The editor seeks essays for a volume tentatively entitled From
Avant-Garde to Mainstream: Post-Punk Cinemas. A major university press
has expressed interest in this volume.
In a recent interview, filmmaker Darren Aronofsky (Pi, 1998)
characterized his latest film Requiem for a Dream (2000) as "a punk
movie." And Danish director Lars von Trier, co-founder of the Dogma 95
Movement, has suggested that "today a technological storm is raging, the
result of which will be the ultimate democratisation of the cinema. For
the first time, anyone can make movies." The resulting films of the New
Cinema, which emerged in the early 1990s, are linked not by genre or
topic, but rather a shared sensibility and style, characterized by
jagged, elliptical editing, rapid-fire, hyperrealistic jump cuts across
time and space, a rupture of the classic three-act structure screenplay
paradigm that has dominated Hollywood, aggressively active (often
hand-held) camera movement, repetition, dense, intertextual references
to cinema itself, and an amateur, Do-It-Yourself sensibility that
eschews "professionalism" in favor of an aesthetics of imperfection.
Even though this New Cinema draws on the punk and avant-garde legacies
of irony, speed, repetition, and resistance to authority, its movement
into the mainstream suggests a more complex process of mediation, what
Raymond Williams has termed the "process of incorporation." This volume
seeks to investigate and map that process. Influenced by a complex
array of cultural sources and codes, including pop music (Magnolia
writer/director Paul Thomas Anderson patterned the narrative structure
of his movie after the Beatles song 'A Day in the Life'), avant-garde
filmmakers such as Maya Deren, Stan Brakhage, and Andy Warhol, video
games, music videos, and the web, the post-punk cinema mediates,
constructs, and narrates reality in vitally new ways. If representation
in western cinema was initially patterned after the narrative
conventions and codes of the realist novel, then this new cinema is
based on a post-atomic, fractured, non-linear sense of reality, one that
has absorbed and appropriated many of the orthodoxies of postmodernism,
including self-reflexivity, irony, repetition, simulation, pastiche, a
mixing of avant-garde and popular conventions, and visual and narrative
disruption. Whereas traditional Hollywood films have often appropriated
avant-garde techniques in the service of films which largely upheld and
reinforced dominant norms, films of the New Cinema--including Fight Club
and Being John Malkovitch--very often deploy such techniques in the
service of critiques of consumer culture, celebrity, gender roles, etc.
Suggested topics include, but are not limited to:
--the critique function of the New Cinema; representations of discontent
with cultural norms (commodity culture, binary codes of
masculinity/femininity, etc.)
--the punk/post-punk poetics of the New Cinema
--the politics of display
--transparency
--emerging forms of sincerity/melodrama in the New Cinema
--exchanges/boundary breakdowns between avant-garde and mainstream
--anxieties about narrative process and structure
--problematics of identification/spectatorship
--open narrative structures that allow (or provide the illusion of
allowing) audiences to actively partake in narrative
selection/construction
--music/sound in the New Cinema (techno, hip-hop, "found" music, etc.)
--alternatives to linear, Aristotelian narrative, plot, and character
development in films such as Memento, Run Lola Run, Fight Club,
Magnolia, Gummo, Blair Witch, etc.
--alternatives to Classic Hollywood editing strategies
--radical configurations of gender/race/sexuality/nationality in the New
Cinema
--historical contexts for the New Cinema, including French New Wave,
Italian Neo-Realism, avant-garde American cinema, New Hollywood cinema,
the Dogma 95 Movement, etc.
--the "beyond postmodern" sensibility of the new films
E-mail 250-500 word abstracts by July 16 to rombesnd@udmercy.edu or mail
to Nicholas Rombes, Department of English, University of Detroit Mercy,
PO Box 19900, Detroit, MI 48219-0900. Complete essays (20-25 pages; MLA
style) are due by October 2001.
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or write Erika Lin: elin@english.upenn.edu
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