Yve-Alain Bois - Seminars / Workshop / Lectures

ART AND FILM - August 2002 (3 credits)

A lesson in resistance that reveals the interdependencies of art and film with a focus on the structural elements of communication.

Required Books and Reading Assignments:
Bois, Yve-Alain, Rosalind E. Krauss and Centre Georges Pompidou. Formless: A User's Guide (Zone Books). MIT Press. October 15, 1997, 296 pages, Hardcover, ISBN: 0942299434. Buy it at Amazon.com. August 28 2000, 304 pages, Paperback, ISBN: 0942299442. Buy it at Amazon.com.

Roland Barthes: The Grain of the Voice: Interviews 1962-1980. Paperback: Publisher: University of California Press; ; Reprint edition (March 1991) ISBN: 0520072375. Buy it at Amazon.com.

Session 1: Introduction to Painting and Film
- History of perspective (Renaissance to today)
- Modelisation and perspective in film
- The cinematic apparatus
- Reading film from an art historian/painting authority’s perspective

Assigned readings:
- Christian Metz, ”The Imaginary Signifier.” from Film and Theory: An Anthology. Blackwell, Massachusetts, 2000, pp.408-436.

Assigned films:
- ”Rhythm 21” (Viking Eggeling and Hans Richter, Germany, 1921)
- ”La Jetée” (Chris Marker, France, 1962)

Session 2: Painting as a Theme in Film
- Biographic representation
- Tableaux vivants
- Film by painters
- Quoting painters in film

Assigned readings:
- Eisenstein, S.M. “Yermalova,” in Selected Works Vol. II: Towards a Theory of Montage. eds. Glenny, Michael and Richard Taylor, St. Edmundsbury Press Ltd., 1991, pp. 82-99.

Assigned films:
- ”Carivagio” (Derek Jarman, UK, 1986)
- ”Andrei Rublyov” (Andrei Tarkovsky, Russia, 1969)
- ”Basquiat” (Julian Schnabel, USA, 1996)


Session 3: “All-Over”: Time and Surface
- The aesthetic of decentering
- Henri Matisse
- Jackson Pollack
- Slowing down the gaze
- Barnett Neuman
- Ad Reinhardt
- Dadaists, Surrealists, the 60s underground
- Texture in film

Assigned readings:
- Greenberg, Clement. “The Crisis of Abstract Art,” Arts Yearbook 7, 1964. in Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism. vol. 4, ed. John O’Brian, 1993.
- Krauss, Rosalind E. “Horizontality,” in Formless: A User’s Guide. with Yve-Alain Bois, Zone Books, NY, NY, 1997, 93-108.
- Rose, Barbara. “Kinetic Solutions to Pictorial Problems: The Films fo Man Ray and Moholy-Nagy,” Artforum, 1971.

Assigned films:
- ”Tillie’s Punctured Romance” (Mack Sennett, USA, 1914)
- ”Kiss” (Andy Warhol, USA,1963)
- ”Empire” (Andy Warhol, USA, 1964)
- ”Playtime” (Jacques Tati, France, 1967)
- ”2001: A Space Odessy” (Stanley Kubrick, USA, 1964)
- ”In the Mood for Love” (Wong Kar-Wai, China, 2000)

Session 4: Omniverous Philosophy
- Historical origins of painting and film
- ”Cut your tongue if you want to be a painter” (Henri Matisse)
- Film-makers read painting
- Painters critique film-makers
- Eisenstein and intertextuality
- Collaborations between painters and film-makers

Assigned readings:
- Eisenstein, Sergei M. “The Problem of the Materialist Approach to Form,” in Selected Works Vol. II: Towards a Theory of Montage. eds. Glenny, Michael and Richard Taylor, St. Edmundsbury Press Ltd., pp. 59-76.
- Eisenstein, Sergei M. “Béla Forgets the Scissors,” in Selected Works Vol. II: Towards a Theory of Montage. eds. Glenny, Michael and Richard Taylor. St. Edmundsbury Press Ltd., pp. 77-81.
- Malevich, Kasimir. “And Images Triumph on the Screens,” in Essays on Art, 1915- 1933, Rapp and Whiting, London, 1969, pp. 226-232.
- Malevich, Kasimir.”The Artist and the Cinéma,” in Essays on Art, 1915-1933, Rapp and Whiting, London, 1969, pp. 233-238.

Assigned films:
- ”Strike” (Sergei M. Eisenstein, Russia, 1925)
- ”Kinoeye” (Dziga Vertov, Russia, 1924)
- ”Diagonal Symphony” (Viking Eggling and Hans Richter, France, 1925)

Session 5: Credits (and Other Formal Exercises)
- Early film experiments
- Op art, french musicals, and the Nouvelle Vague
- Figure-ground relations
- Saturation
- In-class exercise: A formalist reading of “Battleship Potelmkin”

Assigned readings:
- Michelson, Annette. “Anemic Reflections on an Emblematic Work,” in Artforum, September, 1972.
- Kracauer, S. “Experimental Film,” in Theory of Film. Oxford University Press, 1960.

Assigned films:
- ”Desmoiselles de Rochefort” (Jacques Demy, France, 1967)
- ”Les Parapluies de Cherbourg” (Jacques Demy, France, 1964)
- ”Funny Face” (Stanley Donen, USA, 1957)
- ”Ballet Mechanique” (Leger, France, 1924)
- ”Anemic Cinema” (Marcel Duchamp, France, 1926)

Session 6: The Third Meaning
- Roland Barthes’ “Image Music Text”
- Structuralism and Post-structuralism
- Undoing denotation and connotation
- Unfolding: Baroque and obtuse meaning.

Assigned readings:
- Barthes, Roland. “The Third Meaning,” in Image, Music, Text. ed. Stephen Heath, Hill, NY, 1977, pp. 50-68

Assigned films:
- ”Battleship Potemkin” (Sergei M. Eisenstein, Russia, 1925)
- ”Happy Together” (Wong Kar-Wai, China, 1997)

Session 7: Excess
- Theatricality
- Decorativism
- Bakhtin and the relationship to the perceiver

Assigned readings:
- Bataille, Georges. “The Big Toe,” in Encyclopedia Anacephalica. Atlas Press, London, 1995, pp. 85-94.
- Yve-Alain Bois. “Abbatoir,” in Formless: A User’s Guide with Rosalind Kraus, Zone Books, NY, NY, 1997, pp.43-50.

Assigned films:
- ”Ivan the Terrible” (Sergei M. Eisenstein, Russia, 1944)

Session 8: Political Infuences
- Pre-revolution abstraction (1917)
- Communist ideological theory
- Productivists and Constructivists
- France: May 1968

Assigned readings:
- Bataille, Georges. “Slaughterhouse,” in Encyclopedia Anacephalica. Atlas Press, London, 1995, pp. 72-4.
- Eisenstein, S.M. “Laocoon,” in Selected Works Vol. II:Towards a Theory of Montage. eds. Glenny, Michael and Richard Taylor., St. Edmundsbury Press Ltd., 1946, pp.139-181.
- Eisenstein, S.M. “The Races,” in Selected Works Vol. II:Towards a Theory of Montage. eds. Glenny, Michael and Richard Taylor, St. Edmundsbury Press Ltd., 1991, pp. 285-295.

Assigned films:
- ”Strike” (Sergei M. Eisenstein, Russia, 1925)
- ”Kinoeye” (Dziga Vertov, USSR, 1924)
- ”Tout Va Bien” (Jean-Luc Godard, France, 1972)
- ”La Maman et La Putain” (Jean Eustache, France, 1973)
- ”Le Cochon” (Jean Eustache, France, 1970)

Session 9: Subliminal Affects of Plastic Formations
- Eisenstein vs. Vertov
- Montage
- Foregrounding the medium
- Saussure: Subliminal effects and obtuse meaning

Assigned readings:
- Eisenstein, S.M. “Montage,” in Selected Works Vol. II:Towards a Theory of Montage. eds. Glenny, Michael and Richard Taylor, St. Edmundsbury Press Ltd., 1991, pp. 22-41.
- Michelson, Annette. “The Man with a Movie Camera: From Magician to Epistemologist,” Artforum, 1972.

Assigned films:
- ”The Man With a Movie Camera” (Dziga Vertov, Russia, 1928)

Session 10: Semiotics
- Symbol, Icon, Index
- Photography
- Technology and the organic
- Modernism and materials
- film and projection
- Occular themes

Assigned readings:
- Krauss, Rosalind E. “Where’s Poppa?,” in The Definitively Unfinished Marcel Duchamp. ed. Thierry de Duve, Halifax, NZ: NSCAD; Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2001, pp. 432-62.

Assigned films:
- ”The Way Things Go” (Peter Fischli and David Weiss, Germany, 1987)
- ”The Mine” (William Kentridge, South Africa, 1991)
- ”Howl at the Moon” (William Kentridge, South Africa, 1982)

Session 11: History of Color
- Color as a supplement
- Color vs. line and mass
- renaissance painting
- Challenging “local color”
- Delacroix, Courbet, and Impressionism
- Science of color
- Seurat and Post-impressionism
- Creation of line with color
- Cezanne
- Neo-plasticism
- Mondrian
- Experiments with color
- Matisse and Picasso
- Joseph Albers’ color theory

Assigned readings:
- Albers, Joseph. Interaction of Color. Yale University Press, USA, 1963.
- Johnson, William. “Coming to Terms with Color,” in The Cinematic Apparatus. ed. De Lauretis, Teresa and Stephen Heath. Macmillan, 1980, pp. 2-23.

Assigned films:
- ”Fargo” (Joel & Ethan Coen, USA, 1996)
- ”Falling Angels” (Wong Kar-Wai, China, 1995)

Session 12: Color in the 20th Century
- Technical, psychological, and symbolic uses of color
- Return of “local color”
- Detterence and the Cold War paradigm
- Mondrian and Godard
- The “Hegelian” system of oppositions
- Color interaction and tension
- Color separation
- Pollack, Bonnard, Antonioni

Assigned readings:
- Dalle Vache, Angela. “Painting as Ventriloquism and Color as Movement,” in Cinema and Painting: How Art is Used in Film. University of Texas Press, 1994, pp. 43-80.
- Krauss, Rosalind E. “Six,” in The Optical Unconscious. MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass.,1994, pp. 243-329.
- Sharits, Paul J. “Red, Blue, Godard,” in The Cinematic Apparatus. ed. De Lauretis, Teresa and Stephen Heath. Macmillan, 1980, pp 24-29.

Assigned films:
- ”Pierre Le Fou” (Jean-Luc Godard, France, 1968)
- ”Contempt” (Jean-Luc Godard, France, 1964)
- ”Red Desert” (Michelangelo Antonioni, Italy, 1964)