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UNDERGROUND FILM: A CRITICAL HISTORY BY PARKER TYLER Grove Press, 1969; hardcover, $7.50; paperback, $1.75; 249 pages; illustrated.
REVIEWED BY REGINA CORNWELL
Regina Cornwell is writing her Ph.D. thesis on the avant-garde cinema for Northwestern University.
Unshakeable convictions are demanded of the artist now. But what I say is, tomorrow will shake what is unshakeable today, and only he is alive who rejects his convictions of yesterday. -Kasimir Malevich (1913)
Malevich, the Russian Suprematist artist and art critic, is of course talking about the need for the artist in the 20th Century to continually consider and reconsider his art and to move forward at a time of radical change in the arts and in culture in general. It goes without saying that Malevich's statement is equally valid today, and not simply in reference to the artist but to the critic of the arts as well; yet, all too lamentably and all too frequently the critic of film, particularly the commercial film critic, when attempting to approach the avantgarde, is deaf to such wisdom. While Parker Tyler has certainly dealt with the avant-garde and the American Independent Film on numerous occasions in the past, the fact is that he falls into the same category in his book, Underground Film: A Critical History, for he is unable to deal with the work of this present film phenomena in critical terms which are both applicable and adequate to it and therefore must delimit it from a perspective of previous avant-gardes, but also, from an even more delimiting system- his own pseudoFreudian terminology, linked with legislative "oughts" of what he would wish the avant-garde to be. Mr. Tyler is disappointed and disillusioned with the current trend in independent film because he cannot come to terms with it and thus chooses in his book to attack it in a most unscholarly and critically distasteful fashion.
Why does he use the term "Underground" in his title and throughout his book? When Sheldon Renan published his book, An Introduction to the American Underground Film, in 1967 the term was much more commonly accepted; in 1969 or 1970 it isn't. It seems safe to say that Mr. Tyler chooses "underground" over independent, New American Cinema, or avant-garde, even while nebulously equating it with...