- An autobiography of the poet and film maker James Broughton.
- In style and in technique James Broughton's TESTAMENT is quite eclectic; most moving sequence comes right our of Hills Film "Portrait", a sequence of photographs in reverse chronological order. Yet an extreme and profound transformation of the strategies of autobiography is the result of Broughtons art.
The opening trope brings together an allusion to Maya Deren (the reversed sea from At Land), who was one of the major inspirations of Broughtons early cinema, and a recollection of the aging balletomane (the rocking chair), the icon of retrospective fancy in Broughtons Four in the Afternoon. In this shot, the film-maker himself sits in a rocking chair on a beach. His rocking movement indicates a sympathetic union with the sea he contemplates. This image, with its several variations, including one using reverse photography (where Broughton walks backward out of the backward-rolling waves to reoccupy the empty chair), presents the constitutive moment of the film: everything occurs as if recalled from this extended rhythmic figure. The empty chair is one of the strong substitutions for the moment of death in Testament. When the film-maker comes back into it, he acknowledges the ad hoc cinematic illusion of autobiographical continuity. This metaphorical use of reverse motion also occurred in Film Portrait. Broughtons choice of imagery, his superb timing, and the quality of the verbal text which accompanies the images raise this figure to a power unanticipated by the self-irony of Hills film.
The text of the film is an anthology of passages from A Long Undressing, Broughtons collected poems, carefully excerpted and intoned as if they constituted a single autobiographical poem. Early in the film when a voice (presumably that of one of the townspeople watching the procession which is seen much later) asks, Who is James Broughton?, the citation is in fact from the poem I Am a Medium, the autobiographical forward to the collection:
I am a third generation Californian My grandfathers were bankers, and so was my father. But my mother wanted me to become a surgeon. However, one night when I was 3 years old I was awakened by a glittering stranger who told me I was a poet and always would be and never to fear being alone or being laughed at. That was my first meeting with my angel who is the most interesting poet I have ever met.
The indifference to being alone or being laughed at is illustrated by the outrageous procession through Modesto, later in the film. But the moment of poetic incarnation is illustrated at this point by the dance of a nearly naked youth, in silver body-paint, with a long goatlike phallus, which he rubs against an immense egg, representing the poet. A motherly figure hovers over it, too. Even Christ makes a brief appearance, to bless it.
The issue of artistic incarnation is fundamentally different in Testament from the variations we have observed in other film-makers. There is no question of psychological development, dramatic reorientation, or the patterning of aberrant responses. The story that Broughton tells is of a calling, pure and simple. The mythic representation of the angel poet, as of the Great Mother and Christ in this Orphic trinity, looks forward to another scene of incarnation, as a filmmaker per se, a little later in the film.
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