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Beyond Hollywood: American Avant-garde cinema

Beyond Hollywood: American Avant-garde cinema. “ In Los Angeles the film industry itself has always been the most important context of the avant- garde ”—David E. James, The Most T ypical A vant-Garde : History and Geography of Minor C inemas in Los Angeles.

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Beyond Hollywood: American Avant-garde cinema

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  1. Beyond Hollywood: American Avant-garde cinema

  2. “In Los Angeles the film industry itself has always been the most important context of the avant-garde”—David E. James, The Most Typical Avant-Garde : History and Geography of Minor Cinemas in Los Angeles Maya Deren (1917-1961)

  3. Avant-garde, underground, noncommercial, artist film, nonindustrial, experimental, counter, noncommodity, Critical cinema, visionary film, minor cinemas

  4. Individual artist vs. assembly line production (dreams vs. “dream factory”) • Self-reflexive: anti-illusionist; revealing their own filmmaking process.

  5. Background • Early cinema: “cinema of attractions.” Cinema’s non-narrative roots. • 1920s: European avant-garde movements: • French Surrealism/Impressionism • German abstract animation films. • Modernism& formalism (the primacy and purity of artistic form over content or story).

  6. Clement Greenberg, “Avant-garde and Kitsch” (1939) • Avant-garde vs. kitsch. The avant-garde pursues cinema’s “pure form,” following the example of French Surrealism and the abstract animations of European filmmakers like Hans Richter. • Avant-garde as “high art,” untainted by the capitalist culture industry. • But this not borne out by the films themselves...

  7. Los Angeles, the “fragmented metropolis”

  8. Los Angeles • By 1915 Los Angeles is the center of film production: 60% of movies produced there; up to 84% by 1922. • Los Angeles is made in the image of Hollywood; but Hollywood also uses the city as its set. • The relationship between center and periphery is key to Los Angeles film culture.

  9. Morgan Fisher: • “I’ve never turned my back on Hollywood…entirely.” • “There’s no use pretending that narrative film doesn’t exist, that it doesn’t have enormous power.” Standard Gauge (1984)

  10. Life and Death of 9413: A Hollywood Extra (1928) • Robert Florey (1900-79) • SlavkoVorkapich (1892-1967) • Gregg Toland(1904-48) • All three had “mixed careers” within and beyond the Hollywood studio system. • Characteristically European: Expressionist, abstract, and pure in its style. • But the film “did not place itself outside of or opposed to the industry so much as find a place in it” (James 41). • “Extra…served its makers well, providing the platform for careers that passed in and out through the industry and allowing them to develop different forms of experimentation in a variety of production systems” (James 43)

  11. Extra 9413 “prefigured the next year’s most celebrated European avant-garde film, Un chienAndalou, which served its makers in a similar fashion: Luis Bunuel signed a contract with MGM and moved to Hollywood for four months in 1930 and eventually became a feature film director, and Salvador Dali…designed Surrealist dream sequences in feature films, specifically in Hitchcock’s Spellbound in 1945” (James 43).

  12. Maya Deren (1917-1961) Meshes of the Afternoon (1943) • Collaborative: Influenced by Un ChienAndalou. Alexander Hammid’s contribution is key. • Technicalities: 2.5 weeks, 16mm, at the filmmakers’ home in the Hollywood Hills. No script. Filmmakers appear in the film. • A “trance film”: cyclical structure, doubling, mirroring, variations on a theme, and double ending. Focusing on Inner experiences, and dreamlike states. • Subjective camera: “a clear-cut formulation of the idea of first person in cinema” (P. Adams Sitney). • Feminism: Deren as a strong artistic presence in a male dominated industry (cf. Brakhage).

  13. Like Chien, continuity is not eliminated but subverted, building on and reconfiguring our narrative expectations. • Realism is given over to the “dream logic”: the film no longer represents external events in sequence; the narrative reflects internal experience. • Dream-state coherence, not classical continuity. • Relationship to film noir, horror& melodrama. • Influences & parallels: I Walked with a Zombie (1943), : Mulholland Drive (David Lynch, 2001).

  14. Handpicked favourites for further viewing • Marx Brothers, Duck Soup (1933) • Jacques Tourneur, I Walked with a Zombie (1943) • Maya Deren, At Land (1944), Divine Horsemen (1947-54) • Bruce Conner, A Movie (1958) • Stan Brakhage, Dog Star Man (1961-1964) • Kenneth Anger, Eauxd'artifice (1953), Scorpio Rising (1963) • Morgan Fisher, Standard Gauge (1984) • Thom Andersen, Los Angeles Plays Itself (2004) • The New American Cinema/ minor cinemas • John Cassavetes, Shadows(1959) • Kent Mackenzie, The Exiles(1961). • Charles Burnnett, Killer of Sheep(1977), • Cult: • Roger Corman’sAIP films • Russ Meyer, Faster Pussycat, Kill, Kill! (1965)  

  15. Further Reading • P. Adams Sitney, Visionary Film: The American Avant-Garde 1943-2000 [3rd edition]. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. • David E. James, The Most Typical Avant-Garde: History and Geography of Minor Cinemas in Los Angeles. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005. • David E. James, “Hollywood Extras: One Tradition of ‘Avant-Garde’ Film in Los Angeles,” October, Vol. 90, (Autumn, 1999), pp. 3-24(on QM+).

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