American avant-garde cinema's philosophy of the in-between / Rebecca A. Sheehan.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Sheehan, Rebecca, 1979- author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Experimental films--United States--History and criticism.

Experimental films.

United States.

Genre:

Criticism, interpretation, etc.

Physical Description:

xi, 292 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

New York, NY : Oxford University Press, [2020]

Summary:

"Can films philosophize rather than simply represent philosophical ideas developed outside of the cinematic medium? Taking up this question crucial to the emergent field of film philosophy, this book argues that the films of the American avant-garde do "do" philosophy and illuminates the ethical and political stakes of their aesthetic interventions. The book traces the avant-garde's philosophy by developing a history and theory of its investment in dimensional, conceptual, and material in-betweens, clarifying how this cinema's reflections on the creation and reception of images construct an ethics of perception itself, a responsibility to perpetuate thought in an enduring re-encounter with the world and with meaning's unfinished production. This entails the avant-garde's locating of cinema's-and thought's-ends or meanings in their means, and their advancement of an image of truth that is made rather than found that unites their films with the philosophies of Ludwig Wittgenstein and Ralph Waldo Emerson who believed the "journey's end is found in every step of the road" (Cavell). Rectifying film-philosophy's neglect of the American avant-garde, the book demonstrates how rather than showing their interest in the revelation of authoritative truths, the avant-garde's interest in the re-encounter and review of the seen and known emerges from an American Transcendentalist tradition that opposes such notions. Sheehan reads the avant-garde's interest in the contingencies of spectatorial experience as also an extension of Pragmatism's commitment to replacing the authority of a priori knowledge with that of individual experience. She also shows how Emerson's influence on Friedrich Nietzsche connects the American avant-garde's philosophies to Deleuze's time-image, premised largely upon Nietzsche's "powers of the false.""-- Provided by publisher.

Contents:

1 "Here Are Materials Strewn Along the Ground": The Ethical Aesthetics of the Ordinary p. 35

Stan Brakhage, Wittgenstein, and the Renewed Encounter with the Everyday p. 35

Thoreau's "Perpetual Instilling" and Jonas Mekas's Walden p. 55

Virtual Worlds: Phil Solomon's Nomadic Resistance to Clarity p. 75

2 The American Avant-Garde's Landscape Philosophy p. 87

From the Ordinary to Landscapes of the Virtual: Phil Solomon's America p. 96

Ernie Gehr's Fragmentary Landscapes p. 100

Between Self and Other, Space and Place, History and the Present: James Benning's In-Betweens p. 107

New Historicism's Anti-Totalizing In-Betweens p. 115

Sharon Lockhart's Landscapes of Work and Play p. 128

The U.S.-Mexican Border's In-Betweens: Chick Strand and Peggy Ahwesh p. 140

3 Disassembling Vision Through Dimensional In-Betweens p. 145

Pat O'Neill and the Western Edge p. 146

"Disordering the Cinematic Rectangle": Ernie Gehr's Dimensional In-Betweens p. 166

"Found Education" and Disorienting Design: The Philosophical Filmmaking of Ray and Charles Eames p. 174

Glimpses Between Movement and Dimension: Marie Menken's In-Betweens p. 186

The Body in the Stream of Time: Embodied Movement's In-Betweens in the Cinema of Marie Menken, Maya Deren, and Sara Kathryn Arledge p. 194

4 From Figures of Paradox to a Philosophy of Review p. 206

Ken Jacobs's Time in Time, Space in Space p. 208

Paradox and the Ethics of Incompleteness: Hollis Frampton and the Powers of the False p. 224

A Skeptical Use of Space: Michael Snow's Fractal In-Betweens p. 241.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Other Format:

Online version: Sheehan, Rebecca A., American avant-garde cinema's philosophy of the in-between

ISBN:

9780190949716

9780190949709

0190949708

0190949716

OCLC:

1114280415

Publisher Number:

99985041045