Georges Mieles once called film "the most enticing of all the arts, for it makes use of almost all of them." One creator's rhapsody becomes another's complaint; it was this hybridity, this unprecedented and often undifferentiated artistic swirl of photography, painting,... [more]

Georges Mieles once called film "the most enticing of all the arts, for it makes use of almost all of them." One creator's rhapsody becomes another's complaint; it was this hybridity, this unprecedented and often undifferentiated artistic swirl of photography, painting, and sculpture that would lead Modernist aesthetes to critique, and sometimes dismiss, the newly developed art form of the period: cinema. At the same time that Modernism cried "art for art's sake," and cinema struggled to legitimize itself as an art form, Avant-Garde film undertook an anti-narrative critique along two different lines. While Modernist critics decried film's hybrid embrace of the pictorial and the literary, different camps of Avant-Garde filmmakers used each of these elements to comment on the absurdity of the traditional linear narrative. The first adopted and adapted the Neo-Impressionist claim that a painting, above all else, is a surface covered with color; so too, the film could be perceived as a strip of transparent material that ran through a projector, reproducing painted images. Thus, the screen was filled with images but purged of explicit narratives, and in the case of German Avant-Garde animators, the image itself was further stripped to its purest graphic form. The second approach, a more direct comment on narrative structure, consisted of a parody of films which employed traditional storytelling techniques. Complex burlesques and outrageous satire served to undermine the stability of the narrative and to further the cause of reinventing cinema. The second wave of Avant-Garde cinema rose after World War II. Unlike its predecessor from the silent years, this post-war renaissance included an aesthetic branch that embraced narrative in the form of the "psychodrama" while maintaining an arm that remained interested in pure image. Like its parent movement, the second wave detested and eschewed commercialism, a trait that is shared by up-and-coming independent film artists today who are embracing Digital video as a way capturing raw images on an affordable medium that will allow them to work outside the studio system. [show less]