ABSTRACT
Not much has been written about avant-garde cinema of the past twenty years: The Village Voice writer Amy Taubin still reviews the avant-garde, in specialist columns; a few journals like Millennium and telnet listservs like ‘Frameworks’ provide information and viewing news for those already in the know. In terms of general film history, however, the impression all too often is that the avant-garde somehow died after Warhol. Not only are there few specialist publications about avant-garde cinema, but general works on cinema of the 1980s and 1990s have tended to focus on either popular multiplex titles or on mainstream independent productions. Books like William J. Palmer’s The Films of the Eighties: A Social History (1993) make no mention of avant-garde film culture, an omission which suggests that the downtown art scene has no impact on ‘social history.’ And books like Emanuel Levy’s otherwise excellent Cinema of Outsiders: The Rise of American Independent Film take ‘the decline of radical [avant-garde] film practice’ as a ‘given’ (Levy 1999: 6). Even authors like Robert Siegle and Greil Marcus, who have written on other aspects of radical punk-inflected culture – literature, art, music – have tended to omit discussion of contemporary avant-garde film (it’s interesting that Marcus writes about situationist film, but very little that comes after, even though he knows the club environments in which many of these films originally played).
