Series Site
The particular realm of cinema that Anthology Film Archives was put on earth to preserve, present, and celebrate is one that has famously been difficult to label, with filmmakers, programmers, and scholars perpetually debating the appropriateness of such terms as “experimental”, “avant-garde”, “independent”, etc. One descriptor that seems reasonably comprehensive and relatively uncontroversial is “non-commercial”, since much of this body of filmmaking has been made in implicit or explicit opposition to the commercial mainstream embodied by Hollywood, and by profit-driven cinemas around the world. The film series “Avant-Garde Ads”, however, aims to trouble that seemingly foundational distinction by calling attention to those instances in which (for lack of a better term) “avant-garde” filmmakers – even those who seem most indisputably to embody the anti-commercial purity and radicalism of this filmmaking tradition, such as Stan Brakhage, Peter Kubelka, Jordan Belson, Bruce Baillie, and Nathaniel Dorsky – have made advertisements, corporate films, public service announcements, or other sponsored works. Far from simply works-for-hire, these films invariably reflect – and often fully embody – the qualities that mark the filmmakers’ wholly independent work.
“Avant-Garde Ads” features works from the first decades of the cinema that show the then-especially-porous – seemingly almost nonexistent – boundaries between what we now think of as commercial and experimental filmmaking (including sublime animated advertisements by figures such as Walter Ruttmann, Lotte Reiniger, Oskar Fischinger, Len Lye, and the Dodals), as well as little-known later ads or sponsored films by everyone from Nathaniel Dorsky, Jerome Hiler, and Robert Breer to Paul Bartel, Ingmar Bergman, David Cronenberg, and David Lynch. It also includes sponsored films by makers who may not have come from the realm of avant-garde cinema, but who nevertheless produced works that are as visually inventive, formally audacious, and flat-out trippy as anything that has emerged from the underground cinema.
The series expands even further to explore other ways in which experimental filmmakers have engaged with the phenomenon of advertising, by making works that adopt the form, style, or technique of ads; by using ads as found footage; or by actually buying airtime for their own purposes (examples include Richard Serra & Carlotta Schoolman’s TELEVISION DELIVERS PEOPLE, Chris Burden’s THE TV COMMERCIALS 1973-1977, and Stan Douglas’s TELEVISION SPOTS).
Whether the films included here represent something like an “applied experimentalism”, avant-garde incursions into enemy territory, evidence of the reality that even the most independent of artists need to make a living, or all of the above, “Avant-Garde Ads” complicates the idea that “avant-garde film” and sponsored cinema exist in entirely separate universes.