Producing the Avant-Garde: Toward a Materialist History of the Historiography of New American Cinema

Original research article; reviewed material; received: 2026.03.10; reviewed: 2026.04.16; accepted: 2026.05.11

Łukasz Kiełpiński

l.kielpinski@uw.edu.pl
University of Warsaw (Poland)
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4977-9089

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.

Supporting Agencies

This research was supported by the state budget under the Polish Minister of Education and Science’s "Perły nauki'" program, project no. PN/01/0039/2022. The funding awarded for this publication was PLN 0.00, with a total project value of PLN 200,000.00.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Keywords:

avant-garde, archives, materialism, Jonas Mekas, Edouard de Laurot

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Published
2026-06-30

Cited by

Kiełpiński, Łukasz (2026) “Producing the Avant-Garde: Toward a Materialist History of the Historiography of New American Cinema”, Kwartalnik Filmowy, (134), pp. 57–84. doi: 10.36744/kf.4859.

Authors

Łukasz Kiełpiński 
l.kielpinski@uw.edu.pl
University of Warsaw Poland
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4977-9089

PhD candidate at the Doctoral School of Humanities, University of Warsaw. Editor at the academic journal Widok. Theories and Practices of Visual Culture. He has contributed to journals and magazines such as Kwartalnik Filmowy, Kultura Współczesna, Teksty Drugie, Stan Rzeczy, Czas Kultury, Pleograf, Ekrany, and Kino. He is the principal investigator in a “Perły nauki” research grant, funded by the Polish Ministry of Science and Higher Education; his project focuses on the critical history of the postwar American film avant-garde. He has conducted research in this field at the University of Toronto (2023-24), the Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen (IWM) in Vienna as Jerzy Giedroyc Junior Fellow (2024-25), and the University of California, Berkeley as Fulbright Visiting Student Researcher (2025-26). He is also a film critic awarded in the Krzysztof Mętrak Competition for the best Polish film criticism from young authors (2023-2025).



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