Level 4 lectures and DFGA

Images from Robert W. Paul’s film Come Along, Do! 1898

Now that level 5 are starting individual tutorials it is perhaps a good time to reflect on the lecture programme for level 4 and how it contextualises DFGA practice.

The programme started with Modernism and for me what’s interesting here is that Modernism as a movement starts at about the same time as the history of film. The first film to show action moving from one shot into another was Robert W. Paul’s Come Along, Do!, made early in 1898. In the first shot an old couple are outside an art gallery, in the second shot we find them inside the exhibition.

In the same year the Post-Impressionist Paul Cezanne painted Les Grandes Baigneuses, his fellow Post-Impressionist, Paul Gauguin painted The White Horse, Edvard Munch the great symbolist painter produced his key work, Metabolism and Odilon Redon embarked on his painting The Cyclops.


Paul Cezanne: Les Grandes Baigneuses


Paul Gauguin: The White Horse


Edvard Munch: Metabolism


Odilon Redon: The Cyclops

The key early modern movements of Fauvism, Cubism, Expressionism and Surrealism are all starting to jell around the influence of these painters. In my mind’s eye the grey out of focus images of paintings we can see in Paul’s film, could be these seminal images. Later in the same year Georges Méliès’ A Trip to the Moon was made.



Méliès’Trip to the Moon was the first science fiction film. In a few short months film had moved on very quickly and to some extent was already outpacing painting as a modern medium.


Un Chien Andalou


Ballet Mechanique

Some Modernists embraced film as an extension of their art practice, such as Dali with Un Chien Andalou and L'Âge d'Or or Leger’s Ballet Mechanique, while most preferred to stay within the boundaries of their chosen medium. In some ways you could look at their reluctance to play with new media as a perverse aspect of Modernism. An old technology, (painting) being the media that is most often used to illustrate Modernist art practices. (Abstract painting in particular).
However film seems to me to have always been post-modern, even when it was finding its feet. By the very nature of the way lens captured images are made, they are appropriated. Cutting a film and putting it together (montage) is clearly a type of collage technique and college is cited as a key post-modern way of working. Film exemplifies for me what Harvey called "time and space compression". A term he used to point out the nature of post-modern life, which it could be argued, now reads like a film.

Some of the issues that were opened out in the lecture on High and Low culture could be used to explain this, film, as a popular medium perhaps not being taken seriously by Modernist artists, who saw their practice as ‘High’ culture. This divide still exists within the fine art world. Because of the way that Street artists, such as Keith Haring, were appropriated by gallery culture, it could be argued that like modernism, postmodernism does not democratise art. On the other hand it could easily be argued that the low/high culture divide doesn’t matter within the culture of late Capitalism. The example of Blu’s work being used by modern advertising companies to sell everything from cars to insurance being a clear illustration of this.
As makers of digital films and video games, the world of trans-media production is one you will all have to inhabit. The nature of this world has on the one hand been seen as a post-modern one and has been examined by theorists as diverse as Baudrillard (hyper-reality and the simularca), Fredric Jameson who describes postmodernism as the "dominant cultural logic of late capitalism" and Lyotard who saw post-modernism as being a product of the "computerized" or "telematic" era. On the other hand Henry Jenkins would argue that the coordinated use of storytelling across platforms makes for more compelling narratives and that this new technology takes us back into an older aural world, where the story was prime. This echoing Marshall McLuhan’s image of the Global Village, where information technology allows us to exchange ideas across great distances and develop new social structures in response to these fast changes in technology. Steven Shaviro goes on to show in his book Post Cinematic Affect, how these new digital media are shaping new sensibilities.

Finally my own interest in the continuing relevance of allegory leads me to George Romero’s Survival of the Dead (2009). A film that suggests that communications media are over and done with; laptops and i-phones are rendered useless, Net-connected filmmakers can no longer record the events, geeks have to resort to vinyl, WiFi networks have broken down, and as Steven Shaviro states, “we are now stuck in an interminable endgame that is no longer being televised, an ending (of the world) that itself refuses to end”. As revolutions spread throughout the world, many of them fostered by the use of new communications technology, of what use will this be unless we get to grips with the coming triple crunch of endism, climate change, peak phosphorous and peak oil.

Flyboy Is Alone Again This Christmas

I went to see the shadow puppet opera ‘Flyboy Is Alone Again This Christmas’ on Friday night in the Howard Assembly rooms. In this show, musician and shadow puppet artist Matthew Robins tells the heart-rending story of Flyboy, a mutant half-human/half-fly, who is trying to live a normal life in a small town. Animations projected onto the big screen created using on old overhead projector, lie at the centre of a live shadow-puppet opera as Robins and his band sing and perform on stage. It was great and a wonderful example of what you can do with low technology.
Matthew works with the puppeteer Tim Spooner and a band of musicians. The show was wonderfully low-tech: Matthew played piano and sang the story, while Tim worked getting all the cut outs onto the screen for the stories or at times using layers of video projection, paper backgrounds and puppets for pieces using live video and moving superimposed cut-outs.
One story called Nosferatu and Me, where Matthew and Nosteratu mostly ride around on their bicycles and then rent a DVD in the evening, is really so simple it is hard to believe it would work live on stage with a grown up audience, but it works very well and it’s very funny. But it does get all a bit awkward when Nosferatu gets too friendly.
Matthew Robins’ songs are very narrative driven and quite often have lots of complicated scenarios. He was finding it difficult to hold people's concentration in pubs and nightclubs where he was playing his own penned music, so he added live visuals using shadow puppets. As Matthew said, “It worked and suddenly people were really focused and would watch the whole show!”
He now says he is, “writing a rock-opera concept album about mutant spiders that will hopefully be a cross between Tommy-meets-War of the Worlds-meets-Bat out of Hell-meets-The Man from God knows Where”.
Nearly all of these animations are done by cutting out black paper using a sharp scalpel. An old OHP (I bet there are lots of these still hiding in cupboards in educational institutions throughout the country) was used to get the images enlarged and up onto a screen behind the musicians. This is almost the same technology as Indonesian Shadow Puppetry and works really well if you have a simple and clear narrative to tell, with easily identifiable characters. In this case ‘flyboy’ is an easy cutout, or at least Robins makes it look as if it is. If you want to test a character for easily identifiable visual characteristics, try cutting it out of black paper and then check out its silhouette.
I realise I’m working with people who want to use digital technology to carry their ideas. But most transmedia characters have had to stand the test of recognition across several platforms and media types. The narrative strength in this case is all. The short flyboy stories are gripping and easy to follow by children as well as adults. Perhaps ‘Flyboy’ could be a future children’s favorite. He has all the ingredients. Easily identifiable visual characteristics, a storyline that mirrors those of many heroes, including travelling on long voyages and meeting strange creatures, a love story and a Christmas adventure.