I’ve just read Giuliana Bruno’s splendid book called, Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in Art, Architecture and Film. Writing about architecture, art, film, memory, cartography, motion and (e)motion, Bruno maps a cultural history of spatio-visual arts.
A book infused with the ‘female perspective’; ideas on domestic and intimate space, the body, haptic geography, and the transposition of cinema space into gallery and museum space. All areas that tie in with my research interests. It has nothing to do with home movies, yet has everything to do with home movies. It’s about the power of lived spaces, emotions and memories. Nothing is fixed, all is fluid. I love this idea that Bruno has about our bodies as maps:
Film and architecture are practices of representation written on, and by, the body map. As dwelling-places of gender, they are loci for the production of sexuality, not simply vehicles for its representation. Insofar as they are productions of space, their imaging is to be understood as an actual map – a construction lived by users.
Film and architecture share a dimension of living that in Italian is called vissuto, the space of one’s lived experiences…they are about lived space and the narrative of place. They are both inhabited sites and spaces for inhabitation, narrativized by motion. Such types of dwelling always construct a subjectivity. Their subjectivity is the physical self occupying narrativized space, who leaves traces of her history on the wall and on the screen. Crossing between perceived, conceived, and lived space, the spatial arts thus embody the viewer (Bruno 64-65).
Bruno argues that although we think of film as a visual medium, it is as much about the positioning and movement of the body in space – hence it is, as she puts it, ‘haptic’.
The installation space becomes a renewed theater of image (re)collection, which both takes the place of and interfaces with that performative space the movie theatre has represented for the last century and continues to embody. An archive of moving images comes to be displaced in hybrid, residual interfacing (347 Bruno).
I can’t help but think this book will help me enormously in my work. It’s just hard for me to articulate how, as these ideas are all so fresh in my mind and need to settle awhile. Such a voyage of discovery!
INTERVIEW PROJECT has just been launched online. It comprises short interviews with people who Lynch encountered on a 32,000 kilometre road trip across America.
A new instalment will be posted every three days for the next 12 months.
I saw Terence Davies‘ film “Of Time and the City” (2008) on the weekend. While watching the film, I scribbled down lots of pertinent notes in the dark. I have since lost my notes!
This is Davies’ ode to his hometown, Liverpool, England. It comprises mostly archival footage from a variety of sources and the mood is metered by elegiac, classical music.
I was interested to see how Davies grafts his memories on to archival footage. I particularly liked the editing; Davies’ voice-over commentary about his childhood, snatches of verse, disembodied voices and snippets from radio shows of the past, added to the aural blanket draped over the (mostly) black and white moving images. The film was often slowed down, blurred and included stills.
Constantly throughout the film, all ‘voices’ become mute and the viewer is left with a montage of images that clearly speak for themselves. It was a beautiful film and a wonderful way to ’step into’ someone’s life.
In a recent interview about the film, Davies says
if you cut it like fiction, then it [the film] has a emotional subtext…you go on a journey with film…
Quite so! This is not a documentary, it’s a lovingly kept diary about a boy and a place. Both growing up and changing.
Yesterday I attended a one day forum “New Directions in Film Research“, run by Cinema Studies at La Trobe University, Melbourne. I thought it time to re-engage with ‘all things cinema’ and start to flesh out ideas for my Honours project for 2009. New Directions sounded ideal!
Although I felt rather intimidated by the presence of a battalion of erudite cinema academics, of which I am patently not, I’m pleased I attended. There were three speakers, but my main reason to attend was to hear Deb Verhoeven speaking about how research technologies, new to Screen Studies, can contribute to and expand the type of discovery and articulation within the discipline. Her particular focus, in this instance, was on the use of databases and maps in key screen research projects. And I thought I was the only one interested in mapping cinema…go figure!
Deb spoke about her project ‘Greek and Italian Cinemas in Melbourne’ and the cultural mapping it involved. Her project examined audience experiences and business practices of the independent Greek and Italian cinema chains that operated in Melbourne, Australia from the late 1950s until the late 1970s. This project raises questions about National cinemas in relation to diasporic communities, itinerant cinema and indeed, cinema’s place within the wider social milieu.
What was fascinating was the way Deb has been working with geo-spacial scientists to create maps and databases to track Greek and Italian cinema in Melbourne. This included population location (and movement over time), cinemas opened and closed and exactly where Italian and Greek films were distributed throughout Australia. These visualisations provided a lot of information in a short period of time. Now I just need to focus on narrowing my field of exploration.
I’m sure everyone is ‘over’ winter, working and the daily grind. Take time out, sit back and watch William Lamson. I found this link to his videos on Rocketboom. I didn’t know balloons could be so amusing.
Although I’m primarily investigating ‘film‘, I read an article today by Scott McQuire called Videor-Video Theory. Although this 1999 article has a focus on video, it was interesting to ‘re-think’ the impact of image de-composition and the function of the frame afforded by video.
McQuire writes about the problematic relationship between video and theory, suggesting that ‘[o]ne of the problems, even for those theorising video as a ‘specific signifying practice’ was that, while it was clearly different to photography and cinema, it was not entirely new. Moreover, I would argue that the arrival of video around the 1970s didn’t make nearly as radical a break or cultural rupture as photography had in the 1840s or cinema in the 1890s. Nevertheless, it did stretch existing paradigms in a number of ways’. He traces this impact under three headings:
1) instantaneity
2) architectonics
3) plasticity
Plasticity was what I found of most interest.
What I wanted to talk about briefly is a shift in the aesthetics of the image: its increasing density and malleability. I wanted to approach this by considering the changing function of the frame from painting to photography to cinema to video. The frame becomes crucial in painting around the same time that painting begins to detach itself from architecture; it corresponds to the moment in the Renaissance when painting is being reconceptualised by those such as Alberti as a ‘window to the world’. The function of the frame is firstly to demarcate the inside of the image from its exterior; but the stability of the frame also serves as guardian of the stable and centred position of the spectator.
This system continues in photography, with its inheritance of painting’s visual language and its aspirations to be considered an art. But it does so with difficulty. The crux of the matter is that, with the number of ‘views’ which begin to be made, the authority of the one ‘ideal’ view which painting represented becomes increasingly tenuous. The shift towards an active frame, and by implication a mobile, decentred spectator, becomes more explicit with the arrival of cinema, and more, particularly, with the development of a cinematic language based around camera movement and montage. From this moment on, the frame delineates a point of view which is inherently unstable, shifting and highly mobile. The philosophic, political and social ramifications of such a shift are still being felt.
What happens with video belong less to this external axis of framing than to its internal dimensions. As the interior of the image becomes increasingly fluid, there are new possibilities for what might be called ‘internal montage’. One aspect of this is the proliferation of internal ‘windows’ — frames within frames — which can be seen in the work of a film maker such as Peter Greenaway.
This idea of internal montage set my heart aflutter! McQuire concedes that although the plastic possibilities are not unique to video; you could do similar things with film but it was a more laborious and expensive process. He argues that, ‘it is interesting to speculate on video’s role as screen technologies moves away from purely visual concerns to become a combination of image and text — a data screen for the information society.
Aesthetic shifts, fluid frames, overloaded images, montage. It sort’ve fits in with my hazy ideas of re-interpreting home movies/found footage and discovering what’s NOT shown in them and I constantly keep thinking of the wash of amateur film, photos, words on the Web today…am looking for connections…what is this identity thing all about?
I’ve recently finished reading the book Mining the home movie, which is the first international anthology to explore the historical significance of amateur film. These essays are written by filmmakers, film theorists, moving image archivists and preservationists. All authors are passionate about home movies as vital methods of visually preserving history, and see them as an important genre of film studies.
I was interested to read about the wide range of amateur film/home movie collections around the world and somewhat surprised that the National University of Mexico (UNAM), has one of the largest film archives in Latin America – Filmoteca UNAM.
I keep stumbling across the word historiographic and discovered it examines the writing of history and the use of historical methods, drawing upon such elements such as authorship, sourcing, interpretation, style, bias, and audience.
Hayden White argues that ‘history is an imaginative and transformative act, one in which fiction and fact endlessly flow in and out of each other…[and] that historiographic practice needs to be reimagined: “I think the problem now, at the end of the twentieth century, is how we re-imagine history outside of the categories that we inherited from the nineteenth century” (16).
Peter Forgacs is a media artist and independent filmmaker based in Budapest, whose work has been exhibited worldwide. He’s made a series of award-winning films based on home movies from the 1930s and 1960s, which document ordinary lives ruptured by extraordinary historical trauma that occurs off-screen. He tries to ‘see the unseen, to de-and reconstruct the human past through ephemeral private movies’ (47).
I was also intrigued by the definition of trauma by Michael S. Roth. He argues that ‘the modern concept of trauma points to an occurrence that both demands representation and refuses to be represented. The intensity of the occurrence seems to make it impossible to remember or to forget’ (67).
totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century have revealed the existence of a danger never before imagined: the blotting out of memory. These twentieth century tyrannies have understood that the conquest of men and territories could be accomplished through information and communication and have created a systematic and complete takeover of memory, hoping to control it even in its most hidden excesses (p17).
Quite a bold statement, but it made me think…
Finally, Roger Odin discusses the family home movie as a document. He argues that ‘family productions are deployed for a local or identity claim context. The rising interest in amateur productions is one symptom of micromovements fighting for identity and the dissolution of a structured public space. Although these movements can be read as a reaction against globalization, there exists a dangerous corollary in the rise of tribal identifications and mobilizations (267).
There are many other worthy essays in this book, including a selected filmography, videography and bibliography that will have me reading and viewing for many months to come!
Mining the Home Movie: Excavations in Histories and Memories
Editors: Karen L. Ishizuka, Patricia R. Zimmermann
Published by University of California Press, 2007
ISBN 0520230876, 9780520230873
360 pages
Amateurism deflected the chaotic, the incoherent, and the spontaneous into leisure and private life so that public time would persist as methodical, controllable, and regulated (Zimmermann 11).
Written by Patricia Zimmermann in 1995, Reel Families, is the first historical study of amateur film. It provides an in-depth account of amateur filmmaking and equipment from the late 1890s to the present, focusing on the changing discourse of aesthetics, creativity and innovation, standards of production, rhetoric and politics. Zimmermann charts the progress of science, industry, leisure and private life, while firmly situating amateur filmmaking within the domain of ‘upper-and middle-class leisure’.
The discourse on amateur film technology positions it as opposed to professional technology, or as the intermediary between both the past and the present: filmmaking to chronicle family life.
Two historical articulations of home movies:
Represented technological progress as a popular tool and remedy for interpersonal relations.
They retrieved the past as material could be measured and quantified in footage or reels like workers in time and motion studies.(Zimmermann 44)
In the 1950s, ‘the position, function, and definition of amateur film shifted from aesthetics and technology into a social configuration exclusively administering bourgeois, nuclear-family ideologies’ (Zimmermann 111). It’s interesting to note that familialism, ‘an ideology and social practice that emphasized family relations above other kinds of social or political interaction, wedded amateur film to the blissful domain of the home’ (Zimmermann 132). The domestic domain, a world of women and children was generally captured by a man behind the camera.
The book provided me with an excellent overview of the medium. Still lots of investigating to do!
Reel Families: A Social History of Amateur Film
By Patricia Rodden Zimmermann
Published by Indiana University Press, 1995
ISBN 0253209447, 9780253209443
187 pages
Is this where we’re headed? Someone told me about this video (made by CasaleggioAssociati) yesterday. I found it pretty fascinating and I love that crazy, Italian accent! Science fiction…or not? See what you think.
