Neverlands: David Brooks and the New American Cinema
Art & Trash, episode 39
Neverlands: David Brooks and the New American Cinema
Stephen Broomer, August 23, 2024
The American underground filmmaker David Brooks came of age in the 1960s. Brooks was preoccupied with myth; he considered Albert Lamorisse’s short film White Mane (1953) and Barrie’s play Peter Pan; or, the Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up (1904) to be the essential myths, and his various attempts at making feature films were wrapped up in the making of such myths. The Peter Pan fable is at once central and peripheral to Brooks’s filmmaking: it casts a pall over the whole of his work through the tragedy of Brooks’s own premature death. And yet, in his work, the Peter Pan fable also makes occasional and potent intrusions, evident in his preoccupations with exotic and faraway lands. Brooks’s stable vantage point—the island of Manhattan, often seen in his films in panning shots of rooftops—was also Neverland to Brooks’s childhood home of New England.
In this video essay, Stephen Broomer discusses Brooks's modest body of work in relation to the fable of eternal youth and his community, the New American Cinema, from his vantage point of Manhattan in the 1960s.
This text was commissioned as a liner note for the Re:Voir DVD release of the films of David Brooks,.
SCRIPT:
Neverland, the fictional setting of J.M. Barrie’s tales of Peter Pan, was an island as it would exist in the minds of children, an island without boundaries, stage to fables of eternal youth, to rogue fantasies of pirates and orphans locked in conflict. Eternal youth, as it was imagined by Barrie, was the passage to Neverland itself, a perpetual renewal of the self by the imagination; for the rest of us, it is a more abstract concept, oftentimes reserved for those dead ‘before their time’, felled by the vagaries of fate, eternally young in remembrance. The American underground filmmaker David Brooks came of age in the 1960s. Brooks was preoccupied with myth; he considered Albert Lamorisse’s short film White Mane (1953) and Barrie’s play Peter Pan; or, the Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up (1904) to be the essential myths, and his various attempts at making feature films were wrapped up in the making of such myths. The only feature film that he would complete, The Wind is Driving Him Toward the Open Sea (1968), takes its title from stage directions in Barrie’s play. In its elusive protagonist, war veteran and painter Chandler Moore, it also suggests a traumatized mid-century mirror of Lamorisse's and Barrie’s protagonists, those errant children whose shelter of imagination casts them as exiles. The Peter Pan fable is at once central and peripheral to Brooks’s filmmaking: it casts a pall over the whole of his work through the tragedy of Brooks’s own premature death. And yet, in his work, the Peter Pan fable also makes occasional and potent intrusions, evident in his preoccupations with exotic and faraway lands. Brooks’s stable vantage point—the island of Manhattan, often seen in his films in panning shots of rooftops—was also Neverland to Brooks’s childhood home of New England.
David Brooks, born in Massachusetts in 1944, came to New York City in the early 1960s to study philosophy and psychology at Columbia University. He instead found his ideal teacher in the critic and filmmaker Jonas Mekas, midwife to the city’s underground film scene. At 18, Brooks was appointed by Mekas to lead the newly established Film-Makers’ Cooperative; he soon left Columbia to devote himself to filmmaking. He was one of several young people—his contemporaries would include P. Adams Sitney and Barbara Rubin—who congregated around Mekas, together establishing the New American Cinema as a thriving movement. In a sense, it was a movement driven by youth, where a precocious few, arriving at a generational crossroads, responded with urgency to the birth of a new art. The Neverland metaphor extends readily to Mekas and the New American Cinema: for some in Mekas’s circle, just over the edge of adulthood, it was a children’s crusade. As a steward to the New American Cinema, Brooks was a member of a thriving community; he was also, in his own creative efforts, a disciple of its filmmakers, in particular, Mekas and Stan Brakhage. His efforts channel the aesthetics of his mentors: diaristic and epistolary forms mixed with fragmentary and at times illusory images, abstractions of detail that declare the spiritual mysteries of vision and that explore the phenomenal properties of light. Even as his work soon individuated itself from theirs, it would continue to bear the influence of their example.
Brooks’s first finished film, Jerry (1963), is a silent portrait of painter, collagist and underground filmmaker Jerry Jofen. The portrait is structured in two halves. For the first half, Jofen plays a recorder on camera; Brooks lingers on his embouchure, and on his fingers moving along the tone holes. The image zooms around Jofen and he appears in superimposition, crossing himself, a dynamic structure mirrored by the diagonal line of his recorder as seen in profile. At their densest, the superimpositions present three Jofens, recorders protruding in different directions as if summoning the image of Roland Kirk blowing multiple reeds at once. Jofen plays in a room lit for the most part by a single, intense light, which Brooks swings his lens toward repeatedly, the light serving as an entrance and exit point for his shots. The second half follows Jofen as he films in a park, Brooks's and Jofen’s cameras both pursuing kinetic, ecstatic gestures: filming each other; filming their shadows; Jofen striking poses as Brooks swings his Bolex up to glimpse a canopy of trees. In the final shots, Jofen walks along the street, collecting scraps from the sidewalk that interest him. Jofen’s own filmmaking—for example, Voyage (1962) and How Can You Tell the Dancer from the Dance (1968)—likewise use superimpositions extensively in forming dense and psychedelic visions of life in Greenwich Village. In this, Brooks is mirroring the aesthetic sensibilities of his subject.
Brooks followed Jerry with Nightspring Daystar (1963), a charting of nocturnal ruminations. Brooks described it in terms that provoke a journey: “the film springs from the night through the dawn to the daystar, following the adventures of the mind on the way.” These ‘adventures of the mind’ are offered in glimpses, image clusters that burst through long visual rests of black picture. Those images are of Brooks’s bedroom; of a bandstand featuring the Roland Kirk ensemble; of streetlights turned to hints of starlight in the ambulatory gestures of Brooks’s camerawork; and of other things—the sun and sunflowers, clouds seen from the window of an airplane, the artist’s shadow—abstracted by his kinetic cinematography. The film is accompanied in fits and starts by excerpts of music, in the style of radio dial-tuning, gleaned from live recordings of John Coltrane, recordings of Indian classical music, and phrases from Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, and others. The dominant visual form in Nightspring Daystar is a slumber of protracted, uninterrupted black, a rhythmic, structuring blackness that gives the fragmentary images that emerge from it a force complementary to the phrases of bop and modern jazz on its soundtrack. The film enters into a heightened state when the music is silenced, reemerging in little bursts of phrases—measured, much as Brooks’s images are measured—isolated, syntactical units. Brooks develops this stylistic resonance between musical phrases and phrases-of-image, casting himself as a peer to the modern, modal jazz improviser. James Peterson has described Nightspring Daystar as a loose improvisation around oppositional imagery, in other words, Brooks is engaging in games of contrast that parallel the concept of extemporizing on a theme. In this, Brooks also seizes upon the limitations of the film editor, who cannot assume the freest approach of the modern and free jazz musician: for the editor cannot depart fully from the burden of their root material, all they can do is arrange, emphasize, truncate and extend predetermined phrases.
But Brooks’s approach also uncovers a useful means by which to underscore the punctuative might of the cut: to ape musical terms, this rhythmic, structuring blackness that dominates the image becomes the visual equivalent of a rest, and when broken, gives dynamic force to the images that cut through it. Many of those images, where discernible, are focused on Manhattan and city life, the western metropolis a stark contrast to the distant cultures sensed in its soundtrack of Indian classical music, or for that matter in the motivic, modal structures of Coltrane’s aptly-titled “India.” This aspect of Brooks’s filmmaking—an overt Orientalism that seems to dream of a gilded and jewelled elsewhere—becomes a persistent theme in his work.
Brooks’s next film, Winter, made between 1964 and 1966, was partly funded by his friend, Ira Schneider, then an aspiring filmmaker, later to become a prominent video artist. While Brooks was completing the film, he collaborated with Schneider on another project: Redcap, or, Grasshoppers in my Pillow and Peanut Butter on my Roof (1966) is described by the filmmakers as “a mutual venture of a most inordinate sort … vaguely a mistake, but fun at that.” Ira Schneider shot the bulk of the material himself—costumed skits; close-up abstractions on phonebooks and soap bubbles; fireworks bursting in the night sky; the stamens and pistils of flowers; the silhouette of a dancer on a beach in soft focus; and footage of social gatherings. Brooks edited the film and set it to a soundtrack of commentary by George Kuchar, Jonas Mekas, Andy Warhol and others, giving an insider’s earwitness to his community. These are edited alongside excerpts of rock and roll music (The Beatles, Chuck Berry). Working primarily with the ideas and material of another person, Brooks’s editorial approach nevertheless conforms Redcap to the discontinuous rhythms he was demonstrating in his own films, for example, in a prolonged image, overexposed to a clear white light, not unlike the black gaps in the image of Nightspring Daystar.
Winter would maintain that same structural conceit, but would also begin to push the image further into Orientalist territory, this time drawing from imagery as near as Nantucket, as distant as Nepal and Kazakhstan. Along with rock and jazz, Brooks would begin to draw from wild sound, with clattering plates and glasses, shouted conversations, fragmentary dialogue, and the hum of crosstalk mixing with Bo Diddley and Jimmy Reed records, a melancholy paradigm against which an image of Brooks’s bedroom—a desk over which hangs exotic imagery—is contrasted with scenes of the overcast gloom of winter in New York and New England. Brooks lingers on an oval illustration of a man and woman embracing, which he intersperses to pensive effect with overcast skies and abstract, kinetic glimpses of flowers, lyrical imagery in a romantic gloom that reinforces Brooks’s admission that all of his films “start off with breaking up with a girl friend.” The winter of the title is not only the literal winter seasons that passed from the film’s start in 1964 to its completion in 1966, but a metaphoric winter experienced at a time of crisis. This lyrical romanticism is an entrenched trait of Brooks’s filmmaking, as when, in Nightspring Daystar, the brightening of the daystar realizes the aspiration of night—that is, that night aspires to end; or in Winter, when desolate compositions of a deep frost reflect the artist’s sombre mood, inevitably giving way to spring. In the film’s final moments, silhouettes of the Adirondacks and of the city’s rooftops, panned across at dawn, are accompanied by a Russian folk song, “Ducks in Flight,” sung by the Pianitsky Chorus, a haunting minor-key dirge.
With Letter to D.H. in Paris (1967), Brooks declares an epistolary form, although whether D.H. is indeed an intended recipient, an allusion to deceased modern novelist D.H. Lawrence, or even an allusion to the initials of featured subjects (Nathaniel Dorsky and Jerome Hiller) is unclear. It begins with Brooks’s friends and fellow filmmakers Dorsky and Hiller, smoking pot and reading National Geographic, their lazy afternoon intercut with images of a Buddhist drum ceremony and of grass huts. It transitions into scenes of a grand isolated farmhouse in winter, photographed from the perimeter. This leads to contrasts of city and country, with glimpses of sunset in Manhattan giving way to a visit to a farm. If this episodic construction suggests the reportage of a letter, it also suggests the inevitability of digressions, in Brooks’s subtle but insistent intercutting. In a rapturous climax, the soundtrack transitions from the Popular Ensemble of Abkhazia singing the ecstatic folk song “Azamat,” to the squeaking harmonica of Bob Dylan’s “I Want You,” as a succession of images—taken from a ferris wheel at night, through a window at daybreak, and of a woman in the soft light of a bedroom—bring the letter to an end. The metaphor of the letter, its epistolary structure privileging logical, episodic units, gives the film its dominant aesthetic features, and distances it from Brooks’s prior films, with their abyss-gaps absent of imagery. This in itself suggests something about that rhythmic blackness: that it makes Brooks’s earlier films dialogical, structuring space for the viewer’s anticipation and reflection.
The episodic constitution of Letter to D.H. in Paris would find some parallel in Brooks’s feature film, The Wind is Driving Him Toward the Open Sea, which he began work on in the spring of 1965 but would not complete until 1968. The Wind…, rambling in its structure, is ostensibly a journey in search of the American artist and war veteran Chandler Moore (1927-1979), a painter distinguished for the extremity of microscopic detail in his portraits of battle scenes and air and watercraft. Moore had settled in Martha’s Vineyard, where he was regarded affectionately as a village eccentric, often seen wearing his pith helmet and uniform, deeply traumatized by his experiences in the Korean War. Brooks interviews Moore’s friends and neighbours, who speak of his trauma and of his art, and of his life in the Vineyard, but Brooks never finds Moore, whose absence hangs over the resulting film. Into this search, Brooks integrates other modalities: his kinetic photography; a travel diary of sorts featuring actor Jeff Siggins; an assembly of prominent philosophers (Arthur Danto, Sidney Morgenbesser, Stanley Cavell) who debate the existence of grass while playing kick-the-can; and a tragic account of the life of a Kumari, a little girl in Nepal selected by the Newari Buddhist community to be venerated as an oracle, a calling that demands isolation from the common experiences of childhood.
When David Brooks described The Wind…, he claimed it as a work of multiple realities, “including those of image, news, myth, philosophy, documentary, mythopoeia.” Consider the five interwoven elements described above as realities, shifting from the intimate (Brooks’s intimate, lyrical cinematography), to the performative (the philosophers’s assembly), to the documental (interviews in search of Moore), to the mythic (Siggins’s journey, and that of the Kumari). These sequences do not exist in isolation; as the film goes on, they become more deeply entwined, as when an interview subject speaking about Moore is intercut with a sequence of Siggins on the road, marking Siggins as a surrogate for Moore. Similarly, Siggins serves as a surrogate for Brooks, when lyrical imagery crosses shots of Siggins on a roof in New York, as if these images are a shared expression between filmmaker and actor. The braiding of these elements is not merely in direct parallels, but thematic resonances, as when the philosophers play a children’s game, or when the tale of the Kumari is used as a metaphor for the sacrificial altar of youth. It becomes clear in interviews with those who have known Chandler Moore before and after his wartime experiences that his story is a common one, of men going to war and coming home damaged. The metaphor of Neverland haunts these passages, its suggestion of eternal youth dovetailing with Moore’s trauma, with Siggins’s boyishness, with adults joyously playing kick-the-can.
When Brooks began The Wind…, he had just finished Nightspring Daystar, and he would at that time describe his intended project in terms more baroquely aligned with a conventional documentary than the end result would suggest. There is overlap of material between it, Winter, and Letter to D.H. in Paris, to the degree that it seems a summation of his prior work. Interviewed in 1967, Brooks spoke of The Wind… as if it was an abandoned project. That the results are so highly accomplished—that its interwoven currents point back to the shore—is evidence that the maturation of his work was heading towards the porous forms of the mythopoeic epic, this flow of different and disparate modalities into a loose narrative suggestion. Critic David Ehrenstein, writing about The Wind… in the mid-1980s, at a time when Brooks’s work had been largely forgotten, regards it as bearing traits of the structural film—Ehrenstein finds parallels to Michael Snow in Brooks’s motif of a gliding pan. But contrary to this assertion, The Wind… is riddled with an embattled lyricism, is full of humanistic urgency, and seems to have little interest in defining its own shape. Danto, who had taught Brooks at Columbia, describes it as “a film of quest,” in other words, a film conceived in myth and epic. One of its strengths is its rambling form of perpetual digressions, turning over the same stones, in a loose improvisation, in search of an invisible man. In this wild collision of personal lyricism and comprehensive statement, The Wind… is closer to the mythopoeic epics: the cosmic journey of the woodsman, from the mountain range to the microscope, in Brakhage’s Dog Star Man (1961-64); the shifting scales of consciousness in Ed Emshwiller’s Relativity (1966); and the episodic progress of a life, from first-person to myth, in Bruce Baillie’s Quick Billy (1971).
In 1968, David Brooks accepted a teaching appointment at Antioch College, in Yellow Springs, Ohio. In the same year, he finished both The Wind… and Eel Creek, a short observational documentary of a man and a group of boys catching fish. Moments of spontaneous black comedy—the boys’s violent, naive attempts at killing the fish—mix with discreet environmental portraiture. The sustained and professionalized style of observation is far from the wild, anarchic structures of Brooks’s other films, but is a sign of his sampling of styles, shot in a mode akin to sequences from The Wind…, such as the interviews in Martha’s Vineyard, or the philosophers’s assembly.
In January 1969, at age 24, Brooks died in a car accident. Eel Creek was his last film finished in his lifetime, but he left behind materials that have been edited posthumously into three collections: Unfinished Works: Early Fragments (1963-66) and Unfinished Works: Late Fragments (1966-69), compiled by his wife Carolyn Brooks and Jonas Mekas after Brooks’s death; and Carolyn and Me (1968), an in-progress film that was released posthumously, as prepared by Brooks for a first-stage work print. These films have long served as evidence of how Brooks’s filmmaking might have evolved, and in that sense they can only serve speculation. His major films—Nightspring Daystar, Winter, The Wind…—are borne of contemplation, and by his accounts of the productions of Winter and The Wind…, he spent years struggling in editing to create those experiences which, while marked by the suffering gestures of a humanist artist in troubling times and in personal crisis, share in the optimism and passion of his mentor, Mekas. Unlike these films, Carolyn and Me is both spontaneous and a mourning veil. Its photography and even its editing structures bear the markers of Brooks’s other work, with rapid, improvisational camerawork mixing with sustained footage of gatherings, in his crowded New York apartment and on the sprawling lawns of country homes in Martha’s Vineyard. And yet, the film is inevitably marked by the absence of David Brooks, and by the certainty that in his absence, it will remain unfinished.
