Gallery
Susanne Boswell and Gregg Shumann in The Subversion Agency
Miles Sherwood and sound recordist Synne Bull during radio broadcast scene in The Subversion Agency
Mark Boswell is the founder and leading theorist of the NOVA-KINO experimental cinema movement. [1]
Born 1960 in Asheville, North Carolina, Boswell studied film, film theory, and art history in Switzerland, France, Germany and the Florida Space Coast from 1984–1992. He co-founded the Alliance Film/Video Cooperative in 1993 (with William Keddell) and the Anti Film Festival in 1994. Some of his most widely screened films are Unknown Unknown(s), (2009) [2] USSA: Secret Manual of the Soviet Politburger, (2001) [3] Agent Orange, [4] the feature film The Subversion Agency (2004) [5] and the documentary 60 Seconds of Solitude in Year Zero . [6]
For many years Boswell has taught at the San Francisco Art Institute, The Ringling College of Art and Design, Florida, and the Pratt Institute in New York. [7] He was awarded the 2004 International Media Art Award from The ZKM Museum in Karlsruhe Germany for his film The End of Copenhagen. [8] KultKino, Boswell's five minute 1997 experimental short film, was included in the 1999 Venice Biennale. He has also lectured internationally on agit-prop cinema at the UCLA Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, [9] the Wolfsonian/FIU Museum Of Propaganda in Miami Beach, the Magis Film Conference in Italy, [10] and the Ruskin College of Art at Oxford University, England. [11] During the mid-nineties he edited numerous projects for Doris Wishman during the last phase of her career in Miami Beach. [12]
Boswell’s work is sometimes noted for its elliptical montage structure featuring a wild concoction of appropriated film materials coupled with his own production footage. Another aspect of this process is his usage of subtitles over original scenes from iconic films that leads toward an entirely different storyline.
During the 2009 Cambridge Film Festival in England the British film critic Laura J Smith wrote: He refers to his work as “Nova-Kino” a pertinent cinematic theory for filmmakers and media artists alike who, as Boswell describes, “utilise found footage as source material to be re-edited or re-animated, giving radical rebirth or second life in their reconstructed state.” A vital element of Nova-Kino is “the usage of critical, political, and other highly charged points of view embedded within the structure of the work that challenge hegemonic power structures at large or in more specific realms.” By no accident, these aesthetics are undeniably similar to those of Agit-Prop cinema, which Boswell labels “the eternal bi-product of the Russian Revolution.” [13]
In Helsinki 2003 during the Avanto Festival, for the European premiere of his first feature film"The Subversion Agency" [14] – the Finnish film critic Manu Haapalainen wrote: The black and white film feels and looks like a version of Francis Ford Coppola's "The Conversation", set in Cuba, directed by Jean-Luc Godard and scripted by William Burroughs. The film's intricate and non-linear plot has to do with the adventures of an American arms dealer in a perplexing country called K-Zone. K-Zone is like a cross between Cuba and a kind of socialist America imaginable only in an alternative reality. "The Subversion Agency" is an extremely stylish work on the level of both image and sound. The aged, grainy archival material has been allowed to dictate the visual look of the whole film. The soundtrack of "The Subversion Agency" is chock full of something resembling electronic music, hissing sounds, beeps and interferences. The film's narrative is repeatedly interrupted by auditive and visual discontinuities and disturbances. The experience is voyeuristic and somewhat enigmatic.
Nova-Kino is an experimental cinematic movement with departure points from the Russian twenties, film noir, situationism, the classical avant-garde, and post-modern appropriationist theory. The movement is blatantly left with variations of classical anarchism, situationism and Marxist paranoia of unrestrained capitalism. Nova-Kino is a technologically advanced medium that incorporates digital, celluloid, analog, and pseudo-redundant motion picture technologies that en somme, actualize the free market mantra of "the democratization of technology." Nova-Kino's fire-brand critique of Capitalism, Americanism, and Technotopia will make its acceptance into the traditional venues of exhibition, distribution, and production DIFFICULT - but not impossible. Nova-Kino is an investigation into the political structure of the past, present, and future. It does not operate under any sequential formula. Therefore, it is a Buddhist attack on the narrative structure of History. However, unlike the old guard/avant-garde, Nova-Kino wholeheartedly embraces the telling of "stories." Nova-Kino is therefore the simultaneous raconteur of the past and prophet of the present. Nova-Kino does not recognize the traditional property rights of the West. More specifically, the further Hollywood advances its tautological consumerism on Society, the further WE attack! Nova-Kino is like an Indian Casino; paradoxical, autonomous, and ultimately wise...
Dziga Vertov was a Soviet pioneer documentary film and newsreel director, as well as a cinema theorist. His filming practices and theories influenced the cinéma vérité style of documentary movie-making and the Dziga Vertov Group, a radical film-making cooperative which was active from 1968 to 1972. He was a member of the Kinoks collective, with Elizaveta Svilova and Mikhail Kaufman.
Man with a Movie Camera is an experimental 1929 Ukrainian Soviet silent documentary film, directed by Dziga Vertov, filmed by his brother Mikhail Kaufman, and edited by Vertov's wife Yelizaveta Svilova. Kaufman also appears as the eponymous Man of the film.
Sergei Parajanov was a Soviet film director of Armenian origin, screenwriter and artist who made seminal contribution to world cinema with his films Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors and The Color of Pomegranates. Parajanov is regarded by film critics, film historians and filmmakers to be one of the greatest and most influential filmmakers in cinema history.
Peter Weibel is an internationally known Austrian post-conceptual artist, curator and new media theoretician. He started out in 1964 as a visual poet but soon jumped from the page to the screen within the sense of post-structuralist methodology. Thanks to this linguistic input into his visual media works, Weibel developed a critical impulse that turned against society and the media, while investigating virtual reality and other digital art forms. Since 1999 he has been director of the ZKM Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe.
Doris Wishman was an American film director, screenwriter, and producer. She is credited with having directed and produced at least 30 feature films during a career spanning over four decades, most notably in the sexploitation film genre.
The Ann Arbor Film Festival is an annual film festival held in Ann Arbor in the U.S. state of Michigan. Established in 1963, it is the fourth-oldest film festival in North America ; and the oldest experimental film festival. It has become one of the premier film festivals for independent and, especially, experimental filmmakers to showcase their work. Now entering its 60th year, the Ann Arbor Film Festival attracts over 3,000 entries from filmmakers in more than 60 countries, and distributes over $20,000 in cash awards. As a pioneer of the traveling festival concept in 1964, each year the Ann Arbor Film Festival Tour continues to present a collection of short films at more than 30 art house theaters, universities, galleries and cinematheques throughout the world.
Vanalyne Green is an American artist who also teaches and writes about culture. She has screened her video work extensively in the United States and abroad, including The Whitney Biennial (1991), American Film Institute, Rotterdam International Film Festival, the Videotheque de Paris, The Robert Flaherty Film Seminar, The Guggenheim Museum and many other museums, universities and film festivals. She has received a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship, as well as grants from Creative Capital, the Jerome Foundation, the Richard H. Driehaus Foundation (2003), the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York State Council of the Arts, and a Rome Prize at the American Academy in Rome (2001–2002). Her work has been covered in the Village Voice, the Los Angeles Weekly, The Chicago Reader, and Artforum. Publications by and about, and interviews with, Green also can be found in "Performance Artists Talking in the Eighties" by Linda M. Montano, "Women of Vision" by Alexandra Juhasz, in addition to M/E/A/N/I/N/G: An Anthology of Artists' Writings, Theory, and Criticism. Green's videotape "A Spy in the House that Ruth Built" was listed as one of the 1,000 best films ever made by film critic and author Jonathan Rosenbaum.
Edgar Henrique Clemente Pêra is a Portuguese filmmaker. Pêra is also a fine artist and a graphic comics artist. and writes fiction and cinema essays (PhD). Edgar Pêra studied Psychology, but switched to Film at the Portuguese National Conservatory, presently Lisbon Theatre and Film School. Aka Mr. Ego (scripts), Man-Kamera (image), Artur Cyanetto (sound). Edgar Pêra has auto-financed and produced many his own movies, or directed "auteur films" for cultural institutions. " If there has been in Portugal a filmmaker who has continuously filmed, he is Edgar Pêra, as a consequence of his availability and insistence on doing so regardless of the perennial problems of juries and public subsidies. But it is also a consequence of his adaptation to light technologies, he and his camera, constituting symbiotically an "Ego" that is really making its own film-diaries". Pêra started as a screenwriter but in 1985 bought a camera, inspired by Dziga Vertov, and never stopped shooting on a dially basis. "Pêra has a penchant for odd, eccentric, obscure and sometimes twisted humor. His unique touches include an arthouse, avant-garde approach somehow combining retro and avant-garde modernities."
Michael Brynntrup is a German experimental filmmaker and media artist living in Berlin. Besides experimental films and video installations, his better-known works also include electrography, digital art and internet art projects. Since 2006 he has been Professor for Film/Video at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste Braunschweig.
Peggy Ahwesh is an American experimental filmmaker and video artist. She received her B.F.A. at Antioch College. A true bricoleur, her tools include narrative and documentary styles, improvised performance and scripted dialogue, sync-sound film, found footage, digital animation, and crude Pixelvision video. Her work is primarily an investigation of cultural identity and the role of the subject in various genres. Her interests include: women, sexuality and feminism; genre; reenactment; artists' books. Her works have been shown worldwide, including in San Francisco, New York, Barcelona, London, Toronto, Rotterdam, and Creteil, France. Starting in 1990, she has taught at Bard College as a Professor of Film and Electronic Arts. Her teaching interests include: experimental media, history of the non-fiction film, and women in film.
Soviet parallel cinema is a genre of film and underground cinematic movement that occurred in the Soviet Union in the 1970s onwards. The term parallel cinema was first associated with the samizdat films made out of the official Soviet state system. Films from the parallel movement are considered to be avant-garde, non-conventionalist and cinematographically subversive.
Dennis Del Favero is an Australian artist and academic. He has been awarded numerous Artist-in-Residencies and Fellowships, including an Artist-in-Residence at Neue Galerie Graz and Visiting Professorial Fellowship at ZKM Center for Art and Media, Karlsruhe. He is an Australian Research Council Laureate Fellow, Scientia Professor of Digital Innovation and Executive Director of the iCinema Centre for Interactive Cinema Research at the University of New South Wales; Visiting Professor at IUAV, Venice; Member of the editorial board of Studio Corpi’s Quodlibet, Rome; and former Executive Director of the Australian Research Council | Humanities and Creative Arts (2015–2016).
Jeffrey Shaw is a visual artist known for being a leading figure in new media art. In a prolific career of widely exhibited and critically acclaimed work, he has pioneered the creative use of digital media technologies in the fields of expanded cinema, interactive art, virtual, augmented and mixed reality, immersive visualization environments, navigable cinematic systems and interactive narrative. Shaw was co-designer of Algie the inflatable pig, which was photographed above Battersea Power Station for the 1977 Pink Floyd album, Animals.
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In Prison My Whole Life is a 2007 documentary film about American journalist and prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal, directed by Marc Evans, and written by Evans and William Francome. Others involved with the project were Robert R. Bryan, Angela Davis, Anthony Arnove, Dead Prez, Howard Zinn, Mos Def, Noam Chomsky, Robert Meeropol, Russell Simmons, Snoop Dogg and Steve Earle. The film's executive producer is Colin Firth.
Ben Russell is an American artist and experimental filmmaker. Russell developed his reputation over the numerous shorts he made throughout the 2000s, many as part of his "Trypps" series, and as the curator of the Magic Lantern Cinema in Providence, Rhode Island. In 2009, he made his acclaimed feature debut, Let Each One Go Where He May, shot in Suriname in a series of 13 long takes accomplished with a Steadicam. Both a Guggenheim Fellow and participating artist in documenta 14, Russell's work has been described as drawing on elements of ethnography, psychedelia and Surrealism.
Jayne Parker is a British artist and film-maker.
An agit-train was a locomotive engine with special auxiliary cars outfitted for propaganda purposes by the Bolshevik government of Soviet Russia during the time of the Russian Civil War, War Communism, and the New Economic Policy. Brightly painted and carrying on board a printing press, government complaint office, printed political leaflets and pamphlets, library books, and a mobile movie theater, agit-trains traveled the rails of Russia, Siberia, and Ukraine in an attempt to introduce the values and program of the new revolutionary government to a scattered and isolated peasantry.
Travis Wilkerson is an American independent film director, screenwriter, producer and performance artist. Named the "political conscience of 21st century American independent cinema," by Sight & Sound magazine, Wilkerson is heavily influenced by the Third Cinema movement, and known for films that combine "maximalist aesthetics and radical politics." This is owed, in part, to his meeting Cuban filmmaker Santiago Álvarez. Following the meeting, Wilkerson made the feature documentary Accelerated Under-Development about that meeting, and he was heavily involved in the rediscovery of Alvarez's films.
The End of Time is a 2017 experimental short by Milcho Manchevski, a U.S.-Cuban co-production.
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