Man With A Movie Camera: The Global Remake Part One

Man With A Movie Camera:The Global Remake from Perry Bard on Vimeo.

A participatory video shot by people around the world who are uploading footage to dziga.perrybard.net to interpret Vertov's 1929 classic film Man With A Movie Camera.

Log onto dziga.perrybard.net where there is a list of SCENES. Click on any scene to see the shot list.Click see all uploads to see the uploads for each shot. Click upload to upload your interpretation. You can also participate by selecting SHOTS BY TAG.

Software developed for this project archives sequences and streams the submissions as a film.As the same shot can be uploaded more than once infinite versions of the film are possible. A new film is built daily and streams on the website. Click START to see today's version.

Concept/Director: Perry Bard
Software Development: John Weir
Sound Design: Steven Baun
Participants: See list at dziga.perrybard.net

From: http://vimeo.com/6345709

Slightly different from the one in the previous post.

Man With A Movie Camera: The Global Remake Part One

 Perry bard invites interpretations of Dziga Vertov's Man with a Movie Camera (1929). He is streaming them alongside scenes from the original.

Perry Bard's website:

http://dziga.perrybard.net/

Owen Land/George Landow - Remedial Reading Comprehension [1970]

I came across Owen Land in Malcolm Le Grice's Abstract Film and Beyond. Owen Land was then known as George Landow (not to be confused with  George Landow Professor of English and Art History at Brown University). In Le Grice's book  there is a still from Remedial Reading Comprehension on page 139. It was of the sequence featuring a page of a book where we can see part of the sentence "to pupil is an emot". The rest of the text is blurred.  The page is part of a montage which also includes the face of a sleeping woman.

Le Grice is concerned with the way in which the film addresses the audience directly “giving instructions, asking questions or proclaiming blandly ‘this is a film about you- not about its maker’, it forces the audience to recognize the apparent surface intentions, like the instructions to participate in a way which cannot be complied with, are ‘not’ the subject of the work. They are a provocative demonstration that the audience must treat film, however subjectively structured by the film-maker, as raw material for their own use. This is a demand that film should be approached sceptically counteracting unquestioned acceptance of the film’s authority” (Le Grice, 1977 p.139-40). 




 I like this from the Harvard Gazette: "In several of these films, Land constructs facades of reality, often directly addressing the viewer using the language of television, advertising, or educational films".

http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2007/04/film-archive-screening-to-fete-works-of-land/

Research Presentation

The Practitioners

Picasso (1881-1973)

Olia Lialina (1971-)

Picasso:

• Key theorist: Clement Greenberg

• Key essay: "The Pasted-Paper Revolution" of 1958

• In his sophisticated formalist reading of the work he argued that the various elements, the lettering, the charcoal lines and the coloured papers:

"begin to change places in depth with one another, and a process is set up in which every part of the picture takes its turn at occupying every plane, whether real or imagined, in it".

 Guitar, Sheet Music,
and Wine Glass 1912
Pasted paper, gouache,
and charcoal on paper.

• Pictorial allusion gave way to what he called an optical illusion.

• This is reading the collages and purely autonomous decorative objects.

Glass and Bottle of Suze 1912
Pasted paper, gouache,
and charcoal on paper.

• The collage is a still life

• But what does type represent?

• Patricia Leighton (art historian) suggests that there is a relationship between the two pieces of newsprint in this collage

• The collage represents a café- in which ‘we’ are drinking Suze

• The newsprint cut up and arranged, may represent conversation or thoughts regarding the Balkan War

• Collage: a modern idea of a painting of the absolute now

Baudillaire: Modernism/the modern describes what is new in one’s own culture and implied an obligation to be of one’s own time.

"You read handbills, catalogues, posters that shout out loud: Here’s this morning’s poetry, and for prose you’ve got the newspapers… Lettering on billboards and walls, Doorplates and posters squawk like parrots” – Apollinaire, Zone  1912

Violin  1912
Pasted paper and charcoal on
paper

Other readings are possible: Rosalind Krauss (art historian and critic)

• Type can represent light reflected on dust moats

• Type/newsprint can represent the broken surfaces created by stumbling, like those in paintings: Impressionism, Constable and Turner.

Olia Lialina

Key work:

My Boyfiend Came Back from the War  (1996)

The story of two lovers reunited after an unspecified military conflict

http://www.teleportacia.org/war/war.html

Fragments of disjunctive dialogue convey the profound difficulty the couple has reconnecting.

Olia Lialina was born 1971 in Moscow. Finished Moscow State University in 1993 as
a journalist and film critic. In mid 90s one of the organizers of Moscow experimental film club CINE FANTOM. Net Artist, one of net.art pioneers. Lialina writes on New Media, Digital Folklore and Vernacular Web.

Conclusions

Both artists are linked by conflict: Picasso the Balkan War and Lialina a conflict in the late 20th Century. Both works suggest multiple narratives and multiple meanings.

The Icebook at Illuminate Bath and Illuminating York

The Icebook - A Miniature Theatre Show



The Icebook is a pop-up book that comes to life in front of an audience's eyes as if by magic. It could possibly be the smallest show in the world - a 3D cinema made from sheets of paper and light. Each page unfolds an animated miniature world, telling the story of a princess who lures a boy into the forest in order to warm her heart of ice. The Icebook is an intimate and immersive experience of film, theatre, dance, mime and animation designed for an audience of 8 people lasting 20 min.
www.illuminatebath.org







Location Bath: St. James Square, Bath, BA1 2TW (map)






Date/Time:Sat 6 November, Sun 7 November and Sat 13 November. Shows every 30 min from 12:00 – 17:00






www.illuminatingyork.org.uk






Location York: Deans Park, York, North Yorkshire YO1 (map)






Date/Time:Wed 27 October – Sat 30 October. Shows every 30 min from 19:00 – 22:00


 
 
 

 
The Icebook is a production by Davy & Kristin McGuire.

Gertrude Stein and Picasso: The Autobiography of Alice B Toklas

"All of a. sudden down the street came some big cannon, the first any of us had seen painted, that is camouflaged. Pablo stopped, he was spell-bound. C'est nous qui avons fait a, he said, it is we that have created that, he said. And he was right, he had" (Stein 1962, 84-85).

Visual Cultures 1

A classic TV series and a canonical text, John Berger’s Ways of Seeing is an excellent introduction to the complexities of visual cultural. Part one of this series draws heavily on the ideas of the German critic and philosopher Walter Benjamin (1892-1940). His essay is called ‘Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ (1936) and is available in a collection called Illuminations (and on the website below). Benjamin questioned ideas about originality and authenticity. Berger’s use of Benjamin’s arguments is not only relevant to discussions of painting, photography, animation, film and television, but other areas of mass culture: the internet, computer games, magazines, newspapers, CD-ROMs amongst other visual cultural artefacts. When transmitted the images meanings are multiplied and fragment into other meanings and often jostle for attention alongside other images and pieces of information under gaze of a mass audience. Berger encourages us to view images as a language that can be manipulated to communicate all kinds of ideas.



Before this ‘technological age’, the invention of the camera and even before the invention of the printing press by Johann Gutenberg, images adorned the walls and stained glass windows of churches, their meaning singular. This was as Berger suggests the age of pilgrimage: we went to the images; they did not yet travel to us. Information came from one source and it resided in one place at one time, the camera, digital technologies and television changed all of that.
 
Berger, John Ways of Seeing London: British Broadcasting Corporation Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972






Texts of interest and linked to Berger and his book:
 
Clark, Kenneth Civilisation: a personal view London: British Broadcasting Corporation, 1969
 
Web sources:

John Berger Homepage: http://www.johnberger.org/

Daniel Chandler Semiotics for Beginners, Denotation, Connotation and Myth
www.aber.ac.uk/media/documents/54b/sem06.html


The Marxist Internet Archive: Benjamin, Walter The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, 1936 www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ge/benjamin.htm