As many financially strapped theater chain owners will attest, the digital revolution—specifically in the form of DVDs, satellite and cable television, and widescreen HDTVs—has radically impacted film viewing and purchasing habits, transforming a once exclusively public activity into a far more pragmatic and private one. Not only are we able to reasonably simulate the spectacle of the movie-going experience within the comforts of our own living room at a fraction of the cost, but we are no longer bound by the etiquette of viewing films in unfolding real time surrounded by total strangers. We can pause, mute, and fast forward our way through a huge inventory of classic films and new releases, taking time out for necessary bathroom and snack breaks. Moreover, we can overlay the viewing experience with either pre-recorded commentary tracks by film experts or our own forthright opinions without fear of reprisals from irate fellow spectators at our local multiplex, thereby fusing diegesis and exegesis into a unique narrative hybrid.

In addition, like CDs, DVDs are collectable—they can be bought, burned, and taped from cable channels such as TCM and HBO, and stored in ever-expanding home libraries to be viewed on an array of equipment ranging from office computers to vast home entertainment systems. As anyone with a sizeable film collection will confirm, DVDs also generate a domestic form of museological discourse, insofar as we are obliged to organize our personal collection in accordance with both conventional but also occasionally idiosyncratic categorizations. Should we file Brokeback Mountain (2005), to name one obvious example, alphabetically under title, genre (westerns), minority discourse (gay and lesbian cinema), geography (Canadian locations), literary source (E. Annie Proulx), or auteur studies (director Ang Lee)? Similarly, should we create a separate section under “actor” for stalwarts of the screen such as John Wayne or Jack Nicholson, whose highly coded performances might unite a broad collection of titles that would otherwise be dispersed under different categories?

While such discursive questions have become commonplace within the context of most home entertainment libraries, we still find it disconcerting when they are applied to so-called “minor cinemas,” that rag-bag of non-commercial, often anti-establishment “marginalia” that includes art films and independent features, pornography, modernist and postmodernist avant-garde cinema, political documentary, and low budget collectivist films associated with the burgeoning field of identity politics. After all, aren’t such cinemas supposed to defy hegemonic and systematic categorization in the first place? The recent DVD release of Maya Deren and Alexander Hammid’s seminal Meshes of the Afternoon (1943) for example, or the Criterion Collection’s 2001 anthology of 8mm films by Stan Brakhage (the very concept of a digital version of Mothlight (1963) seems almost a contradiction in terms!), and our resulting ability to screen such films at a moment’s notice on $5,000 surround-sound plasma systems seems utterly perverse for a generation of art film cognoscenti who originally viewed them as makeshift projections on portable screens or suspended bed sheets while squirming uncomfortably on rock hard folding chairs at the university film society or downtown Filmforum. It is as if the forbidden fruit of yesteryear had suddenly gone inexorably mainstream, its once transgressive content and artisanal mode of production undermined by a combination of corporate repackaging and an all-too-cozy insinuation of newly domesticated exhibition practices.

Although such an argument obviously has its points, recent books by Haidee Wasson and David James convincingly contend that such a clear-cut binary opposition between the commercial and establishment center—where theatrical film is largely defined as ephemeral, escapist popular entertainment, reinforcing and reflecting a predominantly white, patriarchal, middle-class hegemony—and its non-theatrical independent margins (film as an intellectual, minority art form, sociological document, and mirror of non-conformism and otherness) has always been a spurious and misleading one. Rooting their assiduously researched studies in U.S. film history and social geography, both argue in favor of a fruitful cross-fertilization between the capitalist establishment and the progressivist strain of the social and aesthetic vanguard to the mutual enrichment and propagation of both parties.

Focusing specifically on the formative inter-war period, Wasson’s Museum Movies: The Museum of Modern Art and the Birth of Art Cinema charts the material and discursive shifts in cinema’s transformation from a passing entertainment to an enduring modernist and mass museological art object through the founding in 1935 of MoMA’s Film Library under the chief curatorship of the British-born critic, Iris Barry. Preservation was a particularly pressing issue at the beginning of the sound era, because unlike today, when most theatrical films have a permanent (and often more commercially successful) second life on DVD after their initial release, most commercial Hollywood films were withdrawn from circulation following their first and second run, and then either destroyed outright or recycled for their silver content. The Taylorist apparatus of the studio system had little or no interest in film archiving or subsequent repeat viewing because film was always dismissed as an endlessly replaceable product, falling victim to rapid shifts in fashion and constant technological innovation. Thus, features released in the late silent era (1928–29) seemed embarrassingly “quaint” and naïve within months of the introduction of sound and were promptly relegated to the trash heap of instant obsolescence, taking many a star-studded career along with them (most notably, Greta Garbo’s co-star John Gilbert). MoMA’s museological view—that film was a medium worth saving, collecting, dating, classifying, studying, and re-screening under the rubric of both art and collective history—ran directly counter to the prevailing industry wisdom; and throughout her career Barry was faced with general studio indifference to the library’s preservationist efforts, not least from recognized auteurs such as D.W. Griffith, who resented Barry’s Eurocentric bias and the perceived anti-Americanism of MoMA’s programming.

Barry’s solution was to conscript film as part of a wider campaign to shape the changing face of U.S. public life—itself impacted by conformist fears of social difference—so that cinema would be seen as an indispensable and unifying cultural, moral, and educational institution in its own right. The result was the creation of a recognizable yet eclectic film canon—the collection encompassed Eisenstein, Buñuel, and the European avant-garde, travelogues and political documentaries, outright propaganda such as Triumph of the Will (1935), but also the films of Mae West and popular gangster fare such as Public Enemy (1931) and Little Caesar (1930)—as well as an extremely specialized and “indoctrinated” film audience, where filmgoing quickly became synonymous with the promulgation of moral respectability and an essentially middle-class social outlook (a rubric endorsed by Hollywood itself via its own self-regulating activities through the Hays and Breen Committees). However, it would be a mistake to assume that MoMA was necessarily conservative in its acquisitions and exhibition policies. Because the library stressed the mode and manner of spectatorship (i.e., analytical hermeneutics) as much as the films’ narrative and aesthetic qualities, sexual and violent content that might easily be dismissed as obscene or tawdry in the commercial context could become socially and intellectually acceptable in the new didactic museological milieu. MoMA’s Film Library was thus indexical of an early shift from film as a social and public spectacle/event to a more private, introverted, and discursive experience analogous to that generated by the personal home library and entertainment system noted earlier.

The library’s program was aided and abetted on three main fronts. First, despite general trustee mistrust and indifference (after all, how could Birth of a Nation (1915) be considered on a qualitative par with a Picasso or a Matisse?), the library was underwritten by a substantial initial grant from the Rockefeller Fund and considerable political support from Jock Whitney, who provided a crucial bridge to the Hollywood establishment through his friendship with the independent producer David O. Selznick. Secondly, MoMA’s founding director, Alfred Barr, was an enthusiastic supporter. His Kunsthalle, Bauhaus-type approach to mass museology—namely that art history and exhibition should be seen as a cross-pollination of all aesthetic forms, encompassing folk art as well as everyday and commercial objects such as advertising, records, automobiles, films, and design—perfectly complemented the library’s own view of film art as itself a composite technological and cultural form. The museum would act as the interface or “living space” between the public and the work itself, with scholars, critics, and curators creating a necessary discursive dialogue through pamphlets, radio, and docent talks that would be both popular and specialized. Finally, the library benefited immeasurably from the simultaneous formation of film archives in Berlin, Moscow, Paris, London, and Sweden, as well as non-theatrical amateur film libraries and societies affiliated with women’s clubs, trade unions, universities, and socialist organizations such as the short-lived New York Film Forum and the Workers Film and Photo League, which had themselves exploited the technological innovations wrought by the development of 16mm film stock and lightweight, portable film projectors.

Most importantly, 16mm film was made of acetate as opposed to highly flammable nitrate, which made it cheaper and safer to mail. Consequently, the library could take advantage of a pre-existing and cost-effective network of film organizations for rental and short-term exhibition of its own holdings, allowing it to send out pre-programmed packages of films bearing (through title cards) its own official imprimatur to the heartland of America, thereby expanding its educational function (and the accompanying cachet of museum membership) beyond the confines of the official museum building itself. Films, like books and postcards, thus became mobile signifiers of cultural value and global knowledge, linking the geographical periphery to the urban cultural center through a complex matrix of ever-shifting social discourse.

By 1939, when MoMA moved into its permanent West 53rd Street building and provided the Film Library with its own 500-seat, air-conditioned auditorium, Barry had achieved the full institutionalization of a new kind of film spectatorship, creating what Wasson calls “a cinema of studious attention” whereby, reified under the aegis of the modern art institution, individual films’ narrative and thematic content—particularly their political and ideological substance—was re-shaped into a more aesthetic and historical signification. Instead of “going to the movies” for mere entertainment, with the option of wandering in and out of the cinema at will, the audience was now obliged to watch daily screenings in their entirety, to sit quietly and, most importantly, to think about what they were viewing. This enforced intellectualism was further buttressed by well-researched program notes, written by Barry herself or leading scholars such as Jay Leyda, Alistair Cooke, and Richard Griffith (which in turn became an important resource for college film courses and film clubs), as well as an ongoing program of visiting writers, filmmakers, and researchers (most notably Buñuel, Paul Rotha, Fernand Leger, and Siegfried Kracauer). However, despite the staff’s best efforts, most audiences were rambunctious, with many spectators laughing at the datedness of the material or the very absurdity of viewing such populist fare in a “serious” museum setting. In short, the Film Library’s battle to construct an “ideal audience,” fully appreciative of the medium and its history, was always under constant negotiation and never fully resolved.

Perhaps the most significant outcome of Wasson’s absorbing study is its tautological Benjaminian logic. Just as mechanical reproduction “destroys” the aura of the work of art, art as mechanical reproduction must itself be preserved, via willfully structured criteria, as a unique object in order to “regain” aura and thereby be available for future generations as a significant historical document. In the process, film art itself becomes redefined through reification and constant re-classification, producing negotiable discursive and descriptive categories that we now take for granted (and which delineate the DVD racks at our local Blockbuster: e.g., “classics,” “foreign,” “drama,” “action,” “comedy,” “documentary,” etc.). According to Wasson, “In the 1930s, film became a more clearly defined object. This brokered a qualitatively different network for the movement of that object, across and within a proliferating set of institutions and everyday spaces: homes, schools, libraries, and retail outlets” (186). More importantly, the Film Library emerged when new ideas about museums were also taking shape—embracing technological reproducibility as well as mediated systems such as radio that restructured the very notion of the cultural institution as a specific modernist space/place. In this sense film was as much an imagined and constructed space as a real one, for as Wasson concludes, “The cinema is an effect of modernity that also came to provide a method by which its, and other, effects were made sense of, negotiated with, and protested against” (190; emphasis in original).

As its title suggests, David James’s The Most Typical Avant-Garde: History and Geography of Minor Cinemas in Los Angeles is as much a geographical study of Los Angeles narrated through the broad spectrum of its cinematic practices as it is a formal and aesthetic appreciation of the city’s avant-garde film legacy. Influenced in equal parts by Edward Soja’s postmodern geographies—which theorize Los Angeles spatially as a deterritorialized rhizome—and Mike Davis’s Foucault-like view of “fortress L.A.” as a deliberately ghettoized panopticon, designed and policed to protect the white urban middle class from the spatial intrusion of an ethnic, proletarian “other,” James’s book traces the development of so-called “minor cinema” as both reflective and expressive of the city’s fractured political and geographical fabric. Thus, for example, despite the participation of radicals from all races and classes in the nationwide call-to-arms generated by the Civil Rights and anti-Vietnam War movements of the late 1960s and early ‘70s, there is little or no cross-pollination of cinemas on ethnic and class lines in Los Angeles during the same period. The New Left’s “Los Angeles Newsreel” project, for instance, was largely tied to the politics and interests of the Black Panther Party, while the Asco group’s “No-Movie” performances—founded by Harry Gamboa Jr., Gronk, Patssi Valdez, and Willie Herrón—were exclusively an East L.A., Chicano phenomenon, acting out Latino marginalization from both mainstream Hollywood and City Hall in equal measure. However, although James acknowledges these admirable attempts to create local cinemas independent of, or counter to, the commercial film industry, he also recognizes that Hollywood has been somehow present in all of them. In other words, minor cinemas, for all their seeming independence, have never entirely escaped Hollywood, while the latter has always in turn appropriated many of avant-garde cinema’s political and cultural concerns.

For James, these symbiotic relationships play out through two main filmic paradigms. The first is Slavko Vorkapich, Robert Florey, and Gregg Toland’s seminal The Life and Death of 9143—A Hollywood Extra (1928), a thirteen-minute short that critiques Hollywood’s star-making machinery by chronicling the futile attempts of an extra to “make it” in a cutthroat business ruled by the bottom line and resulting subjective and artistic dehumanization (epitomized by the number “9143” stenciled on his forehead, an eerie premonition of the Nazi concentration camps). James argues that the film’s protagonist represents the ambivalent relationship that has always existed between the counterculture and the capitalist establishment, to the point that the film has itself between remade (in various guises) countless times by the avant-garde and Hollywood alike. Thus Kenneth Anger, Curtis Harrington, and Andy Warhol’s entire cinematic oeuvres can be read as a form of perverse “star envy,” gay pastiches of glamorous Hollywood tropes that transform the plight of the extra into a form of artistic martyrdom-cum-liberation (a strategy not far removed from Asco’s more politicized “No-Movie” performances). In turn, Hollywood has constantly created its own form of interpellating inoculation through a benign form of self-critique in films such as What Price Hollywood? (1932), the three versions of A Star Is Born (1937, 1954, and 1976), and that apotheosis of industry self-loathing, Sunset Boulevard (1950). Moreover, the stenciled number “9143” reappears as quotation and homage in George Lucas’s THX 1138 (1971), which in turn becomes the name of the industry standard for high-definition sound systems. It is also significant that despite their initial harangue against the studios’ heartless Taylorism, Vorkapich went on to become a major practitioner of montage effects on prestige Hollywood films such as The Good Earth (1937), Florey sustained a long career as a contract director of both A and B pictures, while Toland became the famed cinematographer on John Ford’s The Grapes of Wrath (1940) and Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane (1941). Not too shabby for avant-garde “outsiders”!

James’s second paradigm is the so-called “trance film,” epitomized by Deren’s aforementioned Meshes of the Afternoon, Harrington’s Fragments of Seeking (1946), and Anger’s Fireworks (1947). Although highly personal, “subjective” films—their liminal state between dream and waking reality evoking European surrealist and expressionist forebears such as Buñuel and Dali’s Un Chien Andalou (1929) and Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920)—their subject matter also lent itself to the more commercial venue of countless psychological thrillers (Hitchcock’s Spellbound (1945) and Vertigo (1958)), films noirs, and later, under the influence of Anger’s Scorpio Rising (1963) and Invocation of My Demon Brother (1969), mainstream exploitation fare such as Roger Corman’s The Trip (1967), Dennis Hopper’s Easy Rider (1969), and Bob Rafelson’s Head (1968).

For James, these two paradigms ultimately come together in the work of the former Cal Arts professor, Pat O’Neill, specifically his groundbreaking feature, The Decay of Fiction (2002). Shot inside the empty rooms and corridors of L.A.’s Ambassador Hotel, the film consists of fragments of projected black-and-white images and dialogue from old Hollywood films noirs such as Sudden Fear (1952), Possessed (1947), Detour (1945), and The Big Combo (1955), as if they were tawdry ghosts of long-departed hotel guests pathetically attempting to relive the glory days of the Ambassador’s Cocoanut Grove as the Hollywood hot spot, but instead acting out the marginalized status of the B-movie has-been as the studio extra who “never was.” The result is Grand Hotel (1932) metamorphosed into Last Year at Marienbad (1961) by way of Cocteau’s Blood of a Poet (1933) and Warhol’s Chelsea Girls (1967), a brilliant manifestation of cinema history filtered through its center and margin: the star vehicle as both its pastiche and its alienated mirror image.

Although James expounds his thesis with his customary flair, the book ultimately undermines its authority by trying to do too much. Rather than decide between writing an aesthetic history of the Los Angeles filmic avant-garde and a postmodern geography of its ambivalent relationship to the Hollywood mainstream, James attempts to do both, with the result that one strand of his account tends to bog down the other. To be fair, this is an adventurous (perhaps impossible) undertaking, but do we really need a detailed exegesis of the computer-generated films of Jordan Belson and John and James Whitney when there are already adequate accounts of this material available elsewhere (not least James’s own excellent account of the 1960s avant-garde in Allegories of Cinema [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989], as well as the seminal work of Gene Youngblood and P. Adams Sitney)? On the other hand, despite the book’s obvious built-in frustrations, this mélange of detail may also be ultimately one of its strengths. There is something dizzyingly enlightening about weaving one’s way through James’s rhizomic labyrinth of cinematic pathways, where hitherto undisclosed constellations appear as if by Benjaminian magic. To give one example: Karl Freund, widely considered the greatest cinematographer of the German silent era, the man who photographed Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927) also shot Carl Theodor Dreyer’s cult homoerotic independent feature Michael (1924) before moving to Hollywood where he brought his expressionist legacy to bear on Tod Browning’s Dracula (1931), his own directorial debut, The Mummy (1932), and Mad Love (1935). The latter starred the Hungarian émigré Peter Lorre, a veteran of Brecht’s Epic Theater, and was filmed by Hollywood Extra’s Toland (Welles later cited the film as a key influence on his own Citizen Kane). After working on prestigious studio features such as John Huston’s Key Largo (1948), with Lauren Bacall and Humphrey Bogart, Freund ended his career as cinematographer on television’s I Love Lucy (1951), where he helped Desi Arnaz develop the live, three-camera techniques that became a staple of in-studio television editing for decades to follow. And let’s face it, with the possible exception of the Marx Brothers, no one brought us the unadulterated essence of the Dada avant-garde more than the epitome of chaos personified, Lucille Ball. And in the comfort of our own living room no less!