Scales of Being: Ed Emshwiller’s Relativity

Art & Trash, episode 10
Scales of Being: Ed Emshwiller’s Relativity
Stephen Broomer, April 15, 2021

Ed Emshwiller’s Relativity (1966) is a reflection of the ceaseless possibilities of nature to produce distinctive forms acting in concert with one another. It is a myth, enacted through the avatar of a universal man, who samples this world from the cave to the beach to the parking lot to the supermarket, from birth to death, in navigation with other bodies, a figure of bounded perception whose actions are guided by impulse, invention, and perhaps, the stars. It is an embrace of life in its broadest definition, a catalogue of earthly phenomena. In this video, Relativity is discussed in relation to Emshwiller’s trajectory through the course of the 1950s and 60s, his interests in the body and abstraction, the correspondence between his work in science-fiction illustration and his work in experimental cinema, and the film’s mythopoeic constitution.

The narration of this video is indebted to the analysis of Relativity given by R. Bruce Elder in A Body of Vision: Representations of the Body in Recent Film and Poetry.

Relativity is available for rent from the the New York Film-makers’ Coop, the the Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Centre, and Canyon Cinema.

SCRIPT:

Ed Emshwiller began his career as an illustrator of science-fiction books and magazines. In this field his covers were distinct for their realist figuration and bright colours. Emshwiller had studied painting in France under the G.I. Bill, and on returning to America became involved in abstract expressionism. His work in commercial illustration maintained his training in conventional realism, placing vivid, photo-realistic figures into fantastical realms and situations, even as he was otherwise drawn to the possibilities for form to transcend subject. By the mid-1950s, Emshwiller had begun to make 16mm films that combined his interest in abstraction and the figure. Emshwiller’s filmmaking would cover a wide range of subjects, from pure abstraction to dance, as well as a wide range of formal approaches, from his dramatic use of wide-angle lenses and pixilation, to his later groundbreaking work in video synthesis and computer-generated imagery. His earliest films, such as Dance Chromatic, Transformation, and Lifelines, integrated the figure with animated abstract painting. Beginning with Thanatopsis in 1962, Emshwiller’s films would tune these interests increasingly towards the relationship of the body to space. This theme is made explicit in the twitching, sped-up movements of the figure in Thanatopsis, and in films such as Carol, a portrait of the filmmaker’s wife, in which she passes through a forest, slowly in a series of staggering, interlocking fades, her body becoming multiple and transparent, eventually merging with textures and patterns found in nature. The body in space is also at play in George Dumpson’s Place, in which the camera becomes a distorting witness to title space, the home of a fellow veteran whose hoard of junk has become a collage of American life, an example of Emshwiller’s ability to develop claustrophobic wide-angle images that suggest in-utero vision. This relation between perception, the body and space is most directly illustrated in Emshwiller’s dance films, in which the camera becomes a participant in modern dances, the body divided and reconstituted by Emshwiller’s composition and editing. It also has its roots in his parallel work in mass culture science-fiction, where the body was often viewed as a sacred and exceptional container of humanity, in a time when emerging laws began to reimagine the time- and space-relations of humankind, the galaxies, and the atoms that compose it all. By the mid-twentieth century, science had shed the romance and mystery of the self. Yet, in science fiction, the veil between the organic and the metaphysical was at its thinnest.

Emshwiller was not developing these sensibilities in isolation, but was responding to his century, one in which our knowledge of gravity, the force-relation between objects, and thus, the experience of time and space, had grown by leaps and bounds by way of Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity, which determined the universality of the laws of physics; and his resulting concept of space-time, which determined that events that occur at the same time for one observer could occur at different times for another. The possibilities of this in determining the behaviour of objects in space and time, in other words, for understanding external phenomena, were vast, as was the newfound potential for an enhanced understanding of perception, the human condition, the self, in relation to what had been the sacred gift of an endless, bountiful cosmos. The self and its place in relation to all things could be better understood in relation to how speed, distance, and time are experienced at other scales. Yet in this model, the self was no longer a conductor to the cosmos. Emshwiller’s understanding of consciousness had been impacted by these notions of the changing laws of physics, whether at its most internal, as in Thanatopsis or Carol, romantic evocations of anxiety and love, or at its most external, as in George Dumpson’s Place, a study of a world so distinct from one’s own that the eye itself is reshaped into that wide, new-formed eye. The impact of Einstein’s theory on Emshwiller would be made explicit in 1964, when the filmmaker received a grant from the Ford Foundation to make a film that would assume these laws as governing constraints, exploring through them what he would describe as “a journey through the mind, through one’s consciousness of his own place in the world.” Emshwiller’s Relativity is not derived from Einstein’s theory, but it is a reflection of the ceaseless possibilities of nature to produce distinctive forms acting in concert with one another. It is a myth, enacted through the avatar of a universal man, performed by Ralph Ashby, who samples this world from the cave to the beach to the parking lot to the supermarket, from birth to death, in navigation with other bodies, a figure of bounded perception whose actions are guided by impulse, invention, and perhaps, the stars. In this, Relativity is akin to Stan Brakhage’s Dog Star Man, which like the myths of the ancients, serves as a symbolic corridor for common experience. The hero of Dog Star Man, Brakhage himself, ascends a mountain and enacts a reckoning with mortality, in microscopes and mushroom clouds and, so like Odysseus, the wife and kids; but the universal man is not a surrogate for Emshwiller, and his journey is not so heroic nor so self-focused as Brakhage’s confrontation with the stars; rather, Relativity comes to a recognition of the infinitesimal variations of nature, the unlikely miracle of consciousness, the wonder of being-at-all. It is an embrace of life in its broadest definition, a catalogue of earthly phenomena.

For the Ford Foundation, Emshwiller wrote a proposal that tied together three things that he had first planned for other projects: a recurring dream of his in which he was flying; the sexual relationships between men and women; and Isaac Asimov’s writings on the limits of perception. All of these elements are tied to different forms of dynamism; the dynamism of the object in flight; the dynamic machinations of ecstatic bodies; and the dynamic barriers of perception that keep the self grounded in its subjective experience.

Life begins in a cave, the universal man fully grown and reclining, naked, accompanied by the metric drip of water that serves as a metronome would; but any rigid concept of time-keeping is in contrast to the opening seconds of the film which feature a discontinuous countdown. The cave is a kind of womb, intercut with images of animal innards that further this analogy; elsewhere in the cave is a naked woman. Other textures are glimpsed: the bas-relief of a globe, the bark of a tree, all represent the possible forms that this space might produce - even the bark of a tree or the rough flesh of a beast become like the gooseflesh and papules of a human body. The universal man’s emergence from the womb, his arrival into the world, is signaled by the sounds of crickets; he comes as one of science-fiction’s newborn men. Exotic animals are assembled in details, and the details develop consonances between a rhino’s horn, an ape’s mouth, the feathers of birds, an elephant’s eye, a man’s aged face, a little boy’s. These simple, hard cuts may, on some level, suggest a family of organisms, produced by nature; however, while that could imply harmony, Emshwiller offers competition, the organized chaos of earthly things. Hence, a further shot of pigs suckling turns to graphic footage of a slaughterhouse, and from there to the human skull, an anatomical model, the bone machine. Organic forms in nature become both a consequence of the relation between beasts and humanity, and an allegory for the biological constitution of the human body.

The slaughterhouse becomes the supermarket, the doll becomes a relic in a charnel house of concrete and newsprint, handled roughly, predatorily. Here, the universal man becomes Pygmalion shaping Galatea. The doll is first a symbol for the female nude, and then becomes the nude herself. This predation gives way to a swapping of male and female faces within the form of a woman, again, a visual metaphor for modern scientific knowledge, of the chromosomal variances of gender in the womb. Thus, this sex-indeterminate face is linked to the awakening of a cocooned butterfly, and a collision of man and woman. The universal woman, Nancy Griffith, is born into the film through a slow-motion burst of water. Ashby and Griffith perform a parallel dance, a courtship in which the body becomes a plaything and a target, their clothes torn by duelling swords. After, they lay together in a cave, and she vanishes, leaving only the universal man, absorbed into him as an eternal other. Here in the cave, he is both unborn and predestined; she is both his duelling partner and the alternate to his chromosomes.

The universal man and woman appear in white boxes against black, flashing, united and apart, standing, in profile, laying. He stands alone, in a series of superimpositions, in harsh shadows and sunlight, like the stone walls of a prison. He tours scenes of human activity - the city, the beach, oil fields and derricks. He dances, semi-nude, with topless women, in another vacant, black space. The universal man works at a deli counter in a market. The parallels between man and animal continue here: as he eats, we see animals eating. His solitude has become total as he dances alone in nature and in the vacant spaces of civilization, an office, a parking lot. Through his dancing he rejoins civilization, in the street, on the beach. And as he dances, he sings a sad, lilting, wordless song.

In the final sequence, a monologue begins, presenting data that dwarfs mankind in a great scheme of measurable data about the known universe. In Relativity, humankind is nature itself, in that nature finds its consonant variations reflected in man, plant, animal; and yet humans also exist in the vast shadow of a much older order of time. This is the voice of humanity’s highest faculties offering a vision of atomic space-time: it gives a quantified history of earthlings, of matter, and of the galaxy itself. Like the universal man, it indicates something that is miraculous and totally ordinary: origin and destiny; life and death; prosperity and doom. The film concludes with differing paces of life - the universal man’s sad song slows down on the soundtrack, in contrast to normal-speed sounds of children; likewise, an old man’s face becomes a window onto children at play; a paper airplane cast into the cosmos becomes a turtle on its back, an allusion to the world turtle myths of the Lenape and the Iroquois, in which a giant turtle becomes a cosmic vessel, the burden of the earth springs up from its shell; fields of bones and a corpse give way to hands on grated bars, reinforcing that harsh light that was earlier cast on the universal man, prisoner of frail matter, of passing seasons, of gravity, of chance. The womb-like cave becomes a white-lined coffin. And the figure, dancing in the distance, on a burial mound, yelps an ecstatic “Yeah!”

Relativity conveys metaphors for universal experiences—all of humankind is implicated in the cycle of birth and death, the mortal coil as a vast fellowship—and yet it also offers no experience more universal than alienation. It is in alienation that the universal man encounters earthly phenomena, and while he moves at times within and at times apart from society, he is always experiencing society through steel bars, through one frame or another. He is cursed with humanity, a trait that allows him the critical distance to understand relativity as a natural system of echoing forms, to see at some distance the reflection of nature, from his own being to the world at large.