Hollywood: The avant-garde years

Postwar moviemaking in LA wasn't all westerns and musicals. Some directors were making the most bizarre, exciting and experimental work in the business - with the most unusual methods. By Mark Webber
Meshes of the Afternoon
Meshes of the Afternoon: Point of departure for film studies courses around the world Public domain

New York is often seen as the creative hub of experimental film-making, but the postwar avant-garde - that movement that led directly to the explosion of "underground film" in the 1960s - began in Los Angeles, in the shadow of the Hollywood sign. In these films, cinema does not manipulate its audience, systematically pushing our emotional buttons to guide us through a narrative fantasy, but instead engages us, presenting sequences of images that are largely left open to our individual interpretation.

The work of Maya Deren is generally regarded as the modern starting point for film as personal expression. She made Meshes of the Afternoon in the Hollywood Hills in 1943 and, except for its use of the basic tools of cinema, it bears little resemblance to the films being made by the mainstream industry. Deren developed her own film language that echoed prewar European experimentation and the early Soviet avant-garde. Meshes was the first "trance film", in which a lone protagonist wanders through a succession of dreamlike episodes that represent an interior psychological journey. The psychodrama, with its references to myth and surrealism, became the dominant form of a film renaissance.

Deren became an outspoken and articulate defender of independent film-making, with a legacy that still inspires new generations of film-makers today. Meshes of the Afternoon, with its iconic, instantly recognisable image of Maya staring out of a reflecting window, is the point of departure for film studies courses around the world. In 1940s LA, Deren's belief that the commercial film was aesthetic treason provided the necessary encouragement for three precocious teenagers, who had each made childhood home movies, to make mature works in the form of personal confessions.

These films, made individually by Kenneth Anger, Curtis Harrington and Gregory Markopoulos between 1946 and 1948, are now showing together at the Barbican for perhaps the first time. They form a striking trilogy on the subject of adolescent sexual awakening. In later years, Harrington went on to make horror films within the system, rarely gaining commercial recognition.

Markopoulos became his polar opposite, the film-makers' film-maker - a consummate perfectionist who developed a complex editing style (already evident in his early work) that broke cinema down to its fundamental frame-by-frame progression. He made his first 16mm film, Psyche, as a student at USC, while attending Joseph von Sternberg's lectures there on "Advanced Directing". Having no splicer, Markopoulos edited the film with a magnifying glass, cellophane tape an a razor blade. At the height of his notoriety, he withdrew his work from distribution and fled to Europe, settling in Greece, where he conceived The Temenos: an archive, library and screening space in which his obliquely re-edited films could be viewed as he intended them - outdoors in the remote splendour of the Lyssarian countryside. He died in 1992 before this ideal was realised, though his estate continues to work towards this unique vision.

Kenneth Anger's Fireworks, replete with phallic imagery, symbolism and the orgasmic violence of a troupe of sailors, is a psychosexual fantasy told as if a dream. It's remarkable that such an intense and perceptive film was made by a teenager in his parents' house while they were away for the weekend. Anger later wrote: "This flick is all I have to say about being 17, the United States Navy, American Christmas, and the Fourth of July."

Like Jean Genet's private film Un Chant d'Amour (made three years later, and just released on DVD by the BFI), Fireworks is a landmark work of homoerotic film-making. At a time when a screen kiss had to be executed with both feet firmly on the ground, some of the greatest taboos of cinema and society were being quietly addressed in unconventional personal works. Anger himself suppressed the film for two years before its first public screening, and in 1959 it became the first experimental film to attract the attention of the vice squad.

Andy Warhol's fascination with the darker side of celebrity is well known. In late 1965, his Factory entourage made three films based on unsavoury events in the lives of iconic Hollywood goddesses. More Milk Yvette featured transvestite superstar Mario Montez as screen legend Lana Turner, whose boyfriend had been stabbed to death by her own daughter. The "Mexican Spitfire", Lupe Velez, portrayed by Edie Sedgwick, was the second subject. Her perfectly choreographed overdose was scheduled to end in noble serenity on a bed surrounded by flowers but, overcome by nausea, she slipped on the bathroom floor and stumbled head first into the toilet bowl, breaking her neck.

The third film also starred Montez in a dazzling portrayal of Hedy Lamarr, the star of Extase. After leaving her east European homeland, Lamarr had settled perfectly into the Hollywood lifestyle, becoming a pioneering patient of cosmetic surgery and trailing a string of broken marriages. Hedy opens in the operating theatre where a bizarre facelift is taking place, in which pliers serve as cosmetic instruments and Lamarr's features are grossly exaggerated through the doctor's magnifying glass. The film's central narrative is the star's arrest for shoplifting, her interrogation by statuesque dominatrix Mary Woronov, and the appearance of her five husbands on the witness stand. Legendary underground film-maker Jack Smith appears and steals the show at the last minute. As Hedy is forced to drink a final glass of hemlock, Smith is called to testify, uttering only a few words in his high, nasal whine before the reel abruptly ends: "She was... tragic... and noble..."

By the end of the 1960s, Warhol had moved closer to the movie establishment, and the establishment was to a certain extent returning the favour. John Schlesinger's Midnight Cowboy, with its glaring similarities to the Warhol aesthetic in both subject and staging, was just one indication that Hollywood was catching up and moving in on underground territory.

Even the abstract film-makers had their flirtations with the system. Oskar Fischinger, who pioneered the concept of animation as a "moving, visual music", was contracted to both Universal and Disney for several years, and acted as a consultant on the production of Fantasia. The stargate sequence of Kubrick's 2001 borrows heavily from techniques developed since the 1940s by John and James Whitney, whose own short films strive towards a purity of abstract vision. Lapis, for example, is an abstract meditation film made with hand-drawn, optical moiré patterns set to an Indian raga soundtrack. Jordan Belson, a reclusive figure whose self-made mandala films present a perpetual flow of optical trickery, was contracted to provide space effects in features such as The Right Stuff, and Pat O'Neill, master of the optical printer, worked on Return of the Jedi.

Though they occasionally worked within the industry, usually finding the experience troubling and compromised, these film-makers were committed to the idea of film as a meditative tool, with abstract images carefully choreographed to invoke quiet and illuminating reflection. Martin Scorsese is one of the many mainstream directors whose knowledge of the avant-garde has informed his own filmmaking style, and directors as diverse as George Lucas and John Waters are directly indebted to the work of lesser-known film pioneers.

The signature image of aesthetic perfection in American Beauty - a plastic bag blowing gently in the wind - appeared several years before as a fleeting shot in one of the contemplative film poems of Nathaniel Dorsky (who in turn supplements his income with commercial editing work). The development of the TV commercial and the music video, with their fast edits and transformations, would not have been quite the same if film schools and ad agencies had not been looking closely at the work of artist film-makers such as Bruce Conner and Harry Smith.

Of course, the occasional encounters with Hollywood are only part of the story. The rise of the avant-garde did not take place in opposition to the mainstream; it was a parallel art, developed out of the increasing availability of lightweight, affordable 16mm film equipment. And as the phrase "independent film-maker" is all but debased by commercial studios, and digital film is becoming an accepted substitute for the subtle play of projected light on the big screen, it is becoming imperative that works such as these are seen and appreciated in their intended form by a wider public.

· California Sound/California Image runs until June 19 at the Barbican Cinema, London EC2 (020-7638 8891). Details at lux.org.uk/california