scholarly journals ‘Cinema’ as a Modernist Conception of Motion Pictures

2018 ◽  
pp. 55
Author(s):  
Michael Betancourt
Keyword(s):  
Media Studies ◽  
Digital Technology ◽  
Motion Pictures ◽  
Fine Art ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Structural Film

In the 1960s and 1970s the Clement Greenberg’s Modernist ideology of ‘purity’ played a central role in the definition of ‘avant-garde cinema’ as a serious, major genre of film. This transfer between ‘fine art’ and ‘avant-garde film’ was articulated as ‘structural film’ by P. Adams Sitney. This heritage shapes contemporary debates over ‘postcinema’ as digital technology undermines the ontology and dispositive of historical cinema. Its discussion here is not meant to reanimate old debates, but to move past them. Article received: March 12, 2018; Article accepted: April 10, 2018; Published online: September 15, 2018; Original scholarly paperHow to cite this article: Betancourt, Michael. "‘Cinema’ as a Modernist Conception of Motion Pictures." AM Journal of Art and Media Studies 16 (2018): 55−67. doi: 10.25038/am.v0i16.254

Nabaa, Nazir (1938--)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anneka Lenssen
Keyword(s):  
Communist Party ◽  
Rural Schools ◽  
Art Criticism ◽  
Modern Art ◽  
Fine Arts ◽  
Fine Art ◽  
Political Mobilization ◽  
Puppet Theater ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S

Nazir Nabaa, a respected Syrian painter, made his greatest contributions to Arab modern art in the 1960s and 1970s, when he contributed to the graphic identity of progressive political causes and the Palestinian liberation struggle. He joined the Syrian Communist Party in the 1954 and in 1959 was briefly jailed for this affiliation. After his release, he traveled to Cairo on a fellowship to study painting at the Faculty of Fine Arts, there developing a heroic realist style around social and labor themes. After returning to Syria in 1964, Nabaa taught drawing in rural schools and worked with myth and folklife. Moving to Damascus in 1968, he worked as an illustrator and became involved in creative projects in support of political mobilization, including poster design, puppet theater, fine art painting, and art criticism. Between 1971 and 1975, Nabaa studied in Paris at the Academy of Fine Arts. Upon his return, he joined the faculty of the College of Fine Arts in Damascus. His later paintings became more fantastical, combining goddess figures with still lifes of fruits, tapestries, and jewelry. He also developed a parallel corpus of abstract paintings based on the exploration of texture and color.

Coming Home: Portraying Japanese Baseball on the Silver Screen

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher T. Keaveney
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Early History ◽  
Japanese Cinema ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Hollywood Films ◽  
History Of ◽  
Baseball Films ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Important Marker

Chapter 3 examines the long history of baseball films in Japan, a tradition nearly as old as the history of Japanese cinema itself. After a brief survey of the early history of cinema in Japan, a tradition whose history parallels that of the game of baseball chronologically, the study focuses on early shomingeki films and explores how baseball became an important marker of domesticity and middle class respectability in this genre of film in the 1930s. The chapter then examines several pivotal films in the postwar era, examining how baseball was used alternately to perpetuate a national hero in Suzuki Hideo’s Immortal Pitcher (1955) or to chart the corruption and greed surrounding professional baseball as in Kobayashi Masaki’s I Will Buy You (1956). In the 1960s and 1970s, as young filmmakers arose to challenge the dominance of the great postwar filmmakers and to produce often avant-garde and politically charged films that reflected an international challenge to the hegemony of Hollywood films, the baseball film was again adopted as a means to offer that challenge. Ōshima Nagisa’s Ceremonies, in a film that contests the very concept of the baseball film, uses baseball as a metaphor for the Japan’s abandonment of its citizens during the war. The recent splatter comedy baseball films of Yamaguchi Yūdai likewise play with the familiar tropes of Japanese baseball and of the baseball hero as antihero in problematizing the very concept of the baseball film.

Meaning and Musicality

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andy Birtwistle
Keyword(s):  
The Self ◽  
The Political ◽  
Politics Of Representation ◽  
Sound Image ◽  
Modes Of Representation ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Structural Film

The chapter critically reappraises the work of the British experimental filmmaker John Smith, drawing on analyses of key films and interview material to explore his use of sound, music and voice. Smith’s films often engage self-reflexively with how sound creates or accepts meaning within an audiovisual context. Influenced by structural film practice of the 1960s and 1970s, and underpinned by a Brechtian concern with the politics of representation, Smith’s often humorous work both foregrounds and deconstructs the sound-image relations at work in dominant modes of cinematic representation. This analysis of Smith’s work identifies the political dynamic of the filmmaker’s use of sound, and addresses what is at stake—for both Smith and his audience—in the self-reflexive concern with audiovisual modes of representation. Examined within this context are Smith’s creative focus on the production of meaning and how this relates to aspects of musicality and abstraction in his work.

scholarly journals “Breakin' the Rules”: Eleo Pomare and the Transcultural Choreographies of Black Modernity

2012 ◽  
Vol 45 (1) ◽  
pp. 41-63 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rachel Fensham
Keyword(s):  
Modern Dance ◽  
Amiri Baraka ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Radical Innovations ◽  
Black Performance ◽  
Jazz Music ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
And Performance ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
African American Artists

The radical innovations of African-American artists with artistic form during the 1960s and 1970s, according to black performance theorist Fred Moten, led to a new theorization of the avant-garde. His book, In the Break: The Radical Aesthetics of the Black Tradition, discusses the poetry and jazz music of artists, from Amiri Baraka and Billie Holiday to Charles Mingus, and extols their radical experimentation with the structures and conventions of aurality, visuality, literature, and performance dominant in European art and aesthetics. In this essay, I consider the implications of these processes of resignification in relation to the choreographic legacy of the artist, Eleo Pomare, whose work and career during this period was both experimental and radical and, I will suggest, critical to the formation of a transnational, multiracial conception of modern dance.

The MIT Geophysical Analysis Group (GAG): 1954 and beyond

Geophysics ◽  
2005 ◽  
Vol 70 (4) ◽  
pp. 31JA-35JA ◽  
Author(s):  
Sven Treitel
Keyword(s):  
Digital Technology ◽  
Service Industries ◽  
Subsequent Evolution ◽  
Seismic Processing ◽  
Digital Revolution ◽  
Analysis Group ◽  
Exploration Seismology ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Imaging Algorithms

The MIT Geophysical Analysis Group (GAG) laid the groundwork for the so-called “digital revolution” in exploration seismology. Enders Robinson traces in this issue GAG's history from its earliest days till 1954; here, the story continues with GAG's subsequent evolution until its end in 1957. But that was just the beginning — during the 1960s and 1970s, the new digital technology spread throughout the oil and service industries worldwide, making it possible to develop progressively more sophisticated seismic processing and imaging algorithms that permanently changed the landscape of geophysical exploration.

scholarly journals Terrorens poetik: Revolutionen skrives med småt

2009 ◽  
Vol 37 (107) ◽  
pp. 52-73
Author(s):  
Susanne Stoltz ◽  
Anders Tønnesen
Keyword(s):  
Literary History ◽  
Aesthetic Experience ◽  
Left Wing ◽  
Situationist International ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Red Army ◽  
The Spectator ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Aesthetic

The Poetics of Terror: The Manifestoes of the RAF:This paper points to a ‘forgotten’ literary history of the Red Army Fraction (RAF) in order to contest a common misconception. The RAF is often perceived solely as a political phenomenon and its justification of terrorism as a political discourse. Thereby many scholars bluntly fail to pinpoint the attractiveness of the left-wing terrorism of the 1960s and 1970s. The paper argues that the writings of the first generation of the RAF also convey a ‘poetics’ of terrorism. It points to a somewhat overlooked strategy of justification in the writings, which can be formulated as follows: Both the act of terrorism and the utterance of its defence are justified as aesthetic experiences. Furthermore, this was constructed under heavy influence from groups of avant-garde artists in the tradition of the Situationist International (SI). The paper analyses the strategy of justification found in the first few RAF-statements. Beneath the political jargon of left-wing radicalism and the »credo of immediate action«, the paper locates another strategy of justification that carries the sign of avant-garde thought. According to the manifestoes of the RAF, the aesthetic experience of a terrorist act could liberate the spectator. The study concludes that the writings of RAF unveil a ‘poetics’ of terrorism. The act of terrorism is a radical transgression of reality. Hence, the terrorist act destroys the ‘mechanical’ system of cognitive oppression because it shows the possibility of another world. That is why the RAF views terror as a model of spiritual liberation. In addition to this the statements communicate a parallel concept to the ‘poetics’ of the terror act. The RAF constructed a concept of revolutionary language, ‘the armed propaganda’, which claimed to break down the barriers of ‘domination’ in the consciousness of the recipient. In doing so the statements perform what they preach; they are themselves acts of terror. The RAF’s concept of terrorism comprises both word and deed. The writings are acts and the acts are utterances. Accordingly, RAF’s ‘poetics’ of terrorism can be described as the transgression of reality in the word or deed of terror that leads to spiritual liberation.

Miguel Ángel Estrella

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carol A. Hess
Keyword(s):  
Latin American ◽  
The United States ◽  
Dirty War ◽  
Political Activities ◽  
Latin American Music ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
The Status ◽  
Nadia Boulanger ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S

This chapter examines the place of Argentine pianist Miguel Ángel Estrella in the politics of Latin American music, focusing on the Dirty War, the wave of repression and violence by military regimes during the 1960s and 1970s. It begins with Estrella’s recital in September 1987 as a tribute to Nadia Boulanger, who died in October 1979 and was one protagonist in Estrella’s story. It then considers Estrella’s political activities in Argentina and his being formally charged with subversion, sedition, and terrorist activities, as well as his promotion of the masterworks of the Western canon. It also contextualizes Estrella’s experience in light of a number of broader issues, relating Estrella and his traditionalist repertory to the ongoing debate among composers and critics over socially engaged music (música comprometida); the historical antecedents of this debate and how they inform present-day reactions to the status of either the avant-garde or the Western canon in música comprometida; and how scholars in the United States might understand Estrella’s story.

Literary theorists in and beyond French academic space (1960–1970s)

2020 ◽  
Vol 68 (5) ◽  
pp. 1108-1123
Author(s):  
Lucile Dumont
Keyword(s):  
Literary Theory ◽  
Public Engagement ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
French History ◽  
Social Strategies ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Theoretical Approaches ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Collective Strategy

This article demonstrates how social strategies deployed at the margins of French academic space to legitimize theoretical approaches to literary texts (semiology, semantics, structural analysis of narratives) in the 1960s and 1970s strongly relied on the interventions of their promoters beyond the academy. It specifically examines two strategies privileged by promoters of literary theory which allowed some of them to bypass several requirements for academic careers in taking advantage of the transformations of higher education, of the absence of stable and strong disciplinary frames, and of their own integration into the intellectual and literary fields. First, either through the alliance with literary avant-gardes or by the temporary constitution as one, the collective strategy of the literary avant-garde became a way to engage both politically and aesthetically. Second, the investment of transnational networks and internationalization allowed the critics and theorists to get around the national path to symbolic and academic consecration, and to reframe the modalities of their public engagement. Ultimately, this article offers an understanding of how, for aspirant or marginalized academics, interventions beyond the perimeter of the academic space have, at a certain point in French history, helped their acquisition of academic legitimacy.

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