Film Art Phenomena

Alongside the commercial cinema of narrative and spectacle there has always been another practice - call it avant-garde, experimental or artists' film (as opposed to art cinema). It is this work that Nicky Hamlyn, himself an acclaimed film-maker in the alternative tradition, investigates in Film Art Phenomena. The work takes its cue from modern trends in other artforms, notably painting and sculpture. This is film-making that emphasises the nature of its apparatus and medium in order to bring about a critical, inquisitive state of mind in the viewer. It deconstructs, anatomises and reimagines what film images are; it builds new machines; it recreates the setting of cinema or expands into new kinds of performance and exhibition. It often has a political dimension - urging audiences to make a free and active response not a passive, consumerist one. Hamlyn's major new study treats artists' film conceptually in order to explore key categories that connect different works and film-makers: from framing to digital media, installation to interactivity, point of view to sound. In so doing he considers the work of Stan Brakhage, Malcolm Le Grice and Michael Snow, as well as younger artists such as Karen Mirza and Brad Butler, Jennifer Nightingale, and Colin Crockatt, among many others. Film Art Phenomena is a crucial intervention in debates about the modes of film-making that diverge from and oppose the mainstream.

The 1920s and 1930s saw the rise of the city symphony, an experimental film form that presented the city as protagonist instead of mere decor. Combining experimental, documentary, and narrative practices, these films were marked by a high level of abstraction reminiscent of high-modernist experiments in painting and photography. Moreover, interwar city symphonies presented a highly fragmented, oftentimes kaleidoscopic sense of modern life, and they organized their urban-industrial images through rhythmic and associative montage that evoke musical structures. In this comprehensive volume, contributors consider the full 80 film corpus, from Manhatta and Berlin: Die Sinfonie der Grosstadt to lesser-known cinematic explorations.

The Oxford Handbook of Sound and Image in Western Art examines, under one umbrella, different kinds of analogies, mutual influences, integrations and collaborations of audio and visual in different art forms. The book represents state-of-the-art case studies with key figures of modern thinking constituting a foundation for discussion. It thus emphasizes avant-garde and experimental tendencies, while analyzing them in historical, theoretical, and critical frameworks. The book is organized around three core thematic sections. The first, Sights and Sounds, concentrates on the interaction between the experience of seeing and the experience of hearing. Examples of painting, classic and digital animation, video art, choreography, and music performance are examined in this section. Sound, Space, and Matter explores experimental forms emanating from the expansion of the concepts of music and space to include environmental sounds, vibrating frequencies, silence, language, human habitats, the human body, and more. The reader will find here an analysis of different manifestations of this aesthetic shift in sound art, fine art, contemporary dance, multimedia theatre, and cinema. The last section, Performance, Performativity, and Text, shows how new light shed by modernism and the avant-garde on the performative aspect of music have led it - together with sound, voice, and text - to become active in new ways in postmodern and contemporary art creation. In addition to examples of real-time performing arts such as music theatre, experimental theatre, and dance, it includes case studies that demonstrate performativity in fine art, visual poetry, short film, and cinema. Sitting at the cutting edge of the field of music and visual arts, the book offers a unique, at times controversial view of this rapidly evolving area of study. Artists, curators, students and scholars will find here a panoramic view of cutting-edge discourse in the field, by an international roster of scholars and practitioners.

In the mid-1950s C.P. Snow began his campaign against the 'two cultures' - the debilitating divide, as he saw it, between traditional 'literary intellectual' culture, and the culture of the sciences, urging in its place a 'third culture' which would draw upon and integrate the resources of disciplines spanning the natural and social sciences, the arts and the humanities. Murray Smith argues that, with the ever-increasing influence of evolutionary theory and neuroscience, and the pervasive presence of digital technologies, Snow's challenge is more relevant than ever. Working out how the 'scientific' and everyday images of the world 'hang' together is no simple matter. In Film, Art, and the Third Culture, Smith explores this question in relation to the art, technology, and science of film in particular, and to the world of the arts and aesthetic activity more generally. In the first part of his book, Smith explores the general strategies and principles necessary to build a 'third cultural' or naturalized approach to film and art - one that roots itself in an appreciation of scientific knowledge and method. Smith then goes on to focus on the role of emotion in film and the other arts, as an extended experiment in the 'third cultural' integration of ideas on emotion spanning the arts, humanities and sciences. While acknowledging that not all of the questions we ask are scientific in nature, Smith contends that we cannot disregard the insights wrought by taking a naturalized approach to the aesthetics of film and the other arts.

The past 40 years of technological innovation have significantly altered the materials of production and revolutionized the possibilities for experiment and exhibition. Not since the invention of film has there been such a critical period of major change in the imaging technologies accessible to artists. Bringing together key artists in film, video, and digital media, the anthology of Experimental Film and Video revisits the divergent philosophical and critical discourses of the 1970s and repositions these debates relative to contemporary practice. Forty artists have contributed images, and 25 artists reflect on the diverse critical agendas, contexts, and communities that have affected their practice across the period from the late 1960s to date. Along with an introduction by Jackie Hatfield and forewords by Sean Cubitt and Al Rees, this illustrated anthology includes interviews and recent essays by filmmakers, video artists, and pioneers of interactive cinema. Experimental Film and Video opens up the conceptual avenues for future practice and related critical writing.

The Critical Practice of Film introduces film studies and production through the integration of criticism, theory and practice. Its approach is that of critical practice, a process that explores the integration and intersection between the critical analysis of films and the practical aspects of filmmaking. In other words, this book is both an introduction to the ways in which we watch films, as well as an introduction to how films are created. The more you know about how films are made, the more you can appreciate the artistry involved in a film. Author Elspeth kydd combines explorations of basic technical and aesthetic principles with extended analyses drawn from both classic and contemporary Hollywood and other world cinemas, including Battleship Potemkin (1927), Un Chien andalou (1929), Stagecoach (1939), Mildred Pierce (1945), Notorious (1946), Letter from an Unknown Woman (1948), Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953), Breathless (1959), Memories of Underdevelopment (1968), Star Wars (1977), Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988), The Matrix (1999), Amores Perros (2000), Gosford Park (2001) and The Lord of the Rings trilogy (2001–3). Also included is a range of exercises designed to stimulate critical and analytical thought and help to demystify the process of creative mediamaking. Assignments range in scale from simple storyboarding and narrative development exercises that may be explored with minimal technology, to more complex video projects that can be adapted to suit varying levels of technical skill. The Critical Practice of Film provides an accessible introduction to the theory and practice of film studies, integrating creative practice with critical and theoretical engagement to guide students towards an engaged form of creative expression and an active role as reviewer and critic. Beautifully presented, this ground-breaking text offers all students an integrated understanding of film criticism and production. Elspeth kydd is a Senior Lecturer in Film Studies and Video Production at the University of the West of England. She has taught, researched and published in film and television studies for nearly twenty years, as well as being an active documentary videomaker. This book developed from teaching integrated theory-practice film courses at universities in the US and UK.

This volume on avant-garde film has emerged as part of a wider reassessment of 20th century avant-garde art, literature and film carried out in the framework of a research project at the University of Edinburgh. It paves the way for a fresh assessment of avant-garde film and develops its theory as an integral part of a newly defined conception of the avant-garde as a whole, by closing the gap between theoretical approaches towards the avant-garde as defined on the basis of art and literature on the one hand and avant-garde cinema on the other. It gathers contributions by the most esteemed scholars in the field of avant-garde studies relating to the ¿classical¿ avant-garde cinema of the 1920s, to new trends emerging in the 1950s and 1960s and to the impact that innovative technologies have recently had on the further development of avant-garde and experimental film. The contributions reflect the broad range of different moving-image media that make up what we refer to today simply as ¿film¿, at the same time as reconsidering the applicability of the label ¿avant-garde¿, to offer a comprehensive and updated framework that will prove invaluable to scholars of both Moving Image Studies and Art History disciplines.