Godard, Revolution and Representation

Considering Jean-Luc Godard's Ici et Ailleurs (1974) as an 'in-between' point of view consisting of the "complex interweaving of spatio-temporalities and histories of 'us' (France) and 'them' (Palestine)", Emmelhainz goes on to claim that due to our existence in a multicultural realm of global in-betweenness and the closing gap between here and elsewhere by the media and the technologies of co-presence, such an in-between is no longer possible.[1] If we consider France and Palestine as symbols for "the West" and "the Orient", as the concepts defined by Edward Saïd in his works dealing with Orientalism, it would be almost naïve to believe that due to advancements in technology or raised awareness of global multiculturalism, such an 'in-between' would no longer be possible. If anything, what these developments would have caused is an even greater opportunity for the existence of such an in-between, if not the existence of many such in-betweens. While Emmelhainz might see the great divide between the east and west that would have existed in 1974 (a full four years before Saïd's seminal book was published) to be in less need of bridging by such a work as Godrad's Ici et Ailleurs in the present, one might argue that it is now, more than ever, that we are in need of such an 'in-between'. While it is true that advancements in media and technology give us the possibility of increased awareness, it also proportionally raises the possibility of a greater divide. As such, Godard's film can be seen as taking on a newfound importance and relevance. While in practice it presents us with the specific issues of a pre-Black September Palestinian revolution and a family in 1974 France, when taken in a broader sense, the film can be paradigmic of a plethora of situations, not restricted to Palestine or France, and as such can achieve some measure of universality. That being said, the film itself is still very much concerned with the Palestinian revolution as explored by Godard, so in this case, the matter of the specific is as important as the generic, with one complimenting the other and vice-versa. Considering this, I intend to show that Ici et Ailleurs doesn't only provide a look at the specific issue of the Palestinian struggle before Black September, but also makes a broader comment on the nature of representation, perception and the changing ideological perspectives in the aftermath of the massacre, which in turn provides a framework for articulating the issue while remaining true to its nature.

To do so, I shall first begin with a look at the form, content and thematic of the film, concentrating on both the audiovisual (image/sound) and textual (narration / dialogue / intertitles / other text appearing in film) elements used to develop some of the more prevalent themes throughout the work. As the film, in many cases, draws attention to itself and to the (filmic) medium in general, it is important to observe not only how this is done, but also how this is used to develop some of the themes that it explores. Following, I will observe how the form and themes support Goddard's view of not only the Palestinians' struggle, but also of how this struggle raises awareness of the particularities (flaws/benefits/techniques) of filmic (and other) mode(s) of representation.

To begin, one can explore some of the themes and the way they are supported by the form and content of Godard's Ici et Ailleurs. Emmelhainz draws attention to the French word "ET" (AND) that is carved out of Styrofoam and placed on a pedestal throughout the film, deeming it as "Godard's way out of the dialectic and of transforming Vertov and Sergei Eisenstein's dialectical montage by inducing an interstice in the chain of images, positing differences between unities without opposing them, or presenting them as sublating contraries".[2] Here, the visual representation of the verbal conjunction "AND", is not only used to link two unrelated images, thus breaking the Vertov/Eisensteinian dialectical montage of collision, which would apply had the different images not been separated by the third image of the word "ET", but also to create "differences between unities", separating two similar images. In addition to this visual linking, the fact that the object in question is a physical representation of a part of speech (the conjunction), further serves to create the textual link between the meanings of the two images separated by the word. By doing this, we no longer interpret an image of Richard Nixon[3] (United States president at the time), separated by a Styrofoam "ET" from an image of Leonid Brezhnev[4] (Soviet Union Communist party General Secretary at the time) as a mere linking of two images, but we further ascribe it the textual meaning of linking the two opposing heads of state. Of course, the fact that shortly before the film's release, Nixon and Brezhnev opened a new round of negotiations with Nixon's visit to Moscow in '72 and Brezhnev's visit to Washington in '73, gave the linking of the images using the word "AND" so much more significance. It now read "Nixon AND Brezhnev". Further, considering both superpowers' interests in the middle east, with the (official or otherwise) US's support of Israel and the USSR's support of the PLO[5], the image of the two supposedly opposed superpowers' leaders together would have called into question their respective support of the opposing factions in the region.

Emmelhainz's notion of a "chain of images" linked by a visual conjunction, no doubt echoing the voice-over narration which mentions the "uninterrupted chain of images, enslaving one another"[6] in Gordard's film, is further used to develop Godard's theme of combining images and sounds to form associative chains. As Bogue notes, this chain "assigns us our place"[7] in the "chain of events on which we have lost all power"[8]. Further, Bogue points out that the French word for chain ("chaîne") "has associations … with consumer and media culture – travail à la chaîne: assembly-line work; chaîne: [TV] channel"[9]. These linguistic associations with the word chain, linking it to mindless, robotic work and an almost "zombie-like" TV consumer media culture, are not only echoed visually in Godard's film (with the family watching TV, various shots of TV screens and the father's job loss) but are also the subject of debate in the film's critique of the associational qualities of film and media in general.

Bogue points to the juxtaposition of the Palestinian fighters and the French family watching TV which, according to him, "invites a propagandistic reading of this relation as one of an authentic, active and natural culture versus a media-saturated, passive, consumerist culture, just as the alternating stills of Hitler and Golda Meir suggest a facile equation of the two figures"[10]. Indeed, this suggested facile equation managed to generate just this kind of invited propagandistic reading of this relation: Loshitzky sees Godard's work in Ici et Ailleurs as a "naïve idealization of the PLO… accompanied by an anti-Israel position equating the Israeli retaliations against Jordan … with Nazi atrocities"[11]. She further goes on to characterize the use of the image of Israeli prime minister at the time, Golda Meir, combined with a voice-over of a Hitler speech as "verging on anti-Semitism", deeming the entire film and Godard's other political films as "extremely naïve … dogmatic" and infantilic in their approach to the East/West conflict. She continues by referring to the previously discussed associational linking as a "simplistic and horrifying equation" and further refers to the "simplistic and monstrous equation" of associating the capitalist system to the "Nazis' mass murder of Jews"[12]. Ignoring Loshitzky's political inclination and her (arguably) justified dismay at what she perceived to be a blatant and simplistic associational technique for propaganda, one can't help but note that the illustration of this issue in the film managed, at least in this case, to convince Loshitzky of the issue's purported veracity, thus proving Godard's point.

But as Bogue and the narrator in Godard's film both state, it is "too simple and too easy to simply divide the world in two,"[13] "too easy or too simple to say simply that the wealthy are wrong and the poor are right"[14] and that "there are no more simple images, only simple people, who will be forced to stay quiet, like an image."[15] The simplicity of association and equation of two images is instead "exposed" in Ici et Ailleurs, which shows the ease with which form can take meaning and invite a simple, direct reading, instead of a multiplicity of meanings and readings thereof. If anything, Loshitzky's critique of Godard's film is only a testament to this fact, and her simplistic reading only serves to further prove Godard's point. Having said this, one must recognize that this very interpretation, while allowing for a broader spectrum of readings and interpretations with respect to Ici et Ailleurs, can fall in the same "trap" of assigning it one absolute meaning, regardless of how open it might be, and we must recognize that such a reading must also include interpretations in the vein of Loshitzky's for it to retain at least a portion of its validity.

However, Drabinsky reminds us that Ici et Ailleurs is as much about "the fate of a certain kind of representation, under certain conditions, spatial and temporal – as it is about the political events documented."[16] According to him, Godard's act of filmmaking is "fractured by the unsaid image of death."[17] The dead Palestinians in Godard's film ("almost all the actors are dead"[18]) represent the Other, which is both "produced by a system of representation and what escapes from it."[19] The concept of the Other, the "elsewhere", is that which is produced (images of dead Palestinians) by the specific system of representation (in this case - film) but escapes from it (the Other is never "truly" represented). The fact that Godard "comes to name that Other" causes the image to fail and produces separation[20]. As such, in Ici et Ailleurs, "sound and image work and fail to work in important ways, and in that sense become a philosophical language abused by staggered movements and non-movements of [their own appearance]," rendering Godard's cinema "a philosophical language against presence, coincidence, dialectics, and any coherence of representation."[21] Further, is this representation of the Other, in Godard's own "philosophical language", directed at an audience with the intention to be assimilated or with the intention of making this audience aware of its mode of representation?

This, in turn, begs the question of whether or not we (as spectators) are the possible spectators for these films, "are we really that minority to whom these images are addressed?"[22] Are we meant to consume the image of the Other, of the dead Palestinians from "elsewhere", or does that make us complicit with the French family that is juxtaposed with these very images of the Other? Daney attempts to provide several tongue-in-cheek answers to this question, asking if Godard's film should be presented to "the general public eager for sensation (Godard + Palestine = scoop)? To the politically aware anxious to be confirmed in its orthodoxy (Godard + Palestine = good cause + art)? To the PLO who invited him, allowed him to film and trusted him (Godard + Palestine = weapon of propaganda)?"[23] None of the options are satisfactory, however, and it is ultimately Toubiana that points out that what Ici et Ailleurs asks us to do is "to disentangle the notion of spectator activity, of the spectator at work, to make our vision sharper – avoiding the pitfalls of semiology, the distortions of any would-be scientific approach – so as to recover the true logic of the cinema which consists in looking and doing, in listening and recognizing images and sounds, working all the while on our own account."[24] It is indeed this spectator, "working all the while on their own account" that would seem to be the most able to raise to the awareness of the constructed nature of meaning through representation and above a readiness of assimilation with an ideological framework.

Finally, "the film offers an implicit rethinking of images through their isolation, their disconnection from conventional chains and their reconnection in unorthodox series", through "stills of documentary footage of Palestinian corpses, worker's demonstrations and Holocaust victims interjected in unexpected patterns throughout the film" separated by "AND", it eventually leads to this "rethinking of the meaningful differences that pertain to the violence that extends from the Russian revolution to the present" to the point that at the close of the film, "the circle of soldiers in quiet conversation and the French family watching TV has lost its clear ideological bearings."[25] Ultimately, the spectator no longer sees a clear contrast between the French family and the Fedayeen, nor do they see the associational linking of Golda Meir and Hitler's speech or Nixon and Brezhnev. As discussed, while Ici et Ailleurs does present the spectator with this mode of representation, it ultimately does so for the purpose of making them aware of it. Further, this awareness is instead intended to show how easily these images can be presented in order to invoke a certain reaction or ideological reading thereof. Here, the spectator can (or at least should) also see that while these images, sounds and words are used to illustrate this point, they can also (and are also) used to convey the political events which they document, encouraging the spectator's rethinking of both the images and the way they are presented, instead of an "all-too-easy" readiness of assimilation through an ideological framework (although not denying the possibility of such a reading). In conclusion, Ici et Ailleurs provides not only the specific account of the Fedayeen prior to Black September, but also the broader issue of the choice of representation for this subject which applies to a wide range of issues beyond the specific one presented in the film. As such, Godard gives a kind of universal quality to the subjects of his film, forever ascribing to their image a meaning that can be sustained across time, geography and culture, and, one can only hope, is but a humble and appropriate memorial in their honour.

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[1] Emmelhainz, Irmgard. "From Third Worldism to Empire: Jean-Luc Godard and the Palestine Question." Third Text 23, no. 5 (September 2009): 655.

[2] Ibid. 651

[3] Ici et Ailleurs. Directed by Jean Luc Godard, 1974, (00'14'34")

[4] Ibid. (00'14'40")

[5] Golan, Galia. " The Soviet Union and the PLO since the War in Lebanon." Middle East Journal 40, no. 2 (Spring 1968):285.

[6] Ici et Ailleurs, 1974 (00'35'57")

[7] Bogue, Ronald. "Search, Swim and See: Deleuze's Apprenticeship in Signs and Pedagogy of Images." In Deleuze's way: essays in transverse ethics and aesthetics, (Burlington, VT, USA; Aldershot, Hampshire, UK: Ashgate Publishing, 2007), 65

[8] Ici et Ailleurs, 1974 (00'37'37")

[9] Bogue, 2007, 65

[10] Ibid., 66

[11] Loshitzky, Yosefa. "A New Turn: The Collaboration with Miéville." In The radical faces of Godard and Bertolucci. (Detroit, Michigan: Wayne State University Press, 1995), 49.

[12] Ibid. 50

[13] Ici et Ailleurs, 1974 (00'14'36")

[14] Ibid., (00'14'50")

[15] Ibid., (00'35'30")

[16] Drabinski, John. “Separation, Difference, and Time in Godard’s Ici et ailleurs” SubStance #155, Vol.

37, No. 1, 2008. 152.

[17] Ibid,. 152.

[18] Ici et Ailleurs, 1974 (00'09'04")

[19] Reynaud, Bérénice."Introduction" In Cahiers du cinéma: volume four, 1973-1978 : history, ideology, cultural Struggle, edited by David Wilson and Bérénice Reynaud, (New York, NY: Routledge, 2000), 38

[20] Drabinski, 2008, 155

[21] Ibid.

[22] Toubiana, Serge."A matter of chance" In Cahiers du cinéma: volume four, 1973-1978 : history, ideology, cultural Struggle, edited by David Wilson and Bérénice Reynaud, (New York, NY: Routledge, 2000), 108

[23] Daney, Serge."Theorize/Terrorize (Godardian Pedagogy)" In Cahiers du cinéma: volume four, 1973-1978 : history, ideology, cultural Struggle, edited by David Wilson and Bérénice Reynaud, (New York, NY: Routledge, 2000), 121

[24] Toubiana, 2000, 109.

[25] Bogue, 2007, 66

REFERENCES

Bogue, Ronald. "Search, Swim and See: Deleuze's Apprenticeship in Signs and Pedagogy of Images." In Deleuze's way: essays in transverse ethics and aesthetics, 53-68. Burlington, VT, USA; Aldershot, Hampshire, UK: Ashgate Publishing, 2007.

Daney, Serge. "Theorize/Terrorize (Godardian Pedagogy)." In Cahiers du cinéma: volume four, 1973-1978 : history, ideology, cultural Struggle, edited by David Wilson and Bérénice Reynaud, 116-123. New York, NY: Routledge, 2000.

Drabinski, John. "Separation, Difference, and Time in Godard’s Ici et ailleurs." SubStance #115, 37, no. 1 (2008): 148-159.

Emmelhainz, Irmgard. "From Third Worldism to Empire: Jean-Luc Godard and the Palestine Question." Third Text 23, no. 5 (September 2009): 649 - 656.

Ici et Ailleurs. Directed by Jean-Luc Godard. Gaumont, 1974.

Golan, Galia. "The Soviet Union and the PLO since the War in Lebanon." Middle East Journal 40, no. 2 (Spring, 1968): 285-305.

Loshitzky, Yosefa. "A New Turn: The Collaboration with Miéville." In The radical faces of Godard and Bertolucci, 49-53. Detroit, Michigan: Wayne State University Press, 1995.

Reynaud, Bérénice. "Introduction." In Cahiers du cinéma: volume four, 1973-1978 : history, ideology, cultural Struggle, edited by David Wilson and Bérénice Reynaud, 1-44. New York, NY: Routledge, 2000.

Toubiana, Serge. "A matter of chance." In Cahiers du cinéma: volume four, 1973-1978 : history, ideology, cultural Struggle, edited by David Wilson and Bérénice Reynaud, 105-110. New York, NY: Routledge, 2000.

Form and Meaning in Peter Rose's Secondary Currents and Michael Snow's So Is This

Produced at a time when avant-garde film making experienced a newfound marginalization due to the normalization of film studies in academia[1], Peter Rose's Secondary Currents (1983) and Michael Snow's So Is This (1982) constitute a kind of filmic answer to the academic efforts to theorize film in writing, using the "theatre space as the medium for communication", in writing. This situation was described by Snow himself, in his 1989 and 1990 interviews with Scott MacDonald, where he refers to the "academic theorists" who believe that "the subject" is "totally culturally shaped" and his disagreement with the opinion, opting instead for a view that favours nature more than nurture, and which is further evidence of this feeling of marginalization that avant-garde film makers might have felt at the time, having to defend their creativity in light of film theorists' (textual) analysis[2]. While an essay analyzing this practice could be seen as the very thing which these two films are an answer to, and as such risking to even further marginalize avant-garde film-making, it is the very recognition of this risk that renders the analysis even more relevant. Further, as opposed to the supposed film studies work of the 1980's, that would have marginalized avant-garde film making, and which would have concentrated on commercial cinema, exploring the convention of entertainment[3], a text dealing directly with two avant-garde films, should only render avant-garde cinema as more relevant (one would hope), as opposed to marginalizing it.

Through film and text combined, the two works function in conveying an understanding of both means of expression that neither can provide by itself. As such, Both Michael Snow's So Is This and Peter Rose's Secondary Currents allow for a deeper understanding of constructed meaning that goes beyond the meaning presented in text or film in and of themselves.

To see how this is accomplished, I will commence by exploring the formal elements of both films, both visual and (in case of Secondary Currents) aural. Following this, I will look at the concept of time as it is present in both films and the way that it affects our understanding of the text conveyed. Finally, I shall observe how these two elements converge in creating meaning and how this contributes to our understanding of this meaning that neither element can fully achieve by itself.

Beginning with the formal elements of the films - both constitute of primarily white text on a black background, making the films almost entirely text based. Such an approach might seem like it would be going against the very medium used to convey the message. Snow's own admission that such a form is "inconsistent with the nature of the medium"[4], coupled with Brakhage's condemnation of verbal language, stating "Imagine a world before 'the beginning was the word'"[5] might make it seem as though the films are going against the very experimental film tradition from which their creators come. A deeper examination however, reveals that both work very well as structural films. Considering Sitney's definition of structural film, we can find most elements (fixed camera, flicker effect, loop printing, rephotography) that he considers the building blocks of structural film[6], in both Rose's and Snow's films. Other than at the end of Secondary Currents, there is no movement at all in either film (camera movement or text movement). The rapid succession of words in So Is This, at times gives the impression of flicker, and the rapidly alternating words at the end of Secondary Currents gives a similar impression. Finally, in So Is This, Snow employs rephotography (after the segment announcing "Let's Look Back:" there is a brief recap of the first part of the film through rephotography of the screen[7]). Despite exhibiting many of the elements that would deem it as a bona fide structural film, Razutis claims that Rose's film merely has its "roots in structural films" but "nevertheless exceed(s) the prescriptions that have strangled structural film"[8]. While this view that structural film is "strangled" by its own prescriptions might seem somewhat extreme, one can clearly see how both Rose's and Snow's films go beyond the structural film dogma (as defined by Sitney, if one exists) and employ a range of other strategies not necessarily associated with structural film. Rose's film, for example, draws on foreign art house films both in the aural delivery of the dialogue by Rose (alluding to Bergman, Kurosawa and Fellini[9]) and through the visual representation of the text, playing "with the viewer's assumptions about how subtitles will be organized"[10].

Snow, on the other hand, proclaiming in So Is This that "the rest of the film will look just like this" raises the possibility that film is just what it seems to be, that it is "purely visible"[11] something that, on the surface, would conform to Sitney's notion of structural film, insisting on its shape with minimal content that is subsidiary to the outline.[12] Despite this, however, we are placed in a sort of pedagogical position, in front of a blackboard, with all our expectations of narrative pleasure intact[13], giving the film its "educational" nature, that goes beyond what it seems to be and beyond it being "purely visible".

Moving beyond the audiovisual elements of the films, let us now consider the element of time in Secondary Currents and in So Is This. In Rose's Secondary Currents, there are two instances where time is a factor in our understanding of meaning (or lack thereof). The first is when an extended passage narrated by Rose's "woman" voice, in something that sounds similar to Italian, spends around 8 seconds at about 0'05'49" in the film[14] saying something that is "translated" in one single word (the word was "nonsense") pointing to the reality that what was heard wasn't adequately represented by subtitles[15]. The second instance is towards the end, when the "translation" becomes increasingly complex, and as consequence increasingly indecipherable due to the fact that the sentences must be presented only a phrase at a time[16] leaving the viewer little time to form a coherent meaning of the sentences. Both of these instances show how Rose uses the element of time to control our understanding of the text's meaning.

Snow's So Is This, on the other hand, uses time as a means of controlling the pace in which we read his text, not bound by the timing of the made-up narration like Rose was, by doing so he places us, the viewer, at his mercy.[17] MacDonald refers to this as Snow "frustrating our ability to read" and "turning film loose on the experience of reading".[18] But why would Snow do this? Mellencamp talks of the political dimensions of silence, in the gaps and quiet spaces in between words in a world of constant sound, talk and speeded up imaging.[19] But Snow's whole film is silent, and the gaps and quiet spaces between words are represented visually by a black screen. Elder, then, suggests that since the words present themselves one after another, like moments in time, So Is This challenges the apparently obvious truths that what is given in the present moment is fully present, since the viewer needs to remember words presented and anticipate what words are yet to come in order to construct meaningful sentences from the individual words.[20] He further elaborates that the isolation of single words in So Is This is used to reveal that words are not meaningful in isolation, but only in context, therefore in language, like in time, nothing is ever simply present or simply absent.[21] Further, Elder expands on the notion of absence and presence to reach the notion of meaning: the words in So Is This are by themselves meaningless, since meaning is not something given but rather "constructed by an intellectual act of synthesis" as much from the traces of the absent (our memory of the words we've just read) as from the present (the word that we are currently reading). As such, meaning is "constituted by stepping out of the succession of particularized words and rising to a realm of timeless meaning"[22].

Finally, after having explored how the formal elements of Secondary Currents and So Is This function to go beyond the structural film and how the element of time in the films works to elaborate on our understanding of the nature of meaning, what is left is to see how these two converge in giving meaning to the films and how they contribute in our understanding of this meaning. In So Is This, Elder points to the structure of the film that constitutes of an introduction, a flashback of this introduction (through rephotography) and a conclusion, deeming the film as a film whose main body of text is a text without a main body. Further going on to say that this lack of main body is similar to the paradox of the non-being of meaning and presence, and that the whole film is built around this paradox.[23] As an example, he cites the portion of the film that states "There'll be not one word about El Salvador, no mention of Trudeau"[24], a paradox since the very mentioning of those words not being mentioned constitutes them being mentioned, which points to their absence by their presence. And inversely points to the presence in absence when mentioning the part about censorship ("a trace of what is censored always remains")[25]. Here we see how meaning is constructed through the choice of having or not having something mentioned, but even further by pointing out the fact of this mentioning or not mentioning, elevating it to yet another level ("why isn't something mentioned/not mentioned?"). But it is Razutis, commenting on Rose's films, which ultimately points to the significance of the text film, as a response to the "academicised debates on narrative and structure, and in spite of the hegemony of theory", there is still "excellent, inspired work being conducted", which "once again allows us to engage in visual pleasure, experience of self and world within a cinematic practice that is irreducible to paradigms or simple combinational rules"[26]. According to this, the text film's importance and meaning is a kind of escape from the binds of academicised debate and theory towards a work that does not fall within some sort of film-studies formula which, with its prescriptions, has managed to strangle even the structural film[27]. As such Rose's Secondary Currents not only escapes this discourse, but further goes to mock and burlesque it, parodying the increasing complexity of writing about film[28] ("an unrepentant dilution of constructed meaning whose meandering lucubrations foretold the essential entropy whose euphostolic processes and peregnations re-invitriafied by the subcoholate of an ecstatic generative demuneration…"[29]).

Snow on the other hand is more direct in asserting that So Is This is a comment on the "business of using the art object, in this case film, as a pretext for arguments that the writer considers of more interest", and deems this practice as "a misuse of the stimuli" referring to the feeling of "producing [a film] for other people to advance their own interests and arguments"[30]. As such, Snow's film (or rather the meaning expressed in the interview with him about the film) is one that expresses a real concern regarding the use of his films to advance an idea separate (or at least diverging) from his initial intention for his work.

To conclude, we have seen how the formal elements in Michael Snow's So Is This and Peter Rose's Secondary Currents work along with the element of time in the films in expressing meaning. We have also explored the notion of presence and absence conveyed through these two elements and how this notion brings to a better understanding of meaning. Finally we have observed how the meaning in both the films is used as a comment on the state of film theory and academic discourse at the time of their production, as well as the individual filmmaker's ways of dealing with this situation, both in their films and as expressed through interview. While this view seems valid and justified, one would hope that experimental film (and particularly the text-film) has managed since to peacefully coexist with academic discourse (such as this one) regarding these kinds of works. While one could indeed see how the films would have been deemed as "poetic justice" for "people who make a fetish of the ability to write and read sentences"[31], and similarly see how this very text could constitute the fulfillment of said fetish, one would hope that this sort of justice is not produced out of a need to go against such kind of discourse, but rather as an artistic expression not driven by a reaction to its hypothetical use (or misuse) in advancing any interest or argument other than the artist's own. Realizing that this ideal might, inadvertently constitute the death of art criticism as a whole and considering the "dog-eat-dog" nature of today's art circle, one wonders if this is in any way a realistic ideal, or if it should simply be deemed as naïve and overly idealistic, dismissing the contemplative lament on the subject in favor of a full scale defense of academic writing about film (and possibly a similar full scale attack on experimental text-film).

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[1] Scott MacDonald "Experimental Cinema in the 1980s." In A New Pot of Gold: Hollywood Under the Electronic Rainbow, 1980-1989, Stephen Prince, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 439.

[2] Scott MacDonald, A Critical Cinema: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 75.

[3] MacDonald, "Experimental Cinema in the 1980s", 439.

[4] R. Bruce Elder, Image and Identity: Reflections on Canadian Film and Culture, (Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1989), 317.

[5] Stan Brakhage, "From Metaphors of Vision", The Avant-Garde Film: A Reader of Theory and Criticism, P. Adams Sitney, ed., (New York: New York University Press, 1978), 120.

[6] P. Adams Sitney, Visionary Film: The American Avant-garde, 1943-2000, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 348.

[7] So Is This directed by Michael Snow, 1982.

[8] Al Razutis, "Propositions for the Deconstruction of Cine-Structuralism: An Eliptical Introduction to the Films of Peter Rose." Opsis 1, no. 2/3 (1984), 23.

[9] Scott MacDonald, Screen Writings: Scripts and Texts by Independent Filmmakers, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995),m 157.

[10] MacDonald, "Experimental Cinema in the 1980s", 441.

[11] Elder, Image and Identity, 322.

[12] Sitney, Visionary Film, 348.

[13] Patricial Mellencamp, Indiscretions: Avant-garde Film, Video & Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 90.

[14] Secondary Currents, directed by Peter Rose, 1983.

[15] MacDonald, "Experimental Cinema in the 1980s, 440.

[16] Ibid., 441.

[17] MacDonald, Screen Writings, 137.

[18] Ibid., 137.

[19] Mellencamp, Indiscretions, 90.

[20] Elder, Image and Identity, 319

[21] Ibid., 319.

[22] Ibid., 324.

[23] Ibid., 320.

[24] Ibid., 322.

[25] Ibid., 323.

[26] Razutis, "Propositions for the Deconstruction of Cine-Structuralism, 23.

[27] Ibid., 23.

[28] MacDonald, Screen Writings, 157.

[29] Rose, Secondary Currents

[30] MacDonald, A Critical Cinema, 74.

[31] Ibid., 74.

REFERENCES

Brakhage, Stan. "From Metaphors of Vision." In The Avant-Garde Film: A Reader of Theory and Criticism, edited by P. Adams Sitney, 172-183. New York: New York University Press, 1978.

Elder, R. Bruce. Image and Identity: Reflections on Canadian Film and Culture. Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1989.

MacDonald, Scott. A Critical Cinema: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992.

MacDonald, Scott. "Experimental Cinema in the 1980s." In A New Pot of Gold: Hollywood Under the Electronic Rainbow, 1980-1989, by Stephen Prince, 390-444. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002.

MacDonald, Scott. Screen Writings: Scripts and Texts by Independent Filmmakers. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995.

Mellencamp, Patricia. Indiscretions: Avant-garde Film, Video & Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990.

Razutis, Al. "Propositions for the Deconstruction of Cine-Structuralism: An Eliptical Introduction to the Films of Peter Rose." Opsis 1, no. 2/3 (1984): 16-23.

Secondary Currents. Directed by Peter Rose. 1983.

Sitney, P. Adams. Visionary Film: The American Avant-garde, 1943-2000. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.

So Is This. Directed by Michael Snow. 1982.