Screening and discussion
Dick Higgins
The Flaming City
07 Dec 2022
The event is over
American artist Dick Higgins (1938-1998), composer, art theorist, poet, editor and printer, frequented Yale and Columbia universities before graduating from the Manhattan School of Printing.
He studied musical composition with Henry Cowell, attended John Cage's lectures on experimental music at the New School and participated in the earliest Fluxus activities in Europe. He founded and directed two publishing houses - Something Else Press (1963-1974) and Unpublished Editions (renamed Published Editions, 1972-1985) with which he wrote and edited forty-seven books. In terms of theory, Dick Higgins developed the concept of Intermedia (1965), with which he proposed a new definition of the work of art. He began to make films in the late 1950s. He explained that he had always been interested in moving images and rejected narration in film. Higgins recounted that since the period when, as a child, he was given a Keystone 16mm projector, he had always loved amateur films, the source and creators of which were often unknown to him. The artist made a dozen experimental films in various formats, combining different cinematographic techniques, often using collage, reusing pre-existing images (home movies) and acted sequences. The Flaming City (1961-1962) is the only complete full-length film in his filmography. It was shot mainly in Downtown New York. Through his camera lens the city looks like the set for an "anti-semantic love story", in the words of the artist" without any special plot and acted by artist and performer friends. The Kodachrome 16mm film used for the shoot was provided by the Filmmakers' Cooperative, which Higgins entrusted with the film shortly after finishing it. Having long remained unseen, The Flaming City is projected in France for the first time at this session in the Centre Pompidou.
The Flaming City, 1963, film 16mm, colour, sound, 121 min
"An anti-semantic love story about a marvellous part of New York City and the people who lived there as the city is destroyed so are they, except that both are indestructible. Reel 3 uses extraordinary technical effects." Dick Higgins
Session presented by Alice Centamore (researcher and exhibition curator).
Acknowledgements: Alice Centamore, Hannah Higgins and the Filmmaker’s Cooperative (New York) for lending the 16mm copy of the film.
Alice Centamore, researcher and writer lives between New York and Paris. She recently edited A Something Else Reader, an anthology of facsimiles of books published by the Something Else Press (Primary Information, 2022). She is currently preparing an exhibition on Dick Higgins's publishing house, scheduled to open in the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia in September 2023.
Where
Cinema 2, level –1
When
07 Dec 2022
Dick Higgins, Invocation of Canyons and Boulders (Fluxfilm n°2), 1966, (Photogrammes)
© photo : Centre Pompidou, Mnam-Cci/Hervé Véronèse/Dist. RMN-GP