Eduardo Ledesma | University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (original) (raw)
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This article aims to revalorize how an understudied Spanish experimental cinema movement known as... more This article aims to revalorize how an understudied Spanish experimental cinema movement known as the Barcelona School or EdB (1960-1970 resisted Franco's dictatorship through avant-garde filmmaking. The article applies media theory's concept of "intermediality" to analyze how the school's films mobilized political critique by engaging in "impure" media practices (such as the deployment of collage, montage and metalepsis), especially in regards to relations between text and image. It traces those same intermedial practices to the historic avant-gardes, as well as to the influence of contemporary movements such as Fluxus, the New York School or the Nouvelle Vague. After situating the EdB in the context of Spain's 1960s film scene, it explores how text-image interactions activate anti-Francoist discourse in three strikingly different films: Vicente Aranda's Fata Morgana (1965), José María Nunes' Sexperiencias (1968, and Pere Portabella's Nocturno 29 (1968). Concurrently, the essay presents the strong connection between the EdB's intermedial practices and political or counter-cultural resistance in Spain during the turmoil of the 1960s.
In this essay I examine the question of the Catalan avant-garde's relation to the Mechanical Age ... more In this essay I examine the question of the Catalan avant-garde's relation to the Mechanical Age in light of works by four artists who approached technology with a 'futurist' sensibility, and were enthusiastically swept away by the zeitgeist of the times -the speed, novelty and adventure of the machine era -but who also recognized and negotiated with its destructive elements. By analysing representative works by the painter Joaquim Torres-García, the poet Joan Salvat-Papasseit, the architect Josep Lluís Sert and the film director Segundo de Chomón, I explore how Catalan Futurism engaged with the dynamic forces of modernity, and how it incorporated local and traditional sources of inspiration, thereby balancing internationalist impulses with autochthonous nationalist urges. What Salvat-Papasseit's anarchic visual poetry, Torre-García's constructivist paintings, Sert's rationalist structures and Chomón's proto-futurist film art share is a radical experimentalism with the materials of their craft. Their oeuvre is simultaneously informed by their authors' socio-political concerns and tempered by their various degrees of involvement with the Catalan nationalist project. In every case, studying their relationship to the mechanical illuminates their particular and variable understanding of the different Catalan Futurism(s).
In digital poetry, the innovative interplay of the figural and the textual has drawn on and magni... more In digital poetry, the innovative interplay of the figural and the textual has drawn on and magnified historic avant-garde notions of visual poetry. Despite the apparent newness of contemporary technological poetic experiments linking graphics, text, video, and sound, media theorists (such as Siegfried Zielinski, Erkki Huhtamo, or Thomas Elsaesser, among others) 1 have long recognized that the "new" in "new media" is part of a continuum with the past and that the digital can be better understood through an archeological perspective. I intend to examine several experimental poems through an exercise of "close reading," as announced in the title. The "reading" in close reading functions as a metaphor for other hermeneutic practices, such as close "listening" in the case of phonetic poetry or performance, and close "viewing" in the case of filmic and visual poems. One of the practices I examine-script animation-contradicts an ontological difference assumed to separate paper-based from digital media: the notion that the printed word in books and magazines is static, while the digital word displays kinetic qualities derived from time-based media (such as film). While time-based media have had a profound effect on the digital, e-poetry has also drawn on its so-called static antecedents: visual and concrete poetry, sound poetry, etc. The incorporation of moving text ranks among the more spectacular effects of digital poetics, and in combination with the use of anthropomorphic shapes, activates the viewer's affective response.
Much ink has been spilled in regard to the topic of the text (script) and image relationship. A f... more Much ink has been spilled in regard to the topic of the text (script) and image relationship. A fully comprehensive examination of the interactions between script and image in twentieth-and twenty-first-century poetics should cover a period spanning from the first avant-garde's visual poetry, through the 1960s experimental poetry-concretism, lettrism, phonetic and process poetry-and culminating in today's digital and electronic poetry. In order to limit the length of the essay I will, however, primarily focus on the two periods that bookend contemporary experimental poetry (with a special emphasis on the digital), leaving the 1960s, which I only mention briefly, for a future investigation. Such an examination also requires that we first determine the changing understanding of the analogy between the visual arts (painting, photography, film) and the verbal arts (poetry, prose). 1 The aim of this essay will be to investigate how metaphors (visual and aural) have played a key role in the relatively seamless fusion of verbal and visual meaning in experimental poetry, starting with the historical avant-gardes and then proceeding to the digital 1 I use the term analogy here, rather than relationship or correspondence, because it goes further than just establishing relationships and comparisons between two things, in this case, painting and poetry. It does so with the purpose of determining important similarities between the two items compared, often by defining one in the terms of the other, while maintaining a distinction between them. I will use the term metaphor for more specific, poetic instances of comparison. Yet, aiming to destabilize the clear-cut categories that separate language into figurative and literal, I will occasionally use the terms interchangeably.
This article aims to revalorize how an understudied Spanish experimental cinema movement known as... more This article aims to revalorize how an understudied Spanish experimental cinema movement known as the Barcelona School or EdB (1960-1970 resisted Franco's dictatorship through avant-garde filmmaking. The article applies media theory's concept of "intermediality" to analyze how the school's films mobilized political critique by engaging in "impure" media practices (such as the deployment of collage, montage and metalepsis), especially in regards to relations between text and image. It traces those same intermedial practices to the historic avant-gardes, as well as to the influence of contemporary movements such as Fluxus, the New York School or the Nouvelle Vague. After situating the EdB in the context of Spain's 1960s film scene, it explores how text-image interactions activate anti-Francoist discourse in three strikingly different films: Vicente Aranda's Fata Morgana (1965), José María Nunes' Sexperiencias (1968, and Pere Portabella's Nocturno 29 (1968). Concurrently, the essay presents the strong connection between the EdB's intermedial practices and political or counter-cultural resistance in Spain during the turmoil of the 1960s.
In this essay I examine the question of the Catalan avant-garde's relation to the Mechanical Age ... more In this essay I examine the question of the Catalan avant-garde's relation to the Mechanical Age in light of works by four artists who approached technology with a 'futurist' sensibility, and were enthusiastically swept away by the zeitgeist of the times -the speed, novelty and adventure of the machine era -but who also recognized and negotiated with its destructive elements. By analysing representative works by the painter Joaquim Torres-García, the poet Joan Salvat-Papasseit, the architect Josep Lluís Sert and the film director Segundo de Chomón, I explore how Catalan Futurism engaged with the dynamic forces of modernity, and how it incorporated local and traditional sources of inspiration, thereby balancing internationalist impulses with autochthonous nationalist urges. What Salvat-Papasseit's anarchic visual poetry, Torre-García's constructivist paintings, Sert's rationalist structures and Chomón's proto-futurist film art share is a radical experimentalism with the materials of their craft. Their oeuvre is simultaneously informed by their authors' socio-political concerns and tempered by their various degrees of involvement with the Catalan nationalist project. In every case, studying their relationship to the mechanical illuminates their particular and variable understanding of the different Catalan Futurism(s).
In digital poetry, the innovative interplay of the figural and the textual has drawn on and magni... more In digital poetry, the innovative interplay of the figural and the textual has drawn on and magnified historic avant-garde notions of visual poetry. Despite the apparent newness of contemporary technological poetic experiments linking graphics, text, video, and sound, media theorists (such as Siegfried Zielinski, Erkki Huhtamo, or Thomas Elsaesser, among others) 1 have long recognized that the "new" in "new media" is part of a continuum with the past and that the digital can be better understood through an archeological perspective. I intend to examine several experimental poems through an exercise of "close reading," as announced in the title. The "reading" in close reading functions as a metaphor for other hermeneutic practices, such as close "listening" in the case of phonetic poetry or performance, and close "viewing" in the case of filmic and visual poems. One of the practices I examine-script animation-contradicts an ontological difference assumed to separate paper-based from digital media: the notion that the printed word in books and magazines is static, while the digital word displays kinetic qualities derived from time-based media (such as film). While time-based media have had a profound effect on the digital, e-poetry has also drawn on its so-called static antecedents: visual and concrete poetry, sound poetry, etc. The incorporation of moving text ranks among the more spectacular effects of digital poetics, and in combination with the use of anthropomorphic shapes, activates the viewer's affective response.
Much ink has been spilled in regard to the topic of the text (script) and image relationship. A f... more Much ink has been spilled in regard to the topic of the text (script) and image relationship. A fully comprehensive examination of the interactions between script and image in twentieth-and twenty-first-century poetics should cover a period spanning from the first avant-garde's visual poetry, through the 1960s experimental poetry-concretism, lettrism, phonetic and process poetry-and culminating in today's digital and electronic poetry. In order to limit the length of the essay I will, however, primarily focus on the two periods that bookend contemporary experimental poetry (with a special emphasis on the digital), leaving the 1960s, which I only mention briefly, for a future investigation. Such an examination also requires that we first determine the changing understanding of the analogy between the visual arts (painting, photography, film) and the verbal arts (poetry, prose). 1 The aim of this essay will be to investigate how metaphors (visual and aural) have played a key role in the relatively seamless fusion of verbal and visual meaning in experimental poetry, starting with the historical avant-gardes and then proceeding to the digital 1 I use the term analogy here, rather than relationship or correspondence, because it goes further than just establishing relationships and comparisons between two things, in this case, painting and poetry. It does so with the purpose of determining important similarities between the two items compared, often by defining one in the terms of the other, while maintaining a distinction between them. I will use the term metaphor for more specific, poetic instances of comparison. Yet, aiming to destabilize the clear-cut categories that separate language into figurative and literal, I will occasionally use the terms interchangeably.