Fiction or facts?

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Fiction or facts?
SM4134 VISUAL ETHNOGRAPHY CREATIVE INTERVENTION

• Presentation on Yvonne Rainer , Abigail Child and
  Found footage

Presented by Damon Chan and Lilian Fu
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• Yvonne Rainer
• 2. Abigail Child
• 3. Found footage

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Yvonne Rainer

• Born in San Francisco in 1934
• Trained as a modern dancer in New York from 1957
  and began to choreograph
• Her first feature-length film, Lives of
  Performers, in 1972
• In 1988 she and Bérénice Reynaud organised a
  two-week event entitled ,Sexism, Colonialism,
  Misrepresentation' at the Collective for Living
  Cinema.

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• a post-modern concern with inter-textuality,
  combining and recombining snippets from many
  different media and art forms.
• Her films are dense and multi-layered, combining
  irony, passion, self-interrogation and intellect.

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Murder and murder

• Murder and murder(1996)
• two women who have fallen in love late in life as
  part of daily life
• an analysis of the politics of breast cancer
  performed by Rainer herself on camera.
• lesbian love in homophobic society and breast
  cancer

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Synopsis

• Doris and Mildred are lesbian couple who become
  lovers and decide to set up housekeeping together
• Mildred in mid-50s, lesbian for most of her adult
  life
• Middle class origin
• professor in University
• Doris in early 60's
• finds herself in love with a woman for the first
  time in her life
• Never attended college, has never had a steady
  job or predictable income, and has raised her
  grown daughter, single-handedly.
• trying to be a performance artist

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Characters

• Yvonne Rainer periodically pops up in the film
• Jenny, Doris' mother and Young Mildred, Mildred's
  18-year-old self, are ghosts from the past
• A blurred boundary of fact and fiction.

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Brief film Analysis

• Via the conventions of shot/reverse shot and
  extended scenes with almost classical structure
  in terms of development and climax
• ? Make the relationship more credible
• making the space on-screen a tableau that
  contains different narrative trajectories.
• everything that went on onstage became an
  analogue for this daily life and this community

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• shuns the conventions of narrative cinema,
  inviting viewers to participate in academic and
  stylistic exercises in response to sociopolitical
  issues

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Capital letters

• MURDER refers to actual death, by homophobic
  assault or by industrial toxins.

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Lower-case

• "murder" is fantasized murder in domestic or
  familial situations.
• Getting enraged at the person you are living
  with.

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Quotations from Rainer herself
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Against predominating form of narrative
(Described as tyranny ) from mainstream

• Against predominating form of narrative
  (Described as tyranny ) from mainstream
• In 1978, Rainer spoke at The International Forum
  on Avant-Garde Film, discussing the demands of
  narrative filmmaking and describing a type of
  film that contains both narrative and
  non-narrative characteristics For example, a
  series of events containing answers to when,
  where, why, whom, gives way to a series of
  images, or maybe a single image, which, in its
  obsessive repetitiveness or prolonged duration or
  rhythmic predictability or even stillness,
  becomes disengaged from story and enters this
  other realm, call it catalogue, demonstration,
  lyricism, poetry or pure research. The work now
  floats free of ultimate climax, pot of gold,
  pay-off, future truth, existing solely in the
  present. Or perhaps a work that starts out being
  meditative, concerned with resonance,
  moodsuddenly changes its density by
  appropriating elements of melodrama. (p. 138)

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• Where narrative seems to break down in my films
  is simply where it has been subsumed by other
  concerns, such as the resonances created by
  repetition, stillness, allusion, prolonged
  duration, fragmented speech and framing,
  'self-conscious' camera movement, etc. Rather
  than being integrated into the story, these
  things at times replace the story. (p. 156)

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Autobiography as her source material

• Her access to film was through fictionalizing my
  autobiography.
• autobiography as source material, as something
  that could bring a note of authenticity to an
  otherwise flat, uninflected mise-en-scene and
  performance mode.

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Her tactics of using Found Footage

• Ill have found footage from an old movie run
  backwards-a kind of crude device for questioning
  narrativity itself, demonstrating the
  arbitrariness of one persons point of view,
  which may not be the truth and which may be a
  fiction.
• Its much more purposeful. Its about points of
  view and not only pleasure, although some of the
  material I use is very pleasurable.
• Appropriation is a kind of acquisition or use,
  but to some other purpose than its original
  intent,
• and proliferation is about getting the word out
  with an eye to its original purpose.
• I think the way I put these texts in the mouths
  of my characters is more about proliferating
  points of view that belong to the original
  authors.

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Feminism

• A critical reading of culture
• A political interpretation of the social text and
  of the social subject
• A rewriting of our cultures master narratives.

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• Articulated the paradox of woman as both object
  and sign
• Provoke looking at a film as a woman regardless
  the gender of the viewers because the usual gaze
  for cinema is male.
• That is what allows the film to draw into its
  discursive texture something of that Real which
  is the untheorized experience of woman (p.119)

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• Making woman visible on the screen by documenting
  political demonstrations of portraying womens
  daily, real-life activities in the pre-aesthetic
  sphere of domestic life
• In short, to reread, rewrite, remake all cultural
  narratives striving to construct another form of
  coherence, founded on contradiction

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• Feminist Cinema is a notation for a process
• The notation for a process of reinterpretation
  and retextualization of cultural images and
  narratives whose strategies of coherence engage
  the spectators identification through narrative
  and visual pleasure and yet succeed in drawing
  the Real into the films texure

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Abigail Child
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biography

• began her career in San Francisco in 1977 with
  the experimental film Some Exterior Presence. She
  had been originally trained to make documentary
  films, but as her interests primarily lay in the
  technicalities of film form, she switched to the
  cutting edge where she became recognized for her
  fast-paced, whimsical short films.
• From 1981 through 1989, she began producing a
  seven-part film, Is This What You Were Born For?,
  a reworking of different film genres, such as
  film noir, pornography, and the documentary,
  designed to explore their underlying content and
  social setting.
• In 1987 Child created Mayhem, a film about
  lesbianism.
• She moved to New York in 1980 where in addition
  to filmmaking, she was also active in the
  avant-garde film movement teaching, putting
  together public screenings, and publishing
  theoretical writings in several film and poetics
  journals across the U.S. Sandra Brennan

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Abigail Childs series IS THIS WHAT YOU WERE BORN
FOR?

• Child decomposes the materials and gestures that
  would compose us.
• The films are charged with a startling and
  playful musicality and poetic and rigorous
  compression.

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Montage

• Montage means breaking down, giving words and
  sound in bursts that transform meaning and
  association, braking the velocity of a gesture or
  action
• to allow a contemplation of its force and
  contradictions, before it has become sealed in a
  finalized intention.

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Montage

• a method of interruption.
• differences can be maximized to create new
  systems, counter-logics and antilanguages
• a system founded not on coherence,
• but on breakdown, not on continuity, but
  interruption

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• Her work is often about how private lives are
  part of the historical moment and looks at public
  history through private memory,
• how sometimes theres a split between the private
  world inside a person
• and their public presentation of themselves in
  movies

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Brief Analysis

• Poetic form of Cinema
• Viewer passivity is unsafe
• Active viewing is a necessary pleasure
• According to Maya Deren
• The horizontal approach of narrative
• The vertical approach of poetry.

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• Film poetry demands a formal approach, bringing
  to film varieties of viewing
• For Child, a poetics is not a guide to the
  evolution of film style and its narrative
  grammar, but an exploration of both its materials
  and forms, by a practicing filmmaker.

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• How meaning is made, how elements join together,
  how far elements can stand apart and still
  connect, how resonance and meaning is created,
  how putting together fragments of the world can
  create new forms, new ways of thinking, the
  utopian aspect, and the problematic of that
  desire

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• Child aggressively reasserts the aesthetic and
  speculative processes of art making in the
  context of a complex social problem.
• The aggressive framenting of the image produces
  new kinds of meanings and connections through the
  graphic juxtaposition of images and velocity.

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In Philosophical aspect

• Instead of single trajectory of narrative, Child
  suggests an array of possible narratives and
  dramatic events that could be fantasy, dream or
  real experience.
• Narrative elements are used to suggest how
  complex the lived experience might be
• ? Docudrama

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• Shows the multiplicity of forces at play within
  the actual
• the virtual is not opposed to the real, but to
  the actualindeed, the virtual must be defined as
  strictly part of the real object- as though the
  object has one part of itself in the virtual into
  which it plunged as though into an objective
  dimension (Deleuze, Difference and Repition)

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• Indiscernibility of lines between fact and
  fiction within an event
• Indiscernable in the demarcation of past and
  present / true or virtual
• Use power of the false to infect rhetorics of
  truth claims
• This opens the possibility of thinking
  differently about social configuarations that
  must be constantly and creatively rethought and
  reinvented.

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• Constructs a multiplicity of subjectivities
• DeleuzePower of the false
• The undecidability between what is true, what was
  actual, and what is potential in an event
• What actually happened and what did not, but
  rather between what actually happened and all
  other forces that remain virtual as part of an
  ongoing understanding of the event
• Become indistinguishable
• The actual is cut off from its motor-linkages,
  or the real from its legal connection, and the
  virtual for its part detaches itself from its
  actualizations, starts to be valid for
  itself.(Cinema 2,127)

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• Child creates a virtual portrait of one of its
  inhabitants, making inner world of dreams, desire
  and memories indistinguishable from the
  activities of the outer world around

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References

• Film Festival Berlin 1997
• Yvonne Rainer b. 1934, San Francisco,
  California, USAby Erin Brannigan
• Tom Gunning, Introduction to AC's This
• Is Called Moving A Critical Poetics of Film