Jeff Keen, Marvo Movie

Reflections on tradition and history at 14th Views From The Avant-Garde

Views From The Avant-Garde is a section of annual New York Film Festival dedicated to experimental film and video work. The programme offers an opportunity to reflect on the position of experimental film in the US. Anyone with a passing familiarity with this area will recognise many names in the programme from iconic figures such as Ken Jacobs and James Benning to other well established luminaries as Peggy Ahwesh, Robert Beavers, Nathaniel Dorsky, Lewis Klahr and Phil Soloman. Views then is a festival to see new works by different generations of filmmakers alongside each other. The focus, despite the presence of various works from outside America, is decidedly North American and its very constitution makes it a distinctly different proposition to similar festivals in Europe.

This year’s festival followed on from a divisive poll published in Film Comment in the summer May-June 2010 issue. The ‘avant-garde’ film poll, conducted for the first time by the magazine, attempted to evaluate a decade of experimental film from 2000-2009, with contributions from 36 critics, programmers and teachers. All of the filmmakers mentioned above where featured in the poll as were many others showing at Views.

What does the poll really tell us about experimental film in the 21^st century, and what does it bring to bear on new work, especially that shown at Views From the Avant-Garde? Gavin Smith, the editor of Film Comment and co-curator, with Mark McElhatten, of Views, states in the issue, that there is “now more fertile common ground and meaningful dialogue between the avant-garde, art cinema and the contemporary art world.” Yet coming to the festival from London and being used to European festivals positioning of ‘avant-garde’ or experimental film in the broader context of contemporary artists’ film and video, one of the first things that is striking about the festival is its adherence to a specific idea, or tradition, of ‘avant-garde’ which is separate to contemporary art.

‘Avant-garde’ film holds a distinct and unique position in American film culture, and the very fact that we can talk about it as a ‘tradition’ is a distinctly American achievement, to the extent that filmmakers work around the world have largely been understood in relation American work since the 1960s. By showing such an inter-generational programme, and by virtue of taking place in New York, the historic centre of the American ‘avant-garde’ and its founding institutions (New York Filmmakers Co-op, Anthology Film Archives, etc), the festival can be read as an attempt to make explicit the continuity of this specific ‘tradition’. Yet, founded 14 years ago, Views arrived a long time after the primary periods of discussion of ‘avant-garde’ film in the 60s and 70s. The very notion of an ‘avant-garde’ filmmaker now is harder to understand or accept, as the context that this term came from has changed so much. Claims of non-conformity, criticality or an uncompromising aesthetic, notions that accompany the historical idea of the ‘avant-garde’, appear out of place for many of the contemporary works championed in the Poll and shown at Views. Instead. many of the works are better described as ‘beautiful’ rather than ‘radical’, and acclaimed for their technical mastery rather than for breaking rules.

The constitution of filmmakers and films in the Film Comment poll speaks volumes of the list’s specificity. Out of the 50 top filmmakers only eight are not from North America and only 13 from the whole list are women. Out of the top 50 films of the decade only six are from outside of North America and only six are by women. There are other ways the list can be dissected – not least its emphasis on older practitioners or people who have shown at Views in the past -  but these simple tabulations show the list’s specificity and the area of practice it best accommodates. The inclusion of non-American work, especially that of Apichatpong Weerasethakul who is the only non-American or European in the list, shows not so much that there isn’t viable activity outside these continents, but that the very notion of ‘avant-garde’ film relates to a specific and largely American area of practice. The American bias of the understanding and to a large extent history of ‘experimental’ film is not a new issue. Jonas Mekas, one of the instrumental champions of alternative cinema in the US, commented on this in a recent interview:  “I think that the New York and San Francisco scenes were so active in the ’60s and the ’70s, that they had no energy to even get interested in what was happening in other countries. They were too much involved with themselves. Those movements in other countries escaped their attention.”

There are different perspectives at play within the US; just within New York you have the excellent alternative screening space Light Industry whose diverse programme explores how we can approach the history of this area, its work, critical debates and contemporary interpretations, in the context of a diverse arena of contemporary practice that ranges from film, video, performance as well as net art, new media and computer games. Or Migrating Forms the festival that takes place annually at Anthology Film Archives, and was developed out of the New York Underground Film Festival in order to better reflect and accommodate filmmakers practice, rather than impose a historically specific designation on contemporary work.

Despite the largely unacknowledged boundaries of the discourse being addressed by Views and the poll, there were many interesting works shown, and it would be detrimental to see the work solely through the limited prism of ‘avant-garde’ film and the historical peculiarities of the, as Peter Wollen argues, “broken and diverse”[1] history of experimental film.

This ‘broken’ history is highlighted at the festival through the various programmes of recently discovered or restored work, allowing the festival to broaden its frame of reference. This year the Views weekend opened with previously unseen films of Pierre Clementi, well known as a pivotal actor in European art house cinema under direction of Buñuel, Bertolucci, Jancsó and Passolini among others and an active member of underground cinema in France, from Zanzibar Group onwards.

Clémenti’s ‘Unreleased Reels‘ made between 1967-78 featuring the films Souvenir, souvenir (reel 27) (France, 1967-78, 27m), Positano (reel 30B01) (France, c. 1968, 28m) and La Deuxième femme (Reel J) (France, 1967-78, 48m) had laid untouched at the Centre Pompidou where Clémenti was allowed to edit his films, are only being shown publicly now following their recent restoration. The films are impressionistic reveries that trace a life lived in and through cinema, featuring a dense array of imagery drawn from various film shoots as well as scenes with family and friends. The films multilayered imagery veers from the kaleidoscopic to the diaristic showing his life, from youthful psychedelia to a reflection on his own cinematically saturated existence and his later years that poignantly reflects the fact that the counter-culture in which he lived and worked is changing. These played well against a presentation of recent BFI restorations of Jeff Keen’s work, whose own distinctively British cacophonous collages, describe another type of Bohemia and relationship to cinema and pop culture through film.

Despite the festival marketing’s claims for survey programming (which tends to accompany any festival), Views offers a distinct perspective and focus on American contemporary practice, including its relationship to other cinemas and cultures. As well as restored historical work, the weekend featured various monographic programmes dedicated to a single artists as well as multiple new works by various prolific artists such as experimental animators Lewis Klahr and Janie Geiser or Jonathan Schwarz’s recent series of short in-camera edited films. Work of various artists such as Laida Lexthundi’s Llora cuando te pase/Cry When it Happens (USA, 2010, 14m) a brilliantly paced and constructed film which presents a fragmented series of events or actions in and around a Los Angeles motel and selected sites in the broader Californian landscape is an enigmatic, moving and complex work, or Dani Leventhal’s off-hand diaristic video Hearts are Trump Again (USA, 2010, 14m) which is disarmingly funny and refreshingly explores the ambiguity and performative aspects of first person video, present glimpses into very different and distinct practices.

Another archival presentation was of centenarian director Manoel de Oliveira’s Rite of Spring/Acto de Primavera (Portugal, 1963, 99m.), his second fiction film since his 1942 debut, is a remarkable Brechtian folk film, documenting the during their annual staging of the Passion of Christ by residents of the small village Curalha, which leads to a remarkable polemical denouement. Playing together with this was New York based Portuguese artist Fern Silva’s Servants of Mercy (Portugal/USA, 2010, 14m), which presents a variation on portrait film, subtly showing the redevelopment and changes of Portuguese landscape and society through the prism of his families old household helper, a remainder of Portugal’s older bourgeois traditions. Fernando Pessoa’s famous poem of exile “Oh sea, how much of your salt is from the tears of Portugal” can be heard song on the soundtrack, reflecting the gulf between the past and the present and the countries unique place on the edge of Europe. More striking and ambitious in its form was Silva’s In the Absence of Light, Darkness Prevails (Brazil/USA, 2010, 13m.) which manages to weave apocalyptic samples from the new Transformers films into its playful melding of documentary and staged footage of Brazil, to create a visceral anti-ethnographic essay.

Get Out of the Car, Thom Anderson

Photographer and filmmaker Tomonari Nishikawa presented two films constructed from interlocking imagery. Both Tokyo-Ebisu (Japan, 2010, 5m.) and Shibuya-Tokyo (Japan, 2010, 10m.) were produced in camera with a complex use of matte’s so the image consists of a fractured or cubist view, with various planes within the image presenting the Toyko suburb at a different time or from a different angle. The films rich soundtracks align them more with field recordings than expressive pictures of place, their very formality and robust polyphonic imagery creates a complex and yet very specific picture of street culture.

Thom Andersen, whose new film Get Out of the Car (USA, 2010) is already being widely discussed, follows his pivotal cine-essay, Los Angeles Plays Itself, both of which herald a range of work exploring how cities are filmed and how we can understand or counteract their representations. In collaboration with the Center for Land Use Interpretation, photographer and filmmaker Chris McCormak has been creating a filmed archive of abandoned buildings and sites across America, from residential areas and diners to huge plains formerly controlled and occupied by the military. The material in Future So Bright (USA, 2010, 30m.) plays like a catalogue of sites and although strikingly filmed, its argument seems to be overwhelmed by the task of documenting these locations, leaving little room for interpretation apart from a sentimental coda.

Julie Murray’s Distance (USA, 2010, 12m.) offers a more impressionistic exploration of desolate and abandoned landscapes yet has more power, underlined as it is by a reflection on the ruined and abandoned coastlines of America, from the Florida coast following the oilspill to the debris still left behind by Katrina. In a sense similar to Nishikawa films, David Gatten’s Shrimp Boat Log (David Gatten, USA, 2010, 6m.) perceives the world from a static perspective with starkly different results. Using a strict editing system, the film records the process of documenting passing shrimp boats in his family home in South Carolina, cutting between the titles log book and the coastal landscape outside, allowing us to watch the world passing by.

The apologetically titled Sorry (USA, 2010) is another manifestation of American artist Luther Price’s distinct almost sculptural handling of found film. Unlike the new work by Peter Tscherkassky which despite its accomplished construction leaves his materialist aesthetic looking very dated and hollow or the slight new video by Martin Arnold which again offers little more than his signature reworking of existent material, Price’s work presents a distinctly different sensation. Roughly hewn from existing films, his work, similar to his previous Biscotts series, uses film material not as a fetished aesthetic rarity but as a tactile object, re-cutting original material rather than reprinting. Sorry which juxtaposes an old Jesus picture with a documentary on the cosmos and one of fly reproduction, is exhilarating tactile, subversive and funny, his films are without credits or title obscuring any explicit authorship, and perhaps his work bares more resemblance to Jim Shaw’s Thrift Store Paintings in their cataloging of America’s discarded culture than the majority of found footage films. Another ironic picture of a deity was These Hammers Don’t Hurt Us (Michael Robinson, USA, 2010, 13m), an unusual tribute to Michael Jackson constructed from a mash-up Elizathbeth Taylor in Cleopatra with documentation of Jacko’s amazing costumes from his uncompleted final tour.

Bust chance (USA, 2010, 7m) by Stephanie Barber presents a similar mesmerizing display of objects, which in degraded video appear on a theatrical stage in front of a large, attentive Chinese audience. The objects appear without human accompaniment and their every action or inaction is followed by the tense exclamation or applause. This brilliant uncanny video presents a world of performing objects, a mini-exhibition of sculptural performers is as strange and alluring as Stephanie Barber’s other work at the festival, razor’s edge (Stephanie Barber and, USA, 2010, 44m) made with artist Xav LePlae. This highly unusual film is ostensibly an adaption of the W. Somerset Maugham novel, but rather than drawing from the book the film is taken from the artists half-forgotten recollection of it and restaged as a series of absurd actions in unspectacular locations, from a diner to a backyard in Baltimore. The works approach to adaptation from popular memory is similar to Xav LaPlae’s brilliant Bollywood homage I’m Bobby (2004) which restaged the 1974 classic Bobby with children across India. Here through that films exuberance is replaced by a hypnotic distended and reduced narrative of repeated actions and gestures staged in real locations allowing quotidian observation to leak into the film. Despite the weighty history that looms over the festival, these younger artists work largely resists any potentially restrictive context, showing a rich range of distinct and unclassifiable work.

Footnote:
[1] Knight’s Moves, from Camera Obscura, Camera Lucida (Essays in Honor of Annette Michelson), Ed. Richard Allen and Malcolm Turve, Amsterdam University Press, 2003, p147

About the Author: George Clark is a curator, writer and artist. At the Independent Cinema Office between 2006 and 2008 he managed a range of touring projects including: ‘Essentials: The Secret Masterpieces of Cinema‘, ‘Artists & Icons’ and ‘The Artists Cinema 2006′. Independent curatorial projects include ‘The Unstable States of…’, ‘Without Boundaries: European Artists’ Film and Video’ and the retrospective ‘The Cinema of Miklos Jancso’ [co-curated with Travis Miles]. He has written for Art Monthly, Afterall, Sight & Sound, Senses of Cinema and Vertigo Magazine among other publications. He recently collaborated with the artist Beatrice Gibson on the script for a film commissioned by the Serpentine Gallery and Camden Council.

Break Even Concept Store, IFFR 2010

To explore some of these issues I raised in my look at how Rotterdam International Film Festival has changed, and to look at how festivals can operate now and respond to the current climate, I talked with the curator Edwin Carels who has contributed innovative programmes and exhibitions to the Rotterdam over the years. Coming from the visual arts, his projects play a fundamental role to counter-point the film focus of the festival and propose new models for how work is made, shown and disseminated. This year his project, Break Even, took the form of a pop-up store in the heart of the festival. Using this model he paralleled the festival’s various facets, from its mainstay of screenings and discussions, to his shop market, which paralleled the long running co-production market Cinemart.

How did the project come about?

Every year the festival has a big thematic programme and the central idea this year was to go online – to have a 2.0 festival with the Cinema Reloaded project to co-produce films by buying coins online as well as using YouTube as a platform. Which is relevant, obviously – it’s very topical at this moment. But what is it really about? It’s really about the economy of images, it’s about new forms of production and presentation of images and I think that is absolutely something that needs to be addressed.

So I said maybe my shop idea would work in a complimentary way to that, to present the other side. This project is resolutely off-line. I want people to come here to buy and to discover that which is peripherally in their vision and also discover other people. So I went for it. As with Kino Climates, the idea was there, but I argued that this should be part of Cinema Reloaded, as it’s another form of economic survival within a very different kind of situation. So these projects are a combination of different approaches to the central question of the festival.

How important is the location for this project – to be situated here in the centre of Rotterdam and amongst the festival venues, rather than in one of the galleries south of the centre?

As well as the online project, another inclination of our relatively new director is the desire for the marginal to be in the centre. So he was adamant about having Kino Climates in the centre at the Schouwburg, not in Lantaren/Venster. When we went looking for a site I was assuming that there would be plenty of bankrupt or empty storefronts, yet this location, which was the most central, wasn’t bankrupt! This location had been used to sell the most expensive flats in Holland, which are still to be built. I’m very happy with the location, its really key to the success.

It seems that even within this small space you’ve managed to make a parallel or replica of the whole festivals and its different sub sections?

Well for me that’s it – a shop can be sort of emblematic for the festival. We want to be on ground level, so we’re not hiding or doing elitist things. I think this festival is a non-red carpet festival, which I really like, but at the same time we don’t compromise on our tastes. If it’s all obscure names then it’s all obscure names, and you just learn to pronounce them and be excited by them.

I’ve learned my marketing terms – so my ‘bubble plan’ – which is how you organise stores – is just what I think is relevant now – in my opinion. So as a programmer, I’ve compiled shelves, rather than films in a theatre, though it’s the same principle.

I heard that Eisenstein did the same with his bookshelves and he really had an order for how to match this and that. So there is a kind of editing going on in that sense, and a reshuffle everyday. But I’ve also invited a lot of people to contribute – I said, bring your suitcase, I’ll give you some money, surprise me. And I’m amazed by what people have sent. There is this whole generosity thing going on. I used the money that I normally get to make an exhibition or film programme to develop this concept and I’ve already broken even, more or less on day one. All the rest is just a kind of bonus, as we don’t have to make a profit.

It seems like this project is very much about acknowledging the underlying presence of the market at film festivals?

Absolutely. I mean they call it the industry! Amongst ourselves, and in Cinemart, it’s nothing but economic talk, but for the public it’s just not apparent. I mean, it is for big American productions, but for art house films there are just as many economic concerns. It’s all about economy, as is the whole internet thing. That’s why getting away with the title of the store, Break Even, was already half the job done. Everyone talks about how they have to break even… it’s a purely economic term.

So it’s a concept store in the sense that I don’t mind if I sell a lot or not. I think the meeting ground is important, sharing this idea and pointing towards it is important.

Most filmmakers don’t earn a living from their work, so they have to apply for funds, etc. So this is not going to make a difference to their career apart from the fact that they want to be part of this environment. Content wise, I haven’t compromised. For very personal reasons I’m happy to change after doing so many exhibitions in the past to another location – it’s a new challenge and set of parameters. It’s fun! And also a programme of films, an exhibition, live events – they are now all in here.

Do you think that this project is also a reflection on the position of artists’ work within a festival like Rotterdam?

Well, there’s little other art in the festival this year and that unfortunately has to do with the credit crunch and sponsorship, etc. Once I got the idea and I knew I could develop it I started looking around and talking to people. It is a format, the pop-up shop is a viable format because you don’t pay rent for very long, you don’t pay staff longer than necessary. In the art world you see a lot of that, exhibitions of self-publishing, etc. I brought some of the stuff at PS1 during this big New York art book fair, there were amazing things. I mean it’s not about books there either; it’s about lots of different multiples. So this cottage industry is increasingly important.

But what do you think the status is when a cottage industry is incorporated into the institutions of art?

You could consider my role within the festival as that of a jester! I seem to be contracting the argument of Cinema Reloaded but at the same time strengthening it. I see it as a complimentary action. For instance, yesterday we had Vincent Meessen presenting his new work with 10 people and talking for two hours afterwards only about semiotics, Roland Barthes and Africa in a wonderful exchange with Kevin Jerome Everson. And if you can do that in the heart of the festival, here, between the Doelen and the Pathe, if we can talk about Barthes for two hours, that’s great, that’s generous. For me it’s a most happy experience because of the direct interaction.

Artists work often seems to challenge the structure and preconceptions that festivals have about what work is and how it can or should be presented – how do you understand the position of artists’ work at film festival?

I’m very happy about the position that I can take – maybe I don’t have a position, I don’t have a territory, I’m not [representing] Sweden, Germany, Austria and have to scout there. Every year I try out new formats, that I think are topical, of this moment – so that’s why I’ve done programmes on music, and on television, because there was a cultural relevance to the technology. It’s basically more of a Cinema Regained programme here; it’s homage to those disappearing stores. In our daily ‘trade paper’ Unfinished Business we have the story about Kim’s Video, the Mecca for New Yorkers, that is now gone, it’s in Sicily, an Italian bought it and now it’s gone. There was a shop in Brussels, Le Bonhier, The happiness, which had been there for 15 years and you went in and brought the taste of the guy, it could be chocolate, it could be DVDs, books, but also children’s toys. I like those places but they are disappearing because of the Internet, because of online stores.

The project seems to be true to the idea that the role of festivals is to propose different structures for how culture can be configured understood and produced?

Yes. I used to programme the Exploding Cinema section, but we had to explode that, and we’re trying out new formats and asking, well, is this viable? Interesting? A lot of people from a lot of festivals have seen this now, so you never know. It’s also a take on branding, there is no Tiger – the festival logo – in the store. We did tap into the house style with the Break Even logo so on many levels there’s a play with the components of the festival and that is part of the joke! It’s problematising it and at the same time trying to use and understand it. That’s why I showed Farocki’s The Creators of Shopping Worlds (2001)  on the first day so you actually get a crash course in how to do it. In the evening we had a crash course in becoming a pickpocket. So the whole give and take; theory and practice.

Depending on how deep you want to dive into the layers of the concept, you could actually just stumble in here like some police officers did and curiously look around but leave with something in your hands or you can see it as being a performance. There have been many examples before, like Vito Acconci’s bookstore for Documenta was a great one. I’m not reinventing the wheel here, that’s why I only want to do it now, within the framework of the larger theme it makes sense to do this. We had lots of lucky moments with the programming with the settling of the urban estate office and someone just brought Tati’s Playtime which is perfect!

The corporate steel and glass location is an unusual place for a screening especially the difficulty to create a blackout, for one screening here light and shadows kept coming in from the street outside…

Yes, extra shadow play! I’m happy that people are open to it and the artists are not anal about super perfect conditions, there are more important things than that. One of the best comments came from curator Mark McElhatten at the end of that night, “The setting was far from perfect but it was ideal!”

About the Author: George Clark is a curator, writer and artist. At the Independent Cinema Office between 2006 and 2008 he managed a range of touring projects including: ‘Essentials: The Secret Masterpieces of Cinema‘, ‘Artists & Icons’ and ‘The Artists Cinema 2006′. Independent curatorial projects include ‘The Unstable States of…’, ‘Without Boundaries: European Artists’ Film and Video’ and the retrospective ‘The Cinema of Miklos Jancso’ [co-curated with Travis Miles]. He has written for Art Monthly, Afterall, Sight & Sound, Senses of Cinema and Vertigo Magazine among other publications. He is currently collaborating with the artist Beatrice Gibson on the script for a film commissioned by the Serpentine Gallery and Camden Council.