Voyeurism is the standard model of film perception; peeping into others' lives is the standard behaviour of the moviegoer. Popular cinema has even developed a specific set of conventions - called the zero-style - to provide the viewer with the comfort of looking while being invisible. For example, this purpose was served by the rule forbidding the actor/actress to look straight into the camera lens; such a look would necessarily expose the audience engaged in its scopofiliac activity and make them also the object of observation, however imagined. (But when the cinema stopped avoiding the look into the lens, it lost no time in transforming it into another, this time more "transparent" convention).
The audience of a typical feature film looks mainly at bodies. Bodies dressed or undressed, fashionably made-up and coiffured or picturesquely dishevelled, silent or talkative, beaten-up, killed or experiencing orgasm. They are the dramatic nucleus of the film, they determine the structure of the plot; and this privileged position makes their treatment and adventures in the film a part of an ideologically conditioned strategy. They not only co-determine the commonplace image of the world, but accomplish persuasive functions by taking a stand towards all that is allowed, forbidden or recommended.
The avant-garde cinema has either cast off these conventions or treats them in an arbitrary way, putting them to other purposes.
In the classic period ot the 20's and 30's the film avant-garde typically presented an aesthetic attitude towards the body which was transformed - as in the films of Man Ray - into an objet d'art (a means of aesthetic pleasure). In the contemporary surrealist movies (eg. those by Louis Bunuel), the deconstructed image of the body was a way of expressing the surrealist worldview (insane love).
However, the new, multiform film avant-garde arrived at the opinion that the body images typical for the classic period remain subjected to the voyeuristic look, seeking in cinema only visual pleasure. Just as in the popular cinema, here also the woman was assigned only the part of the looked-at object.
The films of the new avant-garde show the body through functions and images which go far beyond the obligatory cultural conventions. The explorations of the body often, and with premeditation, break the various taboos. The images of the liberated body are confronted with images of enslavement. Carnality and sexuality are elevated to the rank of the most important subjects of neo-avant-garde cinema. Even in these films, however, we can sometimes observe a look, which, although uncompromising, can be suspected of a will to dominate. Stan Brakhage's film Window Water Baby Moving (1959), in which he registers the birth of his daughter, is a direct expression of feeling and, at the same time, a calculated symbolic construction, recounting the genesis. Thus he is able to retain male artistic control over a specifically female act of childbirth (recall here the rituals of some primary tribes, where the man symbolically enacts childbirth, appropriating the significance and value related to the act).
The film Window Water Baby Moving is dominated by the expression of the body's vitality. In another of Brakhage's film, The Act of Seeing with One's Own Eyes, we are dealing with emotions on the other extreme; we are terrified by the objective meatiness of a body which is cut, carved, skinned, measured and analysed. Here also expression takes ascendancy over discourse, confronting us with another border experience - with death.
In the Jean Genet film Un Chant d'Amour (1950) the enslaved body is opposed - in a typically romatic manner - to the free imagination which transforms enforced autoeroticism into a sexual encounter with another; in the works of Kenneth Anger, e.g, Fireworks (1947), imagination speaks a language of myth and symbolism. Both are suffused with eroticism and (homo)sexual emotions which oscillate between direct expression and symbolic narration. The works of Genet and - especially - Anger, have given birth to an aesthetics of a body seeking its pleasure in pain, to forms of expression uniting sadism and masochism, and to a vision of death as the ultimate sexual experience.
A special place in this trend of film exploration is occupied by the work of Carolee Schneemann; in her films we find a direct visualisation of sexual pleasure, embodied in their very structure. Ecstatic body behaviour, orgasm, exploding with colour laid directly on the film and expressed through violent scratches of emulsion, are the dominating features of Fuses (1967). The carnality, physicality of sensation is translated into physical action, literally affecting the film material (aided, of course, by the classic means of emotional expression, like e.g. multiple exposure).
The films of Jayne Parker, such as I Dish (1982) or K (1989) address the issues of identity, subjectivity, objectivity, consumption and defecation through the use of a "carnal" convention of the film performance. Claudia Schillinger creates, in her turn, a poetics of sexual perversion (Between, 1989), while Cleo Ubelman presents an ultimately objectified, uniformized body, subjected to endless, unemotionally executed and accepted ritual tortures (Mano Destra, 1986).