American Avant-Garde Research Articles

El periplo internacional de Max Jiménez (1900-1947): mestizaje, sincretismo e itinerancia en la encrucijada genesíaca del arte de vanguardia costarricense

The article offers an unprecedented assessment of the international trajectory of Max Jiménez Huete (1900-1947), a seminal figure in Costa Rican and Central American avant-garde art in the 20th century. Despite being marginalized from the canonical narrative of modern art in Latin America, the aim is to elucidate a critical chronology of his travels, allowing for a systematic study of his work and establishing a rigorous documentary basis that links his aesthetic project with European, North American, and Latin American avant-gardes. Thus, it focuses on three key moments of his artistic progression: a) his training in Paris (1922-1925); b) his contact with Spanish culture (1929-1931/1933); c) his artistic maturity in Cuba (1935-1945).

The Life and Art of Mary Parks Washington (Fall 2018)

This essay presents a critical biography of African American visual artist Mary Parks Washington, with an emphasis on her creative development from 1942 to 1979. Washington's extant art is discussed in the context of her educational background, social network, and political affiliations, as well as the history of activist curation in the wake of the Black Arts and Black Power movements. As an undergraduate at Spelman College in the 1940s, Washington was mentored by muralist Hale Woodruff, who encouraged her to continue her studies at the Art Students League of New York, Black Mountain College, and the Universidad Nacional de México. These experiences introduced Washington to key figures of the international and American avant-gardes, including Josef Albers, Diego Rivera, and Jacob Lawrence. In 1958, Washington settled down with her family in the Bay Area, where she met poet Sarah Webster Fabio, a leading figure in the Black Arts Movement on the West Coast. Washington and Fabio's collaborative friendship over two decades culminated in 1979's Offshoots of Roots Unknown, a series of “poem-paintings” that elegize Washington's family in early twentieth century Atlanta and, formally, deal with the technical (and ethical) problem of remembering and representing history. Drawing extensively on archival materials from the Auburn Avenue Research Library on African American Culture and History, this essay recognizes Washington's contribution to post-WWII African American art and documents her unique artistic trajectory, traversing aesthetic, social, and political formations from pre-Civil Rights Atlanta to the post-Black Arts Movement Bay Area.

The Flying Spirit of Movement within These Solid Objects: Marie Menken’s Home Movies

Marie Menken (1909-1970) was one of the most influential and beloved filmmakers of the American avant-garde, a liberatory inspiration for several subsequent generations of artists. Her films were characterized by wildly kinetic handheld camerawork, which have largely been understood through the lens of those she inspired. This essay analyzes Menken’s films in terms more specific to her, focusing on her broadly inclusive, often structuring celebration of motion in all its forms.

John T. Lowney (1957–2022)

This past September admired friend and respected scholar, John T. Lowney, passed away at the age of 65. John was professor of English at St John’s University in Queens, New York.John’s work explored the cultural politics of how modernism has been constructed in the literary history of the United States. His first book, The American Avant-Garde Tradition: William Carlos Williams, Postmodern Poetry, and the Politics of Cultural Memory (Bucknell UP, 1997), focused on Williams as an avant-garde writer in the early modernist period during and after World War 1 and elaborated the complex literary and cultural politics of Williams’s reception as a poet through the late 1950s and 1960s. His scholarship on twentieth-century American poetry and literary culture continued in History, Memory, and the Literary Left: Modern American Poetry, 1935–1968 (U of Iowa P, 2006).Over the years, his writing on Williams included other essays and reviews—including, most recently, “Williams: The New Poetries and Legacy” in The Cambridge Companion to William Carlos Williams (Cambridge UP, 2016) and “Reflections on Bryce Conrad’s Historiography” in the William Carlos Williams Review (2018). In addition, John’s scholarship in African American literary and cultural studies, and jazz literature, includes Jazz Internationalism: Literary Afro-Modernism and the Cultural Politics of Black Music (U of Illinois P, 2017) as well as essays in American Literature, The Langston Hughes Review, Melus, and The African American Review. His intellectual work was recognized with grants from the Donald C. Gallup Fellowship in American Literature at Yale’s Beinecke Library and a National Endowment for the Humanities Study Grant.During our PhD studies, writing about Williams, we both read John’s work. We also remember John as approachable and engaging, quietly spoken and sharply intelligent, with a sense of humor amid the often overly serious atmosphere of academic conference. Moreover, he was a generous and sensitive reviewer, including a review of Ian’s first book that came out of the PhD studies his own work had helped along. We celebrate his contributions as we mourn the loss of a colleague and friend. Though we are confident that John’s voice will continue to inspire continuing explorations of Williams’s ongoing presence in the tradition of American poetry and poetics.

The Wavelength Papers

Abstract What remains of the North American avant-garde of the 1960s and ‘70s? Certainly many more films than filmmakers, but a paper trail as well. Housed in museums, university libraries, film archives, and personal collections across the United States and Canada, a decentralized and ever-expanding set of documents and ephemera is shaping and informing numerous research-based projects in curation, academic scholarship, and film restoration. And yet, in contrast to this contemporary trend, the collected papers of Michael Snow at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto have yet to be explored in depth. A notable exception is Elizabeth Legge's monograph on Snow's Wavelength (1967), which cites some of the notes he kept during the film's conceptualization and production.2 Because the analysis of those notes was not one of Legge's primary objectives, however, her book reproduces only three of the pages in Snow's Wavelength file. The occasion of Snow's recent passing will doubtless be met by various forms of retrospection, and this small contribution to that extended moment of reflection makes available in print a greater number of the Wavelength files than have previously been published. They represent a rare instance of a canonical avant-garde film's being accompanied by a significant corpus of scribblings, illustrations, and diagrams. This selection, comprising twenty-four pages taken from the filmmaker's unbound notes, introduces some of the themes and questions that Snow was putting to paper during the project's year of gestation. Below, I offer a few remarks on those pages. They are admittedly somewhat arbitrary, but they are intended to bring to light some of the archive's lesser-known revelations.

Marxism for Single Mothers: Anne Boyer’s Garments Against Women

In this reading of Anne Boyer’s Garments Against Women I argue that the poet’s 2015 collection of prose poetry positions literary and intellectual labor as both historically and currently oppressive to women through its figurative engagement with early capitalist textile production. I further demonstrate that despite Boyer’s overt engagement with a narrative of modern labor rooted in eighteenth-century industrialization, her writing is indebted to the work of a contemporary American Avant-garde. I show that the poets Alice Notley and Bernadette Mayer, whose works have culled material from spheres of life traditionally understood as both feminine and anti-poetic, have served as precursors for Boyer’s overtly Marxist and feminist works.

John Dewey, Eastern Philosophy, and the American Avant-Garde: Art and Education in Becoming

Abstract This article begins with a brief comparative analysis of John Dewey’s pragmatic naturalism and several prominent themes from Zen and Confucianism often associated with Dewey. These conceptual themes are then used to examine the combined influence of Dewey and Eastern philosophy on two leading 20th Century American avant-garde artists, John Cage and Allan Kaprow. It is then argued that the work of these artists suggests avenues for cultural enrichment and personal growth and renewal through the arts that reject the dualistic and reductionist premises of Western liberal individualism and its excesses; the disembodied and detached subject of Descartes; the invariant “true” or essential self of Plato; de-situated and compartmentalized views of human experience; and the supposition that the arts are superfluous adornments to the more practical affairs of daily living, all of which tend to disrupt democratic forms of life but remain commonplace in prevailing sociocultural norms and institutional practices (including formal schooling) in the U.S.

John Milton Cage. A look at the most famous composer of the American avant-garde of the twentieth century.

The subject of the research in the article is the work of the American composer John Milton Cage (1912-1992), who is considered one of the most famous and influential avant-garde musicians of the twentieth century. The composer's ideas about sound, the "open form of music", "random operations", "extended" musical instruments and many others were developed in the complex technical, discursive, institutional, cultural and political conditions of life in the United States, constantly changing in the course of his long and productive career. The article analyzes the "artistic and theoretical" legacy of composer John Cage in a philosophical and aesthetic way and shows how his work problematized artistic inventions in music, blurring the boundaries between artistic expressive forms, and his legacy became not only interdisciplinary, but also transdisciplinary, as a result of which the composer's musical experiments were reflected in the work of such American artists like Bill Childs, Fritz Reiner, David Tudor, Christian Wolf, Morton Feldman, Earl Brown, La Monte Young, Pauline Oliveros, Cornelius Cardew, etc. The scientific novelty of the article is that the author attempts to comprehend the creative path of the composer as one of the radical innovators in music, whose musical innovations during the 50s, 60s of the twentieth century led to paradigmatic changes in all areas of American art. Cage fundamentally rebuilt the ideas of what music was and what music could be, eventually becoming one of the most influential avant-garde composers of his time, largely predetermined the trends of the movement of American musical culture of the twentieth century. Cage's experimental innovation, the composer's ability to capture the spirit of the times and the anticipation of many creative ideas related to the nature of sound, made his works an integral part of world culture, an important milestone in the modern development of music

Music and mathematics in Tom Johnson’s work: the composer’s view

ABSTRACT Tom Johnson is an interesting case of interdisciplinarity in that he makes music and mathematics coincide in a very obvious and literal way. He was led to this approach in the context of the American avant-garde of the 1970s, in which many artists tried to set artistic creation in the field of the impersonal. In using mathematics, Tom Johnson is in search for something that might allow the music to compose itself automatically. He establishes sequences of numbers and translates them literally into melodies, harmonies or rhythms. In doing so, he manages to make the mathematical background clearly appear. He seems to think of his music as a way of reflecting mathematics in the form of audible phenomena, and ultimately, he attaches some kind of mystical dimension to this experience. Mathematical truths, as he calls them, are unquestionable. Their laws do not depend on human will, they are deeply inscribed in nature, and a composition strictly based on them is necessarily linked to the absolute.

Discursiveness and History in the Central American Avant-Gardes


 
 
 An approach is offered for the study of discursive manifestations of the avant-garde historical movements in Central American literature to delimit their aesthetic, ideological and thematic features in comparison with the aesthetic framework of the Spanish American avant-garde. Works by four writers are analyzed: Rafael Arévalo Martínez and Luis Cardoza y Aragón, in Guatemala; José Coronel Urtecho and Pablo Antonio Cuadra, in Nicaragua. The analysis of the texts attempts to fill a void that Central American literary criticism has not addressed for several decades, perhaps due to the lack of institutionalization that these artistic manifestations had in Central American countries.
 
 

The Presencing Tendency: French and American Avant-Garde Strategiesunder the Formal Subsumption of Art

Whether what we call the avant-garde in literature ended sometime in the last century or, conversely, persists to this day is an open question. But rather than coming down on one side or another of the issue, this essay concerns itself with what the avant-garde looks like when, in Bourdieusian terms, it feels its very position to be at stake in the field’s struggle for domination, both internally and externally, with the field of power. Either by historical coincidence or, more intriguingly, by something as nefarious as influence, both the French and the American avant-gardes of the 1950s and 60s witnessed the development of a similar aesthetic tendency in response to encroachments upon the restricted production of their respective literary fields by external forces. This tendency, which I call a “poetics of presence,” is a gambit for textual immediacy—what Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht terms “presence effects,” as opposed to “meaning effects.” Through readings of theoretical works by Alain Robbe-Grillet, on the one hand, and poems by Frank O’Hara and John Ashbery, on the other, I demonstrate the character of the poetics of presence in the French and American contexts, concluding ultimately that in both cases such strategies function to preserve a formal subsumption of artistic labor under conditions of restricted production, as against the threading incursions of the real subsumption of that labor to which external forces—capital, politics—would subject it.

Deafening Modernism: Embodied Language and Visual Poetics in American LiteratureBlasphemous Modernism: The 20th-Century Word Made FleshTransatlantic Aliens: Modernism, Exile, and Culture in Midcentury America

Deafening Modernism: Embodied Language and Visual Poetics in American LiteratureBlasphemous Modernism: The 20th-Century Word Made FleshTransatlantic Aliens: Modernism, Exile, and Culture in Midcentury America

On proportional design and diagonal planning in R.M. Schindler’s Beach house of 1936/38 for Anna Olga Zacsek

ABSTRACTRudolph M. Schindler’s revolutionary theories and designs, which were clearly ahead of his time, have gradually been recognized for their ingenuity. His work would equip him to represent the American modern avant-garde. Many architects find it difficult to leave behind working conventions. Perhaps, only a few in the profession have challenged conventional thinking and working traditions, including Schindler. Among Schindler’s oeuvre, the beach house built for Anna Olga Zacsek is unique in terms of its systematic interplay of the diagonal axis and his unit grid design. Unfortunately, the building was demolished before becoming extensively known in the architectural community. Many scholars and commentators have briefly commented on the house, yet there has been no in-depth study. Thus, the surviving archival drawings were read and reconstructing, and a physical scale model was fabricated. These were used to uncover the house’s unique spatial characteristics and to expose the underlying logic of it spatial composition.

Consumption from the Avant-Garde to the Silver Screen

In Oswald de Andrade’s ‘Manifesto Antropófago’ of 1928, he explicitly calls for Brazilian and Latin American artists to resist the vestiges of colonial cultural politics by appropriating the cannibal trope and unabashedly plundering and consuming the European cultural tradition to radically rewrite cultural discourse. While Andrade’s Manifesto has been used as a critical lens to examine the Latin American avant-gardes, as well as other modes of post-colonial cultural production, it has not been as widely used as a theoretical apparatus for examining the question of commodity production and consumption. In this paper, I revisit the Manifesto by focusing on its critical dialogue with Marx’s concept of the fetish of the commodity. Linking this fetish with Apparadurai’s recent thinking on the fetishism of the consumer, I trace how cannibalism can be reworked as a mode of ‘profanation,’ to use Agamben’s terms, of the power apparatuses of consumption itself. Then I test the concept of the profanation of consumption with two film case studies - Nelson Perreira dos Santos’ Como era gostoso o meu francês (dos Santos,1971) and Ruggero Deodato’s Cannibal Holocausto (Deodato, 1980). My readings situate these films in their cultural and political contexts and read them as texts which profane the apparatuses of the construction of historical and spectacular images for global consumption.

Cartoon Vision: UPA Animation and Postwar Aesthetics by Dan Bashara

Reviewed by: Cartoon Vision: UPA Animation and Postwar Aesthetics by Dan Bashara Ryan Pierson (bio) Cartoon Vision: UPA Animation and Postwar Aesthetics by Dan Bashara University of California Press. 2019. 296 pages. $85.00 hardcover; $34.95 paper; also available in e-book. In a 1923 essay, critic Élie Faure argued that cinema's aesthetic and political potential lay in its status as a plastic art. Faure claimed that film did not arouse our deepest feelings through characters or plot; rather, he wrote, we are most moved by the patterns of tonality and volume that shift over time before our eyes. Faure called this quality of film "cineplastics": the expression of movement or change itself as a pictorial value.1 By fixing visual movements into rhythmic shapes, cinema could offer its audience an impersonal collective spectacle. According to Faure, collective spectacles like Greek tragedy, religious ritual, and architecture—and now the cinema—have the power to help a population define itself, "developing in the crowd the sense of confidence, harmony, [and] cohesion."2 For modernist critic Annette Michelson, Faure's essay marks an apotheosis of what she calls the "radical aspiration": a dream that the movies could bring together the possibilities of formal experimentation and social utopianism.3 According to Michelson, this radical aspiration was soon quelled with the consolidation of the film industry and the advent of sync sound. Revolutionary programs for film did crop up again after World War II, but these had to be carried out in fierce defiance of industry and popular taste.4 Michelson's story of cinematic modernism will be familiar to [End Page 173] film scholars. It upholds a now-standard modernist canon as running from the 1920s European avant-garde and the Soviet montage movement through the French New Wave (particularly Jean-Luc Godard) and the American avant-garde. But what if cineplastics—not Faure's to-the-letter definition of modeling in time but the underlying cinematic dream of using pictorial values to organize a population—didn't really go away? What if it changed its form instead? What if the radical aspiration became cartoony? This is the question driving Dan Bashara's book Cartoon Vision: UPA Animation and Postwar Aesthetics. To be sure, linking animation to modernism is hardly a new gesture. In fact, it is probably the characteristic gesture of animation scholarship within film studies.5 Bashara's innovation here is to connect the radical aspiration to a particular American cartoon studio, United Productions of America (UPA), under the aegis of a particular kind of modernism, the New Bauhaus school of postwar design, spearheaded by European émigrés György Kepes and László Moholy-Nagy. UPA has a distinctive visual style. Its major traits are pretty well agreed upon by animation scholarship: simplified graphic forms, bold colors, an aggressive use of the two-dimensionality of the screen, and human characters (rather than animals). In other words, UPA cartoons liberally mix together elements of abstraction and representation. This mixture is easy to read as a kind of light formalism or kitsch. Bashara insists, though, that UPA's style is not reducible to a compromise between high modernist technique and mainstream sensibility. Rather, the principles that UPA took from the world of Kepes and Moholy-Nagy constitute their own specific modernist program, with its own aesthetic and political goals. The chief goal of the Kepes and Moholy-Nagy program was to train citizens in a new way of seeing, one that was more in keeping with the modern world.6 The task of the artist was to streamline a viewer's sense of vision by offering images that reduced forms to their essential qualities and reduced spaces to simple structures. UPA, Bashara argues, was as much an active participant in this modernist project as Charles and Ray Eames, Paul Rand, and other towering figures of postwar American design. Scholars have long noted that UPA stylized its cartoons in a design-like way, but no one before Bashara has clarified UPA's relationship to postwar design with such depth or specificity. Crucial here is that Bashara takes figures in design culture, instead of the work of other animation studios, as his...

James Sibley Watson’s The Fall of The House of Usher: Surrealism—Improvisation—Complementary Serendipities

JAMES SIBLEY WATSON’S THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF USHER: SURREALISM—IMPROVISATION— COMPLEMENTARY SERENDIPITIES ROBERT SHOLL INTRODUCTION There is a way of going to the movies as others go to church and I think that, from a certain angle, completely independent of what is given, it is there that the only absolutely modern mystery is celebrated.1 AMES SIBLEY WATSON’S AND MELVILLE WEBBER’S The Fall of the House of Usher is an extraordinary flm. Edgar Allan Poe’s novella (frst published in 1839) is compressed into a little over twelve minutes of avant-garde cinema.2 According to the flm historian Jan-Christopher Horak, Sibley Watson’s flm was “the most widely seen American avantgarde flm of the era.” It was “hailed by the Chairman of the National Board of Review as the most outstanding contribution to the motion picture as an art form since The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920),” and “the flm was screened both theatrically and non-theatrically hundreds of times all over the United States.”3 The videos referenced in this article may be found on the Perspectives of New Music YouTube channel: www.youtube.com/c/PerspectivesofNewMusic. J 24 Perspectives of New Music The musicologist Charles E. Brewer has recently provided much insight into the lm. Sibley Watson gave an incomplete synopsis of his version of the story in 1929: In a doomed house live the last two children of a once powerful family. The sister falls victim of a strange malady which resembles death. Her brother, unbalanced by hereditary madness, nails her up alive in a cof n. A traveller comes to the house. He tries to sooth the troubled conscience of the brother by reading aloud to him. The words of the book become confused with the noises from the burial vault. The buried woman is struggling to burst her cof n. The door of the vault is forced open, feet are heard on the stair. Starved, broken from her struggle, the girl falls upon her brother and in her now nal death . . . [incomplete]4 Brewer notes that for the most part the musical images of the novella are elided, including Roderick Usher’s “wild improvisations of his speaking guitar” that provide temporary distraction for him from his fate.5 These gures are instead replaced in the lm by other prominent visual images of stairs (present in the novella), the hammer, and a glove (not present in the novella).6 In a commentary, Sibley Watson states: “the importance of the piece lies in its mood—in a development of emotional tone almost without action. We decided to make a picture with a mood rather than a story.”7 In his 1929 article, Sibley Watson recalled his desire to use new cinematic techniques to “invoke in its audiences the esthetic impressions and moods which the tale created in its readers.”8 There are therefore no intertitles, unlike the other much longer lm based on Poe’s novella of the same name, La Chute de la Maison d’Usher by Jean Epstein and Luis Buñuel, also released in 1928, a lm that is less re ned in both its narrative and in its cinematography. In Sibley Watson’s and Webber’s lm, the elision of intertitles is an important departure from standard technique, and the lm therefore moves as one piece from beginning to end. Some scholars have addressed interesting cultural and cinematic facets of the lm. Brewer documents the creation of a score by the composer Alec Wilder (1907–80) as an avant-garde musical companion to the lm. The lm historian Lisa Cartwright has focused on the cinematic context and modernism of the lm, especially with regard to German Expressionism. The lm historian Lucy Fischer has connected it with European lmmakers associated with Expressionism, Surrealism, Futurism, and Cubism.9 Fisher, for instance, notes that the sets “with their peculiar angles, their impossible spaces, their bizarrely decorated surfaces, and their discrepancies of scale,” are “transpositions of Expres- James Sibley Watson’s The Fall of the House of Usher 25 sionist plastics to the cinema.”10 Cartwright links Watson’s thinking with a correspondence between Sibley Watson and the poet E...

James Sibley Watson's <em>The Fall of the House of Usher</em>: Surrealism—Improvisation—Complementary Serendipities

JAMES SIBLEY WATSON’S THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF USHER: SURREALISM—IMPROVISATION— COMPLEMENTARY SERENDIPITIES ROBERT SHOLL INTRODUCTION There is a way of going to the movies as others go to church and I think that, from a certain angle, completely independent of what is given, it is there that the only absolutely modern mystery is celebrated.1 AMES SIBLEY WATSON’S AND MELVILLE WEBBER’S The Fall of the House of Usher is an extraordinary flm. Edgar Allan Poe’s novella (frst published in 1839) is compressed into a little over twelve minutes of avant-garde cinema.2 According to the flm historian Jan-Christopher Horak, Sibley Watson’s flm was “the most widely seen American avantgarde flm of the era.” It was “hailed by the Chairman of the National Board of Review as the most outstanding contribution to the motion picture as an art form since The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920),” and “the flm was screened both theatrically and non-theatrically hundreds of times all over the United States.”3 The videos referenced in this article may be found on the Perspectives of New Music YouTube channel: www.youtube.com/c/PerspectivesofNewMusic. J 24 Perspectives of New Music The musicologist Charles E. Brewer has recently provided much insight into the lm. Sibley Watson gave an incomplete synopsis of his version of the story in 1929: In a doomed house live the last two children of a once powerful family. The sister falls victim of a strange malady which resembles death. Her brother, unbalanced by hereditary madness, nails her up alive in a cof n. A traveller comes to the house. He tries to sooth the troubled conscience of the brother by reading aloud to him. The words of the book become confused with the noises from the burial vault. The buried woman is struggling to burst her cof n. The door of the vault is forced open, feet are heard on the stair. Starved, broken from her struggle, the girl falls upon her brother and in her now nal death . . . [incomplete]4 Brewer notes that for the most part the musical images of the novella are elided, including Roderick Usher’s “wild improvisations of his speaking guitar” that provide temporary distraction for him from his fate.5 These gures are instead replaced in the lm by other prominent visual images of stairs (present in the novella), the hammer, and a glove (not present in the novella).6 In a commentary, Sibley Watson states: “the importance of the piece lies in its mood—in a development of emotional tone almost without action. We decided to make a picture with a mood rather than a story.”7 In his 1929 article, Sibley Watson recalled his desire to use new cinematic techniques to “invoke in its audiences the esthetic impressions and moods which the tale created in its readers.”8 There are therefore no intertitles, unlike the other much longer lm based on Poe’s novella of the same name, La Chute de la Maison d’Usher by Jean Epstein and Luis Buñuel, also released in 1928, a lm that is less re ned in both its narrative and in its cinematography. In Sibley Watson’s and Webber’s lm, the elision of intertitles is an important departure from standard technique, and the lm therefore moves as one piece from beginning to end. Some scholars have addressed interesting cultural and cinematic facets of the lm. Brewer documents the creation of a score by the composer Alec Wilder (1907–80) as an avant-garde musical companion to the lm. The lm historian Lisa Cartwright has focused on the cinematic context and modernism of the lm, especially with regard to German Expressionism. The lm historian Lucy Fischer has connected it with European lmmakers associated with Expressionism, Surrealism, Futurism, and Cubism.9 Fisher, for instance, notes that the sets “with their peculiar angles, their impossible spaces, their bizarrely decorated surfaces, and their discrepancies of scale,” are “transpositions of Expres- James Sibley Watson’s The Fall of the House of Usher 25 sionist plastics to the cinema.”10 Cartwright links Watson’s thinking with a correspondence between Sibley Watson and the poet E...

Extensions of Our Body Moving, Dancing: The American Avant-Garde's Theories of Handheld Subjectivity

Extensions of Our Body Moving, Dancing:The American Avant-Garde's Theories of Handheld Subjectivity Adam Charles Hart (bio) Introduction: Rhetorics of Presence Film history is littered with casual assertions about the meaning and merits of handheld cinematography. In its current usage, the technique is perhaps most frequently described as "intimate" or "immediate" or, more vaguely, "realistic," while it sometimes is understood to be conveying a sense of "presence" within the world of the film or to be asserting an urgency or present-tense temporality: you, the viewer, are there in the world of the film, following the events as they unfold. These are all valid and valuable observations, often explicitly borne out by the rhetoric of directors and cinematographers. But there have been specific historical meanings to handheld camerawork developing out of specific cinematic contexts, each evolving different inflections and associations as new filmmakers adapt it within their own styles. This essay chronicles one of the founding discourses of handheld camerawork: that of the post–World War II American avantgarde in which handheld's registrations of the camera operator [End Page 37] within the image makes it a privileged vehicle for conveying—and expanding—subjectivity. Handheld cinematography made sporadic appearances in the 1920s in France, the Soviet Union, and even Hollywood but remained a minority practice, one that was further relegated to the margins of even nonprofessional cinema once feature film-making transitioned to sound. In the 1940s wartime newsreels and documentaries as well as Roberto Rossellini's Rome, Open City (1945) introduced shaky camerawork to global audiences within the rigidly delimited context of the battlefield but with little immediate influence. In the subsequent decade, handheld camerawork made marginal inroads into independent, documentary, and low-budget feature filmmaking around the world until, at the end of the 1950s, documentary filmmakers in Canada, France, and the United States began to develop new technology and new techniques. These new techniques inaugurated an observational style of documentary, following aspects of the films of Robert Flaherty, Italian Neo-Realism, and a variety of docufiction hybrids of the 1950s, that was dependent on the flexibility and unobtrusiveness of handheld filming. From there, those techniques became more visible not only through their gradual adoption by feature filmmakers but also through the dissemination of TV news programs.1 By the mid-1970s, these new techniques largely redefined the norms of documentary form and function away from a more instructional mode toward one characterized more by observation. In the 1940s, however, handheld camerawork off the battle field was not just unprofessional or "amateur." A shaky camera was, within the professional and amateur cinematographic discourse, antiaesthetic, an indicator of limited or nonexistent artistic aspiration. Shakiness of any kind supposedly betrayed a lack of technical proficiency or a lack of care. A shaky camera betrayed limited resources, a poverty of means and effort that moviemaking guides advised amateur filmmakers to cover up. Or, more simply, shakiness indicated that a film was no more than a "home movie,"2 suitable only for living room screenings among close friends and family (and, as the amateur filmmaking guidebooks never tired of relating, its shakiness placed an unwanted burden on its viewers). So, the handheld camera's widespread embrace by the avantgardes, documentarians, and new wave filmmakers of the 1950s and 1960s was one of the most drastic aesthetic shifts in postwar cinema, an emblem of the overturning of Hollywood and the norms of other classical cinemas. This embrace also initiated a major shift in the function of style. Whereas the classical ethic had preached invisibility, handheld insistently gestured toward the presence of [End Page 38] both camera and cameraperson, and that literal notion of presence became the source of its authenticity and its power as a technique.3 Contrary to conventional notions of cinematographic function, filmmakers began using handheld cameras because they wanted to draw viewers' attention to the cinematography. As viewers, we need to identify a shaky camera as a reference to its camera operator in order to understand its full significance, and no tradition relies more on that recognition than that of the postwar American avant-garde. As battlefield footage introduced one handheld discourse to audiences in the 1940s, Maya...

Their Satanic Majesties' Celluloid Regret

Their Satanic Majesties' Celluloid Regret Justin J. Morris (bio) Rock 'N' Film: Cinema's Dance with Popular Music by David E. James. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016. 470 pages. $35.00 hardback, $13.45 ebook. Rock 'N' Film: Cinema's Dance with Popular Music, the long-gestating, virtuosic new work by David E. James, primarily known for his work on the American avant-garde in Allegories of Cinema: American Film in the Sixties (1989) and The Most Typical Avant-Garde (2005), tackles the intersection of cinema and the shambolic, transformative, and appropriative cultural amalgamation that came to be known as rock 'n' roll. It is perhaps surprising that this topic remains unexplored, given the ongoing cross-medial nature of pop and audiovisual media evidenced by the recent ecstatic reception of Beyoncé's Lemonade and the ubiquity of televisual "backstage" industry musicals (Empire, Star, Nashville, Sun Records, The Get Down, Vinyl, etc.). Pop music continues to be dismissed as a doggerel and delinquent cultural form that persists in evading even the widening aegis of media studies. James's examination, closely argued with texts obvious and recondite, reveals a heretofore obscured history of pop's transformative influence on Western film forms ranging from classical Hollywood to independent, avant-garde, and documentary traditions. [End Page 132] Composed of eighteen chapters, James's history of rock 'n' roll's interactions with cinema reads as comprehensive yet surprisingly succinct. The author proceeds along a set of familiar dichotomies: low versus high, spectacle versus narrative, communal folk art versus commerce, black versus white, and pop music versus film. James enriches and augments these commonplace axes by suggesting that cinema's intermedial employment of rock 'n' roll served as much as a cross-promotional tool as it did to preserve the established hierarchies of the culture industry. For example, the use of Bill Haley and His Comet's "Rock Around the Clock" in Blackboard Jungle (Richard Brooks, 1955) was greeted with "frenzied jubilation from below augmenting apoplectic fear from above that linked it to threats of communism . . . and the escalation of juvenile delinquency" (25). Producers strove not only to normalize the music's rebellious potential but also to ensure that it "did not threaten cinema's position at the apex of the culture industry" (30). Columbia Studios, the distributor of the independently produced Blackboard Jungle, profited from the controversy surrounding the film, cashing in on a "800% return" on its shoestring budget (42). Rock 'N' Film restores historical significance to the resultant genre, jukebox musicals, feature films that built on the generic traditions established by the revue film, 1930s and 1940s backstage musicals, and the musician biopic genre formed around jazz bandleaders such as Glenn Miller and Benny Goodman (44). Initiated with the Alan Freed–starring Rock Around the Clock (Fred F. Sears, 1956), jukebox musicals were "low-budget films made by small independent production companies, the cinematic equivalent of the small companies that recorded early rock 'n' roll" (43). These particular films worked to normalize the transgressive possibilities of rock 'n' roll by placing an emphasis not on the biracial social interaction beyond the stage but instead on the industry-associated promoter or disc jockey (such as Freed). James reveals cinema's role in the whitening of the music, carefully noting that while these films proved "radically progressive" in "emphasizing the primacy of black musicians and integrating them with whites in concert," black musicians rarely migrated from spectacle to narrative, narratives that primarily concerned white teenagers and industry insiders (45). Often culminating in a televisual special performance, jukebox musicals contributed to the project of distancing rock 'n' roll from associations of delinquency by reimaging the genre as a positive social force while confining its ascendant economic possibilities within an established cultural hierarchy that placed it below cinema and television in mid-1950s America. [End Page 133] In addition to exploring a number of lesser-known musical film styles and stars, Rock 'N' Film also attends to the filmic transformations made in relation to the three most enduring artists of the period: Elvis, the Beatles, and the Rolling Stones. In the tightly composed fourth chapter, James contrasts the star image of Jayne Mansfield (primarily in the...

The Specter of Races: Latin American Anthropology and Literature Between the Wars by Anke Birkenmaier

Reviewed by: The Specter of Races: Latin American Anthropology and Literature Between the Wars by Anke Birkenmaier Anne Garland Mahler Birkenmaier, Anke. The Specter of Races: Latin American Anthropology and Literature Between the Wars. Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 2016. 224 pp. In The Specter of Races: Latin American Anthropology and Literature Between the Wars, Anke Birkenmaier resituates discussions of race and culture in the 1930s-40s in Latin America within the rise of anthropology in the region. Spanning broad geography and texts published in English, French, Spanish, and Portuguese, each of the four chapters centers on an anthropologist-writer: Fernando Ortiz of Cuba, French Americanist Paul Rivet, Haitian writer Jacques Roumain, and Brazilian Gilberto Freyre. The book considers not only the less frequently studied works of these writers but also the networks and debates within anthropology through which each writer formulated his notions of race and cultural contact. In this way, Birkenmaier introduces readers to a number of lesser-known figures within these heavyweights' broader professional milieus. The four writers that structure the study, as Birkenmaier points out, "were temporary or permanent exiles" in the interwar years, a condition that "instigated new reflections on one's own culture and that of 'others'" (9). They all participated in an exchange among Latin American, US, and French Americanist anthropologists that would forge the "Americanist years," a reference to Paul Rivet's French Société des Américanistes that would profoundly influence the development of the discipline in Latin America. These anthropologists engaged in a hemispheric and comparatist dialogue, employed a varied range of methods, and founded their approach in an anti-racist politics intended to undermine the rise of fascism. As transnational American studies continues to gain ground within our contemporary academic sphere, Birkenmaier's study details a deep history of interdisciplinary methodology and political engagement that undergirds contemporary hemispheric approaches to cultural studies and critical race theory. Through the meticulous tracing of the formation of Latin Americanist applied cultural anthropology in the interwar years––such as in the founding of museums, the creation of journals, critical editions, excavations, conferences, and lecture series––the book's intellectual history of anthropology informs its insightful readings of both well-known and understudied texts. The writers at the center of the book, Birkenmaier argues, practiced the discipline in unique ways, relying on linguistic analysis and the study of colonial chronicles and writing in a style that "straddled the pamphlet and the scientific essay, the novel and the political speech" (144). Their fusion of humanistic and scientific approaches requires an equally interdisciplinary critical lens, which Birkenmaier––who significantly is a literary and cultural studies scholar and not an anthropologist––readily provides. Known [End Page 693] for scholarship on Caribbean literature and Latin American avant-gardes in such studies as Havana Beyond the Ruins: Cultural Mappings After 1989 (2011, co-ed. Esther Whitfield) and Alejo Carpentier y la cultura del surrealismo en América Latina (2006), which was awarded the 2007 Premio Iberoamericano from the Latin American Studies Association, Birkenmaier's recent book exhibits an innovative cultural studies approach to the intellectual history of a social science discipline. In this way, The Specter of Races pushes against an Area Studies model of Latin Americanist scholarship––in which humanities-based literature departments and social science programs are kept separate––returning to a moment of scholarly "synergy among literature, linguistics, the visual arts, anthropology, and history in regard to Latin America" (144). Perhaps surprisingly, Paul Rivet, the intellectual on which the book hinges, is also the least known of the four within Latin Americanism. Rivet's comparatist model of material cultures, or "diffusionism," through which he studied American "culture areas," greatly influenced the development of a Latin Americanist regionalist anthropology (17). Birkenmaier links Rivet's impact in Latin America to the study of Chaco indigenous people in 1930s Tucumán, Argentina by Rivet's student Alfred Métraux. The book also considers Rivet's exile in Mexico and Colombia, where politically-engaged indigenista intellectuals criticized Rivet for his tendency to relegate the study of indigenous cultures to a removed and forgotten past. Whereas Rivet is lesser known, the chapters on widely-studied writers Gilberto Freyre and Fernando Ortiz...