Research on Found footage/objects videos

"J'interroge et j'invective", poéme de François Dufrene

Lemaitre-Maurice Le-film-est-deja-commence (1951) 

Collage / Found footage film in early stage is always about criticizing social issues and making poems. They are a bit rough as using films to overlap each other, but powerful.

Norman McLaren : Synchromy

Spook Sport 1940 - Norman McLaren

We See the Future - Wm S Burroughs

William S. Burroughs: An Animated Portrait

WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS Revolutionary Weapon

Hans Richter - Rhytmus 21

Some are like VJing, very rhythmatic. I like this style more

Run Lola Run

I encountered this film when I was doing the presentation of SM1008. I am really surprise that a film can be so many variation in visual, and it plays the time concept in a very unique way. Time in Run Lola Run is very important, time gives the movie power and tension in making every decisions. 

In the movie, the editing is very good! Slot machine editing was the first time used in this movie, which is a experimental method in editing. Animation, montage, still images, MV style, many features are included in the film but you won't feel odd. And the idea that making a film like a game is attractive. The 2 media seems that are hard to combined, however, it is very success in Run Lola Run. This film can said to be a breakthrough in traditional film industry, redefining the way of producing narrative.

Think and Drawing

Thinking and Drawing - Japanese Art Animation of the New Millenium

Thinking and Drawing features a wide selection of animation styles from line drawing to CGI manipulated photographs. The subject matter ranges from feminist allegory to ghostly tales. Although each film has a short running time of between 5 and 17 minutes, the depth of meaning in each is truly astonishing. The films have shown together and separately at festivals in Europe, North America, and Australia. 

(From : http://www.midnighteye.com/reviews/thinking-and-drawing.shtml) 

I think this is a kind of experimental animation. Many of them do not have a clear narration but more focus on some psychological and philosophical issues, questioning how animation can be and something else... For example, one of my favourite work is Suwami Nogami's minimalistic line drawing piece, Imagination Practice (Kangaeru Renshu, 2003). The animation is looping and looping seems without an end.A man is sitting in front of a window with a self-portrait, just the same as the cover of that DVD. The window frame and the blue sky filled with moving clouds are in colour, but the figure of the artist is not coloured in. It gives us a feel that the process of thinking is a loop, you need to question yourself, get an answer, and question your answer, and so on. Besides, it shows that the relationship between artist and his/her work is very strong, artists need to think over and over about their work.

My another favourite work is Tetsuji Kurashige's nightmarish U-SA-GUI (2002) begins by citing a section from Brillat-Savarin's 1825 treatise, The Physiology of Taste, in which the renowned French epicure suggests that stimulating foods, meats in particular, can have an influence on one's dreams. The film depicts a macabre game played by two rabbits and a blindfolded woman. It is quite weird for me as I don't really know about the physiology of taste, but I can sense what it wants to express through the development of story. The style of animation is very special. It likes an oil painting but with little japanese style. The mise-en-scene inside is surreal as they all covered with dark colors. I don't really understand what it wants to tell, the overall feeling and tension is powerful, I think it is about desire, something like that. But I really love the way it develops, how the dice came out by different methods... etc...

Giacomo Balla

Speed of the automobile (Speed no. 1), c.1913
Indian ink in watercolour on covered paper,  cm 46,5 x 60

Giacomo Balla
Abstract Speed - The Car Has Passed, 1913 
Oil on Canvas

Giacomo Balla
Warship, Widow and Wind (Veil of Vedova and Landscape), 1916 
Oil on Burlap

Giacomo Balla
Alberi Mutilati, 1918 
Oil on Canvas

Giacomo Balla
Abstract Speed and Sound, 1913-14 
Oil on Board

Abstract Art Artist

Giacomo Balla was part of the first wave of Futurist painters and was born in 1871. He was a well known teacher in his time and his pupils included Umberto Boccioni and Gino Severini. Balla's early works were greatly influenced by Seurat and the pointillist movement, but by 1912 he had joined the Futurist movement. After 1909 Balla's paintings became more and more concerned with the portrayal of light, speed and movement - this fascination is demonstrated in his works such as The Hand of the Violinist, and the Speed of the Motorcycle. As Balla sought to break down elements such as light to their simplest forms he moved closer to total abstraction in his paintings. By 1914 Balla was so involved in his art work, and his belief in Futurism that he named his two daughters Propeller and Light! During the second wave of Futurism in the 1920's Balla remained to be a strong force within the younger Futurists. Balla's paintings and sculptures slowly began to shift to more geometric forms, which he would alternate with figurative abstractions. By the end of his life, Balla had moved away from Futurism all together even though he had been an important driving influence. Giacomo Balla died in 1958.

Giacomo's painting can let you sense the power of speed. As he was so appreciate the invention of car which is the fastest transporting machine he had never seen (speed of car was about 50km/h that period), he wanted to express the feeling of speed on his paintings. Mobility and overlapping features of painting was his unique style. Besides he brought out an new idea: A painting, named “Abstract Speed + Sound” by him, stayed a new idea that frame can be an extension of painting but not separate. His painting is a kind of medium specificity as he extracted colors and lines from traditional way of painting instead of depicting things in reality. His painting is full of power and he was become one of my favourite painter =)

Lesson 12

Our Questions and Linda's answers

Conceptual art

-work of visual art need not be visual

-a way of presenting ideas

-art should emphasize thinking

Conceptual artist 1960s - 70

-intention of the artist

-artist - owner

Outsider's art

-explore automatism

-appreciate children and mental patients' drawings

Write about the creation process

Douglas Huebler

-set of photographs of 13 locations

Duchamp's Large Glass

-documentation

-not yet completed

Ed Kienholz's "concept tableaux"

George Brecht (Fluxus)

Conceptual Art -> painting is dead

-not have to be traditional media

-not too concerned with exploring the medium specificity

-thought concepts = specificity

Josef Albers

- art is concerned "How" not "What"

- with the performance of fractual content

Vito Acconci

-following piece

Jens Hoffmann

-Curator vs Creator

-very abstract and hyper figurative

Christian Boltanski

-archive as art event

Zoe Leonard

-synesthesia - exchanging of sense

Evelyn Glennie

-touch the sound

The Real Thing [Book]

-contemporary Art in China

Gao brothers

-The Utopia of 20 mins Embrace

-www.gaobrothers.net

Du Xinjian [painting]

Peter Gidal -> Essay of structural film

-The shape of the film is crucial, the content peripheral

each film -> record

-not reproduction, representation

Ani*Kuri Series

Ani*Kuri is a series of 15 one-minute shorts created by various people from Japan`s animation industry. The title of the collection, Ani*Kuri15, is abbreviated from the words "anime" and "creators".

Here are some of them:

In this series, different animators used their own style to create a specific topic of one-minute animation short film. There are many variation in these 15 short animation and each of them have their unique style. Inside these 15 animation, some animators are familiar to us, for example, Studio 4 Degree C, 押井守, 新海誠, etc... This kind of project is a very good platform for animators to show their own style and explore their animation. I like episode 2 very much, the buildings of the whole city are built by cardboards, the message of "artificial" is brought out easily. And it also express the cold and detached of people in society. Everyone will be disappointed by the cold city even UFO think so.

The avant-garde in Japan is animation, which is giving life to images. These short animations give life to images, meanwhile, there are narration, new media and very rich imagination. Sometimes a short one is better than long one as the climax brought out faster. Therefore, I enjoy watching this kind of short animation. 

Lesson 11

Europe - avant-garde cinema

*critique of capitalism

Japan -> Animation (avant-garde) gives life to image

HK - John Wu - experimental cinema

       - Pang's brother

Andy Warhol

-desire - cinema

-materialization

-long series of work - screen shot

 - 2-3 minutes of a head facing camera

 - screen space challenge

-instantaneous response (at present of camera)

-performance

"Factory"

-> Banana - spectatorship

*marking the audience

->pornography

->suggestive - ness -> ambiguities

looking at the cinema as event

-here and now movement

Blow job -> title -> direction -> narrow down our interpretation

-challenge our viewing habit

X diegetic absorption

*minimum contents

-takes away comprehension and diegetic absorption 

*Attack / direct representation

Letterism - play with language

not about STYLE

Jeffrey Shaw -> web of life 2002

-expanded cinema

-space / x screen - immersive / x seeing

The Distributed legible city

-simulating a real city

-cycling

-textial reading

*Luc Courchesne (Canada)

http://www.din.umontreal.ca/courchesne/land.html

- about his work - Landscape One at 1999 Ars Electronica Festival

Michael Snow

-setting up what medium specific in cinema

-camera - segmenting a portion of reality

-e.g. people expect camera moved, more face shown

Crouch Leap Land

-transform 2D -> 3D

-isomorphism

Vue 

-play with projection

-no different between projection and object

Dialectic

-no accurate representation of an object

Venetian Blind

-focus -> infinity

-open work

Michael Snow's POV [photography]

- x go straight forward for the subject

- x transparent

Times [photography of abstract painting]

-painting created for the photograph

-painting itself not existed

-wall-extension of the floor

Photographic activity

-primitives and operators

-*transform

-recreate new kind of 3D space

-new perceptual experience

Wavelength

-film process

-subject is transformed by means of light ad mechanical device

-movement of time -> light

 image projected in time

1) illusion

-impression if depth

-realism in film = illusion

separate our tools with subjectivity