MAKING LIGHT OF IT

26.9.13

ACINEMA

11:19 AM

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"...Lyotard, by way of contrast, advocates an 'acinema' that does not trade in fixed identities (not even formal identities, of the sort involved in visual rhymes and repeated figured) and recognizable situations (that is, situations whose doubling existence repeats what we know of the world, to ensure that it can be folded back into the world)... It is a cinema of intense agitation. “Cinematography” means writing movement: in learning cinematography in film schools, one acquires a training in discriminating between “good” and “bad” movements: good movements are commodifiable movements, valued in a strict capitalist sense—good movement, Lyotard suggests in his article “Acinema” is deemed valuable “because it returns to something else . . . it is thus potential return and profit.” Scenes that are “dirty, confused, unsteady, unclear, poorly framed, overexposed” are deleted—it eliminates all impulsional movement (whether representational or abstract) that escapes identification and recognition and will not give itself for reduplication. Against that, Lyotard’s vanguardism advocates a cinema that does not depend on unity and balance, but on a constant movement of rupture. Lyotard’s rethinking of Freud’s dynamic model of energy rejected the privilege that Freud attached to the discharge of energy and the return to the homeostatic condition. Energy (arousal), for Lyotard, is delight, bliss—so he reconceived jouissance, taking it not as discharged, not as having as its objective to return us to the calmed state (that foretells the thanatic extinction of desire), not as a rétournement, but, rather, as a pure activity, a détournement (cf. sublimation, in the literal sense) that misspends energy purposefully. Acinema, Lyotard notes, by writing with movements that go beyond the point of no return, spills “the libidinal forces outside the whole, at the expense of the whole (at the price of the ruin and disintegration of this whole).” Borrowing from Artaud’s ideas on the theatre of cruelty, Lyotard suggests that the purpose of the acinema is to make victims of its spectators/auditors, by generating anxiety, agitation, or emotional turmoil—for it is on the side of intensity, on the side of life against death. Rather than good (unified and reasonable) forms, the dynamics of acinema, presented to the immobilized viewer/auditor, “give[s] rise to the most intense agitation through its fascinating paralysis.” The excess of movement renders a cinema’s medium opaque: it does not offer us that hope that one can see through it to that harmonious presence for which the conventional cinema, in its reactionary nostalgia, yearns. Thus, again, acinema is a savage cinema, for in it, the medium asserts itself, brutally, as its images and sounds relay unresolvable intensities. Attending to it, one comes apart, as by a knife, under its divers movements. Without identifying (naming) what is happening on screen, we sense it viscerally—feeling it in our muscles and our bodies."

- Bruce Elder's Acontecimientos 2012 for Lumière

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from Wide Angle vol. 2, no. 1978

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Labels: ACINEMA, Bruce Elder, Jean-François Lyotard, Lumière, Wide Angle | 2 comments

26.8.13

Call & Response

3:57 PM

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In the 1980s, some of the most ardent, persistent, and perspicacious champions of the American avant-garde - P. Adams Sitney, Fred Camper, Noel Carroll, J. Hoberman - made declarations to the effect that the movement was in a state of profound crisis.* Supposed causes of the predicament were many and varied: skyrocketing costs of 16mm production; cutbacks in government and private foundation funding; a paucity of fresh styles or ideas in the rising generation of filmmakers; a corporately staged obsolescence of key equipment and film stocks; economic and aesthetic challenges posed by video; the negative impact of academic film theory. Debate on the dire state of avant-garde film culminated in 1989 in a large, well-funded, and suitably contentious ''International Experimental Film Congress," held in Toronto, whose extensive screenings, panels, and informal events carried an unmistakably elegiac tone.

A decade later the stream of grim assessments had evaporated, dismissed by some as stodgily alarmist and rebutted by the achievements of a vibrant cadre of younger artists and their return to the sort of vagrant, artisanal, trickle-up energies that had characterized the movement during prior moments of heightened creativity. From a current perspective, there are several possible, not necessarily exclusive, reasons for the perception of "crisis" and its rapid reversal. Established critics and programmers might have been momentarily out of touch with grassroots, geographically dispersed factions at the forefront of change. Or perhaps avant-garde film is in perpetual crisis and pronouncements about its death form part of a self-validating ritual. A third option is that there was in fact a weakening of commitment but, phoenix like, the movement revived itself in response to what, especially, younger makers saw as a cycle of overconsolidation and complacency-rather than slippage-from which they gleaned opportunities for localized intervention. Whatever the case, this intramural profile does not take into account additional factors such as the broader state of visual culture, including mass culture, and various pressures exerted by feminist, queer, and minority political initiative.

*...I participated in the chorus of naysaying by descrying the impact of narrative feature filmmaking on established avant-garde practices...

(Paul Arthur A Line of Sight...)

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from Millennium Film Journal No. 16/17/18

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from The Postmodern Moment

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from Art after Modernism: Rethinking Representation

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from American Film July-August 1985

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from A Line of Sight...

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Keith Sanborn's 1988 manifesto Modern, all too Modern

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Let's set the record straight.

We challenge the official History promoted by the International Experimental Film Congress to be held in Toronto this Spring. The time is long overdue to unwrite the Institutional Canon of Master Works of the Avant-Garde. It is time to shift focus from the History of Film to the position of film within the construction of history. The narratives which take up this new task must respect the complexity of relations among the many competing and overlapping histories which make up the activity within the field.

We are concerned by the tone which pervades the announcements for the Congress. The recognition belatedly accorded to "the founding women of the avant-garde," the ceremonious embalming of lively, refractory work, the minimal attention given new work, the organization of screenings along nationalistic lines, and the "open" -- read "unpaid" -- screenings for those willing to pay $100 for the privilege, all betray a tokenism blind to any activities outside the officially sanctioned margins. And if our analytic concerns seem to prejudge the event, they are borne out with desolate clarity by the record of the Congress organizers in attempting to suppress dissent within their own community. Their efforts in Toronto against the Funnel Experimental Film Centre and against feminist film theory speak for themselves.

And while the putatively timeless Internationalism of the Congress should make it all things to all people, the overwhelming majority of the announced participants consists of representatives of the 60's Avant-Garde and its decaying power base. Only one or two younger filmmakers have been made part of the official program, though some of us will at least be discussed in our absence. Workshops are dominated by technological values and are lead exclusively by older men. In this context, the organization of screenings along nationalistic lines promises a replay of the results with which we have become all too familiar over the past decade: a government- subsidized inventory of products suitable for export. Work is chosen to minimize linguistic, sexual, and cultural difference, typically to conform to the model of the "universal language of form" so dear to institutional esperantists. Difference is recognized only where it can be recuperated and diluted to a tepid pluralism.

The "open screenings" at best provide an image of damage control. These screenings, as the de facto venue for new and unrecognized work, have been scheduled mostly for late in the evening at the end of full days of featured panels, workshops and screenings. Even without average festival delays, this scheduling usually bodes poorly for attendance. The priorities of the Congress organizers are clear: those without established institutional credentials are to be marginalized within the consolidation of the official margins, to be presented as Film Historical leftovers.

There is a spirit of mind which continues to challenge the hegemony of industry, of government, of bureaucracy. The revolutionary frame of mind pervading activity in film in the Teens and Twenties and again in the Fifties and Sixties -- which seemed to die in the Seventies -- continues to thrive, but only where it has shifted and migrated according to changing historical conditions. The issues which galvanized the Cinema Avant-Gardes of earlier decades arose from different conditions than those which confront us today. An event which promotes itself as of major importance to Experimental Film and fails to reflect the vitality and breadth, the vulnerability and urgency of current oppositional practice in the media renders nothing but obeisance to a moribund officialdom. It risks nothing but its own historical relevance.

The Avant-Garde is dead; long live the avant-garde.

-1989

Signed by 76 film-makers (U.S. and Canada):

Caroline Avery
Peggy Ahwesh
Timothy S. Allen
Craig Baldwin
Susan Banas
Jay Blankenship
Emily Breer
Don Brennan
Barbara Broughel
Edmund Cardoni
Abigail Child
Romy Charlesworth
Tom Chomon
Catherine Clarke
Bill Daniel
Moyra Davie
R. Dickie
Paul Dickinson
Jesse Drew
Barry Ellsworth
Steve Fagin
Bruce Fiene
Mary Filippo
Nina Fonoroff
Su Friedrich
John J. Gallagher
David Gerstein
Joe Gibbons
Annie Goldson
Barbara Hammer
Peter M. Hargrove
Todd Haynes
Eve Heller
Peter Herwitz
Robert Hilferty
Chris Hill
Kent Howie
Jim Hubbard
Barbara Lattanzi
I. Lempert
Lewis Klahr
Mark LaPore
Marck McElhatten
Ross McLaren
Deborah Meehan
Andy Moses
Allen Mukamal
Linda Peckham
John Porter
Yvonne Rainer
Berenice Reynaud
Tom Rhoads
Fabio Roberti
D. Rogers
Ron Rogers
Lynne Sachs
Keith Sanborn
Lincoln Schlensky
Sarah Schulman
M. M. Serra
Esther Shatavsky
Joe Shepard
Jeffrey Skoller
Karl Soehnlein
Philip S. Solomon
Carty Talkington
Christine Tamblyn
Leslile Thornton
Christine Vachon
Luis E. Vera
Susanna Virtamen
Jack Walsh
Dan Walsworth
Andreas Wildfang
Sarah E. Wright
Tom Zummer

(via Al Razutis)

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my thanks to David Phelps for his assistance

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Labels: Experimental Media Congress 1989, Fred Camper, J. Hoberman, Noel Carroll, P. Adams Sitney, Paul Arthur | 1 comments

16.7.13

Sneak Peek

12:51 PM

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from the first private showing of Wavelength

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Labels: Amy Taubin, Bob Cowan, George Kuchar, Joyce Wieland, Ken Jacobs, Ken Kelman, Mary Mitchell, Nam June Paik, Richard Foreman, Shirley Clarke, Wavelength, Zemmo | 0 comments

8.7.13

New Composition

3:05 PM

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Stan Brakhage: The Pittsburgh Documents will take place on July 20th at UCLA. The following is from the 20th Anniversary Edition of Millennium Film Journal . A PDF copy is available through MFJ ...

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Labels: Hollis Frampton, Stan Brakhage, The Act of Seeing with One's Own Eyes | 0 comments

21.6.13

INCITE #4: Exhibition Guide

12:09 PM

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Publications on alternative media have been few and far between, a scarcity eased considerably by the depth and quality of those few dedicated to such an undertaking. With just three issues, INCITE: Journal of Experimental Media has already proven an invaluable addition to this effort. The journal is currently seeking to raise funds for the publication of INCITE #4: Exhibition Guide, focusing on alternative media exhibition practices. Brett Kashmere, editor and publisher, took some time out of his busy schedule to answer a few questions about the journal's origin and the upcoming issue.

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JACOB WALTMAN: Could you tell me a little bit about INCITE's founding, how things initially came together?

BRETT KASHMERE: INCITE was founded in 2008, shortly after I immigrated from Montreal to the U.S. Starting a journal about experimental film was a long-time goal of mine, at least going back to the late-90s, but I never had the time, or really the skills or contacts, to act on it prior. Finishing an MA in Film Studies (in 2004) helped prepare me for the editorial responsibilities of managing a journal. And touring with my film, Valery’s Ankle (in 2006-07) introduced me to a larger network of programmers, writers, and film/videomakers on both sides of the border. I think that’s a unique aspect of INCITE. We have an even mix of Canadian and American contributors. It’s truly cross-national.

There were additional catalyzing forces. One was a small, not-for-profit, grassroots cooperative in upstate New York called Syracuse Experimental, dedicated to the growth and preservation of alternative, first person cinema and media, which I helped form. Publishing a journal was one of the core objectives set forth in our manifesto, “There’s More To Filmmaking Than Making Films.” That notion, which I adapted or maybe straight cribbed from something Jonas Mekas once wrote, has been a guiding principle for me. So I was happy to also include Jonas’ manifesto in the first issue of INCITE, MANIFEST.

A second catalyst was reading Scott MacDonald’s interview with P. Adams Sitney, published 2005, in which Sitney questions why no one from the generation of experimental filmmakers born in the 1970s and 80s were starting their own journals and writing about each other’s work, as our predecessors did in the 60s and 70s. Hearing Sitney say that probably sharpened my resolve and signalled that the time was right.

A third factor was that I started a teaching job at Oberlin College in 2008. In addition to my salary, I also received a (very modest) research grant, which I put towards some of the material costs of the journal’s first issue, as well as to hiring student assistants. It wasn’t very much money, but I stretched it as far as I could.

WALTMAN: INCITE's online accessibility is very generous, but you maintain a presence in print as well. Could you talk about balancing the two, and the importance of continuing to produce print?

KASHMERE: Information should be free. Design and printing costs money. To resolve that contradiction we make the content available for free online, and we also produce a nice hard copy version. The sales of the print issue doesn’t recoup the production costs, unfortunately, so we sometimes delay putting each new issue online. I love publishing, and I love printed matter, so the idea that there would be a tangible, physical iteration was always the linchpin for me. There aren’t many printed journals devoted to experimental media anymore, either in depth or as a curiosity. For me, publishing INCITE is a way of giving back to something that I love, and for the most part I relish the process. It can be tedious and frustrating putting each issue into print, though. That’s one reason that we started the online interview series, Back and Forth: to stay active between the annual issues. We’re hoping to add some additional online sections over the next year or so, such as an Annotated Artists’ “Work Bench” series and a reprint series, which contextualizes important or undervalued texts that are difficult to find. We’re currently preparing a new version of Tom Gunning’s “Towards a Minor Cinema,” for instance, with an intro by Ekrem Serdar.

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(Other Cinema, San Francisco)

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WALTMAN: On a related note, for those of us unfamiliar with the more practical details of putting together a publication, speak briefly about some of the challenges that go into putting a journal like this together (and perhaps the necessity of something like an Indiegogo campaign to aid in the process).

KASHMERE: Producing an issue of INCITE is a costly and time-consuming effort. The first couple of issues were published mostly out of my own pocket, with the money that I made from my teaching job. I did the first issue largely by myself – the editing, proofreading, layout, design, glued the binding, made trips to the post office etc – and Leslie Topness created the letter-pressed covers and helped guide me through the workflow. I didn’t know anything about different bindings, or paper stocks, offset printing, proofing, etc at the time. Being at Oberlin eventually allowed me to recruit assistants into the process, and some of those people are still part of the team. Eliza Koch, for instance, designed issues #2 and #3 and is now working on #4. She’s a fantastic talent, and has helped step up our aesthetic. Peter Nowogrodzki created the first version of the website back in 2008 and is now spearheading issue #5, BLOCKBUSTER. Dave Burnham has become a contributing editor and is currently managing the Indiegogo campaign. A number of other students have helped out along the way, assisting on specific issues and general tasks and projects. And, over the past couple of years, people such as Walter Forsberg (who co-edited INCITE #4 with me) and Christina Battle have joined the team, which makes the whole endeavor more fun and more collaborative, and less isolated.

EXHIBITION GUIDE, the issue we’re working on right now, and fundraising for, has about 50 contributors and approximately 75,000 words worth of writing, which will likely translate into 250 pages or more. It’s going to cost about $7000 to print, at minimum. That’s for a perfect-bound edition with approximately 50 color illustrations, printed on high quality paper. We’re trying to raise $8000 through our Indiegogo campaign to cover those printing costs, a small honorarium for the designer, and shipping all of the rewards after Indiegogo and PayPal take their cut (around $600). That doesn’t come close to covering all of our expenses, or our time, but it will help a lot.

We’re not a high circulation, glossy magazine. We don’t receive any outside funding. We don’t publish ads. We’re a completely independent, volunteer-run, niche publication, serving a small but dedicated audience. Each issue allows us to grow that audience a little bigger, and to expand our reach and readership. We’re now collected by about 20 university libraries in Canada and the United States, as well as by the Museum of Modern Art Library and the New York Public Library, among others. The next step is to get the journal into a few stores, to increase its street visibility. But that’s a whole different kind of challenge. We still need to do the cost-benefit analysis on that.

WALTMAN: English-language magazines focusing primarily on experimental media have been few and far between (Experimental Cinema Magazine early on, Film Culture, Millennium Film Journal, etc.). How do you see INCITE communicating with/expanding on/diverging from these publications?

KASHMERE: I think there are significant similarities, and significant differences. I’m not familiar with Experimental Cinema Magazine, but Film Culture and Millennium Film Journal are big influences -- I collect both, and look at them often. I feel like INCITE is part of that tradition. One thing I always enjoyed about Film Culture was all of the writing by filmmakers, in the form of manifestos, letters, interviews. And Millennium Film Journal publishes incredible scholarly articles among many other types of writing, artist pages, polemics, etc. My goal for INCITE has been to land somewhere between a zine and an academic journal, to embody the spirit and rigor of each.

One way that we differ is that each new issue of INCITE is distinct from the previous one: the type of binding or the dimensions may change, for example. And each issue typically includes an insert – a DVD, a poster, etc. There is no uniform style or standard font. The form and design usually derive from the content. The BLOCKBUSTER issue, which Peter is developing with Ian Page (our first with guest editors), will take the journal in a slightly more conceptual-literary direction, I believe. That’s a nice thing about being totally independent: it allows us the flexibility to experiment with different ideas about what a film journal in the 21st century should be or can be. If making INCITE ever became a process of plugging content into a template, where every issue looked exactly the same, like October, which I also love, then it wouldn’t be worth it for me. We fill a different kind of role.

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(Masstransiscope by Bill Brand)

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WALTMAN: In your introduction to INCITE's first issue Manifest (Fall 2008-Spring 2009), you wrote of the journal's intention to address the waning critical attention on more recent developments and accomplishments in experimental media. Four years on and several issues in, how has INCITE responded to this challenge?

I don’t know if we’ve done as good a job as we could in that regard. I would like to be publishing more critical essays and reviews that focus on the work of emerging and emergent media artists. There is still an overall lack of good critical writing about the current scene and new voices. On the other hand, we have provided a platform for younger film and videomakers to articulate their ideas, including Ben Russell, Evan Meaney, Clint Enns, Double Negative Collective, Julie Perini, Jaimz Asmundson, Jesse McLean, Jacob Ciocci and many others. And we’ve published interviews with a lot of up and coming / ascendant artists since our inception, such as Michael Robinson, Aleesa Cohene, Oliver Laric, Karl Lemieux, Jon Rafman, and Sabrina Ratté, as well as established practitioners like Taka Iimura, Deborah Stratman, Craig Baldwin, Jennifer Montgomery, and so on. However, the majority of our critical and scholarly articles have been about the work of an earlier generation: Bruce Conner, Lillian Schwartz, Paolo Gioli, etc. Dave Barber’s piece on the Winnipeg “landfill surrealist” Mike Maryniuk, who probably isn’t known nearly as well as he should be, is an example of the kind of text that I would like to publish more of going forward. Thomas Beard’s essay on Shana Moulton’s video-cycle, 'Whispering Pines' is another.

WALTMAN: Amos Vogel appears to be a touchstone for INCITE #4, could you share some thoughts on his passing and the manner in which legacy served as inspiration for the upcoming issue?

KASHMERE: Amos and Marcia Vogel, in particular the work they did with the Cinema 16 screening series beginning in the late-40s, have been an inspiration for me and countless others. They created a model for exhibiting independent and experimental cinema that microcinemas such as a Light Industry, Other Cinema, UnionDocs, etc continue to follow. Amos had a unique approach to programming – the dialectical collision of diverse forms and genres, that continues to resonate strongly today. He was also fiercely independent, strongly against censorship, believed in the importance of good design, personal expression, and political agitation. In addition, Cinema 16 testifies to the importance of partnerships throughout the history of avant-garde cinema, even if they aren’t always properly or fully acknowledged. It’s hard to imagine Stan Brakhage’s films without the contributions of Jane Brakhage, for instance, beyond her role as “muse.”

I never had the chance to meet Amos, or Marcia, but their grandson, Jesse, was a student at Oberlin during my time there and I had the chance to meet him and talk with him. When Amos passed away last year, I heard about it from Jesse. I believe those personal connections are what make the world/s of experimental film and video unique. It’s a very giving and generous and closely-knit community, even though those relationships can sometimes be difficult or confrontational. People aren’t in it for the money, obviously, but because they believe in the importance of radical expression through moving images, which has the ability to change lives and affect the way we see and interpret the world.

Those are the kinds of things that I’m hoping to pay tribute to with INCITE generally, and this new issue specifically. Our goal with issue #4, is, at least in part, to provide a practical guide for 16mm film exhibition. Thanks to Alain LeTourneau and 40 Frames, we are publishing an array of technical resources in the volume. We also have testimonials from the projection booth, and a DIY screening checklist courtesy of Christina Battle. By focusing attention on the procedures of 16mm film exhibition, within the wider context of microcinema practice, I feel like we’re honoring the work that Amos and Marcia did with Cinema 16 while carrying their legacy forward.

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