Disassembling Vision Through Dimensional In-Betweens

This chapter examines films that suspend the spectator between dimensional poles (flat and deep, left and right, up and down, still and moving, animate and inanimate). Denying the spectator dimensional certainty, films by Marie Menken, Pat O’Neill, Ray and Charles Eames, Ernie Gehr, Maya Deren, and Sara Kathryn Arledge emphasize presentation and the contingencies of reception over the continuities and fidelities of representation. The chapter argues that these filmmakers privilege the contingencies of individual vision by creating and occupying a space in-between the perception and the apprehension of an image. Leaving the image’s dimensional status uncertain and unresolved interrupts the usually transparent means of cinematic representation and charts a preference for autonomy and diversity over universalizing or totalizing vision. Pat O’Neill, for example, uses the optical printer to suspend the spectator between two and three-dimensional images simultaneously, performing Wittgenstein’s aspect theory. The contingency of this mode of reception simultaneously borrows from Surrealism’s elevation of an individual’s subconsciousness over reason and Transcendentalism’s interest in the “intuition” of experience over the “tuition” of institutional learning.

From Figures of Paradox to a Philosophy of Review

This chapter examines the role of paradox in the films and film theory of Ken Jacobs, Hollis Frampton, and Michael Snow. Paradoxes such as Zeno’s paradox, Gödel’s incompleteness theorem, and Benoît Mandelbrot’s fractal theory of geometry, which inform the work of these filmmakers, propose and repeat the unresolvable gap between subject and world that informs skepticism. This chapter argues that the skeptical encounters these films invite, which entice the spectator to work toward solving a riddle or problem of incompleteness, also provide a model for overcoming skepticism by prompting re-encounters with the images on screen and the world to which they refer. These re-encounters occur in the same way that Stanley Cavell imagined the images of mainstream cinema could overcome problems of philosophical skepticism by drawing the subject closer to the world. The author argues, however, that these avant-garde meditations on mises en abyme are possibly more effective than Hollywood filmmaking for overcoming skepticism because of their more immediate emphasis on cinema’s very ability to engage and stage re-encounters between the subject and the limits of the world, rather than their reference to the world through images.

The American Avant-Garde’s Landscape Philosophy

This chapter considers how the American avant-garde utilizes landscape as a site in-between the subject and the world, one which negotiates skepticism’s dilemma of the perceiving subject’s simultaneous distance from and conflation with the world. Examining the films of James Benning, Sharon Lockhart, David Gatten, and Ernie Gehr, as well as Phil Solomon’s machinima and the figure of the border in Chick Strand’s work and recent work by Peggy Ahwesh, the chapter argues that these cinematic takes on landscape forge multiplicity within a singularity of space, staging a paradoxical plurality of encounters with the “same.” Taking up the figure of geological strata prevalent in Benning’s and Gatten’s work, the chapter theorizes the function of the interstitial where re-encounters invited by extreme long takes (Lockhart, Benning) or the obsessive review of “missable” details (Gatten, Solomon) yield forking conceptions of historical time and meaning rather than linear ones. Similarly, the chapter turns to how films by Benning, Gatten, Strand, and Ahwesh use the figure of the in-between to undermine the authority of man-made borders.

“Here Are Materials Strewn Along the Ground”

This chapter investigates the philosophy of the ordinary and the everyday proposed in the films of Stan Brakhage, Jonas Mekas, and Phil Solomon. It places their work in the context of an interest in ordinary experience and language that, for philosopher Stanley Cavell, unifies the thinking of Emerson and Wittgenstein. By pursuing Brakhage’s explicit interest in Wittgenstein and Mekas’s engagement with Transcendentalism through Thoreau, the chapter looks at how these filmmakers construct their films from overlooked means or in-betweens (for Brakhage and Solomon, the materials of the filmstrip itself; for Mekas and Brakhage, everyday happenings). This practice reflects these filmmakers’ collective investment in the ethical philosophy of “finding as founding” that locates ends in means to privilege the contingencies of individual experience over an authoritative truth that is found rather than made.

Introduction

The book’s introductory chapter situates its study of American avant-garde cinema in the context of the field of film-philosophy and the post-theory debates within cinema studies. The chapter rectifies influential misreadings of American avant-garde films by film-philosophers, and goes on to trace philosophy’s influences on the avant-garde, laying the groundwork for putting their films in conversation with the philosophies of Gilles Deleuze, Stanley Cavell, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. This chapter outlines the various kinds of dimensional, conceptual, and material in-betweens at work in American avant-garde cinema, and explains the various ways in which American avant-garde filmmakers have used this figure to advance a philosophy that promotes behaviors of re-encounter and review applicable to the off-screen world.