Editing
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A short black and white film from James Broughton with Kermit Sheets in a Chaplinesque role.
"The poet Daisy Aldan (who brought Gerard Malanga into the world of experimental filmmaking) directed a beautifully evocative and impressionistic documentary, Once Upon an El, in 8mm color with a 7 1/2 ips tape soundtrack. The 15-minute film's cast included John Ashberry, James Broughton, Chester Kallman, Frank O'Hara, Olga Petroff, Kermit Sheets, and other luminaries of the Avant-Garde, the soundtrack was composed by Storm de Hirsch. Once Upon An El documented the activities of a group of writers and composers...[demonstrating] against the demolition of New York's Third Avenue elevated railway (FMC 1967, 7-8) , which was demolished anyway" - Wheeler Winston Dixon
Accepting the potentialities of the medium to manipulate both time and space, Broughton brings past and present head-on as he regards with adult feelings his childhood family and friends. Grown-ups romp like children, and by their magnified infantilism playfully underscore such basic traits as sadism, sensuality, arid egocentricity. (Melbourne International Film Festival)
'Adventures of Jimmy' resolves its immature hero’s quest for “playmates” through a tongue-in-cheek narration that juxtaposes ironically with the images. We are told his family left him their whole estate, as we see a shack in the woods. The happy resolution is a joke on monogamy. It’s a straightforward story, the work of someone who wants to entertain with elegance and quiet subversion.
A lovely, poetic, humorous and crystal investigation of mankind standing, sitting and lying down.
James Broughton's creation myth, THIS IS IT, places a 2-year-old Adam and a bright apple-red balloon in a backyard garden of Eden, and works a small miracle of the ordinary. And since that miracle is what his film is about, he achieves a kind of casual perfection in matching means and ends.
