by Dean Kavanagh
I discovered Film for Unknown Viewer (1983) in 2017 and felt compelled to reach out to its maker. Joseph Bernard’s response was insightful and deftly articulate. As I would soon learn, these were traits he possessed even while shooting the breeze. We quickly became friends, and over the years our nebulous conversations grew to explore Joe’s lifetime in the arts; filmmaking, collage painting, printing, photography, his work with Michael Mann, and the thirty-five years he spent teaching at the College for Creative Studies in Detroit.
In 2019, I had the pleasure of screening Joe’s films in collaboration with AEMI at the Irish Film Institute in Dublin, pairing his work with that of Germaine Dulac. The show featured an introduction by Joe via an audio recording that played as darkness settled over the room. What followed was an hour of silent, mesmerising, and synesthetic cinema. In 2023, Anja Mahler and I stayed with Joe and his wife, an extraordinary artist and painter, MariaLuisa Belmonte, in Troy, Michigan. We explored his stomping grounds and delved into his archive. Seeing his totemic and intricately wrought paintings in person was unforgettable and, like the visual phenomena that preoccupy his cinema, almost impossible to photograph.
Joe’s film work reflects upon the act of seeing and what lies in the primeval horizon of our visual perception. He did all of this within the constraints of a 5.79mm by 4.01mm (1.45:1) piece of plastic. Joe recognised the potential musicality in juxtaposition and montage—often in the one frame—treating the outcome as a form of visual music with a complex inner-signing and playful silent sonority that could be heard, felt and understood by all exposed to it.
It is no secret that Joe preferred digital representation of his films over the quetching sluice of mechanical projection and the counterpoint it autocratically imposed—the silence is golden. He would often quote John Cage, saying, “silence is not acoustic. It is a change of mind, a turning around.” Like the cinema of Stan Brakhage, Paul Sharits, and Jonas Mekas—all of whom he knew and deeply admired—Joe’s art offers a distinct way of seeing the world. Through his lens, these quondam exhalations reveal possibilities dormant in the everyday, awaiting us in the trick and quietude of evening and early morning light. Joseph Bernard’s cinema endures as a reflection of what filmmaking, in all its intricacy and physicality, ultimately represents—a test of time.
Dean Kavanagh is a filmmaker and film archivist based in Dublin, Ireland. [Website]
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