Books Around: All that Avant Garde

By Olaf Möller

Publications on avant-garde cinema, whatever that means, belong to the rarest and most ephemeral breed in the world of film book publication. It’s not that there are so few—actually, quite a lot get published on the subject—it’s just that these works are usually somewhat difficult to find. More often than not, they’re catalogues accompanying a retrospective (travelling or otherwise) and are published by the organizers themselves, who either don’t bother or just don’t know how to get their precious books or deluxe pamphlets distributed a little more widely. So some of the publications commented on here have to be ordered straight from the source (two aren’t even on the ISBN). And another peculiarity: while general studies on whatever is considered avant-garde usually find a “real” publisher (more often than not university owned or affiliated), monographs on the art’s practitioners more often don’t—they have to be canonical big names like Maya Deren to merit such an investment. The reason for all this is pretty obvious: there’s no money in publishing books on cinemas in which there is no money. We’re talking here— let pathos reign for just a moment—about some of the purest and the poorest.

So what’s Donald Richie got to do with all of this, those of you who remember last edition’s cliffhanger on Richie’s The Japan Journals, 1947-2002 (Stone Bridge Press, Berkeley , California ) might ask? Quite a lot, actually, it’s just that most people aren’t aware of it. From the 40s till the 60s, Richie was a prolific and highly accomplished experimental filmmaker, whose work in the 60s (along with his activities as an activist/publicist/curator) was very important for Japan , where most of his major films were made. Richie is probably the only foreign-born filmmaker Japanese cinema has adopted as one of its own. Admittedly, Richie doesn’t talk too much about his filmmaking in his diaries, notes, and sketches—in fact, he doesn’t talk too much about cinema at all, at least not in the “critical” sense one would expect of him. What he talks about when he speaks of cinema is life with cinema and its people. Richie, flaneur and Puckish commentator on human folly and foible, seems happiest penning little cautionary tales and fables involving his friends and acquaintances—he rarely leaves an observation alone, always searching out some meaning to make it worth mentioning. He is a spin doctor of life.

Formally speaking, the book is a peculiar mix. Richie seems to have started writing a diary in the 70s and evidently only got serious about it in the late 80s-early 90s. The “entries” till then are a mix of “nonfiction short stories,” occasional observations, scribblings, ruminations, and reminiscences (some of which already are known to the devoted Richie reader). In short: textwise the book is, fittingly, as heterogeneous as Richie’s oeuvre which, in the end, is his life, the centripetal force behind his scattered interests. It’s a fascinating read—especially when Richie talks about sex, Japan ’s erotic culture, and the West’s e(roto)motional tight-assedness—often unsparing and fierce in its judgments, especially about himself. But careful: somebody so open certainly has something to hide. Meet Donald Richie, literary character.

(For those who are curious about Richie’s filmmaking: several years ago, Klaus Volkmer of the Munich Film Museum and I wrote a monograph on Richie for the Japan Foundation’s Cologne office; it’s one of the few publications available in which one can find comments on Richie’s early Surrealist-inspired 8mm works done in the States and it includes a filmography).

But let’s get on with the avant garde—Richie was a mere prelude—and the question, “Which/what avant garde?” “Which” is the question at the core of two new books, David E. James’ The Most Typical Avant-Garde: History and Geography of Minor Cinemas in Los Angeles ( University of California Press , Berkeley , California ) and Scott MacDonald’s A Critical Cinema 4: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers ( University of California Press , Berkeley , California ). Four suggestively synchronized notions pop up in the two titles: avant garde, “minor cinema,” “critical cinema,” and independence. But is the avant-garde always critical? And if so, of whom or what? And independent of whom or what? And why minor? To take an example from the cover of A Critical Cinema 4, how independent is somebody like the very overrated artist Shirin Neshat, who’s represented by Barbara Gladstone, the art world’s equivalent to Wild Bunch’s Vincent Maraval, if not Harvey Weinstein? Both authors seem to be aware of the fact that they’re defining themselves and their causes through what they’re not, but they can’t really say what unifies their respective visions—i.e. what they really are and want— which means they argue from a defensive, or better, socially engaged yet passive position. No real change ever started with the words, “Excuse me, but is it change they’re after?” Both authors would probably assent, and I’m more than inclined to believe them. But I’m not certain whether they’d be able to say what kind of change they’re after. With MacDonald there’s a clearly articulated sense of unease about this mass of causes and discourses and the way they get lumped together, but whatever James might feel or think about this gets lost in his admittedly valiant attempt at imposing a sensible shape upon a somewhat self-defeating project.

A Critical Cinema 4, like the first three installments of this series, is a judiciously edited collection of interviews/conversations with practitioners—mainly filmmakers but also one critic/theoretician, P. Adams Sitney—of a cinema that’s for the most part non-Hollywood and out of the Euro-arthouse mainstream, although it gets most interesting when all these genre and market borders collapse, as in the cases of Chuck Workman, Chantal Akerman, or Jim McBride. (A quick aside: the cover declares that the book features “McBride’s first extended conversation in thirty years about the classic David Holzman’s Diary.” “In English,” they should have added: there are several similar interviews conducted in the last 15 years or so that have appeared in European publications.) Like all books in this series, MacDonald’s volume is a treasure trove of information. The filmographies alone are invaluable, the interviews—some spanning whole careers while others deal only with one or two films—are for the most part enlightening, while the choice of interviewees is open to discussion (three cheers for Jill Godmilow, thanks for pointing out Lawrence Brose…but Neshat?). It’s amusing to note that MacDonald hasn’t loosened up even a bit in all these years: he’s still desperately well-meaning and a bit stuffy—he’s so obviously a teacher! —which creates problems of its own. But that’s another discussion, to be had, perhaps, when Volume 5—or, as MacDonald suggests, Volume 4.2—is published, as there was so much material for this project that it didn’t seem sensible to put it all in one tome.

An excess of material, approaches, and ideas is actually the main problem of James’ book. He wants to include it all—experimental cinema of all kinds, “ethnic” cinemas, parallel industries like porno, etc. —in his panorama/tapestry of non-Hollywood cinematographic practices that can or could be found in Los Angeles . And he’s done so, nominally—it’s just that most subjects are only touched upon and not dealt with in any length and depth. Now don’t get me wrong: I’m always in favour of more than less, of throwing ideas around hoping that somebody might get interested in one thing, somebody else in another, etc., the same way that I don’t think that one has to explain certain basics again and again. No progress is possible if one doesn’t believe that people evolve. But somehow James makes a mess of it—a fine and fascinating mess, but a mess nonetheless. Of course, one can say that the book has a clear trajectory—Los Angeles without Hollywood yet in its shadow, so to speak—and it argues for a theory of tangential plenty, of a multitude of interacting (or not) socio-political/aesthetic spheres defying the centre. In a way, praising the creative mess is actually what it’s all about. Which is the most sensible way to go, and I’m there with James 100%. Yet James never really argues his choices convincingly: they always feel a tad arbitrary, with socio-historical importance and aesthetic achievements mixed up unproductively, and the reasons why some subjects are argued at length and others mentioned in passing remains obscure in most cases. In the end, one is left constantly struggling for some kind of balance, looking for a position other than anti-whatever and pro-everything else. That some subjects, like working-class cinema, are of greater interest to James than others (like porno) doesn’t help things either. So, what to do with it? Get inspired to dig.

The remaining books and booklets are monographs, three of them devoted to one auteur apiece, and two to elective affinities. The two most comprehensive works of the lot are David Clandfield’s Pierre Perrault and the Poetic Documentary (Toronto International Film Festival/Indiana University Press, Bloomington and Indianapolis , Indiana ) and Peter Todd and Benjamin Cook’s Subjects and Sequences: A Margaret Tait Reader (LUX, London ). Admittedly, Perrault isn’t exactly an avant-garde auteur in the classical sense, yet it seems proper to feature him beside Tait, who, despite her background, is rarely considered a master of the documentary. The synergy between them feels just so perfect—it’s probably their shared sense of cultural nationalism, he agitating for Québec, she for Scotland . The latter volume, as the title indicates, is a collection of essays on Tait —her films as well as her poetry—as well as excerpts from her own writings, finding shape in a patchwork form which fits her oeuvre in a most beautiful fashion, although a more focused attempt at making sense of Tait would be nice, too. (Every additional work on Tait is welcome and needed—yes, she’s that important.) For dealing with the single-mindedness of Perrault’s projections of Québec, Clandfield chooses a classical, well-thought-out approach: he creates certain clusters of films and subjects which he then uses to argue towards a coherent vision, the kind of lucid auteurism rarely seen these days. Both books feature fine filmographies and sensible bibliographies; the Tait book is also beautifully illustrated.

Another LUX publication dedicated to an overlooked, underappreciated, and forgotten master is Mark Webber’s Two Films by Owen Land (LUX, London), which despite the title deals with the whole oeuvre of the former George Landow (now Owen Land), though admittedly it focuses most on his two crowning achievements, Wide Angle Saxon (1975) and On the Marriage Broker Joke as Cited by Sigmund Freud in “Wit and Its Relation to the Unconscious”, or Can the Avant-Garde Artist be Wholed? (1977/79) The first half of the book consists of the illustrated screenplays of these rare, crypto-Christian comedies of structures and signifiers. This rather small but lovingly made book would be a must for the two stills featuring pandas pretending to be avant-garde filmmakers alone; yet there’s also a great interview by Webber (at his self-deprecating best) conducted with Land nee Landow, the writings by Landow-now-Land (especially his explanations for the sometimes outland(ow)ish titles of his works), and a detailed filmography. All of these, and panda pics to boot (which, like all the stills, were created for the Österreichisches Filmmuseum by Georg Wasner, auteur of a major masterpiece of erotic filmmaking, Der zärtliche Dienst [1994]).

The two remaining publications are in praise of filmmakers I suspect most of you have never even heard of, let alone had a chance to see any of their films. Not surprisingly, the booklets are made by the filmmakers themselves, on the occasion of retrospectives devoted to their works: A World in Motion: The Films of Maja Weiss and Peter Braatz (self-published in Ljubljana; available either via www.belafilm.com or www.taris-film.de [Maja and Braatz’s websites, respectively], or via the ever-supportive Slovenska kinoteka), and Ulrike Pfeiffer, Bärbel Freund, Ute Aurand: FILME (self-published in Berlin and Hamburg; available via B. Freund, Markelstr. 54a, 12163 Berlin ).

Weiss and Braatz, now, are something. Talk about a clash of temperaments: she’s Slovenia’s prime (but not only, as some think) woman auteur, whose feature film debut Guardian of the Frontier (2002) made something of a splash internationally, while he, some 15 years older, is the front man of one of Germany’s first punk bands, S.Y.P.H. (Save Your Precious Heart), and a minor master of experimental genre gangbangs, usually with brilliant soundtracks. (His most controlled film is probably an adaptation of Bartok’s Der wunderbare Mandarin [1987]; his most free-floating, a travelogue, Trans [1993]). The booklet is mainly a collection of niceties by their friends, meaning little critically usable is said save by the ever-reliable Nil Basker and Jurij Meden, while Angus Reid and Michael Benson, like Braatz, expatriate auteurs in Slovenia—truly a home for misfits and mavericks—basically just go bonkers. But what do you expect from a Scotsman who published a personal poetics of cinema whose cover consists of sandpaper, and an American who did the first major film on Laibach?

The same, basically, could be said about Ulrike Pfeiffer, Bärbel Freund, Ute Aurand: FILME except that it’s all done in a somewhat more tenderly poetic, finely nuanced register—at least here everybody’s writing in his own language (German). But this tone also has something to do with the delicate nature of the three women’s films. Pfeiffer, Freund, and Aurand—who, by the way, was the first to present works by Margaret Tait in Germany—got to know each other while studying at the DFFB (German Film And Television Academy Berlin); they became friends, worked on each other’s films, and occasionally made films together. This booklet commemorates the first 25 years of their friendship, which alone should be reason enough to have it. But it also features a small, perfect piece by Peter Nau, one of the two modern German masters of the art of film criticism (the other is Helmut Färber who’s probably known to regular readers of Trafic), which is another major reason to have this booklet—as Nau doesn’t write nearly as much as we all need, every piece is precious. Add to this the fact that it’s probably the only place where one can find detailed filmographies for the three—the same, by the way, is true for the Weiss/Braatz-booklet—and that just seeing the images of the films makes one want to watch them.

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Books Around
by Olaf Möller

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