OffOn: An Explosion of the Senses

By Wheeler Winston Dixon.

“The human eye, the human form, the human face: these are the three central images of this avant-garde collage and kaleidoscope of shifting and fractured images, changing colors, and pulsing rhythms. Near the end, a tree appears briefly, and birds fly – first white, then red and blue. Celtic knots morph from one to another. The images become Rorschach tests although the mood, driven by the rapid changing images and the soundtrack, remains frantic.” (J. Hailey, IMDB)

Sometimes it’s good to look back on cinema history, and talk about the films that helped to shape the medium – films that are all too often forgotten today. Such is the case with Scott Bartlett’s landmark film OffOn (1967), which, as filmmaker Charles Levine once observed in a conversation with me, “changed the language of cinema.” Something like this could only come out of the crucible of the 1960s, when everything was being called into question, and no area of experimentation was left untouched.

Made for less than $1,000, OffOn is a dazzling cinema poem, and one of the first film/video mixes in American cinema history. For most of the film’s length, the images are entirely abstract, until a long segment with a beating heart soundtrack gives way to a series of intensely complex geometric compositions. The film is loud, aggressive, and boldly colorful; it fuses a barrage of synthetic shapes with images taken from life (an eye, a woman dancing, a couple on a motorcycle) with abandon, and directly assaults the audience.

Created by Scott Bartlett with Mike MacNamee, Glen McKay and Tom De Witt (now known as Tom Ditto), OffOn used a series of film loops by Bartlett and De Witt as the basic source material. These film loops were then fed through a video effects system, and filmed directly off a television monitor. Bartlett and De Witt edited the material, and intercut the filmed “videoized” footage with direct film loops. The resulting assemblage was then set to an electronic soundtrack created by Bartlett, De Witt, and Manny Meyer.

The impact of OffOn is hard to overestimate. It exploded on the film scene and instantly polarized viewers, many of whom considered any sort of hybrid between film and video inherently suspect. I remember seeing it for the first time at the Filmmakers’ Cinematheque in Manhattan right after it was made, and the audience was utterly blown away by the film’s impact. There had been absolutely nothing like it before.

Bartlett became an overnight celebrity on the college film circuit, and OffOn was added to film collections at museums around the world. In addition, Bartlett’s romantic, West Coast cool sensibility clashed with the then-prevailing New York “structuralist” school, best typified by Michael Snow’s epic film Wavelength (1967), which dealt exclusively with the properties of film grain, color, light, and various color stocks. In stark contrast, OffOn demolished the artificial boundaries between film and video, and set off a wave of similar works that fused video, then an emerging medium, with the filmic image.

Bartlett, whose first film, Metanomen (1966), pushed high contract black and white cinematography to its limits (and which was also made with assistance from DeWitt), opened up a new and controversial art form with OffOn, which represented the first time that film and video had been so effectively intertwined.

For Bartlett, OffOn was also the film that would define his short career; after making a few more short films, most notably the trancelike Moon (1969), which went through various versions before its final release, and 1970 (1972), an autobiographical film which summed up his life to date, Bartlett more or less withdrew from personal filmmaking.

In his later years, despite the security of teaching positions at the University of California at Santa Cruz and the University of Maine, in addition to generous fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the American Film Institute, Bartlett never recaptured the magic of OffOn, or of the era that helped to create it. Scott Bartlett died on September 29, 1990 at the age of 47, as a result of complications from a kidney and liver transplant.

Nevertheless, Bartlett’s work stands as a testament to the personal vision created with a group of friends during the highpoint of the 1960s in San Francisco. A pioneering work in the best sense, OffOn explored the boundaries of video and film, and unleashed a new and explosive art form that redefined the experimental film. In 2004, OffOn was named to the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant,” but that did little to bring it back into the public eye.

Today, although OffOn is available on both DVD and on the web, as nearly everything is, it seems that people have forgotten both Bartlett and his work, which is a shame. The artificial binarism of film and video has long since been abandoned, but somewhere along the way, the film that originally broke the down the barrier has been lost – no longer part of the canon.

But then again, many of the best films don’t make that cut – and so it’s important to remind people where it started, and how, and what an enormous breakthrough OffOn was. Best seen on a large screen with blasting sound, OffOn typified and encapsulated the ecstasy and tumult of the 1960s, a time when anything seemed possible, and probably was.

An earlier version of this essay appeared in the journal Cinespect.

Wheeler Winston Dixon writes regularly for Film International.

OffOn (1967):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hEr9Z7Q4ZxY