notes

Is there a two-way discourse between the avant-garde and the mainstream?

What is mainstream cinema?
is it merely hollywood?
genre?
is hollywood defined by genre?
(genre and stars)

return to zero approach?

narrative/anti-narrative

Fitz Lang, German expressionism and hollywood head-hunting

George Lucas has gone full circle, wanting to return to his 'avant garde days' after helping to create the 'hollywood blockbuster' ( wired interview )

The influence of avant-garde film-making on the music video

"The attempts by filmmakers to seperate themselves from a monolithic mainstream have been guided by two lights - a critical relationship to it and on the other hand an association by some to the fine art modernism tradition with it's own avant gardes, especially in painting and sculture..." (pg71-72, avant garde film: forms, themes and passion)

(For Godard [film] is a medium already defined by narrative..." {P.72)
Godard's experimentation in film is in narrative, in that all his other experiementation (in sound and montage, for example) is to effect the narrative in certain ways

"Beat cinema - in common with beat literature - has no common singular style, rather it shares an attitude that demands self expression, exploration, poetic visions, mysticism, radical ideas, liberation and the belief that art and life can not be separated. Beat filmmakers vary from animators such as Harry Smith - whose bebop influenced alchemical images, collectively titled Early Abstractions (circa 1939 - 1956), explored the potentialities of abstract colour and light, creating images of transmogrification that are characterized by a haunting beauty - to the personal, naturalistic films of directors such as Jonas Mekas (Guns of the Trees, 1961) and Shirley Clarke (The Connection, 1961) - both of whom presented believable quasi-biographical narratives as unmediated literary-cinematic flow." ( link )