The Fluxus 41

In looking at some of the Fluxus films archived on ubu.com, I was surprised to find that they were all silent films. After learning about the all encompassing aspirations of the works of John Cage, and after reading the Fluxus Manifesto by George Maciunas, I was expecting the Fluxus films to try to achieve an overwhelming sense of total immersion on the viewer. My experience was quite the opposite. Most of the films are very simple, in technical execution and in imagery, almost to the point of feeling incomplete. What most struck me was the lack of sound in all of the films. "Surely if they wanted to achive immersion in the idea and experience of the work, they would have included sound, right?" Even in the early 1960's, capabilities for sound recording and even sync-sound recording were a possibility for independent filmmakers. The Cinéma Vérité filmmakers as well as the Direct Cinema filmmakers were employing the use of the Nagra sound recorders at the same time that the Fluxus filmmakers were creating their works. So why no audio?

After re-reading the manifesto, I started to think about the concept of the Wagnerian theater, and the parallels that the Fluxus artist were creating with their work. And then it hit me! These films were just elements of the whole, seperated out to be viewed on their own. They were never meant to be see as individual quicktimes on the internet, or even as films screened alone in the movie theater. These films were part of the Fluxus events, where other artist and the audience members would provide the complimentary elements to create the full experience that the films were destined to be a part of. Harvad University held a retrospective of the 41 Fluxus films in 2007, and the curators description of the collections of films really drove this point home. I am excited to begin to work with some of these films and bring them out of their solitary existence on ubu.com and let them intermingle and fuse into other media.