[Frameworks] Experimental films on photography

[John Muse]

Hi, Bernard.  I often teach a Film on Photography course and just as often include Memento in the syllabus… only to remove it.  Have you taught it?  How does it work for students?  

Thanks!

j

> On Jun 10, 2020, at 4:49 PM, Bernard Roddy <roddybp0 at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Dear Albert:
> 
> This is a nice invitation to read (I quote it below). For me it leaves too much to consider. I had two reactions.First, I have been interested in conceptual art's use of photography. Under these terms we would have to impose a "post-photographic" restriction on what constitutes acceptable examples in your list. I would submit a short list of classic texts written by artists for publication in 1969 and 1970.
> 
> But I also just taught a course in which I used standard narrative cinema in order to think about traditional philosophical material. And the film, Memento, became interesting for reasons having nothing to do with any experimental film.
> 
> Or so it would appear. One could undertake a whole research agenda in which the role of memory in the understanding of shot relationships is explored. This concerns the experience of the spectator when the questions concern the order of events and their causal relationships. In his Matter and Memory Henri Bergson was preoccupied by 19th century research that involves brain lesions. Bergson uses results in neurophysiology to confirm his hypotheses about memory. 
> 
> But it was in order to get a handle on Deleuze's reference to the memory image that I found myself reading Bergson. Deleuze is extremely casual with terminology, but Bergson isn't. What Deleuze means by the memory image and the time image can only be appreciated, of course, by reviewing a history of narrative cinema. But what Bergson means when he discusses research into memory disorders can be appreciated by any artist working with images that replicate perception.
> 
> In Memento Leonard takes instamatic photographs that are developed before his eyes. They are only part of his basis for deciding what he will do in the future, but as images fixed on paper they make possible repeated experience of the circumstances of some past event.
> 
> Why burn a photograph documenting something you did? What is the significance of a character's understanding of the value of a photograph for the understanding that a spectator has of the plot?
> 
> Bernie
> 
> 
> - - - - - -
> Hello all,
> 
> I was making a list of experimental film practices on photography and I was
> wondering if you could suggest more titles.
> 
> At first I wanted to focus just on movies where photographs are deleted
> (burned, destroyed) or denied but I only know *(nostalgia)* for Hollis
> Frampton and the project *Found Monochromes* by David Batchelor (slides).
> Does anyone know other films where the main purpose is the destruction or
> the invisibility of photographs?
> 
> On the other hand I have started a list of films made from photographs.
> There are dozens of films (some of them animations) where the object of
> analysis are still images, from filmed Polaroids to appropriation of
> advertising images from magazines or the accumulation of digital images
> found on the internet:
> 
> *Transformation by Holding Time* by Paul de Nooijer
> *Pasadena Freeway Stills* and *Hand Held Day* by Gary Beydler
> *Production Stills* by Morgan Fisher
> *Frank Film* by Frank Mouris
> *Boy Meets Girl* by Eugènia Balcells
> *Wall *by Takashi Ito
> *Photodiary *by Takashi Ito
> *Clandestine Porn Film* by Augustin Gimel
> *DIES IRAE* by Jean Gabriel Périot
> *The World as Will and Representation* de Roy Arden
> 
> Do others come to mind?
> 
> Thank you,
> Albert Alcoz
> 
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j/PrM


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John Muse
Assistant Professor of Visual Studies
Haverford College
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