La fábrica local de Kraft Foods Argentina y sus encadenamientos

As outlined in chapter two, the historical avant- gardes of the 1940s through the 1960s marks the period in American film history and culture best known for instigating a new form of personal filmmaking. The avant- garde filmmakers from this era ultimately were creating works that were so new, so different, and so individualistic — though traces of similarities can be made among them — that it is impossible to consider the state of contemporary avant- garde film- making without taking into account the relevance of some of their stylistic and thematic concerns that either directly or indirectly found their way into other types of filmmaking. Perhaps the best- known and still relevant type of film- making that began in the 1940s and extends through today’s avant- garde is the highly personal, subjective films known alternatively as “poetic,” “trance,” or “lyrical.” These types of films constitute a larger body of cinematic practice that demonstrated a new way of presenting interiority, focusing on a combi- nation of narrative construction and abstract imagery. Painterly and literary influences helped establish a more subjective, first- person cinema that was more synaesthetic: creating worlds where everything from light/shadow, editing, or point of view focused our attention matters of style and theme.

The most vocal proponent of the “trance” film, and indeed the person who coined the phrase, is P. Adams Sitney, whose groundbreaking (and already mentioned) study in avant- garde cinema, Visionary Film: The American Avant-

Garde, is still considered the best introduction to the theory and practice of

avant- garde cinema. Sitney details the major figures in avant- garde film, offer- ing insightful commentary on individual films as well as giving labels to certain types of films he notices have similarities. The poetic trance film, or “psy- chodrama,” is one such category that remains influential. Sitney delineates sev- eral key characteristics of the trance film by first describing Maya Deren’s canonical Meshes of the Afternoon (1943). He suggests of this film and others like it that they contain “a fluid linear space,” that they evoke “the dream state,”

and that the “filmmaker use herself or himself [as the] protagonist.”1_{He con-}

tinues, saying the origins of the American avant- garde is based on the fact that “film becomes a process of self-realization,” and that the “erotic and irrational imagery that we encounter in many of these earlier films evokes the raw quality of the dream itself.”2_{The focus on the dream- like states of the people in such}

films has ties to surrealism, but these new avant- garde films focused more on the filmmaker him/herself as sole transmitter of knowledge and creation. These types of films also eschew distinct interpretation, something very important when considering feature-length avant- garde films; their complexity generates multiple plausible responses. Elsewhere, Sitney claims of trance films:

They deal with visionary experience. Its protagonists are somnambulists, priests, initiates of rituals, and the possessed, whose stylized movements the camera, with its slow and fast motions, can re-create aptly.... Here is the classic trance film: the protagonist who passes invisibly among people; the dramatic landscape; the climactic confrontation with one’s self and one’s past.3

Some contemporary feature-length avant- garde films arguably have similar structures, from Eraserhead to Conspirators of Pleasure to Careful to The Last

Rite. Perhaps in a more succinct description, A.L. Rees describes the new Amer-

ican trance film as

[M]odeled on dream, lyric verse and contemporary dance. Typically it enacts the personal conflicts of a central subject or protagonist. A scenario of desire and loss, seen from the point of view of a single guiding consciousness, ends either in redemp- tion or death. Against the grain of realism, montage editing evokes swift transitions in space and time. The subjective, fluid camera is more often a participant in the action than its neutral recording agent.4

Here Rees describes not just thematic concerns but stylistic ones as well, which do indeed creep into particular modes of expression found in longer avant- garde films. The most important thing to remember, I think, when considering these earlier and well- known short trance films is the focus on the highly sub- jective perspective and the hallucinatory or dream- like scenario of them. It seems that many avant- garde films follow suit, and longer films experiment with form and style while maintaining a semblance of narrative to detail the particular viewpoint of either the director or protagonist of the picture.

The canonical American avant- garde filmmakers of the 1940s and 1950s (Anger, Deren, and Brakhage, to name the best known) used “mythical themes and images” in their recreations of inner states, where the “poetry of private passions” found articulation through carefully nuanced films, and where imag- ination was the strongest contributor to a new film form.5_{Brakhage, of course,}

would venture into very different territory with his explorations of the ontology of the image itself, but for the most part the (American) films of this era helped establish a new kind of filmmaking that influenced both the underground movement of the 1960s, and more recently, video installation projects from a new generation of avant- garde filmmakers whose personal vision and display

of the self (think Matthew Barney) harkens back to this earlier time. Abstract expressionism would become an important aesthetic touchstone for these and other avant- garde filmmakers as well. The style of the avant- garde film often rested upon “the manipulation of time and space [and was] equally a property of film form, so editing could undermine the surface realism of cinematography to create a new language that was film’s alone.”6_{Such stylistic tendencies are}

important to remember when thinking about contemporary feature films, where form dictates style, such as with abstraction or associative filmmaking. Many patterns that revolve around shapes, colors, or even characters or ideas can be found in feature-length avant- garde films. Such films (like Peter Greenaway’s

The Falls) involve spectators on perceptual and conceptual levels. Sounds, edits,

or certain kinds of mise- en- scène may create a more associative type of exper- imental or avant- garde film, where patterns develop based on the juxtaposition of images (or sounds or objects). Collage films, from Bruce Conner’s famous short A Movie (1958) to Craig Baldwin’s Spectres of the Spectrum (1999), are based on this idea. The lyricism found in abstract collages is also important to note in more contemporary films like Godfrey Reggio’s Koyaanisqatsi (1982), a latter form of the city symphony film.

Further experimentation came with the freeing of the camera, as evidenced in Marie Menken’s films (Geography of the Body, 1943), or the stasis of the cam- era, best shown in Warhol’s films (like Empire, 1964). Such diverse use of cin- ematography (and editing) is seen in contemporary avant- garde features like the overly frenetic Tetsuo: The Iron Man, the detailed close- ups and jumps in

Conspirators of Pleasure, or the calm placidity in Sàtàntàngo. These develop-

ments helped solidify a new form of filmmaking, which has influenced film- makers, from the French New Wave to video experimentalists. Still other means of expression come from a new kind of realism, one that offers entirely indi- vidualistic ways of interpreting society, culture, or history. The future of Amer- ican independent cinema, as well as the primacy of subjective realism — the kind filtered through modernism or through the filmmaker’s individualistic/ idiosyncratic perspective — is linked to such techniques. According to Jonas Mekas, the “godfather” of the American avant- garde, writing in 1961,

Whereas the experimentalists such as Maya Deren, Willard Maas, Hans Richter, and Sidney Peterson were concerned with the exploration of the subconscious, with the development of a universal, abstracted film poetry, free from time and place, this other group of filmmakers were interested in exploring their world in a more prosaic and realistic manner, right here and now.7

Although Mekas is speaking of a very particular kind of filmmaker, I think what he says is applicable to many feature films that follow. As mentioned, any kind of filmic practice can be interpreted as a way of seeing, and avant- garde film is certainly the exception and the better avenue to use when considering how to view the world differently. Hence, even dream- like trance films, surre-

alist films, or even abstract films may be considered ways of looking at the material world in particularly unique ways. Mekas eventually concludes that there are complete poets (Breer, Brakhage and Menken in particular) working in cinema, which “thematically and formally, represent ... the best of the tra- dition of experimental and poetic cinema.” He continues:

Freely, beautifully they sing the physical world, its textures, its colors, its movements; or they speak in little bursts of memories, reflections, meditations. Unlike the early avant- garde films, these films are not burdened by Greek or Freudian mythology and symbolism, their meaning is more immediate, more visual, suggestive. Stylis- tically and formally their work represents the highest and purest creation achieved in the poetic cinema.8

Mekas makes a clear distinction between the surrealism of the 1920s avant- gardes and the more realistic films of pure poetry, even though Breer and Brakhage are concerned with forms antithetical to “real” objects (Breer works in animation; Brakhage in hand- painted and scratched films). But both strands, I think, are present in even the films Mekas designates as “poetic,” and both are present (perhaps in dialectical fashion?) in many feature-length avant- garde films.

There are many other types of avant- garde films made during the second great wave of avant- garde filmmaking during the 1940s through the 1960s. From trance to lyric, collage to structuralism, surrealism to realism, non-narrative to narrative, the short films produced by both American and European artists of the post-war years radically altered avant- garde filmmaking. Their history has been detailed critically and objectively in various texts; hence I offer no detailed examination of the already well- chronicled films and filmmakers from this time frame. Besides, I am focusing on a rarely explored area of film culture, the avant- garde feature film, which, as I have suggested, has direct links to the practices of the early avant- gardes, even when they are entirely original enter- prises. The final point I would like to stress, then, is that in order to consider the contexts and intertexts for contemporary avant- garde feature films, we must remain cognizant of the varying types of films created during this highly prolific and fundamentally aesthetic and ideological era. Knowing this past helps elu- cidate the features and the tropes found in them, or at least the associations we can make with other kinds of avant- garde films. The following case studies will, hopefully, expand on and illustrate some of the ideas mentioned in this brief chapter.

Case Studies