The questions David James asks in The Most Typical Avant-Garde: History and Geographies of Minor Cinemas in Los Angeles begin with a simple problem of space: what is the difference between Los Angeles and Hollywood? Hollywood was once lured to Los Angeles by terrain that could simulate everything from deserts to the Orient, but, as James argues, Los Angeles now tries to create itself in the image of Hollywood. One symptom of this suppression of local geography is that “LA film” has become completely synonymous with “Hollywood film” in the popular imagination. James’s project both continues and revises his canonical work on the avant-garde, 1989’s Allegories of Cinema: American Film in the Sixties (Princeton: Princeton University Press), which importantly redirected the study of film toward its material conditions of production, distribution, and reception—in short, its cinema. “Every film,” James argued, “is thus an allegory of a cinema” (12), even the film seemingly most resistant to such a reading: the so-called “lyric” or “pure” film valorized by P. Sitney Adams in his 1974 Visionary Film: The American Avant Garde (New York: Oxford University Press). According to James, by allowing film to “tell the story of where they were made, the story...