A Critical Cinema 2: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers

Since nearly all of us are acculturated to expect certain types of experiences in movie theaters and on television, one of the valuable functions of the multifaceted independent cinema that has developed alongside the popular cinema during most of its history is to challenge our expectations. When we see a film that surprises or shocks us, we are forced to question the implicit assumptions about cinema our expectations encode. Of course, this process is inevitable within any area of film history. Even in the standard genres of commercial film, viewers are inevitably comparing each new instance of horror film, Western, and suspense thriller with previous instances and with the sense of the genre's history they have developed. What gives some forms, and some particular instances, of independent film their "critical" edge is the

extent

to which they force us to question our psychological/social/political investment in the conventional. A new instance of a horror film usually confronts, at most, a limited number of the expectations we bring to the genrethe way in which characters are developed or plots resolved, or the type of special effects used, or the overall look of the events dramatizedbut an independent film with a powerful critical edge might challenge our assumption that a film must include characters and plot or must present events within images that confirm Western perspectival conventions or must include recognizable imagery at all. Indeed, one of the signals that one is experiencing a powerfully critical film is the conviction that what we're seeing isn't a

real

movie, even though it is obviously being projected by a movie projector in a movie theater.

A particular critical film can relate to the conventional cinema in

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various ways. My distinctions in Volume 1 were determined by the degree to which a particular film, or the work of a particular filmmaker, invokes the conventions in order to challenge them. In some instances, filmmakers use just enough of the elements employed in conventional movies to create an aura of the conventional, but use these elements in a consistently challenging way. George Kuchar's films often reveal characters enacting melodramatic plots, but his articulation of conventional elementsthe acting, the costumes and sets, the continuity, the characters' motivationsis so unlike big-budget Hollywood films that for most viewers Kuchar's films are as much about the disparity between the two levels of film practice as about the issues he pretends to explore. Not only do we realize the limits of Kuchar's economic means and see the effects of these limitations in his filmswe are also reminded that the very extensiveness of the resources available to Hollywood directors constricts what big-budget directors can express and how they can express it.

Other filmmakers invoke fewer cinematic conventions. Some replace the interest in fictional characters and scripted plots with personal explorations of their own lives, particularly dimensions of their lives usually considered unfilmictoo mundane or too outrageous for a conventional film. Carolee Schneemann's frank, erotic revelations of her sexual interactions with lover James Tenney (in

Fuses,

1967) exposedand continue to exposenot only her own personal life, but the limitations of the conventional cinema's portrayal of heterosexual eroticism. Still other filmmakers bring forward dimensions of the conventional cinema that are so fundamental that most moviegoers have rarely, if ever, been conscious of them as conventions. In his films of the early seventies, Taka Iimura eliminates all photographic. imagery and explores the impact of durations of time in the movie theater, using a variety of systems of measurement. Iimura's films simultaneously create new, "minimal" forms of film experience, and they focus on the issue of duration in a way that enables us to think more extensively about the nature and implications of the conventional cinema's manipulations of time.

The critical dimension of the films discussed in

A Critical Cinema

is certainly not the only interesting aspect of those films. The long history of independent cinema has produced hundreds of films that can sustain a viewer's fascination regardless of whatever relationships exist between these films and the commercial cinema. While some independent filmmakers admit their interest in critiquing what they've experienced in commercial movie theaters and on television, others see their work as developing out of traditions that have little or nothing to do with the movie industry and its products. In fact, some of the filmmakers I include under the rubric of "critical" have never been regular moviegoers.

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