At Hand: The Tactics Of Feminist Media PracticeAt Hand: The Tactics Of Feminist Media Practice
by Holly Willis
<Citing the dissolution of the "original sharpness and uniqueness of avant-garde cinema" into a "kind of indistinct haze," Fred Camper proclaimed the death of this avant-garde in the 20th anniversary issue of the Millennium Film Journal (in "The End of Avant-Garde Film," Millennium Film Journal, Nos. 16/17/18, Fall/Winter, 1986-1987, pp. 99-124. Camper is still teased for this essay, and he has responded to its tone in the on-line experimental list serve discussion Frameworks). This was certainly not the first such announcement as the avant-garde is born and dies with amusing regularity, but Camper's description of the decline of the once sublime artform rich with masterpieces that explored ethics, the formal properties of the film medium, and complex relationships with viewers, to a practice characterized as personal, derivative, naively ironic, and institutional suggests a particular paradigm of value, and by extension, a set of criteria for a canon. In "The Theory-Death of the Avant-Garde," Paul Mann argues that the teleology of the avant-garde is the production of a death-theory, a kind of "inexhaustible discourse of exhaustion." (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991.)
<This refraction may be seen as allegory-one of the most interesting aspects of a lot of feminist work is the manner in which it offers a secondary story, one that frequently offers an explicit description of the maker's position relative to a more powerful industry. David James in "Allegories of Cinema" has discussed the way in which avant-garde films contain within them allegories defining their mode of production (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989). In other words, every non-industrial production contains a narrative describing its mode of production outside the industry, and his book is in some ways an attempt to read these narratives. I am shifting this idea somewhat to say that a lot of feminist works reflect the position of women artists both in relation to a larger industry, and in relation to a male-dominated avant-garde tradition, which in the late '60s and early '70s was very much a modernist practice moving increasingly away from a political agenda toward a practice interested in the investigation of the various properties of the medium. For women makers, this was a problem -- many women filmmakers were extremely political and not as interested in aesthetic or philosophical issues. Thus there was a sense of double exclusion.
<Michel de Certeau, "The Practice of Everyday Life" (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984).
<De Certeau, 36.
<De Certeau, 37.
<In an article in Motion Picture several years ago, Tom Gunning described similar work by Nina Fonoroff, Lewis Klahr, Phil Solomon, and Peggy Ahwesh, who, like the filmmakers already mentioned, share a sense of marginality both in relationship to a dominant form of cinema, and in terms of politics. (Motion Picture, The Collective for Living Cinema, Vol. 3, Nos. 1/2, Winter 1989-90.) Gunning used the notion of a "minor cinema," a phrase he borrows from Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, who describe their notion of a "minor literature" in their study of Kafka. Deleuze and Guattari's analysis is based on one of Kafka's diary entries from 1911 in which he described Yiddish literature in Warsaw and Czech literature in Prague. (See Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, "Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature," translation by Dana Polan [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986]. See also an excerpted version of the book in "What Is a Minor Literature?" in "Out There: Marginalization and Contemporary Cultures," edited by Russell Ferguson, Martha Gever, Trinh T. Minh-ha, and Cornel West [New York: The New Museum of Contemporary Art and Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1990.] This writing was in some senses "impossible." Kafka meant this in the sense that for Prague Jews writing in German, there was the impossibility first of not writing given the political situation, and then the impossibility of writing in German, and the discomfort in writing in Hebrew or Yiddish as well. Kafka describes a sense of linguistic dispossession, and the concomitant necessity to take the dominant language and modify it. For Kafka, a minor literature was one in which the difficulties and struggles of a group might be articulated, and one in which authors collectively shared the project of writing politically and thus of creating work for people rather than for the literary canon.
<This category is distinct from the general category of "bad girl" art in utilizing a very specific set of criteria in discussing transgression. For a discussion of a more general sense of transgression, see Laura Kipnis, "Female Transgression," in "Resolutions: Contemporary Video Practices," Michael Renov and Erika Suderburg, editors (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996) and the Bad Girls exhibition catalog, edited by Tim John and published jointly by The New Museum of Contemporary Art and the MIT Press, 1994.
<Earlier projects by Ahwesh, including "Martina's Playhouse" and "The Deadman," an adaptation of a story by Georges Bataille produced in collaboration with Keith Sanborn, are also exemplary of this type of media production.
<In his essay, "Found Footage and Questions of Representation," (in "Found Footage Film," Cecilia Hausheer, Christoph Settele, eds., Lucerne, Switzerland: Viper/zyklop verlag, 1992) William Wees discusses three general ways in which found footage is most often employed: compilation, collage, and appropriation. Wees wants to emphasize that not every found footage film attempts to question representation, and he has two categories -- compilation and appropriation -- which he feels do not at all accomplish this kind of questioning.
1) Compilation: Wees' first category is the compilation film which cuts together pieces of footage which are used to illustrate a point. Usually this kind of film includes a voice-over to help guide the viewer through the material, but the images are intended to register "reality."
2) Collage: Wees' second category is the collage film, which pieces together footage to create metaphors, and to provoke self-conscious and critical viewing. In this category, images are seen as images, and the viewer is able to read them critically, and with attention to metaphor. Bruce Connor's "A Movie" is an example here.
3) Appropriation: Wees' third category is appropriation. In this category, filmmakers take images and reuse them, but for Wees, the use results only in decorative surfaces. Meaning is ironed out, and representation becomes interested in what something looks like, or with what's on the surface, rather than the creation of a secondary meaning. Wees links this strategy to postmodernism, and to the loss of historical meaning.
Wees' categories are helpful, but I think it's necessary to criticize his privileging of the category of the collage, and the easy dismissal of appropriation. Wees uses a Michael Jackson music video to describe how a particular use of found footage can focus attention on surfaces, but in this choice he misses the opportunity to examine what some of the most interesting contemporary film and video artists are doing with found footage.