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Cinéma & Cie. Film and Media Studies Journal
Ph.D Thesis Abstract - Shadows of Hopes: Landmarks for a Plastic History of the Twentieth Century Experimental Film Journals
Text.Serial.Journal
https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/cinemaetcie
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Projects & Abstracts
2019-10-01
2021-09-02
2019-10-01
2024-02-14
Cinéma & Cie
Andrea Pierron
2019/10/01
Paris III Sorbonne-Nouvelle
2036-461X
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Ph.D Thesis Abstract - Shadows of Hopes: Landmarks for a Plastic History of the Twentieth Century Experimental Film Journals
https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/cinemaetcie/article/download/16186/16661
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Shadows of Hopes: Landmarks for a Plastic History of the
Twentieth Century Experimental Film Journals
Andrea Pierron / Ph.D. Thesis Abstract1
Paris III Sorbonne-Nouvelle




   This Ph.D. thesis analyses periodicals published during the twentieth century
by visual artists and filmmakers in the realm of avant-gardes and experimental
cinema. The journals are conceived as plastic, conceptual, complex, and composite
objects where text and image interact, cinematic images are reproduced, and
photomontages are created.
   The dissertation aimed at understanding the unique ways used by visual artists
and filmmakers periodicals to create, defend, document, visualize and analyse
cinematic paradigms. To what extent have journals become experimental works
of texts and images? This study focused on the characteristics of the history
of film periodicals, how layouts exhibit aesthetical, theoretical, and poetical
dimensions of the cinematic image, how they call into question the perception
and the cinematic paradigms, how they offer another insight into the critical
history of cinema.
   The cinematic image used within journals is a reprint of a single or several
frames, either consecutive or isolated. The reprographic technique dematerializes
and reifies the image, shifts the photochemical elements onto paper. The layouts
of journals, in extracting and staging frames and stills, could recreate filmic
idioms in paradoxically relying on stillness. Following the reification process,
how do processes like transposing and transforming aim to objectify the image?
To what extent do reification and objection address the cinematic image as the
material and plastic product of a spatiotemporal apparatus? The reprinted frame
is thus observed as the plastic inscription, the second degree of the artwork and
the cinematic movement.
   The frame gives an introspective look on the overall film from which it is
extracted. The objection constitutes a new process in which the image is
sensitively and intelligibly objectified. The reification on paper then enables
a material, plastic, critical and/or symbolic study. The term ‘objection’ would
describe the actualisation of the object’s paradigms, while ‘symbolisation’



1
    Ph.D. Thesis supervised by Professor Nicole Brenez. For information: andreapierron@gmail.com

                                                         Cinéma & Cie, vol. XIX, no. 33, Fall 2019
                                   Andrea Pierron


would refer to its depiction. Which proportions of objection and symbolisation
compose the process?
   The process of layout can be interpreted as taking the film to pieces and
exhibiting it, leading to the recreation of visual interaction between exhibited
frames. To what extent do the reproductions and layouts exhibit the display
of spatial, plastic and meaningful interrelations between frames? The layout
would compose a visual and textual display of frames taken apart and exhibited,
introduced to new forms and significations. These displays are however designed
to show, transcribe and comment on the film.
   The study aimed at understanding what elements gave the extracted image
this exemplary role, to consider the ways film journals form objects in which the
artworks exist through interposed articles, frames and stills, in which the context
is reflected, timeframes are intertwined between synchronicity and historicity.
How do film journals create paradigms of textual and visual interplays: plastics,
through material and formal processes of reification and objection, or discursive,
through interrelations between texts and images? What form will these new
paradigms take: exemplary, illustrative, iconic, demonstrative?
   Film journals imply historical paradigms: on the one hand, the specific cultural
backgrounds from which they appear, on the other hand each journal aims at
documenting cinematic forms. How does an editor-in-chief design a medium,
select a corpus and leave their mark upon plastic and critic histories of cinema?
How are documentation and subjectivity intertwined? Will journals become
archives of ideas and forms, platforms of interpretation? How do journals share
a common history? What recurrences or transformations occur?
   Journals are used to ensure the movement of the editors’ ideas, either collective
or singular. How do journals support the editor-in-chief’s efforts in building
an alternative cinema domain? Details from avant-garde film journals shed a
different light on the links between avant-gardes and commercial or institutional
cinematographic domains. Studying journals allow an understanding of the
various influences of these domains through artworks, artistic careers and
frequentations, to reconsider the original secession, autonomy if not separatism
of a cinematographic avant-garde domain.
   The dissertation focused on a corpus of journals that share similar editorial
boards: strictly created by filmmakers and plasticians within the avant-garde
realm. The thesis details the paradigms created by each journal and depicts a
progressive specialisation. It opens on Dada I (1916) by poet Tristan Tzara and
visual artist Hans Arp as well as Dada Sinn der Welt (1920) printed by artists
George Grosz and John Heartfield as to distinguish two original interpretations
of the plastic and critic interrelations of texts and images. The comparative
approach of journals will reveal the specificities, as well as the shared aspects and
differences of these two models.
   The second part of the thesis opens on the second issue of Promenoir (1922)
funded by filmmaker and poet Jean Epstein, which introduces the problem of


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the cinematic form and apparatus. Without reproducing cinematic images, the
problems are discussed only through the articles.
   Then the study turns to the issue 5-6 Film of G. Material für elementare
Gestaltung (1926), created by painter and filmmaker Hans Richter in which
cinema becomes for the first time the epicentre of a single issue. Close Up, created
by filmmaker and poet Kenneth Macpherson, poet H.D. and writer Bryher,
lands solid aesthetical and theoretical basis for avant-garde filmmaking within
a collection solely devoted to film. The study of the fifth issue of the second
volume (1928) will uncover the characteristic editorial lines of the publication.
   Finally, the last part of the study revolves around two journals specialized on
experimental cinema: issue 31 of Film Culture (1963–1964) published by Jonas
Mekas and issue 51–52 of Cantrill’s Filmnotes (1986) created by filmmakers
Arthur and Corinne Cantrill.
   Each issue was chosen either for its exemplary and synthetic elements in
dealing with the plastic and discursive questions, or the introduction of specific
changes that crystallize undergoing transformations. The analysis of each issue
follows a similar and systematic scientific method in which the object is at first
observed according to the plastic and problematic specificities of the reproduced
images and the designed layouts, then according to the problems unveiled by the
corpus and the textual and visual interrelations. The analysis details the precise
characteristics to replace the conception of a visual and textual discourse.
   The contemporary study of each issue is seized through crossed readings of
the archive documents allowed by the editor-in-chief and their collaborators,
contemporary journals and writings about art and human sciences. It corroborates
and widens the spectrum of understanding of general or specialized artistic
questions during the time studied. The confrontation with various implantations
and periods, of plastic, theoretical and practical paradigms challenges the intrinsic
dimensions of the magazine revealed by the analysis, and replaces it within a
widened context. The studied journals will link in a chronological succession, of
which incidence would seem reinforced by the progressive specialisation firstly
around the cinematic image, then around the avant-garde cinematic image.




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