From: Sandra Maliga (email suppressed)
Date: Wed Jan 20 2010 - 12:35:01 PST
Here's an installation I did about film:
http://maliga.com/sandy/smallelegies.html
On Jan 20, 2010, at 8:25 AM, Jonathan Walley wrote:
> Hello everyone and (belated) Happy New Year,
>
> This is one of those Frameworks emails that asks for input on a
> research project. Though the project is a "scholarly" (read,
> academic) one, I'm really hoping for input from both artists and
> academics - as well as artistic academics or academic artists.
>
> I'm looking for references by experimental filmmakers to the
> "difficulty" of working with film (I mean film film, not video).
> These can include references to any of the following: the clunky,
> obstinate, mechanical nature of film, the way film materials
> potentially thwart the aims of the artists who work with it, the
> idea of film as "obsolete" in the digital age, the various
> "failings" of film (scratches, burns, fading, dirt particles, faulty
> projectors, etc.), and the effects of any of these things on makers
> and viewers alike. Such references could include filmmakers who saw
> a need to abandon film or radically reconfigure it as a "way out" of
> these problems - that is, expanded cinema as a solution to film's
> material difficulties.
>
> I know this is rather broad, so here are a couple of examples that
> are along the lines of what I'm interested in:
>
> James Broughton on the difficulties of editing: the filmmaker
> “searches for that continuously flowing Light which will transform
> his leaden fragments into a single glowing jewel. Often enough,
> alas, his ‘original chaos’ remains unredeemed.”
>
> Tony Conrad on the arbitrary limitations placed on the filmmaker by
> his/her medium: "I have a certain sense of disappointment about the
> fact that the filmmaker is expected to use a particular kind of
> material that he buys in a box[…]and then he takes it home and puts
> it into an instrument manufactured by someone else, and then he’s
> supposed to perform specific operations on it, like cutting the
> material, and then putting it back together[…]and then running it on
> a projector, manufactured by someone else, and this inextricable
> bind to the commercial process infuriates me to some degree."
>
> Stan Brakhage, famously, on the limits the film machine places on
> vision: "Oh, slow-eyed spectator, the machine is grinding you out of
> existence..."
>
> And so on. These references could be published or unpublished, they
> could even be your own spur of the moment thoughts on the subject of
> what Bazin called "the obstinate resistance of matter to ideas." I'm
> open to anything. Thanks in advance,
>
> Jonathan
>
> Jonathan Walley
> Asst. Professor of Cinema
> Denison University
> email suppressed
>
>
>
> __________________________________________________________________
> For info on FrameWorks, contact Pip Chodorov at <email suppressed>.
>
>
__________________________________________________________________
For info on FrameWorks, contact Pip Chodorov at <email suppressed>.