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Michael Pertnoy

Michael Pertnoy

ANTI-NARRATIVE

 

The avant-garde movement fostered in a wave of new ideas, rejecting the mainstream of narrative cinema. They set in place the groundwork for experimental filmmakers, video artists, and a wide array of innovative non-narrative expanded cinema practices. These artists were playing with the classic visual format in a different way than seen on TV or in movie theaters. The style infiltrated museums, gallery spaces and other alternative venues where the conventional rules of Hollywood did not apply. In time, some of these distinctive qualities began appearing in our popular visual culture, calling into question the nature of the narrative/anti-narrative relationship and suggesting a kinship between dominant cinema and avantgarde. Anti-narrative challenges basic conventions of traditional narrative through visual and audible experiments. Exploring a range of approaches to the creation of image and subsequent meaning, including fragmentary chance operations, montage, sound manipulations, multi-channel presentations, composite effects, all of which counteract and create alternatives to narrative structure. I examine the nature and degree of comprehension that these anti-narrative experiments present. I propose that there is a subconscious physiological reaction that has been learned and cultivated over a lifetime, causing one to organize visual data cohesively and sequentially.

SECTOR C: Art Practice & Technology
ADVISERS: Nadia Hironaka | David Grazian