Every couple of years, I teach a course on “Minor Cinemas,” which takes the concept of “minor” literature from Deleuze and Guattari and explores whether/how the concept might be useful for thinking about a range of film practices. When I began teaching the course about six years ago, I included a week on “short cinema,” in which I taught a smattering of advertisements, music videos, and trailers.
The Ithaca Silent Cinema community celebrates the 100-year anniversary of the famed Stewart Bridge trolley crash, staged for the Prince of India (Wharton Brothers, 1914). More information on Ithaca’s history in silent cinema can be found here. And if you are wondering whatever happened to the Wharton Brothers’ films: check the bottom of Cayuga Lake.
The Smithsonian recently made a small portion of its collection available through its new X3D Explorer platform. In a strange invocation of the digital haptic, the organization describes this new form of encounter as “the end of ‘do not touch’.”
You can touch…but you just can’t feel.
Photographer Antonio Martinez created over 800 “modern dryplate tintypes” from b/w film to produce this stop-motion video, entitled “Near the Egress.” This complex and combinatory work remixes our visual histories and technologies. Here, the moving image precedes the motionless tintype. And digital video gives them both a different kind of life. All of this unfolds with a nod to yet another historical-technological-mythological origin: the circus, the fairground, the site of early cinema.
…in small Scottish towns.
My reading of Josephine Baker and the cinema of métissage has just been published by Framework.
First episode here. It’s just getting off the ground, but promises to cover the contemporary concerns/questions guiding the disicpline, as well as professional and post-grad issues.
KATHERINE GROO 