In late 1980, the American scholar Brian Henderson came to a screen studies conference in Perth, Australia, and delivered a keynote lecture on “Film Theory and the Avant-Garde”. It pursued a line of thought Henderson had previewed in his then just-released book – one that has remained significant to me every year since – titled, plainly but powerfully, A Critique of Film Theory.

In essence, Henderson's talk argued that so-called classical film theory (from its earliest pioneers up through Christian Metz in the 1960s) was proving itself, more egregiously every day, unable to deal with the fact, the history and the challenge of experimental or avant-garde film (and video). This inability was due to the unavoidable truth that, almost a priori, film theory excluded most experimentation from its definition of the film object and its proposed “essence”. For these theories, cinema remained – in business-as-usual mode – a matter of storytelling, pictorial representation, and the illusion of fictional characters in their world. Although semiotic-andbeyond approaches (including Metz's own later work) had intensively and critically examined the codes of narrative by 1980, and regularly gestured toward “other”, alternative cinemas, it nonetheless ended up “preserv[ing] the centrality of narrative film” in the relentless bias of its analyses, case studies and curricula.