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After outlining the course of Stan Brakhage’s early career and the influence of both Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound on his cinematic poetics, this chapter concentrates on the “Faust” and “Vancouver Island” tetralogies. His employment of voice-over in the “Faust” films was a radical departure into narration and free indirect discourse, while his notion of “moving visual thinking” proved to be the culmination of his lifelong polemic against the priority of language in perception and thought.

American experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage revolutionised independent cinema by cultivating a new poetic idiom designed to document the subjective vision of the eye behind the camera. Committed to an inclusive account of the lived visual experience, he augmented the cinematic vocabulary by including components such as hallucination, dreams, closed-eye images and optical feedback, capturing these ephemeral elements using a wide variety of ‘home-made’ modifications to the filming process, including erratic hand-held camera movement, distortion of focus and changing camera speeds. Although most of his projects are silent, he corresponded with composer James Tenney to explore intersections between cinema (“moving visual thinking”) and music (“sound equivalent of the mind’s moving”). When employing a soundtrack, Brakhage gravitated towards musique concrète, which he regarded as an audio analogy for cinematic montage, and he devised a unique brand of audiovisual counterpoint based on the rhythmic interplay of the psychophysiological processes of sight and sound.

This chapter investigates the philosophy of the ordinary and the everyday proposed in the films of Stan Brakhage, Jonas Mekas, and Phil Solomon. It places their work in the context of an interest in ordinary experience and language that, for philosopher Stanley Cavell, unifies the thinking of Emerson and Wittgenstein. By pursuing Brakhage’s explicit interest in Wittgenstein and Mekas’s engagement with Transcendentalism through Thoreau, the chapter looks at how these filmmakers construct their films from overlooked means or in-betweens (for Brakhage and Solomon, the materials of the filmstrip itself; for Mekas and Brakhage, everyday happenings). This practice reflects these filmmakers’ collective investment in the ethical philosophy of “finding as founding” that locates ends in means to privilege the contingencies of individual experience over an authoritative truth that is found rather than made.

This chapter unearths an untaken path of experimental film history. In the mid-1960s, Stan Brakhage, Bruce Conner, and Jonas Mekas were deeply invested in the possibility that 16mm experimental films might be made into 8mm reduction prints and made available for sale to home collectors. This chapter relates this little-known historical episode and questions what relevance this prioritization of access over quality might have for us in the contemporary moment, when these terms are once again embroiled in a fierce battle.

In Joseph Cornell’s New York films from the 1950s, documentary forms shift between realism and symbolism, materiality and mystery. This chapter emphasizes several converging critical contexts for the study of these films: firstly, the visual – especially, photographic – culture in New York in the 1950s, a culture that included Cornell, even if he did not, officially, belong to any of its coteries; secondly, the people he worked with on these films, especially his collaborations with Rudy Burckhardt and Stan Brakhage, and their respective connections to the New York School, and the city’s burgeoning avant-garde scene; thirdly, how – in formal terms – Cornell’s films from the 1950s relate to his other art work, especially, the boxes, assemblages, the collage-montage films of the 1930s, and his artistic vision, more generally; and finally, the relevance of these films to a broader discussion on documentary practice, and its relation to the modern visual arts.

The book’s introductory chapter situates its study of American avant-garde cinema in the context of the field of film-philosophy and the post-theory debates within cinema studies. The chapter rectifies influential misreadings of American avant-garde films by film-philosophers, and goes on to trace philosophy’s influences on the avant-garde, laying the groundwork for putting their films in conversation with the philosophies of Gilles Deleuze, Stanley Cavell, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. This chapter outlines the various kinds of dimensional, conceptual, and material in-betweens at work in American avant-garde cinema, and explains the various ways in which American avant-garde filmmakers have used this figure to advance a philosophy that promotes behaviors of re-encounter and review applicable to the off-screen world.

In his eighty-hour Eniaios, Gregory Markopoulos intensifies both the underlying Romanticism and the montage aesthetics of silent era figures like Abel Gance. He does so by completely rejecting the ordinary networks of cinema, re-envisioning film as a medium capable of reconnecting the viewer to the sacred world of myth. Intended to purge the viewer of media pollution, Eniaios was designed for presentation at a special site (the Temenos) in Arcadia, the mythic birthplace of lyric poetry. In both scale and form, Eniaios is the most ambitious film ever made. Yet in its harmonization of viewing space and image and its emphasis on the mythic resonance of particular locations, it also constitutes a radical reformulation of the issues that preoccupied Markopoulos throughout his career, one that gives new meaning to the aspirations of the postwar avant-garde.

This chapter looks at how the filmmaker Lawrence Jordan realized his trinity of “time/Moment/change” through rhythms of editing and camera movement into a paradoxical image of “timelessness.” It reads his “alchemical autobiography,” Sophie’s Place, as a poem of his aesthetic education as an artist, particularly under the tripart guidance of Cornell, the poet Robert Duncan, and the collage artist Jess, tracing this influence into his “H. D. Trilogy.”

This chapter asks if an artist statement can be integral to, rather than simply illuminate, an artwork. The close-knit rapport between Paul Sharits’s 1968 flicker film N:O:T:H:I:N:G and some remarks about it published in Film Culture the following year suggest such an ‘intermedial nexus’. The concepts of ‘differential specificity’ as developed by Louis Althusser and Marcelin Pleynet and that of the ‘avant-garde gambit’ set out by Griselda Pollock are useful in navigating this proposition.