Reality’s Invisible (1971)
50 Minutes, 16mm, Color, Sound
Reality’s Invisible could be described as a portrait of the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, yet it is a portrait of an extremely idiosyncratic and distinctive sort. Fulton made the film during his brief time at Harvard, where he had been invited to teach by Robert Gardner, his friend and collaborator. Fulton moves us through the concrete space of the Center’s Le Corbusier-designed building—the only structure by the architect in North America—but, more centrally, presents us footage of students making and discussing their work alongside figures like Gardner, theorist Rudolf Arnheim, artist Stan Vanderbeek, filmmaker Stan Brakhage, and graphic designer Toshi Katayama.
In his own words, Fulton describes this film as “Extensive experimentation with optical printing montage in a documentary on Visual Studies.”
In the Screening Room episode which featured Fulton as guest filmmaker, he elaborated on the film saying, “Normally we think of an image as an information-conveying unit,” he explained. “Well, more than that, it does have kinesthetic properties, in that it generates a certain energy, a certain ‘tone’ if you like.”