Films by Morgan Fisher
Now Playing: Selected shorts, 1970-2003
Experimental cinema is hardly my field of expertise, so the new monthly screenings of some of these films will be invaluable to me, curious and interested in exposing himself to a mostly-unexplored avenue of filmmaking. Fisher proves to be a good fit with my own tastes, since his films (at least those screened here) emphasize aspects of cinema tend to ignore. Naturally, I had a soft spot for his 1976 short, PROJECTION INSTRUCTIONS, which as the title suggests is comprised of a series of directions to the on-duty projectionist, such as "frame up," "increase volume," and so on, which the projectionist then follows. The film really is as simple as that, and that's why it works- by making the person in the booth into an active member of the exhibition, the film engages the audience in his job and draws attention to the importance of a good projectionist in the proper exhibition of any film where they'd only otherwise notice him if something went wrong (not that I'm bitter or anything).

The evening's screenings also included two of Fisher's early works, PRODUCTION STILLS (1970) and CUE ROLLS (1974). The former is best described as a long take of a series of Polaroid photos tacked (by visible hands) to a white wall, and the photos are of the people who are shooting the film. This makes for a strange and compelling combination of presumed opposites: a single-take short that also contains a unique style of editing, a mix of black and white (the photos and wall) and color (the hands), and the film being made and the photos which chronicle its making all being folded into one work. CUE ROLLS wasn't quite as stimulating for me, largely because the subject matter on display (a once-standard industry practice involving the synching of different strands of film) was somewhat confusingly explained in voiceover by Fisher himself. The basic idea, however, seemed to be the demonstration of how many short shots could be edited together into one shot through the carefully-honed techniques such as the one within the film. That the cuts are plainly visible on the masking around the screen is, I'm sure, part of the point.

The featured attractions of the night were the final two films, Fisher's most recent works, entitled STANDARD GAUGE (1984) and () (2003). In STANDARD GAUGE, Fisher recounts not only his industry experiences but also a short history of cinema through some of the stuff Hollywood has discarded, all in 35mm, the industry standard (hence the title). He shows us heads and tails of reels to now-forgotten films, old stock footage, subtitled header from Godard's LA CHINOISE, films in various aspect ratios, and deleted and alternate takes from some studio projects with which Fisher himself was involved. Two of the most fascinating segments of the film come fairly late in the film. The first is an examination of the "China Girls," the somewhat un-PC named for photographs of women placed on the tails of film reels by labs to check for skin tones. The second and most poignant section of the film deals with the now-defunct practice of color imbibition, formerly used by Technicolor to develop color films, a process still unparalleled for color vividness (I admit I got a little choked up when he was remembering the "Friends of I.B." fake obit in Variety).

Finally, () is his most recent film, and the penultimate film of the evening. Here, Fisher takes insert shots from dozens of unnamed old films and splices them together somewhat randomly into a montage. He isn't so much interested in constructing a narrative out of his footage as exploring the associations created by montage, the ways the mind of the viewer connects a series of shots even when there isn't really any connection. Divorced from any concerns of plot or characterization, the film often has a Bressonian pull to it, as the repeated shots of hands sometimes have more to contribute to a story than the faces so prized by other filmmakers and discarded completely by Fisher. Some of the other associations tend to be amusing, like a cut from a blade slowly being pulled out of someone's hand to a note reading "the case has been withdrawn." Perhaps the audience missed the memo that avant-garde cinema doesn't always have to be deadly serious, but I for one laughed.