For E.A. Dupont's Piccadilly
Piccadilly Circus, 2007
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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