Film and Video

Yesterday i began a course of lectures that will last over 8 afternoon sessions, within this we will be looking at a wide range of video from film to digital and looking at what makes a video "art."


In the first session we looked at "Abstract and Found Cinema."
Starting with Melies.

These early video's (the above one being from 1938) were some of the first to feature special effects as Méliès discovered the ability to super-impose, reverse the film etc...

 

The above video "Le voyage dans la lune" by Méliès demonstrates the level of vision that he had as a film maker so early in the history of this new art form. To make a film of such grand scale with such limited equipment is incredibly impressive and the fact that the film is still very watchable today is further evidence of Méliès skill.

From Méliès we jump to Johan Grimonprez and his film "Dial H.I.S.T.O.R.Y" Winner of the Documenter award in 1997 this is amongst the most interesting films i have ever seen, the film is an amazing and intense selection of clips around the subject of Hijacking and terrorism and documents the rise of the terrorists status in modern culture. The video is juxtaposed with jaunty music which adds to the feel of menace of the film and clips from Guy Debord's essay "La Societe du spetacle" and Don de Lilo's novel "Mao II".



From that we moved onto the work of Stan Brakhage, Brakhage is seen

as one of the key figures in the world of experimental film making

and produced a large body of work over his life time with his influence

spreading into all areas of film.

 

His work is almost always viewed without sound, the sound of the projector playing the film being all the accompaniment the film needs. Interestingly, one of the aspects that Brakhage features in his films is making the audience aware that they are watching a film rather than trying to immerse the viewer in the film and make them forget they are watching a video, you can see a clear example of this in "Mothlight" 1963 (above).

The final film maker we watched was Austrian artist Martin Arnold who takes films/ T.V programs and re-edits them in order to reveal hidden sub-plots and meanings, he does this by slowing down, repeating and adjusting the footage as you can see in this short clip from "Alone. Life wastes Andy Hardy"