The Afterlife of New American Cinema: An Archival Perspective

Abstract

The Afterlife of New American Cinema:An Archival Perspective Sabrina Negri (bio) In her book After Uniqueness: A History of Film and Video Art in Circulation, Erika Balsom investigates the effect that the digital revolution has had on the perception of authenticity of various works of moving image art: How can we perceive as unique, and therefore authentic, an object that can be endlessly reproduced?1 As she explains, the tension between optimism and skepticism as concerns the potentialities of perfect reproducibility has always been central to the work of several experimental filmmakers, as reflected in both their art and their dissemination strategies. Anxieties towards issues of originality therefore pre-date the advent of digital technology, though I would argue that it is because of the digital transition that they have become more visible and legible in ways that were unthinkable before. This is particularly true when looking at the archival life of some of these works, where the essential difference between films and their digital reproduction (or simulation, as some scholars would put it) emerges more strikingly.2 In this article, I will engage with these issues by exploring the afterlife of the New American Cinema Group's 1960s European Grand Tour from an archival perspective. In particular, I am going to compare the experimental film conservation, preservation, and exhibition approaches of two archives, namely the Rare and Distinctive Collections at the University of Colorado Boulder Libraries and the film archive at Museo Nazionale del Cinema in Turin, Italy. Both institutions house materials related to one of the most prominent members of the New American Cinema group, Stan Brakhage, but their collections and archival strategies differ enormously: while Boulder houses a sizeable Brakhage [End Page 212] collection in which film is only a small portion of the archival holdings, Turin is primarily a film archive that owns a few Brakhage films as part of a small collection of American experimental cinema, which has its roots in the New American Cinema program that took place in the city in 1967. I will argue that the two archives' different approaches to their Brakhage materials reflect their institutional history, their mission, their collections, and their relationship with Brakhage himself, while at the same time inviting different interpretations of Brakhage's work based on how it is archived, preserved, and exhibited. My goal is to approach the work of Brakhage from an archival perspective, while at the same time approaching archival issues through his work. What I want to think through is the dialectical relationship between film archival materials and the institutions that house them—that is, how the one influences the other and is influenced by it in return. The term "film" in relation to its archival life acquires a twofold meaning: on the one hand, it refers to the specific films that are conserved at these institutions, while on the other hand it evokes the nature of the object "film" in general. In fact, I believe that these two case studies can be incredibly instructive as pertains to issues of uniqueness, originality, and authenticity with respect to cinema: in these two archives, and arguably in any film archive, film's nature is revealed to be multifaceted in a way that goes far beyond its being a means for projection, thus broadening our understanding of what film (and therefore cinema) is, and showing how film archiving and preservation function as not only practices, or disciplines, but also interpretive frameworks and lenses that allow us to look at cinema from a different perspective. Even though I am not an experimental cinema scholar, I am particularly interested in this topic because the preservation and archiving of avant-garde cinema challenge traditional standards and theories in use in the field: experimental works, as Balsom demonstrates in her discussion of avant-garde cinema circulation, question widely assumed notions of originality, reproducibility, and exhibition. In this sense, experimental cinema already broadens the boundaries of the medium by creating an overlap between cinema and the fine arts not only as pertains the medium's aesthetics but also, and especially, the medium's material nature—and the aesthetics of its material nature. This is what makes the preservation of...