The traditional narrative of American avant-garde cinema goes something like this: avant-garde flm is a child of the 1920s, spawn of that fervent swirl of so-called “historical” avant-gardes (Futurism, dadism, surrealism, constructivism) that give us Un chien andalou (1929) and L’âge... [more]

The traditional narrative of American avant-garde cinema goes something like this: avant-garde flm is a child of the 1920s, spawn of that fervent swirl of so-called “historical” avant-gardes (Futurism, dadism, surrealism, constructivism) that give us Un chien andalou (1929) and L’âge d’or (1930), Anémic cinéma (1926), Emak Bakia (1926), and L’étoile de mer (1928), Ballet mécanique (1924), and Ghosts Before Breakfast (1928). Nourished by vital art cinema and ciné-club movements on the continent, the frst avant-garde perishes with the coming of sound, the global depression, and the rise of fascism. In the wake of the Second World War, European émigrés on the East and West Coasts (Man Ray, Hans Richter, Oskar Fischinger) helped catalyze a second—and, so the story goes, America’s frst—avant-garde, protagonized by Deren, Sidney Peterson, Gregory Markopolous, Kenneth Anger, and Harry Smith, among others. This avant-garde is then followed by the transatlantic raft of 1960s experimenters and underground denizens—Stan Brakhage, Peter Kubelka, Michael Snow, Ron Rice, the Kuchar Brothers—presided over, with mission-ary zeal, by Jonas Mekas, and given institutional support by the founding of the Filmmakers Cinémathèque, Canyon Cinema, and Anthology Film Archives itself. Horak’s Lovers of Cinema contested this genealogy, one reifed by P. Adams Sitney’s clas-sic study of the postwar American avant-garde’s modernist romanticism, Visionary Film: The American Avant-Garde, 1943–1948, by painstakingly recovering a counter-archive of early American avant-garde production, distribution, exhibition, and reception. Avant-garde and art flms, American and European, were screened in a host of “Little Cinemas” across the nation, in Marius de Zayas’s and Julien Levy’s art galleries, and in Alfred Stieglitz’s An American Place. Experimental production and distribution networks were encouraged by the founding of Artkino in 1925, the Amateur Cinema League in 1926, The Cinema Crafters of Philadelphia and the review essay Cinema Club of Rochester in 1928, and the Workers Film and Photo League in 1930. A number of periodicals also emerged in America and Europe devoted to championing publicly the cause of experimental, amateur, and avant-garde flmmaking, including Experimental Cinema, Film Art, Amateur Movie-Maker, and the National Board of Review Magazine, and Close-Up, edited by Kenneth Macpherson, H. D., and Bryher, and with frequent contributions by the American critics Harry A. Potamkin and Herman Weinberg. Thus, Horak argued convincingly that “while the frst American avant-garde relied on an institutional framework that was less well developed than that of the postwar avant-garde, their efforts did not exist in a complete vacuum, as has been previously assumed.” 2 Like Unseen Cinema, Lovers of Cinema insisted that early cinema’s “multifarious discursive practices were indeed avant-garde, so that the concept of an avant-garde in opposition to the norm appears only after the institutionalization of classical narrative in the mid-teens” (LC, 5). And, like Posner, Horak argues for a broadened defnition of the avant-garde to include the sort of institutionally, privately, or state-funded documentary flm production that, during the Great Depression, would become the bread and butter of experimentalists like Roger Barlow, Irving Lerner, LeRoy Robbins, Ralph Steiner, and Paul Strand. In these instances, avant-gardism was, perforce, hired labor, but Horak insists on a funda-mental discrepancy in self-understanding between the early and postwar avant-gardes. The latter proclaimed themselves independent flmmakers whose flms, in Mekas’s shamanic language, were “like extensions of our own pulse, of our heartbeat, of our eyes, our fngertips they are so personal,” and whose only work was “to surround the early with our flm frames and warm it up—until it begins to move.” 3 But this romantic freedom was paid for by an institutional network of material support in the form of government and foundation grants and university flm courses. Ironically, this second avant-garde’s anti-utilitarian rejection of commerce and industry masked what Horak called the “romanticized professionalization of the avant-garde project” (LC, 15). 4 The frst avant-garde, by contrast, saw themselves as cineastes, as amateurs concerned with flm as an art, and thus free to foat between avant-garde flmmaking and their various day jobs as flm industry workers (Robert Florey, Dudley Murphy, and Warren Newcombe), flm critics (Theodore Huff, Seymour Stern, Herman G. Weinberg), photographers (Strand and Steiner), or commercial illustrators (Douglass Crockwell). But what, for Horak and Posner, are the stakes of these distinct self-conceptions of the frst and second avant-gardes? Is the point that the idea of a completely autonomous avant-garde aesthetic is always a romantic fction, albeit one that the second avant-garde swallowed more uncritically than the frst? (Even Clement Greenberg, whose name has become synonymous with modernist autonomy, knew that the avant-garde was connected to the bourgeoisie with “an umbilical cord of gold.”) excerpt from Archives of Modernist Cinephilia ml [show less]