NYU Cinema Studies Student Conference
Something Old, Something New: The Marriage and Separation of Old and New Media
Friday, February 22, 2013:
5pm-6pm Thomas Elsaesser: Round and Round: Horses, Carousels and Perpetual Motion
6:15pm-7:30pm Franco-American Dialogue and Genre – moderated by Bill Simon
Katherine Johnson: An American Genre in France: Jacques Demy's The Umbrellas of Cherbourg
Carrie Reese: Labeling Genre in France: The Rejection of a "New Queer Cinema"
Aaron Rich: Tourneur's Wichita: Gateway to the West, Doorway to Hell…and the New Western
Saturday, February 23, 2013:
9am Coffee/Pastries
9:30am-10:45am A New Narrative – moderated by Kristin Nicole Harper
Kristopher Montello: Watching the Detectives
Elizabeth Shim: Pearls of the Far East: Remaking and Reclaiming Vietnam Through Cinema
Jacqueline Pinkowitz: The Gothic, the South, and the Rise of the Past in The Walking Dead
11am-12:15pm Reframing Urban Space – moderated by Jose Miguel Palacios Del Valle
Sylvie Vitaglione: Still/Moving in Public Space: David Michalek's Slow Dancing
Hsin-Yuan Peng: Hou Hsiao-hsien's Museum of Memory—The Red Balloon Revisits Paris
Eli Meixler: "Whatever People Say I Am, That's What I'm Not": Class, Gender, and Youth Culture in 1960s British Cinema
12:15pm-1pm Lunch
1pm-2:15pm Recycling Images and Technology – moderated by Ariane Lebot
Amos Stailey-Young: Gustav Deutsch's Film Ist. and Historical Ontologies of Film
Titania Plant: Third Time's A Charm: The Economics and Aesthetics of 3-D, Past and Present
Alston D'Silva: The Supercut: Meme and Montage in the Media Ecology of the Internet
2:30pm-3:45pm Brave New Digit(al) Worlds: Touching Digital Space – moderated by Sylvie Vitaglione
Brian Welesko: Interstitial Reality: Service Tunnels and Steam Pipes in Constructed Worlds
Rochelle Miller: Fish Net: Finding Nemo, and the Digitization of Physical Media
Russell McDermott: Touch-Lessons, Transitions, and Pixar's Practice of Collective Creativity in WALL-E
4pm-5:15pm Cultural Readings and their Semiotic Variances in Disseminated Musical Performances Online – moderated by Dr. Lily Chumley
Carli Vierke: Creepy Lip Sync Contestant Totally WTF!
Kee Eun Joo: Gangnam Style vs. American Style
Kamilah Gibson: Where Have You Been. The Expropriation of Culture as Natural Resource: The Resurgence of African Images within the Pop Culture Arena
5:30pm-6:30pm Hector Rodriguez: Frames of Reference: Vectors, Coordinates and Computational Representation
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Feb 14, 2013
Fwd: UPDATED: NYU Cinema Studies Student Conference Schedule - Feb 22-23
Feb 13, 2013
Bastards & Orphans & medical films - oh my!
Students in the Curating Moving Images course took part in a lively discussion inspired by the Bastard Film Encounter and their call-to-action: "We hope to expand on [the concept of the Orphan Film Symposium] by looking at films that are bastards—ill-conceived or received; embarrassing or beyond the bounds of acceptability; poor in conception or execution; undesirable to those who should be caring for them; proof of something that should have never happened". (from www.bastardfilmencounter.com).
We pondered what content might fit into these parameters, and thought it fitting that this concept was proposed by "bastardly co-organizers" Skip Elsheimer, Marsha Gordon Orgeron, and Dwight Swanson, who had invited Anthology Film Archive's Andrew Lampert to be the keynote speaker at the event during its 2-day run in the end of April 2013.
I was then overwhelmed by the memory of the Medical Film Symposium, which descended upon Philadelphia in January of 2010 – that (unsurprisingly!) had screenings curated by both Lampert and Elsheimer, not to forget local Secret Cinema-er Jay Schwartz. The symposium's website - www.medicalfilmsymposium.com – has a wealth of documentation and detailed program description.
But the experience of the Medical Film Symposium was being exposed to the complex relationship between moving images, medical experimentation, and your own physiological response factors. A succinct review of the experience complete with (non-nausea inducing) images is available and recommended at the Morbid Anatomy blog - http://morbidanatomy.blogspot.com/2010/01/medical-film-sympsium-recap.html
So do these sometimes/often disturbing and beautiful images of "medical procedures, training films for health professionals, hygiene tutorials and contemporary medical imaging" have a home at Bastards?
We are intrigued by the concept of 'too rough for Orphans', and look forward to seeing what Skip, Marsha, and Dwight have in store for us in April.
Good luck, Bastards – though I'm sure we'll be the ones who need it.
--Kathryn Gronsbell
Feb 12, 2013
The Kidnappers Foil: National Film Registry, TAMI, and Orphans
Here's a link to the New York Times articles mentioned in class.
http://orphanfilmsymposium.blogspot.com/2013/02/melton-barker-foils-film.html
Here's an early incarnation of The Search for Melton Barker. http://archive.org/details/4thOrphanFilmSymposiumItinerants
includes an audio recording of talks by Caroline Frick and Dwight Swanson.
Saturday: Roger Corman's THE TRIP at 92Y Tribeca
Here's another trip available for your first Curating paper.
From: NotComing.com <news@notcoming.com>
Director: Roger Corman. 85 mins. 1967. 35mm.
Bear
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| Washington Square Park, fall 2012 |
All dogs go to heaven.
_________________
First movie ever taken with my iPad.
___________________________
First movie ever taken with the Vine video app happened to capture a glimpse of Bear rising from sleep; she died a few hours later, in the early hours of February 9th. I tried to render it in slow-mo.
________________________________
If Bear were a classic Hollywood movie star, she'd've been Barbara Stanwyck.
________________________________
and
R.I.P. Bear (1999-2013)
Feb 9, 2013
Re: TODAY - Stan Brakhage's The Art of Vision
Stan Brakhage's The Art of Vision
Saturday, February 9, 2013 at 5pm
Light Industry
155 Freeman Street
Brooklyn, New York
The Art of Vision
Stan Brakhage, 16mm, 1961-1965, 250 mins
Introduced by P. Adams Sitney
Light Industry hosts a rare screening of Stan Brakhage's The Art of Vision, shown in a new print. This monumental work, regarded as one of Brakhage's greatest films, contains within it the same materials he used to construct the better-known Dog Star Man. It depicts the filmmaker as woodsman, scaling a snow-covered mountain, along with associative images of his wife and child; here the stuff of home movies attains a cosmological status by way of its experimental approach. The Art of Vision employs nearly all the poetic techniques Brakhage had mastered by this point—including saccadic camera movement, radically variable focus, lens distortion, image inversion, painting on film, emulsion scratching, and more—yielding an anthology of perception's myriad forms.
"The Art of Vision is the higher coefficient of what seemed, in the early 1960s, to be Stan Brakhage's extraordinarily ambitious film project, Dog Star Man. Between 1961 and 1965, he furiously produced his first serial work, an epic film in five sections: Prelude (1961), Part One (1962), Part Two (1963), Part Three (1964), and Part Four (1964). All but Part One were articulated with layers of densely edited superimpositions. During the same years he wrote his groundbreaking, polemical book of film theory, Metaphors on Vision. As he was completing the book, the idea struck him that he should also exhibit a version of Dog Star Man in which all the layers of superimposition would be shown separately, and all the possible permutations of layering for each of the parts as well. In homage to J.S. Bach's Art of the Fugue, he called the expanded version The Art of Vision." - P. Adams Sitney
"Imagine an eye unruled by man-made laws of perspective, an eye unprejudiced by compositional logic, an eye which does not respond to the name of everything but which must know each object encountered in life through an adventure of perception. How many colors are there in a field of grass to the crawling baby unaware of 'Green'? How many rainbows can light create for the untutored eye? How aware of variations in heat waves can that eye be? Imagine a world alive with incomprehensible objects and shimmering with an endless variety of movement and innumerable gradations of color. Imagine a world before the 'beginning was the word.'
To see is to retain—to behold. Elimination of all fear is in sight—which must be aimed for. Once vision may have been given—that which seems inherent in the infant's eye, an eye which reflects the loss of innocence more eloquently than any other human feature, an eye which soon learns to classify sights, an eye which mirrors the movement of the individual toward death by its increasing inability to see.
But one can never go back, not even in imagination. After the loss of innocence, only the ultimate of knowledge can balance the wobbling pivot. Yet I suggest that there is a pursuit of knowledge foreign to language and founded upon visual communication, demanding a development of the optical mind, and dependent upon perception in the original and deepest sense of the word." - Stan Brakhage, from Metaphors on Vision
P. Adams Sitney is a historian of film art, a co-founding member of Anthology Film Archives, and Professor of Visual Arts at Princeton University. He is the author of the book Visionary Film, originally published in 1974, which was the first major study on the post-war American avant-garde cinema, and is today considered a classic. Among his other publications are Modernist Montage: The Obscurity of Vision in Cinema and Literature from 1992 and most recently Eyes Upside Down: Visionary Filmmakers and the Heritage of Emerson. His articles regularly appear in Artforum and other journals.
Print courtesy of the Academy Film Archive.
Tickets - $7, available at door.
Please note: seating is limited. First-come, first-served. Box office opens at 4:30pm.
Infermental 4
Sunday, February 17, 2013 from 2:30pm to 10pm
Light Industry
155 Freeman Street
Brooklyn, New York
Light Industry presents Issue 4 of the pioneering videocassette magazine Infermental. The issue will be shown in its seven-hour entirety and introduced by James Richards, who recently edited the publication A Detour Around Infermental with George Clark and Dan Kidner.
Infermental, the "first international magazine on videocassettes," was initiated in 1980 by Gábor and Vera Bódy, and eleven issues were published between 1980 and 1991. The early installments were realized with boundless energy and a visionary zeal—Gábor Bódy's idea was to build an "Encyclopedia of Recorded Imagery." He produced the first edition while on a DAAD residency in Berlin, and each subsequent issue was put together in a different city. Beginning in Europe, and with a distinct focus on connecting video and other media artists in the East and the West, Infermental became a project with global reach when later editions were produced in North America and Japan. Each issue featured between 30 and 100 artists contributing complete films, excerpts, trailers, interviews, and performance footage, and was assembled by a different editorial team, normally consisting of two former contributors and one supervisor. Though Bódy, the publication'! s figurehead, died in 1985, Infermental continued for another six years.
Over the course of the project's life, a diverse range of influential figures contributed to the magazine, like Peggy Ahwesh, Tony Conrad, Gary Hill, Joan Jonas, Jon Jost, Marcel Odenbach, Amos Poe, Steina Vasulka, and Lawrence Weiner. But it was the less familiar names, the editorial rationale, the innovative distribution strategy, and the exhibition model that made it such a fascinating and enduring enterprise. Enabled by the newly accessible technology of U-matic cassette tape, Infermental brought together a number of formats, including 8mm, 16mm, and 35mm, as well as video. The editions were sold or rented to institutions with specific instructions for their presentation: the tapes were to be played one after the other for the full duration of the issue. Given the relatively peripheral status of video at this time, and the broad lack of support from galleries and film festivals, Infermental attempted to find a new way to present and circulate wo! rk among artists and institutions around the world.
Issue 4 was edited by the French artists' group Frigo in 1985 and marks a shift in the magazine's editorial policy, drawing on the group's multi-disciplinary activities, collective organization, DIY ethos, and experience in pirate radio. Authorship is thrown into disarray as amateur footage, artists' films, ethnographic documents, video performances, and music videos are seamlessly edited together.
"Infermental was of course operating at a time when there was a thriving underground film culture. Now culture is more diffuse and, more generally, there is a massive amount of different types of images in circulation from which to sample. But, for example, the free movement between different forms in the Frigo edition in 1985, the way different types of material overlapped—experimental films, documentary, music videos—does relate to the way I compose film programs...Also it was the first edition we watched that we felt was something of its own. We had all watched a lot of programs of video from the 1970s and 1980s, and the earlier editions seemed quite conventional, as much as there were interesting pieces perhaps or ones that stood out. It felt familiar as a structure. But then with the Frigo edition we saw the editors experimenting with ways of mixing the material and thereby making it quite different from a regular screening of works at a festival, m! useum or cinema." - James Richards
James Richards lives and works in London. Solo exhibitions include a residency at CCA Kitakyushu, Japan (2012); Chisenhale Gallery, London (2011); Rodeo Gallery, Istanbul (2011); Art Now (with Clunie Reid), Tate Britain (2010); Tramway, Glasgow (2009) and Swallow Street, London (2009). Recent group exhibitions include Frozen Lakes at Artists Space, New York (2013), Younger than Jesus at the New Museum, New York (2009) and Nought to Sixty at ICA London (2009). Richards has curated film programs and screenings at Serpentine Gallery, London (2010); BFI, London (2010), X-Initiative, New York (2009); and Whitechapel Gallery, London (2007). He is the recipient of the 2012 Jarman Award.
Tickets - $7, all-you-can-watch, available at door. Stop in for an hour, come and go, or stay all day.
Please note: seating is limited. First-come, first-served. Box office opens at 2pm.
Electronic Tonalities: The Film Scores of Louis and Bebe Barron
Tuesday, February 19, 2013 at 7:30pm
Light Industry
155 Freeman Street
Brooklyn, New York
A lecture by Geeta Dayal
Before the advent of synthesizers, a generation of maverick inventors built their own circuits, designed their own instruments, and pushed the limits of tape machines. While the traditional history of electronic music points to Europe, and especially to the birth of musique concrète in France in 1948, an equally important history was taking root around the same time in New York City.
Louis and Bebe Barron, a husband and wife team living in Manhattan in the early 1950s, built a DIY electronic music studio in their Greenwich Village apartment. Inspired by cybernetics, they thought of their circuits as living organisms, with a life and death of their own. The Barrons would become most famous for creating the pioneering electronic music score for the science fiction classic Forbidden Planet (1956), but their work extended beyond Hollywood. They actively collaborated within the New York avant-garde, spending two years building up the samples for John Cage's seminal tape piece Williams Mix and assisting Maya Deren with the soundtrack for her 1959 film The Very Eye of Night. Their work tells a story not only of early electronic music, but of bohemian downtown New York in the same period—Marlon Brando, Aldous Huxley, and Anaïs Nin were among the other notable figures that spent time at the Barrons' studio.
The Barrons also created electronic compositions for three experimental films in the 1950s by Ian Hugo, Nin's then-husband. Two of those films—Bells of Atlantis (1952) and Jazz of Lights (1956)—will be screened tonight, along with Shirley Clarke's Barron-scored Bridges-Go-Round (1958) and excerpts from Forbidden Planet. An illustrated lecture on the life and work of the Barrons by Geeta Dayal will accompany the screening.
Geeta Dayal is the author of Another Green World (Continuum, 2009), a book on Brian Eno, and is currently at work on a new book on the history of electronic music. Her writing about music, technology, and culture has appeared in frieze, the New York Times, Slate, The Wire, and many other publications.
Tickets - $7, available at door.
Please note: seating is limited. First-come, first-served. Box office opens at 7pm.
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Feb 6, 2013
Tony Conrad
Tony Conrad is a pioneering avant-garde artist, filmmaker, musician and composer. Conrad has long been employing a range of methods to investigate authoritarian boundaries in art – from his early 60's anti-art demonstrations with Henry Flynt and Jack Smith, to his Yellow Movies series of paintings and works on paper with central screens of white paint yellowing over decades, thus creating a film whose plot outlasts a lifetime.
In this exhibition, Conrad calls attention to power structures embedded in film by foregrounding an underground genre – Women in Prison, or WiP. "WiP," starring artists such as Tony Oursler and the late Mike Kelley, explores the peripheral possibilities of film not just as a medium but also as an industry, highlighting a second tier of actors, a low budget aspect, and subversive subject matter. Moreover, the relationship of jailor to prisoner takes a central role, extending Conrad's examination of authority into a social realm. Shot in 1982 and 1983, the video work on view is converted from black and white 16mm film. Selections from six hours of footage, separated by blips and shot changes, depict the antics of oddly indifferent inmates, from nonsensical singing to taunting banter.
The first ever screening of these excerpts is accompanied by Conrad's installation of jail cells, a recreation of the original set within the gallery, creating an immersive experience of a dystopic genre, and further upending traditions of film through a transparency of process. Tucked away from natural light, the set that Conrad has created for the gallery is destabilizing and unsettling. The pastel shades of pink and yellow painted on the jail's walls and bars provide a critical nod to the gender of the prisoners, while the trappings of the cells are otherwise scant and dismal – narrow bunk beds, bedpans and sinks. Overhead are relentlessly blinking LED lights, further adding to the disturbing component of the installation. As the lights flicker in the jail cell, the projected video is steadily eclipsed by the light and revealed by the dark, creating a disorienting experience as the viewer's focus rapidly shifts between film and set, past and present.
Zhou Xin