TOP 10 AVANT-GARDE SHORTS

A list requested by Marshall Y. Craig, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser.

So the first question that must be answered, the one that drives everything else: what in the hell do we mean by "avant-garde"? I really cannot think of descriptive term in all the movies that's less distinct than "avant-garde" (or its sibling, "experimental"), even though I think most of us pretty much know it when we see it. Still, while that definition might do for pornography, avant-garde's trashy second cousin, I wanted to have something a bit more concrete to work with. So where do we start: must an avant-garde film be non-narrative? That obviously won't do - it disqualifies Meshes of the Afternoon, one of the building blocks of the American avant-garde, among others? What about animation? Is that automatically disqualified as something subtly separate? I sure as hell hope not, but I took a long time to decide that I was going to include Jan Švankmajer but not the Brothers Quay, for reasons that I still can't quite articulate, other than that it feels right.

And then there's the decision about where we set the box around "short"(40 minutes or less, in my books).

Anyway, I eventually came up with at least a somewhat arbitrary list of things I felt confident about or at least comfortable with including under the umbrella of "avant-garde", and a list of things that felt not-quite-there (Guy Maddin's The Heart of the World was an especially hard call that ended up on the latter list). And then add in the usual "one film per director(s)" caveat. From that list I have now culled a selection of-

Antagony & Ecstasy's Top 10 Avant-Garde Shorts

(Many of these can be found without much effort online. Seek them out if you must, but know that in several cases, it will not be at all the best experience, or even much of an enjoyable one at all)

10. Film in Which There Appear Edge Lettering, Sprocket Holes, Dirt Particles, Etc.
(Owen Land, 1966, USA)

More than anything else on this list: for real, don't bother with this one unless you can see a legitimate film print. Because that physicality is very much what matters about this film, which recycles the same short loop of a "China girl" (a woman and color bars used for color reference when the reel is processed in the lab) for six minutes. What's tedious after one minute grows hypnotic by the end, but even more than that, what makes the film such a remarkable experience is the dawning awareness that every one of those loops is marginally different: the dust, scratches, film grain, and so on are all different enough that by the end, it's those physical imperfections that you're watching, rather than the footage. We're also increasingly aware of the film as an object we're sharing space with, and that it's developing more of those same imperfections as we're watching, so that whoever sees that print next time will be, in fact, watching a different piece of art. The ultimate movie about movies.

9. Composition in Blue (AKA Komposition in Blau)
(Oskar Fischinger, 1935, Germany)

And also a composition in yellow, and orange; the film came out right at the dawn of three-strip color cinematography, and is among the most brazen experiments in playing around with pure color and shape to come out in the 1930s. It's basically the "Toccata and Fugue in D Minor" sequence from Fantasia, five years later, only animating blocks instead of cel drawings, and without the institutional support of the world's biggest animation studio. It's sublimely beautiful, simply for the flow and rhythm with which the colors, music, and shapes all interact, but I think we run the risk, more than 80 years later, of not appreciating how extravagantly inventive it was, just three years after Flowers and Trees, to make a movie predicated on the idea that color can generate meaning all by itself.

8. Fog Line
(Larry Gotheim, 1970, Canada)

Over the course of ten minutes, fog clears from a field with trees, and a camera pointed through a slightly dirty window captures it. I once had a professor excitedly point out the "plot" - a horse walks across the field - and oh damn, now I've spoiled it. My favorite of the "almost undetectable shifts over time" genre, with distinctive shapes emerging slow gradually that you can only tell what's going on by comparing this particular moment with what happened five minutes ago. That is to say, it's an exercise in slowing down perception, and drawing attention to perception, and asking us to think about how we see what we see, how we draw distinctions between "now" and "then" or "before" and "after" or "first" and "last". It's also one of the most remarkably soothing movies I've ever seen, and one of the few I'd endorse as a good meditation tool.

7. Meshes of the Afternoon
(Maya Deren with Alexander Hammid, 1946, USA)

My tastes absolutely do not run to psychoanalytic symbolism, and Deren's legendary masterwork - a fundamental work in the history of both avant-garde and feminist filmmaking - is almost nothing else but symbolism. Yet how can one possibly even think about denying this movie it's incredible significance and impact? Every creepy dream sequence or horrifying corruption of suburban homes into illogical nightmare spaces of the last 70 years owes a debt to Deren, whose work is so powerfully uncanny, and so uniquely great depiction the weightless incoherence of dreams, that it remains a staggering experience with or without attempting to decode it as an in-depth portrayal of bored depression.

6. Serene Velocity
(Ernie Gehr, 1970, USA)

The last structural film here, I promise. The mathematical progression used to construct the film (which consists of snippets of just five frames at a time, taken from increasingly distended focal lengths shooting down a hallway) is easy enough to intuit while you're watching, which makes the 23-minute epic something of an anticipation game, since you can guess how long till the next shift, and what the next shift will be. Thus, having that anticipation rewarded is weirdly fulfilling, given that you're just watching a boring industrial hallway for nearly a full half-hour. It's also increasingly tempting to assemble the images like a puzzle: with the camera remaining stable and only the lens lengths changing, the film invites us to consider how the physical space of the hallway fits together, and how different parts of it are or are not visible based on the camera perspective. Astonishingly stimulating for such a basic, static concept.

5. Alone. Life Wastes Andy Hardy
(Martin Arnold, 1998, Austria)

I wonder if this isn't, in its own way, the most dated film on this list despite being by 15 years the newest:Arnold's epic work re-editing and re-combining pieces of old Hollywood movies (see also: Passage à l'acte, from 1993) becomes much less technically audacious and laborious once digital editing goes mainstream, and now you can see the basic stuff here (repurpose old footage ironically, usually to add sex where there wasn't any before) every day on YouTube. But never this good, and never this savage in its breakdown of the rosy-cheeked enforced innocence of the Andy Hardy movies with Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland, turned into a groaning collection of mother-son incest and protracted orgasms, when Garland isn't being reduced to a siren endlessly bellowing one note into the abyss. The only postmodern commentary on Code Era Hollywood that you really need; and all these words without even bothering to mention how desperately funny it is - by far the funniest movie on this list, but also one of the funniest bits of movie remixing I've ever seen.

4. Tango
(Zbigniew Rybczyński, 1981, Poland)

I've said my piece on this one already, and what was true then for me is still pretty much entirely true: this is a miracle of craftsmanship, the kind of thing that's utterly pleasurable just to watch the smooth motion of dozens of characters, pieced in one at a time, in and around each other in a constant flurry of motion. I'd add now that the political overtones of so many people crowding together in a spartan room trying to live their own private story in a grotesquely overtuffed public space strike me more and more every time I watch. And also, while I've since seen more of Rybczyński's films, and some of them are truly miraculous pieces of choreography of social interactions in their own right, none so reliably thrills me with its artistic bravura and density.

3. Mothlight
(Stan Brakhage, 1963, USA)

Hell, I don't even know if this is the best Brakhage film, let alone the third-best avant-garde short ever. It's on here for strictly personal reasons, as one of the earliest genuinely world-expanding experiences I had watching a movie. The fact of its construction, as an attempt to make cinema not just without a camera, but without any fabrication of any sort, remains impressive as hell, as does the film's rousingly successful experiment in making a sublimely beautiful aesthetic object out of the lowest sort of crap imaginable: dead bug parts and fragments of dry leaves. It remains one of the most pleasurable films for me to revisit, as I do at least a few times every year, just to be reminded that there is something absolutely important and beautiful and wonderful about something as apparently simple as a seed pod. The ultimate adventure in close viewing.

2. Dimensions of Dialogue (AKA Možnosti dialogu)
(Jan Švankmajer, 1983, Czechoslovakia)

Maybe, even probably, the best piece of animation made in any of the Soviet Bloc countries under communism, which was maybe, even probably, the best era and place for animation in history. Švankmajer's three-part study of how human communication works and doesn't work is one of the smartest piece of satiric sociology ever filmed, dissecting in drily morbid metaphors how individual personality is squashed, how romantic passions turn sour, and the destructive nature of people failing to communicate on the same level. But it's style, not theme, that makes this one of the all-time greats: unpleasantly fleshy clay mixed in with sharp metal shards and wet foot, chunks of meat, and overall sense of being distressingly physical and organic - it's basically body horror, not a bad feat for something without a single body.

1. Begone Dull Care
(Evelyn Lambert & Norman McLaren, 1949, Canada)

Do pay attention to the title, which gets it exactly right: this is all about joy. To the bouncy jazz of the Oscar Petersen Trio, Lambert and McLaren provided an imagetrack painted directly on the film strip, providing a jaunty accompaniment in super-saturated color. Or sometimes even just the contrast between light and dark, when it comes down to it. Either way, what we have here is a celebration of music and of color providing each other with ebullient rhythm, a movie about the ecstasy of creating art which exudes the pleasure of its own creation in every pop and burst that both conjures the music into being and responds to it. Its marriage of abstract music and abstract image is not unprecedented in cinema, and in truth already wasn't in 1949; but not one other film doing this kind of thing that I've ever seen is so extraordinarily uplifting and endlessly watchable.