Kevin's Watch

Tazzman wrote:hmmm...i'm getting frustrated with myself here because i cant seem to get my argument across. or maybe im just being ignored .

Tazz...i can't imagine the person who would call YOU pretentious!!! you're a totally "down-to-earth" guy.
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Tazzman wrote:art film, while in many respects liberated from normal constraints HAS TO HAS TO HAS TO adhere to certain principles. namely, the originators of the film cannot in anyway be motivated by money, they cannot target a large audience and it has to be art for arts sake.

Lucimay wrote: let me further state my view in case i've been ambiguous.

Now, I would consider Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon an art film that I enjoyed very much.
Why? I have no idea.

Does anyone else consider it an "art film"?

Matrixman wrote:

Lucimay wrote: let me further state my view in case i've been ambiguous.

Is it ever possible to be absolutely clear when discussing something as nebulous as art? And if the work of art itself (whether film or painting or whatever) has an absolutely clear message about something, then it must be...Propaganda art! Speaking of which, has anyone ever watched Leni Riefenstahl's groundbreaking and infamous Triumph of the Will, her film documentary of the Nazi rally at Nuremberg? I've never seen the whole thing, but enough to appreciate the kind of hypnotic power the film must have had on the German populace.

Going by your expanded defintion, Lucimay, I guess I've never seen a genuine art film, because the kind you're talking about has only ever been seen and circulated in universities and other ivory towers. In other words, it's an elitist thing, heh heh. It's probably for the best anyway.

I know that something like The Matrix will of course never be considered art by many people, both academics and general moviegoers. But that's their problem, not mine. I mentioned this film to see what kind of reaction I'd get.

For truly avant-garde stuff, I guess you can't beat obscure experimental films by university graduates.

The Independant American Cinema

The Independent American Cinema has been called by many names: the American Underground, the American Avant-Garde, the New American Cinema, and the Experimental American Cinema among them. By whatever name, an alternative cinema tradition has existed in the United States since the 1920's with a series of assumptions that differed markedly from those of the commercial American cinema. This cinema is highly personal and individual (often one person literally makes the entire film); like poetry, it has virtually no commercial aspirations; and it is necessarily revolutionary in structure, or visual technique, or intellectual attitude, or all three. These personal, experimental films first attracted wide attention in the late 1950's. Nevertheless, the American avant-garde, independant, poetic cinema was not particularly a 1950's or even a 1960's movement. Rather, a tradition of avant-garde filmmaking that had grown along with, and been influenced by, the avant-garde cinema of Europe since the 1920's, and that had its own major films and figures and movements all along, went throught a particularly creative phase just when public interest in film as an art was at its height.

There are three conflicting critical attitudes about the Independent American Cinema. For some, it represents the narcissistic visual scribblings of the luatic fringe whose work is ultimately irrelevant to the development of serious film art (that is, commercial, narrative, freature-length "art films"). In support of this postion, it is probably true that a vast majority of American filmgoers has never even heard of the most respected Independent filmmakers. A second postition finds the Independent American Cinema a fertile testing ground for techniques and devices that are later absorbed and practiced by the mainstream of filmmaking (that is, commercial, feature-length narrative films). In support of this postition one can point to the influence of the French avant-garde onthe later fearures of Clair, Epstein, Cocteau, and Bunuel (all of whom came out of the avant-garde), as well as the fact that many of the stylistic devices and moral attitudes of the commmercial films of the 1960's and 1970's (their sensuality, the use of slow motion, multiple exposure, accelerated motion, rock music, musique concrete, computer graphics, shock cutting, split screen) were first seen in Independent films.

Many of the experiments undertaken by New Wave directors were inspired by those they had seen in 1958 (at the Brussels World's Fair and, a week later, in Paris) at screenings of films by Kenneth Anger, Jordan Belson, Stan Brakhage, Robert Breer, Jim Davis, Maya Deren, Ian Hugo, and others. More recently, the credits of SE7EN(1995) reflected the influence of Brakhage. Yet a third position finds the Independent American Cinema the only significant and serious works of film art in America. In support of this position, they observe that these are the only films free of commercial pressures, totally dependent on the vision of a single artist, and totally aligned with the parallel movements in modern painting, music, and poetry. The business of these independent films is perception: the way the devices of an art can aid, extend, and complicated one's ability to perceive inner and outer realities. That goal might be taken as the ultimate intention of all the Modernist arts.

sgtnull wrote:is art by nature non comercial? the Mona Lisa seems to defy that explanation.

Deren's writing remains relatively obscure in film theory and her films are rarely screened outside of experimental or feminist film courses.

these are the only films free of commercial pressures, totally dependent on the vision of a single artist, and totally aligned with the parallel movements in modern painting, music, and poetry.

The business of these independent films is perception: the way the devices of an art can aid, extend, and complicated one's ability to perceive inner and outer realities. That goal might be taken as the ultimate intention of all the Modernist arts.

Lucimay wrote:regarding Leni's Triumph of Will...i will be seeing that this semester in my documentary film class!!

jacob Raver, sinTempter wrote:JFK is one of the best films ever made. Keeping that pacing with that level of underlying tension for that long...amazing.