[Frameworks] weird!

[Fred Camper]

Quoting Adam Hyman <amleon13 at earthlink.net>:

> My guess is that it is easy to send to the whole list; it requires conscious
> effort to send to only one person (saving that person¹s email, etc), so I¹m
> thinking he intended it just for you, and you should have checked with him
> before forwarding to the whole list.
>
> That said, it is a useful contribution from Fred....

Thanks, Adam.

I did intend the post Jason forwarded for the whole list, but by the  
time I realized I had sent it only to Jason, I was thinking I would  
not post it, or would post something different. And Adam is right that  
on lists such as these, etiquette is that one never forwards anything  
to the list on one's own, just as one should not reveal private  
discussions ("four people have written me off list in support," that  
sort of thing).

I *do* think there are excellent and original younger makers who are  
not on the Film Comment list, and as I'm writing about the upcoming  
Onion City festival soon, in which I will likely mention more than one  
of them, I'll post a link to that piece when it appears.

It is a very old story in the arts that it often takes a while for  
excellent work to get widely acknowledged. Thus it is usually the case  
that older work is more widely known.

I stand by my position that one should make aesthetic arguments for  
the work one cares about, not political ones, and that aesthetic  
arguments almost always seem absent from discussions such as this one.  
"Inclusiveness" for the sake of "inclusiveness" could be valued if  
what one wants is "inclusiveness," but it also could be that the very  
best Tasmanian avant-garde film is derivative of Brakhage in an  
uninteresting way, while one of Brakhage's best students is now making  
genuinely original work that owes little debt to his teacher. Not  
being a sociologist, for me "inclusiveness" is of limited interest in  
itself; what *can* be interesting is the way different aesthetics  
*sometimes* emerge from very different makers.

There's also an interesting observation of Sitney's from years ago:  
that while his and my generation had a number of advocates for  
avant-garde film among writers, the younger generation(s) seem to have  
fewer such advocates. This may not be exactly what Sitney said, but  
the view as I've stated it is one I believe to be true. This isn't to  
say that only a critic can make a reputation. Sometimes the advocacy  
of other filmmakers has been the main beginning thrust. This is  
something for the unrecognized to consider.

Some other things for the unrecognized to consider: How well do you  
know the work of those "older" filmmakers who you are griping about?  
There's a long tradition in the arts of great artists having really  
studied and learned the work of "masters," before going on and doing  
something different. Brakhage once told me that once he realized, at  
18, that what he most wanted to do was make films, the first thing he  
did was read every piece of writing by Eisenstein that he could find.  
This does not sound like something most young filmmakers I have  
encountered would have done! He later bought a print of "Potemkin,"  
and looked at it again and again. And in the films of his first  
decade, one can absolutely see the influence of Eisensteinian montage,  
along with many other influences from cinema, poetry, and music. And  
by the time of "The Riddle of Lumen," 20 years after he began, little  
trace of Eisensteinian montage remains. Markopoulos, Anger, Gehr,  
Jacobs, Sonbert, and so many others, had a deep knowledge of and deep  
admiration for many areas of film history.

Ask yourself, not, should my films be recognized because I'm a younger  
filmmaker who is not yet recognized, but rather, am I making genuinely  
original cinema of high quality, work that offers the viewers new and  
complex experiences in time? Sorry to say, not every film that gets  
made, even if it was worked on hard, is deserving of most viewers'  
time. Making superb work, pushing beyond what has been done before,  
that is the real struggle.

Fred Camper
Chicago