THE FACES OF AMERICAN CINEMA

American film underground and experimental cinema

American avant-garde (experimental) film is a valuable, although not that well-known, tradition based on which we can follow the development of the idea of an alternative to Hollywood in authors such as Maya Deren, Kenneth Anger, Stan Brakhage and others. Through the films by Bruce Conner and links with the American Beat movement, the text comes to the New American film by Mekas brothers but also John Cassavetes, whose Shadows and other films left a trace in the narrative cinema as well. In the 1970s, structural film was most influential in this context and, considering the importance of thematizing projection as a material act, special attention in the text is dedicated to this aspect in films by American experimentalists, independent and underground film directors and conceptual artists. Marginal themes and provocativeness, such as that in films by Bruce Conner and Andy Warhol, is only one of the aspects of the same phenomenon or a variation of the same tradition of American alternative cinema.

Dejan D. Marković