Technology and the making of experimental film culture / John Powers.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Powers, John (College teacher), author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Experimental films--Production and direction--Technological innovations.

Experimental films.

Experimental films--History.

Motion pictures--Production and direction--Technological innovations.

Motion pictures.

Genre:

History

Physical Description:

xlii, 236 pages, 16 unnumbered pages of plates : illustrations (some color) ; 25 cm

Place of Publication:

New York, NY : Oxford University Press, [2023]

Summary:

"In 1972, the filmmaker John Luther Schofill lured two promising students, Bill Brand and Louis Hock, to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago to join the newly inaugurated film department. Brand was tantalized by the prospect of getting his hands on the school's optical printer, which would allow him to submit his images to repetition, multiplication, and other forms of synthetic transformation through rephotography. For several years, the promise of rephotography had inspired Brand to invent one-off devices for his own films and those of Paul Sharits, his mentor at Antioch College. Upon arrival in Chicago, however, Brand learned that, in fact, no printer existed--he had been recruited to build one. Meanwhile, Hock found himself in need of a financial stipend. At Schofill's behest, the pair was charged with fashioning a newly purchased Mauer camera and a heavy industrial lathe bed into a do-it-yourself (DIY) optical printer--"one piece at a time, putting things in place, modified as we went along," Hock recalled. Homemade optical printers (and their mass-produced offshoot, the JK optical printer) were appearing at other schools, too, providing the first generation of experimental film students with easier access to the technology. Within a decade, the optical printer became a mainstay of MFA programs and filmmaker's cooperatives, as fundamental to avant-garde practice as Bolex cameras and reversal stocks. Meanwhile, the practice itself became routinized, a skill that could be acquired. In hindsight, P. Adams Sitney remarked, "just as rapid editing with invisible splice marks had, for many filmmakers, become a mark of aesthetic authority in the early sixties, optical printing represented technical mastery in the seventies." His observation affirms that technical sophistication had become an important distinction in experimental filmmaking, but it also suggests that the optical printer came to instantiate aesthetic, cultural, and even philosophical values. What were these values, and where did they come from?"-- Provided by publisher.

Contents:

Introduction: Proscriptive orientations

The twitters of the machine: the Bolex H-16 camera in and out of control

Untrue truisms: the paradoxes of reversal film stock

A lab of one's own: personal cinema invades the film laboratory

Holding the jalopy together: the optical printer and DIY culture

Epilogue: Midwives for existence.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 213-227) and index.

Other Format:

Online version: Powers, John. Technology and the making of experimental film culture

ISBN:

9780197683392

0197683398

9780197683385

019768338X

OCLC:

1370009187

Publisher Number:

40031834817