Peter Kubelka's Arnulf Rainer

In this essay I will look at Peter Kubelka’s classic film Arnulf Rainer (6 1/2 minutes, black and white, optical sound, 35mm, 1960) in terms of the way it can be seen to operate around a number of dichotomies, between dark and light and black and white, sound and image, balance and asymmetry, film-strip and projection, onscreen and in-brain, work and context. I will also consider some of the wider issues that arise about lightness and darkness generally, and about the scope and purpose of formal analysis

Exploring changes in the Japanese avant-garde film. From Terayama to the audiovisual experiment after the year 2000

The presented article covers the subject of changes in the Japanese avant garde film through the cinematographic epochs. The aim of the paper is to introduce the reader to the methodology, definitions and the range of the research concerning Japanese avant-garde cinema. The author also presents the importance of the conducted research for the Polish film research. What is more, she tries to answer the question of how the avant-garde film should be perceived in the era of mass-media.The presented article covers the subject of changes in the Japanese avant garde film through the cinematographic epochs. The aim of the paper is to introduce the reader to the methodology, definitions and the range of the research concerning Japanese avant-garde cinema. The author also presents the importance of the conducted research for the Polish film research. What is more, she tries to answer the question of how the avant-garde film should be perceived in the era of mass-media

Nathaniel Dorsky: religion, Buddhism and film

This dissertation examines the life, films, and manuscript, Devotional Cinema, of American Buddhist experimental filmmaker Nathaniel Dorsky (1943-present). Dorsky’s work shifts the point of intersection between religion and film from the ability of movies to immortalize subjects, engage with eternal themes, or provide experiences of transcendence to the immanence of the materials of film, and by extension the contingency and impermanence of our lives. His approach has developed religious meaning in keeping with particular Buddhist teachings and meditation practices by opening up possibilities of how films might do religion, revealing the ways the study of religion and film can become a means of expanding and refining our vision of religion itself. Dorsky’s life intersects with a variety of significant institutions, leaders, and communities of American Buddhism and avant-garde film from the 1950s to the present. His story illustrates a history between religion and film unique in its fluidity, hybridity, and symbiosis: he has studied Buddhism with Asian Buddhist emissaries like Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, who engaged in and wrote about filmmaking as a mode of Buddhist knowledge; he is among a collection of American avant-garde filmmakers who experimented with Buddhist ideas and practices in their lives and work; and has been a friend and follower of Stan Brakhage, a leader of a particular lineage of 1960s avant-garde film, who voiced religious devotion to film itself. By situating Dorky within American Buddhism and avant-garde film, I consider the religious depth underlying his work, challenge definitions of authenticity present within Buddhist and religious studies, and examine the intensity and diversity of religious aspirations among filmmakers and enthusiasts. Doing so encourages a reading of Devotional Cinema and Dorsky’s films that highlights the physicality and temporality of film in religious understanding, emphasizing the worldly, material, diverse, contingent, and impermanent dimensions of both

The Generalized Image:Imagery Beyond Representation in Early Avant-Garde Film

Abstract The dichotomy between the figurative and the abstract has often been evoked as a key element in the understanding of the modern image, as it was the case, for example, in influential art historians such as Wilhelm Worringer and Clement Greenberg. However, if such a rigid opposition between the abstract and figurative has ever been qualified, an unlimited number of images after 1900 – whether painted, printed or screen-based – have significantly obscured any clear distinction between the two. Hence, if one wishes to understand the very nature of modern images it is indispensable to ask what it could mean to conceive of images beyond the opposition between the abstract and the figurative: How could we think of images that are neither figurative nor abstract, or perhaps are both at the same time? How could we think of images that are not either signifying and representational or non-signifying and non-representational but rather a-signifying and a-representational in the sense that they operate and find expression beyond the very question of signification and representation? The aim of this text is to explore some of the key elements in such imagery beyond representation. I will investigate the issue by revisiting a series of iconic images in early 1920s avant-garde film by the artists Man Ray and Fernand Léger. On this background, and in dialogue with film theorists and philosophers such as Malcolm Le Grice and Gilles Deleuze, I outline the basic properties and aesthetic potentials of what I term the generalized image as an imagery that operates and affects beyond the very question of representation

From France to Japan : migration of the surrealist ideas and its influence on Japanese avant-garde film

When in 1920s Surrealism appeared on the Japanese ground it was just after publishing the famous Surrealists Manifesto by André Breton. The creators of Surrealism, who brought attention to the power of unconsciousness and made the understanding of the role of dreams the central subject of their pursuits, firstly inspired the poets, painters and theorists. However, from the 1960s the aesthetics of Surrealism also became an essential source of inspiration for the avant-garde and experimental filmmakers. Following the goal stated by the Western artists, the avant-garde Japanese film directors present the life as ruled by absurd and grotesque situations, full of the mysterious atmosphere of the dream-like structured world. The references to Surrealism appeared in the works of such avant-garde artists as Teinosuke Kinugasa (early exception of the idea on the Japanese cinematic ground), Masao Adachi, Shūji Terayama, Hiroshi Teshigahara, Toshio Matsumoto and Donald Richie. The presented article depicts how Surrealism, perceived as movement and aesthetic, was transferred from one culture to another. The author focuses on the field of Japanese avant-garde and experimental film

In Search of a Third Culture: Towards an Experimental Science and Nature Cinema

This essay attempts to move beyond C.P. Snow’s reductive formulation of the two cultures, positing a third culture forged out of the collision of science documentary television with the avant-garde traditions of the cinema. In particular, I use both scientific and humanistic understandings of memory to compare and contrast a science television program, “Understanding the Mysteries of Memory” (Science Channel, 2002) with an avant-garde film, Report (Bruce Conner, 1967)

New vernaculars and feminine ecriture; twenty-first century avant-garde film

This practice-based research project explores the parameters of – and aims to construct – a new film language for a feminine écriture within a twenty first century avant-garde practice. My two films, Radio and The New World, together with my contextualising thesis, ask how new vernaculars might construct subjectivity in the contemporary moment. Both films draw on classical and independent cinema to revisit the remix in a feminist context. Using appropriated and live-action footage the five short films that comprise Radio are collaged and subjective, representing an imagined world of short, chaptered ‘songs’ inside a radio set. The New World also uses both live-action and found footage to inscribe a feminist transnational world, in which the narrative is continuous and its trajectory bridges, rather than juxtaposes, the stories it tells. Both the films and the contextualising written text flag the possibility of new approaches at the intersections between cinema, poetry, feminism and critical theory. Drawing on the work of a number of filmmakers, feminists, writers and poets - including Abigail Child, Scott MacDonald, Betzy Bromberg, Christopher MacLaine, Chris Kraus, Eileen Myles and others - I describe the possibilities of cross-pollination of media and approaches. Through interrogating the methodologies of feminist, independent, mainstream & experimental films, their use of protagonists, montage, mise en scene and soundtrack, I argue that my two films have developed new vernaculars, which offer the potential to constitute a new feminine écriture through a knowing revival of cinema as a form of exploratory language. In addition to the constituting force of the films themselves, questions of identity and the current and potential future of film are interrogated via the writings of such cultural theorists, philosophers and artists such as Svetlana Boym, Lauren Berlant, and Christian Marclay