the glasshouse (1949):
Wednesday, May 18, 2011
eames links
eames office
eames in australia
case study houses
eames at moma
the lounge chair debuts on nbc:
assembling the lounge chair:
ayn rand and wikipedia
Ayn Rand on Donahue:
You might be interested to see the ways in which the ideas of Ayn Rand have influenced the development of wikipedia. This article from the London Review of Books offers an interesting argument about the way in which wikipedia can be said to be working.
Excerpt:
When knowledge is generated by crowds, no single individual has much personal responsibility for what is produced, but nor does any one person have a realistic prospect of shaping the outcome. With Wikipedia, the opposite is true. The fact that there is no final version means that anyone can change anything, but it also means that every given change can be attributed to a particular individual.
Okay ...
You might be interested to see the ways in which the ideas of Ayn Rand have influenced the development of wikipedia. This article from the London Review of Books offers an interesting argument about the way in which wikipedia can be said to be working.
Excerpt:
When knowledge is generated by crowds, no single individual has much personal responsibility for what is produced, but nor does any one person have a realistic prospect of shaping the outcome. With Wikipedia, the opposite is true. The fact that there is no final version means that anyone can change anything, but it also means that every given change can be attributed to a particular individual.
Okay ...
Ayn Rand lived in a house designed by a renowned modernist architect, Richard Neutra. You can find more information about Neutra's work at the Neutra Institute for Survival through Design. Merrill Schleier, the author of the article I gave you about The Fountainhead, has more to say about Rand's relationship to modernist architecture here. Alas, the house she lived in, the Von Sternberg house (designed 1934) was demolished in the seventies. You can see Julius Sherman's photographs of the house in a slideshow here, as well as read an account of its interesting history; more images of Neutra's work here. The picture below is of Rand (and her husband, Frank O'Connor) in situ.
Wednesday, April 13, 2011
kong v gonga & a miniature city symphony
Mellard ("Framed in the Glaze," available via WebCT) argues that O'Connor offers, in Hazel, a kind of "case history ... a scene of original trauma ... that trauma's effects" (52) and offers a Lacanian reading of the novel that focuses on the novel's depiction of the gaze and anamorphosis. Anamorphosis is defined by the OED as a "distorted projection or drawing of anything, so made that when viewed from a particular point, or by reflection from a suitable mirror, it appears regular and properly proportioned; a deformation." Perhaps the most famous visual example of anamorphosis is Hans Holbein's painting The Ambassadors, where an image of a skull in encrypted near the bottom of the painting.
Mellard argues that O'Connor uses metaphor to effect this same kind of transformation, noting in particular Mrs' Hitchcock's observation of "The outline of a skull under [Haze's ] skin" (10;57). This image introduces one aspect of the novel I want you to consider: its fascination with the visual realm and that fascination translated into writing. From its opening description of Hazel's eyes moving from the window to the carriage aisle the novel adopts, I argue, a cinematic orientation to the representation of its imaginary spaces.
Perhaps equally important is its analysis of the cinematic space in the diegesis. Taulkinham is represented as a city of lights, reminiscent of the signage that dominates the cityscapes of the city symphony film: "PEANUTS, WESTERN UNION, AJAX, TAXI, HOTEL, CANDY" (Chapter 2) and Hazel arrives on the train, as by this point we might anticipate or require. Later Enoch goes to the movies and finds himself engulfed in its "maw." The first film Enoch witnesses concerns "a scientist named The Eye who performed operations by remote control ... only his eyes looked at the screen." The movie palace offers another scene of trauma, one supplemented by the appearance of Gonga, and of Hazel who preaches in front of the Odeon theatre. Gonga, a dimly and debased descendant of King Kong, orients the question of vision around phenomenon of film as he views Enoch through "celluloid eyes."
Marshalling these indices, some lines of flight emerge between:
* the city symphony and King Kong
* the city symphony and Wise Blood
* King Kong and Rose Hobart
* East of Borneo and King Kong
* Kong and Gonga
* writing and film
And one final intersection, the reworking of Wise Blood by John Huston in his 1979 Wise Blood, which we will watch, in part, in class.
A late entry in our catalogue of "city symphony" films, this animated short was shot in 1975.
More from its maker here.
Mellard argues that O'Connor uses metaphor to effect this same kind of transformation, noting in particular Mrs' Hitchcock's observation of "The outline of a skull under [Haze's ] skin" (10;57). This image introduces one aspect of the novel I want you to consider: its fascination with the visual realm and that fascination translated into writing. From its opening description of Hazel's eyes moving from the window to the carriage aisle the novel adopts, I argue, a cinematic orientation to the representation of its imaginary spaces.
Perhaps equally important is its analysis of the cinematic space in the diegesis. Taulkinham is represented as a city of lights, reminiscent of the signage that dominates the cityscapes of the city symphony film: "PEANUTS, WESTERN UNION, AJAX, TAXI, HOTEL, CANDY" (Chapter 2) and Hazel arrives on the train, as by this point we might anticipate or require. Later Enoch goes to the movies and finds himself engulfed in its "maw." The first film Enoch witnesses concerns "a scientist named The Eye who performed operations by remote control ... only his eyes looked at the screen." The movie palace offers another scene of trauma, one supplemented by the appearance of Gonga, and of Hazel who preaches in front of the Odeon theatre. Gonga, a dimly and debased descendant of King Kong, orients the question of vision around phenomenon of film as he views Enoch through "celluloid eyes."
Marshalling these indices, some lines of flight emerge between:
* the city symphony and King Kong
* the city symphony and Wise Blood
* King Kong and Rose Hobart
* East of Borneo and King Kong
* Kong and Gonga
* writing and film
And one final intersection, the reworking of Wise Blood by John Huston in his 1979 Wise Blood, which we will watch, in part, in class.
A late entry in our catalogue of "city symphony" films, this animated short was shot in 1975.
More from its maker here.
Kaleidoscope, Hypnosis, Snack
Our class on Piccadilly marks the last week of our investigation of city films, which started with a consideration of the "city symphony" and closes with a drift to melodrama in a film that nonetheless recapitulates some of the concerns of the first two city films. Piccadilly's bright lights augur also the move to our next sequence, where we look at transmedial conjunctions of cinematic writing and written cinema through Flannery O'Connor's Wise Blood.
So to mark today as a kind of intermission, here's a compilation of cinema intermission ads, including one that evokes Burgin's description of the "psychical space of the spectating subject" as, after Baudelaire, "a kaleidoscope equipped with consciousness." I'm referring of course to the series of kaleidoscoped snacks.
The "special effect" of the kaleidoscope today looks antique, perhaps, but it's interesting how many of the devices used in these ads involve quasi-hypnotic spirals, a registration of cinema's collective hypnotic.
Jean Cocteau: "The collective hypnosis into which the cinema audience is plunged by light and shade is very like a spiritualist seance. Then, the film expresses something other than what it is, something that no one can predict." (Speech at the Institut des Hautes Etudes Cinematographiques, September 9, 1946, quoted in Cocteau, Jean The Art of Cinema, trans. Robin Buss. London and New York: Marion Boyars, 2001, p. 25).
So to mark today as a kind of intermission, here's a compilation of cinema intermission ads, including one that evokes Burgin's description of the "psychical space of the spectating subject" as, after Baudelaire, "a kaleidoscope equipped with consciousness." I'm referring of course to the series of kaleidoscoped snacks.
The "special effect" of the kaleidoscope today looks antique, perhaps, but it's interesting how many of the devices used in these ads involve quasi-hypnotic spirals, a registration of cinema's collective hypnotic.
Jean Cocteau: "The collective hypnosis into which the cinema audience is plunged by light and shade is very like a spiritualist seance. Then, the film expresses something other than what it is, something that no one can predict." (Speech at the Institut des Hautes Etudes Cinematographiques, September 9, 1946, quoted in Cocteau, Jean The Art of Cinema, trans. Robin Buss. London and New York: Marion Boyars, 2001, p. 25).
variously virtual
Victor Burgin: "What we may call the 'cinematic heterotopia' is constituted across the variously virtual spaces in which we encounter displaced pieces of films: the Internet, the media and so on, but also the psychical space of a spectating subject that Baudelaire first identified as 'a kaleidoscope equipped with consciousness'. (The Remembered Film. London: Reaktion Books, 2004).
Blog entries can be considered part of this heterotopia, in particular for their capacity to orient in another way 'the psychical space of a spectating subject.' Thanks to everyone for their blog entries -- I have a good pile of reading for the next week or so!
Blog entries can be considered part of this heterotopia, in particular for their capacity to orient in another way 'the psychical space of a spectating subject.' Thanks to everyone for their blog entries -- I have a good pile of reading for the next week or so!
Calligraphic Modernism
Meanwhile, here's an autographed photograph of Anna May Wong, which she has likewise signed with both her European name and its rendition in characters. Wong's contemporary celebrity can be gauged from the archive of ephemera associated with her career: cigarette cards, celebrity portraits, and posters of Wong are hot properties in the cinephile world.
Wednesday, April 6, 2011
Rancière: The Ignorant Schoolmaster
In one of his most influential books, Jacques Rancière tells the remarkable story of the "ignorant schoolmaster" to open the question of what he calls "universal teaching." At a time of political crisis a French academic named Jacques Jacotot was forced into exile, and he left his teaching post in Dijon to take up another in the Netherlands. Many of the students who wanted to be taught by him were unable to speak French and he was unable to speak Flemish, so the situation was perplexing. His solution was novel. He found that "[t] here was … no language in which he could teach them what they sought from him," and '[y]et he wanted to respond to their wishes" (1-2); their desire to learn. Jacotot decided to improvise by establishing what Rancière calls "the minimal link of a thing in common" between himself and the students" (2), a link he secured through the use of a novel, written in French, with a parallel translation in Flemish. And what he found was that by reading the book carefully in Flemish, and studying the French, his students were able to decipher the text in French and to learn that language, decipher its grammar and understand something of its meanings. Rancière uses the story of Jacotot to question the role of explication in teaching. He writes:
Like all conscientious professors, [Jacotot] knew that teaching was not in the slightest about cramming students with knowledge and having them repeat it like parrots, but he knew equaly well that students had to avoid the chance detours where minds still incapable of distinguishing the essential from the accessory, the principle from the consequence, get lost. In short, the essential act of the master was to explicate: to disengage the simple elements of learning, and to reconcile their simplicity in principle with the factual simplicity that characterizes young and ignorant minds. To teach was to transmit learning and form minds simultaneously, by leading those minds, according to an ordered progression, from the most simple to the most complex. (3)
Rancière writes that the experiment with his Flemish students made this model less than persuasive; without explanation from him, his students had learned the language they did not know. Explication, it seemed, was not necessarily the source of a student's learning. A parallel arises with the most basic scene of learning we have in common:
The words the child learns best, those whose meaning he best fathoms, those he best makes his own through his own usage, are those he learns without a master explicator, well before any master explicator. According to the unequal returns of various intellectual apprenticeships, what all human children learn best is what no master can explain: the mother tongue. We speak to them and we speak around them. They hear and retain, imitate and repeat, make mistakes and correct themselves, succeed by chance and begin again methodically, and, at too young an age for explicators to begin instruction them, they are almost all – regardless of gender, social condition, and skin color – able to understand and speak the language of their parents. (5)
From this observation, Rancière claims a striking truth; explication in learning is a form of "enforced stultification" (7), always inferior to the style of original learning, the way we learn our mother tongue. This "best" teaching, which harnesses the will to learn in place of acts of instruction, is what he calls "universal teaching," a practice that assumes a level of universal competence among students, competence generated by their desire to learn: "[t]here is no one on earth who hasn't learned something by himself and without a master explicator" (16). As Rancière notes, almost all children success in learning their mother tongue without difficulty, although it is in fact a complex task; the capacity to learn complex things is not a talent segregated on the basis of calculable differences in talent or intelligence, but broadly possessed by all. Jacotot discovers that his students acquire French not through his teaching, but rather through his capacity to direct their own interest.
Rancière, Jacques (1987) Le maître ignorant: cinq leçons sur l'émancipation intellectuelle. The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation Trans. Kristin Ross. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991.
Like all conscientious professors, [Jacotot] knew that teaching was not in the slightest about cramming students with knowledge and having them repeat it like parrots, but he knew equaly well that students had to avoid the chance detours where minds still incapable of distinguishing the essential from the accessory, the principle from the consequence, get lost. In short, the essential act of the master was to explicate: to disengage the simple elements of learning, and to reconcile their simplicity in principle with the factual simplicity that characterizes young and ignorant minds. To teach was to transmit learning and form minds simultaneously, by leading those minds, according to an ordered progression, from the most simple to the most complex. (3)
Rancière writes that the experiment with his Flemish students made this model less than persuasive; without explanation from him, his students had learned the language they did not know. Explication, it seemed, was not necessarily the source of a student's learning. A parallel arises with the most basic scene of learning we have in common:
The words the child learns best, those whose meaning he best fathoms, those he best makes his own through his own usage, are those he learns without a master explicator, well before any master explicator. According to the unequal returns of various intellectual apprenticeships, what all human children learn best is what no master can explain: the mother tongue. We speak to them and we speak around them. They hear and retain, imitate and repeat, make mistakes and correct themselves, succeed by chance and begin again methodically, and, at too young an age for explicators to begin instruction them, they are almost all – regardless of gender, social condition, and skin color – able to understand and speak the language of their parents. (5)
From this observation, Rancière claims a striking truth; explication in learning is a form of "enforced stultification" (7), always inferior to the style of original learning, the way we learn our mother tongue. This "best" teaching, which harnesses the will to learn in place of acts of instruction, is what he calls "universal teaching," a practice that assumes a level of universal competence among students, competence generated by their desire to learn: "[t]here is no one on earth who hasn't learned something by himself and without a master explicator" (16). As Rancière notes, almost all children success in learning their mother tongue without difficulty, although it is in fact a complex task; the capacity to learn complex things is not a talent segregated on the basis of calculable differences in talent or intelligence, but broadly possessed by all. Jacotot discovers that his students acquire French not through his teaching, but rather through his capacity to direct their own interest.
Rancière, Jacques (1987) Le maître ignorant: cinq leçons sur l'émancipation intellectuelle. The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation Trans. Kristin Ross. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991.
Wednesday, March 30, 2011
Explode Art's Tower of Babel!
Last week I proposed to you that Wikipedia is often a very useful resource. The quality of Wikipedia entries varies, of course, but on the assumption that you treat it with the same critical judgement you treat all resources, I feel it's important to acknowledge this collaborative encyclopaedia as, in its own way, a revolutionary pedagogical tool.
The entry on Vertov is exemplary: clear, informative, scholarly. An excerpt:
However, Vertov's two credos, often used interchangeably, are in fact distinct, as Yuri Tsivian points out in the commentary track on the DVD for Man with the Movie Camera: for Vertov, "life as it is" means to record life as it would be without the camera present. "Life caught unawares" means to record life when surprised, and perhaps provoked, by the presence of a camera (16:04 on the commentary track). This explanation contradicts the common assumption that for Vertov "life caught unawares" meant "life caught unaware of the camera." All of these shots might conform to Vertov's credo "caught unawares." Dziga's slow motion, fast motion, and other camera techniques were a way to dissect the image, Vertov's brother Mikhail described in a interview. It was to be the honest truth of perception. For example, in "Man with a Movie Cameara", two trains are shown almost melting into each other, although we are taught to see trains as not riding that close, Vertov tried to portray the actual sight of two passing trains. Mikhail talked about Eisenstein's films as different from his and his brother Vertov's in that Eisenstein, "came from the theatre, in the theatre one directs dramas, one strings beads." "We all felt...that through documentary film we could develop a new kind of art. Not only documentary art, or the art of chronicle, but rather an art based on images, the creation of an image-oriented journalism" Mikhail explained. More than even film truth, "Man with a Movie Camera," was supposed to be a way to make those in the Soviet Union more efficient in their actions. He slowed down his actions, such as the decision whether to jump or not, you can see the decision in his face, a psychological dissection for the audience. He wanted a peace between the actions of man and the actions of a machine, form them to be in a sense, one.
Here is an explanation of Manovich's concept of "database cinema," which we will discuss in class.
The urgent business of kino-eye.
Wednesday, March 16, 2011
Tom Gunning on Modernity
Gunning on Modernity:
It could be argued that techniques of circulation define the intersecting transformations in technology and industry that we call modernity. By "modernity" I refer less to a demarcated historical period than to a change in experience. This new configuration of experience was shaped by a large number of factors, which were clearly dependent on the change in production marked by the Industrial Revolution. It was also, however, equally characterized by the transformation in daily life wrought by the growth of capitalism and advances in technology: the growth of urban traffic, the distribution of mass-produced good, and successive new technologies of transportation and communication. While the nineteenth century witnessed the principal conjunction of these transformations in Europe and American, with a particularly crisis coming towards the turn of the century, modernity has not yet exhausted its transformations and has a different pace in different areas of the globe.
The earliest fully developed image of this transformation of experience comes, I believe, with the railway, which embodies the complex realignment of practices which modern circulation entails.
Tom Gunning "Tracing the Individual Body: Photography, Detectives, and Early Cinema" in Charney, Leo and Vanessa R. Schwartz. Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995.
It could be argued that techniques of circulation define the intersecting transformations in technology and industry that we call modernity. By "modernity" I refer less to a demarcated historical period than to a change in experience. This new configuration of experience was shaped by a large number of factors, which were clearly dependent on the change in production marked by the Industrial Revolution. It was also, however, equally characterized by the transformation in daily life wrought by the growth of capitalism and advances in technology: the growth of urban traffic, the distribution of mass-produced good, and successive new technologies of transportation and communication. While the nineteenth century witnessed the principal conjunction of these transformations in Europe and American, with a particularly crisis coming towards the turn of the century, modernity has not yet exhausted its transformations and has a different pace in different areas of the globe.
The earliest fully developed image of this transformation of experience comes, I believe, with the railway, which embodies the complex realignment of practices which modern circulation entails.
Tom Gunning "Tracing the Individual Body: Photography, Detectives, and Early Cinema" in Charney, Leo and Vanessa R. Schwartz. Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995.
Ruttmann
Some of you watched Berlin: Symphony of a City yesterday. You might be interested in comparing Ruttmann's city-symphony to another work, his 1921 abstract animation Opus I. It's interesting to compare the "documentary" style of Berlin with this earlier work, a melange of painting, dance, and music.
Wednesday, March 9, 2011
blog sites
For creating your blog I suggest three sites:
blogger.com
wordpress.com
livejournal.com
They all have their points, so you might want to play around. The simplest, I find, is blogger, and that's what I am using for this blog.
blogger.com
wordpress.com
livejournal.com
They all have their points, so you might want to play around. The simplest, I find, is blogger, and that's what I am using for this blog.
Rose Hobart
Rose Hobart's collage makes extensive use of the 1931 jungle flick, East of Borneo. East of Borneo is now in the public domain so you can torrent it here if you like, perfectly legally. The film narrates the story of Linda Randolph, who goes to Borneo to track down her errant husband. She meets up with not only her spouse but also the Prince of Marudu and a bewildering array of animals from all corners of the globe, though principal players in the animal kingdom are a horde, or herd, of frantic crocodiles. The Prince, he tells us, is descended from a volcano visible through palace windows, and the extinction of his life will be marked by the extinction of Marudu by volcanic eruption. And so it is.
Only fragments of this story remain in Cornell's transporting collage. Cornell has removed the "spine" of narrative to draw our attention instead to the body of Rose Hobart, moving through the space of a series of shots. Cornell's collage pays homage to the silent screen, stripping the film of its sound and substituting recorded music, surreally asynchronous with the images.
Cornell created his collage film from discarded film reels, cutting together a new film from material remnants. It was the first film he made and first exhibited in December 1936 as part of a collection entitled "Goofy Newsreels" (Sitney 77; the other films were unaltered by Cornell). Cornell screened the film at "silent speed," that is, at a slow speed typically used to project silent films which were shot at a slower speed to talking films (Sitney 75). This slow speed gave the film a dreamlike quality, augmented by his showing the film filtered through a blue glass plate (Sitney 76). The film attains its quality of almost opacity.
Whereas East of Borneo ends with a volcanic eruption, Cornell cut into Rose Hobart's last moments images of a solar eclipse intercut with an image of a ball falling into water. Whereas the action of East of Borneo is propulsive, externally energetic, the movements in these concluding scenes are implosive or transitory in their nature. In this perhaps they echo the nature of the collage itself, causing the story of East of Borneo to collapse into a series of scenes which are repetitious and transitory themselves.
You may like to ponder the monkey who makes a brief appearance as Rose's companion. In East of Borneo this monkey meets a swift and unpleasant end. In Rose Hobart its appearance is also transitory, auguring not only the film's origin in a "jungle movie," but also a series of representations of animal-human interactions that will reach their zenith for us in King Kong and Wise Blood. Perhaps it's not accidental that an advertisement for East of Borneo appears on the marquee of a cinema in Peter Jackson's remake of King Kong.
Only fragments of this story remain in Cornell's transporting collage. Cornell has removed the "spine" of narrative to draw our attention instead to the body of Rose Hobart, moving through the space of a series of shots. Cornell's collage pays homage to the silent screen, stripping the film of its sound and substituting recorded music, surreally asynchronous with the images.
Cornell created his collage film from discarded film reels, cutting together a new film from material remnants. It was the first film he made and first exhibited in December 1936 as part of a collection entitled "Goofy Newsreels" (Sitney 77; the other films were unaltered by Cornell). Cornell screened the film at "silent speed," that is, at a slow speed typically used to project silent films which were shot at a slower speed to talking films (Sitney 75). This slow speed gave the film a dreamlike quality, augmented by his showing the film filtered through a blue glass plate (Sitney 76). The film attains its quality of almost opacity.
Whereas East of Borneo ends with a volcanic eruption, Cornell cut into Rose Hobart's last moments images of a solar eclipse intercut with an image of a ball falling into water. Whereas the action of East of Borneo is propulsive, externally energetic, the movements in these concluding scenes are implosive or transitory in their nature. In this perhaps they echo the nature of the collage itself, causing the story of East of Borneo to collapse into a series of scenes which are repetitious and transitory themselves.
Wednesday, March 2, 2011
blog
This is the blog for ENGL3604, Cinematic Modernism, as it is being taught in 2011. I originally taught the unit in 2007, using this blog. This year, I will be adding to the content of the unit of study as it shifts in emphasis and interest, directed by both my experience of teaching the unit last time and by the interests of class members. Some material will be repeated, but you can read the 2007 entries if you want to see one version of its life.
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