This was originally posted as a Facebook Note on July 2, 2016.
Maltese Cross Movement. Keewatin Dewdney, 1967.
Keewatin Dewdney’s Maltese Cross Movement brought me such joy the first time I saw it. I believe that was sometime around 1986 or 1987 and that it was either in a program that someone like Marc Glassman had put together at the Rivoli, or something I previewed at the CFMDC for possible inclusion in an Innis Film Society screening. I wish I could remember, but what’s for certain is that we programmed it every opportunity we could at Innis.
I’m sure I was intrigued by the fact that A.K. Dewdney, aka Keewatin Dewdney, was the brother of Chris Dewdney, the poet and essayist, who had inspired me a few years earlier when I was in my small press and performance poet phase. I might also have been impressed to know that Keewatin Dewdney wrote the Computer Recreations/Mathematical Recreations column in Scientific American, a post he inherited from Godel, Escher, Bach’s author, Douglas Hofstadter.
What really intrigued me, however, is how this film stood alone and apart.
It stands apart from Dewdney’s other films, all of which I love and have programmed as well: Wildwood Flower, Scissors, Four Girls, and Malanga (I’m not sure we ever actually showed Four Girls). It then stands alone from all other avant-garde films. Nothing in the work of Michael Snow, Paul Sharits, Stan Brakhage, Yvonne Rainer or anyone else is like this film. These are straightforward observations, but a welcome reminder: at its best, the avant-garde has been radically anti-formula. There are “structural” films and “lyrical films” and “autobiographical films” but, at the end of the day, they each tend to stand on their own much more than “westerns”, “musicals” and “chick flicks.” Dewdney’s five films can only be described as “Keewatin Dewdney films”, and then one would have to add that what unites the films has more to do with underlying structural obsessions that might be motivating Dewdney, and less so the viewer experience of the films.
This film posits that the projector is at least as important as the film itself.
In looking around for scraps of information and insights about this film, I came across this amazing document from the Canadian Journal of Film Studies, an essay by Keewatin Dewdney. It’s a piece Dewdney wrote in 1967 when he made this film that had only existed as a mimeographed document till 2001: http://www.filmstudies.ca/journal/pdf/cj-film-studies101_Dewdney_discontinuous.pdf. A teaser: “We are now in the process of being released from the assumption of continuity and the cinematic schools this assumption has imposed. Delightful as it has been, continuity has given us little more than a visual re-hash of the literary experience (poems included). Anyone objecting violently to this statement surely has a big stake in continuous cinema. The same person will feel enormously threatened by discontinuous films. At the Fourth Ann Arbor Film Festival last year, many in the auditorium groaned during The Flicker, not bored but frightened.”
I wish I could show you the film. As far as I can tell, there isn’t a version on YouTube or Vimeo. However, how about Margaret Atwood’s description of a book Dewdney made, an adaptation of the movie? “It Typescapes is classical, Keewatin Dewdney’s The Maltese Cross Movement is decidedly romantic, as its merge-and-takeoff last page poem emphasises. According to Alphabet 15, it’s based on an underground movie of the same name, but those who haven’t seen he movie can react only to the book as book. Dewdney uses a collage technique, linking pictures with an organic-looking matrix of tiny hieroglyphics which may or may not be decipherable into English. There are a few recognizable words, and two symbols, a maltese cross and a moon, which weave through the pictures, sometimes together, sometimes apart. The oversize fingers, ears and eyes coupled with machines etc. suggest a McLuhan extended-senses theme, but a linear-sequential interpretative approach doesn’t work (unless there’s some Rosetta Stone I missed). What The Maltese Cross Movement does is to provide the reader with a lush field of images from which he can improvise his own poems (“make a world”, as the first collage says). It raises scrapbooking, that you thing you did with old magazines and a pair of scissors while recovering from the measles, to an art.”
That all pretty much applies to the film as well.
As far as I know, William Wees has written most extensively about the film, first in an article in the now defunct Cinema Canada. Wees argues the point about the projector, not the camera, “is the filmmaker’s true medium. The form and content of the film are shown to derive directly from the mechanical operation of the projector - specifically the maltese cross movement’s animation of the disk and the cross illustrates graphically (pun intended) the projector’s essential parts and movements. It also alludes to a an apparatus, from its central mechanical operation to the spectator’s perception of the film’s images… (His) soundtrack demonstrates that what we hear is also built out of the continuous-discontinuous ‘sub-sets.’ The discontinuous sounds have been stored up to provide the male voice on the soundtrack with the sounds needed to to repeat a little girl’s poem: The cross revolves at sunset The moon returns at dawn If you die tonight, Tomorrow you are gone.”
If you get a chance to see it, you must.
PS: Since I first wrote this, Stephen Broomer wrote what is probably the best overall article on Dewdney’s films: http://elumiere.net/especiales/hancox/dewdneybroomer_en.php.
