French Impressionist Cinema

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard J. Leskosky
Keyword(s):  
Psychological States ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Art Form ◽  
Jean Renoir ◽  
Film Critic

French Impressionist Cinema describes an avant-garde film movement lasting approximately from 1918 to 1929. It was characterised by camera and editing techniques which both augmented the beauty of the image and evoked characters’ psychological states. Impressionist filmmakers regarded film as an art form in itself rather than simply a means for recording plays and novels. They believed art should not attempt to express truths directly, but rather create an experience which gives rise to emotions that would lead audiences to underlying truths. Mood and suggestion took precedence over plot. The ideas underlying French Impressionist Cinema found articulation in the writings of film critic and ciné-club founder Louis Delluc, who went on to write screenplays and direct films in the movement. Other notable Impressionist directors include Abel Gance (1889–1981), Marcel L’Herbier (1890–1979), Germaine Dulac (1882–1942), Jean Epstein (1897–1953), Jacques Feyder (1885–1948), Jean Renoir (1894–1979), and Russian émigré Dimitri Kirsanoff (1899–1957).

Contemporary Art and the Problem of Music: Towards a Musical Contemporary Art

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-26
Author(s):  
G. DOUGLAS BARRETT
Keyword(s):  
Contemporary Art ◽  
Contemporary Music ◽  
Conceptual Art ◽  
Social Process ◽  
Theoretical Concept ◽  
Sound Art ◽  
Art Theory ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Absolute Music ◽  
Art Form

Abstract This article elaborates the art-theoretical concept of ‘the contemporary’ along with formal differences between contemporary music and contemporary art. Contemporary art emerges from the radical transformations of the historical avant-garde and neo-avant-garde that have led to post-conceptual art – a generic art beyond specific mediums that prioritizes discursive meaning and social process – while contemporary music struggles with its status as a non-conceptual art form that inherits its concept from aesthetic modernism and absolute music. The article also considers the category of sound art and discusses some of the ways it, too, is at odds with contemporary art's generic and post-conceptual condition. I argue that, despite their respective claims to contemporaneity, neither sound art nor contemporary music is contemporary in the historical sense of the term articulated in art theory. As an alternative to these categories, I propose ‘musical contemporary art’ to describe practices that depart in consequential ways from new/contemporary music and sound art.

Kazuo Ohno's World from Without and Within. By Kazuo Ohno and Yoshito Ohno. Translated by John Barrett. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2004; pp. 344. $34.95 paper.

2005 ◽  
Vol 46 (2) ◽  
pp. 315-317
Author(s):  
Kurt Wurmli
Keyword(s):  
Academic Research ◽  
Modern Dance ◽  
Deep Understanding ◽  
Research Centers ◽  
The West ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Art Form ◽  
The World ◽  
Inside View ◽  
Scholarly Attention

Kazuo Ohno and Tatsumi Hijikata are recognized as the most influential creators of the contemporary Japanese dance form known today as butoh. Since its wild and avant-garde beginnings in the late 1950s, butoh has evolved into an established and appreciated art form throughout the world. Despite its popularity and strong influences on the international modern dance world, butoh only recently became an accepted subject for academic research in Japan as well as in the West. With the new opening of butoh research centers and archives—such as the Ohno Dance Studio Archives at BANK ART 1929 in Yokohama, the Kazuo Ohno Archives at Bologna University in Italy, and the Hijikata Tatsumi Archives at Keio University in Tokyo—serious scholarly attention has been given to the art of butoh's founders. However, the lack of firsthand sources by butoh artists reflecting their own work still poses great limitations for a deep understanding of the art form. Kazuo Ohno's World from Without and Within is not only the first full-length book in English about the master's life and work, but also offers a rare inside view of butoh.

Cinematic Intermediality

2021 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Theory And Practice ◽  
The Other ◽  
Moving Image ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Digital Era ◽  
Art Form ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
World Cinema ◽  
New Directions ◽  
Probing Questions

As a fundamentally hybrid medium, cinema has always been defined by its interactions with other art forms such as painting, sculpture, photography, performance and dance. Taking the in-between nature of the cinematic medium as its starting point, this collection of essays maps out new directions for understanding the richly diverse ways in which artists and filmmakers draw on and reconfigure the other arts in their creative practice. From pre-cinema to the digital era, from avant-garde to world cinema, and from the projection room to the gallery space, the contributors critically explore what happens when ideas, forms and feelings migrate from one art form to another. Giving voice to both theorists and moving image practitioners, Cinematic Intermediality: Theory and Practice stimulates fresh thinking about how intermediality, as both a creative method and an interpretative paradigm, can be explored alongside probing questions of what cinema is, has been and can be.

Modernismo’s Literary Engagements with Film

2018 ◽  
pp. 181-207
Author(s):  
Maite Conde
Keyword(s):  
Experimental Literature ◽  
Brazilian Literature ◽  
Mario De Andrade ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Literary Movement ◽  
Art Form ◽  
New Ideas ◽  
Film Form

By the 1920s, new ideas regarding film as the seventh art disseminated in Europe had a profound effect on Brazilian literature, specifically the emergence of an avant-garde literary movement known as modernismo, or “modernism.” Charting the new theories regarding cinema as an art form, this chapter examines how they were appropriated and elaborated by modernist writers in Brazil in the 1920s, most notably in the novels of Oswald de Andrade, the poetry of Mário de Andrade, and an urban chronicle by Antônio de Alcântara Machado called Pathé Baby. In examining this experimental literature, the chapter shows how new international ideas regarding film form and aesthetics provided the modernist writers with a tool for critiquing the official trajectory of national modernity in Brazil.

Cut and paste

2018 ◽  
pp. 25-65
Author(s):  
Anna Dahlgren
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Visual Culture ◽  
Historical Perspective ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Victorian Britain ◽  
Art Form ◽  
Close Study ◽  
History Of ◽  
Illustrated Press

Chapter 1 considers the mechanisms of breaks and continuities in the history of photocollage with regard to gender, genre and locations of display. Collage is commonly celebrated as a twentieth-century art form invented by Dada artists in the 1910s. Yet there was already a vibrant culture of making photocollages in Victorian Britain. From an art historical perspective this can be interpreted as an expression of typical modernist amnesia. The default stance of the early twentieth century’s avant-garde was to be radically, ground-breakingly new and different from any historical precursors. However, there is, when turning to the illustrated press, also a trajectory of continuity and withholding of traditions in the history of photocollage. This chapter has two parts. The first includes a critical investigation of the writings on the history of photocollage between the 1970s and 2010s, focusing on the arguments and rationales of forgetting and retrieving those nineteenth-century forerunners. It includes examples of amnesia and recognition and revaluation. The second is a close study of a number of images that appear in Victorian albums produced between 1870 and 1900 and their contemporary counterparts in the visual culture of illustrated journals and books.

Automatism

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hazel Donkin
Keyword(s):  
Visual Artists ◽  
Marcel Duchamp ◽  
Psychological States ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Tristan Tzara ◽  
Automatic Writing ◽  
Philippe Soupault ◽  
Poetic Imagery ◽  
Psychic Automatism ◽  
Francis Picabia

Both Dada and Surrealist writers and artists experimented with "automatic" creative production. Dadaists including Francis Picabia, Tristan Tzara, Hans Arp, and Kurt Schwitters wrote "automatic" poems from 1918, so called because they were transcribed without delay, serious consideration, or revision. Dada visual artists, including Arp, Sophie Tauber, and Marcel Duchamp also relinquished creative control of their works by employing chance. At the same time a group of writers in France around André Breton experimented with automatic writing as a new method of exploring the unconscious. In 1919 Breton and Philippe Soupault published Les Champs magnétiques, the result of their first experiments with automatic writing that tried to tap new poetic imagery through uncontrolled outbursts of imagination. In the period 1922–4 dream accounts were added to automatism. In the First Manifesto of Surrealism (1924) the movement is defined by Breton as "pure psychic automatism by which it is intended to express, either verbally or in writing, the true function of thought." Surrealist visual artists also explored automatism. Surrealist automatism was influential in the development of modernist visual art. Robert Matta’s (1911–2002) concerns with psychological states in the late 1930s set a precedent for American abstraction. CoBrA (1948–51), an avant-garde collective established in Europe, favored automatic techniques and influenced developments in European abstraction.

V. Film and Poetry

2003 ◽  
Vol 33 ◽  
pp. 71-97
Keyword(s):  
Reception Studies ◽  
Public And Private ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Art Form ◽  
Production Techniques ◽  
Acute Form ◽  
Words And Images ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Contexts Of Reception ◽  
Ancient Texts

The growth of film criticism in modern reception studies presents in a particularly acute form many of the issues of method with which other areas of reception are also grappling. In addition, it brings together under the umbrella of one art form the sometimes uneasy relationship between ‘high’ cultures and popular forms of entertainment. ‘Spectacle’ has to be analysed alongside that of the most nuanced ‘avant-garde’ production techniques. Film has been closely related to drama in terms of analytic approaches, not just because of its links with the subject matter of ancient texts but because it is, like theatre, a performative medium – although unlike a staged performance the conditions in which it is created both assume and facilitate its preservation. Yet some aspects of film also move close to poetry. Furthermore, film poems based on ancient texts and paradigms have encouraged a more self-referential approach, reflecting on the relationship between words and images in both public and private contexts of reception. It will become clear from the discussion which follows that film receptions have some significant overlaps with those in drama and poetry.

scholarly journals De la academia a la bohemia y más allá

2009 ◽  
pp. 49-62
Author(s):  
Bolívar Echeverría
Keyword(s):  
Avant Garde ◽  
Art Form ◽  
Technical Revolution

Avant-garde art introduces a technical revolution in the art form. What is it the meaning of this revolution? In view of the dispersion of the interpretations, Echeverría proposes we look for the key to interpreting in the ludic and tragic representations of the art in XX century

Silencing and Sounding the Voice in Transition-Era French Cinema

2020 ◽  
pp. 34-53
Keyword(s):  
Recording Medium ◽  
Silent Cinema ◽  
French Cinema ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Sound Effects ◽  
Jean Renoir ◽  
Speaking Voice ◽  
The Voice ◽  
Classical Hollywood ◽  
Shed Light

This essay examines two contrasting aesthetics of the voice in early 1930s French cinema and the role that music played in each. Filmed theater, or théâtre filmé, emerged from the conception that sound cinema was primarily a recording medium. In French theatrical adaptations, the speaking voice took precedence over all other elements of the soundtrack. The author argues, however, that in théâtre filmé, speech takes on almost musical qualities, folding music and sound effects into the voice itself. Avant-garde filmmakers took a contrasting approach, rejecting the restriction of camera movement imposed by the theatrical model and hoping to recapture some of the visual freedom characteristic of silent cinema. These filmmakers told their stories with as little spoken dialogue as possible, incorporating music prominently into their soundtracks in order to silence the speaking voice. Though the intent may have been to strip the voice of its dominance within the soundtrack, these directors’ strategic denial of the voice often granted it a much greater significance. By examining early experiments with the voice on the soundtrack in the transition years—including those by Jean Renoir, René Clair, and Jean Grémillon—the author’s analysis expands the concept of “vococentrism,” as articulated by Michel Chion and David Neumeyer, to include different models of understanding the voice in cinema beyond those found in classical Hollywood and helps shed light on competing conceptions of the voice’s role in cinema before practices became codified.

The Two Expanded Cinemas

2020 ◽  
pp. 41-99
Author(s):  
Jonathan Walley
Keyword(s):  
Perceived Threat ◽  
Traditional Art ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Art Form ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Expanded Cinema ◽  
Key Factor ◽  
History Of ◽  
Two Phases

This chapter, one of two that make up Part I of the book, provides a revised history of expanded cinema from the mid-1960s to the late 1970s. It divides this period into two phases or waves of expanded cinema. During the first phase, the term was more or less synonymous with “intermedia,” connoting hybridity, the dissolution of artistic boundaries, and the questioning of traditional art forms. But the liberatory rhetoric of this phase was countered by concerns that the expansion of cinema threatened to dilute and destabilize the art form that generations of filmmakers and film critics had worked to establish. It was within avant-garde film that the perceived threat to cinema’s identity caused the most anxiety, as that mode of film practice had always been the most preoccupied with the nature of cinema. Within a few years, the term “expanded cinema” was reclaimed by filmmakers whose work extended avant-garde cinema’s longstanding tradition of specifying the cinematic into a wide range of new, “expanded” forms. This phase of expanded cinema lasted through the 1970s into the first few years of the 1980s. Chapter 1 also introduces two other major themes: a historical process of negotiation between cinema’s specificity and its connections to the other arts, which works of expanded cinema enact, and the interplay between two conceptions of cinema—as a physical material and an ephemeral experience. This reciprocal movement between the material and ephemeral is a key factor in expanded cinema’s formal mutability.

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