ваш фильм (YOURFILM), (Alex Mikhailichenko, 1922)

'Bearing witness to the proud travelogues of others is one thing, but when one can self-document a unique passage in light and colour, does one not hum contentedly? A billion subjective versions, a billion truths, surely ring louder than one.' Gilles Deleuze

What are we viewers if we are not frustrated artists who would love nothing more than to bend the onscreen action to our will? To save a hero from a low-flying blade of a masked villain (or condemn her, should her passions/face/haircut demand it), or step up and throw a piece of small jewellery into a pit so as to better help our half-pint fictional brethren (and so end a painful, long, painfully long journey)?

Such was the conviction of Alex Mikhailichenko, a Ukranian who invented the YOURFILM technology in 1922. His visionary future included the 'destruction of the passive feature film worldwide by 1930', which to his Soviet paymasters meant of course only one thing, the disrobing and slaying of Hollywood demigods. The staggering failure of the technology may disprove something, but certainly not the potency of the idea. If anything it was too good, like Houdini's disappearing elephant trick in 1918, which was received underwhelmingly by an audience who did not understand its potency of the conjurer's greatest illusion.

Utilising 'brain pads' which were attached to the heads of the audience, the action in YOURFILM was changed by the emotional reactions of the punters. What happened on screen, after the initial image of two lovers on a battlefield ('Love and War being a solid beginning for all stories', according to Mikhailichenko), depended entirely on how the assembled react. Mikhailichenko himself described the effects upon his arrival in France in 1962, in an interview with Francois Truffaut for Cahiers du Cinema:

'Always, the screen was bubbling, Dali-like in its concept but more like Monet in its colouring and blurring of fantasies. Like melting clouds... one minute our hero was running through a field, before the swaying wheat was sea. The amazing thing was that what I saw and what my neighbour saw was different... we agreed on the principles... or did we? One time a group of drunken sailors turned the story into a tawdry strip show through their bustling brainwaves, and another time, the same story reached a fetid nirvana of absurdities with one crowd of minor geniuses. I wish I could see that version again and again. But it is gone.'

While Mikhailichenko was more interested in the psychedelic uniqueness of each experience, the Soviets saw otherwise. The filmmaker suggested that the technology was the ultimate socialist art, involving as many authors as possible; but they disagreed. When Maxim Gorky returned from Italy to the USSR in the early 1930s, it was such a coup for the Soviets (a rejection of fascism and (re)embrace of communism being the ultimate propaganda boon) that the writer was given the Order of Lenin. When Gorky compared YOURFILM to the 'distracting trinkets of Coney Island', and called it 'another time destroyer, a waste,' YOURFILM's days were numbered. It was seen as an indulgence, with one prominent critic too many.

The sadness, of course, comes in the corruption. Mikhailichenko claims his technology was stolen. Eyewitnesses claim it was distorted by the Soviets and turned into a weapon, with huge disorientating projections thrown across the invading Nazis in Stalingrad. Others suggest it was stolen by the SS, co-opted after 1945 by American agencies, and subsequently seen in Nicaragua and Afghanistan. Rumours among US squadrons in Vietnam were that the North Vietnamese were being tooled with brain-pads to convince themselves that they were seeing huge ten-headed hydras behind them, on the side of Communism.

Mikhailichenko despaired, and fled the USSR in 1961. 'The fact that it had no measurable purpose frightened everybody. They would rather it had a destructive existence than the vague pleasurable one I conceived.'

Subsequent nuanceless audience-decides interfaces have met with narrow success, but they are on-rails narratives that bear little relation to YOURFILM's freewheeling possibilities: The on-running Choose Your Own... series (in which each film stops at various points to allow audience members to vote for whichever pre-recorded scenario they desire) has been resurrected many times since its 1954 debut. It has survived repeated critical barragings to threaten to come back into fashion following kitschbait features by Robert Rodriguez. His Naked, Naked Sex (2004) and Six-Gun Pizza (2005) were internet-only experiments in the hilariously outdated mode, and only highlight how far ahead of his time Mikhailichenko actually was. We still haven't come near his vision, and next to YOURFILM, all simplistic technologies must cower.1

ваш фильм YOURFILM Directed by Alex Mikhailichenko Produced by Alex Mikhailichenko, Written by Alex Mikhailichenko/ The Assembled Debuted in Moscow in November 1922

1. The rather peurile Top Or Bottom? adult spin-offs quickly lost their novelty in the seventies, however, with audience members frequently taking the most savagely deviant option at every opportunity, causing the films to be little more than the same sequence of events each time (like any normal film), only with a dozen intervals of frustrated clicking on keypads. And worse, surely, is the Cliche Program, rumoured to have been used by major Hollywood studios in various films in the 21st Century. This leaves the suggestion, ever lingering, that certain Hollywood stars can no longer perform to the standard required, and that through variations of YOURFILM technologies, audiences are convinced that, say, Mr de Niro still has his chops; because, after all, we still want him to be good; that perhaps what we are seeing is an assisted performance, with our collective memories of his younger danger twisting his infertile present day efforts, changing them like an empathetic autotune. The possibility also hovers that some stars may not be real, but hazy dreams of suicides, eternally out of focus. For who can really say that they have seen Ms Sandra Bullock and truly understand her; and who can identify what genus one Mr Vincent Jones really is?

Aa (Niko Hämäläinen, 1966)

Bb(Niko Hämäläinen, 1979),Cc(Niko Hämäläinen, 1992), Dd(Niko Hämäläinen, 1999)
Ee(Niko Hämäläinen, 2005), Ff(Niko Hämäläinen and Evan Hämäläinen, 2009)

The Finns, then, have a school of film-makers unadorned by the garland throwers of the world (impossible as that may be, given that in these times mankind increasingly appears to be an island of garland-tossers, with fewer and fewer worthy recipients of those celebrated woven flower decorations); a school that numbers just one, a furious pedant and painfully precise temperment, a man who refuses to die until he finishes his work, a work that is impossible to finish. A man who describes himself as 'Finnish at the beginning, and at the end...'
Hämäläinen's preoccupation, was, is, and will ever be words. The latest in his 'visualised dictionary' series,Ff, has just been completed and will be released in Autumn 2009, a mere four years after the release of Ee, which itself was only seven years after Dd. 'digital video technology is helping us speed up' he says, optimistically. 'Besides, Xx and Qq won't take me long, they are short letters,'1 The concept: Hämäläinen makes visuals of the the dictionary. Aa is a series of images representing each word in the Oxford English Dictionary beginning with A, in alphabetical order. The sequels follow suit. So Aa begins with an image of the letter a itself, before we see an aadvark, then a and so on. Some of his shots have to be created in interesting ways: 'to articulate both argue and then arguing, never mind argument, in interesting and unrepetitive ways is perhaps the difficulty in this. And of course, how to render abstracts such as abstract in second-long bursts of images is a constant problem.'2


The BBC's Arena strand made a documentary about Hämäläinen in 1975 entitled Dictionary Man, and they returned in 1999 to check on his progress, the result of which appeared that year as The Dictionary Man Forever. The question that the interviewer returns to time and again, is inevitable:

'Why, Niko?'

'Why what?'

'Why this?'

'I don't know what you mean.'

'Why film the dictionary? It is an impossible undertaking.'

(Pause. Niko thinks, as if for the first time, about this.)

'Well what else would you have me do?'

And so, we see in Niko Hämäläinen a romantic spirit specific not only to man, but to men; a foolhardy heroism in which no-one can win, for there can be no glory. And yet, we find it admirable, this bloody-minded devotion, and wonder, what would Hämäläinen's reaction be if he were to get close to completing his task? Would his knees buckle like a rookie serving for the championship at Wimbledon, a rookie who had been fearless until the point that possibility is fast becoming probability? We cannot know, for time will have its win over the project.

But is it a defeat for an artist to die before his work is done? Don't all artists die before their work is done? Some, perhaps, are done long before they die. The interest with Hämäläinen stems from the fact that we know exactly how much further he has to go. He is 70 now, and his latest, Ff is chapter six of twenty-six. And while this chapter has a polish that Aa lacks, and some of the transitions are more imaginative, the truth is that his style and technique are largley the same, over forty years on. Such consistency in art confuses us.

Gilbert Adair:
'Why are our letters in the order they are? What does it mean, besides putting the Alexes and Andrews on the sunny side of the classroom and the Zacharys and Zoes in the dark? What does it mean, beyond putting Springsteen, Bruce next to Springfield, Dusty (but far, far away from Springfield, Buffalo) in the record store? What chiming moments does such a pervasive ordering of the world throw up? Is our alphabet a key? Can it tell a story? What Hämäläinen does, in not so many words (or perhaps, in exactly so many words), is ask these questions, with a direct action so bold and hopeless that we question its sanity.'3

Evan Hämäläinen, Niko's son, who co-directed Ff:
'My father is a man haunted by dreams of an oversized alphabet forest, where rain falls and an l tips over, uprooted, or a k bends to offer a branch for a climber. Whether this is why he chose this project, or because of the project, well who can tell at this point?'

Adair agian:

'The truth is that of course he could have chosen to make films about his his family, or his home, something that was superficially more subjective. But the small decisions he makes in his films express his personality in ways other filmmakers fail to do over countless fictions: The skittering creature he chooses for the word bee, for example, or the grey, ashy block for the word brick; both articulate ceaselessly.'

Aa Directed by Niko Hämäläinen Produced by Niko Hämäläinen Venstock Films/Aqua Film Distribution. US/UK Release Date: N/A.

1. The Sunday Times Magazine, September 2009.

2. Dictionary Man, BBC films, 1976.

3. Flickers 2, Faber & Faber, 2008.

4. The Sunday Times Magazine, September 2009.

THE MESMER (Louis Grenier, 1894)

In cinema prehistory, before the Lumiere Brothers and Thomas Edison set the 20th Century in motion, the future was still to be invented. Louis Grenier's Octoscope II was an early possibility: It used a flip-card technique to turn the stills which were then projected using a series of mirrors onto the screen. In purely scientific terms, it was limited, and Grenier lacked the business nous or finances to develop his invention. He may have lacked the desire too, for Grenier was an amateur magician, who performed tricks at private parties in Paris and London for years before moving to New York in 1888 and developing his turns into a professional stage act. He saw moving images as a novelty that he could work into his performances, and by 1891 had developed his prototype Octoscope.

With the invention he developed a new stage persona: Louis the Magic. This was also the name of his first show using the Octoscope, and it appears, according to the few existing reports, to have been a simple spirit illusion using a projection of a dancing girl, which wowed few. The Octoscope II was cumbersome, noisy and incredibly hot, meaning that it drew attention to itself however it was placed in the theater. Louis the Magic shows later that year employed similar effects and had similar problems: The New York Buzzard described The Queen of Sheba as 'a disappointing fizz of non-technologies', while The Manhattan Fidget attacked Resurrection as 'a blasphemous cuss at the black art of entertainment'.

But it was with his final effort that Louis the Magic would make his name. The Mesmer was at first sight a tricksy and self-referential illusion that nodded to Grenier's previous failure as both a magician and a scientist. The performance, as much as can be understood from contemporary reports, involved Grenier performing a series of illusions, including making an assistant (star of the New York stage Annabelle Newton) disappear. She would then re-appear on the screen, in what can be presumed to be pre-recorded reels, where she would dance to the music of the orchestra or pianist in the theatre (the musicians themselves would apparently time pauses in their sequences to coincide with pieces of film where the Newton appears to be frozen, and speed up to a frantic pace during a sequence when the illusionist himself appears on the screen and proceeds to repeat at exaggerated speed the illusion performed not five minutes earlier in the theatre, only in reverse; this time, both Grenier and Newton, according to a frantic report in the Queens Inquisitor, 're-apparitioned there upon the brocaded balconies of the real world Palace Theater, in fully three-dimensions, plausible and verified by those sound gentlemen in proximity')

The trick was repeated, but with masterful variations- at one point, when a vanishing appeared to go wrong, Grenier approached the Octoscope, ripped the reels of images out, turned the machine off, and appeared to puzzle over its non-conforming innards. As people began to leave, booing, an image of Grenier miraculously appeared on the screen, shouting instructions to himself below in the theatre about how to fix the machine. Grenier then argued with himself on the screen, causing 'much hilarity and witless falling about' according to The Downtown Fibber. By this point, the crowd was amazed.

The Mesmer was a great success, and Grenier and Newton toured the country with it, marrying on the road in 1893. The Grenier-Newton's were cover stars of both Sullied Victoriana and American Tat magazines, and a recording of a performance of The Mesmer was made using Edison's Kinetoscope, which itself toured the country.1 Grenier put all his savings into distributing this recording and it played nationally, but shorn of the live action element, the incredible illusions did not translate. By 1896, it was apparent that the tide had turned; cinema was amazing audiences in its own right, and magicians seemed quaint in this era of new wonder. Annabelle Grenier-Newton herself had taken up an offer of a contract to appear in some of Edison's Biograph movies, and Grenier himself, the debts mounting, announced one final farewell performance of The Mesmer at Brooklyn Hall on October 26, 1896 that would 'bury the ghost of magic'. Highly publicized, the show sold out; but despite hundreds of witnesses, there is much conjecture over what actually happened that night.

According to both the Brooklyn Brag and the Gotham Bugle, Grenier performed better than ever, and despite the rumoured strain on their relationship, the horseplay and chemistry between husband and wife was variously 'unnaturally natural' and 'gosh darn cute and a wonder'. The trouble appeared to flare in the third act, at the part when Grenier came into the audience to fix the 'broken' Octoscope. As usual, the images on the screen somehow continued even after Grenier turned his contraption off to examine it, and as ever, he argued with the image of himself onscreen. The Big Apple Vigilant says that 'this time there was a twist; Mrs Grenier herself appeared onscreen, and to much laughter, argued with both of her husbands about the best way to fix the problem, the joke, of course, being that there was no problem if they were both on the screen'. The Williamsburg Soothsayer continues: 'Then, the apparent faux problem, became an apparent real one, or did it? For suddenly the device spun into life, knocking out noise and heat, and the projected Mr and Mrs doubled, tripled, quadrupled, played at super time; the arrangement spun and spun, the poor couple danced and danced, faster yet, and the applause grew to ovations; and then, fast as the Octoscope spun, it caused sparks, which lit the first flame; before we knew it, the cursed contraption was a heap of hot yellow. This caused the images on the screen to melt, distort, spinning the dancing images into new confounding shapeless peoples, before imploding into snapping stars. The smell of burning plastics filled the lungs of the patrons, and the slides burned, burned, burned'

Firemen came to confront the blaze, and while no audince members were hurt, the Grenier-Nortons were never seen again, nor were their bodies found. Eye-witnesses report seeing Grenier 'dissolve into the wall' or 'erupt in a cloud of smoke' as his likeness burned on screen.

A cab driver who claimed to have driven the pair to Grand Central station later that night was proved to be a liar. Did he fake their deaths to escape debts? Or kill his wife and himself in an elaborate double-bluff? Periodically, uncanny likenesses of the pair turn up in the background of many movies from the early decades of the 20th Century; he as an unnamed bar patron or cowboy, she as a Ziegfeld Folly, or a masked beauty in a harem; but no-one ever saw them in three dimensions.

The Big Town Sober Judge offered a sentimental reflection several weeks later: 'It is as if, undone by the real world, failing at life, Grenier conjured a feat beyond any: He managed to vault himself and his wife into a deathless afterlife, a constant invisibility; and in this burning heaven of celluloid and wood, where she dances and he draws rabbits from hats, the words 'Louis the Magic' and 'legend' are never separated'

The Mesmer Directed by Louis Grenier/Thomas Edison Produced by Biograph/ Black Maria Studio Starring Louis Grenier, Annabelle Newton-Grenier Release Date US: 1894; Distributed nationally to limited theatres with Kinetoscopes.

1. This recording, which lasts for a huge for the time seventeen minutes, is what contemporary reviewers refer to when discussing the 'film' The Mesmer. It is of course, a film of a show involving film, and as such is an early example of Filmism, the movement championed by the Spanish New Wave in the early fifties: Filmism was a post-modern attempt to examine the art of cinema by filming showings of films. A split in 1960 between Real-Filmists (those who shot the theatre, the audience and surroundings as well as the feature) and True-Filmists (those who only permitted the feature itself onscreen) caused ripples throughout Spain. Both parties remaned fans of The Mesmer, however.

THE IRON TOWER (Victor Lazarus,1926)

Strident Informations Abound! Default On Life!... and so on; Victor Lazarus' beautifully tinted silent vistas are punctuated by various sloganeering texts that never quite explain themselves; Silent movie great Donald Dunston Dunderville gives an iconic performance as a Roman Centurion who is determined to prove himself; and then there is the great Iron Tower itself, the biggest construction ever on a Hollywood lot, a towering monolith that in the movie appears one morning in the centre of Rome, tall and vulgar, begging to be challenged, and in real life unleashed a thousand poisons upon the Warner Brothers lot during its six-month stay. Avoid Diffusion! Disrupt Arts! the intercutting lines suggest and demand, prompting confusion from the pictures before us. An extistential journey? A surrealist wonder? A visual beanfeast? A symbolic afterlife query? A homosexual inquest? Pseudo-nonsense? The last pure leap of the silent age? The Iron Tower may well be all of these things, and more. Steadfast! Steadfast! Steadfast!

A ripe concoction indeed.

The crackling hollow images of early in the film set up what looks like being a standard romantic plot- Tyrus (Dunderville) is a Centurion of no great reputation, and his dreams of ways to prove himself to his mentor, Lexus (Roberto Strong) include bog-standard run-and-rescue scenarios and heroic pronouncements from the blond wonder (Breathe Maestro! Your Savior Explicits! Defence Is Dust!). Dunderville's broody insecurity invests these sequences with much pathos; but it is when the iron tower appears that he sees his true chance. No explanation is given for the appearance of the tower, which reaches beyond the clouds. The Romans see it at first as military assault, then as a blessing from the Gods; but as brave warrior after brave warrior attempts to ride his horse up the side of the construction, only to fall, the city's fathers begin to feel that the Gods are shunning them. They see this as a message that Rome is doomed. Alas! The Wolf-Brothers Forgotten, Accursed!

Tyrus, to the merriment of all, decides to attempt to climb the tower with the aid of only four arrows, which he drives into holes in the side of the tower and uses as steps, moving one at a time to make progress. The city gathers to laugh at the folly of the cherubic innocent whose climb is painfully slow. In some of the most dramatic sections of the film, Dunderville's hopeful and scared face is besieged by rotten fruit, thrown from below, and occasionally a failed hero, falling from above, hatred in his throat. Ponderus! I Will Resurrect! cries one burning victim. It increasingly seems like failure is the glorious option, that when he falls, Rome will nurse him to her rose breast and love him; but Tyrus continues, and makes it to the Supposed Volcano In The Clouds. The climax, set in lava skies, offers one thundering metaphor after another, as Tyrus, nonreligious and curious, argues with the heavenly voices and their brazen systems.

Freud, Sigmund called it 'the greatest sexual metaphor in the canon'1. Freud, Jimmy of the LA Chronicle called it 'barbaric witchery, fraudulent film-making, juvenile symbolism.'2 In light of the problems Warner had during shooting (one carpenter died falling from the construction, and two horses were injured in seperate incidents; costs escalated three-hundred-fold), Froyd, Beau of Snapshot christened the Iron Tower 'Mr Warner's Limping Member' before adding, after a disastrous opening few weeks, that 'America's chastity is clearly immune to such grand drizzle. Our belts are tight against such pornographic abundance' 3

Even so, the movie in time found a following, not least for its absurdist reckoning of heroism, the desperate performance of Dunderville, and the timeless images that pervade, ripping through the nightmares of a bustling century: The tower, the climb, the success of death.

The movie's title was changed to The Black Tower in Canada, where the terrorist group tour en fer (Iron Tower) had been causing political problems. The group changed their name to la tour noire as a riposte. Authorities thus banned the movie for years there, and it wasn't until a popular new version of the movie (with a soundtrack by German band Harmonia, added neon colouring and rediscovered lost sequences) was released in 1975 that Canadians could see The Iron Tower in full proud glory.

Dunderville? Alas his career struggled, like many of his peers, with the advent of sound. His shyly dashing appearance was undone by an ungodly flat vocal, but even so his fame (and that of co-star Tyrone Symple) was enough to bring success to Little People Are People A Little (Alan Smithee, 1933), RKO's response to MGM's Freaks (Tod Browning, 1932), the movie that started a domino effect of increasingly exploitative outsider flicks about those members of society with physical abnormalities. The success of Dunderville's sound endeavour warranted a quick sequel, but Little People Are People A Little Too (Reckless Adams, 1933) was boycotted by the midget union of Hollywood (Small Person's Association of Movie-Actors, or SPAM) who decided to offer none of their actors to the studio, on account of the first movie's 'unaccountable patronising of fellas under five feet'4. The Folly of Dunston Dunderville (John Turturro, 1998) a movie about the period, was a sympathetic look at Dunderville's naivety, but still drew lawsuits from his estate, such is the sensitivity about the politics of those movies that reside in RKO's vaults, unseen for years.

Oh Dunderville. As one of the captions from The Iron Tower put it: He Burns The Stars With His Poise! Can They Love Him? The answer was that they could, but all too briefly.

The Iron Tower Directed by Victor Lazarus Produced by David Warner, Adam Warner Written by Rick Flynn Starring Donald Dunston Dunderville, Roberto Strong Warner Brothers Release Date US: September 1926 Running Time: 74 mins Tagline: 'Where Did It Come From? Where Does It Go? Beware, The Iron Tower!'

1.Juvenalia, 1933

2. Oct 17th, 1926

3. Jan 3rd, 1927

4. SPAM press release, printed in Variety, Jan 14th, 1933