Modèle / Contre-modèle

Written by Jonas Mekas for Film Culture in 1955, the article "Experimental Film in America" was particularly critical against the film avant-garde in America considered at that time by the young film critic as "the imprisoned self". Especially violent against filmmakers whose Jonas Mekas will defend the work later with passion and no limits – from Sidney Peterson to Stan Brakhage, Ian Hugo or Kenneth Anger – this lampoon reflected then the need of breaking the accepted ideas inherited from the tradition of the avant-gardism in cinema, but also the necessity, for the film critics, to canalize the dispersed energy of a young and rising generation of filmmakers. Conceived from this founder and critiqueable text, the program Model, Counter Model offers to revisit the use against type, and sometime necessary, of films by critics.