Exploring The Avant-Garde: Brakhage And Arnold, 2012...

By Tayla Gentle

The following essay will examine the relationship between avant-garde filmmaking and mainstream cinema, namely the traditional Hollywood narrative, by exploring the ways in which the two movements differ ideologically, stylistically and formally. This will be achieved by analysing Stan Brakhage’s 1959 film Window Water Baby Moving and Martin Arnold’s 1992 piece Passage a L’acte, from the perspective of feminist cinema theory. Through Arnold’s literal deconstruction of Hollywood narrative style and Brakhage’s creation of an alternate mode of filmmaking, these two filmmaker’s epitomise the diversity inherent within the avant-garde cinema type and reflect the principles of feminist film theory.

In writing this essay, a little must be said to distinguish the characteristics and origins of both avant-garde and feminist cinema. Avant-garde cinema, also recognised under the titles of ‘underground’ and ‘experimental’ film, is “an explosion of cinematic styles, forms and directions” (Renan,p17).  Generally, the works which appear beneath the avant-garde banner are those pieces which defy categorisation. From the early Modernist filmmakers to the likes of Maya Deren, Yoko Ono and Andy Warhol, the avant-garde is unmatched in its diversity. The films being made by such auteurs are “fraught with conscious ambiguities, encourage multiple interpretations, and marshal paradoxical and contradictory techniques and subject matter to create a work that requires the active participation of the viewer” (Renan, p18).

Although inclusive of wide-ranging styles, the avant-garde set are bonded through their creating complex and intimate films. Filmmakers, like Brakhage and Arnold, “have the freedom to make films purely for personal satisfaction and to purely aesthetic standards,” (Renan, p17) and in doing so, produce works which entirely disregard the traditional codes and conventions of classical Hollywood cinema. According to Bordwell, mainstream cinema style features three main tenets; firstly, that the film is accessible, secondly, the means of production should be invisible to the audience and thirdly, the film themes should be universal in its emotional appeals. In regards to all three of these principles, avant-garde cinema goes against the mainstream grain. The reflexive nature of the avant-garde film immediately makes reference to filmic processes, the minimal budgets and limited distribution make some films difficult to access and, often, the themes addressed in experimental films are highly intellectual. Experimental cinema’s use of “discontinuous editing, scene repetition, multiple perspectives, disjunctive juxtapositions, and non-realist narration is designed to question the sorts of perceptual procedures which accompany mainstream narrative” (Sitney, p138). Inherently, without any further interpretation required, one can note that “[Avant-garde cinema] has an oppositional relationship to both the stylistic characteristics of mass media and the value systems of mainstream culture” (Sitney, p140).

On this note, it would seem only natural that feminist cinema; a cinema practice dedicated to challenging and eventually ‘solving’ the oppression of women, would fall in line with the principles of avant-garde filmmaking. Both movements share a desire to challenge the formal and ideological aspects of mainstream cinema and to ultimately, welcome a new method of filmmaking free of socially constructed conventions. Laura Mulvey, a filmmaker and theoretician integral to the feminine cinema dialogue, argued that from a feminist perspective the creation of a feminist cinema must reside within a formally experimental discourse. Although earlier decades saw pioneering women discuss the female plight, it wasn’t until the likes of Mulvey and Kate Millet that feminist theory kick-started the ideological critique of “established (White male) intellectual traditions” (Levitin,p 18). Mulvey’s 1975 essay, ‘Visual Pleasure and the Narrative Cinema’ paved the way for the first real deconstruction of an inherently male-dominated media. Mulvey’s work, based upon a study of “the relationship between film techniques, spectators and viewing pleasures”, argues that cinema is an ideological signifier contributing to the creation of masculine “structures of looking” (Humm, p14).

With inspiration taken from the works of Lacan, Freud, Marx and forms of psychoanalysis, there exists no unified, singular approach to feminist theory and style. However, Maggie Humm in her work, Feminism and Film, posits that all feminist positions share three major assumptions. Firstly, gender is a social construction which oppresses women; secondly, ‘patriarchy’ works to fashion and support these constructions; and lastly, the best way to envision a non-sexist society is by utilising women’s shared “experiential knowledge”. These shared foundations go on to serve and shape a more important “double agenda: the task of critique…and the task of construction” (Humm, p5). Therefore the primary aim of feminist theory is to attack privileged ideologies which limit women and to subsequently construct new, healthier modes of thinking.

Arguably, both Arnold and Brakhage’s films can be interpreted as striving for feminist ideals. Arnold takes on the role of critic as he works to deconstruct the oppressive, patriarchal ideologies evident in Passage a L’acte and through Window Water Baby Moving, and his accompanying film theory, Brakhage aims to create films free of social construct, addressing a new way of “seeing” texts.

In her writing, ‘Passionate Detachment’, Annette Kuhn contends that authorship needs not, and should not, be a factor in determining the integrity of a feminist film. By removing the emphasis on authorial influence and intentionality, Kuhn argues that a “feminine text then has no fixed formal characteristics, precisely because it is a relationship: it becomes a feminine text in the moment of its reading” (Kuhn, p13). With this considered, a “non-feminist is capable of producing a feminist text, and on the other hand, a feminist is capable of producing a non-feminist text” (Kuhn, p10). So, it is not unreasonable to come to the conclusion that although male, both Arnold and Brakhage are capable of creating works interpreted as feminist.

Through his 1992 film Passage a L’acte, Arnold simultaneously critiques traditional narrative style and challenges gender indoctrination, two themes which are acutely entwined. Passage sees Arnold take mere seconds worth of footage from the iconic Hollywood film To Kill a Mockingbird and create a film almost ten minutes long. Through his unique editing style, which involves the looping repetition of individual frames of film, Arnold brings to light an unknown eroticism and sexism lying dormant beneath the surface of To Kill a Mockingbird. Throughout the ten minutes of Arnoldian hammering, stutters and bizarre sounds, Arnold is deconstructing and reframing conventional Hollywood’s visual and auditory gestures, creating a “phantasmagoria of visual effects” (Anker, p29).

Using a homemade optical printer, he loops and repeats the found footage until it finds a stammering rhythm and, surprisingly, begins to tell an entirely original story completely removed from the lives of Atticus and Scout Finch. Instead,Passage tells the story of a volatile nuclear family, starring Gregory Peck as the dominant, violent father, a submissive mother and the indoctrination of the son and daughter as they learnt to settle into their expected gender roles. Interestingly, Arnold chose an un-notable scene from the original film, the family eating breakfast doesn’t register as important in the major scheme of To Kill a Mockingbird. But Arnold’s technique causes a viewer to stop and re-evaluate what is unfolding on the screen. The sound of the door slamming repeatedly evokes a knocking tension within the scene, an innocent movement of the boy’s hand is transported to perverse realms, the woman (assumedly playing a mother figure) shrinks from Peck’s wrath and the daughter is scorned by her brother. Arnold captures the tiniest of movements and the tinny sounds and catapults them into meaning.

What is unique about Arnold’s editing technique is that he does not need to “comment on the family scene from the outside, or to deface it, or to intercut it with scenes from the gulf-war, to make something out of it” (Anker, 31), the genius lies in his ability to deconstruct dominant ideologies and codes simply by taking the footage out of context, and allowing the viewers to interpret the text. And what viewers can construe from Passage is a critique of patriarchal ideology negatively affecting an American family. In society, and in film, narratives and lives are driven by men. Men are the leaders, the thinkers and the heroes, while ‘Woman’ is seen as both a sexual being, an object to be desired or claimed, and an oppressed being. Simone de Beauvoir asserts that men have claimed the ‘subject position’ and therefore reduced women to “the positions of the objectified ‘Other’” (Chaudhuri, 5). Arnold’s re-working of the scene implies that the sexual politics are embedded within the very mise-en-scene of the film, and in turn provides an efficient case for arguing that  these socially constructed sexual codes are also ingrained within us. Thus the film “delineates a certain chain of command within the nuclear family, as an otherwise unremarkable product of the post classical Hollywood representational paradigm” (Anker, p23).

Arnold’s choice to use footage from To Kill a Mockingbird, a famous Hollywood narrative, is also of significance. The original film is a straightforward and faithful rendering of the Harper Lee novel it was based upon, it obeys all the conventional Hollywood narrative structures of the period. To Kill a Mockingbird’s evenly balanced compositions, continuity editing, obvious character motivations and causal drives are all disrupted by Arnold’s “jarring visual excitement ”(Anker, p32). This interruption of the mainstream narrative features can be interpreted as challenging the very principles Hollywood cinema is based upon. By resisting the common technique of juxtaposition and Eisenstein’s theory of montage, Arnold reveals how “substantive and critical difference can be asserted without resorting to juxtapositions made in editing” (Anker, p25). His evasion of intellectual montage can be traced back to the works of Peter Kubelka, one of Arnold’s primary mentors, and inventor of the metric film. In this sense, Arnold invigorates “the strategies of Kubelka with the power of ideological and cultural critique, similar if not equal to the critical powers of Eisenstein’s dialectical montage” (Anker, p26).

Passage selects a very precise moment of the film and turns mere seconds into an internally complete unit. By manipulatingTo Kill a Mockingbird at its most fundamental level of frames and sounds, Arnold is indicating the “degree to which this particular film stands in for an entire formal and institutional practice [Hollywood] and a particular era and culture (Anker, p24)”. Arnold is found to not only critique the oppressive and confining nature of socially constructed ideologies, but to also challenge the formal aspects of cinema which give life to such ideas. As Claire Johnston claims, there must be a break between ideology and text in order to overcome society’s misguided values regarding gender and sex.

In a very structuralist thought, Brakhage promotes the principle that ideology wrongly forms our understanding of self by saying “forget ideology, for film unborn has no language and speaks like an aborigine- monotonous rhetoric” (Dixon, p62). The only way to fully critique the reality of the female oppression is to stop scrutinizing images and instead interrogate the filmic process itself, because “images are not mirrors of real life, but ideological signifiers” (Humm, 13).  This is the embarkation point for Claire Johnston’s case for an innovative film process to challenge the depiction of the female ‘reality’. Johnston reasons that the most important facet of filmmaking is how the world is portrayed and ultimately interrogated within the filmic process.

Brakhage’s films strive towards the ‘counter-cinema’ Johnston desires and  takes the work of Arnold one step further. Where Arnold critiques the patriarchal ideologies associated with both Hollywood cinema and feminist theory, he does not actually attempt to ‘solve’ either of these inherent problems. Brakhage ultimately steps in and attempts to create an alternate method of filmmaking free of ideology. This is the feminine film utopia; to not only challenge cultural conventions but to seek a solution to the issues hindering them.

Integral to this premise is Brakhage’s theory on “seeing”. In his writings, ‘Metaphors on Vision’, Brakhage posits that to search for human visual realities, for example the reality of a true gendered society, “man must..transcend the original physical restrictions and inherit world’s of eyes…for the very narrow contemporary moving visual reality is exhausted” (Brakhage, p19). While not an outspoken cynic of the Silver screen, Brakhage does make distinct references to the “illusion” of the dominant cinema, arguing “the entire [Hollywood] film’s soothing syrup being the depressant of imagistic repetition..believe in it blindly, and it will fool you-mind wise, instead of sequins on a cheesecloth or max manufactured make-up, you’ll see stars” (Brakhage, p20). In his article, ‘Defence of the Amateur’ he likens Hollywood’s dream factory to that of tribal society, saying Hollywood “makes ritualistic dramas in celebration of mass memory- very like the rituals of tribal people- and wishful thinking movies which seek to control national destiny…” (Brakhage, p149). And makes reference to ‘poor’ filmgoers “being innocent, they do not consciously know that this church is too corrupt; but they react with counter-hallucinations, believing in stars, and themselves among these Los Angelic orders” (Brakhage, p14).

Brakhage’s personal film theory concerns itself with our visual perception of texts, he speaks on behalf of the eye to “counterbalance what he feels to be our culture’s bias in favour of the mind and our consequent failure to recognise how easily the mind can imprison itself in an abstract and diminished universe of its own making” (Wees, p77). He famously said “somewhere we have an eye capable of imagining..and then we have the camera eye, its lenses grounded to achieve a 19^thcentury western compositional perspective in bending the light and limiting the frame of the image” (Brakhage, p62). His dissatisfaction with the current method of filmmaking, one dependent upon light meters and colour film, acts as the catalyst for an exploration into alternate methods of creating.  He goes onto describe how he disrupts the perfect camera eye by “deliberately spitting on the lens and wrecking its focal intention” (Brakhage, p62). His preferred techniques also involves painting and scratching on film surfaces.

Window Water Baby Moving is an acutely personal film following the non-sequential order of events for the birth of Brakhage and his wife Jane’s first child. It is a rich matrix of initially unrecognisable details, which ultimately, “through reiteration and emphasis, crystallize into identification and meaning” (p64). As with all avant-garde films there exists a distinct lack of formal narrative, however, the film’s meaning is immediate, visual and suggestive. His films “exist outside sequential time in a realm of simultaneity or of disconnected time spans of isolated events” (Dixon, p151).The film is shot from the immediate perspective of Brakhage himself, showing everything that his eyes take in, it shifts from an overexposed window, to droplets of water running over the pregnant belly of Jane bathing, to the gory details of the birthing process itself. Throughout Window Brakhage uses white and black leader to “affirm the screen and the cinematic illusion as one of the several tactics for relieving the dramatic tension built up as the moment of birth approaches” (Dixon, p151). The film is then intercut with images of Jane and Brakhage laughing and making love followed by the face of the born child.

The characteristic most often associated with Brakhage is his preference for placing primacy on “seeing” over “thinking”. Brakhage suggests that “there is a pursuit of knowledge foreign to language and founded upon visual communication, demanding a development of the optical mind, and dependent upon perception in the original and deepest sense of the word” (Brakhage, p12). Arnold also promotes the power of the visual in Passage by allowing the audio composition to take precedence over the images altogether, “as the film plays upon syllables and incidental noises as independent elements” (Anker, p3). Both Arnold and Brakhage eliminate “the power of language to redirect the narrative and lend the images causal motivation.”

The passion evident on Jane’s face as she undergoes labour and the sheer joy we see emanating from Brakhage as the camera is pointed his way are intensely felt by the audience. “Stripped of any sort of sound, either actual or constructed…these films are among the most powerful” (Dixon, p64) precisely because what we are viewing is generally partitioned off from public sight. Especially given the fact that Brakhage made Window in a period when it was rare for a father to be in the birthing room, let alone documenting the birth, Brakhage invites us to pay witness to an otherwise taboo subject. Although many women, Maya Deren among them, found Window to be an intrusive entrance into what is considered secret women’s business, the film can also be interpreted as liberating. From a feminist perspective, Brakhage is freeing women from the social constraints which say men have no place in the hospital ward. Window also provides an alternate representation of childbirth, one that differs from the pleasant panting that graces the Hollywood screen. In making Window Brakhage has matched feminist cinema theory with the formal aspects of the avant-garde and created a film which addresses the ways in which patriarchal ideology and the confines of dominant cinema practice blur our “sight”.

A feminist reading of avant-garde filmmaking is an inherently symbiotic process, where avant-garde works challenge the conventions of mainstream cinema practice they are also simultaneously challenging the patriarchal codes which accompany the Hollywood form. The likes of Stan Brakhage and Martin Arnold exemplify the varying techniques employed by avant-garde filmmakers when working to confront inbuilt cinematic codes of practice.

REFERENCE LIST

Anker, S. Austrian Avant-garde Cinema. San Francisco Cinematheque, Six Pack Film, 1994, pp.29-30

Brakhage, S. Essential Brakhage: selected writings on filmmaking. Kingston, NY.:Documentext, 2001, pp.12-33

Chaudhuri, S. Feminist Film Theorists. London & New York: Routledge Press, 2006, pp. 1-30

Dixon, W. ‘It Looks At You’. The returned gaze of the cinema. State University Press, NY, 1995, pp.54-57

Kuhn, A. ‘Passionate Detachment’. Women’s Pictures: Feminism Cinema. London and New York: Verso, 1993, pp. 2-18

Humm, M. Feminism and Film. Edinburgh & New York: Edinburgh UP, Indiana UP, 1997, pp. 3-9

Levitin. J, Plessis. J, Raoul. V. “Part 1: Refocusing History and Theory”. Women Filmmakers Refocusing. Great Britain & New York: Routledge, 2003, pp. 15-29

Renan, S. Underground Film, An introduction to the American. E.P Dulton & Co., Inc, NY, 1967, pp.17-127

Sitney, P. ‘The Lyrical Film’. Visionary Film: The American Avant-garde 1943-1978, Oxford University Press, NY, 1979, pp.137-155

Wees, W. ‘Giving Sight to the Medium’: Stan Brakhage. Light Moving in Time. University of California, Oxford, 1992, pp. 77-80

Wexman, V. Film and Authorship. Rutgers University Press, New Jersey, 2003, pp 230-250

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