The recent history of the avant-garde film in America mirrors the general pattern of cultural experience over the last two decades. The sense of a unified oppositional movement concerned with the war in Vietnam, student protest, and opposition to racial and sexual domination gives way to a sense of the collapse of that unified energy into a range of heterogeneous projects. If in 1971, one could feel part of the cutting edge of history, that feeling is no longer available. Where in the early seventies the future seemed promising, few today have much confidence about where we are headed.

Avant-garde film of the early seventies appeared to propose, at least to many of its most vocal adherents, a privileged relation to history. It witnessed the ascendency of structural film, which asserted a decisive break not only with commercial entertainment film, but also with the previously dominant tradition of the avant-garde, which was highly expressionist in its practices and theory. At the same time structural film proposed a revolutionary break with several cinematic pasts, it also seemed to afford filmmakers with something like a paradigm for working out a project that could be expatiated endlessly into the future. In the early seventies, there was momentary euphoric agreement about the task of film and about the shape that the future of film should take. A language of criticism, quasi-theory, and appreciation took hold that invited everyone to board the train of film history and to ride into a bountiful future.