Artists and amateurs

This week we studied the amazing amusing films of American artist Joseph Cornell, locating them at the intersection of his deep involvement with collage and his love for the cinema. "ROSE HOBART" (1936)is his infamous 16mm film-collage portrait of the actress Rose Hobart made from the 1931 jungle drama "East of Borneo" in which the artist essentially excises from the film all that is not the object of his devotion. Your fearless leader spent many years holed up at Anthology Film Archives studyng and cataloging his film collection, and wrote this monograph for the SFMOMA Cornell exhibition a few years back.

Looking further then into amateur film--home movies, family films and personal archives . Abigail Child's The Future is Behind You (2004) was one example of an artist using films from a family's collection and creating her own story around those images and people--if you liked that you might be interested in reading a short interview with her in the Wees book as well.

The first real history on that subject was Patricia Zimmerman's Reel Families: A Social History of the Amateur Film (1995), Here's an excerpt for you!

exquisite corpse

still from REMOVED (1999) by Naomi Uman

here is our exquisitely distressed destroyed corpse of a collaborative film project--we started with a movie called JUNKYARD and each person had a section to alter in any way they saw fit, a result of various experiments we have been making with the film material over the last month. I am so glad we can watch it again and again--there aer so many details I missed during the screening! Who did that contact printing?? Maybe each person can discuss their particular section and methods? Yay.
Oh, and here are a couple other class collaboratives, one from The New School in 2008 and one from Boulder 2009.

After watching our project, we projected Naomi Uman's 1999 film REMOVED where she used nail polish and bleach selectively on a found piece of Italian soft-core. This film shows up on several DVD compilations, most importantly on the ILLEGAL ART dvd collection (a project related to STAYFREE magazine). You can buy the dvd or download/stream and watch here.

collage films? said bruce

That's right, we are still making, thinking, watching and breathing collage...


We took our first look at some found footage collage films by the recently departed SF artist Bruce Conner, notably A MOVIE ( 1958) and REPORT (1967), as we compare collage to montage. But first, here's Michael reading from his New York Times Burroughs-style CUT-UP poem--btw, I sure would love it if some people would post their cut-ups on their blogs since we unearthed some interesting poetic details about life on this planet IMHO--



Alot of people worked with the transfer method and so many collage films were heavily text based --we started with Michelle's awesome film of T.S. Eliot's J.Alfred Prufrock that she talked about on her blog--I was so transfixed that I totally forgot to shoot it (sorry Michelle).
Here are a few that I did manage to shoot :


Melissa's Cosmo Movie (materials list includes mascara)



Hogan's TAKE 1,2,3 ( movie trailer in shreds)



and Jeri's Who the F*ck Am I?--check out that keystone "cinemascope"

Papier colle

"The sensation of physically operating in the world is very strong in the medium of collage..." Robert Motherwell

George Braque, Violin and Pipe, 1913

Pablo Picasso, Still Life with Chair Caning, 1913

This week's workshop on Magazine Transfers was pretty great as you can see from our class film below made with a large variety of materials .
We also investigated William Burroughs Cut up techniques using the New York Times and revealed some pretty interesting information hidden on those pages.

But meanwhile how about some readings on COLLAGE: the first is in relationship to the visual arts and the second is in relationship to the literary arts.

The Synthetic Century: Collage from Cubism to PostModernism, by Elisabeth Hodermarsky
and
The Cut-Up Method, by William Burroughs

magazine transfer film: