“TESTAMENT is James Broughton’s exquisite self-portrait. A major figure in avant-garde filmmaking and poetry since the 1940s, Broughton views his life and life’s work with irony, charm, humor, and a combination of joyous self-love and gentle self-depreciation. Scenes from his earlier films mix the elements of humor, magic, slapstick, melodrama, and romance which mark his aesthetic. A plethora of rich personal symbols is woven throughout the film, tied together by verbal games, Zen poems, anecdotes, songs, a child’s prayer, dreams, and visions.”     – Karen Cooper

Above: The poem, “The Girl With The Beady Black Eyes,” as seen in James Broughton’s film  ‘Testament,’ which he thought would be his last. (He made 7 more, mostly with soulmate/partner Joel Singer.) James and his students made shots of James’ birthplace, Modesto, CA, when he was asked to speak at the opening of a new library. They also staged a funeral parade (25 years before he died) for James and he danced on the grave of his ancestors.

P. Adams Sitney wrote about TESTAMENT in his book, “VISIONARY FILM: The American Avant-Garde 1943-2000?:
James Broughton’s Testament (1974) is the purest and to my mind the most powerful of the film autobiographies of the seventies.  In style and in technique it is quite eclectic; its most moving sequence comes right our of Hill’s Film Portrait, a sequence of photographs in reverse chronological order.  Yet an extreme and profound transformation of the strategies of autobiography is the result of Broughton’s art.

The opening trope brings together an allusion to Maya Deren (the reversed sea from At Land), who was one of the major inspirations of Broughton’s early cinema, and a recollection of “the aging balletomane” (the rocking chair), the icon of retrospective fancy in Broughton’s Four in the Afternoon.  In this shot, the film-maker himself sits in a rocking chair on a beach.  His rocking movement indicates a sympathetic union with the sea he contemplates.  This image, with its several variations, including one using reverse photography (where Broughton walks backward out of the backward-rolling waves to reoccupy the empty chair), presents the constituitive moment of the film: everything occurs as if recalled from this extended rhythmic figure.  The empty chair is one of the strong substitutions for the moment of death in Testament.  When the film-maker comes back into it, he acknowledges the ad hoc cinematic illusion of autobiographical continuity.  This metaphorical use of reverse motion also occurred in Film Portrait. Broughton’s choice of imagery, his superb timing, and the quality of the verbal text which accompanies the images raise this figure to a power unanticipated by the self-irony of Hill’s film.

The other intimation of death, juxtaposed in the editing with the sequence of the empty chair, is the montage of photographs to which I referred.  There are several interludes of still photographs, showing Broughton’s parents, his collaborators on the sets of his various films, and his home life.  The most dramatic, however, occurs at the end of a processional march, in which the poet, in an elaborate feathered costume, is carried on a litter through the streets of Modesto, California, his birthplace, on a day when he was publicly honored by the town’s library.   Parading with him, under the banner “In memory of James Broughton,” are many of his students costumed as totemic animals.  Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of this procession is the inclusion of the faces of the puzzled and amused bystanders.  Where Hill told of his family, “These people to whom I belonged, did not belong to me,” Broughton vividly demonstrates the isolation and the strangeness of his poetic vocation in this marvelous parade.  The procession brings him to a graveyard.  A shot of his fascinating, wrinkled face dissolves into the sequence of photographs in anti-chronological order.  As the images rush toward infancy one sees the unmasking of the mature features as a movement towards an essence.  It is as if after the earliest picture we should expect some image of primeval nonexistence.  Instead, the montage cuts powerfully from the baby’s face to a still image of the aged poet under a weblike veil which emphasizes both the lines of his face and the birdlike nature of his costume.  In his text for the presentation of the Twelfth Independent Film Award, Ken Kelman described Testament as “a ritual mask with sardonic bite which opens to giddy depths and lets out the roar of good old animal spirits.”  The whole processional sequence is the giddiest of those depths and one of the sublime moments of the cinema of the seventies.

The text of the film is an anthology of passages from A Long Undressing, Broughton’s collected poems, carefully excerpted and intoned as if they constituted a single autobiographical poem. Early in the film when a voice (presumably that of one of the townspeople watching the procession which is seen much later) asks, “Who is James Broughton?”, the citation is in fact from the poem “I Am a Medium,” the autobiographical forward to the collection:
                    I am a third generation Californian…
                       My grandfathers were bankers, and so was my father.
                       But my mother wanted me to become a surgeon.
                       However, one night when I was 3 years old
                       I was awakened by a glittering stranger
                       who told me I was a poet and always would be
                       and never to fear being alone or being laughed at.
                       That was my first meeting with my angel
                       who is the most interesting poet I have ever met.

The indifference to being alone or being laughed at is illustrated by the outrageous procession through Modesto, later in the film.  But the moment of poetic incarnation is illustrated at this point by the dance of a nearly naked youth, in silver body-paint, with a long goatlike phallus, which he rubs against an immense egg, representing the poet.  A motherly figure hovers over it, too.  Even Christ makes a brief appearance, to bless it.

The issue of artistic incarnation is fundamentally different in Testament from the variations we have observed in other film-makers. There is no question of psychological development, dramatic reorientation, or the patterning of aberrant responses.  The story that Broughton tells is of a calling, pure and simple.  The mythic representation of the angel poet, as of the Great Mother and Christ in this Orphic trinity, looks forward to another scene of incarnation, as a filmmaker per se, a little later in the film.  But before we can come to that point, a more detailed look at the modes of representation throughout the film must be taken.

Broughton represents his filmable life in terms of his actual films.  Starting with a parody of the compositions and foreshortenings of Mother’s Day, with his on, Orion, standing in for the young poet, the sequence proceeds through a re-montage of The Adventures of Jimmy in which Broughton played the main role, Loony Tom, The Golden Positions, Nuptiae, This Is It, and The Bed.  Autobiography becomes, then, for Broughton, a particular (linear) mode of interpreting his works, both cinematic and verbal.

Into this matrix of poetic origins, as an interlude in the parody of Mother’s Day, Broughton inserts the fictitious projection, by the boy for himself, of The Follies of Dr. Magic, itself a parody of very early fantasy films, as Pathe or even Melies made them.  The title is an allusion to Gance’s early anamorphic film, The Folly of Dr. Tube, which is conventionally chronicled as the first avant-garde film.  The statement, “To amuse myself I made my first movie,” however, might refer to either The Potted Psalm, which Broughton made with Sidney Peterson, or Mother’s Day, his first solo film..  The latter reference is more likely, although the mention of negative critical reception is applicable to both.  (Here the film-maker is taking some license, for all of his early films were well received, but only within the very narrow circle of people who knew and cared about advanced cinema.)
… from VISIONARY FILM: The American Avant-Garde 1943-2000, by P. Adams Sitney, pp 396-398.