The Perfect Human: An avant-garde rebellion against Classical Hollywood style

2015 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 141-144
Author(s):  
Derek Dubois
Author(s):  
Todd Berliner

Illustrating some of the points made in chapter 5, chapter 6 offers an extended analysis of some complex tendencies in Raging Bull’s cinematography, editing, and sound devices. The film tests the limits of the classical Hollywood style and sometimes crosses over into avant-garde practice. Raging Bull offers an illustrative case study of the boundaries of Hollywood’s stylistic systems.


2020 ◽  
pp. 34-53

This essay examines two contrasting aesthetics of the voice in early 1930s French cinema and the role that music played in each. Filmed theater, or théâtre filmé, emerged from the conception that sound cinema was primarily a recording medium. In French theatrical adaptations, the speaking voice took precedence over all other elements of the soundtrack. The author argues, however, that in théâtre filmé, speech takes on almost musical qualities, folding music and sound effects into the voice itself. Avant-garde filmmakers took a contrasting approach, rejecting the restriction of camera movement imposed by the theatrical model and hoping to recapture some of the visual freedom characteristic of silent cinema. These filmmakers told their stories with as little spoken dialogue as possible, incorporating music prominently into their soundtracks in order to silence the speaking voice. Though the intent may have been to strip the voice of its dominance within the soundtrack, these directors’ strategic denial of the voice often granted it a much greater significance. By examining early experiments with the voice on the soundtrack in the transition years—including those by Jean Renoir, René Clair, and Jean Grémillon—the author’s analysis expands the concept of “vococentrism,” as articulated by Michel Chion and David Neumeyer, to include different models of understanding the voice in cinema beyond those found in classical Hollywood and helps shed light on competing conceptions of the voice’s role in cinema before practices became codified.


CounterText ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 2 (3) ◽  
pp. 283-306
Author(s):  
Tamara Brzostowska-Tereszkiewicz

Multisensory and cross-modal perception have been recognised as crucial for shaping modernist epistemology, aesthetics, and art. Illustrative examples of how it might be possible to test equivalences (or mutual translatability) between different sensual modalities can be found in theoretical pronouncements on the arts and in artistic production of both the avant-garde and high modernism. While encouraging multisensory, cross-modal, and multimodal artistic experiments, twentieth-century artists set forth a new language of sensory integration. This article addresses the problem of the literary representation of multisensory and cross-modal experience as a particular challenge for translation, which is not only a linguistic and cross-cultural operation but also cross-sensual, involving the gap between different culture-specific perceptual realities. The problem of sensory perception remains a vast underexplored terrain of modernist translation history and theory, and yet it is one with potentially far-reaching ramifications for both a cultural anthropology of translation and modernism's sensory anthropology. The framework of this study is informed by Douglas Robinson's somatics of translation and Clive Scott's perceptive phenomenology of translation, which help to put forth the notion of sensory equivalence as a pragmatic correspondence between the source and target texts, appealing to a range of somato-sensory (audial, visual, haptic, gestural, articulatory kinaesthetic, proprioceptive) modalities of reader response.


2018 ◽  
Vol 36 (1) ◽  
pp. 48-66
Author(s):  
Idoia Murga Castro

Centenary celebrations are being held between 2016 and 2018 to mark the first consecutive tours of Diaghilev's Ballets Russes in Spain. This study analyses the Spanish reception of Le Sacre du Printemps (The Rite of Spring) (1913), one of its most avant-garde pieces. Although the original work was never performed in Spain as a complete ballet, its influence was felt deeply in the work of certain Spanish choreographers, composers, painters and intellectuals during the so-called Silver Age, the period of modernisation and cultural expansion which extended from the end of the nineteenth century to the beginning of the Spanish Civil War.


Author(s):  
Jesse Schotter

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.


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