2019 Fragment of a filmmaker’s work: Robert E. Fulton Fragment of a filmmaker’s work: Robert E. Fulton
Imagine an eye unruled by man-made laws of perspective, an eye unprejudiced by compositional logic, an eye which does not respond to the name of everything but which must know each object encountered in life through an adventure of perception. How many colors are there in a field of grass to the crawling baby unaware of ‘Green’? How many rainbows can light create for the untutored eye? How aware of variations in heat waves can that eye be? Imagine a world alive with incomprehensible objects and shimmering with an endless variety of movement and innumerable gradations of color. Imagine a world before the ‘beginning was the word.’
Stan Brakhage, Metaphors on Vision
Correlating what you see with what you do with your hands. Considering what’s important and what isn’t. Flowing with the movement of the universe as opposed to against it. All the natural movements. You can’t talk about a beginning because everything is circular, but all those things interrelate. It doesn’t begin without any of those.
Robert E. Fulton, Reality’s Invisible
The work of Robert Fulton is a still-hidden treasure; his name appears neither in the histories of experimental film nor in those of documentary cinema. And yet his films are a dazzling demonstration of the secret but possible passage between the gesture of making documentary and that of experimental film. Robert Edison Fulton III (1939-2002 – the great grandson of the inventor of the steamboat) was an American filmmaker, an aviator since his childhood (he learned to fly at the age of ten), an experimental jazz musician (tenor saxophonist) and a world traveller with his Bolex camera: he died in a crash involving his own plane during a storm near Scranton, Pennsylvania. He was also an accomplished nature and ethnographic photographer. He made more than fifty films, and worked on mainstream features, music videos and nature documentaries. Since the sixties, he was one of the most skillful modern aerial cinematographer, directing and shooting his own films, even in extreme flying conditions and locations. He developed a system using a Cessna 180 light aircraft with an Arriflex 35mm camera operated by the pilot. He always said it was no different for him than using a camera on the ground. As a character of a Werner Herzog film, he was almost engulfed with his aircraft by an Ecuadorian volcano: he was filming what became the last sequence he made in his lifetime. During the sixties, he studied film and visual arts at Harvard University, and began to work as a cinematographer with Robert Gardner, his lifelong friend and mentor, one of the masters of ethnographic cinema. Harvard in the sixties was a center of counterculture and Fulton found both the inspiration for his artist career and a deep religious belief: he became a Buddhist, and many of his films reflect a Buddhist view of existence, in particular a deep sense of the void and of life as eternal and circular movement. His twisting, sophisticated and labyrinthine films are full of a striking metaphysical poetry about life on this earth, considered as a little part of a bigger cosmological design. With his ever moving camera, “partly balletic and partly athletic” (Scott MacDonald), Fulton was an aesthetic acrobat and a visual rebel, always mixing thousands of images and a cornucopia of ideas to make grandiose superimpositions that transmit a deeply personal sense of mystical lyricism. In his films, Fulton reorganizes the Real by adopting a radically non-linear approach: each film is pieced together like a torrent of sounds and images rushing by at vertiginous speed. To account for the polyphony of the world – whether it be at Harvard University, in Tibet, Africa, the Andes, etc. – Fulton resorts to oblique, unexpected angles, rapid camera movements (inspired at once by the fluidity of tai chi and the jerky rhythms of free jazz), dynamic superimpositions made directly in camera or using an optical printer, sophisticated re-photography and flickering, speed manipulation and animation techniques (pixillation, direct scratching or painting on the film stock, cutout animation); but he also uses the recording of sync sound and various light camera uses of direct cinema. The visible and the invisible come together in a magistral and jubilant display of fireworks: a pure and joyful cine-kaleidoscope. Thomas W. Cooper describes Fulton’s camerawork as full of “moving point-of-view shots taken from irregular heights and angles while Fulton was running, speed-walking, or ‘dancing’ with his camera. . . . Fultonian motion images propel us across sand, under camels, and close to the earth, as if from a running child’s perspective.” Fulton considered cinema as a part of an immense human adventure and an orphic revelation: with his camera movements he was trying to bring to light the inner and outer shining beauty of the world. In his editing process he was also some kind of an alchemist, mixing elements, symbols, metaphors in an analogical audio-visual tissue, full of open signs and secret winks. His editing was a highly dense procedure: he was always, and quickly, shifting from different spaces and times, methods and subjects, using a panoply of unpredictable camera movements and erratic sounds. As put by Lito Tejada-Flores: “Fulton is a juggler and a combiner, combining ideas and images that don’t really belong together into new definitions of what may well belong together.” His frames are full of different images: frame-within-the-frame images, split screens, multilayered superimpositions. As he explained: “Normally we think of an image as an information-conveying unit, well, more than that, it does have kinesthetic properties, in that it generates a certain energy, a certain ‘tone’ if you like.” Stan Brakhage’s editing in his mystical and cosmological vision Dog Star Man (1964), the use of fast, often subliminal editing and contrapuntal elaborations adopted by Gregory Markopoulos, the virtuosity in making multilayered superimpositions in Bruce Baillie’s films seem to be particularly important references for Fulton. The complex elaboration of his visually resplendent montage was always mirrored in his soundtracks: for Fulton the sound must be as radical as the image. The final editing is a wild mix of music (free jazz), spoken word and poetical statements, moments of silence, direct ambient sounds. We can only hope that Fulton’s work – a truly important discovery – will become more widely known and appreciated, as it should be.
Federico Rossin
Screenings introduced by Federico Rossin.
Special thanks to Florence Fulton and Douglas Kahan.