Process Cinema: Handmade Film in the Digital Age

Description

Handmade films stretch back to cinema's beginnings, yet until now their rich history has been neglected. Process Cinema is the first book to trace the development of handmade and hand-processed film in its historical and contemporary contexts, and from a global perspective. Mapping the genealogy of handmade film, and uncovering confluences, influences, and interstices between various international movements, sites, and practices, Process Cinema positions the resurgence of handmade and process cinema as a counter-practice to the rise of digital filmmaking. This volume brings together a range of renowned academics and artists to examine contemporary artisanal films, DIY labs, and filmmakers typically left out of the avant-garde canon, addressing the convergence between the analog and the digital in contemporary process cinema. Contributors investigate the history of process cinema – unscripted, improvisatory manipulation of the physicality of film – with chapters on pioneering filmmakers such as Len Lye and Marie Menken, while others discuss an international array of collectives devoted to processing films in artist-run labs from South Korea to Finland, Australia to Austria, and Greenland to Morocco, along with historical and contemporary practices in Canada and the United States. Addressing the turn to a new, sustainable creative ecology that is central to handmade films in the twenty-first century, and that defines today's reinvigorated film cultures, Process Cinema features some of the most beautiful handcrafted films and the most forward-thinking filmmakers within a global context. Contents Acknowledgments Introduction: Process Cinema: Handmade Film in the Digital Age • Scott MacKenzie and Janine Marchessault Part One: Histories of Handmade Film 1 Twenty-Four Signatures per Second: Direct Animation and Gestural Repetition • Alla Gadassik 2 At the Limits of Cinema: Marie Menken’s Notebook • Angela Joosse 3 Artisanal Filmmaking in Australia • Arthur Cantrill Part Two: Process as Practice 4 Self-Skilling and Home-Brewing: Some Reflections on Photochemical Film Culture • Kim Knowles 5 After: A Beginner’s Guide to Alchemy • Carl Brown 6 How and Why: A Few Notes Concerning Production Techniques Employed in the Making of My Darkroom Films • Peter Tscherkassky 7 Peter Tscherkassky Manufractures Two Minutesof (Im)Pure Cinema • Tom Gunning 8 Echoes of the Earth: Handmade Film Ecologies • Gregory Zinman 9 Signs of the Three: Process and Composition in Works by Bruce Elder, Izabella Pruska-Oldenhof, and Blake Williams • Bart Testa 10 Notes on the Materiality of Language in the Synthetic Sound Film • Kelly Egan Part Three: Labs and Collectives 11 The Artist-Run Film Labs • Pip Chodorov 12 Toward Artisanal Cinema: A Filmmakers’ Movement • Chris Gehman 13 Impalpable Boundary, Invisible Common: From Ciné-Clubs to Artist-Run Film Labs in Korea • Junho Oh 14 A Collective Charge: Collectif double négativ/Double Negative Collective • Mike Rollo 15 A Short Overview of the Production and Distribution of Alternative Filmmaking in France • Frédérique Devaux 16 Letter to Frédérique Devaux concerning Isou’s Traité de bave et d’éternité • Stan Brakhage 17 Experimental? It’s Not My “Type”! • Frédérique Devaux 18 A Dangerous Encounter: Lab Laba-Laba and the New Order’s Archive of Authoritarianism • Veronika Kusumaryati Part Four: Pedagogies 19 The Materiality of Abstract Animation: The Discovery and Analysis of an Unreleased Film by Gordon Webber • Marco de Blois and Guillaume Lafleur 20 “Sight Unseen”: The Ethos of Handmade Films • Hart Cohen 21 Your Film Farm Manifesto of Process Cinema • Philip Hoffman 22 Chemistry Class: Jeffrey Paull, the Escarpment School, and the Legacy of Process Cinema at Sheridan College • Brett Kashmere 23 The Sound We See: Growing a Global Slow Film Movement • Lisa Marr and Paolo Davanzo 24 A Travelogue in Two Parts: Hand-Processing in the Sahara and Finding no.w.here • Terra Long Part Five: Counter Cinemas 25 Some Recipes for Disaster in the Films of Deirdre Logue and Helen Hill • Janine Marchessault 26 The Immediate Sensuous: The Process Cinema of Jennifer Reeves • Brenda Longfellow 27 Tearing Up the Screen: Pia Arke’s Post-Colonial Processes • Scott MacKenzie and Anna Westerstahl Stenport 28 Projection as Performance: Recent Directions in Canadian Expanded Cinema • Dan Browne Part Six: Digital Interfaces 29 Practice, Interface, and Outcome: Two Interviews in Helsinki • Sami van Ingen 30 Dismantling the Cinema: Restraining Presentness with Locative Media and Experimental Architecture • Solomon Nagler 31 Writing the World: Medium Specificity and Avant-Garde Film in the Digital Age • Tess Takahashi 32 Hardware Hacking, Software Modding, and File Manipulation: Process Cinema in the Digital Age • Clint Enns Illustrations Contributors Index