63.1,2
CONTENTS
DOSSIER:
Exquisite Historiography: Experimental and Collaborative Film Histories
Núria Araüna Baró and David Archibald
Ragged Cinema: Twelve Theses on the Making of Comrades together-apart / Camarades junts-i-a-banda (Araüna Baró and David Archibald, Catalonia/Scotland, 2021) (with accompanying video)
Ka Lee Wong
Textualizing YouTube: Cultivating Bonds of Community via an Online Collaborative Platform in Hong Kong (with accompanying video)
Kiki Loveday and Susan Potter
Commentary: Something Out of Nothing—Making Traffic in Kisses (with accompanying video)
Isabel Seguí and Marina Cavalcanti Tedesco
Feminist Ironic Montage to Dismantle Gender Essentialism
Anila Gill
Inhabiting a Moth-Eaten Method
Allyson Nadia Field
The Life History of Juli Jones, Junior by William Foster
Matilda Mroz and Ivan Cerecina
A Montage of Surviving Images: Deportation footage in
Varsovie, quand même . . . (1954) and Night and Fog (1956) (with accompanying video)
MM Serra
Tales and Visions (video only) 125
Ina Archer, Dino Everett, Marsha Gordon, and Martin Louis Johnson
Gauging Film History: An Exquisite Corpse
DOSSIER:
The New American Cinema Group in Europe: The 1960s Grand Tour and Its Afterlife
Guest Editor: Ronald Gregg
Ronald Gregg
Introduction: The New American Cinema Group in Europe: The 1960s Grand Tour and its Afterlife
Faye Corthésy
Beyond the United States: Three Propositions Toward a History of New American Cinema’s Multiplicity of Sites in the 1960s
Ronald Gregg
”Without Jerome”: The Patronage of Jerome Hill and the Curating of 1960s American Experimental Work in Europe
Giaime Alonge
Underground Films in Factory Town: The New American Cinema Group Travels to Turin, Italy in 1967
Claudio Panella and Silvia Nugara
(Re)Discovering the Italian Reception of NAC Through the Archives of the Unione culturale
Miguel Fernández Labayen and John Sundholm
Promoting and Curating US Experimental Cinema in Europe: “The Western American Experimental Film” Tour in 1963 and the New American Cinema
Alessandro Amaducci
The Relationship between New American Cinema with the American and European Video Art Movement: A Flow of Ideas
Sabrina Negri
The Afterlife of New American Cinema: An Archival Perspective
ESSAY
Olivia Landry
Exil and the Cinematic Mood of Racism
EDITORIAL
A key theme throughout Framework 63 1&2 (Spring & Fall 2022) is interconnection—as both a method and a perception. In the two dossiers, “Exquisite Historiography: Experimental and Collaborative Film Histories” and “The New American Cinema Group in Europe: The 1960s Grand Tour and Its Afterlife,” there is a sense of weaving and interconnecting, allowing for open spaces and an inventive, perhaps kaleidoscopic, perspective on the past, present, and future. This interconnection continues in the only entry that is not part of a dossier, Olivia Landry’s essay, “Exil and the Cinematic Mood of Racism.” With its analysis of Albanian Kosovar Visar Morina’s film Exil/Exile (DE/XK, 2020), Landry brings into focus the contemporary, constant, often indefinable interconnection of immigration, exile, acceptance, and rejection.
The dossier “Exquisite Historiography: Experimental and Collaborative Film Histories” makes use of the Surrealist game “exquisite corpse” as a method of creativity to make experimental and collaborative film histories. Our invitation to contributors was expansive and specific:
An “exquisite historiography” offers a flexible framework for working together, inventively exploring new concepts of authorship, and cultivating bonds of community. It orients film history to chance, imagination, and the “hidden.” We encourage serious and playful reflections on and responses to the disciplinary norms of film history and new forms of film history for our present moment.
We invite new means of authorship, critical fabulations, video essays, reflective and theoretical essays, dialogic exchanges, collective conversations, experimental micro-histories, assemblages and annotations of primary materials, and other creative and experimental responses, including work that focuses on a question (rather than answers one) for this special issue.
We encourage risk-taking, understanding that we might learn as much from intelligent failure as from the most brilliant collaborative work.
Our contributors (some in partnership, some in groups, some alone) Núria Araüna Baró, David Archibald, Ka Lee Wong, Kiki Loveday, Susan Potter, Isabel Seguí, Marina Cavalcanti Tedesco, Anila Gill, Allyson Nadia Field, Matilda Mroz, Ivan Cerecina, Ina Archer, Dino Everett, Marsha Gordon, and Martin Johnson rose to the occasion with wit, seriousness, and joy. Núria Araüna Baró, David Archibald, Kiki Loveday, Susan Potter, Matilda Mroz, Ivan Cerecina, and MM Serra also made films as experiments in Exquisite Historiography, and their films are available on the Framework website: https://www.frameworknow.com/audio-visual.
The essays in the dossier “The New American Cinema Group in Europe: The 1960s Grand Tour and Its Afterlife,” guest edited by Ronald Gregg, are the outcome of the symposium “Transatlantic Experimental Film Connections and Influences: New American Cinema and Europe in the 1960s and Afterwards,” held May 26, 2022, in Turin, Italy. Turin was a progressive, creative city in the sixties (and continues to be one), and it hosted the festival that launched the 1967 germinal tour of New American Cinema films across Europe. The 2022 symposium and subsequent Framework dossier revisit the event, and some argue that this tour was instrumental in building the reputation, in the US as well as in Europe, of now iconic filmmakers like Jonas Mekas, Robert Breer, Storm de Hirsch, and Warren Sonbert, and of highlighting the considerable influence of filmmaker and arts patron Jerome Hill. The 2022 symposium was organized, with others, by Giaime Alonge, writer and associate professor of film history at the University of Turin, and Ronald Gregg, Senior Lecturer in the Discipline in film and media studies at the School of the Arts at Columbia University. Framework was honored to be one of its six sponsors. To offer more context to our readers, Framework asked The Filmmaker’s Cooperative in New York to curate and make available, by links, twelve of the twenty-three films that toured in 1967. Framework also linked to Gartenberg Media Enterprises to have on view Warren Sonbert’s Where Did Our Love Go? (US, 1966), also on the tour. For links to these sites and the films go to: www.framework now.com/audio-visual/the-new-american-cinema-group-in-europe.
The contributors to this dossier are Faye Corthésy, Ronald Gregg, Giaime Alonge, Claudio Panella, Silvia Nugara, Miguel Fernández Labayen, John Sundholm, Alessandro Amaducci, and Sabrina Negri. In their work, the authors often refer to each other’s essays, which shows that the dossier as a whole is made up of pieces that act off one another, a reflexivity that creates an atmosphere of an ongoing conversation. Their scholarship, research, and speculation about what was happening in Turin in 1967 and the impact of the New American Cinema tour creates its own Exquisite Historiography.
Finally, this issue welcomes Susan Potter as a new editor on Framework. Her acumen, scholarship, and originality add much to Framework and its advances as we launch new enterprises on the Framework website and in our bi-annual print issues.
—Drake Stutesman