Theoretrical avant-gardes and avant-garde theories: toward the sociology of an academic art culture

Abstract

Beginning not with the question "What is avant-garde film?" but instead "How is it that this question has come to be asked in the university and who can legitimately ask it?" the theme of this study is the symbolic production over the last four decades of avant-garde cinema, to be understood here both as a specialised field of position-takings and a socio-occupational identity. Such a task is necessarily too large in scope to complete in a single study so I have here limited myself to definitions and symbolic productions of avant-garde film circulated by social agents (artists, critics and theorists) within higher education for the most part in Britain over the preceding four decades, where ..