International Journal of Film and Media Arts

Cornish Knitting Pattern Series

Jennifer Nightingale — 2020-04-07

The Cornish Knitting Pattern Series is a collection of 16mm animation landscape films that use a single frame production technique to translate Guernsey knitting patterns into film. In doing so, the films set up a structural relationship between that of a knitted stitch and a frame of film—drawing out analogies between both forms of production. The article considers methods and processes of the films’ production, including the role of the film charts and location-as-editing system. The film charts are explored as examples of an approach to systems-based editing and a single frame production in the context of experimental film. They are also discussed as visualizations of the knitting patterns; pragmatic preproduction material; notation documentation and retrospectively a significant aid to reflection on the work carried out. Key aspects of the film series such as how gesture, landscape and film are ‘knitted together’ in the film as a material object, are also highlighted. Further to this the article explores how these aspects reveal readings of the films’ relationship to Landscape, knitting practices and the historical and cultural aspects of the Cornish Guernsey patterns.

Process & Temporality: Chance & (Al)chemical Traces invigorating Materiality & Content in the films of Péter Forgács, Penny Siopis and Ben Rivers

Patti Gaal-Holmes — 2020-04-02

This article discusses encounters occurring between the hand of the artist and filmmaking processes that may bypass the intellect, identifying themselves through intuitive modes of production to reveal integral relationships between film form, materiality and content. In this way the results of non-human agency, registered within film chemistry and processes of production – physical, intellectual, ‘spiritual’, (un)conscious – interact as the filmmaker takes an idea from conception to projection. Jane Bennett’s theorization of ‘vital materialism’ is important for investigations (2010), as is the role of chance discussed by William Kentridge (1993), whereby deliberations include the fortuitous manifestations occurring as encounters between hand, page and camera coalesce in the production of films. Additionally, approaches are informed by Vilém Flusser’s description of the photographer as a ‘Functionary: ‘a person who plays with apparatus and acts as a function of apparatus’ (Flusser 2007, p.83). This is, arguably, equally pertinent for the cinematographer/animator/artist who can ‘creep into the camera [and processing/editing equipment] in order to bring to light the tricks concealed within’ (Flusser, p.27).

“VAST/O”: Exploring the use of expanded animation for a shared physical understanding of spatial phobias

Natalie Woolf — 2020-04-02

This paper looks at materialities of expression through expanded animation. In particular, it details the development of a creative approach for the production of artworks for an installation that will provide a shared understanding of spatial phobias and their physical and psychological symptoms.

It brings together the approach of the two authors and their individual research topics. Combining experiential phenomena of particular materials (placing animation within surfaces and technologies), and spatially distributed reading of comic book panels. The physicality of still and moving images and their distribution/placement will be explored, leading to the expansion of animation contexts.

Drawing on various makers and practices, the article explores the use of abstract comics and text as static panels and animated drawing, on-site location, and the intervention of various media technologies and other materialities to recognise their effectiveness and impact as a spatially engaged method of reading. The work developed was applied in an interdisciplinary installation titled VAST/O. The artwork is based on some theoretical approaches from literature and animation, thematically drawing on Gaston Bachelard's notion of vastness, built upon an analysis of Baudelaire’s poetry, and addressing spatial phobias. It seeks to identify a way forward for the communication of the realities of phobic experiences.

Truth of Matter

Birgitta Hosea — 2020-04-01

Animating Poetry: Whose line is It anyway?

Susan Hanna — 2020-04-01

This paper provides a detailed analysis of an example of personal practice in the creation of collaborative contemporary poetry animation as an example of Ecstatic Truth. It cites a rationale for translation, transcription and remodeling of poems into new animated visual and sonic experiences. This investigation into creation and critique of shared language between poetry and animation includes critical commentary and some historical context, as well as supplying comparative exemplars from poets, animators and collaborators. It suggests that poetry animation is an emergent genre in its own right, and that this has expanding potential for engaging specialist and non-specialist audiences.

Re-animating Ghosts: Materiality and memory in hauntological appropriation

Michael Peter Schofield — 2020-04-01

This research examines the spectrality of animation and other media based on the photographic trace. Using diverse examples from popular culture and the author’s own investigative practice in media art, this paper looks at how archival media is re-used and can be brought back to life in new moving image works, in a gesture we might call hauntological appropriation.

While sampling and re-using old materials is nothing new, over the last 15 years we have seen an ongoing tendency to foreground the ghostly qualities of vintage recordings and found footage, and a recurrent fetishisation and simulation of obsolete technologies. Here we examine the philosophies and productions behind this hauntological turn and why the materiality of still and moving image media has become such a focus. We ask how that materiality effects the machines that remember for us, and how we re-use these analogue memories in digital cultures.

Due to the multimodal nature of the author’s creative practice, photography, video art, documentary film and animation, are interrogated here theoretically. Re-animating the ghosts of old media can reveal ontological differences between these forms, and a ghostly synergy between the animated and the photographic.