This Is Called Moving: A Critical Poetics of Film
320
This Is Called Moving: A Critical Poetics of Film
320eBook
Available on Compatible NOOK devices, the free NOOK App and in My Digital Library.
Related collections and offers
Overview
Explores how two language systems inform and cross-fertilize the author’s work
As the writer, director, producer, and cinematographer of almost all her 30 films, videos, and shorts, Abigail Child has been recognized as a major and influential practitioner of experimental cinema since the early 1970s. Hallmarks of her style are the appropriation and reassembly of found footage and fragments from disparate visual sources, ranging from industrial films and documentaries to home movies, vacation photography, and snippets of old B movies.
The resulting collages and montages are cinematic narratives that have been consistently praised for their beauty and sense of wonder and delight in the purely visual. At the same time, Child's films are noted for their incisive political commentary on issues such as gender and sexuality, class, voyeurism, poverty, and the subversive nature of propaganda.
In the essays of This Is Called Moving, Child draws on her long career as a practicing poet as well as a filmmaker to explore how these two language systems inform and cross-fertilize her work. For Child, poetry and film are both potent means of representation, and by examining the parallels between them—words and frames, lines and shots, stanzas and scenes—she discovers how the two art forms re-construct and re-present social meaning, both private and collective.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780817381301 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Alabama Press |
| Publication date: | 04/25/2011 |
| Series: | Modern and Contemporary Poetics |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 320 |
| File size: | 8 MB |
About the Author
Abigail Child is Professor of Film and Animation at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and author of A Motive for Mayhem and Artificial Memory.Tom Gunning is Professor of Art History at the University of Chicago and author of D. W. Griffith and the Origins of American Narrative Film: The Early Years at Biograph.
Read an Excerpt
THIS IS CALLED MOVING A Critical Poetics of Film
By ABIGAIL CHILD The University of Alabama Press Copyright © 2005 The University of Alabama Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8173-5160-1
Chapter One SEX TALK
Invited by MIX Film and Video Festival, 1991, New York, to be on a panel discussing experimental film, I found myself examining the radical nature of "outside" identities and placing this in a context of radical form. The result was a meditation on content and form, on predilections and sympathies of such a relation in the experimental/ gay film scene, and on the cross-connections and potential political implications of such a conjunction. Coming from San Francisco, I had experienced a fluid exchange in both writing and film communities. The scene glittered with local gay "stars" of the avant-garde film world, among them George Kuchar, Warren Sonbert, Nathaniel Dorsky, Jerry Hiler, James Broughton, and Michael Wallin. Back in New York the scenes were larger and more divided. The MIX festival didn't really bring gay and straight artists together, but it did bring a wave of populist support to experimental work in the 1980s, counteracting the then-current alignment of white/hetero/male/ formalist vs. gay/black/Latin/identity positions. Conceived by experimental filmmaker Jim Hubbard and writer Sarah Schulman, inspired by the death of legendary Pittsburgh filmmaker Roger Jacoby, MIX emphasized from the beginning the connection between experimental and gay "outsider" experience and aesthetics. The result was a rare and intensely popular populist festival that has retained its intentions and connections to the community more than a decade later.
Before Agreement
Radical form equals radical content. Radical content radicalizes form. Form and content shape each other. Content just "seems" to represent us better. We look for content. We look at form.
I want to say: only in North America and Western Europe do we have the possibility to discuss this issue. I want to say: the division is not a "given." I want to say: that this distancing of context from content is achieved with loss.
There is only one moment in history that I know when form is the accepted stage of invention. This is Russia in the 1920s, where, significantly, the contemporaneous social order was undergoing sweeping (revolutionary) change.
An interest in form is often taken as elitist or decadent (I take that position myself in the second paragraph above). Why is this so? Because we cannot back away from ourselves far enough to see the form of our lives? Because we are not allowed to see our lives in the form of the world? Then, I want to ask: how does marginalizing an interest in basic structures abet the status quo?
There is no guarantee of a radical order-there have been radically fascist films and gay fascists-yet the challenge of difference and experience of difference, of living as a devalued person in a defended culture, creates/demands expressive freedoms. What we might call the visionary element is present in both.
Radical comes from root, forming a radius, also a ray, a branch. It relates to root as in origin, an original reading or a fundamental principle. It is inherent or implanted by nature; innate, native.
With that definition in mind, the next question is: when does radical come to mean extreme? I theorize that moment: when the branch or root is considered far from the center, far from the norm or average. The Oxford Dictionary lists 1802: with "an advocate of 'radical reform' belonging to the extreme section of the Liberal Party." The 1800s mark increased centralization in government and normalization in society, a time in which profit is served by erasing difference. The period marks developing machine production, sophisticated printing and distribution, the growth of media (the newspaper and, soon, the photograph) to influence and invade the popular mind.
I like to think of the continuing radical tradition as a root. However partial and invisible, it continues to surface. But if I think of the radical tradition in life and art as the "return of the repressed," I need to recognize as well that it is the existence of the repressed that demands our radicalism. It is not that we are "underneath" and surfacing but that we are part of the surface being denied substance. That we are an authentic voice and our invisibility a reflection of the entrenched powers that be. Or, at worse, a reflection of what we ourselves deny. For as part of the socialization process fear is conditioned, and the field of options is narrowed. We are taught to think alike, look alike, and love alike. But it is a lie.
Where homosexuality is visible in films, it is too often stereotypical, antisocial, or token. The character is a butt of jokes or dysfunctional or dies, or her action and being is "laundered." Similarly, the experimental vision is called "a special effect" or, more stringently, performs as dream, hallucination, or drugged state. Never are the alternative ways of perception placed inside the perimeter of the real.
I ask: how does marginalizing an interest in form and structure abet the status quo?
The big lie is that the dominant forces want us to believe and believe themselves that their view is the objective truth and everything else a special interest. "A special effect." Anything that is outside this view needs to be squashed or else people might define their lives by and for themselves.
The issue is always between a false and uniform objectivity and an expansive field.
Movies play a special role in this galaxy of oppression and freedom. As technological events movies and the media allow the audience to be mechanically absent. They teach us distance and passivity. They teach us to be invisible. Films "screen the world, make me invisible; and they screen the world from me, that is screen its existence." It has long been the operative strategy of experimental film to expose that distance. To challenge and shatter with obstreperous sense of new definition, to raise possibilities, to admit variance beyond your own or anyone's imaginings.
You want to smash the stereotype of gender.
You want to smash the machinery of mechanized and victimized vision.
You want to push the ghetto out in the world.
Always we come back to permission, to difference, and the need to unloosen polarization, be it of sex or rhetoric.
In the early 1980s I am back in NYC living in a downtown Eastside apartment within a community of avant-garde musicians and dancers, as well as poets and filmmakers. It is the period of punk, art bands, multiple reading series, little magazines, fervent dialogue, and intense collegiality. I perform in a piece by downtown New York choreographer Sally Silvers at St. Mark's Poetry Project, and soon after we begin a correspondence on "Women and Modernism," for publication in a special issue of Poetics Journal (volume 4, 1984) edited by West Coast poets Lyn Hejinian and Barrett Watten. This is my first literary collaboration, and we begin with a no-holds-barred letter exchange over six months, which we then edit together, coming up with topic divisions and titles in the process. I remember stretching out on the floor with Sally in my tiny Ludlow Street apartment over cut-and-pasted papers as we moved sections around throughout the afternoon. Indented text is Silvers's; flush-left text is mine.
Rewire/Speak in Disagreement
(With Sally Silvers)
1. Almost Necessary but Not Sufficient Criteria Particular to Women for Production of Modern Art
We defeated the lack of expectation.
Enter the social, conditioning, context ... OK, OK.
Perhaps we should use the word girl in every sense of "woman" in this essay-would that drive the point in a way similar to your suggesting a she when the he was always written? When writing about girls and modernism we have to talk about oppression ... and find the ram-battering tiresome. Women have been traditionally involved in issues of the body in art-arts of presence-theater, dance, voice. This is partly economics (body is cheaper than paper and pen even), but also women's bodies seem definitional-as presence, as objects. Our bodies are expected information. Women tend to see themselves relating to and as bodies instead of to and as history. Men, with their tangible symbol/organ/ phallus, are challenged to compete, to locate their desire in the (unattainable) power of the world. Women are more ambiguous in locating an identity, a location in relation to the world (in addition to being appropriated in men's sense of the territory available for them).
I disagree here with your analysis, where you talk about "women lacking a lack symbol." Perhaps we lack a "plus" symbol? Although I always thought we had two in the sense of breasts. I think it more fruitful (a "feminine" adjective perhaps?) to think of phallus as metonymic power, and, however reflective of Patriarchy and Society, not encompassing the totality of Women, neither women's desire nor women's potential. Power again. How we live in a world of male language and the need to redefine this: their terms.
But what I mean is that women, not being trained in the unattainable desire for power/authority, have a chance at a clearly distinct kind of maneuverability-which to me is one of the essences of modernism-maneuvering, recreating the subject using the materials of our mediums. Modernism as getting legs instead of power.
To put down their reigns (reins): defeat prior constitutionality. To give our readers an idea of what P. Charles gazes at in the royal bedroom every night, the Examiner placed Di's face over the body of a fashion model exhibiting the lines of sexy lingerie.
Genital identification. Even the maids aren't black. Historically women have been bound to bonds of relation. Conditioned to Condition. Women are like nature, which is what modernism bases its conquest on. Women were domestic goods so didn't sell or were sold and had earlier obsolescence. They enter the economics but not the politics. Survival based not on knowledge, information, self-sufficiency but on finding a mediator and not going public. Reflex survivors.
Demonstration photos inevitably show a young Japanese woman, a tentative smile on her face, with the robot's 7' 5" arm coiled around her.
Possession of the token of power = has a man.
Domestic speech-what is used in the home in the nuclear family-is irrelevant in the American version where father/husband supports wife/mother, kitchen, kids-the division then of experience is so separate-the wife/mother home front limited to children's speech, consumer advertisement, pubescent addictions, and advocacy of prevailing (and duplicating) role models from a limited closed spectrum -how is an exchange of experience to be realized?
Women's lack exists-is this endless elaboration of perverted social realities, social psychologies, social behavior dysfunction. Feminine, the adjective, and equally masculine, the adjective, partake of the restricting cultural values, define your restraints, shape the lacks.
The gender argument is fucked-making dogma out of social conditioning.
It's just a speech defect because women are forced to accommodate men.
Dichotomous thought is antagonistic to the future, locked into the past.
It's not this equation:
nurturer = earth mechanic = destroyer
No female essence-intuition the small change of the patriarchy. We have to guard against feminizing the irrational, women's prelinguistic association with nature. No primal liberty between the meshes of the social body. As you say, destroy the dichotomies, which structure and wash the patriarchy and insure our position in relation to and formed by power. At the same time defeat coherent subjectivity on which capitalism, idealism is based-point up multiple contradictions, which are clearly delineated and not unspoken, silent, taped shut. Constant strategies.
Which means there is something to do, rather than apologize and explain endlessly the state of things-both male and female have the political/aesthetic job to fracture the social conditions we in this present exist in, show up their absurdities-for life as well as gender reasons.
Articulate the differences with a fig. New realities into new speech.
Speak in disagreement, enter the discourse.
Unless women see their role as humanizing-emotionalizing the forces, personalizing-and then we're cooked and women leave modernism altogether.
Perhaps they have to become more improperly bred in the fear of desire.
Obviously women know too much to try to join the club.
Oh dear little brushes. You can buy a kit and decorate your loved ones. You can buy a kit and go into business. Tattoo-the contact sport of the eighties. Darwin Was Wrong-across their young men's chests.
Obsolete mothers play a role in our lives.
The logo for his museum the design of a heart beating the single word mother (= the most popular tattoo ever created). Defensive signaling of a dying ethos, as well as a fashion statement.
Went up there to prove their manhood, saying: Be an essayist. Be identified. Be focused. Exclude digression, trivia, hilarity. [But ... but ...]
Bull on the above rationalized clarity of expression.
A good thought is a series of resonances.
The English makes its propositions apparently verifiable.
A road to power in quick thinking is the supposition.
A seduction to think office-ties-master-electronics.
While knowledge is another kind of power and is genderless. This our entry.
Yet when you say fuck clarity of expression/focus, I disagree. "Oh what a pretty cute thing, so enigmatic, so easy to ignore." It fits too easily into the basis of existing repression. Our entry is knowledge, but if it is to be "genderless," it can't reinforce stereotypes of the dark, mysterious internal = female expression. Our thoughts will contribute through multivalenced force; with a vision, a uniqueness that has clarity as an intention. How else are we to have a dialogue and learn from e ach other as women? Let's go beyond the role-model method; beyond just another woman on the list.
I'm not talking of hiding behind veils of obfuscation. I'm suggesting rather that the "call to order" is played against us, played against our media. That the traditional limits of the form define in a prohibitive way the boundaries of the possible. And the thrust of extension, of criticism, that I choose to see as part of the work can be blunted by an obeisant clarity. My work is clear to me. Is as complicated as it appears because it wanted more complicated clarities to keep going. I don't want a work I could see in my mind's eye, at the start from the front. I wouldn't make such a work, not need to, no need for. I'm against a solved work. Not a triumph of failure. But a material (un-martial) term of manifold contradictions, construction, stand (fall) (the body metaphor doesn't hold)-complete parts. Nonhierarchical. I'm looking for an unsolved work that satisfies. You want to be a s clear as possible. But not some predestined clarity.
What you didn't understand in my text wasn't where I thought you wouldn't. Accepting the authority of their definition is playing their game.
Can figure out the project of undoing the damage. Not rewarding ourselves for not fucking up the world when we've been fucked instead.
Yet still. The terms of the indictment: who's inventing whom?
The question of power and not the question of "why not enough women?"-whether that be in the dance scene or film or writing. The need for support, for women present.
2. Every Bite Is a Revolution of the Material
We got to it before it had time to finish.
Modernism for me is not minimal. Is rather inclusive, something of the Futurists' action momentum, naturally fractured as movies are (machines are/organic cells are/attention is/"component"), and the unity humans regularly seek (habit) would be by now outside a system-shakes tile habituated, no form/force/system of givens encompassing truth enough.
Instead a charge, a fracturing on all levels of our consciousness, finally getting legs instead of power. Modernism for me is definitely not orderly (as you say minimal). Even surrealism, cubism present the unconscious as surplus code, as orderly explosion or worshipful progress of the imagination. Expressionism was messy, chaotic, but too attached to the existential self. (Our) modernism is realism in the sense that it recognizes the complexities, the identities of things, of material (the components, the cell), but it doesn't make organic relationships between these things. It also interprets the things themselves as relations.
It makes sense to me that the modern insistence on discourse, the text, emerges now as a substance that doesn't try to remember, doesn't represent, is not dream, is itself and actualizes that: the materialization of words, paint, celluloid, noise. Could modernism be a platform for women perhaps, a stance outside the patriarchy? Is there a way to read Gertrude Stein, for instance, as quotidian and daily, as nonhierarchical in her syntax and content?
(Continues...)
Excerpted from THIS IS CALLED MOVING by ABIGAIL CHILD Copyright © 2005 by The University of Alabama Press. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.