Cinema as Performance

2020 ◽  
pp. 157-253
Author(s):  
Jonathan Walley
Keyword(s):  
Intimate Relationship ◽  
Live Performance ◽  
Site Specific ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Moving Images ◽  
Art Form ◽  
Expanded Cinema ◽  
Art Forms ◽  
The Moment

Chapter 3 is the first of four chapters that make up Part II of Cinema Expanded. This part of the book considers different general modes that expanded cinema has taken, each mode representing aesthetic territory and ideas usually associated with a different art form (e.g. performance or sculpture). Chapter 3 considers a variant of expanded cinema that integrates live performance into projection of moving images, usually called “projection performance” or “projector performance.” In this type of expanded work, the tactility of both filmstrip and projector are on display, as is the performer (typically the filmmaker—the representative of avant-garde cinema’s more intimate relationship between artist and audience). But alongside these markers of cinema’s physicality and presence is the ephemerality of live performance. Non-repeatable, site-specific, aleatory instead of mechanistically automatic, projection performance is centered upon the moment when the material of film is transformed into the far less tactile play of light, shadow, and illusion, and when objects give way to processes and experiences. The integration of performance into cinema was initially understood as a blurring of art forms. But the intermedia film-theater hybrids of the first wave of expanded cinema gave way to subsequent projection performances that claimed a performative dimension for cinema itself, rather than thinking of it as an alien form grafted onto film in a new intermedia format.

When Music Unfolds into Image

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jean-Baptiste Barrière ◽  
Aleksi Barrière
Keyword(s):  
Contemporary Music ◽  
Video Art ◽  
Specific Form ◽  
Media Art ◽  
Live Performance ◽  
Cross Media ◽  
Cultural Roots ◽  
Art Form ◽  
Technological Tools ◽  
Art Forms

The authors reflect on their own experience of developing a specific form of multimedia live performance: the visual concert. The various video projects they realized for works by Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho serve as examples illustrating a more general aesthetic question: what can video art bring to music within the concert ritual? Answers are suggested first in a general assessment of the scientific (perception and cognition research) and cultural roots and parameters of cross-media art forms, and second in an analysis of the contemporary technological tools that allow the visual concert to move beyond the antiquated paradigms of synesthesia, synchronization, or aleatory autonomy of juxtaposed media, and thus to meet the challenges of contemporary music. These mostly unexplored links between new musical techniques and video art open new opportunities that expand the listener’s experience of music and suggest a practice that can become an art form of its own.

The Two Expanded Cinemas

2020 ◽  
pp. 41-99
Author(s):  
Jonathan Walley
Keyword(s):  
Perceived Threat ◽  
Traditional Art ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Art Form ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Expanded Cinema ◽  
Key Factor ◽  
History Of ◽  
Two Phases

This chapter, one of two that make up Part I of the book, provides a revised history of expanded cinema from the mid-1960s to the late 1970s. It divides this period into two phases or waves of expanded cinema. During the first phase, the term was more or less synonymous with “intermedia,” connoting hybridity, the dissolution of artistic boundaries, and the questioning of traditional art forms. But the liberatory rhetoric of this phase was countered by concerns that the expansion of cinema threatened to dilute and destabilize the art form that generations of filmmakers and film critics had worked to establish. It was within avant-garde film that the perceived threat to cinema’s identity caused the most anxiety, as that mode of film practice had always been the most preoccupied with the nature of cinema. Within a few years, the term “expanded cinema” was reclaimed by filmmakers whose work extended avant-garde cinema’s longstanding tradition of specifying the cinematic into a wide range of new, “expanded” forms. This phase of expanded cinema lasted through the 1970s into the first few years of the 1980s. Chapter 1 also introduces two other major themes: a historical process of negotiation between cinema’s specificity and its connections to the other arts, which works of expanded cinema enact, and the interplay between two conceptions of cinema—as a physical material and an ephemeral experience. This reciprocal movement between the material and ephemeral is a key factor in expanded cinema’s formal mutability.

Introduction

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-38
Author(s):  
Jonathan Walley
Keyword(s):  
New Media ◽  
Historical Perspective ◽  
Social Values ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Art Form ◽  
Expanded Cinema ◽  
Experimental Cinema ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Critical Literature

This chapter defines expanded cinema, traces its history broadly from the 1960s to the present, and reviews previous scholarly and critical literature on the subject. It argues that while expanded cinema has traditionally been seen as a rejection or abandonment of cinema in its conventional form, and as a form of “intermedia” or “new media,” with historical perspective it is better understood as an attempt to define and explore the limits and essences of cinema as an art form. While it takes forms commonly associated with the other arts (including installation, performance, sculptural objects, and even text), it is precisely by exploring this aesthetic territory that avant-garde/experimental filmmakers have tested the boundaries and clarified the specific nature of their art form. The introduction also defines the category of “avant-garde” or “experimental” cinema, defining it as a distinct cinematic culture and historical tradition, which represents a set of aesthetic and social values that can be traced through works of expanded cinema. The title of the introduction indicates the book’s larger argument: that expanded cinema does not represent the end of cinema as we know it, but its persistence, albeit in new and unconventional forms.

Perception

2020 ◽  
pp. 1027-1055
Author(s):  
Christopher Peacocke
Keyword(s):  
Music Theory ◽  
Mental States ◽  
Live Performance ◽  
States Of Affairs ◽  
Distinctive Features ◽  
Relational Properties ◽  
Art Form ◽  
Art Forms ◽  
Musical Event ◽  
The Aesthetic

This chapter argues that the perception of music involves more than the syntactic and other relations recognized in most music theory. More precisely, the perception of music involves hearing features of the music metaphorically-as mental states and other states of affairs. It also involves hearing the musical event as an action. There are many examples of the aesthetic exploitation by composers of the capacity for perception of various relational properties of these general kinds. There are also differences and similarities between music and poetry, for which there is an account in the presented framework. The account also explains the possibility of music communicating new and unnamed emotions. The perception of relational properties is equally crucial in articulating the distinctive features of live performance. Music also contrasts with other art forms, in that the perception of relational properties, unlike literature, depiction or dance, is almost the only resource available to the composer. This makes the perception of relational properties of music uniquely significant for this art form.

Macaronics as What Eludes Translation

Paragraph ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 38 (2) ◽  
pp. 214-230
Author(s):  
Haun Saussy
Keyword(s):  
Print Culture ◽  
The Other ◽  
Digital Code ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
The Moment

‘Translation’ is one of our all-purpose metaphors for almost any kind of mediation or connection: we ask of a principle how it ‘translates’ into practice, we announce initiatives to ‘translate’ the genome into predictions, and so forth. But the metaphor of translation — of the discovery of equivalents and their mutual substitution — so attracts our attention that we forget the other kinds of inter-linguistic contact, such as transcription, mimicry, borrowing or calque. In a curious echo of the macaronic writings of the era of the dawn of print, the twentieth century's avant-garde, already foreseeing the end of print culture, experimented with hybrid languages. Their untranslatability under the usual definitions of ‘translation’ suggests a revival of this avant-garde practice, as the mainstream aesthetic of the moment invests in ‘convergence’ and the subsumption of all media into digital code.

Cinema Expanded

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan Walley
Keyword(s):  
New Media ◽  
Film History ◽  
Video Art ◽  
Experimental Film ◽  
Art World ◽  
Film Culture ◽  
Moving Image ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Expanded Cinema ◽  
History Of

Cinema Expanded: Avant-Garde Film in the Age of Intermedia is a comprehensive historical survey of expanded cinema from the mid-1960s to the present. It offers an historical and theoretical revision of the concept of expanded cinema, placing it in the context of avant-garde/experimental film history rather than the history of new media, intermedia, or multimedia. The book argues that while expanded cinema has taken an incredible variety of forms (including moving image installation, multi-screen films, live cinematic performance, light shows, shadow plays, computer-generated images, video art, sculptural objects, and texts), it is nonetheless best understood as an ongoing meditation by filmmakers on the nature of cinema, specifically, and on its relationship to the other arts. Cinema Expanded also extends its historical and theoretical scope to avant-garde film culture more generally, placing expanded cinema in that context while also considering what it has to tell us about the moving image in the art world and new media environment.

Contemporary Art and the Problem of Music: Towards a Musical Contemporary Art

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-26
Author(s):  
G. DOUGLAS BARRETT
Keyword(s):  
Contemporary Art ◽  
Contemporary Music ◽  
Conceptual Art ◽  
Social Process ◽  
Theoretical Concept ◽  
Sound Art ◽  
Art Theory ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Absolute Music ◽  
Art Form

Abstract This article elaborates the art-theoretical concept of ‘the contemporary’ along with formal differences between contemporary music and contemporary art. Contemporary art emerges from the radical transformations of the historical avant-garde and neo-avant-garde that have led to post-conceptual art – a generic art beyond specific mediums that prioritizes discursive meaning and social process – while contemporary music struggles with its status as a non-conceptual art form that inherits its concept from aesthetic modernism and absolute music. The article also considers the category of sound art and discusses some of the ways it, too, is at odds with contemporary art's generic and post-conceptual condition. I argue that, despite their respective claims to contemporaneity, neither sound art nor contemporary music is contemporary in the historical sense of the term articulated in art theory. As an alternative to these categories, I propose ‘musical contemporary art’ to describe practices that depart in consequential ways from new/contemporary music and sound art.

scholarly journals Subtitling Calligraphy

2021 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 115-133
Author(s):  
Markus Nornes
Keyword(s):  
East Asia ◽  
Human Body ◽  
Chinese Character ◽  
Intimate Relationship ◽  
Global Dimension ◽  
Written Language ◽  
Chinese Cinema ◽  
Specific Difference ◽  
Art Forms ◽  
Sister Arts

Abstract This essay examines a regional, not global, dimension of Chinese cinema: the Chinese character in its brushed form. Calligraphy and cinema have an intimate relationship in East Asia. Indeed, the ubiquity of the brushed word in cinema is one element that actually ties works in Korean, Japanese and Sinophone Asia together as a regional cinema. At the same time, I will explore the very specific difference of Chinese filmmakers’ use of written language. On first glance, cinema and calligraphy would appear as radically different art forms. On second glance, they present themselves as sister arts. Both are art forms built from records of the human body moving in (an absent) time and space. The essay ends with a consideration of subtitling, upon which Chinese cinema’s global dimension is predicated. How does investigating this very problem lead us to rethinking the nature of the cinematic subtitle, which is very much alive―a truly movable type?

scholarly journals Embodying the Site: the Here and Now in Site-Specific Dance Performance

2005 ◽  
Vol 21 (4) ◽  
pp. 367-381 ◽  
Author(s):  
Victoria Hunter
Keyword(s):  
Creative Process ◽  
Dance Performance ◽  
Site Specific ◽  
The Creation ◽  
Spirit Of Place ◽  
The Moment ◽  
The University ◽  
The Relationship

In this article, Victoria Hunter explores the concept of the ‘here and now’ in the creation of site-specific dance performance, in response to Doreen Massey's questioning of the fixity of the concept of the ‘here and now’ during the recent RESCEN seminar on ‘Making Space’, in which she challenged the concept of a singular fixed ‘present’, suggesting instead that we exist in a constant production of ‘here and nows’ akin to ‘being in the moment’. Here the concept is applied to an analysis of the author's recent performance work created as part of a PhD investigation into the relationship between the site and the creative process in site-specific dance performance. In this context the notion of the ‘here and now’ is discussed in relation to the concept of dance embodiment informed by the site and the genius loci, or ‘spirit of place’. Victoria Hunter is a Lecturer in Dance at the University of Leeds, who is currently researching a PhD in site-specific dance performance.

On self-extraction

2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 11-28 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nevarez Encinias
Keyword(s):  
Live Performance ◽  
Art Form ◽  
And Performance ◽  
At Home

Written under a pandemic stay-at-home order, this article conceives of flamenco choreography and performance as an artisanal craft, likening several of the tradition’s practices to the act of making a coffee. Drawing upon historical descriptions of the art form, theoretical debates from the postmodern shift in dance-making and personal anecdote, the article scrutinizes the notion of ‘self-expression’ and confronts flamenco’s enduring reputation as a dance of extravagant emotion, passion, spontaneity and authenticity. The article experiments with experiential and poetic modes of address to ruminate broadly on artisanship as a creative model for dance-makers, and proposes an interdisciplinary frame-of-mind for choreographers, from a time when traditional live performance was on pause.

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