Ragtag Programming for Film and Media Art has created our first edition of Neither/Nor, an annual series that will partner our two programs, True/False Film Fest and Ragtag Cinema, to celebrate the art of film scholarship while offering a historical overview of “chimeras” — films which straddle the line between fiction and nonfiction. In our inaugural Neither/Nor, film critic Eric Hynes takes a look at New York City chimeric film from the late 1960s. Two of these film, Symbiopsychotaxiplasm (William Greaves, 1968) and 1PM  (D.A. Pennebaker, Jean-Luc Godard, and Richard Leacock, 1972), screened at Ragtag earlier this week.

Chimeras have existed since the advent of film, a form that has always simultaneously offered to record and represent, to capture and simulate life. But as a filmmaker, Jim McBride says, “Something was in the air” in the mid-to-late 1960s, particularly in New York City, where the likes of McBride, William Greaves, D.A. Pennebaker, as well as transients Peter Whitehead and Jean-Luc Godard, were making gloriously uncategorizable works of cinematic art.

It was a moment when everything and everyone seemed to be riding, or even embracing, the edge of things, when films and politics and morality suddenly seemed undefined, up for grabs, subject to reinvention. With the Civil Rights era giving way to Black Power, Kennedy idealism ceding to Johnson’s military morass, Beat Dadaism transforming into hippie agitation, and mod Godard morphing into Mao Godard, it was if utopia an dystopia were both within reach — if not one and the same.

For these four filmmakers, as well as other fellow travelers in New York and beyond, it was a moment when politics, formal curiousity, and the sudden mobility of both the camera and sound recording invited an approach to cinema in which every shot, every gesture, every decision seemed less of a statement than a question. Reality and fiction were constantly being blurred — for serious and for play, and ever sincerely. The four films in this series were all recorded during 1967-1968, and all are both invaluable time capsules of that moment and impossible to box or bottle up. Their very form — their deliberate unwieldiness— makes them perennially modern. Strictly speaking, they’re neither documentary, nor drama, scripted nor spontaneous, true nor false. They’re neither/nor, and therefore pretty much anything they want to be. – ERIC HYNES

A. Friday, March 1 / 7:30PM / Little Ragtag
B. Saturday, March 2 / 8:00PM / Big Ragtag 
DAVID HOLZMAN’S DIARY
dir. Jim McBride, 1967; 74 min
Q&A with director Jim McBride

David Holzman’s Diary comes on as a first-person, documentary-style, chronological diary of David, a young man recently unemployed and potentially going off to war. David rambles for the camera about his ambitions and ideas, shoots hi home and surrounds, and generally tries to give a wholistic sense of his life (including his TV watching and masturbation habits). The footage is so raw that it seems to be edited in camera, with David visibly switching the machine on and off, and includes interstitial sequences of placement, light flares, and distorted sound. Yet it’s all a fiction. Released in 1967, director Jim McBride’s movie anticipates (and pre-satirizes) the next half-century of first-person cinema — of video cam monologues, of YouTube exhibitionism, of faux confessionals, of media’s psychic irresolution. (EH)

Thursday, Feb 28/ 5:00PM, Little Ragtag
THE FALL
dir. Peter Whitehead, 1969; 110 min
discussion with film critic Eric Hynes
The Fall was the parting shot for Peter Whitehead, a 30-year-old British filmmaker who dropped the mic and scarcely returned to stage after all was edited and done, literally wandering the desert to teach falconry in Saudi Arabia in the decades that followed. This would be tragic if the film didn’t deploy a career’s worth of ideas and developments at once. In town for the 1967 New York Film Festival, Whitehead was cajoled into training his lens on Gotham, the de facto capital of civilization he found both kinetically alluring and politically deplorable. From that autumn through May of 1968, he would shoot a daunting spectrum of activity: a pro-military rally in Washington Square Park, an anti-war march on D.C., art openings, art happenings, poetry readings, football games, dance parties, photo shoots, Newark in smoldering ruins, and the tide-turning sit-ins at Columbia University. (EH)