Avant-Garde Cinema

							Avant-Garde Cinema
    Pramaggiore organizes by
       common aesthetics
She see FIVE TYPES:
• Abstract Film
• The City Symphony
• Surrealist Film
• Structuralist Film
• The Compilation Film
     Avant-Garde = a name
  applied to many types of films
• Today: The Historic Avant-Garde
               (Abstract & Surreal)

• Wed: Experimental cinema late 20th
  Century                (Structuralist)
     Other Avant-Garde practices
• Underground Cinema
    – (Warhol, Kenneth Anger, Jack Smith)
•   Soviet Modernism
•   Experimental Forms of Documentary
•   Feminist and Queer Cinema (70s, 80s, 90s)
•   Video art practices
Where does the term come from?
               “avant-garde,”
            a general definition
• The advance guard: the foremost part of the army
  to enter battle
• Pioneers in any art medium
   – “in the vanguard”
   – formal innovation
      • aesthetic experimentation
      • doing things with the medium never done before
      • stretching the conventional limits of the medium
   – anti-establishment, against the status quo
          First uses of the term
• Used right before and right after WWI
  (1914-1918)
• Describes group of radical art movements
  –   Cubism/Futurism           1909-->
  –   Russian Constructivism    1918-->
  –   DADA                      1916 -->
  –   Surrealism                1924 -->
  The Historic A-G Filmmaking
• Non-commercial
• Rebellion - break with tradition
• International
  – Australia, Belgium, England, France, Germany,
    Holland, Italy, Spain, Sweden, U.S.S.R. and the
    U.S.
          Formal features of
        Historical A-G Cinema
• Non-representational (Abstraction)
• Non-narrative
• Explore Medium Specificity
   – Push on the limits of the image
   – Redefine what is possible
   – New language
• Aesthetic experimentation
• Emphasizes Sensory experience
   – Overwhelm the spectator
  The Inter-war years in Europe
1. Political and Social Unrest between wars
      •   Economic -- gleeful wealth and extreme inflations
      •   Political -- revolutions of early 20th Century
      •   Social and cultural unrest
          –   class consciousness
2. Opposition Against Conventional Cinema
   – Technological advances
   – Why then do so many movies look like “canned
     theatre”?
   – Interest in the soul of the medium. “pure cinema”
   – Cineclubs, film societies, journals, patrons
  The Inter-war years in Europe
3. The Artistic Climate of Europe
   -   complete abstraction -- freeing form from
       representation
   -   the fragment

4. New Mentality -- Experience of Modernity

5. The War and Modernization