The Dangerous Telescope: Films by Ian Hugo
Talk and Screening with Stephen Broomer,
Filmmaker, film preservationist and independent scholar
Ian Hugo’s films, made between 1948 and 1979, betray a fascination with the mystic and exotic, the flow of energy, and like a distorting mirror, they give a vision of a world in flux. From his psychodramas, inspired in part by the writings of his wife, Anais Nin (Bells of Atlantis, Melodic Inversion), to his documentaries (Ay-Yi, Tropical Noah’s Ark), to his experiments with pure abstraction (Aphrodisiac I & II), Hugo’s films are an invitation to the most puzzling and difficult strains of American underground cinema.
This program will be introduced by filmmaker and scholar Stephen Broomer, who is presently completing a manuscript on the films of Ian Hugo. All works will be presented on archival 16mm film prints.
PROGRAM
AI-YE
1950 | 19.5 minutes
“At the same time as he found his style, he also found the subject of his work: the life of man, born out of the ocean, which goes through childhood, passes through the battles of manhood to age and death, and is resurrected by plunging back into the ocean. In a Nigerian dialect, “Ai-Ye” signifies “mankind,” and this is the title the black American singer Osborn Smith has given to the film for which he improvised the soundtrack while watching the images pass, blossoming into the black magic of a melodic lament, punctuated by the sound of the tom-tom and shreds of shouted African words.” -Lotte Eisner
BELLS OF ATLANTIS
1952 | 9 minutes
“Onto the surface of authentic nature—reflections of the sun’s rays oscillating on the pebbles below the water surface—he superimposes abstract compositions of great pure lines and color. Stylized waves—the synthesized vision of the engraver—submerge the carcass of a wrecked ship at the bottom of the sea while in superimposition there floats the blurred shape of the beautiful Anais Nin, Hugo’s wife and a poetess of an intuitive lucidity.” -Lotte Eisner
“…the first successful cinematic poem which is worthy of that name.” -Abel Gance
“…the lost continent in ourselves.” -Marianne Moore
MELODIC INVERSION
1958 | 7.5 minutes
“A visual melodic study of transposal…brilliantly diffused colors with fluid, water-like movements…refracted representation of the inner world.” -Rosalind Kosoff
“Melodic Inversion attempts to reproduce an inverse reality: the surfaces of the film seem to undulate, the outlines seem to double, to multiply as though they were seen through a shard of glass or a drop of water. They recall somehow those floating visions in a fog Man Ray created in the Twenties for his black and white film, L’Etoile de Mer. In Ian Hugo’s film, the color adds its whirl of nuances, its hazy sway, its gradations. And this filmmaker, who has moved from impressionism to a surrealism of the screen, provides us once again with his fascinating impressions which, by a few turns of a film negative, can suddenly burst forth in an extravagant fantasy.” -Lotte Eisner
VENICE ETUDE #1
1961 | 7.5 minutes
“What is the difference between Ian Hugo’s film ‘Venice Etude One’ and other films of that much photographed city? A cliché image is one we no longer see, whose familiarity no longer stirs our senses. By a sequence of montages and superimpositions, Hugo shows us the essence of Venice composed of fluctuating textures, light-speckled rhythm, water-tinted moods, sea-lulling cadences. He reveals its seduction and its inner myth, the more subtle beauty under the surface which has stirred many a visitor. The legend of Venice’s wedding to the sea, which is re-enacted each year by the throwing of a wedding ring into the canal, could not be more accurately portrayed than in this film in which the sea seeks to engulf the city by immersion in reflections. The wedding to the sea presents also a danger of death as Hugo portrayed it by superimposing over the luminous images of a wedding the image of a burial. Hugo in a few intense moments gathers together the elements of Venice, glass, mirrors, gold, statues, cupolas, cathedrals, floating palaces and gondolas, in a marriage with water ever seeking to swallow the stones. Only by such poetic liberties, such telescoping of past and present could the dream-like quality of Venice be evoked, one not visible to the superficial eye.” -Anais Nin, Film Culture
“This film like all my films is made to be interpreted by each spectator with his own personal associations. A new attitude is demanded of the spectator, who must discard any idea that this film is about modern Venice. Whatever documentary material I have selected, whether modern or old, was used as raw material for transformation into something of poetic significance.” -I.H
THROUGH THE MAGISCOPE
1969 | 10 minutes
“Here is no literal story, but the dramatic progression of a multitude of women, seen through translucent and transparent sculptured glass and acrylic.” -George Amberg, New York University
APERTURA
1970 | 6 minutes
“The myth of birth, ritualistic ordeals through a labyrinthian underworld…a ceremonial beauty for which the artist has powerful visual equivalents.” -George Amberg, New York University
APHRODISIAC I
1971 | 6 minutes
“A modern painter’s film…an abstract expression of human sensibilities.” -I.H.
APHRODISIAC II
1972 | 5 minutes
“Another experiment pointing to how color film may eventually surpass painting as an art medium.” -I.H.
LEVITATION
1972 | 6 minutes
“A Japanese mime explores Anais Nin’s statement: ‘The poet teaches levitation.’” -I.H.
Total duration: 76 minutes