Shadows, Specters, Shards

Shadows, Specters, Shards PDF Author: Jeffrey Skoller
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 0816642311
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 281

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Book Description
Demonstrates how avant-garde films better reflect the complexity of history than conventional film.

Shadows, Specters, Shards

Shadows, Specters, Shards PDF Author: Jeffrey Skoller
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 0816642311
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 281

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Book Description
Demonstrates how avant-garde films better reflect the complexity of history than conventional film.

Shadows, Specters and Shards

Shadows, Specters and Shards PDF Author: Jeffrey A. Skoller
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Experimental films
Languages : en
Pages : 758

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Book Description


The Utopia of Film

The Utopia of Film PDF Author: Christopher Pavsek
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231530811
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 305

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Book Description
The German filmmaker Alexander Kluge has long promoted cinema's relationship with the goals of human emancipation. Jean-Luc Godard and Filipino director Kidlat Tahimik also believe in cinema's ability to bring about what Theodor W. Adorno once called a "redeemed world." Situating the films of Godard, Tahimik, and Kluge within debates over social revolution, utopian ideals, and the unrealized potential of utopian thought and action, Christopher Pavsek showcases the strengths, weaknesses, and undeniable impact of their utopian visions on film's political evolution. He discusses Godard's Alphaville (1965) against Germany Year 90 Nine-Zero (1991) and JLG/JLG: Self-portrait in December (1994), and he conducts the first scholarly reading of Film Socialisme (2010). He considers Tahimik's virtually unknown masterpiece, I Am Furious Yellow (1981–1991), along with Perfumed Nightmare (1977) and Turumba (1983); and he constructs a dialogue between Kluge's Brutality in Stone (1961) and Yesterday Girl (1965) and his later The Assault of the Present on the Rest of Time (1985) and Fruits of Trust (2009).

Early British Animation

Early British Animation PDF Author: Malcolm Cook
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319734296
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 290

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Book Description
This book is the first history of British animated cartoons, from the earliest period of cinema in the 1890s up to the late 1920s. In this period cartoonists and performers from earlier traditions of print and stage entertainment came to film to expand their artistic practice, bringing with them a range of techniques and ideas that shaped the development of British animation. These were commercial rather than avant-garde artists, but they nevertheless saw the new medium of cinema as offering the potential to engage with modern concerns of the early 20th century, be it the political and human turmoil of the First World War or new freedoms of the 1920s. Cook’s examination and reassessment of these films and their histories reveals their close attention and play with the way audiences saw the world. As such, this book offers new insight into the changing understanding of vision at that time as Britain’s place in the world was reshaped in the early 20th century.

The Melancholy Lens

The Melancholy Lens PDF Author: Tony Pipolo
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0197551165
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 217

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Book Description
The prevalence of loss and mourning, and of charged relationships with parents or parental figures has had a surprising influence on several American avant-garde filmmakers' work. To date, however, little attention has been given to these themes. In The Melancholy Lens, author Tony Pipolooffers a detailed look at the significant role of underlying biographical and psychological factors in specific works by leading avant-garde filmmakers. Covering a range of filmmakers including Maya Deren, Stan Brakhage, Gregory Markopoulos, Robert Beavers, Ken Jacobs, and Ernie Gehr, The MelancholyLens takes a sensitive approach to understand the motivations of each filmmaker as related to a given work. Pipolo argues, for example, that the work of Deren and Brakhage lends itself to a more aggressive appreciation of psychoanalytic principles.The Deren films studied-Meshes of the Afternoon, At Land, and Ritual in Transfigured Time-are read as varying responses to the death of her father, with whom she had a strained relationship. Tortured Dust-the final film Brakhage made about his first family-was, by his own account, a work ofcontention and desperation. The elusiveness of Gregory Markopoulos' The Mysteries cannot conceal its naked obsession with death any more than it can diminish the film's poignancy. Robert Beavers' Sotiros is an especially rich and vivid exposure of a vulnerable chapter in the filmmakers's life. Inthe final two chapters on Ken Jacobs and Ernie Gehr, Pipolo looks outward for artistic motivation to show how both filmmakers' fascination with the history of film and video manifests as a melancholic view of greater history in their work. In the afterword, the author considers later figures whosework is kindred to the theme of this book, among them Nathaniel Dorsky, Phil Solomon, David Gatten, and Lewis Klahr.

Haunting Without Ghosts

Haunting Without Ghosts PDF Author: Juliana Martínez
Publisher: University of Texas Press
ISBN: 1477321713
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 231

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Book Description
For half a century, cultural production in Colombia has labored under the weight of magical realism—above all, the works of Gabriel García Márquez—where ghosts told stories about the country’s violent past and warned against a similarly gruesome future. Decades later, the story of violence in Colombia is no less horrific, but the critical resources of magical realism are depleted. In their wake comes "spectral realism." Juliana Martínez argues that recent Colombian novelists, filmmakers, and artists—from Evelio Rosero and William Vega to Beatriz González and Erika Diettes—share a formal and thematic concern with the spectral but shift the focus from what the ghost is toward what the specter does. These works do not speak of ghosts. Instead, they use the specter to destabilize reality by challenging the authority of human vision and historical chronology. By introducing the spectral into their work, these artists decommodify well-worn modes of representing violence and create a critical space from which to seek justice for the dead and disappeared. A Colombia-based study, Haunting without Ghosts brings powerful insight to the politics and ethics of spectral aesthetics, relevant for a variety of sociohistorical contexts.

Late Godard and the Possibilities of Cinema

Late Godard and the Possibilities of Cinema PDF Author: Daniel Morgan
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520273338
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 325

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Book Description
“Late Godard and the Possibilities of Cinema is an exhilarating and extremely lucid analysis of the way Godard ‘thinks’ in, of, and through cinema. Drawing on his extensive knowledge of French culture, politics and theory, Morgan skillfully illustrates the complex relations between history, aesthetics, and nature in the director’s later works. Defying criticism of Godard’s alleged retreat from politics, this book provides compelling, detailed, and erudite analyses of his later films and illuminates the auteur’s political and aesthetic response to the so-called ‘death of cinema.’”— Mary Ann Doane, author of The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, the Archive. “Daniel Morgan charts a sensible route into the impenetrable Jean-Luc Godard. Posing clear yet insistent questions, he burrows to the center of both parts of this book’s formidable title, finding in late Godard an aesthetic fusion that generates the light and heat of a trenchant and powerful political critique. Anyone who feels drawn or licensed to write about Godard should read Morgan before setting out.”—Dudley Andrew, author of What Cinema Is! “Daniel Morgan's Late Godard and the Possibilities of Cinema signals a major breakthrough in the international study of the cinema of Jean-Luc Godard. Reconciling the filmmaker's peculiarly Romantic sense of aesthetics —to which the book pays scrupulous, material attention—with the thorny political histories that Godard's cinema has always probed, Morgan gives us new, compelling, synthetic tools with which to understand an artist who is at once the most cryptic and the most sensuous of all living filmmakers.”—Adrian Martin, Monash University, co-editor of lolajournal.com

The Art of Subtraction

The Art of Subtraction PDF Author: Bruno Lessard
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 1442625724
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 248

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Book Description
The Art of Subtraction is the first full-length study on the CD-ROM as a creative platform. Bruno Lessard traces the rise and relatively rapid fall of the CD-ROM in the 1980s and 1990s and its impact as a creative platform for media artists such as Jean-Louis Boissier, Zoe Beloff, Adriene Jenik, and Chris Marker. Although the CD-ROM was not a lasting commercial success it was a vibrant medium that allowed for experimentation in adapting literary works. Building on the work of Gilles Deleuze and Michele Foucault, Lessard establishes a comparative framework for linking digital adaptations with innovative concepts such as 'subtractive adaptation' and the 'object image' that will be of interest to researchers examining literary adaptations on other digital platforms such as websites, smart phones, tablets, and digital games. The Art of Subtraction is a fascinating study of intermediality in the late twentieth century and it provides the first chapter in the yet unwritten history of digital adaptation.

Speaking Truths with Film

Speaking Truths with Film PDF Author: Bill Nichols
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520290402
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 294

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Book Description
"What issues, of both form and content, shape the documentary film? What role does visual evidence play in relation to a documentary's arguments about the world in which we live? Can a documentary be believed, and why or why not? How do documentaries abide by or subvert ethical expectations? Are mockumentaries a form of subversion? In what ways can the documentary be an aesthetic experience and at the same time have political or social impact? And how can such impacts be empirically measured? Pioneering film scholar Bill Nichols investigates the ways in which documentaries strive for accuracy and truthfulness, but simultaneously fabricate a form that shapes reality. Such films may rely on re-enactment to re-create the past, storytelling to provide satisfying narratives, and rhetorical figures such as metaphor and expressive forms such as irony to make a point. In many ways documentaries are a fiction unlike any other. With clarity and passion, Nichols offers close readings of several provocative documentaries including Land without Bread, Restrepo, The Thin Blue Line, The Act of Killing, and Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine as part of an authoritative examination of the layered approaches and delicate ethical balance demanded of documentary filmmakers"--Provided by publisher.

The Cinema of Me

The Cinema of Me PDF Author: Alisa Lebow
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231162146
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 289

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Book Description
When a filmmaker makes a film with herself as a subject, she is already divided as both the subject matter of the film and the subject making the film. The two senses of the word are immediately in play - the matter and the maker--thus the two ways of being subjectified as both subject and object. Subjectivity finds its filmic expression, not surprisingly, in very personal ways, yet it is nonetheless shaped by and in relation to collective expressions of identity that can transform the cinema of 'me' into the cinema of 'we'. Leading scholars and practitioners of first-person film are brought together in this groundbreaking collection to consider the theoretical, ideological, and aesthetic challenges wrought by this form of filmmaking in its diverse cultural, geographical, and political contexts.