Sunday, December 18, 2011

CINEMA 1 - Chapter 2

At the end of October we discussed the second chapter of Cinema 1, please find my notes of it below.

Friday, October 28, 2011

Hei,

here are some links relating to the next chapter (chapter 2) which will be
treated on monday (Youtube links have sometimes their limitations, about which
in my small comments below...)

Hitchcock: Suspicion (1941)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kk8FW9atXuw&feature=related
(the link has russian dubbing, but it doesn´t matter)

Hitchcock: Spellbound (1945)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=grn-Wecipdo
(remix buy some Youtube-user... I couldn´t think any more annoying sound than
eurobeat and the "funny" idea of repeating the drinking as videoscratch is of
course destroying the original scene... but for our purposes but you can take
the beat + sound off and watch only the last image...)

Hitchcock: Frenzy (1972)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BRfbuQgJsjY

Griffith: Intolerance (1916)
The scene that Deleuze describes is here (with funny music):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zO545Fie1j4&feature=related
The whole film (part 1):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7puu_dfsSB0&feature=relmfu
following (part 2) (part 3) etc.

Lang: The Nibelungen (1924)
Extract: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mxN2fXCkh2o&feature=related

Chess-like movement of the workers in Lang: Metropolis (1927)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wLMp46Ojy5o&feature=related

Melvyn LeRoy: I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (1932)
Link to see the film:
http://blip.tv/the-phantasmagoria-theater-presents/i-am-a-fugitive-from-a-chain-gang-1932-4364016,
you can start to watrch the scene that Deleuze is describing at 00:42:00

Paul Newman: Sometimes a Great Notion (1970)
Link to see the scene: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vKdF-IP7rE0

Ernst Lubitsch: The Man I Killed (or Broken Lullaby) (1932)
link to the sequences that includes the framing that Deleuze is talking about:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=84WxGnM1f0g
The framing separated from other shots:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DrP7IcjvkEk

Murnau: The Last Laugh (1924)
The whole film (part 1):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MrYksodT5NA&feature=related
following (part 2) (part 3) etc.
(the scene that Deleuze describes could be the very first one, at least it is
easy to understand the point - even though there is no bicycle... what I
believe that he don´t remember the scene exactly as it is - the cinema of our
cinematic memories is sometimes a little bit different than the actual film)

Carol Reed: The Third man (1949)
Scenes:
(circular movement in a Ferris wheel)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8i47-QBL4Qo&feature=related
(flight scene) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bvnjHevRceQ&feature=related

King Vidor: The Crowd (1928)
Link to the famous scene: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WyMwGPyZ5t0

Wenders: Kings of the Road (1976)
link to one scene: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jNlVXDD3cF8
The whole film (part 1):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oPvmJ5bHbZA&feature=related
following (part 2) (part 3) etc.

Wenders: Alice in the Cities (1974)
Extract: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XHc2D3gVxhw&feature=related
The whole film (part 1):
http://www.youtube.com/user/ThePartyFears2#p/c/29B7BEE8F8CFD13F/0/m1uabGuh1Ck
following (part 2) (part 3) etc.

here is also link to a scanned version of the book which I found from scribd:
http://www.scribd.com/doc/32041767/Gilles-Deleuze-Cinema-1-The-Movemen-Image

best,

Kari

Wednesday, October 5, 2011

Dziga Vertov this week in KAVA

I´ll send here a link about Dziga Vertov
-screenings in KAVA this week (Thursday 5pm and Saturday 7pm in Orion,
Eerikinkatu 15; accompanied with live music by an interesting band Cleaning
Women
-- they make music with everyday devices used at home). The tickets cost 12 e / 10 e. The text behind the link is unfortunately only in Finnish but here below are two short english
texts about the films and comment on Deleuze´s thoughts on Vertov:

The Eleventh Year (Odinnadtsatyi)


Directed by Dziga Vertov.
USSR 1928, 35mm, b/w, silent, 52 min. at 20 fps.

Fired from Sovkino studio after A Sixth Part of the World, Vertov
(and his brother-cinematographer Mikhail Kaufman and wife-assistant director
Elizaveta Svilova) was soon hired by the All-Ukrainian Photo Cinema
Administration. The trio's first assignment was a documentary celebrating the
tenth anniversary of the October Revolution – more or less the same kind of
ode-inpictures as Stride, Soviet! and A Sixth Part of the World. But while the
political theme of The Eleventh Year may be orthodox and plain, its photography
and editing are daring and complex. In the eyes of a left-wing artist of the
twenties, ten years of Socialism was a radical social experiment, and as such,
deserved, nay, required to be presented in a radically experimental way.

Kino-Pravda No. 21 (Lenin Kino-Pravda)


Directed by Dziga Vertov.
USSR 1925, 35mm, silent, b/w, 29 min. at 20 fps.

Lenin Kino-Pravda is a special, longer-than-usual issue of Kino-Pravda in which
Vertov jumps with boldness and ease between newsreel and drawn animation to
illustrate Soviet Russia's way up under Lenin's leadership, the decline in
Lenin's health, and the year elapsed since his death. One notable sequence
representing Lenin's illness can be seen as a tour de force of Vertov and
Alexander Rodchenko's animated titling. In another, an animated caricature
shows the face of a capitalist changing from gloating to despair – as he sees
more and more people, crowds of them, join the Communist Party after Lenin's
death.

"In an argument openly indebted to Michelson’s pioneering article, Gilles Deleuze claims that Vertov’s “camera-eye,” at once steadfastly trained upon quotidian “unplayed” reality and extravagantly mobile, functions not as a surrogate “subjective” gaze of any kind but rather as something like the ongoing movement of the dialectic itself, an image of the concrete totality, wherein the endless fullness of the external universe is perpetually reconciled with never-static cognition. Needless to say, neither this fullness nor this kind of cognition can ever provide the form or content for any finite human perception; on the most visible level, the Vertovian theory of the interval [marks] a correlation of two images which are distant (and incommensurable from the viewpoint of our human perception). [...] [T]he cinema could not run in this way from one end of the universe to the other without having at its disposal an agent which was capable of making all the parts converge.

Most important [for Vertov] were all the (communist) transitions from an order [that] is being undone to an order [that] is being constructed. But between two systems or two orders, between two movements, there is necessarily the variable interval. In Vertov the interval of movement is perception, the glance, the eye. But the eye is not the too-immobile human eye; it is the eye of the camera, that is, an eye in matter, a perception such as it is in matter [...] The correlation between a non-human matter and a superhuman eye is the dialectic itself, because it is also the identity of a community of matter and a communism of man.

It would seem initially, as François Zourabichvili argues in his excellent recent discussion of Deleuze-on-Vertov, that Deleuze’s “agent of convergence” is not camera technology as such but the cumulative effect of an entire repertoire of montage techniques, from shooting and editing right down to the stringing-together of photograms along the film strip itself. It is the work of the editor-creator that allows One Sixth of the World, as Deleuze writes, to show “the interaction at a distance, within the USSR, between the most varied peoples, herds of animals, industries, cultures, exchanges of all kinds in the process of conquering time.”

Zourabichvili points out, however, that Vertov’s “convergence of parts” does not converge, in Deleuze’s interpretation, around anything like a “subjective” center—however virtual or constructed—or emanate from a single authorial point. From a technical standpoint, argues Zourabichvili, it is Vertov’s consistent use of false continuity sequences— ubiquitous from the Kino-Pravdas on—that “de-center” the images he offers:
[T]he image is decentered, subtracted from its subjective condition, since the eye is taken away from the voyeur or the camera operator without for all that being attributed to another operator, the spectator perceiving the falseness of the continuity. For false continuity has an objective effect: that of opening the image onto a point of view that is not its own, and insofar as it is not its own. Each image thus interacts with other images, instead of organizing itself according to the conditions of the centering of “natural”—that is, subjective— perception. And it is in this sense that Vertov rejoins [...] the material world of movement-images: he starts with necessarily centered images, which he submits to an operation of decentering (montage)." (John MacKay, Disorganized Noise: Enthusiasm and the Ear of the Collective)

Tuesday, October 4, 2011

CINEMA 1: Prefaces and Chapter 1

Yesterday, October 3, we had our second meeting, going through the prefaces and the first chapter of Gilles Deleuze's Cinema 1 - The Movement-Image. Thanks for the participants for interesting discussions - and especially to the presenter for preparing an overview of the contents.

You'll find my notes for the Chapter 1 below. Next meeting is on October 31, read Chapter 2 for that session.

Friday, September 23, 2011

Behind this link you can find the complete list of the films mentioned in Cinéma 1 and Cinéma 2
We recommend KAVA ((National audiovisual archive) program on the history of cinema in Orion, when going through the first chapters of Cinéma 1... films like

Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari (1920) by Robert Wiene (in KAVA 28.11, 7pm)
Sunrise: A Song of two Humans (1927) by F. Murnau (in KAVA 5.12, 7pm and 8.12, 7.15pm)

La Passion de Jeanne d´Arc (1928) by Carl Th. Dreyer (in KAVA 7.12, 5pm and 9.12, 7pm)

12.12 after the last reading group of this semester we can celebrate forthcoming Christmas by walking to Orion to see Tod Browning´s film Freaks (1932), which is one of the films mentioned in Cinéma 2. 

Tuesday, September 13, 2011

Liikeaikakone: lukupiiri Gilles Deleuzen elokuvafilosofiasta

Kuvataideakatemiassa järjestetään kaksi vuotta kestävä lukupiiri ranskalaisen filosofin Gilles Deleuzen liikkuvan kuvan ajattelusta. Tämä blogi toimii tiedotus- ja keskustelukanavana lukupiiriin liittyvissä asioissa. Lukupiiriä vetävät Kari Yli-Annala (Kokeellisten taiteiden nomadinen akatemia, http://nomadinenakatemia.blogspot.com) ja Janne Vanhanen (HY).

Deleuzen mukaan elokuvan historiassa tapahtuu liikkeen ja ajan suhdetta koskeva radikaali käänne. Tämä käänne näkyy niin klassisessa ja modernissa elokuvassa, nykyisessä liikkuvaa kuvaa sisältävässä taiteessa kuin liikkuvan kuvan uusissa muodoissakin. Deleuzen mukaan liikkuvan kuvan taide on ajattelua, joka toteutuu sille ominaisten materiaalien välityksellä. Tällainen kuvallinen ajattelu tuottaa uudenlaisia käsityksiä liikkeestä ja ajasta. Lukupiiri valottaa Deleuzen ajatusten merkitystä liikkuvan kuvan nykyisille ja tuleville tekijöille.



Lukupiirin aikana luemme Deleuzen kirjat Cinema 1 (1983) ja Cinema 2 (1985) luku luvulta. Oheislukemistona käytämme Ronald Boguen kirjaa Deleuze on Cinema (2003). Lukukauden 2011–2012 aikana luemme ensimmäisen, liike-kuvaa käsittelevän kirjan Cinema 1 ja lukukauden 2012–2013 aikana toisen, aika-kuvaan keskittyvän Cinema 2:n.

Ensimmäinen kokoontuminen pidetään maanantaina 19.9.2011 klo 16-19 Kuvataideakatemian tila-aikataiteiden osaston screeninghuoneessa (kulkuohjeet Akatemian ala-aulassa). Tuolloin käydään läpi lukupiirin käytäntöjä ja jaetaan alustusvuoroja. Jos et pääse ensimmäiselle kerralle, otathan yhteyttä lukupiirin vetäjiin osoitteessa liikeaikakone (at) gmail.com. HUOM! Tarvittaessa lukupiiri pidetään englanniksi.

Lukuvuoden 2011-2012 kokoontumiskerrat ovat:
  1. 19.9.2011 - järjestäytymiskerta
  2. 3.10.2011 - Cinema 1 - The Movement Image: esipuheet ja luku 1 (s. ix-xiv, 1-11)
  3. 31.10.2011 - luvut 2 ja 3 (s. 12-55)
  4. 12.12.2011 - luvut 4 ja 5 (s. 56-86)
  5. 16.1.2012 - luvut 6 ja 7 (s. 87-122)
  6. 13.2.2012 - luvut 8, 9 ja 10 (s. 123-177)
  7. 12.3.2012 - luvut 11 ja 12 (s. 178-215)
Sivut viittaavat kirjan englanninkieliseen käännökseen (London: The Athlone Press, 1986).

Tarkemmat suoritustiedot Kuvataideakatemian KOPSU-järjestelmästä.

Lisäksi järjestämme erillisiä screeningejä, joiden päivämäärät ja paikat ilmoitetaan kurssin alettua.