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Hollis Frampton's Zorns Lemma, 1970; George Landow's A Film In Which There Appear Sprocket Holes, Edge Lettering, Dirt Particles, Etc., 1965-66, his The Film That Rises to the Surface of Clarified Butter, 1968, and his Institutional Quality, 1969; Paul Sharits' early films, including Ray Gun Virus 1966; and several of Ernie Gehr's works such as Morning, and Wait, 1968, Reverberation, 1969, and Serene Velocity, 1970. Because of their prescience and clarity, I've employed Mekas' words about Warhol in describing the recent avant-garde on a number of occasions. The first time I quoted Mekas on Warhol was in 1971 in a review I did of the late Parker Tyler's Underground Film: A Critical History (1969), a book which I scrutinized with analytical passion and found more than wanting. In fact I found it quite reprehensible.

While Mekas finds in Warhol a return to origins-in effect a renaissance occurring outside of the traditional dramatic film helping us to see things again on film we had forgotten how to see because of conventions and trappings-it was quite the contrary with Parker Tyler. He had been a spokesman for earlier avant-gardes, especially of the '40s and '50s, discovering connections to Dada and Surrealism; but he perceived the period of Warhol and many of those who followed him into the 1960s as infantile and escapist. He seemed unable to analyze the work nor could he see important issues present in it. His chapter called "Underground Film is Primitive Film" is anything but recapitulation of Mekas' position. Tyler uses a kind of washed-out psychological vocabulary to attack Warhol and others, equating primitive with childhood, the "playroom," and the libido. While Mekas draws together the primitive with the recent avant-garde and finds relevance in these connections, Tyler condems Warhol and post-Warhol work as decadent, regressive art without moral fiber and commitment. He searched for a set of humanist concerns in film but couldn't locate them in that quarter. The apparent discontinuity distressed him terribly but discontinuity is an essential part of artistic modernism.

Mekas seems to be giving us, from his point of view, a cycle of birth, development, decay and rebirth or revolution, while Tyler sees a direction of development ending in decay. Both lines of argument contain organic metaphors about art and film. I have presented them to underline the significant polarization in their attitudes and the kinds of issues that they suggest, about not only origins, purity, renaissance and decadence, but also perception, discontinuity and modernism.

Modernism. I believe that Tyler is uncomfortable with the discontinuity of modernism. While he dealt with the championed earlier avant-garde work, he often chose those aspects in it which hark back to another esthetic and to a humanist framework. He tended toward work less involved with abstraction and formal issues and more engaged with the narrative and/or highly symbolic. Finally, he was per-

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[[caption]]Andy Warhol, Eat, 1964.[[/caption]]

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[[caption]]Andy Warhol, Empire, 1964.[[/caption]]