Ron Rice often accompanied [Jack] Smith as he was shooting Normal Love. They tended to return to his loft with most of hte cast, still in their costumes, after the day's filming. At first Rice made some casual film studies of the actors swinging on the hammocks in his loft. Late he expanded them into the produciton of Chumlum (1964). The texture and structure of Rice's film is altogether different from Smith's. Throughout Chumlum there are usually at least two layers of moving imagery in superimposition. The compounding of figures, costumes, swinging movements, and hte simultaneous fusino of side adn aerial views flatten the space, thicken the pastel tones in deep and muddled colors, obscure the individual roles, and fragment the actions. Chumlum seems a continuously even, unaccented web of visual textures. The smoothness of the visual mesh is supported by the drone-like music of Angus MacLise on the chumlum, from which the title comes.
[Source: P. Adams Sitney "Visionary Film" , 1974]