The Cine-Files: Film practice as research

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Thứ Bảy, 21 tháng 4, 2012

Screen Heritage Goes App! The Curzon Memories Project

Engaging video about the Curzon Memories App, a practice-research project by Charlotte Crofts, funded by the Digital Cultures Research Centre and the University of the West of England. The video was made by Sy Taffel.

My thinking about locative media as a means of exploring screen heritage is informed by the “apparatus theorists" of the 1970s (Baudry, Comolli, Heath, Metz, Mulvey, Wollen, all collected in Philip Rosen’s seminal collection Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology: A Film Reader, 1972), who were interested in the cinematic apparatus both in terms of the equipment of production and projection and in terms of the conditions of spectatorship (the engaged spectator in a darkened communal auditorium). At the [Curzon Memories App] project’s heart is a concern with both the culture and technologies of seeing: how we might use new screen media as a lens through which to understand the old cinematic apparatus and in turn historicise the new media. The idea is to use locative media to add depth to the everyday architecture of the cinema beyond that which is immediately apparent, and so enhance visitors’ experience and understanding of the cinema and the collection. In this sense, the project is centrally concerned with the interface between cultural memory and the technological imaginary of the moving image. [from Charlotte Crofts, 'Technologies of Seeing the Past: The Curzon Memories App', Paper published in the proceedings of the Electronic Visualisation and the Arts, London 2011 pp. 163-4]

One of the cinemas cited [in David Bordwell's recent post about the threat of digital conversion to art house cinemas] is the Art House Cinema, in Champaign-Urbana, a University town in the middle of corn fields in the mid-West (where I happened to live for a short spell [...]) [...]. I think it might be where I first saw Terence Mallick’s Days of Heaven as a girl of nine, and have been haunted by it ever since. This, combined with my involvement with the Curzon, and indeed the Whiteladies Picture House campaign, made me feel how urgent it is to preserve screen heritage beyond the conservation of the films themselves – which is in itself incredibly important – but there’s something rather pressing about preserving the cinema-going experience in today’s multi-screen world: the apparatus of cinema, the built environment, the technologies; which is at the heart of the Curzon Memories App, and Projection Hero in particular. [Charlotte Crofts, '', The Curzon Project, January 31, 2012]

I hadn’t really thought I was making a documentary the whole time I was developing the app, but with hindsight, my experience as a filmmaker couldn’t help but inform the project and trying to articulate my work [...] really helped me to see that ‘experience design’ is essentially an extension of documentary practice – we all want to move people and make them see the world differently – I’m just excited about doing that in the actual place you are interested in exploring. [Charlotte Crofts, 'Curzon Memories App as interactive documentary', The Curzon Project, April 12, 2012]

[I]t is quite clear that printed works of reference are a thing of the past. I do not here mean, of course, the polders of misinformation contained in the poorly triangulated written texts of Wikipedia: rather I have in mind the breathtaking and illuminating elegance of Touch Publications and Charlotte Croft’s ‘Geo-spatial, Geo-temporal’ app to guide a tourist around a physical site. Why slap a guide-book around when your phone will tell you everything you could possibly want to know about what you are looking at. This will not destroy the publishing, on whatever platform, of unenhanced alphanumeric texts but it surely must transform the presentation of printed information. (And, ok, it’s the first major change in that since the codex started to replace the scroll in the 4th Christian century – this technicism stuff is easy to fall in with.) And Charlotte’s application isn’t going to make the tourist a citizen of the world but it will immeasurably improve their experience of travel. [Brian Winston on i-Docs 2012. Wikipedia link added by FSFF ! :)]

Like Brian Winston in the last of the above quotations, Film Studies For Free (an ever-upbeat Cassandra) has seen the future: it comes on little screens!!

OK, so maybe that's not such an original (or all-encompassing) prophesy. But FSFF really has seen a remarkable, and original, slice of the future of 'pervasive' and 'locative', mobile Film Studies.

The little screens in question here, with their "virtual-experience-design", are very much attached (in this particular project) to a very memorable, big screen, in three dimensions, with its associated history and real-world experiences.

The Curzon Memories App, the beautifully designed outcome of an innovative research project by Charlotte Crofts, Senior Lecturer in Film Studies and Video Production at the University of the West of England, provides a "locative media experience" designed to enhance visits to the Curzon Community Cinema, Clevedon, and its 'Living History' collection of cinema technology, through "context-aware oral history and dramatisation".

The above video sets out brilliantly the scope and functionality of the app. FSFF's favourite-sounding element is Projection Hero, a "miniature cinema installation which you can manipulate with your phone - open the curtains, dim the lights and play the movies - including the infamous Pearl and Dean 'Asteroid' theme and poignant interviews with retired projectionists". It looks forward to trying this out in the cinema itself.

The App is free. Just click on the relevant link, below, to access and download it. It's very much worthy of your exploration and support, even if you live nowhere near Clevedon - a lovely, little, English town not far from which FSFF's author happened to grow up, and in which she was forever traumatised by X: The Man with the X-Ray Eyes...

If you like it, please take time to rate it, and leave an appreciative comment, too, at the digital store of your choice.

The further links below will take you to much more information about, as well as research consideration of, this wonderful project and will also tell you all about Crofts' latest, innovative, project.

The free Curzon Memories App is now out on Google Android and iPhone.
The Curzon Memories Project research blog
Charlotte Crofts, 'Technologies of Seeing the Past: The Curzon Memories App', Paper published in the proceedings of the Electronic Visualisation and the Arts, London 2011
Charlotte Crofts' videoed presentation about the "Curzon Memories App" at Postdigital Encounters: Creativity and Improvisation, Journal of Media Practice Annual Symposium, 24 June 2011, Watershed Media Centre, Bristol, UK.
Charlotte Crofts, 'Geo-spatial and Geo-temporal. The Curzon Memories App documentary, The Curzon Memories App, and City Strata: The Cinemap Layer', slide presentation and document transcript, presentation at i-docs 2012
City Strata: The Cinemap Layer Project

Thứ Ba, 6 tháng 3, 2012

Knowing that/knowing how? On audiovisual film studies, part 1: practice-led film research

Research in progress by Joanna Callaghan for the fourth long format film in the series 'Ontological Narratives' which will take Jacques Derrida's epistolary novel The Post Card as starting point.
In this research film, the possibility of a deconstructive film is discussed with world leading experts on Derrida using a range of clips as counterpoints.
Ontological Narratives is an Arts and Humanities Research Council funded project led by Callaghan in collaboration with Martin McQuillan. [Also see 'The Post Card - Adaptation'; for more on this project see here and here]. See also Callaghan and McQuillan's important film on the current convulsive state of UK Higher Education, "I melt the glass with my forehead".

We can therefore turn this [film theory/film practice divide] debate into an explicitly philosophical issue, by not presupposing that knowing that and knowing how simply overlap; they are two different types of knowledge whose relationship needs to be thought through. It is the theorization of the link/overlap between the two types of knowledge that seems to be missing. [Warren Buckland, Film-Philosophy Discussion List, January 31, 2012]

[The debate about film theory and practice] has a history which, in the UK at least, goes back to the 1970s, when the art colleges taught experimental film making, and the then polytechnics and a few new universities began to include film-making in their undergraduate film courses. Film theory as such was still taking shape, and video was in its earliest stages. In an atmosphere charged with radical intellectual fervour, the theoretical input led to much experimentation in colleges of creative practice—the watchword of the time was deconstruction. The paradigm for the infusion of theory into practice could be found in the work, for example, of Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen, who established themselves on screen and on page, together and separately, as leading denizens of both. Some of the people emerging from this habitus made the break and went on to successful careers in the mainstream, but independent film-making informed by theoretical critique remained in the margins. [Michael Chanan, 'Revisiting the Theory/Practice Debate', Putney Debater, February 15, 2012 (hyperlinks added)]

Audiovisual works, it may be argued – films, videos or some other form – are already discursively articulated, they not only incorporate language (as dialogue, voice-over, intertitle, and so on) but are quasi-linguistic in their very form. The analogy between language and cinema, for example, has been explored with particular rigour in structuralist film theory, not least in the work of Christian Metz. It might be argued that if audiovisual forms are inherently discursive, then an intellectual argument can equally well be presented in the form of a film or video as in a more conventional written form. [Victor Burgin, 'Thoughts on 'research' degrees in visual arts departments', Journal of Media Practice, Vol. 7, No. 2, 2006] (hyperlink added)]

The misgivings about the legitimacy of practice-based research degrees in the creative and performing arts arise mainly because people have trouble taking research seriously which is designed, articulated and documented with both discursive and artistic means. The difficulty lurks in the presumed impossibility of arriving at a more or less objective assessment of the quality of the research – as if a specialised art forum did not already exist alongside the academic one, and as if academic or scientific objectivity itself were an unproblematic notion. In a certain sense, a discussion is repeating itself here that has already taken place (and still continues) with respect to the emancipation of the social sciences: the prerogative of the old guard that thinks it holds the standard of quality against the rights of the newcomers who, by introducing their own field of research, actually alter the current understanding of what scholarship and objectivity are. [Henk Borgdorff, 'The debate on research in the arts', The Sensuous Knowledge Project, 2006]

And so begins a mini-series of posts here at Film Studies For Free on the practical possibilities for, and the critical debates about, audiovisual film studies research and 'publication'.

Below, in this first instalment, FSFF links to freely-accessible, online resources relating to the notion of film practice as a form of film/video theorising, in other words, as a reflexive and/or affective meditation on the ontological qualities of film or video (a 'felt framing', in Julian Klein's great phrase to describe artistic research). It's certainly a good excuse to showcase some of the burgeoning, open access work (and open access publications, or free publishers' samples) in the very healthy field of Moving Image Practice as Research (aka 'Research by Practice' or 'Practice-Led research).

Some studies of Practice-Led Research

Two Open Access journals for AV/media practice work:

The Journal of Media practice: SCREENWORKS (Vol. 1 and Vol. 2 [on AVPhD practice work])
The Journal for Artistic Research

Two free publishers journal samples:

Journal of Media Practice 11.1, 2010, Free Sample Issue

MIRAJ 1:1, 2012 (the journal of the Artists' Moving Image Research Network) – Free Inaugural issue

Editorial:

Catherine Elwes

Articles:

Features:

Reviews:

Thứ Ba, 12 tháng 5, 2009

Thứ Hai, 23 tháng 3, 2009

Reports from the E-Repositories #1: eScholarship Initiative/California Digital Library

Image from November (Hito Steyerl, 2004, DVD, 27 min)

Film Studies For Free has donned its fetching explorer's hat to check out some excellent university e-repositories for research and scholarship.

In the first of a series of posts reporting on its findings, here are five of the best, freely-accessible, film-related items that FSFF found on its e-travels, today courtesy of the eScholarship initiative of the California Digital Library, served by the individual units of the University of California:

Laure Astourian (2008) “Bridging Fiction and Documentary in Godard’s Notre Musique”, The Berkeley Undergraduate Journal : Vol. 21: No. 2, Article 4 (thesis adviser: Ulysse Dutoit) (abstract: This paper is a close analysis of Jean-Luc Godard’s 2004 film, Notre Musique. Its primary focus is the implications of Godard’s blending of documentary footage with staged footage. Among the examples of documentary and narrative blurring, Godard stages an interview with an internationally known poet, Mahmoud Darwish, and though the pretext is completely false, the exchange that takes place is honest and potent. Aside from the famous personages who play themselves, the film’s other main characters are actors. They insert themselves seamlessly through events that actually took place in Sarajevo (i.e. that were not planned for the shooting of the film). I believe this technique echoes Godard’s belief that people have faith in the imaginary, and doubt reality. Even though the narrative curve is atypical--there is no climax, and the two main characters never meet--it offers that which the spectator needs in order to submit himself or herself to a film: the imaginary. Thanks to the lens of narrativity, the varied documentary subjects (the Israeli/Palestine conflict, the symbolic rebuilding of the Mostar Bridge, the Native American plight, the future of digital filmmaking) whose philosophical links would otherwise not be considered are conjoined into a field where realities point to imaginaries and vice versa. Throughout the film, the characters acknowledge the inability of images and words to represent certain atrocities, and strange way by which imaginary representations are at times more believable than the truth.)
Deniz Göktürk (2005) “Yüksel Yavuz’s Kleine Freiheit / A Little Bit of Freedom”, TRANSIT, Vol. 1: No. 1, Article 50915 (abstract: Yüksel Yavuz’s internationally celebrated film Kleine Freiheit / A Little Bit of Freedom (2003), tells the story of a friendship between two young men, both of them illegal immigrants living in Altona, one of them a Kurd from Turkey. Baran’s application for asylum has been declined, and he has therefore fallen into an illegal status in Germany. That means that he does not have basic rights, such as health care or job protection. He works as a delivery boy in a relative’s kebab restaurant. When he has a toothache, they try to cure him in the kitchen by sticking a hot skewer into his mouth. His scream leads over into the first montage sequence of a bicycle trip. This triple exposure sequence conveys a gripping cross-section of the neighborhood by superimposing shots of city traffic with shots of the various locations to which kebab is delivered, ranging from a Turkish bakery to a construction site and a brothel. The sequence conveys a sense of multilayered locality, which is underscored by the music of Mercan Dede. Despite the excess of mobility displayed in these images, the characters remain confined within the St. Pauli neighborhood throughout the film. Taking advantage of a “Germany in transit,” Yavuz’s cinematically impressive engagement with locations in Hamburg raises a whole range of interesting questions such as: Where is home? How are transnational mobility and traumatic memory represented in cinema? Do immigrants live in a “parallel world”? Do they care about integration into German society? Do they form new inter-ethnic alliances in this new place? How do questions of race and gender come into play? And where are German (and global) spectators positioned in relation to immigrant spaces and networks?)
Kathleen Sclafani (2006) “Finding Home in a Liminal Space: Exile and Return in Andreas Dresen’s Halbe Treppe ”, TRANSIT: Vol. 2: No. 1, Article 61212 (abstract: In his film Halbe Treppe, Andreas Dresen uses stylistic elements and modes of production similar to exilic filmmakers, as described by Naficy in his book An Accented Cinema, in an attempt to portray both a sense of exile and a desire for freedom in his characters. Since exile is inextricably bound-up in questions of both homeland and identity, the film invites comparison not only to exilic cinema but also to certain aspects of New German Cinema, particularly issues of German identity that many critics argue have been too often ignored by other young German filmmakers. By emphasizing the importance of Frankfurt/Oder as the setting for his characters’ experience of exile, Dresen creates a connection between identity and “place” that encourages the spectator to reflect upon the traditional notion of “Heimat” and how it might be re-imagined in a new multicultural, unified Germany.)
Dean K. Simonton, 'Film awards as indicators of cinematic creativity and achievement: A quantitative comparison of the Oscars and six alternatives', Creativity Research Journal. 16 (2-3), pp. 163-172 (abstract: Although film awards are often taken as indicating the creative achievements that underlie outstanding motion pictures, critics have questioned whether such honors represent a consensus regarding cinematic contributions. Nevertheless, a strong agreement was demonstrated by investigating 1,132films released between 1975 and 2002 that had received at least 1 award or award nomination from 7 distinct sources (Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Hollywood Foreign Press Association, British Academy of Film and Television Arts, New York Film Critics Circle, National Board of Review, National Society of Film Critics, and Los Angeles Film Critics Association). The results indicated that (a) almost all award categories exhibited a conspicuous consensus, the Oscars providing the best single indicator of that agreement; (b) Oscar awards provided meaningful information about cinematic creativity and achievement beyond that provided by Oscar nominations alone; (c) awards bestowed by the 7 organizations corresponded with more specialized awards granted by guilds and societies, with the Oscars usually providing the best correspondence; and (d) awards correlated positively with later movie guide ratings, the correlations being especially large in the categories of picture, direction, screenplay, and acting. The findings were discussed in terms of whether the awards can be considered to be indicative of cinematic creativity.)
Hito Steyerl (2005) “November: A Film Treatment”, TRANSIT: Vol. 1: No. 1, Article 50914 (abstract: In the eighties Hito Steyerl shot a feminist martial arts film on Super-8 stock. Her best friend Andrea Wolf played the lead role, that of a woman warrior dressed in leather and mounted on a motorcycle. The engagement expressed in the formal grammar of exploitation films later became Wolf’s political praxis: She went to fight alongside the PKK in the Kurdish regions between Turkey and northern Iraq, where she was killed in 1998. Now honored by Kurds as an “immortal revolutionary,” her portrait is carried at demonstrations.
In November Hito Steyerl examines the spectrum of interrelationships between territorial power politics (as practiced by Turkey in Kurdistan with the support of Germany) and individual forms of resistance. Her memories and accounts of Wolf’s life provoke the filmmaker to engage in a fundamental reflexion: She comes to understand how fact and fiction are intertwined in the global discourse. Her friend’s picture as a revolutionary pin-up would equally connect with either Asian genre cinema or a private video document. If October is the hour of revolution, November is the time of common sense afterward, though it is also the time of madness – Hito Steyerl considers from this perspective a relationship which began with a pose, and Andrea Wolf took its implications so seriously that she was no longer satisfied with symbolic action. Wolf chose the Other of filmmaking, which was what made her into a true “icon”.

Thứ Hai, 3 tháng 11, 2008

Artists and Filmmakers' Favourite Films: frieze magazine

Screenshots from films by Clio Barnard

GreenCine Daily, Film Studies For Free's favourite site for 'Film on the Web' news, today brings word of an article (link to it HERE), in the latest, online issue of art magazine frieze, by filmmaker Clio Barnard (a former colleague of this blogger at the University of Kent). The article is part of an ongoing series in which frieze asks artists and filmmakers to list the movies that have influenced their practice.

Barnard is an artist/filmmaker, whose work has shown in cinemas, international film festivals and galleries, including Tate Modern and Tate Britain. She was one of the winners of the 2005 Paul Hamlyn Award for Artists and in 2007 was awarded a major commission from the Art Angel, which will involve an ambitious live performance and feature-length film.

FSFF already links to an online film by Barnard - the wonderful Dark Glass (1 min. 16 seconds, 2006; direct link to MP4 HERE; and to QuickTime HERE), part of the SingleShot series of 'newly commissioned film and video works -- shot in one single take -- by artists and new talent'.

As the Tate Modern website describes it,

Shot on a mobile phone, Clio Barnard’s Dark Glass is a taut micro-drama that visually recreates a spoken description of family photographs recalled under hypnosis. Although the recollection appears incredibly compelling, it also possesses an inherent instability, so that we are never quite sure what we’re hearing or seeing, something further emphasised by the unsteady nature of the image itself, which lends an apparitional quality to this apparent act of truth-telling.

HERE's a link to a good article about the SingleShot films by Aaron Callow for aestheticamagazine, with a few paragraphs dedicated to Dark Glass.

Below are direct links to the other frieze articles about films that have influenced particular artists and filmmakers' work; most are illustrated with video clips from the films:

Issue 101 September 2006:The Otolith Group
Issue 102 October 2006:David Noonan
Issue 103 November-December 2006: Rebecca Warren
Issue 105 March 2007: Runa Islam
Issue 106 April 2007: Jia Zhangke
Issue 107 May 2007: Luke Fowler
Issue 108 Jun-Aug 2007: Hamish Fulton
Issue 109 September 2007: Steve McQueen
Issue 110 October 2007: Rosemarie Trockel
Issue 111 Nov-Dec 2007: James Benning
Issue 113 March 2008: Peter Doig
Issue 114 April 2008: Hito Steyerl
Issue 115 May 2008: Mark Leckey
Issue 116 June - Aug 2008: Raqs Media Collective
Issue 117 September 2008: Babette Mangolte
Issue 118 October 2008: Duncan Campbell
Issue 119 Nov-Dec 2008: Clio Barnard

One final frieze-related Film Studies For Free tip: check out the frieze podcasts. There are interesting ones on: The Expanded Gallery: Mass Forms for Private Consumption; The Expanded Gallery: I Am Not a Flopper Or… (Allan Smithee-related!); and Art, Politics and Popularity (with Jacques Rancière).

Thứ Hai, 22 tháng 9, 2008

More on artists' film and video: an e-book, and 'vodcast' links

From Ecology, directed by Sarah Turner, 2007. Photo: Matthew Walter/Sarah Turner

A few more links have been added to Film Studies For Free's list of film-scholarly podcasts and videocasts, most notably one to a page on the LUXONLINE site, a brilliant web resource for exploring British based artists’ film and video in-depth (offering critical writing, stills, streaming video clips, and other contextual resources).

The link I've just added is to LUXONLINE's offering of 'vodcasts' of interviews with leading British film artists and curators (link HERE, please note, though, that you need to be registered first with iTunes in order to access almost all of the vodcasts). There are video interviews with Andrew Kötting, Angela Kingston (independent curator), Tina Keane, Ruth Novaczek, Chris Welsby, Alia Syed, Stephen Dwoskin, and Harold Offeh. The latest vodcast is with Sarah Pucill (there's currently no need for an iTunes account for this one: there's a direct link HERE)

The LUXONLINE site also has a lot of original artists' films, or clips from artists' films, available for viewing in streaming video, so it is well worth taking the time to explore the site properly. You can start your searches for resources by particular artists HERE and for particular streamed films/clips HERE.

There's another organisation which has even more user-friendly listings to assist with tracking down British-based artists' film available for viewing more generally on the web (links HERE and HERE). The British Artists' Film and Video Study Collection is a research project led by David Curtis and Steven Ball and based at Central St Martins College of Art and Design, London. It focuses in particular on the history of artists' film and video in Britain.

Like LUXONLINE, the British Artists' Film and Video Study Collection also provides a good collection of freely accessible research papers on artists' film or by film artists (link HERE), including ones by Malcolm Le Grice and Michael Mazière. There's also a paper by my friend and former colleague in Film Studies at the University of Kent, Sarah Turner, which sets out some of the conceptual background to her 2007 film Ecology (read a BBC interview HERE), which premiered at last year's Cambridge Film Festival.

Finally, there's also a link now in Film Studies For Free's 'Film Open Access e-books' listing to Gene Youngblood's hugely influential and prescient Expanded Cinema, a 444 page book, originally published in 1970 (downloadable in a single .pdf via Ubu.com; and also accessible HERE in separate sections via http://www.vasulka.org/). Expanded Cinema, as the very useful Wikipedia article on it argues, was

the first book to consider video as an art form, [and] was influential in establishing the field of media arts. In the book [Youngblood] argues that a new, expanded cinema is required for a new consciousness. He describes various types of filmmaking utilising new technology, including film special effects, computer art, video art, multi-media environments and holography.

Thứ Ba, 2 tháng 9, 2008

Expanded Cinema and Unspoken Cinema: 'Film practice as research' links

I have just placed a new link in Film Studies For Free's blogroll to the useful Expanded Cinema weblog, an 'online platform for experimental film, early video, and sound-based, durational work.' All of the material is being curated by Joao Ribas from available media online, 'emphasizing an overlooked facet of the archival function of new media.' Ribas has another good blog, commenting on art/film curatorial matters, among others, too: Notes and Queries. On Expanded Cinema, not all of the video embeds or links are permanently stored (one presumes, for technical reasons), but there's still a lot of good stuff there and it's well worth exploring.

I also posted a blog link to Unspoken Cinema (by HarryTuttle et al), a great resource for practitioners and scholars of what the blog-blurb calls

Contemporary Contemplative Cinema (C.C.C.): the kind that rejects conventional narration to develop almost essentially through minimalistic visual language and atmosphere alone, without the help of music, dialogue, melodrama, action-montage, and the star system.

Phew. The legendary HarryTuttle is also the blog author of SCREENVILLE, which, among other great features, has lists of cinema webcasts and online video. I have added his custom video search page to FSFF's list of resources aimed at those engaged in Film or Screen Media 'Practice as Research' (or 'Research by Practice').

Film Practice as Research (basically, higher-education-based film and video practice that can give a 'reflexive account of itself [its form, especially] as research’) is a lively, but still 'emerging' research area, perhaps primarily in the UK. As the meagre sources of funding for artists' (and non-commercial) film and video in this country have almost completely dried up in recent years, outside the academy, many more filmmakers than before have turned to teaching to (part-)fund their work, not only in practical filmmaking college departments and art schools, but also in Film and Media Studies University departments, too. In this latter context, the academic requirement to be 'research active' and 'excellent' (and measurably so...) has led to the growth in this discourse of 'practice as research'. The Wikipedia page on this matter, that I've linked to, covers the sometimes controversial issues raised by these new ways of working, around the 'articulation as research' of practice-based work, as well as peer-review and dissemination, etc., quite well.