Labour in a Single Shot

This collection of essays offers a critical assessment of Labour in a Single Shot, a groundbreaking documentary video workshop. From 2011 to 2014, curator Antje Ehmann and film- and videomaker Harun Farocki produced an art project of truly global proportions. They travelled to fifteen cities around the world to conduct workshops inspired by cinema history’s first film, Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory, shot in 1895 by the Lumière brothers in France. While the workshop videos are in colour and the camera was not required to remain static, Ehmann and Farocki’s students were tasked with honouring the original Lumière film’s basic parameters of theme and style. The fascinating result is a collection of more than 550 short videos that have appeared in international exhibitions and on an open-access website, offering the widest possible audience the opportunity to ponder contemporary labour in multiple contexts around the world.

History in the Making: The Debut Epic Tiexi qu: West of the Tracks

This chapter discusses Wang Bing’s debut Tiexi qu: West of the Tracks (2002) and engages with history and labour issues. The film shows Wang’s way of observing ‘history in the making’ and extrapolating narratives from an extensive process of shooting. The film is discussed as an unconventional cinematic reportage. Its structure, extensive duration, and approach make this film a groundbreaking work that intertwines various film modes and connects different film traditions, from the early documentaries of the Lumière Brothers to Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven (1972).

Cine para la Educación. Aprender de seis décadas de buenas experiencias educomunicativas

The Lumiere brothers, inventors of the cinematograph, did not think that it could be more interesting than a mere fairground attraction. However, at the beginning of the 20th century, the cinema was considered a medium of immense educational potential and it has been analyzed from multiple perspectives for its cultural value. Not only was George Meliés the first director to believe in the potential of cinema, simultaneously with the director Alice Guy, fictional cinema also began. Directors and theorists such as Griffith or Eisenstein, Riccioto Canudo, Henry Agel, Guido Aristarco, or André Bazin demonstrated the importance of the language of cinema from a practical perspective. The main objective here is to collect some of the most significant experiences in film pedagogy in the Spanish context, and discover with them the meaning and the sense of delving into this field and its importance in the real context of the screens that nourish the digital environment multimedia and transmedia. From the first film clubs, university experiences, pedagogical associations/groups, and the creation of educational centers, to audiovisual literacy actions for groups at risk of exclusion. As an example of the educational potential of cinema in isolation contexts, we will outline a recent case of its application in penitentiary institutions.

Trembling Meaning: Camera Instability and Gilbert Simondon's Transduction in Czech Archival Film

Many experimental found footage films base their meanings and effects on an interaction between the figurative content of the image and its material-technological underpinnings. Can this interaction arise accidentally without artistic appropriation? A recently digitised film by the Czech cinema pioneer Jan Kříženecký, Opening Ceremony of the Čech Bridge (1908), presents such an exercise in accidental aesthetics. At one point, the horizontal and vertical trembling of the cinematograph – obtained from the Lumière brothers – translates into a trembling of the figures on the bridge so precisely that the figurative and material spheres appear to cooperate towards a common aesthetic goal. To account for such phenomena, film theory, found footage filmmaking, and archival practice need to join forces with philosophy. More specifically, Gilbert Simondon's notion of transduction, a process based on the intersection of diverse realities within a domain, allows us to conceptualise the paradoxical interaction between the figurative and material dimensions and the unintentional meanings that arise out of it. Transduction enables the distribution of elements between these heterogeneous spheres while maintaining a certain stability within a system. In the case of archival films in which transduction occurs without prior intention or expectation, transduction can be foregrounded and prolonged. The connection between transduction and the “trembling meaning” of Opening Ceremony, understood within the wider context of camera instability in experimental found footage, will uncover the aesthetic potentialities held by the autonomous creativity of film matter and its interferences with the figurative content.

Organ accompaniment in silent films, part 1 – the process of cinematic art creation

The idea to write music for silent films, both in a form of written-down scores and composed live has experienced its renaissance for more than ten years. Thanks to a quite decent number of preserved theatre instruments and also due to the globalisation and wide data flow options connected with it, the knowledge and interest in Anglo-Saxon tradition of organ accompaniment in cinema were able to spread away from its place of origin. The article is the first part of four attempts to present the phenomenon of combination of the art of organ improvisation with cinematography and it was based on the fragments of the doctoral thesis entitled “Current methods of organ improvisation as performance means in the accompaniment for silent films based on the selected musical and visual work”. The dissertation was written under the supervision of prof. dr hab. Elżbieta Karolak and was defended at the Ignacy Jan Paderewski Academy of Music in Poznań in 2020. The article touches on the initial phase of the development of silent cinema from 1895 to 1909. Having differentiated the terms of typical organ improvisation and the art of improvisation for silent films, the article describes the development of cinema art. From the praxinoscope invented by Émile Reynaud, through the cinematograph and the Kinetoscope (Dickson), Vitascope (Jenkins and Armat) and Bioscop (Skladanowsky brothers), it finally discusses the process how the Lumière brothers invented the cinematograph. It its further part, it presents the development of cinematography based on the improvements in theatre introduced by Méliès. The whole text serves as a basis for more parts of the article touching on the issues of the sound added to silent films and the creation of the theatre type of the pipe organ.

O valor documental do quotidiano: uma leitura histórica

Since its origin, the audiovisual documentary has played an important role in recording not only certain historical events, but also the ways of life of local communities. In this paper we will present an historical reading on the exploration of topics from everyday life in documentary filmmaking. This is something that cuts across the entire history of cinema, from the earliest recordings by the Lumière brothers in the late 19th Century to the experiences created on the crowdsourcing model in the early 21st Century. As the documentary gained momentum as a film genre, important filmmakers like Flaherty and Vertov presented their distinct views on the everyday lives of people. In the 1930s, the sociological and anthropological research project called Mass Observation created an observatory on the daily lives of the English. Later, in the 1950s and 1960s in France, the United Kingdom and the United States, avant-garde movements emerged in documentary cinema: respectively, Cinéma Vérité, Free Cinema and Direct Cinema. From these movements, the work of a group of filmmakers and anthropologists who made documentary films about native populations and about the everyday lives of urban communities of the time will be highlighted, taking special attention to the work of Jean Rouch and his self-reflective approach to cinema that lead him to explore the inclusion of the subject filmed in the actual process of constructing the film.

The Dance of Abstract Cinema

As a moving art, cinema was linked to dance from its earliest moments and, like dance, held an idealized position for artists of the avant-garde, from the serpentine dance films of Edison and the Lumière brothers to the abstract cinema of the interwar avant-garde. At either end, whether filming a dancing body or creating abstract montages, cinema strove to express, not a new formal image on the flat screen but the dancing effects (and affects) of motion itself. This chapter follows a series of early twentieth-century artistic engagements with cinematic abstraction. Despite varying levels of formal abstraction and representational imagery, these films are no longer concerned with reproducing a world to look upon but now an environment to look through with kinesthetic sensation and desire. In a particularly rich case, Germaine Dulac, outwardly indebted to the dance of Loïe Fuller, became her successor in choreographic cinema, engaging the multisensory body through the medium of abstraction.