The seventh art is also exposed
- Michael Gilbert
- May 16, 2017
- 5 min read
If ever the film industry was a symbol of entertainment, in the twenty-first century the presence of cinema in a museum's collection represents the opposite: critical capacity
Every historical period tends to favor some discursive modes over others and to invent new fictions and forms of expression. These are instruments that the successive generations conceive to apprehend a world in continuous change and, at the same time, to promote the peculiar vision of certain social groups above the one of others.
The novel was, in the nineteenth century, the device that the bourgeoisie developed in order to ward off their fears and yearnings. Honoré de Balzac, Leo Tolstoy or George Eliot were clear exponents of this phenomenon, reaching a degree of intensity, subtlety and social incidence that was going to be difficult to repeat in other times.
This was not only due to the literary achievements of its authors, but also to the permeability of this genre in the different social strata that, despite their diversity,
If we had to choose an artistic medium that embodied the spirit of the twentieth century, we would opt for the cinema, which managed to combine popular knowledge and avant-garde
If we had to choose an artistic medium that embodied the spirit of the twentieth century, we would certainly opt for the cinema. He succeeded in bringing together popular knowledge and the vanguard. All around him were the masses who were searching for some myths that he denied them day by day as the most critical voices with the industrialized world. Chaplin, for example, was the modern man by antonomasia, his mechanical movements sought to be precise and articulated, like those of a machine. However, its gaunt bearing showed the shadows of a society whose prosperity continued to be based on inequality.
The museum of modern art hastened to integrate the cinema in its patrimonial heritage. The MOMA of New York was founded in 1929 and already in 1935 had its Film Library . Now, driven by an iron will to separate aesthetic disciplines and subordinate artistic achievements to their formal autonomy, modernity relegated cinema to the space of the projection room. It required a disembodied perception of the world and the black box favored that the spectator be integrated in the filmic story, apparently without any mediation. In fact, although in the most avant-garde expository proposals of the time, such as those designed by El Lissitzky, Kiesler or Moholy-Nagy, cinema was included as one of its basic devices, It will not be until the last decades of the last century when it begins to extend its use in biennials and museums. In the current arrangement of the collections of the Reina Sofia Museum occupies a preferred place, standing at the same level as painting, sculpture or drawing. Welcome, Mr. Marshall of Berlan
ga, or Hitchcock's indiscreet window, give us a better understanding of the continuum between art and the cold war, the mutual monitoring of the political blocs during the 1950s and 1960s, the importance Of the visual in the partition of the sensible of that time and the difficulty to represent the other. Similarly, a number of films by Val del Omar , Resnais, Buñuel , Keaton, Godard,
'Welcome, Mr. Marshall' or 'The indiscreet window' makes us better understand the continuum between art and the cold war.Click here for sarkar 3 movie download torrent.
Despite the crisis in some sectors of the film industry, we can not claim that the moving image, cinema in a broader sense, has declined in recent decades, nor has the capacity of society to Generate stories. However, it is true that the Network has radically transformed our discursive universe: we do not read or see what someone has written or filmed for us, we rebuild it without remedy from the inexhaustible tangle of files that are lodged on the Internet. Virtual navigation, reading in hypertext, the almost infinite multiplicity of options, which forces the user to choose and make the stories, have given a turn to the way we understand what surrounds us. The digital revolution has moved the cinematograph, as a device, into the background. Following the trail of those objects and practices that stopped being useful, the cinema seems to find a second life in the center of art. In his galleries, the filmmaker experiences with times and formats that overflow the limits of the traditional room: films of a few m
inutes or of indefinite duration, multi-screen projections, etcetera. And it is no longer surprising that an author like Albert Serra produces Els tres porquets for Documenta 13 or that Aki Kaurismäki recognizes the museum as the ideal place for one of his few retrospectives. The filmmaker experiences with times and formats that overflow the limits of the traditional room: movies of a few minutes or of indefinite duration, multi-screen projections, etcetera. And it is no longer surprising that an author like Albert Serra produces Els tres porquets for Documenta 13 or that Aki Kaurismäki recognizes the museum as the ideal place for one of his few retrospectives. The filmmaker experiences times and formats that go beyond the limits of the traditional room: films of a few minutes or of indefinite duration, multi-screen projections, and so on. And it is no longer surprising that an author like Albert Serra produces Els tres porquets for Documenta 13 or that Aki Kaurismäki recognizes the museum as the ideal place for one of his few retrospectives.
It is no longer surprising that an author like Albert Serra produces Els tres porquets for Documenta 13 or that Kaurismäki recognizes the museum as the ideal place for one of his few retrospectives
How to explain this incorporation of the cinema to the structure of the museum? Why is cinema relevant in the presentation of our samples? The answer would be twofold. In the first place, the cinema and the exhibitions are organized around a common assumption: the montage, which like the Atlas of Aby Warburg propitiates the fragmentary knowledge, the communication of the forms and the articulation of the elements in a dynamic system of relations , Generating narratives in which there is not necessarily a beginning or an end and in which the principle of causality is replaced by that of continuity. Through assembly we approach history not as something objective and external, but as something internal that allows us to narrate the facts and the madness of the same, history and hysteria, According to Didi-Huberman's expression . Secondly, we would say that cinema's expository interest lies in its anachronism. In a hypertecnified epoch like the present one, located in a continuous present, without past or future, visti us.
and in which all disagreement is coopted beforehand, that anachronism may be able to fulfill the liberating function that the novel had for the liberal bourgeoisie of the XIX. That anachronism, that being in and out of our time without adjusting completely to its conditions, allows the cinema to represent the world and to challenge it. If ever the film industry could be considered a symbol of entertainment and spectacle, in the 21st century, in the era of collective spectacularization, the inclusion of cinema in the museum represents the opposite: the possibility of openness and criticism.
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