Foucault’s metaphor of the “seeing machine” is applicable to U.S. avant-garde cinema: during the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, it was considered illegal or scandalous, and duly censored. To counter this, the New American Cinema Group met in New York in 1960 and issued a “First Statement.” This manifesto asserted that cinema was “indivisibly a personal expression,” rejected censorship and the “high budget myth,” and declared that new forms of financing, distribution, and exhibition were to be collectively and internationally organized. Posited directly against “official cinema,” which the document argued was “morally corrupt, aesthetically obsolete,” and with allegiance to New Cinema movements in other countries, the conclusion announced: “We don’t want false, polished, slick films—we prefer them rough, unpolished, but alive; we don’t want rosy films—we want them the color of blood.”² The language was that of battle on an international scale. The proponents (including a single woman, Shirley Clarke, who would quickly shift her work to video) were cast as warriors against the enemy—Hollywood cinema.

“A group of twenty-three independent film-makers, gathered by invitation of Lewis Allen, stage and film producer, and Jonas Mekas, met at 156 West 46th Street (Producer’s Theater) and, by unanimous vote, bound themselves into a free open organization of the new American cinema: The Group.” Although sorely lacking in inventive names and clarity of language—bound into free and open—“a temporary executive board was elected, consisting of Shirley Clarke, Emile de Antonio, Edward Bland, Jonas Mekas, and Lewis Allen” (79). (Perhaps Bland named “The Group.”) It is important to point out that narrative cinema was not under siege per se; commerce, emblematized by Hollywood, was. As I argue elsewhere and frequently, the conventions of the classical style and the story of the heterosexual couple, on its way to romance with marriage or murder as the end, within the American dream of upward mobility and the family, were challenged, along with recognizing that this style had been packaged and traded for years as a profitable and standardized commodity. The initial impetus was to create alternative narrative features expressive of personal style and link up with the tradition of European art cinema, which had 16mm distribution outlets and virtually its own exhibition circuit developing in the late 1950s and 1960s, including art houses, university theaters, and, critically, student film societies.

I note that the date of the meeting was coincident with the flurry of new wave auteurism and the excited celebrity following the successes and publicity of the Cannes film festival in 1959, where Truffaut’s 400 Blows had won a prize and Breathless had also been shown (along with a winner by Alain Resnais). The “politique des auteurs” would soon be popularized in the United States, tenets which were endorsed by “The Group” and the manifesto—first films, made for low budgets, by first-time directors.

The document passionately asserts: “We are not joining together to make money. We are joining together to make films. We are joining together to build the New American Cinema. And we are going to do it together with the rest of America, together with the rest of our generation. . . . Our colleagues in France, Italy, Russia, Poland, or England can depend on our determination” (82). That this was a generational struggle, that it was international, and that it aligned itself with the goals of new wave directors and Italian neorealist filmmakers was clear. The goal was an alternative, U.S. narrative/feature film practice, made possible by the recognition that a market for “foreign” films was developing. Many participants had their “first feature” in preparation or production, suggesting an allegiance with the auteur policy which, among other things, was a claim to become a director, against the union-studio system of apprenticeship and nepotism—which was also a system of training, the apprenticing of the classical style, which ensured its survival and dominance.

The subsequent and quite rapid shift within New American Cinema from features and an allegiance to its European precursors to “visionary film” and opposition to European narrative is rapid and significant. Thus, between this document (and long before it) and the emergence of U.S. avant-garde film as a movement exists much additional history, missing from my account. Let’s call it a dialectical leap rather than ignorance. Mekas, “The Group” co-founder and a film critic for the Village Voice, was initially critical of the often short, frequently unpolished films, with a posture comparable to that of Andrew Sarris and his version of auteurism. However, Mekas undergoes a radical conversion early on and becomes proselytizer, nurturing prophet, and filmmaker. An explanation more satisfying than the personal realignment, preferences, and early films of the players is the beginning of the counterculture—a youth and generational movement with a critique of U.S. capitalism and a commitment to internationalism via the linkage of the local and the global. International cultural pluralism combined with a devaluation of money and the capitalist work ethic (a rigid instantiation of time and hierarchy) and led to the endorsement of amateur movies, a rapidly developing phenomenon which overlapped with “the personal is political.” (While many filmmakers in the 1980s have returned to the narrative tradition mapped out in this document, Rainer and Potter outrun it by taking the premises of the avant-garde into narrative. By adding a third knowledge, feminism, they rewrite the rules of both games.)

To illustrate the critical paradigm that emerged after this switch of gears, a dogma influenced by and endorsing the films and arguments of Brakhage, Jacobs, and Anger, I will turn to a 1966 essay by Annette Michelson, “Film and the Radical Aspiration,” an essay dedicated to Noel Burch and inspired by Walter Benjamin, in turn influenced by revolutionary Soviet filmmakers.³ For Michelson, while the European film accepts what she calls the dissociative principle, “It is the almost categorical rejection of that principle and the aspiration to an innocence and organicity that animates the efforts of the ‘independent’ filmmakers who compose something of an American avant-garde” (409). She asserts, rather like de Lauretis and others later but to opposite ends, that “the crux of cinematic development lies . . . in the evaluation and redefinition of the nature and role of narrative structure.” After a discussion of the historical avant-garde, then the French nouvelle vague—particularly Godard and Resnais and their “decline” due to their continuing “allegiance” “to the conventions of Hollywood’s commercial cinema, and of the conversion of those conventions to the uses of advanced cinema” (412) which then become preconditions, premises—her essay moves to the “American independent film” and “its almost categorical rejection of the aesthetic grounded in the conventions hitherto discussed. The film-makers with whom we are concerned have, in fact, been led to abandon the tactics of reconciliation basic to European film as a whole. Most importantly, this rejection is in turn predicated on a negation . . . of the middle-class society that supported Hollywood . . . and that continues to sustain . . . the activity of most major European directors” (416).

She then argues the “militant aspect of a radical aspiration in American film. It is postulated on a conception of film as being . . . redemptive of the human condition itself. . . the radicalism . . . of Stan Brakhage, and, to some extent. . . the criticism of Jonas Mekas” (416). The linkage is made with abstract expressionism, with the artist as a “moral hero,” with a quote by Harold Rosenberg who posits the contradictions of an “aesthetic-as-morality,” a “certain radicalism” (418). The American cinema today is compared to the “post-Revolutionary situation in Russia.” The contours—abstract expressionism, Soviet constructivism, ethical aesthetics as morally radical, and an anti-middle-class stance—have shaped the avant-garde critical imaginary and are, for Michelson, the radical aspiration. Her claims for this cinema resemble counterculture claims. Critically, she sets the U.S. avant-garde against the contemporary European, narrative film—an opposition to which I will return in the last chapter through the criticism of Jonas Mekas.

The essay concludes with an assessment that oddly predicts postmodernism: “cinema, on the verge of winning the battle for the recognition of its specificity . . . is now engaged in a reconsideration of its aims. The emergence of new ‘intermedia’ . . . the cross-fertilization of dance, theater, film . . . constitute a syndrome of that radicalism’s crisis, both formal and social. . . . In a country whose dream of revolution has been sublimated in reformism and frustrated by an equivocal prosperity, cinematic radicalism is condemned to a politics and strategy of social and aesthetic subversion” (420-421). She gives the future over to eight-year-olds making films in their backyards—the noble dream of accessibility as a radical promise, one which resembles the video guerrillas and is akin to Mekas.

Form is the ground of the battle (the use of “radical” is culturally bound to the mid-1960s protest culture); her quotation of Eisenstein says it all: “to raise form once more to the level of ideological content.” This position is rather similar to that of Lyotard, argued via psychoanalysis. The divide Michelson argues between the European and U.S. avant-garde was picked up and taken in the opposite direction by Peter Wollen in “ ‘Ontology’ and Materialism in Film.” Although Michelson wishes, during her talk, that she could show examples of the films, and while Jonas Mekas was sitting in the audience with a tape recorder, many contemporary debates have been waged over theories of film, perhaps more than the films themselves, which often serve as theories of film—which might be our greatest debt to the Soviets who taught and argued film theory perhaps as much as they shot or edited films. Michelson, with her aesthetics and politics grounded in French thought and Soviet art of the revolutionary period, has been a leading figure in the debates. That Soviet cinema had a great resurgence during the late 1960s, with student protesters applauding the ending of Battleship Potemkin and seeing the two parts of Ivan the Terrible, often for the first time, should not go unremarked. In many ways, Michelson was very au courant. The radicalism of aesthetics, or of form, can also be seen in the “look” and actions of the counterculture and protest movements—a series of tactics and strategies that could be shifted from issue to issue.

Around the same time, Michelson wrote of another significant event: “The film [Michael Snow’s Wavelength] broke upon the world with the force, the power of conviction which defines a new level of enterprise, a threshold in the evolution of the medium.” Others, too, invoked an evolutionary model of film history, imagining avant-garde as a powerful weapon in a cultural arsenal, a tactic resounding with the militant overtones of earlier avant-gardes, particularly in the Soviet Union in the revolutionary period, but including Italian futurism and surrealism. As Foucault reminds us, “The history which bears and determines us has the form of a war rather than of a language: relations of power, not relations of meaning”⁴ In the midst of the Vietnam War protest and brutal civil rights struggles, which culminated in ending and losing a war, the slaughter of Kent State students, and the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., the U.S. avant-garde waged artistic struggle without much direct engagement with these political issues. Censorship battles were fought (there were confrontations and arrests). Journals (Film Culture and Cinema News) were created to spread the gospel and films. Accolades were garnered at international film festivals (with whispered rumors of aesthetic conspiracies). Coastal collectives (Canyon Cinema in San Francisco and Film-makers’ Cooperative in New York) were organized. There were heroes (Jonas Mekas, Maya Deren, Bruce Baillie, Stan Brakhage, and Michael Snow). There were deaths (Ron Rice and Deren). There were champions of the cause (P. Adams Sitney and John Hanhardt).

Outside existing institutions (including, then, commercial cinema, art galleries, museums, and universities), artists banded together in guilds, forming collectives yet rarely collaborating, preferring the complete work by the total “artist.” In alignment with countercultural politics and with a fervent nod to Soviet artists, including Malevich and Eisenstein, both strategies inverted the commercial model. Anyone could place films for distribution in the collectives, organized then and administered now by artists, and anyone supposedly had access to these embattled theaters for exhibition, thus reversing the Hollywood pattern of exhibition just as the conditions of avant-garde production rejected the studios’ corporate canons of standardization and specialization. Films could be of any length or any quality, about any subject, with no subject; the makers were responsible for funding and maintaining their own prints, which belonged to them, as well as writing their own publicity copy. Without agents or galleries (although not uniformly so; some artists were represented by art dealers), filmmakers, to a degree, hawked their own works, tooted their own artistic horns, and relied on friendship for promotion, taking to the hustings like solo vaudeville acts. Like carnies, they found that eccentricity and brashness were assets. Catalogues listing and describing films available for rental from the co-ops were sources of publicity, along with word of mouth (the key source) and critical columns in, for example, the Village Voice. Art rather than commerce, the rough over the polished, and the group’s cause over the fame of the individual were the radical rules of this game, which were, it should be noted, picked up and copied in, for example, England and Australia, co-op by co-op. Like the classical Hollywood cinema, U.S. avant-garde films and structures influenced other national avant-gardes, to a significant degree remaining artistically dominant.

Individuality versus collectivity (a contradiction built into this system in the gaps between production, distribution, and exhibition) has always been the catch-22 of the politics of U.S. avant-garde (and perhaps of the counterculture). The deeds were noble, the structure epic; yet individualism remained, as Foucault stated:

And if from the early Middle Ages to the present day, the “adventure” is an account of individuality, the passage from the epic to the novel, from the noble deed to the secret singularity, from long exiles to the internal search for childhood, from combats to phantasies, it is also inscribed in the formation of a disciplinary society.⁵

If the intent of the artistic and political conflicts of the 1960s was to undermine the constraints of the “disciplinary society,” it was compromised by “accounts” of individuality and avant-garde finally inscribed within a place of disciplines—universities. The young protagonists of this rebellion aged, crossing the generational divide and finally instantiating hierarchy.

Epic visual journeys charted the artistic progress of the youthful self as emblematic of the “collective consciousness.” Cinema’s conventions were challenged in an outpouring of poetic images, sometimes without sound tracks, stripped of accumulated constraints and conventions: Deren’s fragmented, tortured “meshes”; Brakhage’s mountains, stars, and riddles; Snow’s central and regional encounters in lofts, gallery installations, and eventually the Canadian wilderness, his country; Hollis Frampton’s Magellan voyage into the 1970s; Bruce Baillie’s Parsifal; and Robert Nelson and William Wiley’s Don Quixote, the comically heroic Blondino. Without the expected doses of the time and space of narrative and its historical conventions of continuity style, the spectator was playing an unfamiliar game, caught off guard. The frightening edge of looking (often a derailed or demonic voyeurism), as well as abstracted visual pleasures, came with the risk of misrecognition, of seeing and being seen, of not being able to identify the scene, of the realization of the split between the camera eye and our eye, of the physical disparity between sound and image. Outside the rules of intelligibility and pleasurable placement within memory created by story and repetition, we were shocked, ecstatic, confused, irritated, and bored by these films. By reminding us that our eyes must work, that we are desire’s source and impossibility, that the text was not located on-screen but was a process with and not for us, these works engaged film’s material apparatus, including the disruption of the comfortable place of the spectator at the movies and within culture.

The parallel with contemporary theory, particularly Barthes and Lacan, is uncanny, yet largely unremarked. It is likely that by the 1970s, by making the work of film apparent in more than a decade’s outpouring of “experimental” films, by splitting the signifier from the signified, avant-garde had pushed film theory to explain this now uncomfortable, dispersed, bored, or blissful spectator. If that is the case, then avant-garde can be read historically, as and through theory. For the most part, however, academics clung to the safe familiarity and pleasure of narrative turf, and most artists disdained “theory.”

As Barthes has suggested, “bliss may come only with the absolutely new, for only the new disturbs (weakens) consciousness (easy? not at all: nine times out of ten, the new is only the stereotype of the novelty).”⁶ Unlike classical narrative’s process of differentiation, invention within a set of constraints and conventions labeled “continuity style,” avant-garde sought stylish difference, “the absolutely new.” Of course Barthes’s notion of the “absolutely new” bespeaks the problems of origin as well as the usual polarity between art and popular culture. (Still, the new as the stereotype of novelty is an intriguing third term which must be contended with, particularly in relation to postmodern art, theory, and fashion.) However, his distinction between texts of pleasure and texts of jouissance (the classical film versus the avant-garde film), invoking the readerly and the writerly, seems applicable to the historical effectivity and reception of avant-garde films. Many of the films were texts of bliss. “The text of bliss,” Barthes wrote, “always rises out of it [history] like a scandal”; it is the “text that imposes a state of loss, the text that discomforts (perhaps to the point of a certain boredom), unsettles the reader’s historical, cultural, psychological assumptions. . . .”⁷ Flaming Creatures (Jack Smith, 1962) with its scenes of transves tite orgy, Fireworks (1947) with its homosexual reverie, and Scorpio Rising (Kenneth Anger, 1963) with its parody of Christ and celebration of the occult, drugs, sex, motorcycles, and popular culture (rock music—including 1960s black “girl groups” and Elvis Presley years before the 1980s nostalgic mania for both; movie stars—James Dean, Marlon Brando, and Elvis; and comic books and television) provoked outrage and were banned from the screens of art museums (after Flaming Creatures, the Milwaukee Art Museum stopped showing experimental films).

Additional films (Ken Jacobs’s Tom, Tom, the Piper’s Son, Paul Sharit’s T,O,U,C,H,I,N,G, and Frampton’s Zorns Lemma) illustrated that—to use Barthes’s words—“difference is plural, sensual, and textual . . . difference is the very movement of dispersion.”⁸ Jacobs poetically remade film history. Sharits multilated the body. Frampton erotically dramatized the passage of light and deconstructed linguistics. Nelson and Wiley crazily careened their characters and fantasies through San Francisco. Brakhage showed us abstracted glimpses of light, refractions of swords, hints of naked bodies.

Brakhage had given the heraldic call in Metaphors on Vision (1963): the mythic eye of this heroic avant-garde (including the spectator) was to be “unruled by man-made laws of perspective, unprejudiced by compositional logic, which must know each object encountered in life.”⁹ Critics paid heed and analyzed the individual experience of these films as metaphors of consciousness, of light. Within Western representation’s historical equation of sight with knowledge (“I see” meaning “I understand”), it appears “logical” (actually it must be historical—the phrase of the 1980s is “I hear you”) that in cinema, vision has become both a sight of sensual pleasure and a site of struggle involving the place—the experience (impressions or feelings) versus the construction (history and context)—of the spectator.

A decade later in contemporary film theory, to which I will constantly return, funneled through the writings of Lacan, the “look” was delineated as a fundamental fault. Between appearance and the real is the look, a lack: scopic castration in which the eye is separated from what it sees; this is modeled on the French photogenie debates in which the camera mediates the real, stylizing, altering and yet remaining true to the profilmic, as well as linguistics through which Lacan reread Freud. The eye and the “I” are versions of both the experience and construction of the spectator, depending on whether the subject is imagined as unified or split in language. Perhaps in historical coincidence with this conceptualization of the imaginary—of primary identification, narcissism, unity—eventually the camera of the avant- garde artist was thought of as anthropomorphic, as duplicating or extending the eye of the filmmaker. Ed Emschwiller claimed that his arm holding the camera, which swooped over bodies as physical terrain or landscape, was an extension of his eye. Brakhage had audiences make their own movies by pressing on their closed eyelids. While primarily applied to classical narrative films, the Lacanian model, with its linkages to surrealism, more aptly replicates the premises and practices of avant-garde.

However, in film theory, the divided subject of Lacan, descended from Freud, linguistics, and the surrealists, converged with Marx/Althusser and dissected the codes of narrative films, in the main sidestepping avant-garde until the late 1970s. This time lag should not remain unremarked: the premises and claims of avant-garde, including its international aspirations, were construed in the United States from the mid- to late 1940s, solidified in the 1960s, and were radical and unsettling in that political and intellectual context; contemporary film theory grew from the 1970s application in the United Kingdom of continental theory (from Brecht to Barthes, Freud, Marx, and, to a lesser degree, Foucault) to cinema, after an intense period of international, avant-garde activism and proselytizing. (The cross-cultural transmigration of film is fascinating and often unremarked—one condensed version might see it as the exportation of early U.S. mass film culture returning fifty years later as continental theory.) Rather than examining avant-garde texts within historical parameters and debates, many contemporary critics treat this variegated work as monolithic, timeless, eternal. Anger’s citation of “Blue Velvet” in Scorpio Rising in the early 1960s is a very different story from Blue Velvet of the 1980s, which remembers and alludes to the earlier film. Reception itself—including temporality, repetition, legibility, shock, and scandal—was a focus of avant-garde’s project and critique; what is forgotten in many accounts is that reception and spectators are historical rather than forever; context, including a politics of opposition and negation rather than incorporation and contradiction, must be taken into account. (I will return to reception and detail Lyotard’s and Heath’s respective but overlapping models of reception in a later chapter.)

Brakhage had banished sound from film art, reviving older debates, for example, Rudolph Arnheim, which circled around ontology; Andre Bazin’s question “What is Cinema,” film’s very definition, was then, as it had been since at least 1915, along with deciphering the styles of film artists, a central question and debate, resembling arguments today around television, its very definition at stake. Strangely enough, while many films had sound tracks, although few had sync speech, perhaps due to cost, there was little theoretical talk about the intersection of sound/image, no matter how critical its function in particular films. That is also true of most contemporary film theory (with Noel Burch as a significant early exception and Mary Ann Doane and Rick Altman much later), which did not pick up Eisenstein’s work on what he called “vertical” montage, demonstrated in avant-garde films, for example, Hollis Frampton’s Nostalgia and Critical Mass. Vision, with its thorough grounding in the legitimacy of philosophy and art, has indeed dominated our thinking as well as our memories of films. This is even more ironic given that our theory is predicated on linguistics and semiotics and thus more snugly fits Framptom’s visual and aural linguistics than it does Hitchcock or Berkeley.

For many filmmakers and critics, the subject was a transcendental one— neither split like Barthes’s (through Lacan) nor heroically collective, but supremely individualized. The locus was the archetypal or apocryphal figure of the artist; it was often his (with a few hers) “creative consciousness” that was explored or excavated. Fragmented during the viewing, we were reassembled after the film by the presence of the filmmakers, who accompanied their sometimes silent films as speaking texts. As I continue to argue, this star system of personal appearances, in the Homeric tradition of oral history, combined with traveling circuits and repeated performances reminiscent of U.S. vaudeville to turn avant-garde into an event, an experience which exceeded or superseded the films.

Filmmakers regularly hand-delivered their “personal” films while telling tales of their arduous making, cost, and funding—stories structured on the Bildungsroman, stories of travail, eccentricity, meaning, and origin. One never missed spotting a visiting filmmaker at the airport—easily identifiable by the 16mm film case and the late 1960s leftist garb. (Morgan Fisher dressed more like an accountant, and Brakhage always looked too young to have made so many films; Land resembled a young, impertinent rabbi, his red-hair flowing when he strode; Conrad, a European 1920s intellectual or philosopher, was fashionably adorned in a single color; Woody Vasulka reminded me of Mel Brooks minus the abrasiveness, Sharits of a modern cowboy on the edge or under the volcano, Robert Nelson of the Marlboro Man, literally, and Jonas Mekas of a noble Lithuanian poet, which he was; Hollis Frampton would have been brilliant as God, Noah, or Abraham in a Cecil B. De Mille film—as he so comically said one night, “I was invited to the conference to play the wrath of God.”) Like my experiential rap, the films were clearly framed by presence and anecdote (gossip granting personal familiarity). The unfamiliar was made familiar and often familial in the creation of a loyal band of disciples, students soon to be filmmakers or critics, for example, Diana Barrie in relation to Brakhage or Bruce Conner, Rob Danielson in relation to Owen Land. As Snow “writes” in So Is This: “Sometimes the author is present and poses questions. . . .” Or, it should be mentioned, answers them. Via cross-country repetition, avant-garde developed a history of heroic, mythic accounts, spiced with personal remembrance and gossip.

It is not insignificant that eventually the theaters were often university classrooms and museum corridors and meeting rooms—dispersed exhibitors with meager to bad facilities and without any systematic means of distribution except the energy of the single filmmaker, an occasional newsletter, and irregularly printed journals (sporadic publication was a mark of poverty, overwork, understaffing, and radical politics; journals of official culture are always on time). The Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, the Art Institute in Chicago, Pacific Film Archives and the Art Institute in San Francisco, along with the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney, and the Collective in New York, SUNY in Buffalo and Binghamton were way stations in artists’ crosscountry treks, which were announced in newsletters. The University of Wisconsin in Milwaukee joined the list of welcoming exhibitors in 1974, documenting the visitors that year in a series of twelve one-hour video productions.¹⁰ These places of hinterland exhibition corresponded with the passion of usually one sympathetic curator, faculty member, or filmmaker/teacher. Audiences (created by the local, resident aficionado’s sheer enthusiasm) consisted of significantly more students than teachers; like the counterculture, this was a youthful, student-centered movement. Land taught at the Art Institute, where Brakhage also lectured. Tony Conrad, along with Gerald O’Grady, encouraged filmmakers in Buffalo, where Paul Sharits also taught, on a faculty that in the glory days included Woody and Steina Vasulka, James Blue, and Hollis Frampton. Peter Lehman and Guilio Scalenger invited filmmakers to the yearly film festival and symposium at Ohio University. Scott MacDonald invited and interviewed filmmakers at Utica College. Ken Jacobs, Larry Gottheim, and Maureen Turim kept the avant-garde fires burning at Binghamton. Milwaukee had Robert Nelson, Cecelia Condit, Valie Export, and Rob Danielson.

Like other manifestations of the artistic counterculturve, the movement, which opposed institutions, was funded, recognized, and indeed made possible by institutions—universities via salaries and spotty purchases of basic equipment, and federal and state governments: the National Endowment for the Arts and some state arts councils, such as New York, funneled money to filmmakers (who still remain crucially dependent on various grant agencies). An NEA grant was both the financier and seal of artistic approval, a prestigious award which could be used to garner other funds, and an award which became self-perpetuating. Once an artist entered the grant pantheon, the chances for future awards were almost ensured; refinancing projects was a snowballing strategy of NEA grant panels. (In the early 1980s, a shift in public artistic policy occurred: from supporting media “experimentation” by unknowns to funding “established artists” with track records; given the emphasis on prior reputation, it became more difficult to enter the circuit of exhibition and financing.) Given the extreme cost of filmmaking, however, the amounts were relatively minuscule; this was a poor and struggling movement; innovative works were made for virtually nothing, brought off by the passionate energy of the maker, often made with novice student crews and edited on primitive equipment. (For example, George Kuchar, with an all-student cast and crew, has fashioned the most extraordinary super-8mm and video spectacles in class. His Bakhtinian extravaganzas of grotesque, zany bodies, often edited in camera, replete with special effects, rival De Mille in their sheer excess.) Audiences received the most for their investment—admission to most screenings around the country was either free or minimal. The movement was truly heroic, if not sacrificial, economically speaking. While fascinated by film’s materiality, few artists were materialists in either the Marxist or the capitalist sense of the word. Although money was an obsessive topic, money was not the goal, merely an inconvenient necessity for film stock. Its lack became a social and artistic virtue, at least for a time. The economic history, including institutional connections, needs to be documented.

As crucial as the system of distribution of films and information was (and continues to be, although appearances are winding down as in-group events), it, like the financial linkages to officialdom, raised problems. Certainly word-of-mouth and hand-delivery distribution and exhibition were inefficient, particularly for filmmakers. Moreover, the personal appearance system, bound by its own decorum, risked placing “meaning” totally within the author; meanings after the film were then repeated as criticism of the film. The resulting interpretive translations were often nostalgic documentations, circumscribed by intention, remembrance, and anecdote. As Heath wrote in another context in one of the few theoretical essays on avant-garde films: “Generally avant-garde independent filmmaking has suffered from being provided with a history of its own.”¹¹ Both systems—the circuit and criticism—hovered around the visibly centered artist. Both risked an individualism of “secret singularities,” outside history, without politics, and thus without social critique, effects larger than the event, and audiences other than committed disciples. These problems have still not been resolved.

To return to the 1960 manifesto and a passage that predicted present debates: “We are concerned with Man. We are concerned with what is happening to Man. We are not an aesthetic school that constricts the filmmaker within a set of dead principles . . . we are not only for the New Cinema: we are also for the New Man.”¹² New Men were championed and celebrated. The fragmented subject of Barthes was and still is construed in most theoretical writings and constructed by many avant-garde films as a male subject—albeit dispersed and now, perhaps, plural. As Yvonne Rainer wrote in the script for Journeys from Berlin/1971, “The therapist is still male.”¹³

In the 1970s, feminist critiques of cinema not surprisingly circled avant- garde and grappled with the conventions of the look in narrative as the first site of debate. That this led to the present critique of the “theory of the subject” is also not surprising. In 1975 Laura Mulvey stunningly opened up the psychoanalytic terrain in “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” an essay that caused a theoretical avalanche and to some degree buried historical, cultural specificity in its influential wake, including the fact that her model was perched on an analysis of the films of Hitchcock and Von Sternberg. She wrote: “The first blow against the monolithic accumulation of traditional film conventions is to free the look of the camera into its materiality of time and space and the look of the audience into dialectics, passionate detachment.”¹⁴ Her strategy, marshaled first through and then against traditional narrative structures and within psychoanalysis and feminism, reversed Brakhage’s assault on the system of perspective in Western representation. Avant-garde films might have “freed” the look, but where had it gone? Certainly not into Mulvey’s dialectics and passionate detachment.

While it might be true that “woman” was not blatantly exchanged or grotesquely commodified by avant-garde films, neither was she centrally figured. “She” seemed to vanish with very few traces, except as allied partisan, liberated lover, or filmed mother/muse—a “bearer rather than maker of meaning” so literally enacted in Brakhage’s films of the births of his children, starring his wife, Jane. “She” was no longer a problem, but “she” was silenced only momentarily. Often “she” divorced “him,” obtaining the rights to his films as part of her settlement, as in the case of Freuda and Scott Bartlett. Or in the case of Joyce Wieland and Michael Snow, her painting and films were remembered in another film, by Kay Armitage in her artistic biography of Wieland in 1987. From the mid-1970s on, the fervent outpouring of feminist writing and filmmaking etched a glaring historical absence and affirmed a notable presence—as majority, as subject rather than object, as challenge to networks of power. This work provoked avant-garde practices to move in other directions—toward politics and an engagement with codes of narrative.

As female film and video makers and feminism became increasingly prominent, the masculine avant-garde seemed lethargic; some bemoaned and were bewildered by its decline, explaining it by economics and a conservative political climate. (New York was always an exception; recently, there has been a resurgence of interest due to regular, ambitious, archival programming at two new venues in New York.) It was, however, the decline of only a version of avant-garde, now out of step; instead of endings, perhaps beginnings could be argued; for women, the best, politically speaking, is yet to come.

I don’t mean to suggest that artists should have become male feminists, speaking for or as women (although this did happen under the earlier aegis of women’s liberation); they, along with contemporary critics and theorists, might have paid more attention to women—listening to them, reading their writing, quoting their work, acknowledging their subjectivity, and overtly refusing to perpetuate subservience by assuming the dominant cultural role reserved for male artists—turned to aware tongue-in-cheek in Martin Scorsese’s Life Lessons (in New York Stories), but still true, parodied or not. Imagine a version starring Barbara Krueger in her studio—that is the future.

As I have repeated, the university was one site of the debates and one context of change itself. In 1965 students boycotted classes and occupied buildings. If only a few faculty members joined them, nonetheless a shift of pedagogical authority had occurred. Near the end of that turbulent decade, much teaching and telling converged around “theories of the text” as plural and heterogeneous. For many this was (and continues to be) and intellectual violence to humanist interpretations, a scandal of scholastic politics. As Barthes wrote of France in 1968, “power itself, as a discursive category, was dividing, spreading like a liquid leaking everywhere. . . .”¹⁵ Universities became sites of activism (which was no longer the case in the 1980s, when power had stabilized, returned to conservative normalcy).

Today vestiges of old debates still swirl around theory as if it were an avant-garde practice. Just when I think this recurrent whine is history, I encounter yet another worried, famous, but out of style humanities professor, shaking his head forlornly and worrying about theory’s language, its corrosive influence precipitating a Spenglerian decline of culture and values. It seems clear that discursive power was and is at stake; many of the former leading men of this opposition (like former stars of old TV series returning to Murder, She Wrote only to abruptly die) are still defending their territory without awareness that argumentative boundaries have dramatically shifted to include women. As Barthes archly wrote, “anti-intellectualism [which can also be anti-feminism] reveals itself as a protest of virility.”¹⁶ In the early 1970s, via theories of the text, women gained access to reading as a textual process of inclusion and/or revision; shortly after that breakthrough (for me, an extraordinary opening up and unraveling of hermetically sealed boundaries secured by “truth” or “empiricism”—a real S/Z rush), manifest in detailed textual analyses and sometimes called “deconstruction,” theories of subjectivity enabled us to theorize and codify systems of representation and notice our inequality as spectators—there, as image; not there, as subject, a binarism which we later complicated. With these intellectual models as methods displacing “truth” garnered from informed but expert intuition, we could be critics and theorists—no small claim for knowledge.

Like the plural text as process, teaching was under siege in the late 1960s and the 1970s, no longer conceived as a consummable exchange of knowledge, smoothly flowing from the teacher/god to the student. Equally, knowledge was not to be valued as a commodity to be acquired as a truth, a single and comprehensive meaning, but as both production and process of reciprocal meanings amid historical and cultural intersections. Just as the concept of the perfect transmission from the author to the ideal reader was displaced amid the many debates on “authorship,” so were relations between teacher and student. As Neil Hertz has written:

Both figures—that of lineage and that of the closed circuit—depend for their intelligibility on a radical reduction of what is in fact plural . . . a reduction of those plurals to an imagined interplay of paired elements . . . teacher and student. The power such figures exert over readers is in proportion to the reduction they promise to perform.¹⁷

In addition to “paired elements,” these “reductions” take many forms, including “truth,” knowledge, and answers. The power of the “reduction” can also be read as a seduction—the teacher promising truth or closure at the end, a truth which will be constantly desired and long delayed, as in the performance of narrative. Thus have both teaching and telling been narrativized.

Like narrative (as well as avant-garde), the name of the father is embedded in teaching, in pedagogy. For example, Shoshana Felman analyzes the pedagogical attributes of psychoanalytic practice, predicated as it is on dialogue, “the radical condition of learning and knowledge.” With this as her paradigm of reciprocal teaching/learning, indeed their reversibility if not equation, Felman argues that

the position of the teacher is itself the position of the one who learns, of the one who teaches nothing other than the way he learns. The subject of teaching is interminably—a student; the subject of teaching is interminably—a learning. This is the most radical, perhaps the most far-reaching insight psychoanalysis can give us into pedagogy.¹⁸

As enticing as this analogy is, the student—the one who learns and teaches—is still a “he.” Fathers and sons teach and learn. Historically, an oedipal politics of pedagogy, whether real or symbolic, has been operative. In “Some Reflections on Schoolboy Psychology,” Freud validates this assertion through his own experience: “These men became our substitute fathers. . . . We transferred to them the respect and expectations attaching to the omniscient father of our childhood . . . we struggled with them as we had been in the habit of struggling with our fathers. . . .”¹⁹ Barthes reinforces the lineage of paternal intellectualism: “It is to a fantasy, spoken or unspoken, that the professor must annually return. . . . He thereby turns from the place where he is expected, the place of the Father, who is always dead, as we know.”²⁰ This funeral dirge is only that of Lazarus. Barthes concludes: “For only the son has fantasies, only the son is alive.”

One must ask about mothers and daughters, their fantasies. Where can they turn? The gender of the answer makes a substantial difference. We looked to male theorists in the 1970s; shortly after, feminist critics began to notice fault lines; from these oversights and blind spots, feminists worked out models of contradiction—and went from there to feminist theory. In film, women are still better served in criticism courses than in film production programs, although this is changing. Perhaps it is not only the metaphorical death of fathers and replicated sons which is desired but also the death of psychoanalysis’ narrative reiteration of patriarchal hierarchies. But as Barthes argues, without Oedipus “our popular arts would be transformed entirely” because “what would be left for us to tell?”²¹ Refraining from riddling, the Sphinx, in unison with women teachers, would have answered, “Plenty!” Thus, narrative is part and parcel of this double-binding dilemma. Some daughters are turning against this limited reading of Oedipus, remembering that he blinded himself at Thebes and that there was also Antigone.

Illicit in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, hotly disputed in the 1970s, in the 1980s avant-garde cinema is legal tender, taught rather than fought. “Video” has been embraced in university production curricula by all but the most recalcitrant avant-garde film disciple—most of whom are working on independent feature films if not video. Like the history of Hollywood film, the short (or medium or long) experimental film has been replaced by features or video meditations, video experiments. If, as a discourse, avant-garde is not as “transparent” a “building” (Foucault) as commercial movies or broadcast television, patterns of power have emerged—in a period of decline, of fewer university jobs, and indeed real jobs anywhere. To a large extent, U.S. avant-garde cinema and counterculture video fulfilled their own prophecies: radical goals have, in certain practices, turned into conservative nooses. However scandalous, avant-garde work has been accommodated or incorporated as resistance. Perhaps now it is “art,” safe as unusual if not overly profitable commerce, included and defused within the confines of the commodity art market and the university.

Yet unlike other commodities, the buyer’s market for films and videos never substantially materialized. As 16mm market and distribution decline due to cost of materials, bulky and expensive shipping and projection compared with the easy portability and reproducibility of video, artists are trying to incorporate the half-inch video rental and sales market into their thought and distribution processes. I can rent Scorpio Rising and Blue Velvet at Video Visions for the same price. Scorpio costs slightly more than Blue Velvet to buy, although it is a shorter film. This two dollar a shot mass rental market or fifty dollar purchase price is paradoxical: is it the final blow to or realization of the museum’s commodity market for film? Can avant-garde work imitate or use a commercial model, one which might provide substantial rental and purchase funds? Cecilia Condit says this is true in her case. Reproducibility has a dual edge: it mediates against collection as investment and preservation for scholarship, concealing for archivists the delicate nature of film and video, decomposing within our lifetime. At the same time, this marvelous fluidity and ease of distribution suggests an open market of exchange and sharing, as affordable as a television or a telephone. Historically, film or video rentals have not provided hefty if any incomes for most independent artists, who continue to be dependent on shrinking institutional grants (although Condit’s and other artists’ economic tale is different). Perhaps the weaknesses of the old system (with its linkages through opposition to the Hollywood studio model and the network broadcast spider web) will cause changes which will tap new audiences. Given reproducibility and immateriality, film and video were always less compatible with the museum than with mass culture practices. I wonder what would have happened if the stated opposition in the 1960s manifesto had been to art rather than to commerce. Oppositions are strategies, within contexts, and subject to change.

Today, independent avant-garde practices are moving sideways, outside the conservatism of academia into local galleries, performance spaces, community halls, politics, rock bars, and cable television (in certain venues, particularly the community access people, the dreams of free and easy public access embody the late 1960s countercultural values, dressed up a bit more, wearing shorter and less troubling hair); into other media and disciplines (music, theater, psychoanalysis); into forms of popular culture, including narrative and feature films. The disregard for the old hierarchies and divisions, plus constant examples of collaboration, suggest that avant-garde politics has altered. These heretical deviations from the 1960s canon are visible in the recent films and videotapes. There is indeed a new style, not predicated on purism, ontology, hierarchy—all exclusions. At the same time, the new style has been there all along; interpretations and pantheons obscured or blocked our vision.

Dick Hebdige, taking his cue from Genet and modeling his work on Foucault, argues that style is a “form of Refusal” which lodges objections and displays contradictions.²² Social relations have been taken into avant-garde culture; practices have been mediated and inflected by history, infused by theory, feminism, and the work of artists from other countries. These are productive times of revision, of inclusion rather than exclusion. On the negative side, it is also a time of difficult distribution, exorbitant film printing costs, a shift to video distribution and video sales, without really a plan or organization (the Video Data Bank in Chicago and Electronic Arts Intermix in New York are terrific distributors); along with the cooperatives, a great deal of current distribution is primarily handled by individual artists from their apartments; exhibition is dwindling in the hinterlands, and scholarly criticism has been sparse. Feminism seems to be the only widespread political game of consequence. The radical but (seen in retrospect) paternal, antitheoretical ideology of the 1960s took a heavy toll on a once energized and pedagogic movement—now somewhat frantically trying to catch up with ideas, being caught with its political pants down one time too many. For many once active filmmakers it has been years between exhibitions. “Maybe I’ll make a videotape,” say the former “fathers.” Ironically, along with Barthes’s erotics and Foucault’s “perversions,” dispersion and fragmentation also have disadvantages. The things the 1960s embodied were not only ideas but structures and tactics for achieving them; protest practicum was debated and invented and put into action. We need a different activism for the 1990s. Almost anything would be better than the Spenglerian plaints and whines of Marxists about the decline and fall of postmodern culture in the 1980s.