Quote:
“Maclaine’s next film, Beat (1958), might be thought of as a continuation of The Man Who Invented Gold, since it often cuts back and forth between shots of golden lamps, lights in windows, and gold-colored objects, often situated in the direct center of the frame (in fact, golden lights show up prominently near the close of the fifth section of The End as well). Otherwise, Beat is something of a portrait of the bohemian characters of late-1950s San Francisco, made just as the scene was disintegrating into mass-marketed national media consciousness and North Beach became the tourist’s emblem of the Beat Generation. Once again, Maclaine’s editing technique positively sparkles.

This virtually unprecedented, rapid-fire editing style which Maclaine developed for his films reflects not only his his destitution and sense of extreme alienation. It also reflects his addiction to speed. Stan Brakhage described the experience of listening to Maclaine speak:
“…[a] sentence would break and a new sentence would start that had absolutely nothing clearly recognizable to do with the previous sentence. All these tracks were running simultaneously and he’d leap from one to another, but if you listened long enough, all the stories finally unwound in the whole tapestry of his talking…”
Murphy points out that this is the same principle on which Maclaine seems to have based his editing style: a constant rupturing of the straightforward narrative. The conversation or film will veer off into seemingly random events, only to have those events show up as a crucial element in a later sequence. And to get anywhere with the films, the viewer, as Murphy says, has to “[suspend] judgment until the gestalt can be determined.”

Indeed, Maclaine can be considered a virtuoso of the narrative rupture. Color is intercut with black-and-white; scenes with characters are interrupted by abstract images; disparate juxtapositions abound. And though many of the random-seeming images eventually “justify” themselves in a narrative sense, there is no reassuring sense of an artistic “tapestry” being woven. There is only the tightrope walk between the two poles of “maybe” and “maybe not.” This is one of the qualities that makes Maclaine’s work, despite its pessimism, truly courageous.

Did I mention dancing? This filmmaker is as enchanted by dance as any who ever lived. Shots of walking and dancing feet permeate all of his films. He often edits shots in a way that accents the dance-like qualities of people’s movements – for instance the umbrella woman in Beat who flits at top speed from corner to corner at a four-way intersection like a bird trapped in a cage, or the numerous times he will use jump-cuts to make a person appear to walk faster or slower than they actually are. In a way, all Maclaine’s films could be looked at as choreographic studies – labors of a love for motion and movement.”

“Beat (1958) is weaker, an odd if sometimes powerful essay on alienation whose lack of emotional focus seems to prove that Maclaine’s films need some sort of center, if only for their fragments to fly away from.”

http://nitroflare.com/view/07E03D0B0EE6AAF/beat.avi

Language(s):English
Subtitles:None

The post Christopher Maclaine – Beat (1958) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

The wonderful Scotch Hop (1959) [ imdb says 1953] is something of a letdown only after seeing his first two staggering, shattering masterpieces. In that film Maclaine intercuts a small band of bagpipers with other scenes, making some costumed young women appear to dance to the bagpipes’ rhythms. Scotch Hop is animated by a tension between synchronicity and asynchronicity — the rhythms of the images and the music converge, then diverge. Each image feels as if it were perched on a knife-edge between a world of smooth, lyrical dance and a world about to be torn apart.

However, according to one of Stan Brakhage’s former students, Brakhage “thought SCOTCH HOP was Maclaine’s greatest work, the mature fruition of his filmmaking efforts.”

http://nitroflare.com/view/E7FDFFA8D366432/scotch_hop.avi

Language(s):English
Subtitles:none

The post Christopher Maclaine – Scotch Hop (1959) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Description from Beat Cinema
The End is in six numbered sections, each separated by long stretches of darkness during which Maclaine speaks directly to the audience. Each of the sections is a tale of a different person on the last day of his or her life. The characters in the first three sections meet their end either through random acts of violence or suicide (none depicted graphically), after which Maclaine (in dark humor mode) acknowledges that the audience may not yet be identifying with his characters (“These people are all violent!”). The characters in the second half seem to meet their end through a large-scale disaster, unspecified in Maclaine’s narration but undoubtedly the atomic explosion shown at the beginning and end of the film. The two halves of the film are bridged by Maclaine’s narrator, who equates the self-destruction of the first three characters with a complacent world awaiting “the grand suicide of the human race.” The finale of the film is the end of the world as Maclaine imagines it might look, set to the tune of Beethoven’s ninth symphony – presaging Stanley Kubrick, who would also juxtapose an atomic explosion with ironically uplifting music in Dr. Strangelove a decade later. The End is not just a stern warning, but a prophecy of absolute doom – Maclaine seems to have believed the world was ending before his very eyes, and the eyes of his audience.

That’s the basic structure of the film – the details are another matter altogether. Each of the stories is constantly interrupted by discordant images: shots of arms flexing, pigeons flying or flocked together on the ground, mannequins, dancing feet, a street person lying on a sidewalk, flowers, crashing waves. Very few of the images relate in a directly metaphorical way to the action on screen – instead they only reveal their importance gradually as the film moves from story to story. Meanwhile the action on screen is often edited to create a sense of frustration and helpless repetition: one character runs endlessly through the streets, another repeatedly puts a gun to his head and pulls it away, another approaches a house, but the footage of his approach is edited in jump-cut style so he never seems to reach it. Meanwhile, the narrator doubles back on his stories, starting and suddenly stopping them, repeatedly uses the phrase “for reasons we know nothing about,” insists that he “know[s] no more about this story than you do.” It’s like walking on a tightrope, under the constant threat of vertigo.

The End was first shown in San Francisco in October 1953. It’s not hard to imagine how chaotic the film must have looked to contemporary audiences. In a letter published in Film Culture in 1963, Stan Brakhage, who was at the premiere, articulated the complexity of the crowd’s reaction that night:

“[The] audience was about as restless, and occasionally hysterical with laughter, as I’ve ever seen as American audience get; but I knew even then that what touched-off the audience was the absolute uniqueness of the film and that it laughed just to the extent that the film extends an almost unbearable love to the eyes AND ears of the viewing world…I marveled that Christopher Maclaine had made such a gesture without once, visually or audioly [sic], covering himself in shields of intellectual protect-and-pretensions, that he had been willing and able EVEN THEN to gesture in a way he must have known would be open to the worst, most painful, laughter if even 2 dozen members of the audience chose to vent their embarrassment by making the gesture seem foolish.”

http://nitroflare.com/view/01E757A6C7E11C8/The.End.Christopher.Maclaine.1953.avi

Language(s):English
Subtitles:None

The post Christopher Maclaine – The End (1953) first appeared on Cinema of the World.