Week 8 March 3rd The Post-War Avant-garde The Post-War Avant-garde and Independent Cinema. Readings: Thompson & Bordwell Chapter 21 Documentary and Experimental Cinema in the Postwar Era 1945-Mid 1960’s pp 478-507. Maya Deren p 490 Hayward, Key Concepts Feminist film theory pp97-116; Supplementary Reading: Laura Mulvey “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”, (Braudy and Cohen pp 833-844).
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Week 8 March 3rd The Post-War Avant-garde The Post-War Avant-garde and Independent Cinema. Readings: Thompson & Bordwell Chapter 21 Documentary and Experimental.
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Week 8 March 3rd The Post-War Avant-garde
The Post-War Avant-garde and Independent Cinema.Readings: Thompson & Bordwell Chapter 21 Documentary and Experimental Cinema in the Postwar Era 1945-Mid 1960’s pp 478-507. Maya Deren p 490Hayward, Key Concepts Feminist film theory pp97-116; Supplementary Reading: Laura Mulvey “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”, (Braudy and Cohen pp 833-844).
Screening: Meshes of the Afternoon (1943) Maya Deren/ Alex Hammid; Fireworks (1947) Kenneth Anger; Last Year at Marienbad (1961), Alain Renais;
“The entire life of societies in which modern conditions of production reign appears as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was expressed directly has been distanced in a representation.” (Thesis 1)
“Spectacle in general, as the concrete immersion of life is the autonomous movement of the non-living. Spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation between people mediated through images.” (Thesis 4)
“Among other possibilities the cinema lends itself particularly well to studying the present as an historical problem, to dismantling the processes of reification.” ( René Vienet, 1959)
Debord and Godard were interested in a “politicized Brechtian Cinema” Wexman p363A Marxist cinema?The Dziga Vertov GroupImportance of Cahiers du Cinema.Semiology (Discourse on signs) Ferdinand de Saussure Roland Barthes The Death of the Author
Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913)
Signs
According to Ferdinand De Saussure the Sign consists of:(1) signifier -- the material form of the sign for example the
word red - and (2) the signified -- the concept it represents the colour red
Denotation – denotative (indexical) plane of meaningr.e.d. = colour redConnotation – connotative (iconic and symbolic) plane of meaningRed, rose, love, passion, lust, hot, anger, blood, communism,… endless signification…… hence “the arbitrary nature of the sign”
3 Categories
1. Iconic - a sign which resembles the signified (portrait, photo, diagram, map)
2. Symbolic - a sign which does not resemble the signified but which is purely conventional (the word stop, a red traffic light, or a national flag)
3. Indexical - a sign which is inherently connected in some way (existentially or causally) to the signified (e.g. smoke signifies fire; and all the little symbols on web pages -- mailboxes, speakers, envelopes, arrows).
sound/sense
Roland Barthes: The Death of the Author “the death of the author
ensures the birth of the reader”
Christian Metz (1931 – 1993) The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema