ABSTRACT
Mick Eaton writes in “The avant garde and narrative”: “Gidal writes ‘The dialectic of the film is established in that space of tension between materialist flatness, grain, light, movement, and the supposed real reality that is represented’. Again I feel that the danger of a structural/materialist aesthetic lies in placing too great an emphasis on the former terms without adequately coming to terms with the latter. If this course is adopted it can certainly only lead to a stifling of that very dialectic whose terms are obviously so vital in any interventionist practice. In fact, a concentration in film practice on substance over signification can lead to a retreat, not only from editing, but also from performance, verbal language, and writing. We have to ask ourselves how politically viable at the present time is a cinema which rejects non-cinematic codes? The issue of performance is not as trivial as it may appear. Although ‘acting’ as a representational code is, of course, non-cinematic, it has been fused with cinematic codes since the earliest days of cinema and the transparency and seeming inevitability of this fusion will not be ruptured by denying this history…. It seems dangerous to proscribe a film practice which does attempt to deal dialectically with the processes of performance if only because in the most naive and sociologistic sense this mechanism of identification is one of the most crucial means by which cinemas are filled. To reject this as an issue not pertinent to the matter of film seems to indicate not only an unwillingness to intervene in what, for a large number of cinema-goers is the very matter of film — i.e. stories, characters, etc. — but also the impossibility of any kind of Brechtian practice in which what is represented enters into a dialectic with the way in which it is represented…. I am … merely suggesting that perhaps it is not necessary for the structural/materialist film-maker to reject dealing with performance, or indeed other non-cinematic codes, in advance” (Mick Eaton, “The avant garde and narrative,” Screen, Summer 1978, p. 133). Sally Potter (Thriller, 1978) faltered on that idea. “For The Gold Diggers (1983) she thought she'd get a new, different, and big audience. I had to finally explain to her that no distributor was going to put up over £100,000 to get The Gold Diggers distributed, that is, £100,000 above its £200,000 costs (from Channel 4 and the BFI). No one can understand what's going on in the film! It's not experimental but it is confusing! No one is going to put up the £100,000 that would be needed to get it to different venues from the usual ones. Yet such venues would be necessary to recoup costs! I like the film, but there's no audience for it.” This response to a film which was made as “popularist” shows the pitfalls of taking, with all good intentions, a condescending and paternalistic view of cinema-goers, as Eaton and Potter do. It leads to what Lenin called objective opportunism. There is no in-built elitism adhering to experimental materialist work. Current forms of cultural domination, ideological and economic, must be smashed. The alternative is opportunism becoming the only possibility for those independent filmmakers and critics who disavow a materialist avant-garde. Breaks in the system allow some work to be done which questions the premises of representation. Fundamental to the above remains the question of to what degree a massive change in public structures of representing must be instituted for a radical change to take place; that is, for a change in film, in the social meanings and individual positions produced through film.
