Shadows, Specters, Shards

According to the film scholar and filmmaker Jeffrey Skoller, within the larger field of filmic representation today, it is towards contemporary avant-garde and experimental film that one must look to find the most innovative and complex investigations of history. In particular, Skoller identifies a ‘subgenre within contemporary avant-garde and experimental filmmaking that has taken up the problem of historical representation’, and contrasts this body of films with conventional consumer-based fictional and sociologically-based documentary cinema in which history is often represented through narratives of redemption and closure (p. xvi) Identifying this group of films as a postmodern avant garde and noting its emergence within the latter part of the twentieth century, Skoller addresses the films' continuation of ‘the formal and materialist explorations that were hallmarks of the modernist avant-garde movements’ (p. xxv) while additionally demonstrating ‘their connections to contemporary intellectual thought which reflect the epistemological shifts in historiography during the last half of [the twentieth] century’ (p. xiv). Thus the earlier avant garde's attention to elements such as the film fragment or experimentation with chronology is appropriately embedded within the practice of this later avant garde, now concerned with the representation of history but nonetheless aware that ‘the destabilizing of naturalized narrative forms is a hallmark of postmodernist thought’ (p. xxv). Skoller's hope is to uncover and critique this nexus of experimental form and historical content, and, moreover, to counter the widely held position that avant-garde films are generally constructed solely around formal concerns

Aesthetics · Art · Art history · Avant garde · Epistemology · Film director · Film studies · Filmmaking · Historiography · Literature · Materialism · Movie theater · Narrative · Narrativity · Postmodernism · Representation (politics · Cinema and Media Studies · History · Italian Fascism and Post-war Society · Philosophy · Philosophy, History, and Historiography