[Frameworks] A new book: Lost Highways, Embodied Travels & thanks

[Kornelia Boczkowska]

Hi Pip,

Me neither and I don’t want speak for those who proposed/defined the 
corporeal turn in avant-garde film, but my guess is that some 
experimental films – to a lesser or greater extent – only reference 
selected genre conventions and should not be necessarily considered 
horror or pornographic films per se unless the makers themselves label 
them as such. The same goes for road movies as experimental film usually 
defies genre, narrative, editing and other conventions; at least this is 
what I suggest in the book. So you may be a bit disappointed as I don't 
discuss this theory in much detail, but merely use some aspects of it to 
study how particular films explore a sensuous experience of travel, the 
driver-car’s embodied connection to their surroundings and other things 
(my focus was on case studies rather than film theory).

Again, I appreciate your interest in the book and thanks for your 
comments and the info on these films! I’ll take a look at them when I 
get a chance.

All the best!

Kornelia

W dniu 14.03.2023 o 04:48, Pip Chodorov pisze:
> Hi Kornelia,
>
> Thank you for your replies! I really can’t think of many horror films 
> in American experimental films of the 1960s and 1970s and the ones 
> involving sexuality are mostly not pornographic so I will be very 
> curious to read your book and learn about this.
>
> You should be able to see the films of Guttenplan and Razutis through 
> the documentation center at Light Cone in Paris.
> For Taylor Mead’s home movies, we released them on DVD through Re:Voir 
> and you can find them on the re-voir.com <http://re-voir.com> website 
> or the Re:Voir Online mobile application.
>
> Best wishes,
> Pip
>
>
>> On Mar 14, 2023, at 4:14 AM, Kornelia Boczkowska 
>> <kornelia.boczkowska at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>
>> Dear Pip,
>>
>> Many thanks for your interest, you’ve definitely raised some 
>> interesting points here. Yes, these questions are actually discussed 
>> in the book in more detail, but let me clarify some of them here:
>>
>> Re the corporeal turn (see Chapter 1) – since the book focuses 
>> primarily on American films, I situate my discussion of these works 
>> within the corporeal turn in American avant-garde film (see Elder 
>> 1997; Osterweil 2014; Máté 2021) and apply it to the study of 
>> “non-body” genres, specifically road movies (as compared to “body 
>> genres,” hence my reference to horror and pornography), through the 
>> lens of the mobilities paradigm, haptic visuality, cinematic 
>> tactility and other approaches. Although the corporeal turn was 
>> fundamental to the American experimental film practice of the 1960s 
>> and 1970s, which moved from exploring psychic reality to portray the 
>> body in extreme circumstances through conventions related to horror 
>> and pornography, among other things, I’m trying to demonstrate that 
>> experimental road movies also showcase a multi-sensory nature of the 
>> film image. I’m sure that body genres were popular in the 1970s 
>> French avant-garde film scene (though I don’t know much about that, 
>> to be honest), but extending the methodological framework to include 
>> such works would not necessarily make sense in view of the book’s 
>> focus on American avant-garde film and mentioning them in this 
>> specific context would have to be really well justified.
>>
>> Re pure diary films – I’ve only seen Home Movies at Anthology Film 
>> Archives, but the AFA staff couldn’t arrange more than one research 
>> visit for me at the time, so I didn’t discuss it in my book. Travel 
>> Songs was only mentioned once as a travel film and there’s a 
>> distinctive difference between how we define a travel film and a road 
>> movie – I believe Mekas’ film may qualify as representative of the 
>> former genre.
>>
>> As you said, Bent Time is a road movie without cars, so it doesn't 
>> really fit the definition of the road movie genre, as it functions in 
>> film criticism and elsewhere (see Chapter 1). Perhaps it's more of a 
>> walking film? Go! Go! Go! is a city symphony film more than anything 
>> else, but note that much of the footage was shot through the car's 
>> window.
>>
>>
>> I actually believe At Land can be considered a travel film as it 
>> depicts Maya Deren’s journey through the psychical spaces of water, 
>> air, earth, etc. and the psychic spaces of her own self (see Noble 
>> 2017). Same for Scorpio Rising through its emphasis on the fetishes 
>> of mobility and riding/movement, symbolically conveyed in the 
>> recurrent theme of a queer erotic quest (see Baker 2015; Boczkowska 
>> 2019).
>>
>> So it basically boils down to the use of definitions. Of course, this 
>> is debatable and you have every right to disagree with my 
>> understanding of these works. Please let me know if you have any 
>> further questions/comments.
>>
>> PS. San Francisco Diary '79 and Amerika sound really exciting, thanks 
>> for bringing them to my attention! I’ll try to figure out where/how 
>> to actually see them.
>>
>> Kornelia
>>
>
>
>
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