OUGD401 Lecture notes: Avante-garde Cinema

Avante-garde Cinema

• In opposition to main stream cinema 
• Non linear/ Non figurative/ Non narrative
• Require a different kind of spectatorship
• Hard to define, challenges and questions peoples understanding
• Radicalism- doesn't get shown because it doesn't appeal to general audience
• Outside capitalism

Un chien andalou (1929) Dir. Lius Bunuel

Un chien andalou is a 1929 silent surrealist short film by the Spanish director Luis Buñuel and artist Salvador Dalí. It was Buñuel's first film and was initially released in 1929 with a limited showing at Studio des Ursulines in Paris, but became popular and ran for eight months.The film has no plot in the conventional sense of the word. The chronology of the film is disjointed, jumping from the initial "once upon a time" to "eight years later" without the events or characters changing very much. It uses dream logic in narrative flow that can be described in terms of then-popular Freudian free association, presenting a series of tenuously related scenes.

The idea for the film began when Buñuel was working as an assistant director for Jean Epstein in France. Buñuel told Dalí at a restaurant one day about a dream in which a cloud sliced the moon in half "like a razor blade slicing through an eye". Dalí responded that he'd dreamed about a hand crawling with ants. Excitedly, Buñuel declared: "There's the film, let's go and make it.'" They were fascinated by what the psyche could create, and decided to write a script based on the concept of suppressed human emotions.

Massively influencial and the start of what radical cinema could become.
Still inspires and influences people to this day



Mathew Barney- Cremaster

The film project was 8 years in the making 1994-2002, it consists of 5 feature length films, accompanying sculptures, drawings and photographs. It alludes the process of sexual differentiation during the embryonic process. Filmed in the Guggenheim gallery.

Oskar Fischinger- Spirals

Modernist
Hypnotic 
'in the process of seeing you become aware of seeing and the coordination between the eye and the brain'


James Whitney-Lapis 1966

tried to link speed of the film to brain waves. Romantic, with a mysticism about the word. Categorised as a romantic poetic film.

Stan Brakhage-Black ice 1944

Stan Barkhage-Moth light 1963

A giant in American avant garde cinema

tried to portray a sense of hynagogia- a state between waking and sleeping. a shamanistic vision where nothing makes sense but your brain is still functioning.

He often blurred hand painted film with actual film

James Stanley Brakhage  better known as Stan Brakhage, was an American non-narrative filmmaker. He is considered to be one of the most important figures in 20th-century experimental film.

Over the course of five decades, Brakhage created a large and diverse body of work, exploring a variety of formats, approaches andtechniques that included handheld camerawork, painting directly onto celluloid, fast cutting, in-camera editing, scratching on film, collage film and the use of multiple exposures. Interested in mythology and inspired by music, poetry, and visual phenomena, Brakhage sought to reveal the universal in the particular, exploring themes of birth, mortality, sexuality, and innocence.

Brakhage's films are often noted for their expressiveness and lyricism