The avant-garde melee has been a contest of contrarieties: popular culture versus art, narrative or not, epistemology against phenomenology, or ontology contraposed to ontology.¹ Intriguingly, the demarcations have been adduced not from films but from criticism. To an uncanny degree, P. Adams Sitney’s Visionary Film, published in 1974, has haunted subsequent renderings.² It is Sitney’s sectarian disquisition, in lockstep with the films, diaries, and letters of Brakhage, that is repudiated or upheld. Equally efficacious for feminist theory has been Laura Mulvey’s essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” published in Screen in England in 1975.³ This essay paved a yellow brick road for sophisticated books on female subjectivity and cinema, such as Alice Doesn’t and The Desire to Desire, and for the films of Sally Potter and Yvonne Rainer.

The mutual mise-en-scene of Sitney and Mulvey was the tail end of the counterculture and protest movements. Sexuality, work, liberation, negation, and opposition were key words which hooked up in popular slogans, art criticism, and continental theory. Freud’s sexual fetish linked up with Marx’s commodity fetish and reconnoitered in art and popular culture; this odd coupling overtly and covertly had a cultural field day. Both Mulvey and Sitney set their theorems in discord with institutions (including the economics and stylistic conventions of commercial/narrative cinema), endorsing alternative practices and sharing the “anti-establishment” conviction, so sovereign in the late 1960s and the 1970s, that aesthetics (the foregrounding of the cinematic apparatus) elided with “life-style” would precipitate political change, or at least signaled a radical break with the past. Both writers reflected (1) the decade’s obsession with sexuality, and (2) the rhetorical tactic of binary opposition. However, the similitude ends here. The differences were glaring. Regarding their respective use of theory, particularly psychoanalysis, never would the twain meet. Mulvey begins from a place and with a question which “visionary film,” aesthetic modernism, and the historical avant-garde cannot imagine: female subjectivity, pinpointing its exclusion.

Before I proceed with sexual difference, another skin-deep similarity between these two texts was a fervent belief in the radicality of form, the revolutionary aura of raw, revealed signifiers. It is important to note and remember the political depth of this conviction—that form, its disruption, alteration, and revelation, could change the world, or at least cinema. Along with Freud’s sexual fetish, Althusser’s rereading of Marx had instated imaginary relations, triggering analyses of the concealed “work” of films. The theoretical paragon advocated that deconstruction of techniques would uncover repressed social structures, including sexual difference. Or, from Brecht and later Godard, form as the intrusion and marker of ideology would disrupt and derail the text and spectator, casting illusionism aside for the new day to come. For Mulvey, unraveling the tight nexus of film’s system of looks (of camera, of spectator, and of characters), freeing the camera into “materiality” and the “audience into dialectics” is “the first blow” against “traditional film conventions” by radical filmmakers.⁴ “Continuity style” was under siege more than narrative per se. On the other side of this Maginot line, the visionary reading professed that this work, if already revealed, was the sign (signature) of the artist, equated with the ontology of cinema. For VF (my shorthand for Sitney’s Visionary Film), figuration and form were the signifiers of art and the “secrets of a soul.”

The acute differences between the aesthetics and the politics of form were concealed by critics on both sides of the humanism-theory divide calling up Soviet constructivism and Eisenstein as precursors. For example, Annette Michelson, in “Film and the Radical Aspiration,” a key text of the period, proclaimed a “divergence of radicalisms.”⁵ Janet Bergstrom invoked Eisenstein as an exemplar of form pointing to political meanings.⁶ To complicate these divergent overlaps, both positions ascribe to a comparable take on “modernism,” one derived from Clement Greenberg in defense of abstract expressionist painting, against representation, and on the side of “materialist” ontology and art. (As a qualification: Michelson begins with Eisenstein and does cite Harold Rosenberg, Walter Benjamin, and Marxist thought. Her premises are not Sitney’s.)

Another way to envision modernism is from the side of mass culture. This view is comparable to the “Americanism” endorsed by the Soviet avant- garde and the Prolecult in the 1920s, with a model of work and mass production derived from Detroit, Henry Ford, Taylorism, and the WPA, or to Walter Benjamjn, who already had conjoined Freud and Marx, along with taking art into mass culture. If the latter sites (like Diego Rivera’s murals in the Ford Museum) had become the intellectual objects beneath exegeses of modernism, the illusory division between mass culture and art might never have been instantiated as the tasteful, aesthetic standard for intellectuals which it is, in the United States.

As I stated, Mulvey and Sitney fixate on sexuality as both clue and answer to interpretation. While Mulvey stars Freud/Lacan, along with Hitchcock and Sternberg, elucidating her method, Sitney repudiates psychoanalysis. His denial, however, is merely a disavowal, the repressed as a structuring presence, or major premise. Sitney’s model, on the side of art (abstract expressionism) and predicated on the tenets of romanticism, is inspired by Harold Bloom and his Visionary Company. For Bloom, psychoanalysis agonistically functions as wellspring and raison d’etre of art (poetry) and patriarchy. Mulvey’s construct, on the side of popular culture and triggered by Lacan’s rereading of Freud through linguistics, is inspired by feminism and is akin to Juliet Mitchell, who takes Freud as an analysis rather than a defense of patriarchy. Mulvey divided and gendered the subject in the unconscious, in language, in representation. For Sitney, as for Brakhage and Arnheim, cinema existed outside the symbolic of language and beyond, or in spite of, the real—to a degree conflating not only the unconscious with the conscious but also the symbolic with the imaginary. Under the analogous sway of the romantic poets, VF detailed artistic form as a mythical pursuit of cinematic and sexual identity, reconstituting the triumph of the male artistic ego in its insatiable, and hence impossible, pursuit of desire, predicated, for Lacan, on loss and absence.

The unnoted centrality of Bloom and psychoanalysis to Visionary Film, along with the similarities between Brakhage and Bloom, is acutely ironic. While avant-garde devotees bemoan and smirk at contemporary theory, equating psychoanalysis with feminism and then denigrating both as obstacles to innate creativity, they fail to notice that psychoanalysis is at the heart of their favored romantic exegesis. Critical theory has mapped the debate as phenomenology versus epistemology, rarely mentioning psychoanalysis, itself historical, as a common site of these divergent analyses. Both sides have muddied the waters. Whether epistemology or phenomenology, whether theories of the unconscious or “ego psychology,” Freud provides a model of sexual difference which can only be denied with arduous difficulty.

For VF, sexuality was an internal, erotic, personal quest, a liberation into identity. For “VP” (again, my shorthand for Mulvey’s “Visual Pleasure”), sexuality was constructed by difference embodied not in the artist but in the social, including representation and fiction. For VF, the answer lay deep inside the unique, eternal “self”; for “VP,” the “subject” was a social construct. Or, as Teresa de Lauretis put it much later, it was “the problem of seeing, not as . . . a problem of ‘art,’ but as a questioning of identification and subject identity.”⁷ VF remained within traditional interpretations of Freud, beholden to the brave story of Oedipus; “VP” dissected its strategies, unraveled its system. While VF enshrines the world’s oldest hero, the suffering, creative male artist, giving him an international film pedigree dating back to Melies, “VP” investigates the tactics of this figure in narrative and theory.

Because these mighty renditions have been so imperious, so peremptory, burying many films in the wake, I will relentlessly belabor this pivotal section. The dispute over romanticism has become an “of course” for theory dissenters, a dismissive one-liner, a free-floating axiom like “essentialism or idealism,” killer points eliciting in-group assent in debates, but negative, one-word truisms rarely dissected. Thus, like The Terminator or Lazarus, romanticism returns to trouble theory. But this is the big city or Blade Runner version. Romanticism has been living a happy, suburban, authoritative life in English departments across the land. A 1980s version of what an early 1960s countercultural film might have been is Dead Poets’ Society, a big box-office draw where the unknown, sensitive, and supportive students break the rules, meet in a cave, read the romantic poets, and become actors, incited to learning, generational dignity, and rebellion by the modest antiauthoritarian, Robin Williams. Predictably, the site is an upper-class boys’ school in the 1950s, with young blonde things merely lustful objects. Fathers and school administrators are dogmatic to fascistic, old before their time, and the meek, downcast mothers are silent, pathetic. Like so many memories of the 1960s, the nostalgia for romanticism can also be heard as overtones in postmodernism, when men were boys and knew which side they were on. As Bloom’s reading of Freud, particularly his model of anxiety, now wends its way out of literature, wandering into film theory, it might be propitious to artificially resuscitate an old corpse in order to properly bury it—like the blood-soaked body of Asa Buchanan’s nephew on “One Life to Live,” which returns to haunt only the woman he raped; everyone else believes he is dead, and no one will believe her; she is hysterical, seeing things. Thus, rather like Freud telling endless bad jokes in Jokes and Their Relation to The Unconscious or like watching parades on television, this chapter involves a dulling dose of tedious repetition—or, positively, like a loop film, or filming someone eating, or reprinting the same image, becoming more granular with each generation.

Against academic humanism and eliding high theory with low but popular culture, “VP”s theoretical dissection and salvaging of Freud, in tandem with the Films of Hitchcock and Sternberg, uncovers a system of bipolarities, between spectacle and narrative, between looking and being looked at (reminiscent of John Berger in Ways of Seeing and Foucault in Discipline and Punish), between the active male (spectator and mover of the narrative) and the passive female as the object of his desirous gaze and story. Drawing on Freud’s Three Essays on Sexuality, particularly “The Sexual Aberrations,” his very short elucidation of fetishism, and Jacques Lacan’s writing on the mirror phase and narcissism, Mulvey reiterates Freud’s assessment of scopophilia: “In these perversions the sexual aim occurs in two forms, an active and a passive one.” Mulvey’s tag line, that woman was the “bearer not the maker of meaning,” is an apt epigram for the place of women within what can only be called “the dominant ideology” of both classical art and avant-garde.

Casting the spectator as voyeur or fetishist within the mechanisms of scopophilia or narcissism, a spectator analogous to the child in Lacan’s mirror stage, “woman” was simultaneously the ultimate pleasure and source of terror—for Freud, the contradictory sign of plenitude and castration. “Woman” was an obstacle that had to be overcome on the journey to the symbolic and identification with the father. Mulvey’s investigation is of classical narrative and its pleasured spectator, with a call, in the end, for the overthrow of its traditional conventions, which, since its inception, had featured beautiful, youthful women as stars. The critique of masculinity, aka patriarchy, is, however, a prerequisite for her political agenda as filmmaker and feminist, the reclamation of female desire in films and theory alike.

(The use of bipolarity, of opposition and conflict, was derived from Marx and dialectical materialism as argued by artists during the revolutionary period, for example, Eisenstein’s theory of art as conflict. Noel Burch’s analysis of film’s formal dialectics was loosely based on conflict.⁸ The second term of Marxism, materialism, circulated imprecisely as the revelation of film’s material grain, light, screen surface, and form. Mulvey has critiqued her own rhetorical use of binarisms: “The either/or binary pattern seemed to leave the argument trapped within its own conceptual frame, unable to advance politically . . . or suggest an alternative theory of spectatorship.”⁹ While I agree with the delimitation of difference to the sexual, binary logic signaled political and academic resistance amid a very real politics of protest. While dialectics might have been simplified and materialism evacuated by activists and theorists, rhetorical opposition was a strategy, not an error, and continues to serve a political purpose. In addition, the linguistic models on which this theory was predicated—the Russian formalists, Saussure, the Prague structuralists, and Benveniste—also incorporated binarisms, each term defined by, or containing, its opposite.)

While women such as Shirley Clarke, Marie Menken, Carolee Schneeman, Storm De Hirsch, Barbara Rubin, and Yoko Ono were making films, the majority of avant-garde films, unlike the Hollywood star system of worship and idealization, ignored women, figuring them (I repeat) as off-screen muse, mother, critic, or curator. When on screen, women were incidental, brief eruptions signaling male fantasy, whether “lyrical,” “picaresque,” or “mythopoetic.” I think here of Bruce Baillie’s To Parsifal and the brief appearance of the young naked woman in the forest as the phallic train snakes through and conquers the wilderness, restaging the nature-culture, female-male biological divide in this Wagnerian epic.

In Robert Nelson’s The Great Blondino, the Quixote hero falls asleep and dreams his recurring orgy footage of naked, pendulum-breasted party girls superimposed over his sleeping body. Along the mock-hero’s comic journey through the streets of San Francisco—a parody of Oedipus clinched by the last granular shot, which is of the Sphinx, with dreams of a horse’s castration and an ever-growing but fake penis joke along the way—a strutting prostitute lures the fool off the path, to a restaging of the breast/buttocks transformation scene of naked, artistic lust from Un Chien Andalou. (For Blondino, the woman dissolves into an easel; art is the object of his desire, interchangeable with sex.) She is a joke, truly lacking, signified as only sex/biology. Whether caricatured parody or emblem of nature and beauty, the female body is the guarantee of male desire and, I suspect, the declaration of the maker’s heterosexual preference and commitment to sexual liberation. In either case, the female body is only a brief, usually pathetic, marker, rarely an identity, character, or even significant presence.

When women do make the rare star turn, as in Warhol’s films, often men as drag queens or transvestites, the tale and the pleasure, or in the Warhol/ Morrissey films, displeasure, is homoerotic—from Cocteau, Smith, and Anger on, one dominant position for the male spectator of avant-garde, and one frequently linked to death. The representation of homosexuality rather than heterosexuality (with few films about “the couple”), replicated by the creation of a masculine band of cross-country disciples, is, on one hand, a confusion of roles and a scandalous challenge to conventions of representation, codes of censorship, and heterosexuality; on the other hand, the structuration is adolescent, involving youthful liberation and rebellion, centering, literally, on the phallus.

In Scorpio Rising, via James Dean, Marlon Brando, Elvis Presley, and Scorpio, the repressed of Hollywood cinema and the star system is addressed, in addition to representing the male body as the site of spectacle and sadomasochistic pleasure, including a plethora of crotch shots as climactic moments. Studded black leather jackets, unbuckled leather belts, waist-high camera tilts, and yellow road markers sensuously document the pleasure zone (and foreshadow high fashion of the 1980s). Drugs, scandal, celebrity, rock ‘n’ roll, violence, death, and, of course, sex are celebrated. Unlike the agitation of the female body as the site of spectacle and desire, the male body, perhaps what Barthes called a multiplicity of homosexualities and Foucault described as a multiplication of perversions, becomes the source of fascination. (Perhaps this partially explains the snug fit between The Pleasure of the Text and the reception of avant-garde films.) But whether liberation took a hetero or a homosexual form—like Blondino, Scorpio Rising also has an orgy scene with male bikers—the on-screen woman was worse off in Soho or San Francisco than in Hollywood: she was either an ordinary sex object, without glamor or high fashion, or there as a masquerade male; or she was just not there at all.

Avant-garde criticism also inscribed a masculine bias, reminiscent of the surrealists who worshiped “woman” as muse, the woman behind the man ploy. That the avant-garde was located amid the counterculture, which endorsed women’s liberation and the women’s movement along with “sexual liberation,” suggests a slippery paradox, a containment comparable to postmodernism in the 1980s, which argues that feminism (like “woman” to modernism) has been crucial to postmodernism but is not able to locate many examples or quote any feminist writing. The historical trail in this regard is straight and consistent: the historical avant-garde was fascinated with “woman” as muse, the U.S. avant-garde with “women’s lib” as sexual liberation, and postmodernism with feminism.

Women are caught in a logic of contradiction, being slapped in the face and kissed on the cheek at the same time. We are crucial, but absent. Critics and artists, like the film spectator, enact disavowal, pretending that women have not made films or written about these issues. Clinically speaking, disavowal protects against fear of castration; from a social perspective, it is a power move of exclusion, applicable to differences of sex, race, culture, and age. If one grew up in these equivocations, without theoretical models of feminism, it took time to notice women’s absence or unimportance amid all the radical politics, complimentary flattery, and brazen acknowledgment.

The lack of interest in female subjectivity is also covered up by displacing the problem onto other issues, leading the argument astray, often under a banner of radical change. The first displacement was onto a critique of the institutions of art; the second, into a devaluation of the tangible art object and artist (the central canons of the historical avant-garde, according to Peter Burger). With the U.S. avant-garde, coincident with the film theory of, for example, Jean-Louis Comolli and Jean-Louis Baudry, the concern was the revelation of the film’s work, uncovering the apparatus, in concert with psychoanalysis, Marxism, and structuralism, leading to typologies of “structural” film or, in England, “structuralist/materialist” films. Postmodernism focuses on the dissolving divide between mass culture and art, distinctions (actually standards of taste, education, class) which cannot hold for either film or video, defined by reproducibility, intangible objects until projected or transmitted, and, like Scorpio Rising’s rock ‘n’ roll score, allied with mass cultural techniques of distribution, exhibition, and economic concerns.

Taken together, the now axiomatic arguments of VF and “VP,” particularly their respective uses of psychoanalysis (one as story, the other as system), render the contradiction of difference as the political, historical, and theoretical problem it has been and continues to be for the art world, popular culture, and critical theory alike. Thus, I have schematically placed these two texts in dialogue, although quantitatively the odds are not equal: Sitney’s work is a lengthy book, while Mulvey’s is an essay (to which I return in later chapters). I emphasize that regarding VF I am arguing about a particular interpretation or image of avant-garde cinema, a model rooted in literary rather than film theory, and not the specific films, not alternative women’s films, but a historical discourse taken up as the definitive or dominant reading (like Metz’s psychoanalysis of the apparatus and spectator and Mulvey’s feminist model). Examining the canonized concept of U.S. avant-garde cinema, its imaginary, which resonates with the biases of the historical avant-garde, is a preliminary step toward the emergence of another cultural model, which might enable us to see the films differently.

In tandem with the romantic premises of the U.S. counterculture (to which I will tenaciously return), supported by close readings of hundreds of films and often the corroboration of the filmmakers, Sitney’s ambitious history of avant-garde cinema traces the evolution of styles, with style also connoting metaphysics: the chapter subjects progress from “trance to myth” and “the lyrical film” to the central “major mythopoeia,” “recovered innocence,” and “apocalypses and picaresques,” concluding with “structural film.” The mythical taxonomy is also determined by filmmaker; “The Magus” is devoted to Anger, “Major Mythopoeia” to Brakhage and, to a lesser degree, Baillie. The book traces an avant-garde lineage from the early 1940s to the early 1970s in the United States, analyzing technical variants, “Graphic Cinema,” and “Absolute Animation” and including European antecedents. Few contemporary filmmakers from other countries, except Peter Kubelka, are mentioned. Read another way, as the epic titles suggest, VF traces a Promethean national quest and elucidates male subjectivity as an art of brave, sacrificial narcissism. For Sitney, as for many of the filmmakers, this was their duty as artists embodying the romantic tradition where the traumatic, sometimes treacherous quest for self is art.

As Sitney repeatedly writes of Brakhage, his Diogenes, the “process of making film and the search for consciousness” are one and the same thing, equivalent to the “identity of the erotic and aesthetic quests” (177). Regarding James Broughton: “although he is deeply committed to Jungian rather than Freudian psychoanalysis, the nostalgia for the origins of cinema is fused in his work with an ironic quest for the origin of his own psychic development” (82). The equation of aesthetics and identity, the origin of cinema and the origin of the self, in many ways replicates the pedagogical history of art. The interest of avant-garde also shifts, from Freud to Jung, evolving to embrace the notion of the collective unconscious (153). In her essay on Michael Snow, de Lauretis analyzes this central, agonistic conceit as modernist: the view that “the ‘origin’ of art is (in) the artist, whose desire is inscribed in the representation, whose . . . longing . . . is both mediated and effected by . . . the apparatus; and to whom . . . the film returns as to its only possible reference, its source of aesthetic unity and meaning.”¹⁰ “Visionary film” is film made by a single person and in turn revelatory of that person, if person is read as primarily “man.”

Constance Penley, writing six years earlier, made a comparable argument about British “structuralist-materialist” films, predicated, unlike U.S. avant-garde, on continental theory: “it could be asked if they offer nothing but a multiplication of effects, all striving towards a new recentering of the subject, this time not centered in a transcendental elsewhere but in the body of the subject himself.”¹¹ And a bit later: “The subject constituted by the early avant-gardists and the structural materialists is essentially the same even if one constructs its subject in the name of a romantic humanism and the other in the name of science and ‘materialism.’ Both play on an infantile wish to shape the real to the measure of the subject’s own boundless desire.”¹² Penley neglected to gender the “subject” as male, although the implications are there.

I again reiterate that the conditions of personal rather than corporate distribution and exhibition contributed to this centering on the individual. Appearances, so it would appear, occurred out of necessity, with altruistic, pedagogic, and economic motives—to celebrate the art of cinema, to reach new audiences, and to receive minuscule honoraria for the next film. The presence of the filmmaker was the film’s lure and promise, turning a screening into an event, or, like commercial exhibition until the late 1940s and 1950s, “presentation cinema” (which included short films of various styles and live performance). Whether we understood the film or not, we would come away with something, usually for nothing, from the person in the form of anecdotes, impressions, an art experience, or a conversion “in the way we see.” Whether answer or performance by the maker, the film’s real and only star/author/producer/director who singly made the film, almost by hand, we came away with a story, a feeling of collectivity, and perhaps the belief that, given enough history, we might have chatted with a future Great Artist.

Thus was fostered the cult of the artist, in name or body interchangeable with the film: filmmakers wrote their own descriptive copy and, like the voice of truth and authority called upon to sanction art, interpreted their films after the screenings in question sessions for audiences, eliding criticism with the moment of reception, merging film with maker (which the label of “personal films” already equated), speaking of their work as themselves, thereby transforming what Monroe Beardsley called “the intentional fallacy” into the cornerstone of interpretation. (Coincidentally, filmmaker has, in the course of twenty or more years, become a single word. Unlike the specialist labels or credits of commercial cinema, this is a totalizing and craftlike term.) This narcissistic staging, on film and in person, of the artist/self in which the unique person is both the beginning and the end of art—the artist’s vision the penultimate source of fascination to the maker (and sometimes the scholar), with the presence of devotees as guarantee that the makers’ assumption of their intrinsic fascination is correct—is the very familiar tale of geniuses and humanism, sanctimoniously intoned in art history classrooms and museum galleries.

However comparable to the Kerouac-inspired adventure and freedom of being undomesticated, of being on the road and sexually liberated, making films was also an economic deprivation, a constant search for support. Many filmmakers—I think particularly of Woody Vasulka, Robert Nelson, and Owen Land—were uncomfortable with the pedagogical imperative as their primary means of funding. With the premises of romanticism as underpinning, however, the funding became drama for the story. That we were often hearing an old tale, of Oedipus’s struggles with either the Sphinx or the Muse and ultimately the Father, was complicated and perhaps concealed by what Penley called “a multiplication of effects” and what I call an aesthetics of pluralism (as in Sheldon Renan’s taxonomy of periods and styles), rather than a politics of differences.

As I rapped earlier, films could be of any length, about any subject, of any technical quality, with the human figure or not, with or without sound, shown on one projector or four, exhibited or projected, edited or not, with or without errors, painted or scratched or filmed, made by anyone, trained or not, blurred or focused, shot or collaged, often without discernible beginnings or endings. While the maker should be singular and the aspiration an artistic rather than a commercial one, the factor that counted most was uniqueness, often left up to the artist to decipher. The history of art sustains itself by so many differentiations and taxonomies by period or epoch, artist or school, style or movement, which necessitate expanding official buildings in which art can embrace variant media and history in a global grasp while repressing differences and economic exchange as mundane. This reversal of the value of material concerns is intriguing, taking materiality out of the social, where it is trivial, and into art, which is then “radical.”

As VF sees it, art has little to do with the real world; art is a journey inward, to new depths of consciousness raising, fostered by drugs and liberated by sex. Sitney refers to a moment in Scorpio Rising when “Scorpio takes a sniff of cocaine. . . . We see in one or two seconds of cinema the recreation of a high Romantic, or Byronic myth of the paradox of liberation,” “ ‘an ace of light’ “ which he calls a liberation and a “limitation” because “it is exterior” (119). (That addiction was the debilitating underside of both drugs and sex, de-eroticized commodities of exchange without pleasure and darkly represented in Warhol’s later films, is a postmodern reality; both random sex and drugs have lost their glamor as liberation has soured to self-destruction.) The celebratory contours of the late 1960s and 1970s counterculture, along with Sitney and Bloom, drew inspiration from the premises (and drug practices) of the romantic poets. Thus, Visionary Film paradoxically exemplifies (1) what were then imagined as radical, or anarchistic, social currents, including Bloom’s “iconoclastic” criticism of the romantic poets (youthful artists railing against their fathers to claim their place in the sun), and (2) an evolutionary and apocalyptic (rather than materialist, dialectical) model of art history as a linear, albeit chaotic or pluralistic, series of greats and firsts, accidents and intentions.

VF also documents the not inconsiderable reality that most films available were, in fact, made by men and enthusiastically received by women who believed, as did I, in the radical potential of the inquisition of narrative conventions by the revelation of “the apparatus,” including the spectator. But after continuity style had been peeled away in avant-garde films and narrative conventions analyzed by feminist film theory, another double absence—the erasure of representations of women and the inscription of female subjectivity—came into focus. While contemporary theory came to my rescue with new intellectual models, I spent a great deal of energy discovering that in theory as well I was lacking; how to make theory, like avant-garde, listen to and work for women became an important issue.

The oversights and blind spots of the 1970s were particularly ironic given the activity and publicity of the women’s movement, with women’s issues becoming nightly news, still a rare occurrence. However, attending women’s groups and political organizing was one thing; digging through the archeology of art, creating models to deal with the inequities of that real world of texts and power, money and myth, was quite another, and it took time, particularly when art in the United States made a countercultural swerve in the name of equality and access, presumably in tandem with the women’s movement, the civil rights movement, and the antiwar efforts. Separate but equal, applied in different ways to women and race, is still the critical contradiction, endorsed now by separatist feminists and black militants as deliberately separate because unequal.

An early rejoinder to the critical approach epitomized by VF came in a joint letter published in Screen by Penley and Bergstrom, who critiqued “the dominant ideology” contained in several books on U.S. avant-garde cinema. Penley argued against the phenomenological method, pointing to a tautological flaw: “Criticism’s function will be to refine our seeing and affirm the modernist credo of knowledge through self-consciousness. The discourse about the object becomes (is the same thing as) the discourse of the object.”¹³ I would add to her critique that the object of discourse was a celebration of the subject or self as romantic hero. Penley further pointed out that “this phenomenological approach” eliminates “consideration of the spectator’s unconscious relation to the film . . . an aspect that has received much attention in French and English film theory.”¹⁴

While I agree, with qualifications, the irony is that rather than eliminating the “unconscious,” the romanticism of Bloom taken up by VF stars the unconscious as the battle between eros and death, good and bad art; the artistic unconscious, a battle with one’s precursors, is wellspring, quest and goal, source and discovery. It needs, in the great films, no other actants than the filmmakers, struggling against and in the name of art history. To a degree, this drama resembles Poggioli’s assessment of the stages, particularly agonism, of the historical avant-garde.¹⁵ As Sitney writes of Brakhage and “the erotic quest” in his early films, “Freud has never meant as much to any other film-maker. Brakhage even initiated an ambitious Freudfilm, but failed to bring it off” (175). I will leave this Freudianism alone and return later to the central figuration of psychoanalysis in Bloom’s romanticism.

Bergstrom, in her response to the same texts, argued that “modern formalism” is “by definition opposed to the possibility of a political avant-garde, which is necessarily concerned with meanings.”¹⁶ Like Michelson on the other side, she invoked Eisenstein and pointed to VF’s lack of “any consideration of audience, social context, or the operations by which meaning is produced by and for the spectator.”¹⁷ Given an interpretation of psychoanalysis as eternal rather than historical, as a journey inward rather than an engagement with material practices, discourses, and referents, “meaning” as a social construction including the spectator had become irrelevant for many critics. Bergstrom offered a critical agenda: the analysis of “filmic enunciation” and “the notion that every film is crossed by a heterogeneity of discourses, [which bears] upon the representation of women.” She called for a “shift of attention to the entire process of signification, rather than limiting it to the play of the signifiers.”¹⁸

In both these lucid responses, the erasure of women and its flip side, the vaunting of male subjectivity as art, are noted, but from the cool distance of theoretical knowledge. The revelation of the apparatus in the theoretical criticism of Metz and Baudry (and Comolli) is held up as a better “approach,” albeit in writings which neglect women, constructing an illusionary machine for men only. Bergstrom cautions us to look for meaning, for an outside, toward reception and the audience, including her analysis of Chantal Akerman’s Letters from Home as an alternative. While enunciation was analyzed, we initially cared more about what Benveniste called shifters, the formal parameters rather than content or subjectivity. That the concept of enunciation within feminist theory has been amplified to include the questions to whom, by whom, and about what must be noted.

Oedipus is the unspoken myth woven through VF’s typology of myth as a link between artistic form and artist consciousness. The great films are linked to the poetry of Wordsworth, Blake, and Wallace Stevens, then in high intellectual and countercultural fashion; “the preoccupations of the American avant-garde film-makers coincide with those of our post-Romantic poets and Abstract Expressionist painters. Behind them lies a potent tradition of Romantic Poetics. . . . I have attempted to trace the heritage of Romanticism . . . more generative of a unified view of these films and film-makers than the Freudian hermeneutics and sexual analysis which have dominated . . . previous criticism” (ix). That Bloom’s romanticism draws heavily on Freudian hermeneutics, particularly Beyond the Pleasure Principle, is not taken into account.¹⁹

As I have ceaselessly reiterated, Bloom is the critical model, although he is cited only in brief references, without elaboration of his premises. Thus, he exists as a guiding truism certified by quick allusions. In “The Lyrical Film”: “Harold Bloom’s observation about Wordsworth’s achievement could be applied to Brakhage. . . . ‘The dreadful paradox’ of Wordsworth’s greatness is that his uncanny originality . . . has been so influential that we have lost sight of its audacity and its arbitrariness” (176). The “dreadful paradox” of Brakhage’s greatness drives Sitney’s reading and, to an extraordinary degree, criticism and filmmaking during this entire period. Brakhage just might be the imaginary of the avant-garde; his name is synonymous with it. “As Harold Bloom observed of the twentieth century tradition in English poetry, ‘every fresh attempt of Modernism to go beyond Romanticism ends in the gradual realization of the Romantic’s continued priority’“ (170). Rather than the modernism usually ascribed to abstract expressionism, VF’s other operative analogy for avant-garde cinema, Sitney, led by Bloom and Brakhage, rescues romanticism, a “continued priority.” It is this “gradual realization” of romanticism artificially resuscitated as the history of art that needs interrogation.

To reclaim modernism from a formalism of the signifier, as Penley and de Lauretis imply, and link it to industrial conditions of labor, of work, to the experience of modernity as did, for one example, Benjamin, contextualizing it within mass culture, city streets, electrical technologies, arcades, and public transit—locating it in the crowds, streets, and factories of modernity, which included working women—might result in quite another reading of the films, as I stated earlier. At the same time, placing U.S. avant-garde cinema within the critical sway of romanticism—a revival of earlier communitarian thought and experiment—takes it out of the city and into the country, away from the ideas, techniques, and politics of modernity. This is an old-fashioned, radical aspiration which partakes of the counterculture ethos, a move back to communal farms, crafts, and do-it-yourself-sufficiency.

Via a constantly renewed commitment to Brakhage’s work, VF resolutely holds to this romantic stance—viewed as “inwardness.” “The eye which both Stevens and Brakhage enlist in the service of the imagination confirms . . . as Bloom’s view would have it, the Romantic divorce of consciousness and nature” (187). The only important struggle is in the mind’s eye, the soul, with one’s artistic forebears, in a chain, albeit disruptive, of difficult (opposed to easy) art. Brakhage’s writing in the 1963 Metaphors on Vision (a special and expensive issue of Film Culture dominated by a negatively and positively printed image of Brakhage’s face, with a cut-out peephole for his central eye), and his use of blindness as an early metaphor (for example, Reflections in Black has a blind protagonist, and in an earlier film the character had gouged out his eyes, shades of Thebes) in turn confirms the snug fit of Bloom, exemplified by the anecdote of Brakhage throwing away his glasses when he began to make films—his unfettering of the human eye argued in his polemic against the standardization and hierarchization of codes of vision of Western representation.

Writing Bloom’s history, Helen Elam enthuses over his 1973 book, The Anxiety of Influence: “This criticism transformed the conventional landscape of literary history into a battleground in which each poet . . . enters into . . . an Oedipal struggle with his precursors.”²⁰ Without a qualm or qualification, Elam argues that Bloom simultaneously attacks Arnold’s humanism, the New Criticism, and deconstruction; he “stresses the importance of imaginative vision, one of self-presence and self-origination which goes to the heart of mythmaking” (36). In the sexual identity model of psychoanalysis, the Oedipus myth is accepted for the untroubled centrality it is to Freud, who, in addition, mapped out contradictions and considered femininity a serious question; for feminist theory, Freud, like Oedipus, is dismantled but instructive.

De Lauretis goes right to “the heart of mythmaking” in her brilliant essay “Desire in Narrative”: “In this mythical-textual mechanics, then, the hero must be male . . . because the obstacle ... is morphologically female . . . simply the womb . . . if the work of the mythical structuration is to establish distinctions, the primary distinction on which all others depend is not, say, life and death, but rather sexual difference . . . the hero, the mythical subject, is constructed as human being and as male; he is the active principle of culture . . . the creator of differences. . . . Female is what is not susceptible to transformation . . . she (it) is an element of plot-space.”²¹ (I would add that “the primary distinction is [also] not, say,” mass culture and art, narrative or not.) If she is right, “if the crime of Oedipus is the destruction of differences, the combined work of myth and narrative is the production of Oedipus,”²² then rather than counterpoint Hollywood cinema’s staging of Oedipus, VF merely displaces it, playing it out backstage as a drama of unrequited art and authorship (the male’s search for what Elam calls “self-origination”). If “mythical positioning . . . works through the narrative form,”²³ then criticism predicated on myth is yet another fiction, ironically endorsing the ideological tenets of the classical narrative which Mulvey so lucidly dissected.

Regarding Bloom’s 1961 Visionary Company (revised and enlarged in 1971), the companion volume to Visionary Film (itself revised in a 1979 second edition), Elam writes that “this company of poets, beginning with Blake and stretching in unbroken fashion to the twentieth century, forms a ‘visionary company of love’ “ (36); the most visionary in this company, Blake, like Brakhage in VF, becomes “a model of imaginative strength against which the other poets are tested” (36). With Blake as exemplar, this leads to a “visionary freedom in which the mind directly creates time and space.”²⁴ As Brakhage writes in Metaphors on Vision, “After the loss of innocence [the infant’s learning to see, to classify] . . . there is a pursuit of knowledge foreign to language and founded on visual communication . . . the optical mind . . . perception in the original and deepest sense.”²⁵ Like particularly the later Bloom staging the battle as a biblical epic, Brakhage elides “the Vision of the saint and the artist” as “an increased ability to see.” “To search for human visual realities, man must. . . transcend the original physical restrictions and inherit worlds of eyes. . . contemporary moving visual reality is exhausted.”²⁶

The divorce of mind and nature, or nature and imagination, along with banishing language and visual reality, emerges here: “My eye, tuning toward the imaginary, will go to any wave-lengths for its sights. . . . How long has sight’s center continued pupil to other men’s imaginings? This sensitive instrument must respond to all the gods who deign to play upon it.”²⁷ Thus, Brakhage turns on “2000 years of Western equine painting,” unfettering his eye in his mythological quest for origins—“thwarting the trained response link between retina and brain . . . as in the beginning . . . my eye . . . outwards (without words) . . . transforming optic abstract impressions into non-representational language, enchanting non-sights into non-words. . . .”²⁸

For Sitney, Bloom, and Brakhage, “the great works baffle the intellect. . . these artists become the great martyrs of aesthetic discomfort.”²⁹ For Brakhage, this is “the only private personal key I have for the coffin lid . . . to re-awaken the self, re-illusion the dreamer, and thus prevent the death of the spirit. . . the dogs will tear me to pieces if ever I’m caught.”³⁰ This battle with death by a very young man involves a claim for eros and reproduction, what Elam celebrates without a misstep as “self-origination”—Brakhage filming the birth of all of his and Jane’s children—making origin, reproduction (always a problem for film’s status as art), a literal struggle toward self-sufficiency, involving another usurpation of women. Blake’s Apocalypse describes Sitney’s assessment of Brakhage, a poet who, “with increasing power, overcomes the external world, until word and vision are one.”³¹ Banished from the kingdom of film art are narrative, reality, and now language, along with sound.

VF unsystematically adopts Bloom’s ahistorical use of psychoanalysis which, as Elam asserts, “insists on the priority of psychoanalysis over epistemology, voice over text, a psyche that resists deconstruction’s idea of the self as an effect of language.” Bloom combines Nietzsche’s “will to power and Freud’s theories about psychic defense—wherein poets lie to themselves, and to others. . . .” And regarding Bloom’s 1971 Ringers in the Tower, “the antithetical relationship between nature and imagination attends the concept of central man” (37). For Bloom, original poets are difficult poets; strong poets react against tradition; weaker poets idealize what they inherit. “This is poetic history written from the point of view of poetry rather than a critical perspective that assumes its own detachment and secondariness” (38). Likewise, Sitney writes film history from the filmmakers’ point of view. And, like weak and strong poets, there are weak and strong filmmakers and critics—the strong ones react against the past, not, as Walter Benjamin argues, for a “revolutionary chance” but in the “prospect that freedom and self-origination are within its grasp” (38). The significant place Bloom accords the critic, or himself, on a par with the poet, is compatible with Sitney’s. The critic is a central player in the agon.

Bloom’s valuation of figuration is read through Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle as a psychic force, with eros linked to lack and desire, set against what he calls the literal as cessation, death. Figuration is tension; eros is figural, but a doomed figuration; hence, all human sexuality is topological, while we long for it, says Bloom, to be literal. “Hence the sorrows and the authentic anguish of all human erotic quest, hopelessly seeking to rediscover an object, which never was the true object anyway.”³² For VF and Bloom, figuration is a “psychic force,” “linked with power,” a defense against the literal, a “constant movement and tension as opposed to rest or a coming-to-meaning”; “power and Art is thus lodged, in line with Emerson, in figuration—power ceases in the instant of repose” (45). I can think of no better description of Brakhage’s work.

Along with enshrining Brakhage as the inheritor of romanticism, of the subservience of materiality to personality, of reality (or nature) to imagination, of the literal to the figural, something else is at stake. The biggest problem with male identity and pleasure, along with linkages to power, is that they are secured at the expense of someone else. In this regard, male desire is not like female desire, which still has borders, propriety, humility.

Almost immediately after Sitney’s first reference to Bloom, a dramatic opposition is introduced; it is overtly symptomatic, unexpected, the clincher to the dearth of women as artists, critics, curators, or spectators. In his chapter on Gregory Markopoulos, “From Trance to Myth,” a dispute is staged: “The Romantic posture did not rest well with Maya Deren. She struggled against it in her own films, and labeled them ‘classicist.’ She opposed Anger and later Brakhage when his work veered toward Romanticism. Her contact with Markopoulos, though, was minimal. When she was exercising some limited power through the Creative Film Foundation, he was in Greece . . . she died soon after he returned” (170). This scenario bears some scrutiny. Their contact was minimal, he was in Greece, and then she—of some limited power—died? This reads like classical mythology, with Deren, a powerful woman, figured as an obstacle that needed to be overcome or slain, along with being placed in a subservient position.

Although Sitney has a chapter on Deren’s work, “Ritual and Nature,” with the biological determinism as giveaway, his sniping at Deren is scholastically questionable. It is a tactic of curtailment of a competing “legend” of subjectivity (then being researched by a women’s collective, which he notes in an apologia in the second edition) set against the myth of Brakhage. The story of classicism versus romanticism, or women versus men, of Deren versus Brakhage, of mother against father/son, of female subjectivity, influence, and power, which begins in Meshes of the Afternoon and continues each time I screen it, ends in the first two chapters of VF. Sitney imagines that Deren’s death in 1961 silences her opposition, allowing romanticism, a male purview, to emerge as the unquestioned victor—the Perseus model of avant-garde with Medusa now dead.

Yet, it’s not enough that Deren died, unexpectedly, in 1961. VF puts Deren (who is both his Minotaur and his Medusa—a real blind spot) in her place of subservience to Hammid, her husband, and later to Markopoulos (although he was in Greece—perhaps lost in a maze, for this chapter was excluded, at his request, from the 1979 edition). Like “Snow on the Oedipal Stage,” so is VF; not surprisingly, Oedipus is the myth which cannot be mentioned amid the hundred citations of “myth.” In his opening Deren gambit, Sitney conquers “women,” moving away from mother, journeying into the symbolic (he was a precocious critic, attending avant-garde films and writing criticism at age fourteen) and identification with the Janus father of Brakhage (too young to be Dad) and Bloom. The price is high, however; Deren’s reputation is undervalued and Meshes of the Afternoon is misinterpreted.

“The collaboration of Maya Deren and Alexander Hammid shortly after their marriage in 1942 recalls in its broad outline and its aspiration the earlier collaboration of Salvador Dali and Luis Bunuel” (3). Thus, the film’s first weakness: this is a collaboration, a containment reinforced by a comparison to another film, derivation being another negative in the canon of avant-garde aesthetics, although equivocating pains are taken to avoid the overt claim that Deren and Hammid copied Un Chien Andalou intentionally. The comparison is linked by the Freud of The Interpretation of Dreams; both films use dream logic and symbols.

Then, Deren’s critical flaw: “We should remember that he [Hammid] photographed the whole film. Maya Deren simply pushed the button on the camera for the two scenes in which he appeared.” The film in which she “simply pushed the button” “is also Hammid’s portrait of his young wife” (10). He notes a “difference which obtains between the early American avant-garde ‘trance film’ . . . and its surrealistic precursors. In Meshes of the Afternoon, the heroine undertakes an interior quest. . . revealing the erotic mystery of the self. The surrealistic cinema . . . imitate[s] the . . . irrationality of the unconscious. . . . Deren, with her hands lightly pressed against the window pane, embodies the reflective experience” (11). Thus, Meshes, “as psycho-drama, is the inward exploration of both Deren and Hammid . . . the quest for sexual identity; in their film, unlike those that follow in this book, it is two people, the makers of the film, who participate in this quest” (18). In what follows the next chapter on Deren, women are banished, with the exception of short references to the work of Shirley Clarke, Marie Menken, Carolee Schneemann, and Joyce Wieland (in name only).

Rather than sexual identity revealing “the erotic mystery of the self,” Deren’s (and Hammid’s) is a model of difference, of a woman divided in and by sexual difference. The violence and rage directed against the female body, the contradiction and frustration beneath the heterosexual couple, are almost palpable. Rather than the parodic tone and structure of Un Chien Andalou, this is a deadly serious film. VF’s analysis of Meshes’ violent conclusion is troubling: the look at the end, of the man at the body of the woman, is different; it is an outward glance; she is dead, strangled by a condensation of the film’s images and scenes—seaweed, the telephone cord, the broken mirror or glass. The man is standing, looking down, dominant. Sitney argues that this conventional look “changes the film’s dimension by its affirmation of dream over actuality” (14), an argument which contains her narrative death as dream rather than real. I would assert the opposite: because the last shot is from the conventional male figure’s point of view and hence is marked as stable, the shift argues that her suicide, or murder, is not a dream.

VF’s reading of the violent bedroom scene of Deren stabbing the mirrored face of the man, Hammid, interchangeable with a hooded figure of death or a nun, displaces female terror and heterosexual violence into an art reference, which it is, but much more than that: “In the construction of the scene in which the stabbed face turns out to be a mirror, they pay homage, perhaps unknowingly, to a motif of the painter, Rene Magritte” (15). An attack on representation, on the institution of art, on surrealism, on systems in which woman is merely the reflection or signifier of male desire, without a room or desire of one’s own, is a more apt analysis.

That Meshes is about female subjectivity divided against itself, held in the violent social and domestic contradictions of sexual difference (including giving men most of the credit), a scenario directed against the male for whom she is merely a reflection, an anger tragically turned back on the self as narcissistic rage, with differences played out between the overt and apparent clash of symbols, the knife, the poppy, the key, amid the claustrophobic, disorienting domestic space, is never considered. That the home to which she runs is a frightening space, that the proverbial room at the top of the stairs, the bedroom as the place of the primal scene, is also terrifying, says something about the heterosexual couple when the point of view is female.

Rather than Hammid’s view of his “young wife,” this is a view from the woman’s corner of the room and a system clearly coded in the film. This film is about Deren’s terror and the unconscious; as much as she pursues the elusive, robed figure, she can find neither pleasure nor identity there—only death. If female subjectivity is pursued in the couple or by running after men, there is nothing for women to find except an image of themselves. Meshes is an early version of de Lauretis’s proposition that “the work of the film should be . . . how to position the spectator and the filmmaker not at the center but at the borders of the Oedipal stage.”³³ And this terrain, even if she is standing outside, looking through the window pane, and knowledgeable about psychoanalysis (her father was a psychiatrist), involves risk, unsettling disorientation.

While Deren broke the mirror which held women to the imaginary (yet remained its victim), history remembers her as image, referred to as “the Botticelli.” The female editors of The Legend of Maya Deren wonder why Deren chose for publicity posters the still from the film in which she is looking out the window: “There are so many images she could have chosen—the woman as warrior in Meshes, rising from the earth with a knife. . . .” “The legend of the painting supposes the Venus figure to be modelled after a beautiful Florentine woman who had died quite young and was eloquently mourned by all the poets. Grief for the loss of beautiful young women is a tradition in art that precedes the Primavera and that will extend beyond the still from Meshes. . . . Perhaps it was neither youth nor beauty she sought to keep but the transparency of the glass.” Earlier, the co-editors write that “as the years passed, the discrepancy increased between her appearance and ‘the Botticelli’ on her posters.”³⁴ Perhaps Deren knew about the gap between the real and the appearance, the performer and the filmmaker, women and woman, the contradictions to which women are held. (I note that she was only forty-four when she died, hardly an old woman.)

In a letter written after her death, Rudolf Arnheim pays tribute: “There is a photograph of Maya Deren, so striking and so well known that some of us think of it when we think of her. It. . . shows a girl looking out through a window . . . and yet the image is not really she,” no more than Maya was her name—Eleonora was. Later in the short piece: “What was she after? She was one of the artists and thinkers who speak of the great paradox of our time . . . the world of tangible things . . . in Maya Deren’s films, the familiar world captures us by its pervasive strangeness . . . the sequences of her images are logical. They are neither arbitrary nor absurd. They follow the letter of a law we never studied on paper.”³⁵

That her law was not that of male desire or Western patriarchy is also suggested by her trips to Haiti, along with her interest in ritual. That she must have been profoundly isolated as a woman filmmaker in the 1940s and 1950s is apparent. Her look is from outside, what de Lauretis, after Barthes, might call “elsewhere” and Adrienne Rich, “another planet.” Perhaps the photograph of Deren behind the window pane, a reminder of the power of the female gaze, a knowing look from the margins, remarked the gap between women and their image—a discrepancy familiar to women held to a youthful ideal even by other admiring women.

(Sally Potter’s Thriller begins where Meshes ends and investigates the cost to women of romanticism and Oedipus, unraveling the mystery of La Boheme. Su Friedrich’s Dammed If You Don’t restages the pursuit of the hooded figure—who is a nun. Like Potter, Friedrich interrogates narrative, the amazing Black Narcissus and raging nun lust amid Powell/Pressburger technicolor, exotic excess, somewhere in South America. At the end of her film, as at the end of Potter’s, women unite; for Friedrich, in sex, for Potter, in a fond embrace. Both filmmakers have also explored the uncharted terrain of mother-daughter relationships—new territory for avant-garde.)

The film juxtaposed to Meshes in VF, Un Chien Andalou (1929), was released in 1968 “after almost forty years of clandestinity,” finally “deemed suitable for adult audiences.”³⁶ As Phillip Drummond reports in his detailed analysis, Raymond Rohauer, “key exploiter of the silent cinema,” obtained the rights in 1960 and, under Bunuel’s supervision, added the original gramophone musical score.³⁷

Along with the Oedipus complex as a personal quest, another prevalent use of psychoanalysis in the 1960s and 1970s was deciphering symbols, “the only method of investigation of the symbols” of Un Chien Andalou. In relation to the dream logic and Dali’s boastful proclamations of the film’s total and purposeful meaninglessness, VF asserts that “this method of compiling a scenario was the liberation of their material from the demands of narrative continuity” (4). Drummond repeatedly cautions against a delimited, “primitive, crude psychoanalytic” reading, arguing that “nothing could be less relevant in the face of such detailed intrication . . . of signifiers that form and block the passage of Bunuel’s and Dali’s text.”³⁸

Forewarned by both scholars of the pitfalls of either narrative or psychoanalytic critique and in basic agreement with the film’s disconnections and multiplicity, I would, on the contrary, argue that Un Chien Andalou can be analyzed as operating within the constraints of psychoanalysis and narrative, even functioning as (1) a reenactment of Freud’s essay “The ‘Uncanny’ ” and (2) a critique of classical continuity style, its counterpoints as much as The Interpretation of Dreams and abstract or figural art, which the film claims to depose—what Dali called the “maniacal lozenges of Monsieur Mondrian.”³⁹

That Un Chien Andalou was a “reaction against contemporary avant-garde cinema of Ruttmann, Cavalcanti, Man Ray, Dziga Vertov, Clair, Dulac and Ivens”⁴⁰ places it within a historical conjuncture similar to U.S. and British debates in the mid- to late 1970s around three comparable terms—avant-garde, narrative, and psychoanalysis. For Drummond, the film “is of interest precisely as a turning point between the alternatives of dominant and counter cinema,” with Bunuel “challenging formalism.”⁴¹ Ironically, by positioning a critique of abstraction (along with a claim for representation) within the coincidence of psychoanalysis and Oedipus with narrative, Un Chien Andalou sketches a 1929 theoretical project remarkably similar to the general terrain of de Lauretis’s 1980s call for feminism: “The most exciting work in cinema and in feminism today is not anti-narrative or anti-Oedipal; quite the opposite. It is narrative and Oedipal with a vengeance, for it seeks to stress the duplicity of that scenario and the specific contradiction of the female subject in it. . . .”⁴² (Whether or not it is appropriate for Andalusian dogs, de Lauretis’s description could be copy for Potter’s Thriller, which directly addresses the contradictions for women of the classical texts of cinema, ballet, theater, and opera, specifically Puccini’s La Boheme and Hitchcock’s Psycho; I will return to Thriller later.)

Whether the woman whose vision is attacked by Bunuel’s razor slicing her eye and whose glances and amazed reaction shots paradoxically dominate the film elucidates contradictions of the female subject will remain, for now, uncertain. Drummond argues that “the face of woman . . . redefines and re-figures the male presence and activity within the film,” an argument predicated on the twelve-shot prologue. She “displaces . . . his dream of space,” along with the co-author (Bunuel) and the male actors; the film is a “desperate, castrated compliment to woman,” a conclusion qualified in a footnote that this is not “to suggest that. . . ‘the woman’ is eventually any less fetishised. . . .” “In the narrative surrealism of Un Chien Andalou, the mutilation of the female protagonist is the paradoxical guarantee of her unharmed survival, the doom only of her surgeon, true victim of his reverie.”⁴³ Whether parody or tragedy, the male seducer sacrificing himself to his own desperate desire is a very old and familiar story.

Like the classical film, Un Chien Andalou is a story of seduction and the couple, separated, quarreling, united, and then buried in the sand—happily ever after or dead (with the concluding shot an allusion to Dreyer), the two endings of Hollywood film. Along with a tormented, schizophrenic, sensitive man and a nagging, demanding, impatient woman, the film features death and sex. Along with narrative figuration of characters, the techniques are modeled on continuity style: a system of rhyming and repetition threads the film together, for example, the recurring stripes on the tie and the box and the watch on the man’s arm at the beginning and end. In the classical text, as Heath has argued, repetition and rhymes, fashioned in a symmetrical manner with the end circling back to the beginning, devouring or using up all the elements in the process, create verisimilitude, locating the spectator in a position of intelligibility, of knowledge and power. The details accumulate meaning according to a logic which, like the narrative, is cause-effect and chronological. In Un Chien Andalou, literal and symbolic meaning, like the striped box, is tossed out the balcony window or dropped in the sand on the beach. We have all the clues and techniques but none of the answers or explanations.

Parody, which involves a coded relationship between texts, a referential strategy, more accurately describes the film. Continuity editing techniques of eyeline matches, point of view shots, and matching action create a system in which space appears to be continuous and stable; in Un Chien Andalou, these techniques undermine that stability. The editing is predicated on cutting to the woman’s reaction to what she sees, usually with astonishment and irritation for being interrupted in her reading. The central apartment, the scene of the attempted seduction, is not the concrete locale it appears to be, with a recognizable 180-degree axis—the front door leads either to a city street or to a beach. Like the movie theater, the room has a balcony from which to view death on the streets below. By cutting through discontiguous spaces, encountering impossible objects of the look, with off-screen space capable of containing anything, including grand pianos with dead donkey carcasses and two priests (one is Dali) tied to them, space, like the body, is inconsistent. As the intertitles inform us, times are random. Along with the deconstruction of space and the unraveling of time (arbitrary conventions in the first place), techniques of continuity editing, including the incoherence granted by intertitles, are revealed in their arbitrary randomness, like language, letting us see what is there in narrative cinema—the formal elements—but what usually remains unnoticed in the hold of story, action, and star.

Along with parodying the sheer strength of continuity style and thwarting audiences’ Pavlovian attempts to make meanings, the film relies, superficially, on the similarities between the dream work and the film work, the dreamer and the spectator (an old theory today which must have been hot stuff then), with the substantial difference that unlike the dreamer, the spectator, assaulted by the slicing of the eye in extreme closeup in the opening twelve shots, is not asleep but awake and anxious—anticipating a recurrence of the film’s primal scene. (Hitchcock does return in Psycho in the shower or bathroom scene, but Marion Crane does not return to the story, as Simone Mareuil does in Un Chien Andalou; while that avant-garde moment in Psycho, constructed with a style distinct from the rest of the film, is an assault on spectatorial vision, it is contained, framed by the narrative; the shocking sequence means murder and thus becomes plot; form is narrativized, in Heath’s term.) In addition, techniques of continuity editing are comparable to dream mechanisms of displacement and condensation, with latent and manifest content, for example, the transformation of breasts into buttocks, pubic hair into sea urchins, tennis rackets into books and then guns, one man into his double (an uncredited actor in the titles).

The violent attack on female vision and the spectator plays against our expectations of a cutaway or a fade, a sequence which has been analyzed via the structure of metaphor/metonymy by Linda Williams.⁴⁴ The shot of the razor/eye is followed by a cut to a cloud slicing the moon; unexpectedly, this does not follow metaphorical, censoring logic but returns and, without decorum, slashes the eye in extreme closeup—a more shocking sight. The scene of visual avowal instantiates disavowal as the subsequent spectatorial mechanism, which, as Freud (and film theory) never ceases to argue, is predicated on fear of castration.

In fact, the film can be read through, or as a parody of, or as the film version of, Freud’s 1919 essay “The ‘Uncanny,’ ” which doggedly and directly links castration to a loss of vision or other organs.⁴⁵ The film is a taxonomy of Freud’s examples of images which trigger the uncanny experience of anxiety, “what arouses dread and horror,” having to do with “silence, solitude and darkness” (246) and hence comparable to being at the movies. The experience of the uncanny, tested against and in defiance of the real, is akin to disavowal. The androgynous woman on the street, poking at the severed hand, and the double “become the uncanny harbinger of death,” suggested by “dismembered limbs, a severed head, a hand cut off at the wrist” (244) with its “uncanniness springing from its proximity to the castration complex . . . including being buried alive by mistake [as] the most uncanny thing of all, but which is a transformation of another phantasy . . . qualified by a certain lasciviousness—the phantasy . . . of intra-uterine existence” (244). Thus, if read as an experience of the uncanny, the film’s ending, rather than being meaningless and random, returns precisely and logically to the beginning of the film—loss of vision, castration, the woman’s body, and the narrative logic of death.

“It often happens that neurotic men declare that they feel there is something uncanny about the female genital organs” (245). Female genitals, the unheimlich, or woman is the ultimate, and lascivious, fear. And Drummond is not completely correct—the woman does not survive the surgeon’s scalpel, although she is the motivation, the bearer, of the film’s meaning, perhaps resulting in Dali and Sitney proclaiming the film’s meaninglessness by illogic, and Drummond its meaning infinitely more, by multiplicity. As Mulvey argues, “Woman [is] bound by a symbolic order in which man can live out his phantasies and obsessions . . . by imposing them on the silent image of woman still tied to her place as bearer of meaning, not maker of meaning.”⁴⁶ After the opening twelve shots, the rest of the film “depends on the image of the castrated woman to give order and meaning to its world . . . the symbolic order. . . speaks castration and nothing else.”⁴⁷ I question the value of castrated compliments.

Yet, in Freud’s essay, which is an analysis of aesthetics rather than a clinical study, lies another issue. Beneath our civilized or adult veneer is an animistic proclivity, which he links, in his analysis of Der Sandman, with gothic romanticism. For Freud, “the unrestricted narcissism of that stage of development strove to fend off the manifest prohibitions of reality” (240), involving the “over accentuation of psychical reality in comparison with material reality—a feature closely allied to the belief in the omnipotence of thoughts” (244). It would appear that Bloom’s reading of anxiety has taken Freud literally, rather than as a critique, and banished material reality, declaring “the omnipotence of thoughts,” as does Brakhage. This view has been taken up as a central canon of U.S. avant-garde cinema; yet it is only an interpretation. Freud, in passing, notes a crucial contradiction: the child in “unrestricted narcissism” desires rather than fears the uncanny. Freud’s animism, linked with narcissism, resembles romantic mysticism, which the surrealists elided with Freud’s discovery of the unconscious, believing, in accord with the parapsychology of F. W. H. Myer, that our bodies are inhabited by spirits who can speak through us automatically if we remove conscious, rational logic.

What is not noted regarding Un Chien Andalou is the parody of the romantic hero, the tormented man whose anguished desire is just barely tolerated by the bustling woman, irritated and impatient with all his transformations, suffering, and unrequited lust. The hero, divided against himself, appears in various guises which drive her nuts: the doppelganger of German romanticism, the fool on the bicycle, the Christ figure with stigmata in his hands and blood dripping from his mouth. Romanticism also circulates on the reissued sound track, which combines Wagner—the Liebestod from Tristan and Isolde—with two popular Argentinian tangos, dances of conquest and seduction.⁴⁸ Thus, the divide between art and mass culture is undermined, as is the serious equation between the erotic and the aesthetic quests, two illusions by which intellectuals, like artists, live their lives.

(This collage resembles Potter’s intercutting of Puccini with Bernard Herrmann in Thriller. Abigail Child’s 1988 Mayhem might be the postmodern, feminist remake of Un Chien Andalou, an eye-opening rather than a slasher revision which eliminates all narrative excess, rapidly intercutting highly stylized, gestural moments, allusive glances, poses, and snatches of sounds figuring the mystery of desire, a multiplicity of perversions rather than a bipolarity, with the film leading to (lesbian) sex rather than sex becoming story. Mayhem crosses and blurs the boundaries not only of gender and race but also of nation—its style is, indeed, international.)

The hero of high art and even higher thought is parodied also by his links with popular culture, as pointed out in Drummond’s essay. Pierre Batcheff, “the French James Dean of the 1920s” who had previously appeared in “conventional romantic roles, in particular. . . The Siren of the Tropics . . . with Bunuel as assistant director and Duverger director of cinematography, as for Un Chien Andalou,” resembles Buster Keaton.⁴⁹ Along with citing Bunuel’s 1927 review of Keaton’s College, Drummond suggests that the donkey carcasses/piano sequence is a reference to Keaton’s brilliant One Week, in which the newlywed hauls a piano into his newly built, do-it-yourself house via elaborate pulleys, destroying the living room in the process. That this short film is a critique of domesticity, the couple, and the travails of marriage is of significance, at least to my argument. Keaton’s rope apparatus for hauling the piano might also be linked to Dali’s iconography. The principles and logic of mechanical physics so brilliantly employed by Keaton also comically turn against him. Thus, not only was Un Chien Andalou at “the turning point”⁵⁰ of dominant versus counter cinema, it also addressed the artificiality of the divide between art and mass culture.

Rather than liberation into the freedom from meaning—what Jean Baudrillard also celebrates when he claims that audiences, what he calls the masses, don’t want meaning, preferring fascination, which resembles mesmerization—I prefer meanings as social, historical constructions tied to representation and determined by institutions and experience rather than psyches. The psychoanalysis of “liberation,” posited on what Foucault calls “the repression hypothesis” (which avant-garde expanded to include the repressive constraints of narrative and commerce), smacks of romantic mysticism, so aptly described by Freud. Foucault’s critique of Freud and “the repression hypothesis,” published in France in 1976 amid debates centered on Lacan’s rereading of Freud, can be seen as an intervention in that French context.⁵¹

The History of Sexuality can be taken as a response to the U.S. counterculture of the late 1960s and 1970s—predicated on liberation from the familial, educational, and religious monitoring and instantiation of proper sexuality and the work ethic. That the classical narrative reenacts the scenario of the couple coupling, becoming families, suggests one reason for the desire to be liberated from narrative. The generational rebellion, set against Family, School, Church, and State as the repressors of sexual freedom, argued that the new and creative life-styles of polygamous, casual, and frequent sex would lead to new social institutions and allow practitioners access to new, personal realities. “Free love” echoed the surrealists, who interchanged “love” with “liberty.” The countercultural ethic, akin to romanticism, was a shift to collectivity, to crafts and do-it-yourself rather than precious art or mass production, away from the corporate world of work and fashions to creative life-styles of sleeping around, throwing pots, knotting macrame, baking bread, and wearing third-world, rural, or laborer clothing, along with removing makeup and growing hair; it was a critique of the “disciplinary society” and harkened back to earlier reformist eras.

That psychoanalysis is a deconstruction of the middle-class family in industrial capitalism that must be taken historically and culturally is true of subsequent interpretations, which are also historical and contextual. In the early 1970s, Lacan’s rereading via linguistics and semiotics had not yet been taken up in the United States. And Lacan’s snares and pitfalls had yet to be uncovered. Either biological determinism, the body as given or natural, or “psychologism,” the mind as authentically experienced, or combinations of both were the dominant interpretations of Freud in the United States. This is one discursive context of VF and, from the diametrically opposite shore, feminism. U.S. feminists were leery if not dismissive of the theoretical potential of psychoanalysis to reveal anything of value to women, including an analysis of narrative and representation. That Freud could provide any insights into female subjectivity met with derision. For many feminists, Freud meant and equaled patriarchy. Psychoanalysis was seen as repressive for women, and women needed to be liberated from Freud. Hence the entire system rather than interpretations had to be dethroned—in a sense, throwing out the theoretical baby with the interpretive bathwater.

In a polemically impassioned response (a reprint from lump Cut) to a summer 1975 issue of Screen which included a section from Metz’s The Imaginary Signifies Julia LeSage accused Heath and Colin McCabe’s earlier editorial on psychoanalysis of being “overtly sexist”: “I am referring to the Screen writers’ accepting as an unquestioned given the Freudian concepts of penis envy . . . and fetishism.”⁵² The recent theorizing of psychoanalysis “is strange to me as an American, since the US gave Freud his greatest acceptance . . . in the Vulgar Freudianism that flowered in the 20s and 30s here. . . . In the 60s one of the first victories of the women’s movement in the US was to liberate ourselves both academically and personally from the Freud trap. . . when I see intellectuals such as MacCabe and Heath. . . ground their ideas in an oppressive orthodox Freudianism that takes the male as the basis for defining the female, my first reaction is one of political and intellectual rage” (78). For women, the stakes were high. The raging disputes around the importation of theory (labeled unintelligible jargon), particularly psychoanalysis, into the United States were intense, including the boycotting of the Milwaukee conference in 1977 amid whispers of exclusion and elitism.

In her look back at the radical feminist movement in the United States, Ellen Willis assesses feminists’ repudiation: “The movement’s second major weakness was its failure to develop a coherent analysis of either male or female psychology . . . radical feminists as a group were dogmatically hostile to Freud and psychoanalysis . . . especially its concept of the unconscious and . . . the role of sexual desire . . . had almost no impact on radical feminist theory . . . an intellectual and political disaster.”⁵³ Mulvey, in line with Juliet Mitchell, uses psychoanalysis to analyze systems of male subjectivity, including its operations within specific conventions of classical Hollywood cinema. For her, this was a prerequisite leading to an analysis of female desire and the overthrow of the conventions of the classical text. “Women . . . cannot view the decline of the traditional film form with anything much more than sentimental regret” is her last line (18).

In tandem with Heath theoretically, de Lauretis reclaimed narrative for feminism in her critique of Snow, and in 1983, in “Desire in Narrative,” analyzed myth as narrative: “the movement of narrative discourse, which specifies and even produces the masculine position as that of mythical subject, and the feminine position as mythical obstacle or, simply, the space in which that movement occurs” (143). She goes further in this essay to assert that “one feels indebted to Freud more than any other male theorist for attempting to write the history of femininity, to understand female subjectivity, or simply to imagine woman as mythical and social subject” (131). In concert with Freud’s continual modeling of contradictions, a both/and rather than an either/or logic, de Lauretis’s method also posits contradictions: “the contradiction by which historical women must work with and against Oedipus” (157).

What LeSage rails against is an interpretation of Freud “where psychoanalysis promised the middle class solutions to their identity problems and angst, and where vulgarised Freudian concepts were part of daily life in the child-bearing advice of Spock and Gessell” (77-78). While de Lauretis inscribes the female spectator and theorist within the project, LeSage, concluding her critique, points to an early dilemma of film theory, in which gender did not figure as determinant. She also expands what remained a limitation for most feminists until very recently—the concept of difference as a bipolarity. “We not only have to recognize differences of class but entirely different social experiences based on the fact of the oppression of one sex” (83). Thus, in 1974-1975, she called for a model of difference that is not only sexual but also racial, cultural, and economic. Even the sagacious de Lauretis acknowledged the broad accuracy of LeSage’s charge much later, adding that differences within and among women could be productive.

As I have reiterated, a central notion was that aesthetics (like drugs, clothing, sex, and new technologies such as video), would alter our lives and politics. The revelation of form and a critique of “work” beneath the commodity fetish, like the altered consciousness of drugs, were among the artistic tools of everyday life which would lead to liberation—one version of the personal is political, replete with paradoxes. These techniques of daily life would enable us to bypass social structures and alter economic, political conditions; the new aesthetics of revelation and confrontation would change “consciousness” and hence the world. As Andreas Huyssen writes: “The belief in consciousness raising by means of aesthetic experience was quite common in those days.”⁵⁴ The confluence between revealing the work beneath the art, or separating the signifier from the signified, and the dismissal of the corporate, capitalist work ethic, or getting a nine to five job, must be noted.

This argument divided along at least two lines. For Godard, along with various U.S. cinema verite exponents, political filmmaking must reveal the seams of the apparatus, along with the presence and complicity of the filmmaker, reposing the Soviet avant-garde artist’s question of the intellectual’s relationship to the revolution and the working class. Theoretical writings by Baudry and Commoli, predicated on psychoanalysis, analyzed “the ideology of the cinematic apparatus.” If the technique were revealed, the repressed uncovered, then another politics would emerge, including a repositioning of the now aware spectator. It could be argued that avant-garde’s claimed evacuation of narrative, sometimes including characters and the human body, and its critique of representation dependent on the body, along with eliminating dialogue and sync sound (economic limitations must also be considered as explanations for various absences), precipitated this theoretical endeavor (with the caution that this is a very narrow description of avant-garde practices, although the most common in criticism; few filmmakers actually performed these reductions). However, whether the analysis was predicated upon ideology or aesthetics was critical, as Peter Wollen suggests in drawing the lines between two avant-gardes—the variant traditions in Europe, with a tie to narrative experimentation, and the United States.⁵⁵

Issues of authorship (Foucault) coincidentally reentered film debates, linked to analyses of the apparatus. Within avant-garde, in line with the auteur policy, the sanctity of the author was upheld but pluralized: anyone could be an artist. The aesthetics of liberation read signifiers as marks of the maker; the emergence of a personal rather than professional style separated this work from the anonymity of commercial film, making even the humblest effort more interesting. Along with an inclusive shift in aesthetic standards, authorship was art. For the theoretical side, inscribing the presence of the filmmaker was a disruption, a declaration of enunciation, a political position.

Both approaches grew from the 1960s auteur policy, which attempted to discern authorship amid commercial conditions of corporate production. Issues of individual authorship and anonymous collaboration relate to the critique of private property, questions of standardization and specialization. To ensure personal authorship, avant-garde filmmakers would, indeed must, take on all aspects of filmmaking, particularly cinematography, repeating early film history and combining the amateur, do-it-yourself craft impetus of the counterculture with the fine arts tradition of individual artists. However, what must be remembered about the emergence of the auteur policy around Cahiers du Cinema in the 1950s, spreading to Film Culture in the 1960s with its historical pantheon which includes Welles, Von Stroheim, and Keaton, is that, like theories of the text and feminism, the auteur policy was a claim for access to the means of production. Films by untested directors, outside the rigid labor union and studio structure, made for small sums of money, became possible and fashionable.

If the corporate institution of filmmaking, with its divisions of labor which relied on years of training and apprenticeship, with expertise traded for money, with its system of production modeled on standardization and specialization, with the expenditure and potential profits of huge sums of money, could be overturned, then anyone with a particular vision could, for a minuscule amount of money, make a film, control its circulation, and own the work—gaining access to and then revealing for us the conditions of production. Hence, the contradictions in the United States: the values of a folk/craft culture hooked up with fine arts individualism. Handmade films were mechanically reproduced. Avant-garde rejected standardization and specialization with a vague critique of capitalism but with an eye on art and the purview of the museum.

Along with the rejection of the business suit in favor of blue jeans, of short hair in favor of long, a preference for the country over the city, the values of the craft movement and everyday life were ascribed to advanced technology—throwing pots, raising vegetables, hooking rugs, weaving shawls, building a house, shooting films, accessing information, and making video art were equivalent. Daily life was set against corporate and familial values of 1950s and 1960s upward mobility, a status secured by a job, salary, and home and visually declared by the possession of mass-produced consumer durables. Like competition, private property was critiqued (for example, in the de-emphasis on film titles) but paradoxically upheld: film collectives were organized so that individuals could produce their own personal films. Other values were inverted, for example, middle-class tourism of the 1950s: artist would travel, but not as tourists; they would travel in vans and camp out on cross-country treks, staying with friends rather than in motels. Work, or having a job, was displaced into life-style. Dropping out and turning on or being an artist took precedence. The concept of cinema as “work” and the deciphering of that process was culturally and strangely in tune with not working.

Paradoxically, what is taken today to be a conservative or old-fashioned politics of avant-garde was, like romanticism, not very long ago viewed as a radical practice. Context, like history, does make another kind of difference.