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Introduction: Philosophizing Films

Rebecca A. Sheehan

in American Avant-Garde Cinema's Philosophy of the In-Between

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 ... More

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

Contemporary Scottish Cinema

Neil Blain and David Hutchison

in The Media in Scotland

The chapter starts by countering the view that Scottish cinema is under-developed, noting recent diversity, and films which challenge dominant cinematic forms. The chapter proceeds to discuss a form ... More

The chapter starts by countering the view that Scottish cinema is under-developed, noting recent diversity, and films which challenge dominant cinematic forms. The chapter proceeds to discuss a form of Scottish art cinema, and the avant-garde element represented by film-maker Margaret Tait. Critical approaches to Scottish film are discussed, before an extended examination of the significance of Tait's work. Genre hybrids (‘films which playfully rework a variety of genres’) are noted, as are other Scottish cinematic themes, including heritage, and masculinity. European and American influences are discussed. There follows an extended discussion of personal film making and a Scottish art cinema, referencing Tait, Lynne Ramsay, and others, with emphasis on Ramsay's Morvern Callar and other key films. The chapter concludes with observations on the positive potentials of new technology and low budget film making.Less

The Cine-Poetry of Mário Peixoto’s Limite

Maite Conde

in Foundational Films: Early Cinema and Modernity in Brazil

This chapter undertakes a close reading of the Brazilian experimental silent film Limite, made in 1930 by Mário Peixoto. It pays close attention to the context of the film’s production: Peixoto’s ... More

This chapter undertakes a close reading of the Brazilian experimental silent film Limite, made in 1930 by Mário Peixoto. It pays close attention to the context of the film’s production: Peixoto’s contact with the world of cinephilia in Brazil and his links to the European avant-garde. In doing so, it analyzes the film’s style in the light of Germaine Dulac’s emphasis on cinema’s visual rhythms. Rather than providing us with a story or even presenting us with the psychological state of mind among its characters, it shows how Peixoto’s film “thinks” in pictures, movements, and angles, trying to intertwine diverse visual fields by using certain symbolic themes and variations. The chapter this shows how Limite accomplishes what Dulac had demanded in 1927: the “real” filmmaker should “divest cinema of all elements not particular to it, to seek its true essence in the consciousness of movement and visual rhythms.”Less

Alternative Cinemas

Keith Withall

in Studying Early and Silent Cinema

This chapter assesses alternative cinemas. In the 1920s, there were a series of film movements that were motivated by very different interests than mainstream cinema, primarily political. The most ... More

This chapter assesses alternative cinemas. In the 1920s, there were a series of film movements that were motivated by very different interests than mainstream cinema, primarily political. The most important at the time and the one that has had an enduring influence in world cinema became known as Soviet Montage. Because of their influence, there is an extensive selection of Soviet Montage films available. The chapter then considers filmmakers Sergei Eisenstein and Dziga Vertov. It also looks at the avant-garde and the late silents. Meanwhile, documentary film and especially animation crossover with the mainstream cinema. The developments in the 1920s and John Grierson's founding of the British Documentary Film Movement initiates an important trend in documentary film that still influences film and television today. It also feeds into an idea of ‘British realism’ still apparent in British films.Less

Cinematographic Indeterminacy According to Peter Tscherkassky: Coming Attractions

Christa Blümlinger

in Indefinite Visions: Cinema and the Attractions of Uncertainty

Avant-gardes have been interested, ever since the 1920s, in the leftovers – that which is usually kept out of representation because it is considered too blurry, lacking in focus, ‘faulty’. Starting ... More

Avant-gardes have been interested, ever since the 1920s, in the leftovers – that which is usually kept out of representation because it is considered too blurry, lacking in focus, ‘faulty’. Starting from an analysis of Peter Tscherkassky’s Coming Attractions (2010), this essay assesses the value of that which is, in the cinema, deemed too blurry, while also pointing to the import that certain aesthetic theories (from Jean-François Lyotard to Tom Gunning) have granted it. How and why does Tscherkassky, in his use of found footage, seek to reveal the formless as well the photographic code (the black and the white)? In doing so, he draws near to what John Cage called ‘silencing’: not silence, but the withdrawal of some of the sounds attributed to the musical eventLess

The Dance of Abstract Cinema

Nell Andrew

in Moving Modernism: The Urge to Abstraction in Painting, Dance, 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 ... More

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.Less

The End of the World by Other Means

Natania Meeker and Antónia Szabari

in Radical Botany: Plants and Speculative Fiction

The fifth chapter investigates the way in which early avant-garde French cinema takes up the very forms of vegetal sentience and plant-inspired calamity that so terrified Edgar Allan Poe, thereby ... More

The fifth chapter investigates the way in which early avant-garde French cinema takes up the very forms of vegetal sentience and plant-inspired calamity that so terrified Edgar Allan Poe, thereby rewriting the plant once again as an opening onto new worlds. In these films the “inorganic” function of vegetality—as linked to and inspiring new forms of technology and new means of sociability—returns in the visual domain, generating an “electric plant” that retains its utopian dimensions and its power to deprioritize the human. Thus avant-garde vegetal cinema ties the plant once again to a tradition of speculation that extends into the production and creation of new media capable of apprehending and imitating the subtle materiality of vegetal being. The “electric plant” brings to fruition the concept of cinema as a form of pure movement. The French experimental cinema discussed in this chapter reinvents the project of imagining vegetal worlds, this time in cinematic contexts. While filmmakers and theorists Jean Epstein (1897–1953) and Germaine Dulac (1882–1942) turn with excitement toward vegetality, other contemporaneous artists, including Colette (1873–1954), re-inscribe the plant into the domain of ordinary experience and human pathos.Less

Afterlives

David Bordwell

in The Rhapsodes: How 1940s Critics Changed American Film Culture

This chapter traces the heritage of the four critics across the years up to the 1980s. Ferguson, the earliest of the critics considered, was the last to be rediscovered, after celebrity criticism of ... More

This chapter traces the heritage of the four critics across the years up to the 1980s. Ferguson, the earliest of the critics considered, was the last to be rediscovered, after celebrity criticism of the Kael-Sarris variety took over film reviewing. Agee’s collection, AGEE ON FILM, was the first major collection of a critic’s writing and, because he won the Pulitzer prize posthumously for A DEATH IN THE FAMILY, the anthology garnered enormous praise. It led other critics to collect their reviews as well. Manny Farber created his own collection, strategically selecting items to create a certain persona for himself—one based on his more arcane 1960s writings for film and art journals. Parker Tyler wrote prolifically about non-Hollywood film (chiefly foreign cinema and avant-garde film) and returned only to Hollywood movies to point out that the sexual subtexts he had revealed had come to the surface, rather blatantly. The same period revealed a growing awareness that these critics had been pioneers in arts journalism, and that the new trends owed a great deal to them.Less

“Here Are Materials Strewn Along the Ground”: The Ethical Aesthetics of the Ordinary

Rebecca A. Sheehan

in American Avant-Garde Cinema's Philosophy of the In-Between

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 ... More

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

Kelly Reichardt as Auteur

E. Dawn Hall

in ReFocus: The Films of Kelly Reichardt

Referencing Laura Mulvey, Andre Bazin and Andrew Sarris, this chapter discusses auteur characteristics and explores how Kelly Reichardt is contributing to a definition of feminist avant-garde cinema ... More

Referencing Laura Mulvey, Andre Bazin and Andrew Sarris, this chapter discusses auteur characteristics and explores how Kelly Reichardt is contributing to a definition of feminist avant-garde cinema through her production methods, content, and form. Reichardt offers a 21st century alternative to traditional mainstream cinematic ideologies and her filming style politicizes her cinematic form. While discussing differences between Hollywood and independent filmmaking practices, this chapter also posits alternatives to mainstream cinematic pleasure.Less

A Plan with the Force of a Battleship

Alexander Kluge

Richard Langston (ed.)

in Difference and Orientation: An Alexander Kluge Reader

This chapter explores Alexander Kluge's retrospective evaluation of Soviet avant-garde cinema practices. Kluge recounts Sergei Eisenstein's plan in 1927 to film Capital, “based on the scenario by ... More

This chapter explores Alexander Kluge's retrospective evaluation of Soviet avant-garde cinema practices. Kluge recounts Sergei Eisenstein's plan in 1927 to film Capital, “based on the scenario by Karl Marx.” During the following two years, Eisenstein pursues his plan, which no one is willing to finance. Kluge sees Eisenstein's grand plan to film Capital as a kind of imaginary quarry. One can find fragments there, but one may also discover that there is nothing to be found. Dealing in a respectful way with the plans of a great master like Eisenstein is similar to excavating an ancient site; one discovers more about oneself than actual shards and treasures. Kluge suggests that “today we experience the proliferation of existent conditions. Objective reality has outstripped us, but we also have reason to fear the mass of subjectivity that eludes our consciousness.” In 2008, it is dangerous to confront this reality with the method and the expectations of Marx: one becomes discouraged. Kluge then provides a definition of images.Less

A Celibate Founder

Roberto Curti and Roberto Curti

in Blood and Black Lace

This chapter looks at the popularity of Mario Bava, which was already a prestigious name in the context of the genre cinema in Italy and abroad. It talks about Bava that was mentioned on the cover of ... More

This chapter looks at the popularity of Mario Bava, which was already a prestigious name in the context of the genre cinema in Italy and abroad. It talks about Bava that was mentioned on the cover of the critical anthology Film 1964 that was curated by Vittorio Spinazzola and linked by the significant subtitle of “mass movies and avant-garde cinema.” It also points out why the film Blood and Black Lace (6 donne per l'assassino) was not a commercial success in Italy despite the critics' interest on Bava and the commercial potential of the story. The chapter discusses critics that were content to concede Blood and Black Lace's stylistic qualities and its exquisite tricks of the trade. It looks at the newspaper La Stampa's review about how the film dispenses thrills and emotions by way of the director's excellent technique than with the shaky gimmicks of a clumsy script.Less