Christopher Maclaine was a beat poet, he was the publisher of the short-lived but essential little magazine Contour, and is best remembered as a maker of a small handful of brilliant films. With Scotch Hop, Maclaine films a highland heritage festival in Petaluma, California, where traditional Scottish recreation is on full display, with highland dancers, bagpipers, and drum troops as his subjects. Maclaine strains these events through his own sensibilities, using canted angles and disruptive cutting to cast abstract and discontinuous rhythms—the result isn’t a mockery of what’s on display, it’s a work of love and of connection with something greater than the close borders of self, it is an ecstatic dance.

The film has a tripartite structure: the first and second sequences have similar momentum. In the first sequence, pipers and drummers are documented, with a straightforward style that gives way to increasingly rapid cutting and tight close-up compositions, that seem to build a parallel rhythm to the oscillating drones of the bagpipes; the second sequence features dancers, filmed from a low angle at the edge of a performing stage, interspersing shots in slow and undercranked motion that turns the subject’s rhythm over to Maclaine’s own lyrical operations. In the third sequence, these contrasts - of abstract and broad compositions, and of slow, fast, and normal motion, come together as band processions, competitive games and cultural dances assume Maclaine’s attention, with caber tosses and speed walkers becoming a directional arrow for the film itself, moving rightward towards a conclusion. All of this kinetic activity, and in particular the dances, is slowed into something more graceful by Maclaine’s camera, a grace that is inevitably, if not sentimental, at least tender in its depiction.

Scotch Hop was Maclaine’s final film. The next few years were very harsh for him, as has been reported in various accounts, most vividly by the poet David Melzer—Maclaine’s methadrine and amphetamine addictions were the cause of his deterioration, and he ended up in jail, which broke him in a kind of final way, and though he held on for another 12 years, by the end of the 1960s he was prematurely aged, he was incapable of independent survival, and in the end, he became vegetative at age 46. Maclaine’s own tragic end has cast a pall over his films, especially his darkly absurd masterpiece The End, a film too easily misunderstood as purely miserable although it, like Scotch Hop, dances in its own way, and to its own rhythms…but what we see here in Scotch Hop is a bare and innate liveliness that occupied Maclaine’s core—pleasure and plasticity and the dancing camera, joining in rituals that are themselves ecstatic and celebratory. This film has been a game of pleasant disruptions, like the interruption of daisies woven into the fingers of an idle hand that breaks up the final title credit.

It is a late gesture in the films of Christopher Maclaine to see a world external to that personal mythology that guided his major works, major works that are also more in service to narrative, I’m thinking of The End and The Man Who Invented Gold, little fables that made him into the Homer of hipsterdom. But in Scotch Hop and the film that preceded it, Beat, Maclaine is chronicling phenomena external to his tales, something more spontaneous and social, filtering it all through his own witness: in Beat, his witness is a casual one of romantic haze, in Scotch Hop, an intensely formal one. In the face of this ecstasy, I’m reminded of a poem that Maclaine wrote ten years earlier, a poem that broadcasts the mordant perspective he had on a world gone and going wrong, the whole of the present moment as an echo where little glimpses of vitality spent and spending could still bleed through into a perceptible present.

“as though everything were alive,
I see everything is dying, the clock
says half past eight, in the corridor
but I have been cut off in a room
and the time in the corridor does not reach me
here.
I see everything is dying
on this day of the returning robins,
sparrows: the flowers, heads without bodies,
so young in the tender breath of April—all is life
today as if the awkward movement of death were
halted,
but I know the sun will bow the heads of lilies
tomorrow
as though everything were not dying
but only flowers, birds, and me.”