Intersectional Avant-Garde: Paul Leni’s Rebus-Film Series and the Confluence of Experimental Visual Styles

2021 ◽  
pp. 97-115
Author(s):  
Erica Tortolani

This chapter focuses on Leni’s eight-part short film series, Rebus-Film (1925-26), and the ways that it relates to various avant-garde art movements of the 1910s and 1920s. Using Rebus-Film Nr. 1 as a starting point, the essay analyses the series’ connections to contemporaneous artistic movements such as Cubism, Futurism, and Dada and to cinematic styles and genres of the time, including Soviet montage and the ‘City Symphony’ films. To supplement this analysis, the essay draws upon reviews, trade magazine articles, and other written records from the period. This chapter sheds light on the ways that critics and audiences received the films and regarded Leni’s use of experimental aesthetic styles. While it is debatable as to whether Leni considered himself a modern art practitioner, a close reading of these short films shows that they are in dialogue with the visual avant-garde. This chapter also discusses the ways that the series fits into, and extends, Leni’s German and American careers.

2020 ◽  
Vol 7 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 51-72
Author(s):  
Nicola Brajato ◽  
Alexander Dhoest

The existing literature on the evolution of the Antwerp fashion scene is mainly concerned with the development of the Fashion Academy pedagogy from tradition to avant-garde, the role of the famous ‘Antwerp Six’ in putting the city under the international fashion spotlight, and the making of a specific cultural heritage which up to today continues to inspire young fashion designers. However, less has been said about its contribution to the redefinition of gender, and more specifically of masculinity. Consequently, the aim of the article is to contextualize Antwerp as a site for ‘creative resistance’ against the middle-class ideas of fashion, body and identity through the figure of Belgian designer Walter Van Beirendonck, articulating his contribution in deconstructing the normative understanding of the relationship between fashion and masculinity, providing a new metaphor to think about the process of body fashioning in everyday life. Therefore, Van Beirendonck’s creative practices as a sartorial form of resistance against the bourgeois understanding of masculinity and sexuality will be investigated through a qualitative analysis of visual and audio-visual archive materials generously provided by MoMu, the Antwerp fashion museum, showing how his creations are successful in stretching bodily borders and forming non-conventional masculinities. Far from offering an exhaustive overview of the field, the article constitutes a starting point for the understanding of a particular way of seeing the relationship between fashion, body and gender identity in the Antwerp fashion scene. Furthermore, it aims to stress the urgency to analyse the relevance of fashion in tackling issues of masculinity and the clothed body.


ILUMINURAS ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 18 (45) ◽  
Author(s):  
Wendell Marcel Alves da Costa

Este trabalho analisa o objeto do olhar a cidade do Recife-PE e as suas características espaciais e sociais a partir da perspectiva antropológica e fílmica. A discussão tem como ponto de partida a questão de documentar e ficcionalizar a cidade por meio das narrativas fílmicas do espaço urbano, e também de como o olhar sobre a cidade pode ser analisada através da ótica espacial e fílmica. Considera-se, portanto, os arranjos espaciais, imagéticos, identitários e estéticos presentes no âmbito urbano para então discursar acerca do problema central deste trabalho: os olhares fílmicos construídos da cidade do Recife-PE por meio das narrativas fílmicas dos curtas-metragens pernambucanos. Dessa indagação parte-se às contribuições do imaginário urbano, da memória e da identidade como elementos que constituem a construção do olhar para a cidade.Palavras-chave: Olhares fílmicos. Cidade. Recife-PE.Memories, narrative policies and dicotomies of the city: Film Looks on Recife-PE    AbstractThis work analyzes the object of the look at the city of Recife-PE and its spatial and social characteristics from an anthropological and film perspective. The discussion has as its starting point the question of documenting and fictionalizing the city through the film narratives of urban space, as well as how the view of the city can be analyzed through space and film optics. The spatial, imaginary, identity, and aesthetic arrangements present in the urban context are then considered, and the discourse about the central problem of this work is considered: the film-based views constructed from the city of Recife-PE through the film narratives of Pernambucan short films. From this question we start with the contributions of the urban imaginary, memory and identity as elements that constitute the construction of the look for the city.Keywords: Film looks. City. Recife-PE. 


Author(s):  
Jan Uhde ◽  
Yvonne Ng

ERIC KHOO was born in 1965 to a well-to-do family in Singapore. According to Khoo, his mother started taking him to the movies at the age of two, developing in him a love for the cinema (delete sentence- repeated in main text). According to Khoo, when he was about eight years old, he (chanced upon) his mother's Super 8 camera, started making "little animated films" on it and has since been unable to put his camera down. Khoo's interest led him to study cinematography at the City Art Institute in Sydney, Australia. Back in Singapore, he began making award-winning short films before venturing into feature film-making. In 1990, Khoo's animated short film, Barbie Digs Joe, won five awards at the Singapore Video Competition and became the first Singapore short film to travel to film festivals abroad. His next short, August (1991) won the Best Singapore Short Film at...


2020 ◽  
Vol 47 (1) ◽  
pp. 81-103
Author(s):  
Sabine Haenni

Abstract Focusing on Alexander Kluge’s short film Chicago im Zeitraffer (Chicago in Time Lapse), this article inserts his work with moving images into a larger genealogy of the city symphony film. Elucidating his relationship with the historical cinematic avant-garde, as Kluge borrows and departs from both László Moholy-Nagy’s urban vision and Bertolt Brecht’s conception of urban capitalist modernity, the article shows that Kluge’s film reorients time-lapse cinematography and opens up a new form of perception. By incorporating transnational techno music, the film suggests a concept of body and subjectivity that appears as a consequence of an increasingly voracious capitalist modernity while embedding a sense of obstinacy and self-propulsion. Nonetheless, the film’s reliance on transatlantic techno risks excluding the Black musical and social contexts that inspired it. Throughout the article the “loop,” or the traffic circle (Kreisverkehr), is understood as a governing metaphor that helps explain Kluge’s vision of contemporary urbanity, historical connectivity, and musical influence.


2017 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 118-128
Author(s):  
Jason Cohen ◽  
Judy Backhouse ◽  
Omar Ally

Young people are important to cities, bringing skills and energy and contributing to economic activity. New technologies have led to the idea of a smart city as a framework for city management. Smart cities are developed from the top-down through government programmes, but also from the bottom-up by residents as technologies facilitate participation in developing new forms of city services. Young people are uniquely positioned to contribute to bottom-up smart city projects. Few diagnostic tools exist to guide city authorities on how to prioritise city service provision. A starting point is to understand how the youth value city services. This study surveys young people in Braamfontein, Johannesburg, and conducts an importance-performance analysis to identify which city services are well regarded and where the city should focus efforts and resources. The results show that Smart city initiatives that would most increase the satisfaction of youths in Braamfontein  include wireless connectivity, tools to track public transport  and  information  on city events. These  results  identify  city services that are valued by young people, highlighting services that young people could participate in providing. The importance-performance analysis can assist the city to direct effort and scarce resources effectively.


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.


2012 ◽  
pp. 66-80
Author(s):  
Michał Mrozowicki

Michel Butor, born in 1926, one of the leaders of the French New Novel movement, has written only four novels between 1954 and 1960. The most famous of them is La Modification (Second thoughts), published in 1957. The author of the paper analyzes two other Butor’s novels: L’Emploi du temps (Passing time) – 1956, and Degrés (Degrees) – 1960. The theme of absence is crucial in both of them. In the former, the novel, presented as the diary of Jacques Revel, a young Frenchman spending a year in Bleston (a fictitious English city vaguely similar to Manchester), describes the narrator’s struggle to survive in a double – spatial and temporal – labyrinth. The first of them, formed by Bleston’s streets, squares and parks, is symbolized by the City plan. During his one year sojourn in the city, using its plan, Revel learns patiently how to move in its different districts, and in its strange labyrinth – strange because devoid any centre – that at the end stops annoying him. The other, the temporal one, symbolized by the diary itself, the labyrinth of the human memory, discovered by the narrator rather lately, somewhere in the middle of the year passed in Bleston, becomes, by contrast, more and more dense and complex, which is reflected by an increasinly complex narration used to describe the past. However, at the moment Revel is leaving the city, he is still unable to recall and to describe the events of the 29th of February 1952. This gap, this absence, symbolizes his defeat as the narrator, and, in the same time, the human memory’s limits. In Degrees temporal and spatial structures are also very important. This time round, however, the problems of the narration itself, become predominant. Considered from this point of view, the novel announces Gerard Genette’s work Narrative Discourse and his theoretical discussion of two narratological categories: narrative voice and narrative mode. Having transgressed his narrative competences, Pierre Vernier, the narrator of the first and the second parts of the novel, who, taking as a starting point, a complete account of one hour at school, tries to describe the whole world and various aspects of the human civilization for the benefit of his nephew, Pierre Eller, must fail and disappear, as the narrator, from the third part, which is narrated by another narrator, less audacious and more credible.


Urban Science ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 42
Author(s):  
Dolores Brandis García

Since the late 20th century major, European cities have exhibited large projects driven by neoliberal urban planning policies whose aim is to enhance their position on the global market. By locating these projects in central city areas, they also heighten and reinforce their privileged situation within the city as a whole, thus contributing to deepening the centre–periphery rift. The starting point for this study is the significance and scope of large projects in metropolitan cities’ urban planning agendas since the final decade of the 20th century. The aim of this article is to demonstrate the correlation between the various opposing conservative and progressive urban policies, and the projects put forward, for the city of Madrid. A study of documentary sources and the strategies deployed by public and private agents are interpreted in the light of a process during which the city has had a succession of alternating governments defending opposing urban development models. This analysis allows us to conclude that the predominant large-scale projects proposed under conservative policies have contributed to deepening the centre–periphery rift appreciated in the city.


2005 ◽  
Vol 21 (4) ◽  
pp. 358-366 ◽  
Author(s):  
Silvija Jestrovic

In this article, Silvija Jestrovic introduces the notion of spatial inter-performativity to discuss theatre's relationship to actual political and cultural spaces. Focusing on the Berlin of the 1920s in performances of Brecht and Piscator, then on a street procession of the Générik Vapeur troupe that took place in Belgrade in 1994, she examines how theatrical and political spaces refer to and transform one another. Silvija Jestrovic was a SSHRC postdoctoral fellow at York University in Toronto, and has recently taken up an appointment in the School of Theatre Studies at the University of Warwick. She is currently working on a book-length project entitled Avant-Garde and the City.


2012 ◽  
Vol 450-451 ◽  
pp. 999-1003
Author(s):  
Peng Chen ◽  
Jun Min Zhang ◽  
Ji Nan

Along with the progress of society, the development of the city and economic prosperity, outdoor advertising has achieved great development and plays an increasingly prominent role in the social life. In this paper, the development present situation of outdoor advertising management of Jinan as the starting point, we analyze the problems in the management of outdoor advertising and put forward corresponding countermeasures.


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