Thinking in time.

SHADOWS, SPECTERS, SHARDS:

MAKING HISTORY IN AVANT-GARDE FILM

BY JEFFREY SKOLLER

MINNEAPOLIS: UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA PRESS, 2005

232 PP./$75.00 (HB), $25.00 (SB)

Gone are the days when avant-garde film could be discussed outside of an engagement with history. We now have a substantial body of scholarship which has, on the one hand, historicized the practices of the avant-garde in relation to mass culture and modernity (such as David James's work on avant-garde cinema in the United States in the 1960s) and, on the other hand, analyzed avant-garde film's engagement with questions of history and its representation (such as Paul Arthur's work on U.S. avant-garde film in the 1980s and 1990s). In Shadows, Specters, Shards: Making History in Avant-Garde Film, filmmaker and scholar Jeffrey Skoller extends and develops this tendency by arguing that certain contemporary avant-garde films can be approached as actual practices of historiography and not merely experimental representations of history. Skoller's project is driven by the confluence of two ideas. One is Walter Benjamin's idea of history as Jetztzeit, time filled by the presence of the "now" that is shot through with the shards of the past. The second is Gilles Deleuze's concept of cinema as a means of thinking in time--thus allowing cinema to serve as a philosophical tool for working through the problems of historiography. Hence Skoller approaches the films of Eleanor Antin, Craig Baldwin, James Benning, Charles Burnett, Daniel Eisenberg, Patricio Guzman, Claude Lanzmann, and others in terms of how history is evoked through the durational experience of cinema rather than through the specific representational inscription of history within the films' sound and image.

In opposition to mainstream narrative and documentary cinema's treatment of history as a completed past and an objective truth to which the film viewer may (or may not) gain epistemological access through sound and image, avant-garde cinema, Skoller argues, aligns itself with postmodern theories of history that emphasize the fractured, discontinuous, and occluded relationship between the past and the present. The fragment becomes central to both the cinematic thinking of contemporary avant-garde film and the historical thinking of postmodernism. Skoller notes how the poetic and aesthetic turn in postmodern historiography--marked by thinkers such as Hayden White--opens up a space within the discipline for the inclusion of contemporary avant-garde cinema with its rigorous aesthetic exploration of the paradoxical materiality and ephemerality of the film medium (inherited from structural film of the 1970s). It is in this sense that Skoller wants to make the argument that contemporary avant-garde film is capable of "making history" (xvi).

The book elaborates on this central claim through a series of carefully nuanced, close readings of avant-garde films from the past three decades (the majority from the 1990s), organized in chapters around the conceptual tropes of Skoller's historiographic analysis: shards, shadows, virtualities, specters, and obsessive returns. Skoller brings together an impressively broad selection of films in these readings, including such diverse works as Abigail Child's B/Side (1996), Ernie Gehr's Eureka (1974), Jean-Luc Godard's Allemagne annee 90 neuf zero (1991), and Leandro Katz's El dia que me quieras (The Day You'll Love Me, 1997). In their consistent rigor, insight, and elegance, the individual readings of the films achieve that perfect balance between providing fresh new perspectives to those familiar with the films and inspiring those who are not to seek out and view them. However, the conceptual strength and coherence of the chapters varies depending on the degree to which the organizing trope of the chapter is integrated into its theoretical framework. Thus, the brilliant application of Michael Andre Bernstein's concept of "sideshadows" (the multiple contingencies that surround an event) to the analysis of Antin's The Man Without A World (1991), Eisenberg's Cooperation of Parts (1987), and Ken Jacobs's Urban Peasants (1975) makes the chapter on shadows the strongest in the book while the chapter on specters suffers from the much thinner conceptual elaboration of that trope across the otherwise sophisticated readings of Burnett's Killer of Sheep (1977), Gehr's Signal--Germany on the Air (1982-85), Lanzmann's Un vivant qui passe (A Visitor from the Living, 1997), and Abraham Ravett's The March (1999).

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Although Skoller openly acknowledges the partiality of his selection of films--reflecting his "own aesthetics, cultural interests and ideological positions" (xxxvii)--he chose to focus on recent avant-garde films that have received little or no sustained critical attention, thus leaving many of the usual candidates one would expect to see in a book like this (such as Harun Farocki, Isaac Julien, Chris Marker, or Trinh T. Minha) in a single footnote. This criterion for selection truly serves the originality of the book and its significant contributions to both historiography and avant-garde film studies. However, it is a little disappointing that the book did not engage with feminist, queer, and postcolonial interventions in historiography, which have been similarly invested in shadows, specters, and shards. Just as the theorization of cinema's contribution to historiography benefits greatly from an analysis such as Skoller's, one that refuses to fall back on the same old film examples, so too might it benefit from a shift away from the usual theoretical suspects.

ROGER HALLAS is assistant professor of English at Syracuse University in Syracuse, New York, and co-editor of The Image and the Witness: Trauma, Memory and Visual Culture (forthcoming from Wallflower Press, 2007).