Thomas Korschil

AVANT-GARDE FILMS

V
When I look at the history of humankind, at my own history, and also at film history, I can think of a lot of things I would love to take revenge for . ¹⁷
The remaining three films of the program take their raw material entirely from the factories of Hollywood. In Peter Tscherkassky´s work the theoretical discussion of film plays into his artistic practice. Shot-Countershot humorously thematises one of the most important codes of narrative-representational cinema in one single shot taken from a Western.

In Shot-Countershot [Peter Tscherkassky] counts on the audience´s familiarity with the usual procedures of motion pictures. The viewer supposes he recognises familiar things (shot-countershot), yet is irritated because not the cinematic shot follows, but the protagonist is actually shot ¹⁸ .

Home Stories by Matthias Müller (1990, 6 min.) is a precise and seamless line-up of numerous fragments from Hollywood melodramas where we meet divas like Grace Kelly, Tipi Hedren, and Lana Turner in clichéd domestic scenes, women taking the facial expression of stereotypes, the looks of the classical victim. The beauties stare at something threatening outside their horizon, outside the screen. But what comes up to them is nothing but the viewer´s gaze. ¹⁹
Passage a l'acte by Martin Arnold (1993, 13 min.), a detailed adaptation of one short scene from the film How to Kill a Mockingbird (1962), is also an approach to the restricted narrative codes and role schemata of commercial cinema. A family of four is sitting around the breakfast table. The kids have to go to school. Daddy is in command.
Strikingly enough all the three films mentioned draw their material from the past, especially from the fifties and sixties. Unlike early compilation films, or Conner ´s Report and other films of the sixties thematising contemporary material, the found-footage genre of today rather turns to the past. This tendency can be viewed in the wider framework of general cultural development. After the (temporary) end of modernity pressing forward, striding along with the discredit of the great narratives of progress (Jean François Lyotard), one increasingly looks back at tradition and history, certainly also to acquire a better understanding of the genesis of the present. Anyhow, films made of old found material have become one of the most important forms of expression within the avant-garde of the eighties and the nineties.
The literal revenge upon the history of cinema Martin Arnold is talking of is hardly possible in a direct way. Yet films like Passage a l'acte show that many aspects secretly buried by the entertainment industry can be worked up in a direct dialogue, and that the filmmaker as well as his audience can carry off some little victories in doing so.
First of all, Arnold´s film is an extremely funny sensual experience. Editing the raw material frame by frame, constantly winding and rewinding little phases of motion, Arnold transforms an utterly banal narrative scene into an outrageous cinematic ballet. The actors hang like puppets on the invisible strings he pulls, and perform the most unnatural contortions and spastic movements of all kinds. This is highly amusing, but after a while it generates a spooky effect.
Amazingly enough, Arnold achieves the complete reorganisation without adding anything to the original material or changing anything within the images. He merely manipulates the order and sequence of the frames which already exist. Basically, everything new he generates in his adaptation was in a way already there in the original material.
Arnold himself understands his work as laying bare the things commercial cinema usually tries to suppress. First of all, this liberation takes place on the formal level. Arnold unchains raw cinematic energies to stage a masterly game of rhythm and movement widely emancipating itself from the plot. Yet Passage a l'acte is by no means an abstract film. The movements generated and choreographed by Arnold create new meanings that trigger off a re-reading of the original material even at the content level. So Arnold literally catapults themes and aspects hidden in the structures of Hollywood cinema to the (visual) surface.
So proceeding he tears not only a cinematic subtext, laying bare the prescribed codes of role schemata, modes of narration, editing techniques, etc. underlying a film, out of basically irrelevant scenes, but also a social subtext. So his films go far beyond simplistic criticism of the media or the industry. Hollywood itself is seen as a product, as the expression of a culture reflecting the codes of a society or even a whole civilisation.
In an entertaining and thought-provoking way Arnold unmasks some aspects of the originally probably rather harmonic breakfast scene like the patriarchal chain of command, hence the mental pattern of the traditional family: a little gesture of the father grotesquely amplified and enlarged by Arnold´s sampling denotes the authoritarian centre of the bourgeois family, [the film] shows how the father´s authority is directed against the son, accepted by the latter, taken over, and finally turned against his sister, who in her turn in her relationship to the father takes the place of the mother. ²⁰
Unlike in his debut Piece touchée (1989), Arnold also modified the original soundtrack synchronically to the images in minute units. The actors´ spastic movements are amplified in their effect by their utterances and the noises in the scene (the clattering of dishes, etc.). Surprisingly the fragmentation of sound into constantly changing short loops leads to an approximation of noise and language, in other words the sampling transforms language utterances into noise, whereas the background noises are attributed an order, hence something speech-like by Arnold´s rhythmical patterns. Language loses its supremacy over other sound events. Additionally, the trite content of the speech contributes to the effect that language loses its speaker.
The phrases heard in Passage ŕ lacte are such clichés that nothing personal is being expressed. Who is it that´s talking? Society´s norm speaks through language and language speaks itself, and apart from that nobody speaks! ²¹
Like their body movements, the actors´ utterances are also now completely mechanical. By exaggerating and rewriting Arnold makes clear that not only movie actors, but all of us have to move perpetually in prescribed frameworks of order. As a matter of fact, it is an important function of art to foreground and question these orders and systems of rules time and again, if only, at least, to blast and rearrange them in aesthetic ways.
Dealing with Arnold´s first film, Maureen Turim has spoken of the symptom. She reads the actors´s convulsions rather as a symptom of the film than as a symptom of the actors themselve ²² . The actors´ tics and stutters become the tics and stutters of commercial cinema. Arnold says:
[...] in the symptom, the repressed declares itself. Hollywood cinema is [...] a cinema of exclusion, denial, and repression. I inscribed a symptom into it, which brings some of the aspects of repression onto the surface, or, to say it in more modest words, which gives an idea of how, behind the intact world being represented, another not-at-all intact world is lurking. Maybe this is my revenge on film history. ²³
Inscribing itself into history and its forms of representation and this is what found footage films usually do avant-garde film unmasks the deficiency of mainstream history and mainstream stories. It voices things usually repressed, and contributes to maintaining a critical view of the omnipresent and omnipotent mass media.
It is, therefore, to be hoped that the necessary economical and technical-material basis and independence (access to 16mm or other semi-professional formats) can be maintained in the long term, which is by no means a sure thing from today´s perspective. Of course, avant-garde film won´t be able to shut itself off with impunity (it is threatened with isolation) against new developments and related branches of media, yet one should not be totally seduced by a new-born, often entirely uncritical belief in progress exemplifying itself everywhere in the enthusiasm about new technologies especially in the area of audio-visual media.
It will remain the task of true , i.e. critical cinematic art, to continue this brinkmanship: to remain in touch, to penetrate the area of commerce time and again, yet not to drown in it, but rather lurk and plunder ruthlessly, thus defeating the enemy with his own arms. The dominant and to a large extent exclusive discourse has to be exemplified, indeed embodied. Making the implied explicit, its repetition has to make us aware of this discourse, before it can be playfully reversed, broken up, and finally consigned to oblivion.

Translation O. L.