Directors:
Maya Deren introduction in Senses of Cinema
Paul Sharits
"Imagine an eye unruled by man-made laws of perspective, an eye unprejudiced by compositional logic, an eye which does not respond to the name of everything but which must know each object encountered in life through an adventure of perception." (Stan Brakhage)
Stan Brakhage introduction in Senses of cinema
- Graig Dworkin: "Stan Brakhage, Agrimoniac"
Michael Snow
Ken Jacobs (Conversations with History -interview, YouTube-link)
Artists´moving image – introduction of the concept and the history of the practice in the more general area of media arts
Artists´ moving image (the tradition of the artists´ film and video) means the film- and videomaking apart from the film industry, connected to the field of the Avant-garde and experimental arts from the 1920s on (Surrealist film, Dadaist film, abstract film, expressionist film, cinépoems, pattern films etc.). It includes the developments after the World War II, the new directions in experimental film and it´s subgenres (mythopoetical film, trance film, beat film, personal film etc.). Finally it introduces the big change within the film history via the arrival of the new wave cinema in the 1960s. In the 1970s the new collaborative and critical way of working with film is based on the practice of the previous decades (the new practices including filmmakers´ co-operatives, underground film and the structural/material film tradition). The period introduces also the beginning of the video art (image-processing, performance video, conceptual video art, activist video, video in the gallery space in the form of installations), the hybrid practices which bring video, film and other new forms of artists´ practice together (expanded cinema, multimedia-events and performances). After this we have witnessed the era of the video sculpture in the 1980s, “the cinematic turn” in the 1990s, the effects of the digitalization, the artistic practice in the 2000´s including new hybrid forms of filmmaking etc.
1. Artists´ moving image – introduction
The beginning of the artists´moving image movement in the Avant-garde movements of the 1920s. The connections between the pre-cinematic period (19th century) and the new digital developments.
2. Montage in Avant-garde
The need to be detached from the new narrative developed in Hollywood in the 1910s by D.W. Griffith (“Birth of a Nation” 1915, “Intolerance” 1916) and others. Montage as artists´ practice (film as something that challenges and even “thinks”).
3. Futurism/Constructivism/Expressionism
Dziga Vertov´s influence. Both Eisenstein´s and Vertov´s work seen in the perspective of the later developments in Avant-garde/experimental film and video art/media art. Expressionistic film in Germany (Robert Wiene: Tri Caligari´s Cabinet, 1920) and it´s influence on the set-design and other aspects of alternative and experimental film practice.
4. Surrealist and impressionist film of the 1920s
Cinema as the ideal medium in the surrealists´ ideas in the artistic practice. Antonin Artaud´s concept of "raw cinema" as an attempt of move away from the concept of representation will be presented, as will be the impressionistic film in 1920´s France (Jean Epstein, Abel Gance) and Germaine Dulac´s film based on Artaud´s screenplay (The Seashell and the Clergyman, 1928), rejected by Artaud. The influence of the surrealist films by Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí, Jean Cocteau (Blood of A Poet, 1930) and dadaist films by Man Ray (Emak Bakia 1926) and Hans Richter (Vormittagsspuk, 1928) will be discussed. The invention of the relations between film language and in dreamscape/unconscious and how it is treated by the surrealists. The evolution of the “pure” elements in cinema which are sometimes supposed to escape also the realm of conscious reasoning are seen as “photogenic” elements in the film.
5. The abstract film as visual music (Oscar Fischinger, Viking Eggeling etc.). The abstract painting´s (in example by Wassily Kandinsky) influence on the abstract film tradition will be discussed, as also is the advent of the use of sound in the avant-garde film movement (Len Lye & Norman McLaren in the 1930s). Abstract film as “visual music” is seen both in the light of its historical predecessors, some later developments of the concept (in example in the 1960´s "psychedelic culture", in the structural film tradition, in vj-culture and abstract software art, the latter originating from the early computer art).
6. Artists´ moving image after World War II, in the late 20th century and onwards. The new genres in the tradition appearing after World War II: mythopoetic film (Maya Deren, Stan Brakhage, Kenneth Anger), trance film (Maya Deren), beat cinema and underground film (Andy Warhol, Kenneth Anger (Scorpio Rising 1964), Ken Jacobs).
7. Structures and methods of the structural filmmakers and video artists
8. Artists´ moving image after II World War 1, in the late 20th century and onwards, part 2: The beginning of video art and expanded / extended media
- "old skool" analog image-processing: Nam June Paik & Woody and Steina Vasulka. Paik´s projects, including “first video installation exhibition” in Wuppertal (Galerie Parnass 1963, “Exposition of Music – Electronic Television”). Paik´s collaborations with Shuya Abe. The career of Woody and Steina Vasulka. Newcomers in the image-processing tradition: i.e. Pink Twins
- performance video: The performance video in the beginning of video art, and its further developments, starting from Bruce Nauman, Vito Acconci and Joan Jonas, ranging to Matthew Barney and others.
9. The expanded/extended cinema and media
The cinema, new technologies and new exhibition forms, including video installation (Anthony McCall, Eija-Liisa Ahtila, Douglas Gordon, Pierre Huyghe). The concept "expanded cinema" was introduced by Gene Youngblood in the book of the same name (Youngblood, 1970). Ken Jacobs was among the same lines, when he introduced the concept "paracinema" in the early 1970s, referring to cinema experiences provided by means outside of standard cinema technology.
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Literature list
Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Its Mechanical Reproducibility. In: Selected Writings, vol. 4. Ed. by Howard Eiland et al. The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003
David Bordwell, The Cinema of Eisenstein. Harvard University Press, 1994
Kerry Brougher, Jeremy Strick, Ari Wiseman, Judith Zilczer, Visual Music - Synaesthesia in Art and Music Since 1900. Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden 2005
Sergei Eisenstein, Film Form, Harcourt 1977 (4. p.)
Doug Hall & Sally Jo Hifer, Illuminating video. Aperture 2005 (2.p.)
Chrissie Iles, Into the Light: The Projected Image in American Art 1964-1977. Whitney Museum NY and Abrams, 2001
Rudolf E. Kuenzli, Dada and Surrealist Film. Willis, Locker and Owens, 1987.
Malcolm LeGrice, Experimental Film on Digital Age. BFI, 2001
Tanya Leighton (ed), Art and the Moving Image: A Critical Reader. Tate Publishing, 2008
Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media. MIT Press, 2001
Chris Meigh-Andrews, A History of Video Art: The Development of Form and
Function, Berg Publ., 2006
William Moritz, Optical Poetry. Indiana University Press, 2004
A.L. Rees, A History of Experimental Film and Video. BFI, 1999
Hans Richter, Dada: Art and anti-art (1965, 1977, 1985, Thames and Hudson)
Jeffrey Shaw and Peter Weibel, Future Cinema: The Cinematic Imaginary After Film. MIT Press, 2003
P.A. Sitney, Visionary Film: The American Avant-Garde, 1943-2000. Oxford University Press, 2002
- Eyes Upside Down: Visionary Filmmakers and the Heritage of Emerson. Oxford University Press, 2008
Yvonne Spielmann, Video: The reflexive medium. Leonardo books, 2008
Gene Youngblood, Expanded Cinema. P. Dutton and Co. Inc., 1970
Dziga Vertov, Kino-Eye: the Writings of Dziga Vertov (translated by Kevin O'Brien). University of California Press,1984
