The evolution of avant-garde film, as articulated in the canonical texts of film historiography, has been teleologically structured as a chronological progression toward ever more sophisticated forms of film art. Divided essentially into three periods, each avant-garde has been connected to its predecessor by aesthetic and personnel continuities, constructing over significant gaps in time and space a discourse on the evolution of personal expression in the film medium. While appropriate for polemical argument and aesthetic legitimation, such a view of avant-garde film history has eliminated the gaps and fissures, discontinuities and dead ends, which necessarily mark a film form based on individual and essentially isolated modes of production.
The American film avant-garde established itself in the 1920s and 1930s, contrary to the standard histories, which date its beginnings to 1943 with Maya Deren.1 While the 1930s were characterized by diminishing possibilities for the production of avant-garde film, because of the breakdown of infrastructures established in the latter half of the 1920s, numerous avant-garde filmmakers began or continued their careers. The list includes Roger Barlow, Josef Berne, Thomas Bouchard, Irving Browning, Rudy Burkhardt, Mary Ellen Bute, Joseph Cornell, Douglas Crockwell, Emlen Etting, John Florey, Roman Freulich, Jo Gerson, Jerome Hill, Theodore Huff, Lewis Jacobs, Jay Leyda, Hershell Louis, Ted Nemeth, Lynn Riggs, LeRoy Robbins, Henwar Rodakiewicz, Joseph Schillinger, Mike Siebert, Ralph Steiner, Seymour Stern, Paul Strand, William Vance, Charles Vidor, Slavko Vorkapich, James Sibley Watson, Melville Webber, Herman Weinberg, and Orson Welles.
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