For a Cinema of Bombardment
I.
Although there have always been intrepid critics and cinephiles who have engaged with films belonging to the non-narrative avant-garde, there has existed a perception that such films, operating as they do on somewhat different aesthetic precepts, could be considered a separate cinematic realm, one that even the most dutiful critic could engage with or not, as he or she saw fit. In the ’80s, for example, there was a book series entitled Film—The Front Line that was intended to be an annual assessment of the year in experimental cinema. The text was assigned to a different critic each year, who would themselves decide how “experimental” would be defined. While Jonathan Rosenbaum, in the 1983 edition, carefully considered the relationship between what we once called “art cinema” and the “co-op” avant-garde, David Ehrenstein, in the subsequent volume, essentially dynamited said distinction, treating it like a form of aesthetic and political apartheid.
There was no volume for 1985, indicating that Ehrenstein’s gesture may have been as untimely as it was necessary. Nevertheless, when we look today at the relationship between international auteurist cinema and smaller-gauge, non- or para-narrative experimental work, there is perhaps more mutual cognizance between filmmakers, and greater continuity of interest among critics and cinephiles. These two trends may be related.
Since the ’70s, and the movement in experimental cinema away from the expressive models exemplified by Stan Brakhage toward the more restrained, formalist approaches collectively characterized as “structuralism,” there has been a significant increase in both creative interchange between avant-garde and auteurist narrative filmmakers, and between critics’ interests in both realms. There are possibly anecdotal reasons for this, not least of them being the relative placidity of structural film as compared to the jittery, anxious work of Brakhage, as well as certain gendered critiques of Brakhage’s first-person expressivity that are well worth consideration. By contrast, the clean, open anonymity
