You Can’t Get Then from Now
You Can’t Get Then from Now
Dr. William Moritz
Part 2: The Whitney Brothers
The Whitney Brothers were about twenty years younger than Fischinger, so the war affected them in a very different, albeit perhaps no less painful, way. In 1939, when hostilities were breaking out in Europe, both brothers, fresh from school, were (separately) making the kind of travels Goethe had done so much to further — John in Germany and France, James in England. Naturally, their travels were cut short, and they returned to the United States to live at their parents’ home in Altadena, and search for prosaic work — a considerable come-down from the career in music John had dreamed of and the painter’s life James had planned. However, they soon fixed up a studio in the basement of their family home, and began serious production of nonobjective animated films in 8mm.
John had taken an 8mm camera to Europe with him, and made several short experiments with abstraction. In his autobiographical account, Digital Harmony (Byte/McGraw-Hill, 1980), he describes making an “art film” of fragments of ship-board architecture, and mentions a film of a lunar eclipse. A black-and-white 8mm film in the Whitney vault dated November 9, 1938, showing light bulbs, tools and paper cutouts in moving “still life” arrangements, may have been made in Paris as well. John made these films without knowledge of the similar explorations of the European avant-garde artists such as Leger, Ruttmann and Man Ray in the ’20s.
A second black-and-white 8mm film dated January 5, 1940, contains John’s overt experiments in motion and photographic effects, including images of 8mm and 35mm film strips lit from behind, an image of a lens, flickers at various rates, and a long sequence in which a cube-shaped object moves back and forth along a ruler at different speeds, so one can see the displacement of the object measured while one judges the smoothness or vibration of its motion.
Completed just a few weeks later, January 20, a third black-and-white film presents a controlled artistic expression rather than mere technical experiments. A single oblique intersection of two lines runs asymmetrically, off-center diagonally across the screen. Along these two lines, the action of the film progresses — sometimes merely the textures of two sheets of paper being pulled along these two axes, sometimes small geometric objects or thin stripes pass through, strictly along these same lines, prefiguring in a way the matrixes of John’s later films. In one sequence, this entire imagery is confined to a small sub-screen, one rectangle in the upper right corner of the main screen, while the rest of the potential picture area is kept black.
While John was working on these first 8mm films, James experimented with watercolor painting, trying to develop a means of “controlling the time-plan of the spectator’s attention.”‘ Obviously film was a better medium for the manipulation of time, so James joined John in film production.
They built an 8mm optical printer, and devised an animation system in which cutout stencils could be traced or air-brushed onto animation papers with black ink, filmed in black-and-white, then rephotographed with the optical printer onto color stock, which guarantees absolute control of speed of movement, image placement and superimpositions, and hue (through standard filter gels).
The films they created with this system are breathtakingly beautiful. John says in an article published in Stockhausen’s serial music journal Die Relhe in 1959 (reprinted, with the original illustrations, in Digital Harmony,): “Seeing this short film back from the laboratory for the first time, my brother and I experienced the most gratifying stimulation of our entire filmmaking activities…” Twenty-four Variations on an Original Theme, this first film, has a simple, minimal clarity (all the imagery is derived from one basic intersection of a rectangle and a circle in a ”P”-shaped configuration), yet a richness derived from the full color spectrum, and from the soft “halation” created by air-brushing some shapes (while other figures are outlines or hard-edged, flickering in positive-negative pairs. etc.) Since the main figure is set on a slanted, oblique axis, when that same primary figure is inverted or superimposed, the smaller sections described or implied by the intersection of the two main figures are asymmetrical or wedge-shaped.
The action of the film basically consists of either gradual revelations of a shape, or qualitative substitution of a shape (change of texture or color, or switch of positive for negative of same shape). The twenty-four variations are patterned after the standard permutations (inversions, retrogressions etc.) of 12-tone music, which John had encountered in Paris. However, the variables in this optical composition seem utterly vital and cogent in their flexibility. Words can give little sense of their happening. In one variation, a flicker appears in a cycle, moving back and forth in each of the areas of two figures that stand as mirror images beside each other; the stunning optical result suggests that one single figure is rotating quickly around an axis. But how much more magical to see it than to read about it! I would as soon read about the Brandenburg Concertos.
Seven of these 8mm films survive in the Whitney vault. A second film, closely related to the Twenty-four Variations, uses a slightly trapezoidal rectangle in the basic “P” figure, suggesting a dimensional perspective, and develops a triangle out of the negative space between the mirror conjunction of the two main figures.
During the time they were working on these 8mm films, John found a new job working the graveyard shift at Lockheed Aircraft Factory. At that time Buckminster Fuller was expounding a new theory of sleep efficiency that favored several short naps instead of one long sleep. John attempted to use this system in order to coordinate his best working hours for artistic collaboration with James, who had a regular daytime job as a technical draftsman at California Institute of Technology. However, they gradually began to work more separately, though on the same projects. With their combined salaries they could afford to rent a coach-barn studio on Madison Avenue in downtown Pasadena. There John began constructing a 16mm optical printer with an old cine-special camera, while James continued working on the 8mm films.
One of James’s experiments tried painting and air-brushing the figures onto the white animation cards using colored inks so that they could be photographed directly onto color stock. In this film, a circle, a triangle, and a bar in rare, delicate hues – burnished copper, rust, pale green of oxidized copper, lilac and tan – overlap each other against a light background.
Three other films (or perhaps three movements of the same film) are built around the thematic material of two overlaid circles. Variation in the size of the circles, and the bisection of one circle formed by a straight line, create a powerful figure: the conjunction of one whole circle crowned or tippeted with a larger fragment of a circle – something between an acorn and the planet Saturn – mysteriously beautiful and infinitely vital in its pure, minimal geometry. This figure appears in all three films, sometimes coupled with a circle intersecting a trapezoid, sometimes coupled with simple circles of equal and unequal sizes.
In all the length of these 8mm films (which, on an 8mm projector, varies from about forty minutes to seventy-five minutes) one never gets the feeling of any actual repetition, so inventive are the variations, so subtle are the controls of color shades, momentum, and juxtaposition. In some cases the “halation” around a circle (from the air-brushing) is manipulated by repeating the same animation card several times, and then switching to other cards with the same shape but only the haze of the air-brushing varies, creating the sense of the circle radiating, then freezing, then radiating. One film contains an astonishing dimensional moment: a series of circles in graduated sizes form a single alignment, and each circle is revealed in order by a ripple that flows first in one direction then reversed in the opposite direction, as if some light-wave of revelation were undulating toward the spectator. That same film concludes when the outline of two half-circles appear in mirror inversions, but not concentric, so that their arcs interlock in an electric yin-yang embrace.
One last 8mm film of James’s exploits curved shapes that are more organic and less geometrical. Each of several streamlined segments, vaguely shaped like leaves or fish, interlocks and overlaps to form a primary figure something like a scallop shell (these analogies are really quite poor: the shapes are original and nonobjective). When an inversion of the main figure overlays the basic upright figure, the superimposed colors make sections like facets of a cut gem. Each of the “leaf” figures is also played out separately in extended passages of undulating, flowing revelation, often monochromatic green, blue, or magenta for long enough duration that a slight retinal fatigue adds a mysterious, spectral vigor to the familiar halations.
I have spent so much time on these hopelessly inadequate descriptions only because the films themselves are notgenerally available. The Whitneys tried blowing the 8mm footage up to 16mm, but the results were not satisfactory due to loss of color saturation and density, loss of focus and hence discrimination between hardedged and soft figures, etc. Eight millimeter film cannot be projected for a large audience. It is a chamber medium. And these films by young men in their twenties must rank as one of the greatest pieces of visual “chamber music.”
Of course, these films are silent. The musical analogy is suggested by John’s critical writings stressing his roots in 12-tone theory, coupled with the title Twenty-Four Variations. But we must not forget that James came from a background in painting, and serial composition certainly exists (albeit less codified), in nonobjective painting – most obviously in the mature Mondrian style with its balancing rectangles, but also in the “periods” of Kandinsky’s painting: the organic improvisations, the geometrical balances, and even the canvases of the late ’30s and early ’40s – in effect contemporary with these Whitney films and because of the war unknown to them – in which Kandinsky fills the canvas with numerous similar, complex figures, sometimes in defined compartments, sometimes free floating, that relate to each other almost as animation steps. The specific imagery and kinetic vitality of the Whitney’s 8mm films seem very distant from Mondrian and Kandinsky, more like a fulfillment of Malevitch and the Constructivist ideal, but certainly the brothers were aware of these various trends in visual art, since in their ”Art in Cinema” program notes, they quote Mondrian and Duchamp; and Rudolph Bauer’s great Tetraptychon is used as an illustration for their 1944 article “Audio-Visual Music,” in Arts and Architecture magazine. (1)
The one specific film analogy for these serial compositions is Oskar Fischinger’s series of black-and-white Studies. The Whitneys saw Fischinger show films at Art Center College, and the Stendhal Gallery during 1939-40, which would have included three or four Studies. The brothers were rather offended by what they felt was the domination of music over image in Oskar’s synchronized films, so it brought the issue of sound into urgent focus for them. They experimented with various unfamiliar recorded sounds, such as American Indian music, before resolving to create their own music.
Still in their Pasadena studio, John began constructing the ingenious pendulum system that allowed them to ”write out” sound directly without playing or hearing it, following purely mathematical principles — new sounds with electronic timbres, capable of smooth glissandos and intermittency uncharacteristic of traditional musical instruments. John began the first of the Film Exercises while James was still working in 8mm, but soon James was involved almost full time with the complex optical printing and pendulum composition. These techniques, and the Film Exercises themselves, are fully discussed in Digital Harmony.
When the brothers moved into the west Residence B on the Barnsdall estate, “Olive Hill” in Hollywood (which they shared with photographer Edmund Teske), they became more accessible to the artistic community. Oil heiress Aline Barnsdall also lived in Residence B, as she had donated the main Frank Lloyd Wright house (now a museum in Barnsdall Park) to the city. She was very fond of young artists and radicals, and she allowed her fence along Hollywood Boulevard and Vermont Avenue to be pasted full of socialist propaganda posters and notices of union meetings. She let artists occupy the Residence B (also designed by Wright, and since torn down), in exchange for nominal fees or light caretaking duties.
Edmund Teske took many fine photographs of the Whitneys at work and of their equipment. Their space in Residence B was ideal for small screenings, and they soon developed something of a salon, where their own 8mm and 16mm films were screened along with new films by Maya Deren, Curtis Harrington, Kenneth Anger, and Man Ray, who were then living in Hollywood. These “salons” were attended by many people, such as sculptor Tony Smith, and Sidney and Harriet Janis, in addition to the filmmakers. As the pendulum and optical printer-pantograph became legendary, visiting celebrities like Bertold Brecht made a pilgrimage to see them.
Clara Grossman’s small American Contemporary Gallery on Hollywood Boulevard also held film screenings during the war years. The aging and almost forgotten D.W. Griffith would often wander in to see films by Man Ray or the Whitney brothers, which he seemed to enjoy very much. Concurrently with the film screenings, the gallery of course had regular painting and sculpture shows. Just as the Whitneys were working on Film Exercise #4 in 1944, the gallery sponsored a painting competition which was won by Jackie Blum, who soon became John Whitney’s wife. They moved into a prefabricated house in Studio City, but James (and Edmund Teske) remained in Barnsdall Residence B for several years. The equipment also stayed on Olive Hill until James finished Film Exercise #4.
As this story of nonobjective filmmakers in an objectionable world began with a rapport between New York and Los Angeles, so shall it end. When the Exercises were completed, James resolved to seek a wider audience and possibly support for further film projects by a trip to New York. To James, a naturally quiet, introspective person, those three weeks in New York must have been an unbelievable phantasmagoria. Quite aside from the museums and galleries and other sights, James was befriended and somewhat lionized everywhere. His friends from Los Angeles, Tony and Jane Smith, came by with Tennessee Williams, and they all went down to Greenwich Village to visit Maya Deren. James had a pleasant dinner with Marcel Duchamp, and a very uncomfortable dinner with Hans Richter and John Cage. He visited the apartment of architect and theatrical designer Frederick Kiesler (who had been the first to show Leger’s Ballet Mecanique in Europe), where some exquisite early Mondrian flower paintings shone from the walls (Mondrian had recently died).
James showed the 8mm films and the Film Exercises at the Museum of Modern Art to an enthusiastic, excited audience which included such unexpected celebrities as Nadia Boulanger, and he visited the Museum of Non-Objective Art in hopes of obtaining a grant. James met Solomon Guggenheim first and showed him the films, which he liked very much. When the Baroness Rebay appeared, she was furious that James had approached Solomon directly without being interviewed or “screened” by her first, since, she said, Mr. Guggenheim was too important and busy to be bothered by just anyone. When she learned that Solomon liked the Whitney films, she scheduled James for a screening at the museum, and took him around like her son introducing him to everyone (including people he already knew) among them artists-in-residence Charles Dockum (whose color organ fascinated the Baroness) and Jean Xceron (who was in effect working as a guard).
The announced screening was crowded with people who had heard about the radically new sound and novel imagery of the Film Exercises, among them Sidney and Harriet Janis, who were now in New York. However, the Whitney films were kept until last on the program, which seemed to stretch very long with many films from the museum’s collection. When finally the Whitney Exercises began, the Baroness leapt up and ran to the projection booth screaming, “What is the matter! Shut off that horrible noise! What is wrong with the projector?” James tried to explain that this was experimental music composed for the film. “Nonsense, that is no music!” Rebay replied, and the sound was turned off. Sidney Janis became quite angry and added more vociferous protest to James’s, but the sound remained off, and Film Exercises 2-4 screened in silence (except for agitated conversation in the audience).
James was awarded a monthly stipend to further his film work, but the scholarship was terminated after a few months because he did not write his regular report letters. James decided to return to the more private art of painting for the next few years.
1. Jay Leyda, “Exploration of New Film Technique,” Arts and Architecture, v. 65 (Dec 1945), 56.
Moritz, William. “You Can’t Get Then from Now.” Los Angeles Institute of Contemporary Art Journal n. 29 (Summer 1981): 26-40.