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.

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.

The Pillar of Autonomy, Los Tercios Compas and Zapatista Filmmaking.

The present work describes how video production has integrated within zapatista life and practice as a tool to communicate everyday information among the members of a given community and between geographically distant communities, to protect themselves from structural oppression, to self-present themselves to external audiences, and also to continue developing their autonomous modes of knowledge production. The text focuses on the film The Pillar of Autonomy and the Life of the Partisans (2018), and contextualizes it within the larger framework of political documentary and experimental cinema through the zapatista concept of video-machete.

Le cinéma même: (re)découvrir la collection filmfilm à la cinémathèque québécoise a catalogue raisonné of a film distributor’s collection

This thesis is an applied research project that takes the form of a catalogue raisonné of a section of the FilmFilm distribution center collection deposited in 1991 at the Cinémathèque québécoise. The aim of the project was to offer a detailed study of the collection to propose a reevaluation of the history of experimental cinema in Quebec during the 1960s and 1970s. This project is divided in three main sections. The first one is an accompanying text that includes a brief history of marginal filmmaking practices in Quebec and of FilmFilm, but also the methodology for the film inspections. The second part consists in the inspection forms for each reel of the collection and the last one is composed of the catalogue raisonné. The catalogue represents the main focus of the thesis by documenting each title and offering a description as well as illustrations for each film. Ce mémoire est un projet de recherche appliqué qui se présente sous la forme d’un catalogue raisonné d’une section de la collection de la maison de distribution FilmFilm ayant été déposée à la Cinémathèque québécoise en 1991. L’objectif de ce projet était d’en proposer une étude la plus étayée possible qui puisse conduire à une réévaluation de l'histoire du cinéma expérimental du Québec des années 1960 et 1970. Il comporte trois sections principales. La première est un texte d’accompagnement incluant un bref historique des pratiques cinématographiques marginales au Québec et de FilmFilm et détaillant également ma méthodologie pour l’inspection des copies de films. La seconde partie est constituée des formulaires d’inspection pour chaque bobine de la collection et la dernière comprend le catalogue raisonné, point culminant du travail qui documente chaque titre en offrant un portrait et des photographies de chacune des oeuvres.

Le cinéma même: (re)découvrir la collection filmfilm à la cinémathèque québécoise a catalogue raisonné of a film distributor’s collection

This thesis is an applied research project that takes the form of a catalogue raisonné of a section of the FilmFilm distribution center collection deposited in 1991 at the Cinémathèque québécoise. The aim of the project was to offer a detailed study of the collection to propose a reevaluation of the history of experimental cinema in Quebec during the 1960s and 1970s. This project is divided in three main sections. The first one is an accompanying text that includes a brief history of marginal filmmaking practices in Quebec and of FilmFilm, but also the methodology for the film inspections. The second part consists in the inspection forms for each reel of the collection and the last one is composed of the catalogue raisonné. The catalogue represents the main focus of the thesis by documenting each title and offering a description as well as illustrations for each film. Ce mémoire est un projet de recherche appliqué qui se présente sous la forme d’un catalogue raisonné d’une section de la collection de la maison de distribution FilmFilm ayant été déposée à la Cinémathèque québécoise en 1991. L’objectif de ce projet était d’en proposer une étude la plus étayée possible qui puisse conduire à une réévaluation de l'histoire du cinéma expérimental du Québec des années 1960 et 1970. Il comporte trois sections principales. La première est un texte d’accompagnement incluant un bref historique des pratiques cinématographiques marginales au Québec et de FilmFilm et détaillant également ma méthodologie pour l’inspection des copies de films. La seconde partie est constituée des formulaires d’inspection pour chaque bobine de la collection et la dernière comprend le catalogue raisonné, point culminant du travail qui documente chaque titre en offrant un portrait et des photographies de chacune des oeuvres.

The fecund interval: visualizing acoustic space in Canadian experimental cinema.

"In this paper, I seek to develop an analysis of an aesthetic framework in which my filmmaking practice is situated, through Marshall McLuhan's ideas concerning acoustic space and their resonances within the avant-garde cinema. This may sound at first to be an inherently contradictory formula, given that a visually predominant medium such as the cinema may not be considered to impart experiences beyond this realm, with the exception of its acoustic components. (Sound cinema, similarly, is generally assumed to evoke sense impressions that exist merely in support of the fidelity of its 'realistic' image). However, I seek to demonstrate how the visualization of acoustic space forms a centrally unifying aesthetic strategy within the Canadian avant-garde cinema and many of the perceptual investigations conducted by film artists working during the time of Mcluhan's writings, resulting in a tradition of works which aim to translate visual experience beyond a fragmentary, visually-abstracted field, thus embodying aspects of kinesthetic vision and tactile/acoustic spatial experience. begin by examining the reception of Mcluhan's scholarship from within communication studies, suggesting the most fruitful reading of his often controversial figure as an artist-mystic rather than strictly as a theorist. I will then examine the varied influences from literary and cultural traditions that shaped his unique approach to media analysis and the development of his model of acoustic space-which Richard Cavell proposes as the primary feature that "connects a multiplicity of elements in Mcluhan's large and diverse oeuvre" (2003: xiii)-and consider the relationship of the cinema to Mcluhan's project of a history of the human sensorium."--Introduction.

The fecund interval: visualizing acoustic space in Canadian experimental cinema.

"In this paper, I seek to develop an analysis of an aesthetic framework in which my filmmaking practice is situated, through Marshall McLuhan's ideas concerning acoustic space and their resonances within the avant-garde cinema. This may sound at first to be an inherently contradictory formula, given that a visually predominant medium such as the cinema may not be considered to impart experiences beyond this realm, with the exception of its acoustic components. (Sound cinema, similarly, is generally assumed to evoke sense impressions that exist merely in support of the fidelity of its 'realistic' image). However, I seek to demonstrate how the visualization of acoustic space forms a centrally unifying aesthetic strategy within the Canadian avant-garde cinema and many of the perceptual investigations conducted by film artists working during the time of Mcluhan's writings, resulting in a tradition of works which aim to translate visual experience beyond a fragmentary, visually-abstracted field, thus embodying aspects of kinesthetic vision and tactile/acoustic spatial experience. begin by examining the reception of Mcluhan's scholarship from within communication studies, suggesting the most fruitful reading of his often controversial figure as an artist-mystic rather than strictly as a theorist. I will then examine the varied influences from literary and cultural traditions that shaped his unique approach to media analysis and the development of his model of acoustic space-which Richard Cavell proposes as the primary feature that "connects a multiplicity of elements in Mcluhan's large and diverse oeuvre" (2003: xiii)-and consider the relationship of the cinema to Mcluhan's project of a history of the human sensorium."--Introduction.