Montage Reloaded: From Russian Avant-Garde to the Audiovisual Essay

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Julia Vassilieva
Keyword(s):  
Theory And Practice ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
New Type ◽  
Movie Camera

In this chapter, I explore the relevance of early Russian montage theory and practice to new issues raised by the shift from the essay film to the audiovisual essay. I investigate how, specifically, Sergei Eisenstein’s vision of the new type of cinema of ideas formulated in his project for filming Marx’s Das Kapital, Dziga Vertov’s foregrounding of subjectivity and reflexivity in The Man with a Movie Camera, and Esphir Shub’s practice of ‘compilation film’ contributed to the emergence of the essay film and continue to stimulate the theory and practice of the audiovisual essayism.

Ważyk metafizyczny? / Ważyk – A Metaphysician?

2013 ◽  
Vol 54 (1) ◽  
pp. 35-47
Author(s):  
Jerzy Święch
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Late Phase ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
Strict Sense ◽  
Ontological Security ◽  
Life And Death ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Self Sufficiency

Summary Adam Ważyk’s last volume of poems Zdarzenia (Events) (1977) can be read as a resume of the an avant-garde artist’s life that culminated in the discovery of a new truth about the human condition. The poems reveal his longing for a belief that human life, the mystery of life and death, makes sense, ie. that one’s existence is subject to the rule of some overarching necessity, opened onto the last things, rather than a plaything of chance. That entails a rejection of the idea of man’s self-sufficiency as an illusion, even though that kind of individual sovereignty was the cornerstone of modernist art. The art of late modernity, it may be noted, was already increasingly aware of the dangers of putting man’s ‘ontological security’ at risk. Ważyk’s last volume exemplifies this tendency although its poems appear to remain within the confines of a Cubist poetics which he himself helped to establish. In fact, however, as our readings of the key poems from Events make clear, he employs his accustomed techniques for a new purpose. The shift of perspective can be described as ‘metaphysical’, not in any strict sense of the word, but rather as a shorthand indicator of the general mood of these poems, filled with events which seem to trap the characters into a supernatural order of things. The author sees that much, even though he does not look with the eye of a man of faith. It may be just a game - and Ważyk was always fond of playing games - but in this one the stakes are higher than ever. Ultimately, this game is about salvation. Ważyk is drawn into it by a longing for the wholeness of things and a dissatisfaction with all forms of mediation, including the Cubist games of deformation and fragmentation of the object. It seems that the key to Ważyk’s late phase is to be found in his disillusionment with the twentieth-century avant-gardes. Especially the poems of Events contain enough clues to suggest that the promise of Cubism and surrealism - which he sought to fuse in his poetic theory and practice - was short-lived and hollow.

EPISTEMOLOGY OF TONE: AN OBITUARY FOR JULIEN JALÂL ED-DINE WEISS

Tempo ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 71 (281) ◽  
pp. 71-79
Author(s):  
Stefan Pohlit
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Cross Cultural ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
Just Intonation ◽  
Modal System ◽  
Helpful Tool ◽  
Near Eastern ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
History Of ◽  
Major Discrepancy

AbstractDuring the 1980s, Julien Jalâl Ed-Dine Weiss, founder of the Al-Kindi ensemble of Aleppo, invented a qānūn in just intonation with which he attempted to solve a major discrepancy between the theory and practice of maqām-scales. Weiss objected to the introduction of Western standards, observing that they distort the significance of interval ratios and prevent a comparative understanding of the modal system as a transnational phenomenon. In the twentieth century, the implementation of equal-semitone temperament emerged simultaneously with a notable invasion of sociological criteria into musical inquiry. The polarity observed between westernisation and tradition can be seen most visibly in the present search for identity amongst Middle- and Near-Eastern musicians, but this schismogenic process can also be observed in the history of the Western avant-garde, where microtonal explorations have been halted in favour of extra-musical conceptuality. While cross-cultural musicians are faced with a new climate of distrust, it seems most likely that the principles that draw us apart may originate in the very patterns of thought in which our notion of culture operates. Weiss's tuning system may serve as a helpful tool to foster a new and universal epistemology of tone, bridging and transcending the apparent contradictions between the two spheres.

scholarly journals Grażyna Bacewicz – The Polish Sappho

2019 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 65-102
Author(s):  
Małgorzata Gąsiorowska
Keyword(s):  
String Quartet ◽  
Women Composers ◽  
The Political ◽  
String Orchestra ◽  
Limited Extent ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Political Transformations ◽  
New Type ◽  
Nadia Boulanger ◽  
Artistic Career

Abstract The paper is an attempt at a synthetic presentation of the Polish composer Grażyna Bacewicz’s (1909–1969) musical output and artistic career, presented against the background of events in her personal life, and of major events in Polish and European history in the first seven decades of the 20th century. Bacewicz was called ‘the Polish Sappho’ already in the years between World Wars I and II, when there were very few women-composers capable of creating works comparable to the most eminent achievements of male composers. Her path to success in composition and as a concert soloist leads from lessons with her father, the Lithuanian Vincas Bacevičius, to studies at the Łódź and Warsaw Conservatories (violin with Józef Jarzębski, composition with Kazimierz Sikorski), and later with Nadia Boulanger at the École Normale de la Musique, as well as violin lessons with André Tourret. Her oeuvre has for many years been linked with neoclassicism, and folkloric inspirations are evident in many of her works. Her crowning achievement in the neoclassical style is the Concerto for String Orchestra of 1948, while influences from folklore can distinctly be heard in many concert pieces and small forms. The breakthrough came around 1958, under the influence of avant-garde trends present in West European music, which came to be adapted in Poland thanks to the political transformations and the rejection of socialist realism. In such pieces as Music for Strings, Trumpets and Percussion of 1958, Bacewicz transforms her previously fundamental musical components (melody, rhythm, harmony) into a qualitatively new type of sound structures, mainly focused on the coloristic aspects. Grażyna Bacewicz also applied the twelve-note technique, albeit to a limited extent, as in String Quartet No. 6 (1960). Her last work was the unfinished ballet Desire to a libretto by Mieczysław Bibrowski after Pablo Picasso’s play Le désir attrapé par la queue.

scholarly journals Las exposiciones de El Lissitzky a través del Cine-ojo

2017 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 151
Author(s):  
Luz Paz-Agras
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Human Eye ◽  
Photographic Camera ◽  
New Concepts ◽  
Movie Camera

The Avant-Garde movements of the twentieth century explored the creative possibilities of new types of media in architecture, such as the photographic camera or cinema. In a series of experimental projects, authors such as El Lissitzky based their work on assimilating the human eye with a mechanical lens, making it possible to create new concepts of space. A simultaneous consideration of the resources of Vertov’s Cine-Eye in relation to the exhibition projects of El Lissitzky reveals some of his proposals as paradigmatic examples of the perceptive experimentation of the viewer in relation to art, and in a wider sense, to architecture. By analysing the cinematic resources of the film <em>Man with a Movie Camera</em> (1929), architectural aspects are analysed in the exhibition spaces of the Abstract Cabinet and PRESSA, identifying connections that break down the boundaries between the different disciplines.

scholarly journals Avant-Garde Children’s Magazines and Newspapers of the 1920s – 1930s in Siberia

2019 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 84-105
Author(s):  
Ksenia V. Abramova
Keyword(s):  
20Th Century ◽  
Children And Youth ◽  
Children's Books ◽  
Self Presentation ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Black And White ◽  
Children's Magazines ◽  
New Type ◽  
The Times ◽  
Design Techniques

The purpose of this article is to analyze the magazines and newspapers for children and youth issued on the territory of Siberia in 1920s – 1930s. A great many children’s books were issued that years, moreover, the approach to design of that books and to the contents of writings for children changed significantly: the topics had to be actual, associated with the construction of the new society. At the same time, exactly in children’s press in 1920s, the new principles of book graphics were formed. There are a large number of magazines and newspapers aimed at youth audiences were published in Siberia in the 1920s and 1930s, but they did not have a long history. Some of them appeared only once or twice, after that they closed. But all the more interesting is the study of these rare publications as experiments that influenced how the Soviet children’s and youth magazine was formed. Viewing magazines and newspapers allows you to observe how the rubrication and the genre system of Soviet publications for children evolved, as well as identify trends that have become a definite “sign of the times”. The article explores archive materials and examines the contents of printed issues, peculiarities of the approaches to the inner composition of the material and design techniques, discovers the features of the “Soviet avant-garde” development in children’s and youth periodicals. It indicates that the majority of the Siberian Children’s and youth magazines issued within that period has demonstrated a strongly demonstrated ideological overtone, claiming its purpose raising the new type of human and orientation on the “iterature of fact”. The article covers the peculiarities of the illustration techniques in Siberian post-revolutionary magazines. The article marks that up to the mid – late 1920s, the children’s and youth periodicals design became composed of such elements as insets, plane drawings based on a contrast combination of black and white, photography and photographic compilation. Furthermore, it describes a number of self-presentation techniques, developed exactly by the avant-garde art. As can be seen from the above, it can be stated that Siberian children’s and youth journalism acquired the avant-garde trends of the first third of the 20th century, however, they haven’t been gradually and fully realized.

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.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
pp. 1-16
Author(s):  
Laura Harris
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Social Theory ◽  
The United States ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
Aesthetic Theory ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
History Of ◽  
Visual Artist

In Experiments in Exile, I explore and compare projects undertaken by two twentieth-century American intellectuals while they lived in voluntary exiles in the United States: the Trinidadian writer and revolutionary C. L. R. James and the Brazilian visual artist and counterculturalist Hélio Oiticica. James and Oiticica never met. They lived and worked in the United States at different moments. My focus is on James’s stay during the 1940s and on Oiticica’s stay during the 1970s. Given the significant differences between them—not just at the level of nationality but at the level of race (James was black, Oiticica was white), class (James was situated within a precarious middle class, Oiticica was firmly established within an upper middle class), sexuality (James was straight, Oiticica was gay), and disciplinary locations (James is generally situated in the history of radical social theory and practice, and Oiticica is generally situated in the history of avant-garde aesthetic theory and practice)—this is surely an unlikely combination. This study is itself an experiment, one that goes beyond the usual parameters of comparativist or transnational research, to identify, in the surprising resonances between the projects pursued by these two very disparate figures, a common project I believe they, together, bring into relief....

scholarly journals Forming the Legal Avant-Garde: A Theory of Art/Law

2019 ◽  
pp. 174387211987183
Author(s):  
Lucy Finchett-Maddock
Keyword(s):  
Ways Of Knowing ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
Artistic Practice ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Legal Studies ◽  
Political Aesthetics ◽  
Legal Thinking ◽  
End Of Art ◽  
Legal Aesthetics

This piece seeks to account for an increased interest in the intersection of art and law within legal thinking, activism and artistic practice, arguing there to exist the phenomena and movement of ‘art/law’. Art/law is the coming together of theory and practice in legal and political aesthetics, understood as a practice, (im)materially performed. It is seen as a natural consequence of thinking law and resistance in terms of space and time, accounting for a turn towards the visual, the practical and the role of affect, within ways of knowing. Art/law is a symptom of the end of art and end of law, synchronically rendered. Divisions between legal and aesthetic form have been well rehearsed within legal aesthetics scholarship, from law and literature, to critical legal studies’ work with images, text and performativity, and now law’s Anthropocene. Art/law as a practice, however, is argued as an emergent onto-epistemic-ethics of necessity, a movement of seeing, being and knowing in response to the advancement of spectacle. It is the simultaneous reunion of law, art and resistance as one, breaking down the institutional artifice of art worlds and law worlds, offering a form of ‘resistant (in)formalism’, that accounts for matter and change and asserts convergence as a medium. It is an inclusion of the uncertain and the disordered, that is an opening for the audience. This resistant (in)formalism describes the role of form, audience and practice within property, legal and aesthetic establishment, offering a countering of separatism at the end of art and the end of law, through a praxeology of art/law in seeing, thinking and action.

Dziga Vertov

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alla Gadassik
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Early Adulthood ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Media Technology ◽  
Subsequent Work ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Political Cinema ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Dziga Vertov ◽  
Movie Camera

Dziga Vertov (b. 1896, Bialystok, Russian Empire–d. 1954, Moscow, USSR) was a pioneering Soviet filmmaker, whose films and manifestos played a central role in 20th century documentary, experimental film, and political cinema traditions. Working in the USSR in the 1920s–1950s, Vertov led the radical Kino-Eye (Cine-Eye) collective, which championed a new film language that would draw on the unique mechanical and audiovisual properties of cinematography, rather than on theatre or literature traditions. His polemical resistance to narrative fiction films contributed to the development of avant-garde documentary techniques in the Soviet Union and abroad. Long after Vertov fell out of favor in his native country, his work continued to influence international documentary cinema and political media groups. Born as David Abelevich Kaufman, Dziga Vertov adopted his pseudonym in early adulthood, and his subsequent work often blurs the lines between the filmmaker’s personal experiences and ideas ascribed to his alter ego. This split between Vertov’s personal life and his constructed persona reflected his belief that cinema, too, could simultaneously document observed reality and construct an entirely new reality from captured slices of life. Vertov maintained that filmmakers should seek out and expose the hidden social and political forces that govern life, using moving images and sound to shape spectator consciousness. His films were in dialogue with several avant-garde art movements, and he often experimented with different film techniques in hopes of both depicting and transforming reality. Moreover, Vertov argued that media technology, especially the movie camera and the wireless radio, would radically change how human beings navigated the world and how they understood their place in society. His theoretical writings are foundational to the discipline of film studies and to writings on film cinematography and montage. His seminal 1929 film Man with a Movie Camera (Chelovek s Kinoapparatom) is a cornerstone of film courses worldwide.

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