Intermediality In European Avant Garde Cinema

The book proposes a new perspective on avant-garde cinema, utilising approaches from intermediality to explore how the spirit of experimentation, a hallmark of historical avant-garde and post-war artistic movements, is still present in contemporary filmmaking today. The volume explores how contemporary avant-garde filmmakers have brought innovation to modern cinema. Filmmakers, such as, Jean-Luc Godard, Lars von Trier, and Alexander Sokurov and their contemporary works will be analyzed, reflecting on their experimentation with cinematic techniques and the mixing of the film medium with other media, such as literature, theatre, and painting. Important research questions considered throughout the book include: How do intermedial experiments convey meaning in films? What is the impact on the spectator of the mixing of various media forms in cinema? And how are the contemporary films of Jean-Luc Godard, Lars von Trier, and Alexander Sokurov innovative and experimental? The book is devoted to all these themes and provides a thorough analysis of contemporary films examined through an intermedial perspective. Providing a comprehensive analysis of contemporary avant-garde filmmaking from an intermedial perspective, this book will be of interest to graduate students and scholars working in intermedial studies, film and media studies, and cultural studies.

This edited collection proposes new directions for understanding cinematic intermediality, mapping out innovative approaches to film's relationship with some of its most influential artistic predecessors in the fields of performance, sculpture, painting, photography and dance. With essays by leading researchers and practitioners, this book investigates cinema's productive synergies and crossovers with the other arts through a broad range of avant-garde and experimental work. Mapping a trajectory from pre-cinema to the digital era, the book considers the impact of technological materiality on intermedial expression, incorporating both mainstream and experimental practice, world cinema and peripheral cinemas. Bridging the gap between theory and practice, it opens up new pathways for thinking about how intermediality, as both a creative method and an interpretative paradigm, might be explored alongside probing questions of what cinema is, has been and can be.

This collection of essays explores intermediality as a new perspective in the interpretation of the cinemas that have emerged after the collapse of the former Eastern bloc. As an aesthetic based on a productive interaction of media and highlighting cinema's relationship with the other arts, intermediality always implies a state of in-betweenness which is capable of registering tensions and ambivalences that go beyond the realm of media. The comparative analyses of films from Hungary, Romania, Poland, the Czech Republic, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Russia demonstrate that intermediality can be employed in this way as a form of introspection dealing with complex issues of art and society. Appearing in a variety of sensuous or intellectual modes, intermediality can become an effective poetic strategy to communicate how the cultures of the region are caught in-between East and West, past and present, emotional turmoil and more detached self-awareness. The diverse theoretical approaches that unravel this in-betweenness contribute to the understanding of intermedial phenomena in contemporary cinema as a whole.

"Cinema Expanded: Avant-Garde Film in the Age of Intermedia a comprehensive historical survey of expanded cinema from the mid-1960s to the present. It offers an historical and theoretical revision of the concept of expanded cinema, placing it in the context of avant-garde/experimental film history rather than the history of new media, intermedia, or multimedia. The book argues that, while expanded cinema has taken an incredible variety of forms (including moving image installation, multi-screen films, live cinematic performance, light shows, shadow plays, computer-generated images, video art, sculptural objects, and texts), it is nonetheless best understood as an ongoing meditation by filmmakers on the nature of cinema, specifically, and on its relationship to the other arts. Cinema Expanded also extends its historical and theoretical scope to avant-garde film culture more generally, placing expanded cinema in that context while also considering what it has to tell us about the moving image in the art world and new media environment"--

One of the most comprehensive books to focus on the relationship between cinema and the other arts, this volume explores types and stylistic devices of intermediality through a wide range of case studies. It addresses major theoretical issues and highlights the relevance of intermedial relations in film history, mapping the theoretical field by outlining its main concepts and the research avenues pursued in the study of cinematic intermediality, including the most recent approaches and methodologies. It also presents some major templates of intermediality through various examples from world cinema, including closer looks at films by auteurs like Alfred Hitchcock, Michelangelo Antonioni, Jean-Luc Godard, and Agnès Varda. Supplemented by three new chapters dealing with phenomena which came into view since its first publication, the revised and enlarged edition of this ground-breaking volume will serve as a useful handbook to clarify key ideas and to offer insightful analyses.

This book addresses the preoccupation with memory in contemporary artists’ moving image installations. It situates artists’ moving image in relation to the transformations of digitalization as hybrid intermedial combinations of analogue film, video and digital video emerge from mid 1990s onwards. While film has always been closely associated with the process of memory, this book investigates new models of memory in artists’ remediation of film with video and other intermedial aesthetics. Beginning with a chapter on the theorization of memory and the moving image and the diverse genealogies of artists’ film and video, the following chapters identify five different mnemonic modes in artists’ moving image: critical nostalgia, database narrative, the ‘echo-chamber’, documentary fiction and mediatized memories. Stan Douglas, Steve McQueen, Runa Islam, Mark Leckey and Elizabeth Price are of a generation that has lived through the transition from analogue to digital. Their emphasis on the nuances of intermediality indicates the extent to which we remember through media.

An exploration of what experimental cinema was, is, and might become A Companion to Experimental Cinema is a collection of original essays organized around both theoretical and historical issues of concern to film scholars, programmers, filmmakers, and viewers. Newly-commissioned essays written by specialists in the field, along with dialogues conducted with a diverse range of practitioners, focus on core subjects to present an international array of overlapping and contrasting perspectives. This unique text not only provides detailed accounts of particular films and filmmakers, but also discusses new approaches of understanding, characterizing, and shaping experimental cinema. The Companion offers readers an accessible point of entry to the material while seeking to contribute to scholarly debates. Essays explore a wide range of topics within the realm of experimental film, including the shift from traditional biography to broader contexts, the increased attention afforded to local and transnational circuits of exchange, and the deepening of theoretical considerations regarding cultural identity and cinematic aesthetics. Key themes and concepts are inter-woven throughout the text, offering fresh perspectives on experimental cinema’s dialogues with other modes and practices of film and video, its interactions with the non-cinematic arts, its responses to changing technological landscapes, and more. An essential addition to the field, the Companion: Balances introductory summaries and scholarly dialogue with existing literature Explores how the study of experimental cinema can benefit from scholarship in other disciplines Includes numerous analyses of films that are readily available to view via digital media Discusses both canonical and obscure or neglected works Examines the effects of the growing diversification of experimental film scholarship A Companion to Experimental Cinema is a valuable resource for scholars of film studies and art history, curators and programmers, critics and bloggers, filmmakers and artists, and anyone interested in exploring experimental or avant-garde cinema.

Close Up was the first English-language journal of film theory. Published between 1927 and 1933, it billed itself as "the only magazine devoted to film as an art," promising readers "theory and analysis: no gossip." The journal was edited by the writer and filmmaker Kenneth Macpherson, the novelist Winifred Bryher, and the poet H. D., and it attracted contributions from such major figures as Dorothy Richardson, Sergei Eisenstein, and Man Ray. This anthology presents some of the liveliest and most important articles from the publication's short but influential history. The writing in Close Up was theoretically astute, politically incisive, open to emerging ideas from psychoanalysis, passionately committed to "pure cinema," and deeply critical of Hollywood and its European imitators. The articles collected here cover such subjects as women and film, "The Negro in Cinema," Russian and working-class cinema, and developments in film technology, including the much debated addition of sound. The contributors are a cosmopolitan cast, reflecting the journal's commitment to internationalism; Close Up was published from Switzerland, printed in England and France, and distributed in Paris, Berlin, London, New York, and Los Angeles. The editors of this volume present a substantial introduction and commentaries on the articles that set Close Up in historical and intellectual context. This is crucial reading for anyone interested in the origins of film theory and the relationship between cinema and modernism.

Avant-Garde Film: Forms, Themes and Passions examines the variety of concerns and practices that have comprised the long history of avant-garde film at a level appropriate for undergraduate study. It covers the developments of experimental film-making since the modernist explosion in the 1920s in Europe through to the Soviet film experiments, the American Underground cinema and the French New Wave, structuralism and contemporary gallery work of the young British artists. Through in-depth case-studies, the book introduces students not only to the history of the avant-garde but also to varied analytical approaches to the films themselves - ranging from abstraction (Richter, Ruttmann) to surreal visions (Bunuel, Wyn Evans), underground subversion (Jack Smith, Warhol) to experimental narrative (Deren and Antonioni).

Within the last two decades “intermediality” has emerged as one of the most challenging concepts in media theory with no shortage of various taxonomies and definitions. What prompted the writing of the essays gathered in this volume, however, was not a desire for more classifications applied to the world of moving pictures, but a strong urge to investigate what the “inter-” implied by the idea of “intermediality” stands for, and what it actually entails in the cinema. The book offers in each of the individual chapters a cross-section view of specific instances in which cinema seems to consciously position itself “in-between” media and arts, employing techniques that tap into the multimedial complexity of cinema, and bring into play the tensions generated by media differences. The introductory theoretical writings deal with the historiography of approaching intermedial phenomena in cinema presenting at the same time some of the possible “gateways” that can open up the cinematic image towards the perceptual frames of other media and arts. The book also contains essays that examine more closely specific paradigms in the poetics of cinematic intermediality, like the allure of painting in Hitchcock’s films, the exquisite ways of framing and un-framing haptical imagery in Antonioni’s works, the narrative allegories of media differences, the word and image plays and ekphrastic techniques in Jean-Luc Godard’s “total” cinema, the flâneuristic intermedial gallery of moving images created by José Luis Guerín, or the types of intermedial metalepses in Agnès Varda’s “cinécriture.” From a theoretical vantage point these essays break with the tradition of thinking of intermediality in analogy with intertextuality and attempt a phenomenological (re)definition of intermedial relations. Moreover, some of the analyses target films that expose the coexistence of the hypermediated experience of intermediality and the illusion of reality, connecting the questions of intermediality both to the indexical nature of cinematic representation and to the specific ideological and cultural context of the films, thus offering insights into a few questions regarding the “politics” of intermediality as well.