The writing of any history of the avant-garde in the arts is an undertaking fraught with difficulties due to the esoteric nature of much experimental work. When the art under consideration is the cinema, the problem is magnified. Since the entrance of film studies into the university in the 1960s, mainstream cinema has received increasing critical attention, which has led to the establishment of a canon of films deserving of and receiving ongoing consideration. But avant-garde film has rarely found its way into either film scholarship or undergraduate syllabi. While the following chapter attempts to account for experimental filmmaking practices in the 1970s in the United States, it inevitably omits films of value that have failed to receive either notice or adequate distribution . Furthermore, due partially to growing interest in film by the National Endowment for the Arts and by universities, which occasionally hired and taught the work of avant-garde filmmakers, the 1970s was a decade of tremendous diversity in experimental filmmaking. While filmmakers who had been active for decades-such as Stan Brakhage, James Broughton, or Bruce Conner-continued to work, a new generation of artists influenced by Minimalism, film theory, and feminism exploded the parameters of the avant-garde with a multitude of experimental films.
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