Category Archives: experimental

Baudelaire’s World (2002) – Rosemary Lloyd

Baudelaire’s World (2002) – Rosemary Lloyd
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Charles Baudelaire is often regarded as the founder of modernist poetry. Written with clarity and verve, Baudelaire’s World provides English – language readers with the biographical, historical, and cultural contexts that will lead to a fuller understanding and enjoyment of the great French poet’s work. –from the publisher

Though it is often said Charles Baudelaire published only a single volume of poetry, The Flowers of Evil, this is untrue if you count his published prose poetry such as Spleen de Paris.

See also: Charles Baudelaire – modernist poetry

Jean Duvignaud on the nouveau roman

I had speculated before on the filmic qualities of the nouveau roman and see it confirmed here:

Thus, contemporary literature is moving towards a representation of man based on the event, where the action described is more important than any commentary, and the instantaneous revelation of reality is more important than its description. Such an attempt must end with turning the novel into a screenplay for a film which will never be made and the cinema into an unfolding of an event which never actually occurs. —The Sociology of Art, 1967

See also: sociology – art – visual arts

Already the breaking up has lasted longer than the relationship

David Hodges writes very short novels. 299 words each to be precise:

An excerpt:

Already the breaking up has lasted longer than the relationship and provided her more pleasure. Another week of breaking up and this will be her longest relationship yet. I’d rather drink and stay out with friends than be with you, he tells her, I never cared about you and I don’t care about you now. —Very Short Novels

What a coincidence: Wired Magazine asked a bunch of A-list writers to make six word novels. I particularly like Margaret Atwood’s six word novel:

Longed for him. Got him. Shit.

The Assault on Culture (1988) – Stewart Home

The Assault on Culture: Utopian Currents from Lettrisme to Class War (1988) – Stewart Home
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Stewart Home (born 1962) is a British fiction writer, subcultural pamphleteer, underground art historian, and activist. His mother, Julia Callan-Thompson, was a model and hostess who was associated with the radical arts scene in Notting Hill Gate. She knew such people as the writer and situationist Alexander Trocchi. Stewart was put up for adoption soon after his birth.

The Assault on Culture, originally written but rejected as a B.A. thesis, is an underground art history sketching Stewart Home’s ultimately personal history of ideas and influences in post-World War II fringe radical art and political currents, and including – for the first time in a book – a tactically manipulated history of Neoism (including character assassinations of individual Neoist) that was continued in the later book Neoism, Plagiarism and Praxis. Despite its highly personal perspective and agenda, The Assault on Culture: Utopian currents from Lettrisme to Class War (Aporia Press and Unpopular Books, London, 1988) is considered a useful art-history work, providing an introduction to a range of cultural currents which had, at that time at least, been under-documented. Like Home’s other publications of that time, it played an influential part in renewing interest in the Situationist International. —http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stewart_Home

See also: Lettrism – Situationism – assault – culture – 1988

Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance (2002) – Chan-wook Park

Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance (2002) – Chan-wook Park
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I saw this on MTV Europe (an Asian cinema feature) yesterday evening. Impressive, but not as good as for example Alex van Warmerdam. All in all a surreal, film noirish, arty affair.

The previous Korean film I had seen was the 1999 Lies, which I had chosen because of its subject matter (although the respresentation of which disappointed me). What I liked best about Lies was its breaking of the fourth wall: excerpts from interviews with the author and cast are sometimes inserted between scenes and we see a girl filmed after the ‘cut’ signal of a particularly emotional scene (she continues crying).

After having seen these two films it appears to me that these two Korean filmmakers take the art of art film as seriously as European filmmakers did in the sixties.

Wikipedia: Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance

See also: revenge – film – 2002 – Korea

The Cannibal (1949) – John Hawkes

In search of plotlessness

The Cannibal (1949) – John Hawkes
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“I began to write fiction on the assumption that the true enemies of the novel were plot, character, setting and theme, and having once abandoned these familiar ways of thinking about fiction, totality of vision or structure was really all that remained.”

John Hawkes (born John Clendennin Talbot Burne Hawkes, Jr., August 17, 1925 – May 15, 1998). Born in Stamford, Connecticut he was an avant garde American novelist and a postmodernist, known for the intensity of his work, which suspended the traditional constraints of the narrative.

Educated at Harvard, Hawkes taught at Brown University for thirty years. Though he published his first novel, The Cannibal, in 1949, it was The Lime Twig (1961) that first won him acclaim.

Hawkes died in Providence, Rhode Island. —http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Hawkes

See also: American literature – experimental literature – postmodern literature – plotlessness

The Nonesuch Guide to Electronic Music (1968) – Beaver and Krause

The Nonesuch Guide to Electronic Music (1968) – Beaver and Krause
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Part of the enjoyment of the web is tracking down stuff you know absolutely nothing about. Of course it helps having good guides, and I stumbled on this via Simon Reynolds blissblog who refers to an excellent survey on this scene by the stupendous woebot.

Discogs says:

Variously called electronic music, modern classical, contemporary classical or experimental music this collection was originally released as a 2-LP boxed set as in introduction to and survey of electronic music, circa late 1960s. All work realised on the Moog Series III Synthesiser.

Wikipedia on Nonesuch:

Nonesuch Records is currently allied with Warner Bros. Records even though it is an Elektra Records subsidiary. Jac Holzman, founder of Elektra Records in 1950, founded Nonesuch in 1964 to license European classical music. He sold Elektra and Nonesuch to Kinney National Company in 1970. —http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonesuch_Records

Nonesuch also released Silver Apples of the Moon.

See also: art music – experimental music

Of boredom and interestingness

In defense of interestingness.

A week ago I reported on Harry’s ironically titled ‘Boring Art Films’ blog-a-thon. Harry specifies ironically because he does not believe that the type of contemplative cinema he refers to is indeed boring. Others may find these films boring, we think they are interesting.

While my favourite director of contemplative cinema or essay films (as Doug Dilliman has called them) is probably Catherine Breillat, I want to take this opportunity to write about a category of films which are boring if viewed from a to z – films which may not be worth to spend the 90 to 120 minutes to watch them – but that are all the more interesting to read about. These are the kind of films I wrote about on my page anti-film. The introduction went as follows:

Anti-film is film that does not respect the rules of film. For example, Andy Warhol, who forces us to watch a sleeping man during five hours, Chris Marker, who makes a film out of filmed photographs, with no moving images and Guy Debord’s Howlings in Favor of de Sade which dispenses with images and narrative altogether. [Jul 2006]

Claiming the aesthetic value of the category anti-film is a further defense of my mini-essays in praise of secondary literature and in praise of the paratext, which takes a meta-approach to the arts stating that films that actually ought to be viewed, books that actually ought to be read are just as interesting to read about.

I mean if you take the title of the book 1001 Movies You Must See Before you Die seriously, you have to exclude the wealth of films which are extremely interesting but boring to watch in their entirety. That’s why I call my filmography 199 films you could read about before you die (2006), replacing the word should by could and see by read about.

Which brings me to my contribution to this blog-a-thon, the 1952 film Howlings in Favor of de Sade[Youtube] by Guy Debord (the man who published a book with a sandpaper cover so that it would destroy other books placed next to it):

Hurlements en faveur de Sade (Howlings in Favor of de Sade) (1952) – Guy Debord
image sourced here.

Instead of using pictures, Hurlements en faveur de Sade (Howlings in Favor of de Sade) consists of black and white film leader in alternation for some 75 minutes. Debord’s voice is heard during the white sequences, while the black sections, often lasting minutes, are silent.

On April 9, 2002, Guy Debord’s films were screened in Paris in the Magic Cinema. Although I stated earlier that my purpose is to showcase films which I wouldn’t dream of seeing in their entirety, I would have been tempted to go to this screening (If I had lived in Paris and if I had known about the event). Not for the qualities of these films but from a tribal/sociological point of view: to see who attends this type of screenings.