FSS Abstraction: Cinematic Abstraction
Course Convenor: Prof听JD Rhodes (jdr42@cam.ac.uk), Director of Centre for Film and Screen
Cinema, theoretically, resists abstraction. Cinema, so it is often claimed, is an art of the real鈥攐f realism of documentation, representation, recognition, and identification. But cinema, like all the arts, exists at an ontological remove from the real, exists by way of abstraction鈥攖hat is to say, of withdrawal鈥攆rom the real. Abstraction can be understood as a refusal of the figure, of representation, and even of communication. But abstraction can also be a manner of handling and elaborating figuration and representation There are powerful examples in film history of a complete rejection of representation: for instance, in the hand painted films of Stan Brakhage, or the animations of Len Lye. But abstraction in cinema also happens through the temporal organisation of narrative cinema, through the stereotyping of human characters, or through various forms of formal experimentation that thrust the artifice of moving image representation to the foreground (to name only a few of its modalities). This module will look at a set of case studies in cinematic abstraction, drawn from the archives of both experimental filmmaking and narrative feature filmmaking. Readings will be drawn from film theory and history, aesthetic theory, art history, political theory, and other fields of inquiry.
Preliminary Reading
Wilhelm Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy
Rudolf Arnheim, Film as Art
Siegfried Kracauer, Theory of Film
Georg Luk谩cs, Essays on Realism
T.J. Clark, Farewell to an Idea
Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory
Briony Fer, On Abstract Art
Jaleh Mansoor, Marshall Plan Modernism
Maya Deren, Essential Deren
Stan Brakhage, Metaphors on Vision
Steven Best, None Like Us: Blackness, Belonging, Aesthetic Life
Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time Image
Michael Gillespie, Film Blackness
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