| This dissertation examines paracinema, a body of artworks identified by their makers as films, and more specifically as avant-garde films, that do not employ the film medium, or reconfigure that medium so radically that the resulting works are not recognizable as films in a traditional sense. These works challenge the Modernist concept of medium-specificity, which dominates aesthetic and historical accounts of avant-garde film. These accounts hold that one of the primary aims of avant-garde filmmakers has been to explore and foreground the physical materials of the film medium. The centrality of this idea in avant-garde cinema studies has marginalized cinematic works that do not adhere to the ideals of medium-specificity, including the paracinematic works under review here.; Paracinema has its basis in the longstanding tradition within the avant-garde of questioning the boundaries of art forms and the materials believed to constitute those boundaries---artistic media like painting or film. This tradition has manifested in many contexts, including certain essentialist film theories and the general tendency of expanded and inter-arts activity that can be traced from some of the original European Modernists to the post-WWII international avant-garde (e.g. happenings, Fluxus, Minimalism, Conceptual Art, and expanded cinema). After discussing several of these developments in relation to paracinema, this dissertation examines the paracinematic work of Ken Jacobs, Tony Conrad, and Anthony McCall. Each of these filmmakers, engaging the major aesthetic preoccupations of their contemporaries in film and the visual arts, were led to produce paracinema as a response to problems they imagined in the film medium and the normal modes of film exhibition and reception.; The study of paracinema allows for the incorporation of previously undiscovered works by important filmmakers into the historical canon of avant-garde cinema, and demonstrates the limitations, for both artists and scholars, of a theoretical and historical account of avant-garde cinema organized around medium-specificity. This dissertation is part of an alternative account of artistic Modernism that de-emphasizes the importance of the specificity of art mediums and nuances the standard story of avant-garde film's relationship to the other arts and to Modernism in general. |
