Une méthode dangereuse : comprendre le processus créateur en musique de film, le cas de Norman McLaren et Maurice Blackburn, David Cronenberg et Howard Shore

Cette version de la thèse a été tronquée des certains éléments protégés par le droit d’auteur. Une version plus complète est disponible en ligne pour les membres de la communauté de l’Université de Montréal et peut aussi être consultée dans une des bibliothèques UdeM.

Non-cinema: the location of politics in film

Philosophy has repeatedly denied cinema in order to grant it artistic status. Adorno, for example, defined an ‘uncinematic’ element in the negation of movement in modern cinema, ‘which constitutes its artistic character’. Similarly, Lyotard defended an ‘acinema’, which rather than selecting and excluding movements through editing, accepts what is ‘fortuitous, dirty, confused, unclear, poorly framed, overexposed’. In his Handbook of Inaesthetics, Badiou embraces a similar idea, by describing cinema as an ‘impure circulation’ that incorporates the other arts. Resonating with Bazin and his defence of ‘impure cinema’, that is, of cinema’s interbreeding with other arts, Badiou seems to agree with him also in identifying the uncinematic as the location of the Real. This article will investigate the particular impurities of cinema that drive it beyond the specificities of the medium and into the realm of the other arts and the reality of life itself. Privileged examples will be drawn from various moments in film history and geography, starting with the analysis of two films by Jafar Panahi: This Is Not a Film (In film nist, 2011), whose anti-cinema stance in announced in its own title; and The Mirror (Aineh, 1997), another relentless exercise in self-negation. It goes on to examine Kenji Mizoguchi’s deconstruction of cinematic acting in his exploration of the geidomono genre (films about theatre actors) in The Story of the Last Chrysanthemums (Zangigku monogatari, 1939), and culminates in the conjuring of the physical experience of death through the systematic demolition of film genres in The Act of Killing (Joshua Oppenheimer et al., 2012).

The "other" in film : exclusions of Aboriginal indentity from Australian cinema

Throughout the latter half of the past century, cinema played a significant role in the shaping of the core narratives of Australia. Films express and implicitly shape national images and symbolic representations of cultural fictions in which ideas about Aboriginal identity have been embedded. In this article,1 exclusionary practices in Australian narratives are analyzed through examples of films representing Aboriginal identity. Through these filmic narratives the articulation, interrogation, and contestation of views about filmic representations of Aboriginal identity in Australia are illuminated. The various themes in the filmic narratives are examined in order to compare and contrast the ways in which Australian films display the operation of narrative closure and dualisms within the film texts.

Untitled : live cinema performance

Over the last 30 years Melbourne-based film-maker, writer and academic Dirk de Bruyn has made numerous experimental, documentary and animation films and videos, continuing to maintain a no-budget, independent, self-funded focus for much of his work. De Bruyns distinctive style entails cut-up collages that draw on animation, found footage and fragments of dialogue - dyeing, painting, incising and stencilling the film strip. Live De Bruyn’s anarchic multi projection performances can involve performance, freeform vocal workouts and De Bruyn, ‘bent over and mouthing into a microphone like a demented seagull, totally involved in the relentlessly unravelling collage of home-processed footage’.Penny Webb. Ian Helliwell provided a live electronic soundtrack.

Film, representation and the exclusion of Aboriginal identity: examples from Australian cinema

Throughout the latter half of the past century cinema has played a significant role in the shaping of the core narratives of Australia. Films express and implicitly shape national images and symbolic representations of cultural fictions in which ideas about Indigenous identity have been embedded. In this paper, exclusionary practices in Australian narratives are analysed through examples of films representing Aboriginal identity. Through these filmic narratives the articulation, interrogation, and contestation of views about filmic representations of Aboriginal identity in Australia is illuminated. The various themes in the filmic narratives are examined in order to compare and contrast the ways in which the films display the operation of narrative closure and dualisms within the film texts.

Neil Taylor’s experimental animation

This paper explores from a phenomenological perspective the work of Australian Experimental Animator Neil Taylor (1945-), works situated between animation, performance and sculpture. Taylor’s animated scribbling repetitively and automatically inscribe the surfaces of flipbooks or note pads (Short Lives (1980-90)) and cash register rolls (Roll Film 1990 and Copy Copy 1998) often enhanced by hand-made ‘machines’ designed to facilitate and shape this idiosyncratic activity. Taylor’s work is informed by his successful wire-based sculptural practice and his 20 years experience of teaching animation to tertiary students and 8 years previously in the Australian Technical School system (a system that has since been dismantled but for which these animations remain as an aesthetic trace). His work can be generally situated inside an avant-garde project ‘that continues to explore the physical properties of film and the nature of perceptual transactions which take place between viewer and film.’ (John Hanhardt, 1976: 44) This is performative research into the minutiae of the moving image and its ability to register body gesture. Hanhardt, John G. (1976) The Medium Viewed: The American Avant-Garde Film. A History of American Avant-Garde Cinema. New York, American federation of the Arts.