A.K. Dewdney: Discontinuous Film

In 1966, a mathematics graduate student at the University of Michigan named Alexander “Keewatin” Dewdney (1941-2024) enrolled on a whim in a film production course taught by the experimental filmmaker George Manupelli. Over the next five years, Dewdney would produce six short structuralist films with the best-known of these works, The Maltese-Cross Movement (1967), splitting the prize for film in the major “Canadian Artists ‘68” exhibition at the Art Gallery of Ontario. 1 Later in life, Dewdney became a well-known authority on popular science and computing, authoring numerous books on these subjects, as well as the science-fiction novel The Planiverse (1984) and a monthly “Computer Recreations” column in Scientific American from 1984 until 1990. Though he ultimately retreated from the world of experimental film in the early 1970s because, in his words, “the pressure of teaching computer science pretty well blew away the filmmaking career,” his body of work represents a valuable contribution to the North American film avant-garde of the late-60s and early-70s and offers surprising parallels to his later career as a science educator.

This program celebrates the short but prolific career of Canadian experimental filmmaker, author, and computer scientist Alexander “Keewatin” Dewdney (1941-2024). While a graduate student in mathematics in the late 1960s, he produced several short structuralist films incorporating elements of collage, animation, and poetry, with a particular emphasis on quantized flicker aesthetics and combinatorial word-image-sound substitution games. Grouping his own work and a number of his contemporaries under the label of “Discontinuous Films,” he aimed to chart out a model of experimental cinema which recognized the projector, not the camera, as “the film-maker’s true medium.” In addition to Dewdney’s films, this screening features several contemporaneous works offering varied experiments in filmic discontinuity across light, music, color, collage, language, and the all-important flicker. An introduction will address Dewdney’s work in and writing on experimental film, as well as its unexpected relevance to his later educational and popular science projects in other media, including fiction and computer games. —Zach Yost

Dewdney films include:

Four Girls (1967, 3 minutes, 16mm)

Scissors (1967, 5 minutes, 16mm)

Malanga (1967, 3 minutes, 16mm)

The Maltese-Cross Movement (1967, 8 minutes, 16mm)

Wildwood Flower (1971, 4 minutes, 16mm)

Supplemental films include:

Adebar (Peter Kubelka, Austria, 1957, 3 minutes, 16mm)

Ray Gun Virus (Paul Sharits, USA, 1966, 14 minutes, 16mm)

Poemfield No. 7 (Stan VanDerBeek, USA, 1967, 4 minutes, 16mm)

Straight and Narrow

(Beverly and Tony Conrad, USA, 1970, 10 minutes, 16mm)

This event is free and open to the public; doors open thirty minutes prior to showtime.