Salute Your Shorts: Selections from Treasures IV: American Avant-Garde Film 1947-1986

Salute Your Shorts is a weekly column that looks at short films, music videos, commercials or any other short form visual media that generally get ignored.

As far as artistic forms go, avant-garde films are definitely one of the most obscure ones out there that are culturally recognized. Historically, it was because not only were these films screened in only one location at a time, and sometimes just on one night, but more importantly, they were incapable of being cheaply reproduced in a format that could actually be distributed to the masses. Film stock may be reproducible, but it’s also expensive in a way that traditionally only studios could afford. This causes a problem for anyone outside of major cities, primarily Paris and New York, who had any interest in the form since regardless of a fan’s dedication, if they lived in the outskirts of Nebraska they still couldn’t really check them out. If you wanted to learn about the genre, the best you had to go by was a handful of stills and someone’s descriptions. For something as weird as experimental films could sometimes be, this is obviously wildly insufficient. So it’s little surprise that even the most influential avant-garde films have been almost exclusively watched in college courses or museums.

Due to this cloistered nature, avant-garde films have become a strange little ghetto of the medium, with creators content to make films for each other or occasional museum commissions, but mostly that’s it. If feature films are like mass-market novels, then experimental film is like contemporary poetry or “classical” music—we’re all aware it’s there, but for the most part we’re happy to let the academics keep it to themselves while we enjoy things that don’t take years of study to make heads or tails of.

But it does have a huge, influential and occasionally fascinating history. Moreover, most of its better works are interesting, if perhaps not always that entertaining, without any particular knowledge of the subject. This Tuesday marked the release of what may be the best learning tool on the subject ever created, the DVD set Treasures IV: Avant-Garde Film 1947-1986, which features many of the most important American avant-garde films ever made, not to mention restoring the films and giving purchasers context. To write a cliché certain to make any publicist for the set ecstatic, it’s a treasure trove of material that’s better than any introductory course on the subject could hope to be.

That being said, it’s also fairly pricy, and probably not an obvious purchase even for most cineastes. Luckily, several of its films are available online, and checking them out can give you a taste of whether or not you’re interested in pursuing the subject further—though keep in mind that their picture and sound quality is infinitely better on the DVDs. Since this column tries to focus on films readily accessible to anyone with an Internet connection, we’ll take a quick look at what’s available and accompany that with a heavy recommendation that you check out the rest of the set yourself.

Above is Andy Warhol’s “Mario Banana” (the clip contains both Mario Banana films, whereas the Treasures set only features “Mario Banana (No. 1)”), which works as a relatively accessible introduction to what avant-garde films are about. Like much else Warhol worked on, the immediate question posed by “Mario Banana” is whether this short film, consisting largely of a man provocatively eating a banana in drag, is art. As usual with his works, it’s both a very good and very bad question. Obviously, there’s very little artistic about what’s within the frame, with its only value coming from camp provocativeness. But Warhol’s intent is equally hard to miss: he means his works to be art regardless of whatever silly thing he puts within the frame. Warhol’s themes are ones constant to the entire genre—what makes up a film in the first place, and what qualities about it make for a “good” movie. Even if you fundamentally can’t accept that what he does is of any value, at least you're in on the joke that is him selling a movie of Mario Montez eating a banana to a museum for a ridiculous sum of money.



Probably the most immediately enjoyable of the set’s shorts online is George Kuchar’s “I, An Actress.” Films have long been focused on filmmaking, and musicals in particular are rarely about anything else. “I, An Actress” takes this obsession to a strange place somewhere between documentary and fiction. Like Warhol’s film, it’s a very meta work and also extremely campy. But here, the campiness is about revealing the artificiality of filmmaking rather than mere categorization. Problematically, though, Kuchar’s method for this is the highly artificial performance of a director character who’s seemingly intent on testing the limits of realism. It conflicts with the pseudo-verite film style to make something that’s an oddly revealing statement on what it takes to be real verses what it takes to feel real. It’s also a whole lot funnier than Warhol’s film despite containing fewer dick jokes, even though I suppose it doesn’t count as more than one joke if there’s nothing else in the film. At any rate, always an impressive feat.



Both of the previously mentioned films are performance-based. Shirley Clarke’s “Bridges-Go-Round” contrasts these by featuring no performers at all, instead using camera movement and editing to create a kind of performative bridge. Clarke’s previous films, featured above before “Bridges-Go-Round,” show her early work that’s more about dance movement than the camera. This changed dramatically with her shift to abstraction, where she went about creating the same level of fluidity as before, only without humans. Clearly informed by Maya Deren’s earlier studies of movement with dancing and editing, the film is a short, beautiful study in abstraction that’s revealing in its perceptual shift in subjects. Clarke’s film basically says that if a bridge can’t dance, you can dance around and through and over the bridge and have the same effect.



Hollis Frampton’s “Nostalgia” is little like these other films except in its focus on the possibilities of film itself. No camera tricks or performances here, “Nostalgia” is a structuralist short that challenges its spectators’ ability to read a film. Michael Snow, the primarily structuralist filmmaker behind “Wavelength,” narrates the contents of 13 photographs while they’re burned on a heating coil. However, he describes the contents of the photo just beyond what was burned. It’s a simple concept, and the burning is more or less unnecessary, but it’s surprising how your mind struggles to match up with what’s currently onscreen, even though you know what’s happening. And unlike most painfully silly structuralist films, it’s actually a lot more interesting to watch than to read about. It’s that rare feature of the kind that has bigger interests than just film, bringing memory and expectations into its play with images.



The End Part 2                 The End Part 3                The End Part 4

One more short film from this collection that’s available online is Christopher Maclaine’s “The End,” a beat meditation on dehumanization, the nuclear holocaust and free association. It’s also quite a bit longer than these others and more of a typically narrative film, following six humans on their last day of life. “The End” could certainly take up the entirety of this column on its own, and I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention its ability to make the mere recurring image of a forearm extremely creepy, but it stands largely apart from both the rest of the collection and other films of its time, with its challenges to viewer identification closer to the French New Wave than to contemporaneous avant-garde films. It’s more indicative of how experimental filmmaking concepts can interact with traditional forms than as a purely avant-garde work like the rest.

This isn’t an advertisement for the series, though (which isn’t to say we don’t really advocate checking it out), as one of the other great opportunities for those wanting to learn more about avant-garde cinema is available to anyone able to read this, out there on the interwebs. The collection only features one film each by many of the directors, and while it does a great job highlighting related features, finding them is up to you. Many are available on Google Video, but another place you may want to check out is UbuWeb and also the earlier collections in the American Film Archives series, which also work hard to incorporate the relationships between avant-garde and mainstream cinema.