Always already: affinities between art and film - various artists, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, California

The exhibition "Art and Film Since 1945: Hall of Mirrors" claims to illustrate a moment of cultural progress beyond modernism toward a more enlightened era. The most telling essay, however, in the exhibition catalog - a catalog that does include other very good essays - is the least supportive of such an idea. Jonathan Crary's "Dr. Mabuse and Mr. Edison" concludes that "[o]ne of the most persistent features of modernity is the potent seductiveness of the phantasmagoria of progress, and among the ranks of the seduced are those who believe that modernity has somehow been exceeded."(1) The historical dating the show proposes is itself part of the "phantasmagoria," as Crary implies through his own references to cultural history. Though Crary discusses two of the artists included in the show - Jean-Luc Godard and David Cronenberg - and one of the works in the show - Cronenberg's Videodrome (1982) - he spends most of his time on films and artists from the 100-year period before this show's subject begins. Crary spends more time on Thomas Edison (1890s) and on Fritz Lang's Dr. Mabuse film series (1922, 1933, 1960) than he does on Godard or Cronenberg; and be discusses non-film artists such as Richard Wagner and Paul Cezanne without mentioning any non-film artist included in the show. One might consider Crary's contribution an appropriate historical prelude, but it is more accurately understood as a refutation of the show's main point and of its periodicity, a refutation I want to expand.

The introductory essay by the show's organizer, Kerry Brougher, poses 1945 as "a loose but convenient marker indicating that moment when the modern era slipped past the innocence of its utopian dreams, and when both the cinema and modern art entered states of crisis, decline and self-examination, a 'post-modern,"post-Hollywood' era that has seen the separations between high art and mass culture, art and kitsch, art and film, even further blurred."(2) I disagree with every major and minor point in this statement. 1945 is an arbitrary date; the modern era did not slip past anything of significance, nor were its pre-1945 dreams ever non-dialectically characterized as innocent or utopian except for very brief moments that ended long before 1945 or by handfuls of artists who were recognizably demented or quickly disabused of their utopianism. Neither cinema nor modern art, broadly understood, has entered any serious state of crisis or decline, while self-examination in both realms has been relatively constant from the beginning. There is as yet no countervening postmodernist and certainly no post-Hollywood era; heroically individualistic artists and pandering commercial values are still the paradigm in each of those realms, respectively. High art and mass culture, art and kitsch, and art and film are no more blurred than they ever were, which is not very - high art and mass culture define a spectrum, certainly, but are most often themselves easily distinguishable. Andy Warhol made high art out of soup can labels and pictures of Marilyn Monroe; the mass-cultural audience who loved Campbell's soup and Marilyn hated Warhol's art. To the extent that the mass-cultural audience has learned to love Warhol's art, it is no longer understandable as high art. From the elite-cultural perspective of what high art is - radically defamiliarizing, original, personal, socially and culturally incisive, spiritually redeeming - mass enculturation of Warhol has trivialized his work.

Art and kitsch are perfectly distinguishable in the same way. And art and film have influenced each other from the inception of cinema; there's nothing new about that. (Definitional work on "art" is needed - Art and Film sometimes uses it to mean painting and sculpture, sometimes to mean something grim can be.) Cinema has, since the late 1910s, included works of high film art: The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1919, by Robert Wiene) and Light Play Opus I (1921, by Walter Ruttmann). Cinema has, since the 1910s, produced mass-cultural works that are also considered film art, but those works at that time such as The Birth of a Nation (1915, by D. W. Griffith) and works like them today such as Pulp Fiction (1994, by Quentin Tarantino) or Fargo (1996, by Joel and Ethan Coen), though art, cannot be considered high art. They are not radically defamiliarizing (etc.) in the manner of high-art films like Rhythm 21 (1921, by Hans Richter), Man with a Movie Camera (1928, by Dziga Vertov), or D'Est (1993, by Chantal Akerman).

According to Brougher, early cinema self-consciously drew on high art in order to legitimate itself as art (e.g., Pictorialism in A Corner in Wheat, 1909, by D. W. Griffith), but intense self-examination in cinema, now often called "deconstruction," came much later, after 1945. That, however, is not accurate, even for commercial cinema. The examples of such proprioceptive films as Uncle Josh at the Moving Picture Show (1902, by Edwin S. Porter), The Story the Biograph Told; or Caught by Moving Pictures (1903, produced by Biograph), A Dog's Life (1918, by Charles Chaplin), Sherlock, Jr. (1924, by Buster Keaton), Man with A Movie Camera and A nous, la liberte! (To us, liberty!, 1931, by Rene Clair), not to mention the Mabuse series discussed by Crary, come readily to mind.

Art and Film even claims that "the question: What is - or was - cinema? . . . is an inquiry that could not be posed in the first half of this century . . . but could only be asked . . . after the first fifty years of cinema's evolution and after the pinnacle of its achievement."(3) This also is inaccurate. There was sophisticated film theory before 1945. Hugo Munsterberg's The Photoplay: A Psychological Study, published in 1916, discussed issues of "outer development" (the film apparatus) including photography and proto-cinematic scientific toys, and "inner development" (the psychology of the film experience) including depth and movement, attention, memory, imagination and emotions. He treated aesthetic issues such as the purpose of art; subjectivising the world; artistic specialization (proto-Greenberg); overcoming reality in order to concentrate on a special, "free" zone of art; the means of the arts (theater, painting, novel); and the means, demands and functions of the institution of cinema - all this one year after The Birth of a Nation. There was a steady stream of writings on film theory after Munsterberg and before 1945, including the fairly obvious examples of Bela Balazs, Lev Kuleshov, Jean Epstein, Vsevolod Pudovkin, Sergei Eisenstein, Vertov and John Grierson. As Dudley Andrew has said,

[t]here have been two major periods of prolific formative theory. The first came between 1920 and 1935 when an entire intellectual class became conscious that cinema (especially silent cinema) was not merely a sociological phenomenon of extraordinary importance, but a powerful art form with the same kinds of rights and responsibilities as any other art form. These theorists wanted to make known the properties of this new medium in order to help explain the mysterious success of the great silent films and to help direct future cinema toward greater power and greater maturity. The second major period of formative film theory began in the early 1960s and is still growing today.(4)

It is the second major period that Brougher is claiming as the first moment when the question "what is cinema?" could be posed. The date, 1945, is arbitrary and cannot be defended by claims such as those in Brougher's introduction.

There are numerous films before 1945 that could have been included in a show called "Art and Film," including commercial, semi-commercial "art" and avant-garde art films. Films that relate to the abstract art movements of Constructivism, Suprematism, Bauhaus and De Still include Light Play Opus I, Diagonal Symphony (1924, by Viking Eggeling), Color Box (1935, by Len Lye) and Allegretto (1936, by Oscar Fischinger). In relation to Impressionist painting there are Broken Blossoms (1919, by D. W. Griffith) and Sunrise (1927, by F. W. Murnau) - both discussed at length in Dudley Andrew's Film in the Aura of Art(5) - El Dorado (1921, by Marcel L'Herbier), The Smiling Madame Beudet (1923, by Germaine Dulac) and The Fall of the House of Usher (1928, by Jean Epstein). In relation to Expressionism are The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Dr. Mabuse the Gambler (1922, by Fritz Lang) and many others. In relation to Dada are Entr'acte (1924, by Rene Clair) and Anemic cinema, (1927, by Marcel Duchamp). In relation to Surrealism are L'Etoile de Mer (1928, by Man Ray), The Andalusian Dog (1929, by Luis Bunuel and Salvador Dali) and Lot in Sodom (1933, by James Sibley Watson Jr. and Melville Webber). In relation to "Cezannismus," Cubism, Futurism and Assemblage are Ballet mecanique (1924, by Fernand Leger) and the Soviet montage filmmakers, especially Vertov. Many of those films are beholden to, but also are explicit or implicit critiques of, commercial cinema; every one of them is explicitly both film and art. Those films that are least beholden to commercial cinema, such as the abstract films of the '20s, are analogous to the films in Art and Film that are least referential to commercial cinema, such as those by Stan Brakhage, Tony Conrad (despite the reference in his 1966 The Flicker to horror films), Peter Kubelka, Paul Sharits and John and James Whitney.

What's at stake?

So why is it important to challenge the curator's self-admittedly loose date of 1945 as the beginning of this exhibition? So what if the blurring of the lines between high art and mass culture, between art and kitsch, between art and film were there continuously from the beginning? What is at stake in the periodicity is the claim in Brougher's implications that (1) there is a fundamental transformation to be recognized between a modern and a postmodern era, and that (2) we inhabit a post-Hollywood era. The idea that there was a period of innocent utopianism that defined early twentieth-century modernism is an oversimplification that tends to favor our own later era. Perhaps the most "utopian" moment in modernist cinema, the Soviet golden age, did indeed generate excitement and hope; but every single Soviet film was produced in the context of a bureaucratic reality in which no innocent could survive, even in the 1920s. Eisenstein was a sophisticated cosmopolitan who negotiated his modernist texts "dialectically" and was influenced aesthetically by, among others, the man who made the racist bourgeois classic, The Birth of a Nation. Alexander Dovzhenko made some of the most superficially utopian and deeply modernist films under socialism, always under watchful eyes; but his Ukrainian Cossack and peasant heritage created a dualism that generated nonutopian, even dystopian, questions like the one that recurs throughout Arsenal (1928): "Will someone please tell me if it is alright to kill officers and bourgeois in the street if we see them?"

But it is still not those historical corrections to Art and Film that are important in themselves. It is the implication that we, in a postmodernist age, are wiser now and less innocent in the pejorative sense than the modernists were. I see no evidence of that, either in the world of art, in Western culture, or in Art and Film. I see no evidence, however, that we are significantly less wise or more innocent either. Many of the artists in Art and Film demonstrate a palpable utopianism in the sense that their art is reaching for a better world - Robert Frank, Godard and Derek Jarman, for example. The presence of criticism, irony or a sense of despair in their work links them to such pre-1945 modernists as Carl Meyer, Lang, Germaine Dulac, Luis Bunuel, Kenneth Macpherson and Charles Chaplin. There is no reason why we should expect this basic situation - of art that is fundamentally both progressive and critical - to change soon.

It is frighteningly myopic to think that after 1945 artists and audiences in the wisdom of a new era have deconstructed Hollywood - try explaining that in the light of the New York Times's "Living Arts" section. Money is rolling into Hollywood from all over the world; the more retrograde the film, the more money it can make. Any self-reflexivity (Brian DePalma) or criticism (Oliver Stone) or cynicism (Tarantino) that might be mistakable for meaningful deconstruction must work first as legitimization that helps an institutionally robust commercial industry to claim self-knowledge, intellect, sophistication, maturity and self-discipline. Such smart critiques have no progressive mass and therefore no effect whatever on the underlying structure of the business. Some of these films are very good, some very bad; some are straight pandering, some self-critical, even semi-independent. All Hollywood artists, however, including the "postmodernists" in Hollywood, work for banks, more or less. A Spike Lee phenomenon is a compromise to begin with, but to the extent that the director is independent, he is just a (commercial) mistake or two away from being a Coppola phenomenon.

In Hollywood, nothing fundamental has been deconstructed. Racism has been challenged occasionally, but not racism's underlying economics of class. Some of the most obscenely regressive movies ever made - Scarface (1983, by Brian DePalma), Natural Born Killers (1994, by Oliver Stone), Pulp Fiction, The Usual Suspects (1995, by Bryan Singer) and Johnny Mnemonic (1995, by Robert Longo) - are succeeding under the banner of non-innocent, non-utopian wisdom and of the blurring of high- and mass-market art. These films find it easy to criticize the culture of oppression and violence they pander to, but it is not in their (nor most of our) interests to dismantle, or even displease, the source of that culture. How can one laugh at the bank that one is walking all the way to?

Dave Hickey, an astonishingly talented writer of fiction(6) and art criticism,(7) seems to have taken Brougher's point about the blurring of high and low film art in the opposite direction that I have:

[Art and Film's] dubious premise . . . [is] that the collective labors of artists and filmmakers in the twentieth century have necessarily culminated in the grisaille banality of '80s critique. Curator Kerry Brougher apparently sees himself as a soldier of history, invading the dream factory to remind the moral idiots who toil therein that art and film traffic in illusion for financial gain. (Who knew?!) To this end, works by Andy Warhol, Edward Ruscha and numerous others are subjected to hilarious misprision, based on the risible premise that works of art either 'critique' or 'seduce.' The possibility that they might do one in the guise of the other - or simply do both - seems not to have come up. Major oversight. Minor show.(8)

I have suggested that postmodernist apologists, which Brougher seems to be, haven't moralized enough about the implications of the blurring of all art by raging commercialism. Hickey says, "who knew?!" implying that the readers of and artists in Artforum don't need to be reminded of the implications of commercialism, or, perhaps just consider it a tired issue. By "the grisaille banality of '80s critique," does Hickey mean writers included in the Art and Film catalog such as Crary, a noted theorist of the '80s and '90s whose catalog entry is discussed above; or Bruce Jenkins, an expert on Hollis Frampton and curator of media arts at the Walker Art Center in the '80s and '90s who wrote the catalog chapter called "The 'Other' Cinema: American Avant-Garde Film of the 1960s"; or Robert Rosen, director of the film archive at UCLA in the '80s and '90s who wrote the catalog chapter, "Notes on Painting and Film"?

Hickey's reduction of the point of Art and Film to the terms of "critique" versus "seduction" as applied to Hollywood film as the central cultural object of the show is itself a risible misprision of the show he is reviewing. I don't see how that characterization can be the result of a careful viewing of the show and reading of the catalog. Despite my own serious criticisms of Brougher's concepts, I would defend the show and its catalog from Hickey's take on it. The views in various catalog essays are thoughtful and complex, making the overall conceptual structure of the show dialectical. The writers have long been deeply committed to media arts and cultural studies - the term "risible" is not an appropriate response to their work.

Art and Film is, in fact, a major contribution, including as it does some of the least accessible and most powerful film-related art of the last 50 years. For that, we should be enormously grateful. This show is a very rare opportunity to see works by major film artists who have been neglected or inaccessible since the 1970s: an elegant 1974 installation work by Michael Snow, "Two Sides to Every Story" (which impressed the guards at the Wexner Center so much that they voluntarily acted like docents, not letting any visitor miss its implications or the perfection of its execution - Snow, of course, is a pretty esoteric artist); the entire eight hours of Warhol's Empire (1964); a generous selection of Warhol's Screentests (1966); Conrad's The Flicker as an installation (a good idea as an installation and as a marquee-like entry port for the exhibition at the Wexner Center, though it did not work as a film); a recreation of the set of Carolee Schneeman's performance piece, "Up To And Including Her Limits" (1974-76), a brilliant vaginalization of phallic action painting; Frampton and Marion Faller's "Sixteen Studies From Vegetable Locomotion" (1975); Joseph Cornell's "Rose Hobart" (1936), projected with phonograph-record accompaniment (though with too much ambient light and noise). These, and others in the show, are important works that we cannot count on seeing again.

It is inevitable that gaps would open up, as they do, in such an ambitious project. The gaps, unfortunately, are obvious and huge. One is the inclusion of only one woman out of a total of 50 filmmakers. The key transitional avant-garde filmmakers of the 1940s, Marie Menken and Maya Deren, who both happen to be women, are absent. The entire European, primarily British, formalist avant-garde film movement is also absent, including another crucial woman, Laura Mulvey. Peter Wollen points out in his superb review of Art and Film that,

Jarman's Blue apart, the films chosen come entirely from what I consider the dominant American canon of avant-garde film. Predictably enough, the only European is Kubelka, co-director of Jonas Mekas' canon-forming Anthology Film Archive in New York from 1970 and in effect an honorary American. The chosen few make up an honour roll of Structural Film, with George Landow and (as usual) Joyce Wieland as the conspicuous absences . . .(9)

Wollen's review goes on to sketch out a broader picture of what avant-garde film since 1945 should look like. Given Wollen's position among thinkers and practitioners of avant-garde film, and in the light of his seminal essay from the '70s, "The Two Avant-Gardes" - with its discussion of the dialectical relation of formalism and ideology - Wollen's contribution to this show would have been a saving one. His review is an essential ex post facto addendum to the show's catalog.

Strains of art

The two strong strains of art in Art and Film are avant-garde film and the idea of cinema addressed in the artwork of painters, sculptors, photographers, installationists, conceptual artists and other art-world producers, some of whom, like Warhol, became filmmakers and affected the strain of avant-garde film as well. The weak strain of art in the show is the importation of themes and concerns from the strong strains, avant-garde film and the art world, into popular, commercial cinema. The idea that such importation is a serious challenge to the commercial cinematic institution is not convincing. Each of these strains of artistic phenomena (including the weak one) is worth its own major exhibition. They should have been done separately, because together they make a mess that is very difficult to sort out. Here is another attempt at that sorting out of two of the strains using "deconstruction" as the organizing point.

Commercial film

It is probably Brougher's concern with deconstruction that Hickey is referring to as "banal '80s critique." Some '80s critique, however, is not banal (as the catalog demonstrates); and Art and Film is not bounded by a single idea. Even if Brougher's characterization seems reductive when stated in a one-paragraph review such as Hickey's, Brougher's 117-page introduction to the show is positively expansive.

Brougher argues that Hollywood deconstructs itself in the 1940s, '50s and '60s and that the dream factory is dismantled, producing films that are self-reflexive and aware of their place in the world, including their illusionistic pandering. This phenomenon includes some interesting movies such as Citizen Kane (1941, by Orson Welles), Sunset Boulevard (1950, by Billy Wilder), Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? (1957, by Frank Tashlin), The Nutty Professor (1963, by Jerry Lewis) and most of Alfred Hitchcock's films. Many such films are included as "exhibit A" in Art and Film (the Jerry Lewis film is my addition to the list). Brougher tends to confuse the terms "deconstruct" and "dismantle," a common but deeply confusing mistake. The above films are proto-deconstructionist, but they dismantle nothing institutionally, they only help institutionalize deconstruction. Brougher's language" - Hollywood's fall came about . . ."; "Hollywood's support structure had been badly damaged . . ."; ". . . the decline of Hollywood itself . . . indicated that 'the end' of classic cinema had arrived" - is wishful thinking. Hollywood is clearly thriving and is still classical in the larger sense implied by cinemas opposing Hollywood such as underground and Third cinemas, and in the sense explored definitively by David Bordwell, Janet Staiger and Kristin Thompson in The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960 (1985).

Paul Willeman makes a fundamental distinction between the politics and aesthetics of deconstruction that most critics, including Brougher, fail to make:

[Counter-cinema theorists Peter Wollen and Claire Johnston] pointed to the importance of cinematic strategies designed to explore what dominant regimes of signification were unable to deal with. Theirs was a politics of deconstruction, not an aesthetics of deconstruction. The difference is worth noting. A politics of deconstruction insists on the need to oppose particular institutionally dominant regimes of making particular kinds of sense, excluding or marginalising others. An aesthetics of deconstruction proceeds from the traumatic discovery that language is not a homogeneous, self-sufficient system. Allon White put it most succinctly in an essay on "Bakhtin, Sociolinguistics and Deconstruction," ". . . To discover that rationality (the logic of the signified) may be subverted by writing itself (the logic of the signifier) seems to put the 'whole Western episteme' into jeopardy, but is in fact a fairly trivial business."(10)

Brougher's claim that Hollywood deconstructs after 1945 implies that Hollywood becomes an alternative cinema, or (to be more generous) a place where alternative cinema can happen; that, however, is a vast contradiction. Hollywood cannot produce an alternative to itself, though it may seem to do so in the impressive arguments Robin Wood has made in Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan (1986). Wood argues that the pandering sex and violence in certain commercial films have a radical potentiality that exceeds Hollywood's intentions. This, however, is debatable, and has nothing to do with Brougher's claims for commercial cinema in relation to art. The commercial cinema is seldom alternative and it is never avantgarde, by definition and by structural relations. If the Hollywood cinema in the '60s and '70s seemed to have let a new breed of artists into the halls of power, then (as B. Ruby Rich might put it) the breed was not really so new or the power must in fact have been elsewhere.

Avant-garde film

In part two of his introduction, "Cinema Degree Zero: Testing the Limits," Brougher does treat a truly alternative "1945 transition." He begins the transition with what he calls the cinema of reduction, introducing Brakhage's Text of Light (1974) into this narrative as an example of reducing film to its main elements, including Brakhage's intense scrutinizing of the basic element of light. I would insist on the modernist films before 1945, or at least have begun the 1945 transition with Menken, whose discovery of the camera's relation to the body was a key to a truly alternative and avant-garde cinema that culminated in, precisely, Brakhage. Relevant films by Menken include: Geography of the Body (1943, by Willard Maas [Marie Menken, camera]); Visual Variations on Noguchi (1945); Arabesque for Kenneth Anger (1961); and Mood Mondrian (1963). Menken anticipated the concrete abstract expressionism of a Rauschenberg (painting), a John Chamberlain (sculpture) and a Brakhage (film) by incorporating the represented world into a flagrantly expressive hand-held camera aesthetic that translated the objects of the world captured by her camera into aspects of her gesture, by using the camera as a "brush" and the objects captured as "paint." She anticipated expanded and conceptual cinema by treating film as a materialist project of expanded consciousness.

The paragon of any 1945 transition is certainly Brakhage, a maker of abstract-expressionist masterpieces. He was influenced by both Menken and initially by Cornell, whose film Rose Hobart (c. 1936) is included in Art and Film. The movement that grew out of all those works has been called underground film,(11) expanded cinema,(12) or visionary film,(13) and is related to a movement called New American Cinema. Expanded cinema comprised an amazing variety of styles and concerns, exploring the unconscious, closed-eye vision, jazz, rock and roll, meditation, trance, dance, mythopoetics, poetry, lyricism, synaesthesia, mixed media, perceptual manipulation, drugs and gay-lesbian-bi-hetero-polymorphous libido. Films in this category include Christmas on Earth (1964, by Barbara Rubin); Fuses (1965-68, by Carolee Schneeman); All My Life (1966, by Bruce Baillie); Quick Billie (1970, by Bruce Baillie); Valse Triste (1967, by Bruce Conner); Samadhi (1967, by Jordon Belson); Xfilm (1967, by John Schofill); Watersmith (1969, by Will Hindle); Moon (1969, by Scott Bartlett); and My Life in Art (1973, by Freude).

The manifestation of the film avant garde that grew out of expanded cinema has been called structural,(14) structural/materialist,(15) minimalist and conceptual film, and it definitely included British and European filmmakers. Art and Film calls this movement "Cinema Degree Zero: Testing the Limits," and "The Cinema of Reduction." Art and Film resurrects this area of cinema history and gives it an important place, about one-third of the show. These films exhibit a bewildering variety of characteristics, including: (a) exploration of the film apparatus; (b) exploration of the human perceptual apparatus; and (c) extreme reduction to the radical experiential and material bases of cinema such as the frame, frameline, light, projection, flicker, presence, representation, montage, cognition, narrative and narration (all per se). Examples of such films (some in the show, some not) include Rose Hobart; Arnulf Rainer (1960, by Peter Kubelka); 48 Heads from the Szondi Test (1960, by Kurt Kren); Empire (1964, by Andy Warhol); Blow Job (1964, by Andy Warhol); Screentests (1966, by Andy Warhol); The Flicker; Wavelength (1967, by Michael Snow); T.O.U.C.H.I.N.G. (1968, by Paul Sharits); Serene Velocity (1970, by Ernie Gehr); Remedial Reading Comprehension (1970, by George Landow); Nostalgia (1971, by Hollis Frampton); Movie No. 1 (1972, by Peter Gidal); and Line Describing a Cone (1973, by Anthony McCall).

The catalog for Art and Film returns to commercial cinema for its concluding section called "Rear Window: Fragments of the Cinematic Past." Thus, the show takes a fork in the road of film history that follows the weaker strain of deconstruction, presumably leaving the updating of the stronger strains to another show at another time. As stated above, I contend that Hollywood - commercial cinema - has never seriously challenged its own illusionistic essence, nor does it self-destruct nor disappear as the Art and Film show suggests. It does not ever become avant garde in any important sense because it is too expensive; there is too much at stake financially. This is not to say that there is no connection between avantgarde and commercial film, that avant-garde filmmakers and artists are not deeply interested in commercial cinema. Clearly they are, and they have been since the beginning of cinema.

Semi-commercial art cinemas, however, have had an identifiable relationship with the avant garde at times, especially in Europe, as exemplified by films such as Man with a Movie Camera; A nous, la liberte!; A bout de souffle (Breathless, 1959, by Jean-Luc Godard); Tout va bien (Everything's OK, 1972, by Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin); Letter to Jane (1972, by Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin); and Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975, by Chantal Akerman). Radically deconstructionist films that owe much to the European semi-commercial art film began to take over from expanded and structural cinema in America in the late 1970s. One manifestation of this new strong strain is the avant-garde narrative feature film, such as Film about a woman who... (1974, by Yvonne Rainer); Last Chants for a Slow Dance (1977, by Jon Jost); and Safe (1994, by Todd Haynes).

Another manifestation of radical deconstruction of commercial cinema that owes much to the European art film resides, not in the guilty conscience of a pandering commercial cinema, but in the continuing stronger strain of intensely expository avant-garde film that puts words first and uses images as illustration. Jonathan Rosenbaum and others have called it the essay film, and I have discussed it as illustrated lecture.(16) Examples include: Letter from Siberia (1958, by Chris Marker); A Few Notes on our Food Problem (1960, by James Blue); Hour of the Furnaces (1968, by Fernando Solanas and Ottavio Getino, Argentina); Lives of Performers (1972, by Yvonne Rainer); Speaking Directly (1974, by Jon Jost); and Sans Soleil (1982, by Chris Marker). On one hand, the essay film seems to have attracted few art-world artists, per se, the major exception being Rainer, who is a performance artist rather than painter, sculptor or installationist. The essay film seems like a film genre for English majors and thus inappropriate for Art and Film. On the other hand, the essay film is related to post-structuralist art done by Allan Sekula, Barbara Kruger, Jenny Holzer and Hans Haacke, who use politicized captions or essays with their visuals. The most extreme example of that form in film is directly referential to the art world and is in fact a major installation piece in the Art and Film show - Blue (1993) by Jarman.

One of the greatest deconstructionist scenes about the nature of cinema as revealed in the drive to invent it and to continually reinvent it would have served this show well - the two women kissing from Eadweard Muybridge's nineteenth-century analytic motion photography, as synthetically reconstructed by Thom Andersen in his essay film Eadweard Muybridge: Zoopraxographer (1976). This scene has it all: materialist analysis; phenomenological analysis; ideological analysis; gender and desire in technology; structuralism; the gaze; the essay; irony (the film looks and sounds like an ordinary classroom science film); and avant-garde visual arts (Andersen shot some of Morgan Fisher's conceptualist films in the '70s).

There is another missing artist who made a key film (two ways of representing a key are the key to the issues of the film) about art and film that would also have served the show well. Robert Breer's Gulls and Buoys (1972) incorporates drawing and film; painting and film; collage, assemblage and montage; explication of the process of abstracting from the concrete world; reduction, simplification and minimalism; artistic self-reflection vs. transparency of representation; representation of the compositional elements and the material substrate of cinema; the frame, rather than the shot, as the unit of film composition; animation; matter in motion; evocations again of Muybridge and proto-cinema; flicker effect and liminal zones - the "space" between stillness and motion; the mechanical apparatus - camera, projector and rotoscope; the perceptual apparatus - retinal chemistry (persistence of vision) and gestalt projection (phi phenomenon).

Conclusion

This show claims and implies too much to allow even for an adequate review essay. If it might have been better, seemingly even necessary, to cover the different strains of art and film in separate shows that would have been more responsible to each strain, there is, nevertheless, one important advantage to their having been integrated into one big, impossible show. The unwieldy claims, arbitrary periodicity and the gigantic oversights aside, Art and Film does identify a nexus of artistic concerns that cross traditional boundaries of art and culture. The show comes at a time when many art students do want to work in cinematic ways, and when some popular film thinks it is smarter about art than films used to be, and when some film audiences are - in ignorance of the past - going along with that idea. So a show like this is welcome as a shake down. There needs to be deeper discussion, for example, of those fine artists like Robert Longo, Cindy Sherman, David Salle and Julian Schnabel who have dabbled in truly commercial cinema. Too bad Art and Film is insufficiently historical and insufficiently critical to do more than sketch some of the territory; but perhaps the great artworks this show does include - which are not to be missed - and its huge curatorial effort are compelling enough to encourage others to help fill in or recompose the picture.

NOTES

1. Jonathan Crary, "Dr. Mabuse and Mr. Edison," in Art and Film Since 1945: Hall of Mirrors, Russell Ferguson, ed., (Los Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art, 1996), pp. 277-299.

2. Kerry Brougher, "Hall of Mirrors," in Art and Film since 1945, p. 13.

3. Ibid.

4. J. Dudley Andrew, The Major Film Theories: An Introduction, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), p. 77.

5. J. Dudley Andrew, Film in the Aura of Art, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984).

6. See Dave Hickey, Prior Convictions, (Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 1989).

7. See Dave Hickey, "In the Shelter of the Word: Ann Hamilton's tropos," in Ann Hamilton, tropos, (New York: Dia Center for the Arts, 1994).

8. Artforum, Vol. XXXV, no. 4 (December 1996), p. 86.

9. Peter Wollen, "Together: Reflections on Hollywood, Art, and Experiment," Sight and Sound, no. 6 (July 1996), pp. 30-34.

10. Paul Willeman, "The Third Cinema Question: Notes and Reflections," in Jim Pines and Paul Willeman, eds., Questions of Third Cinema, (London: British Film Institute, 1989), pp. 7-8.

11. From Sheldon Renan, An Introduction to the American Underground Film, (New York: Dutton, 1967).

12. This is the term used by Art and Film, taken from Gene Youngblood, Expanded Cinema, (New York: Dutton, 1970).

13. From P. Adams Sitney, Visionary Film: The American Avant-Garde: 1943-1978, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970).

14. This controversial term was proposed by P. Adams Sitney in the seminal article, "Structural Film," Film Culture 47 (Summer 1969). The article and some responses were reprinted in revised form in Sitney, ed., Film Culture Reader, (New York: Praeger, 1970). Structural film is also discussed extensively in his Visionary Film.

15. The British formalist filmmakers of the 1960s and '70s; see especially Peter Gidal, "Definition and Theory of the Current Avant-Garde: Materialist/Structuralist Film," Studio International, Vol. 187, no. 963 (February 1974), and "Theory and Definition of Structural/Materialist Film," Studio International, Vol. 190, no. 978 (November/December 1975).

16. J. Ronald Green, "The Illustrated Lecture," Quarterly Review of Film and Video, Vol. 15, no. 2 (Summer 1994). Jonathan Rosenbaum, Placing Movies: The Practice of Film Criticism, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995).

J. RONALD GREEN teaches film studies in the Department of History of Art at the Ohio State University. His article, "Micheaux v. Griffith," appeared in the Fall 1997 issue of Griffithiana, Pordenone, Italy.

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