P. Adams Sitney
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- January 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780199337026
- eISBN:
- 9780199370405
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199337026.003.0009
- Subject:
- Literature, Film, Media, and Cultural Studies, Poetry
After outlining the course of Stan Brakhage’s early career and the influence of both Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound on his cinematic poetics, this chapter concentrates on the “Faust” and “Vancouver ...
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After outlining the course of Stan Brakhage’s early career and the influence of both Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound on his cinematic poetics, this chapter concentrates on the “Faust” and “Vancouver Island” tetralogies. His employment of voice-over in the “Faust” films was a radical departure into narration and free indirect discourse, while his notion of “moving visual thinking” proved to be the culmination of his lifelong polemic against the priority of language in perception and thought.Less
After outlining the course of Stan Brakhage’s early career and the influence of both Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound on his cinematic poetics, this chapter concentrates on the “Faust” and “Vancouver Island” tetralogies. His employment of voice-over in the “Faust” films was a radical departure into narration and free indirect discourse, while his notion of “moving visual thinking” proved to be the culmination of his lifelong polemic against the priority of language in perception and thought.
Eric Smigel
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- August 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780190469894
- eISBN:
- 9780190469931
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780190469894.003.0006
- Subject:
- Music, History, Western
American experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage revolutionised independent cinema by cultivating a new poetic idiom designed to document the subjective vision of the eye behind the camera. Committed to ...
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American experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage revolutionised independent cinema by cultivating a new poetic idiom designed to document the subjective vision of the eye behind the camera. Committed to an inclusive account of the lived visual experience, he augmented the cinematic vocabulary by including components such as hallucination, dreams, closed-eye images and optical feedback, capturing these ephemeral elements using a wide variety of ‘home-made’ modifications to the filming process, including erratic hand-held camera movement, distortion of focus and changing camera speeds. Although most of his projects are silent, he corresponded with composer James Tenney to explore intersections between cinema (“moving visual thinking”) and music (“sound equivalent of the mind’s moving”). When employing a soundtrack, Brakhage gravitated towards musique concrète, which he regarded as an audio analogy for cinematic montage, and he devised a unique brand of audiovisual counterpoint based on the rhythmic interplay of the psychophysiological processes of sight and sound.Less
American experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage revolutionised independent cinema by cultivating a new poetic idiom designed to document the subjective vision of the eye behind the camera. Committed to an inclusive account of the lived visual experience, he augmented the cinematic vocabulary by including components such as hallucination, dreams, closed-eye images and optical feedback, capturing these ephemeral elements using a wide variety of ‘home-made’ modifications to the filming process, including erratic hand-held camera movement, distortion of focus and changing camera speeds. Although most of his projects are silent, he corresponded with composer James Tenney to explore intersections between cinema (“moving visual thinking”) and music (“sound equivalent of the mind’s moving”). When employing a soundtrack, Brakhage gravitated towards musique concrète, which he regarded as an audio analogy for cinematic montage, and he devised a unique brand of audiovisual counterpoint based on the rhythmic interplay of the psychophysiological processes of sight and sound.
Rebecca A. Sheehan
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- April 2020
- ISBN:
- 9780190949709
- eISBN:
- 9780190949747
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780190949709.003.0002
- Subject:
- Literature, Film, Media, and Cultural Studies
This chapter investigates the philosophy of the ordinary and the everyday proposed in the films of Stan Brakhage, Jonas Mekas, and Phil Solomon. It places their work in the context of an interest in ...
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This chapter investigates the philosophy of the ordinary and the everyday proposed in the films of Stan Brakhage, Jonas Mekas, and Phil Solomon. It places their work in the context of an interest in ordinary experience and language that, for philosopher Stanley Cavell, unifies the thinking of Emerson and Wittgenstein. By pursuing Brakhage’s explicit interest in Wittgenstein and Mekas’s engagement with Transcendentalism through Thoreau, the chapter looks at how these filmmakers construct their films from overlooked means or in-betweens (for Brakhage and Solomon, the materials of the filmstrip itself; for Mekas and Brakhage, everyday happenings). This practice reflects these filmmakers’ collective investment in the ethical philosophy of “finding as founding” that locates ends in means to privilege the contingencies of individual experience over an authoritative truth that is found rather than made.Less
This chapter investigates the philosophy of the ordinary and the everyday proposed in the films of Stan Brakhage, Jonas Mekas, and Phil Solomon. It places their work in the context of an interest in ordinary experience and language that, for philosopher Stanley Cavell, unifies the thinking of Emerson and Wittgenstein. By pursuing Brakhage’s explicit interest in Wittgenstein and Mekas’s engagement with Transcendentalism through Thoreau, the chapter looks at how these filmmakers construct their films from overlooked means or in-betweens (for Brakhage and Solomon, the materials of the filmstrip itself; for Mekas and Brakhage, everyday happenings). This practice reflects these filmmakers’ collective investment in the ethical philosophy of “finding as founding” that locates ends in means to privilege the contingencies of individual experience over an authoritative truth that is found rather than made.
Erika Balsom
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- January 2019
- ISBN:
- 9780231176934
- eISBN:
- 9780231543125
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Columbia University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7312/columbia/9780231176934.003.0003
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
This chapter unearths an untaken path of experimental film history. In the mid-1960s, Stan Brakhage, Bruce Conner, and Jonas Mekas were deeply invested in the possibility that 16mm experimental films ...
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This chapter unearths an untaken path of experimental film history. In the mid-1960s, Stan Brakhage, Bruce Conner, and Jonas Mekas were deeply invested in the possibility that 16mm experimental films might be made into 8mm reduction prints and made available for sale to home collectors. This chapter relates this little-known historical episode and questions what relevance this prioritization of access over quality might have for us in the contemporary moment, when these terms are once again embroiled in a fierce battle.Less
This chapter unearths an untaken path of experimental film history. In the mid-1960s, Stan Brakhage, Bruce Conner, and Jonas Mekas were deeply invested in the possibility that 16mm experimental films might be made into 8mm reduction prints and made available for sale to home collectors. This chapter relates this little-known historical episode and questions what relevance this prioritization of access over quality might have for us in the contemporary moment, when these terms are once again embroiled in a fierce battle.
Des O’Rawe
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- May 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780719099663
- eISBN:
- 9781526104137
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9780719099663.003.0003
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
In Joseph Cornell’s New York films from the 1950s, documentary forms shift between realism and symbolism, materiality and mystery. This chapter emphasizes several converging critical contexts for the ...
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In Joseph Cornell’s New York films from the 1950s, documentary forms shift between realism and symbolism, materiality and mystery. This chapter emphasizes several converging critical contexts for the study of these films: firstly, the visual – especially, photographic – culture in New York in the 1950s, a culture that included Cornell, even if he did not, officially, belong to any of its coteries; secondly, the people he worked with on these films, especially his collaborations with Rudy Burckhardt and Stan Brakhage, and their respective connections to the New York School, and the city’s burgeoning avant-garde scene; thirdly, how – in formal terms – Cornell’s films from the 1950s relate to his other art work, especially, the boxes, assemblages, the collage-montage films of the 1930s, and his artistic vision, more generally; and finally, the relevance of these films to a broader discussion on documentary practice, and its relation to the modern visual arts.Less
In Joseph Cornell’s New York films from the 1950s, documentary forms shift between realism and symbolism, materiality and mystery. This chapter emphasizes several converging critical contexts for the study of these films: firstly, the visual – especially, photographic – culture in New York in the 1950s, a culture that included Cornell, even if he did not, officially, belong to any of its coteries; secondly, the people he worked with on these films, especially his collaborations with Rudy Burckhardt and Stan Brakhage, and their respective connections to the New York School, and the city’s burgeoning avant-garde scene; thirdly, how – in formal terms – Cornell’s films from the 1950s relate to his other art work, especially, the boxes, assemblages, the collage-montage films of the 1930s, and his artistic vision, more generally; and finally, the relevance of these films to a broader discussion on documentary practice, and its relation to the modern visual arts.
Rebecca A. Sheehan
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- April 2020
- ISBN:
- 9780190949709
- eISBN:
- 9780190949747
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780190949709.003.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Film, Media, and Cultural Studies
The book’s introductory chapter situates its study of American avant-garde cinema in the context of the field of film-philosophy and the post-theory debates within cinema studies. The chapter ...
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The book’s introductory chapter situates its study of American avant-garde cinema in the context of the field of film-philosophy and the post-theory debates within cinema studies. The chapter rectifies influential misreadings of American avant-garde films by film-philosophers, and goes on to trace philosophy’s influences on the avant-garde, laying the groundwork for putting their films in conversation with the philosophies of Gilles Deleuze, Stanley Cavell, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. This chapter outlines the various kinds of dimensional, conceptual, and material in-betweens at work in American avant-garde cinema, and explains the various ways in which American avant-garde filmmakers have used this figure to advance a philosophy that promotes behaviors of re-encounter and review applicable to the off-screen world.Less
The book’s introductory chapter situates its study of American avant-garde cinema in the context of the field of film-philosophy and the post-theory debates within cinema studies. The chapter rectifies influential misreadings of American avant-garde films by film-philosophers, and goes on to trace philosophy’s influences on the avant-garde, laying the groundwork for putting their films in conversation with the philosophies of Gilles Deleuze, Stanley Cavell, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. This chapter outlines the various kinds of dimensional, conceptual, and material in-betweens at work in American avant-garde cinema, and explains the various ways in which American avant-garde filmmakers have used this figure to advance a philosophy that promotes behaviors of re-encounter and review applicable to the off-screen world.
Erika Balsom
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- January 2019
- ISBN:
- 9780231176934
- eISBN:
- 9780231543125
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Columbia University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7312/columbia/9780231176934.001.0001
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
Images have never been as freely circulated as they are today. They have also never been so tightly controlled. As with the birth of photography, digital reproduction has created new possibilities ...
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Images have never been as freely circulated as they are today. They have also never been so tightly controlled. As with the birth of photography, digital reproduction has created new possibilities for the duplication and consumption of images, offering greater dissemination and access. But digital reproduction has also stoked new anxieties concerning authenticity and ownership. From this contemporary vantage point, After Uniqueness traces the ambivalence of reproducibility through the intersecting histories of experimental cinema and the moving image in art, examining how artists, filmmakers, and theorists have found in the copy a utopian promise or a dangerous inauthenticity—or both at once. From the sale of film in limited editions on the art market to the downloading of bootlegs, from the singularity of live cinema to video art broadcast on television, Erika Balsom investigates how the reproducibility of the moving image has been embraced, rejected, and negotiated by major figures including Stan Brakhage, Leo Castelli, and Gregory Markopoulos. Through a comparative analysis of selected distribution models and key case studies, she demonstrates how the question of image circulation is central to the history of film and video art. After Uniqueness shows that distribution channels are more than neutral pathways; they determine how we encounter, interpret, and write the history of the moving image as an art form.Less
Images have never been as freely circulated as they are today. They have also never been so tightly controlled. As with the birth of photography, digital reproduction has created new possibilities for the duplication and consumption of images, offering greater dissemination and access. But digital reproduction has also stoked new anxieties concerning authenticity and ownership. From this contemporary vantage point, After Uniqueness traces the ambivalence of reproducibility through the intersecting histories of experimental cinema and the moving image in art, examining how artists, filmmakers, and theorists have found in the copy a utopian promise or a dangerous inauthenticity—or both at once. From the sale of film in limited editions on the art market to the downloading of bootlegs, from the singularity of live cinema to video art broadcast on television, Erika Balsom investigates how the reproducibility of the moving image has been embraced, rejected, and negotiated by major figures including Stan Brakhage, Leo Castelli, and Gregory Markopoulos. Through a comparative analysis of selected distribution models and key case studies, she demonstrates how the question of image circulation is central to the history of film and video art. After Uniqueness shows that distribution channels are more than neutral pathways; they determine how we encounter, interpret, and write the history of the moving image as an art form.
Richard I. Suchenski
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- September 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780190274108
- eISBN:
- 9780190274139
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780190274108.003.0003
- Subject:
- Literature, Film, Media, and Cultural Studies, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
In his eighty-hour Eniaios, Gregory Markopoulos intensifies both the underlying Romanticism and the montage aesthetics of silent era figures like Abel Gance. He does so by completely rejecting the ...
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In his eighty-hour Eniaios, Gregory Markopoulos intensifies both the underlying Romanticism and the montage aesthetics of silent era figures like Abel Gance. He does so by completely rejecting the ordinary networks of cinema, re-envisioning film as a medium capable of reconnecting the viewer to the sacred world of myth. Intended to purge the viewer of media pollution, Eniaios was designed for presentation at a special site (the Temenos) in Arcadia, the mythic birthplace of lyric poetry. In both scale and form, Eniaios is the most ambitious film ever made. Yet in its harmonization of viewing space and image and its emphasis on the mythic resonance of particular locations, it also constitutes a radical reformulation of the issues that preoccupied Markopoulos throughout his career, one that gives new meaning to the aspirations of the postwar avant-garde.Less
In his eighty-hour Eniaios, Gregory Markopoulos intensifies both the underlying Romanticism and the montage aesthetics of silent era figures like Abel Gance. He does so by completely rejecting the ordinary networks of cinema, re-envisioning film as a medium capable of reconnecting the viewer to the sacred world of myth. Intended to purge the viewer of media pollution, Eniaios was designed for presentation at a special site (the Temenos) in Arcadia, the mythic birthplace of lyric poetry. In both scale and form, Eniaios is the most ambitious film ever made. Yet in its harmonization of viewing space and image and its emphasis on the mythic resonance of particular locations, it also constitutes a radical reformulation of the issues that preoccupied Markopoulos throughout his career, one that gives new meaning to the aspirations of the postwar avant-garde.
P. Adams Sitney
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- January 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780199337026
- eISBN:
- 9780199370405
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199337026.003.0008
- Subject:
- Literature, Film, Media, and Cultural Studies, Poetry
This chapter looks at how the filmmaker Lawrence Jordan realized his trinity of “time/Moment/change” through rhythms of editing and camera movement into a paradoxical image of “timelessness.” It ...
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This chapter looks at how the filmmaker Lawrence Jordan realized his trinity of “time/Moment/change” through rhythms of editing and camera movement into a paradoxical image of “timelessness.” It reads his “alchemical autobiography,” Sophie’s Place, as a poem of his aesthetic education as an artist, particularly under the tripart guidance of Cornell, the poet Robert Duncan, and the collage artist Jess, tracing this influence into his “H. D. Trilogy.”Less
This chapter looks at how the filmmaker Lawrence Jordan realized his trinity of “time/Moment/change” through rhythms of editing and camera movement into a paradoxical image of “timelessness.” It reads his “alchemical autobiography,” Sophie’s Place, as a poem of his aesthetic education as an artist, particularly under the tripart guidance of Cornell, the poet Robert Duncan, and the collage artist Jess, tracing this influence into his “H. D. Trilogy.”
Rebecca A. Sheehan
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- April 2020
- ISBN:
- 9780190949709
- eISBN:
- 9780190949747
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780190949709.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Film, Media, and Cultural Studies
Can films philosophize rather than simply represent philosophical ideas developed outside the cinematic medium? Taking up this question crucial to the field of film-philosophy, this book argues that ...
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Can films philosophize rather than simply represent philosophical ideas developed outside the cinematic medium? Taking up this question crucial to the field of film-philosophy, this book argues that the films of the American avant-garde indeed “do” philosophy, and it illuminates the ethical and political stakes of their aesthetic interventions. The author traces the avant-garde’s philosophy by developing a history and theory of its investment in dimensional, conceptual, and material in-betweens, clarifying how reflections on the creation and reception of images construct an ethics of perception itself. This entails the avant-garde’s locating of cinema’s—and thought’s—ends or meanings in their means, and their advancement of an image of truth that is made rather than found, that unites with the philosophies of Ludwig Wittgenstein and Ralph Waldo Emerson. Rectifying film-philosophy’s neglect of the American avant-garde, the book demonstrates how, rather than showing their interest in the revelation of authoritative truths, the avant-garde’s interest in the re-encounter and review of the seen and known emerge from an American Transcendentalist tradition that opposes such notions. The author reads the avant-garde’s interest in the contingencies of spectatorial experience as an extension of Pragmatism’s commitment to replacing the authority of a priori knowledge with that of individual experience. She also shows how Emerson’s influence on Friedrich Nietzsche connects the American avant-garde’s philosophies to Deleuze’s time-image, premised largely upon Nietzsche’s “powers of the false.”Less
Can films philosophize rather than simply represent philosophical ideas developed outside the cinematic medium? Taking up this question crucial to the field of film-philosophy, this book argues that the films of the American avant-garde indeed “do” philosophy, and it illuminates the ethical and political stakes of their aesthetic interventions. The author traces the avant-garde’s philosophy by developing a history and theory of its investment in dimensional, conceptual, and material in-betweens, clarifying how reflections on the creation and reception of images construct an ethics of perception itself. This entails the avant-garde’s locating of cinema’s—and thought’s—ends or meanings in their means, and their advancement of an image of truth that is made rather than found, that unites with the philosophies of Ludwig Wittgenstein and Ralph Waldo Emerson. Rectifying film-philosophy’s neglect of the American avant-garde, the book demonstrates how, rather than showing their interest in the revelation of authoritative truths, the avant-garde’s interest in the re-encounter and review of the seen and known emerge from an American Transcendentalist tradition that opposes such notions. The author reads the avant-garde’s interest in the contingencies of spectatorial experience as an extension of Pragmatism’s commitment to replacing the authority of a priori knowledge with that of individual experience. She also shows how Emerson’s influence on Friedrich Nietzsche connects the American avant-garde’s philosophies to Deleuze’s time-image, premised largely upon Nietzsche’s “powers of the false.”