From now through April, the Oberhausen International Short Film Festival will present "Film Studies in Motion", a Web Series curated by Volker Pantenburg and Kevin B. Lee. This series, available on the festival's website and Facebook page, presents weekly selections of analytical video essays on the web, in preparation for Pantenberg and Lee's presentation "Whatever happened to Bildungsauftrag? – Teaching cinema on TV and the Web", scheduled for April 28 at the festival.
Week Four: Precursors: TV, Cinema, Contemporary Art
There is a a tradition of “Videographic Film Studies” that existed before the Internet. Some TV channels, like the West-German WDR, but also TV programmers in other countries, initiated an impressive variety of programmes on cinema that combined thorough analytical observations with an inventiveness of visual forms and techniques. Found footage has also been used in experimental cinema and contemporary art. Most examples of this audiovisual legacy remain either overlooked or invisible as they are stacked away in archives or private catalogues. For this reason, this episode mostly gathers fragments and snippets instead of entire essays.
A major figure in the genre of essay film and video, Harun Farocki combines a precise formalist analysis of images with exhaustive research into the history behind those images. Farocki does not merely use archival images to tell stories of modern society, but shows how images convey unexpected stories and meanings, often unintentionally by their creators. In this clip from Workers Leaving the Factory, he uses the first film ever shown on screen to launch into a visual exploration of how factories have been depicted throughout the 20th century, and what those images say about our relationship to industrial labor.
VIDEO ESSAY: The #1 Textbook on Film, Now with Video
Walk into just about any introductory film studies class in the United States and you are bound to find students holding a copy of David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson's Film Art: An Introduction as part of the syllabus. Since it first came out in 1979, the film has been an essential film studies resource, as well as an innovative one: it was the first intro level film textbook to use actual frames from movies rather than publicity stills in order to give an accurate illustration of film technique on screen. For the new tenth edition, Bordwell and Thompson have taken the book into the new dimension of online video.
Through a partnership with the Criterion Collection, Bordwell and Thompson, with the help of filmmaker Erik Gunneson, have produced an hour-long series of twenty online videos called Connect Film. The videos, meant as companions to the Film Art textbook, explore major concepts of mise-en-scene, cinematography, editing and sound, through films mostly from the Criterion Collection: Breathless, Seven Samurai, Shaun of the Dead, M. Hulot's Holiday, M and several others. They also explore concepts in computer animation through a couple of independently produced animated films, My Dog Tulip and Sita Sings the Blues. A full list of the videos can be found on Bordwell and Thompson's blog.
The complete set of videos will be released this summer along with the publication of the new edition of Film Art. They have made one video available, an analysis of eliptical editing in Agnes Varda's Vagabond, embedded at the top of this entry.
It's worth noting how they adopt a simple, modular approach to the video. It opens with a brief synopsis of the story illustrated with still images instead of moving film footage. As a video essayist who generally prefers to use moving rather than still images, I was struck by this decision to go the opposite direction. It's notable how the montage of still images moves briskly alongside Thompson's narration, with specific images accompanying the points being made in her voiceover. To do this with moving footage would have required more length and spacing out of the narration, in order to let the moments play out.
But this introduction is really intended to set up the central section in which eliptical editing is featured and analyzed in a sequence lasting a little over two minutes. It's worth noting how the sequence is left intact without editing, commentary or annotation, a contrast to most online video essays I've seen. The commentary on the sequence is saved for the final third of the video, where Thompson's commentary is again accompanied by still images, this time from the sequence. Here it's particularly interesting that stills are used in place of footage as Thompson describes actions rather than having the footage illustrate them. This approach benefits Thompson's analysis as some of her obsrevations are underscored by the expressive qualities of a freeze frame: the quality of Mona's smile while in the tent, the "No Tresspassing" sign, the friendly expression of the supposedly vicious dog. This approach also seems carried over from Bordwell and Thompson's extensive use of still images in textbooks; in this sense, longstanding techniques are made anew in the video medium.
To see how differently one can approach the format, watch the video essays I produced with Thompson on La Roue and Varietyback in 2009 as part of my Shooting Down Pictures project. In these videos her voiceover runs through footage of the films. In those instances the technique I used, which one could term "interwoven", "immersive" or "invasive" (depending on how positive or negative a connotation you want to append to it). could be more justified as the commentary is directed more towards the film in general rather than focusing on a specific sequence. The approach used in the Vagabond video has an admirable cleanness and precision that preserves the audiovisual integrity of the scene and also establishes an observational distance between the narrator and the work.
The exciting subtext that lies beneath the analysis above, and beneath the very fact that two leading film scholars have produced a formidable body of video work, is that the line dividing filmmaking and film analysis is collapsed and the areas of theory and practice are integrated as never before. This perspective, that film students and enthusiasts are filmmakers and vice versa, is espoused in vivid terms by Bordwell and Thompson themselves, in the first chapter of the new edition of Film Art, as quoted from their blog:
Films are designed to create experiences for viewers. To gain an understanding of film as an art, we should ask why a film is designed the way it is. When a scene frightens or excites us, when an ending makes us laugh or cry, we can ask how the filmmakers have achieved those effects.
It helps to imagine that we’re filmmakers too. Throughout this book, we’ll be asking you to put yourself in the filmmaker’s shoes. This shouldn’t be a great stretch. You’ve taken still photos with a camera or a mobile phone. Very likely you’ve made some videos, perhaps just to record a moment in your life—a party, a wedding, your cat creeping into a paper bag. And central to filmmaking is the act of choice. You may not have realized it at the moment, but every time you framed a shot, shifted your position, told people not to blink, or tried to keep up with a dog chasing a Frisbee, you were making choices.
If you take the next step and make a more ambitious, more controlled film, you’re doing the same thing. You might compile clips into a YouTube video, or document your friend’s musical performance. Again, at every stage you make design decisions, based on how you think this image or that sound will affect your viewers’ experience. What if you start your music video with a black screen that gradually brightens as the music fades in? That will have a different effect than starting it with a sudden cut to a bright screen and a blast of music.
At each instant, the filmmaker can’t avoid making creative decisions about how viewers will respond. Every moviemaker is also a movie viewer, and the choices are considered from the standpoint of the end user. Filmmakers constantly ask themselves: If I do this, as opposed to that, how will viewers react?
These are words well keeping in mind for all the video essayists, film scholars and movie fans out there.
In addition to the videos I made with Kristin Thompson, you can also watch a video essay I produced based on David Bordwell's review of Oxhide II.
Kevin B. Lee is Editor in Chief of IndieWire’s PressPlay Video Blog and contributor to Roger Ebert.com. Follow him on Twitter.
VIDEO – Motion Studies #15 & #16: The Art of Cinema on French TV (Godard on Kubrick; Costa on Straub/Huillet)
From now through April, the Oberhausen International Short Film Festival will present "Film Studies in Motion", a Web Series curated by Volker Pantenburg and Kevin B. Lee. This series, available on the festival's website and Facebook page, presents weekly selections of analytical video essays on the web, in preparation for Pantenberg and Lee's presentation "Whatever happened to Bildungsauftrag? – Teaching cinema on TV and the Web", scheduled for April 28 at the festival.
Week Four: Precursors: TV, Cinema, Contemporary Art
There is a a tradition of “Videographic Film Studies” that existed before the Internet. Some TV channels, like the West-German WDR, but also TV programmers in other countries, initiated an impressive variety of programmes on cinema that combined thorough analytical observations with an inventiveness of visual forms and techniques. Found footage has also been used in experimental cinema and contemporary art. Most examples of this audiovisual legacy remain either overlooked or invisible as they are stacked away in archives or private catalogues. For this reason, this episode mostly gathers fragments and snippets instead of entire essays.
Today's selections:
Cinéma Cinémas (1982-1991, Antenne 2) Anne Andreu, Michel Boujut, Claude Ventura
Cinéma Cinémas" was conceived by Michel Boujut, Anne Andreu and Claude Ventura. It was produced and broadcast by French TV channel "Antenne 2" from 1982 to 1991. Each episode consisted of several pieces, partly interviews with Hollywood-Stars, partly contributions from filmmakers ("Letter from a filmmaker"), partly cinephile observations on directors or individual films.
In this episode produced in 1987, Jean-Luc Godard compares the use of slow motion in Stanley Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket with that of another film about Vietnam, 79 Springtimes of Ho Chi Minh by Santiago Alvarez. A translation of Godard's comparison can be found below (translated by André Dias, originally on Kino Slang)
Godard: «There it is! This is the slow motion we find in Peckinpah, if you will… It addresses the crowd of spectators only by exploiting something that it lacks. It seems like what Welles talked about: a gimmick, a trick, a gadget. Something that's now usual in all these American directors, even in Kubrick, who disappoints me because he has more talent than them. And this is just Peckinpah, if you will… with the exploitation of Vietnam. To his film I wouldn't go because I wouldn't see the Vietnamese, or God knows in which form. They were there. You just needed to go there… He doesn't see them. Something's missing. Kubrick's film misses what America also missed.
They keep showing… In war films about Germany, there's not one big Hollywood actor that hasn't, sooner or later, played a German general. Here no one has played a [Vietnamese] general, cause they didn't know how to do it. That's their shame. To cover up this shame with a slow motion, whatever talent one has, it doesn't work…
Let see the Alvarez slow motion. We see a crowd that cries. And we see each one cry without privilege, despite being privileged. The spectator can make his choice. This is what never occurred… Here is a war movie made by a Cuban. It's sufficient to see this to, when we show Kubrick's images see that they do not hold…
To say good or bad things… I, (…), it wouldn’t come to my mind to make war; I've deserted in two countries. But it's necessary to watch. We see something in which we believe and there he [Kubrick] doesn't believe in films anymore. He forces himself to believe. And at a certain point it doesn't stand. There's a minimum of honesty… We see that the other [Alvarez’s], which is made of documentary, is so worked by a stylised fiction like this, that it gives back something. And there [Kubrick's] lacks the documentary approach.»
Cinéma, de notre temps (1964-1972, ORTF; 1989-present, la 7 / arte) André S. Labarthe, Janine Bazin
"Some of the most successful and fruitful ongoing enterprises related to film history have been either ignored or taken for granted (which sometimes amounts to the same thing) due to their omnipresence… The series of 80-odd French television documentaries about filmmakers produced by Janine Bazin (the widow of André Bazin) and André S. Labarthe, initially called Cinéastes de notre temps when it was produced by the ORTF between 1964 and 1972, and revived as Cinéma, de notre temps when it was produced by Arte between 1990 and 2003, the year that Janine Bazin died, and then taken up again by Cinécinéma in 2006. Some of the more interesting of the earlier documentaries were remarkable in the various ways that they stylistically imitated their subjects, as in the programs on Cassavetes, Samuel Fuller, and Josef von Sternberg. One specialty item was an eight-part conversation between Fritz Lang and Jean-Luc Godard (The Dinosaur and the Baby, 1967). Many important figures worked on these shows, including Noël Burch and Jean Eustache (mainly as editors, although Burch also codirected a few programs), Jean-André Fieschi (mainly on Italian filmmakers), Jean-Louis Comolli and Jean Douchet (on diverse topics), Alexandre Astruc (on F.W. Murnau), Jacques Baratier (on René Clair), Jacques Rivette (a three-part series about Jean Renoir), Claire Denis (a two-part program about Rivette, with Serge Daney as interviewer), Jacques Rozier (on Jean Vigo), Eric Rohmer (on Carl Dreyer), Olivier Assayas (on Hou Hsiao-hsien), Rafi Pitts (on Abel Ferrara), Chris Marker (on Andrei Tarkovsky), and Pedro Costa (on Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet)—to provide a less than exhaustive list."
"This is a film about film, of course, but it understands film as a conversation—about searching, about understanding—as an opportunity for philosophy, we might say—and how all these elements build a working picture of marriage, too."
– Ryland Walker Knight on Cinéma, de notre temps: Where Does Your Hidden Smile Lie? (Pedro Costa, 2001) – embedded above
VIDEO: Stillness in Motion – The Films of Lech Majewski
Lech Majewski’s acclaimed 2011 film The Mill and the Cross transcends artistic categorization, a work of 21st-century digital cinema that resurrects a 16th-century painting, Pieter Bruegel’s masterpiece The Way to Calvary. Re-staging the painting with its cast of hundreds while blending actual landscape footage with hand-painted recreations of Bruegel’s canvas, the film is an unprecedented blend of cinema, painting, theater, and scholarship. As film scholar Kristin Thompson remarked upon seeing the film, “What makes The Mill and the Cross so exciting is that it achieves that rarest of things, making us feel that we are seeing something very worthwhile that has never been done before.”
Yet those familiar with Majewski’s filmography may notice in The Mill and the Cross certain motifs and methods from his past works. This video essay makes a side-by-side comparison of The Mill and the Cross and Majewski’s 1998 film, The Roe’s Room, which happens to be his first film shot on high-definition digital video, and is also available on Fandor. Adapted from a stage opera written and produced by the multi-talented Majewski, The Roe’s Room also features a very painterly sensibility with its precise compositions and delicate visual textures all set in cinematic motion.
From now through April, the Oberhausen International Short Film Festival will present "Film Studies in Motion", a Web Series curated by Volker Pantenburg and Kevin B. Lee. This series, available on the festival's website and Facebook page, presents weekly selections of analytical video essays on the web, in preparation for Pantenberg and Lee's presentation "Whatever happened to Bildungsauftrag? – Teaching cinema on TV and the Web", scheduled for April 28 at the festival.
Week Four: Precursors: TV, Cinema, Contemporary Art
There is a a tradition of “Videographic Film Studies” that existed before the Internet. Some TV channels, like the West-German WDR, but also TV programmers in other countries, initiated an impressive variety of programmes on cinema that combined thorough analytical observations with an inventiveness of visual forms and techniques. Found footage has also been used in experimental cinema and contemporary art. Most examples of this audiovisual legacy remain either overlooked or invisible as they are stacked away in archives or private catalogues. For this reason, this episode mostly gathers fragments and snippets instead of entire essays.
Today's selection:
Screening Room (1972-1981)
Robert Gardner
Even in a world with hundreds of cable TV channels on the air, today it's virtually impossible to conceive of a commercial TV program dedicated to discussing experimental filmmaking in depth. But there was a time when such a program existed; in fact it lasted for a decade and left an indelible legacy to appreciating the art of cinema.
Screening Room was a 1970s Boston television series that invited independent filmmakers to show and discuss their work on a commercial (ABC-TV) affiliate station. This unique program, developed and hosted by filmmaker Robert Gardner, dealt even-handedly with animation, documentary, and experimental film, welcoming such artists as Jean Rouch, Jonas Mekas, Stan Brakhage, Hollis Frampton, Yvonne Rainer, and Michael Snow. Frequently, famous literary guests such as Octavio Paz, Stanley Cavell and Rudolph Arnheim appeared as well. The filmmakers presented on the show are now considered the most influential contributors to their respective genres and the footage is invaluable for students, scholars and lovers of film. The series is now available on DVD through Studio7Arts.
Motion Studies #13: The Endless Night: A Valentine to Film Noir
From now through April, the Oberhausen International Short Film Festival will present "Film Studies in Motion", a Web Series curated by Volker Pantenburg and Kevin B. Lee. This series, available on the festival's website and Facebook page, presents weekly selections of analytical video essays on the web, in preparation for Pantenberg and Lee's presentation "Whatever happened to Bildungsauftrag? – Teaching cinema on TV and the Web", scheduled for April 28 at the festival.
Week Three: Remixes: Parody, Supercut and Mashup
Appropriating and recombining existing footage has been a prime strategy of art and analysis for a long time. With the immense circulation of movies on the web and the accessibility of editing software, this method is no longer restricted to experimental cinema or contemporary art, but has become part of a wider remix culture. This episode gathers recent examples from a wide range of practices. Some of them are driven by critical intentions, some by sheer enthusiasm for iconography and rhythm.
Today's selection:
The Endless Night: A Valentine to Film Noir
Serena Bramble (2009)
A video love letter that distills film noir movies into their atmospheric essence.
VIDEO ESSAY: MONEYBALL and Ways of Seeing, Presented by The Seventh Art
EDITOR'S NOTE: Press Play is proud to co-present a new series of video essays produced by The Seventh Art, an independently produced video magazine on cinema. Our initial co-presentation is a lengthy critical video essay on Moneyball, coinciding with the opening week of Major League Baseball. The video is written and edited by Christopher Heron, and narrated by John Boylan. It originally appeared in Issue Two of The Seventh Art published last month.
This excerpt from the video's narration summarizes its main thesis:
"It’s tempting to think of the film as potentially operating in the same way as the tenets of player valuation championed by this new perspective on reading baseball – that it, too, champions looking at things differently. I believe the formal level of the film does gesture towards this and there is one unmistakable moment that illustrates how the film pushes the baseball film in a new direction through the film’s form and story. However… the film misses in its summary of the new philosophy and this misunderstanding of the importance of logic results in moments where the film is operating in a way antithetical to the subject matter. The result is a transitory film, which at once makes interesting strides in how it differentiates itself formally and narratively from the traditional baseball film, while still beholden to some of the unfortunate formal conventions associated with conveying information in an overly didactic way that includes rote documentary bells and whistles."
The Seventh Art describes its work in the online video magazine format on its website:
"The Seventh Art is an independently produced video magazine about cinema with profiles on interesting aspects of the film industry, video essays and in-depth interviews with filmmakers set in casual environments.
The magazine is based equally on the rich history of writing on cinema and French television shows about cinema, such as Cinéastes de notre temps. The video format allows us to seek ways to differentiate The Seventh Art from the former, while building on the latter through the lack of time or content limitations afforded by the internet. Conventional wisdom tells that internet users are looking for extremely short content, but we believe the value of this medium exists in the abolishment of assumptions of how users engage with content. Our sections err on the longer side because they are like a magazine, which you can pick up and put down at your leisure – never requiring that you consume all sections, or even each section in its entirety in one sitting.
With this video magazine format we strive to explore cinema in a manner that is at once accessible and in-depth as we pursue questions of film form/aesthetic that link back with the initial theorization of cinema as the seventh art – regardless of how unfortunately self-justifying this initial discourse had to be. We ask not only what is cinema, but when is cinema, where is cinema, how is cinema and why cinema, especially as media converges on new distribution models that are hopefully reflected in the cross-platform nature of our 'magazine'."
From now through April, the Oberhausen International Short Film Festival will present "Film Studies in Motion", a Web Series curated by Volker Pantenburg and Kevin B. Lee. This series, available on the festival's website and Facebook page, presents weekly selections of analytical video essays on the web, in preparation for Pantenberg and Lee's presentation "Whatever happened to Bildungsauftrag? – Teaching cinema on TV and the Web", scheduled for April 28 at the festival.
Week Three: Remixes: Parody, Supercut and Mashup
Appropriating and recombining existing footage has been a prime strategy of art and analysis for a long time. With the immense circulation of movies on the web and the accessibility of editing software, this method is no longer restricted to experimental cinema or contemporary art, but has become part of a wider remix culture. This episode gathers recent examples from a wide range of practices. Some of them are driven by critical intentions, some by sheer enthusiasm for iconography and rhythm.
Today's selection:
Everything is a Remix. Part 2: Remix Inc.
Kirby Ferguson (2011)
An exploration of the remix techniques involved in producing films.
From now through April, the Oberhausen International Short Film Festival will present "Film Studies in Motion", a Web Series curated by Volker Pantenburg and Kevin B. Lee. This series, available on the festival's website and Facebook page, presents weekly selections of analytical video essays on the web, in preparation for Pantenberg and Lee's presentation "Whatever happened to Bildungsauftrag? – Teaching cinema on TV and the Web", scheduled for April 28 at the festival.
Week Three: Remixes: Parody, Supercut and Mashup
Appropriating and recombining existing footage has been a prime strategy of art and analysis for a long time. With the immense circulation of movies on the web and the accessibility of editing software, this method is no longer restricted to experimental cinema or contemporary art, but has become part of a wider remix culture. This episode gathers recent examples from a wide range of practices. Some of them are driven by critical intentions, some by sheer enthusiasm for iconography and rhythm.
Today's selection:
Razzle Dazzle Part 6: The Takeaway
Aaron Aradillas, Steven Santos, Matt Zoller Seitz (2010)
A stunning montage that tunnels through the media distortion field as depicted in dozens of movie and video clips.
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