The British Documentary Film Movement (1926–1946)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas S. Davis
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
Documentary Film ◽  
Political Commitment ◽  
News Letter ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
State Sponsorship ◽  
Formal Techniques

The British Documentary Film Movement refers to the film units pioneered by John Grierson. With the benefit of state sponsorship, Grierson and the filmmakers that gathered around him experimented with avant-garde film techniques to develop a socially conscious cinema. Grierson’s film units and the documentary culture they created were also an important part of the debates around aesthetic innovation and political commitment that circulated throughout Britain in the 1930s and 1940s. Grierson’s group disseminated their ideas and theories in publications such as Sight and Sound, Cinema Quarterly, World Film News, and Documentary News Letter. Grierson coined the term "documentary" in a review of Robert Flaherty’s film Moana in The New York Sun in 1926. In this first use, documentary was nearly synonymous with the French documentaire, which typically refers to expedition films. In the coming years, Grierson would theorize documentary in more specific terms. His most famous and most lasting definition comes from an essay in a 1933 edition of Cinema Quarterly. Documentary, he claimed, was "the creative treatment of actuality." Grierson believed documentary could borrow formal techniques from the great Russian filmmakers (Eisenstein, Vertov, and Pudovkin) to dramatize scenes and practices from everyday life.

scholarly journals Rolling amnesia and the omnivorous now

2015 ◽  
pp. 76-88
Author(s):  
Lilly Husbands
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Cognitive Psychology ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
John Locke ◽  
The Self ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Single Frame ◽  
Phenomenological Experience ◽  
Animation Technique ◽  
Universal Nature

Throughout his career, New York-based experimental filmmaker and animator Jeff Scher has created animated works that are in dialogue with the diary film tradition in avant-garde cinema. Scher uses his distinctive single-frame rotoscope and collage animation technique to investigate the selective nature of memory and to celebrate the moments that constitute everyday life. Scher’s animated trilogy, You Won’t Remember This (2007), You Won’t Remember This Either (2009), and You Might Remember This (2011), depicts a series of everyday moments in the early childhoods of his two sons Buster and Oscar. The trilogy is centred on the mnemonic phenomenon that is referred to in developmental and cognitive psychology as childhood amnesia, which has presented problems for the philosophy of memory since John Locke first investigated the roles of memory and consciousness in the constitution of the identity of the self. Scher’s three portraits invite spectators to reflect on the mnemonic imbalance that is specific to this particular temporal situation—where the parent is able to remember what the child will ultimately forget—in both a distilled and heightened way. This paper investigates the ways in which the rotoscope collage technique employed by Scher in the You Won’t Remember This trilogy not only endows the works with a special capacity to emphasise the universal nature of childhood amnesia but also, conversely, resembles the phenomenological experience of remembering itself.

Charles Olson and American Modernism

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Byers
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Political Action ◽  
The Self ◽  
Instrumental Reason ◽  
Charles Olson ◽  
American Modernism ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
American Poet ◽  
Mark Rothko

The Practice of the Self situates the work of American poet Charles Olson (1910–70) at the centre of the early postwar American avant-garde. It shows Olson to have been one of the major advocates and theorists of American modernism in the late 1940s and early 1950s; a poet who responded fully and variously to the political, ethical, and aesthetic urgencies driving innovation across contemporary American art. Reading Olson’s work alongside that of contemporaries associated with the New York Schools of painting and music (as well as the exiled Frankfurt School), the book draws on Olson’s published and unpublished writings to establish an original account of early postwar American modernism. The development of Olson’s work is seen to illustrate two primary drivers of formal innovation in the period: the evolution of a new model of political action pivoting around the radical individual and, relatedly, a powerful new critique of instrumental reason and the Enlightenment tradition. Drawing on extensive archival research and featuring readings of a wide range of artists—including, prominently, Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko, David Smith, Wolfgang Paalen, and John Cage—The Practice of the Self offers a new reading of a major American poet and an original account of the emergence of postwar American modernism.

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

scholarly journals »Heimat im Koffer.« – »Oder über das Emigrantendasein. (Falls nicht zu traurig).«

Aschkenas ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Joachim Schlör
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New York ◽  
Popular Music ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
The United States ◽  
National Socialist ◽  
Weimar Germany ◽  
Musical Traditions ◽  
German Jewish ◽  
Insight Into

AbstractThe idea to create and stage a play called »Heimat im Koffer« – »A home in the suitcase« – emerged, I presume, in Vienna shortly before Austria became part of National Socialist Germany in 1938: the plot involved the magical translocation of a typical Viennese coffeehouse, with all its inhabitants and with the songs they sang, to New York; their confrontation with American everyday life and musical traditions would create the humorous situations the authors hoped for. Since 1933, Robert Gilbert (Robert David Winterfeld, 1899–1978), the son of a famous Jewish musician and himself a most successful writer of popular music for film and operetta in Weimar Germany, found himself in exile in Vienna where he cooperated with the journalist Rudolf Weys (1898–1978) and the piano artist Hermann Leopoldi (1888–1959). Whereas Gilbert and Leopoldi emigrated to the United States and became a part of the German-Jewish and Austrian-Jewish emigré community of New York – summarizing their experience in a song about the difficulty to acquire the new language, »Da wär’s halt gut, wenn man Englisch könnt« (1943) – Weys survived the war years in Vienna. After 1945, Gilbert and Weys renewed their contact and discussed – in letters kept today within the collection of the Viennese Rathausbibliothek – the possibility to finally put »Heimat im Koffer« on stage. The experiences of exile, it turned out, proved to be too strong, and maybe too serious, for the harmless play to be realized, but the letters do give a fascinating insight into everyday-life during emigration, including the need to learn English properly, and into the impossibility to reconnect to the former life and art.

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