The Films of Bill Morrison

2017 ◽  

Avant-garde filmmaker Bill Morrison has been making films that combine archival footage and contemporary music for decades, and he has recently begun to receive substantial recognition: he was the subject of a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, and his 2002 film Decasia was selected for the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress. This is the first book-length study of Morrison's work, covering the whole of his career. It gathers specialists throughout film studies to explore Morrison's "aesthetics of the archive"-his creative play with archival footage and his focus on the materiality of the medium of film.

2019 ◽  
Vol 73 (2) ◽  
pp. 9-22
Author(s):  
Patricia Aufderheide

This examination of the career of Julia Reichert-a three-time Oscar nominee, the recipient of two lifetime achievement awards, and the subject of a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in 2019-follows the trajectory of her oeuvre, which intertwines social commitment and aesthetic concern. Reichert's work is a rare example of U.S. working-class film art made about working-class people. Her career parallels the evolution of a genre of socially-committed documentary in the U.S.


2019 ◽  
pp. 82-97
Author(s):  
Ramón Cernuda

Art collector Ramón Cernuda discusses how Cuban art was consolidated during the first half of the twentieth century, especially after the emergence of two generations of modern artists that are now considered the core of the vanguardia (also known as the Havana School). Cernuda notes that the international art market increasingly valued the work of Cuban artists such as Amelia Peláez, Víctor Manuel García, René Portocarrero, and Wifredo Lam. These artists appeared in numerous individual and collective exhibitions in major museums and private galleries, as well as in specialized art magazines and books. As Cernuda underlines, Cuban vanguardia painters reached a broad audience with Alfred Barr Jr.’s 1944 exhibition, Modern Cuban Painters, at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City. Ironically, the wide success of Cuban artists abroad led Cuban collectors to pay attention to them.


Author(s):  
Nathaniel Brennan

This chapter, by Nathaniel Brennan, discusses the efforts of the Museum of Modern Art Film Library to make use of captured enemy motion pictures on behalf of the federal government’s wartime intelligence programs during World War II. While the chapter presents an overview of the film library’s governmental intelligence work, ranging from matters of storage to the challenges of training analysts, the central case study examines the work of British anthropologist Gregory Bateson, whose work at the film library consisted of trying to define an objective approach to the study of culture through cinema and the preparation of a test film that would instruct American soldiers about the peculiarities of the German character. Although Bateson’s plans did not materialize, the efforts of Margaret Mead to adapt Bateson’s anthropological film methodology for the Cold War nonetheless influenced the development of postwar film studies and the analysis of national cinemas.


2012 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 163-169
Author(s):  
Andrew V. Uroskie

Within William Seitz's 1961 exhibition The Art of Assemblage for the New York Museum of Modern Art, the question of framing – of art's exhibitionary situation within and against a given environment – had emerged as perhaps the major issue of postwar avant-garde practice. Beyond the familiar paintings of Johns and Rauschenberg, a strategy of radical juxtaposition in this time extended well beyond the use of new materials, to the very institutions of aesthetic exhibition and spectatorship. Perhaps the most significant example of this disciplinary juxtaposition can be found in the intermingling of the static and the temporal arts. Like many artists of the twentieth century, Robert Breer was fascinated by the aesthetic and philosophical character of movement. Trained as a painter, he turned to cinematic animation as a way of extending his inquiry into modernist abstraction. While the success of his initial Form Phases spurred what would be a lifelong commitment to film, Breer quickly grew frustrated with the kind of abstract animation that might be said to characterise the dominant tradition of visual music. Starting in 1955, his Image by Images inaugurated a radical new vision of hyperkinetic montage that would paradoxically function at the threshold of movement and stasis. As such, Breer's film ‘accompaniment’ to the 1964 production of Stockhausen's Originals has a curious status. While untethered from the musical performance, Breer's three-part ‘film performance’ extended Stockhausen's aesthetic and conceptual framework in rich and surprising ways. It might thus be understood as a ‘post-Cagean’ form of visual music, one in which the sonic and visual components function in a relation of autonomous complementarity within an overarching intermedia assemblage.


2018 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 83-106
Author(s):  
Keith B Wagner ◽  
Michael A Unger

As a harrowing sub-discipline of English and Comparative Literature, Trauma Studies is in need of geographical expansion beyond its moorings in European genocides of the 20th century. In this article, the authors chart the institutional and cinematic appropriation of atrocity images in relation to the Khmer Rouge’s auto-genocide from 1975–1979 in Cambodia. They analyse the cultural and scholarly value of these images in conjunction with genocide studies to reveal principles often overlooked, taken for granted, or pushed to the periphery in photography studies and film studies. Through grim appropriations of archival or news footage to more experimental approaches in documentary, such as the use of dioramas, the authors examine the commercial and artistic articulations of trauma, reconciliation and testimony in two case studies: The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) exhibition Photographs from S-21: 1975–1979 (1997) and Pithy Panh’s documentary The Missing Picture (2013). The authors first focus on the relatively obscure scholarship devoted to contextualizing images from international genocides outside the Euro-American canon for genocide study in order to build their critical formulations; they go on to explore whether these atrocity-themed still and moving images are capable of defying aspects of commodification and sensationalism to instead convey positive notions of commemoration and memory. Finally, their contribution to this debate regarding the merit of appropriating atrocity imagery is viewed from two perspectives: ‘commodified witnessing’ (a negative descriptor for the MoMA exhibition) and ‘commemorative witnessing’ (a positive term for the Cambodian film).


Heritage ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 4 (4) ◽  
pp. 2903-2917
Author(s):  
Abed Haddad ◽  
Diana Hartman ◽  
Ana Martins

Édouard Vuillard (1868–1949) is well known for his small atmospheric paintings, often portraying his own home and family as the subject matter. Interior, Mother and Sister of the Artist (1893) underwent at least one restoration treatment before being acquired by the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in 1934. The painting was treated again in 1954, but no analysis was carried out to understand the artist’s methods and materials at that time. To better understand the choices of Vuillard in Interior, Mother and Sister of the Artist, a comprehensive suite of imaging and spectroscopic analyses was undertaken, including: XRR, UVF and IRR Photography, XRF, Raman spectroscopy and SERS, and µ-FTIR. Statistical analysis on the XRF data using MCR-ALS further revealed some of the intricacies of Vuillard’s technique and color choices, where a large number of pigments were used in designing this intimate composition, including lead white, zinc white, bone black, ochre, umber, vermilion, Geranium lake, red lead, ultramarine, Prussian blue, chrome yellow, chrome orange, zinc yellow, strontium yellow, cadmium yellow, and a chromium oxide green.


1962 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 35-37
Author(s):  
Eileen Bowser

Author(s):  
Anselm Franke ◽  
Annett Busch ◽  
Katarzyna Bojarska

A conversation between Annett Busch, Anselm Franke, and Katarzyna Bojarska about the exhibition "After Year Zero. Universal Imaginaries - Geographies of Collaboration", shown at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw between June and August 2015.


Molecules ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 26 (4) ◽  
pp. 927
Author(s):  
Thiago Gonçalves ◽  
Ulrich Vasconcelos

Pyocyanin was the first natural phenazine described. The molecule is synthesized by about 95% of the strains of Pseudomonas aeruginosa. From discovery up to now, pyocyanin has been characterised by a very rich and avant-garde history, which includes its use in antimicrobial therapy, even before the discovery of penicillin opened the era of antibiotic therapy, as well as its use in electric current generation. Exhibiting an exuberant blue colour and being easy to obtain, this pigment is the subject of the present review, aiming to narrate its history as well as to unveil its mechanisms and suggest new horizons for applications in different areas of engineering, biology and biotechnology.


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