Re: [Frameworks] Experimental Films before 1910

[Fred Camper]

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
wall...@denison.edu 

On Dec 13, 2017, at 7:29 PM, Dave Tetzlaff > 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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Re: [Frameworks] Experimental Films before 1910

[Jonathan Walley]

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
wall...@denison.edu

> On Dec 13, 2017, at 7:29 PM, Dave Tetzlaff  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.
> 
> ___
> FrameWorks mailing list
> FrameWorks@jonasmekasfilms.com
> https://mailman-mail5.webfaction.com/listinfo/frameworks

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