Moving Image Works Research Articles

Drawn to the light: Cinematic and Performative Ecologies in Stan Brakhage's Mothlight (1963) and Eiko Otake's Night with Moths (2019)

The purpose of this essay is to explore the evocative use of moths within cinematic and performative contexts. To do so, two moving image works were chosen, each framed within in a comparative context to the other: the first, the historic and iconic masterwork of avant-garde cinema by the legendary filmmaker Stan Brakhage titled Mothlight (1963), and the second, a contemporary performance video titled Night with Moths (2019) by the interdisciplinary movement-based artist, Eiko Otake. With their attraction to light, along with their fluttering, nocturnal flights, moths seem to have a strong kinship with not only the moving images of cinema, but also with the movement focus of dance and performance. Indeed, the very presence of moths in both moving image works, invites us to witness compelling cinematic and performative collaborations that move across species and ecologies.

Point/Cloud

Laser scanning holds out the possibility of extreme certainty. Digital scanning has become deeply integrated in contemporary archaeological surveying, and in architectural heritage and preservation contexts digital scans are now common. Certainty in this text-based essay is understood as an affect, an experiential quality rather than an absolute measure. It does not question the possibility or usefulness of precise measurement (although it does question the rhetorical use of exactitude and precision), but explores the imaginative role of exactitude in this form of digital imaging. It makes readings of a series of moving-image works that use point clouds generated by laser scanning. Rhetorically, the term ‘point cloud’ is suspended between the apparent certainty and exactitude of the mathematical point, and the vague ungraspability of vapour. Rather than expressing exactitude and objectivity, the works discussed here highlight ambiguities of human perception, and seek to see from nonhuman perspectives (the driverless car, the kāhu/hawk, and an oak forest). It concludes by suggesting that such works in particular, and point cloud imagery in general, can be understood in terms of a diffusive material imaginary.

Review: Feminist Worldmaking and the Moving Image, edited by Erika Balsom and Hila Peleg

Book Review| June 01 2023 Review: Feminist Worldmaking and the Moving Image, edited by Erika Balsom and Hila Peleg Feminist Worldmaking and the Moving Image, edited by Erika Balsom and Hila Peleg Hoor Elshafei Hoor Elshafei HOOR ELSHAFEI is a graduate student in the Film and Television Studies program at Boston University. Her research examines identity and the cultural flow in film. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar BOOK DATA Feminist Worldmaking and the Moving Image, edited by Erika Balsom and Hila Peleg. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2022. $39.95 paper. 512 pages. Film Quarterly (2023) 76 (4): 108–109. https://doi.org/10.1525/fq.2023.76.4.108 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Hoor Elshafei; Review: Feminist Worldmaking and the Moving Image, edited by Erika Balsom and Hila Peleg. Film Quarterly 1 June 2023; 76 (4): 108–109. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/fq.2023.76.4.108 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 ContentFilm Quarterly Search BOOK DATA Feminist Worldmaking and the Moving Image, edited by Erika Balsom and Hila Peleg. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2022. $39.95 paper. 512 pages. As a complement to the exhibition No Master Territories: Feminist Worldmaking and the Moving Image, curated for the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, Feminist Worldmaking and The Moving Image is a book that belongs to a long tradition of scholarly efforts that focus on practices that flourish in the shadow of the industry, often in fierce opposition to it. The book surveys the moving-image works made by and about women in defiance of commercial norms, works that seek to invent new languages to represent gendered experience. Constructed as an extensive library of moving images, the book offers ten original texts, two conversations, and eight diptychs with key historical texts appearing alongside short responses from contemporary filmmakers. Editors Erika Balsom and Hila Peleg marshal... You do not currently have access to this content.

Film symbiosis: Embodied spectatorship and sensory (auto)ethnography in Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Ilisa Barbash’s Sweetgrass

This article explores the 2009 observational-ethnographic documentary film Sweetgrass by Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Ilisa Barbash. Focusing on visual cues within the observational form (a film that documents the herding of sheep across the Absaroka-Beartooth Mountains for the last time), the article draws on ethnographic and autoethnographic strains to explore the relationship between the embodied spectator and on-screen animal. Sweetgrass, in addition to several moving image works, is explored as sensory ethnography that incorporates a form of spectator address based on the idea of symbiosis. The article situates ‘the nonhuman stare’ as fundamental to this, drawing on the film phenomenology of Vivian Sobchak to consolidate this view. Sweetgrass, the article maintains, aestheticizes the non-human for specific reasons. It adds an ethical purpose to the observational documentation of herding sheep across the mountains – a salvage operation of type – and a sensory experience of ‘living with’ associated with the farming culture represented on-screen. In addition to exploring the film as a sensory object in this way, the article devises a methodology bringing autoethnographic research concerning symbiotic human–non-human animal relationships, in line with explorations of the embodied film spectator.

Gestalt Theory for ‘Disorder’: From Arnheim’s Ordered Chaos to Brambilla’s Entropic Art

The article revisits the concept of entropy in art as discussed by Gestalt psychologist and art theorist Rudolf Arnheim. His discussion of artworks and their reception as complex dynamic fields where the forces of entropy and orderliness counter and complete each other, are brought into dialogue with newer approaches, from the perspective of complexity theory and neuroscience, to the dynamics of perception and to entropic processes in the brain. I will argue that even though Arnheim’s observations can still be valuable for contemporary art criticism they need to be updated as they tend to overstate the tendency for order as well as the visual aspects of reception in the expense of multimodal and embodied aspects. In light of these observations, I will discuss contemporary cases of ‘entropic’ art through the moving image works of Marco Brambilla, their aesthetics as well as the ‘structural themes’ arising and the Gestalt processes involved in their reception.

Im Vestibül der Algorithmen

Abstract Online-access to audiovisual content is rapidly changing the system of film distribution and film presentation. The streaming portal acts as a threshold for online access to moving image works. Algorithms and artificial intelligence are increasingly taking over the selection and curation of audiovisual content and direct viewers’ attention via personalised recommendation systems. The article outlines the market development towards online access to audiovisual content and analyses selected aspects such as artwork (thumbnails) and genres to explore the functionalities of accessory (paratexts) to the film for recommendation systems in video streaming portals and data analysis. From the analysis, the article derives preliminary considerations on requirements that result from the use of artificial intelligence technologies for promoting film and visual literacy in cultural heritage institutions.

Re-emerging voices and re-imagined landscapes: an interview with Chikako Yamashiro

ABSTRACT In this interview, the Okinawa-born filmmaker/artist Chikako Yamashiro looks back at the artistic trajectories and creative processes of her representative moving-image works since the 2000s, which have transitioned from videos of performance art to short experimental documentaries and fictions. In her work, Yamashiro foregrounds the methodology of using the body and voice as a medium to reconsider the politics of remembering vis-à-vis the Battle of Okinawa. Also, reflecting on the intermedial connections between video art and cinema, the artist shares how her recent short films have connected with the socio-ecological problems that Okinawa is aesthetically and affectively entangled with today.

Never Idle

Research Article| June 01 2021 Never Idle: The Animated Screensaver and the Culture of Always-On Computing Kaitlin Clifton Forcier Kaitlin Clifton Forcier Kaitlin Clifton Forcier is a PhD candidate in the Department of Film and Media at UC Berkeley, completing a dissertation titled “The Infinite Image: Digital Media’s Endless Aesthetic.” Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Afterimage (2021) 48 (2): 79–93. https://doi.org/10.1525/aft.2021.48.2.79 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 Kaitlin Clifton Forcier; Never Idle: The Animated Screensaver and the Culture of Always-On Computing. Afterimage 1 June 2021; 48 (2): 79–93. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/aft.2021.48.2.79 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter All ContentAfterimage Search In 2000, an exhibition at the Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Art Center at Stanford University presented a suite of moving-image works created in a form not often seen in the context of the art gallery: the animated screensaver. The works in the show, by a group of artists with varied practices including Jenny Holzer, Glenn Ligon, and Paul Pfeiffer, explored the potential of what was at the time a new media form.1 Originally designed to prevent damage to the screen when a computer was left on for too long, the animated screensaver became something of a pop-culture sensation, and was one of the most successful types of commercial software of the 1990s. The simple utility’s most novel characteristic is its boundless duration: a screensaver automatically displays randomized, continuously changing graphics. The screensaver is unique as a genre of moving image in that—unlike film and video—it does not have... You do not currently have access to this content.

The Video, the City, and the Spectator: The Architecture and Its Bodies in Front of a Video Camera

This paper is an investigation into the kinds of spectatorial relationships that could be generated when a moving image (video, in this case) presents a city within a political framing. To this end I will analyse three different case studies in which the city—its architecture, and its population—is the polemical common ground of the artwork: Guilty Landscape episode I—Hangzhou by Dries Verhoeven (2016), Sign on a Truck by Jenny Holzer (1984), and Història Urbanística by Video-Nou (1978). In my argumentation, I will adhere generally to Jean Baudrillard’s conceptualisations in terms of media “responsibility”, and those of Jacques Rancière when focused on the term “dissensus”, understood as the essence of politics. Importantly, and worth emphasising, all moving image works are able to mirror the spectator who, through different devices and spatial settings, becomes an active part of the representation itself: and a representation that does not require a form of response is a curtailment that does nothing but amplify the decision-making power of the powerful. Instead, Dries Verhoeven, Jenny Holzer, and Video-Nou confront us with their representations and bid us towards an active personal participation in its construction. Moreover, this could be considered as a reflection upon what might feasibly be achieved today in architecture and urban representation through various new media and their intersections with the moving image and performative arts.

Sensing space: An exploration of the generation of depth and space with reference to hybrid moving image works and reported accounts of intense aesthetic experience

This article draws on three hybrid moving image works—David Wilson’s Moray McLaren—We Got Time, Christoph Niemann’s bike, and Richard Linklater’s Waking Life—to explore phenomenologist David Morris’s theory that the perception of space arises from bodily processes that generate inner envelopes of depth and outer envelopes of space. A characteristic of these hybrid moving image works is that they set up spatial dynamics that interrupt dominant modes of spatial perception, allowing aspects of spatial perception that we might not otherwise notice to come to the fore. The analysis demonstrates that the perceiver must hollow out envelopes of space around things for these things to show up as dimensional things that occupy their own space. The analysis demonstrates that a breakdown in the capacity to hollow out outer envelopes of space around things reveals the operation of inner envelopes of ambiguous depth where things flatten out or become diffuse, and can be subject to dramatic changes in scale and position. The analysis also demonstrates that the perceiver’s sense of their own location in space can be disrupted by a breakdown in the ability to hollow out outer envelopes of space around things. The article extends the discussion of the power of artworks to interrupt and reveal the dynamics of spatial perception through an examination of spatial aspects of reported accounts of intense aesthetic experience. These accounts include experiences of feeling unusually close to an artwork, or conversely, of feeling unusually distant from the work. I argue that these unusual spatial experiences can be explained as situations where ambiguous, plastic inner envelopes of depth have come to dominate perception.

Re-animating Ghosts: Materiality and memory in hauntological appropriation

This research examines the spectrality of animation and other media based on the photographic trace. Using diverse examples from popular culture and the author’s own investigative practice in media art, this paper looks at how archival media is re-used and can be brought back to life in new moving image works, in a gesture we might call hauntological appropriation. While sampling and re-using old materials is nothing new, over the last 15 years we have seen an ongoing tendency to foreground the ghostly qualities of vintage recordings and found footage, and a recurrent fetishisation and simulation of obsolete technologies. Here we examine the philosophies and productions behind this hauntological turn and why the materiality of still and moving image media has become such a focus. We ask how that materiality effects the machines that remember for us, and how we re-use these analogue memories in digital cultures. Due to the multimodal nature of the author’s creative practice, photography, video art, documentary film and animation, are interrogated here theoretically. Re-animating the ghosts of old media can reveal ontological differences between these forms, and a ghostly synergy between the animated and the photographic.

Vertigo of presence: Chantal Akerman’s NOW, nomadic dwelling and the ‘war machine’ within the context of contemporary moving image works

ABSTRACT How can the heightened time–space correlation of (armed) conflict, if at all, be represented in an art context? This article explores how Chantal Akerman’s multi-channel installation NOW (2015) can be read in view of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's (1988) ‘war machine’, a concept suggesting a rebellious strategy defined by nomadic existence and acted out against the State and its involvement in capitalist control systems. In this context, nomadic dwelling with its enhanced sense of ‘smooth space’ offers geographical, psychological and audio-visual dimensions. Aiming to examine a range of takes on the political, economical and existential dimension of warfare within contemporary art, the discussion draws parallels with moving image works by Harun Farocki, Anri Sala, Regina José Galindo and Elizabeth Price. A mapping of the proposed theoretical framework across individual case studies allows for a rigorous examination and differentiation of audio-visual and conceptual methodologies and their phenomenological implications.

A Morning Coffee in Melbourne: Discussing the Contentious Spaces of Media Practice Research

This is a conversation that took place between three practitioner-academics one morning in Melbourne. All three work and practice in the field of the moving image: from screen production to audiovisual installation to screenwriting. Our conversation is underpinned by previous research we have undertaken in this field, namely the launching of a moving image journal, Sightlines, and a companion journal article on the process of setting it up, which focussed on the issues presented when trying to establish peer review protocols and guidelines for moving image works.

Images of urban China in Cao Fei’s ‘magical metropolises’

This article examines the moving image works of Chinese artist Cao Fei as a response to China’s rapid urbanization and the transformation of its existing urban spaces which are no longer shaped by socialism but instead by what this article considers as China’s engagement with neo-liberalism, including and facilitated by globalization. The urban sprawl of the Pearl River Delta inspired Rem Koolhaas’s writings on the ‘generic city’, which he celebrates precisely for its blandness. Cao herself is from Guangzhou. Yet, in works such as RMB City, Haze and Fog, Whose Utopia, and Hip Hop: Guangzhou, Cao creates what she calls ‘magical metropolises’. This article asks what kind of responses Cao’s ‘magical’ works are to contemporary Chinese urbanization. As part of the answer to this question, it applies four hermeneutic frameworks to analyse the works themselves. The findings from each of those frameworks indicate that Cao’s work not only reflects the current Chinese urban condition, but also participates and intervenes in it in various ways.

The effective meaning delivery through convergence of the various moving image works and installation art

The effective meaning delivery through convergence of the various moving image works and installation art

Burning Cars, Caricatures and Glub

This article offers close analyses of three photofilmic artworks – pieces blurring the boundaries between photography and film – that confound iconic, charged images in the mass media in order to speak to the problematic of imagining a New Europe. The artist collective Superflex, film-maker Harun Farocki, and cultural theorist and artist Mieke Bal, have all recently produced moving-image works that address the hypervisibility of such fraught images within a public domain, such as burning cars, cartoons of Islamic figures, and veiled women, but each works to disrupt or reconstruct such visual tropes. Through hybrid forms each artist attends to crossover media coverage and how such mediated translations today produce and disseminate the images in socially novel and complex ways. Bal's installation, in particular, through a strategy of photofilmic portraiture, offers a complex counter-aesthetic of the migratory, one that emphasizes everyday, lived and embodied instances of positive, cross-cultural encounter on the continent.

Voicings: a Ventriloquial Strategy to Politicise the Space Between Speaker and the Scripted Utterance

Voicings is a moving image work designed to destabilise the relationship between script and utterance. Its content makes a political comment about the oppressive potential of language. Shot in real time, with an emphasis on process, Voicings is designed to undermine the socio-normative connotations attached to the perfect articulation (and by proxy in ‘Received Pronunciation’) in mainstream performance. Emphasis is placed on the film's soundtrack and the deconstructive process which occurs at the level of the spoken word. Many artists’ moving image works engage critically with the politics of representation by dismantling the role of the cinematic apparatus, yet traditionally this process privileges the visual. In Voicings, the focus has shifted from the visual to the aural, in order to explore how the voice can dismantle the potential for social oppression contained in everyday speech. Formally, the work operates at the level of the script and its enunciation, while contextually it asks the following questions: How debilitating socially is the experience of poor articulacy for foreign speakers? How are individuals and institutions implicated in discriminating against those who are forced to inhabit another language? In the making of Voicings I engaged two groups of people who never meet: a group of refugees attending an English language class and a group of classically trained actors and voice coaches. As it will become apparent, the chasm separating these two groups is instrumental to the ‘ventriloquial’ outcome of the piece. In this article I discuss the ethos and methodology behind Voicings. While my process of deconstruction operates at the aural level, audio is always considered ‘audiovisually’, or in its connection with its visual elements. I discuss Voicings using two notions that have an affinity with this process and that are invested in exploiting the potentiality of the constructed nature of the soundtrack: ventriloquism and isomorphism. It will become apparent how Voicings operates in a context designed to contribute to a critical discussion on the subversive potential of the soundtrack from the perspective of practice.

Post-Cinematic Affect: On Grace Jones,Boarding GateandSouthland Tales

This essay explores the 'structure of feeling' that is emerging today in tandem with new digital technologies, together with economic globalisation and the financialisation of more and more human activities. The 20th century was the age of film and television; these dominant media shaped and reflected our cultural sensibilities. In the 21st century, new digital media help to shape and reflect new forms of sensibility. Movies (moving image and sound works) continue to be made, but they have adopted new formal strategies, they are viewed under massively changed conditions and they address their spectators in different ways than was the case in the 20th century. The article traces these changes, focusing on three recent moving-image works: Nick Hooker's music video for Grace Jones's song 'Corporate Cannibal'; Olivier Assayas' movie Boarding Gate , starring Asia Argento; and Richard Kelly's movie Southland Tales , featuring Justin Timberlake, Dwayne Johnson and other pop culture celebrities.

Everyone I Know Is Stayin' Home: The New Cinephilia

I don't get out to concerts any more . . . but, oh, the recordings! Konrad Visconti's Conversation Piece At the recent Il Cinema Ritrovato Bologna, the festival's directors (and cinephiles of the first water) Peter von Bagh and GianLuca Farinelli organized a series of lunches at which film historians, critics, and archivists, lubricated by salumi and Lambrusco, discussed cinephilia terms of personal history: the first film they ever saw, what movies made a mark on them, how they developed a passion for certain kinds of cinema. Widely variant as the accounts were at the lunch I attended-most participants recalled a Disney or nature film as their baptismal experience; mine was Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, US, 1960) and the concomitant memory, hardly Proustian, of my mother's mouton coat pressed to my face throughout the screening-the lineaments of cinephilic formation remained surprisingly similar. We were mostly Anglophones, all white, and of an older generation, which part explained this commonality of experience, a cultural past that would seem not only antique but profoundly alien to today's emergent cinephile, who, through DVDs and downloads, on every manner of media from in-home cinemas to iPhones, can access films we waited years to see, often traveling great distances to do so. An autodidact and hopeless movie lover from a village northern Saskatchewan with no television (so no late night movies, the provenance of many nascent cinephiles), and long before video recorders, much less DVD players, I took my holidays New York to see the Mizoguchi retrospective at the Japan Society, or Toronto to see Angelopoulos or Godard. Today, many of the same films I traveled hundreds of miles to see can be easily had, often instantly, the hinterland, even as the formats and systems by which they are delivered grievously diminish the experience. For instance, it required endless negotiation and great expense to get a print of Quatre nuits d'un reveur (FR, 1971), made for the Bresson retrospective ten years ago, which has since vanished into Holy Graildom, but recently all it took to secure a DVD of the film for private study was one beseeching email. Was the Quatre nuits that stunned audiences at our cinematheque a decade ago the same film that, swimmy and stippled with video effects, was nevertheless legible (that is, consumable) on my computer screen? (And can one legitimately analyze a film seen that way? The disorienting strangeness of Bresson's editing, which one experiences physiologically the cinema, all but vanishes on video, no matter the quality, the inky nights of the film's title reduced to ashen moire.) Movie love may still be possible, but what if its object of desire is literally obscure-endlessly transferable (an acceleration of Benjamin's reproducibility) but inferior, a phantom of the original? Is the new cinephilia, this Netflix, YouTube grande bouffe of images which Costa, Straub, and Baillie can be seen Nunavut or Cappadocia and immediately discussed online with philes from afar, a miracle of open museum cultural democracy or a spurious celebration of the omnivorous and inauthentic? When Susan Sontag wrote her famous essay the New York Times Magazine on the death of cinephilia-for that was her subject, and not, as was often claimed, the death of cinema-this digital proliferation had barely begun to transform film culture. One wonders what Sontag, with her enduring concern with taste and connoisseurship, would make of the vaunted community of film discussion on the Internet, which frustrates or traduces traditional claims of expertise among critics, scholars, and curators. (It's little wonder that film programmers joke about our imperiled profession and our future as door-to-door consultants for home cinema owners-at least those who don't consult theauteurs.com!) The phrase in cinema experience has recently entered the discourse of film curation-to differentiate traditional filmgoing from gallery and installation presentation of moving image works, videotheques, etc. …

The Concept ofWorkfor Moving Image Materials

In a series of articles to appear soon in this publication, the general concept of work as it applies to all materials will be discussed. In a well-designed catalog, two items treated as the same work will display together and be represented as manifestations (editions) or copies of the same work to the user interested in a particular work. In this article, the concepts of work and related work as they apply to moving image works will be discussed, and recommendations made for their application to moving image works.