Shadows,
Specters, Shards: Making History in Avant-Garde
Film
by Jeffrey Skoller
University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis,
MN, 2005
264 pp. illus., 41 b/w. Trade, $74.95;
paper, $24.95
ISBN: 0-816-4231 1; ISBN: 0-816-4231-x.
Reviewed by Jan Baetens
KU Leuven
Faculty of Arts, Blijde Inkomststraat
21, B-3000 Leuven, Belgium
jan.baetens@arts.kuleuven.be
In this fascinating book, film maker,
teacher, and theoretician Jeffrey Skoller
does not aim at analyzing how historical
facts, events, characters, or situations
are cinematographically represented, but
at disclosing the many ways in which history
is thought ofand therefore
madein contemporary avant-garde
film. Each of these wordsthinking,
making, avant-garde, and filmhas
here its importance and helps the author
to distinguish the corpus and the issues
he is working on from the cinematic strategies
of narrative Hollywood movies, where history
is offered to be re-enacted in a transparent
way by an audience that is no longer aware
nor of the constructedness of what it
is seeing it, neither of the very problematic
nature of its actual looking at a past
made present through fictional narratives.
Contrary to what happens in dominant industry
forms of cinema, avant-garde cinema takes
into account the epistemological shifts
in our thinking of history: our mistrust
of narrative structures, our suspicion
of the very idea of representation, our
critique of the illusion of understanding,
our classic belief in objectivity, our
ancient notions of a clear-cut and unproblematic
distinction of present and past, and our
emphasis on empirical evidence. The basic
ambition of Skoller is to present and
analyze a small number of films (half
of them strictly avant-garde in the strong
sense of the term; half of them at the
margins of progressive documentary cinema,
such as works by Godard and Lanzmann)
and to examine their exploration of thinking
history with purely cinematographic means.
For Skoller, avant-garde film is defined
both negatively and positively: on the
hand, there is the rejection of mainstream
storytelling (and of fiction as a form
of indexical illusion, i.e. deceit); on
the other hand, there is the foregrounding
of the proper materiality of the medium
(and this medium is here, except in the
coda of the book, not video or digital
movie, but the by now anachronistic celluloid
strip projected collectively in theatres).
The theoretical framework of the book
is double. Walter Benjamins "allegory"
offer the first key notion of all analyses:
the allegorical view of history refuses
the idea that the past exists independently
from the present and enhances instead
the possibility, i.e. the political necessity,
of a constant reinterpretation of the
past as it relates to the present. Gilles
Deleuzes "time-image"
is the second major concept that is used
throughout the book: contrary to the "movement-image",
in which a given timeframe or sequence
is inscribed within the moving image,
a "time-image" produces a virtual
time in the mind of the spectator. It
is of course the combination of both concepts,
allegory and time-image, that appear as
revolutionary in the avant-gardes
(re)making of history outside the existing
paths of traditional story-telling. For
the avant-garde film, this "virtualizing"
encounter with the past is a challenge
as well as an opportunity: the former
because the ethical and political dimensions
of each rethinking of the past are not
always easily compatible with the avant-gardes
non representative foregrounding of the
films materiality; the latter because
of the opening it gives to the avant-garde
as a genre after a long period of asphyxiating
and puritan formalism. The idea of "virtuality"
plays a key role in this respect, since
"virtual" is also a term that
has to be interpreted in a Deleuzian sense,
i.e. not as the opposite of "real",
but as the opposite of "actual"
or "current": the virtual completes
the real, it is able to modify what exists,
it is the horizon of the real rather than
its negation. The avant-gardes denaturalizing
formalism de-realizes any reified view
of the past, while projecting it into
new, but equally unstable relationships
between present, future and past. Virtuality,
hence, suggests that avant-garde film-making
cannot be reduced to an almost fetishist
dialogue with the cinemas formal
properties, but that it is deeply rooted
in an engagement with current thinking
(more specifically with thinking on history)
Skollers book is a very radical
plea for an absolutely intransigent and
unconditional avant-garde of film-making,
and one feels in almost every page of
the book the moral urge to resist the
use and abuse of history as entertainment.
Yet thanks to Deleuzes virtuality
(and, to a lesser extent, of Michael André
Bernstein "side-shadowing"),
Skollers stance is not to be confused
with any simplistic refusal of fiction
or composition (nor of narrative as such,
provided it is multilayered, contradictory,
unending). The great variety of films
analyzed (ranging from found-footage movies
to testimonial films, over documentary
interventions and historical reconstructions)
guarantees a well-balanced survey of what
is at stake in the hardly known field
of avant-garde movies, whose very form
and format make it even more difficult
to find the audience it deserves (although
the out-fashioned way of film-making on
celluloid is, of course, a tactical ally
in the case the avant-garde is making
for the re-elaboration of the past). It
was, therefore, an excellent idea to end
the book with an explicit opening towards
the post-cinema. In a more essayistic
way, these notes on issues such as the
mobile spectator, the VCR, interactivity,
and so on, Skoller offers numerous challenging
insights on new ways of reinventing the
avant-garde now. This unexpected union
of the avant-garde and the digital is
a message of hope for all those who, spectators
as well as makers, have been assisting
the gradual fading away of the classic
avant-garde.