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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
An exploration of what experimental cinema was, is, and might become A Companion to Experimental Cinema is a collection of original essays organized around both theoretical and historical issues of concern to film scholars, programmers, filmmakers, and viewers. Newly-commissioned essays written by specialists in the field, along with dialogues conducted with a diverse range of practitioners, focus on core subjects to present an international array of overlapping and contrasting perspectives. This unique text not only provides detailed accounts of particular films and filmmakers, but also discusses new approaches of understanding, characterizing, and shaping experimental cinema. The Companion offers readers an accessible point of entry to the material while seeking to contribute to scholarly debates. Essays explore a wide range of topics within the realm of experimental film, including the shift from traditional biography to broader contexts, the increased attention afforded to local and transnational circuits of exchange, and the deepening of theoretical considerations regarding cultural identity and cinematic aesthetics. Key themes and concepts are inter-woven throughout the text, offering fresh perspectives on experimental cinema's dialogues with other modes and practices of film and video, its interactions with the non-cinematic arts, its responses to changing technological landscapes, and more. An essential addition to the field, the Companion: * Balances introductory summaries and scholarly dialogue with existing literature * Explores how the study of experimental cinema can benefit from scholarship in other disciplines * Includes numerous analyses of films that are readily available to view via digital media * Discusses both canonical and obscure or neglected works * Examines the effects of the growing diversification of experimental film scholarship A Companion to Experimental Cinema is a valuable resource for scholars of film studies and art history, curators and programmers, critics and bloggers, filmmakers and artists, and anyone interested in exploring experimental or avant-garde cinema.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022
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Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright Page
Contributors
1 Introduction
References
Notes
Part I: Overviews
2 Poetry and “Film Poetics”
What Is a Poetic Model?
Modernism, Cinema, and Poetry
The American Avant‐Garde: Deren and After Deren
Poetry and Cinema: Further Footholds
References
Notes
3 Cinematic Specificity, Intermediality, and the European Avant‐Garde
References
Notes
4 Expanded Cinema
Introduction
The First Wave: Liberation
The Second Wave: Identity Crisis
The Third Wave: Expanded Cinema Re‐vis(it)ed
Live Cinema and Expanded Exhibition
Conclusion
References
Notes
5 Sketches of Spain
Spanish Experimental Cinema: Problems of Definition, Questions of Existence
First Explorations: 1927–1960
Second Interventions: 1960–1983
Third Revisions: 1987–2018
Final Remarks
References
Notes
6 The Underground and the Institution
Incommensurability and Its Possible Translations
Howls, Chiseling, and Empty Screens
Expats and Visitors: Toward an International Landscape
Passeurs and Passerbys
Galleries and Dandies
Transmitting Knowledge and Filmmaking: Vincennes
“A” History of Cinema According to the Museum
Polycentrism and Diaspora—After the End of “a” History
Epilogue—Wishful Thinking
References
Notes
7 Hollywood as Home Movies
References
Notes
8 Nothing Clarifies an Image Like Another Image
Enigmatic Dislocations
Fictional Origins
Ongoing Investigations
Material Deaths
Affective Histories
Incongruous Archives
Future Returns
References
Additional Film References
Notes
9 Disquieting Soundtracks
Another History of Film Sound
The Aesthetics of Experimental Sound
References
Notes
10 Music Visualization and Medium Expansion
A History
Key Categories: Visual Music and Synesthetic Film
Medium Expansion: Materials and Techniques
A Closer Look: Three Contemporary Digital Animations
Concluding Remarks
References
Notes
Part II: Case Studies
11 Collage, Montage and Assemblage
The Dynamic of Montage
From the New York Film‐Makers' Cooperative to “Film as Film”
Dissonance Between Images—Instantaneity in Markopoulos' Films
Zeno's Arrow Paradox and Bergson's Kaleidoscope
The Ideogrammatic Model—The Frame as Hieroglyphic Sign
Markopoulos' Montage Theory—An Explosion of Clusters of Frames
Twice a Man
and the Discontinuous Movement of Thought
Overprinting, Palimpsests and Logograms
Persistent Images and Memory Traces
References
Notes
12 Experiment, Cybernetics, and the Formal Film in Britain
Drama in a Wide Media Environment
Cybernetic Serendipity
Pedagogy, Process, Puzzle
References
Notes
13 Agitation and Involvement
Introduction
Experiencing
Wavelength
Alterities and Disturbances in
Come Out
Conclusion (by way of an Addendum)
References
Notes
14 Rebellion of the Body
Hijikata Tatsumi
Expo '70:
Birth
and the Midori‐kan Pavilion
Conclusion
References
Notes
15 Feminist Filmmaking from the Ground Up
Formalism and Feminism: Yvonne Rainer
Art/Film Spaces and Feminism: Barbara Hammer
Collaboration and Feminism: Peggy Ahwesh
Audience
(Barbara Hammer, 1983)
The Man Who Envied Women
(Yvonne Rainer, 1985)
The Deadman
(Peggy Ahwesh and Keith Sanborn, 1989)
References
Notes
16 Barbara Hammer, Optical Printing, and a Theory of Touch
A Theory of Touch
Optical Touch: Barbara Hammer and the Optical Printer
Conclusion: Hammer in Context
References
Notes
Part III: Exchanges
17 Approaching India
References
Notes
18 On the Visibility of Women's Experimental Cinema
Introduction
A Conversation with Birgit Hein
A Conversation with Ute Aurand
Concluding Reflections
References
Notes
19 “Where Are Those Lines?”
Challenging Forms and Containers: Interviews on Experimental Ethnography with Sky Hopinka, Naeem Mohaiemen and Deborah Stratman
References
20 Platform, Showcase, Gathering, Exchange
2021 Postscript
Festivals Referenced
Notes
Index
End User License Agreement
List of Illustrations
Chapter 2
Figure 2.1
Ballet mécanique
Figure 2.2 Gently Down the Stream
Chapter 5
Figure 5.1 Tactile Vision experiments in José Val del Omar's
Fuego en Castil
...
Figure 5.2 Time and body manipulations in Iván Zulueta's
El mensaje es facia
...
Figure 5.3 The erasure of Thomas Edison's
May Irwin Kiss
(1896) through mult...
Figure 5.4 Dancing ghosts in Dress rehearsal for utopia (Andrés Duque, 2012)...
Chapter 6
Figure 6.1 Jackie Raynal,
Deux fois
(Twice Upon a Time)
(1968).
Chapter 7
Figure 7.1 Michael Wallin,
Decodings
(1988).
Figure 7.2 George Kuchar,
Video Album 5/The Thursday People
(1987).
Figure 7.3 Cheryl Dunye,
The Watermelon Woman
(1996).
Chapter 8
Figure 8.1
Found Film Flashes
(1973) by Coleen Fitzgibbon.
Figure 8.2
Sacris Pulso
(2008) by Ana Vaz.
Figure 8.3
The Flamethrowers
(1989), produced by Owen O'Toole in collaborati...
Figure 8.4
Movie Tote
(2007) by Ephraim Asili.
Chapter 9
Figure 9.1 Isidore Isou,
Traité de bave et d'eternité
(1951)....
Figure 9.2 Jack Smith,
Flaming Creatures
(1963).
Figure 9.3 Bruce Baillie,
Castro Street (1966).
Figure 9.4 Guy Sherwin,
Optical Sound
(2007).
Chapter 10
Figure 10.1 Masanobu Hiraoka,
L'Oeil du Cyclone
(2015).
Figure 10.2 Nikita Diakur,
Ugly
(2017).
Figure 10.3 Max Hattler,
Divisional Articulations
(2017).
Chapter 12
Figure 12.1 William Raban and Chris Welsby,
River Yar
(1971).
Figure 12.2 Malcolm Le Grice,
Threshold
(1973).
Figure 12.3 Jenny Okun,
Rounds
(1977).
Chapter 13
Figure 13.1 Michael Snow,
Wavelength
(1967).
Figure 13.2 Narcisa Hirsch,
Come Out
(c. 1974).
Figure 13.3 Narcisa Hirsch,
Taller/Workshop
(1973–1974).
Chapter 15
Figure 15.1 Barbara Hammer,
Audience
(1983).
Figure 15.2 Yvonne Rainer,
The Man Who Envied Women
(1985).
Figure 15.3 Promotional postcard for Peggy Ahwesh and Keith Sanborn,
The Dea
...
Chapter 16
Figure 16.1 Barbara Hammer.
Figure 16.2 Barbara Hammer with a JK optical printer.
Chapter 19
Figure 19.1 Sky Hopinka,
Dislocation Blues
(2017).
Figure 19.2 Naeem Mohaiemen,
Afsan's Long Day (The Young Man Was, Part 2)
...
Figure 19.3 Deborah Stratman,
The Illinois Parables
(2016).
Guide
Cover Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
Index
WILEY END USER LICENSE AGREEMENT
Contributors
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A Companion to Experimental Cinema
Edited by
Federico Windhausen
This edition first published 2023© 2023 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
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Library of Congress Cataloging‐in‐Publication Data
Names: Windhausen, Federico, 1973‐ editor.Title: A companion to experimental cinema / edited by Federico Windhausen.Description: Hoboken, NJ : Wiley‐Blackwell, 2023. | Includes bibliographical references.Identifiers: LCCN 2022027185 (print) | LCCN 2022027186 (ebook) | ISBN 9781119107903 (cloth) | ISBN 9781119107910 (adobe pdf) | ISBN 9781119107927 (epub)Subjects: LCSH: Experimental films–History and criticism.Classification: LCC PN1995.9.E96 C66 2023 (print) | LCC PN1995.9.E96 (ebook) | DDC 791.4309–dc23/eng/20220809LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022027185LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022027186
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Contributors
Erika Balsom is Reader in Film Studies at King's College London and the author of the book TEN SKIES (2021).
François Bovier is a senior lecturer in the Department of Film History and Aesthetics, and he is a research fellow at the Lausanne University of Art and Design (ECAL). He is the co‐founder of the journal Décadrages, and he is the author of H. D. and the Pool group: from literary avant‐gardes to “visionary” cinema (L’Âge d’Homme, 2009). He has led different research projects founded by the Swiss National Science Foundation and the University of Applied Sciences and Arts Western Switzerland. He is also an independent curator, particularly in the field of moving images.
Enrico Camporesi oversees the research activities of the Centre Pompidou film department. His book Futurs de l’obsolescence (Mimésis, 2018) is about restoring artists’ films.
Josetxo Cerdán Los Arcos is professor of film and media studies in the department of Communication at Universidad Carlos III de Madrid and a member of the research group Tecmerin. Since September 2018, he is the director of Filmoteca Española (the Spanish film archive). Cerdán was the director of the Punto de Vista ‐ Navarra International Documentary Film Festival (2010‐2013) or the development of film programs for various national and international institutions such as the Locarno International Film Festival (2009), Anthology Film Archives (2013), and Lincoln Center (2014).
Jon Davies is a curator, writer, and PhD Candidate in Art History at Stanford University. He has held curatorial positions at The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery, Oakville Galleries, and the Art Gallery of Ontario. His book Trash: A Queer Film Classic about the Paul Morrissey film was published by Arsenal Pulp Press in 2009, and his anthology More Voice‐Over: Colin Campbell Writings was published by Concordia University Press in 2021.
Miguel Fernández Labayen is Associate Professor in the Department of Communication at Carlos III University of Madrid and member of the Tecmerin research group and the University Institute of Spanish Cinema at the same university. He has curated experimental film and video programs for S(8) Mostra de Cinema Periferico, the Seville European Film Festival and the Centre de Cultura Contemporània in Barcelona (cccb) among others. Together with John Sundholm (Stockholm Univesity) he is working on a research project on the circulation of the New American Cinema and the emergence of experimental film cultures in Europe.
Jason Fox is the Founding Editor of World Records. He has taught Media Studies at Princeton University, Vassar College, and CUNY Hunter College.
Lalitha Gopalan is an associate professor in the Department of Radio‐Television‐Film and affiliate faculty in the Department of Asian Studies and South Asia Institute at University of Texas at Austin. Her essays and books include Cinemas Dark and Slow in Digital India (2021), Cinema of Interruptions: Action Genres in Contemporary Indian Cinema (2002) and Bombay (2005); and the edited volume The Cinema of India (2010). Her current book project explores various experimental film and video practices across different locations globally.
Shai Heredia is a filmmaker and curator. In 2003, she founded Experimenta, the international festival for experimental cinema in India. She has curated experimental film programs at film festivals and art venues worldwide, and she is currently a member of the curatorial team of Forum Expanded (Berlinale). Her film I Am Micro (2012) co‐directed with Shumona Goel, has screened widely in Europe, North America, and Asia, and received a National Award from the Government of India. Heredia & Goel’s’s most recent film An Old Dog’s Diary (2015), won the Best Short Film award at the BFI London International Film Festival. As an arts grant maker with the India Foundation for the Arts (2006‐2011), Heredia set up the curatorship and extending arts practice grant programs. She is currently based in Bangalore, India where she teaches at the Srishti Institute of Art, Design and Technology and runs Experimenta India.
Shanay Jhaveri is Associate Curator, International Modern and Contemporary Art, at The Metropolian Museum of Art in New York City. He is a graduate of Brown University and holds a PhD from the Royal College of Art. His recent exhibitions include Companionable Silences (2013) at the Palais de Tokyo, Everything we do is music (2017) at the Drawing Room, and film programs for the Dhaka Art Summit, the Film at Lincoln Center, and Tate Modern. His edited books include Western Artists and India: Creative Inspirations in Art and Design, Outsider Films on India: 1950–1990, and America: Films from Elsewhere. At the Metropolian Museum, Jhaveri organized the 2018 Roof Commission, Huma Bhabha: We Come in Peace, and curated Phenomenal Nature: Mrinalini Mukherjee at The Met Breuer in 2019.
Sarah Keller is Professor of Art and Cinema Studies at the University of Massachusetts Boston. She is the founder and organizer of the Boston Cinema/Media Seminar, a coalition of Boston area institutions that hosts presentations throughout the academic year. Her research focuses on experimental form, film experience, and feminist issues in cinema. She is the author of Maya Deren: Incomplete Control (Columbia UP, 2014), Anxious Cinephilia: Pleasure and Peril at the Movies (Columbia UP, 2020), and Barbara Hammer: Pushing Out of the Frame (Wayne State UP, 2021).
Chris Kennedy is an independent filmmaker, film programmer and writer based in Toronto. He is the Executive Director of the Liaison of Independent Filmmakers of Toronto. He programmed for the Images Festival from 2003‐06, Pleasure Dome from 2000‐06 and for TIFF Cinematheque’s The Free Screen/Wavelengths from 2012‐2019. He co‐founded and co‐programmed Early Monthly Segments from 2009 to 2018. His short experimental films have screened at over two hundred film festivals worldwide and have been featured in solo shows at the Canadian Film Institute, Los Angeles Film Forum, Nam June Paik Art Center, the La Plata Semana del Film Experimental and the Pacific Film Archive. His film Watching the Detectives won the Ken Burns Award for the Best of the Festival at the Ann Arbor Film Festival in 2018. He has presented the work of others in Belgium, Egypt, Germany, the US, and Canada. He holds an MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute.
Erica Levin is the author of The Channeled Image: Art and Media Politics After Television (University of Chicago Press, 2022). Her writing has appeared in Camera Obscura, Media‐N, World Picture, Millennium Film Journal, Discourse, and the collections Carolee Schneemann: Unforgivable; The Routledge Companion to Cinema & Gender; Hybrid Practices: Art in Collaboration with Science and Technology in the Long 1960s; and Artists Respond: American Art and the Vietnam War, 1965‐1975. She is an Assistant Professor of Art History and Film Studies at Ohio State University.
Michele Pierson is Senior Lecturer in Film Studies at King’s College London. She is the author of a book on special effects and co‐editor of The Cinema of Ken Jacobs(2011). Her essays on experimental film appear in publications such as Discourse: Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture, Film History, Screen, The Moving Image, and Millennium Film Journal. She is working on a longer research project titled, The Accessibility of the Avant‐Garde: Views from Experimental Cinema.
John Powers is Assistant Professor in Film & Media Studies at Washington University in St. Louis. His research explores small‐gauge media technologies within the context of the history and theory of experimental moving image media. His writing has appeared in Cinema Journal, Screen, October, and Discourse, among other publications. His first monograph is forthcoming from Oxford University Press.
Lucy Reynolds has lectured and published extensively. Her research focuses on questions of the moving image, feminism, political space, and collective practice. She edited the anthology Women Artists, Feminism and the Moving Image, co‐edited Artists’ Moving Image in Britain since 1989 and co‐edits the Moving Image Review and Art Journal (MIRAJ). She co‐ordinates the PhD programme for the Centre for Research in Education, Art and Media (CREAM) at the University of Westminster, and runs the MRES in Creative Practice. She is a Paul Mellon Centre for British Art Mid‐Career Fellow 2022. As an artist, her ongoing sound work A Feminist Chorus has been heard at the Glasgow International Festival, the Wysing Arts Centre, The Grand Action cinema, Paris and Grand Union galleries, Birmingham.
Julian Ross is a researcher, curator and writer based in Amsterdam. He is an Assistant Professor at Leiden University Centre for the Arts in Society (LUCAS). He was a programmer at International Film Festival Rotterdam (2015‐22) and a selection committee member at Locarno Film Festival (2019‐20). He has curated film programs, exhibitions, and performances at Tate Modern, Art Institute of Chicago, Kunsthal Rotterdam, Eye Filmmuseum, Tokyo Photographic Art Museum and British Film Institute. In 2021, he was guest programmer at Singapore International Film Festival, film curator at Other Futures, and co‐curator of the film program at Tallinn Photomonth Biennale.
Sylvia Schedelbauer was born in Tokyo and first moved to Berlin in 1993, where she has been based since. She studied at the University of Arts Berlin (with Katharina Sieverding). Her films negotiate the space between broader historical narratives and personal, psychological realms mainly through poetic manipulations of found and archival footage. Her films have been screened at: Berlinale, Toronto International Film Festival, International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, London Film Festival, New York Film Festival. Awards include the VG Bildkunst Award, the German Film Critics’ Award, and the Gus Van Sant Award for Best Experimental Film. Schedelbauer was a 2019/2020 arts fellow at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute.
Juan A. Suárez teaches American Literature and American Studies at the Universidad de Murcia, Spain. He is the author of the books Bike Boys, Drag Queens, and Superstars (Indiana University Press), Pop Modernism: Noise and the Reinvention of the Everyday (University of Illinois Press), and Jim Jarmusch (University of Illinois Press), and co‐editor of several volumes. Recent essays in English have appeared in L’Atalante, American Studies in Scandinavia, Framework, Screen, and JCMS: Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, and in edited collections such as The Sound and Music of Experimental Film, The Oxford Handbook of Queer Cinema, and The Films of Andy Warhol Catalogue Raisonné, 1963‐1965. He is completing a book titled Experimental Film and Queer Materiality.
Paul Taberham is a Senior Lecturer at the Arts University Bournemouth. He is the author of Lessons in Perception: The Avant‐Garde Filmmaker as Practical Psychologist (2018), and the co‐editor of Cognitive Media Theory (2014) and Experimental Animation: From Analogue to Digital (2019). He has also published articles for several edited collections and journals, and is a fellow of the Society for Cognitive Studies of the Moving Image.
Eduardo Thomas is a research‐based visual artist and film curator whose main interest lies in the many ways that our reality can be constructed/explained/experienced through cinema. He is a founding member of SOMA (MX) and collaborated as film curator in establishing exhibition and discursive platforms such as Ambulante Film Festival (MX) and the Berlin Documentary Forum (DE). In 2013, he was awarded a research grant by The Japan Foundation to inquire into the relationship between the Shinto‐Buddhist concept of “ma” and experimental film practices in Japan. Currently, he splits his time as faculty for the School of Film/Video at CalArts, serves as co‐curator of the film series Film at RedCat, and is a PhD candidate at the Department of Visual Arts of UCSD, where he is pursuing a degree in Art History, Theory and Criticism with an Art Practice concentration.
Malcolm Turvey is Sol Gittleman Professor in the Art and Art History Department and director of the Film and Media Studies Program at Tufts University. He is an editor of the journal October. His books include Doubting Vision: Film and the Revelationist Tradition (2008), The Filming of Modern Life: European Avant‐Garde Film of the 1920s (2011), and Play Time: Jacques Tati and Comedic Modernism (2019).
Jonathan Walley is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Cinema, Denison University. His scholarship on avant‐garde film and expanded cinema has appeared in October, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, The Moving Image Review and Art Journal, Millennium Film Journal, and The Velvet Light Trap, and in numerous collections of writings on avant‐garde art and cinema. He is the author of Cinema Expanded: Avant‐Garde Film in the Age of Intermedia (2020).
Federico Windhausen is a film historian and curator based in Buenos Aires. He is writing a book on Argentine experimental cinema that covers a period of filmmaking activity dating from the late sixties to the early eighties.
Koya Yamashita has been the festival director of Image Forum Festival since 2001 and a programmer of Theater Image Forum in Shibuya, Tokyo since 2005. He has also been the guest programmer/curator for many film and media art festivals and film events in and outside of Japan.
1Introduction
Federico Windhausen
In contemporary discussions, as in the past, invoking experimental cinema often involves assuming a rhetorical position with regard to its apparent relevance or obsolescence. For those who see experimental cinema (or its terminological counterpart, avant‐garde cinema) as a thriving area of moving image culture, its enduring value might be located in any number of interrelated elements, including its perceived aesthetic and formal innovations, the kind of subject matter it has tended to value, its alternative approaches to imaging technologies, its links to countercultural communities, and the diversity of ideas that it has contributed to the theorization of the moving image. More skeptical observers view the very notion of experimental cinema as an outdated one, whether due to the conceptual limitations of a term such as “experimental” or as a consequence of cultural transformations, such as the apparent dissolution of the conceptual, artistic, and technical boundaries that once seemed to divide experimental cinema from the art world, or from independent and arthouse cinemas. This volume of new texts asks what experimental cinema was, is, and might become. In doing so, it addresses itself to the communities whose disagreements and exchanges have produced a rich field of discussion, debate, and inquiry, one that has often encompassed and bridged the interests of filmmakers, academics, and programmers, among others. In addition to providing detailed historical accounts of practices and practitioners and extended analyses of specific films and texts, this collection also provides a contemporary view of the ongoing process of understanding, characterizing, contesting, and shaping experimental cinema.
In this introduction, in lieu of any attempt at a comprehensive definition, a global history of experimental cinema, or a general account of its trajectory as the subject of academic studies, I focus on a significant scholarly development, a move toward what can be called “contexts of collectivity”. This expansion in scholarship has helped to shape much contemporary academic writing, even if only as a set of premises and interests that are more often assumed than elaborated explicitly. In what follows, I offer a preliminary sketch of one of many possible prehistories to the considerations of experimental cinema included in this collection, in the hope of illuminating some of the ideas that motivate how this diverse cultural field is studied today.
***
In the United States and parts of Western Europe, the organizational and promotional efforts of filmmakers such as Maya Deren and Jonas Mekas and their international colleagues, along with the work of a wide array of film clubs and societies and the criticism of impassioned advocates such as Parker Tyler, molded postwar perceptions of the nature and objectives of experimental or avant‐garde film until at least the late 1960s. In the 1970s, however, some of the most active debates about this type of cinema—in print and at conferences and festivals, in the U.S. and Great Britain in particular—became increasingly influenced by academic professionals. A comparison of two instances of scholarly position‐taking, one from the beginning of the 1970s and the other from the end, can bring into relief some of the contours of a larger shift, a change in the objectives, values, and assumptions that impacted how experimental cinema was discussed and subjected to cultural analysis.
In 1971, P. Adams Sitney gave a series of lectures about the corpus of American avant‐garde films he had been writing about and presenting internationally for a number of years. His talks amounted to an overview of his developing interpretations of the work of filmmakers such as Maya Deren, Stan Brakhage, and Michael Snow. In his first lecture, Sitney aligned himself explicitly with aspects of the Russian formalist tradition, and he described his project as the pursuit of a “general theory of the avant‐garde film,” a “systematic morphology,” and a “paradigm of forms” (with “forms” referring to genres, categories, or types within avant‐garde film). Quoting the Russian formalist critic Victor Shklovsky, and implicitly disclosing one of his areas of agreement with the literary scholar Harold Bloom, Sitney suggested that his theoretical interests are oriented toward a diachronic view: “The work of art arises from a background of other works and through association with them” (Sitney, 1972, p. 5). Yet a morphological theory can do more than simply explain how a new form develops out of an old form; it can show that when the new aesthetic paradigm opposes itself to a previously‐dominant one, the later constellation still retains and affirms its links to the past.1 Making this idea one of the foundational tenets of his scholarship, Sitney went on to locate the coherence and meaning of the American avant‐garde cinema across a series of textual connections and dialogues, centering his writing around biographically‐oriented interpretations of the films he deemed historically and aesthetically significant. Expanding his purview to include a long timeline of Western modernity, he also argued for the persistence in the present of an established model of artistic subjectivity, rooted in the literature of the Romantics and manifesting itself ineluctably in the ideas and films of a select group of experimental filmmakers.
By the end of the decade, other theoretical agendas in the discipline of film studies had become more vocal and prominent. In a pair of articles published in the journal Screen, two members of the Camera Obscura collective, Constance Penley and Janet Bergstrom, articulated some of those newer concerns when they deplored various of the critical, curatorial, and institutional biases and blind spots in the culture of American avant‐garde cinema, including the lack of dialogue or involvement with the forms of ideological critique that were being advanced in recent theoretical writing and through “radical” filmmaking. Invested in a version of film studies that aligned itself with feminism, psychoanalysis, semiotics, and Marxist theories of culture, the Camera Obscura authors laid out what they found lacking in the typical critical responses to experimental cinema:
American avant‐garde film criticism … which though it seems like a methodological hodge‐podge, is nonetheless unified through the priority given to formal description and the total absence of reference to film as a discursive practice. It is this combination of characteristics which permit one to call it formalist: a film's structure and formal properties are described step by step, outside any consideration of audience, social context, or the operations by which meaning is produced by and for the spectator.
(Bergstrom & Penley, 1978, pp. 124–125)
As the passage indicates, theirs was more than a reaction against the prevalence of close textual analysis: it was a bid for a change of course, in the direction of different values and ideas (including those of other theorists, such as Jacques Lacan and Jean‐Louis Baudry). It was also a call for writers and programmers to pay closer attention to an alternative selection of films and filmmakers. Bergstrom, for example, explained that her version of the political avant‐garde included both arthouse and experimental film, and she named Yvonne Rainer, Chantal Akerman, and Marguerite Duras as filmmakers whose cinematic work was “suggesting possible approaches to the question ‘who speaks’ when what is at stake is the woman's voice/image” (p. 126).2
In the Camera Obscura texts, a number of existing academic ideologemes found a prominent articulation and affirmation: the alignment of the study of the avant‐garde with theoretical orthodoxies of that particular moment, including, as Bergstrom put it, a focus on “the entire process of signification” (Bergstrom et al., 1979, p. 127), requiring a type of analysis that could be less narrowly formalist and rooted in more broad‐based claims about culture and society; the resistance to an institutionally‐entrenched canon of films and filmmakers; and the imperative to recognize the place of marginalized subjects and communities within this cinema. For some academic writers, these concerns seemed to be leading inevitably to a hermeneutics of suspicion, often fixed to presumptive theories (Metzian, Althusserian, and so on) about ideology and human nature. But for other researchers, to insist on a critique of canon formation and to focus more decisively on identity formations was to participate in a shift—already underway—toward less rigid, more inclusive construals of experimental and avant‐garde cinemas, a move also signaled by the reference to audience, social context, and meaning‐making operations in the passage quoted above.
An emerging interest in the discourses that underpin and are produced within experimental cinema can be detected in William Wees's concise itemization, from 1984, of the “historically accumulated meanings” of the idea of avant‐garde film, a survey from which specifiable formal or aesthetic features are entirely absent:
1) an oppositional stance vis‐a‐vis the social and artistic “establishment”; 2) a seemingly compulsive urge to explore new models of artistic expression—in a word, experimentalism; and 3) a claim to being able to anticipate the future, to being always “in advance.”
(Wees, 1984, p. 7)
As in numerous other attempts to pinpoint this phenomenon, here the stress is placed on attitudes, ideas, and assertions (“stance … urge … claim”) and hence on the notional aspects of this cinema. Rather than discuss key organizational and institutional structures, Wees cast his overview in the broad theoretical terms common throughout the 1980s and 1990s, decades in which the scholarly writing on individual films and filmmakers frequently invoked wide‐ranging historical narratives and theories about postmodernism and the neo‐avant‐garde (Mellencamp, 1990). Yet a more fine‐grained type of historical examination was also being developed, in evidence in at least two major studies of the late 1980s and early 1990s—one being an inclusive account of the 1960s American avant‐garde and its relationship to both independent and industrial cinemas (James, 1989), another a feminist study of women experimental filmmakers associated with the postwar New York film scene (Rabinovitz, 1991). Without steering entirely clear of polemics, such studies did provide a greater degree of historical detail when considering how experimental cinema was imbricated in the politics of its cultural moment.
For the writer seeking to look beyond the idea of “artistic expression,” an alternative approach to scholarship would need to take seriously a wider array of the cultural activities, artifacts, and ideas that emerge from, are proximate to, and shape experimental cinema. In 2005, Paul Arthur provided a telling indicator of a broadening of scholarly interests in a “synoptic sketch” of postwar “montage strategies” in American avant‐garde film, an account quite similar to Sitney's morphology (which Arthur mentions but labels “teleological”). Arthur's chronological narrative characterized various types of experimental films according to their editing styles, each said to be motivated by a dominant “logic” and linked to particular meanings, and he cast the 1970s as a moment of “stalemate” in which filmmakers were caught between “polarities of expressivist/rationalist, maximalist/minimalist” approaches to montage. But despite Arthur's own further development of that type of historicization in various articles, interweaving aesthetic decision‐making, motivating ideologies, and cultural contexts in his analyses, he also took issue, polemically, with the work of those critics, scholars, and curators of earlier eras for whom a predominantly aesthetic history might have been a sufficient introduction to postwar American experimental film. Arguing for the primacy of practices that do not directly or principally determine audiovisual content, he denied the aesthetic dimension of avant‐garde cinema its usual central status, asserting that the films themselves
merit the epithet “avant‐garde” not because of reciprocal or contrasting attitudes toward cinema, as evidenced in themes and formal designs, and not because of telling interventions in, or dialogues with, the tidal flow of avant‐garde stylistics. From a contemporary perspective, this activity is defined by the system through which projects are financed, completed, exhibited, and promoted.
(Arthur, 2005, p. xv)
Arthur mentioned Maya Deren as a filmmaker whose “efforts ‘off the screen”’ (promoting, screening, and discussing experimental cinema) have come to “appear inseparable from the radiant images she conjured on screen.” Thus reconfigured, the experimentalism that Wees understood in relation to the expressiveness of the filmmaker could be broadened, allowing for the study of a variety of pursuits as essential to this culture as the films themselves, including the search for “new models” of participation at all levels of this culture.
As the example of Deren illustrates, among the models being tested and implemented in the United States after World War II was the avant‐garde filmmaker as inventor and promoter of a public persona. The construction of this figure was in keeping with the typically individualist, self‐directed nature of filmmaking practices in experimental cinema, and yet its development also served to connect filmmakers to groups, organizations, and circuits of exchange. The recognition and examination of such interrelationships has become, in the past 15 years or so, an increasingly important area of sustained inquiry, running parallel and intersecting with the long‐evident predilection in criticism and scholarship for presenting the experimental filmmaker as an auteur. Dating from around the time Arthur's text was published, David James's chronicle of Los Angeles‐based “minor cinema,” for instance, asserted that “almost always avant‐garde films emerge from social movements, from identity groups, subcultures, and the like” (James, 2005, p. 15). Including figures from the canonical American avant‐garde but also many other lesser‐known participants, the alternative cinemas that James gathered together under the term “minor” cohere around the politicization of sex, gender, and ethnicity, and he regarded their search for a new “social function or usefulness” for art and cinema, after the mid‐1970s, as a marked challenge to earlier cinematic manifestations of “aesthetic formalism” (James, 2005, p. 13).
For James, making films and attending screenings are “rituals by which the group invents and understands itself, communicates with others, extends its influence, and makes new recruits” (p. 15). His use of the term ritual suggests the importance of patterned activities, of those repeated efforts through which particular values can be acted upon and recognized intersubjectively. The films themselves comprise mediated acts of self‐invention and self‐understanding, as critical analyses of their content can make apparent; yet it is also evident that the significance of a particular ritual associated with an alternative film culture can be ascribed values that are not intrinsically tied to the content of any one film or program of films. Social and cultural meanings and values can be introduced and reinforced through much more than onscreen content: they are also present in the continued existence and functional iterability of collectively‐experienced events, including the organization of screenings that allow filmmakers and audiences to participate in a film culture in different ways. Emphasizing that the rituals of a film culture are grounded in specific regions, sites, and geographies, James identified the “apparatuses” that “mediate between a given minor cinema and its spatiality and allow it to be produced”:
production (e.g., equipment sales and rental houses, laboratories, and co‐operatives that make equipment available to beginning filmmakers, media arts centers, and community‐outreach workshops); consumption (e.g., distribution organizations, promotional mechanisms, and screening organizations, including art theaters and groups formed specifically for this purpose); and suffusing these, ideological apparatuses (e.g., museums, archives, and libraries; journals, magazines, and lectures).
(James, 2005, p. 17)
In early critical writing on experimental cinema, the individual experimental filmmaker was a figure who was frequently considered in isolation or only alongside a very limited selection of familiar practitioners. But as the case‐study analysis of one or more mediating apparatuses has become an established scholarly genre, and as more national overviews have explored the crucial roles played by organizations and institutions of culture, the filmmaker has been shown to function within and move across multiple arenas of culture, including the platforms and structures in James's list.
In the growing literature on the conceptualization, production, dissemination, and reception of experimental cinema, a number of researchers have examined other region‐specific versions of the “system” to which Arthur was referring, and their subject matter has included: the effects of the American avant‐garde's ties to academic institutions (Zryd, 2006); the standard ways of pursuing social, financial, and cultural capital within experimental cinema (Ramey, 2010); ambitious efforts at distribution and promotion in the United Kingdom (Knight & Thomas, 2011); the little‐known films scattered throughout Latin America (Lerner & Piazza, 2017); and the networks, systems, and discursive formations that have facilitated the development of European and Scandinavian experimental cinemas (Hagener, 2007; Andersson et al., 2010; Bovier, 2017). Much of this work either side‐steps, minimizes, or directly argues against the belief that experimental cinema should be interpreted primarily in relation to notions of radicality, novelty, rupture, and innovation (without denying the relevance of those concepts within its cultures and communities). This strain of contemporary research demonstrates that a cultural aspiration toward and endorsement of the production of heterodoxy in aesthetics, ideology, and practice can co‐exist with some of the abiding orthodoxies and conventions that make possible various integral organizations and institutions.
The expansion of scholarly interests to include the typical ways in which certain forms of collectivity are produced and maintained, as others are resisted or revised, is most apparent in empirically‐based studies, yet it is a theoretical concern as well. Adapting a well‐known formulation made by David Bordwell about art cinema (Bordwell, 1979), Jonathan Walley has submitted that avant‐garde cinema is a “mode of film practice,” with a “mode” being “constituted by the norms of production, distribution, exhibition and reception of film art” (Walley, 2008, p. 185). This overarching framework is motivated in part by an echo of Arthur's disinclination to make what he called “stylistics” central to a definition or generalizable characterization: the “simultaneously historical, institutional and discursive” aspects of this context are presented as determinative, providing “the material conditions under which aesthetic goals are formed by artists and recognised by spectators” (Walley, 2008, p. 199). In concentrating on the normativity of widely‐implemented practices, Walley aimed to “illuminate distinctions that already exist” between avant‐garde cinema and artists or gallery‐based moving image culture; the former's history of favoring “acollaborative production,” typically viewed as a rejection of the industrial division of labor in the filmmaking process, is one of his examples, serving as a set of practices and beliefs that is far less prevalent among contemporary artists. In addition, in a later text, Walley echoed Arthur's earlier generalizations, pointing out that, in contrast to the art world's economics, copies of avant‐garde films are made to be rented and allowed to circulate—as in industrial cinema, but usually relying upon different institutions of distribution (or none at all, if the filmmaker prefers to work directly with screening venues)—and their exhibition typically comes with “contextualizing information,” at times provided by the filmmaker in person (Walley, 2020, pp. 28–29).
For Walley, “‘the film medium’ is in part constituted discursively within each mode of film practice” (Walley, 2020, p. 29), and avant‐garde film exhibits a particular “preoccupation with the concept of cinematic specificity and the specificity of the film medium, an investment in these ideas and in the material of film itself, which are much less evident in other modes” (p. 28). This view seems to be supported by at least two relatively recent developments: the collective efforts in a number of countries to create and sustain independent film laboratories that specialize in experimental cinema, and the emphasis placed on the craft‐oriented manipulation of celluloid film as an avowed marker of identity in two pedagogical texts on experimental filmmaking (Ramey, 2015; Schlemowitz, 2019). But even by the mid‐aughts it was apparent that a period of transition was underway, during which the new “material conditions” of the digital era were removing photochemical film from its former place of prominence and transforming the craft approach and its various meanings (an approach surveyed extensively in Knowles, 2020). What such developments put to the test is less the broad outline of a framework such as Walley's (with its discussion of tendencies, norms, and prevailing conditions) than the terms by which a mode's key traits are identified during this extended period of hybridization. This is not a problem specific to the study of experimental cinema: because our contemporary moment seems distinguished by diversity and plurality on a number of levels, scholars must decide how to search for patterns and trends when analyzing a mutable landscape of cultural production in which the “distinctions that already exist” may not be applicable across different sites, for example, or for similar stretches of time.
Much of the writing that examines this diverse field of practice and discourse reflects and contributes to the heightened significance placed in the humanities on the communities, identities, and attachments which form around and through cultural texts. If we look beyond experimental cinema as a subject, affinities with studies of other moving image cultures come into view: a “pragmatic” characterization of American “indie” cinema, in one study, places emphasis on the “strategies and expectations” of a broad gamut of participants in that particular film culture (Newman, 2011); art cinema, in another overview, is presented as “an entirely relational concept” (King, 2019, p. 3) that is tied to “cultural value and status” and is shaped at all stages of conception, production, and reception by the operations and effects of “positioning” (p. 1). The analysis of the formal or textual qualities of specific films tends to be seen as inextricable from other spheres of discourse, wherein mediating apparatuses facilitate or direct the production of cultural meaning and differentiation. Categories are said to pertain to processes, including those shaped by market‐related forces and economic structures, and “the realm of circulation is best understood as not just as an afterthought, something secondary to the production of texts, but as a constitutive component of this or any part of the cinematic landscape” (King, p. 9). What this approach to circulation attempts to interrogate is how a given film or an assortment of films is put to use by individual agents, who tend to be strongly motivated by their cultural investments and orientations, and by larger cultural constituencies, special interest groups, and organizations. Linking together many of the contemporary studies that survey the meanings of a particular film category or term is a methodological and theoretical commitment to some form of contextualism, the idea that interrogating contexts of use, past and present, offers an important key to grasping the cultural distinctions, attitudes, and associations attached to what is called experimental or avant‐garde cinema.3
The exploration of contexts of meaning and use often raises questions of circulation and interchange within and across minoritarian cultures, and in addressing these, some scholars have turned to the conceptual construct of the network (Bovier, 2017; Hagener, 2007). Network accounts can bring to light affiliations and allegiances of various types—aesthetic, ideological, practical, affective, and so on—and this tracking of personal, collective, and textual circuits of exchange can allow for the inclusion of different forms of participation within a given film culture, perhaps more ephemeral or transitional than those that distinguish the filmmakers who have customarily been cast as its primary historical protagonists. In addition to diversifying the field of study beyond a canonical “establishment,” studies oriented toward networks can also show that experimental cinema has drawn upon and established a much more varied and multidisciplinary array of cultural connections than its habitual reliance on the rhetoric of binary oppositions (hegemonic film industry vs. independent artistic practice, or experimental film culture vs. global art market, for instance) might suggest. Following the thread, so to speak, of different relationships and trajectories—involving experimental cinema's individual participants, its formal and informal groups, and the circulation of its texts, for example—can bring forms of cultural engagement and investment to the fore as neglected objects of study.
The diversification of scholarly approaches will likely only press further the perennial question of whether experimental cinema can retain its autonomy, coherence, or relevance as a cultural concept. The contextualist tendency within recent scholarship certainly allows for a great degree of contradiction, inconsistency, and idiosyncrasy in its culturally‐ and historically‐grounded accounts of this cinema, and many practitioners will continue to refuse to be affiliated with any sort of classificatory term or notion, often because “experimental” or “avant‐garde” seem to belong to an outmoded, constraining language of the past. Yet there are also cultural hubs—in Latin American countries such as Mexico and Argentina, for example—where the idea of experimental cinema is being championed by filmmakers, critics, programmers, and educators, just as it is being revised so that it can include both contemporary extensions of recognizable traditions and other pursuits and concerns with roots in underrepresented cultures. This is a dynamic of continuity and change, adoption and repudiation, that scholars are only beginning to chart across local and global sites of activity.
This companion compiles the work of participants and observers who often assume micro and macro perspectives in their considerations of experimental cinema, moving from a focus on singular figures or situations to their locations within a general panorama. Each of the essays and exchanges that comprise this collection demonstrates how experimental cinema is continually being invented and defended, made and remade, repudiated and transformed, within a broader field of culture. This textual production of a cultural grouping is common among discourses on modern and contemporary experimental practices in the arts: in his work on the forms of attachment and performative acts that generate, reproduce, and reshape experimentalism in American music, for example, Benjamin Piekut argued that experimentalist networks are “arranged and fabricated” (Piekut, 2011, p. 19). For Piekut, a lecture given by the composer Gordon Mumma, for instance, “enacts” American experimentalism because Mumma “performs a grouping and articulates this grouping to a well‐connected audience,” introducing into existing discussions and debates a text that will subsequently be published and, as it continues to circulate, will affect other selective accounts of experimental practices. A lecture that discusses a version of experimentalism is one among many “acts [that] are always situated as iterations in a series … another node in a network that gradually stabilizes as it accrues other connections over time” (p. 7). What Piekut describes applies equally well to the textual iterations of the filmmakers who enact and perform experimentalism. This a culture that is also being produced by the historians, curators, critics, and theorists who analyze and evaluate it, and in what follows, each chapter offers a selection of groupings that configure experimentalism in an active and even interventionist manner, chronicling and rethinking this cinema according to a diverse spectrum of agendas, ideologies, and objectives.
***
The three sections of this book are intended to clarify some basic methodological differences, although all of the chapters in the collection evince overlapping concerns. The Overviews section offers the broadest level of generality, and includes introductions to specific categories or genres associated with experimental cinema, surveys of films unified by shared identities, formal techniques, or geographic proximity, and analyses of concepts and ideas of longstanding relevance for the field. The more granular analyses of the Case Studies section demonstrate how new research can illuminate topics such as the intersection of a particular body of films and collectively‐shared values and experiences, the relation between theory and practice, and the ways in which films circulate and are received. Finally, in the Exchanges section, the dialogic format of each of its chapters brings more individual, personal perspectives to bear upon larger histories and contemporary issues. One common thread running throughout this section is the interplay of the individual and the collective, which emerges as one of the book's key themes.
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Notes
1
A feature of Harold Bloom's model of influence that informs Sitney's is summarized by a recent literary commentary: “The anxiety of influence is a way of describing what Bloom called the ‘dark truths of competition and contamination’ that connect a writer with a predecessor. But it encompasses both the psychological anxieties in the author—Oedipal rivalry with literary parents, the fear of death and failure—and the evidence within a poem that it is avoiding or transforming the work of an earlier author. It is therefore at once, perplexingly, a psychological and a rhetorical concept. It is not just a way of explaining how writers feel about other writers, but a way of thinking about how poems relate to and seek to depart from earlier poems, and how by doing so they insert themselves into a canon of works” (Burrow,
2019
). Contemporary writing on experimental cinema is still exploring this combination of psychobiography and cross‐textual analysis, albeit with far less reliance on Freud in particular and a greater emphasis on archival research in general.
2
Whether such filmmakers had ideological ties to Romantic poetry was far less significant to the
Camera Obscura
collective than the “operations” of their films, some of which could be linked to their intentions and some of which were best understood as textual effects, generated within each film's system of “enunciation,” to cite the term that Bergstrom repurposed from French linguistics. Notably, the collective's statements focused intensively on theory—on a theoretical, but also politically engaged, examination of issues of representation. They were not explicitly calling for research programs that would detail the sociohistorical particulars of audience and social context, for example, although some might argue that the issues they were focusing on would eventually lead scholars in that direction.
3
Much of this scholarly work on genre and its contexts of reception reflects the influence of the sociology of art. Of particular importance are two positions within this general area of scholarship, the study of the collective activities and models of cooperation realized within art worlds (Becker,
2008
) and the theorization of cultural fields and forms of cultural capital wherein conflict and competition are given more prominence (Bourdieu
1984
,
1986
). Within writing on experimental cinema, Ramey (
2010
) and Zryd (
2006
) are among the few who have acknowledged directly some aspect of this area of research, but the relevance of its debates has yet to be explicitly addressed in depth.
