Light Moving in Time: Studies in the Visual Aesthetics of Avant-Garde Film - Hardcover

Wees, William C.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0520073673 ISBN 13: 9780520073678

Verlag: UNIV OF CALIFORNIA PR, 1992

Inhaltsangabe

To view a film is to see another's seeing mediated by the technology and techniques of the camera. By manipulating the cinematic apparatus in unorthodox ways, avant-garde filmmakers challenge the standardized versions of seeing perpetuated by the dominant film industry and generate ways of seeing that are truer to actual human vision.

Beginning with the proposition that the images of cinema and vision derive from the same basic elements—light, movement, and time—Wees argues that cinematic apparatus and human visual apparatus have significant properties in common. For that reason they can be brought into a dynamic, creative relationship which the author calls the dialectic of eye and camera. The consequences of this relationship are what Wees explores.

Although previous studies have recognized the visual bias of avant-garde film, this is the first to place the visual aesthetics of avant-garde film in a long-standing, multidisciplinary discourse on vision, visuality, and art.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

William C. Wees is Associate Professor of English at McGill University in Montreal. He has written articles for many film journals and has made several short experimental films.

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Light Moving in Time: Studies in the Visual Aesthetics of Avant-Garde Film

By William C. Wees

University of California Press

Copyright 1992 William C. Wees
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0520073673


Introduction

The artist has carried the tradition of vision and visualization down through the ages. In the present time a very few have continued the process of visual perception in its deepest sense and transformed their inspiration into cinematic expression.
Stan Brakhage, Metaphors on Vision

From the beginning, avant-garde filmmakers have insisted on the visual nature of the film medium. "The image must be everything," said Fernand Lger.1 Man Ray described Emak Bakia (1926) as, "purely optical, made to appeal to the eyes only."2 The scenario for The Seashell and the Clergyman (1928), said Antonin Artaud, was "based on purely visual situations whose action springs from stimuli addressed to the eye only."3 For Hans Richter, film was "visual rhythm, released photographically."4 Dziga Vertov said his goal was to produce "a finished tude of absolute vision."5 Germaine Dulac campaigned tirelessly for, in her words, "an art of vision . . . an art of the eye."6

Comparable pronouncements appear throughout the history of avant-garde film, but I have singled out one by Stan Brakhage for the epigraph to this introduction because it not only reiterates the avant-garde's commitment to "an art of vision" but locates the source of that art in "visual perception in its deepest sense."7 I propose to take this assertion literally and examine its implications for avant-garde film in general and the work of Brakhage and a few of his contemporaries in particular (without implying that the filmmakers I have chosen to discuss are necessarily the "very few" to whom Brakhage alludes).

On the one hand, then, there is the avant-garde's traditional emphasis on vision, on film as "an art of the eye." On the other hand, there is the study of visual perception, the science of the eye. My goal is to bring both approaches to seeingthe cinematic and the perceptualinto a single discourse on vision and the visual art of avant-garde film.

Among early attempts to relate visual perception to film aesthetics, probably the best known is Rudolf Arnheim's Film as Art . Arnheim

invokes the perceptual theories of Gestalt psychology but does not apply them in great detail and does not give any special attention to avant-garde film.8 Similarly, Slavko Vorkapich drew upon Gestalt psychology in a series of lectures, "The Visual Nature of the Film Medium," given at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1965 and extensively summarized in Film Culture .9 Only the first few lectures dealt specifically with perceptual issues, however, and, again, avant-garde film is barely mentioned. Moreover, subsequent research has failed to support the Gestaltists' theoretical premise of an isomorphic relationship between perceived forms and specific electrical fields in the brain.10 So, although an aesthetics based on Gestalt psychology may tell us a great deal about the formal structures of visual art, its basis in the actual functions of visual perception is problematic.

Jacques Aumont calls attention to the weakness of the Gestalt approach in a short but comprehensive article on visual perception and film theory published in 1983.11 Although Aumont's stated concerns are principally "anthropological" rather than aesthetic and he makes no mention of avant-garde film, his argument shares with mine the assumption that questions of cinema and questions of perception are intricately related, especially where they concern the nature of the image and how it is perceived. As Aumont correctly points out, the image per se is of less interest in recent research on perception than are the processes that produce the image, and these psychophysiological processes are more likely to be compared to information processing than to capturing an image on film or projecting it on a screen. Scientific efforts to explain the brain's method of constructing the visual world, however, are relevant to the study of cinema. In chapter 1 I will draw upon scientific studies of vision to argue that what vision and film have in common is a fundamental dependence on light moving in time, and that what we call an image is the shape given to light's movement by the computations of the eye and brain and by the mechanical and optical apparatus of cinema.

In Concepts in Film Theory , Dudley Andrew proposes, "Cinema is above all things a representation of visual life itself." Therefore, he argues, filmmakers can use their art to "pose questions about seeing," and the only filmmakers Andrew mentions in this context are from the avant-garde: J. J. Murphy, Paul Sharits, Michael Snow, Bruce Conner, and Kenneth Anger.12 Andrew does not pursue this line of argument, however, and in the rest of his book he gives scant attention to the avant-garde and none to its "questions about seeing." Nevertheless, the postulate that film represents "visual life itself" and its corollary, that avant-garde film

is especially suited to "pose questions about seeing," provide a firm basis from which to approach the visual aesthetics of avant-garde film. They must be expanded upon, however, and related to another issue that Andrew does not emphasize sufficiently: the role of the cinematic apparatus.

Any cinematic expression of vision must emerge from the optical, photochemical, and mechanical processes of making and showing films. Although these processes differ greatly from those of visual perception, they are designed to produce an image comparable to the world we see when we look around us. Hence the conventions of photographic realism accepted by the dominant film industry. Because of those conventions, most films offer a very limited and highly standardized version of "visual life": focused, stable, unambiguous representations of familiar objects in three-dimensional space. While it is true that this is similar to the image of the world ordinarily provided by so-called normal vision, it is also true that we are capable of seeing the world quite differently. To express some of these other ways of seeing, avant-garde filmmakers have chosen to ignore, subvert, or openly break the rules of conventional filmmaking. Whether intuitively or by conscious intention, they have discovered that "questions about seeing" include questions about the cinematic apparatus itself.

Thus, my inquiry into the avant-garde's cinematic equivalents of visual perception will follow two complementary lines of argument. The first holds that vision embraces many different ways of seeing. In addition to focused and full-color foveal vision, there are varying degrees of less focused and colorless peripheral vision, as well as hallucinations, optical illusions, and "closed-eye vision" (as Brakhage calls it), which includes hypnagogic imagery, phosphenes, and the grainy visual "noise" perceptible when we are in a dark room or have our eyes tightly closed. These and other less familiar ways of seeing have been documented in scientific studies of vision, as well as in the more subjective testimony of visual artists. They can also be discovered through our own processes of visual perception, when we allow ourselves to notice everything we are capable of seeing. In brief, my first line...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: UNIV OF CALIFORNIA PR
• Erscheinungsdatum: 1992
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0520073673
• ISBN 13: 9780520073678
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 199
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
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