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.

Cinema as Idea

2020 ◽  
pp. 439-521
Author(s):  
Jonathan Walley
Keyword(s):  
Conceptual Art ◽  
Delayed Response ◽  
Experimental Film ◽  
Art World ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Prior Art ◽  
Expanded Cinema ◽  
History Of ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S

Chapter 6 considers works of expanded cinema that could be called “conceptual cinema.” “Conceptual,” here, refers to the belief that cinema among many avant-garde/experimental filmmakers and critics that cinema was ultimately a conceptual phenomenon, even when it took forms that seemed decidedly material. The term, or variants of it, was used in the 1960s and 1970s, often to refer to “imaginary” films, films planned or written but purposely never executed, and unprojected or unprojectable films. There are parallels between such conceptual cinematic works and conceptual art. In both cases, concepts, intentions, imagination, and discourse are taken to be as constitutive as art works as materials and physical processes. The objects of the film medium were, and continue to be, de-centered in favor of these less tangible, conceptual, or discursive dimensions of cinematic practice. While conceptual art will be a point of reference, chapter 6 will also show that a concept-based ontology of cinema emerged organically from within the history of avant-garde/experimental film. That is, it should not be thought of simply as a delayed response by filmmakers to prior art world developments, as if playing catch-up with their fellow artists.

Misreading Egypt

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jesse Schotter
Keyword(s):  
New Media ◽  
Narrative Form ◽  
Experimental Film ◽  
Tower Of Babel ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Sergei Eisenstein ◽  
History Of ◽  
The One ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Modern Technologies

The first chapter of Hieroglyphic Modernisms exposes the complex history of Western misconceptions of Egyptian writing from antiquity to the present. Hieroglyphs bridge the gap between modern technologies and the ancient past, looking forward to the rise of new media and backward to the dispersal of languages in the mythical moment of the Tower of Babel. The contradictory ways in which hieroglyphs were interpreted in the West come to shape the differing ways that modernist writers and filmmakers understood the relationship between writing, film, and other new media. On the one hand, poets like Ezra Pound and film theorists like Vachel Lindsay and Sergei Eisenstein use the visual languages of China and of Egypt as a more primal or direct alternative to written words. But Freud, Proust, and the later Eisenstein conversely emphasize the phonetic qualities of Egyptian writing, its similarity to alphabetical scripts. The chapter concludes by arguing that even avant-garde invocations of hieroglyphics depend on narrative form through an examination of Hollis Frampton’s experimental film Zorns Lemma.

scholarly journals Installation of the Exotic

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rod Stoneman
Keyword(s):  
Public Service ◽  
Experimental Work ◽  
Video Art ◽  
Fine Art ◽  
Specific Work ◽  
Art World ◽  
Site Specific ◽  
Moving Image ◽  
Expanded Cinema ◽  
Public Museums

INSTALLATION OF THE EXOTIC Film and audiovisual installations have increasingly taken place in the art world in recent years extending and renewing the range of activities in the fine art domain. Tracing its origins to expanded cinema and video art in the 1970s, moving image installation is now ubiquitous in public museums and private galleries. This is at a time when access to experimental work via public service versions of television has now all but disappeared.(1) In the two decades since, as television channels have proliferated, choice has actually narrowed. Moving image installations are visible in a diversity of art environments from gallery spaces to site-specific work in urban or industrial pop-ups. Multi-screen configurations are not easily arranged in cinemas or easily watched on television sets, let alone computers. The small portable digital screens may issue a blizzard of information and imagery everyday, but their size and scale...

Sea Urchins and Circuses: The Modernist Natural Histories of Jean Painlevé and Alexander Calder

2018 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 187-211
Author(s):  
Patricia E. Chu
Keyword(s):  
New Media ◽  
Sea Urchins ◽  
Life Sciences ◽  
Three Dimensional ◽  
Machine Age ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
History Of ◽  
And Performance ◽  
The One ◽  
Natural Historian

The Paris avant-garde milieu from which both Cirque Calder/Calder's Circus and Painlevé’s early films emerged was a cultural intersection of art and the twentieth-century life sciences. In turning to the style of current scientific journals, the Paris surrealists can be understood as engaging the (life) sciences not simply as a provider of normative categories of materiality to be dismissed, but as a companion in apprehending the “reality” of a world beneath the surface just as real as the one visible to the naked eye. I will focus in this essay on two modernist practices in new media in the context of the history of the life sciences: Jean Painlevé’s (1902–1989) science films and Alexander Calder's (1898–1976) work in three-dimensional moving art and performance—the Circus. In analyzing Painlevé’s work, I discuss it as exemplary of a moment when life sciences and avant-garde technical methods and philosophies created each other rather than being classified as separate categories of epistemological work. In moving from Painlevé’s films to Alexander Calder's Circus, Painlevé’s cinematography remains at the forefront; I use his film of one of Calder's performances of the Circus, a collaboration the men had taken two decades to complete. Painlevé’s depiction allows us to see the elements of Calder's work that mark it as akin to Painlevé’s own interest in a modern experimental organicism as central to the so-called machine-age. Calder's work can be understood as similarly developing an avant-garde practice along the line between the bestiary of the natural historian and the bestiary of the modern life scientist.

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.

scholarly journals Interweaving Realities: Spoken Language and Moving Images in the Sonne halt!, Experimental Film by Ferry Radax

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Luka Bešlagić
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Context ◽  
Narrative Structure ◽  
Spoken Language ◽  
Experimental Film ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Moving Image ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Moving Images ◽  
Narrative Cinema ◽  
Movie Script

This paper analyses the experimental film Sonne halt! by Ferry Radax, an Austrian filmmaker renowned for his unconventional approach to cinematic practice. Filmed and edited between the end of the 1950s and early 1960s, the film at first may appear to be a belated homage to the previous European experiments in avant-garde cinema, already carried out a few decades earlier. However, since there have been no great ‘historical avant-garde’ movements in Vienna in the period between the two world wars – according to the novel argument made by Klaus Kastberger – it was already the middle of the 20th century when the ‘original’ avant-garde strategies were finally acknowledged in Austria, and simultaneously appropriated by the ‘neo-avant-garde’. In this peculiar historico-cultural context Sonne halt!, in its fragmentary non-narrative structure which resembles Dadaist or Surrealist playfulness and openness, innovatively and radically interweaved two disparate film registers: moving image and spoken language. Various sentences arbitrarily enounced throughout the film – which have their origin in Konrad Bayer’s unfinished experimental, pseudo-autobiographical, montage novel der sechste sinn – do not constitute dialogues or narration of a traditional movie script but rather a random collection of fictional and philosophical statements. At certain moments there is a lack of rapport between moving image and speech – an experimental attempt by Ferry Radax to challenge one of the most common principles of sound and narrative cinema. By deconstructing Sonne halt! to its linguistic and cinematic aspects, this article particularly focuses on the role of verbal commentaries within the film. Article received: December 28, 2017; Article accepted: January 10, 2018; Published online: April 15, 2018; Original scholarly paper How to cite this article: Bešlagić, Luka. "Interweaving Realities: Spoken Language and Moving Images in the Sonne halt!, Experimental Film by Ferry Radax." AM Journal of Art and Media Studies 15 (2018): . doi: 10.25038/am.v0i15.228

Video Installation

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Johanna Gosse
Keyword(s):  
Installation Art ◽  
Relevant Literature ◽  
Interactive Media ◽  
Video Art ◽  
Video Installation ◽  
Moving Image ◽  
Moving Images ◽  
Expanded Cinema ◽  
Video Projection ◽  
Selection Of

While at first, “video installation” would seem to refer to a particular medium and mode of display, in practice, the term is applied to a range of intersecting media, histories and genres, including but not limited to experimental and expanded cinema, video art, installation art, digital and new media art, and the emergent category of artists’ moving image. In short, “video installation” encompasses an expansive field of moving image practices, formats, and configurations, from multichannel film projection to video sculpture to immersive and interactive media environments. The term can apply to moving images that emanate from or are projected onto screens, monitors, or mobile devices, and are displayed in spaces outside of a conventional cinematic context. In terms of historical periodization, the rise of video installation coincided with the emergence of analog video technology in the mid- to late 1960s and the concomitant emergence of installation art during this same period. Up until the 1980s, video installation took shape predominantly as gallery-based displays of CRT monitors. Often configured into sculptural arrangements that self-reflexively acknowledge their physical support, “video sculptures” invoke and comment upon video’s genetic ties to broadcast television. Yet, other, more feedback-driven modes of installation, such as Nam June Paik’s TV-Buddha (1974) or Bruce Nauman’s Live-Taped Video Corridor (1970), emphasize the instantaneity of real-time closed circuit video over the sculptural presence of the monitor, and thus privilege surveillant over the televisual optics. By the 1990s, as video projectors improved in quality and decreased in cost, the bulky CRT gave way to the projected moving image, which in turn has emerged as a dominant mode within contemporary artistic production. Since it can adapt to a variety of spaces and surfaces—wall, ceiling, floor, screen, objects, even viewers’ bodies—projection opens up a multitude of experiential possibilities. Projection can also be sculptural, as in the work of Tony Oursler and Krystof Wodizcko, who generate uncannily embodied video portraits by projecting moving images onto free-standing objects, buildings, and monuments. Video projection can also be immersive or environmental, such as in Anthony McCall’s Solid Light Works (2005–2010), a suite of monumental, linear beams of white light projected into darkened gallery spaces, which act as updated, digital variations of his influential expanded cinema work, Line Describing a Cone (1973). In response to its dominant position within contemporary artistic practice, scholarship and criticism devoted to moving image installation, curation, and distribution have spiked since the 1990s. This bibliography offers a selection of relevant literature on this topic. Beginning with an overview of key scholarship on the history of video art and contemporary artists’ moving image, the bibliography transitions to more focused, thematic investigations of and significant prehistories, including topics like expanded cinema, video aesthetics and ecologies, and installation art. Finally, it includes a selection of key exhibition catalogues, including specialized sections on video projection and video sculpture. In tracing the entwined emergence of video and installation art since the 1960s, this bibliography also limns another historical intersection, that of video art and experimental film. While typically, these practices have been framed as historically distinctive, aesthetically autonomous and driven by medium-specific concerns, this bibliography takes inspiration from and highlights more recent scholarly, critical, and curatorial perspectives that align and cross-reference these traditions, and in doing so, situate themselves at the disciplinary intersection of art history and film and media studies.

Argentine Cinema

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jessica Stites Mor ◽  
Nicolas Poppe
Keyword(s):  
Social Movements ◽  
New Media ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Film History ◽  
Professional Associations ◽  
The United States ◽  
Cultural Imperialism ◽  
Political Cinema ◽  
History Of ◽  
Media Politics

The field of Argentine cinema studies can be said to have begun in earnest with the publication of film journalist Domingo Di Núbila’s landmark two-volume history of Argentina’s film history in 1959 and 1960, Historia del cine argentino (Buenos Aires, Argentina: Cruz de Malta). A work of tremendous range and scope, Di Núbila’s history not only provided a synopsis and critique of an abundance of individual films but also examined the influence of professional associations and industry, more broadly speaking. Perhaps due to the comprehensiveness of these volumes, minimal scholarly publishing on Argentine cinema followed until the 1970s, when interest in political cinema propelled Argentine cinema into the global spotlight. Scholarly writing about Argentine film in Europe, the United States, and, to a certain extent, Cuba during this period of heightened Cold War tensions tended to focus on questions of the political and the techniques of radical cinema. Writers from outside Argentina focused predominantly on films being made contemporaneously that engaged questions of colonialism, violence, social movements, and revolution. However, by the late 1970s and early 1980s, filmmakers themselves took on the task of building a new media studies that centered on Latin American cinema with interests in questions of industry, cultural imperialism, and consumption at the core of their inquiry. By the 1980s and early 1990s, growing interest in Argentine filmmaking among academic audiences both at home and abroad culminated in the emergence of a local film studies culture in Argentina that was finally dominated by scholars rather than biographers or filmmakers. This wave of scholarship converged around questions related to the 1976–1983 dictatorship and the subsequent democratic opening. Since 2001, a new wave of interest in Argentine film following the financial crisis has pushed scholarship beyond political questions to engage more seriously with aesthetic and conceptual aspects of national films. However, booming grassroots documentary production in the new digital era captured the interest of nontraditional film scholars interested in media politics, social movements, gender and sexuality, and film as a mode of communication more broadly.

Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Holly Rogers
Keyword(s):  
Experimental Film ◽  
Critical Space ◽  
Moving Image ◽  
Avant Garde

The Introduction situates the subsequent chapters within the wider discourses on music and the moving image, and on experimental film. It identifies several threads that run through the book, most of which concern the identification of a critical space that opens up between previously constructed binaries when audiovisuality is treated experimentally: between music and noise, active and passive consumption, popular and avant-garde practices and audiovisual synchronicity and dissonance. Despite the divergent practices of experimental film’s many histories, these threads enable the identification of persistent and common forms of sonic innovation.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document