Submitted for Your Approval, #1: Patrick (Luke Fowler, 2020) (Patreon)

Scottish filmmaker Luke Fowler is an unusual figure in experimental film: not exactly a documentarian, not precisely a maker of essay films, and yet someone whose complex works certainly partake of those genres. He explores a very particular mien, which is intellectual history, having made films dealing with figures as diverse as R.D. Laing, E.P. Thompson, Margaret Tait, Paul Cézanne, and recently a group of experimental composers, including Christian Wolff, Cornelius Cardew, and Martin Bartlett.

Fowler's newest work Patrick is another in this series, although it is quite different in tenor. Actually, there is an implicit argument in the way Patrick is made, which is very much in keeping with some of the stylistic features of the earlier films. We see certain locations related to the composer's career, his scholarly efforts, and images of particular physical artifacts and archival materials related to his musical practice. We are also treated to highly formalist landscape images of San Francisco, from the Bay to the center of town.

But soon we are looking closely at the exterior of the EndUp, one of the city's storied gay clubs, and we sense that Fowler's focus is a bit different. The subject of this film is Patrick Cowley, pioneering electronic composer whose work was a seminal part of 70s and 80s gay disco. He was best known for his work with Sylvester, but he also introduced a new form of abstraction into gay porn soundtracks. As Patrick demonstrates, Cowley was incredibly erudite and deeply serious about his practice, combining modernist music theory with ethnomusicology and proximics to consider music (and beats in particular) as shared social events.

Patrick asks the viewer to regard Cowley's "social music" with the same degree of seriousness that he did, and to afford it the same respect that we would automatically grant to Wolff or Cardew. Fowler's is a project of leveling, one that examines music not as the province of an elite but as a space for living, a global groove. It feels mighty real.