[iDC] media curating as montage - one historical example

Barbara Lattanzi threads at wildernesspuppets.net
Sun Aug 19 15:31:55 UTC 2007


Greetings all.

The basic concept, here, has to do with the curating of film, video, and 
new media as montage.

Here is a historical example.  My carbon-dating tests indicate that it 
originated in 1975. My data-mining chops unearth a pdf copy of a list 
handed out at the start of a film history class taught that year by 
filmmaker Stan Brakhage at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago:

http://www.wildernesspuppets.net/yarns/curating/stanbrakhage.pdf

Here is the title used for the semester-long course:

"SEX/DEATH, EISENSTEIN, ETCETERA"

What provocations, in directions mapped by the semester title, got 
screened on the first day?  Here is the list for day one:

"El Espectro Rojo", George Melies, 190?
"Gertie  the Dinosaur", Winsor McCay, 1909
"Dreams of a Rarebit Fiend", Winsor McCay, undated
"Emak Bakia", Man Ray, 1927
"L'Etoile de Mer", Man Ray, 1928
"Glenn Falls Sequence", Douglas Crockwell, 1941
"The Long Bodies", Douglas Crockwell, 194?
"Early Abstractions", Harry Smith, 1941-57

------------

Any that you would add to the above list...?

To reiterate from my first post to iDC, a curatorial selection in this 
experiment - a list of film, video and new media works for collective 
viewing - is less based on dominant categorical similarities of a 
"theme", but on productive dissimilarities or surprising associations.

(The material context of the community of viewers obviously weighs 
heavily in all this. In my case, the community is composed of studio 
media art students, in a strongly-rooted, richly-developed electronic 
media art program, in the U.S.)

Feel free to modify any of the lists upcoming, to share notable lists 
that you have knowlege of, to offer your own list based on some other 
index or tags, or to just bear with the onslaught.

best regards,

Barbara

----------------------
Barbara Lattanzi
www.wildernesspuppets.net
www.wildernesspuppets.net/invaders/




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