White Heart (Daniel Barnett, 1975) (Patreon)

One of those canonical titles that has been out of circulation for years, Daniel Barnett's White Heart is a major achievement. Experimental film history is not complete without it. Operating at the juncture between Hollis Frampton's system-building, Jack Chambers' cryptic mythologies, and Owen Land's cornball conceptualism, White Heart is a film that doesn't fit comfortably into any particular school or movement, but somehow seems integral to many of them. 

At any given time in the film, there are at least three things going on at one time. There is a fraught, crackling surface to much of White Heart, a combination of painting, scraping, and the unevenness inherent in hand-developing. There are lines and sprocket holes frequently bobbing up the side of the image. And then there is something moving within the image, a representation that involves something -- trains, a woman washing clothes, a landscape -- traveling across the screen. So Barnett is activating the horizontal, vertical, and surface vectors of the cinema image at any given time.

White Heart also experiments with loops, such as the aforementioned trains, seen in a city intersection from a high window. It is hard to discern at first that parts of the image are repeating. That's because the surface information -- the pockmarks and peels -- are completely unique. There is also the repeated use of the word "rose," which eventually seems to refer to the flower as expected, but through its repetition can take on a multitude of meanings: the image rose higher; objects are arranged in rows; and even several shots of the ocean imply that someone rows, rows, rows their boat.

This is an open-form film, and it contains bits that don't have obvious connections to the whole. In particular, Barnett returns several times to an older man in a library, an academic type who offers erudite narration. His relatively straightforward appearance seems at odds with the heavily worked-over surfaces of so much of White Heart, such that he is like a voice from outside, an Owen Landian commentator. Similarly, we see a close-up of fingers holding a match, sometimes lit, sometimes not, as if prepared to burn the entire film from the inside out.

It would take multiple viewings to fully grasp everything that Barnett is up to. It is a film that gestures outward, as opposed to structural films that point towards their own internal forms and conclusions. I would compare this to such dispersive, "outlier" works as Chambers' The Hart of London, Robert Nelson's Bleu Shut, and David Larcher's Mare's Tail (although White Heart exhibits much more discipline than Larcher's sprawling, whackadoo whatsit). 

You can watch White Heart here.