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There are several illuminating and timely books that I hope to get to read before long. They are:
- Harmony and Dissent: Film and Avant-garde Art Movements in the Early Twentieth Century by R. Bruce Elder
- Roger Scruton's Beauty
- The Wreck of Western Culture: Humanism Revisited by John E. Carroll
I've already started the one by my former professor, R. Bruce Elder, who is an avant-garde filmmaker of much esteem. I deeply respect his erudition and great fountain of knowledge on art and philosophy. Yet, I profoundly disagree with his methods, which consequently led me away from avant-garde film to textile design.
I am absolutely thrilled to find his new book echoes many of my sentiments. I don't think Bruce Elder actually critiques, or even criticizes, the positions that he writes about in his book. His task is to unravel and describe them, which he seems to do thoroughly and fully.
Here is a quote from the preface (none too soon) about my exact perception of avant-garde film making, and why I left it:
Vanguard artists proposed that a universal transcendent art might come forth, might yet unite the arts, might yet re-enchant the world of nature and even of ordinary objects by treating them as hieroglyphs of an invisible reality, and so sway the mind toward a creator-unity immanent in nature. That new art might yet come forth that could fully express the artist's mind. At the beginning of the twentieth century, cinema seemed to many that most closely approximated this ideal. Furthermore... they believed that since it was a synthetic art that exemplified the best attributes of each of the other arts, it was the Ottima Arte.This quote sounds innocuous enough, but the whole idea is to bring transcendence without God. A kind of man-made transcendence. Not only that, but to conjure up ways for the viewer of these films to be caught up in this transcendence.
And I think the vanguard artists were right. Film - cinema - is the best medium (better than painting, which still allowed Rothko to go into his transcendent forays) for this.
