Program 9: Eye and Ear Control

The Last Clean Shirt
Alfred Leslie, 1964, 40m

Peggy’s Blue Skylight
Joyce Wieland, 1964, 16mm, 12m

New York Eye and Ear Control
Michael Snow, 1964, 16mm, 34m

This program includes: Alfred Leslie’s The Last Clean Shirt, a collaborative experiment (with poet Frank O’Hara) in cinematic parallelism, in which a black man and a white woman drive around downtown Manhattan; Peggy’s Blue Skylight, Joyce Wieland’s document of a day in the loft she shares with her then-husband Michael Snow as a succession of friends visit; and Snow’s own New York Eye and Ear Control, in which a group of free jazz musicians (Albert Ayler, Don Cherry, John Tchicai, Roswell Rudd, Gary Peacock, Sonny Murray) provide accompaniment for a series of images featuring the artist’s iconic Walking Woman silhouette. “The film,” wrote Snow, “contains illusions of distances, durations, degrees, divisions of antipathies, polarities, likenesses, complements, desires. Acceleration of absence to presence. Scales of ‘Art’-’Life,’ setting-subject, mind-body, country-city pivot. Simultaneous silence and sound, one and all.”