Chapter 7

Leading from the Front: Avant-Garde Film

In This Chapter

Discovering how to watch avant-garde films

Analysing the avant-garde’s preoccupations

Falling into a trance with dream-like cinema

What colour is grass? The sky? Green and blue, right? Everyone knows that. But go outside and sit on a lawn or a patch of parkland and have a proper long look at the grass. Is it really just green – that vivid crayon green that you used to colour it in as a kid? Or is it a whole range of colours from grey to brown to yellow? While you’re there, lie on your back for five minutes and stare at the sky. Not just blue, is it? You see whites and greys and sometimes oranges and greens. Stare at the sky for long enough and you may also see those weird floaty things that are part of your eyeballs.

My point here, borrowed from American avant-garde film-maker Stan Brakhage, is that the way you talk about vision is quite different from what you actually see. The situation is the same with film. Film students and fans talk about character, narrative, theme and genre, when what they really see and hear are a series of moving photographs of people they don’t know, doing inexplicable, exciting things to each other, accompanied by unrealistic sound effects and loud music with no obvious source.

The concern of avant-garde film, which I attempt valiantly to describe in this chapter, is to break down the accepted conventions that allow you to make sense of your film-watching experience, because avant-garde film-makers believe that the concealed artificiality of mainstream film is inherently dishonest. The avant-garde films I discuss can be challenging and even occasionally unpleasant, but if you can give yourself up to the experience, you gain access to millions of different and fascinating perspectives on what cinema can do.

Advance! Attempting to Pin Down the Avant-Garde

Of all the types of film I discuss in this book, avant-garde film is the least known and understood. If you dip even a toe into these films, you’re likely to encounter a great deal of complex theory and jargon-heavy discussion, which can be off-putting for the average movie fan.

Additionally, until just a few years ago, avant-garde film was difficult to get to see due to the fact that it isn’t often screened in mainstream cinemas and the fact that a lot of it falls foul of censorship restrictions. But since the DVD format brought practically everything into the home arena and the Internet revolutionised distribution (see Chapter 16), finding and watching these films has never been easier.

Try and watch as many of the films I discuss in this chapter as possible, in any way you can. Reasonable quality versions of many of them circulate on YouTube, although clearly DVD and Blu-ray offer higher definition. Either way, the particular viewing experiences they provide are often impossible to recreate in written text.

Standing against the mainstream

So, here’s another French word. Avant-garde was originally a military term for a group of soldiers who forge ahead into battle. When artists adopted it in the 19th or early 20th centuries, the term came to mean creative types with radical, innovative views or techniques, who were separate from – and generally opposed to – the mainstream. The implication is that avant-garde art is somehow ahead of its time, and is leading the way towards greater enlightenment for all. Of course this claim is very grand, and history hasn’t always worked out the way that the avant-garde radicals expected. But you have to admire their ambition nonetheless.

Avant-garde film is also sometimes called experimental film, which is a broader, more inclusive term, or artists’ film, which is somewhat more elitist. Whatever you call it, the avant-garde always exists in opposition to popular mainstream cinema, as Table 7-1 shows.

You may well be thinking: wait a minute here. I’m quite happy with mainstream cinema, thank you very much. I like my blockbusters and even the occasional foreign language film, but that’s as far as it goes. This avant-garde stuff just sounds way too … pretentious.

If so, don’t worry. Certainly this mindset exists and is probably characteristic of the vast majority of film fans. For the time being, however, I can only say to keep an open mind. A film student who refuses any type of film without even trying it is seriously limiting their own options.

Table 7-1 Comparing the Characteristics of Mainstream and Avant-Garde Films

Sampling the many facets of the avant-garde

The blanket term avant-garde film covers an incredibly diverse range of film-making practices, which often overlap with areas of animation (see Chapter 6), documentary (Chapter 8) and art cinema (check out the later sidebar ‘The best of both worlds: Art cinema’). The nature of avant-garde film-making, however, which often flourishes in a workshop community of like-minded artists, means that art and film historians typically identify significant movements or clusters of activity within specific historical moments or locations.

In order to get to grips with the avant-garde, familiarise yourself with a few of the following movements, film-makers and films. The huge variety of practices I describe here means that you should be able to find something here that you at least appreciate, and perhaps even enjoy. So, roughly in order from oldest to most recent, here they are:

• European Avant-Garde: When the word Avant-Garde is capitalised, it tends to refer to 1920s Paris and Berlin, when artists from other media began to embrace cinema. The results were abstract animations (see the later ‘Determining when a cartoon isn’t just a cartoon’ section) or cubist films such as Fernand Legér’s Ballet Mécanique (1924).
• Surrealism: The surrealists took elements recognisable from conventional films (plot, character, locations) and then mixed them all around until nothing made conventional sense. René Clair’s Entr’acte (1924) attacks art and the middle-class bourgeoisie. Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí’s Un Chien Andalou (1929) is filled with disturbing imagery linking sex and death (check out the later section ‘Dissecting cows and priests in chains’ for much more on this avant-garde classic).
• Underground film: Associated particularly with New York in the 1950s and 1960s, underground film is largely unconcerned with ‘art’ but instead offers a voice to alternative lifestyles and philosophies. These films gleefully ignore taboos around sexuality and gender. Kenneth Anger’s Scorpio Rising (1964) blends innocent pop music with gay sadomasochistic bikers. Andy Warhol’s Couch (1964) features various Beat Generation artists and poets getting it on, on a couch.
• Structural film: A movement of the 1960s and 1970s that was stripped back and minimalist. Films are structured by the basic qualities of cinema such as time and space. Michael Snow’s Wavelength (1967) is a 45-minute slow zoom into an empty room. Plus a murder! Malcolm le Grice’s Berlin Horse (1970) superimposes short looping sections of negative and positive film featuring – you guessed it – a horse.
• Found footage film: These collages are made out of bits of other films recovered from archives or other storage media. For Rose Hobart (1936), artist Joseph Cornell re-edited the Universal film East of Borneo (1931) to focus on its leading lady, thus predating the fad for re-cutting movies and trailers on YouTube by around 70 years. Now that’s avant-garde.
• Young British Artists (YBAs): Since the 1990s, video art has become increasingly significant within the art gallery world, particularly in the UK. Sam Taylor-Wood develops Andy Warhol’s obsession with celebrity into video portraits such as David (Beckham, sleeping, in 2004). Steve McQueen won the art world’s prestigious Turner Prize in 1999 for his video art and more recently a Best Picture Oscar for 12 Years a Slave (2013). The fact that many YBAs now make feature films illustrates that hostility to commercial film-making is no longer a prerequisite for video artists.

Determining when a cartoon isn’t just a cartoon

The most familiar examples of animation are undoubtedly cartoons in cinemas and on television for children (and adult) audiences, but the field of animation has much more to offer beyond Walt Disney and Tex Avery (check out Chapter 6 for all about traditional animation). Look at animation another way, and it becomes moving art. Right from the early days of cinema, animation has been a favourite form for experimental and avant-garde film-makers because of its handmade nature, its relationship with drawing and sculpture, and its freedom from the constraints placed on conventional film-making, particularly regarding storytelling and realism.

Following are some key examples of avant-garde animation:

• Viking Eggeling’s abstract film Diagonal-Symphonie (1924) was made using paper cut-outs painstakingly manipulated and then photographed one frame at a time. These shapes grow and move, becoming more complex and resembling musical forms: staves, piano cables, perhaps a harp. It’s a bold, striking and hypnotic film.
• Len Lye’s A Colour Box (1935) was created entirely without a camera: its colourful patterns and shapes were painted directly onto the celluloid. This technique creates an entirely different impression of movement from regular animation. The shapes often appear to dance along with the upbeat jazzy score.
• Norman McLaren’s Neighbours (1952) is a black comedy short that won an Oscar. It uses a technique known as pixilation in which actors are used as stop-motion puppets, enabling them to glide around or even fly through the air. Its abstract soundtrack was created by scratching the edge of the celluloid print, which the projector then reads as sound.
• Stan Vanderbeek was an innovator in the field of computer animation. Together with Kenneth Knowlton he created a series of text-based animations called Poem Field in the late 1960s. These films challenge the spectator with harsh gaudy colours and jazz-noise sound.
• Yuriy Norshteyn’s Hedgehog in the Fog (1975) builds on the tradition of Russian animators using folk tales as source material. It’s a delightful and odd little film that explores a misty wood from the perspective of a terrified hedgehog.

Exploring Three Important Avant-Garde Ideas

Avant-garde film-makers have their own particular set of ideas, themes and aesthetic strategies that they employ in their work. However, a few overreaching big ideas link many of these films. In this section I discuss three of the most important.

Playing around with time

The key difference between film and the other visual arts – painting, sculpture and photography – is time. Film has duration, movement and change. All films use time in one way or another, from short actualities, early slice-of-life films that occupy the length of time necessary for a train to enter a station, to the complex structures of conventional narrative cinema. Fiction films generally manage time through continuity editing (see Chapter 2), which provides a flow of story events from beginning to end. Time can speed up (in montage sequences, which compress many hours or even days of action into a few seconds) or slow down (in long takes which make use of real time), but it generally moves relentlessly forward. Exceptions – such as Christopher Nolan’s Memento (2000) – only serve to reinforce the general rule.

Of course forward-moving is only one way to represent how human beings experience time, and it’s a pretty artificial approach at that. Describing cinema as life with all the boring bits cut out may be a bit clichéd, but it’s a cliché for good reason.

Avant-garde films often offer alternative structures and viewpoints to expose the artificial ways in which mainstream films handle time when telling their stories. The early European Avant-Garde was influenced by cubism in the visual arts, notably the idea that time and space can collapse in on each other within a single image. So when you look at a cubist painting by Pablo Picasso, such as The Accordionist (1911), you’re looking at its subject from different angles and even moments in time.

Maya Deren and Alexander Hammid’s Meshes of the Afternoon (1943) is one of the founding films of the American avant-garde and, as its name suggests, it’s a fascinating study in the subjective experience of time. In this carefully composed black and white film, Deren repeatedly enters a house by climbing up stairs, sometimes pursuing a faceless figure or encountering herself apparently asleep in a chair. Film historian and experimental film archivist P Adams Sitney compares the film’s structure to a spiral shape, because events are repeated but also overlap or intertwine with each other. The woozy effect of the film is like trying to remember a strange dream while you’re still half asleep.

Although it treats time in an unusual way, Meshes of the Afternoon is filled with movement and a story of sorts: it certainly isn’t boring. By contrast, Andy Warhol’s most extreme non-narrative films simply gaze at their subject for interminable lengths of time, testing the patience of even the most committed avant-garde audiences:

• Sleep (1963) is almost five and a half hours of his friend John Giorno asleep in bed. Not a single-take film as many people assume, it uses edits, repeated sections and freeze-frames.
• Eat (1964) watches the painter Robert Indiana eating a mushroom in close-up for 45 minutes. It was shot on four-minute reels, which end with flare-ups (the bright light of the projector through the blank celluloid at the end of the reels) and are simply replaced with the same shot after reels have been changed.
• Empire (1964) is one single take of the Empire State Building in New York. Overnight shooting lasted for six and a half hours, but to extend the experience still further, Warhol insisted the film was projected in slow motion, resulting in more than eight hours of nothing happening, apart from natural light changes and floodlights turning on.

Warhol rightly described these works as ‘anti-films’, because their complete lack of artifice and artistic intervention is almost as shocking as their extreme running times. Of course hardly anyone is capable of watching the whole of Empire in one sitting in a cinema, which is entirely the point. Warhol’s static films force his audience to confront the passing of time head on with no distractions. And that’s quite an experience in itself.

Not worrying about the story

In literature, making the distinction between prose and poetry is important. Prose often tells a story and relies upon events occurring in sequence. Poetry can have a story, but it doesn’t need one. It can just as easily be about meaning that exists in one moment of time, about exploring psychological states or about impressions of beauty. Poetry is also about language itself – the rhythms, constructions and possibilities. Of course this distinction isn’t absolute, most prose has poetic elements and poetry can tell stories. But the fundamental purpose of each practice is different.

Just as literature has prose and poetry, cinema has narrative and avant-garde film. Avant-garde film is similar to poetry in its diversity of forms, its attention to artistic methods and techniques and its use of metaphor (comparisons or clashes between images) rather than continuity. Indeed these similarities are not lost on avant-garde film-makers who have often compared themselves to poets or taken poetry as their subject. Jean Cocteau was a Parisian and a Bohemian who produced art across a range of media. His 1930 Le Sang d’un Poète (The Blood of a Poet) is an early sound film that begins with an intertitle manifesto: ‘Every poem is a coat of arms. It must be deciphered.’

Le Sang d’un Poète does have a story of sorts, but unlike conventional narrative cinema the motivations of its characters are mysterious and events don’t link together in a clear cause-and-event chain. It begins with an artist sketching a face on a canvas. The mouth of the painting comes to life and begins to speak, and so the artist rubs it out with his hand, to where it transfers. The mouth ends up on a female statue, who advises the poet to leap into a mirror. Through the looking glass, the poet finds himself in a hotel where he peers into different rooms. The film then cuts to an outdoor scene where children are playing snowballs. One child (presumably the poet himself) is hit by a chunk of marble and dies, as does the poet. The ending is an image of the female statue with a lyre.

Not exactly a taut plotline filled with narrative tension is it? But think of the film as a poem instead of a story and you can use different bits of your brain (and analytical tools) to make sense of it – or ‘decipher it’ in Cocteau’s terms. Coats of arms use visual symbols to represent the history of a family, and Le Sang d’un Poète is also full of distinctive images that reach back to Ancient Greece: the statue, figures wearing masks posed as tableau images, the laurels placed upon the dying poet’s head. Additionally, hints of the myth of Orpheus, the poet who travelled to the underworld to regain his lost love, crop up in the film. But it’s no staid retelling of a Greek myth. It shocks and scandalises with its sexual references and female impersonators. Don’t worry about the story, just enjoy the lovely poetic imagery.

Embracing abstract images

When avant-garde film chooses to do away with narrative altogether, the result is often abstract work that explores the elements of time, movement and sound. Consider again the idea I introduce at the beginning of this chapter: is grass really green? Or do you just think of it as green because that’s how people described it to you as a child?

The gap between how you discuss images and what you actually see was a central theme of the American avant-garde film-maker Stan Brakhage. Brakhage was an artist, writer and teacher who was part of the New York underground film movement of the 1950s and 1960s, but his films are more personal and idiosyncratic than those of his contemporaries, including Andy Warhol and Maya Deren (whom I discuss in the earlier section ‘Playing around with time’).

Brakhage used the film camera as a tool to represent how he perceived and understood the world in visual terms. His films therefore contain elements of documentary, abstract animation and even home movies. Here are some key examples in chronological order:

• Window Water Baby Moving (1959): A document of the birth of Brakhage’s first child. Shots of his wife Jane happy and relaxed in bathwater are intercut with a highly detailed birth sequence. Beautiful, but not for the squeamish.
• Dog Man Star (1961–4): A cycle of five silent films that all together run to around 75 minutes. Each segment uses a bewildering array of techniques including close-up shots of bodies or other organic forms, painting directly onto the celluloid, or scratches that remove parts of the image revealing bright light beneath.
• Mothlight (1963): A handmade film created without a camera. Instead Brakhage trapped a series of transparent or translucent objects – including moth wings, blades of grass and flower petals – between two strips of tape and printed the result onto celluloid to be projected. The resulting images dance and flicker around the screen.

You can see Brakhage’s Mothlight as part of the structural film movement of the 1960s and 1970s (see ‘Sampling the many facets of the avant-garde’ earlier in this chapter), which produced such examples of abstract imagery as Room Film (1973), in which Peter Gidal’s camera tracks incessantly around a room in extreme close-up.

More recently video and computer artists have deployed new media to create abstract moving images. But probably the most extreme example of abstract film remains Tony Conrad’s The Flicker (1965), which contains only black and white frames that alternate with an increasing speed until they produce stroboscopic effects. The film must be seen in a darkened cinema, but beware – it has been known to cause seizures in unsuspecting audience members!

Drifting Off into a World of Dreams

The cinema-going experience – darkness, comfort, escaping from everyday life – has inspired many film theorists to compare it to dreaming. The metaphor of cinema as dream is particularly powerful for avant-garde film-makers who often count surrealism among their formative influences. The surrealist aesthetic is heavily symbolic and sexualised, drawing on ideas from psychoanalysis, which in fact are important within film theory more generally (see Chapter 13). But within avant-garde film dream logic, symbolism and imagery certainly find their fullest expression. But be careful, they may just give you some bad dreams of your own.

Dissecting cows and priests in chains

If you watch only one avant-garde film as a result of reading this chapter, make it Un Chien Andalou (1929). In fact, if you haven’t seen it yet, go and watch it right now. You can find it on YouTube. I can wait 15 minutes.

Okay, so how was it? Shocking, confusing, hilarious? I concur with all these responses. Of the many, many films that I’ve watched with students, this film is the only one guaranteed to make everyone in the room gasp at the same time. After seeing it, you know exactly which point I mean, I’m sure. I can reassure you by saying that the eyeball wasn’t really the actress’s; it belonged to an unfortunate cow. But that doesn’t lessen the visceral horror of that shot, coming so early in the film, which, until that point, feels fairly conventional. That moment is literally an attack on cinema’s primary sense – sight – from which you struggle to recover during the rest for the film. The film starts you reeling right from the word go and gets only weirder from then on.

Un Chien Andalou has impeccable surrealist credentials because it was created through a partnership between film-maker Luis Buñuel and the painter Salvador Dalí. Unpacking the film’s mythology is difficult, but Buñuel spoke of the script being sparked by images from their own dreams and then developed via a process akin to automatic writing (both contributors brainstormed a series of images that had no rational connection to each other). This process led the film-maker to argue that nothing in the film can be read as symbolic of anything else, and that the only possible way to interpret it was through the lens of psychoanalysis – which is exactly what film theorists later did (I cover film theory in Chapter 13).

If Un Chien Andalou is about anything, it’s probably sex. And death. And rotting donkeys. At the core of the film is the deeply bizarre relationship between its male and female protagonists who love and attack each other in equal measure. She’s introduced waiting for him in a room, reading a book. She rushes to the window to see him collapsed on the street. She descends to kiss him passionately, although he’s inert.

Later, back in her room, he reciprocates with lascivious desire, touching her and imaging her naked breasts and bottom. His eyes roll back in a grotesque seizure accompanied by bloody drool falling down his chin. Intense and disturbing emotional states like this one come and go without explanation or motivation.

As you may expect from a film with Salvador Dalí’s involvement, Un Chien Andalou contains some unforgettable imagery. One example comes as the man attempts to seduce the woman and she resists. He then picks up two ropes and tries to pull them towards her. He turns out to be attempting to drag nothing less that two grand pianos topped by rotting donkeys and two priests in chains (see Figure 7-1).

One of the priests is Dalí himself wearing a sly expression. This image appears to be literal embodiment of the psychological notion of baggage – the mental stuff that you carry around that prevents you from behaving as you’d like to. In this case, his baggage includes religion (the priests), culture (the pianos) and fear of death (the donkeys). The entire film is insane and inspired.

Yet Un Chien Andalou is far from the collection of random images you may expect Buñuel’s methodology to produce. For a start, it’s a well-made film, using techniques drawn from narrative cinema to establish place and character. For example, the man’s cycle ride through the streets is represented using establishing long shots, and then tracking close-ups and point-of-view shots that move in the opposite direction but similar velocity.

This entirely conventional editing pattern (as I discuss in Chapter 4) was as familiar to audiences in 1929 as it is today. Similarly, that shocking opening scene relies for its effect upon another convention, that of match on action. The movement of the man’s hand with the razor is mirrored by the intervening shot of the clouds slicing the moon, and then comes the eyeball. The unsettling balance between conventional film-making technique and moments of radical breakdown give Un Chien Andalou its enduring power.

Going into a cinematic trance

The dream state is such a common subject across a broad swath of avant-garde films that archivist P Adams Sitney created a subcategory of experimental works, which he dubbed trance films. Sitney’s key characteristics of trance films include:

• Sleeping protagonists who remain isolated from what they encounter during the dream state. The prototype here is the sleepwalking Cesare in The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (1920).
• Simple narratives, usually a physical journey through space, toward a climax of self-realisation or death. Stages along the way are marked by what is seen by the protagonist rather than by what is done. Cocteau’s Le Sang d’un Poète is a prime example of this structure (see the earlier section ‘Not worrying about the story’).
• Dream landscapes (natural or architectural) that aren’t bound by realistic notions of space, and which become an element of the film’s symbolism. For example, in At Land (1944) the film-maker Maya Deren is washed up out of the sea and eventually disappears back into the sand dunes.

Kenneth Anger made Fireworks (1947) when he was just 20 years old. It features a protagonist (played by Anger) who begins the film asleep in bed, before (apparently) waking and leaving his apartment through a door marked ‘Gents’. He then has a series of homoerotic and increasingly violent encounters with men dressed in military uniforms. His chest is opened with a broken bottle, and his heart is revealed to be a twitching compass. A sailor unzips his fly to reveal a sparkling Roman candle. Made when homosexuality was still criminalised in the US, Anger faced obscenity charges when the film was first screened. Despite its sleepy protagonist, Fireworks demonstrates that the trance film can be a suitable vehicle for incendiary sexual politics.

Although the trance film provided a fertile model for many avant-garde film-makers, it’s clearly not the only way to represent dreams in celluloid form. Gently Down the Stream (1981) by Su Friedrich uses extracts from the film-maker’s dream journal, hand-scratched into the film as text. These personal memories are intercut with fragments of religious icons or watery imagery, women swimming and rowing. The dream fragments range from the banal to the sexualised, but Friedrich offers no discernible structure among the flow of images and text.

Similarly, Peter Tscherkassky’s Dream Work (2001) uses found footage (see ‘Sampling the many facets of the avant-garde’ earlier in this chapter) that stutters and leaps, creating a nightmarish intensity to the overlapping images and sounds.

Whether with gentle dreams or horrific nightmares, avant-garde film offers a slightly grubby window onto our shared wishes and desires. Dreams break all the cinematic rules of realism with regard to time and space, which is why dream sequences are often the place where mainstream narrative films come over all avant-garde. Just think about Buster Keaton dozing off and then leaping from a cinema auditorium into the screen in Sherlock, Jr. (1924) or the Salvador Dalí designed dream sequence in Alfred Hitchcock’s Spellbound (1945). Or practically the whole of Inception (2010) – which brings me neatly to the next section.

Mixing with the Mainstream: Avant-garde Everywhere

If the early avant-garde film-makers saw themselves as radical soldiers, going into battle for their creative beliefs and aiming to revolutionise cinema as a whole, looking back on more than a century of film history you may be tempted to conclude that they lost. Avant-garde movements and ideas still flourish under certain circumstances, but they seem unlikely ever to rise up and replace mainstream cinema. Given a choice between challenging and complex films which mess with their minds and stories about recognisable characters told in a familiar style, audiences go for the latter almost every time. Surely the evidence suggests that the avant-garde has had a negligible effect upon what the masses choose to see in the multiplexes.

But when you look for them, you can find plenty of points of crossover between the avant-garde and the mainstream. For a start, remember that, no matter how ‘mainstream’ their work may appear to be, the vast majority of film-makers are creative, open-minded people. Even successful Hollywood directors are interested in their chosen art form and keen to experience as wide a range of aesthetic strategies as possible. For example, John Ford, the blustering, macho director of classic Westerns starring John Wayne (see Chapter 14), was a huge fan of German Expressionist film-makers such as FW Murnau and Fritz Lang, and Walt Disney brought in abstract animator Oskar Fischinger to work on his great pet project Fantasia (1940).

You can choose to interpret these artistic influences positively, as a creative dialogue, or negatively, as simple plagiarism. But however you perceive this exchange of techniques and ideas, you can’t stop it happening. And why would you want to, given that many of the most interesting ‘mainstream’ films show some avant-garde influences. Here are just a few examples:

• Psycho (1960): The famous shower sequence uses rapid, disorientating editing techniques directly influenced by the montage of Soviet film-maker Sergei Eisenstein (see Chapter 4).
• Mean Streets (1973): Martin Scorsese’s use of pop music as a score is innovative, but he almost certainly borrowed the idea from Kenneth Anger’s Scorpio Rising (1964).
• Se7en (1995): The grimy handmade look of the opening credits sequence, with its scratched lettering and exposed celluloid sprockets, feels like a compendium of avant-garde techniques from Stan Brakhage to Andy Warhol.

Film-makers also cross from the avant-garde to the mainstream. David Lynch is a textbook example of an avant-garde film-maker whose off-kilter sensibility somehow meshed with the mainstream for The Elephant Man (1980) and the television series Twin Peaks (1990–1). Several emerging British directors of the past few years started out as video artists showing work in art galleries. Steve McQueen is the best-known example, with his 12 Years a Slave (2012) becoming an Oscar-winning commercial success, but also worth noting are Clio Barnard for The Selfish Giant (2013) and Sam Taylor-Wood, who took on the challenge of adapting the controversial publishing phenomenon of the decade, Fifty Shades of Grey (due for release in 2015).

But this pattern of aesthetic influence is no one-way street. Despite the antagonism displayed towards mainstream cinema by early avant-gardists, more recently Hollywood film has become a subject for experimental film-makers. For example, the first feature by British director Sally Potter was inspired by her love of Hollywood musicals, but recast with a feminist perspective. The Gold Diggers (1983) also features a genuine star, Julie Christie. In the gallery space, Douglas Gordon’s 24 Hour Psycho (1993) projects Hitchcock’s famous thriller at just two frames a second, meaning that it takes a full day and night to unspool. This film allows the viewer to see each individual frame as it gradually clicks by.

All these examples of artistic exchange, collaboration, homage or stealing suggest that the hostile connotations of the term avant-garde may no longer be appropriate for this type of film-making practice. The avant-garde didn’t defeat the mainstream, and many of today’s experimental film-makers no longer count that as their ultimate goal. Instead of thinking about the avant-garde and the mainstream as opposing sides in an endless aesthetic war, perhaps a more fitting analogy is to see them as two sides of the same cinematic coin.