Jonas Mekas has jokingly referred to George Maciunas as the “Metro-Goldwyn­ Mayer” of Fluxus film production.¹ The extent of Maciunas’s influence over the Fluxus group as a whole has been much debated, but in this case, Mekas’s analogy is apt: Maciunas played the major role in the selection, packaging and distribution of the forty-one numbered “Fluxfilms,” as well as, in many cases, having a hand in their production.²
   Maciunas was involved with the underground film world of New York long before the coalescence of the Fluxus group in the early sixties. After befriending Mekas, the founder and editor of Film Culture (and a filmmaker in his own right), in the early fifties, Maciunas designed a number of the journal’s issues, including the one dedicated to Stan Brakhage’s films and writing from Autumn 1963. Dick Higgins has suggested that Maciunas first became intrigued with the idea of film production during a trip to London in October 1962, when a group of Fluxus artists participated in the “Festival of Misfits.” While in London, Emmett Williams found and bought a small plastic hand-cranked film loop viewer which so fascinated Maciunas that the latter bought out the store’s entire stock. These viewers would later turn up in the Flux Yearbox 2 (1968), in which many of the Fluxfilms were found in 8 millimeter loop form.
   While virtually every individual Fluxfilm was at some point advertised for purchase in one or another Fluxus publication (for prices ranging from $4 to $150), Maciunas’s most ingenious marketing ploy was to put together several composite reels which were then made available for purchase or rental. There is some confusion over how many different versions of these Fluxfilm packages exist, but references are found, in both publications and correspondence, to a “short version” including 17 films (running time: approximately 40 minutes) and a “long version” with 25 films (running 75 minutes). These packages were sent to the various Fluxus centers (Ken Friedman’s Fluxus West in San Francisco, Milan Knizak’s Fluxus East in Prague, and Ben Vautier’s Western European “headquarters” in Nice) and to other venues, such as the Ann Arbor Film Festival, where in 1966, the Fluxfilm package won the critics’ award.³
   Maciunas’s use of a Fluxfilm numbering system implies an organized method for the selection and production of films. However, the numbering of the films was not chronological, and in one case, a Fluxfilm number exists without an accompanying film [#15]. Some films offered for sale in Fluxus publications were never given numbers, while others shared a single number for a period of time.⁴ In several instances, films which had already been shown independently (such as Dick Higgins’s Invocation of Boulders and Canyons for Stan Brakhage or much of Paul Sharits’s work) were later assigned Fluxfilm numbers, while in others, films were made specifically for inclusion in the Fluxfilm package, and were probably pre-numbered.⁵
   In the Fluxfilm catalogue from the mid-sixties cited above, credit for “editing and titles” is given to Maciunas. Maciunas was editor in both a specific and general sense. He was certainly responsible for cutting certain films, but he could also be considered the overseeing editor of the entire Fluxus film project. A filmmaker might send his or her “completed” film to Maciunas, only to view it later, perhaps in one of the compilation reels, with a new title sequence (including, of course, its Fluxfilm number), as well as substantially reduced in length. Less expensive silent prints were sometimes made from sound films, and in many cases, 16 millimeter prints were transferred to 8 millimeter also to save expenses.⁶ If chosen for inclusion in either the Flux Yearbox 2 or the Fluxus edition Fluxfilms, only one small section of the film would be turned into an 8 millimeter loop, to be viewed through the hand-cranked viewer mentioned above.
   As far as titles are concerned, the Fluxfilm number appeared in the initial frames of almost every film (FLUX - FILM - NO. -  ____). This sequence was followed by the title of the film and the name of its maker, usually designed (again, by Maciunas) to reflect the subject matter of the specific work.⁷ The standardized format of the number sequence called to mind the collective nature of the Fluxus enterprise, while the individual attention given to the particular titles of each film guided the viewer’s attention back to the film at hand.
   Five Fluxfilms were shot on the same night—January 22, 1966—and in the same place—Peter and Barbara Moore’s apartment on East 36th Street in New York City.⁸ Peter Moore, a photographer who documented many of the Fluxus events in the sixties and seventies, had acquired a high-speed instrumentation camera which could run up to 8,000 frames per second.⁹ Maciunas seized this opportunity to transcribe some earlier Fluxus performances onto film, and to create some new works. The films which resulted from the evening’s activity were Yoko Ono’s Number 1 [#14] and Eyeblink [#9], Pieter Vanderbeek’s Five O’Clock in the Morning [#17], Joe Jones’s Smoking [#18], and Chieko Shiomi’s Disappearing Music for Face [#4].
   All of these works could be called “action films,” but the actions represented are brief and banal: a match ls struck; an eye blinks; a cigarette is exhaled; rocks and walnuts drop and settle onto a smooth surface.¹⁰ Due to the high velocity of the camera (running anywhere from 100 to 200 times the usual speed), these normally forgettable tasks are so attenuated as to become epic in scope. Disappearing Music for Face was the title of a score by Shiomi from 1964, in which she instructs the performer to “change gradually from smile to no smile.”¹¹ This “gradual” transition was obviously extended through the use of the high speed camera, and watching the resulting film (approximately 10 minutes long) causes the kind of impatient concentration felt when one tries to discern the barely perceptible movement of the second hand on a clock face.
   In all of these films, the viewer’s attention (which would normally be focused entirely on the subject matter at hand) is necessarily divided between careful scrutiny of the filmed event and consideration of the apparatus which makes such scrutiny possible. In other words, the camera is as much the “subject” of the films as any specific actions which have taken place in front of it.
   Another important element of these films is the valorization of boredom as an artistic effect, a concept which was of major interest to many of the Fluxus artists. Probably the single most important influence in this respect was John Cage, who wrote in his book Silence: “In Zen they say: If something is boring after two minutes. try it for four. If still boring, try it for eight, sixteen, thirty-two, and so on. Eventually one discovers that it’s not boring at all but very interesting.”¹²
   Cage’s thoughts have an almost prescriptive relationship to one of the earliest Fluxfilms (1962), Dick Higgins’s Invocation of Canyons and Boulders for Stan Brakhage [#2]. The work consists of a close-up of the artist’s mouth opening and closing in what appears to be a chewing motion. As the film progresses, one realizes that the “continuous” motion is actually a series of carefully connected loops repeating the same action. Jonas Mekas claimed to have been at one screening of Invocation that “started at 8 p.m. and at 1 a.m., when I left, it was still running…”¹³
   The film’s construction can also be seen as an analogue to the perceptual process that occurs when watching motion pictures. Although we are aware of a disjuncture between the joining of the loops (evident in a slight change of position of the subject within the frame), our eyes tend to want to perceive the action as continuous, because the motion suggests that it actually is, much in the same way our eyes “convince” us that a succession of still images is actually representing continuous motion when projected at a certain speed.
   While the above-mentioned films distilled the film viewing experience by reducing the scope of the subject matter to inconsequential events, thereby calling more attention to the apparatus itself, many other Fluxus films endorsed a reductive attitude towards the actual material and processes of film, making them, in essence, the only subject matter. Four of these films were by Maciunas himself: End After 9 [#3], 10 Feet [#7], 1,000 Frames [#8] and Artype [#20]. All of these works were made without a cam­era—Maciunas simply applied pressure sensitive “Artype” screens or letters directly to clear film leader, bypassing the traditional camera-lab-projector relationship which is predicated upon, and dependent on, the basic unit of film: the frame.¹⁴ The illusion of movement in conventional cinematic practice is caused by the motion of a shutter in the camera which takes 24 pictures (frames) per second, each static, of course, but which give the illusion of movement when passed through a projector equipped with a similar shutter at the same speed. By ignoring the frames, Maciunas subverted the notion of film as an illusionistic representation of movement, underscoring instead the actual movement of the piece of film through the projector.
   Nowhere is this more evident than in the short film, 10 Feet, which is, quite literally, a 10-foot long strip of film leader whose length is indicated in inches and feet on the actual film surface. When projected, the numbers (and their corresponding marks) flash by at different positions in the frame, reminding the viewer that the system used to measure the film is inconsistent with (but no more arbitrary than) the standard system of measurement, namely 24 frames per second, used in filmmaking. Maciunas’s films in general, and 10 Feet in particular, exhibit his fascination with concretism, as opposed to illusionism or realism, in all art forms: “Concretists...prefer unity of form and content, rather than their separation. They prefer the world of concrete reality rather than the artificial abstraction of illusionism….In the end, the form and expression remain [the] same as the content and perception...” ¹⁵ In other words, Maciunas’s films are about what they are (film passing through a projector), as opposed to being about what they represent (any particular illusion of reality).
   Concretism shaped the Fluxus group as a whole (thanks again to the influence of John Cage, and Marcel Duchamp), and many of the other Fluxfilms evinced the same type of literalism found in Maciunas’s films. Albert Fine’s Readymade [#24] is a strip of test film retrieved from a color film developing tank (each “print” is a unique piece). Its swirls of black, orange and red could be interpreted as “beautiful’’ abstractions, but are in essence just an index of the chemical process through which the film has passed.
   In a similar vein, George Brecht’s Entry-Exit [#10] (which Maciunas described in the Fluxfilm catalogue as having been “produced in a developing tank”) can be viewed as another rather literal metaphor for the developing process. The film’s opening image ls a white ENTRANCE sign with black letters, which fades rapidly to white. After several minutes, the image gradually darkens through the gray scale to black, and remains so for several more minutes before another white sign labeled EXIT fades in. Finally, the entire picture once again bleaches out to white. The use of the words ENTRANCE and EXIT could refer to the immersion and subsequent withdrawal of the film from the developing tank, while the actual processes of film developing (i.e. the conversion from negative to positive, etc.) taking place in the tank are both the “form” and the “content” of the film.¹⁶
   While Brecht’s and Fine’s films privileged the chemical processes responsible for the filmic image, other Fluxfilms isolated the projector mechanism. John Cavanaugh’s Blink [#5], one of the early examples of the “Flicker Film” subgenre, consists of various intervals of alternating black and white frames. In the first section of the film, this flicker effect is hardly discernible, due to the fact that the black/white interval occurs every other frame. As Cavanaugh increases the length of intervals from two frames each to four frames each, the effect becomes not only much more pronounced, but difficult to watch. Besides calling attention to the fact that film is nothing more than a procession of frames, the flicker also reminds one of the presence of the projector’s shutter, whose movement necessarily creates a barely noticeable flicker in the projection of every film.
   Paul Sharits, best-known as one of the leading figures of the structural film movement (and the most creative exploiter of the flicker effect), also made a number of Fluxfilms: Sears Catalogue [#26], Dots 1 & 3 [#27], Wrist Trick [#28], and Word Movie [#29]. In the first film, each frame consists of a different item photographed from the pages of the catalogue. When projected at normal speed, the film is essentially unwatchable; the plethora of images blend into a ghostly collage. The title can be taken literally—the film actually is a Sears catalogue, and the only way to “read” it is to examine the actual strip of film one frame at a time, avoiding the use of a projector entirely. Upon doing so, one becomes aware of Sharits’s ingenious matching of images: toolboxes become animated, a pair of egg beaters metamorphoses into a brassiere, and the positive/negative effect explored more thoroughly in Dots 1 & 3 is achieved solely through the juxtaposition of a pair of white shoes on a black background with black shoes against a white floor.
   Perhaps the most extreme example of the reductivism apparent in these films is Nam June Paik’s Zen for Film [#1], which is nothing more than a strip of clear film leader. With progressive projections the strip becomes scratched, soiled and dust-ridden. Again, in this case, not only the materiality of the film is alluded to: the presence of the projector, whose “mark” is usually and necessarily hidden, is also foregrounded. George Brecht’s comment about Paik’s work and the heightened awareness it creates in the spectator applies to all of these films: “See it, then go to your neighborhood theater and see it again.” ¹⁷
   Reflexivity, highly significant in the Fluxfilms mentioned above, was a major element in much experimental filmmaking in the later sixties, especially in the work of the structural filmmakers (for example, George Landow’s Film in which there appear sprocket holes, edge lettering, dirt particles, etc. and Tony Conrad’s The Flicker [both from 1966]. P. Adams Sitney’s article “Structural Film,” which appeared in Film Culture in 1969, attempted to characterize the genesis and maturation of this movement, citing both Andy Warhol and the Austrian filmmaker Peter Kubelka as its major precursors. Curiously, none of the Fluxus films were mentioned either as influences on or as contemporaries of the works cited, despite obvious similarities in approach and method.
   Maciunas’s response to Sitney was immediate and extensive, and characteristically, took the form of a chart.¹⁸ After criticizing and “correcting” Sitney’s use of terminology, he listed the Fluxfilms which either pre-dated or were contemporary with the works Sitney cited in his article. In almost every case, he attributed Sitney’s neglect of these Fluxus works to the “cliquishness and ignorance of film-makers outside the Coop. or Cinematheque circle.”¹⁹ While such a remark from the man who actively attempted to control the membership of Fluxus seems ironic, Maciunas’s obvious annoyance was justified, and the majority of the examples he gave were accurate.²⁰
   Both the Fluxfilms and the structural films exhibit this same reductivism/reflexivity, brought into play through similar methods (loop printing, flicker effects, stationary camera, etc.), but they diverge at the point where this reductivism should be taken to its logical extreme. Structural film ultimately turns “inward,” one could say, always insisting upon (even while critiquing) the necessity of the filmic process, no matter which of its components is isolated and underscored. The result parallels the “dead end” met by minimalist painting and sculpture in the late sixties and early seventies, as the ultimate gesture of a medium-segregated modernist art practice. By insisting on a notion of “pure film,” the structural group moved, as David James suggests, in the direction of “a film encyclopedia, which rather than limiting itself to a single item in the set of filmic codes attempts to mobilize more and more of them in more and more combinations.”²¹
   By contrast, the Fluxfilms, especially when taken in context with other Fluxus performances, insisted on a gradual deconstruction not only of the various components of the cinematic apparatus, but of cinema itself. The logical step after Paul Sharits’s Sears Catalogue, whose form, as mentioned above, suggested the superfluity of the projector, is a film event which precludes its use entirely. Eric Andersen achieves this in Film #6 (1966), in which a length of film (any film, developed or undeveloped) is simply unrolled and passed among a theater audience for their direct perusal. After eliminating the projector, there is nothing left but the screen; and in Ben Vautier’s Monochrome for Y. Klein, the performer is instructed to cover the movie screen with non-reflective paint while a favorite movie is shown. With the traditional viewing space eliminated, the spectator “generates” his or her own screening situation, made possible with the separately packaged film loops which can be observed through hand-held viewers. Finally, the viewer becomes producer, as is the case with Jackson Mac Low’s Tree Movie score which appeared in the first Fluxus newsletter in January 1964: “Select a tree*. Set up and focus a movie camera so that the tree* fills up most of the picture….”²²
   Opposed to the increased hermeticism of structural film, the Fluxus works moved “outward.” dismantling the cinematic apparatus in order to further dismantle the dichotomy between art and everyday life. John Cage, in his short essay “On Film,” asserted that the average spectator “is not entirely alive under film bombardment, but if the building he is in begins to burn down, he will wake up and use his liveliness to save himself.”²³ In the case of Fluxus film practice, the institution of cinema was successfully destroyed, and apparently, the only casualties were a few singed egos in the film establishment.

NOTES

1. I would like to thank the following people for sharing their valuable insights and advice: Jon Hendricks, Dick Higgins, Jonas Mekas, Peter and Barbara Moore, Jeff Perkins, and Paul Sharits. I am also grateful to Jim Ganz tor his comprehensive “Introduction to the Fluxfilm,” which accompanied the Williams College Fluxus Exhibition in December 1987, and to Pamela A. lvinski for reading the manuscript and making many valuable suggestions. The films were screened at Anthology Film Archives In New York City; Francisco Gonzales helped to make the viewing of the films a pleasant and efficient experience.

2. From a conversation with Jonas Mekas on December 12, 1990.

3. The Ann Arbor prize was mentioned in a letter from Maciunas to Ben Vautier, March 29, 1966, reproduced in Jon Hendricks, The Fluxus Codex (New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1988), p. 59.

4. For example, five films by George Landow were Iisted as being available for purchase in cc fiVe ThReE (June 1964), but only one Landow film was ever given a Fluxfilm number. Paul Sharits’s Word Movie and Unrolling Event were both listed as Fluxfilm number 29 on different occasions.

5. In at least one case, this system seems to have backfired. Alison Knowles planned to do a film of one of her performances, and was given number 21, although she doesn’t recall the film ever being made. See Jim Ganz, “An lntroduction to the Fluxfilm” (Willlamstown, Massachusetts: Williams College, 1987), p. 24.

6. Maciunas once remarked in a letter to Paul Sharits, “…we have lost our shirts in various film projects. Very expensive things those films.” In Fluxus Codex, p. 60.

7. Some examples: In James Riddle’s 9 Minutes [#6], the film’s title rotates like the second hand of a clock; in Chieko Shiomi’s Disappearing Music for Face [#4], it fades to white.

8. Unfortunately, it is beyond the scope of this essay to discuss all of the films in detail. A complete list of the numbered Fluxfilms follows: 1. Nam June Paik, Zen for Film (1962–1964); 2. Dick Higgins, Invocation of Canyons and Boulders for Stan Brakhage (1962); George Maciunas, End After 9 (1966); 4. Chieko Shiomi, Disappearing Music for Face (1966); 5. John Cavanaugh, Blink (1966); 6. James Riddle, 9 Minutes (1966); 7. George Maciunas, 10 Feet (1966); 8. George Maciunas, 1,000 Frames (1966); 9. Yoko Ono, Eyeblink (1966); 10. George Brecht, Entrance–Exit (1965); 11. Robert Watts, Trace No. 22 (c. 1965); 12. Robert Watts, Trace No. 23 (c. 1965); 13. Robert Watts, Trace No. 24 (c. 1965); 14. Yoko Ono, Number I (1966); 15. no film listed; 16. Yoko Ono, Number 4 (1967); 17. Pieter Vanderbeek, Five O’Clock in the Morning (1966); 18. Joe Jones, Smoking (1966); 19. Eric Andersen, Opus 74, Version 2 (1966); 20. George Maciunas, Artype (1966); 21. Alison Knowles, never made, 22. Jett Perkins, Shout (n.d.); 23. Wolf Vostell, Sun in Your Head (1963); 24. Albert Fine, Readymade (1966); 25 George Landow, The Evil Faerie (n.d., and apparently later disclaimed by the artist); 26. Paul Sharits, Sears Catalogue (1–3) (1965); 27. Paul Sharits, Dots I & 3 (1965); 28. Paul Sharits, Wrist Trick (1965); 29. Paul Sharits, Word Movie (1966); 30. Dick Higgins, Untitled (Dance) (1963); 31. John Cale, Police Car (n.d.); 32. Milan Knizak, Intermission [a.k.a. Pause] (1966); 33. Milan Knizak, Indeterminate Movie (n.d.); 34. Ay-O, Rainbow Movie (1969); 35. Geoffrey Hendricks, Moon Landing (1970); 36. Peter Kennedy and Mike Parr, [Untitled] (both 1970); 38. Ben Vautier, Seeing, Hearing, Saying Nothing (c. 1967): 39. Ben Vautier, Swimming Across Nice Harbor Fully Clothed (c. 1967); 40. Ben Vautier, Lifting Up and Holding a Chest of Drawers (c. 1967); 41. Ben Vautier, Sitting on a Promenade in Nice with a Sign, Watch Me, That’s All (c. 1967).

9. Peter Moore, who was the cameraman for all of these films, provided me with the details of the evening’s work in a conversation on January 9, 1991.

10. The choice of subject matter aligns perfectly with Maciunas’s manifesto, “Fluxus Art-Amusement:” “…art amusement must be simple, arousing, unpretentious, concerned with insignificances…,” first published In Happenings & Fluxus (Cologne· Kölnischer Kunstverein, 1970).

11. Although the artist wasn’t present for the actual filming of the piece (it was performed by Yoko Ono) it was credited to her, according to standard Fluxus protocol, because she was responsible for the original concept.

12. John Cage, “Four Statements on the Dance,” in Silence (Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 1961), p 93.

13. Filmmakers’ Co-operative Catalogue 3 (1965): 30. Higgins explores the use of boredom in art from Satie to Fluxus in his essay, “Boredom and Danger,” in A Dialectic of Centuries (New York and Barton, Vermont: Printed Editions, 1978), pp. 42–50.

14. Because of the heat sensitivity of the “Artype” screens, positive or negative prints were made from the original for later projection. See Fluxus Codex, p. 320.

15. George Maciunas, “Neo-Dada In Music, Theater, Poetry, Art,” in Clive Phillpot and Jon Hendricks, eds., Fluxus: Selections from the Gilbert and Lila Silverman Collection (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1988), p. 26.

16. Some versions of the film are accompanied by a soundtrack, consisting of a sine wave which gradually increases in decibels until it fades into what is known as “white noise.” This white noise begins, rather ironically, just as the image fades to black.

17. George Brecht, “Something About Fluxus,” in cc fiVe ThReE (Fluxus Newspaper No. 4) (June 1964).

18. Maciunas’s “Some Comments on Structural Film” by P. Adams Sitney appeared at the end of a revised version of the article published in Film Culture Reader (New York: Praeger, 1970), p. 349.

19. The Filmmakers’ Co-operative and Filmmakers’ Cinematheque (which was for some time one of Maciunas’s tenants at 80 Wooster Street in SoHo) were the major 1) alternative filmmakers’ association and 2) film screening space in New York in the sixties.

20. Whether or not the Fluxus works were actually being “plagiarized” by Warhol as Maciunas claimed, for instance ,seemed less important than the fact that they were being ignored by key figures in experimental film in the second half of this century.

21. David James, Allegories of Cinema (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), p. 254.

22. Fluxus Newsletter No. 1 (January 1961). The asterisk Indicates that “tree” may be substituted by any other object, such as “mountain,” “sea,” “flower,” “lake,” etc.

23. John Cage, “On Film,” in Richard Kostelanetz, ed., John Cage (New York: Praeger, 1970), p. 16.