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Reassessing the Personal Registers and Anti-Illusionist Imperatives of the New Formal Film of the 1960S and ’70S

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Reassessing the Personal Registers and Anti-Illusionist Imperatives of the New Formal Film of the 1960S and ’70S Reassessing the Personal Registers and Anti-Illusionist Imperatives of the New Formal Film of the 1960s and ’70s JUAN CARLOS KASE for David E. James I think it would be most dangerous to regard “this new art” in a purely structural way. In my case, at least, the work is not, for example, a proof of an experiment with “structure” but “just occurs,” springs directly from my life patterns which unpre- dictably force me into . oh well . —Paul Sharits, letter to P. Adams Sitney1 In the dominant critical assessments of Anglo-American film history, scholars have agreed that much of the avant-garde cinema of the late 1960s and early ’70s exhibited a collective shift toward increased formalism. From P. Adams Sitney’s initial canonization of “Structural Film” in 19692 to Malcolm Le Grice’s “New Formal Tendency” (1972)3 and Annette Michelson’s “new cinematic discourse” of “epistemological concern” (1972)4 to Peter Gidal’s “Structuralist/Materialist Film” (1975)5—as well as in recent reconceptualizations and reaffirmations of this schol- arship by Paul Arthur (1978, 1979, and 2004), David James (1989), and A. L. Rees 1. Collection of Anthology Film Archives. Letter is dated “1969??.” Roughly fifteen years later, Sharits reiterated his frustration with the critical interpretations of his work in a more public context, albeit in slightly different terms: “There was a problem in the ’60s and even in the ’70s of intimidating artists into avoiding emotional motivations for their work, the dominant criticism then pursued everything in terms of impersonal, formal, structural analysis.” Jean- Claude Lebensztejen, “Interview with Paul Sharits” (June 1983), in Paul Sharits, ed. Jan Beauvais (Dijon: Les Presses du Réel, 2008), p. 50. 2. P. Adams Sitney, “Structural Film” [first version], Film Culture 47 (Summer 1969), pp. 1–10. 3. Malcolm Le Grice, “Thoughts on Recent ‘Underground’ Film” (1972), in Experimental Cinema in the Digital Age (London: BFI, 2001), p. 14. Le Grice also used the descriptive phrases “new for- mal work” in numerous sections of Abstract Film and Beyond (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1977), pp. 86 and 105. 4. Annette Michelson, “Introduction,” in Form and Structure in Recent Film (Vancouver: Vancouver Art Gallery, 1972), n.p. 5. Peter Gidal, “Theory and Definition of Structural/Materialist Film,” Studio International 190, no. 978 (November/December 1975), pp. 189–96. OCTOBER 163, Winter 2017, pp. 49–70. © 2018 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/OCTO_a_00317 by guest on 01 October 2021 50 OCTOBER (1999)6—scholars have remained in agreement: The canonical formalist works of the Anglo-American avant-garde film of the late 1960s and early ’70s differ markedly from the expressive, diaristic, and personal output that dominated earli- er practices of poetic, oneiric, and lyrical cinemas.7 Various intellectual turf wars notwithstanding, it is relatively uncontroversial to accept the basic claim that there was a marked increase in formalism and systematici- ty in experimental filmmaking in the period at hand. As Jonathan Walley has recently written, “What remains is a general agreement among scholars that avant-garde film- makers of this period followed the trend within modernist art toward medium-specif- ic purification: the reduction of the art object to the essential physical or material components of its medium.”8 Filmmakers such as Paul Sharits, Hollis Frampton, Malcolm Le Grice, Michael Snow, Peter Gidal, Peter Kubelka, Tony Conrad, George Landow, Anthony McCall, and Kurt Kren were producing Minimalist, Conceptualist, and materialist films that interrogated the photochemical essence of cinema and its constitutive network of technologies while pulling away from the subjectivist tradition associated with Maya Deren, Stan Brakhage, and Kenneth Anger.9 The variant and roughly contemporaneous critical designations of formalist filmmaking from the late 1960s and ’70s share some heuristic value, despite the dissimilar, often oppositional evaluative rhetorics that they have employed.10 When read together, the critical writ- 6. See Paul Arthur, “Structural Film: Revisions, New Versions, and the Artifact,” Millennium Film Journal 2 (Spring/Summer 1978), pp. 5–13; “Structural Film: Revisions, New Versions, and the Artifact, Part 2,” Millennium Film Journal no. 4/5 (Summer/Fall 1979), pp. 122–34; and A Line of Sight: American Avant-Garde Film Since 1965 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), pp. 80–83. See also David E. James, “Pure Cinema,” in Allegories of Cinema: American Film in the Sixties (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), pp. 237–75; and A. L. Rees, A History of Experimental Film and Video (London: BFI, 1999), pp. 72–83. 7. Of all the scholars cited above, only Sitney attempted to draw a continuous through-line of sensibility between the earlier, expressive traditions and this new “cinema of structure.” As a result, he incorporates such unlikely, Romantic filmmakers as Stan Brakhage and Bruce Baillie alongside arch- Conceptualists like Tony Conrad and George Landow. These idiosyncrasies of his “Structural Film” for- mulation, in addition to many others, have triggered numerous critiques from a range of artists, critics, and scholars. The most thorough, though perhaps least well known, is Bruce Jenkins’s “A Case Against ‘Structural Film,’” Journal of the University Film Association 33, no. 2 (Spring 1981), pp. 9–14. See also George Macuinas, “On ‘Structural Film’ (by P. Adams Sitney),” in Film Culture Reader, ed. P. Adams Sitney (New York: Cooper Square Press, 2000), p. 349. 8. Jonathan Walley also connects this critical history to broader surveys of avant-garde film by John Hanhardt and Sheldon Renan in his essay “The Material of Film and the Idea of Cinema,” October 103 (Winter 2003), p. 17. 9. Though I only address the Anglo-American avant-garde in this essay, it would be just as appropriate to include works by other European filmmakers such as Austrians Birgit and Wilhelm Hein, Kurt Kren, and Peter Kubelka. I have made this arbitrary geographic division for the practical purpose of narrowing the focus and managing the length of the essay. 10. Though the basic historical observation that there was a marked increase in formalist film prac- tice in the late 1960s is shared by both P. Adams Sitney and Peter Gidal, the respective political inflections of their claims were quite different. Nevertheless, their canonical essays form the two most adamant and influential interpretative models for this formalist tendency, which makes the following consideration even more significant: Despite fervent disagreement about the political, aesthetic, and philosophical functions of these films, both Sitney and Gidal included works by Sharits and Frampton in their taxonomies. (Since Sitney’s essay concerned only North American artists, there was no expectation that Le Grice would appear therein; he is, of course, included in Gidal’s categorization.) Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/OCTO_a_00317 by guest on 01 October 2021 Personal Registers and Anti-Illusionist Imperatives 51 ings on this international trend—whether produced by filmmakers, critics, or acade- mics; whether published in 1969, 1974, or 2002; whether addressing American, Canadian, or British artists—bear the common goal of clearly and forcefully defining this new formalist cinema in negative terms, in relation to what it is not: It is neither illusionistic nor expressive.11 Despite their differing political and theoretical emphases, critics and schol- ars have identified shared elements of this formalist turn, including scrutiny of the material elements of the film apparatus (flicker, film grain, projection, etc.) and the use of predetermined a priori organizational structures (algorithmic, arbitrary, organizational mechanisms) that culminate in “a concept about the nature of film,”12 “reduction to the essential materials”13 of the medium, “rationalized, anti- poetic exercises,”14 a “turn toward pure formalism,”15 or the evaluation of the “concrete dimension[s] of cinema.”16 Yet, despite the consensus, there is some- thing missing in the critical assessments of this formalist period in the history of avant-garde filmmaking. Though the evaluative narratives of experimental-film his- tory have grown slightly more diverse and layered over time, an interpretative reductionism continues to linger many years later. The existing historical taxonomies and critical categorizations of this work often minimize the personal richness, conceptual ambiguity, and ideological non- alignment of these films, attempting instead to synthesize a wide array of works into one shared formal concept, as if they marched in tandem to mount a late- modernist assault on filmic illusionism and eradicate it once and for all. Within the perspective of the dominant historical narratives of experimental film, New Formal Film manifested an essentialist, post-Greenbergian reification of form that was evacuated of personal, political, spiritual, and social reference. In the words of Regina Cornwell, this was “film devoid for the most part of traditional content and whose content is largely its form.”17 However, such an understanding of these films undermines the ambivalence, hybridity, and (to borrow Paul Sharits’s term) “dual- 11. Annette Michelson articulated the anti-illusionist implications of this work as a “detailed cri- tique of illusionism . traversed by the auto-critical
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