Martin Rumsby

Although they derive from similar histories Canadian and US avant-garde films are different from each other. Since its very beginning, as part of the European avant-garde movements of the early Twentieth Century, the avant-garde cinema has consistently been concerned with Freudian based representations of the self; specifically the separation of our conscious, unconscious and physical selves.

Many early European avant-garde filmmakers were concerned with developing a non-objective, spiritual language for film. Oskar Fischinger, for example, forged his aesthetic from a synthesis of scientific and mystical thought. Fischinger strove in his art making to create 'optical discussions' capable of revealing the spiritual aspect inherent in all things. Fischingers's work was an important influence on artists such as James Whitney, Jordan Belson and Harry Smith who continued, each in their own way, to develop a non-objective, spiritually based avant-garde cinema.

Although there was also a revolutionary political aspect underlying much of the European avant-garde, social concerns have been rarely brought to the fore in post-WWII American art. This despite the fact artists who were later to become famous as abstract expressionists had been employed on the publicly funded Federal Art Project. The rudiments of the American avant- garde cinema can be traced back to the Workers Film and Photo League established in the 1930s. The Film and Photo League established equipment co-operatives, filmmaking courses, film journals and a distribution network as well as producing socially transgressive films such as PIE IN THE SKY (1934-35).

The American avant-garde cinema which rose to prominence during the 1940s was based on the 'naturalistic individualism' of American artists who saw themselves as pioneers of a New World aesthetic. This aesthetic had already been advanced by a number of American critics. In 1948, for example, Rene d'Harnoncourt wrote that freedom of individual expression was the basis of American culture and that individualistic trends in western art should be privileged above collectivist approaches. Film artists Maya Deren, Marie Menken, Stan Brakhage and Ernie Gehr strove to create an authentic and vital cinema capable of expressing lone personal needs. Their work implies that one learns about oneself by giving oneself completely to the experience of the world.

After WWII, American art graduated from its previously regional to a new international status. This was achieved because American artists successfully integrated traditional American themes into a context which related to Twentieth Century art and thought ­ particularly those ideas concerned with redefining the western tradition.

In well over 300 films Stan Brakhage strove to create cinematic metaphors for consciousness and perception. Inspired by Ezra Pound's edict for artists to 'make it new' Brakhage set about fashioning new forms of cinema. The result was a challenging body of intense emotional work ranging from documentary to mythology, home movies, structural films, collage films, right through to abstract visual musicals ­ all based on the dynamics of Brakhage's interior life.

In early films such as THIGH LINE LYRE TRIANGULAR (1961), DOG STAR MAN (1961-64), MOTHLIGHT (1963), and SONG 21 (1966) Brakhage attempted a synthesis of subjective and objective viewpoints by alternating between gestural and documentary style representations. These films leave an almost indelible trace of Brakhage's struggle toward the complete interiority of his later short abstract films.

Clement Greenberg, the leading theorist of American modernism, emphasized the vitality, virility and brutality of the American artist. Greenberg's theories replaced the Parisian standards of grace, craft and finish with new American standards of violence, spontaneity and incompleteness. Jackson Pollock, Ornette Coleman and Stan Brakhage are all major American artists in whose work we find the fusing of European Internationalism with the American mythos. American aesthetics are, however, much more than positivist celebrations of the American spirit. Beneath the vibrant surface of much of the best American work lurks a brooding sense of loss of selfhood and individual despair in the face of alienating Twentieth Century life.

By the late 1950s the United States was the leading cultural, economic and political force in the world. In John F Kennedy and Martin Luther King it seemed that America had been given leaders who would renew American ideals and deliver a better and more just society. This promise fell apart, however, during the 1960s and 1970s. The Kennedy, Malcolm X, Luther King, and Kent State assassinations, military failure in Vietnam, Watergate, the competing Arabian, European and Japanese economies and the Iranian backlash to the US support of the Shah of Iran set the United States askew. In twenty years, from 1960 to 1980, the United States saw its dreams, ideals and world leadership crumble. For Americans, brought up with an unshakable belief in their society, the 1960s and 70s were devastating. By the 1980s Americans found themselves alone and isolated in a largely hostile world.

The American avant-garde cinema profited greatly from the turmoil and social unrest of the 1960s. Themes of a unified body and psyche which were central to the avant-garde were embraced, largely for the wrong reasons, by populist movements. Sixties audiences saw American avant-garde films as visual aids to their investigations into expanded consciousness and sexual liberation. As audiences for avant-garde films began to decline, the popular culture of television commercials and music videos began to appropriate many of the techniques of avant-garde film. The avant responded by adopting new strategies which included punk/new wave, cross-genre and narrative based films which also began to incorporate more explicit feminist and political themes.

The Canadian imagination and reality is willfully different from that of the United States. (Indeed it may be the sectarian 'difference' of not being American and of Quebec not being English, of Canada as an amalgam of separate provinces that ultimately defines Canada. Could it be that Canada actually represents little more than a refusal to be anything? A Quebecer or Western Canadian rather than a Canadian per se). Maybe Canada is a slightly more Europeanized America, or a very slightly less disheveled America. (Cleaner, nicer, quieter, slower, politer Americans).

Historically, Canadians are Americans who reject the revolution (republic). Canadianess stresses communal awareness and responsibility over the full measure of individualism. (Except in Alberta).

Following on from the experimental films made by Norman McLaren and Arthur Lipsett at the National Film Board of Canada an independent Canadian avant- garde cinema began to emerge in the mid 1960s. Early Canadian avant-garde filmmakers generally worked alone without the support structure of the artist-run media arts centres that were to emerge in the 1970s. (Jack Chambers founded Canada's first filmmakers cooperative in London, Ontario). Since the 1970s the Canadian avant-garde cinema has borne some great work. Today the cities of Toronto and Vancouver are centres of avant-garde cinema and the Canadian film cooperative system is probably the most developed in the western world.

Canadian film artists successfully introduced regional and landscape concerns allied with a curiosity about the social effects of technology into an avant-garde aesthetic previously characterized as monolithically modernist and internationalist. As interdisciplinary artists crossing backwards and forwards between painting, sculpture, photography and film the Canadian artists Michael Snow, Joyce Weiland and Jack Chambers brought the formal concerns of the visual arts to film, then reapplied what they had learned from cinema to the visual arts.

Canadian avant-garde films reflect themes and approaches prevalent in Canadian art. The visual arts in Canada have generally been marked by the simple and reductive exposition of a very clear idea. Ideas sometimes representative of a transcendent spirituality, at other times reflecting concerns with media and technology. This approach is exemplified in the films of Chris Gallagher, David Rimmer, Ellie Epp and Chris Welsby on the West Coast and Joyce Weiland, Michael Snow, John Porter and Jack Chambers in Ontario. Each of these filmmakers' works also demonstrates a strong affinity with the Canadian tradition of documentary filmmaking. Indeed much of the Canadian avant-garde cinema could be characterized as experimental documentaries.

If the American avant-garde cinema has been concerned with articulating connections between nature and human consciousness then Canadian film artists can be characterized as giving representation to a vision of the separateness of humans from nature. Canadian avant-garde films reflect as much upon their own nature than on Nature per se. There is a concern in Canadian avant-garde with reflecting something more on the internal aspects of their films than with actually representing the external world. Even when they appear to be representing that world.

Northrop Frye defined the issues of Canadian art as being strongly regional and driven by a concept of the conquest of nature by an intelligence which does not love it. Canadian culture has been shaped by the struggle to survive a harsh and unyielding landscape. Frye asserted that the power of the Canadian landscape is great enough to determine sensibility.

David Rimmer is a film and video artist who took up the landscape as an important motif in his work. Living in Vancouver, Rimmer has notably stood apart from avant-garde factionalism ­ choosing instead to work in a spare and artisinal manner, producing about one film a year over the past three decades.

Rimmer's film CANADIAN PACIFIC (1974) is a contemplative landscape piece recording various comings and goings on Vancouver harbor and railyards filmed over three winter months. As inscrutable as Rimmer himself, CANADIAN PACIFIC straddles the categories of formalism, structuralism, documentary, landscape and regional film whilst also being quite universal. It is a meditation on a specific place. Vancouver, the end of a line which marks out the northern limit of the United States. The railway as the glue which unified Canada as an economic and political unit separate from the United States. Not that CANADIAN PACIFIC is a narrow piece of provincial boosterism. In creating his cinematic essay Rimmer astutely addresses issues of framing, point of view, depth and duration. CANADIAN PACIFIC is as much a film about itself as about the landscape it represents.

Jack Chambers was the archetype of the artist-filmmaker. His filmmaking career was brief, lasting only seven years between 1964 and 1971. Fatally ill, declining from leukemia, Chambers struggled to grow as an artist. He embedded his theory of art as a notion of exchanges between human perception and nature. As a Romantic artist, Chambers continually emphasized ideas of the unity of self with nature. Much of his work depicted features of the immediate situation in which he lived in Southwestern Ontario.

CIRCLE (1967-68) is a nature film divided into three sections. Every morning, at around the same time, for 365 days, Chambers filmed his backyard shot through a hole he had made in the side of his house. In the first section, as ritual, Chambers prepares himself and his filmmaking equipment to shoot a film. The second section, the everyday recording of a single scene, is enlivened by a variety of focus and f-stop changes by which Chambers continually invigorates the composition through to CIRCLE's paradigmatic final section.

In THE HART OF LONDON (1968-70), Chambers presented a horrifying picture of London, Ontario as a place of middle class repression and slaughter. A deer which accidentally wanders into downtown London is trapped and killed by locals.

Most famous of all Canadian avant-garde filmmakers Michael Snow present a cooler and more detached representation of nature.

Snow began his career in Toronto in the mid 1950s as a designer and painter. Also accomplished musician, Snow is today regarded as Canada's foremost artist. Although known widely for his paintings, photography, sculpture, installations and holography, it is as a film artist that Snow is most respected.

After their marriage in the 1960s, Michael Snow and Joyce Weiland moved to New York where they became involved with the New American Cinema of that time. Snow quickly turned his conceptualist sensibility to a number of works which isolated and elaborated qualities specific to the motion picture camera. For example, WAVELENGTH (1967) elaborates the zoom, SEATED FIGURES (1988) the tracking shot and BREAKFAST (1976) features a camera which advances on and eventually crushes its still life subject flat against a wall.

Situated between the overheated subjectivity of Brakhagian cinema and the cool objectivity of Warhol's urban sensibility, Michael Snow's LA REGION CENTRALE (1971) is an extraordinary cinematic achievement. Where Brakhage could extend a single second of consciousness out into ninety minutes of unrelieved intensity or Warhol could nonchalantly present a single, eight hour long take of the Empire State Building, Snow had a complex camera apparatus designed and built to render a radical meditation on landscape, technology and representation. Snow's apparatus was capable of moving in all directions: horizontally, vertically, laterally or in a spiral as determined by a series of electronic pulses guiding the machine. His film is one of continuous movement across space, filmed from a remote mountaintop in Quebec, a deserted region without trace of human presence.

LA REGION CENTRALE attacks the notion of hierarchical space inherent in Renaissance fixed point perspective. The circular camera movements in LA REGION CENTRALE refuse to privilege any sector of the off-screen space. There is no edge to the film frame. All points in space are of an equal and common nature just as there is a fundamental equality, unity and interconnectedness between all things.

The films of R. Bruce Elder, in Toronto, and Al Razutis, on the West Coast, offer a different and somewhat bleaker view of our relationship with technology. Elder, for example, believes that we are all trapped within and products of a modern technical empire.

There is such a strong sense, in Canada, of that society being swamped by the United States that critical resistance in Canada is most often directed towards the United States. Canadian avant-garde films are often driven by a strong sense of cultural nationalism and with the exception of Joyce Weiland's REASON OVER PASSION (1968-69) the mass society that Canadians critique is the United States. High levels of funding support have created a virtual avant-garde industry across the full range of Canadian art. The Canada Council, for example, has willed a complete 'cinema of resistance' in a film production, distribution and exhibition network through federally funded media art centres right across Canada. (The predominant rationale of these centres is more communal than revolutionary). As a result of this strong funding support, the Canadian avant-garde cinema began evolving toward an epic form, most notably evidenced by R. Bruce Elder's 26 hour long film cycle THE BOOK OF ALL THE DEAD (1988).

An alternative media arts based on such strong institutional support and communal values runs the risk of creating a Canadian avant-garde which is not avant-garde. Canadians have already witnessed the bureaucratization of both the National Film Board of Canada and the CBC. They now need to stand on guard against the hijacking of artist-run media art centres by mediocre and uninspired administrators.

On the plus side of the equation a few filmmakers have emerged from the swamp of Canadian media arts courses and artist-run media art centers, Mike Hoolboom being the most notable of these.

Since the 1970s there has been, in the western world, increased questioning of our basic orientation toward the mythologically perfect future promised by capitalism, science and technological growth. There has been instead a turning away from this orientation by feminist interest in women's history, with the ecological search for an alternative relationship with nature and an increasing interest in cultures not dominated by capitalist, technocratic thought.

The new narrative films of Yvonne Rainer employ a fragmented narrative development to highlight the formal aspects of her work. Films such as JOURNEYS FROM BERLIN are as much works of meaning as they are investigations into film aesthetics. Instead of sweeping the viewer along through a seamless narrative development Rainer's films present the viewer with a series of word/image, dialectical oppositions. These oppositions lead the spectator to an active reading of Rainer's films.

Besides Rainer a number of other women, notably Barbara Hammer, Carolee Schneeman, Ericka Beckman, Su Freidrich and Donna Cameron have produced bodies of challenging work.

American artists did, for some time, look to Native American art. During the 1930s and 1940s, for example, artists began studying Native American culture in the search for a universality and spirituality that may transcend the perceived failures of technocratic society. Painters such as Jackson Pollock, Richard Pousette-Dart and Adolf Gottlieb drew on Native American imagery in an attempt to create meaningful myths for the industrial age. Canadian artists such as Emily Carr, Lauren Harris, Daphne Odjig and Ed Poitras have likewise drawn on Native American values as an important source for their work.

Sadly, an interest in Native American and Afro American spiritual, aesthetic and social forms have been largely neglected by North American avant-garde filmmakers. Whilst contemporary filmmakers, such as Trinh T Minh Ha, Leslie Thornton, Mark Lapore and Peggy Awesh produce self reflexive, semi-ethnographic films their subject matter does not engage the most marginal, and potentially most fruitful, areas of American life ­ the Native and Afro American.

TO BE CONTINUED

Amended version of an essay originally published in THE INVISIBLE CINEMA 1989 Exhibition Catalog, Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, New Plymouth, New Zealand.