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This chapter discusses Amos Vogel, who was one of two (the other was his wife Maria) who sought to show avant-garde films in New York. Their idea for a film society came from their time as being patrons of New York City's most influential avant-garde filmmaker, Maya Deren. The Vogels then tried showing films that they knew were not being seen with any regularity in the city, leading to their Cinema 16 to becoming unique and significant.

This chapter explores how film came into its own as an autonomous art practice in installation. It first considers the material, procedural, industrial, psychoanalytic, phenomenological, political and ontological specificities of film, encompassing moving image in both popular culture and art. It then examines how avant-garde film became so heavily academicized that watching films was now understood to be what A. L. Rees called “an act of reading” rather than the opportunity to go on a journey of “visual emotion” as Virginia Woolf suggested. In particular, it discusses the staging of mainstream, illusionist cinema, along with its disassembly by syntactical critique and material interference in the work of avant-garde filmmakers. It also looks at tendencies that carried over into expanded cinema and installation, primarily work that was concerned with the physical presence of the filmic apparatus and artists who undertook the deconstruction of cinematic codes driven by broadly leftist and feminist political convictions. Finally, it analyzes the illusionism of film in relation to the presupposition of indexicality.

This chapter studies several of Dulac's early narrative Impressionist films, and her ideal of cinema as a spatiotemporally complex universe of symbols—one in which meaning is created through an intertextual network of figurative associations, such as pictorial and rhythmic gesture. Dulac's integral approach, based on life, movement, and rhythm, exemplified in a surviving extract of what is considered the first Impressionist film, La Fête espagnole (1920), is used in a particularly innovative and feminist manner in one of her earliest extant films, La Belle Dame sans merci (1921). Dulac's use of dance as a discursive metaphor disrupts a heteronormative, monogamous, and linear narrative structure, creating a queer subtext in her later films, both commercial and avant-garde.

This chapter examines the once controversial claim that the revolutionary impact of modernist art might as easily be found in cinema as in “higher” arts like literature, painting, and music. It also extends the inclusion of cinema in canonical modernism to consider both how cinema helped constitute modernism itself and how discourse on cinema, serving as an index of what had changed in modern life, produced the kind of comprehensive narrative about culture now integral to cultural studies. In order to also focus on what cultural studies can say about modernism, the chapter discusses the pivotal modernist tension between mass culture and revolutionary art, considering, on the one hand, avant-garde film and, on the other, auteur cinema, which has both popular and avant-garde forms.

This case-study chapter focuses on the blanket rejection of both subtitling and dubbing at New York’s short-lived Invisible Cinema, established by Anthology Film Archives in the early 1970s. In resurrecting the silent-era dream of non-translation, the Invisible Cinema drew attention, paradoxically, to translation’s centrality for screen culture generally and Anthology in particular – pinpointing the re-evaluative role that translation plays in screen culture by keeping ‘originals’ in circulation and contention. This point is affirmed by Anthology’s present-day operations and the residual legacy of its translation ban. Additionally, the chapter explores how the Invisible Cinema’s excessive zero-tolerance approach to translation actually takes certain pro-subtitling arguments to their logical conclusion and is hence ripe for deconstruction. Hence, this chapter outlines a route for revaluation developed further in subsequent chapters, identifying the flaws and failures of screen translation as necessary to the preservation and destabilisation of screen culture.

This chapter addresses the question of how dramatic texts become film images and sounds through stylization and abstraction in two avant-garde films, Jean–Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet's Antigone and Gregory Markopoulos' Illiac Passion. The two films explore the workings and limits of the transmissibility of texts, drawing out connections between recitation and prophetic messages or evidence brought to the attention of a court jury.

This chapter examines the centrality of the work of artistic duo Maria Klonaris and Katerina Thomadaki to the project of writing a feminist women's film history by focusing on the aesthetic and conceptual choices they made and on their thought-provoking contributions to feminist film practice. In particular, it considers Klonaris and Thomadaki's Cinéma corporel (Cinema of the Body). The chapter suggests that the female avant-garde film has, paradoxically, been marginalized by feminist film theory's focus on mainstream cinema as a site of patriarchal representation and spectatorship. It shows that Klonaris and Thomadaki's Cinéma corporel represents, for women's cinema, a strategy of dissidence. In form, content, concept, and approach, it calls for a revisitation of “film” outside the canon established in traditional film history. The chapter underscores the need to “heighten the visibility of women's contributions to traditions of formal innovation and explore how formal innovation enables women to enlarge discourses about women's subjectivity” and art.

This chapter presents the effects of Lettrist experimentation as it relates to visual art's relationship with avant-garde film in postwar Europe. With their films, the Lettrists enlisted various artistic practices, consciously framing their work in relation to multiple histories: from the modern novel and sound poetry, to theatre and painting. Lettrist cinema emerges as a crucial site for establishing an alternative genealogy for the intersections between art and film in the postwar moments as well as the critique of the institution of art. Lettrist work with film is critical of formal categories, testing the conventional limits of the medium through the chiseling of the image and attention to sound. In subsequent years, they extended such experimentation through the production of imaginary, infinitesimal, and supertemporal films.

This chapter discusses Ronald Freedman's efforts to fight for the freedom of the screen. Freedman initially wanted to become a crusader for avant-garde films, but due to the interference of censorship, he was incited to become a free speech advocate instead. The case that Freedman was involved with turned out to be the big case in the razing of governmental film censorship.

The introduction to this study explores the notion of audiovisuality as it pertains to John Cage’s interaction with avant-garde filmmakers. Moving from the corporeal notion of Cage’s “everyday awareness,” audiovisuality is akin to the lived phenomenal experience. Artworks expressing such an awareness point to our understanding of the self and the lived experience. Such a framework allows for the exploration of a number of issues concerning “Cage Studies,” the flood of academic literature from the past two decades that has attempted to situate Cage’s complex aesthetic stances within 20th- and 21st-century theories of history.

Latouche had a side career in film. This included writing songs for two avant-garde films by Hans Richter, Dreams That Money Can Buy and 8 x 8. He also wrote the narration for a Herbert Matter film about Alexander Calder, and began his own film company, Aries Productions, which produced Maya Deren’s last completed film, The Very Eye of Night, and an animated film based on his poem “The Peppermint Tree.” In one instance, he started to direct his own short, Presenting Jane, in conjunction with his friendship with the New York poets, but the film was never completed.

This chapter focuses on the Single Wing Turquoise Bird, the premier light show in Los Angeles as well as one of the best in the world during the last years of the 1960s and the first of the 1970s. First formed in the spring of 1968 to accompany rock concerts at the Shrine Auditorium and Exposition Hall in Los Angeles, the light show several times reconfigured its membership and its performance modes, freeing itself from supplementarity to the rock events. Developing many different technologies and sources of both imagery and abstract light, it evolved into an autonomous multimedia unit that innovated the collectively improvised, real-time composition of projected light. Inspired by both the technological and sociocultural possibilities of its own time, the Single Wing Turquoise Bird expanded and elaborated such intersections between avant-garde film and visual music.

A survey and analysis of films taking jazz as a topic, from early talkies through the birth and development of the swing era. Such films include two innovative 1929 shorts by director Dudley Murphy, one featuring Bessie Smith and the other featuring Duke Ellington. Smith and Ellington play fictionalized versions of themselves. Paul Whiteman and Artie Shaw play their not-quite selves in feature films. Controversy over jazz in the African American community is explored in Broken Strings. Musicians “swing the classics” there and in another film. The 1937 feature Champagne Waltz includes an early instance of a stock jazz-film ending—a big New York concert that reconciles people and/or musical styles in conflict. That ending is tweaked by placing it at Carnegie Hall in 1938’s Alexander’s Ragtime Band. Other films are also discussed.