Experimental Film and Video: An Anthology
302
Experimental Film and Video: An Anthology
302eBook
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Overview
The past 40 years of technological innovation have significantly altered the materials of production and revolutionized the possibilities for experiment and exhibition. Not since the invention of film has there been such a critical period of major change in the imaging technologies accessible to artists. Bringing together key artists in film, video, and digital media, the anthology of Experimental Film and Video revisits the divergent philosophical and critical discourses of the 1970s and repositions these debates relative to contemporary practice. Forty artists have contributed images, and 25 artists reflect on the diverse critical agendas, contexts, and communities that have affected their practice across the period from the late 1960s to date. Along with an introduction by Jackie Hatfield and forewords by Sean Cubitt and Al Rees, this illustrated anthology includes interviews and recent essays by filmmakers, video artists, and pioneers of interactive cinema. Experimental Film and Video opens up the conceptual avenues for future practice and related critical writing.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780861969067 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | John Libbey Publishing |
| Publication date: | 08/09/2006 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 302 |
| File size: | 10 MB |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Jackie Hatfield is an artist and writer who creates expanded and participatory cinematic artworks. She is co-editor of two critical books concerning gender and technology in art practice, Desire by Design and Digital Desires.
Read an Excerpt
Experimental Film and Video
An Anthology
By Jackie Hatfield
John Libbey Publishing Ltd
Copyright © 2015 John Libbey Publishing Ltd.All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-86196-906-7
CHAPTER 1
Post Future Past Perfect
Grahame Weinbren
In a historic passage Mallarmé describes the terror, the sense of sterility, that the poet experiences when he sits down to his desk, confronts the sheet of paper before him on which his poem is supposed to be composed, and no words come to him. But we might ask, Why could not Mallarmé, after an interval of time, have simply got up from his desk and produced the blank sheet of paper as the poem that he sat down to write ? Indeed, in support of this, could one imagine anything that was more expressive of, or would be held to exhibit more precisely, the poet's feelings of inner devastation than the virginal paper?
Richard Wollheim
The contemporary equivalent of Mallarmé's blank sheet is the infinite plain of a blank word processor window, so effortlessly populated with trivia or outright nonsense that one might easily find typing the first character a formidable obstacle. My issue with creativity is the opposite of this, however. I am cursed with a kind of coagulation or infrangibility. An idea comes to me clear and sharp. However it appears as a single unit, like a mass of hair, straw and scraps of fabric, stuck together with mud, gum and all kinds of gook. The main characteristics of this ball of matter are its density and its indivisibility. It is so heavy, so densely packed that one can't identify a single piece of material as central or binding. At the same time the ideas that form this fecal mass are tightly interwoven, so much so that it appears, to me at least, to comprise one single idea, which ought to be speakable in a single sentence. But it never is. Even though the individual elements when finally broken apart are as often salacious, scatological or feculent as logical, aesthetic, or theoretical, each one is necessary. There is no excess, nothing superfluous or extra, and perhaps the metaphor is not quite accurate for this very reason. To omit one sticky shred would result in incoherence, a failure to lay out a clear line of meaning after the processes of decomposition and reassembly are completed. To turn this superhairball from thought to writing involves unraveling the 3 fibers, piece by piece, and laying them out one behind the next. Often one bit emerges still entangled with others, and what looks like an individual idea or a unitary stream is really itself a complex of thoughts and ideas that themselves cannot be easily individuated. Another problem is that what seems to be a unique element repeats itself again and again like a DNA sequence, but each time in a different context within the mass and therefore with a different meaning.
A picture not unlike my problem with writing is drawn by Freud in his descriptions of the struggle for an analysis of a dream – especially in his case history of the Wolf Man, where the dreamer's most emotionally charged memories, his deepest fears, and his darkest obsessional images are displaced and condensed into the opaque and highly symbolic image of white furry-tailed wolves, sitting on the branches of a walnut tree, staring, staring at the terrified dreamer. Freud admits that there is no logical or correct sequence for the dream components to appear during the processes of psychoanalysis, and that the written sequence of the case history can hardly capture the non-linear, repetitive, emotion-charged process of discovery/invention that the patient has gone through. Now whether this is myth or scientific fact, whether the process of psychoanalysis has any validity as treatment of mental disease, or as depiction of the human mind, is irrelevant. The point is that Freud's description of untangling a highly compressed image into its logical or emotional strands describes, as closely as anything else I've seen, my difficulties with writing. My original concept always seems lucid to me. However, it is a single entity. Taking it apart, disentangling it into its elements and laying them out in a sequence that makes sense, i.e. putting it into words, is the whole process, the whole problem of writing.
With this epistemology as my basic psychological condition, one might wonder why I choose the cinema as my medium of expression. Sculpture or installation may seem to correspond more closely to the inner architecture I have described. However, though the initial image or idea can be best imagined as a spatial form, it is incoherent and incommunicable in this state. The mass must be deconstructed to be comprehended. I am interested in communicating my ideas, not just expressing them. So it is natural that the elements be disengaged from one another and recoded into a form that is characterized by duration. This is the process by which I make my works, and I've tried, in different ways, to capture this process in my films and cinematic installations over the last 30 years, looking always for cinema structures and forms that, paradoxically, can be multi-streamed while unfolding in time. The linearity of the filmstrip doesn't easily adapt to these concepts, so I've repeatedly looked for ways both to undermine and to expand it without rejecting it.
The hair/mud-ball I have in mind for this essay can be partially decomposed into the story of the power of a particular book. The book is elegant, carefully written, and precise, by a man who 5 obviously cared sincerely for his subject. It does not claim to be the last word, and in the preface it announces its shortcomings. Published 30 years ago, the book's influence still hangs over the field of avant-garde, experimental, independent, personal, call-it-what-you-will cinema (each adjective implies a contested aesthetic position). It changed the notion of independent filmmaking, erecting fences between filmmakers who belong in the same yard, and herding together some who ought to be kept fields apart. It is a coherent book. But its very coherency is its wrong-headedness. It ignores, in its analyses though not in its descriptions, the most important thing about cinema – duration – and as a consequence the book's underlying presuppositions and explicit conclusions about the nature of art and art-making belong more to the 19th century than the 20th. Because of these fundamental misunderstandings, combined with its substantial influence, it has left a swathe of destruction in its wake. The shortcomings of this book and its consequences deserve a full-length study. However, this is not the context for it, and I am probably not the person to do it.
1974 was a turning point, not only for me personally as a filmmaker, but for avant-garde cinema in the United States. I had lived in the USA for a year or two and had made a couple of films that fell somewhere between documentary, poetry, music, and conceptual art. In 1974 the borders separating documentary and experimental film were open. There were extreme cases of 'cinema verite' on one side (for example Salesman (1967), by David and Albert Maysles and Charlotte Zwerin and Don't Look Back (1967) by D. A. Pennebaker), and the semi-abstract, dance-like films of Marie Menken, Scott Bartlett, Stan Vanderbeek, and Pat O'Neill on the other, but most independently made works fell somewhere between the exploration of the cinematic image in and of itself, an expression of the idiosyncratic nature of individual vision, and an investigation of some aspect of reality. Fiction film, on the other hand, was another nation. Still the most popular form of cinema, narrative film was the mesmerizing monster that we all had to contend with. And almost all experimental filmmakers acknowledged in their work the magnetism of narrative transposed to film. Indeed the most notorious 'structural' film, Michael Snow's Wavelength (1967), has Hollywood's primal scene at its focal point: i.e. a mysterious unexplained death, the dead man played by filmmaker Hollis Frampton, his body discovered by actress and writer Amy Taubin.
1974 was the publication year of the first edition of P. Adams Sitney's Visionary Film. It is a study of about thirty filmmakers, with precise descriptions of many of their films. The book was read carefully by filmmakers, programmers, and, most significantly, in the backwaters of the academic world of the liberal arts. At that time these swamps were populated by mostly young, 'hip', professors in the English Departments of distinguished major universities. Sitney's book was respectable in a way that the films and filmmakers were not, and therefore filled the gap between the increasing isolation of the university from the culture at large and the recent (but getting more distant) memory of the university's power and influence, its threat in the late 1960s. With Sitney's book as a guide to the films, college classes could stay in touch with underground culture without the danger of interference by racial or economic – i.e. class – difference.
Visionary Film is reactionary. Backed up by a monolithic pre-Foucault view of history as causal and linear, its theoretical approach is based on the literary analytic techniques of Paul de Man and Harold Bloom. Because of these very qualities, it was well understood by the young English professors. They were trained in reading and analyzing poetry, and de Man and Bloom were the intellectual heroes of their party. Sitney's techniques of literary analysis domesticated the raucous films that were its subject, making them appropriate study materials of middle-class higher education, even if (or especially because) there were occasional glimpses of pubic hair. Based on its credentials, combined with its readability and teachability, the book had wide general appeal to the academic world. Visionary Film became the defining voice of the avant-garde cinema, canonizing certain filmmakers, validating certain tendencies, and at the same time, needless to say, excluding other filmmakers and invalidating other approaches.
Sitney's descriptions of films are, as I mentioned earlier, articulate, thorough, and sensitive. His analyses, however, are more problematic. They eschew the time-based aspects of the films in favor of poetics and (in the case of Brakhage) comparison with painting. The painting references are largely to Abstract Expressionism. But the book was written in the early 1970s. Abstract Expressionism is a movement associated with the 1950s, hardly an issue of import to practitioners in the 1960s or 70s. The current art world was dominated by Minimalism, Conceptualism, and the still-vigorously-kicking Pop, with parallels in the world of music of minimalism, free jazz, and indeterminacy. There is no question that such filmmakers as Paul Sharits, Hollis Frampton and Michael Snow were at least aware of, and, more likely, embedded in these very movements. However, in his analysis of their films, Professor Sitney either ignored, or was ignorant of, the concepts and practices that animated the arts of that time. Perhaps an even more troubling problem with Sitney's position was that he had a tendency to view works as monolithic, driven by a single idea or motive. For Sitney, 7 grasping this single idea constituted understanding the film. So Structural Film, most reprehensibly, 'insists on its shape.' This is as vague as defining narrative film as 'telling a story'. The label was rejected by most of the filmmakers that Sitney included in the category, and criticisms of his definition have been repeatedly rehearsed, for example by George Maciunas, who points out, among other things, that his field of view is restricted to a certain clique of filmmakers. It not worth repeating yet again the shortcomings of the definition.
My point is at an angle to the critique of Visionary Film: it is about the effects of the book. Despite its limitations, the notion of structural film spread like a forest fire among young filmmakers, some of who began to make films using Sitney's description as a formula. These may have been the only actual structural films ever made, and they were disastrous – films inspired by Visionary Film were, in a word, thin, and, in another, academic; and finally insignificant. The second effect was that it effectively defined a canon based on aesthetic criteria. It was odd timing – during this period the very notion of the canon was under attack on the grounds that it was, in principle, symptomatic of cultural, gender and racial biases, nevertheless, after Visionary Film it was almost as if experimental film was over and done – here is the list of filmmakers, here is the list of relevant issues, and the shop is now closed. No later book had the impact or influence of Visionary Film. It defined the subject, the objects of study, the relevant figures and the approach to the whole ball of wax. Not only were we younger generation of filmmakers shut out, but we remained shut out, as a lost generation of filmmakers whose work was ignored or reviled.
It is difficult to find in Visionary Film any reference to the elementary notion that the understanding of cinema depends on the fact that the film image undergoes constant transformation. This is a more serious shortcoming than the book's narrowness of vision. To experience cinema is to rely on memory and re-evaluation of what one has seen, on anticipation of what is to come, on milestones and signposts, on repetition and variation. Furthermore, films that attempt to do what is, to my mind, most appropriate to the cinema, that is perform multiple functions simultaneously, were either considered unworthy of consideration, or their multi-faceted ness was ignored. Sitney's underlying critical philosophy was: one concept per film. It is this sense of unity that allowed his definition to become a formula, and differentiated those films that are thought of as the core avant-garde film canon from those that followed. One must keep in mind, however, that the most interesting films, not only of the 1960s and 70s, but throughout the hundred year history of cinema, have been those that keep many balls, many kinds of ball, in the air at once.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Experimental Film and Video by Jackie Hatfield. Copyright © 2015 John Libbey Publishing Ltd.. Excerpted by permission of John Libbey Publishing Ltd.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Foreword by Sean Cubitt, viii,Foreword by A.L. Rees, x,
Introduction Jackie Hatfield, xii,
SECTION I Philosophies and Critical Histories of Avant-Garde Film and Current Practice, 1,
Chapter 1 Post Future Past Perfect Grahame Weinbren, 3,
Chapter 2 Matter's Time Time For Material Peter Gidal, 18,
Chapter 3 Films and Installations – A Systems View of Nature Chris Welsby, 26,
Chapter 4 A Line Through My Work Nicky Hamlyn, 36,
Chapter 5 A Few Notes on Filmmaking Jayne Parker, 47,
Chapter 6 Film Noise Aesthetics Rob Gawthrop, 53,
Chapter 7 Line Describing a Cone and Related Films Anthony McCall, 61,
SECTION II Languages of Representation in Film and Video: Thresholds of Materiality, 75,
Chapter 8 Trilogical Distractions Lis Rhodes, 77,
Chapter 9 The 'autoethnographic' in Chantal Akerman's News from Home, and an Analysis of Almost Out and Stages of Mourning Sarah Pucill, 83,
Chapter 10 Film, The Body, The Fold An Interview with Nina Danino on Now I Am Yours Nina Danino and Susanna Poole, 93,
Chapter 11 Attitudes 1-8 Katherine Meynell, 102,
Chapter 12 Video Works 1973–1983 David Critchley, 107,
Chapter 13 Early Video Tapes 1978–1987 Chris Meigh-Andrews 113,
Chapter 14 Andrew Kotting. What he does, how he does it and the context in which it has been done: An Alphabetarium of Kotting Gareth Evans and Andrew Kotting, 126,
Chapter 15 Ardent for Some Desperate Glory: Revisiting Smothering Dreams Daniel Reeves, 137,
Chapter 16 War Stories, or Why I Make Videos About Old Soldiers Cate Elwes, 151,
Chapter 17 Moving Parts: The Divergence of Practice Vicky Smith, 163,
SECTION III Philosophies and Critical Histories of Video Art to Cinema, 169,
Chapter 18 Mutation on a Form Karen Mirza and Brad Butler, 171,
Chapter 19 Video: Incorporeal, Incorporated Stephen Partridge, 180,
Chapter 20 Tamara Krikorian – Defending the Frontier Cate Elwes, 190,
Chapter 21 Another Place – David Hall Jackie Hatfield, 200,
Chapter 22 Alchemy and the Digital Imaginary David Larcher, interviewed by Stephen Littman, 212,
Chapter 23 Reflections on My Practice and Media Specificity Malcolm Le Grice, 220,
Chapter 24 Expanded Cinema – Proto, Post-Photo Jackie Hatfield, 237,
Chapter 25 Image Con Text (1978-2003): Film/Performance/Video/Digital Mike Leggett, 246,
SECTION IV,
Images, 263,