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Redressing Invisibility

Redressing Invisibility BROWSED BETH MAULDIN REDRESSING INVISIBILIT Y Avant-garde and independent filmmakers have tended to position themselves as unfettered storytellers, freed from the shackles of mainstream corporate studios to craft complicated, ambiguous, and often elusive depictions of reality. In his book, Shadows, Specters, Shards: Making History in Avant-Garde Film, Jeffrey Skoller argues that traditional cinema’s approach to historical knowledge resides in the realm of “what can be seen, told, and re-created” (xiv). Most conventional representations of the past resort to realist modes of production in order to lend an air of authority or accuracy to the historical recreation. For alternative filmmakers, however, such approaches are inadequate for “representing the unrepresentable,” a now familiar phrase that has emerged from the traumatic historical events of the past two centuries. Skoller explores how avant-garde artists often work within the gaps and fissures of history, the realm of the invisible, to translate the traumas of our recent past. For example, in Ernie Gehr’s Signal—Germany on the Air (1982--85), as the camera silently meditates on an abandoned lot surrounded by plain, brick buildings, the viewer glimpses a wooden sign that reads: “You are standing on the grounds of the former torture chambers of the Gestapo.” http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Film Quarterly University of California Press

Redressing Invisibility

Mauldin, Beth
Film Quarterly , Volume 62 (1) – Oct 1, 2008
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Publisher
University of California Press
Copyright
Copyright © by the University of California Press
Subject
Columns
ISSN
0015-1386
eISSN
1533-8630
DOI
10.1525/fq.2008.62.1.102
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

BROWSED BETH MAULDIN REDRESSING INVISIBILIT Y Avant-garde and independent filmmakers have tended to position themselves as unfettered storytellers, freed from the shackles of mainstream corporate studios to craft complicated, ambiguous, and often elusive depictions of reality. In his book, Shadows, Specters, Shards: Making History in Avant-Garde Film, Jeffrey Skoller argues that traditional cinema’s approach to historical knowledge resides in the realm of “what can be seen, told, and re-created” (xiv). Most conventional representations of the past resort to realist modes of production in order to lend an air of authority or accuracy to the historical recreation. For alternative filmmakers, however, such approaches are inadequate for “representing the unrepresentable,” a now familiar phrase that has emerged from the traumatic historical events of the past two centuries. Skoller explores how avant-garde artists often work within the gaps and fissures of history, the realm of the invisible, to translate the traumas of our recent past. For example, in Ernie Gehr’s Signal—Germany on the Air (1982--85), as the camera silently meditates on an abandoned lot surrounded by plain, brick buildings, the viewer glimpses a wooden sign that reads: “You are standing on the grounds of the former torture chambers of the Gestapo.”

Journal

Film Quarterly – University of California Press

Published: Oct 1, 2008

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