Cinema alumnus wins Guggenheim Fellowship for experimental filmmaking

Madison Brookshire ’02 is a multidisciplinary artist and a teacher who recently won the 2023 Guggenheim Fellowship. His art ranges from drawings and music to film and performances.

During his time at Binghamton University, Brookshire discovered his passion for film after taking a class on experimental film history. He would later teach a similar class at Binghamton in 2004 and found a love for teaching, too. He is now a lecturer at University of California, Riverside.

The Guggenheim Foundation receives approximately 3,000 applications each year for about 175 fellowships. Brookshire intends to use his fellowship funding to further his art without the pressure of the market, to travel and share his recents creations, and to meet and work with composers he admires.

Q: Why did you choose Binghamton University, and can you talk about your time on campus?

A: During my first year at Binghamton, I took a class with Mark McElhatten on experimental film history that changed my entire trajectory. I had never seen anything like an experimental film before, and I knew almost instantly that I wanted it to be a part of my life. At the end of that semester, I asked Mark what he thought I should do if I wanted to become a filmmaker, and he very generously offered a road map for the rest of my time at Binghamton. I added cinema as a major and studied filmmaking with Ariana Gerstein, Vincent Grenier, Ken Jacobs and Julie Murray.

One of the things that has always surprised me about Binghamton, though, is that the University has this absolute gem of a Cinema Department, it doesn’t seem to fully appreciate it. ... It’s actually one of the few programs in the U.S. that specializes in experimental cinema and one of an even smaller number of undergraduate programs that does. Between the faculty, alumni and network of other incredible artists I was able to come into contact with, it’s hard to overstate what a rich educational environment I felt I was in. We were encouraged to take intellectual risks with our work and then given the space, respect and resources to do so.

For instance, I remember a friend of mine, Peter Bianco ’01, got the idea to borrow a small Tesla coil from either physics or engineering. Peter realized we could use the Tesla coil to make very short contact prints, that the electricity would run through the positive film and expose the negative. It made these wonderful, ghostly, crackling images and we both made a film in his bathtub in one night, taking turns exposing the film with the Tesla coil and then developing it straight away to see what we had done. That film actually premiered at the New York Film Festival, and there’s a print of it in the Binghamton University Library.

I taught my first undergraduate class in experimental film and video production at Binghamton University in spring 2004; immediately, in addition to being an artist, I found teaching to be my calling. So, I have Binghamton to thank for that as well! If I remember correctly, Miles McNulty ’05 was the teaching assistant for the class, and he went on to win a Princess Grace Award.

Over time, as a student, you slowly became aware of all this rich history until you could almost feel it in the halls. In fact, more than one “classic” of experimental cinema was shot there, including Hollis Frampton’s Critical Mass (1971). Critical Mass is part of Frampton’s Hapax Legomena, and the recording of the discussion after he screened it as a work in progress at Binghamton is an amazing document in and of itself. Nicholas Ray also made a film at Binghamton that features in a moving scene in Ray’s and Wim Wenders’ Lightning Over Water (1980).

In 2017, in an essay about Ernie Gehr, I wrote: “I [saw] Serene Velocity (1970) perhaps a dozen times while attending Binghamton University. Like so many others, I studied (and eventually had an office) in the very hall where [Gehr] made Serene Velocity one night in 1970. In some ways, my relationship to that film defines my relationship to cinema: a slow process of ever-increasing appreciation for a something I would call sublime were it not for its insistent, unrelenting realism, its effect much stranger and ultimately more enigmatic than the term ‘structural film’ can touch upon, but that the title Serene Velocity actually begins to approach.”

Q: What attracts you to film, music and drawings?

A: When I was a student at Binghamton, Ken Jacobs encouraged us to pursue other arts, explaining that we would bring whatever we learned there back to our filmmaking. If I remember correctly, Julie Murray came to cinema through painting. In fact, so did Ken, who had studied with Hans Hofmann. Our teachers encouraged us to see ourselves as artists working in film. We took the history of film, especially experimental film, very seriously, but we were conscious of the fact that we were making art.

I took Ken’s advice to heart and tried to paint, draw, create music, write poetry, anything that I felt might be of use down the road. When I enrolled at the California Institute of the Arts, I continued this way of working and I also had the opportunity to study with and alongside some very interesting composers who ended up having a profound effect on me, including Cat Lamb, Michael Pisaro-Liu, James Tenney, Mark So, Tashi Wada and Christian Wolff.

Mani Kaul was also at CalArts at that time, and I was able to take more than one class with him, including a very influential class on the cinema of Robert Bresson and another on letting sound lead the filmmaking process. Mani was not only an amazing filmmaker, he was also a passionate and gifted vocalist. Mani is really the one who introduced me to Indian classical music and then when he left, my composer friends were there to help me fill in the gaps.

Taking experimental music classes, learning from Mani and taking composition lessons from Michael, I began to find sympathies between experimental film and music that led me to work with hybrid forms. Inspired by Jim Tenney’s Postal Pieces and Christian Wolff’s Prose Collection, I started to write verbal scores that other people could turn into films. I also began to experiment with mixing film and performance.

Opening (2007) is a 16mm film with a recorded soundtrack, one that includes long silences, but it also has three live musicians performing an indeterminate score that is integral to the experience. Double or Nothing (2022) expands on Fountain (2016), adding another 16mm projector plus my voice. In Double or Nothing, the music is tuned to the projectors such that they begin to form chords with one another. In addition to hearing the sound, you begin to feel it. Because that sound is tuned to the machines making light, you can feel the cinema in your body.

At some point, I also began to use musical thinking to structure my films. Color Series (2010), for instance, is silent, but uses temporal structures similar to James Tenney’s compositions to create a deep experience of time. Made of six separate films that together form one feature-length work, films in Color Series are created using only the timing lights of the printing process at the film lab. Ordinarily, people use these lights to make a positive print from a negative; in Color Series, however, there is no intervening negative, and the three lights (red, green and blue) shine directly on the print stock to create flat fields of color that slowly change over time.

Watching Color Series is akin to a musical experience in that you learn to listen with your eyes: Each successive film in the series is exponentially longer than the last and as the films lengthen, the transitions become more gradual. Toward the end, the fades are slow enough that most people cease to be able to see them change in real time. As Gilles Deleuze writes in Cinema 2: The Time-Image, we see “a little time in its pure state. … Time ceases to be derived from movement, it appears in itself.”

Q: Many of your works on your website, especially the Film & Performance section, focus on the physicality of film. What do you think makes you so fascinated with this media?

A: For me, the question of “What is cinema?” is endlessly fascinating. When I was a student at Binghamton, Ken Jacobs taught us about his concept of paracinema, or works of cinema that do not necessarily have to use film or projectors. One of our assignments was simply to create a work of art involving light and time.

I’m still basically working on this problem: If you do not need film or even an image to make a work of cinema, what is cinema? Can it just be light moving through a frame? Can it be words on a piece of paper? I think cinema is not only a technology, but a quality of attention, a way of being with and in time.

For me, whenever I am working on a film or a performance, I am ultimately working on questions of time. In cinema, we think of time through movement and what’s more, we don’t only think it, we feel it, we sense it. Cinema allows us to touch time.

I recently had a chance to see Alison O’Daniel’s amazing new movie, The Tuba Thieves (2023), which is all about sound as not just an auditory but also a haptic experience. Taking a cue from Deaf social clubs, during recent screenings Alison gives everyone in the room a balloon to inflate and hold onto while they watch the film. This allows you to literally feel the soundtrack. It’s an amazing experience for hearing audiences, though not necessarily new for Deaf ones. I think about touch in my work too, but in terms of time. What systems or structures or opportunities can we create that might allow us to feel time? This search for a sensuous experience of time is at the heart of almost all my work.

Q: Your undergraduate degree is in philosophy and cinema. Did studying philosophy affect you as an artist, and if so, how?

A: I think of cinema as philosophy by other means. That is, cinema does not necessarily have to be “about” ideas. One doesn’t have to either visualize or verbalize a thought; rather, one thinks through cinema. One thinks through movement. Simone Forti writes about thinking through movement in her wonderful book, Handbook in Motion. Though the kinds and qualities of movements may be different, I feel similarly about cinema.

Gilles Deleuze writes: “Experience is not something subjective, not necessarily. It is not something individual. It is the flow, the splitting up of flows, since each intensity is necessarily related to another intensity in such a way that something passes through.” This is how I understand art, especially cinema: the different speeds and intensities we encounter in the image, and the ways we move with and through them, the ways we split and pass through and double back in relation to the movements. All of this doesn’t happen on an individual level, but rather on a collective or social one.

Cinema exists in the viewers and the viewers form a collective, which is not to say the viewers are all the same; the collective is specific to the people in the room. It is the people watching and how they watch. Cinema is something we can only do with one another. Another thing that Ken Jacobs taught us is that “art is consciousness.” And, as Fred Moten says, consciousness cannot be studied at the individual level.

Q: How do you think the 2023 Guggenheim Fellowship will change your career trajectory?

A: I am very grateful to have the time and support to continue the work that I have been doing. With this fellowship, my goal is to continue to work without consideration for market forces and to create works that challenge our expectations of what film can be and, hopefully, enrich our experience of the world.

I want to use the fellowship not only to make new works, but to travel and share the performances and double projections I have been creating recently. As I travel, I also hope to use that as an opportunity to work with some of the composers I have come to know and love.

Q. Can you share any ongoing or near-future projects with us?

I am currently working on a body of drawings made with graphite, water and gesso. They are modest, enigmatic little works made with only a few relatively simple gestures, but they have a quality of light and sense of depth that very much interest me.

I am also working on a new series that uses cinema as a performative situation. The project is elastic and potentially expansive, so I title each work in the series by the order in which they are made. Therefore, I call them The Number Series. It develops out of my work in abstract filmmaking and performance over the past 15 years, but also represents a deepening and expansion of that project: here, adding multiple projectors changes the relationship between viewer and screen such that these new works make use of cinema and its elements, but deemphasize the image.

For instance, No. 2, 2022 is one film on two reels shown in an overlapping double projection. The films are made in a similar way to Color Series, but instead of saturated colors, when these symmetrical 16mm films are projected one on top of the other, they produce no color, or rather, an opaque white. Thus, this double projection creates an uncanny experience of color as both presence and absence, a negation that is generative. The middle of the image becomes a subtly differentiated field: the overlap cannot be perfect, so there is an interesting gradation inside the field with a halo of pure color just outside it. This penumbra reveals the dynamically shifting contrast between the reels.

Ultimately, I feel Double or Nothing and The Number Series allow us to refocus our attention from the visual to the social and corporeal, or haptic, effects of cinema. They are cinema, but a special case of cinema, a cinema of stasis and quiet. A lot of cinema works hard to grab and keep hold of our attention. Sometimes I like this, but at other times I find it violent. The Number Series lets us shift our attention to things we might not ordinarily consider as cinema. Nothing gets framed out. The space between the projectors, between the screen and the people, between the people themselves, all becomes active, but this activity is achieved, perhaps ironically, through a kind of stasis.

I have been working with static and/or very nearly static films for at least 15 years. I have two films that are just gray, for instance, About 11 Minutes (2014) and Over 30 Minutes (2018). I met someone recently who saw About 11 Minutes at a screening in 2016, and the way he remembered it is exactly how I hoped people would experience the film: He recalled it as a very subtly changing gray. The wonderful thing is it both is, and it isn’t. The color on the film stays the same, but because of our perceptual apparatus, the special quality of attention we bring to cinema (which, again, I think of as a collective attention), and what Andrei Tarkovsky refers to as “the pressure of time,” it changes in the people over time. As Deleuze paraphrases David Hume in Difference and Repetition: “Repetition changes nothing in the object repeated, but does change something in the mind which contemplates it.”

That’s where I see myself right now: I see my work as putting up these little blocks in the flow of experience that ask us to, or rather let us, respond to them. There is a block, something that cannot be removed, moved through or easily absorbed. It doesn’t give way easily, so instead of going through it or consuming it, we have to respond to it. We have to learn to move and change with and in relation to it. In the process, we begin to see and experience our movements as an “intensity … related to another intensity in such a way that something passes through.”