Cry Dr. Chicago

This work comes out of the era when people were starting to distinguish between "movies" and "films," and Dr. Chicago is not a movie. I saw it in Phill Niblock's SoHo loft around 1976, as the centerpiece of an evening of avant garde films. (Other filmmakers represented included Bruce Conner and Ken Jacobs, to give you some context.) I could not say what it's 'about' in a narrative sense. I'm not sure I ever knew. I have a vague recollection that the title character, Dr. Chicago, is an abortionist on the run (but this may be entirely mistaken.) What I believed it to be about at the time - and I still believe that - is "seeing." More than almost any other film I can think of, the images are the content. It is a quality shared somewhat with the works of Andrei Tarkovsky, but Manupelli goes much farther with it than Tarkovsky usually did.

(I note that George Manupelli is listed as writer and cinematographer, and that no director is listed. At the time I saw it, it was clearly presented as the work of George Manupelli, that he was the filmmaker.) The film is composed of very long takes, many of them probably full 10 minute camera reels. The camera is static through most of the film. I do not remember any cutting within a scene, which is to say, each take was a scene and vice versa.

Many of the images were highly layered. I remember one in particular where the title character, Dr. Chicago, sat in a semi-darkened room talking to a woman who was lying on a bed. He was seen in profile through a screen door. The late afternoon light on the screen rendered him half visible, the woman almost invisible. He talked in a low, rhythmic voice. The scene was hypnotic. After a while of looking at it, the screen seemed to undulate and produce weird light patterns. The longer you looked, the more you saw. That's another thing Manupelli shares with Tarkovsky: the work requires great patience on the part of the viewer, and a willingness to keep looking and let the images wash over the eye and accumulate an effect.

It is worth noting that the character Dr. Chicago is played by Alvin Lucier, a renowned New Music composer and theorist. Alvin was a student and friend of John Cage, and has been a professor of Music at Wesleyan University for decades, where he has trained an entire generation of composers.

I don't know if it possible to see Cry Dr. Chicago anywhere anymore. In it's time, it was part of the category called Underground Films. (That name has been applied to a very different sort of film recently.) If there is still an audience for these films, I think it has probably gone underground.

It is a stunning work in its way, composed of motion photographs and, as I remember, very sparing sound. I would not call it minimalist, because the images were often complex. By its reduction of sensory inputs to a few elements, it achieves one of the properties that I personally believe is common to all great art: experiencing it teaches you about how your senses work.