FILM AS A SUBVERSIVE ART

By: Grey Daisies

FILM AS A SUBVERSIVE ART

But that the white eye-lid of the screen reflect its proper light, the Universe would go up in flames. – Luis Buñuel

The original edition of Amos Vogel’s seminal book Film as a Subversive Art was first published in 1974. According to Vogel the book details the “accelerating worldwide trend toward a more liberated cinema, in which subjects and forms hitherto considered unthinkable or forbidden are boldly explored.” Film as a Subversive Art analyzes how aesthetic, sexual, and ideological subversives use one of the most powerful art forms of our day to exchange or manipulate our conscious and unconscious, demystify visual taboos, destroy dated cinematic forms, and undermine existing value systems and institutions. This subversion of form, as well as of content, is placed within the context of the contemporary world view of science, philosophy, and modern art, and is illuminated by a detailed examination of over 500 films, including many banned, rarely seen, or never released works.

Part movie guide, part philosophical treatise, Film as a Subversive Art analyzes and champions works that challenge viewers and thereby precipitate new ways of seeing society and existence. For Vogel, films could provide more than mere entertainment; intelligent programming could be a means of consciousness-raising; he screened anything that made people question an existing value system, that opened up people’s minds to other possibilities. Amos Vogel: “The aesthetic and the political have always been joined. To me the avant-garde, whether they knew it or not, was always part of a radical view of society and of the human psyche.”

CINEMA 16

You know what our attitude was toward people who didn’t like avant-garde films? ‘Oh, you don’t like it? We’ll show it again.’ – Amos Vogel

Cinema 16 was a New York city based film society founded by Amos Vogel. From 1947 until 1963, he and his wife Marcia ran the most successful and influential membership film society in North American history, at its height boasting 7000 members.

Vogel was inspired by Maya Deren‘s independent exhibitions. Deren exhibited and presented lectures on her films across the United States, Cuba and Canada. In 1946, she booked the Provincetown Playhouse in Greenwich Village for a public exhibition. Deren titled the exhibition: Three Abandoned Films – a showing of Meshes of the Afternoon, At Land, and A Study in Choreography for the Camera. Deren took the word ’abandoned’ to refer to Guillaume Apollinaire’s observation that a work of art is never completed, just abandoned. Whilst the title was ironic, the exhibition was successful.

The fare shown at Cinema 16 consisted mostly of the experimental film that began flourishing after World War II, as well as nonfiction films (documentaries of all kinds from around the world and a very wide range of experimental films, along with long-forgotten classics, art cinema from Europe and Asia, medical films, propaganda, many kinds of animation). Cinema 16 began with monthly presentations, but soon expanded to Wednesday evening screenings in two packed houses of 1500 people, and weekend screenings at art film theaters around the city. Cinema 16 inspired a nationwide network of film societies that imitated Vogel’s programming and rented films from the Cinema 16 rental collection (Cinema 16 was among the first distributors of American and European experimental film). Cinema 16 closed in 1963, after 17 years in operation, run by Amos Vogel and his wife Marcia.

- Further readings (Books, Articles):

Film as a Subversive Art (Amos Vogel, 1974)
Cinema 16: Documents Toward a History of the Film Society (Scott MacDonald, 2002)
Film as a Subversive Art (Amos Vogel, Sightlines, Volume 7, No. 5, 1974)
Taboo Revue: Tracking down legendary cineaste Amos Vogel (Ed Halter, The Village Voice, 2005)
Film as a Subversive Art (Book review by Ray Young)
Scott MacDonald’s Cinema 16: Documents Toward a History of the Film Society (Brian Frye, MFJ No. 42, 2004)
Amos Vogel: Das Leben als Subversive Kunst + Striking out in new directions (Viennale 2004 catalogue: Tribute to Amos Vogel, Ed Halter, German translation by Petra Metelko, 2004; An Interview with Amos Vogel, Scott MacDonald, 1983/1995)

- Images etc.:

Will we ever break out of the mold of Profit Motive, Commercial Imperative, Bottom Line, Product? Will the awesome free spirit of humans ever be allowed to offer us splendiferous visions instead of the calculated spurious anti-fantasies generated by the current crop of Hollywood directors and producers? Whatever the answers, I am content knowing that I contributed to the dissemination of such visions, passionate creativity, and radical challenges. To question what exists and to radically transform it remain our most compelling imperatives.

– Amos Vogel, 1984