American Avant-garde Film Research Articles

Expanding on the Cinema of Prayōga as an Embodied Approach to Experimental Film

In this paper I revisit the concept of Cinema of Prayoga, a theoretical framework for the study of experimental film and video proposed by Indian film critic Amrit Gangar. I re-evaluate its potential as an alternative approach to experimental film. In particular I articulate how the Yoga philosophy can further be explored within the context of this framework, to address notions of embodiment in experimental film. I point to how Indian philosophy can be useful towards interpreting cinema globally, with the specific example of American avant-garde film.

"The Theatricality of the Emulsion!"

This article reexamines the career of Roger Jacoby (1945–1985), an abstract painter and gay liberation activist who became renowned for processing film in his darkened bathtub and for films that featured his partner, Ondine, the Andy Warhol Superstar. Through a consideration of film shorts made in the 1970s and 1980s, the article argues that Jacoby’s principal innovation was the exploration of hand-processing, which resulted in films that resembled abstract expressionist paintings in motion. Additionally, it considers hand-processing as an overlooked, albeit powerful, vehicle for expressing non-normative sexuality in American avant-garde film. It situates Jacoby alongside gay filmmakers Kenneth Anger, Gregory Markopoulos, and Jack Smith, and considers how hand-processed media can generate a “corporealized” spectator and disrupt patterns of filmic illusionism and heterosexist protocols of sexual/gender representation.

A Conversation with Annette Michelson

Film scholar Edward Dimendberg spoke to Annette Michelson in July 2014 for a series of interviews sponsored by the Getty Research Institute. In their conversation, which is published for the first time here, Michelson discusses her first encounters with North American avant-garde film, the early days of Anthology Film Archives, and such figures as Jonas Mekas, P. Adams Sitney, Peter Kubelka, Yvonne Rainer, Hollis Frampton, Michael Snow, Stan Brakhage, Hans Richter, Harry Smith, Jack Smith, Marcel Duchamp, Joyce Wieland, Agnès Varda, Richard Serra, and Marguerite Duras, among others.

The Films of MM Serra: Art(core) and the Explicit Body

The Films of MM Serra:Art(core) and the Explicit Body MM Serra (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Mary Magdalene 2017 [End Page 134] "Mary Magdalene" is separate from you, but comes from you. It is a brilliant, explosive, fierce, and passionate gem, the kind that catches light but can also cut. As I said last night, the woman's body is there to contain and resist; she fights the frame and ideology all at the same time, forcing us to think about how images of the body both seduce and confuse us at every turn. The film does not offer easy answers but rather stirs us to move through the world so much more aware. A film about touching that no one can touch. —Lynne Sachs1 I, MM Serra, have since 1982 created over twenty-four short experimental documentary films. Over the last four decades, through my creation of films such as Turner (1987), L'Amour Fou (1992), Darling International (1999, co-directed with Jenn Reeves), Chop Off (2009), Bitch-Beauty (2011), Enduring Ornament (2015, co-directed with Josh Lewis), and Mary Magdalene (2017), I have explored my personal vision in moving image making by focusing on explicit content with a variety of aesthetics and techniques. Not having a camera or access to film equipment, I had the good fortune to be able to study filmmaking with a pioneer of the American avant-garde film scene Shirley Clarke in 1982 at UCLA. My first six films were created in Los Angeles while I studied with Clarke and were cinematic exercises in creating one-minute films about light and shadow and movement. In my early film Turner, sexuality is expressed through the film's star, blonde Marilyn Monroe-esque C. [End Page 135] Breeze, who is reading her poetry. The lyrics of her poetry are part of a dream about her dog, Turner, eagerly licking her nude body, after she put lotion on herself (canine sex). The film is layered with superimpositions and C. Breeze's use of blue-tinted fabrics. These early films from the 1980s serve as an indication of themes I would explore more explicitly in my later works, after I moved to New York in 1987. My mother, Josephine, named me Mary Magdalene (MM) for the only woman disciple of Jesus in the Christian New Testament. I think she was prescient; she knew deep down that the mythology of Mary Magdalene had a double life and multiple meanings. For many Christians, MM has a reputation as a repentant prostitute or loose woman. I have been inspired by this dichotomy throughout my life. As a girl growing up in a small, factory-based town in Western Pennsylvania in the mid twentieth century, I realized that my name was iconoclastic then and still is today. In June 2018, in response to Stormy Daniels's allegations, Donald Trump's lawyer Rudy Giuliani said, "I respect all human beings. I even have to respect criminals. But I'm sorry, I don't respect a porn star the way I respect a career women or a women of substance or a woman who has great respect for herself as a woman and as a person and isn't going to sell her body for sexual exploitation." Even now, at the end of the second decade of the twenty-first century, a woman within the heteronormative system who uses her body in a sexual manner is demonized and censored. Ever since my early childhood, this name Mary Magdalene has propelled me to stand outside the conventional institutions. By resisting normative paradigms in regards to the art I should create, the clothing I should wear, the films I should watch, the food I should eat, and the life I should lead, I am shaping my existence as a woman and as a filmmaker, using my own terms and initiatives. In childhood, looking at images of Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel in my mother's Italian Bible, I was awestruck by the beauty of the colorful, voluptuous bodies. I wanted to be Michelangelo using photography and filmmaking, creating not just the celestial bodies, but the body in all of...

Nicholas C. Morgan. Review of "Flesh Cinema: The Corporeal Turn in American Avant-Garde Film" by Ara Osterweil.

Nicholas C. Morgan. Review of "Flesh Cinema: The Corporeal Turn in American Avant-Garde Film" by Ara Osterweil.

Beyond the Rented World: An Introduction

In conversation with Austrian avant-garde filmmaker Peter Kubelka in 1973, American underground artist Jack Smith shifts focus of censorious reactions to his film Flaming Creatures (1962-63) from its possible obscenity to its anticapitalism.1 Reflecting back, after almost ten years, on what is certainly most notorious legal battle in American avant-garde film history, Smith posits that authorities at time could not accept film's attitudes towards commercialism. Flaming Creatures, he maintains, depicts poor people without any sort of agreement with commercialism that any authorities would want to see. Asked by Kubelka about film's depiction of poor people, Smith offers following lengthy, considered, and fascinating response:It's not a story in which son is going off to college or whatever ... or in which, uh . . . there are no automobiles in it. No automobile worship. Or anything that depends on-or family try to raise their children comfortably. Things like that. No refrigerators. No refrigerator worship . . . values depicted in film are not especially a set of people achieving financial status in some way or other-which is basically what commercial film would depict. For instance, a story about a widow clinging to a home or of these plots really have at their basis property in one way or another, clinging to property, attaining property. I don't think that you can think of a commercial film that didn't have at its basis the-uh-subject of landlordism.2Smith thus offers a political reading of narrative and visual aspects of his seminal underground film, which is rarely described in such terms.3 Moreover, he adds depth and substance to what is obviously more complex than a mere hatred of capitalism.4 The subject of very likely became part of Smith's aesthetic agenda as a result of his difficulties paying rent for his various Manhattan lofts and apartments. But financial, emotional, and psychological burden of regular rent payments can hardly be reduced to an individual problem. For Smith, landlordism is ultimate evil, the one problem, he explains to a seemingly unconvinced Kubelka, that's crushing life everywhere in world.Smith is certainly most famous for that cinematic burst of aesthetic innovation and sexual and gender transgression known as Flaming Creatures. Critic and Smith specialist J. Hoberman maintains, Had Jack Smith produced nothing other than this amazing artifice, he would still rank among great visionaries of American film.5 Fortunately, and despite his chaotic lifestyle, from mid-1950s until his death in 1989 from complications of AIDS, Smith made a great deal of additional work, including films, photos, performances, collages, drawings, costumes, audio recordings, and written texts. Over slightly more than three decades, Smith worked with and influenced some of most significant figures in postwar American avant-garde in film, music, theater, and performance-for example, Tony Conrad, Beverly Grant, Ken Jacobs, Charles Ludlam, Angus MacLise, Judith Malina, Mario Montez, Ronald Tavel, Carmelita Tropicana, Andy Warhol, Robert Wilson, LaMonte Young, Marian Zazeela, and John Zorn.Initially, Smith's work was not inspired by an anticapitalist critique. As he explains to Kubelka, Flaming Creatures emerged simply from a desire to film all funniest stuff he could think oF' and to represent different ideas of glamor.6 It was in early 1970s that Smith became increasingly focused on difficulties of negotiating a world dominated by capital and motivated by profit. A year ago, he tells Kubelka in early 1973,I made a very strong conscious effort to make a play that dealt with subject of landlordism. I tried to rewrite Hamlet story so that it was a family of landlords instead of royalty. This was called Hamlet in Rented World. I got play ready. It was mostly produced. …

‘A Hymn to Movement’: The ‘City Symphony’ of the 1920s and 1930s

The ‘city symphonies’ of my title refer primarily to a cluster of films made in the United States and Europe in the 1920s and the 1930s. The best known, and most frequently imitated, is Walter Ruttmann’s Berlin: Symphony of a Great City (1926). Other ‘city symphonies’ of this period include Alberto Cavalcanti’s Rien que les heures (1926), Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera (1929), Joris Ivens’ Regen [Rain] (1929) and Jean Vigo’s A Propos de Nice (1930). The earliest of the city symphonies was Charles Sheeler and Paul Strand’s Manhatta (1921). Manhatta appears to have had a significant influence on the European city symphonies and city films of the later 1920s, and also on less well known American avant-garde films, including Jay Leyda’s AB ronx Morning and Herman Weinberg’s City Symphony and Autumn Fire .C ity and cinema have been inextricably linked from the very first films onwards. The avant-garde city films of the 1920s show the influence of early urban panoramic films and city actualities. They are part of the complex history whereby film-makers in the 1920s sought to renew the medium–and to turn away from commercial and narrative cinema–by returning to cinema’s origins in the documenting of reality, but with the particular twist given by the perspectives and angles of modernism. The ‘city symphonies’ of Sheeler and Strand, Ruttmann, Cavalcanti and Vertov follow the course of a day in the life of the city. Like the one-day novels of the period, they open up the question of ‘modernist dailiness’; the preoccupation with everyday life is combined with the intimation that much greater spans of time and culture are condensed within the diurnal round. Space and time relations–and duration and the passing of time–are some of the central preoccupations of the films, frequently underlain by the perception that ‘plot’ and ‘story’ must be excluded for time and space to become apparent. Rien que les heures, for example, opens with

Sophistication under Construction: Oscar Micheaux's Infamous Sound Films

What we witness as we experience his work is an evidence of the extreme effort required of maker and spectator alike at the pivotal point in space and time when a new tradition (one uses the phrase without hesitation) is sensed and known to be under construction: and, best of all, the extreme satisfaction consequent upon that effort in its most coherent moments. Hollis Frampton, Inclusions for Patrick Clancy, in On the Camera Arts and Consecutive Matters: The Writings of Hollis Frampton Oscar Micheaux (1884-1951) was and remains the most prolific and celebrated director of African American films during the era when they were called Race Movies. He made some forty independent feature films between 1919 and 1948, and though he was largely forgotten for several decades, recent interest in his work has been robust.1 Almost everyone has initial problems taking seriously much of Oscar Micheaux's sound-era film work.2 An example of the problem from The Girl from Chicago (1932) is the second solo by Mary Austin's sister (see figures 1a-1d; also, a corresponding clip is located at www.frameworkonline.com).3 This scene is awkward, owing to amateurish acting, blocking, editing, sound mixing, and lighting, especially the wandering key light in this shot, which sometimes includes Norma, the younger spectator, in its light and sometimes does not (figures 1a-1c). This keylight radically realigns itself after a couple of edits in the same scene (figure 1d). Such ineptitude is hard to recommend even to the most sympathetic film fan or race-movie supporter. However, there is a technically awkward scene of similar ineptitude from Ten Minutes to Live (also 1932) that almost anyone can appreciate, the two-and-a-half-minute taxi ride when Letha enters New York City for the first time (see figure 2). This sequence is sublime, comparing well with Expressionist classics and American avant-garde films of the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s. In fact, Ken Jacobs reputedly has stated that he could happily have incorporated not just this scene but the whole of Ten Minutes to Live as his own work. But I want to stick with the more typical Micheaux scene. Soon after the solo illustrated above from The Girl from Chicago, another very similar solo occurs with similar problems (see figure 3). This scene is as amateurish in its handling of technical elements as the first solo mentioned above, and it doesn't really work as normal cinema, nor does it transcend its technical problems like the taxi ride in Ten Minutes to Live. In addition to the wandering key light, the establishing shot is static and tableau-like, the eyeline matching seems off, the lighting setup alters between the tableaux and the closeups, expressions on people's faces are not appropriate to the progress of the action, and emphatic facial expressions repeat unaccountably and without ever being acknowledged by the other members of the group. However, if this scene is taken as a set-piece production number, like Al Jolson's solos in The Jazz Singer, then there is a kind of logic to some of these mistakes. Micheaux is mounting a secular version of a spiritual that might be titled Shout, Sister, Shout! The dialogue has already established that both the piano player and the vocalist, Wade Washington, are members of the local church choir. The film's editing of this set-piece interpolates their religious song into a worldly social-uplift skit in which the Devil is represented by a peonage boss's informer, and the sister's shout is represented by Norma's wide-open mouth. The shooting and editing of the scene accomplish this transposition perfectly well. I say perfectly in the sense that the elements that Micheaux cares about-the conjuring of a Negro spiritual, the lines of the song about the devil rising up, the close-up of a snitch rising up in the window, the particular lines of the song about a sister shouting, and the shocking foregrounding of Norma seeming to shout-these several elements all work to make the spiritual-to-secular transposition Micheaux wants to construct. …

From Compilation to Collage: The Found-Footage Films of Arthur Lipsett The Martin Walsh Memorial Lecture 2007

Oeuvrant à l’Office national du film du Canada pendant les années 60, Arthur Lipsett a transformé le documentaire de compilation—illustré par les séries Canada Carries On et World in Action produites pendant la guerre-en films de collage modernistes qui critiquent les valeurs et moeurs de la société nord-américaine des années 50 et 60. Une lecture attentive de certains passages de Very Nice, Very Nice, A Trip Down Memory Lane et Fluxes nous permet de voir ses méthodes en action. Ces méthodes partagent certaines prémisses théoriques établies par Walter Benjamin pour son projet inachevé sur Les Arcades, en particulier le potentiel révélateur des « rebus » et « déchets » extraits de leurs contextes originaux et juxtaposés selon les principes du montage.

Review: Picturing a Metropolis: New York City Unveiled, by Bruce Posner and David Shepard and Unseen Cinema: Early American Avant-Garde Film 1893–1941, by Bruce Posner

Book Review| March 01 2007 Review: Picturing a Metropolis: New York City Unveiled, by Bruce Posner and David Shepard and Unseen Cinema: Early American Avant-Garde Film 1893–1941, by Bruce Posner Picturing a Metropolis: New York City Unveiled, in Unseen Cinema: Early American Avant-Garde Film 1893–1941 (fifth of a seven-part series). Bruce Posner, curator, and David Shepard, producer. New York: Anthology Film Archives with Deutsches Filmmuseum, British Film Institute, Film Preservation Associates, George Eastman House, The Library of Congress, and the Museum of Modern Art, 2005, DVD, 152 min., $24.99, ISBN 14381-2874-2, Distributed by Image Entertainment, www.unseen-cinema.com.Unseen Cinema: Early American Avant-Garde Film 1893–1941, edited by Bruce Posner. New York: Black Thistle Press/Anthology Film Archives, 2001, 160 pp., 31 b/w illus. $15.95, ISBN 0-9628151-7-8, www.unseen-cinema.com. Mary N. Woods Mary N. Woods Cornell University Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians (2007) 66 (1): 129–130. https://doi.org/10.1525/jsah.2007.66.1.129 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Mary N. Woods; Review: Picturing a Metropolis: New York City Unveiled, by Bruce Posner and David Shepard and Unseen Cinema: Early American Avant-Garde Film 1893–1941, by Bruce Posner. Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 1 March 2007; 66 (1): 129–130. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/jsah.2007.66.1.129 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentJournal of the Society of Architectural Historians Search This content is only available via PDF. © 2007 by the Society of Architectural Historians.2007 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Unseen Cinema: Early American Avant-Garde Film 1894–1941 (review)

Reviewed by: Unseen Cinema: Early American Avant-Garde Film 1894–1941 William C. Wees (bio) Unseen Cinema: Early American Avant-Garde Film 1894–1941 CURATED BY Bruce Posner ; PRODUCED FOR DVD BY David Shepard . DISTRIBUTED BY Entertainment and Anthology Film Archives, 2005. With 155 films on seven DVDs and a total running time of just under nineteen hours, Unseen Cinema represents a major effort to present, in the words of its curator, Bruce Posner, "the broadest possible spectrum of experimental films produced between the 1890s and 1940s."1 Thus Posner joins Jan-Christopher Horak and the contributors to his anthology Lovers of Cinema: The First American Film Avant-Garde, 1919–1945 in an effort to open the canon of American experimental/avant-garde film to work made before 1943, when Maya Deren and Alexander Hammid made Meshes of the Afternoon–"the quasi-official inauguration of the American avant-garde"2 and starting point for P. Adams Sitney's extremely influential study of American avant-garde film, Visionary Film: The American Avant-Garde, 1943–2000. By making these films available for multiple viewings, Unseen Cinema contributes significantly to the study and enjoyment of what Horak calls the "first avant-garde" in American cinema.3 Information preceding each film includes its source, the title, date, director(s), musicians (for the silent films), or, when relevant, the title of the composition heard on the soundtrack. Brief notes introduce most of the films, and among extra features (accessible on a computer's DVD-ROM drive) is information on the authors of the film notes and the musicians who provided accompaniment for the silent films. Most useful of all is a "Bios" section with information on "filmmakers, artists, musicians, and related individuals and groups active in experimental cinema between 1894 and 1941." Many entries include photographs; there are also examples of artwork, frame enlargements, and other relevant visual material. The list is organized alphabetically, but there is no way to call up a name directly; you must find it by scrolling through its 253 "pages" or by selecting the number of a "page" and hoping you land close to the one you are seeking. The visual quality of the films varies considerably, but all were, according to Posner, "digitally mastered from newly preserved and restored 35mm and 16mm prints," and a note on the DVD box promises, "Films are presented in their original 1.33:1 aspect ratio." Presumably that is how they can be seen when properly projected, but on my TV screen the full frame is not visible. This is especially annoying when viewing films with the most carefully composed images and films with abstract, geometrical patterns. Nevertheless, given the challenges involved in collecting and making presentable prints for Unseen Cinema, Posner and DVD producer David Shepard have done a commendable job. Sound quality also varies. As one would expect, the early sound films tend to have rather thin, tinny soundtracks. The quality of the sound [End Page 117] added to the silent films is good; the music itself ranges from imaginative to cliché and banal. In a few instances, a new recording of the original music was made for the print in the collection. A few films are "intentionally silent." A special case is Dudley Murphy and Fernand Léger's Ballet mécanique (1924). With the aid of computers, player pianos, live performances, synthesizers, and samples of sound effects, Paul D. Lehrman, a composer and expert in music technology at Tufts University, created a shortened version of Georges Antheil's Ballet mécanique for the soundtrack of a good quality, partially tinted print of the film.4 The result is the collection's pièce de résistance as far as the use of sound is concerned. The films on each disk appear in roughly chronological order and are nominally illustrative of a particular subject, theme, or set of formal devices. I say "nominally" because the relevance of some films to the organizing principle of the disk in which they appear is tenuous at best. While this dilutes the conceptual and aesthetic impact of the disk, it allows Posner to include a number of interesting films that might otherwise...

A Line of Sight: American Avant-Garde Film since 1965

A Line of Sight: American Avant-Garde Film since 1965

A Line of Sight: American Avant-Garde Film since 1965, and: The Most Typical Avant-Garde: History and Geography of Minor Cinemas in Los Angeles (review)

Reviewed by: A Line of Sight: American Avant-Garde Film since 1965, and: The Most Typical Avant-Garde: History and Geography of Minor Cinemas in Los Angeles Jan-Christopher Horak (bio) A Line of Sight: American Avant-Garde Film since 1965 by Paul ArthurUniversity of Minnesota Press, 2005 The Most Typical Avant-Garde: History and Geography of Minor Cinemas in Los Angeles by David E. JamesUniversity of California Press, 2005 Until recently, the history of American avant-garde cinema was written by critics who were often filmmakers themselves or polemicists for the avant-garde, so that their historical narratives were imbricated with other agendas. Descriptions and analyses of avant-garde films went hand in hand with valorizing specific filmmakers. Given the focus on individual works, most histories eschewed discussions of cultural contexts or theoretical frameworks in favor of enlightened connoisseurship. Unanswered were questions of how various avant-garde movements were constituted through institutional networks, historical ruptures, and continuities. As I noted in Lovers of Cinema, "Avant-garde film movements can only be historically circumscribed if they are constituted in terms of production, distribution, exhibition, and reception. Their role in the history of cinema should not only be gauged according to their individual aesthetic achievements, but also in terms of the myriad contexts of their institutional frameworks and reception."1 The two new books reviewed here are very different, but both are informed by similar concerns for establishing historical contexts. While Arthur's monograph is a collection of essays focusing on a more narrowly defined modernist film avant-garde in America, organized according to a rough chronology from the 1960s to the present, James's history of alternative film production [End Page 142] in Los Angeles over the past ninety years is a monumental work of historical synthesis that seeks to place Los Angeles beside San Francisco and New York as a center of avant-garde practice. Originally published between 1982 and 2003 and reworked for the present volume, Paul Arthur's essays chronicle the American avant-garde's checkered trajectory through the past forty years. As both an acute observer and critic and a participant in the avant-garde—he has been closely associated with Millennium Film Journal—Arthur writes both from within the movement and from outside it, being also an academic film historian. His book's title, then, refers both to the internal vision of the filmmakers as constituted in aesthetic artifacts and to the external vision of the audience and its construction. While each chapter can stand alone, Arthur notes continuities in his introduction: "the legacy of sixties counterculture; uses and theoretical implications of found footage; the allegorizing of technology; intersections of personal and social histories; the philosophical schism between poetic, expressive tropes and structural film's anti-subjective, rationalist basis" (xiii). Arthur's first chapter focuses on Jonas Mekas while discussing the rise of what was then called new American cinema in the context of the burgeoning 1960s counterculture, seeing in the culture at large the very same elements of incompleteness, fragmentation, and presentness in Mekas's diary films and exhibition/distribution projects. Quoting Mekas's dictum, "The policy of NO POLICY is also a policy," Arthur sees the sense of improvisation, of going with the flow, of staying independent by never tying yourself down as key to both the success and weakness of the times. An intense distrust of language went hand in glove with the lack of definitions, because language could be used by the ruling class to control. In chapters 2 and 3, then, the urge to capture the moment is explicated in terms of film portraiture and cityscapes, respectively. While the work of Andy Warhol (Eat, Henry Geldzahler) serves as an example of portraiture, Arthur next discusses numerous city symphonies from Shirley Clarke's Bridges-Go-Round to Hollis Frampton's Zorns Lemma to Ernie Gehr's Signal—Germany on the Air. Common to all these projects is a radical subjectivity that insisted on the primacy of aesthetics and formal experimentation over politics. In the 1970s, then, the American avant-garde turned away from its "desire to exist outside history" by embracing what Foucault has called "the archive." Influenced as much by...

Unseen Cinema: Early American Avant-Garde Film, 1893–1941

Book Review| June 01 2005 Unseen Cinema: Early American Avant-Garde Film, 1893–1941 Bruce Posner, ed. Unseen Cinema: Early American Avant-Garde Film, 1893–1941. New York: Anthology Film Archives, 2001. $11.95. Greg Taylor Greg Taylor Greg Taylor is Associate Professor of Film in the Conservatory of Theatre Arts and Film at Purchase College, SUNY, and the author of Artists in the Audience: Cults, Camp, and American Film Criticism. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Film Quarterly (2005) 58 (4): 73–74. https://doi.org/10.1525/fq.2005.58.4.73 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Greg Taylor; Unseen Cinema: Early American Avant-Garde Film, 1893–1941. Film Quarterly 1 June 2005; 58 (4): 73–74. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/fq.2005.58.4.73 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentFilm Quarterly Search This content is only available via PDF. © 2005 by The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved.2005 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Artists as Filmmakers in Los Angeles

Almost all the classic European avant-garde filmmakers of the 1920s were visual artists who experimented with the new medium. Viking Eggeling, Hans Richter, and Walter Ruttmann in Germany, and Man Ray, Fernand Leger, Francis Picabia, Marcel Duchamp, and Salvador Dali in France all created alternatives to the industrial entertainment cinema by elaborating in film the principles of the various schools of modernist painting with which they were associated. The landmark American experimental film of the same period, Manhatta (1921), was similarly made by two visual artists in New York, Charles Sheeler, a painter, and Paul Strand, a photographer. In Los Angeles, however, avant-garde films were mostly made by artists who were themselves regularly employed in the industrial studios. Slavko Vorkapich, for example, one of the makers of a seminal American avant-garde film, The Life and Death of 9413—A Hollywood Extra (1928), began his career as a painter, and Boris Deutsch, the maker of the experimental short Lullaby (1929) and painter of a notable series of murals in the Post Office annex, made his living as a studio set designer. In these films, modernist aesthetic influences were mediated by thematic references to Hollywood as well as some incorporation of Hollywood studio production values and formal priorities, especially those reflecting the requirements of sutured narrative. But the effects of the development of sound technology on the one hand and the Depression on the other ended this para-industrial artists’ cinema in the U.S., and after the 1920s, Los Angeles artists only occasionally worked in film. (One notable exception, however, was the painter Sara Kathryn Arledge, who made several films and also wrote a history of experimental cinema.)1

Cinema 16: Documents toward a History of the Film Society (review)

For decades the only books available on the history of American avant-garde cinema were either hagiographies or art history-inflected narratives of great men and their movements. Valorizing the film artist, such histories implied little need for the kind of institutional [End Page 185] histories that film studies was beginning to produce in the 1980s and after in relation to Hollywood. However, as I noted in my Lovers of Cinema: The First American Film Avant-Garde(Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995), avant-garde film movements can only be historically circumscribed if they are constituted in terms of production, distribution, exhibition, and reception. Thankfully, the work of creating such institutional histories has now begun, as evidenced in David James's work on the West Coast avant-garde and Scott MacDonald's smashing book on Cinema 16, the New York film society founded by Amos and Marcia Vogel in the late 1940s, which became the primary sounding board for much American avant-garde film production in the 1950s.

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

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

Round Table: Obsolescence and American Avant-Garde Film

Round Table: Obsolescence and American Avant-Garde Film

The Garden in the Machine: Two American Avant-Garde Films and the Nineteenth-Century Visual Arts

One of the primary reasons I became interested in film studies was the seeming open-endedness of the field. Cinema wasnew, I reasoned, and would continue to be new, unlike other academic fields, and particularly those devoted to historical periods: as a scholar and a teacher, I would face the future, endlessly enthralled and energized by the transformation of the potential into the actual. That my development as a film scholar/teacher increasingly involved me in avant-garde film seemed quite natural — a logical extension of the attraction of film studies in general: Avant-garde film was the newest of the new, the sharpest edge of the present as it sliced into the promise of the future. Scholars in some fields may empathize with the attitude I describe, but scholars in all fields will smile at its self-defeating implications: of course, I can see now how typically American my assumptions were — as if one could maintain the excitement of youth merely by refusing to acknowledge the past! Obviously, film studies, like any other discipline, is only a field once its history takes, or is given, a recognizable shape.

Su Friedrich: Reappropriations

It's not unusual these days for those who have followed the history of North American avantgarde film to complain that the great days of Movement are over, that important avant-garde film-makers are no longer coming onto the cinema scene. While this attitude is definitely not one I share, I notice that even those who announce such views make certain exceptions. Perhaps the most frequent of these is Su Friedrich.' Su Friedrich has earned the respect of those who have lost patience for avant-garde cinema, despite the fact that she's made relatively few films: Hot Water, 1978; Scar Tissue, 1979; Cool Hands Warm Heart, 1979; I Suggest Mine, 1980; Gently Down the Stream, 1981; But No One, 1982; The Ties That Bind, 1984; and Damned If You Don't, 1987. Her acceptance may seem strange until one sees Gently Down the Stream, The Ties That Bind, and Damned If You Don't. These three films reveal combination of formal inventiveness and moral courage which has characterized most of the avant-garde film-makers who have been considered major figures.2 Gently Down the Stream combines extensive hand-scratched texts and photographed imagery. In program note for the film, Friedrich explains that the texts are a succession of fourteen dreams taken from eight years of my journals. They were shuffled out of their original chronological order for the purpose of coherence and because often we know/dream some-