The Material of Film and the Idea of Cinema: Contrasting Practices in Sixties and Seventies Avant-Garde Film

Abstract

In 1976, the American Federation of Arts organized a major program of American avant-garde films made since the early 1940s. In his introduction to the program's catalog, Whitney film curator and series organizerJohn Hanhardt argued that the central preoccupation of filmmakers across the history of avant-garde cinema had been with the exploration of the material of the film medium itself: This cinema subverts cinematic convention by exploring its medium and its and materials, and in the process creates its own history separate from that of the classical narrative cinema. It is filmmaking that creates itself out of its own experience.1 Having traced the history of avant-garde film according to the modernist notion that an art form advances by reflexively scrutinizing the properties and of its medium, Hanhardt turned his attention to more recent developments. But these new developments were not entirely receptive to his modernist model. On the one hand, he argued, filmmakers were continuing to create works that engaged the physical materials of film-film strip, projector, camera, and screen-and the range of effects these made possible. On the other, this engagement appeared to be leading some filmmakers to create cinematic works challenging the material limits of the film medium as it had been defined for over eighty years. For example, in Anthony McCall's Line Describing a Cone (1973), the focus of the viewer's attention was not an image projected onto a screen, but the projector beam itself, which over the course of thirty minutes grew from a thin line of light to a cone-a three-dimensional light sculpture with which the viewer could interact. Such a work not only eliminated one of the material limits of