Dóra Maurer: Proportions & Timing

This paper aims at re-evaluating two of Hungarian artist Dóra Mauer’s films, the video work Proportions (1979) and the 16mm film Timing (1973/80). Both films follow a rigid structure. In Proportions, Maurer uses a paper roll to compare her own body measures repeatedly; in Timing, she repeatedly folds a white linen to compare the rhythm of her arm movements. Through her use of paper and the gesture of folding, the two films can be read as references to the very origin of the term format, as coined in early letterpress printing. When the notion of format is understood as a determination of a ratio and, as such, as an indexical reference to given social relationships (Summers, 2003), these films unfold sociocultural and political meanings. The present paper traces this spectrum of meaning through the pointed inclusion of historical discourses surrounding early motion studies, the art scene in socialist Hungary in the 1970s, and early time experiments before the advent of precision clocks.

Made From Movement: Michael Snow's That/Cela/Dat, Marie Menken's Arabesque for Kenneth Anger, and Richard Serra's Double Torqued Ellipse

Made from Movement works towards a theory of art that is grounded in movement. Thinking through movement allows for consideration of the temporal presence and experience of artworks, and enables an approach to art that crosses aesthetic boundaries. This study is carried out through close hermeneutic studies of three distinct artworks: Michael Snow's video gallery installation That/Cela/Dat (2000), Marie Menken's 16mm film Arabesque for Kenneth Anger (1958 – 1961), and Richard Serra's steel sculpture Double Torqued Ellipse (1997). Movement in these artworks does not appear merely as change over time or change of place, but rather as something that is coherent and consistent with itself but does not conclude itself, something that is in continual flux but does not try to achieve an end point, and something that holds forth and protects potent encounters with otherness. Movement, grasped in this way, is irreducible, generative, and tensile. The particular approach to this study is drawn from Samuel Mallin's phenomenological method of Body Hermeneutics. The method continues Heidegger's focus on singular artworks, and accepts that any particularly strong work of art is as worthy of careful study as any noteworthy work of philosophy or theory. Furthermore, drawing on Merleau-Ponty's philosophy, the method works from a conception of human consciousness that includes our affective, movingbody, perceptual, as well as cognitive integrations with the world. All four of these distinct, yet overlapping, regions of consciousness are embodied, and thus require physical situatedness with the phenomena to be described. Hence, the phenomenological descriptions in the dissertation are developed from writing done in the presence of the artworks, and the themes of movement are drawn from the phenomena shown by the artworks themselves. Through its embodied approach, and by working itself out through themes of movement encountered in three distinct works of art, Made from Movement contributes insights into topics of temporality, technology, language, femininity, perception, cinema, and art. In addition to offering critical writing on artworks by Snow, Menken, and Serra, the three hermeneutic studies also contribute philosophical reflection on the work of Merleau-Ponty, Heidegger, Irigaray, and Wittgenstein, among others.

Made From Movement: Michael Snow's That/Cela/Dat, Marie Menken's Arabesque for Kenneth Anger, and Richard Serra's Double Torqued Ellipse

Made from Movement works towards a theory of art that is grounded in movement. Thinking through movement allows for consideration of the temporal presence and experience of artworks, and enables an approach to art that crosses aesthetic boundaries. This study is carried out through close hermeneutic studies of three distinct artworks: Michael Snow's video gallery installation That/Cela/Dat (2000), Marie Menken's 16mm film Arabesque for Kenneth Anger (1958 – 1961), and Richard Serra's steel sculpture Double Torqued Ellipse (1997). Movement in these artworks does not appear merely as change over time or change of place, but rather as something that is coherent and consistent with itself but does not conclude itself, something that is in continual flux but does not try to achieve an end point, and something that holds forth and protects potent encounters with otherness. Movement, grasped in this way, is irreducible, generative, and tensile. The particular approach to this study is drawn from Samuel Mallin's phenomenological method of Body Hermeneutics. The method continues Heidegger's focus on singular artworks, and accepts that any particularly strong work of art is as worthy of careful study as any noteworthy work of philosophy or theory. Furthermore, drawing on Merleau-Ponty's philosophy, the method works from a conception of human consciousness that includes our affective, movingbody, perceptual, as well as cognitive integrations with the world. All four of these distinct, yet overlapping, regions of consciousness are embodied, and thus require physical situatedness with the phenomena to be described. Hence, the phenomenological descriptions in the dissertation are developed from writing done in the presence of the artworks, and the themes of movement are drawn from the phenomena shown by the artworks themselves. Through its embodied approach, and by working itself out through themes of movement encountered in three distinct works of art, Made from Movement contributes insights into topics of temporality, technology, language, femininity, perception, cinema, and art. In addition to offering critical writing on artworks by Snow, Menken, and Serra, the three hermeneutic studies also contribute philosophical reflection on the work of Merleau-Ponty, Heidegger, Irigaray, and Wittgenstein, among others.

Stan Brakhage and Ethnographic Praxis

Stan Brakhage (b. 1933–d. 2003) was a visual artist and filmmaker who embodied many of the theoretical tensions and pragmatic themes in cultural anthropology in the 20th century, despite not being an anthropologist and working almost totally through experiments in 16mm film. In traversing, and being claimed by, both modernist and postmodernist thinkers and artists alike, he was a creator as much influenced by the poetry of American Romanticism as he was the harbinger of a millennial deconstruction. He is generally considered, along with the filmmaker Maya Deren, the quintessential savant of American avant-garde cinema. His phenomenological approach to filmmaking and his attention to poesis in visuality, combined with his persistent dispensation with narrative and plot, drew to light still pressing existential questions about the space between structure and individualism, the unconscious mind, myth, and intersubjective experiences in the shared quotidian of everyday being. While his early works of the mid-1950s showed solidarity with the surrealist and Freudian-inspired themes of compatriots like Maya Deren, in the 1960s Brakhage quickly engaged with what he viewed as the untapped potential of cinematic celluloid as a malleable medium with which to both capture and express the immediacy of sensual experience. At the core of his creative impulse was an exploration of visual perception unfiltered by symbolic textuality. To that end, his 16mm films were mostly soundless, color-saturated, nonlinear impressions of the most consequential of life’s relational phenomena; birth, sex, human development, death, and familial intimacies untethered from linguistic discourses, character drama, and traditional act-based storytelling structures. Brakhage’s process of etching and painting directly onto the emulsified film strips he used for shooting enabled his impressionistic questioning of the boundaries of representation in moving images. Brakhage asserted that, much as with human vision, such manipulations punched holes in the epistemic orthodoxy of experiential narrative and instead stressed the messy and affective ways that our sensory organs force us to negotiate our immanent worlds. His early artistic tenure found him characteristically prolific in modernist aesthetics as he explored concepts ranging from the psychoanalysis of dreaming and the Freudian death-drive in Reflections on Black (1955) to the metaphysical man-myth opus Dog Star Man (1961–1964). Such themes paralleled similar theoretical concerns emergent in anthropology in the mid-20th century as evident in both the structuralism of Levi-Strauss and the persistence of the Freudian unconscious as an explanatory hermeneutic. Today, Stan Brakhage’s influence in anthropology is evident in ethnographic filmmaking that challenges the documentary impulse, ambiguates hegemonic truth claims, and explores the modalities of sensorial representation related to human experience through iterative experimentation.

The Unsatisfactory Medium: the Transition from Mobile Cinema to Television in the Post-war Highlands and Islands

Becky Conekin et al. identify the Queen's Coronation and its mediation by television in 1953 as the defining moment in post-war British modernity (Conekin, Mort, Waters 1999). The population of the Highlands and Islands mostly watched this event on 16mm film, via the mobile cinema shows provided by the Highlands and Islands Film Guild. Film assumed the audio-visual functions of television because the geography of the Highlands and Islands did not readily accommodate television broadcasting. Television arrived slowly and unevenly. This paper traces arrival of television into the Highlands and Islands and the uncertainty over accessibility and quality of reception. It argues that whilst the Scottish Education Department assumed that the mobile cinema service had been succeeded by television; the inherent problems of delivering television enabled the more communal, educative, legitimate and reliable cinema to prevail. This asynchronous relationship compels us to recognise the geography of British modernity. Drawing on archival sources, oral history interviews and media histories, this paper presents an account of the Highland experience of a transition typically aligned with an urban perspective.

The Cinematic Kon-Tiki Expeditions: Realism, Spectacle, and the Migration of Nordic Cinema

This chapter investigates cinematic strategies used to depict Thor Heyerdahl’s Kon-Tiki expedition of 1947 on screen. The critical discourse surrounding Heyerdahl’s 1950 documentary film has centered on the ontology of its images, which film history’s most influential theorist of realism, André Bazin, famously praised in Kon-Tiki. Despite Bazin’s enthusiasm, both expedition and documentary were highly mediated and staged promotional events from the beginning. The only reason a film could be cobbled together at all from the waterlogged 16mm film that Heyerdahl brought home with him was because of the intervention of a Swedish film technician who resized and repaired the badly damaged sequences. In 2013, Norwegian directors Joachim Rønning and Espen Sandberg turned to Heyerdahl’s expedition for their own film. In their take, the sedate source material of the documentary has given way to spectacular visual effects and scenes of peril on the high seas. All the absent scenes of danger in the original take center stage in the latter film. Subtext has become text, as Rønning and Sandberg transform the source material into cinematic spectacle.

James Benning Goes Digital

James Benning’s turn from 16mm filmmaking to digital filmmaking after his RR (2007) released the already prolific Benning from his struggles with 16mm film projection and print damage and unleashed a new wave of digital productivity. This interview explores Benning’s many digital films, including the several films that are part of his Two Cabins project (focusing on the cabins, lives, and writings of Henry David Thoreau and Ted Kaczynski), his Warhol-inspired portrait films—After Warhol (2011), Twenty Cigarettes (2011)—his three-hour-plus “single-shot” film, BNSF (2012), his cine-exploration of Vienna’s Naturhistorischesmuseum, and his personal epic, 52 Films (2015), an adventure into modifying a broad range of online postings from the internet—originally designed to be presented on fifty-two computers, but so far, shown mostly as interactive screenings with Benning present.