By way of Greencine Daily, Armond White’s provocative discussion
of the relationship between avant-garde cinema and Hollywood makes some very
good—and highly contentious—points. Armond’s article—on one level a review of
the new Kino DVD Avant-Garde: Experimental Cinema of the 1920s and ‘30s—laments
the lack of an avant-garde spirit today: “Movies used to be the avant-garde
until Hollywood commercialism caused the art form to undergo cell division,” he
writes. And, “KINO’s box set celebrates the moment—the tradition—where
moviemakers appreciated film for its ability to capture life and inspire
dreaming.”
Statements like this are necessary but also nostalgic, a
sort of lament for the past. But why is “capturing life” a condition of
avant-garde filmmaking, or even commercial filmmaking? Hasn’t film always
pondered an escape from life, from realism? I’m not sure that many of the films
on the KINO DVD actually capture life at all; certainly they capture a
historical moment that is now long gone. They are documentary in the sense that
they give witness to the historical conditions of their production, even as
they often try to transcend these conditions. In this regard, every film ever
made—ranging from Murder Ball to Suspicion—is a documentary and “captures life”
insomuch as it is made by people using the available technologies of their time
and that it records and creates a reality of its time.
Far from being opposed to avant-garde traditions (or
experimental traditions, or New Wave traditions) Hollywood has fully absorbed
avant-garde techniques, often in the service of traditional genre exercises,
such as Dressed to Kill, The Ring, The Blair Witch Project, and Memento. It's not that there is no
avant-garde today, or that Hollywood commercialism is a
natural enemy of the avant-garde imagination, but rather that the avant-garde
has become so thoroughly familiar as a style, a gesture, a stance.
In her 1996 Afterwards to the essays collected in Against Interpretation, Susan Sontag
recognized the paradox of her writing; when she championed certain elements of
pop culture against “serious” or “official” art back in the early and
mid-1960s, she had no idea of the looming, near-total triumph and hegemony of
pop culture: “What I didn’t understand (I was surely not the right person to
understand this) was that seriousness itself was in the early stages of losing
credibility in the culture at large, and that some of the more transgressive
art I was enjoying would reinforce frivolous, merely consumerist transgressions.
Thirty years later, the undermining of standards of seriousness is almost
complete, with the ascendancy of a culture whose most intelligible, persuasive
values are drawn from the entertainment industries” (312).
What’s surprising here about both White’s and Sontag’s
laments about the commercialization of transgression is not their nostalgic,
even conservative undertones, but rather their recognition that the blurring of
lines of distinction between transgressive and mainstream, or avant-garde and
commercial, or serious and frivolous has resulted in a sort of permanent state
of critical paralysis. Is something like Michel Gondry’s dual-screen,
forward-and-backward video for Cibo Matto’s “Sugar Water” simply a pop video,
or something approaching experimental art?
What about the unsettling, black and
white tape that spreads the curse in The
Ring? In Gore Verbinski’s version, the videotape draws explicitly upon
avant-garde cinematic traditions, including the cinema of Man Ray. In the novel Ringu (by Koji Suzuki, 1991), Ryuji, upon seeing the videotape,
says: “Now, this falls into two broad categories: abstract scenes and real
scenes” (103). Of course he is tragically wrong, as the video’s power lies in
exploding these categories.
Watching the films collected on the KINO avant-garde DVD one
is struck not only by how fresh and remarkable many of these films are, but
also by how deeply embedded those avant-garde gestures have become in
contemporary music videos, movies, and web-based cinema. The distinction
between “pure” uncorrupted avant-garde and “commercialized” Hollywood or
mainstream cinema is a false one, and probably always was. It’s as mythical and wishful as Ryuji’s hopeless distinction between “abstract” and “real.”
Below, some strange correspondences......
Retour a la Raison The Ring
(Man Ray, 1923) (Gore Verbinski, 2002)
L'etoile de Mer The Ring
(Man Ray, 1928) (Gore Verbinski, 2002)
Fascinating post, Nick.
Just off the top of my head here: Ironically, one arena in which avant-garde techniques seem to have been applied with great force (and restrained by fewer "narrative necessities") is that of the TV commercial. Many of the formal ideas employed by commercials would be considered (I suspect) radically disjunctive or innovative or boldly "non-narrative" in a Hollywood film. In these commercials, the gap between "avant-garde" and "commercial" simply seems to disappear since one is being used solely at the service of the other.
Posted by: girish | August 14, 2005 at 10:30 PM
The Ring's art direction is clearly inspired by modern and contemporary avant-garde and experimental art. I hadn't specifically noticed the Man Ray comparison, but I know that David Hockney's art inspired some of the shots in downtown Seattle, and Francis Bacon was the primary inspiration for the blurred faces. And several of the images in the tape reminded me of Bunuel and Dali's Un chien andalo. All that to say that I think you're right to say that Hollywood has absored many of the avant-garde stylistics (my students are surprised at how "tame" the Bunuel film is), for example. What this says about a pure avant-garde is another question. I think it does bring into question the principle of identifying avant-garde as specifically anti-commerical. At the very least, avant-garde images can be appropriated.
Posted by: Chuck | August 15, 2005 at 02:21 PM
Hey Girish and Chuck--
I think you're right on about many tv commercials...in many ways they are a populist art. It's too bad that most writing about commercials--at least in the academic sphere--is so pedantic and infected by a sort of shallow cultural studies approach that inevitably focuses on ideology, etc. at the expense of their aesthetic power.
Maybe that's part of the reason why--as Chuck points out--today's students aren't too surprised by something like Bunuel's films. There are all sorts of things wrong with this line of argument, I know, but I do sometimes wonder if an avant-garde is even possible today when mass culture absorbs, modifies, and redeploys its shocks so quickly and effeciently.
Posted by: Nick | August 17, 2005 at 09:35 PM
Interesting post, and great illustrations of your point. The speed and efficiency with which pop culture (and capitalism, if you want to go down that road) absorbs anything experimental has grown so much over the 20th century, that there really seems to be no "outside" from which to critique mainstream hollywood or pop culture. Avant-garde techniques now have to be enbedded within a narrative structure that gives them a different meaning, as in the Ring, or they are used to sell things, as in commericials. Music videos are the experimental form par excellence these days, and they are, of course, also used to sell something.
My favorite documentary filmmaker, Errol Morris (errolmorris.com), has made many commercials, which he once called the "American haiku".
Posted by: Erik | August 19, 2005 at 01:08 PM