Film Screenings / Programs / Retrospectives
THE EXPERIMENTAL FILMS OF DICK HIGGINS
August 2 – August 4
Artist, publisher, and Fluxus co-founder Dick Higgins (1938-98) began experimenting with film while in college at Yale University, when he briefly joined a summer stock playhouse and served as the cameraman for a pornographic venture. After moving to New York City in the late 1950s, Higgins attended composer John Cage’s course in experimental composition at the New School and co-founded the New York Audio-Visual Group, which staged multimedia productions at venues in Downtown New York. Alongside artist Al Hansen, Higgins embarked on his first cinematic experiments, utilizing projectors, lights, and electrical circuits. The pair’s endeavors highlighted their shared love for risk and an element of danger.
Throughout the 1960s and early ’70s, Higgins created a dozen experimental movies, most of which have only recently been rediscovered and digitized. A selection of these virtually unknown works will be presented at Anthology. With the exception of THE FLAMING CITY (1961-62), which was occasionally screened in New York and Europe during the 1960s, the other films in the program have not been shown in over fifty years. The last recorded screening of a Higgins film program in New York dates back to November 1969, when the Film-Makers’ Cinematheque presented his works as part of their “Avant Garde Tuesdays” series at the Jewish Museum.
The series has been guest-programmed by Alice Centamore and Lauren Fulton, with support from the Dick Higgins Estate.
Lauren Fulton is a researcher and curator based in Lawrence, Kansas. She is an art history PhD candidate at SUNY Stony Brook where she just completed her dissertation on Higgins, which in part examines his work in film.
Alice Centamore is an art historian and curator based in Brooklyn, NY. She co-curated a show on Dick Higgins’s publishing house, Something Else Press, at the Reina Sofïa Museum, Madrid, in which his films were featured.
Special thanks to Hannah Higgins & Jessica Higgins (Estate of Dick Higgins and the Something Else Press) and Emily Cushman (MoMA).
PROGRAM 1
Dick Higgins
THE FLAMING CITY
1961-62, 121 min, 16mm-to-digital
Higgins’s only feature-length film, THE FLAMING CITY, explores the dichotomy between the lifestyle of Higgins and his artist friends in SoHo, which was viewed as a threat to middle class American values, and Higgins’s well-heeled upbringing. The film incorporates acted footage of friends and family, including Lette Eisenhauer, Alison Knowles, and Florence Tarlow, as well as the artist’s grandparents. Settings range from Downtown New York and Central Park Zoo to Coney Island Beach, Upstate New York, and Worcester, Massachusetts. Baroque music accompanies the otherwise silent film. THE FLAMING CITY employs several photographic techniques Higgins learned at the Manhattan School of Printing, including filters, hand-drawn patterns, and alteration of color.
Fri, Aug 2 at 7:30 and Sun, Aug 4 at 7:30.
The screening on Fri, Aug 2 will be introduced by Lauren Fulton.
PROGRAM 2
This program brings together a selection of Higgins’s films in which he experimented with several photo-derived techniques – including color filters and hand-drawn patterns – the superimposition of reels, manipulation of found footage, and the use of Möbius strips.
The screening will be followed by a conversation between Lauren Fulton, Alice Centamore, and Andrew Uroskie (Stony Brook University).
SCENARIO 1968, 11 min, 16mm-to-digital
A home movie of Higgins’s twin toddlers filmed by the artist in Vermont. The film incorporates Higgins’s fanciful poem of the same name written one year earlier alongside imagery that has nothing to do with it.
MEN & WOMEN & BELLS 1970, 41 min, 16mm-to-digitalFeaturing home movie footage shot by Higgins and other material derived from his father, MEN & WOMEN & BELLS includes the recurring sound of the bells of Rostov-on-Don in Russia, lending it a mournful quality.
HANK AND MARY WITHOUT APOLOGIES 1969, 16.5 min, 16mm-to-digital
“Good evening ladies and gentlemen. We are gathered together to witness a very strange occasion: the death of the traditional American theater.” Following Higgins’s opening words, the viewer is met with flashing images, unspectacular visuals but for their color. Higgins establishes a complex relationship between these and his 1967 computational poem “Hank and Mary, a Love Story, a Chorale (for Diter Rot).” Overlaid throughout is audio recorded during the weekend-long “Ray Gun Spex,” a series of Happenings organized by Claes Oldenburg and Jim Dine at the Judson Gallery in 1960.
THE END 1962, 12 min, 16mm-to-digital
Higgins altered a found 1940s employee communication film from a telephone company by running it backwards so that, in his hands, the instructional film instead becomes nonsensical gibberish.
INVOCATION OF CANYONS AND BOULDERS (FOR STAN BRAKHAGE) 1962, 7 sec, 16mm-to-digital, silent. Preserved by Anthology Film Archives.
Intended to be projected as a Möbius strip for eternity, INVOCATION features a repeated blip of close-up footage of Higgins’s chewing mouth. Later produced as a Fluxfilm by George Maciunas, the piece is dedicated to Higgins’s favorite filmmaker at the time.
Total running time: ca. 85 min (plus panel).
Alice Centamore is an incoming PhD student in the Department of Art History at the University of Chicago. In Fall 2023, she co-curated an exhibition on Dick Higgins’s publishing house, Something Else Press, at the Reina Sofía Museum, Madrid. She is the editor of A Something Else Reader (2022) and Fluxus Newspaper (2024), both published by Primary Information. Alice is currently researching independent feminist and lesbian communities in 1970s and 80s North America, including Pauline Oliveros’s ♀ [women] Ensemble and Kate Millett’s Farm. Her other projects include the republication of Monique Wittig’s work in English and a book on Judith Arcana and the Chicago Janes.
Lauren Fulton is an art history PhD candidate at Stony Brook University and a bookseller based in Lawrence, Kansas. Her recently completed dissertation is the first academic study devoted to Dick Higgins, concentrating on his activity over a twenty-year period from 1956-76. Her research interests include postwar performance practices, moving image, Fluxus and intermedia theory, the aesthetics of boredom, and the history of experimental publishing and artist books. Fulton has held curatorial positions at the Aspen Art Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, and the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas.
Andrew V. Uroskie is Associate Professor of Modern Art and Media at Stony Brook University, where he teaches in the MA/PhD Program in Modern Art History and Criticism, the MA Program in Philosophy and the Arts, and the Graduate Certificate in Media, Art, Culture and Technology. Focusing on film, video, sound, installation, and performance, his writing explores how durational media have helped to reframe models of aesthetic production, exhibition, spectatorship, and objecthood. He is the author of Between the Black Box and the White Cube: Expanded Cinema and Postwar Art, from University of Chicago Press. His forthcoming book, The Kinetic Imaginary – an interdisciplinary history of the emergence of temporality and movement in postwar American art – has been supported by the Creative Capital / Arts Writers Foundation Book Award.
Sat, Aug 3 at 7:30.
