8 mm and the “Blessings of Books and Records”

2017 ◽  
pp. 54-80
Author(s):  
Erika Balsom
Keyword(s):  
Film History ◽  
Experimental Film ◽  
Historical Episode ◽  
Stan Brakhage ◽  
Experimental Films

This chapter unearths an untaken path of experimental film history. In the mid-1960s, Stan Brakhage, Bruce Conner, and Jonas Mekas were deeply invested in the possibility that 16mm experimental films might be made into 8mm reduction prints and made available for sale to home collectors. This chapter relates this little-known historical episode and questions what relevance this prioritization of access over quality might have for us in the contemporary moment, when these terms are once again embroiled in a fierce battle.

Cinema Expanded

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan Walley
Keyword(s):  
New Media ◽  
Film History ◽  
Video Art ◽  
Experimental Film ◽  
Art World ◽  
Film Culture ◽  
Moving Image ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Expanded Cinema ◽  
History Of

Cinema Expanded: Avant-Garde Film in the Age of Intermedia is a comprehensive historical survey of expanded cinema from the mid-1960s to the present. It offers an historical and theoretical revision of the concept of expanded cinema, placing it in the context of avant-garde/experimental film history rather than the history of new media, intermedia, or multimedia. The book argues that while expanded cinema has taken an incredible variety of forms (including moving image installation, multi-screen films, live cinematic performance, light shows, shadow plays, computer-generated images, video art, sculptural objects, and texts), it is nonetheless best understood as an ongoing meditation by filmmakers on the nature of cinema, specifically, and on its relationship to the other arts. Cinema Expanded also extends its historical and theoretical scope to avant-garde film culture more generally, placing expanded cinema in that context while also considering what it has to tell us about the moving image in the art world and new media environment.

scholarly journals Cinematic “Pas de Deux”: The Dialogue between Maya Deren's Experimental Filmmaking and Talley Beatty's Black Ballet Dancer in A Study in Choreography for Camera (1945)

2013 ◽  
Vol 47 (2) ◽  
pp. 385-403
Author(s):  
HANNAH DURKIN
Keyword(s):  
Film History ◽  
Cross Cultural ◽  
Experimental Film ◽  
Ballet Dancer ◽  
Emotional Experiences ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
The Us ◽  
Artistic Vision ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Ballet Dancing

A Study in Choreography for Camera (1945) is a collaborative enterprise between avant-garde filmmaker Maya Deren and African American ballet dancer Talley Beatty. Study is significant in experimental film history – it was one of three films by Deren that shaped the emergence of the postwar avant-garde cinema movement in the US. The film represents a pioneering cross-cultural and cross-disciplinary dialogue between Beatty's ballet dancing and Deren's experimental cinematic technique. The film explores complex emotional experiences through a cinematic re-creation of Deren's understanding of ritual (which she borrowed from Katherine Dunham's Haitian experiences after spending many years documenting vodou) while allowing a leading black male dancer to display his artistry on-screen. I show that cultures and artistic forms widely dismissed as incompatible are rendered equivocal. Study adopts a stylized and rhythmic technique borrowed from dance in its attempt to establish cinema as “art,” and I foreground Beatty's contribution to the film, arguing that his technically complex movements situate him as joint author of its artistic vision. The essay also explores tensions between the artistic intentions of Deren, who sought to deprivilege the individual performer in favour of the filmic “ritual,” and Beatty, who sought to display his individual skills as a technically accomplished dancer.

Kinugasa, Teinosuke (1896–1982)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kendall Heitzman
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Language ◽  
Film History ◽  
Film Festival ◽  
Financial Success ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Film Studios ◽  
Female Roles ◽  
Kawabata Yasunari ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
Experimental Films

Kinugasa Teinosuke (1 January 1896–26 February 1982) was a Japanese actor and film director, most famous for his experimental films of the 1920s and art-house classics of the 1950s. He started as a specialist in oyama female roles, a tradition carried over from Japanese theater to film, and turned to directing as the convention faded in the 1910s and 1920s. After directing films for the major film studios Nikkatsu and Makino, Kinugasa went independent in 1926 with the New Impressionist Film League, his collaboration with members of the New Impressionist School of modernist writers led by Yokomitsu Riichi and Kawabata Yasunari. Kinugasa produced his most famous film, the experimental, avant-garde Kurutta ichipeiji [A Page of Madness] (1926), from a script by Kawabata and others. Despite its secure location in global film history, A Page of Madness was not a financial success, and Kinugasa began working for Shōchiku, at first producing noteworthy films such as Jujiro [Crossroads] (1928) that, while experimental in nature, never again rose to the same level of high-modernist abstraction. Kinugasa had a long career at Shōchiku and then Daiei as a director of period dramas. His films Yukinojo henge [An Actor’s Revenge] (1935) and Jigokumon [Gate of Hell] (1953)—both starring Kinugasa’s frequent collaborator, Hasegawa Kazuo—are representative of his middle and late career. Gate of Hell won a Palme d’Or at the Cannes International Film Festival and received an Academy Honorary Award, the precursor category to Best Foreign Language Film.

Anemic Cinema (1926)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ryan Robert Mitchell
Keyword(s):  
Experimental Film ◽  
Marcel Duchamp ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Experimental Films

Considered one of the important experimental films of the prewar European avant-garde, Anemic Cinema (1926) is a short experimental film by Marcel Duchamp, who authored the film under his pseudonym Rrose Sélavy.

The Music and Sound of Experimental Film

2017 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Digital Technology ◽  
The United States ◽  
Critical Discourse ◽  
Experimental Film ◽  
Found Footage ◽  
Sound Image ◽  
Experimental Cinema ◽  
Stan Brakhage

This book explores music- and sound-image relationships in non-mainstream screen repertoire from the earliest examples of experimental audiovisuality to the most recent forms of expanded and digital technology. It challenges presumptions of visual primacy in experimental cinema and rethinks screen music discourse in light of the aesthetics of non-commercial imperatives. Several themes run through the book, connecting with and significantly enlarging upon current critical discourse surrounding realism and audibility in the fiction film, the role of music in mainstream cinema, and the audiovisual strategies of experimental film. The contributors investigate repertoires and artists from Europe and the United States through the critical lenses of synchronicity and animated sound, interrelations of experimentation in image and sound, audiovisual synchresis and dissonance, experimental soundscape traditions, found-footage film, remediation of pre-existent music and sound, popular and queer sound cultures, and a diversity of radical technological and aesthetic tropes in film media traversing the work of early pioneers such as Walter Ruttmann and Len Lye, through the mid-century innovations of Norman McLaren, Stan Brakhage, Lis Rhodes, Kenneth Anger, Andy Warhol, and studio collectives in Poland, to latter-day experimentalists John Smith and Bill Morrison, as well as the contemporary practices of VJing.

scholarly journals Teaching experimental film: On the practical and analytic treatment of avant-garde cinema

2018 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Volker Pantenburg ◽  
Stefanie Schlüter
Keyword(s):  
Perceptual Experience ◽  
Practical Experience ◽  
Experimental Film ◽  
Film Material ◽  
Moving Image ◽  
Analytic Treatment ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Image Movement ◽  
Stan Brakhage

This article highlights the potential of experimental and avant-garde cinema in film educational contexts. In the first part, Stefanie Schlüter evaluates her practical experience in working with 10- to 11-year-old schoolchildren. Based on reflections by Peter Kubelka, Stan Brakhage and others, she emphasizes the act of engaging with film material (scratching, painting) as a genuine haptic and perceptual experience. In the second part, Volker Pantenburg reframes classical avant-garde films by Gary Beidler, Peter Tscherkassky and Morgan Fisher as valuable, implicitly didactic 'lessons of cinema'. In a playful and elaborate way, these films perform and display basic qualities of the moving image: movement and stillness, materiality and narration, format and affect.

scholarly journals Animasi Video Eksperimental “Kertas Putih” Sebagai Gambar Imajinasi Anak Tunagrahita dari SLB Negeri 2 Sayidan Yogyakarta

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hapsari Dyah Aryani
Keyword(s):  
Mental Retardation ◽  
Video Art ◽  
White Paper ◽  
Experimental Film ◽  
Normal Children ◽  
Art Works ◽  
Human Figure ◽  
The Government ◽  
Object Of Study ◽  
Experimental Films

Video art-experimental is a blend of video art and experimental film. Video art which is a modern form of art will be integrated with the cinematic techniques of indefinitely experimental films. The results may not be too contrast to video art or experimental films that stands alone, but its uniqueness is that the concept of blend is performed to create a work that is capable to entertain the children with mental retardation.Children with mental retardation is a child who frequently forgotten in theprovision of facilities by the government and also forgotten in the acceptance of family affection. Glance they look normal, and it's physically not very different to normal children, but if we talk about things that should require complicated notion such as mathematics etc., they will be distress. This is because they have the intelligence level far below normal. Children with mental retardation are many came from poor families, so they are getting forgotten. Problem of mental retardation is not only studied through only one field of science, but by many other sciences, such as medicine, psychology, science, pharmacy and so on. In this case, the art also plays a role. In addition is able to produce works which entertaining, it can also become the object of study for other disciplines that are researching this problem.Naming the title of the work of the "the White Paper" is a symbol of a child with mental retardation. Through in-depth observation for several months along with them, then their thought were created as a symbol of the human figure who permanently innocent.They are as innocent sheet of white paper that ready to inscribe by parents, community, teachers and the surrounding neighborhood.Experimental video-art works for children with mental retardation under the title "the White Paper” will create a new work is devoted to people with mental retardation.This work was a new experience in watching by using the theory of the two major theories; that are, the theory of video art and experimental films.

scholarly journals A Place for Shadows: A Prolegomena to the Authorship Practices and Films of Joanna Margaret Paul

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Dick Whyte
Keyword(s):  
Metropolitan Areas ◽  
Specific Reference ◽  
Experimental Film ◽  
Dominant Culture ◽  
Art Object ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Mass Circulation ◽  
Narrative Forms ◽  
Capitalist Ideology ◽  
Experimental Films

<p>This is an "authorship" study of New Zealand artist Joanna Margaret Paul, with specific reference to her "experimental film" works. Though I will draw on a wide range of theorists, my overall approach is what Laura Marks calls "intercultural cinema." For Marks the term "intercultural cinema" refers to a specific "genre" or "movement" of experimental films created by authors caught "between two or more cultural regimes of knowledge." Intercultural film-makers include feminist, queer, indigenous and immigrant authors (any "minority" which possesses its own "regime of knowledge" and makes experimental film) living in "Western metropolitan areas," whose dominant culture is capitalist, masculine, "hegemonic, white and Euro-American" (a second regime of knowledge). What draws intercultural cinema together (and indeed, one could argue, experimental film in general) is an oppositional stance toward capitalist ideology, the commodification of the art object and the uniformity of classical narrative forms. As David Bordwell and Kristen Thompson write, experimental films are "often deliberate attempts to undercut the conventions of commercial narrative filmmaking" and, as Marks writes, intercultural cinema "flows against waves of economic neocolonialism," and is "suspicious of mass circulation... [as] making commercial cinema still involves significant compromises."</p>

American as Apple Pie

2021 ◽  
Vol 36 (2) ◽  
pp. 145-149
Author(s):  
Erica Levin
Keyword(s):  
Gender Norms ◽  
Experimental Film ◽  
Performance Score ◽  
I Ching ◽  
American Artist ◽  
Performance Of Gender ◽  
Younger Generation ◽  
Artist's Book ◽  
Stan Brakhage ◽  
The Way

Abstract This brief tribute to Carolee Schneemann examines her self-conception as an American artist, considering how it intersects with the disruptive performance of gender norms in Americana I Ching Apple Pie (1972). The work was originally staged for the camera in Schneemann's London kitchen in 1972, during a period in which the artist was living in voluntary exile. She published a performance score for the piece in her artist's book Parts of a Body House (1972) and reprinted it in Cezanne She Was a Great Painter (1974–75). This essay reads Americana I Ching Apple Pie as an unruly reenactment of the highly gendered role that the filmmaker Stan Brakhage cast Schneemann to play in his short experimental film Cat's Cradle (1959). It considers the way she understood home and homeland as two interlocking fronts in the ongoing battle over how gender is encoded and enacted. It concludes by briefly considering the reception of Schneemann's work by a younger generation of artists, including Sondra Perry, who staged an homage to Americana I Ching Apple Pie in 2015.

Anthology Film Archives

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kristen Alfaro
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
York City ◽  
Experimental Film ◽  
Film Study ◽  
Film Archives ◽  
Art Canon ◽  
Stan Brakhage ◽  
Study Center ◽  
Film Critic

Anthology Film Archives ("Anthology" hereafter) is an experimental film institution that was founded in 1970 by experimental filmmakers Jonas Mekas, Jerome Hill, Peter Kubelka, Stan Brakhage, James Broughton, Ken Kelman, and film critic P. Adams Sitney. Based in the Joseph Papp Theater in New York City, Anthology was funded primarily by Jerome Hill. According to its founders, Anthology was the first film museum dedicated to film art and, as stated in their manifesto, the institution aimed to define film study and exhibition with a film art canon (Essential Cinema) and a theater (Invisible Cinema). In addition, Anthology created the Film Study Center, a space for archiving, preserving, and examining films and film-related journals, ephemera, and paper documents.

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