Film Manifestos and Global Cinema Cultures: A Critical Anthology

FILM MANIFESTOS AND GLOBAL CINEMA CULTURES

FILM MANIFESTOS AND GLOBAL CINEMA CULTURES

A Critical Anthology

Scott MacKenzie

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

Berkeley    Los Angeles    London

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© 2014 by The Regents of the University of California

For acknowledgments of permissions, see page 635.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

MacKenzie, Scott, 1967–.

    Film manifestos and global cinema cultures : a critical anthology / Scott MacKenzie.

        p.    cm.

    Includes index.

ISBN 978-0-520-27674-1 (cloth : alk. paper)

eISBN 978-0-520-95741-1

    1. Motion pictures—Philosophy.    I. Title.

PN1995.M2335    2014

    791.4301—dc23

2013025528

Manufactured in the United States of America

23    22    21    20    19    18    17    16    15    14

10    9    8    7    6    5    4    3    2    1

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48–1992 (R 2002) (Permanence of Paper).

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Introduction. An Invention without a Future

1. THE AVANT-GARDE(S)

The Futurist Cinema (Italy, 1916)

F.T. Marinetti, Bruno Corra, et al.

Lenin Decree (USSR, 1919)

Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

The ABCs of Cinema (France, 1917–1921)

Blaise Cendrars

WE: Variant of a Manifesto (USSR, 1922)

Dziga Vertov

The Method of Making Workers’ Films (USSR, 1925)

Sergei Eisenstein

Constructivism in the Cinema (USSR, 1928)

Alexei Gan

Preface: Un chien Andalou (France, 1928)

Luis Buñuel

Manifesto of the Surrealists Concerning L’Age d’or (France, 1930)

The Surrealist Group

Manifesto on Que Viva Mexico (USA, 1933)

The Editors of Experimental Film

Spirit of Truth (France, 1933)

Le Corbusier

An Open Letter to the Film Industry and to All Who Are Interested in the Evolution of the Good Film (Hungary, 1934)

László Moholy-Nagy

Light*Form*Movement*Sound (USA, 1935)

Mary Ellen Bute

Prolegomena for All Future Cinema (France, 1952)

Guy Debord

No More Flat Feet! (France, 1952)

Lettriste International

The Lettristes Disavow the Insulters of Chaplin (France, 1952)

Jean-Isidore Isou, Maurice Lemaître, and Gabriel Pomerand

The Only Dynamic Art (USA, 1953)

Jim Davis

A Statement of Principles (USA, 1961)

Maya Deren

The First Statement of the New American Cinema Group (USA, 1961)

New American Cinema Group

Foundation for the Invention and Creation of Absurd Movies (USA, 1962)

Ron Rice

From Metaphors on Vision (USA, 1963)

Stan Brakhage

Kuchar 8mm Film Manifesto (USA, 1964)

George Kuchar

Film Andepandan [Independents] Manifesto (Japan, 1964)

Takahiko Iimura, Koichiro Ishizaki, et al.

Discontinuous Films (Canada, 1967)

Keewatin Dewdney

Hand-Made Films Manifesto (Australia, 1968)

Ubu Films, Thoms

Cinema Manifesto (Australia, 1971)

Arthur Cantrill and Corinne Cantrill

For a Metahistory of Film: Commonplace Notes and Hypotheses (USA, 1971)

Hollis Frampton

Elements of the Void (Greece, 1972)

Gregory Markopoulos

Small Gauge Manifesto (USA, 1980)

JoAnn Elam and Chuck Kleinhans

Cinema of Transgression Manifesto (USA, 1985)

Nick Zedd

Modern, All Too Modern (USA, 1988)

Keith Sanborn

Open Letter to the Experimental Film Congress: Let’s Set the Record Straight (Canada, 1989)

Peggy Ahwesh, Caroline Avery, et al.

Anti-100 Years of Cinema Manifesto (USA, 1996)

Jonas Mekas

The Decalogue (Czech Republic, 1999)

Jan Švankmajer

Your Film Farm Manifesto on Process Cinema (Canada, 2012)

Philip Hoffman

2. NATIONAL AND TRANSNATIONAL CINEMAS

From The Glass Eye (Italy, 1933)

Leo Longanesi

The Archers’ Manifesto (UK, 1942)

Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger

What Is Wrong with Indian Films? (India, 1948)

Satyajit Ray

Buñuel the Poet (Mexico, 1951)

Octavio Paz

French Cinema Is Over (France, 1952)

Serge Berna, Guy Debord, et al.

Some Ideas on the Cinema (Italy, 1953)

Cesare Zavattini

A Certain Tendency in French Cinema (France, 1954)

François Truffaut

Salamanca Manifesto & Conclusions of the Congress of Salamanca (Spain, 1955)

Juan Antonio Bardem

Free Cinema Manifestos (UK, 1956–1959)

Committee for Free Cinema

The Oberhausen Manifesto (West Germany, 1962)

Alexander Kluge, Edgar Reitz, et al.

Untitled [Oberhausen 1965] (West Germany, 1965)

Jean-Marie Straub, Rodolf Thome, Dirk Alvermann, et al.

The Mannheim Declaration (West Germany, 1967)

Joseph von Sternberg, Alexander Kluge, et al.

Sitges Manifesto (Spain, 1967)

Manuel Revuelta, Antonio Artero, Joachin Jordà, and Julián Marcos

How to Make a Canadian Film (Canada, 1967)

Guy Glover

How to Not Make a Canadian Film (Canada, 1967)

Claude Jutra

From The Estates General of the French Cinema, May 1968 (France, 1968)

Thierry Derocles, Michel Demoule, Claude Chabrol, and Marin Karmitz

Manifesto of the New Cinema Movement (India, 1968)

Arun Kaul and Mrinal Sen

What Is to Be Done? (France, 1970)

Jean-Luc Godard

The Winnipeg Manifesto (Canada, 1974)

Denys Arcand, Colin Low, Don Shebib, et al.

Hamburg Declaration of German Filmmakers (West Germany, 1979)

Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Werner Herzog, Wim Wenders, et al.

Manifesto I (Denmark, 1984)

Lars von Trier

Manifesto II (Denmark, 1987)

Lars von Trier

Manifesto III: I Confess! (Denmark, 1990)

Lars von Trier

The Cinema We Need (Canada, 1985)

R. Bruce Elder

Pathways to the Establishment of a Nigerian Film Industry (Nigeria, 1985)

Ola Balogun

Manifesto of 1988 (German Democratic Republic, 1988)

Young DEFA Filmmakers

In Praise of a Poor Cinema (Scotland, 1993)

Colin McArthur

Dogme ’95 Manifesto and Vow of Chastity (Denmark, 1995)

Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg

I Sinema Manifesto (Indonesia, 1999)

Dimas Djayadinigrat, Enison Sinaro, et al.

3. THIRD CINEMAS, COLONIALISM, DECOLONIZATION, AND POSTCOLONIALISM

Manifesto of the New Cinema Group (Mexico, 1961)

El grupo nuevo cine

Cinema and Underdevelopment (Argentina, 1962)

Fernando Birri

The Aesthetics of Hunger (Brazil, 1965)

Glauber Rocha

For an Imperfect Cinema (Cuba, 1969)

Julio García Espinosa

Towards a Third Cinema: Notes and Experiences for the Development of a Cinema of Liberation in the Third World (Argentina, 1969)

Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino

Film Makers and the Popular Government Political Manifesto (Chile, 1970)

Comité de cine de la unidad popular

Consciousness of a Need (Uruguay, 1970)

Mario Handler

Militant Cinema: An Internal Category of Third Cinema (Argentina, 1971)

Octavio Getino and Fernando Solanas

For Colombia 1971: Militancy and Cinema (Colombia, 1971)

Carlos Alvarez

The Cinema: Another Face of Colonised Québec (Canada, 1971)

Association professionnelle des cinéastes du Québec

8 Millimeters versus 8 Millions (Mexico, 1972)

Jaime Humberto Hermosillo, Arturo Ripstein, Paul Leduc, et al.

Manifesto of the Palestinian Cinema Group (Palestine, 1973)

Palestinian Cinema Group

Resolutions of the Third World Filmmakers Meeting (Algeria, 1973)

Fernando Birri, Ousmane Sembène, Jorge Silva, et al.

The Luz e Ação Manifesto (Brazil, 1973)

Carlos Diegues, Glauber Rocha, et al.

Problems of Form and Content in Revolutionary Cinema (Bolivia, 1976)

Jorge Sanjinés

Manifesto of the National Front of Cinematographers (Mexico, 1975)

Paul Leduc, Jorge Fons, et al.

The Algiers Charter on African Cinema (Algeria, 1975)

FEPACI (Fédération panafricaine des cinéastes)

Declaration of Principles and Goals of the Nicaraguan Institute of Cinema (Nicaragua, 1979)

Nicaraguan Institute of Cinema

What Is the Cinema for Us? (Mauritania, 1979)

Med Hondo

Niamey Manifesto of African Filmmakers (Niger, 1982)

FEPACI (Fédération panafricaine des cinéastes)

Black Independent Filmmaking: A Statement by the Black Audio Film Collective (UK, 1983)

John Akomfrah

From Birth Certificate of the International School of Cinema and Television in San Antonio de Los Baños, Cuba, Nicknamed the School of Three Worlds (Cuba, 1986)

Fernando Birri

FeCAViP Manifesto (France, 1990)

Federation of Caribbean Audiovisual Professionals

Final Communique of the First Frontline Film Festival and Workshop (Zimbabwe, 1990)

SADCC (South African Development Coordination Conference)

Pocha Manifesto #1 (USA, 1994)

Sandra Peña-Sarmiento

Poor Cinema Manifesto (Cuba, 2004)

Humberto Solás

Jollywood Manifesto (Haiti, 2008)

Ciné Institute

The Toronto Declaration: No Celebration of Occupation (Canada, 2009)

John Greyson, Naomi Klein, et al.

4. GENDER, FEMINIST, QUEER, SEXUALITY, AND PORN MANIFESTOS

Woman’s Place in Photoplay Production (USA, 1914)

Alice Guy-Blaché

Hands Off Love (France, 1927)

Maxime Alexandre, Louis Aragon, et al.

The Perfect Filmic Appositeness of Maria Montez (USA, 1962)

Jack Smith

On Film No. 4 (In Taking the Bottoms of 365 Saints of Our Time) (UK, 1967)

Yoko Ono

Statement (USA, 1969)

Kenneth Anger

Wet Dream Film Festival Manifesto (The Netherlands, 1970)

S.E.L.F. (Sexual Egalitarianism and Libertarian Fraternity)

Women’s Cinema as Counter-Cinema (UK, 1973)

Claire Johnston

Manifesto for a Non-sexist Cinema (Canada, 1974)

FECIP (Fédération européenne du cinéma progressiste)

Womanifesto (USA, 1975)

Feminists in the Media

Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema (UK, 1975)

Laura Mulvey

An Egret in the Porno Swamp: Notes of Sex in the Cinema (Sweden, 1977)

Vilgot Sjöman

For the Self-Expression of the Arab Woman (France, 1978)

Heiny Srour, Salma Baccar, and Magda Wassef

Manifesto of the Women Filmmakers (West Germany, 1979)

Verband der Filmarbeiterinnen

Wimmin’s Fire Brigade Communiqué (Canada, 1982)

Wimmin’s Fire Brigade

Thoughts on Women’s Cinema: Eating Words, Voicing Struggles (USA, 1986)

Yvonne Rainer

The Post Porn Modernist Manifesto (USA, 1989)

Annie Sprinkle, Veronica Vera, et al.

Statement of African Women Professionals of Cinema, Television and Video (Burkina Faso, 1991)

FEPACI (Fédération panafricaine des cinéastes)

Puzzy Power Manifesto: Thoughts on Women and Pornography (Denmark, 1998)

Vibeke Windeløv, Lene Børglum, et al.

Cinema with Tits (Spain, 1998)

Icíar Bollaín

My Porn Manifesto (France, 2002)

Ovidie

No More Mr. Nice Gay: A Manifesto (USA, 2009)

Todd Verow

Barefoot Filmmaking Manifesto (UK, 2009)

Sally Potter

Dirty Diaries Manifesto (Sweden, 2009)

Mia Engberg

5. MILITATING HOLLYWOOD

Code to Govern the Making of Talking, Synchronized and Silent Motion Pictures (Motion Picture Production Code) (USA, 1930)

Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America

Red Films: Soviets Spreading Doctrine in U.S. Theatres (USA, 1935)

William Randolph Hearst

Statement of Principles (USA, 1944)

Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals

Screen Guide for Americans (USA, 1947)

Ayn Rand

White Elephant Art vs. Termite Art (USA, 1962)

Manny Farber

Super Fly: A Summary of Objections by the Kuumba Workshop (USA, 1972)

Kuumba Workshop

Full Frontal Manifesto (USA, 2001)

Steven Soderbergh

6. THE CREATIVE TREATMENT OF ACTUALITY

Towards a Social Cinema (France, 1930)

Jean Vigo

From First Principles of Documentary (UK, 1932)

John Grierson

Manifesto on the Documentary Film (UK, 1933)

Oswell Blakeston

Declaration of the Group of Thirty (France, 1953)

Jean Painlevé, Jacques-Yves Cousteau, Alain Resnais, et al.

Initial Statement of the Newsreel (USA, 1967)

New York Newsreel

Nowsreel, or the Potentialities of a Political Cinema (USA, 1970)

Robert Kramer, New York Newsreel

Documentary Filmmakers Make Their Case (Poland, 1971)

Bohdan Kosiński, Krzysztof Kieślowski, and Tomasz Zygadło

The Asian Filmmakers at Yamagata YIDFF Manifesto (Japan, 1989)

Kidlat Tahimik, Stephen Teo, et al.

Minnesota Declaration: Truth and Fact in Documentary Cinema (Germany, 1999)

Werner Herzog

Defocus Manifesto (Denmark, 2000)

Lars von Trier

Kill the Documentary as We Know It (USA, 2002)

Jill Godmilow

Ethnographic Cinema (EC): A Manifesto/A Provocation (USA, 2003)

Jay Ruby

Reality Cinema Manifesto (Russia, 2005)

Vitaly Manskiy

Documentary Manifesto (USA, 2008)

Albert Maysles

China Independent Film Festival Manifesto: Shamans* Animals (People’s Republic of China, 2011)

By several documentary filmmakers who participated and also who did not participate in the festival

7. STATES, DICTATORSHIPS, THE COMINTERN, AND THEOCRACIES

Capture the Film! Hints on the Use of, Out of the Use of, Proletarian Film Propaganda (USA, 1925)

Willi Münzenberg

The Legion of Decency Pledge (USA, 1934)

Archbishop John McNicholas

Creative Film (Germany, 1935)

Joseph Goebbels

Vigilanti Cura: On Motion Pictures (Vatican City, 1936)

Pope Pius XI

Four Cardinal Points of A Revolução de Maio (Portugal, 1937)

António Lopes Ribeiro

From On the Art of Cinema (North Korea, 1973)

Kim Jong-il

8. ARCHIVES, MUSEUMS, FESTIVALS, AND CINEMATHEQUES

A New Source of History: The Creation of a Depository for Historical Cinematography (Poland/France, 1898)

Bolesław Matuszewski

The Film Prayer (USA, c. 1920)

A. P. Hollis

The Film Society (UK, 1925)

Iris Barry

Filmliga Manifesto (The Netherlands, 1927)

Joris Ivens, Henrik Scholte, Men’no Ter Bbaak, et al.

Statement of Purposes (USA, 1948)

Amos Vogel, Cinema 16

The Importance of Film Archives (UK, 1948)

Ernest Lindgren

A Plea for a Canadian Film Archive (Canada, 1949)

Hye Bossin

Open Letter to Film-Makers of the World (USA, 1966)

Jonas Mekas

A Declaration from the Committee for the Defense of La Cinémathèque française (France, 1968)

Committee for the Defense of La Cinémathèque française

Filmmakers versus the Museum of Modern Art (USA, 1969)

Hollis Frampton, Ken Jacobs, and Michael Snow

Anthology Film Archives Manifesto (USA, 1970)

P. Adams Sitney

Toward an Ethnographic Film Archive (USA, 1971)

Alan Lomax

Brooklyn Babylon Cinema Manifesto (USA, 1998)

Scott Miller Berry and Stephen Kent Jusick

Don’t Throw Film Away: The FIAF 70th Anniversary Manifesto (France, 2008)

Hisashi Okajima and La fédération internationale des archives du film Manifesto Working Group

The Lindgren Manifesto: The Film Curator of the Future (Italy, 2010)

Paolo Cherchi Usai

Film Festival Form: A Manifesto (UK, 2012)

Mark Cousins

9. SOUNDS AND SILENCE

A Statement on Sound (USSR, 1928)

Sergei Eisenstein, Vsevolod Pudovkin, and Grigori Alexandrov

A Rejection of the Talkies (USA, 1931)

Charlie Chaplin

A Dialogue on Sound: A Manifesto (UK, 1934)

Basil Wright and B. Vivian Braun

Amalfi Manifesto (Italy, 1967)

Michelangelo Antonioni, Bernardo Bertolucci, Pier Paolo Pasolini, et al.

10. THE DIGITAL REVOLUTION

Culture: Intercom and Expanded Cinema: A Proposal and Manifesto (USA, 1966)

Stan VanDerBeek

The Digital Revolution and the Future Cinema (Iran, 2000)

Samira Makhmalbaf

The Pluginmanifesto (UK, 2001)

Ana Kronschnabl

Digital Dekalogo: A Manifesto for a Filmless Philippines (The Philippines, 2003)

Khavn de la Cruz

11. AESTHETICS AND THE FUTURES OF THE CINEMA

The Birth of the Sixth Art (France, 1911)

Ricciotto Canudo

The Birth of a New Avant Garde: La caméra-stylo (France, 1948)

Alexandre Astruc

From Preface to Film (UK, 1954)

Raymond Williams

The Snakeskin (Sweden, 1965)

Ingmar Bergman

Manifesto (Italy, 1965)

Roberto Rossellini, Bernardo Bertolucci, Tinto Brass, et al.

Manifesto on the Release of La Chinoise (France, 1967)

Jean-Luc Godard

Direct Action Cinema Manifesto (USA, 1985)

Rob Nilsson

Remodernist Film Manifesto (USA, 2008)

Jesse Richards

The Age of Amateur Cinema Will Return (People’s Republic of China, 2010)

Jia Zhangke

Appendix. What Is a Manifesto Film?

Notes

Acknowledgments of Permissions

Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book has been a long time in the making as I have searched far, wide, and somewhat obsessively for film manifestos over the course of the last few years. I was aided in this Sisyphean task by a great many people who passed on manifestos, provided hard-to-find articles and essays on manifesto movements, helped me track down the diverse and often obscure documents I needed, and discussed in detail their own thoughts and theories on film and moving image manifestos. Many thanks, then, to those who sent materials my way, answered emails, spent time talking about niches in film history with which I was relatively unfamiliar, and all in all made this book far better as a result of their collegiality and generosity: Hata Ayumi, John Belton, Moinak Biswas, Marcel Beltrán, Paul Coates, Donald Crafton, Scott Forsyth, John Greyson, Lillah Halla, Sharon Hayashi, Jennie Holmes, Eli Horwatt, Takahiko Iimura, Stephen Kent Jusick, Ali Kazimi, David Kidman, Chuck Kleinhans, Paisley Livingston, Alan Lovell, Tadeusz Lubelski, Scott MacDonald, Nicholas Mercury, Sahar Moridani, Laura Mulvey, Zuzana M. Pick, Paula Potter, Eric Rentschler, Sarah Schulman, Elena Pinto Simon, Martin Stollery, Ava Tews, Thomas Waugh, and Brian Winston. Joseph Ditta at the New York Historical Society generously located and passed along some hard-to-find material, as did Mike Hamilton at the University of Toronto’s Media Commons.

I must also thank the film studies and production students in my 2006–2007 film theory class at York University, all of whom wrote manifestos and took part in a project called Manifest This! My two teaching assistants, Shana MacDonald and Aimée Mitchell, went above and beyond the call of duty, helping type out student manifestos, writing their own screeds, and co-organizing the Manifest This! launch-declamation event in which the students read out their manifestos (not on a soapbox but on a chair in a pub). I must also thank Aimée for pointing me in the direction of the Hye Bossin manifesto. Thanks also go to John McCullough, the head of film studies at York at the time, who allotted funds to print up the manifestos.

The book benefited greatly from the Experimental Writing Workshop in 2011; the workshop is held each year in conjunction with the Independent Imaging Workshop (Film Farm) in Mount Forest, Ontario. The participants that year, Susan Lord and Mike Zryd, along with my co-organizer Janine Marchessault, helped structure the book and forced me to clarify many of my more extreme pronouncements (a process that goes hand in hand with writing on manifestos). Mike in particular compelled me to formalize my thoughts on manifesto films, a concept he thought outlandish and untenable (and one about which, of course, he might very well be right). For Mike and Susan’s collegiality, feedback, insights, friendship, and support, I offer my thanks.

The book was completed as I took up a post at Queen’s University. My new colleagues in the Department of Film and Media deserve thanks for combining intellectual stimulation and generous conviviality.

Many friends, colleagues, and collaborators have played a central and ongoing role in the development and realization of this book. Thanks go first to Mette Hjort, as the work we did together on both national cinemas and Dogme ’95 led me to consider the role of manifestos more generally in film culture. Thanks also to Bill Wees, whose course on the history of avant-garde cinema introduced me to avant-garde, experimental, and found footage film when I was an undergraduate at McGill. Having shared countless taco lunches with me over the past fifteen years, Bill has been a key resource for all things avant-garde, including introducing me to many of the manifestos that populate these pages. He’s also been a great friend. Brenda Longfellow’s friendship, acuity, and solidarity, over many glasses of red wine, were indispensable components in the completion of the book and in thinking through the political implications of many of the manifestos contained herein, especially those related to feminism and third cinemas. Anna Stenport also deserves a great deal of thanks for motivating me in her resolute and tenacious way to get this project finished, so I could move on to the next one, with her, on the Arctic. As the book was cascading to its conclusion, Anna read through all the introductory material for each chapter and offered incisive and invaluable feedback, all the while maintaining a glass-half-full attitude toward my writing, cheering me toward the finish line.

My partner, Darlene, put up with what must have seemed like (because it almost was) a never-ending project, providing many pleasurable diversions and some truly magnificent rants (she was born to write manifestos). She also helped with the Herculean task of data entry and, with a great deal of mock rage and good humor, argued with the ideas put forth in the manifestos that she undertook the unenviable task of transcribing, given her background in scientific thought. For this, her support, dark sense of humor, and so much more, she deserves my profound thanks and heartfelt gratitude.

Finally, I thank Janine Marchessault and Phil Hoffman. Much of the editorial material in the book was composed during writing sessions with Janine, who supported this project from the beginning. She read drafts of the editorial material, brainstormed endlessly, and was my main sounding board for the ideas in the book. Indeed, the present structure of the book came about after I spent a weekend talking with Janine and Phil. Janine was discussing the extensive primary materials she was using in her book on Expo ’67. A couple of hours later, Phil handed me a copy of Fernando Birri’s Birth Certificate of the . . . School of Three Worlds manifesto, saying, I don’t think you’ve seen this. The realization that my book ought to be built around the combination of primary materials composed of the plethora of manifestos that many film and media scholars have heard of but never seen, or indeed have just never heard of, became the backbone of the project and crystallized through the synthesis of these two conversations. Their friendship, generosity of spirit, and intellectual and artistic stimulation (as well as our shared, near-obsessive love of The Office and Kitchen Nightmares) have been a constant source of inspiration and, in the latter parenthetical case, pleasurable distraction for me. For all these reasons, and too many more to enumerate, I offer my heartfelt thanks.

The first steps of this project were possible thanks to initial funding from the British Academy. Queen’s University generously provided a Fund for Scholarly Research and Creative Work and Professional Development research grant, which allowed me to undertake research at La Cinémathèque française in Paris; the Library of Congress in Washington, DC; and the British Film Institute in London.

Any mistakes remaining herein are my own.

INTRODUCTION

An Invention without a Future

The cinema is an invention without a future.

—LOUIS LUMIÈRE, AUTHOR OF THE FIRST FILM MANIFESTO

To forge oneself iron laws, if only in order to obey or disobey them with difficulty . . .

—ROBERT BRESSON, NOTES ON THE CINEMATOGRAPHER

THE FOURTH COLUMN

Manifestos are typically understood as ruptures, breaks, and challenges to the steady flow of politics, aesthetics, or history. This is equally true of film and other moving image manifestos. Paradoxically, film manifestos pervade the history of cinema yet exist at the margins of almost all accounts of film history itself. An examination of this elision raises not simply the question of whether manifestos have changed the cinema (even if their existence has often been marginalized in film history) but whether the act of calling into being a new form of cinema changed not only moving images but the world itself. For this proposition to make any sense at all, one cannot take moving images to be separate from the world or to be simply a mirror or reflection of the real. Instead, one must see moving images as a constitutive part of the real: as images change, so does the rest of the world. By way of introduction to Film Manifestos and Global Cinema Cultures, I examine what exactly a manifesto is, consider the role played by manifestos in film culture, offer an overview of some of the film manifestos and manifesto movements covered in the book, and map out a critical model of what constitutes a film manifesto and a manifesto-style of writing. My aim is to outline a theoretically informed counterhistory that places film manifestos, often neglected, at the center of film history, politics, and culture.

Film manifestos are a missing link in our knowledge of the history of cinema production, exhibition, and distribution. Often considered a subset of aesthetics or mere political propaganda, film manifestos are better understood as a creative and political engine, an often unacknowledged force pushing forward film theory, criticism, and history. Examining these writings as a distinct category—constituting calls to action for political and aesthetic changes in the cinema and, equally important, the cinema’s role in the world—allows one not only to better understand their use-value but also the way in which they have functioned as catalysts for film practices outside the dominant narrative paradigms of what Jean-Luc Godard pejoratively calls Hollywood-Mosfilm. Yet manifestos and manifesto-style writing have also greatly influenced, and indeed regulated, narrative cinema, especially that of the classical Hollywood period.

One of the other goals of Film Manifestos and Global Cinema Cultures is to reconsider the status of the film manifesto in film theory and history. Part of my desire to do this stems from my coming of age, as an academic, during the theory wars of the 1990s (nowhere near as sexy as the Clone Wars but similarly populated with mutterings about the dark side). Many of the most contentious essays at the center of the theory wars are better understood not as theory qua theory, in some empirical sense, but as manifestos—calls to arms to change, destroy, and reimagine the cinema. Certainly, this is the political and aesthetic power that lies behind a multitude of central writings on the cinema, from Sergei Eisenstein’s The Method of Making Workers’ Films, and Dziga Vertov’s WE: Variant of a Manifesto through Laura Mulvey’s Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema and Claire Johnston’s Women’s Cinema as Counter-Cinema (indeed, some of the writings from the analytic side of the debate by Noël Carroll and Gregory Currie can be read as manifestos for film theory itself).¹ To get tied up in positivist arguments about the empirical nature of these texts is to miss the means by which they functioned as catalysts for writers and filmmakers alike to reimagine the cinema.

Film Manifestos and Global Cinema Cultures brings together film manifestos from the global history of cinema, constituting the first historical and theoretical account of the role played by film manifestos in filmmaking and film culture.² Focusing equally on political and aesthetic manifestos (and the numerous ones that address the relationship between aesthetics and politics), Film Manifestos and Global Cinema Cultures uncovers a neglected yet central history of cinema through the exploration of a series of documents that postulate ways in which to reimagine the medium, how moving images intervene in the public sphere, and the ways film might function as a catalyst to change the world. Many film manifestos accomplish these goals by foregrounding the dialectical relationship between questions of aesthetic form and political discourse, raising salient questions about how cinematic form is in and of itself a form of political action and intervention in the public sphere. Indeed, one of the defining characteristics of film manifestos could be understood by the maxim aesthetics as action.

Film Manifestos and Global Cinema Cultures brings together key manifestos of the last 110 years, alongside many little-known manifestos that, despite their obscurity, have nevertheless served to challenge and reimagine cinema aesthetics, politics, distribution, production, and exhibition. To this end the book includes the major European manifestos (those of Sergei Eisenstein, François Truffaut, Free Cinema, Oberhausen, Dogme ’95, et al.), the Latin American political manifestos (Fernando Birri, Jorge Sanjinés, Julio García Espinosa, Fernando Solanas, et al.), those of the postcolonial nation-state independence movements (Scotland, Québec, Palestine) and those of avant-garde filmmakers and writers (Stan Brakhage, Maya Deren, Jonas Mekas, Keith Sanborn, et al.). Film Manifestos and Global Cinema Cultures also brings to light many manifestos largely unknown in Anglo-American film culture, as the book contains many previously untranslated manifestos authored or coauthored by figures such as Icíar Bollaín, Luis Buñuel, Guy Debord, Jean-Luc Godard, Jaime Humberto Hermosillo, Isidore Isou, Krzysztof Kieślowski, and François Truffaut. The book also includes thematic sections addressing documentary cinema, feminist and queer film cultures, and state-controlled filmmaking and archives. Furthermore, it includes texts that have been traditionally left out of the canon of film manifestos, such as the Motion Picture Production Code and Pius XI’s Vigilanti Cura, which have nevertheless played a central role in film culture (indeed, the Production Code can be seen as the most successful film manifesto of all time). Finally, I have also included many local manifestos, ones that were influential in specific scenes and micromovements. The counterhistory that emerges from these varied texts brings to life, in essence, a new history of the cinema.

WHAT IS A MANIFESTO?

Before turning to film manifestos, consideration must be given to what, in general, constitutes a manifesto. To begin, then, a perhaps audacious claim: the last three thousand years of Judeo-Christian history are based on a manifesto. The Decalogue, or the Ten Commandments, declaimed in both Exodus and Deuteronomy, functions as Western culture’s first and most definitive manifesto. The rules it sets out defined the basic structures around which Western culture has organized itself and its belief systems. The Commandments, like any good subsequent manifesto, offer not only rules to live by but nothing less than a totalizing vision of how one ought to live one’s life. An examination of the Decalogue also allows one to delineate the difference between a manifesto and what could be more broadly construed as rules: You shall have no other gods before me or You shall not make wrongful use of the name of the Lord your God (Exodus 20:3, 7; and Deuteronomy 5:7, 11) are imperatives that effect one’s morality and ethics in a way that don’t run with scissors does not (even though the latter may be considered a more pragmatic piece of advice).

While the Decalogue is only the most prominent of the myriad of totalizing theological proclamations of the way in which one ought to live one’s life, contemporary manifestos and our understanding of them date from the upheavals of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, most notably with the United States’ Declaration of Independence of 1776, the Constitution of 1788, and the Bill of Rights of 1791; France’s Déclaration des droits de l’homme et du citoyen of 1789; and Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’s Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei (The Communist Manifesto) of 1848. These foundational documents of two of the three competing ideologies of the twentieth century (the other being fascism) have taken on a quasi-religious status, partly replacing old messianic principles with newly found societal and secular ones; for instance, James Madison once referred to the founding American documents as political scripture. Here, the political manifesto takes on the totalizing role of societal definition once held by the Decalogue. Indeed, Fredric Jameson sees connections between these forms of writings, codifies both manifestos and constitutions as subsets of utopian writing, and delineates the four different kinds of utopian writing: the manifesto; the constitution; the ‘mirror of princes’; and great prophecy, which includes within itself that mode called satire.³ All four kinds of writing can be seen as means by which to reimagine the world by calling a new world into being through the act of writing.

The aesthetic manifesto demonstrates many of the same qualities as the classical political manifesto, even when lacking an overt political or ideological goal. The rules put forth in aesthetic manifestos set structures that not only pertain to artistic form but do so with the implicit or explicit belief that following aesthetic rules in artistic production has political, social, and cultural consequences in the world at large. The rules or constraints placed on poetic form, from haiku to iambic pentameter, may lead to aesthetically pleasing texts, but the rules themselves don’t speak to larger cultural, political, or aesthetic issues. Aesthetic manifestos, then, make claims about not only the formal aspects of art but the ways in which these formal rules will help transform the world at large.

What constitutes the preferred discursive model of the manifesto in order to bring this transformation into being is open to debate. As a form of speech, manifestos have been understood as both monological and dialectical in nature. Janet Lyon, for instance, argues that traditional aesthetic and political modernist manifestos are both exhortations to action and simultaneous attempts to eradicate dissent and debate:

The literary and political manifestoes that flag the history of modernity are usually taken to be transparent public expressions of pure will: whoever its author and whatever its subject, a manifesto is understood as the testimony of a historical present tense spoken in the impassioned voice of its participants. The form’s capacity for rhetorical trompe l’oeil tends to shape its wide intelligibility: the syntax of a manifesto is so narrowly controlled by exhortation, its style so insistently unmediated, that it appears to say only what it means, and to mean only what it says. The manifesto declares a position; the manifesto refuses dialogue or discussion; the manifesto fosters antagonism and scorns conciliation. It is univocal, unilateral, single-minded. It conveys resolute oppositionality and indulges no tolerance for the faint hearted.⁴

For Lyon it is a strategic necessity for the manifesto to be monological in nature. To engage in a dialogical process in regard to what the manifesto is calling into being is to undercut its very efficacy as a speech act. In contrast, for Louis Althusser the manifesto is dialectical in nature, mediating past and present. Writing on Antonin Gramsci’s reading of Machiavelli’s The Prince as a manifesto, Althusser writes, "Machiavelli ‘speaks’ to Gramsci in the future tense. . . . Gramsci calmly writes that The Prince is a manifesto and a ‘revolutionary utopia.’ For the sake of brevity, let us say ‘a revolutionary utopian manifesto.’"⁵ He argues elsewhere, also in relation to The Prince, that for the manifesto to be truly political and realistic—materialistic—the theory that it states must not only be stated by the manifesto, but located by it in the social space into which it is intervening and which it thinks.⁶ Manifestos for Althusser, then, are invocations: they call the future into being through a dialectical mediation of the present and the past. This utopian drive is central to the post-Enlightenment manifesto and to the calls for a radical reimagining of the cinema in film manifestos, bringing into being not only a new cinema but a new world.

MANIFESTOS AND UTOPIAS

What would a new intellectual history of film culture, read through the prism of the manifesto, look like; and how can one, in a theoretical frame, begin to synthesize this kind of history and writing with the concept of the utopian? What kind of form might this kind of secret history take, and what might this history reveal? One notion that comes to mind is that a radically different kind of dialogical process would occur among different historical, political, national, and cultural moments in film theory, criticism, and history. This reimagination of the history of cinema through the utopian ruptures of film manifestos has philosophical precedents: in strikingly different ways the works of Walter Benjamin and Guy Debord engage in this process, as both these Marxist philosophers examine the role of the image in twentieth-century culture.

Greil Marcus’s Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century, his classic study of punk, the Diggers, the Lettristes, the Situationists, and a cornucopia of other termite-like political and aesthetic movements, is also an example of this kind of radical utopian critical approach to cultural history. Marcus traces dialogical relationships among different moments of radical cultural history and uses punk as a contemporary culmination of many of these cultural and political practices:

In Anarchy in the UK, a twenty-year-old called Johnny Rotten has rephrased a social critique generated by people who, as far as he knew, had never been born. Who knew what else was part of the conversation? If one can stop looking at the past and start listening to it, one might hear echoes of a new conversation; then the task of the critic would be to lead speakers and listeners unaware of each other’s existence to talk to one another. The job of the critic would be to maintain the ability to be surprised at how the conversation goes, and to communicate that sense of surprise to other people, because a life infused with surprise is better than a life that is not.⁷

This analysis is both utopian and dialogical in nature. But it also speaks of the ways by which social and political breaks and ruptures take place in culture—in other words, how radical interventions from radical voices come about. Part of the task of Film Manifestos and Global Cinema Cultures is not simply to document, in some sort of Rankéan manner, the inexorable progression of one manifesto movement to another; instead, it is to place these manifestos, as if in a noisy room, in dialogue and debate with each other, much like the role of the critics that Marcus outlines in the passage above. The reason to consider film manifestos as if they are in dialogue with each other is that this allows one to open up the possibility of seeing manifestos not simply as static, temporal texts but as discourses and exhortations, knowingly or not, in cacophonous debate, shouting from the margins an untold history of the cinema and its radical, utopian possibilities. This, in essence, is the goal of this collection: by placing film manifestos at the center of film history and culture, the book aims to reimagine a lost history of the cinema and to bring to light the way in which so many filmmakers, critics, theorists, archivists, activists, and historians have deployed cinema as a means to reconfigure the world.

This utopian, if not messianic, desire to radically reimagine the world deserves further consideration. Karl Mannheim was one of the first critical theorists to explore the role played by the utopian in contemporary theory, with his groundbreaking study Ideology and Utopia. Writing in 1936, he stated:

A state of mind is utopian when it is incongruous with the state of reality within which it occurs. This incongruence is always evident in the fact that such a state of mind in experience, in thought, and in practice, is oriented towards objects which do not exist in the actual situation. However, we should not regard as utopian every state of mind which is incongruous with and transcends the immediate situation (and in this sense, departs from reality). Only those orientations transcending reality will be referred to by us as utopian which, when they pass over into conduct, tend to shatter, either partially or wholly, the order of things prevailing at the time.⁸

Paul Ricoeur analyzes the perceived strengths and limitations of Mannheim’s theory by drawing distinctions between the utopian and the ideological: ideologies relate mainly to dominant groups; to comfort the collective ego of these dominant groups. Utopias, on the other hand, are more naturally supported by ascending groups and therefore are more usually by the lower strata of society. He continues: "Utopia is not only a set of ideas but a mentality, a Geist, a configuration of factors which permeates a whole range of ideas and feelings. . . . Mannheim speaks here of the ‘dominant wish,’ something which can be retained as a methodological concept if we understand it as an organizing principle that is more felt than thought."⁹ Ricoeur concludes by drawing into relief the clear distinctions between the two concepts: If we call ideology false consciousness of our real situation, we can imagine a society without ideology. We cannot imagine, however, a society without utopia, because this would be a society without goals.¹⁰ One of Ricoeur’s critiques of Mannheim is that Mannheim postulates that society is moving toward a gradual approximation of real life and therefore no longer has a need to postulate utopias; Ricoeur fundamentally disagrees with this Rankéan conception. However, one can take away from Mannheim’s conception of the utopian the notion of the dominant wish, which echoes Walter Benjamin’s concept of the dialectical image, as outlined by Susan Buck-Morss:

As fore-history, the objects are prototypes, ur-phenomena that can be recognized as precursors to the present, no matter how distant or estranged they now appear. Benjamin implies that if the fore-history of an object reveals its possibility (including its utopian potential), its after-history is that which, as an object of natural history, it has in fact become. . . . In the traces left by the object’s after-history, the conditions of its decay and the manner of its cultural transmission, the utopian images of past objects can be read as truth. . . . Benjamin was counting on the shock of this recognition to jolt the dreaming collective into a political awakening.¹¹

Here are the beginnings of what a theory of the manifesto might look like: manifestos not only as diagnostic but as causing a shock of recognition, a blow to the dominant order’s illusion of ideological and aesthetic coherence: one witnesses the revival of the utopian as a political form, recasting a leftist critique of both culture and theory. In essence, then, film manifestos, read as utopian texts, function in a similar way to the dialectical image. Along similar lines this relationship between the utopian and the political, and specifically the ideological, is outlined quite clearly by Fredric Jameson in his analysis of the relationship between ideology and utopia: "A Marxist negative hermeneutic, a Marxist practice of ideological analysis proper, must in the practical work of reading and interpretation be exercised simultaneously with a Marxist positive hermeneutic, or a decipherment of the Utopian impulses of these same ideological cultural texts."¹² In a more recent article, evaluating the possibility of the utopian in a globalized world, Jameson notes that it is difficult enough to imagine any radical political programme today without the conception of systematic otherness, of an alternative society, which only the idea of utopia seems to keep alive, however feebly. This clearly does not mean that, even if we succeed in reviving utopia itself, the outlines of a new and effective practical politics for the era of globalization will at once become visible; but only that we will never come to one without it.¹³

What Jameson does not address here is the fact that the utopian can and has been mobilized by the right as often as it has been by the left. Certainly, the rightist ideologies and manifestos of fascism and Stalinism both postulate utopian visions of a future world. This is in no way to discount the leftist manifesto and its relationship to the utopian, but it is to foreground the ways in which the utopian is postulated across the ideological spectrum. Broadly speaking, while leftist utopias look to the future for a better world, the utopias of the right position the utopian by harking back to the past. Both kinds of utopias run through the histories of film manifestos.

RADICALS, REACTIONARIES, AND THE FILM MANIFESTO

Within most accounts of cinematic history, the film manifesto plays a decidedly marginal role. While moving image manifestos are often seen as relevant to the study of national cinemas or as cornerstones to aesthetic movements such as surrealism or Dadaism, they are rarely understood as one of the driving forces behind large swathes of film theory and practice. Film Manifestos and Global Cinema Cultures readdresses this critical elision. The book traces the interface between film manifestos and film practice in the broadest sense—-to consider not only the high art manifestos of surrealism, Dadaism, expressionism, and futurism, or more recently, the Oberhausen, Third Cinema, and Dogme ’95 manifestos—-but also to examine manifesto-style writing, found in documents as diverse as Laura Mulvey’s highly influential essay Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, Hollywood’s Motion Picture Production Code, and the papal encyclical Vigilanti Cura. The reason these documents can be usefully understood as instances of manifesto writing is precisely because of their authors’ attempts through polemics to radically reimagine the nature of cinema (and, by extension, social and political relations) and to delineate in a programmatic and utopian manner what the cinema ought to be and how it should best function within the public sphere. At times, this reimagining is undertaken in order to bring about political, social, aesthetic, or cultural revolution. At other times it is undertaken to preserve a quite reactionary status quo. In most cases film manifestos postulate a discursive, imaginary, but politically charged utopia of one form or another, be it purely social, political, aesthetic, or some combination thereof. My aim, therefore, is to delineate a critical history of the role played by film manifestos in the construction of both the cinema itself and the theoretical and critical practices and apparatuses that surround and underpin it.

Throughout the history of the cinema, radicals and reactionaries alike have used the film manifesto as a means of stating their key aesthetic and political goals. Indeed, film manifestos are almost as old as the cinema itself; the first film manifesto can be traced to 1898. By the early 1910s and 1920s, Italian futurists, French Dadaists and surrealists, and German expressionists were all producing manifestos, stating their political, aesthetic, and philosophical principles. In most cases these texts were calls to revolution—a revolution of consciousness, of political hierarchies, and of aesthetic practices, which all bled together in an attempt to radically redefine the cinema and the culture in which it existed. Luis Buñuel’s famous claim that the film Un chien andalou (France, 1928) was a call to murder is only the most infamous of the statements in circulation at the time; many others framed the ways in which avant-garde, experimental, and alternative film (and later, television and video) came to be understood throughout the history of moving images.¹⁴ Furthermore, film manifestos can be seen as constituting the earliest form of film theory; for instance, Ricciotto Canudo’s The Birth of the Sixth Art in many ways marks the beginnings of a theory of radical film practice. Similarly, Sergei Eisenstein, Vsevolod Pudovkin, and Grigori Alexandrov’s A Statement on Sound marks the beginnings of critical discussions on the relations between image and sound in the cinema. Surrealism, Free Cinema, and the emergence of film archives were all framed, to varying degrees, by manifestos. In subsequent decades virtually every artistic and political movement existing outside mainstream, narrative cinema sallied forth with a manifesto, proclaiming the end of the old regimes of representation and the need to wipe the slate clean and begin anew. Here, the slicing open of the eye in Un chien andalou again stands as a nodal point, encapsulating the preferred mode of address adopted by manifesto scribes.

Despite the wide variety of ideological and political points of view put forth in film manifestos, the rhetorical stances adopted by the writers—which foregrounded both an urgent call to arms and a profoundly undialectical form of argumentation—led to a certain similarity in the cinematic manifesto genre, at least in its modernist iteration. Because of the programmatic, proclamatory nature of most manifesto writing—which is an unavoidable occurrence, precisely because of the inflammatory nature of the discourse involved—the intended outcomes of manifestos were, for the most part, hopelessly doomed; yet this hopelessness added to the nihilistic romance of dramatic intervention in the public sphere. This romance was fortified by the fact that manifestos were most often texts of the moment. Intrinsically tied not only to the cinema, but the immediate world surrounding the authors, manifestos have had, in most cases, quite short life spans; they quickly left the world of political intervention and became that most aberrant thing (at least in the eyes of the writers themselves), a declawed aesthetic text. This led to the need to write and rewrite basic principles, either by design, in order to maintain relevance, or by force, because of political pressures; one only has to look at the ways in which André Breton continually rewrote his manifestos of surrealism as an example of the former, or the ways in which the fundamental, guiding principles underlying the cinema of Sergei Eisenstein necessarily shifted as intellectual montage and Lenin led to Stalin and socialist realism—a sad but inevitable example of the latter.

Film Manifestos and Global Cinema Cultures elucidates, within this theoretical and historical framework, the role played by manifestos and manifesto-style writing in film culture. Through this analysis a very different, though crucial, history of the cinema comes to light—one that engages critically not only with moving images but also with the diverse and contradictory discourses that inevitably surround cinematic production and consumption within the public sphere. The perceived failure of film manifestos to create a new, utopian, revolutionary world through the moving image points to the fact that the interest they generate as texts, and as statements of purpose, are as tied to their extremism, and the possibility they offer the reader to reimagine the cinema, as they are to initiating programmatic changes in and of themselves. In many ways, therefore, it is the extremism of most manifestos that give them, if not their political foundation, then their intellectual appeal. Indeed, the cinema one imagines whilst reading these texts is often more compelling than some of the films produced under the auspices of their influence. Yet many manifesto writers have transformed the cinema: the raison d’être of the film manifesto is to provoke not only a new form of cinema but a way of reimagining the medium, and therefore the world, itself. If one is to analyze manifestos of any kind, one must return to Karl Marx. And while the spirit of The Communist Manifesto haunts everything from Godard to Dogme, it is most certainly Marx’s posthumously published Theses on Feuerbach that sits at a key nodal point in the emergence of the manifesto-like nature of critical theory. Marx’s most famous edict in the theses is number 11: "The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it."¹⁵

1

THE AVANT-GARDE(S)

•      •      •

Without a doubt the most prevalent type of film manifesto comes from the cinematic avant-garde. This makes a great deal of sense, as manifestos—whether political, aesthetic, or both—can be seen in the first instance as a form of avant-garde writing, calling into being a new future. From the early twentieth century onward, film manifestos played a formative role in the way in which the avant-garde was understood. This chapter begins with the The Futurist Cinema manifesto from 1916, a key early film manifesto made all the more relevant because of the disappearance of most futurist cinema films through loss and neglect. The various Russian formalist and surrealist statements all point to the way in which avant-garde practices allowed for filmmakers to conceptualize the cinema as a tool to release the unconscious, or allow for revolutionary transformation, moving away from the realist principles that the cinema embodies so well.

László Moholy-Nagy’s Open Letter calls for a cinema determined not by capital but by artistic vision. This is a refrain that filmmakers will return to again and again throughout this book. Cinema determined by artistic vision is also the theme of Mary Ellen Bute’s Light*Form*Movement*Sound and Jim Davis’s The Only Dynamic Art. Both artists, working in Absolute Film, experiment with the cinema’s capacity to capture light, and in their manifestos they argue that the cinema ought to be used to enhance and explore new ways of seeing.

In a different vein the French Situationist Guy Debord argues that the image had replaced the more traditional commodity at the heart of capitalism. In his manifesto (1967) and film (1973) Society of the Spectacle he states: The spectacle is not a collection of images; it is a social relation between people that is mediated by images. In the three manifestos Debord authored or coauthored contained herein, we see the development of his notion of situations; indeed, it is present in his first film manifesto, and his first published work, Prolegomena for All Future Cinema. Debord’s thought is picked up by a new generation of American avant-garde and experimental filmmakers in the 1990s. Far more concerned with the image detritus that surrounds and at times bombards contemporary culture, filmmakers like Peggy Ahwesh, Craig Baldwin, and Keith Sanborn produced works that recycled the detritus images of contemporary culture into found footage films. Sanborn himself wrote one of the key avant-garde film manifestos of the time, Modern, All Too Modern, modeled in part on the writings of Debord.

Other movements were far more polysemic than the surrealists, the Lettristes, and the Situationists. A key example is the New American Cinema movement of the late 1950s and early 1960s. The differences among George Kuchar’s 8mm Film Manifesto, Stan Brakhage’s Metaphors on Vision, Hollis Frampton’s manifesto on metahistory, and the far more structural writings of Keewatin Dewdney on the flicker film speak to the heterogeneity of the American underground. Yet what united these filmmakers and their manifestos was a profound concern with alternative ways of seeing. And underlying this concern, despite the subsequent claims that some of these manifestos were apolitical and ahistorical, was the conviction that different ways of seeing the cinema meant different ways for spectators to see the world, perhaps even the world as it actually was and not how they, through indoctrination and ideology, thought they saw it. Indeed, the opening lines of Metaphors on Vision point to this in a dramatic formulation: Imagine an eye unruled by man-made laws of perspective, an eye unprejudiced by compositional logic, an eye which does not respond to the name of everything but which must know each object encountered in life through an adventure of perception. How many colors are there in a field of grass to the crawling baby unaware of ‘Green’? How many rainbows can light create for the untutored eye? Here Brakhage is not speaking of the cinema but of perception itself; cinema, therefore, is just a medium through which to rediscover the process of seeing.

Nick Zedd’s Cinema of Transgression manifesto points toward the third wave of avant-garde and experimental filmmaking in the United States and demonstrates the profound influence of the punk aesthetic on experimental film in New York during the 1980s. If punk is a rebellion against older, corporatized forms of music and art, the Let’s Set the Record Straight manifesto, issued at the International Film Congress in Toronto in 1989, points to the large schism that had developed between the old guard of the avant-garde and the new generation of American and Canadian experimental filmmakers. In contrast, Jonas Mekas’s Anti-100 Years of Cinema manifesto derides the celebrations of the cinema’s first century that nevertheless neglect the avant-garde, old and new.

The final manifesto comes from Canada and points to the ways in which the avant-garde and experimental cinema is being reimagined through the development of alternative forms of pedagogy and the emergence of local ateliers. Philip Hoffman’s Independent Imaging Retreat in Mount Forest, Ontario, foregrounds the artisanal aspect of experimental filmmaking and supports not only the screening of new avant-garde works but their production as well. Avant-garde cinema can only be truly understood through an understanding of the manifestos produced by artists, and these documents point to the controversial, visionary, and deeply political nature of the avant-garde.

THE FUTURIST CINEMA (Italy, 1916)

F.T. Marinetti, Bruno Corra, Emilio Settimelli, Arnaldo Ginna, Giacomo Balla, Remo Chiti

[First published in Italian in L’italia futurista, 15 November 1916. First published in English in R.W. Flint, Marinetti: Selected Writings (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1972).]

The Futurist Cinema manifesto argues for a total cinema, decrying the cinema of newsreels and documentaries as a shoddy subsection of the dramatic tradition. Thus, the writers call for a cinema of polyexpressive symphony that, through poetry and analogy, creates a cinema capable of a vast range of expression, while standing on its own as a distinctive art form. The futurists’ critique of film’s reliance on drama and its celebration of technology and the speed it brings to contemporary artistic practice foreshadows a line of attack present in many of the avant-garde manifestos to come.

The book, a wholly passéist means of preserving and communicating thought, has for a long time been fated to disappear like cathedrals, towers, crenellated walls, museums, and the pacifist ideal. The book, static companion of the sedentary, the nostalgic, the neutralist, cannot entertain or exalt the new Futurist generations intoxicated with revolutionary and bellicose dynamism.

The conflagration is steadily enlivening the European sensibility. Our great hygienic war, which should satisfy all our national aspirations, centuples the renewing power of the Italian race. The Futurist cinema, which we are preparing, a joyful deformation of the universe, an alogical, fleeting synthesis of life in the world, will become the best school for boys: a school of joy, of speed, of force, of courage, and heroism. The Futurist cinema will sharpen, develop the sensibility, will quicken the creative imagination, will give the intelligence a prodigious sense of simultaneity and omnipresence. The Futurist cinema will thus cooperate in the general renewal, taking the place of the literary review (always pedantic) and the drama (always predictable), and killing the book (always tedious and oppressive). The necessities of propaganda will force us to publish a book once in a while. But we prefer to express ourselves through the cinema, through great tables of words-in-freedom and mobile illuminated signs.

With our manifesto The Futurist Synthetic Theatre, with the victorious tours of the theatre companies of Gualtiero Tumiati, Ettore Berti, Annibale Ninchi, Luigi Zoncada, with the two volumes of Futurist Synthetic Theatre containing eighty theatrical syntheses, we have begun the revolution in the Italian prose theatre. An earlier Futurist manifesto had rehabilitated, glorified, and perfected the Variety Theatre. It is logical therefore for us to carry our vivifying energies into a new theatrical zone: the cinema.

At first look the cinema, born only a few years ago, may seem to be Futurist already, lacking a past and free from traditions. Actually, by appearing in the guise of theatre without words, it has inherited all the most traditional sweepings of the literary theatre. Consequently, everything we have said and done about the stage applies to the cinema. Our action is legitimate and necessary in so far as the cinema up to now has been and tends to remain profoundly passéist, whereas we see in it the possibility of an eminently Futurist art and the expressive medium most adapted to the complex sensibility of a Futurist artist.

Except for interesting films of travel, hunting, wars, and so on, the film-makers have done no more than inflict on us the most backward looking dramas, great and small. The same scenario whose brevity and variety may make it seem advanced is, in most cases, nothing but the most trite and pious analysis. Therefore all the immense artistic possibilities of the cinema still rest entirely in the future. The cinema is an autonomous art. The cinema must therefore never copy the stage. The cinema, being essentially visual, must above all fulfill the evolution of painting, detach itself from reality, from photography, from the graceful and solemn. It must become antigraceful, deforming, impressionistic, synthetic, dynamic, free-wording.

One must free the cinema as an expressive medium in order to make it the ideal instrument of a new art, immensely vaster and lighter than all the existing arts. We are convinced that only in this way can one reach that polyexpressiveness towards which all the most modern artistic researches are moving. Today the Futurist cinema creates precisely the polyexpressive symphony that just a year ago we announced in our manifesto Weights, Measures, and Prices of Artistic Genius. The most varied elements will enter into the Futurist film as expressive means: from the slice of life to the streak of color, from the conventional line to words-in-freedom, from chromatic and plastic music to the music of objects. In other words it will be painting, architecture, sculpture, words-in-freedom, music of colors, lines, and forms, a jumble of objects and reality thrown together at random. We shall offer new inspirations for the researchers of painters, which will tend to break out of the limits of the frame. We shall set in motion the words-in-freedom that smash the boundaries of literature as they march towards painting, music, noise-art, and throw a marvelous bridge between the word and the real object. Our films will be:

1. Cinematic analogies that use reality directly as one of the two elements of the analogy. Example: If we should want to express the anguished state of one of our protagonists, instead of describing it in its various phases of suffering, we would give an equivalent impression with the sight of a jagged and cavernous mountain.

The mountains, seas, woods, cities, crowds, armies, squadrons, aeroplanes will often be our formidable expressive words: the universe will be our vocabulary.

Example: We want to give a sensation of strange cheerfulness: we show a chair cover flying comically around an enormous coat stand until they decide to join. We want to give the sensation of anger: we fracture the angry man into a whirlwind of little yellow balls. We want to give the anguish of a hero who has lost his faith and lapsed into a dead neutral skepticism: we show the hero in the act of making an inspired speech to a great crowd; suddenly we bring on Giovanni Giolitti who treasonably stuffs a thick forkful of macaroni into the hero’s mouth, drowning his winged words in tomato sauce.

We shall add color to the dialogue by swiftly, simultaneously showing every image that passes through the actors’ brains. Example: representing a man who will say to his woman: You’re as lovely as a gazelle, we shall show the gazelle. Example: if a character says, "I contemplate your fresh and luminous smile as a traveler after