The experimental film also renewed itself after World War II. The wider availability of 16mm equipment made experimental filmmaking more feasible for the nonprofessional. Most schools, universities, and museums in the United States had 16mm projectors and could show experimental films. Foreign classics had been available on 16mm from the Museum of Modern Art, but after the war new companies began to circulate experimental films in that gauge. In Europe, which largely lacked 16mm distribution, newly founded or reopened film archives screened classic experimental films.
A growing number of institutions nurtured experimental cinema. Hundreds of cine-clubs sprang up in cities and universities throughout Europe; because of censorship laws, avant-garde works barred from general screenings could only be shown in such venues. An international federation of cine-clubs was created in 1954. International festivals appeared as well, most significantly the Experimental Film Competition at Knokke-le-Zoute, Belgium, begun in 1949. Occasionally European governments offered funding for imaginative “cultural films.” In France, theaters designated to show art et essai (artistic and experimental) films received some government subsidy.
The most dramatic growth of an experimental film culture occurred in the United States. Here 16mm film stock and equipment were available, universities and art schools began film production departments, and the wartime work of Willard Maas, Marie Menken, brothers John and James Whitney, and other experimentalists started to circulate. Moreover, Hans Richter, Oskar Fischinger, and other older avant-gardists had emigrated to America. Experimental film acquired a public identity with Richter’s feature-length Dreams that Money Can Buy (1946), a batch of vaguely surrealist sketches by prominent avant-gardists.
Throughout the period, most filmmakers funded their work in the time-honored ways: from their own pocket-books or from a patron. Although the U. S. government and private foundations stepped up support for the fine arts generally, only a few filmmakers won grants. Still, in the postwar era, a number of new exhibition venues emerged. Frank Stauffacher’s “Art in Cinema” series, presented at the San Francisco Museum of Art immediately after the war, crystallized interest on the West Coast. The New York City film society Cinema 16 was founded in 1949 and grew to a membership of 7,000. In 1960, Canyon Cinema in San Francisco became a similar venue. Students at Dartmouth, Wisconsin, and other universities founded campus film societies, and many were eager for alternatives to commercial fare. A national association of film societies, the Film Council of America (later the American Federation of Film Societies), began in 1954.
21.33, left A “snapshot” made possible by the lightweight 16mm camera: Kazi-mierz Karabasz’s Musicians (1960).
21.34, right In Peter Watkins’s The War Game (1966), the staging of a nuclear attack on Britain gains intensity through use of Direct Cinema; here, a hand-held shot captures a fireman collapsing by a child.
THE FIRST POSTWAR DECADE: MAYA DEREN » • » ® * - * *
The figure of Maya Deren dominated the first decade of postwar experimental film in the United States. She achieved recognition with two films made in wartime, won a prize at the Cannes Film Festival, and became the emblematic figure of the American avant-garde. Renting a New York theater for her screenings, sending flyers to film societies to advertise her work, lecturing mesmerically, she inspired an intellectual public with a new respect for artistic film.
Deren initially studied literary criticism and then became interested in dance. She worked as secretary to the choreographer Katherine Dunham, who inspired in Deren an enduring interest in Caribbean cultures, particularly the dance and religion of Haiti.
In 1943, Deren and her husband, Alexander Hammid, collaborated on what would become the most famous American avant-garde film, Meshes of the Afternoon. A woman (played by Deren) has a series of mysterious encounters with a hooded figure whose face is a mirror. She passes through chambers (21.35). splits into several personalities, and eventually dies.
The drifting protagonist and the dream structure were conventions of what came to be called the trance film. Strong cues that the images are projections of the heroine's anxieties also initiated a long line of "psychodramas" in American experimental film. Stylistically, Meshes creates a nonrealistic spatial and temporal continuity through false eyeline matches of the sort already exploited in the avant-garde tradition.
Hammid (whose original name was Hackenschmied) had made some experimental narratives himself in his native Prague, and Meshes has strong resemblances to Un Chien andalou, Blood ofa Poet, and Vampyr. But Deren disavowed
21.35 Air and space as gauzy barriers in Meshes of the Afternoon.
Any connection with the European tradition of experiment, rejecting the continental version of Surrealism for relying too much on the unconscious. "Creativity," she noted, "consists in a logical, imaginative extension of a known reality. "8 Moreover, making a woman the protagonist alters the implications ofthe role changes (21.36, 21.37).
Deren went on to make another psychodrama, At Land (1944), in which she plays a woman emerging from the sea and crawling across a variety of landscapes. This film was almost completely Deren's creation, with Hammid serving occasionally as a technical adviser.
Deren's postwar films marked a new phase in her creative development. She initiated a series of dance films with A Study in Choreography for Camera (1945), an exploration
21.36, left Meshes of the Afternoon: the abject figure of the early sequences.. .
21.37, right assassin.
Becomes a cool
21.38 A Study in Choreography for Camera the dancer lifts a leg in a forest.. .
21.39 .. . and through a match-on-action cut, the movement continues in a studio.
Of the unique ways in which framing and editing could create an "impossible" time and space (21.38, 21.39). A similar examination of movement dominates Meditation on Violence (1948), a choreographic study of Chinese boxing.
Ritual in Transfigured Time (1946) combines techniques of the dance films with the trancelike narrative of psychodrama. A woman whose identity shifts across two bodies drifts through three rituals—domestic work (21.40), flirtatious socializing, and sexual pursuit. Slow motion, freeze-frames, and Deren's elliptical match cuts "transfigure" the time of these social rites. Deren saw deep affinities between artistic form and the rote gestures of social ceremonies. "Historically, all art derives from ritual. In ritual, the form is the meaning.' '9
Supported by a Guggenheim grant, Deren went to Haiti to make a film on Voudoun dance and ritual. Although she never competed the film, she did publish a book, Divine Horsemen: The Voodoo Gods of Haiti (1953). Before her death in 1961, she finished another dance film, The Very Eye of Night (1959).
In New York, Deren adopted the image of a Voudoun priestess, gifted with the power to bless herfriends and curse her enemies. An extroverted, dynamic organizer, she formed a community of filmmakers in 1953, eventually named the Independent Film Foundation, which held monthly meetings for screenings, lectures, and heated disputes.
21.40 Ritual in Transfigured Time: winding yarn as an image of both unWinding time and women's domestic rituals.
I n specialized journals and the general press, Deren promoted avant-garde cinema. She also elaborated a provocative theory of film form and expression. She distinguished between a "horizontal" cinema that emphasizes action and plot and a "vertical" cinema that "probes the ramifications of the moment," emphasizing not what is happening but "what it feels like or means."io
21.41 Poets Gregory Corso and Allen Ginsberg spar in Pull My Daisy (production still).
Distribution, always a problem for independent American cinema, also expanded considerably. Amos Vogel started a Cinema 16 distribution library, and other companies followed. The founding of the FilmMakers’ Cooperative in New York in 1962 marked a milestone. The cooperative accepted all work, making no judgment of quality, and received a flat percentage for rentals. A year later, the Canyon Cinema Cooperative was established on the West Coast.
The United States had developed an infrastructure for supporting the avant-garde cinema. Tastemakers had emerged: Maya Deren, Amos Vogel, the critic Parker Tyler, and Jonas Mekas, editor of the key New York journal Film Culture (founded in 1955), organizer of the Film-Makers’ Cooperative, and film reviewer for the Village Voice. By 1962, anyone with access to 16mm or even 8mm equipment could make a film, and it had a chance of being distributed and discussed. While New York was displacing Paris as the capital of modern painting, the United States had become the leading force in avant-garde cinema. In the postwar decade, the filmmaker most responsible for establishing experimental cinema in the United States was Maya Deren (see previous box).
As in earlier epochs, experimental filmmakers were more closely tied to the world of the fine arts than to the commercial film industry. Some filmmakers continued to animate abstract paintings or illustrate passages drawn from classical music (e. g., Jean Mitry’s Pacific 231, 1949). Stylistically, several postwar filmmakers were influenced by Surrealism and Dada. During the 1950s, others found inspiration in contemporary trends that favored an intuitive, personal approach to creation. Abstract Expressionist painting had centered on the spontaneous creativity of the artist, who might splatter and drip paint as Jackson Pollock did. Critics compared this “gestural painting” to the writings of Jack Kerouac and other “Beats,” who advocated an impulsive, nonintellectual approach to experience.
Some avant-garde painters and poets moved into film. In Paris, the Lettrist movement of the late 1940s experimented with the pure sound of verse and the arrangement of letters on the printed page; it soon made filmmaking integral to its program. A breakaway Lettrist group eventually founded the “antiart” Situation-ist International, which also produced several films. In the early 1960s in the United States, experimental films were made by artists associated with Pop Art and the Fluxus group. Avant-garde composers, such as Steve Reich and Terry Riley, assisted their filmmaker friends by scoring films or performing live accompaniment.
At certain moments, experimental filmmaking spread beyond the fine-arts world and made contact with wider audiences. Typically, this occurred when the filmmakers addressed a distinct subculture of viewers. For example, Pull My Daisy (1959) attracted attention because of its ties to the Beat milieu; its narration was written and recited by Jack Kerouac, and its veneer of loose improvisation reflected the “hip” attitude to life
(21.41) . Soon afterward, experimental films drew audiences in the worldwide “counterculture.”
Abstraction, Collage, and Personal Expression
The new avenues of expression encouraged the continuation of many tendencies of the prewar period. Dada and surrealist influences continued throughout the postwar era. For example, Dada’s antiart impulses can be seen in the films made by the French Lettrists. Their leader, Isidore Isou, argued that linguistic signs were more important than images. In an updating of the strategy of Marcel Duchamp’s Anemic cinema (1926; p. 178), he argued for a cinema discrepant (“cinema of discrepancy”), in which the sound track dominates the image. Guy Debord’s Lettrist film Hurlements en faveur de Sade (“Howls for de Sade,” 1952) carried out Isou’s program by eliminating all images. A silent black screen alternates with a white screen that is accompanied by a voice-over harangue.
Surrealist imagery pervaded the work of the Polish animator Walerian Borowczyk. His Les Jeux des anges (“Games of Angels,” 1964), made in France, presents a series of undefinable objects and nonsense syllables flying past the camera before what seem to be disembodied human organs start to fight. Renaissance (1963) uses stop-motion in reverse to make messy heaps of material on a floor assemble into a series of ordinary but disquieting objects: a table, a stuffed owl, an antique doll
(21.42) . In the end, a grenade explodes the still life.
Besides dada and surrealist tendencies, four major
Trends dominated avant-garde filmmaking between the late 1940s and the early 1960s: abstract film, experimental narrative, the lyrical film, and the experimental compilation film.
Abstract Film The abstract film had emerged in the 1920s with such works as Walter Ruttmann’s Lichtspiel Opus 1 and Viking Eggeling’s Diagonal Symphony (p. 176). Several Americans who made abstract films during the war (p. 321) continued their experiments in the postwar decades. Harry Smith, who created his early abstractions directly on the film strip, began to use a camera to shoot painted imagery (Color Plate 21.1). Douglass Crockwell employed cut-outs, frame-by-frame painting, and color-veined blocks of wax in Glens Falls Sequence (1946) and The Long Bodies (1947; Color Plate 21.2). Marie Menken painted designs on film that present one pattern onscreen and another when one examines the film strip (for example, Copycat, 1963; Color Plate 21.3).
21.42 The reassembly process nears completion in Renaissance.
The Canadian Norman McLaren practiced a great many forms of animation, including Cohl’s technique of animating three-dimensional objects (dubbed by McLaren “pixillation”). It was, however, principally his abstract animation that garnered praise for his unit at the National Film Board. Soon after Len Lye, McLaren mastered painting and scratching directly on film, and his hand-painted Begone Dull Care (1949) and Blinkety Blank (1955; Color Plate 21.4) were shown and admired in art cinemas throughout North America.
Two other exponents of abstraction, John and James Whitney, won a prize for their Variations (1943) at Knokke in 1949. John went on to experiment with computer imagery, while James devised a dot-painting method that could generate mandala shapes and kinetic patterns reminiscent of Op Art (Color Plate 21.5). In a similar vein was the abstract animation of Jordan Belson, who sought to induce Zen-like states (Color Plate 21.6).
Smith, McLaren, the Whitneys, and Belson presented rich, elaborate works, but other filmmakers took a more reductive approach to abstraction. The Viennese filmmaker Dieter Rot created his “Dots” series (19561962) by punching different-size holes in black leader. When projected, the holes appeared as shifting or expanding white disks. Perhaps the height of such reduction was reached in Arnulf Rainer (1960). Here the Austrian Peter Kubelka created a film wholly out of clumps of pure white and black frames, which created a rhythmic flicker onscreen and produced spectral afterimages in the viewer’s eye (21.43).
All these experiments relied on filming purely abstract designs, often frame by frame. The filmmaker could also shoot objects in ways that brought out their abstract qualities. This approach, earlier identified with cinema
21.43 Peter Kubelka before a wall to which strips of his flicker film Arnulf Rainer are attached.
Pur (p. 179), had been launched by Fernand Leger and Dudley Murphy’s Ballet mecanique (1924), and it was taken up throughout the postwar era. Charles and Ray Eames’s Blacktop (1950) recalls Joris Ivens’s Rain in its scrutiny of the patterns formed by foaming water. In Kubelka’s Adebar (1957), printing processes turn footage of people dancing in a cafe into a flow of negative images, inverted or flipped end for end. Shirley Clarke’s Bridges Go Round (1958) employs more complicated laboratory effects, including tinting and superimposition to bring out the bridges’ soaring arcs (Color Plate 21.7).
Pure pictorial design and the abstract handling of familiar objects mix frantically in the witty films of the American Robert Breer. While in Paris in the early 1950s, he experimented with single-frame filming. The technique was established in animation, but, instead of changing a single object or drawing frame by frame, Breer hit on the idea of making each frame a completely different image. In REcreation (1956), abstract images swirl together with close-ups of tools, writing utensils, toys, photos, and drawings (Color Plate 21.8). Breer went on to incorporate animated footage, handwriting, and other material, as in Fist Fight (1964; Color Plate
21.9). His films establish a new threshold of minimal clarity: in the context of single-frame images, a shot of four or five frames becomes distinct and vivid. The avant-garde equivalent of cartoons, Breer’s works exude the gentle humor and childlike wonder that we find in the paintings of Paul Klee.
Some European films were abstract in yet another sense. Their makers organized the images into rigorous patterns according to formulaic rules. Whether the shot displayed a pure design or a distinct object, the filmmaker could build the shots into an unfolding structure that owed nothing to narrative. The most evident precursor of this approach is Charles Dekeukeleire’s Impatience (1929; p. 183), with its few motifs inexorably reiterated. In postwar Austria, avant-garde artists were under the sway of formalistic painting and the serial music of Arnold Schoenberg and Anton von Webern, so it is not surprising that the two major proponents of structural abstraction were the Viennese Peter Kubelka and Kurt Kren.
Building on the discoveries of Breer, as well as on the rhythmic cutting of the French Impressionists and the Soviet Montage directors of the 1920s, Kubelka formulated a theory of “metrical” film: “Cinema is not movement. Cinema is a projection of stills—which means images which do not move—in a very quick rhythm.” 11 Kubelka concluded that the basic units of cinema were not shots but the single frame and the interval between one frame and the next. The director could assemble frames into a fixed series and then build the film out of variations and manipulations of that series. For example, because the musical phrase to be used in Adebar lasted twenty-six frames, Kubelka decided that all his shots of dancing couples would be either thirteen, twenty-six, or fifty-two frames. These shots would combine to form “phrases.”
21.44 Kren’s 2/60: the effect on screen is that of turning heads, blinking eyes, and transformed features.
Kubelka then varied the phrases according to a set of self-imposed rules; for example, a cut could link only positive and negative images. Adebar ends when all the combinations of shots have been exhausted. The process consumes a mere ninety seconds.
Like Kubelka, Kurt Kren worked with shot units of only a few frames, but his exercises in structural abstraction paid more attention to the imagery. His frame-by-frame patterning is applied to material that is more recognizable despite the brevity of each shot. For example, 2/60 48 Kopfe aus dem Szondi Test (“2/60 48 Heads from the Szondi Test,” 1960 [Kren numbers and dates his films]) atomizes a set of photo-cards from a psychological test (21.44). His 5/62 Fenstergucker, Ab-fall, Etc. (“5/62 Window Watchers, Garbage, Etc.,” 1962) teases the viewer with repeated shots ordered according to strict rules. At the start, each shot of the win-
21.45 Mother's Day: mother’s “lovely boys and girls" are frozen in childish postures recast by adult fantasy.
21.46 A game of hopscotch in The Lead Shoes, with the lens enhancing the quality of heaviness evoked by the title.
Dow watchers lasts only a single frame. As the film goes on, each image extends to two frames, then three, then five, and so on. Kren’s formulas are less mathematically intricate than Kubelka’s, but their patterning is more geared to the spectator’s memory of specific images.
Experimental Narrative In Entr’acte, Un Chten an-dalou, Histoire de detective, and other films, the 1920s experimentalists had challenged the storytelling conventions already developed by the world’s film industries. After World War II, filmmakers continued to create narratives that differed significantly from those produced by mainstream film industries.
Deren’s Meshes of the Afternoon and At Land (p. 490) had crystallized the tendency toward psychodrama that emerged in the symbolic dramas of the Surrealists and French Impressionists of the 1920s. American filmmakers found the psychodrama a congenial form for expressing personal obsessions and erotic impulses. In its fluid mixture of subjective and objective events, the genre anticipated the exploration of narrative ambiguities that characterizes the postwar European art cinema.
Psychodramas commonly present fantasy tales through highly stylized techniques. James Broughton’s Mother’s Day (1948) offers an adult’s fantasy projection of childhood. Adults play children’s games, framed in striated, off-center tablea ux (21.45). By contrast, d is-torting lenses intensify the grotesque plot of Sidney Peterson’s The Lead Shoes (1949; 21.46).
21.47 Bells of Atlantis: a superimposition reminiscent of French Impressionism (compare with 4.8).
21.48 In Fireworks, the protagonist, played by Anger himself, stares at himself in a shot that recalls the mirror imagery in Jean Cocteau’s films.
21.49 Photos of pain/ecstasy burn in Fireworks.
21.50 Un Chant d’amour: prisoners share smoke through a straw.
21.51 Tensi ons between a couple in Brakhage’s Reflections on Black.
21.52 John takes his life in Maclaine’s tense and brooding The End.
21.53, left A U. S. missile targets Khrushchev in Science Friction.
21.54, right Esoteric imagery in Heaven and Earth Magic.
As in Meshes and surrealist works, postwar psychodramas are often presented as dreams. Ian Hugo’s Bells of Atlantis (1952) uses languorous superimpositions to create an underwater world (21.47), but, according to Anais Nin’s voice-over commentary, “This Atlantis could only be found at night by the route of the dream.” Similarly, Kenneth Anger’s Fireworks (1947) elaborates a dream structure reminiscent of Blood ofa Poet (p. 318; 21.48). The story of a young man drawn to a sailor and then beaten by a gang of sailors ends with the hero awakening alongside his lover as flames consume photographs of dream images (21.49).
Gregory Markopoulos also used dreams and hallucinations to motivate erotic fantasy. Like Anger, he structured his films around protagonists who stood in for himself; like Cocteau, he filled his narratives with references to classical mythology. He made Psyche (1 947) while a student at the University of Southern California and then completed several films (Lysis, 1948; Charamides, 1948) in his hometown of Toledo, Ohio. In Swain (1950), an inmate of a mental hospital fantasizes escape from his prison and from confining masculine roles.
Anger and Markopoulos brought male homosexual themes and imagery into films with an explicitness not
21.55 The improvised “hanging-out” narrative: Jack Smith as the Spirit of Listlessness in Little Stabs at Happiness.
21.56 In The Invention of Destruction, real people are dwarfed by animated machines in a style that recalls nineteenth-century engravings.
Previously seen in the avant-garde. So did French poet Jean Genet in Un Chant d’amour (“Song of Love,” 1950), which presents desire among prisoners and guards with surrealist touches but without the abili of dream or hallucination (21.50). Psychodramatic narratives express heterosexual drives as well. Stan Brakhage’s Reflections on Black (1955) presents a series of variations on male-female relationships through a mysterious blind man’s visit to an apartment house (21.51).
Apart from dramas of erotic longings and personal anxiety, postwar experimental films offered large-scale narratives. Some, like Christopher Maclaine’s sepulchral The End (1953), warned against nuclear holocaust (21.52). Several filmmakers offered satiric or mystical fables. Stan VanDerBeek’s Pop-flavored Science Friction (1959) stages the cold war through animated cut-outs taken from TV imagery and news-media caricature (21.53). Harry Smith’s cut-out animations, culminating in Heaven and Earth Magic (1958), present bizarre narratives dominated by occult symbolism
(21.54) .
Far more loosely organized are the anecdotal, almost home-movie, narratives cultivated by filmmakers influenced by the Beat and hipster milieus. Pull My Daisy is an example of this genre; another is Ken Jacobs’s Little Stabs at Happiness (1959), featuring Jack Smith, founder of a vaudeville act called “The Human Wreckage Revue”
(21.55) . Ron Rice’s Flower Thief (1960) follows the misadventures of the roguishly goofy Taylor Mead, one of the “stars” of American experimental film.
European animators were particularly noteworthy for their experiments with narrative. After the war, several of the newly socialist eastern European countries formed small, state-supported animation units that often allowed filmmakers a considerable degree of creative freedom. In Czechoslovakia, for example, the puppet animator Jifi Trnka started working in 1945. As with many eastern European animators, his work made veiled comments on the contemporary political situation while celebrating national culture, especially folklore. The latter tendency is evident in Old Czech Legends (1953). Trnka’s last film, The Hand (1965), is an allegory of artistic freedom. A little artisan who makes flowerpots is pressured by a huge, officious hand into making a sculpture of it; when he finally agrees, he must work in a giant cage (Color Plate 21.10). Ironically, Trnka was able to make this fable of state-controlled art in a Communist-supported studio.
Another major Czech animator, Karel Zeman, seemed to comment on the nuclear-arms race in his feature The Invention of Destruction (aka The Fabulous World ofJules Verne, 1957), which combines live action, special effects, and animation to create an elaborate science-fiction film about a menacing factory hidden inside a mysterious island (21.56).
The most prominent of the eastern European animation units was in Yugoslavia. Founded in 1956, the Zagreb studio gained a reputation for highly stylized cartoons, most of them specifically aimed at an adult, art-cinema audience. The films, with simple or lyrical stories that needed little or no dialogue, had considerable international appeal. The comedies usually satirized modern life, as in Ersatz (1961, Dusan Vukotic), in which a man’s visit to the beach ends when everything—
21.57 The protagonist confronts his nemesis in A.
21.58 The discomfited hero tries to retrieve his nose, now grown into a government official.
Including the hero and the scenery—turn out to be inflatable imitations.
Jan Lenica began work in Poland, moved to France, and also worked in Germany. His French-made A (1964) typifies much European narrative animation by combining the humorous and the threatening. A writer is tyrannized by an enormous letter “A” that invades his home (21.57); then, just as he thinks he has finally gotten rid of it, a giant “B” appears.
Alexandre Alexeieff and Claire Parker, back in France after the war, continued to support themselves by doing advertisements. They also made more pinboard films (p. 320). The Nose (1963), an adaptation of a tale by Nikolay Gogol, alludes evocatively to the original story rather than presenting it in linear fashion (21.58).
The Lyrical Film As continuations of prewar genres, abstract film and experimental narrative appealed to well-established avant-garde conventions. But new genres were created as well. The most influential is called the poetic, or lyric, film. Here the filmmaker seeks to capture a personal perception or emotion, much as a poet conveys a flash of insight in a brief lyric. The film lyric aims to convey a sensation or a mood directly, with little or no recourse to narrative structure.
Stan Brakhage, one of the most influential avant-garde filmmakers of the postwar era, established the genre of the lyrical film (see box). Other filmmakers followed him, including Charles Boultenhouse in Hand Written (1959) and Bruce Baillie in To Parsifal (1963). Brakhage’s footage of his family, pets, and household showed that the lyric form could work with intimate, home-movie material. The lyric mode led filmmakers to explore the film journal or diary, in which the filmmaker records impressions of daily existence (e. g., Jonas Mekas’s Walden, completed 1969). There was also the film “portrait,” such as Markopoulos’s Galaxie (1966), which consists of thirty brief films depicting friends.
The experimental narrative and the lyric film incorporate abstract imagery and structure. Broughton’s hard-edged compositions emphasize the design of the shot, while Anger’s play with lighting and focus to soften outlines and make the image fairly abstract. Brakhage’s films exploit reflections, spectral diffusion, and hand-painting on the film strip. Markopoulos interrupts his erotic quest tales with brief clusters of single-frame shots, film phrases that recall the abstract modules of Kren and Kubelka. And the animators who worked in narrative often used abstraction; Zagreb films display flat, painterly backgrounds (Color Plate 21.14). In most narrative and lyric works, however, abstraction carries symbolic overtones, enhances expressive qualities, or conveys that direct perception that Brakhage believed to be the mission of art.
The Experimental Compilation Film This postwar trend also has few antecedents in earlier years, though Joseph Cornell’s Rose Hobart (1939; p. 318) is an important one. In this genre, the filmmaker either gathers footage from a variety of sources and cuts it together or trims and rearranges someone else’s finished film. The result conveys an emotion or builds up metaphorical associations. Unlike the compilation documentary, the avant-garde compilation, or assemblage, film avoids an overt message and uses the original footage in satiric or shocking ways.
World History
