Film and Video大师作品[学习]

苏文祥

Bill Viola
American, born 1951
The Sleep of Reason, 1988
3/4 in. videotape, color, sound; three video projectors and one single-channel monitor in a specified space
Museum purchase: gift of Milton Fine and A. W. Mellon Acquisition Endowment Fund, 88.33



On first entering this installaion, one sees a wooden chest in an otherwise empty room. A small black-and-white monitor on the chest shows a close-up of either a man or woman sleeping, his or her night sounds softly heard. Also on the chest are a vase of white roses, a small lamp, and a digital clock. At unpredictable intervals of seconds or minutes, the lights in the room shut off suddenly, plunging the space into total darkness. Large moving color images appear, covering three of the walls, and a distressingly loud roaring sound fills the space. The disturbance lasts only seconds, and then, just as suddenly as the darkness descended, the lights come back on and the room returns to normal.

The blackouts are like unpredictable "image seizures," symptoms of some incurable affliction of the room. The imagery on the walls includes burning buildings, fierce dogs, a forest at night, an owl, and underwater views of fish and a sinking man. A moral as well as an experiential quality is inscribed in this interaction between the dreamlike, demonic, transcendent state and the earthly state of the "normal" room.   


Stan Brakhage
American, born 1933
Dog Star Man, 1961 – 64
16-mm film, color, silent, 74 minutes
Gift of The A. W. Mellon Educational and Charitable Trust, 71.57.1



Beginning with his films of the early 1950\'s and continuing through more than four prolific decades, Stan Brakhage is a monumental figure in American cinema. Dog Star Man is a watershed work in Brakhage\'s career and in the development of American avant-garde filmmaking.

Dog Star Man evokes mythic themes that have been compared with the epic Romantic poetry of William Blake and others. It was filmed with a hand-held camera and edited from fleeting, overlapping images: Brakhage\'s children, fires on the hearth, solar explosions, his wife, close-ups of snow melting, the moon, family pets, winter storms blowing through a forest, the filmmaker himself climbing a mountain. From these images Brakhage has structured an epic work that shifts from microcosm to macrocosm, from night to dawn to midday, from winter to spring and summer, climaxing with what Brakhage has called "a Fall-the fall back to somewhere, mid-winter."  


Nam June Paik
Korean, born 1932
Global Groove, 1973
3/4 in. videotape, color, sound, 30 minutes
Video Purchase Fund, 83.79.13



In 1965, Nam June Paik acquired a portable videotape recorder, the then-primitive consumer equipment that had just come on the market, and became one of the first artists to explore the artistic possibilities of videotape.

Global Groove draws heavily on popular culture. The first sequence includes Japanese Pepsi-Cola advertisements and pop dancers moving rapidly to rock music. The second includes a male Korean dancer, the poet Allen Ginsberg chanting, a female Navajo drummer, and performances by cellist Charlotte Moorman. The initial rapid, energetic sequences and the subsequent slow, ritual ones reflect Paik\'s notion of two major states of being: ecstasy and dreaming. Mediating between these two states is a third: normal wakefulness, represented in Global Groove by interviews with composer John Cage and Charlotte Moorman and by some sequences that document performances.


Hollis Frampton
American, 1936 – 1984
Nostalgia, 1971
16-mm film, black and white, sound, 36 minutes
Museum purchase: National Endowment for the Arts
purchase grant and the Women\'s Committee, 77.24.26



Nostalgia is a key work by a major figure in the history of American avant-garde filmmaking. The images for the film were made by burning thirteen of Frampton\'s favorite photographs on a primitive hotplate. This destruction of a still image in order to make a moving image clearly demonstrates Frampton\'s shift from photography to filmmaking.

Frampton wrote voice-overs for the thirteen photographs, the texts ranging from the theoretical to the personal and anecdotal, including references to friends and acquaintances. As one photograph burns, the voice-over for the next photograph-as yet unseen-is heard, and so each image is first established through the use of language. The distance and relationship between language and image is a major concern for Frampton, as is memory. He evokes his own past in the film, while requiring the viewer to remember each text until its related image appears. Nostalgia is thus an essay on human consciousness as revealed in language and image, in desire and anxiety, in personal and cultural memory.   





[em46]

罗倮

拜托，全是英文图片又小。看不出来什么啊

苏文祥

呵呵｀｀你将就着点看啊｀｀｀

优雅少年

一？？？
没看出好来