Loop Issue One



Avant Garde '03: What Rules?
Cinemahead

A few days ago I represented Cinemahead at Avant 2003, a conference on "avant-garde" cinema in Karlstad, Sweden. Several scholarly questions floated around this once military term, but most of them boiled down to, “What really constitutes avant-garde?” Is it not a paradox to want to unify unrelated fragments of personal film work into a paradigm? Doesn't experimental film defy all rules? And if so, why create a system of rules to define these films at all?

But the focus wasn't only in defining theoretical borderlines, or identifying and dissecting individual niches of film art. There was of course some comparing and contrasting of Stan Brackage with Jonas Mekas and Peter Weiss, but the main focus was in fact quite retro-grade: the pure contemplation of splendid 16 mm film prints.

Visual Weiss

For two days, the Karlstad Arenan theater became a "cineforum" space where a rare brand of cinema mysteriously held center stage, thanks to Re:VOIR, a traveling exhibitor of experimental cinema from Paris. Moth wings and other odd objects and shapes danced irrationally on screen: only light, movement and rhythm. These short works peeked out their optically-printed faces from the academic catacombs for the first time to many of the audience members. In fact, most had never even heard of these films before.

In today's panorama of commercial cinema and packaged entertainment, it was some kind of wonder

to find a twenty-something audience watching films with a group of international academics. Cinema as culture? Maybe… but can a visual culture related to both a) the world of ideas, and b) the physical realm survive ephemer-all modernity?

One of the most interesting outcomes of watching avant-garde film is the unpredictability of each individual viewer's reaction. The films reveal personal experiences to be absorbed by an individual consciousness. This is the opposite of twenty first century commercial film, which abhors personal experience in both subject and story formula, and prefers to engage wider, popular, and familiar themes catering to impulse-buying teenagers who can rapidly associate stars and plots with other marketable products, brands, and enviable behaviors. For a commercial film to be successful, it better elicit the same reactions in all viewers. One of the formulae of the hyped "collaborative science" of Hollywood is that there exist one outcome, no cultural challenges (i.e., foreign settings or languages), and no mental homework for viewers. This ambition of producing unanimous readings of films has one goal: "more asses in the seats" (pardon the studio lingo). Fire-burning word-of-mouth endorsements and strong first-week grosses can make or break a blockbuster (what film can afford to allow spectators to make up their own free un-consensus?).

Walking out of an overdose of experimental film screenings, one enjoys free and often much more radical reactions, which would be difficult to reproduce on a studio test-audience questionnaire. Different opinions and mental associations flow from mostly non-narrative pictures lacking both the mythical hero structures and the moral polarities of good and evil common in popular Movies. For the untrained spectator, this could be bewildering and even dangerous, especially if you're on a first date. But to get positively lost in avant-garde films only takes practice, like quitting smoking, or recycling your TV. The pain lasts only a few minutes (or weeks), and then you find a new path through a work such as Un Chien Andalou by Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dali.

An experimental film requires a first time viewer to create her own reference points in order to welcome the unknown, and such interaction is challenging and sugar free. It is difficult to react to purely visual cinema (Brackage made mostly silent films) and even harder to find a language to communicate your own reaction, especially if you never suffered through film school. Perhaps this is why avant-garde films are usually the domain of academics rather than the loud and jazzy trailers before your average blockbuster. But experimentation in cinema has established an ongoing - if little heard about - legacy; to navigate these films, you cannot rely only on pre-set button-pushing. You determine which way is front and back, and must realign the axis/horizon of your interpretative palette, that is, you are on your own, which can be frightening for a Friday night.

There are few things Hollywood fears more than a spectator/citizen being on his own, charting un-mediated realities without towing the line of freedom and satisfaction (in some kind of future) through the purchase of material objects and the feelings we have learned to associate with them. Control, fear and manipulation is at the heart of commercial movies. Experimental film - using the same medium - aims at the opposite: liberation, challenge, and individual reaction.

In the Q&A sessions in Karlstad, I observed several young audience members' disorientation from the experimental film screenings. Leif (24) did not know what to say about "Mothlight" by Brakhage, because it was unlike any other film he'd seen before. Hanna (18) liked the "Castro Street" by B. Baillie. Do you remember ever noticing or remembering specific colors in films? Sounds?

Experimental films embrace their own creation of chaos by abstraction and process. By allowing film-makers to control their work with their intuition and talent, and without financial issues as main concerns during production, the avant-garde engages a discourse rooted in personal consciousness and transformation. In the absence of heroes to support and enemies to fight, we have only our personal compasses to go by to navigate these special films' unique visions.


This article © 2003 by Cinemahead.