Kern first addresses time with two opposing ideas. Isaac Newton states that absolute time, “flows equally without relation to anything external” (21), whereas Immanuel Kant defines time as a subjective form of all experiences. It was not until the late nineteenth century that the homogeneity of time was even considered questionable. Many novelists, psychologists, physicists and sociologist brought about a debate over homogeneous versus heterogeneous time. Kafka uses his novel to address his personal feelings toward the conflict time produces when he says, “The inner one rushes on in a devilish or demonic way while the outer one goes, falteringly, its accustomed pace” (24). Taking a scientific approach, Einstein developed the special theory of relativity stating that time depends on the perspective of “relative motion between an observer and the thing observed” (25). Sociologists such as Durkheim believe time is dependent upon social agendas and groupings. They believe there is a social relativity of time that is affected by recurring events such as feasts and ceremonies. Turning to a psychiatrist’s opinion of time in relation to mental illnesses, Karl Jasper provides examples from two cases in which one patient experienced time as interminable, while another patient experienced a lifetime of inescapable anxiety due to her distorted sense of time.
Science, film and art all contribute to the argument for the atomistic nature of time. Newton’s calculus envisions time as a, “sum of infinitesimally small but discrete units” (26). In film, chronophotography is used to piece together pictures taken simultaneously to create a finished product of, for example, a horse galloping. Also photodynamist is used in film by leaving the lens open longer to capture the blurred vision of the in-between movements. Both these forms of film support time as having an atomistic nature. Many use art as an argument for atomistic time, saying that in art, “everything was fixed in a single moment” (27). Artists such as Paul Cezanne, Juan Gris and Salvador Dali painted obscured and sometimes defaced clocks to acknowledge their inability to depict an image over time. Opposing atomistic nature, the theory that time is flux is inspired by the theory that human consciousness is a stream. William James describing the mind as “pailfuls” of rain first suggested the theory in an essay. He argues that, “each mental event is linked with those before and after it” (28). Henri Bergson attempts to compare movement with time stating both are an indivisible flux. He believes atomism opposes time’s true nature saying, “we cannot consider movement as a sum of stoppages nor time as a sum of temporal atoms without distorting their essentially fluid nature” (29). Edouard Dujardin’s novel addresses temporal fluidity with a monologue displaying the, “mixture of thought and perception, and its unpredictable jumps in space and time” (30). The monologue depicts a moment of thought flowing from one subject to another free of breaks or pauses. This monologue exemplifies the reality of thoughts in time, showing the fluent nature these thoughts entail.
The forward movement of time, clocks and days tell us by instinct that time is irreversible. New technologies such as electric lights and cinemas sparked a dispute on the reversible nature of time. The ability to run film backwards was introduced by Louis Lumiere, and caused many to question their certainty about the irreversibility of time. Novelist such as James Joyce have experimented with time in their novels by using, for example, forty pages to describe a few seconds of thought. Psychologists and sociologists use dreams, psychoses and magic to argue for the reversibility of time, saying they neglect chronological relations. Freud relates his theories on the reversibility of time by arguing that, “unconscious mental processes are ‘timeless,’ for the passage of time does not change them in any way and the idea of time cannot be applied to them” (31). All arguments presented in Walter Kern’s debate over time are compelling and display strong opinions in regards to the controversy of time.
Kern concludes his work on time by distinguishing between the reality of private time as opposed to that of public time. He pronounces public time as human interrelated, and distinguishes this time by its homogeneity and irreversible nature. In opposition to public time, Kern describes private time as subject to solely the individual who is consumed by it.
Friday, January 26, 2007
Wednesday, January 24, 2007
Reading Response Assignments
Reading Response Assignments
The due dates below mean posted on the blog by 5pm that day.
You only need to do a reading response once.
You will need to post comments to someone else’s reading response at least two different times over the semester. But, posting quality comments more than twice will give you extra points for participation.
Kern: Nature of Time
Joanna B. and Tessa B.
Date Discussed in Class: 1/29
Response Due by: 1/26
Kern: The Present
Chloe K. and Cathy H.
Date Discussed in Class: 1/ 31
Response Due by: 1/30
Solnit: River of Shadows
Date Discussed in Class: 2/5
Response Due by: 2/2
Braun: Marey, Art, and Modernism
Date Discussed in Class: 2/7
Response Due by: 2/6
Bergson: Creative Evolution
Date Discussed in Class: 2/12
Response Due by: 2/9
Bergson: Creative Evolution
Date Discussed in Class: 2/14
Response Due by: 2/13
Bragaglia: Futurist Photodynamism
Date Discussed in Class: 2/21
Response Due by: 2/19
Doanne: Emergence of Cinematic Time
Date Discussed in Class: 2/28
Response Due by: 2/26
Videos: Boomerang and Centers
Date Discussed in Class: 3/7
Response Due by: 3/6
Deleuze
Date Discussed in Class: 3/14
Response Due by: 3/13
Deleuze
Date Discussed in Class: 3/19
Response Due by: 3/16
Virilio: The Perspective of Real Time
Date Discussed in Class: 4/2
Response Due by: 3/30
Sobchack: Carnal Thoughts
Date Discussed in Class: 4/9
Response Due by: 4/6
TBA on Digital Media
Date Discussed in Class: 4/16
Response Due by: 4/13
TALKS, FILMS & EVENTS
You are required to attend the 4/22 dance performance on campus as well as TWO other events. One must be a film, the other can be a film or lecture. Post a response and evaluation for both the events you choose to attend. Please start a new post if you are the first to respond to an event. Then other people who also attended can post their responses as comments to the initial response. The responses should be similar to reading responses, describing the film a bit for those who did not see it but focusing on your ideas rather than on summarizing, doing some thinking about relationship of the event to themes in the course.
More events may be added to this list as they are announced. You may attend up to three extra events for extra credit (extra events 10pts each, required events 25 each except April 22 event counts double for 50).
I've put stars ** by the events I particularly recommend.
Websites for More info about locations, tickets, etc:
Yerba Buena http://www.ybca.org/
Berkeley Art, Technology, Culture Colloquium http://atc.berkeley.edu/
Berkeley’s Pacific Film Archive www.bampfa.berkeley.edu/
California College for the Arts http://www.cca.edu/calendar/
**Tuesday February 27 PFA
7:30 Pine Flat
Sharon Lockhart (U.S., 2005, 138 mins)
[guest icon] Sharon Lockhart in Person
The long static shot has been used to beautiful, often demanding, ends by filmmakers as diverse as the Lumière Brothers, Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, Andy Warhol, and James Benning. For Pine Flat, Sharon Lockhart, who is also a photographer, collaborated with a group of youths living in a small town in the Sierra foothills. As they worked together over three years, an intimacy developed, and the kids shared the places they valued and the rhythms of their everyday life. Slowly a film emerged: a girl reading alone, a boy asleep outside, some kids playing in the river, others traipsing among the trees are depicted in twelve ten-minute shots. While Pine Flat provides a portrait of rural life and landscape, the pregnant shots also contain the promise of narrative. Tender and endearing, the film gives the young people unusually extended time on the screen, and allows us to contemplate how we experience the passing of time.
Sunday, March 4 at 8:30pm
Film Art Phenomena: Works by Nicky Hamlyn, Nicky Hamlyn In Person.
701 Mission Street (corner of Third) Tickets: 415-978-ARTS
Composing his work “in camera,” the films of Nicky Hamlyn incorporate each shooting’s unique character, producing open-ended outcomes while questioning matter and perception. Quoting from his Film Art Phenomena (published 2003): “I see my films as arising out of an encounter between a situation or location or subject, and a camera/production strategy. I have been inspired partly by Robert Morris’ reading of Jackson Pollock’s paintings as resulting from the interactions of horizontal canvas, paint viscosity, stick, gravity, arm mechanics. Morris’ behavioristic take on Pollock redeems it from an expressionistic reading.” Screening: Minutiae, Hole, Not Resting, Pistrino, Water, Matrix, Penumbra, Object Studies, and Transit of Venus, which records two consecutive passes of Venus across the sun. (Caroline Savage)
**Monday March 12 7:30 Kaja Silverman (lecture)
Art Technology Culture Colloquium, on campus (see website for location)
Berkeley Rhetoric and Film professor Kaja Silverman delivers a lecture on the time-based art of James Coleman, particularly a digital video installation he made based on da Vinci’s painting The Last Supper.
Wednesday, March 14 at 8:30pm
Live Cinema Lab: viDEO savant, viDEO sAVant and Friends In Person
California College of the Arts: 1111 Eighth Street (near Sixteenth)
“What happens when you take cinema out of the movie theater, wrench the reel off the projector and start editing the images and sound live, in front of the audience? LIVE CINEMA!” (Holly Willis, New Digital Cinema: Reinventing the Moving Image) The mysterious multi-media ensemble viDEO sAVant has travelled the world presenting its own brand of live improvisational cinema since 1990. This will be their first Bay Area appearance. This dynamic performance will feature a synthesis of sound and moving images with elements produced and mixed on the spot in a process of live interaction between projectionist and musician, yielding fluid results, shifting and varied, never the same twice. Participants include Charles Woodman on images, Margaret Schedel on cello and electronics, and Yoni Wolf (of Anticon’s Why?) on vocals, samples and assorted sound makers. (Steve Polta)
Thursday March 15 PFA
7:30 L’avventura, Michelangelo Antonioni (Italy, 1960, 140 mins)
While exploring a volcanic island on a yachting expedition, a troubled young woman named Anna disappears, leaving her lover Sandro (Gabriele Ferzetti) and close friend Claudia (Monica Vitti) to search in vain, and fall in love. L’avventura unfolds against Anna’s very palpable absence, a love story in a void. As always, landscape is the screen onto which Antonioni projects human emotions. Anna’s pain is articulated in the parched suburb from which she came, and in the rocky island on which her cohorts wander, not realizing it is they who are lost. (Anna may have escaped.) Stunning love scenes prepare us for those in The Passenger fifteen years later: love as a standoff, a sizing-up as in a bullfight, played out-of-doors. L’avventura is rich in Antonioni’s visual architecture, wicked humor, and, finally, youth: a shot of Vitti, hair blowing in the wind while village bells answer one another, may be unmatched in these films for its spirit of hope.
Thursday March 22 PFA
7:30 The Girl Who Leapt Through Time, Mamoru Hosoda (Japan, 2006)
(Toki wo kakeru shoujo). One of the most acclaimed anime features in recent years, The Girl Who Leapt Through Time is the first animated adaptation of a famous 1965 young adult novel that has spawned countless films and television programs through the years. Makoto is a vivacious—if klutzy—seventeen-year-old tomboy whose carefree summer days are literally thrown for a loop when she discovers a mysterious ability to leap back through time. Her trivial temporal maneuvers, like undoing little blunders or finding out exam questions in advance, soon lead to complicated wrinkles that have an inevitable impact on those around her, especially when her best friend confesses his love for her. Hosoda is a remarkable new talent who, together with art director Nizou Yamamoto (Princess Mononoke) and character designer Yoshiyuki Sadamoto (Neon Genesis Evangelion), has crafted a magical, affecting film full of humor, warmth, and the bittersweet pangs of first love.
Tuesday, March 27
7pm CCA, SF Rebecca Solnit (author of the Muybridge reading)
Graduate Studies Lecture Series
Timken Lecture Hall, San Francisco campus Info: 415.703.9505
Rebecca Solnit is a writer, art critic, curator, political activist, and educator. She won wide acclaim for her 1994 book Savage Dreams: A Journey into the Landscape Wars of the American West.
Another work, Hollow City: The Siege of San Francisco and the Crisis of American Urbanism (2000), combines text by Solnit with photo essays by Susan Schwartzenberg and traces the devastation attending San Francisco's dot-com-fueled gentrification: skyrocketing residential and commercial rents that have driven out artists, activists, and the poor; the homogenization of the city's appearance, industries, and population; and the decay of public life and erasure of sites of civic memory. Solnit is also the author of River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West (2003).
**Friday March 30 PFA
7:00 Blow-Up, Michelangelo Antonioni (U.K., 1966, 110 mins)
For his first English-language film, Antonioni set a metaphysical mystery in the world of fashion, at a time when the director’s metaphysics had itself become a fad; the movie and its meaning were the talk of the swingingest parties of 1966. Photographer David Hemmings snaps images of Vanessa Redgrave and an older man apparently trysting in a London park; later, analyzing the eyelines, scrutinizing the grain, he believes he sees evidence of murder, but finds that the harder you look, the less you know. The same interpretive limits apply to the viewing of Blow-Up: is this portrayal of youth culture, with its pot parties and Yardbirds shows, its rehearsed rebellion and limitless cool, affectionate—perhaps parodic—or a lament over the inscrutable emptiness of hip? Is it really about philosophical depths, or fascinating surfaces? Like its closing game of mime-tennis, the film may be daring us to focus on something that doesn’t exist. Keep your eye on the ball.—Juliet Clark
**Wednesday April 4
7:30 The Medium Is, works by Lynda Benglis, Peter Campus, Hermine Freed, Dan Graham, Richard Serra
With its instantaneous feedback and image manipulation, video technology creates a nowness of perception along with the distraction offered by any good spectacle. In Now, Lynda Benglis’s first color tape, the eponymous word is repeated, questioning the currency and the command. Then, over-driving the color image, Benglis collapses the notion of the medium as neutral. Wearing headphones in Richard Serra’s Boomerang, Nancy Holt repeats phrases that are heard, then heard again in delay. The effect is of feedback effectively devouring its own message. Using a split screen in Two Faces, Hermine Freed faces herself, caressing her mirrored image. Suspended between images, Freed exists as a doubled person, alienated and adrift. Recorded in San Francisco, Dan Graham’s Performer/Audience/Mirror is a study of mediated relations, a mirror standing in for the TV as the artist describes the audience before him. The circularity of the exchange captures the phenomenology of feedback. In Peter Campus’s seminal tape Three Transitions, inherent properties of the medium become potent metaphors for the depiction of internal states and the breach between reality and illusion.—Steve Seid
Now (Lynda Benglis, 1973, 12 mins, Color, Mini-DV, From VDB). Boomerang (Richard Serra, 1974, 10.5 mins, B&W, DVD, From The Museum of Modern Art, New York). Two Faces (Hermine Freed, 1972, 8 mins, B&W, Mini-DV, From VDB). Performer/Audience/Mirror (Dan Graham, 1975, 23 mins, B&W, DVD, From EAI). Three Transitions (Peter Campus, 1973, 5 mins, Color, Mini-DV, From EAI).
• (Total running time: 59 mins, U.S.)
Thursday April 5, Friday April 6 PFA (counts as one event)
Thurs April 5 7:30 Tropical Malady, Apichatpong Weerasethakul (Thailand/France, 2004, 118 mins)
Fri April 6 7:00 Tropical Malady: Shot-by-Shot, Discussion with Apichatpong Weerasethakul
(Sud pralad). The agreeably irrational Tropical Malady melds folk fable with euphoric modern moviemaking, effortlessly traversing the mundane and the miraculous. In this pastoral with a dark pulse, two beguiling stories unfold: the first a playful romance between a handsome soldier, Keng, and Tong, a country boy; the second, a nocturnal journey into a realm of shape-shifting creatures. While Keng and Tong’s blissful courtship is told through moody, tender tableaux, the seeds of a lurking apprehension are being quietly sown—a dead body is found at the edge of the jungle, cows are found slaughtered in the fields. The villagers tell of a spirit that inhabits the body of a wandering tiger. As the second story emerges, Tropical Malady leaves behind the matter-of-fact for the mystical, a lush jungle peopled by talking monkeys and tricksters in human form. And who is that stalking the dread tiger? Is it soldier Keng? In this numinous tropic, we relish the malady of not necessarily knowing. Winner, Prix du Jury, Cannes 2004.
Friday April 13 PFA
8:50 The Passenger
Michelangelo Antonioni (Italy/France/Spain, 1975, 123 mins)
A penetrating political thriller, The Passenger, set in the Sahara, is also a desert film, and it resembles the much earlier L’avventura—a desert island film—with its horizontal vistas and its theme of absence. Jack Nicholson portrays a London journalist named Locke who, sent to cover a rebellion in North Africa, assumes the identity of a man, Robertson, who has died in the next hotel room. Locke is running away from being a journalist—from the codes that replace knowing, the images that replace seeing. He’s much like Monica Vitti’s Vittoria in L’eclisse in his desire for escape, for a mask. But, embracing Robertson’s globetrotting, increasingly mysterious persona, he finds himself pursuing not the man’s life, but his death. Even the camera seems to have a will toward another world: it distractedly tracks a passing camel in the desert, an anachronistic horse-drawn carriage in Munich. The film’s famous final seven-minute zoom literally draws out the pain of seeing in focus.
(REQUIRED) Sunday April 22, 2pm Zellerbach theater, Berkeley Dance Project
Directed by Lisa Wymore
Featuring The Reception, a cross-disciplinary performance piece utilizing dance choreography and tele-immersion technology to explore a re-visioning of cyber culture and corporeal presence. Also featuring new choreographic works by Tammy Cheney, Robert Moses, Carol Murota, and Ellis Wood. The Reception: Co-directed by Lisa Wymore (TDPS) and Ruzena Bajcsy (CITRIS). *The April 22 performance will be followed by a post-performance discussion: Being Here: Presence/Remote Presence within Live and Media Based Performance by N. Katherine Hayles.
The Resonance Project is a team of choreographers, dancers, computer engineers, and visual and sound artists who are investigating concepts of presence/remote presence and corporeal and code interactivity within live and media based performance. Unique to the project is the use of a "performance as research" model, within which scientists and artists collaborate to explore a re-visioning of cyber culture and corporeal presence.
You do not need to buy a ticket for this performance, meet in front of the theater before the show.
**Monday April 23 Doug Aitken 7:30
Art Technology Culture Colloquia, on campus (see website for location)
Internationally known Video and Digital artist Doug Aitken talks about his work
Wednesday May 2
3:00 Goodbye, Dragon Inn
Tsai Ming-liang (Taiwan, 2003, 82 mins)
Lecture by Marilyn Fabe
(Bu jian bu san). In Goodbye, Dragon Inn, Tsai Ming-liang, director of Vive l'Amour (1994) and What Time Is It There? (2001), created the sharpest combination yet of his major themes—rain, missed connections, and the poetry of loneliness—juxtaposed this time against something completely unexpected: a martial arts film. It's a rainy night in Taipei, and the crumbling neighborhood kino-barn is showing King Hu's swordplay classic Dragon Inn. Most of the audience appears to be elsewhere, offscreen dreamers haltingly putting their thoughts of love into very slow motion while the onscreen kinetic frenzies keep blazing on like helpful cues. Visualizing the fantasies of anyone who's ever worked in a movie theater, or just adored being in one, Goodbye, Dragon Inn underscores the essence of why people watch films: to be reminded of what it is to live, and what it means to dream.
More events may be added to this list as they are announced. You may attend up to three extra events for extra credit (extra events 10pts each, required events 25 each except April 22 event counts double for 50).
I've put stars ** by the events I particularly recommend.
Websites for More info about locations, tickets, etc:
Yerba Buena http://www.ybca.org/
Berkeley Art, Technology, Culture Colloquium http://atc.berkeley.edu/
Berkeley’s Pacific Film Archive www.bampfa.berkeley.edu/
California College for the Arts http://www.cca.edu/calendar/
**Tuesday February 27 PFA
7:30 Pine Flat
Sharon Lockhart (U.S., 2005, 138 mins)
[guest icon] Sharon Lockhart in Person
The long static shot has been used to beautiful, often demanding, ends by filmmakers as diverse as the Lumière Brothers, Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, Andy Warhol, and James Benning. For Pine Flat, Sharon Lockhart, who is also a photographer, collaborated with a group of youths living in a small town in the Sierra foothills. As they worked together over three years, an intimacy developed, and the kids shared the places they valued and the rhythms of their everyday life. Slowly a film emerged: a girl reading alone, a boy asleep outside, some kids playing in the river, others traipsing among the trees are depicted in twelve ten-minute shots. While Pine Flat provides a portrait of rural life and landscape, the pregnant shots also contain the promise of narrative. Tender and endearing, the film gives the young people unusually extended time on the screen, and allows us to contemplate how we experience the passing of time.
Sunday, March 4 at 8:30pm
Film Art Phenomena: Works by Nicky Hamlyn, Nicky Hamlyn In Person.
701 Mission Street (corner of Third) Tickets: 415-978-ARTS
Composing his work “in camera,” the films of Nicky Hamlyn incorporate each shooting’s unique character, producing open-ended outcomes while questioning matter and perception. Quoting from his Film Art Phenomena (published 2003): “I see my films as arising out of an encounter between a situation or location or subject, and a camera/production strategy. I have been inspired partly by Robert Morris’ reading of Jackson Pollock’s paintings as resulting from the interactions of horizontal canvas, paint viscosity, stick, gravity, arm mechanics. Morris’ behavioristic take on Pollock redeems it from an expressionistic reading.” Screening: Minutiae, Hole, Not Resting, Pistrino, Water, Matrix, Penumbra, Object Studies, and Transit of Venus, which records two consecutive passes of Venus across the sun. (Caroline Savage)
**Monday March 12 7:30 Kaja Silverman (lecture)
Art Technology Culture Colloquium, on campus (see website for location)
Berkeley Rhetoric and Film professor Kaja Silverman delivers a lecture on the time-based art of James Coleman, particularly a digital video installation he made based on da Vinci’s painting The Last Supper.
Wednesday, March 14 at 8:30pm
Live Cinema Lab: viDEO savant, viDEO sAVant and Friends In Person
California College of the Arts: 1111 Eighth Street (near Sixteenth)
“What happens when you take cinema out of the movie theater, wrench the reel off the projector and start editing the images and sound live, in front of the audience? LIVE CINEMA!” (Holly Willis, New Digital Cinema: Reinventing the Moving Image) The mysterious multi-media ensemble viDEO sAVant has travelled the world presenting its own brand of live improvisational cinema since 1990. This will be their first Bay Area appearance. This dynamic performance will feature a synthesis of sound and moving images with elements produced and mixed on the spot in a process of live interaction between projectionist and musician, yielding fluid results, shifting and varied, never the same twice. Participants include Charles Woodman on images, Margaret Schedel on cello and electronics, and Yoni Wolf (of Anticon’s Why?) on vocals, samples and assorted sound makers. (Steve Polta)
Thursday March 15 PFA
7:30 L’avventura, Michelangelo Antonioni (Italy, 1960, 140 mins)
While exploring a volcanic island on a yachting expedition, a troubled young woman named Anna disappears, leaving her lover Sandro (Gabriele Ferzetti) and close friend Claudia (Monica Vitti) to search in vain, and fall in love. L’avventura unfolds against Anna’s very palpable absence, a love story in a void. As always, landscape is the screen onto which Antonioni projects human emotions. Anna’s pain is articulated in the parched suburb from which she came, and in the rocky island on which her cohorts wander, not realizing it is they who are lost. (Anna may have escaped.) Stunning love scenes prepare us for those in The Passenger fifteen years later: love as a standoff, a sizing-up as in a bullfight, played out-of-doors. L’avventura is rich in Antonioni’s visual architecture, wicked humor, and, finally, youth: a shot of Vitti, hair blowing in the wind while village bells answer one another, may be unmatched in these films for its spirit of hope.
Thursday March 22 PFA
7:30 The Girl Who Leapt Through Time, Mamoru Hosoda (Japan, 2006)
(Toki wo kakeru shoujo). One of the most acclaimed anime features in recent years, The Girl Who Leapt Through Time is the first animated adaptation of a famous 1965 young adult novel that has spawned countless films and television programs through the years. Makoto is a vivacious—if klutzy—seventeen-year-old tomboy whose carefree summer days are literally thrown for a loop when she discovers a mysterious ability to leap back through time. Her trivial temporal maneuvers, like undoing little blunders or finding out exam questions in advance, soon lead to complicated wrinkles that have an inevitable impact on those around her, especially when her best friend confesses his love for her. Hosoda is a remarkable new talent who, together with art director Nizou Yamamoto (Princess Mononoke) and character designer Yoshiyuki Sadamoto (Neon Genesis Evangelion), has crafted a magical, affecting film full of humor, warmth, and the bittersweet pangs of first love.
Tuesday, March 27
7pm CCA, SF Rebecca Solnit (author of the Muybridge reading)
Graduate Studies Lecture Series
Timken Lecture Hall, San Francisco campus Info: 415.703.9505
Rebecca Solnit is a writer, art critic, curator, political activist, and educator. She won wide acclaim for her 1994 book Savage Dreams: A Journey into the Landscape Wars of the American West.
Another work, Hollow City: The Siege of San Francisco and the Crisis of American Urbanism (2000), combines text by Solnit with photo essays by Susan Schwartzenberg and traces the devastation attending San Francisco's dot-com-fueled gentrification: skyrocketing residential and commercial rents that have driven out artists, activists, and the poor; the homogenization of the city's appearance, industries, and population; and the decay of public life and erasure of sites of civic memory. Solnit is also the author of River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West (2003).
**Friday March 30 PFA
7:00 Blow-Up, Michelangelo Antonioni (U.K., 1966, 110 mins)
For his first English-language film, Antonioni set a metaphysical mystery in the world of fashion, at a time when the director’s metaphysics had itself become a fad; the movie and its meaning were the talk of the swingingest parties of 1966. Photographer David Hemmings snaps images of Vanessa Redgrave and an older man apparently trysting in a London park; later, analyzing the eyelines, scrutinizing the grain, he believes he sees evidence of murder, but finds that the harder you look, the less you know. The same interpretive limits apply to the viewing of Blow-Up: is this portrayal of youth culture, with its pot parties and Yardbirds shows, its rehearsed rebellion and limitless cool, affectionate—perhaps parodic—or a lament over the inscrutable emptiness of hip? Is it really about philosophical depths, or fascinating surfaces? Like its closing game of mime-tennis, the film may be daring us to focus on something that doesn’t exist. Keep your eye on the ball.—Juliet Clark
**Wednesday April 4
7:30 The Medium Is, works by Lynda Benglis, Peter Campus, Hermine Freed, Dan Graham, Richard Serra
With its instantaneous feedback and image manipulation, video technology creates a nowness of perception along with the distraction offered by any good spectacle. In Now, Lynda Benglis’s first color tape, the eponymous word is repeated, questioning the currency and the command. Then, over-driving the color image, Benglis collapses the notion of the medium as neutral. Wearing headphones in Richard Serra’s Boomerang, Nancy Holt repeats phrases that are heard, then heard again in delay. The effect is of feedback effectively devouring its own message. Using a split screen in Two Faces, Hermine Freed faces herself, caressing her mirrored image. Suspended between images, Freed exists as a doubled person, alienated and adrift. Recorded in San Francisco, Dan Graham’s Performer/Audience/Mirror is a study of mediated relations, a mirror standing in for the TV as the artist describes the audience before him. The circularity of the exchange captures the phenomenology of feedback. In Peter Campus’s seminal tape Three Transitions, inherent properties of the medium become potent metaphors for the depiction of internal states and the breach between reality and illusion.—Steve Seid
Now (Lynda Benglis, 1973, 12 mins, Color, Mini-DV, From VDB). Boomerang (Richard Serra, 1974, 10.5 mins, B&W, DVD, From The Museum of Modern Art, New York). Two Faces (Hermine Freed, 1972, 8 mins, B&W, Mini-DV, From VDB). Performer/Audience/Mirror (Dan Graham, 1975, 23 mins, B&W, DVD, From EAI). Three Transitions (Peter Campus, 1973, 5 mins, Color, Mini-DV, From EAI).
• (Total running time: 59 mins, U.S.)
Thursday April 5, Friday April 6 PFA (counts as one event)
Thurs April 5 7:30 Tropical Malady, Apichatpong Weerasethakul (Thailand/France, 2004, 118 mins)
Fri April 6 7:00 Tropical Malady: Shot-by-Shot, Discussion with Apichatpong Weerasethakul
(Sud pralad). The agreeably irrational Tropical Malady melds folk fable with euphoric modern moviemaking, effortlessly traversing the mundane and the miraculous. In this pastoral with a dark pulse, two beguiling stories unfold: the first a playful romance between a handsome soldier, Keng, and Tong, a country boy; the second, a nocturnal journey into a realm of shape-shifting creatures. While Keng and Tong’s blissful courtship is told through moody, tender tableaux, the seeds of a lurking apprehension are being quietly sown—a dead body is found at the edge of the jungle, cows are found slaughtered in the fields. The villagers tell of a spirit that inhabits the body of a wandering tiger. As the second story emerges, Tropical Malady leaves behind the matter-of-fact for the mystical, a lush jungle peopled by talking monkeys and tricksters in human form. And who is that stalking the dread tiger? Is it soldier Keng? In this numinous tropic, we relish the malady of not necessarily knowing. Winner, Prix du Jury, Cannes 2004.
Friday April 13 PFA
8:50 The Passenger
Michelangelo Antonioni (Italy/France/Spain, 1975, 123 mins)
A penetrating political thriller, The Passenger, set in the Sahara, is also a desert film, and it resembles the much earlier L’avventura—a desert island film—with its horizontal vistas and its theme of absence. Jack Nicholson portrays a London journalist named Locke who, sent to cover a rebellion in North Africa, assumes the identity of a man, Robertson, who has died in the next hotel room. Locke is running away from being a journalist—from the codes that replace knowing, the images that replace seeing. He’s much like Monica Vitti’s Vittoria in L’eclisse in his desire for escape, for a mask. But, embracing Robertson’s globetrotting, increasingly mysterious persona, he finds himself pursuing not the man’s life, but his death. Even the camera seems to have a will toward another world: it distractedly tracks a passing camel in the desert, an anachronistic horse-drawn carriage in Munich. The film’s famous final seven-minute zoom literally draws out the pain of seeing in focus.
(REQUIRED) Sunday April 22, 2pm Zellerbach theater, Berkeley Dance Project
Directed by Lisa Wymore
Featuring The Reception, a cross-disciplinary performance piece utilizing dance choreography and tele-immersion technology to explore a re-visioning of cyber culture and corporeal presence. Also featuring new choreographic works by Tammy Cheney, Robert Moses, Carol Murota, and Ellis Wood. The Reception: Co-directed by Lisa Wymore (TDPS) and Ruzena Bajcsy (CITRIS). *The April 22 performance will be followed by a post-performance discussion: Being Here: Presence/Remote Presence within Live and Media Based Performance by N. Katherine Hayles.
The Resonance Project is a team of choreographers, dancers, computer engineers, and visual and sound artists who are investigating concepts of presence/remote presence and corporeal and code interactivity within live and media based performance. Unique to the project is the use of a "performance as research" model, within which scientists and artists collaborate to explore a re-visioning of cyber culture and corporeal presence.
You do not need to buy a ticket for this performance, meet in front of the theater before the show.
**Monday April 23 Doug Aitken 7:30
Art Technology Culture Colloquia, on campus (see website for location)
Internationally known Video and Digital artist Doug Aitken talks about his work
Wednesday May 2
3:00 Goodbye, Dragon Inn
Tsai Ming-liang (Taiwan, 2003, 82 mins)
Lecture by Marilyn Fabe
(Bu jian bu san). In Goodbye, Dragon Inn, Tsai Ming-liang, director of Vive l'Amour (1994) and What Time Is It There? (2001), created the sharpest combination yet of his major themes—rain, missed connections, and the poetry of loneliness—juxtaposed this time against something completely unexpected: a martial arts film. It's a rainy night in Taipei, and the crumbling neighborhood kino-barn is showing King Hu's swordplay classic Dragon Inn. Most of the audience appears to be elsewhere, offscreen dreamers haltingly putting their thoughts of love into very slow motion while the onscreen kinetic frenzies keep blazing on like helpful cues. Visualizing the fantasies of anyone who's ever worked in a movie theater, or just adored being in one, Goodbye, Dragon Inn underscores the essence of why people watch films: to be reminded of what it is to live, and what it means to dream.
Tuesday, January 23, 2007
(Sample) Reading Response for Lessing, Laocoon
from Course Policies handout:
"You will be required, one time over the course, to post a reading response to the blog. This should consist of three or four numbered paragraphs which each reference a specific passage in the text and focus on that passage in order to make an argument or offer an insightful interpretation. You will also be required, at least twice, to respond to other students’ posts on the blog. Append your comments to their reading response; refer to the numbered paragraph you are commenting on and the relevant passage in the text; go back to the text yourself and offer an elaboration or counterargument. Your comments should not be as much about ‘liking’ or ‘disliking’ the student’s response but either lending further support for their argument or offering an alternative reading of the same material. Always sign your full name to your blog posts since your login may not be recognizable."
Each numbered paragraph of your reading response should offer an interpretation of or argument about something specific in the text. You do not need to summarize the reading or cover all the reading in your response. Your responses should be about your own ideas rather than outlining the material.
(Sample) Reading Response by Brooke Belisle
on Lessing, selections from Laocoon (p.3 in reader)
1. Lessing differentiates poetry and painting based on an assumption that each medium is best at representing whatever corresponds to its specific mode of presentation. Since poems are constituted by “sounds in time” and paintings are constituted by figures in space, Lessing claims that “succession in time is the province of the poet, co-existence in space that of the artist.” (3) As his argument develops, however, he seems to describe a kind of “succession in time” that belongs to painting. In the section labeled “2”, he claims that when we perceive an object in space, “first we observe its separate parts, then the union of these parts, and finally the whole.” (3) If painting presents objects in space, then this argument introduces a kind of time into painting: ‘wholes’ are not instantaneously perceived but built-up from a process of perceiving parts and relationships between parts. In the first paragraph of section 2 he refers to “parts” but in the second paragraph he switches to the word “details” as if it is interchangeable with “parts.” If details are also considered “parts” then even the most simple, singular, or undifferentiated object—one which seemed not to have ‘parts’—would be multiple just in the sense of having details. I wonder if the way the whole painting works as a ‘pregnant moment’ could also be a way of thinking about how each detail in a painting works like a mini pregnant-moment, offering potential connections with everything else in the painting.
(I only wrote one numbered paragraph, but you will need to write three or four--though they don't have to be quite as long as mine. The Lessing reading was only one page (page 3), but for other readings you need to include page numbers. To avoid confusion, refer to the page number in the READER rather than the page of the photocopied text.)
"You will be required, one time over the course, to post a reading response to the blog. This should consist of three or four numbered paragraphs which each reference a specific passage in the text and focus on that passage in order to make an argument or offer an insightful interpretation. You will also be required, at least twice, to respond to other students’ posts on the blog. Append your comments to their reading response; refer to the numbered paragraph you are commenting on and the relevant passage in the text; go back to the text yourself and offer an elaboration or counterargument. Your comments should not be as much about ‘liking’ or ‘disliking’ the student’s response but either lending further support for their argument or offering an alternative reading of the same material. Always sign your full name to your blog posts since your login may not be recognizable."
Each numbered paragraph of your reading response should offer an interpretation of or argument about something specific in the text. You do not need to summarize the reading or cover all the reading in your response. Your responses should be about your own ideas rather than outlining the material.
(Sample) Reading Response by Brooke Belisle
on Lessing, selections from Laocoon (p.3 in reader)
1. Lessing differentiates poetry and painting based on an assumption that each medium is best at representing whatever corresponds to its specific mode of presentation. Since poems are constituted by “sounds in time” and paintings are constituted by figures in space, Lessing claims that “succession in time is the province of the poet, co-existence in space that of the artist.” (3) As his argument develops, however, he seems to describe a kind of “succession in time” that belongs to painting. In the section labeled “2”, he claims that when we perceive an object in space, “first we observe its separate parts, then the union of these parts, and finally the whole.” (3) If painting presents objects in space, then this argument introduces a kind of time into painting: ‘wholes’ are not instantaneously perceived but built-up from a process of perceiving parts and relationships between parts. In the first paragraph of section 2 he refers to “parts” but in the second paragraph he switches to the word “details” as if it is interchangeable with “parts.” If details are also considered “parts” then even the most simple, singular, or undifferentiated object—one which seemed not to have ‘parts’—would be multiple just in the sense of having details. I wonder if the way the whole painting works as a ‘pregnant moment’ could also be a way of thinking about how each detail in a painting works like a mini pregnant-moment, offering potential connections with everything else in the painting.
(I only wrote one numbered paragraph, but you will need to write three or four--though they don't have to be quite as long as mine. The Lessing reading was only one page (page 3), but for other readings you need to include page numbers. To avoid confusion, refer to the page number in the READER rather than the page of the photocopied text.)
Monday, January 22, 2007
Assignment for 1/24: Analysis of description
Assignment Due in Class (in hard copy, printed) Wed 1/24:
Analysis of Description
In the Stella responses blog entry (see list on the left of all entries), find the blog comment posted below your own and paste this paragraph description of Battle of Lights along with the author’s name, at the top of a document. Below, write your own paragraph or two (at least 8 sentences) about the description. In the top right corner of the page be sure to put your own name.
Don’t argue about how ‘good’ or effective the description is, analyze exactly how it works. Point out specific details in the description and show how they create specific kinds of effects or produce meaning in specific ways. For example, if you noticed your author used the words “blending” and “oozing” you might point out some of the implications or effects of those words:
The author describes the colors as “blending” and “oozing,” suggesting that the colors intersect in fluid ways rather than defining clear boundaries. The gerund form of these verbs imagines the paint as still moving on the canvas, as if the paint is still wet and the painting is still in-process.
Remember you are writing about the description not about the painting, so, maybe you notice the author says “I noticed tons of lines.” You could point out the use of the first person, the fact that it is in the past tense, the unusual pairing of “tons” and “lines” (a ton is a unit of weight; so is he suggesting that the lines in the painting look heavy or is this a translation of number into weight, an exaggeration used to express being overwhelmed?). You might notice the author writes that “shadows are cast by a building” and notice that instead of describing how black paint angles from a rectangular patch of white paint, taking up the perspective of someone looking at a painting, the author imagines the paint as what it may represent, taking up a perspective that is projected into the ‘world’ the painting seems to represent.
Below are some things to think about as you read and begin to think about the paragraph you are analyzing. Don’t answer these questions directly, like a list, in your response. Use them to help you pick up on details, but then structure your analysis around what you discover. You might choose to move through the description following the order of its sentences. Or you might choose to group certain patterns you notice. Or, you might start with surface observations that you then develop into insightful interpretations. Don’t judge the description or suggest what the author could have done better; don’t talk about how their words affect you personally as a reader or how their experience of the painting compares to your experience or description—write impersonally and analytically.
++++++What words stand out in this description? What patterns of language do you notice, and how do these patterns correspond with what they describe? Does the author make judgments or offer interpretations, or does she simply describe? Where might you find implicit judgments and interpretations in what looks like pure description? How does the author convey his point of view (not in the sense of opinion, but in the literary sense) and what effect does this create? Pay attention to the verbs in every sentence. Who or what ‘acts’ in the description; does the author describe her own actions, the actions of the artist, the ‘actions’ of the artwork? Is the action literal or figural; if it is figural what might it actually correspond to or attempt to express? Where are passive constructions used and why; what ‘actors’ are being obscured or avoided? What is the tense or temporality of the action? How does time work in the description: what is described as in the past and what is described as in the present? Does the author describe the experience of the painting as if it is happening right then, at the time of the description—or does he describe the experience as if he is reflecting back on it? Do you as a reader have the sense of being shown or made to share the author’s experience, as if you were looking at what she looks at in the order she looks at things—does this bring you as a reader into the imagined ‘present’ moment of the description? Do you have the sense that the author is sharing his reflections about a past experience, allowing you to participate or share in the moment of his description as you read and consider it in your own moment of reflection? Where are there shifts in time and why do you think they happen; what effects do these shifts have?
Analysis of Description
In the Stella responses blog entry (see list on the left of all entries), find the blog comment posted below your own and paste this paragraph description of Battle of Lights along with the author’s name, at the top of a document. Below, write your own paragraph or two (at least 8 sentences) about the description. In the top right corner of the page be sure to put your own name.
Don’t argue about how ‘good’ or effective the description is, analyze exactly how it works. Point out specific details in the description and show how they create specific kinds of effects or produce meaning in specific ways. For example, if you noticed your author used the words “blending” and “oozing” you might point out some of the implications or effects of those words:
The author describes the colors as “blending” and “oozing,” suggesting that the colors intersect in fluid ways rather than defining clear boundaries. The gerund form of these verbs imagines the paint as still moving on the canvas, as if the paint is still wet and the painting is still in-process.
Remember you are writing about the description not about the painting, so, maybe you notice the author says “I noticed tons of lines.” You could point out the use of the first person, the fact that it is in the past tense, the unusual pairing of “tons” and “lines” (a ton is a unit of weight; so is he suggesting that the lines in the painting look heavy or is this a translation of number into weight, an exaggeration used to express being overwhelmed?). You might notice the author writes that “shadows are cast by a building” and notice that instead of describing how black paint angles from a rectangular patch of white paint, taking up the perspective of someone looking at a painting, the author imagines the paint as what it may represent, taking up a perspective that is projected into the ‘world’ the painting seems to represent.
Below are some things to think about as you read and begin to think about the paragraph you are analyzing. Don’t answer these questions directly, like a list, in your response. Use them to help you pick up on details, but then structure your analysis around what you discover. You might choose to move through the description following the order of its sentences. Or you might choose to group certain patterns you notice. Or, you might start with surface observations that you then develop into insightful interpretations. Don’t judge the description or suggest what the author could have done better; don’t talk about how their words affect you personally as a reader or how their experience of the painting compares to your experience or description—write impersonally and analytically.
++++++What words stand out in this description? What patterns of language do you notice, and how do these patterns correspond with what they describe? Does the author make judgments or offer interpretations, or does she simply describe? Where might you find implicit judgments and interpretations in what looks like pure description? How does the author convey his point of view (not in the sense of opinion, but in the literary sense) and what effect does this create? Pay attention to the verbs in every sentence. Who or what ‘acts’ in the description; does the author describe her own actions, the actions of the artist, the ‘actions’ of the artwork? Is the action literal or figural; if it is figural what might it actually correspond to or attempt to express? Where are passive constructions used and why; what ‘actors’ are being obscured or avoided? What is the tense or temporality of the action? How does time work in the description: what is described as in the past and what is described as in the present? Does the author describe the experience of the painting as if it is happening right then, at the time of the description—or does he describe the experience as if he is reflecting back on it? Do you as a reader have the sense of being shown or made to share the author’s experience, as if you were looking at what she looks at in the order she looks at things—does this bring you as a reader into the imagined ‘present’ moment of the description? Do you have the sense that the author is sharing his reflections about a past experience, allowing you to participate or share in the moment of his description as you read and consider it in your own moment of reflection? Where are there shifts in time and why do you think they happen; what effects do these shifts have?
Event Reviews for 1/22
Please post here if you attended either the Geoffrey Batchen talk at Bekeley on Camera Lucida, or the Pierre Huyghe talk in San Francisco on Monday night. Try to give us the general topic, recount the major argument or point you took away, tell us what if any images or examples were used, and let us know what you thought about it all. It would be especially helpful if you could say something about how you think the talk might be relevant to the themes that are emerging in the course.
(to the left is an image of an artwork Pierre Huyghe spoke about in his lecture at CCA)
Measure of Time Exhibit: Descriptions of Artworks
If you wrote about the wrong Stella painting, please post your description of a different painting in the Measure of Time exhibit at BAM. The museum is closed Monday and Tuesday so you can have until Friday to make up the assignment.
Hours and Location
Hours and Location
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
