CINE 502 Avant Garde Cinema

Write a 4-5 page paper on one of the topics listed below. Use at least one outside resource (e.g., a book or journal article).

Paper Topics for the first assignment:

1. Compare René Magritte's The Rape (1934) and the selected sequence from Un Chien Andalou.
2. Compare Lambeth Walk - Nazi Style and the selected sequence from Naqoyqatsi.
3. Compare Leni Riefenstahl's Olympia (Diving Sequence) and the selected sequence from Naqoyqatsi.
4. Using Dali's essay, "The Stinking Ass," assess the selected sequence from Naqoyqatsi. Does Naqoyqatsi meet Dali's 'revolutionary' standard?
5. L’Age d’Or seems to challenge all forms of authority (e.g., the Church, the State, Paternal Law). In the selected sequence discuss the possible confrontation of authority.
6. Maya Deren in her essay, "Cinematography: The Creative use of Reality," argues that cinema should not be treated as a ‘faster painting.’ Does Deren ‘practice what she preaches’ in her own work? Choose ONE of the following clips for your paper: Meshes of the Afternoon, or A Study in Choreography for Camera.
7. Horror seems to line Free Fall, but it is never explicitly expressed. In the selected sequence discuss how the presence of horror is represented.
8. The repeated motifs found in much of Andy Warhol’s pieces are thought by some to be a commentary on the media’s morbid fascination with scandal, sex, and violence. In fact many of the images from his disaster series are taken straight from media source (e.g,. newspapers). Is Bruce Conner’s A Movie operating in a similar manner? Are his appropriations commenting on our culture’s obsession for violent imagery? Or is there something else at work here? (It might be useful to compare the selected scene from A Movie and Andy Warhol’s White Burning Car III, 1963 - detail. The car crash victim has been impaled on a telephone pole).


Paper Two:

Write a 5-6 page paper on one of the topics listed below. Use at least one outside resource (e.g., a book or journal article).

1. At the beginning of Kelly Dennis’s article, "Leave to Beaver: The Object of Pornography," she says:

What cannot be seen in pornography is displaced onto what can be seen: onto both the "hydraulics of male ejaculation" and the expression of ecstasy on the woman’s face ­ often coupled in the film cum shot onto the woman’s face.1[Download the article].
One of the ‘problems’ with representing female sexuality is that it doesn’t necessarily have a ‘visual’ equivalent to male ejaculate (i.e., there is no visual ‘proof’ of climax). Does Fuses attempt to represent the female orgasm? If so, how? How does Fuses represent female sexuality? Is there specific audio/visual material that might be interpreted as manifestations of female sexuality?

2. Schneemann says that Fuses was made, in part, as a response to Stan Brakhage’s Window Water Baby Moving. What exactly does Schneemann seem to be reacting to with regards to Brakhage’s film? Are there similarities between these films? Or are these two radically different films? If so, what makes them different? Does gender play a role? (For a short audio commentary by Brakhage on Window Water Baby Moving click on the link).
 
3. Toshio Matsumoto is an important figure when considering the theoretical issues pertaining to ‘documentary realism.’ Abe Mark Nornes comments that, the “shifting attention to [the cinematic] surface, process, and detail may well embody the qualities Matsumoto called for in evoking the unheimlich [uncanny] lurking beneath the sure surfaces of documentary realism.”2  Although not a documentary per se, discuss how Matsumoto seems to employ these ideas to Funeral Parade of Roses [clip 1, 2]. If it is useful compare the selected clip to the opening of Resnais’s Hiroshima mon amour.

4. In ethnographic and documentary authority is in the voice-over, in the presentation and mastery of images, or in expert testimony. In what ways is authority presented in the Guatinaui performance? What makes us, or the visitors believe that what is being presented is authentic? By situating the performance in natural history museums, what affect does this have? See a selected clip from The Couple in a Cage: A Guatinaui Odyssey.

5. On page 65 of Nichols’s article, "The Ethnographer’s Tale," he discusses the dissemination of (scientific) knowledge. He compares knowledge to cargo on a ship; it is transported, unchanged, from one location to another. Nichols is working towards a different mode of ethnography, one that leaves room for an emotive dimension, as he says an ethnography, "that will not abolish experience, the body, and knowledge from the belly but affirm it."3  Does the Guatinaui performance enact this alternative form of ethnography? Is there a visceral dimension to the performance, and if so how is it elicited? See a selected clip from The Couple in a Cage: A Guatinaui Odyssey.


1. Kelly Dennis, "Leave it to Beaver: The Object of Pornography," in Strategies for Theory: From Marx to Madonna, Randy L. Rutsky and Bradley J. Macdonald, eds. (Albany: State University of New York, 2003), 187. Download the paper.

2. Julia Kristeva, "Fantasy and Cinema," Intimate Revolt: The Powers and Limits of Psychoanalysis Volume 2, trans. Jeanine Herman (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 80.

 

Paper 3:

Third Paper Due in class November 21st

Write a 5-6 page paper on one of the topics listed below. Use at least one outside resource (e.g., a book or journal article).
  1. Discuss how these disparate influences – Butoh, Viennese Actionism, and Stan Brakhages films – manifest in Begotten. In what possible ways do these various influences inform the aesthetics, conceptual or sociocultural significance of Begotten?
    1. Butoh - clip from Butoh: Body on the Edge of Crisis, Michael Blackwood Productions, 1990.
    2. Viennese Actionism - Malaution, Herman Nitsch, 1962
    3. Brakhage films - The Act of Seeing with One’s Own Eyes (1971), and/or Window Water Baby Moving (1962) Warning: The Act of Seeing with One's Own Eyes contains footage of real autopsies and is very graphic.

    2. Conceptually and aesthetically it seems that Tetsuo: Iron Man is drawing elements from Butoh. (See clip from Butoh: Body on the Edge of Crisis.)What conceptual parallels might there be between Butoh and the themes found in Tetsuo? How might we compare the visual aesthetics and choreography in Tetsuo to that of Butoh?

    3. Akira and Tetsuo revolve around issues of contamination, and we might conclude that this sense of contamination has something to do with anxiety regarding Japanese identity. Who or what is contaminating Japanese identity? Why does contamination in these films manifest as monstrous forms? Here are some additional clips from Tetsuo and Akira; note that the clip from Akira has been slowed down.

4. Manthia Diawara writes that, “Mise-en-scene, or the formal disposition of objects in front of the camera, is a pleasure to look at in Looking for Langston. The plastic beauty of the images in classic black and white film, and the construction of male body parts in the same way that Hollywood fetishizes its goddesses of the screen, position the spectator to identify with the camera.”1  Is this ‘objectification’ of the black male body ‘positive’? In what possible ways does Julien ‘sanction’ the spectator’s voyeurism? How does Julien manage to make the male body appealing to a heterosexual spectator, or perhaps the question should be, does he make black male bodies appealing across sexual orientation?

5. Compare Isaac Julien's Looking For Langston (1989) and Kenneth Anger's, Fireworks (1947). What conceptual and/of aesthetic similarities are indentifiable in these films? How do these films treat the male body?

6. Derek Jarman in Blue self-consciously resists the representation of AIDS, or those who are ‘living with it.’ Jarman says that things like the AIDS Quilt, while it might heighten some awareness, ultimately ‘loses something.’ What is lost? What can Blue ‘show’ that something like the AIDS Quilt cannot? Or is it the other way around? Does the apparent ‘lack’ of representation in Blue offer more freedom to the spectator?

1. Manthia Diawara, “The Absent One: The Avant-Garde and the Black Imaginary in Looking for Langston,” Wide Angle, vol. 13, no. 3-4 (July-October 1991), 100.


Assignment 4:

Due in class on December 5th.

For assistance with citations see the online version of Diana Hacker's A Pocket Style Manual.

1. Peter Greenaway might be asking us to consider the pleasure of the text with his The Pillow Book. But for Greenaway the text is inseparable from the body; that the body itself is uttered in the text. Is Greenaway, as asked by Paula Willoquet-Maricondi, “inviting us to rediscover the roots of our language in the organic world and in our bodies?”1 How does Greenaway use the body in The Pillow Book? Are Greenaway's displays of the body sadistic or fetishistic, such as Mulvey might have it? Or does Greenaway's work navigate around the Mulvey paradigm?

2. Matthew Barney’s Cremaster is an exploration of gender. “For the first eight weeks of pregnancy, a fetus exists in a state that is neither male nor female. During the ninth week … the internal gonads begin to move either upward, to become ovaries, or downward, to become testicles.”2  It seems that Barney is interested in this in-between, this hermaphroditic/androgynous development of gender. How might the break down of clear gender distinctions disturb the spectator, and how might Barney’s ‘surrealist’ sets, props, costumes, light, or colors contribute to the representations of an in-between gender in Cremaster 4?

3. Matthew Barney considers himself – above all else – a sculptor; he is interested in form, space, and volume. How does Barney use film to explore the sculptural in his Cremaster 3?

  1. Paula Willoquet-Maricondi, “Fleshing the Text: Greenaway’s The Pillow Book and the Erasure of the Body,” Postmodern Culture vol. 9, no. 2 (1999), ¶ 35.
  2. Calvin Tomkins, “His Body, Himself: Matthew Barney’s strange and passionate exploration of gender,” The New Yorker, (January 27, 2003), 51.