the discontinuous cinema. In a restaurant a couple converse while the camera on a trip of its own, explores them and the restaurant interior with very fast, sharp scenes, none of them subliminal but all contributing to a sense of hurried excitement about the restaurant. Bang bang bang. The NFB's Norman McLaren and Arthur Lipsett, though from quite different traditions, show an awareness of discontinuous film. McLaren in Blinkety Blank, a somewhat older production than these others, uses a very short subliminal sequence and hues from frame to frame, giving one a floating sense of 'lost' beauty. Arthur Lipsett's Free Fall and Very Nice Very Nice are clean, documentary versions of Breathdeath from the point of view of scene length and content.
A changing sense of the function of the camera can be attributed to Fat Feet by Red Grooms and others, in which, against a pasteboard facade of city, people act out stock roles as drunks, firemen, prostitutes, etc., all of them wearing enormous cardboard shoes. The technique is stop-motion and the jerky, uneven movements of the actors give the picture a nervous, hysterical quality. One hopes that a great talent like Larry Jordan will begin to explore discontinuity because he is naturally equipped, as an animator, to do it.
To postulate the existence of a kind of film which as yet publicly exists in one example alone would seem foolish were it not for the very clearly detectable trend toward shorter and shorter scenes, more and more discontinuous. For convenience we will call this kind of film, a Flicker Film, recalling that during the 20's films did flicker, and that in one sense at least, the flicker is more important than the film.
Description and Techniques
The discontinuous or flicker film will replace Conrad's blacks and whites with dark and light images. Subliminal runs (lengths of film in which the image changes entirely from frame to frame (will come into their own as an aesthetic device. A kind of visual (or even audiovisual) grammar will be built up within each film. Hypermontage. Sound will take on an entirely new dimension - no longer a slave to the continuous scene, it will cease to act as a radio or phonograph and mesh with the visual component of the film in a way never before imagined.
As an example of this kind of film, Gerard Malanga was recently filmed both reading poetry and dancing. The sounds (reading and music) were recorded on 1/4" tape and transferred to 16 m.m. sound stock. Both the reading and dancing scenes lasted 2 1/2 minutes (one hundred feet of film each) and the original film was painted with black acetate ink on the base side in the following manner. First, 24 frames reading, then 24 frames black, 23 frames reading, 23 frames black, down to a frame of each. Alternate frames were blackened for nearly a full minute after this, after which the blackened frames occurred in twos, then in threes, various distances apart. The other film (dancing) was painted in complementary fashion so that when the two films were A and B rolled onto one print, one simply had an alternation from one scene to the other, an alternation whose speed was governed by how close together blackened frames were put in the original. The 16 m.m. sound track was cut so that sounds would confirm to action right down to the frame. The result was a highly interesting study of simultaneity. The effect one might think, would be of double exposure, but it does not work this way at all. A powerful technique.
Since disparate images being flashed 24 per second on a screen are almost entirely lost on the viewer in his normal conscious state, it would certainly help if they had been seen before. This means starting such a film with one or more key images which by the increasing complexity of their context as the film progresses, heighten the value of the image. Somewhere after this, (one should pay close attention to the build up of pace in The Flicker) we begin subliminal runs which to someone just walking into the theatre may be meaningless but which to the clued-in audience are working a special magic all their own. Sound, working with image, does not merely "fill-in" the ear, but links it to the eye to an almost sensuous extent.
Persistence of Vision.
Keewatin Dewdney (1967)
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Keewatin Dewdney (1941–2024) was a Canadian mathematician, computer scientist, writer and experimental filmmaker. Born in London, Ontario, he studied mathematics at the University of Western Ontario, the University of Waterloo and the University of Michigan, completing his PhD at Waterloo in 1974. Between 1966 and 1971, Dewdney made a distinctive body of experimental films, including Malanga, Scissors, Four Girls, The Maltese Cross Movement, Patricia and Wildwood Flower. His films drew on mathematics, collage, animation and flicker. The Maltese Cross Movement remains his best-known work and was accompanied by a related book of collage-poetry and graphic notation.