This article makes a case for Caroline Avery as one of the most compelling experimental filmmakers of the ‘minor cinema’ generation through a close analysis of her magnum opus, Midweekend (1986). In 2018, I conducted the first interviews with Avery since she began making films in 1982. Based on those interviews, this essay offers an historical and theoretical perspective on Avery’s work, situating her within the context of the 1980s-era avant-garde, investigating her memory-based poetics of cinema, and demonstrating her relevance to contemporary experimental media culture. More specifically, this article examines Avery’s contributions to what I call, following Tom Gunning, ‘submerged narrative’, an attenuated approach to narrative construction that privileges sense impressions, affective environments, and haptic surfaces over characters and causality — or, cultivating the ambiance of a story without providing an actual story. In the second half of the essay, I turn to the work of two contemporary artists, Michael Robinson and Mary Helena Clark, to argue that their similar ideas about affective narrative environments demonstrates the degree to which the ‘minor cinema’ has contributed to the establishment of a shared language within the avant-garde that younger artists can borrow from, revise, and extend.
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Rediscovering Caroline Avery: Submerged Narrative, Affect, and the Legacy of Minor Cinema
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Rediscovering Caroline Avery: Submerged Narrative, Affect,
and the Legacy of Minor Cinema
John Powers, Washington University in St. Louis




Abstract

   This article makes a case for Caroline Avery as one of the most compelling
   experimental filmmakers of the ‘minor cinema’ generation through a close
   analysis of her magnum opus, Midweekend (1986). In 2018, I conducted the
   first interviews with Avery since she began making films in 1982. Based on
   those interviews, this essay offers an historical and theoretical perspective on
   Avery’s work, situating her within the context of the 1980s-era avant-garde,
   investigating her memory-based poetics of cinema, and demonstrating her
   relevance to contemporary experimental media culture. More specifically, this
   article examines Avery’s contributions to what I call, following Tom Gunning,
   ‘submerged narrative’, an attenuated approach to narrative construction that
   privileges sense impressions, affective environments, and haptic surfaces over
   characters and causality — or, cultivating the ambiance of a story without
   providing an actual story. In the second half of the essay, I turn to the work of
   two contemporary artists, Michael Robinson and Mary Helena Clark, to argue
   that their similar ideas about affective narrative environments demonstrates the
   degree to which the ‘minor cinema’ has contributed to the establishment of a
   shared language within the avant-garde that younger artists can borrow from,
   revise, and extend.

   This article rediscovers the work of Caroline Avery, a significant but neglected
experimental filmmaker. Born and raised in Long Island, New York, Avery
enrolled at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design in 1977 to study painting.
Her interest in the dynamics of movement in the European avant-gardes of the
1920s prompted a shift to filmmaking, where she combined an artisanal approach
to the filmstrip with a found footage collage aesthetic in films such as Sonntag
Platz (1982) and Big Brother (1983). Upon relocating to New York City, Avery
expanded her recycling of twentieth century cultural iconography into a more
thoroughly deconstructive vein, painting and scratching directly onto found
footage to explore memory, allegory, and affect in films such as Pilgrim’s Progress
(1985) and Midweekend (1986). Her affinity for and interaction with filmmakers
such as Phil Solomon and Cécile Fontaine, who also used found footage and
handmade processes to create evocative, enigmatic films, aligned Avery with the
cohort of filmmakers that Tom Gunning identified as forging a ‘minor cinema’
                                                Cinéma & Cie, vol. XX, no. 34, Spring 2020
                                           John Powers


in the 1980s, although Avery never became as prominent as other members of
that generation.1 Disillusioned with internal competition for funding and grants,
Avery withdrew from experimental filmmaking in 1989 and moved to Hawaii,
where she continues to work as a painter.

   In this essay, I have two goals. The first is to make a case for Caroline Avery
as one of the most compelling filmmakers of the period through a close analysis
of her magnum opus, Midweekend. Like many women artists, Avery’s work has
been difficult to access, and there have been no scholarly articles or book chapters
devoted to her work.2 In 2018, I conducted the first interviews with Avery since
she began making films in 1982.3 Based on those interviews, this article will offer
an historical and theoretical perspective on Avery’s work, situating her within the
context of the 1980s-era avant-garde, investigating her memory-based poetics of
cinema, and demonstrating her relevance to contemporary experimental media
culture. The second is to examine Avery’s contributions to what I call, following
Gunning, submerged narrative, an attenuated approach to narrative construction
that privileges sense impressions, affective environments, and haptic surfaces
over characters and causality — or, cultivating the ambiance of a story without
providing an actual story.4 For Avery, submerged narrative is also a strategy for
replicating the processes of memory in cinema. In contrast to a model that aims
to recreate or allude to personal memories, Avery’s approach constitutes a set of
techniques and working methods grounded in an intuitive theory of memory’s
sensual effects. Midweekend will serve as my central example, but in the second
half of the essay, I turn to the work of two contemporary artists, Michael Robinson
and Mary Helena Clark, to argue that Avery’s ideas about narrative have endured
for twenty-first century experimental image-makers.


The Smell of a Rose, But the Rose Is Gone

  Before examining Avery’s approach to submerged narrative, I will provide a
detailed description of Midweekend, as well as some production background, to


1
  Tom Gunning, ‘Towards a Minor Cinema: Fonoroff, Herwitz, Ahwesh, Lapore, Klahr, and
Solomon,’ Motion Picture 3.1/2 (Winter 1989-90), 2–5. See also A Passage Illuminated: The
American Avant-Garde Film 1980-1990, ed. by Nelly Voorhuis (Amsterdam: Stichting Mecano,
1991).
2
  Avery’s films are currently in a state of transition. She is aiming to have them restored and back
in circulation in the near future. In the meantime, the Paris-based distributor Light Cone has a
near-complete set of 16mm prints, which can be viewed on their website in low-resolution digital
reproductions. Avery also appears in Saul Levine’s film Raps & Chants 2 with Caroline Avery
(1981–82).
3
  The interview with Avery that I quote throughout this article was conducted via Skype on 28
February 2018.
4
  Gunning, p. 4. The term is Gunning’s, although I elaborate on and extrapolate from his conception
by identifying and developing additional components.

74
                                 Rediscovering Caroline Avery


situate the film within Avery’s oeuvre and convey a sense of its moment-by-moment
effects on the viewer. Midweekend was the third film (following Pilgrim’s Progress
and Mr. Speaker, 1985 and 1986) that Avery made after leaving MassArt for New
York, where she worked as a layout artist at the Village Voice. It was facilitated by
several fortuitous developments. First, the New York Public Library unloaded
a cache of educational films (mostly from Coronet Films, a leading producer of
shorts for public schools) at the Collective for Living Cinema, which became
an important resource for Avery.5 Second, the painter Ellen Rothenberg made
a lightbox to Avery’s specifications by fitting a piece of sandblasted glass to a
wooden box, allowing her to work more intensively with cameraless filmmaking
methods.6 Third, Avery secured a Jerome Foundation grant to purchase a JK
optical printer, which she used to blow up 8mm and Super 8 to 16mm, increasing
the variety of found footage that she could appropriate.7
   The statement that Avery provided to distributors with Midweekend is
resolutely descriptive: ‘Great Society Era, social services, “how to” films from
the 1960s and other footage from travel, education, documentary, and unsplit
8mm film edited with densely painted film leader in rapid sequences of one-to-
three frame splices’.8 More recently, Avery explained that the film was inspired
by the desperation she sensed in the lives of New Yorkers as they approached the
end of the working week:

    There was a desperate happiness to the weekends in New York. It was like people
    had a very short window to lead this totally other life and were trying to get as much
    in as they could. By Sunday afternoon or evening, a lot of people were, in spite of
    themselves, looking forward to the routine of going back to work, because [on the
    weekends] they were left to find themselves on their own without the definition of
    where they worked.9

   Apart from its title, the thematics of Midweekend are never made overt in the
film itself, but intimated through a melancholy undertone, the source of which can
be difficult to identify. The majority of the silent, 7’30’’ film is handpainted, with
brief interjections (Avery’s indication of one to three frames is generally accurate)
of found footage, some of which appears in color, some in black-and-white. Avery’s
artisanal techniques — using Dr. Ph. Martin’s paint, solvents, nail polish, bleach,
and a #11 Exacto blade — result in resplendently detailed images, anticipating
the intricate surges of rapid color that characterize Stan Brakhage’s well-known


5
  Caroline Avery, interview with the author, 28 February 2018.
6
  Ellen Rothenberg is married to filmmaker Daniel Eisenberg, who was in Avery’s cohort at MassArt.
7
  All information about the making of Midweekend comes from Caroline Avery, interview with
the author, 28 February 2018. On the history of the JK optical printer, see John Powers, ‘A DIY
Come-On: A History of Optical Printing in Avant-Garde Cinema,’ Cinema Journal, 57.4 (Summer
2018), pp. 71–95.
8
  Canyon Cinema Film/Video Catalog 7 (San Francisco: Canyon Cinema, 1992), p. 19.
9
  Caroline Avery, interview with the author, 28 February 2018.

                                                                                               75
                                    John Powers
                                          ﻿


handpainted films of the late 1980s and 1990s, albeit more rough-hewn, with
an abundance of visible splices, dirt particles, and other pockmarks that lend
the painting a fibrous texture. Entirely abstract, Avery’s painting simultaneously
evokes biology and astronomy, suggesting both the reticular, packed networks of
microbes and the celestial webs of constellations in space.
   The first thirty seconds of the film alternate rapidly between cellular splotches
of orange and white against a bluish black interstellar background and dense
arrays of orange, white, black, and purple speckles before the first briefly glimpsed
images appear: a band of horseback riders on a pink horizon cut into a horizontal
strip and pasted onto the 4x3 frame, a woman with a bouffant in a car, and most
prominently, an adolescent boy playing with a pinwheel on a school bus. This
sequence initiates a patterning that remains consistent over the film’s duration:
a cluster of five or six images (painted or photographic) will rise to prominence
through breakneck alternation before gradually giving way to others, creating
a transient flow out of which images assert themselves for a period and then
quietly disappear. Soon, the painting becomes more varied: green, purple, and
pink appear more frequently, and Avery adopts more diverse approaches to line,
shape, and texture without abandoning her global commitment to a mottled,
rapidly evolving surface. New images materialize; some of the more conspicuous
include a nurse attending to a small boy at a table, an insert of hands cracking
an egg into a bowl, and schoolchildren lined up in single formation, presenting
themselves for inspection to a female teacher, who seems to be adjusting their
postures.
   By the film’s midpoint, the barrage of the painting, constantly interrupted
by half-glimpsed fragments of found footage — as well as the introduction of
a strobe-like yellow and black flicker — induces the palpable sensation that
the screen is pulsating, an unrelenting fusillade of haptic sensations. These
thousands of congested, painted universes frustrate our ability to fully absorb
the referential images, which now include an overhead shot of a cowboy riding a
bucking bronco, cavalry officers in white, various shots of assembly line factory
work, and a four-quadrant image (from a reel of unsplit 8mm) bathed in blue,
which is employed regularly enough to impose a gridlike aspect onto the film.
Ethnographic images of an African dancer’s legs appear in conjunction with a
more rigid painting schema of yellow and green cellular blotches on a black
background.
   The film’s climax is dominated by a ratcheting up of the intensity, as the film
threatens to spin out of control. Against a throbbing flicker appear a series of
shots of children at windows. In a perspectival image that sets itself off from
the two-dimensionality of the painted image stream, schoolchildren pour out of
school. A race car driver pulls his helmet over his head and a man moves a piece
of furniture, all glimpsed in jagged, flashing bursts. The nurse and boy return,
joined by new images of race cars barreling down the track and a bandana-clad
woman dusting a shelf. In a final diptych, a child washing his hands turns to
the camera to convey a haunted look, and a man in a car covers his face before

76
                                 Rediscovering Caroline Avery


an impending crash. The film ends as it began, with an extended passage of
painting, this time a colorful explosion of confetti on a clear background.
   As this description intends to convey, in Midweekend, fairly inscrutable
images materialize out of the exquisite tumult of the paint, which renders the
film obscure and dynamic in equal measure. In a statement worth quoting at
length, Avery explains that her ambition for the film was to provide the hint
of a narrative thread through fleeting sense-impressions, a structure she finds
analogous to the processes of memory:

     I was really interested in creating an evocative environment in which a narrative might
     exist, but not actually having the story unfold. It’s kind of like the way memory works.
     You remember having read a story years ago, but you can’t remember the details. You
     can remember how it felt: maybe a detail will surface, like one of those 8-balls where
     the answer is revealed for a moment. As you remember events, there’s a palimpsest
     of other events superimposed over them. Maybe you’re having a cup of tea or an
     argument, and all of a sudden, a memory will come from another event, and things
     get scrambled. You end up with a memory of a memory; you remember having done
     a thing, but the raw direct emotion of having that event happen is long gone. And
     when we construct narratives for ourselves, we’re drawing from memory, and those
     memories color the narrative that we’re creating. So Midweekend takes the storyline
     away but keeps the feel of a story: like the smell of a rose, but the rose is gone.10

   In this statement, Avery links narrative with memory through their shared
emotional, associative, and sensual qualities. By instantiating these qualities in the
film’s form, the filmmaker can conjure a narrative atmosphere without limiting
its range of meanings through denotative specificity or a causal chain. For Avery,
memory is predominantly affective, preserving not the details of an event, but
the emotional states that it aroused. The intensity of emotion fades, but residual
traces remain, buried under a patina of time, mediation, and contingency. This
would seem to be an unlikely model for narrative structure insofar as the erasure
of specificity threatens to invalidate the sources commonly identified by film
theorists as facilitating the emotional engagement of viewers, such as allegiances
and alliances with characters and what Barthes called the hermeneutic and
proairetic codes, the large and small-scale questions and tensions that generate
narrative momentum.11 How, then, does Midweekend retain ‘the feel of a story’
without including a story’s typical components?
   In the absence of causal linkage, individual images bear the weight of developing
narrative atmosphere. Thus, each image is effectively promoted to the level of the
symbolic, retaining an affective charge that derives from its codified meanings. In
Midweekend, images of children are heavily allegorized, resonating beyond their


10
  Ibidem.
11
  Roland Barthes, S/Z, trans. by Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1974), pp. 18–20.
On allegiance and alignment, see Murray Smith, Engaging Characters: Fiction, Emotion, and the
Cinema (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), pp. 142–227.

                                                                                          77
                                      John Powers
                                            ﻿


denotative capacities. Midway through the film, Avery incorporates a black-and-
white shot of a girl in plaid dress and boy in striped shirt peering out a window, their
backs to the camera. Absent the expectation that the film will provide answers
to basic narrational questions about the children’s identities, relationship to
one another, or the object of their gaze, the image simply registers as a concept
— ‘children looking’ — that invokes emotional associations: intimacy between
siblings, childhood as an interminable waiting period for adulthood, and the
longing to be released into a world that offers more possibilities than the present
one. Similarly, a wide-angle shot of children streaming out of school, lunchboxes in
hand, represents the sudden release of pent-up energy, freedom from institutional
constraints and pressures, and the exuberance of sharing a collective experience.
Midweekend does not cue the viewer to draw causal inferences between these
images, but to experience them as affective evocations of events whose contexts have
long faded from memory.
   How is this different from simply asserting that ‘childhood’ is one of
Midweekend’s themes? After all, a film need not have ‘narrative atmosphere’ to
make meaning, and Midweekend’s images can be readily organized into thematic
clusters: childhood, especially as regulated by routine, surveillance, and hygiene
(the children by the window, the boy washing his hands, the nurse inspecting the
children); gendered domestic routines (hands cracking eggs, the woman dusting
the shelf, the assembly line); western imagery (the horse taming, cavalry, and
cowboys); and cars, racing, and accidents (the race car driver with visor, the car
crashes). These categories, in turn, suggest readings. One could follow Avery
in claiming that Midweekend is about the ambivalent dialectic of routine and
release, or interpret the film as an ideological critique of 1950s-era conformity.
   But Midweekend resists such tidy meanings. The ambiguity of the film suggests
not a transparent set of themes, but an affective environment, a diegesis constructed
entirely from icons and symbols. Instead of an internal storyworld that characters
experience and encounter, Midweekend’s diegesis is posited as a collection of sense
impressions, recollections, and associations that seem to occupy the same conceptual
space. Conceiving of Midweekend as a diegesis clarifies Avery’s analogy with memory:
the relationships between images are akin to the relationships between thoughts,
both of which are enclosed within a figurative space. The actions depicted in the
images could be understood to point to specific events that transpired within the
diegesis, but it seems more apposite to consider them as symbols working together
to produce an emotional valence. That is, Midweekend’s storyworld is not necessarily
one in which a child washed his hands after school let out, but one of adolescence
circumscribed by rigidity and routine, a pronounced emphasis on hygiene that is
mirrored at home and at school, and a yearning for emancipation inflected with the
threat of a destructive abandon. Thus, images relate to each other not solely at the
level of formal or thematic correspondences, but as a storehouse of affect-producing
sense-impressions that share a kind of mental landscape.
   In Avery’s remarks on Midweekend, her Proustian reference to a cup of tea as a
trigger for involuntary memory alludes to a conception of memory as an associative

78
                                 Rediscovering Caroline Avery


chain of linkages. In this way, Midweekend’s images could be understood as a series
of emotional impressions, each inspired by its predecessor. Of course, associative
editing is a fairly straightforward way of conceptualizing relationships among
images, but of particular interest is the rapidity and repetition of Midweekend’s
associations. Only a few frames each, Avery’s images appear in short bursts that the
viewer barely has time to assimilate, flashing onscreen in repetitive cycles. This is
an effect of Avery’s working process. After gathering a batch of handpainted and
found footage, Avery would intuitively select images that evoked the emotional state
she was trying to cultivate for a film. Each filmstrip would be assigned a number.
Avery would then use ‘a Cagean process’ to write a ‘score’ for the film on graph
paper composed of patterns of repeating numbers (e.g., two, three, five, two, five,
three, seven), representing the order in which the strips would be edited. Below
each number, Avery would make dots corresponding to the number of frames to
be included from each strip. When she performed the actual cement splicing, she
allowed herself to deviate from her score, adjusting the order of strips or number
of frames intuitively in a process that she describes as ‘editing with a flourish’.12
   This method represents a unique fusion of intuitive editing, metrical editing,
and chance operations, but it also instantiates a working process that is itself
structured according to memory, translating Avery’s central analogy from
the film’s content to the artist’s practice. Unlike many of her found footage
peers, Avery does not embrace a juxtapositional approach to editing, avoiding
deliberate connections between edits on the basis of formal or conceptual
similarities and differences. Instead, she composes her scores abstractly with
irregular numbering patterns, lending a randomness to the order in which the
images appear. This process resembles the inherent unpredictability of memory
— the sudden appearance of an involuntary memory, materializing abruptly to
make further connections with other memories. On the other hand, by allowing
herself to repeat patterns and improvise intuitively, Avery suggests that one can
‘follow’ memories, using an involuntary memory as the spark for more directed
voluntary recall. In exploring the tension between randomization, patterning,
and improvisation, Avery’s practice itself becomes an analogue for memory.
   That said, Midweekend’s representational images are often eclipsed by the
astounding intricacy of the handpainting, which comprises the majority of the
film. In fact, Avery’s painting is so elaborate and labored that it became the
focal point of a laudatory letter from Stan Brakhage, who used phrases such
as ‘exhausting,’ ‘painstaking care,’ and, after his initial viewing, ‘the work of a
compulsive neurotic’ to describe her films.13 Avery’s coarsely textured surfaces
convey a palpable sensuality, encouraging the touch-based mode of looking that
Laura U. Marks has proposed as constituting ‘haptic cinema’.14 As Marks notes,


12
   Caroline Avery, interview with the author, 28 February 2018.
13
   Stan Brakhage to Caroline Avery, 23 May 1985, James Stanley Brakhage Collection, box 2, folder
9, Special Collections and Archives, University of Colorado Boulder Archives.
14
   Laura U. Marks, The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses

                                                                                              79
                                       John Powers
                                             ﻿


physically working with film’s emulsion is a frequent method for producing haptic
images, which share with Midweekend an emphasis on the striated surface.15 More
specifically, Marks ties cinema’s appeal to touch to an embodied knowledge that
seeks to recover memories. As she explains, ‘senses that are closer to the body,
like the sense of touch, are capable of storing powerful memories that are lost to
the visual’.16 That is, haptic cinema is a means of representing unrepresentable
memories through an appeal to the senses.
   Although Marks’s work appeared over a decade after Avery made her
last film, there are striking convergences between their articulations of the
interconnections between cinema, memory, and sensuality. In Avery’s account,
memories are triggered by sensual experiences, such as drinking tea or smelling
a rose. These experiences function as catalysts for memories to arise and recede
out of the streaming substrate of organic unconscious processes, where they
become conflated with other memories, superimposed over each other like a
‘palimpsest’. In Midweekend, then, the painting serves as an analogue for this
primordial state of consciousness, a swirling skein out of which sense-impressions
emerge and intermix. As much as Avery’s painting seems to give rise to the
images, it also conceals them, functioning as a thick veil that mediates between
image and viewer; our ability to perceive the images is thwarted by the cloak of
paint, within which the images seem to be enfolded. This encourages the viewer
to adopt a haptic visuality, a mode of viewing that, as Marks explains, ‘tends to
move over the surface of its object rather than to plunge into illusionistic depth,
not to distinguish form so much as to discern texture’.17 Thus, the handpainted
sections of Midweekend are not detached from Avery’s memory-based narrative
structure, but integral components of its realization.


Collecting Clues and Abstracting Emotions

   Although Avery’s work has not been widely seen, the submerged narrative
model that she helped to develop has continued to resonate for experimental
filmmakers. In the second section of this essay, I want to chart Avery’s indirect
influence on contemporary artists by demonstrating the degree to which the
ideas and methods instantiated in her filmmaking have become significant points
of reference for the avant-garde. To be clear, the relative obscurity of Avery’s
work prohibits the tracing of a direct line of influence — in fact, the filmmakers
I discuss below are unfamiliar with Avery’s films. Instead, I argue that Avery’s
contributions to ideas that were circulating more broadly among the minor
cinema generation have been overlooked, and these ideas in turn bequeathed a


(Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2000), pp. 162–82.
15
   Ivi, p. 173.
16
   Ivi, p. 130.
17
   Ivi, p. 162.

80
                                    Rediscovering Caroline Avery


shared conception of experimental narrative that contemporary filmmakers can
draw from to contextualize their own practice.
   This argument may seem counterintuitive insomuch as experimental cinema
is often considered to be a non-narrative filmmaking mode. Many scholars have
countered this mischaracterization by investigating periods of more sustained avant-
garde engagement with narrative form (e.g., the trance film of the 1940s and 1950s,
the Baudelarian cinema of the 1960s, the New Narrative of the late 1970s). By the
late 1980s, a new approach to narrative had emerged, identified by Tom Gunning in
‘Towards a Minor Cinema,’ a short, incisive piece of film criticism that framed the
post-Structural generation of experimental filmmakers as renouncing the ‘aspiration
to mastery’ of their forebears and celebrating their marginal identity.18 While this
aspect of his argument is well-known, less acknowledged is Gunning’s concomitant
suggestion that the minor cinema generation returned to narrative, albeit in a radically
attenuated form. For Gunning, their ‘submerged narratives’ hovered ‘just below
the threshold of perceptibility’. He continued: ‘The sea swells of these subliminal
stories align images into meaningful but often indecipherable configurations. The
films invite the reader/detective to pursue the thread of narrative, but no closure is
promised, no final answer lies behind the veil’.19
   Although Gunning does not mention Avery specifically — he focuses on similarly
minded filmmakers, such as Lewis Klahr, Nina Fonoroff, Phil Solomon, and
Mark LaPore (some of whom studied with Avery at MassArt) — his observations
are remarkably congruent with her own conception of narrative. Drawing from
and expanding on Gunning’s formulation, we can posit a loose approach to
narrative shared by Avery and her peers that includes some configuration of the
following elements: sense impressions over causal linkage; affective environments;
allegorized or hieroglyphic images; memory-based structures; intuitive editing;
haptic surfaces; and an emphasis on childhood and formative experiences. These
concerns paralleled contemporaneous intellectual currents — Freudian-Lacanian
psychoanalysis (cf. Freud’s notion of the ‘screen memory,’ a distorted visual memory
arising from childhood), semiotics (see Barthes’s exploration of the photographic
image in terms of studium and punctum), and the expanded interest in cultural


18
  Gunning, p. 2.
19
   Ivi, p. 4. Although there has not been a single book-length study on the avant-garde of the 1980s,
sustained discussions of this period appear in Radical Light: Alternative Film & Video in the San Francisco
Bay Area, 1945-2000, ed. by Steve Anker, Kathy Geritz, and Steve Seid (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and
London: University of California Press, 2010); Paul Arthur, A Line of Sight: American Avant-Garde Film
since 1965 (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2005); Women’s Experimental
Cinema: Critical Frameworks, ed. by Robin Blaetz (Durham and London: Duke University Press,
2007); David E. James, The Most Typical Avant-Garde: History and Geography of Minor Cinemas in Los
Angeles (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 2005); Scott MacDonald’s
interviews with filmmakers in his A Critical Cinema series; Jeffrey Skoller, Shadows, Specters, Shards:
Making History in Avant-Garde Film (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2005);
William C. Wees, Recycled Images: The Art and Politics of Found Footage Films (New York: Anthology
Film Archives, 1993); and Gregory Zinman, Making Images Move: Handmade Cinema and the Other
Arts (Oakland: University of California Press, 2020), among many others.

                                                                                                        81
                                         John Powers
                                               ﻿


memory (cf. Huyssen’s remarks on the postmodern historical shift from ‘present
futures’ to ‘present pasts’), to name a few — that reinforced a more general interest
in the sensuality of memory and the iconicity of images.20 But this does not mean
that these interests were confined to the minor cinema generation that embraced
them.
    As evidenced by contemporary experimental practice, the subsequent
generation of filmmakers has productively expanded on the submerged narratives
of Avery and her peers, now the elder statesmen of the avant-garde. To cite two
prominent examples, in their films, videos, and discursive performances, Michael
Robinson and Mary Helena Clark develop similar ideas about the possibilities
experimental film offers in exploring affective narrative environments,
demonstrating the degree to which the ‘minor cinema’ has contributed to the
establishment of a shared language within the avant-garde that younger artists
can borrow from, revise, and extend.
    In interviews, Robinson has characterized his films as ‘narratives created through
non-narrative materials,’ to indicate a process that, like Avery’s, entails constructing
submerged narratives that resonate affectively within a diegesis composed of
symbols and associations.21 He elaborates: ‘I like the idea of having the semblance
of a narrative without actual characters or plot that carves out the feeling and the
emotional thrust of the storytelling’.22 Similarly, Clark describes her approach to
narrative as ‘filmic shorthand,’ ‘collecting clues’ and ‘world-building,’ phrases that
evoke a spatial form of narration that refigures the filmmaker as an investigator
intent on making meaning out of traces of actions and objects.23 Moreover,
both filmmakers place a premium on conjuring uncanny and ominous affective
atmospheres, attempting to inspire emotional responses in viewers that are usually
associated with plot development and attachment to characters. Robinson admits,
‘If I can really scare the audience or really break their heart, that’s what I ultimately
want to do’,24 while Clark suggests that ‘many of the emotions in my work include
portent, which requires a pause or suspense in story’.25


20
   Sigmund Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud,
Vol. III, ed. by James Strachey (New York: Vintage, 1999), pp. 303–22; Roland Barthes, Camera
Lucida, trans. by Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981); Andreas Huyssen, ‘The
Search for Tradition’ and ‘Mapping the Postmodern’, in After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass
Culture, Postmodernism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), pp. 160–78, 179–221.
21
    Cat Tyc, ‘Interview with Michael Robinson’, Incite!, 2 (2010) <http://www.incite-online.net/
robinson.html> [accessed 29 September 2019].
22
   ‘Michael Robinson with Z.W. Lewis,’ The Brooklyn Rail (December 17, 2017-January 18, 2018),
<https://brooklynrail.org/2017/12/film/IN-CONVERSATION-Michael-Robinson-with-Z-W-
Lewis> [accessed 29 September 2019].
23
   Dan Browne, ‘Outside the Text: An Interview with Mary Helena Clark’, Incite! (October 10,
2016) <http://www.incite-online.net/clark.html> [accessed 29 September 2019].
24
   Ananda Pellerin, ‘Michael Robinson: The Experimental Filmmaker Who Will Steal Your Heart,’
Wheel Me Out (May 2010) <http://poisonberries.net/wheel_me_out.pdf>, p. 4 [accessed 29
September 2019].
25
   Mary Helena Clark, interview with the author, 9 October 2019.

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                                Rediscovering Caroline Avery


   As we have seen, Avery cultivated narrative atmosphere through the signifying
power of the symbolic image, an editing procedure based on memory processes,
and a haptic approach to handpainting. Clark and Robinson, however, expand
the range of techniques available to experimental filmmakers for submerging
their narratives. In The Dragon Is the Frame (2014), Clark employs strategies
that embolden viewers to attribute logic and motivation to abstract images and
situations, or, as Clark puts it, ‘playing with an implied narrative to footage
that [is] just “of the world”’.26 Throughout Dragon, Clark provides a series
of relatively conventional establishing shots to which she insistently returns
— street corners, a blooming red tree, Muir Woods, Mission Viejo, and San
Francisco Bay (the film is an homage to Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock, 1958)) — as
though to imply that significant events have occurred (or are to occur) there,
but these events never materialize. People recur, as well, most conspicuously
Mark Aguhar, the late multidisciplinary artist to whom the film is dedicated, who
performs for the camera. Familiar musical cues (Bernard Herrmann’s score for
Vertigo) suggest rising action and climax, as if to lend emotional heft to situations
left undramatized. Like Avery in Midweekend, Clark fashions an emotionally
charged hermetic world of indirect impressions, albeit by different means.
   In Robinson’s films and videos, submerged narrative is constructed through
an ‘atmospheric web of associations,’ often via the dense interweaving of found
materials.27 Echoing Avery’s language in describing memory, Robinson ‘trust[s]
that the signifiers or triggers in the film — whether they are pop cultural, or
mythological, or whatever — hold both obvious, surface-level connotations, and
more residual, subconscious ones’.28 In Mad Ladders (2015), many of the surface-
level connotations are provided by a fairly direct narrative, presented in voice-
over by a YouTube prophet named Sister Donna, who tells a passionate, surreal
story about the coming rapture as revealed to her in visions, complete with
euphoric violence and hallucinogenic shapeshifting. More residual connotations
appear in heavily processed images of American Music Award (AMA) telecasts, as
stagecraft by Whitney Houston and Janet Jackson is transformed into a swirling
storm of rising curtains and spinning geometric set pieces. Only occasionally
recognizable as such, the AMA stage serves as a kind of storyworld, an occult
space within which artifactual mythologies rub shoulders with each other. At the
end of the film, an overhead shot of women waving to the camera on a beach,
arranged in a Busby Berkeley-esque circle and rephotographed from a television
set, is strangely moving, as it suggests that these televisual models have ascended
to the higher spiritual plane described by Sister Donna. For Robinson, then,
‘memory’ is specifically ‘cultural memory,’ a collective phenomenon rooted in


26
   Browne.
27
   Luke Goodsell, ‘Familiar Spirit – An Interview with Michael Robinson’, 4:3 (10 January 2019),
<https://fourthreefilm.com/2016/01/familiar-spirit-an-interview-with-michael-robinson>
[accessed 30 September 2019].
28
   Ibidem.

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                                            John Powers
                                                  ﻿


shared experience and nostalgia, preserved in the low resolution of the virtual
online archive.
   In Midweekend, Avery reoriented the well-established experimental film
traditions of handpainting and metrical editing toward narrative objectives,
forging a haptic cinematic surface and working process, respectively, that tapped
into the sensuality of memory. Similarly, Robinson repurposes entrenched avant-
garde techniques such as image layering and flicker to heighten the affective
intensity of his narratives. In Line Describing Your Mom (2011), an aggressive
black-and-neon-green flicker abstracts blurry footage of liturgical choreography
while a woman recounts a nightmarish story in voice-over about a disturbed
neighbor who committed suicide after threatening his baby with a handgun. The
red-and-blue flicker of Light Is Waiting (2007) is even narratively motivated,
introduced as the result of a dropped television set, which suggests that the
rest of the video takes place inside this broken analogue relic. In experimental
film history, flicker has served as an ontological inquiry into the fundamental
properties of the medium, but Robinson’s flicker — which, in its bright
uniformity, announces its digital provenance — becomes a strategy simply for
escalating the physiological intensity of his films, imbuing otherwise ambiguous
imagery with elevated narrative significance. According to Robinson, ‘I never
want the effects and manipulations in my films to feel purely formal — they all
play specific emotional or psychological roles, and are meant to be experienced
as parts of an abstract narrative’.29
   Clark, on the other hand, merges the first-person camera, theorized within
the avant-garde tradition as an imprimatur of the filmmaker’s subjectivity, with
the more functional use of the point-of-view shot in commercial filmmaking to
frustrate our ability to align with the subjectivity of the protagonist.30 In her
self-described ‘spy film’ The Plant (2012), Clark surreptitiously films a man in
a trench coat as he peers inside doorways, crosses the street, and walks along
the city sidewalks of downtown Chicago.31 The handheld camera, often looking
down from a high vantage point, lurches from object to object, as though the
filmmaker is searching for a clue, but the focus of her attention is usually unclear
or obstructed by passing cars. Moreover, her images are emphatically amateurish,
even clumsy, as she struggles to follow her protagonist, zooms erratically, and loses
focus for long stretches. In its formal particulars, the shots evoke the subjectivity


29
   Forrest Muelrath, ‘Medium of Sand’, Bomb (27 November 2012) <https://bombmagazine.org/
articles/medium-of-sand> [accessed 8 October 2019].
30
   The argument that the first-person camera aligns viewers with the subjectivity of the filmmaker has
been discussed extensively. For its application to Brakhage’s filmmaking, for example, see P. Adams
Sitney, Visionary Film: The American Avant-Garde, 1943-2000, 3rd edn. (Oxford and New York:
Oxford University Press, 2002 [1974]), p. 160, 166–68, 205–06; and Annette Michelson, ‘Film and
the radical aspiration,’ Film Culture, 42 (Fall 1966), pp. 40–42. James Peterson discusses this as a
heuristic for evaluating poetic films in Peterson, Dreams of Chaos, Visions of Order: Understanding the
American Avant-garde Cinema (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1994), pp. 34–40.
31
   Browne.

84
                                   Rediscovering Caroline Avery


of the Brakhagean handheld camera, but in this quasi-narrative context, our
attempts to align voyeuristically with the filmmaker prove futile, as we have no
access to the investigative objectives that motivate her movements. According to
Clark, ‘the inquisitive zoom lens carries story with it, mostly broadly the desire
to decode’.32 Thus, Clark draws upon one of the avant-garde’s most codified
techniques to establish a narrative environment without an actual narrative at its
center — a detective film without the mystery.


Conclusion

   In this essay, I have argued for the vitality of Caroline Avery’s cinema with
the express intention of encouraging experimental filmmakers, viewers, and
scholars to rediscover her films. Due to limitations of space, I have been able to
examine only one of her contributions to experimental filmmaking: a model for
‘submerged narrative’, an idea pursued in tandem with other filmmakers of her
generation, that holds currency within the contemporary avant-garde. But Avery
is not the only woman filmmaker of the ‘minor cinema’ cohort who demands
renewed critical and curatorial attention. While important artists such as Marie
Menken, Carolee Schneemann, and Barbara Rubin have seen an exciting surge
in scholarship devoted to their work, there remain dozens of filmmakers from
Avery’s era whose films deserve to be seen and discussed. A very partial list could
include: Diana Barrie, Ericka Beckman, Betzy Bromberg, Renata Breth, Sharon
Couzin, Sandra Davis, JoAnn Elam, Mary Filippo, Michele Fleming, Amy
Halpern, Lynn Marie Kirby, Janis Crystal Lipzin, Pelle Lowe, Vivian Ostrovsky,
Dana Plays, Esther Shatavsky, Jean Sousa, and Jacalyn White. Although they
have failed to receive the critical attention of some of their contemporaries, these
filmmakers contributed films, ideas, and cultural interventions that continue to
resonate within experimental film culture — even for a generation of artists who
may not yet be familiar with their pioneering work.




32
     Mary Helena Clark, interview with the author, 9 October 2019.

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