Direct Theory: Experimental Motion Pictures as Major Genre

2. Experimental Motion Pictures as Major Genre

20 2. Experimental Motion Pictures as Major Genre E xperimental productions at once suffer and enjoy a marginal position throughout the history of motion picture scholarship. While these productions constitute a remarkably coherent genre, that genre remains an unusually overlooked one. However, this same marginality provides a peculiar site, an especially heuristic vantage from which to question a number of critical concepts that have marked the history of motion picture scholarship. Just as Western music’s arbitrary traditions become clearer from the oppositional contrast of Indian music, or just as Western philosophy is more readily deconstructed from the distinct perspectives of Indo-Asian philosophy, so too can established critical concepts of motion pictures be examined and interrogated from experimental cinema’s marginality . Indeed, this vantage is similar to Scott MacDonald’s concept of “a critical cinema”: The most interesting and useful film-critical insights of recent years, it could be argued, have been coming not from the continuing elaborations of auteurism and genre studies or from the systematic application of recent French theory to popular film, but from that remarkable body of North American films known variously as “underground film,” “the New American Cinema,” “experimental cinema,” and “avant-garde cinema.” Many of if not most of the filmmakers loosely designated by such terms explicitly and implicitly view the dominant, commercial cinema (and its sibling, television) not as a competing mode but as a set of culturally conditioned and accepted approaches to cinema—a cultural text—to be analyzed from within the medium of film itself. One of the goals of these critical filmmakers has been to place our awareness and acceptance of experimental Motion Pictures as Major Genre 21 the commercial forms and their highly conventionalized modes of representation into crisis.1 MacDonald’s paragraph mentions two critical mainstays, both of which will receive revisionist regard in this chapter. One of these mainstays is commonly known as auteur theory. With its roots in post–World War II France—especially select essays published during the 1950s in the cinema journal Cahiers du cinema—what was initially called politique des auteurs was transformed and popularized by the American film critic Andrew Sarris during the 1960s. The premises of auteur criticism are, first, that film is a highly collaborative art form (the product of writers, actors, cinematographers, editors, studios, directors, and so on) that contradicts the kind of artistic credit that society provides comparatively autonomous novelists or painters; and second, that in certain films, certain directors’ exceptional personalities can realize a thematic and stylistic impression that allows these directors to receive clear artistic credit for the film. Today, these still debatable premises inform a great deal of popular and even academic film categorization. To speak of going to see a Woody Allen film or a new Steven Spielberg film has become a societal commonplace. The second critical mainstay that will receive revisionist regard throughout this book is commonly known as genre theory. Basically, it is derived from a proto-empirical faith in the powers of categorization to aid our understanding of phenomena. Faced with countless film titles, film criticism was quick to construct such now-common categories as westerns, musicals, and horror films. In its more sophisticated academic form, such categorization is proposedly interrelated with audience expectations. In its simplest form, such categorization rather depends upon rude distinctions of subject matter (as one might find in a children’s library section titled “Sea Stories”). From the perspective of the pages that follow, the greatest weakness of most popular and academic generic categorization (the very phrase “generic categorization” being somewhat redundant, since the French word genre means “kind” or “type”) is oversubordination. Because most of the genre theory that marks scholarly publication and academic curricula is devoted to subcategories of the fictive feature—those theatrical narratives that dominate movie houses and home viewing—such differential emphasis upon westerns, musicals, experimental Motion Pictures as Major Genre 22 or the subject matter of war often results in troublesome tunnel vision that not only fails to recognize such equally robust major genres as experimental motion pictures but also, relatedly, fails to understand them: for recognition and understanding both are attendant upon structural considerations. Oversubordination implicitly or explicitly relegates the distinct aesthetic address of experimental or documentary works to subcategories of the fictive narrative. This at once confounds the heuristic powers of proper classification (which depend upon taxonomic concerns with hierarchical patterns of coordination and subordination...