A late entry in our catalogue of "city symphony" films, this animated short was shot in 1975.
More from its maker here.
Tuesday, May 26, 2009
miniature city symphony
A late entry in our catalogue of "city symphony" films, this animated short was shot in 1975.
More from its maker here.
Monday, May 25, 2009
eames links
eames office
eames in australia
case study houses
eames at moma
the lounge chair debuts on nbc:
assembling the lounge chair:
Thursday, May 21, 2009
wikipedia and ayn rand
Ayn Rand on Donahue:
You might be interested to see the ways in which the ideas of Ayn Rand have influenced the development of wikipedia. This article from the London Review of Books offers an interesting argument about the way in which wikipedia can be said to be working.
Excerpt:
When knowledge is generated by crowds, no single individual has much personal responsibility for what is produced, but nor does any one person have a realistic prospect of shaping the outcome. With Wikipedia, the opposite is true. The fact that there is no final version means that anyone can change anything, but it also means that every given change can be attributed to a particular individual.
Okay ...
You might be interested to see the ways in which the ideas of Ayn Rand have influenced the development of wikipedia. This article from the London Review of Books offers an interesting argument about the way in which wikipedia can be said to be working.
Excerpt:
When knowledge is generated by crowds, no single individual has much personal responsibility for what is produced, but nor does any one person have a realistic prospect of shaping the outcome. With Wikipedia, the opposite is true. The fact that there is no final version means that anyone can change anything, but it also means that every given change can be attributed to a particular individual.
Okay ...
Monday, May 18, 2009
Ayn Rand lived in a house designed by a renowned modernist architect, Richard Neutra. You can find more information about Neutra's work at the Neutra Institute for Survival through Design. Merrill Schleier, the author of the article I gave you about The Fountainhead, has more to say about Rand's relationship to modernist architecture here. Alas, the house she lived in, the Von Sternberg house (designed 1934) was demolished in the seventies. You can see Julius Sherman's photographs of the house in a slideshow here, as well as read an account of its interesting history; more images of Neutra's work here. The picture below is of Rand (and her husband, Frank O'Connor) in situ.
Monday, May 11, 2009
Kong v Gonga
Mellard ("Framed in the Glaze," available via WebCT) argues that O'Connor offers, in Hazel, a kind of "case history ... a scene of original trauma ... that trauma's effects" (52) and offers a Lacanian reading of the novel that focuses on the novel's depiction of the gaze and anamorphosis. Anamorphosis is defined by the OED as a "distorted projection or drawing of anything, so made that when viewed from a particular point, or by reflection from a suitable mirror, it appears regular and properly proportioned; a deformation." Perhaps the most famous visual example of anamorphosis is Hans Holbein's painting The Ambassadors, where an image of a skull in encrypted near the bottom of the painting.
Mellard argues that O'Connor uses metaphor to effect this same kind of transformation, noting in particular Mrs' Hitchcock's observation of "The outline of a skull under [Haze's ] skin" (10;57). This image introduces one aspect of the novel I want you to consider: its fascination with the visual realm and that fascination translated into writing. From its opening description of Hazel's eyes moving from the window to the carriage aisle the novel adopts, I argue, a cinematic orientation to the representation of its imaginary spaces.
Perhaps equally important is its analysis of the cinematic space in the diegesis. Taulkinham is represented as a city of lights, reminiscent of the signage that dominates the cityscapes of the city symphony film: "PEANUTS, WESTERN UNION, AJAX, TAXI, HOTEL, CANDY" (Chapter 2) and Hazel arrives on the train, as by this point we might anticipate or require. Later Enoch goes to the movies and finds himself engulfed in its "maw." The first film Enoch witnesses concerns "a scientist named The Eye who performed operations by remote control ... only his eyes looked at the screen." The movie palace offers another scene of trauma, one supplemented by the appearance of Gonga, and of Hazel who preaches in front of the Odeon theatre. Gonga, a dimly and debased descendant of King Kong, orients the question of vision around phenomenon of film as he views Enoch through "celluloid eyes."
Marshalling these indices, some lines of flight emerge between:
* the city symphony and King Kong
* the city symphony and Wise Blood
* King Kong and Rose Hobart
* East of Borneo and King Kong
* Kong and Gonga
* writing and film
And one final intersection, the reworking of Wise Blood by John Huston in his 1979 Wise Blood, which we will watch, in part, in class.
Mellard argues that O'Connor uses metaphor to effect this same kind of transformation, noting in particular Mrs' Hitchcock's observation of "The outline of a skull under [Haze's ] skin" (10;57). This image introduces one aspect of the novel I want you to consider: its fascination with the visual realm and that fascination translated into writing. From its opening description of Hazel's eyes moving from the window to the carriage aisle the novel adopts, I argue, a cinematic orientation to the representation of its imaginary spaces.
Perhaps equally important is its analysis of the cinematic space in the diegesis. Taulkinham is represented as a city of lights, reminiscent of the signage that dominates the cityscapes of the city symphony film: "PEANUTS, WESTERN UNION, AJAX, TAXI, HOTEL, CANDY" (Chapter 2) and Hazel arrives on the train, as by this point we might anticipate or require. Later Enoch goes to the movies and finds himself engulfed in its "maw." The first film Enoch witnesses concerns "a scientist named The Eye who performed operations by remote control ... only his eyes looked at the screen." The movie palace offers another scene of trauma, one supplemented by the appearance of Gonga, and of Hazel who preaches in front of the Odeon theatre. Gonga, a dimly and debased descendant of King Kong, orients the question of vision around phenomenon of film as he views Enoch through "celluloid eyes."
Marshalling these indices, some lines of flight emerge between:
* the city symphony and King Kong
* the city symphony and Wise Blood
* King Kong and Rose Hobart
* East of Borneo and King Kong
* Kong and Gonga
* writing and film
And one final intersection, the reworking of Wise Blood by John Huston in his 1979 Wise Blood, which we will watch, in part, in class.
Monday, April 27, 2009
Explode Art's Tower of Babel!
Last week I proposed to you that Wikipedia is often a very useful resource. The quality of Wikipedia entries varies, of course, but on the assumption that you treat it with the same critical judgement you treat all resources, I feel it's important to acknowledge this collaborative encyclopaedia as, in its own way, a revolutionary pedagogical tool.
The entry on Vertov is exemplary: clear, informative, scholarly. An excerpt:
However, Vertov's two credos, often used interchangeably, are in fact distinct, as Yuri Tsivian points out in the commentary track on the DVD for Man with the Movie Camera: for Vertov, "life as it is" means to record life as it would be without the camera present. "Life caught unawares" means to record life when surprised, and perhaps provoked, by the presence of a camera (16:04 on the commentary track). This explanation contradicts the common assumption that for Vertov "life caught unawares" meant "life caught unaware of the camera." All of these shots might conform to Vertov's credo "caught unawares." Dziga's slow motion, fast motion, and other camera techniques were a way to dissect the image, Vertov's brother Mikhail described in a interview. It was to be the honest truth of perception. For example, in "Man with a Movie Cameara", two trains are shown almost melting into each other, although we are taught to see trains as not riding that close, Vertov tried to portray the actual sight of two passing trains. Mikhail talked about Eisenstein's films as different from his and his brother Vertov's in that Eisenstein, "came from the theatre, in the theatre one directs dramas, one strings beads." "We all felt...that through documentary film we could develop a new kind of art. Not only documentary art, or the art of chronicle, but rather an art based on images, the creation of an image-oriented journalism" Mikhail explained. More than even film truth, "Man with a Movie Camera," was supposed to be a way to make those in the Soviet Union more efficient in their actions. He slowed down his actions, such as the decision whether to jump or not, you can see the decision in his face, a psychological dissection for the audience. He wanted a peace between the actions of man and the actions of a machine, form them to be in a sense, one.
Here is an explanation of Manovich's concept of "database cinema," which we will discuss in class.
The urgent business of kino-eye.
Wednesday, April 22, 2009
Hart Crane
During this week's seminar I mentioned the poetry of Hart Crane, and in particular his evocation of the Brookly Bridge in The Bridge (1930). In the Proem to the poem, "To Brooklyn Bridge," Crane writes:
I think of cinemas, panoramic sleights
With multitudes bent toward some flashing scene
Never disclosed, but hastened to again,
Foretold to other eyes on the same screen;
The stanza describes the "thought" of the cinema as a moment of transport: a sleight (trick), an experience of "multitudes . . . bent toward" (turned to, oriented by, organised through) a scene that bears repetition, and points to the future. It's an interesting image to sit beside the experience of the "Masstransiscope" artwork we discussed. From Walt Whitman ("Manhatta") to Masstransiscope, an aesthetic trajectory complements the experience of cinematic modernity.
You can read "To Brooklyn Bridge" here.
This is the cover of the first edition of The Bridge, with photographs by Walker Evans. Note the way in which the material of the bridge comes to look almost abstract, a migration we discussed as symptomatic of the conversion of shapes to objects (and back) in Ruttmann.
I think of cinemas, panoramic sleights
With multitudes bent toward some flashing scene
Never disclosed, but hastened to again,
Foretold to other eyes on the same screen;
The stanza describes the "thought" of the cinema as a moment of transport: a sleight (trick), an experience of "multitudes . . . bent toward" (turned to, oriented by, organised through) a scene that bears repetition, and points to the future. It's an interesting image to sit beside the experience of the "Masstransiscope" artwork we discussed. From Walt Whitman ("Manhatta") to Masstransiscope, an aesthetic trajectory complements the experience of cinematic modernity.
You can read "To Brooklyn Bridge" here.
This is the cover of the first edition of The Bridge, with photographs by Walker Evans. Note the way in which the material of the bridge comes to look almost abstract, a migration we discussed as symptomatic of the conversion of shapes to objects (and back) in Ruttmann.
Monday, April 20, 2009
The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Rancière
In one of his most influential books, Jacques Rancière tells the remarkable story of the "ignorant schoolmaster" to open the question of what he calls "universal teaching." At a time of political crisis a French academic named Jacques Jacotot was forced into exile, and he left his teaching post in Dijon to take up another in the Netherlands. Many of the students who wanted to be taught by him were unable to speak French and he was unable to speak Flemish, so the situation was perplexing. His solution was novel. He found that "[t] here was … no language in which he could teach them what they sought from him," and '[y]et he wanted to respond to their wishes" (1-2); their desire to learn. Jacotot decided to improvise by establishing what Rancière calls "the minimal link of a thing in common" between himself and the students" (2), a link he secured through the use of a novel, written in French, with a parallel translation in Flemish. And what he found was that by reading the book carefully in Flemish, and studying the French, his students were able to decipher the text in French and to learn that language, decipher its grammar and understand something of its meanings. Rancière uses the story of Jacotot to question the role of explication in teaching. He writes:
Like all conscientious professors, [Jacotot] knew that teaching was not in the slightest about cramming students with knowledge and having them repeat it like parrots, but he knew equaly well that students had to avoid the chance detours where minds still incapable of distinguishing the essential from the accessory, the principle from the consequence, get lost. In short, the essential act of the master was to explicate: to disengage the simple elements of learning, and to reconcile their simplicity in principle with the factual simplicity that characterizes young and ignorant minds. To teach was to transmit learning and form minds simultaneously, by leading those minds, according to an ordered progression, from the most simple to the most complex. (3)
Rancière writes that the experiment with his Flemish students made this model less than persuasive; without explanation from him, his students had learned the language they did not know. Explication, it seemed, was not necessarily the source of a student's learning. A parallel arises with the most basic scene of learning we have in common:
The words the child learns best, those whose meaning he best fathoms, those he best makes his own through his own usage, are those he learns without a master explicator, well before any master explicator. According to the unequal returns of various intellectual apprenticeships, what all human children learn best is what no master can explain: the mother tongue. We speak to them and we speak around them. They hear and retain, imitate and repeat, make mistakes and correct themselves, succeed by chance and begin again methodically, and, at too young an age for explicators to begin instruction them, they are almost all – regardless of gender, social condition, and skin color – able to understand and speak the language of their parents. (5)
From this observation, Rancière claims a striking truth; explication in learning is a form of "enforced stultification" (7), always inferior to the style of original learning, the way we learn our mother tongue. This "best" teaching, which harnesses the will to learn in place of acts of instruction, is what he calls "universal teaching," a practice that assumes a level of universal competence among students, competence generated by their desire to learn: "[t]here is no one on earth who hasn't learned something by himself and without a master explicator" (16). As Rancière notes, almost all children success in learning their mother tongue without difficulty, although it is in fact a complex task; the capacity to learn complex things is not a talent segregated on the basis of calculable differences in talent or intelligence, but broadly possessed by all. Jacotot discovers that his students acquire French not through his teaching, but rather through his capacity to direct their own interest.
Rancière, Jacques (1987) Le maître ignorant: cinq leçons sur l'émancipation intellectuelle. The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation Trans. Kristin Ross. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991.
Some links.
Like all conscientious professors, [Jacotot] knew that teaching was not in the slightest about cramming students with knowledge and having them repeat it like parrots, but he knew equaly well that students had to avoid the chance detours where minds still incapable of distinguishing the essential from the accessory, the principle from the consequence, get lost. In short, the essential act of the master was to explicate: to disengage the simple elements of learning, and to reconcile their simplicity in principle with the factual simplicity that characterizes young and ignorant minds. To teach was to transmit learning and form minds simultaneously, by leading those minds, according to an ordered progression, from the most simple to the most complex. (3)
Rancière writes that the experiment with his Flemish students made this model less than persuasive; without explanation from him, his students had learned the language they did not know. Explication, it seemed, was not necessarily the source of a student's learning. A parallel arises with the most basic scene of learning we have in common:
The words the child learns best, those whose meaning he best fathoms, those he best makes his own through his own usage, are those he learns without a master explicator, well before any master explicator. According to the unequal returns of various intellectual apprenticeships, what all human children learn best is what no master can explain: the mother tongue. We speak to them and we speak around them. They hear and retain, imitate and repeat, make mistakes and correct themselves, succeed by chance and begin again methodically, and, at too young an age for explicators to begin instruction them, they are almost all – regardless of gender, social condition, and skin color – able to understand and speak the language of their parents. (5)
From this observation, Rancière claims a striking truth; explication in learning is a form of "enforced stultification" (7), always inferior to the style of original learning, the way we learn our mother tongue. This "best" teaching, which harnesses the will to learn in place of acts of instruction, is what he calls "universal teaching," a practice that assumes a level of universal competence among students, competence generated by their desire to learn: "[t]here is no one on earth who hasn't learned something by himself and without a master explicator" (16). As Rancière notes, almost all children success in learning their mother tongue without difficulty, although it is in fact a complex task; the capacity to learn complex things is not a talent segregated on the basis of calculable differences in talent or intelligence, but broadly possessed by all. Jacotot discovers that his students acquire French not through his teaching, but rather through his capacity to direct their own interest.
Rancière, Jacques (1987) Le maître ignorant: cinq leçons sur l'émancipation intellectuelle. The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation Trans. Kristin Ross. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991.
Some links.
tom gunning
Gunning on Modernity:
It could be argued that techniques of circulation define the intersecting transformations in technology and industry that we call modernity. By "modernity" I refer less to a demarcated historical period than to a change in experience. This new configuration of experience was shaped by a large number of factors, which were clearly dependent on the change in production marked by the Industrial Revolution. It was also, however, equally characterized by the transformation in daily life wrought by the growth of capitalism and advances in technology: the growth of urban traffic, the distribution of mass-produced good, and successive new technologies of transportation and communication. While the nineteenth century witnessed the principal conjunction of these transformations in Europe and American, with a particularly crisis coming towards the turn of the century, modernity has not yet exhausted its transformations and has a different pace in different areas of the globe.
The earliest fully developed image of this transformation of experience comes, I believe, with the railway, which embodies the complex realignment of practices which modern circulation entails.
Tom Gunning "Tracing the Individual Body: Photography, Detectives, and Early Cinema" in Charney, Leo and Vanessa R. Schwartz. Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995.
It could be argued that techniques of circulation define the intersecting transformations in technology and industry that we call modernity. By "modernity" I refer less to a demarcated historical period than to a change in experience. This new configuration of experience was shaped by a large number of factors, which were clearly dependent on the change in production marked by the Industrial Revolution. It was also, however, equally characterized by the transformation in daily life wrought by the growth of capitalism and advances in technology: the growth of urban traffic, the distribution of mass-produced good, and successive new technologies of transportation and communication. While the nineteenth century witnessed the principal conjunction of these transformations in Europe and American, with a particularly crisis coming towards the turn of the century, modernity has not yet exhausted its transformations and has a different pace in different areas of the globe.
The earliest fully developed image of this transformation of experience comes, I believe, with the railway, which embodies the complex realignment of practices which modern circulation entails.
Tom Gunning "Tracing the Individual Body: Photography, Detectives, and Early Cinema" in Charney, Leo and Vanessa R. Schwartz. Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995.
masstransiscope
From the blog:
Bill Brand’s Masstransiscope was installed in the abandoned Myrtle Avenue subway station in Brooklyn, New York in September 1980. It has been seen by millions of commuters for over twenty-five years. The 228 hand-painted panels are viewed through a series of vertical slits set into a specially constructed housing. The piece works on the principle of the Zoetrope, a 19th century optical toy.
official site
blog
Bill Brand’s Masstransiscope was installed in the abandoned Myrtle Avenue subway station in Brooklyn, New York in September 1980. It has been seen by millions of commuters for over twenty-five years. The 228 hand-painted panels are viewed through a series of vertical slits set into a specially constructed housing. The piece works on the principle of the Zoetrope, a 19th century optical toy.
official site
blog
Monday, March 16, 2009
a film canon
In preparation for next week's class, you should browse Billy Stevenson's website, a film canon.
calligraphic modernism
Scraps of paper are very important to the plot of Piccadilly. In particular, the camera rests on the signature of Shosho, whose contractual relationship to the Piccadilly Club is never quite clarified, as if the matter of monetary loss and gain, ostensibly the engine of the story, can be established in writing but never disclosed with precision. The film's interest in scenes of writing establishes a special link between the written word and the cinematic. We see more action in Wilmot's office than onstage, and we see comparatively lengthy scenes of writing and blotting. Wilmot's blotting might have struck you as odd: it gestures to an archaic technology, the fountain pen, and a temporality of writing that generally escapes observation. When writing with a fountain pen, one either waited for the ink to dry or else blotted the page on a special kind of paper, blotting paper, which was often used as the "desktop" of a writing surface, as it is here. I'll have more to say about writing and in particular the use of calligraphy in Piccadilly. If you haven't yet watched the film, stay tuned for the scene where Shosho signs her contract with both a European signature and a series of characters.
Meanwhile, here's an autographed photograph of Anna May Wong, which she has likewise signed with both her European name and its rendition in characters. Wong's contemporary celebrity can be gauged from the archive of ephemera associated with her career: cigarette cards, celebrity portraits, and posters of Wong are hot properties in the cinephile world.
Meanwhile, here's an autographed photograph of Anna May Wong, which she has likewise signed with both her European name and its rendition in characters. Wong's contemporary celebrity can be gauged from the archive of ephemera associated with her career: cigarette cards, celebrity portraits, and posters of Wong are hot properties in the cinephile world.
Sunday, March 8, 2009
Senses of Cinema and fanvid
There's a useful account of Rose Hobart at the online journal Senses of Cinema. Senses of Cinema is an extraordinarily useful resource for cinephiles and I recommend it to you in any case; Brian Frye's piece on Rose Hobart gives a good sense of Cornell's place in surrealist cinema. You might also find the style of the articles there an interesting model for your own blog entries.
Meanwhile, I want to say a little more about Rose Hobart in relation to fanvideos. Fanvids are generally short "collages" made by fans -- amateurs -- from material drawn from their fandom. For example, fans of the CSI or Law & Order shows will select excerpts from their preferred show and cut them together, often to the accompaniment of a song chosen to orient or skew their fan perspective on the show (these are sometimes called songvid). Romances between otherwise uninvolved characters can be made to "appear" through the work of fanvid. At the end of this post I've embedded one such songvid, featuring Bobby Goren and Alex Eames from Law & Order: Criminal Intent; I chose this couple because they are so decidedly not a romantic couple according to the show that the video demonstrates the kind of inventive work involved in fanvideos.
I'm interested in the way one might see the work of Cornell in Rose Hobart as a similar, earlier labour. Modern technology has liberated audiovisual texts in such a way that such work has become characteristic of our digital times (remember Burgin on this), but if you watch fanvideos across different fandoms you will notice that many of the techniques Cornell pioneered in his erzatz fandom are still present: repetition, slow motion, tints, anti-narrative cuts, asynchronous music.
Anyway, here's "Bring Me To Life," and here's a link to Henry Jenkins' article on How to Watch a Fan-Vid.
Meanwhile, I want to say a little more about Rose Hobart in relation to fanvideos. Fanvids are generally short "collages" made by fans -- amateurs -- from material drawn from their fandom. For example, fans of the CSI or Law & Order shows will select excerpts from their preferred show and cut them together, often to the accompaniment of a song chosen to orient or skew their fan perspective on the show (these are sometimes called songvid). Romances between otherwise uninvolved characters can be made to "appear" through the work of fanvid. At the end of this post I've embedded one such songvid, featuring Bobby Goren and Alex Eames from Law & Order: Criminal Intent; I chose this couple because they are so decidedly not a romantic couple according to the show that the video demonstrates the kind of inventive work involved in fanvideos.
I'm interested in the way one might see the work of Cornell in Rose Hobart as a similar, earlier labour. Modern technology has liberated audiovisual texts in such a way that such work has become characteristic of our digital times (remember Burgin on this), but if you watch fanvideos across different fandoms you will notice that many of the techniques Cornell pioneered in his erzatz fandom are still present: repetition, slow motion, tints, anti-narrative cuts, asynchronous music.
Anyway, here's "Bring Me To Life," and here's a link to Henry Jenkins' article on How to Watch a Fan-Vid.
Kaleidoscope, Hypnosis, Snack.
Here's a compilation of cinema intermission ads, including one that evokes Burgin's description of the "psychical space of the spectating subject" as, after Baudelaire, "a kaleidoscope equipped with consciousness." I'm referring of course to the series of kaleidoscoped snacks.
The "special effect" of the kaleidoscope today looks antique, perhaps, but it's interesting how many of the devices used in these ads involve quasi-hypnotic spirals: we will be discussing those spirals further when we turn to Cocteau.
The "special effect" of the kaleidoscope today looks antique, perhaps, but it's interesting how many of the devices used in these ads involve quasi-hypnotic spirals: we will be discussing those spirals further when we turn to Cocteau.
Thursday, March 5, 2009
My City of Sydney
In a seminar last week, I mentioned this time capsule, the closing message Channel 7 showed in the 70s and 80s. Tommy Leonetti, the singer, hosted a variety show, but for many this was his most memorable moment on Australian television. Leonetti was American.
The song observes a similar logic to the "city symphony" albeit in miniature, offering a variety of perspectives on the cinematic liveliness of the city's arteries and nodal points. Its nightclub ambience and topographical drift from the Harbour to the Cross orients the viewer to her city as a place of adult recreation, which seems odd since it immediately precedes the cartoon of a kangaroo putting her joey to bed, kawaii before its time. Perhaps its implication is that the night-time, and so sleep, is an adult playground, one which ties it directly to the surrealistic dreamscapes we are investigating this fortnight. Sweet cosmopolitan dreams!
The dating of the clip is ambitious; the Opera House is still under construction (so it's pre-1973), and Tommy's outfit suggests to me we are on the cusp of the seventies. To give you an idea of the way in which this clip oriented the feeling of being a "Sydneysider" in the 70s, you might want to watch the punk cover by XL Capris, also at YouTube. Frenzal Rhomb also did a cover, in the 90s.
The song observes a similar logic to the "city symphony" albeit in miniature, offering a variety of perspectives on the cinematic liveliness of the city's arteries and nodal points. Its nightclub ambience and topographical drift from the Harbour to the Cross orients the viewer to her city as a place of adult recreation, which seems odd since it immediately precedes the cartoon of a kangaroo putting her joey to bed, kawaii before its time. Perhaps its implication is that the night-time, and so sleep, is an adult playground, one which ties it directly to the surrealistic dreamscapes we are investigating this fortnight. Sweet cosmopolitan dreams!
The dating of the clip is ambitious; the Opera House is still under construction (so it's pre-1973), and Tommy's outfit suggests to me we are on the cusp of the seventies. To give you an idea of the way in which this clip oriented the feeling of being a "Sydneysider" in the 70s, you might want to watch the punk cover by XL Capris, also at YouTube. Frenzal Rhomb also did a cover, in the 90s.
Wednesday, March 4, 2009
Vox popular
Tuesday, March 3, 2009
Blogging Sites
For creating your blog I suggest three sites:
blogger.com
wordpress.com
livejournal.com
They all have their points, so you might want to play around. The simplest, I find, is blogger, and that's what I am using for this blog.
blogger.com
wordpress.com
livejournal.com
They all have their points, so you might want to play around. The simplest, I find, is blogger, and that's what I am using for this blog.
One class member, Matthew, has already created his blog. It's linked to the right, under "student blogs." A comment on his blog suggested it might be a good idea to create a Facebook group for the class, and that was something I'd been wondering about as well. So -- I have. Just search "cinematic modernism" and you will find it.
The group can give anyone who wants it another point of access to discussion and distribution of material. I'm very interested to see how you all make use of the space, so don't want to comment too much more on that: it's for you to play with.
The group can give anyone who wants it another point of access to discussion and distribution of material. I'm very interested to see how you all make use of the space, so don't want to comment too much more on that: it's for you to play with.
Monday, March 2, 2009
Rose Hobart
Rose Hobart's collage makes extensive use of the 1931 jungle flick, East of Borneo. East of Borneo is now in the public domain so you can torrent it here if you like, perfectly legally. The film narrates the story of Linda Randolph, who goes to Borneo to track down her errant husband. She meets up with not only her spouse but also the Prince of Marudu and a bewildering array of animals from all corners of the globe, though principal players in the animal kingdom are a horde, or herd, of frantic crocodiles. The Prince, he tells us, is descended from a volcano visible through palace windows, and the extinction of his life will be marked by the extinction of Marudu by volcanic eruption. And so it is.
Only fragments of this story remain in Cornell's transporting collage. Cornell has removed the "spine" of narrative to draw our attention instead to the body of Rose Hobart, moving through the space of a series of shots. Cornell's collage pays homage to the silent screen, stripping the film of its sound and substituting recorded music, surreally asynchronous with the images.
Cornell created his collage film from discarded film reels, cutting together a new film from material remnants. It was the first film he made and first exhibited in December 1936 as part of a collection entitled "Goofy Newsreels" (Sitney 77; the other films were unaltered by Cornell). Cornell screened the film at "silent speed," that is, at a slow speed typically used to project silent films which were shot at a slower speed to talking films (Sitney 75). This slow speed gave the film a dreamlike quality, augmented by his showing the film filtered through a blue glass plate (Sitney 76). The film attains its quality of almost opacity.
Whereas East of Borneo ends with a volcanic eruption, Cornell cut into Rose Hobart's last moments images of a solar eclipse intercut with an image of a ball falling into water. Whereas the action of East of Borneo is propulsive, externally energetic, the movements in these concluding scenes are implosive or transitory in their nature. In this perhaps they echo the nature of the collage itself, causing the story of East of Borneo to collapse into a series of scenes which are repetitious and transitory themselves.
You may like to ponder the monkey who makes a brief appearance as Rose's companion. In East of Borneo this monkey meets a swift and unpleasant end. In Rose Hobart its appearance is also transitory, auguring not only the film's origin in a "jungle movie," but also a series of representations of animal-human interactions that will reach their zenith for us in King Kong and Wise Blood. Perhaps it's not accidental that an advertisement for East of Borneo appears on the marquee of a cinema in Peter Jackson's remake of King Kong.
Only fragments of this story remain in Cornell's transporting collage. Cornell has removed the "spine" of narrative to draw our attention instead to the body of Rose Hobart, moving through the space of a series of shots. Cornell's collage pays homage to the silent screen, stripping the film of its sound and substituting recorded music, surreally asynchronous with the images.
Cornell created his collage film from discarded film reels, cutting together a new film from material remnants. It was the first film he made and first exhibited in December 1936 as part of a collection entitled "Goofy Newsreels" (Sitney 77; the other films were unaltered by Cornell). Cornell screened the film at "silent speed," that is, at a slow speed typically used to project silent films which were shot at a slower speed to talking films (Sitney 75). This slow speed gave the film a dreamlike quality, augmented by his showing the film filtered through a blue glass plate (Sitney 76). The film attains its quality of almost opacity.
Whereas East of Borneo ends with a volcanic eruption, Cornell cut into Rose Hobart's last moments images of a solar eclipse intercut with an image of a ball falling into water. Whereas the action of East of Borneo is propulsive, externally energetic, the movements in these concluding scenes are implosive or transitory in their nature. In this perhaps they echo the nature of the collage itself, causing the story of East of Borneo to collapse into a series of scenes which are repetitious and transitory themselves.
A Mascot: Tilly Losch
The image to the right is a detail from one of Joseph Cornell's boxes, Tilly Losch.
Cornell's name for the work remembers a Viennese actor and dancer who appeared in several Hollywood films of the thirties and forties as well as in a wide variety of dance and avant garde theatrical performances. She was later a painter.
Cornell suspends Tilly in time: she embodies both the spectacle of performance and the attentive spectator at work, held or animated by a fragile collection of threads. She sits amidst, or aloft, the sublime spectacle of alps. Miniaturised and poised, Tilly has a body that is still and yet in action. She is seated in a space whose contours describe a simulated theatre; inside and outside, her location mid-air makes her half-audience, half-curtain (raiser).
You can find more information about Joseph Cornell here, here, and here, and we will be kicking off the unit by viewing a Cornell film, Rose Hobart. You can view it here.
You can find more information about Tilly Losch here.
Cornell's name for the work remembers a Viennese actor and dancer who appeared in several Hollywood films of the thirties and forties as well as in a wide variety of dance and avant garde theatrical performances. She was later a painter.
Cornell suspends Tilly in time: she embodies both the spectacle of performance and the attentive spectator at work, held or animated by a fragile collection of threads. She sits amidst, or aloft, the sublime spectacle of alps. Miniaturised and poised, Tilly has a body that is still and yet in action. She is seated in a space whose contours describe a simulated theatre; inside and outside, her location mid-air makes her half-audience, half-curtain (raiser).
You can find more information about Joseph Cornell here, here, and here, and we will be kicking off the unit by viewing a Cornell film, Rose Hobart. You can view it here.
You can find more information about Tilly Losch here.
Cinematic Modernism, Son Of Cinematic Modernism
This is the blog for ENGL3604, Cinematic Modernism, as it is being taught in 2009. I originally taught the unit in 2007, using this blog. This year, I will be adding to the content of the unit of study as it shifts in emphasis and interest, directed by both my experience of teaching the unit last time and by the interests of class members. Some material will be repeated, but you can read the 2007 entries if you want to see one version of its life.
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