The Maltese Cross Movement (Keewatin Dewdney, 1967)

Quite unexpectedly, I finally had the chance to see Keewatin Dewdney's The Maltese Cross Movement, a film I've read about for as long as I've been studying experimental film. Dewdney is a mathematician who made exactly one film, following a cinema workshop he happened to take while completing his PhD at the University of Michigan. This one film became a minor classic, touching upon many of the key concepts that dominated the artistic conversation around structuralist film at the time. Although Maltese Cross Movement shows certain affinities with both Owen Land and Hollis Frampton, it manages to exhibit a highly unique creative voice. The fact that Dewdney made a film in his free time, one that stands up against the most significant contributions in its field, has only heightened the mystique around Dewdney and Maltese Cross.

In under seven minutes, Dewdney offers a consideration of the role of the projector in cinema, a self-reflexive film that introduces an essential component of the cinematic apparatus for investigation, while also using that auto-referential container for unexpectedly resonant content. The Maltese cross is a metal gear that opens and closes the shutter on a film projector. Its mechanical movement helps to disguise the projector's shift from one frame to the next, and it does so at a pace (24fps) designed to meet the eye's natural threshold for perceiving film's "artificial" movement pattern. That is, it parses out one frame at a time during projection, blocking out the space in between, so that cinema can replicate motion in the human eye, thanks to our persistence of vision. It is said that when we watch a film on a projector, we are spending half our time in the dark, even if we don't "see" that darkness. This is the job of the Maltese cross movement.

In the film, Dewdney shows us an animation of the Maltese cross movement -- the four-pronged wheel and disc-shaped shutter, pictured above. Gradually, the film introduces visible flicker, slowing down the process so that we can see the Maltese cross at work. As this continues, Dewdney starts inserting single images and sounds, mostly still pictures of various objects -- tea kettle, car, frying pan, etc. -- that are named by a male voice as they appear. But periodically, a young girl in a chair shows up, asking Dewdney and the viewer, "are we ready yet?"

A young woman, meanwhile is shown in black-and-white, walking through a forest. The film is moving toward the recitation of a short poem about the Maltese cross, and what we discover is that all of the inserted images are being banked by the film for later use. Each image is a component of an audiovisual rebus which "reads" the poem using phonetic fragments of the names of the objects. By doing this, Dewdney not only squares the circle with respect to self-reflexivity. (I.e., the delivery of a poem that describes the very process that allows us to make sense of the film itself.) He also displays the fragmentation of sound along with image, an element of the apparatus we often ignore.

That's to say, a sync-sound film typically has its soundtrack on the filmstrip. So just as we are imperceptibly in the dark for 1/24 of a second during projection, we are also in silence during that time. The speed of the soundtrack exists at the limits of natural human audition, so we are basically hearing tiny fragments of sound and speech that, like the images, are joined together in the mind. By breaking the poem into rebus-like phonemes, The Maltese Cross Movement displays this fragmentation, making words out of otherwise unrelated sounds.

So within the texture of the film, we find an audiovisual catalogue of meaning-fragments, much like we find in Frampton's Zorns Lemma, only here they work together to form individual words, rather than a theoretical meta-framework as Frampton does. And the introduction of a character of sorts -- the young girl who is demanding the film's completion so that she can express her thoughts to the viewer -- recalls the equally self-referential figures we meet in Land's Remedial Reading Comprehension or Wide Angle Saxon.

But Dewdney's approach is unique, in that he is addressing the different types of meaning that the film projector itself can produce. We see the woman in the forest as a coherent diegetic space, but this creation of a film-world is interrupted by an interlocutor (the little girl) who wants her voice heard. The rebus images are adding up like a language, one that creates the possibility for the girl to speak her piece. So the process displayed by The Maltese Cross Movement is one that eventually permits cinematic communication of any kind. Dewdney's film offers a concrete metaphor for the projector's labor, but one that is so mechanically fundamental as to not really be a metaphor at all. It's kinda neat.

Thanks to the largesse of the Media City Film Festival, you can see The Maltese Cross Movement online, along with dozens of other experimental films, absolutely free. Check it out.