Avant-Garde Binge

Critics have argued that in Avant-Garde and post modern film there is an emphasis on style over substance, a consumption of images for their own sake rather than for their usefulness or the values they symbolize, a preoccupation with playfulness and inside jokes at the expense of meaning. Even in big Hollywood movies like Zach Snyder’s depiction of Alan Moore’s world renowned graphic novel, The Watchmen (2009), we see fashion over content. As a result qualities like integrity, coherence, seriousness, authenticity and intellectual depth are undermined. Indie films, as well as some Hollywood pictures have destabilized cinema from within by challenging audiences’ expectations of narrative and visual representation.

Avant-Garde director, Jon Jost, is a ruggedly independent filmmaker who unlike most of his contemporaries exhibits a voice that is uncompromisingly personal. Self-taught, Jost has made his films as cheaply as possible. Though he has been directing for over 30 years, only a few of his works have had theatrical releases.

In an article published in Film Comment Jost writes that he has always worked “small.” “My entire career has been mounted on a fiscal sum- less than $500,000- that in LA would scarcely be imagined suitable for an episode of a lame half-hour sitcom.” Jost later in his article writes, “The thought that there might be virtue in modesty, that having a crew of just two or three might actually have its benefits- and not merely fiscal- is perceived lunacy…is to point out the obvious and the tragic.” The obvious and the tragic being that big production, big money and big promotion have nothing to do with art or human values.

Jost’s movies are mostly about losers. The kind of protagonists considered unappealing by mainstream standards. His repertoire consists of three kinds of film according to film annalist, Emanuel Levy; essays, Westerns, and urbans. His essays include Speaking Directly: Some American Notes (1973), which deals with the intersection of the personal and the political of American involvement of the Vietnam War. Last Chance for a Slow Dance (1977), Slow Moves (1983) and Sure Fire (1988-1990) are among Jost’s Westerns. His westerns examine the teetering generation of cowboys after the frontier and the decline of honor at this time. The characters go on long drives through barren landscapes and the only emotion they have left is rage, which often results in violent and seemingly pointless deaths.

His urban films like All the Vermeer’s in New York (1992) incorporate the lyrical camera of Jost’s essays and the violence of his Westerns together, creating a poignant story of discrepancies between art and spiritual decay. Like all of Jost’s films, he explores the boundaries between narrative and experimental cinema. He presents worlds that are both beautiful and decadent, calm on the surface, but riddled with anxiety.

Like Jost, filmmaker David Lynch is dedicated to explaining the violent nature of American life, but unlike Jost, Lynch has the ability to transform scary nightmares into pleasurable sensations, like the infamous dinner scene from Lynch’s breakthrough film, Eraserhead (1977).


From the very beginning, viewers of a Lynch film expect to be shaken up, to be astonished by the tension, mood and sensation in his work. This is very likely the reason why the term “Lynchian” has become a catchphrase of all other cinematic deviations somewhat like his style. Lynch’s creativity manifests itself through a disconnected series of images and moods. “Cinema is a language that can say abstractions,” Lynch said in a June of 2007 lecture. In that lecture he explained that sometimes even he doesn’t know what’s going on in his films, but that “Intuition and knowingness” of the individual are all that matter. People can interpret things an infinite number of ways, and Lynch says that “You know for yourself what an idea in a films means, and what you know for yourself is valid.”

Thus is the gist of Avant-Garde independent film. A provocative thought or image that suggests nothing in life is fixed and that everything is relative. A surreal search beyond logic and beyond narrative of perversity, violence and frivolity.