Wytwarzanie awangardy. Przyczynek do materialistycznej historii historiografii „New American Cinema”
Producing the Avant-Garde: Toward a Materialist History of the Historiography of New American Cinema

Summary/Abstract: The article presents a brief history of the historiography of New American Cinema, a key movement within the postwar American film avant-garde. Beginning with a critique of Malte Hagener’s metaphor of the film avant-garde as the Benjaminian angel of history, the author proposes a materialist perspective on how the history of New American Cinema has been written, taking into account mechanisms of discursive control, personal interests, and economic and institutional constraints. This approach makes it possible to trace how an internally diverse avant-garde movement became homogenised within conventionalised academic discourse. It concludes that, in the face of an increasingly complex picture of film history emerging from archival interventions, scholars should avoid overarching historical syntheses and remain capable of holding several seemingly contradictory historiographical accounts at once.

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