issue date: June 26, 2006
JED PERL
ON ART
Peep Shows for Poets
While technophiles
are often far too quick to assume that heightened access equals heightened understanding,
access is surely one of the conditions for understanding. Unseen Cinema: Early
American Avant-Garde Film 1894-1941, a magnificent set of seven DVDs recently
issued by Anthology Film Archives, the temple of avant-garde cinema in New York's
East Village, will provide the raw materials for many a do-it-yourself revaluation
of the history of experimentation in the movies. Some hand-colored footage of
a "Butterfly Dance" performed by Annabelle Moore, whose billowing
costume is maneuvered to create delicious Art Nouveau patterns, suggests a startling
prefiguring of the blots and blurs of color in Blake's film, although I have
no reason to believe that Blake was thinking of this footage--or of the more
famous films of Loie Fuller performing similar dances in fin-de-siècle
Paris.
Unseen Cinema, which was organized by Bruce Posner and runs to some nineteen
hours, is an astonishing achievement. The DVDs are presented thematically, although
some of the themes are so capacious as to confound their own titles. The most
sharply focused, Picturing a Metropolis: New York City Unveiled, moves from
early footage of the city, including the Edison Company's heart-stoppingly poetic
Coney Island at Night to Charles Sheeler and Paul Strand's well-known Manhatta,
to some work by Rudy Burckhardt, the film-maker, photographer, and painter who
was also one of de Kooning's earliest friends in New York. Viva La Dance: The
Beginnings of Ciné-Dance is more variegated but still clearly delimited,
opening with Annabelle Moore's "Butterfly Dance" and bringing, near
its end, David Bradley's Peer Gynt of 1941, starring a teenage Charlton Heston.
What is evident in these selections--and only becomes clearer in the omnium-gatherum
DVDs devoted to "new directions in storytelling," "music and
abstraction," and "experiments in technique and form"--is how
fluid the definition of avant-garde film turns out to be, at least according
to the curators at Anthology Film Archives. Suspense--a 1913 melodrama in which
a housewife and her baby are nearly attacked by a knife-wielding drifter--is
included because of its split-screen techniques, but if this silent prefigures
a certain kind of art film, it is also a potboiler with a place in the prehistory
of the psycho-thrillers we all see at the multiplex. Unseen Cinema is a gloriously
messy affair, in which Busby Berkeley, everybody's hero of Hollywood high camp,
can rub shoulders with an abstract movie by the utterly highbrow geometric painter
and Partisan Review editor George L. K. Morris.
The inclusion in Unseen Cinema of work by the Edison Company and D.W. Griffith
and a host of other people who have secure places in the standard histories
of Hollywood suggests that film, a radically new medium around 1900, was once
inherently avant-garde. And there is an even larger conclusion that some may
want to draw from this anthology, which is that those who explore the possibilities
of the moving image are by the very nature of their work members of a permanent
avant-garde. Certainly the old idea that avant-gardism is essentially anti-commercial
does not make much sense in this context. And if the early Edison films of Coney
Island are indeed avant-garde, it is an avant-gardism that depends not on a
revaluation of tradition (which most commentators would say is the essence of
the thing) but simply on the fundamentalism of the visual impressions, the almost
unconscious freshness of the imagery.
Copyright 2006, The New Republic