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Film Artist Looks Forward Filmically and Back on Lovers By Joel Singer
This is a video-rich article, featuring Joel Singer's lush, luxurious and languorous "Sebali Cremation" (2014), concerning a cremation ceremony in Bali.
"LIVE LIFE POETICALLY!" WAS THE DICTUM OF MY MAGNIFICENT OTHER,
the poet and filmmaker James Broughton, who was one of the titans of Bay Area avant-garde film—"Mother’s Day", 1948, "The Pleasure Garden", 1953, "The Bed", 1968, among many others—see "Big Joy: The Adventures of James Broughton".
Joel SInger, left, and James Broughton shooting their film 'Devotions' from atop Twin Peaks overlooking San Francisco, circa 1983. photo: courtesy J. Singer
My twenty-five year journey with James (1913-1999) was lived in that spirit and we made a dozen films together ("Song of the Godbody", 1977, "Hermes Bird", 1979, "Devotions", 1983). With our last film, "Scattered Remains" (1988), created to celebrate James's 75th year, my filmmaking ended—or so I thought!
But I just uploaded to YouTube my latest film "Sebali Cremation"—in high definition, it took 24 hours—from a glass house overlooking the verdant rice fields of central Bali. After a twenty-two year cinema hiatus and moving here from the heart of Manhattan in 2009, I have now made another dozen films, this one my longest and most indepth.
I decided to document the mass cremation that takes place every five years in our village, Sebali, for those who have died during that time. The entire process, both shooting video and stills, transpired over a two-month period.
In preparation, I told a number of villagers what I was intending and asked that they please not engage the camera. As a result I was able to drift through their elaborate preparations almost invisibly every morning and evening and gather gorgeous footage.
One of the many spectacular shots from SInger's 'Sebali Cremation', 2014. photo: courtesy J. Singer
The ceremony to consecrate the rice fields, where the temporary buildings would be constructed, took place in early June. For the next eight weeks they built the structures that would house thousands of Hindu offerings for the forty people whose lives were being honored.
It was thrilling to be able to observe and document the many extraordinary things, culminating with the cremation on August 8th. This film is for the beautiful, endlessly creative and imaginative people of Sebali who have deeply moved us with their rituals and ceremonies.
I first came to Bali with James, as it happened, on our honeymoon journey around the world in 1979, during his sabbatical year. We were inspired by our close friend, Tobias Schneebaum, the literary world’s most famous "cannibal." A painter who lived with tribes in Peru and New Guinea, he had also visited Bali and told us of its magical ceremonies and its people's amazing openness.
Schneebaum's groundbreaking book "Keep the River on Your Right", 1969, shocked but also enlightened many with its insight into jungle life and connections to modern romanticism. His incredible adventures, including a return to both those countries, can be viewed in "Keep the River on Your Right: A Modern Cannibal Tale", 2000, by David Shapiro and Laurie Gwen Shapiro (available on Netflix, here).
I arrived in New York City in 2000 and had the great experience of living with Tobias in the famous artist’s building WestBeth until his passing in 2005. At Tobias' last public reading, at a bookstore in SoHo, I met my current partner, Nirgrantha, a Jewish-born, Hindu-named, Buddhist psychiatrist from Brooklyn.
As it turned out, Nirgrantha was in the middle of building his dream home—in Bali!
Tobias Schneeabaum, artist, author and 'cannibal', at home and in the field. photo: courtesy T. Schneebaum and D. Blair
I was 11 when I first discovered the enchantment of image making. My older brother set up a black and white darkroom in our basement in Montreal, Canada, where I was born in 1948, and I never tired of the mysterious alchemy of images manifesting in chemical baths.
After several unhappy years working in our family-owned furniture business, I returned to college to major in fine arts. As film quickly became my passion, I dreamt of leaving Canada to leap into the great renaissance in avant-garde cinema afoot in the United States.
I met James Broughton in 1974 when I was searching for a graduate school and had the good fortune to audit one of his film history classes at the San Francisco Art Institute. Instantly my life changed: I knew James and San Francisco were it. The films of James Broughton can be acquired through Facets.
We spent the next fifteen years in the Bay Area sharing fully in art and life. We collaborated on seven films, mostly celebrations of our loving relationship as well as our artistic vision, and I helped design several volumes of his poetry.
SInger and Broughton doing Big Sur, circa 1975. photo: courtesy J. Singer
One of my most poetic cinema moments occurred in the mid-1980s when I was invited to show at Harvard University's Carpenter Center. Considering my prior, less-than-stellar academic life, my Mom and Dad came down from Montreal to witness this great achievement.
They were so taken, they didn’t notice (or chose not to comment) that one of the films was "Song of the Godbody", an intimate exploration of James’s nude body including an extended and extreme close up of his pulsing anus.
Admittedly, it was "very artistic", set to classical cello, and hard to discern precisely—indeed, Larry Kardish, the longtime film curator at The Museum of Modern Art called it “a classic liberation film” and it is in their collection.
Of course, this was nothing new for James, who made his groundbreaking "The Bed", during the Summer of Love. The first film to show full frontal male and female nudity, it featured a bed full of people pixilating its way across the Marin countryside, and is his most popular film.
A close-up for the Broughton/Singer film "Song of Godbody" which features incredibly aesthetic shots of an anus. photo: courtesy J. Singer
James also celebrated my phallus in "Hermes Bird". Shot in slow motion, it follows its engorgement to full erection over the course of ten minutes, while he reads his poems in praise of the phallic god Hermes on the soundtrack. Many have noted to me that this film, along with "Song of Godbody", were some of the most striking avant-garde films they had ever seen.
We spent the last decade of his life in Port Townsend, Washington, where we moved in 1989. I became part of an artist’s cooperative gallery there and my photographic collage work thrived.
Since James died in 1999 I continue to be guided by his spirit, notably another one of his pithy aphorisms, "Adventure not predicament!" which comes in very handy here in Bali.
Joel Singer is filmmaker and activist residing in Bali and can be .