One of the few people that single handedly made sure the American avant-garde always had a home has passed away. In 1947 he created the first venue for such films to be showcased: Cinema 16. In the 1960s he founded the Lincoln Center Film Department and was co-founder of the New York Film Festival. From there going on to write the highly important and radical book Film as Subversive Art.
Excerpt:
In retrospect, it's clear that Vogel was at once programmer and pedagogue; Cinema 16 folded for many reasons, but one was a revolt sparked by Vogel's refusal to program or distribute works he considered inferior, even by filmmakers he had supported in the past. The abrasive approach reflected in the title of I-House's three-day tribute extended not just to Vogel's choice of films — which ran from the poetic slaughterhouse documentary Blood of the Beasts to the notorious Nazi propaganda film The Eternal Jew — but his programming style, which might find the latest in experimental film on a bill with a documentary about ants in equatorial South America. The idea was to produce conflict in the manner of Sergei Eisenstein's montage, forcing audiences to rethink their comfortable categorizations.
So it is, too, with Film as a Subversive Art, which eschews standard taxonomies in favor of provocative thematic clusters: A still from Robert Bresson's Pickpocket shares a spread with Buñuel's Belle de Jour and a Mae West clinch from She Done Him Wrong, all grouped under the heading, "Erotic and Pornographic Cinema." The lavishly illustrated book, which is as much fun to browse as is it to read, consistently throws up such surprising comparisons: Turn the page from the eye-slicing scene in Un Chien Andalou and you'll find King Kong's head starting back at you.(full article here by Sam Adams)
No comments:
Post a Comment