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.
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.
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.”
