Avant-Garde Essay, Research Paper

Avant-garde movies all start with the belief that movie is more interesting as art than as narrative. Not surprisingly, the first people to believe this manner were creative persons. In Germany after World War I, Swedish-born painter Viking Eggeling and Berliner Hans Richter collaborated on coil pictures which they took to UFA studios in the hope of reproducing them as animated movies. Richter agreed to fix a coil utilizing simpler square forms, and the energizers produced his one-minute abstract movie Rhythmus 21 ( 1921 ) ; Eggeling, who kept to his original designs, fastidiously made his ain alive short, Diagonal Symphony ( 1922 ) , but died non long after. The American-born Dadaist-turned-surrealist Man Ray was populating in Paris and made his first movie in 1923, Le Retour? La Raison, uniting superimpositions and shootings of Mobiles with his ain “ rayograms ” ( registering objects on movie by puting them on the photographic surface and exposing them to visible radiation ) .

The following twelvemonth, France ‘s great Cubist painter Fernand L? ger made the first photographed abstract movie, Le Ballet M? canique, in which he wildly edited shootings lit in utmost contrasts. Besides in 1924, Ren? Clair made the zany Entr’acte, with creative persons Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp, and Francis Picabia looking onscreen. The late 1920s saw a turning international motion of daring film. Richter used colour and hand-painted the lines and squares of his Rhythmus 25 ( 1925 ) ; he made Film Study in 1926, uniting filmed images in surrealist associations, and so continued to work in movie ( Inflation, 1927 ; Ghosts Before Breakfast, 1928 ) . Man Ray made two surrealist trunkss, Emak Bakia ( 1927 ) and L ‘ ? toile De Mer ( 1928 ) , every bit good as the capricious Les Myst? res Du Ch? teau Du D? ( 1929 ) . In Hollywood in 1927 and ’28, French-born Robert Florey directed low-budget characteristics, was adjunct manager on big-budget movies, and made experimental trunkss: The Life And Death Of 9413 & # 8212 ; A Hollywood Extra ( co-directed with Slavko Vorkapich ) , The Loves Of Zero, Johann The Coffin Maker, and Skyscraper Symphony. In Rochester, New York, James Watson and Melville Webber made an experimental version of Poe with The Fall Of The House Of Usher ( 1928 ) . Soviet manager Dziga Vertoz made 23 editions of his one-reel intelligence magazine Kino-Pravda from 1922 to ’25, utilizing complex, original redacting techniques. His characteristic Kino-Glaz ( 1924 ) consisted largely of footage of people changeable unawares, and his best-known work, Man With A Movie Camera ( 1929 ) marshalled all his advanced techniques for a portrayal of Moscow. Spanish surrealists Luis Bu? uel and Salvador Dali wrote and directed the landmark short Un Chien Andalou in 1928. Avoiding narrative or symbolic logic, they filled the screen with amusing and lurid imagination ( including a close-up of Bu? uel cut downing an orb with a razor ) . They clashed over their sound follow-up, L’Age D’Or ( 1930 ) , which Bu? uel took over. Widely banned for its anti-clericism, this authoritative characteristic introduced Bu? uel ‘s vision of obsessional erotism and black comedy. Poet and artist Jean Cocteau made his first movie, Le Sang D’Un Po? Te ( 1930 ) , a personal dream journey as loaded with camera fast ones as a M? Li? s abruptly ; subsequently he ‘d return to personalise, imaginatively-shot surrealism with Orph? vitamin E ( 1950 ) and Le Testament D’Orph? vitamin E ( 1960 ) . In Germany during the 1920s Oskar Fischinger had made his soundless Studies, a series of abstract alive trunkss ; he won international acclamation with his sound movie Composition In Blue ( 1935 ) and came to America, where he ‘d do Radio Dynamics ( 1942 ) and Motion Painting No. 1 ( 1947 ) . Vertoz used sound creatively in Enthusiasm ( 1931 ) and Three Songs About Lenin ( 1934 ) , but Stalinist repression demanded simpler movies. Europe darkened with the growing of fascism and the at hand war, and by the terminal of the 1930s Bu? uel, Richter, and Ray had left for America. After the war, Richter would do Dreams That Money Can Buy ( 1946 ) , an American characteristic with sequences scripted by himself, Ray, L? ger, and their fellow creative persons Max Ernst, Marcel Duchamp, and Alexander Calder. ( Subsequently he ‘d besides make the episode movie 8 Ten 8 ( 1957 ) with Jean Arp, Duchamp, Ray, Yves Tanguy, Calder, Ernst, Dorothea Tanning, and Cocteau. ) In the States, Watson and Webber made their inventive and titillating Lot In Sodom ( 1933 ) merely to happen that there were few locales where they could test so make bolding a movie. The creative person and sculpturer Joseph Cornell began doing movies in the late thirtiess. His celebrated Rose Hobart ( 1937 ) took footage of the titular actress from her low-budget jungle film, East Of Borneo ( 1931 ) , and collaged it into an elegant jubilation of Hobart. His ulterior movies, some of which went unfinished for decennaries, include the trilogy Cotillions & # 8212 ; The Children ‘s Party & # 8212 ; The Midnight Party ( edited in 1968 from footage shooting in the ’30s ) and A Legend For Fountains ( shooting in 1957 but unreleased until 1970 ) . Mary Ellen Bute, hiting objects in utmost close-ups with a assortment of lenses, made over a twelve abstract movies, get downing in 1936 with Anitra ‘s Dance and Rhythm In Light. Some were shown at Radio City Music Hall as pre-feature attractive forces, but after 1941 she quit doing them. Old ages subsequently Bute made the fashionable features The Boy Who Saw Through ( 1958 ) and Passages From Finnegans Wake ( 1965 ) .In the 1940s, another adult female film maker became a accelerator for the American vanguard. Russian-born Maya Deren, with her hubby Alexander Hammid, made Meshes Of The Afternoon ( 1943 ) , a psychodrama of a adult female haunted by visions of decease. Deren made several noteworthy movies in the ’40s: At Land ( 1943 ) , The Private Life Of A Cat ( 1945, besides with Hammid ) , A Study In Choreography For Camera ( 1945 ) , Ritual In Transfigured Time ( 1946 ) , Meditation On Violence ( 1948 ) . By 1946, she was giving showings of daring movies by herself and others and promoting a greater consciousness of experimental film. Deren besides spent several old ages shooting Voudoun rites in Haiti and even became a priestess, but in the last decennary of her life she was unable to redact the footage into a completed work ; her concluding movie was The Very Eye Of Night ( 1955 ) . The psychodrama & # 8212 ; puting bare the subconscious in personal, supercharged imagination & # 8212 ; became an of import filmmaking manner in the ’40s. The teenage Kenneth Anger made Fireworks ( 1947 ) , a homoerotic dream of decease and Transfiguration and went on to go one of the major American vanguard film makers with such classics as Rabbit ‘s Moon ( 1950 ) , a studio-made narrative of Pierrot ; Eaux D’Artifice ( 1953 ) , in which sprays of H2O become keen abstract surveies ; Inauguration Of The Pleasure Dome ( 1954 ) , a hallucinatory assembly of originals ; and Scorpio Rising ( 1963 ) , an insightful and witty dissection of biker mythology. Anger ‘s engagement with ceremonial thaumaturgy informs his eye-popping Invocation Of My Demon Brother ( 1969 ) every bit good as his magnum musical composition, Lucifer Rising ( 1980 ) , a vision of nonnatural forces and existences at work on Earth.Sidney Peterson and James Broughton made their first movie, The Potted Psalm ( 1946 ) , as a coaction. Peterson went on to do such psychodramas as The Petrified Dog ( 1948 ) and The Lead Shoes ( 1949 ) before retiring in the ’50s. Broughton ‘s ulterior work includes Mother ‘s Day ( 1948 ) , The Pleasure Garden ( 1953 ) , and The Bed ( 1968 ) ; since the mid ’70s he has worked in coaction with Joel Singer ( Together, 1976 ; Shaman Psalm, 1981 ) . Gregory Markopolous began uniting mythology and homoerotic imagination in Du Sang, De La Volupt? Et De La Mort ( 1948 ) , but after Swain ( 1950 ) and Flowers Of Asphalt ( 1951 ) he spent the ’50s working on the Grecian production Serenity ( 1961 ) . In the ’60s his earlier manner gained a new ocular polish and originality with such major movies as Twice A Man ( 1963 ) , Eros, O Basileus ( 1967 ) , Himself As Herself ( 1967 ) , and The Illiac Passion ( 1967 ) . He besides made movies without people, such as the multiple-exposure authoritative Ming Green ( 1966 ) , and developed a decontextualizing redacting manner in which shootings are glimpsed merely at uneven intervals, with Gammelion ( 1968 ) and Hagiographia ( 1973 ) . Markopolous spent the last old ages of his life cutting together all his movies into the mammoth, 22-film-cycle Eniaios ( 1990 ) .Willard Mass made several gay-inflected psychodramas ; his married woman Marie Menken Helped on Images In The Snow ( 1948 ) , and Ben Moore collaborated with him on The Mechanics Of Love ( 1955 ) and Narcissus ( 1956 ) . Menken ‘s ain movies, including Hurry! Hurry! ( 1957 ) , Go Go Go ( 1963 ) , and Wrestling ( 1964 ) , are prized for her redaction accomplishments. Stan Brakhage began doing movies in the early ’50s and by 1955 was doing psychodramas: Contemplations On Black, Way To The Shadow Garden. The undermentioned twelvemonth he made Nightcats, shooting cats in a nighttime pace. The dim visible radiation, decontextualizing angles and composings, and utmost close-ups turned the cats into abstract textures, and since so the prolific Brakhage has made chef-d’oeuvres with this aesthetic. Normally shuning a soundtrack, he creates rhythms through action, redaction, and movie velocities. The most utmost deformations of focal point or camera motion become ocular poesy, offering a new manner to see non merely cinema but the universe, in such short movies as Window Water Baby Moving ( 1959 ) , Door ( 1971 ) , The Riddle Of Lumen ( 1972 ) , and two authoritative characteristics, Dog Star Man ( 1964 ) and Scenes From Under Childhood ( 1970 ) . Brakhage ‘s Mothlight ( 1963 ) consisted of flower petals, moth wings, and blades of grass sandwiched between two clear strips of movie ; he has besides painted on the movie stock itself in The Horseman, The Woman And The Moth ( 1968 ) , Murder Psalm ( 1981 ) , and his characteristic Trilogy ( 1995 ) . In England in 1935, New Zealander Len Lye made Colour Box, painting straight on movie: the first non-camera film. Lye ‘s ulterior work was more traditional, but by the terminal of the decennary, an American adolescent, unaware of Lye, was pulling and etching on movie ; Harry Smith made five trunkss in this mode, stoping with Number 5 & # 8212 ; Round Tensions in 1946. He so began snaping life and developed a manner of traveling montages, into which he poured his old ages of analyzing chemistry and the Qabalah, climaxing in 1962 with his authoritative Number 12 & # 8212 ; Heaven And Earth Magic. Smith is one of several daring energizers of the fortiess who did their minute

st admired work in the ’60s. John and James Whitney made abstract animation together starting with their Variations series (1941-43). After 1950 they worked independently: John developed his own films based on the graphics of first the analogue and then the digital computer (Catalogue, 1961; Permutations, 1968); James drew the basic dot-structures for his Yantra (1957) but adapted John’s analogue-computer process for Lapis (1966). Jordan Belson made animated films in the late 1940s and by the late ’50s was creating his multi-media Vortex Concerts in San Francisco, the density of which led to his ’60s films combining animation and photographic techniques: Allures (1961), Re-Entry (1964), Samadhi (1967), Momentum (1969). In the 1960s gay and transgendered men expressed their imagination and sexuality without the angst of Markopolous or Anger: Taylor Mead was a holy fool in Ron Rice’s The Flower Thief (1962); the wit and theatricality of Jack Smith are the core of Ken Jacobs’ Little Stabs At Happiness (1958/63) and Blonde Cobra (1959/63). Smith made the era’s classic, Flaming Creatures (1963), shooting on backdated black-and-white stock and giving the film an exploded, archaic look. This pageant of nudity and crossdressing met with many censorship attacks, much to Smith’s horror. His attempts to make Normal Love using backdated color stock were never completed, but Ron Rice’s Chumlum (1964) offers glimpses of Smith and his cast from Normal Love, as does a short “newsreel” from an artist making his second try at using a camera: Andy Warhol. Warhol made minimalist films in 1963, silently photographing mundane events from the short Kiss to the six-hour Sleep; in 1965 he made the eight-hour Empire, consisting of the Empire State Building seen from one unchanging angle. But that same year his use of sound brought more character and humor to his work, beginning with his films written by Ronald Tavel, such as Screen Test with drag-performer Mario Montez, The Life Of Juanita Castro with filmmaker Marie Menken, and Vinyl, a version of Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange; in 1966 they made The 14 Year Old Girl [aka Hedy; Hedy The Shoplifter] and More Milk, Evette (aka Lana Turner) with Montez, and Kitchen with Edie Sedgwick. Warhol looked at lust and commerce on Fire Island with My Hustler (1965) and his 1967 follow-ups I A Man and Bike Boy. His 3?-hour The Chelsea Girls (1966) was twelve uncut reels of people from Warhol’s circle, shown in random sequence, two at a time from two adjacent projectors but with only one soundtrack audible. After Lonesome Cowboys (1968) Warhol turned to producing for writer/director Paul Morrissey, most notably in Flesh (1968) and Trash (1970) with Joe Dallesandro, and Women In Revolt (1972) with Holly Woodlawn, Jackie Curtis and Candy Darling. Other experimental filmmakers also made major works in the ’60s — indeed, taken as a whole, the decade is something of a golden age for American avant-garde film. Mike and George Kuchar, identical-twin brothers, began making 8-mm films in the 1950s, and by the early ’60s had adapted the situations and language of Hollywood melodramas to their no-budget Bronx-made movies: I Was A Teenage Rumpot (1960), Pussy On A Hot Tin Roof (1961), Lust For Ecstasy (1963). By the mid ’60s the brothers worked independently. Mike’s films include his science-fiction reinventions Sins Of The Fleshapoids (1965) and Dwarf Star (1974), as well as the abstract Fragments (1967); George’s notable later films include Hold Me While I’m Naked (1966), The Devil’s Cleavage (1973), and Cattle Mutilations (1983). More recently they’ve both worked in video, Mike with Purgatory Junction (1994) and George with Cult Of The Cubicles (1987) and The Weather Diary (1990). Swiss-born photographer Robert Frank made the quintessential “Beat” film with his first effort, Pull My Daisy (1959), written by Jack Kerouac and co-directed by Alfred Leslie; his later films include the feature-length Me And My Brother (1969), with documentary and staged scenes. In 1958, Bruce Conner made a powerful debut editing found footage for his A Movie. He went on to create such major films as Cosmic Ray (1961), which combines found footage with glimpses of a woman dancing naked; Report (1967), a reworking of television news footage of the Kennedy assassination; and Crossroads (1976), about the atomic bomb. Bruce Baillie made several outstanding films, working with real locations in To Parsifal (1963) and Castro Street (1966), and using superimpositions, negative film, and alternate speeds and exposures in Mass For The Dakota Sioux (1964). George Landow (aka Owen Land) creatively used looped footage in Film In Which There Appear Sprocket Holes, Edge Lettering, Dirt Particles, Etc. (1966) and The Film That Rises To The Surface Of Clarified Butter (1968); he’d later parody instructional films with Remedial Reading Comprehension (1971) and New Improved Institutional Quality: In The Environments Of Liquids And Nasals A Parasitic Vowel Sometimes Develops (1976). Stan Vanderbeek made accomplished animated collages, such as Breathdeath (1963) and Dance Of The Looney Spoons (1965), and then began using computers with Computer Art (number one) (1966) and his series of Poem Field films, starting in 1968. Lithuanian-born Jonas Mekas, besides working ceaselessly to promote avant-garde cinema, also made the notable films Guns Of The Trees (1961), The Brig (1964), and the film diaries Hare Krishna (1966), Walden (1969), and Lost, Lost, Lost (1976); his brother Adolfas made the comic Hallelujah The Hills (1963) and the macabre Windflowers (1968). Robert Nelson combined humor and social commentary with Oh Dem Watermelons (1965) and The Great Blondino (1967). More austere were the films of Michael Snow: Wavelength (1967), a continuous 45-minute zoom, and the feature-length (1969, [aka Back And Forth; The Double-Headed Arrow]), highlighted by an accelerating back-and-forth pan. Snow’s later work includes Seated Figures (1988), a landscape shot from a moving car. Minimalism also figured in the films of Robert Huot (Leader, 1966; Scratch, 1967) and Hollis Frampton (Surface Tension, 1968; Zorns Lemma, 1970). In 1969 Ken Jacobs made Tom Tom The Piper’s Son, re-editing an old silent short into a commentary on itself. Jacobs began his “Nervous System” performances in the ’70s, using two near-identical prints shown by two projectors capable of single-frame advance and freezes; the slight discrepancies between prints create 3-D effects in such works as The Impossible: Chapters One To Five (1975-80) and Two Wrenching Departures (1989). Tony Conrad’s The Flicker (1966) is stroboscopic light, from 24 flashes per second to four and back to 24. Paul Sharits adapted Conrad’s method to include footage of people and objects in Peace Mandala/End War (1967) and N:O:T:H:I:N:G (1968). In Austria, Peter Kubelka worked in a similar vein with Arnulf Rainer (1960), while his Unsere Afrikareise (1966) raised film and sound editing to new heights. Kurt Kren imaginatively cut looped footage in 15/67 TV (1967), and the “materialaktions” of Otto Muehl used food, paint, nudity, sexual activity, excreta, and violence for such shocks-to-the-system as Sodoma (1969).Czechoslovakia’s Jan Svankmajer began making stop-motion animation shorts in the mid ’60s. Whether using antique dolls (Jabberwocky, 1971), chairs (The Fall Of The House Of Usher, 1981), or sculpted clay (Dimensions Of Dialogue, 1982), his imagination has captivated audiences internationally and led to two highly original features combining live-action and stop-motion: Alice (1988), freely adapted from Lewis Carroll’s Alice In Wonderland, and Faust (1994). Equally sensitive to texture, atmosphere, and enigmatic weirdness are the Brothers Quay, identical twins from America who film stop-motion shorts in England — Street Of Crocodiles (1986), The Comb (From The Museums Of Sleep) (1990) — and have also made the live-action feature Institute Benjamenta (1995). In the ’70s, several notable avant-garde films came from writer/directors who would also work in commercial cinema. David Lynch made the bizarre but touching abused-child short The Grandmother (1970) and his classic feature, the nightmare vision Eraserhead (1977). In Mexico, Alexandro Jodorowky made the violent and allegorical El Topo (1970); his other surreal features of blood, religiosity, and insanity include The Holy Mountain (1973) and Santa Sangre (1989). England’s Derek Jarman began making striking abstract films shot in super-8, such as The Art Of Mirrors (1973) and In The Shadow Of The Sun (1974); in the ’80s he adapted these techniques for his great non-narrative features, The Angelic Conversation (1985) and The Last Of England (1987). His last film, Blue (1993), shows only a blue screen as the soundtrack relates his thoughts in the last weeks of his terminal illness from AIDS.In the 1980s, the punk-inspired Cinema of Transgression produced several noteworthy sex-and-violence films. Richard Kern’s plot-driven shorts are especially memorable: The Right Side Of My Brain (1985) and Fingered (1986), both co-written by and starring Lydia Lunch, and Manhattan Love Suicides (1985) and King Of Sex (1986), both with Nick Zedd. Other notable works of like-minded filmmakers include Tessa-Hughes Freeland’s Nymphomania (1993), Where Evil Dwells (1986) by David Wojnarowicz and Tommy Turner, and Cassandra Stark’s Parade Of Cruelty (1995). Most striking are the shockers of writer/director/actor Zedd: Totem Of The Depraved (1983, co-directed with Ela Troyano), Thrust In Me (1984, co-directed with Kern), the police-brutality melodrama Police State (1987), the alternately abstract and erotic Whoregasm (1988), and the phantasmagoric War Is Menstrual Envy (1992). Zedd’s excesses may be a hard pill for some to swallow, but he comes from a long line of shock-mongers, including Bu?uel, Anger, and Muehl — all means are acceptable to break down the audience’s conditioning and expose them to something genuine, both onscreen and within themselves. Cinematic transgressions are verboten in entertainment, which must always work with the audience’s familiarity, and one way or another they represent an underlying impulse of all avant-garde cinema.