Avant-garde Film Research Articles

Expanding on the Cinema of Prayōga as an Embodied Approach to Experimental Film

In this paper I revisit the concept of Cinema of Prayoga, a theoretical framework for the study of experimental film and video proposed by Indian film critic Amrit Gangar. I re-evaluate its potential as an alternative approach to experimental film. In particular I articulate how the Yoga philosophy can further be explored within the context of this framework, to address notions of embodiment in experimental film. I point to how Indian philosophy can be useful towards interpreting cinema globally, with the specific example of American avant-garde film.

Film Review: Forsaken Fragments

Review| June 01 2022 Film Review: Forsaken Fragments Forsaken Fragments by Robert Gardner, 50 min., 2021. Scott MacDonald Scott MacDonald Scott MacDonald’s many books on independent cinema include collections of interviews with independent filmmakers, the five-volume Critical Cinema series from University of California Press, and more recently Avant-Doc: Intersections of Documentary and Avant-Garde Cinema (2014) and The Sublimity of Document: Cinema as Diorama (Avant-Doc 2) (2019)—as well as explorations of particular moving-image artists and films/videos, and of institutions that have kept independent media alive. He teaches film history and programs film events at Hamilton College in Clinton, New York. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Afterimage (2022) 49 (2): 104–109. https://doi.org/10.1525/aft.2022.49.2.104 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Scott MacDonald; Film Review: Forsaken Fragments. Afterimage 1 June 2022; 49 (2): 104–109. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/aft.2022.49.2.104 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentAfterimage Search In October 2009 Bard College honored Robert Gardner’s filmmaking career, which included remarkable, if now sometimes controversial, contributions to ethnographic cinema—Dead Birds (1963), Rivers of Sand (1974), Deep Hearts (1981), Forest of Bliss (1986), and Ika Hands (1988)—as well as dozens of episodes of Screening Room, a late-night, Boston-area TV interview show that focused on independent filmmakers. For the Bard event, Gardner put together a fifty-minute compilation titled “Nine Forsaken Fragments.” In his comments at Bard, Gardner was diffident about the individual fragments or the compilation being considered finished films. As time has passed—along with Gardner himself in 2014, and Peter Hutton, who had organized the Bard event, in 2016—Gardner’s “fragments” have become something more than a compilation for a one-time occasion. In 2021, Documentary Educational Resources, the distributor of much of Gardner’s work, released Forsaken Fragments: a compilation of fourteen short pieces that together can be... You do not currently have access to this content.

Expanded Cinema, Recycled Cinema

VALIE EXPORT and Agnès Varda both made moving-image installations about ping pong (EXPORT’s 1968 Ping Pong and Varda’s 2006 “Ping Pong, Tong, et Camping”), a subject each returned to on multiple occasions in subsequent works across different media forms. Apprehending ping pong as a cinematic thing and gesture, this essay considers how EXPORT and Varda, each in her own way, unsettle and expand the rules of the game in ways shaped by their distinct, and distinctly feminist, politics. This essay explores these works and the artists’ repeated returns to ping pong by staging a “volley,” alternating between different scenes and iterations across Europe and the US, from the 1960s to the 2010s. Additional works discussed include EXPORT’s 1980s television documentary on avant-garde film, The Armed Eye, and Varda’s final two documentaries, Faces Places (2017) and Varda by Agnès (2019).

할리우드 재난영화와 미국적 이데올로기 그리고 〈클로버필드〉의 장르 전복

This essay has twin foci. First, it reviews some of the 2000’s disaster movies—particularly, Alfonso Cuaron’s Children of Men (2006) and Francis Lawrence’s I am Legend (2007) along with a 1988’s hit movie Die Hard—from the perspective of American cultural archetype moulded and developed by Ralph Waldo Emerson and later R.W.B. Lewis. Then it argues that all the Hollywood disaster movies are likely to reinforce American ideologies such as American dream and American exceptionalism by repeating and recreating American founding myth. Such a reading would possibly provide a new perspective through which we can read Hollywood disaster films prevailing these days after the outbreak of COVID-19 pandemic. Second, this essay demonstrates how Matt Reeves’s 2008 film Cloverfield revises the codes and conventions of those Hollywood disaster movies through a strategic use of subjective camera. Its peculiar use of first-person camera not only effectively debunks the metaphysical center of the film hallucinatorily created by third-person omniscient viewpoint; it also strips white male heroes—especially, father figures as saviors of the world from disasters—of American cultural authority. Furthermore, the film’s telling representation of unlimited and relentless violence that exceeds the subjective camera angle makes it difficult to imagine what the post-disaster America would be like. In this sense, Cloverfield expands the ideological and political possibility of the disaster genre, although we could hardly say that the film is an outright avant-garde film that provides a new vision about disasters and America.

On Werner Schroeter

Abstract In this essay, artist Nick Mauss draws attention to the slippage between image and sound in Werner Schroeter's early films, proposing that the deliberate misalignment between song, speech, gesture, and affect opens a space of radical intimacies and unforeseen expressive potentialities that inflect Mauss' own work. Tracing Schroeter's influences through romantic and modernist literature, avant-garde film, philosophy, pop music, and, most importantly, through the advent of the lip sync as a performative resistance to interpellation, Mauss also addresses Schroeter's artistic debt to the filmmaker Edward Owens.

Haptic visuality, sensation and politics in Eisenstein’s film theory

ABSTRACT In this article, I analyse the convergences between haptic visuality and Sergei Eisenstein’s film theory, in particular his ideas on rhythm, sensorial thought, organic unity, pathos and ecstasy in order to consider the extent to which they constitute the core of a ‘cinema of sensation’ that, for Eisenstein, serves a very important political drive. Simultaneously positioned at the core of avant-garde criticism of traditional models of representation on the one hand, and political revolutionary ideas on the other, cinema appears, to Eisenstein, as a privileged space in which to bring the representative imagery dominant in ‘bourgeois societies’ into question and to put art at the service of the Revolution. My intent is to assess how Eisenstein combines avant-garde aesthetic aims and experimental film practices with the goals of politically engaged creations. This combination is achieved through the exploration of a haptic use of images that prefigure a ‘cinema of sensation’. This article therefore takes the form of a double analysis: on the one hand, it examines the relationship between haptic visuality and Eisenstein’s film theories; on the other, it questions how haptic visuality plays a fundamental role in harmonising the apparently opposite vectors of aesthetic avant-garde and materialistic political drives.

With and Without, Wise and Otherwise, José and José

With and Without, Wise and Otherwise, José and <i>José</i>

Primary sources for a definition of Cubism in cinema

The article presents four documentary sources in order to elucidate the impact of Cubism and its interpretation in French narrative avant-garde cinema between 1918 and 1923: ‘Cinema and Cubism’, by Louis Delluc; ‘Cubism and Cinema’, by Louis Vauxcelles; ‘Cubist Films’, by Yvan Goll; and ‘Cubism in Cinema’, by Robert Mallet-Stevens. Although filmmaking took certain influences from Cubism after it had been absorbed by other aesthetic movements (Art déco, Purism), the role played by film criticism and theory in the definition of Cubism applied to the cinema is decisive, given that the filmmakers of the French school developed a whole theoretical corpus through which they defended the entry of this new medium into the world of art.

Gossip, the Common Denominator

Gossip, the Common Denominator

Scratching the Surface: Adventures in Storytelling by Harvey Ovshinsky

Reviewed by: Scratching the Surface: Adventures in Storytelling by Harvey Ovshinsky John McMillian Harvey Ovshinsky. Scratching the Surface: Adventures in Storytelling. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2021. Pp. 272. Illustrations. Paperback: $27.99. I recently came across a line by the epigrammatically clever writer Henry Oliver, who devised what he calls "The Fitzgerald Rule" (after the British novelist Penelope Fitzgerald): "You spot talent by looking at what people persist at, not what persistently happens to them." By that measure, Harvey Ovshinsky—a Detroit-born-and-raised writer and creator who has thrived in a variety of mediums—is talented indeed. In his warm and inviting memoir, Scratching the Surface: Adventures in Storytelling, Ovshinsky takes us behind the scenes of his work as a journalist, publisher, radio broadcaster, documentary filmmaker, and teacher. Along the way, he offers guidance and lessons for readers who may share his enthusiasm for storytelling. Ovshinsky's childhood was not a happy one. His socialist father, Stanford R. Ovshinsky, was an inventor who, among many other [End Page 153] accomplishments, helped pioneer the development of electric cars. But Stan fought frequently with his wife, Norma, and he kept a mistress before the couple finally divorced. (Ovshinsky refers to his parents' "Seven-Year War.") During this time, Ovshinsky showed early flashes of creativity. When he was in eighth grade, for instance, he co-created The Transylvanian Newsletter, a mimeographed fanzine for kids who liked horror and monster movies. After graduating from Mumford High School in 1965, Ovshinsky was forced to briefly live with his mother in Los Angeles, where he got caught up in the Sunset Strip's burgeoning post-beat bohemian scene. He watched avant-garde films at L.A.'s famed Fifth Estate coffee house, and under the tutelage of the legendary publisher Art Kunkin, he briefly worked at the nation's first underground newspaper, the Los Angeles Free Press. All the while, however, he pined for his previous life in Michigan. Upon returning to Detroit in 1966, Ovshinsky befriended radical artists John and Leni Sinclair and became the publisher of The Fifth Estate. This was another pioneering and provocative underground rag, which catalyzed political tumult and contributed mightily to the growth of Detroit's countercultural community. From my vantage as a historian of the Vietnam Era, the book's most impactful passages describe the Motor City in the late 1960s, when it was a hive of rebellious left-wing activity. Bands like the MC5 and Iggy and the Stooges commanded the local music scene. The Detroit Artists Workshop organized concerts, plays, poetry readings, and gallery shows. The Fifth Estate operated out of a wooden building on Plum Street, the popular district for radical and countercultural youths. During the summer of 1967, Ovshinsky helped cover the Detroit riot, which was the bloodiest and most destructive upheaval to occur in the United States since the Civil War. All the while, Detroit's notorious Red Squad surveilled Ovshinsky and others for supposedly subversive political activities. But this was just the beginning of "Hippie Harvey's" career in a variety of creative mediums. At twenty-one, he became news director at WABX, a beloved community-minded, free-form progressive rock station. Later, he hosted popular talk shows at a different station. He produced award-winning documentary films, and he describes numerous setbacks, achievements, and electric moments with his interview subjects. He helped manage a Detroit public television station, and in 1986, after receiving a generous inheritance from his mother, he created HKO Media, a successful film and video production company. [End Page 154] A back cover blurb calls Scratching the Surface a "biotext," and that is a good descriptor. Across the book, a clear theme emerges: An artist should take risks. Ovshinsky was rarely afraid to plunge himself into unfamiliar creative projects. He learned by doing, adapting, and by frequently being way over his head. Ovshinsky reminds us that creative work can, at times, seem impossibly difficult. But one does not need deep reservoirs of talent to tell stories successfully, Ovshinsky says. "You just have to feel strongly about something, or have something important to say or get off your chest. And then you have to find the courage...

The Notion of ‘Avant-garde Cinema’ in Film Practice and Theory of the 1920s

The Notion of ‘Avant-garde Cinema’ in Film Practice and Theory of the 1920s

Underground Films in Factory Town: The New American Cinema Group Travels to Turin, Italy in 1967

Underground Films in Factory Town:The New American Cinema Group Travels to Turin, Italy in 1967 Giaime Alonge (bio) The topic of this essay is the retrospective of New American Cinema works organized in Turin, Italy, in May 1967, at the Unione Culturale, a left-wing cultural organization, very active at the time (as well as today).1 I researched the papers regarding this retrospective, held by the archive of the Unione Culturale, along with some papers held by Susanna Fadini, the daughter of late Edoardo Fadini, a man who plays a very important role in the story I am about to tell. Moreover, I also interviewed a few people who attended the retrospective—experimental filmmaker Tonino De Bernardi; painter and sculptor Ugo Nespolo, who also made several experimental films; and Paolo Bertetto, who at the time was a young film critic and later became an academic with a specific interest in avant-garde cinema.2 I thank all these people, as well as the archive of the Unione Culturale, for their help and the time they devoted to me. I will start by briefly sketching the context in which the 1967 retrospective was held. Then I will analyze the content of the retrospective and the way it was organized. Finally, I will close with a few remarks on the impact of the retrospective on the Italian film culture. As you can see from Fay Corthésy's essay included in this dossier, the 1967 Turin retrospective was not the very first retrospective of New American Cinema films that took place in Italy. The first one—the first one in the whole world, actually—according to Fay's extensive and very important research, was held in Spoleto, in the Summer of 1961, at the "Festival dei Due Mondi," the Festival of Two Worlds. But even if it was the Ur-retrospective, the Spoleto program had a relatively modest impact on the Italian cultural scene. In all the [End Page 159] documents, letters, and articles regarding the Turin retrospective that I saw, the Spoleto screenings are never mentioned. On the one hand, it is self-evident that the organizers of the new retrospective had an interest in presenting their program as the first one. But on the other hand, even journalists and critics, who had no connection with the organizers, ever mention the Spoleto program. I do not know exactly why the memory of Spoleto was erased. Maybe 1961 was too early. There was no real interest, in Italy, for underground cinema at the time, while in the late sixties a young generation of avant-garde artists and enthusiasts was emerging. Maybe the Festival dei Due Mondi, dominated by non avant-garde figures such as Luchino Visconti, was not the ideal place to present experimental cinema to a film audience whose culture was deeply connected to the notion of realism. On the contrary, the Unione Culturale in Turin, notwithstanding the relative marginality of both the institution and the city, was a good place to start a revolution. I say "marginality" because Turin was—and still is—a "second city." Albeit a very important economic and cultural center, it has always been a much smaller city than Milan, where real economic power rested, while the political power was, of course, in Rome. In the late sixties, Turin was a sleepy, conformist, provincial city, basically owned by FIAT, the main Italian automaker, which was the biggest employer in town. Moreover, FIAT owned the major local newspaper, La Stampa, and one of the two local soccer clubs, Juventus. So, almost nothing happened in town that the Agnelli family, who owned FIAT, did not like. And what FIAT did not control was controlled either by the Catholic Church or the Communist Party, which both had deep roots in the city, playing a big role in its social and cultural life.3 So, from this perspective, Turin seems a very unlikely place to present experimental films made by a bunch of bohemians. But besides being a provincial factory town, or maybe precisely because it was a provincial factory town, Turin could count on small but very active artistic and intellectual groups. During the twentieth century, many...

Absence in Cinema: The Art of Showing Nothing by Justin Remes

Reviewed by: Absence in Cinema: The Art of Showing Nothing by Justin Remes Cameron Moneo (bio) Absence in Cinema: The Art of Showing Nothing by Justin Remes. Columbia University Press. Film and Culture Series. 2020. 264 pages. $95.00 hardcover; $28.00 paper; also available in e-book Absence in Cinema: The Art of Showing Nothing is a witty, richly detailed book filled with holes, gaps, and omissions. Justin Remes asks us to look at the invisible, to listen to the inaudible, and surprises us with the strangely ample rewards of making ourselves present to an absence—which is, after all, merely "a presence in disguise," with a whole set of unique features.1 This is not the first study of absence in art, but it is the first to pay close attention to absence as a gesture in cinema, that stubbornly audiovisual art (hard emphasis on the visual). Remes's subject is avant-garde cinema, whose manifold uses of absence tend to recast theoretical assumptions about the film medium and expand its aesthetic possibilities. In this way, Absence in Cinema forms a companion volume to Remes's Motion(less) Pictures: The Cinema of Stasis, whose chapter on "monochrome films" already began to beckon us toward the voids we enter here.2 To ward off the infinite abyss of absence in potentia, Remes clarifies that he is dealing in absences that thwart expectation and are strongly defined by their relata. Citing Jean-Paul Sartre, Remes insists on the "real" [End Page 219] relation of absence to what it negates.3 If Yves Klein and Andy Warhol both make invisible artworks, these artworks are phenomenologically distinct from each other, despite all their (non)appearances. The medium of film would seem to present a problem for studies of absence, however, since, in theory and fact, most of what we see in a film is absent from us. Fortunately, cinema's mediated "pseudopresence" is not Remes's concern; rather, he focuses on what Timothy Walsh calls "structured absences," which draw attention to a missing something that would normally have been there.4 With these parameters in place, the ensuing chapters offer case studies of four distinct ways that avant-garde filmmakers have willfully used absence. Remes carefully traces the context, function, and effect of these absences with a methodology based on case-by-case interdisciplinary analysis (e.g., neuroscience when called for), "autobiographical and anecdotal" accounts of absence's potential effects (influenced by Vivian Sobchack's work), and "counterfactual thought experiments" to imagine what we're missing and how it might reshape our experience.5 Chapter 1 looks at—or perhaps listens to?—Walter Ruttmann's imageless film Wochenende (Weekend, 1930).6 This city-based sound collage, commissioned by the Berlin Radio Hour, is often analyzed by sound, music, and radio scholars but less so by film theorists—this despite the fact that Ruttmann exhibited Wochenende in theaters and called it a "blind film."7 (Indeed he recorded his sounds with a film camera, leaving the lens cap on.) For Remes, the conservatism of film theory is partly to blame for this inattention; when ocularcentrism predominates, the imageless film is a contradiction. While Remes heralds Wochenende as a radical work of sound art, relating it to such twentieth-century landmarks as the Italian Futurist Luigi Russolo's art of noises and Pierre Schaeffer's musique concrète, the larger question of the chapter is how to categorize and experience Wochenende as cinema.8 Remes argues that the "promiscuously intermedial" Wochenende poses an ontological challenge, prompting reflection on whether the construction or experience of a work determines what we call cinema.9 Remes presents a case for experience: though Wochenende was made on film, being imageless it can (and did from the start) function as a standalone audio record. Thus, we experience it as a film, per a suggestion by Michel Chion, "with reference to a frame, even if an empty one."10 But what is the function of a frame that shows nothing? Remes concludes by suggesting how Wochenende destabilizes the cinematic encounter [End Page 220] and reorients our senses: at times, the blackness of a screen may occupy one's attention; at...

Een wat lange kerstvakantie in Tsjechoslowakije, maar wel economisch : over een drietal lezingen van de Nederlandse avant-gardistische vormgever, fotograaf en filmmaker Paul Schuitema in Brno en Praag begin januari 1936

The following article deals with a small episode in the manifold relations between the historical avant-garde in the Netherlands and Czechia and Slovakia in the first half of the twentieth century. Early December 1935, the Dutch avant-garde designer, photographer and filmmaker Paul Schuitema decided that the time was ripe for a holiday trip to Czechoslovakia during his Christmas break as teacher at the art academy in The Hague. His destination was Brno, where the designer and just starting architect František Kalivoda lived. Kalivoda had visited Holland in early 1934 touring Dutch cinemas and film clubs with avant-garde films from Czechoslovakia. Kalivoda and Schuitema had become acquainted during Kalivoda’s stay in the Netherlands and most likely invited Schuitema to come over to Brno to show Dutch experimental films in the Moldavian capital in return. Since Schuitema had little money, he proposed to give lectures for honoraria. Whereas two lectures were organized by Kalivoda in Brno in advance, only last-minute a third lecture was arranged in Prague to finance Schuitema's stay over there. As a tourist visiting Czechia for the first time, Schuitema also wanted to see Prague. However, as he found out, the hotel arranged for him was far beyond his budget. Solace offered his final Czech lecture in the Prague Museum for applied art, arranged by his Prague avant-garde contacts and the Scandinavian-Dutch Institute, an organization related to the Czechoslovakian Foreign Office to promote cultural relations between Czechoslovakia and the Netherlands.

Literature, Print Culture, and the Indian New Wave

This article explores the rise and fall of the Hindi literary film, circa 1969–1995. I discuss three hybrid genres that emerged from collaborations between modern Hindi writers and Indian New Wave filmmakers: lighthearted, middlebrow comedies about urban life; an avant-garde cinema characterized by a mofussil modernism; and an activist cinema concurrent with the Indian human rights movement. The article concludes by identifying the factors that pushed Hindi literature and cinema apart in the 1990s, with changes in state policies, the growth of private television channels, and the provincialization of Hindi literary culture.

The Afterlife of New American Cinema: An Archival Perspective

The Afterlife of New American Cinema:An Archival Perspective Sabrina Negri (bio) In her book After Uniqueness: A History of Film and Video Art in Circulation, Erika Balsom investigates the effect that the digital revolution has had on the perception of authenticity of various works of moving image art: How can we perceive as unique, and therefore authentic, an object that can be endlessly reproduced?1 As she explains, the tension between optimism and skepticism as concerns the potentialities of perfect reproducibility has always been central to the work of several experimental filmmakers, as reflected in both their art and their dissemination strategies. Anxieties towards issues of originality therefore pre-date the advent of digital technology, though I would argue that it is because of the digital transition that they have become more visible and legible in ways that were unthinkable before. This is particularly true when looking at the archival life of some of these works, where the essential difference between films and their digital reproduction (or simulation, as some scholars would put it) emerges more strikingly.2 In this article, I will engage with these issues by exploring the afterlife of the New American Cinema Group's 1960s European Grand Tour from an archival perspective. In particular, I am going to compare the experimental film conservation, preservation, and exhibition approaches of two archives, namely the Rare and Distinctive Collections at the University of Colorado Boulder Libraries and the film archive at Museo Nazionale del Cinema in Turin, Italy. Both institutions house materials related to one of the most prominent members of the New American Cinema group, Stan Brakhage, but their collections and archival strategies differ enormously: while Boulder houses a sizeable Brakhage [End Page 212] collection in which film is only a small portion of the archival holdings, Turin is primarily a film archive that owns a few Brakhage films as part of a small collection of American experimental cinema, which has its roots in the New American Cinema program that took place in the city in 1967. I will argue that the two archives' different approaches to their Brakhage materials reflect their institutional history, their mission, their collections, and their relationship with Brakhage himself, while at the same time inviting different interpretations of Brakhage's work based on how it is archived, preserved, and exhibited. My goal is to approach the work of Brakhage from an archival perspective, while at the same time approaching archival issues through his work. What I want to think through is the dialectical relationship between film archival materials and the institutions that house them—that is, how the one influences the other and is influenced by it in return. The term "film" in relation to its archival life acquires a twofold meaning: on the one hand, it refers to the specific films that are conserved at these institutions, while on the other hand it evokes the nature of the object "film" in general. In fact, I believe that these two case studies can be incredibly instructive as pertains to issues of uniqueness, originality, and authenticity with respect to cinema: in these two archives, and arguably in any film archive, film's nature is revealed to be multifaceted in a way that goes far beyond its being a means for projection, thus broadening our understanding of what film (and therefore cinema) is, and showing how film archiving and preservation function as not only practices, or disciplines, but also interpretive frameworks and lenses that allow us to look at cinema from a different perspective. Even though I am not an experimental cinema scholar, I am particularly interested in this topic because the preservation and archiving of avant-garde cinema challenge traditional standards and theories in use in the field: experimental works, as Balsom demonstrates in her discussion of avant-garde cinema circulation, question widely assumed notions of originality, reproducibility, and exhibition. In this sense, experimental cinema already broadens the boundaries of the medium by creating an overlap between cinema and the fine arts not only as pertains the medium's aesthetics but also, and especially, the medium's material nature—and the aesthetics of its material nature. This is what makes the preservation of...

Осмысляя «красный смех»: англоязычные исследования о советской кинокомедии

In this article, I address foreign English-language works on Soviet film comedy, tracing the waves of researchers’ interest to it, and identifying the time periods as well as film directors attracting scholars most often. The first surge of interest in Soviet film comedy came in the first half of the 1990s and was largely associated with the fall of the Iron Curtain. The major subject of research during those years were Soviet avant-garde cinema of the 1920s, musical comedies of the 1930s, and films of the Perestroika period. The second wave came in the 2010s with the emigration of a large number of Russian scholars who had personally witnessed the Soviet Union. Thanks to them, the range of the studied material has significantly expanded through the analysis of film comedies of the 1960s and 1970s. The main thematic directions and topics in the study of the comedy genre are structured in accordance with the history of film timeline. Soviet comedies of the 1920s–1930s are of specific interest to foreign researchers in terms of the ideological regulation of art, as well as in terms of how the mythology of the new socialist society was formed, and how Soviet filmmakers adapted or rejected Western standards. In the comedies of the 1960s and 1970s, scholars analyze the discordance between declared and unspoken humor and study the Aesopian language of famous comedy film directors (Ryazanov and Gaidai above all). Finally, in late-Soviet films, researchers note the growth of absurdist motifs as a sign of a complete and no longer hidden disillusionment with communist ideals.

"Without Jerome": The Patronage of Jerome Hill and the Curating of 1960s American Experimental Work in Europe

"Without Jerome":The Patronage of Jerome Hill and the Curating of 1960s American Experimental Work in Europe Ronald Gregg (bio) Experimental filmmaker, critic, curator, archivist, and advocate Jonas Mekas acknowledged the importance of filmmaker Jerome Hill's patronage to the New York avant-garde cinema, emphatically stating—quoting him—"I have to tell you frankly that without Jerome, Film Culture magazine would have closed by 1960. Without Jerome, neither the Film-Makers Cooperative nor the Film Makers Cinematheque would have survived. Without Jerome there would be no Anthology Film Archives."1 Both Mekas and playwright Jack Gelber, who wrote The Living Theater's first major success, The Connection (1959), used the word "angel" as a label for the philanthropist Jerome Hill and his financial support of the experimental underground;2 as Mekas acknowledged, many artists and entities would never have survived the 1950s and 60s without his financial support. A descendent of the multimillionaire railroad tycoon James J. Hill, Hill generously used his inherited wealth to fund his own filmmaking and extensively fund those experimental entities that Mekas lists and much, much more. Hill provided direct grants to individual filmmakers such as Stan Brakhage, Gregory Markopoulos, James Broughton, and Mary Ellen Bute3 and anonymously funded twelve experimental filmmakers a year from 1960–65 through the "Friends of New Cinema" fund administered by Mekas. According to Mekas, these "Friends of New Cinema" grants paid "twelve needy avantgarde filmmakers … forty dollars a month for a year. … Today, you may laugh about the forty dollars. But in the early sixties, it paid for a month's rent."4 He [End Page 148] significantly supported the work of film producer and entrepreneur David Stone, including Stone's production of Adolfas Mekas's Hallelujah the Hills (US, 1963), which featured Jerome Hill as Convict 1,5 and, as Gelber noted, Judith Melina and Julian Beck's experimental theatrical company The Living Theater, including their European tours. For instance, Hill gave The Living Theater $20,000 in support of their 1962 European tour.6 Also, Hill paid the legal bills for Mekas and Ken and Flo Jacobs in 1964, who were arrested for screening Jack Smith's experimental film Flaming Creatures and charged through the obscenity laws at the time.7 Important to the focus of this article, Hill also funded and participated in the introduction of American independent and experimental films to Europe in the 1960s, including the Festival of Two Worlds at Spoleto, Italy in 1961, and two traveling exhibitions of experimental films throughout Europe in 1964 and 1967 into 1968; organized film screenings of experimental work in Cassis, France; and supported the New American Cinema Group Exposition in Torino, Italy, in 1967. In his giving, Hill stayed mostly anonymous. Only Mekas and a few other individuals knew about the extent of his giving. Two major reasons for his anonymity stand out. One, as word got out about his generosity, the number of requests for financial assistance from struggling artists greatly increased. To shield himself from these requests, Hill set up the Avon Foundation in the 1960s, formalizing the request process and giving him distance from requests. A 1964 memo by A. A. Heckman, Executive Secretary of the Avon Foundation, notes this desire for anonymity, stating, "Mr. Hill has created a personal foundation to be known as Avon Foundation for the purpose of providing anonymity for Mr. Hill. (Under no circumstances is anyone to know who founded Avon Foundation except the officials of the First Trust Company, the partners of Doherty, Rumble and Butler, and the Directors and staff of Hill Family Foundation)."8 The Avon Foundation was later renamed the Jerome Foundation after Hill's death in 1972, which is still an important source of grants for early career artists. Two, Stan Brakhage relates that Hill was once prevented from exhibiting his paintings in a Paris gallery due to his wealth, since the gallery claimed that "everyone would think that your family had bought the show for you. … Our reputation would be ruined."9 Similarly, Hill was likely concerned that observers would think that he had bought his way into screening his films in Spoleto, Torino, and other places. Mekas seems to...

ОБРАЗ ГОРОДА ВО ФРАНЦУЗСКОМ ЭКСПЕРИМЕНТАЛЬНОМ КИНО 1970-Х ГГ.: «ЧЕЛОВЕК, КОТОРЫЙ СПИТ» ЖОРЖА ПЕРЕКА

The article examines the image of the city on the example of the film “The Man Who Sleeps”, released in 1974. The presented film accumulates the first experimental experiences of avant-garde cinema of the 1920s in working with image and sound and tries to create a new narrative, resorting to the actual social issues of 1970s, in particular to issue of private and public space. Private and public spaces, considered in the film as part of general urban space, are spaces of repetitive actions and practices of the protagonist filmed in a chaotic sequence. The city is understood as constantly changing construction where the line between subjective perception of the protagonist of the city and objective perception for which the movie camera, CCTV cameras are responsible is blurred.

Concrete Abstract: Exploring Tactility in Abstract Animations from Early Avant-garde Films to Contemporary Artworks

After witnessing social chaos and the collapse of values at the beginning of the twentieth century, avant-garde artists insert new thought patterns and progressive aesthetic into the traditional perception of art. Being enthralled by the new film medium, former painters like Viking Eggeling, Walther Ruttman and Hans Richter start to experiment with light in two-dimensional film formats, they animate lines, stripes, basic shapes, play with the foreground and the background, and, most important of all, they construct a temporality within the visual order of the screen. Viking Eggeling’s Symphonie Diagonale (1921-24), Walther Ruttman’s Opus I (1921) and Hans Richter’s Rhythmus 21 (1921) show such temporality built in, which is caught by the idea of music as their titles suggest. These short abstract animation films attempt to discover the artistic possibilities of the new developing medium, film. Like the pioneer avant-garde abstract filmmakers, today’s artists still seek to stimulate a new perception for a possible embodiment that will activate the sense of touch in the audience. Tactility, enhanced by the material, opens up a new network of spatio-temporal relationships in the viewer's consciousness and subjecthood. This essay aims to bring a historical perspective to the abstract moving images of which the tactile or haptic experience is a defining characteristic. Through a selection of abstract animations, the materiality of the film image and the screening site will be elaborated upon according to the haptic features that are corporally embodied by the viewers. In the light of historical abstract animation, the aim is to dwell upon the dynamics of a continuous tendency to capture tactile instances to help bring forth the spatial resonances as well as visualize and reedify the rhythmic passing of time.