The Moving Image

With the fourth volume of their Treasures from American Film Archives series, the National Film Preservation Foundation has turned its attention to one of the richest, most vital veins of film history, the postwar American avant-garde. While their historical importance is undeniable, the seminal works of the avant-garde remain much less widely seen than documentaries or narrative features of comparable significance, despite (or perhaps because of) the unique perceptual, formal, and material challenges they present to ideas of what cinema can be. It is the material challenges that have contributed most to the relatively low profile of the avantgarde since the 1980s. The great flourishing of the 1960s and 1970s was made possible in part by the existence of cheap 16mm cameras and stock as well as the explosion of nontheatrical venues like college campuses and film societies. With the advent of even cheaper [End Page 187] video equipment and the gradual dissolution of nontheatrical distribution networks over the past two decades, the number of spaces in which small-gauge avant-garde films can even be screened has contracted rapidly. For many, this set will act as an introduction to the work of a number of filmmakers known, if at all, only by reputation.

There has nevertheless been a surprising renewal of interest in the avant-garde in the past few years, evidenced by sold-out screenings at events like the New York Film Festival's annual Views from the Avant-Garde program as well as a growing number of DVD releases. Companies as diverse as the Criterion Collection, the Center for Visual Music, and Fantoma have released high-quality DVD sets devoted to filmmakers such as Stan Brakhage, Oskar Fischinger, Jordan Belson, Kenneth Anger, Maya Deren, and James Broughton, while Kino has put out three volumes worth of films that were once circulated by Raymond Rohauer. Treasures from American Film Archives IV: Avant-Garde Film, 1947–1986 (referred to in the extensive accompanying booklet as Treasures IV) is, however, the first DVD set focused on the postwar avant-garde as a whole rather than on individual filmmakers or collections. It includes films culled from the archives of the organizations that have done the most to keep avant-garde cinema in the public eye and to preserve its legacy for posterity: Anthology Film Archives, the Museum of Modern Art, the Donnell Media Center of the New York Public Library, the Pacific Film Archive, and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences' Academy Film Archive. Credit is due to all for their extraordinarily meticulous preservation work and the care with which these unusually delicate films were transferred and presented on DVD. Several of the films are meant to be watched in total silence, and the DVD producers have respected these preferences in the set, including new scores by Anthology Film Archives' composer-in-residence John Zorn only for those films that were originally accompanied by live music. In cases like Bridges-Go-Round (Shirley Clarke, 1958), where the film was shown with alternate scores at different times, multiple options are included.

Treasures IV follows in the wake of the mammoth seven-disc set Unseen Cinema: Early American Avant-Garde Cinema, 1894–1941, released in 2005, a curatorially dubious mixture of independently produced shorts, early films from the first two decades of film production, and excerpts from Hollywood features. Unlike Unseen Cinema, which made a large number of remarkable films available while diluting the historical meaning of the term "avant-garde," Treasures IV is focused entirely on the work of filmmakers whose work falls squarely within that tradition. No explanation is given anywhere in the booklet for the use of 1947 and 1986 as brackets for the twenty-six films in the set, but there is an unspoken logic to it: the standard history of the American avant-garde, summarized most famously in P. Adams Sitney's Visionary Film, begins in 1943 with Maya Deren and Alexander Hammid's Meshes...