Village Voice, February 22, 1983

Drawing a House? By P. Adams Sitney

FILMS OF DAVID HAXTON.

At the Millennium, February 19

David Haxton’s films demonstrate the successes and defects of a contemporary painterly sensibility working with film. For 10 years Haxton has been playing with optical illusions he creates by treating the film screen, in one moment, as if it were a flat drawing surface, and then, in the next moment, by sending someone to tromp through its depths. The wit of this filmmaker consists largely in inducing his viewers to exert the hopeless effort of seeing what the mind apprehends but the eyes refuse to discriminate. The films actually do little more than describe the painting or drawing of mainly geometrical forms by a “performer.” Without dramatic action, arresting humor, or even surface lushness, the typical Haxton film shows someone painting in an otherwise invisible, suspended square, and later cutting it to pieces along with its unseen supports. A fascination with minimalist performance or a fanatical reverence for Gombrich’s useful book, Art and Illusion, may be needed to redeem these coldly methodical 10- to 15-minute films from their polemical superficiality. Haxton’s repertory of filmic ploys is severely constricted: he switches between color negative and positive, shifts from overhead to frontal views, cuts away a paper backdrop to reveal another behind it, and rotates figures to change their illusory shapes. However, it is remarkable that a filmmaker so stingy with effects succeeds in making so many variations on an idea without producing boring films. By continually engaging us with the well-paced production of these illusions, Haxton elicits both an amusement and a skepticism toward the eventual effect. He never loses the precarious balance between expectation and resolution. Even more to his credit is the subtle nonchalance with which he allows faint vestiges of his “invisible” props to be seen. The Millennium’s audience, who are the true connoisseurs of this mode of filmmaking, will be remind- ed of the achievements of Pat O’Neill, Robert Breer, and Michael Snow by the finest moments of Haxton’s films; some, seeing his most recent work, Drawing Houses (1982), may even recall the gorgeous tackiness of Richard Foreman’s scenic perspectivism and literalized sight lines. Yet measured by the standard of those artists, Haxton’s work is sadly dwarfed. Oddly, the strongest and most original filmmakers of the past decade happen to have been artists who established themselves in the ‘60s or earlier. Haxton’s films do not acknowledge them, their tradition, or its challenges. Instead, with the cleverness and assurance of art-school prize winners, his films doggedly set out to prove that anti-illusionism remains a vital issue for the cinema today. They almost succeed.