A Constellation of Avant-Garde Cinemas and My Place in It Kuba
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UNIVERSITY OF NEW SOUTH WALES ART AND DESIGN News From Elsewhere: A Constellation of Avant-Garde Cinemas and My Place in It Kuba Dorabialski MFA Research Paper School of Art and Design March 2017 1 ORIGINALITY STATEMENT ‘I hereby declare that this submission is my own work and to the best of my knowledge it contains no materials previously published or written by another person, or substantial proportions of material which have been accepted for the award of any other degree or diploma at UNSW or any other educational institution, except where due acknowledgement is made in the thesis. Any contribu- tion made to the research by others, with whom I have worked at UNSW or elsewhere, is explicitly acknowledged in the thesis. I also declare that the intellectual content of this thesis is the product of my own work, except to the extent that assistance from others in the project's design and conception or in style, presentation and linguistic expression is acknowledged.’ Signed: Date: 27/03/2017 COPYRIGHT STATEMENT ‘I hereby grant the University of New South Wales or its agents the right to archive and to make available my thesis or dissertation in whole or part in the University libraries in all forms of media, now or here after known, subject to the provisions of the Copyright Act 1968. I retain all proprietary rights, such as patent rights. I also retain the right to use in future works (such as articles or books) all or part of this thesis or dissertation. I also authorise University Microfilms to use the 350 word abstract of my thesis in Dissertation Abstract International (this is applicable to doctoral theses only). I have either used no substantial portions of copyright material in my thesis or I have obtained permission to use copyright material; where permission has not been granted I have applied/will apply for a par- tial restriction of the digital copy of my thesis or dissertation.' Signed: Date: 27/03/2017 AUTHENTICITY STATEMENT ‘I certify that the Library deposit digital copy is a direct equivalent of the final officially approved version of my thesis. No emendation of content has occurred and if there are any minor variations in format- ting, they are the result of the conversion to digital format.’ Signed: Date: 27/03/2017 2 PLEASE TYPE THE UNIVERSITY OF NEW SOUTH WALES Thesis/Dissertation Sheet Surname or Family name: Dorabialski First name: Kuba Other name/s: Abbreviation for degree as given in the University calendar: MFA School: SCHOOL OF ART AND DESIGN Faculty: Title: News From Elsewhere: A Constellation of Avant-Garde Cinemas and My Place in It Abstract 350 words maximum: (PLEASE TYPE) In the second half of the 1970s, two Francophone filmmakers each made a film which was to define a significant milestone in the histories of both avant-garde cinema and gallery-based moving image practice. Chantal Akerman's News From Home (1976) and Chris Marker's Sans Soleil (1976-1983) emerged from a cinematic idiom that dates back to the Lumiere brothers' earliest films of 1895. However, it was the incorporation of the practices of experimental 1960s structuralist film that was to take the legacy of these two works out of the cinema screen and into the gallery space. This thesis views this legacy through the microcosm of my art practice, linking several formal and conceptual characteristics present in News from Home and Sans Soleil through to my work, as well as the work of several contemporary gallery-based film and video artists. These characteristics, common throughout the history of the essay film tradition, are grouped under three headings: The Voice, Politics in the Era of Capital, and To Be Elsewhere. Declaration relating to disposition of project thesis/dissertation I hereby grant to the University of New South Wales or its agents the right to archive and to make available my thesis or dissertation in whole or in part in the University libraries in all forms of media, now or here after known, subject to the provisions of the Copyright Act 1968. I retain all property rights, such as patent rights. I also retain the right to use in future works (such as articles or books) all or part of this thesis or dissertation. I also authorise University Microfilms to use the 350 word abstract of my thesis in Dissertation Abstracts International (this is applicable to doctoral theses only). …………………………………………………………… ……………………………………..……………… ……….……………………..22/01/2018 .…….… Signature Witness Signature Date The University recognises that there may be exceptional circumstances requiring restrictions on copying or conditions on use. Requests for restriction for a period of up to 2 years must be made in writing. Requests for a longer period of restriction may be considered in exceptional circumstances and require the approval of the Dean of Graduate Research. FOR OFFICE USE ONLY Date of completion of requirements for Award: APOLOGIES AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Apologies to all the subjects of this paper who died during my research: Chantal Akerman, Natalia Akerman, Hilda Becher, Svetlana Boym, Trisha Brown, Harun Farocki and Chris Marker. I sincerely hope it wasn’t my fault. Many thanks to Joanna Elliot for administrative assistance. Big thank you to John Gillies and Uros Cvoro for guidance and insight and help. Tremendous thanks to Katy B Plummer. 4 CONTENTS The Two Avant-Gardes: Beginning and End 6 Parallel Forms: The Essay Film 9 News from Home & Sans Soleil 12 The Voice (I Have Some Regrets/I Have No Doubts) 18 Politics In the Era of Capital (You Can’t the Fire) 25 To Be Elsewhere (All of Them in There) 31 Conclusion 38 Bibliography 39 Appendix 1: Links to my videos 41 Appendix 2: Script of All of Them in There 42 5 THE TWO AVANT-GARDES: BEGINNING AND END The genesis of this research paper lies in a well known and highly cited 1975 essay by the British filmmaker and theorist Peter Wollen. I came upon it by chance, while searching for news of the death of avant-garde filmmaker Chris Marker in 2012. And although the essay doesn’t mention Marker directly (nor, for that matter, did any of the Marker obituaries I read that day mention Wollen’s essay), Marker was one of two filmmakers that immediately came to mind while reading it. The other was Chantal Akerman. In part, this research paper is an explanation of why. In his essay, The Two Avant-Gardes1, Peter Wollen writes of two distinct traditions in experimental film2. He traces these two paths to a split that occurred in the years following the First World War. One camp, according to Wollen, is the lineage of filmmakers growing out of Cubist filmmakers such as Man Ray, Francis Picabia and Rene Clair. Theirs were formalist studies that sought to “extend the scope of painting.”3 Juxtaposed alongside – and in contradistinction to – this tradition, Wollen placed another avant-garde; this was the lineage of the early Soviet filmmakers like Dziga Vertov and the Kino-Pravda Group; those experimenting with political understandings in language and representation within what came to be recognised as classical cinematic rules, or what Noel Burch termed Institutional Modes of Representation4. Wollen follows these two camps backward and forward, noting their alliances to the ontological modes of painting and theatre, respectively. One would grow into the avant- garde film works of Structuralists such as Michael Snow and Holis Frampton, while the other would become the experimental European cinema of Godard and Straub-Huillet. Wollen is reluctant to clearly mark the boundaries of these two avant-gardes. He switches variously between such binaries as Co-op movement/Right Bank school, New York/Continental, 1 Peter Wollen, “The Two Avant-Gardes”, Studio International (Vol 190, no 978, November/December 1975), pp. 171-175. 2 Throughout this research paper I use the words film and video interchangeably to refer to a praxis that, despite some technical, commercial and conceptual particularities, can for the purposes of this thesis be considered a unified field. 3 Wollen, op cit. 4 Noël Burch, Life to Those Shadows, University of California Press, Berkeley 1990. 6 bourgeois/radical, art/film, yet he consistently presents examples that defy clear separation, as well as presenting liminal modes of avant-garde filmmaking. Subsequent commentators, such as David Andrews, draw issue with Wollen’s conception of “avant-garde”, interpreting his distinction as one defined by filmmakers’ perceived political militancy and articulated radical credentials, rather than an analysis of relations to modes of commercial distribution and other such relatively objective metrics5. Wollen himself, writing six years after his original essay was published, admits that his approach lacked nuance and that, in fact, the avant-gardes he identified were further divisible into smaller and less stable groups of artists and filmmakers. So unstable, in fact, that it becomes difficult to identify to which camp any given filmmaker belongs6. For all its reductionist shortcomings, Wollen’s 1975 essay is an effective model for critiquing the idea of the 20th century avant-garde as a giant singular monolith that proceeded chronologically in a single linear fashion. And Wollen was not alone in its acknowledgement of two distinct avant-gardes in modernism. Matei Calinescu identifies a split in the avant-garde in its earliest moments, in the letters of Rimbaud and his milieu in the 1870s7. Like Wollen, Calinescu attributes this split to an alliance to either of two political approaches in art production: revolution and subsequent liberation through dismantling of forms, versus revolution and liberation through content and Geist, leading in turn to a withering away of the strictures of traditional form. The differences echo the “revolution versus reform” debates surrounding the Paris Commune of 1871 (about which the aforementioned Rimbaud showed great enthusiasm), and which were to feature prominently in the discourse of socialist praxis throughout the 20th century.