What occurs in this account then is a splitting of artistic practice, a split predatingmodernism, in which there emerges two movements: an avant-garde opposed toboth mass culture and bourgeois values, and a more official, legitimate artistictradition of ‘disinterested’ practice. According to Wollen, in a reading of avant-garde film, under modernism the avant-garde splits again, but we might read this division as a more extreme reproduction of the separation in existence.In ‘The Two Avant-Gardes’,Wollen proposes a formalist cinema and a politicalavant-garde, one derived from a painterly tradition, the other from a literary one. Both traditions are profoundly affected, if not set in motion, by a break inrepresentational history in the work of cubists.Thus, for Wollen, the dissemblingof the mimetic relation of art, ‘a disjunction between signifier and signified’(1976: 79), is common to both as an ideological critique. Yet the trajectory of each differs, as one takes the painterly tradition of concern with light, colour,form and the abstract language of the specifically cinematic (rendered as the visualrather than audial), the other borrows the literary concerns of montage,association and meaning.Wollen’s project is to realign these two traditions withina semiological model, in which the project of modernism may be restoredthrough an acknowledgement that meaning does not reside outside of the text(practices of reference) but within its own code or system of signification.

Wollen’s text is both seminal and exemplary of the Screen tradition of filmcriticism, profoundly influenced by Althussarian Marxism (the ideologicalcritique) and poststructuralism (the centred subject displaced through ellipses inlanguage). The prioritization of the text, and representation as the locus ofpolitical concerns, fetishizes aesthetics to the exclusion of other social conditions.As Sylvia Harvey notes, the critical focus on the internal organization of the textneglects ‘the insertion of that text within a particular apparatus, within a systemof consumption, distribution or exchange specific to a particular society and aparticular historical moment’ (1978: 69). In response to this, I want to suggest that the avant-garde in these two modes of development becomes located in theinstitutional contexts of the gallery (formalist, abstract film) and the arthouse (the ‘political’ tradition).These sites represent more than situations of viewing ofcourse; they are indicative of the modes of production,distribution and exchangeof film within different institutional networks.

Within the gallery, film is firmly located within a history of art; the contextprovides the intertextual references of a filmic practice concerned with traditionsof formal representation both in terms of the relationship to other artifacts withinthe immediate surroundings, and by the descriptive frameworks of catalogues and themed exhibitions. Here, film acquires the status of the collectible, limitedin transmission (unlike film which moves to video and broadcast), and ascribedan exchange value (the gallery buys the work or offers it for sale at a fixed price).

FILM CULTURES

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