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Ideology, The Counterculture, And The Avant Garde: Positioning The Filmmaker And The Spectator In Four Films Of Late-1960s America, Mary Bronstein Cantoral

College of Communication Master of Arts Theses

Kenneth Anger’s Invocation of My Demon Brother (1969), Emile de Antonio’s In the Year of the Pig (1968), Jonas Mekas’s Diaries, Notes, and Sketches: Also Known as Walden (1969) and Haskell Wexler’s Medium Cool (1969) constitute historical artifacts as well as discursive interventions intended to shape a vision of the nation. Therein emerged varying imbrications of ideology and the volatility of the era, along with palpable disharmony that scholars have identified between the youth movement’s cultural and political camps.¹ In each case, the film’s avant-garde status did not, in and of itself, confer liberatory ideology. While all but Medium …