Edward S. Small: Direct Theory: Experimental Film/Video as Major Genre (1994)

“Undulating water patterns; designs etched directly into exposed film; computer- generated, pulsating, multihued light tapestries—the visual images that often constitute experimental film and video provide the basis for Edward S. Small’s argument for a new theory defining this often overlooked and misunderstood genre. In a radical revision of film theory incorporating a semiotic system, Small contends that experimental film/video constitutes a mode of theory that bypasses written or spoken words to directly connect Ferdinand de Saussure’s “signifier” and “signified,” the image and the viewer. This new theory leads Small to develop a case for the establishment of experimental film/video as a major genre.

Small contends that the aesthetic of experimental film/video would best be understood as a coordinate major genre separate from genres such as fictive narrative and documentary. He employs eight experimental technical/structural characteristics to demonstrate this thesis: the autonomy of the artist or a-collaborative construction; economic independence; brevity; an affinity for animation and special effects that embraces video technology and computer graphics; use of the phenomenology of mental imagery, including dreams, reveries, and hallucinations; an avoidance of verbal language as either dialogue or narration; an exploration of nonnarrative structure; and a pronounced reflexivity—drawing the audience’s attention to the art of the film through images rather than through the mediation of words.

Along with a theoretical approach, Small provides an overview of the historical development of experimental film as a genre. He covers seven decades beginning in France and Germany in the 1920s with European avant-garde and underground films and ends with a discussion of experimental videos of the 1990s. He highlights certain films and provides a sampling of frames from them to demonstrate the heightened reflexivity when images rather than words are the transmitters: for example, Ralph Steiner’s 1929 H2O, a twelve-minute, wordless, realistic study of water patterns, and Bruce Conner’s 1958 A Movie, which unites his themes of war-weapons-death and sexuality not by narrative digesis but by intellectual montage juxtapositions. Small also examines experimental video productions such as Stephen Beck’s 1977 Video Weavings, which has a simple musical score and abstract images recalling American Indian rugs and tapestries.

Small adds classic and contemporary film theory discussions to this historical survey to further develop his direct-theory argument and his presentation of experimental film/video as a separate major genre. He stresses that the function of experimental film/video is “neither to entertain nor persuade but rather to examine the quite omnipresent yet little understood pictos [semiotic symbols] that mark and measure our postmodern milieu.”

Publisher SIU Press, 1994
ISBN 0809319209, 9780809319206
122 pages

Publisher

EPUB (updated on 2012-7-9)

Shoot Shoot Shoot: The First Decade of the London Film-Makers’ Co-operative and British Avant-Garde Film 1966-1976 (2002)

Broadsheet for the film exhibition curated by Mark Webber and organised by LUX London. Includes film descriptions, chronology of events and developments 1966-76, and the article by A.L. Rees.

“The London Film-Makers’ Co-operative was founded in 1966 and based upon the artist-led distribution centre created by Jonas Mekas and the New American Cinema Group. Both had a policy of open membership, accepting all submissions without judgement, but the LFMC was unique in incorporating the three key aspects of artist filmmaking: production, distribution and exhibition within a single facility.

Early pioneers like Len Lye, Antony Balch, Margaret Tait and John Latham had already made remarkable personal films in England, but by the mid-60s interest in “underground” film was growing. On his arrival from New York, Stephen Dwoskin demonstrated and encouraged the possibilities of experimental filmmaking and the Coop soon became a dynamic centre for the discussion, production and presentation of avant-garde film. Several key figures such as Peter Gidal, Malcolm Le Grice, John Smith and Chris Welsby went onto become internationally celebrated. Many others, like Annabel Nicolson and the fiercely autonomous and prolific Jeff Keen, worked across the boundaries between film and performance and remain relatively unknown, or at least unseen.

The Co-op asserted the significance of the British films in line with international developments, whilst surviving hand-to-mouth in a series of run down buildings. The physical hardship of the organisation’s struggle contributed to the rigorous, formal nature of films produced during this period. While the Structural approach dominated, informing both the interior and landscape tendencies, the British filmmakers also made significant innovations with multi-screen films and expanded cinema events, producing works whose essence was defined by their ephemerality. Many of the works fell into the netherworld between film and fine art, never really seeming at home in either cinema or gallery spaces.

Shoot Shoot Shoot, a major retrospective programme and research project, will bring these extraordinary works back to life.

Curated by Mark Webber with assistance from Gregory Kurcewicz and Ben Cook.
Shoot Shoot Shoot is a LUX project.” (from Introduction)

Publisher Lux, London, May 2002
8 pages

project
more (touring programme, Lux Online)
overview of the touring programme (George Clark, Senses of Cinema)
DVD anthology (published in 2006)

PDF (85 MB, added on 2014-12-22), Scribd

Peter Gidal (ed.): Structural Film Anthology (1976/1978)

“This anthology of texts about what have been termed Structural Films attempts to bring together some of the more important essays and articles on those films which have formed the core of film work in this field since its inception. It is a first attempt to bring together texts from Europe, Britain and the United States. In the past we have been inundated with the parochial, American view of avant-garde film work, as expounded on both sides of the Atlantic. This anthology was published to coincide with the series of eighteen programmes, Structural Film Retrospective, at the National Film Theatre, London, in May 1976.

As it happened, no film-maker was included in the programmes who had not produced relevant work before 1971, though many works were from after that year. No new films were introduced; this was a retrospective programme intended to enable a viewing that saw each film in the context of each other film, that could recognise alliances and misalliances between films, that could attempt to deal with the individual filmworks and the critical practice which preceded or followed.

In some cases, the critical practice here is a virtually complete repression through ideology of the text of the film; in the gaps presented work can now take place. The lengths of the sections are dictated by the materials of interest available, and unfortunately in a few cases only very slight material existed. I hope that the selection will not offend; the younger Americans have been left out, as have many of the younger British, because of the wish for a solid retrospective programme as elucidated above. No doubt there are quite a few film-makers completely unknown to me, and to nearly everyone else, who have done and may be doing very important work, and whose work remains ‘out of view’ for a variety of sociological reasons, none of which are praiseworthy. I wish to thank all the film-makers and writers, obviously.

For this reprint nothing has been changed, though a few minor errors have been corrected and Ben Brewster’s review of the Anthology inScreen has been included as an afterward. I call attention to the ‘Theory and Definition of Structural/Materialist Film’ article in its original form in Studio International (November 1975), and to Deke Dusinberre’s article relating to it in Screen (Summer 1977). P.G., January 1978” (Introduction)

With an introduction by Peter Gidal
Publisher British Film Institute, London, 1976; reprint from 1978
ISBN 0 85170 0535
144 pages

google books

PDF (updated on 2012-7-14)