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 Round Table: Obsolescence and
American Avant-Garde Film

Obslescencia de:

MalcolmTurvey:Focusing on the concept of obsolescence-the occasion for which is

announced elsewhere in this issue-allows us to address a number of points of
interest to October at this moment in its history. First, it appears that some of us
Tecnologa involved with the magazine feel that, due to recent technological innovations,
some of the artistic media with which Octoberhas been engaged since its
inception are now obsolete, or threatened with obsolescence, or are
undergoing major changes. The most obvious case is cinema, as there is much
talk about the obsolescence of celluloid, and the various production and
exhibition technologies associated with it, due to the introduction of digital
technologies.1 Second, and I'm trying to say this very carefully, I suspect that
Cine de some of us feel that the sort of avant-garde art-and that includes avant-garde
vanguardia film-whose theorization and criticism was October'soriginal project may no
longer be with us, or may at least have shifted in some fundamental way since
the 1970s. Within the context of avant-garde cinema, an example of this type
of shift might be that there no longer seems to be a collective movement
among American avant-garde filmmakers-that what used to be called the
New American Cinema is now obsolete-and that it has been replaced by
pluralism. Third, I think some of us are wondering whether the sort of theory
and criticism we publish in the magazine plays the role it was originally
Crtica
intended to play--whether, in other words, the sort of writing we promote is
itself obsolete, or becoming so.
These are the kinds of issues-and there are probably several others
too-that we want to address via the concept of obsolescence. We have asked
you here because you are all very important figures in the world of American
avant-garde cinema. Ken Jacobs and Brian Frye are well-known New
York-based filmmakers of different generations; Chrissie Iles programs-very
aggressively and successfully, I might add-avant-garde film at the Whitney
Museum of American Art, as does Brian at the Robert Beck Memorial Cinema;

1. Editor's note: The text byJohn Belton on pages 98-114 examines this topic in depth.

OCTOBER100, Spring2002, pp. 115-132. ? 2002 OctoberMagazine,Ltd. and MassachusettsInstituteof Technology.

116 OCTOBER

and Paul Arthur is a widely published critic of avant-garde film. We are

wondering what you think about this cinema in relation to the concept of
obsolescence, and what you can teach us and our readers about the current
state of avant-garde cinema in this country.
KenJacobs:But has Octoberbeen active in looking at avant-garde film through the
years?Are you writing about the avant-garde?Are you coming out to see it?
AnnetteMichelson:I think that if you look at what Octoberhas published on cinema,
you will see that there is a great diversity of material. There is material on
independent cinema, on the avant-gardes, including the avant-gardes of the
1920s and 1930s. But there is also a certain amount of material on cinema that
can be considered as occupying a place within what one might call the canon
of avant-garde film, but is not produced on the kind of artisanal level-within
the artisanal scheme of economics-as the cinema that you, Ken, and many of
your contemporaries produce. We have published, for example, Eisenstein's
notes for a film on Capital,the script of Fassbinder's film In a Yearof Thirteen
Moons, and our most recent roundtable on film was about contemporary
international "art"cinema. Also, the magazine does not carry the reviews
associated with the task of criticism. So I can't say that we've really kept up
with everything that's been produced on the artisanal level on which you work,
Ken, but I think that on the whole, considering that we're not a film magazine,
we've done reasonably well. But there are great gaps, no doubt about it.
Jacobs:My sense of the gap is from the early seventies on in terms of keeping up with
people who arrived after the canon, the established canon such as it is, with all
the younger people that came along, as well as the things that my
contemporaries and myself are still producing. So my sense is that while your
interest in cinema is very broad, it moved away from this particular territory.
Yet you are now asking about the health of this particular territory, as if we've
been moribund rather than that you've been detached.
Paul Arthur:I think Ken's point is well taken. For me, the most remarkable thing
about American avant-garde film is how little it has changed over a fairly long
period of time. As long as the characterization of American avant-garde film
isn't constrained by modernist or even postmoder aesthetic categories, then
the avant-garde seems to be doing much the same kind of thing as it's done
for a minimum of thirty years. I think that the most useful way to look at it is as
some sort of mesh of institutional frameworks and practices-for instance,
funding sources and generic protocols, a certain use of distribution and
exhibition-as well as a set of exigencies or modes of production that remain
fairly consistent: short form versus feature film, unscripted, made by primarily
single individuals, non-sync sound, 16mm format, almost entirely films made
for under $10,000. This is a fairly productive way to define avant-garde film, at
least in the present moment.
Michelson:Well, I agree, as I've always hesitated to use the term "avant-garde,"
preferring the term "independent," meaning a film produced, as I say, from
 and AmericanAvant-GardeFilm
Obsolescence 117

within the artisanal system, because "avant-garde" is a much broader term

and certainly I wouldn't want to restrict it to the province of American
artisanal cinema.
Jacobs:Don't you think that "independent" is the broader term, and that "avant-
garde" specifies the radically new, and that's the tradition that we're talking
about, that's been kept up? Cinema is a huge territory, and for many works,
photoplays, documentaries, the level is high. They are admirable, but they stay
close-from my perspective-to the common language. But then you have
things that uphold the idea of the avant-garde, which is to forage and get out
there into new territory, to think completely freshly, come up with whole other
ways of putting things together, unexpected things to go for. New things have
been made all through these years. New things are being made now.
Arthur:I'm sure that's true, but I find this aspect of the cultural ideology somewhat
suspect, even obsolescent. This idea of constant innovation, of stretching the
envelope of what's possible in cinema ... I find that a problematic notion at
this point.
Michelson:Why?
Arthur: Because I don't see that much stretching these days, but I do see a very
strongly institutionalized movement, and for me, that's the essential definition.
Turvey:But wouldn't that constitute an important change over the last thirty years?
Inasmuch as innovation has always been a key criterion of avant-garde, or
experimental, or independent film, or whatever we want to call it, surely if that
is something that isn't happening right now in your eyes, that does constitute
an important shift. It might not be an institutional shift, but it is a crucial
aesthetic one.
Arthur:I think that innovation has been very cyclical in the context of American
avant-garde cinema. That is, there have certainly been periods of great stylistic
or formal innovation, and then there have been periods when there has been
a lot less pushing, and this notion of some sort of constant advancement-that
this idea of continual aesthetic progress-I don't think it, at least, comports
with my sense of...
Brian Frye:But would you saddle any other kind of art form with that requirement
for innovation?
Arthur:Not anymore.
Frye:Because I don't think anyone would criticize modern painting for not being
innovative. I mean, who cares, right? That's not really an issue, I don't think.
My concern with the word "innovation" is that I think that it easily comes to
mean bells and whistles, a little gimmick. People think of innovation and they
want to say, "What'sdifferent that this thing's doing that something else hasn't
done?" If what you mean by innovation is simply things that are really
interesting, then I think "Yeah, absolutely." But I think that innovation is a
word that you can read in two very different ways.
ChrissieIles: I've just taken part in an online conference on postmodernism, and it
118 OCTOBER

was felt among the participants that postmodernism has reached some kind of
conclusion, which what you are saying about innovation seems to confirm. The
questions that might be asked of avant-garde film-is the old technology of
cinema and the actual practice of avant-garde film obsolescent?-have a much
broader cultural context and could also be asked of art. One of the reasons
that my Into the Light show has been such a success is that people are
discovering work made thirty years ago that was truly extraordinary and
radical, and young artists, and perhaps certain filmmakers, can't get beyond it;
so perhaps we're looking at a certain crisis in innovation.2 On the other hand,
avant-garde film seems to me to be more alive than ever. In New York, there's
the Robert Beck Memorial Cinema, the Whitney, MoMA'sfilm programs, and
the screenings at Ocularis. There are many different kinds of cinema being
screened and in so many different kinds of places, and young filmmakers are
going, as well as filmmakers who have been practicing for thirty years and
more. It seems very exciting to me. There's a crisis in innovation, but there is
also a new energy.
Arthur:I want to provide a little bit of unscientific and cursory background to this.
By my count, in the last decade, there have been seventeen book-length studies
in English devoted entirely, or substantially, to avant-garde film, and this
doesn't include avant-garde video. The majority were published by front-line
academic presses, and if you throw in another dozen monographs or catalogs
issued by museums and galleries, I think this is a fairly potent index of at least
an academic interest in the historiography, and probably to a lesser extent the
theorization, of avant-garde film. About distribution and exhibition, I had a
conversation just the other day with M. M. Serra, the director of the
Filmmaker's Cooperative here in New York. According to her, last year
produced the largest gross rental receipts at the Co-op in nearly a decade,
and there has been a marked increase in rentals to foreign festivals and
foreign museums.
A
Frye: big reason for that is sitting across the table [referring to Chrissie Iles].
[Laughter]
Arthur:That's probably true. And there's been a continuing increase in the number
of filmmakers who've joined the Filmmaker's Cooperative, because there are
no criteria of value, no selection process. It's now up over 500. The increased
rental of films has also been accompanied by increases in video sales. This
seems to me an extraordinary phenomenon.
I
Frye: agree with you to a certain extent, although, having been on the board of the
Co-op for quite some time, I would note that of all those new members,
perhaps only one or two of them have actually ever rented a film through the
Co-op, and a great many of them simply deposit things there. Of the

2. Into the Light: TheProjectedImage in AmericanArt, 1964-1977, Whitney Museum of American Art,
October 18, 2001-January 27, 2002. Ed.
 and AmericanAvant-GardeFilm
Obsolescence 119

filmmakers distributed by the Co-op, the films of only perhaps thirty or forty
are rented on a regular basis. For example, we did a show of films by Richard
Meltzer the other day. The films were deposited in 1970, and we showed them
for the first time thirty years later. They'd never left the shelf. So the fact that
there are more people joining doesn't necessarily mean that anyone's actually
ever seen their films.
Arthur: Continuing on from what I was saying before, by the same token, the
coverage of avant-garde films in mainstream film magazines and somewhat
more specialized journals, although not at an all-time high, has been
significantly expanded over the last ten years. I'm thinking of Film Comment,
Afterimage,TheIndependent,Film Quarterly.I think they do a lot more with both
current and somewhat less current avant-garde film. Conversely, I don't think
art magazines, such as Artforum,have done as much with avant-garde film over
the last ten years.
Iles:It is difficult to look at and understand avant-garde film, and art world people
don't know how to approach it. They don't know where to find it either. Also,
one has to take account of what's happened in the art world, where there's less
interest in the theoretical or conceptual underpinnings of art. The market has
become strong in recent years, and mediocre work receives a rather wide
hearing. To address the question you raised, Malcolm, about the obsolescence
of the sort of theoretical writing Octoberpromotes, or any theoretical activity in
relation to art, the art world is almost completely anti-theoretical these days
and resists analysis, perhaps because analysis might throw too much light on
what is, in the end, very little.
Arthur:Yes, but that's from an art world perspective. If you look from a film world
perspective, here's another interesting tidbit: after decades of neglect, or even
worse, every new academic introductory film textbook now feels compelled to
include a chapter or some major subchapter on the American avant-garde,
and this simply wasn't the case in the seventies or eighties. Some of that, I
think, is due to the pressure exerted by David Bordwell and Kristin
Thompson's FilmArt, which is the leading textbook in the field. I see this as a
salutary development. That is, even beginning film students who might never
take another film course wind up reading twenty pages on the American
avant-garde, or the American/European avant-gardes, and are therefore at
least encouraged to learn how to look at non-narrative means of expression, at
the same time that they're learning how to look at Hitchcock and Welles.
Michelson: And a good deal of this is due to the entrance of the filmmakers
themselves into the academy in the seventies.
Jacobs:Okay, there are so many things that we are coming up with here. The twenty
pages on American avant-garde cinema in a textbook are a burial, for the most
part. They relegate American avant-garde filmmaking to something that took
place in the sixties and early seventies. They don't bring students into the real
problems and excitements of an on-going art. Also, students aren't taught how
120 OCTOBER

to look at avant-garde film. It is very rare that somebody clues them into
sensory apprehension of these works.
Arthur:So, you'd rather see avant-garde film excluded from standard film history
textbooks?
Jacobs:I'd rather see a provocation than something settled.
Iles:Ken's point about people not being educated in terms of sensory apprehension
applies to film and art. I think that there has been an extraordinary mediation
of art, and film, and the world around us, by technology. It's hard to get people
to engage fully in the experience of looking directly at a film or a painting. It's
hard just to be present with a film or painting because to do so is antithetical
to contemporary experience. You can't turn on the television news without
having the screen divide into four parts, and you don't know which to look at
first. It's impossible to have an engaged, focused, quiet, committed...
Jacobs:... contemplation?
Iles:... contemplation of anything. This is a huge problem because you cannot
possibly deeply enter something, and therefore understand it, unless you
do that.
Turvey:Justa point of clarification, Ken. Are you saying that a shift has occurred? In
other words, are you saying that there used to be better spectators and now
there's been a deterioration of the audience?
Jacobs:That's a golden age myth. There are more good spectators today than there
ever were back in the sixties and early seventies. Many people came then
simply to see taboo. They came to see censorable subject matter, or even
political things that somebody was attempting in a small film that the
mainline films were staying awayfrom. Now, mainline works can offer that and
people don't have to deal with innovative form.
Iles: The most important place where obsolescence is a potential reality is in the
technology itself. Take Line Describing a Cone [1973] by Anthony McCall.
We made film loops of it for the Into the Light show, and we discovered that
the original stock onto which the film was printed no longer exists. If you
don't have that intense black, the film cannot function properly. And
there was a moment when we really wondered whether the film had been
lost forever. That really brought home to me the fragility and materiality
of the medium.
Arthur:We've been hearing about the loss of film stocks, the inability to replace
parts on projectors, for thirty years. How, therefore, to explain the persistence
measured in numbers, measured in number of venues, measured by all kinds
of criteria, of avant-garde film?
Jacobs:World War II, the leftovers of World War II. Cheap projectors, cheap cameras,
cheap film were dumped by the military, and this tremendously aided this new
art. Now there's a dumping of film technology due to digital, and there is still
film around if you can find this stuff. People can begin to play with these
materials and these technologies in ways they hadn't even thought about
Obsolescence
and AmericanAvant-GardeFilm 121

doing before, because they were expected to make a film that fit within the
channels that had been set up.
Iles:It has persisted not only because of this dumping, but also because of the love
that people making the work have for the technology, and the deep
understanding they have for the possibilities that celluloid offers in relation to
light and dark, and a chamber of projective space. It's a low-tech, hands-on,
performative material medium.
Turvey:This takes us to another way-and this is not necessarily what I think-in
which people argue there has been a shift in American avant-garde cinema. It
has been suggested that filmmakers these days are less interested in exploring
the specific properties of cinema as a medium. One of the reasons could be
the impending obsolescence of technology that we're talking about. But
the other reason, surely, is that since the sixties, there has been in the art
world in general, not just in film, a shift away from medium-specific artistic
practice, from work that is rooted in an expertise in a medium. And I guess
I'm wondering, first, whether that's happened with film, and second,
whether it's a problem.
Frye:I think it was a problem that seems to be solving itself, because my sense is that
a lot of the work that came out of that change-that shift away from medium-
specificity and a sense of understanding the medium-was pretty dreadful.
But I think that it's solving itself because people are starting to realize it was
not very good.
Iles: But I also think that there's a lot of work now which is dealing with the
specificity of film. The work by filmmakers both young and established that
I've seen recently could not have been made without a deep understanding of
what the film medium is capable of. Many filmmakers are deliberately
engaging with the material qualities of film. They develop their own emulsion,
bury film in the ground, alter the speed, rust it, and use rare stocks, a 3-D
camera, or special projectors with unusual aspect ratios. I saw Bruce McClure's
film performances recently, including XXX, OXX, XOX, XXO (Slapdash
Slapstick)[2001], which were absolutely stunning. He projected four superim-
posed sets of film loops sprayed with Indian inks and colored them live with
multiple colored gels. The frame melted as one layer of color emerged out of
another. He is addressing issues like surface, interval, focus, apparatus, frame,
sprocket hole, and sound, as did the Structural filmmakers in the seventies,
but in a completely original way. In my opinion, he's created a new language.
So I think what we're talking about is not obsolescence, but transformation.
I
Frye: think you're totally right, that people who are making interesting films right
now are really concerned about working with their medium.
Turvey:But you're saying that for a while they weren't?
Frye:I'm saying for a while a lot of people didn't feel like they had to learn how to
make a film.
Michelson:Chrissie's evocation of the difficulty regarding the reconstitution of
122 OCTOBER

Anthony McCall's work does, nonetheless, point to a problem in the future,

and that is the obsolescence of the technologies for exhibiting this kind of
work. For example, it may be very difficult to find, eventually, the kinds of
monitors that would be ordinarily used today for videocassettes because the
technologies, as we progress, become obsolete. Preservation is very important,
and so is the current establishment of museums of the moving image as reposi-
tories for a lot of extremely interesting stages and variants in the technology
of the moving image, for many of them are indeed obsolete.
Iles: In the art world, it's the same thing. What does one do with works that were
made with very ephemeral materials, such as the work of Eva Hesse? Some of
her latex sculptures are now disintegrating. Does one recast an Eva Hesse work
in order to preserve the three-dimensional shadow of it? I've talked with Ken
about this problem in relation to his NervousSystemperformances. I think the
issue of preservation has to be looked at as a whole by museums, whether they
are museums that, like the Whitney, collect film within the context of an art
collection, or whether they are film archives or film museums. The over-
whelming response to Into the Light is partly because people are seeing film
installations that have been reconstructed from scratch and brought back to
life. If it weren't for Jonas Mekas, Paul Sharits's ShutterInterfacewouldn't exist.
It was because Jonas managed to find the A and B reels in the basement of
Anthology Film Archives that we are able, with Christopher Sharits's permis-
sion, to restore the piece. Anthology is an extraordinary repository of rare,
precious work.
Frye: would just interject one caveat. I think technological obsolescence is a lot
I
more difficult to predict than people like to think it is, and that there are
plenty of people in the business world who would kill for the facility for
prediction that a lot of people in the art world attribute to themselves. For all
the talk about the imminent obsolescence of film, which may or may not take
place-and I don't pretend to be any kind of seer-I have yet to see digital
projection in a commercial theater. I'll believe it when I see it.
Iles:Oh, it will happen.
Arthur: I'm of two minds about this. The much-vaunted war between digital or
video, and film, is in certain ways much like media hype before a heavyweight
prizefight. When you have first-generation film purists like Ken Jacobs,
Michael Snow, Jonas Mekas, Ernie Gehr, Bruce Baillie, Andrew Noren, Peter
Hutton, and Gunvor Nelson all working in video; and you have younger-
generation filmmakers like Peggy Ahwesh and Scott Stark who move back and
forth between digital and film; and you've got Stan Brakhage willing to commit
his precious hand-painted films to VHS for distribution, it seems to me that
the notion of medium specificity is somewhat vitiated.
Jacobs:I think the approaching obsolescence of film has attracted people to see
what's possible in this thing before it's gone. Obsolescence, or approaching
obsolescence, can actually be very attractive to a lot of people.
 and AmericanAvant-GardeFilm
Obsolescence 123

Iles: Apart from the fact that art world magazines don't cover experimental film,
there is another reason it does not get seen by most of my colleagues in the
art world. It's a bit like someone who doesn't know anything about classical
music. If you don't know anything about classical music, how do you know
what to choose to hear? There's so little knowledge and information about
experimental film made available beyond the immediate film community.
It's about accessibility. One of the things I try to do at the Whitney is, during
the week, rather than screening a film at 3 P.M.on a Thursday, I have it
repeated constantly in a gallery context. And then suddenly fifty people sit
there. If you take the seats away and put four benches in the gallery, many
art visitors will sit and watch. If you had a black box in the middle of
Chelsea-which is usually flooded with people-showing Ken's Tom, Tom,
The Piper'sSon [1969] repeatedly every day for a month, you would expose
that work to people who had no idea it existed, and whose thinking about
the way in which images are used could be transformed. It would be revolu-
tionary. But nobody is doing that.
Michelson: But it's also the case, Chrissie, that traditionally the art world, and
particularly the artists in the art world, are not really very much interested in
the independent avant-garde or experimental cinema. The work of artists who
are using cinematic imagery or stills is essentially dependent on the resources
of mainstream, industrially produced cinema. One exception, of course, is
Richard Serra, who not only attended every screening at Anthology Film
Archives, but who also produced some very interesting films.
Iles:But what is interesting to me is to compare, for example, left is rightand right is
wrong and left is wrong and right is right [2000], the installation by Douglas
Gordon shown last year at Dia, and Ken's film The Doctor'sDream [1978].
Gordon's installation re-edits Otto Preminger's 1949 Hollywood film Whirlpool
by separating the odd- and even-numbered frames into two groups. The odd
ones are then projected to the left and the even to the right in a double
projection. The Doctor's Dream re-edits the original film to place the
numerically middle shot as the first, followed by the one that originally
preceded that middle shot, then the one that originally followed it, and so on.
The art world does not know TheDoctor'sDream,but they know Gordon's work
at Dia. If you were able to see both pieces, important things could be learned,
and new thinking could develop out of being aware of both.
Jacobs:It's a very peculiar split, and I can't really explain it very much. Probably
Chrissie crosses over more than myself. What's featured in those things are
things that somehow have broken off into their own kind of art world, have
taken an art world place, that avant-garde cinema and video somehow did not.
I can hardly understand it. But it seems to me that they're mostly very boring
ideas about cinema. There's no product in those ideas.
Iles:It's also a question of accessibility to a space at a more reasonable time than 6, 7,
8, 9, or 10 P.M.I'm not criticizing cinema, I'm just saying, in terms of exposure,
124 OCTOBER

there are ways to open up experimental film to an audience beyond its core
members. One of the reasons contemporary film art may be lacking is the
ignorance of the history of experimental film. There needs to be Anthology
screenings, and Robert Beck screenings, and Ocularis and Whitney and
MoMA screenings, and this kind of black box I'm talking about in somewhere
like Chelsea, only so that you can broaden the discussion and so that you can
also expose film in a space and at a time when people who are interested in
film can see it.
Frye: think that one reason for this problem with accessibility that you're pointing
I
to is that experimental filmmakers all fall in love with the movies at the movie
theater. No matter how close the kind of art work they make comes to art
world thinking about the medium, they identify with Hollywood and
commercial film to a certain extent, not in the sense that that's what they want
to make, but in the sense that they want their films to be projected at a theater,
at a certain time, with an audience there.
Jacobs:It has to be encased in darkness and silence, not a black box in the street that
people are going to pass by and get a dollop of.
Frye:But Ken, what's your perfect venue?
Jacobs:My perfect venue is anyplace where I can go in and not be interrupted and
distracted by other things, and be given the scale of presentation that some
works require. Putting it in a little black box is not going to happen.
Arthur:If PBS called tomorrow and said they wanted to show Tom, Tomon some
Sunday night independent cinema slot on television ...
Jacobs:People have a choice at home whether they watch with the lights on or they
put the lights out and they concentrate on this rectangle. One can create, if
you want that kind of thing, the isolation of the object, even at home on
television. And you can also have a marvelous sound system that, instead of a
little squeak from a black box, really fills your aural space.
Arthur:So, you wouldn't object to that?
Jacobs:Not at all, it would be up to the person that's watching. But I want to say that I
love the idea of making work that can't work into the art market, whether in
the form of a little black box or something else. I think that's a real
accomplishment. Very little I've found in the art market takes me to the edge,
where the other or the new is being introduced, where I'm being asked notjust
to look at something unusual but to transform myself, to find resources in
myself that have not been tapped before and are brought into play. I approach
new art very selfishly.I want to be revivified by it, I want to be pulled out of stale
habits, I want to be taken beyond what I know. I say Fred Worden's Oneshould
be celebrated, but the art world is not looking, the magazines are not looking,
the art writers, for the most part, are touts for the galleries, placing their bets
on this or that thing that's going to be a good investment, and to hell with
them. The work of my generation coincided with a revolt against consumerism,
a willingness to go for expanded consciousness, and that's very, very far, so far
 and AmericanAvant-GardeFilm
Obsolescence 125

away from just being the latest, incredible hit, whether in the art market or
mainstream commercial cinema, where we're up against people who spend as
much money arousing interest in their film product as they do in making it.
Arthur:I want to speak to this notion of revolt. At the end of the sixties and begin-
ning of the seventies, utopian energies were focused on the democratization
of film. Jonas Mekas planned to reduce films to 8mm and sell them in
bookstores, and there were traveling road shows of avant-garde films that
would play in regular commercial theaters. I saw several of them. Then, with
the advent of cable television, there was a moment in which avant-garde film-
makers thought this would become a real channel for getting their work out to
the "masses,"and obviously that didn't happen. That is one change, I think,
from the time that Ken is talking about. No one's thinking in those terms now.
Bruce McClure or Brian Frye are not thinking "tomorrow HBO," and in one
sense that's more realistic but its also, in a way,unfortunate.
Frye: Ninety-nine percent of people living in the United States today are not
interested in avant-garde film, 99 percent of people living in the United States
today are not interested in art, theyjust aren't interested. I may be idiosyncratic
in this respect, because in large part I think people from my generation
have internalized a sense of wanting to strike back against evil corporate
interests, but the fact of the matter is most of the people who spend all their
time striking back against evil corporate interests do it in the most banal,
pathetic, and ridiculous way one can possibly imagine. And they don't make art
or protest of a kind that's any more interesting than any of what they're
protesting. What I'm really more interested in is art, and all the rest of this
"revolt"stuff, although it comes along with art a lot of the time, I'm just not
interested in it. I'm certainly not interested in it in an art world context,
because I think it's superficial.
Turvey:But can I ask you, Brian, if you don't share Ken's aspiration to "revolt,"what
is the value of your practice for you? What is the point of it?
Well,
Frye: I think it has the same point as making any other kind of art work. All I'm
saying is I'm not scared of markets. I think the art market has been around for
a really long time, and, lo and behold, people still make interesting art. I
mean, it's bought and it's sold and they put a price tag on it.
Turvey:So all you care about is that an art work be aesthetically interesting. It
doesn't have to change the world, it doesn't have to "revolt"?
No,
Frye: it doesn't. I think that kind of iconoclasm is important for some artists, but
not for all of them. I don't think people make good art because they "revolt"
against something.
Turvey:So it could be that there has been a shift since the early seventies, that for
people of Ken's generation, attached to the conception of experimental avant-
garde art is a certain notion of resistance, while Brian, it seems to me that
you're saying that that notion is much less operative for you, or much less
126 OCTOBER

important. By the way, this is one of the senses of the word obsolescence that
October, I think, is very interested in.
Frye:Honestly, I think that artists make exceptionally poor social critics, and I
think the more people try to turn art into social criticism, in most cases, the
worse it gets.
Michelson:But it's also a matter of historical periods. There are times when artists
have been really driven to make certain kinds of political statements through
their art, around their art.
Jacobs:The art world, in its ignorance of art, sells objects, and we create experiences,
we create life-and-death challenges to the psyche.
Michelson:But Ken, someone like Mark Rothko would not have thought that he was
producing objects. I think he thought he was generating experiences.
Jacobs:Mark Rothko?
Michelson:Yes. Well, you say paintings are objects, but filmmakers are producing
experiences.
Jacobs:I am a painter. I love painting.
Michelson:Oh, then I have misunderstood you.
Jacobs:I'm talking about an art market that was very likely part of why Mark Rothko
committed suicide. It had to be incredibly disappointing to that generation to
work with the kind of idealism I believe many of them had, and end up making
commodities for the art market. What a downer. I would say, looking at Kline
at the end, even Pollock, that they were very disappointed, given the kind of
aspirations they had, in how their work ended up as more goddamned
commodities in the hands of art gallery dealers.
Michelson: But it's simply that duality between experience and object that I
wanted to...
Jacobs:Oh, of course. Of course they created experiences.
Arthur: We would probably sell objects if we could, but we can't, and we know
that, because there's been a long track record of near-total uncommodifiability
of experimental film. But there's something that's so self-defeating about
this. The revolt or resistance is not resistance on the level of a film's content
or its formal attributes, but a resistance on the level of where it can be
shown and who can see it. That seems to be for many the dominant side of
its cultural resistance.
Turvey:So the fact that it's not commodifiable is what constitutes its resistance?
Arthur: Right. And only that, since I think that that cultural ideology of
oppositionality in avant-garde film is also something that has seen better days.
Jacobs:In the fifties, working with Star Spangled to Death [1957-2002], I actually
seriously considered the possibility of going to a theater, going into the
projection booth, pushing out the projectionist, locking the doors, and
showing my work, and then I would go to jail. But that isn't the case today. The
last couple of weekends I showed work at the American Museum of the
Moving Image. I've also shown at the Whitney, and MoMA. As you said
 and AmericanAvant-GardeFilm
Obsolescence 127

before, the venues are available in a way we've never had before.
Obsolescence? I don't think so.
Arthur:But we won't see you in my local multiplex.
Iles:Thank goodness.
Arthur:No! On the contrary. It would be great to see it.
Jacobs:The audience would be disappointed with what I'm offering because they
come there to get a recognizable hamburger, they come there expecting...
Iles:Yes, it's like McDonald's.
Frye:Hollywood is offering something really different from what avant-garde film-
makers offer. And the fact of the matter is Hollywood studios have turned out
some really great films as well. We all know that. But trying to establish a
parallel between what you and I do, and what they do is pointless. It'sjust not
going to happen. We're working in a whole different world.
Iles: I was reading an interview with Francis Ford Coppola the other day about the
making of Apocalypse Now [1979], and he was talking about how few
opportunities there are now to make serious films because of the extreme
commodification and commercialization of the film industry. He was con-
vinced it would be impossible to make Apocalypse Now today.
Frye: Well Malick made The Thin RedLine [1998].
Michelson: But Coppola had great difficulty finding anybody to make any film
whatsoever, for quite some time.
Turvey: But just because something is commodifiable, or "mainstream," or
Hollywood, doesn't mean it lacks artistic merit, even of the sort that we
would normally ascribe to avant-garde films. Ken, do you see contemporary
Hollywood films? Do you ever go?
Michelson:Oh, he does.
Jacobs:I see some.
Michelson:He's lectured on them, he's taught them to students.
Jacobs:Right. I like Drop Dead Gorgeous[1999], Breast Men [1997], and A Chinese
Odyssey[1994] starring Stephen Chow.
[Laughter.]
Michelson:Not only those films. He mentioned those to indicate a distance from
industrial films, but he knows them quite well.
Jacobs:I don't know new movies well.
Michelson:No, but you know a whole canon that reaches way far back in time.
Iles:I alwayslike to take the broad view and look at how other aspects of culture, as
well as science, politics, and economics, are involved. What is this anxiety
about obsolescence signifying? No one's mentioned September 11, but there is
a larger context here, which may be the end of the American Empire.
Therefore, one question in my mind is: How does experimental cinema, as it's
been understood to this point, operate within what might be termed this
American Empire, and its cultural imperialism that's dominated the scene for
the last fifty years, including experimental cinema, which, of course, is more
128 OCTOBER

powerful in America than anywhere else in the world, for all its relatively
peripheral role?
Jacobs:Well, if the fundamentalists take over, that's the end of this, okay? At least
we're allowed to operate, we're not destroyed as infidels. So we're ignored, but
we're allowed activity in one of the greatest of the arts.
Iles:But there is something important in the fact that this discussion is taking place
here, and not, say,London. In New York there is an incredible vitality, and one
of the things I've noticed is how hard it is for avant-garde or experimental
filmmakers to make a film. The filmmakers that I know are tough, rigorous,
and determined. They're operating without a safety net, and sometimes with-
out proper recognition. There is an energy and resilience among the
experimental filmmaking community here that is exceptional. I don't think a
lot of people have the stamina for it, frankly, and I think this rigor is part of
the work.
Michelson:I think you're absolutely right, and it was this that led me-many, many
years ago in my early encounters with this scene-to think of filmmaking as
the last of the heroic occupations. And let me say parenthetically that this was
one of the reasons, I think, that I moved from the art world, from writing
about painting and sculpture, to reviewing experimental films. I found
filmmakers much more interesting as individuals. I think that, in part, the
toughness, the difficulty, the amount of stamina and ingenuity that it took to
make film made them much more interesting than most of the people whom I
knew who were working, even if they were not successful, within the estab-
lished institutions of museum, gallery, and so on. This is, I think, fundamental
in my own decision to concentrate my own particular energies on experimental
cinema, as it is called.
Arthur: Your article "Film and the Radical Aspiration" is now, what, thirty-five
years old?
Michelson:Nineteen sixty-six.
Jacobs:Do you stand by it today?
Michelson:Yes, I do, and in fact I've even cannibalized it a bit from time to time for
other things. There are specific statements within it that I might want to qualify
or modify, and obviously if I were writing it now, I would be writing very, very
differently, not simply because I've evolved, but also because ways of thinking
and writing about cinema have evolved since then as well. When I wrote "Film
and the Radical Aspiration," the enormous work done on film history and film
theory since then had not yet happened; which leads me, by the way, to a
question for Paul, as somebody who does watch new film and think continu-
ously about it. I was wondering whether you feel, as a writer and as a reader of
other writers, that there have been or have not been shifts in the kind of
critical and theoretical work on independent, avant-garde film?
Arthur:Within academic circles, I think there's been a dramatic shift. I think that
David James's Allegoriesof Cinemais a landmark work in its approach to the
 and AmericanAvant-GardeFilm
Obsolescence 129

avant-garde. It's had very positive reverberations on other people, on people

who have written since that work came out-I'm thinking of Lauren
Rabinovich, Jeffrey Ruoff, Juan Suarez, and others-who are interested in
different kinds of historiography that have to do with institutional and material
history. So in that area, there's been a discernible shift. In terms of mainstream
writing about avant-garde film, probably not. There's more being written, but I
think the way in which I write about new films is not all that different from, say,
the wayJonas Mekas wrote about a new film in hisjournal for the VillageVoice.
Frye: I have to say that I find your writing something of an anomaly within
contemporary criticism, because my sense of a lot of contemporary writing
about experimental film is that it's become really academicized, and I feel that
a lot of people writing, especially people who started writing more recently,
have really bad eyes; they don't look at film very well.
Michelson:Do you think that they are inaccurate in their descriptions?
Frye:I mean that they don't seem to really look at films very closely, not in the sense
that they're inaccurate, but that there's cliche piled upon cliche. I often find
myself distrusting a writer's ability to distinguish a really great film from a
really mediocre one. I think there's a lot of very good historians out there, and
I think that contemporary film writers, at least a lot of those whom I've read,
have done a fantastic job of piling up factual information, which I think is
really important. And yet I don't find that they tend to contribute to my
understanding of the actual films all that well.
Iles:But what strikes me about film writing is that it is written for people who already
know what experimental film is. An awful lot is taken for granted. A lot of film
writing is either highly theoretical or simply descriptive. I would think that
one of the reasons that David's book Allegoriesof Cinemais so successful is that
he writes in a way that is both analytical and accessible. I'm calling for more of
that kind of writing. I use David's book constantly.
Arthur:I'm sure you're making exceptions for present company, since Brian and
I both write for a general film magazine on avant-garde film for people
who know a lot about film but don't know anything about experimental
cinema, and therefore we're forced to write in a way that tries to make
these films accessible.
Iles:I'm calling for more of that.
Michelson:I certainly find David's book extremely important. I think, though, for a
general audience of the kind you're talking about, it would be a difficult book.
I think he does take for granted quite a lot, and the texture of his writing is
tight, dense.
Iles:Yes, you're right. Ken said at the beginning that there should have been more
articles about experimental film in October.Perhaps all I'm calling for is more
articles like the ones Octoberhas already published, which I think are very
important and have taught me a lot about experimental film.
Michelson:I think that both you and Ken are right in remarking on the absence of
130 OCTOBER

coverage in Octoberbeyond a certain period. I think that's true, although,

obviously in the eighties, certain attempts were made. We published interviews
with people such as Vivian Dick, as well as work by people such as James
Benning. But it's true that the younger generation is not covered, and I regret
that. I can't say it's our fault. I would have to say it is my fault.
Frye:From my perspective, I feel there has been plenty of theoretical writing. What
we're seeing is a shortage of criticism. What I see happening in the art world,
and the film world as well, is this kind of self-congratulatory writing by the
numbers, and that what we're really missing is people who are willing to point
to certain films and say, "This film's not any good," not because it doesn't
correspond to whatever theoretical position I happen to be coming from, but
because it's actuallyjust a bad movie. Criticism these days tends to be a kind of
boosterism in most cases, and I think that really doesn't do anybody a service.
Arthur:There's nothing disgraceful about boosterism given our cultural marginality.
I can understand the place for the kind of evaluative criticism you're talking
about. But as someone who writes as often as I can in mainstream contexts
about this sort of film, I consider it one of my duties to get people to see the
work, and to explain it in ways that will make it seem as potentially edifying
and entertaining as going to a nearby multiplex.
Frye:Well, I try to write about films I like too, and I try to write about films I think
are important and interesting, but I think it's also important to have a situation
in which everything doesn't automatically become good when you write about
it. I think about the people who helped me, as writers, throughout the time I
have been interested in experimental film, and most have been critics, film
critics, people like Jim Hoberman, Manny Farber, or Peter Bogdanovich. A lot
of that is the writing I'd like to see more of, personally, because I feel like
sometimes what comes out of the university isn't very helpful.
Turvey:Why, Brian?
Frye:Well, I think part of it is a result of the extent to which theory has come to
dominate academic writing, and I think that a lot of students go through
school simply learning how to parse the theories they read in class.
Turvey:I couldn't agree more. Part of the problem, I think, is that they learn theory
badly, because it is taught so, so badly. Graduate students in the arts, at least in
the Anglo-American world, are not typically encouraged to critically reflect on
the theories they read. Theorists such as Benjamin, Adorno, Lacan, Foucault,
all the usual suspects, are taught as if everything they say is true, when the
opposite is probably the case. The result, in my view, is that the majority of
theoretical writing on the arts today consists of little more than the
mechanical and dogmatic application of the same theories ad nauseam. I
think this is a major reason for the inability to see films or art that you are
talking about, Brian. So many theoretical writers, it seems to me, approach art
works with a theory in hand that they believe in unconditionally, and that they
then apply to the art work regardless of whether it reveals something about it
 and AmericanAvant-GardeFilm
Obsolescence 131

or not. They use the art work to prove the theory. Someone like Slavoj zi~ek, I
think, is a classic example of this. Lacanianism is like a religious faith for him.
It's not open to falsification, as theories in the sciences are. And you already
know what he is going to say about every art work he writes about in advance-
it's going to turn out to be yet another illustration of Lacanianism. Theorists
like ziiek don't start with the art work, and then move upward in search of a
framework that will illuminate it. This is the type of theoretical writing that
graduate students are taught to admire and emulate-with terrible
consequences, in my view.
Frye:And I think that one of the reasons that, for instance, Annette's writing is so
good is that it doesn't read like that. I pick up film books these days and I just
cringe to think about reading through them, because they're so poorly written
for all the information that's in them. They're bloodless.
Iles:Well, you should be able to describe what you're seeing before you start analyzing
what it is. Most writers don't do that. It's one thing if you're discussing the
Mona Lisa, and you have a picture of it opposite the text. But with a film, you
don't have that, because film is a time-bound medium. Robert Beavers, by the
way,is an extraordinarily articulate writer.
Frye: an example, there's a book on Joseph Cornell that I got a copy of recently.
As
Michelson:Which one?
Frye:I think it is called Stargazingin the Cinema.There was a still reproduced in this
hard-cover, glossy, expensive book that was a photograph taken of a video of
the film playing on a television. And I thought, "Youcouldn't go to the trouble
of going and getting an actual still made?" To me, that shows a lack of respect
for the actual film, and it may be the first time a reader has ever seen it.
Iles: This brings me back to what you said earlier, Ken: "We create experiences."
Perhaps when we're thinking about obsolescence and shifts, what we're
thinking about is how we experience something. And I think that, in a very
McLuhan-esque way, new technology has a negative physiological impact. New
technology shifts the way one understands materiality, the way one
experiences it physically,and by materiality, I include painting, sculpture, and
film. You can see the same film projected in three different spaces and have a
completely different experience of it due to differences in light, screen
surface, size, the color and quality of the print, or the physical space of the
screening venue, just as you do when a painting or a sculpture is hung in
three different kinds of contexts in different museums or galleries. Our
fundamental understanding of what physical space is in relation to the
space of the film has changed.
Michelson:This sense of loss that Chrissie has is, of course, shared by those who make
industrially produced film, who lament the idea that we'll no longer be alone
with people in a dark room, involved in an experience of something that is
alive, and who lament the death of the kind of cinephilia that they knew until
probably the end of the seventies at least. Going to see a film was also a way of
132 OCTOBER

organizing a social event, being with people, and discussing the film afterward
in a cafe with a glass of wine or coffee.
Turvey:And you're saying that's now obsolete?
Michelson:I'm not saying that it's obsolete, but it's certainly no longer as common as
it was, and that Chrissie's sense of loss is parallel.
Iles:And this may also be one of the reasons why artists have reached out to film as
something they want to work with. They feel a nostalgia for cinema, and what
cinema was, whether it's the wonderful old cinemas with elaborate interiors,
or the sense of theatrical engagement you have, which you still get at the
opera and, regrettably, don't get in cinemas anymore because they've become
very impersonal and commercialized. But one does still experience a sense of
intimacy in smaller screenings of avant-garde film, where you are very aware of
the audience and the space.
Michelson: The architecture of the first Anthology Film Archives theater is an
interesting instance of what Chrissie is talking about, namely, the way you
experience film differently in different spaces. Indeed, it was an attempt at a
form of resistance against the kind of spatial situation of the ordinary theater
showing industrially produced film.
Arthur:But it was also a theater constructed, in large part, for the optimal presenta-
tion of one particular film.
Jacobs:And it didn't work.
[Laughter.]
Arthur:For that film or for any film?
Jacobs:Any film. I too have a utopian exhibition plan, and that's waiting for the Net
to improve its way of delivering film and video. It seems to me mostly a matter
of time.
Michelson:What do you mean?
Jacobs:To give films over to the Net, to let them get out there and let them have a
social existence, and forget about the little money that comes back from these
things. Just forget about it. We'll ask people, "Did you like this? Then send me
a dollar."
Iles:But how does that connect with your statement about "Wecreate experiences"?
Isn't an experience on the Net vastly diluted in terms of cinematic space?
Jacobs:We read things in translation, we read things in different typefaces, on
different kinds of paper. I was asked to put Tom,Tom,ThePiper'sSon on video.
Put Tom,Tom,ThePipers Son on video? It seemed nuts. But it was done and it
looks nice! So if I can have that thing going out on the Net, and finding some-
one in Madagascar... it would be wonderful.

-New York City, November 17, 2001