Avant-garde film in the United States
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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| *[[American avant-garde]] | *[[American avant-garde]] | ||
| *[[New American Cinema]] | *[[New American Cinema]] | ||
| + | *[[North American counterculture]] | ||
| *[[Structural film]] | *[[Structural film]] | ||
| *[[The Film-Makers' Cooperative]] | *[[The Film-Makers' Cooperative]] | ||
| *[[Unseen Cinema: Early American Avant Garde Film 1894-1941]] | *[[Unseen Cinema: Early American Avant Garde Film 1894-1941]] | ||
| *[[Anthology Film Archives]] | *[[Anthology Film Archives]] | ||
Revision as of 18:01, 29 September 2007
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The United States had some avant-garde filmmakers before World War II, but as a whole pre-war experimental film culture failed to gain a critical mass.
The 1940s
Meshes of the Afternoon by Maya Deren is considered to be one of the first important American experimental films. It provided a model for self-financed 16mm production and distribution, one that was soon picked up by Cinema 16 and other film societies. Just as importantly, it established an aesthetic model of what experimental cinema could do. Meshes had a dream-like feel that harkened to Jean Cocteau and the Surrealists, but equally seemed personal, new and American.
In 1947, the Art in Cinema film series began at the San Francisco Museum of Art, which screened a number of significant experimental films.
The 1960s
Early works by Kenneth Anger, Stan Brakhage, Shirley Clarke, Gregory Markopoulos, Willard Maas, Marie Menken, Curtis Harrington and Sydney Peterson followed in a similar vein. Significantly, many of these filmmakers were the first students from the pioneering university film programs established in Los Angeles and New York.
"Alternative film programs" were set up at Black Mountain College (now defunct) and the San Francisco Art Institute (formerly California College of Fine Arts), most notably. Arthur Penn taught at Black Mountain College, which points out some of the popular misconceptions in both the art world and Hollywood that the avant-garde and the commercial never meet.
Jonas Mekas organized New American Cinema. In 1974, P. Adams Sitney wrote Visionary Film in which he documented the history of post-World War II American avant-garde filmmaking.
