Technology and the Making of Experimental Film Culture

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John Powers (Assistant Professor of Film and Media Studies, Assistant Professor of Film and Media Studies, Washington University in St. Louis)

Technology and the Making of Experimental Film Culture

John Powers (Assistant Professor of Film and Media Studies, Assistant Professor of Film and Media Studies, Washington University in St. Louis)

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English

Oxford University Press Inc
15 October 2023

Films, movies & cinema; Film movie production: technical skills; Popular culture

The Bolex camera, 16mm reversal film stocks, commercial film laboratories, and low-budget optical printers were the small-gauge media technologies that provided the infrastructure for experimental filmmaking at the height of its cultural impact. Technology and the Making of Experimental Film Culture examines how the avant-garde embraced these material resources and invested them with meanings and values adjacent to those of semiprofessional film culture. By reasserting the physicality of the body in making time-lapse and kinesthetic sequences with the Bolex, filmmakers conversed with other art forms and integrated broader spheres of humanistic and scientific inquiry into their artistic process. Drawing from the photographic qualities of stocks such as Tri-X and Kodachrome, they discovered pliant metaphors that allowed them to connect their artistic practice to metaphysics, spiritualism, and Hollywood excess. By framing film labs as mystical or adversarial, they cultivated an oppositionality that valorized control over the artistic process. And by using the optical printer as a tool for excavating latent meaning out of found footage, they posited the reworking of images as fundamental to the exploration of personal and cultural identity. Providing a wealth of new detail about the making of canonized avant-garde classics by such luminaries as Carolee Schneemann, Jack Smith, and Stan Brakhage, as well as rediscovering works from overlooked artists such as Chick Strand, Amy Halpern, and Gunvor Nelson, Technology and the Making of Experimental Film Culture uses technology as a lens for examining the process of making: where ideas come from, how they are put into practice, and how arguments about those ideas foster cultural and artistic commitments and communities.

By: John Powers (Assistant Professor of Film and Media Studies Assistant Professor of Film and Media Studies Washington University in St. Louis)
Imprint: Oxford University Press Inc
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions: Height: 242mm, Width: 160mm, Spine: 21mm
Weight: 556g
ISBN: 9780197683385
ISBN 10: 019768338X
Pages: 280
Publication Date: 15 October 2023
Audience: Professional and scholarly , Undergraduate
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active

List of Illustrations Introduction: Proscriptive Orientations Chapter 1. The Twitters of the Machine: The Bolex H-16 Camera In and Out of Control Chapter 2. Untrue Truisms: The Paradoxes of Reversal Film Stock Chapter 3. A Lab of One's Own: Personal Cinema Invades the Film Laboratory Chapter 4. Holding the Jalopy Together: The Optical Printer and DIY Culture Epilogue: Midwives for Existence Notes Selected Bibliography Index

John Powers is Assistant Professor of Film and Media Studies at Washington University in St. Louis. His writing has appeared in Cinema Journal, Screen, October, Discourse, and numerous edited volumes dedicated to experimental film and video.