| 1. |
- Dybwad Brandrud, Marius
(författare)
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Örat nära munnen : samtal mellan film och filosofi
- 2024
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Konstnärligt arbete (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Doktorandprojektet är en studie i och genom filmiska samtal. Det genomförs i relation till samtalets roll i lärandet av filosofi. Medan filosofi oftast antar individuellt skriven form studeras hur filmiska samtal kan fungera som filosofiskt uttryck, främst utifrån filmen Samtal om samtal som är projektets huvudmaterial. Filmen börjar i ett försök att prata om hur vi pratar med varandra på seminariet, och i en förlängning hur det kan bestämma vilken filosofi som alls blir möjlig: Vem talar och vem lyssnar? Vilka erfarenheter räknas och vilka idéer är välkomna? Samtidigt är samtalet inte bara av intresse som praktik utan också som uttryck. Ibland sägs något i samtalet som inte skulle bli sagt annars. Vad skulle hända om samtal, som ett slags gemensamt sägande, kunde utgöra ett filosofiskt uttryck i egen rätt, liksom den individuellt skrivna texten? Hur skulle ett sådant uttryck i så fall alls kunna ta form? Skulle det kunna göras med film? I och genom studiens filmiska samtal leder detta också vidare till frågor om representation och ansvar: Vad är det att göra film om eller med någon? Hur påverkas de som är del av en film och vad gör den på egen hand? Vad är det att ta ansvar i det filmiska arbetet och för den film som blir till? Utöver Samtal om samtal läggs texten Eftertext fram. Den försätter studien kring samma frågeställningar, men försöker därigenom också svara an till det filmiska arbetet i Samtal om samtal. Eftertext hänvisar även till filmerna Ett jag som säger vi och Rehearsals samt dokumentet Transkription. Dessa ingår som appendix då de utgör delstudier i arbetet med Samtal om samtal.
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| 2. |
- Eriksson, Olivia, 1985-
(författare)
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Gallery Experience : Viewers, Screens and the Space In-Between in Contemporary Installation Art
- 2021
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This dissertation explores gallery experience as an embodied and site-specific occurrence. Using an interdisciplinary approach that bridges art historical research with film theoretical perspectives, it offers contextualized, in-depth analyses of a limited number of contemporary installation works exhibited in Scandinavia during 2014–2016. Focusing on how these case studies complicate the relationship between viewers and screens, the thesis examines how they actualize the notion of an in-between, both thematically and with regard to the specificities of the exhibition context. Drawing on film phenomenology on the one hand and art historical studies of relational art practices on the other, this study stakes out new paths for understanding embodied spectatorship in the social space of the gallery.Chapter one is concerned with how spatial arrangements structure the viewing experience and discusses the transitory nature of the gallery in relation to the five-channel film installation Intercourses (Jesper Just, Bonniers Konsthall, 2015). Reexamining the concept of relational aesthetics, it proposes that the gallery experience engenders provisional viewing collectives that are characterized by a sense of embodied displacement. This chapter also focuses on the viewer’s place vis-à-vis highly aestheticized images of war in the six-channel film installation The Enclave (Richard Mosse, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, 2015), examining the blurring of boundaries between aesthetics and ethics at the site of projection.Chapter two explores archival art practices, focusing on institutional framing and how the gallery comes to function as a site for shared memory work. Discussing the two hybrid exhibitions Unfolding (Akram Zaatari, Moderna Museet, 2015) and Geography of Time (Fiona Tan, Museet for samtidskunst, 2015-2016), it considers the excavation of cultural memory and the formation of idiosyncratic image collections as a form of alternative historiography that is made possible by the animation of the archival document within the walls of the gallery.Chapter three deals more explicitly with participatory aspects through close analysis of a selection of works by installation artist Olafur Eliasson (Riverbed, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, 2014 and Reality Machines, Moderna Museet, 2015-2016). It also considers the commercialized art sphere and the blockbuster exhibition in relation to the traditional function of the gallery or museum as a site for contemplation and demonstrates how Eliasson’s installations renegotiate the borders between the two.Chapter four considers the afterlife of installation through various documentation practices. Drawing on debates about the preservation of live art and the possible restructuring of aura brought on by these processes, it examines how the gallery experience is remembered and modified as a mediated event, as institutional memory, in alternative versions or in the form of embodied memory.The thesis concludes by reiterating how the case studies pose challenges to predominant models of aesthetic experience and require a double focus where thematic analysis and contextual considerations of the gallery as an institutional and social space form an undeniable whole. Arguing for the insights of a site-specific approach, the dissertation conceptualizes the gallery experience as a shared event where images, sculptural elements and viewer interaction come together to form new modes of embodied spectatorship.
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| 3. |
- Najem, Chafic T., 1991-
(författare)
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Smuggle, Frame, Shoot : Illicit Media Practices and Visual Insurgency from Lebanese Incarceration
- 2023
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This research explores prisoners’ illicit use of digital-media technology during their incarceration in Lebanon. Prisoners smuggle cellphones and access internet and telecommunication connection to produce and mediate videos, images, and voice recordings documenting quotidian experiences of imprisonment, violent events, and the COVID-19 Pandemic inside the notorious and overcrowded Roumieh Central Prison. Fragmentary prison amateur cellphone media messages make their way from behind bars to various media ecologies, from social media to local and international news-media platforms, where they are (re)mediated and often appropriated to feed partisan and sectarian media narratives. In this dissertation, I investigate prison cellphone recordings and their political and testimonial possibilities by tracing the prison media practices responsible for their production and circulation. Influenced by Amel’s (1976, 1988) intellectual project of theorizing from the periphery and the lo popular approach to theorizing media with and from individuals’ media practices in their territory (Martín-Barbero, 1998), I propose a framework for the conceptualization of prisoners’ illicit use of digital-media technologies and the recordings they produce as media from the prison. Based on a foundation of media-practice theory, more specifically the articulation of activist media practices and mediation theory (Martín-Barbero, 1993; Mattoni, 2012; Mattoni & Treré, 2014), I introduce three overarching and overlapping conceptual themes: media witnessing, media mobilization, and vulnerability in resistance. Using this theoretical framework, I examine the categories, characteristics, and modes of framing reflected in prison cellphone recordings, explore their alignment with mechanisms of mobilization and organized protest, and consider them as visual and sonic recorded testimonies that document and communicate personal impressions and the conditions of quotidian life in confinement. The analysis draws on a qualitative, multi-method approach combining visual analysis and contextual interviews. Location- and event-based searches were used to systematically collect a corpus of prison cellphone recordings remediated between 2011 and 2022 on Facebook, YouTube, and local and international news-media platforms. I propose the notion of visual insurgency as a step towards understanding the role and function of recordings that are produced and mediated through inherently prohibited media practices. Through the examination of composition, POV, frame, sound, (re)mediation, and the partisan context of Lebanon and the colonial history of its prisons, I trace the illicit media practices responsible for these prison representations. I claim that, through their media practices, prisoners mediate from the prison testimonies of their lived experiences, expose their vulnerabilities to the precarious conditions they exist in, re-claim a sense of mundanity, and incite feelings of affinity to mobilize support. I conclude that prison cellphone recordings are the result of meticulous prison media practices that are intended to actively mobilize support and sympathy, as well as to establish communication networks with affiliates and media personnel. Prison media practices continue to grow as prisoners smuggle digital-media technologies, develop new approaches to framing their testimonies and shooting the precarious environment, stories, performative assemblies, and lived experiences behind bars.
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| 4. |
- Smith, Ashley, 1979-
(författare)
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The Archival Life of Home Movies : Regional Reflections and Negotiated Visions of a Shared Past
- 2018
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This study investigates the ways in which private home movies are transformed into curated archival objects. Through the concept of the archival home movie, it explores the impact of preservation and content description on access, use, and, thus, regional historiography. Additionally, it maps out the relationship between ordinary home-movie imagery and regional meaning making.Using material from the University of Mississippi’s Home Movie Collection as a case study, the dissertation centers on the practice of researching family films and the possibilities for their contemporary cultural relevance. In recent years, home movies and amateur film have become topics of interest in studies of non-theatrical film as sources for unofficial histories. This dissertation intervenes into these discussions of the cultural value of home movies as a hands-on and self-reflexive investigation into the archive itself, as well as an activation of the archive. This methodology includes stagings of the home movie in live screenings, through which the dissertation investigates modes of spectator engagement with the historical material.Chapter 1 assesses strategies for working with archival home movies that draw from areas such as the study of family photography and photo albums, as well as the study of diaries. The following chapters each move further away from the familial point of origin of the home movie and toward regional re-readings and archival reuses. Using “home” as a starting point, Chapter 2 engages with the domestic elements in a selection of home movies shot on a cotton plantation during the late 1930s and early 1940s. Through an expanded notion of home, it argues that work and free time, public and private, and family and nonfamily are intertwined—both onscreen and off. Chapter 3 positions a collection of archival home movies shot in the Mississippi Delta in the 1950s as mediated witness to the ever-presence and—at times—invisibility of institutionalized racism in the mid-century American South. Chapter 4 maps the creative treatment of one collection of archival home movies in contemporary documentaries, museum installations, and experimental films. Finally, Chapter 5 evaluates the activation of home movies as constructed regional reflections in a series of live screenings associated with Home Movie Day.Previous studies of family photographs and family film have pointed to the ways these media function to obscure discord and present a harmonious picture. Overall, this study of southern home movies demonstrates how a double logic of obfuscation is at work in these films. In addition to a vision of familial harmony, this dissertation argues that the southern home movie also puts forth a vision of racial harmony. This onscreen racial harmony, when presented during the Jim Crow years, should be understood as the result of a specifically white fantasy of racial togetherness that, at the same time, upholds traditional hierarchies.
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| 5. |
- Wickman, Annika, 1968-
(författare)
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Filmen i försvarets tjänst : Undervisningsfilm i svensk militär utbildning 1920–1939
- 2018
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Film and other visual media played a significant role in the modernization efforts of the Swedish Armed Forces during the interwar period. Driving the effort to establish educational cinema within the armed forces was an association called Föreningen Armé-, Marin- och Flygfilm (AMF), run by military officers. AMF produced, distributed, and promoted hundreds of military training films over the years which, together with written documentation, are kept in its archives today.Based on empirical basic research, this dissertation discusses these educational activities from several angles. It presents an analysis of eighty instructional and orientation films; examines how military staff became film producers; and traces how educational cinema was gradually integrated into military education accompanied by related technologies, adapted teaching methods, and modified lecture halls. It also reconstructs official justifications for the use of cinema.The dissertation belongs to an evolving field of studies of useful cinema and specifically to a recent shift in international research interest toward military media practices undertaken in peacetime. It offers a first comprehensive study of the history of Swedish military cinema culture and complements previous work on early educational cinema.A general observation of the dissertation concerns the significant challenges proponents of educational cinema faced when attempting to establish it within the Swedish Armed Forces. Cinema was not useful per se. The dissertation proposes an explanation of the historical processes through the lens of assemblage (agencement) to highlight the dynamic entanglement of various heterogeneous actors and components over time. A network of alliances accommodated change and maintained continuity. Military educational cinema was established by those who produced and used the films; those who justified their practices; those who financed them; and those who believed they could gain from them. This military media constellation was also deeply connected to contemporary cinema culture.
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| 6. |
- Noheden, Kristoffer, 1977-
(författare)
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Haloed Objects on Mental Parade : Myth and Magic in Post-War Surrealist Cinema
- 2015
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Following the end of World War II, the surrealist founder André Breton organized the exhibition Le Surréalisme en 1947. In conjunction with it, he announced a “change in direction” for surrealism, towards the search for a new myth, replete with magic. This dissertation examines post-war surrealist cinema in the light of these changing priorities. Earlier scholarship on surrealist cinema has predominantly focused on a few canonized films from the interwar period. Similarly, scholarship across the disciplines has tended to all but ignore surrealism’s continued existence and development after 1939. This dissertation draws on recent tendencies in interdisciplinary surrealism scholarship, in order to expand the perspectives on both surrealist cinema and the wider meaning and implications of the movement’s turn to myth and magic. It takes a broadly comparative, interdisciplinary, and intermedial approach, and situates surrealist cinema in the context of surrealist art, exhibitions, literature, and theoretical writings. The surrealist change in direction was also bound up with a little-explored sensory dimension, the dissertation argues. Accordingly, it seeks to give particular attention to the embodied and sensory aspects of the films it discusses, and so constructs a theoretical framework in which Walter Benjamin, Gaston Bachelard, and embodied film theory are central components.The dissertation is organized into four case studies. The first two of these treat films from the immediate post-war era, and comprise the Danish artist Wilhelm Freddie’s forays into filmmaking, and the French poet Benjamin Péret’s contribution to the 1953 documentary film L’Invention du monde. The remaining two case studies cover films from the late 1960s and onwards, and treat the Argentinean-born director Nelly Kaplan’s feature films, and the Czech artist and animator Jan Švankmajer’s short and feature films. These films are all analysed as being interventions in and contributions to the surrealist search for a new myth. The nature of this search, the dissertation shows, varies depending on the historical and cultural contexts that the respective filmmakers have worked in. In that sense, the analyses of the films also expand the inquest into surrealism’s change in direction to other national contexts than France. While Breton never managed to locate the new myth that he was searching, this dissertation shows that these examples of post-war surrealist cinema are bound up with some of the central pursuits the new myth gravitated around, including initiation, esotericism, and an appeal to “primitive” cultures.
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| 7. |
- Rozenkrantz, Jonathan, 1984-
(författare)
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Electronic Labyrinths : An Archaeology of Videographic Cinema
- 2019
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This study scans six decades of film history in search for video images, the imaginaries within which they are framed, and (taking cues from the archaeological methods of Friedrich Kittler and Michel Foucault) their technical, historical, and institutional conditions of existence. The British experimental science fiction film Anti-Clock (Jane Arden and Jack Bond, 1979) revolves around a video device with the capacity to confront subjects with their own repressed memory images. While being fictional, these “memory monitors” have real conditions of existence: the emergence of video therapy and surveillance practices, conceptions of video as a recording medium, and the video processing allowing for this imaginary medium’s cinematic treatment. Framing such films as videographic cinema, this study provides a mapping and tracking of works such as Anti-Clock. From prospective imaginaries of surveillance and control to retrospective ones concerned with memory and history, the two-part dissertation tracks an epistemic shift occurring between videographic cinema’s emergent phase conditioned by video as a medium for live transmission (1950s-1980s), and its remanent phase in which the video images and imaginaries become reconditioned by the reconception of video as a recording technology (1970s-2010s).Chapter 1 looks at the emergence of videographic cinema through 1960s science fiction films and political thrillers in which the electronic image came to connote imminent futures of surveillance and control. Chapter 2 studies films that responded to the perceived threats of broadcast TV by imagining more or less outrageous reality TV formats. Drawing on research published by a forgotten avant-garde of psychiatrists, Chapter 3 shows how video in the 1960s gave rise to a utopian belief in self-confrontation techniques whose progressive promises were complicated by explicit overlaps between video therapy and surveillance practices. Video self-confrontation techniques also inform Chapter 4, which tracks the emergence of the videographic psyche (based on an analogy between videographic and mental images) as it was invented/discovered by 1970s artists, therapists, and filmmakers – soon to crystallise into the conception of video as a means for confronting subjects with their own repressed memories. Chapter 5 zooms out to map a larger post-millennial media landscape in which the obsolescence of analogue video granted a nostalgic appeal to its particular noisy aesthetics, fusing the cultural connotations of a certain retro “VHS style” with the material conditions of magnetic recording. Continuing the mapping of analogue video in the digital age, Chapter 6 zooms in on a selection of recent films that excavate obsolete video formats to scrutinise historical events and the media conditions of their description. Having started as an archaeology of videographic cinema, the dissertation thus ends by considering videographic cinema itself as a form of archaeology.
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| 8. |
- von Schantz, Miriam, 1973-
(författare)
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The Doc, the Mock and the What? : Events of Realing, Mockumentalities and the Becoming-Political of the Viewing Subject
- 2018
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This study aims at making inquiry into what happens when a viewing subject encounters a film where it proves difficult to recognize if it is factual or fictional. In order to meet this aim the dissertation offers an experimental approach of both theoretical and methodological nature. Drawing on materialist-affective theory and Deleuzian philosophy a method assemblage for mediamateriality is suggested. This offers a set of conceptual keys that makes it possible to trace the unfolding of actual encounters with blurred boundaries between the factual and the fictional. By performing a reception study whereby six data-producers engage with Exit Through the Giftshop, (Banksy 2010), I’m Still Here (Affleck 2010) and Catfish (Joost and Schulman 2010), a three-fold data is produced. Making this resonate through the method assemblage, the series of events of spectating is seen to have functioned as an event of destabilization of the relationship between the viewing subject and the discourse of factuality, what is called an event of realing. This functions as a challenge to the existential territory of the viewing subject-asspectator, bringing forth a certain mockumentality that can give cause to practices of a becoming-political of the viewing subject, notably by serving as a reconfiguration of the regime of truth. However, as will be guarded against, mockumentality may potentially bring about practices that both flatten as well as hierarchize relations of power. Following this, the dissertation will end with a suggestion that the method assemblage for mediamateriality, besides as a tool for the analytic endeavour and an ethical practice for the viewing subject (inside or outside of academia), can also be put to work in a pedagogical aim, as a moving-image-pedagogics.
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| 9. |
- Wahlberg, Malin, 1971-
(författare)
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Figures of time : on the phenomenology of cinema and temporality
- 2003
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Image and time represent a favored issue among theorists and practitioners in the history of cinema, where discussion is related to the ingenious machine, the new art, as well as the experience of film. Looking back on this debate, and considering recent accounts of 'time-images,' it is striking to note how the problem has always oscillated between issues of the medium specific and issues of film experience; that is, the ontology of cinema as a time-bound medium, the quality of rhythm, duration, and recorded views, and, not least, the sensory and affective impact of mediated sound-images. The phenomenological tradition in film theory demands recognition in this respect because it contributed, in various ways, to the acknowledgment of film as something other than a static image object or a filmed story. Phenomenology brought attention to the perceptual modalities of the moving image as well as to the pleasures of film viewing. At the point of intersection between the phenomenology of time-images and the phenomenology of time consciousness, cinema already justifies a philosophical perspective. This study suggests a reassessment of cinema and temporality from the perspective of phenomenology. It aims at a conceptualization of this problem and historically maps this issue in theoretical work as well as in the practice of filmmaking. A major argument is that the problem of cinema and temporality in classical film theory deserves critical attention as well as modification in light of contemporary film, video, and multimedia. For example, what are the significations of 'temporalization' in moving images today, what are the possibilities and fallacies of a phenomenological perspective, and how do classical notions of the temporal image and 'film art' correspond to the play with time and space in documentary and experimental cinema? In line with these questions, Figures of Time advances a methodological discussion, where an alternative phenomenological approach is outlined with reference to the context of semiotic phenomenology and, more specifically, a discussion of texts by Paul Ricoeur, Dominique Janicaud, and Erving Goffman. Three themes demarcate the overall structure of this study: the sensory, time measurement, and the trace. Throughout Western philosophy, from Plato and Aristotle to Déscartes, Kant, Husserl, and Merleau-Ponty, 'the sensory' stands out as a crucial theme in aesthetic theory. Its imprecise signification between the quality of a given object and the quality of our perception resonates in classical discussions of the temporal status of photography and film. Aside from this contextualization of the sensory in classical film theory, the theme is also present in contemporary approaches to the tactile and experiential nature of moving images, such as in The Address of the Eye by Vivian Sobchack. 'Time Measurement' matches predominant notions of film as a Zeitobjekt, visualized music and staged rhythm, as well as the production of interval and tempo that were crucial to the avant-garde cinema of the 1920s and 1960s, and which still reverberate in sound-image elaborations of framing, duration, and speed. In this study, and with reference to Dominique Janicaud, 'time measurement' becomes a conceptual theme that stresses temporalization as a figural process realized between the time of the image and the time of film viewing. Accordingly, 'time measurement' is already incorporated in 'the sensory' and vice versa, because the performed meter of a film cannot be isolated from the viewer's sensory judgment of a temporal dimension.'The trace' offers a recurrent theme in French phenomenology in general, and in André Bazin's film criticism in particular. Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Roland Barthes, and Paul Ricoeur, all address the semiotic hybridity of this notion between materiality and experience. In the theory of photography it has been regarded as the prerequisite of the photographic image and its uncanny presence of the past. However, as Bernard Stiegler reminds us, the trace-status of photography is not opposed to the suggested Prässenzzeit of moving images. Rather, within our culture of recording and preservation, cinema stands out as a technology of memory, which opens up this account of cinema and temporality to broader issues of media, archive, and the production of historical time. By drawing attention to the ephemeral and concrete work in cinema of mediated rhythm, stasis, and photographic traces of historical time, these themes bring attention to the plastic and expressive nature of temporalization on the screen, as well as the existential dimensions of Time that have always puzzled man.
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