For those of you haven't seen the film, I highly recommend you pause and check it out now. http://www.ubu.com/film/schneemann_fuses.html. Schneemann made Fuses partly primarily as a response to Brakhage's Loving. According to Schneemann, Brakhage made Loving because he was obsessed with the erotic relationship between her the composer Jim Tenney. And yet, she always felt that he failed to capture it adequately so she set out to make Fuses. In Millennium Film Journal 54, David James argues: “Dissatisfied with Brakhage's representation of her sexuality in Loving (1957) and Cat's Cradle (1959), the films he made about her relationship with James Tenney, Carolee Schneemann made her own vision, one that addresses the phallocentric imbalance of even Brakhage's best attempts to share authorship with a lover in the profilmic space. In doing so she was able to address the repression in culture generally of what she understood as the female principle. Her film is, then a polemically female representation of heterosexual eroticism, one that demonstrates its difference in almost all the phases of its production.
“Schneemann's intimate and graphic representation of sexual intercourse was historically anomalous; its explicitness appeared anti-feminist in the contexts of feminist attempts to differentiate erotica from pornography, and its fascination with the male as much as the female body was unusual outside homosexual pornography. As in Brakhage's participation films, this egalitarian representation follows from the lovers photographing each other during lovemaking, though Schneemann also photographed herself and used camera stands to photograph herself and Tenney together. The editing was entirely Schneemanns own work, but otherwise labor was not divided in the production of the profilmic nor in its recording. Thus reproduction of gender in power relations in the profilmic or in the control of the apparatus was avoided, as was phallocratic distribution of roles - the male as the scopophilic subject and the female as its object. The film so thoroughly interweaves shots of Schneemann and shots from her point of view, shots of Tenney and shots from his point of view, and of the two of them from no attributable point of view that narratorial positioning is entirely dissolved. The only stable persona implied is a black cat, its manifest sensuality is a purring correlative to the action, reminding us that in the textual plurality of the film's enfolding, it illustrates the pussy's point of view. “Within this plurality, the organizing telos of the male orgasm - the end that orders the narrative and representational systems of contemporary pornography - is shunned. The montage does not insert the shots into the rhetorical figures of orthodox narrative economy, but rather disperses authorship and subjectivity as generalized functions of an indeterminate erotic field. Emotions are legible on the participants' faces and their existence outside sexual passion is fragmentarily glimpsed (but then only in contexts that feed back metaphorically into the iconographic field - she running on the beach and he driving a car), but these do not articulate psychological dimensions of character. The lovers are not unified, discrete subjects within the erotic activity, so much as the vehicle of an eroticism that possesses them.” James’s account of the film in Millennium is one of the more helpful descriptions and, though there has been significant recent writing on Schneemann by women, I apologize for foregrounding a male take on the matter. Not just one, but two, for Bruce Elder’s response to James further illuminates the nature of Schneemann’s radical project in Fuses:
“While it is certainly true that Schneemann believes the female principle is repressed in our culture and that a large part of Schneemann’s art is devoted to making explicit what such repression bars from our consciousness, it is not so clear that ‘phallocentricism’ is what is statke between herself and Brakhage on the matter of representing the erotic relationship she and her lover Tenney shared. For Schneemann seems less eager to deny men their expression of sexuality than to claim for women the right to express theirs. Schneeman has an abiding curiosity about ‘primitive’ thinking (forms of thinking that our culture of instrumental reason has marginalized by ascribing to them the status of infantile modes of awareness or superstitious and pre-scientific ways of understanding the world.) She has even taken on the ask of exploring her fascination (and, may we suppose, that of other people) with the spell the phallus exercises in the consciousness. Plumb Line, as we have alredy seen, attempts to plumb the depths of the erotic spell with which a lover from whom she has just split had held her, virtually enthralled – and the film associates this erotic spell with her fascination with the phallus.”
In case you’re interested, you can watch an online representation of Plumb Line here: http://www.ubu.com/film/schneemann_plumb.html. Schneemann never says explicitly what she finds lacking in Loving, and how she’s addressing that in Fuses. Elder proposes, somewhat speculatively, that she felt that for “a film to be true to her sense of lovemaking, it could not be so scoptic as the formidable power of Brakhage’s imagination causes his to be. I believe that Schneemann wanted to capture the sense of the tacticle/kinaesthetic body, rather than the body observed externally; this is the implication of her remark concerning her motivation for making Fuses, ‘Since my deepest expressive and responsive life core was considered obscene, I thought I had better see what it looked like in my own vision. I had never seen any erotica or pornography what lived sexuality felt like.’” (Bruce Elder, Bodies of Vision). A few asides. Fuses was also a response to Brakhage’s Cat’s Cradle, in which she and Tenney (and Stan and Jane) also appear. https://vimeo.com/40928474.
Carolee basically felt that Loving, as well as films Cat's Cradle and Window Water Baby Moving, were inadequate representations of the female experience, romantic and phallocentric I've never quite found the words to describe it, and I sometimes think I'm completely missing the point, but Fuses is just more erotic to me. When I was in my 20s and 30s and discovering this film, I really did focus on the formal elements. The film took me to that zone occupied by Pollock, Rauschenberg, Brakhage, and others (mostly men ). The drawing on film, superimpositions, rapid montage, and color palette all seemed more significant to me than the documentation of sexual activity that was going on. I find this unfathomable now. Was it because I knew the couple on screen (especially Jim)? Was I such a formalist that I was blind (and comatose)? I’m not sure, but it all seems so bizarre now.
There is much more I’d like to say about Schneemann, but this is just about one film in a rich career that intersected with the Viennese Actionists (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fw_wW2v45eI), Fluxus, John Cage, Claes Oldenburg, the Minimalists, several generations of feminists (including influences like de Beauvoir), Yves Klein, Kusama, Paik, Moorman, Yoko Ono… and dozens and dozens of other collaborators and influences. I’d like to talk about the International Experimental Film Congress/Innis Film Society/AGO appearances, her extraordinary influence on younger artists (performance, film/video, and otherwise), the parody of her performance persona in The Big Lebowski. So I’ll leave it that.
“I never thought I was shocking,” she says. “I say this all the time and it sounds disingenuous, but I always thought, ‘This is something they need. My culture is going to recognize it’s missing something.'” (Carolee Schneemann, 2014, The Guardian)
