America Is Hard to See

May 1–Sept 27, 2015

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Working outside of Hollywood’s commercial system of movie production and distribution, many filmmakers developed new approaches to their medium from the 1930s to the 1950s. Some focused on formal concerns traditionally associated with painting. In the 1930s Mary Ellen Bute, for example, took inspiration from the abstract compositions of European modernists such as Vassily Kandinsky and Piet Mondrian. In Synchromy No. 4: Escape, one of her “visual symphonies” set to classical music, an animated orange triangle struggles to escape a patterned prison. Abstract avant-garde filmmaking carried into the 1950s through the work of artists like Robert Breer and Len Lye, who captured the dynamism of gestural abstraction—a prominent feature of American painting at the time.

For a number of mid-century American filmmakers, cinema became a medium for psychological, philosophical, and even ritual experiment. Maya Deren—a leading auteur visionary who wrote, produced, financed, distributed, publicized, and even acted in her Surrealist-influenced films—deconstructed conventional cinema’s presentation of linear plots and genre, producing poetic investigations of cinematic time and metaphor. Helen Levitt’s film In the Street, like her photography, seemingly takes a more documentary approach to everyday life in what was then known as Spanish Harlem—but it is not simple reportage. Declaring her broad, metaphorical view at the beginning of the film, she proclaims that everyday street life is a “theater and a battleground . . . where every human being is a poet, a masker, a warrior, a dancer.” Raphael Montañez Ortiz used footage from a classic Hollywood Western and from a World War II news reel, “re-editing” them by chopping them up with a tomahawk, tossing the pieces in a “medicine bag,” dumping them out, and splicing them together in random order. These chance operations served, for the artist, to symbolically alter American history, and to “redeem the indigenous wound” caused by the violent displacement and vilification of Native Americans.

Below is a selection of works from this chapter.