The fading impact of the global avant-garde
At a time when the contemporary cinematic landscape is plagued by questions about its future and evolution, the most popular releases naturally continue to garner the most attention and further fuel such fatalistic discourses. Throughout history, whenever an artistic medium faced a crisis, it was the avant-garde that showed the way forward by redefining the rules of the game. But where is the avant-garde now?
When Martin Scorsese penned his critique of Marvel, everyone immediately chose their battle camps and there emerged an implicit and insidious demarcation between the cinema as art and cinema as entertainment. One cursory cruise through social media platforms and the kind of conversations started by “film critic influencers” will be enough to tell you that a prevailing opinion demands cinema to be a vehicle for chills and thrills, separate from aesthetic or social experimentations.
Even when the concept of the avant-garde was first defined, it was clear that art had the potential to change not only itself but also the society that birthed it. This constant rebellion against both artistic and social conventions has resulted in some of the greatest masterpieces in the medium. Whether it be the incendiary post-colonial protests of Med Hondo or the revolutionary techniques championed by the French New Wave, the pursuit of change has always been the fundamental driving force.
This brings us to the central irony of our society, which is primarily defined by its rapid and previously unimaginable technological advancements. A world that is constantly changing so that it doesn’t have to change, fighting to preserve the status quo while boasting of its AI-powered customer support chatbots and longer battery lives on the devices with which we not just consume but devour the art that is manufactured today.
Experimental cinema has always operated on the margins, but its influence reverberated through the works of more prominent practitioners who were mesmerised by it. When Scorsese saw the beauty of the indecipherable gems of Stan Brakhage, something within him changed, and by extension, his work. Most of us have always interacted with the avant-garde through these artistic agents who absorbed their radical thoughts and furthered mainstream cinema in a variety of ways.
However, it is no longer in the interests of the studios or the streaming platforms to bring something new to the table when their algorithms are only concerned with establishing a formula that “works”. Not only that, they have also managed to foster an active hostility towards the avant-garde within audiences who immediately dismiss alternative artistic expressions as onanistic fodder for film festival nerds.
While having such a separate but robust ecosystem for the avant-garde would be theoretically fine, modern film festival circuits are more concerned with the prestige attached to their selections rather than their potential for innovation. It’s the red carpet walks and the celebrity photo shoots that drive online discussions, while the less-attended and considerably smaller “experimental” sections are only praised by other experimental filmmakers.
This has been an observable phenomenon for decades now, but the final nail in the coffin has most likely been delivered by AI-generated videos, which are cited by tech bros all around the world as the next step for cinema, designed to eliminate the auteur from the production chain. It will be interesting to observe how the already dangerously marginalised global avant-garde responds to such an existential crisis, but it’s hard to fight when the battlefield is already owned by your opponent.