I pretty much agree with Jonathan here.
Two other elements: the avant-garde of the 1920s, and even more so I
think the American movement beginning with Harry Smith and Maya Deren,
operated simultaneously in opposition to the naive representationalism
of the dominant commercial cinema and within the thinking that
characterized modernism in the other arts. Thus Deren speaks of the
"vertical" and opposed to the "horizontal" as ways of organizing a film,
and was working with an obvious awareness of surrealism. Thus these
later films make the viewer self aware of the viewing process in ways
that might lead to a certain kind of intellectual reflection less likely
to be engendered by the earliest films -- and I find this to be as true
of Jack Smith as it is of Hollis Frampton. These later films put it to
us that film viewing itself is something to think about.
Jonathan, I am in the same situation as you are with regards to grading.
It is always nice by way of relief to read a bit of writing by someone
who knows the difference between "its" and "it’s," that most sentences
need both subjects and verbs, and when to use capital letters...
Fred Camper
Chicago
On 12/14/2017 10:02 AM, Jonathan Walley wrote:
Would that I could resist this, but no…
It’s probably a little dangerous to think of these films as
“experimental” in any strong sense of that term, since mostly the
“experiments” on view in these films are about cultivating film’s
ability to tell stories; or else, formal experimentation was about
exploiting cinema’s novelty in the early years. Both of these impulses
are about making film/cinema a commodity, and developing a degree of
formal standardization (which paralleled attempts at
material/technological standardization that were underway by the
mid-oughts). Once early cinema was rediscovered, so to speak, as a
paradigm of “roads to taken,” something Gunning suggests in “The
Cinema of Attractions,” the historical link between it and
experimental film “proper” was forged, I would say. But not before.
This is not to put these films down, or to say they have no relevance
to genuinely Experimental/Avant-garde cinema. But the impulse was
entirely different than the ones animating experimental filmmaking
beginning in the late teens and early twenties. Early generations of
experimental/avant-garde filmmakers looked much more, I think, to the
budding commercial cinema of the teens for their inspiration (I’m
thinking of Leger’s love for /La Roue/, for example, or the
Surrealists’ of slapstick comedy ala Chaplin and Keaton, or Cornell’s
for films like /East of Borneo/).
Gunning argues that the “cinema of attractions” “goes underground,” to
be revisited by the avant-garde decades later (he mentioned Jack
Smith, for instance). But this suggests a kindred spirit between
someone like Smith or Warhol and the earliest filmmakers, and that it
was simply a matter of returning to a way of doing things that existed
before commercial cinema; both claims are questionable.
Anyway, this has allowed me to avoid grading for a little while, which
is nice.
All best,
JW
Dr. Jonathan Walley
Associate Professor and Chair
Department of Cinema
Denison University
[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>
On Dec 13, 2017, at 7:29 PM, Dave Tetzlaff <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
thinking about how it ALL was that way by definition early on; an
inventory of tricks, effusions, failed and successful experiments.
Do take a look at Gunning’s concept of "cinema of attractions”. You
could argue that the whole idea of cinema was a trick. Against the
conventional view that the Lumieres were proto-realists and Melies a
proto-expressionist, take the famous anecdote about early audiences
panicking viewing Train Approching A Station. That wasn’t people
seeing the film as a representation. There’s also something
connecting the early films of single take with locked down camera
between later era formal works (e.g. Peter Hutton) that are in the
Experimental canon.
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