ABSTRACT
The organizing tendency around the empirical real of a performance made important experimental inroads for the avant-garde through research and practice, to do with the parameters of film form (not to exclude the body). (By this time, 1974, American avant-garde film was a stultified formalism.) Nevertheless, a rerouted concern with the perceptual “truth” of an event, and, curiously, a form of documentary illusionism, were re-inserted into the proceedings. Dunford's Still Life with Pear (1973) and LeGrice's After Lumiere (1977) are examples. The theorization and film-practices against the reintegration of illusionism, narrativization, perspective, could not be somehow safe against these cultural modes. The latter found aspects of their dominance reinserted, via uncommon strategies. This difficulty though was simultaneous to advances in performance and projection events: the materiality of the referent in constant conflict with the materiality of the photochemical means of production. Causes versus effects, a necessary problematic in the British philosophical context. The problematic in those productive terms informed most of Eatherley's, Crosswaite's, Dunford's, and LeGrice's work as well as Raban's exceptional 2 minutes 45 seconds (1973), and Nicholson's Reel Time (1973). Any difficulties enjoined were not somehow anyone's “fault,” nor were there tendencies giving credence to dominant modes; it is simply that when ideology is assumed to be absent, it refinds its place. When a conjunction between experimental film-work and avant-garde film-work is assumed instead of being forged, ideology finds its place. You are never outside ideology.
