On the evening of Tuesday 11 November 2008, the New York Review of Science Fiction Readings Series, in a departure from its usual program of author readings, featured a look at an artist, a retrospective on the career—or, rather, careers—of Ed Emshwiller. (It was Veterans’ Day and, aptly, Emshwiller was a World War II vet.) Participating in the tribute, presented at the NYRSF Readings’ venue at the South Street Seaport Museum’s Melville Gallery, were Luis Ortiz, Carol Emshwiller, and Robert A. Haller, respectively, his biographer, his muse, and an authority on his cinematic work.
Edmund Alexander Emshwiller (1925-1990) was one of the preeminent (and most-published) artists and illustrators in the field of science fiction in the 1950s and ’60s, best-known for his covers and interior illustrations (some 500 to 600 artworks) for Galaxy and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and paperbacks. A five-time winner of the Hugo Award for Best Artist, Emsh (as he signed his work, though he also sometimes used the signatures Ed Emsh and Emsler) was inducted posthumously into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame in 2007.
He was, additionally, a visual artist of the moving image, interested in our physical and spatial relationships “as living organisms in time-space”, and one of the leading avant-garde, experimental, independent (non-theatrical, non-commercial) filmmakers of the 1960s and ’70s, frequently crafting multimedia performance pieces. “Movies,” he once said, explaining what attracted him to filmmaking, “are, by nature, a perfect medium for mating arts, drama, music, artwork, etc., and we are living in a period of artistic eclecticism.” Working in film and video led him to become an advocate for independent filmmaking, even testifying before the House of Representatives. Finally, he was a teacher; from 1979 to 1986, he served as Dean and then Provost of the School of Film/Video at the California Institute of Arts.
After welcoming the audience of about 20, Jim Freund, host of WBAI-FM’s Hour of the Wolf (a weekly program on sf and fantasy), and the Series’ executive curator, introduced Luis Ortiz, author of Emshwiller: Infinity X Two: The Art & Life of Ed and Carol Emshwiller. Ortiz read the first chapter of the book, which was nominated for both the Hugo and Locus Awards, relating how Emshwiller’s fascination with the future and early passion or adventure comic strips (like Terry and the Pirates) and films led him into sf illustration, and recounting his wife Carol’s early life as well. Regrettably, as engaging as the material was, Ortiz’s delivery tended to the monotone.
Carol Emshwiller, Ed’s wife of over 40 years, followed Ortiz, sharing fond memories of her husband and of the end of his life. Reading from her introduction to Ortiz’s book, “Wanderings and Wonderings”, she said, “I was always awed and impressed by just about everything Ed did. Watching his paintings developing little by little was like magic. And later the movies impressed me, too.… I may have gotten mad at him plenty of times… but I never, ever, ever stopped admiring his work.”
The final panelist was Robert A. Haller, the Director of Collections and Special Projects at Anthology Film Archives in New York City, who spoke about Emshwiller’s work in cinema and presented two short films. Ed’s films, like his sf illustrations, Haller asserted, were rooted in the 1940s, when technology was becoming a major force in American society. Ed was interested in how the individual, the human figure, related to—”wrestl[ed] with”—the environment. The first film shown, Thanotopsis (b&w, 1962), was very much concerned with the human condition. Static and dizzyingly active images, and machine-created sounds (a buzzsaw and a heartbeat) are juxtaposed: the world whizzes around a male figure (perhaps Man, played by Ed’s brother Mac) and the blurry figure of the Angel of Death hovers over him.
In the second short, Film with Three Dancers (color, 1970), a trio of dancers discuss their art in voiceover as their bodies move and swirl dynamically, stylistically, rhythmically, and erotically, exhibiting their shapes and physicality in superimposed images and in slow-motion, starting out in leotards and ultimately finishing up naked. “The body,” explained Haller, “becomes a landscape.”
“Most films… are word-oriented… however, I think that a great deal can be accomplished in filmmaking which is not based on words,” said Emshwiller at a (West) Berlin Film Festival. He liked to make films with dancers because he wasn’t interested in telling “stories in the usual sense.” He was into metaphor, not narrative. “Dancers are a natural for me because they express themselves through movement.”
A question-and-answer session with the panelists followed. Haller praised Ortiz’s book for “brilliantly” bringing together in one volume Ed and Carol, the image and the word. Ortiz remarked that everything that Emsh did had multiple aspects, how “some other little thing” was always going on in his art, calling for close scrutiny and second looks. There was even “an odd continuity” in his illustrations for Again, Dangerous Visions; he was “thinking in terms of a soundtrack for a movie.” Carol revealed the secret behind Ed’s beard (he grew it originally as part of a contest with her brother, Charley), that she was the model for “only 75%” of the women in his art (he used people he knew, including the woman next door [and, incidentally, her son, the future Zippy the Pinhead cartoonist, Bill Griffith]), and that he was tapped to do special effects for the acclaimed 1980 PBS production of The Lathe of Heaven (his hand is very evident in the final look of the film) because he was artist-in-residence at WNET’s (New York’s Channel 13) Television Laboratory and “worked cheap”.
Several high-quality reproductions of Emsh’s artwork were on display in the room, prints owned by Ortiz and his wife Karan, and Chromaline screen prints from Andy Porter that had been used for covers of Science Fiction Chronicle.
Among the audience were Richard Bowes, Barbara Krasnoff, Gordon Linzner, and Andy Porter. Afterward, as customary, the guests and a number of the audience adjourned to a nearby pub for dinner and conversation.
I am indebted to Intersecting Images: The Cinema of Ed Emshwiller, edited by Robert A. Haller (Anthology Film Archives, 1997) for the quotes above from Ed Emshwiller.