Avant-Garde Cinema

Colocviul "Plurilingvism şi interculturalitate", editia a IX-a, cu genericul "Contribuţii româneşti la patrimoniul cultural european: Tristan Tzara 55, Benjamin Fondane 120", 9 – 10 noiembrie 2018:
Colocviul anual iniţiat de Grupul de cercetare interdisciplinară LOGOS (afiliat Centrului INTERSTUD), organizat în colaborare cu membrii Departamentului de limba şi literatura română şi ştiinţe ale comunicării de la Facultatea de Litere a Universităţii „Vasile Alecsandri” din Bacău şi în parteneriat cu Universitatea Laval din Québec, Canada (Departamentul de literatură, teatru şi cinema), Asociaţia „Artă, Tradiţii, Patrimoniu – Fără Frontiere”, Centrul de Cultură „George Apostu”, Teatrul Municipal „Bacovia”. Ediţie desfăşurată cu sprijinul financiar al Ministerul Culturii şi Identităţii Naţionale, prin Programul dedicat Centenarului României (1918 - 2018) și Primului Război Mondial.

The title of this article – a 1925 aphorism by Germaine Dulac – aims to show that personalities such as Jean Painlevé or Jan Cornelis Mol are just the result of an intimate and much older link between scientific cinematography and the avant-garde. Scientific film actually contributed to effectively building film theory in the 1920s: on one side it is systematically included in the screenings of film societies and ciné-clubs emerging in those years throughout Europe and, on the other side, it nourished the growing discourse on medium specificity due to the specific techniques it developed (slow motion and time-lapse, micro and radiocinematography). Throughout these pages we will deepen the contest of time-lapse to the theory of cinema of that time.

In this work, I analyze the visual point of view and its dialectic with the narrative point of view in the  En el balcón vacío. I apply a methodology of textual analysis coming from the area of the Cinemetrics, as well as the Theory of Text. This dialectic explains, for example, the often-contested decision of both the director, Jomí García Ascot and one his screenwriters, María Luisa Elío, to divide the film into two parts: those that correspond to childhood and maturity. The last one with the protagonist trying to give order and to understand its experience of
the Republican exile.

En este trabajo analizo el punto de vista visual y su dialéctica con el punto de vista narrativo en la película En el balcón vacío. Aplico una metodología de análisis textual proveniente del área del Cinemetrics, así como de la Teoría del Texto. Esta dialéctica explica, por ejemplo, la decisión, a menudo contestada, tanto del director, Jomí García Ascot como de una sus guionistas, María
Luis Elío, de dividir en dos partes la película: las
que se corresponden con la infancia y madurez desde la que la protagonista adulta intenta ordenar y comprender su experiencia del exilio republicano.

Propõe-se discutir o contexto específico da realização e analisar sequências do filme Lágrima-Pantera, a míssil, de Júlio Bressane, buscando-se compreender a importância da parceria e do trabalho pregresso de Hélio Oiticica em sua ideação e realização. Observa-se que esse intercâmbio é atravessado por um interesse comum pelo cinema amador e pelo cinema underground, principalmente pela valorização da precariedade dos meios, pelas potências do registro cinematográfico mais como prática do que como produto final e por sua marginalidade em relação aos campos artísticos – em um momento em que a experimentação no Brasil encontrava sérias barreiras, de modo que a marginalidade artística se tornava não somente uma opção, mas uma necessidade para a prática artística independente.

This article proposes to discuss the specific context of the filmmaking process and analyzes sequences from the film Lágrima-Pantera, a míssil, by Júlio Bressane, seeking to understand the importance of the collaboration and previous works of Hélio Oiticica in its conception and making. It comes forth that such exchange was intertwined by a shared fondness for amateur and underground cinema, mostly for their appreciation for their scarcity of resources, the power of cinematographic record more as a practice than as a final product, and their marginal position regarding the artistic fields – at a moment when experimentation needed to overcome severe opposition in Brazil, turning artistic marginality not only into an option, but a need for independent artistic practices.

The article attempts to interpret the idea of “the communist world” based on the Anthony Giddens theory of modernity. Before the beginning of the Revolution, and especially during the Revolution, there appeared different interpretations of construct models of the post-revolutionary landscape. In the article, we use the so-called “avant-garde interpretation”. This mean that the understanding of idea of “the communist world” based on avant-garde aesthetics. Our understanding of the left avant-garde is based on the research of I. Chubarov “The Collective Sensibility: Theories and Practices of the Left Avant-garde”. In this book, the left avant-garde is understood as an “intelligible idea”.

The task that Paul Douglas Grant sets himself in this book is to fill a gap in film history. As he points out in his introduction, previous English-language accounts of the French film world’s response to the ‘events’ of May 1968 have tended to privilege the involvement of established directors, particularly those associated with the New Wave (most notably Jean-Luc Godard and his flirtation with radical left-wing politics and collective filmmaking under the banner of the Dziga Vertov Group). What historians have largely ignored is the abundance of cinema produced in France in this period by militants operating outside the institutions of the commercial industry (including its auteur-focused art-house wing). It is this body of work, an assortment of mostly low-budget documentary films shot on 16 mm between 1968 and 1981 (the year of the Socialist Party’s electoral victory under François Mitterand) that is Grant’s focus.

A Abbas Kiarostami (22/06/1940 - 4/7/2016), in memoriam.

La obra cinematográfica del iraní Abbas Kiarostami se sitúa sobre dos fronteras: una frontera geográfica y una frontera estética. La primera de ellas aparece trazada por la denominación que la crítica y la filmología han establecido según el modelo topológico centro/periferia en torno al concepto de "cinematografías periféricas". Del otro lado, las formas fílmicas trabajan en la inestabilidad tanto de los límites de la ficción como en el decoro de los personales. En este sentido, 'Copia certificada' contiene a un tiempo un ejercicio de estilo y una pequeña poética del cine. En este trabajo nos proponemos explorar ambas dimensiones, con el objetivo de someter a juicio dichas nociones fronterizas.

Broullón-Lozano, Manuel A. (2017). "El cine fronterizo de Abbas Kiarostami: en torno a 'Copia certificada' (2010)", en María Jesús Orozco Vera y Pedro Javier Millán Barroso (coords.), "Discurso y frontera. Visiones teóricas y aplicaciones. Homenaje a la dra. Mª Elena Barroso Villar". Sevilla: Alfar. Pp. 191-228.

Resumo: Alberto Cavalcanti foi um dos artistas de vanguarda de maior projeção na Paris dos anos de 1920. Depois de quatro anos trabalhando como cenógrafo e diretor assistente em produções ficcionais cinematográficas francesas, dirigiu aquela que é tida por muitos teóricos do assunto como sua obra-prima: “Rien que les heures” (1926). O “documentário romanesco”, como o diretor o classifica, dialoga estreitamente com seus textos teóricos sobre o “medium” escritos dos anos 1920 a 1950 e posteriormente inseridos no volume “Filme e Realidade” (1953). Neste artigo, proponho-me a discutir tal diálogo, bem como a pensar no lugar que o filme ocupa no interior da produção cinematográfica de vanguarda.

The poetry of the modern city: a reading of “Rien que les Heures” (1926) Abstract Alberto Cavalcanti was one of the most influential “avant-garde” artists in the Paris of the 1920s. After four years working as a set designer and an assistant director in French cinematographic fiction, he directed what is considered by many movie theorists his masterpiece: “Rien que les heures” (1926). The “fictional documentary”, as the director classifies it, is strictly related to his theory about the “medium” written from 1920 to 1950 and latter published in the book “Filme e Realidade” (1953). In this article, I intent to discuss this connection, as well as to think about the place this motion picture occupies in the “avantgarde” cinema.

回顧性視角單元從日記電影的角度，來回顧台灣的日記電影創作，從1933年劉吶鷗先生的《持攝影機的男人》開始、1960年代莊靈先生的《延》與《赤子》、一直到金穗獎早期的作品，與千禧年之際年輕導演的日記電影。橫跨超過半世紀的作品，在此單元展開對話。

In Retrospection we will look at Taiwanese diary films. We collect diary films from as early as more than half a century ago, from Man with a Movie Camera by LIU Na’Ou in 1933, CHUANG Ling’s Life Continued and My Newborn Baby in the 1960’s, some of the early works in Golden Harvest Awards, and diary films made by young directors in the early millennium. Various routes and intersections in this program open up a space for conversation between diary filmmakers across different time periods.

Bibliographical essay that begins with a summary profile leading to an exhaustive digest of overviews, biographies, critical studies, documentaries, and film surveys concerning the director. Over one hundred books, articles, and documentaries abstracted. Access to first page only; the rest requires a library or individual subscription to Oxford Bibliographies.

Why is today's culture so deeply attached to the past and focused on its own remnants, which have suprisingly quickly come to represent its creators' main field of interest? Marzec explores this question by drawing on Jacques Derrida's quasi-concept of 'the spectre' in order to interpret the artistic 'found footage' work of Bill Morrison and other artists fascinated by the unusually creative and productive force of disintegration. This interesting film genre, forever gazing into the abyss of archival resources, not only brings to light the traces of a reality that has long ceased to exist - it also inspires a deep sense of nostalgia in its viewers and points to the faint presence of the past in the present, but above all, it fetishizes remnants.

Dlaczego współczesna kultura jest tak bardzo przywiązana do swojej
przeszłości oraz skoncentrowana na własnych resztkach, które w
zadziwiająco krótkim czasie stały się głównym obszarem zainteresowania
jej twórców? Autor pragnie odnaleźć odpowiedź na to pytanie,
wykorzystując quasi-pojęcie „widma” Jacquesa Derridy do interpretacji
artystycznej twórczości „found footage” – prac Billa Morrisona oraz
innych artystów zafascynowanych niezwykle twórczą i produktywną siłą
rozkładu. Ten ciekawy gatunek filmowy, nieustannie zapatrzony w
przepastne zasoby archiwum, nie tylko wyciąga na światło dzienne ślady
nieistniejącej już dawno rzeczywistości, budzi w swoich widzach
głębokie poczucie nostalgii oraz wskazuje na słabą obecność
przeszłości w teraźniejszości, ale przede wszystkim fetyszyzuje
resztki

This conference aims to form a transdisciplinary discussion about the political and critical uses of film archive images, by approaching the subject via Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucci’s films and other artistic productions. The call for papers is addressed to researchers and students, from disciplines such as film history and theory, art history, history, anthropology, visual anthropology, as well as participants in these fields (film critics, artists and curators) who have encountered the filmmakers’ work at different moments in their artistic career.

Cách làm bánh rán doremon đơn giản mà ngon đúng vị Nếu bạn là fan hâm mộ của bộ truyện tranh nổi tiếng Doraemon thì hẳn bạn sẽ biết đến một loại bánh rán mà chú mèo máy này cực kỳ mê mẩn. Đó chính là bánh rán Doremon, hay có tên gọi khác là bánh Dorayaki, loại bánh cực kì quen thuộc tại đất nước mặt trời mọc. Ngày hôm nay, Mẹo vặt cuộc sống xin hướng dẫn các bạn cách làm món bánh doremon ngon đúng vị Nhật Bản mà không hề khó làm nhé ^^. Bắt đầu nào!!!

Scholars have mostly focused on ‘positive materiality’.  Semioticians too have predominantly studied the meaning of materials and techniques in the production of artifacts.  However, matter means not only when it is shaped into materiality, but also when it is destroyed. The two aspects are intimately related. In many circumstances, the act of destruction functions as paradoxical semiotic operator, which subverts the common connotations of materiality. That which is produced, indeed, is not simply antimatter, as scientists call the counterpart of physical matter, but anti-materiality, that is, a substratum of signification in which the current articulations of material semiotics are broken and rearranged. The intriguing aspect of the process is that the meaning of materiality does not completely disappear with its destruction but subsists in a shadowy manner, as filigree that one can glimpse underneath the disrupted material. A broken artifact preserves its former aura of meaning, yet new semantic configurations are violently superimposed on its shattered silhouette.

This essay is the introduction to the publication of Ronald Tavel's book "Andy Warhol's Ridiculous Screenplays." Tavel was the screenwriter for some of Warhol's most important films, including Vinyl, The Life of Juanita Castro, Horse, Kitchen and Screen Test #2. He was also a founder of the Theatre of the Ridiculous, the significant queer off-off Broadway theater movement of the late 60s. This essay highlights Tavel's working relationship with Warhol and draws attention to the "ridiculous" status and quality of his screenplays.

Contributors: Marina Abramović, Louis Armand, Nevena Daković, Vadim Erent, Goran Gocić, Benjamin Halligan, Patrick Kinsman, Ivana Kronja, Phillip Lopate, Katarina Mihailović, Lorraine Mortimer, Julianna Ostrovsky, Richard Porton, Maxim Pozdorovkin, Bonita Rhoads, Zoran Samardzija, Anna Schober, Steven Shaviro, Nevenka Stankovic, Aida Vidan.

Among the most idiosyncratic auteurs of avant-garde film, Dušan Makavejev was championed in the early 70s as the herald of art cinema’s next wave. In those years, film critics were calling Makavejev’s early movie, Love Affair (1967), the best film that Godard never made. Innocence Unprotected (1968) was pronounced a tour de force of cinematographic collage. WR: Mysteries of the Organism (1971) received a thirteen-minute standing ovation as well as the Luis Buñuel Award at Cannes & was later lauded as a subversive masterpiece & as “the flagship of ‘philosophical cinema.’” Francis Ford Coppola invited him to direct Apocalypse Now. Instead, Makavejev made Sweet Movie (1974), a conceptual sequel to WR, a politological, erotological, scatological, scandalous & unapologetic work which received practically no distribution, ending his honeymoon with film critics & with financial backers, nearly killing his career.

Este artículo reúne las principales aportaciones realizadas por la tesis de su autora en relación a investigar la narrativa digital. Partiendo de la noción de “narrativa digital”, se han articulado tres objetivos centrados en identificar, describir y contrastar este tipo de narrativa con sus filiaciones en diversos lenguajes creativos. Asimismo, se han descrito los marcos teóricos artístico y comunicativo que han contextualizado el objeto de estudio, y la metodología cualitativa para estudiarlo. El artículo concluye con las observaciones y reflexiones que la aplicación metodológica genealógica ha suscitado.

This paper examines the excessive use of recycled footage in badfilm of the 50s and 60s, a practice that exposes the films’ technological basis and has often been cited as contributing to these films' badness. Viewed most often simply as a visual marker of a technologically and economically insufficient production process, there has been little attempt to analyse the aesthetic significance of combining film stocks that are of markedly different qualities and are derived from a multiplicity of sources. This paper addresses this gap, demonstrating how the filmmakers’ combination of existing and new footage – and, importantly, their failed attempts to disguise the discrepancies – directly affects the aesthetic and narrative outcome of the finished film, thereby challenging traditional notions of continuity, visual style, and storytelling. There is a critical consensus around recycled footage’s ‘acceptable’ use within the avant-garde ‘found footage’ film and as a way to ground more mainstream productions within a certain time and/or place. This critical discourse does not account for the impact of recycled footage in badfilm, where it is often used to provide a level of production values and spectacle that the original material does not possess. However, the obvious disjunction between the various sources of footage generally highlights the films’ inadequate production levels rather than compensating for them, while creating an unusual dynamic in which it is the existing footage that becomes the primary controlling factor in the film's production. Specific examination of a variety of badfilms, such as Horror of the Blood Monsters (Al Adamson, 1970) and Glen or Glenda (Ed Wood Jr, 1953), will demonstrate the extreme lengths filmmakers went to to conceal their use of existing footage and the (unintentional) effect these attempts have on the films as a final product.

This issue reviews 3 dream-themed films of Ginger Rogers: Tom, Dick and Harry, (1941); Lady in the Dark (1944); and It Had to Be You, (1947). These were made in the 1940’s, immediately after her collaborations with Fred Astaire. While all dream sequences are designed to advance the plot and provide a rationale for extravagant song and dance routines, it was the heyday of both psychoanalysis and surrealism, so many incorporated the former in their content and the latter in sets and costumes.

Paul Bush’s fine art animation Furniture Poetry (1999) uses his painstaking, oscillating pixilation technique to playfully engage with philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein’s question in On Certainty: ‘What prevents me from supposing that this table either vanishes or alters its shape when no one is observing it and then when someone looks at it again changes back? But one feels like saying - who is going to suppose such a thing?’ This paper proposes to engage with Bush’s work in order to think through the unique philosophical relationship between the profilmic and diegetic worlds that is particular to stop motion animation. Furniture Poetry disrupts our normal spectatorial acceptance of constructed diegetic worlds—an acceptance that is arguably rooted in our habitual and unquestioned certainty of the profilmic world—and calls attention to itself as a highly unstable manipulation of traces of that world. This paper conceives of Bush in the role of the Cartesian Evil Genius whose power to make objects vanish, alter their shapes, and reappear presented the philosopher with the possibility of a perfectly complete illusion of the external world. Only, in this case, the animator gleefully uses these powers that make explicit the true, chimerical nature of diegetic worlds.

Έτσι το κινηματογραφικό έργο υπερβαίνει τις εξαρτήσεις της ύλης, ξεπερνά τους περιορισμούς, μετουσιώνεται σε γεγονός πνευματικό. Αντανακλά τις κοινωνικές ή τις ιδεολογικές συνθήκες που το παρήγαγαν. Μπορεί να μεταδώσει δέος αλλά και τρόμο. Μπορεί να αφανίσει μορφές του παρελθόντος που κατέληξαν ανενεργές. Αποκολλάται από τον δημιουργό του και ζει σε πείσμα της φθοράς που επιφέρει ο χρόνος. Ζει ανεξάρτητο γιατί ο καθένας μπορεί να διαβάσει καινούργια πράγματα σ' αυτό.