WHEN I FIRST CONCEIVED of this book in 1968, it was to have been a short collection of interpretations of a selected number of films made by American independent film-makers. At that time I was taking the International Exhibition of the New American Cinema to a number of European film archives and universities. In the repeated screenings of a large collection of films I was able to become very familiar with the works I wanted to interpret, and in my lectures on those occasions I had an opportunity to refine my ideas. Yet when it came to writing a book, two years later, that original plan expanded into this lengthy study.
The interpretation of individual films spread to the consideration of the whole career of their makers. Then the question of the relationship of one film-maker to another arose. Soon I found my work moving in a direction that could lead to a life-long enterprise, a history and analysis of the American avant-garde film in several volumes, continually to be revised to encompass new films. At that point I had to clarify my aspirations and define my topic.
The earliest American films discussed here were called “film poems” or “experimental films” when they were first seen. Both names, like all the subsequent ones, are inaccurate and limiting. Of the two, the term “film poem” has the advantage of underlining a useful analogy: the relationship of the type of film discussed in this book to the commercial narrative cinema is in many ways like that of poetry to fiction in our times. The film-makers in question, like poets, produce their work without financial reward, often making great personal sacrifices to do so. The films themselves will always have a more limited audience than commercial features because they are so much more demanding. The analogy is also useful in that it does not put a value on the films in question. Poetry is not by essence better than prose. “Experimental” cinema, on the other hand, implies a tentative and secondary relationship to a more stable cinema.
Both terms fell out of use in the late fifties. In their places arose the “New American Cinema” on the model of the French Nouvelle Vague, and the “underground” film, in response to an increased social commitment on the part of certain newly emerging film-makers. Very few filmmakers were ever satisfied with any of these labels. “Avant-garde” is itself unfortunate. On the one hand, it implies a privileged relationship to a norm which I do not wish to affirm, and on the other hand it has been used to describe thousands of films which fall outside the scope of this book, some of which are excellent and many of which are very bad. I have chosen to use the term “avant-garde” cinema throughout the book simply because it is the one name which is not associated with a particular phase of the thirty-year span I attempt to cover.
The precise relationship of the avant-garde cinema to American commercial film is one of radical otherness. They operate in different realms with next to no significant influence on each other. In the forties when the first generation of native independent film-makers learned their art, young people could not make films freely within the industry. A long apprenticeship was required and the division of functions (writer, producer, director, cameraman) was jealously protected. In reaction the young American film-makers turned to the European avant-garde tradition. But unlike the painters and poets who had made films in the twenties, they did not stop film-making after one or two efforts when they did not find commercial support. They continued to make films, responding to each other’s work and to the forces that were active in American painting, poetry, and dance around them.
The commercial film industry was in fact so conservative that in France a new critical theory was developing in response to the loss of directorial authority in American films. The followers of André Bazin enunciated “la politique des auteurs,” which sought out the stylistic constants in the films of directors who had to work under factory-like conditions. This critical method was later imported into America as the “auteur theory.” However there have always been two independent strains in the theory of cinema. One goes back to the psychologist Hugo Munsterberg and includes the writings of other psychologists, sociologists, and philosophers such as Arnheim, Kracauer, and Merleau-Ponty, as well as Bazin, and has tried to understand what constitutes the whole cinematic experience. The other strain includes the theories of film-makers themselves from Delluc and Epstein in France through the great Soviet theoreticians Kuleshov, Vertov, Pudovkin, and Eisenstein. They have sought the ideal essence of cinema, and their theories have been concerned with how films should be made. While French and American critics were propounding the auteur theory for the cinema of the forties and fifties, major theoretical writing was being produced by the film-makers within the American avant-garde. Deren, Brakhage, Markopoulos, and Kubelka were defining new potentials for the cinema.
American avant-garde film theory has received even less critical attention than the films. Therefore I have assumed the task of commenting on the major theoretical works of the period, and I have tried to analyze the theoretical stance of those film-makers who have responded in their films if not in their writings to these issues. The selection of film-makers to be discussed here has been guided as much by their commitment to the major theoretical concerns as by my original list of films to interpret.
Just as the chief works of French film theory must be seen in the light of Cubist and Surrealist thought, and Soviet theory in the context of formalism and constructivism, the preoccupations of the American avantgarde film-makers coincide with those of our post-Romantic poets and Abstract Expressionist painters. Behind them lies a potent tradition of Romantic poetics. Wherever possible, both in my interpretation of films and discussion of theory, I have attempted to trace the heritage of Romanticism. I have found this approach consistently more useful and more generative of a unified view of these films and film-makers than the Freudian hermeneutics and sexual analyses which have dominated much previous criticism of the American avant-garde film.
In the course of writing, historical patterns emerged which I have allowed to control the structure of the book. I have had to invent a series of terms—the trance film, the mythopoeic film, the structural film, and the participatory film—in order to describe this historical morphology. It is almost too obvious to point out that the film-makers themselves did not think in these categories when they made their films. Many of them will, of course, resist my categorizing them at all.
The thirty-year period which this book covers has seen vast changes in the incidental circumstances of avant-garde film-making and distribution. Many of the film-makers discussed here have been able to earn their living in the past few years as professors of film theory and film-making. This is a function of the increasing interest in this mode of film-making shown by the academic community. Hundreds of colleges now regularly screen avant-garde films; they have become an essential part of the program of the nation’s few film archives. Literally hundreds of new independent films are made and distributed every year. All this has occurred without any significant influence on the programming of commercial theaters.
Naturally the vast majority of independent films produced in any year are of very low quality, as is the year’s poetry, painting, or music by and large. This book does not pretend to be exhaustive of American avantgarde film-making. Nor does it discuss the work of all the most famous and important film-makers. Major figures such as Ed Emshwiller, Stan VanDerBeek, Storm De Hirsch, and Shirley Clarke, to name a few, are not discussed here. This book attempts to isolate and describe the visionary strain within the complex manifold of the American avant-garde film.
New York
January 1974
P. A. S.