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The Avant-Garde

Author(s): David BordwellSource: The Wilson Quarterly (1976-), Vol. 10, No. 3 (Summer, 1986), pp. 70-75Published by: Wilson QuarterlyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40257025

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THE MOVIES

THE AVANT-GARDE

byDavid Bordwell

If LouisB. Mayer,the Hollywoodmogul,hadlived until the late1960s, he would have been startledby some of the changesin thetastes of

movie-goingAmericans.

True, the lines would have been longest at theaters offeringsuch easily recognizableHollywoodfare as Dr. Dolittle or PaintYourWagon.But in the largercities andcollegetowns,a goodmanymovie fans would have been elsewhere. Some would have beenthrongingocal "art" heaters to see IngmarBergman'sThe Hourofthe Wolfor Luis Bunuel'sViridiana. Otherswouldhave been at themuseum watching experimentalworks by Stan Brakhageor AndyWarhol.And the localcampusfilmsociety mighthave been packingthem in withJean-LucGodard'sWeekend, savage denunciation fbourgeois ifestyles.

Most Americanswere (andare) still goingto the movies to beentertained. But the emergence after WorldWar II of a big newgenerationof college graduates some of them with filmapprecia-tion coursesunder theirbelts, manywith some exposureto modern-ism in the arts createda sizableaudience n the UnitedStates forexperimental ilms.

Such films were nothingnew. Almost as soon as it was born,cinema encounteredmodernism.The meeting occurred not in theHollywood tudiosbut, duringthe 1920s, in the cafes of Paris andBerlinand the chillymeeting rooms of Moscow. Painterswere at-tracted to cinemaby its capacityto become what one artist called"drawingsbrought o life."Composers ound ts dynamicmovementand montage a counterpartof musicalrhythm.For artists in manyfields,the new mediumrepresentedmodernitytself. "Mostforms ofrepresentationhave had their day,"declared AntoninArtaud,theFrenchpoet and founderof the "theaterof cruelty," n 1930. "Life,what we calllife,becomes ever moreinseparableromthe mind.Thecinema is capableof interpreting his domainmore than any otherart, because idiotic orderandcustomaryclarityare its enemies."

It was thus not simply he technical ide of cinemathatappealedto modernistartists. Cinemawas an idealvehicle for the modernist

urge to questionthe solidityof reality,to probethe way the worldseems to the beholder.Amongthe first film-makers o take this approachwas Germa-

ny's Robert Wiene, in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920). With

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THE MOVIES

In a scene from RobertWiene's hallucinatory The

Cabinet of Dr. Caligari(1920), Caligari 's hypnotized

servant, Cesare, looms overone of his victims. Many

film critics argue thatCesare representedthe

"enslaved" Germanworking class.

remarkable ets painted n the expressioniststyle, the filmconveyedthe hallucinatoryision of a madmannamed Francis.Only n the endis it revealed that Dr. Caligari s the warden of the insaneasylumwhere Francis is an inmate. Yet the audience is led to wonderwhether there is some largermetaphoricalruth aboutsociety in thehallucinations f the madman.This theme is well-worn oday,but itwas novel in its time. Not untilafterWorldWarII didthe probingofpsychicambiguitybecome a common theme for movie-makers.

And there were otherambiguities.

A samuraihas been killedand his wife raped;a bandit has confessed. So much is fact. Yet,through lashbacks,he wife, the bandit,and a witness eachpresentadifferentversion of events. Wasthe rape resisted? Did the samuraifightbravely,or didhe try to flee?That is the substanceof KurosawaAkira's Rashomon (1951), which inauguratedthe illusion-realitytheme in post-WorldWarÛ cinema.Althoughconsidered"too West-ern" in Japan,the film had an enormousimpactin the West notleast for its refusal to answer the riddles it posed. The audiencenever learnsthe truth;Kurosawa uggests that each version is thetruth,at least to each character.

The inquirynto the relativityof perceptionpreoccupied wholegenerationof European ilm-makersduringthe 1950s and '60s. InWild Strawberries(1957), Sweden's Ingmar Bergmanused flash-backs to detail an old man'snostalgicrevisionof his past. Later,in

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THE MOVIES

Persona (1966), Bergman merged almost seamlessly the chaoticdreams of a nurse on the edge of a nervous breakdownwith hisportrayalof her reality.Bergmansuggests that film-makingtself isas mysteriousandimpenetrable s the lives he portrays:"The illumi-natedface, the handraised as if for an incantation,he old ladiesatthe square, he few banalwords,all of these imagescome and attachthemselves ikesilveryfish to my net; or,moreprecisely, myselfamtrapped n a net, the texture of whichI am not aware."

EmptySpaces

FedericoFelM's lively8V2(1963) advanced he theme furtherwith its hero,a harriedmovie directorwhosememoriesand fantasiesare filteredthroughfilm conventionsand cliches. Fellini thus intro-duceda reflectionuponcinemaitself, the machine or producing e-alistic-seemingllusions.Just as PabloPicasso'swork questionedre-alisticconceptionsof painting,so such films as Rashomon and 8V2challenged he "customary larities"of the Hollywoodilm.As AlainResnais,co-directorof HiroshimaMon Amour (1959), put it, "Myaimis to putthe spectator n sucha state thata week, six months,ora year afterwards,placedbefore a problem,he wouldbe prevented

fromcheatingandbe obligedto react freely."But Resnais and his colleaguesclung to the belief that a filmshould ell a story.Othermodernists,not only in film,were going astep further,de-emphasizingtory-telling,or even eliminatingt alto-gether.They aimedto drawthe audience'sattention o the mediumitself, to the tangiblepatternsof words, gestures, scenes. The ideaoriginated n modern painting.Some painters, such as the SovietconstructivistVladimirTatlin (1885-1953), held that doing awaywith "stories"wouldreturnthe spectatorto a state of innocentper-ception,allowinghimto see the elements of art clearly.Artistsof amoremystical urnbelievedthat the puristapproach ouldprovidea

glimpseof the ineffable- what KazimirMalevich(1878-1935), in-ventor of the school of abstract geometric painting known assuprematism, alled"thesemaphoreof lightacrossaninfiniteabyss."

Malevich'sdeaswere echoedafterWorldWarII in the workofyoungdirectors nfluencedby abstractexpressionistpainting. n thefilms of Missouri-born tan Brakhage,perhapsthe most importantAmerican vant-gardist f hisgeneration, he "story" s no morethan

David Bordwell, 39, is professor of communication arts and director of theCenterfor Film and TheaterResearch at the University of Wisconsin-Madi-son. Born in New YorkCity, he receiveda B.A. from the State University of

New Yorkat Albany (1969) and an MA. (1972) and a Ph.D. (1974) from theUniversity of Iowa. He is the author of several books, including Film Art: AnIntroduction (with Kristin Thompson, 2nd éd., 1985) and Narration in theFiction Film (1985).

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THE MOVIES

Andy Warhol'soster or the1967 New YorkFilm Festi-val.Avant-gardeilm-mak-

ers exhibit heirworksatdozensof major estivals

held aroundtheworldeveryyear in hopesof winning

critical acclaim orgainingtheattentionof a commer-

cial distributor.

an episodefrom his personal ife or a sketchymythicformula, rans-formed into a purely cinematic vision of flickeringhues, flowingshapes,andendlesslychangingviews of mundaneobjects.In Scenesfrom under Childhood1967), Brakhageproduced he mostpoeticofhome movies. He interspersedphotosfrom a familyalbumwith im-

agesof domestic

activity,as well as with

superimpositions,eflec-

tions, and other distortions,to suggest the lyricaldeformationsofmemory.In The Textof Light (1974), he put an ordinaryashtrayclose to his camera lens to create a startlingplayof colorandshape.

The classicexampleof the "purist"avant-gardes probablyMi-chael Snow's Wavelength1967). Wavelengthells a "story,"but itis completely ragmented.The scene is a New York oft:Peoplecomeandgo, playa radio,answera phonecall.Perhapsa murder s com-mitted. But the film is organizedaround a cameratechnique.Thecamera is in a fixed position.Snow's zoom lens begins with a longshot inside the loft andjerkilyenlarges the room little by little until

the distantwall fills the frameto reveal a photograph f ocean waves.The film's 45-minuteduration s thus revealed as a "wavelength."As the frameenlarges,the audience s invitedto playa percep-

tualguessing game. How will the shot'scomposition hange?Will he

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THE MOVIES

fragmentsof story ever coalesce?Snow'sexplanation f Wavelengthshows that his intentionswere purelyabstract:"The image of theyellowchair has as much Value'in its own worldas the girl closingthe window.The film events are ... chosen from a kind of scale ofmobility hat runs frompurelightevents, the variousperceptionsofthe room,to the images of movinghumanbeings."

To whichplaywrightBertolt Brecht (1898-1956), anotherfa-ther figureof modernism,wouldhave repliedthat art is aboutsoci-ety, notjust lightandfigures.The politicaland rhetoricaluses of filmtechniquehadbeen pioneeredduring he 1920s by a groupof young

Soviet film-makers,notablySergey Eisensteinin Strike (1925) andPotemkin(1925). Fourdecadeslater,it was to Brechtand the Sovi-ets that young leftist film-makersurnedto merge experimentationwith socialcriticism.

Beginning at the End

From the Soviets they adoptedthe notionthat film shouldnotpassivelycopy reality but challengeit throughdisjunctiveediting,explicitcommentary,and by allowingaudiencesto see that sceneshavebeen staged.FromBrechtcamethe "estrangement ffect,"the

notionthat by callingattentionto the mechanicsof presentation n-stead of concealing hem Hollywood-style,ctorsanddirectorscouldmake audiences hinkcriticallyaboutwhat they were seeing.

This trendshows clearly n the workof the West German ilm-making eamofJean-Marie traubandDanièleHuillet.In Not Recon-ciled (1965), they depicteda fascist specter hauntingGermanybyinterruptingcenes fromthe daily ife of a contemporaryamilywithan ellipticalseries of flashbacks o Germanyduringthe two worldwars. The charactersare barelyidentified;he chronologyof eventsis unclear.The cameradwellsominouslyon emptyspaces,as if wait-

ingfor the hiddenmeaningof history to emerge. HistoryLessons

(1972), adaptedfrom a Brecht novel, uses anachronism o makeviewers thinkaboutthe links between economicandpoliticalpower.Set amidthe ruinsof imperialRome, it is a portraitof JuliusCaesar,busily uggling tate businesswith the pursuitof privateprofit,drawnlargelythrough ake TV interviewswith his toga-cladcolleagues.

FromSohoto Paris,today'sfilm-makers re still experimentingwith these three modernist"traditions":he illusion-realityheme,the purely cinematicstatement, and the politicalcritiquebuilt oninnovativeilmtechniques.RaulRuiztracesthe convolutions f mem-ory andmisunderstandingn such elusive filmsas ThreeCrownsof

the Sailor (1983). The American film-makerJim Jarmusch, inStranger Than Paradise (1984), dramatizeshis portraitof threewanderingdown-and-outers itha rigorous,almostmathematical seof framingandediting.Hans-Jurgen yberberg'sOurHitler:A Film

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THEMOVIES

from Germany(1977) uses Brechtian echniquesto trace the linksbetween Germany'sWagnerian omanticism nd the rise of Hitler.

In recent years, many avant-garde ilm-makershave trimmedtheir sails a bit. Duringthe late 1970s, youngerdirectorslike WimWendersand Rainer Werner Fassbinder(1946-82), raised on asteady diet of Hollywoodclassics, created a more popular"artcin-ema."Withhisrecentparodiesof the earlyFrankenstein ndDraculamovies, AndyWarholhas moved into straightforwardeature film-making,and several experimentalistshave followed. Even BruceConner,masterof the surrealcompilationilm,now makescommer-

cialmusicvideos for Devo and other rock groups.Andmanydirec-tors with a politicalmessage have set off in search of larger audi-ences, a trend best seen in such films as the popularNight of theShootingStars (1982), aboutItaly'sinternalwrestlingwith fascismduringWorldWarH, by the brothersVittorioandPaoloTaviani.

The relationship etweenavant-garde ndpopular inema s, asalways,complex.The Hollywood lassicsof the 1930s and '40s, forexample,inspired he experimentsof the French New Wavedirec-tors of the 1950s, whichinfluenced he young directorswho beganarrivingn Hollywoodduring he late 1960s. The makersof popular

horrorandscience fictionmovies,always n searchofnew cinematic

shocks,are quickto exploitnew avant-gardeechniques.At the moment,the avant-gardes in a bit of a lull.But there

remainsa largeandgrowingaudience,readyto welcomeallmannerof filmsthat wouldhave been unthinkable uringthe heydayof theHollywood tudiosystem. The experimentalists re sure to thrive.

The workof Jean-LucGodardperfectlyexemplifies he fluctua-tions and adjustmentswithin the alternativecinema. From NewWave cinephiliaduringthe early 1960s, he shifted to stridentandforbiddingMarxistworks later in the decade, and then to serene,voluptuous tudieslike Passion (1982). Last year, he releasedHail

Mary,a mysticalretellingof the VirginBirth n contemporaryimes.It is anythingbut conventional.To manyfilmconnoisseurs,Godard s the symbolof cinematic

modernism'svitality.The twisting path of his career suggests thatthere is alwaysa new avenueforexperimentation,hatmanypossibil-ities remainopen to avant-gardeilm-makersmaginative noughtoseek them out. An exasperated nquisitor nce demandedof Godard:"But surely you will admit that a film must have a beginning,amiddle,andan end?"

"Certainly,"e replied."Butnot necessarily n that order."

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