RAYCARNEY
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his imposition of crude ideological labels.
In the course of
Allegories
of
Cinema,
James mentions almost five
hundred films and discusses close to a hundred of them in some detail,
but his omissions are at least as revealing as his inclusions. He cuts his def–
inition of independent film down to fit his Procrustean critical methods.
That is the only explanation I can see for why some of the most
stunning works of the independent movement are as completely omitted
from his treatment as if they had never existed (Barbara Loden's
Wanda,
Robert Kramer's
Milestones,
and Mark Rappaport's, James Ivory's, and
John Korty's entire
oeuvres),
or are written off in a few sentences (much
of Paul Morrissey's work and all of Cassavetes's beyond
Shadows).
They
are apparently omitted because they are not politically radical enough to
merit his attention. On the other hand, works of almost no enduring
value are dwelled on for pages, as long as they have their political papers
in order. Even discounting its ideological tendentiousness, James's canon
of independent work demonstrates a strikingly provincial and limited
knowledge of the field. A reader hoping for a fresher and more
"independent" view of independent cinema will be disappointed by
James's roundup of the usual suspects. More than half of his text is
devoted to reciting the same tired litany of fllms and filmmakers that one
encounters in the few previous treatments of the subject. It is the by-now
all too predictable list of New York avant-garde work installed in the
cinematic pantheon by Sitney almost two decades ago: a small and not
terribly fascinating group of filmmakers, most of whom know each
other, come from the same geographical area, share similar assumptions
about film, and show regularly in the same downtown theaters and
uptown museums: Stan Brakhage, Ernie Gehr, Peter Kubelka, Michael
Snow, Paul Sharits, Hollis Frampton, and Jack Smith, among others.
(The politically fashionable Jean-Luc Godard is predictably dragged in as
the prime piece of foreign real estate by which to assess New York
values.)
Many of the preceding limitations in James's text can be attributed
to his lack of critical sophistication: his naivete about artistic expression '
allows him to confuse political correctness with acts of genius, and his
inability to tell good work from bad forces him to stay on the beaten
path where others have already cleared the way for him. But another as–
pect of his approach is even more disturbing than his critical immaturity.
It is his profound bias against all "realistic," "narrative" forms of repre–
sentation (that is to say: all forms committed to presenting events in a
dramatically "transparent" manner, in terms of the personal interactions
of characters, by means of a temporally sequential and coherent course of
events).
James displays a blithe confidence that realistic, narrative forms of
