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The Adventures of Form (1990) |
 A Song of Ceylon |
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Introduction 2022: The following pair of texts from 1990 were
connected as a sequence in my mind (which is why I combine them here), if not
in the circumstances of their commission and publication. They come from a
period of my life when I was deeply absorbed in experimental/avant-garde cinema
– both in its programming/screening (“curation”, as we’d say today!), and in
the possibility of establishing a robust critical/theoretical tradition in and
around it. The pretext was usually Australian-made work – as I was heavily involved,
at the time, with the small arts organisation MIMA (later renamed and
up-marketed as Experimenta) – but the outlook of most people involved in that
scene was invariably international, as is often the case in avant-garde
subcultures. The first essay – which I somewhat cryptically titled “Introduction
to the Adventures of Form”! – was written to
accompany a program of Australian film and photography (titled Aurora
Australis) selected by Ann Pollock Berecry for Presentation House Gallery
(today restyled as The Polygon Gallery) in Vancouver. I realise in retrospect
that whenever I received the invitation – rare, in those days – to write for a
non-Australian art audience, I would use it as an opportunity to mull over
something for myself that I figured nobody “at home” would read, and probably
very few people abroad would understand! (I would also never fail to subtly or
unsubtly criticise the curatorial selection made by the interloping “outsider”
– a habit that, oddly enough, rarely went down well.) The second essay comes
from the 1990 MIMA Experimenta Festival catalogue.
I.
The kind of art that works for me is
Orphic, i.e., we are too gripped by darkness when we’re whole, we are alert
only when we are floating heads. It’s the vulnerability that interests me, not
the déjà vu doctrine. Obviously you try to capture the shifting politics and
sociologies of every work. I’m not against asking tough-minded, historical
materialist questions – I think it’s crucial – but a lot of art
work is very fragile. It exists across the gap between blindness and insight.
With society turning all experience into a form of consumption, is it still
possible to be moved?
– George Alexander
The
relation between Theory and Practice – those two well-known fictional
characters – has always been stormy, even despite the efforts and dreams of
those who, over roughly the last 25 years, have wanted to see the couple fused
once and for all.
This
uneasy détente – often breaking out into total war – besets
avant-garde film as much as it does any of the contemporary visual arts. Among
the milestones in the literature on experimental film, Noël Burch gave one of
the first and most stirring renditions of the happy-marriage scenario in his
1966 Praxis du cinéma – a “theory of film practice”, as its
title was later translated into English. Both a filmmaker and a film scholar,
Burch spoke of a type of practical research – thoughts and ideas gained
from the viewing of films, from reading and writing about them, were then
pursued in the materials of film itself.
In
a sense, it was an attitude that the Nouvelle Vague of Jean-Luc Godard, François
Truffaut, Jacques Rivette et al had already pioneered, in terms of a cinephile’s
love of filmic fictions – especially heightened moments, and his or her desire
to prolong such experiences, extend them, analyse them, abstract and heighten
them further through somehow remaking them.
But
for Burch, as befits the self-styled avant-garde artist, research had to have a
more rigorous, materialist, i.e., formalist edge: not to spin
out beloved Hollywood fictions, but to explore the edges of the frame,
off-screen space, the role of sound, editing discontinuities, and so on. In his
book, he lists all the parameters of film form he
can conceptualise, and then sets about a systematic inventory of their possible
permutations (a familiar practical avant-garde project, from Hollis Frampton’s Hapax Legomena [1971-1972] to Philip Brophy’s Contracted
Cinema [1978]).
Burch
was not strictly scientific and calculating about such a manner of film work
(in his open-ended and playful system, chance was to play a major part). What
he envisaged was not an illustration of theoretical
precepts in or on film, but rather, a kind of transformation-in-process of them, a working-through of some hunch, intuition or game that could well
take the filmmaker/thinker very far from where he or she started – ending up
with a new set of ideas and problems to be worked on in film or writing. (The
more that Sergei Eisenstein is re-read by our contemporaries including Jacques
Aumont, the more one suspects that he was the prototype of the artist/thinker
working perpetually towards such a praxis.)
Not
all theoretical or essay cinema (as it has
been variously called) of the intervening years has been so willing to jettison
its supposedly solid theoretical underpinnings (indeed, Burch’s own Correction,
Please [1979] is a fairly pedagogic, by-the-numbers film theory exercise).
But, in its most open, fluid form, Burch’s way has been the most attractive,
and for periods an almost workable, form of the
theory-practice partnership. Theorists who are the most sensitive to the new
achievements of art, most respectful of the labour of artists, and most desirous
to make their own writing creative rather than simply descriptive or
transparent (Jean-François Lyotard is an example) have championed this notion of a mutual
research – theory and practice forever extending, transforming, providing some
possible materials for each other’s experimentation, without a hierarchy of
dominance, neither one getting the first
or last word in the relation. And filmmakers like Burch or Peter Gidal have
also been more than open to this possibility – encouraging the idea that theory
and practice feed each other, anticipate each other. Sounds good, no?
However,
as Buffalo Springfield sang in the 1960s, paranoia strikes deep – and into your
life it will creep! The paranoid relation (in life as in art) is all about the
fear that one is being flattered and seduced in order to be, at any imminent
moment, incorporated, exploited, obliterated. In a psychoanalytic sense,
paranoia signals the fear of losing one’s clear borders, definition or
identity. Paranoia is at times (to be sure) the best defence, vitally required –
particularly if one has (like avant-garde filmmakers everywhere) fought long
and hard to create any cohesive sense of personal identity, or a shared
social and cultural space.
The
paranoid delusion is sometimes the truest insight: “they” are indeed out to get
you, to wipe you off the face of the earth. The very notion of an avant-garde practice – something
necessarily not for everyone, not modelled on the norms of consumer
entertainment, something frequently difficult initially to watch and hear – still
creates such palpable unease, such bad vibes in some prominent mainstream media
journalists, educationalists and film-world bureaucrats, that it clearly
invites secret (or not so secret) imaginings,
on the part of practitioners, of imperialist invasion and genocidal extermination.
Paranoia, in this creepy scenario, is just one good way of remaining vigilant,
on guard.
All
the same, the paranoid state can also be a sign of advanced unhealth, a total
refusal to ever move beyond one’s long rigid and static borders – an inability to deal with one’s opposite number, or
indeed the whole range of one’s Others, those who are different from you. If
crippling paranoia of this sort is one of the ground-tones of our Western
culture, it can be heard every day on the radio in one of the otherwise most
progressive musical forms: rap. “We’re Run-DMC, got a
beat to settle / D’s not Hansel, he’s not Gretel!” Rap says, over and over (and
sometimes, again, for good political reasons), on every imaginable pretext
(even nursery rhymes) or point: I’m not you, you’re
not me, you’ll never know me, don’t even try, get out of my space and out of my
face (see Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing [1989] for a dramatisation of
this as a total model of social relations).
I
can’t help but hear an echo of this rap when avant-garde filmmakers (in
Australia as elsewhere) express their suspicions of the motivations of
critics/theorists who start exploring their field. (I’ve long been
subject to this suspicion myself!) Are these critic-types about to simply annex
avant-garde film/video to their empire, their institution of theoretical texts
and propositions? Are they going to subordinate the (more or less) open-ended
practice of art to the rational, prescriptive, exclusive, reductive certainties
of a dogmatic theoretical or pedagogical program? The result
of such paranoid speculation is often a trench mentality, wilfully sticking to
old guns, old positions, set themes and practices.
Critics,
on their part, are just as good at mirroring the paranoid sentiment. Their
authoritarian streak can be discouraging to artists and, indeed, downright fascistic in cultural terms.
Such critics sneer: Don’t filmmakers read? Aren’t they concerned with the key
ongoing debates and issues? Shouldn’t they be engaging with what’s going down
right now, at the forefront of common research? In this way, so many artists
are so quickly cast off the current agenda for being old-fashioned, disengaged,
contributing nothing useful or vital to current discussions … and the special
work that is chosen for (or blessed with) close analysis is indeed often
reduced, managed to fit a certain grid that highlights only specific,
theoretically sanctioned points of interest. (In Britain, for instance, Stephen Dwoskin became theoretically/critically
fashionable for about two weeks out of his long career when his film practice
fortuitously coincided, in the mid ’70s, with writings on the cinematic gaze,
voyeurism, scopophilia, and so on – and even then, he tended to be the negative
pole of the argument!)
It’s
all very well to assert that filmmakers and theorists should (and sometimes
happily do) share and swap materials of various sorts, that their work runs in
tandem, intertwining at many points, that neither is in any sense superior to
the other, and so forth. But isn’t such a romance of mutual interdependence,
finally, a little stifling for both parties concerned? One needs a bit more
difference, distance, autonomy in the relationship beyond what is usually allowed – that is, if we conjure
theory and practice, in the usual binary way, as opposite sexes, drawn to and
in need of each other.
There
is no unbridgeable abyss between the work of theory and the work of practice – experience
and history always prove otherwise – but neither is there necessarily a clear,
common ground. One distinction between writing/criticism/theory and the
practice of art can be described as follows: the difference between
(respectively) rhetoric and evidence.
Criticism,
as I see it (and it is what I see myself as doing), functions in a rhetorical way. It is about sizing up the here and now, making a move, intervening. It
is immaterial what the pretext of the writing is – an old movie, a new
painting, whatever – because where and how it happens is in the action
of the forces it calls up and marshals at a specific point of historical time
and cultural space. Criticism, in this sense, is always on the spot, polemical
(which is why it can date so quickly and translate so badly into foreign
contexts). Often it is openly rhetorical, explicitly marking
the contextual positions and elements of time and
location at play, you the reader and I the author.
Essentially,
I dislike the work of critics who are (or act) dumb about the inevitable
political, rhetorical function of what they publish, and the material factors
which inflect how they are read and what they can manage to communicate. (Much
criticism of the arts is still plagued by the worst apolitical Romanticism of
sensitive souls expressing their responses to a free-floating artwork on the
virgin page.) I tend to demand that criticism be aware of its here’s and now’s,
that it be answerable to the cultural struggles (however minute or localised)
of the day, and the scene.
In
the face of some art, however, I feel impelled to make no such demand
(although I once might have, in the triumphal days of the March of Theory
1975-1985). I don’t immediately care if the avant-garde film I see tomorrow is
exactly on-the-spot where I would like to be as a critic. There are many works
of which one cannot make immediate sense – but one is, all the same, gripped, moved, shaken by a sense of their immense significance. In such cases,
art practice comes at you in the form of brute evidence, a presence to
be gradually reckoned with, figured into what you know and what you do.
I
don’t mean by this, imperially, that art offers up an enigmatic symptom of the times that the critic will later master and decipher (symptomatic reading, as that practice is known). On the contrary,
one of art’s most salutary functions is to affront, over and over, the too-easily assumed mastery of the critical, rational mind.
Some films hit you from a space other to the one in which you are working. They
thus impress upon you the very evidence of otherness everywhere, of matters and
emotions still (or again) marginalised, silenced, banished, exiled to the limbo
of the culture and the mind, not to mention the heart.
The
problem of theory or criticism simply missing the significance or resonance of
a work of art is particularly exacerbated in the area of avant-garde film. For how does
one talk about and value the kinds of works that are not clearly about anything
in the first place, which don’t seem to offer any immediate commentary or reflection
on a topic, event or situation?
Many
manifestations of theory and criticism are indelibly bound (whether they would
admit it or not) to art’s more conventional representational contract/mandate –
the obligation to stage and picture, at whatever level, identifiable
characters, stories, times and places. Everything we call abstract art
naturally falls outside the terms of this
contract. Traditional art criticism has found numerous, if rather feeble, ways
of discussing abstraction, for instance in painting: as a reflection of the
artist’s state of mind, as the gesturely expression of inchoate drives, as
purely spiritual diagrams of energy … This has tended to give abstraction and
other non-representational practices a rather childish, primitive, impulsivist character, securing them a place firmly on
the far side of critical rationality – as
a pleasing shadow world to be patronised, dipped into, rhetorically evoked at
will.
Even
the most strait-laced critic or curator knows, these days, to make a show of
themselves letting their hair down approvingly before a work which is
dauntingly obscure and awesome, somehow thrilling and disturbing, “breaking all the rules”. This sorry tactic
indeed conjures difficult, avant-garde work as Other – but secretly and defensively
forestalls the moment of ever having to encounter and to be
worked over by this Other. It enshrines the spectacular as exemplary, and
forfeits the fragile – the unusual tone, the unfamiliar shape, the work whose
undeniable reserve of logic and order is as unfathomable in immediate critical
terms as its passion, its tender charge of emotion.
Spectacular
and fragile alike, the difficult work that moves us does so through its form – and form, despite the reams of aesthetic theory that have been devoted to its
definition and elaboration, remains as elusive, as unaccounted for as ever. And
particularly so in the case of avant-garde. We are still very far from
plotting, being able to bear witness to, the adventures of form that
have gone on, are always going on, in obscure pockets of intense, creative
activity everywhere.
This
is why (speaking personally) I will always value, on principle, the murky
hand-scratched film, the obscure montage experiment, the fleeting lyrical film
poem, the intensely coloured and wavering abstraction – anything I find
strangely compelling – above the work which I can know too quickly and too well, which pushes prescribed buttons and lights up neon
signs of mere interest and prefabricated interpretation (“profitless”
reading, as Stanley Cavell called it in another context).
I’m
not opposing form to content here, as in the old art-class distinction between
a vessel and what it contains – for, in the entire sphere of independent film,
there are a thousand perfectly boring and predictable formalist experiments,
and their clear operations on this level (de-framing, “returning the gaze”,
systematic play with off-screen space, etc.) is certainly what constitutes
their content! However, in
appealing to films in which the form swallows the content, or transforms it
beyond recognition, I mean that the works in question get (or start) well
beyond the points of identification available at any given time – the
points from which, typically, critics (and audiences) achieve their easy
reading, their mastery, their appropriation and purchase of the text. I am
referring here not so much to conventional,
emotional identification with a character or story, but rather engagement (deep
or shallow as it may be) with a known issue, topic or (in the journalistic
sense) angle.
Not
that I’m exactly against work which engages with, or somehow acutely reflects,
current points of theoretical/critical debate (whatever they may be at any
given time), which aims to be instrumental, more or less a tool within what Gilles Deleuze once called the toolbox of available
intellectual and artistic materials. For, as Deleuze well taught us, the kinds
of machines that can be built from any such toolbox are themselves incredibly
variable and open to transformation, and that in itself can be an adventure of
the highest order.
Among
the independents represented in the Aurora Australis program, I would
nominate Ross Gibson’s Camera Natura (1985), Helen
Grace’s Serious Undertakings (1983), Tracey
Moffatt’s Night Cries: A Rural Tragedy (1989), Laleen Jayamanne’s A
Song of Ceylon (1985), Sonia Leber’s History Takes
Place (1987), Toula Anastas’ Ec/Static (1988) and Philip Brophy’s Salt, Saliva, Sperm
and Sweat (1988) as films which have, in their various (and often warring) ways, emerged
out of the peculiarly local tool box of cultural ideas, writings, concerns, and
the practical experiments in film that have led to new ways of conceptualising
and feeling certain issues within Australia – whether the issue
be terrorism, childcare, colonialism, the representation of history, the
possibility of a female voice, or exploitation cinema. All these works could,
in an expanded, Deleuzian sense, be called essay-films.
No
less informed by movements in the Australian cultural (mainly inner-city) scene
is another grouping of filmmakers – with the difference that their immersion in
a more postmodern ethos leads to an exploratory sensibility of a less
explicitly committed, engaged, essayistic kind. More studiously drifting,
ambiguous and ironic in their manipulations of culturally earmarked materials, filmmakers we find in this grouping include Andrew Frost, The Marine Biologists, Mark Titmarsh,
Stephen Harrop, and Debbie Lee (all
Sydney-based).
Finally,
there are the other films and artists – the ones I find most
intractable, singular, less answerable to the local scene and more inviting
into worlds of form unknown: In
This Life’s Body (1984) and Waterfall (1984)
both by Arthur and/or Corinne Cantrill; Marie Craven’s White Woman (1988), Marcus Bergner’s Tales from Vienna Hoods (1989). Speaking as an
Australian, these titles stand, in my eyes, for all the individuals and groups
who slog away under perennially impossible conditions, producing their
salutary, difficult, tough, fragile, Orphic work.
Some
of the notable artists not represented in the Aurora Australis selection include Chris Windmill, Maj Green, Nick Ostrovskis, Melanie El
Mir, Frank Lovece, Dirk de Bruyn …
If I emphasise this work favourably here, it is because the Australian
art/culture scene as a whole too often overlooks it, or remains content to be
merely dumbfounded by it.
After
the initial applause – if applause there be – only silence reigns on the scene
as regards the real contribution of such films, such artists. Hardly anyone
seems compelled to try to articulate, in more than a few summary words,
their effect, their impact, their
resonance. The rhetoric flags, while the evidence insists.
Where
are the testaments to the adventures of form?
II.
Neocapitalism restores to poets a late
humanistic function: the myth and the technical awareness of form.
At
the first Experimenta festival in 1988 in Melbourne, there was a
particularly memorable program of avant-garde films from USA. I was struck by
the energy of some of them – the power and
delirium of their kinetic effects. Two examples have particularly stayed with
me. The first was a recognisably postmodern work: Abigail Child’s Mayhem (1987), with its
violent montage of attractions (and repulsions) constructed from tiny fragments
of image and sound set free from some obscure, tacky, restaged noir melodramas.
The
second was actually more surprising, less predictable. One might have imagined
that the work of that venerable old god of the American avant-garde, Stan Brakhage, had probably reached some serene plateau
of painterly, contemplative abstraction by the dawn of the ‘80s. But what a
shock Murder Psalm (1980) turned out to be. Completely silent and taken up for relatively extended periods by washes of pure, abstract colours
and shapes (hence the typical Breakage playbook), it nonetheless
deployed its own montage effect – flash inserts of odd images from old cartoons
and educational shorts – with a jolting, electric intensity, obviously timed, frame by frame, for maximum impact. Cinephiles of a particular
persuasion talk of the body blows delivered by the editing strategies of Orson Welles, Sam Peckinpah, Samuel Fuller or Martin Scorsese; I’ve felt and savoured those blows too, but
I would swear that Brakhage’s film seemed to deliver me into an even purer,
more sublime cinematic ecstasy.
It
was an adventure of form – one of the many that I have experienced in
the unquestionably rarefied realm of avant-garde film and video, adventures that have kept me invested in the possibilities of the area. Form is a word
that cannot be dropped casually in any forum where people discuss any kind of
art without the expectation of a few reverberating murmurs. There will always
be those who deliberately go to the extreme of exalting pure form in every instance – meaning, in this context (as distinct from a Hitchcock/De
Palma/Argento context), a completely non- or anti-representational play of sounds (as
in music) or colours and shapes (as in abstract painting) – pitted against
those who decry such an apparent withdrawal into mere, self-referring form.
In
fact, when I consider the problem of discussing form, I recall two incidents
almost ten years apart, at either end of the 1980s. In the first, I am assailed
by a self-styled leftie at the conclusion of a particularly rigorous program of
early 1980s Super 8 films: “What are you doing patronising this decadent
formalist wanking?” In the second, I hear a complaint on
radio about the kinds of discussions the Modern Image Makers Association holds
about the works it shows: “Will there be any seminars on the content of the films and videos? All you ever seem to talk about is their form”. These
two anecdotes alone are enough to trigger in a paranoid avant-gardist’s mind
the sometimes literally bloody wars fought around and against form – recall,
for instance, the regime of Stalinist Russia and its outlawing of decadent
formalism (construed as florid, elitist, bourgeois-romantic-Western),
officially replaced by the greyest abiding genre of Socialist Realism.
Even
taken less melodramatically, these incidents certainly signal the continuing,
consistent grudge against any exercise in pure form: that it lacks – apparently
unlike real art, committed (engagé) art, or popular
art – a message (“something to say”), or even a nominal
content (storyline, characters, setting, world).
Definition
begs. Let’s describe a work’s form as the organisation of its material elements
– audio-visually, that indicates the arrangement of the shots, the construction
of their flow and rhythm, the disposition of colours and shapes in the frame,
the relation of image to sound, and so on. The invention of media like film and
video posed a fertile challenge to reigning aesthetic theory on a number of
levels. How to delineate the formal parameters of such media that are hybrids
of theatre, painting, architecture, music, literature; how to measure the
specific large-scale and small-scale configurations of so many elements in any
one work?
Even
more acutely, film and video posed – beyond the point that even music had done –
the mystery of the time-based arts: how to describe the working of a
form that is in motion, evolving as you experience it? Already in 1951, Emile Benveniste (in “The Notion of
‘Rhythm’ in its Linguistic Expression”) had questioned, in a radical and
searching way, our understanding of the notion of aesthetic form as something
fixed, static, monumental, regulated – as able to be measured, contained and
summarised in, for example, a structural diagram. Benveniste evokes:
Naturally,
form is not absent from so-called classical cinema, or any of its mutant
variations. Mainstream and B cinema alike have evolved very powerful forms – from
familiar large-scale narrative shapes like the rise-and fall of the gangster
movie or the three-act story, to the minutiae of
comic timing and thrilling editing strategies. The reason we don’t often centre
discussion of Hollywood films on the question of form – even though we know it’s
there, and that a great deal of our pleasure and displeasure derives precisely
from its working – is because it seems to slip under, to be in the service of,
things that are greater (or at least more
immediately generative of) our engagement: a
story, a fictional world, characters, themes, representation. And this
is indeed one of the absolute boundaries separating defensively normal cinema
from its dreaded avant-garde double: form, for the former, is
essentially theorised as a tool, an instrument to aid expression, a support or
container.
Pure
form is, in this context, non-existent because it is unthinkable: why would you
even want to work at a form if there was nothing you wanted to say, or show, or
tell? This is why the forms of mainstream cinema tend, within each film and
across the evolution of the various formulae and genres, to become (as far as
possible) perfect systems: they aim for closure, symmetry, organic
unity, consistency, seamlessness, rhyme, catharsis.
Even when the films flaunt deliberate acts of discontinuity, ruptures in tone,
ugly or disconcerting concatenations of rhythms and events
(as in Scorsese’s masterful Goodfellas [1990] or Spike
Lee’s Mo’ Better Blues [1990]), all such stylistic gestures strive to
remain functional in the first and last instance: they serve the story,
its mood, message and method, everything has a place in the
ensemble. The mainstream always distinguishes between a how and a what,
a form and a function – no matter how fused and interrelated these may, in practice, be.
Isidore
Isou, the principal architect of Lettrism in 1940s Romania and France,
theorised that, once the amplic, expansionary
phase of an art form was over – and it was, as far as he was concerned, over
for all the art forms – a merry chiselling operation was the only thing left to
do:
the reduction of the medium to tiny, elemental fragments (sounds, gestures,
letters, scratches), and their furiously meaningless organisation in time and
space. Isou’s account is like a perverse rendering of all those well-known
histories of the “life of forms” in art (such as that proposed by Henri
Focillon) – the sequence of Classical-Romantic-Baroque, degenerating and
regenerating over and over. For Lettrism (which receives a special focus in Experimenta 1990), by contrast,
there is no regeneration, only decay. Lettrism, by definition, was and is an
adventure of form, one of the purest expressions of the power of form left to
its own devices. It’s the Dark Star of 20th
century art history.
This
type of work, in its various cultural manifestations, remains one of the
indispensable extreme poles of avant-garde art. Some Australian examples have been collected in the Adventures in Form program for Experimenta in 1990. Representation – in the sense of familiar things to see and hear, to
recognise, latch onto, from which to imply and anticipate an unfolding
storyline – is routinely evacuated and butchered in the works at this pole (as
in Marcus Bergner’s Musical Four Letters [1989]). Or else it is simply
dispensed with altogether, and we plunge into
pure abstraction, with perhaps only a droll reminder or two of the regime of illustration that we have left behind (as in Neil Taylor’s Roll Film [1990]).
Fiction,
in the conventional sense, is usually absent from such films or videos. But
some of the affects and effects we associate with fiction – the formal flesh of
fiction – can certainly be in play, even in the most abstract
contexts: intrigue, timing, movement, tension, crescendo, juxtaposition … For this is
always possible when the constituent units or elements of audio-visual form are
separated and then put into relational circulation. Even the most determined
attempts at random formlessness can result in the most surprising and
idiosyncratic forms.
Formalist
work, as we well know, slips in and out of favour in critical/theoretical
fashion. So often, the extremely rigorous, chiselled kinds of film/video – whether
inclining to the most minimal or the most maximal – are cast into the dustbin
of the past, as representative of a necessary but ultimately irritating and
dissatisfying phase one goes through, whether as a viewing fan or as a
developing artist. There is a sense that extremely formal or abstract work
doesn’t travel too well into complex cultural debates – it doesn’t make or mark
clear-enough points for our spectatorial engagement.
Such
an attitude is indicative of a deficiency not in the work, but in our heads: it
is one of the sad tyrannies of our time that we demand that every act of
creation be rhetorical, sizing up and positioning its
cultural/intellectual references. This is basically the demand that art be more
like criticism, or writing, or theory. But art is not rhetoric, it is evidence. Evidence of what? Often nothing very
clear – a power, an affect, a unique and compelling concatenation of elements,
untranslatable into a verbal exposition. What can impress us as the awesome significance of a work (like Murder Psalm or Frank Lovece’s Te Possino Ammazza [1987]) is often something that, in a salutary way,
cannot immediately be articulated – for it stirs the whole being, whilst
exposing the limit of the rational mind and its too easily assumed mastery.
When
Peter Wollen outlined his division of the “two avant-gardes” in 1975, he
inaugurated a gesture that came to define, locally as elsewhere, the sometimes
testy split
between Old and New experimental trajectories. Pure form – British and American
structuralist film styles, Romantic painterly abstractions, contemplative
landscape films – went into the Old category; a more vigorous engagement with
(and love for) the representations and fictions of popular culture and its
attendant subcultures was the flag of the New. For Wollen, the difference was
between Brakhage the ahistorical purist and Godard the culturally plugged-in
impurist. (Many in-between figures, including the great Stephen Dwoskin, got
overlooked or lost in this categorical division.)
In
Australia, we witnessed, for a moment, a polemical divide between the established avant-garde
and the renegade Super-8 movement of the early 1980s. As ephemeral and
ultimately untrue as such oppositions usually turn out to be, impurism
certainly established itself, by the end of the ‘80s,
as another indispensable pole of avant-garde practice. Here, what reigns
supreme is the dialectical, often violent clash between formal elements and
representational ones, between an unashamed avant-garde consciousness and a
funky junk-culture one.
The
programs of Experimental Narrative and Experimental Documentary in Experimenta 1990 were devised to showcase some of the evidence in this area
of work. To take just one example, it’s intriguing to look back from Ian Haig’s
& Maria Kozic’s Snap! Crackle! Die! (1989) to Noël Burch
anticipating, in 1967, the avant-garde potential suggested by the earliest
splatter movies (in an essay tellingly titled “Structures d’agression”):
“The traumatic power inherent in their imagery undoubtedly provides raw material
that other filmmakers, more sensitive to the complexities of Form [sic] and
more conscious of the means we have at our disposal today, could exploit” (Cahiers du cinéma, no. 195, November
1967, p. 61).
Taken
in a perversely upbeat way, there’s something grand about the decadent
formalism of all these adventures (and
adventurers) – something
of which Pier Paolo Pasolini would certainly have approved. Pasolini wrote
glowingly of the myth of form in the mid 1960s, when he saw mass culture
becoming more and more streamlined into highly functional, commodity models: tight, well-constructed narratives;
feel-good emotional manipulation; a strict economy of laughs and shocks and
tears. Like functionalist architecture, everyday artistic production was
becoming increasingly obsessed with being utilitarian, economic, instrumental,
wasteless. Much has changed in cultural and social contexts since then – but
Pasolini’s prognosis remains largely valid.
In
this context (ours as much as his), to elevate form over function – in
film/video as anywhere else – is indeed a decadent, excessive, publicly
embarrassing, unmanageable act. Formal adventuring – like the masturbation it
is so often accused of resembling! – lives for itself and its moment, not for
the future, not for the public sphere. It leads to nothing, connects to
nothing, reproduces nothing. Nothing conventional or predictable, that is – its
only subsequent history would be a secret history (as Greil
Marcus outlines this concept in his wonderful 1989 book Lipstick Traces: A
Secret History of the 20th Century), a history of inspirations, appropriations, inadvertent echoes popping up in other
adventures.
Pasolini’s surprising myth of form elevated the necessary
excesses and elitism of experimentation to a very grand plateau: in its
intractability and effervescence, formal adventure provides modernity with both
its poetry and its humanism. It’s our task, 25 years later, to try
to live up to such a fine myth.
© Adrian Martin January & November 1990 |
