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Why has the historiography of avant-garde film remained even more conventional than that of mainstream cinema, against which it is so often defined, dominated by a small canon of artists' films and divorced from wider currents of innovation and experimentation in the moving image? Three recent books on different aspects of avant-garde film culture offer, inevitably, their own perspectives on the historiography of the avantgarde. Considered together, they point to somecommonly perceived shortcomings of the avant-garde canon, and also to some inherent problems that arise from the history of its formation. But there may be reasons to believethat thiscanon willchangeradically in the near future, under the impact of new technologies and decentralised authority.1
The history of avant-garde film - to use one of the accepted designations (the others being 'experimental' and 'artists' film') - has long been trapped in a complex dilemma. Its diverse protagonists fall into threemain, yet overlapping, categories: those whose reputations derive entirely or predominantly from their avant-garde film work; those who also belong to the mainstream history of cinema; and others whose main artistic reputation lies outside film. Examples of these three would be Maya Deren, Luis Buñuel and Fernand Léger, and it is likely that any adequate history of the avant-garde would include discussion of them. Indeed, a list of canonic figures, stretching chronologically from Hans Richter and Walter Ruttmann to, let us say, Stan Brakhage and Michael Snow, would define the 'international' film avant-garde for most pedagogic purposes.2 Thereafter, however, problems arise. One of these, which has been exacerbated by the rise of digital moving image work among contemporary artists, is the issue of whether 'artists' films' belong to the history of cinema or that of visual art. And are contemporary artists who work solely in the moving image, such as Douglas Gordon and Bill Viola, properly considered moving image artists, or simply contemporary artists? Another version of this problem is the issue of whether an artist's film can be adequately considered in the same terms as a dramatic narrative film - with the concomitant question: can any film be adequately considered as an unvarying material 'text', independently of its contexts of presentation and reception?
Behind these issues of definition and nomenclature lie larger doubts about the definition of...