Lost and found: an avant-garde trajectory into the audiovisual essay

ABSTRACT

This article dissects the audiovisual essay Found Found Found (de Bruyn [2014]. “Found Found Found” NECSUS: Autumn, 2014. https://necsus-ejms.org/found-found-found/). Through a study of its formalist influences and strategies it is argued that it is possible to arrive at the audiovisual essay as a creative research methodology from a different practice trajectory. The originating point is the avant-garde split documented in Peter Wollen’s Two Avant-gardes (Wollen 1982 [1975]. “The two avant-gardes.” In Readings and Writings: Semiotic Counter Strategies, 92–114. London: Verso.), which articulated a formalist avant-garde, focusing on perceptual processes, as utopian in its extreme dismissal of the signified, as non-narrative and unreadable as political discourse. Vilém Flusser’s ‘technical image’ is enlisted to place such practice into a productive relationship with the audiovisual essay. This formalist cinema has already been re-read through the digital turn as producing forms of traumatic memory (de Bruyn [2014]. The Performance of Trauma in Moving Image Art. Newcastle Upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars.) and performing the formalist methods of surveillance technology (de Bruyn 2014. “Structuralist Film and the Birth of Surveillance: The 2013 Alternativa Film/Video Festival.” Senses of Cinema 70 March 2014: http://sensesofcinema.com/2014/festival-reports/structuralist-film-and-the-birth-of-surveillance-the-2013-alternativa-filmvideo-festival/.).

KEYWORDS:

• Flusser
• technical image
• structuralist film
• avant-garde

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on contributor

Dirk de Bruyn is Associate Professor of Screen and Design at Deakin University, Melbourne, Australia where he teaches Animation Project and Documentary Animation modules. He has presented numerous moving image, performance and installation work internationally over the last 45 years. He was a founding member and past president of MIMA (Experimenta). His book The Performance of Trauma in Moving Image Art (ISBN-13: 978-1-4438-6053-6) was published in 2014. Retrospective programmes of his moving image work has been presented at Alternativa, Belgrade, Serbia (2015), Melbourne International Animation Festival (2016), and Punto Y Raya, Karlsruhe Germany (2016).