experimental artists cinema & theory and works by cathy fitzgerald. Thesis working title – 'The ecocidal eye: beyond the anthropocentric gaze to a relational gaze in cinema'
Posts from the other artists experimental films Category
‘I make work that is multi-dimensional. Having come from a background in documentary photography, it is important to me to draw attention to socio-economic and political issues. While at the same time exploring more metaphysical concepts… I make my work aesthetically pleasing, rich in detail and large in scale in the hopes that the viewer can reflect on the ideas and issues that are prevalent in the work, whilst also getting a better sense of their own position in the world.’ – David Thomas Smith, Dublin based photographer
I found David’s work yesterday, a pity, as I wish I’d seen it before I’d written my recent article on ‘the Anthropocene: 10 000 years of ecocide. His photographic works in his Anthropocene series, each made up of thousands of images, show much more detailed perspectives and offer a more unsettling reflection on the state of the earth, compared to the ‘Welcome to the Anthropocene’ video that I reviewed in my article. His works do this as they cleverly engage one on many different levels. The intricate patterns and colours in the photographs are aesthetically arresting in their own right, yet a tension exists in the works as one is presented with the enormous scale of our own species activities: Humanity’s effects on the biosphere, in the Age of the Anthropocene, are here confirmed as inconceivably sublime. (more…)
The diary form of film-making by its master and leading experimental filmer and expermental film advocate… Walden is Mekas’ conversation with a city (New York) and friends. It’s nice to see that Jonas’ celebratory and generous work now has spread to the new world of internet diary making too – see Jonas vlogging at http://jonasmekasfilms.com/diary/ It probably not surprising but I particularly like his deceptively simple and moving poem from Words Apart: II In the Woodshere
‘Poet and hero of the American counter-culture, Jonas Mekas, born in Lithuania in 1922, invented the diary form of film-making. Walden, his first completed diary film, an epic portrait of the New York avant-garde art scene of the 60s, is also a groundbreaking work of personal cinema.
“Since 1950 I have been keeping a film diary. I have been walking around with my Bolex and reacting to the immediate reality: situations, friends, New York, seasons of the year. On some days I shoot ten frames, on others ten seconds, still on others ten minutes. Or I shoot nothing…. Walden contains material from the years 1964-1968 strung together in chronological order.”
Jonas Mekas
“Jonas Mekas’s films celebrate life. They rise up against the world’s overwhelming commercialism, attempting instead to revive the pleasures of friendship, a first snowfall or the return of Spring. Mekas’s genius stems from his generously including the viewer in his vision of the world, allowing us to (re)discover, in a simple image, the incredible force and necessity of poetry.”
‘So what exactly is this “nature” that’s so lovely and such a respite if it’s filled with death and dismemberment? And what changes when we try to learn about it instead of just treating it as a pretty backdrop to our daily work and worries?’
Su Frederich, experimental filmmaker
USA / 2004 / 21 min / Colour / Video.
click image to play 3 min. clip
While one film critic, Jill Godmilow, has described the above film as “…delightful and sobering…a quasi-scientific, relaxed proof of the intense power of narrative, ” experimental film critic Scott MacDonald argues that The Head of a Pin can
‘serve as a metaphor for the gap that has formed between the humanities and the sciences… ‘ both of which only partially and imperfectly reveal the worlds we create and the earth on which we depend (MacDonald, 2009)
More recent research on the Personal Camera: subjective cinema and the essay film is to be found in Univ. College Cork film lecturer, Laura Rascaroli’s, 2009 book.
The essay, diary format has been a convention in experimental cinema over many decades offering immediacy and intense personal perspectives. Audience empathy towards a personal narration structures and forms is often compelling.
The Russian filmmaker Sokurov’s Spiritual Voices – the War Diaries’ 1995 offers personal narration over quiet and silent war landscapes and young soldiers; his observations of memories of being a soldier, classical music, readings of seemingly unrelated texts whose relationship to the theme gradually evolves, for e.g Mozart’s letter on the grief felt on his mothers death echoes the grief of war, are woven together to create a rich personal vehicle of aesthetic experience that reflects on universal and profound realities of war, grief and the innocence that it collides with.
‘The film develops as the author’s diary, where unbiased narration is dissolved in the lyrical intonation. You watch the real persons in the particular circumstances on the screen. They are Russian frontier–guards on the Tadjik–Afghani border. But it is also a piece of art, where aesthetic laws give the theme and arrange the facts taken from life’. Alexandra Tuchinskaya
Rascaroli’s book is an ‘exploration of an elusive but increasingly compelling field: essayistic cinema. The essay film, together with its cognate forms – the diary, the travelogue, the notebook and the self-protrait – is cinema in the first person’
+ high-res version
