Generally, the first response generated by an avant-garde film is, “This isn’t a movie,” or the more combative, “You call this a movie!?” Even the rare, responsive viewer almost inevitably finds the film—whatever its actual length in minutes—”too long.” By the time we see our first avant-garde films, we think we know what movies are, we recognise what “everyone” agrees they should be; and we see the new cinematic failures-to-conform as presumptuous refusuals to use the cinematic space (the theater, the VCR viewing room) “correctly.” If we look carefully at this response, however … we recognise that the obvious anger and frustration are a function of the fact that these films confront us with the necessity of redefining an experience we were sure we understood. We may feel we know that these avant-garde films are not movies, but what are they? We see them in a theater; they’re projected by movie projectors, just as conventional movies are … we can see that they are movies, even if we “know” they’re not. The experience provides us with the opportunity (an opportunity much of our training has taught us to resist) to come to a clearer, more complete understanding of what the cinematic experience actually can be, and what—for all the pleasure and inspiration it may give us—the conventional movie experience is not.
These first avant-garde films, in other words, can catalyze what I would like to call our first fully critical response to a set of experiences our culture has trained us to enjoy, primarily as a process of unquestioning consumption.
—Scott McDonald, Introduction to Avant-Garde Film: Motion Studies (1993).
[Still from Dziga Vertov's Man With A Movie Camera (1929).]