A cinema of anxiety: American experimental film in the realm of art (1965--1975)

Contrary to the dominant narratives of art history, experimental cinema once played a meaningful role in American art. The filmic works discussed in this dissertation devised fresh modes of authorship and experimentation involving chance, collaboration, and interpersonal provocation that were as modern and innovative of those used in any art form. In this project experimental cinema is thus situated in close conceptual and historical proximity to other kinds of advanced art practice -- including performance, video, assemblage, and installation art -- that aggravated representational, artistic, ethical, and spectatorial anxieties, while challenging conventional divisions between art and media forms. By creating works that were often hostile and aggressive, these filmmakers attempted to undermine the smooth flows of information and entertainment that dominated the United States in the waning years of film's significance as the nation's dominant mass medium.;Through its consideration of selected works by multi-faceted, multi-media artists including Robert Breer, Andy Warhol, Shirley Clarke, Nam June Paik, Bruce Conner, Carolee Schneemann, and Paul Sharits, this study argues that an interdisciplinary strategy provides the most effective means for understanding the intermedial art environment that defined avant-garde cultural production in the wake of Abstract Expressionism. In its aversion to conventional divisions between artists' film, avant-garde film, and non-fiction film, this project thus attempts to reintegrate celluloid-based, experimental moving image works into the multifarious cultural, social, and historical networks that produced them and even, for a brief moment, made them popular. Despite its fleeting presence in the popular mindset of the late 1960s, experimental cinema never realized its promise as a transformational influence on the overall field of American art: it did not gain the economic support of gallery culture or the intellectual esteem of art history. Because of its interstitial identity, provocative mode of address, and distinctive ontological challenges to representation, it was an anxious object then, and in critical hindsight remains so.;This dissertation argues that the anxieties surrounding avant-garde art -- related to its function as a mechanism for undermining conventional notions of pleasure, ethics, and craft -- are not only central to experimental cinema, but may in significant ways, define it.