Recovering the hidden through found-footage films

In the early nineteen seventies materialist experimental film was cogently rejected by feminist theorists for its inability to deliver a feminist counter-cinema addressing its political agenda. The concomitant development of feminist psychoanalytic readings of “dominant cinema” against its grain also discounted such work. This split is marked by Peter Wollen’s formulation of “two avant-gardes”, one narrative and explicit about its political position and the other non-narrative and focusing directly on implicit perceptual processes. Materialist film’s fixation on structure jettisoned content, and extended post-war painting’s essentialist move to pure abstraction manifest in abstract expressionism and minimalism. The emergence of trauma theory and the recent explosion of moving image digital media with its non-linear bias and the complex layering of “technical images” have created a new situation opening up alternate readings of such discounted materialist practices. As well as a historic precursor for digital media, it is suggested that a materialist cinema, represented here by the found footage films: Alone: Life Wastes Andy Hardy (Arnold 1998) and Dreamwork (Tscherkassky 2001), signposts a belated return for materialist film within the context of trauma studies. This materialist turn rescues such experimental film from its traumatic excision and extends an understanding of what has been termed a “trauma cinema” by Janet Walker. Rather than pure, abstract or visionary such practice is read here through trauma theory as performing implicit mechanisms of denial and erasure.

Found footage: recycling historic material a-historically

The digital has speeded up multi-platform image delivery, to impose sampling and collagic strategies into the way we process information. This is a trauma inducing situation. During an earlier period of technological change reading the moving landscape similarly overwhelmed the early train traveller. Wolfgang Schivelbusch noted that ‘The inability to acquire a mode of perception adequate to technological travel crossed all political, ideological and aesthetic lines.’ (1983) New perceptual strategies had to be developed that contextualized the blur and the streak produced by looking out the train window without overwhelming the viewer. Utilizing Chris Brewin’s (2001) model of two parallel memory systems, this paper argues that, as another round of unprecedented technological change impacts on our senses, another ‘re-alignment’ of the senses is required. Chris Brewin’s (2001) model of two parallel memory systems, of Verbally Accessible Memory (VAM) and Situational Accessible Memory (SAM), suggests that the current information explosion requires a greater emphasis on the SAM system for processing information and critical thinking. Processed through the amygdala, SAM is implicit, situationally triggered, information intensive and conveys no sense of time. Found footage films, like those of Martin Arnold and Peter Tscherkassky that cut up, layer, repeat and recycle historic imagery perform the sampling and collagic strategies that characterize this SAM memory system to demonstrate a more visually based mode of critical thinking.

Understanding science

Understanding Science is about breakdown of meaning, breakdown of relationship, trying to exist in that space between meaninglessness and understanding, at its cusp, its node, its no-man's land.. It is a melting pot of more than just fragments of images, there are clusters of things, ideas, sounds, words, that swim in and out of your attention. I wanted this film to be a dense multidimensional collage of automatic writing, sound poetry and abstracting strings of images.

Program notes: Scratch Film Festival. UWA. Perth 1997

Catalogue notes for black noise

Where the speed-up of technology led Marshall McLuhan into the realm of ‘pattern-recognition’ the game has now been ratcheted up a further notch. Technologies themselves are being creatively re-designed and reconfigured to hunt down the Snark (see Lewis Carrol, 1898), a game in which the skill of identifying gaps, ruptures, of cracking the surface, remains critical. In this situation a New Minimalism has taken shape in which narrative and content have not been erased exactly but have retreated, to be resident in the architecture and flow of the apparatus itself. For Marcia Jane this is where the story now sits, to be laid bare on the Gallery floor.

Bridges

Bridges is a hand-drawn film. Some elements have been printed onto clear acatate that has then been glued onto a clear film surface, which itself has been prepared by bleaching away parts of the sound and image of the original film, a documentary about bridges.The sound develops a chant like quality using the rhythm of a race call and a the commentary of a football match. A celebration of the Australian voice.

Click if you like this or occupy as spectacle : situationism and a technological derive

This performative, multi-media lecture re-reads Guy Debord’s book, The Society of the Spectacle (1967) with reference to the global Occupy movement, and the role social media and the Internet play in the facilitation and hindrance of this recent form of political activism. Debord claims that all ‘having’ — that is, all forms of accumulating capital — ‘derives its immediate prestige and its ultimate purpose from appearances’, and that individual reality, which is shaped by social forces, can ‘appear only if it is not actually real (Debord, thesis 18).’ Using the multiple functions and staggering proliferation of various image making technologies used to record and represent OCCUPY actions as a starting point, we respond to Debord’s proposition by examining the ways his analysis of the spectacle both enables and impedes a thorough critique of social media as a spectacular technology par excellence. Part reflective essay, part critical analysis, and part performance, ‘Click if You Like This’ connects various situationist strategies of ‘artistic interference’ — such as the dérive and détournement — with expanded cinema in order to generate a series of questions and provocations about the politics of place, the degradation of social space, networked images and the ubiquity of contemporary ‘spectacular’ technologies, which have colonized all forms of everyday life. This presentation questions whether contemporary forms and strategies of interference are the same as their historical precedents.

The performing frame

This project explores the ways that creative practices—improvised movement, choreographed dance, and digital video—produce new knowledge about the sociability of public space. In other words, it uses various theoretical concepts and practical strategies to document and analyse the ways people inhabit and sometimes subvert public spaces — such as plazas, malls and piazzas — as part of their everyday experience. Drawing on concepts developed within the fields of performance theory, spatial history, cultural geography and social theory, the project will build a methodological toolbox for understanding the relationships between the diverse groups that use public spaces in Melbourne, Australia. This ‘toolbox’ will subsequently be used to understand analogous public spaces in other parts of the world to generate comparative data about spatial sociability. The research will enable an innovative way of mapping social, civic and political relations in space through a series of creative interventions, and will reveal the politics of everyday movement while exposing tensions between the spaces of public culture — those framed and legitimated by state institutions — and what Michael Warner calls ‘Counter-Publics.’ That is, those oppositional groups who actively seek to use public space in subversive or unauthorised ways.

This project documents a series of performative interventions designed to harness the untapped potential of various forms of street performance genres to function as tools that can produce new ways of understanding the politics of movement in public space. These ‘interventions’ will be generated through a series of practical performance and movement workshops that will draw on street theatre techniques, contact improvisation, Laban movement analysis and contemporary dance choreography. The project will focus on a series of dyadic relationships: self and other, inside and outside, centre and periphery that are relevant to human interaction in public space.
Street performers — musicians, acrobats, jugglers, magicians, mimes and so on — seek public spaces with high volumes of pedestrian traffic in order to maximise their ability to draw an audience and make a living. These performers who create temporary performance zones alter the flow and intensity of movement around them, thereby transforming the plazas, piazzas, town squares and subways favoured by buskers. Some of these performers interact with their audience more than others, and are potentially capable of telling us something about the politics of space. The practice of ‘shadowing’ the movements of passers-by is an increasingly popular form of public entertainment around the world.

Unsung oz hysteries

The screening and funding opportunities for Experimental film in Australia has always had a problematic and underground history since the 1960s, moving through 16mm, super 8 and now digital moving image forms. One source of that history was Cantrills Filmnotes which expressed the rhetoric of a founding generation who experience the promise of a new Australian National Cinema and new film culture in the 70s, but whose mainstream product eventually left it behind. Experimental film inherited a marginal position through a lack of critical debate and because funding shifts left its identity somewhere between the fine arts and commercial cinema. It was consequently viewed as marginal to both. The general visual quality of this work meant it was perceived as apolitical, although it implicitly expressed and performed the denials and negations experienced directly by the migrant and working classes.

Through several cycles of emerging generations of artists (through such organizations as Fringe Network, MIMA and Experimenta), such artists knew more of the histories of work emanating from Europe and North America than their own, a general problem for Australian history. New underground opportunities are now arising to connect with the emerging and aspirant cultures coming out of Asia that reflect the shifts of global capital and the rise of China as an economic power. Asian work, registering a history of aspiration offers a re-integration of Peter Wollen’s avant-gardes split from the early 70s in the West. In the academy the Avant-garde’s strategies and techniques are studied, but are offered up in new work as aesthetic and lifestyle choices, rather than as the political imperatives announced implicitly or explicitly in their originating forms.

Alt.film.au(2) : Blogging at the margins in Australian retrospective 2012

In 1972 Albie Thoms wrote: ‘In Australia it has been impossible to elicit much sympathetic appraisal from critics who seem distressed by the relation of personal film to amateur movies. Even those proselytizing for the New cinema have underrated the personal film as a worthy antidote to the market assumptions of Hollywood.’ (Thoms 1978, p. 146) The question now is, of course, is anything different in 2012? The answer is of course yes and no. Although the politics remains frustratingly familiar the digital has progressed further to the point that where in the 60s every one picked up a guitar, now we pick up a video camera. A postscript relates those films in the program not available for inclusion in the original 90s rant- (i.e. they did not exist) I have further annotated this re-play of old wounds and victories with commentary on some of the films in the screening program.

Oz@1950

This short film re-edits Australian historic newsreel footage to present the point of view of the migrant arriving into Australia in the 1950s.

Glassimations

Glassimations, an exhibition of contemporary Australian artworks that bridge the materials of glass and animation to produce works with qualities that are unique to these two mediums and yet create a dialogue between them. The exhibition includes the work of a variety of artists. Lee Whitmore paints on glass to achieve an animated image that metamorphs with its own unique movement; Tom Moore animates his blown glass creations into their own world; Deirdre Feeney animates onto her glass architectural forms to produce places of light that condense time and are full of intangible narrative; Mark Eliott and Jack McGrath collaborate to bring their understanding and skills of glass and animation together, creating works that are founded in the production processes of both materials; and Lienors Torre and Alastair Boell collaborate to create animated films that become objects of glass and furniture, able to occupy real spaces in our domestic lives.

The more things change, the more they stay the same : the 2012 alternative film/video festival

The Alternative Film/Video Festival in Belgrade has historically been one of a triumvirate of critical festivals, with Pula’s MAFAF (1965-1990) and Zagreb’s initiating GEFF (1963-70), servicing experimental, exploratory, avant-garde, personal film in the former Yugoslavia, at Belgrade’s Academic Film Center (AFC) within the Student City Cultural Centre (DKSG). Initiated in 1982 it was resurrected in 2003 with a dual regional and international focus after a hiatus due to the collapse of the socialist states of the former Yugoslavia. As well as a series of curated and retrospective programs each competition program is now split into international and regional halves, selected by Greg de Cuir and Zoran Saveski with production support by Milan Milosavljević. Two film workshops were also available. One on scratch film by Ivan Ladislav Galeta, the other on filming and processing led by Vassily Bourakis. Initiated by de Cuir the first Alternative Film/Video Research Forum was part of the festival this year bringing together research on alternative/ experimental/ avant-garde/ underground film and video. Although I participated in this side-bar I will concentrate here more on discussions from the festival roundtable and contextualise a small number of films, a couple from competition but mainly regional work that I would find difficult to encounter without attendance here.

Conversations with my mother

An intense and sometimes disturbing series of encounters between the filmmaker and his mother as they relive the traumatic years of his childhood and adolescence. Following the migration of the family to Australia from Holland in the difficult postwar years they had to grapple with problems of housing, social injustice and adjustment made more difficult by the father's mental illness. For the filmmaker 'the sentiment had to be uncompromisingly true' although he became aware that 'all film is fiction'.

Click if you like this, or OCCUPY as spectacle : a technological derive

This paper is the textual component of a dialogic, performative, multi-media lecture that rereads Guy Debord’s, The Society of the Spectacle (1967) with reference to the global Occupy movement, and the role social media, and the proliferation of digital images play in the facilitation and hindrance of this recent form of political activism. It explicitly addresses the connections between global capitalism, public space and digital technology by responding to selective quotations from Debord’s book in creative and anecdotal registers.