Experimental Cinema in the 1980s
SCOTT MACDONALD

All history including film history-is provisional and under constant revision. But no arena of modern film history provides more of a challenge to the historian than what is most often called avant-garde film or experimental film (various other terms have been used for various sectors of this immense, other cinema).¹ While we can know how many commercial films are produced during any one calendar year, the personal nature of so many avant-garde films, and the limited distribution and exhibition options for this work, are capable of keeping even some of the most remarkable films outside the general awareness, even of those relatively few who are fascinated with alternative cinema. Further, because so man\, avant-garde filmmakers are exploring cinema in new, "obscure" ways-that is, because few of these filmmakers feel an economic stake in...