The Third Eye: Chick Strand / Gunvor Nelson / Storm de Hirsch

Retinas and Cochleae

by

Christopher Zimmerman

Storm de Hirsch Peyote Queen (1965)

I don’t want to put any labels on my films.  

I never impose on you; you need to find what you have to find.

Storm de Hirsch

I want to go into myself as much as possible, and hopefully it will be universal. 

Gunvor Nelson

I get this feeling that we have another role to play that is put upon us by other women sometimes, by what is expected of women artists, and that is to make films about women and make them a certain way.  Make certain statements.  Those statements have been made already over and over.

Chick Strand

The Eye

Storm de Hirsch’s experimental short film Third Eye Butterfly (1968) was conceived as a dual projection, with two screens side-by-side, expanding the experience, in effect, to 70mm.  Like Eisenstein’s theory of montage in which the viewer synthesizes the collision between two shots deriving a third meaning, de Hirsch’s film calls for the viewer to arrive at a third meaning by fusing the two screens in the mind.  In both cases, film and its meaning are produced by the encounter (collision) of image and mind.  

In her program note for the film, Storm de Hirsch concludes with:  ‘The Great Eye dominates’.  This ‘great eye’ refers to the ‘Third Eye’ in her title, which refers to the mystical concept of perception beyond sight.  Also referred to as the Mind’s Eye and Inner Eye, the Third Eye is located in the middle of the forehead of the Hindu god Shiva.  As one of the creators and protectors of the universe, Shiva’s creative power is said to derive from a goddess.  The Third Eye is the portal through which one accesses one’s inner space thus achieving a higher level of awareness and consciousness.  Itself invisible, the Third Eye is visionary; it is the gate to experience outside of the scientifically verifiable empirical realm of perception.  

Each in their own way, the three women filmmakers in this triptych program—Chick Strand, Gunvor Nelson, and Storm de Hirsch—have accessed the Third Eye.  They are seers whose films open modes of seeing, hearing, and touching that move beyond conventional experience structured by patriarchal systems of power.  These three pioneers of American underground film experiment with a host of hand-made visual techniques (painting, etching, layers of glass) forging a highly personal cinema of reflection, the visual experience of which can be stunning.  

Chick Strand Soft Fiction (1979)

However, in a provocative move, I would like to shift our attention away from the Third Eye to the Inner Ear, so to speak.  What also unites the films in this program, besides their visual beauty and feminist sensibilities of a certain generation of women filmmakers, is their attention to and innovations in sound.  By developing the notion of the female voice in its multiplicity, I would like to suggest that it is through sound that these three feminist filmmakers subvert the dominant culture thus carving out a space for their cinematic ‘voices’.

Subversive Sound

Whereas vision requires distance between subject and object, sound literally enters the body.  Looking is one-directional; hearing is always three-dimensional, immersive, encompassing.   Although our primordial experience is sonic, our reality is structured visually, with Western intellectual history prioritizing vision over hearing, the eye over the ear.  From Plato’s allegory of the Cave to modern science to Foucault’s analysis of Bentham’s panopticon, knowledge has been wrapped up in the visual:  light, illumination, enlightenment, objectivity, rationality, detached observation, analysis, control, surveillance…  We ‘master’ our world visually.

Sound, on the other hand, cannot be reduced to a single moment for prolonged observation.  It can only be experienced in time.  It is fleeting, diaphanous; it escapes our desire to capture it and fixate it.  Sound also possesses haptic and tactile properties.  As a phenomenon, it is waves, movement that make bodies vibrate (an object must be touched to make a sound:  musical instruments).  In the cinema, sound traditionally serves to support and spatialize the two-dimensional image and to enmesh the spectator acoustically into the projection space and the filmic texture.  Sound covers and envelops the spectator’s body.  One can always look away, but one can never escape sound.

Against the grain of the conventional framing of sound as an information carrier that supplements visual images, sound exceeds these limits in its power to destabilize.  With sound in cinema, we have doubt, depth, interiority, fear.  Because sound enters the ear and thus the mind, it is as if sound probes deeper into our inner selves.  Just as sound can communicate, it can also disrupt, distort, subvert.  Sound can shatter the coordinates of visual reality.

The Ear

In the Preface to her The Acoustic Mirror:  The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and Cinema, Kaja Silverman remarks that, ‘It has somehow escaped theoretical attention that sexual difference is the effect of dominant cinema’s sound regime as well as its visual regime, and the female voice is as relentlessly held to normative representations and functions as is the female body.’  There has been an incredible theoretical investment in sustaining and then deconstructing the active male gaze’s objectification of the passive female.  And yet, this obsession with the scopic regime in cinema has, in important respects, repressed sound and disavowed how the female voice is sonically constituted and constrained, thus maintaining the original hierarchy of image over sound.  

Gunvor Nelson Natural Features (1990)

In listening to these films by Strand, Nelson, and de Hirsch, we can hear a reversal of this hierarchy, or at least an equilibrium between sound and image. The fact that these filmmakers made experimental work already placed them outside of mainstream cinema and within avant-garde traditions of subverting and transgressing the dominant culture and ways of seeing. Nevertheless, patriarchy runs through experimental film culture, and these three women fought to create films on their own terms even before the Women’s Movement in the early 1970s. On the margins of the marginal, each filmmaker uses sound in unconventional ways, not in support of the image, but to weave audio-visual tapestries out of women’s experience that opens something of a counter history of the woman’s ‘voice’.

Voices

Co-Founder of Canyon Cinema in 1961, West Coast filmmaker Chick Strand forged a unique body of experimental films that fused ethnographic investigation, personal cinema, and feminist concerns with her mastery of bringing out metaphorical meaning through the editing of images.  The centerpiece of our program, Chick Strand’s Soft Fiction (1979) is one of the defining films of the 1970s feminist movement.  Suggesting that the line between truth and fiction is soft and playing on the idea of ‘softcore’ pornography, Soft Fiction weaves a complex tapestry of female subjectivity through the voices of five women recounting and talking about their own erotic experiences.  

Storm de Hirsch Third Eye Butterfly (1968)

In the mode of personal documentary, Strand creates an intimate and lyrical polyphony of female voices entirely from and within female perspectives.  Importantly, the rich texture of the film was developed in collaboration between the filmmaker and subjects.  Not only does Soft Fiction establish Chick Strand’s ‘voice’ as an important, although ‘unheard’, feminist artist, it literally mobilizes women’s voices to build a counter-narrative to the dominance of male subjectivity as the default position.  

Swedish experimental filmmaker Gunvor Nelson’s early formative work was made in the Bay Area in the 1960s and early 1970s.  Deeply involved in film’s ability to transform the visual materials of reality, Nelson’s personal cinema addresses the themes of memory, childhood, home, displacement, ageing, and death as related to women’s experience and issues of identity.  Her tireless and uncompromising creative and critical spirit has driven her to experiment with an impressive range of materials and filmmaking modes:  from her first film that sardonically explores the gap between the idealized media image of the American woman and her quotidian reality, to her sublime series of collage films, on to experiments in video and hand-painted animation.  All of her films emerge out of a very personal and private space between the self, the family, and nature.  

Whether in her first film, the feminist Schmeerguntz, in her first collage film upon her return to Sweden, Frame Line, or in her Natural Features—an intricately layered form of free association animation combining glass, mirrors, photos, cut-outs, paint, Gunvor Nelson’s handling of sound and how it relates to image radically breaks from convention, even from the ‘conventions’ of the avant-garde treatment of sound.  Nelson’s virtuosic manipulation of sound, which tends to emphasize the equivocation, rather than the communication of sonic information, results in soundscapes as thickly layered and textured as her images, if not more.  Nelson uses sound to challenge the visual realm, to comment satirically and poignantly on the imagery, to force our ears to notice the gap between sound and image, to distort and to disturb.  

American poet Storm de Hirsch was a key figure in the New York avant-garde film scene in the 1960s and was one of the founding members of the Filmmakers’ Coop.  Often etching and painting on the celluloid frame-by-frame, Storm de Hirsch created abstract animated films heavily under the influence of her poetic sensibilities.  

Chick Strand Soft Fiction

Explorations into color and light, both Peyote Queen and Third Eye Butterfly operate in a mystical, visionary realm, in which their abstract animations pulsate and surge to the rhythms of the musical sound tracks—mind-expanding experiences in which sound, image, and mind enter into the same pulse, into the same flow, the same rhythm.  One might say that Storm de Hirsch’s abstractions become musical at the same time that the music becomes visual.  Interestingly and perhaps provocatively, her document of Charlotte Moorman’s avant-garde music festival is a silent film, a ‘cine-sonnet’, as if her images speak through silence.

Although taking very different paths, Chick Strand, Gunvor Nelson, and Storm de Hirsch each found and developed their creative voice in environments where the female voice is muted and disciplined.  A strong line running through each of their battles against patriarchy to shape their voices (as expressing their authority as ‘authors’) is their innovative and subversive use of sound.  The contributions to American underground cinema by these three filmmakers have been ‘overlooked’, perhaps because they call to be heard.

© 2020 Christopher Zimmerman