Back to the Future, or the Vanguard Meets the Rearguard

Abstract

The interrupting of narrative is a recurrent motif of avant-garde film. Structuralist-materialist filmmakers of the 1960s and 1970s, for example, emptied their motion pictures of apparent content in order to draw attention to how a particular aspect of cinematic technique functioned, or to emphasize film as a concrete material rather than as a medium for imitating actions and conveying emotions. But, surveying the history of avant-garde cinema as a whole, it would be more accurate to say, not that narrative has simply been expunged altogether a la the structuralist-materialists, but that it has been displaced, deformed, and reformed over the years in such quasi-mainstream yet otherwise disparate films as Earth (1930), Paisan (1946), Tokyo Story (1953), Last Year at Marienbad (1961), The Phantom of Liberty (1974), and Mystery Train (1989). “Back to the Future, or the Vanguard Meets the Rearguard” considers three relatively recent, more-or-less mainstream films that all similarly attempt to bridge the gap between narrative and non-narrative cinema--between the abstract and the representational, that is, or the avant and the garde. These films are Van Sant"s Last Days (2005), Gondry"s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004), and July"s Me and You and Everyone We Know (2005).