Frank Verano
My PhD research project was entitled 'D.A. Pennebaker and the Politics and Aesthetics of Mature-Period Direct Cinema.' I successfully defended my thesis in January 2016.
In my thesis, I offer a reappraisal of direct cinema through a study of documentarian D.A. Pennebaker’s mature-period direct cinema. This is an unexamined period in Pennebaker’s career that offers new perspectives on an often-maligned form of documentary. The period under study ranges from 1968 to 1970 and encompasses a range of films, commercials, abandoned projects and personal works. I focus on three films: Eat the Document, Sweet Toronto and One P.M. By shifting the critical focus away from the early and classic period of direct cinema, as well as its ‘canonical’ films, I ask: How does direct cinema engage with the world in its later stages? What can be understood about direct cinema by examining works that do not circulate in ‘the canon,’ and how does this analysis change our perception of it?
Two further questions guide my study of Pennebaker: What are the aesthetic properties and ideological preoccupations that characterise Pennebaker’s mature period? What is the political address of this set of films and how does that reposition the politics of direct cinema as a whole? Methodologically, I employ a close textual analysis of the films and an historical analysis of the period, conduct personal interviews with Pennebaker, and engage with intellectual debates within documentary studies to answer these questions. My study builds upon recent trends in direct cinema scholarship, which have opened up new critical horizons by returning the critical focus to the film texts themselves and the cultural and social contexts in which they were produced.
I contribute knowledge to documentary studies by focusing critical attention on a neglected period in a key documentarian’s career. Additionally, I perform a textual analysis of the period’s films that focuses on the materiality of sync sound – the crucial, but largely neglected, aesthetic characteristic of direct cinema – as a means of investigating my ideological and political line of questioning. I also develop two key concepts: the performative documentary, which builds upon existing definitions by Waugh ([1990] 2011), Nichols (1994) and Bruzzi (2006; 2013) and furthers the concept through an application of Brecht’s alienation effect; and ‘kinetic progressions,’ which, I argue, is Pennebaker’s cinematic process of signification that exploits classic direct cinema’s emphasis on present-ness and found symbolism to further formally evolve the language of direct cinema in a way that fulfills its potentiality for political discourse.
Supervisors: Dr Thomas Austin and Prof Ben Highmore
In my thesis, I offer a reappraisal of direct cinema through a study of documentarian D.A. Pennebaker’s mature-period direct cinema. This is an unexamined period in Pennebaker’s career that offers new perspectives on an often-maligned form of documentary. The period under study ranges from 1968 to 1970 and encompasses a range of films, commercials, abandoned projects and personal works. I focus on three films: Eat the Document, Sweet Toronto and One P.M. By shifting the critical focus away from the early and classic period of direct cinema, as well as its ‘canonical’ films, I ask: How does direct cinema engage with the world in its later stages? What can be understood about direct cinema by examining works that do not circulate in ‘the canon,’ and how does this analysis change our perception of it?
Two further questions guide my study of Pennebaker: What are the aesthetic properties and ideological preoccupations that characterise Pennebaker’s mature period? What is the political address of this set of films and how does that reposition the politics of direct cinema as a whole? Methodologically, I employ a close textual analysis of the films and an historical analysis of the period, conduct personal interviews with Pennebaker, and engage with intellectual debates within documentary studies to answer these questions. My study builds upon recent trends in direct cinema scholarship, which have opened up new critical horizons by returning the critical focus to the film texts themselves and the cultural and social contexts in which they were produced.
I contribute knowledge to documentary studies by focusing critical attention on a neglected period in a key documentarian’s career. Additionally, I perform a textual analysis of the period’s films that focuses on the materiality of sync sound – the crucial, but largely neglected, aesthetic characteristic of direct cinema – as a means of investigating my ideological and political line of questioning. I also develop two key concepts: the performative documentary, which builds upon existing definitions by Waugh ([1990] 2011), Nichols (1994) and Bruzzi (2006; 2013) and furthers the concept through an application of Brecht’s alienation effect; and ‘kinetic progressions,’ which, I argue, is Pennebaker’s cinematic process of signification that exploits classic direct cinema’s emphasis on present-ness and found symbolism to further formally evolve the language of direct cinema in a way that fulfills its potentiality for political discourse.
Supervisors: Dr Thomas Austin and Prof Ben Highmore
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Journal Articles by Frank Verano
(1953–1957), the Drew Associates oddity David (1961), as well as Wild 90 (1968), Eat the Document (1972) and 1 P.M. (1972) – collaborations with Norman Mailer, Bob Dylan and Jean-Luc Godard, respectively. He addresses the meaning of cinéma vérité, Godard’s ‘reckless’ approach to film-making, and the sadness behind his second, and ultimately abandoned, collaboration with Dylan.
Throughout his extensive body of comics writing, Grant Morrison has challenged the accepted divisive framework that structures the referent-signifier classifications. In books such as The Invisibles, The Filth, and Marvel Boy, he excels at generating “real unrealities” and blurring lines that designate ontological categories. In Animal Man, the title character grows aware of his existence as a fictitious image, crosses into the “real world” (which is the referent to his signifier) and converses with Grant Morrison himself. Flex Mentallo claims that comic book characters are survivors of a higher dimension that collapsed themselves into a fictional reality to save their universe from doom. Certainly, Morrison’s intriguing claims that fictional characters are “more real” than “real” people exemplify the image’s triumph over reality.
What is the relationship of the image to its referent? What are the implications of the image becoming more real than reality (hyper real)? This study (which also includes Kill Your Boyfriend, Seaguy, and Doom Patrol) casts the work of Grant Morrison under the gloss and sheen of such leading visual culture theorist as Walter Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire, and Guy Bebord, and, in the process, exposes the invisible spectacle that encircles the image."
From the economy of Golden Age stories (as well as the cheapness and easy disposability of the text itself) to the present emphasis on the trade paperback (“writing for the trade”), how have production standards created a certain kind of consumer? What issues do “decompression” raise for the visual consumer of the comics page? How do creators like Frank Miller, Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons (and others) exploit the structures of production to allow for innovative ways of visually consuming the comics page in works like Ronin and Watchmen?
Through a study of comic books pulled from the 1930s to the present, this paper will examine the structures that underlie comics innovation.
Book Chapters by Frank Verano
Conference Presentations by Frank Verano
As D.A. Pennebaker recounts it, the pairing of Jean-Luc Godard and himself, the cynical sidekick, as watchmen on the walls of revolution has a certain quirky appeal, but their collaboration in the waning months of 1968 signified much more than a cultural curiosity. “It kind of caught an urgency that was going on in this country in terms of filmmaking,” Pennebaker would reflect, decades later (Adams, 2011). With One P.M. (Pennebaker, 1972), Jean-Luc Godard and D.A. Pennebaker develop a documentary practice to respond to a society in crisis in the late 1960s; in so doing, they expose a crisis of form in prevailing modes of documentary representation, which, most immediately, implicated Pennebaker’s own observational practice as well as that of his fellow practitioners of American cinéma vérité, or direct cinema.
One P.M. is a documentary project initiated by Godard after he foresaw a 1968 American revolution and completed by Pennebaker when Godard abandoned it after no revolution came to pass. One P.M.’s self-reflexive (destructive?) structure interlaces sequences of political urgency (starring Tom Hayden, Eldridge Cleaver and the Jefferson Airplane) with fictionalised re/deconstructions that challenge and complicate the moving image’s representation of race, class and gender, while building to a destructive climax. Throughout the film, artificiality is foregrounded and the (re)presentation of reality is made unnatural. This paper will consider the film’s political address, and pay particular attention to the cynical voice of Pennebaker, which particularly manifests itself in the film’s double-function as a critique of Godard’s agenda and methods.
Papers by Frank Verano
(1953–1957), the Drew Associates oddity David (1961), as well as Wild 90 (1968), Eat the Document (1972) and 1 P.M. (1972) – collaborations with Norman Mailer, Bob Dylan and Jean-Luc Godard, respectively. He addresses the meaning of cinéma vérité, Godard’s ‘reckless’ approach to film-making, and the sadness behind his second, and ultimately abandoned, collaboration with Dylan.
Throughout his extensive body of comics writing, Grant Morrison has challenged the accepted divisive framework that structures the referent-signifier classifications. In books such as The Invisibles, The Filth, and Marvel Boy, he excels at generating “real unrealities” and blurring lines that designate ontological categories. In Animal Man, the title character grows aware of his existence as a fictitious image, crosses into the “real world” (which is the referent to his signifier) and converses with Grant Morrison himself. Flex Mentallo claims that comic book characters are survivors of a higher dimension that collapsed themselves into a fictional reality to save their universe from doom. Certainly, Morrison’s intriguing claims that fictional characters are “more real” than “real” people exemplify the image’s triumph over reality.
What is the relationship of the image to its referent? What are the implications of the image becoming more real than reality (hyper real)? This study (which also includes Kill Your Boyfriend, Seaguy, and Doom Patrol) casts the work of Grant Morrison under the gloss and sheen of such leading visual culture theorist as Walter Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire, and Guy Bebord, and, in the process, exposes the invisible spectacle that encircles the image."
From the economy of Golden Age stories (as well as the cheapness and easy disposability of the text itself) to the present emphasis on the trade paperback (“writing for the trade”), how have production standards created a certain kind of consumer? What issues do “decompression” raise for the visual consumer of the comics page? How do creators like Frank Miller, Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons (and others) exploit the structures of production to allow for innovative ways of visually consuming the comics page in works like Ronin and Watchmen?
Through a study of comic books pulled from the 1930s to the present, this paper will examine the structures that underlie comics innovation.
As D.A. Pennebaker recounts it, the pairing of Jean-Luc Godard and himself, the cynical sidekick, as watchmen on the walls of revolution has a certain quirky appeal, but their collaboration in the waning months of 1968 signified much more than a cultural curiosity. “It kind of caught an urgency that was going on in this country in terms of filmmaking,” Pennebaker would reflect, decades later (Adams, 2011). With One P.M. (Pennebaker, 1972), Jean-Luc Godard and D.A. Pennebaker develop a documentary practice to respond to a society in crisis in the late 1960s; in so doing, they expose a crisis of form in prevailing modes of documentary representation, which, most immediately, implicated Pennebaker’s own observational practice as well as that of his fellow practitioners of American cinéma vérité, or direct cinema.
One P.M. is a documentary project initiated by Godard after he foresaw a 1968 American revolution and completed by Pennebaker when Godard abandoned it after no revolution came to pass. One P.M.’s self-reflexive (destructive?) structure interlaces sequences of political urgency (starring Tom Hayden, Eldridge Cleaver and the Jefferson Airplane) with fictionalised re/deconstructions that challenge and complicate the moving image’s representation of race, class and gender, while building to a destructive climax. Throughout the film, artificiality is foregrounded and the (re)presentation of reality is made unnatural. This paper will consider the film’s political address, and pay particular attention to the cynical voice of Pennebaker, which particularly manifests itself in the film’s double-function as a critique of Godard’s agenda and methods.