1. Beyond Hollywood: American Avant-garde cinema
Please refer to the handout on the films this morning. If we have time at the end, I can take questions and comments on what we watched.

2.
This is the trailer to Thom Andersen 2003 cinematic essay Los Angeles Plays Itself. The film is a meditation on the city of Los Angeles using excerpts of Hollywood films. It was not released commercially until 2014, when Cinema Guild picked it up for distribution.
Andersen works outside of the Hollywood mainstream and his film is an example of the relationship between the cultural and economic powerhouse of Hollywood, and more minor forms of cultural production in the city. Andersen is an experimental filmmaker, programmer, critic, and artist whose work engages with questions of center and periphery in the city. Los Angeles Plays Itself is both critical and appreciative of Hollywood.
Today’s lecture is designed to give you a tiny taste of filmmaking that took place in the US alongside and outside the studio system. Although Concepts & History is an introduction to the Hollywood studio system, I don’t think you should reach the second semester without having been exposed to any other kind of filmmaking. Hollywood is the dominant filmic presence in the US and beyond, but it is certainly not the only one.
Filmmaking outside the system is not only made with less money and without recourse to Hollywood’s roster of stars, but it inevitably comes up with different film style and form. Avant-garde cinema often challenges and subverts many of the conventions you have been discussing so far: continuity editing, narrative storytelling, use of mise-en-scene, realism and invisibility, etc.

3. “In Los Angeles the film industry itself has always been the most important context of the avant-garde”—David E. James, The Most Typical Avant-Garde : History and Geography of Minor Cinemas in Los Angeles
This selection screened today is only a small sample of nonindustrial cinemas in the US. It is impossible to trace the history of the American avant-garde in an hour. So my focus will be the relationship between the Hollywood mode of production and storytelling conventions—especially narrative continuity—and experimental modes of production that run up against classical realism, continuity editing, and the primacy of a coherent and transparent narrative.
******
Experimental films share an oppositional attitude to the dominant film industry, and yet they’re also influenced by it. These are films that to some extent have flourished in Hollywood’s shadow.
In the other direction, as we saw in the excerpt from Spellbound (1945), Hollywood films also borrowed from noncommercial film. Some of the filmmakers involved in the making of these films worked within Hollywood.
So the notion of absolute separation is overly simplistic. It is detrimental both to our understanding of Hollywood and of the avant-garde. Following the avant-garde in Hollywood is like shadowing the history of Hollywood itself.
** Some of you may have enjoyed the films, others not. I urge you not to take experimental film as elitist or anti-popular. It is partly a matter of familiarity of viewing conventions. In its disruption of narrative conventions, moreover, experimental film casts another light on Hollywood’s storytelling conventions—it shows them to be as deliberate and as artificial as any other convention. Both modes of filmmaking offer ways of thinking about and organizing the relationship between space and time on the screen.
Maya Deren ( )

4. visionary film, minor cinemas
Avant-garde, underground, noncommercial, artist film, nonindustrial, experimental, counter, noncommodity,
Critical cinema,
visionary film, minor cinemas
There are many labels used to describe avant-garde cinema. Each label emphasizes a different aspect of this kind of film practice.

5. assembly line production (dreams vs. “dream factory”)
Individual artist vs.
assembly line production
(dreams vs. “dream factory”)
Self-reflexive: anti-illusionist; revealing their own filmmaking process.
Anti-Hollywood:
The individual artist vs. standardized, assembly line film production (a post-Romantic view of the autonomous, creative artist  auteur theory.
Small-scale productions, outside of the economic power-structure of Hollywood, and thus more “free” to express radical ideas.
Rejection or critique of classical realism (the primacy of narrative, invisible editing, an illusionist approach—immersing us in an invisible fictional world, from which all traces of cinematic production have been removed).
Self-reflexivity:
Films that are aware of their “otherness” and self-conscious about the conventions of studio films, which they subvert, reimagine, parody, or even try to inspire. Unlike the illusionist classical Hollywood film, these films reveal their own filmmaking processes. They expose their own artifice.

6. Background
Early cinema: “cinema of attractions.” Cinema’s non-narrative roots.
1920s: European avant-garde movements:
French Surrealism/Impressionism
German abstract animation films.
Modernism & formalism (the primacy and purity of artistic form over content or story).
A key example of French impressionism: The Seashell and the Clergyman, by Germaine Dulac (1926):

7. Clement Greenberg, “Avant-garde and Kitsch” (1939)
Avant-garde vs. kitsch. The avant-garde pursues cinema’s “pure form,” following the example of French Surrealism and the abstract animations of European filmmakers like Hans Richter.
Avant-garde as “high art,” untainted by the capitalist culture industry.
But this not borne out by the films themselves...
Clement Greenberg ( ): influential modern visual art critic who wrote essays, notably “Avant-garde and Kitsch” (1939) in the Partisan Review. In this article, he contrasts the two modes, with avant-garde resisting the vulgar mass-market works of the capitalist economy, and kitsch being its product of a capitalist degraded culture.

8. Los Angeles, the “fragmented metropolis”
After a book by Robert M. Fogelson, first published in 1967 (qtd., in David E James, p. 5).
Los Angeles as a city and a setting is important not only to Hollywood but to film production beyond Hollywood. Its unique layout, divisions, and diverse communities partly account for the richness of filmic cultures that develop alongside the studio system.
Not to push the editing analogy too far, but Los Angeles itself is the result of complicated urban “editing,” discontinuous, stratified, and “polynucleated.” This fragmentation necessarily led to a variety of different cinemas reflecting the different communities of the city.
** Diversity but also segregation, mainly around racial and ethnic lines, has informed Hollywood films like Crash (Haggis, 2004) and Short Cuts (Altman, 1993), or Magnolia (Anderson, 1999).

9. Los Angeles
By 1915 Los Angeles is the center of film production: 60% of movies produced there; up to 84% by 1922.
Los Angeles is made in the image of Hollywood; but Hollywood also uses the city as its set.
The relationship between center and periphery is key to Los Angeles film culture.

10. Morgan Fisher: “I’ve never turned my back on Hollywood…entirely.”
“There’s no use pretending that narrative film doesn’t exist, that it doesn’t have enormous power.”
Standard Gauge is, like Andersen film earlier, an example of an avant-garde artist engaging with the technology of the Hollywood industry. Shot on 16mm (the format of avant-garde filmmakers), the film shows only 35mm film, the standard of the Hollywood film industry.
“Perhaps his best-known work, the one-take Standard Gauge (1984) shows excerpts of footage Fisher found while working as a film editor in the 1970s – snippets of Bruce Conner’s A Movie or Edgar Ulmer’s Detour – as he explains how 35mm came to be the industry standard. Moving from the film stock’s origins in the Lumières’ factory to his own interactions with it, he draws a history of the gauge that is at once mechanical, social and personal. (The film itself is shot on 16mm.)”
Standard Gauge (1984)

11. Life and Death of 9413: A Hollywood Extra (1928)
Robert Florey ( )
Slavko Vorkapich ( )
Gregg Toland ( )
All three had “mixed careers” within and beyond the Hollywood studio system.
Characteristically European: Expressionist, abstract, and pure in its style.
But the film “did not place itself outside of or opposed to the industry so much as find a place in it” (James 41).
“Extra…served its makers well, providing the platform for careers that passed in and out through the industry and allowing them to develop different forms of experimentation in a variety of production systems” (James 43)
This film seems like the ultimate anti-Hollywood film. It satirizes and criticizes the industry and its dehumanizing, cannibalizing effect on those who try and fail to succeed in it. Yet, the film was made by three men who were all industry insiders, and whose commercial careers benefitted from the film’s success.
Shot on 35mm
In 1927
Home made—filmed at home using props like sardine cans, and with friends of the filmmakers as actors.
In 1937, Gregg Tolland was nominated for Best Cinematography for the film Dead End with Humphrey Bogart.
Toland would go on to film Citizen Kane (1941), itself a film that tried to bring the avant-garde into Hollywood, not as an occasional poetic moment or sequence, as in Spellbound, for instance, but for the duration of the film.

12. Extra 9413 “prefigured the next year’s most celebrated European avant-garde film, Un chien Andalou, which served its makers in a similar fashion: Luis Bunuel signed a contract with MGM and moved to Hollywood for four months in 1930 and eventually became a feature film director, and Salvador Dali…designed Surrealist dream sequences in feature films, specifically in Hitchcock’s Spellbound in 1945” (James 43).

14. Maya Deren (1917-1961) Meshes of the Afternoon (1943)
Collaborative: Influenced by Un Chien Andalou. Alexander Hammid’s contribution is key.
Technicalities: 2.5 weeks, 16mm, at the filmmakers’ home in the Hollywood Hills. No script. Filmmakers appear in the film.
A “trance film”: cyclical structure, doubling, mirroring, variations on a theme, and double ending. Focusing on Inner experiences, and dreamlike states.
Subjective camera: “a clear-cut formulation of the idea of first person in cinema” (P. Adams Sitney).
Feminism: Deren as a strong artistic presence in a male dominated industry (cf. Brakhage).

15. Dream-state coherence, not classical continuity.
Like Chien, continuity is not eliminated but subverted, building on and reconfiguring our narrative expectations.
Realism is given over to the “dream logic”: the film no longer represents external events in sequence; the narrative reflects internal experience.
Dream-state coherence, not classical continuity.
Relationship to film noir, horror & melodrama.
Influences & parallels: I Walked with a Zombie (1943), : Mulholland Drive (David Lynch, 2001).
See also I Walked with a Zombie (1943)

16. Handpicked favourites for further viewing
Marx Brothers, Duck Soup (1933)
Jacques Tourneur, I Walked with a Zombie (1943)
Maya Deren, At Land (1944), Divine Horsemen ( )
Bruce Conner, A Movie (1958)
Stan Brakhage, Dog Star Man ( )
Kenneth Anger, Eaux d'artifice (1953), Scorpio Rising (1963)
Morgan Fisher, Standard Gauge (1984)
Thom Andersen, Los Angeles Plays Itself (2004)
The New American Cinema/ minor cinemas
John Cassavetes, Shadows (1959)
Kent Mackenzie, The Exiles (1961).
Charles Burnnett, Killer of Sheep (1977),
Cult:
Roger Corman’s AIP films
Russ Meyer, Faster Pussycat, Kill, Kill! (1965)  

17. Further Reading
P. Adams Sitney, Visionary Film: The American Avant-Garde [3rd edition]. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.
David E. James, The Most Typical Avant-Garde: History and Geography of Minor Cinemas in Los Angeles. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005.
David E. James, “Hollywood Extras: One Tradition of ‘Avant-Garde’ Film in Los Angeles,” October, Vol. 90, (Autumn, 1999), pp (on QM+).