Cx72 Interview: Bradley Eros on Eau de Cinema, Scent, and Film
December 21, 2021

Bradley Eros at his desk at Anthology Film Archives.

“eau de cinema is an attempt to contain the uncontainable, to bottle the essence of poetic thought & accident, as a perfume of the creative act. It is also memory driven by an irrepressible mourning, the way scent is linked to both loss and longing.  Like cinema, it is both material and immaterial, an apparatus and the experience of light and time. It is disappearance and the obsolete, of both technology and culture, but also hybrids and beautiful mutations coming alive.”
–  Eros

From M. Elizabeth Scott: Upon the release of Flaming Creatures, a fragrant ode to filmmaker Jack Smith’s film made collaboratively with Marissa Zappas, I found myself thinking often about Bradley Eros’ eau de cinema. The work, a hybrid creation of scent-as-art which eventually became a perfume, transcended film’s limitations of sight and sound and sought to capture it in communion with the (unfairly ignored) sense of smell. I sat down with him to discuss his creative history and philosophies, particularly with regard to the senses: a cinema of embodiment. Combing through Eros’ archives of collage and ephemera, I was surprised and delighted to learn that he, too, had envisioned Flaming Creatures in the form of a fragrance; more on that later.

Are these your collages on the walls?

You know, this room, this room is my collage. And at one point – you know, I've been here 23 years – and it's all full of collages. Then at one point, I was told, 'Take all this down!' So I took all of it down. So all this stuff is only from the last decade – I had to start over. You know, I used to live here [gestures towards a sealed-up wall].

You used to live here?

Right out here, in this little room. There used to be this room; I used to live in here. Jonas [Mekas] had just come out with his book, I Have Nowhere to Go, so I was like, 'He can't say anything.' Nowhere to go, that was my logic. I was working here, and all my stuff was in storage next door. So I crashed here, in this secret room under the Maya Deren seats, for about four months. I didn't tell anybody; people kind of found out.

What would you do if one of your employees did that now?

Oh, I'd be fine with it [laughs]. But they sealed it up, 'cause you know, they said 'That's not really a room; we just keep toilet paper in there.'

Can't live in there.

But I think there's collages inside there, like a time capsule. At some point, maybe when they start doing renovation, we'll find out what's actually in there... I used to see Harry Smith's ghost around sometimes. We get along really fine, we talk about alchemy, things like that; we've never had any problems.

Collages on the walls of Anthology Film Archives’ offices.

How did you originally become interested in film? Was there a medium you were working with before that?

Both of my brothers are artists; when I was a little kid, they were actually the only artists that I knew. I grew up in a small town in Southern Illinois.

Nocturnal, Illinois,* right?

It was a dry county, so things were really weird in terms of like – how do teenagers hang out? You have some Fonzi character who gets a truckload of alcohol and brings it to an abandoned farmhouse, have some raging party with sixteen year olds. I was in twenty car wrecks, I think, before I left high school... somehow I survived all of that –

Twenty? That's crazy.

But, here are some things I found when I was packing [gestures towards childhood artworks]. I made this one when I was like, seven.

'Space cat visits Venus!'

I love the fact that it's not a dog, and it didn't go to Mars.

Space cat visits Venus, it's you.

I also made this witch...

Oh, my God, wow.

I hadn't seen these in many years.

Love the witch.

Here's a photo of my brothers...

Eros’ childhood artworks.

Oh, so you guys were a bunch of weirdos.

Yeah, I often say that both of my brothers could be from another planet. I would believe that. They didn't really get along, one was very conceptual, studied with John Cage at one point, very Duchampian. I started making films with him – he was making super 8 films. I started working with him first. He had me hang upside down in a ditch once, while he shot me. I started making films at 16. My other brother is a big bear who still lives in the woods there. He's a painter who doesn't think there were any great painters after the Dutch painters of the 17th century.

I know a lot of painters like that.

But they didn't really get along. I collaborated with both of them.

Were you a middle child?

I was the youngest child.

What's your astrological sign?

I'm a Sagittarius. When I was a little kid, and they went to school, hanging out with my mom was my favorite time, when I was five. That's when I really became an artist – when I realized that. We'd go to the beauty shop, we'd iron and vacuum, and those were just games that we played. I still really like that very much – I love washing the dishes – it seems like a game, just a game I played with my mom. We [my brothers and I] did get beat up sometimes, for being weirdos. My older brother went to Woodstock, and he was like, 'That's me in the film! See that guy up on the hill, there?' 'Cause in Playboy, I had seen this special spread about Fellini's Satyricon. I thought, I have to see this film. It was screening in St. Louis on a double bill on a double bill with Woodstock. This was 200 miles away. We drove to St. Louis to spend the day and watch those two films together.

So, were your parents also artists?

No, kind of the opposite. My mother was a home economist, a professional, went to college. She was one of those people who, post-war, would help women figure out how to run a household. She'd do lectures, travel all the time, do radio shows. My father was a tailor. My great grandfather was a Jew from Bohemia, in Austria, who came over as a tailor. We had a clothing store on Main Street for 92 years. Steiner's my family name. Steiner the clothier. So he was really good at that, but didn't care about art at all. Didn't care about religion at all. He was kind of agnostic. Whereas my mother was totally supportive of everything we did. So in one sense, it was the most possible extreme situation, where my mother would think anything we possibly did was great, and my father was like, 'I don't care about any of the stuff you do.' So I thought it was interesting coming to New York – I'd already had this extreme situation where people either love what I'm doing or absolutely don't care about it. He was indifferent to it, 'cause I think he realized none of us were going to take over the store. We were into fashion, but we weren't going to stay in town.

So we did music, collage, performance, painting, puppet shows, [...] but nobody else made films. There wasn't even a library to see things like that. I had to just imagine them: like, 'Oh, I make films from my dreams.' I mean, I knew about surrealism, dada, things like that, but I didn't really see any of that stuff 'til I went to college. Maybe I'd heard a bit about it from my brother, but he wouldn't show me anything. It was more like, I'd have to sneak into my brother's room when he wasn't there to look through his records and wonder what they were. So eventually he realized I was the only other person in town who cared about what he cared about.

Bradley Eros’ 1986 exhibition catalog composed by Bradley Eros for Hallwalls, Inc., combining science, philosophy, media, art & performance in images of excess and ecstasy. 

Do you remember the first film that you saw that really impacted you?

Probably Un Chien Andalou, or Maya Deren, or Kenneth Anger. My first semester in school, I just totally caught up on all that kind of stuff. There was a friend of mine who was a distributor of experimental film and he was teaching a class. At one point, he said, 'Why don't you teach a class too?' So I came to class and taught a class on surrealism with a box of chocolate covered cherries with razor blades in them that I just passed out to everybody [laughs]...

What!

That was my take on Un Chien Andalou, I guess. At that time, I went to every film society. I'd watch these films, unsubtitled, untranslated, and feel they were so immersive. I didn't even necessarily want the translated versions. I think I saw a thousand films in the first year of school.

I made films like that, maybe, before I saw any of them. They were just more like, you know, dream films.

But I don't know [laughs].

When I go to my hometown and try to talk about experimental film, nobody knows what the hell I'm talking about. So I tell 'em, 'You know how there's a drunk sequence, or someone's hallucinating, or there's a dream sequence? Well, the whole film's like that.' Then they understand what I'm talking about.

Do you find there are specific themes you return to?

You know this book? This book was a huge influence. When I found it, it was like a big box of bon-bons.

It matches my outfit.

It matches my wallet [pulls out wallet]. Well, this book has more films that I love than any other book I've ever seen. I love those films you aren't supposed to look at: visual taboo. In a sense, still, surrealism – dada – Fluxus – all these things are in there. Let me tell you about experiences I had as a kid that were Fluxus before I knew what it was.

My first year in college, we had this theatre company called Realeyes. We just made plays about our hometown. The first play we wrote, we recorded verbatim dialogue at the drive-in, at the pool hall... we made this play called Nothing Ever Happens Here. The city park was our back yard, and we used the bandshell. But then they got wind of what the play was about, realized there was gonna be cursing – 'cause you know, people talk the way people talk, but families couldn't hear that – so they told us, 'You can do the play, but you can't do any of the dialogue.' And I thought, well, the play's all dialogue. We thought we'd do it anyway. So we set up microphones at the park lake and caught these frogs. We put the frogs on the microphone –

Stop! [laughs]

And we said, OK, this is the play. Except it's all frogs doing the dialogue. So the next time, we thought, 'Let's do something they can't ban.' We decided to do Alice in Wonderland, 'cause it's as weird as anything else, but you can't ban it. Except we got all the people who cursed to say their original dialogue in the mad tea party. Once they were on stage, they were out of anyone's control.

We'd get anonymous Christian youth banning us each week, and we'd write these manifestos... There was a whole division in the town. Even though we grew up there, they considered us outside agitators. At the very end of that summer, they'd established a town dress code – no short skirts, no long hair –

In the entire town?

It was a very Christian, conservative community. So we found lawyers to defend us, and my brother and I did the very opposite: put on long dresses and skullcaps and no hair. We came to school and organized the kids. They lined up police cars around the school, arrested every one of us, and threw us all in jail. Everyone was like, 'Free the Steiner brothers!'

Your stories are...

– We had to go to court, so we defended ourselves in court. It was really like a Marx Brothers play, or something. We wore the skullcaps and long dresses and talked about how bullshit this illegal rule was. The judge threw the book at us, said, 'If you wanna protest, do it in your bedroom!' Like, what does that even mean?

Protest in the bedroom!

So then we left.

So how'd you end up in New York?

'Cause it was the most fascinating place. I thought I was gonna move to Chicago, 'cause first that was the most fascinating place I'd ever been to... I thought I should try to go to New York and see if it's more interesting than Chicago. I got there, thought, 'Oh, this is great, I'm gonna stay here.' Third day of 1980, I moved to Chinatown. At 27, the same as Jonas [Mekas].

How did you meet Jonas?

We met in Soho, when Anthology was in Soho, the ground floor of the loft. To tell you the truth, I thought Anthology [Film Archives] was a mausoleum for old, dead films. I was showing films in clubs, these crazy places in the East Village... it seemed so much more lively than Anthology did to me.

Isn't that what [filmmaker] Jack Smith called it, as well? 'Uncle Fishhook's Mausoleum'?

Well, the Uncle Fishhook story, to clarify the thing... I know that Jack [Smith] felt a little bit exploited because people were hiring [Jonas Mekas] to talk about the film. But in another sense, they really preserved the film. I saw this beautiful letter that Jack had written to Jonas: 'Thank you for all your support.' Even though he liked the enmity of having a public enemy, and everyone likes to talk about that, I believe that all along he knew that Jonas was a huge supporter, that he made things possible.

I do feel that vibe comes through: that appreciation, and yet also wanting to have a bone to pick.

Exactly, exactly [laughs].

But it's hilarious, a beautifully funny nickname.

He's really good at that. When he talks about socialism: 'What's Underground About Marshmallows?' I have something to show you. We did some Jack Smith shows... [pulls out a stack of papers].

Left: Bradley Eros, eau de cinema {essence of film}, 2006, collage on paper. Right: Bradley Eros, eau de cinema, 2014, original fragrance in labeled glass bottle. Images provided by artist.

Will you tell me a little bit, from the beginning, about the fragrance you created, Eau de Cinema?

I was doing things with other senses. Some of the other, non-visual senses... it's not that they are denigrated, per se, but they are not seen as often in the arts. For many people, taste, smell, and touch seem to be relegated to some other field. Why aren't they in the same conversation? So there was that, in the sense of bending the parameters of cinema itself. At some point I remember describing to my lover: 'Cinema can be anything.' It's a lens through which I can look at any part of the universe through, from the most micro situation. Yes, it includes narrative... but that's only one tip of it. Maybe opium... [trails off, laughs]. But the idea of the trans-sensual: one thing triggers another. And there is some deeper history of olfactory cinema. I was into the idea of expanding that type of thing. I worked with Vanessa Macdonald, who has done some great things with olfactory cinema. When I came out with Eau de Cinema, we did some live performances. She had developed some stuff, almost in the realm of horror: half-horrendous, half-disgusting kinds of triggers.

I'd heard about this.

Primarily I think I was trying to pierce the threshold of what one could think of as cinema – which is something I'd been doing for decades. What are the surfaces? What are the materials? What is left when you take everything apart and make a contracted cinema, focusing on the lens, the bulb, the shudder? Many people focus on the physical material of the film. But everything about the projection, if you think of doing expanded things you need to consider what each thing can do on their own. I did some performances in the dark, that only dealt with the subtlest possible sense of sound and sight and other elements. Almost a kind of like, caged-in, let's pay attention to everything in the room, everything in the environment... when you start to get into that, everything from insects to mold and other smells... all that is part of the cinema experience. They're denigrated to this lower level. But what if you were to heighten it?

The most extreme, the most hybrid. Things that are the most purified, and the most blended: these are both interesting to me. The point where you get an expanded cinema and everything is possible. Leave nothing. Take nothing for granted. Every element could be part of it. With Vanessa, I thought I'd bring in someone who was just really good with the scent element. But I could have gone with musicians. Or thought about at what point in the film you eat something or taste something. There was something about the extreme isolation of the sensual experience, or the extreme blending of the sensual experience. 

That was the initiation of that. Kind of thinking about the essential films. Meshes of the Afternoon, Flaming Creatures... they all have an extrasensory experience to them: the implication of that. And particularly sometimes when films are silent, or they don't have color, they often have other things that are just as strong. With a lot of cinemas, music things... you have a concert hall in the Western world where you isolate these things. But anywhere else in the world, you're gonna have taste and smell and touch intermingling as part of the concert. It wouldn't be strange to think that: 'I'm gonna be smelling the local food, the local things.' It seems like an extremely Western classical idea to isolate these things. Heighten painting, sculpture, classical music above everything else. There's no reason for that. One way to revolt against that is to go back to these other universes. How do these other elements come into it? Why did they get erased? What is the hierarchical thinking that made that as some part of categorical narrative? There's usually a prejudice of some kind. So let's bring in the other things.

You say 'There's gonna be a scent involved,' and people immediately think scratch-and-sniff. And I mean, I like scratch-and-sniff – the John Waters scratch-and-sniff, you know, one of my favorites. And all those things I take seriously. Especially if they come from 'no-culture' or a situation or a place that people think, 'That's not a serious art form.' But yes, it still is. It's in dialogue with all these other things.

It's funny to take the Eau de Cinema – to think about the concept. I thought about it as an invisible cinema: experiencing the thing you can't see. I thought, maybe I'll have a version in pitch dark. How would that work? Even the idea of it being silver, dust and light: that's pretty conceptual. Most people don't think, 'I wanna create a film based on silver, based on dust, based on light.' But every element, I took seriously.

Collage of an imagined bottle and label design by Bradley Eros for Eau de Flaming Creatures, a fragrant response to Jack Smith’s film envisioned but never produced. When asked what the scent would smell like? Bradley: “A perfumed swamp.”

Did you use orris?

I did use orris. The perfumer I worked with, that woman on 4th Street, there, across from La Mama, most of the things she kept secret from me, which I kind of like. I trusted her to make it. And there are other plants that smell like silver, maybe some nightshade, or something. The idea of the dust as being the air itself you see in the beam of the projection. The light itself. What is the smell of light? That was the most fascinating thing, when I said to her [the perfumer] – 'This is really, really close, but can you add more light?' She went back in the back, came back, had done something: I don't even know what that was she added, you might have a better idea –

It was light.

Yes, exactly [laughs]. Not a guess what that could be.

I like what you're saying about the blending of the senses. It's kind of wild how, in the ancient world, there was no difference between scent and taste. The devaluation of scent has a long history of racialization, association with 'the bestial,' all of these elements.

I love this idea of cinema moving beyond the visual. The shift for me, in moving from working with photographs towards working with words (through poetry) happened perhaps as a reaction to living in this wildly visual culture. I thought it was interesting and unique that you were pulling these other senses into the fold.

There was this earlier piece I'd written called Braille Cinema, related to the idea of cinema by the other senses. There's a piece I've been working on that I think will come to fruition: making a braille screen for a film that only the blind, and those who can read braille, would be able to see. This idea: here's a film that a blind person can see, that other people can't see. It would describe an image, something visually, in the braille itself. The screen would be able to be touched, as well, which is kind of taboo. And they could see it, but those who could see could not. I've not entirely decided what that image should be. How abstract should it be?

One time I was in Stockholm and found a braille copy of Playboy. It's a thick volume.

Imagined labels of eau de cinema by Bradley Eros, including label designs for unmade fragrance evocations of essential cinema.

Helen Keller referred to scent as the 'fallen angel of the five senses.' Of course, she relied upon it quite a bit as part of her world. We're desensitized to it. A lot of times, I think, the more reliant a culture or a people is on scent, the more they are seen by the West as 'other,' as 'primitive.'

I had written this piece, Ancient Cinema – a speculative idea of all of the other versions of cinema that might have existed hundreds if not thousands of years earlier. One of them goes back to the ancient Egyptian idea that the hieroglyphs are meant to be... Peter Lamborn Wilson speculates that they were meant to be read musically. That if you knew how to read them, you would hear them, the hieroglyphs. It would be as if you knew how to read music. You'd look at the pictures; they'd make music in your head. This other idea that I had was that there were these glyphs in the pyramids, the hieroglyphs were inside. And because the culture was so heliocentric, they knew exactly where the sun would be at any time of day. The sun could pierce into the cinema of the pyramid; there would be a moving image of the hieroglyphs around it. That's definitely a cinema that existed prior to this one. And moving images, you know. And if you add the other: with soundtracks.

I also wrote a zine called Blackhole Cinema, wrote about quantum physics: that cinema began with light. There's a whole history of cinema as light itself. There too is the selenographic idea, that the sun projected light on the moon: that the moon was the first screen...

That's... that's wild.

Yeah, yeah [laughs].

* FURTHER NOTES ON NOCTURNAL, ILLINOIS, FROM BRADLEY EROS:

I forgot to mention, that it's also trans sylvan (i.e. 'across the woods') that is, transylvanian , or at least trans~illinoisian, or trans~illinoin, or trance~illusion, meaning, it's not only somewhere across (the wooded) Illinois, but also that you (may) need to 'be in a trance to see the illusion', otherwise, you won't see what's not there for others to not see, & only in this state ('illinois illusion') can you see what's not there, by night light only, by light of night, by nocturnal admission."

*

Bradley Eros is an artist working in myriad media: experimental film & video, collage, photography, performance, sound, text, contracted and expanded cinema & installation. He has exhibited at the Whitney Biennial, NY; The American Century at the Whitney Musuem, NY; MoMA, NY; MoMA PS1, Queens, NY; The Kitchen, NY; New Museum, NY; Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, PA; Performs09, Exit Art, Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM), NY; The New York, London & Rotterdam Film Festivals, among many others. He has collaborated with the Alchemical Theater, the band Circle X, Voom HD Lab, expanded cinema groups kinoSonik & Arcane Project, and most recently with the Optipus film group. For many years he has been a manager and research at Anthology Film Archives as well as a Member of the Board of Director’s of the Film-makers’ Cooperative in New York.)

Interviewed by M. Elizabeth Scott at Anthology Film Archives, November 2021.

More on Bradley here.
Marissa & Elizabeth’s fragrant take on Flaming Creatures can be found here.