OUGD401: Lecture Notes - Advante-Garde Cinema

• Richard Miles - richard.miles@leeds-art.ac.uk

• In opposition to mainstream cinema.
• A critical attack on Hollywood cinema, being different in everyday.
• Non Linear/Non Figurative/Non narrative.
• Open audience, rather than closed.
• Requires a different kind of spectatorship.
• Create your own meaning to the film.

• 'Un Chien Andalou' (1929) Luis Bunuel.
• Plot was constructed with Salvador Dali.
• Surrealist feeling to the film.
• Can be seen as a metaphor for the weight of the world, social and sexual oppression. 

• Cremaster 3 (2002) Matthew Barney.
• Starring himself,
• He was going on a quest to climb the gugamhimeh, being stopped by show girls, and two american hardcore rock bands.

• Spirals (1926) Oskar Fischinger
• Playing with optics
• Showed at the Bauhaus.

• Lapis (1966) James Whitney
• Bohemian
• Synthetic sounds, creating by new electronic instruments which became popular in the 60s, as the 'new sound'.
• People write about it as a form of poetry

• Black Ice (1994) Stan Brakhage
• physically modified the film stripes, scratching, painting, drawing.
• Mothlight (1963)
• made using the same process as Black ice.
• Window Water Baby Moving
• Attempts to make a hypnogogic feeling, the state between waking and sleeping. 
• Nothing makes sense, but your brain is half conscious, feeling. 

• Empire (-) Andy Warhol 
• Static camera filming the empire state building for 10 hours.

• All these films take the idea of cinema and remove it, and look at cinema from a new point of view. 
• They're not made for money, so there's a feeling of honesty from them, however, since they're not made to make money, they're never shown.