SIEMPRE CERCA

Holly Fisher’s collage film Bullets for Breakfast (1992) is both a deconstruc- tion of the Western genre and a filmic essay about representations of women. It uses John Ford’s My Darling Clementine as the backdrop — or template —for Westerns in general, and intersperses footage of photographs and other images of women, particularly art postcards of Renaissance paintings, all of which have women as the object of the artistic gaze, though the images themselves are innocuous simply because they are generally accepted well- known, or well- worn, pictures of Renaissance paintings. Fisher seems to be interested in the way multiple lines of narrative inquiry create incongruent, contrasting conclu- sions about representation. Counterpointing Ford’s landscapes and masculinity with, respectively, shots of landscapes in Maine and underscoring the women as objects of beauty through Renaissance painting, and positioning women at work (the film also offers sequences of women working in a fish- smoking house)

Bullets for Breakfast is the kind of collage film that ultimately suggests how

found footage combines with new images in a densely textured and interrelated tapestry.

In addition to the various images, Fisher uses different forms of audio narration. The pulp–Western writer Ryerson Johnson reads selections from his autobiography, and feminist poet Nancy Nielson recites her poetry. Both insti- gate a dialectical play of forms of representation: While being first- person accounts of life experience, they are used to help distinguish and distort the images in ways that create tension, ambiguity, and humor. Overall, Bullets for

Breakfast is a film that foregrounds its hybrid structure — part documen tary,

part collage film, and part narrative — to expose the ways stereotypes are formed and perpetuated through myths (John Ford’s landscapes), ideals (Renaissance art), or memory (fiction, poetry, autobiography). Its strange eclecticism makes its “message” unrestricted, in that we get a sense of how images and words combine to form lines of inquiry or even lines of ideology; but there are no definite means by which to subsume one to the other — they always intermingle and outlast one another in perpetual interplay. Part of the aesthetic of collage filmmaking is to disrupt causal narrative, to present different forms of narra- tivity. A collagist quite literally takes various forms, which can be various forms of media, or visual and audio rhetoric, and combines them in ways antithetical to expectation, since we have to work to uncover how they are used.

Bullets for Breakfast is really a film about the women depicted through

imagistic representation, whether in Western films or painting, or other forms of verbal discourse, like autobiography, pulp novel, or poetry. It is experimental in its form, and Fisher aims to break linearity apart in order to show how women have been illustrated through the seeming cacophony of collaged images, voices, sounds, and texts. The juxtaposition of the readings, for exam- ple, highlight the ways biography counters history and fictional re-creations of historical circumstance, making the personal “visible.” Fisher has described the film as “a Western filtered through a post-feminist sensibility,” and that her film “shows ... that history is relative to who is writing and when.”89_History,

as portrayed through narrative film, can sometimes be discursive or didactic, which I think is part of Fisher’s critique of a film like My Darling Clementine, which is both romanticized and moralizing. By contrast, Bullets for Breakfast is a Western that makes one reconsider the tropes of the Western and how they have been used in popular culture, or how they are interrelated with other forms of representation that can be misconstrued as forming a linear, “real” history. Watching the clash of images— when superimpositions intrude on

Clementine, or when the fish- house workers toil —creates the irony and jarring

sensibility Fisher wants.

Collage films are based on the notion that a complete (re)assembly of dif- ferent elements will creates new meanings of expression, representation, and aesthetic sensibilities that may owe something to the parts or may stand alone (or both). In this way, the film functions from a critical perspective. With Bullets

for Breakfast, Fisher is analyzing the perceived accepted roles of women, espe-

fore situates the woman as “other” or opposite to the man. Also, the film decon- structs the Western using My Darling Clementine as the template. In creating the assemblage that resulted in the finished film (the sounds/texts/images), Fisher said:

To lay in the sound effects of bullets was amazing, to just feel the power of those tiny pieces on the soundtrack. Bang! You realize, ah, so that’s how you get power. I’m hoping, in the language and structure I’m trying to evolve, to find another way to make a powerful statement — not through loud noises and dramatic plot structure and cliff hangers.90

The key point made here, that Fisher is interested in the evolving of lan- guage and structure, reminds us of the film’s experimental nature. Hoping for progress, change — evolution — is something many (if not all) avant- garde film- makers try to achieve. To develop a new form of cinematic language, which collage films do, and also to resurrect structure by divorcing it from plot or “cliff hangers,” is a particular way to enhance the meaning through theme and form. For example, by including a selection of art postcards, the film announces a clear dichotomy between our understanding of the iconography of the Western and a more nuanced understanding of the way images of women have helped shape memory, meaning, and ideological representation. As Fisher says, “I knew by single framing these cards in location I could explore questions of represen- tation and perspective in a nonverbal way.”91

Bullets for Breakfast is often quick; the editing and music/sound effects

work in tandem to present the stories of the images. The film is a dissection of the particular codes that direct meaning. It also is an examination of genres— Westerns, melodrama, documentary, collage — that often dictate emotional response. Here, though, Fisher breaks them down as well, suggesting that mean- ing is not predicated on what we ought to know, but on what we do know. Bul-

lets for Breakfast is an example of collage filmmaking that ultimately presents

us with a new way of reconsidering sexual difference. In using disparate ele- ments, Fisher asks us to view images (to read texts) anew. Collage films generally offer a wide array of images and sounds, and places them in carefully edited positions for informational purposes. In this sense, Bullets for Broadway pro- vides a very distinct way of (re)interpreting reality inasmuch as it gives us a new way of understanding differences between men and women that are based on recycled images or photos or texts.