Experimental Cinemas in State Socialist Eastern Europe

Was there experimental cinema behind the Iron Curtain? What forms did experiments with film take in state socialist Eastern Europe? Who conducted them, where, how, and why? These are the questions answered in this volume, the first of its kind in any language. Bringing together scholars from different disciplines, the book offers case studies from Bulgaria, Czech Republic, former East Germany, Hungary, Poland, Romania, and former Yugoslavia. Together, these contributions demonstrate the variety of makers, production contexts, and aesthetic approaches that shaped a surprisingly robust and diverse experimental film output in the region. The book maps out the terrain of our present-day knowledge of cinematic experimentalism in Eastern Europe, suggests directions for further research, and will be of interest to scholars of film and media, art historians, cultural historians of Eastern Europe, and anyone concerned with questions of how alternative cultures emerge and function under repressive political conditions.

The Documentaries of Barbara Hammer: Lesbian Creativity, Kinship, and Erotic Pleasure in the Historical Margins

Lesbian filmmaker Barbara Hammer turned from experimental filmmaking to feature-length documentaries in the early 1990s. These late documentaries illustrate her distinct perspective on queer history and affect, which was influenced by 1970s lesbian feminism and queer scholarship in the 1980s and 1990s. Her structure and style in these films draw on the tools of both conventional historical documentaries and experimental film. Offering an astonishing range of evidence, Hammer creatively presents queer plenty from the margins of the archive. Through this evidence, Hammer affirms past queer lives, celebrating and highlighting rebelliousness, agency, creativity, queer kinship, and passion. Additionally, Hammer attempts to communicate with and embody the past, physically and emotionally seeking out and feeling the interior and exterior lives of her biographical subjects, who are predominantly creative women, including the poet Elizabeth Bishop, the Dada artist Hannah Höch, the surreal photographer Claude Cahun, and the painter Nicole Eisenman.

Off the Wall with Shchedryk

This paper examines how music and juxtapositions can ground a story in a longer history where the potential of images and cutting points become a dialectics of point, counter-point, and fusion in a revisitation of archetypal images and as a co-authorship of reception. A visual dialogue evolves in the film Shchedryk (2014) through a remediation of scenes from Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin (1925), Alexander Dovzhenko‘s Earth (1930) and Norman McLaren’s experimental film Synchromy (1971). People who do not have recourse to the dominant culture are through recipient-co-authorship able to replay things in more sophisticated ways. Judith Butler’s idea of the performative and of subjects re-performing an injury (Butler 1993) can be introduced to the multi-screen experience. Foregrounding the wounding aspect as visual images is about ‘bad pleasure’ (O’Brien & Julien 2005). If realness is a standard by which we judge any performance, what makes it effective is its ability to compel beliefs and embody and reiterate norms (Butler, 387). Image Credit: Frame from Shechedryk, directed by Kalli Paakspuu

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

<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>

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

<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>

Trances, Myth, Bachelor Machines, and Abstractions: Queer Experimental Film in the Cold War Era (1943–1962)

This chapter surveys the emergence and development of a queer experimental cinema in the United States between the early 1940s and the early 1960s. It locates queer experimental film within post–World War II culture, explores the conceptions of sexuality that subtend it, and discusses its main thematic concerns, stylistic gestures, and subgenres. Against earlier readings that stress the subjective, introspective character of this body of work, the chapter argues that these films are also forms of subcultural material practice: they sexualize public and private space, upend traditional myths, articulate heterodox conceptions of the body, and make peculiar uses of everyday objects and substances. In the process, they cast sexuality and desire as a series of unclassifiable impulses and affects that attach to varied gender and corporeal configurations indiscriminately. The chapter considers well-known filmmakers such as Kenneth Anger, Gregory Markopoulos, Harry Smith, and Marie Menken, along with lesser-known figures such as Willard Maas, Theodor Huff, Sara Katryn Arledge, and Jim Davis.

Queer Theory and Nontheatrical Films: Perversion in the Public Domain

This chapter considers the intersection of queer theory and nontheatrical film studies by examining antipornography film Perversion for Profit (1962). Produced and distributed by Citizens for Decent Literature, the film visualizes a range of straight and gay pornographic images by censoring and categorizing them as evidence of societal aberrations. Now in the public domain and streaming on Internet Archive, the film’s pornographic images have been repurposed for new meanings. By analyzing Barbara Hammer’s inclusion of Perversion in her experimental film History Lessons (2000) and a mash-up of the original film titled Come Join the Fun! (2004), shared on Internet Archive, the chapter argues that the Perversion’s value now lies in what queer creators make of its cinematic time and space.

Shifting Perspectives: A cinematic dialogue about Synthetic Biology in a more-than-human world

The short experimental film Shifting Perspectives stems from a collaborative research project initiated in 2019 in Sydney, Australia, during the ‘Choreographic Hack Lab—a week-long laboratory co-presented by Critical Path and Sydney Festival in partnership with the Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences (MAAS), which asked artists and academics to reflect and respond and rethink to the idea of the Anthropocene (Pini &amp; George, 2019). The film was later developed in 2020 during a Responsive Residency at Critical Path, Sydney, awarded to anthropologist and choreographer Sarah Pini in collaboration with Jestin George, biotechnologist and visual artist, and Melissa Ramos, visual artist and filmmaker.This work aims to open a multivocal interdisciplinary dialogue across screendance, performance and synthetic biology. Inspired by a recent conversation between two leaders in the field of synthetic biology (Sarah Richardson and Tom Knight) and their divergent approaches to working with microbial life (Agapakis, 2019), the film invites to consider how collaborating with microorganisms can reshape our future in a more-than-human world.&nbsp;