Independents

From the January-February 1980 Issue

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Independents By J. Hoberman

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For the New American Cinema, the period had been a time of unprecedented achievement. A disparate band of self-subsidized amateurs succeeded in transcending the Hollywood craft mystique while opening movies up to formal possibilities that had largely lain dormant since D.W. Griffith designed the straitjacket of conventional cinematics. The era that began with Stan Brakhage’s ultra-subjective Anticipation of the Night (1958), his 1959 birth film, and subsequent epics, continuing through the beatnik-cum-glamorous underground of Ken Jacobs’s unfinished Star Spangled to Death, Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures (1963), and the world of Andy Warhol, to end with the minimalist, formalist, Clement Greenbergian shift precipitated by Michael Snow’s Wavelength (1967), saw one of the most astonishing, diversified art movements of the twentieth century.

Then, having attained a sort of apotheosis in 1971, with the establishment of the Anthology Film Archives, the (temporary) recruitment of an ex-Beatle into its ranks, and the devotion of an entire issue of Artforum to its accomplishments, the New American Cinema retrenched. The Anthology Film Archives opened on December 1, 1970. This crowning accomplishment of filmmaker-journalist-organizer-self-described-“raving maniac of cinema” Jonas Mekas—comparable in its way to the founding of The Museum of Modern Art—at once solidified an avant-garde tradition, created a pantheon of filmmakers, and reified a canon of masterpieces. But this new authority produced its own inhibitive effect.

Not only were young filmmakers over-awed by their elders, but the elders seemed over-awed by themselves. Stan Brakhage, alone of those filmmakers most prominently Anthologized, continued to invent and produce at the same high level. Brakhage’s “Pittsburgh Trilogy” of urban documents (including his beautiful and devastating city morgue autopsy film, The Act of Seeing With One’s Own Eyes), his series of Sexual Meditations, his unexpected tour-deforce The Text of Light (a universe revealed in the patterns of refraction on a clunky glass ashtray), his experiments with Super-8, and autobiographical Sincerity films, are without parallel in the seventies as a sustained body of work.

Structural filmmaking, the last effluence of the sixties (first identified by P. Adams Sitney in the Summer 1969 issue of Film Culture), spilled into the following decade. The structuralists (most of whom instantly rejected the label) produced work that was reductivist and anti-expressive, aspiring to the absolute. Their concern was with perceptual problems and/or specific properties of film. The cusp of the decades saw a succession of blockbusters: Jacobs’s Tom, Tom, the Piper’s Son (1969), Snow’s Back and Forth (1969), Paul Sharits’s S:TREAM:S:S:ECTION:S:ECTION:S:S:ECTIONED (1970), Hollis Frampton’s Zorns Lemma (1970), Ernie Gehr’s Still (1971), Snow’s La Région Centrale (1971). Reverberating through the Seventies, these films inspired many imitations and a handful of inspired syntheses. (Sitney’s “structuralism” had nothing to do with that of Christian Metz—a source of much confusion. It was, however, paralleled by the European “structural-materialist” films of Malcom LeGrice, Peter Gidal, Wilhelm and Birgit Hein, and their students. The Europeans produced more cogent theory, if duller films, than their American colleagues.)

Perhaps the key structural event of the decade was the absorption of the New American Cinema into the university. By the early Seventies almost all of the major filmmakers (and a host of minor ones) had come in from the cold. Improbably, the underground spawned a generation of university-trained, tenured filmmakers, academic specialists, and aware cultural bureaucrats. If the institutionalizing of the avant-garde has not fully subverted the reactionary segregation of film-studies from filmmaking, and conventional cinema from avant-garde, it has undoubtedly created a serious, educated audience. The best academic filmmaking has been genuinely populist (James Benning’s 1976 11×14) and usefully pedagogic (Larry Gottheim’s 1978 Four Shadows). But much more has been denatured, esoteric, uncritical, and derivative.

The university altered the hegemony of New York and (particularly) California by dotting the heartland with regional film centers. At the same time, the avant-garde wing of the New German Cinema began to surface here. Filmmakers like Werner Nekes, Dore O, Klaus Wyborny, Kurt Kren, and the Heins shared obvious concerns with American formalists. Others—Helmuth Costard, Rosa von Praunheim, HansJürgen Syberberg—were more narrative-minded and political. In 1975 Peter Wollen published an essay on “the two avant-gardes,” the second being post-’68 Godard, Jean-Marie Straub and Daniéle Huillet, Marcel Hanoun, and Miklos Jancso. Subsequently, various British filmmakers—the Berwick Street Collective, Wollen and Laura Mulvey, reformed formalist Anthony McCall and Andrew Tyndall—put forward a highly theoretical (and equally problematic) post-Godardian, après-Screen political film.

From the perspective of New York, the “first avant-garde” saw four broad post-structural developments over the Seventies: narrative features, autobiographies, performance-psychodramas, and Super-8 punk films. The first was manifested in the fractured, meta-narratives of Yvonne Rainer, Klaus Wyborny, and James Benning, as well as in the more conventional (but stylized) features of Chantal Akerman and Mark Rappaport.

Autobiography, the official counterstructural current of the Me Decade—delineated by Sitney in his first topical essay since “Structural Film”—is a tendency possibly brought about by the encroaching middle-age of leading New American filmmakers. With his four-part Sincerity (1973-78), Brakhage has made the most complex contribution to the genre. Brakhage’s work in general is the forerunner of the related—but less formal diary-film, as exemplified by the films of Mekas, Andrew Noren, and Warren Sonbert, all of whom have produced their finest work since the mid-Seventies.

Performance art (or “autoperformance”), which during the same period attracted the art-world attention previously accorded happenings, underground movies, and video, provided another avenue for the introduction of autobiographical or emotive content into post-structural film. A new psychodrama—often feminist; cooler, more ironic and behaviorist than the Forties psychodrama of Maya Deren—emerged in the early Seventies. The influence of Yvonne Rainer, who made her first film, Lives of Peformers, in 1972, is marked upon the work of younger filmmakers like Stuart Sherman and Ericka Beckman. Akerman made at least one psychodrama, Je, Tu, Il, Elle (1974), before synthesizing the monumentality of the structural blockbusters with the narrative concerns of advanced French cinema in Jeanne Dielman, 23 Rue de Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles.

Finally, in 1978, the first radical break with the structural-academic-formalism (as well as the artistic concerns) of the Seventies unexpectedly developed out of New York’s punk bohemia. By a commodius vicus of recirculation, this Super-8 new wave exalted most of the qualities that structural film rejected: extreme technical pragmatism, the enactment of libidinal fantasies, an interest in American mass culture, the glorification of a marginal life-style, and an inchoate social criticism. Its blockbusters are yet to come.

The first five of the following films—my Ten Best List for the decade—are masterpieces. The second five strike me as flawed, but otherwise, brilliant efforts:

1. The Act of Seeing With One’s Own Eyes (1971), Stan Brakhage, U.S.A.
2. La Région Centrale (1971) Michael Snow, Canada.
3. Jeanne Dielman, 23 Rue de Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975), Chantal Akerman, Belgium.
4. The Text of Light (1974), Stan Brakhage, U.S.A.
5. Still (1971), Ernie Gehr, U.S.A.
6. Numero Deux (1976), Jean-Luc Godard, France.
7. Our Hitler: A Film From Germany (1977), Hans-Jürgen Syberberg, West Germany.
8. Lost, Lost, Lost (1975), Jonas Mekas, U.S.A.
9. The Birth of a Nation (1973), Klaus Wyborny, West Germany.
10. 11×14 (1976), James Benning, U.S.A.