The online circulation of raw footage from live streams, cell phones, and police dash-cams has fueled much political dissent in recent years, from Occupy Wall Street to the protests surrounding the deaths of Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Sandra Bland, and others. This essay looks at experimental moving image works made in response to these contemporary dynamics of protest. It offers a comparative analysis of short digital videos by Jem Cohen and Alex Johnson, both of whom embrace the newsreel as a radical genre, making direct reference to earlier generations of filmmakers who did the same. Cohen’s Gravity Hill Newsreels (2011) offer a series of immersive observational studies of the Occupy demonstrations and Zuccotti Park encampment. In a more directly referential mode, Johnson’s Now! Again! (2014) appropriates Santiago Alvarez’s Now! (1965), a Cuban newsreel made by animating photographs depicting the civil rights struggle. Johnston juxtaposes this imagery with media coverage of protests in Ferguson, Missouri after the death of Michael Brown in August 2014. Fifty years ago, radical filmmakers of Alvarez’s generation urged newsreel audiences to recognize themselves as a social body, sharing a stake in the struggles depicted on screen. Today, the currency of “newsreel” as a political mode of experimental media is less certain. Although the experimental videos at issue here could be read as nostalgic for conditions of cinematic exhibition long since eclipsed by the dominance of social media, I argue instead that they engage the current mediation of political unrest in order to explore the indeterminacy of the social body to which it gives rise. Calling attention to rifts in the visual field and the seams that bind one historical moment to another, these works are guided by a desire to grasp the historicity of newsreel as a form enlisted to play a participatory role in social protest. In each case, newsreel provides new forms for responding to urgent events that cut against the temporality and visual codes of social media, opening up new space to share the world differently.
Carolee Schneemann is an American artist (born in Pennsylvania, United States) whose work interrogates vision as embodied experience. She has produced films made to be screened in conventional theatrical contexts, and has also innovated the use of filmic and video-graphic elements in collage environments and happening-like performances. Schneemann is known within the larger context of post-war art for incorporating her own body into works of performance such as Eye/Body (1963), Meat Joy (1964), Interior Scroll (1975), and Up To And Including Her Limits (1973–1976). Trained as a painter, she embraced film as a means of radically expanding the medium beyond the canvas. Her process is rooted in the dynamic relation between perception and visibility, particularly as it concerns the body’s legibility within a social matrix of power and difference. In her film Fuses (1967), she works against conventional cinematic codes of eroticism while exploring her sexual relationship with composer James Tenney. The work, a densely layered collage, records moments of lovemaking and everyday life over the course of a year. Schneemann emphasises the haptic and tactile qualities of vision by baking, stamping, and exposing the film to natural elements, drawing an analogy between the materiality of bodies on screen and the celluloid substance of the film itself.
This brief tribute to Carolee Schneemann examines her self-conception as an American artist, considering how it intersects with the disruptive performance of gender norms in Americana I Ching Apple Pie (1972). The work was originally staged for the camera in Schneemann's London kitchen in 1972, during a period in which the artist was living in voluntary exile. She published a performance score for the piece in her artist's book Parts of a Body House (1972) and reprinted it in Cezanne She Was a Great Painter (1974–75). This essay reads Americana I Ching Apple Pie as an unruly reenactment of the highly gendered role that the filmmaker Stan Brakhage cast Schneemann to play in his short experimental film Cat's Cradle (1959). It considers the way she understood home and homeland as two interlocking fronts in the ongoing battle over how gender is encoded and enacted. It concludes by briefly considering the reception of Schneemann's work by a younger generation of artists, including Sondra Perry, who staged an homage to Americana I Ching Apple Pie in 2015.
Stan VanDerBeek is an American artist (b. New York City, US) who is widely regarded as a pioneer and visionary in the field of experimental media. VanDerBeek coined a number of indispensable terms that describe the myriad paths he pursued as an innovator of new media forms, including ‘underground cinema’, ‘expanded cinema’, and possibly ‘social media’, using the phrase as early as 1974. His first cut-out animations and collage films were produced in the late 1950s after he picked up a Bolex camera at Black Mountain College. As more advanced technologies became available, he embraced the possibilities opened up by video processing and early computer graphics. VanDerBeek not only focused on new modes of image production, he also imagined alternatives to conventional forms of viewing and distributing moving images, devising a proposal for a system of satellite-linked ‘movie-dromes’ (dome-shaped theatres built for multi-channel immersive screenings), media labs, and image archives that he called a Culture Intercom. VanDerBeek envisioned a future in which increased access to the tools of multimedia production would enable networked exchange across the globe. His prolific output and creative re-appropriation of the flotsam and jetsam of mass culture anticipated the antic eclecticism of a user-generated social media culture yet to come.
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