Eszter Polonyi is Assistant Professor of Cultural History at the University of Nova Gorica in Slovenia, EU. She has previously worked as Visiting Assistant Professor at the History of Art and Design Department of the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn (2017-2020) and as Core Lecturer at the Art History and Archaeology Department of Columbia University, from which she earned her doctorate in 2017.
Address: Research Center for the Humanities
School for the Humanities
University of Nova Gorica
Vipavska cesta 13
5000 Nova Gorica, Slovenia
Address: Research Center for the Humanities
School for the Humanities
University of Nova Gorica
Vipavska cesta 13
5000 Nova Gorica, Slovenia
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Zoran Samardzija, Steven Shaviro, Eszter Polonyi, Tommy Swenson (mod)
FFM accommodates a selection of articles and sections aimed at exploring issues of ethics, politics, form and content related to the culture of recycled cinema: monographs, interdisciplinary essays, interviews and opinion pieces concerning the eclectic universe of found footage filmmaking.
Collaborators Issue #3: Alejandro Bachmann, Yann Beauvais, Stephen Broomer, Felix Dufour-Laperrière & Dominic Etienne Simard, Clint Enns, Michael Fleming, Cécile Fontaine, David J. Gunkel, Winston Hacking, Michael Higgins, Mike Hoolboom, Malcolm Le Grice, Matt Levine, Josh Lewis, Scott MacDonald, Pablo Marín, Julie Murray, Eszter Polonyi, Gracia Ramírez, Jonathan Rosenbaum, Sam Spreckley, Oli Sorenson, Peter Tscherkassky, César Ustarroz, and Virgil Widrich.
After familiarizing students with the techniques and properties of the standard and theatrical film apparatus, the class embarks on the process of imagining these within alternative structures, institutions, networks and communities. Thus the story of 16mm film will take us into spaces not traditionally associated with film, such as military barracks, corporate infrastructures, underground distribution centers and experimental laboratories. By uncovering the numerous nontheatrical sites of film, the history of the nonstandard format begins to expand the horizons within which we have situated cinema. In addition to new spaces of film exhibition, 16mm also involved networks of distribution entirely separate from movies and encompassing film viewing communities much more diverse than previously assumed, with 16mm film often employed for purposes of political and human rights education and among populations of color. Used for making copies and dupes, 16mm accounts for much of film’s distribution, including those originally on the industrial format, but that of other forms of culture as well. In addition to recording live and musical performance, 16mm was also tasked with disseminating work in more established mediums such as painting, sculpture and architecture, thus enacting the reproducibility that thinkers like Walter Benjamin believed film introduced to the art work. The final sessions end the course with consideration of the potentially critical rediscovery of the past that 16mm offers today.
Moving images figure centrally in postwar and contemporary art. But there is nothing necessary or predictable about the prominence they have recently enjoyed in art galleries. Long associated with the spectacle of mass culture, film has been sidelined from narratives of artistic development for most of its history. In order to better appreciate the vast gulf between art and film, this course develops out of the assumption of certain discontinuities, disjunctures and disparities at work in their encounter within the museum. Before considering a range of examples of moving image exhibition from museums in New York and beyond, we consider the art-film hybrid as emerging two systems of thought with radically different aesthetic, cultural and discursive concerns.