The Afterimage Reader (Web Exclusive)
Edited by Mark Webber. London: The Visible Press, 2022. 349 pp., illus. Hardcover: £25.00.

Reviewed by Jonathan Rosenbaum

I can think of at least three reasons why the independent British film journal Afterimage (1970–87) isn’t better known in the United States: 1) It shares the name of a still-existing American bimonthly devoted to digital media; 2) It lasted for only thirteen issues; and 3) Although it was supported by state funding, like the far better-known Screen, its nature and its influence were (and still are) far less institutional. 

The third reason requires some elucidation. The seventeen years of Afterimage’s existence corresponded closely to the founding of academic film studies in both the U.S. and the U.K. Screen sprang from the British Film Institute’s Education Department during the same period, and its pedagogical mission has always been inseparable from its institutional armor, including its dull boilerplate design and the virtual equation of the positioning of its armchair Marxism with institutional protection. Afterimage was far more independent, exploratory, and eclectic, stemming largely from the passions of a single individual, Simon Field (seven of whose editorials are included, along with his interview with Hollis Frampton) and shifting its focus and aspects of its design with each successive issue. Although Film Culture in the United States similarly owed most of its orientation to Jonas Mekas and P. Adams Sitney—and Field is forthcoming in his Foreword about how much it provided a model—Film Culture eventually became somewhat institutionalized by its relation to Anthology Film Archives whereas Field, even after being joined by co-editors Peter Sainsbury, Ian Christie, and Michael O’Pray, remained proudly independent and pluralistic.

As Field writes, “Afterimage was founded on the principle…of an ongoing commitment to avant-garde cinema, to radical cinema, to ‘new’ cinema, understood both aesthetically and politically,” and the fact that he allows for three adjectives preceding “cinema” explains how, unlike Film Culture, his magazine could count Godard, Jarman, Pasolini, Ruiz, Straub-Huillet, and Švankmajer as well as Frampton, Sharits, and Snow among its culture heroes. It is thus fitting that the editor and publisher of The Afterimage Reader is the enterprising independent Mark Webber, whose Visible Press has previously published collections by Thom Andersen, Peter Gidal, Gregory J. Markopoulos, and Lis Rhodes. 

In the interests of full disclosure, I’ve contributed single pieces to both Screen and Afterimage, and my preference for Afterimage has a lot to do with its more open-minded taste and reflexes. And a good reason for recommending this excellent anthology is that it relies largely on the openness of its implied audience in a national film culture arguably ruled by conformity, insularity, and groupthink even more than the film cultures of France and America.

This is less apparent in the two relatively dogmatic entries devoted to Godard—Godard’s own “What Is to be Done?” from 1970, a list of thirty-nine rules proposed for his own practice, and Peter Wollen’s far better known “Counter Cinema: Vent d’est” in 1972, a set of rules for teaching Godard’s post-1968 practices to students, rules arguably destined for blackboards more than for political struggles outside classrooms. Afterimage’s address to its readers as independent thinkers is more apparent in a useful 1978 essay by Edward Bennett whose very title seems to challenge Wollen’s methodology—“The Films of Straub are not ‘Theoretical.’” Bennett begins, “I see the films of Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet as fluctuating between two different models of organization. In the first everything follows from the wish to draw out those relationships of power and class which the ‘commercial cinema’ systematically obscures…In the second model [the] movement towards transcendence is held in check: the different discourses of the film—including discourses like camera movement, which are normally regarded as purely instrumental—coexist without justifying or transforming each other.” In short, Bennett is more interested in how a particular group of films function, Wollen in where a particular film belongs, treating counter cinema as a sort of categorical genre with built-in recipes. 

I suspect that the names in this anthology most likely to be unfamiliar to North American readers are those associated with English experimental cinema, but whether this can be ascribed to Yankee provincialism or to a moribund canon is open to debate. Nevertheless, much of the liveliest material here comes from English or England-based experimental filmmakers trying their hands at criticism, such as Stephen Dwoskin writing about David Larcher’s Mare’s Tail (1969), Jarman taking on Pasolini’s Salò (1975), and Deke Dusinberre’s “See Real Images!,” which mingles “factual analysis with more or less transparent fictions,” the latter of which include a few pokes at Screen (and requires a brief postscript to explain some of its pranks). There’s also a “Written Discussion” by Laura Mulvey and Wollen reflecting on their own practice as co-directors and theorists, and essays by Paul Hammond on the Quay brothers and by Tony Rayns on Jeff Keen. And beyond these local turfs, we can read Peter Sainsbury on The Battle of Algiers (1966) and B. Ruby Rich on Yvonne Rainer’s Kristina Talking Pictures (1976). 

For me, the most fascinating as well as contentious text included is Noël Burch and Jorge Dana’s ambitious thirty-six-page “Propositions,” an attempt to counter and dismantle the pro-Hollywood positions of “the disciples of Bazin and Henri Agel” (as Burch writes in a New Preface), structured around analyses of Fritz Lang’s The Secret Beyond the Door (Bad Object #1), Citizen Kane (Bad Object #2), and Carl Dreyer’s Gertrud (Good Object). Kane is identified as a “false masterpiece” while its co-writer, Herman J. Mankiewicz, is confused with the author of All About Eve, his kid brother Joseph—a howler that the authors then try to justify in a footnote by calling the parallel they make between the two “nonetheless emblematic of the profound solidarity of a (the) Hollywood family.” Moreover, a brilliant account of the reverse-field editing technique employed by Dreyer in Gertrud is seriously limited, if not undercut, by a refusal to consider its meaning. (This reverse-angle cutting occurs on only two occasions in the film—in the opening sequence, when Gertrud tells her husband that she’s in love with someone else and, at the film’s very end, when she says goodbye to a friend—two moments of both communication and disconnection articulated by connected shots.)

This is a collection packed with ideas, including a few disputatious ones. My favorite comes from Jean Epstein, whom I’m happy to report is one of the contributors: “The cinema is true; a story is false. One could argue this with a semblance of conviction. But I prefer to say that their truths are different.”

Jonathan Rosenbaum is the author of numerous books, including his forthcoming In Dreams Begin Responsibilities, which will include his criticism on film, literature, and jazz.

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Cineaste, Vol. XLVIII, No. 2