Category: {film}

Film

Expanded Cinema by Gene Youngblood

expanded.jpgThis prescient out-of-print volume from 1970 is available as a free PDF download here. Also at the essential ubu.com. (Thanks to Jay for the tip!)

From the original back jacket copy:

“Today when one speaks of cinema, one implies a metamorphosis in human perception,” writes the author of this extraordinary book. “Just as the term ‘man’ is coming to mean man / plant / machine, so the definition of cinema must be expanded to include videotronics, computer science, and atomic light.”

In a brilliant and far-ranging study, Gene Youngblood traces the evolution of cinematic language to the end of fiction, drama, and realism. New technological extensions of the medium have become necessary. Thus he concentrates on the advanced image-making technologies of computer films, television experiments, laser movies, and multiple-projection environments. Outstanding works in each field are analyzed in detail. Methods of production are meticulously described, including interviews with artists and technologists. Expanded Cinema is filled with provocative post-McLuhan philosophical probes into: “the Paleocybernetic Age,” “the videosphere,” and “the new nostalgia,” all in the context of what the author calls “the global intermedia network.” In “Image-Exchange and the Post-Mass Audience Age,” Mr. Youngblood discusses the revolutionary implications of videotape cassettes and cable television as educational tools. His observations are placed in a comprehensive perspective by an inspiring introduction written by R. Buckmister Fuller. Vast in scope, both philosophical and technical, Expanded Cinema will be invaluable to all who are concerned with the audio-visual extensions of man, the technologies that are reshaping the nature of human communication.

About Gene Youngblood:

Gene Youngblood is an internationally known theorist of electronic media arts, and a respected scholar in the history and theory of experimental film and video art, which he has taught for 34 years. He is the author of Expanded Cinema (1970), the first book about video as an art medium, which was influential in establishing the field of media arts. He is also widely known as a pioneering voice in the Media Democracy movement, and has been teaching Media and Democracy for 30 years. He has lectured at more than 400 colleges and universities throughout North America, Europe, Japan, and Australia, and his writing is published extensively around the world. He has received grants from the Rockefeller Foundation, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), The New Mexico Arts Division, and the New Mexico Endowment for the Humanities. He has taught at CalArts, The California Institute of Technology, Columbia University, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, UCLA and USC.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The abstract cinema archive

Un Chant d’Amour by Jean Genet

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Genet’s gay classic at Ubuweb.

Un Chant d’Amour, 1950, 269 mb (AVI)

Packed with shots of full frontal hard ons, masturbation, and extreme close ups of sweaty feet, armpits and thighs, Jean Genet’s only film is confrontingly explicit. Though no sex takes place, the erotic factor of Un Chant d’Amour is off the scale, and makes for a sensational viewing experience that feels like watching porn. As well, as a twenty-five minute black and white avant garde short, it’s everything but commercial, and it was even abandoned by its director who, à la George Michael, disowned it in the mid seventies on the grounds that he had reached a far more sophisticated plateau of artistic expression, and was embarrassed by this crude early work. No wonder then, that Un Chant D’Amour has been banned, censored and blacklisted ever since its 1950 release.

This is quite a shame, for apart from being an excellent and extremely horny short film, Un Chant d’Amour is quite the hidden treasure, an underviewed and lushly romantic avant-garde tribute to yearning and desire, and and a frustrating glimpse of what might have been if Genet had kept making films.

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Stuck in airless and solitary prison cells (somewhere in Algeria, presumably), sexy inmates drive themselves to the edge with obsessive erotic longing for each other. Almost mad from solitude and longing, they blow cigarette smoke through mini glory holes, and writhe against thick concrete walls, knowing their man is on the other side. A sexually suspect guard spies on them, one by one, peep show style, and they sometimes notice, and perform for him. He gets so worked up he breaks into a cell, whips the inmate, and gets him to fellate his gun. Symbolism and dream sequences abound, but are hard to distinguish from the narrative proper as Genet’s use of repetition, ritual, and stylised movement is unrelentlingly hypnotic.

Un Chant d’Amour’s resonance is mostly due to images that would never make the cut of modern pop culture, certainly not a modern commercial film. Saying that most gay-interest films pale in comparison, then, is unfair. However, Genet’s sensuous presentation makes his two central characters’ almost insane cravings tangible and heartfelt. No amount of dialogue compensates, and furrow-browed pleas for tolerance and happiness drag things in the opposite direction fast. The fantasies of Un Chant D’Amour involve smoke, flowers, dance and forests as well as hair, sweat and muscle. This rocking back and forth between lush romance and salty carnality is a little dizzying, but masterfully (unknowingly?) evocative. By comparison, most other gay films look like tupperware parties, gatherings of politically activated animatronic eunuchs.

Like The Deep End, Un Chant d’Amour taps into elemental energies and ignores politics and socialisation, and as a result comes closest to capturing (pre-rainbow flag) “gay” on screen.

Review by Mark Adnum
www.outrate.net