Direct Theory: Experimental Motion Pictures as Major Genre

4. The American Avant-Garde and the American Underground

47 4. The American Avant-Garde and the American Underground I t is convenient to posit a precise end for European avant-garde production with the advent of the Great Depression followed by a sudden flourish of sometimes fresh, sometimes derivative work in the United States. Yet certain concomitant productions preclude such consideration . As David Curtis notes, “America’s first avant-garde film was Charles Sheeler’s and Paul Strand’s Manhatta, an isolated attempt made as early as 1921.”1 Curtis’s choice of the qualification “isolated” is, however, quite telling. Whereas the EAG’s body of production is so extensive as to make the titles discussed in chapter 3 but a bare sample, the American avant-garde (AAG) evidences no comparable largesse. For the decade of the 1920s, few U.S. experimental productions likely survive, and only speculation would suggest that future film histories will eventually reveal many others. In 1928, Robert Florey’s The Life and Death of 9413—A Hollywood Extra did provide an experimental homage to that movement of the fictive feature today called German cinematic expressionism, but it wasn’t until the decade of the 1940s before we see any real flourish in the AAG. Among the exceptions to this generalization is, again, Sheeler and Strand’s Manhatta. Silent, less than ten minutes long, independently produced, and distinctly nonnarrative, the film’s aesthetic is far more dependent upon still photography and lyric poetry than upon the EAG’s affinity for painting or musical structures. Indeed, Manhatta ’s quiet photodocumentary images of New York City are organized according to passages from a poem by Walt Whitman. Later, in 1929, the silent H2O was independently produced by Strand’s documentary colleague, the photographer Ralph Steiner. H2O is a brief (twelve minute), wordless, acollaborative, independent, highly realist study of the American Avant-Garde 48 water patterns. Surviving prints retain Steiner’s superb photographic skills and structures. The realistic opening shots are progressively replaced by tighter compositions from longer focal-length lenses into a realm of increased “natural” abstraction. Figure and ground become confounded. H2O’s water reflections anticipate computer-generated modulations upon cathode ray tubes that would appear decades later; also, the turbulence and undulations of Steiner’s simple subject mimic the strange distortions of fun-house mirrors (see plate 4.1). But all of this is done without EAG recourse to prisms, mirrors, or multiple exposures. In Steiner, the AAG evidences a special, pragmatic respect for what the representationalist written theory of Siegfried Kracauer came to call, three decades later, “the jurisdiction of external reality.” Both Manhatta and H2O thus constitute exceptions to Kracauer’s rule: “[T]he avant-garde film makers did not repudiate the hegemony of the story to exchange it for another restrictive imposition—that of the raw material of nature. Rather, they conceived of film as an art medium in the established sense and consequently rejected the jurisdiction of external reality as an unjustified limitation of the artist’s creativity, his formative urges.”2 Melding Kracauer’s perspective with the often poetic quality of films like Manhatta and H2O, we would introduce the label lyric realism for this AAG subcategory. But Kracauer’s repeated proscriptions for the avant-garde filmmakers are largely retrospective. Extant written theory of the 1930s (and indeed into the post–World War II period) was the transformationalism of, first, Sergei Eisenstein (along with Vsevolod Pudovkin, Lev Kuleshov, and Béla Balázs), followed by the remarkable popularity of Rudolf Arnheim’s essays—written between 1933 and 1938—which are today published under the title Film as Art. Film as Art’s written theory depends upon an elaborate, bionic comparison between the cinematographic apparatus and the human sensorium. The text’s thesis is designed to repudiate a quoted denigration of cinema: “Film cannot be art, for it does nothing but reproduce reality mechanically.”3 Detailing cinema’s “reduction of depth,” or then-common “absence of color” and “silence,” or the delimitation of the camera’s frame, especially the contrast between our real-world phenomenology where “time and space are continuous” versus the power of montage, Arnheim’s repeated thesis is clear: “Art the American Avant-Garde 49 begins where mechanical reproduction leaves off.”4 Here, Arnheim’s position is but an elaboration of the Russian formalists, following Eisenstein, who championed not an aesthetic of reproduction but an aesthetic of transformation. It is noteworthy that just as we...