[Frameworks] Difference between

[Jonathan Walley]

I agree with everything Fred says here, with one exception, I guess. Un Chien Andalou (or Mothlight, or Meshes of the Afternoon, etc. etc. etc.) is still avant-garde to an 18-year-old hayseed in an intro film class. Generally “avant-garde” is thought of as an historical designation and so, as Fred implies “It might work in a repressive country in which you could not really show your films”), but I also tend to think of it as an effect. In that case, the relevant history is not global, but personal - the history of the hayseed. 

[I know “hayseed” is impolite, but I just mean it as blanket term for innocent eyes, and after all, I do teach in Ohio].

I do think that underground is more specific than experimental or avant-garde, with historically-bound connotations (certain variants of experimental film output of the 1960s into the early 1980s, with punk film and the cinema of transgression as examples). While I am wary of the implication of “experimental” to which Fred alludes (as in, “they’re just experimenting; eventually they’ll get it right”), I still think it’s the least loaded, most neutral term to encompass a cinematic tradition that, if heterogeneous to the point of anarchy, is nonetheless discernible. “Underground” and “avant-garde” can be considered sub-categories, I suppose.

For what it’s worth…

JW


Jonathan Walley
Associate Professor
Department of Cinema
Denison University
https://denison.edu/people/jonathan-walley




> On Mar 2, 2021, at 10:53 AM, Fred Camper <f at fredcamper.com> wrote:
> 
> I've given this issue, along with that of "experimental," more thought than it perhaps deserves.
> 
> I don't think "underground" works at all today. It only barely worked in the 60s. It might work in a repressive country in which you could not really show your films. Our culture, whatever one thinks of it, has become too open and too diverse for this word. But I don't think "avant-garde" works either. So much has been done; most filmmakers are working within existing traditions. Nor is "experimental" of much use, except for a minority who, for better or for worse, feel that the word is right for them. A response to that word from one filmmaker decades ago: "I made many experiments while working on this film. I left them behind in my editing room. What you will see is a finished work."
> 
> On the other hand, just calling these works "films" doesn't work either; your viewers will be for most such films be disappointed to find no evidence of Batman, or Luke Skywalker, or similarFrame. We need a neologism, but I have never found one.
> 
> Fred Camper
> Chicago
> 
> On 3/2/2021 2:33 AM, Jaime Cleeland wrote:
>> Hi,
>> How would y’all differentiate between calling a filmmaker ‘Underground’ as opposed to ‘Avant-Garde’?
>> 
>> Best,
>> Jaime
>> 
>> Sent from my iPad
>> 
> 
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