[Frameworks] abstraction and politics

[Beebe, Roger]

Kelly,

This is an interesting question, and it demands a complicated answer.  First, I think it's important to note that abstraction is not an absolute but that there's a large gray area between abstraction and representation.  I'd argue that many if not most experimental films inhabit that gray area.  I'd say these films "tend toward abstraction" but I wouldn't simply say they "are abstract."  So a videotape like Jackie Goss's "There There Square" plays with forms of abstraction (in the morphing, sometimes roughly drawn outlines of states and the U.S.) and her intro and outro sequences are fully abstract (colored squares that float around in relationship to one another).  "There There Square" is also (obviously?) political, in the way it wants to think about cartography and our imagination of boundaries.

But then there are fully abstract works, like some of Brakhage's hand-painted films.  There is certainly a politics to the making of abstract works--a refusal of normative visual codes, a challenge to the viewer to reimagine her or his relationship to cinema, etc.  And these politics are surely different in different historical moments, depending on what the aims of that abstract gesture are (refusal of Hollywood's codes,  a representation of closed-eye vision, etc.)

But since you've used a very specific language ("films/videos that use abstraction TO ADDRESS political, social, or cultural histories"), I assume you mean a more direct and specific engagement with specific political issues.  In that case, I think we'd have to be in the realm of films that tend toward abstraction rather than the fully abstract.  Many found footage films do this kind of work (abstracting from a representational original)--Chris Harris's "Reckless Eyeballing" comes immediately to mind, but there are dozens and dozens more in this mode.  

And then there are films that are shot or processed using techniques that abstract the image (shooting through glass, shooting reflections, hand-processing, pushing film to increase grain, using macrophotography to isolate textures, etc.).  Lawrence Brose's De Profundis, especially important at this moment due to his current legal travails, uses a number of these techniques to abstract both found and original footage, but again, that's just one example of hundreds.

Hope this helps as a starting point for what's potentially a very big conversation.  (For those with long histories on Frameworks, I know we've been on this merry-go-round before.  I don't propose to rekindle the fires of those old flame wars, so hopefully it'll be possible to lay this out without having to "choose sides.")

...
Roger

On Oct 6, 2013, at 10:59 PM, Kelly Sears wrote:

> Dear frameworkers,
> 
> I would love to pick your collective brain about some film/videos that use abstraction to address political, social, or cultural histories.   I would double love it if anyone had any suggestions of writings on this topic as well.  I'm interested in learning more about how this visual strategy and lack of the figurative or representational could be used in a political/critical way.
> 
> Many thank yous.
> 
> Kelly
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
> FrameWorks mailing list
> FrameWorks at jonasmekasfilms.com
> https://mailman-mail5.webfaction.com/listinfo/frameworks