There was once a time when you didn’t need to apply for a grant in order to make a feature-length independent film, nor was academic or institutional backing a requirement either, and you didn’t have to worry about making something digestible enough to be accepted at festivals. Most importantly, movies didn’t have to be about anything in particular—the total anthesis to contemporary trends in what’s more broadly considered “experimental” cinema today, with films that almost require its makers to lay out entire statements of intent by the end credits. This bygone moment was New York City in the early 1960s, when 16mm film was readily available at drug stores and the only requirements for making a movie beyond celluloid were a Bolex, some splicing equipment, and a lab to develop it. It’s the only time and place in which great trash epics made in the gutters of downtown Manhattan such as Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures (1963) could be made and still be considered art.
In this fertile environment, once you finished whatever it was you deemed decent-enough, good word-of-mouth or a rave review from Jonas Mekas in The Village Voice could assemble an audience; just take his review of Dick Higgins’s The Flaming City (1961-62), which casually observes that “a few hundred people sat through” this “two-and-one-half-hour” non-narrative epic—an occurrence that’s difficult to imagine nowadays and will probably not repeat itself when the film screens at Anthology this week. (If there is a contemporary experimental filmmaker capable of drawing in a crowd like that today, at any theater in the city, and who makes similarly lengthy work, I’d gladly shake their hand and ask them to forgive my short-sightedness.)
But it’s in part due to these circumstances that a figure like Dick Higgins—a poet, printmaker, and composer who was a student of John Cage, and co-founder of Fluxus—was able to make The Flaming City, which Mekas accurately described as containing “almost pure nothing” for the vast majority of its runtime. As someone who has seen enough rarely screened features from the New American Cinema movement and skimmed through enough of Mekas’s imprecise and hyperbolic prose on them to know better, I was a tad skeptical from the outset. As is unfortunately the case, lengthy obscure underground films from this period are often guilty until proven innocent, usually for the punishable crimes of over-indulgence and wheel-spinning, and this one’s daunting runtime—to give some perspective, it’s longer than both Dog Star Man (1961-64) and Tom, Tom the Piper’s Son (1969)—gave me slight pause.
According to Higgins, The Flaming City is “an anti-semantic love story.” True to his word, there is not a word of spoken dialogue and little discernible logic to follow. While the film initially takes the shape of a traditional city symphony, darting from downtown Soho to the beaches of Coney Island at a moment’s notice, and accompanied by both the sounds of a classical orchestra and traditional choral music that provides the film with a baroque grandiosity, The Flaming City thankfully has a bit more up its sleeve. The film also contains small vignettes peppered throughout, performative tableaux that infuse the film with a theatrical playfulness. Most are set in black boxes where performers’ self-conscious physical contortions, be it facial or bodily, hearken back to the Edison era, while a few others feature a rotating cast of stock characters played by Higgins's real-life family and acquaintances. Additionally, the film’s technical effects, most of which pop up during the third reel, and many of which Higgins learned at the Manhattan School of Printing, remain impressive even six decades later. At one point, an extremely skillful combination of hand-made camera filters—what looks like rear projection and color tinting—creates a striking resemblance to a double exposure. That’s not to say The Flaming City was incompletely assembled before this juncture, but that the contrast from two reels of what amounts to loosely-edited horseplay with the sophisticated visual techniques of the last reel is stark.
I’d be lying if I said The Flaming City earns every second of its runtime; there are too many instances where the film simply repeats itself, either by showing the same footage—scenes of a couple frockling at the beach and three elderly women dancing are both recycled a handful of times—or reusing a formal idea it introduced just a few minutes earlier—a detailed filter resembling a person’s face quickly becomes an overplayed trick. After the noted instances where Higgins alters his footage, things return to normal for another half-hour or so. However, boredom never once reared its ugly head during my viewing of The Flaming City, and all things considered, that was perhaps its greatest achievement.
The Flaming City makes the strongest case for Higgins's bona fides as a filmmaker, something not evinced frequently enough throughout the remainder of his life. The End (1962) reverses a '50s informational film for cheap ironies and Scenario (1968), while cute in theory and in practice, feels like a parlor trick compared to Hollis Frampton’s more probing Poetic Justice (1972), which takes the same basic premise—of a cinema largely imagined in the viewer’s head with the assistance of hand-written notes—to its foremost logical conclusion. Invocations of Canyons and Boulders (for Stan Brakhage) (1966), officially the second Fluxus short film, is a particularly unpleasant extreme close-up of what looks like someone chewing bubblegum. Mekas called it “the purest attempt to clear art from any or all historical, esthetic, thematic, ornamental claptrap to regain the lost-eye consciousness.”
However, out of Higgins's short films, Hank and Mary Without Apologies (1970) is the only one that features the stand-out array of coloring techniques found in The Flaming City. Set to Higgins’s own performance of Edifices Cabarets Contributions at the Judson Church in 1960, during the first Happening, the film cycles through predominantly time-lapsed sky and nature footage. It also includes both unprocessed and color-processed imagery, alternating between the two with each hard cut. This produces a mild after-image effect that isn’t quite violent enough to be a flicker but is noticeable enough to form visual patterns, especially once the film kicks into higher gear and hits a near-consistent staccato rhythm in its final few minutes (as a whole, Hank and Mary Without Apologies contains some 3,000 splices in under eighteen minutes).
Yet, if there is any Higgins film truly worth experiencing, it’s still unquestionably The Flaming City—a distinguished and compelling maximalist relic of its time. Regardless of qualitative judgments, the film embodies, to an almost suffocating degree, the avant-garde ethos of its era: an openness to any possibility, an insatiable drive to create, and the vision needed to bring these ideas, practical or not, to life.
The Experimental Films of Dick Higgins runs August 2 - 4 at Anthology Film Archives.
