This is the wonderland of avant-garde film, a vast arena of styles, attitudes and ideas that's also been called by several equally ill-fitting names: experimental, underground, counter-cinema or sometimes New American Cinema (despite existing internationally). There are just too many types of such films for any category, ranging from deathly solemn formal experiments to exuberantly silly movie parodies to graceful landscapes. Some are basically paintings in motion, others organized more along ideas of poetic continuity and quite a few just bursts of energy that dare you to not laugh. These are an alternative, almost secret history of innovation and radically different ways of making movies that will fascinate the more adventurous viewers.
Now there's a solid introduction to this field in the form of Treasures IV: American Avant-Garde Film, 1947-1986 (Image Entertainment), the latest in the series Treasures from American Film Archives. (For the story up to this point check out Unseen Cinema: Early American Avant-Garde Film 1894-1941.) Two DVDs contain 26 films from such major artists as Andy Warhol, Joseph Cornell, Harry Smith, Marie Menken, Robert Breer and Paul Sharits covering most major avant-garde styles while an extensive book provides background, commentary and further sources. Rather than being presented in a strict chronological order the films are organized for a flow in mood and style that highlights shared concerns and techniques, almost like a mixtape. A few major names are missing such as structuralist Ernie Gehr and collage trailblazer Bruce Conner as well as those who did their best work at feature-length such as James Benning and Jon Jost. But some omissions are inevitable and don't detract from the value of the set.
Avant-garde films generally show indifference or outright hostility to conventional filmmaking but today many viewers are more comfortable with them because of the wide-spread adoption of avant-garde techniques in music videos but even that is only true up to a point. What to make, for instance, of Stan Brakhage's "The Riddle of Lumen", 13 minutes of stray images in a variety of textures but entirely silent? Or Ken Jacobs' "Little Stabs at Happiness" which features quasi-addled 60s rebels running around the streets of New York? Or the vibrating, crayon-colored squares in Harry Smith's "Film No. 3: Interwoven"? Music videos won't have prepared most people for these though the films aren't just one-off oddities but come from a rich tradition.
All movies began as a gimmick when the 20th century dawned, a sideshow attraction that managed to tap into a popular thirst for movement and spectacle leaving a lineage it's never entirely given up. There were stray works attempting something different and a few determined artists all along but it took the inexpensive, lightweight equipment developed during the Second World War to really open the gates. Filmmakers no longer needed bags of money and small armies of craftspeople so they responded with energy and imagination, creating films that ranged from elaborate pranks to some of the most sublime and moving ever screened. With local theatres now enemy territory they found other places to show films in art galleries, colleges, rented spaces, midnight screenings. The avant-garde film community developed its own distribution system, publications, critics, genres and even stars (though these were more likely to be directors than actors).
Many filmmakers responded with their own version of what might be considered documentaries or more broadly different ways of engaging with what they saw outside their doors. Bruce Baillie's 1962 "Here I Am" takes a look at a daycare center for troubled children. Unnarrated like cinema verite, it doesn't build a linear argument as even verite documentaries tend to do but follows various actions of the children and some teachers, at times in close-up and other times in long shot. The end result is both charming and a bit unsettling. Saul Levine's "Note to Pati" compiles shots of a family in a snow-filled backyard along with local cityscapes but with such frequent blurry movement and deliberately visible splices that it's practically an abstract expressionist home movie. Shirley Clarke's 1958 "Bridges-Go-Round" even uses actual documentary extracts showing NYC bridges but combines, overlaps and re-colors them to reveal an unexpected beauty in such commonplace industrial constructions.
But it's the formal innovation that's generally been the mark of avant-garde filmmakers. Some cram everything into their films, such as Wallace Berman's remarkable "Aleph" with its extremely fast editing and frequently superimposed images and text, sometimes funny and sometimes abrasive but it almost demands to be watched again. At the other extreme, Larry Gottheim's 1970 "Fog Line" watches in hushed, unedited attention as fog slowly disappears on a hillside almost like Monet's paintings of the Rouen cathedral. Storm De Hirsch's "Peyote Queen" has her scratching directly onto the film itself, Stanish Lawder's "Necrology" runs the film backwards before pulling a gag at the end, Paul Sharits makes a film out of film burning, and Andy Warhol simply peers at a drag performer until the film reel runs out. Anything goes as long as it results in a striking or memorable film.
Other filmmakers explored the nature of storytelling. Christopher Maclaine's tour-de-force "The End" (1953) opens with an atomic blast and "The End" credits before going back to tell us about six people who may or may not have witnessed the end of the world. But even "tell us about" doesn't really describe what Maclaine does with his off-center approach that provides through voice-over seemingly irrelevant information while showing images that don't exactly connect to the stories. Most of the characters meet a violent death so even the atomic blast is almost a deception. George Kuchar's "I, an Actress" toys with Hollywood melodrama though in a very unusual way. On a bare stage an actress plays a woman confronting her husband (actually a wig on a chair), at times barely audible and at others her voice rising to implausible shrieks, before the director comes on-screen to show her how to do it, how to not do it, other ways of doing it.
There are a few pieces that haven't entirely stood the test of time. Jonas Mekas was a major critic, proselytizer and filmmaker but his 11-minute "Notes on the Circus" tends toward tedium. An unrelenting mix of very shaky hand-held images of the circus, sometimes superimposed and always edited very fast, it must have an eye-opener in 1966 but today seems experimental in the worst sense. Chick Strand's "Fake Fruit Factory" (1986) portrays Mexican women working in the title factory almost entirely through extreme close-ups and seemingly unedited voice-overs. Its informational value is almost nothing and by denying the women any individuality the film borders on colonial smugness.
The transfers are for the most part sharp and bright even though there's unavoidable print damage in some cases. While many avant-garde filmmakers have avoided releasing their films on video due to misguided purism (can you imagine a poet who wouldn't let his work be translated?), these DVD transfers often present the work in far better condition than what you might be able to see by actually renting a print. It's not uncommon for only a single print or two to be in circulation; after a few years they're far from pristine. Though Treasures IV isn't quite like watching actual film being screened--for one thing you can pause or speed it up whenever you like--it's about as good as most of us will ever get and pretty much essential for any real understanding of cinema.
For more information about Treasures IV: American Avant-Garde Film, 1947-1986, visit The National Film Preservation Foundation. To order Treasures IV: American Avant-Garde Film, 1947-1986, go to TCM Shopping.
by Lang Thompson
