Just Another Notion

“If there’s anyone who’s under the age of 16, would they please leave the theatre now,” a solemn voice, deep, with a country upbringing in its vowels, intones against a screen of black leader, “and return when they are over 16. It would be greatly appreciated then, because we are only in it”—suddenly rising to a scream—“FOR THE MONEY.” So began the retrospective selection of works by San Francisco-based artist Mike Henderson presented at this year’s Projections, the New York Film Festival’s experimental sidebar. And so too began his brief career in film: the two-minute Money was one of seven films Henderson directed in 1970, the year he completed his graduate studies at the San Francisco Art Institute and found himself a 16mm camera at the urging of his friend, mentor, and eventual collaborator Robert Nelson. Over the next decade and a half Henderson made 14 more films, before leaving the medium behind and returning his attentions to painting and the blues exclusively, where they’ve stayed ever since.

Was Henderson indulging a passing fancy? Was he testing the limits of painting, his primary medium? Was he, in short, just moonlighting? Even the temptation to ask such questions has an appropriately bitter comic tinge, given that the institutions of the American avant-garde have never counted an even relative commitment to racial equality among their departures from the world of commercial entertainment. As one of the few black artists of the era involved in the broad field of independent cinema to gain considerable exposure—he screened at the Museum of Modern Art in 1971—? The answer is either, “Yes, plainly,” (he described himself to Michael T. Martin in a 2015 interview as “a painter who makes films and plays blues guitar”) or “Who cares?” (In the same interview, he mentions both his plans to shoot new, the expansive survey of San Francisco’s “alternative film & video” scenes across the second half of the 20th century, only grants Henderson a total of three sentences: one in which he praises Nelson’s teaching methods, another in which Nelson reminisces fondly about their collaboration (on drawings), and a lone reference to Henderson’s work as “orgiastic parables,” an accurate description of one of the 13 of his films I’ve seen.