The Tree

A portrait of the noble American Elm standing at the center of Tompkins Square Park in the East Village known as “The Hare Krishna Tree” (because the Hare Krishna movement was founded under it in the Fall of 1966, with Allen Ginsberg in attendance). You can see some of the dryads here within if you don’t blink. I had shot a B&W reversal camera roll of this tree as my contribution to the “A Roll for Peter” memorial for Peter Hutton and, happy with the result, pursued it further, adding color negative even. In the mid-1970’s as I was beginning to work in film I started an in-depth study of discontinuous single-frame editing as perceptual enhancement training, a kind of dynamic cubism, making such films as GEORGE on the optical printer, but after a year I could no longer sit for days on end in a darkened room clicking a frame at a time and decided to wait until computers were available to assist me. So this footage, 40 years later, filmed primarily as continuous shots over all four seasons, has been deconstructed into single frames, reconstructed through a variety of scored arrangements, and edited into a composition in Adobe Premiere on my laptop. .