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Beyond Fuller
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This is a fascinating work years ahead of its time,
and one of the truly successful attempts to make a film which is its own act of
criticism or theory.
It is a short work by avowed cinephiles who are very
well known on the Australian film culture scene since the 1960s, and still
today: Barrett as a critic and teacher, author of, most recently, The
Elusive Auteur: The Question of Film Authorship Throughout the Age of Cinema (McFarland, 2017); Bruce as writer, curator and programmer (these days, he
appears mainly at the Film Alert 101 website).
With the aid of Michael Edols’ cinematography (he was
also a renowned documentarian), the Hodsdon brothers depart from a wonderfully
vivid and violent scene in Samuel Fuller’s Underworld U.S.A. (1961); the clip is
incorporated into the whole. As is, today, the almost nostalgic situation of
actually entering a cinema to view such a film!
Yet this is not some cultish homage given over to mere
pop indulgence. The beyond in its
title does not signify any superiority to Fuller’s legacy, but rather signals the
evocation of a wider context, during and after the experience of watching a
film of this precise kind. It is less about Fuller per se than a certain regime of cinema-as-spectacle.
In its time, it was probably responding most
immediately to debates over violence in the cinema and its effects – see also,
in this regard, George Mad Max Miller’s very
different early short, Violence in the Cinema, Part 1 (1971). Beyond its
original moment, Beyond Fuller anticipates strikingly many of film theory’s later explorations into the deep, metapsychological
effects of the cinematic apparatus and its attendant system of specular
fascination. So, naturally, the womb-like cinema experience is an integral part
of the specific dispositif investigated.
The film both evokes and probes a hypnotic trance
state in its relentless images of the eye, looking, and spectator immobility –
some cluey spectators will jump ahead in their minds 15 years to Bigas Luna’s
remarkable horror-thriller Anguish (1987). The Everyman figure in this abstract drama is played by another celebrated
Australian critic-cinephile, Geoff Gardner, formerly artistic director of the
Melbourne Film Festival in the early ‘80s, today Film Alert editor.
The concerns of the
film are not related only to cinema-gazing. “The intent of Beyond Fuller”,
comments Barrett in a retrospective view from 2009, “was to juxtapose the
romantic tradition of gangster self-annihilation with the casual, impassive
imposition of killing ingrained in contemporary war reportage, in this case of
the Vietnam War (i.e., violence as an everyday and arbitrary monstrosity)”.
Unlike many subsequent, didactic works in the
formalist-conceptualist mode (I refer here to categories of experimental cinema
that I sketched in my 1988 survey “Indefinite Objects”), Beyond Fuller is a film-essay which does not need to declare itself
as such, on its soundtrack or anywhere else. It leaves many of its
argumentative links buried in the deep structure of the work, letting them rise
up suggestively and poetically. In this, it is also a forerunner of the audiovisual essay form as practiced
by savvy cinephiles of the 21st century.
The brief flurry of intense Australian governmental
support for short, experimental work was basically over by the close of the
1970s, and attention was shunted more firmly to securing a feature-based
industry (spurring the “short as professional calling card” era, often woeful
in its cultural effects). The Hodsdons, separately or together, did not go on to
direct further films. Another sad tale …
© Adrian Martin January 1988 / December 2021 |
