The Sticking Place Theatre and Film productions

An international movement of aesthetic iconoclasts whose works proclaim new modes of representation and narrative. Their existence reflects the conflict between dominant and emerging form-content codes by which the arts evolve. In film, alongside the dominant Hollywood code (conventional narrative and pseudorealism reflecting nineteenth-century storytelling norms), there exist alternative trends that parallel developments in other twentieth-century arts.

If the arts represent systems of messages, particular message systems are relevant to particular audiences - in film, a mass audience for Hollywood, a specialized audience for the avant-garde. In both cases, the messages (delivered by illusory images in illusory motion) are the fantasies, nightmares, and myths of the particular group. The transmission of meaning occurs in both content and form.

Characteristics

The parameters of opposition between the dominant Hollywood code and the avant-garde are clearly drawn. Most or all of the following attributes are characteristic of avant-garde films:

The emphasis is on film as a visual rather than a storytelling medium. The visual image is viewed as an active process, not as a dead record.

The avant-garde film is made not by a committee or a team hired for the occasion by a third party but by one individual who almost always also photographs and edits it. The film is not tailored to a market for profit purposes but results from a desire for self-expression.

The 'realism' of the commercial cinema is unmasked as neither a self-evident, ordained mode of expression nor a true rendition of reality; its seeming transparency appears fraudulent to the legatees of Sigmund Freud, Karl Marx, and others who have shown hidden texts underlying the "commonsense" readings of self and society. Realism is viewed merely as one possible system of representation, as much a construct as any other.

The conventional, straightforward narrative of Hollywood is attenuated or destroyed, its horizontal progression from inception to closure superseded by vertical exploration of states of mind, atmosphere, interior universe, and the nature of film itself. Discontinuity, ellipsis, ambiguity, and aleatory elements abound - in short, a development paralleling modernism in the other arts.

Space and time are no longer seen as separate but as a continuum; absolute space and time have disappeared. Time and space are manipulated or shattered, telescoped or expanded.

The illusory nature of film, so carefully masked by Hollywood, is explicitly undermined by a strongly anti-illusionist stance: "This is a film, a made object." By the subverting of this hitherto unquestioned, invisible code, its underlying system of meaning-making is revealed. Thus, editing and camerawork are overt and intrusive instead of invisible, conventional punctuation and composition, insistence on "cutting on movement" or establishing direction are eliminated.

There is a stress on improvisation and lack of polish, seen as expressions of a new artistic freedom and casualness.

Themes are often subversive, reaching beyond the commonly accepted for the taboo. Shock is viewed as a basic tool for heightening awareness. The on-screen splitting of an eyeball in the first scene of Luis Bunuel's Un chien Andalou (1929) - suggesting that the old vision must be destroyed before the new one can come in - is the prototypical image of the avant-garde. The shock of the unfamiliar and the violation of conventional narratives are seen as breakthroughs to new codes. The confluence of these attributes makes it apparent that the film avant-garde is an inextricable part of the modernist impulse in the arts. Each of the modernist schools - from surrealism to abstraction, expressionism to cubism, dada to pop - finds its counterpart here.

Evolution and classification

The beginnings of the avant-garde movement date back to the enormously fertile period of its first wave (1919-1930), which sprang up in various parts of Europe: in France, with Louis Delluc, Jean Epstein, Germaine Dulac, Man Ray, Fernand Leger, Marcel Duchamp, Bunuel and Salvador Dali; in Germany, with Viking Eggeling, Hans Richter, Walther Ruttman and Oskar Fischinger; and in the USSR, an early center of film theory and experimentation, with Sergei Eisenstein, V.I. Pudovkin, Dziga Vertov, Aleksandr Dovzhenko and Lev Kuleshov. During the 1930s, German fascism, Joseph Stalin's counterrevolution, and growing international tension inhibited the avant-garde. From the 1940s on, its center shifted decisively to the United States, where a second wave of the avant-garde reached its peak during the 1950s and 1960s, contributing in turn to a new European avant-garde surge and to a parallel movement in Japan.

Two main lines of development are discernible in the movement from its inception: a psychoanalytically influenced subjective-film tendency, an out-growth of surrealism, expressionism, and dada; and a film-as-film tendency, grounded in abstract art, cubism, constructivism, futurism, and minimalism.

Subjective film includes emotive-expressive works of dream or trance states, myths (personal or collective), self-revelation, and the unconscious; they are commonly symbolic, expressionist, surrealist, psychedelic, or metaphysical. Pioneers in the subjective film field were Maya Deren, Sidney Peterson, James Broughton and Stan Brakhage in the United States; Germaine Dulac, Abel Gance and Philippe Garrel in Europe.

Film-as-film extends from abstract to structural works. Abstract films feature rhythmically structured configurations of geometric or nonfigurative shapes and colors, offering an emotion, if not a narrative. Structural films dismantle the medium itself, exploring its very materiality (light, rhythm, projection and image sequence). Here films no longer exist in the service of something else (the narrative), but for themselves.

While subjective film continues to use narratives, albeit modernist ones, the film-as-film tendency rejects narrative entirely. Both trends are synchronous in time, though the period from the 1920s to the late 1960s was mainly stamped by the subjective trend, with film-as-film in steady ascendancy since then. Early catalysts in this field were James and John Whitney, Robert Breer, Andy Warhol, Michael Snow and Hollis Frampton in the United States; Eggeling, Man Ray and Malcolm Le Grice in Europe.

Still another group bridges the two major avant-garde tendencies. Its members include collage artists, such as Bruce Conner and Stan Vanderbeek in the United States, and the directors of mixed-media presentations, filmic happenings, multiple projections, and light shows.

At various times there has also existed a semi-avant-garde in the commercial cinema, whose pioneering in form and content has been of great significance. Contributors to this movement have been Carl Theodor Dreyer in Denmark; Jean Cocteau, Robert Bresson, Jean-Luc Godard and Alain Resnais in France; Orson Welles in the United States; Michelangelo Antonioni in Italy; Nagisha Oshima in Japan; Roman Polanski in Poland; Dusan Makevejev in Yugoslavia; Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Werner Herzog in the Federal Republic of Germany; and Sergei Parajanov and Andrei Tarkovsky in the Soviet Union.

Social position and role

Though the avant-garde attempts to set itself against the culture industry and, in fact, propounds a countermessage - in the 1960s, one reflecting oppositional lifestyles and world-views - it has always remained tied to society. The first wave of the avant-garde was ideologically linked to the rise of the socialist and anarchist movements, sharing the common goal of total social transformation, with art to serve as a means of changing consciousness. In the second wave, these radical impulses were attenuated with the decline of radical politics. They flared briefly during the youth movement of the 1960s, but in the following decades they rarely made large claims regarding sociopolitical intentions or effects.

Significantly, the avant-garde appears to be concentrated largely in technologically advanced, affluent societies. Here its creations are in constant danger of becoming commodities (if found sufficiently marketable) or of being shunted to the sidelines by mass culture. The avant-garde has had its own showcases, critics, magazines, distribution collectives, archives, and festivals - but this autonomy may cloak its social ineffectuality.

It can be argued that the ever-growing power of the culture industry has signified some neutralization or the avant-garde's radical impulse. Shock need not be merely an avant-garde technique but can be domesticated by being expected, as in popular adventure or horror films. Staccato editing, fluid camera movements, and attenuated narratives can also be found in music videos, station breaks, and commercials.

The emergence of cheaper, more mobile video cameras, the growth of the videocassette recorder market, and even the success of music videos as a format will undoubtedly contribute to the rise of new avant-garde talents. It is safe to surmise, however, that they will remain outsiders, given the growing domination of new cable and satellite markets by large corporate structures. Yet the avant-garde's delight in the unpredictable, its insistence on the deconstruction of ossified codes, its probing of the unacceptable, signify gestures of freedom in an increasingly commercialized cinema.

International Encyclopedia of Communications, Oxford University Press, 1989

© Amos Vogel/Oxford University Press
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