The history of world cinema is an open archive on the internet. It is a wonderful chance to explore and learn and experience some of the greatest works of the human imagination. In searching through the history of the moving image it is important to break out of the categories that characterize and promote the moving image. Film festivals and museums create categories, theatrical film, installation art, avant-garde film, video art, new media, that separate and do not acknowledge the connections between different moving image practices.  The internet and the virtual archive of moving images are an open text of viewing opportunities that make it possible to link and disrupt the categories and conventions for viewing the moving image. It can become a means to engage the global scale and deep history of the moving image.

I love the moving image, whether it's movies, independent narratives and documentaries, avant-garde film, video art, animation, television shows, telenovelas, videogames, favorite YouTube pieces, installation art: all the genres and styles that make up the world of moving images are an open resource to be experienced. It is clear that the history of Twentieth Century art is going to be rewritten through the moving image. As we become a media culture the traditional institutions and practices of history writing, preservation, and museum exhibition are going to try and deny this large scale change. A  true politics of reinvention has to begin by revisiting the moving image’s history and current practices to see the ways the whole experience of the text and its construction have challenged traditional categories of analysis. So I want to transcend these categories and begin to explore what we remember from a film, an installation, a television show. I remember films through ways that they push categories, transcend their story, and discover a moment that I never forget. Just like we remember plays for particular characters or scenes, paintings for a particular insight into a character or expressive brush stroke, the impression of the graphic pencil in a drawing, a sculpture seen from a particular point of view, a line in a poem, an uncanny moment in a videogames where the unexpected happens with a logic all its own, etc. 

In suggesting that we open ourselves up to a flow of connections between the artforms of the moving image I want to recover lost films, memories, and create new experiences and connections across genres and styles. This is not the cinephilia of the movies but of the moving image. I have taken Gilles Deleuze’s term demark, which he employs to identify that shot that works against the flow, an unexpected movement, sign, that unsettles the reception of the narrative, like the crop duster suddenly appearing in Hitchcock’s North by Northwest. I want to expand the demark from a single definitional category within Deleuze’s lexicon and employ it as an inspiration to discover the scenes, sequences, that recompose our sense of identity and place, that unsettle the imaginary,  and as a means to break out of the limited categories of film and art historical studies. I want to further refine this idea with an image from David K. Lewis’ essay “How many Lives has Schrodinger’s Cat?” (from Frank Jackson and Graham Priest, eds. Lewisian Themes. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004. P.9). This “out of phase” diagram conveys the dislocation within the symmetry of the whole, how a shifting perspective realigns what we thought we knew or sensed where we were going. Once again, the scene, shot, etc. that recomposes the whole, giving it a fuller texture of meaning. I’ll be returning to David Lewis later when I discuss other worlds.

I have put these films together in groups in hopes that they might encourage a revisiting (if you know them) or look at for the first time. I am also suggesting that we can open up to a wider register of sources when we think about such categories as I am using here. In any case I want to make them less familiar, to put our expectations in a different place.  I have watched and have enjoyed all these films many times. And what I remember from each film is a favorite scene, edited sequence, gesture, camera movement, a piece of action, a stretch of silence, a section of music or dialogue. I enjoy watching them again and again.

So I encourage you to watch some of these films and tell me if you have favorite scenes, moments, elements (set design, music) etc. I’ll identify some of my impressions, scenes, sensibilities, that I love to remember in hopes that they hint at what to look for in the film groupings listed below. I will be expanding and refining my descriptions. I have just begun to identify what I recall and need to spend more time on this by enlarging my descriptions, adding titles, developing new categories. All of this is meant to reveal the shifting strategies for placing and considering individual titles. There is nothing exclusive or permanent about these lists! I am only opening up a discourse and testing through this blog responses and redirections I might take as I hear from you. I look forward to hearing what you think of these films, groupings, scenes, and perhaps your favorite moments, that’ll become my favorite moments. Also please recommend other films to add to the groups and make your own groupings. Let’s try and shake up the linear, formal, national, genre, historical periods and categories, the narrow focus and restrictive representation of artists and ideas. The result will be (I hope) a reopening of the excitement and challenge that comes from experiencing the moving image.


Art & Artist
The representation on film of the artist and the creative imagination is explored in this international selection of works by master filmmakers.

Luchino Visconti. Death in Venice.
The sequence in the hotel lobby where the guests wait to be called for dinner. Everything about the film, the tension of desire between the characters, is conveyed in this sequence as the camera moves and follows Dirk Bogart’s gaze as he catches sight of Tadzio and anticipates meeting him as he leaves the room. The way that Bogart through the construction of the set and scene conveys an affective engagement with Tadzio shapes the entire film and our reception of the story and characters.


Derek Jarman. Caravaggio
The violent and erotic tension between Caravagio and the young model he paints explodes with a raw intensity.  It captures the formal elegance and the brusque violence that emanates from Caravaggio’s canvas. The lighting and physical action, the relentless camera movement, and harsh performances convey a vivid sense of the artist trying to release his powers and convey his feelings on life and canvas.    

Federico Fellini. Fellini’s Satyricon
Walking up and through the towering maze that opens up onto illicit desires. Fellini conveys with a smoothly tracking camera the rooms which are windows onto the unconscious and desires of the two young men. The architecture of the set and physical movement of the camera frame the scenes and shape the interactions between the actors and the erotic tableaus. The final shot reveals the whole structure and the paths taken by the protagonists in this sequence.    

Kenneth Anger. Kustom Kar Kommandos (Vol. II)
Kenneth Anger’s lush cinematography and rock soundtrack have two great moments the powder buffs on the chrome and the silhouette of the driver moving through the car’s gears. The sublime smoothness of machine and the human body as artist and artform are eloquently equated and celebrated in this perfect film.



Future Shock
The world’s great film directors have imagined future worlds through different genres and cinematic styles.

Chris Marker. La Jetee. Composed of still photographs and a voice over narrative this haunting mediation on memory and violence achieves its perfect moment when the still image suddenly moves. The voice of the narration carries its own memorable power and shapes the temporal reception of the entire film. It is not about still images but a Bergsonian reflection on the reception of time and memory.

Stanley Kubrick. 2001.
When the dialogue with Hal the Computer begins to die down. Machine and man become a dialectical whole as character and emotion become the subtext of this conversation on death and control.

Jean-Luc Godard. Alphaville.
When Lemmy Caution walks across the lobby and goes up the elevator into the room. The movement of Eddie Constantine, the mirrored reflections of the door, the lobby and elevator all seamlessly composed to convey a film noirish view of a future composed through the city of today. Once again the voice over, cinematography, and Constantine’s physical movements articulate the space of the cinematic action and convey the forces of state control and individual resistance.

Ridley Scott. Blade Runner.
The over head shot like a film noir mystery that shifts to the interrogation of the replicant, where the human seeks to locate the inhuman through a viewing instrument and  questions about who we are as human beings. Here virtual worlds coexist within the perceptions we have of ourselves and others conveyed through the set design, camera movements, and physical movements of the actors.



Modernity & the City
Modern life is embodied in the contradictions and variety of urban living here represented in films and videotapes by major film and video artists .

Jacqques Tati. Traffic.
The scene where Tati’s character meets someone from his army days who invites him into his ultra modern apartment. The ensuing scene is shot from outdoors, with ambient sound, and the scene in the apartment is like a modernist stage, a critique of the everyday banality of modern living. 

F.W. Murnau. Sunrise.
The ride on the streetcar from the country into the city. This is one of the great cinematic sequences conveying the movement from the pastoral tradition to urban modernity.

Dziga Vertov. Man With the Movie Camera.
Making the film about the film about the city. The result is the great modernist epic, a self-reflective meditation, performance, of daily life as the fabrication of a new cinematic language.

Ken Jacobs. New York Ghetto Fish Market 1903
Any moment in this breathtaking refashioning of found footage.  Jacobs’ spectacular restaging of found footage opens up the liminal notes of life within the everydayness of urban New York at the beginning of the last century.

Bill Viola. Hatsu Yume (First Dream).
Begin with the man moving slowly down a Tokyo street, looks into a window display then the camera goes inside a taxi and ends in a fish pond. Bill Viola whose video installations remake time as being itself here invokes the urban in a continuity with nature and the rythms and cycles of spiritual life and myth. The reflection of water and light in the rear view mirror of a taxi is one of the great scenes that links Viola to that other master of the moving image Stan Brakhage.



Other Worlds
Filmmakers explore and create other worlds through a richly imagined poetics of story telling and filmic technique.

Luis Bunuel/Salvador Dali. Un Chien Andalou
The opening is still breathtaking statement on vision, dreams and cinema. The slit across the eye opens the imagination to the dislocating vision of our dream worlds.   A powerful emblem of the cinema as window onto the unconscious it is a shot that haunts the history of the cinema.

Jean Cocteau. Orpheus
The plunge into the mirror becomes one of the signature demarks of surrealism and the cinema of the unconscious. The black and white cinematography conveys an uncanny luminosity and bathes the actors in the dream like action of myth. Here other worlds, coexisting with our own, emerge. The stuff of science fiction and philosophy.

Maya Deren. Meshes of the Afternoon.
Watch the sequence where Maya Deren goes into the house and discovers herself dreaming. The epic sweep of the movement from out of doors, up the stairs, and floating across the living room to her own self asleep is the perfect fusion of choreography and narrative through dream and camera point of view.

Stan Brakhage. Dog Star Man.(Criterion Collection)
Any time spent with Brakhage plunging up the mountain is thrilling. One of the truly epic works of our time. A Whitmanesque sequence that conveys the textures of nature and memory as a living present. The vertiginous camera movements and edits that shift space and scale and time are among the most achieved and complex within the cinema.

Bill Viola. I do not know what it is I am like.
Watch where the artist discovers his reflection in the owl’s eye. This moment is one of the most astonishing in the history of the movie image. It is embedded and becomes the demark of a rich epistemological catalog of ways of seeing and sensing the world around us. The eye of Un Chien Andalou and the owl’s eye are reflective metaphors for the epistemologies of knowing and unknowing.

Richard Linklater. The Waking Life.
From a nap on the couch to drifting above the town. The fusion of graphic animation with the cinematic narrative creates a haunting and complex celebration of language and story telling. The drift into dream life is given its perfect expression in the haunting restraint and evocation of the excitement and boredom of ideas and daily life. 



Dreams & Desires
This program features some of the greatest film directors of this and earlier generations who share in exploring the human condition through a variety of narrative techniques.


F.W. Murnau. Faust.
The sets of the medieval town creates a sense of place that becomes its own character. One of the wonders of the cinematic imaginary the sets and cinematic compositions of Murnau’s epic mediattaion on myth and power evoke a  powerful sense of the Faust legend becoming cinematic poetry.   

Luis Bunuel. Belle de Jour.
Those apartment interiors and what happens inside. Jeanne Moreau’s affecting performance conveys in its subtle narcisism a powerful sense of the uncanny erotic logic of power and the desires that inhabit and constantly change our real/dream world.

Jean-Luc Godard. Weekend
Follow the argument in the parking lot to driving into the endless line of cars on the highway. This is as evocative a sequence as any in world cinema, conveying a sense of catastrophe and revolution out of the self-destructive logic of a society that has lost all sense of renewal and hope.

Stanly Kubrick. The Shining.
Jack Nicholson’s frantic hunt for his son near the end of the film. The vertigious camera that follows Nichols’s berzerk character and the flight of the child to its mother is enveloped in tunnels of snow and light and the soundtrack of relentless fear. The stedicam becomes a player as it transports our point of view and propels the logic of the narrative forward to its conclusion.

Werner Herzog. Fitzcaraldo
Carrying the boat up and over the jungle. The obsessions of creativity, the godlike posture of the artist, and capitalist, are given epic proportions. The frenzied performance of Klaus Kinski and the demanding construction of scenes of ambition and control become abstract and real in a mixture of power as artistic control.

Wes Anderson. The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou.
I love the cross section views of action in the boat. Here we see the transparent movements of the scene and the ironic interplay of characters and ideas. A synecdoche of the whole film its makes theater and film one in the transparency of the set design within the movement of the story and characters relationships to each other.

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