THESE FILMS --- THIS SITE

The films listed on this site span over three decades of avant-garde filmmaking, beginning in the 'underground film' 60's, continuing with 'experimental' films and videos in the 70's and 80's, and engaging with 3D and web-interactive (VRML) and digital forms in the 90's and today.

Historical contexts of Canadian avant-garde cinema: Recovering Lost History - Vancouver Avant-Garde Cinema 1960-69 Critical Perspectives on Vancouver Avant-Garde Cinema 1970-1983

Who is the speaking subject 'I'

This is written by a avant-garde filmmaker whose works and experiences constitute a 'body' of film and critical works with a perspective that is of its own time and place. You, the reader, and 'I' will likely never meet. In any case, this is not about you and I but about knowing avant-garde motion-picture cultures, the players and the playing field. Wankers don't produce films or original insights; they go with the flow. And this is about going against the flow.

This is written in first-person, because specifics have a name and perspective. This is only one of many pages on avant-garde film on the spider-crawled world wide web. A first-person narrative concerning the SeNef2004 exhibitions or 2002 EMAF Retrospective of these works may be illuminating as to 'da Old School', 'avant-garde' and 'how we got from those kinds of films' to 3D - virtual - digital. All of these writings come with a certain perspective 'I'.

In the digital era the 16 / 35 mm film sprocket holes were replaced by a binary 'dash' that synchronized all of the audio video streams into a MPEG delta frame train, read from a laser illuminated disc DVD, decoded on the fly into scenes. That's what the 'experimental scene' of DVD artists today owe to 'da Old School': the invention of the streamed synchronized and variable bit rate data train 'bandwidth' that commercial and avant-garde creators share on the web, and everywhere else. And they're called digital 'talking motion-pictures', and legitimately art.

These films were not created or determined by consumer - client markets or financial enticements. (They were not produced 'to make money' or to 'illustrate a screenplay' or as 'commissioned art'.) My impulse to create radical and independent motion-pictures became a life's work that was personally and socially motivated, independently financed, and contentious to the core. The films themselves, and the methods of production - distribution - exhibition are the 'theory' and 'practice' (the praxis) of these works. The hostile environment of academic (notably psychoanalytic) film theory towards avant-garde film is referenced in a separate essay Film Studies 101.

This body of work is argumentative and has provoked many contests 'for' and 'against' the works and myself. Some of the films have been censored, some denounced (as 'un-Canadian' or 'trivial'); conversely, some of the films have been praised, awarded prizes, purchased for inclusion in collections, exhibited in retrospectives. Antagonisms to me and my works chiefly arise from the 80's - 90's academic sectors (which I have not been shy in criticizing) and these antagonisms continue to this day on the web and in blocking actions (blocking grants, purchases, employment, exhibition) by administrators of rear-guard cultural pension plans. (See some examples for the record here.)There's no reason to be 'deaf' and 'dumb' to this practice. The collective paranoia of academia gone po-mo and stale has its own programming for dummies: it's called ''theoretical ventriloquism' and typically requires a network of supporting behind the scenes 'colleagues'. That's how awards systems work.

The films and videos continue to be exhibited world wide, are distributed for rental only from Light Cone (Paris) and sales of available distribution copies have been strictly relegated to the web since the late 90's. The numbers of available distribution copies are diminishing due to the economics of the 'end of experimental film'. Films and videos no longer in distribution are listed here.

The many intersecting medias (video art, 3D Video, virtual reality, web animations) on this site join with the many avant-gardes of motion picture practice today and in the demonstration that contemporary motion pictures can be hybrids of source, form and content, and exhibition contexts to include all forms of analog, digital, single and multi-channel 'animation' and 'photography' and 're-photography, browser-art, performance and on-line distribution which utilize cross-platform technologies that are 3D, 2D, and interactive.

In spite of those who pretended to know.

Who says that a motion-picture must be a linear oedipalized story telling of photographic events recorded in logical order that should be 'informed by theory' and other sanctioned 'social realisms'? There's plenty of Semiotic Marxists around in media studies at the U, but they're not making the films, nor can they determine who and what can be made any more. Their empires of 'structural linguistics' will vanish.

Contemporary 'film' is now any motion-picture that was or was not shot with a camera, analog or digital, linear or non-linear, passive or interactive, bitmapped or vector mapped, local or networked, two - dimensional or three - dimensional, single or multiple channel, screened or performed, cached or streamed, flash animated, anything you can imagine, including interactive on-line video games!

Contemporary 'film' is of any or all genres, crossing borders, sweeping aside nationalist chauvinisms ('the school of Canadian experimental cinema' ), existing on the internet at many places simultaneously, projected in subways, on trains, and it certainly isn't to be 'politically corrected' and 'informed by theory' by a bunch of grey haired docs in the old folks home at the media marxism art college and Women's Studies.

'What a bummer for linear projectionists!',

Along with (1996-97) works that featured motion-picture movie mapping of 3D objects in VRML 'worlds' as interactive 'movies in 3D space', I wrote "The future cinema is being created now. And it does not have 'sprocket holes". These 1996-7 postings of mine on Frameworks are listed here.

The topics of these avant-garde films by Al Razutis are both the works themselves and the critical environment, presented in selected manifestos - critiques - writings, that have contextualized the works.

This is the way the words end.

These films are the works of a media anarchist who 'left the profession' and set out to discover the possibilities of a 'future' that was not condemned to the ventriloquism of 'the lack', 'castration', 'social realism', 'theoretically informed production', and other hegemonies.

Let Imagination Rule!