the rise of the image, the fall of the word

By Mitchell Stephens

Jeff Scher, who is in his early forties, bridges two generations. He studied under the late avant-garde filmmaker Warren Sonbert, a buddy of Bruce Conner’s and another early experimenter in fast cutting. But Scher, whose own films mostly employ animation, also makes some television commercials and knows Mark Pellington and the MTV generation of directors. Sometimes he finds the view from this bridge a little upsetting: “When I watch MTV, I’ll think, ‘Oops, that’s borrowed from Bruce Conner; oops that’s from Warren Sombert,’” Scher reported with some bitterness. “Those guys couldn’t afford to pay their rent, and now these kids are driving BMWs. Another rape of the avant-garde, I guess.” Still Scher is not oblivious to the talents of this new generation. “Sparks of epiphany seem to come off of the boy,” he said of Pellington.

Enough members of the MTV generation had mentioned Jeff Scher’s own work to make me want to see it. The best way of doing that, it turned out, was to take the subway to the artist’s own studio in Manhattan for a private screening. This filmmaker is resolutely low-tech. An old 16mm projector, just about as loud as the one that frightened the young Renoir, began clacking away and a reel of Scher’s short films played. The one that seemed the most interesting for my purposes was Milk of Amnesia, a 1992 film shown at the New York Film Festival and on PBS. It offers yet another glimpse of the potential of techniques introduced by Conner and employed by Pellington among others.

Milk of Amnesia is a collage of dozens of brief movements—each of which Scher has painted, frame by frame. (The film runs four and a half minutes; it features, the filmmaker said, thousands of individual, index-card-sized paintings.) To the accompaniment of an Argentine tango from the 1930’s, a woman makes a bed; a cow turns its head; the famous Parisian artists’ model Kiki turns her head; a woman prepares to jump awkwardly off a diving board; et cetera, et cetera. Motion painting, it might be called. There is something lovely, even poignant about these movements. I tried to make an analogy to dance, but Scher stopped me. “These are motions from everyday life,” he explained. “That’s much more interesting to me. I’d rather watch a fat man and a dwarf walk down Fourteenth Street than go to the ballet.”

And there is much more going on in Scher’s film than lovely, interesting, everyday motions. That woman poised on the diving board, though her movements seem realistic, changes colors with each frame; her clothes come off, then back on; the pool she hovers above fills with swirls, dots, colors, patterns, writings, and even golf tees. In similar fashion, dozens of abstract patterns and newspaper collages explode around and over Kiki’s slowly turning face. Motions are not only being re-created here; they are being reconstituted into a multiperspectival series of one-frame instants. Dance can’t do that. Theater certainly can’t. This is a kind of cubism of motion. It is as if Muybridge’s horse had found a way to move and be frozen in revelatory instants at the same time. It is a kind of “fast seeing” in motion.

Milk of Amnesia partakes, too, of the power of montage. Scher spoke, Einstein-like, of how the “collisions” among these short scenes “create this other event.” That clumsy woman on the diving board is surrounded, for example, by images of acrobats and fancy divers and watching eyes. Her awkwardness and self-consciousness deepen.
Jeff Scher is the son of a painter and a sculptor. “Film was the only thing left,” he quipped. But Scher left no doubt that he is happy with his choice. “Film is the culmination of every medium man has worked in,” he declared. “It has the ability to incorporate painting, architecture, stage performance and story telling. It’s an Aladdin’s cave of treasures.” My view, of course is that it is also more than that; that there are new unopened boxes in that cave; that moving images can do things no other art form could manage, such as quote or reconstitute motions and bump those short bits of motion up against each other.

It turned out Milk of Amnesia had been transferred—with erratic quality, Scher cautioned—onto the medium that is in the process of incorporating film: video. I don’t own a film projector, and I wanted to watch it some more times, so this was good news. Scher, though he is capable of waxing poetic on the virtues of celluloid, did acknowledge one advantage to seeing the film on video: The pause button would allow me to easily examine individual frames—the swimming pool filled with golf tees, for example, or a Kiki collage.