I am happy to announce an exciting series of upcoming events that I have been organizing as part of the Aberdeen Sound Festival in collaboration with Ross Whyte, a colleague in Music. In September, we will be hosting SCRATCH, a set of workshops and film screenings that will introduce participants to a variety of recycled, found footage, and recycled cinema practices, along with the basics of sound production and recording.
La Jetée (Chris Marker, 1962)
The latest edition of archival news, edited by yours truly, just went live at the Cinema Journal website. Please take a look! I welcome feedback on the new format and tips for future issues.
If you will be in Aberdeen on June 12th, please join the Film and Visual Culture department for a workshop focused on the relationship between animal life and the moving image. From the organizers:
The workshop asks how different dynamics of (re)production – of images, of animals – converge within the circulation of global agri-capital. Yet it also asks broader questions about the relations between cinematic and nonhuman worlds, and about the ethics and politics of images of animal life.
The programme includes the following speakers/papers:
Dr Anat Pick (Queen Mary), “Animal Life in the Cinematic Umwelt'”
Professor Claire Molloy (Edge Hill), “Industrialized food and the politics of pleasure”
Dr Laura McMahon (Gonville & Caius, Cambridge), “Screening Pigs: Moving Images, Materiality and the Production of Species”
Mr Chris Heppell (Aberdeen), “The Withdrawal of Sense in Michelangelo Frammartino’s Le Quattro Volte (2010)”
The workshop will run from 10am to 5pm in the Craig Suite in the Sir Duncan Rice Library. There will be lunch, as well as tea and coffee at relevant intervals. If you are interested in attending the workshop (it is free), please email simon.ward@abdn.ac.uk.
Over the last couple of weeks, I have been looking more carefully at the expansive field of recycled cinemas. I am particularly interested in the the places where found and orphan films intersect with the contemporary avant garde, producing works that are torn between past and present tenses, between concepts and material. At the recommendation of a colleague, I have been making my way through the work of Peter Tscherkassky, an Austrian filmmaker whose work combines cinematic scraps with dense layers of sound:
Dream Work (2001)
Tscherkassky’s work also includes several returns to early cinema. His most recent film, Coming Attractions (2010) explores Tom Gunning’s canonical concept across eleven distinct visual “chapters”. I am still trying to get my hands on it for a screening. In the meantime, bits of Tscherkassky’s other works can be found online. Mubi hosts a small, but very good collection (and charges a small fee per film).
A fantastic new resource for researchers and teachers of early cinema has just appeared online. The first twelve years of Moving Picture World have been digitized and added to the Media History Digital Library’s “Early Cinema Collection.” From the MHDL:
Moving Picture World was one of the most influential trade papers of the early motion picture industry and the period film historians call cinema’s “transitional era” (lasting roughly from 1908 to 1917). During this era and inside the paper, you can watch the transition from short film programs to feature films and witness the transition from the dominance of Edison’s Trust to the rise of the “Independent” film companies that ultimately became the Hollywood studios.
The first issue includes some “novel uses for cinema,” instructions for making latern slides, a review of The Teddy Bears (Edison, 1907), and a full-page ad from the Miles Brothers (mentioned just last week): “Conversation gets you nothing. Real Johnny-on-the-spot service is what you want!”
The project was funded, in part, by Domitor and its members. For those who are interested in contributing, MHDL is still raising funds to digitize MPW through 1927, its last year of publication.
Two new open access, e-journals dedicated to film and media studies have appeared over the last two weeks. The first, Necsus, is institutionally affiliated with the European Network for Cinema and Media Studies and, content aside, is just plain beautiful. Its first issue focuses on the theme of “Crisis” and opens with a very timely essay by Jacques Rancière entitled “The Gaps of Cinema.” Here, Rancière explores the irreducibility of cinema’s disparate parts (part material, part experience, part memory, part ideology, part art, part industrial craft, part philosphical concept, part utopia of parts). The essay was first delivered on the occasion of the award ceremony for the Maurizio Grande prize in Reggio de Calabria in January 2004. Upcoming issues of Necsus will organize around the themes of “tangibility,” “green,” and “waste.” These themes invite us to think between the concrete and the conceptual, the material and the experiential. In this way, Rancière’s essay seems to foreground the very gaps that are at stake not just in the concept of “crisis,” but in the thinking of cinema and media that frames this particular journal project.
The second journal, Frames, appeared just two days ago. It is edited by the graduate students at St. Andrews University. The first issue is edited by Catherine Grant, a Senior Lecturer at Sussex and writer-editor of the inimitable Film Studies for Free, and focuses on the intersection between our discipline and the digital. The issue is bursting with forty contributions from scholars, researchers, artists, and archivists. I was lucky enough to be invited to contribute, and even luckier to have my essay selected to open the issue. Frames includes a set of “point of view” pieces that I am just starting to make my way through (and hope to post responses to here). At a first pass, one will immediately notice the multiple experiments at work in the journal. Frames innovates in a number of directions and challenges the boundaries of both the traditional journal and even the formats of e-journaling that have come into view in recent years. Frames is not a digital journal modeling or mimicking an analogue one. Rather, Catherine has taken the opportunity to bring a community together and play with the possibilities of digital forms and the formation of digital knowledge.
I am organizing a workshop for SCMS 2013. If you teach early cinema, please consider submitting a proposal: Continue reading
I am just catching up with the mess at the University of Virginia. For those who haven’t heard, good summaries and commentaries can be found here, here, and here. The short story: the University’s Board of Visitors fired the University President, Teresa Sullivan, after just two years in office. A string of emails between the Board and Sullivan reveal that she was under pressure to dismantle disciplines that “couldn’t sustain themselves financially, such as obscure academic departments in classics and German.”
The conflation of academic value and financial solvency is deeply troubling, especially at such a wealthy institution (UVA’s $5 billion endowment is the largest of any public university in the United States). Humanities programs rarely sustain themselves financially. They always rely upon other, more profitable disciplines to survive. Moreover, the humanities have historically been regarded as instrinsically valuable. They do not need to meet any other conditions or criteria to justify their existence. Without them, you no longer have a university.
Kevin Carey’s article in the New Republic makes an important link between the global economic crisis and the corporate culture of (many) university administrations: Continue reading
I just finished a week of amateur films and home movies for a new course I am co-teaching entitled “Cinema and Revolution.” We screened/discussed key films from the post-war American avant-garde (including Brakhage, Mekas, Levine, Menkin) alongside a set of home movies. I wanted students to think about the differences between these two amateur modes, their different expressions of contingency and history, and (perhaps most interesting) their very different conceptions of “home.”
The lectures were nevertheless overshadowed by an unexpected encounter with my own family history. About two weeks ago, a collection called “The Amateur as Auteur” arrived (ordered way back in January). I took a quick look and decided to add the “Stewart Family Home Movies” to the screening list for the week. The films were made between 1936 and 1939, by a film enthusiast named Archie Stewart. I knew the Stewarts were from upstate New York, but did not know anything else about the family or their provenance. As I prepared for lecture, I caught two names that I had missed during my first screening session: Newburgh and Orange Lake.
(Stewart Family Home Movies, 1936-1939)
It seems that I inadvertently assigned my own home movies. My mother was born and raised in Newburgh, New York. Her childhood home is on the shores of Orange Lake. I spent my summers swimming in that very lake and looking out towards Pine Point, the peninsula just behind the unhappy little girls (who must now be in their eighties).
The discovery forced a slight adjustment to the lecture plan. I spent a good deal of time discussing (via Susan Sontag) the affective “surplus” of home movies and those strange, personal histories inscribed, lost, refound upon their surface. The home movie, like the twilight, elegiac art of photography “testifies to time’s relentless melt.”
Many thanks to Matt Lloyd and the organizers of the Glasgow Short Film Festival for organizing a wonderful day of all-things-archive. The discussion(s) got me thinking in several directions through the archive (financial, physical, digital, conceptual). My contribution to the discussion after the jump:
KATHERINE GROO 