idealism ceding to Johnson’s military morass, Beat Dadaism transforming into hippie agitation, and mod Godard morphing into Mao Godard, it was as if utopia and dystopia were both within reach—if not one and the same.
For these four filmmakers, as well as other fellow trav- elers in New York and beyond, it was a moment when politics, formal curiosity, and the sudden mobility of both the camera and sound recording invited an approach to cinema in which every shot, every ges- ture, every decision seemed less a statement than a question. Reality and fiction were constantly being blurred—for serious and for play, and ever sincerely. The four films in this series were all recorded during 1967–1968 in New York City, and all are both invalu- able time capsules of that moment and impossible to box or bottle up. There are resonances and ricochets among these four films—having all drunk from the same wild New York well, with its fly-on-the-wall doc- umentarians and Warholian flair, its Actor’s Studio interiority and Living Theatre political absurdity, there would have to be. Viewed together they rep- resent less of a cinematic leap forward than a scatter- shot concentric expansion into the beyond—beyond genre, beyond the limits of film itself.
Filmed over the summer of 1967, David Holzman’s Diary marked the advent of cinéma vérité by slavishly albeit fictionally aping it, while 16 months later the
vanguards of that movement subtly aped themselves in 1 P.M.; in between, The Fall would both deconstruct and co-opt the movement’s objective approach, while Symbiopsychotaxiplasm cajoled its flies on the wall to swarm to the center of the room. Method actor Rip Torn bustles through 1 P.M. (as he would in sev- eral chimeric films of the era), Dadaist destructivists make mischief in The Fall , a salty nude model steals the show in Holzman’s, and Symbiopsychotaxiplasm closes the circle with a former Method man mak- ing an entire film crew into an extension of his own directorial performance. News and politics of the day buzz between background and foreground of all four films, from Vietnam and the Newark riots to ubiqui- tous activist Tom Hayden. And in the most startling overlap, an elevator rising up a half-formed sky- scraper in The Fall is almost exactly matched in 1 P.M.; while the former metaphorically implies a toppling in its very title, the latter ends with a literal, time-lapse dismantling of a city tower.
Rising and falling, accumulating and dispersing, evoking and projecting, destroying and creating, these are films whose true common thread is insta- bility. And it’s instability that makes them, still, vital. Their very form—their deliberate unwieldiness— makes them perennially modern. Strictly speaking, they’re neither documentary nor drama, scripted nor spontaneous, true nor false. They’re neither/nor, and therefore pretty much anything they want to be.
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