Experimental Film and Television.

If somebody living in Dublin and preparing a solo-performance for an academic audience in Cork retreats to a location in Berlin to rehearse for his upcoming show – isn’t that somewhat peculiar? One evening in the winter of 1801 I met an old friend in a public park.2 That is the beginning of the text my friend Peter was reciting as he strolled through the Kleistpark in Berlin. I imagine the way he circles, at a leisurely pace, around the green, time and again pausing at a verge or under one of the mighty beech-trees to practise a gesture or test a graceful move. Each movement, he told me, has its centre of gravity; it is enough to control this within the puppet. The limbs, which are only pendulums, they follow mechanically of their own accord, without further help.3 Walkers, joggers and Turkish women and children sitting on the grass and having their picnic catch the odd word or sentence and may wonder about this elderly gentleman in an Irish sweater. During his days in Berlin, Peter...

In 1950 and 1952, the British Broadcast Corporation (BBC) and Radio Télévision Française (RTF) realized the first transnational television transmissions ever. The so called 'Calais Experiment' (1950) and the 'Paris Week' (1952) were celebrated as historic landmarks in European television and celebrated as a new 'entente cordiale' between the two countries. This article aims at highlighting some of the tensions that surrounded the realization of these first experiments in transnational television by embedding the historic events into the broader context of television development in Europe and by emphasizing the hidden technopolitical interests at stake. In line with current trends in transnational and European television historiography, the article analyses transnational media events as performances that highlight the complex interplay of the technical, institutional and symbolic dimension of television as a transnational infrastructure.

Éric Thouvenel/ Carole Contant: Não é uma questão muito original para começarmos, mas... Como aconteceu de você fazer filmes em primeiro lugar? Martin Arnold: Quando eu era jovem, no fim dos anos 70, eu ia frequentemente ao Filmmuseum de Viena, que era dirigido por Peter Kubelka e Peter Konlechner nessa época. De tempos em tempos, cineastas americanos nos visitavam; programas de filmes experimentais eram apresentados com bastante frequência; e Kubelka, pelo menos uma vez por ano, dava palestras fascinantes. Fiquei bem impressionado ao conhecer esse novo campo e explorar a história do cinema experimental. Acho que Kubelka foi bastante influente. Eu também estava interessado em ir para uma escola de arte, mas naquela época elas eram muito conservadoras em Viena: havia apenas escultura, pintura, design gráfico e só. Não havia nenhuma arte midiática, nem mesmo fotografia, e nada de cinema... O que, acho, era um problema político e institucional, porque nós sempre tivemos cineastas experimentais bastante conhecidos ao redor do mundo, e assim a questão é: por que eles não deram uma cadeira de professor para Peter Kubelka? Ou para Kurt Kren ou Valie Export? Tínhamos esse pessoal aqui e eles todos tiveram que ir para os EUA ou para a Alemanha para lecionar.

« L'incendie va vers la mer », ces mots d'André Werpin dans le film, récemment élu maire en mars 1971, nous évoquent aujourd'hui les incendies de 2003, puis de cet été 2021, qui ont suivi le même chemin du vent, mais ce point commun masque d'importantes différences avec les réalités et les images d'aujourd'hui. Incendies dans les Maures, reportage expérimental en Super 8 (au départ un format amateur), n'avait pas nécessairement vocation à être diffusé (même si des droits antenne sont envisagés dans une fiche interne) : il est issu d'un « atelier Super 8 », qui existait depuis 1967 au moins au sein d'une unité de production originale de l'ORTF, le Service de la Recherche, dirigé par Pierre Schaeffer, et bénéficiant d'une large autonomie dans ses choix de sujet et de forme audiovisuelle (Les Shadoks et le magazine culturel Un certain regard sont parmi les émissions les plus connues du SR). Cette notice présente le film et sa genèse.

This paper looks at the early years of the Service de la Recherche - Radio-Télévision Française (including its prefiguration before 1960) in terms of its relationship to early television. While criticizing the forms of standardization already in place, the Service de la Recherche aims to re-examine the beginnings of television in order to show its unfulfilled potential, notably by drawing on the experience and self-critical viewpoint of professionals.

Film as document The moment when Siegfried Kracauer knew that he wanted to write of film as what he terms the ‘Discover of the Marvels of Everyday Life’ is relayed in his introduction to the Theory of Film from 1960.1 Kracauer recalls watching a film long ago that shows a banal scene, an ordinary city street. A puddle in the foreground reflects the houses that cannot be seen and some of the sky. A breeze crosses the site. The puddle’s water trembles. ‘The trembling upper world in the dirty puddle – this image has never left me’, writes Kracauer. In this trembling, which is the moment of nature’s uninvited intervention, its inscription as movement on film, everything, from nature to culture, ‘takes on life’, he notes. What is important about film is its presentation of this given life indiscriminately. The puddle, this unworthy spillage, is redeemed in the low art of cinema. Both cinema and puddle are elevated from the ground. The upper world is brought down to earth as image. Fixed ...

Film as document The moment when Siegfried Kracauer knew that he wanted to write of film as what he terms the ‘Discover of the Marvels of Everyday Life’ is relayed in his introduction to the Theory of Film from 1960.1 Kracauer recalls watching a film long ago that shows a banal scene, an ordinary city street. A puddle in the foreground reflects the houses that cannot be seen and some of the sky. A breeze crosses the site. The puddle’s water trembles. ‘The trembling upper world in the dirty puddle – this image has never left me’, writes Kracauer. In this trembling, which is the moment of nature’s uninvited intervention, its inscription as movement on film, everything, from nature to culture, ‘takes on life’, he notes. What is important about film is its presentation of this given life indiscriminately. The puddle, this unworthy spillage, is redeemed in the low art of cinema. Both cinema and puddle are elevated from the ground. The upper world is brought down to earth as image. Fixed ...

Journée d'études - 30 novembre 2022 - Maison de la recherche de la Sorbonne Nouvelle - Paris 5e ar.

Diffusé d’août 1969 à octobre 1975, de façon irrégulière en termes de programmation, d’horaires et de chaîne (pas d’émissions en 1970 ou en 1974), à la fin de l’ORTF et au début de TF1 (1975), et ayant connu un succès grandissant, Tac au Tac, inventé par Jean Frapat au sein du Service de la Recherche de l’ORTF, a marqué toute une génération de spectateurs. Le programme (une centaine d’émissions) a permis de développer un lien fort – et peu fréquent – entre télévision et dessin (dessin de presse, dessin d’humour et bande dessinée). Par son originalité et son succès, Tac au Tac a produit, semble-t-il, des effets sur les mondes de la bande dessinée et du dessin de presse, en contribuant à les légitimer symboliquement. A partir de jeux imposés (l’escalade, le piège, l’énigme...), dérivés du « cadavre exquis » des Surréalistes, son principe reposait sur des joutes filmées en studio, entre dessinateurs généralement rassemblés autour d’une planche à dessin et d’une grande feuille blanche. La plupart des grands noms du dessin et de la BD des années 1970 a participé à cette émission (de Faizant à Piem et Siné, en passant par Uderzo, Franquin, Peyo, Gotlib, Topor...), qui a également fait connaître des auteurs émergents ou moins célèbres à l’époque (Bretécher, Pratt, Crepax...), ainsi que de multiples dessinateurs européens et américains. L’objectif de cette journée d’études est de partir du cas Tac au Tac pour l’analyser en lui-même, tout en le mettant en perspective autour de quatre pistes (Formes, Histoire, Economie, Publics) qu’on pourra croiser dans les interventions. (suite voir pdf)

This book maps the presence of moving images within the field of public art through encounters with passersby. It argues that far from mere distraction or spectacle, moving images can produce moments of enchantment that can renew, intensify, or challenge our everyday engagement with public space and each other. These artworks also offer frameworks for understanding how moving images operate in public space—how they move viewers and reconfigure the site of the screen. Each chapter explores a mode of address that examines how artists and curators leverage the moving image’s attentional power to engage audiences, create spaces, make place, and challenge assumptions. This book also examines the difficulties and compromises that arise when using urban screens for public art.

Sample is available through publisher's website. Ebook downloadable from your library, should they acquire it.

This Makes Me Want to Predict the Past is a black-and-white film by Cana Bilir-Meier, with a voiceover that includes the titular phrase 'This makes me want to remember the future', along with many other variants of 'This makes me want to…' taken from the YouTube comments for Childish Gambino's song Redbone. 1 Bilir-Meier's short film shows young women in and around the Munich shopping mall where nine people were killed in a racist attack in 2016. In total, more than 200 people have been killed in Germany for racist motives since 1990. There is a memorial right outside the mall, opposite the Saturn electronics store, dark and grainy images of which can be gleaned in Bilir-Meier's film. Through photos and performed reenactments the film also references the 1982 play Düşler Ülkesi about migrant Gastarbeiter, on whose production the artist's mother, Zühal Bilir-Meier, had worked. Whilst shown as a digital video, This Makes Me Want to Predict the Past was originally shot on Super 8 film stock, giving it not so much an aura of timelessness as of 'out-of-timeness'. While the film does not dissolve chronology as such, it instills doubt about the direction of time's arrow. The past has a habit of being all too predictable-or does it? What if there are historical genealogies to be unearthed that disrupt conventional narratives and formatted forms of commemoration? And what if the future, in turn, can already be remembered, and indeed commemorated, as a future of inequity, oppression, murder and massacres? Contemporary art is marked by a profound interest in historiography and counter-history, in memory and commemoration-and in the decolonisation of institutional memory. 2 I will approach these matters here indirectly at first, by rereading a set of literary and cinematic practices from the 1960s and 1970s. These are European and (more or less/somewhat) German practices, mostly by male and (to some extent/in certain milieus) canonical writers and/or filmmakers. This might seem a slightly conservative constellation, but I hope to show that the works in question matter profoundly nowif we are attentive to anachronic resonances and disturbances in the canon. In the West Germany of the 1960s and 1970s, artists such as Peter Weiss or Alexander Kluge challenged the Cold War consensus by re-excavating the avant-garde of the 1920s and 1930s and its 1 The YouTube comments say 'This song makes me want to…'; Bilir-Meier left out 'song' https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kp7eSUU9oy8 accessed

This interview arose out of a shared desire to document some of the unwritten, anecdotal history of film studies and the cultures of cinema more broadly. In a conversation with Karola Gramann and Heide Schlüpmann, film and media scholars Julia Leyda and Chris Tedjasukmana encouraged them to narrate some of their individual and intertwined personal, political, and professional experiences surrounding the development of the discipline in Europe, knowing that this was enmeshed with other fertile intellectual movements like critical theory and feminism.

Karola Gramann is a film curator and author who has been working as a programmer in an international context since the early 1980s. She was director of Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen (1985-89) and co-organiser of the Frankfurter Filmschau (1990-93). Together with Heide Schlüpmann she has written on Asta Nielsen, feminist cinema, and erotic cinema. Heide Schlüpmann is an author and retired professor of film studies at the University of Frankfurt am Main (1991-2008). She is the author of The Uncanny Gaze: The Drama of Early German Cinema (2010 [orig. in 1990]) and other books (in German) on feminism, film philosophy, Siegfried Kracauer, and Friedrich Nietzsche. Together they are the co-founders of the Kinothek Asta Nielsen in Frankfurt am Main, an association supporting and documenting the film work of women. They also co-founded the Remake: Frankfurter Frauen Film Tage (Frankfurt Women’s Film Days) and have been editors of the journal Frauen und Film. Both have received numerous awards for their continuous efforts in documenting and promoting cinema culture.

Ten papers or chapters on ORTF's Service de la Recherche. V3

Dix articles ou chapitres sur le Service de la Recherche. V3

Fims and TV-shows analysed among others : Psychodrame (Rossellini, 1956) ; Autoportrait Dubuffet (1964), Le Mystère Koumiko (1965), Les Grandes Répétitions (1964-72), Vocations (1969), Enseignants-Enseignés (1972)...

Filmes constituídos de fragmentos de obras já existentes, que po-dem incluir noticiários, filmes governamentais, industriais, médi-cos, educativos, hollywoodianos de baixo orçamento, pornográfi-cos, assim como trailers e anúncios publicitários, os found footages, embora não tenham um propósito único, nos levam a reconhecê-los como imagens recicladas. Fora de seu contexto, as imagens que dão forma a um filme de found footage são articuladas de maneira a se desvincular de seus sentidos originais. Como bem observa William C. Wees a respeito desses filmes que são reciclados: Se essas "sobras" também são "perfeitas, deixadas sozinhas", não é porque são gemas não reconhecidas da arte cinematográfica, mas porque sua própria falta de arte as expõe a leituras mais críticas-e mais divertidas-do que seus criadores originais pretendiam ou seu público original provavelmente produziria. (WEES, 1993, p. 7-8).

The challenge of the dominant discourses on &dquo;public&dquo; and &dquo;public sphere&dquo; as well as on &dquo;private&dquo; and &dquo;non-political&dquo; is a practical necessity of any radical political initiative. In recent decades, some of the most significant contributions of the Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School have been centered on the notion of &dquo;public sphere&dquo; (Offentlichkeit). Habermas' and Negt and Kluge's theories of public sphere have recently aroused widening interest in the English speaking world. This article critically assesses their established theories as well as their tentative new interventions on this topic.

In Germany, Kluge is regarded both as a major filmmaker and as a major social theorist in the tradition of the Frankfurt School. His films center upon the question
of memory and history. For Kluge, the memory of any given situation is multiform, and the situation in space and time of its many forms is the result of perspectives in the present. To put this in another way, memory has a history, or, more precisely, histories.This does not mean that the relationship between history and memory is,
or should be, balanced or stable. In Kluge’s work, the tension or outright conflict between history and memory is both necessary and productive.Thus my emphasis
with regard to Kluge’s films is to locate "a break in the ancient bond of identity," a break in the equilibrium of memory and history.The basis of Kluge’s critical formulation of what is lacking in German history is the intertwining of memory with history, archive, documentary, and fiction and its subsequent regression to the problem of identity.This “lack” must be thought of in terms of what it is to have a positive identity
of the German people.
Published in Lost in the Archives, ed. Rebecca Comay (Toronto: Alphabet City Media Inc., 2002), pp. 383-401.

The spirit of research seems to have almost deserted public television nowadays. In the 60ies and 70ies, Pierre Schaeffer and the Service de la Recherche of the ORTF tried to experiment new "dispositifs" to counter our audiovisual habits. This paper analyses contemporary television according to the spirit of these schaefferian ideas and experiences and aims at identifying ways to design new perspectives for television.

This chapter discusses five important books published in the field of Film
Theory in 2015 and is divided into five sections: 1. Film Rhythm After
Sound; 2. Closed Circuits; 3. The Feel-Bad Film; 4. Realism as Protest;
5. Farocki/Godard: Film as Theory.

Presentation of Pierre Schaeffer and Service de la Recherche's visions of (free) speech and of "dispositif". Specific analysis of "Sylvie, comédienne" ("Vocations" series, 1969) and "Observateur/observé 3 - Autoportrait Pierre Schaeffer" (unaired).

The artist Stan Brakhage drew creatively from the habits, limitations, and thresholds of human visual perception. This article examines how Brakhage compelled viewers to attend to their visual perceptions in a unique way when engaging with his films. The article begins with an outline of John Ruskin's concept of the innocent eye, and its relevance to Brakhage's creative aspirations. Next, by placing the concept of the innocent eye within the context of existing theories on visual perception, the article suggests two ways in which Brakhage was able to retutor the eyes through his films: the first was by paying special attention to entoptic vision (visual impressions whose source is within the eye itself) as a source of inspiration; the second was by developing a series of techniques that compel the viewer to attend to the visual information on the screen in a way that subordinates semantic salience, and emphasizes the surface detail.

Front cover illustration: Alexander Kluge. Photo: Regina Schmeken Back cover illustration: Artists under the Big Top: Perplexed () Cover design: Kok Korpershoek, Amsterdam Lay-out: japes, Amsterdam isbn      (paperback) isbn      (hardcover) e-isbn      nur 

is one of the most important voices of the 20 th century. A political philosopher associated with the writings of the Frankfurt School, a filmmaker and a novelist, Kluge is a figure that has challenged Orthodox Marxist philosophy and the conventions of cinematic and literary language. His films employ Marxist methodology and Brechtian formal strategies, but they do not force any certain response or conclusion. Marxism is used as a methodology and not as a dogma. Kluge brings Marxism back to its initial interest in questioning perceptions taken for granted and revealing that what passes for real and natural is socially constructed.