Obsolescence and American Avant-Garde Film

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American avant-garde filmmakers—that what used to be called the New American Cinema is now obsolete—and that it has been replaced by pluralism.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. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/016228702320218420 by guest on 30 September 2021 116 OCTOBER 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 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/016228702320218420 by guest on 30 September 2021 Obsolescence and American Avant-Garde Film 117 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 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/016228702320218420 by guest on 30 September 2021 118 OCTOBER 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.

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