Documenta 5 is half a life-time away if not more!. In 1972 I was studying film history in London. I was soon to join a group, the Society for Education in Film and Television, and a magazine, »Screen«, that was challenging the terms of the debates on the role of the mass media in contemporary society- through a massive importation of french theoretical work - from linguistics, semiotics, and psychoanalysis.

The possibility of political and social change through ideological struggle in culture was very much in the agenda in the early 1970s - we used to paraphrase Bertolt Brecht "the point is to change things". Althussers work combined with both soviet and chinese writing about the social function of art (also part of the documenta5 agenda) were very imporant for us.

Documenta5 was unique however in its bringing together avant-garde film and video practices with these elaborate politico-cultural schemas. In the UK these discourses and their practitioners kept themselves very separate. There were in fact two avant-gardes, - the FilmCoop movement was was concerned with formal experimentation, Greenbergianism in the cinema if you will, and a looser political cinema concerned with struggles in representation as in the work of Godard, or Straub-Huillet. These were soon to be joined in the Screen avant-garde by an unlikely mix of a range of art-cinema film makers such as Jancso and Oshima.

The 1970s as I recall it was a period of left factionalism if not micro-factionalism. Within the Screen umbrella there was a small grouping including myself which wanted to hold together these "formal" and political avant-gardes. We tried to bridge the division between theoretical reflection on mass-media and entertainment cinema on the one hand and the avant-garde already fissured between formal and political concerns on the other.

I saw most of the films screened in the Kino Royal programme of documenta 5 in film coop and film club screenings in the UK. The material in the artists film programme in the Fridericianum was less familiar to me then.

In the 30 years that have intervened, the project for a political avant-garde cinema has all but collapsed. The end of the cold-war and the failure of "actually existing socialism" were major factors. The co-op avantgarde is also in bad shape. Most of the Coops and their supporting institutions have closed and the only hope for those films and videos which have survived is preservation by the main-stream institutions such as the British Film Institute we were once so critical of.

Entertainment and Art cinema have become an archive of ideas and images for this brave new world. Godards "Histoire du Cinema" project emblematises this - his reflection on the past century of cinema becomes itself an autonomous aesthetic object with ever-weakening reference to the originary dim and distant past of film history. Gallery audiences will soon discover Hitchcock through say Douglas Gordon or Victor Burgin!

Artists film and video on the otherhand has emerged as a major if not dominant moving image discourse in the museum and gallery circuit.
What can be perplexing to an older generation cinephile such as myself is the now hidden history of avant-garde moving image practices almost wifully being reinvented by younger generations of New Media artists. It is now a major task of both the museum and film critics and journalists to help preserve these and make them available for future generations.

Sadder still is the disappearance from view of the range of aesthetico-political practices of film collectives. The films and videos produced internationally by the womens movement, cinema novo in Latin America or the wide range of film and video associated with working-class struggles eg the UK miners strike, Cin_tracts in France in 1968 etc etc. Little is left of these movements and their films to be preserved , indeed perhaps the best form of preservation is to encourage new work in the context of on-going social struggles to engage with these histories.

Just as photography liberated painting from a realist trajectory early the 20th century, one might argue that the history of 20th century art has been dominated by a dialogue with the moving image. Much contemporary art practice is now concerned with duration, movement, realism and representation which were previously the concern of avant-garde film. Recently artists like Eija-Liisa Ahtila or Isaac Julien have begun to explore issues of narration and fantasy which were previously the preserve of mainstream cinematic genres.

This is part of a complex shift in the visual and the sonic conditions of the production of subjectivity in our culture. This is one of those moments when art practice may in fact be ahead of much theoretical and critical reflection and signals imminent cultural shifts. It would be foolish then to allow a nostalgia for past aesthetic practices to blind onself to the possibilities and productivities of the contemporary. Instead we should address ourselves to the questions of how the issues of liberation and social change which documenta5 pointed to in art and film can be articulated today.

Source: 18. Kassel Documentary- and Video-Festival