Hollywood Extras: One Tradition of "Avant-Garde" Film in Los Angeles

Abstract

art/mass culture binary that was most decisively formulated by Critical Theory. As a consequence, when the historiography and theory of non-commodity film practices in the United States were developed in the 1960s, they privileged the concept of an aesthetically autonomous, formalist avant-garde. Traced via figures such as Hans Richter and Maya Deren primarily from the European post-World War I Surrealists, a tradition of such films was understood to be entirely distinct from the entertainment industry, in formulations that echoed Clement Greenberg's analysis of the division of art in the modern period into and kitsch, even though Greenberg's recognition of the historical preconditions of their separate emergence and of the determining priority of mass culture in modernism generally was not engaged. In retrospect, we can clearly see the conditions that made the construction of this tradition of avant-garde film both possible and necessary. On the one hand, the 1960s saw an unprecedented flowering of non-studio film practices; these reflected the emergence of strong social movements based initially on disaffiliation from the corporate state, the several crises in the entertainment industry, the ready availability of the material resources of cinema for popular use, and the hegemony of the movies in the popular imagination. On the other hand, both the journalistic and the academic forms of film criticism then emerging were developed primarily in reference to the industrial narrative; the inadequacy of this theory to