How does cinematic fiction render the ordinary world intelligible?

Narrative is one of the fundamental ways in which we organnize the world. In recent years the study of narrative has acquired a new and prominent role in theorizing film theory.
How do you study narratology?

• You should study theories about the nature of those patterns and structures, which are created while consciuonsly reading a text;
• You should look at the concept of causality, space and time and how they have been perceived as data in an imagined story world;
• You should ask yourself how to represent a particular event within a narrative schema;
• You should also expand the concept of the spectator's knowledge beyond immediate seeing to include other influences: cultural expectations, memory of previous scenes and the sound track;
• You should create a hierarchy of roles or levels which describes the typical ways in which a reader participates in a novel.

It isn't a simple task, but Edward Branigan has done it in his Narrative Comprehension and Film. His principal references are Todorov's causal-transformation theory of narrative and Stephen Heath's theory of displacement.
Edward Branigan offers us a great deal of substance and a range of attractive speculative insights. The book explain us how to relate the double argument about narrative in film and human perception as interpretive construals.

Echo, Terry Moore's new creator owned series

Terry Moore has won the prestigious Will Eisner Award for “Best Continuing Series” and the National Cartoonist Society’s Reuben Award for “Best Comic Book” with his graphic novel series, Strangers In Paradise . He' s currently under contract with Marvel Comics, where he writes Runaways, and Spider-Man Loves Mary Jane. I wouldn't think he had any free time, but instead he's working on a new creator-owned series, Echo, which will come out in March 2008.
Echo is a black humor thriller comedy drama which narrates the story of Julie Martin, a photographer taking pictures in the desert who finds herself in the wrong place at the wrong time. It seems that Julie lives in the same world and time of the SIP characters. The setting of the story takes place in Yosemite National Park, near Lake Mono. Her marriage is going bad and her credit has been cut off.
Echo #1 will be in stores March 5th. It will be 24 pages long and in B&W. The first printing of issue one, and only the first printing, will feature a silver foil cover.
It should be about the lenght of three trade paperbacks.
If you want to read a preview, click here.

Pulsazioni (Beats, 2006)

Original editing, the use of close-ups, great photography. Antonio Ansalone, a virtually unknown filmaker has directed this obsessive short film about headache pain and the abuse of medication. Ansalone entered his film in an Italian film competition but it didn't win any prize.

Is art dead?

Since Hegel, the idea of the end of art has become a staple of aesthetic theory. Will postart be the end of art?

The concept of “postart” was developed by the happening artist Allan Kaprow, based on his idea that life is much more interesting than art, at the expense of art. Postart is not a point of no return and in fact there are many fine artists who continue to make important art. But it was perhaps inevitable that “postart” would be attacked as non-elitist (aristocratic). Marcel Duchamp called it “intellectual expression” over “animal expression”. This can be seen in art with the split between minimal-conceptual art and expressionism.

In his book The End of Art, Donald Kuspit promotes the idea that fear and ignorance of the unconscious have created a climate of creative superficiality in which artists are unwilling to break trhough the surface of their minds to the uncomfortable waters that lie beneath. Militarism and materialism, authoritarianism and capitalism, are more devastating than anything in the unconscious, even though they have roots in unconscious.
Artists are scared of the inner truth about themselves, more particularly, about acknowledging psychic conflict and trauma as well as the primary creativity evidenced by fantasy (especially dreams).
Kuspit traces the genealogy of the postart aesthetic from Duchamp through Warhol’s commercialism to Hirst’s installations (and his preoccupation with banal objects and everyday life situations).
Whereas modern art consist of revolutionary experiments motivated by a desire to express aspects of the newly-discovered “unconscious mind,” postart, Kuspit argues, is shallow, unreflective banality motivated by the desire to become institutionalized.
The End of Art will appeal to anyone who has ever felt bamboozled by the productions of the postmodern establishment.

Kim Duchateau wins Bronzen Adhemar 2007!

Kim Duchateau is one of the most inventive and most productive Flemish strip-makers of the moment. He's also active as a painter and musician, and makes animated films .
He combines an efficient, accurate story line with an absurdist, sometimes painfully sharp feeling for humor. His style reminds one of Tex Avery and Jan Svankmajer.


Duchateau won the ` Stripschappenning 2006 ' award in the adventure and recreation category for the third part from the ` Esther Verkest ' range. He has made comics for the small-press magazines Incognito, Zone 5300 and Beeldstorm. He has created one panel cartoons for severals newspapers. His comics 'Verhaaltjes voor het Slapengaan', parts 1 & 2, and 'Unne' were self-published. In 2000, his POCKET was chosen as daily strip for a morning newspaper. His` Esther Verkest ' was issued in p-Magazine, his ` Aldegonne ' in Stripgids and other illustrations were published in Knack. Other works also appear in the popular French booklet L'Echo of the Savanes and in Dutch newspapers and illustrated magazines. Five albums of ` Esther Verkest ' were realeased, the last (`Verschwunden ') in 2006. His new character 'Aldegonne' is published in the Zipp-addition of the newspaper De Standaard.

Blinding light

The Blinding Light Cinema existed as North America's only full time underground cinema, operating 6 nights a week for five years from 1998 to 2003. An archive of these years can be found on their website.
Blinding light helped underground cinema grow more and more. Now the foundation needs your help. As a non-profit society its financial status has always been rather shaky even though they did pretty well with what they had. Still, they do have an ongoing debt which needs to be shaken off. It runs around $4000.00. If you can give them a financial donation of $30, they'll send you a special "grab bag" of goods from their archive of materials.
Visit http://www.blindinglight.com/ or contact info@blindinglight.com them for more information!

To be a photographer

Many people think that photography isn't an art because things are depicted as they are. This simply isn't true! The work of a
photographer also entails choosing what he shall describe.

Photographers shoot all they see. It seems an easy and cheap task. How can a mechanical process be made to produce artistic pictures?
This has been one of the aesthetic questions of the eighteenth century. Photography is the product of knowledge and sensibility, trial and error and empirical experiment.
"Will the industry invade the territory of art?" Baudelaire asked himself. Today we could answer him "No, it won't. Look at some photographs. The variety of their imagery is prodigious: the light, the viewpoint, the change in print tonality."
Shooting a photo is less simple than it seems. You can study photo, you can learn as a photographer does. Photographers learn in two ways: from an intimate understanding of their tools and materials and from other photographs. If you can't go to a photography exhibition, you can study John Szarkowski's The Photographer's Eye, a visual history of photography.