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and space of the early work in between. When we arrive at the original again at the end it simply looks different. In the example of Eureka, Gehr manipulates the time of the early work in remaking his own. Both have concentrated on form in their films in ways not possible and unthought of by either Billy Bitzer, maker of Tom, Tom and later a cameraman for D.W. Griffith, or by the anonymous cameraperson who shot the footage of the San Francisco tram.

It may indeed be the American avant-garde film's longstanding and general unease with narrative, its condemnation, avoidance, and transformation of it that creates an interest in and suggests parallels to the early fiction as well as the nonfiction. It may appear a relief to some that film is not and has not been automatically and naturally narrative from its inception but was shaped into such as a dominant form. A relief that earlier audiences knew how to read the paratactical forms and the overlaps, could follow what to us today seem curious and static chases, totally unmotivated and gratuitous happenings or incidents. Their formal relevance is seen as something totally other than what it actually was at that time. It is our contemporary way of seeing, of shaping, and is totally relative to our interests. These forms, as we see them and make them relevant, serve as interesting models and supports by way of the simplicity of going back to the beginning, by starting over again, by a kind of revolution in seeing—not through symbols and metaphors but through the literal, simple and literal shapes and forms and by simple technical procedures. The adversary role of the avant-garde is played through (or out) by going back to beginnings, didactically starting over, examining and researching, in its own products, new and ever new forms.

E.H. Gombrich once said in a lecture he gave at Cooper Union (Spring, 1971), called "The Ideas of Progress and Their Impact on Art" that "It is only an apparent paradox that the more a critic will deny the idea that art can progress the more he will feel progressive."

But film is an invention along a line in time in bourgeois modernism, a medium of exchange and of information, a mechanical device for progress in the ways that we can communicate. But as far as art goes, as I mentioned earlier, André Bazin does see the cinema as a mode of progress in representation, moving toward greater and greater realism, fulfilling our psychological need and esthetic need for realism. It doesn't substitute for reality, as do other forms for art, but according to Bazin it transfers reality like a fingerprint or a shroud. Sound, color and wide screen continue to enhance this realism. Cinema thus becomes a form of continuity and of progress in the world. In Bazin's frame of reference, it is continuous rather than discontinuous and like a form in nature. Bourgeois realism is enhanced by smoothing away or ignoring the discontinuities in the form.

I want to return full circle to Mekas and Tyler - to the positive pole of renaissance and revolution which Mekas suggests that Warhol heralds - a new era of making and perception, and to Tyler's opposition. For him, clearly, the classical avant-garde had passed and all that followed was only downhill, a decay Tyler points to a demise in the line of development,

[[image]]
Ernie Gehr, Wait, 1968

while Mekas suggests a return, in order to begin again. At any rate there is a period of time which can be bracketed off: the 85 years from the first projections until today. Film, a mechanical product of the age of industrial revolution, developed at the time of the coalescing of the artistic avant-garde, and, today the period of film we speak of occurs in conjunction with Minimalism and apparent break-up of modernmism (and perhaps also the end of linear notion of progress). But if we reject Toynbee's placement of the start of the postmodern at the end of the 19th century, and look at it as born only yesterday, we have no longer a bracketing off but a total closure on that 85 year period.
In itself, postmodernism is still being defined. It is heralded by some and accepted with reluctance by others. It is characterized most often as anti-intellectual, populist, a move toward a mass culture, less middle-class and more working-class, and altogether more relative in values. In art, specifically and significantly, it is a move away from immanence.
If it is the end modernism, if we locate the beginnings of postmodernism at this time, then what about the age of mechanical reproduction? Post-modernism does unseat or overthrow the mechanical age and install very firmly the electronic age. The costs of mechanical technology continue to increase, while electronics decrease in cost, and the various electronic technologies steadily improve, superseding the mechanical. And we certainly know that this is true with cinema, film, television, and video costs and technological development (speaking, of course, only of economics and technology and not of esthetics.)But then, where is film? Perhaps Mekas' notion of a rejuvenation and a cleansing really cycles back and closes the era of an art form. "Progress -Discontinuous" –perhaps progress discontinues is more appropriate. Louis Lumiére's statement which has been laughed at for decades now turns out to be prophetic, for perhaps, after all, "The cinematograph is an invention without a future."`

Regina Cornwell is a New York based critic whose first, book, Snow Seen: the Films and Photographs of Michael Snow. was published in March by Peter Martin Associates, Tronto.

1. This is a revised version of what was originally presented as a lecture at the Whiteney Museum of American Art on November 14, 1979, as a part of a series program called "Researches and Investigations Into Film: Its Orgins and the Avant-Garde." I eould like to that Jon Garenberg, Bob Summers and- Charles Silver of Film Department of the Museum of Modern Art for making numerous primitive films and the facilities to view them available to me.
2. "Objectivity and the Shrinking Self,"Other Criteria, New York, 1979, p.317.
3. Film Culture, No.33 (Summer 1964), p. 1.
4. Matei Calinescu, Faces of Modernity: Avant-Garde Decadence, Kitsch. Bloomington, 1977, p. 41. Calinescu is the single most valuable source I have found on the subject of modernism. He speaks at length of the two modernism. For the defenitions and discussions of the two modernisms in what follows I have relied heavily on Calinescu as well as for part of my discussions of the historic avant-garde.
5. Ibid., p. 5. See also pages 3-46.
6. Ibid., p. 10 and p. 41.
7. Ibid., p. 5.
8. Ibis., p. 45.
9. Ibid., pp. 95-112
10. Ibid., pp.133-134
11. See P. Adams Sitney, "Stuctural Film,"Film Culture, No. 47 (Summer 1969), pp 1-10, and my critique of the concept in "Structural Film: Ten Years Later," The Drama Review, Vol. 23, No. 3(September 1979), pp. 77-92.
12. "Style," reprinted in Aesthetics Today, ed. M. Philipson, New York, 1961, p. 87.
13. See papers from "The brighton Symposium on Fiction Film: 1900-1906" sponsored by FIAF (International Federation of Film Archives) held in Brighton, England, Spring, 1978, on deposit at the Museum of Modern Art, and now published in French Cahiers de Cinematheque, No. 29 (January 1980) and to be published in English by the National Film Archives in London. Especially valuable to my concerns here are the papers of Eileen Bowser, Tom Gunning, John Fell and Charles Musser.