Theory 7 – Post-Modernism

Anything goes..

Doris Lessing ‘The Cleft’ – ‘The Cleft’ could be classed as a post-modern piece simply due to the fact that Lessing ‘appropriated’ events/notions from history such as the pre-60s socially accepted notion that women belonged in the kitchen and were nothing but baby and homemakers. She then transformed this fact into a piece of fiction that focuses primarily on this notion and applied it to a story that sees women in these exact roles.

Hans Giger ‘Necromonicon’ – Post-Modernism has a preference for abstract or non-realist forms, and the desire to effect a complete break with the past. This is very much the case with ‘Necromonicon’. With anthropomorphic features on nightmarish bio-mechanical aliens, Necromonicon couldnt get any further from the realists.

Theory 6 – Marxism

The requirement to judge all activities of a society, its artistic activities included, in political perspective.

Doris Lessing ‘The cleft’ –  Lessing confronts the themes that inspired much of her early writing: how men and women manage to live side by side in the world and how the troublesome particulars of gender affect every aspect of our existence. Although over a century since the establishment of the suffragettes, Lessing continues to confront issues of  perception of the roles of both genders.

In the book she writes of the very earliest form of human, with women being maternal, unadventurous homemakers and of men being adventure seekers, rebels who show no interest in homemaking. There are many political connotations associated with this.

Since the suffrogettes in the late 19th century to the present day, women have been fighting for years to be acknowledged as equals to men. In contrast, men’s rights movement (MRM) fight for rights generally associated with divorce and children.

‘The Cleft’ from a political standpoint discusses issues that were proliferate pre-19th century but are a complete contrast to today’s mens and womens rights.

Hans Giger ‘Necromonicon’ – Marxism attempts to show how art is tied to specific classes, how images contain information about the economy. ‘Necromonicon’ is a series of paintings that depict fantasy, horror and sex as the main themes.There are no apparent political motivations (intentional or accidental) in the production of this work. Therefore I don’t see the relevance in applying the Marxist theory here.

Theory 5 – Institutional Theory of Art

‘x is an artwork in the classificatory sense if and only if (1) x is an artefact (2) upon which someone acting on behalf of a certain institution (the artworld) confers the status of being a candidate for appreciation.

Doris Lessing ‘The cleft’ – This is an ‘artwork’ as defined by The Institutional Theory of Art due to the simple fact that it was read, accepted and published by a publisher. The book has also been widely critiqued as mentioned earlier, the literary critic Harold Bloom wrote an honest but scathing review..as well as many others. The critics and publishers are people in a position of authority within the ‘artworld’ and as such thier recognition of ‘The Cleft’ make it a piece of art.

Hans Giger ‘Necromonicon’ – Necromonicon is a published compendium of images and as such has been recognized by publishers and critics.This work was recognized by the film director Ridley Scott who then asked Giger to create the aliens in the film ‘Alien’ heavily based on this work. Subsequent film directors have also taken the design of the aliens and used them in the sequels. Giger also received recognition for this work in 1980 by receiving an Oscar for Best Achievement for Visual Effects.

His work in Necromonicon has been very popular on the tattoo scene with many tattooists receiving requests for his designs (see image below).

Film Directors, Publishers, Critics and Tattoo artists alike are all prominent within the ‘artworld’ and recognize Necronomicon, therefore it would classed as art as defined by The Institutional Theory of Art.

 

Theory 4 – Aesthetics

‘x is an art work if and only if x is produced with the intention that it possess  a certain capacity, namely the capacity of affording aesthetic experience’.

Doris Lessing ‘The Cleft’ –  The aesthetics in this book are derived from its content and as such would be classed as a ‘content orientated account‘, ie ‘The Cleft is an artwork because it is intended to present unities, diversities and/or intensities for apprehension’. Apprehension states from the plot/narrative, this is essential in creating a successful book and Doris Lessing very much succeeds in this.

Hans Giger ‘Necromonicon’ – Theres no doubt that ‘Necromonicon’ provides an intense aesthetic experience for viewers. For me, it is the appreciation of the immense detail and imagination obvious in his paintings that is awe inspiring. For others it could be horror. The artists aesthetic intention here is to portray the beauty of the human figure and the skeleton. By introducing bio-mechanical elements the appreciation of the human of elements increases.

Theory 3 – Form

‘x is an artwork if and only if: (1) x has content (2) x has form (3) the form and content of x are related to each other in a satisfyingly appropriate

Form follows function.

Doris Lessing ‘The Cleft’ – This novel has form in {form of} the narrative/story/plot. With this being a literary piece of work the form and content inevitably co-exist.
Hans Giger ‘Necromonicon’ – If Necromonicon was viewed in the traditional interpretation of formalism then it would not be considered to posses significant form due to the fact that the primary function is to scare people and certainly not to ‘invite the appreciation of significant form’.

Neo-formalism fixes that though. The image below was used as the front cover of Necromonicon. The content consists of a satyr sitting on a throne of skuls surrounded by naked women/aliens, snakes and pentagrams. The form is the relationship between all of these elements. The women are cradled among the snakes, the snakes are intertwined within the pentagrams. The satyr is connected to these elements by its throne. The color scheme is cold with greys and sepia tones, this is further emphasized by the snakes as they breathe frost/smoke.  There is a sense of balance and symmetry to this painting which overall makes the content and form of this painting visually stimulating.

Theory 2 – Expressionism

Expressionism = Something is art only if it expresses emotion.

Doris Lessing ‘The Cleft’ – This piece of literary work was written with the intention of portraying a ‘prologue’ to modern humans. Lessing admits being fascinated by an early scientific paper which concluded that all humans at one time in our evolution were all female. And so Lessing wrote ‘The Cleft’, a fictitious work that is based on this theory.

This belief is fully expressed in her writing and does well in conveying the emotions associated with such a belief, for example her frustration directed  at the male gender. This emotion is understood by the reader, however, is not (by the majority) reciprocated. The literary critic Harold Bloom once accused Lessing of ‘a crusade against male human beings’.

‘The Cleft’ expresses the emotions felt by the author quite clearly . The book brings forth emotions individual of the reader generally due to the controversial theory behind the work. Therefore ‘The Cleft’ is a work that fits into the category of expressionism.

Hans Giger ‘Necromonicon’ – This series of paintings, (in my opinion) is the very definition of expressionism. His paintings portray images of bio-mechanical humanoids, aliens and nightmarish landscapes.
Giger is documented as saying he fascinated with such things, as well as “bones and vertebrae” (see interview link below).

For anyone viewing Necromonicon for the first time may be appalled, disgusted or scared at the sight of these nightmarish figures. The interview elaborates when Gigers wife Carmen Maria Giger  explains that many women in particular find his work disturbing. For those who know his work already agree with Gigers own opinion that it is beautiful, distinctive and original to the point that his work has inspired many feature films to adopt his style and characters in their movies.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=83kJOl06ikk

Theory 1 – Representation

Imitation = x is an artwork only if it is an imitation.

Representational = x represents y. For example an artist intends x (a picture) to stand for y (a haystack) and the audience realizes that x is intended to stand for y’

Neo-representationalism = x is an artwork only if it is about something.
Doris Lessing ‘The Cleft’ – This piece of literary work would not fall into the category of Imitation art as it is a work of fiction and so is not an imitation of anything factual.

‘The cleft’ could be classed as a representational work. The book is written with characters, theories and content that are familiar yet still fictitious as a whole.

‘The cleft’ would be considered a piece of neo-representational art due to the fact that it contains content (the story) and is therefore ‘about’ something.

Hans Giger ‘Necromonicon’ – The Necromonicon series of artworks would not be categorized as a work of imitation. This is due to the fact that the artwork (as a whole) contains no content that could be said to be an imitation of any real world elements.

Necromonicon contains images of bio-mechanical humans. This of course in itself is not an imitation of any thing found in the real world. However, certain elements within the whole work could be classed as representational. For example, the picture below contains easily distinguishable facial features and is therefore defined as representational.

As with ‘The cleft’, Necromonicon contains content that is intended to be ‘about’ something. Therefore the work would be classed as neo-representational.

Outcome 2 – New Media Editor – Verna Fields

Verna Fields 1918 – 1982  was an American film editor, film and television sound editor, educator, and entertainment industry executive.

Credits

Fields has edited more than thirty motion pictures, including Peter Bogdanovich’s What’s Up, Doc ? (1972), Paper Moon (1973), and Daisy Miller (1974). She brought George Lucas, her pupil at USC, into the studios, and she supervised the ground-breaking editing on American Graffiti (1973). Then she edited The Sugarland Express (1974), 23-year-old Steven Spielberg’s first major picture. That work led to her most heralded assignment: editing Jaws (1975).

Life

Her father Sam Hellman, a managing editor of The St.Louis Post-Dispatch, had moved his family to Los Angeles so he could write screenplays. Hellman scripted Little Miss Marker (1934) and Stanley and Livingstone (1939) and other 1930s successes. But he had higher aspirations for his daughter than Hollywood. “My father was very celebral,” Verna said. He sent her to a fancy Parisian secondary school at the College Feminin de Bouffemont, before she studied at USC, receiving a BA in journalism.  In 1946, she married the film editor Sam Fields. The Fields had two sons; one of them, Richard Fields, became a film editor. In 1954, Sam Fields died of a heart attack at the age of 38.Her career as an executive at Universal continued until her death in 1982 at age 64.

Early Career

When asked how she planned to break Hollywood barriers against women in production jobs, she said this:

“I’m the wrong one to ask,” she said. “I was totally ambitionless. I got into movies by accident. I was on canteen duty during World War II, doing nothing special. I met my friend Margie Johnson one day, and we were on our way to serve coffee to the GIs. But her boyfriend was an assistant editor, so she said, ‘Come over to the studio first. It’s fun.’ Well, this guy met us at the gate. He was cute. I started hanging out there to be with the cute guy.”

Director Fritz Lang needed help with sound editing, so he asked, “Who is that young girl always hanging around?” Thus “discovered” by Lang, Verna was hired on as an editing apprentice, without knowledge or experience; and four years later, she joined the union.

Subsequently her first credit as a sound editor was for Fritz Lang’s While the City Sleeps (pictured above). She worked on the experimental documentary The Savage Eye (1959); the co-directors Ben Maddow, Sidney Meyers, and Joseph Strick and the other connections she made on this film were important to her in her future career. In 1962 Fields won the Motion Picture Sound Editors’ Golden Reel Award for the film El Cid (directed by Anthony Mann).

Teaching

In the mid-1960s, Fields taught film editing at the University of Southern California. Douglas Gomery wrote of her time at USC that: “Her greatest impact came when she began to teach film editing to a generation of students at the University of Southern California. She then operated on the fringes of the film business, for a time making documentaries for the Office of Economic Opportunity. The end of that Federal Agency pushed her back into mainstream Hollywood then being overrun by her former USC students.” Fields students had included Matthew Robbins, Willard Huyck, Gloria Katz, John Milius, and George Lucas.

Career

Shortly after the completion of Jaws in 1975, Fields was hired by Universal Studios as an executive consultant. Some insight into Universal’s reasons for hiring her can be gleaned from the fact that during the filming of Jaws, in addition to her editing, Fields had been “omnipresent…at Spielberg’s beck and call by means of a walkie-talkie. Often she would shuttle back and forth on her bike between the producers in town and Spielberg at the dock for last-minute decisions”. Throughout her career, Fields had worked independently, but in 1976, and following the unexpected success of Jaws, she accepted a position as the Feature-Production Vice-President with Universal.She was thus among the first women to hold high executive positions with the major studios.In a 1982 interview, Fields was quoted as saying, “I got a lot of credit for Jaws, rightly or wrongly.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

Outcome 3 – Film Evaluation

The project for video practice and editing for new media required me to create a visual sequence which considers the continuity of storytelling through planned shots and camera angles. My aim was to create a logical flow which an audience could easily follow through my exploration of rhythm, pace, stillness and motion.

The brief required me to create a two-minute film exploring the theme of body and movement using various camera angles and shot types.

My idea was to capture on film the process of being homeless and “couch-surfing” as i had experienced it. My next step was to document this experience via storyboard. I created a board that featured the various houses and flats I had lived in. Another prominent aspect was the suitcase that I travelled from house to house with.

Issues

• Re-visiting all the places I had lived in the first year of homelessness (eight in total) this was a problem as three of the people i lived with had moved, one to the states and two down south. This meant making the film shorter than planned.
• I wanted to convey that the person in the film was being forced to move from home to home and not simply visiting friends. The only way i could think of doing this while keeping with my plan to not feature anyones face and emotions, was to portray it in the audio. Various people affirming that the character on-screen is homeless through a series of short quotes.
• My plan was to film all the shots needed over a weekend. It was important to maintain continuity as the film was meant to represent a year. This meant a few wardrobe changes to give a sense of a different timescale.

Filming Methods

It helped to remember the time spent couch surfing as a series of scenes, this helped create the plan for filming. I also had decided beforehand that the film wouldnt feature any faces, this was to represent my experience of homeless culture, a faceless minority that refuses by all in authority to be recognized. The following are the shots i planned out and subsequently filmed.

• Point of view/eyelevel angle of the characters hand pressing a buzzer or doorbell to gain entry to a home.
• Jump cut, close up, low angle shot of character walking up the stairs dragging the suitcase behind them. The close up will show the feet and part of the legs of the character.
• Jump cut, master shot from eye level of the room the character is living in. The suitcase will be placed within view in this room to maintain continuity.
• Jump cut, close up, eye level view of a front door closing to represent moving again
• Above shots will be repeated four or five times at different locations.

Process and Techniques i have learned

I have learned a lot throughout this project. The use of planning and storyboarding is a valuable and necessary process to go through in order to make a succesful film. Creating a schedule by making lists of shots needed, locations to be filmed, equipment needed, props (in my case the borrowed suitcase) are all extremely important. Pre-planning and good time keeping was important to me as i had to arrange specific times to visit people’s homes for the shots needed. This was my first time using a camcorder and so I have also learned a lot and become more confident using the various associated controls and functions.

What I would do differently in the future

I planned the shots and locations etc as best I could, however in hindsight i feel it could have been better planned. The fact that the equipment was borrowed for a short period of time made me rush some of the shots.

Outcome 1- Film/Video art research

Douglas Gordon

Gordon was born in Glasgow and studied art first there at the Glasgow School of Art from 1984-1988 and later at the Slade School of Fine Art, University College London, from 1988-1990.

Much of Gordon’s work is seen as being about memory and uses repetition in various forms. He uses material from the public realm and also creates performance-based videos. His work often overturns traditional uses of video by playing with time elements and employing multiple monitors.

In one early work, Meaning and Location (1990), a passage from the Gospel of Luke is given with a comma in different places, thus subtly changing the meaning of the sentence. List of Names (1990-present) is a list of every person Gordon has ever met and can remember. One version of this is applied onto the wall of a stairwell in the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art.

Gordon has often reused older film footage in his photographs and videos. One of his best-known art works is 24 Hour Psycho, 1993 which slows down Alfred Hitchcock’s film Psycho so that it lasts twenty-four hours. Feature Film, 1999 is a projection of Gordon’s own film of James Conlon conducting Bernard Herrmann’s score to Vertigo, thus drawing attention to the film score and the emotional responses it creates in the viewer. In one installation, this was placed at the top of a tall building, referencing one of the film’s main plot points. In Through a looking glass, 1999, Gordon created a double-projection work around the climactic scene in Martin Scorsese’s film Taxi Driver 1976, in which the main character addresses the camera; the screens are arranged so that the character seems to be addressing himself.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I1jkoMfPa40

Norman McLaren

11 April 1914 – 27 January 1987 was a Scottish-born Canadian animator and film director known for his work for the National Film Board of Canada (NFB). He was a pioneer in a number of areas of animation and filmmaking, including drawn on film animation, visual music, abstract film, pixilation and graphical sound.

His awards included an Oscar for the Best Documentary in 1952 for Neighbours, a Silver Bear for best short documentary at the 1956 Berlin International Film Festival Rythmetic and a 1969 BAFTA Award for Best Animated Film for Pas de deux.

McLaren’s next film, Camera Makes Whoopee, 1935, was a more elaborate take on the themes explored in Seven Till Five, inspired by his acquisition of a Ciné-Kodak camera, which enabled him to execute a number of ‘trick’ shots. McLaren used pixilation effects, superimposition and animation not only to display the staging of an art school ball, but also to tap into the aesthetic sensations supposedly produced by this event.

His two early films won prizes at the Scottish Amateur Film Festival, where fellow Scot and future NFB founder John Grierson was a judge.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fjl0i_p_pow