Moving Image Review & Art Journal (MIRAJ), The - Volume 7, Issue 1, 2018

The Nottinghamshire village of Laxton is unique in that only there has survived the common, or open-field system of farming, with its substantial elements of community participation and control. By the early twentieth century, public recognition of its historical significance facilitated attempts to preserve it. At three moments when the open-field system was critically endangered – in 1935, 1975 and 1981– documentary film-makers made the case for its importance. The utopian vision of these films becomes newly pertinent as Brexit now precipitates a new crisis for the village.

This article analyses the moving portraits and the gazes of a female lowland gorilla named Triska in the film Visitors (Reggio, 2013). By examining the formal qualities of her filmic portrayal and the biological and emotional affects that portraits and gazes potentially have on the human viewer, I propose that Triska’s gazes create a ‘cinema of sentience’ that not only represent Triska as a sentient being, but affect an awareness of her sentience and subjectivity. I argue that Reggio’s filmic portraits of Triska do not position the viewer as superior to her – our gazes do not conquer or consumer her, and they do not sentimentalise her – rather, her gazes serve to equalise her for the viewer at the level of representation and affect by encouraging the audience to experience a sense of affective empathy for the gorilla and her subjectivity, and to feel the sentience of the non-human other. In the filmic encounters with Triska, humans become aware of both their humanity and their animality, producing affective moments where biology and philosophy collide – an affective encounter that questions our cognitive philosophical assumptions about what it means to be human and what it means to be animal and simian.

This essay explores the relationship between cinema and taxidermy, and some of the ways in which artists and experimental film-makers have used the moving image to engage with the ramifications of stuffing and preserving animals. It is argued that the taxidermied creature’s eerie mixture of death and life has particular resonance for film-makers with an interest in slowness and stasis. James Benning’s 2014 film natural history, which was shot behind the scenes at the Naturhistorisches Museum in Vienna, serves as a central focus. As with other films by Benning, natural history can be understood as both structuralist and a landscape film. The film is compared to works depicting stuffed animals by other experimental film-makers who explore stillness and slowness; it is proposed that such film-makers can be conceived of as taxidermists. Finally, the article looks at the complex relations between cinema, taxidermy and sound. The aural dimension of Benning’s film, missing from many other artists’ engagements with taxidermy, enables a richer exploration of its operations.

This article examines the recent wave of feature-length film productions directed by visual artists. Financed largely by public art institutions and state cinema funds, the ‘artist’s feature film’ is a phenomenon unique to the past fifteen years; although precedents can be found in the American art scene of the 1990s, the contemporary trend of artists’ feature production gestures towards something different and more specific. Defined by a ‘crossover’ ambition to reach audiences both in cinema and in contemporary art, and circulating largely through channels of mainstream and arthouse cinema, the artist’s feature mobilises its high-cultural stature as a key selling point during promotion to film and art crowds alike. It signals the artist’s transition into the film business – not with the aim of challenging its methods and mechanisms, but to participate in them. Concluding with an analysis of the vexed reception in the popular press of Douglas Gordon and Philippe Parreno’s Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait (2006), the article suggests that artists’ features do not come without their contradictions and ambivalence.

This article derives from the author’s research in the archive of artist and experimental film-maker Stephen Dwoskin (1939–2012). It represents the preliminary stages of a longer-term investigation and is a response to the specificity of Dwoskin’s work, its use of archival materials and its relation to the physical archive housed in the University of Reading. It emphasises the ‘autobiographical’ strand in Dwoskin’s filmography and offers readings of the films Trying to kiss the moon (1994) and Grandpère’s pear (2003). It proposes the usefulness of Dwoskin’s theory of ‘soft’ film-making, outlined in Film is... (1975), his study of international avant-garde cinema. To contextualise these late autobiographical films, the article also draws on the work of Dwoskin’s neighbour, friend, colleague and collaborator Laura Mulvey, in particular, the book Death 24x a second (2006), with its analysis of the relationship between the materiality of traditional film-making and the digital technology of the present.

In response to the 2015 ‘Feminisms’ issue of MIRAJ (4:1&2), this article will discuss the development of feminist engagement with film over the last four decades (most particularly in the United Kingdom), beginning with its origins in the radical film practices of the 1970s and noting its variations across time according to changes in social conditions and mentalities. Reference will be made to Mulvey’s original moments of engagement with film and feminist theory, and their conversion into practice notably in her own film Riddles of the Sphinx (1977 with Peter Wollen) and Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman (1975), but the article will also comment on ways in which the MIRAJ issue opened up histories and perspectives that are less widely discussed in the literature. The relationship of feminism to economic and social exploitation will also be discussed and forms of resistance will be identified, particularly in the culture of collectivities. Finally, the psychoanalytic approach proposed by Elizabeth Cowie in relation to affect and ‘gap’ will enter the frame, while slowness and duration in early feminist film will lead into a deeper discussion of practice.

Berlin: Sternberg Press, 295 pp., ISBN: 9783956790942, paperback, € 22

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13 May – 26 November 2016