scholarly journals Left Bank Cinema: Memories of History and the Experience of Time

2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-18
Author(s):  
VG Bijoy Philip
Keyword(s):  
Film History ◽  
Left Bank ◽  
French Cinema ◽  
Film Genre ◽  
Alain Resnais ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Experience Of Time ◽  
French New Wave ◽  
History Of ◽  
Spatio Temporal

In this paper, I use two films—Les Statues MeurrentAussi (Statues also Die, 1953) directed by Resnais and Marker and Sans Soleil (Sunless, 1983) as representatives of Left Bank cinema to show how they construct experiences of time and memory using various modernist strategies. Key to this is the use of a mental journey genre in modernist cinema and the construction of a facial dispositif which leads to a perceptual experiencing of inner states. Les Statues MeurrentAussi is a key film in the history of French cinema as it highlights Alain Resnais’ and Chris Marker’s early commitment towards a politically avant-garde filmmaking style. The film was banned for many decades because it was highly critical of France’s colonial interests. The film is also a proof to the less emphasised collaboration between two pioneering directors and especially in their use of the essay film genre. Sans Soleil on the other hand is considered as a philosophical masterpiece because of its meditations on time and memory. In taking these two films, I hope not only to demonstrate cinema’s capability to generate affective spatio-temporal states but also to highlight a piece of film history which is often misappropriated under the tag of the French New Wave.

Intermedial Dialogues

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marion Schmid
Keyword(s):  
Film History ◽  
The Other ◽  
Discursive Construction ◽  
Left Bank ◽  
New Wave ◽  
Alain Resnais ◽  
French New Wave ◽  
Eric Rohmer ◽  
Andre Bazin ◽  
Bank Group

Casting fresh light on one of the most important movements in film history, Intermedial Dialogues: The French New Wave and the Other Arts is the first comprehensive study of the New Wave's relationship with the older arts. Traversing the fields of literature, theatre, painting, architecture and photography, and drawing on André Bazin alongside recent theories of intermediality, it investigates the 'impure', intermedial aesthetics of New Wave cinema. Filmmakers under discussion include critics-turned-directors François Truffaut, Eric Rohmer, Jean-Luc Godard, Jacques Rivette and Claude Chabrol, members of the Left Bank Group Alain Resnais, AgnèsVarda and Chris Marker, but also lesser-known directors, notably the 'secret child of the New Wave', Guy Gilles. This wide-ranging book offers an original reading of the complex, often ambivalent ways in which the New Wave engages the other arts in both its discursive construction and filmic practice.

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.

Introduction

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-11
Author(s):  
Marion Schmid
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Film History ◽  
Discursive Construction ◽  
New Wave ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Medium Specificity ◽  
French New Wave ◽  
Ambivalent Relationship ◽  
Struggle For Recognition ◽  
Purity And Impurity

The introduction contextualises the French New Wave's ambivalent relationship to the older arts with regard to cinema's wider struggle for recognition in the course of the twentieth century. Surveying the debates around medium specificity, cinematic 'purity' and 'impurity' from the classical avant-garde to the Nouvelle Vague, it addresses the French New Wave's complex discursive construction in relation to the more established arts. Reframing traditional studies of the French New Wave, it argues for an intermedial approach to illuminate this seminal movement of film history. The corpus, rationale and approach of the book are also introduced and clarified.

Sounds of February, Smells of October: The Russian Revolution as Sensory Experience

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jan Plamper
Keyword(s):  
Cognitive Process ◽  
Russian Revolution ◽  
News Item ◽  
Historical Event ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Experience Of Time ◽  
Sensory History ◽  
Holistic Concept ◽  
History Of ◽  
Sensory Impression

Abstract Temporally speaking, the Russian Revolution of 1917 was not a news item, not even a rumor, but first and foremost a novel sensory impression—gunshots with live ammunition from unusual places, the smell of burnt police files. This article explores the sensory history of the revolution through ego-documents like diaries and memoirs. It tracks in detail how people of various backgrounds in Petrograd and Moscow lived the olfactory class struggles after February and the taste excesses of the post-October “wine pogroms,” how they expressed a new experience of time in a sensory idiom, and how they ultimately became habituated to the new sounds and sights of revolutionary Russia. Historiography is at a propitious moment to move beyond a dichotomy of discourse versus “raw” experience: conjoining the histories of experience, the senses, and the emotions, the article probes what is to be gained from interpreting a world-historical event with a concept of experience as an integrated, multimodal, simultaneous sensory-emotional-cognitive process. Avant-garde artists, contemporaries of the Russian Revolution, foreshadowed such a holistic concept of experience by a century.

François Truffaut

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alistair Fox
Keyword(s):  
New Wave ◽  
French Cinema ◽  
Feature Film ◽  
Steven Spielberg ◽  
Hollywood Cinema ◽  
New Hollywood ◽  
French New Wave ◽  
History Of ◽  
Auteur Cinema ◽  
Iconic Figure

François Truffaut (b. 1932–d. 1984) is renowned both for the originality and the enduring popularity of his films, being considered an iconic figure of the French New Wave, a movement for which he was an aggressive and controversial spokesman. Prior to becoming a filmmaker, Truffaut was a critic and film theorist, contributing to the journal Cahiers du Cinéma. Notorious for his ferocious attack on traditional French “quality cinema,” he also asserted that the director is the true author of a film, on the grounds that a director’s stylistic and thematic choices reveal his identity as surely as fingerprints. Having turned to filmmaking, Truffaut achieved instant success with his first feature film, The 400 Blows (Les 400 coups), which gained a prize at the Cannes Festival in 1959 and was universally acclaimed. Thereafter, he regularly produced a film every two years, accumulating an oeuvre of twenty-five films, a number of which, such as Day for Night (La Nuit américaine, 1973) and The Last Metro (Le Dernier Métro, 1980), were highly successful both in France and abroad. Subsequently, Truffaut’s reputation suffered a decline as his popularity grew with the incorporation of elements of genre cinema into his films, which caused certain of his fellow filmmakers, such as Jean-Luc Godard, to see him as betraying the ideals of the New Wave for the sake of achieving commercial success. In recent years, however, there has been a revival of interest in Truffaut, reflected in several retrospectives of his films, and the discovery of complexities in his work that have modified earlier appraisals of him as a sentimental, lightweight filmmaker. Indisputably, Truffaut has exerted an enormous influence on subsequent filmmaking in France and elsewhere, his influence being most evident in the auteur cinema of le Jeune Cinéma Français (Young French Cinema) of the 1990s and 2000s, the New Hollywood cinema of the 1970s, recent American “indie” movies, and various “New Waves” in a number of national cinemas such as those of Germany, Denmark, Taiwan, Australia, and New Zealand. Prominent contemporary filmmakers such as Steven Spielberg, Arnaud Desplechin, and Tsai Ming Liang have freely confessed their debt to Truffaut, leaving little doubt that Truffaut is emerging as one of the most influential figures in the history of cinema. Tragically, Truffaut’s career was cut short by his death from a brain tumor in 1984, leaving a number of foreshadowed projects unrealized.

Looking for Myriam

2016 ◽  
Vol 2 (3) ◽  
pp. 29-53 ◽  
Author(s):  
Monica Dall'Asta
Keyword(s):  
Detailed Analysis ◽  
Cultural Context ◽  
French Cinema ◽  
Alain Resnais ◽  
Found Footage ◽  
Michel Leiris ◽  
History Of ◽  
Andre Bazin ◽  
Chris Marker ◽  
Critical Notes

Despite the recent multiplication of studies in found footage cinema, the fog surrounding the figure of Myriam Borsoutsky remains thick. This article elaborates the rare extant information about her work to retrace an important chapter in the history of found footage cinema in France, in which women have played a major role. In an attempt to delineate a specifically female genealogy in the history of French compilation film, Myriam's work is studied alongside that of Nicole Vedrès, and situated in the cultural context of a net of relationships that includes other women, for instance Denise Tual and Yannick Bellon, as well as such masters of French cinema as Pierre Braunberger, Sacha Guitry, Henri Langlois, Alain Resnais, André Bazin, Chris Marker, Jean-Luc Godard, and Michel Leiris. A detailed analysis of two major works in this genealogy, Paris 1900 (dir. Nicole Vedrès, 1947) and Bullfight (dir. Myriam and Pierre Braunberger, 1951), draws upon Vedrès's own writings and André Bazin's critical notes on the films. The last section addresses the meaning of the neologism neomontage, coined by Bazin in his review of Bullfight to describe Myriam's “diabolical” editing abilities.

scholarly journals ‘I didn't think I'd be working on this type of film’: Berberian Sound Studio and British Art Film as Alternative Film History

2016 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 262-277
Author(s):  
Paul Newland
Keyword(s):  
Film History ◽  
Narrative Structure ◽  
First Century ◽  
National Cinema ◽  
Art Cinema ◽  
Film Genre ◽  
British Art ◽  
History Of ◽  
Art Film ◽  
Twenty First Century

It could be said that the films of the director Peter Strickland are in many ways exemplars of a rich strain of twenty-first-century British art cinema. Like work by Andrea Arnold, Steve McQueen, Jonathan Glazer, Lynne Ramsay, Ben Wheatley and Sam Taylor-Wood, among others, Strickland's three feature-length films to date are thought-provoking, well-crafted, prestigious, quality productions. But in this article I show that while Strickland's second feature-length film, Berberian Sound Studio, conforms to some of the commonly held understandings of the key traits of British art cinema – especially through its specific history of production and exhibition, its characterisation, its narrative structure, and its evidencing of the vision of an auteur – ultimately it does not sit comfortably within most extant histories of British national cinema or film genre, including art cinema. More than this, though, I argue that in its challenge to such extant critical traditions, Berberian Sound Studio effectively operates as ‘art film as alternative film history’. I demonstrate that it does this through the foregrounding of Strickland's cine-literacy, which notices and in turn foregrounds the historically transnational nature of cinema, and, at the same time, playfully and knowingly disrupts well-established cultural categories and coherent, homogenous histories of cinema.

Misreading Egypt

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jesse Schotter
Keyword(s):  
New Media ◽  
Narrative Form ◽  
Experimental Film ◽  
Tower Of Babel ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Sergei Eisenstein ◽  
History Of ◽  
The One ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Modern Technologies

The first chapter of Hieroglyphic Modernisms exposes the complex history of Western misconceptions of Egyptian writing from antiquity to the present. Hieroglyphs bridge the gap between modern technologies and the ancient past, looking forward to the rise of new media and backward to the dispersal of languages in the mythical moment of the Tower of Babel. The contradictory ways in which hieroglyphs were interpreted in the West come to shape the differing ways that modernist writers and filmmakers understood the relationship between writing, film, and other new media. On the one hand, poets like Ezra Pound and film theorists like Vachel Lindsay and Sergei Eisenstein use the visual languages of China and of Egypt as a more primal or direct alternative to written words. But Freud, Proust, and the later Eisenstein conversely emphasize the phonetic qualities of Egyptian writing, its similarity to alphabetical scripts. The chapter concludes by arguing that even avant-garde invocations of hieroglyphics depend on narrative form through an examination of Hollis Frampton’s experimental film Zorns Lemma.

Sea Urchins and Circuses: The Modernist Natural Histories of Jean Painlevé and Alexander Calder

2018 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 187-211
Author(s):  
Patricia E. Chu
Keyword(s):  
New Media ◽  
Sea Urchins ◽  
Life Sciences ◽  
Three Dimensional ◽  
Machine Age ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
History Of ◽  
And Performance ◽  
The One ◽  
Natural Historian

The Paris avant-garde milieu from which both Cirque Calder/Calder's Circus and Painlevé’s early films emerged was a cultural intersection of art and the twentieth-century life sciences. In turning to the style of current scientific journals, the Paris surrealists can be understood as engaging the (life) sciences not simply as a provider of normative categories of materiality to be dismissed, but as a companion in apprehending the “reality” of a world beneath the surface just as real as the one visible to the naked eye. I will focus in this essay on two modernist practices in new media in the context of the history of the life sciences: Jean Painlevé’s (1902–1989) science films and Alexander Calder's (1898–1976) work in three-dimensional moving art and performance—the Circus. In analyzing Painlevé’s work, I discuss it as exemplary of a moment when life sciences and avant-garde technical methods and philosophies created each other rather than being classified as separate categories of epistemological work. In moving from Painlevé’s films to Alexander Calder's Circus, Painlevé’s cinematography remains at the forefront; I use his film of one of Calder's performances of the Circus, a collaboration the men had taken two decades to complete. Painlevé’s depiction allows us to see the elements of Calder's work that mark it as akin to Painlevé’s own interest in a modern experimental organicism as central to the so-called machine-age. Calder's work can be understood as similarly developing an avant-garde practice along the line between the bestiary of the natural historian and the bestiary of the modern life scientist.

National Institute of Art and Design named after Kamoliddin Behzod

2019 ◽  
Vol 5 (4) ◽  
pp. 104-108
Author(s):  
Dilzoda Alimkulova
Keyword(s):  
20Th Century ◽  
Art And Design ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
History Of ◽  
20Th Century Art

The art of Uzbekistan of the first decade of 20th century (1920-30s) is worthily recognized as the brightest period in history of Uzbek national art. We may observe big interest among the artwork which was created during the years of Independence of Uzbekistan towards the art of 20th century and mainly it may be seen in form, style, idea and semantics. Despite the significant gap between the 20th century art tendencies and Independence period, there is very big influence of avant-garde style in works of such artists as Javlon Umarbekov, Akmal Ikramjanov, Alisher Mirzaev, Tokhir Karimov, Daima Rakhmanbekova and others.

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