Abstract
This dissertation chronicles the formation of a Canadian avant-garde cinema and its relation to the tradition of art of purposeful difficulty. It is informed by the writings of George Steiner, who advanced a typology of difficult forms in poetry. The major works of Jack Chambers (The Hart of London), Michael Snow (La Region Centrale), and Joyce Wieland (Reason Over Passion) illustrate the ways in which a poetic vanguard in cinema is anchored in an aesthetic of difficulty. Such aesthetics enclose the various forms of avant-garde cinema, from the lyrical to the structural film, and signal work of an enduring radicalism. SImultaneously, this dissertation charts the origins of these artists, the circumstances that formed their aesthetic themes, and their maturation. In doing so, it attends to their individual origins and sources, and consequently, the individuation of their artistic activity. This research fills gaps in the literature of Canadian cinema by explicitly linking the origins of a Canadian avant-garde cinema to the forms of purposeful difficulty in modernism. Additionally, it offers new commentary on the idea of difficulty in art, and specifically, the resonances of difficult modern art in vanguard cinema. This study champions progressive poetic form in avant-garde cinema, identifying aesthetic strategies that have analogues in other art forms such as music, painting and poetry.
Highlights
This dissertation chronicles the formation of a Canadian avant-garde cinema and its relation to the tradition of art of purposeful difficulty
It is informed by the writings of George Steiner, who advanced a typology of difficult forms in poetry
Clive Bell has argued that some viewers miss the aesthetic because they bring their lives into art: “For them the significance of a work of art depends on what they bring to it; no new thing is added to their lives, only the old material is stirred.”40 If art’s vital end is toward the gratification of man, difficult modern art gratifies through the richness of experience, by turning away from narrow representational experience of realism, and toward the vast introspective experience of the abstract, allusive, modal, and sublime
Summary
William Wordsworth, in his preface to Lyrical Ballads, speculated on the sources of delight in poetry. Clive Bell has argued that some viewers miss the aesthetic because they bring their lives into art: “For them the significance of a work of art depends on what they bring to it; no new thing is added to their lives, only the old material is stirred.” If art’s vital end is toward the gratification of man, difficult modern art gratifies through the richness of experience, by turning away from narrow representational experience of realism, and toward the vast introspective experience of the abstract, allusive, modal, and sublime The former would inevitably aspire to please through mimesis, and through social or political meaning that reinforced its audience’s convictions, winning mass appeal, while the latter would push toward building relations between forms, subjects, and modes, toward an open-endedness that would involve the audience but which, above all, would grant the work an autonomy that granted it authenticity. Against the radical fringe of modern art, mass culture poses a genuinely elitist position, in the guise of populism: the cultural form is not worthy of its audience unless we can dance to it
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