Whitney Biennial Film

In the mid-’70s a dissatisfaction with the limitations of gallery production and what were perceived as the preponderant styles of American avant-garde film emerged in certain circles in the art world. A generation steeped in movies and rock ’n’ roll wanted out from the strictures of Greenbergian nuance and conceptual ’pataphysics, wanted to admit that they never wanted to go to the Rothko chapel, that they fell asleep watching the filmic transformation of a tree through summer, fall, winter, and spring. To these artists, the return to imagery and to the play and disruption of the narrative were welcome. They considered what they thought to be the masochism of the spectator a drag. And their production echoed these concerns.

This confluence of ideas and activities around film and rock ’n’ roll created a lasciviously ironic gutter salon, whose work was the recipient of uncritical, desperately benevolent journalistic praise. We can now look back for a few lessons. Some of the artists who forayed into music were appropriated by the entertainment industry and continued their work thanks to the directives and financial embellishments of corporate capital. But for filmmakers, the riff was slightly more atonal. Most discovered that their small, fast, flashy movies might furnish a few toney nights on St. Marks Place, but that the road to larger budgets would be a rocky one. And without the constant sustenance of journalistic hype, the best and the brightest split the sinking ship and headed back to the atelier, back to the flourishes of easel painting and the reductivism of myth.

But the bulk of American avant-garde film production remained untouched by these rumblings. As Peter Wollen has noted in his essay “The Two Avant-Gardes,” independent film production seems divided into two sections: an artisanal, cottage-industry procedure whose intellectual and stylistic operations are informed by the discourse of the art world, and a more secular film-work engaged in a critical relationship to conventional narrative and on the lookout for the slippages which displace representation. While there is much artisanal production in Europe, a large portion of it is American; but this other, second avant-garde seems unable to proceed here, in the shadow of Hollywood. Perhaps it is New York’s distance from the conglomerate studio setup, coupled with the cushioning of the art world, that allows for intermittent bursts of sometimes interesting albeit naive deminarrative film activity. But regardless of this, most of this type of production is located abroad and totes a lineage from Sergei Eisenstein to Dziga Vertov to Jean-Luc Godard to Jean-Marie Straub and Danielle HuiIlet to Alexander Kluge to Yvonne Rainer to Chantal Akerman to Peter Wollen and Laura Mulvey to Michael Oblowitz to Sally Potter.

But, need we be reminded, the Whitney is a Museum of American Art, and this geographical designation necessarily governs the films in the Biennial. Many of the works included fit into the artisanal category and involve the dominance of the image. Some engage the total suppression of language, and the estheticized formalities of these films, coupled with their silence, make them comfortably akin to the objets d’art offered up for contemplation in the accompanying galleries of the museum. But this is not to say that the program lacks “variety.” There are sound films, color films, kind-of-narrative films, and animations. (Why no documentary?) Though cursory classifications are often suspect, I will attempt some gatherings.

Sandy Moore’s Gawrsh I Didn’t Know You Was A Lady!, 1982, Ernie Gehr’s Untitled, 1981, and James Herbert’s Pony, 1981, seem to explore how cinematography is inscribed and arrested in representation. Gehr’s film functions as a protracted framing exercise, with Gehr’s film turning the poor of the Lower East Side into colorful details, into successful formal “arrangements.” Bruce Conner’s America Is Waiting, 1981, Martha Haslanger’s The Revolution, 1982, and Warren Sonbert’s Noblesse Oblige, 1981, indulge to varying degrees in the choreography of the collage film. The brevity of America Is Waiting also defines the five cute films by Stuart Sherman here, but one can’t help imagining these works as examples of what would have been if (perish the thought) Ernie Kovacs had been a “humorist” instead of a “comedian.” The aptly titled Episodes from the Secret Life, 1982, by Barry Gerson, is a continually oblique viewing of floors, furniture, windows, and sweetly fetishistic little objects, held together by a single graphic device. David Haxton’s Drawing Houses, 1982, Robert Breer’s Swiss Army Knife with Rats and Pigeons, 1981, and Ericka Beckman’s Out of Hand, 1981, seem informed by the esthetics of physical constructions and the pleasures of repetition. Perhaps the program should have included Beckman’s new 16mm work, You the Better, another of her continual minglings of fugitive figures and choruses of linguistic directives. Daniel Walworth’s The Earth is a Satellite of the Moon, 1982, and Vivienne Dick’s Visibility: Moderate, 1981, seem a bit closer to conventional narrative movement, with Walworth’s camera circling two men as they joke, hug, and unravel connections (in Spanish and English) between diplomacy and male sexuality, between the oppressive power relations at work in Central America and the tyrannies of representation. Less successful is Visibility: Moderate, especially in relation to Dick’s tough and bawdy earlier work; here her scrutiny of the politics of Northern Ireland and of the poverty of social life there is undermined by her uncritical representation of her heroine, a tourist in spike heels who looks as if she has mistakenly wandered into a war zone while actually heading for a divine little party given by a millionette friend of hers on East 7th Street. Ken Kobland’s Landscape and Desire, 1981, is a formidable cinematographic accomplishment in which an assortment of “perfect” framings are embellished with sans serif labels saying either “landscape” or “desire.” Aside from this clever device, the film is an impressive exposition of Kobland’s rendition of the last twenty years of American avant-garde film. James Benning’s Him and Me, 1982, is another example of Benning’s continuing engagement of filmic multiplicities. His cinematographic prowess does not become mired in self-reflexive formalist repetitions, and his fragmented but insistent narrative base does not replicate the repressions of narrative convention. Feature-length and shot in color, Him and Me, it is important to note, is yet another American independent film which was made possible through the funding of ZDF, the German television channel.

This last point is an important one and returns us to the notion of the two avant-gardes and how economics determine cultural production. The films here, taking their cues from the stylistic precedents of the art world, manage to proceed with the limited funding available to American independent moviemaking. With stateside television and the American Film Institute functioning as sparse renditions of their European counterparts (i.e., ZDF and the British Film Institute), it is no wonder that a more privatistic, artisanal filmwork dominates the Biennial’s selections. One hopes that the suggestions of the second avant-garde will become more visible and audible in America and that a distributive network will emerge which will exist not only in museums and academia, but also up the block.

—Barbara Kruger