Round Table: Obsolescence and American Avant-Garde Film

Malcolm Turvey: Focusing on the concept of obsolescence—the occasion for which is announced elsewhere in this issue—allows us to address a number of points of interest to October at this moment in its history. First, it appears that some of us involved with the magazine feel that, due to recent technological innovations, some of the artistic media with which October has been engaged since its inception are now obsolete, or threatened with obsolescence, or are undergoing major changes. The most obvious case is cinema, as there is much talk about the obsolescence of celluloid, and the various production and exhibition technologies associated with it, due to the introduction of digital technologies.1 Second, and I’m trying to say this very carefully, I suspect that some of us feel that the sort of avant-garde art—and that includes avant-garde film—whose theorization and criticism was October’s original project may no longer be with us, or may at least have shifted in some fundamental way since the 1970s. Within the context of avant-garde cinema, an example of this type of shift might be that there no longer seems to be a collective movement among American avant-garde filmmakers—that what used to be called the New American Cinema is now obsolete—and that it has been replaced by pluralism. Third, I think some of us are wondering whether the sort of theory and criticism we publish in the magazine plays the role it was originally intended to play—whether, in other words, the sort of writing we promote is itself obsolete, or becoming so. These are the kinds of issues—and there are probably several others too—that we want to address via the concept of obsolescence. We have asked you here because you are all very important figures in the world of American avant-garde cinema. Ken Jacobs and Brian Frye are well-known New York–based filmmakers of different generations; Chrissie Iles programs—very aggressively and successfully, I might add—avant-garde film at the Whitney Museum of American Art, as does Brian at the Robert Beck Memorial Cinema;

1. Editor’s note: The text by John Belton on pages 98–114 examines this topic in depth.

OCTOBER 100, Spring 2002, pp. 115–132. © 2002 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

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and Paul Arthur is a widely published critic of avant-garde film. We are wondering what you think about this cinema in relation to the concept of obsolescence, and what you can teach us and our readers about the current state of avant-garde cinema in this country. Ken Jacobs: But has October been active in looking at avant-garde film through the years? Are you writing about the avant-garde? Are you coming out to see it? Annette Michelson: I think that if you look at what October has published on cinema, you will see that there is a great diversity of material. There is material on independent cinema, on the avant-gardes, including the avant-gardes of the 1920s and 1930s. But there is also a certain amount of material on cinema that can be considered as occupying a place within what one might call the canon of avant-garde film, but is not produced on the kind of artisanal level—within the artisanal scheme of economics—as the cinema that you, Ken, and many of your contemporaries produce. We have published, for example, Eisenstein’s notes for a film on Capital, the script of Fassbinder’s film In a Year of Thirteen Moons, and our most recent roundtable on film was about contemporary international “art” cinema. Also, the magazine does not carry the reviews associated with the task of criticism. So I can’t say that we’ve really kept up with everything that’s been produced on the artisanal level on which you work, Ken, but I think that on the whole, considering that we’re not a film magazine, we’ve done reasonably well. But there are great gaps, no doubt about it. Jacobs: My sense of the gap is from the early seventies on in terms of keeping up with people who arrived after the canon, the established canon such as it is, with all the younger people that came along, as well as the things that my contemporaries and myself are still producing. So my sense is that while your interest in cinema is very broad, it moved away from this particular territory. Yet you are now asking about the health of this particular territory, as if we’ve been moribund rather than that you’ve been detached. Paul Arthur: I think Ken’s point is well taken. For me, the most remarkable thing about American avant-garde film is how little it has changed over a fairly long period of time. As long as the characterization of American avant-garde film isn’t constrained by modernist or even postmodern aesthetic categories, then the avant-garde seems to be doing much the same kind of thing as it’s done for a minimum of thirty years. I think that the most useful way to look at it is as some sort of mesh of institutional frameworks and practices—for instance, funding sources and generic protocols, a certain use of distribution and exhibition—as well as a set of exigencies or modes of production that remain fairly consistent: short form versus feature film, unscripted, made by primarily single individuals, non-sync sound, 16mm format, almost entirely films made for under $10,000. This is a fairly productive way to define avant-garde film, at least in the present moment. Michelson: Well, I agree, as I’ve always hesitated to use the term “avant-garde,” preferring the term “independent,” meaning a film produced, as I say, from

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within the artisanal system, because “avant-garde” is a much broader term and certainly I wouldn’t want to restrict it to the province of American artisanal cinema. Jacobs: Don’t you think that “independent” is the broader term, and that “avant- garde” specifies the radically new, and that’s the tradition that we’re talking about, that’s been kept up? Cinema is a huge territory, and for many works, photoplays, documentaries, the level is high. They are admirable, but they stay close—from my perspective—to the common language. But then you have things that uphold the idea of the avant-garde, which is to forage and get out there into new territory, to think completely freshly, come up with whole other ways of putting things together, unexpected things to go for. New things have been made all through these years. New things are being made now. Arthur: I’m sure that’s true, but I find this aspect of the cultural ideology somewhat suspect, even obsolescent. This idea of constant innovation, of stretching the envelope of what’s possible in cinema . . . I find that a problematic notion at this point. Michelson: Why? Arthur: Because I don’t see that much stretching these days, but I do see a very strongly institutionalized movement, and for me, that’s the essential definition. Turvey: But wouldn’t that constitute an important change over the last thirty years? Inasmuch as innovation has always been a key criterion of avant-garde, or experimental, or independent film, or whatever we want to call it, surely if that is something that isn’t happening right now in your eyes, that does constitute an important shift. It might not be an institutional shift, but it is a crucial aesthetic one. Arthur: I think that innovation has been very cyclical in the context of American avant-garde cinema. That is, there have certainly been periods of great stylistic or formal innovation, and then there have been periods when there has been a lot less pushing, and this notion of some sort of constant advancement—that this idea of continual aesthetic progress—I don’t think it, at least, comports with my sense of . . . Brian Frye: But would you saddle any other kind of art form with that requirement for innovation? Arthur: Not anymore. Frye: Because I don’t think anyone would criticize modern painting for not being innovative. I mean, who cares, right? That’s not really an issue, I don’t think. My concern with the word “innovation” is that I think that it easily comes to mean bells and whistles, a little gimmick. People think of innovation and they want to say, “What’s different that this thing’s doing that something else hasn’t done?” If what you mean by innovation is simply things that are really interesting, then I think “Yeah, absolutely.” But I think that innovation is a word that you can read in two very different ways. Chrissie Iles: I’ve just taken part in an online conference on postmodernism, and it

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was felt among the participants that postmodernism has reached some kind of conclusion, which what you are saying about innovation seems to confirm. The questions that might be asked of avant-garde film—is the old technology of cinema and the actual practice of avant-garde film obsolescent?—have a much broader cultural context and could also be asked of art. One of the reasons that my Into the Light show has been such a success is that people are discovering work made thirty years ago that was truly extraordinary and radical, and young artists, and perhaps certain filmmakers, can’t get beyond it; so perhaps we’re looking at a certain crisis in innovation.2 On the other hand, avant-garde film seems to me to be more alive than ever. In New York, there’s the Robert Beck Memorial Cinema, the Whitney, MoMA’s film programs, and the screenings at Ocularis. There are many different kinds of cinema being screened and in so many different kinds of places, and young filmmakers are going, as well as filmmakers who have been practicing for thirty years and more. It seems very exciting to me. There’s a crisis in innovation, but there is also a new energy. Arthur: I want to provide a little bit of unscientific and cursory background to this. By my count, in the last decade, there have been seventeen book-length studies in English devoted entirely, or substantially, to avant-garde film, and this doesn’t include avant-garde video. The majority were published by front-line academic presses, and if you throw in another dozen monographs or catalogs issued by museums and galleries, I think this is a fairly potent index of at least an academic interest in the historiography, and probably to a lesser extent the theorization, of avant-garde film. About distribution and exhibition, I had a conversation just the other day with M. M. Serra, the director of the Filmmaker’s Cooperative here in New York. According to her, last year produced the largest gross rental receipts at the Co-op in nearly a decade, and there has been a marked increase in rentals to foreign festivals and foreign museums. Frye: A big reason for that is sitting across the table [referring to Chrissie Iles]. [Laughter.] Arthur: That’s probably true. And there’s been a continuing increase in the number of filmmakers who’ve joined the Filmmaker’s Cooperative, because there are no criteria of value, no selection process. It’s now up over 500. The increased rental of films has also been accompanied by increases in video sales. This seems to me an extraordinary phenomenon. Frye: I agree with you to a certain extent, although, having been on the board of the Co-op for quite some time, I would note that of all those new members, perhaps only one or two of them have actually ever rented a film through the Co-op, and a great many of them simply deposit things there. Of the

2. Into the Light: The Projected Image in American Art, 1964–1977, Whitney Museum of American Art, October 18, 2001–January 27, 2002. Ed.

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filmmakers distributed by the Co-op, the films of only perhaps thirty or forty are rented on a regular basis. For example, we did a show of films by Richard Meltzer the other day. The films were deposited in 1970, and we showed them for the first time thirty years later. They’d never left the shelf. So the fact that there are more people joining doesn’t necessarily mean that anyone’s actually ever seen their films. Arthur: Continuing on from what I was saying before, by the same token, the coverage of avant-garde films in mainstream film magazines and somewhat more specialized journals, although not at an all-time high, has been significantly expanded over the last ten years. I’m thinking of Film Comment, Afterimage, The Independent, Film Quarterly. I think they do a lot more with both current and somewhat less current avant-garde film. Conversely, I don’t think art magazines, such as Artforum, have done as much with avant-garde film over the last ten years. Iles: It is difficult to look at and understand avant-garde film, and art world people don’t know how to approach it. They don’t know where to find it either. Also, one has to take account of what’s happened in the art world, where there’s less interest in the theoretical or conceptual underpinnings of art. The market has become strong in recent years, and mediocre work receives a rather wide hearing. To address the question you raised, Malcolm, about the obsolescence of the sort of theoretical writing October promotes, or any theoretical activity in relation to art, the art world is almost completely anti-theoretical these days and resists analysis, perhaps because analysis might throw too much light on what is, in the end, very little. Arthur: Yes, but that’s from an art world perspective. If you look from a film world perspective, here’s another interesting tidbit: after decades of neglect, or even worse, every new academic introductory film textbook now feels compelled to include a chapter or some major subchapter on the American avant-garde, and this simply wasn’t the case in the seventies or eighties. Some of that, I think, is due to the pressure exerted by David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson’s Film Art, which is the leading textbook in the field. I see this as a salutary development. That is, even beginning film students who might never take another film course wind up reading twenty pages on the American avant-garde, or the American/European avant-gardes, and are therefore at least encouraged to learn how to look at non-narrative means of expression, at the same time that they’re learning how to look at Hitchcock and Welles. Michelson: And a good deal of this is due to the entrance of the filmmakers themselves into the academy in the seventies. Jacobs: Okay, there are so many things that we are coming up with here. The twenty pages on American avant-garde cinema in a textbook are a burial, for the most part. They relegate American avant-garde filmmaking to something that took place in the sixties and early seventies. They don’t bring students into the real problems and excitements of an on-going art. Also, students aren’t taught how

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to look at avant-garde film. It is very rare that somebody clues them into sensory apprehension of these works. Arthur: So, you’d rather see avant-garde film excluded from standard film history textbooks? Jacobs: I’d rather see a provocation than something settled. Iles: Ken’s point about people not being educated in terms of sensory apprehension applies to film and art. I think that there has been an extraordinary mediation of art, and film, and the world around us, by technology. It’s hard to get people to engage fully in the experience of looking directly at a film or a painting. It’s hard just to be present with a film or painting because to do so is antithetical to contemporary experience. You can’t turn on the television news without having the screen divide into four parts, and you don’t know which to look at first. It’s impossible to have an engaged, focused, quiet, committed . . . Jacobs: . . . contemplation? Iles: . . . contemplation of anything. This is a huge problem because you cannot possibly deeply enter something, and therefore understand it, unless you do that. Turvey: Just a point of clarification, Ken. Are you saying that a shift has occurred? In other words, are you saying that there used to be better spectators and now there’s been a deterioration of the audience? Jacobs: That’s a golden age myth. There are more good spectators today than there ever were back in the sixties and early seventies. Many people came then simply to see taboo. They came to see censorable subject matter, or even political things that somebody was attempting in a small film that the mainline films were staying away from. Now, mainline works can offer that and people don’t have to deal with innovative form. Iles: The most important place where obsolescence is a potential reality is in the technology itself. Take Line Describing a Cone [1973] by Anthony McCall. We made film loops of it for the Into the Light show, and we discovered that the original stock onto which the film was printed no longer exists. If you don’t have that intense black, the film cannot function properly. And there was a moment when we really wondered whether the film had been lost forever. That really brought home to me the fragility and materiality of the medium. Arthur: We’ve been hearing about the loss of film stocks, the inability to replace parts on projectors, for thirty years. How, therefore, to explain the persistence measured in numbers, measured in number of venues, measured by all kinds of criteria, of avant-garde film? Jacobs: World War II, the leftovers of World War II. Cheap projectors, cheap cameras, cheap film were dumped by the military, and this tremendously aided this new art. Now there’s a dumping of film technology due to digital, and there is still film around if you can find this stuff. People can begin to play with these materials and these technologies in ways they hadn’t even thought about

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doing before, because they were expected to make a film that fit within the channels that had been set up. Iles: It has persisted not only because of this dumping, but also because of the love that people making the work have for the technology, and the deep understanding they have for the possibilities that celluloid offers in relation to light and dark, and a chamber of projective space. It’s a low-tech, hands-on, performative material medium. Turvey: This takes us to another way—and this is not necessarily what I think—in which people argue there has been a shift in American avant-garde cinema. It has been suggested that filmmakers these days are less interested in exploring the specific properties of cinema as a medium. One of the reasons could be the impending obsolescence of technology that we’re talking about. But the other reason, surely, is that since the sixties, there has been in the art world in general, not just in film, a shift away from medium-specific artistic practice, from work that is rooted in an expertise in a medium. And I guess I’m wondering, first, whether that’s happened with film, and second, whether it’s a problem. Frye: I think it was a problem that seems to be solving itself, because my sense is that a lot of the work that came out of that change—that shift away from medium- specificity and a sense of understanding the medium—was pretty dreadful. But I think that it’s solving itself because people are starting to realize it was not very good. Iles: But I also think that there’s a lot of work now which is dealing with the specificity of film. The work by filmmakers both young and established that I’ve seen recently could not have been made without a deep understanding of what the film medium is capable of. Many filmmakers are deliberately engaging with the material qualities of film. They develop their own emulsion, bury film in the ground, alter the speed, rust it, and use rare stocks, a 3-D camera, or special projectors with unusual aspect ratios. I saw Bruce McClure’s film performances recently, including XXX, OXX, XOX, XXO (Slapdash Slapstick) [2001], which were absolutely stunning. He projected four superim- posed sets of film loops sprayed with Indian inks and colored them live with multiple colored gels. The frame melted as one layer of color emerged out of another. He is addressing issues like surface, interval, focus, apparatus, frame, sprocket hole, and sound, as did the Structural filmmakers in the seventies, but in a completely original way. In my opinion, he’s created a new language. So I think what we’re talking about is not obsolescence, but transformation. Frye: I think you’re totally right, that people who are making interesting films right now are really concerned about working with their medium. Turvey: But you’re saying that for a while they weren’t? Frye: I’m saying for a while a lot of people didn’t feel like they had to learn how to make a film. Michelson: Chrissie’s evocation of the difficulty regarding the reconstitution of

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Anthony McCall’s work does, nonetheless, point to a problem in the future, and that is the obsolescence of the technologies for exhibiting this kind of work. For example, it may be very difficult to find, eventually, the kinds of monitors that would be ordinarily used today for videocassettes because the technologies, as we progress, become obsolete. Preservation is very important, and so is the current establishment of museums of the moving image as reposi- tories for a lot of extremely interesting stages and variants in the technology of the moving image, for many of them are indeed obsolete. Iles: In the art world, it’s the same thing. What does one do with works that were made with very ephemeral materials, such as the work of Eva Hesse? Some of her latex sculptures are now disintegrating. Does one recast an Eva Hesse work in order to preserve the three-dimensional shadow of it? I’ve talked with Ken about this problem in relation to his Nervous System performances. I think the issue of preservation has to be looked at as a whole by museums, whether they are museums that, like the Whitney, collect film within the context of an art collection, or whether they are film archives or film museums. The over- whelming response to Into the Light is partly because people are seeing film installations that have been reconstructed from scratch and brought back to life. If it weren’t for Jonas Mekas, Paul Sharits’s Shutter Interface wouldn’t exist. It was because Jonas managed to find the A and B reels in the basement of Anthology Film Archives that we are able, with Christopher Sharits’s permis- sion, to restore the piece. Anthology is an extraordinary repository of rare, precious work. Frye: I would just interject one caveat. I think technological obsolescence is a lot more difficult to predict than people like to think it is, and that there are plenty of people in the business world who would kill for the facility for prediction that a lot of people in the art world attribute to themselves. For all the talk about the imminent obsolescence of film, which may or may not take place—and I don’t pretend to be any kind of seer—I have yet to see digital projection in a commercial theater. I’ll believe it when I see it. Iles: Oh, it will happen. Arthur: I’m of two minds about this. The much-vaunted war between digital or video, and film, is in certain ways much like media hype before a heavyweight prizefight. When you have first-generation film purists like Ken Jacobs, Michael Snow, Jonas Mekas, Ernie Gehr, Bruce Baillie, Andrew Noren, Peter Hutton, and Gunvor Nelson all working in video; and you have younger- generation filmmakers like Peggy Ahwesh and Scott Stark who move back and forth between digital and film; and you’ve got Stan Brakhage willing to commit his precious hand-painted films to VHS for distribution, it seems to me that the notion of medium specificity is somewhat vitiated. Jacobs: I think the approaching obsolescence of film has attracted people to see what’s possible in this thing before it’s gone. Obsolescence, or approaching obsolescence, can actually be very attractive to a lot of people.

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Iles: Apart from the fact that art world magazines don’t cover experimental film, there is another reason it does not get seen by most of my colleagues in the art world. It’s a bit like someone who doesn’t know anything about classical music. If you don’t know anything about classical music, how do you know what to choose to hear? There’s so little knowledge and information about experimental film made available beyond the immediate film community. It’s about accessibility. One of the things I try to do at the Whitney is, during the week, rather than screening a film at 3 P.M. on a Thursday, I have it repeated constantly in a gallery context. And then suddenly fifty people sit there. If you take the seats away and put four benches in the gallery, many art visitors will sit and watch. If you had a black box in the middle of Chelsea—which is usually flooded with people—showing Ken’s Tom, Tom, The Piper’s Son [1969] repeatedly every day for a month, you would expose that work to people who had no idea it existed, and whose thinking about the way in which images are used could be transformed. It would be revolu- tionary. But nobody is doing that. Michelson: But it’s also the case, Chrissie, that traditionally the art world, and particularly the artists in the art world, are not really very much interested in the independent avant-garde or experimental cinema. The work of artists who are using cinematic imagery or stills is essentially dependent on the resources of mainstream, industrially produced cinema. One exception, of course, is Richard Serra, who not only attended every screening at Anthology Film Archives, but who also produced some very interesting films. Iles: But what is interesting to me is to compare, for example, left is right and right is wrong and left is wrong and right is right [2000], the installation by Douglas Gordon shown last year at Dia, and Ken’s film The Doctor’s Dream [1978]. Gordon’s installation re-edits Otto Preminger’s 1949 Hollywood film Whirlpool by separating the odd- and even-numbered frames into two groups. The odd ones are then projected to the left and the even to the right in a double projection. The Doctor’s Dream re-edits the original film to place the numerically middle shot as the first, followed by the one that originally preceded that middle shot, then the one that originally followed it, and so on. The art world does not know The Doctor’s Dream, but they know Gordon’s work at Dia. If you were able to see both pieces, important things could be learned, and new thinking could develop out of being aware of both. Jacobs: It’s a very peculiar split, and I can’t really explain it very much. Probably Chrissie crosses over more than myself. What’s featured in those things are things that somehow have broken off into their own kind of art world, have taken an art world place, that avant-garde cinema and video somehow did not. I can hardly understand it. But it seems to me that they’re mostly very boring ideas about cinema. There’s no product in those ideas. Iles: It’s also a question of accessibility to a space at a more reasonable time than 6, 7, 8, 9, or 10 P.M. I’m not criticizing cinema, I’m just saying, in terms of exposure,

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there are ways to open up experimental film to an audience beyond its core members. One of the reasons contemporary film art may be lacking is the ignorance of the history of experimental film. There needs to be Anthology screenings, and Robert Beck screenings, and Ocularis and Whitney and MoMA screenings, and this kind of black box I’m talking about in somewhere like Chelsea, only so that you can broaden the discussion and so that you can also expose film in a space and at a time when people who are interested in film can see it. Frye: I think that one reason for this problem with accessibility that you’re pointing to is that experimental filmmakers all fall in love with the movies at the movie theater. No matter how close the kind of art work they make comes to art world thinking about the medium, they identify with Hollywood and commercial film to a certain extent, not in the sense that that’s what they want to make, but in the sense that they want their films to be projected at a theater, at a certain time, with an audience there. Jacobs: It has to be encased in darkness and silence, not a black box in the street that people are going to pass by and get a dollop of. Frye: But Ken, what’s your perfect venue? Jacobs: My perfect venue is anyplace where I can go in and not be interrupted and distracted by other things, and be given the scale of presentation that some works require. Putting it in a little black box is not going to happen. Arthur: If PBS called tomorrow and said they wanted to show Tom, Tom on some Sunday night independent cinema slot on television . . . Jacobs: People have a choice at home whether they watch with the lights on or they put the lights out and they concentrate on this rectangle. One can create, if you want that kind of thing, the isolation of the object, even at home on television. And you can also have a marvelous sound system that, instead of a little squeak from a black box, really fills your aural space. Arthur: So, you wouldn’t object to that? Jacobs: Not at all, it would be up to the person that’s watching. But I want to say that I love the idea of making work that can’t work into the art market, whether in the form of a little black box or something else. I think that’s a real accomplishment. Very little I’ve found in the art market takes me to the edge, where the other or the new is being introduced, where I’m being asked not just to look at something unusual but to transform myself, to find resources in myself that have not been tapped before and are brought into play. I approach new art very selfishly. I want to be revivified by it, I want to be pulled out of stale habits, I want to be taken beyond what I know. I say Fred Worden’s One should be celebrated, but the art world is not looking, the magazines are not looking, the art writers, for the most part, are touts for the galleries, placing their bets on this or that thing that’s going to be a good investment, and to hell with them. The work of my generation coincided with a revolt against consumerism, a willingness to go for expanded consciousness, and that’s very, very far, so far

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away from just being the latest, incredible hit, whether in the art market or mainstream commercial cinema, where we’re up against people who spend as much money arousing interest in their film product as they do in making it. Arthur: I want to speak to this notion of revolt. At the end of the sixties and begin- ning of the seventies, utopian energies were focused on the democratization of film. Jonas Mekas planned to reduce films to 8mm and sell them in bookstores, and there were traveling road shows of avant-garde films that would play in regular commercial theaters. I saw several of them. Then, with the advent of cable television, there was a moment in which avant-garde film- makers thought this would become a real channel for getting their work out to the “masses,” and obviously that didn’t happen. That is one change, I think, from the time that Ken is talking about. No one’s thinking in those terms now. Bruce McClure or Brian Frye are not thinking “tomorrow HBO,” and in one sense that’s more realistic but its also, in a way, unfortunate. Frye: Ninety-nine percent of people living in the United States today are not interested in avant-garde film, 99 percent of people living in the United States today are not interested in art, they just aren’t interested. I may be idiosyncratic in this respect, because in large part I think people from my generation have internalized a sense of wanting to strike back against evil corporate interests, but the fact of the matter is most of the people who spend all their time striking back against evil corporate interests do it in the most banal, pathetic, and ridiculous way one can possibly imagine. And they don’t make art or protest of a kind that’s any more interesting than any of what they’re protesting. What I’m really more interested in is art, and all the rest of this “revolt” stuff, although it comes along with art a lot of the time, I’m just not interested in it. I’m certainly not interested in it in an art world context, because I think it’s superficial. Turvey: But can I ask you, Brian, if you don’t share Ken’s aspiration to “revolt,” what is the value of your practice for you? What is the point of it? Frye: Well, I think it has the same point as making any other kind of art work. All I’m saying is I’m not scared of markets. I think the art market has been around for a really long time, and, lo and behold, people still make interesting art. I mean, it’s bought and it’s sold and they put a price tag on it. Turvey: So all you care about is that an art work be aesthetically interesting. It doesn’t have to change the world, it doesn’t have to “revolt”? Frye: No, it doesn’t. I think that kind of iconoclasm is important for some artists, but not for all of them. I don’t think people make good art because they “revolt” against something. Turvey: So it could be that there has been a shift since the early seventies, that for people of Ken’s generation, attached to the conception of experimental avant- garde art is a certain notion of resistance, while Brian, it seems to me that you’re saying that that notion is much less operative for you, or much less

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important. By the way, this is one of the senses of the word obsolescence that October, I think, is very interested in. Frye: Honestly, I think that artists make exceptionally poor social critics, and I think the more people try to turn art into social criticism, in most cases, the worse it gets. Michelson: But it’s also a matter of historical periods. There are times when artists have been really driven to make certain kinds of political statements through their art, around their art. Jacobs: The art world, in its ignorance of art, sells objects, and we create experiences, we create life-and-death challenges to the psyche. Michelson: But Ken, someone like Mark Rothko would not have thought that he was producing objects. I think he thought he was generating experiences. Jacobs: Mark Rothko? Michelson: Yes. Well, you say paintings are objects, but filmmakers are producing experiences. Jacobs: I am a painter. I love painting. Michelson: Oh, then I have misunderstood you. Jacobs: I’m talking about an art market that was very likely part of why Mark Rothko committed suicide. It had to be incredibly disappointing to that generation to work with the kind of idealism I believe many of them had, and end up making commodities for the art market. What a downer. I would say, looking at Kline at the end, even Pollock, that they were very disappointed, given the kind of aspirations they had, in how their work ended up as more goddamned commodities in the hands of art gallery dealers. Michelson: But it’s simply that duality between experience and object that I wanted to . . . Jacobs: Oh, of course. Of course they created experiences. Arthur: We would probably sell objects if we could, but we can’t, and we know that, because there’s been a long track record of near-total uncommodifiability of experimental film. But there’s something that’s so self-defeating about this. The revolt or resistance is not resistance on the level of a film’s content or its formal attributes, but a resistance on the level of where it can be shown and who can see it. That seems to be for many the dominant side of its cultural resistance. Turvey: So the fact that it’s not commodifiable is what constitutes its resistance? Arthur: Right. And only that, since I think that that cultural ideology of oppositionality in avant-garde film is also something that has seen better days. Jacobs: In the fifties, working with Star Spangled to Death [1957–2002], I actually seriously considered the possibility of going to a theater, going into the projection booth, pushing out the projectionist, locking the doors, and showing my work, and then I would go to jail. But that isn’t the case today. The last couple of weekends I showed work at the American Museum of the Moving Image. I’ve also shown at the Whitney, and MoMA. As you said

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before, the venues are available in a way we’ve never had before. Obsolescence? I don’t think so. Arthur: But we won’t see you in my local multiplex. Iles: Thank goodness. Arthur: No! On the contrary. It would be great to see it. Jacobs: The audience would be disappointed with what I’m offering because they come there to get a recognizable hamburger, they come there expecting . . . Iles: Yes, it’s like McDonald’s. Frye: Hollywood is offering something really different from what avant-garde film- makers offer. And the fact of the matter is Hollywood studios have turned out some really great films as well. We all know that. But trying to establish a parallel between what you and I do, and what they do is pointless. It’s just not going to happen. We’re working in a whole different world. Iles: I was reading an interview with Francis Ford Coppola the other day about the making of Apocalypse Now [1979], and he was talking about how few opportunities there are now to make serious films because of the extreme commodification and commercialization of the film industry. He was con- vinced it would be impossible to make Apocalypse Now today. Frye: Well Malick made The Thin Red Line [1998]. Michelson: But Coppola had great difficulty finding anybody to make any film whatsoever, for quite some time. Turvey: But just because something is commodifiable, or “mainstream,” or Hollywood, doesn’t mean it lacks artistic merit, even of the sort that we would normally ascribe to avant-garde films. Ken, do you see contemporary Hollywood films? Do you ever go? Michelson: Oh, he does. Jacobs: I see some. Michelson: He’s lectured on them, he’s taught them to students. Jacobs: Right. I like Drop Dead Gorgeous [1999], Breast Men [1997], and A Chinese Odyssey [1994] starring Stephen Chow. [Laughter.] Michelson: Not only those films. He mentioned those to indicate a distance from industrial films, but he knows them quite well. Jacobs: I don’t know new movies well. Michelson: No, but you know a whole canon that reaches way far back in time. Iles: I always like to take the broad view and look at how other aspects of culture, as well as science, politics, and economics, are involved. What is this anxiety about obsolescence signifying? No one’s mentioned September 11, but there is a larger context here, which may be the end of the American Empire. Therefore, one question in my mind is: How does experimental cinema, as it’s been understood to this point, operate within what might be termed this American Empire, and its cultural imperialism that’s dominated the scene for the last fifty years, including experimental cinema, which, of course, is more

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powerful in America than anywhere else in the world, for all its relatively peripheral role? Jacobs: Well, if the fundamentalists take over, that’s the end of this, okay? At least we’re allowed to operate, we’re not destroyed as infidels. So we’re ignored, but we’re allowed activity in one of the greatest of the arts. Iles: But there is something important in the fact that this discussion is taking place here, and not, say, London. In New York there is an incredible vitality, and one of the things I’ve noticed is how hard it is for avant-garde or experimental filmmakers to make a film. The filmmakers that I know are tough, rigorous, and determined. They’re operating without a safety net, and sometimes with- out proper recognition. There is an energy and resilience among the experimental filmmaking community here that is exceptional. I don’t think a lot of people have the stamina for it, frankly, and I think this rigor is part of the work. Michelson: I think you’re absolutely right, and it was this that led me—many, many years ago in my early encounters with this scene—to think of filmmaking as the last of the heroic occupations. And let me say parenthetically that this was one of the reasons, I think, that I moved from the art world, from writing about painting and sculpture, to reviewing experimental films. I found filmmakers much more interesting as individuals. I think that, in part, the toughness, the difficulty, the amount of stamina and ingenuity that it took to make film made them much more interesting than most of the people whom I knew who were working, even if they were not successful, within the estab- lished institutions of museum, gallery, and so on. This is, I think, fundamental in my own decision to concentrate my own particular energies on experimental cinema, as it is called. Arthur: Your article “Film and the Radical Aspiration” is now, what, thirty-five years old? Michelson: Nineteen sixty-six. Jacobs: Do you stand by it today? Michelson: Yes, I do, and in fact I’ve even cannibalized it a bit from time to time for other things. There are specific statements within it that I might want to qualify or modify, and obviously if I were writing it now, I would be writing very, very differently, not simply because I’ve evolved, but also because ways of thinking and writing about cinema have evolved since then as well. When I wrote “Film and the Radical Aspiration,” the enormous work done on film history and film theory since then had not yet happened; which leads me, by the way, to a question for Paul, as somebody who does watch new film and think continu- ously about it. I was wondering whether you feel, as a writer and as a reader of other writers, that there have been or have not been shifts in the kind of critical and theoretical work on independent, avant-garde film? Arthur: Within academic circles, I think there’s been a dramatic shift. I think that David James’s Allegories of Cinema is a landmark work in its approach to the

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avant-garde. It’s had very positive reverberations on other people, on people who have written since that work came out—I’m thinking of Lauren Rabinovich, Jeffrey Ruoff, Juan Suarez, and others—who are interested in different kinds of historiography that have to do with institutional and material history. So in that area, there’s been a discernible shift. In terms of mainstream writing about avant-garde film, probably not. There’s more being written, but I think the way in which I write about new films is not all that different from, say, the way Jonas Mekas wrote about a new film in his journal for the Village Voice. Frye: I have to say that I find your writing something of an anomaly within contemporary criticism, because my sense of a lot of contemporary writing about experimental film is that it’s become really academicized, and I feel that a lot of people writing, especially people who started writing more recently, have really bad eyes; they don’t look at film very well. Michelson: Do you think that they are inaccurate in their descriptions? Frye: I mean that they don’t seem to really look at films very closely, not in the sense that they’re inaccurate, but that there’s cliché piled upon cliché. I often find myself distrusting a writer’s ability to distinguish a really great film from a really mediocre one. I think there’s a lot of very good historians out there, and I think that contemporary film writers, at least a lot of those whom I’ve read, have done a fantastic job of piling up factual information, which I think is really important. And yet I don’t find that they tend to contribute to my understanding of the actual films all that well. Iles: But what strikes me about film writing is that it is written for people who already know what experimental film is. An awful lot is taken for granted. A lot of film writing is either highly theoretical or simply descriptive. I would think that one of the reasons that David’s book Allegories of Cinema is so successful is that he writes in a way that is both analytical and accessible. I’m calling for more of that kind of writing. I use David’s book constantly. Arthur: I’m sure you’re making exceptions for present company, since Brian and I both write for a general film magazine on avant-garde film for people who know a lot about film but don’t know anything about experimental cinema, and therefore we’re forced to write in a way that tries to make these films accessible. Iles: I’m calling for more of that. Michelson: I certainly find David’s book extremely important. I think, though, for a general audience of the kind you’re talking about, it would be a difficult book. I think he does take for granted quite a lot, and the texture of his writing is tight, dense. Iles: Yes, you’re right. Ken said at the beginning that there should have been more articles about experimental film in October. Perhaps all I’m calling for is more articles like the ones October has already published, which I think are very important and have taught me a lot about experimental film. Michelson: I think that both you and Ken are right in remarking on the absence of

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coverage in October beyond a certain period. I think that’s true, although, obviously in the eighties, certain attempts were made. We published interviews with people such as Vivian Dick, as well as work by people such as James Benning. But it’s true that the younger generation is not covered, and I regret that. I can’t say it’s our fault. I would have to say it is my fault. Frye: From my perspective, I feel there has been plenty of theoretical writing. What we’re seeing is a shortage of criticism. What I see happening in the art world, and the film world as well, is this kind of self-congratulatory writing by the numbers, and that what we’re really missing is people who are willing to point to certain films and say, “This film’s not any good,” not because it doesn’t correspond to whatever theoretical position I happen to be coming from, but because it’s actually just a bad movie. Criticism these days tends to be a kind of boosterism in most cases, and I think that really doesn’t do anybody a service. Arthur: There’s nothing disgraceful about boosterism given our cultural marginality. I can understand the place for the kind of evaluative criticism you’re talking about. But as someone who writes as often as I can in mainstream contexts about this sort of film, I consider it one of my duties to get people to see the work, and to explain it in ways that will make it seem as potentially edifying and entertaining as going to a nearby multiplex. Frye: Well, I try to write about films I like too, and I try to write about films I think are important and interesting, but I think it’s also important to have a situation in which everything doesn’t automatically become good when you write about it. I think about the people who helped me, as writers, throughout the time I have been interested in experimental film, and most have been critics, film critics, people like Jim Hoberman, Manny Farber, or Peter Bogdanovich. A lot of that is the writing I’d like to see more of, personally, because I feel like sometimes what comes out of the university isn’t very helpful. Turvey: Why, Brian? Frye: Well, I think part of it is a result of the extent to which theory has come to dominate academic writing, and I think that a lot of students go through school simply learning how to parse the theories they read in class. Turvey: I couldn’t agree more. Part of the problem, I think, is that they learn theory badly, because it is taught so, so badly. Graduate students in the arts, at least in the Anglo-American world, are not typically encouraged to critically reflect on the theories they read. Theorists such as Benjamin, Adorno, Lacan, Foucault, all the usual suspects, are taught as if everything they say is true, when the opposite is probably the case. The result, in my view, is that the majority of theoretical writing on the arts today consists of little more than the mechanical and dogmatic application of the same theories ad nauseam. I think this is a major reason for the inability to see films or art that you are talking about, Brian. So many theoretical writers, it seems to me, approach art works with a theory in hand that they believe in unconditionally, and that they then apply to the art work regardless of whether it reveals something about it

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or not. They use the art work to prove the theory. Someone like Slavoj iek, I think, is a classic example of this. Lacanianism is like a religious faith for him. It’s not open to falsification, as theories in the sciences are. And you already know what he is going to say about every art work he writes about in advance— it’s going to turn out to be yet another illustration of Lacanianism. Theorists like iek don’t start with the art work, and then move upward in search of a framework that will illuminate it. This is the type of theoretical writing that graduate students are taught to admire and emulate—with terrible consequences, in my view. Frye: And I think that one of the reasons that, for instance, Annette’s writing is so good is that it doesn’t read like that. I pick up film books these days and I just cringe to think about reading through them, because they’re so poorly written for all the information that’s in them. They’re bloodless. Iles: Well, you should be able to describe what you’re seeing before you start analyzing what it is. Most writers don’t do that. It’s one thing if you’re discussing the Mona Lisa, and you have a picture of it opposite the text. But with a film, you don’t have that, because film is a time-bound medium. Robert Beavers, by the way, is an extraordinarily articulate writer. Frye: As an example, there’s a book on Joseph Cornell that I got a copy of recently. Michelson: Which one? Frye: I think it is called Stargazing in the Cinema. There was a still reproduced in this hard-cover, glossy, expensive book that was a photograph taken of a video of the film playing on a television. And I thought, “You couldn’t go to the trouble of going and getting an actual still made?” To me, that shows a lack of respect for the actual film, and it may be the first time a reader has ever seen it. Iles: This brings me back to what you said earlier, Ken: “We create experiences.” Perhaps when we’re thinking about obsolescence and shifts, what we’re thinking about is how we experience something. And I think that, in a very McLuhan-esque way, new technology has a negative physiological impact. New technology shifts the way one understands materiality, the way one experiences it physically, and by materiality, I include painting, sculpture, and film. You can see the same film projected in three different spaces and have a completely different experience of it due to differences in light, screen surface, size, the color and quality of the print, or the physical space of the screening venue, just as you do when a painting or a sculpture is hung in three different kinds of contexts in different museums or galleries. Our fundamental understanding of what physical space is in relation to the space of the film has changed. Michelson: This sense of loss that Chrissie has is, of course, shared by those who make industrially produced film, who lament the idea that we’ll no longer be alone with people in a dark room, involved in an experience of something that is alive, and who lament the death of the kind of cinephilia that they knew until probably the end of the seventies at least. Going to see a film was also a way of

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organizing a social event, being with people, and discussing the film afterward in a café with a glass of wine or coffee. Turvey: And you’re saying that’s now obsolete? Michelson: I’m not saying that it’s obsolete, but it’s certainly no longer as common as it was, and that Chrissie’s sense of loss is parallel. Iles: And this may also be one of the reasons why artists have reached out to film as something they want to work with. They feel a nostalgia for cinema, and what cinema was, whether it’s the wonderful old cinemas with elaborate interiors, or the sense of theatrical engagement you have, which you still get at the opera and, regrettably, don’t get in cinemas anymore because they’ve become very impersonal and commercialized. But one does still experience a sense of intimacy in smaller screenings of avant-garde film, where you are very aware of the audience and the space. Michelson: The architecture of the first Anthology Film Archives theater is an interesting instance of what Chrissie is talking about, namely, the way you experience film differently in different spaces. Indeed, it was an attempt at a form of resistance against the kind of spatial situation of the ordinary theater showing industrially produced film. Arthur: But it was also a theater constructed, in large part, for the optimal presenta- tion of one particular film. Jacobs: And it didn’t work. [Laughter.] Arthur: For that film or for any film? Jacobs: Any film. I too have a utopian exhibition plan, and that’s waiting for the Net to improve its way of delivering film and video. It seems to me mostly a matter of time. Michelson: What do you mean? Jacobs: To give films over to the Net, to let them get out there and let them have a social existence, and forget about the little money that comes back from these things. Just forget about it. We’ll ask people, “Did you like this? Then send me a dollar.” Iles: But how does that connect with your statement about “We create experiences”? Isn’t an experience on the Net vastly diluted in terms of cinematic space? Jacobs: We read things in translation, we read things in different typefaces, on different kinds of paper. I was asked to put Tom, Tom, The Piper’s Son on video. Put Tom, Tom, The Piper’s Son on video? It seemed nuts. But it was done and it looks nice! So if I can have that thing going out on the Net, and finding some- one in Madagascar . . . it would be wonderful.

—New York City, November 17, 2001

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