Los Angeles has nourished a dazzling array of independent cinemas: avant-garde and art cinema, ethnic and industrial films, pornography, documentaries, and many other far-flung corners of film culture. This glorious panoramic history of film production outside the commercial studio system reconfigures Los Angeles, rather than New York, as the true center of avant-garde cinema in the United States. As he brilliantly delineates the cultural perimeter of the film business from the earliest days of cinema to the contemporary scene, David James argues that avant-garde and minority filmmaking in Los Angeles has in fact been the prototypical attempt to create emancipatory and progressive culture. Drawing from urban history and geography, local news reporting, and a wide range of film criticism, James gives astute analyzes of scores of films—many of which are to found only in archives. He also looks at some of the most innovative moments in Hollywood, revealing the full extent of the cross-fertilization the occurred between the studio system and films created outside it. Throughout, he demonstrates that Los Angeles has been in the aesthetic and social vanguard in all cinematic periods—from the Socialist cinemas of the early teens and 1930s; to the personal cinemas of psychic self-investigation in the 1940s; to attempts in the 1960s to revitalize the industry with the counterculture’s utopian visions; and to the 1970s, when African Americans, Asian Americans, Latinos, women, gays, and lesbians worked to create cinemas of their own. James takes us up to the 1990s and beyond to explore new forms of art cinema that are now transforming the representation of Southern California’s geography.

Cinema may be called a bastard art in both meanings of the word: because it is usually defined as a hybrid art form, obviously, but also, and perhaps more importantly, because it has been able to become formally as well as generically innovative mostly through adulterous relationships, thus making illegitimacy its grounding principle by preferring a blurred lineage to a legible succession. Trying to find what film is referred to in a sequence, therefore, amounts to establishing a clear family tree, which takes no account of the illegitimate unions, natural children and forgotten ancestors that are nevertheless part and parcel of film history. If that quest should still be conducted, its object, it seems, should not be one sole point of reference. The aim of this book is to create the opportunity of studying, and perhaps of rehabilitating, those shadowy corners of cinematographic creation and film memory, and to provide film studies, but also literature and Arts studies altogether, with a newly productive way of using such familiar notions as difference, quotation, reference, blending, hybridity, miscegenation or crossbreeding.

Among the avant-garde of the early twentieth century, the German movement remains one of the least understood in the current avant-garde and modernism debates. Rainer Rumold fills this gap with a first large-scale reassessment of the heyday and afterlife of German expressionist and Dada productions as a prolonged crisis of literary culture. Mapping avant-garde activity in Germany in a series of critical constellations from roughly 1918 to the post-World War II period, Rumold divides its history into three phases: the revolt of contradictory discourses in the teens and twenties; the conservative reversal vs. a radicalized anti-art stance of the avant-garde in exile; and the post-avant-garde. The latter is viewed as a unique step toward the postmodern represented in the late (postfascist) work of the once-radical expressionist Gottfried Benn and that of the neo-avant-gardists Helmut Heissenbuttel and Hans Magnus Enzensberger. Throughout, Rumold notes a symptomatic oscillation between the avant-garde's wish to abolish art and the apotheosis of art as a form of redemption - the Janus face of his title. In highly original readings of Carl Einstein, Walter Benjamin, Bertold Brech

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