scholarly journals Beyond the Screen

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eugenio De Angelis
Keyword(s):  
Film Theory ◽  
Active Agent ◽  
Art World ◽  
Role Changes ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Japanese Art ◽  
The Sixties ◽  
The Spectator ◽  
Movie Theatre

Intermedial practices are a common trademark of the Japanese art world in the sixties and seventies. This article focuses on a case study of such practices, namely the relationship between artwork and audience in Terayama Shūji’s cinema. Moving from the author’s theatrical theories on spectatorship (kankyakuron), the paper applies those theories to Terayama’s experimental movies, analysing how they are adapted to the cinematic medium. This study conceives a three-phased system, where the spectator is progressively brought towards the screen and his role changes from passive viewer to active agent. The study adopts an approach based on performance studies and avant-garde film theory to reveal how Terayama moulds the movie-going practice into a performative and collective event, using the movie theatre as a theatrical stage.

From Figures of Paradox to a Philosophy of Review

2020 ◽  
pp. 206-254
Author(s):  
Rebecca A. Sheehan
Keyword(s):  
Fractal Theory ◽  
Film Theory ◽  
Incompleteness Theorem ◽  
Stanley Cavell ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
The World ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Spectator ◽  
Zeno's Paradox

This chapter examines the role of paradox in the films and film theory of Ken Jacobs, Hollis Frampton, and Michael Snow. Paradoxes such as Zeno’s paradox, Gödel’s incompleteness theorem, and Benoît Mandelbrot’s fractal theory of geometry, which inform the work of these filmmakers, propose and repeat the unresolvable gap between subject and world that informs skepticism. This chapter argues that the skeptical encounters these films invite, which entice the spectator to work toward solving a riddle or problem of incompleteness, also provide a model for overcoming skepticism by prompting re-encounters with the images on screen and the world to which they refer. These re-encounters occur in the same way that Stanley Cavell imagined the images of mainstream cinema could overcome problems of philosophical skepticism by drawing the subject closer to the world. The author argues, however, that these avant-garde meditations on mises en abyme are possibly more effective than Hollywood filmmaking for overcoming skepticism because of their more immediate emphasis on cinema’s very ability to engage and stage re-encounters between the subject and the limits of the world, rather than their reference to the world through images.

The Director, the Spectator and the Eiffel Tower

2005 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 36-48 ◽  
Author(s):  
DENNIS KENNEDY
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Final Section ◽  
Cultural Authority ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
The Past ◽  
Modern Age ◽  
The World ◽  
The Spectator ◽  
Theatre Historiography

Though directors have been central to the theatre for more than a century, it is not easy to describe their function or explain fully what they do. Since they have not all done the same things, theorizing the office is a slippery enterprise. Despite this difficulty, the cultural authority of directors has become embedded in the thinking of both the commercial and subsidized sectors in most countries in the world, including many parts of Asia, so that directors are fundamental to the way we comprehend and value theatrical work. Though dictatorial modes of direction have been challenged in the past three decades by a variety of strategies, the theatre industry continues to rely heavily upon the managerial and aesthetic skills of the director, who stands as an icon of the successes and failures of twentieth-century theatre. This essay discusses two alternative histories of the director in the modern age, the modernist avant-garde model and an industrial model, showing that the two are much closer than typically claimed. Using André Antoine as case study, the essay offers a critique of certain tendencies in modernist theatre historiography. A final section looks at the interrelationship of the director and the spectator.

Cinema Expanded

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan Walley
Keyword(s):  
New Media ◽  
Film History ◽  
Video Art ◽  
Experimental Film ◽  
Art World ◽  
Film Culture ◽  
Moving Image ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Expanded Cinema ◽  
History Of

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.

scholarly journals Digitizing artist periodicals: new methodologies from the Digital Humanities for Analysing Artist Networks

2014 ◽  
Vol 39 (4) ◽  
pp. 6-11
Author(s):  
Thomas Crombez
Keyword(s):  
Visual Arts ◽  
Small Groups ◽  
Digital Humanities ◽  
First Generation ◽  
Digital Archive ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Socially Engaged Art ◽  
The Sixties ◽  
New Methodologies ◽  
Post War

The research project Digital Archive of Belgian Neo-Avant-garde Periodicals (DABNAP) aims to digitize and analyse a large number of artists’ periodicals from the period 1950–1990. The artistic renewal in Belgium since the 1950s, sustained by small groups of artists (such as G58 or De Nevelvlek), led to a first generation of post-war artist periodicals. Such titles proved decisive for the formation of the Belgian neo-avant-garde in literature and the visual arts. During the sixties and the seventies, happening and socially-engaged art took over and gave a new orientation to artist periodicals. In this article, I wish to highlight the challenges and difficulties of this project, for example, in dealing with non-standard formats, types of paper, typography, and non-paper inserts. A fully searchable archive of neo-avant-garde periodicals allows researchers to analyse in much more detail than before how influences from foreign literature and arts took root in the Belgian context.

The Transformation of the Avant-Garde: The New York Art World, 1940-1985

1988 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 221
Author(s):  
Rosanne Martorella ◽  
Diana Crane
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Art World ◽  
Avant Garde

De cultuurhistorische waarde van de literatuur

1970 ◽  
Vol 63 ◽  
pp. 163-183
Author(s):  
Lies Wesseling
Keyword(s):  
The Netherlands ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Literary Works ◽  
Gothic Novel ◽  
The Sixties ◽  
Post War ◽  
Literary System ◽  
Specific Expertise

This article probes the extent to which literary history and cultural history may mutuallyilluminate each other, without neglecting the poetic dimension of literary works. Thispoetic dimension is embedded within the genre repertoires that shape the production andreception of literary works. One should therefore take into close account that the literaryrepresentation of social conflict is always deflected by the prism of genre conventions.Focusing on the case study of the Dutch Gothic novel, I argue that Gothic tales provide aspecific take on the post-war modernization of the Netherlands. As such, they make avaluable contribution to historical debates about the periodization of the sixties andseventies, not in spite of, but because of their specific poetic properties. Thus, it is verywell possible to bring literary works to bear upon the discussion of historical issueswithout either infringing upon the relative autonomy of the literary system or neglectingthe specific expertise of literary studies as a discipline in its own rights.

Hearing Film Music Topics outside the Movie Theatre

2021 ◽  
pp. 548-574
Author(s):  
Janet Bourne
Keyword(s):  
Statistical Analysis ◽  
Extraction Method ◽  
Film Music ◽  
Art Music ◽  
Film Scores ◽  
Western Art ◽  
Western Art Music ◽  
Movie Theatre

This chapter describes a cognitively informed framework based on analogy for theorizing cinematic listening; in this case, it tests the hypothesis that contemporary listeners might use associations learned from film music topics to make sense of western art music (WAM). Using the pastoral topic as a case study, a corpus of film scores from 1980–2014 determines common associations for this topic based on imagery, emotion, and narrative contexts. Then, the chapter outlines potential narratives a modern moviegoer might make by listening “cinematically” to a Sibelius movement. The hypothesis is empirically tested through an experiment where participants record their imagined narratives and images while listening to WAM and film music. The meaning extraction method, a statistical analysis for identifying associational themes, is used to analyze people’s responses.

Politics in the Art of War: The American War Cemeteries

2018 ◽  
Vol 38 (2) ◽  
pp. 223-254
Author(s):  
Kate Clarke Lemay
Keyword(s):  
Soft Power ◽  
American Art ◽  
The United States ◽  
Political Strategy ◽  
Art World ◽  
Art Making ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Art Of War ◽  
International Diplomacy ◽  
Internal Struggle

The overseas American war cemeteries, in their aim to achieve “soft power” or cultural diplomacy during the mid-century, created high-value commissions in the American art world. The sought-after commissions resulted in an internal struggle between artists practicing traditional figural Classicism and the avant-garde who had adopted expressionism and abstraction. Additionally, a surging political stream of anti-Communism made artists vulnerable, because modern art seemed to underscore Communism’s abandonment of religion. By adopting demagoguery as political strategy, McCarthyists escalated the perception of Communism as present in the United States by targeting American culture, including artists of the American war cemeteries. Describing the struggles surrounding the creation of the cemeteries, this essay takes into account the artists’ biographies, statements, and actions, arguing that their art-making was not only critical in creating international diplomacy, but also in sustaining American freedom, particularly within an era of American political suspicion.

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