Left Center Left

Over at Digital Poetics, Nicholas Rombes compares and contrasts amateur, home-movie culture of the 1950s with the postwar American avant-garde. He writes,

it’s too easy to divide amateur aesthetics in the 1950s-60s into two diametrically opposed camps: the avant garde (Mekas, Brakhage, Deren, etc.) and the middle-class hobbyist (i.e., all the amateur film clubs and publications which promoted well-made, professional-looking movies). The deeper into these two worlds we look, the more it becomes clear that one of the most compelling components for defining, shaping, and delineating the contours of “avant garde” or “experimental” cinema was in fact the discourse that surrounded it. The journal Film Culture actively promoted a regular set of writers who actually created the discursive contours of avant-garde cinema at that time. By and large, the narrative and aesthetic traits that were championed in Film Culture in the 1950s and 60s remain, today, the very ones that film buffs/scholars use to define avant-garde film from that era. If the home movies of Mekas or Brakhage are considered avant-garde—while home movies by any number of amateurs from the same era are not—is this due, at least in some part, to the fact that these films of Mekas and Brakhage were discussed and promoted in the pages of a “serious” journal like Film Culture, while the pages of a magazine like Better Movie Making promoted a different vision?

I happen to think he is overstating the case here. Maybe not with Mekas, whom I’ve not yet seen; but certainly the other key figures of the postwar avant-garde show a difference that registers in the films themselves, not merely in the discursive context. Brakhage played with montage, color, abstraction and the materiality of the film itself. Deren, Harrington and Markopoulos tweaked Hollywood conventions only to frustrate them. Also, I wonder how much of his argument is subtended by a postmodern (i.e. post-Pop, post-1970) avant-garde’s camp-ironic quotation of the home movie.

But the point is taken - the discursive constructs of the avant-garde were crucial to their reception as art. And at the very least, in reminding us of that, Rombes defamiliarizes the self-understanding of the avant-garde that gets passed down through time. That is, if we are familiar with the films to begin with. As I’ve complained before, avant-garde cinema is quite difficult to see these days if you’re outside of an academic setting.