Films by Sara Kathryn Arledge (Patreon)

First, I want to thank James Hansen for alerting me to the fact that these films are streamable through the Pacific Film Archive. I'd have missed them otherwise. I recall first encountering Sara Kathryn Arledge's name in Wheeler Winston Dixon's 1997 book The Exploding Eye, a sort of alternate history of experimental film. She is cited as a pioneer, and looking at her work, one can immediately understand its importance. Primarily a painter, Arledge made hundreds of artworks on glass slides, individual mini-paintings designed for projection. The program included ten minutes' worth of these glass slide works, and it is indeed fascinating that she was working in this medium around the same time as Stan Brakhage, but without being aware of it.

The films, however, are less engaging, possibly because Arledge is hovering around certain ideas that became more fully realized by later artists and filmmakers. She strikes me as a worthy footnote to experimental film history, but a footnote nonetheless.

Interior Garden II (1978)

Designed primarily as a vehicle for her painted transparencies, Interior Garden II is a kind of anti-animation. The film consists of a series of individual artworks that fade into and out of each other, one by one. There is a progression; the images start out bright and colorful and become increasingly darker. Arledge discovered that painterly blacks are, in fact, more visually potent with a beam of light shooting through them. In order to make Interior Garden II more like a film, she adds an unnecessary soundtrack loop of loud crickets. It's overkill, but what can you do?

Introspection (1947)

Almost exactly contemporary with Maya Deren's first experiments in filmed dance, Arledge made Introspection, a film that uses superimposition and colored gels to render the bodies of her three dancers as abstract forms. Arledge masks most of their bodies, so we see arms, feel, and torsos are floating objects, often playing one against another in terms of scale and perspective. The results are a bit reminiscent of Norman McLaren, but without his sense of play.

What Is a Man? (1958)

The most compelling of Arledge's films, What Is a Man? combines found footage with staged sequences that bear the look of older, found footage. Even though the film is highly episodic, there's a remarkable seamlessness to it, in terms of texture and overall theme. It's largely about the breakdown of language and identity, with people bristling against the meanings imposed on them by the broader culture. There's a tense ambiance similar to Christopher Maclaine's The End, which was made only five years earlier. And in its tendency to sift through audiovisual detritus to discover Wittgensteinian paradox, What Is a Man? looks ahead to the work of Robert Nelson and especially Owen Land.