An Introduction to Burroughs' and Gysin's Cut-up Theory and Practice
(Part 2 of An Appraisal of the films of William Burroughs, Brion Gysin, and Antony Balch in terms of recent avant-garde theory by Rob Bridgett)
I will concentrate this study on two films made between 1961 and 1966 by the English filmmaker Anthony Balch, the painter Brion Gysin, and the American writer William S. Burroughs. Certain techniques in these films clearly predate many of those claimed by the American and English structural/materialist movements. Curiously, they are omitted from the standard histories and lists of precursors.
William Burroughs was born in St. Louis in 1914. He graduated from Harvard in 1936 and went on to study medicine in Vienna. He traveled extensively in his youth and at one point researched pre-Colombian civilizations in Mexico. In 1944 he became addicted to heroin. His writing career began in the early 1950s with encouragement from poet and friend Allen Ginsberg, and he gained the reputation of elder of the beat movement in New York. He subsequently lived in Paris, London, Tangier, and New York in the 1960s, which is the period on which I am currently focusing.
Brion Gysin, an American born in 1916 in England of a Swiss father and a Canadian mother, became a painter early in life and was in fact expelled from the Surrealist group in Paris by Andre Breton when he was only nineteen years old. He lived in Tangier as a restaurant owner for many years before relocating to Paris, where he met Burroughs in the late 1950s. (Gysin died in 1986.)
Burroughs and Gysin
In Paris, September 1959, both Burroughs and Gysin were in residence at 9 Rue Git le Coeur (the famous “Beat Hotel”). It was there that Brion Gysin, while mounting some drawings, accidentally sliced through a pile of old New York Herald Tribunes, which he was using to protect his table. He observed that where a strip of text had been cut away, the print on the next page linked up and could be read across, combining different stories from other pages. Later Gysin showed the discovery to Burroughs. Having himself recently completed the avant-garde novel The Naked Lunch, Burroughs pronounced the technique a project for “disastrous success.”
Burroughs stated, "I felt I had been working towards the same goal … any narrative passage or any passage of poetic images is subject to any number of variations, all of which may be interesting and valid in their own right … cut-ups establish new connections between images."12
Burroughs' own literary work was in a naturally fragmented state; Naked Lunch appears very similar to the cut-up texts he and Gysin were to work on, even though it was written prior to their discovery. He felt that "anyone with a pair of scissors could become a poet," 13 echoing the sentiments of Lautremont, who said that “poetry should be made by all.”
Of course, this technique is not without its precedents. In 1897, Stephane Mallarme's poem “Un coup de des jamais n'aborlira le hazard” (A throw of the dice can never abolish chance) distributed the individual words across 21 pages scattered and disjointed with the occasional blank page, giving “structure” an equal compositional value to content. Also, Guillaume Apollinaire in “Calligrammes” (1914) composed poems into typographical layout shapes. Dadaist Tristan Tzara's random poetry from the 1920s bears a remarkable similarity to the cut-up technique in that he had cut-out phrases and words that he produced from a hat and read in random order. However if there were a patron saint of experimental poetry, it would be Quirinus Kuhlmann (1651-1689), who wrote the “variable poem” “The Kiss of Love.” Only the first and last words of any line are to be kept, along with any one of the thirteen in between, thus maintaining meter and giving millions of possible combinations (Kuhlmann was burned at the stake by the Lutheran patriarch of Moscow for his chiliastic beliefs).14
Despite the numerous experimental precursors to this literary technique, Gysin's application of the montage technique to writing never received such a sustained and intense investigation as Burroughs and he were to achieve, first collaborating on a collection of cut-ups entitled “Minutes to Go” (1960) and later Burroughs producing three cut-up novels, The Soft Machine (1961), The Ticket that Exploded (1962), and Nova Express (1964).
Describing the discovery of cut-ups, Brion Gysin stressed, "The cut-up method treats words as the painter treats his paints, raw materials with rules and reasons of its own." 15 . Because of his experience as a painter, Gysin was able to see the fundamental elements of literature as pictorial materials to be used like any other forms, shapes, colors, or textures. Burroughs and Gysin's individual and collaborative efforts in these areas have extended into a vast range of media aside from literature such as tape cut-ups and importantly the technique was transferred to cinema.
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Brion Gysin |
The Cut-ups in Film
In Paris in 1960, young filmmaker Anthony Balch met Brion Gysin and subsequently Burroughs through his friend Jean Claude de Feugas. Balch was born in England in 1938 and learned film craft in the advertising industry during the mid-1950s. He subsequently worked as an editor, distributor, exhibitor, and director. (He died in 1980.)
Balch was familiar with Burroughs' writings and the new ideas concerning the cut-ups, and he wanted to collaborate with him in order to find a cinematic equivalent for Burroughs' writing.
The first of these experimental films was Towers Open Fire , shot between 1961 and 1962 in Paris and Gibraltar. Not released until 1966, it runs eleven minutes. The film was premiered at the London Pullman Cinema along with Tod Browning's 1932 feature Freaks . It was later screened at the Times Theatre on Baker Street and the Piccadilly Jacey, which Balch programmed in the late 1960s. Interestingly, it was also screened as part of the International Times launch party (the spontaneous festival of underground film at the Cochrane Theatre organized by I.T. and the two-week-old London Filmmakers' Co-op) in September 1966. 16
Towers Open Fire is a collage of the main themes and situations or “routines” that appear in Burroughs cut-up novels of the period. The soundtrack accompaniment is a mixture of recordings made by Burroughs on a cheap Grundig tape recorder and resembles many of the cut-up tape experiments achieved in collaboration with Ian Somerville. The rest was done in a studio, with some Arab music used. The film depicts society as crumbling in the form of a stock exchange crash, shots of which were purchased from Pathé news. Members of “a board” are dematerialized, and Burroughs plays an omnipresent role in the film (not least as the victim of an “orgasm attack” in which he leaps through a window and shoots family photos with a ping-pong gun). There are also important scenes using facial projections in which a face has a light mask projected onto it. 17
Also appearing in the film are early flicker experiments courtesy of Gysin's “dream machine” (1962), a flicker machine that when viewed with eyelids closed reproduces alpha-rhythm flicker and reputedly causes 360-degree fractal hallucinations without the use of chemical stimulants. There is also a scene in which Burroughs' friend Mickey Portman dances around in a comic, music-hall fashion, and looks up to the sky to see a dancing series of pink and blue dots. These were hand-painted by Balch onto clear leader for each print of the film. |
Gysin and Burroughs
contemplate the
" dream machine" |
An important section of the film is the actual “cut-up” sequence. Filmed on a quayside in Paris, this sequence is the first filmic example of the cut-ups, and it lasts around 30 seconds. Initially Burroughs is seen walking along the quayside, and the original linear footage has been rearranged into a mathematically precise cutting ratio at 12 frames (or two cuts per second). This reveals arbitrary cutting with regard to what is happening in the sequence in terms of content motivation, but a mathematical “structure” can be deduced by the cut every 12 frames. The sequence goes on to become more frenetic, culminating in a cyclical segment (or loop) in which each frame is different and imperceptible (reminding one of sections of Man with a Movie Camera ).
Following this brief exposition of what was to come, in The Cut Ups , instead of rendering Burroughs' writing, Balch reinterprets it as a pure cinematic technique. After Towers Open Fire , Balch was to film a 23-minute silent documentary of Gysin and Burroughs at the Beat Hotel in 1961, the Muniria Hotel in Tangier and the Hotel Chelsea in New York in 1963. The film was to be entitled Guerrilla Conditions . The subject matter can be compared to Towers Open Fire as parts of Burroughs' novels and documents of his life at that period. It also contains several sequences that are rumored to be Balch's attempt at filming The Naked Lunch, an ongoing project that was eventually shelved as appropriate financing could not be raised. Guerilla Conditions was in fact never realized, but the footage was shot and it became the basis for The Cut Ups.
The Cut Ups was conventionally edited and then cut into four approximately equal lengths. It was then assembled into its final state by taking one-foot lengths from each of the four sections that were cut together with mathematical precision — 1,2,3,4,1,2,3,4 etc. Variations to this structure occur randomly when a shot change occurs within one of the already edited one-foot lengths.
Balch faced very difficult grading problems. "Twenty minutes with one change every foot was just too much, what we did was to have a graded fine-grain print made of the edited sequences and then chop up the fine grain and make a dupe negative from it, so the film prints at one light.” 18 The film was cut into exact lengths by none of the actual artists. “The actual chopping was done by a lady who was employed to take a foot from each roll and join them up. A purely mechanical thing, nobody was exercising any artistic judgement at all."19
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The Cut Ups |
The length of the shots, with the exception of the last, is always the same (apart from the shot changes within the one-foot sections). Balch experimented extensively with the speed at which the film was run. "I asked myself what was the shortest length that anyone could really take a scene in, shorter than a foot not everyone could see everything, longer than a foot and they'd have time to examine it." 20. The film can also be shown at variable speeds. "I've shown the film at 16 frames per second instead of 24, and it is also very interesting." 21
The soundtrack was made by Somerville, Burroughs, and Gysin. They asked Balch how long the film was, and they produced permutated phrases to the exact length of 20 minutes and 4 seconds, including the final “Good. Thank you.” These permutated phrases are repeated and phased like a Steve Reich 22 composition. There are four in all: “Yes, Hello?", “Look at that picture,” “Does it seem to be persisting?”, and “Good. Thank you.” 23
The Cut Ups was completed in 1963 24 but played much later at the Cinephone Academy Moviehouse in Oxford Street in 1966. Audience members are reputed to have walked out complaining that the film was “disgusting” and then were referred by cinema staff to the “U” certificate it had been granted. It ran for a fortnight and eventually had to be shortened from 20 minutes to 12 minutes because staff and manager couldn't stand running it five times a day. Roy Underhill, the assistant manager at the time, told Balch that during the performances an unusual number of strange articles such as bags, pants, shoes, and coats were left behind, lost property, probably out of complete disorientation.
Towers Open Fire and, more importantly, The Cut Ups were not run in exclusively avant-garde establishments, as the London Filmmakers' Co-op had not yet set up dedicated screenings. This enabled Burroughs and Balch to catch audiences unaware of what they were going to see. They would not be expecting such an outright attack on narrative logic — much in the tradition of the direct attack on bourgeois sensibilities that had been achieved by Dada and Surrealist filmmakers in the 1920s.
The big problem with filmmakers' co-ops is that audiences go along expecting to be challenged and even outraged, thus negating any real potency to do so. The Cut Ups did achieve this on its release, as English audiences had not yet been exposed to much, if any, provocative avant-garde film practice.
This “misunderstanding” is reflected in reviews such as the Monthly Film Bulletin's "a cinematic reductio ad absurdum, a mechanical and quite pointless exercise."25 And regarding the soundtrack, "simple phrases repeated ad nauseam." 26 Ignored were the nihilistic aspects of the film and its confrontational approach to audience and language/logic as a control system.
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A page from a book
used in Towers Open Fire |
In his book Here to Go, Gysin said that "Burroughs pushed Cut-ups so far with variations of his own that he produced texts that were sickeningly painful to read." The Cut Ups recreates this in cinema; it too is almost “sickeningly painful” to watch and try to make sense of. This is a way of “deranging the senses” in the Rimbaud sense. In this context, Burroughs and Balch can be seen as modernists developing beyond Eliot, Pound, Joyce, and Robbe-Grillet and revealing the actual structure of writing and cinema, while also creating new juxtapositions and fresh and hidden meanings in the texts. This predates the “structural film's” concepts and does not pursue the political, Marxist positions of Gidal et al. of losing content. Rather, the cut-up creates new, poetic, crippled syntax and reflects a basic concern with narrative juxtaposition.
Wider Theoretical Debates and Contexts
Sitney's original critical approach in identifying the trend of structural film is important in that it is the first real critical work that aspires to a recognition and delineation of the phenomenon specific to film. However, due to his incomplete knowledge of certain precursors in film and other arts, he paints a short-sighted definition of structural cinema, positing it within his own clique of the New York Film-Makers' Co-op.
In George Maciunas' “Comments on Structural Film,27 he presents a wider range of influence in other arts and a reappraisal of Sitney's formulation, making several important gestures. The very semantic nature of the term “structural” is criticized, as it refers not only to simple , minimal structures, but as a general term that can be divided into complex (polymorphic) and simple (monomorphic) structures.
In “Expanded arts diagram,”28 Maciunas proposed the category of “monomorphic structure,” which is applied to a single, simple form exhibiting essentially one structural pattern. He argues that this tends to border on concept art since it represents an “idea” and its material is concepts. The Cut Ups fits into this conceptual model as it exhibits the monomorphic structural pattern throughout. (Although I would argue that its currency and materials are not merely concepts, but the new juxtapositions and meanings that the shots acquire via the application of the structure.) Towers Open Fire represents a polymorphic structure; however the “cut-up” sequence of the film can easily be viewed as an independent monomorphic sequence.
A useful comparative film to use here is Peter Kubelka's Arnulf Rainer . Maciunas also raises the point that Arnulf Rainer is not monomorphic (as Sitney implies through his usage of the term “structural”) but polymorphic in structure. Arnulf Rainer concentrates explicitly upon the various juxtapositions available from limited cinematic “units” (black frame, white frame). The Cut Ups does not rely on two basic units but on four film strips to which the basic structural pattern is applied.
These elements in the strips never “recur,” as do the black and white frames in Arnulf Rainer . This therefore provides a progression, reflecting the films' concern with “content.” With a set number of basic units there are only a finite number of variations available. The Cut Ups operates on three levels of juxtaposition. The mathematical cuts on a vertical level (1-4 in the diagram) represent the “structure” and bring four reels of film into arbitrary connection with one another. A second occurs on the horizontal or linear frame-to-frame level of the original pre-cut film (1-24 in the diagram), giving also a linear progression (but only at this level). The third juxtaposition occurs with the soundtrack's relation to the image. This further fractures the film as the permutated phrases overlap and phase to produce complex rhythmic ideas originating from simple phrases. These do not condone the rhythm of the visual cuts on screen, thus further embellishing the auditory/visual complexity of the film.
In Arnulf Rainer , Kubelka's binary cinematic raw material explores the two basic cinematic units, varying the mathematical structure (making it polymorphic) as it is impossible to vary the frames any further than black or white. Kubelka is therefore embraced by the “ascetic structuralists” (Le Grice and Gidal) for emptying his film of content. In The Cut Ups , however, concern is placed onto the arbitrary relationships that the monomorphic structure brings to the frames of the already extant footage. This is the raison d'être of the cut-up project. Kubelka does state, however, that "articulation in the film takes place between one frame and the next, between one sound and the next, and between sound and synchronous image,"29 a concern shared with The Cut Ups . This leads into further and subsequent criticism of Sitney's perspectives that were afforded via the London Filmmakers' Co-op, strongly influenced by Film Culture and the New American Cinema that it championed. Filmmaker critics such as Malcolm Le Grice, Peter Gidal, and Deke Dusinberre worked on taking the application of structure to film to self-destructive extremes in their films and theoretical writings. Ascetic structuralism, light-play, and structural “landscape films” offered intense development in structure above content of the films. The ascetic and light-play films seek to eradicate the film altogether, echoing moves already clearly anticipated in the Fluxus group, but instead taking a theoretical thrust that would bring them into collision with linguistic and ontological theory of Christian Metz et al.
Gidal's and Le Grice's theory works on the illusionistic nature of narrative and of "emptying from the cinematic signifier all semantic, associative, representational significance," 30 viewing content from political Marxist perspectives as a feature of dominant ideology used to manipulate and sedate the spectator. Gidal continues: "The structural/materialist film must minimize the content in its overpowering, imagistically seductive sense" 31. |
Arnulf Rainer |
This denies content and thus “representationalism,” occurring on a binary level in Arnulf Rainer , and thus disallowing all but the most basic visual relationships to occur between the images. In Christian Metz's “The Imaginary Signifier,” he states, “Basic to the constitution of the cinematic signifier is that it is absent: unlike the theatre in which real persons share the time and space of the spectator." 32 The projector and cinematic apparatus (even used in light-play films, which verge on performance art/theatre) project shadows and patterns of light — “representations” of a certain “reality.”
Burroughs and Balch are not involved in this line of enquiry, their approach being wholly different in that their concern is with content. They are not concerned with the imaginary status of the cinematic signifier, only with fresh propinquity of narrative elements. The results may often seem nonsensical, but they represent the new antirational meanings sought by the cut-up operative. This concern with relationships between units of meaning reflects Vertovian concepts of cinematic expression and Kubelka's serialist musical heritage and its approach to film.
Dziga Vertov's Man with a Movie Camera , amongst his other films, articulates a concern with constructivist theories and, primarily with relationships between shots (or “intervals”) and making up “phrases.” "It is the interval between two frames which is the important element of the articulation of meaning." 33
The Cut-Ups' concern also clearly remains in this tradition, bringing disparate elements into collision spatially and temporally with the effect of focusing attention onto the importance of the new relationships. Kubelka's approach to cinema is informed by antecedents in Viennese serialist and minimalist music, such as Gerhard Ruhm's one-tone music (1952) and Joseph Mattihas Haeur's rigorous approach to twelve-tone musical structure. 34
The “formal” film relies heavily on musical metaphor as this is the most highly developed of the formal arts. However, it is not representational (on a visual level), as cinema clearly is. Kubelka seeks to empty his films of representation, in the same way that John Cage emphasized the importance of silence/vacancy in his compositions of the 1950s. However, Kubelka's films emphasize relationships between frames as highly important to the articulation of meaning. "Just as Webern reduced music and the interval to the single tone, so Kubelka reduced film to the film frame and the interval between two frames." 35 Arnulf Rainer is a film arranged into frame sequences (“phrases” in Vertov's terminology) and achieves as many different relationships between the frames as possible by varying the structure. The Cut Ups can therefore be divided into two different approaches. The first approach is the concern with rigorously applying a monomorphic cutting structure to film footage and creating new arbitrary relationships between units, linking hitherto unrelated linear shots into a new spatio-temporal whole. The strongly rhythmic visual cuts play a particularly interesting role, especially when considered as anti-rhythmic elements in relationship to the soundtrack's constantly shifting tempo. This can be related to minimalist music, hence the need for the full 20-minute duration, in its aim of “derangement of the senses” — relating to the meditative and thus to the repression of logic and coherence. This also ties in with a Dadaist tradition of confrontation and making the audience uncomfortable in order to transgress through entrenched barriers, which all avant-garde art practice attempts to achieve.
The techniques and ideas demonstrated in The Cut Ups and Towers Open Fire are highly important in portraying a more complete picture of a period of experimental filmmaking occurring during the 1960s. These films are unrecognized antecedents of a “structural” avant-garde cinema, yet also represent a unique ontological approach specific to the cut-up techniques of Gysin, Balch, and Burroughs. |
Burroughs and Gysin |
Notes
12. Miles, Barry. “El Hombre Invisible” p.118, Virgin Books, 1993. (These sentiments echo those of Cubist painter George Braque: “I am not so much interested in things as with their relationships with each other.”)
13. Ibid.
14. Green, Malcolm, ed. “Black Letters Unleashed!” London: Serpent's Tail/Atlas Press, 1989.
15. Interview with Brion Gysin. Rolling Stone, May 1972.
16. Curtis, David. “Film: An Early Chronology,” Studio International Nov/Dec 1975.
17. A third collaborative film worthy of mention here is Bill and Tony (1972), in which Burroughs and Balch appear as talking heads, blacked out except for the faces. This film was designed specifically to be projected onto the human face, much like the sequences in Towers Open Fire . The film is based on a 1961 idea of Gysin's in which he appeared “nude” on stage — in fact a photograph of his naked body was projected onto himself.
18. Interview with Anthony Balch. Cinema Rising #1, April 1972 p.12.
19. Ibid.
20. Ibid.
21. Ibid.
22. Steve Reich, American “minimilist” composer of the late 1960s. His compositions consisted of very simple, single lines of music, played repeatedly and gradually “phased” against one another to create complex rhythmic ideas. Reich was inspired by La Monte Young, who wrote similar ascetic pieces in the 1950s, however Reich is a better comparative analogy to use with regard to The Cut Ups due to his use of “phasing” and repetition.
23. This breakdown of one-foot sections of The Cut Ups proceeds in the order C1,R1;C1,R2;C1,R3;C1,R4;C2,R1,;C2,R2; etc.
24. Cantrill's Filmnotes #43/44, February 1984. p.38. Interview with Brion Gysin. Gysin gives dates of the films contrary to the later dates supplied by the BFI (BFI Dates: Towers Open Fire 1963, The Cut Ups 1967).
25. Monthly Film Bulletin. 1967. p. 62. Review of The Cut Ups .
26. Ibid.
27. Maciunas, George. “ Some Comments on ‘Structural film' by P. A. Sitney” in Sitney, ed., Film Culture Reader. New York: Praeger, 1970.
28. Maciunas, George. “Expanded Arts Diagram,” Film Culture #43, 1966.
29. Kubelka, Peter. Extracts from an interview with Mike Wallington, Tony Rayns, and John Du Crane. Cinema #9, 1970.
30. Gidal, Peter “Theory and definition of Structural/Materialist film,” from Gidal, Peter, ed., Structural Film Anthology. London: BFI, 1976.
31. Ibid.
32. Metz, Christian “Le Signifiant Imaginaire: Psychanalyse et cinema” 1977.
33. Vertov, Dziga “We Manifesto” Kinofot #1, 1972. From “Petric, Vlada, Constructivism in Film — Cinematic Analysis: The Man with the Movie Camera. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. The Soviet constructivist avant-garde saw the artist as an engineer who constructed useful objects for the postrevolutionary society.
34. Weibel, Peter “The Viennese Formal Film” from Drummond, Film as Film.
35. Ibid., p. 109.
February 2003 |Bright Lights Film Journal Issue 39
Copyright © 2003 by Rob Bridgett
