In defence of the backwater.

 Radical filmmaking is important.  Radical films force the audience to confront their prejudices, question their perceptions, and form opinions that challenge accepted norms.

Film for film's sake.  Film made for deeper reasons than entertainment.

However, this form of filmmaking can alienate and confuse.  For some fundamentalists, this might be a test for the seriousness of a text.

Is entertainment bad?  Why? If an artwork entertains, is this a weakness?

Radical politics and radical filmmaking are bedfellows.

How does art change society?  By embodying ideas (making people think).

Does the revolutionary aid or hinder the evolutionary?

What does an analysis of history suggest?

How has radical film influenced visual mediums - modes and ways of seeing and interpreting.

Visual literacy has lots of parallels with literacy per se: it is intrinsically valuable, it enriches society, defines diverse cultures.

Poetry develops language and ways of communicating ideas.  It is a forum for radical experimentation with language.  It expands perceptions of the world.  This is true of radical film.

Paddling up a backwater is exciting.  There are difficult passages, past fallen trees, and up shallow rapids, but the effort is always worth it because it takes your head to a different place.  Radical film amounts to many backwaters that feed the mainstream, but only if they are regularly visited.  And there is always a way to get further upstream if you try.

Narrative shapes people's lives.  Narrative film reinforces common narratives (myths) that are often reactionary.  Radical film works with concepts.  Can narrative be a part of radical film?

A recuperation of narrative?

Is metafiction really the enemy?  Does radical film really need to define itself in terms that dismiss narrative and its apologists?  Is being 'anti-illusionist' its only justification?

I can't really believe anything I'm seeing on any screen, but I am seduced by moving images combined with sound, and let myself be entranced.  I know a painting is just paint on canvas, but I let myself drift off into the world of the painting.  I acquiesce, but know that I can move on from screen or painting at any time it suits me.

Re:structural/materialists like Peter Gidel - 

I suspect that there was an anti-acrylic paint group when this particular technology arose, populated by those who swore by the political, moral, and technical superiority of oil paints.  The material used to communicate ideas in artworks might not be not irrelevant, but is not very important either.  Acrylic and oil can happily be combined.  What counts is actually the content.

That was the climax of this particular blog post, narratively speaking.  There is no escape from narrative.  This next bit is the denouement - even the most apparently narrativeless films have a narrative.  It is the story of their creation, the context of their making, the history of their viewing audience, their influence on filmmaking, but also their content - if a blank screen has duration, it has narrative.  If a blank screen doesn't have duration, it still has narrative.  This is because narrative is the way everyone attempts to understand the world and navigate life.

There are backwater narratives that don't appear to have any story, but they still have meaning.