|
The first filmic avant garde in Australia arose in the second half of the 1960's, not so much as a coherent grouping or movement but via various individuals tapping into the international underground which was gathering attention in the USA and Europe.
In Sydney, the Ubu films outfit presented itself as the spearhead of underground filmmaking but it did so in the spirit of libertarian protest which was prominent in the New York avant garde of the time. The isolated creative individualism of the local avant garde would remain a characteristic of its output because of a strong identification with the ethos of artisanship in contra distinction to the newly emerging industrial-commercial complex of the Australian feature film industry.
Some of the notable early film practitioners who carried the avant garde banner were Dusan Merek, Arther and Corinne Cantrill, Albie Thoms, David Perry and Aggy Read. The early manifestations of avant garde practice in Australia were markedly influenced by the emerging stylistic rhetoric(s) of the international underground of the period, thus providing a future indicator of the ease of global cult ural transmission in line with the McCluhanite epithets, then current. Indeed, these rhetorics usually made a virtue of camera self consciousness and structural disjuncture.
Once the local Filmmakers Co-op movement took hold in the 1970s, there was an increasing tendency to displace what was perceived as avant garde purism and abstraction by the more explicit political agendas affecting the polemics of independent film. Thus, ostensibly more restrictive notions of avant-gardism were squeezed by 1970's independent film polemics which focused on alternative dissemination mechanisms and funding issues rather than more intricate questions of film practice.
Apart from the afore-mentioned filmmakers, there were instances of other avant garde filmmakers coming to the fore - Paul Winkler, Mike Lee, Mike Parr and Peter Kennedy, Jonas Balsaitis, Brendon Stretch, Dirk de Bruyn, and Mick Glasheen - who were primarily formalist in orientation rather than proponents for minority political positions. These people tended to be lone individualists preoccupied with their particular aesthetic worlds. Furthermore, there were other local filmmakers - Bert Deling, Zbigniew Friedrich, Albie Thoms, James Clayden, lan Pringle and Paul Cox starting to experiment on the edges of narrativity in contrast to the emerging naturalist-realist tradition for most Australian feature films. Yet, from the mid to late 70s, Co-op politics was charged by the coalescence of social minority polemics with alternative filmmaking missions. This somewhat diminished the debate over radical formalism of the Brechtian variety or otherwise, let alone those avant garde film strategies deriving from pop art influences.
In the 1980s, the notion of avant garde became redefined in relation to local film practice because the independent film community was passing through a catch-up phase via the currency of academic film theory issuing from the British journal 'Screen'. This source had a direct effect on a new strand of independent filmmaking (from 1982) that might be classified as the essay form - Serious Undertakings, Camera Natura, My Life Without Steve, All that is Solid Melts, Landslides, Night Cries, Breathing Under Water, One Way Street, Wild.
Additionally, the vogue for post modernist perspectives during the 1980s afforded considerable impetus to a new generation of filmmakers waving the Super 8 film banner in Sydney and Melbourne. More recently, fringe video making has been given a new fillip under the rubric of video art in contrast to the first phase of video usage in the 1970s which was basically energised by community action video directly funded by a federal government program.
The video art hype has also fed into the promise of the new frontier of computer generated imagery and interactive technologies. By the start of the 90s, the avant garde mediascape had substantially shifted focus with much talk of a limitless horizon of visual possibilities. Perhaps this euphoria about the future has diverted from the need for local video makers to reflect more upon questions of form and strategy instead of fantasizing about hyperspace.
Today, the dispersion of the film and video fronts under the avant garde rubric is a function of both cultural pluralism and the multiplication of visual media choices. Moreover, the art scene exerts a disproportionate impact upon the visual avant garde through its institutional framing and established culture broking.
As mentioned earlier, the term avant garde has often been submerged in the catch-all term independent film which was invoked with a sharp political edge in domestic film politics stretching from the 70s into the 80s. Nevertheless, avant-gardism has been protected as a space to be marked out in Australian film culture so that a range of marginal film and video making can continue under the umbrella of government support programs. This is in spite of the fact that amidst the hoop-la around the rebirth of the Australian film industry, the position and nature of marginal filmmaking was only intermittently addressed and usually by its own constituents (often seemingly addressing themselves).
For the Australian public at large, a media profile only exists for what is deemed mainstream Australian cinema - Picnic at Hanging Rock, My Brilliant Career, Mad Max, Breaker Morant, Gallipoli, The Man From Snowy River, Crocodile Dundee and latterly Death in Brunswick, Proof, Strictly Ballroom and The Piano. Of course, one could hardly expect the public to have a more intricate view of the range of local audio-visual production. Nor can one expect any substantial mass media coverage of marginal cultural activity. Notwithstanding this, public com prehension of the avant garde and related film activity remains limited because it is over determined by the historical circumstances of the entertainment industry.
By their very nature, the more marginal cultural expressions and their dissemination avenues will not reach the wider public who restrict their pursuits to standard leisure zones. Moreover, the contemporary pressures to commercialise, and the push to find market outlets may well threaten marginal cultural spaces out of existence. In the past government funding agencies, like the Australian Film Commission, have used the circuit of international film festivals (and specialist film awards) as a means of cultural circulation for fringe films and videos to help provide a cushion for lack of exposure in the commercial arena.
It would be unfortunate if the funding programs for fringe film and video work should exert too much conformist influence on the nature of output under the cloak of cultural pluralism. The film funding bodies, especially the AFC, are continually confronted by the dilemmas of market placement and formal experimentation. Such dilemmas are further compounded by the danger of selecting film projects for support which appear to mark out an approved terrain of experimentation both formally and/or socially. This process might be construed as a variation on the theme of political correctness. If filmmakers are obliged to seek the favour of the funding body or apposite academic intellectual approval in order to sustain a mode of experimentation, then we are indeed in trouble. Debate over contrived credentialism in the name of experimentation is often dismissed as a manifestation of sour grapes when more serious issues are at stake. Certainly, the marginal fields of cultural production for film and video should be supported but not over designated or prescribed.
Having established an ongoing cultural space for fringe film and video work it is important to ensure that it is not eroded by the various pressures of the nineties: The conformity of cultural comodification; a declining funding base; and the apprenticeship mentality in production training.
The danger for the 90s may well be explicit and implicit constraints on creative energy and 'originality', so that there is insufficient space for innovative work to spring from left field. There is some lineage of exciting maverick filmmaking stretching back to the start of the rebirth period e.g. S~nshine City, Scars, Mystical Rose, Apostasy, S~rrender in Paradise, Against the Grain, In this Life's Body. Ye~ with the pervasive economic climate encouraging vocational and career positioning, today's fringe filmmakers are frequently instances of people in transition towards a commercial centre. The separateness and resistance, so strongly associated with avant garde modernism, are now more often conceived as veneer-like and ephemeral moments of non acceptance rather than vantage points of perpetual struggle.
Today, it is not so easy to find a suitable label to characterize the scattered terrain of fringe filmmaking where neither avant garde nor independent is an adequate description. Historically, the avant garde has been very much tied to artistic modernism, whilst the term independent has been shifted around so much over recent decades that it has almost displaced itself. This is further complicated by the developments on the new multimedia fronts. The technological fetishism over virtual reality and cyberspace tends to deflect from a proper consideration of issues around cultural form and innovative practice.
Even if new technical aesthetic choices are extending the horizon of creative visual possibilities we need to accommodate this changing situation without either sanctifying it or rejecting it. In the rush-to seize upon the new visual media and the constant exuberance over hyperspace and interactivity, there is a general poverty of analysis in defining historically specific media worlds, their precise cultural spaces, and how they differ from each other. For example, cinema has continually adjusted over the last forty years as other media spaces have emerged and carved out their own cultural domains. The aura generated around the new visual technologies (interactive images, virtual reality, computer generated images) can breed a naive optimism over applications as well as restrictive applications via capitalist corporatism.
Although the MIMA Touring Collection - DIVERSIONARY TACTICS - represents a good cross section of contemporary Australian fringe film and video work embracing a variety of formal strategies, it does pose some classificatory questions. To be designated as coming from an avant garde tradition may in itself be an indicator of a foreclosed rhetorical history where the markers of self consciousness in image making can outstrip the manifest content.
Presumably, the bulk of film and video makers selected would see themselves loosely positioned in the post modernist paradigm(s). However, some are more decisively inheritors of modernist strategies than they might care to admit, whilst other filmmakers like Marie Craven (Pale Black) and Jackie Farkas (Amelia Rose Towers and Illustrated Auschwitz) are clearly indebted to modernism in their overall conception and reliance upon visual opacity and structural ellipsis.
Many of the films in the collection qualify as exercises in post modernist collage to the extent that they juxtapose different orders of imagery, yet they withhold from making more precise connections (e.g. Row, Row, Row, Your Boat (L.Jayamanne), Uranus (M.Hill), Conscientiousness (P.Veitch), Planet of the Vampires (S.Oliveira).
The history of avant garde film work is steeped in a self conscious, sometimes turgid, search for a phenomenology of the filmic process which eschews the protocols of normal narrative grounding. Nevertheless, in a desire to constantly assert and re-mark itself, fringe film and video work may ironically slide into a hiatus of articulation. Here, the spaces between images, and between images and words tend to remain insulated in their sense of discontinuity, unable to find an equilibrium between disjuncture and synthesis. The lure of uninhibited freedom so dear to avant gardists can also be a caveat for strategic over-determination; strained markers of subjectivity, disjunctural poetic modes, and quasi philosophical and knowing voice-overs may all vie for new levels of 'alienated' formalism. Today the challenge is to rejuvenate avant garde stylistics without lapsing into the territory of overworked reflexivity.
© Barrett Hodsdon 1994