| dc.description.abstract | Within a period of roughly a century, perception and creative vision of the moving image in time have been involved in three main massmedia: cinema, television and the Internet, each representing its own era. None of the leading visions in cinema and television - experimental cinema and video - was born by chance but all were connected with the general spirit that ran through the other visual arts of their time and the search taken up by their most avant-garde wings. This study aims to clarify and understand the different visions of avant-garde cinema and video and at the same time to question the current definition of avant-garde facing the developing digital culture. If many previous works have focussed in their analyses on the evolution of avant-garde vision in cinema or video art, and more recently some have been done this rather tentatively in the digital domain, very few have paid much attention to the wider contemporary social and cultural environments, either historically or in the large empirical perspective of artistic activity. The perspective of this work is the creative point of view of the artist, involved in a double mechanism of perception and creation, and catalysed by his original vision. This work gives to the specific eye of the camera a mythological association with the vision of the Cyclops, showing that this vision also has connections with an inherited classical perspective and with modern dynamism. Man Ray (1890-1976), painter, photographer, filmmaker, object creator, inventor and writer, was a key figure in New York Dada, French Dada and Surrealism. To his work he brought his personal vision and creative innovation. Man Ray was also an outsider without dogmatic tendencies; he was in constant contact with the main personalities of the avant-garde but also followed his own creative intuition. Man Ray can be considered to be a much more paradoxical artist than Marcel Duchamp, and probably also more prophetic, especially considering avant-garde cinema and the recent development in video art. With his eyewitness account of the turning-point represented by Dada, and also of the whole process of conversion to modernism and the critical-individualistic attitude that he developed in his autobiography, he can be considered, with Hans Richter, to be one of the most significant pioneers in independent and non-narrative cinema. An incursion into the contradictions of the Bauhaus at that time will help us to understand some fundamental and philosophical perspectives in artistic activity. By its juxtaposition of radically divergent points of view on cinematic realities, from Dziga Vertov to Stan Brakhage or recent video artists, the present study questions what are these basic cinematographic concepts. More specifically it compares rational and intuitive processes. It concentrates on the evolution of Man Ray from his avant-garde painting to his personal vision in film. As basic discussion material, a complete visual and rhythm analysis of the short film Emak Bakia is used. This study traces the historical tendencies of marginal cinema, evaluates its relatively recent output in the fields of video art and digital culture and elaborates a tentative theory including the concept of anti-art, modern ways of seeing and the individualistic vision of Man Ray. The understanding of vision as a complex mental process will help to investigate the spirit of contemporary video art and its educational possibilities in the new digital era. | en |
