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.
Neil Blain and David Hutchison
- Published in print:
- 2008
- Published Online:
- September 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780748627998
- eISBN:
- 9780748671205
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748627998.003.0010
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Media Studies
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 ...
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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 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.
Maite Conde
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- May 2019
- ISBN:
- 9780520290983
- eISBN:
- 9780520964884
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of California Press
- DOI:
- 10.1525/california/9780520290983.003.0010
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
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 ...
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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
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.”
Christa Blümlinger
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- May 2018
- ISBN:
- 9781474407120
- eISBN:
- 9781474434874
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474407120.003.0010
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
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 ...
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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
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 event
Nell Andrew
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- April 2020
- ISBN:
- 9780190057275
- eISBN:
- 9780190057312
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780190057275.003.0006
- Subject:
- Music, Dance
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 ...
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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
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.
Tami Williams
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- April 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780252038471
- eISBN:
- 9780252096365
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Illinois Press
- DOI:
- 10.5406/illinois/9780252038471.001.0001
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
Best known for directing the Impressionist classic The Smiling Madame Beudet and the first Surrealist film The Seashell and the Clergyman, Germaine Dulac—feminist and pioneer of 1920s French ...
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Best known for directing the Impressionist classic The Smiling Madame Beudet and the first Surrealist film The Seashell and the Clergyman, Germaine Dulac—feminist and pioneer of 1920s French avant-garde cinema—made close to thirty fiction films as well as numerous documentaries and newsreels. Through her filmmaking, writing, and cine-club activism, Dulac's passionate defense of the cinema as a lyrical art and social practice had a major influence on twentieth-century film history and theory. This book—making unprecedented use of the filmmaker's personal papers, production files, and archival film prints—is the first full-length historical study and critical biography of Dulac. The book's analysis explores the artistic and sociopolitical currents that shaped Dulac's approach to cinema while interrogating the ground-breaking techniques and strategies she used to critique conservative notions of gender and sexuality. Moving beyond the director's work of the 1920s, the book examines Dulac's largely ignored 1930s documentaries and newsreels establishing clear links with the more experimental Impressionist and abstract works of her early period. This vivid portrait will be of interest to general readers, as well as to scholars of cinema and visual culture, performance, French history, women's studies, queer cinema, in addition to studies of narrative avant-garde, experimental, and documentary film history and theory.Less
Best known for directing the Impressionist classic The Smiling Madame Beudet and the first Surrealist film The Seashell and the Clergyman, Germaine Dulac—feminist and pioneer of 1920s French avant-garde cinema—made close to thirty fiction films as well as numerous documentaries and newsreels. Through her filmmaking, writing, and cine-club activism, Dulac's passionate defense of the cinema as a lyrical art and social practice had a major influence on twentieth-century film history and theory. This book—making unprecedented use of the filmmaker's personal papers, production files, and archival film prints—is the first full-length historical study and critical biography of Dulac. The book's analysis explores the artistic and sociopolitical currents that shaped Dulac's approach to cinema while interrogating the ground-breaking techniques and strategies she used to critique conservative notions of gender and sexuality. Moving beyond the director's work of the 1920s, the book examines Dulac's largely ignored 1930s documentaries and newsreels establishing clear links with the more experimental Impressionist and abstract works of her early period. This vivid portrait will be of interest to general readers, as well as to scholars of cinema and visual culture, performance, French history, women's studies, queer cinema, in addition to studies of narrative avant-garde, experimental, and documentary film history and theory.
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.”
David Bordwell
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- September 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780226352176
- eISBN:
- 9780226352343
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226352343.003.0008
- Subject:
- Literature, Film, Media, and Cultural Studies
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 ...
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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
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.
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.
Nell Andrew
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- April 2020
- ISBN:
- 9780190057275
- eISBN:
- 9780190057312
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780190057275.001.0001
- Subject:
- Music, Dance
This book reenacts the simultaneous eruption of three spectacular revolutions—the development of pictorial abstraction, the first modern dance, and the birth of cinema—which together changed the ...
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This book reenacts the simultaneous eruption of three spectacular revolutions—the development of pictorial abstraction, the first modern dance, and the birth of cinema—which together changed the artistic landscape of early twentieth-century Europe and the future of modern art. Rather than seeking dancing pictures or pictures of dancing, however, this study follows the chronology of the historical avant-garde to show how dance and pictures were engaged in a kindred exploration of the limits of art and perception that required the process of abstraction. Recovering the performances, methods, and circles of aesthetic influence of avant-garde dance pioneers and experimental filmmakers from the turn of the century to the interwar period, this book challenges modernism’s medium-specific frameworks by demonstrating the significant role played by the arts of motion in the historical avant-garde’s development of abstraction: from the turn-of-the-century dancer Loïe Fuller, who awakened in symbolist artists the possibility of prolonged vision; to cubo-futurist and neosymbolist artists who reached pure abstraction in tandem with the radical dance theory of Valentine de Saint-Point; to Sophie Taeuber’s hybrid Dadaism between art and dance; to Akarova, a prolific choreographer whose dancing Belgian constructivist pioneers called “music architecture”; and finally to the dancing images of early cinematic abstraction from the Lumière brothers to Germaine Dulac. Each chapter reveals the emergence of abstractionas an apparatus of creation, perception, and reception deployed across artistic media toward shared modernist goals. The author argues that abstraction can be worked like a muscle, a medium through which habits of reception and perception are broken and art’s viewers are engaged by the kinesthetic sensation to move and be moved.Less
This book reenacts the simultaneous eruption of three spectacular revolutions—the development of pictorial abstraction, the first modern dance, and the birth of cinema—which together changed the artistic landscape of early twentieth-century Europe and the future of modern art. Rather than seeking dancing pictures or pictures of dancing, however, this study follows the chronology of the historical avant-garde to show how dance and pictures were engaged in a kindred exploration of the limits of art and perception that required the process of abstraction. Recovering the performances, methods, and circles of aesthetic influence of avant-garde dance pioneers and experimental filmmakers from the turn of the century to the interwar period, this book challenges modernism’s medium-specific frameworks by demonstrating the significant role played by the arts of motion in the historical avant-garde’s development of abstraction: from the turn-of-the-century dancer Loïe Fuller, who awakened in symbolist artists the possibility of prolonged vision; to cubo-futurist and neosymbolist artists who reached pure abstraction in tandem with the radical dance theory of Valentine de Saint-Point; to Sophie Taeuber’s hybrid Dadaism between art and dance; to Akarova, a prolific choreographer whose dancing Belgian constructivist pioneers called “music architecture”; and finally to the dancing images of early cinematic abstraction from the Lumière brothers to Germaine Dulac. Each chapter reveals the emergence of abstractionas an apparatus of creation, perception, and reception deployed across artistic media toward shared modernist goals. The author argues that abstraction can be worked like a muscle, a medium through which habits of reception and perception are broken and art’s viewers are engaged by the kinesthetic sensation to move and be moved.
E. Dawn Hall
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- September 2018
- ISBN:
- 9781474411127
- eISBN:
- 9781474444620
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474411127.003.0001
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
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 ...
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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
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.
Alexander Kluge
Richard Langston (ed.)
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- May 2020
- ISBN:
- 9781501739200
- eISBN:
- 9781501739224
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Cornell University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7591/cornell/9781501739200.003.0013
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Media Studies
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 ...
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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
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.
Gabriel Menotti and Virginia Crisp (eds)
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- March 2020
- ISBN:
- 9780190934118
- eISBN:
- 9780190934156
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780190934118.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Film, Media, and Cultural Studies
This volume makes an intervention in the fields of film studies and visual culture by examining projection as a pivotal element in the continuing technological becoming of media systems. The chapters ...
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This volume makes an intervention in the fields of film studies and visual culture by examining projection as a pivotal element in the continuing technological becoming of media systems. The chapters come together to paint a picture of projection that incorporates a range of practices across time and space. From studies of travelling projectionists in early twentieth-century Scotland and modern-day Uruguay to considerations of the (almost) lost mediums of the slide-tape and the magic lantern, the authors invite us to consider the varied nature of the technologies, apparatuses, practices, and histories of projection in a holistic manner. In doing so, the volume departs from the psychological metaphors of projection often employed by apparatus theory, instead emphasizing the performative character of the moving image and the labour of the various actors involved in the utterance of such texts.Less
This volume makes an intervention in the fields of film studies and visual culture by examining projection as a pivotal element in the continuing technological becoming of media systems. The chapters come together to paint a picture of projection that incorporates a range of practices across time and space. From studies of travelling projectionists in early twentieth-century Scotland and modern-day Uruguay to considerations of the (almost) lost mediums of the slide-tape and the magic lantern, the authors invite us to consider the varied nature of the technologies, apparatuses, practices, and histories of projection in a holistic manner. In doing so, the volume departs from the psychological metaphors of projection often employed by apparatus theory, instead emphasizing the performative character of the moving image and the labour of the various actors involved in the utterance of such texts.
