Dawn Ades, Simon Baker (eds.): Undercover Surrealism: Georges Bataille and DOCUMENTS (2006)

“In the Paris art world of the 1920s, Georges Bataille and his journal DOCUMENTS represented a dissident branch of surrealism. Bataille—poet, philosopher, writer, and self-styled “enemy within” surrealism—used DOCUMENTS to put art into violent confrontation with popular culture, ethnography, film, and archaeology. Undercover Surrealism, taking the visual richness of DOCUMENTS as its starting point, recovers the explosive and vital intellectual context of works by Picasso, Dalí, Miró, Giacometti, and others in 1920s Paris. Featuring 180 color images and translations of original texts from DOCUMENTS accompanied by essays and shorter descriptive texts, Undercover Surrealism recreates and recontextualizes Bataille’s still unsettling approach to culture. Putting Picasso’s Three Dancers back into its original context of sex, sacrifice, and violence, for example, then juxtaposing it with images of gang wars, tribal masks, voodoo ritual, Hollywood musicals, and jazz, makes the urgency and excitement of Bataille’s radical ideas startlingly vivid to a twenty-first-century reader.”

With contributions by Fiona Bradley, Neil Cox, Caroline Hancock, Denis Hollier, William Jeffett, CFB Miller, Michael Richardson, and Ian Walker.

Publisher Hayward Gallery, London, with MIT Press, Cambridge/MA, 2006
ISBN 1853322504, 9781853322501
272 pages

Exh. reviews: Peter Suchin (Frieze), Benjamin Noys (Radical Philosophy), John Phillips and Ma Shaoling (Theory, Culture & Society).
Wikipedia

Publisher
Publisher

PDF (104 MB, updated on 2020-2-20)

Rosemari Elizabeth Baker: Shklovsky in the Cinema, 1926-1932 (2010)

“The following research project is grounded in the interrelated contexts of the Russian intelligentsia’s ambivalent engagement with post-revolutionary culture and cinema’s rise as an artistic medium and instrument of Russian cultural development. By examining Viktor Shklovsky’s earliest activities in the Soviet film industry, this project will explore how narrative, aesthetic, and ideological programmes were repeatedly and variously moulded, undermined, and complicated by the twentieth-century Russian avant-garde interest in dissolving creative boundaries between the domains of the ‘internal’ (embracing private, individual, and domestic concerns) and ‘external’ (their public, communal, and social counterparts) in a bid ‘to turn space outwards’ (vyvorachivat´ prostranstvo vovne). These critical enquiries will lend themselves to an investigation of how the behaviours of Shklovsky, his colleagues, and his artistic creations were affected by internal and/or external loci of control and how these activities were reconciled (if at all) in a society where the relationship between freedom and necessity was in a constant state of fluctuation.

This research aims not simply to establish the extent and significance of Shklovsky’s influence on cinema as an individual, but rather to utilise his personal narrative for an assessment of the levels of interaction between theory and practice and between the verbal and the visual as integral to the intelligentsia movement. The project will investigate the part that Shklovsky played in conceptualising the boundaries, exchanges, and conflicts that arose between different artistic media and the critical institutions that developed around them, before considering how these relations changed as Soviet culture entered and emerged from the period of Cultural Revolution. In addition, an exploration of the effects of personal and professional tensions between different ideological groups will not only develop a better understanding of Shklovsky’s role in the cinema as theorist, critic, polemicist, screenwriter, and ‘creative administrator’, but will also help to establish the similarities and/or disparities between his film-works and contemporary cultural experience.” (Abstract)

Master Thesis
Faculty of Arts and Humanities, Durham University
209 pages

publisher

PDF

Leshu Torchin: Creating the Witness: Documenting Genocide on Film, Video, and the Internet (2012)

“Since the beginning of the conflict in 2003, more than 300,000 lives have been lost in Darfur. Players of the video game Darfur Is Dying learn this sobering fact and more as they endeavor to ensure the survival of a virtual refugee camp. The video game not only puts players in the position of a struggling refugee, it shows them how they can take action in the real world.

Creating the Witness examines the role of film and the Internet in creating virtual witnesses to genocide over the past one hundred years. The book asks, how do visual media work to produce witnesses—audiences who are drawn into action? The argument is a detailed critique of the notion that there is a seamless trajectory from observing an atrocity to acting in order to intervene. According to Leshu Torchin, it is not enough to have a camera; images of genocide require an ideological framework to reinforce the messages the images are meant to convey. Torchin presents wide-ranging examples of witnessing and genocide, including the Armenian genocide, the Holocaust (engaging film as witness in the context of the Nuremburg trials), and the international human rights organization WITNESS and its sustained efforts to use video to publicize human rights advocacy and compel action.

From a historical and comparative approach, Torchin’s broad survey of media and the social practices around it investigates the development of popular understandings of genocide to achieve recognition and response—both political and judicial—ultimately calling on viewers to act on behalf of human rights.”

Publisher University of Minnesota Press, 2012
Visible Evidence series, Volume 26
ISBN 0816676224, 9780816676224
296 pages

Author’s discussion of the book
Publisher

PDF (updated on 2021-1-24)