DOCSLIB.ORG

Technological Determinism and Medium Ontology in Film and Early Video

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
Technological Determinism and Medium Ontology in Film and Early Video TECHNOLOGICAL DETERMINISM AND MEDIUM ONTOLOGY IN FILM AND EARLY VIDEO A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE DEPARTMENT OF ART AND ART HISTORY AND THE COMMITTEE ON GRADUATE STUDIES OF STANFORD UNIVERSITY IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Rudolph Navarro May 2014 © 2014 by Rudolph Navarro, II. All Rights Reserved. Re-distributed by Stanford University under license with the author. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution- Noncommercial 3.0 United States License. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/us/ This dissertation is online at: http://purl.stanford.edu/fd162kx3899 ii I certify that I have read this dissertation and that, in my opinion, it is fully adequate in scope and quality as a dissertation for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Pamela Lee, Primary Adviser I certify that I have read this dissertation and that, in my opinion, it is fully adequate in scope and quality as a dissertation for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Scott Bukatman I certify that I have read this dissertation and that, in my opinion, it is fully adequate in scope and quality as a dissertation for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Jean Ma I certify that I have read this dissertation and that, in my opinion, it is fully adequate in scope and quality as a dissertation for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Claudia Mesch Approved for the Stanford University Committee on Graduate Studies. Patricia J. Gumport, Vice Provost for Graduate Education This signature page was generated electronically upon submission of this dissertation in electronic format. An original signed hard copy of the signature page is on file in University Archives. iii ABSTRACT This dissertation examines the unexplored relationship between film and early video. While video and film cultures of the sixties and seventies frequently sought to separate themselves, I consider the two mediums in constellation to reveal a series of tandem concerns and effects. In their investigation of liveness and self-awareness with the forms and operations of video, seminal artists Frank Gillette, Ira Schneider, and Paul Ryan displayed a formalism that was contemporaneously theorized in avant- garde film and minimalism. The early work of Nam June Paik shares with the structural films of Paul Sharits a fascination with technological dysfunction and obsolescence. Jud Yalkut’s exemplary videofilms probe the boundary between film and video mediums to investigate a cultural preoccupation with authenticity in an environment increasingly mediated by electronic communications. In delineating these point of conjunction I make two arguments. First, I claim that this constellation of film and early video destabilizes traditional notions of an immanently defined medium, thereby making the film/video configuration a signal moment in the development of intermedia. By focusing on the shared operations and subject effects of film and early video rather than intrinsic qualities, I reconsider the medium as something contingently defined by its variable processes and results rather than its morphology. Contrary to some conceptualizations of intermedia as a fusion of mediums or a disregard for medium, the concurrence of film and video I research characterizes intermedia as a considered analysis of how differentiated mediums interact. To consider film and video together as intermedia is to recognize that while they both form and inform their objects in particular ways, their interaction reveals iv something unique about their effects that could not be ascertained by considering them separately. My second argument complicates the technological determinism that runs through these artists’ work and has been used to criticize their practices. Immersed in the culture of McLuhan, information, and cybernetics, my artists often celebrated their technology as a powerful ameliorative to problems caused by the social, political, and economic order. For these artists, using and watching video was sufficient to alter and direct social and political processes. Though they never explicitly attack the socio- political order or structurally consider their technology’s ties to the masters that developed and purposed the technology, they do refashion video with contrary intentions and ends. By drawing on film theory and considering film and video together as dominant cultural media that organize our perception and world, I show how the divergent practices of these artists meaningfully critique the socio-political order even as they work within the confines of that order. v CONTENTS Introduction 1 Chapter 1. Video and Film Forms in the Work of Frank Gillette, Ira Schneider, and Paul Ryan 28 Chapter 2. Nam June Paik, Paul Sharits, and the Dysfunctional Operational Form 100 Chapter 3. Jud Yalkut’s Videofilm and the Search for Authenticity 160 Conclusion 230 Appendix 235 Bibliography 246 vi INTRODUCTION A recent museum visit with my class conveniently reminded me why I undertook this research. Installed in the museum was a one-person exhibition consisting of works in a variety of mediums: paintings, sculptures, installations, large- scale photographs, and textiles. Tucked away in this proliferation of artistic forms was the requisite flat panel monitor and artist’s video. The moving image appeared anemic and inconsequential amidst the other artworks on wall and floor. While my exposure to the artwork was admittedly brief and cursory, it seemed to me that the artist had instrumentalized the moving image. He treated the video screen as merely one more site to display his social message while ignoring over one hundred years of a rich historical and theoretical development that could have informed, even transformed that message. When artists do address the history of film, their artworks frequently quote particular films or directors as cultural artifacts rather than meaningfully engage with the forms, operations, and historical transformations of the moving image. I believe that artists and their digital clips should recognize that how we see and read a moving image today is indebted to a language developed in a long and complex filmic tradition and that our being in the world is beholden to how we see and read the moving image. In the same way that surgeons build upon decades of medical research and practice to perform their operations, progressive artists should also consider their practice within the lineage of the moving image, whether they seek to advance or reject that lineage. This is the sentiment I bring to my study of early video. In the sixties and seventies, artists, curators, and critics were eager to claim video for the museum and as 1 a radical communications device. To a large degree, they argued for video’s separation from film in order to advance these claims. For example, in a 1969 interview for the East Village Other, Frank Gillette announces video’s difference from film: “Film people come to videotape as an extension of film; it’s a relief for them. They see videotape in a large part as a means of making film easy, whereas tape is an entirely different realm, having many more bogus similarities to film than genuine ones.”1 Gillette’s claim, however, becomes problematic when his artistic partner, Ira Schneider, recognizes that Gillette is speaking as a painter and good-naturedly laughs off his proclamation. Schneider, who is a filmmaker, goes on to describe his own involvement with video as an extension of his filmmaking: “What I wanted to do was environmental and very loose, and I found it much easier to work with videotape equipment than with film equipment because basically you got everything down…”2 This tension between the specificities of film and video continues to assert itself to the present day while it also begs the question as to the nature of the relationship between film and video. Must film and video be considered as separate mediums each with their own distinct formal operations and effects or are they interdependent with their natures derived, to whatever degree, from the other? As with my contemporary artist, these early commentators ignored the fact that the very legibility of the video image, from the semantics of its shots to the way an individual orients themselves to the image, is indebted to the dominant visual medium of the twentieth century. This ignorance is all the more noticeable when we consider 1 Frank Gillette and Ira Schneider, “Parts I and II of an Interview by Jud Yalkut.,” Radical Software 1, no. 1 (Spring 1970): 9. 2 Ibid. 2 that the moment of video’s genesis also saw a burgeoning of artist’s film and critical attention to the New American Cinema, underground, and structural film in scholarly journals and other forums. These critics, impresarios, and director/artists were also noticing video by discussing it in their columns and writings or taking up a video camera themselves. How video’s early reception avoided engagement with this culture of film is another topic, but what concerns me is how our understanding of early video might change were we to place it in this expansive and dense tradition of the moving image. As a moving image, the first videos necessarily participate in a discourse that has never been fully discussed. In beginning this project I was faced with, and immobilized by, the innumerable ways in which film and video’s association can be figured. A cursory scan of the film and art milieus during the sixties and seventies reveals a dizzying exchange among filmmakers, artists, and institutions associated with art and cinema. Artists like Andy Warhol, Bruce Nauman, and Nancy Holt made both films and videos. Powerful investigations of the filmic and videographic images were conducted by artists and filmmakers such as Bruce Conner, Stan Vanderbeek, and Scott Bartlett while Gerry Shum’s Television Gallery sponsored films made specifically for television. Even Jonas Mekas, that indefatigable proponent of the New American Cinema, frequently ran articles and discussions about television and video art in his journal Film Culture and his columns for the Village Voice.
Load more

Recommended publications
  • Electronic Zen
    ELECTRONIC ZEN: The Alternate Video Generation By Jud Yalkut Copyright, 1984, Jud Yalkut. "The light-flower of heaven and earth fills all the thousand spaces. But also the light-flower of the individual body passes through heaven and covers the earth. Therefore, as soon as the light is circulating, heaven and earth, mountains and rivers, are all circulating with it at the same time. To concentrate the seed-flower of the human body above in the eyes, that is the great key of the human body." - THE SECRET OF THE GOLDEN FLOWER. "Zen Meditation is purely a subjective experience completed by a concentration which holds the inner mind calm, pure and serene. And yet Zen meditation produces a special psychological state based on the changes in the electroencephalogram. Therefore, Zen meditation influences not only the psychic life but also the physiology of the brain." - AKIRA KASAMATSU AND TOMIO HIRAI ("An Electroen- cephalographic Study on the Zen Meditation (Zazen)") in ALTERED STATES OF CONSCIOUSNESS (Charles Tart, editor). "We are not yet aware that telepathy is conveyed through the resonance factors of the mind... The electromagnetic vibration of the head might lead the way to Electronic Zen." - NAM JUNE PAIK. ELECTRONIC ZEN: THE ALTERNATE VIDEO GENERATION PREFACE Although the medium of television has existed in the American home since the post-war period, it has only been since the advent of portable video recorders in the late sixties that a meaningful dissemination of electronics communication technology has permitted the two-way interf low of information and vision exchange. This predominantly half-inch video technology engendered the emergence of alternate video innovators who have gradually mastered the parameters and circuitry of equipment woefully unstable as com pared to the hardware used daily by the vast television broadcasting networks.
    [Show full text]
  • The Convergence of Video, Art and Television at WGBH (1969)
    The Medium is the Medium: the Convergence of Video, Art and Television at WGBH (1969). By James A. Nadeau B.F.A. Studio Art Tufts University, 2001 SUBMITTED TO THE DEPARTMENT OF COMPARATIVE MEDIA STUDIES IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF SCIENCE IN COMPARATIVE MEDIA STUDIES AT THE MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY SEPTEMBER 2006 ©2006 James A. Nadeau. All rights reserved. The author hereby grants to MIT permission to reproduce and to distribute publicly paper and electronic copies of this thesis document in whole or in part in any medium now known of hereafter created. Signature of Author: ti[ - -[I i Department of Comparative Media Studies August 11, 2006 Certified by: v - William Uricchio Professor of Comparative Media Studies JThesis Supervisor Accepted by: - v William Uricchio Professor of Comparative Media Studies OF TECHNOLOGY SEP 2 8 2006 ARCHIVES LIBRARIES "The Medium is the Medium: the Convergence of Video, Art and Television at WGBH (1969). "The greatest service technology could do for art would be to enable the artist to reach a proliferating audience, perhaps through TV, or to create tools for some new monumental art that would bring art to as many men today as in the middle ages."I Otto Piene James A. Nadeau Comparative Media Studies AUGUST 2006 Otto Piene, "Two Contributions to the Art and Science Muddle: A Report on a symposium on Art and Science held at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, March 20-22, 1968," Artforum Vol. VII, Number 5, January 1969. p. 29. INTRODUCTION Video, n. "That which is displayed or to be displayed on a television screen or other cathode-ray tube; the signal corresponding to this." Oxford English Dictionary, 2006.
    [Show full text]
  • Report to the U.S. Congress for the Year Ending December 31, 2016
    Report to the U.S. Congress for the Year Ending December 31, 2016 Created by the U.S. Congress to Preserve America’s Film Heritage Created by the U.S. Congress to Preserve America’s Film Heritage August 15, 2017 Dr. Carla Hayden The Librarian of Congress Washington, D.C. 20540-1000 Dear Dr. Hayden: In accordance with The Library of Congress Sound Recording and Film Preservation Programs Reauthorization Act of 2008 (P.L. 110-336), I submit to the U.S. Congress the 2016 Report of the National Film Preservation Foundation. Americans have been making films for more than 120 years, but it is only in the last 30 that we have rallied to save those images. In 1996, Congress created the NFPF to help archives, libraries, and museums to rescue this history and share it with the public. Thanks to federal funding secured through the Library of Congress, entertainment industry and foundation support, and the unwaver- ing dedication of preservationists, there is much good news to report. As of 2016, the NFPF programs have preserved more than 2,290 motion pictures—newsreels, actualities, cartoons, silent-era productions, avant-garde films, home movies, and other independent works that might otherwise have faded from public memory. Tremendous credit is due to the 284 public institutions that have participated in our programs to save culturally significant motion pic- tures. Once copied to film stock and safely archived, the works begin a new life through teaching, exhibition, broadcast, DVD, and most especially, the Internet. With international partners, the NFPF has helped archives in the United States bring home 240 early American films that had not been seen in decades.
    [Show full text]
  • Yayoi Kusama: Biography and Cultural Confrontation, 1945–1969
    City University of New York (CUNY) CUNY Academic Works Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects CUNY Graduate Center 2012 Yayoi Kusama: Biography and Cultural Confrontation, 1945–1969 Midori Yamamura The Graduate Center, City University of New York How does access to this work benefit ou?y Let us know! More information about this work at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds/4328 Discover additional works at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu This work is made publicly available by the City University of New York (CUNY). Contact: [email protected] YAYOI KUSAMA: BIOGRAPHY AND CULTURAL CONFRONTATION, 1945-1969 by MIDORI YAMAMURA A dissertation submitted to the Graduate Faculty in Art History in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, The City University of New York 2012 ©2012 MIDORI YAMAMURA All Rights Reserved ii This manuscript has been read and accepted for the Graduate Faculty in Art History in satisfaction of the dissertation requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Anna C. Chave Date Chair of Examining Committee Kevin Murphy Date Executive Officer Mona Hadler Claire Bishop Julie Nelson Davis Supervisory Committee THE CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK iii Abstract YAYOI KUSAMA: BIOGRAPHY AND CULTURAL CONFRONTATION, 1945-1969 by Midori Yamamura Adviser: Professor Anna C. Chave Yayoi Kusama (b.1929) was among the first Japanese artists to rise to international prominence after World War II. She emerged when wartime modern nation-state formations and national identity in the former Axis Alliance countries quickly lost ground to U.S.-led Allied control, enforcing a U.S.-centered model of democracy and capitalism.
    [Show full text]
  • RARE Periodicals Performance ART, Happenings, Fluxus Etc
    We specialize in RARE JOURNALS, PERIODICALS and MAGAZINES rare PeriodicAlS Please ask for our Catalogues and come to visit us at: per fORMANcE ART, HappENINgS, http://antiq.benjamins.com flT UxUS E c. RARE PERIODICALS Search from our Website for Unusual, Rare, Obscure - complete sets and special issues of journals, in the best possible condition. Avant Garde Art Documentation Concrete Art Fluxus Visual Poetry Small Press Publications Little Magazines Artist Periodicals De-Luxe editions CAT. Beat Periodicals 297 Underground and Counterculture and much more Catalogue No. 297 (2017/2018) JOHN BENJAMINS ANTIQUARIAT Visiting address: Klaprozenweg 75G · 1033 NN Amsterdam · The Netherlands Postal address: P.O. BOX 36224 · 1020 ME Amsterdam · The Netherlands tel +31 20 630 4747 · fax +31 20 673 9773 · [email protected] JOHN BENJAMINS ANTIQUARIAT B.V. AMSTERDAM CONDITIONS OF SALE 1. Prices in this catalogue are indicated in EUR. Payment and billing in US-dollars to the Euro equivalent is possible. 2. All prices are strictly net. For sales and delivery within the European Union, VAT will be charged unless a VAT number is supplied with the order. Libraries within the European Community are therefore requested to supply their VAT-ID number when ordering, in which case we can issue the invoice at zero-rate. For sales outside the European Community the sales-tax (VAT) will not be applicable (zero-rate). 3. The cost of shipment and insurance is additional. 4. Delivery according to the Trade Conditions of the NVvA (Antiquarian Booksellers Association of The Netherlands), Amsterdam, depot nr. 212/1982. All goods supplied will remain our property until full payment has been received.
    [Show full text]
  • Independent Video: the First Fifteen Years - Artforum International
    10/11/2019 Independent Video: The First Fifteen Years - Artforum International TABLE OF CONTENTS PRINT SEPTEMBER 1980 INDEPENDENT VIDEO: THE FIRST FIFTEEN YEARS THE DEVELOPMENT OF VIDEO as an artistic medium has occurred over a relatively short period of time.1 When artists began using video in the mid ’60s, it was a period of wide experimentation—the Pop Art of Andy Warhol and Tom Wesselmann, the Happenings of Robert Rauschenberg and Allan Kaprow, and the New York Fluxus events of George Maciunas and Nam June Paik—generated by intuition and spontaneity, rather than logic or reason. Video art was initiated largely by small artists’ collectives scattered across the United States, as a form of political and esthetic opposition to commercial television genres and to the more traditional art forms. During the ’70s the nature of video activity changed, along with work in other mediums. Some artists explored alternatives to the formal exhibition space in the creation of environmental and land art works, generally conceptualized in response to a particular situation or setting. At the same time, video installations were being designed for specific spaces and audio and video equipment was being used to explore temporal and spatial https://www.artforum.com/print/198007/independent-video-the-first-fifteen-years-37723 1/18 10/11/2019 Independent Video: The First Fifteen Years - Artforum International relationships, often involving time delays and viewer participation. While performance art continued, video art was employed by many artists to create personal, autobiographical or narrative pieces, in addition to conceptual works. There was extensive activity with the building and exploration of color image processors, which included synthesizers and computers.
    [Show full text]
  • Visions and Sur-Realities
    University of Dayton eCommons News Releases Marketing and Communications 1-15-2013 Visions and Sur-Realities Follow this and additional works at: https://ecommons.udayton.edu/news_rls Recommended Citation "Visions and Sur-Realities" (2013). News Releases. 515. https://ecommons.udayton.edu/news_rls/515 This News Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Marketing and Communications at eCommons. It has been accepted for inclusion in News Releases by an authorized administrator of eCommons. For more information, please contact [email protected], [email protected]. 11/6/13 University of Dayton : News : Visions and Sur-Realities University of Dayton, Ohio (url: http://w w w .udayton.edu/index.php) Visions and Sur-Realities 01.15.2013 | Culture and Society, Campus and Community, Fine Arts The University of Dayton this winter is celebrating the long and internationally acclaimed career of a local artist whose works have been displayed at some of the world's finest art museums. A variety of works by video artist Jud Yalkut will be presented at three venues at the University of Dayton Jan. 31 through March 7. Yalkut will attend an opening reception Thursday, Jan. 31, a film discussion Friday and Saturday, Feb. 22-23, and a closing reception Thursday, March 7. See below for details. Titled "Visions and Sur-Realites," the survey of works brings together Yalkut's early works, contemporary films and even a holographic laser display he created with University of Dayton physicists in the 1980s. "Jud Yalkut has been a leading force in Dayton's arts community as well as an arts journalist for more than 20 years," said Jeanne Philipp, visual arts faculty and curator of the exhibits.
    [Show full text]
  • Resumee 2015.Pages
    Ira Schneider, Resume [email protected] !1 of 6! List of Video Works Videotapes: documentary (D) / art (A) / installation (I), all PAL, color, except where otherwise stated (IC) = “Information Collage”, style of combining audio & visual data: 2016: “Breaking News”, 4:33min (A); “H2O #21”, H2O #22, H2O #23, H2O #25, H2O #27; “Windmills” (A) - endless loop 2015: “*” (Asterisk), edit No.5, 3min (A), “The Return of the Frantic Pedantic Semantic Antic”, 8:45min (A) “H20 #18” 2:47min; “Somewhere on Orchard Street” 8:09min (A) 2014: “*” (Asterisk) 3min (A), “200 Years in the Remaking” 2min (A) 2013: “Composed Pandæmonium” (A) 3:38min; “13” ("13 Steaks", "13 Cakes", "13 Snakes" and "13 Fakes”) (A) 13min; "Odds and Ends" (IC) 28:30min; “The Earth is Spinning and We are On It” (D) 12:51min “Schneider to Marry” (4:43min) (A); Gillette moves out (D) 14:25min 2012: “Austerity Breeds Contempt” (1:30min) (A); “Everybody Rides the Subway” (3:30min) (A) “The Ohio Tapes”, (D/A) farmers, students, performance, America, with Frank Gillette, b/w, (NTSC) (restored and reedited) 2011: “Werner Melletin's last adventure” (9:30min) (D); “The Raindance 40th Reunion Symposium 2010“ (15:56) (D) 2010: “13 Cakes” (2 Versions: 14min & 3:30min) (A), Janis Joplin: "Piece of My Heart" (1968/2010), 4:20min (A); “Some Scenes in the Live of Radical Software” (15:20min) (D) 2009: “H2O #9” with music by Steve Reich 4:50min (A); “Endangered Species” 14:33min (A), “H2O #12” 7:30min(A); H2O#10a,b,c, 17:21min (A); ”H2O#11”5:23min (A); "Berlin Wall" restored from 1989 2008: “Fact and Artifact” (IC) 28:30; “H2O #6” 6:30min, “H2O #7” 16:57min; “H2O #8” (A), 5:54min; “H2O #3.5”, 1:57min; “Arizona Desert”, 17:32min, “More or Less Related Incidents in Recent History”(IC) 37:54min., Patti Smith (D) 5:34min 2007: “Songs by Janis Joplin” (1968) (D) 11min; “H2O #1”, music: Werner Durand (A) 8:30min; “Songs by Jimi Hendrix” (1968) (D) 10 min, “H2O #2”, music: Alvin Curran, (A) 10:45min; “H2O #3” 1:53min, “H2O #4” 11:48min, “H2O #5” 11:04min(A); “4 Seasons in Venice”(I); “Fluxus Mass” (rec.
    [Show full text]
  • A Chronology of Video Activity in the United States: 1965–1980 - Artforum International
    10/11/2019 A Chronology of Video Activity in the United States: 1965–1980 - Artforum International TABLE OF CONTENTS PRINT SEPTEMBER 1980 A CHRONOLOGY OF VIDEO ACTIVITY IN THE UNITED STATES: 1965–1980 This chronology in now way covers all video exhibitions or artists’ video activities in the United States. Instead it concentrates on events and works that have deeply influenced the development of video history. Guaranteed sources for a medium which is only in the process of documenting itself are not always available. Much source material is extremely ephemeral and often contradictory, and many of the enterprises mentioned here are no longer in existence. 1965 Sony introduced the first portable 1/2-inch black-and-white videotape camera and recorder in U.S. (limited availability). https://www.artforum.com/print/198007/a-chronology-of-video-activity-in-the-united-states-1965-1980-37724 1/28 10/11/2019 A Chronology of Video Activity in the United States: 1965–1980 - Artforum International “Third Annual New York Avant-Garde Festival.” Judson Hall, New York City. Included video sculpture by Nam June Paik. Café au Go Go, New York City. First use of Sony Portapak by video artist in U.S. “Electronic Art,” Nam June Paik, Bonino Gallery, New York City, Paik’s first American gallery exhibition. “New Cinema Festival I,” Filmmakers Cinemathèque, New York City. Included videotapes by Nam June Paik, with Charlotte Moorman, John Brockman, organizer. 1967 Sony 1/2-inch black and white portable videotape recorder and Portapak camera marketed for commercial sale in U.S. Electronic Blues, Nam June Paik.
    [Show full text]
  • Part Six: Intermedia
    PART SIX: INTERMEDIA "Shall we... use the new art as a vehicle for a new message and express the human longing which light has always symbolized, a longing for greater reality, a cosmic consciousness, a balance between the human entity and the great common denominator, the universal rhythmic flow?" THOMAS WILFRED 345 ARTSCILAB 2001 The Artist as Ecologist For some years now the activity of the artist in our society has been trending more toward the function of the ecologist: one who deals with environmental relationships. Ecology is defined as the totality or pattern of relations between organisms and their environment. Thus the act of creation for the new artist is not so much the invention of new objects as the revelation of previously unrecognized relation- ships between existing phenomena, both physical and metaphysical. So we find that ecology is art in the most fundamental and pragmatic sense, expanding our apprehension of reality. Artists and scientists rearrange the environment to the advantage of society. Moreover, we find that all the arts and sciences have moved along an evolutionary path whose milestones are Form, Structure, and Place. In fact, man's total development as a sentient being can be said to follow from initial concerns with Form or surface appearances, to an examination of the Structure of forms, and finally to a desire to comprehend the totality of relationships between forms, that is, Places. Since it generally is thought that art represents the avant-garde of human insight, it is interesting to note that science itself has evolved through Form, Structure, and Place appreciably in advance of the arts.
    [Show full text]
  • Report to the U. S. Congress for the Year Ending December 31, 2015
    Report to the U.S. Congress for the Year Ending December 31, 2015 Created by the U.S. Congress to Preserve America’s Film Heritage Created by the U.S. Congress to Preserve America’s Film Heritage June 15, 2016 Dr. David S. Mao Acting Librarian of Congress Washington, D.C. 20540-1000 Dear Dr. Mao: In accordance with The Library of Congress Sound Recording and Film Preservation Programs Reauthorization Act of 2008 (P.L. 110-336), I submit to the U.S. Congress the 2015 Report of the National Film Preservation Foundation. Film has documented America for more than 120 years, but it is only in the last 30 that we have rallied to save it. In 1996, Congress created the NFPF to help archives, libraries, and museums to res- cue this history and share it with the public. Thanks to federal funding secured through the Library of Congress, entertainment industry support, and the unwavering dedication of preservationists, there is much good news to report. As of 2015, the NFPF programs have preserved more than 2,230 motion pictures—newsreels, actuali- ties, cartoons, silent-era productions, avant-garde films, home movies, and other independent works that might otherwise have faded from public memory. Tremendous credit is due to the 279 cultural institutions that have tapped our programs to save culturally significant motion pictures. Once copied to film stock and safely archived, the works begin a new life through teaching, exhibition, broadcast, DVD, and the Internet. In past reports, I’ve singled out international partners that have enabled the United States to bring home 211 early American films that had not been seen in decades.
    [Show full text]
  • March 2012 Anthology Film Archives Film Program, Volume 42 No
    ANTHOLOGY FILM ARCHIVES January - March 2012 Anthology Film Archives Film Program, Volume 42 No. 1, January–March 2012 Anthology Film Archives Film Program is published quarterly by Anthology Film Archives, 32 Second Avenue, NY, NY 10003 Subscription is free with Membership to Anthology Film Archives, or $15/year for non-members. Cover artwork by Amy Sillman, After Edward Hopper, After George Kuchar, 2011, all rights reserved. Staff Board of Directors Jonas Mekas, Artistic Director Jonas Mekas, President John Mhiripiri, Director Oona Mekas, Treasurer Robert A. Haller, Director of Library Collections John Mhiripiri, Secretary Stephanie Gray, Director of Development & Publicity Barney Oldfi eld, Chair Wendy Dorsett, Director of Publications & Membership Matthew Press Jed Rapfogel, Film Programmer, Theater Manager Jeffrey Stout Andrew Lampert, Curator of Collections Arturas Zuokas John Klacsmann, Archivist Erik Piil, Digital Archivist Honorary Board Tim Keane, Print Traffi c Coordinator & Head Manager agnès b., Louise Bourgeois (1911–2010), Brigitte Kristin Hole & Ava Tews, Administrative Assistants Cornand, Robert Gardner, Annette Michelson, Bradley Eros, Theater Manager, Researcher Nam June Paik (1932-2006). Rachelle Rahme, Assistant Theater Manager Craig Barclift, Assistant Theater Manager Board of Advisors Richard Barone, Deborah Bell, Rachel Chodorov, Steve Projectionists Ernst, Roselee Goldberg, Timothy Greenfi eld-Sanders, Ted Fendt, Carolyn Funk, Sarah Halpern, Daren Ho, Jose Ramos, Ali Hossaini, Akiko Iimura, Susan McGuirk, Sebastian Moira Tierney, Eva von Schweinitz, Tim White, Jacob Wiener. Mekas, Sara L. Meyerson, Benn Northover, Ted Perry, Ikkan Sanada, Lola Schnabel, Stella Schnabel, Ingrid Box Offi ce Scheib-Rothbart, P. Adams Sitney, Hedda Szmulewicz, Phillip Gerson, Rachael Guma, Nellie Killian, Lisa Kletjian, Marvin Soloway.
    [Show full text]