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- Volume 3, Issue 2, 2014
Moving Image Review & Art Journal (MIRAJ), The - Volume 3, Issue 2, 2014
Volume 3, Issue 2, 2014
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The poetic reactivation of historical time: Eija-Liisa Ahtila’s Where is Where?
By Maria WalshAbstractIn this article, I argue that Eija-Liisa Ahtila’s techniques of narration in her six-screen film installation Where is Where? (2008) generate an affective, lived relation to historical time that counters its reduction in contemporary news media to a series of easily consumed and forgotten instants. Ahtila’s multi-screen film, based in part on Frantz Fanon’s account of the murder by two Algerian boys of their European playmate as revenge for the massacre of Meftah in 1956 during the Algerian War, conjures a different kind of remembering and embodying of historical events. To elaborate this claim, I perform a rereading of Guy Debord’s concept of historical time and argue that Ahtila’s work orchestrates an image of historical time transformed into ‘use’ rather than collected in the archive. This form of time, which incorporates historical agency and cyclical temporalities, connects with Julia Kristeva’s concept of ‘women’s time’ as well as Irish poet Eavan Boland’s writing on history and the past in relation to oppression, colonialism and violence. Film examples looked at include Alain Resnais’ Hiroshima, Mon Amour (1959) and I consider Maya Deren’s notion of the poetic in film. Through an evocation of the ‘vertical register’ of the latter, Where is Where? shows us the incommensurability of war crime and trauma as well as the necessity to forge a relation to this incommensurability.
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Between canvas and celluloid: Painted films and filmed paintings
More LessAbstractThis article investigates how artists’ attempts to inject a time element to painting through cinematic means expanded the aesthetic and affective possibilities of both mediums. These approaches include ‘painted films’ wherein the artist applies paint directly onto the celluloid in an exploration of an alternative material support for painting, as well as ‘filmed paintings’, films that display the act of a painting being made. The article surveys the historical development of these intermedial concepts and methods before offering close readings of films by José Antonio Sistiaga, Francis Lee, David Haxton, in order to demonstrate how these works simultaneously complicate the notion of medium specificity as they present new modes of, and encounters with, painting.
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The automaton in all of us: GIFs, cinemagraphs and the films of Martin Arnold
More LessAbstractThe work of the experimental film-maker, Martin Arnold, has been described as part structural film, part rap, and part seizure or stutter. Using an optical printer to manipulate 16mm films, Arnold plays with the movement and timing of a film to create an effect like that of a DJ scratching a record: the motion of the film seems to seize, to convulse in repetitive patterns of time. This article focuses on the first and last of a trio of Arnold’s experimental films that include Pièce Toucheé (1989), Passage à l’acte (1993), and Alone. Life Wastes Andy Hardy (1998). The perverse motions studies that Arnold creates are generated through footage taken from Hollywood and detourned to reveal another set of meanings that appear beneath the surface of the original narrative. Arnold’s films belong both to experimental film and to new media and they reveal something about a distinctive pattern of time: a tightening temporal loop that is characteristic of both new media and global capitalism, both of which exhibit a temporality that serves to manage the status quo and to deny real change. This article will trace out the connections between Arnold’s films and certain digital moving images, such as the gif and cinemagraph, in order to better understand the small temporal loop, which expresses something important and unique about the temporality of our time.
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Threshold faces: The physiognomy of Comédie
By David FosterAbstractSince its re-emergence in 2000, and its re-exhibition as a gallery film as opposed to a piece of cinema, Marin Karmitz’s film adaptation of Samuel Beckett’s Comédie – filmed in 1966 in close collaboration with Beckett himself – has been recognized as an important and even canonical work of avant-garde film. Along with Beckett’s other work for the screen, it foreshadowed some prominent aesthetic tendencies that emerged in artists’ film and video in the decades that followed. This article focuses on Comédie’s use of close-ups of the human face, and discusses this medium-specific trope as a threshold image that ‘auto-expressively’ both conceals and reveals its subject. This dichotomy of simultaneous concealment and revelation is shown to manifest through the ‘threshold space’ of the close-up being occupied but never transcended by the film’s protagonists. The figures are deprived of the intersubjectivity that would be engendered through interfacing with another, a notion developed by exploring the dynamic between the virtual face/s we see on-screen, and the face of the viewer. It is posited that the ambiguity of the faces’ directness of address comes to inscribe a perpetual process of unveiling, perpetually towards a state of transcendence, of ontological totality; such absoluteness only arriving inasmuch as it is constituted by the formless presence of the black screen. The article argues that Comédie’s faces represent an abyssal, reflexive awareness of an incarceration inside the process of becoming, and thus inside the very process of their representation.
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Cinema–in–the–round: Doug Aitken’s SONG 1 (2012), the Hirshhorn Museum and the pleasures of cinematic projection
More LessAbstractIn the spring of 2012, eleven projectors transformed Washington, DC’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden into a nocturnal cinematic spectacle: Doug Aitken’s SONG 1, a 360° cinematic homage to the great pop standard ‘I Only Have Eyes for You’. To experience SONG 1 was to be entranced and seduced by its high production values, rich soundscape and (most importantly) its monumental scale. This cinematic revelling in the image, I argue, is one that operates on registers between the work’s status as film, public art and major museum event to create an active viewer engagement. This article analyses SONG 1 in terms of its institutional setting, its imagery and mode of installation. Using Roland Barthes’s reflections on the in-between state of leaving a movie theatre, I argue that SONG 1 illustrates a mode of public art that uses the moving image’s visual attraction to create positive encounters with art in public spaces.
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Flesh Cinema: The Corporeal Turn in American Avant-Garde Film, Ara Osterweil (2014)
By James BoadenAbstract1st ed., Manchester: Manchester University Press, 304 pp., ISBN: 9780719091919, paperback, £ 18.99
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TV Museum: Contemporary Art and the Age of Television, Maeve Connolly (2014)
More LessAbstractBristol: Intellect Books, 332 pp., ISBN: 9781783201815, paperback, £30/$43
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Exhibiting Cinema in Contemporary Art, Erika Balsom (2013)
More LessAbstractAmsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 256 pp., ISBN: 9789089644718, paperback, € 39.95
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John Woodman’s early landscape films
More LessAbstractDVD: Landscape Films 1977–1982 by John Woodman (2012) London: LUX.1 Booklet Text: John Woodman/Malcolm Le Grice, Price: £20.00
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Editorial
Authors: Michael Mazière and Lucy Reynolds
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