1,720,993 research outputs found
Inanimation: the film performances of Bruce McClure
Full text linkContribution to the collection of newly commissioned essays by filmmakers and theorists on the subject of expanded forms of experimental animation. The essay analyses a number of 16mm film loop performances by the Brooklyn-based filmmaker Bruce McClure. McClure performs with camera-less loops that carry patterns of alternating black and white frames. The work is shown on modified projectors that are manipulated and repositioned during the event. The neologism ‘inanimation’ is used to analyse McClure’s imageless animations, in which there is no apparent moving image, and in which sound plays a major role. The deformation of the frame, its reduction to a small dim, flickering blur, while the sound is contrastingly overwhelming and dominant, leads to a revaluation of what film is and the extent to which it can be defined by its technological resources. This is in the light of the fact that McClure’s projectors are modified and their outputs supplemented by the use of dimmers, guitar effects pedals and other augmentations.
The essay draws in part on Theodor Adorno’s essay Transparencies on Film (1966) in relation to McClure’s reconfiguration of film technology in order to stimulate a reflection on the relationship between technology, medium and form in the context of experimental / artists’ filmmaking. It aims to make a contribution to ongoing debates around animation and the concept that all films are animations, of which ‘animation’ is one manifestation
Kurt Kren: structural films
Full text linkKurt Kren was a vital figure in Austrian avant-garde cinema of the post-war period. His structural films, often shot frame-by-frame following elaborately pre-scored charts and diagrams, have influenced filmmakers for decades, even as Kren himself has remained a nomadic and obscure public figure. Kurt Kren, edited by Nicky Hamlyn, Simon Payne, and A. L. Rees, brings together interviews with Kren, film scores, and classic, out-of-print essays, alongside the reflections of contemporary academics and filmmakers, to add much-needed critical discussion of Kren's legacy. Taken together, the collection challenges the canonical view of Kren that ignores his underground lineage and powerful, lyrical imagery. Kren was overshadowed in his lifetime by other structural filmmakers, but the essays in this book argue the originality and novelty of his approach to film form in the context of European and North American structural film
Experimental & expanded animation
Full text linkThis book discusses developments and continuities in experimental animation that, since Robert Russet and Cecile Starr’s Experimental Animation: Origins of a New Art (1976), has proliferated in the context of expanded cinema, performance and live ‘making’ and is today exhibited in galleries, public sites and online. With reference to historical, critical, phenomenological and inter-disciplinary approaches, international researchers offer new and diverse methodologies for thinking through these myriad animation practices. This volume addresses fundamental questions of form, such as drawing and the line, but also broadens out to encompass topics such as the inter-medial, post-humanism, the real, fakeness and fabrication, causation, new forms of synthetic space, ecology, critical re-workings of cartoons, and process as narrative. This book will appeal to cross and inter-disciplinary researchers, animation practitioners, scholars, teachers and students from Fine Art, Film and Media Studies, Philosophy and Aesthetics.
The book is edited by Vicky Smith and Nicky Hamlyn, and includes contributions by: Nicky Hamlyn, Vicky Smith, Sean Cubitt, Simon Payne, Birgitta Hosea, Barnaby Dicker, Paul Wells, Dirk De Bruyn, Alex Jukes, Sarah Pucill, and Johanna Gosse
University for the Creative Arts staff research 2011
No full textThis publication brings together a selection of the University’s current research. The contributions foreground areas of research strength including still and moving image research, applied arts and crafts, as well as emerging fields of investigations such as design and architecture. It also maps thematic concerns across disciplinary areas that focus on models and processes of creative practice, value formations and processes of identification through art and artefacts as well as cross-cultural connectivity. Dr. Seymour Roworth-Stoke
Analogon: Of a World Already Animated
Full text linkFilms, and perhaps especially animated films, are ways of thinking. In their own ways, and beyond any intention of human filmmakers, films think (Frampton 2006). Animations think especially hard about movement, time and, unsurprisingly, animation: what motivates something to move. In their remarkably different ways, Muto (2007-8) and Der Lauf der Dinge (1987) undertake a radical thinking-through of change, respectively as mutation and its constituents, and the capacities of film generally and animation specifically to unhinge and re-articulate classifications of human, environmental and technological life. Muto is a seven-minute graphic by Italian street artist Blu filmed in stop-motion on location in Buenos Aires as the artist and his team paint, erase and redraw a series of evolving figures on the walls of the city. Der Lauf der Dinge (The Way Things Go) is a 30-minute film by Swiss artists Peter Fischli and David Weiss which documents in a series of long takes (with carefully concealed edits) a series of homemade devices which variously decompose, fall, crash and burn to produce a chain reaction of events
Unframing
Full text linkSeveral technical functions in film and video are either overlooked or taken for granted. One of the most important of these is the frame, especially in the cinema context where it functions as an image container, a subsistent, invisible barrier or cut-off between the screen space and its surrounding darkness. Several filmmakers have tested the givenness of the framing edges—it's called the frame but it’s really a mask—either by incorporating them into the work or by making them disappear. The strategy of incorporation, in the form of frames within frames, can generate a partial mise-en-abyme (Droste Effect), or gesture towards it. This essay discusses examples of film and video work by artist-filmmakers, in which the frame is variously incorporated into the image as part of it, redescribed or dismantled through a process of material reconfiguration. The essay begins with a key historical example, Hans Richter’s 35mm film Rhythm 21 (1921-23), moving on to more recent works, including William Raban’s seminal work 2’ 45” and Steve Partridges’ video work Monitor 1, thence to more recent examples by Bruce McClure, Cathy Rogers, Simon Payne and the author. The essay is intended to show how the frame is essential in the process of meaning formation in both film and, to a lesser extent, painting, and how the work of the artists discussed challenges the givenness that afflicts the photographic image. To this end, much of the work discussed is non-representational, though not all of it
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Deceptive reflections: on the first ten minutes of Slow Glass
No full textEssay on John Smith's longest 16mm film, 'Slow Glass' (1988-91), accompanying a DVD box set published by LUX containing a comprehensive selection of John Smith's film and video works made between 1975 and 2007. The accompanying booklets contain essays by Adrian Danks, Nicky Hamlyn and Ian Christie
Brakhage's blacks
Full text linkThis essay is based on a talk given at Birkbeck, University of London, on the work of the US filmmaker Stan Brakhage. The essay analyses Brakhage's use of black in his vast output, focusing especially on Passage Through: A Ritual (1990), a fifty-minute, 16mm film which is black for all but about one minute of its running time. A few very brief shots punctuate the blackness but, rarely for this artist, the film has a music track, created by the veteran experimental musician Phillip Corner. The essay considers the various ways in which Brakhage has used black frames and sections; for punctuation, to emphasise a contrastingly light frame, as rhythmic device and, in the case of Passage Through, as a way of focusing attention on sound, i.e, on one thing, not two or more, as is the case in most movies, where attention is divided between seeing and hearing. The essay considers viewing situations, and how the film offers an optimal way of listening to music, since there are minimal visual distractions. The essay also examines some of Brakahage's earliest films from the 1950s, especially The Way to Shadow Garden (1954) and The Roman Numeral Films (1979-82). Work by Sean Cubitt from his book The Practice of Light (2014), and from Ray Durgnat's A Long Hard Look at Psycho (BFI, 2002), in which the idea of black as a graphic device is considered, are also deployed.
The essay contributes new thinking to the existing work on Brakhage's films by P. Adams Sitney and others, in considering previously undiscussed work from his oeuvre. Hitherto most of the discussion of Brakhage's work has been in relation to its 'mythopoeia'. This essay offers, by contrast, detailed examinations of the films' formal structures and effects, focusing on previously undiscussed films
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