f i l m fo r u m
los angeles

fall 2005 screenings
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The Egyptian Theater
6712 Hollywood Blvd.

The Most Typical Avant-Garde: Minor Cinemas in Los Angeles

Presented by David James

Black & Chicano Film  
I Am Joaquin (Luis Valdez, 1969, 20 min.)
Passing Through (Larry Clark, 1977, 105 min.)

In the 1970s, film schools and other institutions ancillary to Hollywood interacted with  the city's unique demographic and spatial structures to make Los Angeles the single most significant place where ethnic minorities were able to produce cinemas of their own. In ways that reflected their various cultural traditions, African-Americans, Asian Americans,  and Chicanos all made populist challenges to the exploitative and repressive traditions of  the capitalist cinema.

In his new book, The Most Typical Avant-Garde: History and Geography of Minor Cinemas in Los Angeles (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005) David E. James argues that, as well as being the center of the commercial film industry, Los Angeles has nourished a dazzling array of avant-garde, minor, and minority cinemas: Socialist cinemas in the early teens and 1930s; formal experimentations in the interstices or on the edges of the industry in the 1920s;  amateur cinemas with many kinds of negotiation with the industry in the 1930s; personal cinemas of psychic self-investigation invented by Maya Deren in the 1940s and continued by Kenneth Anger, Curtis Harrington, and Stan Brakhage; the tradition of radiant abstract visual music that runs from Oskar Fischinger and John and James Whitney to contemporary digital works; the counterculture's utopian visions of the 1960s; and the attempts by African Americans, Asian Americans, Chicanos, women, gays, and lesbians  to create cinemas of their own in the 1970s and since. That these and other movements kept the city in the aesthetic and social vanguard in all periods of cinema obliges us to recognize that Los Angeles, rather than New York or San Francisco is the true center of avant-garde cinema in the United States, and hence the prototype of all twentieth century attempts to create emancipatory alternatives to capitalist culture.

Los Angeles Filmforum joins with the UCLA Film and Television Archive  to screen a selection of the works James discusses, emphasizing films that have recently been screened only rarely.  This major seven program retrospective will give the audiences of Los Angeles an unparalleled opportunity to view the range of truly alternative film work that has been produced in the city over the last 85 years.  David James in person, with copies of his book for sale.

The series opens Wednesday November 2 at UCLA.