scholarly journals Fragments Over Experimental Film: Liminal Zones of Cinema, Art and Theory

Author(s):  
Miško Šuvaković

In what follows, I will point to theorization of concept of the experimental film. My main thesis is that experimental art is based on the project, research practice, innovation and open transgressive or subversive artworks. Art focused on subversion of institutional power features as a singular event performed within a particular social relationship, as a critical actionist, engaged, or activist practice. Transgression – literally – refers to: infraction, violation of a law or an order, while in geological terms it implies penetration and expansion of the sea over the mainland. The notion of transgression relates to excess, overrunning or, more precisely, departing the familiar for the unknown, control for freedom. Experimental art was created in different disciplines such as experimental music, experimental film, experimental theater, etc. John Cage’s concept of ‘experimental music’ has been the starting point for new experimental art and artistic practices since 1950. Experimental film (experimental, new, avant-garde or neo-avant-garde cinema) has featured since the Second World War. The concept and term describe a range of filmmaking styles which are generally quite different from, and often opposed to, the practices of mainstream commercial and documentary filmmaking and entertainment-oriented cinematography. In the second and third part of the essay, I will present an analysis of the experimental films of the artists the OHO group and Neša Paripović. Article received: December 2, 2017; Article accepted: December 18, 2017; Published online: April 15, 2018; Original scholarly paper How to cite this article: Šuvaković, Miško. "Fragments Over Experimental Film: Liminal Zones of Cinema, Art and Theory." AM Journal of Art and Media Studies no 15 (2018): . doi: 10.25038/am.v0i15.225

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.


Journeys ◽  
2007 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 77-91
Author(s):  
Andrew A. Gentes

My visit to Moscow's Maiakovskii Museum serves as starting point for an exploration, informed by Peter Bürger's Theory of the Avant-Garde, of the influence of the Russian avant-garde and poet Vladimir Maiakovskii's role within this movement. It also queries the essentialism and functionality of the museum dedicated to him, as well as the personal experience of my visit.


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.


2013 ◽  
Vol 47 (2) ◽  
pp. 385-403
Author(s):  
HANNAH DURKIN

A Study in Choreography for Camera (1945) is a collaborative enterprise between avant-garde filmmaker Maya Deren and African American ballet dancer Talley Beatty. Study is significant in experimental film history – it was one of three films by Deren that shaped the emergence of the postwar avant-garde cinema movement in the US. The film represents a pioneering cross-cultural and cross-disciplinary dialogue between Beatty's ballet dancing and Deren's experimental cinematic technique. The film explores complex emotional experiences through a cinematic re-creation of Deren's understanding of ritual (which she borrowed from Katherine Dunham's Haitian experiences after spending many years documenting vodou) while allowing a leading black male dancer to display his artistry on-screen. I show that cultures and artistic forms widely dismissed as incompatible are rendered equivocal. Study adopts a stylized and rhythmic technique borrowed from dance in its attempt to establish cinema as “art,” and I foreground Beatty's contribution to the film, arguing that his technically complex movements situate him as joint author of its artistic vision. The essay also explores tensions between the artistic intentions of Deren, who sought to deprivilege the individual performer in favour of the filmic “ritual,” and Beatty, who sought to display his individual skills as a technically accomplished dancer.


2021 ◽  

Karl Friedrich Schinkel (b. Neuruppin, 1781–d. Berlin, 1841) was a celebrated Prussian architect, theatre set designer, artist, furniture and object designer, urban planner, and civil servant. Born into modest yet respectable circumstances as the son of a deacon, Schinkel, by virtue of his talent and work ethic, rose in his own lifetime to become one of Prussia’s most celebrated cultural figures and its chief royal architect. He worked mostly in Berlin and its surrounding territories, including in some areas that are now part of Poland. His built works suffered heavy destruction during the Second World War, but important examples still survive or have been reconstructed, including the Altes Museum, the Friedrich-Werder Church, the Theatre (Schauspielhaus), and the New Guardhouse in Berlin, as well as the Charlottenhof and Glienicke Palaces in nearby Potsdam. His paintings, drawings, and personal archives can be found mostly in collections in and around Berlin, including at various departments of the Berlin State Museums. Recent debates have surrounded the potential reconstruction of Schinkel’s celebrated masterpiece, the Berlin Bauakademie (which was demolished in 1962), bringing a consciousness of Schinkel’s legacy to the fore in German public life once again. Despite his fame in Germany and his noted status as a reference-point for German avant-garde modernism, Schinkel’s work has remained under-explored in the English language (with some notable exceptions) due to difficulties accessing both his buildings and his archives in the years between the Second World War and German reunification. Since the 1990s, however, Schinkel’s international reputation has been steadily restored due to the efforts of a number of scholars and curators who have sought to disseminate his work more widely than ever before. Schinkel’s oeuvre is as eclectic as the tools and media he employed to realize it are versatile. They reveal traces of neoclassicism and the neogothic, French Enlightenment formalism, German Romanticism and Idealism, and 19th-century historicism. But at the same time, his work resists absolute categorization, by virtue of the fact that he lived and worked suspended between two epochs: he was born too late to be immersed in the worldview of the 18th-century Enlightenment and French Revolution, but nor did he live to see Germany’s development as a fully industrialized and unified nation. Occupying this ambiguous historical moment has given Schinkel’s work a versatility, a freedom, and an inquiring rigor that has assured its originality and enduring value.


Author(s):  
Weiam Hussein ◽  
Fawaz Alheibshy ◽  
Farhan Alshammari

The coronavirus pandemic is a modern social emergency and the biggest global challenge since the Second World War. Since the pandemic began in China at the end of 2019, the disease spread to every landmass except Antarctica. The effect of antiviral drugs on the new corona virus has been tested, but no basic and complete cure has been found, although there are many drugs such as  interleukin-6 inhibitor,  monoclonal antibody and corticosteroid which remarkably reduced mortality of critically ill COVID-19 patients in a major clinical trial. Although not enough experimental data has been released yet, many researchers have hailed the result as a step in the right direction. In this review, a series of the newly chemical derivatives were synthesized and evaluated against human coronavirus. Many derivatives found to be active in inhibiting the cellular infection of human coronavirus which causes the SARS-CoV-2pandemic. This mini- review summarizes the synthesis of these new antiviral derivatives that target coronaviruses and describes general current strategies and models for developing antiviral drugs. The review aims to provide a starting point for medicinal chemists to synthesize necessary and effective drugs against coronaviruses.


2012 ◽  
Vol 17 ◽  
pp. 17-32
Author(s):  
Mónika Szente-Varga

The first diplomatic and consular relations were established between Mexico and the Habsburg Empire in the 1800 s, motivated basically by commerdal reasons and dynastic interests. These got to an abrupt end with the execution of Emperor Maximilian in Querétaro in 1867, and diplomatic relations were resumed only decades later, in 1901, which is, in fact, our starting point. This essay examines the development of diplomatic relations between Mexico and Central-Eastern Europe from the beginning of the 20'' centuiy until nowadays. It is divided into chronological chapters, where we study bilateral relations in the coordinates of the following periods: beginning of the century, the period between the two world wars, the Second World War, Cold War and recent years. The investigation in based on documents of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Mexico (SRE-AHD) and of the Hungarian National Archive (MOL).


2007 ◽  
Vol 43 (2) ◽  
pp. 287-303
Author(s):  
Susanne Kogler

That art functions as a corrective to rational-scientific insights is one of the formative thoughts of art philosophy. The fact that artistic expression represents a corrective to linguistically-rationally affected insight also ranks among the constants of art philosophy in the 20th century. “Expression is the opponent of articulating something” can be read, for instance, in Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory with regards to the character of language in art and Jean François Lyotard wrote on aesthetic experience: “What happens to us is by no means something which we would have controlled, programmed or conceptually apprehended beforehand”. The uneducible, conceptually unattainable is also at the centre of current art production of the 21st century. On the basis of Lyotard’s and Adorno’s positions, the article shows that one should acknowledge a constancy of the topos of art as non-conceptual knowledge on the one hand as the continuing function of a tradition defined from the philosophical aesthetics of modernity to post-modernity and orientated on the artistic avant-garde. On the other hand and beyond this a continuous line of tradition of New Music becomes clear, leading to the expressionistic avant-garde of the 20th century which represented the starting point for Adorno’s music philosophy, through Lyotard’s focus on John Cage, up to the avant-garde of New Music in the era of post modernity. Specific features of contemporary art, such as rebellion against linguistic standards, an understanding of expressivity that opposes the traditional language of music and operates on the verge of silence, as well as the utopian vision of a modified reality which aims at transcendency enable a conception of art as non-conceptual knowledge, corresponding with the positions of art philosophy in modernity and post-modernity in important points. The relevance of focusing on this line of tradition for musicology lies in the fact that it sheds new light on the musical avant-garde and its further function and, last but not least, that it opens new perspectives in understanding contemporary artistic productions.


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


2010 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jakob Haahr

I artiklen sættes med afsæt i fjernvandreruten fokus på, hvad det er der gør, at vi i Danmark ikke har samme vandrekultur som i vores nabolande.The Missing LinkA long-distance footpath runs from Kilpisjärvi in northern Finland to Alexandroupolis in Greece. However the track does not cross intact but is interrupted on the island of Funen in Denmark. It is no coincidence that the rupture is in Denmark, nor that it is on Funen. In this article this ‘missing link’ provides the starting point to discuss a walking culture, which in Denmark is notable by its absence.At the beginning of 20th century, thanks to the influence of neighbouring countries, the culture of walking did increasingly make itself felt in Denmark. Longer walks became popular and many Danes embarked on hiking tours, walking for several days and spending the night at special ‘vandrehjem’ (or ‘youth hostels’). Since the Second World War this culture has more or less disappeared, and the question asked here is why?The article is divided in two parts. In the first there is a historical review of the development of the Danish culture of walking from the beginning of 20th century until the late 1930’s. This is followed by a discussion of the circumstances that led to the disappearance of this walking culture, focusing on the long distance footpath. This centres on a jostling for supremacy among sporting factions and on the struggle between various outdoor interests, between different management concerns, and between farmers, the state and local authorities about who should have the right to develop and exploit the landscape in southern Funen area. In this struggle organisations representing outdoor activities have been poorly organized and until now the landscape has primary been developed on the premises of agriculture, industry and urbanism.Today the position and status of outdoor life (friluftsliv) and the culture of hiking are improving. Councils in particular are focusing on health, tourism and attracting new residents´, and there is both a political and a popular will to establish hiking trails. For the long-distance footpath these changes mean that the missing link on Funen now disappears and that the hiking trail across Europe is established.


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