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

Maya Deren & the Trance Film  
Meshes of the Afternoon (Maya Deren, 1943, 14 min.)
Fragment of Seeking (Curtis Harrington, 1946, 14 min.)
Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome (Kenneth Anger, 1954-66, 38 min.)
Flesh of Morning (Stan Brakhage, 1956, 21 min)
Nightcats (Stan Brakhage, 1956, 8 min)

Working out of the traditions of amateur cinemas created in the 1930s, Maya Deren created one of the most important of avant-garde genres, the Trance film, in which the protagonist undergoes a quest for psycho-sexual self-knowledge. Exponents of the form made Los Angeles the center of avant-garde cinema in the late 1940s, until Stan Brakhage created the next important mode, the lyrical film made entirely from the protagonist's perspective.

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.  

The series opens Wednesday November 2 at UCLA and continues Friday November 4 at UCLA (before tonight's show).