scholarly journals Remediating Past Images. The Temporality of “Found Footage” in Gábor Bódy’s American Torso

2014 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 59-78
Author(s):  
Judit Pieldner

Abstract Along Laura U. Marks’s thoughts on the “disappearing image” as embodied experience, the article proposes to bring into discussion particular modes of occurrence of “past images,” whether in form of the use of archival/found footage or of creating visual archaisms in the spirit of archival recordings, within the practice of the Hungarian experimental film making of the 1970s and 1980s, more speciflcally, in Gábor Bódy’s films. The return to archival/found footage as well as the production of visual archaisms reveal an attempt of remediation (Bolter and Grusin) that goes beyond the cultural responsibility of preservation: it confronts the film medium with its materiality, historicity, and temporality, and creates productive tensions between the private and the historical, between the pre-cinematic and the texture of motion pictures, between the documentary value of the image and its rhetorical dimension. The paper argues that the authenticity of the moving image in Gábor Bódy’s American Torso (Amerikai anzix, 1975) is achieved through a special combination of the immediacy and the hypermediacy of experience. Bódy’s interest in “past images” goes beyond the intention of experimentation with the medium; it is aimed at a profound, reconsidered archaeology of the image and a distinct sensing of the cinema.

Author(s):  
Jonathan Walley

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.


Author(s):  
Melanie Wilmink

Utilising case studies from my curatorial practice, this paper discusses the balance between research and creation, and elaborates on exhibition projects that centre the spectator within an embodied experience of the moving image. While some of my curatorial practice includes installation art that literalises the space of the image, including Urbanity on Film (2009), and The Situated Cinema Project; in camera (2015), other programs have achieved this same effect within a single-channel screening format, including Radiant Bodies (2015) and Dirt City Rock Fantasy: The Short Films of Trevor Anderson (2016). By treating the moving image as an experience that incorporates the space and time of the viewer’s body, these curatorial projects explore the idea of artwork as a phenomenological tool, creating exciting environments while simultaneously advancing knowledge through the process of being with the artwork.


Author(s):  
Luka Bešlagić

This paper analyses the experimental film Sonne halt! by Ferry Radax, an Austrian filmmaker renowned for his unconventional approach to cinematic practice. Filmed and edited between the end of the 1950s and early 1960s, the film at first may appear to be a belated homage to the previous European experiments in avant-garde cinema, already carried out a few decades earlier. However, since there have been no great ‘historical avant-garde’ movements in Vienna in the period between the two world wars – according to the novel argument made by Klaus Kastberger – it was already the middle of the 20th century when the ‘original’ avant-garde strategies were finally acknowledged in Austria, and simultaneously appropriated by the ‘neo-avant-garde’. In this peculiar historico-cultural context Sonne halt!, in its fragmentary non-narrative structure which resembles Dadaist or Surrealist playfulness and openness, innovatively and radically interweaved two disparate film registers: moving image and spoken language. Various sentences arbitrarily enounced throughout the film – which have their origin in Konrad Bayer’s unfinished experimental, pseudo-autobiographical, montage novel der sechste sinn – do not constitute dialogues or narration of a traditional movie script but rather a random collection of fictional and philosophical statements. At certain moments there is a lack of rapport between moving image and speech – an experimental attempt by Ferry Radax to challenge one of the most common principles of sound and narrative cinema. By deconstructing Sonne halt! to its linguistic and cinematic aspects, this article particularly focuses on the role of verbal commentaries within the film. Article received: December 28, 2017; Article accepted: January 10, 2018; Published online: April 15, 2018; Original scholarly paper How to cite this article: Bešlagić, Luka. "Interweaving Realities: Spoken Language and Moving Images in the Sonne halt!, Experimental Film by Ferry Radax." AM Journal of Art and Media Studies 15 (2018): . doi: 10.25038/am.v0i15.228


2018 ◽  
pp. 84-105
Author(s):  
Leon Gurevitch

In this chapter Leon Gurevitch discusses computer-generated documentary simulations that function both as spectacular attractions and visual signifiers of expertise and authority. Gurevitch explores the increasing prominence of such images within a variety of documentary contexts since the digital revolution that began during the 1990s. The chapter underscores the extent to which CG-animated documentary spectacles are today routinely encountered within a range of fields, many not readily associated in the popular mind with animated aesthetics, production technologies or histories: military, scientific, architectural and engineering, for example. Gurevitch explains that in the absence of live footage (or even in support of it), animated and simulated spectacle is frequently deployed within documentary film making in the interests of “expertise”. In this sense, CG simulations function to persuade the audience of the time and effort put into making the documentary and therefore act as an index of a given moving image work’s veracity.


2020 ◽  
pp. 104-121
Author(s):  
Amanda Egbe

Focusing on Edison’s early cinematic apparatus and the optical printer, this chapter explores how copyright law intersects with creativity, providing an alternative to teleological accounts of moving-image technologies. Thomas Edison attempted to control the film industry through patents and copyright. Edison’s first film experiments were registered as a series of photographs on card by his assistant, W. L. Dickson. In protecting these contact copies as paper prints with copyright, the new medium of motion pictures was being formalized. The necessity to duplicate film to support the development of exhibition and distribution was also necessary for copyright purposes. An archaeological approach is utilized to explore how paper prints enabled innovation in the area of the optical printer, a primary form of duplication in cinema. In developing approaches that could bring to life the remaining examples of early cinema, novel solutions in the form of innovations were required. The overlapping concerns of the copyright clerk, the film entrepreneur, and the film historian thus provide a basis for new materials and new innovations in moving-image technology and film history.


Author(s):  
Michelle Cannon

Youth film-making practices in educational settings are often positioned in discourses that support older teenagers’ career prospects and their training for industry. However, the work detailed in this list is located in formal and informal educational settings that foreground the social and cultural dimension of youth film and media production. As such, this article engages with the role of the moving image in everyday living, in creative arts education, and in the “reframing” of literacy to include visual and audio modes. In this view, film-making opportunities move beyond the formal domains of secondary and higher education film and media studies students, so that learners of all ages can become “writers” of the moving image as well as “readers.” This bibliography lays out the different sites and means through which primary and secondary children encounter film-making in the anglophone world and more internationally. In addition, it details the academic perspectives through which children’s engagements with film are studied and the increasing number of resources available to researchers and educators in the field. As distinct from the broader realm of production activities with digital media (e.g., game authoring or podcasting), research interest in children’s film-making is in the early stages of development in terms of academic literature and its differentiation. The making dimension might occupy part of a text on, for example, the uses of film in the classroom or on media education more broadly. Notably, discourses on youth film-making have increased in recent years with the development of new media technologies, social media platforms, and digital media authoring software. Functionality that used to be mediated through cumbersome professional apparatuses are now at the disposal of many amateurs via mobile digital devices. These ongoing advances coupled with a wide-ranging academic interest in multimodal expression open up new worlds of audiovisual storytelling for children and young people. Readers will notice the multidimensional nature of the categories that serve to demonstrate the versatility of film across social domains. Despite this and the significant uptake of creative media production by educators and practitioners in informal educational settings in the Western world, there is a discernible disinclination for many educational institutions to include film-making programs in formal education. Thus, there is a sense in which film-making for children remains a marginal activity, dependent on local enthusiasts and pockets of random good practice. Many of the authors are keen to see this change and to promote film as a relevant, dynamic, and cross-disciplinary constituent of modern literacy and the visual arts. Legitimizing film-making experience as a systematic literacy practice with a strong creative and critical dimension is seen as a way of enriching cultural expression in schools.


This book explores music- and sound-image relationships in non-mainstream screen repertoire from the earliest examples of experimental audiovisuality to the most recent forms of expanded and digital technology. It challenges presumptions of visual primacy in experimental cinema and rethinks screen music discourse in light of the aesthetics of non-commercial imperatives. Several themes run through the book, connecting with and significantly enlarging upon current critical discourse surrounding realism and audibility in the fiction film, the role of music in mainstream cinema, and the audiovisual strategies of experimental film. The contributors investigate repertoires and artists from Europe and the United States through the critical lenses of synchronicity and animated sound, interrelations of experimentation in image and sound, audiovisual synchresis and dissonance, experimental soundscape traditions, found-footage film, remediation of pre-existent music and sound, popular and queer sound cultures, and a diversity of radical technological and aesthetic tropes in film media traversing the work of early pioneers such as Walter Ruttmann and Len Lye, through the mid-century innovations of Norman McLaren, Stan Brakhage, Lis Rhodes, Kenneth Anger, Andy Warhol, and studio collectives in Poland, to latter-day experimentalists John Smith and Bill Morrison, as well as the contemporary practices of VJing.


Author(s):  
Holly Rogers

The Introduction situates the subsequent chapters within the wider discourses on music and the moving image, and on experimental film. It identifies several threads that run through the book, most of which concern the identification of a critical space that opens up between previously constructed binaries when audiovisuality is treated experimentally: between music and noise, active and passive consumption, popular and avant-garde practices and audiovisual synchronicity and dissonance. Despite the divergent practices of experimental film’s many histories, these threads enable the identification of persistent and common forms of sonic innovation.


2019 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 7-22
Author(s):  
Gauri Nori

Abstract This article will examine the emergence of independent platforms to screen radical and alternative cinema in India by tracing two case-studies: Experimenta, a biannual festival curated by Shai Heredia, and The New Medium section curated by Shaina Anand. While Experimenta has remained largely independent, relying on the support of established artists and cultural organizations, The New Medium section has managed to secure its place within the programme of the MAMI Mumbai Film Festival (MFF). Although their approach may differ, both curators are committed to promoting a culture of moving image experimentation in the country. Drawing on first-hand observations, interviews and scrutinizing festival ephemera, this article aims to identify the curatorial practices and strategies that have established these alternative film festivals both within the international film festival network and the larger film community in the country.


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