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 of their own spatiality,” avant-garde cinemas engage in a project of historical recovery (18). It is only in the avant-garde that (to borrow the title of Thom Andersen’s essay film) Los Angeles can play itself, rather than be staged from the outside. James’s project to center Los Angeles parallels other recent reexaminations of avant-garde history in Southern California, notably in a 2006 Pompidou Center exhibition that provocatively declared Los Angeles an “artistic capital” and attempted to simulate the feeling of walking on Los Angeles’s streets. These spaces—of South Central, of arthouse theaters in Pasadena, of docks at San Pedro—are the subjects of James’s study, each neighborhood rubbing uncomfortably against another in shifting patterns of allegiance.

These stories often reveal tensions between city/country, center/margins, and liberal state/community. UCLA’s Ethno-Communications Program, for example, provided much of the training for a generation of minority-cinema filmmakers, but remained, as James contends, an “academic reservation” located separate from but inside Hollywood’s demand for skilled workers. In keeping with this tension, James’s chapters tend to overlap and double back, interrupting a linear chronology: the 1930s, working-class cinema, the amateur, and then the 1940s; the idea of the avant-garde, art films, then minority cinemas in the 1970s. This is an epic project, and the method swerves between geography, institutional history, and aesthetic formalism in the span of one paragraph. As a way of getting at the “most typical avant-garde,” James works through particular and local film practices rather than generalized movements, as in his profile of individual hobbyists and other “exemplary amateurs.” This often results in a list rather than a taxonomy, the typical rather than the type.

Yet there’s a broad theme of resistance to and cross-pollination with Hollywood, of economic coercion and consent. Maya Deren is seemingly inspired by Busby Berkeley; Kenneth Anger turns out to be a collector of cinephilia; John Whitney is hired, with Saul Bass, to do special effects for Hitchcock’s Vertigo; Sergei Eisenstein muses on the utopian potential of Disney animations; even George Lucas makes an appearance with THX-1138 before Star Wars lures him to the dark side.

Within the book’s geography, there is one omission: Los Angeles is a city produced as much outside its territorial limits as inside—by remittance capital sent across the Mexican border, by Pacific Rim dockworkers loading containers destined to float off the shore of Long Beach, or even by the fictive imaginary. (As French artist Sophie Calle once asked Angelenos: “Where are the angels here?”) James instead chooses to focus on the films actually produced within its physical boundaries. Indeed, James’s attention to the everyday suggests one possible conclusion: avant-garde cinema is embedded in domestic space. The meeting room of the cine-club is always a metaphoric outgrowth of an enthusiast’s living room. In the case of Filmforum’s initial screenings, the room is literally furnished with the organizer’s old sofas.

This amateur impulse was marked by a poverty of materials along with the hope of piercing ideological veils. Asco’s 1970s No Movie performances spoke of the impossibility of working-class cinema when barred from access to equipment, film stock, and audience. Still, Los Angeles kinoks dabbled in home movies, actualities, travelogues—and, somewhat unsurprisingly, sex flicks. That most domestic of actions moved easily from the bedroom to celluloid, as in a particular print of Dudley Murphy’s Soul of the Cypress (1920) that couples California geography with beaver shots. As James writes, “domestic pornography is . . . one of the deepest roots of avant-garde film” (29), foreshadowing films that negotiated the politics of queer identity (as well as the multi-billion-dollar porn industry in the San Fernando Valley).

The amateur act of lovemaking is significant for another reason. As James notes, theorists of cinema have found significance and political import in the etymological link between the phrase’s two words, amateur and lover. The lacerating words of Christian Metz are worth importing here: “To be a theoretician of the cinema, one should ideally no longer love the cinema and yet still love it: have loved it a lot . . . [h]ave broken with it, as certain relationships are broken, not in order to move on to something else, but in order to return to it at the next bend in the spiral (Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986, 15). The melancholy of breaking with a lover is a particularly relevant metaphor for the structure of James’s book, one that returns to certain landmarks in avant-garde cinema, production practices, and hopes for amateurism. (As if thinking of Metz’s spiral, he offers the image of major and minor cinema curled like a double helix around each other.) But love for cinema also involves claiming the object of desire: (re)claiming authorship and exemplars out of the noise of history. Take Bruce Nauman’s 1969 films, which, the author freely admits, “could have been made in some other city . . . [yet] while not specific to Los Angeles, nevertheless has a special resonance there” (290). Nominating these films into the registers of a Los Angeles avant-garde comes from deep aesthetic appreciation as well as a bit of idiosyncrasy.

James is normally careful to reserve judgment on films, but it’s here, in the thick of films that cross disciplines, that his composure changes, that the first person comes out. John Baldessari’s Script (1973) breaks “no new ground” in his reading, having come ten years after other investigations of medium specificity, and Ed Ruscha’s Premium (1971) is “trite and clumsy . . . a first-year film school project” (283). Baldessari and Ruscha contrast with the “absolute film” of abstract artists Oskar Fischinger and other animators, language used by Gene Youngblood’s Expanded Cinema (New York: EP Dutton, 1970), and even Laszlo Moholy-Nagy’s experiments with light. 8mm film is rhetorically “pristine and unsullied” compared to the professionalization of 35mm; prewar home movies are “exemplary” but post-war home movies are “unambitious.”

James’s avant-garde film is not only preoccupied with newness, but also exhaustion; not just purity, but also “sullied” potential. And this dialectic generates the chronology for James’s minor cinemas, which runs roughly like this: amateur (1920s to pre-war), experimental (forties), avant-garde (post-war). Despite minor cinema’s explicit dependence on Surrealism or Expressionism, all rely on a model of historical rupture that comes with a fetishization of the new. Yet the reader can’t shake the feeling of elegy running throughout the narrative, one that recalls the city of Los Angeles’s “soil . . . simultaneously deep and impoverished” (352)—meaning the soil of counterculture, of course, but also its geography.

A sense of loss is likely also behind the author’s quixotic explanation for recent landscape film: that white men, excluded from the discussion of subjectivity otherwise claimed by marginalized identities in the 1960s and 1970s, effect a “spatial turn” and begin using structural techniques to examine the physical terrain of Los Angeles. And it is done under the acknowledgement that, by the mid-1980s, video had “largely replaced film for many avant-garde undertakings,” partially because it “allowed for the easy quotation of feature films” (370).

Though video is largely unaddressed by choice, this point is worth a closer look. Calling Los Angeles the “most typical avant-garde” has two effects: nominating Los Angeles to join the ranks of New York or San Francisco, but also allowing Los Angeles to stand in for all avant-gardes. James’s thoughts in the final two chapters hint at one direction for avant-garde cinema in general. As video quotes feature-length films, the result becomes a form of analysis and compilation, even a curatorial practice. While reflexive cinemas animate the entire length of avant-garde film history, this practice incorporates what is lost—the “extras” of Hollywood labor, but also the “extras” from film produced under impossible conditions, from ephemera, and from film lost to history. One example, Robert Nakamura and Karen Ishizuka’s Something Strong Within (1994) is a video compilation of 8- and 16mm home movies shot by eight Japanese-Americans interned at American camps during World War II. Filming a camp that has since been destroyed and has left few traces on the desert floor is impossible; nevertheless, the camp reaches us, somehow, through past images.

At one point, James calls this genre the dossier film. It is a genre that collects the everyday of historical memory and juxtaposes it with the present. That word, dossier, also describes James’s project in this book: of love for the cinema, and of making cuttings and assembling them to form “the next bend in the spiral.”