VOL 59
no. 1
spring 2018
CONTENTS
Drake Stutesman
Editorial
ESSAY
Lauren Boumaroun
Costume Designer/Everything: Hybridized Identities in Animation Production
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ESSAY
Scott MacDonald
Lyrical Television
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ESSAY
Ben Olin
Reframing the New York School: Public Access Poetry and the Screening of Poetic Coterie
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NEW LOOKS: FILM REVIEW
Susan Potter and Matias Perez
Melodramatic Ends: Winter Sleep (KiÅŸ Uykusu)
EDITORIAL
Framework 59.1 looks at various mediums in which creativity flourishes in unexpected ways. Television, as a vehicle for the poetic as much as for the prosaic, is examined by two writers. Ben Olin's "Reframing the New York School: Public Access Poetry and the Screening of Poetic Coterie" details the 1970s and '80s New York cable television show Public Access Poetry, which featured poets, most of whom were in emerging avant-garde literary movements, and discusses how the visual medium reflected and played with the verbal medium and how central it was to the development of the new writing. In his piece "Lyrical Television" Scott MacDonald, critic, programmer, and advocate of independent/avant-garde cinema, work that is often regarded as poetic, considers the way television also employs "lyrical," as he names it, avant-garde practices. Scholar and costume designer Lauren Boumaroun, in her essay "Costume Designer/Everything: Hybridized Identities in Animation Production," reveals the surprising world of costume design in animation, especially focusing on particular designers by exploring their experience in the workplace as well as their ingenuity in executing the task of creating outfits for stop-frame and drawn characters. One of the Framework 59.1 cover images, showing a close-up of fingers knitting a sweater on knitting needles the size of small straight pins, tells part of that story. In the section "New Looks: Film Review" in which authors reexamine a film released in the past few years, Susan Potter and Matias Perez ponder Nuri Bilge Ceylan's 2014 film, Winter Sleep, in "Melodramatic Ends: Winter Sleep (KiÅŸ Uykusu)."
– Drake Stutesman
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VOL 59
no. 2
fall 2018
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CONTENTS
Drake Stutesman
Editorial
ESSAY
Tom Cunliffe
The Grandmaster: Socio-Political Plurality in Contemporary Hong Kong
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DOSSIER: Four Visual Essays
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Rob Roth
Alchemy and the Magick in the Media
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MM Serra
The Flms of MM Serra: Art(core) and the Explicit Body
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Bette Gordon
Film Stills from My Work: Looking at Women and Men
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Michelle Handelman
Hustlers & Empires
EDITORIAL
Framework 59.2 has a focus on perception. Perception is immediate, supple, repetitive, and personal, but, in contentious political times, perception can be construed as only a fixed opinion and often extremely so. This issue looks at ways in which perception, art, and politics are blended.
In the opening essay, "The Grandmaster: Socio-Political Plurality in Contemporary Hong Kong," Tom Cunliffe's geo-political focus broadens a viewer's understanding of the complexities of the internationally screened martial arts genres. In looking at The Grandmaster (2013) as Wong Kar-wai's take on the China-Hong Kong dispute, Cunliffe argues that, through the director's use of the martial arts genre and its specialized niche of the Ip biography, Wong Kar-wai subtly pushed for an overall plurality across Chinese society and for a strong voice from the younger generations.
In the dossier, Four Visual Essays, four artists, Rob Roth, MM Serra, Bette Gordon, and Michelle Handelman, who are known for their exceptional experimental talents in both film and media and for their strong opinions, were asked to create a personal essay, composed mostly of visuals and using any approach they wanted. They each made a visual essay embedded with ideas, often political, that they felt were core to their perception of the world and ones that were part of the formation of their subjective and objective selves. Rob Roth, in his Alchemy and the Magick in the Media, contemplates how watching television as a child formed his aesthetic sense. In The Films of MM Serra: Art(core) and the Explicit Body, MM Serra renames what have been called pornographic images, rejecting the artificial term of "hard core," and creating "Art(core)," a gesture toward the importance of changing our perception of what explicit nudity and sex is. Bette Gordon, known for experimentally formal films and narratives, in her Film Stills from My Work: Looking at Women and Men made a montage of stills from her films with an emphasis on how she perceived the story through color, space, and lighting. Michelle Handelman, in Hustlers & Empires, visually unfolded a juxtaposition of images, words, and performance pieces. All these offer the option to look again and again at how we determine meaning and how we read at a gut level. Framework is honored to have their artwork.
– Drake Stutesman
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