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Due to their remarkable ability to retrain perception and create an evocative 'illusion of preserving nature,' avant-garde film and VR nature videos often draw on slow and ecocinema aesthetics to [...]

MacDonald, Scott. The Sublimity of Document: Cinema as Diorama (Avant-Doc 2). Oxford UP, 2019. 504 pages. Hardback, [pounds sterling]93.00; paperback, [pounds sterling]25.99. The Sublimity of Document: Cinema as Diorama (Avant-Doc [...]

Introduction Given the paucity of material offering in-depth scholarly analyses of experimental film and video from both traditional and revisionist theoretical perspectives, this special issue of Papers on Language and [...]

While in social history and mobilities research, the study of railway mobility is becoming increasingly popular, offering new insights into (trans)national railway cultures, there is less interest in illicit mobility, unconventional modes of travel and non-regulated, irregular patterns of movement, such as train hopping, and the way they function in experimental film. To fill this gap, I build on the recent mobilities literature to discuss two stylistically distinct experimental films, Reading Canada Backwards (Steve Topping, 1995) and Portland (Greta Snider, 1996), which offer a social commentary on train hopping, typically associated with the history and material conditions of North American railway travels. Challenging the larger freighthopping mobilities discourse, both films confront the historical legacy of the hobo, as reimagined by occasional transients and punk drifters, as a product of capitalist enterprise, railroad transportation services and failed bourgeois masculinity. While in narrative and documentary films, hobo culture often emerges as an alternative, intrepid lifestyle and a personal philosophy based on economic or environmental concerns, Reading Canada Backwards and Portland take a more critical and ironic take on riding the rails, highlighting its casual spontaneity, playful creativity and affective potential, which questions the drifter as an active agent of marginal mobility practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I discuss the ways in which Bruce Baillie’s Mass for the Dakota Sioux (1964) and Quixote (1965) evoke Native American Indian heritage and western-hero road poems by challenging the concept of the American landscape and incorporating conventions traditionally associated with cinéma pur, cinéma vérité, and the city symphony. Both pictures, seen as largely ambiguous and ironic travelogue forms, expose their audiences to “the sheer beauty of the phenomenal world” (Sitney 2002: 182) and nurture nostalgic feelings for the lost indigenous civilizations, while simultaneously reinforcing the image of an American conquistador, hence creating a strong sense of dialectical tension. Moreover, albeit differing in a specific use of imagery and editing, the films rely on dense, collage-like and often superimposed images, which clearly contribute to the complexity of mood conveyed on screen and emphasize the striking conceptual contrast between white American and Indian culture. Taking such an assumption, I argue that although frequently referred to as epic road poems obliquely critical of the U.S. westward expansion and manifest destiny, the analyzed works’ use of plot reduction, observational and documentary style as well as kinaesthetic visual modes and rhythmic editing derive primarily from the cinéma pur’s camerawork, the cinéma vérité’s superstructure, and the city symphony’s spatial arrangement of urban environments. Such multifaceted inspirations do not only diversify Mass’ and Quixote’s non-narrative aesthetics, but also help document an intriguing psychogeography of the 1960s American landscapes, thus making a valuable contribution to the history of experimental filmmaking dealing with Native American Indian heritage.

Although the relationship between cycling and cinema has recently received some attention from researchers, there are no accounts on how it links to experimental documentary film and avant-doc storytelling. To fill this gap, I take a phenomenological stance on cycling to discuss the rider's embodied experience of travel in a few short and stylistically distinct works, Chuck Hudina's Bicycle (1975), Jon Behrens' Girl and a Bicycle (1995), Vanessa Renwick's The Yodeling Lesson (1998), Ken Paul Rosenthal's I My Bike (2002), Tomonari Nishikawa's Into the Mass (2007) and Tony Hill's Bike (2013). Despite a different format and narrative focus, which questions the genderedness of cycling, explores it in a trance and dreamlike state or turns it into the sheer spectacle of motion, all films echo the recent phenomenological turn in film studies and present cycling as a multisensorial, kinesthetic practice, demonstrating how the rider-bicycle hybrid assemblage relates to both cycling mobilities and the riding environment. Compared to narrative and fiction film, experimental documentary film looks at the bicycle identity as a distinctive subject of inquiry and maps cycling not so much through its traditional connotations as through the actual lived experience, one that is not necessarily already pre-determined, mediated and ideological. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Seen as historically masculine, the road movie has privileged the white heterosexual male and thus perpetuated its traditional patriarchal configuration. To counteract the genre's gendered nature, some scholars have pointed to the growing need to study women's road movies, yet never in the context of experimental filmmaking, which was institutionalized as thoroughly masculine with women's work dismissed as peripheral or excessively lyrical. To fill this gap, I build on feminist geography and automobilities research to discuss the "feminine" road movie aesthetics in contemporary experimental films, Sophie Calle's No Sex Last Night (1992), Su Friedrich's Rules of the Road (1993), Michaela Grill's Carte Noir (2014) and Faith Arazi and Madeleine Mori's Through a Field (2019). While Carte Noir and Through a Field construct a lone female nomadic story and Double Blind and Rules of the Road embrace the couple road movie format, all works contest the road as a masculine space and question the genderedness of mobility through a strong emphasis on the (female) self and embodied practices of driving. This signals the cinematic transformation of women from a desired object to a creative subject, consequently denying the spectator the usual pleasures associated with voyeurism, fetishism and the (patriarchal) spectacle. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the recent upsurge of interest in passengering, there are no accounts on how backseat passengering links to experimental film and 360 video or how it responds to the broader relationship between automobilities, the organization of car travel and on-screen storytelling. To fill this gap, I follow up on the profiling of the passenger as a distinctive subject and object of infrastructures of mobility to discuss the backseat passenger's experience, seen as both a socially engaged and embodied practice, in four stylistically distinct works, Larry Gottheim's Harmonica, Lluis Escartín's Mohave Cruising, Ken Jacobs' Berkeley to San Francisco, and ASMR Driving at night: Back seat view. While Harmonica, Mohave Cruising and Berkeley to San Francisco are selective, self-aware experiments, which play out in various forms, ASMR is an authorless 360 drive video that lacks much aesthetic value and continues the long-established culture of scenic road and auto-tourism, turning on-site visitors into virtual tourists. Although each work approaches passengering visualities differently through exhibiting forward, side, parallax and 3 D views, they all articulate a multi-sensorial experience of driving and offer a relatively novel take on the practices of automobility through shifting the perspective of the driver and frontseat passenger to the backseat view. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although remakes and road movies are particularly endemic to Hollywood cinema, experimental filmmakers have also embraced the road movie tradition and reproduced existing material for new audiences to retell, readdress and rearticulate the prior story, exploring the dialectics between repetition, differentiation and genre. Interestingly, however, while the remake, seen mostly as a genre phenomenon, has received some critical attention, remaking in the avant-garde film scene has been rarely explored by adaptation theory and practice. To somewhat fill in this gap, the article situates two recent avant-garde films, James Benning's Easy Rider (2012) and Jessica Bardsley's Goodbye Thelma (2019), within the framework of remake and adaptation studies and proposes that both works function as acknowledged and transformed remakes of the classic road movies, in which the outcome radically differs from the original story and crosses the temporal and spatial boundaries of the genre. In doing so, the projects fit in with the broader tradition of cinematic reworking and recycling as they continuously reference and exploit earlier films by creating their alternative versions as well as a strong sense of place and movement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The emergence of post-media aesthetics and hybrid media culture marked by media convergence as well as diachronic and synchronic hybridization has resulted in an ongoing re-evaluation, re-contextualization and re-mobilization of the city symphony film's practices, which offer novel cinematic experiences by abandoning the genre's traditional narrative trajectory or editing patterns and replacing them with new digital forms. Following this trend, I analyze the ways in which Tracing the Decay of Fiction: Encounters with a Film by Pat O'Neill and Man With A Movie Camera: The Global Remake operate within the post-digital sublime and database documentary framework, and consequently play with or critique the standard city symphony format and message centered around the concept of decay or kino-eye. Particularly, both works oppose the genre's traditional montage and postmodern aesthetics by means of database and interactive storytelling, and instead rely on the mutability of the digital image and image-altering software, which seemingly lacks or merely imitates the sublime. To counteract this effect, the post-digital sublime takes a participatory form and is based on enquiry and discovery (Tracing) or novelty, invention and surprise (The Global Remake) rather than boredom and repetition traditionally associated with an unbounded potential of technology and the banal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper analyzes various ways in which James Benning's Deseret (1995) develops the concept of sublime and luminous landscape through its reliance on the relationship between the image as well as the spoken and written word. In particular, it seems that Deseret, which represents the peak of Benning's text/image period and may constitute „the most sustained exploration of the American West in the annals of American independent cinema" (MacDonald, „The Ecocinema Experience" 29), tends to incorporate narrative and visual conventions traditionally associated with the structural film, cinéma pur and slow (eco)cinema aesthetics. Interestingly however, while paying homage to the Hudson River School tradition of sublime and luminist painting, a series of static shots is also accompanied by voice-over narration, seen as confounding or often unrelated to the imagery. Following such a peculiar structure, Deseret oscillates between mimesis and diegesis through simultaneously drawing on and challenging the cinéma pur's notion of „pure images" and hence reinforces the traditional word-image dichotomy in an attempt to expose its audiences to often untold and deeply pessimistic exposés of American history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I analyze various ways in which Sharon Lockhart's experimental films, Lunch Break (2008) and Podwórka (2009), develop the concept of an industrial landscape and local community by simultaneously incorporating and challenging narrative and visual conventions traditionally associated with the poetics of slow cinema. Focusing mostly on the realities of urban life, Lockhart's unscripted and intimate portraits of American and Polish localities resonate with a highly meditative approach as well as blend rigorous film aesthetics with an anthropological and ethnographic sensibility to community engagement. Although the filmmaker's legacy has been predominantly classified, akin to Peter Hutton's or James Benning's works, as representing slow cinema (see e.g. Mac- Donald, Avant-doc? 2; MacDonald, "Panorama" 636), it seems to have taken some of its formal traits to their extreme through juxtaposing stillness and movement of the imagery with "filmic time, subjective time, and real time in mediations on ritual, landscape, and labour" (Kuhn and Westwell 381). To achieve the desired effect, Lockhart experiments and expands on the genre's typical devices such as: an extended shot duration, fixed camera position, minimalism and austerity or anti-narrative by the use of vertical planes, Z-axis, a single tracking shot slowed down to three frames per second, extremely long takes, atypical camera angles or a detached perspective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]