The Performance of Trauma in Moving Image Art

2014-10-02
The Performance of Trauma in Moving Image Art

PDF The Performance of Trauma in Moving Image Art Download

  • Author: Dirk Cornelis de Bruyn
  • Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
  • ISBN: 1443868752
  • Category : Social Science
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 245

With reference to recent neurological research into Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) using new imaging technologies and models of implicit and explicit memory systems developed from this research, The Performance of Trauma in Moving Image Art examines the capacity of an artist’s cinema of experimental and avant-garde film to perform and communicate traumatic experience. De Bruyn analyses key films from the 1940s to the present that perform aspects of overwhelming experience through their approach, structure, content and perceptual impact, mapping a trajectory from analogue to contemporary digital moving image practice. He argues for the inclusion of Peter Gidal’s 1970s conception of ‘materialist film’ into the genre of ‘trauma cinema’ through its capacity to articulate un-locatability and perceptually perform dis-orientation and a flashback effect, all further identified here as key characteristics of digital moving image practice. The discussion explores the following questions. Can ‘materialist film’ model traumatic memory and perform the traumatic flashback? Does the capacity to articulate trauma’s un-speakability and invisibility give this practice a renewed relevance in digital media’s preoccupation with surface and the impact of information overload? De Bruyn’s phenomenological ‘traumatic’ reading of materialist film steps beyond Gidal’s original anti-illusionist rationale to incorporate critiques effectively mounted against it by the founders of a ‘70s feminist psychoanalytic counter-cinema. This contemporary re-reading further re-evaluates the Minimalist turn in painting and sculpture after the Second World War, arguing that this development is not essentialist or visionary but makes visible the implicit mechanisms of denial and erasure at the core of traumatic remembering. For de Bruyn, the initial traumatic impact of industrialization on the body’s perceptual apparatus, traceable through the advent of cinema and train travel, is communicated by such moving image art. The development of digital technology marks a new cycle of such perceptual re-balancing for which materialist film is uniquely positioned and which it critically addresses.

Reframing Bodies

2009-12-02
Reframing Bodies

PDF Reframing Bodies Download

  • Author: Roger Hallas
  • Publisher: Duke University Press
  • ISBN: 0822391406
  • Category : Social Science
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 336

In Reframing Bodies, Roger Hallas illuminates the capacities of film and video to bear witness to the cultural, political, and psychological imperatives of the AIDS crisis. He explains how queer films and videos made in response to the AIDS epidemics in North America, Europe, Australia, and South Africa challenge longstanding assumptions about both historical trauma and the politics of gay visibility. Drawing on a wide range of works, including activist tapes, found footage films, autobiographical videos, documentary portraits, museum installations, and even film musicals, Hallas reveals how such “queer AIDS media” simultaneously express both immediacy and historical consciousness. Queer AIDS media are neither mere ideological critiques of the dominant media representation of homosexuality and AIDS nor corrective attempts to produce “positive images” of people living with HIV/AIDS. Rather, they perform complex, mediated acts of bearing witness to the individual and collective trauma of AIDS. Challenging the entrenched media politics of who gets to speak, how, and to whom, Hallas offers a bold reconsideration of the intersubjective relations that connect filmmakers, subjects, and viewers. He explains how queer testimony reframes AIDS witnesses and their speech through its striking combination of direct address and aesthetic experimentation. In addition, Hallas engages recent historical changes and media transformations that have not only displaced queer AIDS media from activism to the archive, but also created new witnessing dynamics through the logics of the database and the remix. Reframing Bodies provides new insight into the work of Gregg Bordowitz, John Greyson, Derek Jarman, Matthias Müller, and Marlon Riggs, and offers critical consideration of important but often overlooked filmmakers, including Jim Hubbard, Jack Lewis, and Stuart Marshall.

Death and the Moving Image

2015-02-13
Death and the Moving Image

PDF Death and the Moving Image Download

  • Author: Michele Aaron
  • Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
  • ISBN: 0748677763
  • Category : Performing Arts
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 240

Exploring gender, race, nation and narration, this groundbreaking study isolates how mainstream cinema works to bestow value upon certain lives and specific socio-cultural identities in a hierarchical and partisan way. Dedicated to the popular, to the pol

Killer Images

2013-01-08
Killer Images

PDF Killer Images Download

  • Author: Joram ten Brink
  • Publisher: Columbia University Press
  • ISBN: 0231850247
  • Category : Performing Arts
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 345

Cinema has long shaped not only how mass violence is perceived but also how it is performed. Today, when media coverage is central to the execution of terror campaigns and news anchormen serve as embedded journalists, a critical understanding of how the moving image is implicated in the imaginations and actions of perpetrators and survivors of violence is all the more urgent. If the cinematic image and mass violence are among the defining features of modernity, the former is significantly implicated in the latter, and the nature of this implication is the book's central focus. This book brings together a range of newly commissioned essays and interviews from the world's leading academics and documentary filmmakers, including Ben Anderson, Errol Morris, Harun Farocki, Rithy Phan, Avi Mograbi, Brian Winston, and Michael Chanan. Contributors explore such topics as the tension between remembrance and performance, the function of moving images in the execution of political violence, and nonfiction filmmaking methods that facilitate communities of survivors to respond to, recover, and redeem a history that sought to physically and symbolically annihilate them

Scars and Wounds

2017-06-14
Scars and Wounds

PDF Scars and Wounds Download

  • Author: Nick Hodgin
  • Publisher: Springer
  • ISBN: 3319410245
  • Category : Performing Arts
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 307

This book examines recent cinematic representations of the traumatic legacies of national and international events and processes. Whilst not ignoring European and Hollywood cinema, it includes studies of films about countries which have been less well-represented in cinematic trauma studies, including Australia, Rwanda, Chile and Iran. Each essay establishes national and international contexts that are relevant to the films considered. All essays also deal with form, whether this means the use of specific techniques to represent certain aspects of trauma or challenges to certain genre conventions to make them more adaptable to the traumatic legacies addressed by directors. The editors argue that the healing processes associated with such legacies can helpfully be studied through the idiom of ‘scar-formation’ rather than event-centred ‘wound-creation’.

Landscape and the Moving Image

2022-06-21
Landscape and the Moving Image

PDF Landscape and the Moving Image Download

  • Author: Catherine Elwes
  • Publisher: Intellect (UK)
  • ISBN: 9781789385823
  • Category : Landscapes in art
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 0

Elwes takes a journey through the twin histories of landscape art and experimental moving image and discovers how they coalesce in the work of artists from the 1970s to the present day.0Drawing on a wide geographical sampling, Elwes considers issues that have preoccupied film and video artists over the years, ranging from ecology, gender, race, performativity, conflict, colonialism and our relationship to the nonhuman creatures with whom we share our world. The book is informed by the belief that artists can provide an embodied, emotional response to landscape, which is an essential driver in the urgent task of combating the environmental crisis we now face.0The book comprises a series of essays that explore how the moving image mediates our relationship to and understanding of landscapes. The focus is on artists' film and video and draws on work from the 1970s to the present day. Early chapters map the theoretical terrain for both landscape and artists' moving image creating a foundation for the chapters that follow devoted to practice. These address themes of identity politics, performativity and animals and examine examples of British 'weather-blown films' and work from around the world including Indigenous Australian film landscapes. The book offers an informed, personal view of the subject and threaded through the narrative is a concern with the environment and the vexed question of whether an appreciation of nature's aesthetics undermines a commitment to ecology.0The book is written in a clear, engaging style and is enlivened by Elwes's own experiences as a video artist, writer and curator, and the primary material she draws on derived from conversations with fellow practitioners across the years.

Global Animation Theory

2018-11-01
Global Animation Theory

PDF Global Animation Theory Download

  • Author: Franziska Bruckner
  • Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
  • ISBN: 1501337149
  • Category : Performing Arts
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 283

This book is open access and available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. It is funded by Knowledge Unlatched. Scanning historical and current trends in animation through different perspectives including art history, film, media and cultural studies is a prominent facet of today's theoretical and historical approaches in this rapidly evolving field. Global Animation Theory offers detailed and diverse insights into the methodologies of contemporary animation studies, as well as the topics relevant for today's study of animation. The contact between practical and theoretical approaches to animation at Animafest Scanner, is closely connected to host of this event, the World Festival of Animated Film Animafest Zagreb. It has given way to academic writing that is very open to practical aspects of animation, with several contributors being established not only as animation scholars, but also as artists. This anthology presents, alongside an introduction by the editors and a preface by well known animation scholar Giannalberto Bendazzi, 15 selected essays from the first three Animafest Scanner editions. They explore various significant aspects of animation studies, some of them still unknown to the English speaking communities.

Canadian Cinema in the New Millennium

2023-01-15
Canadian Cinema in the New Millennium

PDF Canadian Cinema in the New Millennium Download

  • Author: Lee Carruthers
  • Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
  • ISBN: 0228014921
  • Category : Performing Arts
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 431

At the turn of the millennium Canadian cinema appeared to have reached an apex of aesthetic and commercial transformation. Domestic filmmaking has since declined in visibility: the sense of celebrity once associated with independent directors has diminished, projects garner less critical attention, and concepts that made late-twentieth-century Canadian film legible have been reconsidered or displaced. Canadian Cinema in the New Millennium examines this dramatic transformation and revitalizes our engagement with Canadian cinema in the contemporary moment, presenting focused case studies of films and filmmakers and contextual studies of Canadian film policy, labour, and film festivals. Contributors trace key developments since 2000, including the renouveau or Quebec New Wave, Indigenous filmmaking, i-docs, and diasporic experimental filmmaking. Reflecting the way film in Canada mediates multiple cultures, forging new affinities among anglophone, francophone, and Indigenous-language examples, this book engages familiar figures, such as Denis Villeneuve, Xavier Dolan, Sarah Polley, and Guy Maddin, in the same breath as small-budget independent films, documentaries, and experimental works that have emerged in the Canadian scene. Fuelled by close attention to the films themselves and a desire to develop new scholarly approaches, Canadian Cinema in the New Millennium models a renewed commitment to keeping the conversation about Canadian cinema vibrant and alive.

Cinema, Suffering and Psychoanalysis

2023-12-14
Cinema, Suffering and Psychoanalysis

PDF Cinema, Suffering and Psychoanalysis Download

  • Author: Laura Stephenson
  • Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
  • ISBN:
  • Category : Psychology
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 233

Cinema, Suffering and Psychoanalysis explores psychological disorder as common to the human condition using a unique three-angled approach: psychoanalysis recognises the inherent suffering encountered by each subject due to developmental phases; psychology applies specific categorisation to how this suffering manifests; cinema depicts suffering through a combination of video and aural elements. Functioning as a culturally reflexive medium, the six feature films analysed, including Black Swan (2010) and The Machinist (2004), represent some of the most common psychological disorders and lived experiences of the contemporary era. This book enters unchartered terrain in cinema scholarship by combining clinical psychology's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual Five (DSM-V) to organise and diagnose each character, and psychoanalysis to track the origin, mechanism and affect of the psychological disorder within the narrative trajectory of each film. Lacan's theories on the infantile mirror phase, the Imaginary, and the Symbolic, Žižek's theories on the Real, the big Other and the Event, and Kristeva's theories on abjection and melancholia work in combination with the DSM's classification of symptoms to interpret six contemporary pieces of cinema. By taking into consideration that origin, mechanism, affect and symptomatology are part of an interconnected group, this book explores psychological disorder as part of the human condition, something which contributes to and informs personal identity. More specifically, this research refutes the notion that psychological disorder and psychological health exist as a binary, instead recognising that what has traditionally been pathologised, may instead be viewed as variations on human identity.

Stan Brakhage

2018
Stan Brakhage

PDF Stan Brakhage Download

  • Author: Marco Lori
  • Publisher: Indiana University Press
  • ISBN: 0861969472
  • Category : Electronic books
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 231

Essays on the work of this iconic experimental filmmaker from a variety of scholars. Stan Brakhage's body of work counts as one of the most important within post-war avant-garde cinema, and yet it has rarely been given the attention it deserves. Over the years, though, diverse, and original reflections have developed, distancing his figure little by little from critical categories. This collection of newly commissioned essays, plus some important reprinted work, queries some of the consensus on Brakhage's films. In particular, many of these essays revolve around the controversial issues of representation and perception. This project sets out from the assumption that Brakhage's art is articulated primarily through opposing tensions, which donate his figure and films an extraordinary depth, even as they evince fleetingness, elusivity and paradoxicality. This collection aims not only to clarify aspects of Brakhage's art, but also to show how his work is involved in a constant mediation between antinomies and opposites. At the same time, his art presents a multifaceted object endlessly posing new questions to the viewer, for which no point of entry or perspective is preferred in respect to the others. Acknowledging this, this volume hopes that the experience of his films will be revitalized. Featuring topics as diverse as the technical and semantic ambiguity of blacks, the fissures in mimetic representation of the 'it' within the 'itself' of an image, the film-maker as practical psychologist through cognitive theories, the critique of ocular centrism by mingling sight with other senses such as touch, films that can actually philosophize in a Wittgensteinian way, political guilt and collusion in aesthetic forms, a disjunctive, reflexive, and phenomenological temporality realizing Deleuze's image-time, and the echoes of Ezra Pound and pneumophantasmology in the quest of art as spiritual revelation, this book not only addresses scholars, but also is a thorough and thought-provoking introduction for the uninitiated. Contributors include: Nicky Hamlyn, Peter Mudie, Paul Taberham, Gareth Evans, Rebecca A. Sheehan, Christina Chalmers, Stephen Mooney, and Marco Lori.