The End of the World by Other Means

2019 ◽  
pp. 114-143
Author(s):  
Natania Meeker ◽  
Antónia Szabari
Keyword(s):  
New Media ◽  
Edgar Allan Poe ◽  
French Cinema ◽  
Ordinary Experience ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Experimental Cinema ◽  
The World ◽  
Visual Domain ◽  
Electric Plant ◽  
The Way

The fifth chapter investigates the way in which early avant-garde French cinema takes up the very forms of vegetal sentience and plant-inspired calamity that so terrified Edgar Allan Poe, thereby rewriting the plant once again as an opening onto new worlds. In these films the “inorganic” function of vegetality—as linked to and inspiring new forms of technology and new means of sociability—returns in the visual domain, generating an “electric plant” that retains its utopian dimensions and its power to deprioritize the human. Thus avant-garde vegetal cinema ties the plant once again to a tradition of speculation that extends into the production and creation of new media capable of apprehending and imitating the subtle materiality of vegetal being. The “electric plant” brings to fruition the concept of cinema as a form of pure movement. The French experimental cinema discussed in this chapter reinvents the project of imagining vegetal worlds, this time in cinematic contexts. While filmmakers and theorists Jean Epstein (1897–1953) and Germaine Dulac (1882–1942) turn with excitement toward vegetality, other contemporaneous artists, including Colette (1873–1954), re-inscribe the plant into the domain of ordinary experience and human pathos.

scholarly journals (Re)framing Movement in Stan Brakhage’s Visions in Meditation N°1

2013 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 35-48
Author(s):  
Emőke Simon
Keyword(s):  
Visual Experience ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Short Films ◽  
The World ◽  
Way Of Thinking ◽  
The Spectator ◽  
Stan Brakhage ◽  
The Way

Abstract Considered as one of the main figures of the avant-garde lyrical cinema, Stan Brakhage questions perception. His language of inquiry constantly confronts the spectator with the limits of visual experience of the world and the multiple possibilities of their transgression. Critically addressing one of his short films, Visions in Meditation n°l (1989),1 this analysis aims to discuss the way movement may become a principle of perception, that is to say, according to Gilles Deleuze’s definition - a mode of transgressing the frame of representation. Reappropriating the cinematographic grammar and submitting it to a vibrating movement, Brakhage invents a rhythm which paves the way for a transcendental experience, meanwhile proposing a reflection on the meditative possibilities of the film in terms of the image in meditation. Gilles Deleuze’s way of thinking of cinema in Cinema 1: Movement-image, as well as Slavoj Žižek’s writings on cinema, allows one to consider movement in its cinematographic and philosophical meaning, a project which in Brakhage’s case seems to be primordial

scholarly journals Editorial: Time Travel

2017 ◽  
Vol 42 (3) ◽  
pp. 245-248
Author(s):  
PAUL RAE
Keyword(s):  
Social Economic ◽  
Time Travel ◽  
The West ◽  
American Power ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
The Past ◽  
Aesthetic Form ◽  
The World ◽  
And Performance ◽  
The Way

One of the most forbidding and yet rewarding challenges in a substantive internationalization of arts scholarship is accounting for the experience and passage of time. The extent to which developments in theatre and performance over the past 150 years have been tied up with the larger social, economic and technological transformations reflexively understood as ‘modernity’ is a key reason an international journal readership is able to find interest and value in scholarship on performances they may not have seen, that are practised in places they have never been. At the same time, any such research – it is tempting to say ‘from outside the West’, but in fact the requirement holds everywhere – must register how the work under discussion complicates an otherwise oversimplified narrative of developmental modernity. This narrative treats a homogenized industrial and postindustrial ‘West’ as having led the way and established a model for how other parts of the world would modernize subsequently. The assumption is quickened in discussions of art because arguably one characteristic of those transformations as they happened in numerous centres of Euro-American power was the role that artists played in giving them aesthetic form and expressing their meanings. This is prominent in the emergence of modernism and the avant-garde, and it is logical that in recent times scholars of modernism have been particularly energetic in questioning the developmental narrative and demonstrating not only how such phenomena were constitutively reliant on processes elsewhere, but also how artistic developments everywhere both informed each other (often inequably) and manifested local and highly contingent characteristics.

An Avant-garde for Today: ‘the Ally of its Own Gravediggers’? Some Thoughts on Apollinaire and Kundera

2011 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 321-328
Author(s):  
Timothy Mathews
Keyword(s):  
Effect Change ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
The Past ◽  
The World ◽  
The Way

This essay is concerned with the power of art to effect change, but also to show attachments to existing ways of understanding. Avant-garde art from Cubism to Surrealism seeks to transform the shapes in which we see the world. But change may simply create blindness to the past, and to what is, and to the way our chains are yanked by the lures of domination whether economic, social or emotional. Kundera's novelistic meditation on the canonical and radical poets Rimbaud and Éluard encourages us to wonder whether the obsession with change is an investment in the powers of oblivion and ignorance.

Introduction

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-38
Author(s):  
Jonathan Walley
Keyword(s):  
New Media ◽  
Historical Perspective ◽  
Social Values ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Art Form ◽  
Expanded Cinema ◽  
Experimental Cinema ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Critical Literature

This chapter defines expanded cinema, traces its history broadly from the 1960s to the present, and reviews previous scholarly and critical literature on the subject. It argues that while expanded cinema has traditionally been seen as a rejection or abandonment of cinema in its conventional form, and as a form of “intermedia” or “new media,” with historical perspective it is better understood as an attempt to define and explore the limits and essences of cinema as an art form. While it takes forms commonly associated with the other arts (including installation, performance, sculptural objects, and even text), it is precisely by exploring this aesthetic territory that avant-garde/experimental filmmakers have tested the boundaries and clarified the specific nature of their art form. The introduction also defines the category of “avant-garde” or “experimental” cinema, defining it as a distinct cinematic culture and historical tradition, which represents a set of aesthetic and social values that can be traced through works of expanded cinema. The title of the introduction indicates the book’s larger argument: that expanded cinema does not represent the end of cinema as we know it, but its persistence, albeit in new and unconventional forms.

scholarly journals ROKEYA SAKHAWAT HOSSAIN’S SULTANA’S DREAM: AN AVANT-GARDE OF ECONOMIC INDEPENDENCE OF WOMEN TOWARDS FREEDOM

2020 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 185-195
Author(s):  
Mahbubul Alam ◽  
Nawshan Ara Rima
Keyword(s):  
State Power ◽  
Quality Education ◽  
Economic Independence ◽  
Important Condition ◽  
Indian Women ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Self Reliance ◽  
The World ◽  
Considerable Detail ◽  
The Way

Critics and research scholars, so far have observed and considered Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain’s (1880-1932) Sultana’s Dream to be a feminist utopia- an imaginary place of ideal perfection or any non-existent society described in her considerable detail-overlooking main purpose, to an extent, in writing the novella. When the idea of female emancipation and awakening was completely unknown and unimaginable to Indian women in general, Begum Rokeya tried to instill its zeal in these ignorant women, got them to believe in their power, and showed a way of their ultimate freedom as something real and possible through a dream. The bitter discrimination she experienced in her own family as a girl, and the misfortune of the women of her society and women of undivided India bled her soft heart and urged her to work for the advancement and empowerment of women breaking all the traditional, social, cultural and religious barriers. In this regard, besides quality education, she believed that the first and the most important condition for female emancipation is self-reliance or economic independence where she differed from all other major contemporary feminists of the world for her unequivocal approach. The paper, therefore, aims at exposing the pathetic consequences of deprived and distressed women drowned under the dirt of illiteracy, fanaticism, superstitions, and prejudices showing the way they can be educated, economically solvent, self-reliant towards ultimate freedom and attributed state power and responsibilities which Begum Rokeya presents in the disguise of a dream in Sultana’s Dream. 

Becoming Politicized

2017 ◽  
Vol 225 (4) ◽  
pp. 324-335 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dimitrios Barkas ◽  
Xenia Chryssochoou
Keyword(s):  
Collective Identity ◽  
Political Socialization ◽  
Greek Society ◽  
Economic Vulnerability ◽  
The World ◽  
The Future ◽  
Identity Model ◽  
Beliefs About The Future ◽  
Of Greece ◽  
The Way

Abstract. This research took place just after the end of the protests following the killing of a 16-year-old boy by a policeman in Greece in December 2008. Participants (N = 224) were 16-year-olds in different schools in Attiki. Informed by the Politicized Collective Identity Model ( Simon & Klandermans, 2001 ), a questionnaire measuring grievances, adversarial attributions, emotions, vulnerability, identifications with students and activists, and questions about justice and Greek society in the future, as well as about youngsters’ participation in different actions, was completed. Four profiles of the participants emerged from a cluster analysis using representations of the conflict, emotions, and identifications with activists and students. These profiles differed on beliefs about the future of Greece, participants’ economic vulnerability, and forms of participation. Importantly, the clusters corresponded to students from schools of different socioeconomic areas. The results indicate that the way young people interpret the events and the context, their levels of identification, and the way they represent society are important factors of their political socialization that impacts on their forms of participation. Political socialization seems to be related to youngsters’ position in society which probably constitutes an important anchoring point of their interpretation of the world.

Coda: The Rosetta Stone

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jesse Schotter
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
New Media ◽  
Digital Media ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Digital Code ◽  
Media Technologies ◽  
Rosetta Stone ◽  
The World ◽  
Western Imagination ◽  
Origin Point

Hieroglyphs have persisted for so long in the Western imagination because of the malleability of their metaphorical meanings. Emblems of readability and unreadability, universality and difference, writing and film, writing and digital media, hieroglyphs serve to encompass many of the central tensions in understandings of race, nation, language and media in the twentieth century. For Pound and Lindsay, they served as inspirations for a more direct and universal form of writing; for Woolf, as a way of treating the new medium of film and our perceptions of the world as a kind of language. For Conrad and Welles, they embodied the hybridity of writing or the images of film; for al-Hakim and Mahfouz, the persistence of links between ancient Pharaonic civilisation and a newly independent Egypt. For Joyce, hieroglyphs symbolised the origin point for the world’s cultures and nations; for Pynchon, the connection between digital code and the novel. In their modernist interpretations and applications, hieroglyphs bring together writing and new media technologies, language and the material world, and all the nations and languages of the globe....

Misreading Egypt

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jesse Schotter
Keyword(s):  
New Media ◽  
Narrative Form ◽  
Experimental Film ◽  
Tower Of Babel ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Sergei Eisenstein ◽  
History Of ◽  
The One ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Modern Technologies

The first chapter of Hieroglyphic Modernisms exposes the complex history of Western misconceptions of Egyptian writing from antiquity to the present. Hieroglyphs bridge the gap between modern technologies and the ancient past, looking forward to the rise of new media and backward to the dispersal of languages in the mythical moment of the Tower of Babel. The contradictory ways in which hieroglyphs were interpreted in the West come to shape the differing ways that modernist writers and filmmakers understood the relationship between writing, film, and other new media. On the one hand, poets like Ezra Pound and film theorists like Vachel Lindsay and Sergei Eisenstein use the visual languages of China and of Egypt as a more primal or direct alternative to written words. But Freud, Proust, and the later Eisenstein conversely emphasize the phonetic qualities of Egyptian writing, its similarity to alphabetical scripts. The chapter concludes by arguing that even avant-garde invocations of hieroglyphics depend on narrative form through an examination of Hollis Frampton’s experimental film Zorns Lemma.

Restrained Airs: The Diegetic Surface and Nondiegetic Depth of British Film Music

2019 ◽  
Vol 16 (4) ◽  
pp. 429-443
Author(s):  
Paul Mazey
Keyword(s):  
Film Music ◽  
The World ◽  
British Cinema ◽  
Film Making ◽  
The Way

This article considers how pre-existing music has been employed in British cinema, paying particular attention to the diegetic/nondiegetic boundary and notions of restraint. It explores the significance of the distinction between diegetic music, which exists in the world of the narrative, and nondiegetic music, which does not. It analyses the use of pre-existing operatic music in two British films of the same era and genre: Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949) and The Importance of Being Earnest (1952), and demonstrates how seemingly subtle variations in the way music is used in these films produce markedly different effects. Specifically, it investigates the meaning of the music in its original context and finds that only when this bears a narrative relevance to the film does it cross from the diegetic to the nondiegetic plane. This reveals that whereas music restricted to the diegetic plane may express the outward projection of the characters' emotions, music also heard on the nondiegetic track may reveal a deeper truth about their feelings. In this way, the meaning of the music varies depending upon how it is used. While these two films may differ in whether or not their pre-existing music occupies a nondiegetic or diegetic position in relation to the narrative, both are characteristic of this era of British film-making in using music in an understated manner which expresses a sense of emotional restraint and which marks the films with a particularly British inflection.

Sea Urchins and Circuses: The Modernist Natural Histories of Jean Painlevé and Alexander Calder

2018 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 187-211
Author(s):  
Patricia E. Chu
Keyword(s):  
New Media ◽  
Sea Urchins ◽  
Life Sciences ◽  
Three Dimensional ◽  
Machine Age ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
History Of ◽  
And Performance ◽  
The One ◽  
Natural Historian

The Paris avant-garde milieu from which both Cirque Calder/Calder's Circus and Painlevé’s early films emerged was a cultural intersection of art and the twentieth-century life sciences. In turning to the style of current scientific journals, the Paris surrealists can be understood as engaging the (life) sciences not simply as a provider of normative categories of materiality to be dismissed, but as a companion in apprehending the “reality” of a world beneath the surface just as real as the one visible to the naked eye. I will focus in this essay on two modernist practices in new media in the context of the history of the life sciences: Jean Painlevé’s (1902–1989) science films and Alexander Calder's (1898–1976) work in three-dimensional moving art and performance—the Circus. In analyzing Painlevé’s work, I discuss it as exemplary of a moment when life sciences and avant-garde technical methods and philosophies created each other rather than being classified as separate categories of epistemological work. In moving from Painlevé’s films to Alexander Calder's Circus, Painlevé’s cinematography remains at the forefront; I use his film of one of Calder's performances of the Circus, a collaboration the men had taken two decades to complete. Painlevé’s depiction allows us to see the elements of Calder's work that mark it as akin to Painlevé’s own interest in a modern experimental organicism as central to the so-called machine-age. Calder's work can be understood as similarly developing an avant-garde practice along the line between the bestiary of the natural historian and the bestiary of the modern life scientist.

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