Oxford and Nottingham

Category: research (Page 3 of 5)

General Frost shaving Little Boney – Robert Seymour – 1812

boney1

Source image: http://digital.library.mcgill.ca/napoleon/search/printsdetail.php?ID=1052&doctype=Prints&sitelanguage=english

‘General Frost shaving Little Boney’ (December 1, 1812) is very grim in its humour. Bonaparte begs,  but in vain,  for pity: ‘Pray Brother General, have Mercy. Don’t overwhelm me with your hoary element. You have so nipped me, that my very teeth chatter. O dear—I am quite chop fallen.’ But the unrelenting and unpitying Frost replies, ‘Invade my Country, indeed! I’ll shave, freeze, and bury you in snow, you little Monkey.’

Source: Ashton, J (1884). English Caricature and satire on Napoleon I. London: Chatto & Windus.

(Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/englishcaricatur02ashtiala)

via http://no-sword.jp/blog/2009/12/doch_an_den_fensterscheiben.html

Johnny Newcome Part 2.

The same sequence I had earlier discovered via Saville’s excellent caricature website has been discovered by Doug Wheeler at Superitch too. Here he concentrates on the racist message being conveyed but again it the sequential panelling I focussed on.

Original article here: http://superitch.com/?p=43407

I have changed contrast on images in an attempt to clarify the text. I also have larger jpeg versions now so can work out the narrative.

The narrative is sequential in that Johnny takes part in a logical progression of activities culminating in his marriage to the plantation owner’s beautiful daughter after a variety of idle and lascivious ‘adventures’. There are no linking actions in a filmic sense but then as this 1812 the whole idea of photography and cinema did not exist the nearest would have been sequences in magic lanterns which tended to be (like Hogarth) separate entities. What significant here is the panels being displayed as a sequence in one frame. This something I will look at in more detail  in the paper. If one compares to popular broadside imagery and text then it is a step forward. It is also close to Hone and Cruikshank’s ‘The Queen’s Matrimonial Ladder’ toy of 1819 for a full pamphlet of 1820 (Source: p.70 James, L. (1976) English Popular Literature 1819-1851. (see below) for more detail see The Print Shop Window Archive including original photos of Hone’s ‘toy’.
here : http://printshopwindow.blogspot.co.uk/2012/05/george-cruikshank-william-hone-queens.html

 

JohnnyNewcome1812WilliamElmesPlate1small JohnnyNewcome1812WilliamElmesPlate2small

 

ladder1

1830: the Swing Riots..turbulent times and Seymour.

LookingGlass18301201pg1

 

Source: http://superitch.com/images/2012/10/LookingGlass18301201pg1.jpg

from

http://superitch.com/?p=33870

Accessed: 04.02.2014.

I am indebted to Superitch which has proved to be an excellent stateside resource which challenges most of the prevailing Stateside views of comic history.

These sequential panels by Seymour are especially interesting in relation to the pre Dickens/Victoria mid 1830s. In it Seymour depicts the unrest which affected London and the wider country,  including here in  Nottingham in 1831 post Reform Bill.

Again the question of a ‘continuing character’ seems not to apply and the titling does not seem to cohere into a complete sequential narrative but it damn close …As for Seymour’s radical politics they seem proven here and it interesting that just six years later the ‘radical’ Seymour was dead and the ‘Liberal’ Dickens was set to thrive as the conscience of a rising literate bourgeoisie fueled by cheap labour, imports and new technology…..sound familiar? Daumier would have understood completely…

This is an undercurrent I shall return to.

LookingGlass18301201pg4

 

Panel 2 captions are fascinating in light of what about to occur in terms of expansion of the railway….the means whereby Dickens and Pickwick papers began its technological dissemination and promoted his ‘fame.

Large central figure, speaking to his dog: “What the Devil is the matter with us? Can you tell Trusty?”

Dog: “No my good Master John. You like myself Seem to be getting worse and worse. I have a chance of a chance should the Steam Carriage come into vogue, But I see nothing for you except you can descend to live as I do.”

 

Searching for the sequential…..

One of the things that fascinating me at this point is where and when the notion of a ‘comic strip. i.e. a discernible sequential narrative arose. Reading classic comic histories there are a lot of different opinions but none seem to go back beyond Punch and as in Roger Sabin, Scott McCloud and the more recent book by Jared Gardner there different views depending on position i.e. USA, Europe etc. There also the arguments over when the ‘central CONTINUING character’ present’ a quote from Sabin. He cites Ally Sloper 1884 however I have already found some work by both Seymour ( The Heiress 1830) and William Elmes (published 1812) that seem to challenge these dates and notions. The Elmes pictured below has a identifiable protagonist even if the material is highly racist in ‘The Adventures of Johnny Newcome’. There are also several freestanding ‘panels’ attributed to him that may or may not have been cut from a larger canvas or may have been intended like Rakes Progress to be ‘one-offs’ in sequence. I am still looking for the answers to that.

LARGEELMES Source: http://www.art.co.uk/products/p22111912598-sa-i7618904/william-elmes-the-adventures-of-johnny-newcome-published-1812.htm?

McCloud states on page 17 of ‘Understanding Comics’ (1993) an otherwise excellent drawn examination of the field that Topffer ..

‘featured the first interdependent combination of words and pictures seen in Europe’.

I would say that wrong in light of image above although exactly what he means by interdependent could be argued if the commentary is verbalised speech as opposed to ‘titling’. Again an area to be further explored.

Our ever valid and controversial wikipedia commentator states…in line with most commentaries that Topffer should be considered the originator but as in the illustration below I see no difference between this and Elmes….

Was it possible that continental practitioners were influenced by post Hogarth sequences is part of my investigation. I have also found some curious confluences between French and British images…..

The Swiss teacher, author and caricature artist Rodolphe Töpffer (Geneva, 1799–1846) is considered the father of the modern comic strips. His illustrated stories such as Histoire de M. Vieux Bois (1827), first published in the USA in 1842 as The Adventures of Obadiah Oldbuck or Histoire de Monsieur Jabot (1831), inspired subsequent generations of German and American comic artists. In 1865, the Germanpainter, author and caricaturist Wilhelm Busch created the strip Max and Moritz, about two trouble-making boys, which had a direct influence on the American comic strip. Max and Moritz was a series of severely moralistic tales in the vein of German children’s stories such as Struwwelpeter (“Shockheaded Peter”); in one, the boys, after perpetrating some mischief, are tossed into a sack of grain, run through a mill and consumed by a flock of geese. Max and Moritz provided an inspiration for German immigrant Rudolph Dirks, who created the Katzenjammer Kids in 1897. Familiar comic-strip iconography such as stars for pain, sawing logs for snoring, speech balloons, and thought balloons originated in Dirks’ strip.[5]

Source: Wikipedia Accessed 25.02.2014 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comic_strip

800px-Toepffer_Cryptogame_13

 

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Toepffer_Cryptogame_13.png

Collected Dickens

dickens2

This is the prompt for the whole Robert Seymour paper. Purchased in my hometown of Didcot many years ago from a second-hand shop it is a complete Caxton edition of Dickens novels,  It is from this that I took the idea of looking more closely at the Dickens illustrators in relation to sequential narrative.

dickens1

Back to the future? Film Research paper accepted Amsterdam!

 

I sent a submission to a Film Philosophy conference in Amsterdam and have been accepted so have three months to write paper detailed below. This will pull together all the research done as first year of M.A. which was put on hold whilst rejigged M.A. to be fine art and cartoon based (this blog). The previous research is specifically archived here https://shaunbelcher.com/rpt and merges into ongoing fine art’Projects’ here https://shaunbelcher.com/fineart/

The proposal which has been accepted is as follows:
BEYOND FILM PROPOSAL

mann1 mann2

Alexander Mann’s ‘Gnats’: Early film and photography in rural England as traced through an artist’s sequential narrative and sketchbooks.
Alexander Mann (1853-1908) landscape and genre painter was an early adopter, seek post impressionism, viagra of photography and his sequential narrative in etchings ‘Gnats and other hindrances to the landscape artist’ of 1884 reveals not only an awareness of photography but hints at a wider filmic narrative.
It is the purpose of this paper to explore this folio work of Alexander Mann alongside his sketchbooks and relate this to the wider discourse around early cinematic and photographic technology, troche artistic modernism, artistic communities and the railway. This will draw on Benjamin, Kirby, Solnit and Schivelbusch in attempting to uncover information from a neglected area of art history i.e. Artistic Modernism in the Thames Valley (England) and the spread of ‘new’ imaging technology from 1850-1914 through artists to the local community.
The paper will attempt to reveal a correlation between ‘experimentation’ with ‘new’ technology in post-impressionism in the English provinces with present day advances in pervasive mobile and digital imaging and its equivalent widening of participation in the processes of image creation.

Keywords: Early photography and cinema, sequential narrative, mobile technology, imaging, landscape and genre painting, etching, provincial modernism.

EYE
www.eyefilm.nl

www.film-philosophy.com

Where I stopped: RP June 2012

This post was originally posted on June 12th 2012 and was the end of two years (one unsupervised because of ‘administrative’ problems and one of official leave of absence because of my mother’s terminal cancer and she passed away in June 2012.)

I subsequently managed to get the M.A. repositioned as being in ‘FINE ART’ and resumed in January 2013 with a supervisor Deborah Harty who active in Drawing Research network. This has meant that the M.A. when completed will be focussed on my ‘Graphic Research’ i.e. art research examined using cartoons/illustration and drawing as a research method.

(See full reflective journal for this HERE : https://shaunbelcher.com/research/ )

The illustration below shows the strongest categories in my original research blog in 2010 and 2011.

(Click to see larger version)

Looking at the spider diagram one can see how the original parameters changed as I went through the year. The above diagram does not include any references to non-multimedia i.e. Drawing related practice as at this point I was keeping this separate. I began with a fairly tight proposal focused narrowly upon using the then new tablets and possibly applications running on tablets which used a narrow geographical location as its subject matter. As I progressed through the year and investigated the area more deeply I found myself moving away from the original proposal. My original idea of using GPS within a hand held application was quickly undermined by a rapid development of several freely available apps which operated very similarly to my original concept. These included the Spanish paint map use of Google maps API and the Brothers and Sisters ‘Street Museum’ for the Museum of London.Since then the History Pin android app pretty much does what I was hoping to prototype. I also looked carefully at the category of Locative drawing. This seemed to me to be a fairly shallow theoretical area which had been explored thoroughly and had produced a range of outcomes from the banal to the quite good. At this point I seemed to be drawn most to Richard Coyne’s theory of ‘Tuning of Place’ and the multimedia work of Martin Rieser.

Having a year break has reinforced the turn away from this original idea as both hardware and software developments have moved on a pace.

My first actions on location on the actual disused railway track involved photographing places along it. In the course of this I met a local photographer and historian who is very active in documenting this particular location. This led me to investigate the then new concept of context provision and to consider placing my practice within a social practice container. Once again I felt that this categorisation did not really reflect my aims. There are elements of my practice as a web practitioner which could be seen as context provision. However,  for me, this was not an area I wished to develop at this point.

Having decided that my research project should produce quantifiable research and physical artefacts as outcomes I reconsidered my position and turned to photography/film as a more solid theoretical base and area to explore. This was reinforced by the wider availability of DSLR HD cameras as well as the increasing potential of mobile phones to shoot video footage. Two photography mentors suggested that I focus on producing manageable outcomes in a variety of media. I also discussed with them the concept of deep mapping and especially the work of Cliff McLucas and Mike Pearson in regard to performance mixed with graphical elements and video. This for me, all linked directly to the work of Patrick Keiller especially in his recent ‘Robinson in Ruins’ film.

At this point (November 2011) I had taken several photos on location and voiceover films via mobile phone incorporating local history/natural observation/political commentary live as I was walking along the track. This correlates with a lot of contemporary theory and practice in terms of both Locative and dialogue related practice. Some of this practice appears to me to be weak if not founded on a thorough knowledge of the area being traversed. I bring to my practice knowledge gained over 25 years of researching and writing poetry informed by local history and natural observation. This enabled me to ad lib continuously over handheld film for 40 minutes. This was very experimental and obviously is not tightly scripted nor well edited material. Indeed the very amateurish and ad-hoc nature of the performance as recorded is a necessary part of the experimentation and the final output.

View on Vimeo here : http://vimeo.com/user2430018/videos

Following up suggestions from mentors I have been investigating the theories in respect to early rail travel and early cinema. Rebecca Solnit, Lynne Kirby and Wofgang Schivelbusch have been most useful in terms of examining the experience of place on this disused railway line. However I also from an art historical point of view found myself digressing in to a great deal of art historical research. Especially in regard to a little documented art colony known as the Blewbury artists and related material. This colony and other artists such as Alexander Mann had direct physical connection to the area of railway track I was working on and alongside. Subsequent research uncovered a rare set of etchings in a Folio edition by Alexander Mann called ‘Gnats and other hindrances to the landscape artist’. These etchings possibly show an early knowledge of photography and cinema. The publication was found in a house Alexander Mann had occupied in the village of East Hagbourne next to the disused track. Below a couple of illustrations from the folio I discovered. This suite of etchings has a performative and animated aspect. (see Appendix One)

I however cannot directly link this portfolio to this area. Others sketches by Alexander Mann do correlate with the location. These drawings appear to relate to a Scottish landscape particularly in their subject matter i.e. Gnats being actually Scottish midges! Mann is not the only artist who relates directly from the historical point of view to the track I was walking. I went into some depth in locating various individuals as they linked to my own practice in the early 1990s. I have found one Mann easel painting which appears to be the same view I drew some 90 years later.

Alexander Mann – The Road to Wittenham Clumps near Oxford 1901 (Government Art Collection)
However as with previous research diversions this material takes me very far away from the original premise of the research project. At present I have put this particular research on hold until I can find a way of reintegrating with the notion of multimedia.

(Postscript – this material formed the basis of a paper given at the Film Philosophy Conference Amsterdam in July 2013 see paper and abstract on SCRIBD here http://www.scribd.com/collections/4262615/Art-Research-Film-and-Transme )

Returning to the idea of multimedia and leaving the historical aspect for while I re-examined the material shot on the Sony Xperia Mini mobile phone. This is low quality footage gathered by holding the phone in front of my face and speaking as walking. This enabled me to produce a voice-over in the manner of Patrick Keiller not with a far more personal focus. I have also experimented with this footage by stripping out the frames using free software and then moving through the sequence by hand and using screen capture software to produce a fake’ film’. The results I have posted to my vimeo website. My interest here relates to the Solnit and Schivelbusch concepts of film and railway time being linked. In my case I am slowing down the film manually to create ‘walking time’ as my viewpoint is that of the walker not of the railway carriage occupant. This can be seen to link to Darren Almonds contemporary work with film and trains. I also see it as linking to Philippe Parreno’s reconstruction of the funeral train journey of Robert Kennedy’s body only in my case I am deconstructing the view from the train completely and replacing it with a walk thus reversing the technological advance which aligns with the physical deconstruction of an arterial route. This particular line reveals a post imperial contraction as commerce and goods ceased to flow through the traditional ports such as Southampton. Thus this in a greater sense reveals the nature of Britain as a post imperial, service led rather than manufacturing economy. My political comments came about through voiceover as a natural addendum to the film. As I have stated this was not scripted or planned. In this regard that commentary links directly to my work in poetry.

This project has been directly influenced by a sense of loss. My father died in 2004 from cancer and my mother suffered from carcinoid cancer in the period 2005 to 2012 and died on the 8th June 2012. My focus on the track was done in the full knowledge that I would be visiting the area regularly and that this would be the last time I could focus on it fully. I intend through the summer of 2012 to complete a series of short films with no dialogue related to their loss. I also intend to create more artefacts out of my engagement with the track itself. Whether or not this will be shown or included as part of my final M.A. RPT multimedia summation depends upon the direction I choose from September 2012 onwards. This I will decide in due course. This document acts as a summing up of the various directions my research has taken over the past two years including the year of leave of absence. It is intended to clarify these tentative investigations both for myself and any potential supervisors.

Shaun Belcher June 2012

 

Vintage Camera footage shot in London – Joseph Ernst

 

This antique camera, used to make short film Londoners, was found in a British warehouse.
Photos courtesy Joseph Ernst

 

In his quirky new short Londoners, director Joseph Ernst uses a hand-cranked camera from the 1920s to film contemporary city dwellers as they might have been portrayed during The Artist‘s glory days.

The British filmmaker got inspired after discovering vintage documentaries by Mitchell and Kenyon, who chronicled everyday life in Edwardian England during the early 1900s.

“When you look at the old Mitchell and Kenyon films, there is a kind of innocence, a charm and allure of a time past,” Ernst told Wired.com in an e-mail interview. “I knew that this side of life still existed in London. The challenge was, would it be possible to produce such a document of this day and age?”

As seen in the exclusive silent premiere of Londoners above, the answer is a black-and-white “yes.” Soccer fans, cafe loungers, subway crowds and parade-goers peer into the camera as though from an earlier century, lending the group portraits an eerily timeless quality.

 

TECH SPECS Camera: The Ertel Filmette was manufactured in Germany between 1910 and 1920. “We needed a camera manufactured after 1909, which is when they standardized film gauges,” said Joseph Ernst. Before 1909, cameras used film sizes that do not exist today.
Lens: The camera’s original 50mm lens was used for the entire Londoners shoot.
Tripod: Vintage tripods proved too fragile, so Ernst used a heavy Ronford that had to moved with a trolley.
Film stock: 35mm Kodak 5222.
Film cartridges: Ernst chopped up a now-standard 400-foot reel of film stock into three 130-foot sections to accommodate the camera’s relatively tiny magazine.

Londoners isn’t Ernst’s first experiment in offbeat cinema: For his previous short film, Feeder, he poked a camera down the esophagus of a willing subject to record exactly what happens when humans swallow food.

His less-invasive follow-up became an interesting essay on today’s world, as Ernst trundled a bulky antique camera onto city sidewalks crawling with wannabe smartphone documentarians.

“Modern society finds no comfort in the digital camera,” Ernst said. “We shy away from them. We complain if someone points it in our direction. But if you bring out some spectacular relic from the past, people forget all that. They’re surprised that such a thing still exists and that it actually still works.”

Londoners owes much of its flickering charisma to a wooden, 18-frames-per-second camera — circa 1915 — that Ernst discovered in a warehouse full of antique filmmaking gear managed by David French.

“I would never have got this kind of footage with a digital camera,” said Ernst.

Director of photography Oliver Schofield cleaned up the antique camera and “nursed it back to life,” Ernst said. “After a couple of botched test shoots, we had her working.”

Propped on an enormous tripod next to a “changing tent,” the bulky contraption made a sidewalk spectacle of itself — which is precisely what Ernst was aiming for.

“Our intention was to capture people reacting, happily or not, directly into the lens,” he said. “We never knew what we were going to get and we only really had one take per setup. We roughly aimed the camera in the right direction and trust our light-meter reading, which is an alien concept in the digital era.”

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