scholarly journals Rolling amnesia and the omnivorous now

2015 ◽  
pp. 76-88
Author(s):  
Lilly Husbands
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Cognitive Psychology ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
John Locke ◽  
The Self ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Single Frame ◽  
Phenomenological Experience ◽  
Animation Technique ◽  
Universal Nature

Throughout his career, New York-based experimental filmmaker and animator Jeff Scher has created animated works that are in dialogue with the diary film tradition in avant-garde cinema. Scher uses his distinctive single-frame rotoscope and collage animation technique to investigate the selective nature of memory and to celebrate the moments that constitute everyday life. Scher’s animated trilogy, You Won’t Remember This (2007), You Won’t Remember This Either (2009), and You Might Remember This (2011), depicts a series of everyday moments in the early childhoods of his two sons Buster and Oscar. The trilogy is centred on the mnemonic phenomenon that is referred to in developmental and cognitive psychology as childhood amnesia, which has presented problems for the philosophy of memory since John Locke first investigated the roles of memory and consciousness in the constitution of the identity of the self. Scher’s three portraits invite spectators to reflect on the mnemonic imbalance that is specific to this particular temporal situation—where the parent is able to remember what the child will ultimately forget—in both a distilled and heightened way. This paper investigates the ways in which the rotoscope collage technique employed by Scher in the You Won’t Remember This trilogy not only endows the works with a special capacity to emphasise the universal nature of childhood amnesia but also, conversely, resembles the phenomenological experience of remembering itself.

Charles Olson and American Modernism

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Byers
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Political Action ◽  
The Self ◽  
Instrumental Reason ◽  
Charles Olson ◽  
American Modernism ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
American Poet ◽  
Mark Rothko

The Practice of the Self situates the work of American poet Charles Olson (1910–70) at the centre of the early postwar American avant-garde. It shows Olson to have been one of the major advocates and theorists of American modernism in the late 1940s and early 1950s; a poet who responded fully and variously to the political, ethical, and aesthetic urgencies driving innovation across contemporary American art. Reading Olson’s work alongside that of contemporaries associated with the New York Schools of painting and music (as well as the exiled Frankfurt School), the book draws on Olson’s published and unpublished writings to establish an original account of early postwar American modernism. The development of Olson’s work is seen to illustrate two primary drivers of formal innovation in the period: the evolution of a new model of political action pivoting around the radical individual and, relatedly, a powerful new critique of instrumental reason and the Enlightenment tradition. Drawing on extensive archival research and featuring readings of a wide range of artists—including, prominently, Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko, David Smith, Wolfgang Paalen, and John Cage—The Practice of the Self offers a new reading of a major American poet and an original account of the emergence of postwar American modernism.

The British Documentary Film Movement (1926–1946)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas S. Davis
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
Documentary Film ◽  
Political Commitment ◽  
News Letter ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
State Sponsorship ◽  
Formal Techniques

The British Documentary Film Movement refers to the film units pioneered by John Grierson. With the benefit of state sponsorship, Grierson and the filmmakers that gathered around him experimented with avant-garde film techniques to develop a socially conscious cinema. Grierson’s film units and the documentary culture they created were also an important part of the debates around aesthetic innovation and political commitment that circulated throughout Britain in the 1930s and 1940s. Grierson’s group disseminated their ideas and theories in publications such as Sight and Sound, Cinema Quarterly, World Film News, and Documentary News Letter. Grierson coined the term "documentary" in a review of Robert Flaherty’s film Moana in The New York Sun in 1926. In this first use, documentary was nearly synonymous with the French documentaire, which typically refers to expedition films. In the coming years, Grierson would theorize documentary in more specific terms. His most famous and most lasting definition comes from an essay in a 1933 edition of Cinema Quarterly. Documentary, he claimed, was "the creative treatment of actuality." Grierson believed documentary could borrow formal techniques from the great Russian filmmakers (Eisenstein, Vertov, and Pudovkin) to dramatize scenes and practices from everyday life.

‘Out Past / Self-Dramatization’: Maurice Scully's Several Dances

2016 ◽  
Vol 46 (1) ◽  
pp. 105-118
Author(s):  
Romana Huk
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
William Carlos Williams ◽  
The Self ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
George Oppen ◽  
American Poets

What has lyric to do with any radical phenomenology's choreography? Maurice Scully in Several Dances asks that question, as he has for years now, alongside other poets of Ireland's avant-garde whose ‘distinguishing (not inhibiting) feature’, as Sarah Bennett writes (acknowledging the work of Alex Davis and Eric Falci before her) is that in it ‘the lyric subject persists’ – in tandem with, this essay argues, what she names ‘an interest in perception … [which] is perhaps the most compelling commonality in these poets' work’. What distinguishes Scully's from the lyric phenomenology of American poets from William Carlos Williams (invoked throughout the volume) to George Oppen (also invoked) is that he queries existentialism's ‘singular’ approach to phenomena, achieved as Heidegger thought through the phenomenological ‘bracketing’ of individual (and communal) preconceptions from the perception of things. Cosmic – even theological – speculation enters in as Scully's poems move out past both self-centered lyric and twentieth-century cancellations of all preconceptions in the ‘limit-thinking’ and being-toward-death that phenomenology proposed for seeing past the self. Yet Scully works with mortality always in his sights too as he sings ‘the Huuuman / Limit-at-tation Blues’ (p.118) and, more vertiginously, considers both the undelimitability and the fragility of us.

„Rzymski” Żyd – nieznana twórczość Romana Brandstaettera

2012 ◽  
Vol 53 (1) ◽  
pp. 47-61
Author(s):  
Dariusz Konrad Sikorski
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Social Norms ◽  
Cultural Values ◽  
Interwar Period ◽  
Free Speech ◽  
Role Model ◽  
The Self ◽  
Polish Literature ◽  
The Bible ◽  
The Law

Summary After 1946, ie. after embracing Christianity, Roman Brandstaetter would often point to the Biblical Jonah as a role model for both his life and his artistic endeavour. In the interwar period, when he was a columnist of Nowy Głos, a New York Polish-Jewish periodical, he used the penname Romanus. The ‘Roman’ Jew appears to have treated his columns as a form of an artistic and civic ‘investigation’ into scandalous cases of breaking the law, destruction of cultural values and violation of social norms. Although it his was hardly ‘a new voice’ with the potential to change the course of history, he did become an intransigent defender of free speech. Brought up on the Bible and the best traditions of Polish literature and culture, Brandstaetter, the self-appointed disciple of Adam Mickiewicz, could not but stand up to the challenge of anti-Semitic aggression.

Maximus

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Byers
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Political Action ◽  
American Art ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Self ◽  
Postwar Period ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Art Practices ◽  
The One

This concluding chapter charts the continuing significance of the early postwar moment in Olson’s later work, particularly The Maximus Poems. The philosophical and political concerns of the American avant-garde between 1946 and 1951 play out across The Maximus Poems just as they inform later American art practices. The search of the early postwar American independent left for a source of political action rooted in the embodied individual is seen, on the one hand, to have been personified in the figure of Maximus. At the same time, Maximus’s radical ‘practice of the self’ charts a sophisticated alternative to the Enlightenment humanist subject widely critiqued in the United States in the immediate postwar period.

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