NOTES

PROLOGUE

1. Roland Barthes, Roland Barthes, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), p. 90.

2. Ibid.

3. Meaghan Morris, “Postmodernity and Lyotard’s Sublime,” Art and Text 16 (1984-1985), p. 45; this essay is reprinted in The Pirate’s Fiancee (New York: Verso, 1988).

4. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Illuminations (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), p. 234.

1. HISTORICALLY SPEAKING

1. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1979), p. 207.

2. “The First Statement of the New American Cinema Group” was first published in Film Culture, nos. 22-23 (Summer 1961). It was reprinted in P. Adams Sitney, ed., Film Culture Reader (New York: Praeger, 1970), from which I quote this passage (p. 83). Sitney’s writing on “visionary film” has contributed not only careful analyses of hundreds of films, providing a stylistic model and a formal history; it has also served a pedagogical function. Like so many of the artists, he came to criticism at an extraordinarily young age (14?)—perhaps explaining why, like Brakhage, he has written so much at a relatively young age. The participants at the meeting included Lionel Rogosin, Peter Bogdanovich, Robert Frank, Alfred Leslie, Edouard de Laurot, Ben Carruthers and Argus Speare Julliard, Adolfas Mekas, Gregory Markopoulos, Daniel Talbot, Guy Thomajan, Louis Brigante, Harold Humes, Bert Stert, Don Gillin, Walter Gutman, Jack Perlman, David C. Stone, Sheldon Rochlin.

3. Annette Michelson, “Film and the Radical Aspiration,” in Sitney, ed., Film Culture Reader, reprinted from Film Culture, no. 42 (Fall 1966).

4. Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-1977, ed. Colin Young (New York: Pantheon, 1980), p. 114.

5. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, p. 193.

6. Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1975), p. 40.

7. Barthes, Pleasure of the Text, pp. 20, 14.

8. Barthes, Roland Barthes, p. 69.

9. Metaphors on Vision by Stan Brakhage was a special, beautifully printed issue of Film Culture, no. 30 (Fall 1963). This quotation is from the first section. We are to “imagine the eye.” Other segments are titled “The Camera Eye” and “My Eye”— which might have influenced Snow’s Wavelength: “My eye, turning toward the imaginary, will go to any wave-lengths for its sights.” Later passages are titled “Move Meant” and “State Meant.” Like so many avant-garde filmmakers, Brakhage is fascinated with language, and like other avant-garde filmmakers, his films are silent. The influence of the man, his films, and his teaching has been incalculable. This issue also begins another practice so central to criticism of this work: the interview with the artist. The recent University of California book by Scott MacDonald, A Critical Cinema, carries on this tradition of oral history and interpretation, including a significant number of women filmmakers.

10. I raised the funds for this endeavor through the Center for Twentieth Century Studies. Public performances had audiences of mainly students, with only two or three faculty in attendance. The interesting, awkward, and inadvertently funny tapes (Paik is so bemusedly bored and sleepy that he completely bewilders the interviewer; unwittingly, the interviewer imitates Bail lie’s body gestures, like a monkey/mirror effect) include clips and interviews with Bail lie, Paik, Bartlett, Hindle, Brakhage, Sitney, Clarke, Beck, and Mekas.

11. Stephen Heath, “Repetition Time: Notes around ‘Structural/Materialist Films,’ ” Wide Angle, 2, no. 3 (1978), p. 11. This important essay is more intricate than my extraction; I analyze his argument in greater detail in chapter 5.

12. “The First Statement of the New American Cinema Group,” pp. 81, 83.

13. Yvonne Rainer, “Working Title: Journeys from Berlin/1971,” October 9 (Summer 1979), p. 90.

14. Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Screen 16, no. 3 (Autumn 1975), p. 18.

15. Roland Barthes, “Lecture in Inauguration of the Chair of Literary Semiology, College de France,” October 8 (Spring 1979), p. 12.

16. Barthes, Roland Barthes, p. 103.

17. Neil Hertz, “Two Extravagant Teachings,” Yale French Studies, no. 63 (1982), p. 67.

18. Shoshana Felman, “Psychoanalysis and Education: Teaching Terminable and Interminable,” Yale French Studies, no. 63 (1982), p. 33.

19. Quoted in Felman, “Psychoanalysis,” p. 35.

20. Barthes, “Lecture,” p. 15.

21. Barthes, Roland Barthes, p. 121. This fragment is titled “Marriage” and speaks of the connections of that institution to narrative. His example is adultery as a source of expectations. In addition, in The Pleasure of the Text he wrote: “Death of the father would deprive literature of many of its pleasures. . . . As fiction, Oedipus was at least good for something . . .” (47). The central figuration of his marriage and children is proclaimed over and over again by Brakhage, with Sitney documenting his career by his marriage date in his brief introduction to Metaphors on Vision. Within the counterculture mentality, this makes Brakhage perhaps a bit of an anomaly—at least verbally argued if not in actuality, making him a family man.

22. Dick Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style (London: Methuen, 1979), pp. 2, 84. I am using style in Hebdige’s larger sense as a resistance, a refusal that exists in moments of conjuncture. Hebdige worked on punk; in the United States, graffiti was a pertinent example.

2. VISIONARY FILM AND SEXUAL DIFFERENCE

1. Peter Wollen, “ ‘Ontology’ and Materialism in Film,” Screen 17, no. 1 (Spring 1976), reprinted in Readings and Writings: Semiotic Counter-Strategies (London: Verso, 1982). In this lucid essay, Wollen documents the shift from a Bazinian ontology, or “reproducing natural objects and events without human intervention,” to an ontology of the “photo-chemical process . . . setting up an alternative to the cinema of reproduction or representation . . . a displacement of. . . ‘ontology’ . . . a rift between modernism and traditionalism that marked all the arts during the first decades of this century.” He points to the difference, as well, between an ontology of “idealism” (Sitney) and one of materialism (Peter Gidal). Furthermore, the materialism of Godard is differentiated from the materialism of Straub, placing Godard’s materialism within the purview of Brecht. This essay was a response to the U.S. avant-garde proponents’ various challenges to the European narrative experimentation. Thus, it can be read in dialogue with Michelson’s, detailed earlier. For both sides, Eisenstein and, to a degree, Godard, are pivotal. See also my presentation of Mekas in the last chapter, particularly regarding Godard.

2. P. Adams Sitney, Visionary Film (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974, 1979). My quotations are from the 1974 edition. For many years, this book has been one of the few sources available with detailed information about these films. After an initial rush of late 1960s and early 1970s books, e.g., by Sheldon Renan, An Introduction to the American Underground Film (London: Studio Vista, 1968), David Curtis, Experimental Film, and anthologies by Sitney and Gregory Battcock, relatively few books dealt with this material. Sitney’s almost had the field to itself, becoming a dominant reading. While Michelson and Sitney share, as it were, the same taste and have similar passionate commitments, their intellectual premises diverge—Michelson positions her arguments within Soviet art.

3. Mulvey’s system, predicated on a textual analysis of the films of Hitchcock and Sternberg, is now being lifted off and applied to still photography and painting in explications which, along with the specificity of cinema, fail to note context, history, or the particularities of Lacanian analysis.

4. Mulvey “Visual Pleasure,” p. 18.

5. Michelson, “Film and the Radical Aspiration.”

6. Janet Bergstrom, “The Avant-Garde: Histories and Theories,” Screen 19, no. 3 (Autumn 1978). Her reference, unlike Michelson’s detailed analysis, is more in passing. Thus, this comparison is a bit far-fetched.

7. Teresa de Lauretis, Alice Doesn’t (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), p. 81. This point is argued around Michael Snow’s Presents, including his remarks in an after the film question session with Snow at the Art Institute in Chicago, which I attended with de Lauretis and Danielson.

8. Noel Burch, A Theory of Film Practice, trans. Helen Lane (New York: Praeger, 1973); the French edition was published in 1969. Burch maps a series of formal oppositions, including the “absence of dialectics” and “complex dialectics,” the “structural use of sound,” and the “two kinds of space,” including off-screen space. Here, Michelson’s edict that form must be raised to ideological content is a working premise. That practice was theory, as suggested in his title, was a crucial argument, again reminiscent of Soviet film; thus, using other theories to elucidate the films, already theoretical texts, was viewed as redundant, constrictive.

9. Laura Mulvey, “Changes: Thoughts on Myth, Narrative and Historical Experience,” History Workshop journal, no. 23 (Spring 1987), pp. 6-7.

10. De Lauretis, Alice Doesn’t, p. 74.

11. Constance Penley, “The Avant-Garde and Its Imaginary,” Camera Obscura 2, p. 18.

12. Ibid., p. 19.

13. Constance Penley, “The Avant-Garde: Histories and Theories,” Screen 19, no. 3 (Autumn 1978), p. 118.

14. Ibid.

15. Renato Poggioli, The Theory of the Avant-Garde (New York: Harper and Row, 1968, 1971). Poggioli, speaking of the literary, historical avant-garde, discerns its connections with romanticism, but not negatively so. He charts a typology of avant-garde “attitudes,” including nihilism, agonism, futurism, decadence, and alienation. His model perches somewhere between the French symbolists and Marxism, including chapters on fashion and taste along with technology. He argues that criticism of avant-garde has been primarily polemical, either for or against, and notes in his prologue that “critics have not paid much attention to its . . . manifestations,” p. 1.

16. Bergstrom, “The Avant-Garde,” p. 121.

17. Ibid., p. 125.

18. Ibid., pp. 126, 127.

19. As I stated earlier, Bloom’s evaluation of the poets, seen as analogous to U.S. filmmakers, is Sitney’s focus rather than Bloom’s method, increasingly indebted to psychoanalysis. I have interpreted Freud’s writing on anxiety differently from Bloom—as a model of contradiction, one in which Freud acknowledges that the subject, in this instance, might more likely be a woman—this in Inhibitions, Symptoms, and Anxiety (1925-1926). As this text is close to Beyond the Pleasure Principle in time and argument, this shift to a female subject, albeit barely mentioned as an afterthought in Inhibitions, troubles, for me, Bloom’s oedipal reading. Furthermore, in this construct, Freud’s shifts from the “unconscious” to the conscious, the ego, thereby suggesting why Sitney’s argument, with its premises in Bloom, stays with the conscious—so does Freud, in this instance. Thus, the debate is as much with Freud as with the U.S. phenomenology approach as ignoring Freud.

20. Helen Elam, in Modern American Critics since 1955, ed. Gregory Jay, 1988 (Detroit: Gale), p. 33.

21. De Lauretis, Alice Doesn’t, p. 119.

22. Ibid., p. 120.

23. Ibid., p. 123.

24. Elam. p. 33.

25. Stan Brakhage, Metaphors on Vision, Film Culture, no. 30 (Fall 1963). There are no page numbers in this issue, so I will note the quotations by the (few) side-headings. This passage is from “Metaphors on Vision.”

26. Brakhage, “The Camera Eye.”

27. Brakhage, “My Eye.”

28. Ibid.

29. Brakhage, “From a letter to a very dear friend and severe critic of Anticipation of the Night (1958).”

30. Brakhage, “Letter to a Friend, 1959.”

31. Elam, p. 30.

32. Harold Bloom, in The Breaking of the Vessels (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982).

33. De Lauretis, Alice Doesn% p. 83.

34. VeVe A. Clark, Millicent Hodson, and Catrina Neiman, The Legend of Maya Deren: A Documentary Biography and Collected Works, Film Culture, nos. 72-75. (New York: Anthology Film Archives/Film Culture, 1984), pp. xii, xiv, xxi.

35. Rudolf Arnheim, “To Maya Deren,” Film Culture, no. 24 (Spring 1962), reprinted in Film Culture Reader, ed. P. Adams Sitney (New York: Praeger, 1970), pp. 84-85.

36. Phillip Drummond, “Textual Space in Un Chien Andalou,” Screen, 18, no. 3 (Autumn 1977), p. 64. This is a long, extremely detailed, shot-by-shot analysis of certain sections of the film, including production history and biographical data, though Drummond says it is only a partial analysis, part of a larger project. It focuses on an avant-garde, very short film—a rare occurrence—positioning its arguments within alternate rather than dominant cinema. In many ways, Drummond employs what Foucault would call an archeology, or an analysis of discourses in and surrounding the film.

37. Rohauer has also rereleased Buster Keaton’s films and withdrawn them, held up in legal battles, as the argument goes.

38. Drummond, “Textual Space,” p. 57.

39. Quoted from Sitney, Visionary Film, p. 3.

40. Drummond, “Textual Space,” p. 62.

41. Ibid., p. 65.

42. De Lauretis, Alice Doesn’t, p. 157.

43. Drummond, “Textual Space,” pp. 102-103.

44. Linda Williams, “The Prologue to Un Chien Andalou: A Surrealist Film Metaphor,” Screen 17, no. 4 (Winter 1976-1977). Drummond takes issue with Williams’s analysis of the opening twelve shots.

45. Sigmund Freud, “The ‘Uncanny,’” Standard Fdition, vol. 17 (London: Hogarth Press, 1964), p. 252.

46. Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure,” p. 7.

47. Ibid., p. 6.

48. Drummond, “Textual Space,” p. 72.

49. Ibid., p. 79. The Keaton point is made on p. 78. I didn’t notice this resemblance until I read Drummond; the longer comparison with Keaton’s One Week is mine, but it is an aftereffect of Drummond. I never would have come up with it on my own.

50. I refer to an earlier quotation and argument by Drummond. That this essay was also positioned at a turning point in the narrative-avant-garde debate in England, around the editorial board of Screen, a debate which would shortly thereafter travel to the United States, should be noted.

51. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality (New York: Random House, 1978, 1980).

52. Julia LeSage, “The Human Subject—You, He, or Me?” Screen 16, no. 2 (Summer 1975), p. 77.

53. Ellen Willis, “Radical Feminism and Feminist Radicalism,” in The 60s without Apology (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), pp. 105-106.

54. Andreas Huyssen, “The Cultural Politics of Pop,” After the Great Divide (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), p. 143. Huyssen looks at the U.S. art scene from his German context, granting a clarity and distantiation. The differences between the reception and circulation of pop art in the United States and Germany are intriguing.

55. See note 1 to this chapter, above, and Wollen’s essay. This dispute between contemporary European cinema and the U.S. avant-garde is picked up in my last chapter. See also Michelson, “Film and the Radical Aspiration.”

3. VIDEO POLITICS

1. Theodore Roszak, The Making of a Counter Culture: Reflections on the Technocratic Society and Its Youthful Opposition (Faber, 1970). See also Alec Gordon, “Thoughts out of Season on Counter Culture,” in Contemporary Cultural Studies, ed. David Punter (London: Hangman, 1986), pp. 185-211. Gordon’s essay has directly and indirectly given me many ideas.

2. These are among the central figures for Gordon, sans communication and the cybernetic theorists, who I argue are critical.

3. Barbara London, “Video: A Selected Chronology, 1963-1983,” Art journal 45 no. 3 (Fall 1985), pp. 249-62. This was a special issue devoted to video, with the majority of the essays by women.

4. Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1969).

5. Katherine Dieckmann, “Electra Myths: Video, Modernism, Postmodernism,” Art journal 45, no. 3 (Fall 1985), p. 195.

6. Shamberg notes these affiliations in prefatory remarks; his book contains an initial section whose pages I have numbered. The second section, called content, I have labeled with tagged numbers, such as 8a. The material becomes increasingly practical (sometimes passionate, sometimes flip; both postures become cloying, as does the repetition of labeling terms like “information” and “design” repeated ad infinitum or nauseum). The book is a how and what to do manual, which includes the suggestion of taping weddings and bar mitzvahs and selling copies as entertainment. Shamberg also recommends making “pornographic tapes. You’ll find a market.” It took very little thought to co-opt (shall we say reify?) such notions.

7. Jean Baudrillard, “Requiem for the Media,” For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign (St. Louis: Telos Press, 1981), p. 173. The biblical invocations should not go unnoticed; along with Derrida, Baudrillard follows on the heels of the biblical catastrophists.

8. Ibid., p. 170.

9. Domus 522 (May 1973), p. 28.

10. Design Quarterly 78/79 (1979), pp. 6-18; also see Casabella 376 (1973), p. 30.

11. The video guerrillas’ assessment of television and the general state of culture, although estranged by language—high tech talk plus low slang plus esoterica—is extraordinarily accurate, almost prophecy in reverse. Rather than “the people,” corporations adopted their tactics.

12. Ant Farm participants had plans for a mobile university in a Ford truck and called themselves environmental nomads—shades of Deleuze and Guattari and traveling theory! The relation between D and G and the counterculture is examined in my last chapter, but the similarities begin here. Shamberg advocated media buses for these “cybernetic nomads,” who would live in their own inflatables: “Thus, the true university is no longer anchored to one place, but free to move in all directions to enhance indigenous cybernetic activity” (92a).

13. Linda Burnham, “Ant Farm Strikes Again,” High Performance 24 (1983), p. 27. This short piece contains a useful chronology of Ant Farm projects.

14. Shamberg argues that NASA made patriotism obsolete; who could think in terms of nations after shots of the world from space? Their “international” or “global” scope is still pertinent, taken up in arguments which depict the anonymity and evil of multinational corporations or bemoan the economic decline of the United States—actually, a monetary example of heterogeneity, a dispersal of economic centers to the East.

15. “TVTV: Video Pioneers 10 Years Later,” Send (Summer 1983), pp. 18-23.

16. Meaghan Morris, “Room 101 or a Few Worst Things in the World,” in Seduced and Abandoned: The Baudrillard Scene, ed. Andre Frankovits (Glebe, Australia: Stonemoss Services, 1984), pp. 91-117.

17. Fredric Jameson, “A Very Partial Chronology,” in The 60s Without Apology, ed. Sohnya Sayres, Anders Stephanson, Stanley Aronowitz, and Fredric Jameson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), pp. 182-183. See also his “Periodizing the 60s.” The difficulty of realizing a movement of collective protest and principles, precariously perched on the cult of individuality, and a very wealthy one at that, is apparent.

18. Jean Baudrillard, In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities or the End of the Social, trans. Paul Foss, Paul Patton, and John Johnston (New York: Semiotext[e], 1983), p. 84.

19. Jean Baudrillard, Simulations, trans. Paul Foss, Paul Patton, and Philip Baitchman (New York: Semiotext[e], 1983), p. 38.

20. Gilles Deleuze, “Plato and the Simulacrum,” October 27 (1984), pp. 47-56.

21. Baudrillard, “Requiem,” pp. 178, 179.

4. SURVEILLANCE AND SIMULATION

1. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1 (New York: Random House, 1978, 1980), p. 6.

2. Gene Youngblood, Expanded Cinema (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1970).

3. Roland Barthes, S/Z, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1974), p. 188.

4. Peter Burger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Michael Shaw (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984).

5. The film consists of clips from educational, military, and corporate films from the late forties and fifties. The amateur status of film, so embraced by Mekas and Michelson, along with filmmakers’ use of this degraded genre and bad style of filmmaking, is intriguing, a topic which Patricia Zimmerman has discussed.

6. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, p. 148.

7. The Heath passage was taken from a 1976 proseminar he conducted as a fellow of the Center for Twentieth Century Studies at the University of Wisconsin in Milwaukee; the Forrester passage is from her presentation at the 1979 conference on “Cinema and Language”; the Rose and Comolli excerpts are from the 1978 conference on “The Cinematic Apparatus.” Papers and further debates from these events are to be found in Cinema and Language, edited by Heath and Mellencamp, and The Cinematic Apparatus, edited by de Lauretis and Heath. We taped all the events of the film conferences, including “Conditions of Presence” and “Cinema Histories, Cinema Practices.” They would be a good source of primary information.

8. Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, trans. James Strachey (New York: Norton, 1961), pp. 9, 10, 11.

9. I transcribed the sound track; also, I single framed his films, the source of the written quotations. I should have asked the filmmaker for a copy of the script—this took untold hours of detailed work.

10. Deleuze, “Plato and the Simulacrum,” p. 47.

11. Baudrillard, Simulations, p. 1.

12. Ibid., p. 53.

13. Ibid., p. 52.

14. Baudrillard, In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities, p. 84.

15. Ibid., p. 69.

16. Ibid., p. 39.

17. Jean Baudrillard, “The Ecstasy of Communication,” in The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, ed. Hal Foster (Port Townsend, Wash.: Bay Press, 1983), pp. 126-133. I have collapsed several sentences and phrases from this essay.

18. Deleuze, “Plato and the Simulacrum,” pp. 47-56. The remainder of the quotations are from this translation.

19. Baudrillard, In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities, pp. 99-100.

20. Roland Barthes, “Writers, Intellectuals, Teachers,” Image-Music-Text, ed. Stephen Heath (London: Fontana/Collins, 1977), p. 191.

21. Barthes, Roland Barthes, p. 118. The heading of this passage, which I just now noticed, is “Readerly, writerly, and beyond.”

5. THEORETICAL OBJECTS

1. Jean-Francois Lyotard, “Acinema,” Wide Angle, 2, no. 3 (1978), pp. 53-54.

2. Meaghan Morris, “Postmodernity and Lyotard’s Sublime,” Art and Text 16 (Summer 1984-85), p. 45; reprinted in The Pirate’s Fiancee (London: Verso, 1988).

3. Barthes, Roland Barthes, p. 159. “He has always regarded the (domestic) ‘scene’ as a pure experience of violence, to the degree that, wherever he encounters it, the scene always inspires fear, as though he were a child, panic-stricken. . . .” When I first read this passage, I thought of Critical Mass.

4. Roland Barthes, “Change the Object Itself,” Image-Music-Text, p. 167.

5. Benjamin, “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” Illuminations, p. 160.

6. Heath, “Repetition Time,” p. 6.

7. Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” Illuminations, p. 263.

8. Adrienne Rich, “When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision,” On Lies, Secrets and Silence (New York: Norton, 1979), p. 35.

9. Barthes, “Change the Object Itself,” p. 166.

10. Philip Leider, “Bruce Conner: A New Sensibility,” Art Forum 6 (November 1962), p. 31.

11. Peter Wollen, “Postmodernism,” a talk at the Center for Twentieth Century Studies in 1984, if my memory is correct; or is that remembrance?

6. POSTMODERN TV

1. For example, see Andreas Huyssen, “The Hidden Dialectic: The Avant-Garde-Technology-Mass Culture,” in The Myths of Information: Technology and Postindustrial Culture, ed. Kathleen Woodward (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, Coda Press, 1980), pp. 151-164; “The Search for Tradition: Avant-Garde and Postmodernism in the 1970s,” New German Critique 22 (Winter 1981), pp. 23-40.

2. Andreas Huyssen, “Mapping the Postmodern,” New German Critique 33 (Fall 1984), pp. 5-52.

3. In The Anti-Aesthetic, pp. 57-82.

4. Huyssen, “Mapping the Postmodern,” p. 27.

5. There are comments in Huyssen’s essay which disturb me. For example, “Without succumbing to the kind of feminine essentialism which is one of the more problematic sides of the feminist enterprise . . .” (p. 28). It is not essentialism which is troubling; it is “one of the more”—what are the other problems?

6. Ibid., p. 28.

7. Edited by Hal Foster for Bay Press, 1983.

8. Foster, “Postmodernism: A Preface,” in The Anti-Aesthetic, p. xii.

9. Alice Jardine, “In the Name of the Modern: Feminist Questions d’apres Gynesis (a Tape Play),” delivered at a seminar series on modernism.

10. Another comment in Huyssen’s “Mapping the Postmodern” is troubling: “But one might want to stop talking of postmodernism altogether, and take Barthes’ writing for what it is: a theory of modernism which manages to turn the dung of post-68 disillusionment into the gold of aesthetic bliss” (p. 42).

11. Edward Said, “Opponents, Audiences, Constituencies and Community,” in The Anti-Aesthetic, p. 158.

12. Ibid., p. 157.

13. Ibid., p. 155.

14. Baudrillard, “The Ecstasy of Communication,” in The Anti-Aesthetic, pp. 126-133, specifically p. 130. I have collapsed several sentences and phrases from this essay—another example of Baudril lard’s religious, priestly, indeed Catholic bent, also evident in “Requiem for the Media,” an essay divided into the stages of the high mass. Simulations, for example, opens by quoting Ecclesiastes. Something more than modern art is being mourned as absent or vanishing. The religiosity is also more than decrying new and false idols.

15. Morris, “Room 101,” pp. 91-117. Another quotation from this marvelous essay: “the murderous messiness of mass media culture implies something profoundly un-European; and that the lost ‘reality’ we mourn can sound remarkably like a declension of classical European (academic) values. The wondrous description of Disneyland . . . depends . . . on our acceptance that the American social is—really— infantile, banal, childish,” p. 100.

16. Ibid., p. 98.

17. Fredric Jameson, “Postmodernism and Consumer Society,” The Anti-Aesthetic, p. 115. This is argued amid his position on “pastiche: in a world in which stylistic innovation is no longer possible . . . and will involve the necessary failure of art and the aesthetic, the failure of the new and the imprisonment in the past.”

18. Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past, vol. 1 (New York: Random House, 1981), p. 42.

19. Tania Modleski, “The Terror of Pleasure: The Contemporary Horror Film and Postmodern Theory,” Studies in Entertainment: Critical Approaches to Mass Culture, ed. Tania Modleski (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986).

20. Jameson, “Postmodernism and Consumer Society,” p. 125.

21. Ibid., p. 119.

22. Ibid., p. 125.

23. The debt of the postmodern debate to architectural works and writing is significant and perhaps as determining as television. For example, see Jameson’s introduction to the recent translation of Jean-Francois Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition, or earlier writings by Robert Venturi, e.g., Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture.

24. These are the arguments made, I reiterate, by Burger in Theory of the Avant-Garde.

25. Sigmund Freud, jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious (New York: Norton, 1960), p. 155. I have written in greater detail on this text in “Jokes and Their Relation to the Marx Brothers,” in Cinema and Language, ed. Stephen Heath and Patricia Mellencamp (Frederick, Md.: University Publications, 1983), pp. 63-78.

26. Barthes, Roland Barthes, p. 81. To refer back to Deleuze, for a caution: before any rush to embrace this decentering of flat-footed mastery, it should be noted that paternal lineage, and Plato at that, is still intact; furthermore, the theory (perhaps any model of liberation) smacks of surrealism—with its positioning of women as muse/lover.

27. Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, p. 6.

28. Jean-Francois Lyotard, “Philosophy and Painting in the Age of Their Experimentation: Contribution to an Idea of Postmodernity,” Camera Obscura 12 (1984), p. 119.

29. Freud, jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, pp. 204, 144, 149, and 155. After writing this essay about Wegman for the Society for Cinema Studies conference, I discovered (to my research chagrin) an essay by Craig Owens on Wegman: “William Wegman’s Psychoanalytic Vaudeville,” Art in America 71 (March 1983), pp. 100-109. I recommend it, with the disclaimer that any resemblance between Owens’s essay and this one is coincidental.

30. Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, p. 24.

31. Ibid., p. 18.

32. Ibid., p. 30.

33. Michael Smith, “Acting/Non-Acting,” Performance Art Magazine 2 (1979), p. 14.

34. Smith, “Acting/Non-Acting,” p. 13.

35. Barthes, “Lecture,” pp. 4-5.

36. Jean Baudrillard, “Requiem for the Media,” For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign, p. 177. Baudrillard—picking up where Shamberg and other video visionaries, along with Paik, left off—disagrees with their dream of access, of artist producers, of pluralism: “Reversibility has nothing to do with reciprocity . . . cybernetic systems put this complex regulation and feedback to work without any ‘responsibility’ in exchange. This is indeed the system’s surest line of defence, since it thus integrates the contingency of any such response in advance” (181). He argues against the “revolutionary” solution that “everyone becomes a manipulator”: “because this revolution at bottom conserves the category of transmitter, which it is content to generalize as separated; transforming everyone into his own transmitter, it fails to place the mass media system in check” (182).

37. Huyssen, “The Hidden Dialectic,” p. 155.

38. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, pp. 200-203.

39. This is a reference taken from the introduction to Re-Vision: Essays in Feminist Film Criticism, ed. Mary Ann Doane, Patricia Mellencamp, and Linda Williams (Frederick, Md.: University Publications, 1984).

7. UNCANNY FEMINISM

1. Benjamin, “The Storyteller: Reflections on the Works of Nikolai Leskov.” Illuminations, p. 92.

2. Freud, “The ‘Uncanny,’ ” Standard Edition, vol. 18, p. 252.

3. Brothers Grimm, Grimms’ Fairy Tales, trans. Mrs. E. V. Lucas, Lucy Crane, and Marian Edwards (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1945), pp. 1-6.

4. Anne Sexton, “The Twelve Dancing Princesses,” from Transformations (1971); collected in The Complete Poems (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1981), p. 281.

5. I am referring to the essays by, for example, Foster and Huyssen in New German Critique and Craig Owens in The Anti-Aesthetic.

6. Lawrence Stone, “Only Women,” New York Review of Books 32, no. 6 (April 11, 1985), p. 21.

7. Raymond Durgnat, “Amazing Grace,” American Film 11, no. 4 (January-February 1986), p. 35.

8. Dick Hebdige, “Posing . . . Threats, Striking . . . Poses: Youth, Surveillance, and Display,” Substance 37/38, (1983), pp. 85, 86. I have collapsed remarks from several paragraphs in this very interesting essay concerning youth subcultures—a topic which overlaps to a vague degree Condit’s concern with adolescence or moments of passage, and an area or approach which can be applied fruitfully to the “subcultures” of the art scene, including avant-garde, independent filmmaking.

9. Mary Russo, “Female Grotesques: Carnival and Theory,” from her manuscript for Feminist Studies/Critical Studies, ed. Teresa de Lauretis (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986).

10. Perhaps more than other divides, for example, between art and mass culture, the gap between men and women is the one that needs to be acknowledged, a division enhanced by sexual difference as the kingpin difference. As de Lauretis wrote in Alice Doesn’t, “It may well be, however, that the story has to be told differently. Take Oedipus, for instance.” I love the timing of the last sentence, p. 156.

11. “Postmodern TV” details a model of postmodernism as it relates to video and feminism.

12. Hal Foster, October 34 (1985), pp. 64, 65, 69. This last reference is comparable to other marginal allusions to feminism—for “feminists,” for “minorities,” for “tribal peoples.” Taxonomy is not innocent, no matter how qualified by quotations.

13. Mary Ann Doane, Patricia Mellencamp, and Linda Williams, “Feminist Film Criticism: An Introduction,” Re-Vision: Essays in Feminist Film Criticism, p. 15.

14. Teresa de Lauretis, “Aesthetic and Feminist Theory: Rethinking Women’s Cinema,” New German Critique, no. 34 (Winter 1985), pp. 164, 168.

15. Jameson, “Postmodernism and Consumer Society,” in The Anti-Aesthetic, p. 125.

16. Roland Barthes, “Change the Object Itself: Mythology Today,” Image-Music-Text, pp. 167-168. This short, five-page essay is an update of Barthes’s earlier work on mythology—the latter, cited by Foster.

17. De Lauretis, Alice Doesn’t, p. 186. The end of this book, like that of the classical Hollywood film, circles back to the beginning: “In the heart of Looking-Glass country, between her fifth and sixth moves across the chessboard, Alice comes to the center of the labyrinth of language,” p. 1.

18. Sexton, “Briar Rose (Sleeping Beauty),” The Complete Poems, p. 293.

19. Russo, “Female Grotesques.”

20. Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Helene Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), pp. 317-318.

21. Russo, “Female Grotesques.”

22. Quoted from Russo.

23. I transcribed the videotapes and hope the quotations are accurate.

24. Benjamin, “The Storyteller,” Illuminations, p. 92.

25. Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, p. 317.

26. Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Parody (New York: Methuen, 1985), p. 72. Her chapter “The Paradox of Parody,” pp. 69-83, discusses Bakhtin’s writings, taking issue with his negative regard toward modern parody, what she calls “his rejection of the contemporary.” Thus Hutcheon argues (p. 71) that “we should look to what the theories suggest, rather than what the practice denies. . . .”

27. Ibid., pp. 92, 99.

28. Benjamin “The Storyteller,” Illuminations, p. 87.

29. Ibid., p. 102.

30. Ibid., p. 100.

31. De Lauretis, “Aesthetic and Feminist Theory,” p. 160.

32. Benjamin, “The Storyteller,” Illuminations, p. 94.

33. Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, p. 316.

34. Herbert Blau, “Comedy since the Absurd,” Modern Drama 25, no. 4 (December 1982), pp. 555, 556.

35. Freud, “The ‘Uncanny/ “ p. 250.

36. Ibid., p. 235.

37. Ibid., p. 231.

38. Sigmund Freud, “Medusa’s Head,” Standard Edition, vol. 18, p. 273.

39. Benjamin “The Storyteller,” Illuminations, p. 86.

40. Adrienne Rich, “Natural Resources,” The Dream of a Common Language (New York: Norton, 1978), p. 61.

8. LAST SCENE IN THE STREETS OF MODERNISM

1. David Lodge, Small World (New York: Warner Books, 1984), p. 74.

2. Teresa de Lauretis, “From a Dream of Woman,” Cinema and Language (Frederick, Md.: University Publications, 1983), pp. 21-22.

3. Sigmund Freud, Delusion and Dream (Boston: Beacon Press, 1956), p. 33.

4. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Los Angeles: University of California Press), p. 94.

5. Benjamin, “A Berlin Chronicle,” Reflections, p. 3.

6. Thomas Bulfinch, Mythology (New York: Dell, 1959), p. 125.

7. Benjamin, “Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century,” Reflections, p. 157.

8. Patrice Petro, Joyless Streets: Women and Melodramatic Representation in Weimar Germany (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988); the quotation is taken from her dissertation, University of Iowa, p. 69.

9. Andreas Huyssen, “Mass Culture as Woman: “Modernism’s Other,” Studies in Entertainment (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), p. 189.

10. Benjamin, “A Berlin Chronicle,” Reflections, p. 8.

11. Meaghan Morris, “At Henry Parkes Motel,” unpublished manuscript; a version is available in “Working Papers,” Center for Twentieth Century Studies.

12. Benjamin, “A Berlin Chronicle,” Reflections, p. 31.

13. Umberto Eco, Postscript to The Name of the Rose (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983) p. 57.

14. Benjamin, “A Berlin Chronicle,” Reflections, p. 9.

15. Marguerite Duras, Hiroshima Mon Amour, trans. Richard Seaver (New York: Grove Press, 1961), p. 25.

16. Barthes’s “meditation” on mother culminates in Camera Lucida.

9. TAKING A CUE FROM ARIADNE

1. Foucault, Power/Knowledge, p. 193.

2. Rich, “When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision,” On Lies, Secrets and Silence, p. 35.

3. This was the initial meeting of KIWI, the women’s international organization for film and television; it took place in Georgia, USSR, in March 1988.

4. For a detailed, shot-by-shot analysis and reading of Thriller in conjunction with contemporary theory, e.g., Heath, de Lauretis, and Helene Cixous, see “Mimi’s Resistance: Strategies of Refusal in Sally Potter’s Thriller,” by Sonja Rein, master’s thesis, Department of Art History, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Rein’s transcription of the film, including her annotation of shots, is very helpful and her analysis is quite wonderful.

5. This conference was organized by de Lauretis for the Center for Twentieth Century Studies in April 1985.

6. Pam Cook, “The Gold Diggers: Interview with Sally Potter,” Framework 24 (Spring 1984), p. 26. This brilliantly lucid analysis by Potter is perhaps the best critique of the film, raising most of the issues I discuss. Because all of the sections I will quote are Potter’s, I will cite her name rather than Cook’s. It should, however, be noted that Cook is a significant intellect, along with Johnston and Mulvey, in the feminist-theory debates in England.

7. Film history so far has largely been left up to men, who have paid scant heed to the gendered bias of its writing. Thus, a strange paradox has emerged in this discipline: feminism has pervaded film theory, while the history of women, other than as luminous objects, has been overlooked. Equally, the application of much “feminist” film theory to Hollywood films has ignored the historical context in which the films were produced. Another divide is suggestive: theory as women’s work with history the domain of men. However, this, too, is rapidly changing.

8. I am referring to the essay by Hal Foster which I discussed in “Uncanny Feminism.” The scene of trauma, the daughter’s memory of separation, erupts into this very modern film.

9. Potter, p. 15.

10. Ibid., p. 14.

11. Ibid., p. 19.

12. Ibid., p. 25.

13. Ibid., pp. 15-16.

14. This is from the film.

15. The dialogue resembles writings from the early 1970s on “the cinematic apparatus,” particularly those of Metz and Baudry, which were minus feminism, never mind gender.

16. Monique Wittig, “One Is Not Born a Woman,” Feminist Issues, Winter 1981, p. 44.

17. At the Society for Cinema Studies annual meeting in Montreal, Kaja Silverman presented a chapter of her new book, The Acoustic Mirror, which contains her analysis of this film; her argument circled around a negative and positive Oedipus and female subjectivity. Because I had completed this essay four months prior to hearing this talk, I decided not to read Silverman’s analysis—the negative, ostrich model of scholarship. From what I heard, our takes are very different.

18. I am thinking particularly about recent British feminist debates about pleasure—reviving pleasure for feminism. I am unsure of the terms of this debate—given that pleasure was, for me, never dead.

19. Potter, p. 18; one can feel Potter’s irritation and passion regarding “formalism,” usually taken to be incompatible with feminism. And, as I argue in the early chapters, feminism was largely ignored by avant-garde filmmakers. However, this is history; it can change. Potter asks the critical question here: “What is the pleasure if it’s based on female pain?” This issue is also raised in the film clips which Rainer incorporates in her film.

20. Ibid., p. 20.

21. Paul Willemen, “An Avant-Garde for the Eighties,” Framework 24 (Spring 1984), p. 62. I have not done justice to this dense argument, which positions avant-garde resolutely against modernism without, however, taking into consideration the development of the postmodern critique in the United States. Willemen, so knowledgeable about avant-garde, argues through and for history and a politics of a narrative avant-garde.

22. Wittig, “One Is Not Born a Woman,” p. 43.

23. Ibid., p. 53.

24. Ibid.

25. Potter, p. 27.

26. Ibid., p. 12.

27. Jane Feuer, The Hollywood Musical (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982). This general argument runs throughout her book. See also Mellencamp, “The Spectacle and the Spectator: Looking Through the Hollywood Musical,” in Cine-Tracts.

28. Alexander Cockburn, “Don’t Look Now,” American Film 11, no. 4, p. 19.

29. Potter, p. 29.

30. Potter would disagree with Feuer and take her pleasure in formalism, critique, and revelation. This film thinks about the base of mass entertainment—particularly the female body, largely ignored by Feuer, as are most of the musical’s ramifications of gender. And, I agree with Potter: it is deeply pleasurable, as are many avant-garde films, narrative or not, which dissect the apparatus, entertaining us but in other ways.

31. Willemen, “Avant-Garde,” p. 61. Given that “reference” is so critical to postmodernism, Willemen’s argument for history might serve as a corrective to Jameson’s claim that postmodernism is the loss of history.

32. Potter, p. 12.

33. Ibid., p. 16.

34. Ibid.

35. Ibid., p. 20.

36. Sigmund Freud, “Female Sexuality,” Sexuality and the Psychology of Love, (New York: Collier Books, 1963). p. 194.

37. Ibid., p. 195.

38. Ibid., p. 197.

39. Sigmund Freud, “Some Psychological Consequences of the Anatomical Distinction between the Sexes,” Sexuality and the Psychology of Love, p. 191.

40. Freud, “Female Sexuality,” p. 195.

41. Ibid., p. 203.

42. This song is taken from the film’s sound track, which is available from Arcades. Cooper’s music includes twelve songs.

43. I await the publication of women writers on the history of Hollywood stars, particularly the silent film stars. I want to thank Mary Yelanjian for transcribing the sound track, which is very succinct, precisely written, like the visual track.

44. The lyrics of this performance were almost impossible for me to discern. I suspect that the sound mix was not as good as it could have been—I get the feeling that money ran out. Most critics don’t realize the time, cost, and detailed effort that go into mixing sound.

45. Sigmund Freud, “Identification,” Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, trans. James Strachey (New York: Norton, 1959), pp. 37-42. Freud’s opening sentences are a giveaway, linking identification, like everything else under the sun and in the universe, to the Oedipus complex: “It (identification] plays a part in the early history of the Oedipus complex. A little boy will exhibit a special interest in his father; he would like to grow like him and be like him. . . . This behaviour has nothing to do with a passive or feminine attitude towards his father (and towards males in general); it is on the contrary typically masculine.” For women, identification, particularly with mothers, involves an illness or is hysterical. For men, it involves growing up.

46. Potter, p. 24.

47. Willemen, “Avant-Garde,” p. 69.

48. Scott MacDonald, “Points of View: An Interview with Babette Mangolte,” Afterimage 12, nos. 1 and 2 (Summer 1984). p. 12.

49. This is the crucial argument for Willemen, the marking of history as politics within film.

50. Potter, p. 21.

51. Potter, pp. 25-26.

10. IMAGES OF LANGUAGE AND INDISCREET DIALOGUES

1. De Lauretis, Alice Doesn’t, p. 156.

2. Yvonne Rainer, “More Kicking and Screaming from the Narrative Front/Backwater,” Wide Angle 7, nos. 1 and 2, p. 8. This is a sketch of the film—working thoughts and scenes as a dialogue with an imagined audience response. This special double issue of Wide Angle, which I edited, was the publication of the proceedings of the conference. “Cinema Histories, Cinema Practices II.”

3. Rainer, “More Kicking and Screaming,” p. 11.

4. Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1978), p. 106. See also Foucault, Discipline and Punish. This speaking eye is frequently operative in women’s melodrama, particularly regarding medical discourse. For an acute analysis of the “woman’s film,” see Mary Ann Doane, The Desire to Desire (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987) and her essay (as well as the introduction by Doane, Mellencamp, and Williams) in Re- Vision: Essays in Feminist Film Criticism.

5. Jacques Lacan, “Seminar on The Purloined Letter,” in French Freud, ed. Jeffrey Mehlman, Yale French Studies, p. 44.

6. Peter Wollen’s essay “The Hermeneutic Code,” Readings and Writings: Semiotic Counter Strategies (London: Verso Editions, 1982), ferrets out this analytical schema and applies it to Hitchcock’s films, with a detailed analysis of North by Northwest. Wollen’s recent work on Hitchcock is a fine example of textual analysis applying analytical constructs to the films—critical models which Hitchcock’s work can bear with little strain. Because Wollen’s style of writing is so succinct, difficult arguments are presented with such ease that the unwary reader might mistakenly construe them as apparent.

7. Lacan, “Seminar.” It is sometimes baffling how a simple alteration—a glance or a word—would adjust the historical terms of narrative, which repeatedly depict woman as a narrative image or empty position, a body without a soul.

8. Ibid., pp. 66, 71.

9. Ibid., pp. 66.

10. Ibid. On page 69, there is a clincher to this relation between the analyst as ravisher; Lacan’s bliss of ecstastic transference is claimed for the analyst, the “we who become the emissaries of all the purloined letters which at least for a time remain in sufferance with us in the transference.” In sufferance, indeed!

11. I have taken these quotations from the film, and thus they are not as accurate as they might have been if quoted from Rainer’s script. Reading this text, like her other scripts, would be a pleasurable experience; Rainer is also a writer.

12. Rainer, “More Kicking and Screaming,” p. 11. She appeals to the “spectator-of-my-dreams” who “has given equal attention to the fictions and the production of these fictions, to the social relations and to the representation of those relations.” This ideal spectator resembles Bakhtin’s “higher, super-receiver [I dislike this translation immensely—the Clark Kent or NFL version of wide “reception” theory] whose absolutely appropriate responsive understanding is projected either into a metaphysical distance or into a distant historical time. (A spare receiver.)” I like the imagined idea of a spare receiver—art’s pinch-hitter. What an artist’s and teacher’s and lover’s dream—an “absolutely appropriate responsive understanding.” See Tzvetan Todorov, Mikhail Bakhtin: The Dialogical Principle, trans. Wlad Godzick (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), p. 110.

13. Rainer, “More Kicking and Screaming,” p. 12.

14. I have taken these quotations from Stephen Heath’s paper “Male Feminism,” delivered at the MLA and subsequently published in a collection of essays, Male Feminism. This topic has been powerfully explored by Modleski in Feminist Studies/Critical Studies.

15. Blau, “Comedy since the Absurd,” p. 557.

16. Meaghan Morris, “The Pirate’s Fiancee,” in Power; Truth, Strategy, ed. Morris and Paul Stratton (Sydney: Feral Publications, 1980), p. 33. This essay clearly affected Rainer (as it did me when I first encountered it), who took its advice and position. Regarding Foucault’s work Morris writes, “the point is to use it and not to ‘apply’ it.” The energy and wit of her writing is contagious—like the film. The powerful women behind the scenes, pulling all the strings and making themselves heard along with Rainer, are, of course, Trisha Brown, but including Morris and Martha Rosier. Jack didn’t stand a chance, although Rainer and Rosier let him off the hook at the end when they return to the “About Men” column in the New York Times Magazine—and Rosler’s voice-over states: “It is a matter of interest whether men are or are not presented as hard surfaces . . . masculinity as uncaringness and unthinkingness. . . . It does matter. . . .” In their earlier confrontation with this essay, they harshly critiqued the attention bestowed on sensitive males as yet another example of the continual focus on male subjectivity.

17. These quotations are taken from the manuscript of Mary Russo’s “Female Grotesques: Carnival and Theory,” in Feminist Studies/Critical Studies.

18. Part of the recent history of film studies involves the legitimation of heavy-duty and constant talk about sexuality, disguised as “discourse.”

19. During this terrific scene, the audience begins to fight with each other, oblivious to the escalating bloody, violent film nightmare. Dutiful onstage, Jack is also oblivious to the pandemonium of rebelling spectators; perhaps like us, they just can’t stand him and his endless, platitudinous analysis anymore. This is the comically black underside of “going to the movies” akin to “going into analysis.” Perhaps it is also a displaced version of the artist explicating her films to audiences on the independent traveling circuit—usually standing onstage, in front of the screen which had just shown the “new work,”—a process that has its own dynamic or inertia, pleasures and dangers. I suspect the trek and the repetition must, in the end, be boring.

20. Morris, “Room 101,” p. 98. The writing is unstoppable, clever; for example, under the caption “famous last words,” Morris writes about Baudril lard’s conservative pessimism: “No more God, no more Subject, no more Philosophy of the Subject, no more Progress, Regress, History, Nature, Reality, Imaginary, Profit, Revolution, Repression, Representation, Power, Meaning, Production, Dialectic, Judgement, Criticism, War, Liberation, Capital, Class, Change, Exchange, Fiction, Value . . .” When read aloud, it quite makes hilarious sense, concluding with the clincher, after a pause of punctuation—the capitalized word “Death” (p. 103). This essay concludes a book in which the editor writes with comic candor about his editorship: “One immediate and widespread reaction was disbelief that it was actually I who was editing the book. Who was this Andre Frankovits and where was his curriculum vitae? Perhaps my name already sounds like a pseudonym” (p. 6).

21. Morris, “The Pirate’s Fiancee,” p. 152.

22. Helen de Michel, “Rainer’s Manhattan,” Afterimage 13, no. 5 (December 1985), p. 20.

23. Hutcheon, Theory of Parody, p. 8. It is disconcerting to realize the lack of acknowledgment of feminist influences on this book; for Hutcheon, feminism is merely an aside, a singular practice, a unimensional topic, albeit an interesting one; feminism, which is so apparent, is denied; I wonder why?

24. Ibid., pp. 32, 72.

25. Ibid., pp. 99, 101.

26. Ibid., pp. 101, 109.

27. Judy Stone, “Datebook,” San Francisco Chronicle; this was a review of the film’s opening at the Roxy Cinema in San Francisco; unlike most independent films, this feature-length film had “real” distribution and exhibition rather than the usual classroom, one-night stands of most alternative or avant-garde works.

28. For an explication of Bakhtin’s writings, most of which have not been translated into English (a volume is forthcoming from the University of Minnesota Press), Todorov’s compendium, Mikhail Bakhtin, was invaluable. I realize the reduction, however, of lifting quotations out of Bakhtin’s Soviet time and context, from Todorov’s context of fragments assembled as an argumentative whole. My ripping off this work is thus a questionable, timeless postmodern strategy of raiding—reaching back into another culture and another history—secondarily derived. This is not scholarly method and should be approached with caution.

29. Todorov quoting Bakhtin, p. 108.

30. Ibid., p. 178.

31. Ibid., p. 46.

32. Ibid.

33. Todorov, p. 39.

34. Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, ed. Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981).

35. Todorov quoting Bakhtin, p. 22.

36. Jean-Francois Lyotard, “Philosophy and Painting in the Age of Their Experimentation: Contribution to an Idea of Postmodernity,” Camera Obscura 12 (Summer 1984), p. 119.

37. I refer to the comprehensive exegeses of postmodernism by Andreas Huyssen in New German Critique, Hal Foster in New German Critique and The Anti-Aesthetic, and Fredric Jameson in these and other places; I discussed their arguments in earlier chapters. The first two writers invite feminists to join this dance. Jameson and Huyssen mourn the loss of history and story. The influence of Jameson’s writings on the debate has been incalculable. Ask anyone in the United States what postmodernism is and the reply will be a facile “pastiche.” Ask for a definition of pastiche and the answerer will oppose it to parody. Don’t pursue this line of questioning. Change the subject.

38. Heath, “Male Feminism.”

39. Russo, “Female Grotesques.”

40. Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas (New York: Harcourt, 1938), pp. 4, 18.

11. THE AVANT-GARDE, THE EVERYDAY, AND THE UNDERGROUND

1. Jonas Mekas, Movie Journal: The Rise of a New American Cinema, 1959-1971 (New York: Collier Books, 1972).

2. I have taken my quotations from an earlier translation/publication by Deleuze and Guattari, On the Line, trans. John Johnston (New York: Semiotext[e], 1983), which includes “Rhizome” by Deleuze and Guattari and “Politics” by Deleuze. The reason for retaining and including so many quotations from Mekas and D and G is the striking similarity between phrases and words, along with argument.

3. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986).

4. Deleuze and Guattari, On the Line, p. 2.

5. There are other analogies throughout A Thousand Plateaus that suggest that this comparison is operative throughout. The organizational principles of AA are against hierarchy and leadership, cross-cutting differences of race, class, sex, economics, education, age.

6. Scott MacDonald, A Critical Cinema: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), p. 30.

7. Alice A. Jardine, “Becoming a Body without Organs: Deleuze and His Brothers,” Gynesis: Configurations of Woman and Modernity (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), pp. 208-209.

8. Meaghan Morris made these points in a graduate seminar for the Modern Studies Program, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, during the spring semester, 1989.

9. Dana Polan, “Powers of Vision, Visions of Power,” Camera Obscura 18, pp. 106-119.

10. I received the protest letter in April or May 1989; the list of signers will grow, as this is also a petition, a call for action.

11. Meaghan Morris, The Pirate’s Fiancee: Feminism/Reading Postmodernism (London: Verso, 1988), p. 176.

12. Aronowitz, in The 60s without Apology; Jameson, in New German Critique and The Anti-Aesthetic.

13. Examples from Land’s (of course) multiple-choice exam include the following questions: “DOLLY SHOT: a) the basic technique used in filming Un Chien Andalou, b) Shot of a female Country and Western Singer; or c) Shot in which the camera, placed on a wheeled mount, moves closer to or away from a scene. . . . TAKE: a) What many public officials are on; b) A common name among Japanese men; or c) A run of the camera from start to finish.” Note: both the correct answers are c.

14. Doug Henwood, “The Empire’s New Clothes,” Village Voice, April 18, 1989, p. 59.

15. Bertrand Bellon and Jorge Niosi, The Decline of the American Economy, trans. Robert Chodos and Ellen Garmaise (Black Rose Books).

16. Freud, “Anxiety and Instinctual Life,” Standard Edition, vol. 22, p. 108.