Experimental filmmaker Carolee Schneeman will be giving the fifth annual Experimental Film Lecture, jointly presented by the departments of Cinema Studies and Undergraduate Film & Television, two departments that coordinate much less that you would expect.
The 5th Annual Experimental Lecture
Presented by the Departments of Cinema Studies and Undergraduate Film & Television
Carolee Schneemann is a visual artist and moving image maker known for her discourses on the body, sexuality and gender. She has been a leader and provocateur in the American avant-garde community since the mid 1960s when she created her groundbreaking performance Meat Joy. From Interior Scroll to Plumb Line to Mortal Coil to Vespers Pool, Schneemann’s work pushes form and consciousness like no other artist working today. Ever since Fuses (1965), her landmark exploration of the female body, Schneemann has pushed visual perception in radical directions that awe, disturb and mystify audiences.
In her Experimental Lecture, Schneemann travels backwards and forwards in time. Beginning with obsessive childhood drawings of a staircase, she will analyze recurring formal properties in her film, sculpture and installation work. The mysteries of a notched stick, paper folds, indentations, the slice of line in space are followed as unexpected structural motives, up to and including her recent photographic grids and objects.
This fall, I am teaching Experimental Film at Pratt Institute. It’s one of my favorite classes because many of the films we screened in class were life-changing for me. Last year, when I taught the class, I relied mostly on DVDs to screen the films. To me, that seemed remarkable because a decade ago, many of the filmmakers of the American avant-garde refused to transfer their films to DVD, preferring to rent and sell 16mm prints. However, by the early 2010s, the situation had changed and many of them had embraced the format for reaching a wider audience, although many remain steadfastly opposed to releasing their films on video… so they end up as poor quality transfers on YouTube instead.
The New York film world is going crazy for the John Waters retrospective at the Film Society of Lincoln Center, which starts today and continues into the following weekend. Although I was a rabid fan of Waters’s earliest work and loved screening VHS copies of his films to confused and disgusted friends in college, I don’t consider his work experimental, per se, though it certainly had many anti-commercial tendencies and influenced scores of filmmakers.
In a recent interview with Gothamist’s Rebecca Fishbein, John Waters discusses showing some of his earliest work at the retrospective, including a 16mm print of Mondo Trasho (1969):
I’m going to show one of my very last prints of Mondo Trasho. They might burn up in the projector, but that would be okay because even if they ever even come out again, they’ll never be made on 16mm prints. That’s a thing of the past.
What struck me is his characterization of 16mm as a “thing of the past.” I understand his point: it’s very difficult to find facilities that process 16mm film anymore and the film stock itself is just as scarce. However, many of my students in the experimental film class complained that we watched too many videos of these films and that we should screen actual films in a film class. Last night, I screened a DVD copy of Entr’acte (1924). It was horrible. One of the students jumped into action, verified that Pratt owned a 16mm copy, and we screened that. It was a much better experience.
However, it’s sad to think of 16mm as a dying form. It’s true that we can still screen it in a university course, but it’s also true that we can still study Latin in college, too.
In 1966, Gregory Markopoulos filmed portraits of notable figures in the New York art world, including painters, poets, critics, filmmakers, and choreographers. Markopoulos populated his Galaxie with a remarkable constellation of personalities, ranging from those in his immediate circle of filmmakers (Jonas Mekas, Storm de Hirsch, the Kuchar Brothers) to luminaries from other art forms (Jasper Johns, W.H. Auden, Allen Ginsberg). Each is shot with a single roll of 16mm film and, though edited entirely in-camera in the moment of filming, comprises many layers of dense superimpositions that build a complex portrait of the sitter. The subjects were invited to pose in their home or studio, together with personal objects of their choice: Parker Tyler is a seen with a drawing by Tchelitchew, Susan Sontag with photographs of Garbo and Dietrich, Shirley Clarke and Maurice Sendak both with children’s toys, Gregory Battcock with a Christmas card and zebra rug. The film is silent except for the sound of a ritual bell, its number of rings increasing incrementally until 30 chimes accompany the final portrait.
As I don’t have a class on Tuesday evenings, I certainly plan on attending.
Details
September 16, 2014
7:30 PM
155 Freeman Street, Brooklyn
7.00
I wonder if this statement was influenced by the seminal French New Wave film, Á bout de souffle, which translates to “out of breath” or Breathless. ↩
For years, Jonathan Sterne has maintained a collection of links on academia and professionalization, simply titled Academe. He recently updated the links, including some new material on how to deal with campus rape culture, a challenging but relevant theme.
While publishing a collection of links might seem antiquated, I would prefer that this information remain on the web. As a webpage, it is more permanent than a stream of shared links from a Twitter or Facebook account, where immediacy and ephemerality prevail. A valuable reference such as this one should always be available. I also like that it embodies an enduring aspect of the World Wide Web: to openly share information.
Thank you for sharing, Professor Sterne.
Update: And it looks like another scholar, Jie Qin, has similarly been collecting links for those looking for research and teaching jobs in Communication and Media Studies.
Lest I be accused promoting only men filmmakers at the expense of women, allow me to inform you that Millennium Film Workshop will be screening a collection of films by Tessa Hughes-Freeland, a filmmaker closely associated with the Cinema of Transgression.
The Cinema of Transgression was a 1980s film movement that documented the underground arts and culture scenes of New York City. The movement disavowed the production style and principles of the commercial cinema. Some of the films are not for the faint of heart.
The following Hughes-Freeland films are scheduled to screen:
Baby Doll, 1982, 3 mins
Hippie Home Movie, 2013 , 2 mins
Joker, 1983, 5 mins
Kind, 2013, 1 min
Rat Trap, 1986, 12 mins
Gift, 2010, 6 mins
Playboy Voodoo, 19991, 12 mins
Western Tests, 2011, 2 mins
Nymphomania, 1994, 9 mins
Instinct: Bitches Side, 2007, 13 mins
Of these, I’ve only seen Baby Doll and that was at least a decade ago. You can watch it as a low-quality video on YouTube, but it’s NSFW. However, as the video is about the working girls of the long-gone Baby Doll lounge in Tribeca, I guess it really depends on what you do for work, right?
Having vacated their old theater on East 4th Street in Manhattan, Millennium Film Workshop now holds their screenings in Bushwick, at the Brooklyn Fireproof, at 119 Ingraham Street.
However, if you live in a major metropolitan area, you can watch the games the old fashioned way, over the air using an antenna.
ABC aired today’s Belgium–Argentina game, over the air, and in New York, I found the game on channel 7.1. Today’s late game, between Netherlands and Costa Rica, was on ESPN only so I had to find it on Univision’s broadcast channel. In New York, I had remembered that the channel was on 41 in the old analog days. I expected to find the digital channel on 41.1, but that’s not what you get in New York City. The Wikipedia article on WXTV had some information about the digital channel, but I had to get creative and search the proverbial dial. I found there were two feeds, one in 480-line SD and one in 1080-line HD.
Signal
Channel
Standard Definition, 480 lines
68.2
High Definition, 1080 lines
40.1
As I’ve said before, we cord cutters need to stick together.
Since I stopped paying for a multichannel television subscription, it’s been really hard to follow sports. This month, I’ve really noticed the absence of professional, spectator sports because it looks like this could be the greatest sports month ever.
Usually, October is every American sports fan’s favorite month. NHL hockey is just getting started. The NBA is about to start in a matter of weeks, and there are preseason games to watch. The NFL and college football seasons are each in their second month and are just getting interesting. And, my personal favorite, baseball is in full-blown postseason mode.
But this month, there’s even more sports to watch. Last week, a ton of people watched a horse finish fourth. The Stanley Cup Finals finished hours ago with a Los Angeles team defeating a New York team for the NHL title. The NBA Finals feature two of the winningest teams of the last decade, the Heat and the Spurs. Tennis fans have not one, but two, two, two grand-slam tournaments to watch: the French Open and Wimbledon. Baseball is winding down its first half, setting up the races that will remain with us throughout the summer. And if that wasn’t enough, then there’s the FIFA Men’s World Cup!
Best of all, with all these great sports to follow, none of them are college or NFL football games. This really is the greatest sports month!
Members of the editorial board of Prometheus: Critical Studies in Innovation have threatened to resign over the decision of the publisher, Taylor and Francis, to first, delay the publication of an article that criticizes the economics of academic publishing, and then redact a significant part of it when it was eventually published months later.
The last time I was in College Park, Maryland was in 2006 to visit the National Archives. While the National Archives is housed in a Greek Revival building in Washington, D.C., easily accessible from the Archives–Navy Memorial–Penn Quarter Metro station, most of the archive’s materials are housed off-site in College Park.
While in College Park, you can also visit the Broadcast Archives at the University of Maryland. The archive consists of two collections: a collection devoted to public broadcasting and the Library of American Broadcasting. This archive was featured in a recent video on the Washington Post website, where Post reporter John Kelly donates some television-related memorabilia.
Most of the artifacts in the video, such as the Partridge Family and the Starsky and Hutch board games should be familiar to most contemporary pop-culture fans, but you might not recognize Swayze. At first, I didn’t recognize it either, but, as I suspected, Swayze was named for John Cameron Swayze. Between 1949 and 1956, Swayze hosted the Camel News Caravan, which was also called the Plymouth News Caravan after 1955, when the automaker and cigarette maker began co-sponsoring the program on alternating days.
Swayze was a news trivia game made by Milton Bradley, produced around 1954. Apparently, you can find a copy for sale on Ebay, the Internet’s largest unofficial archive of ephemeral culture.
Further to yesterday’s post about Nick Zedd, where I called Zedd a “Cinema of Transgression icon,” it reminded me of one of my favorite strategies for playing trivia games, such as bar trivia or even Trivial Pursuit. Whenever you’re presented with a question about a very specific and obscure topic, try to select the most obvious answer.
For example:
Which “Yippie” was expelled as a sophomore from Classical High School in Worcester, Massachusetts after questioning the existence of God?
This question, in the course of the game, seems like a brain buster. But once you realize that the question isn’t about who got expelled from school and that it’s simply asking you to name a Yippie, you’re set. The most obvious answer is Abbie Hoffman, as he is the most famous Yippie and probably the only one you’ll ever need to know as part of your trivia experience.
Similarly, I was once in asked, “How many sexual mates do swans have in their lifetime?” I answered one because it was the smallest number. It turned out that I was right. Swans mate for life.
I mention these tips because, should anyone ever ask you the name of a “Cinema of Transgression” filmmaker, you can safely ignore any part of the question that follows “Cinema of Transgression” and confidently answer, “Nick Zedd!”
Unless it’s Beth B. Then forget everything I just told you.
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