An archival turn?
In the first Joint Theory Session (JTS) of the Winter semester 2006 we are going to work on the notions of archiving. The title is borrowed by Kodwo Eshun who - in his text for the Academy book that just appeared these days - promotes an understanding of the archive neither in the Foucauldian "outside of our own language" nor in its Derridian elaboration as the "scene of domiciliation" nor in Agamben's "systems of relations between the said and the unsaid", but in the sense of "documented cinema" offered by director Francesco Rosi in his film "Salvatore Giuliano" from 1961. From the question of ownership and what it means to "own an image" we are going to discuss contemporary cultural strategies for imagining and imaging the world.
Links to Tarkowsky's "Mirror"
Here is a collection of various links to websites that deal with Tarkovsky's Mirror:
A division of the film into 15 sections and a brief synopsis:
http://www.arts.ualberta.ca/~dmiall/Mirror/Mirror.htm
Andrei Tarkovsky's Mirror - A Landmark In World Cinema:
http://www.ezinearticles.com/?Andrei-Tarkovskys-Mirror---A-Landmark-In-W...
From Tarkovsky’s autobiography Scultping in Time:
http://www.its.caltech.edu/~ifilm/mirror.pdf#search=%22tarkovsky%20mirro...
Internet movie database
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0072443/
Sculpting the End of Time
Tollof Nelson has published a paper entitled "Sculpting the End of Time: The Anamorphosis of History and Memory in Andrei Tarkovsky’s Mirror (1975)": "Articulating a materialist conception of rhythm and temporality in the medium of film, this paper seeks to explore the way in which Andrei Tarkovsky’s Mirror (1975) is constituted by the alternation of explosions and implosions of historical time-images. The author makes a detailed analysis of several sequences of the film in order to lend support to the central argument: that spectators are taken “out of time” through an anamorphic experience of death in the material contact transmitted by a spectral dimension of history and memory. This argument allows political considerations regarding the mediation of social memory and mourning and also epistemological considerations regarding the critique of traditional historiography and the literary bias of narrative storytelling."
Steal this Film - stockholm, summer 2006
In 2006, a group of friends decided to make a film about filesharing that *we* would recognise. There have been a few documentaries by 'old media' crews who don't understand the net and see peer-to-peer organisation as a threat to their livelihoods. They have no reason to represent the filesharing movement positively, and no capacity to represent it lucidly. We wanted to make a film that would explore this huge popular movement in a way that excited us, engaged us, and most importantly, focussed on what we know to be the positive and optimistic vision many filesharers and artists (they are often one) have for the future of creativity.
Hopefully you'll enjoy the first part of Steal this Film ('stockholm, summer 2006'). It achieves some, but by no means all, of our goals. To continue we need your help. this film is free for you to share, watch on your dvd player or on your ipod, or show in cinemas. But if you like the work we've done and want us to carry on, use our donate link to send us a couple of dollars or euros.
We will start making the second part straight away, and release it on this site and on major bittorrent trackers, when it's done. Each part, we estimate, will take about 2 months to complete. the plan for the second part is on our wiki. Feel free to add suggestions.
The league of noble peers. august 2006 - à nous la liberté!
The league of noble peers / stealthisfilm.com
English / 00:32:13 / 101 MB / Ogg Theora
Time Image: Gilles Deleuze's Bergsonian Film Project
In the canadian film webzine "offscreen" Donato Totaro published an introduction to Gilles Deleuze's cinema books. Here is the link to the second part that is elaborating on the concept of the movement image:
http://www.horschamp.qc.ca/9903/offscreen_essays/deleuze2.html
"In his second book Deleuze tackles temporality in a more direct fashion. Although the book is considerably longer than the first (344 to 250 pages), Deleuze does not propose rigid or neat classifications. The central shift remains from a cinema that defined itself primarily through motion to one that concerned itself more directly with time. The time-image moved beyond motion by freeing itself of the "sensory-motor" link to a "pure optical and sound" (tactile) image. This emancipating of the senses concurred with a "direct relation with time and thought" ( Cinema 2 , 17). Deleuze spends considerable space discussing memory, especially Henri Bergson's views on memory, because it forms an important part of the second book's central concept: crystal-image (or time-image). In fact, one gets the sense that Deleuze's two books align themselves with the Bergson book that most influenced Deleuze, Matter and Memory : movement-image (matter) and time-image (memory)."