Scott MacDonald,
Adventures of Perception: Cinema as Exploration.
University of California Press, 2009
ISBN: 9780520258563
US$29.95 (pb)
440pp
(Review copy supplied by University of California Press)

Scott MacDonald’s Adventures of Perception: Cinema as Exploration is a category defying collection of eight essays and eight interviews produced between 1983 and 2009. It unfolds as a series of pairings exploring independent and avant-garde cinema culture in – with a few notable exceptions – the United States. In addition to twelve pieces anthologized from Afterimage, Artforum, and Film Quarterly, among other publications, Adventures includes a substantial new essay, “Desegregating Film History: Avant-Garde Film and Race at the Robert Flaherty Seminar, and Beyond,” and new interviews with Korean filmmaker Gina Kim, Canadian poet/filmmaker Clive Holden, and the French nature filmmakers Claude Nuridsany and Marie Pérennou. An addendum to the author’s seminal self-ethnography, “Confessions of a Feminist Porn Watcher (Then and Now),” and interviews with filmmaker Peter Hutton, and longtime Film Forum Director Karen Cooper have also been updated with new material.

While no doubt a leading authority on American avant-garde cinema[1] , MacDonald’s contributions to the discipline of Film Studies remain an under explored aspect of his body of work. This fact is something that jumps off the pages of Adventures – which offers a career of engagements with cinema as a set of cultural practices and not isolated texts. In the context of recent turns toward spatial, material, ethnographic and convergence studies, these essays and interviews provide critical provocations and initial responses to what an accessible and multi-dimensional media studies might look like – all the while remaining committed to the enduring draw and utility of alternative avenues of production and participation.

Beginning with “Desegregating Film History,” the longest essay in the book, MacDonald demonstrates a key critical maneuver that defines much of his work: the impulse to make connections where (disciplinary, institutional, generic, etc.) categories make breaks. The essay addresses a lingering question from the fiftieth Flaherty Seminar (2004) about why avant-garde audiences and filmmakers “seem so white.” Surprisingly, his answer is that “the issue is more one of terminology than of the racism of avant-garde filmmakers or programmers” – that is, an issue of categorization or “segregation” in the way we conceptualize film history (p. 14). Part of a larger project of demonstrating the value of avant-garde film history for disciplines across the humanities, (c.f., The Garden in the Machine: A Field Guide to Independent Films About Place, UC Press, 2001), MacDonald traces an extensive series of intersections between avant-garde and African American cinema, paying close attention to the conceptual walls that “blind us” to both forms, and pushing historians and teachers to mine these interchanges in their work. There is little doubt that many such intersections would greatly improve canonical approaches to international film history, among other subjects.

In the set-up to his interview with avant-garde filmmaker David Gatten, MacDonald writes:

Gatten is, above all, a new form of cinematic researcher for whom making films is a way of exploring the evolution of cultural history. As we watch his films, we join Gatten in his surveys of territories that are new for him and for us, and we have the opportunity to enjoy both what he and we learn about the past and how this past continues to materialize into the film-viewing present (p. 299).

MacDonald’s observations about Gatten’s fascinating and obsessive Secret History film series (an ongoing nine-film project) also serves as an apt description of his own research and his variegated roles as a fan, teacher, critic/scholar, programmer and interviewer. While rarely explicitly taking up questions of method or of film theory, MacDonald’s essays and interviews are a sustained engagement with film history as a living history. In “Film History and ‘Film History’”, he makes this historiographic distinction clear:

To think of a “film historian” only as someone who writes about the evolution of cinema is a perversion of terminology, a perversion that has had problematic implications for film history itself, because this definition has been accompanied by a tendency on the part of “film historians” throughout academe to make themselves responsible only to writing about film (p. 369).

This theoretical and practical intervention extends across each selection, highlighting many extra-textual circulations. These include many valuable inter-medial intersections, such as poetry and film (“Poetry and Film: Avant-Garde Cinema as Publication”), landscape painting and nature films (“The Attractions of Nature in Early Cinema”), celluloid and digital style (“Putting All Your Eggs in One Basket: The Single-Shot Film”) and illuminating interviews with contemporary filmmakers such as Gatten, Peter Hutton, James Benning, and George Kuchar.

The production and exhibition of independent works also remain relatively neglected, MacDonald argues, as the “academe, like a corrupt union, has created systems that implicitly reward ‘film historians’ for avoiding the labor of actually doing film history” (p. 368). His own attention to textual detail throughout illustrates that the claim is not an attack on textual analysis, but a call for more studies that trace film history as the “history of what is shown and seen” (p. 368). MacDonald’s recounting of “The Mohawk Valley Journey to The Journey” is one such useful gesture in this direction, underscoring the value of sharing our own experience as viewers, programmers and, in this case, his involvement in the community production of Peter Watkins epic (14.5 hours) international collaboration about the local effects of the arms race, The Journey (1984-5).

The interview is perhaps the form of research that has most defined and been defined by MacDonald’s project of supporting independent filmmakers and bringing their works to wider audiences.[2] Few points in the book are as engaging as the riffs he has with filmmakers Kim, Holden, Hutton, Benning and Gatten, and both new and old hands will no doubt walk away with several must see bodies of work jotted in the margins. And, as with the above interventions in doing film history, MacDonald’s commitment to interviewing as a form central to teaching and research deserves to be taken seriously by media scholars.

While Adventures may convince its readers that the avant-garde and independent traditions of the past and present need to be re-explored and better integrated into various research and teaching projects, one is left with the feeling that a basic categorical divide still brackets these essays too sharply: the divide between popular and avant-garde/independent films. MacDonald is no doubt compelled by various independent traditions and their capacity to suggest other social potentialities – he discusses, for instance, Peter Hutton’s audiovisual “reprieves” or single-shot film as a meditation that challenges the furious everywhere of contemporary media culture. But as he argues throughout the book, such divides need to be reexamined and productively mined before they too continue to ossify. Only “Up Close and Political: Three Short Ruminations on Nature Film,” for example, addresses films or the film going experience from anything like a mainstream perspective.

Finally, I find Adventures of Perception delivers on its introductory promise to conceive of cinema as a field of “direct exploration” and as “forms of sensuous learning and interchange” (p. 1). MacDonald’s lucid prose and clear thinking about his teaching, research and personal experience make the collection a moving and often exciting read, akin to the movie-going experience itself. This readability, at times, comes at the expense of historical and theoretical clarity in certain debates. MacDonald, for instance, spends relatively little time dealing with the existing research that frames the intersections he charts: about race, environmental cinema, exhibition studies or even the avant-garde. That said, perhaps the greatest achievement of this collection is that it serves as a springboard for new projects, drawing our attention to old and new films, and suggesting provocative intersections that are deserving of more scholarly and pedagogical energy.

Joshua Neves,
UC Santa Barbara, USA.

Endnotes

[1]His publications in the area include the five-volume Critical Cinema interview books (UC Press), a collection of extended essays on 15 seminal avant-garde films, Avant-Garde Film: Motion Studies (Cambridge Press, 1993), as well as studies and sourcebooks on film societies and distribution, including Canyon Cinema: The Life and Times of an Independent Film Distributor (UC Press, 2008), Art in Cinema: Documents Toward the History of the Film Society (Temple University Press, 2006) and Cinema 16: Documents Toward the History of the Film Society (Temple University Press, 2002), among numerous other essays and books.
[2] For a discussion of MacDonald’s interviewing practice see: “An Ethics and Aesthetics of Interviewing,” Cinema Journal 47, No. 2, Winter 2008. pp. 123-129.

Created on: Monday, 23 August 2010