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Introductory Avant-Garde Cinema College Course

By: Jeremy Moss

First time teaching this course.

Blowing minds.

And Mike Kuchar is visiting this month to show his recent work!

 

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Jeremy Moss

2Oct10

Great points. We spoke in my class a bit actually about Hammid and his photographic stamp/influence on Meshes and Deren's future work. P. Adam Sitney definitely rock starred Deren and Brakhage - persona running along form. And the fact that they prolifically wrote a lot about themselves, their work, and theories (thus causing others to write about them) helped get us to where we are today. I sympathize with your beef. Truly. Another problem is the availability of the avant-garde cinema course in US schools. It's most often a survey course that gets taught once a year at best. Meanwhile, "film history" courses get a series of semesters/quarters and do nothing (or barely highlight) to show avant-garde works (or documentary), equating the history of film with the history of mostly mainstream narrative cinema ... it's truly truly bull shit.

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Kenji

2Oct10

Well i think it's great you're covering European cinema, and with an excellent selection (to drop that would be a great loss), but you've hit a bug bear of mine, the imbalance favouring the US and Brakhage in particular. I'm no expert at all on avant-garde films, far from it, but i do think directors like Vertov, Ivens, Hammid, Epstein and Fischinger deserve more promotion too. On a forum thread on a Joris Ivens film i was saying i thought he wasn't getting a fair look in on courses compared with Brakhage, which was disputed. It's also common practice for Hammid to be sidelined, completely overshadowed by Deren; i think he and his earlier film Aimless Walk are very important to Meshes of the Afternoon at least.

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Jeremy Moss

1Oct10

I see what you are saying and agree. There is def something off giving Brakhage two weeks and early European cinema just one. I wish I would have called the course US Avant-Garde Cinema - that is the narrative and trajectory of the course. I think it's also an issue of availability and the very nature of a survey course, i.e. getting to the 21st century in 14 weeks, while most available films happen to be post-WWII.

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Kenji

1Oct10

I'm glad you've got European cinema of the 20s, but i've long had the impression film courses, at least in the US, are dominated by the US and Brakhage especially, when some European films before them are neglected, which i think gives a false impression. Is Brakhage alone greater than the whole of pre WW2 European avant-garde film history?

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