In the two decades after World War II, documentary and avant-garde filmmaking underwent enormous changes around the world. New technologies and institutions altered the basis of independent filmmaking. These developments were often connected to the rise of the commercial art cinema and the emergence of new waves.
Both documentarists and avant-gardists renewed the idea of a personal cinema. In the 1930s, the Spanish civil war, Stalin’s rigged trials of his former associates in Moscow, and the rise of fascism and militarism had led to genocide and a world war. Now many artists turned from political commitment (see Chapter 14) to a conception of individual expression. This impulse, most notable in the rise of Abstract Expressionist painting in the United States and Europe, was also visible in experimental film. Even the postwar documentary film became more of a vehicle for the filmmaker’s beliefs and feelings than had been usual before.
Another prevailing idea was a new interest in capturing unpredictable events on film. Before 1950, most documentary cinema had sought to control chance to a great degree. The filmmaker might record a casual action, but that would be smoothly absorbed into a larger structure of meaning by virtue of editing and voice-over commentary. Most major documentarists, from Dziga Vertov and Robert Flaherty to Pare Lorentz and Humphrey Jennings, had resorted to even more strongly controlling techniques, such as staging scenes for the camera. But Neorealism, particularly in Cesare Zavattini’s pronouncements, had seen truth in the uncontrolled event. In the 1950s lightweight cameras and sound equipment allowed documentarists to eliminate the artifice of voice-over commentary and preplanned structure, creating a cinema centered on the spontaneous moment.
At the same time, avant-gardists revived dada and surrealist conceptions of the revelatory accident. John Cage, for example, composed
21.1, left The Silent World: this view toward the ocean’s surface suggests the new freedom given divers by Cousteau’s invention, the aqualung.
21.2, right Flirtation on the stoop (In the Street, Helen Levitt, Sidney Loeb, and James Aree).
Musical pieces that incorporated chance and environmental sounds. His Imaginary Landscape no. 4 (1951) consisted of twelve radios tuned to different stations according to chance. Postwar experimental filmmakers, as well as workers in other arts, often adapted Cagean ideas by incorporating accidents as part of self-expression. Lucky aberrations of light or color could become part of a larger form. By the late 1950s and early 1960s, the sort of objectivity courted by documentarists entered the avant-garde as well. In the work of the Fluxus group and of Andy Warhol, the artist no longer expressed personal feelings but rather invited the spectator to scrutinize a process or witness an improvised scene. Because this approach risked boring the audience, these avant-gardists, like their documentary counterparts, in effect asked audiences to accept a cinema that refused to arouse and fulfill the narrative appetites to which Hollywood catered.
World History
