The Wilkinson Household Fire Alarm (Morgan Fisher, 1973) (Patreon)

Morgan Fisher is an unusual figure in experimental cinema. While his work is clearly aligned with the concepts and procedures of structuralism, he isn't always cited as one of the major figures of that "school." Fisher's work is wry and rigorous; it is probably closest in attitude to the films of Hollis Frampton. But where Frampton's films are wide-ranging in approach, reflecting his underlying fascination with philosophy and mathematics, Fisher's domain is fairly circumscribed. He makes films about cinema, and most of them are in fact about the industrial cinema of the entertainment industry. 

David James has written about Fisher, noting that he is sometimes perceived as a bit to the side of the dominant history of the American avant-garde. And this partial marginality, according to James, has to do with the fact that Fisher is an L.A. filmmaker, with a sensibility removed from both the visionary-Beat orientation of San Francisco, and the "tougher" East Coast structural approach along the NYC-Upstate-Toronto corridor. Films like Production Stills and Picture and Sound Rushes are explicitly about the formal parameters of mainstream film. Those films are almost absurdly self-reflexive, even Borgesian, cataloguing the ways that films can be made. But they treat cinema as a world unto itself. The epistemological and ontological investigations of Frampton and Snow are foreign to Fisher's auto-ethnography of cinema as a kind of labor.

The Wilkinson Household Fire Alarm may be Fisher's shortest film. Clocking in at a mere two minutes, it is somewhat atypical of Fisher's more process-oriented efforts. But it is equally hermetic, seeing as how it's based on a very basic homology, one that is entirely contained within the closed universe of cinema. It is an homage / parody of a particular film from the European avant-garde canon, Marcel Duchamp's 1926 film Anemic Cinema. That filmis comprised entirely of close-ups of spinning discs that Duchamp designed for it. It represents a collision between the graphic experimentation of Duchamp's contemporaries -- Hans Richter, Oskar Fischinger -- and the linguistic punning of the Symbolist poets.

In Fisher's film, meanwhile, we are given a static shot of a very different disc. When it is activated, it too spins, swirling the message that's printed on its outside, and gradually revealing a second, hidden message. Unlike most of Fisher's other films, Wilkinson doesn't document a cinematic process. Instead, it is all about indexical communication, which is a vital part of the cinema. In other words, the cinematic sign and the actual object have an existential connection. One is a material trace of the other. The presence of the one testifies to the existence of the other. Where there's smoke, there's fire.