Alphaville: Journal of Film and Screen Media. Issue 23: Screening the Artist: Between Presence/Absence, Immediacy/Mediation
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Item Advertising and the Transformation of Screen Cultures, by Bo Florin, Patrick Vonderau and Yvonne Zimmerman(Film and Screen Media, University College Cork, 2022-07-15) Stephanie, Rains; Murphy, JillItem Hands in the machine: Maya Deren and Marie Menken’s manual gestures(Film and Screen Media, University College Cork, 2022-07-15) Walton, Saige; Walton, Saige; Crispino, LucioIn this article, I examine how Maya Deren and Marie Menken’s mid-1940s filmmaking enacts a gestural aesthetic. Drawing on Vilém Flusser’s thinking on gesture (his discussion of “moving tools” and the thoughtfulness of hands), I draw attention to the importance of hands in Deren and Menken’s work. In Visual Variations on Noguchi (1945), Menken employs a handheld Bolex camera to explore the different material properties of art objects. Through her sweeping camerawork, film editing and sound, she transforms Noguchi’s art into new, cinematically stuttering, borderline abstract compositions. In At Land (1944), Deren’s unnamed protagonist (played by Deren herself) is filmed reaching, touching, clasping and grasping her way through a highly mutable world. In Deren’s re-working of the mythic quest narrative, hands function as a gestural, thoughtful means of adaptation. Hands also provide Deren with a manual means of manipulating “film form”, of manually piecing together different surfaces, shots and scenes. In Visual Variations on Noguchi and in At Land, both artist-filmmakers use their “moving tools” to transform human gesture. Through their foregrounding of the hands (onscreen and offscreen), Deren and Menken enact a desubjectified, gestural cinema.Item Decolonial gesture and the screening of the botanical artist in Miasma, Plants, Export Paintings (Bo Wang and Pan Lu, 2017)(Film and Screen Media, University College Cork, 2022-07-15) Cooper, Sarah; Walton, Saige; Crispino, LucioBo Wang and Pan Lu’s split-screen video essay Miasma, Plants, Export Paintings (2017) charts the relationship between its titular categories and British imperialism in China, especially the colonial possession of Hong Kong as a result of the Opium Wars in the nineteenth century. It centres on the collecting of plants from China for the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, along with their documentation through botanical drawings by local Chinese artists. The video essay shows fleeting glimpses of several anonymous Chinese paintings, revealing in the process the dual sense of screening at the heart of the colonialist enterprise that involved showcasing the art while obscuring the artist. Wang and Lu, in contrast, return attention to the skills of the Chinese artists. Through their own dual vision, they challenge myriad hierarchical colonial images of human-plant relations. Drawing on Vilém Flusser’s work on the gesture of video and combining this with Walter D. Mignolo’s discussion of decolonial gesture, I show how Wang and Lu question through their own artistic gestures the distortions of the colonial gaze evident within dominant western image regimes. In this, their work speaks indirectly to recent writings in the environmental humanities and critical plant studies that valorise more lateral relations between humans and plants.Item The Cinema of Disorientation: Inviting Confusions, by Dominic Lash(Film and Screen Media, University College Cork, 2022-07-15) Brown, Lewis; Murphy, JillItem Bill Viola’s figures of submersion as techniques of transindividual affect(Film and Screen Media, University College Cork, 2022-07-15) del Río, Elena; Walton, Saige; Crispino, LucioThis article seeks to establish a fundamental continuity between distinctive periods in Bill Viola’s work. Examining two relatively early works—The Reflecting Pool (1977–79) and The Passing (1991)—and the more recent piece Self Portrait, Submerged (2013), I consider the artist’s physical presence as a catalyst for an inherent continuity between early formalism and the intense affectivity of the later period. Affect and its transindividual energies were present in Viola even before they came to acquire a more explicit articulation in the 2000s and beyond. We see in Viola’s work a merging of artist and artwork which drastically departs from traditional notions of authorial autonomy and mediation, giving rise instead to an event of transindividual affect. I consider the merging of artist and artwork here in light of Gilbert Simondon’s philosophy of individuation, a process-oriented ontology remarkably resonant with Viola’s art. I rely on Simondon’s concepts of the technical object, the preindividual and the transindividual, to examine: first, Viola’s immanent, transductive relation to his medium as illustrated in The Reflecting Pool; second, the way in which the artist’s participatory witnessing of technological ontogenesis transmutes into a directly affective experience in The Passing; and finally, the confluent affectivity of artist and spectator in Self Portrait, Submerged.