9 Edition des Etats Generaux du Film Documentaire, 20 - 26 August 2019

‘FRAGMENT OF A WORK’ by Federico Rossin

Imagine an eye that knows nothing about the laws of perspective invented by man, an eye that ignores the logical recomposition, an eye that does not correspond to anything definite, but that must discover each object encountered in life through a perceptive adventure. How many colors are there for the eyes of a four-legged baby on the lawn and who knows nothing about the concept of "Green"? How many rainbows can light create for an uneducated eye? What perception of thermal waves can this eye have? Imagine a living world populated by all sorts of incomprehensible objects, trembling in inexplicable and interminable variations of movement and color. Imagine the world before "In the beginning was the word".
Stan Brakhage, Metaphors and Vision(Pierre Camus)

Correlate what you see with what you do with your hands. Think about what's important and what's not. To be carried away by the movement of the universe rather than to oppose it. By all natural movements. We can not speak of beginning because everything is circular, but all this is interdependent. Nothing starts without it.
Robert E. Fulton, Reality's Invisible

The work of Robert Fulton remains a hidden treasure. His name does not appear in the stories of experimental cinema or documentary cinema. Yet his films are dazzling proof that there is a passage - secret - between the gestures of making documentary cinema and experimental cinema. Robert Edison Fulton III (1939-2002 - the great-grandson of the inventor of the steamboat) was an American filmmaker, an aviator since childhood (he learned to fly at the age of ten), a musician of experimental jazz (tenor saxophonist), who traveled around the world with his Bolex camera. He died aboard his own plane, which crashed in a storm near Scranton, Pennsylvania. He was also recognized for his photographs taking as subject nature or taking an ethnographic approach. He has directed more than fifty films and worked on mainstream feature films, video clips and nature documentaries. From the sixties, he is one of the most advanced modern aerial photography operators. He makes and turns his own films, even in extreme zones and flight conditions. It develops a device combining a light aircraft (a Cessna 180) and a camera 35 mm Arriflex handled by the pilot. He always said that he did not see any difference with the use of a camera on the ground. While Werner Herzog takes him for character of a film, he misses being engulfed in an Ecuadorian volcano with his plane: he films then what will be the last sequence of his life. During the sixties, He studied film and visual arts at Harvard University and began working as a cinematographer with Robert Gardner, one of the masters of ethnographic cinema, who was his mentor and lifelong friend. During the sixties, Harvard was a center of counterculture and Robert Fulton found there both inspiration for his career as an artist and a deep religious belief: he became a Buddhist. Many of his films reflect a Buddhist vision of existence, including a deep awareness of emptiness and a vision of life as an eternal and circular movement. His sinuous, sophisticated, labyrinthine films are filled with striking metaphysical poetry about life on earth as a tiny part of a larger cosmological structure. With his camera in perpetual motion, "Semi-danceable and semi-athletic" (Scott MacDonald), Fulton was an aesthetic acrobat and a visual rebel, who constantly mixed thousands of images and a wealth of ideas to create grandiose overprints expressing a mystic lyricism deeply personal. In his films, he reorganizes reality by adopting a radically nonlinear approach: each film takes the form of a torrent of sounds and images scrolling at a vertiginous speed. To account for the polyphony of the world - whether at Harvard University, Tibet, Africa, the Andes, or other - Robert Fulton adopts oblique and unexpected angles, fast camera movements (inspired by the times of the fluidity of tai chi and jerky rhythms of free jazz),flickerssophisticated, manipulations of speed and animation techniques (in live shooting, scraping or painting on film, or with paper cut). It also uses synchronous sound recording and various light-film direct cinema techniques. The visible and the invisible unite in a masterful fireworks, euphoric: a kaleidoscope cinematographic pure and joyful. Thomas W. Cooper describes the filmmaker's shots as "full of subjective, moving shots at irregular heights and angles while Fulton carried the camera in races, fast walks or" dances ". [...] The moving images of Fulton propel us through the sand, under camels and close to the earth, as if taken from the point of view of a running child. Fulton considers that cinema is part of an immense human adventure and an Orphic revelation: with his camera movements, he tries to highlight the brilliant inner and outer beauty of the world. His editing work likens him to an alchemist mixing elements, symbols, metaphors into an analogue audiovisual fabric, full of ostensible signs and secret allusions. Its montage is the result of an extremely dense process: it oscillates constantly, at a frantic pace, between different spaces, times, methods and subjects, resorting to a vast panoply of unpredictable camera movements and erratic sounds. As Lito Tejada-Flores writes: "Fulton is a juggler and a" combiner "that combines ideas and images that do not really go together to form new definitions of what might fit together. His frames contain a plethora of images: frames in the frame,split screens , multiple overprints ... As he explains: "We generally consider an image as a unit of information transmission. In reality, beyond that, an image carries kinesthetic properties in the sense that it generates a certain energy, a certain "tone", if you will. Stan Brakhage's montage in his mystical and cosmological film Dog Star Man(1964), the use of a fast montage, often subliminal, and contrapuntal constructions by Gregory Markopoulos, the virtuosity of multiple overprints in Bruce Baillie's films: these seem to be particularly important references for Robert Fulton. The complex elaboration of the visually resplendent montage of his films is still reflected in his soundtracks: for the filmmaker, the sound must be as radical as the image. The final montage furiously mixes music (free jazz), lyrics and poetic utterances, moments of silence and direct atmospheric sounds. One can only hope that Robert Fulton's work - a truly important discovery - will come to be more widely known and appreciated. That would only be fair.

- Federico Rossin

Sessions presented by Federico Rossin.
Special thanks to Florence Fulton and Douglas Kahan.