Isabel Rocamora. Urban intervention n. 3. Image: Muff AA © 2001 

Event information

The workshop will ask: to what extent do definitions of avant-garde/experimental film hinge on the language of other disciplines? Where is avant-garde film practice positioned in relation to the disciplines of Film Studies and Fine Art/Art History, and what are the implications of this for both academics and practitioners? What connections can be made between different phases of avant-garde practice and how might we assess their legacy? The workshop will be accompanied by a mini festival on avant-garde films at Filmhouse Cinema Edinburgh (25-26 February), in association with LUX.

Find out more on the season of avant-garde films at Edinburgh Filmhouse, 25 & 26 February

Date: 24th of February 2017

Host: The University of Edinburgh

Website: www.ed.ac.uk

Videos: www.filmandarts-network.hss.ed.ac.uk/podcast/talks/the-intermedial-avant-gardes

Programme

Venue: Boardroom, ECA Evolution House, 78 West Port

 

9.30 Welcome and Introduction

 

9.45-11.00 Keynote

Chris Townsend (Royal Holloway, London), ‘From the Periphery to the Interstices: Avant-Garde Film and Intermediality, 1970-2015’

 

11.00-11.30 Tea/Coffee

 

11.30-1.00 Session 1

Kim Knowles (University of Aberystwyth), ‘Kinesthetic Connections: Film, Poetry and Architecture in Man Ray’s Les Mystères du Château du Dé (1929)’

 

Tom Day (University of Edinburgh), ‘Techniques of the Observer: William Klein’s Pop Between Stillness and Movement’

 

Julian Ross (University of Westminster), ‘Intermedia in 1960s Japan’

 

1-2 Lunch

 

2.00-3.30 Session 2

Barnaby Dicker (Cardiff Metropolitan University), ‘Notes on Differential Specificity: The Artwork/Statement Nexus as Intermedial Site’

 

Davide Messina (University of Edinburgh), ‘What is a cinèma? Tensive structures in Pasolini’s first screenplay’

 

Erika Balsom (King’s College London), ‘Intermediality and the Museum: Exhibiting the Moving Image in Passages de l’image (1990)’

 

3.30-3.45 Tea/Coffee

 

3.45-5.00 Practitioner’s Talk

Isabel Rocamora (University of Edinburgh), ‘Gesture, performance, film: the making of belief in Faith and Body of War’

 

5-6 Screening

Isabel Rocamora, ‘Body of War’, 2010, 21mins + Q&A with the artist

Film still of Body of War © 2010

Body of War reflects on how a man becomes a soldier through the relentless repetition of acts of violence. What happens to the psyche as it learns to transgress social principles and integrates the willingness to kill? Set in the geography of the Normandy Landings and punctuated by testimonies of retired and serving soldiers, a mise-en-scène of visceral hand-to-hand combat is gradually deconstructed – inviting the viewer to engage in the relationship between human intimacy and the brutality of war. A poetic observation of the momentary collapse of the heroic, the piece stages the pathos of military strategy by using documented mise-en-scène as a form of discourse as opposed to celebration, in this way Body of War is as much an ode to the human inside the soldier as a questioning of military structures.

 

Reviews and awards

“A tool for heightened awakening, a radical challenge to our prejudices regarding our understanding of conflict, its sacrifices and its resolutions… 
A sublime work revealing a shocking tenderness” 


William Fowler, curator of artist moving image at the British Film Institute
for Eikon Photography and Media Art Magazine, November 2010

“Rarely have horror and beauty been so intertwined… cut to the bone”

Rita Felciano, danceviewtimes.com, March 2012

 

HONORABLE MENTION, San Francisco Dance Film Festival 2012

JURY SPECIAL MENTION, IDN Festival 2010