Rambler: Spoofing the Avant-Garde in Jane Conger Belson’s Odds & Ends

Art & Trash, episode 37
Rambler: Spoofing the Avant-Garde in Jane Conger Belson’s Odds & Ends
Stephen Broomer, July 19, 2024

Jane Conger Belson, later Jane Conger Belson Shimané, entered San Francisco’s underground film scene in the mid-1950s through her common-law husband Jordan Belson, a painter and abstract animator whose light shows were a focal point in the city’s evolving intermedia counterculture. She made only two films, Logos and Odds & Ends, although claims have been made that she had three more films in progress circa 1960, when she and Belson parted. With the dissolution of their marriage she stopped making films. Brief though Conger Belson’s participation was, her films reflect an iconoclast sensibility common to the times.

In this video essay, Stephen Broomer discusses Jane Conger Belson's films in relation to the beat culture that had overtaken San Francisco in her day, with a focus on her collaboration with sound artist and comedian Henry Jacobs, and her playing the Holy Fool as maker of the essential 1959 film Odds & Ends.

Odds & Ends was preserved by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences with the support of a National Film Preservation Foundation grant. The film can be viewed in the fourth volume of Treasures from American Film Archives.

SCRIPT:

The Beat movement had a comic undercurrent, an absurd one that bled through outrage and disaffection and tragedy: like the stand-up, the beatnik presented their art to jeers, boos, disruption, argument, for that matter, to the lion’s den directly. Talking wit and rage in turn, no other movement in the arts could so readily reconcile itself with its own parodies—from the unflinching free speech martyrdom of Lenny Bruce to the ghoulish mainstreaming of Dobie Gillis’s hipster pal Maynard G. Krebs. In its manifestations beyond poetry—among its filmmakers, its painters, its musicians, the para-scene of bebop—there was no less a mixing of serious contemplation, agitation and humour. Such restlessness, in itself, is ripe for parody. The voice of the hipster could be parodied and manipulated also for its openness: at its very best, it bore an innocent enthusiasm. This was the case of Lenny Bruce, a man who just wanted to love things, but whose halting speech couldn’t articulate that love. That warm naivety, which so defined the communities of American modernism in the 1950s, was prone to cliché.

Jane Conger Belson, later Jane Conger Belson Shimané, entered San Francisco’s underground film scene in the mid-1950s through her common-law husband Jordan Belson, a painter and abstract animator whose light shows were a focal point in the city’s evolving intermedia counterculture. She made only two films, Logos and Odds & Ends, although claims have been made that she had three more films in progress circa 1960, when she and Belson parted. With the dissolution of their marriage she stopped making films. Brief though Conger Belson’s participation was, her films reflect an iconoclast sensibility common to the times. In Logos, Conger Belson offers a purely graphic film, one with rapidly shifting mandala stencils, tinted in vivid colours via backlighting. Logos uses the flicker of interpolated symmetrical shapes and the pulses of brightening and dimming centrifugal light to form its own rhythms, an exchange among ideal forms. With a soundtrack of electronic distortion and feedback, provided by sound artist Henry Jacobs, Logos reflects the forms of experimental animation that were dominant in Belson’s community, an interplay of ridged and grooved symmetries that invoke the universal energies of the mandala. Logos resonates with the work that was being done by Jordan Belson, with themes anticipated in the abstract painting and filmmaking that the polymath artist Harry Smith had been pursuing in the Bay Area throughout the 1940s. Conger Belson’s alternating mandalas reflect eastern notions of symmetry in representing an ideal universe, ideals ceaseless in their variations—and in its blinkering colours, Logos furthers such a proposition: that the perfect enclosed continuity of a symmetrical abstract image, like that of the mandala, is one of many ideals that intrude on and circulate through one another. This changing imagery inevitably becomes a kind of tunnel of light through which the viewer is beckoned.

In Odds & Ends, Jane Conger Belson combined outtakes from her own work with found materials gathered from the advertising and non-theatrical film agency Studio 16, founded by the amateur and industrial filmmakers Denver Sutton and Ralph Luce. Conger Belson again teamed with Henry Jacobs to produce a unique and innovative comedy, one that contests the boundaries, attitudes, and pretences of the hipster. Jacobs offers a completely different kind of soundtrack, performing a seemingly extemporized monologue in the double-talk of an archetypal hipster. The target of Jacobs’s comedy was self-important hipsters like Jacobs himself, Conger Belson herself, her husband, their friends. Again, the Beat world eagerly parodies itself, offering up its own village explainer as mad and unreliable interpreter. The image is composed of odds and ends, in the sense that it appears to have no organizing principle, a medley of advertising images, home movies, fragmentary footage taken with the camera upside down and at uncommon canted angles, as well as outtakes from Logos and other abstract animations. At one point, a set of cardboard mandala stencils are piled up, a glimpse behind the scenes of Conger Belson’s process. Persistently throughout the film, the artist uses fragmentary footage of a camera being jostled, material that is clearly not found, unless it was found in the trim bin of another avant-garde filmmaker. These images are integral for the film, not only for how they give it shape, but for how they resonate against the extemporized speech on the soundtrack, when Jacobs speaks of composition and spontaneity. Jacobs performs his monologue under the guise of Rheny Bojacs, an anagram for his own name, but Rheny Bojacs is an echo of another creation of Jacobs, a fictional beatnik named Shorty Petterstein, whose observations were attempts to interpret, for squares, the world of the mod hipster. Jacobs had, a year earlier, released a comedy album under the title The Wide Weird World of Shorty Petterstein, performing monologues in character, frequently in the form of interviews—giving the performance a rich air of self-seriousness that deepens its parody. The album takes the form of a series of observational raps, with a jazz combo playing beneath it. The Wide Weird World influenced Conger Belson’s film, which even takes its title from a remark thrown at Petterstein by his interviewer on a cut titled "Origin of Jazz Terms. ““Jazz people seem to have developed an extraordinarily expressive language, but it seems to me as I listen to odds & ends of it, that it undergoes a good many frequent changes. Is it true that it’s a rapidly changing lingo?” 'Odds & ends’ are invoked here to describe speech: the odds & ends, the haphazard, muddled, stoned discourse of the jazz ‘cat' and the beat poet, an act of comic interpretation akin to Slim Gaillard’s more imaginative vout-a-reenee dictionary of hipster slang. On the soundtrack to Odds & Ends, Jacobs as Bojacs persists with his Shorty Petterstein act, talking, but not really talking, about the relation between jazz and poetry, a rambling work of double-talk that assigns and reverses definitions of one and the other; Bojacs ventures from philosophical double-talk about spontaneity and composition, into more casual rambling, which becomes increasingly unwound into a litany of consumer-culture observations and cynicism, ending with the suggestion that those who pursue a professional life of respectability should reject jazz and poetry outright. But the way he says this is especially telling: “don’t bother with the jazz nor with the poetry because the two don’t mix!” It suggests, half heard in the ramble of Bojacs’s odds and ends, a rejection of his own premise: “the two don’t mix.”

Bojacs’s solipsistic monologue is itself accompanied by bongos, adding layer to the parody, matching the inexact, uncommitted speech of the scene hipster with a driving beat, from the bongo, that instrument that was mastered in Afro-Cuban jazz but which could also be tied in the popular imagination to the image of an incompetent poet, anticipating slam poetry to elicit rolling eyes and wagging tongues. Picture the slouch of a Maynard G. Krebsian beatnik stereotype whose double-talk would fuse anti-authoritarianism, communist sanctimony, and pretences to total freedom. Like his Shorty Petterstein alter-ego, Henry Jacobs is playing with the perception that new movements in the arts are inaccessible and decadent, reinforcing the idea that they may simply be immoral, practiced by ignorant, helpless imbeciles—people who would gladly reject respectability and common aspirations. If art is an act of service to humanity, how else might such a poet be perceived, in his inability to articulate what he’s doing, in his contradictions, expounding on spontaneity and composition when he himself is neither spontaneous nor composed. That Jacobs's commentary corresponds at times with Conger Belson’s imagery seems a matter of chance more than intention: combining these disparate parts, the fragmentary sketches of the component images, the comedy of his commentary, is bound to produce such an effect, for example, when his sentiments about the loose going-together of idea and action seems to correspond to staccato tilts in the image.

Jane Conger Belson takes no prisoners of the sacred cows of the underground scene: the comedy of Odds & Ends lies in part with the clarity of her critique, less a matter of incisive and incendiary attack than, in her own words, an act of getting high and putting it together. She described it this way when she accepted a prize for it from the Creative Film Foundation, and what the jury might have recognized in Odds & Ends was the vitality of putting it all together, an inbuilt vitality that emerges from the continuous transitions of Conger Belson’s images. The worst cliché of the bohemian—worst for its potential truth—is that their freest ideas around art and expression could be wrong, that the vitality of risk in art may just be foregone failure, that the hipster lives a futile and decadent life propelled by self-delusion. It wasn’t uncommon for critics—professional and armchair alike—to contend with this theme in beat art, from claims that bebop was just noise, to claims that beat poetry was unschooled, to claims that experimental filmmakers should be forcefully kept from wasting precious film on their movies. Odds & Ends is a triumph of risk, and what it represents is less an echo of cynicism than a willingness to be playful, to admit and revel in foolishness. It is the work of a great beat spirit, the holy fool, acting through the filmmakers, a merry prankster bent on expression cleansed of the preciousness and defensiveness of authority and expertise. It is also a work of appropriation still new to the community of experimental cinema, in its translation of home movies and advertising into the constructed composition of the artwork. The holy fool admits, gladly, that she just got high and put it together. What has she put together? The flow of the montage is something like what Jacobs describes as a flow of observations: with tensions between symmetrical and geometric and rephotographed abstract paintings on the one hand, and photographic scenes of consensus reality on the other, from the dramatic lighting of advertising, to the straightforward composition of the home movie, to the kinetic composition of the avant-garde. It becomes a tour of techniques, some of which recall the scroll-painting films that Jordan Belson had made alongside Patricia Marx in the early 1950s; some of which resemble the newly-emerging subjective cinema of Stan Brakhage in nearby Colorado; and an overarching compilation gesture that resonates with the work that Bruce Conner had just begun to pursue in the Bay Area. In other words, Jane Conger Belson’s film is both parody and prophecy of the spirit of her times.

While claims would later be made that the film was a challenge to the work of her then-husband, the holy fool in her is not placing so deliberate a gesture against any one peer: it is an admission that vitality and freedom is in the act itself. Alongside this backdrop of the hip underground, Conger Belson pursues her own forms, for example, the rhythmic dance effected in sequences among the punch-holes that mark the end of an 8mm film strip, common to home movies, typically excised for semi-professional projection. These sequences are constructed with intention, combining images that have occurred at the beginning or end of home movie reels. These punch holes, manufacturer’s markings, appear in a concentration that calls attention to their rhythmic interplay, aligning, likely by chance, with a relevant remark from Jacobs, that “poetry is a pre-conceived thing and jazz is a thing of the moment.” What do we see here but a thing of the moment (the travel scenes captured) governed by a pre-conceived marker of construction (the punch-holes, imposed by the film manufacturer before use)?

Jane Conger Belson’s process seems to invite chance. Odds & Ends is a film made from a seemingly random combination of refuse. That refuse, accumulated as the outtakes and sketches of other projects (odds) and materials pilfered from Studio 16 (ends), allows the film to also resemble an artist’s drafting desk. The Neo-Dada movement in the plastic arts often had at its core a celebration of the ordinary cast-off object. A found film could be readymade art, or, it could be carved into a new shape and combined with other materials, integrated into a network of quotidian collage, one that may even discover a harmonious integration of its parts by chance. Conger Belson’s film challenges its own materials, in that her montage disrupts their celebrations. Odds & Ends is itself a celebration of new perceptions. On the soundtrack, when Jacobs talks about the importance of an audience having a good time, there is an irony in the disconnect between the good times being digested (in scenes of holidays) and the good time being produced (Conger Belson’s rapid montage that veers off in as many directions as Jacobs’s speech). It is the difference between a ‘50s trip and a ‘60s trip, at the intersection of two realities, the piercing-through of postwar consumerist pleasures with a free-flowing density that mirrors some states of altered consciousness.

The comedy of Odds & Ends is renewed by the enduring relevance of the narrator’s question: what’s the relation between jazz and poetry? What’s the relation between jazz and poetry and cinema? If the relations aren’t obvious, are they foolish? Is the question itself disingenuous? And even if it is, what is the relation between different forms of expression? What’s the value in finding relational networks among expressions? Conger Belson sifts through these odds and ends. It is hard to say what she has stitched together through them. Do the sound and image integrate, do they mix? For all of her knowing, subversive lampooning of the underground, what Conger Belson has put together is authentically experimental in its collision of spontaneous instinct and rambling self-parody. Odds & Ends offers that even when the bric-a-brac, curios, knickknacks, bits and bobs of experience ‘don’t mix,’ ‘don’t cohere,’ mix them anyway, to create a collage that is true to the stray threads of experience and the conflicts of creative discourse.