Avant-Garde Cinema

Informal communities of Russian artists and intellectuals during the late Soviet years practiced a “politics of indistinction.” They claimed to be uninterested in anything political and differentiated themselves from ordinary “Soviet citizens,” whether supporters of or dissenters from the system. However, their apolitical lifestyles and pursuits contributed greatly to creating the conditions for making the collapse of the Soviet state imminent. Close examination of one such group, the Necrorealists, raises a set of questions that are central for an understanding of momentous and unexpected social transformations, and of the concept of "politics" more broadly

Keywords
Tomislav Gotovac,experimental cinema,editing.conceptual art,images,genre
Abstract
Tomislav/Tom Gotovac (Antonio Lauer), one of the leading Croatian conceptual and multimedia artists, successfully recycles visual images in his recent films, as demonstrated in the best works of his more recent opus. By using stills and inserts from his own films and from films important for him or his art (e.g. films by George Stevens, Lazar Stojanovic’, the Vasiliev brothers), but also from famous paintings (by Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo) and popular songs, Gotovac’s films (Tomislav Gotovac, Dead Man Walking, Proroci) transcend the borders of cinema as much as his performances and exhibitions transcend borders of every medium of artistic creation. However, certain general questions are raised by such artistic procedure: broadly speaking, today’s conceptual art is institutionalized in some sort of artistic ‘genre’ and Gotovac/Lauer seems to be a true master of that genre.

In the context of the Japanese Long 68, this essay explores the work of experimental filmmaker Shuji Terayama in relation to the tragicomic possibilities of visual humor and cinematic gags. Juxtaposing Ryan Holmberg’s exploration of Japanese nansensu with other historical, cultural and political theories, the article argues that visual gags and comedic performativity (going back to silent cinema and the avantgarde) allowed Terayama to both embrace and critique the revolutionary ideals of the Japanese New Left in the late 60s and early 70s.

Taking as a point of departure the 1970s’ concept of the ‘dispositif’, this article seeks to redefine it in the context of experimental cinematic practices which reject the usual tools of filmmaking, or, more precisely, replace them by ‘retrograde’ technical means (such as handmade techniques, camera-less films, etc.). Instead of adhering to the classical notion of dispositif, which privileges the screening situation, I rather suggest that we envisage a dispositif of production, involving the spatial relationship between the body of the artist, the ‘pro-filmic’ event and his/her material at the very moment of production, and that informs the practices of cinematic retrograde technicity.

Auteur music video director Floria Sigismondi has a reputation for creating beautifully macabre imagery that has been described as surreal and uncanny. Less obvious is the way in which she uses animation and gesture to estrange the movement of performing bodies. While pixilation and stop motion animation are used together to invert the agency of humans and objects, Sigismondi’s use of gesture extends this manipulation of agency beyond technical processes. This dialectic of cinematic agency is discussed through an examination of three music videos directed by Sigismondi: End of the World(2004) for The Cure, Montauk Fling (2013) for Lawrence Rothman and The Stars (Are Out Tonight) (2013) for David Bowie. Considering these videos in relation to puppet animation, live-action film and the cultural and historical migration of gesture, the author argues that Sigismondi puppetises humans and animates gesture as a means of transgression.

The final, definitive version of this paper has been published in  Animation: an Interdisciplinary Journal; 10(2), July 2015, by SAGE Publications Ltd, All rights reserved. Copyright Lisa Perrott
Pages 119-140. doi:10.1177/1746847715593697

This paper examines the diva as a site of conflict, a film image that represents a rupture in the status quo and that questions the boundaries of socially constructed identities. Taking as its inspiration film and art historian Angela Dalle Vacche’s interpretation of the modern, ‘anti-conformist’ Italian film diva (Dalle Vacche, 2008) rather than a model of classical Hollywood stardom and the diva as spectacle, the essay argues that the film diva can be said to represent the crisis and ambiguity at the heart of a global social modernisation. It also discusses various ways in which affect – the tension generated by the central character’s indeterminate identity and pathos – can be presented visually.
Matsumoto Toshio’s 1969 angura film Bara no soretsu, or Funeral Parade of Roses, presents Shinnosuke Ikehata, better known as Peter (ピーター Pītā) in the role of Eddie, a transvestite who performs as a drag queen in a notorious Shinjuku gay bar named ‘Genet’. Matsumoto’s film is a fusion of experimental avant-garde self-reflexivity and psychological drama that deliberately aims to produce a defamiliarising portrait of 1960s youth culture in Japan. Drawing on Matsumoto’s art historical writing and Anton Giulio Bragaglia’s 1911 manifesto on dynamism in the photographic image, the essay asks whether the subversive metamorphosis enacted in Funeral Parade of Roses can be understood better via recourse to aesthetic theories on affective or so-called indeterminate images.
After analysing the dynamic force of Eddie’s transformation against the upheaval of 1960s Japan, and Matsumoto’s attempts to ‘revitalise’ the production of the image in avant-garde filmmaking, the paper will conclude by summarising the subversive potential that the cinematic image of the diva presents for reinvention.

This exegesis contextualises my feature-length film The Sultan and the Kings, a studio-based project produced for the Doctorate of Visual Arts.
As a Kurdish émigré and filmmaker who left Iran in 1997, lived in Turkey for a couple of years, then emigrated to Australia in 2000, I studied film and also continued the filmmaking practice that I had begun in Iran in 1988.
The exegesis examines the shortage of literature about Kurdish films, the misrepresentation of Kurdish filmmaking, the emergence of Kurdish cinema and the obstacles faced by it, as well as the emergence of Kurdish cinematic styles.
By considering how my film relates to Kurdish cinema overall, both what I call the “cinema under oppression” and the “cinema of diaspora”, this exegesis examines the development of a form of storytelling that I term digital docu-fiction, which blends elements of documentary, fiction and digital film manipulation. Through this form of practice, Kurdish filmmakers have been able to take control of the whole process of filmmaking, from production to exhibition.
The exegesis discusses this form of storytelling with reference to the development of my own practice and aesthetic, using my short film A Woman with a Digital Camera as an example of digital docu-fiction.
In particular, I discuss my major studio work, The Sultan and The Kings, a contemporary version of hybrid Kurdish film in diaspora, which I argue is independent of political and economic interference.

From Amazon: a book that the conscientious film scholar cannot afford to be without. . . . This volume signals the beginning of a new era in the discussion of the early American avant-garde. Editor has compiled in Lovers of Cinema a ground-breaking group of articles on this neglected film period. With one exception, all are original to this volume, and many are the first to treat comprehensively such early filmmakers as Mary Ellen Bute, Theodore Huff, and Douglass Crockwell. Also included in the book is a listing of all American avant-garde films produced in the years before World War II as well as a bibliography of the most relevant criticism, literature, and news accounts.

Resumen. El siguiente artículo ofrece un itinerario crítico que toma en cuenta la diversidad de operaciones dirigidas a la deconstrucción del cine de Hollywood a partir del remontaje y tratamiento transformativo de sus películas. El objetivo prioritario persigue razonar cómo y por qué, con la apropiación y desplazamiento semántico del patrimonio artístico tipificado por una industria cultural corporativista y hegemónica, el ejercicio del cine de metraje encontrado se erige en una práctica artística de segundo grado extraordinariamente metacrítica y autorreferencial con la que reflexionar sobre las dinámicas del cine de Hollywood habitando sus mismas estructuras de significación.

This essay examines the innovative film and theatrical spaces proposed and designed in the 1920s and 1930s by the Austrian-American architect and stage designer Frederick Kiesler, including the Optophon and the Film Arts Guild Cinema. Within a context in which both theatrical designers and science fiction authors postulated increasingly immersive entertainment
environments, Kiesler’s designs brought to the fore complex interfaces between the human body, sensory experience, and modern entertainment technologies for the architectural interior. Kiesler’s ideas, along with those of his contemporaries, predicted the virtual reality spaces of today.

Este trabajo analiza la relación de cine y mujer a partir de la obra fílmica de Carolee Schneemann, principalmente de su obra autobiográfica Fuses (1964-1966). Desde ella, se plantea el papel de la artista como productora, directora y protagonista principal de todas sus obras. Reflexionamos así sobre el rol del creador-director como actor que derivaría en la consecución de una obra cinematográfica de tintes necesariamente autobiográficos. Asumiendo la visión vanguardista del cine como diario personal/Entendido el cine como diario personal, Schneemann va a explorar en su obra diferentes aspectos de la identidad y la sexualidad de la mujer en un cine artístico, alternativo y de tendencia política feminista. Entendido/Asumido su cine como elemento plástico, la artista explorará de forma paralela la experimentación matérica y física a través de los cuerpos filmados así como de la propia materialidad de la película, excluyendo toda posibilidad narrativa, dramática e ilusoria de proyección del espectador en el espacio cinematográfico y el espacio privado del creador.

Lucifer Rising can be understood as the culmination of Kenneth Anger’s Magick Lantern Cycle. The power of this film, in part, rests on the way in which Anger alludes to a range of esoteric myths and Gods, without contextualising them in the way a more traditional film would do. This article sets out to reveal the various allusions, and in turn elucidate Anger’s unique approach to filmmaking.

This article argues that the computerization of audiovisual culture has led to a ‘Cinemas of Transactions’. Asserting that computer generated image forms now function as a single currency across multiple audiovisual economies, this article posits a new understanding of digital attractions as constituting a ‘cinemas of transactions’. Neither a singular, unitary ‘cinema’ nor a singular ‘transaction’, the cinemas of transactions constitutes a complex and multiply interrelated system of textual, technological, aesthetic and economic developments whereby computer generated attractions and promotional practices span many media and textual forms. Most importantly however, the cinemas of transactions does not represent a radical break from past configurations of cinematic and audiovisually promotional history, rather, (as the name suggests) it represents the continuation of a relationship initiated at the inception of cinematic history.

Sergei Eisenstein’s work on "The Great Fergana Canal" in 1939 and his subsequent wartime evacuation to Kazakhstan gave him the opportunity to reflect on Stalin’s famous definition of proletarian culture as ‘national in form, socialist in content’. The modernist cult of difficult forms endured a radical reformulation through the 1930s. The insistence on clarity and accessibility, fuelled by the emergence of the Socialist Realist style, made aesthetic intricacy unacceptable and dramatically reshaped acceptable practices of perception and expression. But the ‘strangeness’ of the Orient allowed the modernist valorisation of defamiliarized forms to continue its existence in new ways. The ‘national in form, socialist in content’ formula provided a context in which formal strangeness could re-emerge as a sanctioned entity. Formal experimentation was possible only in the national context, and only if singular socialist content predominated. As such, national form was the last sanctuary of modernist strangeness. By utilising this formula, the late modernist Eisenstein concerned himself with creating national building blocks for the socialist edifice, which was, in turn, intended to evolve into a supranational construct.

It is well known that issues of playfulness, form and philosophy represent central concerns - even obsessions - within the oeuvre of Jean-Luc Godard. However, what remains to be fully appreciated in Godard’s later work is the extremely dense and engaging way in which these questions interconnect within specific moments of text. Based on a general desire to further critical understanding of Godard’s collaborations with Anne-Marie Miéville, this article aims to open up new approaches to their 1975 work Numéro deux via the notion of formal play. To do this, the article begins with a reading of the wordplay that opens Numéro deux; analysis is then conducted on the film’s playful treatment of the filmic frame, which is variously bordered, transgressed and made mobile. This close reading is extended by reference to theoretical work on the filmic screen as frame/window by André Bazin, Jean Mitry and Jacques Aumont. The final section of the article goes on to argue that the ‘ludo-formal’ aspects of Numéro deux - a potentially crucial point of reference for much of Godard’s late work - raise an extremely rich set of philosophical ideas about what it is to be human in the spatial universe.

In 1958, Hanada Kiyoteru pointed to the virtues of the ‘semidocumentary’ format. By the 1960s, highly political films,
especially those centered on human rights, abandoned
Griersonian documentary and instead used highly poetic and
allegorical forms. Hanada claimed that postwar viewers can only
feel fuman – dissatisfaction – with documentary objectivity;
indeed, the era produced a number of filmmakers attempting a
more subjective iteration of the documentary format, or a more
documentarian approach to a standard fiction film. This paper
analyzes two such ‘semi-documentaries’ that serve as political
allegories: Kuroki Kazuo’s Silence Has No Wings (1966) and
Imamura Shohei’s Insect Woman (1963). Interestingly, both films
use insects – a beetle in Imamura’s film and a butterfly in Kuroki’s
– to allegorize the contemporary landscape of postwar Japan.
Although both appear fiction films to contemporary audiences,
these two films were ‘semidocumentaries’ according to the
zeitgeist of the 1960s. By analyzing the form and content of both
films, this paper describes a documentary format which, while
remaining deeply committed to politics and issues of human
rights, still retains the artfulness inherent in the filmmaking
process. Such films are undidactic works of leftist inspiration,
capable of striking deeply affecting notes, while defined by and
desirous of transformation.

The article presents visualization analysis of the films The Eleventh Year (1928) and Man with a Movie Camera (1929) by the famous Russian filmmaker Dziga Vertov. One of the goals of the project is to show how various dimensions of films can be explored using special visualization techniques inspired by media and new media art, as well as the basic principle of cinema itself - editing (i.e., selecting and arranging together media elements).

In some cases, we use digital image processing software to measure visual properties of every film frame, and then plot these measurements along with the selected frames. (For example, this approach allows us to visualize the amounts of movement in every shot in a film.)

In other cases, we don’t measure or count anything. Instead, we arrange the sampled frames from a film in a single high-resolution visualizations in particular layouts. (For example, we can represent a feature film as a grid of frames - one frame for every shot.)

This use of visualization without measurements, counting, or adding annotations is the crucial aspect of my lab’s approach for working with media collections. We hope that it can add to other approaches already used in quantitative film studies and digital humanities.

L’évolution de la littérature et des arts est communément envisagée comme une succession de ruptures, dont chacune définit une école ou un mouvement dit d’avant-garde. Mais il serait temps de s’interroger sur la face cachée de ce récit : celle des continuités et des retours, de la tradition et des arrière-gardes qui s’inscrivent dans les marges ou même à contre-courant de la dynamique générale.
Il s’agit de transformer en profondeur notre perception de l’évolution littéraire et artistique et d’inventer une nouvelle manière d’écrire l’histoire. Cet ouvrage montre l’intérêt d’une diversité des approches pour étudier un objet aussi ambigu. Face cachée de la modernité, l’arrière-garde pourrait bien aussi en être la clé, apte à ouvrir des perspectives nouvelles et faire surgir des aspects inattendus. S’il faut penser les arrière-gardes, c’est pour pouvoir penser tout le reste.


TABLE DES MATIÈRES

Introduction : Penser les arrière-gardes, par William Marx

Première partie : Modèles théoriques, archétypes artistiques

1 - L'arrière-garde vue de l'avant, par Vincent Kaufmann 2 - Rétrospection et prospection, de Mallarmé à Heidegger, par Laurent Mattiussi 3 - L'opéra, combat d'avant ou d'arrière-garde ? le cas Wagner, par Timothée Picard 4 - Arrière-gardes et Nouvelle vague, le cinéma "qualité France", par Jean-Pierre Esquenazi 5 - Le postmodernisme est-il une arrière-garde ? par Henri Garric

Deuxième partie : L'antimodernisme en France

6 - L'arrière-garde, de Péguy à Paulhan et Barthes, par Antoine Compagnon 7 - Avant-garde poétique, arrière-garde politique : autour de "L'Effort libre", par Michel Décaudin 8 - Une revue d'arrière-garde militante, "Les Guêpes" , par Pascal Mercier 9 - Régionalisme et arrière-garde, le cas du "Pigeonnier", par Franck Jouffre 10 - Julien Benda, ou l'éternelle arrière-garde, par Régine Pietra 11 - Roger Nimier, hussard d'arrière-garde, par Jean-François Louette

Troisième partie : Les paradoxes du modernisme européen

12 - A l'arrière-garde du modernisme, Wyndham Lewis, par Martin Puchner 13 - Arrière-garde et modernisme anglais, Leavis et la grande tradition de la rupture, par Niels Buch-Jepsen 14 - Une arrière-garde à l'italienne ? La Ronda, par Anne-Rachel Hermetet 15 - La référence à Dieu, une posture d'arrière-garde ? Bernanos et Unamuno, par Danielle Perrot-Corpet

Index

(Post-Print allowed by Publisher uploaded OR ask for a copy) Godard’s films prior to 1968 are usually received as pure experimentations of style, as if these films were little more than art-historical examples of a certain kind of avant-garde cinema. The author argues instead that Godard’s often frenzied cinematic experimentations in his early movies may be understood as reflections on the political, cultural and historical issues of France in the 1950s and 60s. In his early films, Godard engages the political and aesthetic strategy of much of French philosophy and avant-garde: the playful and often self-contradictory project of resisting the spectacles of modernity, while transforming the everyday. The author contends that this project constitutes what Jameson calls the political unconscious of Godard’s early work. To sketch this unconscious, the author refers to the larger context in which philosophers, cultural critics and filmmakers take issue with notions of the everyday, spectacle, style, resistance, festivity, consumerism, as well as with the signs of postwar modernity such as cars, modern households, traffic, polls and movies.

"Working in Germany in the interwar era, John Heartfield (born Helmut Herzfeld, 1891–1968) developed an innovative method of appropriating and reusing photographs to powerful political effect. A pioneer of modern photomontage, he assembled images that transformed the meaning of the mass-media photos from which they were taken. In John Heartfield and the Agitated Image, Andrés Mario Zervigón explores this crucial period in the life and work of this brilliant, radical artist whose desire to disclose the truth obscured by the mainstream press and the propaganda of politicians made him a de facto prosecutor of Germany’s visual culture.

Zervigón charts the evolution of Heartfield’s photomontage from an act of antiwar resistance into a formalized and widely disseminated political art in the Weimar Republic, when his work appeared on everything from campaign posters to book covers. He explains how Heartfield’s engagement with montage arose from dissatisfaction with photography’s capacity to represent the modern world, and the result was likely the most important combination of avant-garde art and politics in the twentieth century. A rare look at Heartfield’s early and middle years as an artist and designer, this book provides a new understanding of photography’s role at this critical juncture in history."

Pre-World War II American avant-garde filmmakers, like their postwar successors, created films in opposition to commercial narrative cinema, yet unlike their successors who  defended themselves as artists and filmmakers, these early filmmakers saw themselves as amateur lovers of cinema. While European modernist influences are present, the early American avant-garde expressed a romantic desire to represent nature. Urban mechanization coexists with or stands in stark contrast to the natural world.

This is the  first publication of the editing list for the lost sound version of Mikhail Tsekhanovskii’s animated cartoon The Post (Pochta, aka The Mail, 1930), which Nikolai Izvolov discovered in the Film Institute VGIK in 2013. Izvolov introduces the  film and its distribution history in the early 1930s, before discussing the peculiarities of Tsekhanovskii’s sound version of the  film, which is 10 minutes longer than the silent version and includes a prologue in the form of a cabaret; the text is written by Daniil Kharms. The publication of the dialogue sheets follows this introduction.

Discusses shift in the politics of the avant-garde after World War II.  I argue that the utopian aspirations of the avant-garde are refocused on providing singular, non-binding examples of alternative ways of seeing, thinking, and experiencing everyday life.  Chapters on John Cage, Jackson Mac Low, David Tudor, Stan Brakhage, Gilbert Sorrentino, Samuel Beckett.

"[T]he carefully constructed essays in [this volume] contribute to elevating this reference book so much more than its component parts could have achieved - much like German cinema itself. It is a volume that contributes significantly to reference works on German cinema, European cinema, and cinematic history. Any academic library that has students that might get the merest whiff of cinema as part of their curriculum should ensure this work is available to them."
-- Matt Borg, Sheffield Hallam University, REFERENCE REVIEWS

“A Companion to German Cinema represents the cutting edge of German cinema studies that will force scholars to rethink their approach to the subject. Conceptually innovative and theoretically rigorous, the collection convincingly claims that the renewal of the field must occur from its margins.” -- Roy Grundmann, Boston University

“This book is meant to re-envision what has been little seen, unsettle your thinking about German cinema and visual culture, and examine German cinema’s socially transformative potential.” -- Dora Apel, Wayne State University

“Combining a path-breaking exploration of German cinema beyond the canon with a serious contribution to theories of nation and transnationalism, this collection is a much-needed addition to European film scholarship.” -- Rosalind Galt, University of Sussex


A COMPANION TO GERMAN CINEMA offers a wide-ranging collection of essays demonstrating state-of-play scholarship on German cinema at a time during which cinema studies as well as German cinema have once again begun to flourish.

* Offers a careful combination of theoretical rigor, conceptual accessibility, and intellectual inclusiveness

* Includes essays by well-known writers as well as up-and-coming scholars who take innovative critical approaches to both time-honored and emergent areas in the field, especially regarding race, gender, sexuality, and (trans)nationalism

* Distinctive for its contemporary relevance, reorienting the field to the global twenty-first century

* Fills critical gaps in the extant scholarship, opening the field onto new terrains of critical engagement