scholarly journals Note on Hallucinatory Film

2021 ◽  
Vol 27 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Harris
Keyword(s):  
Film Material ◽  
High Definition ◽  
Stan Brakhage ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Experimental Films ◽  
As If

Comparisons between hallucinatory films of the 1960s and 2000s show a conversion of the earlier utopian signifiers from benign fields of intoxicating color that celebrate and induce psychic bliss, into high-definition alarm bells for a world imploding from accelerated hyperconsumption. Paranoid, conspiracy-driven 70s commercial cinema, which appropriates editing techniques from earlier experimental films, marks a threshold of disenchantment. The entropic model of 60s hallucinatory works by Stan Brakhage, Carolee Schneemann, and others, where film material and abstract imagery are modified analagous to the intensification of bodily pleasures, is digitally exacerbated in high-definition videos of Heather Phillipson, Ed Atkins, and Benedict Drew as if collapsing under environmental and psychic degradation. This later work maximizes hallucinatory HD properties through relentlessly overlaying imagery of interpenetrating, deflating, and exploding bodies that are avatars of overindulgence, the nightmarish uncanny descendants of 60s utopian intoxications. (MH)

Stan Brakhage and Ethnographic Praxis

Anthropology ◽  
2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roxanne Varzi ◽  
Andrew McGrath
Keyword(s):  
20Th Century ◽  
Cultural Anthropology ◽  
Phenomenological Approach ◽  
Human Vision ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
16Mm Film ◽  
Visual Artist ◽  
American Romanticism ◽  
Stan Brakhage ◽  
The 1960S

Stan Brakhage (b. 1933–d. 2003) was a visual artist and filmmaker who embodied many of the theoretical tensions and pragmatic themes in cultural anthropology in the 20th century, despite not being an anthropologist and working almost totally through experiments in 16mm film. In traversing, and being claimed by, both modernist and postmodernist thinkers and artists alike, he was a creator as much influenced by the poetry of American Romanticism as he was the harbinger of a millennial deconstruction. He is generally considered, along with the filmmaker Maya Deren, the quintessential savant of American avant-garde cinema. His phenomenological approach to filmmaking and his attention to poesis in visuality, combined with his persistent dispensation with narrative and plot, drew to light still pressing existential questions about the space between structure and individualism, the unconscious mind, myth, and intersubjective experiences in the shared quotidian of everyday being. While his early works of the mid-1950s showed solidarity with the surrealist and Freudian-inspired themes of compatriots like Maya Deren, in the 1960s Brakhage quickly engaged with what he viewed as the untapped potential of cinematic celluloid as a malleable medium with which to both capture and express the immediacy of sensual experience. At the core of his creative impulse was an exploration of visual perception unfiltered by symbolic textuality. To that end, his 16mm films were mostly soundless, color-saturated, nonlinear impressions of the most consequential of life’s relational phenomena; birth, sex, human development, death, and familial intimacies untethered from linguistic discourses, character drama, and traditional act-based storytelling structures. Brakhage’s process of etching and painting directly onto the emulsified film strips he used for shooting enabled his impressionistic questioning of the boundaries of representation in moving images. Brakhage asserted that, much as with human vision, such manipulations punched holes in the epistemic orthodoxy of experiential narrative and instead stressed the messy and affective ways that our sensory organs force us to negotiate our immanent worlds. His early artistic tenure found him characteristically prolific in modernist aesthetics as he explored concepts ranging from the psychoanalysis of dreaming and the Freudian death-drive in Reflections on Black (1955) to the metaphysical man-myth opus Dog Star Man (1961–1964). Such themes paralleled similar theoretical concerns emergent in anthropology in the mid-20th century as evident in both the structuralism of Levi-Strauss and the persistence of the Freudian unconscious as an explanatory hermeneutic. Today, Stan Brakhage’s influence in anthropology is evident in ethnographic filmmaking that challenges the documentary impulse, ambiguates hegemonic truth claims, and explores the modalities of sensorial representation related to human experience through iterative experimentation.

Flicker and Shutter: Exploring Cinema’s Shuddering Shadow

2017 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
19Th Century ◽  
Psychological Problems ◽  
Moving Image ◽  
Image Movement ◽  
Projection Device ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The 19Th Century ◽  
Experimental Films

A rotating shutter interrupts the light of a projection device, breaking up the succession of image movement and creating the appearance of motion. This technology, essential to cinematic and even some pre-cinematic devices, creates an effect of flicker. In the early era of cinema, the flickering of cinematic images was claimed to damage viewers’ eyesight and even to produce psychological problems. In the 1960s, however, filmmakers such as Peter Kubelka, Tony Conrad and Ken Jacobs explored the flicker as an aesthetic device. This chapter traces the effects of flicker, focusing on the invention of the moving image in the latter part of the 19th century, its initial reception, and the use of flicker in experimental films and projections from the 1960s on.

scholarly journals Learning to Read in the Digital Age: From Reading Texts to Hacking Codes

PMLA ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 130 (3) ◽  
pp. 743-749 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yves Citton
Keyword(s):  
Digital Age ◽  
Common Language ◽  
Literary Reading ◽  
Learning To Read ◽  
The Common ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
As If ◽  
Reading Texts

Reading is still often perceived as the decoding of a message, as if the text were meant to be merely received, as if it had been composed in a known and invariable code, and as if the meaning were determined solely by the author. Since at least the 1960s, however, theories of interpretation have constructed (literary) reading in a more elaborate and inventive fashion: while each author was supposed to invent a singular language against the background of the common language, each interpreter had to create something new, even interpreters reading the same text, because each interpreter understood the text and its singular language within an ever-changing context of actualization. The model of interpretation nevertheless remained indebted to the activity of deciphering: the ever-changing meaning was to be found in the text itself.

scholarly journals Teaching experimental film: On the practical and analytic treatment of avant-garde cinema

2018 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Volker Pantenburg ◽  
Stefanie Schlüter
Keyword(s):  
Perceptual Experience ◽  
Practical Experience ◽  
Experimental Film ◽  
Film Material ◽  
Moving Image ◽  
Analytic Treatment ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Image Movement ◽  
Stan Brakhage

This article highlights the potential of experimental and avant-garde cinema in film educational contexts. In the first part, Stefanie Schlüter evaluates her practical experience in working with 10- to 11-year-old schoolchildren. Based on reflections by Peter Kubelka, Stan Brakhage and others, she emphasizes the act of engaging with film material (scratching, painting) as a genuine haptic and perceptual experience. In the second part, Volker Pantenburg reframes classical avant-garde films by Gary Beidler, Peter Tscherkassky and Morgan Fisher as valuable, implicitly didactic 'lessons of cinema'. In a playful and elaborate way, these films perform and display basic qualities of the moving image: movement and stillness, materiality and narration, format and affect.

scholarly journals Lessons Learned from 55 (or More) Years of Professional Experience in Urban Planning and Development

2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 218-224
Author(s):  
Han Verschure
Keyword(s):  
Urban Planning ◽  
Rapid Change ◽  
Lessons Learned ◽  
Urban Life ◽  
The Earth ◽  
Main Challenge ◽  
Quality Of Urban Life ◽  
The Rich ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
As If

Reflecting on the many debates over the years on changing urbanization processes, on the towns and cities of yesterday, today, and tomorrow, the main challenge will be listening to lessons of wisdom from the past and adapting these to our future professional work. When Chief Seattle said that the Earth does not belong to us, we belong to the Earth, he called for more humility and respect so as to plan for the needs of today and tomorrow, and not for the greed of a few. The doomsday scenarios of overpopulation only make sense if we continue to exploit our planet the way we do today, as if we have an infinite reservoir of resources. Already back in the 1960s, Barbara Ward, John F. C. Turner, and particularly Kenneth Boulding taught me to rethink our whole perception of Spaceship Earth. I have seen many towns and cities grow as if resources were limitless; I myself have seen and worked on efforts to focus on spatial quality, respecting nature whenever possible for a growing number of people, recognizing resources as being precious and scarce, and yet guaranteeing equitable access to a good quality of urban life. Such objectives are not evident, when models in education, schools of thought, professional planners, and greedy developers are often geared towards the contrary: the higher the skyscrapers, the better; the more egotripping by architects, the more the rich like it; the more people are stimulated to consume, the better the world will be. Such narrow visions will no longer help. At several global urban planning and developments events (1976, 1992, 1996, 2016, etc.), new ideas and agendas have been put forward. Whether the present Covid-19 crisis may induce a more rapid change in vision and practice is still too early to confirm, but luckily, several towns and cities, and a few visionary planners and decision makers are showing some promising examples.

8 mm and the “Blessings of Books and Records”

2017 ◽  
pp. 54-80
Author(s):  
Erika Balsom
Keyword(s):  
Film History ◽  
Experimental Film ◽  
Historical Episode ◽  
Stan Brakhage ◽  
Experimental Films

This chapter unearths an untaken path of experimental film history. In the mid-1960s, Stan Brakhage, Bruce Conner, and Jonas Mekas were deeply invested in the possibility that 16mm experimental films might be made into 8mm reduction prints and made available for sale to home collectors. This chapter relates this little-known historical episode and questions what relevance this prioritization of access over quality might have for us in the contemporary moment, when these terms are once again embroiled in a fierce battle.

Louisiana Country Blues: A Comparison with the Delta Country Style of Charley Patton and Followers: Mutual Influences

2018 ◽  
pp. 149-156
Author(s):  
John Broven
Keyword(s):  
Mississippi Delta ◽  
Country Music ◽  
Reciprocal Influence ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
As If

This chapter compares Louisiana country music with the Mississippi Delta country style of Charley Patton. The influence of the Mississippi Delta blues can be found in Louisiana through artists such as Robert Pete Williams and other rural performers. As if to emphasize the fragmented nature of the Louisiana blues scene, Williams did not start to assert himself until the blues revival years of the 1960s. Like Patton and Blind Lemon, he did have an individualistic style, as can be heard on his classic recording of “Prisoner's Talking Blues.” Williams was an intensely personal artist, an introvert lost in his own music. He was not the sort of man to influence young contemporaries, as Patton did in Mississippi. Indeed, it seems that there was no reciprocal influence from Louisiana to Mississippi.

An experiment in space and time: Remaking the missing Doctor Who episode ‘Mission to the Unknown’

2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 315-333
Author(s):  
Philip Braithwaite
Keyword(s):  
Feedback Loop ◽  
Doctor Who ◽  
The Past ◽  
Space And Time ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The University ◽  
Made In ◽  
As If

In the 1960s, the majority of Doctor Who (1963–89, 1996, 2005–present) episodes were wiped or lost. Students and staff at the University of Central Lancashire recently took on the challenge of remaking the missing Doctor Who episode ‘Mission to the Unknown’ (1965). The goal was to faithfully recreate the episode in a way that lays a claim to authenticity. This article examines the process and product and asks, with reference to television historiography, whether it achieves its goal of authenticity and what ‘authenticity’ might mean in this context. Ellis and others discuss the estrangement felt when viewing television from earlier decades. This article discusses the ‘feedback loop’ involved in knowing that the episode was made recently whilst assessing it as if it had been made in the past. The estrangement the viewer feels is therefore a sign that the episode is succeeding in its task of staying authentic to its era. But is it possible to completely abandon the knowledge of its contemporary production and lose oneself to the experience of viewing?

Reading Barthes, Again

2019 ◽  
pp. 17-42
Author(s):  
Victor Burgin ◽  
Sunil Manghani
Keyword(s):  
The Political ◽  
Art World ◽  
Medium Specificity ◽  
Zero Degree ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
As If

The exchange presented in this chapter between Victor Burgin and Sunil Manghani builds upon an earlier on, 'Reading Barthes', as presented in the volume Barthes/Burgin (Bishop and Manghani 2016: 73-89). The text is premised upon reading Barthes again, as in reflecting on what it has meant to engage with his work while addressing questions around the zero degree, specificities, responsibilities of form, and the political. By establishing a number of historical and critical interests, the exchange recounts how Burgin's sustained reading of Barthes begun in the 1960s long before many in the art world were familiar with the name. The dialogue covers a range of ideas and issues including medium specificity, the Neutral and the trope of 'as if' as common to both Burgin and Barthes work.

The High Tide of Anticolonial Legalism

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-27
Author(s):  
Samuel Moyn
Keyword(s):  
International Law ◽  
High Tide ◽  
Great Power ◽  
Power Politics ◽  
Great Power Politics ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Postcolonial States ◽  
As If

Abstract For a time in the 1960s it seemed as if one domain in which the global south’s enthusiastic struggle to arrogate the mantle of universalism as an exercise in “worldmaking” was the transformation of international law. Though this struggle was ultimately circumvented by great power politics and newer forms of international law and organization, it was a crucial moment. The introductory prosopographical survey that follows seeks to recapture the consensus of a set of northern and southern international lawyers in the 1960s who saw potential in the project of transforming their field to register the aims of a new epoch – the aims of postcolonial states.

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