Fireworks (1947)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fouad Oveisy
Keyword(s):  
Middle Finger ◽  
Short Film ◽  
Christmas Tree ◽  
The Unconscious ◽  
Visual Storytelling ◽  
Jean Cocteau ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Thematic Unity ◽  
Mise En Scene ◽  
Missing Middle

Fireworks, Kenneth Anger’s breakthrough short film brought him immediate renown, and acclaim from the likes of Jean Cocteau, upon its debut at the 1949 Festival du Film Maudit (Hutchison, 2004: 27). Inspired by the baroque approach to imagery and mise en scène that dominates Cocteau’s Le Sang d’un poète [The Blood of a Poet] (1930), and exploring the trance-like machinations of the unconscious and dreams found in the cinema of Maya Deren, this film cemented Anger’s reputation as a pioneer of the ‘postwar American avant-garde cinema’ (Meir, 2003). Homoeroticism, a growing disenchantment with violence, and the monolithic rememoration of figures of fascination and authority, are among the major themes explored in Fireworks. To speak of an underlying thematic unity is to reduce the film’s stylistic and philosophical multiplicity; nevertheless, a number of key motifs predominate in the narrative and visual storytelling. For example, while the morphing matrices of phallic symbols (a totem, a missing middle finger) and icons of American power and consumerism (navy soldiers, a Christmas tree) hint at an overt use of symbolism, the suspended gaze of the camera emphasizes Anger’s own articulation of the work as the release of ‘all the explosive pyrotechnics of a dream’ (Fireworks). After its public release, homophobic outrage against the perceived pornographic content of the film led to an obscenity trial; in the end, the California Supreme Court declared that Fireworks was art (Hattenstone, 2010).

Aquarelles parisiennes: Gautier, Baudelaire, and the Poetry of Urban Watercolours

2019 ◽  
Vol 58 (2) ◽  
pp. 170-182
Author(s):  
Karen F. Quandt
Keyword(s):  
Urban Landscape ◽  
Second Empire ◽  
Theophile Gautier ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Meeting Point ◽  
Mise En Scene ◽  
Bleed Through ◽  
Fleurs Du Mal

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.

scholarly journals Cinematic Representation of Chinese-Indonesians’ Trauma in Jason Iskandar The Day The Sky Roared

2019 ◽  
Vol 13 (4) ◽  
pp. 275
Author(s):  
Anton Sutandio
Keyword(s):  
Visual Analysis ◽  
Film Studies ◽  
Historical Trauma ◽  
Silent Film ◽  
Short Film ◽  
Trauma Studies ◽  
Mise En Scene ◽  
Different Levels

This research analyzed a contemporary independent Indonesian film entitled The Day the Sky Roared (2015) that was directed by Jason Iskandar. This 10-minute silent film talked about the anxiety of Chinese-Indonesians through the eyes of a mother and her daughter regarding the historical trauma of the May 1998 tragedy. The fact that the film was produced about 17 years after the tragedy suggested the director’s awareness that the trauma remained due to the absence of reconciliation and closure. This research would show how the short film frames the incident and trauma of the Chinese-Indonesians. The research was a combination of trauma studies and film studies that focuses on the visual analysis of the film’s cinematography and mise-en-scene to show the cinematic representation of Chinese-Indonesians’ trauma. The findings show that the portrayal of Chinese-Indonesians still strongly suggests unrelieved psychological discomfort, albeit, at different levels, that is closely related to the traumatic past and the pervasive stereotyping of Chinese-Indonesians. 

Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Victoria L. Evans
Keyword(s):  
Le Corbusier ◽  
Window Frame ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Mise En Scene ◽  
The Creation ◽  
Douglas Sirk ◽  
Architecture And Design

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.

Soviet Film

2019 ◽  
pp. 63-74
Author(s):  
Lisa Nanney
Keyword(s):  
Political Action ◽  
Film Industry ◽  
Short Film ◽  
Independent Film ◽  
Hollywood Film ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Critical Response ◽  
Film Treatment ◽  
Film Productions ◽  
The Masses

Dos Passos’s adaptation of cinematic methods to literary style beginning in the mid-1920s emerged further in his work after he visited Russia in 1928. Tepid public and critical response to New Playwrights dramas motivated Dos Passos to explore how the revolutionary state-supported Russian theater and film productions had engaged the masses, united them politically, and produced groundbreaking artists. In dramatist Meyerhold’s avant-garde theater, Constructivist industrial sets and “biomechanical” acting techniques created successful dramas about and for workers. Dos Passos observed that cinematic innovations emerged from the Soviet-controlled studios despite the state’s use of film as its primary tool of mass ideological education. Though Lenin, then Stalin increasingly controlled film productions and artists, Soviet filmmakers nonetheless evolved theories of montage that became foundational in filmmaking and informed Dos Passos’s modernist novels and his 1936 independent film treatment “Dreamfactory,” with its meta-filmic exposé of the Hollywood film industry. In particular, these works registered the formal and conceptual innovations of two directors: Eisenstein, whose films combined fiction and history to effect political action through art; and Vertov, whose films acknowledged the artist’s vision as controlling the camera “eye” and who embedded in one short film an auto-critique of movie-making.

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

2021 ◽  
pp. 97-115
Author(s):  
Erica Tortolani
Keyword(s):  
Modern Art ◽  
Short Film ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Short Films ◽  
Film Series ◽  
Magazine Articles ◽  
The City

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.

Parade

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Juliet Bellow
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Pablo Picasso ◽  
Jean Cocteau ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Production Team ◽  
Ballets Russes ◽  
Cabaret Songs ◽  
Erik Satie ◽  
One Act

A one-act ballet on the theme of a fairground sideshow, Parade was produced by Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, and premiered on May 18, 1917 at the Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris. According to Jean Cocteau, the poet who wrote the ballet’s libretto, the impetus for Parade originated in 1912 with Diaghilev’s command, ‘‘Astonish me!’’ To fulfill Diaghilev’s mandate, Cocteau assembled a production team drawn from the Parisian avant-garde: for the score, he recruited the composer Erik Satie, known for experimental piano compositions such as Gymnopédies (1888) and for cabaret songs performed at the Montmartre cabaret Le Chat Noir. In 1916, Cocteau secured the participation of Pablo Picasso, a painter associated with the Cubist movement of the early 1910s, to design the overture curtain, set, and costumes. Working with the choreographer Léonide Massine, this group produced a ballet-pantomime featuring familiar characters from the circus, variety shows, and cinema. Mixing various forms of art and entertainment, Parade used dance to explore the unstable relationship between elite and popular culture.

Diagonalsymphonien [Diagonal Symphony] (1924)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard J. Leskosky
Keyword(s):  
Musical Instruments ◽  
Short Film ◽  
Film Exhibition ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
The Public ◽  
Black And White ◽  
Visual Music ◽  
Universal Language ◽  
Sequential Images ◽  
Abstract Shapes

Diagonalsymphonien [Diagonal Symphony], a black-and-white, abstract, animated short film made in Germany by Swedish painter Viking Eggeling, assisted by Bauhaus student Erna Niemeyer, is a seminal work of avant-garde cinema. It arose from Eggeling’s experiments trying to create a universal language of abstract symbols in which he created sequential images on long painted scrolls. Though silent, the film explores the concept of visual music—the artificial creation of visual rhythms analogous to music. Eggeling made his images with paper and tin foil cut-outs affixed to black sheets of paper filmed one frame at a time. The abstract shapes, constantly growing and disappearing along diagonal axes, often suggest musical instruments such as panpipes, grand pianos, zithers, and drums. Eggeling premiered his film to friends in 1924. Its first public screening was in Berlin at the 3 May 1925 First International Avant-Garde Film Exhibition, titled Der absolute Film, along with Rene Clair’s Entr’acte (1924), Fernand Leger’s Ballet mecanique (1924), and examples of Walther Ruttmann’s Lichtspiele Opus works (1921–25) and Hans Richter’s Rhythmus films (1921–25). Eggeling’s film received critical praise for its exploration of time and the non-literary potential of film. He, however, was too ill to attend the public screening and died sixteen days later. Diagonal Symphony is his only surviving film.

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