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From the Periphery to the Interstices: Avant-garde Film, Medium Specificity and Intermediality, 1970–2015

This chapter surveys an important shift in the last fifty years in the study of avant-garde film within academia. It explores the move from study at the margins of widely separated disciplines, notably Art History and the nascent field of Film Studies, to the interstices between increasingly connected disciplines, but focused upon English and Modern Languages. As a consequence of this move, the author argues, avant-garde film has become the object of a form of scholarship that scrutinises the intermedial relations of films and texts. With this attention, mostly from scholars trained in literature and textual analysis, there is a risk of losing the technical competence in film analysis that characterised the earlier mode of scholarship. In the 1960s and 70s, much of the crucial work in the field was undertaken by practising, experimental filmmakers who understood the material possibilities and constraints of their medium. Both approaches and sites of scholarship bring particular benefits and problems, and contemporary study of the intermedial relationships of experimental film in the wider, intermedial, culture needs to account for both in its historiography.