Douglas Sirk, Aesthetic Modernism and the Culture of Modernity

Author(s):  
Victoria L. Evans

The first truly interdisciplinary analysis to link Douglas Sirk’s striking visual aesthetic to key movements in twentieth century art and architecture, this book reveals how the exaggerated artifice of Sirk's formal style emerged from his detailed understanding of the artistic debates that raged in 1920s Europe and the post-war United States. By providing an extensive analysis of nine of this director's most pivotal works, including lengthy case studies of Final Chord (1936), Magnificent Obsession (1953), All That Heaven Allows (1954), The Tarnished Angels (1957) and Imitation of Life (1959), Victoria L. Evans demonstrates how Sirk attempted to dissolve the boundaries of the cinema by assimilating elements of avant-garde art, architecture and design into the colour, composition and settings of many of his most well-known films. Treating Sirk’s oeuvre as a continuum between his German and American periods, Evans argues that this influential director's non-naturalistic mise-en-scène was the result of an interdisciplinary, transnational dialogue, and she illuminates the broader cultural context in which his films appeared by establishing connections with archival documents, Modernist manifestos and the philosophical writings of his peers.

Author(s):  
Victoria L. Evans

After describing one of Peter Greenaway's recent efforts to move beyond the limits of the cinema, Evans proposes that Douglas Sirk had already begun to dissolve the boundaries the medium by assimilating elements of avant-garde art, architecture and design into his mise-en-scène. She goes on to assert that Sirk's importation of a high art aesthetic into the low genre of melodrama echoed the widespread European Modernist preoccupation with the creation of a synergistic Gesamtkunstwerk or "total art work" during the period in which he intellectually came of age. Finally, the director's tendency to create "pictures" of the external landscape that the characters (and the viewer) are obliged to contemplate through the window frame is interpreted in the light of the theories of Le Corbusier.


Slovo ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol To the East of Pixar :... ◽  
Author(s):  
Pascal Vimenet

International audience Новый Гулливер (1935), первый черно-белый советскиймультипликационно-игровой фильм, режиссера Александра Птушко, не былдо сих пор предметом специального исследования. Нижеследующее являетсяего контекстуальным, биографическим, равно как и кинематографическим анализом. Творческий путь Птушко (1900-1973) дается в новом освещении, особенно 1920-30 годы, на которые приходится становление его кино.Осуществив постановку Это случилось на стадионе (1928) и Властелинбыта (1932), Птушко принял руководство секцией мультипликационногофильма на студии Совкино, ставшей Москинокомбинат, затем Мосфильм.Подробно рассматривается политико-культурный контекст, в период созданияего игрового фильма, между 1927 и 1935 годами, который сводит воедино всёмногообразие советского авангарда, но и является свидетелем торжествадогмы соцреализма. Фильм Птушко оказался восприимчив к теориям бурлескаоснователей Фабрики эксцентрического актера (ФЭКС). Превращениеперсонажей фильма Птушко в кукол-марионеток, символическое обыгрываниемасштабов могло зародиться в недрах этого движения. Но как сумел «НовыйГулливер», этот «фильм-сказка» обмануть политический контекст ипротивостоять сиренам соцреализма или отклониться от известныхшаблонных кодов? Птушко избирает философскую повесть, усугубленнуюполитическим памфлетом, что дает ему законное основание привязать чудесноек политическому. Смелая экранизация Свифта, московский дорогостоящийкинофильм, с его полуторатысячей шарнирных кукол, сотнями пластилиновыхфигурок, их сочетание с игровым кино, и два десятка массовых сцен претендуетна соперничество с «Кинг Конгом». Своим остроумием и развлекательностьюфильм Птушко вызывал восхищение Чарли Чаплина. Данное исследованиепрепарирует аллегорию – держащий каркас фильма, и стремитсяидентифицировать в кинопостановке всё то, в чем отголоском дают о себе знатьсоветские времена. И когда оказывается, что гимн лиллипутов, это воспеваниеотвратительного монархизма, жутковатым образом предвосхищает ОдуСталину 1939 года, то совершенно внятно становится, что Новый Гулливерне столько выставляет на показ всепобедительность homo sovieticus, сколькоделает из истории опасный аттракцион падений и взлетов и внедряет в неёсубверсивное понятие ухронии. The New Gulliver (1935), the first black and white Soviet animatedfeature film directed by Alexander Ptusko, has not been the subject of a specific studyso far. The following is contextual, biographical, as well as filmic analysis. It offers anew light on the route of Ptusko (1900-1973), especially on the 1920-1930 whichsees emerge his cinema. After having realized It Arrived at the Stadium (1928)and The Master of Everyday Life (1932), Ptusko took the lead of the section of theanimated film of the Sovkino studios become Moskinokombinat, then Mosfilm. Thepolitico-cultural context of the emergence of his feature film, 1927 and 1935, whichbrings together all the diversity of the Soviet avant-garde but sees the triumph of thedogma of socialist realism, is examined at length. Ptusko’s film seems receptive to theburlesque theories of the founders of the FEKS. The puppetisation of the characters inPtusko’s film, the symbolic games of scale, may have originated in this movement. Buthow could The New Gulliver, this « film-tale », have imposed itself in the politicalcontext and resist the realistic socialist sirens or divert certain codes? Ptusko choosesa philosophical tale doubled by a political pamphlet that authorizes him to link themarvelous to the political. An audacious adaptation of Swift, a Muscovite spectacular,The New Gulliver aims to compete, with its 1 500 puppets articulated, hundreds ofplastic figurines, their combination to the real shot and its 20 sets, with King Kong.Ptusko’s film provokes Chaplin’s admiration for his facetiousness. The study dissects theallegory that structures the film and seeks to identify in the staging of everything thatechoes the Soviet present. And when it appears that the Lilliputian hymn, the songof the hated kingship, anticipates in an unsettling way The Ode to Stalin of 1939, itbecomes certain that The New Gulliver, more than to demonstrate the invincibility ofthe homo sovieticus, transforms the history in a roller coaster and makes penetrate theexplosive concept of uchronia. Le Nouveau Gulliver (1935), premier long métrage d’animationsoviétique noir et blanc, réalisé par Aleksandr Ptouchko, n’a pas fait l’objetd’études spécifiques jusqu’ici. Celle qui suit est contextuelle, biographique, toutautant qu’analyse filmique. Elle propose un nouvel éclairage sur l’itinéraire dePtouchko (1900-1973), particulièrement sur les années 1920-1930 qui voitémerger son cinéma. Après avoir réalisé C’est arrivé au stade (1928) et Le Maîtredu quotidien (1932), Ptouchko prend la tête de la section du film animé des studiosSovkino devenus Moskinokombinat, puis Mosfilm. Le contexte politico-cultureld’émergence de son long métrage, entre 1927 et 1935, qui met en présence toutela diversité de l’avant-garde soviétique mais voit triompher le dogme du réalismesocialiste, est longuement examiné. Le film de Ptouchko semble réceptif aux théoriesburlesques des fondateurs de la FEKS. La marionnettisation des personnages dufilm de Ptouchko, les jeux symboliques d’échelle ont peut-être pris leur sourcedans ce mouvement. Mais comment Le Nouveau Gulliver, ce « ciné-conte », a-t-ilpu s’imposer dans le contexte politique et résister aux sirènes réalistes socialistesou en détourner certains codes ? Ptouchko choisit un conte philosophiquedoublé d’un pamphlet politique qui l’autorise à lier le merveilleux au politique.Audacieuse adaptation de Swift, superproduction moscovite, Le Nouveau Gulliverambitionne de rivaliser, avec ses 1 500 marionnettes articulées, ses centaines defigurines en plastiline, leur combinaison à la prise de vue réelle et ses vingt décors,avec King-Kong. Le film de Ptouchko provoque l’admiration de Chaplin, quien apprécie l’esprit facétieux. L’étude dissèque l’allégorie qui structure le film ets’attache à repérer dans la mise en scène tout ce qui fait écho au présent soviétique.Et quand il apparaît que l’hymne lilliputien, chant de la royauté honnie, anticipede manière troublante L’Ode à Staline de 1939, il devient certain que Le NouveauGulliver, plus que de démontrer l’invincibilité de l’homo sovieticus, transformel’histoire en montagnes russes et y fait pénétrer le concept explosif de l’uchronie.


Author(s):  
Justus Nieland

A key figure in the ongoing legacy of modern cinema, David Lynch designs environments for spectators, transporting them to inner worlds built by mood, texture, and uneasy artifice. We enter these famously cinematic interiors to be wrapped in plastic, the fundamental substance of Lynch's work. This volume revels in the weird dynamism of Lynch's plastic worlds. Exploring the range of modern design idioms that inform Lynch's films and signature mise-en-scène, the book argues that plastic is at once a key architectural and interior design dynamic in Lynch's films, an uncertain way of feeling essential to Lynch's art, and the prime matter of Lynch's strange picture of the human organism. The book offers striking new readings of Lynch's major works (Eraserhead, Blue Velvet, Wild at Heart, Mulholland Dr., Inland Empire) and his early experimental films, placing Lynch's experimentalism within the aesthetic traditions of modernism and the avant-garde; the genres of melodrama, film noir, and art cinema; architecture and design history; and contemporary debates about cinematic ontology in the wake of the digital. This inventive study argues that Lynch's plastic concept of life—supplemented by technology, media, and sensuous networks of an electric world—is more alive today than ever.


2016 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
pp. 8-18
Author(s):  
Nina Yu Sputnitskaya

Evaluation of Russian animated cartoons of the 1930s wasnt positive for a long time; historians of cinema, directors, artists marked this period as the era of hard times, as formalism and imitation Disney's esthetics. However the films considered in the article have played a significant role in development of world cinema. Particularly they have influenced upon moulding of the Czech, Polish and Ukrainian stop motion animation of the post-war years. Unfortunately, some works released in the Union of puppet animation at Mosfilm studios under the leadership of A.L. Ptushko have been lost, and nowadays it is impossible to establish precisely their actual released number. In the article the experimental animation films of the second half of the 1930s which have remained on film and also in the form of editorial scripts (RGALI, Mosfilm, Gosfilmofond) are being analyzed. It should be noted/ that five films of the group shot with P. Mershin's method are restored (method of time-lapse reconstruction) by N. Mayorov and V. Kotovsky (on the remained color negatives) in the 2010s. So it is possible now to estimate innovation and originality of these films, and to define a role of school of the Soviet animation in development of the world stop motion. Special attention is drawn to the socio-cultural context accentuating peculiarities of reading the films, which formed their imagery and on specific reflection of a defence discourse in the Soviet animation of 1935-41s.


2020 ◽  
pp. 236-260
Author(s):  
Anastasia V. Gladoshchuk

Two tendencies define one of the “master -currents” (Ch. Innes) in the XXth century drama, epitomized by Antonin Artaud’s “theatre of cruelty”: revival of ritual practices and search for a “new myth”. Artaud perceives the Myth both as the end and the means: by creating a new myth, theatre reveals and heals illnesses of modernity; by reviving the ancient, theatre conducts the primitive, metaphysical “forces” of the “great cultures”. Particularly attracted to the Mesoamerican world, Artaud intended to stage “The Conquest of Mexico” (1933), a drama in four acts, to inaugurate his new theatre. Considering this, a special relevance should be given to the fact that M.A. Asturias’s article –manifesto “Reflections on the Possibility of an American Theatre in Indian spirit” was published in November 1930, anticipating Artaud’s conception of theatre based on myth. The ideas stated in the manifesto will be put into practice in “Cuculcán” play, the last piece of the “Legends of Guatemala”, second edition (1948). Settled in Paris since 1924, Asturias received the same aesthetic impulses as Artaud did: surrealism, avant -garde cinematography, “Ballets russes”, primitivism in all its forms. However, their preferences were not thoroughly the same. A parallel reading of the manifesto and the chronicles reveals how Asturias’s ideas on theatre correspond to the cultural context. It can be affirmed that many of Asturias’s and Artaud’s principles are isomorphic: accentuation of colour and disproportion in decorations, abolition of stage, use of masks, formalized movements, rejection of rhetoric and declamation, revelation of word’s religious force. Yet the ways Asturias and Artaud work with myth differ: it is in a playful, not tragic and ritualistic mode that myths are being actualized in Asturias’s theatre, and not only by means of “mise en scène”. Asturias considers the Myth as an inherited language, that is why the action in “Cuculcán” is determined by speech and what he calls “the Word’s value”, in accordance with indigenous philosophy.


Author(s):  
C. Claire Thomson

The first book-length study in English of a national corpus of state-sponsored informational film, this book traces how Danish shorts on topics including social welfare, industry, art and architecture were commissioned, funded, produced and reviewed from the inter-war period to the 1960s. For three decades, state-sponsored short filmmaking educated Danish citizens, promoted Denmark to the world, and shaped the careers of renowned directors like Carl Th. Dreyer. Examining the life cycle of a representative selection of films, and discussing their preservation and mediation in the digital age, this book presents a detailed case study of how informational cinema is shaped by, and indeed shapes, its cultural, political and technological contexts.The book combines close textual analysis of a broad range of films with detailed accounts of their commissioning, production, distribution and reception in Denmark and abroad, drawing on Actor-Network Theory to emphasise the role of a wide range of entities in these processes. It considers a broad range of genres and sub-genres, including industrial process films, public information films, art films, the city symphony, the essay film, and many more. It also maps international networks of informational and documentary films in the post-war period, and explores the role of informational film in Danish cultural and political history.


2019 ◽  
Vol 58 (2) ◽  
pp. 170-182
Author(s):  
Karen F. Quandt

Baudelaire refers in his first essay on Théophile Gautier (1859) to the ‘fraîcheurs enchanteresses’ and ‘profondeurs fuyantes’ yielded by the medium of watercolour, which invites a reading of his unearthing of a romantic Gautier as a prescription for the ‘watercolouring’ of his own lyric. If Paris's environment was tinted black as a spiking population and industrial zeal made their marks on the metropolis, Baudelaire's washing over of the urban landscape allowed vivid colours to bleed through the ‘fange’. In his early urban poems from Albertus (1832), Gautier's overall tint of an ethereal atmosphere as well as absorption of chaos and din into a lulling, muted harmony establish the balmy ‘mise en scène’ that Baudelaire produces at the outset of the ‘Tableaux parisiens’ (Les Fleurs du mal, 1861). With a reading of Baudelaire's ‘Tableaux parisiens’ as at once a response and departure from Gautier, or a meeting point where nostalgia ironically informs an avant-garde poetics, I show in this paper how Baudelaire's luminescent and fluid traces of color in his urban poems, no matter how washed or pale, vividly resist the inky plumes of the Second Empire.


2014 ◽  
Vol 39 (4) ◽  
pp. 6-11
Author(s):  
Thomas Crombez

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.


2012 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 38-55
Author(s):  
Riikka Korppi-Tommola

Abstract The reception of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company and John Cage’s visit to Helsinki in 1964 revealed local, Finnish aesthetic priorities. In the dance critics’ texts, Cunningham’s style seemed to create confusion, for example, with its mixture of styles visà-vis avant-garde music. Music critics, mainly avant-garde and jazz musicians, had high expectations for this theatrical event. In their reviews, comparisons were made between Cunningham’s style and the productions of Anna Halprin. In this paper, I analyse the cultural perspectives of this encounter and utilize the theoretical framework of Thomas Postlewait’s pattern of cultural contexts. Additionally, I follow David M. Levin’s argumentation about changes in aesthetics. Local and foreign conventions become emphasized in this kind of a transnational, intercultural encounter. Time and place are involved in the interpretations of the past as well as later in the processes of forming periods.


Popular Music ◽  
2006 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 77-95 ◽  
Author(s):  
MATTHEW BANNISTER

Indie alternative rock in the 1980s is often presented as authentically autonomous, produced in local scenes, uncaptured by ideology, free of commercial pressures, but also of high culture elitism. In claiming that the music is avant-garde, postmodern and subversive, such accounts simplify indie's historical, social and cultural context. Indie did not simply arise organically out of developing postpunk music networks, but was shaped by media, and was not just collective, but also stratified, hierarchical and traditional. Canon (articulated through practices of archivalism and connoisseurship) is a key means of stratification within indie scenes, produced by and serving particular social and cultural needs for dominant social groups (journalists, scenemakers, tastemakers, etc.). These groups and individuals were mainly masculine, and thus gender in indie scenes is an important means for deconstructing the discourse of indie independence. I suggest re-envisioning indie as a history of record collectors, emphasising the importance of rock ‘tradition’, of male rock ‘intellectuals’, second-hand record shops, and of an alternative canon as a form of pedagogy. I also consider such activities as models of rational organisation and points of symbolic identification.


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