This post is a response to a query posed by gokinsmen in the Ask Karina thread: “Avant-garde and short films. Your favorites, ‘the state of…’”

I’m not sure I know what “avant-garde” means anymore, and the only reason I admit that is because the very haziness of the concept seems to be the crux of the issue. What could avant garde possibly mean, in an time and place where Jonas Mekas takes to his video blog to drop wisdom from the Kabballah and defend Paris Hilton, and anyone can watch clips of Out 1 on YouTube (which is pretty much the only place to watch music videos such as the above), and an incest-heavy work of poorsploitation with riffs on Italian neorealism is poised for major mainstream success –– and all the while the general public shows little to no interest in movies starring movie stars, over and over and over again?

I feel semi-qualified to talk about this only because I studied film in two undergraduate art programs, and thus I do have a pretty solid grounding in cinema that could be described as short and/or avant-garde. Before grad school, I was much more familiar with the works of Brakhage, Benning and Connor than I was with, say, Bergman, Spielberg or Welles. I was left to my own devices to explore most classical Hollywood and European cinema, and when I did, I decided that I had more to say about it, or maybe it had more to say about me. So I applied to graduate programs that were more mainstream in focus, and I went to NYU, and here I am today! Even if I eventually turned away from the art film canon, I do think much of the way I look at cinema stems from the fact that I was, in my formative years, invited to think about film as four-dimensional painting (and, also, that I was forced to write about painting).

If I had gone to college ten or even five years later, in terms of my primary interests, I think I still would have made the trade (although thanks to the whole blog rumpus, I might have skipped academia and headed straight into more populist writing). But I also used to make films, and I wonder all the time if I would have stopped when I did (which was essentially the day I closed the book on my BFA) had I been in art school during the explosion of web video. This world sprung up so quickly that one has to make an effort to remember that it was very different very recently. When I first started making stuff in 1998, my school had AVIDs and what not, but they were reserved for upper classmen. I learned how to edit on a VHS tape-to-tape system and a Steenbeck simultaneously, and then by 1999 graduated to a pre-G-series Mac running Adobe Premiere. Final Cut Pro soon followed, but the technology was still comparatively ancient. We saved large files on Jaz disks or gigantic portable drives or data tapes. I didn’t own a computer that could burn one of my short films to DVD until shortly before I stopped making short films.

Looking back, it’s incredible that I went through all the trouble, because I certainly wasn’t having any fun. I mostly made diary-style films about my pop culture fascinations, with found footage montages set to my own narration. They weren’t gallery art, and they were too copyright-infringey for any kind of TV broadcast, and if there were festivals that they were appropriate for, certainly no one told me. So most of them went unseen by anyone but me and a few professors (usually kind but not terribly enthusiastic) and classmates (usually hostile). I ultimately stopped making films because it became clear that there was no niche for what I was doing. If I had only held on a couple of years, YouTube would have come along and with it, my movies would have suddenly had a context. Alas.

Which is not to say that YouTube has solved the problem of every short-form or experimentally minded filmmaker. I’ve written quite a bit about the pros and cons of web video — for starters, see my interview with Cory McAbee from earlier this week, and my piece on David Lynch’s Interview Project, and etc –– but it’s no secret that the format privileges the unexpected over the contrived, to an extent where forethought of any kind (nevermind creative energy) may be a liability. The most of the most loved web videos are standalone, discreet gestures that often defy our expectations of narrative. Or, to borrow from Tom Gunning’s writings on very early silent film, the web is kindest to videos that embody “both climax and resolution” without leading “to a series of incidents or the creation of characters with discernible traits.” YouTube has been widely interrogated by academics as the new home of the cinema of attractions, yet everything about it seems to be anti-cinema.

So the refuge of the short film lacking obvious spectacle remains the film festival, which is problematic. Events dedicated to shorts and/or non-traditional films are necessarily marginalized. Too many general festivals program too many short films, and few schedule them imaginatively. So something like Glory at Sea, which could and probably should easily stand on its own, plays on a program with half a dozen other films, with no air in between. Meanwhile, shorts tacked on to features, where thematically appropriate or not, too often become something to sit through rather than something to be seen.

And this has now become a lot of words to simply say that I don’t envy anyone trying to do anything interesting in shorter formats in this climate. However, here are some people who are succeeding, whose work you can watch online: Rob Parrish’s webseries Next to Heaven, which we featured on the podcast awhile back; Fiddlestixx, and other delights from David and Nathan Zellner; Chonto, and more from Carson Mell; Jerry Ruis, Can We Do This and the rest of the Red Bucket Films stuff; and finally if anything is avant garde, it is Cute Porn, who produced this. It also can’t hurt to invest time and money in Wholphin, who have done as much in recent years to legitimize unusual short filmmaking as anyone.