viernes, 18 de noviembre de 2011
jueves, 29 de julio de 2010
The Dissolving effect
The real life events are closer to me. That’s why this documentary effect is not accidental – it is achieved by combining a number of interconnected technical and dramatic methods. By the way, I am trying to avoid the word “narrative” – I think it has become outdated in relation to cinema. This term is not a genre and not a category – it’s from an area of philosophical categories. I do prefer to juxtapose the narrative and documentary cinema. You were quite correct in noting the dissolving effect. This is what the concept consists of: the relativity of the divide between life and its artistic comprehension.
Sharunas Bartas in conversation with Xenia Drugoveyko
Sharunas Bartas in conversation with Xenia Drugoveyko
Agreement with reality
Something I've noticed from making picture to picture is I have increasingly more confidence with what reality can give me and how I can come in agreement with this reality to create my discourse.
Jose Luis Guerin speaking about Los motivos de Berta.
Jose Luis Guerin speaking about Los motivos de Berta.
martes, 6 de abril de 2010
James Benning interview by Scott Mcdonald
Well, there are many different ways to enter one of my films. Certainly the formal and aesthetic level is the most apparent, and perhaps the most immediately challenging. From the very beginning I tried to define a new film language, a new way of giving information (or telling a story). When I first showed 11 x 14, I lost half my audience because they didn't know how to watch the film, but it always pleased me when people would tell me they'd almost left but instead had stayed with the film and felt that the experience had taught them to look differently, to pay more attention and become more proactive as viewers, to look around the frame for small details and not wait for the film to come to them.
I have a very simple definition of an artist: The artist is someone who pays attention and reports back. A good artist pays close attention and knows how to report back. I teach a course called "Looking and Listening." The class and I practice paying attention Noun 1. paying attention - paying particular notice (as to children or helpless people); "his attentiveness to her wishes"; "he spends without heed to the consequences"
attentiveness, heed, regard . I take them to many different places, often for a full day, and we look and listen. Sometimes we go to an oil field in the Central Valley, or to a mountaintop moun·tain·top
n.
The summit of a mountain. to watch the sky brighten as the sun begins to rise, or to a homeless neighborhood in downtown Los Angeles Downtown Los Angeles is the central business district of Los Angeles, California, located close to the geographic center of the metropolitan area. The sprawling, multi-centered megacity is such that its downtown core is often considered just another district like Hollywood or , or to the port at Long Beach. We gradually learn that our looking and listening are coded by our own prejudices, that we interpret what we see through our own particular experiences, and we learn that we need to confront our prejudices and learn to see and hear more clearly. And to learn more about what we do see.
Yes, I do think people want to know more about things after they learn how to really hear and see. Yes, I do hope they will go on to interrogate not only what I show in my films but what they see and hear in their everyday lives. Paying attention can lead to many things. Perhaps even to a better government.
Testing your patience: Scott MacDonald talks with James Benning
I have a very simple definition of an artist: The artist is someone who pays attention and reports back. A good artist pays close attention and knows how to report back. I teach a course called "Looking and Listening." The class and I practice paying attention Noun 1. paying attention - paying particular notice (as to children or helpless people); "his attentiveness to her wishes"; "he spends without heed to the consequences"
attentiveness, heed, regard . I take them to many different places, often for a full day, and we look and listen. Sometimes we go to an oil field in the Central Valley, or to a mountaintop moun·tain·top
n.
The summit of a mountain. to watch the sky brighten as the sun begins to rise, or to a homeless neighborhood in downtown Los Angeles Downtown Los Angeles is the central business district of Los Angeles, California, located close to the geographic center of the metropolitan area. The sprawling, multi-centered megacity is such that its downtown core is often considered just another district like Hollywood or , or to the port at Long Beach. We gradually learn that our looking and listening are coded by our own prejudices, that we interpret what we see through our own particular experiences, and we learn that we need to confront our prejudices and learn to see and hear more clearly. And to learn more about what we do see.
Yes, I do think people want to know more about things after they learn how to really hear and see. Yes, I do hope they will go on to interrogate not only what I show in my films but what they see and hear in their everyday lives. Paying attention can lead to many things. Perhaps even to a better government.
Testing your patience: Scott MacDonald talks with James Benning
domingo, 10 de enero de 2010
Jaques Ranciere by T. J Demos
"[Aesthetics] is a delimitation of spaces and times, of the
visible and the invisible, or speech and noise, that simultane-
ously determines the place and the stakes of politics as a form of
experience.”The aesthetic constructs the scene of politics as
much as it defines and (de)legitimates the discourses within it"
The aesthetic constructs the scene of politics as
much as it defines and (de)legitimates the discourses within it.
And while, for Rancière, aesthetics signifies a mode of appear-
ance that extends beyond artistic practice—in terms of its “dis-
tribution of the sensible” within everyday life, regulated by
institutionalized and policed systems of power—it also defines
the force of the political within art, which is capable of propos-
ing alternatives to conventional politics from outside its system.
For Rancière, fiction (as from the Latin, fingere) means
to forge, rather than to feign, and therefore what he appropriately
calls “documentary fiction” reconfigures the real as an effect to
be produced, rather than a fact to be understood.28“Documentary
fiction,” Rancière contends, “invents new intrigues with histor-
ical documents, and thus it touches hands with the film fable
that joins and disjoins—in the relationship between story and
character, shot and sequence—the powers of the visible, of speech,
and of movement.”As a result “we cannot think of ‘documen-
tary’ film as the polar opposite of ‘fiction’ film,”
Far from being opposed to fiction, documentary is actually one mode of it,joining—both in continuity and conflict—the “real” (the indexical, contingent elements of recorded footage) and the “fabulated” (the constructed, the edited, the narrative) in cinema.
visible and the invisible, or speech and noise, that simultane-
ously determines the place and the stakes of politics as a form of
experience.”The aesthetic constructs the scene of politics as
much as it defines and (de)legitimates the discourses within it"
The aesthetic constructs the scene of politics as
much as it defines and (de)legitimates the discourses within it.
And while, for Rancière, aesthetics signifies a mode of appear-
ance that extends beyond artistic practice—in terms of its “dis-
tribution of the sensible” within everyday life, regulated by
institutionalized and policed systems of power—it also defines
the force of the political within art, which is capable of propos-
ing alternatives to conventional politics from outside its system.
For Rancière, fiction (as from the Latin, fingere) means
to forge, rather than to feign, and therefore what he appropriately
calls “documentary fiction” reconfigures the real as an effect to
be produced, rather than a fact to be understood.28“Documentary
fiction,” Rancière contends, “invents new intrigues with histor-
ical documents, and thus it touches hands with the film fable
that joins and disjoins—in the relationship between story and
character, shot and sequence—the powers of the visible, of speech,
and of movement.”As a result “we cannot think of ‘documen-
tary’ film as the polar opposite of ‘fiction’ film,”
Far from being opposed to fiction, documentary is actually one mode of it,joining—both in continuity and conflict—the “real” (the indexical, contingent elements of recorded footage) and the “fabulated” (the constructed, the edited, the narrative) in cinema.
lunes, 16 de noviembre de 2009
Barnett Newman "The Sublime is Now"
Barnett Newman
"The Sublime is Now"
European art has struggled with the Greek postulate of beauty that confusedly identified the Absolute with the absolutisms of creations, resulting in a continual "moral struggle between notions of beauty and the desire for sublimity" (17b).
Longinus was bound to his Platonic notion of beauty and value, hence he tied the feeling of exaltation to the perfect statement, that is, to objective rhetoric. Kant continues this confusion with his theory of transcendent perception, which holds the phenomenon to be more than the phenomenon. In Hegel's theory of beauty, the sublime lies at the bottom of a hierarchy of beauties set in formal relationships to reality. Although, Edmund Burke insisted on distinguishing the Absolute with the absolutism of perfect creations in a way that hints of surrealism.
This philosophical struggle manifests as well in the history of the plastic arts. So today we see Greek art's exaltation of the perfect form as an idealization of sensibility, and so also think that in the Gothic or baroque, "the sublime consists of a desire to destroy form, where form can be formless".
The struggle between beauty and the sublime reaches its climax in the Renaissance and further in the "reaction against the Renaissance that is known as modern art" (172a). Renaissance artists revived Greek ideals of beauty by casting Christ legends "in terms of absolute beauty as against the original Gothic ecstasy over the legend's evocation of the Absolute" (172a). Despite Michelangelo's efforts to attain the sublimity of pure forms and grandeur, "painting continued on its merry quest for a voluptuous art until in modern times the impressionists, disgusted with its inadequacy, began the movement to destroy the established rhetoric of beauty by the impressionist insistence on a surface of ugly strokes".
So modern art's impulse was to destroy beauty, but because it did not compensate for the loss of the Renaissance's sublime message, modern art was able only to transfer values rather than devise new ways of experiencing life. For example, the cubists, "by their dada gestures of substituting a sheet of newspaper and sandpaper for both the velvet surfaces of the Renaissance and the impressionists, made a similar transfer of values instead of creating a new vision, and succeeded only in elevating the sheet of paper" (172cd). The rhetoric of exaltation was so strong in European art that modern arts' elements of sublimity manifest "in its effort and energy to escape the pattern rather than in the realization of a new experience".
The failure of European art to achieve the sublime is due to this blind desire to exist inside the reality of sensation (the objective world, whether distorted or pure) and to build an art within a framework of pure plasticity (the Greek ideal of beauty, whether that plasticity be a romantic active surface or a classic stable one). In other words, modern art, caught without a sublime content, was incapable of creating a new sublime image and, unable to move away from the Renaissance image of figures and objects except by distortion or by denying it completely for an empty world of geometric formalisms — a pure rhetoric of abstract mathematical relationships — became enmeshed in a struggle over the nature of beauty: whether beauty was in nature or could be found without nature.
American artists deny that art is concerned with beauty. Newman asks, if we now live in a time without a mythos of the sublime and when we refuse to exalt pure relations or live in the abstract, how then can we create sublime art?
We want to hold on to the exalted and our absolute emotions, although we want to let go of the "obsolete props of an outmoded and antiquated legend" (173d). Instead, we create images with a self evident reality but without the "props and crutches" that evoke outmoded sublime and beautiful images; and, we do so without being burdened by the traditions of Western European painting.
Instead of making cathedrals out of Christ, man, or "life," we are making [them] out of ourselves, out of our own feelings. The image we produce is the self-evident one of revelation, real and concrete, that can be understood by anyone who will look at it without the nostalgic glasses of history.
From:
Newman, Barnett. Selected Writings. Ed. John P. O'Neil. Berkeley: University of California Press.
"The Sublime is Now"
European art has struggled with the Greek postulate of beauty that confusedly identified the Absolute with the absolutisms of creations, resulting in a continual "moral struggle between notions of beauty and the desire for sublimity" (17b).
Longinus was bound to his Platonic notion of beauty and value, hence he tied the feeling of exaltation to the perfect statement, that is, to objective rhetoric. Kant continues this confusion with his theory of transcendent perception, which holds the phenomenon to be more than the phenomenon. In Hegel's theory of beauty, the sublime lies at the bottom of a hierarchy of beauties set in formal relationships to reality. Although, Edmund Burke insisted on distinguishing the Absolute with the absolutism of perfect creations in a way that hints of surrealism.
This philosophical struggle manifests as well in the history of the plastic arts. So today we see Greek art's exaltation of the perfect form as an idealization of sensibility, and so also think that in the Gothic or baroque, "the sublime consists of a desire to destroy form, where form can be formless".
The struggle between beauty and the sublime reaches its climax in the Renaissance and further in the "reaction against the Renaissance that is known as modern art" (172a). Renaissance artists revived Greek ideals of beauty by casting Christ legends "in terms of absolute beauty as against the original Gothic ecstasy over the legend's evocation of the Absolute" (172a). Despite Michelangelo's efforts to attain the sublimity of pure forms and grandeur, "painting continued on its merry quest for a voluptuous art until in modern times the impressionists, disgusted with its inadequacy, began the movement to destroy the established rhetoric of beauty by the impressionist insistence on a surface of ugly strokes".
So modern art's impulse was to destroy beauty, but because it did not compensate for the loss of the Renaissance's sublime message, modern art was able only to transfer values rather than devise new ways of experiencing life. For example, the cubists, "by their dada gestures of substituting a sheet of newspaper and sandpaper for both the velvet surfaces of the Renaissance and the impressionists, made a similar transfer of values instead of creating a new vision, and succeeded only in elevating the sheet of paper" (172cd). The rhetoric of exaltation was so strong in European art that modern arts' elements of sublimity manifest "in its effort and energy to escape the pattern rather than in the realization of a new experience".
The failure of European art to achieve the sublime is due to this blind desire to exist inside the reality of sensation (the objective world, whether distorted or pure) and to build an art within a framework of pure plasticity (the Greek ideal of beauty, whether that plasticity be a romantic active surface or a classic stable one). In other words, modern art, caught without a sublime content, was incapable of creating a new sublime image and, unable to move away from the Renaissance image of figures and objects except by distortion or by denying it completely for an empty world of geometric formalisms — a pure rhetoric of abstract mathematical relationships — became enmeshed in a struggle over the nature of beauty: whether beauty was in nature or could be found without nature.
American artists deny that art is concerned with beauty. Newman asks, if we now live in a time without a mythos of the sublime and when we refuse to exalt pure relations or live in the abstract, how then can we create sublime art?
We want to hold on to the exalted and our absolute emotions, although we want to let go of the "obsolete props of an outmoded and antiquated legend" (173d). Instead, we create images with a self evident reality but without the "props and crutches" that evoke outmoded sublime and beautiful images; and, we do so without being burdened by the traditions of Western European painting.
Instead of making cathedrals out of Christ, man, or "life," we are making [them] out of ourselves, out of our own feelings. The image we produce is the self-evident one of revelation, real and concrete, that can be understood by anyone who will look at it without the nostalgic glasses of history.
From:
Newman, Barnett. Selected Writings. Ed. John P. O'Neil. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Sublime Now
Instead of making cathedrals out of Christ, man, or "life", we are making [them] out of ourselves, out of our own feelings. The image we produce is the self-evident one of revelation, real and concrete, that can be understood by anyone who will look at it without the nostalgic glasses of history.
Barnett Newman "The Sublime is now"
Barnett Newman "The Sublime is now"
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