Minor Dedications

The dedication in experimental film has been a persistent, if overlooked field of aesthetic practice. Even among filmmakers, the dedication’s evocation of a social and familial world of intimacy and experience is often dismissed or seen as incidental to the work itself. This essay proposes that we approach dedications as meaningful formal procedures in which a host of influences, aesthetic lineages, and social relations are organized and revealed. Dedications provide a paratextual space that expands and complicates the separation of viewer and film, and because of this, they can function as social connectors. Though dedications abound in many artistic practices, the experimental film dedication is unique for the way it has been used to express a more vernacular and, following Tom Gunning’s theorization of “minor filmmakers,” a “minor” method of locating a film within a social and aesthetic constellation and for determining a film’s mode of address. I examine different approaches to minor dedications in the work of Joseph Cornell and in more recent films by Deborah Stratman, Beatrice Gibson, and Jonathan Schwartz.