Homeless Movies: The Redemptive Project of the New American Cinema By Joshua Guilford B.A., Michigan State University, 2004 M.A., Brown University, 2007 A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University. Providence, Rhode Island May 2015 © Joshua Guilford 2015 All rights reserved. This dissertation by Joshua Guilford is accepted in its present form by the Department of Modern Culture and Media as satisfying the dissertation requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Date Mary Ann Doane, Advisor Recommended to the Graduate Council Date Philip Rosen, Reader Date Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Reader Approved by the Graduate Council Date Peter M. Weber, Dean of the Graduate School iii CURRICULUM VITAE JOSHUA GUILFORD DATE AND PLACE OF BIRTH 16 September 1981, Flint, Michigan, USA EDUCATION Ph.D. Brown University, Modern Culture and Media, 2014 M.A. Brown University, Modern Culture and Media, May 2007 B.A. Michigan State University, English, December 2004 PUBLICATIONS 2015 “An  Interview  with  Fern  Silva,”  Millennium Film Journal, forthcoming 2015 2014 “Against  Transparency:  Jonas  Mekas,  Vernon  Zimmerman,  and  the  West   Coast  Contribution  to  the  New  American  Cinema,”  Alternative Projections: Experimental Film in Los Angeles, 1945-1980, ed. David E. James, forthcoming 2014, John Libbey “Turning  Inwards:  the  Politics  of  Privacy  in  the  New  American  Cinema,”   Sounds and Visions: Music, Counterculture, and the Global 1968, eds. Timothy S. Brown and Andrew E. Lison, Palgrave Macmillan, 2014 “Ron  Rice,”  Routledge Encyclopedia of Modernism, ed. Stephen Ross, et al, forthcoming 2014 “The Flower Thief,”  Routledge Encyclopedia of Modernism, ed. Stephen Ross, et al, forthcoming 2014 2013 “Magic  Lantern:  Interviews with  Ben  Russell  and  Josh  Guilford,”   INCITE: Journal of Experimental Media, 2013 2012 “Baudrillard,  Obscenity,  and  the  Intimate  Cinema  of  Saul  Levine,”   Theorizing Visual Studies: Writing Through the Discipline, ed. James Elkins, et al, Routledge, 2012. CONFERENCES AND INVITED TALKS (selected) 2014 “The  Loop  as  Documentary,”  Paper,  Codes and Modes: The Character of Documentary Culture, New York City, November 2014 2013 “Magic  Lantern  Cinema,”  Invited  Talk,  Microcinemas and Alternative Media, Undergraduate Seminar, Instructor: Lynne Sachs, The New School, upcoming November 2013 “New  Approaches  to  the  Politics  of  the  1960s  American  Avant-Garde,”   Panel Co-Chair, with David Fresko, Erica Levin, and Juan A. Suárez, Society for Cinema and Media Studies, Chicago, March 2013 “Ron  Rice,  Vagabond,”  Paper,  Society for Cinema and Media Studies, Chicago, March 2013 2011 “The  Homeless  Movies  of  the  New  American  Cinema,”  Paper,  Visible iv Evidence, New York City, August 2011 “The  Homeless  Movies  of  the  New  American  Cinema,”  Paper,  Society for Cinema and Media Studies, New Orleans, March 2011 “Curating  Experimental  Film  and  Video,”  Invited  Talk,  The Art of Curating, Undergraduate Seminar, Instructor: Mark Tribe, Brown University, April 2011 2010 “The  ‘Private  Visions’  of  the  New  American  Cinema,”  Paper,  Society for Cinema and Media Studies, Los Angeles, March 2010 2008 “Recovering  the  Bones  Brigade:  Skateboard  Videos  and  Publicity,”  Paper,   Society for Cinema and Media Studies, Philadelphia, March 2008 2006 “Breaking  Windows  from  Baghdad:  Insurgent  Video  and  the  Case  of   Juba,”  Paper,  Spaces of Conflict, San Francisco State University, November 2006 CURATING & CULTURAL ORGANIZATION (selected) 2014 “Ways to Fail,”  The Film-Makers’  Cooperative,  5 September 2014, New York “Spaces  Open  &  Closed:  Five  Films  by  Rosalind  Nashashibi,”  Le  Petit   Versailles, 12 July 2014, New York “Transanimations”  McGill  University,  7 June 2014, Montreal “New  Year,  New  Works,”  Millennium Film Workshop, Brooklyn Fire Proof, 25 January 2014, Brooklyn 2013 “An  Archive  of  Intersections,”  Film-Makers’  Cooperative,  22  October   2013, New York “Temporary  Ocean  (in  Light  and  Sound),”  Brattle  Theater,  in  conjunction   with Balagan Film Series, 17 October 2013, Cambridge “Temporary  Ocean  (in  Light  and  Sound),”  Machines  with  Magnets, 16 October 2013, Pawtucket “Gatherings,”  Le  Petit  Versailles,  in  conjunction  with  the  Millennium   Film  Workshop’s  A Collective Cinema, 6 July 2013, New York “Time/s/pace,”  AS220  Black  Box  Theater, 25 April 2013, Providence “Intimate  Projections: Barbara  Hammer,  Peter  Hutton,  &  Amie  Siegel,”   The New School, in conjunction with Millennium Film Workshop Personal Cinema Series at The New School, 17 April 2013, New York “Jennifer  Reeves:  Exuberant  Emulsions,”  The  New  School,  in  conjunction   with Millennium Film Workshop Personal Cinema Series at The New School, 20 March 2013, New York “New  from  Old:  Martha  Colburn,  Bradley  Eros,  &  Colleen  Fitzgibbon,”   The New School, in conjunction with Millennium Film Workshop Personal Cinema Series at The New School, 20 February 2013, New York 2012 “Ship  to  Shore,”  Post Office Square, in conjunction with Balagan Film Series, 25 August 2012, Boston “Ship  to  Shore,”  Grant’s  Block,  24  August  2012,  Providence v “Curious  Magic:  The  Magic  Lantern  Slides  of  the  Museum  of  Natural   History,”  Museum of Natural History and Planetarium, in conjunction with Curiouser: Art, Science, and the Secret Life of Specimens, 12-13 April 2012, Providence “Andy  Warhol’s  Sleep,”  40  Rice  Street,  in conjunction with R.K. Projects, 18 February 2012, Providence 2010 – 11 “Affect  Unbounded:  Selfhood,  Collectivity,  and  the  Politics  of  Feeling,”   Mellon Graduate Student Workshop, Brown University, Providence 2009 – 10 Modern Culture Workshop, Brown University, Providence 2009 “The  Private  Show,”  Cable  Car  Cinema  &  Café,  11  March  2009, Providence TEACHING 2014 Art of Film, The New School, Media Studies 2013 Experimental Cinema at Anthology Film Archives, The New School, Eugene Lang College, Culture and Media Intimate Film Cultures, The New School, Culture and Media 2012 The Embattled Eye: Modernity, Visuality, and Cinema, The New School, Culture and Media 2011 The Art of the Film, Brown University, Summer and Continuing Studies 2010 Secret Flix: Privacy, Intimacy, and Cinema, Brown University, Modern Culture and Media 2010 The Art of the Film, Brown University, Summer and Continuing Studies TEACHING AND RESEARCH ASSISTANTSHIPS 2011 Text/Media/Culture, Brown University, Modern Culture and Media 2009 – 2011 Research Assistant, Prof. Mary Ann Doane, Brown University, Modern Culture and Media 2009 Text/Media/Culture, Brown University, Modern Culture and Media 2008 Screens and Projections, Brown University, Modern Culture and Media Digital Media, Brown University, Modern Culture and Media 2007 Cinematic Coding and Narrativity, Brown University, Modern Culture and Media Text/Media/Culture, Brown University, Modern Culture and Media 2006 Screens and Projections, Brown University, Modern Culture and Media AWARDS, GRANTS, & HONORS 2012 – 15 Robert Rauschenberg Foundation SEED Grant, for Magic Lantern Cinema 2014 Wave Farm Media Arts Assistance Fund Grant 2014 Malcolm S. Forbes Center for Culture and Media Grant, for Magic Lantern Cinema 2013 Malcolm S. Forbes Center Grant, for Magic Lantern Cinema 2012 Malcolm S. Forbes Center Grant, for Magic Lantern Cinema Malcolm S. Forbes Center Grant, for Magic Lantern Cinema vi Rhode Island Council for the Humanities Mini-Grant, for Magic Lantern Cinema 2011 – 12 Josephine de Kármán Dissertation Fellowship 2011 Malcolm S. Forbes Center Grant, for Magic Lantern Cinema Creative Arts Council Student Grant, for Magic Lantern Cinema Malcolm S. Forbes Center Grant, for Magic Lantern Cinema 2010 – 2011 Andrew Mellon Foundation Graduate Student Workshop Grant 2010 Malcolm S. Forbes Center Grant, for Magic Lantern Cinema Creative Arts Council Student Grant, for Magic Lantern Cinema 2009 Brown University Dissertation Fellowship 2008 Creative Arts Council Student Grant Malcolm S. Forbes Center Grant REFERENCES Professor Mary Ann Doane, Department of Film and Media, University of California, Berkeley, madoane@berkeley.edu Professor Philip Rosen, Department of Modern Culture and Media, Brown University, philip_rosen@brown.edu Professor Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Department of Modern Culture and Media, Brown University, wendy_chun@brown.edu vii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This dissertation would not have been possible without the support of a number of people and institutions to whom I would like to extend my sincere gratitude. For assisting the development of this project and insisting on its completion, I would like to thank my advisor, Mary Ann Doane, and my readers, Philip Rosen and Wendy Hui Kyong Chun. I would also like to thank Susan McNeil, Liza Hebert, Richard Manning, and Colleen Doyle in the Department of Modern Culture and Media at Brown, and the faculty in the English Department at Michigan State University who first introduced me to the works of the American avant-garde, especially Justus Nieland, Jennifer Fay, and Judith Roof. For providing material support in the form of grants and fellowships, I would like to thank the Josephine de Kármán Fellowship Trust, the Brown University Graduate School, the Creative Arts Council at Brown, and the Malcolm S. Forbes Center for Culture and Media Studies at Brown. For assistance with research, I would like to thank the Film- Makers’  Cooperative  (especially  MM  Serra),  Anthology Film Archives, the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, the Museum Archives and Film Study Center at the Museum of Modern Art, the Research and Study Center at the UCLA Film and Television Archive, Jonas Mekas, Amy Rice, and ACME Video. For their hospitality along the way, I would like to thank Leslie Thornton, Tom Zummer, Julie Russo, and Melissa Getreu. Most importantly, I would like to thank the people who supported me throughout this project in ways that are difficult to formulate. To my family, especially my mother, Eileen Guilford; my father and step mother, Dave Guilford and Becky Shiemke; my brother, John Guilford; and my sister, Hannah Guilford. To my friends, especially Sarah Osment. And finally, to my partner, Pooja Rangan. viii TABLE OF CONTENTS Signature Page................................................................................................................... iii Curriculum Vitae............................................................................................................... iv Acknowledgements........................................................................................................... vii Introduction:  “Return  to  the  New  American  Cinema”....................................................... 2 Chapter  One:  “Turning Inwards”...................................................................................... 21 Chapter  Two:  “Homeless Movies”................................................................................. 104 Chapter  Three:  “Ron  Rice,  Vagabond”.......................................................................... 182 Works Cited.................................................................................................................... 270 ix HOMELESS MOVIES: THE REDEMPTIVE PROJECT OF THE NEW AMERICAN CINEMA by Joshua Guilford 1 INTRODUCTION RETURN TO THE NEW AMERICAN CINEMA The New American Cinema (NAC) remains a murky object within film studies. It is  generally  accepted  that  the  heading  “New  American  Cinema”  refers  to  a  community  of   independent filmmakers that emerged in New York City in the late 1950s, which was working to establish an alternative cinema in the U.S. modeled loosely on the European “new  waves” and existing in opposition to both Hollywood and the established art cinema. Yet accounts  of  the  NAC’s  period  of  activity,  roster  of  participants,  and   filmography  are  highly  varied,  and  this  movement’s  primary  objectives,  characteristics,   and organizing principles have been framed in remarkably divergent ways. This  instability  is  not  a  recent  development.  The  NAC’s  status  as  a  relatively   coherent  “movement”  was  the  source  of  considerable  anxiety  for  representatives  of  this   film culture throughout its period of operation. The sheer quantity of appellations that the NAC’s  main  spokesperson,  Jonas  Mekas,  temporarily  applied  to  this  film  culture  before   begrudgingly  settling  on  “New  American  Cinema”  speaks  to  this  anxiety:  “new   American  wave,”  “American  New  Wave,”  “Ninth  Wave,”  “New  American  Cinema   Group,”  and  “the  Group”  were  all  alternates  to  “New  American  Cinema”  at  one  point  or   another,  to  say  nothing  of  the  term  “underground.”1 But the critic Ken Kelman addressed 1 Jonas  Mekas,  “New  York  Letter:  Towards  a  Spontaneous  Cinema,”  Sight and Sound 28.3-4 (Summer- Autumn 1959): 118; Movie Journal: The Rise of the New American Cinema, 1959-1971 (New York: MacMillan,  1972)  14;;  “The  First  Statement  of  the  New  American  Cinema  Group,”  Film Culture Reader, ed. P. Adams Sitney (New York: Cooper Square, 2000) 79. By 1962, Mekas was already expressing his discomfort with the designation “New  American  Cinema.”  See  Mekas,  Movie Journal 68. 2 the problem of cultural stability more directly in his influential 1964 survey of the NAC, “Anticipations  of  the  Light.”  For  Kelman,  it  was  dangerous  to  apply  the  term   “movement”  to  the  NAC,  given  this  term’s  association with static aesthetic schools and categories rather than with dynamic processes such as that embodied by the NAC. Framing  the  NAC  as  a  vital  “release  of  energies,”  Kelman  asserts:  “that  movement  which   has  been  called  New  American  Cinema…  can  no  more  be  defined than any other form of life;;  it  can  be  autopsied  only  when  dead.  No  vivisection.”2 Echoing  the  NAC’s  call  for   films  that  would  be  “rough,  unpolished,  but  alive”  – its  insistence  that  films  not  be  “rosy”   but  rather  “the  color  of  blood”  – Kelman here envisions the NAC as a living cinema, one whose  rebellion  against  both  “the  exhaustion  of  film  form  at  midcentury”  and  the   “increasingly  restrictive”  character  of  the  late-modern world required an anarchic embrace of instability.3 This dissertation initiates a return to the NAC, one that elucidates, while also questioning, the consequence this film culture attributed to the intimate, unruly, and disorganized vital impulse it sought to harness and transmit through the animating technology of cinema. What follows  is  not  an  autopsy,  however,  whether  “autopsy”  is   conceived as an objective examination of a whole corpus or  a  deeply  subjective  “act  of   seeing  with  one’s  own  eyes.”  I  do  not  seek  to  present  an  exhaustive  account  of  the  NAC   (my scope is narrower than the  pathologist’s)  or  to  compose  a  personal  ode  to  the   “visionaries”  comprising  this  film  culture  (I  evade  the  lure  to  trance).  Rather,  my  project   is to revisit the primary assertions and neuroses that recur throughout the films, writings, and practices of this film culture, and to reframe our view of the internal and external 2 Ken  Kelman,  “Anticipations  of  the  Light”  in  The New American Cinema: A Critical Anthology, ed. Gregory Battcock (New York: Dutton, 1967) 23, 22, originally published in The Nation 11 May 1964. 3 “First Statement”  83;;  Kelman  23,  24. 3 “pressure[s]  for  coherence”  that  organize  these  works  and  activities,  thus  allowing  for  a   deeper  understanding  of  the  NAC’s  accomplishments  and  limitations,  repetitions  and   innovations.4 This dissertation is a revisionary study, in other words, one that problematizes existing perceptions of the NAC by resituating its most insistent claims, themes, and ambitions within a conceptual and historical context that awakens unexplored meanings and implications lying dormant within these claims. While  this  decision  to  “go  back”  to  the  NAC  might  seem  to  mimic  this  film   culture’s  own  redemptive  project  – its  effort  “to  replenish  the  human  spirit  which  has   been eroded as much as our earth has been by  ‘progress’”  – it should be stated from the outset that this dissertation is not intended as a work of salvation.5 It does not seek to rescue the NAC from its detractors by championing it uncritically. The task here is to develop a critical framework that can adequately account for the irreducible tensions and contradictions that structure this film culture – tensions and contradictions whose existence  reveals  celebratory  ballads  of  the  NAC’s  achievements  to  be  as  insufficient  as   dismissive caricatures of its defects. My  primary  claim  is  that  the  NAC’s  effort  to  redeem  or  replenish  a  dwindling   realm  of  “spirit”  must  be  understood  as  a  response  to  the  apparent  decline  of  interiority   initiated by the rise of a distinctly impersonal, late-modern world. To artists of the NAC, the dominant configurations of both private and public life in post-WWII American society seemed to be rendering the very notion of the inner self obsolete. They believed the development of a more vital, spontaneous, and intimate aesthetic was the most effective method through which to combat this process – an aesthetic modeled after a 4 Kelman 24. 5 Ibid 24. 4 wild, irrational mode of inner experience held to be incongruous with the excessive rationality of postwar culture. Yet  the  NAC’s  promotion  of  cinema  as  a  “spiritual medium” was not a purely solipsistic endeavor.6 It was part of a larger effort to reorganize the cinema in a more intimate form, one capable of generating new and highly vitalizing experiences of inwardness and belonging through which the alienating effects of late modernity could be remedied. The  notion  of  “returning”  to  the  NAC  may  seem  somewhat  confusing  given  the   paucity of scholarly studies devoted specifically to this film culture. At the time of this writing, there is no academic book that takes the NAC as its specific object of study. This is not to say that researchers of the NAC are confronted with a scarcity of resources. It is to say that our understanding of the NAC has not come from an exhaustive or definitive scholarly inquiry into this film culture, but from a dispersed and heterogeneous set of primary and secondary resources that diverge and disagree as often as they overlap. These resources include: the films of the NAC themselves; critical, creative, and personal writings produced by artists and critics affiliated with this film culture; interviews, movie reviews, and popular journalism; critical and scholarly essays on individual authors and films, or select groupings of authors and films; scholarly works devoted to broader periods, genres, or categories that include the NAC, such as the American avant-garde, women’s  avant-garde film, or Beat cinema; scholarly studies of related offshoots of the NAC such as underground film, the Baudelarian cinema, or direct cinema; exhibition catalogues, program notes, newsletters, archival documents, and other forms of institutional discourse; and the more amorphous collection of anecdotes, gossip, and 6 Kelman 24. 5 myths that combine to make up avant-garde film legend.7 When viewed collectively, such materials cannot but fail to add up to a coherent picture. However, the multiple representations of the NAC contained within these materials conflict in ways that make the task of delineating and analyzing the NAC uniquely difficult. It is illustrative in this regard to consider one of the more basic points of disagreement  that  structures  these  materials:  the  date  of  the  NAC’s  demise.  In  Film Culture Reader, P. Adams Sitney situates this date as early as 1963. By 1963, he explains, a host of independent American filmmakers  who  were  working  to  develop  “a   cinema of low-budget productions of high artistic interest, economically akin to the Off- Broadway  theater,  as  it  was  then,  or  to  the  ‘new  waves’  in  France,  Italy,  England,  and   Eastern Europe,”  realized  that  their  project  for  a  “new  cinema”  had  been  a  mere  illusion.8 As he writes: This illusion lasted while Jonas Mekas, Shirley Clarke, Adolfas Mekas, Robert Frank, John Cassavetes, and a number of others were making their first feature films; it ended abruptly when they had completed them and were seeking distribution for them and financing for further projects. In the wake of this illusion, The Film-Makers Cooperative was born [in the beginning of 1962]. Through it, the film-makers planned to distribute their own films and keep the income, minus a marginal percentage for operational costs. At this point, the low-budget film-makers joined forces with  the  ‘experimental’  film-makers, who had no budgets at all. Within a year, it was apparent that the Film-Makers Cooperative could not bring in sufficient funds to keep a director working on a $25,000 budget, yet it 7 In addition to the texts discussed and cited in this introduction, notable works of criticism and scholarship related to the NAC include: P. Adams Sitney, Visionary Film: The American Avant-Garde, 1943-2000 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002); David E. James, ed., To Free the Cinema: Jonas Mekas and the New York Underground (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992); Sheldon Renan, An Introduction to the American Underground Film (New York: Dutton, 1967); Lauren Rabinovitz, Points of Resistance: Women, Power & Politics in the New York Avant-Garde Cinema, 1943-71 (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1991); Jack Sargeant, The Naked Lens: An Illustrated History of Beat Cinema (London: Creation Books, 1997); Louis Marcorelles, Living Cinema: New Directions in Contemporary Film-making, tr. Isabel Quigley (New York: Praeger, 1973); Carel Rowe, The Baudelarian Cinema: A Trend Within the American Avant-Garde (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1982. 8 P.  Adams  Sitney,  “The  New  American  Cinema”  in  Film Culture Reader, ed. Sitney (New York: Cooper Square, 2000) 71. 6 could help to sustain the avant-gardists. Thus, Film Culture drifted from being the forum for low-budget film directors to that of the most radical innovators.9 In  Sitney’s  little  history  of  the  American  avant-garde, the NAC is equated with the  New  American  Cinema  Group  (hereafter  referred  to  as  “The  Group”):  an  organization   of filmmakers that included many of the artists mentioned by Sitney, as well as figures such as Lionel Rogosin, Gregory Markopoulos, and Alfred Leslie, who were committed to establishing an alternative network of production, distribution, and exhibition in the U.S. According to Sitney, the dream of a new cinema that motivated The Group was abandoned for the sake of a highly artisanal and radically innovative avant-garde mode of production.10 And quite similar chronologies have also been put forward in a pair of more recent, scholarly works devoted to avant-garde film in  the  1960s:  David  E.  James’s   Allegories of Cinema and  Juan  A.  Suárez’s  Bike Boys, Drag Queens, and Superstars. Though  these  authors’  highly  significant  readings  of  the  NAC  vary  in  important  respects,   both James and Suárez perceive the NAC as an initial effort to establish an alternative cinema in the U.S. that flourished momentarily, failed abruptly, and was supplanted by a more explicitly counter-cultural  film  movement  better  designated  “underground  film.”11 If this narrative succeeds in addressing the significant shifts in mode of production, style, and cultural orientation that occurred in experimental film circles in the U.S.  in  the  mid  1960s,  it  nevertheless  restricts  the  notion  “New  American  Cinema”  to  a   small subset of filmic practices to which that designation has been applied since the late 1950s. In the critical and artistic discourse that emerged from the 1960s American avant- 9 Ibid 71-72. 10 See:  “First  Statement,”  op.  cit. 11 See: David E. James, Allegories of Cinema: American Film in the Sixties (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1989) ch. 4; and Juan A. Suárez, Bike Boys, Drag Queens, and Superstars: Avant-Garde, Mass Culture, and Gay Identities in the 1960s Underground Cinema (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University, 1996) esp. 73-81. 7 garde  itself,  the  heading  “New  American  Cinema”  was  more  fluid  and  its  usage  extended   well past 1963. For instance, Gregory  Battcock’s  1967  critical  anthology  devoted  to  the   “extraordinary  variety  of  artistically  and  sometimes  technically  amateurish  ambitious   productions that have recently attracted critical attention in New York City and elsewhere”  is  titled  The New American Cinema.12 Battcock liked this heading because he found  it  “sufficiently  elastic”  to  cover  the  diverse  range  of  tendencies  that  comprised   then-contemporary independent American cinema.13 And this elasticity is attested to by the repeated employment of this heading over the course of the anthology to refer not only to the work of artists associated with The Group, but also to those more closely affiliated with the underground (Andy Warhol, Ken Jacobs, Jack Smith, etc.), those typically associated with a more artisanal avant-garde (Stan Brakhage, Marie Menken, Storm De Hirsch, etc.), and even artists and works affiliated with the then-budding structural  film  movement  (George  Landow,  Tony  Conrad’s  The Flicker [1966]).14 The  heading  “New  American  Cinema”  was  first employed by Mekas as a critical category to designate a rebellious spirit of improvisation and modernity that was beginning  to  make  itself  visible  in  independent  American  cinema  of  the  late  ‘50s,  but   which preceded the formation of The Group. Reflecting this early application, this heading eventually became detached from the artists who founded The Group to function as a more general designation of independent and avant-garde film practices based in the U.S. during the 1960s.15 Mekas’s  own  periodization  speaks to this detachment. With the 12 Gregory  Battcock,  “Introduction”  in  The New American Cinema: A Critical Anthology, ed. Battcock (New York: Dutton, 1967) 12. 13 Ibid 12. 14 Not  all  contributors  to  this  volume  used  the  heading  “New  American  Cinema”  in  this  expanded  fashion.   See, for instance,  Amos  Vogel,  “Thirteen  Confusions”  in  The New American Cinema esp. 127. 15 For  early  writings  on  the  NAC  see:  Mekas,  “New  York  Letter”;;  “A  Call  for  a  New  Generation  of  Film- Makers”  in  Film Culture Reader;;  and  “Cinema  of  the  New  Generation,”  Film Culture 21 (Summer 1960). 8 publication of his 1972 book Movie Journal,  which  contains  a  selection  of  Mekas’s   “Movie  Journal”  columns  composed  for  the  Village Voice between 1959-1971, Mekas extended the NAC indefinitely by designating this period that of  “The  Rise of the New American  Cinema.”16 Yet without refusing periodization entirely, we can note that chronologies exceeding that employed by Sitney have been proposed by other significant works of critical and curatorial retrospection. Most notably, Melinda Ward and Bruce Jenkins chose 1967 as the concluding year of their traveling retrospective, The American New Wave, 1958-1967, which was co-produced by the Walker Art Center and Media Study/Buffalo in 1982. As Ward and Jenkins explain in their introduction to the catalogue for  this  retrospective,  though  the  “first  American  independent  cinema”  (which  they   designate  “The  American  New  Wave”)  was  initially  comprised  of  the  “array  of  dramatic,   documentary  and  experimental  filmmakers”  associated  with  The  Group, the activities of The Group are ultimately difficult to conceive outside the expanded terrain of independent filmmaking that developed in the U.S. in the 1960s, and which came to include  artists  who  weren’t  directly  affiliated  with  the  Group  such  as  Michael Roemer and Robert Young, Robert Downey, and George Kuchar.17 According  to  Ward’s  and   Jenkins’  chronology,  this  wave  of  independent  cinema  did  not  recede  until  its  defining   emphasis on realism and immediacy was simultaneously displaced from the helm of the 16 Mekas, Movie Journal: The Rise of the New American Cinema, 1959-1971 (New York: MacMillan, 1972), emphasis added. 17 Melinda  Ward  and  Bruce  Jenkins,  “Introduction”  in  The American New Wave: 1958-1967, ed. Ward (Minneapolis, MN: Walker Art Center, 1982) 2-3. 9 avant-garde by the rise of structural film and recuperated by the commercial cinema with the appearance of the New Hollywood.18 Though brief and patchy, this consideration of some prominent efforts to either periodize the NAC or prevent its periodization sufficiently demonstrates the remarkable volatility  of  this  film  culture’s  history  and  identity.  In  many  ways,  the  NAC  remains   unhoused within contemporary film studies, floating in a liminal space between relatively fixed  categories  such  as  “independent  film”  and  “avant-garde,”  and  relegated  to  a  sort  of   temporal vagrancy by which it has somehow come to represent both the naïve optimism evinced  by  “new  wave”  adherents  in  the  early  ‘60s,  and  the  more  radical  formal   innovations and countercultural rebellions enacted by the underground over the course of this  decade.  It  is  therefore  not  entirely  surprising  to  find  that  the  heading  “New  American   Cinema”  has  recently  been  appropriated  as  an  umbrella  term  for  the  range  of  economic,   aesthetic, and ideological mutations that have manifested themselves in diverse branches of industrial and independent American cinema since 1980.19 While this sort of critical recycling  reflects  the  historical  imprecision  of  the  heading  “New  American  Cinema,”  it  is   also symptomatic of  a  broader  reduction  of  the  NAC’s  significance  to  film  history  by   contemporary film scholarship.20 The  vagrancy  of  the  concept  “New  American  Cinema”  cannot  be  blamed  on  the   laziness or imprecision  of  film  scholars,  however.  As  is  suggested  by  Kelman’s  above- 18 The  significance  of  structural  film  and  the  New  Hollywood  to  Ward  and  Jenkins’s  periodization  can  be   inferred  from  this  catalogue’s  “Chronology,”  esp.  73.  For  another,  more  recent  work  of  scholarship  that   retains  the  heading  “New  American  Cinema,”  see:  Daniel  Kane,  We Saw the Light: Conversations between the New American Cinema and Poetry (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2009). 19 See Jon Lewis, ed., The New American Cinema (Durham, NC: Duke University, 1998). 20 This tendency reaches its apogee with Geoffrey Nowell-Smith’s  factually inaccurate claim that North American  film  movements  such  as  the  NAC  played  a  “relatively  insignificant”  role  in  the  elaboration  of  the   international  network  of  “new  cinemas”  throughout  the  1960s  (Goeffrey Nowell-Smith, Making Waves: New Cinemas of the 1960s [New York: Continuum, 2008] 14). 10 quoted statement against critical definition, the artists of the NAC actively strove to stave off stabilization to retain a sense of vitality. This investment in forging a living cinema was  intentional,  to  be  sure,  emerging  as  it  did  out  of  a  broader  “culture  of  spontaneity”   that flourished in the American arts of the postwar period.21 However, the ideology of spontaneity that simultaneously animated and imperiled the NAC was equally an outgrowth of necessity. As Paul Arthur has demonstrated in his invaluable analysis of this film  culture,  “Routines  of  Emancipation,”  the  NAC’s  commitment  to  remaining   “disorganizedly  organized”  (Mekas’s  phrase)  was  “a  tactic  intended  both  to  guarantee   maximum personal freedom and to disguise the real fragility of the [independent film] network”  that  constituted  the  NAC.22 While the exceptional filmic works and enduring cultural institutions created by the NAC testifies to the shrewdness of this tactic, the commitment to disorganization that rendered this film culture possible has also contributed to its continuing obscurity. Though the NAC has received substantial critical recognition, the cultural discourse on which scholarship of the NAC is based is laden with inconsistencies, gaps, dissonances, and disavowals. It is a turbulent discourse, one that continues to make historiographic endeavors feel closer to vivisection than autopsy. Rather  than  ironing  out  or  systematizing  the  NAC’s  discourse,  this  dissertation   isolates one prominent through line that manifests itself in different variations in the writings, films, and life practices of a number of artists and critics affiliated with this film culture – a  “line  of  sight”  whose  basic  direction  served  to  guide  a  set  of  otherwise  distinct   individuals affiliated with the NAC, providing them with a shared project or purpose. 21 Daniel Belgrad, The Culture of Spontaneity: Improvisation and the Arts in Postwar America (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1998). 22 Paul  Arthur,  “Routines  of  Emancipation: Jonas Mekas and Alternative Cinema in the Ideology and Politics  of  the  Sixties”  in  A Line of Sight: American Avant-Garde Film since 1965 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2005) 7. 11 Borrowing  from  Annette  Michelson,  I  designate  this  project  “redemptive”  to  convey  this   film  culture’s  investment  in  cinema  as  a  restorative  medium  capable  of  salvaging  “the   human  condition  itself,”  or  rectifying  the alienation permeating mass society at midcentury.23 As  I  noted  above,  this  redemptive  project  turned  on  a  belief  in  cinema’s   ability to restore a dwindling realm of inner experience being stifled by an impersonal late-modern world. Perceiving this world to be inhospitable to all forms of intimacy, this project defined the late-modern condition in terms of a pervasive homelessness. The individual was said to be lacking both a reliable shelter for interiority and a sense of belonging to his or her surrounding social environment, leaving him or her doubly homeless, devoid of both private enclosure and public recognition. The solution the NAC proposed entailed a two-fold movement: to mobilize film practice toward the redemption of  “man’s  soul”  and  then,  with  the inner intact, to begin the project of building a more truthful, moral, and intimate world.24 Because the inner was imagined as a deep, timeless, and  universal  realm,  it  was  believed  to  be  capable  of  providing  “an  un-corrupt  basis  for…   life,”  or  a  starting point from which to create an alternative world.25 Yet the timelessness of the inner also meant that the new world this film culture envisioned was a strangely familiar  one.  As  Mekas  once  stated,  the  NAC’s  efforts  to  render  film  responsive  to  “the   deeper needs  of  man’s  soul”  stemmed  from  its  desire  to  “bring  [man]  home.”26 The  NAC’s  redemptive  project  was  imbricated  in  a  proliferation  of  artistic  and   critical discourses that emerged in postwar American culture around the problem of interiority, and which isolated the growing hostility to inner experience exhibited by mass 23 Michelson,  “Film  and  the  Radical  Aspiration”  in  Film Culture Reader 416. 24 Mekas,  “Notes  on  the  New  American  Cinema”  in  Film Culture Reader 103. 25 Mekas,  “Cinema  of  the  New  Generation”  19. 26 Mekas,  “Where  Are  We—the  Underground?”  in  The New American Cinema 20. 12 culture and mass society as one of the signal dilemmas of the postwar period. My dissertation situates the NAC within the context of such discourses to underscore its participation in a broader field of conversations about the disappearance of inner life in late modernity, though I also emphasize the peculiarity of its decision to combat this process through cinema. These conversations were not only being conducted in parallel avant-garde formations such as beat poetry, abstract expressionism, and jazz. As I demonstrate  in  the  chapters  that  follow,  anxieties  surrounding  the  apparent  “loss”  or   colonization of inner life can be discerned in other registers of American culture that would otherwise seem unrelated – even opposed – to the films of the NAC. These include popular forms of Hollywood cinema such as classical film noir and science fiction, and the more rigorous inquiries into the changing character of subjectivity put forward in diverse genres of postwar theory, such as sociology, experimental psychology, theories of the mass media, and political theory. The NAC was thus not alone in its concern over the decline of inner life. In fact, its effort to create an intimate cinema capable of undoing the homogenizing effects of mass  culture  and  mass  society  stands  as  a  rather  “late”  iteration  of  the  distinctly  romantic   revolt against social conformism that originated in the 18th century. According to Hannah Arendt,  the  Romanticists’  “rebellion  of  the  heart”  was  intended  to  combat  the  “leveling   demands”  of  an  intrusive  social  realm  defined  by  its  tendency  to  invade  and  eradicate  the   innermost depths of intimate life – a realm whose emergence marked the very onset of modernity.27 The  NAC’s  insistence on the renewed urgency of this intimate rebellion nearly two centuries after Romanticism should not be viewed as a merely nostalgic longing for a bygone artistic era. Nor should it be understood as a smooth inheritance of 27 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1958) 39. 13 that  era’s  central  preoccupations or perspective.28 Like  other  “romantic  modernists”  who   emerged  coextensive  with  the  NAC,  this  film  culture  was  endeavoring  to  “salvage  the   self  from  [the]  supposedly  decrepit,  authoritarian  culture”  that  developed  in  the  U.S.  after   the onset of the cold war.29 Its attempts to do so may have been grounded in blatantly “reactionary,  if  not  retrograde,  assumptions  about  identity.”30 Yet the  NAC’s voicing of such romantic assumptions from the position of 1960s American culture nevertheless indexes the remarkable intensification of conformism inaugurated by the rise of a distinctly late-modern configuration of mass society. Much like Arendt herself, artists of the NAC believed that, by the end of the 1950s, American mass society had nearly succeeded in its efforts to eradicate inner life. It was this historically-grounded anxiety that motivated their call for a film practice modeled after the opaque movements of poetry, one which could regain a deep, timeless interiority. As is suggested by my emphasis  on  the  NAC’s  redemptive  claims,  this   dissertation locates the organizing principle of this film culture not in its efforts to reconfigure distribution or to promote an aesthetic of realism, but in its assertion that film be conceived as a radically personal  medium.  Yet  “personal”  here  designates  a  concern   with  harnessing  cinema’s  proximity  to  inner  experience  for  the  purpose  of  social  change,   rather than a purely individual pursuit of self-expression. This concern persists as a central preoccupation of this film culture from the moment of its emergence at the end of the 1950s through the many stylistic, economic, and cultural shifts it underwent over the course  of  the  following  decade.  The  Group’s  oft-cited  assertion  in  their  1961  “First   28 On American avant-garde  film’s  relationship  to  “the  heritage  of  Romanticism,”  see  Sitney,  Visionary Film xiii. 29 Robert Genter, Late Modernism: Art, Culture, and Politics in Cold War America (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010) 17. 30 Ibid 17. 14 Statement”  that  “cinema  is  indivisibly  a  personal  expression”  can  thus  be  found  recurring   as late as 1966 when, in the context of discussions regarding the establishment of an International Committee for New Cinema, Mekas and Clarke chose to characterize the NAC as an effort  to  remedy  the  “los[s]”  or  “hunger  of  the  soul”  suffered  in  American   society, insisting that the inner was the most important register of social engagement for the American avant-garde.31 It is only through a sustained analysis of this investment in inner experience as a potentially transformative force that we can begin to understand the implications  of  the  NAC’s  filmic  rebellion. My  dissertation  embarks  on  such  an  analysis  by  arguing  that,  despite  the  NAC’s   interest in the soul as an eternal and universal domain,  this  film  culture’s  anxiety  about   the  “loss”  of  interiority  was  deeply  enmeshed  in  the  specific  cultural  and  historical   context  of  postwar  American  society.  In  my  first  chapter,  “Turning  Inwards,”  I   demonstrate  this  by  placing  the  NAC’s  statements about redemption in dialogue with a range of critical discourses that reveal the centrality of privacy, domesticity, and interiority to American politics of the postwar period. Though I draw on recent contributions to such disciplines as television studies, American studies, and architectural studies,  I  focus  on  Deborah  Nelson’s  recent  analysis  of  the  dramatic  “privacy  crisis”  that   erupted in American culture at the end of the 1950s, when privacy suddenly emerged as a “lost  thing”  at  the  very  moment  that  containment ideology strove to reorganize democratic politics around the vigilant protection of the private realm.32 Extending Nelson’s  analysis  of  this  crisis,  I  revisit  two  prominent  contributions  to  postwar  political   31 “First  Statement”  81;;  “What  is  the  New  Cinema?  (Two  Views—Paris  and  New  York),”  Film Culture 42 (Fall 1966): 60. 32 Deborah Nelson, Pursuing Privacy in Cold War America (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002) xii, xiv. 15 theory by Arendt and Herbert Marcuse, The Origins of Totalitarianism and One- Dimensional Man respectively, which both define the central dilemma of this period in terms  of  a  startling  “destr[uction]”  or  “inva[sion]”  of  a  previously  private  space  of  inner   experience.33 I  argue  for  the  importance  of  viewing  the  NAC’s  redemptive  project  as  an   effort  to  harness  cinema’s  potential  to  repair  the  damage wrought on interiority by the impersonal character of postwar American mass culture and mass society, demonstrating how this redemptive  orientation  impacts  this  movement’s  well-known innovations at the level of form and mode of production, as well as its attempts to conceive of cinema as a highly relational medium. My  second  chapter,  “Homeless  Movies,”  further  contextualizes  the  NAC’s   redemptive project by considering how the theme of homelessness that recurs throughout this  movement’s  collective  oeuvre can be said to both expresses and respond to anxieties concerning the destabilization of traditional private and public realms that saturated American  culture  of  the  postwar  period.  Comparing  the  NAC’s  fixation  on  homelessness   with  that  evinced  by  an  American  film  culture  that  immediately  preceded  the  NAC’s   emergence, classical film noir, I argue that the figures of homelessness we encounter in the  NAC  index  this  movement’s  longing  for  stable  domestic  and  social  spheres  in  a   manner remarkably similar to the nostalgic sentiments of noir. Yet I also show how artists of the NAC marked their difference from noir by seeking, in the manner of the Beats, to recuperate homelessness as an improvisatory, alternative lifestyle capable of rectifying postwar alienation by making new modalities of inwardness and belonging available to those who abandoned stable configurations of private and public life. I do so 33 Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 1966 ed. (Orlando, FL: Harcourt, 1951) 475; Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society (Boston, MA: Beacon, 1991) 10. 16 through  close  readings  of  three  early  works  affiliated  with  the  NAC:  Lionel  Rogosin’s  On the Bowery (1956),  Robert  Frank  and  Alfred  Leslie’s  Pull My Daisy (1959), and Jonas Mekas’s  Guns of the Trees (1961). As I argue, these three films encapsulate a spectrum of responses to the condition of postwar homelessness, variously casting this condition in a tragic, celebratory, or ambivalent light. My  third  and  final  chapter,  “Ron  Rice,  Vagabond,”  extends  this  discussion  of   homelessness through an analysis of the life and work of a single filmmaker, Ron Rice, paying  particular  attention  to  Rice’s  first  feature,  The Flower Thief (1960). I consider how  Rice’s  pursuit  of  a  life  of  rootlessness  and  marginality  should  be  viewed  as  a   paradoxical effort to locate or create something like home: a peaceful domain detached from the inhospitable environs of normative domestic and social spheres, and brimming with vitality and intimacy. This pursuit of an intimate home-space, I argue, is an exemplary instance of a  complex,  poetic  impulse  that  structures  the  NAC’s  redemptive   project.  This  impulse  can  be  deemed  “poetic”  because  it  was  oriented  toward  building  a   whole,  alternative  world.  It  speaks  to  this  film  culture’s  interest  in  mobilizing  cinema’s   intimacy toward the creation of alternative cultural formations within which new relational  and  experiential  modes  could  be  reliably  cultivated.  Rice’s  life  and  films   encapsulate both the productiveness and the futility of this poetic impulse. They illustrate the  NAC’s  success in utilizing intimacy to generate unruly subcultural spheres. Yet they also reveal the fragility and ephemerality of all worldly formations mediated by intimacy. In each of these three chapters, I focus on the NAC as an artistic development evocative of specific crises, conditions, and paradoxes that confronted cultural practices of the postwar period. I therefore intend this dissertation as a contribution to the 17 resurgence of scholarly interest in postwar American culture and the politics of the cold war. Yet I also conducted this analysis of the NAC with an eye on debates pertaining to developments  in  contemporary  media  cultures.  Indeed,  though  the  NAC’s  unabashed   employment  of  such  terms  as  “soul”  or  “spirit”  when  describing  its  redemptive  project would appear to relegate it to a temporally distant realm, revealing its Sixtiesness and thus  its  historicity,  the  NAC’s  attempt  to  formulate  a  personal  film  practice  capable  of   preserving interiority resonates with a pair of tendencies in contemporary media spheres in a manner that affords analyses of the NAC a distinct timeliness. The first of these tendencies concerns the increasing significance of the personal with  the  rise  of  digital  media.  The  digital’s  impressive  promotion  of  personal  media   devices and its extensive commercialization of self-expression has given new meaning to Annette  Michelson’s  assertion,  in  a  1966  lecture,  that  then-contemporary experimental home movie practices affiliated with the NAC were the most significant example of an artistic  practice  “aquiver  with  a  sense  of  the  future”  (a  phrase  she  borrows  from  André   Breton).34 Just  as  the  NAC’s  jubilant  embrace  of  portable  16mm  and  8mm  film  cameras   prefigured the ongoing explosion of mobile imaging technologies in contemporary media economies,  the  NAC’s  contribution  to  the  development  of  personal  film  forms  such  as  the   diary film and the portrait film anticipated the growing pervasiveness of mediation and self-representation  in  our  contemporary  “confessional  culture,”  where  traditional   distinctions between the private and the public, the everyday and the aesthetic, have been deeply and thoroughly problematized. The second tendency concerns the anxieties such contemporary developments have  provoked.  When  the  NAC’s  complaints  about  the  “loss”  of  the  soul  are  viewed  not   34 Michelson, op. cit., 421. 18 simply  as  an  index  of  this  film  culture’s  mysticism,  but  as  expressions  of  unease  over  the   absence of privacy in late modernity, these complaints appear far less dated or foreign. Mekas’s  repeated  assertion  throughout  the  late  ‘50s  and  ‘60s  that  inner  experience  was   being threatened by the deprivatizing logic of mass communications in fact stands as an early iteration of a central claim structuring postmodern media theory, in which the transparency and overexposure of contemporary media culture is said to signal nothing less  than  “the  end  of  interiority  and  intimacy.”35 Whether in his diatribes against the “shadow-killing  and  all  leveling  California  sun”  (which  he  associated  with  Hollywood   cinema), his critiques of the impersonal  superficiality  of  “the  public  arts,”  or  his   protestations against the soul-crushing  “machinery  of  bureaucracy,  war,  and  mass   communications,”  Mekas  anticipated  such  postmodern  complaints,  whose  continuing   relevance to contemporary media studies stands as a testament to the surprising resilience of  the  postwar  “privacy  crisis”  identified  by  Nelson.36 As Nelson observes, this crisis has only intensified with the development of new and more sophisticated technologies of surveillance and confession over the last half century, creating an uncanny cultural condition  in  which  “Privacy…  is  not  simply  dead.  It  is  dying  over  and  over  and  over   again.”37 While the NAC prefigures postmodern theories of overexposure, this film culture also harbors a latent critique of such  theories.  What  differentiates  Mekas’s  anxieties   35 Jean  Baudrillard,  “The  Ecstasy  of  Communication”  in  The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, ed. Hal Foster (New York: New Press, 1998) 153. For more on transparency and overexposure, see also: Baudrillard, The Transparency of Evil: Essays on Extreme Phenomena, tr. James Benedict (New York: Verso, 1993); Paul Virilio, The Vision Machine, tr. Julie Rose (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1994). 36 Mekas,  “Cinema  of  the  New  Generation”  17;;  “New  York  Letter”  121;;  “Notes  on  the New American Cinema”  103. 37 Nelson xi. 19 about the loss of privacy from those exhibited by contemporary critics of visual culture is the  fact  that  Mekas’s  suspicions  of  the  media  motivated  an  extended  effort  to  reclaim  a   visual media form for redemptive purposes. For artists of the NAC, film was invested with an ability to counter the withering of interiority in modern society – a view that would seem unthinkable from the perspective of postmodern media theory, where the superficial glare of the image has been deemed fundamentally incompatible with the deep, opaque workings of private life. Within the context of current debates on privacy and media, a return to the NAC reveals the need to rethink prevailing conceptions of the image. Like privacy itself, the image is too often equated with information by contemporary media theorists, a tendency that elides the continuing capacity of visual media to facilitate  the  production  of  “shadows…  [where]  we  can  cultivate  forbidden virtues and forbidden beauties.”38 38 Mekas, Movie Journal 83. 20 CHAPTER ONE TURNING INWARDS I. The Redemptive Project of the New American Cinema We have come to understand the New American Cinema (NAC) as much for its demands as for its failures and achievements. Perhaps the most familiar of these demands appears  at  the  end  of  “The First  Statement  of  the  New  American  Cinema  Group,”  a   collective manifesto issued by twenty-six individuals involved in the independent film scene in New York in the 1950s, who assembled in the fall of 1960 to form an independent film  organization  called  “The  Group.”39 Written by Jonas Mekas in the summer  of  1961,  the  “First  Statement”  was  meant  to  synthesize  the  positions  of  the   Group as a whole, which included artists such as Lionel Rogosin, Robert Frank, Alfred Leslie, Shirley Clarke, Gregory Markopoulos, and Edward Bland, as well as several producers  and  an  attorney.  The  “First  Statement”  rallies  against  a  host  of  economic,   organizational, aesthetic, and legal issues that representatives of the NAC saw as inhibiting the formation of a sustainable, alternative network of film production and distribution in the United States: censorship laws, the lack of a domestic exhibition system for independent film, artistically constrictive aesthetic principles, and other such issues. However, it  closes  on  a  quite  different  note,  one  which  reflects  the  NAC’s   insistence  that  cinema  be  understood  as  a  medium  of  “personal  expression.”40 “We  are   39 “The  First  Statement  of  the  New  American  Cinema  Group,”  Film Culture Reader, ed. P. Adams Sitney (New York: Cooper Square Press, 2000) 79. 40 Ibid 81. 21 for  art,”  the  conclusion  reads,  “but  not  at  the  expense  of  life.  We  don’t  want  false,   polished, slick films—we  prefer  them  rough,  unpolished,  but  alive;;  we  don’t  want  rosy   films—we  want  them  the  color  of  blood.”41 Framed  as  a  rebellion  against  the  “official   cinema  all  over  the  world,”  a  designation  meant  to  refer  as  much  to  the  critically- acclaimed, international Art Cinemas as to Hollywood, both of which were seen to be “morally  corrupt,”  lacking  in  “sensitivity,”  and  otherwise  “out  of  breath,”  the  NAC’s  call   for an unpolished film practice that could return a level of truth and vitality to the cinema reiterates  one  of  the  more  striking  assertions  made  earlier  in  the  “First  Statement”:  that   this  movement’s  primary  motivation  was  not  aesthetic  or  financial,  but  ethical.42 As the statement  reads:  “We  are  concerned  with  Man.  We  are  concerned  with  what  is  happening   to  Man.”43 This  critique  of  the  established  cinema’s  immorality  points  to  an  important  aspect   of  the  NAC’s  representation  of  itself  as  a  movement.  Critics  and  historians  frequently   emphasize stylistic or material similarities linking the disparate filmmakers affiliated with the NAC, noting their adoption of a quasi-vérité shooting style, for instance, or their development of a pseudo-industrial mode of production.44 However, the main spokespersons of this movement tended to cite a more ambitious task or project when seeking to define its organizing principle. Referred to variously as ethical, spiritual, or radical  in  nature,  this  project  was  predicated,  as  Annette  Michelson  has  observed,  “on  a   41 Ibid 83. 42 Ibid 80. 43 Ibid 81. 44 See: Gregory  Battcock,  “Introduction”  in  The New American Cinema: A Critical Anthology, ed. Battcock  (New  York:  Dutton,  1967);;  Melinda  Ward  and  Bruce  Jenkins,  “Introduction,”  in  The American New Wave, 1958-1967, ed. Ward (Buffalo, NY: Walker Art Center, 1982); David E. James, Allegories of Cinema: American Film in the Sixties (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989), esp. 85-87; and Juan A. Suárez, Bike Boys, Drag Queens, and Superstars: Avant-Garde, Mass Culture, and Gay Identities in the 1960s Underground Cinema (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1996), esp. 73-81. 22 conception of film as being, in the very broadest sense, redemptive of the human condition  itself.”45 Hence,  the  critic  Ken  Kelman’s  influential  definition  of  the  NAC  as  a   “spiritual  medium…  [whose]  primary  drive  is  to  replenish  the  human  spirit  which  has   been  eroded  as  much  as  our  earth  has  been  by  ‘progress,’”  and  Mekas’s repeated insistence  that  the  NAC’s  filmic  rebellion  was  a  sign  of  these  artists’  participation  in  a   broader  “ethical  movement”  sweeping  through  American  culture  of  the  postwar  period  – a movement oriented toward saving the human soul.46 At the heart of the  NAC’s  redemptive  project,  there  is  a  basic  claim  about  the   depthlessness of American cultural production at midcentury, with the cinema in particular  standing  as  one  of  the  primary  indices  of  mass  culture’s  hostility  to  interiority.   As  the  NAC’s  indictment  of  the  immoral  and  constrictive  character  of  the  “Product   Film[s]”  being  engineered  by  the  commercial  film  industry  suggests,  this  movement’s   aesthetic rebellion, its attempt to cultivate a more personal mode of film practice rooted in creative expression and improvisation, centers on a conviction that the impersonal forces of mechanization and standardization underlying late-modern American society were being reproduced at the level of artistic practice through a forced adherence to the mandates of classical aesthetics and the artificial benchmarks of professional quality established by Hollywood.47 Within  this  context,  the  negative  dimension  of  the  NAC’s   rebellion – this  movement’s  modest  attempt,  as  Mekas  writes  elsewhere,  to  enact  “a   complete derangement  of  the  official  cinematic  senses,”  break  free  from  the  stifling   45 Annette  Michelson,  “Film  and  the  Radical  Aspiration,”  in  Film Culture Reader, 416. 46 Ken  Kelman,  “Anticipations  of  the  Light,”  in  The New American Cinema, 24; Mekas,  “Cinema of the New  Generation”  19.  See  also:  Mekas,  “Notes  on  the  New  American  Cinema,”  in  Film Culture Reader, 103-107;;  “First  Statement,”  81;;  and  Mekas,  “Movie  Journal,”  Village Voice, March 30, 1960, 16. 47 “First  Statement”  80.  On  the  “private”  dimension  of  the  New  American  Cinema’s  film  practice,  see  Jonas   Mekas,  “Notes  on  the  New  American  Cinema,”  Film Culture Reader, 93; and Mekas, Movie Journal: The Rise of the New American Cinema (New York: Macmillan, 1972) 199-201. 23 “molds  of  Western  culture,”  and  overturn  “the  entire  landscape  of  human  thought,  as  it  is   accepted  publicly  in  the  Western  world”  – was felt to go hand in hand with a more productive or reparative work, one that was framed as an attempt to restore or replenish a dwindling realm of inner experience.48 The redemptive project of the NAC thus stemmed from a basic wager: that cinema, despite its perceived midcentury exhaustion, could be the site of a profound investment; that the filmic medium was uniquely capable of returning some vestige of intimacy and vitality to the increasingly superficial terrain of the late-modern world. The  NAC’s  redemptive  claims  have  provoked  a  significant  level  of  critical unease within  the  discipline  of  film  studies,  where  this  movement’s  redemptive  project  has  been   framed largely as a problematic dimension of this film culture, one that was severely out of step with the radical socio-political movements that would come to redefine American society over the course of the 1960s.49 The two most significant scholarly engagements with  the  NAC  appear  in  David  E.  James’s  study  of  1960s  American  film,  Allegories of Cinema, and  Juan  A.  Suárez’s  analysis  of  the  gay  sensibility  structuring American avant- garde film of this period, Bike Boys, Drag Queens, and Superstars. It is important to note, however, that each of these considerations of the NAC occur in the course of studies that are concerned primarily with the political dynamic  of  the  “underground”  film  movement   48 Mekas,  “A  Call  for  a  New  Generation  of Film-Makers,”  Film Culture Reader, 75. See also: Mekas, Movie Journal 1. 49 For  film  critics  writing  during  the  1960s,  the  NAC’s  attempt  to  justify  its  anarchical  abandonment  of   formal and aesthetic criteria on moral or spiritual grounds were often perceived as misguided, irresponsible, and apolitical. See  for  instance  the  collection  of  essays  published  under  the  heading  “Critique  of  the  new   American  cinema”  in  Film Culture 24  (Spring  1962),  especially  Edouard  de  Laurot,  “The  Future  of  the   New American Cinema,”  and  de  Laurot,  et  al,  “Glossary  of  the  New  American  Cinema.”  For  related   criticisms,  see:  Parker  Tyler,  “Is  Film  Criticism  Only  Propaganda”  in  The New American Cinema; Amos Vogel,  “Thirteen  Confusions”  in  The New American Cinema; Michelson, op. cit; and  Louis  Marcorelles’s   statements  in  “What  is  the  New  Cinema?  (Two  Views—Paris  and  New  York),”  Film Culture 42 (Fall 1966). 24 that  James  and  Suárez  position  as  the  NAC’s  immediate  successor.  For  these  scholars,   underground film is framed as a more explicitly countercultural filmic avant-garde that came  into  its  own  after  the  NAC’s  brief  flourishing and dispersal in the early 1960s.50 Though the  heading  “new  American  cinema”  was  used  somewhat  interchangeably  with   other  designations  such  as  “underground,”  “independent,”  “personal  film,”  or  “new   wave”  throughout  the  ‘50s  and  ‘60s,  James  and  Suárez conceive the NAC and the underground as distinct moments in American avant-garde film history, situating these formations on either side of an historical division that they also articulate in political terms.  While  these  scholars’ readings of the NAC differ in many respects, they each argue  that  this  movement’s  redemptive  claims  – its concern with morality or interiority – reveal the NAC not only as an historical predecessor of underground film, but as a relatively conservative predecessor from which a more radical underground film movement departed. In contemporary scholarship on the American avant-garde, the politics of the NAC have thus come to be defined, necessarily, against those of the underground:  the  NAC  appears  as  the  “not-radical”  or  “less  radical”  precursor to underground film. For  James,  who  criticizes  the  NAC’s  effort  to  “[reform]”  Hollywood’s  industrial   model  of  film  practice  while  leaving  this  model’s  basic  principles  of  “professional   production  and  public  consumption”  intact,  the  NAC’s attempt to create a quasi-industrial film  practice  that  would  be  “more  serious,  honest,  mature,  or  responsible”  than  that  of   Hollywood is said to have been directly opposed to the anti-political and anti-industrial “social  energy  of  the  period.”51 In James’s  framework,  it  wasn’t  until  a  more  directly   50 See: James ch. 4, esp. 85-100; Suárez ch. 2, esp. 73-86. 51 James 87. 25 countercultural  movement  of  underground  filmmakers  “joyfully  rejected”  the  ethical  and   industrial premises of the NAC that a truly radical alternative film culture was able to develop in America, one that succeeded  in  “open[ing]  out  the  entire  practice  of  cinema  as   a  sphere  of  countercultural  activity.”52 Suárez,  on  the  other  hand,  frames  the  NAC’s   emergence primarily through a discussion of its stylistic influences and affiliates this movement’s  rebellion  against the mainstream with a retrograde, residual modernism, one that developed in the U.S. after WWII as a response to an emergent, postmodern cultural formation. Positioning the currency and radicality of 1960s cultural expressions in terms of their willingness  to  engage  the  terrain  of  mass  culture,  Suárez  reads  the  NAC’s   concern  with  the  integrity  of  the  “inner  self”  and  the  “human  spirit,”  and  its  opposition  to   the standardization of commercial cinema, as a reactionary response akin to high modernism’s  historical  “withdr[awal]  into  the  realm  of  autonomous  aesthetics.”53 Despite the differences of these two readings, James and Suárez both frame the NAC’s  dissolution  and  replacement  by  underground  cinema  as  a  result  of  the  NAC’s   pronounced detachment from the defining energy or sensibility of its cultural present. The NAC appears in these studies as a distinctly non-synchronous cultural formation, one divorced from its historical moment due either to its failure to relinquish its old-fashioned moral seriousness, or to its belated rehearsal of an outmoded ideology of interiority. The redemptive project of the NAC is thus perceived, paradoxically, to undercut the very claims to newness and immediacy that drive this project. And similarly, both James and Suárez understand  the  NAC’s  oppositional  stance  to  be  problematized  by  its  redemptive   burden, either because this burden requires the NAC to address itself to a general 52 James 87, 99. 53 Suárez 84, 96, 78, xiii. In his more recent book, Suárez explores a different side of modernism. See his Pop Modernism: Noise and the Reinvention of the Everyday (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois, 2007). 26 populace  through  a  public  mode  of  exhibition,  or  because  the  NAC’s  concern  with  the   spirit encourages it to retreat into an autonomous, eternal aesthetic realm. Though  these  characterizations  of  the  NAC  are  by  no  means  unfounded,  James’s   and  Suárez’s  shared  perception  of  the  NAC  as  an  arrière-garde formation that was out of sync with the defining cultural and political energy of its historical context is complicated by recent scholarship that illustrates the centrality of privacy to American politics of the post-WWII period. In particular, new studies devoted to the politicization of privacy and domesticity during the cold war reveal the need to reconsider lingering perceptions of the NAC as a detached or disengaged cultural formation. With the aid of recent cultural histories of the postwar U.S. and the resurgence of interest in American political discourse during the cold war, we can gain an alternative critical framework through which to view the redemptive claims of the NAC, one that allows us to perceive this movement’s  defining  statements  and  artistic  practices  in  their  specific historical context, rather than as precedents of underground film. In this chapter, I construct such a framework by situating the emergence of the NAC’s  redemptive  project  in  relation  to  what  the  literary  scholar  Deborah  Nelson  has   recently  identified  as  the  widespread  “privacy  crisis”  that  took  shape  in  postwar   American society as a result of a range of social, political, and cultural developments affiliated with the cold war.54 As  Nelson  shows,  the  rise  of  the  cold  war’s  governing   “containment  culture”  simultaneously  threatened and bolstered a lingering national investment in the private sphere as an autonomous and impervious space of protective enclosure, one most frequently identified with the privileged symbol of capitalist 54 Deborah Nelson, Pursuing Privacy in Cold War America (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002) xii. 27 democracy: the private home. Seeking to both expand  on  and  modify  Nelson’s  discussion   of this crisis, I consider a range of socio-cultural phenomena from the postwar era that contributed to growing anxieties about the vulnerability and instability of privacy within the context of the cold war. I then trace out an alternative set of responses to this destabilization of privacy articulated within theoretical analyses of mass society and mass culture  put  forward  in  the  late  ‘50s  and  ‘60s  by  Hannah  Arendt  and  Herbert  Marcuse.  As   I argue, while these analyses are concerned with protecting or preserving a realm of privacy, this concern nevertheless diverges from dominant iterations of the politics of privacy  in  cold  war  culture.  As  in  the  critical  discourse  produced  by  the  NAC,  Arendt’s   and  Marcuse’s  writings  from  this  period  isolate  mass  society’s  increasing  hostility  to   interiority as a signal dilemma of the late-modern era. Though these theorists do exhibit considerable  anxiety  about  the  “death”  of  privacy,  they  do  not  locate  the  meaning  of   privacy in a normative domestic realm whose security testifies to the vitality of American democracy. Rather, privacy is conceived as a subjective mode or register that provides the condition of possibility for inner experience, where the latter is aligned with the mental processes of the mind as well as the affective impulses of the soul. The apparent “loss”  of  this  subjective  mode  thus  motivates  far-reaching critiques of the thoughtlessness and dehumanization attaining in mass society. One of the primary arguments of this chapter is that the redemptive project of the NAC must be understood as an artistic analogue of these theoretical efforts to elaborate alternative conceptions of privacy from within an American cultural regime devoted to maintaining the private as a singular and coherent notion. As I demonstrate, though the NAC’s  critical  and  artistic  statements  do  register  or  participate  in  the  postwar  privacy   28 crisis, they also respond to and reframe this crisis in crucial ways. On the one hand, artists of the NAC frame American  society’s  progressive  eradication  of  all  forms  of  depth   and interiority as one of the most threatening tendencies of the late-modern era. On the other  hand,  however,  they  also  insist  on  cinema’s  ability  to  counter  this  process  by   producing new forms or dispositions of inner experience. For representatives of the NAC, cinema’s  spontaneity  afforded  it  a  unique  capacity  to  reanimate  a  latent  realm  of   interiority, one whose chaotic impulses were conceived in direct opposition to the excessive rationality of  late  modernity.  By  creating  films  modeled  on  the  “wildness”  of   inner experience, and projecting these films to a public audience, the NAC hoped to employ cinema as a medium capable of generating new spaces of intimate encounter in which a vital feeling of  inwardness  could  be  regained.  The  “inward  turn”  that  defined  this   movement’s  practices  at  the  level  of  production  thus  entailed  a  corresponding  outward   orientation, an effort to impact and reconfigure the material and spiritual composition of the viewer. The  NAC’s  redemptive  project  hinged  on  the  creative  repurposing  of  a   seemingly lifeless cinematic apparatus as a distinctly intimate technology, one generative of new modes of being-in-depth immune to the leveling force of mass society and mass culture. Though this chapter considers the development of this view of cinema primarily through a detailed examination of the critical writings of Jonas Mekas and other spokespersons  of  the  NAC,  I  conclude  by  discussing  how  the  this  movement’s   redemptive project also impacted its films at the level of both form and content. I do so by  arguing  that  the  NAC’s  oft-discussed  elaboration  of  a  “spontaneous”  or  “immediate”   filmic grammar must be understood as an extension of its investment in interiority, and 29 by demonstrating  how  this  investment  also  motivates  the  NAC’s  recurrent  depictions  of   subcultural artistic practices mediated by intimacy. Paying particular attention to a set of films that draw on the affective resonances of then-contemporary musical forms such as folk  and  jazz  in  an  effort  to  develop  a  radically  “direct”  or  “unmediated”  relationship   with the viewer, I conclude by analyzing the political and conceptual stakes of this movement’s  pursuit  of  intimacy,  examining  the  representational  practices  that  this  pursuit motivated as well as its theoretical limitations. II. The Postwar Privacy Crisis As numerous historians have observed, the period following the end of World War II brought a series of rapid and far-reaching cultural, economic, technological, and political  transformations  to  American  life  that  were  articulated  across  the  nation’s  social   fabric at a variety of different levels, fundamentally affecting the modes of transportation, habitation, leisure, labor, communication, and individual consumption that structured everyday life for the majority of Americans during the 1950s, and significantly altering the already-tenuous dynamic of prevailing social hierarchies that had been thrown into disrepair  by  the  exceptional  demands  of  the  nation’s  wartime  economy.55 The major developments structuring this process of transformation are relatively well known. Amidst a national housing crisis, federally subsidized private housing construction grew to an unprecedented degree, and masses of young, white Americans moved out of 55 See, for instance: William Henry Chafe, The Unfinished Journey: America since World War II (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003); Lizabeth Cohen, A  Consumers’  Republic:  The  Politics  of  Mass   Consumption in Postwar America (New York: Vintage, 2003); Gary Cross, An All-Consuming Century: Why Commercialism Won in America (New York: Columbia UP, 2000) esp. chs. 3-5; Daniel Horowitz, The Anxieties of Affluence: Critiques of American Consumer Culture, 1939-1979 (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2004); Dolores Hayden, Building Suburbia: Green Fields and Urban Growth, 1880-2000 (New York: Pantheon, 2003) esp. ch. 7. 30 crowded urban centers and into a budding suburbia, which – with the aid of government subsidies encouraging workers to aspire to middle-class status – became the mingling ground  of  a  new  “mass  middle  class”  and  the  emblem  of  American  social  equality, though it also established a material topography of racial segregation between the nation’s  largely  all-white suburban clusters and the Northern and Western cities that African Americans increasingly came to populate throughout the 40s and 50s.56 While suburban housing developments spurred the construction of new highway systems, the middle-class home quickly became the motor of a growing mass consumption economy founded on ideals of affluence, comfort, and excess as growing numbers of homeowners purchased automobiles and filled their houses with modern domestic appliances like refrigerators, washers and dryers, blenders, dishwashers, and televisions, the latter of which found their way into nearly 90 percent of American homes by the end of the 1950s. Meanwhile, as veterans struggled to forget the traumas and anxieties of warfare by attempting to reinsert themselves into the fractured family unit and accustom themselves to the increasingly bureaucratized, white-collar American workforce, women who had previously entered spheres of paid labor during wartime were now asked to resume more traditional roles as homemakers in the name of a national return to family values. As these examples indicate, despite the breadth and scope of these transformations, the shifts and transitions subtending daily life in American society after WWII were largely framed and perceived as part of a broader project of national restabilization and reunification. As Vivian Sobchack pointedly observes in a recent essay on American film  noir  of  the  postwar  period,  “the  decade  immediately  following   56 For a discussion of the class divisions that persisted despite claims regarding the emergence, in postwar America,  of  something  resembling  a  “classless  society,”  see:  Cohen  152-65 and ch. 5. 31 World  War  II  [in  U.S.  history]…  is  marked  as  ‘transitional,’  and  its  overarching  themes   are the recovery of a lost patriarchal order and the need for the country to literally and metaphorically  ‘settle  down.’”57 As  Sobchack’s  language  here  suggests,  the  postwar  era’s  drive  toward  national   restabilization was primarily played out in relation to the middle-class home, whose claims to security, stability, intimacy, and legibility transformed this material site or space into a highly overdetermined symbol of national unity and phenomenological plenitude during this period of transition. As now-canonical studies of postwar domesticity  such  as  Elaine  Tyler  May’s  Homeward Bound have shown, during this era, the home took on a therapeutic and protective function within the context of an American social universe suddenly felt to be lacking in coherence and unity, and a political environment permeated by the threat of nuclear annihilation.58 Paradoxically, however, as more recent inquiries into the postwar period by critics and historians such as Lynn Spigel, Beatriz Colomina, and Lizabeth Cohen have detailed, this intense national investment in the sanctity and autonomy of domestic life and the middle-class home emerged coextensive with a profound destabilization of the rigid, material boundary traditionally held to separate the public from the private sphere. According to Spigel, this destabilization  must  be  counted  as  a  “central  dilemma”  of  the  postwar  era.59 Indeed, with the aid recent scholarship on American society in the 1940s and 50s, it has become 57 Vivian  Sobchack,  “Lounge  Time:  Postwar  Crises  and  the  Chronotope  of  Film  Noir,”  Refiguring American Film Genres: History and Theory, ed. Nick Browne (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1998) 130-31. 58 Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (New York: Basic Books, 2008). 59 Lynn Spigel, Welcome to the Dreamhouse: Popular Media and Postwar Suburbs (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2001) 1. See also: Spigel, Make Room for TV: Television and the Family Ideal in Postwar America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992); Colomina. Domesticity at War (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007); and Cohen, esp. ch. 3. 32 increasingly clear that the tensions and volatility of the postwar era were registered nowhere more acutely than in cultural conceptions and configurations of domesticity and the private sphere. Even before the famous refutation of prevailing distinctions between the personal and the political that took shape in the 1960s, this destabilization of the private sphere can be identified through an analysis of what we, borrowing from Colomina, might term a twin  “publiciz[ation]”  of  domesticity,  the  suburban  household,  and  private  life  more   generally in American culture after WWII.60 This process of publicization can be discerned first of all in the widespread turn in domestic architecture, interior design, and domestic  practices  of  the  50s  toward  what  Spigel  has  referred  to  as  the  home’s   reconfiguration  as  a  highly  permeable  “space  for  looking”  or  “vehicle  for  [imaginative]   transport”  defined  by  a  heightened  interrelation between the inside and the outside world.61 As Spigel argues in Welcome to the Dreamhouse, this reconfiguration comes through  most  clearly  in  the  postwar  suburban  household’s  incorporation  of  modernist   architectural ideals (open floor plans, an unprecedented use of large plate-glass windows, etc.) that sought to blur distinctions between public and private spaces as a way of mediating  between  the  “dual  goals  of  separation  from  and  integration  into  the  outside   world”  that  motivated  the  nation’s  embrace  of suburban living during this period.62 But amidst this turn toward spatial ambiguity, Spigel explains, the television quickly became the perfect addition to the suburban home because of its ability to provide virtual access 60 Beatriz Colomina,  “Introduction:  Cold  War  Hothouses,”  Cold War Hothouses, eds. Colomina, Annmarie Brennan, and Jeannie Kim (New York: Princeton Architectural, 2004) 14. 61 Spigel, Dreamhouse 2. 62 Ibid 32. 33 to public events and faraway places through otherwise private acts of gazing.63 Though television was frequently advertised during this era as a means of maintaining familial bonds  and  reinforcing  the  subtle  architecture  of  patriarchal  domesticity,  television’s   entrance into the domestic sphere further dissolved the boundaries between the structured, homogeneous space-time of the domestic universe and the punctual, unpredictable rhythms of public life.64 Though this blurring had already been accomplished to a certain degree by earlier architectural trends and domestic technologies like  radio,  as  Spigel  argues,  television’s  popularization  during  the  1950s  represented  an   historically  new  “spectac[ularization]”  of  the  domestic  environment.65 A second tendency toward publicization concerned the production of American domesticity itself as an object of intra- and international ocular fascination by a growing American culture industry mobilized toward the manufacture and distribution of images of  the  “American  way  of  life.”  As  has  been  documented  most extensively by Colomina, throughout the 1950s – a  decade  that,  she  argues,  witnessed  the  image’s  rise  to   dominance as the primary architectural substance structuring/subtending daily life in the western world – the middle-class American home was fervently transformed into both an advertising  product  and  a  “propaganda  device”  by  an  impressive,  emergent  apparatus  of   American mass-mediated  publicity  that  mobilized  “expertly  designed  images  of  domestic   bliss”  in  magazines,  advertisements,  and  television  programs to bolster a growing mass consumption economy and contribute to national and international perceptions of 63 Ibid 32-33. 64 See  Spigel’s  discussion  of  TV’s  simultaneous  disruption  and  reinforcement  of  family  “togetherness”  and   domestic  space  in  “Television  in  the  Family  Circle:  The  Popular  Reception  of  a  New  Medium,”  Logics of Television: Essays in Cultural Criticism ed. Patricia Mellencamp (Bloomington, IN: Indiana UP, 1990). 65 Spigel, Dreamhouse 2. 34 American affluence as a symbol of democratic liberty.66 As  Colomina  puts  it:  “The   suburban house, equipped with every imaginable appliance, projected the image of the ‘Good  Life,’  of  the  lifestyle  of  prosperity  and  excess  that  was  the  main  weapon  in  the   Cold  War.”67 That the middle-class home was able to function  as  a  “weapon”  in   America’s  fight  against  communism  was  perceived  early  on  by  Senator  Joseph   McCarthy, who worked throughout the late 1940s to see that federal aid allocated to counteract the housing shortage would go to the construction of communities of single- family homes by large private builders, instead of multi-family public housing units which  McCarthy  considered  “breeding  ground[s]  for  communists”  – a sentiment that would  later  be  reiterated  by  one  of  McCarthy’s  affiliates,  William  Levitt,  who  famously asserted  that  “No  man  who  has  a  house  and  lot  can  be  a  communist.”68 But the remarkable collapsing of the national and the ideological into the space of the home evidenced by this politicization of domestic life became most glaringly apparent – of course – during  the  1959  “Kitchen  Debates”  between  Richard  Nixon  and  Nikita   Khrushchev, where Nixon scored one of his most memorable political victories by extolling the relative merits of washing machines over missiles, and asserting that everyday domestic appliances wrested from the free market by private consumers constituted the essence of American freedom. As the remarkable impact that photographs of this debate had on both American and global perceptions of capitalist democracy suggests, in the postwar era, middle-class American domesticity was both defined through mass-mediated forms of visual representation and made to function as the central symbol of democratic freedom for audiences within the U.S. and abroad. 66 Colomina, Domesticity at War 12, 7. 67 Colomina,  “Introduction:  Cold  War  Hothouses”  16. 68 Hayden 130-31, 135. 35 These transformations to domestic architecture and technologies, as well as to practices of representing the American home, were paralleled by a somewhat more basic alteration of the function and configuration of the private sphere in American society during this era. As Lizabeth Cohen argues in her remarkable analysis of the politics of postwar consumption, A  Consumers’  Republic,  a  “fundamental  shift”  took  shape  in   American economic, political, and cultural life after WWII that radically disturbed previously operative divisions in American life between private spheres of consumerism and the public realm of political practice.69 With the end of WWII and the development of a national and political economy of reconversion and containment, Cohen demonstrates, there emerged a new emphasis in diverse strata of American society on mass consumption as both a pathway to national recovery and a testament to the superiority of capitalist democracy over the evils of communism. Cohen finds this emphasis operating in everything from advertisements and photo-essays in popular magazines like Life and Bride to new federal support programs like the Employment Act of  1946  and  the  G.I.  Bill,  “sponsored  films”  produced  by  nonprofits  and  private   corporations,  and  more  basic  changes  in  individual  consumers’  perceptions  of the relationship existing between the market and individual freedom.70 According  to  Cohen,  the  emergence  of  this  “Consumers’  Republic,”  in  which   consumerism became inseparable from democratic ideology, created a new ideal of the American consumer that Cohen  dubs  the  “purchaser  as  citizen,”  which  is  to  be   distinguished from the two competing models of consumership that held sway in the U.S. during WWII: 69 Cohen 8. 70 Ibid 112-29. 36 Out of the wartime conflict between citizen consumers, who reoriented their personal consumption to serve the general good, and purchaser consumers, who pursued private gain regardless of it, emerged a new postwar ideal of the purchaser as citizen who simultaneously fulfilled personal  desire  and  civic  obligation  by  consuming…  Wherever  one  looked   in the aftermath of war, one found a vision of postwar America where the general good would be best served not by frugality or even moderation, but by individuals pursuing personal wants in a flourishing mass consumption marketplace.71 What this mutual imbrication of the general/civic and the individual/personal after WWII demonstrates is that, in postwar American society, previously independent realms of private consumption and public responsibility became indistinguishable as both the nation’s  fate  and  the  broader  project of capitalist democracy were suddenly found to hinge on the practices of individual purchasers, whose personal acts of consumption were now  redefined  as  acts  of  patriotic  duty.  In  Cohen’s  schema,  the  “fundamental  shift”   inaugurated by the appearance of  the  Consumers’  Republic  in  postwar  America  entailed   an extensive, systematic blurring of distinctions between public and private spheres not only in the national imaginary, but in the material structure of economic, political, and cultural institutions as well as the everyday practices of individual citizens. Within the Consumers’  Republic,  private  possessions  and  the  values  attached  to  them  – particularly the virtues and morals housed by the suburban home, which, according to Cohen, functioned as the very  “bedrock”  of  the  postwar  mass  consumption  economy  – no longer belonged to individuals or the nuclear family, but to what Arendt once referred to as the more  amorphous  “facsimile  of  one  super-human  family”  that  is  the  nation.72 As these analyses reveal, dominant conceptions of privacy and domesticity during the postwar era were riddled with internal contradictions. Despite popular conceptions of 71 Ibid 119-21. 72 Ibid 122; Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958) 29. 37 the home as a private haven or a protective enclosure from the pressures of working life and the impending threat of the bomb, the private sphere was itself run through and defined by the workings of capitalist exchange and the ideological principles of the free market, just as everyday domestic activities were permeated by uncanny traces of warfare, which haunted newly popular push-button technologies and the panoptic layout of domestic interiors.73 Alongside this commercialization and militarization of the private sphere, domesticity became overtly politicized through its thorough colonization by a national propaganda apparatus geared toward the maintenance and intensification of distinctly anti-communist national sentiments. And at a more quotidian level, the extensive reorganization of the household and domestic life undertaken in the name of family unity and personal security during this era made the home increasingly vulnerable to various forces of invasion, contamination, disturbance, and familial discord.74 Paradoxically, then, although the postwar era lives on in national memory as a period organized by centripetal social forces, the intensified policing of borders, and a highly nostalgic attempt to preserve and protect the stability of family life and the private sphere, the dominant models of privacy and domesticity holding sway during this era significantly undermined conceptions of the private as an autonomous realm untouched by the operations of the workplace, society, or the state. These tensions and contradictions did not go unnoticed. As Deborah Nelson has shown in Pursuing Privacy in Cold War America, with the onset of the cold war and its governing project of containment, which depended so heavily on the maintenance of strict borders and demarcations, the increasingly blurred distinction between public and 73 Colomina,  “Introduction:  Cold  War  Hothouses”  14,  16-17. 74 See, for instance: Spigel, Dreamhouse 38-39;;  Spigel,  “Television  in  the  Family  Circle,”  esp.  80-89. 38 private realms generated a host of cultural anxieties that reached beyond the realm of philosophical discourse to become a much more pervasive aspect of midcentury American culture.75 Because cold war rhetoric generally perceived the sanctity and autonomy  of  the  private  sphere  as  “the  most  significant  point of contrast between [democracies  and  totalitarian  regimes],”  Nelson  argues,  the  anxieties  generated  by  the   breakdown of the public/private divide manifested themselves in the form of an extensive “crisis”  of  privacy,  what  Nelson  terms  “the  stunning  emergence  of  privacy  as  a  ‘lost   thing’  at  the  end  of  the  1950s.”76 As  Nelson  shows,  the  cold  war’s  privacy  crisis  spread   through  an  “astonishing  variety  of  locations”  from  the  late  50s  to  the  early  70s  including   popular journalism, medical discourse, law enforcement, and diverse spheres of cultural production, and drew from a range of technological, social, and cultural developments to designate  multitudinous  “invasions”  into  private  life,  from  wiretaps  and  the  proliferation   of new surveillance devices to the institution of personality testing by employers and the increased dependency on data gathering by corporations, educational systems, and government agencies like the IRS, the CIA, and the NSA.77 And at the same time, there emerged  an  entire  “culture  of  confession”  within  postwar  American  society,  whose   members and affiliates were characterized most directly by their willingness to open the whole  sphere  of  intimacy  and  private  experience  to  public  exposure,  “both  for  pleasure   and  in  protest.”78 Best represented by  the  growth  of  “confessional  poetry”  at  the  end  of   the 1950s typified by the indecorous writing of authors such as Anne Sexton, Robert Lowell,  and  Sylvia  Plath,  this  culture  of  confession  constituted  the  “mirror  side  of  the   75 Nelson xi-xv. 76 Ibid xiii, xiv. 77 Ibid 9-11. For the most detailed analysis of these invasions to emerge during the 1960s, see Vance Packard, The Naked Society (New York: McKay, 1962). 78 Nelson 19, xv. 39 ‘death  of  privacy’  debate”:  a shift toward a modern culture of self-disclosure, and a loosening of socio-cultural taboos against the exposure or confession of private experience, which provoked new fears regarding the growing indifference displayed by modern Americans toward invasions of privacy.79 Discussing  the  ways  in  which  containment  ideology  “scripted”  this  privacy  crisis,   or  “provided  a  language  and  a  narrative  to  the  dilemma  of  privacy  in  modernity  more   generally,”  Nelson  explains  that,  in  the  political  context  of  the  cold  war,  the twin developments of increased invasion and self-disclosure were often said to signal the “end”  or  “death”  of  privacy,  and  by  extension,  the  end  of  American  democracy.80 As she writes: The  potency  of  American  democracy  in  cold  war  rhetoric  was…  not  its cultivation of a vibrant and free public discourse but its vigilant protection of private autonomy. Moreover, the stakes of this conviction were typically apocalyptic: either we preserved the integrity of private spaces and thus the free world, or we tolerated their penetration and took the first step toward totalitarian oppression.81 Despite such apocalyptic, binarized rhetoric, however, the explosion of inquiries into the status of privacy at the end of the 1950s should not be read, Nelson explains, as signaling the  disappearance  of  this  realm  of  experience.  Rather,  this  explosion  indicates  privacy’s   “sudden  visibility,”  or  the  specific  moment  in  American  history  when  “privacy  emerged   as a central term in a vast social debate about the dilemmas of modern citizenship.”82 Contesting the notion that there has ever been anything like a singular and universal, or non-exclusionary and non-privative form of privacy, Nelson suggests we view the onset of this crisis as marking the breakdown of a particular, dominant fiction of privacy, what 79 Ibid 19, 11. 80 Ibid xii. 81 Ibid xiii. 82 Ibid xii. 40 she  refers  to  here  as  “patriarchal  privacy,”  or  notions  of  privacy  as  an  autonomous  realm   of individual freedom and relief from public scrutiny that is organized and made legible through the maintenance of traditional gender hierarchies.83 Despite the fictional character of this conception of privacy, its breakdown nevertheless functioned as a central impetus in highly divergent manifestations of postwar American culture, though one whose significance has been severely underestimated  in  cultural  histories  of  this  period.  While  Nelson’s  elucidates  the  ways  in   which this breakdown impacted constitutional law and American literature throughout the 1950s  and  60s,  we  can  also  extend  Nelson’s  analysis  by  pointing  to  other  representations   of this crisis in postwar culture, and particularly in the cinema. One particularly sinister manifestation of anxieties surrounding the loss of privacy can be seen in the dramatization of scenes of bodily possession and home intrusion in postwar science fiction films like Them! (1954), It Came from Outer Space (1953), Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), and The Blob (1958), whose fantastical depictions of alien invasions and monstrous mutations have frequently been discussed as coded expressions of communist threats.84 Similar anxieties also figure in works of the American avant-garde culture  that  preceded  the  NAC,  perhaps  most  recognizably  in  Maya  Deren’s  Meshes of the Afternoon (1943), which film scholars like Lauren Rabinovitz and Dana Polan have intriguingly framed as a reworking of conventional representations of women and patriarchal domesticity in 1940s Hollywood genres such as noir and the melodrama.85 83 Ibid xiii. 84 On the relationship between American science fiction films and the cold war, see for instance: Victoria O’Donnel,  “Science  Fiction  Films  and  Cold  War  Anxiety”  in  Transforming the Screen, 1950-1959, ed. Peter Lev (New York: Thomson/Gale, 2003); and David Seed, American Science Fiction Film and the Cold War: Literature and Film (New York: Routledge, 2013). 85 Lauren Rabinovitz, Points of Resistance: Women, Power & Politics in the New York Avant-garde Cinema, 1943-71 (Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1993) 55-65; Dana Polan, Power and 41 However,  as  I  show  in  more  detail  in  the  next  chapter,  uncertainty  surrounding  the  “loss”   of traditional conceptions of privacy also register in a far more concrete way in both classical noir and the films of the NAC itself. While noir has emerged in recent film scholarship  as  the  dominant  cinematic  genre  in  which  the  “new  American  homelessness”   of the postwar period gained expression, the postwar privacy crisis also impacted the NAC  to  a  considerable  extent,  helping  to  shape  this  film  movement’s  obsessive   preoccupation with the absence of traditional home-spaces and the potential for their recovery.86 To read such film practices as responses to the crisis of privacy outlined by Nelson,  it  is  necessary  to  push  back  our  understanding  of  this  dilemma’s  historical   appearance  in  order  to  account  for  the  ways  that  privacy’s  perceived  vulnerability  during   the postwar era contributed to the emergence of cultural formations and expressions like classical noir and early sci-fi  that  precede  the  explosion  of  discourse  on  the  “death”  of   privacy at the end of the 1950s. Conceiving the NAC in particular as a representation of this  crisis  also  demands  that  we  modify  one  important  aspect  of  Nelson’s  analysis.   Despite  her  continued  emphasis  on  the  “elastic”  and  “protean”  character  of  privacy  in   late-modern  American  society,  Nelson’s  discussion  of  the  manner  in  which  cultural fears regarding the dissolution of the private sphere were articulated in the context of the cold war retains a peculiar rigidity.87 While Nelson shows that these concerns motivated and informed the work of a highly diverse set of intellectuals, cultural critics, legal theorists, artists, politicians, and social, cultural, and governmental organizations, she nevertheless Paranoia: History, Narrative, and the American Cinema, 1940-1950 (New York: Columbia UP, 1986) 10- 11. 86 Sobchack 146. 87 Nelson xix, xiv. 42 endeavors to group such organizations and figures together as variations on a common theme:  the  expression  of  a  “nostalgi[c]”  and  politically suspect lamentation over the passing  of  a  fundamentally  “elite  and  patriarchal”  cultural  ideal,  the  pursuit  and   promotion of which was, by the end of the 1950s, simply no longer tenable or justifiable from a liberal standpoint.88 In an important passage that speaks to this tendency, Nelson argues: if privacy was supposed to symbolize the autonomy, freedom, self- determination, and repose that the citizen of a democracy most valued, it became increasingly evident in the confessional writing of the period that privacy could also represent isolation, loneliness, domination, and routine. Moreover, it was newly obvious that these deprivations of privacy were unevenly distributed; categories of citizens – women or homosexuals – rather than unlucky individuals were banished to the deprivation, rather than the liberation, of privacy. This ambivalence suggests that the sudden visibility  of  privacy  fractured  it.  Therefore,  what  got  ‘lost’  at  the  end  of   the 1950s was a certain fantasy of privacy as a stable and self-evident concept,  ‘privacy  as  we  have  always  known  it,’  in  the  common  parlance  of   the era.89 While  Nelson’s  rejection  of  the  false  claims  to  universality  and  liberation   underlying  attempts  to  preserve  “patriarchal  privacy”  during  this  era  is  indispensible,  in establishing this division between the range of nostalgic and fundamentally conservative figures  mourning  the  breakdown  of  “privacy  as  we  have  always  known  it”  in  postwar   American society, and those more politically progressive confessional poets committed to revealing  privacy’s  restrictiveness  and  celebrating  its  death  through  pleasurable  acts  of   self-disclosure,  Nelson  overlooks  the  fact  that  “patriarchal  privacy”  was  not  the  only   version of the private being analyzed and valorized within the context of the cold war. In doing so, she is also unable to consider the ways in which a range of left-leaning political theorists, artists, and cultural critics sought to combat the specific forms of domination, 88 Ibid xiii. 89 Ibid xiii. 43 isolation, and exploitation subtending postwar American society not by rejecting the violence  and  exclusions  underlying  capitalist  democracy’s  investment  in  the  private   sphere, but by working to formulate, explore, and regain a version of privacy rooted in claims to inner experience. This  oversight  comes  through  most  clearly  in  Nelson’s  attempt  to  group  Arendt’s   writings on privacy in The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951)  together  with  the  “welter  of   anxious  musing  on  the  death  of  privacy”  circulating  through  American  popular  culture   after the war.90 Drawing  on  one  of  Arendt’s  concluding  arguments  in  The Origins of Totalitarianism, which asserts that the historical innovation of totalitarian modes of governance  comes  through  totalitarianism’s  complete  penetration  and  destruction  of  the   private  realm  of  life,  Nelson  suggests  that  this  claim,  along  with  Arendt’s  statement  that   “the  most  essential  political  criterion  for  judging  events  of  our  time  [is]:  will  it  lead  to   totalitarian  rule  or  will  it  not?,”  is  representative  of  the  cold  war’s  aforementioned, apocalyptic tendency to position the private sphere as the ultimate litmus test of the health of American freedom and democracy.91 This suggestion is ultimately problematic, and  not  only  because  of  Arendt’s  insistence  that  true  freedom  can  never be found in private but only and exclusively in the political realm.92 Even  more  importantly,  Arendt’s   discovery  of  totalitarianism’s  unique  purchase  on  the  private  sphere  was  only  made   possible, as Arendt herself explains in the Preface to the 1966 edition, by her attainment of  “certain  insights  of  a  strictly  theoretical  nature”  between  the  time  of  The Origins of Totalitarianism’s original appearance in 1951 and her publication of a second paperback edition  in  1958  (in  which  the  concluding  chapter  on  “Ideology  and  Terror”  quoted  by   90 Ibid 11. 91 Ibid 9. 92 Arendt, Human 31. 44 Nelson  first  appeared),  the  year  that  also  saw  the  publication  of  Arendt’s  highly   idiosyncratic  theorization  of  “The  Public  and  the  Private  Realm”  in  The Human Condition.93 Upon considering the image of the private sphere that emerges between these two works,  it  becomes  clear  that  Arendt’s  interest  in  the  value  and  function  of  privacy  should   not only not be equated with the widespread investment in patriarchal privacy exhibited by proponents of capitalist democracy during the cold war. It should also be understood as harboring a severe critique of that form of attachment to the private realm. Indeed, The Human Condition in  particular,  through  its  attention  to  the  “perfect”  or  uncontested   “despotic  powers”  of  the  paterfamilias, could even be read as demonstrating significant affinities  with  what  Nelson  refers  to  as  the  exposure  of  the  “dark  side  of  private  life”   performed  by  the  poetry  of  Anne  Sexton  and  Sylvia  Plath,  though  Arendt’s  work  is  not   feminist in any conventional respect.94 Rather,  Arendt’s  discussion  of  privacy  should  be   counted among a series of postwar inquiries that worked from a variety of perspectives to elucidate the growing alienation, conformism, and repression subtending daily life in the modern United States, and  to  demonstrate  how  postwar  American  society’s  systematic   eradication of intimacy and interiority was creating a dehumanizing social environment on par with the most severe accomplishments of totalitarian regimes. Aspects of this critique of American mass democracy can be found in a range of critical and sociological work produced throughout the 1950s and 60s by figures like 93 Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 1966 ed. (Orlando, FL: Harcourt, 1951) xxiv; Human ch. 2. 94 Arendt, Human 27; Nelson 95, 77. 45 David Riesman, C. Wright Mills, and William H. Whyte.95 However, two of the more insightful and extensive analyses of the totalitarian dynamic of postwar American society were put forward by Arendt and Herbert Marcuse. The work of these two theorists differs in  a  number  of  important  ways.  But  Arendt’s  and  Marcuse’s  writings  from  the  postwar   era share a concern with what they saw as an historically unique, and potentially devastating infiltration of the private sphere by the impersonal workings of what Arendt termed  “mass  society”  and  what  Marcuse  referred  to  alternately  as  “advanced  industrial   society”  or  the  “affluent  society.”   For each of these thinkers, the private sphere is held out as a last reserve of inwardness – a subjective realm that houses or shelters the most basic aspects of inner experience, which are said to mark the difference between humans and things. Though both Arendt and Marcuse distinguish the private from the political realm, they also argue that political resistance is dependent on the existence of a private, experiential domain. As such, they offer an invaluable resource for any effort to understand what was at stake in  the  NAC’s  attempt  to  recover  some  vestige  of  privacy  as  a  means  of  social  and  cultural   rebellion, rather than simply cheering the historical passing of the private realm in the manner of the confessional poets. Arendt and Marcuse also articulate a distinctly European vision of the totalitarian dynamic of American mass society and mass culture that  was  informed  by  these  theorists’  unsettling  proximity  to  the  legacy  of  Nazism  – a vision that intersects in important ways with that of Mekas, a Lithuanian poet displaced by WWII whose personal experiences with the extreme and subtle forms of violence perpetrated by fascism deeply impacted his subsequent writings on postwar American 95 See David Riesman, The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American Character (New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1950); C. Wright Mills, White Collar: The American Middle Classes (New York: Oxford UP, 1951); William H. Whyte, Jr., The Organization Man (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1956). 46 culture. The work of Arendt and Marcuse therefore provides a valuable framework for contextualizing  Mekas’s  commitment  to  inner  experience  as  a  life-sustaining force capable of countering the destructive tendencies of the twentieth century. By examining these writings more closely, we will be better equipped to understand how Mekas could believe  that  “Privacy  will  save  the  world.”96 III. Loneliness and One-Dimensionality The Origins of Totalitarianism offers a particularly detailed historical and philosophical analysis of the relationship between totalitarianism and the private sphere. As noted above, one of the more striking arguments to emerge from The Origins of Totalitarianism concerns the historical innovation effected by totalitarian modes of dominance,  which  Arendt  locates  in  this  movement’s  unique  penetration  and  destruction of all aspects of private life. As Arendt argues: Totalitarian government, like all tyrannies, certainly could not exist without destroying the public realm of life, that is, without destroying, by isolating men, their political capacities. But totalitarian domination as a form of government is new in that it is not content with this isolation and destroys private life as well. It bases itself on loneliness, on the experience of not belonging [to] the world at all, which is among the most radical and desperate experiences of man.97 For  Arendt,  totalitarianism’s  destruction  of  private  life  can  be  acutely  perceived  in   the impact this mode of governance has on interpersonal and intimate relations. As Arendt explains, through systems of ubiquitous surveillance established by totalitarianism’s  “power  nucleus,”  the  secret  police,  and  the  institution  of  methods  of   punishment  based  on  “guilt  by  association,”  totalitarian  regimes  create  an  atmosphere  of   96 Jonas Mekas, I Had Nowhere to Go (New York: Black Thistle, 1991) 92. 97 Ibid 475. 47 mutual suspicion that permeates all forms of social relationships, turning everyone from casual acquaintances to friends, comrades to family members, into future enemies and detractors.98 Totalitarianism  seeks  to  transform  its  social  body  into  an  “atomized  and   individualized  mass,”  where  all  meaningful  social  ties  have been severed, and all “channels  of  communication  between  individuals”  have  been  blocked.99 As Arendt explains,  for  the  individual  living  under  totalitarian  rule,  “the  most  elementary  caution   demands that one avoid all intimate contacts, if possible—not in order to prevent discovery  of  one’s  secret  thoughts,  but  rather  to  eliminate,  in  the  almost  certain  case  of   future trouble, all persons who might have not only an ordinary cheap interest in your denunciation but an irresistible need to bring about your ruin simply because they are in danger  of  their  own  lives.”100 As  political  movements  that  demand  each  member’s   “unrestricted,  unconditional,  and  unalterable  loyalty,”  totalitarian  regimes  depend  entirely   on  “completely  isolated  human  being[s]  who,  without  any other social ties to family, friends, comrades, or even mere acquaintances, [derive their] sense of having a place in the  world  only  from  [their]  belonging  to  a  movement,  [their]  membership  in  the  party.”101 Totalitarianism’s  destruction  of  private  life  reaches further than the realm of social relations. As Arendt extensively details, because totalitarianism is geared toward the  total  and  “permanent  domination  of  each  single  individual  in  each  and  every  sphere  of   life,”  it  also  works  to  destroy  the  most  basic aspects of inner experience that, according to Arendt, are constitutive of human nature itself – aspects like individuality, creativity, spontaneity,  freedom  of  thought,  and  the  human  capacity  for  fabrication  (as  in  “poiesis, 98 Ibid 420, 323, 430-31. 99 Ibid 318, 465. 100 Ibid 323. 101 Ibid 323-24. 48 the  making  of  things,”  or “the  capacity  to  add  something  of  one’s  own  to  the  common   world”).102 Through  various  forms  of  torture  and  conditioning  that  seek  to  destroy  man’s   psyche and capacity for resistance; the establishment of an intensely conformist citizenry composed not of multiple,  unique  persons,  but  “One  Man  of  gigantic  dimensions”;;  the   reduction  of  man’s  productive  capacities  and  modes  of  activity  to  mere  labor,  or  an  effort   to  simply  “keep  alive”;;  and  the  subordination  of  all  thought  to  the  “logical”  operations  of   party ideology, Arendt argues, totalitarianism seeks to transform its subjects into so many “ghastly  marionettes  with  human  faces,  which  all  behave  like  the  dog  in  Pavlov’s   experiments, which all react with perfect reliability even when going to their own death, and  which  do  nothing  but  react.”103 In  Arendt’s  schema,  totalitarian  domination  is  not  achieved  unless  all  spontaneity   has been replaced by bundles of mechanical reactions and operations, and all individuals have been made equally superfluous. Because totalitarian ideology views the world in purely utilitarian terms, and seeks to organize the world in strict accordance with the inexorable progress of Nature or History, it cannot tolerate unpredictability, individuality, or the infinite variations of human character.  This  fact  motivates  Arendt’s  assertion  that   totalitarianism  aims  toward  “the  transformation  of  human  nature  itself”  through  the   destruction of the very humanness that defines mankind.104 The condition of loneliness that Arendt designates as the basic experience of totalitarianism  is  a  peculiar  one.  For  Arendt,  loneliness  refers  to  an  experience  of  “not   belonging  [to]  the  world”  or  “a  situation  where  I  as  a  person  feel  myself  deserted  by  all   102 Ibid 326, 458, 475. 103 Ibid 441, 453-55, 466, 475, 473. 104 Ibid 457-59, 458; see also 472-74. 49 human  companionship.”105 And she distinguishes loneliness from solitude, noting that the former appears most generally when an individual is in the company of others with whom he  or  she  “cannot  establish  contact.”106 This inability to connect or communicate with others,  according  to  Arendt,  destroys  both  one’s  sense  of  self (which is said to be established  through  that  Platonic  “dialogue  between  me  and  myself”  which  is  constitutive   of  thinking),  and  one’s  sense  of  reality  (or  of  that  “common  world”  constructed  through   mutual activity with others, which is to be distinguished entirely from the fictional vision of the world projected by totalitarian ideologies).107 As  Arendt  explains,  just  as  “the   experience of the materially and sensually given world depends upon my being in contact with other men, upon our common sense  which  regulates  and  controls  all  other  senses,”   so  too  “the  confirmation  of  my  identity...  depend[s]  entirely  upon  other  people”  who   alone  can  solidify  one’s  status  as  an  “unchangeable  individual  whose  identity  can  never   be mistaken for that of any other.”108 The  “radical…  desperat[ion]”  that  Arendt  associates   with loneliness comes precisely through this double loss of world and self: when lonely, “man  loses  trust  in  himself  as  the  partner  of  his  thoughts  and  that  elementary  confidence   in the world which  is  necessary  to  make  experiences  at  all,”  and  feels  as  if  he  were   “abandoned  by  everything  and  everybody.”109 Totalitarianism seizes on this situation, Arendt warns, by providing its lonely subjects with a fictional sense of meaning and participation, with  a  sense  of  belonging  to  an  entirely  “fictional  world”  that  can  be   entered only through a complete self-abandonment to the reigning party line.110 105 Ibid 475, 474. 106 Ibid 476. 107 Ibid 475-77; see also 466-67. 108 Ibid 475-76. 109 Ibid 477, 476. 110 Ibid 477, 363. 50 In The Origins of Totalitarianism, loneliness is said to be closely related to both “uprootedness”  and  “superfluousness,”  two  conditions  that  Arendt  describes  as  “the  curse   of  the  modern  masses  since  the  beginning  of  the  industrial  revolution.”111 And though she considers  loneliness  to  be  “one  of  the  fundamental  experiences  of  every  human  life,”   Arendt also argues that  totalitarianism’s  establishment  of  a  mode  of  domination  based  on   this experience is rooted in very specific historical developments – what she refers to as the  emergence  of  “classless  societies”  in  pre-Hitler Germany and Stalinist Russia. As Arendt observes, while the rise of Nazism depended on a dramatic breakdown of traditional  class  systems  in  the  wake  of  WWI,  Stalin’s  establishment  of  totalitarian  rule   depended on his active elimination of all forms of social stratification from post- revolutionary Russia.112 According to Arendt, this historical disintegration or destruction of  previous  modes  of  social  identification  based  on  class,  which  Arendt  terms  the  “fall  of   protecting  class  walls,”  led  to  the  establishment  of  societies  – or more specifically, masses – comprised  entirely  of  the  “atomized,  isolated  individuals”  through  which   totalitarian movements gain their momentum.113 These  masses,  Arendt  asserts,  “grew  out   of the fragments of a highly atomized society whose competitive structure and concomitant loneliness of the individual had been held in check only through membership  in  a  class.”114 Because Arendt views traditional class systems as providing individuals  with  a  sense  of  “membership”  and  “protect[ion],”  or  a  “sense  of  having  a   place  in  the  world,”  the breakdown of these systems is said to have resulted in the onset of  a  general  condition  of  “homelessness,”  leaving  the  newly  (un)formed  masses  to   111 Ibid 475. 112 Ibid 312-13, 318-23. 113 Ibid 315, 323. 114 Ibid 317. 51 confront  a  “reality  in  which  no  place  was  left  for  them.”115 Within this context, Arendt explains, the aforementioned fictional world created and maintained by totalitarian movements  offered  a  much  needed  source  of  “shelter”  to  “the  new  homeless  masses.”116 While Arendt is careful to emphasize the historical and national specificity grounding the emergence of conditions like loneliness and homelessness in pre- totalitarian societies, one of the more alarming claims put forward in The Origins of Totalitarianism comes  in  Arendt’s  assertion  that,  since  the  end  of  WWII,  these  conditions   had become far more general: Conditions in pre-Hitler Germany are indicative of the dangers implicit in the development of the Western part of the world since, with the end of the second World War, the same dramatic event of a breakdown of the class system repeated itself in almost all European countries, while events in Russia clearly indicate the direction which the inevitable revolutionary changes in Asia may take.117 Describing  what  she  terms  the  development  of  “the  psychology  of  the  European  mass   man,”  Arendt  argues  that  the  postwar  breakdown of European class systems could be credited  with  establishing  the  widespread  sense  of  “selflessness”  experienced  by   Europeans, where selflessness refers not to some sort of altruistic idealism, but rather to “the  sense  that  oneself  does  not  matter,  the  feeling  of  being  expendable.”118 Later in The Origins of Totalitarianism she warns of the temptation to resort to purely utilitarian solutions for the problem of overpopulation caused by the increasing number of homeless masses moving through the modern world – solutions that, by viewing these masses as “economically  superfluous,”  might  be  attracted  to  the  destructive  but  efficient  answers  to   115 Ibid 437. 116 Ibid 363, 437. 117 Ibid 313. 118 Ibid 315. 52 the problem of superfluous masses offered by the legacy of totalitarianism.119 And in the closing paragraphs of The Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt leaves the reader with this final  warning:  “What  prepares  men  for  totalitarian  domination  in  the  non-totalitarian world is the fact that loneliness, once a borderline experience usually suffered in certain marginal social conditions like old age, has become an everyday experience of the evergrowing  masses  of  our  century.”120 It may be argued that the Euro-centric  character  of  Arendt’s  discussion  of  mass   psychology, loneliness, and homelessness has little to offer a consideration of privacy in postwar  American  society.  This  argument  would  seem  to  be  bolstered  by  Arendt’s  claim   in The Origins of Totalitarianism that  the  United  States  “knows  less  of  the  modern   psychology  of  masses  than  perhaps  any  other  country  in  the  world.”121 However, with the publication of The Human Condition in 1958, Arendt dispenses with the Euro-centric character of The Origins of Totalitarianism and comes to position a variety of the debilitating experiences initially conceived as specific effects of totalitarian domination as more general aspects of life in mass society, which are rendered no less inhuman by their  newly  “democratic”  character.   Arendt’s  return  to  the  issue  of  loneliness  in  The Human Condition reveals this transition in her thinking. Considering  how  the  term  “private”  originated  as  a  marker  of   deprivation, as a designation for those persons (slaves, women, the propertyless) deprived of access to a public reality shared with others, Arendt writes: Under modern circumstances, this deprivation of  ‘objective’  relationships   to others and of a reality guaranteed through them has become the mass phenomenon of loneliness, where it has assumed its most extreme and 119 Ibid 459. 120 Ibid 478. 121 Ibid 316. 53 antihuman form. The reason for this extremity is that mass society not only destroys the public realm but the private as well, deprives men not only of their place in the world but of their private home, where they once felt sheltered against the world and where, at any rate, even those excluded from the world could find a substitute in the warmth of the hearth and the limited reality of family life.122 In  terms  almost  identical  to  her  aforementioned  analysis  of  totalitarianism’s  destructive   impact on both public and private life, Arendt here draws a direct parallel between the conditions of life under totalitarianism and those attaining in postwar American society, citing  the  American  sociologist  David  Riesman’s  1950  publication  of  The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American Character, as reinforcement for her observation that loneliness  had  become  a  “mass  phenomenon.”123 Less than a decade after the initial publication of The Origins of Totalitarianism, the incompatibility Arendt had earlier detected between totalitarianism and American democracy has vanished. With mass society’s  eradication of both the shelter offered by the public world and the warmth offered by the private home, where privacy functions as the guarantor of a form of humanness that reaches its highest level of expression in public, the threat of totalitarianism is positioned as a far more insidious, transnational reality of late modernity. Parallels not withstanding, The Origins of Totalitarianism and The Human Condition employ rather distinct narratives when framing the deterioration of the public and the private sphere that determine both the loneliness of the modern individual and the homelessness of the modern masses. Whereas The Origins of Totalitarianism views the destruction of these spheres largely in terms of the depoliticizing, inhuman operations of totalitarian ideology and terror, in The Human Condition, Arendt presents a broader 122 Arendt, Human 58-59. 123 Ibid 59, n. 52. 54 historical framework for understanding this phenomenon, arguing that the public and the private sphere that originated in classical Greece have, since the onset of the modern age, been  rapidly  and  thoroughly  “devour[ed]”  by  what  she  terms  the  rise  of  the  “social   realm.”124 As Arendt explains, whereas the Greeks organized human existence around two distinct and opposing spheres of life, with the private understood as a sphere of “natural  association  whose  center  is  the  home  (oikia)  and  the  family,”  and  the  public   understood as the realm of political action centered in the city-state, or the polis, the emergence of modern society is characterized most definitively by its eradication of this distinction.125 In contemporary political thought, on the other hand, and particularly with the emergence of the modern nation-state,  Arendt  stresses,  “the  dividing line [between public and private] is entirely blurred, because we see the body of peoples and political communities in the image of a family whose everyday affairs have to be taken care of by a gigantic, nation-wide administration of housekeeping.”126 The  social  realm’s  attempt  to  organize  all  modes  of  political,  economic,  and   cultural  difference  into  “the  facsimile  of  one  super-human  family”  blurs  the  division   between public and private spheres in two basic ways. First, because the social turns previously private realms of experience into political matter, it transforms privacy into a collective  concern  and  eliminates  the  private  sphere’s  capacity  to  function  as  a  shadowy   “hiding  place”  for  those  aspects  of  human  existence  and  subjective  experience  that “cannot  withstand  the  implacable,  bright  light”  of  publicity.127 Second, because society organizes itself around the forced togetherness and uncontested, monarchical rule that 124 Ibid 45. 125 Ibid 24-25, 28-29. 126 Ibid 28. 127 Ibid 71, 50-51. 55 inheres within family life – requiring  of  its  members  “a  certain  kind  of  behavior”  that  is   held  in  check  not  by  a  single  individual,  but  by  the  equally  tyrannical  “no-man  rule”  of   opinion – it eliminates the potential for spontaneous action and unique expressions of individuality that define public life in ancient political thought, penetrating down to the “innermost  region”  of  the  “human  heart.”128 This  requirement  that  individuals  “behave”   forms  the  basis  of  what  Arendt  terms  the  “leveling  demands  of  the  social,”  which  – particularly in modern mass society, where conformism is said to reach its apogee – effectively flatten the diversity of perspectives of the public realm into the singular, monolithic  viewpoint  of  the  social  family,  with  its  “one  interest  and  one  opinion.”129 Resuming  her  argument  about  the  “common”  put  forward  in  the  concluding section of The Origins of Totalitarianism,  Arendt  reasons  that,  because  “the  reality  of  the  public   realm relies on the simultaneous presence of innumerable perspectives and aspects in which  the  common  world  presents  itself…  [as]  sameness  in  utter  diversity,”  the  intensely   conformist  and  monolithic  character  of  the  social  “can  offer  only  the  prolongation  or   multiplication  of  one’s  own  position  with  its  attending  aspects  and  perspectives.”130 Which is to say, because the existence and objectivity of the common world can only be verified  by  judging  one’s  subjective  perception  or  experience  of  it  against  that  of  the   other, the conformism of mass society – which destroys the uniqueness of its individuals to such an extent that, for all intents and purposes, the other ceases to exist – renders impossible  the  common  world’s  objective  appearance.  This  is  the  loneliness  of  the   modern individual in mass society: deprived of all objective relations to others and of the 128 Ibid 39-41. On the family as a natural association organized around necessity, and governed by the absolute power held by the paterfamilias, see pp. 22-28;;  on  the  distinction  between  the  “political   fellowship”  of  the  public  sphere  and  the  “mere  togetherness”  of  the  family, see p. 36. 129 Ibid 39-41, 46 130 Ibid 57-58. 56 potential to exhibit his or her unique particularity, the individual is simultaneously without any realm of experience that exists apart from the operations of the social, any space of darkness or sanctuary to which that individual might withdraw and be with his or her self. Though Arendt is not particularly interested in providing anything like a program for  social  change  or  for  countering  society’s  rise  to  ubiquity  in  The Human Condition, recent contributions to public sphere theory have argued for the contemporary political import  of  Arendt’s vision of the public sphere.131 And such arguments resonate in important  ways  with  Arendt’s  preferences  in  this  text.  Despite  the  value  that  Arendt   attributes to the protective and reparative functions of privacy, and despite her defense – in The Origins of Totalitarianism – of  the  private  sphere’s  integral  role  in  retaining  the   mode  of  “life”  that  differentiates  humans  from  mindless  animals  or  marionettes,  The Human Condition’s  critique  of  the  forms  of  violence,  deprivation,  and  conformity  that   adhere within the private realm significantly complicates any attempt to read this work as advocating for the political significance of privacy or intimacy.132 Indeed, in The Human Condition, the private sphere is decidedly apolitical, or rather it is political only to the extent that it provides a structural opposition upon which the existence of a public realm depends.  The  private  sphere’s  detachment  from,  and  opposition  to,  the  realm  of  politics  is   what  grounds  Arendt’s  critique  of  Rousseau’s  private  “rebellion  of  the  heart,”  or  his   attempt to counter bourgeois conformism through unsanctioned expressions of 131 See,  for  instance:  Michael  Warner,  “Publics  and  Counterpublics”  in  Publics and Counterpublics (New York:  Zone  Books,  2002);;  and  Lauren  Berlant  and  Michael  Warner,  “Sex  in  Public,”  Critical Inquiry 24.2 (Winter  1998).  For  a  different  engagement  with  Arendt’s  ideas  about  public  action  and  performance,  see   Justus  Nieland’s  intriguing  account  of  the  “mimetic-sympathetic  public  spheres”  formulated  through   modernist cultures of performance in Feeling Modern: The Eccentricities of Public Life (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2008). 132 Arendt, Human 64. 57 intimacy.133 Because Arendt positions the public as the space of political action in this work,  she  can  only  view  the  “modern  discovery  of  intimacy”  exemplified  by  the writings of  Rousseau  as  “a  flight  from  the  whole  outer  world  into  the  inner  subjectivity  of  the   individual…”134 This attempt to equate intimacy and privacy with public withdrawal reveals a tension  in  Arendt’s  argument.  In  the  face  of  distinctly  totalitarian social pressures whose severity and radicality are said to stem from their penetration and eradication of all previously private realms of human experience, Arendt can only think intimate modes of rebellion in terms of disengagement. Though she isolates  loneliness  as  mass  society’s   most  distinctive  and  “antihuman”  accomplishment,  she  does  not  concede  any  resistant   potential  to  efforts  at  elaborating  a  distinctly  “modern  privacy  [whose]  most  relevant   function  [is]  to  shelter  the  intimate…”135 This tension reveals the persistence of a certain nostalgia  for  classical  culture  at  the  base  of  Arendt’s  thought.  At  the  same  time  that  she   defines the modern era in terms of a thorough destabilization of the classical division between private and public realms, her insistence on viewing all modern explorations of intimacy in terms of an abandonment of politics reveals her refusal to relinquish this division. Marcuse’s  critique  of  “one-dimensionality”  and  the  historically  unique  demands   this social development places on attempts to think political action provides a way of getting  beyond  this  limitation  in  Arendt’s  thought.  Like  Arendt’s  work  in  The Human Condition,  Marcuse’s  highly  influential  indictment  of  American  society  in  One- Dimensional Man hinges on a claim about advanced  industrial  society’s  pervasive   133 Ibid 36-37 134 Ibid 69. 135 Ibid 38. 58 destruction of all interior domains of human experience. For Marcuse, the modern era witnesses a new mutation in the processes by which individuals reproduce the external controls exercised by society, which he designates  as  a  shift  from  “introjection”  to   “mimesis.”  As  Marcuse  explains,  while  introjection  refers  to  “a  variety  of  relatively   spontaneous  processes  by  which  a  Self  (Ego)  transposes  the  ‘outer’  into  the  ‘inner,’”   mimesis  designates  “an  immediate  identification of the individual with his society and through  it,  with  the  society  as  a  whole…”136 Introjection  therefore  “implies  the  existence   of  an  inner  dimension,”  Marcuse  observes,  or  a  “private  space”  of  “inner  freedom”  that  is   distinct from and even antagonistic to public opinion and behavior.137 For Marcuse, this private  space  functions  as  the  very  “home”  of  critical  reason,  contradiction,  and  those   aspects of negative thinking that allow the individual to transcend the realm of mere appearance and access the dialectical reality of their surroundings. However, it is precisely  this  “private  space”  of  depth  and  interiority  that  is  rendered  inaccessible  by  the   “one-dimensional”  logic  of  advanced  industrial  society.   Marcuse’s  analysis  of  one-dimensionality intersects in important ways with Arendt’s  study  of  totalitarianism.  According  to  Marcuse,  one-dimensional society (or advanced industrial society) seeks to replace reason with the impersonal workings of “technological  rationality,”  which  extend  from  systems  of  mass production, distribution, and  communication  to  impact  modern  individuals  down  to  their  very  “core,”  replacing  all   forms of spontaneity by mechanical reactions, subordinating all thought processes and modes of interrelation to the logic of operationalism, and organizing instinctual drives, feelings, imaginations, and aspirations in accordance with the rhythms and logic of 136 Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society (Boston, MA: Beacon, 1991) 10. 137 Ibid 10. 59 mechanical reproduction.138 Due to the decidedly rational character of advanced industrial  society’s  irrationality  – or the way in which the actual inequality, oppression, alienation, and waste subtending modern systems of production and consumption are covered over by the ability of these systems to satisfy basic needs and provide various perks and comforts, and to do so in a highly efficient way – the very capacity for transcendence  or  resistance  is  effectively  contained.  As  Marcuse  puts  it:  “[I]n  the   contemporary period, the technological controls appear to be the very embodiment of Reason for the benefit of all social groups and interests—to such an extent that all contradiction  seems  irrational  and  all  counteraction  impossible.”139 Unlike previous configurations of industrial society, whose claims to operate according to principles of reason  “were  always  contradicted  by  the  evident  misery  and  injustice  of  the  ‘great  public   bodies,’”  and  were  thereby  always  susceptible  to  the  emergence  of  revolutionary  social   movements, advanced industrial society eradicates the potential for even personal forms of dissociation, thereby denying the potential for such private modes of rebellion to develop into an effective political opposition.140 In  addition  to  echoing  Arendt’s  anxiety  about  the  loss  of  spontaneity  and  critical   thought, Marcuse also associates one-dimensional  society’s  colonization  of  the  private sphere directly with totalitarianism. As he argues, totalitarianism does not only designate a  specific  form  of  government  or  party  rule,  but  a  “system  of  production  and  distribution”   that  “precludes  the  emergence  of  an  effective  opposition  against  the  whole.”141 For Marcuse,  the  productive  apparatus  of  advanced  industrial  society  “tends  to  become   138 Ibid 11, 26-27, 32. 139 Ibid 9. 140 Ibid 15. 141 Ibid 3. 60 totalitarian  to  the  extent  to  which  it…  obliterates  the  opposition  between  private  and   public  existence,”  and  develops  “new,  more  effective,  and  more  pleasant  forms of social control  and  social  cohesion”  based  not  on  physical  violence  but  on  processes  of  tolerance,   containment, and superficial forms of satisfaction.142 Rather than excluding particular social groups, experiences, or modes of expression, advanced industrial society simply incorporates them into its own logic, eradicating their oppositional or subversive components through a system of assimilation. And rather than perpetuating a social configuration based on material hierarchies and visible inequalities, the  “new   totalitarianism”  of  late  capitalism  founds  itself  on  an  endlessly  inclusive  pluralism,   allowing all individuals equal access to the material goods and leisure activities that serve to perpetuate the reigning mode of production.143 Despite these overlaps  between  Marcuse’s  and  Arendt’s  theoretical  frameworks,   Marcuse  diverges  from  Arendt  on  the  matter  of  privacy’s  relevance  to  politics.  This   difference comes through especially clearly in a lecture that Marcuse originally delivered in  1967,  “Liberation from  the  Affluent  Society,”  which  outlines  a  response  to  one- dimensionality by returning to the basic problem of conceiving the possibility of liberation from a society that is neither poor, nor disintegrating, nor explicitly terroristic. This  “affluent  society”  is  one  that  “develops  to  a  great  extent  the  material  and  even   cultural  needs  of  man…  a  society  where  liberation  is  apparently  without  a  mass  basis.”144 Within such a situation, Marcuse argues, it is not enough to call for the constitution of a 142 Ibid xlvii. 143 Ibid 61, 8. 144 Marcuse,  “Liberation  from  the  Affluent  Society”  in  Collected Papers of Herbert Marcuse, Volume Three: The New Left and the 1960s, ed. Douglas Kellner (New York: Routledge, 2005) 77. This lecture was originally delivered at the Congress of the Dialectics of Liberation in London in 1967, and published in David Cooper, ed., To Free a Generation: The Dialectics of Liberation (New York, NY: Collier, 1969). 61 free society, as the peculiarity of late capitalism comes precisely through its perpetuation of  a  form  of  “liberty  within  a  situation  of  servitude,”  or  its  making-accessible of a form of freedom that – however false or limited – is still felt to be preferable to the violence and self-sacrifice required by revolutionary movements.145 Rather, in the face of modern society’s  “inva[sion  of]  even  the  deepest  roots  of  individual  existence,  even  the   unconscious  of  man,”  the  potential  for  political  resistance  requires  the  creation of “qualitatively  different  values,”  or  of  individuals  who  are  driven  by  “new  needs  and   satisfactions.”146 In other words, the remarkable deepening of control in the affluent society demanded a complete rethinking of existing strategies of liberation. The possibility of resistance  seemed  to  depend  on  a  transformation  of  the  inner,  “organic”  disposition  of  the   individual,  essentially  presupposing  the  emergence  of  an  entirely  “new  type  of  man,  with   a  vital,  biological  drive  for  liberation…”147 In this sense, when Marcuse comes to call for a  “new  anthropology,”  or  a  concerted  effort  to  bring  this  new  man  into  being,  he   envisions  a  mode  of  practice  oriented  toward  “opening  and…  activat[ing]  a  depth   dimension  of  human  existence,”  or  toward  the  production  of an inner, subjective realm configured in opposition to the repressive aspirations instilled by the affluent society. 148 While  Marcuse  notes  the  “traditional  weakness  of  emotional,  moral  and  humanitarian   arguments”  in  the  context  of  an  essentially  political  problem, he nevertheless insists that resistance to the affluent society requires an attempt to activate this inner register of 145 Marcuse, “Liberation”  80. 146 Ibid 81, 78, 79. 147 Ibid  81.  For  more  on  Marcuse’s  understanding  of  the  “biological”  register  of  these  needs,  see  Marcuse,   An Essay on Liberation (Boston, MA: Beacon, 1969) 10 n. 1. 148 Marcuse,  “Liberation,”  82,  81. 62 experience, which is typically dissociated from the realm of politics.149 As he asserts, “today  qualitative  change,  liberation,  involves organic, instinctual, biological changes at the  same  time  as  political  and  social  changes.”150 In stark contrast to classical conceptions of the private as wholly other to the space and time of political praxis, then, Marcuse here insists that the most integral dimension of political activity is located in the deep, interior recesses of the private self. Marcuse’s  call  for  a  “new  anthropology”  resonates  productively  with  the   redemptive project of the NAC, and not only because Mekas often wrote of this project as an  effort  to  “build…  the  New  Man”  by  revitalizing  the  dwindling  register  of  the   “soul.”151 Marcuse also attributed a central role to art in his conception of this endeavor, explaining that such an anthropological project would necessitate a radical aesthetic practice capable of mobilizing the imagination toward an alternative world-building project. He envisioned an aesthetic in which: sensitivity and sensibility, creative imagination play, [would become] forces  of  transformation…  [and]  would  guide, for example, the total reconstruction of our cities and of the countryside; the restoration of nature after the elimination of the violence and destruction of capitalist industrialization; the creation of internal and external space for privacy, individual autonomy, tranquility; the elimination of noise, of captive audiences, of enforced togetherness, of pollution, of ugliness.152 For Marcuse, such values were not conceived as bourgeois privileges or romantic ideals, but  as  “organic  needs  of  the  human  organism”  whose  destruction  “mutilates  [that]   organism…  in  a  very  real  and  literal  sense.”153 Unlike the critique of modern intimacy we 149 Ibid 80. 150 Ibid 82. 151 Mekas,  “Cinema  of  the  New  Generation,”  Film Culture 21  (Summer,  1960):  19.  For  more  of  Mekas’s   thoughts  on  the  “new  man,”  see  especially  “Notes  on  the  New  American  Cinema”  103-107,  and  Mekas’s   first feature, Guns of the Trees (1961). 152 Marcuse,  “Liberation”  83. 153 Ibid 83. 63 find in Arendt, Marcuse viewed the project of rebuilding the spaces of inner experience that had been obliterated by industrialization as integral to the formulation of anything resembling  effective  political  opposition  or  liberation.  His  writings  on  privacy’s   oppositional value thus provide a highly constructive lens through which to reframe the NAC’s  insistence  on  the  radical  potential of personal film. IV. An Intimate Cinema Statements  on  the  NAC’s  redemptive  orientation  were  put  forward  by  a  number  of   different figures affiliated with the NAC in a variety of different contexts and forms. But the redemptive project of the NAC was announced and formulated most extensively by Jonas Mekas in a series of essays, editorials, statements, and movie reviews written between 1959 and the mid 1960s primarily in the pages of Film Culture and the Village Voice. In these writings, Mekas drew out lines of relation between a diverse set of independent film practices taking shape in the U.S. toward the beginning of the 1960s, and argued for a view of these practices as constituting a relatively unified cultural formation organized around a shared task or purpose. Despite clear formal, financial, and ideological differences separating the works of artists such as Robert Frank and Alfred Leslie, Lionel Rogosin, Shirley Clarke, Ron Rice, Edward Bland, Stan Vanderbeek, Marie Menken, and Stan Brakhage, Mekas viewed such artists as representatives of a “new  spirit  in  American  cinema,”  whose  disaffiliation  from  the  mode  of  living   propagated  by  the  old  America,  and  dissatisfaction  with  the  “stiffness”  and   “overprofessionalism”  of  Hollywood  film  emerged  from the same rebellious climate that 64 had spurred the formation of the various European new waves after WWII.154 And though Mekas argued that the filmmakers comprising the NAC revealed distinct similarities at the level of style and mode of production, demonstrating a shared interest in improvisational engagements with the actions and situations comprising contemporary reality in the postwar U.S., as well as a lack of concern with professional standards or classical aesthetic guidelines and a commitment to low-budget filmmaking, it was these artists’  common  participation  in  a  broader  moral  or  ethical  movement  that  was said to give the NAC its sense of unity and momentum. Mekas’s  understanding  of  the  ethical  movement  taking  shape  in  the  U.S.  at  the   end of the 1950s revolves around a claim to historical rupture. Like many other critics and artists affiliated with the 1960s American counterculture, he conceived the process of generational dissociation underlying the emergence of the NAC in terms of what Fredric Jameson  would  call  a  “situation  of  modernity,”  or  a  coming-into-consciousness of a new historical period via the  tangible  modification  of  “a  whole  collective  temporality.”155 Mekas’s  most  involved  discussion  of  this  rupture  comes  in  an  early  essay  published  in   Film Culture in  1960  entitled  “Cinema  of  the  New  Generation,”  where  he  argues  for  a   view of the NAC as part of a broader turn to an aesthetic of spontaneity and immediacy manifesting itself in nearly every level of American cultural production at the end of the 1950s, from rock and roll to beat poetry, action painting, and experimental developments in dance, sculpture, and theater.156 According to Mekas, the explosion of these distinctly modern artistic practices had to be understood as the outgrowth of a much larger socio- 154 Mekas,  “A  Call  for  a  New  Generation  of  Film-Makers,”  Film Culture Reader,  74;;  “Cinema  of  the  New   Generation”  1. 155 Fredric Jameson, A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present (New York: Verso, 2002) 57, 18. 156 Mekas,  “Cinema  of  the  New  Generation”  1,  12-13,  19;;  see  also  “New  York  Letter”  119,  121. 65 historical transition that had been slowly altering the technological and economic conditions of daily life in the U.S. since the end of WWII, as well as the very “psychological”  fabric  of  American  society,  impacting  the  “actions,  emotions  and  dreams   of  the  people”  and  bringing  an  entirely  “new  generation”  into  being  with  “completely   different needs and surroundings that influence their very physical movements, their speech  habits,  their  dressing  habits  and,  naturally,  their  love  habits.”157 According  to  Mekas,  the  basic  “temperament”  of  this  new  generation  – which he refers  to  here  as  the  “cold-war generation,”  the  “beat  generation,”  the  “new  American   generation,”  or  simply  the  “new  America”  – was  reflected  in  the  young  American  artist’s   valorization  of  impurity,  roughness,  and  actuality  over  the  “respectable  classicism”   advocated by established critics.158 However,  the  particular  “needs”  driving  these  stylistic   preferences were organized around moral issues: a need to locate some vestige of truth, sincerity,  and  humanness  in  a  “phony”  society,  or  to  achieve  some  form  of  liberation   from the increasingly repressive and restrictive atmosphere of the postwar U.S. This is what  grounds  Mekas’s  claim,  in  a  1960  “Movie  Journal”  entry,  that  “the  entire  movement   of the new America in the arts and life is primarily an ethical movement, a search for sincerity.”159 To  a  certain  extent,  Mekas’s  discussion  of  this  process  of  historical  transformation   can be said to intersect with the broader body of discourse that emerged in the U.S. during  the  1950s  and  60s  concerning  the  “end  of  ideology,”  or  the  breakdown  of   traditional belief systems and the disintegration of previously held certainties after the war. For Mekas, the generational dissociation occurring in postwar American society was 157 Mekas,  “Cinema  of  the  New  Generation”  1. 158 Ibid 1, 5, 14, 17, 9. 159 Mekas,  “Movie  Journal,”  Village Voice 30 March 1960: 16. 66 said  to  be  predicated  on  the  new  America’s  realization  that  the  mores  and  values,  as  well as  the  whole  “way  of  life”  established  by  the  old  generation,  had  become  outmoded,   thereby leaving modern man in a rather precarious position that Siegfried Kracauer poignantly  described  as  being  “ideologically  shelterless.”160 In an address given to the Philadelphia College of Art in 1966, Mekas drew a parallel between his own sense of disillusionment  after  the  war,  which  he  described  as  a  crippling  loss  of  “faith  in  the   goodness  of  man  and  progress  of  man”  or  a  “shatter[ing]”  of  all  of  his  beliefs  and   idealism, and the general feeling of disorientation and self-fragmentation permeating the emergent  artistic  culture  in  the  postwar  U.S.,  which  was  composed  of  “poets,  and   filmmakers,  and  painters…  who  were  also  walking  like  one  thousand  painful  pieces,”  and who  “felt  that  there  was  almost  nothing  to  lose  any  more…  [and]  nothing  worth  keeping   from  our  civilized  inheritance.”161 For  Mekas,  the  NAC’s  much-maligned “unprofessionalism”  was  a  direct  expression  of  this  condition.  He  considered  the  “shaky”   camerawork of  Frank  and  Rogosin,  or  the  “fragile,  searching  acting  style”  embodied  by   artists  like  Ben  Carruthers,  to  be  indices  of  the  “psychological…  reality  of  modern  man,”   or  an  unavoidable  outgrowth  of  the  new  artist’s  struggle  to  feel  out  the  contours  of  the   “uncertain  moral  landscape”  he  or  she  had  inherited  after  WWII.162 Yet  Mekas’s  conception  of  this  process  of  ideological  disintegration  also  differs   considerably from more nostalgic and conservative commentaries on this process. For Mekas, the new generation’s  rejection  of  the  American  way  of  life  was  said  to  be   motivated by its belief that the moral system of the previous generation was not just 160 Siegfried Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality, paperback ed. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1960; 1997) 288. For other commentaries on the decline of previously operative values and conventions in postwar culture, see: Whyte, op. cit., 3; Riesman, op. cit., 25; and Mills, op. cit., xvi. 161 Mekas,  “Where  Are  We  – the  Underground?”  in  The New American Cinema, op. cit., 18. 162 Mekas,  “Notes”  105-06; Movie Journal 27. 67 anachronistic but immoral, which is to say, that the mores and conventions established by the old America had become profoundly dehumanizing, violent, and repressive. As Mekas argues in various contexts, the blatant dishonesty and lack of compassion in the postwar  U.S.  made  the  new  generation  feel  that  they  had  been  “betrayed”  by  the  mode  of   living established by the previous  generation,  which  spurred  the  new  America’s  growing   belief that  “All  public  ideologies,  values,  and  ways  of  life  [had  to]  be  doubted,   attacked.”163 Within  this  context,  the  NAC’s  redemptive  project  came  into  being  not  as  an   attempt to regain or recover the lost coherence of a previously functioning moral system, but through a two-part  movement  of  abandonment  and  rediscovery:  by  “believing  only  in   immediate  experience,”  the  artists  of  the  NAC  sought  to  shrug  off  all  inherited  cultural   and perceptual frameworks  and  gain  access  to  some  “deeper”  form  of  knowledge  from   which they could responsibly undertake the vital rebirthing process demanded by the transformations of the new historical era.164 Anticipating  Marcuse’s  call  for  a  new   anthropology, Mekas believed that the scope of these transformations required nothing less  than  the  creation  of  an  entirely  “New  Man”  capable  of  reversing  the  destructive   course of modern progress.165 Mekas outlines the dual project facing the new generation at the end of his 1959 essay,  “New  York  Letter:  Towards  a  Spontaneous  Cinema.”  As  he  writes: The question is one of loosening the frozen sensibilities, of weeding out anachronistic moral, social and political clichés, the false authorities, the false  purposes  of  life…  [W]hen  you  don’t  any  longer  know  where  and   what the essence is, the surest way – if there is any way at all – is to throw away all inhibitions and lose oneself completely in the spontaneous 163 Mekas,  “New  York”  121;;  “Notes”  103.  See  also  Mekas,  “Cinema  of  the  New  Generation”  19-20, and “Where  Are  We”  18-19. 164 Mekas,  “Cinema  of  the  New  Generation”  17,  19. 165 Ibid 19. 68 improvisations that lead into the inner regions of our being: where, after all, everything rests.166 In  “Cinema  of  the  New  Generation,”  Mekas  frames  this  project  in  explicitly  ethical   terms,  arguing  that  the  NAC’s  attempt  to  locate  an  “un-corrupt  basis  for…  life”  by   descending ever-deeper  into  the  “less  contaminated  depths  of  man’s  soul,”  formed  the   basis  of  this  film  culture’s  contribution  to  the  “ethical  movement”  of  the  new  America.167 And  in  “Notes  on  the  New  American  Cinema,”  Mekas  argues  that  the  new  filmmaker’s   decision  to  “direct  his  ear  inward”  in  an  effort  to  “[listen]  deeper than [his] other contemporaries,”  or  his  attempt  to  pursue  a  realm  of  “inner  freedom”  in  direct  opposition   to  the  “centrifugal  force”  of  postwar  American  society,  constituted  a  distinctly  “human   act,”  one  that  was  “open[ing]  new  vistas  for  life”  by  “liberat[ing]…  man’s  spirit  from  the   dead  matter  of  culture.”168 Earlier in his career as a film critic, Mekas had been a vociferous opponent of the personal aesthetic practiced by emerging experimental filmmakers in the U.S. like Brakhage and Kenneth Anger, criticizing such artists for failing  to  transcend  their  “private”  dilemmas  and  utilize  cinema’s  potential  for   communicating universally intelligible statements on social issues ordered in accordance with a well-defined  “moral  stand.”169 By the end of the 50s, however, when such a stable moral  position  was  no  longer  felt  to  be  tenable,  Mekas  came  to  locate  cinema’s  value  in   its ability to function as a medium for conducting self-shattering  adventures  (one  “lose[s]   oneself  completely”)  into  the  unexplored  depths  of  inner  experience,  or  “that  valley  of   irrationality”  housed  by  man’s  “subconscious”  or  “core,”  which  seemed  to  offer  the  only   166 Mekas, Movie Journal 1;;  “New  York  Letter:  Towards  a  Spontaneous  Cinema,”  Sight and Sound 28.3-4 (Summer-Autumn, 1959): 121. 167 Mekas,  “Cinema  of  the  New  Generation”  19-20. 168 Mekas,  “Notes”  104, 106-07. 169 Mekas,  “The  Experimental  Film  in  America,”  Film Culture Reader 22-23. 69 opportunity for the new generation to locate a true starting point from which to slowly begin the project of building the new man.170 As such statements demonstrate, for Mekas, the ultimate significance of the NAC’s  artistic  rebellion  was  intricately  bound  up  with  this  film  culture’s  investment  in   interiority.  The  NAC’s  exploration  of  the  new  generation’s  “inner  landscape,”  which   Mekas frequently described as the psychological, intellectual, and emotional realities of modern  man,  or  the  basic  condition  of  man’s  “spirit”  or  “soul,”  was  said  to  constitute  this   movement’s  most  significant  contribution  to  the  history  of  American  film.171 Mekas formulates  this  belief  in  his  important  1962  survey  of  the  NAC,  “Notes  on  the  New   American  Cinema.”  As  Mekas  explains,  the  release  of  John  Cassavetes’s  Shadows in 1958  marked  an  historical  “turn  inwards”  in  postwar  American  cinema,  one  that   distinguished  the  NAC  from  the  mere  “surface  realism”  practiced  by  independent   filmmakers  like  Morris  Engel  throughout  the  ‘50s.172 As  Mekas’s  writings  on  Shadows throughout this period makes clear, he believed that Cassavetes effected this inward turn not  only  by  “focusing  upon  psychological  realities”  and  encouraging  his  actors  to   “[search]  into  their  own  experiences”  to  find  motivation  for  their  performances,  but  also   because Shadows’  pairing  of  the  aesthetic  properties  of  documentary  realism  (natural   lighting, location shooting, an emphasis on daily incidents, handheld cinematography, black and white film stock, etc.) with a highly improvisational, fragmentary, and seemingly  “plotless”  organization  provided  its  viewer  with  a  sense  of  gaining  access  to   170 Mekas,  “Cinema  of  the  New  Generation”  19-20. 171 Mekas,  “Notes”  96,  103-04,  91.  See  also  “Call”  74. 172 Mekas,  “Notes”  91.  For  more  on  Mekas’s  critique  of  the  “surface”  aesthetic of popular, independent, and  experimental  American  cinema,  see  “The  Experimental  Film  in  America,”  Film Culture Reader, 24-25; and  “Editorial,”  Film Culture 10 (1956): 1-2. 70 the inner condition of the new generation.173 Which is to say, because Mekas conceived the inner in stark opposition to the rational intellect and its worldly manifestations – imagining the soul as a deep, opaque realm of anarchic impulses wholly inaccessible to reason – he  viewed  Cassavetes’s  apparent  abandonment  of  established  formal   conventions for the sake of a disorganized but vital aesthetic as an effort to elaborate a filmic grammar structurally analogous to the chaotic movements of inner experience: a “spontaneous cinema.”174 Mekas’s  understanding  of  the  NAC’s  inward  turn  was  not  a  conventional  one,  in   other words. He did not seek to designate a process of communicating the internal dilemmas of an individual protagonist through an effective employment of traditional narrative forms, but something closer to an effort to remodel cinema in the disorganized image of the soul. At the level of practice, this took shape primarily through methods of improvisation, which Mekas conceived as a pathway to the deep, internal aspects of human nature that were being denied expression by postwar American society. As he argues  in  “New  York  Letter,”  the  NAC’s  attempt  to  “capture  life  in  its  most  free  and   spontaneous  flight”  stemmed  from  their  desire  to  “grasp  life  from  within  and  not  from without”  (a  phrase  he  borrows  from  D.T.  Suzuki),  or  from  this  movement’s  investment  in   pursuing  an  “inner  intelligence”  directly  opposed  to  the  superficial,  commercialized  form   of  entertainment  offered  by  Hollywood  (that  “extrovert  art,  made  with,  for, and because of  money”).175 It was through the medium of improvisation, Mekas wagered, that artists 173 Mekas,  “Notes”  91.  For  Mekas’s  thoughts  on  Shadows,  see  also:  “New  York”  119;;  and  “Cinema  of  the   New  Generation”  10. 174 Mekas,  “New  York”  119,  italics  in  original. 175 Mekas,  “New  York”  119,  121;;  Mekas,  “Editorial,”  Film Culture 10 (1956): 1. 71 of  the  NAC  could  dispense  with  “the  prearranged,  the  contrived  mental  structures,  and   [go]  directly  to  the  depths  of  the  matter.”176 That  the  NAC’s  inward  turn, and the broader emphasis on interiority underlying this movement, emerged as a direct response to the crisis of privacy outlined above can be readily discerned by considering one of the primary claims subtending discourse on the NAC. As has been shown, for  Mekas,  the  NAC’s  rebellion  against  the  old  America   was driven by a belief that the reigning mode of living in the postwar U.S. was profoundly  dehumanizing.  And  as  Mekas’s  reference  to  the  “centrifugal”  character  of   daily life suggests, this dehumanizing effect was said to be the result of American society’s  hostility  to  all  forms  of  interiority. The inner, the deep, the personal, the private: these  were  felt  to  be  the  very  base  of  humanness,  the  site  or  source  of  the  “true  voice  of   man”;;  yet  the  impersonal workings of mass culture and mass society were said to be actively suppressing and eradicating these dimensions of experience in a manner that Mekas affiliated directly with fascism.177 This belief in the dehumanizing effects of mass culture is what drives  Mekas’s  insistence  on  the  life-affirming character of the new American  filmmaker’s  destructiveness.  As  he  states  in  a  passage  of  “Notes  on  the  New   American  Cinema”  that  reveals  Mekas’s  participation  in  the  postwar  privacy  crisis,  while   also revealing his perception that a spontaneous artistic practice could counter the apparent decline of privacy under modernity: With  man’s  soul  being  squeezed  out  in  all  the  four  corners  of  the  world  today,   when governments are encroaching upon his personal being with the huge machinery of bureaucracy, war, and mass communications, [the new artist] feels 176 Mekas,  “Notes”  105. 177 Mekas,  “Notes”  104.  On  the  role  of  fascism  in  Mekas’s  writings,  see  for instance: Mekas, Movie Journal 36-37;;  “Cinema”  17-18;;  “Movie  Journal,”  Village Voice 27 April 1960: 8. 72 that the only way to preserve man is to encourage his sense of rebellion, his sense of disobedience, even at the cost of open anarchy and nihilism.178 The  NAC’s  attempt  to  abandon established social, cultural, and artistic conventions is here attributed a distinctly preservative function. The  NAC’s  critique  of  the  depthlessness  and  superficiality  of  modern  society  and   mass  culture  is  not  limited  to  Mekas’s  writings,  but  in  fact permeates critical and artistic statements put forward by a wide range of spokespersons and affiliates of the NAC, forming one of the central threads that links the otherwise diverse conceptions of cinema that emerged from this movement. Aspects of this critique can be found operating, for instance,  in:  Vanderbeek’s  influential  definition  of  the  underground  filmmaker  as   someone  working  to  create  “private  art  that  can  be  made  public,  rather  than  the  public  art   we  know,  which  cannot  be  made  private”;;  Brakhage’s  vision  of  society  as  a  “machine”   “bent  on  destroying  that  which  is  alive  within  its  individuals”;;  Rice’s  paranoid   characterization  of  industrial  society  as  a  “monster”  seeking  to  “rape  your  consciousness”   through  the  various  “spat  loudspeaker  direction  systems”  constituting  mass  culture;;   Cassavetes’s  condemnation  of  the  “other-directed and mass-minded”  character  of  the   general  public  and  Hollywood;;  and  Kelman’s  aforementioned  characterization  of  the   NAC  as  a  “spiritual  medium”  whose  “primary  drive  is to replenish the human spirit which  has  been  eroded  as  much  as  our  earth  has  been  by  ‘progress.’”179 One of the more important iterations of this claim was formulated by Allen Ginsberg, who appeared in Frank  and  Leslie’s  landmark  contribution  to  the  NAC,  Pull My Daisy (1959), and who 178 Mekas,  “Notes”  103. 179 Stan  Vanderbeek,  “The  Cinema  Delimina:  Films  from  the  Underground,”  Film Quarterly 14.4 (Summer, 1961):  6;;  Brakhage’s  quote  is  taken  from  Mekas,  “Notes”  103;;  Ron  Rice,  “Ron  Rice:  Diaries,  Notebooks,   Scripts,  Letters,  Documents,”  Film Culture 39  (Winter,  1965):  113;;  John  Cassavetes,  “What’s  Wrong  with   Hollywood?”  Film Culture 19 (1959): 4-5;;  Kelman,  “Anticipations”  24. 73 also  provided  poetic  interludes  for  the  soundtrack  of  Mekas’s  Guns of the Trees (1961) and  appeared  in  various  other  films  produced  by  artists  of  the  NAC.  Paralleling  Arendt’s   association  of  mass  society  with  totalitarianism’s  eradication of private life, Ginsberg viewed the growing system of mass communications in the U.S. as the primary instrument  of  a  “vast  conspiracy  to  impose  one  level  of  mechanical  consciousness  on   mankind,”  and  to  “exterminate,”  in  the  manner  of  the  Gestapo, all manifestations of “contemplative  individuality,”  unsanctioned  lifestyles,  or  spiritual  knowledge  from  then- contemporary American society.180 In  Ginsberg’s  schema,  the  depthlessness  of  this   system  of  “mass  consciousness”  revolved  around  a  two-part exclusion: while the public were  actively  suppressing  the  “deepest  and  most  personal  sensitivities  and  confessions  of   reality,”  they  were  also  denying  artists’  efforts  to  represent  a  “vast  national  subconscious   netherworld”  that  thrived  beneath  the  surface  of 1950s America.181 While such statements differ in many ways, they provide adequate justification for  viewing  the  NAC  as  a  distinct  expression  of  the  “topological  crisis”  that  Nelson   reveals to have been one of the central impetuses behind American aesthetic production during  the  cold  war,  in  the  same  way  that  Ginsberg  and  Mekas’s  comments  on  fascism   establish an affinity between the redemptive project of the NAC and the more ordered critiques of the loss of privacy formulated by Arendt and Marcuse.182 Yet the distinctly oppositional  thrust  of  the  NAC’s  redemptive  project  also  indicates  that  cold  war   America’s  efforts  to  promote  the  zone  of  privacy  supposedly  sheltered  by  the  suburban   household as an emblem of democratic freedom only constitutes one, particularly 180 Allen Ginsberg,  “America’s  Nervous  Breakdown:  Poetry,  Violence,  and  the  Trembling  Lambs,”  Village Voice 26  August  1959:  1,  8.  Mekas  quotes  from  Ginsberg’s  piece  in  “New  York  Letter,”  “Cinema  of  the   New  Generation,”  and  “Movie  Journal,”  Village Voice 5 August 1959: 7. 181 Ginsberg 1. 182 Nelson 3. 74 paradoxical response to this topological crisis – a response that undermined the very privacy it sought to protect by publicizing and politicizing it.183 The writings of Arendt, Marcuse,  and  the  NAC  demonstrate  that  concerns  about  the  “loss”  of  privacy  also motivated various criticisms of – and modes of resistance against – the dominant social and  cultural  tendencies  of  this  period.  Even  amidst  containment  ideology’s  attempt  to   regain private stability in the form of private property, the artists affiliated with the NAC strove to elucidate the totalitarian aspects of mass society and mass culture by decrying their destructive impact on the private self. While  the  NAC’s  investment  in  privacy  might  seem  to  reveal  strange  parallels   between  this  “radical”  film  culture and cold war conservatism, it would be wrong to equate  the  former’s  defense  of  inner  experience  with  the  latter’s  promotion  of  suburbia  as   the site and source of human freedom. Emerging as an explicit effort to counter the dehumanizing logic of late-modern  private  and  public  spheres,  the  NAC’s  drive  to   reclaim inner experience as a source of vitality and rebellion should not be read as a symptom  of  this  movement’s  secret  conservatism,  but  as  a  testament  to  its  participation  in   one of the defining political debates of the postwar era. Much like the confessional poets discussed  by  Nelson,  these  filmmakers  “were  preoccupied  with  the  nature  of  privacy   itself”  at  a  specific  moment  when  the  value,  meaning,  and  composition  of  the  private   stood at the heart of American public discourse.184 And rather than affirming dominant conceptions of the private sphere as a stable, coherent space in which normative values are secured and reproduced, the NAC conceived this realm as a fluid, opaque experiential register destructive of such norms. Their view of the private thus adheres more closely to 183 Nelson  refers  to  this  as  the  “governing  paradox”  of  the  Cold  War  (Pursuing Privacy, xiii). 184 Nelson, Pursuing Privacy 29. 75 what  Julia  Kristeva  has  described  as  the  domain  of  “intimate  revolt”  – a timeless, interior region  of  return  and  negation;;  the  space  “where  we  end  up  when  we  question  apparent   meanings  and  values.”185 In  addition  to  obscuring  this  movement’s  participation  in  such  debates,  the   tendency  to  read  the  NAC’s  inward  turn  as  an  anachronistic  detachment  or  apolitical   withdrawal from the surrounding world risks eliding the social dimensions of this movement’s  redemptive  project.186 To be sure, members of the NAC did value artistic practice  as  a  mode  of  private  introspection,  or  a  purely  personal  method  for  evading  one’s   surrounding  culture  and  accessing  a  more  “authentic”  register  of  experience. Yet the radical  potential  these  artists  attributed  to  cinema  was  also  dependent  on  this  medium’s   relational basis, its orientation toward viewers. This  investment  in  cinema’s  relational  character  is  clearly  expressed  in  this   movement’s  numerous  statements on and references to the experiences of spectatorship. In  various  writings  from  the  late  ‘50s  and  early  ‘60s,  for  instance,  Mekas  celebrates   cinema for its intensely intimate mode of address, emphasizing the capacity of particular films to effect a profound mental, emotional, or spiritual transformation in their viewers. The poetic works of the avant-garde  are  praised  for  their  ability  to  “stir  us  out  of  our   numbness”  or  to  plunge  a  “spearhead  into  the  [viewer’s]  heart”  that  dissolves  the   185 Julia Kristeva, Intimate Revolt: The Powers and Limits of Psychoanalysis, Vol. 2, trans. Jeanine Herman (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002) 43. 186 The  NAC’s  purported  withdrawal  from  the  realm  of  politics  is  a  recurring  focus  of  critical  writings  on   this  film  culture  dating  from  the  beginning  of  the  ‘60s.  These  have  ranged  from  Eduoard  de  Laurot’s   characterization  of  the  NAC’s  commitment  to  a  purely  private  mode  of  self-expression  as  an  “effete”  and   “unmanly”  abdication  of  the  artist’s  duty  to  communicate  with  his  public,  to  Louis  Marcorelles’s   hyperbolic dismissal of the American avant-garde as an  “individualistic”  filmic  movement  “completely   divorced”  from  its  social  context,  and  Annette  Michelson’s  more  nuanced  juxtaposition  of  the  NAC’s  view   of  art  as  “a  construction  in  ethics”  with  a  more  overtly  politicized  avant-garde’s  conception  of  art  as  “a   ground  for  an  ethos.”  See:  De  Laurot,  op.  cit.,  21;;  Marcorelles  quoted  in  Mekas,  Movie Journal 239-40; Michelson, op. cit., 417. 76 contours of his or  her  ego,  provoking  the  viewer  into  a  “communion”  with  the  “soul”  of   the  filmmaker  through  which  that  viewer  is  rendered  “more  beautiful.”187 Mekas also insisted  that  the  new  cinema’s  main  value  lay  in  its  ability  to  “make  us  conscious”  by   activating  that  “area in the human mind (or heart) that can be reached only through cinema.”188 A  similar  sentiment  is  expressed  in  Vanderbeek’s  description  of  the   underground  artist  as  someone  working  conjure  “explosives  vivid  enough  to  rock  the   status  quo.”189 For Rice, cinema  was  similarly  valued  for  its  ability  to  “[clear]  the   windows  of  our  perception,”  or  to  “reach  men  through  the  heart  and  cause  them  to   think.”190 Yet Rice also viewed film as a medium of transportation, one which could make  the  spectator  “soar…  to  impossible  places”  of  pure  sublimity,  or  “Locations  that  he   cannot  reach  on  the  subway.”191 Rogosin attributed a somewhat different transportive effect to the filmic image. He believed that improvisational employments of film harbored  a  unique  capacity  to  “[communicate  the]  human  spirit”  of  a  particular  people  or   culture  in  a  manner  that  could  make  individual  viewers  “feel  emotionally”  what  that   culture  was  really  like,  providing  those  viewers  with  a  sense  of  “direct  personal  contact   with the individuals of another society.”192 A similar emphasis on the feeling of directness made possible by film is expressed  in  Kelman’s  critical  survey  of  the  NAC,  “Anticipations  of  the  Light.”  Kelman   underscores  the  “passion[ate]”  relational  dynamic  this  movement  establishes  between   film  and  viewer,  one  capable  of  “impact[ing]”  the  viewer’s  inner  disposition  in  a  manner   187 Mekas,  “Movie  Journal,”  Village Voice December 17, 1958, 8; Mekas, Movie Journal, 47. 188 Mekas,  “Notes”  105. 189 Vanderbeek 10. 190 Rice,  “Diaries”  97;;  notes  for  federal  grant,  1  November  1962,  Reginald  Gay  Collection  of  Taylor  Mead   and Related Materials, New York Public Library, New York. 191 Rice,  “Diaries”  119. 192 Lionel Rogosin, Come Back, Africa: Lionel Rogosin – A Man Possessed (Johannesburg, South Africa: STE 2004) 34, 59 77 denied by conventional Hollywood cinema.193 Whereas Hollywood narrative films force the  viewer  to  experience  events  and  insights  “vicarious[ly],”  Kelman  argues,  by  “making us see things along with (or through) a protagonist with whom we identify, and a plot in which  we  are  caught,”  the  NAC  dispenses  with  such  mediating  structures  as   identification  and  narrativization  in  an  effort  to  “project  genuine  experience  and  direct   vision,”  or  to  present  the  viewer  with  a  stream  of  “filmic  substance”  (light,  sound)  to  be   experienced  in  all  its  “physical[ity]”  and  “immediacy.”194 It was this relational capacity that  motivated  Kelman’s  attempt  to  theorize  the  work performed  by  the  NAC’s  films, as can  be  seen  in  his  reading  of  the  NAC  as  an  attempt  to  “restore  subjectivity  to  its  proper   realm”  and  create,  via  mythopoeisis,  new  “inner  worlds”  that  might  “fill  our  rationalistic   void.”195 While other statements on spectatorship could be cited here, these suffice to demonstrate  that  the  NAC’s  efforts  to  develop  a  personal  film  practice  were  ultimately   directed toward generating a more intimate effect on the spectator. Indeed, for all of these artists and critics, cinema is envisioned as a strangely immediate medium. The filmic image’s  association  with  contingency  and  the  instant  made  it  appear  uniquely  capable  of   mirroring the wildness of inner psychical, emotional, and spiritual processes. And the NAC’s  decision  to  affirm  this  wildness,  rather  than to contain it in the name of aesthetic coherence, seemed to facilitate a direct, unmediated encounter with these domains. As Michelson argued as early as 1966, the imagination of film advanced in such statements is highly ideological, based as it is on an intensely naturalized perception of cinematic  technology  that,  by  seeking  to  void  film’s  status  as  “instrument  of  mediation,”   193 Kelman 24, 28. 194 Ibid 24-25, 28. 195 Ibid 24, 25, 26-27. 78 reveals  itself  to  be  a  thoroughly  “pastoral  attitude.”196 However,  the  NAC’s  investment  in   immediacy also cuts in another direction.  It  designates  this  movement’s  interest  in   creating  a  distinctly  affective  filmic  grammar,  one  capable  of  impacting  the  viewer’s   outer,  bodily  sensorium  with  such  intensity  that  the  deeper  recesses  of  that  viewer’s  inner   soul would also be moved. This attempt  to  enlist  cinema’s  bodily  address  into  a  project  of   spiritual  redemption  points  to  the  NAC’s  recurrent  emphasis  on  the  material  dimensions   of the soul – an  emphasis  that  resonates  in  intriguing  ways  with  Arendt’s  insistence,  in  a   later  work,  on  the  “body-bound”  nature  of  “soul-experiences,”  or  the  body’s  status  as  a   register  through  which  the  concrete  “language  of  the  soul”  gains  expression  in  the  form   of affective experiences.197 As if seeking to reverse the expressive movement envisioned by Arendt, the NAC sought to dialogue with the soul via this somatic language, endeavoring  to  resuscitate  the  former  by  addressing  the  body  into  which  the  soul’s  fluid,   chaotic  impulses  “[do]  indeed  ‘overflow.’”198 The  filmic  image’s  indexicality  is  clearly  privileged  in this conception of cinematic immediacy, both for its unique relation to the instant and the contingent, and for  what  Mary  Ann  Doane  has  termed  the  “disconcerting  closeness  of  the  index  to  its   object,”  or  the  index’s  status  as  a  material  trace  physically  linked to the object it references.199 But in direct opposition to contemporaneously developed theories of cinema  that  emphasized  the  index’s  ability  to  “redeem…  physical  reality,”  Mekas  valued   film’s  immediacy  for  its  ability  to  redeem  inner  life.200 The term “intimacy”  is   particularly  well  suited  for  discussions  of  the  NAC’s  redemptive  project,  then,  not  as  a   196 Michelson 419, 408. 197 Arendt, The Life of the Mind (New York: Harcourt, 1977) 32, 33. 198 Ibid 33. 199 Mary  Ann  Doane,  “Indexicality:  Trace  and  Sign:  Introduction,”  differences 18.1 (2007): 2, 4. 200 Kracauer 300. 79 marker of the habitual and the routine, but for its ability to hold together notions of self- knowledge, inwardness, and the essential (as in intimus: inmost, deepest) with the ideal of direct,  impassioned  modes  of  communication  that  underlie  the  NAC’s  writings  on  film   (as in intimare: to put or bring into, drive or press into, to make known). Lauren Berlant has touched on this dual orientation of intimacy in a recent publication,  noting  that  intimacy’s  association  with  inwardness  also  opens  out  onto  the   other  because  of  this  term’s  affiliation  with  practices  of  intimation,  where  the  latter   entails  “communicat[ing]  with  the  sparest  of  signs  and  gestures.”201 Yet unlike the more normative conceptions of the intimate identified by Berlant, which have come to saturate American public culture since the onset of modernity, and which stubbornly cling to optimistic notions of transparency, stability, wholeness, and unity, Mekas believed that intimacy’s  value  was  to  be  located  in  its  resistance  to  systematization  – its capacity to uncover or activate an intensely vital dimension of experience incompatible with the fantasy of the rational subject. Mekas thus emphasized what Berlant describes as intimacy’s  wilder tendencies,  its  basis  in  a  psychic  or  libidinal  “drive…  that  is  not necessarily organized [in  accordance  with  convention],  or  any  way.”202 Mekas’s  investment  in  the  defamiliarizing  and  destabilizing  potential  of  cinema’s   intimacy  is  best  expressed  in  a  review  of  Ingmar  Bergman’s  Wild Strawberries (1957), which  is  worth  parsing  before  moving  on  to  an  analysis  of  the  NAC’s  films.  Mekas   describes Bergman’s  film as  a  “classically  simple,”  “down-to-earth  film”  that  was   uniquely  attuned  to  the  level  of  the  concrete,  or  the  “universally  identifiable”  dramatic   201 Berlant,  “Intimacy:  A  Special  Issue”  in  Intimacy, ed. Berlant (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000) 1. 202 Ibid 4. 80 incidents and experiences that punctuate and define everyday life.203 Recounting the narrative of the film, which  revolves  around  a  particularly  callous,  elderly  doctor’s   journey through the Swedish countryside, and his encounter with a series of persons and childhood memories that send him into vertiginous bouts of contemplation, Mekas expresses a certain fascination with the interactions and encounters that provoke this process of self-reflection,  referring  to  them  as  “concrete  emotional  clashes  and  concrete   dramatic  situations”  that  force  the  doctor  to  “face  his  whole  life,  to  evaluate  it,  to  reject  it,   and to try  to  correct  it.”204 For Mekas, these experiences are conceived in particularly violent  terms:  he  refers  to  them  as  “clashes  which  cut  into  one’s  consciousness  with  the   sharpness  of  a  lash,”  which  leave  man  in  “anguish  and  fear”  by  forcing  him  to  confront   “the  crumbling  of  [his]  entire  life,”  and  which,  by  “corner[ing  man]  into  facing  himself,”   effectively  “burn  him  out,  purify  him,  change  him.”205 Yet as this last note on purification and  change  suggest,  in  Mekas’s  eyes,  these  rupturing,  self-immolating experiences were felt  to  radiate  with  a  revitalizing,  beautifying  power.  As  he  explains,  “the  film  ends  in   such  a  clarity,  serenity,  and  peace  that  it  leaves  one  in  ecstasy,  admiration,  wonder”  – an assertion that intersects with a number of statements made by Mekas on the healthy, life- affirming forms that violence and destruction sometimes assume.206 For Mekas, these ecstatic, blissful experiences were valued for their ability to erode the contours of the artificial, socially-imposed egos circumscribing an individual’s  thoughts,  perceptions,   and feelings, so that he or she might gain some insight into some eternal realm of truth or beauty. 203 Mekas,  “Movie  Journal,”  Village Voice 1 July 1959: 6. 204 Ibid 6, 11. 205 Ibid 6, 11. 206 Ibid 11. 81 It  is  neither  surprising  nor  problematic  that  Mekas’s  formulation  of  this   delightfully  incongruous  understanding  of  cinema’s  potential – somehow both spiritual and secular, transcendent and profane – appears in a review of what would now be considered a rather traditional instance of European art cinema, whose use of symbolism and classical narrative economy Mekas would later denounce as commercial, uncinematic,  pure  “theatre.”207 In his early years at Film Culture and the Voice,  Mekas’s   attempt to envision a new cinema wholly other than that being mass-produced by Hollywood or meticulously composed by a budding culture of international auteurs – his interest,  as  he  once  put  it,  in  a  “cinema  that  doesn’t  yet  exist”  – occurred through a sort of critical bricolage, whereby Mekas culled glimpses of vividness and intensity from the otherwise formulaic, clichéd workings of various B-grade Hollywood thrillers and science fiction movies, independent documentaries, star performances, and foreign arthouse offerings, and then assembled these into a haphazard, patchwork imagination of the cinematic that, to him, eventually came to be most fully embodied or realized by the NAC.208 We can say, then, that the fascination and excitement Mekas exhibits in his review of Wild Strawberries stems  from  this  work’s  dramatization  of  the  intimate,  life- altering experiences that the films of the NAC would come to perform. In other words, while  Bergman’s  film  narrates  a  series  of  encounters  with  these  experiences  through  the   figure of a protagonist, thereby leaving the viewer to feel or undergo them vicariously, the NAC seeks to present these experiences in all their concreteness and immediacy through the matter of film itself, so that the viewer might encounter their forcefulness 207 Mekas, Movie Journal 23. 208 Mekas,  “Movie  Journal,”  Village Voice 13 April 1960: 10. 82 directly.209 The  impact  these  “lashes  of  experiences  and  memories”  have  on  the  old   doctor in Wild Strawberries is precisely the work that the films of the NAC seek to accomplish:  they  mean  to  “do  something  good  to  us,”  to  reactivate  the  inner  recesses  of   man’s  soul.210 Such statements on cinematic immediacy demonstrate how, for artists of the NAC, it was only when the intimate artistic products of their personal film practice were projected to a public audience that cinema revealed its true redemptive potential: its ability  to  “move  our  corrupt  little  minds  and  hearts”  or  more  simply  “to  refresh  us…”211 The  NAC’s  inward  turn  was  motivated  not  only by a deeply felt anxiety about the decline of  inner  experience,  but  also  by  a  belief  in  cinema’s  ability  to  counter  this  tendency  on  a   potentially  mass  scale.  It  was  not  merely  cinema’s  usefulness  for  self-expression but its unique combination of an intimate form and a public mode of address that allowed this seemingly sterile communications technology to assume a new and vital function, becoming the privileged medium through which artists of the NAC sought to create new forums for the cultivation of inner experience. By considering how this ambition gained expression  in  the  NAC’s  films,  we  can  better  understand  its  terms  and  implications. V. Toward a Grammar of Filmic Immediacy Each  aspect  of  this  movement’s  inward  turn  – its motivating concern over the decline of interiority, and its outward orientation toward the viewer – informed its aesthetic rebellion. Though frequently phrased as a rejection of form and formal 209 Kelman 24-25. 210 Mekas,  “Movie  Journal,”  Village Voice 1 July 1959: 11; Mekas, Movie Journal 64. 211 Mekas, Movie Journal, 64; Kelman,  “Anticipations,”  25. 83 concerns, this rebellion in fact depended on the development of a complex formal vocabulary emphasizing signs of amateurism and contingency as markers of spontaneity. Paraphrasing Roland Barthes, we might describe these signs as carriers of a distinct “immediacy  effect.”212 The visual dimensions of this vocabulary are well-known: the incorporation of shaky, hand-held camerawork, over- and underexposed shots, unconventional framing, and abstract sequences; the use of grainy, black and white 16mm film stock originally intended for newsreels and military surveillance; the blending of fictional sequences involving non-professional actors, location shooting, and improvisation with vérité footage – all strategies serving to convey what Ricky Leacock once  described  as  “the  feeling  of  being  there.”213 Yet this production of immediacy also involved important sonic components, including highly innovative experiments with sync sound cameras, forays into pseudo-spontaneous voiceover, and perhaps more significantly,  a  frequent  incorporation  of  various  “impure”  and  improvisatory  musical   forms. While postwar musical genres such as rock and jazz provided valuable models for filmic  improvisation  throughout  the  ‘60s,  these  musical  forms  became  important   resources  in  the  NAC’s  redemptive  project  because  of  their  ability  to  generate  intense   feelings of vitality and presentness in their audience. A prime example of this imbrication of sonic and visual strategies can be found in Mekas’s  own  use  of  folk  songs  in  his  first  feature,  Guns of the Trees, an experimental narrative film that centers on a pair of young couples living in New York City, but which mainly  seeks  to  evoke  the  more  general  “atmosphere”  of  Cold  War  America.  This   atmosphere is figured in the film as a constant and unpredictable oscillation between 212 Roland  Barthes,  “The  Reality  Effect”  in  The Rustle of Language, tr. Richard Howard (New York: Oxford, 1986). 213 Quoted  in  Mekas,  “Notes,”  93. 84 paranoia and potential, or between the sense of despair inherited by the new generation after the destructive legacy of WWII, and glimpses of the nascent – but still vulnerable – culture of hopefulness this new generation was working to create. The two sides of this conflict are signified visually through the film’s  juxtaposition  of  barren  cityscapes  and   white-collar work environments that actively militate against any expression of personality with scenes depicting heartwarming quotidian occurrences, such as spontaneous dance sessions, children skipping, and friends playing in the rain. But this contrast figures sonically as well. For instance, a series of vitriolic poetry interludes spoken in voiceover by Ginsberg portray Cold War America as a terrifying collage of atomic bombs, depthless mass spectacles, environmental destruction, and pervasive government  surveillance,  though  Ginsberg’s  recitation  of  a  portion  of  his  “Sunflower   Sutra”  in  the  closing  moments  of  the  film  still  leaves  room  for  a  glimmer  of  optimism,   celebrating  the  “beautiful  golden  sunflowers”  growing beneath the wreckage of western modernity  in  the  depths  of  the  human  soul.  The  film’s  music  similarly  alternates  between   an actively irritating, flute-heavy score composed by Lucia Dlugoszewski – which resembles the sound of air raid sirens, evoking the looming threat of nuclear catastrophe – and  “warmer”  folk  songs  featuring  fiddles  and  banjos,  imperfect  guitar  picking,  and   earnestly-sung  lyrics  about  birds,  crying,  and  the  open  seas.  Affirming  James  J.  Farrell’s   observation that the resurgence of folk music  in  the  early  ‘60s  was  part  of  a  broader   cultural  rebellion  against  “the  mechanical  modernism  of  the  Atomic  Age,”  Guns of the Trees employs folk as a way of gesturing to an escape route from the dehumanizing confines of Cold War American culture, or of cinematically imagining a simpler, more organic mode of living.214 Indeed, two separate scenes – one at a bohemian house party, 214 James J. Farrell, The Spirit of the Sixties: Making Postwar Radicalism (New York: Routledge, 1997) 73. 85 another at a bar – feature folk songs performed by musicians within the diegesis, as if Guns of the Trees were attempting to filmically  extract  folk’s  intimate  cultural  cachet,  its   emphasis on oral tradition and small-scale performances, to convey a fleeting feeling of togetherness  to  the  viewer,  one  capable  of  overcoming  cinema’s  inherent  separation  of   profilmic activities from the audience. Mekas’s  interest  in  utilizing  folk  to  produce  such  intimate  effects  can  be  seen   quite  clearly  in  this  film’s  most  whimsical  scene,  where  Ben  (Ben  Carruthers)  and  Argus   (Argus Spear Juillard) are found lazing in an overgrown field at the margins of the city as the  sun  shines  down  and  a  rendition  of  “Little  Birdie”  plays  on  the  soundtrack.  The   couple approaches an empty freight car at the edge of a rail yard bordering the field. As an amused Argus looks on, Ben begins to play, pouncing into and atop the car as if he were  a  hobo  hopping  a  ride.  The  sense  of  spontaneity  conveyed  by  Ben’s  improvised  act   is amplified by the use of shaky, imprecise camerawork, which lags behind and fails to frame  portions  of  Ben’s  performance,  as  well  as  by  the  addition of a pair of quick jump cuts that interrupt the action at unexpected moments. These markers of amateur filmmaking are echoed by the rough-hewn quality of the vocals, banjo playing, and fiddle work featured in the song, which are riddled with accidental dissonances and traces of materiality (hesitations, the grain of the voice, etc.) Such technical imperfections generate a rather tangled cluster of responses in the viewer. Along with their vaguely endearing quality, they serve as indices of bodily presence that  seem  to  “humanize”  the  highly  mechanical  processes  of  film  and  music   production  in  a  manner  that  resonates  with  the  scene’s  bucolic  setting,  conveying  a   feeling of reciprocity to the viewer – a sense of being directly involved with the actors 86 and filmmakers  responsible  for  this  sequence’s  production  – that is suggestive of the face-to-face exchanges of pre-modern  communities.  Anticipating  Kelman’s  claim  that   Hollywood’s  repressiveness  resulted  from  its  unnecessary  addition  of  layers  of  artificial   mediation, Guns of the Trees does not utilize such imperfections to effect a cognitive awareness  of  cinema’s  technological  base  (as  in  Brechtian  distancing),  but  to  naturalize   the filmic apparatus to the point of its disappearance. Providing an illusory sense of involvement with the activities comprising the profilmic, amateur imperfections thus function in this film as instances of cinematic excess: traces of contingency that seem to exceed the logic of classical representation. As Mekas knew very well from his experiences as a film critic, encounters with cinematic excess can generate what Paul Willemen  has  described  as  an  invigorating,  affective  “spark”  in  the  viewer  trained  in   conventional modes of cinematic perception, producing the sort of stirring, revelatory experiences that Mekas originally discovered while watching decidedly non-classical iterations of postwar cinema.215 Indeed, in a 1962 description of Guns of the Trees, Mekas  explains  that  the  film’s  messy  aesthetic  developed  as  a  conscious  effort  to  create an essentially excessive cinema that would be more conducive to such experiences. By jettisoning conventions of narrative realism and coherence for a disordered, untidy form modeled  as  an  “accumulative  emotional  fresco,”  he  hoped  to  “confront  [the  viewer], eye to  eye,  with  the  soul  of  modern  man.”216 The inclusion of impure sounds and images was thus part of a strategy to force the viewer to encounter the irrational workings of inner experience. 215 Willemen describes this experience as a mode of cinephilic pleasure in Looks and Frictions: Essays in Cultural Studies and Film Theory (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1994) 235-242. 216 Mekas,  “Notes,”  97. 87 Though created within a decidedly different socio-political context, Lionel Rogosin’s  feature  length  docu-fiction, Come Back, Africa (1959) utilizes amateur techniques and footage of musical performances to produce a similar feeling of intimacy. Like Guns of the Trees,  Rogosin’s  film  exhibits  a  palpable  anxiety  about  the   dehumanizing effects of modernization. Here, however, these effects are localized in the urban spaces of apartheid-era Johannesburg, and the revitalizing force of the human spirit emerges primarily from the dynamic environs of Sophiatown, an impoverished yet culturally vibrant suburb of Johannesburg that was in the process of being razed by the South African government when Rogosin shot his film in 1958. Though it may seem problematic to consider a film about South African apartheid within the context of an analysis  of  anxieties  about  privacy  in  the  postwar  United  States,  Rogosin’s  motivation  for   making Come Back, Africa in fact intersects in important ways with the postwar privacy crisis discussed  above,  and  particularly  with  the  way  in  which  this  crisis  was  “scripted”   as a development intricately bound up with totalitarianism. In his posthumously published memoirs of his experiences creating this film, for instance, Rogosin explains that he was driven to make Come Back, Africa because, in the aftermath of WWII, he felt a  strong  “conviction  that  anything  remotely  resembling  fascism  had  to  be  fought  with  all   the  energy  that  one  could  possibly  muster.”217 For Rogosin, the distressing parallels he saw between the legacy of Nazism and the barbaric racism structuring daily life in both South  Africa  and  the  United  States  left  him  with  a  “desperate  need  to  communicate  to   people  everywhere  the  disastrous  effects  of  such  unchecked  primitive  behaviour,”  thus 217 Rogosin, op. cit., 18. 88 motivating  his  decision  to  “fight  this  ill-conceived ideology with the most effective weapon  available  to  me,  cinema.”218 In  a  manner  that  resonates  with  Arendt’s  and  Marcuse’s  belief  that  the  novelty  of   totalitarianism resided in its eradication of all forms of privacy and humanness, Come Back, Africa frequently associates the dehumanizing effects of apartheid with the impoverished living conditions suffered in the slums and suburbs of Johannesburg, exhibiting a clear anxiety over the lack of stable home-spaces in these locales and on the negative impact that racism has on notions of selfhood and identity. For instance, the South  African  government’s  destruction  of  Sophiatown  is  continuously  registered   through shots of crumbling houses and haphazardly assembled shanties vulnerable to external threats, and the living conditions endured in such areas are repeatedly designated by the film as animalistic or inhuman, whether through cutaways to the many, undomesticated animals that mill about in these areas, or through exchanges of dialogue concerning  the  government’s  refusal  to  let  black  South  Africans  to  “live  like  people.”  The   lack of stable spaces of privacy is ultimately represented as tragic. Toward the end of the film, police burst into the bedroom of Vinah,  who  is  the  wife  of  the  film’s  protagonist,   Zacharia, a black migrant worker who moves to the city in search of employment only to suffer the dehumanizing effects of apartheid. The police find Zacharia sleeping illegally in  Vinah’s  bed  and  arrest  him.  A  short while later, in what is the most devastating scene of the film, Vinah is home alone in a sparse room she has rented in Sophiatown while Zacharia remains in jail. A local gangster, Marumu, enters the home and murders her, undeterred by the flimsy door that separates this interior realm from the outside world. The porosity of the public/private divide, or the vulnerability that results from the loss of 218 Ibid 18. 89 a  secure  border  between  the  domestic  and  the  social,  thus  figures  at  the  heart  of  the  film’s   condemnation of apartheid. Alongside this attention to the dangers that result from a deprivation of privacy, however, Come Back, Africa also devotes a good deal of time to celebrating the forms of public intimacy that circulate through Sophiatown, largely by way of a representation of the many vibrant musical performances that flash up in this space, and the punctual, fluid communities these performances generate. As a politically-charged examination of racial divisions in South Africa, Come Back, Africa was shot secretly with a small crew, a cast of non-professional actors, a loose script, and a rushed production schedule to evade government censorship. Despite these considerable material limitations, however, the film employs specific audio-visual techniques to establish a coherent opposition between the liveliness of Sophiatown and the impersonal deadness of Johannesburg. In  keeping  with  Rogosin’s  personal  impression  of  Johannesburg  as  a  “ghost  city”   whose  gloomy  architecture  and  “death-like  silence”  conveyed  a  sense of impending violence, a recurring series of documentary sequences portray the city as an inhuman space where alienated masses file to and from work surrounded by rigid, modernist high- rises, eerily unpopulated construction sites, and broad patches of urban waste and debris. The images are largely seen through observational long shots frequently taken from detached, elevated positions with a static camera, and are often accompanied by the repetitive, mechanical rhythms of drumbeats, though the initially silent architectural sequence that opens the film is suddenly punctuated by the more distressing sound of an alarm bell ringing.219 219 Ibid 22. 90 Sophiatown on the other hand is figured as an intensely rich source of energy and community, a haphazardly assembled shantytown whose relative disorder and porosity allows impromptu forms of collectivity to suddenly emerge into being, whether on a street corner or in a shebeen frequented by a young Miriam Makeba. In contrast to the observational images of Johannesburg, the most extensive documentary sequence depicting life in Sophiatown utilizes footage taken primarily from handheld or mobile cameras positioned at street level, which is edited into highly dynamic sequences that employ multiple, short takes and framings that shift between long shots of group activities and closer images of local residents. Ostensibly following Zacharia and Vinah as they stroll through Sophiatown in search of housing, the camera encounters four separate musical performances in the open streets: a large and highly improvisatory drum and whistle circle; a few men playing horns; a small group of men singing religious hymns; and an expansive wedding party accompanied by musicians with drums and horns.  While  this  sequence’s  visuals  seem  to  mimic  the  dynamic, improvisational character of the music featured on the soundtrack, the camera itself responds to the inclusive energy that radiates from these performances, becoming progressively immersed in the groups it documents until it finds itself in the middle of the dance floor at the wedding reception, surrounded by horns, sharply-dressed men, and dancing children. Unlike  its  silent,  ghostly  counterpart,  Sophiatown  held  an  “almost  magical   quality”  for  Rogosin  that  he  associated  closely  with  this  suburb’s  integration of music into daily life.220 In his account of Come Back, Africa’s  production,  he  discusses  how  the   brass bands, penny whistlers, and singers that he came across when visiting Sophiatown 220 Ibid 33. 91 generated  a  “highly  contagious”  spirit,  or  an  especially  palpable  atmosphere  of  “rapport”   whose swirling, affective currents would inevitably fill visitors to this suburb with a vitalizing sense of humanness and fellow-feeling.221 For Rogosin, the highly affective, sympathetic atmosphere produced by such musical performances was inherently political: it allowed outsiders to develop a deeper, more personal understanding of the African people that could cut across artificial barriers such as race and nationality, giving them an embodied  experience  of  the  “warmth  of  life”  pervading Sophiatown that could replace distorted representations of African culture.222 Because Rogosin believed that neorealist filmic strategies could provide viewers with a profound feeling of proximity to or involvement with persons and communities depicted on screen, he adopted a neorealist style when filming musical performances and daily activities in Sophiatown in an effort to capture the intimate atmosphere of this locale and transmit it in a highly tactile manner to audiences throughout the world, affording  them  a  “sense  of  direct  personal  contact”   with  Sophiatown’s  invigorating  ambience.223 “I  didn’t  want  the  film  to  be  a  pure  polemic   on  political  terms  ‘about’  the  wrongs  and  injustice  of  apartheid,”  Rogosin  writes,  “I   wanted also a communication of human spirit so that the people on the other side of the barrier could feel emotionally what Africa really is like and not what their particular mentality has created for them – the  stereotype  image.”224 As  with  Mekas’s  embrace  of   excess,  Rogosin’s  interest  in  cinema’s  immediacy  and  tactility  was  predicated  on  an   assumption that such inner, emotional modes of knowledge had fallen into disrepair with the onset of late modernity. 221 Ibid 34, 36. 222 Ibid 29. 223 Ibid 59. 224 Ibic 34. 92 The intimate value attributed to improvisational music also comes through in a number  of  the  NAC’s  engagements  with  jazz,  a  musical  form  whose  capacity  to  produce   intense sensations of immediacy in both artist and audience afforded it a central role in this  movement’s  films.  While  jazz  music  is  thus  employed  at  the  level  of  the  soundtrack to convey a sense of modernity in works such as Shadows, Lemon Hearts (Vernon Zimmerman, 1960), The Flower Thief (Ron Rice, 1960), and The Cool World (Shirley Clarke,  1964),  Bert  Stern’s  documentary  of  the  1958  Newport  Jazz  Festival,  Jazz on a Summer’s  Day (1959), utilizes footage of live performances by musicians such as Louis Armstrong and Mahalia Jackson to produce a feeling of directness that Mekas was quick to  invest  with  redemptive  potential.  “The  young  works  of  the  New  American  Cinema   [such as Jazz  on  a  Summer’s  Day] are criticized by audience and reviewers for their roughness  and  for  their  technical  imperfections,”  he  complained  in  a  “Movie  Journal”   entry  from  the  spring  of  1960,  adding  “if  we  could  just  sit,  open-eyed, completely noncritical, and be anti-art, anti-cinema  for  ten  minutes,  going  through  a  sort  of  Actors’   Studio  ‘seeing’  lesson—we  might  start  a  revolution  in  ourselves.”225 Even  Shirley  Clarke’s  The Connection (1962), which departs dramatically from then-fashionable vérité conventions, employs footage of jazz performances in a similar manner. Though The Connection presents these performances in a thoroughly fictional context, purporting to provide documentation of a group of jazz-musician junkies originally recorded for a documentary about  drug  addiction,  the  film’s  artificial  narrative   is continuously interrupted by lengthy sequences of hard bop sessions featuring musicians such as Freddie Redd and Jackie McLean. Generally shot with a roaming camera that slowly glides past or quickly pushes in on the sweaty faces and jumping 225 Mekas, Movie Journal, 15-16. 93 fingers of such musicians, these musical sequences pierce through the fictional gloss of the mise-en-scène,  bringing  the  filmic  image’s  indexical  character  to  the  fore  and   producing a seemingly direct relationship between film and viewer that denies the voyeuristic distance typically fostered by narrative cinema. For Clarke, this sense of directness  was  central  to  her  understanding  of  cinema’s  dance-like qualities. As she states in an interview with Gretchen Berg published in a 1967 issue of Film Culture: In The Connection, when the camera is in the middle of a group and chases after one character, thus rotating 360 degrees, here you have a very definite  dance  sensation.  Basically,  what  you’re  including  is  a  kinetic   response  in  the  audience…  All  my  films  are  dance  films…  [W]hen  I  try  to   communicate with my cameraman sometimes I find myself dancing in order to describe the camera movements I want him to do. I am trying to give him my rhythm, my breathing. Hopefully, this is then communicable to the audience.226 Though  articulated  in  a  less  romantic  way,  Clarke’s  belief  in  the  “dance  film”  as  an   iteration of cinema capable of transmitting the internal and corporeal rhythms of the director to the audience parallels Stan Brakhage’s  and  Mekas’s  more  well-known statements  on  the  camera  as  an  “extension”  of  the  author’s  body  or  nervous  system.227 Clarke does not invest this communicative capacity with a redemptive potential. However, her interest in employing kinetic techniques to overcome the barrier between artist and audience speaks to her belief that cold war culture was defined by a palpable absence of intimacy and relationality. As she stated in a later interview with Lauren Rabinovitz: Everybody thought the film—like the play—was mainly about drug addiction. But I do not think that is what the play is about, nor do I think the film is about that.  I  think  it’s  about  alienation,  and  that  was  something  with  which  I  did   226 Gretchen  Berg,  “Interview  with  Shirley  Clarke,”  Film Culture 44 (1967) 52-53. 227 See  for  instance:  Brakhage’s  statement on  the  camera  quoted  in  Michelson  417;;  Mekas,  “Where  Are   We”  20-21. 94 identify. Those were the days when I had a deep understanding of the word [alienation], and drugs as yet had nothing to do with it.228 Though  also  a  fictional  film,  Frank  and  Leslie’s  Pull My Daisy culminates in an intra-diegetic jazz session that relates to those featured in both The Connection and Jazz on a Summer’s  Day. Based on the third act of an unproduced play written by Jack Kerouac, and featuring performances by Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, and Peter Orlovsky, the film depicts a humorous encounter between some drunk poets, a railroad worker named Milo, his wife, and a Bishop in a Manhattan loft, which ends when Milo and a friend  suddenly  take  up  horns  and  begin  playing  jazz.  Extending  the  Beats’  attempts  to   produce a spontaneous mode of literary composition modeled on jazz, Pull My Daisy seeks to integrate jazz’s  improvisational  dynamic  at  the  level  of  film  form, utilizing quick, jerky camera movements, imperfect framing, improvised performances, shots of inconsequential objects and details, and a slang-ridden, pseudo-free-form voiceover performed by Kerouac to create  what  Mekas  heralded  as  a  “true  cinemadynamics,”  or  a   mode  of  film  practice  aimed  not  only  at  achieving  a  direct  “contact”  with  the  flux  of   “immediate  experience,”  but  also  at  transmitting  the  tactile  “impact”  of  this  experience  to   the viewer.229 Describing Pull My Daisy as  a  highly  affective  “portrait  of  the  inner   condition  of  an  entire  generation,”  Mekas  conceived  the  event  of  viewing  this  film  as  a   sort of reciprocal play between twin interiorities: the film is said to project, into the viewer’s  inmost core, a chaotic audio-visual expression of inner experience itself.230 Along with their shared interest in improvised musical forms and performances, films such as Guns of the Trees, Come Back, Africa, and Pull My Daisy also exhibit a 228 Lauren  Rabinovitz,  “Choreography  of  Cinema:  An  interview  with  Shirley  Clarke,”  Afterimage 11.5 (December 1983): 10. 229 Mekas,  “Cinema  of  the  New  Generation,”  14,  13,  17. 230 Ibid 14. 95 problematic  affiliation  of  intimacy  with  persons  of  color.  Echoing  Rogosin’s  valorization   of  the  “authenticity,”  “exuberance,”  and  “enjoyment  of  life”  displayed  by  black  South   Africans, Guns of the Trees frequently contrasts the spontaneous movements, amorous interactions, and carefree attitude of Ben and Argus (both of whom are portrayed by non- white  actors)  with  the  existential  brooding  of  this  couple’s  white  friends.231 In contrast, Pull My Daisy offers what Parker Tyler once criticized as an  uncomfortably  “ofay”   portrait of bohemianism.232 Nevertheless, its celebration of jazz as a means of intimate revolt  is  part  and  parcel  with  the  Beats’  well-known romanticization of the African American jazz musician as a symbol of intuitive knowledge, sexual energy, psychic union, and social detachment.233 In keeping with what Sally Banes has termed the “essentialist  positive  primitivism”  that  structured  countercultural  engagements  with  race   during  the  ‘60s  – that is, the assumption that favorable qualities were engendered by race itself  and  intrinsic  to  racial  minorities,  who  were  often  held  to  be  closer  to  humanity’s   “natural”  condition  – non-white bodies and cultural practices are located in these films as latent reserves of intimate potential, or natural resources from which the vitality being suffocated by then-dominant white culture could be extracted, harnessed, and transmitted to the viewer with the aid of cinema.234 For Banes, this primitivizing tendency reflects the broader  “anti-enlightenment triumph of  the  body  over  rationality”  that  held  sway  in  the   ‘60s  counterculture.235 Because the body was affiliated with an inner, irrational mode of 231 Rogosin 23, 24, 33. 232 Parker  Tyler,  “For  Shadows, Against Pull My Daisy,”  in  Film Culture Reader 111. 233 James discusses this aspect of Beat culture in Allegories 96-98. 234 Sally Banes, Greenwich Village 1963: Avant-Garde Performance and the Effervescent Body (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993) 206. 235 Ibid 206. 96 knowledge,  the  “surplus  embodiment”  displayed  by  various  racial  and  ethnic  minorities   came to be a vital asset in the  NAC’s  redemptive  project.236 Edward  Bland’s  The Cry of Jazz (1959) directly engages this relationship between improvisatory music, immediacy, and race, while also approaching it in a manner that differs from other works affiliated with the NAC. An essay film that was made by a group of African American intellectuals in Chicago, The Cry of Jazz was promptly embraced  by  Mekas  as  a  work  of  the  NAC  for  its  intense  “passion”  and  personal   vision.237 Bland’s  film  features  extensive  sequences  depicting  jazz  performances, including rare documentary footage of Sun Ra and his Arkestra playing a score composed by Bland himself.238 Employing a framing structure that mimics generic conventions of the educational film – a dramatic depiction of a racially charged argument between black and white members of a Chicago jazz club leads to a detailed exposition on the nature of jazz – Bland’s  work  sets  out  a  polemical  view  of  jazz  as  an  authentic  cultural  expression   of  the  “American  Negro.”239 Though  the  film  does  confirm  jazz’s  inherent claim to improvisation  and  “presentness,”  Bland  also  recasts  this  temporal  character  as  a  direct   outgrowth of the oppressive living conditions suffered historically by African Americans. Having been stripped of all forms of cultural history and collective memory by slavery and denied any capacity to imagine a viable future by American racism, Bland argues, African Americans created jazz as a means for achieving spiritual transcendence through a  “worship  of  time  in  its  vivid  present”:  “Jazz  is  a  musical  expression  of  the  Negro’s   236 On  the  “surplus  embodiment”  invested  in  gendered  and  raced  subjects  in  American  culture,  see  Lauren   Berlant, The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), esp. ch. 3. 237 Mekas,  “New  York,”  121. 238 Edward  Bland,  “On  ‘The  Cry  of  Jazz,’”  Film Culture 21 (Summer, 1960): 31. 239 Ibid 30. 97 eternal re-creation  in  the  eternal  present.”240 The  white  hipster’s  turn  to  jazz  in  the  1950s   is thus viewed by Bland as an instance of cultural appropriation, though The Cry of Jazz also discerns a kernel of hope in this appropriation,  arguing  that  white  America’s   engagement with the vital spirit inherent in jazz might give them access to a form of humanness that they otherwise lack. Much  like  Mekas  and  Kelman,  Bland  also  expressed  an  interest  in  utilizing  film’s   directness and immediacy to reconfigure the relational dynamic of spectatorship. Throughout the film, the pedagogical voiceover is supplemented by vérité-style documentary footage shot in African American communities throughout Chicago, which presents fleeting glimpses of black children and adults playing, walking, conversing, working, shooting pool, and singing – images that seek to embody what the film describes  as  the  spirit  of  “joy  in  suffering”  that  defines  jazz.  As  Bland  explains  in  a   statement concerning the aesthetic basis of The Cry of Jazz, this footage was central to his construction  of  the  film  as  a  sort  of  “religious  ritual”: Religious in the sense that everywhere one touches, hears, sees, or feels one encounters the variegatedness of the subject matter while experiencing its identity; and ritualistic in the sense that the musical, visual, and literary operations would so cohere as to create a particular pantheon of values expressive of the essence of the being and becoming of the American Negro.241 Bland’s  emphasis  on  the  tactile  and  emotional  character  of  this  audio-visual encounter, and  his  investment  in  film’s  ability  to  transmit  the  “essence”  of  the  American  Negro’s   spiritual struggle to the viewer, demonstrates significant overlaps between The Cry of Jazz’s  guiding  project  and  the  redemptive  ambitions  of  the  NAC.  Yet  Bland’s   subordination  of  the  film’s  documentary  footage  to  its  thesis,  a  decision  that  stemmed   240 Ibid 29. 241 Ibid 31. 98 from his belief in the necessity of linguistically anchoring the polysemic character of the filmic image to avoid misinterpretation, also indicates the considerable distance existing between the pedagogical thrust of The Cry of Jazz and the valorization of irrationality exhibited by a film like Pull My Daisy.  For  Bland,  the  jazz  musician’s  “worship of the vividness  of  the  present  moment”  was  said  to  fulfill  a  vital  function  for  African   Americans of the postwar era, allowing them to temporarily regain the freedom of soul they had been denied by American racism. Yet The Cry of Jazz ultimately casts improvisatory immediacy as an imperfect mode of cultural resistance. Because improvisation holds no future orientation, the film argues, it is merely a holding action and is of no use in effecting the wide-scale social transformation demanded by the inhuman conditions of late-modern America. VI. Between Presentness and Pedagogy I end with this note on the role of pedagogy in The Cry of Jazz because I think this film’s  attention  to  the  shortcomings  of  presentness  offers  an  important  corrective  to  the   revolutionary  claims  that  came  to  structure  the  NAC’s  redemptive  project.  As  has  been   shown,  Mekas  believed  that  this  movement’s  personal  films  were  capable  of  transforming   the underlying spiritual composition of the individual viewer. And it was his hope that this transformation would cause the viewer to alter his or her activities and beliefs, forcing  this  viewer  to  encounter  the  essential  “goodness”  of  humanity  in  a  manner  that   would lead him or her to thereby reject the immorality and ugliness of postwar American society and pursue a more beautiful mode of living.242 Yet the connection between these two moments – one’s  encounter  with  inner  experience,  and  one’s  decision  to  act  in  a   242 Mekas, Movie Journal 131. 99 more moral way – was not theorized by Mekas during his initial formulation of the NAC’s  redemptive  project.  Which  is  to  say,  because  Mekas  conceived  inner  experience   as  fundamentally  disorganized,  irrational,  anarchical,  and  even  “stupid,”  his  theorization   of this project could not account for the way in which an intimate encounter with the spirit  of  “idiocy”  embodied  by  the  NAC’s  films  might  provide  viewers  with  a  more   truthful moral framework through which to navigate their subsequent engagements with the world.243 Over  the  course  of  the  ‘60s,  Mekas  would  increasingly  attempt  to account for this oversight through intermittent inquiries into the importance of form, which would eventually lead him to emphasize the moral function of aesthetic organization, and to critique amateur art for its distinctly debilitating effects. This shift in his critical position occurred more-or-less  contemporaneously  with  the  displacement  of  the  Beats’  anti- aesthetic  by  the  calculated  orderings  of  structural  film.  In  a  “Movie  Journal”  column  on   the films of Ken Jacobs published on July 17, 1969, for instance, Mekas states this newfound  investment  in  form  rather  bluntly:  “in  art  nothing  else  matters  besides  form.”244 These  later  analyses  of  form  reiterate,  in  a  modified  version,  Mekas’s  earlier  investment   in the transformative power of cinema, arguing that artworks with a clearly ordered form, where  form  is  defined  as  “that  radiance  from  within,  to  which  a  shape  attains  when  in  a   given  situation  it  realizes  itself  completely,”  have  the  capacity  to  “transform  [us]  into…   better  human  being[s]”  by  “get[ting]  very  directly  to  us,  and  mak[ing]  us  more  radiant,”   or  “produc[ing]  in  us  the  states  and  forms  of  radiance”  that  “help  to  sustain  man,   243 On  stupidity,  see:  Mekas,  “Notes  on the  New  American  Cinema”  92;;  Movie Journal 63-65. 244 Mekas, Movie Journal 351. 100 spiritually,  like  bread  does,  like  rain  does,  like  rivers,  like  mountains,  like  sun.”245 Yet in this naturalized conception of film practice, the productive function of art – its ability to directly  produce  the  radiant  forms  of  inner  experience  (“that  radiance  from  within”)  in  the   depths  of  a  viewer’s  spirit  – is  given  a  distinct  “shape,”  order,  and  coherence  (“All   confusing matters  eliminated”);;  in  short,  a  logic.246 In  its  essence,  Mekas’s  valorization  of  form’s  radiant  power  can  be  seen  as  an   attempt  to  put  forward  a  newly  formalist  iteration  of  the  NAC’s  redemptive  project.  And   the basic logic he comes to attribute to form might be understood as filling the aforementioned  theoretical  void  in  his  earlier  writings,  in  that  the  particular  “shape”  of   form’s  radiant  power  here  provides  the  viewer  with  something  like  a  moral  code  or   directive:  a  sensory  orientation  toward  “happiness”  that  prevents  one  from  living  a  life   that  is  in  conflict  with  “beauty  and  truth.”247 Indeed, in this same column, Mekas even refutes new criticisms of the American avant-garde voiced by members of the New Left who  rejected  the  “apolitical”  character  of  Jacobs’s  newly  formalist  works  in  the  wake  of   May  ’68,  by  asserting  that,  as  “manifestoes  of  the  politics  of  truth  and  beauty,”  a  politics   that  “mean[s]  no  harm,”  Jacobs’s  films  “belong  to  the  strongest  political  statements  made   by anybody working in cinema today.”248 However,  Mekas’s  movement  toward  a   pleasant, harmless political art and away from his earlier interest in the violent, defamiliarizing intensity of avant-garde cinema seems to have been accompanied by a decline in his capacity to conceive anything like political action.249 245 Ibid 351-52. Mekas attributes this definition to Bernard Berenson. 246 Ibid 351. 247 Ibid 351-52.  For  a  related  discussion  of  happiness,  see  Mekas,  “Notes  on  Some  New  Movies  and   Happiness”  in  Film Culture Reader. 248 Mekas, Movie Journal 351-52. 249 Ibid 1. 101 As  he  explains  in  an  earlier  “Movie  Journal”  entry:  “The  only  action,  besides   love,  that  one  can  take…  is…  to  increase  [man’s]  knowledge  of  himself  so  that  he   wouldn’t  do  anything  that  is  against  himself—because to do harm to others is to do harm to  yourself.”250 Published  on  September  26,  1968,  Mekas’  rejection  of  “action”  and   conflict  here  was  most  certainly  at  odds  with  the  New  Left’s  novel  approach  to  political   radicalism, which – as Michael Renov has argued – departed from the Popular  Front’s   goals of base-building  and  unification  by  seeking  “the  intensification  of  social   contradiction  to  the  point  of  rupture,”  rather  than  clean  solutions  to  political  problems.251 In  this  sense,  Mekas’s  valorization  of  form  at  the  end  of  the  ‘60s,  and the life-affirming, spiritual  reveries  that  accompany  an  encounter  with  the  “pleasant  currents”  of  affective   energy emitted by well-ordered artworks, would seem to offer a poignant example of what Marcuse referred to as the ultimately harmless, easily containable efforts to liberate the  human  sensibility  as  a  wholly  “private  factor,”  rather  than  “as  a  force  for   transformation  of  human  existence  and  of  its  environment.”252 For Marcuse, the revitalizing function assumed by radical aesthetics within the context of the affluent society – art’s  drive  to  reach  and  revitalize  human  interiority  – was positioned as the initial stage in a more long-term project of world transformation, one that art could never achieve on its own.253 According to him, the process of carrying out such  a  project  always  “remains  the  task  of  political  action”  where  “the  artist  participates   not as artist.”254 As a means for moving from one stage of this radical project to the 250 Ibid 323. 251 Michael  Renov,  “Newsreel:  Old  and  New.  Towards  an  Historical  Profile,”  Film Quarterly 41:1 (Autumn, 1987): 22. 252 Mekas, Movie Journal 309;;  Marcuse,  “Liberation  from  the  Affluent  Society”  82. 253 Ibid 81. 254 Marcuse,  “Art  in  the  One-Dimensional  Society”  in  Collected Papers of Herbert Marcuse, Volume Four: Art and Liberation, ed. Douglas Kellner (New York: Routledge, 2007) 122. 102 other, Marcuse placed a crucial emphasis on pedagogy, or more precisely, on a form of education  that  “must  involve  the  mind  and the body, reason and imagination, the intellectual and the  instinctual  needs.”255 It was his belief that such a form of education would  be  capable  of  acknowledging  late  capitalism’s  development  of  a  mode  of  “social   engineering”  capable  of  dominating  all  previously  private  realms  of  human  experience,   while still insisting on the indispensable role of reason in providing such inherently unstructured experiences with a specific – and specifically political – rationality: namely, “the  reconstruction  of  the  polis.”256 To  the  extent  that  the  NAC’s  attempt  to  redeem   interiority refused to direct or orient the latter toward such a world-transformative practice,  its  desire  to  create  a  cinema  of  “luminous  colors  and  heavenly  sounds”  that   would  “change  our  cities,  our  faces,  our  movements,  our  voices,  [and]  our  souls”  could   only ever be incomplete.257 255 Marcuse,  “Liberation  from  the  Affluent  Society”  85.   256 Marcuse,  “Art  in  the  One-Dimensional  Society”  122. 257 Mekas,  “Where  Are  We”  21. 103 CHAPTER TWO HOMELESS MOVIES I. Bringing Man Home In a 1966 speech delivered to the Philadelphia College of Art, Jonas Mekas sought to explain the postwar American avant-garde’s  growing  emphasis  on  an  aesthetics   of amateurism by situating this emphasis as an artistic response to the widespread absence  of  “home”  in  late  modernity.  As  Mekas  states: What we are doing  comes  from  the  deeper  needs  of  man’s  soul.  Man  has   wasted himself outside himself; man has disappeared in his projections. We want to bring him down, into his small room, to bring him home. We want to remind him that there is such a thing as home, where he can be, once in a while, alone and with himself and with a few that he loves close to him, and be with himself and his soul—that’s  the  meaning  of  the  home   movie, the private visions of our movies.258 Though this passage is excerpted from a speech concerning  “underground”  film   specifically – or the more explicitly counter-cultural variant of American avant-garde film practice that is generally understood to have followed from the New American Cinema’s  (NAC)  dissolution  around  1963-64 – Mekas’s  description of the avant-garde filmmaker  as  someone  working  to  “bring  [man]  home”  in  fact  stands  as  a  highly   condensed summation of the redemptive project of the NAC. Here, the primary impetus driving avant-garde film practice lies in the basic lack of humanness and intimacy in modern  mass  society,  or  in  the  artist’s  sense  that  the  impersonal  conditions  of  life  in  the   postwar  U.S.  had  severed  man’s  relation  to  the  inmost  region  of  his  “soul.”  And  though   258 Jonas  Mekas,  “Where  Are  We—the  Underground?”  in  The New American Cinema: A Critical Anthology, ed. Gregory Battcock (New York: Dutton, 1967) 20. 104 the  inhuman  “projections”  of  postwar  mass  culture  are  deemed representative of (if not responsible  for)  this  condition,  in  keeping  with  Mekas’s  perception  of  the  productive   dimension  of  the  NAC’s  rebellion,  the  task  of  preserving  or  restoring  this  inner  realm  is   attributed wholly to cinema; or more specifically, to  a  “private”  mode  of  avant-garde film practice felt to be capable of bringing the viewer into a seemingly unmediated relation with the stuff of inner experience. As Mekas goes on to argue, the postwar American avant-garde’s  signal  achievement  lay  in  their creation  of  movies  that  are  “so  personal”   they  feel  “like  extensions  of  our  [the  filmmakers’]  own  pulse,  of  our  heartbeat,  of  our   eyes,  our  fingertips.”259 In  this  intensely  romantic  expression  of  cinema’s  intimate   potential, redemptive value is invested in cinema’s  immediacy  and  tactility,  as  the   relationship between artist and audience is conceived on the order of a direct caress or communion,  where  the  viewer  “experience[s]  admittance  into  the  sanctuary  of  [the   artist’s]  soul”  and  thereby  “become[s]  more  beautiful,”  as  Mekas  states  in  another   context.260 Restating the avant-garde’s  commitment  to  countering  modern  mass  society’s   hostility  to  interiority,  this  conception  of  cinema’s  redemptive  potential  – this belief in film’s  capacity  to  “bring  [man]  home”  – is still very much enmeshed in the postwar “privacy  crisis”  outlined  in  the  previous  chapter. Yet  there  is  something  curious  about  Mekas’s  investment  in  the  reparative   potential of home in this speech, or in his attempt to attribute some distinctly avant-garde value  to  a  mode  of  filmmaking  oriented  toward  restoring  man’s  relation  to  home.  Is  it   strange  that  Mekas’s  invocation  of  the  familiar  notion  of  homelessness-as-modern- 259 Ibid 20. 260 Mekas, Movie Journal: The Rise of the New American Cinema, 1959-1971 (New York: Macmillan, 1972) 47. On the event of spectatorship as a form of communion, see also Mekas’s  “Why  Do  People  Like   Morbid  Movies?”  New York Times 3 August 1969. 105 condition enters onto the scene of American cultural discourse at the tail end of a massive project of national domestication?261 As numerous historians of post-WWII American society have shown, and as my first chapter details, one of the most significant socio- cultural developments that occurred during this period of American life lay precisely in dominant  American  society’s  wide-scale embrace of suburbanization as a solution to the social and political unrest that took shape after the war, as well as the psychological turmoil induced by growing concerns over nuclear conflict. Over the course of the late 1950s, as extensive projects of suburban housing construction radically reconfigured the basic fabric of daily life for the large majority of middle-class Americans, the suburban household was idealized as a material repository of the stability, plenitude, and autonomy that postwar Americans longed for – a  “dream  house”  to  use  the  Levittian  rhetoric  of  the   moment.  And  as  the  “bedrock”  of  a  growing  mass-consumption economy, the suburban home also became inseparable from matters of patriotism and citizenship with the onset of the cold war, assuming enormous import in American domestic and international politics.262 Indeed, the stabilized and modernized form of domesticity manufactured by American mass culture during this period operated as the public face of capitalist democracy  itself:  employed  as  “weapons”  in  capitalist  propaganda,  glossy  images  of   domestic bliss were projected to the world at large as advertisements of an historically new brand of freedom founded on material affluence, heteronormative intimacy, and the sanctity of the private sphere.263 When combined with the actual mass settlement of the 261 For a useful summary of discourse on homelessness under modernity, see Anthony Vidler, “Introduction,”  The Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the Modern Unhomely (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992). 262 Lizabeth Cohen, A  Consumers’  Republic:  The  Politics  of  Mass  Consumption  in  Postwar  America (New York: Vintage, 2003) 122. 263 Beatriz Colomina, Domesticity at War (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007) 12. 106 new suburban frontier that occurred during the postwar era, the proliferation of such images  would  seem  to  make  redundant  Mekas’s  contemporaneous  assertion  of  the  need   to  “remind  [man]  that  there  is  such  a  thing  as  home.”   But  what  is  the  status  of  “home”  in  Mekas’s  speech?  As  is  suggested  by  his   occasional  diatribes  against  the  “Beautiful  American  Home”  in  his  “Movie  Journal”   column for the Village Voice, Mekas was not unaware of the social, political, and economic value that dominant American society had invested in the middle-class suburban household during the postwar era.264 Like other critics of normative domesticity writing at the time, he considered popular imaginations of the happy and healthy suburban home circulating through postwar culture to be wholly illusory, covering over the  actual  alienation  subtending  Americans’  private  lives  (as  well  as  the  injustices   structuring their social world) with a sheen of material abundance.265 It would thus be a mistake to align his attempt to envision an avant-garde film practice capable of bringing the modern individual back home with normative domestic propaganda of the cold war. Rather,  Mekas’s  decision  to  locate  homelessness  as  the  central  ailment  of  the  modern individual  reiterates  the  anxiety  he  expressed  continuously  throughout  the  early  ‘60s  over   postwar  American  society’s  perceived  eradication  of  the  workings  of  inner  experience.   By  stating  that  the  absence  of  home  concerns,  first  and  foremost,  “the  deeper needs of man’s  soul,”  Mekas  thereby  reframes  his  earlier  statements  on  the  value  of  human   interiority through recourse to a metaphor of home. Within the framework of this speech, 264 Mekas, Movie Journal 135, 186-88; see also 176-78. 265 This  position  is  expressed  most  fully  in  a  1961  “Movie  Journal”  entry,  wherein  Mekas  rejects  then- contemporary efforts to valorize the privately owned suburban household as the material embodiment of the American dream, arguing that the middle-class lifestyle subtending this dream was immoral and this apparently  “clean,  wise,  white  house”  was  itself  “really  disease-infested”  (Mekas,  “Movie  Journal,”  Village Voice 15 June 1961, 13). 107 home is not conceived as a stable site or space (house, homeland, etc.), but as an experiential condition arising from the cultivation of intimate relations, whether these be with  one’s  self  or  “soul”,  with  others  (those  “few  that  he  loves  close  to  him”),  or  even   with  cultural  products  (the  “projections”  comprising  the  individual’s  environment).   Though  Mekas  employs  a  metaphor  of  home  in  this  passage,  his  interest  in  cinema’s   capacity  to  “bring  [man]  home”  should  therefore  be  read  quite  literally:  it  was  his  belief   that  the  “private  visions”  being  publicized  by  the  avant-garde could cinematically generate the conditions of possibility for individuals to regain an experience of home, or reestablish contact with those inner experiences being denied expression by postwar American society. As a statement on the necessity of home put forward during a period within which the middle-class household was firmly positioned as the lynchpin of conservative ideology,  Mekas’s  reformulation  of  the  NAC’s  redemptive  project  in  this  speech   encapsulates an intriguing paradox structuring his critical writings from this period. Though he rejected the middle-class  lifestyle  sheltered  within  the  “disease-infested”   confines of the postwar suburban household, he nevertheless embraced the concept of home for its critical or oppositional value, asserting that avant-garde home movies could generate  a  form  of  intimate  relation  that  would  itself  function  as  a  “protest  and…  critique   of  the  existing  order  of  life…”  Which  is  to  say,  while  he  considered  the  dominant   configuration of domestic life holding sway in then-contemporary U.S. culture to be dehumanizing and impersonal, he simultaneously emphasized the need to retain the life- sustaining potential harbored within the figure of home, arguing that intimacy and vitality connoted by this figure were essential to any project of alternative world building. In 108 keeping  with  the  general  spirit  of  the  ‘60s  counterculture,  Mekas’s  conception  of  this   project  was  unabashedly  mystical:  he  speaks,  for  instance,  of  the  home  as  harboring  “that   wisdom  which  is  as  old  as  the  earth… the  mystical,  the  eternal,”  and  of  the  avant-garde’s   desire  to  locate  “something  joyful  deep  within  us,  deep  in  the  stars,  and…  bring  it  down   to earth so that it will change our cities, our faces, our movements, our voices, our souls…”266 In attempting to envision a process of world transformation and a condition of  being  “at  home,”  he  thus  swerved  perplexingly  into  the  otherworldly  and  the  astral.   Yet  despite  the  limitations  of  Mekas’s  program  for  social  change,  to  view  his  celebration   of such things as privacy, intimacy, and the home in this speech as simply apolitical or escapist would be to divorce it from its social and historical context. Mekas is here found articulating an alternative imagination of home within a socio-political climate wherein the meaning  of  “home”  was  not  supposed  to  be  up  for  debate.  When  viewed  alongside   cold  war  America’s  attempts  to  render  an  arbitrary,  historically  contingent  fiction  of   domestic life as the image of Home tout court,  Mekas’s  defense  of  the  home  movie   appears less like a reactionary call to abandon the political than something more closely resembling an instance of semiotic struggle. Rather than abandoning a concept that he knew to be central to conservative ideology of the period, Mekas asserts a claim over it, investing it with alternative values, meanings, affects, and origin stories. To  read  Mekas’s  speech  in  this  manner,  as  complicating  then-dominant efforts to naturalize and privatize the meaning of home by offering another narrative of home through which modes of avant-garde practice could be organized and articulated, it is not necessary  to  reclaim  Mekas  as  a  “radical”  figure  or  to  assert  that  his  writings  about  the   mystical  and  the  personal  were  “really”  political  all  along.  As we saw in the previous 266 Mekas,  “Where  Are  We”  19,  21. 109 chapter, amidst the increasing radicalization of the counterculture over the course the 1960s, Mekas sought to distance himself from both political activism and all forms of “action”  more  broadly  conceived.267 This was not a political filmmaker in any standard sense of the term. But he remained a filmmaker nevertheless, and not only one involved in the active creation of cultural objects and images, but one committed to the publicization of alternative representations of intimate spaces and activities at a time when such representations were subject to intense scrutiny, regulation, and resistance. In order to attend to the political import that such practices assumed within their specific, socio-historical context, it is necessary to adopt a less-conventional understanding  of  the  political,  one  capable  of  accounting  for  Mekas’s  involvement  in  a   struggle waged throughout the postwar period over the representation of domesticity and the  circulation  of  such  representations.  From  this  angle,  Mekas’s  defense  of  home   movies, his efforts to conceive the critical potential of home, and his own depiction of alternative home-spaces in the content of his films appear as attempts to contest the terms of appearance itself, or to challenge the norms and conventions that delimited commonly held  perceptions  of  home  within  postwar  American  culture.  The  stakes  of  this  “politics  of   representation”  concern  the  availability  to  perception  of  images,  scenarios,  and  narratives   of alternative modes of habitation with which individuals script personal trajectories and reorganize material practices. Yet in the context of the cold war, this practice also opened onto broader political horizons. Because images and notions of home were so laden with ideological value during this period, with the home functioning  as  a  “symbol  of   democratic  liberty”  in  Deborah  Nelson’s  terms,  the  avant-garde’s  attempts  to  revise  that   267 See,  for  instance,  Mekas’s  inclusion  of  Barbara  Rubin’s  claim  to  have  “abandoned  all  action”  in  his   “Notes  on  Some  New  Movies  and  Happiness,”  Film Culture Reader, ed. P. Adams Sitney (New York: Cooper Square, 2000) 323. 110 symbol – or to alter or interrupt the relationship between symbol and symbolized – also posed a threat to the grounding myths and assumptions structuring the new socio- psychological dwelling place constructed by late-modern capitalist democracy.268 Posing the question of home in the films and statements produced by this avant-garde, and of the strategies it employed to remind itself of the possibility of home, is thus simultaneously to ponder the uncanny architecture of that dwelling place, its historical failure to provide a viable refuge for the homeless. II. Homeless Movies Mekas’s  concern  over  the  absence  of  stable  dwelling  places  in  modernity cannot be divorced from his status as a displaced person uprooted from his home in Lithuania by the Second World War. As Jan-Christopher  Horak  has  recently  noted,  “the  idea  of   Heimat…  remains  the  structuring  absence  at  the  center  of  Mekas’s  work.”269 Yet in “Where  Are  We—the  Underground?,”  homelessness  is  not  framed  as  a  matter  of   displacement but of what Mekas perceived to be a more general sense of alienation pervading artistic circles in postwar New York City. Upon arriving in New York from Europe, Mekas explains in this speech, he was surprised to discover a whole culture of aimless artists whose core beliefs had been fractured much like his own by the atrocities of  WWII:  those  “poets,  and  filmmakers,  and  painters…  who  were  also  walking  like  one   thousand  painful  pieces.”270 268 Nelson, Pursuing Privacy in Cold War America (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002) xiv. 269 Jan-Christopher  Horak,  “Regarding  Mekas:  Avant-Garde  Film  and  Audience  Subjectivity,”  Millennium Film Journal 53 (Fall/Winter 2010-2011): 58. 270 Mekas,  “Where  Are  We”  18. 111 This assessment of the postwar avant-garde resonates in important ways with a central problematic of this artistic culture, one that is especially prevalent in the works of the NAC. Indeed, a general condition of homelessness saturates the filmic expressions of this movement, appearing sometimes as the primary subject matter of individual films, other times as a somewhat peripheral theme, symbol, or narrative device, and still other times as a more amorphous, extra-textual ground driving  a  particular  artist’s  engagement   with the cinematic. Different variations on this condition can be seen, for instance, in: the emphasis on disenfranchised and unsheltered populations or figures exhibited by films such as On the Bowery (1956), Come Back, Africa (1959), The Cry of Jazz (1959), The Cool World (1964), and The Brig (1964), as well as the ruminations on modern loneliness and urban alienation put forward in Shadows (1959), The Savage Eye (1959), and Guns of the Trees (1961); the celebration of beatific vagabondage displayed in Pull My Daisy (1959), The Flower Thief (1960), and Hallelujah the Hills (1963), and the more sober representations of rootlessness and exile seen in works such as Senseless (1962) and Quixote (1965); nostalgic or comedic lamentations over the destruction of Victorian-era houses by urban renewal seen in Centuries of June (1955) and Lemon Hearts (1960), as well as the imaginative recasting of marginal urban spaces as precarious sites of habitation in Willard  Maas’s  Narcissus (1956),  the  “rubble  films”  of  Jack  Smith,  or   Harold  Humes’s  never-completed Don Peyote. The temporary runaways and middle-class domestic ambitions represented in the films of Morris Engel (Little Fugitive [1953], Lovers and Lollipops [1956], and Weddings and Babies [1958]) are also pertinent here, as is the destabilization, inversion, or perversion of normative domestic interiors performed by works as diverse as Desistfilm (1954), Wedlock House (1959), Overstimulated (1960), 112 The Connection (1961), To  LA…  With  Lust  (1962), The Queen of Sheba Meets the Atom Man (1963/82), Little Stabs at Happiness (1959-63), and the early 8mm films of the Kuchar brothers (The Thief and the Stripper [1959], I Was a Teenage Rumpot [1960], Night of the Bomb [1962], The Confessions of Babette [1963], etc.) How can we account for the appearance of these different figures of homelessness in the films of the NAC? Although the intensely heterogeneous character of such films is generally understood to complicate any effort to conceive the NAC as a unified “movement,”  the  pervasiveness  of  homelessness  suggests  the  presence  of  a  heretofore   unacknowledged  “pressure  for  coherence”  structuring  and  binding  these  otherwise   distinct artistic productions.271 Homelessness operates in all of these films as something like a primary generative force – a disturbance that motivated the formulation of the filmic statements comprising this movement – or a point of cathexis upon which the divergent energies of the NAC converge. While this film culture is often attributed with popularizing a home movie mode of production within the American avant-garde, “homeless  movies”  would  thus  seem  to  be  a  more  apt  descriptor,  given  the  fact  that  home   was first and foremost a problem for the NAC. In this cycle of films, home is only ever operative as a horizon, never as a foundation. This chapter considers how homelessness functions in the works of the NAC as an index of the wide scale transformations to private and public spheres that occurred in postwar American society, a period of American life within which traditional conceptions 271 I take this phrase from Ken Kelman who, despite viewing any effort at systematizing the films of the NAC  as  a  direct  contradiction  of  this  film  culture’s  rejection  of  rational  order,  nevertheless  identified  two   “pressure[s]  for  coherence”  binding  these  works  together:  one  aesthetic,  “the  exhaustion  of  film form by midcentury”;;  one  spiritual,  “the  need  for  freedom  in  an  increasingly  restrictive  world”  (“Anticipations  of   the  Light,”  23,  24).  A  more  extreme  refutation  of  attempts  to  characterize  the  NAC  as  a  unified  movement   can  be  found  in  Shirley  Clarke’s  assertion  that  “The  [New  American  Cinema]  Group  doesn’t  exist,  and   never  will”  (quoted  in  Walter  Ross,  “The  New  Cinema:  It’s  Independent  and  Personal,”  Esquire [May, 1962]: 36). 113 of the private and the public as stable, autonomous, and universal realms were swiftly and deeply problematized. More specifically, it positions homelessness as the primary medium  through  which  anxieties  about  the  “loss”  of  traditional  private  and  public  forms   gain  expression  in  the  NAC’s  films,  and  examines  the  correspondences  these  anxieties   reveal between this avant-garde film culture and more popular cultural manifestations of this era, the latter of which frequently draw on notions of homelessness to voice conservative lamentations about the decline of private and public life in the context of late modernity. Yet this chapter also examines another, seemingly contradictory tendency at  work  in  the  NAC’s  films,  few  of  which  are  content  to  simply  worry  over  the   destabilization of such traditional forms. Indeed, homelessness also figures in this film culture as something more closely resembling a lifestyle or strategy: a transient, improvisatory practice of living consciously pursued and promoted by these artists in an effort to alleviate, or more actively dispense with, anxieties about the dwindling of private and public spheres. In such instances, the absence of normative home-spaces is framed as something to be celebrated rather than lamented, a hard-won achievement for artists working to cultivate decidedly non-traditional modalities of interiority and collectivity incompatible with suburbia and mass society, which could facilitate new ways of inhabiting the world. These two opposing engagements with homelessness – one anxious and conservative; the other exploratory and generative – persist across the collective oeuvre produced by the NAC, indicating the profoundly ambivalent position that homelessness occupies in this film culture. In what follows, I seek to trace out the historical context of this ambivalence, while also addressing its political and theoretical implications. At the 114 same  time  that  the  NAC’s  films  frame  the  “loss”  of  home  as  a  highly  threatening  and   disorienting condition foisted on the late-modern subject, I argue, they also embrace this loss as an enabling condition for elaborating alternative modes of habitation up to speed with the specific demands and constraints of late modernity. As a way of approaching these demands and constraints, I begin by analyzing how popular American culture of the postwar period, and particularly the cycle of films associated with classical film noir, utilized images of homelessness to evoke concerns about shifting configurations of private  and  public  spheres.  I  then  explore  how  the  NAC’s  homeless  movies  overlap  with,   and simultaneously depart from, such conventional cultural forms. I do so by constructing a dialogue between two  films  crucial  to  this  movement’s  emergence:  Lionel  Rogosin’s   influential early docu-fiction  about  homeless  men  living  on  New  York  City’s  infamous   skid row, On the Bowery,  and  Robert  Frank  and  Alfred  Leslie’s  landmark  contribution  to   Beat cinema, Pull My Daisy. By juxtaposing On the Bowery’s  anxious  depiction  of  a   shabby hobo subculture with Pull My Daisy’s  jubilant  ode  to  the  Beats’  itinerant  spirit,  I   seek to underscore the novelty and significance of Pull My Daisy’s  raucous  disregard  for   then-conventional  concerns  about  the  “loss”  of  traditional  private  and  public  forms.   Simultaneously, by attending to On the Bowery’s  dramatization  of  the  very  real  dangers   that can follow from exposure and alienation, I also seek to temper Pull My Daisy’s   exuberance about the absence of private shelter and public belonging. Positioning On the Bowery and Pull My Daisy in this manner, on either end of a spectrum of responses to postwar transformations that was available to artists of the NAC, I then consider how the differing imaginations of homelessness presented by these films  merge  and  clash  in  Jonas  Mekas’s  radically  ambivalent  first  feature,  Guns of the 115 Trees (1960),  which  dramatizes  Mekas’s  broader  attempt  to  wrest  some  generative   potential from this transitional period.  Drawing  on  Edward  Dimendberg’s  recent  analysis   of the distinctly late-modern  “urban  malaise”  that  developed  in  American  culture   coextensive with WWII to comprehend Guns of the Trees’s  apocalyptic  depiction  of   then-contemporary New York City, I argue that  Dimendberg’s  historical  and  theoretical   insights  allow  us  to  read  this  film’s  anxiety  about  sterile,  alienating  cityscapes  as  a   symptom  of  the  NAC’s  nostalgia  for  traditional  private  and  public  realms.272 However, by  turning  to  Hannah  Arendt’s  theoretical  ruminations  on  the  deadness  of  “worldliness”   and  the  vivifying  form  of  “life”  that  flourishes  in  spaces  and  practices  positioned  outside   or  against  the  domain  of  “world,”  I  then  work  to  elucidate  an  opposing,  progressive   impulse in Guns of the Trees.273 This  impulse  can  be  discerned,  I  contend,  in  this  film’s   recurrent – and not unproblematic – attempt to locate new and revitalizing forms of private and public experience in various social realms, activities, and figures that it imagines  to  exist  “outside”  the dominant life-world of the late-modern U.S. With the aid of  Arendt’s  theoretical  framework,  I  demonstrate  how  Guns of the Trees envisions such a homeless mode of living – one positioned outside or against then-dominant domestic and social spheres, and the normative lifestyle facilitated by such spheres – as the only viable option  for  members  of  a  “new  generation”  endeavoring  to  make  the  uncanny  terrain  of   late-modern America feel like home. I conclude by analyzing the different worldly and human resources upon which Guns of the Trees draws in order to imagine this homeless lifestyle, while also posing questions about its viability as an alternative. 272 See Edward Dimendberg, Film Noir and the Spaces of Modernity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,  2004);;  and  Dimendberg,  “From  Berlin  to  Bunker  Hill:  Urban  Space,  Late  Modernity,  and  Film  Noir   in  Fritz  Lang’s  and  Joseph  Losey’s  M,”  Wide Angle 19.4 (October, 1997). 273 See Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1958), esp. chs. 3 and 4. 116 III. Postwar Homelessness If the concept of home harbors a clear pertinence to discussions of privacy and changing  perceptions  of  the  private  sphere,  this  concept’s  relevance  for  studies  of  the   public  sphere  is  perhaps  not  as  certain.  The  home’s  status  as  a  material  construct  that   delimits and shelters a zone of privacy is a commonly held (though by no means universal)  assumption,  as  is  this  construct’s  ability  to  function  as  a  model  of  interiority   and  the  private  self,  or  what  Gaston  Bachelard  famously  referred  to  as  a  “topography   of…  Intimate  being.”274 Yet  “home”  is  an  especially  tensile  signifier,  one  that  frequently stretches beyond the confines of a domestic shelter to designate a more general sense of belonging,  or  a  feeling  of  integration  with  one’s  surroundings  or  community.  In  his  study   of 1940s American cinema, Power and Paranoia, Dana Polan addresses this tendency by distinguishing between understandings of home as a space and as a sign, where the latter is  “not  necessarily  limited  to  a  specific  locale,  a  specific  building,”  but  is  something  more   closely  resembling  “an  attitude—a way of perceiving environment…”275 “Home’s  values   can  extend  outward,”  Polan  observes,  “through  the  stability  of  a  job,  the  camaraderie  of   friends, through places invested with the succoring warmth of the home. Even public places are transformed into symbolic extensions of home values…”276 It follows that signs of homelessness harbor an analogous relevance to both private and public domains, signifying not only an absence of a material dwelling or a loss of interiority, but also a lack of social recognition and cultural integration. Statements and representations of 274 Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (Boston, MA: Beacon, 1958) xxxvi. 275 Dana Polan, Power and Paranoia: History, Narrative, and the American Cinema, 1940-1950 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986) 253. 276 Ibid 253. 117 homelessness thus resonate equally well with experiences of shelterlessness and self- alienation as with those of marginality and superfluousness, or the sense of not belonging to  one’s  surrounding,  public  world. Ideas about homelessness were therefore particularly marketable within the context of post-WWII American society. Just as notions of private stability were complicated during this period by the postwar housing shortage, the rise of an unnerving suburban frontier, and the proliferation of new anxieties about surveillance, reification, confession, and atomic warfare, perceptions of the public as a realm of identity formation and collectivity were similarly challenged by a highly fractured postwar social landscape and the development of impersonal configurations of white-collar labor, mass culture, and urban space. Amidst such changes, the concept of homelessness achieved a striking level of currency in American social criticism and popular culture. It provided a highly flexible – and trafficable – narrative of rupture and decline through which the lived instability of the postwar period could be made legible, though in a necessarily distressing form. Sociological bestsellers such as White Collar, The Lonely Crowd, and The Organization Man, which draw on themes of homelessness to describe a postwar subject newly devoid of interiority, community, and stabilizing ideological systems, here intersect with popular formations in postwar American cinema such as classical film noir and science fiction, which sought to capitalize on the instability of this period by manufacturing images of transient anti-heroes set adrift in alien cityscapes without moral coordinates, or of excessively vulnerable psychic, domestic, and communal interiors perpetually threatened with invasion and expropriation.277 In such discursive registers, the 277 The significance of this theme in postwar sociology cannot be understated. On the first page of his introduction to The Organization Man, William H. Whyte describes the subject of his study thusly: “They   118 postwar period was envisioned as the era of a historically novel uncanny condition that resulted from the radical disturbance of traditional forms of private and public life. Despite a longer history of critical thought concerning the decline of private and public spheres under modernity, popular imaginations of homelessness in postwar culture typically envision this period in terms of a sudden – or suddenly critical – breakdown of these spheres, a double loss of both shelter and belonging. The dominant idiom through which anxieties about homelessness were articulated in postwar American film was that formulated by classical film noir. As a number of recent studies of noir by scholars such as Vivian Sobchack, Edward Dimendberg, and Dean MacCannell have emphasized, homelessness figures as a central problem in this film  cycle,  which  is  now  understood  “to  encode  a  crisis  of  dwelling  [specific  to]  postwar   American modernity,”  as  Jennifer  Fay  and  Justus  Nieland  have  astutely  observed.278 [organization men] are the ones of our middle class who have left home, spiritually as well as physically, to take  the  vows  of  organization  life…”  (The Organization Man [Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002; New York, NY: Simon and Schuster, 1956] 3). David Riesman utilizes the concept  of  homelessness  similarly  when  distinguishing  between  “the  inner-directed person [who] could be ‘at  home  abroad’  by  virtue  of  his  relative  insensitivity  to  others,  [and]  the  other-directed person [who] is, in a sense, at home everywhere and nowhere, capable of a rapid if sometimes superficial intimacy with and response  to  everyone”  (Riesman  with  Nathan  Glazer  and  Reuel  Denney,  The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American Character [New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001; Garden City, NY: Doubleday,  1953]  25).  C.  Wright  Mills  describes  the  condition  in  more  urgent  terms:  “The uneasiness, the malaise of our time, is due to this root fact: in our politics and economy, in family life and religion—in practically every sphere of our existence—the certainties of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries have disintegrated or been destroyed and, at the same time, no new sanctions or justifications for the new routines we live, and must live, have taken hold. So there is no acceptance and there is no rejection, no sweeping hope and no sweeping rebellion. There is no plan of life. Among white-collar people, the malaise is deep-rooted; for the absence of any order of belief has left them morally defenseless as individuals and politically impotent as a group. Newly created in a harsh time of creation, white-collar man has no culture to lean upon except the contents of a mass society that has shaped him and seeks to manipulate him to its alien ends. For security's sake, he must strain to attach himself somewhere, but no communities or organizations seem to be thoroughly his”  (White Collar: The American Middle Classes [New York: Oxford University  Press,  2002;;  1959]  xvi).  A  related  assessment  can  be  found  in  Siegfried  Kracauer’s  epilogue to Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997; New York: Oxford University Press, 1960), in which Kracauer asserts that the breakdown of ancient belief systems  in  modern  society  has  left  man  “ideologically  shelterless”  (288). 278 Jennifer Fay and Justus Nieland, Film Noir: Hard-Boiled Modernity and the Cultures of Globalization (New  York:  Routledge,  2010)  140.  See  also  Vivian  Sobchack,  “Lounge  Time:  Postwar  Crises  and  the   Chronotope  of  Film  Noir,” Refiguring American Film Genres: History and Theory, ed. Jon Lewis 119 These  analyses  of  “homeless  noir”  (MacCannell)  are  particularly  valuable  to   considerations of the NAC, because they provide highly sophisticated historical and theoretical frameworks through which to view the transposition of then-popular concerns about the difficulty of dwelling into the realm of filmic representation. However, to apply the lessons of these analyses to the case of an experimental film culture such as the NAC, it is nevertheless necessary to revise the insights of these critics, given that their accounts of the postwar dwelling crisis do not engage the substantial reworking of problems of homelessness undertaken at the end of the postwar period by filmmakers affiliated with the NAC. Indeed, variations on this theme put forward by experimental and independent American filmmakers after WWII are strikingly absent from recent critical literature on homeless noir. Sobchack’s  innovative  re-reading of this film cycle is especially pertinent for our purposes because of her interest in situating noir as an outgrowth of transformations to private  and  public  spheres  in  the  postwar  U.S.  She  demonstrates  that  classical  noir’s   notoriously bleak outlook on the impossibility of dwelling needs to be viewed as one, particularly nostalgic response to the reorganization of private and public life that formed noir’s  immediate  historical  context.  Indeed,  for  Sobchack,  the  drama  of  noir  turns  on  its   inability to relinquish traditional models of home in the midst of a transitional period of American history that fundamentally disturbed such models, rendering both stable domestic shelters and nostalgic notions of the unified home front inaccessible, and instituting  what  she  describes  as  an  entirely  “new  American  homelessness.”279 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1998); Dimendberg, Film Noir; Dean MacCannell, “Democracy’s  Turn:  On  Homeless  Noir”  in  Shades of Noir: A Reader, ed. Joan Copjec (New York: Verso, 1993). 279 Sobchack 146. 120 According  to  Sobchack,  noir’s  anxiety  about  the  decline  of  traditional  private  and   public  realms  can  be  seen  most  clearly  in  this  film  cycle’s  obsession  with  the  various   anonymous, pseudo-public  “quasi-places”  that  constitute  it’s  material  premises:  those   “cocktail  lounges,  hotel  bars,  diners,  roadhouses,  and  motels  that  spatialize  film  noir— those rented rooms or tables or counter stools that resist individual particularity and are made  for  transients  and  transience…”280 Drawing on  Mikhail  Bakhtin’s  notion  of  the   “chronotope,”  or  time-space, Sobchack views these impersonal quasi-places as examples of  a  distinctly  postwar  chronotopic  structure  that  she  calls  “lounge  time,”  which  entails   actual, material spaces specific to postwar culture that, in the midst of the domestic and social  disruptions  of  this  period,  became  “charged  with  particular  temporal  meaning  for   the  culture’s  life-world,”  or  which  came  to  encapsulate  the  broader  process  of  historical   transition that made it so difficult for inhabitants of this life-world to feel at home.281 As Sobchack  explains,  the  historical  significance  of  the  spaces  frequented  by  noir’s  transient   anti-heroes comes in the threat such spaces pose to the plenitude and security traditionally associated with the domestic realm and the purposive productivity of capitalist social spheres. Such spaces: substitute  for  and  fragment  into  ‘broken’  status  the  nurturant  functions   of…  the  home.  They  transport  spatially  contiguous  and  intimate  familial   activity (eating, drinking, sleeping, and recreating) from private and personalized to public and anonymous domain. They substitute impersonal, incoherent, discontinuous, and rented space for personal, intelligible, unified, and generated space. They spatially rend and break up the home—and, correlatively, family contiguity and generational continuity.  […]  [They]  also  radically  [transform]  recreational  time,   making leisure more a condition to be suffered than pleasurably embraced. Indeed, leisure, as lounge time in the mise-en-scène of noir, is temporalized  not  as  idyllic  and  regenerational  activity…  Rather,  it  is   280 Ibid 138. 281 Ibid 147. 121 temporalized negatively as idle restlessness, as a lack of occupation, as a disturbing, ambiguous, and public display of unemployment.282 Disturbing traditional private and public divisions, as well as the gendered social positions and functions traditionally secured by such divisions, the fractured sites that constitute  noir’s  mise-en-scène thus register, in a highly concrete fashion, the lived sense of shelterlessness and superfluousness suffered by Americans during this period, “concretiz[ing]  an  existential  world  in  which…  ‘there  is  no  place  like  home.’”283 In  Sobchack’s  rubric,  classical  film  noir  registers the actual, lived experience of postwar homelessness by taking the various quasi-places noted above as its material premises. However, noir also frames the absence of home in especially cynical terms by utilizing specific stylistic practices, themes, and narrative structures that consistently represent the absence of a stable home-space as both insurmountable and unendurable, as the  ground  from  which  this  film  cycle’s  violent  narratives  emerge  and  to  which  they   inevitably return. According to Sobchack, this  particularly  “perverse  and  dark”  response   to  the  problem  of  home  in  postwar  culture  is  the  product  of  classical  noir’s  occupation  of   a  somewhat  impossible  historical  position  mirroring  that  endured  by  America’s  homeless   masses during this period: Like the characters of noir, much of America was fixed, paradoxically, in a transitional moment—looking back toward a retrospectively idyllic world that could not be historically recuperated (even if it could be represented),  looking  forward…  with  a  certain  inertial apprehension of a probable  dead  end.  […]  [N]oir  historicizes  in  the  most  concrete  manner   the  moment  when  the  idyllic  and  ‘timeless’  identity  and  security  of  the   patriarchal  American  ‘home’  was  held  hostage  to  a  domestic  future   beyond its imagination.284 282 Ibid 157-158. 283 Ibid 137. 284 Ibid 165-167. 122 Awkwardly  stuck  in  this  moment  of  fixed  transience,  noir’s  protagonists  – like postwar Americans themselves – were left without access either to the previously operative myth of a stable home or an historically viable alternative. It is in this sense that Sobchack views  noir’s  obsession  with  the  impossibility  of  dwelling  as  representative  of  a  broader   failure  of  postwar  American  society.  “[L]ounge  time,”  she  asserts,  borrowing  once  again   from  Bakhtin,  “represents  both  the  historical  necessity  and  the  historical failure to constitute  the  [new,  postwar]  ‘world  on  a  new  basis,  to  render  it  familiar,  to  humanize   it.’”285 Sobchack’s  understanding  of  this  transitional  experience  contributes  substantially   to analyses of the NAC, though it is also limited by her attempt  to  position  noir’s  decline   toward the end of the 1950s as corresponding with the resolution of the postwar transition.  “[A]s  the  Eisenhower  years  (1952-1960)  drew  to  a  prosperous  close,”  she   claims,  “the  country…  learned  to  love  the  security  state  and the  Bomb  and…  settled   down—into  what  David  Reid  and  Jayne  L.  Walker  describe  as  ‘a  cold  torpor.’”286 Though  this  narrative  accurately  describes  mainstream  America’s  slow  acquiescence  to   the frigid domestic and social norms that solidified as cultural dominants  during  the  ‘50s,   it nevertheless elides the ways in which anxieties about homelessness persisted in new forms at the margins of American culture throughout the subsequent decade. Stemming largely from the influence of Beat literature, then-emergent sub- and counter-cultural formations such as the NAC reiterated popular concerns about the loss or absence of home, while also dramatically reframing them. Following on the heels of classical noir, the  NAC’s  films  extended  noir’s  use  of  homelessness  to  evoke  the decline of traditional 285 Ibid 166. 286 Ibid 131. 123 private  and  public  spheres,  even  drawing  freely  from  noir’s  formal  lexicon  and   chronotopic coordinates, to communicate the dangerous instability brought on by this decline.287 But  because  the  NAC’s  homeless  movies  were  produced  amidst the process of mass settlement described by Sobchack – when  suburbia,  mass  culture,  and  “the   organization”  had  already  been  installed  to  alleviate  the  sense  of  shelterlessness  and   superfluousness suffered after WWII – the  NAC’s  rehearsal  of  this  homeless refrain also assumed  a  novel  criticality  at  the  beginning  of  the  ‘60s.  By  persisting  in  naming   homelessness as the defining condition of American life, the NAC thereby deemed then- dominant  American  society’s  new  approximations  of  private  and  public  spheres ineffective. To artists of the NAC, the spurious domestic and social norms then being promoted as the solution to postwar homelessness only served to exacerbate, rather than to resolve, this condition. This critical dimension of the NAC helps to elucidate the curious ambivalence with  which  this  movement  confronted  the  apparent  “loss”  of  stable  home-spaces that occurred after WWII – an  ambivalence  that  most  easily  distinguishes  the  NAC’s   homeless movies from engagements with this theme in popular cultural forms such as film  noir.  Indeed,  while  the  NAC’s  films  do  worry  constantly  over  the  decline  of  private   and public life, they also endeavor to reclaim this decline as a decidedly positive condition, or more precisely, as a condition of possibility for elaborating different forms of private and public experience capable of alleviating the feelings of shelterlessness and superfluousness that defined daily life throughout the postwar period. In other words, 287 It is telling in this respect that the independently produced noir Blast of Silence (Allen Baron, 1961) was included  in  the  “Il  Nuovo Cinema  Americano”  exposition  curated  by  the  producer,  David  C.  Stone,  for  the   1961  Festival  of  Two  Worlds  in  Spoleto,  Italy,  where  it  screened  alongside  works  such  as  Stan  Brakhage’s   Anticipation of the Night (1958)  and  Gregory  Markopoulos’  Serenity (1961). 124 what  is  especially  intriguing  about  this  movement’s  films is the ways in which they work to position homelessness as a remedy to homelessness, striving to recuperate the absence or inaccessibility of a stable home-space as the basis of an alternative lifestyle through which new forms of inner experience and social recognition could be explored, assessed, and negotiated. The  NAC’s  attempt  to  redeem  homelessness  turned  on  a  double  reversal  of  then- popular concerns about the absence of private and public spheres. Because artists affiliated with this movement believed then-dominant configurations of domestic and social life were inhospitable – which is to say, hostile to the forms of selfhood and communal expression that such spheres were traditionally intended to house – notions of rootedness and participation were  themselves  rendered  suspect,  just  as  one’s  evasion  of   suburbia and mass society came to be viewed as an achievement. Taking a page from the Beat culture out of which they emerged, artists of the NAC reframed the condition of shelterlessness imposed by postwar uncertainty as the basis of a vagabond lifestyle devoted to itinerancy and spontaneity, and valued for its capacity to produce highly vitalizing – yet also fleeting and unreliable – experiences of inwardness. Similarly, the sense of non-belonging foisted on the postwar subject by a newly alienating social world was also recuperated as the ground of a more active practice of disaffiliation, or the willful assumption of a marginal social position from which alternative forms of relatedness and collectivity could be elaborated, though in a necessarily tentative and precarious  manner.  While  this  movement  did  participate  in  the  postwar  period’s  culture   of  anxious  discourse  about  the  “loss”  of  home,  then,  it  also  departed  from  this  culture,   125 actively relinquishing traditional home-spaces in favor of the more vagrant personal and collective experiences that elude or exceed such spaces. The  NAC’s  effort  to  redeem  homelessness  was  certainly  not  without  its  problems.   Indeed, this project brought with it a laundry list of disturbing consequences paralleling that of their literary predecessors and sometimes-collaborators. Along with aestheticizing poverty and glorifying a masculinized mobility at the expense of feminized domestic interiors, this valorization of homelessness was also complexly intertwined with the NAC’s  unfortunate  rehearsal  of  high  modernism’s  primitivizing  tendencies:  its  flawed   pursuit  of  spiritual  redemption  through  various  “pre-cultural,”  “irrational,”  or  otherwise   “abnormal”  figures  believed  to harbor a supposedly ancient or eternal humanness that was nevertheless endangered by modern rationalism. As will be shown in more detail below,  the  NAC’s  failure  to  dispense  with  such  modernist  clichés  was  not  secondary  to   its redemptive project but immanent to it, depending as this project did on access to an experiential realm existing somewhere before or beyond modernity, which Western culture has historically imagined to lie within or through the body of the other. Without seeking to minimize such disturbing tendencies, it is nevertheless important  to  emphasize  the  necessity  of  situating  this  film  culture’s  embrace  of   homelessness  historically.  Though  problematic,  the  NAC’s  affirmative  response  to  the   absence of stable home-spaces in postwar America exhibits an important willingness on the part of these artists to directly confront the extensive reconfiguration of modes of habitation that occurred during this era: an endeavor that was by no means common at the time, and whose difficulty should not be underestimated.  Indeed,  the  NAC’s  homeless   movies assume a distinctly progressive character when viewed alongside the range of 126 nostalgic and alarmist representations of homelessness that defined popular engagements with this development in postwar American culture.  This  movement’s  efforts  to   recuperate homelessness as a means for revitalizing private and public experience should thus be understood as part of its larger attempt to imagine, and take up residence within, the  “domestic  future”  that  classical  film  noir was unable or unwilling to conceive. Though this project frequently found artists of the NAC running up against the limits of their historical position, its radicality must nevertheless be acknowledged. We  can  get  a  better  sense  of  the  NAC’s  ambivalence  about  the  “crisis  of   dwelling”  that  formed  its  historical  context,  and  the  problems  that  followed  from  its   responses to this crisis, by turning to an analysis of On the Bowery and Pull My Daisy. Though numerous correspondences can be drawn between these works – their commitment to a small-scale, independent mode of production; their merging of fictional narration with verité stylistic strategies; their  interest  in  capturing  the  “authenticity”  of   distinct, postwar American subcultures; their shared setting  on  New  York  City’s   infamous skid row – On the Bowery and Pull My Daisy display radically different perspectives on the condition of postwar homelessness, respectively exemplifying the NAC’s  anxious  and  celebratory  engagements  with  this  theme.  Indeed,  while  Rogosin’s   depiction of the mostly alcoholic itinerant workers and homeless persons populating the Bowery was by no means a typical portrayal of homelessness for its time, as I will show, aspects of the humanist ideology and representational strategies that structure this film nevertheless reproduce important assumptions and conventions underlying conservative phrasings of postwar homelessness put forward in then-dominant cultural forms such as classical noir. On the Bowery’s  resonance  with  such  normative forms therefore 127 demonstrates  the  need  to  balance  liberal  celebrations  of  the  radical  “compassion”  this   film  harbors  for  the  “appalling  collection  of  human  catastrophes”  it  portrays  with  a   recognition of the ways in which this very compassion – or this emphasis on the misery and suffering brought on by an absence of home – simultaneously re-inscribes then- normative concerns about the necessity of stable, traditional private and public forms.288 Conversely, Pull My Daisy’s  attempt  to  casually  dispense  with  such concerns stands as the cinematic announcement of the vagabond lifestyle embraced by members of the  Beat  Generation.  This  film,  which  was  adapted  from  the  third  act  of  Jack  Kerouac’s   unproduced play, The Beat Generation Or the New Amaraean Church, and which features voiceover narration by Kerouac and performances by Beat figures such as Allen Ginsberg,  Gregory  Corso,  and  Peter  Orlovsky,  thus  does  attest  to  the  NAC’s   disarticulation  from  postwar  America’s  dominant  culture  of  dwelling.  However,  as  I   argue below, Pull My Daisy also demonstrates the political shortcomings of this film culture’s  affirmation  of  homelessness  by  eliding  any  of  the  negative  conditions  that   impoverished and homeless persons do endure. In an early attack on Pull My Daisy, Parker Tyler addressed these aspects of the film, criticizing its seemingly unselfconscious repetition  of  the  tired,  modernist  trope  whereby  a  privileged  “poet-witness is set off against the common people and their poverty on grounds where he is, of course, an ambiguously  welcome  trespasser,”  before  denouncing  the  film as  “an  audio-visual paean to  [the]  fact”  that  the  Beats’  popular  success  had  rendered  the  familiar  figure  of  the   “outcast  tramp-poet”  into  a  mere  “theatrical  charade.”289 Seeking to both reiterate and to refute this assertion of Pull My Daisy’s  obsolescence  at  the  time  of  its  production,  my   288 Basil  Wright,  “On  the  Bowery,”  Sight and Sound 26.2 [Autumn, 1956]: 98. 289 Parker  Tyler,  “For  Shadows, Against Pull My Daisy”  in  Film Culture Reader, ed. P. Adams Sitney (New York: Cooper Square, 2000) 110-111. 128 reading of this film confirms that its performance of homelessness does cling stubbornly to outmoded, modernist ideologies whereby social marginality is exploited as a source of authentic  humanness,  though  I  also  work  to  demonstrate  how  this  film’s  outdated  politics   are  complexly  imbricated  in  the  NAC’s  progressive,  future  orientation,  functioning  as   part  of  this  film  culture’s  attempts  to  envision  a  world  that,  at  the time of Pull My Daisy’s   production,  had  yet  to  be  “humanize[d]”  or  “constitute[d]…  on  a  new  basis.”290 IV. Sightseeing on the Bowery Both versions of homelessness outlined above – the lack of private shelter and the sense of non-belonging – figure strongly in On the Bowery and each is affiliated by this film with a fundamental loss of humanness that it designates as the most devastating condition  suffered  by  persons  living  on  skid  row.  The  first  sentences  of  “Filming  a  Skid   Row,”  a  remarkable  memoir  of  this  film’s  production  published  by  Mark  Sufrin  in  the   1955/56 issue of Sight and Sound, speak to these aspects of the film. As Sufrin, who collaborated  with  Rogosin  on  the  film’s  screenplay  and  other  aspects  of  its  production,   writes in the lengthy but incredibly rich opening passage of this memoir: The Bowery, the infamous street of derelicts in New York, is a syndrome of human blight, waste and decay; misused and shabby men living in a stale tenement city-confusion. At the turn of the century, the Bowery was a high-life district; it has long outlived its reputation, with only faded memories of that kind of vitality remaining. For years the street has been a refuge for the marginal people—the homeless and friendless, the alcoholic, the dope addict, the mentally ill, the prostitute, the aged, the petty thief, the uneducable and unemployable, the occasional railroad worker and seaman—a sociological underground that moves in and out of city hospitals and prisons, welfare offices, grinding jobs, domestic courts, seedy employment agencies, and all the grey, antiseptic smelling unprivate 290 Sobchack 166. 129 places. It is a sifting down to the bottom level—the sediment of a society that is inexorably carried down to this last place to exist.291 Here, Sufrin designates the congeries of persons who populate the Bowery as representatives of a sociological category defined by lack of access to a stable private household. They consist, he explains, of the various unfortunate, diseased, or migrant figures who continuously flow in and out of the  “antiseptic  smelling  unprivate”   institutions  established  by  the  state  to  monitor,  punish,  and  occasionally  assist  society’s   most impoverished members, and who – when they are released or forcibly expelled from such institutions – have  no  other  “refuge”  but the street. The denizens of the Bowery are thus destitute of material shelter, a private place in the world. Yet this lack of material shelter also carries with it a symbolic marginality that Sufrin quickly equates with a certain baseness, relegating the  “marginal  people”  comprising  this  “sociological   underground”  to  a  position  at  the  extreme  periphery  or  bottom  of  society,  one  described   by  Sufrin  as  “sediment[ary],”  which  is  to  say,  the  dregs,  worthless,  non-integrated, superfluous.292 It is this exclusion from the proper domain of the social that MacCannell underscores in his recent essay on the fate of the homeless under capitalist democracy, a social configuration that steadfastly denies those persons without access to a stable 291 Mark  Sufrin,  “Filming  a Skid  Row,”  Sight and Sound 25.3 (Winter, 1955/56): 133. 292 This  affiliation  of  the  homeless  with  baseness  can  also  be  inferred  from  the  title  of  Sufrin’s  memoir.  As   the  historian  Todd  Depastino  has  noted,  the  widespread  use  of  the  term  “skid  row”  in  American  culture   after WWII corresponded with a dramatic shift in American perceptions of the homeless around mid- century:  “The  label  [‘skid  row’]  originally  derived  from  the  skidways  that  loggers  in  the  Pacific  Northwest   had used to transport lumber to sawmills. In Seattle lumberjacks had fashioned one of the liveliest main stems  in  America  along  the  ‘skid  road’  that  led  to  Henry  Yesler’s  waterfront  sawmill.  When  the  migratory   labor  market  declined  after  World  War  I,  the  generic  term  ‘skid  row’  cam  into  use,  rivaling  the  more   positively  construed  ‘main  stem’  and  ‘hobohemia.’  Whereas  the  latter  terms  had  signified  a  certain   swaggering  élan  associated  with  the  hobo  world,  ‘skid  row’  emphasized  downward  mobility  (hitting  the   ‘skids’)  and  a  constrained  physical  environment  (a  ‘row’  instead  of  a  ‘stem’).  In  the  wake  of  World War II, the  older  terms  disappeared  entirely.  ‘Hoboes,’  who  had  once  epitomized  freewheeling  American  working- class  manhood,  had  become  ‘bums,’  confined  to  a  few  city  blocks  and  shut  out  of  the  abundance  and   fulfillment that the postwar world had to offer”  (Depastino,  Citizen Hobo: How a Century of Homelessness Shaped America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003) 227-228. 130 material shelter the more  crucial,  symbolic  “shelter  under  the  dominion  of  the  paternal   metaphor,”  or  “the  right  to  be  included  in  society,  criticism,  fiction,  policy  – a place in the  symbolic  order.”293 In  Sufrin’s  framework,  the  persons  dwelling  along  or  atop  skid  row  are  without both such forms of shelter. Yet to Sufrin, this double homelessness seems to disturb not only the integrity of the social body, but the very notion of the human itself. The Bowery is  a  “syndrome  of  human  blight,”  as  he  puts  it  in  the  passage  quoted  above, a configuration of wayward men and women whose utter lack of vitality (the Bowery is no longer  a  “high-life  district”)  is  perceived  to  be  a  symptom  of  some  broader  decline  of   humanness plaguing the modern world, which here appears to be focalized within the disorienting  milieu  of  the  poor  quarters  of  the  inner  city  (the  Bowery’s  “stale  tenement   city-confusion”).  And  in  a  manner  that  is  consistent  with  the  NAC’s  broader  investment   in interiority, this decline of humanness is repeatedly associated by Sufrin with a tragic disturbance of selfhood, personality, or the soul: he goes on to describe residents of skid row  as  broken  figures  “too  concerned  with  the  fracture  of  their  own  personality”  to  fulfill   a  life  of  “normal  ambition,  responsibility  or  demands,”  and  as  “shattered  men  who  wish   to paralyse in themselves with drink and senseless violence what human beings desire most to keep alive.”294 To be clear, Sufrin does not characterize the homeless persons he met while making On the Bowery as inhuman. On the contrary, he repeatedly stresses their humanity, or their status as living, suffering, and mortal human beings who are prone to disease and death, vulnerable to exploitation, yet also capable of compassion, honesty, and friendliness. It is thus not humanity, but humanness – as the true measure of 293 MacCannell, 287, 286. 294 Sufrin 134, emphasis added. 131 the human, or the capacity to transcend mere biological existence and pursue a life lived in  accordance  with  man’s  innate  spirit  – that is here identified as the ultimate casualty of life on skid row. Whether or not Rogosin  was  in  total  agreement  with  Sufrin,  the  latter’s  analysis  of   homelessness  in  “Filming  a  Skid  Row”  is  reinforced  by  On the Bowery itself. For instance,  several  sequences  in  the  film  echo  Sufrin’s  concerns  about  the  absence  of   material shelter suffered by the homeless by demonstrating the vulnerable position of exposure that follows from this condition and leaves one open at all times to violence, theft,  or  incarceration.  In  keeping  with  this  work’s  employment  of  the  docu-drama format that had gained currency in American experimental film practice after WWII, wherein naturalistic documentary footage of a particular subject or milieu is incorporated into a more-or-less scripted, fictional narrative that is often filmed using various verité devices (non-professional actors, handheld cameras, improvised performances, etc.), On the Bowery both documents and dramatizes the dangers of exposure. This  can  be  seen  as  early  as  the  film’s  opening  sequence,  which  presents  candid   footage of homeless men being arrested for sleeping in public, as well as shots of others scattering from police scrutiny by ducking in the nearest doorway or hustling along to another block. Yet a pair of fictional scenes positioned after this opening reinforce the vulnerability that accompanies  shelterlessness.  These  concern  the  film’s  protagonist,  Ray,   an itinerant railroad worker who has just arrived on the Bowery from an extended period of employment in New Jersey, and who is looking to spend a couple of days drinking and picking up odd jobs in New York before heading on down the road. On the first night that Ray spends sleeping in the alleys of the main stem, the suitcase containing all his 132 possessions is stolen, leaving him without the clothes and other valuables he could have used as collateral for a motel room or a bus ticket off the Bowery. On the second night, Ray is assaulted before being robbed. In the scene depicting this assault, which is among the more histrionic in the film, Ray stumbles out of a bar and down a dark street after a night of boozing while an abrasive, foreboding piano score plays on the soundtrack. A pair of medium close-ups  reveal  two  anonymous  thugs  who  observe  Ray’s  drunken   behavior and then follow him down the street. We cut to a shot of Ray pausing at a dumpster to catch his breath or vomit, his figure lit partially by a frontal, ambient light source, though he is mostly surrounded by shadow. As he struggles to stay upright, the thugs jump him, violently grabbing his neck and sinking a fist into his stomach. After the first punch is landed, the camera cuts to a high angle medium shot taken from the other side of the action – a cut that heightens the tension of the scene by producing a new sense of proximity in the viewer, while also creating a more drastic, visually striking contrast between lit and unlit portions of the frame. The thugs then quickly land a blow to the back  of  Ray’s  head  that  sends  him  to  the  ground  where  he  sprawls  out,  writhing  in  pain.   While this scene offers a stark, brutal depiction of the violence that On the Bowery’s  producers  associated  with  skid  row,  the  sequence  that  immediately  follows   Ray’s  assault  further  underscores  their  belief  in  the  vital  importance  of  material  shelter.   After a set of fades and an establishing shot to signify morning’s  arrival,  we’re  taken   immediately  to  a  sequence  depicting  Gorman,  one  of  Ray’s  acquaintances,  waking  in  the   relative tranquility of a sparsely furnished semi-private room in a nearby flophouse. As Gorman quietly shifts in his bunk beneath the chicken wire ceiling of this small, cubicle- like enclosure with his possessions resting safely on the floor and his body warmed by a 133 strand of sunshine entering through the window, Ray lies in a heap on a brick-paved alleyway, where he narrowly evades arrest after a group of men drag him away from an approaching cop. As this transition demonstrates, within the narrative economy of On the Bowery, even the minimal sense of enclosure and physical security provided by an impersonal rented room is preferable to the unpredictability of a night spent on the street. More than just dangerous, though, being destitute of a private dwelling place is also depicted in the film as profoundly abject. Rather than providing images of homeless persons in ramshackle but functional shelters, or documenting the nightly commute of Bowery drunks who eventually return to a family home after a long day in the tavern, the film presents us over and over again with shots of men sleeping, resting, or lying unconscious on the street.295 Though such figures pepper the mise-en-scène throughout the  film,  a  montage  sequence  depicting  the  first  morning  after  Ray’s  arrival  presents  the   most extensive documentation of this abject side of homelessness. Approximately fifty seconds of documentary footage – mostly short takes with fixed frames, though occasional slight camera movements, imperfectly focused shots, and underexposed images suggests the footage was taken candidly and off the cuff – shows a typical morning on skid row, cutting between numerous images of men sprawled out or curled on filthy sidewalks, curbs, or in doorways, covered in dirt and sweat, lacking anything resembling bedding and typically surrounded by rubbish, insects, or derelict articles of clothing. In one shot, a row of men lie on the dirt-grey sidewalk at the edge of a decaying brick building, covered in trash; in another a man sits upright but unconscious in an 295 A  statement  made  by  the  film’s  star,  Ray  Salyer,  during  a  filmed  interview excerpted in the short documentary The Perfect Team: The Making of On  the  Bowery  (2009),  directed  by  Lionel  Rogosin’s  son,   Michael  Rogosin,  is  relevant  here:  “And  I’d  like  to  clear  up  another  thing  about  the  Bowery:  ninety-five percent of the men down there  work  every  day.” 134 empty wagon cart, a dark smudge on his forehead and a fly crawling on the cardboard beside him; a later shot presents a man who is missing his left arm and his right leg, shifting on the sidewalk with a crutch held awkwardly by the partial limb jutting out from his left shoulder; and another shows a man standing awake while wearing only slacks, an undershirt, and socks, who confusedly looks down to find himself missing shoes. Importantly, this entire sequence plays without any music or dialogue, featuring a soundtrack composed almost entirely of the dim, ambient noise created by a distant train running along the elevated track that  bordered  the  Bowery  at  the  time  of  the  film’s   production. More than just an attempt to signify early morning stillness, the pairing of ambient sound with verité cinematography in this sequence is clearly intended to generate an awesome sense of realness, presenting a direct, unfiltered vision of homelessness in all its pathos and misery.296 In representing the reality of homelessness in this abject manner, On the Bowery resonates  strongly  with  Sufrin’s  characterization  of  skid  row  as  a   shocking,  even  “frightening”  space  in  which  men  become  indistinguishable  from  the  dirt,   ugliness, and ruin comprising their material environs.297 What we witness in this sequence is the spectacle of humanity without humanness, or what one critic described as an  “appalling  collection  of  human  catastrophes…  men  and  women  who  have  passed  the   point  of  no  return.”298 296 And this strategy was certainly effective. In his early, influential review of the film, Basil Wright celebrated the affective impact of On the Bowery’s  amateurish  cinematography,  which  he  believed  to  be   “stronger  and  more  effective  than all the technical spit-and-polish  in  the  world,”  and  whose  disturbing   forcefulness  he  compared  to  “the  terror  of  a  reality  seen  by  mistake  from  the  corner  of  the  eye”  (Wright   98). 297 Sufrin 139. 298 Wright 98. Along with seeking to document the baseness of this condition, the film also suggests that the inability to secure some form of housing – whether an actual home, or a mere flop for the night – is positioned a rung below mere vagrancy to persons living on the Bowery as well. In a more humorous scene later in the film, Ray drunkenly attempts to ditch Gorman and head home with a random woman he meets 135 The representational logic of On the Bowery also  corresponds  with  Sufrin’s   understanding of homelessness as marginality, and of the margin itself as a lifeless realm wherein  man’s  spirit  decays.  Through  specific  strategies  employed  at  the  level  of   cinematography,  acting,  direction,  and  narrative,  the  Bowery’s  marginality  is  conveyed   both in terms of its status as a peripheral space-time set off from the more modernized areas of Manhattan that surround it, and its status as a distinct subcultural territory, one inhabited by relatively likeminded persons possessing their own argot, gestures, and habits, whose behavior and interactions are governed by a loose – but operative – code of conduct.  An  important  dimension  of  this  is  Rogosin’s  oft-discussed commitment to a mode  of  filmmaking  “from  the  inside,”  wherein  fictional  characters  and  scenarios  are   developed in collaboration with actual members of a particular culture for the sake of authenticity, the latter of whom are then cast to play these scenes out in location settings with  only  minimal  direction,  and  encouraged  to  “be  themselves,  to  express  themselves  in   their  own  manner.”299 The film is thus riddled with all manner of ethnographic detail, including  hobo  slang  (characters  speak  of  “springing”  a  drink  when  “dry,”  or  getting   “peeled  off”),  demonstrations  of  practices  specific  to  the  Bowery  lifestyle  (for  example,   making  a  “hot  shot”  by  straining  the  alcohol  from  a  can  of  Sterno cooking fuel), and scenes depicting the conventions that organize that lifestyle (saving a sleeping man from arrest, sharing the wealth, etc.) Yet in addition to such details, the actual geographic locale of this culture also takes shape as an other world set off from the vital, functional at the bar. Growing a bit perturbed, Gorman asks the woman for her address, then insults her by specifying: “What  bush  is  it?” 299 Lionel  Rogosin,  “Interpreting  Reality  (Notes  on  the  Esthetics  and  Practices  of  Improvisational  Acting),”   Film Culture 21  (Summer,  1960):  22.  On  Rogosin’s  practice  of  filmmaking  “from  the  inside,”  see  for   instance: Wright 98; and Richard Meran Barsam, Non-Fiction Film: A Critical History (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1973) 240. 136 spaces of society, one which respectable citizens typically pass over – rather than through – on  the  elevated  train  that  “shadowed  the  Bowery  for  so  many  years,”  in  Sufrin’s   words.300 Indeed, the film opens and closes on a pair of establishing shots taken from directly beneath the imposing, tenebrous structure of this elevated train: a strategy of formal  “rhyming”  that  is  among  classical  narrative  cinema’s  most  beloved  methods  for   articulating formal and ideological order, and which here conveys a sense that the disturbing lifestyle shown to thrive in this particular portion of the lower east side of Manhattan remains safely limited to this specific region. Along with its use as a framing device, the film continuously returns to shots of this elevated structure that assume a more expressive function similar to that so frequently associated with the visual logic of film  noir.  In  these  shots,  the  darkness  and  impersonal  massiveness  of  this  “wormy  old   structure,”  which  Sufrin believed to be rich with symbolic meaning, is utilized to convey the  Bowery’s  status  as  an  opaque  and  irrational  “night-street,”  one  devoid  of  hope  and   standing in marked contrast to the transparent rationalism of normative society.301 It is thus crucial that, in the only sequence of On the Bowery in which we glimpse the straight, workaday world, it appears as a high-paced, productive environment existing somewhere spatially distant from the elevated train. In this sequence, we see Gorman panhandling for drinking money on a bustling commercial street where men and women in business suits, uniforms, or snappy dresses walk across rather brilliant white sidewalks with purpose and direction as cars and buses stream by, carrying citizens from home to work and back home again. In the midst of this activity, Gorman slowly shuffles about, attempting – and mostly failing – to interrupt trajectories or to wrest attention from the 300 Sufrin 135. 301 Ibid 138, 134. 137 anonymous sea of bodies that quickly rushes past. At the end of this sequence, we see Gorman walking back across town until he reaches the elevated structure once more, then continuing through the decrepit blocks of the main stem with their dirty buildings and cracked sidewalks. The first shot in this sequence that shows Gorman back within the space of the Bowery is particularly arresting: he strolls slowly down a nearly deserted block, passing a bum who lies unconscious on his back beside an abandoned construction zone,  as  if  this  man’s  eerily  immobile  body  were  just  another piece of debris in this entropic urban landscape. When Gorman finally arrives at his destination, perching atop a bar stool before a shot of muscatel, the tavern is empty and his associates are nowhere to be found. So he sips his wine, then moseys on to kill  the  time  left  until  the  night’s   drinking begins. In this sequence, the incredibly jarring contrast between the cleanliness and order of mainstream society, and the bleak, crumbling life-world of the Bowery, reveals how the  latter’s  spatial  separation  from  the  normative  social  realm  was  perceived  to  be   doubled by a temporal disjunction as well. In a manner that is consistent with then- contemporary  conceptions  of  skid  row  as  “a  perverse  holdout  against  the  modernizing   forces  of  the  age,”  to  quote  the  cultural  historian  Todd  Depastino’s  recent  study  of   modern American homelessness, Citizen Hobo: How a Century of Homelessness Shaped America, this sequence depicts the Bowery as an archaic realm of urban decay, architectural ruin, and inactivity, an uncanny pocket of some premodern era existing at the edge of the modern city.302 Much like the nightclubs, cocktail lounges, and cheap 302 Depastino 229. Sufrin provides a typically poetic account of this temporal disjunction when he describes the  “mosaic”  of  the  Bowery  as  woven  from  “Ugly,  blighted  buildings  that  degenerated  to  ruin  in  fifty  to  a   hundred  years…  Cracked  sidewalks[,]  cobbled  streets with rusting, unused trolley tracks, [and] pawnbrokers  with  their  mean,  mildewed  harvest,”  while  also  addressing  “the  phenomenon  that  can  frighten   138 motel  rooms  that  form  the  basis  of  what  Sobchack  terms  “lounge  time,”  the  Bowery  is   thus shown to be governed by an aimless logic of leisure that, as in film noir, is “temporalized…  negatively  as  [a]  public  display  of  unemployment,”  one  whose  inherent   “threat  to  the  very  language  of  patriarchal  and  capitalist  culture…  dictates  that  its   spatiotemporal boundaries limit and contain its [inhabitants] in what can only be described as a hermetically sealed—quarantined—social  space,”  one  that  is  “not  allowed   integration  with  the  culture’s  traditional…  spaces  of  domesticity  and  labor.303 For Sufrin, the aimless temporality of this liminal social space existing somewhere between zones of domesticity and labor is inseparable from its evacuation of interiority. Because he affiliates  humanness  with  an  aspiration  for  normalcy,  or  with  one’s  adherence  to  “the   whip  of  normal  ambition,  responsibility  or  demands”  – in short, with conformity to the re/productive and purposeful temporality of patriarchal and capitalist culture – he therefore  lists  the  sight  of  “bodies  sitting,  slumped,  stretched  prone  in  drunken  release   [with]  nothing  to  do,  nowhere  to  go”  among  the  most  “frighten[ing]”  and  “shatter[ing]”   images to  be  seen  by  “the  person  who  walks  with  ‘somewhere  to  go,’  who  knows  a  home   and  a  job,”  yet  who  nevertheless  enters  (surely  by  accident)  into  this  aimless  and  soulless   space.304 In  other  words,  this  is  no  “hobohemia,”  no  space  of  joyous  release  from   professional and domestic responsibility as the main stems initially established in American  cities  by  a  rising  tramp  “army”  were  known  in  the  late  19th and early 20th and  shatter  the  person  who  walks  with  ‘somewhere  to  go,’  who  knows  a  home  and  a  job,  whose  horizons   extend beyond a few city blocks—the hesitant, shuffling, reeling walk of the men up-and-down  the  street…   and the endless parade of bodies sitting, slumped, stretched prone in drunken release—nothing to do, nowhere  to  go”  (135). 303 Sobchack 158-59. 304 Sufrin 134, 135. 139 century.305 Indeed, On the Bowery’s  vision  of  skid  row  as  a  dehumanizing  realm  set  off   from the respectable space of postwar society and replete with tragic figures, shocking behavior, and grotesque imagery corresponds in important ways with popular representations and perceptions of homelessness in post-WWII American culture – a period in which homeless persons, as the unmanaged excess of containment ideology, were typically viewed as either non-conformist  deviants  or  as  “a  fascinating  and   disturbing anachronism, a throwback to another age before mass consumerism, suburban subdivisions, and high-wage jobs  had  liberated  the  American  family  from  the  ‘congregate   form  of  living.’”306 As Depastino explains while analyzing the tensions generated by the homeless communities that persisted amidst the postwar culture of abundance, in the 1950s,  “skid  row  represented an illegitimate subculture with bonds and allegiances separate from and resistant to those of the middle-class  nuclear  family.”307 By rejecting the  nuclear  family  ideal  and  refusing  to  take  their  places  as  “citizen-homeowners”  at  a   time when domestic-oriented consumption was the measure of democratic vitality, the members  of  this  subculture  were  thus  believed  to  be  “potentially  threaten[ing]  not  only   [to]  gender  and  family  norms,  but  [to]  national  security  itself.”308 Rather than framing homelessness as a matter of shelter, poverty, or structural inequality, then-contemporary social  scientists  defined  it  instead  as  a  form  of  “disaffiliation”  from  the  relational  bonds   comprising normative social systems; and rather than using this discovery as the basis for 305 See Depastino, esp. chs. 1-3. 306 Ibid 229, 230. 307 Ibid 228. 308 Ibid 232, 230. 140 a  broad  critique  of  the  alienating  conditions  subtending  postwar  society,  “disaffiliation”   was understood largely as the result of individual failure or psychological damage.309 Thus,  even  though  Rogosin  and  Sufrin’s  attempt  to  produce  an  “authentic”  and   “compassionate  record”  of  life  on  the  Bowery  diverges  considerably  from  the   sensationalist depictions of homelessness manufactured by conservative institutions at the time  of  the  film’s  production,  On the Bowery ultimately fails to adequately dislocate itself from the broader culture of cold war conservatism within which it was immersed. By depicting the absence of stable, material shelter as a dangerous condition, while also placing the burden of social detachment on the shoulders of individuals and framing this detachment negatively as the result of personal affliction, On the Bowery ultimately reinforces the then-dominant belief that homeownership and social conformism constituted the foundation of personal success, health, and fulfillment. According to this film,  there  is  no  redemptive  potential  in  one’s  avoidance  of  a  normative  domestic   environment,  nor  in  one’s  relegation  to  a  marginal  social  space.  It  consistently  denies  any   impulse  to  romanticize  homelessness  or  attribute  subversive  value  to  this  “illegitimate subculture.”  The  only  chance  for  redemption  the  film  offers  Ray  comes  in  the  slim   possibility that he might somehow escape the destructive gravity of this shadowy, underground social space: a possibility the film makes available in the form of bus fare to a stable job in Chicago, though confirmation that Ray has boarded the bus and overcome his self-destructive compulsions is never given. Indeed, the final line of dialogue – an ominous  “He’ll  be  back”  spoken  by  a  peripheral  character  in  the  midst  of a morning drinking session – reveals  the  filmmakers’  belief  in  the  profound  difficulty  of  ever  truly   recovering  from  the  Bowery’s  characteristic  destruction  of  humanness.  As  Sufrin  himself   309 Ibid 230-31. 141 states toward the end of his memoir, On the Bowery’s  sole  intention  was  to  “[catch]   something of the loneliness, the ignorance, the waste and futility of such lives, and [communicate]  it  to  others…”310 When situated within the broader context of postwar debates about homelessness, Frank  and  Leslie’s  Pull My Daisy comes into view as the perfect inverse of On the Bowery.  Representative  of  the  Beats’  well-known rejection of the socially homogeneous and sexually normative environs of 1950s suburbia, which was itself part of their broader effort to critique and evade the dehumanizing conformism of cold war American society, Leslie  and  Frank’s  film  embraces  the  absence  of  a  stable,  bounded  space  of  material   shelter in an effort to reclaim instability as the basis of an alternative lifestyle, while also promoting social detachment as the condition of possibility for alternative cultural formations. Much like Mekas, the poets and artists of the Beat Generation did not perceive any clear demarcations between normative configurations of public and private life in postwar America, even asserting that the domestic realm had to be located as the primary  staging  ground  for  postwar  society’s  destruction  of  human  interiority.  As   Kerouac’s  alter  ego  Ray  Smith  explains  in  The Dharma Bums, it was not the anonymous offices of white-collar bureaucrats  but  the  “rows  of  well-to-do houses with lawns and television sets in each living room with everybody looking at the same thing and thinking the  same  thing  at  the  same  time”  that  were  the  “perfect  expression”  of  “the  middle-class non-identity”  – a description  that  reveals  Kerouac  to  have  shared  Ginsberg’s  anxiety   310 Sufrin 139. 142 about  the  mass  media’s  “extermination”  of  the  previously  autonomous  private  realm   under late modernity.311 Because the Beats held spontaneity and immediacy to be the true measure of human interiority, their abandonment of such routinized domestic interiors for the romance of the road was spurred by the alternative modalities of intimate experience promised by the latter, whether these intimacies took shape as private reveries conducted in the solitude of nature, friendship offered by fellow travelers, or unconventional and unsanctioned forms of interpersonal communion. Leading artists like Kerouac away from the traditional spaces of social reproduction and into spaces perceived to be separate from dominant American culture (the highway, the Denver colored section, subterranean heroin  pads,  mountain  cabins,  Mexico,  etc.),  the  Beats’  embrace  of  shelterlessness  was   intricately bound up with their strategic advocation for the benefits of social detachment. Rather than an insurmountable tragedy, alienation was reclaimed as an achievement, a position of externality cultivated as a way of removing oneself from the impersonal associative bonds governing dominant society, which was thus integral to the maintenance of human vitality.312 Though the Beats were not simply oblivious to the vulnerability suffered by those deemed superfluous, they believed that this willful divorce from the social offered the only viable strategy for formulating an alternative community, one organized in accordance with the inner needs being denied expression by dominant American society. In direct opposition to On the Bowery’s  association  of  homelessness   311 Jack Kerouac, Road Novels 1957-1960 (New York: Library of America, 2007), 307; Allen Ginsberg, “America’s  Nervous  Breakdown:  Poetry,  Violence,  and  the  Trembling  Lambs,”  Village Voice, 25 August 1959: 1. 312 As  Norman  Mailer  put  it  in  his  1957  essay,  “The  White  Negro,”  from  within  the  deathly  conformism  of   cold  war  America,  it  appeared  that  the  “only  life-giving  answer”  was  “to  divorce  oneself  from society, to exist  without  roots,  to  set  out  on  that  uncharted  journey  into  the  rebellious  imperatives  of  the  self…   explor[ing]  that  domain  of  experience  where  security  is  boredom  and  therefore  sickness…”  (Mailer,   Advertisements for Myself [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992]: 339). 143 with dehumanization, then, the Beats claimed that the demand for normativity governing both public and private domains of life was responsible for the decline of humanness in postwar society. In doing so, they effectively reframed homelessness as the only remaining avenue to redemption. Although Pull My Daisy takes place almost entirely in the interior space of an artists’  loft  in  the  lower  east  side  of  Manhattan,  the  film’s  depiction  of  its  pseudo- domestic  setting,  the  actions  that  occur  within  it,  and  its  protagonists’  eventual  departure   from this space exhibit an immensely celebratory take on postwar homelessness. Within the austere, yet shabby domesticity of this loft, a railroad worker named Milo lives with his wife (a painter), their son Pablo, and an unidentified young woman who simply lounges in bed throughout the film. Representative  of  what  Parker  Tyler  once  called  “the   tenement-like homes the impoverished Beats have made, statistically, into their Waste Lands,”  the  loft  has  mostly  bare  walls  punctuated  by  the  occasional  unframed  painting,   hand-me-down sofas and wicker chairs imperfectly arranged into loose configurations, purely functional appliances and fixtures, and untidy floors and tables littered with dirty laundry, food, and other anonymous objects.313 In other words, it bears a certain resemblance to the flop that Gorman temporarily comes to inhabit in On the Bowery: rather than some ordered, continuous, and hermetically sealed interior, this is a provisional and porous domestic space, where beatniks enter without invitation to recite boozy poetry or burst into musical performance, and where the aleatory music of the surrounding street filters in through open windows, along with the more mysterious “sounds  of  time”  referenced  in  Kerouac’s  celebrated  narration.  In  a  manner  that  subverts   normative representations of the postwar suburban  “dream  home”  circulating  through   313 Tyler 110. 144 American mass culture at the time, Pull My Daisy embraces the disorder, unpredictability, and improvisation that traditional domestic interiors and routines are designed  to  contain,  refusing  this  era’s  ideal  of  domestic harmony and habitualized familial intimacy to leave room for contingency, thereby setting the stage for a wilder sort of intimate relationality. Pull My Daisy narrates the sudden emergence of such an intimate relational dynamic, while also revealing its masculinist dimensions. As noted in the previous chapter, the film revolves around a visit paid to the loft by a bishop, along with his mother  and  sister,  which  has  been  arranged  and  prepared  for  by  Milo’s  (unnamed)  wife.   While the wife works to make the loft tidy and presentable to her guests, the motley collection of uninvited male artists who gather in the loft over the course of the day luxuriate in its messiness, flopping on the floor to drink and smoke, inquiring about the holiness of various quotidian activities and objects, and providing enough linguistic “goofing”  and  organ  banging  to  continuously  subvert  the  aura  of  propriety  the  wife   struggles to project. During the majority of the evening, Milo tries to maintain a modicum of sobriety, making pleasant conversation with the bishop and telling the poets to behave themselves and be patient. But at the end of the night, pleasantries are finally dispensed with as Milo and a musician friend suddenly take up horns to engage in a proper bit of “blowing”:  a  playful,  impromptu  jazz  session  whose  profane  rhythms  send  the  bishop   searching for the door. As an improvisatory collaborative artistic practice valued for its sensuous impact on both performers and spectators, jazz functions in this context as a medium of intimate exchange, an interpersonal practice capable of producing a feeling of aliveness,  emotional  intensity,  and  reciprocity  in  its  participants,  which  the  film’s  loose,   145 imperfect, and improvisational formal grammar also strives to transmit to its viewers.314 Yet while Milo loses himself in this experience of relationality, embracing it as a welcome release from normativity, his wife interprets this break from behavioral norms as  a  tragic  failure,  declaring:  “All  this  nonsense!  All  this  time  we  should have fed them some  food,  we  should  have  done  ‘em  some  good,  we  shoulda  – all  that  time  you  give  ‘em   wine  and  beer  and  give  ‘em  all  these  beatniks  in  the  house.”315 Here,  Kerouac’s  narration  ventriloquizes  the  wife’s  aspiration  for  a  version  of   normalcy defined by the reproduction of conventions of domestic hospitality that, to the Beats, were mere extensions of a phony and restrictive middle-class propriety, the latter of which seemed designed to prevent one from doing such harmless activities as consuming large quantities of wine or reciting scatological poetry. In voicing this familiar version of the female complaint, the wife disturbs the playful, spontaneous atmosphere these men finally succeeded in wresting from the constraining domesticity she worked so hard to create. Yet all is not lost for the beatniks. Rather than endeavoring to generate this atmosphere again, they simply abandon the homestead for a night on the town, seeking to extract charges of intimacy from the unpredictable encounters and activities promised by the street. On their way out, we glimpse the idealized fantasy of vagrancy that motivates this  departure,  as  Kerouac  is  found  proclaiming  with  an  intensely  romantic  air:  “Let’s  go.   We’ll  go  somewhere;;  we’ll  find  something.  Maybe  we’ll  play  by  fires  in  the  Bowery…”   Carrying  the  film’s  suspicion  of  domesticity  to  its  logical  conclusion,  these  closing   scenes thus project a counter-image of the representation of skid row formulated by On 314 Norman  Mailer’s  description  of  jazz  as  “the  music  of  orgasm,…  a  communication  by  art  [that  says],  ‘I   feel  this,  and  now  you  do  too,’”  is  only  the  most  obvious  reference  here  (Mailer  341). 315 This  and  subsequent  quotes  from  Kerouac’s  narration  draw  from  Steidl’s  recent  republication  of  Grove   Press’s  1961  book  Pull My Daisy,  which  includes  an  incomplete  transcript  of  Kerouac’s  voiceover.  See   Jack Kerouac, Robert Frank, and Alfred Leslie, Pull My Daisy (Gottingen, Germany: Steidl, 2008), n.p. 146 the Bowery,  effectively  recasting  one’s  evasion  of  a  conventional home-space as invigorating, a hard-won adventure for a group of poets willing to engage in a bit of class transvestism.316 The condition of homelessness-as-marginality is similarly cheered in Pull My Daisy,  as  is  perhaps  clear  from  the  film’s  embrace of the baseness (the dirt, disorder, and drunkenness) that On the Bowery inscribes as a shocking and grotesque reality of marginal lifestyles. Indeed, along with the critique of domestic conventions that Pull My Daisy advances,  the  Beats’  disinterest  in participating in the normative public world is expressed rather nicely in an early scene that hyperbolizes On the Bowery’s   aforementioned representation of this world as a bustling realm of productive activity that simply races past Gorman, positioning the latter as an obsolete holdover from a bygone, hobohemian golden age. Pull My Daisy reiterates this basic relation while also redistributing  it,  choosing  to  cast  the  “normal”  outside  world  as  a  profoundly  hostile   realm and to align its sympathies with the bums. Approximately three minutes into the film,  after  Ginsberg  and  Corso  come  falling  into  Milo’s  loft,  cracking  open  cans  of  beer   and  toasting  to  each  other’s  health,  Corso  glances  out  the  window  and,  as  the  film  cuts  to   a shot of automobiles passing in and  out  of  view  on  the  street  outside,  Kerouac’s   voiceover  intones:  “Look  at  all  those  cars  out  there.  There’s  nothing  out  there  but  a   million screaming ninety-year-old  men  being  run  over  by  gasoline  trucks.”  A  cut  takes  us   back to Ginsberg and Corso sitting inside, where the latter places a cigarette in his mouth, crumples the empty pack in his hand, and tosses it off-screen  as  Kerouac  concludes,  “So   throw  the  match  on  it.”  In  this  fantasy  of  beatific  apocalypse,  the  postwar  capitalist   316 I  borrow  the  term  “class  transvestite”  from  Eric  Schocket’s  “Undercover  Explorations  of  the  ‘Other   Half,’  or  the  Writer  as  Class  Transvestite,”  Representations 64 (Autumn, 1998). 147 culture that had rendered bums like Gorman superfluous is casually discarded or set aflame.  Rather  than  lamenting  this  culture’s  refusal  to  acknowledge  their  alternative   values and aspirations, Ginsberg and Corso emphasize the freedom afforded by non- belonging, reveling in the pleasures of an early morning drunk as Pablo sets out for school and the rest of the world goes off to work. To paraphrase Sobchack, leisure in this scene is temporalized in distinctly positive terms, as a pleasurable and unsanctioned withdrawal from the inhuman temporality of dominant society. Such explicit critiques of normative society are doubled by a more implicit dimension of this film, whose very setting can be read as expressing a similarly celebratory take on social detachment. As noted before, the improvisational exchanges represented and documented by Pull My Daisy are imagined to occur on the Bowery itself.  Despite  the  fact  that  the  film  was  actually  shot  in  Leslie’s  Manhattan  loft  located  at   Fourth Avenue and 12th Street,  or  a  good  eight  blocks  north  of  the  Bowery’s  conclusion   at  the  southern  edge  of  Cooper  Square,  the  opening  lines  of  Kerouac’s  voiceover  re- position  the  action  “in  [a]  loft  that’s  in  the  bowery  in  the  lower  east  side,  new  york.”  This   change suggests  that  the  Bowery’s  liminal  location  in  respect  to  the  normative  spaces  of   domesticity and labor in postwar New York – its geographic position in the less-traveled and neglected space between Levittown and the white collar institutions located in other Manhattan neighborhoods, such as the financial district or midtown – was integral to these  artists’  attempt  to  represent  an  alternative  form  of  intimate  relationality  in  this  film,   providing the very ground from which Pull My Daisy’s  alternative  values  and  sensibility 148 were articulated.317 Which is to say, though the two films differ considerably, Pull My Daisy nevertheless ascribes to the same logic through which On the Bowery distinguishes between  normative  and  marginal  social  spaces,  assuming  that  the  Bowery’s geographic separation from the middle-class life-world brings with it a corresponding cultural alterity – an  alternative  or  subversive  “atmosphere”  that  allows  denizens  of  the  margin  to  shrug   off the behavioral conventions, values, and practices governing dominant culture and work toward an alternative lifestyle. The main difference is that, while Sufrin viewed the confused,  shadowy  atmosphere  this  “fervent  night  street”  as  a  frightening  departure  from   the transparent rationalism governing then-dominant American culture, to the Beats, the alterity and opacity of such peripheral spaces provided much of their allure. Indeed, much like  Kerouac’s  infamous  description  of  the  “dark  mysterious  streets”  of  “the  Denver   colored  section”  in  On the Road, Pull My Daisy’s gesture toward the unpredictable, risk- laden, fire-lit streets of the Bowery invests them with an enigmatic aura of exoticism, thereby  underscoring  the  Bowery’s  capacity  to  better  facilitate  these  artists’  exploration   of the unstructured impulses comprising inner experience.318 In the Beat imagination, the Bowery thus resembles what the urban sociologist Robert  Park  referred  to  as  the  “moral  regions”  characteristic  of  large  cities:  small,   “detached  milieus”  dispersed  throughout  urban  space  wherein  “vagrant and suppressed impulses,  passions,  and  ideals  emancipate  themselves  from  the  dominant  moral  order”   and  provide  “abnormal”  personality  types  with  a  “moral  climate”  in  which  their  “peculiar   nature obtains the stimulations that bring [their] innate dispositions to full and free 317 Jack Sargeant notes the location  of  Leslie’s  loft  in  his  informative  discussion  of  Pull My Daisy’s   production history in The Naked Lens: An Illustrated History of Beat Cinema (London, UK: Creation, 1997), 14. 318 Kerouac, Road Novels 161. 149 expression.”319 Essentially referring to urban spaces inhabited or frequented by a specific sort  of  subculture,  one  whose  inhabitants  “are  dominated,  as  people  are  ordinarily  not   dominated, by a taste or by a passion or by some interest which has its roots directly in the  original  nature  of  the  individual”  and  is  thus  “more  immediate  and  more   fundamental”  than  the  interests  organizing  other  social  groups,  Park’s  “moral  region”   also draws an intriguing connection between such subcultures, the concrete spaces they congregate in, and the domain of inner experience.320 Park suggests that the expression of those  “impulses,  passions,  and  ideals”  comprising  one’s  “innate  disposition”  depends   upon  one’s  “detach[ment]”  from  the  spaces  of  “the  dominant  moral  order.”321 To Park, whose work was informed by Freud and who conceived the moral in opposition to the intellectual,  such  inner,  moral  impulses  were  “vagrant”  not  only  because  of  their  essential   fluidity or non-fixity, but also because of their distinctly asocial character, or their status as  “wild”  instinctual  urges  that  had  somehow  evaded  the  normative  processes  of   socialization through which such passions are sublimated into socially productive behavior.322 In  Park’s  schema,  then,  inner  experiences  are defined by their homelessness, or their essential incompatibility with the rational, ordered space of the social. Yet despite this, their cultivation is nevertheless said to be encouraged within small, contained locales punctuating the broader space of the city, or actually existing, material sites within which a  “moral  climate”  can  reliably  be  found  to  prevail  or  reside.  The  “moral  region”  is  thus  a   home that is not one – an uncanny domain that is valued as such, sought out for its 319 Robert  E.  Park,  “The  City:  Suggestions  for the Investigation of Human Behavior in the Urban Environment”  in  The City, Park, Ernest W. Burgess, and Roderick D. McKenzie (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1967) 43, 45, 41. 320 Ibid 45. 321 Ibid 43, 41. 322 Ibid 43. 150 perceived ability to generate reciprocity between inner and outer spheres, or to provide a “stimulat[ing]”  environment  governed  by  chance  in  which  one’s  most  primitive  impulses   are allowed expression in all their irrationality.323 Like Sufrin, Park viewed such uncanny regions with suspicion, affiliating them primarily  with  such  sociological  categories  as  “the  poor,”  “the  criminal,”  and  “the   defective.”324 To artists of the NAC, however, the vagrant atmosphere of such regions as the Bowery provided a vital release from the excessively rational environs of dominant society. In celebrating the Bowery in such terms, as a marginal locale possessing an alternative cultural atmosphere conducive to the expression of intimacy, Pull My Daisy gave cinematic expression to a distinct spatial logic that would come to serve as the basic architecture  of  the  NAC’s  films,  as  well  as  the  organizing  principle  of  their  very  lives  and   artistic practices. With the normative spaces and values of society deemed dehumanizing, Leslie  and  Frank’s  film  made  redemption dependent on an elsewhere, a material or imaginary  space  existing  outside  late  modernity’s  dominant  spheres  of  labor,   consumption,  and  domesticity,  and  thus  beyond  the  reach  of  the  “centrifugal  force”   governing these spheres.325 The pursuit of this elsewhere thus led the artists of the NAC into spaces demarcated as liminal, peripheral, abandoned, detached, or foreign; spaces untraveled by the middle-class, not yet fully colonized by consumer capitalism, not yet “developed”  in  the  name  of  suburban  expansion  or  “renovated”  in  the  name  of  urban   renewal; decaying and neglected spaces that seemed ready to be repurposed for alternative modes of habitation, and whose porous architecture made them privileged sites of intimate encounter. 323 Ibid 41. 324 Ibid 45, 41. 325 Mekas,  “Notes on  the  New  American  Cinema”  in  Film Culture Reader, 106. 151 By assuming the position of a topophile and mapping the marginal spaces that attracted these artists, while also analyzing the ways in which such spaces were used, inhabited, and cinematically re-imagined, an architectonics of late-modern intimacy can thus be discerned along the surface  of  the  NAC’s  films,  retraced  or  reconstructed  across   the collective oeuvre produced by this movement. However, the unstable, un-housed, and essentially vagrant forms of intimacy pursued and produced by such films suggests the need to resist any impulse  to  contain  intimate  space  in  a  secure  and  stable  “house  image”   or  to  imagine  it  as  an  enclosure  that  “concentrates  being  within  limits  that  protect.”326 Moreover,  any  effort  to  map  the  intimacies  that  organize  the  NAC’s  films  would   necessarily require a refocusing  of  the  topophile’s  attention  from  the  formal  axis   emphasized by Bachelard to that of politics. For, as Pull My Daisy makes clear, the inner experiences that artists of the NAC sought to wrest from – or generate within – regions such as the Bowery  was  as  much  a  product  of  those  regions’  inhabitants  as  their  shadowy   mise-en-scene. Seeking to extract humanness from an impersonal world, the poets depicted  in  Leslie  and  Frank’s  film  turn  rather  predictably  to  the  more  spontaneous  and   vitalizing environs of the poor, entering without invitation first into the home of a working-class man idolized by the Beats for his insatiable libido (the painter Larry Rivers portraying  Neal  Cassady,  that  heroic  “cocksman  and  Adonis  of  Denver”  whose  sexual   exploits are perennially  celebrated  in  the  Beats’  prose),  and  second  into  the  overlooked,   risky quarter of New York City nightly appropriated by the homeless.327 Like  Mailer’s   “white  Negro”  – that  “new  breed  of…  urban  [adventurer]  who  drifted  out  at  night  looking   for action  with  a  black  man’s  code  to  fit  [his]  facts”  – the  “life-giving”  experience  of   326 Bachelard  xxxvi.  “Topophilia”  is  the  name  that  Bachelard  gives  to  his  examination  of  the  “images  of   felicitous space”  (xxxv). 327 Ginsberg, Howl and Other Poems (San Francisco, CA: City Lights, 2001), 14. 152 outsideness pursued by Pull My Daisy’s  hipster-protagonists comes not through solitude, but through a touristic journey into the spaces inhabited by a community situated as “marginal”  within  American  culture.328 This particular distribution of the intimate is by no means a novel component of Leslie  and  Frank’s  film. At the time of Pull My Daisy’s  release,  the  distinctly  modern   tendency to locate the other as a wellspring of human vitality even appeared to be on the wane.  In  an  essay  published  in  1961  on  “The  Crisis  in  Culture,”  Hannah  Arendt  notes  the   long lineage of modern artists and revolutionaries who, since the emergence of the social in the 18th and 19th centuries, sought to preserve their newly discovered (or invented) inner selves from the de-individualizing  logic  of  society  by  “escap[ing]”  into  those  strata   of the population that had not yet been admitted to the still-exclusionary  domain  of  “good   society”  – what she calls  “non-society  strata”  who  were  believed  to  retain  “certain  traits   of  humanity  which  had  become  extinct  in  society,”  such  as  the  capacity  for  intimacy. 329 Yet for Arendt, the existence of such redeeming strata had been jeopardized, if not outmoded, by the historical onset of mass society, which had effectively closed all “avenues  of  escape”  by  “incorporat[ing]  all  strata  of  the  population.”330 To figures affiliated  with  the  NAC,  the  evident  persistence  of  “non-society  strata”  in  the  postwar   U.S. was both alarming  and  alluring:  while  this  movement’s  protest  against  the  dominant   society was frequently voiced from explicitly anti-racist and anti-homophobic positions that  sought  to  abolish  the  social  hierarchy  described  by  Arendt,  the  NAC’s  assumption   that oppressed communities and subjects resided within the symbolic margins of the 328 Mailer 341. 329 Arendt,  “The  Crisis  in  Culture:  Its  Social  and  Its  Political  Significance”  in  Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought (New York: Viking, 1968) 197. An earlier version of this argument appeared  as  “Society  and  Culture,”  Daedalus 89.2 (Spring, 1960): 278-87. 330 Arendt,  “Crisis  in  Culture”  197. 153 social also motivated their problematic valorization of such subjects as material reserves of intimacy, or depositories of otherness through which an intensely embodied feeling of escape could be extracted, however fleetingly. V. Life in End Times Few  of  the  NAC’s  films  are  as  excited  about  homelessness  as  Pull My Daisy. Though Pull My Daisy did not strive to produce a thorough representation of its socio- historical context, its purely celebratory depiction of postwar homelessness presents an image of this condition that contrasts markedly with the more conflicted perceptions of shelterlessness and non-belonging circulating through American culture of the 1950s and ‘60s.  To  Parker  Tyler,  the  rather  blithe  tone  of  Pull My Daisy was one of its more disturbing  qualities.  In  his  aforementioned  criticism  of  Frank  and  Leslie’s  film, Tyler attacks the  latter’s  promotion  of  a  carefree  idiocy  as  an  extension  of  the  Beats’  typically   “euphori[c]”  mode  of  existence,  where  euphoria,  as  “the  antithesis  of  angst,”  entails  a   callous blindness to the anxiety-inducing aspects of modern life.331 Though  Tyler’s   suggestion that the Beats were entirely devoid of angst or anxiety is misguided, his insistence on the disconcertingly celebratory tone of Pull My Daisy nevertheless retains insight,  as  does  his  emphasis  on  the  performative  (or  “theatrical”)  nature  of  the  version of homelessness we encounter in this film.332 Indeed, when considered alongside a poem like  “Howl”  or  the  more  gloomy  moments  of  Kerouac’s  novels  (“After  all  a  homeless   man  has  reason  to  cry,  everything  in  the  world  is  pointed  against  him”),  Pull My Daisy feels highly imbalanced, as if the critical side of Beat literature was simply filtered out 331 Tyler 110. 332 Ibid 111. 154 when adapted to the silver screen.333 In emphasizing the vitalizing experiences that these “outcast  tramp-poet[s]”  gained  by  abandoning  traditional  home-spaces and embracing marginality, Pull My Daisy completely elides the ways in which homelessness was also experienced by these artists as, alternately, a woeful absence of shelter or an oppressive state of alienation, exclusion, and superfluity.334 This negative dimension of postwar homelessness,  which  functions  at  the  heart  of  the  Beats’  rebellion  against  cold  war   American society, is merely glimpsed in Pull My Daisy, excluded from its zany portrayal of  the  “mad  evening”  had  by  this  “heroic  and  bedraggled  circle”  (Frank  and  Leslie’s   description)  like  the  more  explicit  sexual  references  of  the  film’s  original  theme  song,   whose  eventual  “bowdleriz[ation]”  was  astutely  attributed  by  Tyler  to  commercial   acquiescence.335 As  a  figure  that  condenses  the  NAC’s  profoundly  conflicted relationship to late- modernity,  homelessness  is  at  its  most  coherent  in  the  NAC’s  films  when  it  is  ambivalent.   And though this ambivalence does not appear in On the Bowery or Pull My Daisy, it determines  the  very  form  of  Jonas  Mekas’s  Guns of the Trees, a sprawling excoriation of cold war America that revolves around the death of a young woman named Frances (Frances Stillman), and the effect her death has on her lover Gregory (Adolfas Mekas) and their two friends Ben and Argus (Ben Carruthers and Argus Speare Juillard). As I touch on briefly in the previous chapter, with Guns of the Trees, Mekas sought to abandon traditional narrative structure for a more improvisatory and intentionally incoherent form that he hoped would better embody the sense of disorder and uncertainty governing  daily  life  in  American  society  at  the  beginning  of  the  ‘60s  – a time that he 333 Kerouac, Road Novels 369. 334 Tyler 111. 335 Quoted  in  Mekas,  “Cinema  of  the  New  Generation,”  Film Culture 21 (Summer, 1960):14; Tyler 111. 155 describes, in an entry composed in his personal diary during Guns of the Trees’s   production,  as  a  “period  of  darkness”  that  had  rendered  the  detached, omniscient perspective of classical narration inaccessible.336 The  film’s  image  track  thus  moves   haphazardly  between  staged  sequences  dramatizing  the  new  generation’s  existential   dilemmas, poetic imagery expressing the alienating and liberatory dimensions of then- contemporary American society, documentary footage of protests, political clashes, landscapes, and urban architecture, and patches of blank, white leader that suggest an affinity with minimalist painting, while the soundtrack oscillates similarly between a grating, high-pitched score composed by Lucia Dlugoszewski, more pleasant, relaxing folk music conveying romantic or melancholic sentiments, and angry outbursts of poetry read in voiceover by Allen Ginsberg. Shifting constantly between different genres, tones, spaces, and times, and moving back and forth between the realms of fiction and documentary, Guns of the Trees is – despite its considerable dramatic failures – among this  film  culture’s  most  significant  formal  accomplishments,  a  stunningly  dispersed text that successfully jettisons many standard strictures of narrative coherence in pursuit of a murkier, messier aesthetic. As an effort to evoke the disorienting experience of daily life in  a  transitional  historical  period,  this  film’s  opacity  therefore  underscores  the  NAC’s   proximity  to  classical  film  noir,  demonstrating  how  the  latter’s  anxieties  about  the   instability of late-modern American life are extended and transmuted by the former. An  important  “Movie  Journal”  entry  from  March  2nd, 1961, “On  Improvisation   and  Spontaneity,”  reiterates  the  connections  that  Mekas  perceived  between  the  messy   aesthetic of works such as Guns of the Trees and the sense of homelessness suffered by 336 “Guns  will  not  lift  itself  ‘above’  its  material.  It  will  have  more  to  do  with  naming  the  areas  of  anxieties   than providing solutions. This is still a period of  darkness.  I  am  part  of  that  darkness  myself”  (Mekas,   Diary, 30 March 1960). 156 the new America, while also revealing his attempt to discern a glimmer of hope in the latter. Here, in addition to attributing the seemingly incoherent, directionless character of then-contemporary improvisatory American art to a sudden and disorienting delegitimation  of  the  old  America’s  reigning  mores  and  beliefs  – one that had left members  of  the  new  generation  “lost  and  shaky,  searching,  fragile,  groping  in  an   uncertain  moral  landscape”  – Mekas also states that this precarious, vulnerable position of moral shelterlessness produced an unexpected gain for the new artist, yielding an immensely  valuable  “oversensitiv[ity],”  or  a  state  of  heightened  receptivity  to  the   “distant,  deep  waves,  and  motions  and  voices  and  groans”  emanating  from  inner   experience: traces of some ancient core of truth and knowledge that Mekas, in a characteristically mystical manner, positions as the ground from which the new America’s  project  of  alternative  world-building can begin.337 It is this renewed relationship to inner experience and the redemptive potential implied therein that motivates Mekas to reframe the shakiness and messiness of the new art as signs of natality,  or  of  what  he  describes  as  the  impending  “birth”  of  a  “new  man.”338 Along with the profound uncertainty it registers, then, the disorganized aesthetic of the new America – a homeless form for a homeless generation – is simultaneously perceived to radiate with the potential for change, encapsulating both the anxious and exhilarating affects engendered by an historical period devoid of all stable ideological frameworks. The homelessness experienced by the new generation does not figure in Guns of the Trees solely at the level of form, but in fact recurs in numerous manifestations at the level of content as well, functioning as a central trope through which a semblance of 337 Mekas, Movie Journal 27, 29, 28. 338 Ibid 29. 157 continuity is retained  across  the  film’s  highly  disparate  segments.  And  though  the  “loss”   of  moral  certitude  is  dramatized  in  key  scenes,  the  new  generation’s  shelterlessness  is   also attributed to a variety of other socio-cultural, political, and environmental phenomena that cannot be easily reduced to matters of morality and truth, but which nevertheless resonate productively with perceptions of this period as one of transition, vulnerability, and disorientation. Many of these phenomena are intricately bound up with matters  of  privacy  and  publicity,  and  particularly  with  Mekas’s  belief  that  then- contemporary iterations of private and public life were incapable of adequately sheltering the individual from seemingly omnipresent dehumanizing social forces. Along with the decline of previously-operative  mores  and  conventions,  then,  Mekas’s  film  also  reveals   late-modernity as a moment when classical perceptions of the public and the private sphere as stable, coherent, and rigidly demarcated realms are severely problematized or disturbed,  if  not  altogether  outmoded.  As  with  Mekas’s  attempt  to  recast  uncertainty  as   natality, Guns of the Trees works quite hard to develop an optimistic perspective on the sense of homelessness that resulted from this decline of private and public forms, as we will  see  in  more  detail  below.  But  in  order  to  consider  how  Mekas’s  film  goes  about  this,   it is first necessary to examine its depiction of the negative side of postwar homelessness. In  a  manner  that  resonates  with  certain  of  Mekas’s  statements  from this period about  the  value  of  private  space,  one  side  of  this  film’s  representation  of  the  predicament   of postwar homelessness concerns the actual instability of domestic shelters within the context of cold war America. Set primarily in urban spaces of Manhattan and more rural locales throughout New Jersey, Connecticut, and New York, Guns of the Trees does not venture  into  the  new  suburban  interiors  that  Mekas  assumed  to  be  “disease-infested”  and   158 constraining.339 But it does spend ample time depicting the pseudo-domestic activities of Frances and her friends, paying particular attention to the bohemian, inner-city pad shared  by  Ben  and  Argus.  Looking  a  great  deal  like  Milo’s  loft  in  Pull My Daisy, Ben and  Argus’s  apartment  is  a  welcoming  domestic  interior  in which quotidian activities (amateur haircuts, playing with cats, potluck dinners, etc.) provide respite from an alienating outside world, while also contributing to the sense of vitality conveyed by the film. Despite moments of joyousness, however, the boundaries of this space are constantly revealed to be unstable. In the first sequence depicting the loft, for instance, images of Ben and Argus lounging around their home are not paired with banal dialogue or  nostalgic  folk  songs,  but  with  Dlugoszewski’s  air raid siren-like score – a discordant audio-visual  join  through  which  the  couple’s  seemingly  carefree  domestic  activities   become permeated by a free-floating dread. In a later sequence, which follows footage of Ben and Argus at a political rally, we see them lying asleep in bed beside an open window, until Ben wakes with a start, apparently disturbed by a nightmare. As if it were meant  to  function  as  a  vocalization  of  Ben’s  internal  dream-work, the soundtrack features Ginsberg reading portions of a surreal and queer collage poem populated by movie stars, fleets of war planes, atomic bombs, beauty queens, and over-enthusiastic American soldiers.340 After  a  brief  series  of  shots,  we  then  hear  Ginsberg  denouncing  the  “paid   smug college boys spying on [his] private  life,”  before  confessing  to  have  “dreamed   [that]  J.  Edgar  Hoover  groped  me  in  a  silent  hallway  in  the  Capitol.”  Immediately  after   this statement, we see documentary footage of a protest against nuclear armament, the first shot of which shows a young woman standing in a sea of people while holding a 339 Mekas,  “Movie  Journal,”  Village Voice 15 June 1961, 13. 340 An alternate version of the untitled poem read in this sequence of Guns of the Trees is published in Ginsberg, Journals: Early Fifties, Early Sixties, ed. Gordon Ball (New York: Grove Press, 1977), 156-57. 159 baby  doll  and  a  placard  that  proclaims,  “THERE  IS  NO  SHELTER  IN  NUCLEAR   WAR.” In this remarkably tangled sequence, clusters of anxieties about international aggression, government surveillance, atomic warfare, and the mass media all intersect to convey how classical conceptions of the private sphere had been rendered obsolete by cold war American society. Just as the overwhelming complexity of then-contemporary political  relations  slips  in  through  Ben’s  window to penetrate his psychic integrity, dissolving the contours of his inner self, the closing protest footage also demonstrates the absurdity of traditional notions of private shelter within the context of nuclear modernity. In a manner that gives the lie to then-contemporary fantasies of the suburban household as  a  stable,  protective  enclosure,  Ben  and  Argus’s  material  dwelling  place  is  revealed  to   be  incapable  of  sheltering  them  from  the  outside  world.  Similarly,  Ginsberg’s  invocation   of figures ranging from  Mae  West  to  Hoover  and  the  anonymous  “college  boys”   employed by the CIA serves both to reiterate more pervasive, paranoid anxieties about the  “brainwashing”  or  soul-exterminating force of the mass media, and to denounce the very real invasions of private life suffered by American citizens after the rise of containment ideology, especially those persons whose sexual or corporeal identities could not cohere with the subject position delineated by then-contemporary privacy law.341 Through a series of specific formal and narrational strategies including the construction of fictional scenes representing the emotional unrest of the new generation, the juxtaposition of scenes of domestic repose with documentary footage of social unrest, and the pairing of such domestic  scenes  with  foreboding,  alarming,  or  “obscene”  sonic   341 On  brainwashing,  see  for  instance  the  recent  special  issue  “On  Brainwashing:  Mind  Control,  Media,  and   Warfare,”  Grey Room 45 (Fall, 2011). 160 elements, Guns of the Trees continuously performs – while simultaneously agonizing over – the  destabilization  of  the  traditional  “fantasy  of  privacy  as  a  stable  and  self-evident concept”  that  occurred  contemporaneous  with  this  film’s  production.342 This historical “loss”  of  privacy  is  thus  consciously  positioned  by  Mekas  as  a  structuring  dilemma  of   Guns of the Trees.  When  Ben  is  later  found  intoning  “I  want  to  go  home  and  have   cookies in dull kitchens  and  glasses  of  milk,”  the  image  of  the  stable,  traditional  home- space invoked in this nostalgic reverie is meant to feel unattainable. The stress that Guns of the Trees exhibits  in  the  face  of  the  new  generation’s   shelterlessness is not solely evident in its depiction of spaces and activities conventionally perceived to be private, but also in its representation of the late-modern American  public  world.  Mekas’s  film  is  one of the only works of the NAC to directly confront the newly bureaucratized institutions of white-collar labor analyzed so extensively in contemporaneous works of social criticism such as White Collar and The Organization Man, for instance. Throughout the film, fictional scenes depicting Ben racing to a job interview beneath the repetitive, standardized lighting of an excessively rationalized office building, Argus working as a secretary in an antiseptic, white-walled office where women sit separated from each other by broad desks and stacks of paper, or a pair of strange, lifeless mimes donning business garb and white face paint while weeping in a cabbage field reveal postwar spheres of labor to be impersonal, sterile, and phony, governed by a dehumanizing concern for money and populated by what Ginsberg 342 Nelson, Pursuing Privacy in Cold War America xiii. 161 refers  to  derogatorily  as  “owners  with  obsession  on  property  and  the  vanishing   selfhood.”343 The  public  world’s  dehumanizing  effects  are  also  attributed  by  Guns of the Trees to the material composition of New York City itself, which is frequently figured in the film as a mute and unfeeling mechanism – a rigid, artificial configuration of concrete, glass, iron, and stone whose strictly ordered architecture and monumental scale actively inhibits individual expression. Along with scenes depicting the estranging, anonymous dynamic  of  city  streets  and  the  film’s  recurrent  return  to  documentary  images  of  urban   unrest (its chaotic representation of clashes between protesters and the police), one particularly striking sequence  demonstrates  Mekas’s  use  of  urban  architecture  to   articulate anxieties about late-modernity’s  eradication  of  selfhood.  Filmed  in  the  early   morning in downtown Manhattan, this sequence shows Gregory walking alone on an empty street lined by tall buildings – a tiny figure beneath a monumental cityscape who then collapses dramatically to the street as the camera tilts jerkily up the face of a skyscraper  on  the  far  side  of  Gregory’s  body  before  pausing  in  a  low-angle shot of the top portion of this building, which seems to loom in the distance. Here, the imposing giganticism  of  urban  architecture  seems  to  overwhelm  and  exceed  Gregory’s  merely   human frame, as if the impersonal scale of the city simply left no room for the human organism. Along with war, bureaucracy, and mass communications, then, the city itself should  be  counted  among  the  “huge  machinery”  Mekas  believed  to  be  “encroaching  upon   [man’s]  personal  being”  in  the  context  of  postwar  America.344 343 An  excerpt  from  Ginsberg’s  1957  poem  “Death  to  Van  Gogh’s  Ear!,”  printed  in  Ginsberg,  Selected Poems 1947-1995 (New York: HarperCollins, 1996). 344 Mekas,  “Notes”  103. 162 More than simply impersonal, however, New York is imagined in this film in nearly  apocalyptic  terms.  In  keeping  with  Mekas’s  belief  that  the  postwar  period  was   witnessing  the  “death”  of  Western  civilization,  Guns of the Trees frames its urban setting as a crumbling, decrepit wasteland or ruin, as if it were  a  materialization  of  the  “dramatic   end  of  the  Christian  Era.”345 Similar to the narrative construction of On the Bowery, this framing effect is achieved through the placement of rhyming scenes in the opening and closing sequences of the film. Shot in a junkyard somewhere in the Bronx, these scenes show Gregory milling about amidst ruined engines and towering stacks of car frames, pondering ambiguous industrial debris, gazing across an expanse of water at the high-rise buildings in the distance, or conversing with a damaged old sailor. Importantly, each of these  scenes  feature  portions  of  Ginsberg’s  “Sunflower  Sutra,”  an  intensely  critical   reflection on the dehumanizing effects of modernization that begins by evoking melancholy views of a littered railroad yard  bordered  by  a  “tincan  banana  dock”  and  “box   house  hills,”  and  which  goes  on  to  narrate  an  encounter  with  the  dead  carcass  of  a   sunflower  covered  in  “that  dress  of  dust,  that  veil  of  darkened  railroad/skin,  that  smog  of   cheek,  that  eyelid  of  black/mis’ry, that sooty hand or phallus or protuber-/ance of artificial worse-than-dirt—industrial—/modern—all that civilization spotting your crazy golden  crown…”346 In such charged poetic imagery, the waste and pollution of urban- industrial society, along with the uninspired, rationalized design of mass-produced suburban housing, are made to stand in for the broader wreckage of Western modernity, the latter of which is blamed not only for the destruction of nature but also for damaging 345 Mekas,  “Where  Are  We”  21,  19. 346 Ginsberg, Howl and Other Poems (San Francisco, CA: City Lights, 1956), 35, 36. 163 the  “beautiful  golden  [sunflower]”  comprising  the  human  soul.347 Emphasizing Ginsberg’s  sweeping  indictment  of  “civilization,”  the  cinematography  in  these  two   scenes returns frequently to shots that frame decaying rubbish in the foreground with broader expanses of urban space visible in the background, even panning in an important shot from a heap of trashed automobile parts across a small body of water with smokestacks and buildings visible on the horizon, before resting on a close-up of Gregory whose concerned face is seen in profile with ambiguous and banal high-rises looming behind  him,  solemn  buildings  that  are  evocative  of  Lewis  Mumford’s  famous  description   of  New  York’s  Stuyvesant  Town  as  an  “unrelieved  nightmare”  of  “Police  State”   regimentation and uniformity, an architectural construct  “mechanically  conceived  and   mechanically  executed,  with  the  word  ‘control’  implicit  in  every  aspect  of  the  design.”348 The horizontal slide of the panning camera in this shot links the nightmarish architecture of the late-modern city metonymically to the junkyard,  thereby  implicating  Gregory’s   urban surroundings in the existential anguish he suffers. In such instances, Guns of the Trees can be said to provide a prime example of what Mekas would go on to describe as the early, critical period of the NAC, a moment  prior  to  the  underground’s  pursuit  of  a   purely  joyous  “art  of  light”  in  which  members  of  the  NAC  used  film  to  “[mirror]  the  dirty   cities,  the  black  dailiness  [sic]”  comprising  their  life-world.349 What is the significance of this representation of the city? Though  Mekas’s  periodization  here  is  not  meant  to  be  exhaustive,  it  does  resonate   in important ways with other pessimistic depictions of urban space in the early films of the  NAC.  Despite  Paul  Arthur’s  claim  that  post-WWII American avant-garde film 347 Ginsberg, Howl 38. 348 Quoted in Dimendberg, Film Noir 16-17. 349 Mekas,  “Where  Are  We”  21. 164 exhibits  a  “surprisingly  affirmative,  if  not  outright  exultant”  attitude  toward  city  life,  the   NAC’s  exultations  of  the  city,  when  they  appear  at  all,  are  most  often  tempered  by  an   acute anxiety about the impersonality and alienation subtending urban life in the context of postwar America.350 The social isolation, existential angst, and racial discrimination suffered by Benny, Lelia, and Hugh in Shadows; the endless stream of vapid or violent spectacles witnessed in and around Los Angeles by Judith in The Savage Eye; the heartless destruction of historic San Francisco neighborhoods critiqued in Lemon Hearts; the documentation of New York City police violence in Sunday; the more pervasive, structural violence endured by African American communities in The Cool World; the lifelessness and pollution of urban space as imagined in Mass for the Dakota Sioux – such  examples  reveal  this  film  culture’s  concerns  about  the  profound  difficulty  of   residing within the postwar American metropolis. The  NAC’s  exploration  of  the darker dimensions of urban life was not anomalous in  the  context  of  postwar  America.  Indeed,  though  Mekas  framed  this  movement’s   critical representation of the urban environment as a distinctly counter-cultural gesture, it was actually an extension of far more general anxieties about urban space that Edward Dimendberg has recently identified as a constitutive facet of late-modern American culture. As Dimendberg has shown in Film Noir and the Spaces of Modernity, American culture  of  the  1940s  and  ‘50s  witnessed the appearance of a profoundly bleak, melancholy urban aesthetic that contrasts markedly with the romantic odes to the metropolis put forward by early modernism, and which Dimendberg believes to be exemplified by classical film noir. Unlike the celebrated city symphony films and utopian 350 Paul  Arthur,  “The  Redemption  of  the  City,”  A Line of Sight: American Avant-Garde Film Since 1965 (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota, 2005) 47. 165 accounts  of  urban  modernity  articulated  during  the  1920s  and  ‘30s  – within which the city  appears  as  “a  fantasy  domain  of  speed,  dynamic  machine  production,  new   perspectives on quotidian realities, or technological precision”  – during  the  ‘40s  and  ‘50s,   a diverse range of artists, social critics, and theorists advanced a highly somber perspective on the late-modern  American  city,  characterizing  the  latter  as  “a  coldhearted   and treacherous mechanism more likely to provoke  fear  and  awe.”351 Revealing the parallels  that  exist  between  this  new  “urban  malaise”  and  the  postwar  privacy  crisis   charted by Deborah Nelson, Dimendberg also shows that, for anti-urban critics and artists of the late-modern period, the primary threat posed by the city was no longer a matter of moral dissolution, as in earlier strands of anti-urban thought, but of dehumanization.352 “After  1939,”  he  writes,  “the  danger  increasingly  addressed  by  cultural  and  intellectual   practitioners  was…  the potential loss of individual identity and the growing power of a technological  society  organized  by  new  spatial  forms  and  the  mass  media.”353 Dimdenberg’s  account  of  the  material  processes  responsible  for  the  emergence  of   this new urban malaise provides valuable insight into  the  NAC’s  concerns  with   homelessness. According to Dimendberg, this anti-urban aesthetic emerged in response to a  “fundamental  break”  in  historical  organizations  of  city  space  that  took  shape  in  the  U.S.   over  the  course  of  the  1940s  and  ‘50s.354 The range of socio-cultural transformations that occurred during this period, from the construction of new highway systems and suburban communities to the popularization of television and the unprecedented architectural destruction brought on by urban renewal programs,  produced  “rapid  and  unprecedented   351 Dimendberg, Film Noir 14. 352 Ibid 110. Dimendberg also discusses this distinctly late-modern  “urban  malaise”  in  his  earlier  essay,   “From  Berlin  to  Bunker  Hill.”   353 Dimendberg, Film Noir 14, emphasis added. 354 Ibid 9. 166 changes  in  the  built  environment,”  Dimendberg  explains,  which  radically  disturbed   traditional practices of navigating and inhabiting the city.355 The period of late modernity is here defined by the dramatic decline of urban centrality, or the historical supersession of traditional, humanist organizations of urban space affiliated with the Renaissance and designed  with  “regard  for  the  corporeal  and  aesthetic  experience  of  those  who  navigate   it”  by  contemporary,  “abstract”  spatial  forms  affiliated  with  the  industrialized  city  and   designed  primarily  for  “the  realization  of  specific  economic  ends,  social  policies,  or   technological  functions.”356 Instead of providing an ordered, proportionate, and unified environment capable of  functioning,  in  Paul  Zucker’s  terms,  as  “a  psychological  parking   place”  while  also  facilitating  the  expression  and  maintenance  of  collective  experience,  the   dispersed space and gigantic scale of the late-modern American city seemed to have simply excised the human figure and severed all substantive social and worldly relations.357 In Arendtian terms, the transformation of city space analyzed by Dimendberg can be read as one particularly disorienting facet of a broader reorganization of worldliness that Arendt posits as the material backdrop of modern social practices. Indeed, Dimendberg’s  insistence  that  discussions  of  “space”  entail  both  material  “forms  of  the   built  environment”  (buildings,  streets,  districts,  etc.)  and the  “range  of  attitudes,   behaviors, and  shared  interpretations”  that  take  shape  within  and  around  such  forms   resonates  productively  with  Arendt’s  notion  of  worldliness.358 The  designation  “world”  is   not  only  extended  by  Arendt  to  the  “environment  of  things”  that  stands  between  and   355 Ibid 8. 356 Ibid 104. 357 Quoted in ibid 103. 358 Ibid 99. 167 around humans,  but  to  the  shared  “customs  and  habits  of  intercourse”  that  such  things   give rise to as well.359 Arendt thus attributes worldliness to the material structures, use objects, and cultural products created through human fabrication as well as to cultural behaviors  and  conventions,  or  the  “deeds  and  facts  and  events  and  patterns  of  thoughts  or   ideas”  that  form  the  fabric  of  common  sense.360 The  function  of  this  “human  artifice”  is   nevertheless more specific than that of space. As Arendt states repeatedly throughout The Human Condition, the things and customs of the world have the function of providing a home  for  humans  during  their  time  on  earth:  they  serve  “to  house  the  unstable  and  mortal   creature  which  is  man”  by  providing  a  durable  man-made  environment  that  “stabiliz[es] human  life,”  offsetting  the  endless  change  and  cyclical  temporality  of  natural  life   processes  while  also  providing  a  reliable  “in-between”  for  human  activities,  a  commonly   shared public realm that brings individuals into objective relations and establishes their subjective position, thus allowing them to verify experiences and articulate their uniqueness.361 Resonating  in  certain  respects  with  Arendt’s  narrative  about  the  decline  or  “loss”   of worldliness that followed from the rise of modern society, the violent destruction/reconstruction of the late modern city charted by Dimendberg, and the traumatic disorganization of traditional social practices, cultural customs, and experiential modalities this process entailed, should be counted among the concrete historical developments responsible for the pervasive experiences of non-belonging, uprootedness, and loneliness that Arendt believed to have achieved the status of mass 359 Arendt, The Human Condition 94. 360 Ibid 95. 361 Ibid 136, 137, 52. 168 phenomena in postwar society.362 When late-modern urban transformations are approached in this manner, as material causes of a broader condition of world-alienation, we  gain  a  deeper  understanding  of  Dimendberg’s  frequent  references  to  the  perpetual   homelessness  of  film  noir’s  protagonists.  Much  like  the  more  general  anxieties  expressed in then-contemporary urban criticism about the increasing homelessness of modern man, these  protagonists’  “inability  to  dwell  comfortably  anywhere”  encapsulates  film  noir’s   characteristic blend of nostalgia and cynicism: its perception of the postwar period as a moment of crisis characterized by the degeneration of traditional configurations of domestic life and a parallel loss of worldliness, both of which are typically represented as unendurable.363 The particular iteration of world-alienation that we encounter in classical noir intersects in important ways with the condition of homelessness subtending the films of the NAC. As is demonstrated by the apocalyptic representation of New York City in Guns of the Trees, Mekas was also plagued by anxieties about the loss of worldliness during  the  period  of  this  film’s  production.  Moreover,  just  as  Mekas’s  representation  of   New York as an impersonal and inhospitable environment draws on decidedly noirish stylistic strategies for communicating psychical and emotional disturbances through abstracted urban forms, Guns of the Trees’s  consistent  disruption  of  its  characters’   362 In  Arendt’s  theoretical  framework,  the  rise  of  modern  society  is  said  to  result  in  a  corresponding   degeneration  of  worldliness,  with  the  durability  of  the  human  artifice  progressively  eroded  by  modernity’s   emphasis on essentially futile forms of labor (which leave no trace) and world-devouring processes of consumption (which destroy materials and use-objects by emphasizing their functionalism, or their capacity to  nourish  human  life).  Though  Dimendberg’s  narrative  about  the  emergence  of  abstract  space  is  highly distinct, it also corresponds in important ways with that of Arendt. It is worth noting, for instance, that both these thinkers track these processes back to the industrial revolution (see Dimendberg, Film Noir 99-108; Arendt, The Human Condition 124).  Also  relevant  here  is  Dimendberg’s  emphasis  on  the  increasing   functionalization  of  city  space  after  the  advent  of  the  industrialized  metropolis,  or  the  city’s  division  into   separate regions demarcated to fulfill basic functions (shopping centers, spaces of leisure, housing developments, etc.) rather than to facilitate the stabilization of identity or the emergence and persistence of community (Dimendberg, Film Noir 102-03). 363 Dimendberg, Film Noir 7. 169 attempts  to  “flee  from  the  ravages  of  [their]  disenchanted  urban  world”  and  regain   historically outmoded configurations of domesticity and community – whether in pastoral settings such as river banks, lake fronts, and woodlands or small social gatherings with friends and earnest folk musicians – also  seems  to  reiterate  noir’s  fatalistic  lamentations over the impossibility of accessing a stable refuge from late modernity.364 One  scene  poignantly  expresses  Mekas’s  belief  that  all  previously  existing   “outsides”  of  modernity  had  been  thoroughly  problematized,  incorporated,  or  obliterated   by the new realities of the postwar era. Forty-eight minutes into the film, we see Ben walking aimlessly over a criss-crossing  set  of  train  tracks  as  a  version  of  “Nine  Hundred   Miles”  (a  folk  song  narrated  from  the  perspective  of  a  tramp  who  is  “nine  hundred  miles   from  [his]  home”)  plays  on  the  soundtrack.  Lacking  home  and  direction,  Ben  recounts  a   conversation  with  a  friend  who,  upon  being  asked  to  propose  a  “way  out”  of  their   confusion,  responds  with  an  answer  that  is  not  an  answer:  “What  is  the  way  out  for  an  asp tree  or  an  apple?”  Situated  precariously  in  a  space  of  flux  and  transit,  Ben  is  nevertheless   stuck like some piece of passive matter, unable to escape the uncertainty of late-modern life because he is incapable of conceiving the existence of a stable, locatable elsewhere. With both public and private spheres of life penetrated by technological rationality, and both natural and domestic spaces of refuge no longer capable of providing adequate shelter,  Ben’s  position  here  resembles  that  attributed  by  Sobchack to the protagonists of film  noir:  both  are  “fixed…  in  a  transitional  moment,”  unable  to  recuperate  outmoded   configurations of home or to imagine a new modality of habitation more suitable to their historical predicament.365 364 Ibid 7. 365 Sobchack 165. 170 Despite such correlations between  these  two  film  cycles,  the  NAC’s  films  also   diverge in important respects from the representations of postwar homelessness that we encounter  in  film  noir.  After  all,  unlike  noir’s  typical  anti-hero,  Ben  does  not  “[opt]  for   death”  when  faced  with  difficulty of imagining a new domestic future.366 Guns of the Trees marks its difference from classical noir by holding the pessimism embodied by Frances  together  with  the  optimism  symbolized  by  Ben  and  Argus’s  relationship.  For  in   keeping  with  Mekas’s  belief  that  uncertainty was closely linked to natality, Argus is revealed  to  be  with  child,  a  secret  “conspirator  in  a  plot  of  a  new  man.”  By  seeking  to   discern  an  element  of  natality  in  the  “darkness”  of  late-modern American culture, Guns of the Trees swerves from the conservative and cynical trajectories of classical noir. It can thus  be  understood  as  an  effort  to  correct  noir’s  “historical  failure  to  constitute  the  ‘world   on  a  new  basis,  to  render  it  familiar,  to  humanize  it,’”  so  long  as  we  also  acknowledge   that this  project  of  humanization  is  not  fully  completed  in  Mekas’s  film.367 As the critic Joseph Freeman has observed, the success of Guns of the Trees is  that  it  “[catches]…  the   outline of  [the]  new  world”  being  ushered  in  by  members  of  the  new  generation,   rendering the new America as a mere horizon, a potential for change that has not yet materialized as a stable, cohesive entity.368 Guns of the Trees is thus less concerned with working to create a truly hospitable home-space, than with reframing the decline of what Freeman  terms  the  “old  order”  – those  for  whom  newness  signifies  “the  end  of  things”  – as  the  ground  from  which  a  new  beginning  could  emerge.  Which  is  to  say,  Mekas’s  film   invests redemptive potential in the very loss of worldliness lamented by classical noir. 366 Ibid 166. 367 Ibid 166. 368 Joseph  Freeman,  “Awakening  of  Spring:  ‘Guns  of  the  Trees,’”  Film Culture 25 (1962): 27, emphasis added. 171 Reiterating in a more radical manner Pull My Daisy’s  attempt  to  reclaim  non-belonging as an opportunity for elaborating new intimacies, Guns of the Trees attempts to envision the decay of the established human artifice – the passing-into-history of previously- operative,  “traditional”  configurations  of  worldliness  – as the condition of possibility for alternative world-formation, or for rebuilding the world in a more intimate and vitalizing form.  For  the  “new  order”  represented  in  this  film,  Freeman  explains,  “the  new  is  not  the   end  of  things,  but  the  beginning…”369 We can get a better sense of the difference between the NAC and film noir by turning to another railroad scene in which the condition of homelessness invoked by the decline of the established world is shown to yield a distinct, vitalizing energy. Approximately sixteen minutes into the film, we come to the overgrown field at the edge of a rail yard that I discuss briefly in my previous chapter, in which Ben and Argus are found  killing  time  as  “Little  Birdie”  plays  on  the  soundtrack.  When  the  couple  walks  to   an empty Southern Pacific freight car sitting unused at the edge of the yard, Ben enacts a playful performance of his own homelessness, climbing in and around the car as if he were freighthopping, then waving goodbye and pointing off into the distance at some imagined elsewhere.  Though  no  stable,  material  “outside”  appears  here,  an  instance  of   intimate exchange still occurs. At the level of content, Ben and Argus are allowed to momentarily relinquish their existential woes and engage in a playful, improvised interaction that can only be described as heart warming, conveying what one critic referred  to  as  the  “joyously  human”  sense  of  “spontaneity”  that  seems  to  radiate  from   Mekas’s  depictions  of  this  couple’s  quotidian  interactions,  whether  these  occur  within  the   porous walls of their pseudo-domestic loft, at a folk music performance in a subcultural 369 Ibid 29. 172 book store, or on a playground populated by young children.370 And as we saw in the previous chapter, the intimate effect generated by such sequences is heightened by the use of shaky, imprecise camerawork, a pair of quick jump-cuts,  and  “warm,”  rough-hewn folk music to intensify the affective immediacy of the sequence, producing a palpable feeling of “being  there”  that  stirs  the  intimate  recesses  of  the  viewer.   The  naturalization  of  the  cinematic  apparatus  implicit  in  this  ideal  of  “directness”   is echoed within the mise-en-scene as well, where a mechanized, urban-industrial setting is made to appear surprisingly organic. When we first see the aforementioned freight car, for instance, it appears in the background of a long shot taken with the camera positioned in the field bordering the rail yard. The foreground of the frame is filled with weeds, plants, and wildflowers, and toward the end of the shot, a butterfly even flutters across the  screen.  Immediately  after  Ben’s  hobo  performance,  we  again  find  the  couple  lingering   in a largely natural expanse of greenery. The ordering of this sequence of shots, which sandwiches images of the rail yard between more pastoral imagery of the surrounding field, thus makes these adjoining spaces seem continuous and the freight car itself seem overgrown, as if it were an abandoned remnant of an older era of industrial capitalism that had now become available for reappropriation by members of the new generation. In keeping  with  the  NAC’s  tendency  to  stage  forms  of  intimate  exchange  within  or  upon   abandoned industrial structures, ruinous city spaces, and decaying domestic interiors, the carefree, life-affirming instance of play depicted in this scene does not simply occur on, but seems to be more actively generated by, the overgrown space and dilapidated objects comprising its mise-en-scene – spaces and objects that are laden with historical 370 Roger  Ebert,  “Guns  of  the  Trees  Movie  Review  (1967),”  RogerEbert.com, accessed 7 September 2013, http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/guns-of-the-trees-1967. 173 significance, evoking the slow death of the old America that the NAC was seeking to overturn and transcend. How should we understand the complex imbrication of vitality, intimacy, overgrowth, and decay conveyed by this sequence? While the  NAC’s  attraction  to  sites  of  ruin  and  overgrowth  may  appear  to   resonate  with  film  noir’s  profoundly  nostalgic  engagement  with  similar  spaces,  the  NAC   does not turn to dilapidated, non-synchronous  remnants  of  the  “unrefurbished  urban  past”   in an effort to recover  some  “traditional”  realm  of  experiential  plenitude  and  social   coherence  persisting  like  an  “urban  village”  in  the  interstices  of  the  late-modern city.371 Because the old world is depicted by the NAC as inherently lifeless and dehumanizing, this movement embraces decaying relics of that world as indices of its essential mutability, its status as an historical, man-made construct that, despite exuding an aura of immortality, is ultimately subject to change. This quality of mutability is acknowledged in important  moments  of  Arendt’s  The Human Condition, wherein she addresses the merely relative permanence  of  the  human  artifice,  or  the  fact  that  its  “durability…  is  not   absolute.”372 In  Arendt’s  theoretical  schema,  worldliness  is  set  off  against  – and perpetually threatened by – a particular form of life that she terms zōē  or  “the  life   process.”373 Unlike bios, which designates a linear series of events in a life that can be reconstructed and recounted as a story (a biography), and which is thus aligned with speech, action, and the establishment of a common world, zōē refers  to  “the  ever- recurrent  cyclical  movement  of  nature,”  is  affiliated  with  labor,  bodily  movements,  and   practices of consumption, and is thus aligned with the private and considered to be world- 371 Dimendberg, Film Noir 90, 98. 372 Arendt, Human Condition 136. 373 Ibid 96. 174 destructive.374 Like  consumption  itself,  Arendt  explains,  “Life  is  a  process  that   everywhere  uses  up  durability,  wears  it  down,  [and]  makes  it  disappear,”  and  the  natural   movements of zōē “[make  their]  presence  felt  in  the  man-made world through the constant  threat  of  overgrowing  or  decaying  it.”375 When approached in this manner, as a manifestation of the life process, the redemptive potential Guns of the Trees invests in its overgrown, abandoned rail yard does not appear as a product of the bygone experiential modalities often perceived to lie dormant within decaying objects of the past, but of the sense of futurity suggested by such objects – their capacity to open windows onto an unknown future by revealing the impermanence of the established human artifice. Viewing the overgrown rail yard in Guns of the Trees as a worldly realm within which zōē has  “made  its  presence  felt”  provides  a  valuable  framework  for  understanding   how homelessness – as non-belonging or detachment from the world – comes to be affiliated with intimacy and vitality in this film, as well as in the broader oeuvre of the NAC. For as in the spontaneous jazz session that erupts in Pull My Daisy, the intimacy that flourishes in this rail yard scene requires a porous and precarious mise-en-scène, a space within which the stability of the human artifice – and by extension, its capacity to house  human  activities,  or  to  serve  as  “the  non-mortal  home  for  mortal  beings”  – has been eroded.376 Like the renewed relation to interiority yielded by the uncertainty of a transitional period, a vitalizing, intimate experience is here facilitated by the instability of this non-worldly realm and the feeling of homelessness it induces. While Arendt would be weary of this effort to valorize the life process at the expense of worldliness, her analysis of zōē  nevertheless provides insight into this aspect 374 Ibid 96. 375 Ibid 96, 98. 376 Ibid 168. 175 of  Mekas’s  film.  Though  Arendt  argues  that  any  form  of  life  equated  solely  with  zōē is akin  to  slavery,  she  does  not  advocate  for  “liberation”  from  the  toil  of  labor  and  the   necessity  of  the  life  process.  Just  as  consumption  has  its  own  “pleasures,”  she  reminds  us,   activities and experiences that involve us in the life process – whether when laboring or conducting  other  “private”  activities  that  emphasize  the  rhythmic  movements  of  the  body   – are often accompanied by decidedly intimate affective states, or profoundly subjective feelings  that  “[black]  out  all  other  worldly  reality,”  and  which  can  be  felt  either  as  “pain”   and  “sorrow,”  or  as  “bliss,”  “joy,”  and  “elation.”377 For Arendt, these affective states involve  more  than  simple  bodily  pleasure  or  displeasure.  Their  “impact”  is  so  intense,  she   asserts, that they entail a more basic experience  of  “life  itself,”  comprising  the  very   “modes  in  which  life  itself…  makes  itself  felt.”378 In other words, the intense, affective experiences  that  follow  from  immersion  within  the  life  process  give  life  “its  very   liveliness  and  vitality,”  generating  a  profound, embodied sensation of aliveness that would be lacking from a purely worldly form of existence.379 Though numerous aspects of homelessness can be found operating in the rail yard sequence of Guns of the Trees, the intimacy that radiates from Ben and Argus’s   interactions in this space should be read as an expression of the intensely affective experience yielded by involvement in the life process, by the feeling of accessing an existential modality – a particularly vitalizing form of life – unhinged from worldly reality. Seeking relief from the deadening effects of a sterile society, Mekas, his camera, and his actors gravitate toward an overgrown, marginal urban space caught up in the cyclical movements of zōē. With the aid of improvisation, they attempt to channel the 377 Ibid 120. 378 Ibid 120. 379 Ibid 120. 176 vitality saturating this space for both personal revivification – losing themselves in the opaque, unstructured swirlings of inner experience – and a broader practice of redemption, by registering and transmitting this experience through the filmic image. As an  outspoken  student  of  Lumière,  Mekas  held  that  cinema’s  own  mythologized   relationship  to  “life  itself,”  its  capacity  to  “[transplant]  life”  from  “the  street  to  the   screen”  in  all  its  “immediacy”  and  “alive[ness],”  could  be  of  great  value in conveying the intensity of such moments to a mass audience.380 Indeed, because Mekas counted the absence of vitality among the most alienating features of late-modern mass society and mass culture, the glimpses of redemptive potential that pepper Guns of the Trees come almost entirely from brief flashes of spontaneity that somehow manage to show through the cracks of the established human artifice: Ben playfully racing around a lamppost; Argus dancing in an awkward hat; a child smiling on a swing set, etc. Yet as such examples  may  suggest,  his  effort  to  capitalize  on  cinema’s  “natural”  vitality  required   more than a neutral employment of this representational technology. Extending Pull My Daisy’s  problematic  celebration  of  poverty,  the  sense  of  “liveness” conveyed by Guns of the Trees relies  quite  heavily  on  the  “liveliness”  traditionally  invested  in  various  raced,   gendered, or otherwise othered subjects, whether this is located in the perpetual presentness  and  “animatedness”  of  persons  of  color,  the  “surplus  embodiment”  of   women, or the primitive innocence of children.381 It is thus no accident that our encounter with zōē in the rail yard scene comes through the enlivening, animated interactions of Ben and Argus who, as persons of color, are consistently valorized in this film as true 380 Mekas, Movie Journal 6. 381 I  borrow  the  term  “animatedness”  from  Sianne  Ngai,  Ugly Feelings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University  Press,  2005).  On  the  “surplus  embodiment”  invested  in  gendered  and  raced  subjects  in   American culture, see Lauren Berlant, The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), esp. ch. 3. 177 “children  of  nature,”  kept  at  a  distance  from  the  worldly  environs  of  the  social  (despite   their white-collar jobs) as a way of facilitating what Mekas described as the new America’s  “desire  to  be  close  to  earth”  or  to  “have  a  contact  with  life.”382 In order to be an especially moving technology  for  writing  movement,  Mekas’s  cinematography  yokes   itself continuously to the fluid excess and indeterminacy of those positioned outside the fixed coordinates of the social. Along with such political  issues,  Mekas’s  broader  investment  in  vitality  points  to   a more basic tension structuring the homeless movies of the NAC, one whose implications harbor as much relevance for public and private sphere theory as they do for critical understandings of the NAC. As the preceding analysis of Guns of the Trees and Pull My Daisy indicates,  the  NAC’s  interest  in  the  invigorating,  non-worldly experience yielded by zōē  does not manifest itself solely in the narrative content of such films. When we recall Arendt’s  affiliation  of  worldliness  with  both  material  things  and  cultural   conventions,  it  becomes  clear  that  the  NAC’s  investment  in  accessing  a  vitalizing  realm   of  experience  situated  outside  or  against  the  established  world  also  informs  these  artists’   formal practices (their rejection of all established cinematic and artistic standards, codes, and  conventions  for  a  “spontaneous”  cinema);;  their  organizational  practices  (for  instance,   Mekas’s  plea  to  avoid  institutional  affiliation,  or  to  keep  avant-garde institutions “disorganizedly  organized”);;  and  the  broader  “way  of  life”  that  many  of  them  adopted   and pursued (the attempt to inhabit homelessness, or to elaborate a life of perpetual 382 J.  Hoberman,  “The  Forest  and  The Trees”  in  To Free the Cinema: Jonas Mekas and the New York Underground,  ed.  David  E.  James  (Princeton,  NJ:  Princeton  University  Press,  1992)  113;;  Mekas,  “Cinema   of the New Generation”  17,  13. 178 vagabondage).383 This effort to resist aesthetic conventions, institutionalization, and domestic or professional stability was certainly not limited to the NAC but formed a more general horizon of sub- and counter-cultural  activities  in  the  U.S.  during  the  late  ‘50s  and   ‘60s,  as  can  be  seen  especially  well  in  New  York-based avant-garde art from this period, from Fluxus to the Living Theater, and from performance art and happenings to action painting  and  pop  art.  However,  to  the  extent  that  the  NAC’s  commitment  to  spontaneity   and immediacy entailed more than a mere contestation of then-dominant configurations of worldly reality and motivated a more radical rebellion against stability, permanence, and reification tout court – or against the very permanence of the human artifice – the NAC’s  parallel  effort  to  integrate  this  rebellion  into a project of alternative world building  would  seem  to  have  been  doomed  from  the  outset.  Which  is  to  say,  if  the  NAC’s   rebellion against aesthetic and cultural stability can be equated with a valorization of zōē at the expense of worldliness, and if the intimacy and vitality of the former is truly worldless,  then  this  movement’s  interest  in  rebuilding  the  world  in  a  more  intimate,   vitalizing form would seem to be a contradiction in terms. In a provocative moment of The Human Condition, Arendt makes this point herself, reasserting the incompatibility of zōē and the human artifice in a section concerning  “The  Permanence  of  the  World  and  the  Work  of  Art”  that  many   representatives  of  the  ‘60s  avant-garde would have found highly conservative. Contrasting human capacities  such  as  thought,  exchange,  and  usage  with  “mere  attributes   of  the  human  animal  like  feelings,  wants,  and  needs,”  Arendt  states  that  any  attempt  to   create  a  world  with  such  attributes  as  its  basis  could  only  result  in  a  “non-world,”  or  a   383 Quoted  in  Arthur,  “Routines  of  Emancipation:  Jonas  Mekas  and  Alternative  Cinema  in  the  Ideology  and   Politics  of  the  Sixties”  in  A Line of Sight, op. cit., 7. 179 profoundly  unstable  and  intangible  environment  produced  through  “emanation  rather   than  creation.”384 Because these attributes are essentially private, subjective, and affiliated with the life process, they are said to require the transformative – or transfigurative – work of human capacities to fashion them into a shape fit for public appearance. This is the creative work of reification and artistic fabrication, processes through  which  the  fluid  affects  or  “passionate  intensit[ies]”  of  inner  experience  are   “release[d]…  from  [their]  imprisonment  within  the  self”  and  made  to  assume  a  common,   objective material form.385 And though Arendt acknowledges that reification always comes  at  “the  price  [of]  life  itself,”  she  nevertheless  insists  that  “the  human  artifice  could   never  be  a  reliable  home  for  men”  without  this  element  of  “deadness”  or  stability.386 What happens, then, when a whole culture takes shape around a project of intimate world building? How do the stakes or terms of artistic practice shift when an assemblage of artists  refuse  to  succumb  to  the  “deadness…  present  in  all  art”  and  begin   elaborating a more vital mode of production committed to the retention of what Arendt terms  the  “living  spirit”?387 And what consequences result from the implicit disturbance of public and private divisions enacted by such a mode of cultural production, where matters  traditionally  deemed  “irrelevant”  to  the  public  are  made  the  basis  of  relational   practices? In a manner that resonates with divergent social, political, and cultural tendencies  of  the  American  ‘60s,  the  NAC’s  investment  in  personal  cinema  – or a mode of film practice oriented toward the public exhibition of private experiences in a manner that  would  not  relinquish  their  “passionate  intensity”  – emerged from a more broadly 384 Arendt, Human Condition 168. 385 Ibid 168. 386 Ibid 169, 167. 387 Ibid 169. 180 held belief that the suppression of private concerns from the public sphere was not contributing to the establishment of commonality and freedom, but to the maintenance of an oppressive and repressive late-modern American social realm. Indeed, as we have seen, this regulation of intimate expression was central to the feelings of non-belonging suffered by members of this film culture, and the extension of public impersonality and conformism into the previously private space of the home also motivated their belief that then-dominant configurations of domestic life were ultimately uninhabitable. Yet how might  the  NAC’s  effort  to  merge  private  experience  with  public  expression  and  integrate   intimacy into a project of world building have contributed to the very condition of homelessness these artists were working to combat? How does one maintain a community of belonging if one is opposed to its persistence in a durable form, or seek to establish residence within an environment built from the transient emanations of inner experience? There is no better way to explore these questions than through a consideration of the  life  and  films  of  Ron  Rice,  the  NAC’s  resident  “wildman.”  Just  as  the  story  of  Rice’s   too-brief adult life should be recounted as a perpetual struggle to negotiate the anxious and liberating dimensions of postwar homelessness, his tragically short filmography encapsulates  the  tensions  and  contradictions  subtending  the  NAC’s  redemptive  project,   standing as a testament to the profound difficulties entailed in any effort to reconstitute the world in a more vital, intimate form. 181 CHAPTER THREE RON RICE, VAGABOND I. A Wandering Sickness The beginning of the 1960s marked a significant turning point in the life of Ron Rice. Though Rice initially began his artistic life as a painter, in 1959 he became interested in making a transition into filmmaking, a medium he began experimenting with during the summer of 1958 but which he only adopted as an artistic practice after reading Jonas  Mekas’s  film  criticism  and discussing film with Mekas in the spring of 1959. This artistic shift occurred contemporaneous with a more dramatic life change that Rice began planning circa November 1959, when he decided to leave his home in New York City where he was born in 1935, and “set  out  in  quest  of  adventure.”  Camping  equipment  was   purchased and inspected, weather reports were analyzed, and the liberating hardship of a life  of  travel  was  envisioned:  “Bring  on  those  mountains  of  black  sea,  plains  of  freezing   snow, green entanglements  of  seething  heat,”  he  writes  in  a  diary  entry  from  December   10th,  1959:  “Drown  me,  freeze  me,  burn  me,  but  you  can’t  chain  me.  Or  can  you?  Am  I   not  now  chained  to  the  city,  the  subway,  the  company,  the  Country,  the  World?”  Thus   seeking to break the chains  binding  him  to  “the  World”  and  immerse  himself  in  the   unstructured  intensity  of  what  he  termed  “Nature,”  Rice  departed  from  the  East  Coast  in   the beginning of 1960. In the five year span that separated this worldly departure from the one that occurred  in  an  Acapulco  hospital  at  the  end  of  1964,  Rice’s  life  was  defined  by  a  near- 182 constant state of movement, whether this took shape through his incessant, physical journeying or through his active pursuit of the virtual mobility provided by aesthetic experience and the drug state. For Rice, whose investment in narcotics has been well documented, art and drugs were fundamentally equivalent, valued for their capacity to transport  him  to  what  he  termed  “impossible  places,”  or  locations  that  he  “[could  not]   reach  on  the  subway.”388 But his actual movements during this period index an equivalent commitment to travel as a way of life. Between the beginning of 1960 and the end of 1964, Rice crossed the North American continent at least seven times, traveling variously by car, train, or plane, and pausing to take up temporary forms of residence in various Bohemian enclaves in California, New York, and Mexico, where he generally depended on friends and girlfriends for money, housing, and film supplies. During this five year stretch, Rice completed three films: The Flower Thief (1960), which he shot amidst the death knell of the  Beat  scene  in  San  Francisco’s  North  Beach  with  Taylor  Mead  and  a  host  of  other   local artists and beatniks; Senseless (1962), which combined scenes shot in San Francisco and Venice, CA, with improvisational sequences and travelogue footage from a road trip through Mexico; and Chumlum (1964), a psychedelic montage of multiple exposures that Rice shot in New York with members of the burgeoning underground film scene, including Jack Smith, Beverly Grant, and Francis Francine. He also produced a rough cut of the epic feature he shot in New York between 1963-64, The Queen of Sheba Meets the Atom Man. Before completing this project, however, Rice died suddenly of bronchial 388 Ron  Rice,  “Diaries,  Notebooks,  Scripts,  Letters,  Documents,”  Film Culture 39 (Winter, 1965): 119. See also  Rice,  “Diaries”  118,  122;;  Jack  Sargeant,  The Naked Lens: An Illustrated History of Beat Cinema (London: Creation Books, 1997) 84. 183 pneumonia on December 22nd, 1964, while living with his wife Amy on the outskirts of Acapulco. He was twenty-nine years old.389 Though  patchy  and  brief,  this  overview  of  Rice’s  activities  between  1960  and  the   end of 1964 suffices to demonstrate that his initial departure from New York did not mark the beginning of a mere road trip. This departure inaugurated a more definitive turn away from the normative way of life prescribed by then-dominant American culture through the assumption of a life of vagabondage: an improvisatory, itinerant mode of living rooted in the abandonment of domestic stability, which entailed a corresponding drift away from the central spaces and values of late-modern American society. We know from the journal entries Rice composed between 1962 and 1964 that he considered cinema an integral component of the mobile, rootless manner of living he developed during  this  period.  He  believed  film  to  be  capable  of  “captur[ing]  forever  the  very  spirit   of  motion,”  and  viewed  the  motion  picture  camera  as  “a  black  suitcase  full  of  magic,”  a   sort of requisite carry-on  for  the  nomadic  “witch  doctor”  he  was  seeking  to  become.390 But  how  should  we  understand  Rice’s  sudden  adoption  of  this  homeless  lifestyle?  And   what should we make of the way in which this life change coincided with his decision to take up filmmaking? Rice’s  turn  to  a  rootless,  bohemian  lifestyle  could  certainly  be  read  as  a  simple   reiteration of the romanticized vision of homelessness put forward by Pull My Daisy. The influence Pull My Daisy had on Rice and Mead during the production of The Flower Thief is  well  known,  and  Rice’s  personal  writings  and  films  from  this  period  reveal  his   389 While there has been  some  disagreement  about  Rice’s  age  at  the  time  of  his  death,  Rice’s  1962   application for a Guggenheim Fellowship lists his date of birth as November 7 th, 1935. See Rice, application to John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, 14 October 1962, Reginald Gay Collection of Taylor Mead and Related Materials, New York Public Library, New York. 390 Rice,  “Diaries”  95,  102. 184 strong affinity with Beat culture, and the significant relationships he established with poets such as Allen Ginsberg, Peter Orlovsky, and Bob Kaufman.391 Rice was very much part  of  the  “Beat  da-da-da,”  and  his  investments  in  travel  and  marginality  could  easily  be   written off as evincing a naïve equation of homelessness with unconstrained freedom.392 This interpretation is reinforced by the collection of anecdotes, publicity materials, and critical writings that together comprise avant-garde film legend, in which Rice  has  been  represented  with  a  striking  level  of  consistency  as  an  untamed  “wild  man”   who exemplifies the ideal of unconstrained spontaneity and dynamism championed by the  Beats.  Over  and  over,  we  find  descriptions  of  Rice  as  a  figure  of  “primitive   forcefulness”;;  a  “solid  mustachioed  strong  man  who  might  have  rode  with  Poncho  Villa”;;   a  “professional  rebel”;;  a  “psychopath”;;  or  a  drug-fueled,  “outcast  visionary”  whose   anarchic,  “push  the  button”  approach  to  filmmaking  was  merely  an  extension  of  the   adrenalized lifestyle that eventually led to his death.393 In such recollections, Rice appears as a veritable embodiment of zōē,  a  modern  savage  driven  by  an  insatiable  lust  for  “life   itself.”  His  decision  to  leave  “the  World”  and  dive  head  first  into  the  sublime  intensity  of   “Nature”  would  thus  seem  to  provide  a  perfect  case  study  for  examining  then-pervasive countercultural ambitions to abandon worldly durability for the vitalizing rhythms of the 391 Taylor Mead and Barry Clark (a filmmaker who lent Rice his Bolex for use on The Flower Thief) have both noted the influence that Pull My Daisy had  on  Rice.  For  Mead’s  comments,  see    Sargeant  81;;  for   Clark’s,  see  “Ron  Rice  Biography,”  Film and Video Art: A Collection of Information, ed. Hugh McCarney, March 2006, Western Connecticut State University, 30 July 2014 < http://people.wcsu.edu/mccarneyh/fva/r/RRice_bio.html>. Mead also references Pull My Daisy in a letter sent to Rice after an early screening of The Flower Thief in San Francisco. See Mead, letter to Ron Rice, 16 June 1960, Reginald Gay Collection. 392 Parker  Tyler,  “For  Shadows, Against Pull My Daisy”  in  Film Culture Reader, ed. P. Adams Sitney (New York: Cooper Square Press, 2002) 109. 393 Sheldon Renan, An Introduction to the American Underground Film (New York: Dutton, 1967) 175; P. Adams  Sitney,  “Ron  Rice:  SENSELESS;;  CHUMLUM,”  program notes from The Avantgarde Film Tuesday Series at the Jewish Museum, 10 December 1968, Paper Materials Collection, Anthology Film Archives,  New  York;;  Eugene  Archer,  quoted  in  Mary  Batten,  “Ron  Rice  &  His  Work,”  Film Comment 1.3 (1962): 30; Clark, quoted in  McCarney,  “Ron  Rice  Biography”;;  Sargeant  ch.  3,  82. 185 life process, just as his too-brief adult life could be read as a tragic testament to the futility of such projects. There is a level of truth to such perceptions. After all, this is an artist who advertised  his  own  work  as  “mad”  and  “absurd,”  was  temporarily  committed  to  an  insane   asylum,  advocated  publicly  for  bank  robbery,  criticized  “self-conscious  spontaneity”  in   the arts, and advanced a neo-dadaist-cum-Buddhist mode of artistic practice termed “Dazendada.”394 But despite his self-proclaimed senselessness, avant-garde  film  history’s   construction of Rice as the apogee of beatific immediacy, a mad artist who lived spontaneity and died because of it, has elided important aspects of his life and work. For instance,  as  I  demonstrate  in  more  detail  below,  Rice’s  belief  in  the  importance  of  film   form has been obscured by critical analyses that emphasize the chaotic and spontaneous dimensions of his work. Perhaps more important for our purposes, the discourse surrounding  Rice’s  “madness”  or  “wildness”  undercuts  Rice’s  own  statements  about  the   irrational, diseased, and even barbarous condition of late-modern American society, or what  he  referred  to  derogatorily  as  “Civilization.”395 Rice’s  posthumously  published   journals clarify that he did not only believe that daily life in the U.S. was constraining and repressive. He also believed that it was sickening, which is to say, generative of deleterious effects on the mental, physical, and spiritual life of the human organism. In  Rice’s  mind,  the  maladies  of  late-modern America were manifold. His journals, letters, and artistic statements from this period index innumerable socio-cultural ills – some real, some hallucinated – that  he  blamed  for  the  growing  “insanity”  of  American   society. Among the most significant of these was the progressive mechanization of daily 394 Rice,  “Diaries”  121,  117,  118,  119.  On  Rice’s  temporary  internment  in  Bellevue,  see  Mekas,  Movie Journal: The Rise of the New American Cinema, 1959-1971 (New York: Macmillan, 1972) 116-118. 395 See, for  instance,  Rice,  “Diaries”  90,  105,  113. 186 experience by late-modern systems of capital and mass communication, which Rice held responsible  for  an  inexorable  “extension  of  industry”  into  all  previously  autonomous   realms of experience. Echoing far more general concerns from this era about one- dimensionality, Rice considered this extension responsible for eradicating both the artistic realm (through commercialization) and individual consciousness (through reification), as well as for altering the very composition of time, which he believed had been accelerated and intensified to such a degree by systems of mass communication that no  “Time  gaps”  remained  in  daily  experience for critical reflection or repose. While Rice worried over the general conditions of alienation resulting from this process, he was especially concerned with its debilitating effects on artistic work, which he believed required access to a peaceful, intimate realm conducive to creative expression. Rice’s  interest  in  this  sort  of  intimate  domain  comes  through  in  numerous   moments of his personal journals. This interest is best expressed, however, in a letter Rice wrote to Robert Frank on May 29th, 1964, shortly after Rice began living with his wife  Amy  near  Acapulco.  Invoking  the  imagery  of  Jean  Cocteau’s  Beauty and the Beast (1946), this letter contrasts the wild Mexican shoreline with the inhuman beastliness of New York City. In Mexico, Rice explains,  “the  backgrounds  contain  the  most  wild   assortment  of  giant  cactus,  twisted  trees,  vultures…  [and]  disappearing  stairways,”  and   one  can  envision  “beauty  herself…  drifting  along…  in  color  and  transparent  gown,  green   vapor  rising  from  her  hair.”396 New York conjures a different sort of image, as we see in this  passage,  which  I  have  reproduced  in  the  manner  that  it  appears  in  Rice’s  letter: the figure of the beast is something else. he drains the spirit,leaves you felling dull,full of anxieties and worries which spread a vile infection thru 396 Rice, letter to Robert Frank, 29 May 1964, Paper Materials Collection, Anthology Film Archives, New York,  printed  as  “Letter  from  Ron  Rice  to  Robert  Frank,”  Film Culture 70-71 (1982). 187 the  body.  in  new  york  the  beast  is  reality  itself*  “modern  suffering”  made   possible with all the great machines I guess you can see at the worlds fair, here in mexico where there are not so many machines, life is more fun. the creative faculity developes, the mind and body gets a complete rest. (this is very important for artists) ideas for movies come and go, the spring of creation wound tight freewhells itself, gaing speed, spinning out down the lone some hig hway.397 As the  beastly  incarnation  of  “modern  suffering,”  New  York  City  is  charged  here  with   spreading  a  malignant  “infection”  through  the  body  that  also  impacts  one’s  mental  and   spiritual well-being. By contrast, the less-modernized (and explicitly feminized) environs of Acapulco offer a restorative environment for reversing the exhausting effects of life in the  city  and  putting  the  artist  back  in  touch  with  the  inner,  “creative  [faculty].”  New  York   is rendered as a depthless, infertile, and artificial terrain, whereas Acapulco is imagined as a deep space where intimacy and vitality thrive – a  “rugged”  environment  where  “the   huge  waves  of  the  elevator  sea  threaten  to  wash  you  off  if  you  go  to[o]  low,”  and  the  un- containable  “spring  of  creation”  flows  freely.398 Though Rice composed this letter four-and-a-half years after he first departed from his home in New York City, his description of the relief he found in Acapulco provides an important lens through which to reframe his initial turn to a life of vagabondage. Such a reframing,  I  propose,  allows  us  to  envision  Rice’s  departure  from   New York at the beginning of 1960 as an action motivated not merely by the lure of the open road, but also by an urgently felt need for shelter from the inhospitable life-world of late-modern American  society.  In  his  letter  to  Frank,  Rice’s  decision  to  move  to  Mexico   in the middle of 1964 is not framed as a quest for adventure, but as an effort to locate or regain something like home: a detached space of spiritual repose where the vitalizing 397 Rice, letter to Robert Frank. 398 Rice, letter to Robert Frank. 188 impulses of inner experience could be cultivated and articulated. If we project this longing for an alternative home-space  backwards,  Rice’s  decision  to  leave  behind  the   stability of his home in New York for a life of itinerancy and marginality comes into view  as  an  expression  of  the  NAC’s  characteristic  attempt  to  position  a  homeless  lifestyle   as the remedy to postwar homelessness. Some might argue that it is problematic to collapse the distance separating these two moments. However, journal entries that Rice composed at the end of 1959 contain sentiments about New York that are quite similar to those which he expressed in his letter to Frank. In his aforementioned entry from December 10th, 1959, for instance, Rice characterizes  New  York  as  a  “Big  Monster”  before  referring  to  it  more  simply  as  “the   city  which  I  hate,”  and  also  describes  New  York  as  an  exhausting,  constrictive,  and   anxiety-inducing  environment,  one  that  leaves  him  “tired  and  edgy,”  with  his  “desire   trampled”  and  all  escape  routes  “block[ed].”399 Before he left home in 1960, then, Rice was already suffering from a severe case of urban malaise, one that mirrors the position of  Gregory  in  Jonas  Mekas’s  Guns of the Trees (1960) and so many of classical noir’s   doomed protagonists. But rather than worrying  about  discovering  a  true  “way  out,”  Rice   simply left town – a gesture that must have confounded Mekas. 399 Rice,  “Diaries”  89.  Rice’s  hatred  of  New  York  appears  to  have  been  rather  consistent  during  the  time  he   spent there between 1960-64. For instance, personal writings of his composed between 1962-63 include references to New York that are comparable in many respects to that noted here. In an unpublished journal entry  that  appears  to  have  been  composed  in  the  summer  of  1962,  following  Rice’s  receipt  of  the  Most   Promising  Filmaker  award  at  the  Charles  Theatre’s  1962  American  Filmakers’  Festival  in  July  1962,  Rice   colors  New  York  as  an  “exhaust[ing]”  realm  of  “destruction,”  “speed,”  and  “murder,”  and  details  his   exasperation  with  the  city’s  independent  film  scene  (Rice,  untitled  journal  entry,  n.d.,  Reginald  Gay   Collection.) And in a letter Rice originally intended to send to the Village Voice in the winter of 1962-63, he  describes  New  York  as  a  “great  void”  (Rice,  “Diaries”  119).  See  also: Mekas’s  remarks  on  Rice’s   decision to leave New York for Acapulco in Movie Journal 161-162; and Rice’s  diatribe  against  “this   motherfucker  of  cities”  in letter to unknown recipient, 20 September 1962, Reginald Gay Collection. 189 Rice’s  hatred  of  New  York  demonstrates  that  the  images  of  untamed  “Nature”   that guided his initial departure from the city in 1960 should not be read as fantasies of a “mad”  or  “wild”  man.  They  should  instead  be  viewed  as  testaments  to  Rice’s  difficulty  in   envisioning a realm of life existing outside the mechanizing rhythms of urban-industrial society: an elsewhere that, in stark contrast to the impersonal confines of the late-modern American city, would be conducive to the expression of intimacy. It is only by approaching  Rice’s  investment  in  “Nature”  in  this  manner  that  we  can  understand  how  he   was  able  to  feel  so  at  home  amidst  the  “wild”  landscape he came to inhabit in Acapulco, where he was surrounded by gnarly vegetation, massive waves threatening instant death, and cliff-side  stairways  that  dropped  without  warning  “to  the  jagged  rocks  below,”   vultures circling above. To be sure, this was a strangely precarious sort of residence. But Rice deemed the wildness of the Acapulco seaside capable of reviving an equally untamable interiority, that is, of stimulating a correspondence between inner and outer domains that could yield a crucial sense of refuge from one-dimensionality. Rice’s  belief  that  such  an  intimate,  alternative  residence  could  only  be  accessed   by assuming a self-imposed exile in Mexico speaks to the impressive hegemony established in the postwar U.S. by middle-class culture: its success in suppressing, containing, or expelling alternative modes of living, and continuously rendering its particular conventions and rules of appearance as constitutive of American culture, tout court.  When  we  approach  Rice’s  vagabondage  in  this  fashion,  as  a  lifestyle he developed in an effort to locate an alternative home-space at a moment when American culture had become immensely inhospitable to alternatives, an intriguing tension becomes apparent at the  heart  of  his  project.  From  this  perspective,  Rice’s  turn to a life of rootlessness and 190 mobility appears as a paradoxical effort to achieve a degree of personal and cultural stability, or to seek out a differently configured life-world that could serve as a reliable venue for the intimate experiences that were being denied by then-dominant American culture.  Any  analysis  of  Rice’s  life  and  films  must  account  for  this  basic  paradox. II. Impossible Places That Rice eventually attempted to regain a sense of home in Mexico is somewhat inevitable,  given  that  country’s status in the Beat imaginary as something like the moral region par excellence.400 Yet his films consistently seek out, and unfold within, similarly unsettled mise-en-scènes whose volatile environs parallel his description of life on the Acapulco seaside in many respects. When viewed together, these environs provide significant  insight  into  Rice’s  investment  in  vagabondage  and  cinema  as  potential   remedies for homelessness. As I argue in this chapter, the peripheral locales featured in his work, and the errant subcultural formations housed by these locales, function paradoxically  as  the  gravitational  center  of  Rice’s  films.  These  detached  locales  connect   the  divergent  productions  comprising  his  “broken-off”  body  of  work,  each  of  which  can   otherwise appear to constitute  a  “new  departure”  from  the  last,  as  Jonas  Mekas  observed   shortly  after  Rice’s  death.401 Produced as they were in distant cities across the U.S. and Mexico  with  meager  resources  that  encouraged  experimentation  and  innovation,  Rice’s   films are disparate both geographically and stylistically. But they all revolve around distinctly  transient  spaces  and  social  forms,  whose  centrality  to  Rice’s  work  must  be   400 See,  for  instance,  Manuel  Luis  Martinez,  “‘With  Imperious  Eye’:  Kerouac,  Burroughs,  and  Ginsberg  on   the Road in  South  America,”  Aztlán 23.1 (Spring 1998). 401 Mekas, Movie Journal 171. 191 understood within the context of the postwar anxieties about homelessness elaborated in the previous chapter. In  what  follows,  I  position  Rice’s  creative  practice,  and  particularly  his  efforts  to   inhabit, document, and envision a series of unruly, intimate social realms, amidst what I describe as the broader world-building project conducted by the NAC. Following Michael  Warner’s  analysis  of  public  discourse  as  a  form  of  “poetic  world  making,”  I   view  this  project  as  an  effort  to  harness  the  poetic  capacity  inhering  in  cinema’s   specifically public mode of address toward the characterization and realization of an alternative world.402 By  “alternative  world,”  I  mean  a  configuration  of  material  objects   (such as films and cultural institutions) and cultural conventions developed in an effort to organize and stabilize a way of living defined by its difference from that housed by the dominant world.403 The  NAC’s  filmic  intervention  constitutes  such  a  world-building project, I propose, because the new forms of cinema it strove to produce and perpetuate, like the cultural institutions it founded and maintained, were not created merely for artistic purposes, but to shelter modes of experience and relationality unrecognized by the dominant institutions and conventions of late-modern American culture. As I argue, however, this world-building project was of an especially peculiar variety. The world envisioned by the NAC, and the modes of creative practice that artists such as Rice developed to realize that world, were valued for their conduciveness to intimacy. Yet intimacy was imagined by the NAC as a fundamentally unstable relational mode, one whose primary attribute lay in its capacity to exceed institutionalization and disrupt established conventions, thus rendering it difficult to instantiate as a world. 402 Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics (New York: Zone, 2005) 114. 403 I draw this notion of worldliness from Hannah Arendt. See Arendt, The Human Condition, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1998) esp. 93-96. 192 The  tension  subtending  the  NAC’s  poetic  ambitions  manifests  itself  most dramatically in the life and films of Ron Rice. As I show in this chapter, though Rice continuously strove to locate and generate alternative sites of intimate exchange as remedies to postwar homelessness, he also celebrated intimacy as a wild thing resistant to domestication. To demonstrate this, I analyze the multiple scenes of intimate encounter and  exchange  that  structure  Rice’s  films  and  writings,  focusing  primarily  on  his   representation of the North Beach Beat hangout, the Co-Existence Bagel Shop, in his first feature The Flower Thief, and on the ways in which his simultaneous desire for and suspicion of worldliness impacted the conception of cinema he developed while working on this film. As I argue, intimacy operates in The Flower Thief at a variety of levels, facilitating transient modes of private and public experience that differ considerably from those promoted by then-dominant American culture. This film stands as a testament to intimacy’s  poetic  potential,  revealing  its  ability  to  generate  spaces conducive to alternative forms of living in which new modalities of inwardness and belonging can emerge. At the same time, The Flower Thief also reveals the limitations of intimacy as a world-building medium. The intimate spaces it depicts do not solidify and persist because they are grounded on ephemeral relational practices valued for their instability, rendering them perpetually vulnerable to outside forces and subject to constant change from within. The Flower Thief therefore reveals the need to problematize  Rice’s  belief  that  intimacy   could remedy the conditions of shelterlessness and alienation suffered under late modernity. As an extension of my reading of The Flower Thief, I end this chapter with a brief coda,  which  considers  how  Rice’s  personal and artistic trajectories raise larger questions 193 about  the  viability  of  the  NAC’s  world-building project, and the radical claims that are often wedded to the 1960s American avant-garde’s  efforts  to  integrate  life  and  art.  To  do   so,  I  consider  how  Rice’s films and personal writings from the period after The Flower Thief’s  production  reveal  how  his  refusal  to  relinquish  intimacy  and  vitality  as  the   governing principles of his life and work led him to progressively extreme lengths in his pursuit of an alternative home-space. We  can  better  understand  intimacy’s  complex  status  in  Rice’s  oeuvre  by   considering how intimacy functions in the peripheral locations and subcultural formations featured in his films. Though these spaces and formations vary considerably, each of them  reveal  Rice’s  association  of  intimacy  with  marginality  and  mobility.  They  also   demonstrate his investment in the redemptive potential of alternative modes of intimate experience,  and  his  belief  in  cinema’s  facility  for  cultivating  and  transmitting such experiences. In The Flower Thief, for instance, a bohemian bar, an abandoned powerhouse, and a  peripheral,  bayside  fairground  in  San  Francisco’s  North  Beach  become  staging  grounds   for anarchical forms of creative expression and unsanctioned modes of interpersonal relation  enacted  by  a  wild  assortment  of  beatniks.  The  film’s  transient  protagonist,  played   by Taylor Mead, drifts through these locales like a bit of urban flotsam, observing and participating in the intimate practices that animate them, whereby fluid issuances from inner experience circulate and resonate with other wastrels of the modern world. In Senseless,  the  dread  pervading  San  Francisco’s  official  life-world, a space weighted down by consumer culture and the threat of nuclear disaster, is alleviated by escaping southward to Venice and Baja California. These detached, slower regions serve as the 194 backdrops against which Rice and a group of friends struggle to liberate themselves from the apocalyptic atmosphere of the cold war via druggy meanderings, profane rituals, and impromptu forms of play. In The Queen of Sheba Meets the Atom Man, the exotic yet shabby  interiors  of  the  titular  monarch’s  New  York  City  digs  become  the  site  of  a   delirious, queer encounter between Mead, Winifred Bryant, and Jack Smith, who work to parry urban loneliness through an extended round of licentious frolicking. In Chumlum, a cavernous loft floating somewhere above or behind the rigid enclosures of lower Manhattan provides a disorienting, ethereal venue for a host of costumed creatures to embark on a seemingly endless, amorous idle. Even The Mexican Footage, a posthumously compiled collection of camera rolls Rice shot in Mexico, begins with a tangle of hairy limbs, swaying bodies, and vaguely oriental adornments melding with rural landscapes, and then shifts into diaristic footage of Rice and friends riding trains through the countryside or playing conga drums amidst ancient ruins. The haphazard social forms that consistently flash up within these locations enfold  a  rather  motley  collection  of  cinematic  intimacies,  condensing  Rice’s  divergent   attempts to utilize film as a medium for establishing new modes of intimate experience and relation. On the one hand, such depictions index the search for an alternative home- space that occupied Rice throughout his artistic career, and which spurred their production in the first place. The small, bayside neighborhood in northern San Francisco famous  for  harboring  that  city’s  “Poetry  Renaissance”  in  the  1950s;;  the  seaside  slum  at   the  edge  of  Los  Angeles,  where  a  “barbaric”  subculture  emerged  into  notoriety  at  the  end   of  that  decade;;  the  cities  and  rural  villages  scattered  throughout  the  Beats’  preferred “sacred  colony”  to  the  south,  variously  celebrated  in  the  writings  of  William  Burroughs,   195 Allen  Ginsberg,  and  Jack  Kerouac;;  and  the  various  “unclean  corners”  that  sheltered  an   emergent, underground film community in 1960s New York – Rice actively sought out these bohemian enclaves as part of his everyday life practice, endeavoring to participate in the unruly subcultures they were reported to house, and to avail himself of their redemptive environs.404 At one level, his films document different stages of that pursuit, providing glimpses into the marginal scenes Rice came temporarily to move through and inhabit. Yet cinema also played a more active role in fostering these scenes. At the level of  production,  for  instance,  Rice’s  camera  often  provided  the  occasion for the perverse performances we witness in his films, just as his decidedly amateur mode of production engendered highly affective bonds – what Rice once referred to as feelings of “intima[cy]”  and  “close[ness]”  – between the persons involved in each project.405 Rice’s   films also consistently rework the irrational activities they depict at the level of representation, transfiguring profilmic occurrences through diverse and inventive formal strategies that further evacuate such occurrences of reason, heightening their disharmony with  everyday  reality  by  abstracting  them  into  an  “absurd,”  aesthetic  dimension.406 As much  as  Rice’s  works  bear  witness  to  his  seemingly  perpetual  search  for  an  ideal  home- space, they also put forward imaginative projections of that ideal, utilizing what he described  as  the  “MAGIC”  of  cinema  to  conjure  images  of  alternative  experiential  realms   404 Jack Kerouac, quoted in Sargeant 69; Lawrence Lipton, The Holy Barbarians (New York: Julian Messner, 1959); Martinez 42; Mekas, Movie Journal 75. On the North Beach Beat culture, see also: Francis J. Rigney and L. Douglas Smith, The  Real  Bohemia:  A  Sociological  and  Psychological  Study  of  the  ‘Beats’ (New  York:  Basic,  1961).  On  Venice’s  Beat  scene,  see  also:  John  Arthur  Maynard,  Venice West: The Beat Generation in Southern California (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1991). 405 Batten 34. 406 On  the  status  of  the  absurd  in  Rice’s  films,  see:  Rice,  “Foundation  for  the  Invention  and  Creation  of   Absurd  Movies,”  Film Culture 24 (1962): 19, republished in Film Culture 39 (Winter 1965): 117; and Mekas,  “Notes  on  the  New  American  Cinema,”  Film Culture Reader 101-102. 196 saturated by the revitalizing currents of intimacy.407 For Rice, this magic was not merely illusory. Like other affiliates of the NAC, he believed the senseless imagery contained in his films could have profound effects on the audiences who engaged them, whether by “reach[ing]  men  through  the  heart,  and  caus[ing]  them  to  think,”  or  by  provoking  more   ecstatic  states  of  “sublimity”  and  “Euphoria”  that  he  conceived  in  opposition  to  the  mere   entertainment provided by superficial forms of mass communication.408 As his previously cited  statement  on  art’s  ability  to  “transport”  the  viewer  to  “impossible  places”  suggests,   Rice believed that cinema could induce a liberating feeling of dislocation in the viewer, a sense of gaining access to an other-worldly domain set off from the dehumanizing environs of late modernity. His films were not conceived as mere abstractions, but as material conveyances to the alternative realms they served simultaneously to index and envision.409 Along with demonstrating his participation in the redemptive project of the NAC, Rice’s  efforts  to  foster  intimate  relations  through  an  amateur  film  practice  also  reveal  his   commitment to this  movement’s  related  ambition  to  mobilize  cinema  toward  the  creation   of a more vitalizing and humanizing world. This poetic ambition is formulated most clearly  in  Mekas’s  “Where  Are  We—the  Underground?,”  in  which  Mekas  characterizes   the new generation as  a  movement  being  “pulled  by  a  desire  for  something  joyful  deep   within  us,  deep  in  the  stars”  that  its  members  were  working  to  “bring…  down  to  earth  so   that  it  will  change  our  cities,  our  faces,  our  movements,  our  voices,  our  souls.”410 But the 407 Rice,  “Diaries”  95. 408 Rice, notes for federal grant; Rice, note on intention of films, n.d., Reginald Gay Collection. 409 Rice reiterates this belief in a note composed ca. 1962-63,  in  which  he  states:  “I  have been trying to discover  the  ‘secret’,  where  by  [sic]  my  visual  images  contain  the  plazma  [sic]  of  the  Euphoria  one  feels   when  carried  away  to  regions  of  fantasy  as  when  listening  to  music”  (note  on  intention  of  films.) 410 Mekas,  “Where  Are  We—the Underground?”  in  The New American Cinema: A Critical Anthology, ed. Gregory Battcock (New York: Dutton, 1967) 21. 197 NAC’s  poetic  drive  is  also  evidenced  in  the  intimate  locales  and  congregations  that   organize  Rice’s  films,  revealing  his  desire  to  elaborate  a  space  in  time  where  artists  could   reliably cultivate inner experience, and where the expression of these experiences could attain  recognition  by  others.  Despite  Rice’s  stated  interest  in  unchaining  himself  from   “the  World,”  one  finds  a  persistent  striving  for  worldliness  in  his  films,  writings,  and   everyday life practices – a longing to discover or construct a relatively stable cultural realm within which an experience of home could be secured. While  the  intimate  scenes  that  we  encounter  in  Rice’s  films  do  demonstrate  his   relative success in establishing such a realm, standing as they do as relics of the dispersed,  subterranean  communities  he  helped  to  cultivate  in  the  early  ‘60s,  the  very   plurality of these scenes speaks to the recurrent problems Rice confronted in his efforts to locate or construct an alternative world: whether in San Francisco, Venice, Baja, or New York, the subcultural communities to which Rice journeyed seemed to be perpetually on the brink of dissolution. The precarity of these communities (at least those in the U.S.) was no doubt ensured by the pressures imposed on them by containment culture. The persecution of artistic communities by various municipal entities in San Francisco and Los  Angeles  throughout  the  late  ‘50s  and  early  ‘60s  is  a  matter  of  public  record,  and  the   impressive resources mobilized by the city of New York and the federal government to censor and harass avant-garde filmmakers throughout the 1960s has been the subject of extensive critical commentary.411 However,  even  as  Rice’s  films  and  writings  frequently   gesture to such external pressures, they also illuminate an internal tension structuring the 411 On San Francisco and Los Angeles, see especially: Rigney and Smith ch. 10; Maynard chs. 5 and 8. On censorship and harassment in New York, see for instance: Mekas, Movie Journal 126-130, 132-138, 161- 163, 234-235, 329-332; Juan A. Suarez, Bike Boys, Drag Queens & Superstars: Avant-Garde, Mass Culture, and Gay Identities in the 1960s Underground Cinema,  ch.  5;;  and  Brian  L.  Frye,  “The  Dialectic  of   Obscenity,”  Hamline Law Review 35.1 (Winter 2012). 198 NAC’s  efforts  at  alternative  world  building  that  is  not  typically  acknowledged  by   apologists  of  this  movement.  Though  Rice’s  decision  to  seek  out  these  communities   stemmed from his desire for a stable realm or locale that could reliably facilitate the intimate experiences he believed were essential to creative practice, the version of intimacy he valued was a fundamentally transient and irrational one that thwarted all attempts at organization and prediction. His pursuit of an alternative home-space was thus grounded on a contradiction: Rice wanted to locate or construct a world capable of housing an inherently vagrant experiential form. Though this project was actively and continually obstructed by an oppressively normative containment  culture,  Rice’s   contradictory desires for stability and unpredictability reveal that it was also hindered by his personal investment in the wildness of intimacy. When  we  approach  Rice’s  engagement  with  film  and  his  turn  to  a  life  of   homelessness as decisions that were driven by competing investments in immediacy and shelter,  Rice’s  life  and  work  can  be  said  to  exemplify  what  Lauren  Berlant  and  Michael   Warner have identified as the complications entailed by projects of intimate world building. As Berlant  and  Warner  explain  in  their  influential  essay  “Sex  in  Public,”  efforts   to organize social worlds around alternative forms of intimacy conflict with normative perceptions of intimate life as a purely private affair. As a result, such efforts tend to be relegated  to  “mobile  sites”  of  subcultural  practice,  or  transient  and  often  illicit  domains   where  intimacies  that  have  been  deemed  “criminal”  or  “nonstandard”  by  dominant   culture can be cultivated, though in necessarily fleeting and ephemeral ways.412 While these erratic spaces provide members of unrecognized subcultures with crucial “context[s]  for  witnessing  intense  and  personal  affect  while  elaborating  a  public  world  of   412 Lauren  Berlant  and  Michael  Warner,  “Sex  in  Public,”  Critical Inquiry 24.2 (Winter 1998): 561, 558. 199 belonging  and  transformation,”  Berlant  and  Warner  emphasize  that  the  experiences  of   selfhood and collectivity afforded by such contexts are also limited in important ways, noting  that  the  very  “mobility  [that]  makes  [these  sites]  possible…  also  renders  them  hard   to  recognize  as  world  making  because  they  are  so  fragile  and  ephemeral.”413 Reflecting  either  side  of  this  problem,  Rice’s  films  and  writings  valorize   intimacy’s  capacity  to  generate  such  “mobile  sites”  of  private  and  public  experience,   celebrating the fleeting modes of inwardness and belonging that emerge through improvised practices of intimate exchange. But they also consistently figure the transience of such experiences as a source of anxiety. Oscillating continuously between an  infectious  optimism  for  intimacy’s  vitalizing  potential  and  a  disappointment  over  that   potential’s  failure  to endure, his work illustrates with particular clarity what Berlant has identified  in  another  context  as  intimacy’s  simultaneously  poetic  and  destabilizing   character.  While  intimacy  harbors  a  distinct  capacity  to  “[build]  worlds,”  Berlant  asserts,   or  to  “[create]  spaces  and  [usurp]  places  meant  for  other  kinds  of  relation,”  this  capacity   is offset by its stubborn tendency to neutralize its own world-building force, as the latent unpredictability  of  intimate  relations  always  threatens  to  “[destabilize]  the  very things that  institutions  of  intimacy  are  created  to  stabilize…”414 As  is  demonstrated  by  the  multiple  modalities  of  intimacy  animated  by  Rice’s   depictions of subcultural formations discussed above, Rice seeks in his films to usurp the impersonal spaces of cinematic production, representation, and exhibition as forums of intimate  relation.  In  doing  so,  he  enlists  intimacy’s  poetic  capacity  in  the  creation  of   alternative worlds conducive to new forms of habitation. Yet his ultimate suspicion of 413 Berlant and Warner 561, 558. 414 Berlant,  “Intimacy:  A  Special  Issue”  in  Intimacy, ed. Berlant (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago, 2000) 2, 6. 200 organization  and  stability  ensure  the  perpetual  postponement  of  that  world’s  arrival.  If   Rice’s  intimate  cinema  can  be  characterized,  following  Berlant,  as  an  “aesthetic  of   attachment,”  or  an  effort  to  forge  the  affective  bonds  that  undergird  intimate  worlds,  his   films must also be viewed as testaments to the precarity of all forms of attachment mediated  by  intimacy,  a  relational  form  whose  “potential  failure  to  stabilize  closeness   always  haunts  its  persistent  activity…”415 We will be better equipped to examine the dialectic between attachment and dispersal  that  structures  Rice’s  films  if  we  analyze  the  relationship  between  intimacy  and   worldliness  more  closely.  Hannah  Arendt’s  affiliation  of  intimacy  with  the  world- destructive movements of zōē or  “the  life  process” in a series of writings published at the end  of  the  ‘50s  and  the  beginning  of  the  ‘60s  provides the most useful interpretive framework  through  which  to  make  sense  of  Rice’s  troubles  with  intimate  world  building.   Her analysis in these writings of a far-reaching  “crisis”  precipitated  by  the  “decay  of   culture  in  mass  society”  is  useful  because  it  conflicts  so  dramatically  with  discourse   surrounding the NAC.416 In  keeping  with  Arendt’s  understanding  of  decay  as  merely  one   stage of a broader cycle of life, the loss of worldliness Arendt describes ultimately turns on an extensive vitalization of the artistic sphere that resonates strongly with the ambitions of the NAC. But for Arendt, the becoming-vital of art is not associated with the avant-garde formations that emerged contemporaneous with her writing, but with the rise of an American mass-cultural regime oriented toward consumption and entertainment, in which art becomes mere fodder for the life process of society. This admittedly 415 Berlant 5, 2. 416 Arendt,  “The  Crisis  in  Culture:  Its  Social  and  Its  Political  Significance”  in  Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought (New York: Penguin, 2006), orig. published as Between Past and Future: Six Exercises in Political Thought (New  York:  Viking,  1961);;  Arendt,  “Society  and  Culture,”   Daedalus 89.2 (Spring 1960): 284. 201 idiosyncratic theory of culture, which  emphasizes  the  distressing  consequences  of  art’s   proximity to life in modernity, offers a valuable opportunity to reassess the ideology of vitality  structuring  Rice’s  work  as  well  as  the  artistic  output  of  the  NAC  and  the  1960s   American avant-garde more broadly. To  take  advantage  of  this  opportunity,  we  cannot  simply  apply  Arendt’s  insights   to the study of avant-garde film. We will also need to complicate her insistence on the unworldly character of intimacy and vitality, as I demonstrate later in this chapter through recourse  to  Georges  Bataille’s  examination  of  the  seemingly  paradoxical  role  of  what  he   terms  “project”  in  the  otherwise  directionless  and  meaningless  movements  of  inner   experience.417 Before turning to Bataille, however, I seek in the following section to draw out  certain  limitations  in  Arendt’s  theoretical  framework  by  expanding  on  a  concept  she   herself employs in The Human Condition:  that  of  the  “non-world.”  This  rather  strange   social  form  embodies  the  NAC’s  ambivalence  about  worldliness  in a particularly succinct and productive fashion, unifying the otherwise disparate spaces of intimate experience and relationality that artists such as Rice hoped to generate through cinema. As I demonstrate, while the ephemeral dynamic of non-worldly environments underscores the ultimate precarity of intimacy, these environments also provide a crucial forum for elaborating alternative modes of intimate practice that would otherwise go unrecognized. If  Rice’s  life  and  films  were  oriented  around  efforts  to  produce and sustain non-worldly formations, his failure to permanently inhabit such formations should be weighed against his success in representing them in a simultaneously durable and vital cinematic form, rendering the intimate dynamic of the fleeting environs through which he passed available for those who wish to reanimate them. 417 Georges Bataille, Inner Experience (Albany, NY: State University of New York, 1988). 202 III. Intimate Life and The Crisis in Culture Arendt’s  most  direct  discussion  of  intimate  experience  comes  in  The Human Condition. As I note in my first chapter, she initially defines intimacy as an inner, subjective mode of existence standing in opposition to the conformism of modern society.  Intimacy  was  “discovered,”  she  explains,  by  Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the Romanticists  during  their  “rebellion…  against  society’s  unbearable perversion of the human heart, its intrusion upon an innermost region in man which until [the modern age] had  needed  no  special  protection.”418 But her descriptions of intimacy over the course of The Human Condition diverge from this initial definition in crucial ways, and in fact align  intimacy  contradictorily  with  the  natural  “life  process”  she  perceives  as  the  driving   force of society itself. Indeed, over the course of The Human Condition, intimacy is characterized primarily by its transience and opacity, rendering it comparable in important respects to the inherently futile and private activities that Arendt associates with zōē, the particular form  of  life  that  involves  “biological”  activities  such  as  labor  and  consumption  that  are   necessary to the maintenance of living organisms, but which remain ephemeral and murky  because  they  leave  no  trace  and  are  irrelevant  to  others.  “The  intimacy  of  the   heart…  has  no  objective  tangible  place  in  the  world,”  Arendt  asserts,  and  intimacy’s   intensely subjective nature renders it incompatible with the demand for commonality and legibility governing the public realm of appearance.419 “[T]he  greatest  forces  of  intimate   life,”  she  explains,  such  as  “the  passions  of  the  heart,  the  thoughts  of  the  mind,  the   418 Arendt, Human Condition 39. 419 Ibid 39. 203 delights of the senses—lead an uncertain, shadowy kind of existence unless and until they are transformed, deprivatized and deindividualized, as it were, into a shape to fit them for public  appearance.”420 In such passages, the fluid, opaque contents of what Arendt tellingly refers  to  as  “intimate  life”  are  rendered  analogous  to  the  experiences  of  pain  and   pleasure, sorrow and bliss that accompany activities of labor and consumption – bodily activities through which individuals respond to the exigencies of life and by which human  life  attains  its  very  “liveliness  and  vitality.”421 While engaged in these and other bodily  endeavors,  the  body  is  “thrown  back  upon  itself,”  Arendt  argues,  into  a  purely   private,  even  animalistic  experiential  state  whose  “intensity  is  so  great  and  [whose] force so  elementary  that…  it  blacks  out  all  other  worldly  reality,”  leaving  one  within  the   incommunicable confines of bodily sensation.422 Arendt makes the relationship between intimacy and life more explicit in a later work, The Life of the Mind, which helps to elucidate this connection in her thought. In a fascinating  section  of  this  work  entitled  “Body  and  soul;;  soul  and  mind,”  Arendt  expands   on her discussion of intimate experience by affiliating what The Human Condition describes as the peculiarly modern experience of intimacy with a longer history of philosophical discourse on the soul. As Arendt explains, the inherent opacity and fluidity of  the  “feelings,  passions,  and  emotions”  that  comprise  the  inner  “life  of  the  soul”  are   similar in many respects to the inner organs of the human body.423 Much like our inner organs, which were intended to remain hidden from view, and which exist therefore outside the realm of appearance, the impulses of the soul do not manifest themselves in a 420 Ibid 50. 421 Ibid 120; see also 140. 422 Ibid 113, 120, 112. 423 Arendt, The Life of the Mind (New York: Harcourt, 1978) 31. 204 common or easily communicable form. Contrary to human speech, which can be clearly heard  and  comprehended  by  others,  the  soul  has  its  own  “language,”  a  distinctly   “physical”  language  that  is  expressed  primarily  by  “glance,  gesture,  [and]  inarticulate   sound,”  and  is  thus  comparable  to  modes  of  communication  employed  by  “higher  animal   species.”424 The moods and emotions that characterize the inner life process are also defined  by  a  “continual  change  [that]  is  in  no  way  different  from  the  continual  change  of   our  bodily  organs.”425 Moreover,  according  to  Arendt,  the  “passions  and  emotions  of  our   soul are not only body-bound [like our organs], they seem to have the same life- sustaining  and  preserving  functions  as  [these]  organs,”  in  that  they  provide  the  basic   urges and instinctual responses that are necessary for sexual reproduction and survival.426 The inner experiences of intimate life are here positioned as both analogs and extensions of the material register of the body that inevitably renders all human beings subject to the life process. It  is  by  no  means  novel  to  remark  on  intimacy’s  relationship  to  necessity,   reproduction,  and  the  body.  But  Arendt’s  emphasis  on  intimacy’s  vital,  biological   character has significant implications for any effort to enlist it in a project of world building. Her insistence on the relationship between intimate experience and the life process suggests that intimacy is fundamentally opposed to, or even destructive of worldly  stability.  Indeed,  she  considers  “life’s  chief  character,  with  respect  to  the  world,”   to  be  its  ability  “to  wear  down  durability”  and  describes  the  two  main  activities  affiliated   with the life process – labor and consumption – as  “devouring  processes  that  seize  and   424 Ibid 33, 32. 425 Ibid 32. 426 Ibid 35. 205 destroy  matter…”427 Intimacy’s  imbrication  with  life  therefore  renders  the  notion of an “intimate  world”  an  essentially  oxymoronic  one  in  her  theoretical  system.  Like  other   intensely subjective experiences such as pain and love, intimacy is held by Arendt to be inherently  “unworldly”:  it  lacks  entirely  in  the  stable  objectivity  of  the human artifice, and even actively unsettles it.428 Arendt addresses the unworldly character of intimacy explicitly in a provocative section of The Human Condition on  “The  Permanence  of  the  World  and  the  Work  of   Art,”  noted  briefly  in  my  previous  chapter. Echoing her discussion of the “deprivatiz[ing]”  work  required  to  make  intimate  experiences  public,  as  well  as  her   references  to  the  animalistic  “language  of  the  soul,”  she  here  contrasts  “mere  attributes  of   the human animal like feelings, wants, and needs”  with  “capacities  of  man”  that   transcend and transform these attributes, such as thought, exchange, and usage.429 While human  attributes  are  associated  with  privacy  and  the  life  process,  capacities  are  “world- open  and  communicative”  by  nature.430 For instance, when an individual employs the capacity  of  thought,  the  “mute  and  inarticulate  despondency”  of  that  individual’s  feeling   is given an impersonal, objective shape (such as a book or an artwork) through which it is made to appear to others in a recognizable and verifiable form.431 This process of reification, whereby an aspect of living experience is rendered into a fixed, tangible thing, transforms  a  “passionate  intensity  [imprisoned]  within  the  self”  into  something  “fit  to   427 Arendt, Human Condition 100. 428 As she states quite clearly in The Life of the Mind, quoting  from  Kant’s  Critique of Pure Reason:  “‘No   fixed  and  abiding  self  can  present  itself  in  this  flux  of  inner  appearances,’  as  Kant  observed  repeatedly.   Actually  it  is  misleading  to  speak  even  of  inner  ‘appearances’;;  all  we  know  are  inner  sensations  whose relentless  succession  prevents  any  of  them  from  assuming  a  lasting,  identifiable  shape…  Emotions  and   ‘inner  sensations’  are  ‘unworldly’  in  that  they  lack  the  chief  worldly  property  of  ‘standing  still  and   remaining’  at  least  long  enough  to  be  clearly  perceived…”  (39-40). 429 Arendt, Human Condition 168. 430 Ibid 168. 431 Ibid 168. 206 enter  the  world,”  allowing it to serve as a stable reference point for the establishment of common experience, and to endure the constant change enacted by the life process.432 Capacities are therefore essential to the construction and maintenance of the human artifice, while attributes, which Arendt affiliates with the passions and delights of intimate experience, are said to bear no relation to that world. In a peculiar moment, Arendt underscores this worldlessness by stating that, even if such attributes somehow managed  “to  constitute a man-made  environment  for  the  human  animal,”  this   environment  would  be  a  mere  “non-world, the product of emanation rather than of creation.”433 Arendt does not elaborate on this enigmatic notion of the non-world in The Human Condition. However, her  brief  discussion  of  this  “man-made  environment”   comprised  solely  of  “emanation[s]”  is  worth  parsing.  Though  Arendt  insists  that  such  a   realm would lack the shape and stability of a world, she nevertheless affords it a relatively delimited form, conceiving  of  it  as  a  distinct  entity  or  “environment,”  and   thereby conceding a certain productive potential to intimate and vital impulses. When human  interactions  are  mediated  by  the  “passionate  intensit[ies]”  of  intimacy,  or  those   psychical, emotional, and bodily  urges  that  are  not  “fit  to  enter  the  world,”  such   interactions are not purely fruitless; they are generative, Arendt allows, of an impermanent, yet palpable experiential realm where shapeless impulses hold sway, undisciplined by dominant social conventions or normative rules of public appearance. There is a certain correspondence between the non-world Arendt here imagines and  Robert  Park’s  notion  of  the  “moral  regions”  that  pepper  urban  locales  (which  I   432 Ibid 168. 433 Ibid 168. 207 discuss in detail in the previous chapter).434 Though Arendt conceives the non-world as a rootless social form that flashes up temporarily rather than the stable, geographical locales on which Park focuses, her description of the non-world suggests a similarly opaque,  “vagrant”  environ  as  that  analyzed  by  Park – a space in which traditionally private experiences become strikingly displaced, assuming a disarmingly public character in a manner that disturbs clear-cut distinctions between inner and outer domains. Being comprised entirely of emanations, such a realm would certainly not partake of worldliness  in  any  traditional  sense,  given  that  the  term  “emanation”  (from  the  Latin   emanare, to flow out) is associated not only with fluidity and immateriality, but also with thinness, weakness, and fragility. Yet participation in a non-world would necessarily entail a level of publicness, involving individuals in volatile, affective relations with others through which intimate experiences could be verified and a sort of recognition could be gained. Arendt’s  invocation  of the non-world is essentially a rhetorical gesture employed as a way of conveying the unheimlich situation she believed would result from a complete loss of reification in modern society. For Arendt, the possibility of such a loss was tied to the rise of a social realm oriented almost solely around consumption at the expense  of  fabrication,  a  development  that  seemed  poised  to  jeopardize  the  very  “world   which  man  creates  as  his  home  on  earth”  by  doing  away  with  worldliness  altogether.435 But despite these rhetorical origins, the concept of the non-world is uniquely applicable to studies of the NAC for two basic reasons. 434 Robert  E.  Park,  “The  City:  Suggestions  for  the  Investigation  of  Human  Behavior  in  the  Urban   Environment”  in  The City, Park, Ernest W. Burgess, and Roderick D. McKenzie (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1967) 40-46. 435 Ibid 168. 208 First,  Arendt’s  description  of  the  non-world as a fluid environment saturated with intimacy resonates quite nicely with the unruly social forms and subcultural gatherings that artists of the NAC such as Rice worked incessantly to discover, produce, and represent. An unstable and rootless, yet passionate and vitalizing realm swirling with inner experience is precisely what films such as The Flower Thief, Pull My Daisy, The Connection, Guns of the Trees, and Come Back, Africa seek to create through scenes of improvised  performance  and  intimate  exchange.  But  crucially,  whereas  Arendt’s   affiliation of the intimate with an animalistic mode of experience and communication limit non-worldly formations to irrational crowds rather than of speaking and acting publics,  the  NAC’s  depictions  of  such  formations  reveal  a  more  complex  interplay  of   intimacy and publicity operative within a non-world. Second, the designation non-world expresses the tension between vitality and durability that is so evident in the work of the NAC with a poignancy that is lacking from more familiar terms circulating within contemporary public sphere theory, such as “intimate  public sphere”  or  “counterpublic.”  For  example,  because  the  prefix  non- can indicate an environment that is not identical to or involved with the world, the concept non-world evokes the sense of detachment from dominant society that the NAC struggled to achieve through  its  filmic  rebellion,  and  also  conveys  these  artists’  more  radical  effort   to subvert worldly stability as a way of retaining contact with life. Non-world therefore positively expresses the difference that is so essential to alternative cultural formations and affirms that there exist forms of activity that do not conform to the deadening logic of reification. However, because non- also indicates a more negative lack of worldliness, the designation non-world also gestures toward the apparent futility of any attempt to regain 209 an experience of shelter or belonging by relinquishing stability and durability. It thus accounts for the stubborn persistence of complaints about homelessness in the films and writings produced by this movement throughout its rebellion. Along with accurately describing the vagrant social forms that appear throughout the  NAC’s  homeless  movies,  the  term  non-world encapsulates the peculiar predicament in which artists such as Rice found themselves while elaborating intimate worlds. Because these artists were attempting to break from a dominant socio-cultural formation whose oppressiveness was felt to reside in its excessively reified and reifying character, their rebellion took shape as a rejection of worldliness itself. However, they still longed for the sense of personal and cultural stability that only something like a world could provide. Members of the NAC were thus seeking shelter, but they wanted shelter from reification; they were striving to produce a world, but a world without worldliness. Arendt elaborates on the complexities and limitations of intimate world building in a related argument published in two different forms at the beginning of the 1960s: first as  the  essay  “Society  and  Culture,”  which  appeared  in  a  special  issue of Daedalus on “Mass  Culture  and  Mass  Media”  in  1960;;  and  then  as  “The  Crisis  in  Culture:  Its  Social   and  Its  Political  Significance,”  an  expanded  chapter  in  her  1961  collection  of  essays,   Between Past and Future. In both of these works, Arendt extends her analysis of the opposition between worldliness and life by focusing specifically on the role that artworks and  cultural  practice  have  played  in  the  maintenance  of  worldliness.  The  cultural  “crisis”   she identifies in these works stems from a dramatic transformation to classical conceptions of art effected by the rise of mass society, whose radically novel cultural 210 analog  (“what  we  call  mass  culture”)  problematizes  the  very  possibility  of  culture   itself.436 Arendt’s  attempt  at  art  history  in  these  essays  rests on a deeply nostalgic narrative of modernity. Works of art were initially created, she contends, as useless objects of pure appearance and endurance, or man-made things meant to persist in the world throughout the ages as testaments to the greatness of past civilizations. They were thus intended to be removed from spheres of utility and consumption, in which worldly objects are progressively  worn  down  or  devoured  in  the  course  of  daily  life.  From  Arendt’s   perspective, it is only where the endurance of art is assured through this removal that one can speak of culture in the strict sense of the term. For if culture designates the particular “mode  of  intercourse  prescribed  by  [different]  civilizations  with  respect  to  the  least  useful   and most worldly of things, the works of artists, poets, musicians, philosophers, and so forth,”  then  the  proper  form  for  this  mode  of  intercourse  to  assume  is  surely  that  of   “loving  care,”  given  the  fact  that  “‘culture’  derives  from  colere—to cultivate, to dwell, to take care, to  tend  and  preserve…”437 In this framework, a culture is constituted through the active protection of artistic objects from the destructiveness of natural life processes, and this practice is crucial to ensuring the existence and endurance of a common world. The emergence of mass culture, according to Arendt, represents a radical break from such traditional configurations of art and culture. As the worldly disposition of a true  “consumers’  society,”  mass  culture  exhibits  a  novel  disregard  for  artistic  durability, striving instead to produce ever-new forms of entertainment for the purpose of immediate consumption – an orientation that reveals mass culture to be no culture at all, but rather 436 Arendt,  “Society  and  Culture”  284. 437 Arendt,  “Crisis in Culture”  210,  208. 211 an  “anticultural”  process.438 If  culture  is  understood  as  “a  phenomenon  of  the  world,”  or  a   mode  of  caring  for  worldly  things,  then  entertainment  must  be  distinguished  as  “a   phenomenon  of  life,”  Arendt  reasons,  or  a  mode  of  tending  to  and  sustaining  the  life   process of society.439 In  the  “culture”  of  entertainment,  worldly  things are approached as mere resources for amusement, ephemeral consumer goods that, like food products, are “necessary  for…  [the]  preservation  and  recuperation  [of  human  life],”  but  which  cannot   survive the moment of consumption.440 Through consumption, cultural objects lose their very thingness; they are functionalized, made to fulfill a basic need of society or the individual  in  an  effort  “to  satisfy  the  growing  appetites  of  a  life  process  whose  vital   energy, no longer spent in the toil and trouble of a laboring body, must be used up by consumption…”441 The danger that Arendt attributes to entertainment does not lie in its failure  to  be  artistic,  therefore,  but  in  its  “biological”  proclivity  for  drawing  more  and   more worldly things into its destructive metabolism. As  an  index  of  the  artistic  realm’s  subsumption  by  the  social,  the  decay  of  culture   represents  the  apogee  of  Arendt’s  theory  of  modernization.  Indeed,  “Society  and  Culture”   and  “The  Crisis  in  Culture”  position  this  subsumption  as  a  particularly  distressing intensification  of  the  “unnatural  growth  of  the  natural”  that  Arendt  identifies  in  The Human Condition as a defining event of the modern age.442 Because Arendt viewed individual art works as spectacular crystallizations of worldly stability, or objects whose potential immortality seemed to condense the durability of the human artifice with an unmatched  “purity  and  clarity,”  she  took  the  increasingly  consumable  character  of  art  in   438 Arendt,  “Society  and  Culture”  286. 439 Arendt,  “Crisis  in  Culture”  204. 440 Ibid 203. 441 Ibid 207. 442 Arendt, Human Condition 47. 212 mass society as an indication that the life process had penetrated into even “the   worldliest”  of  all  worldly  realms.443 The artist is still singled out in The Human Condition as  “the  only  ‘worker’  left”  in  a  society  increasingly  restricted  to  labor  and   consumption.444 “Society  and  Culture”  and  “The  Crisis  in  Culture”  foreclose  on  this   option, equating the rise of mass culture with a dramatic decline of reification, fabrication,  and  worldly  permanence  more  generally.  In  other  words,  art’s  replacement  by   entertainment is positioned in these two essays as confirmation that the world previously created by homo faber and formerly cared for by agents of culture had devolved into a non-world,  a  fleeting  social  environment  mediated  solely  by  “mere  attributes  of  the   human  animal.” Arendt’s  narrative  of  cultural  decline,  however  polemical  or  hyperbolic, generates productive tensions when placed in dialogue with discourse surrounding the NAC. These tensions emerge from the radically divergent investments in vitality and worldliness, and intimacy and stability that structure these discourses. For instance,  Arendt’s  analysis  of  mass  culture’s  startling  vitalization of the artistic realm conflicts markedly with the stated ambitions of the NAC, dedicated as this movement  was  to  countering  the  “dead[ness]”  of  conventional  artistic  products  with  an   explicitly lively mode  of  film  practice,  one  that  would  remain  “rough,  unpolished,  but   alive.”445 By  characterizing  entertainment  as  a  “phenomenon  of  life,”  Arendt  troubles  the   NAC’s  efforts  to  pursue  a  living  cinema  in  direct  opposition  to  mass  culture.  If  critical statements  of  the  NAC  typically  emphasize  Hollywood’s  perpetuation  of  tired  formal  and   thematic conventions when declaiming the moribund state of postwar mass culture, 443 Ibid  168;;  Arendt,  “Crisis  in  Culture”  206. 444 Arendt, Human Condtion 127. 445 “The First  Statement  of  the  New  American  Cinema  Group”  in  Film Culture Reader, 83. 213 Arendt turns our attention to the actual social function of mass cultural products, revealing  how  mass  society’s  “mode  of  intercourse”  with  entertainment  commodities   parallels life-sustaining practices of consumption. Moreover, though intimacy is not evoked  explicitly  in  “Society  and  Culture”  or  “The  Crisis  in  Culture,”  Arendt’s   description  of  entertainment  as  fulfilling  the  vital  “needs”  of  human  animals,  “whether   the  needs  in  question  are  of  a  high  or  a  low  order,”  resonates  in  suggestive  ways  with  her   association of intimacy with vitality in The Human Condition and The Life of the Mind. Within  Arendt’s  framework,  the  becoming-vital of culture in modernity is also a becoming-intimate: the art work is no longer a reified object of pure appearance serving the establishment of a common, public world, but rather a transient consumer good oriented toward the opaque register of subjective, bodily needs. From this perspective, the  NAC’s  demands  that  cinema  be  made  more  personal,  domestic,  or  physical  seem   perplexing and redundant. Even  more  importantly,  Arendt’s  analysis  of  the  vital  dimensions  of entertainment complicates  the  NAC’s  belief  that  late-modern alienation could be remedied through a vivification of art and film. It is precisely the influx of life into the formerly inanimate artistic sphere that Arendt credits with reducing the world modern man had inherited as his  “home  on  earth”  to  a  fluid,  transitory  environment,  one  incapable  of  reliably   sheltering private life or of adequately grounding common experience. Whereas artists of the NAC blame the inhospitable rigidity of American mass culture for stifling inner expression and impeding communal belonging, Arendt attributes the homelessness suffered by the modern individual to the dynamic vitality of her/his surrounding culture, 214 blaming  the  increasingly  “nomadic”  existence  of  the  denizens  of mass society on the decline of reification under modernity.446 Arendt’s  classicist  writings  on  art  and  culture  would  have  appeared  highly   conservative to members of the NAC, invested as she was in notions of form, skilled craftsmanship, and eternal beauty. Affiliates of the NAC were prone to advocating not only  for  an  abandonment  of  form  and  technique,  but  also  for  a  view  of  art  as  “disposable”   and  “temporary,”  if  not  more  explicitly  consumable.447 When  viewed  through  Arendt’s   theoretical framework, both  the  “anticultural”  dynamic  of  popular  entertainment  and  the   “countercultural”  films  of  the  NAC  appear  as  mere  variations  on  a  theme  of  life,  or   alternative expressions of what Arendt describes in The Human Condition as the distinctively  modern  “assumption that life, and not the world, is the highest good of man…”448 Though this elision of the difference separating popular culture from the avant-garde is reductive, the strange parallels that Arendt reveals between these apparently opposed cultural manifestations allows us to perceive an important limitation in  the  NAC’s  world-building project. Even as artists of this movement strove to embrace and amplify the inherent volatility of human affairs, they simultaneously complained of the shelterlessness and alienation they suffered in the absence of a relatively stable, alternative world in which 446 Arendt,  “Crisis  in  Culture”  206. 447 See  especially  Stan  Vanderbeek,  “Movies,  Disposable  Art,  Synthetic  Media  and  Artificial  Intelligence,”   Take One 1.2 (January-February  1969);;  and  Dick  Higgins,  “Intending,”  The Something Else Newsletter 1.3 (April 1966): n.p. It is interesting to note that Arendt’s  comparison  of  the  entertainment  industry’s   ephemeral wares with the perishable goods manufactured by a bakery – “Panis et circenses truly belong together; both are necessary for life, for its preservation and recuperation, and both vanish in the course of the  life  process”  – is  restated  in  positive  terms  in  a  1969  “Movie  Journal”  column,  in  which  Mekas  locates   the political value of avant-garde  films  in  their  capacity  to  “sustain  man,  spiritually,  like  bread  does,  like   rain does, like rivers, like mountains,  like  sun”  (Arendt,  “Crisis  in  Culture”  202;;  Mekas,  Movie Journal 352).  Mekas  has  also  written:  “enjoyment  of  cinema  as  food  – let the image, screen drip over your eyes like when  you  enjoy  food”  (To Petrarca [Paris: Dis Voir, 2009] 6). 448 Arendt, Human Condition 318. 215 nonconventional values, sensibilities, and modes of living could be both privately cultivated  and  publicly  recognized.  Arendt’s  theory  of  culture  reveals  that  the  NAC’s   longing for such a reliable, alternative world was incompatible with their desire for a vital,  living  cinema.  If  a  world’s  ability  to  function  as  a  stabilizing  “home”  for  human  life   is  truly  dependent  on  that  world’s  immutable,  reified  character,  then  the  NAC’s  interest   in fabricating a hospitable, alternative world defined by its animating volatility was doomed  from  the  outset.  Arendt’s  analysis  of  the  necessity  of  reification  to  habitation   thus  forces  us  to  reevaluate  the  NAC’s  attempts  to  rectify  homelessness through the pursuit of an unstructured vitality. To note the challenge Arendt poses to discourse on the NAC is not to argue for an “Arendtian”  reading  of  this  film  culture.  I  am  interested  instead  in  considering  the  value   of a comparative analysis of these conflicting, contemporaneous discourses that reveals the  limitations  structuring  both.  Just  as  Arendt’s  concerns  about  cultural  vitality  undercut   the avant-garde’s  desire  to  merge  art  and  life,  the  NAC’s  historical  success  in  mobilizing   the dream of a living cinema toward the creation of an impressive, if perpetually vulnerable, network of alternative cultural organizations prompts us to interrogate Arendt’s  insistence  that  life  and  worldliness  occupy  mutually  exclusive  domains.  This   dream did not only animate the formation of a host of alternative institutions dedicated to the production, distribution, exhibition, criticism, and even preservation of personal cinema. It also resonated with communities dispersed throughout the world and spread across multiple generations who have contributed to the maintenance of avant-garde film culture  since  the  1960s,  thereby  ensuring  the  paradoxical  persistence  of  the  NAC’s   ideology of presentness. If Arendt asks us to reexamine the radical claims that continue to 216 be yoked to that ideology, the remarkable longevity of the American avant-garde demonstrates  the  importance  of  questioning  Arendt’s  narrative  of  modernity  as  a  process   of cultural decline. Arendt’s  theories  of  art  and  culture  are  also  complicated  when  we  apply them to the study of film. Her view of the artwork as a crystallization of worldly permanence can be  seen  quite  clearly  by  examining  cinema’s  fundamental  dependence  on  aspects  of  both   worldliness and vitality. If the co-presence of these two attributes has figured in a wide range of critical and theoretical writings on film, perhaps most famously in André Bazin’s  view  of  cinema  as  “change  mummified,”  this  medium’s  paradoxical  fusion  of   stasis and dynamism, objectivity and motion, fabrication and animation was also central to  Rice’s  conception  of  film  practice.449 By  examining  Rice’s  effort  to  develop  a   conceptual framework capable of holding together both the wildness of life and the order of  worldliness,  we  can  put  pressure  on  some  of  Arendt’s  basic  assumptions about art, while  also  expanding  on  existing  accounts  of  Rice’s  work.  To  do  so,  it  will  be  necessary   to  draw  from  a  variety  of  Rice’s  personal  and  public  writings  composed  during  the  years   he was active as a filmmaker, but to retain a focus on his initial production, The Flower Thief. This focus is warranted not only because Rice began to formulate his ideas about film aesthetics during the time he was actively engaged in producing and exhibiting this work. It also continued to function as a crucial reference point for Rice throughout his subsequent writings on and forays into film practice, serving as a sort of constant source or spring for his thoughts on cinema.450 449 André Bazin, What is Cinema?, vol. 1, trans. Hugh Gray (Berkeley, CA: University of California, 1967) 15. 450 In addition to referencing The Flower Thief in  publications  such  as  “A  Statement”  and  “Foundation  for   the Invention and Creation  of  Absurd  Movies,”  Rice  also  wrote  and  spoke  occasionally  of  producing  some   217 IV. Wild Geometrics Few commentators on The Flower Thief have failed to remark on the commitment to  presentness  exhibited  by  this  film.  Often  hailed  as  a  sort  of  apogee  of  the  NAC’s   aesthetic  of  immediacy  (“a  peak  of  spontaneous  cinema,”  “the  purest  expression  of  the   Beat  sensibility  in  cinema,”  “the  beatnik  film  par excellence”),  The Flower Thief lends itself quite willingly to the celebration of vitality that continues to inflect critical discourse on this film culture.451 Rice’s  investment  in  presentness  can  be  found  operating   in the film at multiple, interrelated levels, including those of style, narrative, and mode of production,  as  well  as  in  Rice’s  broader  conceptualization  of  this  work.  And  though  this   section will demonstrate the need to complicate our understanding of that investment by drawing  on  a  range  of  Rice’s  writings  about  film that elucidate how his attraction to cinema’s  vitality  was  intricately  bound  up  with  his  commitment  to  technique,  it  is  first   necessary to examine the central role that presentness played in the production of The Flower Thief. The numerous registers of presentness  at  play  in  Rice’s  film  are  delineated  rather   nicely in what is, perhaps, the first critical response this work provoked. In a brief essay that  appeared  initially  as  program  notes  for  the  film’s  “world  premiere”  at  the   Contemporary Dancers Foundation (CDF) in San Francisco, but which was also reprinted form of sequel to the film. For instance, in his 1962 interview with Mary Batten, Rice says of his aborted project  for  a  film  set  entirely  in  Venice,  CA,  “I  could  have  made  THE SON OF THE FLOWER THIEF [but]  I  couldn’t  get  going”  (Batten  35).  Rice  makes  a  similar  remark  as  late  as  April  16,  1964  in  a  letter  to   Allen  Ginsberg  and  Peter  Orlovsky  written  in  Acapulco,  in  which  Rice  states,  “the  hot-blooded flower thief rides again in  search  of  swamps  and  shipwrecks  for  my  new  movie”  (Rice,  “Diaries”  116.) 451 Mekas,  “Movie  Journal,”  Village Voice 14 September 1961: 10; Sitney, Visionary Film: The American Avant-Garde, 1943-2000, 3rd edition (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002) 300;;  J.  Hoberman,  “Pull   My  Daisy  The  Queen  of  Sheba  Meets  the  Atom  Man”  in  The American New Wave, 1958-1967 ed. Melinda Ward (Buffalo, NY: Walker Art Center, 1982) 38. 218 in the small arts journal, Contemporary, that was published by the CDF, the writer, choreographer, and then-director of the CDF, J Marks (aka Jay Marks, aka Jamake Highwater),  notes  how  Rice’s  commitment to spontaneity manifests itself in The Flower Thief’s  content  and  technique,  as  well  as  Rice’s  more  general  creative  process.  Marks   also frames this commitment through recourse to a familiar theme of homelessness. Quoting  Rice’s  own  description  of  The Flower Thief as  “a  true  cinematic   expression  of  the  ‘hip’  and  ‘beat’  philosophy”  that  seeks  to  depict  North  Beach  culture   “without  a  moral  to  intrude  upon  the  action”  and  with  an  emphasis  on  “spontaneous   antics, without too much contrived staging – all too  common  in  the  planned  film,”  Marks   then  argues  that  Rice’s  impromptu  method  of  filmmaking  gives  The Flower Thief “the   freedom of an essentially irresponsible artist who permits his imagination to carry him wherever fancy or a temporary stimulation takes  him.”452 For  Marks,  Rice’s  meandering   approach to production, driven by fancy rather than a preformed plan, carries over into the  film’s  content  as  well.  The Flower Thief constitutes  “an  artful  rendering  of  a   wandering  sickness,”  he  explains,  or  a  depiction of an experience of homelessness suffered  by  members  of  the  Beat  generation,  those  “out-casts, nerdo-wells,  …   experimenters…  [and]  unfixed  personalities”  whose  rootlessness  is  the  result  of  their   “determination  or  failure  to  be  assimilated  into  a  society which [they] either rejected as false  or  which  rejects  the  misfit.”453 This evasion of fixity and social convention also impacts  the  film’s  anarchic  form,  which  Marks  describes  as  resulting  from  a  similarly   452 J  Marks,  “The  Flower  Thief,”  Contemporary 1-2  (1960):  4.  Though  Marks  bills  the  CDF’s  screening  as   The Flower Thief’s  “world  premiere,”  the  film  appears  to  have  been  screened  initially  at  the  North  Beach   arts space, The Coffee Gallery, in an earlier form. See Sargeant 83; and McCarney. Taylor Mead also references a pair of early, public screenings, the location of which is not specified, in a correspondence with Rice from the summer of 1960. See: Mead, letter to Ron Rice, 16 June 1960, Reginald Gay Collection; and letter to Ron Rice, 20 June 1960, Reginald Gay Collection. However, Rice confirms that the CDF gave The Flower Thief its  “first  run”  in  a  1962  interview  in  Film Comment. See Batten 34. 453 Ibid 4. 219 vagrant  determination  “to  avoid  technique”  and  dispense with classical notions of artistic authority.454 As  with  other  of  the  NAC’s  homeless  movies,  social  alienation  is  here   positioned  by  Marks  as  the  condition  of  the  film’s  production  that  motivates  Rice’s   cultivation of an improvisatory, spontaneous lifestyle, before bleeding into the subject and  formal  composition  of  Rice’s  film.  Yet  importantly,  the  ambivalence  of  this   experience is underscored by Marks. Homelessness is suffered as a sickness but also adopted as a strategy, or a means for exploring new forms  of  creative  “freedom”  and  new   occasions  for  sensory  “stimulation.”455 Marks’  description  of  Rice’s  film  is  accurate  in  many  respects.  The Flower Thief does portray in its subject matter the spontaneous, transient lifestyle promoted by the Beats. And Rice did adopt an intensely low budget and impromptu mode of production when shooting and editing the film, which resulted in the purposely crude, pseudo-naïf aesthetic celebrated by critics of his work. Just as The Flower Thief patches together a vague narrative out of loosely related sequences depicting an unnamed protagonist (Taylor Mead) as he meanders about the North Beach area of San Francisco, whiling away the time and interacting in improvisatory ways with various beatniks, authority figures, and inanimate objects, the film consistently employs markers of amateurism and contingency  to  heighten  the  sense  of  immediacy  and  ephemerality  conveyed  by  the  film’s   content, utilizing handheld camerawork, natural lighting, location shooting, and non- professional actors, while also retaining a wide variety of audio-visual imperfections (over- and under-exposed footage, variations in volume, seemingly extraneous multiple 454 Ibid 18. 455 For another reading of The Flower Thief as a distinctly Beat expression of homelessness, see the Reverand  Al  Carmines’s  sermon  on  the  film,  “Saint  Francis  and  The  Flower  Thief,”  originally  delivered  at   the Judson Memorial Church on August 12th, 1962, but reprinted in Film Culture 39 (Winter, 1965), esp. 125. 220 exposures,  etc.)  As  Rice’s  own  description  of  the  film  in  Marks’  program  notes  makes   clear, The Flower Thief emphasizes action and spontaneity over coherence and professionalism in an effort to accurately reflect the North Beach way of life. Rice’s  approach  to  filmmaking  was  thus  deeply  imbricated  in  the  broader  “culture   of  spontaneity”  elaborated  by the post-WWII American avant-garde, which the cultural historian Daniel Belgrad has examined at length in The Culture of Spontaneity.456 The Flower Thief stands as one, particularly celebrated contribution to this culture whose effort  to  “explore  and  record the  spontaneous  creative  act”  manifested  itself  in  a  variety   of artistic media and disciplines, including poetry, music, painting, dance, ceramics, and film.457 Though Rice sometimes framed his interest in improvisation as an outgrowth of necessity, or a result  of  his  lack  of  the  financial  resources  required  to  “stage  events   throughly  [sic],”  he  also  believed  that  film’s  capacity  to  register  unpredictable   occurrences, accidents, and concrete details afforded it a privileged relationship to spontaneity.458 Film appeared to Rice to be uniquely equipped to extend what Belgrad identifies  as  the  “aesthetic  of  presence”  that  the  Beats,  mimicking  improvisational  jazz   musicians, sought to incorporate into their poetry through an emphasis on public readings, which Belgrad  describes  as  performative  “events  taking  place  in  real  space  and   time, [which] shared with life itself an element of contingency that written texts lacked.”459 456 Daniel Belgrad, The Culture of Spontaneity: Improvisation and the Arts in Postwar America (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1998). 457 Belgrad  1.  As  Deane  M.  Williams  has  noted,  film  is  conspicuously  absent  from  Belgrad’s  otherwise   wide-ranging analysis of postwar American art (Williams,  “Street  Life:  Between  the  New  Deal  and  Direct   Cinema,”  presentation  at  Visible  Evidence  18  conference,  New  York  University,  New  York  City,  14   August 2011). 458 Rice,  “A  Statement,”  Film Culture 25 (1962): 71, reprinted in Film Culture 39 (Winter 1965): 120. 459 Belgrad 218, 219. 221 The  import  Rice  placed  on  presentness  can  be  seen  quite  clearly  in  his  “Ode  to  the   Eye,”  a  brief statement Rice composed in 1961 that underscores the affective force of the unplanned film and celebrates its ability to revitalize what he perceived to be a dwindling realm of inner experience. The complexity of this statement and its significance to discourse on the NAC (it has been printed in at least four separate issues of Film Culture) warrants  its  reproduction  here  in  full.  I  have  again  retained  Rice’s  original  spelling  and   punctuation: About that time it was decided by the Gods that reality was more important then creation. The reality of anything moves the spirit more then artificial attempts to create motion where there is static. A drunkard struggling in the alley to remove the cap from the wine bottle strikes the emotions with more force and meaning then any logical sequence  of  staged  events  that  don’t  have  the  fibre  of  life. Any scene, no matter what, can evoke more of man to believe and feel then a parallelism which contains logic without reality. It is better to film anything that is living and real than to film ideas of what should, or might be real.460 In  this  rather  tangled  defense  of  cinematic  realism,  Rice  praises  film’s  ability  to  capture   what  he  terms  the  “fibre  of  life”  by  presenting  the  reality  of  an  event  or  scene  in  an   essentially unmediated  manner  that  allows  it  to  “[strike]  the  emotions”  and  “[move]  the   spirit”  with  an  intensity  that  cannot  be  matched  by  any  film  rooted  in  artifice.  Recasting   Arendt’s  view  of  artistic  creation  as  reification  in  decidedly  negative  terms,  Rice  here   seems to envision filmmaking as a strangely uncreative artistic practice, a process of 460 “Ode  to  the  Eye”  was  originally  published  in  Mekas,  “Notes  on  the  New  American  Cinema,”  Film Culture 24  (1962).  It  was  later  included  as  part  of  Rice’s  longer  statement,  “Dazendada  Works,”  Film Culture 29 (1963), which was reprinted in Film Culture 39  (Winter  1965).  “Ode  to  the  Eye”  was  also   printed in its original form, as a typewritten statement with handwritten notation sent by Rice to Jonas Mekas,  as  “Ron  Rice  Note  to  Jonas  Mekas”  in  Film Culture 70/71 (1983), where it is dated by Rice from “Mon.  Nov.  22,  1961”  (158).  This  document  is  also  reprinted  in  Mekas,  Jonas  Mekas:  Artists’  Book (Paris: Onestar,  2003).  I  have  retained  Rice’s  original  spelling,  punctuation,  and  style. 222 reproducing, without altering, the inherently dynamic character of life in an effort to “evoke  more  of  man  to  believe  and  feel.”461 “Ode  to  the  Eye”  succeeds  in  conveying Rice’s  interest  in  life  as  an  unstructured,   illogical  domain.  But  it  is  ultimately  a  misleading  representation  of  Rice’s  views  on  film   aesthetics when read outside the broader context of his other writings on art and cinema. Despite  Rice’s  frequent  denunciation of planned, staged, artificial, and coherent films in statements  such  as  “Ode  to  the  Eye,”  he  was  actually  deeply  invested  in  the  craft  of   filmmaking, and he expended a considerable amount of effort planning and editing his projects in accordance with  his  views  on  film  aesthetics.  This  side  of  Rice’s  creative   practice has not been documented by film history. It is therefore worth detailing here to provide a more comprehensive view of his approach to filmmaking. Rice’s  interest  in  craft  becomes  evident upon examining the personal journals he composed in the years following the production of The Flower Thief, some of which were published in a special issue of Film Culture from 1965 devoted to the writings of Rice and Maya Deren, and others of which are archived in a collection of paper materials surrounding the life of Taylor Mead at the New York Public Library (NYPL). These journals are littered with treatments for new film projects, sketches of locations, and diagrams of shots, sequences, and even short films, some of which feature detailed notes on technique including specifications for particular actions, camera angles, frame rates, 461 Along with invoking the Kino-Eye theories of Dziga Vertov, which were a significant influence on Rice, the  title  “Ode  to  the  Eye”  also  speaks  to  Rice’s  belief  in  the  image’s  ability  to  revitalize  the  viewer’s  body   and  spirit  through  the  medium  of  vision.  On  Vertov,  see:  Rice,  “A  Statement”;;  and  “Foundation  for the Invention  and  Creation  of  Absurd  Movies.”  On  the  image,  see  especially  Batten,  “An  Interview  with  Ron   Rice”  33. 223 and sound and editing effects.462 Demonstrating the amount of time Rice spent watching movies and thinking about film practice, his journals also contain frequent references to the films, writings, imagery, and techniques of various auteurs, actors, and movie critics, ranging from Griffith to Eisenstein, Dreyer, Humphrey Bogart, and James Agee. Many of Rice’s  writings  also  include comments regarding the value of film form and the significance of montage in particular. For example, one passage from notes for an unrealized film project contained in his posthumously published diaries describes editing as a highly artisanal process  akin  to  a  sort  of  tapestry.  “How  the  things  are  revealed  and   when  gives  it  the  Art,”  Rice  writes,  before  adding,  “The  cutting,  the  drama,  the  tension[,]   all  created  from  ordinary  matter[,]  the  layers  of  meaning  woven  in  the  Cinema  fabric.”463 This comparison of editing to an intricate practice of weaving, where dramatic tension and  meaning  are  constructed  out  of  mere  “ordinary  matter,”  clearly  departs  from  the   realist  perspective  advanced  in  “Ode  to  the  Eye”  though  it  resonates  strongly  with  the complex  montage  sequences,  visual  effects,  and  soundtracks  composed  for  Rice’s  three   completed  films.  But  his  polemics  against  “staging”  are  problematized  even  further  by   documents  surrounding  a  different  unrealized  project:  Rice’s  proposal  for  the   establishment  of  a  film  production  program  devoted  to  “continu[ing]  the  aesthetic   development  of  the  Silent  Motion  Picture  Film,”  which  was  to  involve,  among  other   things,  “The  construction  of  a  movie  studio”  complete  with  “Lighting,  Platforms,   Backgrounds, Props,  Controls,  ect.  [sic],”  and  focused  periods  of  “Studio  Filming”  in   462 In  addition  to  the  sketches  and  treatments  to  be  found  in  Rice’s  posthumously  published  “Diaries”  op.   cit., see also: Rice, sketch of scene for The Queen of Sheba Meets the Atom Man, n.d., Reginald Gay Collection. 463 Rice,  “Diaries”  102-103. This passage echoes the language of a note included at the bottom of a storyboard  for  another  unrealized  film,  wherein  Rice  writes:  “This  is  the  surface of the scene. Now the ‘how’  these  images  play  together  begins  the  Cinema  ‘Art’”  (ibid,  100). 224 which  artists  would  explore  “The  transformation  of  real  events  in  Space  and  Time  into   the  ‘Plastic’  dimensions  of  the  Cinema.”464 The period of time in which Rice shot The Flower Thief is not covered in either the aforementioned special issue of Film Culture or  the  NYPL’s  paper  materials   collection.  But  documents  dating  from  after  the  film’s  initial  exhibition  reveal  that  Rice’s   commitment to form and technique played a central role in the creation of this work, which  Rice  himself  described  as  a  reaction  against  “the  planned  film.”  For  instance,  in  a   1962 interview in Film Comment with Mary Batten, Rice details the incredibly meticulous process by which The Flower Thief was produced and edited, explaining that all three thousand feet of the footage he exposed throughout the production period was shot on fifty foot rolls of film (Ansco reversal machine-gun stock left over after WWII) that he had to hand-wind onto small daylight spools from twelve hundred foot cans of unexposed stock. He also explains that the soundtrack for the film was created through a laborious process that involved breaking the initial rough cut into ten minute sections, projecting each section, and then transferring relevant audio materials onto a quarter-inch tape recorder during playback. After the resulting, two-hour cut was exhibited to different audiences in San Francisco, Rice explains, he then decided to reedit the film, cutting it down to approximately 80-85 minutes. The cutting did not stop there, evidently. The version of The Flower Thief currently in distribution through the Film-Makers’   Cooperative has a runtime of just under 60 minutes.465 464 See  Rice,  “Plans  for  Work,”  29  November  1962,  Reginald  Gay  Collection. Rice submitted this proposal for consideration to grants committees at the Whitney Foundation and Brown University. 465 Batten 32. In his 1962 review of The Flower Thief,  Mekas  notes  seeing  the  film  in  “three  different   versions, a two-hour-long version, a forty-five-minute version, and now a seventy-minute  version,”  adding     “It  always  works,  no  matter  how  long  or  how  short  it  is”  (Mekas,  Movie Journal 63). The online catalog of the Pacific Film Archive notes that a 75-minute version apparently edited by Francis Rigney is the 225 Rice’s  decision  to  reedit  and  condense  the  original  cut  was  the  source  of a dispute between Mead and himself. In a pair of letters sent to Rice in the summer of 1960 after a screening of The Flower Thief in San Francisco, Mead chastises Rice for editing down an earlier version of the film, stating that Rice had destroyed that version’s  simplicity  and   spontaneity,  the  accidental  discontinuities  of  which  Mead  compares  to  “the  elements  of   modern  jazz.”466 In  an  echo  of  Mekas’s  infamous  critique  of  the  “second  version”  of  John   Cassavetes’  Shadows, Mead accuses Rice in a profanity-riddled diatribe of forcibly imposing  a  sense  of  “continuity”  on  The Flower Thief in a misguided effort to make the film more marketable.467 Rather  than  striving  for  a  “shit  ass  Hollywood  mass  8,000,000   dollar  money  mad  worthless  bore,”  Mead  writes,  Rice  should  “be  content  with  a  little   100,000  dollar  epic  that  means  something  artistically  and  jazzistically  baby.”468 Rice’s   response,  dismissively  labeled  “Memo  to  actor  of  movie,”  further  illuminates  his  views   on film form, asserting: The essence of The Flower Thief is image. The moving image doing something, no matter how trite or sophisticated! The film is built on image and editing order [that are] a direct result of my unexplained genius to integrate abstract concepts into cinematic concepts of action. No Man can tell me how to make my film. After I have built these filmic ideas into projectable realities I refuse to take advice from anyone.469 Whether serious or self-mocking,  Rice’s  defense  of  his  edits  reiterates  a  position  he   advances in other writings from this period, which was apparently the source of an earlier argument  with  Mead  about  the  artistic  basis  of  film:  namely,  Rice’s  belief  that  “the   “definitive  version,”  according  to  Rigney  (http://oskicat.berkeley.edu/record=b10391981~S1). This chapter refers to the version currently in distribution through the Film-Makers’ Cooperative. 466 Mead, letter to Ron Rice, 16 June 1960, Reginald Gay Collection. 467 Mead, letter to Ron Rice, 20 June 1960, Reginald Gay Collection. 468 Mead, letter to Ron Rice, 16 June 1960. 469 Rice, memo to Taylor Mead, n.d., Reginald Gay Collection. 226 difference  between  a  natural  event  and  it  [sic]  appearance  on  the  screen…  makes  film  an   art  form.”470 Such statements reveal a side of Rice that differs considerably from that presented by  contemporary  scholarship  on  his  work,  in  which  Rice’s  films  have  been  framed,  for   instance,  as  exemplars  of  the  American  underground’s  improvisatory  “practice  in  the   profilmic”;;  as anarchic  expressions  of  a  liberating  philosophy  of  “play”;;  and  as  authentic   manifestations  of  a  Beat  aesthetic  of  “purity  and  innocence”  whose  spontaneity  and   messiness has since been co-opted  by  the  “faux primitivism”  of  American  popular   culture.471 When we  compare  such  descriptions  of  Rice’s  work  with  his  statements  on  the   value of editing and technique, we would seem to be confronted with the existence of two separate Rices: on the one hand, a spontaneous realist invested in film as a conduit for life; on the other, a meticulous craftsman committed to artistic fabrication and control. These versions of Rice are not wholly incompatible, however, as can be seen upon  returning  to  Rice’s  deceptively  brief  “Memo”  to  Mead.  In  this  memo,  Rice   embraces the fabricated  character  of  what  he  refers  to  as  the  “filmic  ideas”  contained  in   The Flower Thief and underscores the considerable work he put into creating and ordering these ideas. But he also insists that the final result of his work retains an intimate connection  to  reality.  The  film  is  a  compilation  of  “projectable  realities,”  he  states,  or   abstract  concepts  that  have  been  concretized  and  infused  with  “action”  through  the  filmic   transcription of actual events enacted to realize such concepts. The intriguing fusion of the artificial and the real in this memo demonstrates that film was valued by Rice for 470 Rice,  “Foundation  for  the  Invention  and  Creation  of  Absurd  Movies.”  Rice  here relates an argument with Mead about film art that occurred on the first day of shooting The Flower Thief. 471 David E. James, Allegories of Cinema: American Film in the Sixties (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University, 1989) 120-127;;  Sargeant  73;;  Ray  Carney,  “Escape  Velocity:  Notes  on  Beat  Film”  in  Beat Culture and the New America, 1950-1965 (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1995) 202-203. 227 facilitating a mode of artistic practice capable of melding his seemingly opposing investments in spontaneity and order, reality and fabrication, life and form. Like other artists of the NAC, Rice was trying to develop an employment of film craft whose products would be experienced as manifestations of pure life. He wanted to utilize form to convey a feeling of formlessness. The contradictions and inconsistencies that occur across his writings are the result of his attempt to elaborate the conceptual basis of an inherently  paradoxical  film  practice,  a  sort  of  “foundation  for  the  invention  and  creation   of  absurd  movies”  to  borrow  one  of  Rice’s  own,  internally  redundant phrases.472 Rice’s  interest  in  cinema’s  paradoxical  qualities  points  to  the  difficulties  that  arise   from  applying  Arendt’s  theory  of  art  to  the  study  of  film.  The  distinction  between  life  and   world that underlies this theory is confounded by film, a medium whose specificity derives from a complex intermingling of these two realms. On the one hand, the process of photographic inscription at the base of filmic representation, whereby the flux of a real event is frozen and fixed onto a material strip of celluloid, conforms rather nicely to Arendt’s  view  of  artistry  as  a  reifying  work,  a  practice  centered  on  “the  transformation  of   the  intangible  into  the  tangibility  of  things.”473 Indeed, the individual frame or photogram, whose stillness has frequently been associated with death, exemplifies Arendt’s  characterization  of  the  artwork  as  a  “‘dead  letter’  [that]  replaces…  the  ‘living   spirit,’”  or  an  inert  object  in  which  an  ephemeral  action  or  occurrence  attains   representation in a durable, tangible form.474 On the other hand, when the still frame is activated through projection, the very thingly  character  of  film’s  material  base  dissolves  into  a  fragile  play  of  shadow  and   472 Rice,  “Foundation”  17. 473 Arendt, Human Condition 95. 474 Ibid 95. 228 movement. In the act of projection, static indices of reality are reanimated through a process of emanation  by  which  they  are  resolved  into  an  illusion  of  “life  itself.”  “Unlike   the photograph, a movie watched in the correct conditions (24 frames a second, darkness) tends  to  be  elusive,”  Laura  Mulvey  notes,  much  like  “running  water,  fire  or  the   movement  of  trees  in  the  wind…”475 Indexing the thorough confusion of life and world accomplished by the modern era from which it emerged, cinema harbors in its very form an uncanny co-presence of stillness and movement. It is a distinctly modern medium, simultaneously durable and ephemeral, objective and abstract, which encapsulates Arendt’s  anxieties  about  the  vitalization  of  art  under  modernity.   Though  Arendt  would  have  been  suspicious  of  cinema’s  internal  contradictions,  I   would argue that the duality of cinema  was  crucial  to  Rice’s  decision  to  pursue  film   practice  as  his  primary  mode  of  creative  work.  Rice’s  attraction  to  film  was  motivated  by   a desire for worldliness-in-vitality similar to that which spurred his initial departure from the East Coast at the beginning of 1960, shortly after his decision to switch from painting to film. Film afforded Rice a sense of immersion in the real, a liveliness and unpredictability that he felt to be lacking not only from static iterations of the plastic arts, but also from the forms of entertainment manufactured by mass culture, and the monstrously artificial environment of New York City. But in addition to this liveliness, the workmanship involved in film practice appealed to his investment in aesthetic order and creative expression, allowing Rice to self-identify as a member of a marginal community of artists whose specialized knowledge set them apart from the mundane circuits of labor and consumption that defined daily life in the late-modern American 475 Laura Mulvey, Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image (London: Reaktion Books, 2006), 66. 229 city. Film thus seemed especially capable of remedying the absence of both belonging and inwardness that Rice experienced in New York. Its technical requirements facilitated his  participation  in  a  budding  filmic  underground  as  well  as  the  broader  ‘60s  American   avant-garde, while its dynamism and vitality provided him with a medium for reanimating his inner spirit and potentially that of others. A journal entry Rice composed in Mexico City in the summer of 1963 speaks to either side of his attraction to cinema: The most accurate name to describe Cinema is MAGIC. The witch doctor uses a weird looking black box, two circles of light metal form the shape of the box. Contained inside the total darkness of these circles is a mass of gelatinous substance which feels solid. By finding an edge of substance the  witch  doctor,  with  a  quick  pull  can  transform  ‘it’  into  a  soft  mass  of   swirling transparent plastic. The mushroom and bone which captures forever the very spirit of motion, and the sound of the spring rushing down the  mountain…476 Rice here positions filmmaking as a specialized form of practice pursued by an elite and mysterious artist figure, whose transformative work revolves around a seemingly magical transposition of static, solid material into a vivifying illusion, one coursing with liquid dynamism. And the remainder of this entry, which takes up the better part of three pages in the issue of Film Culture devoted  to  Rice’s  writings,  further  elucidates  his  belief  that   cinema’s  fusion  of  wordliness  and  vitality  could  remedy  the alienating effects of urban- industrial society. His  invocation  of  the  “spirit  of  motion”  in  this  passage  in  fact  spurs  a  fervent   composition  of  an  unrealized  film  project  that  revolves  around  a  mystical  “Giant   476 Rice,  “Diaries”  95,  spacing  modified.  On  Rice’s  investment  in  the  artist  as  a  privileged  figure,  see  also   his concern about  the  emergence  of  “New  Realism”  (Pop  Art)  in  painting  (Rice,  “Diaries”  113-114). Rice also  touches  on  this  point  in  a  letter  he  wrote  in  the  fall  of  1962  in  which  he  complains  of  his  mother’s   insistence  that  he  support  himself  with  a  regular  job:  “the  fool still expects me to be working in some gasoline station. can you imagine that, me, the flower of american [sic] cinema, of every cinema to fill the tanks  of  the  ‘drabs’”  (letter  to  unknown  recipient,  20  September  1962,  Reginald  Gay  Collection.) 230 locomotive”  that  twists  through  “wild  green  mountains bearing the tremendous weight of Man  born  in  the  Cities  of  darkness…  in  search  of  something  lost  thousands  of  milleniums   [sic]  ago.”477 As the train races along, gushing green vomit onto the wooden ties (symbolic,  Rice  explains,  “of  all  the  shit  we have  to  endure”),  a  man  is  found  hunched   inside  a  railroad  car  “desperately  trying  to  rise  up,”  though  he  is  “exhausted,  sick,   helpless.”478 When the man collapses into sleep, Rice envisions a euphoric dream scene clearly modeled after cinema itself, which appears  in  his  journal  under  the  heading:  “THE   LIGHTS  OF  SLEEP.” As the train enters a long tunnel, the newly darkened theater of the car explodes into an intimate, multi-sensory  spectacle.  A  burst  of  “pure  colors  from  the   depths”  suddenly  “drifts  through  the  black  windows”  carried  by  “radiating  circles  of  sun   stuff”  that  “[fill]  the  car  with  the  temperature  of  crisp  alto  sax”  and  cycle  rapidly  through   a  “WILD  GEOMETRICS  OF  PIN-POINTED  FORMS.”479 This  “symphony  of  all  color”   glazes  upon  the  sleeping  man’s  body and then speaks to him more deeply, casting its “voices…  into  him”  and  filling  him  with  “complementary  shadows  of  the  entire   Universe”  that  reanimate  a  faint,  forgotten  region  of  “fallen  dreams[,]  foolish  dreams,”   effectively  dusting  off  “the  windows  of  our  perception”  and  elevating  the  man’s  soul  into   an  eternal,  cosmic  realm  (“the  eye  of  the  Bodidarhama  [sic]  Forever  Motionless”).480 In  this  vision  of  cinema,  film’s  ethereal  dynamism  affords  it  access  to  a  forgotten   realm of inner experience nearly eradicated by modernity. And its capacity to order the opaque illuminations of interiority into recognizable forms, while also conveying those forms in an embodied, synaesthetic mode of address that reaches viewers in a dreamlike 477 Rice,  “Diaries”  95. 478 Ibid 97, 96. 479 Ibid 97. 480 Ibid 97. 231 state conducive to irrational experiences, provides it with an ability to counter the sickening effects of the modern world, reactivating the domain of spirit. Though I will have  occasion  to  return  to  the  mystical  dimensions  of  Rice’s  thought  in  the  coda  to  this   chapter, here we can simply note that his vivid invocation of spectatorial experience in the  “LIGHTS  OF  SLEEP”  sequence overlaps  in  crucial  ways  with  Arendt’s  description   of non-worldly environments. Rice here envisions the space of cinematic reception as an intimate enclosure animated by the shadowy torrents of inner experience, one capable of undoing  the  deathly  rigidity  of  the  reified  world,  whose  sickness  had  rendered  it  “pale   and  almost  dead.”481 For  Rice,  cinema’s  value  lay  not  only  in  its  ability  to  facilitate  and   depict non-worldly formations at the levels of production and representation. He also celebrated this medium for its ability to generate new spaces of intimate encounter through  the  act  of  projection,  emitting  a  sort  of  “dark  incandescence”  through  which  new   forums for the cultivation of intimate experience could be activated at the level of exhibition.482 To  adequately  analyze  this  dream  of  cinema’s  poetic  potential,  we  must  turn  to  a   consideration of the specific formal strategies through which Rice sought to mobilize that potential.  His  emphasis  on  film’s  chromatic  character  (“symphony  of  all  color”)  in  the   journal entry above would seem to resonate more with the psychedelic superimpositions of Chumlum than the washed-out black-and-white cinematography of The Flower Thief. Yet Rice in fact strives in The Flower Thief to fabricate similarly animating scenarios as that described above, though this film locates these scenarios on (relatively) steadier ground.  Rice’s  project  in  The Flower Thief centers on his effort to develop a means for 481 Ibid 96. 482 Bataille 47. 232 representing non-worldly environments in a highly fabricated, cinematic form that would nevertheless  convey  the  “living  spirit”  of  such  environments  rather  than  the  “premonition   of  immortality”  evoked  by  the  beautiful artworks.483 To paraphrase Bataille, who I discuss in more detail below, the principle of this film could be stated as an attempt to emerge through reification from the realm of reification. V. Pictures of the Non-World Rice’s  seemingly  contradictory investments in life and worldliness figure strongly in The Flower Thief. In addition to inflecting his turn to filmmaking and the views on film aesthetics he developed during production, the search for an alternative home-space that drove Rice to California impacts the film at the levels of content and form. The errant, meandering narrative identified by Marks in fact dramatizes this search. Yet the “wandering  sickness”  of  Mead’s  character  results  not  only  from  his  “failure  to  be   assimilated  into…  society,”  but  also  from  a  more  basic  lack  of  a  stable  residence.484 The film depicts Mead as an accidental transient who, deprived of both shelter and belonging, spends his days seeking out a new basis for habitation that would not reproduce the stifling atmosphere of normative domestic and social realms. The Flower Thief narrates his struggle to locate a world replete with vitality, or to elaborate a stable basis for life that will not foreclose on life itself. The balancing act entailed by this pursuit, between the  thrills  of  uncertainty  and  the  comforts  of  stability,  also  manifests  itself  in  Rice’s   paradoxical  form.  To  modify  Marks’  assertion  that  The Flower Thief’s  “technique  is   essentially  found  in  its  effort  to  avoid  technique,”  we  can  more  accurately  say  that Rice 483 Arendt Human Condition 168, 169. 484 Marks 4. 233 strives for a careful employment of technique that will read like a natural evasion of technique.485 The opening sequence of The Flower Thief shows  each  side  of  Mead’s   homelessness, establishing him as a rootless figure detached from normative spheres of domesticity  and  labor,  while  also  demonstrating  Rice’s  careful  attention  to  form.  We  are   introduced to Mead after a brief credit sequence where hand-painted title cards nailed imperfectly to the façade of a decaying wooden structure are photographed in a single, long take that pans and tilts from card to card before coming to rest on a long scrap of frayed cloth that flaps in the breeze. Following this image of futile but mesmerizing movement imperfectly secured to a material structure overrun by the life process, we see a brief traveling shot taken from the inside of a car driving through a tunnel, which cuts to a low-angle, slow-motion shot of a bed sheet on a clothesline that dances in the wind, the sun shining behind and through its porous fabric into the camera. As the sun fills the frame,  flaring  out  the  image,  the  camera  pans  and  tilts  down  to  a  shot  of  the  sheet’s   shadow on the sidewalk, which slowly shifts and sways. Immediately following these establishing shots, which convey little information about  our  location  (one  title  card  notes  the  film’s  setting  as  “North  Beach  San   Francisco”),  but  which  do  fix  the  film’s  ethereal  tone,  the  camera  cuts  to  a  high-angle, slow-motion  shot  of  a  man’s  dark  shadow  and  feet  (those  of  Mead,  though  his  face  is  not yet seen) ambling along a bleached-out, luminous sidewalk. A pair of similarly-framed shots  of  Mead’s  shuffling  legs  and  shadow  follow,  then  the  image  cuts  to  a  rapid  burst  of   single-frame footage depicting two anonymous workers loading materials into the back of a pickup truck, which plays in fast-motion. The image then cuts again to Mead drifting 485 Ibid 18. 234 through  the  city.  In  a  series  of  brief  shots  that  eventually  reveal  Mead’s  face,  we  find  him   goofing with small children beside a playground, walking without purpose down the middle of an active street, strolling through a long shot while framed by a circular, black matte reminiscent of those used in silent cinema, and finally, stealing a flower from a sidewalk florist. After fleeing across the street with flower in hand, Mead is eventually found standing outside an apartment building, looking up at something off screen with a concerned look on his face. A brief cutaway shows two children staring vacantly into the camera, then Mead is again seen looking up at something off screen. Framed from behind, he approaches the building in front of him and the camera tilts up to reveal the object  of  his  gaze:  a  pair  of  windows  on  the  building’s  second  floor.  We  cut  to  a  close-up of  Mead’s  hand  on  a  door  handle  as  it  struggles unsuccessfully to open the door. After another cutaway to the same two children, we cut to a high-angle shot of Mead on the sidewalk staring dumbly at the camera, which now shoots him from the position of the second-story window that previously drew his gaze. After a beat, Mead turns and walks up the sidewalk out of frame as a second exposure bleeds through the image – a shot of what appears to be a stuffed monkey hanging from a wire in an otherwise unpopulated living room. Presumably, this is the domestic interior Mead failed to access. In this deceptively haphazard sequence, which runs approximately five and a half minutes, frequent cutaways to seemingly extraneous documentary footage of neighborhood scenery serve to interrupt or retard The Flower Thief’s  rather  occasional narrative, diverting our attention from the protagonist Rice once described as an unnamed “poet  living  in  North  Beach,  San  Francisco,”  whose  life  this  film  presumably  takes  as  its   235 center.486 Yet this sequence nevertheless establishes, in a relatively systematic fashion, the double absence of shelter and belonging that constitutes what I refer to in the previous chapter  as  “postwar  homelessness”  as  the  point  of  departure  of  this  film’s  narrative.  In   addition to constructing a sequence where Mead discovers he is locked out of his apartment, a plot point which is communicated through a conventional employment of eyeline matches and a detail-oriented close-up, Rice also utilizes a series of representational  strategies  to  convey  Mead’s  detachment from mainstream society. The criminal act that gives The Flower Thief its title expresses this detachment rather explicitly. But throughout this sequence, Mead is depicted as someone deeply out of sync with  his  surroundings,  reflecting  David  E.  James’s  characterization of the poet as a superfluous  cultural  practitioner  who  remains  “economically  unincorporated”  and   socially  unplaced  within  the  context  of  modernity  because  of  poetry’s  stubborn   “resistan[ce]  to  integration  into  the  mercantile  processes  of  capitalism or its attendant social  rituals.”487 Mead’s  superfluous  character  is  suggested,  for  instance,  by  the  metonymic   association  that  links  his  aimless  drifting  to  the  rag  and  bed  sheet  seen  in  the  film’s   opening shots. The transience and contingency signified by these flapping materials slides metonymically across the splices that join the shots in this sequence, accumulating in  Mead’s  shadow  and  body,  and  inflecting  our  reading  of  his  leisurely  mannerisms.   Meandering through the North Beach streets as if carried by the wind, Mead lacks the purpose and direction of those who inhabit the working world that envelopes him. He is aligned more closely with the children he encounters along the way, as many 486 Ibid 4. 487 James 32, 31. 236 commentators have noted. But his difference from mainstream society is underscored by Rice’s  alternation  between  slow- and fast-motion photography, which further contrasts Mead’s  casual  movements  with  the  sped-up temporality attaining in normative spheres of labor and commerce. This temporal disjunction is also  heightened  by  Rice’s  use  of  a   visual device associated with silent cinema (the circular matte), which makes Mead appear  like  some  unwelcome  holdover  from  a  bygone  era.  But  Rice’s  framing  throughout   this  sequence  enhances  Mead’s  alterity.  The  first  five  shots that feature Mead depict him as an anonymous, immaterial shadow whose opacity is juxtaposed against the brilliant, sun-drenched concrete that structures his urban environment. Emerging into partial visibility and then melding with the shadows cast by nearby buildings and trees, Mead troubles the logic of appearance that governs the surrounding, common world. He is represented not only as a futile presence in this landscape, but also as a decidedly turbid one – an unsettling darkness floating through an otherwise transparent public sphere. Lacking  a  stable  dwelling  or  a  sense  of  social  recognition,  Mead’s  character  thus   occupies  a  similarly  homeless  position  as  that  of  the  NAC’s  other  derelict  protagonists.   Appearing more like the joyful tramps in Pull My Daisy than the listless mopes in Guns of the Trees, he does not exactly suffer this position: he is happy to be free from the bustle of society, and becomes accustomed rather quickly to his unanticipated vagrancy, using the latter as an excuse to hunt through back alleys for more illicit flowers. But unlike the poets in Pull My Daisy, The Flower Thief’s  protagonist  is  not  content  with   such fleeting kicks. Rather than submitting wholeheartedly to the lure of street life, whose unpredictability Pull My Daisy extols, Mead spends the remainder of the film 237 moving along the margins of San Francisco in pursuit of an environment conducive to both habitation and contingency. This search leads Mead to a variety of subcultural, abandoned, and peripheral locations, which provide a welcome relief from the accelerated pace and mechanized environs  of  dominant  culture.  Heading  first  to  the  North  Beach’s  famous  Beat  hangout,   the Co-Existence Bagel Shop, Mead makes the scene with an assortment of hipsters (which include the poet Bob Kaufman), immersing himself in the vibrant atmosphere of this crowded, bohemian venue and even contributing – if lethargically – to that atmosphere’s  production.  Amidst  animated  conversations,  raucous  poetry  readings   (included on the sound track, but not pictured), and a jazz performance, Mead is found gently bopping his head or patting a bongo drum to the beat that pervades the bar. After that scene fizzles, he takes to exploring a massive, abandoned powerhouse left to deteriorate in an overlooked interstice of the city. In an extended sequence, this crumbling structure is reanimated through the anarchic improvisations of a rotating cast of local artists and scenesters (including Kaufman and Eric Nord) with whom Mead cavorts, goes mad, and plays house amidst the ruins. But when the powerhouse is reduced to rubble, Mead makes his way (via a brief stopover in jail) to a fairground at San Francisco’s  western  edge:  the  former  Playland  amusement  park  (aka  Playland-at-the- Beach). In this space of purposeless expenditure, which here appears mostly empty, as if pictured at mid-morning on a weekday, Mead tries his hand at some tic-tac-toe, cruises a young rake in a leather jacket, takes a ride on a merry-go-round, and engages in some explosive sex on the beach. After the fireworks subside, he meanders along the coast and disappears into the sea. 238 Though geographically distant and distinct in numerous ways (culturally, architecturally, tonally, financially, etc.), these three main locations are similar in crucial respects. In each of these marginal or forgotten spaces, a general atmosphere of purposelessness allows intimacy to rise up in waves, slowly emerging into experience with  “the  fullness…  of  an  invading  flood.”488 These settings afford their inhabitants the sort  of  “lounge  time”  required  to  cultivate  alternative  forms  of  private  and  public   experience, offering a relatively enclosed, non-synchronous realm sheltered from the standardized temporality of dominant culture, in which the mechanizing effects of late modernity can be shrugged off or counteracted through vitalizing practices of intimate exchange.489 The cessation of purpose attaining in these spaces resonates in important ways with  Georges  Bataille’s  understanding  of  inner  experience  as  a  communicative potential arising  from  the  abolition  of  “project,”  where  the  refusal  of  action-oriented, utilitarian modes of existence facilitates radical states of intimate communion.490 Though far more whimsical than the anguished ecstasies envisioned by Bataille, the intimate exchanges that occur in these realms are characterized by a similar instability and fluidity as Bataille’s  inner  experience.  Like  the  dynamic  version  of  intimacy  Rice  cultivated  on  the   Acapulco  seaside,  where  the  wild  movements  of  his  “inner  spring  of  creation”  came  to   488 Bataille, Inner Experience 17, italics in original. 489 Vivian  Sobchack,  “Lounge  Time:  Postwar Crises  and  the  Chronotope  of  Film  Noir,”  Refiguring American Film Genres: History and Theory, ed. Jon Lewis (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1998).  Rice’s  interest  in  slowness  and  purposelessness  can  also  be  seen  in  his  frequent  statements  against the increasing speed or temporality of daily life in late-modern  society.  See,  for  instance:  Rice,  “Diaries”   esp. 114-115. Rice also touches on this theme in an article published in a magazine called Show Business, in which Rice describes his plans for  an  unrealized  film  called  “The  Spider’s  Trail,”  which  concerned:   “Man’s  accelerated  and  intensified  consciousness,  to  which  we  all  bear  witness”  (“‘The  Spider’s  Trail,’   New  Feature  Film,  To  Be  Shot  in  N.Y.  This  Summer  By  Ron  Rice,”  n.a.,  Show Business 7 July 1962, n.p. Included in Reginald Gay Collection.) 490 Bataille 22. 239 mimic the unpredictable surging of the surrounding coastline, these purposeless sites provide the setting in which a distinctly turbulent experiential atmosphere can emerge, one where boundaries between self and other, inside and outside dissolve into an “ocean[ic]”  coursing.491 The Bagel Shop scene illustrates this atmosphere particularly well. It occurs shortly  after  the  film’s  opening  sequence  in  which  Mead  finds  that  he  is  locked  out  of  his   apartment. In a brief series of shots, we follow Mead as he hustles through the North Beach streets, jogging sloppily past teenagers holding schoolbooks and automobiles in transit, as if seeking some escape from this terrorizing culture of productiveness. He arrives at a dimly lit corner bar where hiply-dressed men and women of different ages and races lounge around in a crowded but relaxed space, perching on bar stools or sitting at tables while smoking, drinking, and conversing. Though bands of light cut into this space through large windows at the front of the bar that partially illuminate the smoke- filled room, the interior is nevertheless dark and indeterminate, its inhabitants largely anonymous silhouettes, a combination of outline and texture. After a few shots of the space, we see a close-up  of  Mead’s  head  in  profile,  lit  from  behind  and  appearing  as  a   dark  field.  A  second  exposure  comes  into  the  frame:  a  shot  of  the  Bagel  Shop’s  exterior   sign.  We  are  thus  placed  in  what  Rice  once  described  as  “the  famous  ‘Bagel  Shop’…   [which] was the leading institution of culture and life on the West Coast of America in the  late  fifties.”492 Following this establishing sequence, we see quick glimpses of occurrences within and around the bar: Mead plays with a baby, placing a flower petal on its 491 Rice, letter to Robert Frank; Bataille 27, see also 92-98. 492 Batten 35. 240 forehead; a man in a beret strolls down the street toward the bar as another man in a baggy suit and dark sunglasses exits the front door, the two exchanging pleasantries as they pass; a person off screen pours beer from a glass into that of a man with a broad mustache, then clinks the two glasses together as Mead looks on; a woman with a long, loose ponytail hanging over one shoulder speaks animatedly, gesticulating with her hands as another woman smiles and nods in recognition; a man with a narrow-rimmed hat and a patterned vest (the poet Bob Kaufman) holds a beer and talks casually with another man at his side who wears a checked suit and a thin mustache; a woman and a man sit beside each other looking off screen, then turn their heads to the left in synchrony. The images in this sequence portray a space that is not only cool and convivial, but also brimming with relationality. The Bagel Shop appears as a highly fluid social venue, in which forms of association stream across artificial boundaries of age, race, and gender, creating a vitalizing atmosphere of rapport. Yet the people within this space also radiate hipness, performing a subcultural style that delimits the boundaries of this space, its terms of entrance and participation. Importantly, as the scene progresses, we see a small group of musicians at one edge of the room playing instruments (a trumpet and an upright bass are visible) as a jazz song plays on the soundtrack. And throughout the scene we see various shots of people nodding their heads or moving rhythmically to the beat in the room. Individuals marked by their difference from dominant culture through clothing, appearance, gestures, and mannerisms assemble in this space to mingle, assume poses, and respond in an embodied manner to the improvised modes of creative expression occurring around them, engaging in the production of a stimulating realm of interaction and appearance that is actively differentiated from the surrounding world. 241 Rice’s  camera  participates  in  this  activity.  Throughout  the  Bagel  Shop  scene, he shoots from standing and seated positions, relying on tight framings that result from his proximity to his subjects, and which – when filming with the aid of the natural light that punctuates the bar – yield images that are rich in detail, highlighting the particularity of the individuals he films. He also employs shaky, handheld cinematography to respond to the quick movements of those around him, which heightens the sense of contingency and unpredictability conveyed by those movements. The soundtrack enhances the feelings of spontaneity and irrationality, presenting a collage of absurd sonic experiments (such as recorded speech being played in reverse) and amateur recordings of poetry readings, blues guitar, and an up-tempo jazz song that are punctuated by missed notes, accidental dissonances, feedback, and background noise. A sort of intimate cacophony seems to animate this space, one resembling the sea of communication described by Bataille, in which  a  multiplicity  of  “Waves,  undulations,  single particles”  stream  in  and  out  of  each   other  with  a  measured  agitation  but  only  achieve  “a  fleeting  unity.”493 This  sense  of  fleeting  unity  emerges  in  the  middle  of  this  scene,  when  Rice’s   method of editing shifts in a subtle but significant way. What begins as a mere documentation of subcultural relations transforms, almost imperceptibly, into an active analysis and reproduction of the medium of those relations through montage. As if the associative bonds in the profilmic swelled and spilled into the level of form, Rice suddenly fuses together an extended chain of images in which prominent details and gestures marking the individuals featured in each shot carry over into the next, where they reverberate with the appearance or actions of other people existing in close proximity. The resonances between images generate a sense of closeness and 493 Bataille 93. 242 connectivity between the Bagel Shop patrons that Rice enhances through the use of strategic framings, eyeline matches, and shot/reverse-shot relations typically associated with narrative cinema. In a consistent, though somewhat unconventional manner, he weaves discrete views of actions and occurrences into an interlacing fabric that enfolds a relatively coherent cinematic space, one whose arrangement is not clearly established in advance but unfurled over the course of the sequence as the distribution of bodies and objects  featured  in  each  shot  assembles  itself  into  a  recognizable  form.  Following  Rice’s   own  assertion  that  the  “careful  understanding  of  a  films  [sic]  internal  structure is worth some  words,”  it  will  help  to  analyze  this  sequence  in  detail.494 As a dark, surreal poem plays on the soundtrack, the aforementioned shot of a man and woman turning their heads in synchrony cuts to a close-up  of  a  man’s  hand   reaching down from screen right to pull a cigarette from an offered pack, which is positioned at the bottom left of the screen. As the man pulls the cigarette back to where he’s  standing,  the  camera  follows  his  hand,  panning  to  the  right  and  tilting  up  to  frame   him in a low-angle medium shot. The man raises and lowers his hand mechanically to pack the tobacco into his cigarette, moving to the right edge of the frame while acknowledging the person who provided the smoke, who sits below and in front of him, off screen to the left. The image then cuts to a high-angle shot of a man seated on the left side  of  the  screen,  as  if  presenting  a  reverse  shot  taken  from  the  standing  man’s   perspective. This seated man pulls a cigarette from a pack with a similarly mechanical gesture, quickly raising it and lowering it while looking off screen to the right. Following his glance, we cut to a brief close-up of a young woman with pale skin and long dark hair seated at screen right, who appears to be speaking while looking off screen to the left. We 494 Rice,  “A  Statement”  op.  cit. 243 then cut to the object of her view: a medium close-up of a similar-looking young woman with pale skin and long dark hair, who sits at the left of the screen while looking to the right. She fidgets with her hair and listens, nodding her head in recognition. The image cuts to a medium close-up of a man seated in virtually the same position of the frame, who nods his head in the same manner while looking off screen in the same direction, his arm resting on the frame of a jukebox. A cut follows his eyeline to return us to the first pale-skinned woman, now seen to be sitting at the opposite side of the jukebox, a hand fidgeting with her hair in the manner of the second pale-skinned woman. As the sound switches to a recording of improvised drumming accompanied by scat and incomprehensible noises, we cut back to the second pale-skinned woman, whose head is turned away from the camera, her dark curls nearly filling the frame. As she leans forward, bringing an unlit cigarette to her lips, the camera pans right to reveal the head- nodding man (originally seen two shots before) seated directly beside her. He lights her cigarette with a match as an unlit cigarette dangles from his lips. A cut takes us to a shot of people seated at a table. A man with a cigarette in his hand stands up as a cloud of smoke enters the frame from off screen. We then see a man beside the jukebox rolling his head rhythmically from side to side with a cigarette in his mouth. A quick shot of another man smiling then cuts to a shot of the first pale-skinned woman leaning her head back in laughter. This, I submit, is what a non-world looks like. In this chain of images, which flashes across the screen in approximately half a minute, a sense of commonality is conveyed through the construction of a complex system of intimate exchange, where a reverberating play of glances, gestures, and inarticulate sounds produces a relational 244 space  mediated  by  the  “language  of  the  soul.”495 Linked  through  a  sort  of  “mimetic- sympathetic”  circuit,  the  beatniks  in  this scene suddenly overcome their shared condition of  alienation  in  a  flurry  of  “fellow-feeling,”  or  a  fleeting  configuration  of  sameness-in- difference generated through the public circulation of private expressions.496 An atmosphere of belonging is generated, one resembling what Park would refer to as a “moral  climate.”  The  Bagel  Shop  shelters  a  murky,  stimulating  environment  in  which  the   impulses  of  inner  experience,  normally  sublimated  in  social  spheres,  gain  “full  and  free   expression,”  facilitating  the  creation of a paradoxical space of appearance and recognition that is simultaneously opaque and illuminating, fluid and objective, vital and artificial.497 Yet  this  atmosphere  is  not  rooted  to  a  particular  region  or  place.  Like  the  “mobile   sites of drag, youth culture,  music,  dance,  parades,  flaunting,  and  cruising”  discussed  by   Berlant  and  Warner,  the  particular  form  of  “counterintimacy”  that  flashes  up  in  the  Bagel   Shop is elaborated through fugitive and ephemeral relational practices that often migrate to new venues without warning and cannot reliably be found operating anywhere.498 As Kaufman  notes  in  his  poetic  tribute  to  the  North  Beach  hangout,  “Bagel  Shop  Jazz,”  this   venue  does  not  house,  but  temporarily  hosts  a  transient  manifestation  of  “Shadow  people,   projected on coffee-shop  walls/…  eating  each  other/  Over  a  noisy  cup  of  coffee,”  who   remain  mere  “Brief,  beautiful  shadows,  burned  on  walls  of  night.”499 Echoing the fleeting,  ethereal  imagery  of  Kaufman’s  invocation,  the  sense  of  unity  conveyed  by   Rice’s  montage dissipates as swiftly as it emerges, returning to more general 495 Arendt, Life of the Mind 33. 496 I  draw  these  terms  from  Justus  Nieland’s  discussion  of  the  “mimetic-sympathetic  public  sphere”  in   Feeling Modern: The Eccentricities of Public Life (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois, 2008) 23. 497 Park 41. 498 Berlant and Warner 561. 499 Bob  Kaufman,  “Bagel  Shop  Jazz”  in  Solitudes Crowded with Loneliness (New York: New Directions, 1965) 14, 15. 245 documentary views of bopping heads and bodies in motion before abruptly transitioning to the next scene. After a brief shot of a man sweeping cigarettes from the otherwise empty Bagel Shop floor, we see a close-up of a hand reaching for a torn newspaper headline  reading:  “VIOLENCE.”  We  then  cut  to  a  shot  of  Mead  breaking  through  a   window of the abandoned powerhouse with a two-by-four, a maniacal grin on his face. We have suddenly, violently been uprooted and transplanted to the next stop on our itinerary. Bataille’s  understanding  of  the  complex  status  of  “project”  in  inner  experience   provides a helpful framework through which to unravel the dialectic of worldliness and vitality attaining in the Bagel Shop scene, which can also provide insight into the abruptness  with  which  this  scene  ends.  For  Bataille,  the  term  “project”  is  affiliated  not   only with rational, purposive activities directed toward specific ends but also with the cultural, epistemological, and linguistic structures that delimit such activities. Project is thus  comparable  to  Arendt’s  conception  of  worldliness  in  important  respects,  rooted  as   the latter is in the stabilizing work of both fabrication and convention. And though Bataille positions inner experience against project in a manner that is consistent with Arendt’s  insistence  on  intimacy’s  opposition  to  worldliness,  Bataille  also  holds  that  inner   experience is not simply devoid of project or purpose. Inner experience revolves, instead, around  a  sort  of  purposeless  purposiveness:  its  principle,  he  asserts,  is  “to  emerge  through   project  from  the  realm  of  project.”500 Inner experience thus entails a certain direction, though  it  is  directed  toward  the  evasion  of  direction.  It  “leads  to  no  harbor,”  Bataille   500 Bataille 46. 246 states,  “but  to  a  place  of  bewilderment,  of  nonsense.” 501 Its project is to go beyond project. For Bataille, this process of going beyond is not reducible to a destructive or negative movement. In a passage of Inner Experience, he makes this point explicitly, attributing  a  distinctly  poetic  potential  to  experience.  “Reason  alone  has  the  power  to   undo  [the]  work  [of  inner  experience],”  he  insists,  “to  hurl  down  what  it  has  built  up.”502 This passage would seem contradictory within the logic  of  Bataille’s  system,  where  work   and accumulation are both associated with reason, thus making reason a productive force rather than a power of destruction as it is here envisioned. Yet this formulation becomes comprehensible when we understand inner experience as a work whose yield is what Bataille  refers  to  as  “non-knowledge.”  Inner  experience  is  not  a  simple  negation  of   project,  production,  or  poesis.  It  is  an  active  “putting  into  question…  of  that  which  a  man   knows  of  being,”  one  whose  product  is  “the unknown”  itself,  “a  presence  that  is  no  longer   in  any  way  distinct  from  an  absence.”503 It is this place of non-presence that Julia Kristeva  has  designated  “the  intimate”  as  such,  a  timeless  interior  region  of  return  and   revolt,  which  is  “where  we  end  up  when  we  question  apparent  meanings  and  values.”504 The intimate activities conducted in the Bagel Shop do depend on a leisurely atmosphere of uselessness in order to emerge at all. But these activities are not devoid of worldliness,  as  Arendt  would  have  us  believe.  Like  the  “nonstandard  intimacies”  that   drive  the  queer  “world-making  project[s]” envisioned by Berlant and Warner, the intimate activities we witness in The Flower Thief are directed toward a specific end: 501 Ibid 3. 502 Ibid 46. 503 Ibid 4, 5. 504 Julia Kristeva, Intimate Revolt: The Powers and Limits of Psychoanalysis, Vol. 2 (New York: Columbia University, 2002) 43. 247 namely, the production of new experiences of inwardness and belonging, through which Rice hoped to forge the basis of an alternative world.505 Yet these experiences are only valuable  to  the  extent  that  they  “put  into  question”  established  configurations  of   worldliness, allowing those involved in their production to shrug off the normative values and reifying effects of dominant culture, affording them a sense of accessing a wild, inner region  modeled  after  “life  itself.”  The  intimacy  that  we  see  at  work  in  The Flower Thief must avoid stabilizing into an ordered or reasonable construct if it is to remain intimate at all.  It  is  “nonstandard”  in  the  sense  of  being  averse  to  standardization,  habits,  and   conventions;;  the  world  that  it  “builds  up”  is  defined  by  its  non-worldliness. This complex dynamic accounts for the disorienting relay between vitality and worldliness that we witness in the Bagel Shop scene. Just as the homelessness suffered under late modernity appears to have been alleviated through intimacy, or through vitalizing interactions that subvert alienating conventions and provide a consoling sense of habitation, this sensation is necessarily  thwarted  by  intimacy’s  own  resistance  to   habituation, or its tendency to subvert all forms of convention and stability. A feeling of home may be attained, but it is fleeting and precarious. It emerges in the midst of intimate exchanges that cannot persist as durable achievements without relinquishing their intimacy. To put this problem somewhat differently, the recovery of home is here presented as an effort to inhabit a realm of pure vitality. Though this project is of course self- defeating, it is also strangely realizable to an extent. A feeling of life is manufactured in this scene both at the level of the profilmic and that of film form. Yet the fabrication of life here depends on a whole repertoire of subcultural conventions that necessarily call 505 Berlant and Warner 558. 248 vitality into question. In the Bagel Shop itself, these conventions take shape variously as hip styles and dispositions affected by individual patrons; the presence of bohemian accoutrements such as beer, cigarettes, berets, and bongo drums; the requisite jazz ensemble and druggy poetry; and a basic adherence to an ideology of spontaneity whose elaboration  can  be  traced  back  further  than  the  postwar  “culture  of  spontaneity,”  at  least   as far as the historical avant-garde. The formal operations of the film mirror this ideology, employing a highly ordered aesthetic that draws from a range of cinematic conventions affiliated with realist and avant-garde traditions in order to approximate, in Rice’s  terms,  “the  fibre  of  life.”506 It presents documentary footage of a dynamic subcultural scene that has been recorded in an improvised, participatory style to yield markers of contingency and immediacy, and organizes this footage via a casual appropriation of continuity editing techniques in an effort to express an abstract concept (community, belonging). The presence of these conventions in both content and form points to the worldliness in vitality, indexing the static cultural frameworks required for dynamic experiences of life to accrue. Yet in order for these conventions to function effectively, they must necessarily be disavowed as conventions. Through the avant-garde’s  particular   brand  of  “ex-nominating  operation,”  the  lessons  inherited  by  the  Beats  from  Dada  are   naturalized through recourse to what Paul Arthur  identifies  as  the  “elaborated  myth  of   ‘presentness’”  that  defines  American  avant-garde  film  of  the  ’60s.507 In other words, the habit  of  vitality  adopted  by  the  Bagel  Shop’s  patrons,  much  like  Rice’s  formless  form   506 Rice,  “Ode  to  the  Eye”  op.  cit. 507 Paul Arthur, A Line of Sight: American Avant-Garde Film Since 1965 (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota,  2005)  1.  I  borrow  the  phrase  “ex-nominating  operation”  from  Roland  Barthes, Mythologies (New York: Hill and Wang, 1972) 138, italics removed. 249 itself, must be denied as a habit to yield a feeling of detachment from worldliness, or of participating  in  something  that  is  “living  and  real.”508 This disavowal may afford a sort of refuge from reification or routine. The Reverend Al Carmines touches on this point in his remarkable sermon on Rice’s  film,  “Saint  Francis  and  The  Flower  Thief,”  in  which  he   explains  that  the  Beats’  tendency  toward  a  “religious  abandonment  to  the  minute”  reflects   their  “attempt  to  strip  off  the  layers  of  accumulated  impersonality  – brittle cultivation that winds itself  around  us  as  mindlessly  and  unconsciously  as  a  shell  around  a  snail.”509 But as  the  Reverend’s  imagery  here  suggests,  without  the  structure  of  habit,  or  the  stabilizing   accumulation of convention and routine, no lasting form of habitation can be secured. The effort to remedy homelessness through intimacy must therefore end by reinstating homelessness. This dilemma plays itself out over the remainder of The Flower Thief, whose episodic  structure  follows  from  Mead’s  inevitable  displacement  from  the  increasingly precarious  locales  he  strives  to  inhabit.  Once  deposited  at  the  powerhouse,  the  film’s   domestic ambitions are made manifest with a new clarity and urgency. We watch as Mead and a pair of friends (a stray cat and an oversized teddy bear) work to ensconce themselves in the vast, maze-like interior of this seemingly vacant structure, which according  to  Rice  once  functioned  “as  a  bus  [or]  trolley  repair  station.”510 Mead gives the bear a bath and is later found setting out a candlelight dinner for the cat, approximating rituals of heteronormative intimacy (bathing the kids, feeding the pets) that can only appear perverse when enacted in this setting with these actors. His efforts at domestication are also repeatedly interrupted by the irrational outbursts of a cadre of 508 Rice,  “Ode  to  the  Eye”  op.  cit. 509 Carmines 124. 510 Batten 34. 250 scary beatniks who suddenly burst forth from a back room or file creepily out of an underground  tunnel.  Transforming  Mead’s  playhouse  into  a  combination  insane   asylum/performance  art  space,  these  mad  “junkie  prophets”  disrupt  and  divert  Mead’s   homemaking practices by enacting vaguely political protests that return us to the alienating context of late-modern American society. The uncanny intrusion of domesticity within these junk-ridden ruins of public transport recurs in a later sequence involving an attractive young bohemian couple (seen earlier in the Bagel Shop) who also appear to be inhabiting the powerhouse. In the midst of a scene depicting the couple and some friends engaging in meaningless activities in a large, open concourse, we suddenly cut to a three-shot sequence in which the couple is seen embracing in the dark, showering together, and then cuddling before a sun-filled window with lace curtains, playing husband and wife in some idyllic, domestic interior. Returning to the powerhouse, we watch as the husband, who apparently has transformed into an automaton, opens the door to a metal locker to reveal the wife necking with another man. The mechanical husband then moves on to the next locker where he finds Mead inside, making love to the stuffed bear. The seemingly extraneous scenes of heteronormative domesticity that immediately precede these images are defamiliarized in a  series  of  “unsettling  images”  similar  to  those  which  Bataille  associates  with  poetry,  a   perverse yet moving employment of  language  that  “overturns  everything  within  us  like  a   violent  wind,”  “touch[ing]  us”  at  a  deeply  emotional  level  by  “introduc[ing]  the   251 strange…  by  means  of  the  familiar  [so  that]  the  familiar  [dissolves]  into  the  strange,  and   ourselves  with  it.”511 In such sequences, it is as if the trappings of domesticity from which The Flower Thief’s  subjects  have  been  estranged  cannot  be  regained  for  fear  of  their  becoming  too   familiar. In a movement that echoes the simultaneous adoption and disavowal of subcultural conventions that we witness in the Bagel Shop, these sequences find The Flower Thief reaching for a home that it cannot allow itself to occupy. Because it cannot conceive of settlement in terms other than the staunching of vitality, it can only approach worldliness anxiously, through parodic rehearsals of worldly stability in a decaying space overrun by the life process. The concluding sequence shot in this location expresses this problem acutely. We find Mead seated atop a heap of rubble with his abusive girlfriend, who is dressed inexplicably in a bathing suit. On a makeshift tabletop, the two manically shuffle discarded food containers, milk cartons, and paper cups as a young boy gawks at them from the sidelines. On the soundtrack, a psychiatrist speaking at a state hospital reads a passage from Alice in Wonderland, remarks on madness and LSD, then reminds us  that  “we’re  all  part  of  a  sick  society,  troubled  members  of  a  troubled  world.”  In  this   absurd parody of the family dinner, an image of home is built up but in a bewildering, nonsensical form. Domesticity can only be invoked to be overturned, leaving only scattered debris to subsist. When the powerhouse becomes too weird, or too normal, Mead heads back out into the streets of North Beach. He stops off once  more  at  the  Bagel  Shop,  but  it’s  no   longer a scene, just a lonesome bar; he rolls down hills in a wagon with the teddy bear; he 511 Bataille 5. The shower sequence was apparently significant enough to Rice to warrant his use of an artificial light when shooting it, which he claims was the only time he employed artificial lighting during The Flower Thief’s  production.  See  Batten  33. 252 squats for a stretch in Washington Square Park, but is arrested and executed for urinating in public; he rises again but gets tired and falls asleep, this time on an outdoor statue of a lion, his hand cupping its ass; then he finds his way to Playland where he frolics and gets laid. In the final shot of the film, which is actually two shots, Mead simply vanishes: a double exposure combines a shot of Mead walking eerily like a phantom down a wall along the seashore with a shot of waves splashing and swirling around some rocks. The exposure of the waves remains on screen for a few seconds longer than that of Mead. When the image finally cuts to black, the soundtrack, which plays the foreboding opening of  the  Russian  composer  Modest  Mussorgsky’s  “Samuel  Goldenberg  and  Schmuÿle,”   continues to linger for another twenty seconds. The  dematerialization  of  Rice’s  homeless  protagonist  in  this concluding sequence is  inevitable.  With  no  way  of  conceiving  resolution,  how  else  could  the  film  end?  Rice’s   suspicion of stasis required that his conclusion be inconclusive, a point that is underscored in an outline of The Flower Thief published along with his interview in Film Comment. Offering the reader multiple options for interpreting this scene, Rice describes his  final  location  as:  “The  sea,  where:  (a)  Taylor  just  plain  disappears  into.  (b)Taylor   commits suicide. (c) The poet disappears into eternity. (d) Taylor decides to take a bath ….”512 Like the unsettled locales featured throughout The Flower Thief,  Rice’s  ending   had  to  remain  open.  And  his  resistance  to  fixity  went  further  than  the  film’s  non- conclusion, extending down even to its material base. Along with producing multiple cuts of this work (of which at least 5 appear to have existed), Rice also reportedly expressed 512 Batten 35, spacing modified. 253 his intentions to either dye the film blue or simply burn it in defiance of Hollywood.513 While such plans reflect then-emergent concerns in American avant-garde cinema with destabilizing  the  filmic  “work”  by  amplifying  the  elements  of  liveness  and  chance   inherent  in  cinematic  exhibition,  these  plans  also  clearly  express  Rice’s  deep  ambivalence   about reification, stability, and worldliness. Rice did and did not want The Flower Thief to persist as a material thing in the same way that he did and did not want to finally locate a stable home-space. If The Flower Thief does remain today as a relic of Rice’s pursuit of home, this is only due  to  cinema’s  inherent  disturbance  of  the  artwork’s  status  as  a  dead   object, or its uncanny capacity to combine life and death into an absurd form. Coda: Celestial Hobo Four  minutes  into  Ron  Rice’s  follow-up to The Flower Thief, the experimental short Senseless, an unsettling series of images comes to pass. A bearded man in a hooded robe is found kneeling in prayer before a profane assemblage of wooden beams, metal, and an animal skull. In dramatic, high contrast black and white footage set to a sometimes whimsical, sometimes ominous orchestral score, we see the man walking on a beach beneath a web of old rope and tattered canvas, seemingly strung up by previous inhabitants to serve as a makeshift shelter, its knotted ropes and shredded fabric now billowing in the wind. With a portion of an animal skeleton hoisted onto his shoulder, this lone settler of some vanished community walks slowly to a refrigerator left abandoned in the middle of the beach, opens the door, bends forward, drops the skeleton inside, and closes the door. 513 On  Rice’s  intentions  to  dye  or  burn  the  film,  see:  Sargeant  83;;  Mead,  letter  to  Ron Rice, 16 June 1960, Reginald  Gay  Collection;;  and  Michael  Goodwin,  “Excerpts  from  an  interview  with  Taylor  Mead  and   Shirley  Clarke  /  January  1983,”  January  1983,  Pacific  Film  Archive,  Berkeley. 254 We cut to a close-up of an old, ruined speedometer, then tilt and pan past a stretch of ocean to find the man now dragging a car tire through the sand. Cut to a close-up of a pair of hands abstracted from their surroundings, stitching a small piece of domestic kitsch: a tapestry featuring an idyllic landscape (a cabin, a river, pine trees, a pillowy cloud)  with  big  letters  that  read:  “GOD  BLESS  OUR  HOME.”  Cut  to  another  close-up of a pot of boiling water, with a baby bottle inside that bobs and spins in the heat. Cut to an extreme long shot of the exterior of a banal one-story building resembling a ranch house. A  pair  of  shadows  cast  by  small  awnings  cut  violently  across  the  building’s  façade  at  45   degree angles, invoking some impending danger. Two young men in dark clothing walk toward the door, starkly set off against the white of the building and carrying a gas mask and  an  American  flag.  On  the  roof,  a  sign  designates  this  an  office  of  “CIVIL   DEFENSE.”  On  either  edge  of  the  sign  stand  a  pair  of  Coca-Cola logos. Coming  in  the  midst  of  Rice’s  schizophrenic  travelogue,  which  moves  jarringly   between images of a road trip, protests against nuclear war, pot smoking, bull fights, landscapes ruined by industry, and scenes of beatnik antics shot in San Francisco, Venice, and different areas of Mexico, this sequence cannot be reduced to any singular or final interpretation. In its stubborn resistance to clean reason or rationalization, it reveals the film’s  title,  Senseless, to designate an active refusal of coherence as much as an unhealthy mental state imposed on the late-modern subject by the insanity of the period. Indeed, this “montage  of  events  that  have  no  rational  linkage”  would  seem  to  verify  Rice’s   description  of  himself  as  “a  recording  machine…  [for]  nonsense.”514 Yet despite its absurdity,  this  montage  is  not  devoid  of  meaning.  When  read  in  relation  to  Rice’s   biography,  creative  practice,  and  this  film’s  broader  historical  context, the domestic 514 Batten 32. 255 imagery in this sequence takes shape as a constellation of anxieties about the breakdown of traditional home-spaces in late-modern American society, and the limitations of the avant-garde’s  attempts  to  rectify  its  homeless  condition  through  a  lifestyle  and  aesthetic   of immediacy. These anxieties register most  immediately  in  this  sequence’s  clear  criticism  of  the   domestic dream holding sway in the U.S. at the  time  of  the  film’s  production. In its parodic re-staging of a banal domestic chore (stocking the fridge) within such a bleak and soulless  landscape,  and  its  juxtaposition  of  the  dilapidated,  canvas  “shelter”  adopted  by   its momentary protagonist with the picturesque imagination of home glimpsed in the kitschy tapestry, the sequence unsettles then-dominant conceptions of the private household as an autonomous space of refuge, vitality, and personal fulfillment, while also suggesting the vacuity underlying postwar ideals of affluence and material abundance. Coming just over a minute after documentary footage of a sit-in protest against nuclear armament at the United States Atomic Energy Commission in San Francisco, which features a brief close-up of a boldly-printed  sign  designating  “HELL  ON  EARTH”  to  be   the consequence of modern warfare, the hellish, post-apocalyptic atmosphere of this beach scene also reveals the absurdity underlying then-contemporary investments in the private sphere as a safe haven from nuclear fallout. And in its final image of the Office of Civil Defense and Coca-Cola, one can even read a gesture toward the postwar  era’s   uncomfortably cozy imbrication of middle-class domesticity, consumer capitalism, and national  security.  Though  Rice’s  decision  to  depart  from  San  Francisco  for  Venice  and   Mexico was motivated, in part, by his dissatisfaction with the dwindling Beat scene in North Beach, the hostility Senseless exhibits toward normative domestic and social 256 spaces of the postwar period reveal that he had no interest in abandoning his vagrant lifestyle for a more traditional, settled existence. But this sequence does not simply extol homelessness. The sacred, idyllic image of refuge invoked in the kitschy tapestry is not merely ridiculed. In many ways, this image  condenses  Rice’s  nostalgic  sentiments  about  privacy – his longing for an autonomous shelter set apart from the world and conducive to intimacy. And despite the parodic elements in the beach scenes, Senseless is far less irreverent about the absence of home than The Flower Thief.  Against  the  latter’s  carefree  meandering,  Senseless frames the homelessness of the late-modern subject in a tenor of grim seriousness, presenting the vulnerability  and  alienation  of  the  age  as  resulting  from  a  disorienting  “loss”  of  home. It is  telling  in  this  regard  that  Rice’s  initial  conception  of  the  project  into  which  Senseless eventually developed – a film he began working on after he completed The Flower Thief, and which he was hoping to produce in San Francisco and Venice alone – was structured around a married couple whose attempt to inhabit the traditional form of the nuclear family is thwarted by modernity. Outlining a tentative plot for the project in a note dated October 1961, which I quote here in its original spelling and punctuation, Rice writes: Jim as the wanderer meets Caroline,falls in love, marries her. they have a child,who dies. How? sickness,violence,fallout,?  because  of  this  they…   They  embark  upon  the  ‘black  Journey’  on  the  endless  river  beneath  a   thousand bridges while a million pumping twisting oil wells work.  […]  In   the mist of all this early hell […]  a doctor of  the  mind  […] gives Jim and Caroline magic medicine, they leave the black river,enter a nice doll house in the beautiful country and live happily every after.515 Whether  or  not  Rice’s  sketch  of  this  storybook  ending  was  sincere,  his  conception  of  this early project as a sort of magical domestic melodrama centered on the destruction and 515 Rice,  “Concerning  the  film  which  I  am  shooting  in  San  Francisco  and  Venice,”  October  1961,  Reginald   Gay Collection. 257 eventual recovery of home is reflected in the somberness with which Senseless confronts postwar homelessness. Indeed, it is interesting to note that a later description of Senseless composed  by  Rice  after  his  completion  of  the  film  still  framed  it  as  a  story  of  “A  man  and   his  wife  [who]  start  a  voyage  in  a  boat,”  though  his  description  of  the  ending  is  far  less   promising:  “Under  a  full  moon  the  couple  walk  the  horizon  to  disappear beneath the world.”516 As  in  Vivian  Sobchack’s  reading of classical film noir, the sequence of domestic imagery described above reveals Senseless to  be  an  outgrowth  of  a  “transitional  moment”   in American culture, when past iterations of private shelter and public belonging had been rendered inaccessible (or undesirable), but no viable alternative to these forms had been realized  or  discovered.  Yet  Rice’s  anxiety  about  living  in  the  context  of  this  transition  was   not  solely  the  result  of  his  “inability to imagine being at home in history, in capitalist democracy, at this time.”517 Unlike  noir’s  protagonists,  Rice  was  not  resigned  to  his   homelessness. As we have seen, his films were products of his attempts to rectify this condition, where the solution  he  proposed  did  not  depend  on  “constitut[ing]  the  [late- modern]  ‘world  on  a  new  basis…,’”  but  on  elaborating  a  whole  other  world  in  a  more   intimate form – a non-world  in  which  the  “domestic  future”  that  evaded  classical  noir   could be concretized in a paradoxical solidification of presentness. The existence of this poetic orientation is the very measure  of  Rice’s  radicality:  it reveals the progressive purposes  to  which  the  NAC’s  “retrograde”  romantic inclinations were directed, demonstrating their commitment to remedying late-modern alienation through an 516 Rice,  “A  short  sketch  of  my  past  films,”  n.d.,  Reginald  Gay  Collection. 517 Sobchack 166. 258 engaged, alternative cultural practice.518 However, the limitations of this practice are also evident in this sequence of domestic images, whose evocation of the rootless and superfluous condition of late-modern life results not only from the inhospitable environs of American culture, but also from the impracticality of the avant-garde’s ideology of spontaneity. An anecdote related by P. Adams Sitney in the program notes for a 1968 screening of Senseless speaks to this impracticality. According to Sitney, the beach footage with which this sequence begins was actually shot at the site of a failed Utopian community that  Eric  Nord  originally  sought  to  establish  on  an  island  off  the  coast  of  Mexico.  “[A]s   the story goes,”  Sitney  writes: [Nord] purchased an island from the Mexican government with the modest intention of establishing an Utopia. Unfortunately Nord neglected to ascertain whether or not there was running water in his island. There wasn’t,  of  course.  So  he and his pilgrims established camp of army surplus parachutes for tents on the shores of Baja California. When Rice and his settlers arrived, Nord and his pioneers were gone. Unfurled lonely parachutes rocked with the breezes.519 Regardless of the authenticity of this anecdote, the image of Rice setting out to settle in such a community resonates strongly with his recurrent quest for some actual, stable, autonomous elsewhere in which he could reliably submerge into the opaque eddies of inner experience. That this refuge was not waiting for Rice when he arrived – that its intimate community had already scattered like the tattered fragments of its architecture – is another testament to the ephemerality of the non-world. Though separated geographically and temporally from the settings of The Flower Thief, the sea breeze that 518 Robert Genter, Late Modernism: Art, Culture, and Politics in Cold War America (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010) 17. 519 P.  Adams  Sitney,  “Ron  Rice:  SENSELESS;;  CHUMLUM,”  program  notes  from  The  Avantgarde  Film   Tuesday Series at the Jewish Museum, 10 December 1968, Ron Rice File, Paper Materials Collection, Anthology Film Archives, New York. 259 courses through the lonely parachutes in this sequence is inextricably linked to the turbulent atmosphere of the Bagel Shop, the decaying ruins of the powerhouse, and the perilous shoreline bordering the Playland amusement park. Despite this particular Utopian failure, Senseless does provide glimpses of reparative, life-affirming alternatives to the dreary imagery that Rice foregrounds throughout the film. As in The Flower Thief, however, such alternatives always come through fleeting moments of intimate exchange that emerge through improvised forms of play. In Senseless, these playful exchanges are made possible by the interstitial spaces and purposeless interludes of travel, as in the celebrated  “great  train  robbery”  sequence   that occurs approximately twenty minutes into the film. In this scene, a roving band of Dazendadaists discover an abandoned train resting at the edge of a dirt road, its exterior covered in graffiti, and suddenly embark on a playful remake  of  Edwin  S.  Porter’s  early   masterpiece. A man hops a train, a bandit appears, and a skirmish ensues with the engineer while a passenger serenades a woman with a ukulele. Echoing the overgrown rail  yard  sequence  in  Mekas’s  Guns of the Trees (which I discuss in each of my previous chapters), a momentary sense of intimacy and belonging is here produced by way of an extemporaneous performance that seeks to extract some vital impulse from a decaying remnant of modernization. Rice documents this performance with his camera and seeks to transmit its vitality to the viewer through a dynamic form, employing handheld cinematography and recording at a slow frame rate to render the actions in a comic fast- motion. In such scenes, Senseless gestures to – and indeed, offers – the sort of animating experiences that Rice repeatedly sought out in Mexico. But this film also reveals that such experiences are neither bound to a specific region nor localizable in a stable 260 structure. They are dependent on erratic relational practices that flash up unexpectedly and dissipate without warning, and whose invigorating effects are the result of their resistance to structuration. The  “mobile  sites”  of  intimacy  that  we  encounter  in  Senseless further reiterate the lesson conveyed by those sites which punctuate The Flower Thief, demonstrating that the alternative world Rice desired was not realizable as a world. As we have seen, this basic contradiction motivates the episodic structure of The Flower Thief, generating this  film’s   dialectic of immediacy and habitation. Yet this contradiction also impelled Rice’s personal movements and practices between 1960-64. The  story  of  Rice’s  activities  during   this period is in fact remarkably similar to that of The Flower Thief, revolving as it does around a series of efforts by Rice to forge an alternative home-space in dispersed, subcultural locales throughout the U.S. and Mexico – efforts that were always eventually interrupted or abandoned. In addition to providing  an  appropriate  form  for  Rice’s   rendering  of  the  Beat  generation’s  “wandering  sickness,”  the  episodic  structure  of  The Flower Thief can thus be read as an allegory of the fragility of the intimate worlds Rice struggled to cultivate and maintain from the beginning of 1960 until his death at the end of 1964.520 If the fragility of such environs contributed to the intimacy they offered by facilitating dynamic, unpredictable interactions, this fragility was also the source of considerable frustration for Rice. After his completion of The Flower Thief, Rice faced a 520 It is not coincidental, for instance, that many of the locations featured in The Flower Thief had been shut down or demolished only two years after Rice completed the film. By the summer of 1962, North Beach was dead: the powerhouse  was  “torn  down,”  the  Bagel  Shop  was  “forced  to  close  by  local  pressure,”   Washington  Square  Park  was  “cleaned  up  and  sprayed,”  the  “feeling  or  mood”  had  dissipated,  and  the   “people  who  were  in  the film no longer exist[ed] there” (Batten 34, 35). Even Playland was razed shortly thereafter, when the property was sold to a developer who demolished the park in the fall of 1972 and put up condominiums in its place. 261 series  of  disappointments  comparable  to  the  implosion  of  Nord’s  Utopia  and  the   dwindling of the North Beach scene. These disappointments resulted from a potent confluence of external and internal pressures. On the one hand, the basic lack of resources available to experimental filmmakers in the U.S. and the growing censorship of underground  film  practices  in  New  York  over  the  course  of  the  ‘60s made  Rice’s  position as a practicing artist in the States more and more untenable. A letter that Rice wrote in September of 1962 speaks to the incredible difficulties he had in raising funds to support his work, and describes his living conditions in especially bleak terms: writing letters for various grants he was unlikely to receive; relying on friends for food and shelter; lacking the suit (as well as the socks) he would need to interview for jobs; receiving no money from The Flower Thief, despite a successful theatrical run that summer; and without funds to retrieve either the negative of The Flower Thief or the original reversal print of Senseless from the lab.521 In the winter of 1964, after Rice had completed Chumlum and was still seeking to complete work on The Queen of Sheba Meets the Atom Man, Mekas wrote  of  Rice’s  departure  from  New  York  for  Acapulco  earlier  that  year  as  a  forced  exile:   He went there [to Mexico], exiled from New York by impossible working and living conditions, without a penny, searching for peace of mind, disgusted with the police persecution of arts in New York. They would not even permit him to hold a benefit screening of his work here, and when he did hold one—at the Gramercy Arts Theatre—they gave him a summons…  Rice’s  Chumlum has been acclaimed as a masterpiece in Brussels,  in  Paris,  in  Stockholm…  But  the  New  York  police  and  city   bureaucrats will not permit Rice to show his films! They would rather see him starve to death in Mexico.522 Alongside  such  material  difficulties  and  restrictions,  however,  Rice’s  failure  to   complete a number of projects he began conceiving or producing during this period also 521 Rice, letter to unknown recipient, 20 September 1962, Reginald Gay Collection. 522 Mekas, Movie Journal 161-162. 262 resulted from his refusal to seek normal forms of employment, his aversion toward all forms of commercial success, his increasing prioritization of narcotics and Mexican getaways over creative practice, and the quarrels he had with friends, family members, and collaborators as a result of such antics. For instance, the aforementioned letter he composed  in  September  of  1962  refers  to  a  falling  out  he  had  with  his  mother,  who:  “does   not give me a cent, since i told her off. the fool still expects me to be working in some gasoline  station.”523 Than November, Rice sent a letter to Joseph E. Levine of Embassy Pictures requesting financial  support  for  “the GREATEST FILM Ever made in New York”  before  threatening  to  “direct  all  the  efforts  of  my  ELEBORATE,  staff  to  THE   COMPLETE ANILATION OF  YOUR  ORGANIZATION”  if  Levine  decided  to  pass.524 More famously, after a benefit screening of an early rough cut of The Queen of Sheba Meets the Atom Man that Rice and Mead arranged at Cooper Union in January of 1963 in order to raise funds to complete the film – a screening for which Mead claims to have cashed in a life insurance policy worth a couple of thousand dollars in order to produce the 70 minute print that the two exhibited – Rice used the proceeds from the screening to purchase tickets to Mexico for he and his girlfriend, where the two remained for several months before returning to New York after they had run out of money.525 According to Mead,  this  period  also  witnessed  a  dramatic  change  in  Rice’s  approach  to  budgeting:   “When  we  started  [The Queen of Sheba Meets the Atom Man], the budget for the film was 90% film, 10% drugs—and  then  finally  it  went  70%  drugs,  30%  film!”526 523 Rice, letter to unknown recipient. 524 Rice,  “Diaries”  123. 525 For  Mead’s  account  of  this  event,  see  Sargeant  78-79. 526 Goodwin 2. Mead makes a similar claim, though with different percentages, in Sargeant 84. 263 Due to the precarity that was both imposed on Rice by an oppressive culture and actively cultivated by him as a sign of authenticity, Rice’s efforts to envision a stable, yet vitalizing shelter for interiority grew increasingly desperate between 1963-64. This shift is documented in the journal entries, letters, and artistic statements Rice composed during this period. The non-worldly formations in which Rice had previously imagined intimacy to reside are replaced in these writings by a new emphasis on distinctly otherworldly domains:  timeless,  astral  realms  that  Rice  referred  to  variously  as  “cosmic,”  “celestial,”   “far-out,”  “ancient,”  “eternal,”  and  “Universal.”527 If Rice had previously invested redemptive potential in particular, material locales known for housing unruly subcultures, by  1963,  he  came  to  locate  that  potential  alternately  in  “the  clouds,”  “the  sky,”  “Space,”   the  stars,”  or  a  realm  of  “sublimity”  residing  somewhere  on  “another  planet.”528 Rice’s  1963  publication,  “Dazendada  Works,”  is  one  of  the  most  prominent   markers  of  this  transition.  Announcing  the  foundation  of  “The Dazendada Film Group,”   this document – which I again quote in Rice’s  original  language  and style – goes on to detail  a  few  of  The  Group’s  plans,  which  include  undertaking “the construction of a film processing machine so full of holes that it will pass the most abstract film material without any complications,”  purchasing “a warehouse full of surplus film,” and embarking on a special sort of field trip that Rice describes as follows: There will be a Grand meeting of the Group soon where everyone will gather around a new type film stock developed for shooting, afterwards everyone will go on a Universal field Trip in order to observe the universe. Reports of these experiences will thereupon be fed into the new processing machine, which it is said to be able to transform the old style black and white shooting stock into more advanced color material which allows one to climb higher, achieve more resolution of image, gain the color, and 527 Rice,  “Diaries”  97,  104,  112,  116,  118. 528 Ibid 97, 116, 104, 110, 119. 264 return after a few days shooting with less anxiety than previously possible.529 In the dream of cinema that Rice articulates in this passage, film’s  redemptive  potential  is   no  longer  associated  with  “projectable  realities,”  as  it  was  when  Rice  was  completing   production on The Flower Thief.  Rather,  in  a  manner  that  resembles  the  “LIGHTS  OF   SLEEP”  scene  Rice  describes  in  his  journal  entry  from  the summer of 1963, the same year  in  which  “Dazendada  Works”  was  published, Rice  here  emphasizes  cinema’s   abstractness, while also valorizing the transcendent force of perceptually demanding, psychedelic spectacles. This  shift  in  Rice’s  aesthetic  preferences is not exactly visible in the footage that remains of The Queen of Sheba Meets the Atom Man.530 But it is quite clear in his last completed film, Chumlum. The only color film that Rice produced, Chumlum is composed of intricately layered, hallucinatory superimpositions that Rice shot of the cast of  Jack  Smith’s  film,  Normal Love,  as  they  lounged  about  in  Rice’s  Tribeca  loft  after   daily  shooting  sessions  for  Smith’s  production.  Beneath  a  druggy  cymbalom  soundtrack   composed and performed by Angus MacLise (at the prodding of Tony Conrad), Smith and his cast pose, sway on hammocks, writhe, and rub against each other, sometimes rolling  on  the  floor,  swinging  on  ropes,  or  shaving  each  others’  nipples. Drifting in and 529 Rice,  “Dazendada  Works,”  op.  cit., 10, italics in original. 530 The Queen of Sheba Meets the Atom Man has existed in at least 3 separate versions: the initial, 70- minute rough cut produced by Mead and Rice; a subsequent edit produced by Howard Everngham after Rice’s  death;;  and  the  currently-existing print produced by Mead in the early 1980s. However, the critic Fred Camper’s  observations  regarding  the  Everngham edit  remain  applicable  to  Mead’s  cut  as  well:  “One   finds it hard to believe, given the complexities of Chumlum and Senseless, that had Rice completed [The Queen of Sheba Meets the Atom Man] entirely as he wanted to, he would not have created some of the hallucinatory  confusion  of  all  his  individual  other  films”  (Quoted in Hoberman, op. cit., 39). Camper has in fact  made  a  similar  remark  regarding  Mead’s  version,  noting  that  it  “has  the  look  of  a  rough cut, especially when  compared  with  Rice's  precisely  edited  earlier  works”  (“The  Queen  of  Sheba  Meets  the  Atom  Man,”   ChicagoReader.com, accessed 2 September 2014, http://www.chicagoreader.com/chicago/the-queen-of- sheba-meets-the-atom-man/Content?oid=883698).  For  Mead’s  account  of  his  role  in  editing  the  current   version, see: Goodwin 2; and Sargeant 84. 265 out of view, the actors wear vibrant, ethereal fabrics with ornamental prints and patterns; dark, flowing gowns complemented with dangly bracelets or fake pearls; makeshift turbans and sashes adorned with a starfish or a sand dollar; fake mustaches and ambiguous furs; leather sandals, crocheted throws, and the occasional pair of khakis – a complex mélange of exotic costumes that evokes some unspecifiable elsewhere. The mise-en-scene, Sitney reports, “is  typical  of  reveries  under  the  power  of  hashish…  [and]   suggests a restrained orgy in a Moorish brothel or  harem…”531 Within this amorous, ethereal realm, bodies and objects continuously flow in and out of one another, creating a highly textured, tactile surface beneath which alternate dimensions sometimes emerge into view: an expanse of rippling water; a woman roller skating on a city street; a train rolling through a tunnel. This is a space without boundaries or base, one whose frame somehow  manages  to  enclose  “complementary  shadows  of  the  entire  Universe,”  and   whose  contents  are  illuminated  by  the  “the  pure  colors  from  the  depths.”532 Though Chumlum is not a narrative film, it is important to note the pseudo- narrative framing device that Rice employs to contextualize the orgia the film depicts. After the opening, title card sequence, we cut to a low-angle, exterior shot of a city street. While the street appears to be unpopulated, the frame is nevertheless cluttered. A horse- drawn carriage stands in the foreground near the center of the screen, with a dark expanse to its right and another, dark expanse at its left. Behind these largely indiscernible objects, a set of buildings rises in the background of the shot, angling dramatically toward a distant vanishing point and nearly blocking out the sky. After a moment, a young man is seen running toward the camera between the dark shapes of the street, casting nervous 531 Sitney,  “Ron  Rice:  SENSELESS;;  CHUMLUM.” 532 Rice,  “Diaries”  97. 266 glances over his shoulder and to his side as he passes out of view. He is fleeing the city, no  doubt,  as  well  as  “the  subway,  the  company,  the  Country,  the  World.”533 When we emerge out the other end of the oneiric interior into which he escapes, we find ourselves in a dense wood where a few disoriented exiles from the orgy manage to untangle themselves from tree branches, and continue frolicking on the sticks and leaves outside of a log cabin. We then see a series of shots taken around Coney Island: men run along the beach; an aerial view shows the park; a pan reveals the Parachute Jump tower; and an upside-down exposure of bumper cars is superimposed over a skyline. We have thus fallen back to earth after our extended, “Universal field Trip.”  Yet  behind  these  images  of   reality, barely-visible  silhouettes  of  Rice’s  costumed  creatures  remain  present  in  the   image – a lingering memory of our journey. We have returned to the world, but “with less anxiety than previously possible,” deposited not in the paranoid claustrophobia of the city but in a marginal space of purposeless expenditure echoing the seaside amusements of San  Francisco’s  Playland-at-the-Beach. Despite this resonance with the concluding sequences of The Flower Thief, Chumlum’s pseudo-narrative framework suggests that the tension at the base of Rice’s poetic ambition required a modification of his world-building project by the time Chumlum was completed. Though he still seeks in this film to effect a change in his viewer by transporting her or him to a more intimate domain, this domain is no longer an ordered space in which accidents and anarchic improvisations occur, but an eternal realm where the contingency of the world is sublated into a cosmic universality. This shift in  Rice’s  ideas  about  cinema  parallels  a  similar  transition  in  Mekas’s   conception  of  the  NAC’s  redemptive  project  – a transition that one can begin to discern in 533 Ibid 89. 267 Mekas’s writings and public addresses from the mid-to-late  ‘60s.  For  instance,  in his aforementioned  speech,  “Where  Are  We—the  Underground?,”  which  Mekas  originally   delivered to the Philadelphia College of Art in the summer of 1966, the world- transformative potential of the period is no longer located in cinema itself, but in a range of avant-garde filmmakers caught up in the violent  “birth  of…  the  Aquarian  Age”  who   were  being  “blown  and  played  by  the  mystical  winds  of  the  incoming  Age”  and  “pulled   by a desire for something  joyful…  deep  in  the  stars.”534 In similar statements he made at the  University  of  Cincinnati’s  1967  Spring  Arts  Festival,  Mekas  spoke  of  the  new  cinema   being  conducted  in  “the  age  of  the  spaceship  [when]  the  earth  and  its  three  billion   inhabitants is becoming an abstract small dot seen through the porthole of a spaceship.”535 Within this context, he explained, the cinema of the Underground was beginning  a  new  search  for  eternal  truths,  one  rooted  in  “flickering  colors  and  lights  and   sun  visions.”536 In a passage worth quoting at length, he states: We  don’t  want  those  truths…  which  concern…  that  surface  where  recent   centuries and the recent past have built their structures. Since we reject these  pasts…  we  are  leaving  them  alone,  and  are  descending  where  a   much deeper  past  resides.  […]  Part  of  this  job  in  cinema  is  done  by   staying  out  of  all  plots  and  stories…;;  by  keeping  our  cameras  on  naked   bodies, fields, flowers, colors and shapes of the world, and finally by abandoning…  everything  touched  and  distorted  by  man’s  hand…  The   work of the new cinema is to pluck down from heaven glimpses of truth and  beauty  so  unfamiliar  and  ungraspable  that  you  will  say:  ‘I  have  never   seen  nor  felt  like  this  before.  I’m  transformed;;  I’m  changed.  This  is  all   new experience, new knowledge  to  me.’  […]  The  question  is:  ‘What  do  I   want to do with my life: to be consumed by the transitory manifestations of the material and the emotional worlds created by man, or to outgrow— to transcend them and to contribute to the building of a new spiritual sun?’537 534 Mekas,  “Where  Are  We”  19,  20,  21. 535 Hector Currie and Michael Porte, eds., Cinema Now 1: Stan Brakhage, John Cage, Jonas Mekas, Stan Vanderbeek (Cincinnati, OH: University of Cincinnati Press, 1968) 12. 536 Ibid 12. 537 Ibid 12-13. 268 In this statement,  the  NAC’s  hostility  to  worldliness  gains  its  most  dramatic  and symptomatic expression. Mekas denounces the material structures built on the surface of the  earth  in  “recent  centuries,”  everything  produced  by  “man’s  hand,”  and all established emotional, experiential, and epistemological frameworks – objects and conventions that he believed were preventing artists  from  “re-attun[ing] ourselves, step by step, with the life  forces.”538 Though  Mekas’s  statements  in  this  symposium  reiterate many points he put forward in earlier writings, most notably his  1959  call  for  “a  complete  derangement   of the official cinematic senses,” the  direction  of  the  NAC’s  rebellion  is  here  framed  in   quite different terms. Rather than promoting transformative encounters with the concreteness of reality that  “cut  into  one’s  consciousness with the sharpness of a lash,” the task of the artist is now framed as an effort to discern a guiding light in the depths of the sun, and to find some paradisiacal “now”  existing between  “our  memory  of  Eden”   and  “the  godhead  toward  which  we  are  going.”539 Within the context of a culture in which all manifestations of worldliness seemed tainted by the destructive legacy of modernity, the world-building ambitions of the NAC could only be realized by gaining access to a mystical realm of pure vitality cut free from the world. 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